Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: Dawn of the Dreadfuls by Steve Hockensmith Page B

squat on the floor, his back still to her, and after a long, silent moment she moved on.
    She found her sisters already gathered around Mr. Bennet.
    “—and then she kicked Master Hawksworth in the . . .,” Mary was saying. Her cheeks flushed pink, and she leaned toward her father, hand cupped to mouth, and whispered in his ear.
    Mr. Bennet frowned . . . yet it seemed to Elizabeth his eyes were smiling.
    “Why did you do it, Lizzy?” Lydia asked as she joined them.
    “Yes, tell us, Lizzy!” Kitty said. “Were you cross or simply frightened?”
    “I was being strangled. Need I really explain beyond that?”
    “Didn’t you hear the Master say the Panther’s Kiss can be used as a ‘sleeper hold’?” Mary asked. “That he could bring you to the brink of unconsciousness without doing you any harm?”
    “It is rather difficult to hear properly when being throttled,” Elizabeth replied. “Shall I demonstrate?”
    She brought her hands up toward Mary’s throat, and her sister actually blanched and hopped back behind their father.
    “No, that’s quite all right, thank you.”
    Elizabeth dropped her arms to her sides, ashamed. She knew it wasn’t her younger sisters she was angry at, thoughtless though they were.
    “The Axis of Calamity, eh?” her father said. “I’m sure that made quite an impression on the Master . . . and perhaps, I’m beginning tothink, just where he needed one most.”
    “What do you mean, Papa?” Mary asked.
    Mr. Bennet ignored her.
    “Now, seeing as you’re back in my hands for the next hour, I’d say it’s time for something your training has, so far, entirely overlooked. Something I feel I owe you all, given the sacrifices I’ve asked you to make.”
    He paused until Jane finally asked the inevitable question.
    “Which is what, Father?”
    Mr. Bennet smiled. “Fun. There is, you will observe, a stag striking a most majestic pose upon that hilltop.”
    The girls followed his gaze to the east, and saw, not a quarter mile away, the great, antlered buck their father spoke of.
    “Kiss it.”
    “Kiss it?” Mary said.
    “Yes. Catch it and kiss it.”
    Lydia grimaced. “On the lips?”
    Mr. Bennet shrugged. “Or the nose or the cheek or whatever else you might prefer.”
    “You expect us,” Jane said slowly, “to catch a deer and hold it long enough to kiss it?”
    “Oh, goodness me, no!” Mr. Bennet chuckled. “Not all of you. But your training has, I suspect, brought you further, faster than you think, and one of you might manage it—and whichever of you it is will get the rest of the hour off to do whatever she pleases.”
    Jane was already halfway to the stag before anyone else was even running.
    Elizabeth took off after the deer with no hope of actually catching it. The big buck quickly saw the girls coming, wheeled about, and bolted. How were such as they to catch one of the fleetest creatures in the forest?
    Yet the distance between her and the hill disappeared with surprising speed, and even when she charged up the bluff and into the trees, shefound herself hardly slowed at all. The deer kept to no path, of course, simply crashing through the bramble, and Elizabeth was soon doing the same—bursting through bushes, hurdling over streams and rocks, dodging tree trunks that flew past her in a smear of brown.
    All those
dand-baithaks
, all those laps, all those hours meditating and sparring and wielding the weight of swords and axes and heavy wooden staffs—it was working!
    All around, Elizabeth could hear her sisters laughing as they, too, discovered what they could now do. And she joined in.
    The stag began to zigzag, cutting left, then right as the girls closed in. Though Elizabeth was now closer to him than ever, he grew harder to see: The chase had led them into the darkest, thickest of thickets. Soon, all she had to guide her was the sound of the buck’s flight up ahead, but then even that began to fade. Elizabeth pushed herself harder, trying to squeeze