Guilty Pleasures

“I've done it twice before.” Twice before with the same person.

Twice before with someone who had trained me as an animator. Never with a stranger.

His voice dropped to a bare whisper. “Are you sure you want to do this?”

“Save you?” I asked.

“Share your power,” he said.

Theresa strode over to us in a swish of cloth. “Enough of this, animator. He can't do it, so he pays the price. Either leave now, or join us at our … feast.”

“Are you having rare Who-roast-beast?” I asked.

“What are you talking about?”

“It's from Dr. Seuss, How the Grinch Stole Christmas. You know the part, 'And they'd Feast! Feast! Feast! Feast! They would feast on Who-pudding, and rare Who-roast-beast.”

“You are crazy.”

“So I've been told.”

“Do you want to die?” she asked.

I stood up, very slowly, and felt something build in me. A sureness, an absolute certainty that she was not a danger to me. Stupid, but it was there, solid and real. “Someone may kill me before all this is over, Theresa”-I stepped into her, and she gave ground but it won't be you.”

I could almost taste her pulse in my mouth. Was she afraid of me? Was I going crazy? I had just stood up to a hundred-year-old vampire, and she had backed down. I felt disoriented, almost dizzy, as if reality had moved and no one had warned me.

Theresa turned her back on me, hands balled into fists. “Raise the dead, animators, or by all the blood ever spilled, I'll kill you both.”

I think she meant it. I shook myself like a dog coming out of deep water. I had a baker's dozen worth of vampires to pacify and a one-hundred-year-old corpse to raise. I could only handle a zillion problems at a time. A zillion and one was beyond me.

“Get up, Zachary,” I said. “Time to go to work.”

He stood. “I've never worked with a focus before. You'll have to tell me what to do.”

“No problem,” I said.