Guilty Pleasures

I knelt by Zachary. “Are you hurt?”

He shook his head. “I appreciate the gesture, but they’re going to try to kill me tonight.” He looked up at me, pale eyes searching my face. “There isn’t anything you can do to stop them.” He gave a thin smile. “Even you have your limits.”

“We can raise this zombie if you’ll trust me.”

He frowned, then stared at me. I couldn’t read his expression: puzzlement and something else. “Why?”

What could I say, that I couldn’t just watch him die? He had watched a man be tortured and hadn’t lifted a hand. I opted for the short reason. “Because I can’t let them have you, if I can stop it.”

“I don’t understand you, Anita, I don’t understand you at all.”

“That makes two of us. Can you stand?”

He nodded. “What are you pla

“We’re going to share our talent.”

His eyes widened. “Shit, you can act as a focus?”

“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.

Chapter 28

The goat lay on its side. The bare white of its spine glimmered in the moonlight. Blood still seeped into the ground from the gaping wound. Eyes were rolled and glazed, tongue lolling out of its mouth.

The older the zombie, the bigger the death needed. I knew that, and that was why I avoided older zombies when I could. At a hundred years the corpse was just so much dust. Maybe a few bone fragments if you were lucky. They reformed to rise from the grave. If you had the power to do it.

Problem was, most animators couldn’t raise the long-dead, a century and over. I could. I just didn’t want to. Bert and I had had long discussions about my preferences. The older the zombie, the more we can charge. This was at least a twenty-thousand-dollar job. I doubted I’d get paid tonight, unless living ‘til morning was payment enough. Yeah, I guess it was. Here’s to seeing another dawn.

Zachary came to stand beside me. He had torn the remnants of his shirt off. He stood thin and pale beside me. His face was all shadows and white flesh, high cheekbones almost cavernous. “What next?” he asked.

The goat carcass was inside the blood circle he had traced earlier; good. “Bring everything we need into the circle.”

He brought a long hunting knife and a pint jar full of pale faintly luminous ointment. I preferred a machete myself, but the knife was huge, with one jagged edge and a gleaming point. The knife was clean and sharp. He took good care of his tools. Brownie point for him.

“We can’t kill the goat twice,” he said. “What are we going to use?”

“Us,” I said.

“What are you talking about?”

“We’ll cut ourselves; fresh, live blood, as much as we’re willing to give.”

“The blood loss would leave you too weak to go on.”

I shook my head. “We already have a blood circle, Zachary We’re just going to rewalk, not redraw it.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I don’t have time to explain metaphysics to you. Every injury is a small death. We’ll give the circle a lesser death, and reactivate it.”

He shook his head. “I still don’t get it.”

I took a deep breath, and then realized I couldn’t explain it to him. It was like trying to explain the mechanics of breathing. You could break it down into steps, but that didn’t tell you what it felt like to breathe. “I’ll show you what I mean.” If he didn’t feel this part of the ritual, understand it without words, the rest wouldn’t work anyway.

I held out my hand for the knife. He hesitated, then handed it to me, hilt first. The thing felt top-heavy, but then it wasn’t designed for throwing. I took a deep breath and pressed the blade edge against my left arm, just below the cross burn. A quick down stroke, and blood welled up, dark and dripping. It stung, sharp and immediate. I let out the breath I’d been holding and handed the knife to Zachary.

He was staring from me to the knife.

“Do it, right arm, so we’ll mirror each other,” I said.

He nodded and made a quick slash across his right upper arm. His breath hissed, almost a gasp.

“Kneel with me.” I knelt, and he followed me down, mirroring me as I asked. A man who could follow directions; not bad.

I bent my left arm at the elbow and raised it so the fingertips were head-high, elbow shoulder-high. He did the same. “We clasp hands and press the cuts together.”

He hesitated, immobile.

“What’s the matter?” I asked.

He shook his head, two quick shakes, and his hand wrapped around mine. His arm was longer than mine, but we managed.

His skin felt uncomfortably cool against mine. I glanced up at his face, but I couldn’t read it. I had no idea what he was thinking. I took a deep, cleansing breath and began. “We give our blood to the earth. Life for death, death for life. Raise the dead to drink our blood. Let us feed them as they obey us.”

His eyes did widen then; he understood. One hurdle down. I stood and drew him with me. I led him along the blood circle. I could feel it, like an electric current up my spine. I stared straight into his eyes. They were almost silver in the moonlight. We walked the circle and ended where we had begun, by the sacrifice.

We sat in the blood-soaked grass. I dabbed my right hand in the still-oozing blood of the goat’s wound. I was forced to kneel to reach Zachary’s face. I smeared blood over his forehead, down his cheeks. Smooth skin, the rub of new beard. I left a dark handprint over his heart.

The woven band was like a ring of darkness on his arm. I smeared blood along the beads, fingertips finding the soft brush of feathers worked into the string. The gris-gris needed blood, I could feel that, but not goat blood. I shrugged it away. Time to worry about Zachary’s personal magic later.

He smeared blood on my face. Fingertips only, as if afraid to touch me. I could feel his hand shake as he traced my cheek. The blood was a cool wetness over my breast. Heart blood.

Zachary unscrewed the jar of homemade ointment. It was a pale off-white color with flecks of greenish light in it. The glowing flecks were graveyard mold.