Incubus Dreams

I started to pull away, and Richard's voice was in my head. "Wait, wait, Anita, please." He excused himself from the table and walked through the big living room, out onto the sweep of porch, and down the handful of steps until he could gaze up into the same sky that rode above me. By the time he gazed up into the air, gazed at me, he seemed to have sensed some of what was happening, because he said, "Dear God, Anita, what's happened? I've felt your power before, but not like this."

I didn't have enough control to talk in my head, so Requiem was going to get the out loud version, but I was past caring. "The vampires keep saying that we've hit a new power level."

He hugged his bare arms in the T-shirt. He hadn't stopped for a jacket. "It's like the night is breathing your power. What can I do?"

"Remind me that I'm not dead. Remind me that my ties are with things that have a heartbeat."

"How will that help?"

I wanted to scream my frustration at him. "God, Richard, just help me, please help. If you don't, I'm afraid of what I'll raise in this cemetery tonight."

He nodded. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry for so much, Anita." He looked down, and I knew the gesture, he was thinking, or gathering his will for something. Usually something he didn't want to do. But I didn't have time to worry about Richard's hangups tonight. I was too scared of the power that pulsed in the ground underneath me. A cold pulsing, but it promised to spread to all the graves. I knew that tonight I could raise one of those shambling zombie armies that the movies are so fond of portraying, and usually has nothing to do with real necromancy.

He looked back at the house and said, "I'm fine, Mom. I just need a little privacy. Keep everybody close to the house, okay." He shook his head. "No, Mom, it's not that close to the full moon."

He walked out into the ope

Richard walked into the edge of trees that began the woods that bordered the western edge of the family land. He touched a trunk, laid his hands on it, and it was rough and hard, with deep grooves in the bark like tiny tu

He twisted through the underbrush like it wasn't there. And as I'd felt only once before, it was as if the trees and bushes welcomed him, or turned aside for him, or as if green growth could be water, and he dived through it, ru

Richard ran, and he took me with him, as he had one night long ago. Then he'd held my hand, and I'd struggled to keep up, to understand. Now it was effortless, because I was inside his head, inside him. The night was alive for him in a way that it wasn't for Jean-Claude, or for me. I was too human, and Jean-Claude's interest in life was too shallow. Neither of us could feel what Richard's beast could give him.

Something touched my hand, and I was jerked back to the grave. Requiem was still at my back, dead still, but Graham was on the grave. He looked uncertain, but he was sniffing the air near my skin. "You smell like trees and pack," he said softly.

Richard looked up at us. "Why is Graham there?"

"Bodyguard. Jean-Claude was afraid of what would happen if I didn't have someone with me."

"Tell him he's supposed to guard you, and he can't do that on the grave."

"You're supposed to guard me, Graham, you can't do that from here." The sharp scent of wolf thickened around me as I said it.

Graham reacted to it like he'd been struck. He cringed to the ground, doing the wolf grovel. "I'm sorry, you just smelled so good. I forgot myself."

"Stop groveling and get back to work." Richard said it first, and I echoed it for him.

Graham did what he was told. He went back to very serious bodyguard mode, looking out into the dark for whatever might come.

Richard took in a deep breath, and I smelled that thick, sweet scent of deep woods. He'd run miles, effortlessly, not for the same reason that a human will run well, but because the land itself helped him run, gave him strength, welcomed him.

He stood there in the middle of the woods, his feet anchored into the ground. I realized that Richard was my ground, my center, his joy, his heart pumping in his chest from that joyous run. I kept my tie to him open and full of scents and sounds and things faraway from here. I put my hands on the grave, and even with Requiem at my back, touching me, it wasn't as real as the pounding of Richard's heart miles away.

"Edwin Alonzo Herman, with will, word, and flesh, I call you from your grave. Come, come now!" It was all wrong, all different from usual, but it was right just the same.

I felt the corpse shift, solidify, piece itself together like a puzzle, and begin to rise up through the earth as if it were water. I'd watched this happen countless times, but I'd never been kneeling on the ground when it happened. The earth buckled and rolled like an earthquake that was trapped in a few feet of ground. The ground flowed under my hands like it was something else, not water, not mud, but something both less and more solid. I don't know what Requiem thought was happening, but he didn't try to pull away, he stayed solid at my back. He rode it with me and never made a noise. Brave vampire.

Hands met mine through the shifting earth, cool fingers wrapped around my warmth. Edwin Alonzo Herman's hands wrapped around mine like a swimmer who's given up hope and finally touches a rope. The grave threw him upward like a flower springing free of the earth, but the push of it forced me to pull him upward, to find my feet with Requiem steadying me. If the vampire hadn't been there to hold me standing on the writhing, twisting ground, I would have fallen. But Requiem kept me standing, and I pulled the dead man from his grave, pulled him perfect and whole, until he stood taller than me, with the grave dirt falling away from a perfect black suit that looked as if it had been freshly pressed. His hair was balding with a thick fringe just above the ears and down the collar, and thick sideburns that curved to a walrus thick mustache. He was portly, nearly fat, which had been in style among the rich. When Edwin Alonzo died, only the poor were ski