He nodded. “Your power calls to me, ma petite.”
Richard’s hands slid over my shoulders, his face brushing my hair. “Now what?”
“We ride the power this time, it doesn’t ride us.”
“How?” Richard whispered.
Jean-Claude looked at me with eyes that were deep as any ocean and as full of secrets. “I believe ma petite has a plan.”
“Yeah,” I said, “I have a plan.” I looked from one to the other of them. “I’m going to call Dominic Dumare and see if he knows how to put vampires back in their coffins.” Dominic had been cleared of Robert’s murder. He had an airtight alibi. He’d been with a woman. Even if he hadn’t been, I might have asked for his help. I wanted to save Willie more than I wanted to revenge Robert.
A strange expression crossed Jean-Claude’s face. “You, asking for help, ma petite? That is unusual.”
I drew away from both of them. We could get the power back, I was pretty certain of that. I looked at Willie’s empty face and the fuzzy dice hanging from his coffin. “If I make a mistake, Willie’s gone. I want him back.”
There were times when I thought that it wasn’t Jean-Claude who had convinced me that vampires weren’t always monsters. It was Willie and Dead Dave, ex-cop and bar owner. It was a host of lesser vampires that seemed, occasionally, like nice guys. Jean-Claude was a lot of things; nice was not one of them.
31
* * *
DOMINIC Dumare showed up wearing a pair of black dress slacks and a black leather jacket unzipped over a grey silk T-shirt. He looked more relaxed without Sabin looking on, like an employee on his day off. Even the neatly trimmed Vandyke beard and mustache seemed less formal.
Dominic walked around the three vampires I’d raised. We’d moved back out into the rubble-strewn main area, so he could see the zombies and the vampires all at once. He paced around the vampires, touching them here and there. He grinned at me, teeth flashing in his dark beard. “This is marvelous, truly marvelous.”
I fought the urge to frown at him. “Forgive me if I don’t share your enthusiasm. Can you help me put them back the way they were?”
“Theoretically, yes.”
“When people start using the word theoretically, it means they don’t know how to do something. You can’t help me, can you?”
“Now, now,” Dominic said. He knelt by Willie, staring up at him, studying him like a bug under a bioscope. “I didn’t say I couldn’t help. It’s true that I’ve never seen this done. And you say you’ve done this before.” He stood up, brushing off the knees of his pants.
“Once.”
“That time was without the triumvirate?” Dominic asked.
I’d had to tell him. I understood enough about ritual magic to know that if we withheld how we’d gotten this much power, anything Dominic helped us come up with wouldn’t work. It would be like telling the police it was a burglary when it was really a murder. They’d be trying to solve the wrong crime.
“Yeah, the first time was just me.”
“But both times in daylight hours?” he asked.
I nodded.
“That makes sense. We can only raise zombies after the souls have flown. It would make sense that vampires can only be raised during the day. When darkness falls, their souls return.”
I wasn’t even going to try and argue about whether or not vampires had souls. I wasn’t as sure of the answer as I used to be.
“I can’t raise zombies during daylight hours. Let alone vampires,” I said.
Dominic motioned at all the waiting dead of both kinds. “But you did it.”
I shook my head. “That’s not the point. I’m not supposed to be able to do it.”
“Have you ever tried to raise normal zombies during daylight hours?”
“Well, no. The man who trained me said it wasn’t possible.”
“So you never tried,” Dominic said.
I hesitated before answering.
“You have tried,” he said.
“I can’t do it. I can’t even call the power under the light of the sun.”
“Only because you believe you can’t,” Dominic said.
“Run that by me again.”
“Belief is one of the most important aspects of magic.”
“You mean, if I don’t believe I can raise zombies during the day, I can’t.”
“Exactly.”
“That doesn’t make sense,” Richard said. He leaned against one of the intact walls. He’d been very quiet while I talked magic with Dominic. Jason, still in wolf form, lay at his feet. Stephen had cleared some of the broken stones and sat beside the wolf.
“Actually,” I said, “it does. I’ve seen people with a lot of raw talent that couldn’t raise anything. One guy was convinced it was a mortal sin so he just blocked it out. But he shone with power whether he wanted to accept it or not.”
“A shapeshifter can deny his power all he wants, but that doesn’t keep him from changing,” Richard said.
“I believe that is why lycanthropy is referred to as a curse,” Dominic said.
Richard looked at me. The expression on his face was eloquent. “A curse.”
“You’ll have to forgive Dominic,” Jean-Claude said. “A hundred years ago, it never occurred to anyone that lycanthropy could be a disease.”
“Concern for Richard’s feelings?” I asked.
“His happiness is your happiness, ma petite.”
Jean-Claude’s new gentlemanly behavior was beginning to bug me. I didn’t trust his change of heart.
Cassandra said, “If Anita didn’t believe she could raise the dead during daylight hours, then how did she do it?” She had joined in the metaphysical discussion like it was a graduate class in magical theory. I’d met people like her in college. Theorists who had no real magic of their own. But they could sit around for hours debating whether a theoretical spell would work. They treated magic like higher physics, a pure science without any true way of testing. Heaven forbid the ivory tower magicians should actually try out their theories in a real spell. Dominic would have fit in well with them, except he had his own magic.
“Both occasions were extreme situations,” Dominic said. “It works on the same principle that allows a grandmother to lift a truck off her grandchild. In times of great need, we often touch abilities beyond the everyday.”
“But the grandmother can’t lift a car at will, just because she did it once,” I said.
“Hmm,” Dominic said, “perhaps the analogy is not perfect, but you understand what I am saying. If you say you do not, you are merely being difficult.”
That almost made me smile. “So you’re saying that I could raise the dead in daylight if I believed I could.”
“I believe so.”
I shook my head. “I’ve never heard of any animator being able to do that.”
“But you are not merely an animator, Anita,” Dominic said. “You are a necromancer.”
“I have never heard of a necromancer that could raise the dead in broad daylight,” Jean-Claude said.
Dominic shrugged gracefully. It reminded me of Jean-Claude. It takes a couple hundred years to make a shrug pretty. “I don’t know about broad daylight, but just as some vampires can walk around during the day, as long as they are sufficiently sheltered, I believe the same principle would apply to necromancers.”
“So you don’t believe Anita could raise the dead at high noon out of doors, either?” Cassandra said.
Dominic shrugged again. Then he laughed. “You have caught me, my studious beauty. It may well be possible for Anita to do exactly that, but even I have never heard of such a thing.”
I shook my head. “Look, we can explore the magical implications later. Right now, can you help me figure a way to put the vampires back without screwing them up?”
“Define screwing them up,” Dominic said.
“Do not joke, Dominic,” Jean-Claude said. “You know precisely what she means.”
“I wa
nt to hear it from her lips.”
Jean-Claude looked at me and gave a barely perceptible shrug.
“When darkness falls, I want them to rise as vampires. I’m afraid if I do this wrong, they’ll just be dead, permanently.”
“You surprise me, Anita. Perhaps your reputation as the scourge of the local vampire populace is exaggerated.”
I stared at him. Before I could say something that sounded like bragging, Jean-Claude spoke. “I would think what she has done today is proof enough of how very much she deserves her reputation.”
Dominic and the vampire stared at each other. Something seemed to pass between them. A challenge, a knowledge, something. “She would make an amazing human servant if only some vampire could tame her,” Dominic said.
Jean-Claude laughed. The sound filled the room with echoes that shivered and danced across the skin. The laughter swept through my body, and for the briefest moment, I could feel something touch me deep inside where no hand belonged. In another context Jean-Claude might have made it sexual; now it was simply disturbing.
“Don’t ever do that again,” Richard said. He rubbed his bare arms as if he were cold or trying to erase the memory of that invasive laughter.
Jason trotted over to Jean-Claude, to butt his head against the vampire’s hand. He’d liked it.
Dominic gave a little bow. “My apologies, Jean-Claude, you have made your point. If you wished to, you could cause the damage that my master caused by accident at your office.”
“My office,” I said. Personally, I didn’t think that Jean-Claude could cause damage with just his voice. I’d been in situations where if he could have done it, he would have. No sense telling Dominic that, though.
Dominic gave an even lower bow in my direction. “Your office, of course.”
“Can we cut the grandstanding?” I said. “Can you help us?”
“I am more than willing to try.”
I walked up to him, picking my way over the broken stones. When I was standing as close as was polite and maybe an inch or so more, I said, “These three vampires are not an experiment. This is not some graduate study in magical metaphysics. You offered to teach me necromancy, Dominic. I think you’re not up to the job. How can you teach me when I can do things you can’t? Unless, of course, you can raise vampires from their coffins?”
I stared into his dark eyes the entire time I spoke, watching the anger narrow his eyes, tighten his lips. His ego was as big as I’d hoped. I knew he wouldn’t disappoint me. Dominic would do his best for us now. His pride was at stake.
“Tell me exactly how you called the power, Anita, and I will build you a spell that should work—if you have the control to make it work.”
I smiled at him, and I made sure it was just this side of condescending. “You come up with it, I can pull it off.”
He smiled. “Arrogance is not a becoming trait in a woman.”
“I find it a very becoming trait,” Jean-Claude said. “If it’s deserved. If you had just raised three vampires from their daytime rest, wouldn’t you be arrogant, Dominic?”
His smile widened. “Yes, I would be.”
Truth was, I didn’t feel arrogant. I was scared. Scared that I’d screwed Willie up and he would never rise again. I felt bad too, about Liv and Damian. It wasn’t a matter of liking them or not; I didn’t mean to do it. You shouldn’t extinguish someone’s life force by accident. If I felt half as secure as my words to Dominic, why did my stomach hurt?
32
* * *
DOMINIC, Cassandra, and I came up with a spell. The part of the plan that was my idea was very simple. I had put zombies back in their graves for years. I was good at it. As far as I was able, I was going to treat this like just another job: laying the dead to rest, nothing special. Lay the zombies first, worry about the vamps later.
I had Cassandra fetch one of my knives and a wrist sheath from the bedroom. If I’d been acting as a focus for another animator, I wouldn’t have let him sink teeth into me, so why did the blood have to come from Jean-Claude drinking it? It didn’t, or I didn’t think it did. Dominic agreed with me, but he wasn’t a hundred percent sure. So zombies first. They’d be the practice. If the knife didn’t work, we’d go to fangs, but what little normalcy was left to me, I was going to cling to.
I’d sent Stephen for a bowl to hold the blood. He’d returned with a small, golden bowl. I wondered if the size was deliberate, to encourage me not to spill too much blood. For a werewolf, Stephen didn’t seem to like blood very much. The bowl was polished to a shine so bright it almost glowed. The inside showed the dimpled blows of hammer work. Beaten gold, and I knew as soon as I touched it, it was old. Why does everyone think you have to have something special to hold the blood? Tupperware would have worked.
We stood in the rubble-strewn room where the zombies waited, patient as only the dead can be. Some of the eyes that watched me were sunken like the blind eyes of dead fish, a few skulls were empty, and even without eyes, they all seemed to be looking at me.
I stood, knife strapped to my left wrist, facing them. Richard stood to my left, Jean-Claude to my right. They weren’t touching me, by my request.
Dominic had asked for enough details of the first triumvirate that I’d been embarrassed. He agreed with me that the power was probably there without us having to crawl all over each other. Agreeing to that alone earned him brownie points. After all, the plan was to raise the magic tonight in front of the whole pack. I didn’t really want to be having sex in front of that many strangers. All right, it wasn’t exactly sex, but it was close enough that I didn’t want an audience.
The glow was fading. Staring at the partially rotting zombies, it was hard to regain the mood. “My zombies usually hold together better than this,” I said.
“If you had pulled this much power from two other necromancers, the zombies would be better,” Dominic said.
“Perhaps it was the lack of control,” Jean-Claude said.
I turned and looked at him. “I think Dominic means that some of the power that raised them was taken from a dead man.”
“Do you believe I am a dead man, ma petite?”
I stared into that lovely face and nodded. “The vampires I raised are just corpses. Whatever you are, it’s a form of necromancy. Necromancy only works when you start with a dead body.”
He cocked his head to one side. “I hear your words, ma petite, but I do not think you believe them, not completely.”
I shook my head. “I don’t know what I believe anymore.”
“Actually,” Dominic said, “I don’t believe it matters that Jean-Claude is a vampire. I think it is more that neither he nor Richard know anything of raising the dead. That is your talent alone. I think with practice, you could channel the power into perfect zombies, but in a way, Jean-Claude is right. The wildness of it, the lack of control, made the zombies less perfect.”
Something must have shown on my face, because he said, “You had too many things to control to pay attention to all the details. I think you instinctively let the zombies go, because it was the part you were most sure of. You have excellent instincts.”
“Thanks, I guess,” I said.
He smiled. “I know time is growing short. As we can see from Jean-Claude’s presence, not all vampires sleep until full dark. I fear that if one of the vampires passes its waking hour, that he or she will be lost. But I would ask Anita to do one thing for me that has nothing to do with her problem, but everything to do with mine.”
“What problem?” I asked.
“Sabin,” Jean-Claude said.
Dominic nodded. “Sabin’s time is running short.”
“Sabin, the vampire at the club?” Cassandra asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “What do you need, Dominic? Make it quick, and I’m your girl.”
Dominic smiled. “Thank you, Anita. Concentrate on one of your zombies. Try to bring it closer to perfection.”
I frowned at him.
“Heal one of yo
ur zombies, ma petite.”
“You can’t heal the dead,” I said, “but I can make them more lifelike.”
Dominic nodded. “That would do very nicely.”
“I usually do that during the initial rush of power. I’ve never tried to fiddle with my dead once they were raised.”
“Please try,” Dominic said.
“We could raise the power between the three of us, then try it,” I said.
Dominic shook his head. “I am not sure what that would do to the spell. I think it would be taking a great risk with your companions.”
I stared at him for a heartbeat or two. “You’d risk leaving Sabin to rot to save our friends?”
“You asked for my help, Anita. I think you are not a woman who asks for help often. It would be poor payment of such a compliment if I let you risk your friends for mine. If you can heal your dead cold, as it were, so be it. If you cannot, we will proceed to save these three vampires.”
“A very honorable sentiment,” Jean-Claude said.
“There are moments when honor is all that is left,” Dominic said.
The vampire and the man seemed to have a moment of near perfect understanding. A wealth of history, if not shared, then similar, passed between them. I was odd woman out.
I looked to Richard and we had our own moment of perfect understanding. We valued our mortal life span. The fatalism in Dominic’s voice had been frightening. How old was he? I could usually tell with a vampire, but never with a human servant. I didn’t ask. There was a weight of years in Dominic’s brown eyes that made me afraid to ask.
I looked at Jean-Claude’s lovely face and wondered if I would be as honorable, or would I have risked anyone, everyone, to heal him? To see Jean-Claude dead would be one thing, but rotted away like Sabin . . . It would be worse than death in many ways. Of course, Sabin was dying. Powerful as he was, he couldn’t hold himself together forever. Or maybe he could. Maybe Dominic could sew him up in a big sack, like the gloves the vampire wore on his hands. Maybe Sabin could go on living even after he’d been reduced to so much liquid. Now that was a hideous thought.
Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter Collection 6-10 Page 31
