Dead Ice

by Laurell K. Hamilton

  "Person," he said.

  "Defending your life?"

  "No," he said.

  "Mine was."

  "You bothered that mine wasn't?"

  "Maybe, maybe not. Either way, this isn't the time or place to discuss it."

  "No, it's not."

  "Okay then," I said.

  "Okay then," he said.

  "Is anything wrong, Ms. Blake?" It was Mr. MacDougal, patiently standing behind the worn tombstone.

  I shook my head. "No, nothing wrong, just filling in my assistant on a detail or two. I usually walk the circle alone."

  "It's a big bowl," he said.

  "It is that, Mr. MacDougal, it is that." I dipped the blade back in the cooling blood and started walking the circle like I had a purpose.

  14

  WE WALKED THE circle together, Nicky finding just the right height to hold the bowl so that I could dip the machete in without spattering us, or even hesitating as we moved. He anticipated me in this as he did when we had sex, so that we fell into a rhythm that was almost a dance. It made it more of a ritual, some sort of liturgical dance, but with more blood than I assume the monks use during theirs. It was so smooth, so . . . something I had no word for that I was shocked when I looked down and saw blood on the grass ahead of us. One more sprinkle of blood and we'd close the circle. It didn't seem like we'd walked that far. Nicky offered the bowl to me one more time; I dipped the long blade in, pulled it slowly out, and let the thickening drops fall to touch the blood already on the grass. The moment the fresh blood hit the first drop we had cast down, the circle closed. It closed with a rush and a roar of power that left every hair on my body dancing. It pulled a gasp from my throat.

  "Oh, my God," Nicky whispered. I looked into his face and found his eyes wide and his own skin reacting to the power.

  It was hard to breathe through the power. My chest was tight with it. What the fuck?

  Nicky whispered, "That's more power than I've ever felt when you've put up a circle."

  I nodded, swallowing hard to be able to whisper back, "I haven't used a death as big as a cow in a while. I think it was more battery power than I needed."

  "What does that mean?"

  "It means this is going to be a really kickass zombie."

  "What?"

  I shook my head and it wasn't until a sound came from inside the circle with us that I turned and saw MacDougal. He was standing behind the tombstone where we'd told him to stand. He looked a little pale in the moonlight, mouth open and gasping as if he'd been running. I hadn't thought to ask if he was psychically gifted. He couldn't be very gifted, or I would have sensed it, but his reaction said clearly he wasn't a null. They felt nothing when you did magic around them. Mac Dougal sure felt something.

  I started walking toward him, and Nicky stayed at my side as if we'd planned it. "You okay, MacDougal?" I asked.

  He nodded, but he was still pale, eyes too wide.

  "I have to smear blood on you, remember?"

  He nodded again, but he wasn't looking at me.

  "MacDougal." I said his name sharply, almost a yell. He jumped, then looked at me. "Oh, my God," he said, and it was almost a yell, too.

  "Mr. MacDougal, can you hear me?"

  He nodded, and then coughed sharply, as if he were having trouble breathing. "I hear you, Blake."

  "Do you remember what I said I had to do with the cow blood?"

  "You smear it on my face, heart, hands, correct?"

  "Yes, very good. How psychically gifted are you, MacDougal?"

  "I'm not, I mean . . . I can feel ghosts, but I can't see them. They're what made me want to study history, so I could hear what they were trying to tell me."

  I had to take a deep breath and let it out slow, or I would have yelled at him. "You can sense ghosts? But you can't see them?"

  "No, just feel them. Gettysburg was so thick with them it was hard to breathe."

  "For future reference, MacDougal, if you're around necromancy and you have a touch of it yourself, you need to say something up front, and not make it a surprise."

  "Is that why it feels like my skin is jumping?"

  "Yeah, that would be why."

  Jesus, people just didn't think the logic through, did they? I didn't want to put the blood on him. I didn't want to give him a zombie to control; would it make his own abilities with the dead stronger, so that next time the ghosts could talk directly to him? Or was it just a quirk of fate, the universe laughing up its sleeve, and this would be the closest he'd ever come to the kind of power he might have had? If he'd been in his teens, or even twenties, I'd have called it, and opened the circle and tried for another historian, but he was late forties, early fifties. It was too late for some huge jump in psychic abilities--usually. I was 99.9 percent sure it wouldn't cause a problem. I stood there debating on that fraction of a percent.

  "Do you need to use someone else?" Nicky asked.

  "Debating that now."

  "Why can't you use me?" MacDougal asked.

  "Not sure."

  "Not sure of what?" he asked.

  "A lot of things, but right now how it might affect your psychic abilities to give you a zombie."

  "What could it do?"

  I shook my head. "I don't want to say."

  "Why, is it something bad?"

  "People are suggestible, Mr. MacDougal; you might talk yourself into things that aren't true later."

  "I don't understand."

  I shook my head again. "It's okay, don't worry about it."

  I turned to Nicky. "I don't like this."

  "Can you open the circle and put him out, put someone else back in?"

  Just that he'd asked that question meant that Nicky had watched me do this a lot lately. It also meant that he thought about my job as logically as possible, the way he did most things. "If I open it, the power gets out sometimes, too. I won't have as much control of it once the circle is open."

  "Then that's out," he said.

  "Yeah, and we don't have another cow. I open the circle and I may be able to raise the zombie, but weird things happen when I raise the dead without a circle of protection up."

  "Like the night we met," he said.

  I realized that he was right. His mercenary group's witch had put a circle of power around the whole graveyard to keep me from being able to contact Jean-Claude and my other people. They'd thought that would be enough of a circle of power for me to raise the dead, and they'd been right. I'd raised the whole graveyard for them, and used the zombies as weapons against them. It had worked, but there had been a moment when I felt that mass of zombies fight me for control. They hadn't wanted to go back to their graves that night. They had turned hungry eyes to me, Nicky, and his old Rex. It had worked out, but I wasn't eager to repeat it.

  "Yeah, like that."

  "So you have more power than you need for one zombie; just raise it."

  Logically I knew I couldn't give MacDougal more power permanently, but it's not always about logic. "I don't know."

  "You're the boss," he said, which sometimes meant he would follow me to the ends of the earth, and sometimes meant that I was being silly, usually overly sentimental. Sociopaths are so fun to work with.

  "If I were really the boss I'd have sensed his ability, but my necromancy was too loud in my head, like a tune you hum without realizing you do it. It drowned out his smaller sound."

  "Has this ever happened before?" he asked.

  "No."

  "Then odds are you were overdue to hit someone like this."

  I studied his so-serious face. I couldn't argue with his logic, though I wanted to, because it just seemed like I should have felt MacDougal's abilities, but even standing this close I felt nothing from him. It was only his own reactions that had let me know anything was wrong with him. Shouldn't I have felt more from him now that I knew? All I could feel was my own power filling the circle, pushing at me to use it. God, I wasn't raising enough dead, or it wouldn't have felt like so
me kind of flood waiting to crash down on us, or out of me and into the ground. The power needed to be used. I looked down at the grave.

  I wanted to touch it. I wanted to pull out the corpse inside that hard ground. It felt good to use my magic; that wasn't new.

  I dipped the machete back into the bowl of rapidly cooling blood. "I have to smear blood on you, Mr. MacDougal."

  "I remember," he said, in a strained voice.

  I used my other hand to take blood off the machete and have him bend down so I could smear it on his forehead, then open his shirt so I could touch over his heart, and lastly his hands. He didn't argue, or flinch at the blood. It made me wonder what our historian did in his spare time, or maybe the magic had him, too.

  "I'm going to raise the zombie now. Don't leave the circle, because if you do then you won't be able to control the zombie and I don't have time to hand-hold it for you."

  "I'll stay right here."

  "Good," I said.

  Nicky set the bowl of blood carefully on the ground and straightened with his hands flexing at his sides. "I want my hands free, just in case."

  "You think you're going to wrestle the zombie?"

  "I'd shoot it first, but I'll do what's needed."

  I frowned at him, but I knelt and placed the machete across the bowl. I wanted my hands free, too, but for a different reason. I looked down at the grave. It was as if the last drop of blood had been one drop too many, and it was a moment of critical mass where the death and the magic met and imploded into something bigger. It was like doing a physics experiment that I'd done a thousand times before, but the same data, the same actions, and I suddenly had a brand-new result. Chaos theory is never a good thing when it meets magic.

  I went to the grave and put my hands just above the soft dip in the earth where the coffin had broken down and a pocket of decay had risen underground and then deflated like a badly made cake so that the ground was hollowed out above it. I could feel the bits and pieces of the body under the dirt, like puzzle pieces stirred about. I put my hands on the dirt, and the moment my hands touched earth, it was like a spark leapt from the remains to my hands, up my arms, across my shoulders, and over my scalp like the way scientists say lightning truly is, from ground to air, but it never looks that way. This felt that way.

  I concentrated on the earth against my hands. It was dry and hard packed, the spring grass the only softness. I made myself concentrate on the physical sensation so it would help anchor me against the magic that was spilling over my skin. This was an old cemetery; it didn't have sprinklers, and nothing got watered unless it was paid for with the caretakers, so I dug my fingers into the hard earth and the coolness of the new grass, and fought to control my own necromancy. It was just so much power tonight.

  I plunged that power into the hard dirt and I called, "Thomas Warrington, Thomas James Warrington, I call thee from the grave. I call you to my hand, and the hand of the man behind your gravestone. Come to us, Thomas, rise and walk with us." I was cutting the ceremony to pieces, because I didn't need words of the ritual to build power. How did I know that I didn't need all the steps to raise this zombie? I just knew, knew with capital letters, I KNEW I could pull this zombie from the grave. It would take more energy doing it this way, but I needed to burn off the extra kick of the cow's death, and MacDougal's baby psychic powers. This was my only zombie raising of the night, and the magic had to go somewhere, because I didn't want it to go home with me to Jean-Claude and the other vampires in the underground. Necromancy was supposed to be good for all kinds of undead, including vamps. I so didn't need that tonight.

  I used the dead man's name, because I wasn't certain that without it he would be himself and able to answer questions, but part of me was almost certain that I needed nothing but my own hands, my own power, to pull him out of the grave.

  The earth moved against my hands like water, but thicker, as if mud could move like water and not be wet. The earth separated, remade itself, and I felt the pieces collect and begin to rebuild themselves. There were pieces missing, but it was all right, I didn't need the small pieces. I gathered him up and felt him begin to be.

  I plunged my hands into that moving, writhing earth, and hands met mine, hands that laced their fingers around mine, and felt as real. It was like dragging a drowning victim up out of solid water. He clutched at my hands and the ground pushed, and I pulled, and he came out of the earth to his thighs, dressed in the black suit he'd been buried in. I got to my feet and pulled him with me, and the ground spilled him up like some kind of escalator. That was new; usually even the best zombies had to climb the last few feet from the ground as if the grave was reluctant to let them out. This grave gave him up like a flower opening and pushing out a seed.

  He blinked huge, pale eyes at me, gray or blue. It was hard to tell by moonlight. He looked at me, at our hands, and said, "Who are you?"

  Zombies didn't ask that first thing; like all true undead they needed blood to speak, to be real, to be "alive," even for a little while. I looked up into that young face and he was in there, aware, awake, and he was perfect. Even I was impressed.

  15

  WE LEFT THOMAS the Zombie with MacDougal. He and Mrs. Willis were very, very pleased with the zombie. "He seems alive," Mrs. Willis whispered to me, because once we'd explained to him what he was, and how much time had passed, it had scared him. I'd seen zombies react like that before, when they didn't know they were dead. I always hated that part, explaining to them that they were dead, and there was no way to change that permanently. Not even my necromancy could resurrect the dead. Thomas the Zombie looked fabulously alive, but he wasn't, and if we left him walking aboveground long enough his body would begin to rot and the miracle would turn into the nightmare of every shambling zombie movie you'd ever seen.

  I used to have a hard-and-fast rule that I never let clients take their zombies away from the graveside. I put the rule in place after a few families took their loved ones home and kept them until they were rotted nightmares, and even then some didn't want to let them go. The worst was when they tried to bathe them. Water made them rot faster and did nothing to help the smell. My zombies didn't rot initially, even back in the day when they'd looked like partially rotted corpses, but the "magic" would eventually begin to fade, and the first sign of that was that the decay process started back up, and rotting meat stinks; it just does.

  But technology and enough profit to buy the technology had given us options. I had an electronic ankle cuff waiting to put on the zombie. I'd use it to track him just like the police do with someone on house arrest. This model of cuff would also alarm if it was tampered with, so if they tried to take it off I'd know and they could be charged with disturbance of a corpse, among other things.

  Our business manager at Animators Inc., Bert Vaughn, had approved the expense after he lost me for entire nights while I stayed with my zombies listening to them being questioned about everything from court cases to historical events. We billed per zombie raised, not by the hour, so that much revenue loss had finally convinced even Bert that we needed a different way to keep track of our zombies. But first we needed someone to give the zombie to, which was MacDougal.

  Once the zombie was aboveground, the power was fine. I pulled the circle down and the spring night was just normal. Only the zombie was extraordinary, so lifelike that it was a little disturbing. I raised the dead; I did not do resurrection--no one did outside of Bible stories--but Thomas Warrington might have made a believer out of people. Not me; I knew in a few days he'd start to rot, and being this "alive" only meant that he'd be more horrified when it started, like the poor victims in the videos that the FBI had shown me. It was the same principle, except I didn't have Thomas Warrington's soul in a magical reinforced jar somewhere, so I could put it back in, or take it out, at my customers' whim.

  To raise a zombie, even a recently dead one, that looked as alive as the women in the videos, the animator had to be damned powerful. There weren't many of us who
had the juice to do something like this, and fewer still who could capture souls. Hell, I didn't even know how to do that. Dominga Salvador had offered to teach me, but I'd told her I didn't want anyone's soul. I hadn't then, and I didn't now, but watching Thomas laugh and joke with everyone made me wonder, if it wasn't his soul in there, what was it? Was it just body memory? The last flickers of personality, caught in the flesh like the traumatic events that get caught in the walls and floors of a house, so they play over and over again--not a true ghost, but the echoes of emotions so strong they leave images behind? Was that all I was seeing in the tall young "man"? I didn't know and Manny hadn't known either, because I'd asked him. My grandmother Flores, who taught me how to control my power, hadn't known either. As far as I knew, no one knew the answer; maybe there wasn't one.

  We made plans for them to bring him back tomorrow night to be put back down. We made the plans quietly while MacDougal asked questions and the zombie answered them, and one of the young guys, whose name I couldn't quite remember, recorded it with his phone. Ah, technology. The zombie had protested the ankle bracelet, but when I gave him a direct order to let me put it on, he'd complied like he had no will of his own. It sort of comforted me that he reacted like any other zombie, because he was almost unnervingly alive, even to me. His skin was still unnaturally cool to the touch, but other than being a little pale, he looked great; for being dead over two hundred years, he looked amazing.

  Nicky, Dino, and I were using the aloe baby wipes I kept in the car to clean my hands. The wipes did well on everything except the blood that always seemed to embed itself at the roots of your fingernails. That needed soap, water, and scrubbing, sometimes with a bristle brush, but for everything else we'd be presentable. Nathaniel held a fresh trash bag so we could throw the used wipes in. Tonight it wasn't very full, but on some nights the kitchen-sized bag filled up.

  "Killing dinosaurs to no purpose," I said.

  "What?" Dino asked.

  Nathaniel explained, "A lot of plastics used to be made from petroleum products, just like gasoline, so it's all prehistoric dead plants and animals."

  "Dead dinosaurs," Nicky said.