Fantastic Hope

by Laurell K. Hamilton

  “I don’t see the difference,” I said.

  “That’s because you’re evil!” She shouted it at me. If the office hadn’t been mostly soundproof, it might have brought our daytime office staff to the door, but for help to come that way I’d need her to yell louder. If we made that much noise, then it would probably be from me handling it myself.

  “So, you don’t want me to raise a zombie for you.”

  “Of course not!” She stood then, shaking with her anger and other strong emotions I couldn’t even guess at.

  “Do you have a vampire or shapeshifter problem?” I asked, keeping an eye both on her husband and on her hands clutching the purse. It was big enough that she could have hidden anything from a .380 to a small .45. Maybe all that was in there was her wallet and an understated lipstick, but I’d never gotten in trouble being paranoid. I was a U.S. Marshal for the Preternatural Division; it wasn’t paranoia if they really were trying to kill you.

  “No, no, none of that,” said Mr. Henderson. He tugged on his wife’s arm, trying to get her to sit back down, but she stood there ramrod straight and glaring at me. He wasn’t going to shush her or make her sit down. In fact, I wasn’t sure I could count on him for any real help. If I had to shoot her, he’d probably lie and say I shot first. Screw this. I reached for the button on the telephone.

  “Please, Miss Blake, we don’t know who else to go to.”

  I hesitated over the button. “The note by your appointment said ‘zombie,’ so I assumed you needed one raised, or maybe laid to rest.”

  “You defiled our daughter!”

  I pressed the button and smiled at the crazy woman while I counted slowly in my head. Before I got to twenty, there was a knock on the door and Mary, our daytime receptionist, poked her head in. “Sorry, Anita, but you’ve got an emergency call.”

  It was now up to me to decide how serious the fake emergency would be. Was it a small one, so that she could escort the Hendersons to the lounge for coffee, tea, and some calming down, or was it a big one, so I was done with appointments for the day and she’d escort the would-be clients out of our offices for good? They would then find that my calendar would be full for them for, like, ever.

  “Julie, sit down or they’re going to think we’re crazy.”

  “I’m sorry but I really do have to go,” I said, standing up.

  Mary walked into the room to help herd them out.

  “You raised a zombie and it got our little girl pregnant.”

  “And we’re done,” I said, making shooshing motions at them toward the door, while Mary made come-right-this-way motions on her end.

  Mr. Henderson stood and took his wife’s arm, pulling her away from me but not exactly going for the door. “Miss Blake, you raised Thomas Warrington for the historical society our daughter belonged to.”

  I stopped shooshing, because I did remember raising Thomas Warrington from the grave. I remembered because he’d been one of the most perfect zombies I’d ever raised. He’d not only looked alive, but he’d felt warm, had a pulse. He’d felt alive even to me, and it was my psychic ability, or magic, or whatever you want to call it, that had raised him. It had been creepy as hell.

  “I can see it in your face, you remember now, don’t you?” Mrs. Henderson said, and she sounded triumphant.

  “I remember Thomas Warrington. I put him back in his grave when the historians were finished with their interview. He’s still dead and gone and in his grave.”

  “Our daughter told us that you knew they’d had sex, that you knew what he’d done to her.”

  “I don’t expect to have to warn my clients that they shouldn’t fuck the zombies I raise. If they want them for that kind of shit, they can go somewhere else, because that’s a hard limit for me.”

  “My daughter did not plan on having sex with that creature, he seduced her with your magic.”

  I shook my head. “When I realized that barrier had been crossed, I put him back in the ground. I remember your daughter, she was over twenty-one and a consenting adult. It’s not my fault she made a poor choice, but he was centuries dead, which means that if she got pregnant, it wasn’t from my zombie.”

  “Are you calling my daughter a whore?” She almost lunged at me, but her husband grabbed her arms and started backing her up.

  “We didn’t believe it, either, Miss Blake, but according to the blood test, our grandson is related to the closest living descendant of Thomas Warrington.”

  “That’s not possible,” I said.

  “Blood tests don’t lie, Miss Blake.”

  “Then you need to double-check the test.”

  “We did.”

  I stared at him, and something on my face made the woman say, “You really didn’t know it was possible, did you?”

  I shook my head. “It’s hard for any undead to father children, but zombies . . . it’s impossible.”

  “Our grandson is real enough, Miss Blake,” he said.

  “Impossible,” I said, but softer.

  “Our daughter is dying, Miss Blake.”

  “What? Of what?”

  “The doctors don’t know.”

  “She just lies in the bed,” Mrs. Henderson said, “and no matter how much they feed her through the tubes, she just keeps dying.” She started to cry softly.

  “That can’t have anything to do with a zombie from almost two years ago.”

  She rallied her anger one last time, eyes blazing at me from between her tears. “She’s wasting away, the doctors said it’s like a vampire victim except there are no bites, but something is draining her to death.”

  “Zombies don’t do that, can’t do that.”

  “The doctors brought in a witch to consult,” he said.

  The mother glared at me, tears drying on her face. “The witch said it’s something dead that’s trying to drag her down into the grave. She asked if there were any malevolent spirits associated with our daughter, or our family, and there aren’t except for your zombie.”

  “When I realized he wasn’t a normal zombie, I reopened the grave. He was burned to bone and ash and scattered in running water. That’s as dead and gone as it gets, Mrs. Henderson.”

  “Then what is killing our daughter?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Will you help us, please,” he said.

  “I don’t know how to help your daughter.”

  Mrs. Henderson jerked away from her husband and poked a finger into my upper chest hard enough that it pushed me back a little. I could have stood my ground, but it would have hurt us both. She didn’t need a jammed finger.

  “Your monster got our daughter pregnant. Justine didn’t want to date ever again, because she’d had a perfect love and their love child. She was so happy that she just closed herself off to anything or anyone else, and now she’s dying.”

  “I’m terribly sorry for what’s happened, but it’s not my zombie. I destroyed it almost two years ago.”

  The anger drained away and she started to cry again. I’d have preferred her yelling at me. “You owe us,” she whispered.

  * * *

  —

  Justine Henderson lay in the hospital bed, hooked up to more tubes and wires than you ever want to see on someone. Her hair was still straight and brown, but I remembered it thick and shiny. Now it was dry and lifeless like the rest of her. She was painfully thin. The doctors said that no matter how many nutrients they pumped into her through tubes and needles, she just kept losing weight. I wouldn’t have recognized her if her parents and the doctor hadn’t assured me that this was the same woman I’d met that one strange night nearly two years ago.

  The doctors were stumped, so they’d researched supernatural diseases and come up with a wasting illness associated with old-time vampirism, as in the last case reported in America was in the 1700s. It was why I’d br
ought Jean-Claude with me. He’d arrived in this country from France around the same time, though that “epidemic” of wasting illness hadn’t been his doing. I was hoping he would know something the modern doctors and witches didn’t about whatever the hell was happening to Justine Henderson.

  “Was she very thin when you met her?” he asked.

  “No, she was a good, normal weight, not one of those women that starve themselves.”

  “Then she has lost a great deal,” he said, fingers smoothing down the front of his white shirt in one of his nervous gestures, but there was no lace for him to toy with, just a plain shirtfront. His fingers went to the mandarin collar, but it was too plain for him to have anything to play his fingers over and soothe himself. He was actually wearing a tailored black suit with thin satin lapels so that it was vaguely tuxedo-like. It was the simplest clothing I’d ever seen him in, and his fingers kept trying to find something to fuss with, to no avail. Until this moment, I’d never realized how much fussing with the lace and complicated bits of his clothes helped him deal with stress. He’d dressed to meet the family and the doctors, saying, “It would be unseemly for me to look festive in the face of their grief.”

  I took his hand to let him run his thumb over my knuckles to see if that would help. It was odd to think of the master vampire, ruler of all the bloodsuckers in America, as nervous. He was my fiancé, which made me feel like I should have understood what all the fancy outfits meant to him sooner than this.

  “She looks skeletal,” I said softly.

  “That is fitting since she is dying.”

  “Do you agree with the doctor that this is some sort of vampire-caused illness?”

  His hand went very still in mine, as if he were holding his breath, but that wasn’t it; he’d just stopped breathing. He didn’t have to breathe except to talk, but he usually did it anyway. Now he went still in that way that the older vampires could so that if I hadn’t been holding his hand, I would think he’d left the room.

  “The illness the doctor refers to is when a newly risen vampire began to prey on their family. They would lure them out and drain them dry. Some would turn into vampires, but most simply died.” His thumb started moving over my hand in small circles and he began to breathe again, as if a switch had been turned back on. If he’d been human, he would have needed at least a bigger breath, or maybe a gasp, but he wasn’t human. “They preyed on their family because they could gain entrance to the house without permission,” I said.

  “Oui, we can enter public buildings without being invited, but private homes are safe from us unless they were once our homes.”

  “Shouldn’t the vampire who made the new vamp stay with them and make sure the family massacre doesn’t happen since it draws attention to them?” I asked.

  “They should, and in Europe they would, or some older vampire would, but many of the ones that fled to America did not hold with tradition. They did not understand that some traditions weren’t whims of the council but logical precautions.”

  “You heard the doctors—there are no marks where a vamp is taking blood from her.”

  “There are other ways for vampires to feed, ma petite, as you know.”

  I lowered my voice because it wasn’t common knowledge that some master vampires had secondary ways to feed. “I know you guys can feed through your human servants, like literally take some of the nutrition when we eat if you’re trapped in, like, the hold of a ship. It makes sense for long voyages, but if you drain your human servant to death, that could mean you’d die with them.”

  “Harm to one can be harm to both,” he said. His fingers had found my engagement ring and he was now sliding his finger over it. I guess any fidget object would do.

  “So, no vampire would do this to his own servant.”

  “You are correct.”

  “I’m missing something, aren’t I?”

  “There are even rarer ways to feed from a distance, ma petite.”

  I shook my head. “Feeding on fear, or anger, or whatever emotion usually requires touching skin to skin.”

  “Not if they are ancient enough.”

  I filed that away for later, because I hadn’t known that. “So, some ancient vamp is doing this?”

  “Non, ma petite, I would sense such power, and even the very ancient among us would need some connection to the woman. It would not be random.”

  “So, what is it?”

  “I have seen this happen to humans for only one cause from my kind. The ardeur can drain someone to death.”

  “Only if you’re feeding on them continuously, and no one is coming in here and fucking Justine to death.”

  “Once a human is addicted to the ardeur, if they do not get regular feedings, they can stop eating and waste away from want of its touch.”

  “She’s not starving herself to death by not eating, Jean-Claude, she’s starving while the doctors are pumping her full of food. She should not still be losing ground.”

  “Belle Morte, who was first gifted with the ardeur so she could feed from lust, could drain a human from a distance like this.”

  “Are you saying it’s Belle doing this?”

  “No, no.”

  “Then what are you saying?” I was getting angry or impatient or both, and I wanted to stop holding hands. I must have thought it too loudly, because he let go of me.

  “Sorry, I’m just . . . I want to help Justine and her family.”

  “You feel responsible,” he said.

  “Yeah, I guess I do.”

  “Does the baby truly belong to the zombie you raised?”

  “They really did trace down a descendant from Thomas Warrington’s brother. He didn’t have any children personally. The descendant shares genetics with the baby Justine gave birth to, enough to be family, so yeah, it looks like Warrington really is the father.”

  “It is difficult enough for an older vampire to have children. I have never heard of a zombie being able to do so.”

  “Me either. I guess I’ll be doing another write-up in the professional journals.” Though honestly I didn’t want anyone to know I could raise a zombie this alive. The government had looked to me to raise a recently dead world leader just temporarily, or so the rumor had said, but luckily the zombie they spied on had been the shambling dead and wouldn’t pass for human. That had been a few years and a few power levels ago. If the same government agencies realized I could raise something this “alive,” I’d be back on their hit parade. No thanks. I could just see Bert Vaughn, the business manager at Animators Inc., trying to schedule me to raise dead husbands from the grave to get that one last baby. Yeah, Bert was an unscrupulous bastard and would think it was a great idea. No. Just no.

  The one thing helping me stay out of the news and off the radar of the unscrupulous was that the Hendersons didn’t want anyone to know that their little girl had had sex with a zombie. They didn’t want their grandson to be all over the Internet as the zombie baby. If we all worked hard, maybe we could stay out of the news on this one.

  “Unless Belle Morte snuck into this country and targeted Justine for some reason, it can’t be the ardeur being fed from a distance,” I said.

  “Not Belle, no, but the woman was seduced by our bloodline.”

  I looked up at him. “What do you mean by that?”

  “Your zombie may have looked alive, ma petite, but this girl saw him rise from his grave, correct?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Yet despite seeing that fearful sight, she still had sex with him within an hour or two of his rising.”

  I nodded. “It was freaky quick.”

  “She professed her love for him and he for her within hours, is that not also correct?”

  “Yes,” I said. I really didn’t like where this was going.

  “Belle’s power was lust, mine was more than that, but it wa
s only after you gained the power that it turned into love.”

  “Yeah, I accidentally bound several people to me in true love.” I rolled my eyes as I said it, trying to make light of something that scared me. To be able to make someone accidentally fall in love with you—real love—was not a power I wanted.

  “Belle could cause lust in hundreds, thousands, and be unmoved if she wished it, so it was her weapon of power. I saw kings give up their kingdoms for one more night with her. In me, it became a two-edged blade. I could cause casual lust, but for more, I could only cut as deeply as I was willing to be wounded myself.”

  I nodded. We’d realized a while back that some of our love might be the ardeur, but if it was, we both felt it now. What do you do when your happy-ever-after may be magically induced love? Do you fight it? Ignore it? Find some witchy therapy? I’d have been pissier about it if I hadn’t bound several people to me by accident, too. It made it harder to throw stones at him. My house had too much damn glass in it for me to bitch at him. Lust isn’t love, and my version could even cause true friendship, because that’s a type of love, as well. The learning curve was still ongoing.

  “You’re explaining in detail things I already know, because you want me to think about them.”

  “Yes, ma petite.”

  “You’re saying that the zombie, Thomas Warrington, used a type of the ardeur on himself and Justine here. You’re saying that’s what made them fall in love.”

  “I believe so.”

  “That’s not possible. He was a zombie, not a vampire, for a start, and even vampires don’t come into secondary powers like the ardeur as soon as they rise from the grave. It takes decades, or centuries, to come into that kind of power.”

  “I do not believe it was his ardeur, ma petite, but yours. He was your creature, after all.”

  I really didn’t like the term your creature, but I let it go, because it couldn’t be true, or maybe because I didn’t want it to be true. “But he’s dead, Jean-Claude. We let the exterminator crew burn him to ashes and bones after he went crazy and tried to attack us.”

  “He turned into a flesh-eating zombie, if I remember correctly.”