Affliction (Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter) - Laurell K. Hamilton Page 0,257

the ground seeking the dead.

It hit the graves one after another like a stone tossed into water so that the power spilled out and out like rings in water, but it was earth underneath us that began to move like water. I heard startled cries and knew it was some of the police with us, but it was distant. The two vampires pressed to my body, and the bodies in the ground were all more real to me, because they were dead, and my power liked the dead.

Truth whispered against my face, ‘Oh, my God.’

I said, ‘Yes.’ I got to my knees with Wicked wrapped around the back of me, his hands still caressing me; my hand was in Truth’s, and with the vampires wrapped around me, the graves moved like water, spilling the zombies to the surface. They didn’t have to climb their way out; my power brought them up whole and in one piece. But they didn’t look like his zombies, they didn’t look like corpses, they looked like people in their funeral finery.

It wasn’t enough. I sent my power out and out seeking more, and found another graveyard, and I raised it, and even that wasn’t enough. For the first time I didn’t argue, or hold back, I just embraced how good it felt to find the dead and call them to me, because that was what I did. I raised them and then I told them to come to me, and I knew that the distant ones were making their slow, careful way to me.

I felt him almost on the other side of the city. My necromancy found him like iron seeking a magnet, but it was more than that; his power was seeking me, too. I realized in that moment that we both carried Her power inside us, and those pieces wanted to be whole again.

He came to me, not just because we carried pieces of the Mother of All Darkness, but because he was dead and all the dead are attracted to necromancers. He walked into our cemetery wearing the body of one of his own zombies, so that he was just one of many, though he looked rotted, and my zombies didn’t, so that he stood out as he walked in with the first group of zombies I’d called to me.

‘My power knows you,’ he said.

‘We carry the power of the Living Dark inside us,’ I said.

‘Yes,’ he said.

Then two things happened at once. I drew a circle in my mind’s eye in a large, sweeping arc, visualizing it glowing as it came up. The second thing was that Seamus leapt like a piece of the night itself toward me. Truth and Wicked moved in front of me, but Jane was there first. They fell to the ground in a whirl of black cloth and struggling bodies.

‘You have put up a circle of power,’ the Lover of Death said. ‘How did you do that without blood to seal it?’

‘I’m a modern necromancer; it’s all about the shortcuts,’ I said.

He didn’t understand the comment, but it didn’t matter, because Edward called out, ‘Hatfield is a go.’

‘Do it!’

I heard the little hiss, a hesitant click, and I threw myself backward to the ground, grabbing Truth and Wicked by their coats and taking them down with me, so that we were almost flat to the ground when the fire breathed over us orange and yellow and so hot that it made the night air shimmer in heat waves, and made the air above us so hot we were afraid to move.

The Lover of Death was engulfed in flames. Some of my zombies were caught in the edges of it, but the Lover of Death was lost in flame. He didn’t scream at first, and then he did, wordless at first, and then, ‘My body, you’re destroying my body! No! NO! Half the Mother’s power dies with me! Nooooo!’ He charged toward us as he burned. Edward in the silver fire suit was between us and the burning zombie. I heard the click and whirr and whoosh again and fresh flame spilled onto him. He tried to run then for the edge of the circle, but when he got to that invisible line he could not cross it. He stood on the edge of it and screamed and burned and died.

Jane, Lisandro, Dev, and Nicky had pinned Seamus. Nicky’s face was bloody. Dev’s left arm hung useless, something very wrong at the shoulder. Jane and Lisandro seemed

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