it in the future. In reality I wasn’t sure the police would be able to overlook it. At best I’d lose my badge; at worst I might be up on charges of using magic to kill people, which was an automatic death sentence. It was a gray area for the law, but the price was a little too high for me to want to test the limits of it.
‘Marshal Blake, Marshal, can you hear me?’
I blinked and realized that Burke had been talking to me for a while, and I hadn’t heard. Automatically I said, ‘I’m sorry, can you repeat that? I think I was thinking too hard.’
‘Too hard about what?’ Rickman asked.
‘The dead,’ I said. I left the statement there for him to make what he would of it: the dead in this room, zombies, vamps, the victims – what dead?
‘Why does eating flesh make them faster?’ Rickman said, and I realized he was repeating himself.
‘I don’t know, but I do know that fresh blood allows zombies to speak and helps them be more “alive.”’
‘What do you mean, fresh blood?’ he asked.
‘Have any of you ever seen a zombie raised from the grave?’
They all shook their heads. I thought about explaining the whole ritual to them, but it was more information than they needed, and if they didn’t have a background in some sort of ritual-based religion it would be way too much. ‘We usually kill a chicken at the grave, or some animators cut their own body to get the blood, but either way you need fresh blood to do the ritual.’
‘What else do you need?’ Al asked.
‘A blade, salt, and most use an ointment with herbs in it; the mix is usually unique to each individual animator, because it’s homemade. Some animators feel they can’t raise the dead without their own mix of herbs and ointment; it’s usually partly based on the ointment their mentor used when he or she trained them.’
‘Is that all you need to raise the dead?’ Rickman asked.
‘You need the psychic ability to do it, which is damn rare. You need a buried body that is at least three days dead and you need to know the name of the body you’re trying to call from the grave.’
‘Why three days dead?’ Al asked.
‘That’s minimum time for the soul to leave the body,’ I said.
I got owl blinks from most of them, like I’d startled them or overcomplicated their little heads. It’s not a look you get from veteran cops very often. It didn’t make me proud; more crap, how did I explain this?
‘You believe in the soul?’ Rickman asked.
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Do you believe in God?’
‘Of course.’
‘Then how can you …’ Al asked it.
I frowned at him. ‘Finish your sentence.’
He shifted a little as if maybe my look and my request didn’t match up, but he finished. ‘Then how can you use black magic to raise the dead?’
‘Oh, for pity’s sake, don’t you guys read the federal bulletins on religious differences between legal religious practices and illegal ones?’
Al flushed a little, and I didn’t want to embarrass him. He was an ally and I would probably need them. Crap. ‘Sorry, we’re just a little podunk town sheriff department. We don’t get all the federal updates.’
‘Sorry, Al, I’m just a little tired of being accused of black magic and devil worshipping after Micah’s aunt and uncle.’
‘Geez, I’m sorry, Anita, really; they were horrible to you. I should have remembered that.’
‘You mean Bertie and Jamie?’ Gonzales asked.
‘Yeah,’ Al said.
‘Talk to me later and I’ll give you some stories that’ll make her leave you alone.’
‘That’d be great,’ I said.
‘Okay, I apologize again,’ Al said, ‘but if raising the dead isn’t black magic, what is it?’
‘Most people consider it vaudun, or voodoo, but since I’m still a card-carrying Episcopalian, it’s not a religious ritual for me, it’s just a ritual that helps me focus a natural ability with the dead.’
‘Is that what it is to other zombie raisers?’ Rickman asked.
I gave him a look. ‘If I were a practitioner I’d accept voodoo priestess, but since I’m not, the term is animator, from the Latin “to bring life.” I know the Boulder PD gets seminars on what’s insulting and what’s okay to say to various special groups, and animators are about as elite a group as we can get.’
‘Elite, in what way?’ Rickman asked.
‘As in a specialized skill. There probably aren’t two hundred people in the world who can raise the dead, at all. Of those, most can only