Dead Ice (Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter) - Laurell K. Hamilton Page 0,150

made a different noise higher in its throat and started backing away. I had a sense of movement out among the graves, and knew it was the other ghouls.

“What are they doing?” Domino asked.

The one in front of me got very low to the ground and sort of groveled, and then it began to crawl backward away from us. It kept looking at Nicky and then Domino and the two exterminators in their fire suits, as it tried to keep all the dangers in sight. It stopped and groveled again, but that was always aimed at me.

“The others are at the mausoleum,” Nicky said.

I glanced up and could see the others like gray shadows skulking around the huge stone. The ghoul in front of me made an abrupt, sharp almost-growl that made the hair at the back of my neck stand up, and then he turned and crept out among the tombstones, using them for cover the way a lion used the long grass.

“Don’t shoot it,” I said.

“No, we’ll burn them out once daylight comes,” Susannah said.

“No,” I said.

She looked at me. “Yes, we will.”

“You’re not paid for ghoul extermination tonight.”

“You’re protecting them.”

Manny said, “Contact the company that runs the graveyard, and then they’ll pay you to do it.”

“Is that what you meant, Anita?”

“Why do it for free if you can do it for money?”

Her body language was all relief as she let go of the serious mad-on she’d been about to aim at me. Her father added, “I like the way you think, Anita; business first.”

“If I took it personally every time a monster pissed me off, I couldn’t do my job.”

“I guess not,” Susannah said.

Zerbrowski gave me a look, and then Manny. Both of them were wondering if I’d meant business, or if I just hadn’t wanted them fried in front of me. Since I wasn’t sure, I didn’t try to enlighten them. You can’t share the light if you’re still in the dark yourself, and I was stumbling around in the pitch black, wondering why the hell a ghoul pack had come to visit me tonight. The ghoul had taken my orders, which wasn’t possible, but it had happened, so it was possible. Impossible: I was beginning to think it didn’t mean what I thought it meant.

36

FALSE DAWN CAME, making the darkness lighter, but it wasn’t truly daylight. Vampires would still have time to run for cover before they started to burn. The ghouls had broken into the crypt and were crawling inside like rats in a hidey-hole. That left just one undead to deal with, and I turned back to the open grave.

The zombie had managed to free itself to its waist in the dirt and was still wiggling more of itself free. Domino was keeping an eye on it the way Nicky and I had told him to. If I gave the word, or the zombie tried to get out of the grave, he’d shoot it. I didn’t want to shoot it, but I didn’t know what else to do with it either.

“Ms. Blake,” it said, “please, I just want out of this awful place.” His face looked more cadaverous with the growing light, so that no matter how cultured his language was he still looked like a rotting corpse.

“Are you still craving flesh?”

He stopped trying to get his legs free and seemed to think about my question. “Yes, yes, I am.”

“Do you feel as empty as you did in the mountains when the snow trapped you?”

“I don’t understand what that means.”

“Do you remember your name?”

“Tom.”

“Tom what?”

“I don’t know.” He’d gone back to trying to free his legs; he was only caught below the knees now.

“Do you know what Tom is short for?”

“Thomas.”

“Thomas, what’s your last name?”

It blinked eyes up at me that were still hazel, but watching the balls roll in the nearly exposed sockets meant that they weren’t lovely hazel eyes anymore. There was so little flesh on the face that I couldn’t read his expressions anymore.

“Thomas Warrington,” I said.

“Is that me?”

“Yes.”

“I should know my own name, shouldn’t I?”

“Yes, Mr. Warrington, you should.”

“Why does it sound strange, as if it’s not me at all?”

“Dawn is coming,” I said.

“I don’t understand.”

I didn’t know if he had forgotten what dawn meant, or if he didn’t understand that the sun coming up was a potentially bad thing for a zombie. Hell, maybe he didn’t even know that last part. Most people didn’t understand that zombies preferred darkness, and some couldn’t move around in daylight at all.