Dead Ice (Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter) - Laurell K. Hamilton Page 0,59

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 some 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