This is the final resting place of Calyce, the only mother I ever knew. Let it be known that every donai—male and female—who bears the name Dobromil owes their life to the love and bravery of a human woman.
—ANDRET, FOUNDER OF HOUSE DOBROMIL
ZOMBIE DEAREST
AN ANITA BLAKE, VAMPIRE HUNTER STORY
LAURELL K. HAMILTON
“You got my daughter pregnant,” the woman said.
I settled a little more comfortably in my office chair in my business skirt outfit. I wasn’t a cross-dresser, or trans-anything, so being a woman with only girl parts I couldn’t have gotten anyone pregnant, which meant she was crazy, but like a lot of delusional people she looked sane. In fact, Mrs. Herman Henderson looked like she should be sitting on the PTA board of a nice school where they still had bake sales to raise money for band uniforms.
The man sitting beside her looked like the male version of her, someone who still read the paper for his news, maybe smoked a pipe, hunted once a year, or maybe went fly-fishing with the same group of men he’d gone to college with, but they still kept in touch. They looked like churchgoers, the conservative wet dream that people would assume voted Republican but actually voted Democrat because of certain issues not to be discussed at church. Too bad they were crazy.
“Mrs. Henderson, I assure you that I had nothing to do with your daughter being pregnant.”
“You had everything to do with it,” she said, voice getting a little shrill.
I debated pressing the button on the complicated phone on my desk that let the office assistants know to interrupt me. It was meant to be an intercom system, but hitting the button so the office staff could hear crazy talk or screaming usually got reinforcements pretty quick.
Mr. Henderson tried to pat his wife’s arm, but she jerked away from him. “Julie, I don’t think Miss Blake has any idea what you’re talking about.”
Normally I’d have corrected him to Ms. Blake, or Marshal Blake, but he seemed to be the sane half of the couple and I didn’t want to insult him. Miss was okay if he helped get his crazy wife out of my office.
“She should know, she should know what her black magic does to people.”
“Now, dear.”
“Don’t you ‘now, dear’ me, Herman Henderson.”
“I don’t know what you think I do here, Mrs. Henderson, but I don’t do black magic.”
She looked at me then with brown eyes so angry they were almost black, the way mine could get sometimes. Her hands clutched the handbag in her lap so tightly the skin was mottled. If she opened her purse and reached inside it, I was going to draw my gun just in case.
“You raise zombies, that’s black magic.”
“No, as a matter of fact, it’s not.”
“You sacrifice animals to raise the dead. That’s evil.” Her purse began to shake, and I had a moment of wondering if bombs shook like that, then realized it was just her hands shaking. I really had to stop jumping to the worst possible conclusion all the time. If there was anything in the purse, it would be a gun. See, not the worst possible thing.
“So you’re a vegetarian?” I was betting money she wasn’t.
The question caught her off guard enough that she frowned and forgot to be furious with me for a second. “No, no, I’m not a vegetarian. What has that got to do with anything?”
“You eat meat then.”
She nodded, her hands relaxing a little around her purse. “I just said that.”
“Does it make you evil to eat meat?”
“Are you making fun of me?” she asked, and the anger started to climb back into her hands and eyes.
“No, just pointing out that the fact that I kill a few chickens or the occasional goat to raise the long dead isn’t any worse than slaughtering animals for food. If one doesn’t make you evil, then neither does the other one.”
“Eating a good steak or baked chicken isn’t the same thing as slitting their throats to call the dead from