not plan on having sex with that creature, he seduced her with your magic.”
I shook my head. “When I realized that barrier had been crossed, I put him back in the ground. I remember your daughter, she was over twenty-one and a consenting adult. It’s not my fault she made a poor choice, but he was centuries dead, which means that if she got pregnant, it wasn’t from my zombie.”
“Are you calling my daughter a whore?” She almost lunged at me, but her husband grabbed her arms and started backing her up.
“We didn’t believe it, either, Miss Blake, but according to the blood test, our grandson is related to the closest living descendant of Thomas Warrington.”
“That’s not possible,” I said.
“Blood tests don’t lie, Miss Blake.”
“Then you need to double-check the test.”
“We did.”
I stared at him, and something on my face made the woman say, “You really didn’t know it was possible, did you?”
I shook my head. “It’s hard for any undead to father children, but zombies . . . it’s impossible.”
“Our grandson is real enough, Miss Blake,” he said.
“Impossible,” I said, but softer.
“Our daughter is dying, Miss Blake.”
“What? Of what?”
“The doctors don’t know.”
“She just lies in the bed,” Mrs. Henderson said, “and no matter how much they feed her through the tubes, she just keeps dying.” She started to cry softly.
“That can’t have anything to do with a zombie from almost two years ago.”
She rallied her anger one last time, eyes blazing at me from between her tears. “She’s wasting away, the doctors said it’s like a vampire victim except there are no bites, but something is draining her to death.”
“Zombies don’t do that, can’t do that.”
“The doctors brought in a witch to consult,” he said.
The mother glared at me, tears drying on her face. “The witch said it’s something dead that’s trying to drag her down into the grave. She asked if there were any malevolent spirits associated with our daughter, or our family, and there aren’t except for your zombie.”
“When I realized he wasn’t a normal zombie, I reopened the grave. He was burned to bone and ash and scattered in running water. That’s as dead and gone as it gets, Mrs. Henderson.”
“Then what is killing our daughter?”
“I don’t know.”
“Will you help us, please,” he said.
“I don’t know how to help your daughter.”
Mrs. Henderson jerked away from her husband and poked a finger into my upper chest hard enough that it pushed me back a little. I could have stood my ground, but it would have hurt us both. She didn’t need a jammed finger.
“Your monster got our daughter pregnant. Justine didn’t want to date ever again, because she’d had a perfect love and their love child. She was so happy that she just closed herself off to anything or anyone else, and now she’s dying.”
“I’m terribly sorry for what’s happened, but it’s not my zombie. I destroyed it almost two years ago.”
The anger drained away and she started to cry again. I’d have preferred her yelling at me. “You owe us,” she whispered.
* * *
—
Justine Henderson lay in the hospital bed, hooked up to more tubes and wires than you ever want to see on someone. Her hair was still straight and brown, but I remembered it thick and shiny. Now it was dry and lifeless like the rest of her. She was painfully thin. The doctors said that no matter how many nutrients they pumped into her through tubes and needles, she just kept losing weight. I wouldn’t have recognized her if her parents and the doctor hadn’t assured me that this was the same woman I’d met that one strange night nearly two years ago.
The doctors were stumped, so they’d researched supernatural diseases and come up with a wasting illness associated with old-time vampirism, as in the last case reported in America was in the 1700s. It was why I’d brought Jean-Claude with me. He’d arrived in this country