I stood up, smoothing my skirt down in back, out of habit. I’d been polite because I knew how much money he’d paid just to talk to me, and since I was going to refuse I wanted him to feel he’d gotten something for his money, but I’d had enough.
"I need you because there isn’t much left of her body. Most animators need a nearly intact body to do the job; I don’t have an intact body to work with." He wouldn’t look at me as he said it, and there was a flinching around his mouth, a tension to those eyes he was hiding from me. Here was the pain.
I sat back down and my voice was gentler. "How did she die?"
"It was an explosion. Our vacation home had a gas leak. She’d gone up ahead of me. I was going to join her the next day, but that night . . ." His fists tightened, mottling the skin, and that muscle in his jaw bulged as if he were trying to bite through something hard and bitter. "I loved my wife, Ms. Blake." He sounded like the words choked him. His dark gray eyes gleamed when he raised them back to me. He held on to his unshed tears the way he held on to everything else: tightly.
"I believe you, and I really am sorry for your loss, but I need to know what you think you’ll get out of raising her like this. She will be a zombie. Mine look very human, Mr. Bennington, very human, but they aren’t. I don’t want you to believe that I can raise her up and you can keep her with you, because you can’t."
"Why can’t I?"
I made my voice soft as I told him the truth. "Because eventually she’ll start to rot, and you don’t want that to be your last visual of your wife."
"I heard you raise zombies that don’t even know they’re dead."
"Not at first," I said, "but eventually the magic wears off, and it’s . . . not pretty, Mr. Bennington."
"Please," he said, "no one else can do this but you."
"If I could raise her from the dead for real for you, maybe I would. I won’t debate the whole religious/philosophical problem with you, but the truth is that even I can’t do what you want. I raise zombies, Mr. Bennington, and that is not the same thing as resurrection of the dead. I’m good, maybe the best there is in the business, but I’m not that good. No one is."
A tear began to slide down each cheek, and I knew from my own hatred of crying that the tears were hot, and his throat hurt with holding it all in. "I don’t beg, Ms. Blake—ever—but I’ll beg you now. I’ll double your fee. I’ll do whatever it takes for you to do this for me."
That he was willing to double my fee meant he had as much money as he seemed to have; a lot of people who wore designer suits and Rolex watches were wearing their money. I stood again. "I am sorry, but I don’t have the ability to do what you want. No one on this earth can bring your wife back from the dead in the way you want."
"It’s too late for her to be a vampire, then?"
"First, she’d have to have been bitten before she died to have any chance of raising her as a vampire. Second, you say she died in an explosion."