I looked past them to Cassandra. She was standing her ground, but her hands were balled into fists, and a sheen of sweat gleamed on her upper lip. The look on her face was near panic.
Dominic stood smiling and unaffected. He was the only other human in the room.
Jason growled at us, but it wasn't a real growl. There was a rhythm to the noise. He was trying to talk.
Stephen moistened his lips. "Jason wants to know if we can lick the bowl?"
I looked at Jean-Claude and Richard. The looks on their faces were enough. "Am I the only one in this room not lusting after the blood?"
"Except for Dominic, I fear so, ma petite."
"Do what you have to do, Anita, but do it quick. It's full moon, and fresh blood is fresh blood," Richard said.
The two other vamps I'd raised shuffled towards me. Their eyes still empty of personality, like well-made dolls.
"Did you call them?" Richard asked.
"No," I said.
"The blood called them," Dominic said.
The vampires came into the room. They didn't look at me this time. They looked at the blood, and the moment they saw it, something flared in them. I felt it. Hunger. No one was home, but the need was still there.
Damian's green eyes stared at the bowl with the same hunger. His handsome face thinned down to something beastial and primitive.
I licked my lips and said, "Stop." They did, but they stared at the freshly spilled blood, never raising their eyes to me. If I hadn't been here to stop them, they might have fed. Fed like revenants, animalistic vampires that know nothing but the hunger and never regain their humanity or their minds.
My heart thudded into my throat at the thought of what I'd almost loosed upon some unsuspecting person. The hunger wouldn't have differentiated between human and lycanthrope. Wouldn't that have been a fine fight?
I took the bloody bowl, cradling it against my stomach, the knife still in my right hand.
"Do not be afraid," Dominic said. "Lay the zombies to rest as you have a thousand times over the years. Do that and that alone."
"One step at a time, right?" I said.
"Indeed," he said.
I nodded. "Okay."
Everyone but the three vampires looked at me as if they believed I knew what I was doing. I wished I did. Even Dominic looked confident. But he didn't have to put sixty zombies back in the ground without a circle of power. I did.
I had to watch my step on the rubble-strewn floor. It wouldn't do to fall and spill all this blood, all this power. Because that's what it was. I could feel Jean-Claude and Richard at my back like two braids of a rope twisting inside me as I moved. Dominic had said that I would be able to feel both of the men. When I'd asked for specifics about how I would be able to feel them, he had gone vague. Magic was too individualistic for exactness. If he told me one way and it felt another, it would have made me doubt. He'd been right.
I stirred the knife through the blood and flung blood on the waiting zombies with the blade. Only a few drops fell on them, but every time the blood touched one, I could feel it, a shock of power, a jolt. I ended in the center of the once walled room, surrounded by the zombies. When the blood touched the last one, a shock ran through me that tore a gasp from my throat. I felt the blood close round the dead. It was similar to closing a circle of power, but it was like the closure was inside me, rather than outside.
"Back," I said, "back into your graves, all of you. Back into the ground."
The dead shuffled around me, positioning themselves like sleepwalkers in a game of musical chairs. As each one reached its place, it lay down, and the raw earth poured over them all like water. The earth swallowed them back and smoothed over them as if a giant hand had come to neaten everything up.
I was alone in the room with the earth still twitching like a horse thick with flies. When the last ripple had died away, I looked out of the blasted wall at the others.
Jean-Claude and Richard stood at the opening of the wall. The three werewolves clustered around them. Even Cassandra had knelt on the ground beside the wolf that was Jason. Dominic stood behind them, watching. He was grinning at me like a proud papa.
I walked towards them, my legs a touch rubbery, and I stumbled, splashing blood down the side of the bowl. Crimson drops fell onto the swept earth.
The wolf was suddenly there, licking the ground clean. I ignored it and kept walking. Vampires next. Everyone moved to let me pass as if they were afraid to touch me. Except for Dominic. He crowded almost too close.
I felt his own power crackle between us, shivering over my skin, down the ropes of power that bound me to Richard and Jean-Claude.