Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter collection 11-15

by Laurell K. Hamilton

  It had that feel that sometimes happens in emergencies where everything slows down, and the world becomes hard edge, like everything is carved of crystal. Painfully real, and full of sharp edges.

  I realized in that crystalline moment that I had never used the blood of a shapeshifter to do a power circle, and the only time I’d used the blood of a vampire, the magic had gone horribly wrong. But that vampire had died to complete the circle, and Micah was alive. Not a sacrifice, only blood, but magically there wasn’t as much difference between the two as we’d all like to believe. Cut yourself and it is a small death.

  It was as if the power circle were a glass and power was poured into it, held in that small space. When I’d accidentally killed a vamp, the power had just been necromancy. This was warmer—it was like drowning in bathwater. So warm, hot, alive. The air was alive with power. It crawled over my skin, burned over me, so that I cried out.

  Micah’s cry echoed mine.

  I turned through the heavy air and watched him collapse to his knees. He’d never been inside a completed power circle. Of course, I’d never been inside a circle when this kind of power went up. It was like some hybrid between the coldness of the grave and the heat of the lycanthrope. That’s what had been wrong from the moment I’d hit the cemetery. That’s why the dead had seemed more active than they should have been. Yes, my necromancy was getting stronger, but it was my tie to Micah that had made the dead whisper across my skin, Micah’s nearness that had made the dead seem more “alive” than they had ever been.

  Now we were drowning in that living power. The air inside the circle was growing heavier, thicker, more solid, as if soon it wouldn’t be air at all but something plastic and unbreathable. I had to fight to inhale, as if the air were crushing me. I fell to my knees on top of the grave and suddenly knew what to do with all that power.

  I plunged my hands into the soft, turned earth, and I called Emmett Leroy Rose from the grave. I tried to shout his name, but the air was too thick. I whispered his name, the way you whisper a lover’s name in the dark. But it was enough, that whisper of name.

  The ground shivered underneath me like the hide of a horse when a fly lands on it. I felt Emmett below me. Felt his rotting body in its coffin, inside the metal of its burial vault. Trapped underneath more than six feet of earth, and none of it mattered. I called him, and he came.

  He came to me like a swimmer rising up, up through deep, black water. He reached for me. I plunged my hands into that shifting dirt. Always before I had stood on the grave but never in it. I had never laid my bare skin into the grave while the ground was doing things that ground was never meant to do.

  I knew I was touching earth, but it didn’t feel like dirt. It felt warmer, more like very thick liquid, and yet that wasn’t it either. It was as if the earth under my hands had become part liquid and part air, so that my hands reached impossibly down and through that solid-seeming earth until fingers brushed mine. I grabbed at those fingers the way you’d grab at a drowning victim.

  Hands grasped mine with that same desperate strength, as if they’d thought they were lost and my touch was the only solid thing in a liquid world.

  I pulled my hands out of that sucking, liquid, airy earth, but something pushed as I pulled. Some power, some magic, something pushed as I pulled the zombie from the grave.

  The zombie spilled upward out of the grave in a shuddering burst of dirt and energy. Some zombies crawl out, but some, most of mine lately, are just suddenly standing on the grave. This one was standing, his fingers still intertwined with mine. There was no pulse to his skin, no beat of life, but when he stared down at me, there was something in his dark eyes, something more than there should have been.

  There was intelligence and a force of personality that shouldn’t have been there until I put blood on his mouth. The dead do not speak without help from the living, one way or the other.

  He was tall and broad, his skin the color of good, sweet chocolate. He smiled down at me in a way that no zombie should have done without first tasting blood.

  I stared down at my hands still grasping his and realized that my hands had been covered in Micah’s blood when I plunged them into the dirt. Had that done it? Had that been enough?

  Voices were speaking, gasping, exclaiming, but it was all distant and less real than the dead man who held my hands. I knew he’d be very alive, because there’d been so much power. But even to me, the only thing he lacked was a pulse. Even by my standards it was good work.

  “Emmett Leroy Rose, can you speak?” I asked.

  Salvia interrupted me. “Marshal, this is highly irregular. We were not ready for you to raise Mr. Rose from the grave.”

  “We were ready,” Laban said, “because the rest of us want to go home before dawn.”

  Rose’s head turned slowly toward Salvia’s voice, and his first words were “Arthur, is that you?”

  Salvia’s protests stopped in midsyllable. His eyes were wide enough to flash their whites. “Should it be able to do that? Should it recognize people?”

  “Yes,” I said, “sometimes they can.”

  Rose dropped my hands, and I let him. He moved toward Salvia’s side of the circle. “Why, Arthur? Why did you order Jimmy to put the boy’s body in my car?”

  “I don’t know what this thing’s talking about. I didn’t do anything. He was a pedophile. None of us knew it.” But Salvia’s words were a little too fast. I knew now why he’d been trying to delay the zombie-raising. Guilt.

  Rose stepped forward, a little slow, a little uncertain, as if he looked more alive than he felt. “Me, a pedophile? You bastard. You knew that George’s son was a fucking child molester. You knew, and you helped cover for him. You helped get him his kiddies, until he got too rough and killed that last one.”

  “You’ve done something to his mind, Marshal. He’s babbling.”

  “No, Mr. Salvia, the dead don’t lie. They tell the absolute truth as they know it.”

  Micah came to stand beside me, holding his wounded arm up and pressing on it. He seemed as fascinated with the walking dead man as the rest of them. He might never have seen a zombie before, but then he wasn’t really seeing one now, not the kind most people call from the grave anyway.

  Rose had come to the edge of the circle. “The moment you had Jimmy put the boy in my car, I was dead, Arthur. You might as well have put a bullet in me.” He tried to take another step toward Salvia. The circle held, but I felt him push against it. That shouldn’t have been possible. No matter how good the zombie, the circle should have been sacrosanct, inviolate. Something was wrong.

  I called out, “Fox, your report said he died of natural causes.”

  Fox came to stand a little closer to the circle but not closer to Rose, as if he found the dead man a little unnerving. “He did. Heart attack. Not poison, or anything like that. A heart attack.”

  “You swear it,” I said.

  “I swear,” he said.

  “Why put Georgie’s last victim in my car, Arthur?” Rose continued. “What the fuck did I ever do to you? I had a wife and kids, and you took me away from them the moment that body went in my car.”

  “Oh, shit,” I whispered.

  “What’s wrong?” Micah asked.

  “He blames Salvia for his death. Not the pedophile that hurt the kid.” My stomach clenched tight, and I started to pray, Please don’t let this go bad.

  Fox said, “You’d think he’d blame the guy who put the body in his car.”

  “He blames Salvia because that’s who ordered it done,” I said.

  “You’re scared,” Micah said softly. “Why?”

  I spoke to Fox, trying to keep my voice low and not attract the zombie’s attention. “A murdered zombie always does one thing first and foremost: it kills its murderer. Until its murderer is dead, no one can control it. Not even me.”

  Fox gave me wide eyes on the other side of the circle. Franklin had moved well back from the circle, from the zombie, from me. Fox w
hispered, “Rose wasn’t murdered. He died of a heart attack.”

  “I’m not sure he sees it that way,” I whispered back.

  Rose screamed, “Why, Arthur!” And he tried to walk out of the circle. It gave, gave like a piece of plastic stretched tight by a pushing hand.

  I yelled, “Emmett Leroy Rose, I command you to stay.” But the moment I had to yell anything, I knew we were in trouble.

  Rose kept trying to move forward, and the circle was no longer a wall. It was folding outward—I could feel it. I threw my will and power not into the zombie but into the circle. I yelled, “NO!” and threw that no, that refusal, into the circle. It helped. It was as if the circle took a breath that it had needed. But I’d never tried to do anything like this before. I didn’t know how long it would hold the dead man.

  The dead man turned to me and said, “Let me out.”

  “I can’t,” I said.

  “He killed me.”

  “No, he didn’t. If he’d really killed you, you’d be outside this circle right now. If you were the righteously murdered, nothing I could do would hold you.”

  “Righteously murdered.” And he gave a laugh so bitter that it hurt to hear it. “Righteous. No, not righteous. I took money I knew was dirty. I told myself that as long as I didn’t do any of the illegal stuff, it was okay. But it wasn’t. It wasn’t okay.” He glanced back toward the circle, but then his eyes were all for Salvia. “I may not have been a righteous man, but I did not know what Georgie was doing to those kids. I swear to God, I didn’t know. And you had the body put in my car. Did you see the boy before Jimmy moved him, Arthur? Did you see what Georgie had done to him? He ripped him open. Ripped him open!”

  And he hit the circle, hit it with his hands like he was trying to reach through it, and it gave. I felt it begin to tear like paper.

  I screamed, “No! This circle is mine! Within the limits of this circle of power I command. I command, not you, and I say no, no, Emmett Leroy Rose, you shall not pass this circle.”

  Rose staggered back from the circle. “Let me out!”

  I screamed, “No! Fox, get Salvia out of here!” Then something hit me in the arm. Hit me so hard that it spun me around. I fell to all fours. I couldn’t feel my arm, but I was bleeding. I had a second to think, Oh, I’ve been shot, before Micah moved past me, standing in front of me. Standing between me and where the shot had come from. He was pointing. I heard the second bullet hit the gravestone behind me, a sharp ping of sound.

  Salvia was screaming, “Don’t shoot her! Don’t shoot her, you idiot. The zombie is up—don’t shoot her now. It won’t do any good.”

  I crawled around the tombstone, putting it between me and the shooter. My arm worked enough to help me scramble across the ground. The feeling was even returning to it, which was good, because that meant I wasn’t hurt too badly.

  The downside was that I was hurt, and now my body knew it. The bullet had only grazed me, but whatever grazed me had been of a big enough caliber that I could see things in my arm that were never meant to be visible to the naked eye. I hate seeing my own muscle and ligaments. It means the shit has hit the fan, and I’m standing downwind.

  Gunshots were sounding, this time going away from us and out into the night. The FBI were returning fire. Good for them. I used my left hand to get my right one moving, so I could get my gun out. I wasn’t as good left-handed, but it was better than nothing.

  I yelled, “Micah!” With bullets flying, I wanted him with me.

  But it wasn’t Micah who loomed over me. Rose bent his large dark shape over me, reaching for me. I ordered him, “Don’t.”

  “Let me out,” he said.

  “No,” I said. I fired into him, though I knew better than anyone there that bullets wouldn’t do a damn thing.

  He was a zombie; they didn’t feel pain. He grabbed me and lifted me off the ground as I fired point-blank into his chest. His body rocked with the impact, but that was all.

  Claws blossomed through his throat a moment before I realized Micah was on the zombie’s back, only his hands in half-clawed form, like only the really powerful shapeshifters could do. But you can’t kill the dead.

  Rose smashed me down with everything that his more-than-human body had in it. I hit the gravestone. The inside of my head was suddenly filled with white starbursts, then the starbursts were crimson, and the inside of my head spilled to velvet dark, and that was all she wrote. The velvet dark, and nothing.

  CHAPTER

  12

  I woke staring up at a white ceiling. Micah was standing by the bedside, smiling down at me. Bedside? My left arm was taped down to a little board and there were needles and tubes going into it. My right arm was bandaged like a mummy. Someone had left a florist shop in one corner near the window, complete with those silly character Mylar balloons.

  “How long?” I asked, and my voice sounded funny. My throat felt like sandpaper.

  “Forty-eight hours.” He found one of those cups with the little bendy straws and brought it to me. The water tasted stale and metallic in a none-too-tasty sort of way, but my throat felt better.

  The door opened, and a doctor, a nurse, and Nathaniel came through the door. The doctor and nurse I’d expected. I reached for Nathaniel and found that my right arm actually did work.

  He gave me that wonderful smile, but it didn’t reach his eyes. They looked haunted, and I knew that I’d put that particular look there. Me, getting hurt.

  The doctor’s name was Nelson, and the nurse was Debbie. Nurse Debbie, like she didn’t have a last name, but I didn’t protest. If it didn’t bother her, I guess it didn’t bother me.

  Dr. Nelson was short and roundish, with most of his dark hair receding around a face that looked too young for either the hairline or the weight. “It’s good to see you awake, Marshal.” And he laughed, as if that amused him. “Sorry, but every time I say it, I keep thinking of Gunsmoke, my dad’s favorite show.”

  “Glad I could be amusing,” I said, and I had to clear my throat again.

  Micah gave me some more water, and Nathaniel moved up on the other side of him. He touched the side of my face, and even the brush of his fingertips made me feel better.

  Nurse Debbie’s eyes flicked to the two men, and then her face had that pleasant professional look again.

  “First, you’re going to be fine,” Nelson said. He had the nurse hold my arm up while he began to cut away the bandages.

  “Good to hear it,” I said in a voice that was beginning to sound more like me.

  “Second, I have no idea why. You took a very large caliber rifle round to your right arm. There should be muscle damage, but there isn’t.” He slid the bandages off, handing them to the nurse to dispose of. He took my hand in his and raised my arm so I could see it. There was a slick, pink scar on the side of my arm, about an inch and a half wide at its widest. “It’s been only forty-eight hours, Marshal. Care to explain how you’re healing this fast?”

  I gave him nice blank eyes.

  He sighed and lowered my arm to the bed. He got out one of those little flashlights and began to shine it in my eyes. “Any pain?”

  “No,” I said.

  He made me follow his fingers back and forth; he even made me look up and down. “Your head connected with a marble tombstone, so the FBI tells me. Our tests showed you had a concussion. Initially we thought your skull was cracked, and you were bleeding in places inside your head where you don’t want to be bleeding.” His eyes were very serious as he studied my face. “We ran a second set of tests before scheduling you for surgery, and what do you think, Marshal? No internal bleeding. Gone. We thought we’d read the first test wrong, but I’ve got the pictures to show what we saw that first night. There was a crack in your skull, and you were bleeding, but later that morning, it had stopped. In fact, the second set of tests shows the fracture healing. Healing like your arm is healing.” His serious expression intensified. “You know, the only person I’ve ever seen heal damage like this was
a lycanthrope.”

  “Really,” I said, giving him my best blank face.

  “Really,” he said, and looked at Micah. He had his sunglasses back on over his kitty-cat eyes, but something about the way Nelson looked at him said the doctor had probably seen Micah without the glasses. “We had to type you for surgery. There are certain things we look at it in a blood test, just routine these days. Guess what we found?”

  “No idea,” I said.

  “Weird fucking shit,” he said.

  I laughed. “Should I be worried? I mean, are doctors supposed to say ‘weird fucking shit’ to their patients?”

  He shrugged, laughed, but it was too late to go back to the nice roly-poly doctor disguise. There was a very sharp mind in there, and someone who only did good bedside manner because he was supposed to.

  Nurse Debbie moved, almost uneasily, beside him.

  “You’re not a lycanthrope, but you’re a carrier, which is impossible. A person either has lycanthropy, or she doesn’t. You’re actually carrying around four different kinds. Wolf, leopard, lion, and one we can’t even identify, all of which is impossible. You can’t catch more than one kind of lycanthropy, because once you’ve got one, it makes you immune to the others.” He looked at me as if the look would be enough and I’d crack and confess.

  I just blinked at him. I’d suspected the leopard and wolf, but the only time I’d been touched by a were-lion had resulted in tiny wounds. They had been from Micah’s old leader, Chimera, in lionman form. He’d bled me, but it was unusual to catch feline-based lycanthropy from such small damage. Lucky fucking me.

  “Did you hear me, Marshal? You’re carrying four different kinds of lycanthropy.” He kept giving me his hard-as-nails look.