Affliction

79

Yancey and Sergeant Badger came over to me. Nicky moved up to join us. 'If we destroyed the vampire's body, would this all end?' Badger asked.

'I believe so.'

'That's not very definite,' Yancey said, with a smile that couldn't take the worry from his eyes.

'This vampire is doing things that are not possible, so the best you're going to get from me is, I think that will work, but we thought another marshal in another city destroyed his body once before and you see how that turned out.'

'Why didn't it work?' Yancey asked.

'Because this vamp can jump bodies to other vampires he's made and zombies he's raised. I admit the zombie thing is a new vampire trick, even for me.'

'So he jumped to a different body; why will destroying this body work any better?' Badger asked.

'Because this is his original body. We destroy that and no more jumping around, or we hold him in the body he's currently using long enough to destroy it and him with it; that could work, too.'

'Hatfield's group is close to where Little Henry drew the map to, so they could detour and destroy the body.'

I thought about sending Hatfield toward not just the Lover of Death, but Seamus; it seemed like a good way to get her killed.

'That's not a good face. What's wrong?' Yancey asked.

'Little Henry still sulking because you sent his map via smart phone, and he's not included?'

'Yes,' Badger said.

'But that's not the look on your face; you don't care if Henry sulks about this. What were you really thinking?' Yancey said.

'What are you, an expert on my facial expressions?'

He just looked at me, crooking one dark eyebrow over those brown-black eyes.

'He's figuring you pretty fast,' Lisandro said.

I frowned at him.

He just smiled at me. 'It's just the truth.'

'Fine. I don't want to get Hatfield and the men with her killed.'

'You won't be doing anything to them,' Badger said. 'You will be here helping save lives, while she tries to do the one thing that could end all this before it gets out of hand.'

'Besides, Blake, you've got to stop believing that only you can save the world and give the rest of us a chance,' Yancey said.

'Hatfield is competent,' Badger said. 'Text her any information you think she needs to remember and let her do her job. Right now, I want you to tell us everything you know about flesh-eating zombies.'

'If you want to know about zombies in general I've got lots to share, but flesh-eating zombies, honestly they are so rare that there isn't a lot of information.'

'Tell us what you have, Blake. It's more than anyone else has,' Badger said.

I nodded. 'Okay, I can tell you this: When it gets full dark they will be faster, stronger, and even harder to kill.'

They exchanged a look between them. Badger sighed and rubbed his hand over his close-cropped hair. 'What can kill them?'

'Fire. Blow them up into small enough bits and you can burn the pieces at your leisure.'

'What about the bomb squad?' Nicky asked.

We all looked at him.

'If you know how to defuse a bomb, you know how to make one,' he said.

'That's a good idea,' Badger said.

'Not fair,' Yancey said. 'You look big enough to bench-press a truck and you're smart.'

Nicky grinned at him. 'I'm not just another pretty face.'

That made us all smile, and we were going to need all the smiles we could get tonight, or maybe that was my pessimistic side talking. Wait, I didn't have an optimistic side, so it was just my naturally sunny disposition.

'Exterminators, too; they have to have one person at every company who's trained in extreme measures of pest control.'

'How extreme could it be?' Yancey asked.

'The last time I was up against a killer zombie, I had an exterminator team backing me up with a flamethrower, just in case, as I walked the cemetery looking for the original grave.'

'What would you have gained from finding the grave the zombie came out of?' Badger asked.

'A clue to who had raised it might have led us to where it was hiding during the day, or it might have told us why it had turned into a flesh eater. Most flesh-eating zombies are out for revenge of some kind; you give them their revenge and they often go back to being a normal shambling zombie.'

'Are these out for revenge?'

'Most violent zombies are murder victims. They rise out of the grave with revenge their prime motivator, and anything that gets between them and that revenge they will kill. Some of them resort to eating people who didn't harm them in life; again, no one knows why some killer zombies just strangle people to death, or beat them to death but never try to eat anyone.'

'Are these all murder victims?' Yancey asked.

I thought about that. 'Maybe; most of the ones we've been able to identify are all missing-person cases, so yeah, I guess they are, but the weird thing is they should all be trying to kill whoever killed them. Once they've killed their murderer they become harmless.'

'But they were killed by rotting vampires, right?' Nicky asked.

'Or other killer zombies, yeah,' I said.

'So what if you raise a zombie that was killed by another zombie? They can't kill their murderers, because they're already dead.'

'In a more normal zombie it could go one of two ways; either the death of their murderer would negate everything and they'd just not animate quite right, but they'd be peaceful, or they could be driven by revenge that they could never satisfy. Zombies that can't get revenge because their murderer has died sometimes do go on a killing spree until they get burned.'

'Are we saying that every zombie this rotting vampire raises is seeking revenge, but because he's dead to begin with they're slaughtering everything in their path?' Yancey asked, frowning as if he were trying to work it out in his head.

'I think you may have hit on it, but the difference is that these zombies seem to be under his control and murderous zombies are wild cards. They obey no one.'

'Would it be possible to raise a zombie as a sort of weapon?' Yancey asked.

Nicky and I said, 'Yes,' at the same time. We looked at each other. The night I met Nicky I'd saved myself - us - by turning the cemetery of zombies I'd raised against the bad guys. They'd made me raise the dead at gunpoint and threat of death to Micah, Nathaniel, and Jason and hadn't thought that giving me a cemetery of my own zombies tipped the odds in my favor.

I looked back at the other two men. 'It's pretty standard folklore that vaudun priests can raise a zombie and send it after their enemies.'

'Vaudun, you mean voodoo?' Badger asked.

'Same religion, different words. I usually say vaudun, because people are less likely to think all movie monsters. You say voodoo and people get very set ideas in their head. It's a perfectly fine religion and most believers are law-abiding citizens.'

'Does that mean that zombies see vampires, like the rotting vampires, as already dead?' Yancey asked.

I shrugged. 'I guess so, or they'd go after their murderers.'

'Or maybe they haven't found their murderers yet,' Nicky said.

'What do you mean?' I asked.

'If we gave them the two vampires you guys have in custody, and they were able to kill them, would the ones that those two killed go back to being ordinary zombies?'

'I don't know,' I said.

'You said that if a killer zombie can't find his murderer and have his revenge, he can start killing and eating anything that gets in his way, right?'

'Yeah.'

'Then shouldn't giving the vampires over to the zombies quiet some of them?'

'It might, but we'd be giving two legal citizens over to be torn limb from limb. Vampires are a lot harder to kill than humans usually, which means the vamps would stay alive a lot longer during the process.'

He nodded. 'Makes sense.'

'That would be a really bad way to die, Nicky.'

'Yeah.' He said it as if to say, So what?

'If we were just going to execute the vamps anyway, and it would save dozens of lives ...' Yancey let his words trail off.

Badger looked at him. 'You could do that, give someone over to the thing we saw today?'

He shrugged. 'It's a thought; we're just brainstorming and gathering information, right?'

'They're rotting vampires,' Nicky said. 'If you can't teach them how to look human, the woman seemed to want to die.'

'They should have two forms; one should be totally human and as attractive as they were in life,' I said.

Dev and Lisandro came over to us. 'What has you guys all serious face?' Dev asked, smiling.

'We're debating on whether giving the two vampires in custody over to the zombies of their murder victims would make the zombies stop killing other people,' I said.

Dev's eyes widened and he went pale.

'Who came up with the idea?' Lisandro asked.

'I did,' Nicky said.

'You are a sick motherfucker,' Lisandro said.

'Yes, yes, I am,' Nicky said, totally unbothered by the comment.

Lisandro laughed, as if he couldn't quite believe it, but he did.

'You're not going to actually do it, are you?' Dev asked.

'They are citizens with rights, so no,' I said.

'Not if Anita thinks the vampires in custody committed some of the murders without being controlled by their master,' Nicky said.

'They'd still be legal citizens,' I said.

'But they'd be executed anyway; what does it matter whether you stake them during the day or feed them to the people they killed?'

'It does have an interesting sense of irony,' Yancey said.

'They're either people, with all that means, or they're not,' Dev said. 'You can't make them legal and fight for the law that gave them a second chance at life and then turn around and lie so that they lose that second chance.'

'That's directed at me, I take it,' I said.

'Yes, because it's your warrant and you are the expert on vampires. If you decide that they killed people without being forced to do it, then they're dead,' Dev said. He didn't sound happy, but he was right.

'And the marshal who holds the warrants has complete discretion on how the executions are to be carried out,' Nicky said.

'Is that true?' Yancey said.

I nodded. 'Yeah.'

'So you could do anything to them as long as they die eventually?' Yancey asked.

I nodded again. Olaf, alias Marshal Otto Jeffries, was known to torture his vamps before killing them; of course, torture was his hobby, but the badge and warrant gave him a legal outlet for his passion. It did make one wonder about the job, when a serial killer found it a good outlet.

'You look like you're remembering something bad,' he said.

I shook my head. 'I try to be humane when I kill, so let's table the idea until we get desperate.'

'We won't get that desperate,' Dev said, looking at me, very seriously.

'If he's as powerful a necromancer as I think he is, he could raise dozens of zombies.'

'What about the zombies in the morgue?' Nicky asked.

'What about them?' I asked.

'Were they all murder victims?'

'I don't know.'

'What would it mean if they weren't all murder victims?' Yancey asked.

'That every zombie this guy raises turns into a killer.'

'He's ordering them to kill,' Nicky said.

I nodded. 'Yeah, he has to be.'

'Well, this just gets better and better,' Yancey said.

'Don't most zombies need a ritual to raise them from the grave?' Badger asked.

'Yes,' I said.

'Does this necromancer need a ritual, and if he does, could we use that to find him?'

'I don't know for certain, but if he does, then yeah, potentially I could trace it back to him.'

'How would that work?'

'You know that old saying, about more than one way to skin a cat?'

'Yes.'

'There's more than one way to raise a zombie, and more than one way to catch a necromancer.'

'You have an idea,' Nicky said.

'Maybe.'

'Maybe is better than nothing, so let's hear it,' Badger said.

I told them my maybe.

'You're setting yourself up as bait; as your bodyguard I vote no,' Lisandro said.

'She's not bait,' Nicky said.

'She's going to do the metaphysical version of standing in the middle of a fight and yelling, Come and get me! That's bait,' Lisandro said.

'He's going to think she's bait, that's the point,' Nicky said.

'So she's bait.'

'It's not bait, it's a challenge. Anita is betting that she's the biggest, baddest necromancer,' Dev said. He was very serious as he studied my face.

'Don't mean to be a wet blanket,' Yancey said, 'but what if you're wrong? What if he's the biggest and baddest?'

'He won't be,' Nicky said.

I wasn't quite as confident as Nicky, but I was confident that if I raised my own mini-army of zombies, the Lover of Death wouldn't be able to resist coming around to check out the competition. It would distract him from the fact that Hatfield and her team of SWAT were hunting his original body. It might keep him from inhabiting it once darkness fell, and killing all of them. If she could destroy his original body, and I could trap him in whatever body he was inhabiting at the moment here in town and destroy that one, we could kill him, and we had to kill him, because we had to stop him, and dead is the stoppest stop of all.

80

The cemetery was one of the largest and oldest in the city. You could see the years marching across in the changes in the tombstones from ornate angels and beautiful sculptures to the nearly flat stone markers that were easier to mow around. It was like visible archaeology: centur-ies in a glance, and the change from looking up to heaven to staying low to the ground, and worrying more about ease of maintenance than about God and all his angels. The sunset was a spectacular spread of pink and purple and pale crimson all done in neon-glow colors, as if some disco queen's lipstick had been spread across the western sky and set on fire. I don't know if I'd ever seen the sky painted so bright with the dying of the light.

I took Nicky's hand as we watched the sunset. I wasn't sure this plan was going to work, and I'd decided that if the other cops wanted to give me grief about being up close and personal with my guys, so be it. We were about to enter a night that could be like the hospital, except with more zombies, and no hallway to contain them. If hundreds of killer zombies rose we were going to be either one of the safest spots in town, or one of the most dangerous. We wouldn't know which until it was too late to back out.

'The sunsets are always like that out here,' Yancey said.

It made me turn and look at him, Nicky's hand still in mine, so that my turning turned the big man with me. It was a couple thing, that turning with the hands joined so that you spent most of your time looking in the same direction.

'Really?' I said.

'You expect to get bored with another spectacular sunset, but you never do,' Badger said. They'd stayed with us in case our plan worked and the big bad showed up. Willy had found a vantage point and was waiting to do what snipers do best: shoot the bad guy on my signal. Machete was with him in case a zombie tried to sneak up and eat Willy while he was trying to shoot.

'How could you ever get bored of something that beautiful?' Dev asked.

'Most people stop seeing things they experience too often, even the amazing ones,' I said.

He shook his head. 'I don't understand that.'

'I like that you don't understand it.'

He smiled a little uncertainly. 'Do you stop appreciating the wonderful things in your life just because you see them every day?'

'No,' I said, and turned to Nicky, going up on tiptoe to kiss him gently. It earned me a surprised and very pleased look, which made me smile. He knew that I did not do public displays of affection when I was around the police often and especially not with my secondary lovers.

I walked over to Dev, put my hands on his arms, and looked up into that handsome face and those eyes with their ring of pale golden brown and blue around the outside. I went up on tiptoe and he leaned down so we could kiss.

I moved back from the kiss and stood flat-footed with my hands still on his arms. 'I don't grow tired of the wonderful things in my life, Dev. I value that you're afraid of the zombies and you're still going to stay here with us.'

'I'm your bodyguard, Anita; I would suck at my job if I left now.'

I smiled. 'I guess so.'

'I feel totally neglected,' Lisandro said. 'Aren't I wonderful, too?'

I laughed. 'I'm told your wife and kids think you're amazingly wonderful.'

He grinned at me. 'Yeah, they do.'

'I'm not married,' Yancey said. 'Do I get a kiss?'

'I know I started it, because of kissing more than one man at work, but don't let my PDA with my guys go to your head.'

'It didn't go to my head, I promise,' he said.

It took me a three-count to realize he'd made a double entendre. I laughed. 'I'd get mad, but that was clever.'

He grinned at me. 'Thank you, I'm pretty proud of that one myself.'

'You do throw the best parties.' It was Edward in his most cheerful Ted voice walking across the grass toward us. He had two SWAT officers with him, too. I knew that the other two were mirroring our sniper and spotter from a different vantage point. The local PD was allocating a lot of their best people to my very 'maybe' plan. I hoped we all lived.

Edward introduced the first one as Lindell, who was as tall as Dev, but so thin he probably had to fight for every ounce of muscle and every pound of weight. He was just built lean and willowy. Officer Shrewsbury was barely six feet, built solid, and moved in a tight coil of energy as if he were just waiting for someone to yell, Go! He was also a natural redhead, complete with the pale skin and freckles that usually went with it. Lindell's nickname was Paris. Shrewsbury's was Berry, as in Strawberry. No one offered to explain the tall, almost homely Lindell being named after the city of love, and I didn't ask. I'd learned that nicknames were personal, sometimes very personal, especially among the special teams.

Edward came up to me smiling broadly and radiating his alter ego, Ted.

'If you didn't bring your flamethrower, I'm going to be disappointed,' I said, smiling.

'It's in the car, Anita; you know I never tease unless I'm planning to come across.'

I smiled at him and gave a small eye flick behind him. He made the smallest eye-slide to the side Paris was standing on, which meant Paris was the guy who had been giving Edward enough grief about our supposed love affair that he'd begun to play with him.

'I know you're always good for anything you promise, Ted.' I put a smile to go with the teasing tone and looked up in time to see Dev puzzling down at me. I had totally forgotten about promising to help Ted tease someone, so had forgotten to mention it to my guys. Oh, well.

'Very important, everybody, when the sun goes down I will be having some vampires fly to meet us. They are my close friends and associates; do not shoot them thinking they're bad guys.'

'How do we tell one vampire from another?' Paris asked.

'Are you saying all vampires look alike?' I asked.

He frowned at me, then said, 'I'm saying that our main perp is a vampire, so how are we supposed to know the difference?'

'The three that are joining us will literally be flying in, as in coming from the sky on their own power. The bad vamp, as far as I know, can't fly.'

'I thought flying was just a story. You mean they can really do that?' he asked.

'A few master vamps can levitate; actual flight is a lot rarer, but these three can do it.'

'Who's coming to play with us?' Edward asked.

'Wicked Truth and one you haven't met yet, Jane.'

'A vampire named Jane?' Paris made it a question.

'Yep,' I said.

'I thought all vampires had cool names like Jean-Claude, or what was the other one you just said, Wicked True?'

'They're the Wicked Truth, think of it as a paired call sign,' I said.

'See, cool.'

I was beginning to think it wasn't personal with Paris; he just couldn't stop talking long enough to think things through. Maybe his nickname came from the fact that the mythological Paris had started the Trojan War.

Darkness came, and it wasn't the fading of the brilliant sunset that let me know, it was the feeling inside me as if a switch had been clicked over. It was as if I could breathe easier in the thin air, or as if I'd been holding some tension inside me all day that finally eased.

I felt Jean-Claude wake for the night. Knew when he opened his eyes and knew that he felt the cool night breeze against my face. I didn't envy Claudia explaining everything to him. I thought about Wicked and Truth and I could feel them, too. Feel them coming aware to the night and all the possibilities. Claudia would be telling them that they had been volunteered to stand at my back and be my metaphysical battery, and if Seamus showed up they, plus Lisandro, were probably the best chance we had at winning without just shooting him on sight. Since shooting him might kill Jane, too, and she'd done nothing, we'd try not to shoot him, but if we had to, we would.

Badger's radio crackled and he touched his mic on his vest. 'Roger that.' He turned to me. 'We're getting reports of packs of zombies.'

'How big?'

'Eyewitnesses are reporting anywhere from five to twenty, so probably somewhere in between.'

My phone rang and I knew the ring tone. I picked it up. 'Jean-Claude,' I said.

'Ma petite, what have you done?'

'My job.'

'I would stand by your side, you know that.'

'Claudia and I talked about it, but we learned from some of the older guards that if you are in person here, then the Lover of Death could make a direct challenge to you to try to take over as king of all the vampires here. It's too great a risk, and you know that.'

'I would be more power at your back.'

'Yes, but if I get hurt you have the ability to feed me energy and keep me alive. If we're both hurt, then we're screwed.'

He laughed, that wonderful touchable sound that seemed to glide down my skin as if he'd touched me with his hand. It made me shiver.

'Ma petite, you say the sweetest things.'

'You still know I'm right.'

'I would love to say I do not and fly to your side.'

'I love you,' I said.

'Je t'aime, ma petite.'

'Kiss Asher for me when he shows up tonight.'

'He will not be coming tonight. They have closed all the airports and roads into the city. The National Guard is being mobilized.'

'One little zombie apocalypse and they call out the big guns,' I said.

'You are the big gun, ma petite.'

'You can't see me smiling, but I am.'

'I can feel you smiling,' he said.

There was a prickly rush of cold that wasn't the night air. 'I sense vampire, gotta go. Je t'aime, mon fiance.'

'That is the first time you have called me so; I love you, ma petite.'

I made the sign we'd agreed upon when I sensed vampire and hoped that the snipers remembered that just because I sensed vampire didn't mean it was bad guys. I reached out toward that sense of power and found Wicked Truth. I concentrated and could feel the air against their bodies as they literally flew toward me; they were just above us. If they hadn't been blood-oathed to Jean-Claude, and my lovers, I wouldn't have been able to pinpoint them so accurately, but they were mine. What was mine I could sense.

It made me try to sense Jane. She was blood-oathed to Jean-Claude, too, and I got a flash of vampire. I'd have known she was close and a vampire, but other than that I'd have been blind. So it wasn't just the connection to Jean-Claude. Was it being my lovers, or that I fed the ardeur on them, that made me be able to know so much about the Wicked Truth? Later, when we got through all this, I'd experiment and see what made the difference between the vampires I could track and the ones I couldn't.

The SWAT officers all tensed and at least touched their guns as the vampires landed. Edward took it in stride; he'd seen the show before. Truth touched ground a few seconds before Wicked, so that they were both crouched on the ground letting the momentum of landing sink into the earth itself, and then stood together, tall and handsome, their faces as close to identical as any brothers I'd ever seen. Only the hair was different, one slightly wavy and brown, the other straight, thick, and blond, plus one had slightly bluer eyes, the other a bit more gray, and choice of clothing. Wicked wore a pale designer trench coat that flared around an equally beautiful tailored suit, and Truth was back in his newly repaired knee-high leather boots; they looked like something that should have been worn to a Renaissance fair, but they were the real deal, not a modern imitation. We'd finally convinced him that modern jeans were a good thing, and a black pair was tucked into the boots. Under his black leather jacket I caught glimpses of one of his new black T-shirts, the one that read, Don't Worry I'm Right Behind You, using you as a meat shield, the second phrase in much smaller type. They walked toward me smiling. Wicked's smile seem to promise naughty mischief; Truth's was open and just happy to see me.

I met them partway, and normally I didn't greet them with a hug let alone more, but I was about to ask them to risk their lives, not as my bodyguards, but as my familiars, like a witch might use a cat. So I went to them and held a hand out to each of them. They exchanged a quick glance between them, all the surprise they showed, and then took my hands. I put an arm around each of their waists, sliding my arms under the trench coat and the leather jacket, sliding my hands over the texture difference between Truth's cotton T-shirt and Wicked's silk dress shirt, until I tucked myself in close between them. They gazed down at me with those mirror faces, the deep dimples in their chins like an extra grace to those handsome faces. Their arms slid around me, one across my shoulders, the other lower.

'I'm not complaining,' Wicked said, 'but why the effusive greeting for us?'

'I'm asking a lot of you tonight.'

'We're your bodyguards, Anita; if you need our lives, they are yours,' Truth said.

I hugged him a little tighter. 'I don't want your life, Truth.'

'Whatever you want, it is yours,' he said.

'Whatever our lady requires,' Wicked said.

'And that's why you got hugs,' I said.

Jane landed in a fall of black hooded cloak. It would match her outfit, so that she looked like a movie ninja until she pushed back the hood to reveal the very blond hair and the large blue eyes. I'd seen men react to the delicate beauty of her, until they got a taste of her coldness. She was about my size, delicate but curvy, because she'd been recruited from a time when to be too thin meant you were poor or ill. She was as silent and self-contained as any of the Harlequin vampires, as cool and controlled as Goran and his master were hotheaded and uncontrolled.

She stood and came toward us, moving in a glide that caused the black cloak to billow and wave around her almost as if it were alive on its own. I wasn't sure how she did it, but she wasn't the only one of the Harlequin who could make the cloaks distractingly dramatic. As Seamus was Water, because of his grace, she was Ice, because she let nothing ruffle her, and she was as inexorable as a glacier, and as patient. There was something a little scary about Jane. She'd never done anything to me, or said an unkind word, but she was unnerving somehow.

I untangled myself from Wicked Truth and turned to face her. Did I apologize for taking her animal to call into harm's way? 'I'm sorry that Seamus has been compromised.'

'He was doing his job,' she said.

Okay, so much for pleasantries. 'Can you sense Seamus?'

'Yes,' she said.

'Is he still bound to you?' I asked.

'Yes and no.'

'Explain.'

'The Lover of Death has not broken our tie completely. It is almost as if we are sharing Seamus, which is not possible.'

'If Seamus comes, we will give you a chance to win him back to you completely, but if he tries to fight us ... we can't let that happen, Jane.'

'He is too dangerous, I understand,' she said.

'Do you understand the consequences?'

'If he dies, I may die. It is almost a certainty now that our Dark Mother is dead and no longer sharing her power with us. We, her guards, are much diminished.' Her voice never changed inflection. She might have been talking about what we'd do tomorrow if it didn't rain.

'I'm sorry for that, but I can't be sorry for why it happened.'

'Understood,' she said.

'Okay, then, I'll introduce everyone around.' I did, and Paris was the one who tried to flirt with Jane. She looked at him as if he were less than nothing, a pimple on the butt of the universe and she could have cared less. Wicked and Truth bothered the SWAT guys for the same reason that Dev, Nicky, and Lisandro did: SWAT wasn't used to meeting other men who made them for a moment think, Would I win this fight? They were friendly about it, but I knew that Wicked had picked up on it; I couldn't tell if Truth had, or if he cared. If we'd had more time Wicked would have played with them a little, gently, but he would have amused himself.

I was about to try to do something that most animators couldn't have attempted at all, and those who could would have needed a human sacrifice to even try, which was very illegal, but I'd had more than one zombie raising where the power wanted to spread outside the circle of power. The circle was to keep the zombie you raised inside just in case something went wrong, but it was also there to keep things out. There are things that will inhabit corpses, especially fresh ones, until the body starts to rot and then everything leaves it. I'd accidentally raised entire cemeteries before when people had died inside the circle of power. It had been enough energy that the circle had cracked and spread the power throughout the cemetery. One of the times that the energy had wanted to spread had been without a circle of protection and with a vampire at my back acting as my undead energy boost. I was going to try to replicate that, but this time I wasn't going to fight the power, I was going to indulge it. I was purposefully going to raise as many zombies as I could. I was chumming for the Lover of the Death to come play with me. He thought that having some of the power of the Mother of All Darkness inside him made him a bad-ass necromancer; I was going to do everything I could to show him that I was better at it. I needed him to come close enough for me to raise a circle with him inside it, and then all I had to do was keep him trapped in the body he walked in with, and give the word to Hatfield to burn the one on her end. She still hadn't found the body, but she had found the old mine that he'd been hiding in. Little Henry had been right that it was a maze. I prayed she'd find the body before he showed up on this end, because if not we were fucked. To kill him, the body he was in and the body he'd started in both had to burn.

We were in the modern open area of the cemetery. It gave the snipers the best chance. It left us open for the same thing, but long gun wasn't Seamus's strong suit, and the Lover of Death wouldn't shoot us. If he killed us tonight it would be death by zombie, or rotting vampire, nothing as clean and neat as a bullet.

Nicky came to me and spoke low. 'Why are you delaying?'

He was right. 'I think I'm afraid.'

'That you can't do it?'

'No, that I can.'

'Why does that scare you?' he asked.

I took a deep breath and was honest with the gibbering voice in the back of my head. 'I've fought my necromancy for years to not do the very thing I'm about to do on purpose.'

'Create your own army of the undead?'

I nodded.

'What scares you about it the most?'

I looked up at him. 'That I'll enjoy it too much.'

'It's okay to enjoy what we're good at, Anita.'

'It's not okay to enjoy certain things, it's dangerous.'

'You mean how you're not supposed to enjoy killing people, or hurting them?'

I nodded. 'Yeah, like that.'

'Do you feel guilty about anyone you've killed?'

'No, not really.'

'Me either; now do this, Anita. Let your power out of its cage and see how far it runs.'

'What if it runs too far to put back in its cage?'

'If you're the one controlling the zombie army, I know it will be a good zombie army, because you are my moral compass and you always point true north, Anita. Don't let your doubts, or anyone else's issues, make you think otherwise.'

'Are you sure you're a sociopath?' I asked.

'Pretty sure, yeah; why?'

'Because somehow I didn't think sociopaths were good at being comforting.'

'We can be great at it, because we spend our lives play-acting, pretending so that we fit in and no one suspects that we have no idea why people are nice to each other.'

'You understand that was completely not comforting, right?'

'Yes, but I don't have to pretend with you; you already know that I'm a sociopath, and you love me anyway.'

Edward came up to us. 'Sorry to interrupt, but what's the holdup?'

'Me, worrying about things I shouldn't be,' I said.

'Want some help clearing your head?' he asked.

I shook my head. 'I'm good, Nicky helped.'

Nicky looked at Edward. 'She's having one of those what-if-killing-feels-really-good, doesn't-that-make-me-a-bad-person moments.'

Edward nodded as if that made perfect sense. 'Then it feels good. We can't really control what flips our switch; don't judge it, Anita, and just accept it.'

I wanted to argue, but it would have been beyond stupid to argue with the two sociopaths in my life. 'Why do I have moral quandary questions with the two of you?'

'Because you don't really have moral quandaries about violence, Anita, but you're afraid of being judged for enjoying it, so you only bring it to the two people in your life who won't judge you.'

I wanted to argue with Edward, but I couldn't. 'Well, fuck.'

'Pretty much; now go raise zombies like the kickass necromancer we all know you are.' He actually petted me on the head, which he knew I hated.

'Don't pet me,' I said.

'Sorry, but if you need to stroke off, I can help you; otherwise do your job so that the evil necromancer's undead army doesn't eat all the nice people in Boulder.'

'Does that make me the good necromancer, or just the other evil one?'

'It makes you our necromancer; now go play with the vampires and raise us some zombies.'

'Fine, you guys go stand somewhere else.' I went to get my vampires and embrace my inner necromancer. I hoped I was the good one.