Dead Ice

We all looked at Nicky; even I was surprised. “Wow,” Domino said, “that was like really smart.”

“I thought sociopaths couldn’t understand emotions,” Manny said.

“Sociopaths spend their lives studying people, because we have to imitate things we don’t understand, or feel, to blend in. It makes us some of the most observant people on the planet. We have to be or people figure out what we are, and I’m pretty sure centuries ago they killed us, or put us in charge of killing people.”

Manny made a hmm face and said, “Okay, let’s talk to Justine and Warrington.”

“You know, you both call him by his name now,” Nicky said.

Manny and I looked at each other. “Creepy, isn’t it?” I said.

“Oh yes,” he said, “very.”

Manny and I went to give all the warnings to Justine and the zombie, knowing full well what she would decide. Sometimes you can’t save people, and sometimes they don’t want to be saved.

30

WE HADN’T COUNTED on Warrington’s sense of honor. He didn’t want to leave the only woman he had ever loved haunted like that. “Show her that I am a zombie,” he said at last.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“If I am truly what you say I am, then shouldn’t you be able to order me to do things and I will have no choice but to obey?”

“You get that from the Internet, too?”

“Yes,” he said, with no hint that he’d heard the sarcasm. I guess he hadn’t been exposed to modern culture long enough to know that people could lie, and frequently did, on the Internet. Of course, in this case it wasn’t a lie; fancy that.

There was a tiny part of me that wondered if Warrington really had to obey me like other zombies. I think part of me was beginning to think of him as a person, and not undead, or at least not a zombie. Sometimes doubt can undo your abilities. It’s like if you don’t believe you can, you can’t, or something like that.

I pushed the unhelpful thought away, and just believed. I wasn’t just an animator; I was a necromancer, which was a whole new level of power. I’d raised the zombie, which meant I could control it, period.

I closed my eyes and breathed in and out, slowly, letting the tension, the doubts, everything slide down into the ground, away from me. Grounding, Marianne, witch and my metaphysical teacher, called it. You could air, instead of ground, but that usually needed wind for me to do it. Ground and center, she had said over and over, until it was almost automatic for me.

When I opened my eyes I was calm again, and I could look at Warrington without the guilt and all the emotions getting in my way. He was warm to the touch now; so what? He could love again; so what? I looked at him not with my eyes, but with that part of the brain just behind them where you can see dreams. I didn’t usually “see” auras around people, but I could “feel” energy around them. I brushed my abilities over the waiting group and found the humans warm; Nicky and Domino’s energy was warmer still, and Manny’s energy was cooler. An ability to work with the dead leaves its mark like a kiss from the grave on our energy signatures. I couldn’t see my own the way I could see other people’s—most practitioners couldn’t, Marianne said—but she’d told me my energy could be very cool, like no other human she’d ever touched. I let my power trail over Warrington, and his energy was very different. It wasn’t just a trace of the grave, but as if the lightbulb of his aura were going out, not like death, or not like he was injured and dying, but . . . He wasn’t as alive as everyone else, because he was the undead. He was a zombie, just a zombie, a really good and high-functioning one, but still it was my power that animated him, not that more divine spark that filled the living.

It was impressive as hell, but in the end I could feel what he was, and it wasn’t alive. I had no idea how I’d brought this much of his personality back, but it didn’t matter in the end. He wanted me to prove to Justine that he wasn’t alive; I could do that.

I used what Nicky had started calling my command voice and said, “Thomas Warrington, come to me!” I held out my hand.

Justine shivered and held on to his arm. “Don’t do it, Tom, don’t go.”

He frowned at her and then at me. “I seem to have a choice, Miss Blake.”

I shook my head. “If I’m nice about it, you have some choice, but I don’t have to be nice.”

“I don’t understand what you mean by that, Miss Blake.”

“I know you don’t.”

Justine wrapped herself around him, hugging him tight, making him look down at her. “She may have raised you from the grave, but something else happened when we kissed for the first time. You get warmer every time I touch you.”

“Romantic wishful thinking, Justine,” I said.

She turned and looked at me, eyes a little wild. “No, no, it’s not. His skin gets warmer every time we kiss, or hold hands. I’m not making it up.” She went up on tiptoe and offered her lips to him.

He hesitated, looking at me. I nodded, and only then did he bend down to her. I didn’t think he was a zombie looking for permission, but just Warrington wondering if it was still all right, with my magic creeping over their skin, because I knew he felt it, and her reaction let me know that Justine was feeling some touch of it.

They kissed and I looked with power, not my eyes. Energy flared between them so that his glow went from a pale, almost invisible shine to a flare of scarlet. When they parted from the kiss his energy stayed brighter, and so did hers. It was as if she gained power from it, too, but then maybe we always do from love, or even lust. If we didn’t gain shared energy it wouldn’t be so addictive.