Incubus Dreams (Vampire Hunter 12)

The night was suddenly less dark. I could see details, colors, things that my own eyes could never have seen. Requiem's shirt was so green it seemed to burn like his eyes. It was a kind of hyperfocus, and it wasn't just sight. His hand in mine felt heavier than it should have, more important than it should have, as if I could feel each whorl of his fingertip like tiny silken lines against my hand. To make love like this would either be the most wondrous experience of your life, or drive you mad.

I remembered this power, but it wasn't what I needed. I had another flash from Requiem's mind, a tiny flash of fear, quieted almost immediately, because I was touching him and I didn't want him to be afraid. The stars in my eyes drowned in a rush of flame, black flame with a center of brown, as if wood were the flame, and fire what it ate.

My eyes were, for a moment, what they'd be if I'd been a vampire. They filled with dark, dark brown light, so dark it was almost black. I turned those glowing eyes toward the grave, and Graham saw them.

"Oh, God," he whispered.

"Get off the grave, Graham," I said, and my voice was mine, almost.

He just knelt on the ground and stared up at me.

"Move, Graham," I said, "you won't want to be there when I'm finished."

He scrambled to his feet and moved, until I told him, "Good enough." He stayed close, eyes wide, fear like a scent off of his skin, but he didn't run, and he didn't try to distance himself. Brave boy.

I knelt on the hard ground and drew Requiem down with me, so that he knelt behind me with his hands on my shoulders. He was like some huge solid wall of quiet strength behind me. I'd known that I amplified Jean-Claude's powers when I was near him, but I'd never felt anything like what was happening now. It wasn't a triumvirate of power between Requiem and me, it was that he was one of Jean-Claude's vampires, and that made him mine in a way. Mine to call on, mine to use, mine to reward.

I bent until my hands touched the ground, until I could feel the dead just below me. It was as if the ground were water, and I knew there was someone drowning just below me, and all I had to do was reach down and save them.

I whispered, "Edwin Alonzo Herman, hear me." I felt him stir, like a sleeper disturbed by a dream. "Edwin Alonzo Herman, I call you from your grave." I felt his bones grow long and straight, felt his flesh coalesce around him. It was like restuffing a broken doll. He remade himself, and it was so easy, too easy. The power began to spread outward, began to seek another grave, but some small part of me that was still me, knew better. It wouldn't be just one more grave. I knew in that instant that I could raise this cemetery. That I could raise them all. No blood sacrifice. No chickens. No goats. Nothing, but the power blowing through me, and the vampire at my back. Because the power wanted to be used. It wanted to help me, help me caress them all from their graves, pull them to the light of stars, and fill them with... life. It would feel so good to lift them all up, so good.

I shook my head and fought that helpful power. Fought not to spread like a sweet sickness through the graves. Fought to hold on to what was left of who I'd thought I was. I needed help. I thought about Jean-Claude, but that wasn't it. I needed to remember that I wasn't just the dead. I was alive.

I reached out to the other third of our triumvirate. I reached out to Richard. He looked up at me as if I hovered in the air above his family's dining room table. I saw his father like an older clone of Richard himself, and most of his brothers, sitting at the table, passing a blue bowl. Charlotte, his mother, came in from the kitchen's swinging door just behind that chair. She was still about my size, with honey-blond hair and a figure that was both petite and full-figured. Except for the hair color and skin tone, Charlotte even reminded me of me. There was a reason that most of the Zeeman brothers had chosen small, tough women. I watched her bring in a big platter, smiling, chatting with her family. I couldn't hear what she was saying, or any noise from the crowded, smiling family scene. They all seemed so happy, so perfect. I didn't want to bring this here.

I started to pull away, and Richard's voice was in my head. "Wait, wait, Anita, please." He excused himself from the table and walked through the big living room, out onto the sweep of porch, and down the handful of steps until he could gaze up into the same sky that rode above me. By the time he gazed up into the air, gazed at me, he seemed to have sensed some of what was happening, because he said, "Dear God, Anita, what's happened? I've felt your power before, but not like this."

I didn't have enough control to talk in my head, so Requiem was going to get the out loud version, but I was past caring. "The vampires keep saying that we've hit a new power level."

He hugged his bare arms in the T-shirt. He hadn't stopped for a jacket. "It's like the night is breathing your power. What can I do?"

"Remind me that I'm not dead. Remind me that my ties are with things that have a heartbeat."

"How will that help?"

I wanted to scream my frustration at him. "God, Richard, just help me, please help. If you don't, I'm afraid of what I'll raise in this cemetery tonight."

He nodded. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry for so much, Anita." He looked down, and I knew the gesture, he was thinking, or gathering his will for something. Usually something he didn't want to do. But I didn't have time to worry about Richard's hangups tonight. I was too scared of the power that pulsed in the ground underneath me. A cold pulsing, but it promised to spread to all the graves. I knew that tonight I could raise one of those shambling zombie armies that the movies are so fond of portraying, and usually has nothing to do with real necromancy.

He looked back at the house and said, "I'm fine, Mom. I just need a little privacy. Keep everybody close to the house, okay." He shook his head. "No, Mom, it's not that close to the full moon."

He walked out into the openness of the yard away from the lights of the house and he let down his shields--the metaphysical walls that kept his beast caged and helped him pass for human. The night was suddenly alive in a way that it hadn't been. The still air held a thousand scents: the ripeness of apples from the orchard behind the house; grass like a thick green blanket against our face; trees, the spicy tang of sweet gum, the softer scent of birch, the sweet pungent wood of poplar, and over it all, the dry richness of fallen leaves all around us. Sounds, then. The last crickets of the year chirping their plaintive song. Other insects from the woods, singing their last songs before the cold came. The wind raised, and the trees creaked and groaned around the house. The big oak by the driveway threw its branches against the stars, and Richard raised his head to watch that wild wind. There was barely a breeze on the ground, but up high in the highest trees, the wind ran fast and pulled at the bare limbs at the very top of the trees. Most people don't look up, animals look up, because they know that there is no true safety. They don't worry about it the way we do, but they're aware of it in a way that we aren't.

Richard walked into the edge of trees that began the woods that bordered the western edge of the family land. He touched a trunk, laid his hands on it, and it was rough and hard, with deep grooves in the bark like tiny tunnels. He laid his face against that roughness, and it was spicy and pungent, and I knew it was sweet gum. He gazed up into the bare branches where the tiny rough balls still hung on to the edges of the tree. He hugged the tree, hugged it so tight that the bark dug into his skin, he rubbed his cheek against the roughness of it, like he was scent marking, then he was off. He was running at an easy lope through the trees, into the woods. He wasn't hunting. He was running for the joy of it.

He twisted through the underbrush like it wasn't there. And as I'd felt only once before, it was as if the trees and bushes welcomed him, or turned aside for him, or as if green growth could be water, and he dived through it, running, dodging, twisting, giving himself to the brush of twigs and branches and the feel of the living ground underfoot. There was life that didn't run or hide, it was all alive, alive in a way that most humans never understand.

Richard ran, and he took me with him, as he had one night long ago. Then he'd held my hand, and I'd struggled to keep up, to understand. Now it was effortless, because I was inside his head, inside him. The night was alive for him in a way that it wasn't for Jean-Claude, or for me. I was too human, and Jean-Claude's interest in life was too shallow. Neither of us could feel what Richard's beast could give him.