Anita Blake 24 - Dead Ice (19 page)

I used the dead man’s name, because I wasn’t certain that without it he would be himself and able to answer questions, but part of me was almost certain that I needed nothing but my own hands, my own power, to pull him out of the grave.

The earth moved against my hands like water, but thicker, as if mud could move like water and not be wet. The earth separated, remade itself, and I felt the pieces collect and begin to rebuild themselves. There were pieces missing, but it was all right, I didn’t need the small pieces. I gathered him up and felt him begin to be.

I plunged my hands into that moving, writhing earth, and hands met mine, hands that laced their fingers around mine, and felt as real. It was like dragging a drowning victim up out of solid water. He clutched at my hands and the ground pushed, and I pulled, and he came out of the earth to his thighs, dressed in the black suit he’d been buried in. I got to my feet and pulled him with me, and the ground spilled him up like some kind of escalator. That was new; usually even the best zombies had to climb the last few feet from the ground as if the grave was reluctant to let them out. This grave gave him up like a flower opening and pushing out a seed.

He blinked huge, pale eyes at me, gray or blue. It was hard to tell by moonlight. He looked at me, at our hands, and said, “Who are you?”

Zombies didn’t ask that first thing; like all true undead they needed blood to speak, to be real, to be “alive,” even for a little while. I looked up into that young face and he was in there, aware, awake, and he was perfect. Even I was impressed.

W
E LEFT THOMAS
the Zombie with MacDougal. He and Mrs. Willis were very, very pleased with the zombie. “He seems alive,” Mrs. Willis whispered to me, because once we’d explained to him what he was, and how much time had passed, it had scared him. I’d seen zombies react like that before, when they didn’t know they were dead. I always hated that part, explaining to them that they were dead, and there was no way to change that permanently. Not even my necromancy could resurrect the dead. Thomas the Zombie looked fabulously alive, but he wasn’t, and if we left him walking aboveground long enough his body would begin to rot and the miracle would turn into the nightmare of every shambling zombie movie you’d ever seen.

I used to have a hard-and-fast rule that I never let clients take their zombies away from the graveside. I put the rule in place after a few families took their loved ones home and kept them until they were rotted nightmares, and even then some didn’t want to let them go. The worst was when they tried to bathe them. Water made them rot faster and did nothing to help the smell. My zombies didn’t rot initially, even back in the day when they’d looked like partially rotted corpses, but the “magic” would eventually begin to fade, and the first sign of that was that the decay process started back up, and rotting meat stinks; it just does.

But technology and enough profit to buy the technology had given us options. I had an electronic ankle cuff waiting to put on the zombie. I’d use it to track him just like the police do with someone on house arrest. This model of cuff would also alarm if it was tampered with, so if they tried to take it off I’d know and they could be charged with disturbance of a corpse, among other things.

Our business manager at Animators Inc., Bert Vaughn, had approved the expense after he lost me for entire nights while I stayed with my zombies listening to them being questioned about everything from court cases to historical events. We billed per zombie raised, not by the hour, so that much revenue loss had finally convinced even Bert that we needed a different way to keep track of our zombies. But first we needed someone to give the zombie to, which was MacDougal.

Once the zombie was aboveground, the power was fine. I pulled the circle down and the spring night was just normal. Only the zombie was extraordinary, so lifelike that it was a little disturbing. I raised the dead; I did not do resurrection—no one did outside of Bible stories—but Thomas Warrington might have made a believer out of people. Not me; I knew in a few days he’d start to rot, and being this “alive” only meant that he’d be more horrified when it started, like the poor victims in the videos that the FBI had shown me. It was the same principle, except I didn’t have Thomas Warrington’s soul in a magical reinforced jar somewhere, so I could put it back in, or take it out, at my customers’ whim.

To raise a zombie, even a recently dead one, that looked as alive as the women in the videos, the animator had to be damned powerful. There weren’t many of us who had the juice to do something like this, and fewer still who could capture souls. Hell, I didn’t even know how to do that. Dominga Salvador had offered to teach me, but I’d told her I didn’t want anyone’s soul. I hadn’t then, and I didn’t now, but watching Thomas laugh and joke with everyone made me wonder, if it wasn’t his soul in there, what was it? Was it just body memory? The last flickers of personality, caught in the flesh like the traumatic events that get caught in the walls and floors of a house, so they play over and over again—not a true ghost, but the echoes of emotions so strong they leave images behind? Was that all I was seeing in the tall young “man”? I didn’t know and Manny hadn’t known either, because I’d asked him. My grandmother Flores, who taught me how to control my power, hadn’t known either. As far as I knew, no one knew the answer; maybe there wasn’t one.

We made plans for them to bring him back tomorrow night to be put back down. We made the plans quietly while MacDougal asked questions and the zombie answered them, and one of the young guys, whose name I couldn’t quite remember, recorded it with his phone. Ah, technology. The zombie had protested the ankle bracelet, but when I gave him a direct order to let me put it on, he’d complied like he had no will of his own. It sort of comforted me that he reacted like any other zombie, because he was almost unnervingly alive, even to me. His skin was still unnaturally cool to the touch, but other than being a little pale, he looked great; for being dead over two hundred years, he looked amazing.

Nicky, Dino, and I were using the aloe baby wipes I kept in the car to clean my hands. The wipes did well on everything except the blood that always seemed to embed itself at the roots of your fingernails. That needed soap, water, and scrubbing, sometimes with a bristle brush, but for everything else we’d be presentable. Nathaniel held a fresh trash bag so we could throw the used wipes in. Tonight it wasn’t very full, but on some nights the kitchen-sized bag filled up.

“Killing dinosaurs to no purpose,” I said.

“What?” Dino asked.

Nathaniel explained, “A lot of plastics used to be made from petroleum products, just like gasoline, so it’s all prehistoric dead plants and animals.”

“Dead dinosaurs,” Nicky said.

Dino looked at both of us. “That was Anita’s explanation out of your mouth, right?”

Nathaniel nodded. “Yes.”

“Yeah,” Nicky said.

“It’s that couple thing again,” he said.

“What couple thing?” I asked.

“Couples start using each other’s sayings, speech patterns, jokes, and specialized information after a while, because you hear it repeated over and over.”

“Coworkers and military units do it, too,” Nicky said.

“Yeah, but that’s usually more narrowly centered. Couples can go all over the board. I’d like to know someone that well someday.”

“Are you saying you’ve never been part of a couple?” I asked.

“I’ve dated, but no, not really.”

“This is my first real couple,” Nicky said.

“What do you mean, real?” I asked.

“I was told to seduce people for work sometimes, or go undercover. People are less suspicious of you if you have a romantic partner. They thought we were dating, and I went along with what they thought that should be, but it was all pretend for maintaining my cover or gaining information from them.”

“How long was the longest you dated someone like that?” I asked.

“Almost six months.”

“That’s a long time,” Nathaniel said. “And you didn’t care about her at all?”

“The sex was good.”

I looked up at one of the men I was in love with and couldn’t wrap my head around it. “And if the sex hadn’t been good?” I asked.

“She was cover, so I’d have found someone who was better in bed.”

“What happened to her?” Nathaniel asked.

Nicky looked at him as if he’d asked a dumb question or one that he’d never thought of before. “I don’t know.”

“Did anything you do bring her into harm’s way?” I asked.

He thought about it for a second and then made a little waffling motion with his head. “I don’t know.”

“How can you not know?” I asked.

“I completed my assignment and then I ditched the cell phone and walked away. It was the only number she had for me, so if anything happened, she had no way to contact me. She didn’t know my real name, background, nothing. The person she dated for six months didn’t exist.”

“Not once you left,” I said.

He shook his head. “No, Anita, that person never existed. I was undercover as a social, charming extrovert with lots of friends, with a new party, or show, or something almost every night.”

“You hate going to parties and shit,” I said.

“Yeah, but socializing was the best way to gather information and to move around without arousing suspicion. The more friends I made, the closer I got to the inner circle I wanted to break into, so I could get close to my target.”

“So you didn’t just lie to the girl, you lied to every friend you made,” Nathaniel said.

“If you want to call it that, yeah.”

“What else do you call it?” he asked.

“Work.”

“You scare me sometimes,” Dino said, “just so you know.”

“I know,” Nicky said.

We all looked at him and he gave perfect blank face back.

“But you also give me hope,” Dino said.

Nicky narrowed his eyes at him then. “I give you hope?”

“Yeah.”

“How?”

“If you can fall in love and make a family for yourself, then I have to have a shot at it, because I’m way more charming than you are.”

Nicky grinned. “You haven’t seen me try to be charming.”

“Yeah, I have,” Dino said.

“No, you haven’t,” Nicky said with a smile.

“Yeah, I have.”

“No, you really haven’t.”

Dino frowned at him.

“Anita knew what I was from the moment she met me; so did Nathaniel and Micah, Jean-Claude, all of them. I never had to pretend that I was someone else, something else. I didn’t even have to pretend I was this big, tough crazy guy who would do anything, so don’t mess with me.”

“So even that was pretend,” I said.

“People don’t fuck with you as much when they think you’re crazy. It scares them more than calm.”

“When I met you, I thought you enjoyed the violence, or the threat of it,” I said.

“Only in the bedroom. When I’m working, I’m working. It’s not personal.”

“Oh, come on, sometimes it feels good to hit someone as hard as you want, no holding back,” Dino said.

Nicky grinned suddenly, but it was more a baring of teeth, closer to a snarl as if his lion were peeking out. “Okay, yeah, just the physicality of it, yeah.”

“Yeah,” Dino said, and gave a low, very male chuckle.

Nicky joined him with his own version of it.

Nathaniel and I looked at each other. “You understand this moment of male bonding?” I asked him.

He shook his head. “Nope, I’ve spent most of my life not understanding the ‘hit ’em as hard as you can’ kind of guy. Whatever it means to be a man, I’m not that kind.”

“But you don’t have a problem with me being that kind of man,” Nicky said.

“No,” Nathaniel said.

“I make a lot of guys nervous.”

“And me being bisexual makes a lot of guys nervous.”

Nicky grinned. “I’m secure.”

Nathaniel grinned back. “Me, too.”

Nicky raised his fist and Nathaniel bumped it softly.

Dino shook his head. “You guys are just fun to see and I like it, but I don’t think I’m that secure.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“I’m not as pretty as either of these two. Nicky beats me in the gym, and from what I hear the two of them are both great in bed. They both cook, and we won’t even get into Jean-Claude and Micah. One is the prettiest man I’ve ever seen, and the other one is, well, Micah. He’s this tiny guy, but he walks into a room like he owns it, and like everyone should know that.”

“Anita does the same thing,” Nicky said.

“Yeah, she makes us all feel a little less like ‘the man.’”

“Not me,” Nicky said.

“Me, either,” Nathaniel said.

“We’re all pretty secure,” I said.

Nathaniel’s phone rang, and it was his ring tone for Micah. “Hey, baby,” he said, and then something Micah said made his face go serious, and he walked a little away from us.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

He shook his head and spoke to Micah. “Okay, but I’m not sure how it’s going to go on our end.”

“Nathaniel, what’s wrong?” I asked.

He turned with a face as serious as any I’d seen, which sort of scared me. “Is Micah all right, is everyone all right?”

“There’s a . . . mixer set up for you to meet the weretigers.”

“A mixer, what the hell does that mean?”

“It means there wasn’t time to plan a formal dinner, or a cocktail party, but they’re putting something together so that all the weretigers Jean-Claude and Micah like for us, and who are interested in the position, can be in one place at one time, and we can interact with them.”

“Is this the tigers bitching about not being included in the commitment ceremony?” Nicky asked.

“Yeah,” I said.

“Anita agreed to look at more weretigers, including female.”

Nicky looked at me.

Dino whistled softly, grinning.

I pointed a finger at Dino. “You stay out of this.”

He pressed his lips tight together but couldn’t quite stop looking like he was about to laugh.

To Nicky I said, “Say something.”

“When did you agree to do all this?”

“On the drive here,” Nathaniel said.