Cerulean Sins

3

My zombie-raising equipment was in a gray Nike gym bag. Some animators have elaborate cases. I've even seen one who had a little suitcase that turned into a table like a magician's or a street vendor's. Me, I made sure everything was packed tight so nothing got broken or scratched up, but other than that, I didn't see the point to being fancier than you needed to be. If people wanted a show they could go down to the Circus of the Damned and watch zombies crawl from the grave with actors pretending to be terrified of them. I wasn't an entertainer, I was an animator, and this was work.

I turned down Halloween parties every year, where people wanted zombies raised at the stroke of midnight or some such nonsense. The scarier my reputation got, the more people wanted me to come be scary for them. I'd told Bert I could always go and threaten to shoot all the partygoers, that'd be scary. Bert had not been amused. But he had stopped asking me to do parties.

I'd been trained to use an ointment spread over face, hands, heart. The smell of rosemary, like breathing in a Christmas tree, still held a great nostalgia for me, but I didn't use the ointment anymore. I'd raised the dead in emergencies without it, more than once, so it got me to thinking. Some believed it helped the spirits enter you, so the powers that be could use you to raise the dead. Most, in America anyway, believed that the scent and touch of the herbal mixture enhanced your psychic abilities, or helped open them so they'd work at all. I never seemed to have any trouble raising the dead. My psychic abilities were always on line for animating. So I still carried the ointment, just in case, but I didn't use it much anymore.

The three things I did still need for animating were steel, fresh blood, and salt. Though the salt actually was to put the zombie back in the grave once we were finished with it. I'd cut my paraphernalia to the absolute minimum, and recently, I'd cut it down even more. And I mean that «cut» part literally.

My left hand was covered in little bandages. I was using the clear ones, so I didn't look like a tan version of the mummy's hand. There were larger bandages on my left forearm. All the wounds were self-inflicted, and it was beginning to piss me off.

I had been learning how to control my growing psychic powers by studying with Marianne, who had been a psychic when I met her, but had become a witch. She was Wiccan now. Not all witches are Wiccan, and if Marianne had been another flavor of witch, I wouldn't have had to cut myself up. Marianne, as my teacher, shared some of my karmic debt, or so her group—read coven—believed. The fact that I killed an animal every time I raised the dead, three, four times a night, almost every night, had made her coven rant, rave, scream, and basically lose it. Blood magic is black magic to a Wiccan. Taking a life for magical purposes, any life, even a chicken's, is very black magic.

How could Marianne have tied herself to someone who was being so… evil? they demanded to know.

To help Marianne's karmic burden—and mine, the coven assured me—I'd been trying to raise the dead without killing anything. I'd done it in emergencies without an animal to sacrifice, so I knew it was possible. But—surprise, surprise—while it was true that I could do my job without killing anything, I could not do it without fresh blood. Blood magic is still black magic to Wiccans, so what to do? The compromise was that I would use only my own blood. I wasn't sure it would work. But it did, for the recently dead, at least.

I'd started out slicing up my left forearm, but that had rapidly lost its appeal, since I needed to do it three or more times a night. Then I'd taken to pricking my fingers. Just a little blood seemed to be enough for those dead under six months. But I'd run out of fingers, and my arm had enough scars already. I'd also found that when I practiced left-handed shooting that I was slower, because the cuts freaking hurt. I would not cut up my right hand, because I couldn't afford to be slower with my right. I'd pretty much decided that, while I was sorry I had to kill a few chickens or goats to raise the dead, the animal's lives were not worth my own. There I've said it, a totally selfish judgment call.

I'd really hoped the tiny cuts would heal instantly. Thanks to my ties to Jean-Claude, master vamp of the city, I healed fast, very fast. The little cuts didn't heal fast. Marianne said it was probably because I was using a magically charged blade to do the cutting. But I liked my machete. Truthfully, I wasn't a hundred percent sure that I could raise the dead with only a prick of blood without a magically charged blade. It was a problem.

I was going to have to call Marianne and tell her I'd failed the Wiccan test of goodness. Why should they be any different? Most right-wing Christian groups hated me too.

I glanced behind me at my audience. Two new uniformed police officers had joined Lt. Nicols and the first officer. The police stood in the middle of the two groups, which had been allowed to come close enough to the grave to hear what the zombie would say. It was way closer than fifty feet, but both parties needed to hear Gordon Bennington, or so the judge had ruled. The judge in question had actually joined us, along with a court reporter and her little machine. He'd also brought along two burly looking bailiffs, which made me think the judge was even smarter than he looked, and I'd been pretty impressed before. Not every judge will take zombie testimony.

For tonight Lindel graveyard was court. I was glad that Court TV hadn't gotten wind of it. It was just the kind of weird crap that they liked to televise. You know—transsexual's custody case; female teacher rapes thirteen-year-old boy student; pro-football player's murder trial. The O. J. Simpson trial had not been a good influence on American television.

The judge said in his booming, court voice, which echoed strangely in the flat emptiness of the cemetery, "Go ahead, Ms. Blake, we're all assembled."

Ordinarily I'd have beheaded a chicken and used its body to help me sprinkle a blood circle, a circle of power, to contain the zombie once it was raised so it wouldn't go wandering all over the place. The circle also helped focus power and raise energy. But I had no chickens at the moment. There was a chance that if I'd tried to get enough blood out of my body to walk even a small circle of power, I'd be finished for the night, too dizzy and too light-headed to do anything else. So what's a morally upright animator supposed to do?

I sighed and unsheathed the machete and heard several gasps behind me. It was a big blade, but I'd found that in beheading a chicken one-handed you needed a big, sharp blade. I stared at my left hand and tried to find a space that was bandage free. I put the top edge of the blade against my middle finger (the symbolism was not lost on me) and pressed. I kept the machete too sharp to risk drawing the blade down my finger. It would be a bitch to need stitches because I'd cut too deep.

The cut didn't hurt immediately, which meant I'd probably cut deeper than I wanted. I raised my hand so the moonlight fell on it, and saw the first dark welling of blood. The moment I saw it, the cut hurt. Why was it that everything hurt worse when you realized you were bleeding?

I began to walk the circle, holding the steel point downward, my bleeding finger flat to the earth, so that occasional drops would hit the ground. I'd never truly felt the machete carving the magic circle through the ground, through me, until I stopped killing animals. It had probably always been like a steel pencil tracing my circle, but I'd never ever been able to feel it over the stronger rush of the death. I felt each drop of blood that fell, felt the earth almost hungry for it, like rain in a drought, but it wasn't the moisture the earth drank, it was the power. I knew when I'd walked the entire circle around the headstone, because the moment I touched the place where I'd begun, the circle closed with a skin-tingling, hair-raising rush.

I turned to face the headstone, feeling the circle around me like an invisible trembling in the air. I went to the headstone, which was at the far end of the circle. I tapped the headstone with the machete. "Gordon Bennington, with steel I call you from your grave." I touched my bloody hand to the cold stone. "With blood I call you from your grave." I moved back to the far edge of the circle, at the foot of the grave. "Hear me now, Gordon Bennington, hear and obey. With steel, blood, and power, I command you to rise from your grave. Rise from your grave and walk amongst us."

The earth rolled like heavy water and just spilled the body upward. In the movies the zombies always crawl from the grave with reaching hands like the ground tries to keep them prisoner, but most of the time, the earth gives freely, and the zombie simply rises to the top, like something floating to the surface of a liquid. There were no flowers to get in the way this time, nothing for the body to trip over, as the zombie sat up and looked around.

One thing I had noticed with not killing the animals was that my zombies weren't as pretty. With a chicken I could have made Gordon Bennington look like his photo in the paper. With only my own blood, he looked like what he was, a reanimated corpse.

He wasn't awful, I'd seen much worse, but his widow screamed, long and loud, and began to sob. There had been more than one reason I wanted Mrs. Bennington to stay home.

The nice blue suit hid the chest wound that had killed him. But you could still tell he was dead. It was the odd color of his skin. The way the flesh had begun to sink into the bones of his face. His eyes left too round, too large, too bare, so they rolled in their sockets barely contained by the waxy flesh. His blond hair was patchy and looked like it had grown. But that was illusion, caused by the shrinking of the meat of his body. Hair and fingernails do not grow after death, contrary to popular belief.

There was one more thing I had to do to help Gordon Bennington speak. Blood. The Odyssey speaks of blood sacrifice to get a dead seer's ghost to give Odysseus advice. It's a very old truism that the dead crave blood. I walked across the now solid ground and knelt by his puzzled, wizened face. I couldn't smooth my skirt down in back because one hand was full of machete and the other was bleeding. Everyone got a nice long glimpse of thigh, but it didn't really matter, I was about to do the thing that disturbed me the most since I stopped sacrificing poultry.

I held out my hand towards Gordon Bennington's face. "Drink, Gordon, drink of my blood and speak to us."

Those round, rolling eyes stared at me, then his sunken nose caught the scent of blood, and he grabbed my hand with both of his, and lowered his mouth to the wound. His hands felt like cold wax with sticks inside. His mouth was almost lipless, so his teeth pressed close in my flesh as he sucked at my hand. His tongue whipped back and forth on the wound like something separate and alive in his mouth, feeding from me.

I took a deep, steadying breath, breathe in and out, in and out. I would not be sick. Nope. I would not embarrass myself in front of this many people.

When I thought he'd had enough, I said, "Gordon Bennington."

He didn't react, but kept his mouth pressed to the wound, his hands clutching my wrist.

I tapped the top of his head gently with the side of the machete. "Mr. Bennington, people are waiting to talk to you."

I don't know if it was the words or the tap with the blade, but he looked up, and slowly began to pull back from my hand. His eyes held more of him now. The blood always seemed to do that, fill them back up with themselves.

"Are you Gordon Bennington?" I asked. We had to be all formal.

He shook his head.

The judge said, "We need you to answer out loud, Mr. Bennington, for the record."

He stared up at me. I repeated what the judge had said, and Bennington spoke, "I am, was, Gordon Bennington."

One of the upsides to raising the dead with only my blood was that they always knew they were dead. I'd raised some before where they didn't know that, and that was a bitch, telling someone that they were dead, and you were about to put them back in the grave. Real nightmare stuff, that was.

"How did you die, Mr. Bennington?" I asked.

He sighed, drawing in air, and I heard it whistle, because most of the right side of his chest was missing. The suit hid it, but I'd seen the forensic photos. Besides I knew what a mess a twelve-gauge shotgun makes at close range.

"I got shot."

There was a tension behind me, I could feel it over the buzz of the power circle. "How did you get shot?" I asked, voice calm, soothing.

"I shot myself going down the stairs to our basement."

There was a cry of triumph from one side of the crowd and an inarticulate scream from the other.

"Did you shoot yourself on purpose?" I asked.

"No, of course not. I tripped, gun went off, so stupid, really. So stupid."

There was a lot of screaming behind me. Mostly Mrs. Bennington yelling, "I told you so, little bitch…"

I turned and called, "Judge Fletcher, did you hear all that?"

"Most of it," he said. He turned that booming voice on overdrive and shouted, "Mrs. Bennington, if you will be quiet long enough to listen, your husband has just said he died by accident."

"Gail," Gordon Bennington's voice was tentative, "Gail, are you there?"

I did not want a tearful reunion on top of the grave. "Are we finished, Judge? Can I put him back?"

"No," this from Fidelis Insurance's lawyers. Conroy stepped closer. "We have some questions for Mr. Bennington."

They asked questions, at first I had to repeat them for Bennington to be able to answer, but he got better at answering. He didn't look any better, physically, but he was gathering himself up, being more alert, more aware of his surroundings. He spotted his wife, and said, "Gail, I'm so sorry. You were right about the guns. I wasn't careful enough. I'm so sorry to leave you and the kids."

Mrs. Bennington came towards us, with her lawyers in tow. I thought I'd have to ask them to keep her off the grave, but she stopped outside the circle, as if she could feel it. Sometimes the people that turn out to be psychically gifted surprise you. I doubt if she was even aware of why she stopped moving forward. Of course, she was holding her hands tight to her body. She was not reaching out to touch her husband. I don't think she wanted to find out what that waxy looking skin felt like. I couldn't blame her.

Conroy and the other lawyers tried to keep asking questions, but it was the judge who said, "Gordon Bennington has answered all your questions in detail. It's time to let him get back to… rest."

I agreed. Mrs. Bennington was in tears, and Gordon would have been too, except his tear ducts had dried up months ago.

I got Gordon Bennington's attention. "Mr. Bennington, I'm going to put you back now."

"Will Gail and the children get the insurance money now?"

I glanced behind me at the judge. He nodded.

"Yes, Mr. Bennington, they will."

He smiled, or tried to. "Thank you, then, I'm ready." He gazed back at his wife, who was still kneeling on the grass by his grave. "I'm glad I got to say good-bye."

She was shaking her head, over and over, tears streaming down her face. "Me, too, Gordie, me, too. I miss you."

"I miss you too, my little hell cat."

She burst into sobs at that. Hiding her face in her hands. If one of the lawyers hadn't grabbed her she'd have fallen to the ground.

"My little hell cat" didn't sound like a term of endearment to me, but hey, it proved Gordon Bennington had really known his wife. It probably also proved that she would miss him for the rest of her life. I could forgive her a few temper tantrums in the face of that much pain.

I squeezed on the wound in my finger and thankfully got a little more blood. Some nights I had to reopen a wound, or make another one, to get the zombie put back. I touched my bloody hand to his forehead, leaving a small dark mark.

"With blood I bind you to your grave, Gordon Bennington." I touched him with the edge of the machete, gently. "With steel I bind you to your grave." I switched the machete to my left hand and picked up the open container of salt that I'd left inside the circle. I sprinkled him with salt, and it sounded like dry sleet as it hit him. "With salt I bind you to your grave, Gordon Bennington. Go and rise no more."

With the touch of the salt, his eyes lost their alertness, he was empty as he lay back on the earth. The ground swallowed him, like some great beast had rippled its fur and he was just gone, sunk back into the grave. Gordon Bennington's corpse was back where it belonged, and there was nothing to distinguish this grave from any other. Not so much as a blade of grass was out of place. Magic.

I still had to walk the circle backwards and uncast it. Normally, I don't have an audience for that part. The zombie goes back in the grave, everyone leaves. But Conroy of Fidelis Insurance was arguing with the judge, who was threatening to cite him for contempt. And Mrs. Bennington was not in a condition to walk yet.

The police were standing around watching the show. Lieutenant Nicols looked at me and shook his head, smiling. He walked over to me as the circle went down, and I began to clean my new wound with antiseptic wipes.

He lowered his voice so the truly grieving widow wouldn't hear him. "You could not pay me enough to let that thing suck my blood."

I half-shrugged, holding gauze over my finger so it would stop bleeding. "You'd be surprised what people pay for this kind of work."

"It ain't enough," he said, an unlit cigarette already in his hand.

I started to give some flip answer, when I felt the presence of a vampire, like a chill across my skin. Out there in the dark, someone was waiting. There was a gust of wind, and there was no wind tonight. I looked up, and no one else did, because humans never look up, never expect death to fall upon them from the sky.

I had seconds to say, "Don't shoot, he's a friend," before Asher appeared in our midst, very close to me, his long hair streaming behind him, his booted feet touching down. He was forced to make a half running step to catch the momentum of his flight, which brought him to my side.

I turned and put myself in front of his body. He was too tall for me to cover all of him, but I did my best, moving us so that if anyone shot at him they'd risk hitting me. Every policeman, every bodyguard had drawn a gun, and every barrel was pointed at Asher, and at me.