screaming, “Ugly, they’re so ugly. Take me home, Tony, take me home!”
Jacob called out to Bennington as he moved through the cemetery of watching dead. “ Bennington, you have your wife just like you asked.”
“I do, she’s perfect.”
“Then transfer the rest of the funds.”
“I will once my wife is safely home.”
“Three of my men are captured. One of my men is dead; the other is lost to me, and I just hit Ellen harder than I’ve ever hit a woman before. Make the damn call now.” There was an edge of a growl in his voice.
Bennington looked offended, but he also looked a little scared. Maybe he was scared of Jacob, or maybe it was the zombies. There was plenty to be scared of in that cemetery. Bennington got a cell phone out of his expensive suit and made the call. “It should be in your account now.”
Jacob used his own phone to check on that. He nodded. “It’s in the account. Take your wife home.”
They started walking out between the silent watching dead. He was talking to her. “It’s all right, Ilsa. Don’t be afraid.”
“You have your money,” I said.
“Yes,” Jacob said.
“She will rot, Jacob. Even with this much power she won’t hold together. She can’t, because she’s a zombie and no matter how good she looks now, it won’t last.”
“You’re sure of that?”
“Absolutely, and how do you think a man like Tony Bennington will take it when his flirty wife starts to forget she’s alive and starts to rot?”
“He’ll go to the cops,” Nicky said.
“Or he’ll hire someone else expensive to hunt you down, and he’ll kill my flirty boys if he can’t have his flirty girl.”
“What are you asking me?”
“I’m asking you not to interfere, that’s it.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Something symmetrical.”
“Symmetrical,” he said, and then I watched as understanding crossed his face in the moonlight.
“Very,” I said.
He looked past the waiting dead to Bennington and his pretty dead wife. A look came over his face, and he nodded. “I won’t stop you.”
“Stand near me, both of you. Zombies aren’t particularly smart.”
Nicky moved close to me, and I offered him my hand. Jacob picked up Ellen’s unconscious body and joined us. I spoke to the dead. “Kill him.”
There was a moment when they all looked at us, a moment when I felt them hesitate, and then I pointed toward Bennington and his blond wife. “Kill him.” I thought it at them. I pictured his face and I wanted them to move forward, to surround him, and they did.
He yelled, “Mr. Leon, what’s happening? What are they doing?”
Jacob called out, “It’s symmetry, Bennington.”
Then Bennington screamed, “Ilsa, Ilsa, what are you doing! Oh, my God!” The zombies closed around him and began to feed. Bennington shrieked for a long time, and then there were hands reaching for the dead hooker and Silas’s body. The sounds were not good sounds. The visuals were graphic. It was like every horror movie you can imagine, but worse. Real bone is always both whiter and wetter. Real blood is darker, thicker, and you don’t get the smells on a movie screen. You can always tell when they perforate a bowel by the smell.
One zombie grabbed at Jacob’s pants leg. “Back up,” I said, and it bowed low to the ground, crawling back to the feeding frenzy that had become Silas’s body.
I offered Jacob my other hand, and he took it, balancing Ellen’s body in his arms. I stood there in the midst of the dead I had raised, and the living they were eating. I stood there holding on to the two werelions, and it was to keep them safer, but it was also because I needed to hold on to something warm and alive. I needed to be reminded that I wasn’t just this.
When all the bodies were eaten they turned to me, and I watched, and felt that there was more home in them. There was something in there now that hadn’t been there before they tasted flesh. There are things that wait in the dark, that wait for a chance to find a body that they can walk around in, things that were never human. Sometimes you can feel them on the edge of your mind, the shadows that flit out of the corners of your eyes, and aren’t there if you look directly at them. The dead that stood there in the moonlight with blood decorating their mouths held the shadows in their eyes. I could finally see what hid just out of sight, just out of thought, and I knew that I could keep the dead. I could keep them animated. They could be the beginning of my own private army. An army of the dead that knew neither pain, nor fear. It would be an army that no bullet would slow, no blade could kill, and only fire would stop.
Nicky squeezed my hand and whispered, “Something’s in there now.”
“Their eyes,” Jacob whispered, “there’s something in their eyes.”
“I see it.”
“What is it?” Nicky asked.
“Shadows,” I said, and then I spoke loud, in that ringing voice that you use in ritual. “All of you, hear me, go back to your graves. Lie down and be what you were. Rest, and walk no more.”
Their eyes flickered almost like a television that wasn’t quite on station, like two channels trying to be on screen at once.
“Tell me you brought salt,” I said, voice low and even.
“ Bennington wouldn’t let us bring any, because salt is for putting zombies back in their graves and he didn’t want you to do that to his wife.”
“Fine,” I said. I knelt, very carefully, keeping my eyes on the zombies the way I did when I was on the judo mat. You never take your eyes off your opponent because if you do they can rush you. I knelt and found the blade I’d dropped into the grave dirt. The blade still had Silas’s blood on it. Salt would have been good, but I had steel, and grave dirt, and power. It would be enough, because it would have to be.
I stood up, slowly, deliberately, and called my necromancy. I called it in a way I hadn’t before. I called it to use against the shadows in their eyes, the shadows that were promising me power, glory, conquest.
I’d been arrogant, and I prayed for forgiveness for that particular sin. I was heartily sorry for it. Killing Bennington didn’t bother me. “By steel, blood, and will, I command you to go back to your graves and walk no more.”
There was another moment of that eye flicker.
I put power into the words, all the power I had, and willed it to work. I called the dead to me. I called them with the power that had made my dog rise from the grave when I was fourteen. I called them to me with the power that had put a suicidal professor in my dorm room in college. I called them with that part of me that made vampires hover around me like I was the last light in all the darkness. I called the dead to me, and bade them to rest and walk no more.
I shoved my power into them, and felt something else in there. Something else that shoved back, but the bodies were too much mine. Too much of my power animated them, and one by one their eyes emptied and they stood like shells waiting for orders.
“Rest and walk no more; by steel, grave, and will, I command thee.” They shambled back to their graves in a silent mass; the only sounds the shuffling of feet and the brush of cloth. Ilsa Bennington came to stand in front of us. She was still the lovely flirt that her husband had been willing to kill for, but her blue eyes were as empty as all the rest. Her mouth was smeared with redder things than lipstick.
