Anita Blake 24 - Dead Ice (45 page)

“There’s no one close,” I said softly, my voice distant with power.

My phone rang, sharp and jarring, so I lost some of the thread of what I was doing. It’s easier to do magic while shooting a gun than answering a phone, or so I’ve found. I fumbled it out to turn the sound off, but recognized the number, so I took it.

“Larry,” I said.

“What the fuck are you playing at, Anita?” In person he looked like a grown-up Howdy Doody complete with orange-red hair, freckles, and a boyish face that still got him carded, though the fact that he was about my height probably didn’t help.

“Well, hello to you, too,” I said.

“Your power is all over me and you think I’m being rude?”

“Manny and I are in a cemetery with predatory ghouls; forgive me if my trying to control the situation got my psychic cooties on you.”

“Tell me where you are. Police can be there in minutes, and I’ll—”

“It’s okay, I think, Larry. Manny urged me to handle it with magic, not guns, and I’m trying.”

“What kind of magic could save you from ghouls once they’ve gone predatory?”

“I’ll explain later, but I can’t do metaphysics while I’m on the phone.”

“You’re using your necromancy?” He made it a question.

“Trying to.”

“If the two of you need backup, call.”

“I will, thanks, Larry.” I hung up. It was the friendliest conversation I’d had with him in months. He and I had come to a parting of the ways over our views on vampires and the fact that I was a shooter and he wasn’t, and the other marshals respected my kill count over his moral high ground.

The ghoul was still pressed to Eddie’s back, but it wasn’t snarling at us. “I can’t find another necromancer anywhere in the city, or the miles beyond.”

“But you were able to touch Larry enough for him to call?” Manny made it a question.

“Apparently, so if I did touch someone with our psychic gift they’d know it when I did.” I stared at the ghoul, and a quick thought let me feel the others still out in the darkness.

“We need to get him off my dad,” Susannah said in a voice that was squeezed down into a tight, frightened sound.

“I know.”

“Ask him to get off the man,” Manny said.

“What?” I asked.

“Ask him, or tell him to move.”

“So, what, we move him away from Eddie, so we can shoot him?”

“No need to shoot him if he does what you tell him to do, Anita.”

I looked at Manny. “I can’t control ghouls, especially wild ones that my necromancy didn’t do anything to bring to life.”

“If it were anyone else but you, I’d agree, but if any animator I know can do this, it’s you.”

“Manny . . .”

“Try, Anita,” Nicky said.

I glanced at him.

“Please, Anita, at least try before that thing hurts my dad.”

I sighed, and looked at the ghoul. It was watching me, not in a hostile way, not even in a neutral way. There was a demand in its large reddish eyes, not the kind of demand human eyes give you, but closer to the way a really active dog will look at its owner, as if thinking,
You’re going to do something interesting now, right? We’re going to do something now, right?
And even that wasn’t exactly it, but it was the closest thing I’d ever seen to the look in the ghoul’s face.

“You”—I pointed at the ghoul—“move off the man.”

It blinked, looked at me for a second.

“Move, now,” I said.

The ghoul blinked one more time and then crawled off the man he’d pinned to the ground. He kept his eyes on Nicky, Domino, and Susannah while he did it, but he moved. I think we all held our breath. The ghoul sat beside Eddie, but he wasn’t on top of him anymore.

“Tell him to move farther away from Eddie,” Manny said.

“Move farther away from the man,” I said.

The ghoul looked at me.

“Try it simpler,” Nicky said.

“Like you’d talk to a dog,” Zerbrowski said.

I looked at him.

He shrugged.

If the ghoul were a dog, what would I say? How would I order it to get away from Eddie? I’d say,
Get away from the man
. I tried it. “Get away from the man.”

It looked at me, puzzled, but it moved a few more inches away from Eddie.

“Call him to you, Anita,” Manny said.

“He’s not really a dog, Manny.”

“Just try.”

My heart was beating a little fast; it wouldn’t work, it couldn’t work. “Come to me,” I said.

It looked at me sort of sideways, suspicious, but it came to me slowly, each movement stiff and reluctant like a half-feral dog. It wants to be petted and loved, but it’s learned humans are bastards and more likely to hurt than help. The ghoul moved in that awkward, nearly four-legged gait they had sometimes, as if the legs didn’t quite hold them upright, so they had to use their arms more like an ape. He, or it, sat a few feet away from me, out of reach, but closer to me than to Eddie, which is what we wanted.

Eddie got up slowly, and when he stood up, Susannah started to run to him, but Manny said, “Don’t run; that attracts ghouls and can trigger their chase reflex.”

“He’s right,” I said, softly, still keeping my gaze on the ghoul in front of me.

Susannah went slowly to meet her father around the far side of the grave. They hugged hard. One win for the good guys.

I went back to staring at the ghoul, and he stared back. He was less than eight feet from me. If he tried to jump me I’d never get any of the guns up in time to defend myself. Minimum safe distance for drawing, aiming, and firing a gun is twenty-one feet; anything closer and a human being can close the distance faster than you can draw a weapon. All the people who complain about cops shooting someone from a distance don’t understand how fast people can move, and how long it takes to draw, aim, and fire. The ghoul would be faster than a human. Eight feet between us was like giving him a free try at me, or at Zerbrowski or Manny, who were clustered around me.

“What now?” I asked.

“I’m not sure,” Manny said.

Nicky was moving slowly toward us. Domino started to follow, but Nicky shook his head. The ghoul noticed Nicky and shifted uneasily, making a low anxious sound in its throat. “Hold up, Nicky.”

“Why isn’t he afraid of me? I’ve got a gun,” Zerbrowski said.

“I don’t know, maybe Nicky looks like more of a threat.”

“I think he can smell what I am,” Nicky said, keeping his voice low and as nonthreatening as he could.

“He’s more afraid of shapeshifters than humans; interesting,” I said.

“Don’t go all Mr. Spock on us, Anita. This isn’t interesting, it’s dangerous,” Zerbrowski said.

“It’s both,” I said.

“Add scary to that, and you’re about right,” Domino said, still at the graveside. He was watching out into the trees, trying to keep attention on the other ghouls, and trusting that Nicky would handle the one closest to me. He was right; there were four of them still out there, and they might not be as obedient as this one.

“Okay, but now what do I do with it?”

“Dawn is less than half an hour away, Anita. The ghouls will run for cover as the light comes,” Manny said.

“I don’t believe they came from this cemetery; if we let them tunnel in here to hide from the sunlight, they’ll start feeding on the bodies buried here. They need to go back where they came from.”

“And where is that?” Manny asked.

I looked at the ghoul. “Maybe he’ll play Lassie for me,” I said.

“What does that even mean?” Zerbrowski asked; he sounded nervous. I guess we all were, but he usually hid it better.

“Show us where your cemetery is,” I said. The ghoul blinked at me.

“Too complex,” Nicky said.

“If you say
Is Timmy down the well
, I’m going to punch you later, just so you know,” Zerbrowski said.

“Go back to your own cemetery.”

It made a sound low in its throat, halfway between a growl and a purr. I didn’t understand the sound.

I repeated my order.

It made the sound again, but this time it went up and down the scale, and there was more trill to it. There was an answering noise from the dark here, there, over there, so that the whole pack made the noise back and forth at each other.

“What are they doing?” Susannah asked.

“It doesn’t sound threatening,” I said, but knew I sounded less than absolutely certain, because I wasn’t certain. I was so far outside my comfort zone that I just didn’t know. Ghouls didn’t act like this, and they sure as hell didn’t obey me. I’d been chased through my share of graveyards by the damn things. They were animalistic scavengers that would turn into opportunistic predators if they found something wounded enough. I’d heard them growl, howl, chitter, scream, but never this up-and-down, half-questioning noise.

“Not to complicate things,” Zerbrowski said, “but won’t the zombie have an issue with sunlight, too?”

“Shit,” I said.

“Will it burn in sunlight like a vampire?” Nicky asked.

“No,” I said, “but zombies hide from the light.”

“Why?” he asked.

“Some of them fall into a vampire-like torpor once the sun rises. Flesh eaters are smart enough to find cover before dawn sometimes.”

“Will this one die at dawn like a vampire?” Zerbrowski asked.

“I don’t know.”

“You’re saying that a lot tonight,” he said.

“I’ve noticed.”

“Order them to go back to their cemetery again, Anita.”

“I tried, Manny.”

“Make it more of an order,” he suggested.

I looked at the ghoul in front of me and said, “I order you to go back to the cemetery you crawled out of tonight.”

“Think dog, not person, Anita,” Nicky said.

“How would you word it?”

He was quiet for a minute, and I almost said,
See, not so easy
, but he said, “Do they burn in daylight like a vampire?”

“No, but they hide from daylight, so it doesn’t feel good. They can come out at dusk before it’s truly dark; most vampires can’t.”

“If dawn comes and they aren’t near their tunnels, what do they do?” he asked.

“Take shelter until dark.”

“Look around, Anita, where can they hide? It’s going to be light soon.”

I looked for a shed, or a mausoleum, and found a tomb that rose above the others in the distance. I motioned toward it. “They might be able to hide in there.”

“Are they strong enough to break into it?”

“Oh, yeah.”

The ghoul looked at me, his crimson eyes doing that flat shine again as if reflecting light I couldn’t see. It made a different noise higher in its throat and started backing away. I had a sense of movement out among the graves, and knew it was the other ghouls.

“What are they doing?” Domino asked.

The one in front of me got very low to the ground and sort of groveled, and then it began to crawl backward away from us. It kept looking at Nicky and then Domino and the two exterminators in their fire suits, as it tried to keep all the dangers in sight. It stopped and groveled again, but that was always aimed at me.

“The others are at the mausoleum,” Nicky said.

I glanced up and could see the others like gray shadows skulking around the huge stone. The ghoul in front of me made an abrupt, sharp almost-growl that made the hair at the back of my neck stand up, and then he turned and crept out among the tombstones, using them for cover the way a lion used the long grass.

“Don’t shoot it,” I said.

“No, we’ll burn them out once daylight comes,” Susannah said.

“No,” I said.

She looked at me. “Yes, we will.”

“You’re not paid for ghoul extermination tonight.”

“You’re protecting them.”

Manny said, “Contact the company that runs the graveyard, and then they’ll pay you to do it.”

“Is that what you meant, Anita?”

“Why do it for free if you can do it for money?”

Her body language was all relief as she let go of the serious mad-on she’d been about to aim at me. Her father added, “I like the way you think, Anita; business first.”

“If I took it personally every time a monster pissed me off, I couldn’t do my job.”

“I guess not,” Susannah said.

Zerbrowski gave me a look, and then Manny. Both of them were wondering if I’d meant business, or if I just hadn’t wanted them fried in front of me. Since I wasn’t sure, I didn’t try to enlighten them. You can’t share the light if you’re still in the dark yourself, and I was stumbling around in the pitch black, wondering why the hell a ghoul pack had come to visit me tonight. The ghoul had taken my orders, which wasn’t possible, but it had happened, so it was possible.
Impossible
: I was beginning to think it didn’t mean what I thought it meant.

F
ALSE DAWN CAME,
making the darkness lighter, but it wasn’t truly daylight. Vampires would still have time to run for cover before they started to burn. The ghouls had broken into the crypt and were crawling inside like rats in a hidey-hole. That left just one undead to deal with, and I turned back to the open grave.

The zombie had managed to free itself to its waist in the dirt and was still wiggling more of itself free. Domino was keeping an eye on it the way Nicky and I had told him to. If I gave the word, or the zombie tried to get out of the grave, he’d shoot it. I didn’t want to shoot it, but I didn’t know what else to do with it either.

“Ms. Blake,” it said, “please, I just want out of this awful place.” His face looked more cadaverous with the growing light, so that no matter how cultured his language was he still looked like a rotting corpse.

“Are you still craving flesh?”

He stopped trying to get his legs free and seemed to think about my question. “Yes, yes, I am.”

“Do you feel as empty as you did in the mountains when the snow trapped you?”

“I don’t understand what that means.”

“Do you remember your name?”

“Tom.”

“Tom what?”

“I don’t know.” He’d gone back to trying to free his legs; he was only caught below the knees now.

“Do you know what Tom is short for?”

“Thomas.”

“Thomas, what’s your last name?”

It blinked eyes up at me that were still hazel, but watching the balls roll in the nearly exposed sockets meant that they weren’t lovely hazel eyes anymore. There was so little flesh on the face that I couldn’t read his expressions anymore.