Laurell Hamilton - Affliction

I wanted to argue with Edward, but I couldn’t. ‘Well, fuck.’

‘Pretty much; now go raise zombies like the kickass necromancer we all know you are.’ He actually petted me on the head, which he knew I hated.

‘Don’t pet me,’ I said.

‘Sorry, but if you need to stroke off, I can help you; otherwise do your job so that the evil necromancer’s undead army doesn’t eat all the nice people in Boulder.’

‘Does that make me the good necromancer, or just the other evil one?’

‘It makes you our necromancer; now go play with the vampires and raise us some zombies.’

‘Fine, you guys go stand somewhere else.’ I went to get my vampires and embrace my inner necromancer. I hoped I was the good one.

Most animators need practice and training to raise the dead; I got training so I could stop doing it by accident. A beloved dog that crawled into bed with me when I was fourteen, roadkill that followed me like I was some nightmarish Pied Piper, and finally a college professor who had committed suicide and come to my dorm room so I could tell his wife he was sorry. I wondered if the lone shambling zombies that they’d occasionally find wandering around were accidents from untrained animators like I had been once. I’d learned to raise the dead with the traditional words, steel, ointment, and blood sacrifice, usually a chicken, but I didn’t need them. The man who had trained me needed them, but in emergencies I’d learned that they were just window dressing for me.

Edward was in the shadows with his flamethrower propped up against a larger tombstone. He’d only get it out if I could trap the Lover of Death in the circle. If he used a zombie body then I’d have him, but if he chose to ride one of his rotting vampires, that was harder. It was a lot harder to make a circle of power that could hold a vampire in, or out. I believed I could do it, if I stopped being afraid of myself. I realized as I stood in the cool night sensing Truth and Wicked at my back that I was still afraid of who I was, what I was, and there was still a part of me that would have chosen a different talent. Necromancy had given me so much in my life that made me happy, and I’d still have been ‘normal’ if I could have magically made it so.

I thought about no Jean-Claude in my life, no Nathaniel, or Micah, because they’d come to me because I had animals to call through Jean-Claude’s vampire marks. No one in my life who made me happy would have come into my life without my necromancy – not a single one. I thought about how happy I was, happier than I’d ever been, and I let go of the fear, the doubts, and decided to embrace all of me, truly, completely, and just trust.

I turned around and looked at the two vampires. I hugged them to me like I had when I first saw them tonight, but this time I let myself cuddle against their chests and raise my face up for a kiss. Wicked bent over me first and laid a gentle kiss upon my lips, and then Truth bent over me and started gentle, but the kiss grew and I moved my arm from around Wicked’s waist so I could wrap myself around Truth and kiss him back, all eager lips, and tongue, and then I lost enough control that I forgot I was kissing a vampire and those dainty fangs are sharp. I tasted blood like sweet copper pennies. Truth made a small inarticulate sound and kissed me harder, lifting me off the ground with his arms around my upper body, so that my feet dangled inches above the ground. It could have turned to the ardeur and heat, but I chose that moment to call my necromancy, though call was not the right word, because that implies you have to coax it, call it like a reluctant dog. I just stopped holding it back, and it spilled up through my body into my mouth and the vampire that was kissing me. He cried out, his mouth coming away from mine, blood trickling down his lower lip. Wicked was at my back, hand curling in my hair, turning my head to kiss him, and the necromancy liked him, too. Animators can raise zombies; necromancers control all the undead. Wicked kissed me as his brother had, all mouth and tongue and teeth, and bled me a little bit more so that it was passion and blood and necromancy all intertwined. The men dropped to their knees and took me with them to the grave underneath us. The moment my body touched the ground, my necromancy flooded into the ground seeking the dead.

It hit the graves one after another like a stone tossed into water so that the power spilled out and out like rings in water, but it was earth underneath us that began to move like water. I heard startled cries and knew it was some of the police with us, but it was distant. The two vampires pressed to my body, and the bodies in the ground were all more real to me, because they were dead, and my power liked the dead.

Truth whispered against my face, ‘Oh, my God.’

I said, ‘Yes.’ I got to my knees with Wicked wrapped around the back of me, his hands still caressing me; my hand was in Truth’s, and with the vampires wrapped around me, the graves moved like water, spilling the zombies to the surface. They didn’t have to climb their way out; my power brought them up whole and in one piece. But they didn’t look like his zombies, they didn’t look like corpses, they looked like people in their funeral finery.

It wasn’t enough. I sent my power out and out seeking more, and found another graveyard, and I raised it, and even that wasn’t enough. For the first time I didn’t argue, or hold back, I just embraced how good it felt to find the dead and call them to me, because that was what I did. I raised them and then I told them to come to me, and I knew that the distant ones were making their slow, careful way to me.

I felt him almost on the other side of the city. My necromancy found him like iron seeking a magnet, but it was more than that; his power was seeking me, too. I realized in that moment that we both carried Her power inside us, and those pieces wanted to be whole again.

He came to me, not just because we carried pieces of the Mother of All Darkness, but because he was dead and all the dead are attracted to necromancers. He walked into our cemetery wearing the body of one of his own zombies, so that he was just one of many, though he looked rotted, and my zombies didn’t, so that he stood out as he walked in with the first group of zombies I’d called to me.

‘My power knows you,’ he said.

‘We carry the power of the Living Dark inside us,’ I said.

‘Yes,’ he said.

Then two things happened at once. I drew a circle in my mind’s eye in a large, sweeping arc, visualizing it glowing as it came up. The second thing was that Seamus leapt like a piece of the night itself toward me. Truth and Wicked moved in front of me, but Jane was there first. They fell to the ground in a whirl of black cloth and struggling bodies.

‘You have put up a circle of power,’ the Lover of Death said. ‘How did you do that without blood to seal it?’

‘I’m a modern necromancer; it’s all about the shortcuts,’ I said.

He didn’t understand the comment, but it didn’t matter, because Edward called out, ‘Hatfield is a go.’

‘Do it!’

I heard the little hiss, a hesitant click, and I threw myself backward to the ground, grabbing Truth and Wicked by their coats and taking them down with me, so that we were almost flat to the ground when the fire breathed over us orange and yellow and so hot that it made the night air shimmer in heat waves, and made the air above us so hot we were afraid to move.

The Lover of Death was engulfed in flames. Some of my zombies were caught in the edges of it, but the Lover of Death was lost in flame. He didn’t scream at first, and then he did, wordless at first, and then, ‘My body, you’re destroying my body! No! NO! Half the Mother’s power dies with me! Nooooo!’ He charged toward us as he burned. Edward in the silver fire suit was between us and the burning zombie. I heard the click and whirr and whoosh again and fresh flame spilled onto him. He tried to run then for the edge of the circle, but when he got to that invisible line he could not cross it. He stood on the edge of it and screamed and burned and died.