Лорел Гамильтон - Dead Ice

“Of course.”

“Then why do you keep trying to give me the bum’s rush, when I’m probably the best you have at dealing with the undead, which is his specialty?”

“I have one of the most powerful touch clairvoyants to come down the pike in a decade, all she has to do is find something he’s touched.”

“Touched often,” I said.

He nodded. “I grant you that.”

“He took everything, Jarvis. Beck can’t find any common item that belonged to our missing man,” Gillingham said.

“I can’t believe we don’t even have a name,” I said.

“Sir, he’s just sir,” Gillingham said.

“It’s like he treated them all as if he were their dominant and they were all submissive to him. He was on a serious power trip.”

“No one will argue with that,” Jarvis said.

“Wait, did you say your clairvoyant is trying to find common items to touch?”

“Yes.”

“What about the zombies he made?”

“We tried that, but she got the impressions from the bodies themselves. Their lives, not his.”

“Beck was hysterical for hours after that,” Gillingham added.

“No need to overshare, Agent,” Jarvis said.

“Sorry, sir.”

“Damn it, we can’t lose him like this.”

“They say he took one zombie with him, the most lifelike. He only let her do two films with actors, and he never took her soul out and let her rot. She was special to him, they all agree on that,” Gillingham said.

“Do we have the videos of her?” I asked.

“Yes, they weren’t put out online, but they have them.”

“Do we have a still frame for a picture?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“If she was special to him, maybe he knew her when she was alive?”

“We do know our job, Marshal.”

“Sorry, I’m just brainstorming.”

“Well, we don’t really need your brainstorming, we’re pretty good at it ourselves here at the FBI.”

“Why don’t you like me, Jarvis?”

He looked startled. “I don’t dislike you, Blake.”

“I didn’t ask that, I asked why don’t you like me?”

“I heard you were direct.”

“Yeah, now are you going to answer the question?”

“You are uncontrollable. Your powers seem to have grown exponentially and no one knows what the limit of that power is, or if you have limits to your necromancy. You have your uses for helping the common good and keeping the peace, but your gift has been misused for centuries. Necromancers always seem to be creating armies of the undead and trying to conquer countries.”

“Actually, everyone says that, but I can’t find a single historical account of it really happening; can you?”

He was caught off guard for a moment, but he recovered his surety and his prejudice rapidly. “I don’t have to debate with you, Marshal. You can go home and leave things in our capable hands.”

“You mean in the hands of people you can control, with talents that don’t scare you.”

“The man we’re chasing, this Sir, is a necromancer like you. Will you argue that he’s not evil?”

“He’s evil, but he’s not necessarily a necromancer. He could just be a powerful voodoo practitioner. I hesitate to call him a priest, because that implies followers and I think he’s solitary.”

“His powers are still over the dead and he has abused them.”

“I don’t abuse my powers.”

“You raise historical figures for academics to question. You raise families’ lost ones so they can cry at the grave and ask forgiveness. You raise people from the dead over disputed wills and grand jury testimony. You disturb the dead for money, Marshal Blake; I think that is an abuse of power.”

“So you think the touch clairvoyants working in the major museums worldwide to help with antiquities are abusing their power?”

“No, that is a good career path for the talent.”

“So it’s just the ability to work with the dead that you don’t like.”

“I have yet to meet anyone who deals in your brand of psychic gifts who isn’t mad, or a charlatan that can barely call a shambling corpse from the grave.”

“If they can call the dead they’re not a charlatan, they just aren’t powerful,” I said.

“Be that as it may, I haven’t found the more powerful animators to be cooperative in the way that makes a team player.”

I laughed. “Well, we are a solitary bunch, I’ll grant you that, but part of that is that people don’t like you when you can raise the dead. They’re afraid of you, and after a while you just want to be left alone rather than having people making the sign against evil behind your back, or to your face.”

“You’re saying I’m prejudiced?”

“Yes, I am.”

“Perhaps, but what you did in Colorado just months ago . . . Blake, you did raise an army of the undead. You raised every corpse in the ground in the Boulder area, and found some dead hikers we didn’t even know how to find. They dropped dead in their tracks when you made the magic go away at the end. The local PD closed three missing person cases that way.”

“I’m glad I could give the family closure,” I said.

“We’ve managed to keep it quiet that it was all you, but people put pictures of the shambling dead, hundreds of them, up on YouTube. The government told everyone that was part of the disease that was rotting people, but you know and I know it was you, all you.”

“Actually it wasn’t all me, it was another ancient vampire who had talent with the dead.”

“That’s another thing I don’t like about necromancers: You can kill them, but that doesn’t always stop them.”

“Treat necromancers like master vampires, Jarvis. Take the head and heart, burn all of it, and scatter the ashes in three different bodies of water.”

“Are you really saying that’s what you want done at your death?”

“It’s in my will, so yeah,” I said.

He studied me for a minute. “You’re afraid you’ll come back.”

“Yeah, I am.”

“You’re marrying a vampire, why don’t you want to come back?”

“Because the only necromancers I’ve seen come back aren’t vampires, they’re just super-killing zombies, and I don’t want that.”

“You know you’re a monster, don’t you?” he said.

Gillingham said, “Agent Jarvis!” like he’d shocked her.

“I’m outta here. At least in St. Louis they’re more open-minded than this.”

“I’m open-minded, Blake, I just think you’re dangerous, more dangerous than anyone knows. Maybe more dangerous than you know.”

I shook my head, and said, “Bye, Teresa, I hope you don’t drink too much of this man’s Kool-Aid.”

She made a point of shaking my hand; good for her. I hunted up Manning and Brent to say good-bye and good luck. They did show me good still-frame pictures of the one zombie that “Sir” took with him. She was dark complected, maybe Hispanic, maybe Greek, or southern Italian like our missing bad guy. She was pretty, with long dark hair and brown eyes that were terrified in every picture.

I said good-bye to all the agents in sight that I wanted to talk to. Larry was staying on with the rest of the Kool-Aid squad, but he apologized for Jarvis and seemed to mean it. I wished them all happy hunting and left for the airport. It was time for me to go home.

I’D LEFT MY SUV at airport parking, because I hadn’t had any idea how long I’d be out of state. The men in my life had tried picking me up from the airport for a while, but it only worked if I had a set schedule. Crime-fighting was hard to schedule, but I didn’t mind as I drove home from the airport in the soft spring dark, or was that early-summer dark? May was one of those months that could be either in St. Louis, late-summer cool or almost midsummer hot. The calendar could say summer started at some arbitrary astronomical event, but the weather really got the last vote.