Лорел Гамильтон - Dead Ice

The cow went down without a sound, its knees buckling. The front of it sank to the ground first. Dino kept the halter rope tight and Nicky continued to shield its eye, so it wouldn’t see the blood. Dino was a huge shape on the other side of the animal, waiting to see if he was needed for more. I knelt with the wound, catching as much blood as I could in the bowl. We didn’t need this much to draw the circle, but blood is always precious and if you take something’s life you should treat the blood with respect. The cow’s back end just seemed to collapse all at once, and I had to move backward on the balls of my feet as the big animal slid to one side toward me. Blood splashed over the edge of the already bloody bowl, soaking the front of my coveralls. That was why I wore them.

I got to my feet, bloody machete in one hand and the blood-drenched bowl in the other. The front of me was black with blood, and there had been enough of it that it felt like it was trying to seep through the coveralls and onto my clothes. I hoped it didn’t soak through, but there was nothing I could do about it until the ceremony was complete.

“Well done,” Dino said.

“I do my best,” I said, but my voice was already growing distant. I was only half paying attention, because I was about to lower my metaphysical shields so I could raise the dead, and I wanted to do it. My necromancy was like a horse that had been in its stall too long. It needed to run. It needed to use all that muscle and sinew and run! I was one of only three animators in the country who could have raised something this old without a human sacrifice, which was illegal in almost every country in the world. It was a seller’s market and I was the seller.

NOW THAT THE cow was safely dead and not going to trample anyone, I had Dino get MacDougal and stand him behind the tombstone, so he’d be in the circle but out of the way while we cast it. The tombstone wasn’t much to look at, just a weathered white chunk of marble, softened by the centuries until it looked like a piece of candy spit out of a giant’s mouth with the lettering worn away. I’d seen all the paperwork assuring me this was the right grave, but if I’d had to rely on the stone for name and information I’d have been out of luck; all the readable info had been sucked away by time and weather. Normally I just take the much smaller bowl of blood, or even the whole beheaded chicken, and walk the circle by myself, but I was going to need help to carry this big a bowl. I could have brought the much smaller bowl that I used when I killed a goat, and that would have been plenty to sprinkle for casting the circle, but it had seemed wrong to waste that much of the cow’s lifeblood on the ground. If I needed a bigger death to raise the older dead, then wasn’t part of that using more blood? I wasn’t sure of the metaphysical logic, but I was stuck with the huge bowl now and I couldn’t carry it in one hand with the machete in the other, so I had needed a lovely assistant, or in this case a handsome assistant.

We’d lost another two history lovers, apparently overcome by the sight of more blood than they’d ever seen before, or maybe it was seeing something slaughtered in front of them. People will eat meat, like Mrs. Willis said, but that’s nice, safe meat in plastic wrap at the grocery store, or behind the butcher’s window. It’s not real, not a dead thing, just meat, just food. One of them had run off into the gravestones and was throwing up rather noisily. At least they’d moved far enough away and downwind so the rest of us couldn’t smell it. I really appreciated that. The rest of the huddled group had exclaimed everything from “Cool” to “Oh, my God,” but they didn’t argue when I had Dino and Nathaniel move them back to the gravel road. I didn’t want anyone drawn into the circle by accident. I’d given the orders distractedly, already staring down at the grave. My necromancy pushed at the boundaries I’d set around it like it wanted to expand to fill all available space. Usually it was like opening a tightly closed fist, a relief to let go, but it didn’t push at me like this. I hadn’t been raising as many zombies as in years past, because Bert, our business manager, could get more money for my time than anyone else at the firm, which meant I didn’t always raise the dead every night. I spent a lot of time doing police work now, so that worked out, but it meant that my necromancy wasn’t getting as much use as normal. Like Manny and I had discussed, if you don’t use it on purpose it finds other ways to leak out. Raising the dead wasn’t a choice for me. The only choice was how and when I’d do it.

The bowl didn’t look so big in Nicky’s hands. He carried it easily; now all I had to decide was, did he walk backward or beside me as I dipped the machete in the blood and sprinkled the circle into being. I chose beside me, because walking backward carrying a big bowl of blood seemed to be asking for a mess.

I was used to using a beheaded chicken to walk the circle—that sprinkled blood along my blade—but when I dipped my machete in the bowl it came out black, coated like some kind of evil candy apple. The last time I’d tried dipping into a bowl half this size I’d ended up sprinkling myself as much as the ground, so I was cautious as I dripped the blood onto the grass.

“Hmm,” Nicky said, more an involuntary sound.

“What?” I asked, glancing up at him.

“You usually use more flourish.”

“If I do my usual body English we’ll both be wearing cow blood. Trust me, when there’s this much blood on the machete you have to be careful swinging it.”

“Yeah, you can get really messy when you use a machete,” he said.

I studied his face for a second. “You’re not talking about using a machete for casting a circle, are you?”

“No,” he said.

We looked at each other for a few seconds. He gave great blank face, but then most sociopaths do. I debated whether to ask, or how, and finally said, “Animal, or person?”

“Person,” he said.

“Defending your life?”

“No,” he said.

“Mine was.”

“You bothered that mine wasn’t?”

“Maybe, maybe not. Either way, this isn’t the time or place to discuss it.”

“No, it’s not.”

“Okay then,” I said.

“Okay then,” he said.

“Is anything wrong, Ms. Blake?” It was Mr. MacDougal, patiently standing behind the worn tombstone.

I shook my head. “No, nothing wrong, just filling in my assistant on a detail or two. I usually walk the circle alone.”

“It’s a big bowl,” he said.

“It is that, Mr. MacDougal, it is that.” I dipped the blade back in the cooling blood and started walking the circle like I had a purpose.

WE WALKED THE circle together, Nicky finding just the right height to hold the bowl so that I could dip the machete in without spattering us, or even hesitating as we moved. He anticipated me in this as he did when we had sex, so that we fell into a rhythm that was almost a dance. It made it more of a ritual, some sort of liturgical dance, but with more blood than I assume the monks use during theirs. It was so smooth, so . . . something I had no word for that I was shocked when I looked down and saw blood on the grass ahead of us. One more sprinkle of blood and we’d close the circle. It didn’t seem like we’d walked that far. Nicky offered the bowl to me one more time; I dipped the long blade in, pulled it slowly out, and let the thickening drops fall to touch the blood already on the grass. The moment the fresh blood hit the first drop we had cast down, the circle closed. It closed with a rush and a roar of power that left every hair on my body dancing. It pulled a gasp from my throat.