“For future reference, MacDougal, if you’re around necromancy and you have a touch of it yourself, you need to say something up front, and not make it a surprise.”
“Is that why it feels like my skin is jumping?”
“Yeah, that would be why.”
Jesus, people just didn’t think the logic through, did they? I didn’t want to put the blood on him. I didn’t want to give him a zombie to control; would it make his own abilities with the dead stronger, so that next time the ghosts could talk directly to him? Or was it just a quirk of fate, the universe laughing up its sleeve, and this would be the closest he’d ever come to the kind of power he might have had? If he’d been in his teens, or even twenties, I’d have called it, and opened the circle and tried for another historian, but he was late forties, early fifties. It was too late for some huge jump in psychic abilities—usually. I was 99.9 percent sure it wouldn’t cause a problem. I stood there debating on that fraction of a percent.
“Do you need to use someone else?” Nicky asked.
“Debating that now.”
“Why can’t you use me?” MacDougal asked.
“Not sure.”
“Not sure of what?” he asked.
“A lot of things, but right now how it might affect your psychic abilities to give you a zombie.”
“What could it do?”
I shook my head. “I don’t want to say.”
“Why, is it something bad?”
“People are suggestible, Mr. MacDougal; you might talk yourself into things that aren’t true later.”
“I don’t understand.”
I shook my head again. “It’s okay, don’t worry about it.”
I turned to Nicky. “I don’t like this.”
“Can you open the circle and put him out, put someone else back in?”
Just that he’d asked that question meant that Nicky had watched me do this a lot lately. It also meant that he thought about my job as logically as possible, the way he did most things. “If I open it, the power gets out sometimes, too. I won’t have as much control of it once the circle is open.”
“Then that’s out,” he said.
“Yeah, and we don’t have another cow. I open the circle and I may be able to raise the zombie, but weird things happen when I raise the dead without a circle of protection up.”
“Like the night we met,” he said.
I realized that he was right. His mercenary group’s witch had put a circle of power around the whole graveyard to keep me from being able to contact Jean-Claude and my other people. They’d thought that would be enough of a circle of power for me to raise the dead, and they’d been right. I’d raised the whole graveyard for them, and used the zombies as weapons against them. It had worked, but there had been a moment when I felt that mass of zombies fight me for control. They hadn’t wanted to go back to their graves that night. They had turned hungry eyes to me, Nicky, and his old Rex. It had worked out, but I wasn’t eager to repeat it.
“Yeah, like that.”
“So you have more power than you need for one zombie; just raise it.”
Logically I knew I couldn’t give MacDougal more power permanently, but it’s not always about logic. “I don’t know.”
“You’re the boss,” he said, which sometimes meant he would follow me to the ends of the earth, and sometimes meant that I was being silly, usually overly sentimental. Sociopaths are so fun to work with.
“If I were really the boss I’d have sensed his ability, but my necromancy was too loud in my head, like a tune you hum without realizing you do it. It drowned out his smaller sound.”
“Has this ever happened before?” he asked.
“No.”
“Then odds are you were overdue to hit someone like this.”
I studied his so-serious face. I couldn’t argue with his logic, though I wanted to, because it just seemed like I should have felt MacDougal’s abilities, but even standing this close I felt nothing from him. It was only his own reactions that had let me know anything was wrong with him. Shouldn’t I have felt more from him now that I knew? All I could feel was my own power filling the circle, pushing at me to use it. God, I wasn’t raising enough dead, or it wouldn’t have felt like some kind of flood waiting to crash down on us, or out of me and into the ground. The power needed to be used. I looked down at the grave.
I wanted to touch it. I wanted to pull out the corpse inside that hard ground. It felt good to use my magic; that wasn’t new.
I dipped the machete back into the bowl of rapidly cooling blood. “I have to smear blood on you, Mr. MacDougal.”
“I remember,” he said, in a strained voice.
I used my other hand to take blood off the machete and have him bend down so I could smear it on his forehead, then open his shirt so I could touch over his heart, and lastly his hands. He didn’t argue, or flinch at the blood. It made me wonder what our historian did in his spare time, or maybe the magic had him, too.
“I’m going to raise the zombie now. Don’t leave the circle, because if you do then you won’t be able to control the zombie and I don’t have time to hand-hold it for you.”
“I’ll stay right here.”
“Good,” I said.
Nicky set the bowl of blood carefully on the ground and straightened with his hands flexing at his sides. “I want my hands free, just in case.”