“I am Rex, not you. You don’t get to question me, with your mistakes while you’re dying on the ground and bleeding out your gut.”
Silas struggled to his feet, using the gravestone to help him stand. Bennington backed away from him with a look of disgust. I wasn’t sure if it was the bloody bandages on the front of him or something personal about Silas that he didn’t like.
“She’s rolled you both.”
“She’s rolled Nicky.”
“No, she’s rolled you both.” Silas pushed himself away from the grave, one big hand tight to his stomach, just above his belt, as if he were holding something inside.
“How’s the stomachache, Silas?” I asked.
Jacob gave me a look. “Don’t help,” he said.
Bennington said, “Oh, my God!” We all looked back and found Silas raising a gun. Ellen screamed, “Silas, no!”
He was pointing it at me as Nicky moved in front to shield me. “Put it down, Silas,” Jacob said. “I won’t ask twice.”
“She has mind-fucked you both,” Silas said. I couldn’t see around Nicky’s body, but he was looking behind us, and suddenly we were headed for the ground, him riding me down. Gunshots sounded, and I couldn’t see who was shooting. I was trapped under Nicky’s body, completely shielded from whatever was happening. The guns were thunderous in the silence. For a second I wasn’t sure how many guns had gone off, and then I heard Jacob cursing. “What the fuck, Silas? What the fuck?”
Nicky rose up enough to look behind us, and then he was on his knees and offering me a hand. “Are you hurt?” he asked.
I shook my head, and we stood up together, turning toward the grave. Ellen was beside Silas, her face silvered by tears in the moonlight. Her hands were bloody as if she’d tried to stop the wound, but the look on her face said it was too late for that. Jacob knelt beside his fallen man. “Fuck, fuck, fuck!”
Nicky knelt on the other side of Silas. The three werelions huddled around their fallen man, only Bennington and me left standing, untouched by the tragedy of it all. Jacob pointed the gun at me. “He’s alive, but he won’t be for long.”
Nicky stood up and started moving toward me.
“Don’t do it, Nicky,” he said.
“It’s not her fault, Jacob,” he said, and kept moving toward me.
“Don’t shield her!”
“If you want the second half of your money, Mr. Leon, she needs to be alive to raise my wife from the dead.”
I think the lions had forgotten about Bennington, or maybe he’d stopped being important. It was his money and his desire that had begun everything, but he was strangely not part of the tableau between Jacob, Nicky, Ellen, and me until he spoke. Then it was as if Jacob remembered why he was there, what had made him risk so much: money.
“The prostitute died while they were screwing,” Bennington said; “we don’t have a human sacrifice.”
“We have something better,” I said, and I looked at Jacob.
“No,” he said.
“You said it yourself: he’s dying, and it’s his fault the woman is dead. I think it has a nice symmetry to it that Silas is our sacrifice.”
“Symmetry,” Jacob said, and he sounded like he was choking; “is that what you call this?”
“If you let him die without me raising the dead, then this is all for nothing. You won’t even get your money.”
Jacob lowered his gun and nodded. “Do it, do it before I change my mind.”
Ellen grabbed his arm. “No, don’t let her do this.”
He jerked away from her. “Can you raise the dead?”
She stared at him with large dark eyes, and just started to cry again.
“Can you?” He screamed it into her face, so that she recoiled from him.
“No,” she yelled back.
“Then shut the fuck up.”
I moved forward, and Nicky moved with me like a big blond shadow. “What can I do to help?”
“Stay close,” I said, and dropped to my knees on the grave, beside the dying werelion. Jacob looked at me across the body of his man. “You need to put up a circle of power,” he said, in a voice that was dull with all the shocks of the evening.
“Ellen’s put a circle up so wide and deep that I can’t feel anything from my vampire master or the men I’m tied to metaphysically. I think her circle will keep out any damn thing.”
“Which means what?” he asked.
“It means give me a blade so I can finish him and raise the dead.” I held my hand out, and he lifted a hunting knife out from under the back of his shirt. It was almost as big as the one they’d taken from me. It gleamed in the bright moonlight, and you just knew it would be sharp.
I looked at the crying woman who was huddled beside the weathered tombstone. “Can you hold the circle?”
She glared at me, some of the heat of the look ruined by the tears. “I can hold my end up.”
“Good.”
“You’d better be as good as your reputation,” she said.
I nodded. “Yeah.” I knelt on the grave, knife in one hand, and grabbed Silas’s hair. I bent his neck back, and it was Nicky who said, “You only bend the neck back in the movies; it’s actually easier if you don’t hyperextend the tendons.”
I didn’t argue, just put the neck back to a more natural angle, and then put the blade against the throat. I dug the tip in and pushed deep as I pulled the blade across his throat. I’d forgotten what kind of power you got from killing a person. I’d only done it once before. And I had forgotten the kind of power you got from killing someone who wasn’t a person, but something more than human. I’d only done that once before, too. The power poured over me, through me; my skin vibrated with it, my bones ached with the thrum and beat of all that POWER. Oh, God!
The knife dropped from my hand to the grave, and I dropped to my knees with it. I put my bloody hands on the grave and visualized reaching down through the dirt and pulling her free of it, as if it were water and she were drowning and only I could save her. I screamed her name, “Ilsa Bennington, rise, come to me, come to me, Ilsa!” The dirt moved under my knees, against my hands. I shoved the power into the grave, into the pieces of body, and there was so much power. I felt her re-form, felt pieces come together that weren’t in the grave. The power remade her into something perfect and whole, and that something grabbed my hands through the dirt, and I pulled it from the grave.
She rose blond and dressed in white, her face in perfect makeup. Only her blue eyes were empty, and it took more than power to fill those up. I touched the still-bleeding neck wound on Silas and drew fresh blood across Ilsa Bennington’s lips. She blinked, and then a delicate tongue flicked out and licked that blood. She licked her lips, then she blinked again and she was suddenly in there.
She looked at the grave, and at me, and the body, and started to scream. Tony Bennington came and took her from the grave, comforting her, as she asked, “Why are we here? That’s a dead man? Tony, what’s happening?”
He walked his dead wife away from the grave, but the power from Silas’s death was still there, still in me, and now that the zombie was raised, the power beat through me again. It pulsed through me, hammered along my bones; I’d never felt anything like it. I fell onto the grave, writhing in the pain of it. The power wanted to be used. It was as if my necromancy had become something closer to the beasts inside me, or the ardeur, as if the power had a will of its own and that will wanted the dead.
Nicky knelt by me. “Anita, what’s wrong?”
“Too much power from the one death for just one zombie. Too much power for just that.”
“We’re in a cemetery; why raise just one?”
I looked up at him, and thought, why not? I got to my knees and put my hands back on the earth and I knew what the power wanted. I knew exactly what to do with it. I put my hands back on the grave and I cast the power down and out. I sent it out and out and out in an ever-widening circle until I touched every grave, every body, and I called, “Rise, rise to me. Rise!”