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I whispered, “Edwin Alonzo Herman, hear me.” I felt him stir, like a sleeper disturbed by a dream. “Edwin Alonzo Herman, I call you from your grave.” I felt his bones grow long and straight, felt his flesh coalesce around him. It was like restuffing a broken doll. He remade himself, and it was so easy, too easy. The power began to spread outward, began to seek another grave, but some small part of me that was still me, knew better. It wouldn’t be just one more grave. I knew in that instant that I could raise this cemetery. That I could raise them all. No blood sacrifice. No chickens. No goats. Nothing, but the power blowing through me, and the vampire at my back. Because the power wanted to be used. It wanted to help me, help me caress them all from their graves, pull them to the light of stars, and fill them with . . . life. It would feel so good to lift them all up, so good.

I shook my head and fought that helpful power. Fought not to spread like a sweet sickness through the graves. Fought to hold on to what was left of who I’d thought I was. I needed help. I thought about Jean-Claude, but that wasn’t it. I needed to remember that I wasn’t just the dead. I was alive.

I reached out to the other third of our triumverate. I reached out to Richard. He looked up at me as if I hovered in the air above his family’s dining room table. I saw his father like an older clone of Richard himself, and most of his brothers, sitting at the table, passing a blue bowl. Charlotte, his mother, came in from the kitchen’s swinging door just behind that chair. She was still about my size, with honey-blond hair and a figure that was both petite and full-figured. Except for the hair color and skin tone, Charlotte even reminded me of me. There was a reason that most of the Zeeman brothers had chosen small, tough women. I watched her bring in a big platter, smiling, chatting with her family. I couldn’t hear what she was saying, or any noise from the crowded, smiling family scene. They all seemed so happy, so perfect. I didn’t want to bring this here.

I started to pull away, and Richard’s voice was in my head. “Wait, wait, Anita, please.” He excused himself from the table and walked through the big living room, out onto the sweep of porch, and down the handful of steps until he could gaze up into the same sky that rode above me. By the time he gazed up into the air, gazed at me, he seemed to have sensed some of what was happening, because he said, “Dear God, Anita, what’s happened? I’ve felt your power before, but not like this.”

I didn’t have enough control to talk in my head, so Requiem was going to get the out loud version, but I was past caring. “The vampires keep saying that we’ve hit a new power level.”

He hugged his bare arms in the T-shirt. He hadn’t stopped for a jacket. “It’s like the night is breathing your power. What can I do?”

“Remind me that I’m not dead. Remind me that my ties are with things that have a heartbeat.”

“How will that help?”

I wanted to scream my frustration at him. “God, Richard, just help me, please help. If you don’t, I’m afraid of what I’ll raise in this cemetery tonight.”

He nodded. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry for so much, Anita.” He looked down, and I knew the gesture, he was thinking, or gathering his will for something. Usually something he didn’t want to do. But I didn’t have time to worry about Richard’s hangups tonight. I was too scared of the power that pulsed in the ground underneath me. A cold pulsing, but it promised to spread to all the graves. I knew that tonight I could raise one of those shambling zombie armies that the movies are so fond of portraying, and usually has nothing to do with real necromancy.

He looked back at the house and said, “I’m fine, Mom. I just need a little privacy. Keep everybody close to the house, okay.” He shook his head. “No, Mom, it’s not that close to the full moon.”

He walked out into the openness of the yard away from the lights of the house and he let down his shields—the metaphysical walls that kept his beast caged and helped