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“It’s okay, Richard, we’ll do what we can from here. Go take care of yourself.”

He looked up, and there were tears shining in the starlight. “I’m supposed to take care of you.”

“It’s a partnerhsip, Richard, we’re supposed to take turns helping each other.”

He shook his head. “I fucked this up, Anita, I’m sorry.” I wasn’t sure I’d ever heard him say fuck when he wasn’t referring to sex.

“Go, Richard, go back to your folks’ house. They’ll be worried.”

The zombie bit hard enough that I screamed, and Richard was suddenly gone. He cut the tie so abruptly that it staggered me, and only Requiem’s and Graham’s hands kept me from falling.

“Anita!” Graham said, and he lost his grip on the zombie, trying to keep me standing. But the hands on my wrists eased.

I looked down at the kneeling zombie, and the eyes were filling up. There was personality there, someone home. I’d been stupid. Richard had accidentally tied the zombie to him, and when he broke the link to me, the zombie was mine again. Good news, but I felt stupid that I hadn’t thought of it sooner. The dead are supposed to be my specialty. I wasn’t feeling very special tonight.

The zombie blinked up at me, drawing its mouth back from my wrist. His big mustache was stained with my blood. He frowned up at me. “I’m sorry, I don’t know what I’m doing here.” He let me go and stumbled to his feet, staring at his hands and my bloody wrist, horror showing on his face. “I beg your pardon, miss, I don’t know what I was doing to you. I do apologize most sincerely, it’s monstrous, monstrous.” He was staring at the blood on his hands and wiping at his mouth.

Shit, he didn’t know he was dead. I hated when they didn’t know they were dead. And as if on cue he backed up enough to bump into his own monument. He gazed up at that uncompromising stone angel, and then he had the Ebenezer Scrooge moment. He saw his own name on the tomb, complete with a date. Even by starlight, all the color drained from his face.

“Hear me, Edwin, by right of the blood you have tasted, hear me.”

He turned huge, stricken eyes to me. “Where am I? What’s happened to me?”

“Don’t be afraid, Edwin, be calm.”

The panic began to slide away from his face, his eyes began to fill with that artificial calm, because I willed it, and because I’d been the one to call him from the grave, and it was my blood on his lips. I’d earned the right to order him around.

I told him to be calm. I told him to be clear and concise and answer the questions from the nice lawyers. He informed me that he was always clear and concise thank you very much, and I knew he’d do what the lawyers and his descendants wanted him to do. This group of lawyers and clients had decided ahead of time that they didn’t want me asking the questions. Something about not trusting that I couldn’t control the zombie enough to get the answers that certain people wanted. The implication had been that some of the clients feared that other clients would bribe me. At the time they’d set the guidelines down, I’d been a little offended, tonight I was glad. It meant that I could go back to the Jeep while they questioned the zombie. I had a first aid kit in the Jeep, and I needed it.

The zombie hadn’t exactly reopened the wound, he’d made the old wound bloodier, and put new teeth marks into my wrist. So it was like a new wound around the old one. Some nights it feels like I have a target on my left arm. If I take a major hit, it that’s usually where it lands.

“You’ve lost more blood,” Requiem said.

“No shit,” I said.

He gave a small frown. “What I am saying is, could you not allow them to take the zombie home for the night and put him back tomorrow?”

I shook my head and winced as Graham raised the gauze to see if the bleeding had stopped. “He bit me, he actually injured me, zombies aren’t supposed to do that. They take blood from an open wound or animal that’s already dead, but they don’t make a wound. They don’t feed that actively.”

“This one sure as hell did,” Graham said, frowing at my wrist and putting pressure and a