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By Root 6866 0

using my hand, both hands. It made me lean back from Requiem and stare at my burned hand. I’d had burns before, almost this bad, and for similar reasons. Admittedly, it had been because a vamp had pressed his flesh into the holy item. I guess this was the first time it had been just my body involved. Had it been because Marmee Noir had been possessing me, or had it been because I was using vampire powers? Huh? That was an interesting thought. I pushed it back, for so many reasons. I’d look at the implications later. Much later.

The skin had blistered, and hardened, and begun to slough off. Days, or weeks, of healing in minutes. I moved the hardened skin to one side. I wasn’t quite brave enough to pull at it. I moved all that truly dead skin aside until I found the palm of my hand. The skin of the palm was soft, baby soft, but there was a new cross-shaped scar in the middle of my hand. That skin was shiny and not soft, not rough, more slick. Weeks of healing.

I hadn’t used Raina to heal Requiem. I’d used her to heal me. But I understood why. I’d asked something of her munin that it could not do. She healed lycanthrope flesh, living flesh, and Requiem was not living flesh. No matter how alive he seemed, it was a trick, or a lie, or something I had no name for.

I stared down at Requiem. He gazed up at me with eyes that had gone back to their normal swimming blue. There was no power in him now. If it hadn’t been silver blades, his body would have smoothed the damage over by now. But it was silver, and that meant healing would be almost human-slow, unless he had help.

“You are healed?” He made it a question.

I nodded. “A little trimming away of dead skin, but yeah.”

“Trimming away the dead,” he said, voice soft. He sighed, and said, “I can go back inside as I am. I will not be at my best, but it was your wounds that were most important.”

I stared down at him, the two nearly fatal wounds in his upper body, the dozens of cuts and slashes on his arms. But I looked lower and found the rest of his body still hard and ready. “You should walk around nude more often,” I said.

He actually frowned at me. “Why, m’lady?”

“Because you are beautiful.”

He smiled. “I thank you for that.”

“You say it like it’s not true.”

“If I were truly beautiful you would have found your way to my bed weeks ago.”

I closed my eyes and drew a deep breath. My necromancy was still here, but it was changed somehow. It was like calling the munin or something about chasing out the Dark Mother had changed my own power. It was still necromancy, but it held an edge of…life. It was more alive, this energy. I didn’t understand it, exactly, but I understood one thing: always before when I’d healed damage on vampires, small wounds, it had been in the daytime when they were dead. Once they rose, their own personality, or soul, or whatever, kept my power from recognizing them as a dead thing, the way it recognized zombies. They always hit the radar as dead, no matter how mobile they were.

I could feel the wound I had touched. I could feel it, and knew that it was a little like gathering up the bits of a zombie. One of the things I did most often in my job was to make the dead whole again.

It seemed important to do this thing. As though if I didn’t heal Requiem now, I would forget how to do it. It was like a gift offered once, and wiped away if you don’t use it. I wanted to use it; it would feel good to use. It always felt good to work with the dead.

I set my fingertips over his wound, and thought about it like clay. Like smoothing clay back into place. I closed my eyes so I could “see” the deeper tissues of the body knitting together, things I could not touch with my physical fingers.

There was a wind in the car, a wind that was chill, but held an edge of spring. I thought someone had opened a door, but when I opened my eyes, the car was closed. The wind was coming from me. I looked down at Requiem’s body, and found my hands touching smooth, healed skin. There wasn’t even a scar. I moved my hands to the wound on his side, at the ribs. I did it before my conscious