Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter Colletion_ Books 6-10 - Laurell K. Hamilton [134]
My heart thudded into my throat at the thought of what I’d almost loosed upon some unsuspecting person. The hunger wouldn’t have differentiated between human and lycanthrope. Wouldn’t that have been a fine fight?
I took the bloody bowl, cradling it against my stomach, the knife still in my right hand.
“Do not be afraid,” Dominic said. “Lay the zombies to rest as you have a thousand times over the years. Do that and that alone.”
“One step at a time, right?” I said.
“Indeed,” he said.
I nodded. “Okay.”
Everyone but the three vampires looked at me as if they believed I knew what I was doing. I wished I did. Even Dominic looked confident. But he didn’t have to put sixty zombies back in the ground without a circle of power. I did.
I had to watch my step on the rubble-strewn floor. It wouldn’t do to fall and spill all this blood, all this power. Because that’s what it was. I could feel Jean-Claude and Richard at my back like two braids of a rope twisting inside me as I moved. Dominic had said that I would be able to feel both of the men. When I’d asked for specifics about how I would be able to feel them, he had gone vague. Magic was too individualistic for exactness. If he told me one way and it felt another, it would have made me doubt. He’d been right.
I stirred the knife through the blood and flung blood on the waiting zombies with the blade. Only a few drops fell on them, but every time the blood touched one, I could feel it, a shock of power, a jolt. I ended in the center of the once walled room, surrounded by the zombies. When the blood touched the last one, a shock ran through me that tore a gasp from my throat. I felt the blood close round the dead. It was similar to closing a circle of power, but it was like the closure was inside me, rather than outside.
“Back,” I said, “back into your graves, all of you. Back into the ground.”
The dead shuffled around me, positioning themselves like sleepwalkers in a game of musical chairs. As each one reached its place, it lay down, and the raw earth poured over them all like water. The earth swallowed them back and smoothed over them as if a giant hand had come to neaten everything up.
I was alone in the room with the earth still twitching like a horse thick with flies. When the last ripple had died away, I looked out of the blasted wall at the others.
Jean-Claude and Richard stood at the opening of the wall. The three werewolves clustered around them. Even Cassandra had knelt on the ground beside the wolf that was Jason. Dominic stood behind them, watching. He was grinning at me like a proud papa.
I walked towards them, my legs a touch rubbery, and I stumbled, splashing blood down the side of the bowl. Crimson drops fell onto the swept earth.
The wolf was suddenly there, licking the ground clean. I ignored it and kept walking. Vampires next. Everyone moved to let me pass as if they were afraid to touch me. Except for Dominic. He crowded almost too close.
I felt his own power crackle between us, shivering over my skin, down the ropes of power that bound me to Richard and Jean-Claude.
I swallowed and said, “Back up.”
“My apologies.” He moved back until I couldn’t feel him quite so tightly. “Good enough?”
I nodded.
The three vampires waited with hungry eyes. I sprinkled them with the cooling blood. They twitched when the blood touched them, but there was no rush of power. Nothing. Shit.
Dominic frowned. “The blood is still warm. It should work.”
Jean-Claude moved closer. I could feel it without turning around. I could feel him coming down the line of power between us like a fish being reeled in. “But it is not working,” he said.
“No,” I said.
“They are lost then.”
I shook my head. Willie was staring at the bowl of blood. The look was feral, pure hunger. I’d thought that the worst thing that could happen would be for Willie to simply lie down in his coffin and be truly dead. I was wrong. Having