Burnt Offerings - Laurell K. Hamilton [56]
I stared at him. I’d never heard a vampire say “I pray.” Vampires, for obvious reasons, didn’t pray a lot. I mean, who was going to answer? Oh, yeah, there was the Church of Eternal Life, but they were more a humanist religion, sort of New Wavey. I’m not sure they talked much about God.
Damian’s hair was nearly blood-red, a startling color against the alabaster whiteness of his skin. I knew his eyes were a green that any cat would envy, but tonight his eyes were closed, and if things went badly, they’d never open again.
Jean-Claude knelt beside Damian. He laid his hand on Damian’s chest, near the sword. “If I pull out the sword and his heart does not beat, his eyes do not open, then he is gone. One chance, and one chance only. We could put him in a hole somewhere for a hundred years and until the sword was pulled out of his heart, there would still be a chance. If we do it here and now, we risk losing him forever.”
That last bit of lore is why you never ever remove a stake from a corpse’s heart no matter how dead it appears to be.
I knelt beside them. “Is there a ritual for it?”
He shook his head. “I will invoke the blood oath he took. That will help call him back, but Warrick is correct. I did not make Damian. I am not his true master.”
“No, he’s older than you are by about six hundred years.” I looked down at the vampire, spitted on the sword, lying in a pool of his own dark blood. He was wearing a pair of dress pants that matched the vest. Without a conservative shirt under the vest it looked strangely erotic. I could still feel Damian in my head. His power, the beat and the pulse of centuries flowed through him. He wasn’t dead, or at least not completely dead. I could still feel his aura, something.
“I can still feel Damian,” I said.
“What do you mean, ma petite?”
I had a horrible compulsion to touch Damian. To run my hands over his bare arms. I wasn’t into necrophilia, no matter how close I walked the edge. What was going on?
“I can feel him. His energy in my head. It’s like coming on a fresh corpse before the soul has left the body. He’s still intact, I think.”
Warrick was looking at me. “How can you know that?”
I reached out towards Damian and stopped myself, hands curling into fists. My hands ached to touch him, not sexual exactly but like seeing a really fine sculpture. I wanted to trace the lines of his body, to feel the flow and ebb of him. To…
“What is wrong, ma petite?”
I touched my fingertips to Damian’s arm, as if afraid he would burn. My hand slid over his cool flesh, almost without me wanting it to. The force that animated Damian’s body flowed through his cooling skin, flowed over my hand, down my arm, marched in goose bumps across my body.
I gasped.
“What are you doing, ma petite?” Jean-Claude was rubbing his arms as if he, too, felt it.
Warrick put out a hand towards me like he was holding his hand in front of fire, not sure if he could or should touch. He pulled back, rubbing his hand on his pants. “It is true. You are a necromancer.”
“You ain’t seen nothing yet,” I whispered. I turned to Jean-Claude. “When you pull out the sword, the trick is going to be to keep the power from leaving with the opening of the wound. To keep, for lack of a better word, his soul from fleeing, right?”
Jean-Claude was watching me, as if he’d never really seen me before. Nice to know I could still surprise him. “I do not know, ma petite. I am not a witch or a student of magical metaphysics. I will invoke the oath, speak the ritual, and hope he survives.”
“Sometimes when I call a zombie from the grave, it’s easier to call them a second time.” I slid my hands down to hold Damian’s limp hand, but it wasn’t enough. My power and the power inside the vampire needed a more immediate touch than mere hands.
“He is not a zombie, ma petite.”
“Warrick said you hadn’t called Damian from the grave, but I have.” Once upon a time, nearly by accident I had raised three of Jean-Claude’s vampires. It was when he, Richard, and I first invoked the triumvirate. The power