Circus of the Damned - Laurell K. Hamilton [59]
“Larry, name’s Larry.”
I smiled; it was too ridiculous. He was worried about me calling him Lawrence instead of Larry with a rogue zombie climbing out of the dirt. Maybe he’d snapped under the pressure. Naw.
“Open the circle, Larry,” I said.
He crawled forward, nearly falling face first into the flowers. He scraped his hand across the line of blood. The magic snapped. The circle of power was gone, just like that. Now it was just me.
“Where’s your knife?”
He tried to look back over his shoulder but couldn’t manage it. I saw the blade gleam in the moonlight on the other side of the grave.
“Just rest,” I said. “I’ll take care of it.”
He collapsed into a little ball, hugging his arms around himself, as if he was cold. I let him go, for now. The first order of business had to be the zombie.
The knife was lying beside the gutted chicken he’d used to call the zombie. I grabbed the knife and faced the zombie over the grave. Andrew Doughal was leaning against his own tombstone, trying to orient himself. It’s hard on a person, being dead; it takes a few minutes to wake up the dead brain cells. The mind doesn’t quite believe that it should work. But it will, eventually.
I pushed back the sleeve of my leather jacket and took a deep breath. It was the only way, but I didn’t have to like it. I drew the blade across my wrist. A thin, dark line appeared. The skin split and blood trickled out, nearly black in the moonlight. The pain was sharp, stinging. Small wounds always felt worse than big ones . . . at first.
The wound was small and wouldn’t leave a scar. Short of slitting my wrist, or someone else’s, I couldn’t remake the blood circle. It was too late in the ceremony to get another chicken and start over. I had to salvage this ceremony, or the zombie would be free with no boss. Zombies without bosses tended to eat people.
The zombie was still leaning on its tombstone. It stared at nothing with empty eyes. If Larry had been strong enough, Andrew Doughal might have been able to talk, to reason on his own. Now he was just a corpse waiting for orders, or a stray thought.
I climbed onto the mound of gladioluses, chrysanthemums, carnations. The perfume of flowers mixed with the stale smell of the corpse. I stood knee-deep in dying flowers and waved my bleeding wrist in front of the zombie’s face.
The pale eyes followed my hand, flat and dead as day-old fish. Andrew Doughal was not home, but something was, something that smelled blood and knew its worth.
I know that zombies don’t have souls. In fact, I can only raise the dead after three days. It takes that long for the soul to leave. Incidentally, the same amount of time it takes for vampires to rise. Fancy that.
But if it isn’t the soul reanimating the corpse, then what is it? Magic, my magic, or Larry’s. Maybe. But there was something in the corpse. If the soul was gone, something filled the void. In an animation that worked, magic filled it. Now? Now I didn’t know. I wasn’t even sure I wanted to know. What did it matter as long as I pulled the fat out of the fire? Yeah. Maybe if I kept repeating that, I’d even believe it.
I offered the corpse my bleeding wrist. The thing hesitated for a second. If it refused, I was out of options.
The zombie stared at me. I dropped the knife and squeezed the skin around the wound. Blood welled out, thick and viscous. The zombie snatched at my hand. Its pale hands were cold and strong. Its head bowed over the wound, mouth sucking. It fed at my wrist, jaws working convulsively, swallowing as hard and as fast as it could. I was going to have the world’s worst hickey. But at least it hurt.
I tried to draw my hand away, but the zombie just sucked harder. It didn’t want to let go. Great.
“Larry, can you stand?” I asked softly. We were still trying to pretend that nothing had gone wrong. The zombie had accepted blood. I controlled it now, if I could get it to let go.
Larry looked up at me in slow motion. “Sure,” he said. He got to his feet using the burial mound for support. When he was standing,