Incubus Dreams - Laurell K. Hamilton [177]
I dropped my shields, not all of them, but enough. Enough so I could open that part of me that raised the dead. It was like a fist that stayed clenched and tight, and only when I relaxed, spread wide those metaphysical fingers, could I be free. I knew people that had studied with animators or voodoo practitioners to aquire the skills needed to raise the dead. I’d studied to learn how not to raise the dead. But it took a little effort, all the time, to keep that fist closed, that power shut down. It was like a piece of me never completely relaxed, not even when I slept, unless I was here, with the true dead. Here to call one of them from the grave. It was the only moment that all of me could be free.
I stood there for a minute with my power spilling, cool and seeking, like a wind, except that this wind didn’t move your hair, it only crept along your skin. It was like I’d been holding my breath, tight, so tight, and finally I could let it out, let it all out, and relax. Once I’d stopped being afraid of it, it felt so good to be with the dead. Peaceful, so peaceful, because whatever was left in the grave had nothing to do with souls or pain. Quiet as the grave wasn’t just a saying. But I’d forgotten that there were dead near at hand that weren’t underground.
My power touched Requiem. It should have ignored him, but it didn’t. That cool not-wind curled around him like the arms of some long-lost lover. I’d never felt anything quite like it. For the first time I truly understood that my power was over the dead, all the dead, and that undead is still dead. I’d always thought, and been told, that vampires killed necromancers for fear that they would be controlled by them, but in that second, I knew that wasn’t the whole truth. It was as if a door opened inside me, to a room that I hadn’t known existed. Inside that metaphysical room stood something. It had no shape that my eye could see, no weight, nothing to touch, nothing to hold, but it was there, and it was real, and it was me, mine, sort of. A “power plateau” Byron and Requiem had called it, but that wasn’t it. Plateau is static, not growing, not changing. This wasn’t static.
It blew out toward me, and if it had been a real room in a real house, the house would have exploded outward with the force of its coming. It would have roared outward in a blizzard of wood and glass and metal, and there would have been nothing standing in that metaphysical yard, except ground zero of some mysterious blast.
It was inside me, so it couldn’t slam into me, that was silly, but that’s still what it did. It slammed into me, and for a second I was blind, deaf, weightless, nothingness. There was nothing but the rawness of that power.
I came to, with Graham’s voice. “Anita, Anita, can you hear me? Anita!” I felt him holding me, knew we were on top of the grave. I could feel the grave, could feel Edwin Alonzo Herman lying underneath me. All I had to do was call his name.
“Something’s wrong, Requiem.”
“No,” he said, and that one word was enough. I opened my eyes and saw the vampire standing over me.
“She’s awake,” Graham said, and he tried to cradle me into a sitting position, but I lifted my hand up toward Requiem.
The vampire reached down for me, and I reached for him. Graham helped, by pushing me upright, but he wasn’t there for me in that moment. My business was with the dead, and Graham was too warm for me. The blood I wanted was slow and thick, and holding its hand out to me.
Requiem’s fingers brushed mine, and the power inside