“He’s taking energy from her, that I know.”

Warrington went down on his knees with Justine still clasped in his arms. He kissed her gently on the cheek, then slipped her into the arms of MacDougal and the woman, Iris. “Tell her I never meant to hurt her, and that I am more sorry than I know how to say.”

“I will,” MacDougal said.

“Time to go,” I said.

Warrington stood up, glancing at the love of his life one more time, then turned and came to stand beside me. “Put me back where I belong, Ms. Blake, before I hurt someone else.”

“That’s the plan, Mr. Warrington, that’s the plan.”

The four, now five of us got into my SUV and left the history group clustered around Justine. If someone called 911, I wondered what they’d tell the ambulance was wrong with her. Zombie love? It made me smile, until I saw the grim look on the zombie’s face. Did I tell him that it was my fault Justine had fainted? Was it? Or had he taken too much energy when they had sex? He and Justine had lied to me earlier when we talked about them having sex again tonight. Was it a lie by omission, or directly? I couldn’t remember their exact words, but either way he’d known I’d be upset, or maybe he’d just tried to be a gentleman. They didn’t kiss and tell.

“Justine should be fine, Warrington. She just needs time to rebuild her energy.”

“Are you certain she will be all right?” he asked from the very backseat.

Was I? Manny answered for me. “She’ll be fine, Warrington.”

A tension went out of the zombie’s face and shoulders. I exchanged a look with Manny in the front seat. He knew that neither of us was sure that Justine would be a hundred percent. We’d never had a client that boned one of our zombies before. It made me wonder about the men who were screwing the zombies on the Feds’ sex tapes. Were the men feeling drained like Justine? Was the animator who raised them gaining energy from it? Maybe there was more than one reason for someone to turn zombies into sex slaves. Was it for power as well as profit? I didn’t know, but I knew one thing: I needed to watch the videos again, but this time not as a cop, but as a necromancer. I needed to look at the images with power, not eyesight. I’d try to find out how much Manny had seen with his own power of what just happened. If he’d sensed enough, I’d ask the Feds if he could watch the tapes with me. It was either Manny or try to make friendly with fellow animator and U.S. Marshal Larry Kirkland. We’d started out friends—hell, I’d trained him as an animator and vampire hunter—but we weren’t buddies anymore. He thought I was a monster who killed too many and too easily, and I thought he was weak and didn’t kill easily enough to do our job. I wasn’t the only marshal who thought that about Larry. He’d gotten a reputation for not being a shooter. It made other marshals with the Preternatural Branch not want to work with him. Every time someone requested me over him, he resented me more. But if I needed someone to watch the videos for raising magic, Larry was good. Truthfully if he went all out he could raise more zombies in a night than Manny could.

I still hoped the Feds would work with Manny, or let me show him the videos. The thought of watching sex videos this hardcore with Larry, who was a right-wing, squeaky-clean, vanilla kind of guy, was just . . . awkward.

31

BUT FIRST WE had a very special zombie to put back in his grave. I’d called MacDougal from the car and found that Warrington’s clothes weren’t going to be ready until tomorrow, something about the older fabrics and not knowing how to clean them safely. I asked Manny and he thought it should be fine to put him back in the new clothes.

“You don’t think the clothes are like pieces of the body can be sometimes?” I asked out of earshot of the zombie in question.

He shook his head. “The missing pieces are only for raising a zombie, and only for low-level animators who need all the parts to raise a body. It’s one of the reasons they can’t raise older bodies, because too much has turned to dust. They need solid bits to work with; you never have.”

“It never occurred to me: Do any animators need all the parts to put a zombie back in the grave?”

“I’ve known a few who couldn’t lay the zombie to rest if a hand had rotted off and was lost, but I always wondered if it was really a problem, or if they just thought they needed all the parts.”

“You mean they believed they couldn’t do it without the missing part, so they couldn’t?”

He nodded. “I’ve been called in on a few cases where the animators were powerful enough to do it, but they still couldn’t.”

“You think they psyched themselves out,” I said.

“Yes.”

“So, if I don’t worry about the clothes, they aren’t anything to worry about?”

“Exactly.”

I frowned at his logic, but in the end I wanted Warrington below-ground enough to try. He stood on his grave in a T-shirt advertising music that he had probably never heard, and a pair of jeans that whoever had lent them to him would probably miss, but it wasn’t my problem.

Traditional wisdom was that you needed salt, steel, and will. I’d learned that the most important part was sheer force of will, but tonight I went old-schoolish, because I wanted to be sure that this zombie went quietly back to rest.

The blood circle had darkened and was smudged in places. “The circle isn’t intact anymore,” Manny said.

I looked at the ground, and he was right. The blood circle was there, black in the grass, but it was seriously smudged in places, and nowhere near complete.

“I don’t really need it to put him back; it’s only in raising the zombie that the circle matters to me.”

Manny raised eyebrows at me. The look was enough to let me know he did need the circle to lay his zombies back. I forgot sometimes how little we’d worked together over the last few years. Once he took himself out of the vampire execution side of things, he and I had very different dance cards for work.

“Maybe an intact circle for laying the zombie to rest is like the missing body part; you only think you need it,” I said.

He grinned at me, smile bright in the darkness. “The student becomes the teacher.”

I smiled back and shrugged.

“What do you need, then?”

“I’ve done it with just will and word, but tonight—” I lifted a container of salt and the machete still sheathed out of the nice leather bag. Every time I used Jean-Claude’s gift I knew it was just a matter of time before I got something bloody, or worse, on the nice leather, but I’d use it until I ruined it. Sometimes nice things don’t last long, but they’re pretty while they do.

“You don’t need another sacrifice?”

I shook my head.

“I should shadow you one night when you’re on the job. I think you’ve changed a lot of the rituals I taught you.”

I shrugged again. “I’ve streamlined some.”

“It’s all right, Anita. I knew you were a more powerful animator than I was the first week I took you out with me.”

I let him see that he’d surprised me. “You never told me that.”

“I didn’t want you to get a big head about it, or put too much pressure on yourself as a new animator. I knew you’d figure out just how powerful you were.”