Nicky gave a small smile. “Good, you’re not dead.”
“Was I supposed to be?” I asked.
“When Silas hit you and you dropped like that”-he shrugged-“it was a thought.”
“I didn’t even have time to worry about it. He was so fast.”
“You managed to move a little out of the way or he’d have snapped your neck.”
I started to try to get up, but he touched my arm. “Stay down a little longer. Once you get up, then you have to raise the dead.”
“Did you win the fight with Jacob?”
“You nearly dying sort of stopped it.” He grinned, a sudden whiteness in the dark. “And we had to help patch up Silas. You opened him up from”-he sat up so he could use his own body to demonstrate-“here at just under the ribs, across the stomach, to the upper intestine. I got to see his intestines on the outside. That is one sharp blade.”
I heard footsteps rustling the leaves, and the crooked door opened to show a dark shadow that turned out to be Jacob. “It wasn’t just the blade, Nick. She knows how to use a knife.” Apparently he’d heard us, too. He walked across the dirt floor and stood on the other side of me, looming over us both. I didn’t like that, so I tried to sit up.
“Slowly,” Nicky said, “you’ve been mostly dead all night.”
I stopped in midmotion. “Did you just quote Princess Bride?”
“I may not be able to quote books, but movies, those I can do.”
“He’s right, though,” Jacob said, and he reached down to offer a hand, “move slow; there’s no way to tell how much you’ve healed.”
I thought about not taking the hand, but I still needed to get out of this with all my people alive, which meant friendly was still better than unfriendly. His hand closed over mine and it was just a hand. He’d shut down his shields on his power so tight that nothing leaked out. When you’re as powerful as he was, that’s a lot of shielding. The less powerful, or the newbies, will leak faster, and leak more the closer to the full moon it gets. For Jacob it was just hard to hide that much light under your bushel basket. He lifted me gently to a sitting position. The world stayed steady, but a headache started on the right side of my face from jaw to temple, as if it had waited for me to sit up.
Jacob knelt on one knee beside me, still holding my hand. “How does it feel?”
“My head and face hurt, but honestly I’m surprised that it’s not worse. Aspirin would be great.”
“No, just in case you’re bleeding inside your skull you don’t want something that thins your blood.” He took his hand back and I let him. “You seem steady enough. Sit here for a few minutes, and then Nick will help you try standing. I’ll go comfort our client again.” He sounded disgusted, but he walked out, having to lift the crooked door to close it behind him. It still left an outline of moonlight on almost every side of it. The shed was so old that I could have torn out a board from the backside and gotten out; maybe Nicky was in here with me to see that I didn’t do that very thing.
“Where are we?” I asked.
“In an old shed,” he said.
I gave him the look the comment deserved. It made him smile. “You know what I meant, Nicky.”
“I think this used to be the caretaker’s shed, but now it’s a place to hide you out of sight, until you’re well enough to raise the dead.”
I took in a deeper breath and realized I could smell old marble. I’d been around it most of my adult life, and it actually did have an odor, if you were close enough to it, or surrounded by enough of it. “I take it this is the cemetery where Ilsa Bennington is buried.”
“How do you know we’re in a cemetery?”
I thought about lying, but decided to save my lies for later. “I can smell the marble headstones.”
He drew in a deep breath. “I can, too, but I wasn’t sure you could. You don’t shift, or that’s what we’re told.”
“Not yet,” I said.
“Why say it that way?”
I shrugged. “There’s always the chance that my body will complete the change someday. My situation is too rare to really know what will happen in the long run. So, is this where Ilsa is buried?”
“Yep, he found an old, out-of-the-way one so we wouldn’t be interrupted.”
“Yeah, without the right permits you can get arrested for disturbance of a corpse, or worse.” I turned my head, and the ache intensified as if some of the muscles or ligaments were bruised. Since I should have been dead, I was okay with that. Jean-Claude’s vampire marks had made me damn hard to kill. The thought made me realize that it was after dark and I could contact him by thought alone.
“You won’t be able to use metaphysics to contact your vampire master, or anyone else, Anita.” It was almost as if he’d read my thought, though I was pretty sure it was only coincidence.
“I didn’t…,” I said.
“You were stronger metaphysically than we planned, so Jacob called in our team witch. She’s done something so that while you’re on this land you won’t be able to contact anyone mind to mind.”
“What if they try to contact me?”
He shook his head. “Nope, Ellen is good, and very thorough, and we’re also over two hours outside your city. Even if your guys break through, they’ll never be able to get to you in time to stop Jacob from telling the snipers to finish the job.”
It was my turn to try to tell if he was lying. I took a deep breath of the cool, earthy air, and there was nothing. He was as peaceful and empty as a still pool of water. It was strangely Zen, and very unlike most of the shapeshifters I knew.
“Besides, if Jacob or Ellen senses you trying to break through the barrier she’s put up, then Micah Callahan dies.” He said it with almost no change in inflection, and only the smallest speed of pulse.
My stomach clenched tight at that lack of inflection. It seemed worse that it didn’t bother him to talk about destroying someone I loved, someone who was a linchpin on which my happiness revolved. That it didn’t matter to him both helped and hurt. It hurt because lack of emotion can make people harder to manipulate, and helped because it made me calmer, made me understand the rules, or lack of them. I could play this game.
I fought the urge to search for the barrier the witch had put up, the same way I’d try a locked door, just in case. If this Ellen was any good at all, she’d sense me trying her barrier. I couldn’t risk what her reaction would be; if it had been a real door I could probably have rattled it a little without my “guards” getting upset, but how do you rattle a metaphysical barrier just a little? My powers tended to rely on brute force more than subtlety. I couldn’t risk it. I couldn’t risk Micah like that. My voice came out steady; point for me. “Not that I’m complaining exactly, but why do you keep threatening to kill him first?”
“He’s just your Nimir-Raj; the others are your animals to call. We aren’t sure exactly what powers you’ve gained from your vampire master, but if you are some kind of lesser vampire, then killing a wereanimal that you’ve bound to yourself can sometimes kill you both. We need you alive to raise the zombie, so Micah goes first.”