"If I raise Emmett Rose from the dead tonight, you'll be here to see it, right?"
"Are you speaking to me, Marshal Blake?" asked the defense lawyer.
"Yes, Mr. Salvia, I am speaking to you." I fought to keep the impatience out of my voice.
"Could you repeat the question?" he asked.
I repeated it, then added, "If I fail to raise Emmett Rose from the dead tonight, you'll be here to see that, too, right?"
I could see him frown even in the cooler darkness under the trees. "Yes." But he said it slowly, as if he didn't see the trap but suspected that there was one.
"I will either raise the zombie from this grave, or I will not. Correct, Mr. Salvia?"
"Your honor, what is Marshal Blake trying to get at?" Salvia asked.
"Do you concede that my raising Emmett Rose from the dead is either a yes or no question? Either he pops out of the grave, or he does not."
"Yes, yes, I concede that, but I still don't see—"
"Would you say that the zombie rising from the grave is open to interpretation?" I asked.
Salvia opened his mouth, closed it. "I'm not sure I understand the question."
The judge said, "Marshal Blake has made her point. Either the zombie will rise from the grave, or it won't. We will all be here to see the zombie either rise, or not rise. It isn't open to interpretation, Mr. Salvia. Either she will do what she's being paid for, or she won't. It either works or it does not."
"But the ritual she chooses to raise the dead could affect the ability of Mr. Rose to give intelligent testimony."
The judge asked me, "Is that true? Marshal, could your choice of rituals affect the zombie?"
"Not the ritual. No, your honor. But the ability of the animator." The moment that last bit left my mouth, I flinched. I should have stopped with "No, your honor." Dammit.
"Explain the last part of that statement," the judge said.
See, I'd said too much. Given them something to question and be confused by. I knew better than that.
"The greater the degree of power the animator has, and sometimes the more practice he or she has at raising the dead, the better their zombies are."
"Better how?" he asked.
"More alive. The greater the power used, the more alive the zombie will appear. You'll also get more of their personality, more of what they were like in life."
Again, I'd overexplained. What was the matter with me tonight? The moment I thought it, I knew, or thought I knew. The dead were whispering to me. Not in voices—the true dead have no voices—but in power. It should have taken energy from me to raise a zombie. They shouldn't have been offering power up to me, like some sort of gift. Power over the dead comes with a price, always. Nothing's free with the dead.
Micah touched my arm. It startled me. I looked at him, and he said softly, "Are you all right?"
I nodded.
"The judge is talking to you."
I turned back to the judge and apologized. "I'm sorry, your honor. Could you repeat what you just said?"
He frowned at me but said, "You seemed distracted just then, Marshal Blake."
"I'm sorry, your honor. I'm just thinking about the job ahead."
"Well, we'd like you to concentrate a little harder on this part of the proceedings before you rush ahead of us."
I sighed, swallowed a half dozen witty and unhelpful things, and settled for, "Fine, what did you say that I missed?"
Micah touched my arm again, as if my tone might have been a little less than polite. He was right. I was getting angry. That old tension in my shoulders and along my arms was settling in.
"What I said, Marshal, was I was under the impression that only a blood sacrifice would give you that much life in a zombie."
I thought better of the judge. He'd done some research, but not enough. "There's always blood involved in raising the dead, your honor."
"We understand that the FBI was requested to supply you with poultry," he said.
Any normal human being would have said, Is that what the chicken is for? Court time is not the same as real time; it's sort of like football time. What should take five minutes will take thirty.
"Yes, that is why the chicken was requested." See, I could talk the long way 'round the mountain, too. If a question has a simple yes or no answer, then give that. Beyond yes or no questions, explain things. Don't add, don't embellish, but be thorough. Because you're going to have to talk one way or the other. I preferred to give complete answers in the beginning rather than have my explanations be made longer on cross-examination.
"How does the chicken help you with this protective circle?" he asked.
"You normally behead the chicken and use its blood, its life energy, to help put up a protective circle around the grave."
"Your honor," Salvia again, "why does Marshal Blake need a protective circle?"
Laban, our friendly neighborhood prosecutor, said, "Is my esteemed colleague going to question every step of the ritual?"
"I think I have the right on behalf of my clients to ask why she needs a protective circle. One of my objections to this entire procedure was the worry that something else could animate the corpse, and what is raised will be merely Mr. Rose's shell but with something else inside it. Some wandering spirit could—"
"Mr. Salvia," Laban said, "your fanciful worries did not convince the judge to grant your motion. Why bring it up again?"
Truthfully, one of the reasons we put up protective circles was to keep wandering spirits, as Salvia put it, from animating the corpse. Though I'm not sure spirits were what I'd worry about. There were other things, nastier things, that loved getting hold of a corpse.
They'd use it for walking-around clothes until someone made them leave it, or until they'd so damaged it that the body no longer functioned well enough to be useful. I did not say this out loud. To my knowledge, no animator had volunteered this part of the reason for the protective circle. It would open too many legal problems when we were still striving to have animation be accepted as standard practice for court cases. The circle also helped raise power, and that was the main reason for it. The whole corpse-being-highjacked thing was so rare that I actually didn't know anyone who had ever had it happen to one of their zombies. It was one of those stories that always seems to happen to the friend of your uncle's cousin, who no one actually ever met. I wasn't going to help Salvia keep us here all night.
"Mr. Laban is right," the judge said. "There is nothing in the literature about zombies being taken over by alien energy." His voice held distaste, as if Salvia had actually proposed some sort of alien possession theory.
For all I knew, he had. I guess if the prosecution's star witness can be raised from the dead to testify, then the defense is allowed to look for unusual help, too. Aliens seemed a little far-fetched, but hey, I raise the dead for a living and slay vampires. I really couldn't throw stones.
"Marshal Blake, once you have your protective circle, how much more ritual will you need?" I think the judge was tired of the delays, too. Good—me getting impatient didn't help much. But the judge getting impatient—that could be very helpful.
I thought about it and was glad he'd phrased the question the way he had. How much ritual would I need? A very different question from, What comes next in animating the dead? Once the circle was up, I deviated so far from normal animating ritual that it was like comparing apples to watermelons.
"Not much more, your honor."
"Can you be more exact?" he asked.
"I'll call Emmett Rose from the grave. Once he's above ground, then I'll put blood on or in his mouth, and he'll be able to answer questions very soon after that."