Anita Blake 24 - Dead Ice Read Online Free PDF Page B

the newly dead, five or six in a night, maybe more if the travel time works out, but that’s rare.”
    “Why is it rare?” Manning asked.
    “I don’t raise zombies without a good reason, and it’s not cheap. The times when I’ve had more than five or six clients in one night in one geographic area are really rare. Sometimes I’ll travel and do multiple zombies in a distant area, because I’m going to be in town, but most out-of-town trips are just one client who’s willing to pay for me to come to them.”
    “So why is this animator in the room ordering the zombie around?” she asked.
    “Maybe he doesn’t know how to give control of a zombie over to someone else. It wasn’t how I was taught. You stayed at the graveside and put the zombie back after the questions had been asked, or the last good-byes said. Even now it’s rare for me to let anyone take a zombie off-site.”
    “Why?” Manning asked.
    “One, some clients won’t bring them back. Remember, it looks like their loved one, and I’m powerful enough that my zombies look and act alive, or enough so that if you want to believe Mom or Dad is back for good, you could. Well, for a while.”
    “Define
a while
.”
    “Until the body starts to rot. Eventually all zombies decay, Agent Manning, even mine.”
    “The Catholic Church claims that all animators are trampling on Jesus’ territory by raising the dead.”
    “Yeah, that’s what got us all excommunicated unless we agreed to stop doing it. What the Church doesn’t understand is that for some of us it’s a psychic gift, which means if we don’t use it on purpose it comes out in other ways.”
    “Like untrained telepaths who go crazy because they can’t block everyone else’s thoughts,” Brent said.
    “Yeah, except for me it was roadkill following me home, or my first dog that died and came back.”
    Zerbrowski gave me wide eyes; apparently I’d never shared that with him.
    “That sounds pretty awful,” Manning said.
    “It was, and my dad and stepmom were not amused.”
    “I bet,” Brent said.
    “Would you need a human sacrifice to do this?” Manning asked.
    “You mean to capture the soul, or put the soul back in the zombies?”
    “Either, both.”
    “The priest would be able to answer the question about the soul-capture thing better than I could, but I don’t believe so, and if the zombies are the recently dead then you wouldn’t need a death that big.”
    “Define
big
,” she said.
    “Most of us use chickens as the blood sacrifice for a normal zombie raising, but if it’s an older body we move up to goats, sometimes sheep, but mostly goats. After that you get into cows.”
    “So it’s literally physically larger, not smarter?” Manning said.
    That was a good question, maybe a great question. “You know, I’ve never thought about it like that. Traditionally, I was taught that bigger sacrifice meant literally bigger, so theoretically an elephant could raise more, but we jump from cow to human sacrifice, and people are smaller than most full-grown cattle.” I thought about it. “I guess there’s just not a reasonable way to kill something bigger than a cow, or maybe horse, though I don’t know anyone in this country who uses horses for sacrifice. I know some people use doves or pigeons instead of chickens, but the jump to human is considered the biggest sacrifice possible.”
    “Pigs are smarter than goats or cows; would their death be bigger?” Brent asked.
    “I’ve never known anyone who used a pig; maybe a baby pig, but not a grown one.”
    “Why?” Manning asked.
    “Honestly, I don’t know, but I was raised in farm country, and pigs will eat people; cows and chickens, even goats, won’t.”
    “Pigs don’t really eat people unless a serial killer feeds them the pieces,” Brent said.
    “Feral hogs used to drag off babies left at the edge of fields and eat them.”
    “That’s just an old wives’ tale,” Brent said.
    “No, it’s not,” I said,