Cerulean Sins Read Online Free PDF Page A

you, so the powers that be could use you to raise the dead. Most, in America anyway, believed that the scent and touch of the herbal mixture enhanced your psychic abilities, or helped open them so they’d work at all. I never seemed to have any trouble raising the dead. My psychic abilities were always on line for animating. So I still carried the ointment, just in case, but I didn’t use it much anymore.
    The three things I did still need for animating were steel, fresh blood,and salt. Though the salt actually was to put the zombie back in the grave once we were finished with it. I’d cut my paraphernalia to the absolute minimum, and recently, I’d cut it down even more. And I mean that “cut” part literally.
    My left hand was covered in little bandages. I was using the clear ones, so I didn’t look like a tan version of the mummy’s hand. There were larger bandages on my left forearm. All the wounds were self-inflicted, and it was beginning to piss me off.
    I had been learning how to control my growing psychic powers by studying with Marianne, who had been a psychic when I met her, but had become a witch. She was Wiccan now. Not all witches are Wiccan, and if Marianne had been another flavor of witch, I wouldn’t have had to cut myself up. Marianne as my teacher, shared some of my karmic debt, or so her group—read coven—believed. The fact that I killed an animal every time I raised the dead, three, four times a night, almost every night, had made her coven rant, rave, scream, and basically lose it. Blood magic is black magic to a Wiccan. Taking a life for magical purposes, any life, even a chicken’s, is very black magic.
    How could Marianne have tied herself to someone who was being so . . . evil? they demanded to know.
    To help Marianne’s karmic burden—and mine, the coven assured me—I’d been trying to raise the dead without killing anything. I’d done it in emergencies without an animal to sacrifice, so I knew it was possible. But—surprise, surprise—while it was true that I could do my job without killing anything, I could not do it without fresh blood. Blood magic is still black magic to Wiccans, so what to do? The compromise was that I would use only my own blood. I wasn’t sure it would work. But it did, for the recently dead, at least.
    I’d started out slicing up my left forearm, but that had rapidly lost its appeal, since I needed to do it three or more times a night. Then I’d taken to pricking my fingers. Just a little blood seemed to be enough for those dead under six months. But I’d run out of fingers, and my arm had enough scars already. I’d also found that when I practiced lefthanded shooting that I was slower, because the cuts freaking hurt. I would not cut up my right hand, because I couldn’t afford to be slower with my right. I’d pretty much decided that, while I was sorry I had to kill a few chickens or goats to raise the dead, the animal’s lives were not worth my own. There I’ve said it, a totally selfish judgment call.
    I’d really hoped the tiny cuts would heal instantly. Thanks to my ties to Jean-Claude, master vamp of the city, I healed fast, very fast. The little cuts didn’t heal fast. Marianne said it was probably because I was using a magically charged blade to do the cutting. But I liked my machete. Truthfully,I wasn’t a hundred percent sure that I could raise the dead with only a prick of blood without a magically charged blade. It was a problem.
    I was going to have to call Marianne and tell her I’d failed the Wiccan test of goodness. Why should they be any different? Most right-wing Christian groups hated me too.
    I glanced behind me at my audience. Two new uniformed police officers had joined Lt. Nicols and the first officer. The police stood in the middle of the two groups, which had been allowed to come close enough to the grave to hear