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I shied back, but he just thrust her at me again.
I took her.
She didn’t look like me. She didn’t look like anything in that distinctive way of babies and half-baked loaves of bread. Until she got bored staring at the pocket on Pritkin’s shirt, and a familiar pair of baby blues met mine.
They didn’t appear impressed.
“Son of a—” Roger cursed.
I looked up to find him with a red welt on his wrist, courtesy of the now steamy hot and curdled contents of the bottle. I waited while he fished out another, tried whatever spell he was using again, and finally managed to get the temperature right. “I don’t usually do this,” he explained. “I’m not, that is, I drop things, and her mother said—”
“Your. Legions,” I repeated, because I had to. I had to know.
“Oh, for—” He broke off, looking like he wished he could still stop my mouth with a pacifier. “My legions consist of an ex-marine who died in the Spanish-American War and a bag lady who expired under the Forty-fourth Street Bridge! And I never drained anybody to keep them. It’s quite the contrary—they usually end up draining me!”
He took the baby back, popped the bottle in her mouth, and glared at me.
“But . . . you made an army for the Black Circle. You just said—”
He shrugged. “I’ve always been good at telling tales. And your war mage . . . well, he deserved a few bad moments. He gave me enough tonight!”
“Are you trying to tell me that wasn’t true? That you just made it all up?” I didn’t believe it for a second. The evidence to the contrary had just thrown Pritkin halfway through a wall.
He looked at me impatiently. “The theory is sound enough, but in practice—it’s like I told you. It was a failed experiment.”
“It looked pretty successful to me!”
“Well, of course. It was designed to.” He held the bottle under his chin and pulled over an ottoman, I guess so he wouldn’t drop me, and plunked down.
“Designed to do what?”
“To fool the Black Circle.” He saw my expression and made a disgusted sound. “Look, it doesn’t work, all right? But the Circle didn’t know that because no one had ever tried it. The demonologists who could create a proper binding spell couldn’t see ghosts, and you can’t bind what you can’t even tell is there! And the necromancers who specialize in ghosts can’t do a binding.”
“Daisy said otherwise,” I reminded him.
He rolled his eyes in unconscious imitation. “Do you know how zombies are made?” he demanded, putting the baby on his shoulder and patting her back. “They’re not like ghosts. They have no souls. So a necromancer must send a tiny bit of his own to animate his creation.”
“So?”
“So it’s not like you can spare that much! That’s why you don’t see zombie armies roaming about, despite what the movies would have you believe. A necromancer can only direct two, maybe three at a time with any success. Any others he tries to raise will be on autopilot—the lights are on but nobody’s home, all right? And as such, they’re sitting ducks. Useless.”
“I still don’t see—”
The baby interrupted me with an astonishingly loud burp. We both looked at her, me with shock, him with satisfaction. He wiped her chin and popped the bottle back in her mouth.
“I told you, I modified the binding spell used on golems with the spell we use for making zombies. And it worked, more or less. But you know how it is with magic—it always bites you on the ass somehow. And in this particular case, I found that the new spell was limited in the same way the zombie spell is—I could only bind two or three ‘bodies’ at a time. I couldn’t make an army if I tried!”
I scanned his face, wanting to believe him. His blue eyes looked guileless, and he sounded completely convincing. But then, he had downstairs, too.
Roger scowled, I guess because I was taking too long. “Think, girl! Why do you think nobody’s used ghosts as a weapon before? I’m not a genius and nothing’s new under the sun. Somebody probably tried at some point, then gave up in disgust and went back to zombies! They may be disgusting, but at least they’re reliable.”
“Yet you’ve done it, at least with two—”
“Yes, two. And you wouldn’t believe the merry hell they give me, either. I mean, think about the logistics of it for a minute. If you could find enough independent-minded spirits, who weren’t obsessing over revenge twenty-four-seven, and if you could somehow find enough energy to feed them, and if you could convince them to support your cause . . . well, then you might have a force to be reckoned with. But do you know what the odds are on that?”
He was right, I realized. And if I hadn’t been so busy worrying about him and Pritkin going for each other’s throats, I might have realized it on my own. Billy Joe was just one ghost and he gave me a fit. I couldn’t imagine controlling an army, or even managing to recruit it to begin with. No wonder nobody had ever done it. It would be like trying to herd cats.
“Obsessive, chattering cats,” Roger agreed, because I guess I’d spoken that last out loud.
