“What did they say about putting the soul back in the body after death?” I asked.

“There are ways to steal a piece of someone’s soul and get some control over them, though it’s a bad idea. It’s some kind of karma balance thing; just because you can do a thing doesn’t mean you should,” Manning said.

“There are repercussions to dabbling too far in the blacker side of the arts of any magical path,” I said.

She gave me those hard, straight cop eyes. I was betting she was hell in an interrogation room as the bad cop. “Some witches say that blood sacrifice of any kind is pretty black, and that you must have racked up some serious negative karma yourself, Blake.”

“Yeah, I’ve talked to some of the witches who believe that. They’re either the Christian witches who are okay with being second-class citizens in their own religion as long as they play by very strict Church rules, or fluffy-bunny Wiccans, or another more New Age flavor of witches.”

“I know Wiccan is a modern word for witchcraft as a religion, but what’s a fluffy-bunny Wiccan?” Brent asked.

“Fluffy-bunny neopagans seem to believe that there’s no such thing as bad energy or evil magic; as long as they don’t mess with it, it won’t mess with them. It’s the equivalent of civilians who think that nothing bad will happen to them as long as they don’t go into the wrong neighborhood or hang out with dangerous people. Neither group wants to believe that evil lurks in good neighborhoods, too, and predators of all kinds hunt the good with the bad folk sometimes.”

“Most civilians need to believe that to feel safe,” Brent said.

“Yeah, but believing it too completely gets them hurt, or worse,” I said.

“So you’re saying the fluffy-bunny witches believe the blood sacrifice opens you up to the bad stuff, and as long as they don’t do it, they’re safe?” Brent asked.

I nodded.

“Safe from what?” he asked.

“It’s the metaphysical equivalent of bad guys. I’ve seen some of the fluffy bunnies do major magic without enough magical protection and just believe that the innate goodness of the universe will protect them.”

“I don’t understand,” Brent said.

“It’s like a couple wearing mink and diamonds driving their brand-new Jaguar through the ghetto and thinking that nothing bad will happen to them, because they’re good people.”

“In a perfect world they’d be right,” Manning said.

“We don’t live in a perfect world,” I said.

“Ain’t that the truth,” Zerbrowski said.

“One voodoo priest who was in his eighties said that there were no spells to accomplish what had been done to the poor women.”

“I’m not a follower of vaudun, which is what a lot of their faith prefer to call it instead of voodoo, but I’d say the priest is right. My knowledge of their faith is limited, but Dominga Salvador said she’d invented this method, or whatever you want to call it.”

“Well, either someone else figured it out, or she shared the secret before she vanished,” Manning said.

“Apparently,” I said.

“Can I ask a question that isn’t directly on topic?” Brent asked.

Manning gave him a sideways look and sighed. “If you have to, and I know you have to.”

Brent smiled at her, then looked at me. “I thought you used voodoo, or vaudun, to raise the zombies?”

“Sort of,” I said. “People without any psychic ability with the dead should be able to raise zombies using just the ritual and accompanying paraphernalia, but I haven’t met anyone who could do it who wasn’t psychically gifted.”

“So you’re saying it’s just another psychic ability, like telekinesis?”

I nodded and shrugged at the same time. “Yes and no. It’s a magical ability, rather than a straight natural one, for most people. By that I mean that there’s no ritual to enable an empath to sense emotions, but some magical abilities need ritual to prepare and open the mind to it.”

“Meditation helps most psychics do better at the tests, so maybe it’s all about the same thing,” Brent said.

“Maybe,” I said.

“You do use voodoo to raise the dead.” Manning said it like it was just true.

“I was taught to do it that way.”

“You sound like you’re not sure you need the ritual.”

I shrugged. “I’ve whittled down the ceremony a lot on occasion, but I know other animators who can’t raise anything without all the bells and whistles. It’s been my experience that the lower their psychic ability, the more magical ritual they need.”

“The priest that we trusted enough to show some of the films to, he said the same thing you did, that the souls have been put into the body, trapped somehow. He said he wasn’t sure if the bodies would rot with the soul inside them, or not.”

“Again, I can tell you what I was told by the Señora. She found a way to put the soul back in the zombie, and once she did, it didn’t decay.”

“So why are these zombies rotting?”

“Because she could take the soul back out at will, apparently, and when she did the zombie rotted like normal.”

“But some of the rotted zombies have their soul”—she made little air quotes—“in their eyes. Why are they rotting?”