When the monsters are involved, it's never just one dead body. One way or another the dead multiply.

First, there were the dead in the graveyard, two-hundred years dead. I'd been hired to raise them to settle a dispute over who owned the land they were buried in. Then there were the three dead teenagers in the woods, slaughtered in a way I had never seen before. And then they found the dead girl, drained of blood and left in her bed. I knew what that meant, all right. It didn't take a degree in preternatural studies to figure out that something was very wrong in and around Branson, Missouri. And I was right in the middle of it. My name is Anita Blake. Welcome to my life...

We'd awakened something old and long dormant. It made me hesitate. Made me not want to finish the circle. Stubbornness, and fear. I didn't completely understand what I was feeling. It was someone else's magic, someone's spell. We'd triggered it, but I didn't know what it would do.

We could raise our dead but it would be like walking a tightrope between another spell and ... something.