04.05: Harry Rutherford

So, someone had reanimated the contents of a very small pet cemetery. If they were trying to impress him they would have to work a lot harder than that. He had firebombed a vampire family in Peckham, it was one of the first things he had done with Inspector Coleridge.
He checked the signare of the magic to see if he recognised the practitioner that had brought these sad little zombie critters back into the world.
“Oh.” There was no magical signare because there was no magic.
Unexpected.
But Harry could feel the power involved. They did not have the feel of tactus disvitae, that, he had learned, referred both to the smell of anti-life or just anti-life; the phrase was coined by Samuel Erasmus Wolfe.
Not magic. Probably a mutant then. Harry wished he had one of the Xavier Institute faculty with him.
Unsophisticated but effective. This would have been cruel if the animals’ awareness had been there but they were nothing more than a weapon.
He could have dismissed it easily enough but that would have left a bunch of little corpses scattered over the ground. He broke the compulsion and sent them back to their rest.
“Revertere ad quietem loca vestra.”
He waited for the animal zombies to wander off again.
“It’s not very kind to disturb the dead, you know. Your final rest should be just that, even if you are a gerbil.”