Note: This story was dynamically reformatted for online reading convenience.
 
 The nice dead lady's name turned out to be Talia.

   We cleaned up a little, bandaged my wounds, got dressed.  She told me
more about herself.  She lived alone.  Her job was something in an office
that was so boring I stopped paying attention before she finished
describing it.  In her spare time she painted.  She was good.  She was
single and had been for a long time.  "Too busy with life," she said.

   She was also still dead.  Her skin wasn't icy anymore, just room
temperature.  The places I'd bitten her never bled.  I suspected they would
also never heal.  I'd pulled her spirit back into her body, mostly, but it
had been on the Other Side for several days, and she was never really human
again.  Sometimes she seemed perfectly lucid; and then there were times
when she'd drift off into nothing in the middle of a sentence, staring into
the distance, lost in...wherever.

   I invited her back across the hall to meet my roommates.  Sophie was
sprawled out in the hallway on her butt, back to the wall, bloody cleaver
in one hand and an empty jug of vodka in the other, panties on display for
the world to see.  Several chopped-up zombies had tried to make it into the
apartment.  I hadn't heard any of the ruckus, but I guess I was distracted.
She looked up at us and mumbled "Fuck you," cigarette stuck to her bottom
lip as she talked.  I helped her up.

   Our apartment wasn't much different than it had been.  Hanako was
propped up on the couch, sleeping.  I brushed some hair off her face. 
Elena was kneeling on the floor below her, holding her hand.

   Lisa was still sitting next to the door.  I winced and told her she
could get up.  She wobbled over and looked down at the ninja.  "She fought
hard.  It was very bad."

   "She kept saying your name," Elena said.  "You kept her human.  She
wouldn't turn.  It was...it was horrible."

   "She saved everybody," I said quietly.

   "You saved us," Elena corrected me.  "You saved the whole world.  You're
a better witch than I am."

   "No," I insisted, "Hanako made the difference.  If she'd died, there
would have only been six of us.  She held on so I could finish the job."

   "We all saved the world," Sophie announced from the doorway where she
was leaning.  "Congratufuckinlations.  Do we have anything else to drink? I
don't think I have enough energy to put on pants and they told me at the
liquor store not to show up again without any."

   "I did not really do much," Alex said without an ounce of guilt.  "We
have no alcohol, but would you like a tomato?" Sophie growled at her and
shuffled toward her bedroom in search of pants.

   Hanako opened her eyes, briefly, and smiled at me.

   ***

   The plague was over, but the damage was already done.  Thousands were
dead, and anybody who got hacked up wasn't coming back.  Whole
neighborhoods had burned.  It was the biggest disaster in living memory. 
The city was declared a state of emergency for the foreseeable future. 
Obviously, the cat was also out of the bag about weird shit, since viruses
don't normally burn themselves out overnight without a cure.  Nobody really
seemed to know what to think about that.

   Talia kept living in her apartment but we all split our time on both
sides of the hall.  She seemed to fit right in without thinking about it.

   After the Great Event, she didn't sleep much and she never slept well.
She always seemed to have nightmares, groaning and twisting in the bed.  If
she talked about them at all she ended up rambling quietly about black suns
and silent stones and dead faces.  No fun.  It didn't seem to bother her
much, though.  Nothing did.  Sometimes she laughed or seemed sad, but
mostly emotion seemed like too much work for her.  She did get a little
better over time.  Her new paintings all seemed to be seascapes and ruined
cities at night.

   She claimed not to remember how it'd started, but she was the source of
the whole zombie plague.  She was never a zombie herself, exactly.

   "She's a revenant," Sophie explained.  "A dibbuk, as the Jews would say.
An evil spirit possessing a dead body so it can work mischief.  Except you
exorcised the evil spirit and put her own back in.  Somehow."

   "Don't ask me, I was ensorcelled at the time," I said with hands raised
in front of me.  "All I did was get laid."

   But something had changed.  Elena had been right.  I was never the same.
I'd taken charge that night in a way that was new for me.  And the
experience with Talia was...transforming.  My soul had been marked by the
Other Side too, a little.

   Spells I practiced with Sophia and Elena seemed more effective after
that.  I took up an interest in Necromancy, which neither of them were
experts in, and did a little experimenting of my own with contacting
spirits and sending my soul out of my body.  I seemed to have a knack for
it.

   I spent a lot of time with Talia, just sitting, not saying anything,
watching her paint or sometimes just staring into space together.

   Sophie and I speculated that it had been another assassination attempt
gone wrong, the result of some demon prince trying to sick a revenant on
me. Or maybe just trying to end civilization.  It sounded like it wouldn't
have been that hard to get an evil spirit into Talia's apartment to kill
and possess her, but tying the plague into that seemed complicated.  It was
a mystery for a while.

   Hanako recovered quickly from her zombie flu and injuries.  Soon she was
pestering me for more sex.  I got her started on Elena's herbal tea recipe,
but after a few weeks she said she didn't want to drink it anymore.

   "What do you mean?" I said.  It was obvious what she meant, of course,
but not to my thunderstruck brain.

   "I would like to have your baby, my lord."
   Holy shit.