“So she’d want all of us to be married?” Nathaniel asked.
“Oh yes.”
“Could you tell she was a wolf when you met her?” Jake asked.
Flannery shook his head. “I could tell there was something Fey about her, but not what.”
“Is it Fey to be an Irish wolf?” I asked.
“It’s why they don’t like any of the wolves that cut off their tails. They love their own deformities, but they would see it as a betrayal of their heritage,” Nolan said.
“Your tail was not a deformity,” Flannery said.
“You tell that to the other lads in school and their families,” Nolan said.
We were all quiet for a few minutes as the truck whirred along the road.
“Being different is always hard,” I said. “You know that vampire that tried to use me as a human sacrifice?”
“I remember the story,” Flannery said.
“His friend was a necromancer, too. They approached me initially to combine our powers and help heal the vampire.”
“Ah, well I’m sorry for that, but I assure you that I only want to do positive magic. Human sacrifice does not qualify as positive magic.”
“Is that what they call it now?” Jake asked.
“Call what?” he asked him.
“Is it positive magic instead of white magic now?”
“Yes, actually that is the new, more politically correct phrase.”
“I guess black magic being bad and white magic being good doesn’t match the new social justice climate,” I said.
“The last necromancer we dealt with felt like her magic should wither the grass as she walked,” Flannery said, and that memory stole the smile from his face and made his eyes look haunted. It was the kind of look that combat gave you, or working violent crimes too long. You were haunted not by real ghosts, but by the ghosts of memory. Real ghosts were sort of boring, and not really a problem if you ignored them and didn’t feed them power by paying attention to them. The ghosts of the past didn’t go away because you ignored them.
“Some of the people with my psychic ability give the rest of us a bad name.”
He looked startled. “You think it’s a psychic ability?”
“Yeah.”
“But you do magical rituals to raise the dead. If it were purely a psychic ability, there’d be no ritual needed.”
I opened my mouth, closed it, and finally said, “I raised my first zombie spontaneously when I was a child. I didn’t do a damn bit of ritual for it.”
“Who was it?” he asked.
“What, not who. It was my dog. She came home and crawled into bed with me. I thought she was alive again, at first.”
“That should make your power metaphysical, not mystical, but . . .” And it was his turn to hesitate, as if he were trying to pick his words more carefully.
“But what?” I asked.
“Maybe you are a psychic just like a natural witch, but I’ve never known a necromancer who didn’t need magic ritual to raise the dead.”
“I’m a special little snowflake,” I said.
“Maybe, or maybe you’re the kind of necromancer that the legends tell about.”
“What legends?”
Nolan said, “Please, Blake, don’t play stupid.”
“Yeah, yeah, raise an army of the dead and conquer the world. Legends and myths say that witch kings and voodoo queens keep trying it, and keep failing at it.”
“I saw some of the films from Colorado last year,” Flannery said.
“You raised an army of the dead,” Nolan said.
“Only to combat the one that the bad guy had already raised,” I said.
“But you still raised all the dead for miles around the city of Boulder, Colorado,” Flannery said.
I shrugged, not sure what to say.
“That is legendary magic, Blake,” Flannery said.
“Do I blush and say Aw shucks?”
“If the land and the gentle folk like you, Blake, then that’s good enough for me.”
Nolan said, “Flannery is my expert on magic, so if he likes you, then that’s good enough for me, too.”
“When did you fight this other necromancer?” Jake asked.
“Just a few months ago. I’d never seen anything like it, until I saw the videos from Colorado and what Blake did there.”
“Was she human?” Jake asked. “The necromancer, I mean.”
Flannery nodded. “As far as we could tell, yes.”
“You’ve thought of something,” Nolan said.
Jake smiled and looked so friendly, so open. “Anita fought a vampire that could raise zombies just last year, and you fought a human necromancer within the same year. I just find that an interesting coincidence.”
“You don’t think it’s a coincidence any more than we do,” Nolan said.
“I don’t know what you mean,” Jake said.
“People hadn’t seen a real necromancer in living memory, and now suddenly we’ve got three,” Nolan said.
“We killed the one in Colorado,” I said.
“We had to kill the one in—”
“Flannery!” Nolan snapped, and stopped him from saying the location.
“I’m betting it wasn’t in Ireland, was it?” I asked.
“That’s classified,” Nolan said.
“And now we’ve got vampires spreading in Ireland, which your gentle friends should have helped prevent,” Jake said. He looked at me and there was something in that look. Were we to blame for all of this? Had killing the Mother of All Darkness unleashed some of her power to spread through the world? Or had fear of her power kept other necromancers in check, since she had given standing orders to the Harlequin to kill all necromancers on sight?