Now Auntie Nim’s eyes weren’t the blue of sky and flowers, but gray like clouds and rain. Her face stayed the same, as if the lines of age in her face and the weathered tan of her skin didn’t bother her enough to use illusion to change it. I liked that, or she didn’t have enough magic to hide that part of her appearance, but I hoped it was the first, and not the second. She seemed tireder, and less bursting with sunlight and birdsong.
“What are you doing, Devereux?” Flannery asked.
Dev leaned in and whispered to us both, “Remember, you have magic, too.”
With him touching me, I could remember that, and I could feel more of Nathaniel through our entwined hands. It was as if something about her magic had dampened our own. Why would it work like that? I didn’t know how to ask Flannery without giving away that it had, and if it was accidental, I didn’t want to give his aunt any ideas.
I looked at Domino and Ethan on the other side of the table, trying to judge how much they were being affected by Auntie Nim without Dev to protect them with his touch. I could have just asked, but that seemed like giving away too much, so I dropped just a tiny bit of my shields, which kept them from invading too far inside me. With Dev touching me, I could feel that I kept the walls between myself and the two men across the table higher and thicker than with Nathaniel or even Dev. I wasn’t sure what it was about being hooked up to our Devil that made me suddenly aware of how differently I shielded with them, but it was there like a thought, or maybe knowledge, that I hadn’t wanted to really understand before. I filed it away for later, because right now we had other problems. Yeah, I was aware that was how I ran a lot of my life, one emergency to another, so I didn’t have to dig too deep at other issues. My therapist and I were working on it.
Domino and Ethan both startled as if I’d touched them for real and they hadn’t known I was behind them. Domino shook his head as if he was trying to clear his ears after a loud noise. Ethan shivered from the top of his head down the rest of his body that I could see above the table. They glanced at me in turns, and then went back to paying attention to the possible threat in front of us all.
Auntie Nim narrowed her eyes at us. I didn’t feel like a flower with the sun overhead now, not unless the flower was trapped in an ice field and the weak winter sun was too far away. She didn’t like that we’d seen through her illusions.
“You missed this one, nephew,” she said in a voice that was as cold as her attitude and didn’t hold a single note of birdsong in it.
“I told you what he was, what they all were.”
“You said he was a tiger in man form, and golden, but you did not tell me he was a witch.”
“I’ve been called a lot of things, but never a witch,” Dev said, trying for light and cheery in the face of her disapproval.
“Dev . . . Devereux isn’t a witch,” I said.
“If you believe that, then you do not know his worth, Anita.”
“Maybe we’re defining the term witch differently,” I said.
“What do you see when you look at me, Devereux?” Nim said.
“What there is to see,” Dev said with a smile, but his hands stroked against our faces. It was a reassuring gesture; I just wasn’t sure if he was reassuring himself, us, or both.
I raised my hand up to touch his hand where he cupped my cheek. It looked loving and gentle, and it was, but what I said next was neither of those things. “What does it matter what he sees or doesn’t see? I thought we were here to discuss your vampire problem and why the metaphysics in Dublin have changed after a thousand years.”
She sat up a little straighter, using her cane to push herself forward. She was wearing black lace gloves on her hands, so I couldn’t see if her hands matched her face. I’d never seen anyone wear gloves like those outside of a historical drama. “What do you mean, my vampire problem, Anita?”
“I meant Dublin’s vampire problem. Since you live here, it’s sort of your problem, too, right?”
Was it my imagination or did she relax when I said it that way? What was it about what I’d said first that had bothered her so much? I made a mental note to ask the men later if they could figure it out, because it had bothered her. I just had no idea why.
“I was a part of this place before the humans named it Black Pool.”
Flannery added, “That’s basically what Dublin means, Black Pool.”
“Then do you know why vampires are suddenly rising in such numbers here?”
She put both hands on the head of her cane, flexing them around the well-worn wood of it. Her gray eyes darkened to a dark charcoal gray like the sky before a rainstorm. “Death magic.”
“It was one reason that we didn’t want another necromancer here,” Flannery said.
“So you think that a necromancer is behind your vampires?” I asked.
Auntie Nim turned those storm-colored eyes to me. It made me sit back a little and involuntarily clutch Nathaniel’s hand harder and press Dev’s hand tighter against my face. He responded by rubbing along the line of my jaw, which felt great, but also felt a little too touchy-feely for a meeting that had anything remotely police oriented about it. I still didn’t make him stop touching me; there was something about it that helped keep my head clear.
“If it is not true necromancy, then it is a type of vampire we have never seen. It is as if whoever is behind all our troubles is drinking far more than mere blood. It is drinking the life, the magic, from the very earth of Dublin.” Auntie Nim’s face was grim, her eyes full of a fierceness that would probably have been hidden behind sunshine and birdsong if Dev hadn’t been touching us. She didn’t look like your favorite grandma now. She looked predatory, like something that would hurt you. The charcoal gray of her eyes was almost black with anger, or fear, or some emotion I couldn’t understand.