“I like that you think about my eyes that much.”
I didn’t tell him that it was partly because the rest of him puzzled me almost as much as his eyes. I hugged him more tightly around the waist, pressing our bodies even closer together. Close enough that I could feel that he was beginning to be happy to be there, which meant I needed to kiss him and send him on his way before he got to the point where walking was uncomfortable without adjusting things.
I moved minutely so we had a little more room so that I could go up on tiptoe and he could bend down. He brought his hand up to cradle one side of my face, while his other arm stayed behind me to steady me as I rose to meet his lips. The kiss was soft, but with more lips moving than that sounds like, a tender kiss, with just an edge of tongue like a promise for later. Things low in my body responded to him so that I was breathless when he broke the kiss and pulled back to look into my eyes. If I’d been a man, Devereux wouldn’t have been the only one who needed to adjust things before we walked away.
“Wow,” I said softly.
His smile, his eyes, his whole face was shining with happiness. He liked that he’d gotten that much reaction from me. Part of me was happy, and part of me was confused. I kept thinking I knew how many people I had in my life, how many I wanted in my life, and how many were occasional fun and food, and then one of them would do something like this, and I’d want more than just fun and games. Damn it.
Nathaniel took him by the arm and pulled him away. “We’ll do more kissing later. I want to see Ireland.”
Dev laughed and let himself be pulled away. I saw Detective Sheridan watching us and knew that there’d be no misunderstandings now about her attraction to this particular tall, blond man. Good. Fortune came up to me, smiling and shaking her head. “I can’t follow that. Let’s just shake.” She meant it, but she also had come up to get her kiss. She was one of the women in our lives and in our beds, so . . . I rolled my eyes at her, but offered her a kiss. I had to go up on tiptoe for her like I did the men, but our kiss was light and not serious by comparison. Fortune’s heart belonged to Echo, whom she was leaving in my care while she saw Dublin for the first time and helped guard the others. But she had asked for a kiss good-bye, which meant the acknowledgment of the relationship mattered to her. Sometimes it’s not about romance; it’s about belonging, about knowing that someone cares for you enough to kiss you in public and say, This is mine. Or at least I’m thinking of making it mine. Acknowledgment was important to Fortune and to Dev, to Devereux. Wasn’t it weird that I liked him better with that name attached to him? Dev seemed unfinished, like a nickname for something longer, and since it was short for Devil, which I was never going to cry out in a moment of passion, Devereux made me happier. Maybe Shakespeare had been wrong, and a rose by any other name wouldn’t be as sweet?
I was actually sad to see Nathaniel and Dev go without me. It would have been nice to go out holding hands and being all romantic tourist with them. But I had a job to do, so I joined Edward in the room where we’d look for clues. Nicky helped me place Echo and Damian in their lightproof bags at the sides of my chair and then he went out into the hallway with Domino, Kaazim, and Jake to be good bodyguards. Socrates and Ethan had stayed with Magda at headquarters. Socrates thought it would be a good idea to show some of Nolan’s people the speed of a regular lycanthrope. He and Ethan were good, but they were slower than Magda because they weren’t Harlequin or sleeping with me and Jean-Claude. Though they were going to leave that part out and just say it was age and practice that made her even faster than them.
Flannery got to wait out in the hallway with my guards, because he was there to partner, or back up, or even keep an eye on his boss. Nolan got to join us in the room this time; whoever had his back was pushing hard that he get involved in things. Pearson and Sheridan didn’t like it, but they took it like the professionals they were when the top brass above you force people into your investigation. We settled down with pictures of horrors spread on the table, a fresh map of Dublin on the corkboard, and people bringing in actual paper for us since I didn’t have an iPad or a computer with me to read things on screen. My iPhone was good for a lot of things, but reading detailed forensics wasn’t one of them. I looked at the first victim with their throat torn open and thought, I really don’t want to be here. I wanted to be out in the sunshine with Nathaniel and Dev and Fortune and even Donnie and Griffin. They both seemed pleasant and would probably be good tour guides for the city. I promised myself that I would get a few days of vacation in here with my people before we flew home. I would, damn it, but first we had a mystery to solve. Why were vampires spreading through Dublin for the first time in their history? Why was the fairy magic of the city’s land fading? Why wasn’t Damian’s old master policing the new vampires or destroying them? Had she really lost that much power, and had she lost it because we’d killed the Mother of All Darkness? How did we find the vampire who had started all this in the city, if it wasn’t M’Lady? How did we find the vampire that seemed to be enjoying tearing people’s throats out? How did we keep more of the families of Dublin from joining the Brady family as the new undead? We had so many questions; what we needed were answers, and that was why I didn’t get to play tourist. If we solved the mystery, caught all the bad guys and girls, and saved Ireland from its first-ever plague of vampires, then I could be a tourist; until then it had to be all business for me, because if I didn’t do my job more people would die. Was it weird that I still thought of the Brady family as having died, even though they were vampires now? I was in love and engaged to Jean-Claude, but looking down at the new vampires in the children’s room today, I’d still thought, dead, murdered, not undead, and alive. Even when your murder victims can come back to “life” at sunset, it doesn’t always change the fact that they had their lives taken from them. Being made a vampire against your will was still murder in the United States; it’d be interesting to see how Irish law handled it. It takes a while to get used to the thought that your victim can give testimony in their own murder trial. It would be up to Irish courts and politicians to decide if being turned against your will was considered murder here; all I knew was that back home Edward and I would have had warrants of execution on the asses of every vampire involved in this, as I looked at the photos of fang marks, torn throats, and a few bodies just torn apart—killing whoever had done this totally worked for me.