“I’m coming with you, Anita,” Nathaniel said.
“No.”
“I’m not asking your permission, Anita.”
“Excuse me?”
“I’m not asking permission. I’m telling you I’m coming.”
“It’s my case. If I say no, then it’s no.”
“I was able to take control of the power between us and make it work, which is something that neither one of you has managed to do. Don’t you think that it might be useful to have a working triumvirate of power in Ireland when you’re up against rogue vampires?”
“I’m already part of a working triumvirate.”
“Richard’s doubts cripple Jean-Claude and you, too.”
“Jean-Claude and I work just fine, and it’s helped make Richard Ulfric here in St. Louis.”
“I’m not sure it’s been your trio so much as the fact that you ended up being so fucking powerful, and that fed into Jean-Claude and Richard. I think if you’d just been a normal animator and not a true necromancer, or if you hadn’t gotten contaminated with one of the rarest types of lycanthropy on the planet, that having your first triumvirate crippled could have gotten all three of you killed by some ambitious master vampire years ago.”
I stared at Nathaniel. It was like he was somebody else suddenly. Someone more serious and more . . . Was it wiser? I didn’t want it to be true, because I didn’t like what he’d said, but he was right in one thing. Richard’s reluctance to fully be with Jean-Claude and me had damaged the power the three of us could have had, but luckily for Jean-Claude I had become a metaphysical miracle.
“I think he’s right.”
I glared at Damian. “Don’t help.”
“I thought you wanted me to help by going back to the one country I most want to avoid. She let me go once, Anita, but part of me worries that if I get this close to her again physically, she’ll find enough power to steal me from you forever.”
“You’re my vampire servant and in a triumvirate with Nathaniel and me. Your metaphysical dance card is all filled up.”
“She won’t know that.”
“She will if she tries to break you free of me.”
“She almost killed me once from a distance, remember?”
I did remember.
Nathaniel said, “We remember.”
“I always wondered why she didn’t try to take you again. Maybe this is why,” I said.
“What do you mean?”
“Maybe something about the Mother of All Darkness waking up and then getting killed damaged She-Who-Made-You’s power.”
“If she’s allowing lesser vampires to invade Dublin, then she’s lost power. She would never have allowed that many new vampires to just happen that close to her.”
“The Harlequin think that the magic that kept her, or any vampire, from creating too many vampires in Ireland is fading.”
“What do you mean, the magic that kept the vampires from being created? She-Who-Made-Me kept our numbers low to help us hide.”
“According to the Harlequin, the Fey magic of Ireland itself makes the land so alive that the dead don’t rise easily.”
“Are you saying that She-Who-Made-Me didn’t keep our numbers low because she wanted to, but because she had no choice?”
“If Pierette and Pierrot are correct, yeah.”
“If that is true, then she lied so we wouldn’t realize her power had limits.”
“What did that gain her?” I asked.
“She’s controlling us all through fear of her power. If we’d known that power had limits, we might have pushed back more. Hell, Anita, she had some pretty powerful people under her power. If they had known the land itself was fighting back, it might have made them fight harder to be free. Her animal to call is seal, so she can call the Roane, or Selkies.”
“I thought they were considered a type of fairy creature, not a shapeshifter,” I said.
“I know that’s what folklore says, but from my experience they reacted to her the same way that the wolves react to Jean-Claude, or the tigers interact with you. She can call real seals to do her bidding and their half-human counterparts the same way that I’ve seen other master vampires call their natural animals and their preternatural ones.”
Nathaniel said, “Maybe folklore thinks they’re fairy creatures, because they didn’t know what else to call them?”
“Maybe,” I said.
“Knowing the land itself was fighting her might have been enough to get the Selkies to fight harder for their freedom. The rest of us were created by her, part of her bloodline, but the Selkies are born free folk. Only her magic, or the theft of their sealskin, could bind them to someone on land as a slave.”
“Like the stories of the seal maidens where fishermen stole their skins and forced them to be their wives,” I said.
“Yes.”
“Some of those legends are supposed to be romantic stories,” I said.
“There’s nothing romantic about a man stealing something of yours and then blackmailing you into his bed or forcing you to marry him, Anita.”
“When you say it like that, no,” I said.
“Remember that the romantic versions of these stories were told in centuries when women didn’t always have a lot of freedom to choose a husband. Ancient Ireland had some of the best laws for women when it came to marriage, but overall marriage was less about romance and more about land, wealth, safety, and procreation. I mean inheritance and the safety of land and even countries. The idea that marriage is about romance and love is such a new idea.”