Crimson Death

“Did you ever kill anyone in Ireland?” I asked.

“No, M’Lady took care of such things herself.”

“M’Lady? I’ve never heard her called that before.” We were up even with them now, so I got the full weight of her large brown eyes.

“Even we of the Harlequin with the strength of the Mother of All Darkness behind us dared not speak her true names, for it called her attention to us, so we christened her M’Lady, for it was the name she forced her pets to call her.”

“Pets. Do you mean her animals to call?” Sin asked.

She turned that delicate face with its large dark eyes up to his face. “No, my prince. Though she made some wereanimals into pets, most were vampires like the queen’s servant, Damian.”

“What do you mean, Damian was her pet? I don’t understand what the word means in this context.”

“They were her sexual partners, but to call them lovers suggested an emotion that M’Lady did not seem to exhibit. She was as likely to torture them as share pleasure with them. They were at the mercy of her whims and she was . . . very whimsical.”

“I thought whimsical meant fun and lighthearted,” I said.

“Then I have misspoken, because M’Lady was not prone to fun, and if she had a heart in the sense that you mean, there was nothing light about it. She forced them to call her M’Lady much as the way a slave in the bondage-and-submission community will call their dominant master, except that title is usually earned and freely given, and nothing was free of cost between M’Lady and her pets, or slaves.”

“Calling someone master is a term of endearment and respect in the BDSM community,” Nathaniel said.

“Then again, I have misspoken, because it was a demand, a title like queen, or king, with nothing endearing about it.”

“Didn’t it bother you to use the same name she forced her pets to use?” I asked.

“Somewhat, yes, but what else were we to call her?”

“Wicked Bitch of Ireland’s been working for me.”

Pierette looked shocked for a moment, and then she laughed, but it was laughter you make when someone surprises or shocks you, more than amuses you. “If you have the misfortune to see her, my queen, please do not call her that to her face. I do not want to lose another dark queen in less than two years.”

“What if I told you that M’Lady is allowing vampires that aren’t hers to terrorize a city in Ireland?”

“I would say that it isn’t true. She holds absolute sway over the vampires in Ireland, because they can only rise through her bite, her line. She is her own sourdre de sang, fountain of blood, just as Jean-Claude has become, as Belle Morte and the Dragon have been for centuries. Only her power has been great enough to overcome the reluctance of the land to give up its dead.”

“What do you mean about the land?” I asked.

“The wild magic of the Fey is stronger in Ireland than anywhere else remaining in the world. Even if someone dies by vampire bite with the three bites and the right amount of blood taken in the last feeding, most bodies do not rise in Ireland. They are simply dead and begin to rot. Only someone who was their own bloodline could have any hope of creating vampires in Ireland.”

“So, a vampire that was a fountain of blood would be able to raise vampires there, but no one else?” I asked.

“Even then it wouldn’t be a given. We have seen M’Lady try to create vampires and the bodies remain inert. She was enraged by her failures, and they were not infrequent. The land’s magic is too alive for any kind of death magic to work well there.”

“Then why do the Irish not like necromancers?”

“True necromancers are so rare throughout history that I would not think they had a policy for or against,” Pierette said.

“Another Marshal has been trying to get permission for me to come to Ireland and help him on a case, but they didn’t want to let a necromancer into their country.”

“That surprises me, my queen. They are one of the most welcoming countries in the world to all magics.”

I shrugged. “All I can tell you is that they didn’t want to let me in at first.”

“He did say your reputation for violence was part of the reason,” Nathaniel said.

I frowned at him. “Okay. Well, yeah.”

“I can see them protesting that, but not your magic,” she said.

“It’s what I was told.”

“Maybe it’s that you’re a true necromancer,” Sin said.

“What do you mean?”

“You killed the Mother of All Darkness, Anita; that’s like a step up from normal necromancy,” Nathaniel said.

“There is no normal necromancy,” Pierette said. “There have only been a handful of necromancers worthy of the name in the last thousand years, and we killed them before they could grow into their full powers.”

“And yet everyone’s afraid of us,” I said.

“They’re afraid of people like your coworkers who raise and control zombies. They have no idea what a true necromancer could do.”

“There are videos all over the Internet showing the zombies in Boulder, Colorado, last year,” Sin said.

Pierette nodded. “Some show Anita surrounded by her own army of zombies. Yes, that might give the Irish authorities pause.”

I hadn’t thought about it like that. “But wait. Shouldn’t the magic of the land keep me from raising zombies there?”