56
THE FIRST MEETING had seemed pretty secret to me, and yet Riley and his girlfriend were both missing. This time we met in a churchyard at the edge of an ancient-looking cemetery. Compared to last time, it was out in the damn open, and that had gotten two people kidnapped. I didn’t understand why we were meeting here until Damian hesitated at the edge of the stone wall. He had the hood on his coat up, his hands plunged into the pockets, sunglasses back in place. Honestly, with the hood up, there was almost none of him in the sunlight.
“I can’t step on holy ground,” Damian said.
I had a “duh” moment. “Crap, of course you can’t. Some vampire expert I am.”
He smiled. “Trust me, I won’t forget that stepping on holy ground could make me burst into flames.”
“Wait. I’ve had vampires with me in graveyards before, and they didn’t burst into flame.”
“This is a graveyard inside a church wall. It’s potentially part of the church itself, and I can’t enter a church.”
Nathaniel said, “You’re not sure if you can step on the grass inside the wall or not, are you?”
“No, but it’s not worth the risk to me.”
I hugged him and said, “Totally not worth it. You stay here, and I’ll go find our mystery guest.”
Slane watched us waiting on the other side of the little metal gate, and I asked him, “Why did you choose this location when you knew we had a vampire with us?”
“I did not choose it,” he said, which answered and didn’t answer the question all at the same time. Nathaniel stayed with Damian, along with Donnie and Brennan, at Slane’s request: “Humans make some of us nervous.”
It was interesting that none of the rest of us counted as human. Not bad or good, just interesting. Dev was happy to stay with Nathaniel and Damian. Nicky went where I went, but after that, everyone let Jake be senior guard and send himself and Kaazim with me, while everyone else waited outside the wall with our nervous vampire.
Slane left us waiting among the weathered tombstones, while he checked that there was no one inside the church that we’d want to avoid. I was right there waiting on the edge of the graves, and I just couldn’t help myself. I lowered my shields just a little, and there was nothing. It was like standing in the middle of a meadow or a garden. There was no sense of the dead under the ground. It was just living ground. Had the bodies been moved but the grave markers left in place? That happened in the States sometimes. Hell, in St. Louis, if a company had permission to build on an old graveyard, they only had to move a spadeful of dirt from each grave and the tombstones, but weren’t forced to move the actual bodies. Was that what had happened here?
Nicky leaned in and whispered, “What’s wrong?”
“I can’t feel the dead. I can’t feel anything except the ground, which is fertile and alive.”
Slane came back out of the church. “Is this the first Irish graveyard you’ve visited, Ms. Blake?”
“Yes.”
“Does it feel any different from the ones back in America?”
I frowned at him. “Is this a trick question?”
“It’s not meant to be.”
“Have the bodies been moved?”
He looked out over the graves. “To my knowledge what was buried here is still here.”
“If this Roane wants to meet with a vampire, why meet inside a church? He knows that the vampires can’t go in there.”
“Once he feels reassured, then he will come out to Damian.”
“What will reassure him?” I asked.
“Come inside the church and ask him yourself.”
I stared back over the graveyard and its strangely alive ground. As a teenager, I’d have given anything to be able to walk through a cemetery and feel nothing, but now . . . I wasn’t afraid of graveyards, but I was a little afraid of this one. Why couldn’t I sense anything?
“You are unsettled, Ms. Blake. I thought it was tradition that necromancy doesn’t work in daylight.”
“You can’t raise the dead in daylight, but I can sense the dead.”
“What of ghosts? Do you sense them, as well?”
“I try not to see ghosts.”
“How can you not see them?” he asked.
“The same way I don’t go around raising the dead willy-nilly: by controlling my natural gifts.”
“So, without control, you can cause the dead to rise spontaneously?”
“No, not exactly. Let’s meet this mystery man, Slane. I have to meet up with the local police later.”
He led the way into the church without another word. The church smelled old, like mildew and water and . . . weariness. I’d never thought a church could have a feel to it like a person who had seen too much and needed to rest. How did you let a church rest? I genuflected and crossed myself automatically and then I went up the church aisle.
Slane led us to a man sitting in one of the pews. He had long black hair shot through with silver and white, not gray, so that the contrast in colors didn’t look so much like age as just the way his hair was colored. I knew plenty of people who would have loved to have the color combo as a dye job, but nothing was going to look quite like the real thing. Slane moved past the man so that I could sit next to him. Nicky sat on the other side of me; Kaazim and Jake sat in the pew behind us.
The stranger looked at me with huge black eyes, so like Riley’s that it startled me for a second, like looking into the eyes of the dead. Was it a premonition or just a family likeness?