Dead in the Family

me. I looked up and met his mad eyes. I understood that my great-uncle was trying to tell me something. I wished to God I could make him rational. Just for five minutes. I stepped back from him and tried to figure out what he needed.
    “You’re not the only fairy left out in the human world. I know Claude’s here. Someone else is, too?” I would’ve enjoyed my telepathy for a couple of minutes.
    “Yes. Yes. ” His eyes were pleading with me to understand.
    I’d risk a direct question. “Who else is on this side of Faery?”
    “You don’t want to meet him,” Dermot assured me. “You have to be careful. He can’t decide right now. He’s ambivalent.”
    “Right.” Whoever “he” was, he wasn’t the only one who had mixed feelings. I wished I knew the right nutcracker that would open up Dermot’s head.
    “Sometimes he’s in your woods.” Dermot put his hands on my shoulders and squeezed gently. It was like he was trying to transmit things he couldn’t say directly into my flesh.
    “I heard about that,” I said sourly.
    “Don’t trust other fairies,” Dermot told me. “I shouldn’t have.”
    I felt like a lightbulb had popped on above my head. “Dermot, have you had magic put on you? Like a spell?”
    The relief in his eyes was almost palpable. He nodded frantically. “Unless they’re at war, fairies don’t like to kill other fairies. Except for Neave and Lochlan. They liked to kill everything. But I’m not dead. So there’s hope.”
    Fairies might be reluctant to kill their own kind, but they didn’t mind making them insane, apparently. “Is there anything I can do to reverse this spell? Can Claude help?”
    “Claude has little magic, I think,” Dermot said. “He’s been living like a human too long. My dearest niece, I love you. How is your brother?”
    We were back in nutty land. God bless poor Dermot. I hugged him, following an impulse. “My brother is happy, Uncle Dermot. He’s dating a woman who suits him, and she won’t take any shit off him, either. Her name is Michele—like my mom’s, but with one l instead of two.”
    Dermot smiled down at me. Hard to say how much of this he was absorbing.
    “Dead things love you,” Dermot told me, and I made myself keep smiling.
    “Eric the vampire? He says he does.”
    “Other dead things, too. They’re pulling on you.”
    That was a not-so-welcome revelation. Dermot was right. I’d been feeling Eric through our bond, as usual, but there were two other gray presences with me every moment after dark: Alexei and Appius Livius. It was a drain on me, and I hadn’t realized it until this moment.
    “Tonight,” Dermot said, “you’ll receive visitors.”
    So now he was a prophet. “Good ones?”
    He shrugged. “That’s a matter of taste and expedience.”
    “Hey, Uncle Dermot? Do you walk around this land very often?”
    “Too scared of the other one,” he said. “But I try to watch you a little.”
    I was figuring out if that was a good thing or a bad thing when he vanished. Poof! I saw a kind of blur and then nothing. His hands were on my shoulders, and then they weren’t. I assumed the tension of conversing with another person had gotten to Dermot.
    Boy. That had been really, really weird.
    I glanced around me, thinking I might see some other trace of his passage. He might even decide to return. But nothing happened. There wasn’t a sound except the prosaic growl of my stomach, reminding me that I hadn’t eaten lunch and that it was now suppertime. I went into the house on shaking legs and collapsed at the table. Conversation with a spy. Interview with an insane fairy. Oh, yes, phone Jason and tell him to be back on fairy watch. That was something I could do sitting down.
    After that conversation, I remembered to carry in the newspapers when I got my legs to working again. While I baked a Marie Callender’s pot pie, I read the past two days’ papers.
    Unfortunately, there was a lot of interest on the front page. There had been a gruesome murder in Shreveport, probably gang-related. The victim had been a young black man wearing gang colors, which was like a blinking arrow to the police, but he hadn’t been shot. He’d been stabbed multiple times, and then his throat had been slashed. Yuck. Sounded more personal than a gang killing to me. Then the next night the same thing had happened again, this time to a kid of nineteen who wore different gang colors. He’d died the same awful way. I shook my head over the