by Хлоя Нейл
“Sometimes the only way to counter prejudice is to remind them how similar we are. To challenge their perceptions of what it means to be vampire . . . or human. Besides, he wouldn’t have asked who we were if he hadn’t at least suspected, and lying probably would have irritated him further.”
“Quite possibly.”
He smiled magnanimously. “Besides, you clearly wooed them with your cream cheese and double-bacon talk.”
“Who wouldn’t be wooed by cream cheese and double-bacon talk? I mean, other than vegetarians, I guess. But as we have thoroughly established, vegetarianism is not my gig.”
Ethan opened my car door. “No, Sentinel, it is not.”
I’d climbed inside and he did the same, but he didn’t start the car right away.
“Problems?” I asked.
He frowned. “I’m not sure I’m ready to return to the House. Not that I’d prefer to be at Creeley Creek, of course, but until I go back to Hyde Park, the drama hasn’t quite solidified.” He glanced at me. “Does that make sense?”
Only a four-hundred-year-old Master vampire would wonder if a grad student could understand procrastination. “Of course it does.
Procrastination is a very human emotion.”
“I’m not sure humans have a monopoly on procrastination. And, more important, I’m not sure this counts as procrastination.” He turned back again and started the ignition. “Unlike what you’re doing.”
“What I’m doing?”
He smiled just a little—a tease of a smile.
“Procrastinating,” he said. “Avoiding the inevitability of you and me.”
“How long does ‘inevitability’ take when you’re immortal?”
He grinned and pulled the Mercedes away from the curb. “I suppose we’ll find out.”
One summer night in Chicago. Three sets of battle lines drawn.
The protesters were still outside when we returned, their apparent hatred of us undiminished. On the other hand, their energy did seem to be a little diminished; this time, they were sitting on the narrow strip of grass between the sidewalk and street. Some sat in pop-up camping chairs. Others sat on blankets in pairs, one’s head on the other’s shoulder, given the late hour. Late-night prejudice was apparently exhausting.
Malik met us at the door, folder in hand; Ethan had given him a heads-up call in the car on the way back to the House.
Malik was tall, with cocoa skin, pale green eyes, and closely cropped hair. He had the regal bearing of a prince in training—shoulders back, jaw set, eyes scanning and alert, as if waiting for marauders to scale the castle walls.
“Militiamen and arrest warrants,” Malik said.
“I’m not sure it’s advisable for you two to leave the House together anymore.”
Ethan made a snort of agreement. “At this point, I’d tend to agree with you.”
“Tate indicated the supposed incident was violent?”
“Exceptionally so, according to the firsthand account,” Ethan said.
Once we were in Ethan’s office and he’d closed the door behind us, he got to the heart of it. “The story is, the vamps lost control and killed three humans. But Mr. Jackson’s description rang more of uncontrolled bloodlust than of a typical rave.”
“Mr. Jackson?” Malik asked.
Ethan headed for his desk. “Our eyewitness.
Potentially under the influence, but sober enough that Tate was apparently convinced. And by convinced, I mean he’s threatening my arrest if we don’t fix the problem, whatever it is.”
Malik, eyes wide, looked between the two of us. “He’s serious, then.”
Ethan nodded. “He’s had the warrant drawn.
And that makes this problem our current focus.
Tate said the incident occurred in West Town.
Look through your rave intel again. Any connections to that neighborhood? Any talk about violence? Anything that would suggest the scale the witness talked about?”
That assignment given, Ethan looked at me.
“When the sun sets, talk to your grandfather.
Ask him to track down what they can about the Jackson incident—the vampires involved, Houses, whatever—and any new information they’ve gotten about the raves. This may not actually be one, but at the moment it’s the best lead we’ve got. And one way or the other,” he added, looking between us, “let’s close these things down, shall we?”
“Liege,” I agreed with a nod. I’d definitely visit my grandfather, but my circle of friends had grown a little wider over the last few months. I’d recently been asked to join the Red Guard, a kind of vampire watchdog group that kept an eye on Master vamps and the GP. I’d declined the invitation, but I’d made use of the resource, calling on the RG for backup during the attack on the House. This might be the time to make that call again. . . .
“And this McKetrick fellow?” Malik asked.
“He’ll wait,” Ethan said, determination in his eyes. “He’ll wait until hell freezes over, because we’re not leaving Chicago.”
I’d visit my grandfather when the sun set. But first, I had a couple more hours of darkness and many hours of daylight to get through.
All the bedrooms in the House, which accommodated about ninety of Cadogan’s three-hundred-odd vampires, looked like small dorm rooms. A bed. A bureau. A nightstand. Small closet, small bathroom. They weren’t exactly fancy, but they gave us a respite from vampire drama. Given the messes we tended to get into, drama free was definitely a good thing.
My second-floor room—just like the rest of the House—still smelled like construction. New paint. Varnish. Drywall. Plastic. It smelled good somehow, like a new beginning. A fresh start.
The storm broke overhead just as I shut my door, rain beginning to pelt the shuttered window in my room. I peeled off my suit and toed off Mary Jane heels, then headed to my small bathroom, where I scrubbed my face. The makeup washed off easily. The memories, on the other hand, weren’t going anywhere.
Those were the tough things to ignore—the sounds, the expressions, the sensation of Ethan and his body. I’d tried to lock the memories away, to keep my mind clear of them in order to get my work done. But they were still there.
They stung a little less now, but you couldn’t unring the bell. For better or worse, I’d probably always have those memories with me.
When I’d dressed again in a tank top and shorts, I glanced back at the clock. I had two hours to kill until dawn, which meant I had an hour to kill until my weekly date with my other favorite blond vampire.
My first task—taking care of basic vampiric necessities. I walked down the hallway to the second-floor kitchen, smiling at a couple of vaguely familiar-looking vampires as I passed them. Each of the House’s aboveground floors had a kitchen, a very handy thing since vampiric emergencies didn’t respect cafeteria hours. I opened the fridge and plucked out two drink boxes of type A blood (prepared by the lamely named Blood4You, our delivery service), then headed back to my room. Most vamps were fortunate enough to retain a pretty good hold on their bloodlust, me included. But just because I wasn’t ripping at the seams of the boxes didn’t mean I didn’t need the blood. Most of the time, bloodlust in vamps was kind of like thirst in humans; if you waited to drink until you were truly thirsty, it was probably already too late.
While waiting for her highness’s arrival, I poked a straw into one of the drink boxes and pored through the stack of books that was beginning to crawl its way up my bedroom wall.
It was my TBR—my To Be Read stack. The usual subjects were there. Chick lit. Action. A Pulitzer Prize winner. A romance novel about a pirate and a damsel in a low-cut blouse. (What?
Even a vampire enjoys a little bodice ripping now and again.)
Even though I’d spent the final hours of more than a few evenings in my vampire dorm room, my TBR stack hadn’t gotten any shorter. With each book I finished, I found a replacement in the House’s library. And I’d occasionally wake at dusk to find a pile of books o
utside my door, presumably left by the House librarian, another Novitiate vampire. His selections were usually related to politics: stories about the ancient conflicts between vampires and shape-shifters; biographies of the one hundred most vampire-friendly politicians in Western history; time lines of vampiric events in history. Unfortunately, no matter how serious the topic, the names were usually just silly.
Get to the Point: Vampire Contributions in Western Architecture.
Fangs and Balances: Vampire Politicians in History.
To Drink or Not to Drink: A Vampire Dialectic.
Blood Sausage, Blood Stew, Blood Orange: Food for All Seasons.
And the awfully named Plasmatlas, which contained maps of important vampire locales.
Maybe the managing editor of the vampire press was the same guy who wrote the chapter titles for the Canon of the North American Houses, my vampire guidebook. Both were equally punny—and just as ridiculous.
The names aside, let’s be honest—with Ethan running around the House, there were definitely advantages to reading in my room. Was it Master avoidance? Absolutely. But when faced with the temptation of something you couldn’t have, why not find something more productive to do?
Put another way, why order dessert if you couldn’t take a bite?
So there I was—in a tank and boxers—cross-legged on my bed with To Drink or Not to Drink in hand, the rain pummeling the roof above me. I sighed, leaned back against the pillows, and sank into the words, hoping that I might find something moderately edutaining. Or infotaining.
Whatever.
An hour later, Lindsey knocked, and I dog-eared the book (a bad habit, I know, but I never had a bookmark handy).
The book had actually been informative, discussing the earliest recorded instances of a condition the author called hemoanhedonia—the inability to take pleasure from drinking blood.
Vamps with the condition tended to demonize those who drank. Add that to the fact that being a “practicing” vampire was dangerous in its own right—humans didn’t usually take kindly to being treated like sippy cups—and vampires began drinking together privately, away from the criticism. Abracadabra, raves are born.
With that historical nugget in mind, I put the book on the nightstand and opened the door.
Lindsey, fellow guard and my best friend in the House (assuming Ethan didn’t count, and I don’t think he did), stood in the hallway with a blond ponytail, killer figure, and silly smile on her face. She wore jeans and a black T-shirt with CADOGAN printed in white block letters across the front. Her feet were bare, her toenails painted gleaming gold.
“Hi, blondie.”
“Merit. I like those duds.” She cast an appraising glance at my ILLINOIS IS FOR LOVERS! tank top and shamrock-patterned Cubs shorts.
“Off-duty Cadogan Sentinel at your service.
Come on in.”
She hit the bed. I shut the door behind her.
One of our earliest dates as new friends had been a night in her room with pizza and reality television. It wasn’t exactly cerebral, but it gave us a chance to be silly for a little while, to be concerned with which celebutante was dating which rock star or who was winning this week’s crazy challenge . . . instead of worrying about which groups of people were trying to kill us. The latter was exhausting after a while.
I flipped on my tiny television (my Sentinel stipend at work) and changed the channel to tonight’s reality opera, which involved male contestants solving puzzles so they could escape from an island of ex-girlfriends.
It was high-quality stuff. Classy stuff.
I joined Linds on the bed and pulled a pillow behind my head.
“How was the meeting with Tate?” she asked.
“Drama, drama, drama. Luc will fill you in.
Suffice it to say, Ethan could be in Cook County lockup next week.”
“Sullivan may have a heart of coal, but I bet he looks really good in orange. And stripes.
Rawr,” she said, curling her fingers like a cat.
Lindsey was even less convinced that Ethan had had a legitimate post-breakup change of heart. But that didn’t make him any less pretty.
“I’m sure he’ll appreciate your compliments when he’s climbing into that jumpsuit,” I said.
“Although Luc might get jealous.”
As a guard, Luc was Lindsey’s boss. He was tall and touslehaired, his dark blond locks sun streaked from years, I imagined, as a boots-wearing cowboy on some high-plains ranch where cattle and horses outnumbered humans and vampires. Luc kept the boots after becoming a vampire, and he’d developed a monumental crush on Lindsey. Long story short, nothing had come of it until the attack on the House. Then they started spending more time together.
I didn’t think it was überserious—more like a movie night here, a snack at sunset there. But it did seem like he’d finally managed to push through the emotional barriers she’d erected to keep him at a distance. I completely approved of that development. Luc had pined pretty hard; it was about time he tasted victory.
“Luc can take care of himself,” Lindsey said, her voice dry.
“He’d enjoy it more if you were doing the caring.”
Lindsey held up a hand. “Enough boy talk. If you keep harping about Luc, I’m going to hit you with a Sullivan one-two combination, in which case I’ll be quizzing you about his hot bod and emotional iciness for the rest of the evening.”
“Spoilsport.” I pouted, but let it go. I knew she wasn’t completely convinced about Luc, even if she was spending more time with him, and I didn’t want to push her too far too fast. And to be fair, just because I thought they’d be good together didn’t mean she was obligated to date him. It was her life, and I could respect that.
So I let it go and settled into a comfy position beside her, and then let my mind drift on the waves of prerecorded, trashy television. As relaxation went, it didn’t exactly rank up there with a hotrock massage and mud bath, but a vampire took what a vampire could get.
CHAPTER FIVE
DOWN BY THE RIVER
When I awoke again, I dressed in my personal uniform—jeans and a tank top over high-heeled boots, my Cadogan medal, my sword, and my beeper—and headed out.
I stopped at the House gate, intending to get a sense of the gauntlet I’d have to walk to get to my car. One of the two fairies at the gate guessed my game.
“They are quiet tonight,” he said. “Ethan planned ahead.”
I glanced over at him. “He planned ahead?”
The fairy pointed down the street. I peeked outside the gate, smiling when I realized Ethan’s strategy. A food truck hawking Italian beefs was parked at the corner, a dozen protesters standing beside it, sandwiches in hand, their signs propped against the side of the truck.
Ethan must have made a phone call.
“Hot beef in the name of peace,” I murmured, then hustled across the street to my ride, a boxy orange Volvo. The car was old and had seen better days, but it got me where I needed to go.
Tonight, I needed to go south.
You’d think a name as fancy as
“Ombudsman” (which really meant “liaison”) would have gotten my grandfather a nice office in some fancy city building in the Loop.
But Chuck Merit, cop turned supernatural administrator, was a man of the people, supernatural or otherwise. So instead of a swank office with a river view, he had a squat brick building on the South Side in a neighborhood where the lawns were surrounded by chain-link fences.
Normally, the street was quiet. But tonight, cars spilled across the office’s yard and down the street a couple of blocks. I’d seen my grandfather surrounded by cars before—at his house in the midst of a water-nymph catfight. Those vehicles had been roadsters with recognizable vanity plates; these were beat-up, harddriven vehicles with rusty bumpers and paint splatter.
I parked and made my way across the yard.
The door was unlocked, unusual for the office, and music—Johnny Cash’s rumbling voic
eechoed throughout.
The building’s decor was all 1970s, but the problems were modern and paranormally driven.
So, I assumed, were the boxy men and women who mingled in the hallways, plastic cups of orange drink in hand. They turned and stared at me as I wove through them, their smallish eyes watching as I walked down the hallway. Their features were similar, like they might have been cousins related by common grandparents. All had slightly porcine faces, upturned noses, and apple cheeks.
On my way back to the office Catcher shared with Jeff Christopher—an adorable shifter with mad tech skills and a former crush on me—I passed a large table of fruit: spears of pineapple and red-orange papaya in a watermelon bowl; blood orange slices dotted with pomegranate seeds; and a pineapple shell full of blueberries and grapes. Snacks for the office guests, I assumed.
“Merit!” Jeff’s head popped out from a doorway, and he beckoned me inside. I squeezed through a few more men and women and into the office. Catcher was nowhere in sight.
“We saw you on the security monitor,” Jeff said, moving to the chair behind his bank of computer monitors. His brown hair was getting longer, and nearly reached his shoulders now. It was straight and parted down the middle, and currently tucked behind his ears. Jeff had paired a button-up shirt, as he always did, with khakis, his shirtsleeves rolled up to his elbows, presumably to give him room to maneuver over his monstrous keyboard. Jeff was tall and lanky, but what he lacked in mass he more than made up for in fighting skills. He was a shifter, and a force to be reckoned with.
“Thanks for finding me,” I told him. “What’s going on out there?”
“Open house for river trolls.”
Of course it was. “I thought the water nymphs controlled the river?”
“They do. They draw the lines; the trolls enforce them.”
“And the fruit?”
Jeff smiled. “Good catch. River trolls are vegetarians. Fruitarians, really. Offer up fruit and you can lure them out from beneath the bridges.”
