by Chloe Neill
“Like he’s going to be any different,” Catcher said, gesturing to Ethan, who was kissing the palms Elisa held out to him.
“Aspen stakes, but probably, yeah. Although I’d think you’d have to be pretty brave to call on the daughter of a Master vampire.”
“Especially the only daughter of a Master vampire,” Mallory said. “Her suitor is gonna have to come correct real quick.”
“That’s a good girl,” Ethan said as she squirmed in his arms. “Do you want to say hello to Lulu?”
Elisa nodded, and Ethan put her down. She waddled toward me, reached out a hand to touch Lulu’s hair. But before she made contact, she looked up at Mallory, who nodded.
“You can touch, Elisa.”
“Elisa,” I said, “do you remember how we said to love the baby?”
She nodded solemnly, her blond hair bouncing. “Careful.”
“That’s right.” I put my hand over hers, helped her softly touch her.
“Soft,” Elisa quietly said, raising her emerald green eyes to mine. “Baby soft?”
“Yes, she is. Like your baby?” Her baby was a floppy-eared, floppy-legged rabbit nearly as tall as she was that she’d dragged around by an ear as soon as she started walking. It had been a gift from Mallory, her first stuffed animal.
Elisa nodded gravely. “Baby,” she agreed. “Soft.”
“Good girl,” Mallory said. “You’re really good at that, Elisa.”
“Hep.”
“She likes to help,” I translated. “Ethan let her put a book on the shelves in his office yesterday, and she was pretty sure she’d earned her own House.”
“So she got his looks and his attitude?” Mallory said, glancing up at Ethan.
“And my charm,” he said.
There was a knock at the threshold. We looked back, found Margot in the doorway. She smiled at us. “We’re ready if you are.”
“I think we’re ready.” Hands on his hips, Ethan looked down at Elisa. “Would you like some cake?”
She just blinked up at him, gaze blank. This would be her first experience with cake, which made it special for both of us.
Ethan held out his hands, and she abandoned Lulu and me, practically jumped into his arms. He situated her on his hip again. “Let’s see if you can hold as much sugar as your mother does.”
Mallory snorted, climbed to her feet. I did the same, and carefully handed Lulu back to her. “I’m not sure that’s possible.”
“Says the woman who out-ate me at my own bachelorette party.”
“That was more than a year ago. When are you going to stop bringing that up?”
“When it stops serving my purpose.”
Mallory just shook her head. “Never change.”
“I’ll do my best.”
• • •
Some children might have shied away from a room full of dozens of humans and supernaturals, from the cheery music and the bundles of balloons that filled the House’s cafeteria. Those children probably hadn’t grown up in a House of vampires, loved within an inch of their lives.
Those children were not Elisa.
“Happy birthday, Elisa!” they called out when we entered. She screamed and clapped her little hands together, tried to wiggle out of Ethan’s arms.
“Okay, my little lemur. Hold on.” He put her on the floor and she dashed toward a rainbow-hued column of balloons that reached to the room’s high ceiling. She reached out a tentative hand and touched the column, watched it wobble beneath her touch.
She shrieked with joy and touched it again, then tried to drag it away from its column.
“Just to touch, honey,” my grandfather said, gently taking her free hand. Her face screwed up into angry lines before she realized who’d touched her. And that smile blossomed again.
“Give your Papaw a kiss?” He bent down to her, leaning on the cane he’d been using more frequently these days.
Elisa squeezed up her little face, closed her eyes, and leaned in, pressing her lips to his face.
“She got that expression from you, you know,” Ethan said, putting a hand at my waist.
I humphed.
“Good kiss,” my grandfather said. “I hear it’s your birthday.”
“Ree?” She looked back at me, her official translator.
“It’s your birthday,” I said. “And do you know what birthday girls get?” I pointed to the giant sheet cake—chocolate with emerald green icing—that sat on a table near the rest of the food, a high chair posed next to it, ready for the birthday girl. Elisa’s eyes went huge.
“Ree,” she said reverently.
Ethan smirked at the sound, and settled Elisa in the high chair. And she started immediately squirming for a better view of the cake.
She was definitely my kid.
“Ladies and gentlemen, people and . . . other,” Ethan said, glancing around.
The crowd knew their cue and chuckled just when they should have.
“We’re here today to celebrate the first birthday of the most amazing girl on the face of the Earth. And we wanted to take this opportunity to thank all of you for the support you’ve given us over the last twelve months. We couldn’t have managed it without you, without your love and support. Without your gratuitous diaper changings and willingness to experiment with pink milk.”
Pink milk was the concoction of blood and milk it had taken us nearly three months to work out. Elisa was a vampire, but she was also a child. We were writing the book on baby vampire nutrition. In the unlikely event anyone else might ever need the book . . .
I looked at Elisa, who stared happily around the crowd. “But I’m sure you’ll agree that she was totally worth it.”
“Hear, hear!” said my grandfather.
“To Elisa Isabel Sullivan,” I said.
While the crowd repeated her name, which amused the tiny blonde to no end, I lit the candles on the cake. Elisa’s eyes went astoundingly round.
“Ree,” she quietly said.
“And that’s all for you, Elisa,” Ethan said. Margot cut a piece of the cake, handed me the plate. Ethan fastened on a bib—much good it would do—and I put the cake slice on the high chair table.
Elisa stared at it. Gently, I dipped her finger into the green icing, then brought it to her mouth. She grinned and looked at her now-green finger, then dug her other hand into the icing and brought a sticky handful of it to her mouth. But before she dug in, she looked at me.
“Go ahead,” I said, nodding at her.
Elisa pushed icing into her mouth, giggling all the while, then dug both hands into the cake again.
“And that cry of joy at the taste of chocolate pretty much confirms she’s your daughter,” Mallory said, slinging an arm over my shoulders. “I mean, in case the labor wasn’t proof enough.”
“You just wait until Lulu’s a toddler,” I said, putting an arm around her waist. “There’s plenty of fun in store for you, too.”
• • •
We eventually said good-bye to our guests, and the Remains of the Cake (the lesser-known British novel) were finished off by a descending horde of hungry Cadogan vampires. It took two baths to remove Elisa’s skim coat of chocolate, and we were inching toward dawn by that point. She slept like a vampire—lights out at dawn, fully awake at dusk—with naps sprinkled during her waking hours.
We’d just given her a late bottle when Malik found us in Ethan’s office, sitting on the couch as we perused one of Elisa’s favorite books.
“Meek!” she said, clapping her hands together when she saw him.
“Ms. Sullivan,” he said, and she squealed with delight. Probably didn’t know what it meant, but she enjoyed it all the same. “There’s someone here to see you,” he told her, then glanced at us. “Of the shifter variety.”
Together, we walked into the
foyer, found Gabriel with Connor in his arms. Connor’s head was on his father’s shoulder.
Connor’s hair was as dark and curling as his mother’s, his eyes as blue as a spring sky. His fingers were clutched around a plastic giraffe, and he watched us with baleful eyes and the poked-out lip that said he was unhappy about his trip to Cadogan House.
“Sorry we missed the party.” Gabriel’s gaze narrowed at his son. “Someone had a tantrum.”
“He looks displeased,” Ethan agreed.
“Yeah,” Gabe said. “I offered him a cup of water.”
“A parent’s worst betrayal,” Ethan said soberly.
Gabriel’s mouth twitched. “I love my son. God and Pack willing, he’ll lead the NAC someday. But if there was a pill that would get him to adulthood that much faster, I’d take it.”
“Probably a good thing you missed cake time,” I said, imagining Connor smearing green frosting down the hallway. “But there’s plenty left, if you’d like a piece to go?”
“Let’s see how it goes.” He looked at Connor, brushed a dark curl from his face. “Would you like to say hi to Elisa, kiddo?”
In response, Connor buried his face in Gabe’s shoulder.
“We’ll get things started,” Ethan said, and carried Elisa to the front parlor, put her down on the rug in the middle of the floor, where she promptly sat down in her footie pajamas. It had been an exhausting night, evidently.
“Here we go,” Gabriel said, and put Connor on the floor in front of Elisa, giraffe still firmly in hand.
They hadn’t actually met yet. Scheduling vampire-shifter playdates hadn’t been the easiest thing to do, especially given the sheer number of people who’d wanted to lay eyes on Elisa, assure themselves that Ethan and I had actually managed to make her.
None of them, curiously, wanted to deal with her when she had soggy diapers, pureed carrots in her nose, or Spaghetti-Os in her hair.
For a long moment, Elisa and Connor just looked at each other.
“Doggy,” Elisa said.
I stared at her. “Did you just call him ‘Doggy’?”
Ethan lifted a brow at Gabriel. “Do I even want to know how she knows that?”
Gabriel grinned. “Magic is magic.”
“Doggy!” Elisa said again, this time with more force, and bounced on her butt.
Connor blinked at her, then looked up at Gabriel for support.
“She’s not wrong, son. Technically.”
Elisa looked at the toy in his hands, her eyes widening. “Doggy?”
Connor frowned, hugged the toy to his chest. But much like her father, Elisa was bound and determined to get what she wanted. She scooted forward on her bottom, touched a finger to the giraffe, and lifted those big green eyes to his. “Doggy?”
Connor’s eyes narrowed, a toddler not quite ready for sharing—or a shifter trying to distinguish enemy from friend.
“Doggy!” Elisa said, clapping her hands together. Then she laughed like she’d told herself the world’s funniest joke, and tossed her head around. “Doggy doggy doggy.”
“Not a dog,” Connor said with a burgeoning smile, and held out the giraffe. “Giraffe!” He said it with a hard “g,” so it came out more like “graph.” But close enough for Elisa’s eyes to widen with the thrill of a new word.
“Graph!” she said, and took the toy, mashed it against the rug like it was running. “Graph! Graph! Graph!”
“And I apologize for that,” Gabriel said.
“Graph!” Connor said with a grin, and they took turns marching the giraffe up and down the rug, Elisa occasionally laughing in that utterly selfless, completely happy way.
“The beginning of a beautiful friendship,” Ethan said with a smile.
Gabriel made a rough sound. “Now,” he said, gold and amber swirling in his eyes. “But you just wait—”
I knew where he was going, so I cut him off with a pointed finger. “No. No more prophecies unless you’ve got a time and place I need to be to keep my daughter safe. Barring that, she lives her own life, ‘tests’ or otherwise.” I didn’t want the pressure. Not anymore.
Gabriel went quiet, and for a moment I was afraid I’d pissed him off. But he was watching Connor and Elisa, brow furrowed in contemplation. “No one’s future is written completely. Not in stone. There are always choices to make, roads that could be taken. Life is in the choosing of them.”
Ethan reached out, put a hand at my back. “And they have to make their own choices, just as we did. Just as we do.”
Gabe grunted. “This got philosophical quickly,” he said, then glanced at me. “You sure you don’t want details?”
I narrowed my eyes at him. “Just tell me this—is there a happy ending?”
Screams erupted from the floor, and we all looked back again. Elisa had made the unforgiveable mistake of putting the giraffe on top of a plastic dollhouse. Because toddlers.
We all sighed.
“I guess that answers that,” Ethan said, and we went to separate our screaming children. “On the other hand, I’m pretty sure our first meeting looked fairly similar. And look what we have now.”
I glanced at the crying child, plastic giraffe in her mouth, now kicking at the shifter who was trying to take it back from her. It didn’t get any more real than that. Or any more perfect.
“Everything,” I said. “We have everything.”
Don’t miss the first novel in Chloe Neill’s Heirs of Chicagoland series!
WILD HUNGER
Coming in 2018 from Berkley
As the only vampire child ever born, some believed Elisa Sullivan had all the luck. But the magic that helped bring her into the world left her with a dark secret. Shifter Connor Keene, the only son of North American Central Pack Apex Gabriel Keene, is the only one she trusts with it. But she’s a vampire and the daughter of a Master and a Sentinel, and he’s prince of the Pack and its future king.
When the assassination of an ambassador brings old feuds to the fore again, Elisa and Connor must choose between love and family, between honor and obligation, before Chicago disappears forever.
Read on for a look at the first book in Chloe Neill’s new Devil’s Isle series,
THE VEIL
Available now wherever books and e-books are sold
The French Quarter was thinking about war again.
Booms echoed across the neighborhood, vibrating windows and shaking the shelves at Royal Mercantile—the finest purveyor of dehydrated meals in New Orleans.
And antique walking sticks. We were flush with antique walking sticks.
I sat at the store’s front counter, working on a brass owl that topped one of them. The owl’s head was supposed to turn when you pushed a button on the handle, but the mechanism was broken. I’d taken apart the tiny brass pieces and found the problem—one of the small toothy gears had become misaligned. I just needed to slip it back into place.
I adjusted the magnifying glass over the owl, its jointed brass wings spread to reveal its inner mechanisms. I had a thin screwdriver in one hand, a pair of watchmaking tweezers in the other. To get the gear in place, I had to push one spring down and another up in that very small space.
I liked tinkering with the store’s antiques, to puzzle through broken parts and sticky locks. It was satisfying to make something work that hadn’t before. And since the demand for fancy French sideboards and secretaries wasn’t exactly high these days, there was plenty of inventory to pick from.
I nibbled on my bottom lip as I moved the pieces, carefully adjusting the tension so the gear could slip in. I had to get the gear into the back compartment, between the rods, and into place between the springs. Just a smidge to the right, and . . .
Boom.
I jumped, the sound of another round of fireworks shuddering me back to the store—and the gear that now floated in the air
beside me, bobbing a foot off the counter’s surface.
“Damn,” I muttered, heart tripping.
I’d moved it with my mind, with the telekinetic magic I wasn’t supposed to have. At least, not unless I wanted a lifetime prison sentence.
I let go of the magic, and the gear dropped, hit the counter, bounced onto the floor.
My heart now pounding in my chest, the fingers on both hands crossed superstitiously, I hopped off the stool and hurried to the front door to check the box mounted on the building across the street. It was a monitor with a camera on top, triggered when the amount of magic in the air rose above background levels—like when a Sensitive accidentally moved a gear.
I’d gotten lucky; the light was still red. I must not have done enough to trigger it, at least from this distance. I was still in the clear—for now. But damn, that had been close. I hadn’t even known I’d been using magic.
Boom.
Already pumped with nervous energy, I jumped again.
“Good lord,” I said, pushing the door open and stepping outside onto the threshold between the store’s bay windows, where MERCANTILE was mosaicked in tidy blue capitals.
It was mid-October, and the heat and humidity still formed a miserable blanket across the French Quarter. Royal Street was nearly empty of people.
The war had knocked down half the buildings in the Quarter, which gave me a clear view of the back part of the neighborhood and the Mississippi River, which bordered it. Figures moved along the riverbank, testing fireworks for the finale of the festivities. The air smelled like sparks and flame, and wisps of white smoke drifted across the twilight sky.
It wasn’t the first time we’d seen smoke over the Quarter.
On an equally sweltering day in October seven years ago, the Veil—the barrier that separated humans from a world of magic we hadn’t even known existed—was shattered by the Paranormals who’d lived in what we now called the Beyond.
They wanted our world, and they didn’t have a problem eradicating us in the process. They spilled through the fracture, bringing death and destruction—and changing everything: Magic was now real and measurable and a scientific fact.
