by Chloe Neill
Ethan and I grabbed food, but took it back to the office to talk through status while we ate. Ethan no longer ate his hot dog with a fork off undoubtedly expensive China, and he’d striped it with neon relish and added sport peppers, which brought it closer to a proper Chicago dog. I was getting through.
“Would you like to tell me about your RG visit?” he asked, taking a bite.
“Nothing changed,” I said. “That’s really all there is to say. We’re at an impasse.”
“Odd. You’d think meeting atop the Navy Pier Ferris wheel would make for a happy occasion.”
I started to say something, then looked at him. “Are you trying to guess where the meetings are?”
“I would do no such thing.”
“You completely would. But, seriously, the Ferris wheel?”
He formed a box with his fingers. “I believe it has cars.”
I just shook my head. “How have you lived here so long without a ride on the Ferris wheel?”
“I’m a vampire,” he said, as if that was the obvious explanation.
I just sighed.
“Did they recognize the Rogue?”
“No. No one recognized him, and no one had seen any alchemy. They don’t seem naive to the possibility Reed’s our villain, but they don’t seem terribly interested in doing anything about it, either. I gave them a speech about how we’re the allies, not the enemies, and then walked out and left them to think about it.”
Ethan smiled, attacked his dog. “There may be a Master in you yet.”
“Don’t even joke about that. I know you have to look at bank statements and spreadsheets.”
“There’s nothing like the beauty of a good P-and-L statement.”
“I’ll take your word for it.”
There was a knock on the threshold, and we both looked up.
Jonah stood in the doorway.
Assuming he was there for me, I wiped my mouth with a napkin, rose. “Hey. Is everything all right?”
“Yeah. I’m sorry to interrupt your dinner. Could we talk? Merit, I mean.”
I blinked. I hadn’t expected to see him here, much less to pose anything in the form of a question. I’d expected yelling, angry text messages, demands that I return the Midnight High T-shirts and medal I’d received when I was inducted. But asking me to talk? That was a new one.
“Sure,” I said, and glanced at Ethan, got his nod.
I took a final drink of milk shake, pushed my chair under the table again. “Don’t eat my fries while I’m gone.”
“Finders keepers,” he muttered, and snatched one from my plate.
• • •
“Sorry to interrupt your dinner,” Jonah said as we walked down the hall toward the front of the House. I wasn’t in the mood for another session of Confessions in the Garden, so I opted for the smaller of the House’s two front parlors. It was a cozy room, with a wall of bookshelves, a couch, and a few chairs. It was also empty of vampires, since most of the Novitiates who lived in the House were in the cafeteria chowing down.
I took a seat in an armchair. He took the one across from me.
“No problem. I’m surprised you’re here, after . . .”
He nodded, looked at his hands, rubbed them together. Was he nervous? “To tell you the truth, I am, too,” he said. “Listen, about the lighthouse—”
“Yeah, I’m sorry about that.”
He gazed up at me, eyes bright. “Don’t be sorry. You were absolutely right. And you said something that people have been thinking for a while now. The world is different than it was when the RG was created, and we haven’t really adapted.” He paused, seeming to consider. “Historically, the good vampires were the ones who didn’t make trouble. Who kept their heads down. The bad vampires didn’t. They drew attention to themselves.”
“That’s a very pre-Celina attitude,” I said, since she’d been the one to out our existence to the rest of the world.
“Exactly. And it’s where they still are. For a long time, it worked. When our focus was staying quiet and safe, it totally worked. But you’re right. It doesn’t work anymore. It’s time we change.”
He looked up at me. “It’s going to be hard for some to adapt. Some will be afraid, and some will probably leave the RG. But I don’t think we have a choice.”
“We?” I asked, very deliberately.
The question must have made him antsy, because he rose, walked to the bookshelves, putting space between us.
“You still think I’m a traitor to the cause,” I said. “Because I won’t spy on him.”
He ran a hand through his auburn locks. “No. It’s more complicated than that. And not really complicated at all.”
Silence descended while he looked everywhere but at me. And I just stared at him, baffled. Finally, after a good two minutes had passed, Jonah cleared his throat again and looked at me with stormy blue eyes. “I handled the request poorly—asking you to watch Ethan, to report on Ethan—because I still have feelings for you.”
I stared at him. “You . . . what?”
“Yeah,” he said with a sad little shrug. “I haven’t been able to shake it.”
I was staggered. Flattered, absolutely—who wouldn’t be?—but also staggered. I’d been with Ethan for virtually our entire partnership, and Jonah knew how I’d felt. I hadn’t done anything to encourage him, at least as far as I was aware, but that didn’t really make me feel any better.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “That really sucks.”
He threw his head back and laughed until he was wiping tears from his eyes. “Sorry,” he said. “Cathartic laugh.” And then he shook it off. “Yeah. Unrequited feelings are never fun. I guess that’s why your refusal to report about the House felt like a betrayal. Not because you picked Ethan, or not just anyway. But because I lost out on the piece of you that should have been mine—our RG partnership. He won that, too. And it pissed me off.”
He looked back at me, smiled sadly. “I just, I don’t know, feel a connection. Which you don’t share.”
“I’m sorry you’ve been hurt by that.”
Another half laugh. “I’m not sure ‘hurt’ captures the real poetic desperation of unrequited love. Which, if I’m honest with myself, is part of the draw. Oh, the poignancy of wanting someone you can’t have.”
This time, I smiled, too. “Maybe you could find someone a little more emotionally available?”
Jonah snorted. “I can’t even ask if you have a sister, since I took her to prom.”
“Oh my God, I forgot about that. Small world. And, I mean, her husband wouldn’t appreciate me trying to get you together again.”
On the other hand, that didn’t mean I didn’t have ideas. And if fixing Jonah up would ease the tension between us, I was more than happy to help. In fact, hadn’t someone just told me she was ready to date again?
“How do you feel about food?”
He glanced at me, eyebrows lifted. “Is that a trick question?”
“Nope. Completely earnest.”
He lifted a shoulder. “I mean, I like food.”
That worked for me. Now I just had to talk to my new target.
“So what do we do now?” I asked. “I mean about the RG.”
One hand on his hip, another on the bookshelf, fingers tapping, he frowned as he contemplated. “I think I should go back to the RG, present them with a specific plan. I think it’s harder to imagine themselves as crusaders. But if we give them a task, and they begin to see their new role that way, it might help.”
“You up for working on some alchemy?”
He smiled, and some of the old humor was back in his eyes. “I am. I’ve got permission from Scott.”
“Good. Because there’s a lot of work to do. Confusing, confusing work.”
“I’m willing to learn. I’m glad we had a
chance to talk about all this. To clear the air.”
That clear air was fractured by the huge sound of metallic wrenching.
“The front gate,” I said, and had just pivoted into the foyer when the blast blew in the front door.
• • •
Sometime later, I blinked. Once, then twice, until the two images of the foyer’s coffered ceiling above me combined into one again.
I was on my back on the floor, eyes stinging from dust and smoke, my ears ringing from the concussion of noise. I pushed myself up on my elbows, ribs aching on my right side. Jonah lay across my legs, facedown, arms sprawled. He’d turned his body toward mine as the wall of hot air hit us, and the blast had hit him full-on, throwing us both across the foyer until we’d nearly hit the staircase.
I lifted my gaze. The front doors were broken and splintered on the floor, the walls around them cracked and crumbling, smoke pouring into the House. There’d been a vase of flowers on the round table in the center of the foyer. The table was in splinters, the vase shattered, the flowers scattered across the floor among pieces of the door and spilled water.
Since no one else had come out to investigate, I guessed I’d been out for only a few seconds.
As carefully as I could manage, I rolled Jonah onto his back. There was a large cut across his forehead, streaming blood and sending magic into the air. Jonah and I had complementary magic, uniquely compatible. My body, wounded and eager, wanted that blood so badly my hands began to shake.
“No,” I muttered, grabbing a piece of cloth from the floor, probably part of the foyer table’s cover, and pressed it to the laceration.
I tapped his cheeks. “Jonah! Jonah! Wake up!” And when he didn’t, I put fingers on the pulse point in his wrist. He had a pulse, but it was slow.
Shots began to ring out, bullets whizzing through the front of the House with the speed of an automatic weapon. I ducked, covering him with my body, lowered my lips to his ear. “If you die, I will personally kick your ass.”
The bullets kept coming, spinning through the hallway to splinter the wood of the stairs, the plaster and art on the opposite wall.
There was a break in the noise, probably as guns were reloaded.
Help would come soon. But in the meantime, I had to get him out of here. Wincing as pain shot through my torso, I grabbed him under the arms, pulled him into the parlor.
Merit!
Thank God for psychic connections. I’m all right, I told Ethan, the fear in his voice keen. I’m in the parlor. Front door’s gone. I think they hit it with a grenade, and they’re still firing. Jonah’s down; he shielded me. I’ve dragged him into the front parlor. Too much smoke to see the perps, but this kind of fight doesn’t seem like Reed. Open the arsenal, Ethan. We’re going to need it.
Covering fire en route, Sentinel. Keep your head down.
On that. There wasn’t much else I could do. Not with Jonah unconscious. Bullets wouldn’t kill me, but I could dodge them. He couldn’t, and I wasn’t about to leave him alone.
A bullet zinged through the wall over my head, and I ducked again, covering Jonah as plaster filled the air.
I reached up, pulled down a blanket from the sofa, flipped it over his body. That would at least keep dust out of his eyes and mouth. I belly-crawled across the floor to the far end of the window, used the end of the couch as a shield to raise up.
There was a Humvee in the front yard, the hook and winch on the front still attached to a mangled piece of the front gate.
The human guards who’d been at the gate were on the ground beside one of the giant brick pillars. They were blood streaked, but had weapons in hand, and were shooting the enemy combatants who’d taken positions around the Humvee.
The guards wouldn’t have let someone winch off the gate without a fight. They must have been targeted first, wounded or moved aside, and then the winch was hooked up. And then the Humvee came through, probably lobbed a grenade at the front door.
“You sons of bitches!” A man with broad shoulders, dark skin, and a shaved head pointed an enormous gun at the House. “You goddamn bloodsucking assholes! You wanna fuck with us? We will destroy you.”
Angry magic buzzed through the air like an upended hornets’ nest.
It wasn’t Adrien Reed, or his sorcerer, or his vampire.
It was a shifter.
• • •
Claxons sounded as the House went on full alert. Two figures in black moved through the lobby. Guards, although they moved so quickly I couldn’t tell who. Others would go around the back, and temps would be stationed on the roof. Luc hadn’t skimped on the response plans.
Ethan darted into the room with a belted sword, another in hand, and a handgun. Vampires didn’t usually use guns. But then again, sups didn’t usually come at the House with an army’s worth of weapons.
He hit the floor beside Jonah, took his pulse. “Knocked out?”
“I think so. I haven’t been able to wake him.” I swallowed down the ball of emotions that rose suddenly to my throat. “He moved in front of me when they blasted the door.”
“Looks like he took a good blow to the head,” Ethan said, lifting the cloth I’d placed on the wound. “Concussion, I’d bet. I wish Delia was here.”
“She’s not?”
“At the hospital. She’s en route, and we have other vampires trained as medics. But she’s the best.”
I had no reason to argue with that. “They’re shifters, Ethan. Shifters who are totally pissed off about something.”
He turned to me, stared. “Shifters. Pissed about Caleb Franklin? That was nearly a week ago.”
“I don’t know. I just know the guy who looks to be calling the shots is a shifter, and he’s pissed.”
A vampire I’d seen around the House but didn’t know personally—a man with tan skin and black hair—dodged into the room, a medical kit in hand, and fell to his knees beside Jonah.
“Unconscious,” Ethan said. “Head wound.”
“On it, Sire,” the vampire said, opening his kit and arranging his tools.
“Thank you, Ramón. Take care.”
“Always. You, too, Sire.”
Ethan nodded, looked back at me, handed me a katana. I unsheathed it, took in the beautifully engraved blade, glanced back at him.
“One of yours?”
“Peter Cadogan’s,” Ethan said. “Luc brought it up from the arsenal.” Because mine was still in our apartments; I hadn’t taken it with me to the lighthouse. “Seems appropriate our Sentinel bear it to protect the House.” Ethan rose, offered me a hand, pressed a hard kiss to my lips. “Let’s get it done.”
• • •
The air was thick with blood, with smoke, with magic. Sirens were closing in, and house and car alarms were sounding up and down the street.
A shifter rushed toward me, damp footsteps on grass. I pivoted, turned, sliced with the katana. He crumpled to the ground, screaming as he held an arm against the laceration across his abdomen. The air filled with the powerful scent of shifter’s blood. My predatory instincts kicked into overdrive, wanting that blood, craving it. Once again, this wasn’t the time or the place.
Another man came charging at me in a bruised leather jacket covered in NAC and motorcycle club patches. He had a bowie knife, its blade down as though he meant to take me with a single thrust.
I had two questions: Why were NAC shifters attacking us, and where the hell was Gabriel?
“Fucking vampires! We know what you did!”
“We didn’t do anything!” I yelled back, using the spine of my katana to block his strike. The spine caught in one of the notches in the serrated blade, and I twisted the sword, yanking it out of his hand and sending it flying through the air. It hit the ground fifteen feet away. The shifter gave one quick glance at his lost weapon before deciding hand-to-hand would be just
as effective.
“You’re trying to kill us! Trying to take us out!” Light flashed as magic surrounded him, ensconced him. And when it cleared, I was facing an enormous ruddy-colored wolf. His hackles were raised, and his massive yellow teeth dripped saliva.
Now I began to sweat. I was skilled at fighting two-legged creatures. I didn’t exactly have the skill set for a wolf, even if I could get over the emotional baggage of intentionally hurting an animal.
When he leaped at me again, my hesitancy disappeared. I was a predator, too, with a mighty fine survival instinct.
I spun to dodge him, brought my sword around low, catching the tip of the blade on the back of one of his paws. He yelped and stumbled. Light flashed and magic spun around him again, and then he was in human form, naked and screaming at the gaping and bloody wound in his left Achilles tendon.
That was why shifters so often fought in their human forms. A shift into animal form would heal any injuries they’d suffered as humans, but the magic didn’t work in reverse.
“Maybe think before you attack next time,” I murmured. My store of sympathy was tapped out.
“Sentinel!” Juliet screamed, and I glanced back just in time to dodge the enormous fist aimed at my head. I hit the ground, rolled, came up again with my katana in front of me. It was the shifter who’d screamed and aimed the automatic weapon at the House.
“Thanks!” I yelled out to Juliet. She’d brought a handgun to this particular fight, fired neat shots into the shoulder of the first female shifter I’d seen tonight. They were the shifter version of unicorns—public sightings were rare, especially in battle.
I looked back to my enemy, who eyed me with loathing that seemed to radiate off him.
“You think you’re better than we are? You think you have the right?”
“Only in this particular instance,” I said as he punched again with his right fist. I dodged, but he grazed my sore shoulder, sending a shock of hot pain all the way to my toes. I went into a crouch, aimed an elbow into his stomach when he moved over me. The shifter grunted, stumbled back a few feet before regaining his footing.