Dinner was ready by the time we made it into the kitchen, our fingers linked together as we walked. Morgan slipped his hand away and presented his bundle of red-tipped white tulips to Mallory. “Thanks for having me over.”
“Oh, these are gorgeous.” She enveloped him in a hug he didn’t look like he was expecting, but seemed inordinately pleased by. “And you’re welcome. We’re glad you could come.”
Mallory gave him a bright smile, and gave me a concealed thumbs-up, then set about finding a vase for the flowers while Morgan and Catcher said their manly hellos—consisting of a symbolic head bob from Catcher (of the “You’re in my lair now” variety) and a responding nod from Morgan (of the “You are clearly the king of this castle” variety).
A vase in one hand and the flowers in the other, Mallory paused at the threshold of the kitchen. “Merit, do you need blood?”
I didn’t even need to think about it. Although I hadn’t had a run of overwhelming bloodlust since my first week as a vampire—the First Hunger that had led me to nearly plant my fangs in Ethan’s neck, and a second bout of drinking roused by an unpleasant discussion with my father—I wasn’t going to risk it, and tried to be preventative by drinking the Canon’s recommended pint every other day. Vampires were hardly the monsters we were made out to be in fairy tales and television shows. We were hardly different from humans, but for the genetic mutation, fangs, silvering eyes, and periodic penchant for blood.
What? I said hardly different.
“Yes, I need blood,” I told her, petulant as a teenager reminded to take her vitamins, and snatched a bag of Blood4You Type A from the refrigerator. Although Mallory, as a now-former ad exec, found the name embarrassingly sophomoric, she appreciated not being my lunch.
I glanced back at Morgan, waved the bag at him. “Hungry?”
He moved closer to me, gaze surprisingly possessive, arms crossed over his chest, and leaned down. “You realize that we’d be sharing blood?”
“Is that a problem?”
His brow furrowed in confusion. “No, no. It’s just. . . .”
He paused, and I blinked. Did I miss something? I tried to flip mentally back through chapter three of the Canon (“Drink Me”), which discussed some of the etiquette of vampire drinking. Vampires could drink directly from humans or other vampires, and I’d witnessed firsthand the sensuality of it when Amber had been Ethan’s beverage of choice. But the intimacy of drinking prepackaged blood in front of an audience escaped me. I’d seen Ethan do it just the other day.
On the other hand, Morgan was a Navarre vampire, prohibited from drinking blood directly from humans. The Canon didn’t get into the emotions of it, but maybe even drinking from plastic assumed a greater importance when it was the only way you could share the act.
“Is that a problem?” I asked.
He must have reconciled my ignorance, as he finally smiled back. “Must be a House thing. Yeah, I’ll take a pint. B if you have it.”
There was a bag of B in the refrigerator, and I concluded his palate was more sensitive than mine if he could taste the difference in the coagulant qualities of a bag of blood. I was about to reach for two glasses when I realized that, in addition to the apparent philosophical differences, he might ingest differently, too.
My hand on the open cabinet door, I turned back to him. “How do you take it?”
“Just pour it into a glass.” He frowned, scratched absently at his temple. “You know, maybe we need to have some kind of mixer. Get Cadogan and Navarre vamps together, get them talking. It seems like there’s a lot we don’t know about each other.”
“I was just thinking that the other day, actually,” I said, thinking Ethan would be thrilled at the opportunity to build rapport, and potentially an alliance, with the folks from Navarre.
I pulled down waffle-etched glasses from a cabinet and opened the plastic valves in the top of the bags, filling a glass for each of us. I handed one to Morgan, and took a sip of mine.
Morgan sipped from his own glass, eyes on me as he drank. His eyes didn’t silver, but his predatory, seductive gaze left little doubt about his line of thinking. He drained the glass without taking a breath, chest heaving when he finally finished it.
And then, with the tip of his tongue, he grabbed a single drop that had caught on his upper lip.
“I win,” he said, very softly.
It took Mallory’s voice to drag my gaze away from his mouth. “All right, kids,” she said from the dining room, “I think we’re ready.”
I took the final drink from my glass, put both our glasses into the sink, and accompanied Morgan into the dining room. His tulips were in the vase and the accessories of fancy dining—place mats, cloth napkins, silverware, and wineglasses—lay on the table before each of the four chairs. Our plates were already laden with food—fillets of salmon, herb-sprinkled rice, and spears of steamed asparagus—larger portions for the calorie-sucks that were modern-day vampires.
Catcher and Mallory were already seated on two sides of the table. We took the remaining two chairs, then Morgan picked up his wineglass and raised it to both of them. “To good friends,” he said.
“To vampires,” Mallory said, clinking her glass against mine.
“No,” Catcher said. “To Chicago.”
Dinner was great. Good food, good conversation, good company. Catcher and Mallory were entertaining, as usual, and Morgan was charming, listening intently to Mallory’s stories of my antics.
Of course, because I’d been a grad student the entire time that I’d known her, there weren’t that many antics to report. There were, however, plenty of stories about my geekiness, including the tale of what she called my “Juilliard” stage.
“She’d been in the middle of some kind of musical obsession,” Mallory began, grinning at me. She’d pushed back her plate and crossed her legs on her chair, clearly prepped for a lengthy tale. I pre-cut the last of my salmon into tiny bites, ready to intervene should things get dicey.
“She’d rented, like, every musical DVD she could find, from Chicago to Oklahoma. Girl could not get enough of the singing and dancing.”
Morgan leaned forward. “Did she watch Newsies? Tell me she watched Newsies.”
Mallory pursed her lips to bite back a laugh, then held up two fingers. “Twice.”
“Do go on,” Morgan said, giving me a sideways glance. “I’m fascinated.”
“Well,” Mallory said, lifting a hand to push blue hair behind her ear, “you know Merit used to dance—ballet—but she eventually came to her senses. And by the way, I don’t know what kind of freaky shit vampires are into, but if at all possible, stay away from her feet.”
“Mallory Carmichael!” My cheeks heated with a blush I’m sure was crimson red.
“What?” she asked with a nonchalant shrug. “You danced in toe shoes. It happens.”
I put an elbow on the table, my forehead in my hand. This, I bet, is what my life would have been like had my sister Charlotte and I been closer—the kind of intimate humiliation that only siblings could provide. For better or for worse and, God willing, in sickness and in health, Mallory was a sister.
A hand caressed my back. Morgan leaned over, whispered in my ear, “It’s okay, babe. I still like you.”
I gave him a sardonic look. “That feeling is not mutual at the moment.”
“Mmm-hmmm,” he said, then turned back to Mallory. “So our former ballerina was hooked on musicals.”
“Not so much the musicals, but the style.” Mallory looked at me, made an apologetic face.
I waved her off. “Just put it out there.”
“Keep in mind, she went to NYU, then Stanford, then lands back in Chicago. And our Merit loved the Big Apple. The Windy City is a little more akin to New York living than California was, but it’s far from having a walkup in the Village. But Mer decides she can make up for it. With clothes. So this one winter, she starts wearing leggings, big floppy sweaters, and always a scarf. She never left the house without a scarf kind of”—Mallory waggled her arms in the air—“draped all around her. She had a pair of brown knee-high boots, wore them every day. It was this whole ‘ballerina chic’ thing.” Mallory adjusted on her seat, leaned forward, and crooked a finger at Morgan and Catcher. They both leaned forward, obviously entranced. The girl knew how to work a crowd.
“There was a beret.”
They both let out groans, sat up again. “How could you?” Morgan asked with a mock horror that was belied by the laugh that was threatening to escape him. “A beret, Merit? Really?”
“You will never give me shit again,” Catcher said. “I own you now. I own your ass.”
I plucked at a bite of salmon, chewed it with careful deliberation, then waved my fork at them. “You are all on my shit list. All of you.”