I nodded. “That’s when he found out I was from Cadogan, and when he became a complete jackass. Celina and some other vamps were called out, and they kicked us out of the club. I wanted to tell you in case you heard about it from someone else and assumed I’d been out—I don’t know—wreaking vampire havoc and giving Cadogan a bad name.” Or a worse name, I mentally corrected.
Ethan’s gaze narrowed. “Would I assume that?”
“Why lay blame where it belongs when you can use me as a scapegoat?”
“Touché,” he allowed, one corner of his mouth tipped into a smile. I inclined my head.
Ethan rose from his chair, hands linked behind his back, and walked to the conference table at the end of the room. Then he turned and leaned back against it between two of its matching chairs. The move put distance between us, and I found it interesting that he was so eager to get away.
“And yet they let you into the club in the first place. Why?”
“They may have known who I was. We found flyers, Catcher and I, for Red on our cars. He suggested we give it a whirl, and they let us in at the door.”
“She wanted a look at you.”
I nodded. “That was Catcher’s theory.”
“Celina likely knew your family name, saw the registry list in the paper, and arranged a very passive-aggressive hello.”
“She sounds like a treat.”
“Celina isn’t the most . . . philanthropic of vampires,” Ethan said. “But she’s smart. She’s focused, determined, and very, very protective of her vamps. Navarre has flourished under her leadership, and the GP loves her. Added to that is the fact that she’s one of the most powerful vampires in the U.S.”
I met his gaze, and thought about the test she’d given me, thought about the fact that I’d withstood enough of it to put a sulky look on her face.
“Her psychic skills are particularly noteworthy,” he continued. “She has an amazing ability to glamour. It’s rather like the stories of old about mortals who go dopey-eyed after ill-timed eye contact.”
He cocked his head at me, gave me an appraising look. I felt—just as I’d felt with Celina the night before—the subtle flow of a testing magic. But where Celina’s investigation was pushy, aggressive, Ethan’s moved like water over rocks—slipping, trickling, checking the shape of what lay beneath.
“You’ll measure up,” he finally concluded.
I nodded, opting not to tell him that she’d tried to glamour me, or that she’d failed. That I’d felt the pull, but shaken it off. If that was a sample of my burgeoning powers, he’d find out soon enough.
Without elaborating, Ethan moved across the room to the wall of bookshelves behind the leather couches, and pulled out a slim book. “Come here, Merit.”
I pushed off the desk and followed, stopping a few feet shy of him. Ethan flipped through the red leather volume until he found a particular page, then handed the book, the pages spread open between his long fingers, to me. When I met his gaze, he tapped the book with a finger. A sense of dread coiled in my abdomen, but I made myself look.
They were as horrible as that bit of prescience predicted. On each side of the page were woodcut prints, their black lines stark against thick linen paper. Each woodcut depicted a vampire, or medieval imaginings of vampires anyway. The left-hand print showed a busty maiden lying beneath a forest tree. An animalistic caricature of a male vampire, his inch-long fangs bared and ready to bite, reached over her. The vampire was naked from the waist up, and he wore no shoes. His fingers were tipped by claws, his hair long, dark and mangy. Perhaps most telling, his feet were cloven hooves. Beneath the woodcut, in elaborate script, were the words: Beware Ye the Vampyre, Whose Luste Tempts the Chaste.
But the industrious peasant who’d carved the original block had offered not only a problem—the virgin-despoiling vamp—but a solution: On the facing page, the vampire stood alone, his hands bound behind the tree to which he was also tied at the ankles and neck. His neck had been cut, his head tipping precariously to the side, and his gut had been split, organs spilling from a gaping wound in his belly. Through his heart, which lay on the ground beside him, was a wooden stake.
Perhaps worst of all, his eyes were open, tears streaming from the corners, his gaze on something just off the page, his expression one of terror, pain, and loss. This wasn’t caricature. This was portraiture, an image of the vampire in the depths of agony. The artist, if that was the appropriate word for the creator of something so gruesome, had offered little sympathy. This woodcut bore the inscription Rejoice In The Terror Cut Downe.
“Jesus,” I mumbled, suddenly trembling enough to shake the book in my hands. Ethan took it back, closed it, and slid it carefully back into place.
I glanced up at him. His expression was unsurprisingly solemn. “We are not at war,” he said. “Not today. But that could change at any moment, so we do what we must to protect peace. We’ve learned to be careful to distinguish our friends from our enemies, and to be sure that our enemies understand who our friends are.”
That, I mused, echoed Catcher’s sentiments regarding the state of vampire-shifter relations. It made sense to me that shifters, who’d opted for anonymity over stepping in to protest the massacre of vampires, weren’t a popular bunch among the Houses. It also explained the vamps’ tendency to band together, to nest into Houses, to form explicit alliances and view outsiders with wariness.
“Did you see”—I groped for an appropriate word—“punishments like that?”
“Not exactly like that. But I lost friends in the Second Clearing, and barely lived through it myself.”
I frowned and worried my bottom lip with my teeth. “But if that’s true, wasn’t it ill advised to hold a press conference? To announce our existence at all? What did anonymity risk?”
Ethan didn’t answer. His expression didn’t change. He just looked at me, as if willing me to reach a conclusion he was unwilling to speak aloud.
The conclusion wasn’t hard to reach: Coming out of the closet put us front and center before humans, endangered our survival, even, as my grandfather put it, in the post-Harry Potter era. We’d been lucky so far—Congressional investigations and minor rioting notwithstanding. Curiosity had generally won out over vampiricide. God willing, our luck would hold, but the fact that a vampire killer was loose in Chicago and that our House was suspected of involvement didn’t bode well. The tide could so easily turn.
I was suddenly eager to be home again, safe inside my locked house, safe behind wood and stone and sword-bearing guards.
“I should go,” I told him, and he walked me to the office door. “Do you think you’ll hear from Celina about the club incident?”
“I’ll hear from Celina.” When we reached the office door, he opened it and waved an invitational hand. “Thank you for informing me about your . . . escapades.”
I objected to the phrasing, but could tell he was trying to lighten the heavy mood, so I just smirked in response. “No problem. Thanks for the history lesson.”
Ethan nodded and began, “If you’d only read—” but I held up a hand.
“I know. I’ve been advised to read the Canon. I’ll hit the book when I get home.” I held up two fingers to my brow. “Scout’s honor.”
A corner of his mouth tipped up. “I’m sure if you only applied yourself, you could find some use for that intellect beyond sarcasm.”
“But what would be the fun of that?”
Ethan leaned out the door. “I realize that obedience would be a novelty to you, but I’d find it thrilling. You’ve two days left before the Commendation, the oaths. You might spend that time contemplating your allegiance.”
That stopped me, and I turned on my heel to see him again. “If I’m one of twelve, have you given the rest the same speeches you’re giving me? Made the same threats? Doubted?” Made the same offer?
I wondered if he’d lie to me, give me some speech about duty and being the Master of the House. But instead he said, “No. The stakes aren’t so high with the rest of your cohort. They’re foot soldiers, Merit.”
When he didn’t elaborate, I prodded, “And I’m . . . ?”
“Not.” With that enigmatic response, he went back into his office and closed the door behind him.
It was nearly midnight when I returned to Wicker Park. The house was empty, and I wondered if Mallory and Catcher had reached some kind of peace after the dinnertime fight. I was starving, so I made a ham sandwich, layered on some tortilla chips, squished the concoction into a napkin, and carried it into the living room. I turned on the television for background noise—and it was unfortunate that I now lived in the hours of infomercials, B-movies and syndicated garbage—and pulled the Canon into my lap. I ate as I read, filling an hour of time and finishing chapter one, then moving on to the “Servicing Your Lord” tutorial. Luckily, the text was a little less connubial than the name sounded. Where the first chapter was a kind of introduction to vampirism, chapter two offered more detail about the duties of the Novitiate vampire—loyalty, allegiance, and something the book referred to as “Grateful Condescension,” which was as ass-backwardly Jane Austen-esque as its name suggested. I was supposed to offer Ethan my “Polite Regarde,” treating him with deference and respect and generally meeting his requests and demands with gratefulness that he’d deigned to make them of me in the first place.
I chuckled, realizing the degree to which my unacquiescent behavior probably shocked him and wondering why the Canon hadn’t been substantively updated since, what, Regency England?
I’d just balled up my napkin and tossed it on the coffee table when a knock sounded at the door. Mallory, maybe, having forgotten her keys, or Ethan with a demand that I Gratefully Condescend to his Honored Personage. A little too comfortable with the guards out front, I made the mistake of opening the door without checking the peephole first. He stuck a black boot in the door before I could slam it shut in his face.
“I’m sorry,” he offered through the three inches of open space.
“Get your foot out of my house.”
Morgan shifted, peering through the crack. “I’m here to apologize profusely. And I’m willing to genuflect.” His voice turned softer. “Look, I’m really sorry about the scene last night. I could have handled it better.”