“Does it matter who my father is?”
Morgan shrugged lightly. “Not to me. To some, maybe. I wonder if Ethan cares.”
He had, I ruefully thought, but that was not how I answered. “He saved my life.”
Morgan’s gaze shot up. “How?”
I debated what to tell him, but opted for the truth. If he really knew nothing, all the better. If he knew something, maybe the boundaries of his knowledge could help signal the guilty parties. “I was attacked. Ethan saved my life.”
Morgan stared at me, then wiped his mouth with a napkin he’d taken from the stainless steel holder on the counter. “You’re kidding.”
I shook my head. “Someone assaulted me when I was walking across campus. He nearly tore out my throat. Ethan found me, and started the change.”
Morgan’s gaze narrowed. “How do you know Ethan didn’t set it up?”
An uncomfortable twitch arced through my stomach. I didn’t know that, not for sure. I was relying on instinct and Ethan’s explanation, his professions of innocence. I still wondered why he’d happened to be in that spot in the middle of the night, and his answer—something about luck—hadn’t been satisfying. I didn’t think he’d purposefully hurt me, not physically anyway. Emotionally, though, was a different matter, and all the more reason for me to steer clear of him. He was my boss, and I’d acquiesce as far as necessary to get my job done, whatever that might be. But he was off-limits for anything else, his (conflicted) interest beside the point.
“Merit?”
I blinked back to my kitchen, to Morgan staring at me across the countertop. “Sorry,” I said. “Just thinking. I know he didn’t set it up. He saved my life.” I crossed my fingers under the table, hoped that it was true.
Morgan frowned. “Huh. They found that Cadogan medal at the scene of Jennifer Porter’s death.”
“Anyone with access to the House could have planted it there—even a Rogue trying to make the House system look bad.”
He nodded. “That’s a theory. Actually, it’s what Celina thinks.”
“She doesn’t think Ethan did it? Or someone from Cadogan?”
Morgan watched me for a careful moment, then shrugged and finished the final bites of his sandwich. “It would be more accurate to say that we fear people’s responses to Cadogan, not the vamps themselves. Peace is fragile.”
So I’d heard, but somehow the sentiment didn’t ring as true coming from Morgan as it did from Ethan.
“What did you do—before?” he asked.
Having finished the first soda, I moved back to the refrigerator and grabbed another one, popped open the top, and returned to our spot at the counter. “I was a graduate student. English lit.”
“Here in Chicago?”
I nodded. “University of Chicago.”
“So you wanted to, what, teach?”
“At the college level, yeah. I wanted to be a professor. Romantic medieval literature was my specialty. The Arthurian sagas, Tristan and Isolde, that kind of thing.”
“Tristan and Isolde. That’s interesting.”
I dug into the chip bag for a single whole chip, found one, and crunched into it. “Is it? What did you do before?”
“My dad owned Red, or at least the bar it was before I rehabbed it. He died a few years before I switched, and I took it over.”
“Why did you decide to become a vampire?”
Morgan frowned, rubbed the back of his neck. “I had a girlfriend. She was sick, and she was approached by someone in Navarre. We made some overtures to Carlos—he was Celina’s Second at the time—and they approved our becoming Initiates. She was bright, strong, would have made a great vampire.”
He paused and stared blankly at the counter, and the volume of his voice dropped. “The night came for the change. They changed me, but she couldn’t go through with it. She died about a year later.”
“I’m sorry.”
“She said she didn’t want to live forever. I was young and stupid, felt immortal anyway—who doesn’t at that age? I was with her when she died. She wasn’t afraid.”
We sat quietly for a few minutes, as I let him work through that memory.
“Anyway, that’s my story.”
“How long ago was that?”
“Nineteen seventy-two.”
“So that would make you . . .”
He half chuckled, and I was glad to see a little more color in his face. “An age that will make you uncomfortable.”
I leaned against the counter, crossed my arms, and gave him a good looking over. “You look about, what, twenty-eight? That would mean you were born around nineteen forty-four.”
“I’m seventy-two,” he offered, saving me the subtraction. “Not so old that it seems unreal enough to discount, and just old enough to think of me as . . . old.”
“You don’t look seventy-two. You certainly don’t act seventy-two. Not that there’s anything wrong with that,” I belatedly added, a finger in the air to emphasize the point.
Morgan laughed. “Thanks, Mer. I don’t feel a day over seventy-one.”
“A spritely seventy-one.”
“A spritely seventy-one,” he agreed. “There’s actually some pretty serious debate out there on the impact of looking young on how we act, on the age we pretend to be.”
I smiled dubiously. “Vampire philosophers?”
He smiled back. “Immortality does pose its own set of quandaries.”
Immortality was a quandary I hadn’t fully considered yet, and I wondered what the rest of the vamps were thinking about. “Like?”
Morgan reached out and grabbed the bag of chips, our arms just brushing as he pulled it away. I ignored the little shock that spilt down my arm, reminding myself that I’d sworn off boys with unusually large canines.
“Vamps change identities every sixty years or so,” Morgan responded, waving a chip in the air. “And yet, to stay under the radar, we’ve had to operate within the system. That means we fake our deaths. We have to lie to the friends and family we accumulate in each human lifetime. We forge social security numbers, drivers’ licenses, passports. Is that ethical?” He shrugged. “We justify it by saying its necessary to protect ourselves. But it’s still lying.”
Thinking of my own hasty exit from academia, I wondered aloud, “Where do they work? These philosophers, I mean.”