Okay, I decided. I wouldn’t confront him, but I also wouldn’t hurt myself further by watching their interactions.
I turned around and, without another word, took the stairs to the second floor. I went to my room and locked the door behind me. I didn’t cry—wouldn’t cry.
Not again.
I also wouldn’t sleep.
It being minutes before dawn, I changed into pajamas and climbed into bed. It had been a long night, but I lay awake, one arm behind my pillow, staring at the ceiling. Dawn was coming, the pull of it enticing my eyes to close, my brain to shut off. But the human part of me kept replaying the moments we’d shared, few though they were, and wondering if there was something I could have done, should have said, to give us a chance.
I’d made myself vulnerable, and I was paying the price. But the real insult was that the entire House now knew—or would soon enough—about my being summarily dumped and replaced.
Admittedly, I’d given him a chance. But that didn’t mean I had to keep making bad decisions. I blew out a breath and swore off dating vampires.
It was at that moment, ironically, that my would-be RG partner decided to give me a call. Assuming he was getting in touch because he’d heard from Luc about ConPack, I plucked up my phone and flipped it open. “Merit.”
“It’s Jonah,” he said. “Are you ready for this thing tomorrow night?” I appreciated the concern in his voice, but I wasn’t sure if it was directed at me on a personal level, or because I was potentially an RG asset.
“We’ve met the Pack leaders, spent some time with the NAC, and seen schematics of the building. We have a communications plan, and you guys are backup.” I shrugged. “That’s as prepared as we can be.” I skipped the details of the interaction that would have embarrassed Ethan; no point in both of us feeling miserable.
Jonah offered a vague sound of agreement. “If I’m asked later, we never had this conversation. But I’m wondering if this is a time to request RG backup? To have guards on standby?”
I couldn’t get the words out fast enough. “This is definitely not that time. I appreciate the offer of support, but there are plenty of shifters out there who hate us.” I’d seen that in action, firsthand. “Sending in special ops and black helicopters isn’t going to help. It will only fuel the fire. Trust me—we’re in better stead than we might have been if we hadn’t been at the bar, but we’re not ‘in’ by any means.”
He was quiet for a moment. “And if the shit goes down?”
“Then Luc will call you in. You’re a Red Guard, which means at that point you’d have the authority to make decisions on their behalf. But you can’t move early on this one. They think we’re too political. Untrustworthy. If we show up with extra vampires in tow—and without a crisis to justify it—we’ve proved their point. Let’s go in assuming there’ll be trouble that we can handle. And if things escalate into your jurisdiction, you can make the call.”
Another moment of consideration. “We’ll stand by for now. Good luck.”
I hoped we wouldn’t need it.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN GOTV (GET OUT THE VAMPIRE) Even as the sun descended again, I lay in bed for a good fifteen minutes. Have you ever noticed that however uncomfortable you might have been when you first went to bed—the room too hot or too cold; the pillows not quite right; the mattress lumpy; the sheets scratchy—by the time you should get up, your bed has transformed itself into the Platonic ideal of beds? The room is cool, the bed is soft, and the pillow may as well have been God’s Own Headrest. The transformation inevitably happens, of course, when you’re obligated to get up and out, when nothing sounds better than hunkering down in a pile of cool cotton —especially when facing your recent fling and his former lover is the other option.
But even Sentinels have to act like grown-ups, so I sat up and threw off the covers.
It had been a good week since I’d gone for a run. Since I had a couple of hours before we’d meet to go to the convocation, I pulled on a running bra, tank, and running shorts so I could kick out three miles through Hyde Park. Training with Ethan or the guards was a workout, certainly, but not the kind that loosened up your bones and mind, cleared away everything but the pounding of the pavement, the rhythm of your breathing, and a good old-fashioned sweat.
But first, I needed some fuel for the gas tank. I wasn’t ready to face down the rest of the vampires in the House, or risk the possibility of a Sheridan-Sullivan meeting. So I opted to avoid whatever drama might be awaiting me downstairs and scavenge breakfast on the second floor. I headed down the hallway and through a swinging door into the tiny rectangular kitchen. Granite-topped maple cabinets lined both long sides of the room, and a refrigerator and other appliances were built into the cabinets in the same maple wood. The countertops held baskets of napkins and the like and smaller appliances. The refrigerator was covered in magnets and take-out menus from Chinese, Greek, and pizza places in Hyde Park. That was the advantage of living near U of C—the undergrads kept food delivery in business at all hours, and that was good for the rest of us.
I went for the refrigerator and pulled it open. It wasn’t unlike something you might have seen in an office building—a lot of leftover takeout, yogurt containers, and half-eaten desserts with initials marked on the top. It was all the detritus of prior vampires’ meals and dates, labeled to keep other fangs away.
But there were also House-supplied goodies, including lots and lots of blood in pourable pint bags and smaller drink boxes. I took a second to appraise my need and decided it was time to stock up. I grabbed two drink boxes, shook and poked in the attached straw, sipped . . . and grimaced. Biting Ethan had been like drinking a rare vintage—rich, complex, intoxicating. Drinking from a plastic box now tasted exactly like that—flat, plasticky, sterile. It tasted dead, somehow, as if the blood had lost the infusion of energy you got from drinking from the tap, so to speak.
But since that particular supply had been cut off, I knocked it back, then did the same to the second box. This wasn’t the time to let personal preference stand in the way of biological need, especially in light of the physical and emotional challenges I could be facing in a couple of hours.
I tossed the empty boxes in the trash and out of curiosity opened a couple of the upper cabinets. They were stocked with healthy snacks—bags of granola, nuts, high-protein cereals, natural popcorn.
“Blech,” I muttered, then closed the cabinet doors again and headed through the swinging kitchen door. When they stocked the cabinets with Twinkies, I’d be back. I made a note to talk to Helen, the House’s den mother, about that.
Breakfast in the bag, I headed outside. It was a warm and muggy June night. Not terribly late, but the streets were still quiet. I thought avoiding the paparazzi altogether risked making them a little too interested in vampire activities, so I headed down the street to the right and toward the group at the corner. I smiled and waved, flashbulbs snapping and popping as I moved nearer.
“Hey,” one called out, “it’s the Ponytailed Avenger!”
“Good evening, gentlemen.”
“Any comment on the bar shooting, Merit?”
I smiled thoughtfully at the reporter, a youngish kid in jeans and a T-shirt, a laminated press badge around his neck. “Only that I hope the perpetrators are caught.”
“Any comment on the stakings in Alabama?” he asked.
My blood ran cold. “What stakings?”
The man beside him—older, pudgier, with a mass of frizzy white hair and similar mustache—gestured with his small, reporter-style notebook. “Four vamps were taken out at a, well, they’re calling it a ‘nest’ of vampires. Apparently part of some kind of underground, anti-fang movement.”
Gabriel’s concern about rumblings, then, had clearly been real. Maybe it was only an isolated incident. Maybe it was a horrible, but random, act of violence that didn’t signal the turning of the tide for the rest of us.
But maybe it wasn’t.
“I hadn’t heard,” I said quietly, “but my thoughts and prayers go out to their friends and families. That kind of violence, the kind that grows from prejudice, is indefensible.”
The reporters were quiet for a moment as they scribbled down my comments. “I should get going. Thanks for the update, gentlemen.”
They called out my name, trying to get in additional questions before I trotted off into the night, but I’d done my duty. I needed the run, the chance to clear my head, before heading back into Cadogan House and the drama that undoubtedly awaited me there—political or otherwise.
The first mile was uncomfortable; doable, especially as a vampire, but painful in the way first miles often were. But I eventually found a rhythm, my breathing and footfalls aligned, and made a circle around the neighborhood. I skirted U of C, the wound of no longer being enrolled in my would-have-been alma mater still a bit too raw.
A breeze had stirred up by the time I made it back around to Cadogan House, and I nodded at the guards as I reentered the grounds, trying to slow my breathing, hands on my hips. I had to run faster as a vampire to get my heart rate up, and I wasn’t really sure how much good it did, but I felt better for having done it. It felt good to escape the confines of Cadogan House for a little while, to focus only on my speed and rhythm and kick.
Figuring cleanliness was next on my to-do list, I went back to my room to grab a shower.
I made it as far as my door.
There was a smallish bulletin board on every dormlike room in Cadogan House. A flyer was tacked to mine—a thick bit of cardstock bearing an announcement in fancy script letters: Greet the Master!
Join us Saturday at 10:00 p.m. to welcome Lacey Sheridan, Master of Sheridan House.
Cocktails and Music.
Casual Attire.
Rolling my eyes, I pulled the invitation off the door, then stepped back to glance down the hall. The same black-and-white flyer was posted on every door I could see—a GOTV effort that had nothing to do with voting or democracy. I wondered if this had been his idea—a chance to show the Novitiates of Cadogan House whose team he was on?
Maybe more important, how mandatory was something like this? Was I required to make an appearance? Toast Lacey Sheridan? Bring a gift?
I crushed the card in my hand, then opened my door and stepped inside, but before I could close it again, I heard footsteps in the hallway. There were rarely vampires moving through this part of the building, so I nosily peeked through the crack . . . and got an eyeful.