Some Girls Bite (10 page)

“That said, should you ever pull a stunt like this again, you will be disciplined. If you ever raise a hand to me again, you’ll rue that decision. I am the Master of this House and in command of three hundred and eight vampires. They look to me for protection, and they give me their loyalty in exchange for it. Should any not understand that bargain, I’m fast, I’m strong, and I’m willing to demonstrate those qualities. Next time, I won’t pull my punches. Do you understand what I’m telling you?”

The chill in his glare tamped down my instinct for sarcasm. I nodded.

“Good.” He held out his hand toward the sidewalk, inviting me out of the House. “You have five days yet before the Commendation. The
Canon
will explain the oaths, the ceremony and the manner in which I will call you to service. Prepare yourself.”

Giving him another acquiescent nod, I stepped down to the sidewalk.

“And do something about your clothes,” he ordered, just before closing the heavy oak door behind me.

We silently walked back to the car, where I found a club flyer beneath my windshield wiper. I lifted the wiper, scanned the sheet, which advertised Red, a club in River North. I got into the car, unlocked Mal’s door, and stuffed the flyer into the glove box. Partying wasn’t really on my agenda right now.

The ride back home was quiet as we both, I imagine, mulled over the night’s events. I certainly did, especially the enigma of Ethan Sullivan. For the few seconds I hadn’t known who he was, I’d been awed by his face and form, intrigued by his nearly tangible sense of power and determination.

Thinking he was pretty was one thing. Infinitely more disconcerting was the fact that after I discovered who he was—and even knowing what he’d taken from me—I could admit to a lingering attraction. His arrogance was irritating, but he was handsome, intelligent, and respected by his subjects. Ethan wore his power—his mantle of confident self-possession—as well as his designer clothes. But danger, I knew, lurked underneath that perfect facade. Ethan demanded complete and utter loyalty with no exceptions and, it seemed, had little willingness to compromise. He was skilled, strong, fast, limber, and confident enough to prove his mettle against an unknown opponent in front of a gallery of observers. And while he might have found me attractive—his flirting was proof enough of that—he wasn’t thrilled about the attraction. Quite the opposite—he seemed as eager to be rid of me as I was of him.

For all that, I hadn’t been able to banish the memory of my first glimpse of him. An after-image of green irises ghosted across my retinas when I closed my eyes, and I knew nothing would wipe away the visual. The impact had been that strong—like a crater furrowed into my psyche, leaving an empty space that a mortal man seemed unlikely to fill.

I muttered a curse when I realized the anatomical direction that line of thought was headed, and renewed my attention to Chicago’s dark streets.

Mallory cleared her throat. “So that was Ethan.”

I turned the Volvo down a side street as we neared home. “That was him.”

“And you’re thinking what?”

I shrugged, unsure how much I wanted to admit to my feelings, even to Mallory. “I should hate him, right? I mean, he did this to me. Changed everything. Took away everything.”

Mallory stared out the car window. “You were due for a change, Merit. And he saved your life.”

“He made me the walking undead.”

“He said you aren’t dead. It was just a genetic change. And there are benefits, whether you want to admit them or not.”

Just a genetic change, she’d said, like it was a small, simple matter. “I have to drink blood,” I reminded her. “Drink. Blood.”

Mallory slid me an unpleasant glance. “At least be honest about it—you can drink whatever you want. You eat whatever you want, and you’ll probably never gain an ounce on those mile-long legs. Blood’s just a new”—she waved a hand in the air—“vitamin or something.”

“Maybe,” I allowed. “But I can’t put toe one in the sun. I can’t go to the beach, or drive around with the top down.”

And then something incredibly disturbing occurred to me. “I can’t go back to Wrigley, Mallory. No Cubs games on a warm Saturday afternoon.”

“You’re Irish way back. You get splotchy in the sun, and you haven’t been to Wrigley in, what, two years? You’ll watch the Cubbies from your bedroom television set, just like you always do.”

“I can’t go back to school. And my family hates me.”

“Hon, your parents have always been horrible. At least this way,” she gently said, “you get to feed them a steady diet of inappropriate vampire behavior.”

Pleasant as that thought was, it didn’t completely assuage the grief. I knew I needed to buck up, to let go of what I’d lost and find a way to survive, to thrive, in my new world. But how do you let go of a lifetime of plans? Of assumptions about your life, about who you were and who you were going to be?

While Mallory was more than willing to dole out advice and urge me to get over “my little quibbles” about having been made a vampire, she wouldn’t discuss the trio’s bizarre conclusion that she’d brought magic to Cadogan House, that she was a witch. I knew nothing about magic beyond what I’d learned from television and in the tidbits Mallory, in her fixation with the occult, managed to slip into conversation. And it scared me that my normally chatty roommate was avoiding the discussion. So, as I pulled the car into the garage, I tried again.

“Do you want to talk about the other thing?”

“As far as I’m concerned, there is no other thing.”

“Come on, Mallory. They said you have magic. Do you feel like you’re . . . different? I mean, if they’re right, you must have felt something.”

She got out of the car and slammed the door shut, and I winced on the Volvo’s behalf as Mallory stormed to the sidewalk. “I don’t want to talk about it, Merit.”

I closed the garage door and followed her, both of us ignoring the black-clad guards who flanked the front door. They were virtually identical to the guards who stood point at the Cadogan gate, tall and gaunt with sleek swords at their sides. Whatever Ethan’s faults, he was damn efficient.

We went into the house, which was comfortingly quiet and, present company excluded, vampire-free. Mallory faked a yawn and trudged toward the staircase. “I’m going to bed.”

“Mallory.”

She stopped at the bottom stair, turned, and looked at me with very little patience. “What?”

“Just—try to be careful. We don’t have to talk about it now, but if this threat thing continues, or if Ethan learns anything more about who you are . . .”

“Fine.”

As she started up the stairs, desperate to comfort her as she’d done for me, I threw out, “This could be a good thing, Mallory. You could have some special powers, or something.”

She stopped and glanced back, her smile sardonic. “Given how I feel right now, I can only assume that my giving you the same bullshit platitudes earlier didn’t help you, either.” She walked up the stairs, and I heard the slam of her bedroom door. I went to my room and lay on my back on the double bed, staring at the rotating ceiling fan until dawn claimed me.

 

 

 

H
aving avoided my granddaughterly duty for two days, when I rose at sunset the next evening to an empty house, I showered, dressed in jeans and a fitted T-shirt that bore the image of a ninja (and certainly would have embarrassed Ethan), and drove to the West Side to my grandfather’s house.

Unfortunately, even fight-happy Vampire Merit feared rejection, so I’d been standing on his narrow front stoop, unable to make myself knock, when the door opened with a creak. My grandfather peered out through the aluminum screen door. “You weren’t going to come by and talk to your pop?”

Tears—of doubt, of relief, of love—immediately spilled over. I shrugged sheepishly at him.

“Ah, jeez, baby girl. Don’t start that.” He pulled open the screen door, held it open with his foot, and opened his arms. I moved into them, clenched him in a fierce hug. He coughed. “Easy now. You’ve got a little more push in those muscles than the last time we did this.”

I released him and wiped the tears from my face. “Sorry, Grandpa.”

He cupped my face in his bear-paw hands and kissed my forehead. “No worries. Come on in.” I moved into the house and heard the closing of both doors behind me.

My grandfather’s house—once my grandparents’ house—hadn’t changed in all the years I remembered it. The furniture was simple and homey, the walls adorned with family pictures of my aunts and uncles—my father’s brother and two sisters and their families. My aunts and uncles had endured their upbringing with significantly more grace than my own father, and I envied their easy relationships with their children and my grandfather. No family was perfect, I knew, but I’d take imperfection over the farce of my social-climbing parents any day.

“Have a seat, honey. You want some cookies? I’ve got Oreos.”

I grinned at him and sat down on the floral sofa. “No, thanks, Grandpa. I’m fine.”

He sat on an ancient recliner positioned kitty-corner to the sofa and leaned forward, elbows on his knees. “Your father called me when the House called him.” He paused. “You were attacked? Bitten?”

I nodded.

He looked me over. “And everything’s okay now? You’re okay?”

“I guess. I mean, I feel okay. I feel the same, except for the vampire part.”

He chuckled, but his expression sobered fast enough. “Do you know about the attack on Jennifer Porter? That it was similar to your attack?”

I nodded again. “Mallory and I saw the press conference on television.”

“Sure, sure.” My grandfather started to speak, but seemed to think better of it. He was silent for a moment, the ticking of the wall clock the only sound in the house. He finally raised concerned eyes to mine. “Your father has asked that the police not be involved in your attack. But your name was in the paper, so the city will know that you were changed. That you’re a vampire now.”

“I know,” I told him. “I’ve already gotten calls from reporters.”

My grandfather nodded. “Of course. I would have expected that given your father’s notoriety. Frankly, Merit, I’m not going to hinder a police investigation, not for crimes of this magnitude. I can’t in good conscience do that, not when a killer is still out there. But I have enough pull to keep the nature of your transition under wraps but for a select few detectives. If we can limit access to that information, keep it on a need-to-know basis, you won’t be called out as a potential victim of this killer. We can keep the press from hounding you about it, and you can learn to live as a vampire, not just as an attack victim. Okay?”

I nodded, tears beginning to well again. Say what you wanted about my father, but I loved this man.

“Now that said, while I’m not going to parade you through a bureau office, we still need an official interview for the record.” He put a gnarly hand on my knee. “So why don’t you tell me what happened in your own words?”

My grandfather, the cop.

 

I gave him the entire tale, from my walk across campus to my conversation with Ethan, Luc, and Malik, including their Rogue-vampire hypothesis. The general public may not know about the Rogues’ existence, but I wasn’t about to hide that fact from my grandfather. When I was done, he asked thoughtful questions—essentially walking me through the entire few days again, but this time pulling out details Ethan, Luc, and Malik hadn’t discussed, like the fact that the attacker bailed upon seeing Ethan, apparently aware of who he was and unwilling to risk a one-on-one confrontation. When we’d walked through the events twice, he sat back in his recliner and scratched what little hair remained on the perimeter of his head. For all that his mind was impeccably sharp, he looked so much the grandpa—tucked-in flannel shirt, twill trousers, comfortable thick-soled shoes, gleaming pate.

He sat forward again, elbows on his knees. “So the Cadogan folks have concluded that Porter’s death is connected to your attack?”

“I think they’re willing to consider it a possibility.”

After nodding thoughtfully, Grandpa rose and disappeared into the kitchen. When he returned, there was a manila folder in his hand. He sat down again and opened it, then flipped through some documents. “Twenty-seven-year-old white female. College educated. Brunette. Blue eyes. Slim build. She was attacked just after dusk, walking her dog through Grant Park. Her blood was drained, and she was left for dead.” His pale blue eyes, which matched mine in color, watched me intently. “There are undeniable similarities.”

I nodded, not thrilled that Grandpa agreed with Ethan’s conclusion. But what was worse, the first vampire probably had meant to kill me. Which meant I was supposed to be his second victim and would have been—death by exsanguination in the middle of the quad—had Ethan not come along.

I really did owe Ethan for saving my life.

And I really didn’t want to owe Ethan anything.

My grandfather reached out and patted my knee with a large callused hand. “I’d really like to know what you’re thinking right now.”

I frowned and picked a fingernail against the nubby fabric of the couch. “I’m alive. And I really do have Ethan Sullivan to thank for it, which is . . . disturbing.” I looked up at my grandfather. “Someone was gunning for me. Because I look like Jennifer Porter? If so, why send the brick through my window? This guy wanted me dead, maybe for himself, maybe on someone else’s behalf. And he’s still out there.” I shook my head. “Vampires coming out of the closet was bad enough. The city is not going to be prepared for this.”

Grandpa patted my hand again, then rose from his chair and grabbed a jacket that lay across its arm. “Merit, let’s go for a drive.”