Some Girls Bite (22 page)

I pulled open the door and offered him my haughtiest stare. “You ‘could have handled it better’? In the sense of not humiliating my friends and me? In not backing me up when I said—when you knew—that we hadn’t been causing problems? Or in not treating us like trash because I’m from a different House than you? Which part of it could you have handled better?
Specifically
.”

Morgan smiled sheepishly, an expression that was irritatingly cute on a dark-haired, bedroom-eyed boy. He was in jeans again tonight, this time paired with a smoky blue quarter-sleeved T-shirt that snugged his torso. I noted a hint of gold around his neck, and I guessed it was the medal of Navarre House, similar in style to the one worn by Ethan, but, as last night had shown, symbolizing a very, very different philosophy.

I stared him down, but he met my gaze, one corner of his mouth tipped into a charmingly lopsided smile. “Please?”

I blew out a slow breath that ruffled my bangs, but stood back to let him in. “Come in.”

“Thanks.”

I walked into the living room, assuming he’d follow, dropped onto the couch and crossed my legs. I looked up at him expectantly while he closed the door behind us. “Well?”

“Well, what?”

I waved a hand at the room. “Start genuflecting. Let’s see some knee action.”

“You’re serious.”

I lifted my brows. He responded in kind, but finally nodded his head, then walked between the couches. He dropped to one knee, then held out his hands. “I’m monumentally sorry for the pain and humiliation that I caused you and your—”

“Both knees.”

“Pardon?”

“I’d prefer to see both knees on the ground. I mean, if you’re going to grovel, be the best groveler you can, right?”

Morgan watched me for a moment, mouth twitching, the smile threatening to break, but acquiesced with grave solemnity. He bent both knees to the ground, then looked up at me through those navy blue eyes with an expression that would have worked on a loyal hound. “I’m really sorry.”

I watched him for a moment, let him linger there on the floor, then nodded. “Okay.”

So I wasn’t immune to a cute boy with a sappy expression. Really, what twenty-seven-year-old ex-graduate-student-cum-Cadogan-vampire was?

Morgan rose and dusted off his knees, then took a seat on the love seat behind him. Just as I was wondering why, exactly, he’d decided to play contrite, he offered, “There’s a lot of talk in Navarre about Cadogan. About Houses that drink. There are a lot of vampires with long memories, and a lot of them are affiliated with Navarre. It’s not you personally—it’s more like decades of inbred fear. Fear that everything we’ve worked to build—the House system, the Presidium, the
Canon
—will be brought down by vamps who drink.”

It was a good argument, and one that I could appreciate, having seen a sample of the punishments doled out to vampires by humans. However, I reminded him, “It was Navarre that held the press conference, Morgan. It was Navarre that announced our existence.”

“It was a precautionary move. Every day that passed without vampires taking the initiative was one day closer to humans doing it for us. Pushing us into the spotlight in a way we couldn’t control. In a way we couldn’t spin. This was about coming out on
our
terms.”

I stretched my legs out on the couch and rested my head on the armrest. “And do you believe that?”

“It doesn’t especially matter what I believe. I’m Celina’s Second. I act as she wishes. But having said that, yes, I do believe it. The world’s a different place today.”

“You act as she wishes, yet here you are, conversing with the enemy.”

He chuckled. “It seemed worth the minor mutiny.”

“And I wasn’t worth it last night when she was calling us out?”

Morgan sighed, then lifted both hands to run them through his hair. “At the risk of sounding ungrateful for your forgiveness, I already apologized for that.” He let his hands fall and offered me a hopeful look. “Maybe we could talk about something else? Not vampires or drinking. Not alliances or Houses. Just pretend to be normal for a couple of hours?”

I let the smile spread slowly. “How do you feel about the Bears?”

Morgan snorted, then looked down the hallway. “Kitchen down there?”

I nodded.

“Can I get something to eat?”

Had I any interest in dating the boy—had it not evaporated last night when I’d promised never to flirt with another vampire again—I’d have decided this was the lamest second date ever. “I guess.”

He popped up and walked to the threshold. “Thanks.” He disappeared down the hallway, but called back, “I’m a Packer fan. I was born in Madison.”

He was rustling through a drawer when I reached the kitchen. “You have to admit it—Green Bay’s a better team, especially this year. Chicago has problems with its O line, there’s a quarterback issue, and you’ve got no defensive secondary.”

I leaned back against the doorframe and crossed my arms. “You’re going to stand in my kitchen, eating my food, going through my things, and bash my Bears? You’re either brave or stupid.”

Morgan pulled out a knife and cutting board, then moved to a stack of sandwich items he’d already arranged on the countertop—a loaf of nutty bread, mustard, mayo, ham, American cheese, Swiss cheese (an international cheese détente!), smoked turkey, a jar of bread and butter pickle slices, black olives, lettuce, and a tomato.

In other words, the contents of our refrigerator but for the sodas and blood.

Then he grabbed two cans of soda. He popped the tab on one, and offered the other to me as he sipped, one hip cocked against the cabinets.

“Thoughtful of you to offer,” I drily said, accepting the soda as I joined him at the counter. “Don’t they feed you at Navarre House?”

He cut off two healthy slices of bread, then went to work on the tomato, slicing as he talked. “They throw out some gruel between the indoctrination sessions and propaganda films. Then we’re off for a good marching around the grounds and the recitation of sonnets to Celina’s loveliness.”

I chuckled and tore off a couple of lettuce leaves, then held them up for his approval. He nodded, then began the very careful process of layering meats, cheeses, vegetables, and condiments on his Dagwood.

“They put out healthy stuff in the cafeteria—I just don’t usually have a chance to make a sandwich my own way, you know?”

Having grown up with too much brie and foie gras and too few processed carbs, I knew very well. That was why I stopped him before he added the final piece of bread. I grabbed the bag of tortilla chips from the other end of the counter and handed them to him.

“Layer of chips,” I solemnly explained. “Adds a good crunch.”

“Genius,” he said, then squished a layer of tortilla chips into his sandwich. We both looked down at it for a moment, four vertical inches of deliciousness.

“Should we take a picture?”

“It’s pretty damn impressive.”

He cocked his head at it. “I almost hate to ruin it by biting in, but I’m starving, so. . . .” Regrets spoken, he picked it up with two hands and bit in. His eyes closed as he crunched through the first bite. “That’s a damn good sandwich.”

“Told you,” I said, leaning against the counter and pulling the bag of chips toward me.

“Tell me about yourself,” he said between bites.

The bag crinkled noisily as I reached for a chip. “What do you want to know?”

“Origins. Interests. Why the daughter of one of the most powerful men in Chicago decided to become a vampire.”

I watched him for a minute, a little disappointed that he’d asked, and wondering if the fact that my parents had money was the lodestone of his interest in me. And since he’d known, I wondered if news of my changing and my family connections was circulating through the Houses. Of course, since he thought the decision was mine, he clearly didn’t know everything.

“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.”