Хлоя Нейл: Twice Bitten

“To some extent, Celina has made that impossible. With all due respect to our friends in Navarre House, she has sought, at every opportunity, to increase our profile, to alienate us from humans, and to alienate us from ourselves.” In a rare moment of humanity, Ethan looked down at the ground, worry furrowing a line between his eyes.

“We are on the brink,” he said. “The brink of what, exactly, remains to be seen. As it stands, we’ve been gifted with a time of peace and relative tranquility, a time in which the Houses have blossomed financially. But our coming out, by hook or by crook, for better or worse, has put us back in the public eye—a public that hasn’t always been kind toward us. Whether our pseudocelebrity will last—who knows?

“And now, as you may have heard, the shifters are preparing to meet this week in Chicago. We’ve been informed that during this convocation, they will decide, for one and all, whether to stay in their respective territories or to return to their ancestral home in Alaska. If they go, and the tide turns against us—Well, I don’t need to remind you about our shared historical experiences with shifters.”

There was mumbling in the crowd, a spike of discomforted magic in the air. Shifters had retreated before when vamps had been in trouble. Vamps blamed shifters for the resulting deaths, and vampires now feared that if the human tide turned against us, shifters would do it again, leaving us here holding the supernatural baggage.

“As you know, we don’t have formal allies within the Packs. They have avoided such ties. But my hope remains that should we face animosity or anger or fear, they will agree to help us.”

A male vampire stood up. “They’ve never helped before!” he shouted down.

Ethan regarded him thoughtfully. “They haven’t. But suggesting that they ‘owe us’ hasn’t worked. We will do what we can to form new connections between us. And in the meantime . . .”

He paused, and the room was silent as the vampires waited for his next words. My issues with Ethan notwithstanding, he knew how to work a crowd.

“In the meantime,” he continued, “I ask you, not as your Master, but as your brother, your colleague, your friend. Be careful. Mind the company you keep. Be aware of your surroundings. And most of all, don’t be afraid to come to me. Any of you. Anytime.”

Ethan cleared his throat, and when he spoke again, his voice was crisp, clear, and Master-like again. “Dismissed,” he said, and the vampires in the balcony began to file out of the Sparring Room.

Ethan walked toward us. “My apartments,” he told Luc, then glanced at me. “You, too.”

“Your apartments?” I asked, but Ethan had already turned away, smiling politely at a vampire who’d trekked down from the balcony. I didn’t know her, but her goal was obvious enough in the cant of her hip, the subtle play of her fingers as she pushed her long dark hair behind her ears. She leaned toward him and asked something. He laughed and chuckled politely, then began explaining—with visual aids—how to correctly position her hands on the handle of her sword.

My lip curled involuntarily, but before I could get out a snarky comment, I felt a tug on my ponytail. I glanced back.

“Let’s go,” Luc said.

“What did he mean by ‘his apartments’?”

“We have a meeting.”

The last time we’d had a meeting, Ethan had told me about raves, mass feedings in which humans became unwilling vampire snacks. “About the raves?”

“Not today,” Luc said. “We haven’t heard anything else about raves since the attempt to blackmail us went bad. Malik’s working up a long-term strategy.

Today we’re talking shifters. Let’s go—unless you want to keep watching?”

I stuck out my tongue at him, but I followed when he headed for the door.

The basement of Cadogan House was all business, most of it violent—Training Room, Sparring Room, Ops Room, arsenal. The first floor, like the second and third, was about decor. Soft lighting, French antiques, hardwoods, expensive furniture. “Five-star hotel” had been my first impression. The rest of the rooms were equally fancy, from Ethan’s masculine office to his luxe apartments.

We took the central staircase to the third floor. When we reached Ethan’s apartments, Luc grasped the handles of the double doors in both hands, then pushed them open.

I’d been in Ethan’s rooms before, but only briefly. As far as I could tell, Ethan’s chunk of the third floor had three rooms—the main living room, a bedroom, and presumably a bathroom somewhere in the back. It was as elegantly appointed as the rest of the House—from the hardwood floors to the warmly painted walls; from the onyx fireplace to the expensive, tailored furniture. It looked more like a suite in a fine hotel than the home of a vampire in the prime of his (immortal) life.

This trip, I gave the room a careful look, scanning for hints into the psyche of the Master of the House. And there were plenty of details to peruse—the detritus of his four hundred years of life dotted the room. A bow and arrow hung on one wall. A campaign chair and desk that looked like it would fold for travel, maybe remnants of Ethan’s time as a soldier, sat in one corner. A low buffet-style chest was centered on another wall, a spread of objects on top of it. I ambled over, hands behind my back, and surveyed the goods. There were two silver trophies styled like giant cups, a picture of men in early-nineteenth-century garb (but no Ethan amongst them), and a flat stone with symbols carved into the top.

After I’d given them a once-over, I glanced up and checked out the rest of the room. That was when I spied it in a corner—in one corner, inside a tall glass case, sat a gleaming Fabergé egg.

“Oh, wow,” I said, walking toward it to get a better look. A pendant light shone above it, illuminating the lustrous, spring green enamel and the snarling, golden dragon that wound around it.

“It was Peter’s,” Luc said.

I glanced back at him. “Peter’s?”

“Peter Cadogan.” Luc walked toward me, arms crossed, then gestured toward the glass case. “The Master vampire who founded Cadogan House. It was a gift from a member of the Russian royalty.” He tapped a finger on the glass. “Peter was from Wales, and it’s a representation of the Welsh dragon. See the eye?”

I nodded at where he pointed. A round red gem was placed at the dragon’s eye. Six white lines radiated from its middle.

“It’s a star ruby,” he said. “Incredibly rare.”

“And incredibly expensive,” added a voice behind us. We both stood straight again and glanced around. Ethan walked in, still in his gi pants, around his neck a navy towel bearing a silver monogrammed “C.”

“Shower,” he said. “Make yourselves at home.” Ethan walked toward the doors that led to his bedroom. He opened one, slipped inside, and closed it behind him again.

“I could have used a shower,” I pointed out.

“I know. I can smell you from here.”

I was halfway to discreetly sniffing my armpit before I realized he was just trying to rile me up. “You’re funny.”

“You’re easy.”

“You were telling me about the egg?”

“Oh,” Luc said, then scratched absently at his temple. “So Peter met this Russian duchess, and they bonded. Completely Platonic, from what I understand, but he did her a favor of some kind. She wanted to repay him, so she commissioned the egg and threw in the ruby for good measure.”

“I suppose it pays to have friends,” I concluded, then dropped my tone to something a little more serious. “Speaking of Peters, any developments on a replacement for our former colleague?” Peter Spencer had been excommunicated from the House for betraying us to Celina, for assisting in her blackmail plans and her ploy to create more anti-shifter fervor amongst vamps, and anti-Cadogan fervor amongst humans.