Хлоя Нейл: Friday Night Bites

Of which, I guessed, they’d inform me at some later date.

“Ethan, what are we going to do about . . . what I did?”

“You’ll be punished. There’s no avoiding it.” He answered a little faster than made me comfortable. My stomach clenched, but not in surprise. The headline NOVITIATE VAMPIRE ATTACKS HER MASTER wasn’t going to read well unless it was followed by LATER STRICTLY PUNISHED.

“I know,” I told him. “For what it’s worth, I’m sorry for it.”

“Partly sorry,” he said. “And partly glad we had it out. Perhaps it will . . . clear the air.”

If he meant that it might clear the air between us, I doubted that, but I nodded anyway. “Am I out of Cadogan House?”

This question took longer for him to answer. More consideration, maybe, or more political evaluation. More strategy. He rubbed absently at his neck as he thought it out, but then shook his head. I wasn’t sure whether I was relieved or not.

“You’ll stay in Cadogan. Stay the day here, come back tomorrow night. See me first thing. But we’ll adjust your duties, and you’ll train—and not with Catcher this time. You need to be trained by a vampire, someone who understands the draw of the predator, who can help you control your—let’s call it your predatory instinct.”

“Who?”

He blinked. “Me, I suppose,” was his answer, and then the door opened and closed, and he was gone.

I stared at the closed door for a moment.

“ Fuck ,” was all I could think to say.

I knew who it was before the door opened, before she’d even knocked, from the cotton-candy brightness of her perfume in the hallway.

She peeked in, blue hair slipping through the crack between the door and jamb. “Is your head still spinning around?”

“Are you still trying to throw blue flaming shit at me?”

She winced and opened the door, then stepped inside the bedroom, hugging her arms. She was in pajamas, a shortish T-shirt and oversized cotton pants, white-painted toes peeking from beneath them. “I’m sorry. I’d just gotten back from Schaumburg. I was actually on my way to Cadogan when Luc called me, said you were in a bad way.”

“Why were you on your way to Cadogan?”

Mallory leaned back against the doorjamb. There was a time—a few days ago—when she’d have plopped onto the bed beside me. We weren’t there anymore, had lost that easy sense of comfort. “Catcher was going to meet me, and we were going to talk to Ethan. Catcher had some . . . concerns.”

It wasn’t difficult to translate the hesitation in her voice. “About me. He had concerns about me.”

She held up a hand. “We were worried about you. Catcher thought you were holding back when you trained, thought something was up.” She blew out a breath, ran a hand through her hair. “We had no idea you were some kind of freaky super vampire.”

“Said the woman who can shoot fireballs from her palms.”

She raised her eyes, looked at me. I saw something there—pain or worry—but it was tempered by her own reluctance to be candid with me. That made my stomach knot uncomfortably.

“This isn’t easy for me either,” she said.

I nodded, dropped my gaze, dropped my chin onto the upthrust pillow in my lap. “I know. And I know I bailed. I’m sorry.”

“You bailed,” she agreed, and pushed off the door. The bed dipped as she sat beside me, wiggled into a cross-legged position. “And I pushed you about this Morgan thing. It’s just—”

“Mallory.”

“No, Merit,” she said. “Damn, just let me finish this for once. I want good things for you. I thought Morgan was one of those things. If he’s not, then so be it. I just . . .”

“You think I’m in love with Ethan.”

“Are you?”

A fair question. “I . . . No. Not like you think. Not like you and Catcher. It’s stupid, I know. I have this thing, this idea. This bullshit ‘Mr. Darcy’ idea, about the one that changes his mind. That comes back for me. And I’ll look up some night, and he’ll be there in front of me. And he’ll stare at me and say, ‘It was you. It was always you.’ ”

She paused, then offered, so quietly, so gently, “Maybe the kind of guy worth your time is the kind of guy who’s there from the beginning. Who wants you from the beginning.”

“I know. I mean, intellectually, I understand that. It’s just . . .”

Admit it, I thought to myself. Admit it and get it out there, and at least that way it won’t be rolling around in your head anymore.

“I don’t agree with him a lot of the time, most of the time, and he drives me crazy, but I get him. I know I drive him crazy, but I feel like he . . . like he gets me somehow, too. Appreciates something about me. I’m different, Mallory. I’m not like the rest of them. And I’m not like you anymore.” I looked up at her and saw both sadness and acceptance in her eyes. I thought of what Lindsey had said, and parroted her words. “Ethan isn’t like the rest of them, either. For all the strategy, the talk of alliances, he holds himself back from them.”

“He holds himself back from you.”

Not every time, I thought, and that was the payoff that kept me coming back for more.

“And you’re holding yourself back from me, from Morgan.”

“I know,” I said again. “Look, about Morgan, there are other considerations. What you know isn’t the entire story.” What I knew wasn’t the entire story either, but I wasn’t sure I was ready to tell the rest of it, to tell Mallory about the lingering relationship between the current and former Masters of Navarre. “It doesn’t matter. It’s done anyway.”

“Done?”

“Earlier. Before she found me. We ended it.” Not that it truly mattered. He didn’t trust me, had never trusted me. Maybe his own insecurities, maybe the rumors that seemed to follow me, maybe the sense that I’d never been really his.

Mallory interrupted my reverie and was, as usual, right on. “There is nothing we want quite as much as the thing we know we can’t have.”

I nodded, although I wasn’t sure if she meant me or Morgan. “I know.”

The room was silent for a minute. “You looked dead,” she said.

I glanced back at her, saw tears brimming at her lashes. And yet I still couldn’t reach back, the barrier still between us.

“I thought I’d killed you.” She sniffed, swiped absently at a tear. “Catcher had to hold me up. The vampires freaked; I think they wanted to take us out. Ethan checked your pulse, said you were alive, and he was all bloodied up. Blood everywhere. You were, too, cuts and scratches on your arms, on your cheeks. You two beat the shit out of each other. Catcher picked you up, and someone brought Ethan a shirt, and everyone got in the car. I brought your sword.” She pointed to the corner where it balanced on its pommel against the bedroom wall. It was back in the scabbard, cleaned, probably by Catcher, who’d have taken exquisite care of the blood-tempered blade.

“He carried you up here.”

“Catcher?”

Mallory shook her head, then rubbed at her eyes and ran her hands through her hair, seemed to shake off the emotion.

“Ethan. He rode with us. They—the vampires, your vampires—followed him in another car.”

My vampires. I’d become something else to her. A different kind of thing.

“Catcher said you needed to sleep it off, that you’d heal from it all.”

I looked down at my arms, which were pale and pristine once again. I had healed, just like he’d predicted.

“So Ethan carried you up here, and Catcher took care of me, I guess, and Lindsey and Luc—we all waited downstairs.” She glanced up at me. “You were unconscious the whole time?”