Twice Bitten (11 page)

My grandfather shook his head. “Gabriel doesn’t think Tony is capable of this.”

“Is he being objective?” Ethan asked.

Catcher shrugged. “Hard to say, but he does know Tony better than the rest of us.”

“It doesn’t read like an assassination on Gabriel,” Jeff said, his delicate features pulled into serious concentration. “The shots were at the bar, not any particular shifter. The shooter could have attempted to push his way inside, used a rifle, tried a sniperlike approach.” He frowned. “This reads more like a message—an attack against the Packs or the meeting, not Gabriel specifically.”

“The forensics folks will process the bullets,” my grandfather said. “Maybe they’ll find some trace, figure out the target and the perpetrator.”

“I, for one, would feel a lot better knowing the crazy shifter shooter was off the streets,” Jeff said, stuffing his hands into his pockets. But then he looked at me, a glint in his eyes. “Unless someone was willing to offer up some one-on-one protection?”

“Keep dreaming,” I said, but patted his shoulder cordially.

“Come on, Casanova,” Catcher said, steering him toward the car. “Let’s go use that hard drive you reformed.”

“Reformatted.”

“Whatever.”

We made our goodbyes, and my grandfather followed Catcher and a sheepish Jeff back to the Olds and their South Side office.

The remaining shifters—Gabriel, Adam, Jason, Robin, and a handful of blondish men I assumed to be more alphabetically named Keene siblings—walked outside and congregated near the door. A delivery truck pulled up to the curb, and two more men hopped out, then began lifting flats of particle board to place over the broken window. While the other brothers began to order and direct the repairmen, Gabriel, Adam, and the other Pack leaders walked over to where we stood.

“We appreciate your discretion tonight,” Gabriel said.

“It is the better part of valor,” I pointed out.

Ethan rolled his eyes. “Vampires no longer have the luxury of discretion, but I understand the need. Will you be able to keep the convocation under wraps after this?”

“I’m not worried about it. We’ll get in, we’ll meet, we’ll get out, and we’ll disperse back to our respective territories.”

“And whose territory is Chicago?” Ethan asked, his head tilted to the side. “You said Chicago was a city of power. Whose power?”

Gabriel shook his head. “You don’t want to know the answer to that one, vampire. While we’re waiting for the conference, we’ll focus on the investigation here.”

“And until then?” Ethan asked, then glanced around between the men. “Do you all have security you’re comfortable with?”

Gabriel nodded. “I’m not worried about the day-to-day; it’s the en masse meeting of Pack members that has me concerned. Are you still up for working the convocation, given the drama?”

Ethan considered the idea. “What are the odds that I’m putting myself and my Sentinel right into the line of fire?”

Gabriel barked out a laugh. “Given what we’ve seen so far, I’d guess one hundred percent.” He leaned in toward me. “Pack whatever steel you can find, Kitten. You’ll probably need the arsenal.”

“Do you have a final location?” Ethan asked.

“Same neighborhood, but we’re finalizing the details.” His voice flattened as he glanced back at what was left of the bar. He checked his watch. “It’s two thirty now. Let me clean up things here, and I’ll give you a call before dawn.”

Ethan nodded, then extended a hand to Gabriel. “We’ll wait for your call, and we’ll be prepared for the worst on Friday.”

Gabe barked out a laugh as they shook on it. “You are ever the vampire, Sullivan. Ever the vampire.”

“What else would I be?” Ethan mused aloud.

The deal struck, we turned to get into Ethan’s car.

“By the way,” Ethan said when the car’s motor was humming, “I like the jacket.”

I got an arched eyebrow when I slid in, pizza box on my lap, probably at the size of the behemoth. It steamed the knees of my suit pants, no doubt leaving a disk of grease in the process. Good thing I had a couple of backup pairs. I didn’t think Ethan would approve of a grease-stained Sentinel.

When his call was done, and my stomach was rumbling loud enough to fill the car with sound, we began the trek back to Hyde Park.

“It’s been a long night,” he said. “Assuming you’re willing to set aside a piece or two of that for me, we’ll camp in my rooms and wait for Gabriel to call.”

Since I’d been in his apartments the day before—and since I had seven or eight pounds of Saul’s Best on my lap—I didn’t give that invitation the kind of clearheaded thought it deserved. And it did make sense to think that we would relax over pizza in Ethan’s quarters while waiting for Gabriel’s follow-up call, mulling the night’s events and considering strategy for the convocation and pre-meeting.

Well.

I was half right.

“Margot?” Ethan asked aloud. One of the chefs smiled back at him, said something in French, and pointed farther into the kitchen. Ethan bobbed his head at her, took the pizza box from my hand, and started down the aisle between the chefs’ stations. He said hello to the men and women along the way; since I didn’t know any of them, I offered polite smiles as I passed.

I also didn’t know Ethan spoke French.

But I did, of course, know Margot. She sat on a stool beside a giant slab of marble, watching as a young man with dark hair rolled out dough on the floured marble.

“Watch your pressure,” she said before lifting her gaze and smiling at Ethan.

“Liege,” she said, hopping off her stool. “What brings you and”—she slid her gaze my way, measuring whom Ethan had brought into her lair, then offered me a sly smile—“Merit to my neck of the mansion?”

Ethan placed the pizza box on a clean spot of counter. “Merit and I will be waiting on a call in my rooms. Could you arrange this and deliver it upstairs with some plates and silverware?”

She arched a curious eyebrow, then lifted the pizza box, her lips twisting into a smile. “Saul’s Best,” she said fondly, one hand over her heart. “He got me through culinary school. And given our culinary history to date, I’m assuming, Liege, that our Sentinel had some input on this choice?”

“It’s not my usual fare,” he agreed.

Margot winked at me. “In that case, excellent choice, Merit.”

I smiled back.

Margot closed the box again, then clapped her hands together. “Well, let’s get this going. Something to drink, Liege? You still haven’t opened the bottle of Château Mouton Rothschild you picked up in Paris.”

Being a Merit, and having been raised by my father to appreciate the difference between Cabernet and Riesling, I knew she was talking about high-dollar wine . . . and pairing it with junk food. “You want to drink a Mouton Rothschild with pizza?”

Ethan looked amused. “I’m surprised at you, Sentinel. Given your diet, I’d have thought you’d appreciate the combination. And we are in Chicago, after all. What better to drink with Chicago’s finest than something nice from France?”

A girl couldn’t argue with logic like that.

“The Rothschild is fine,” Ethan said, putting his hand at my back to turn me toward the door again. “Merit is hungry, so all due haste would be appreciated.”

Since he was right, I spared him a sarcastic retort, but I couldn’t stop myself from glancing back to check Margot’s expression. It didn’t look good: arched eyebrow, crossed arms, and much-too-curious stare.

I was
so
going to hear about this later.

“Make yourself at home,” Ethan said, “such as it is.” He slipped off his jacket, flipped it around like a matador’s cape, and placed it carefully on the back of a desk chair.

When he plucked his PDA off the desktop and began to thumb through it, I took the opportunity to give the room another perusal. It was, after all, a record of Ethan’s four-hundred-year existence. If the
stuff
didn’t give some clue to the puzzle that was Ethan Sullivan, I wasn’t sure what would.

Hands behind my back, I walked to the wall opposite the Fabergé egg, where an embroidered heraldic crest was mounted in a cherrywood frame. The crest bore an oak tree with red acorns, a symbol I’d seen before.

I pointed to it, then glanced back at him. Ethan stood with one hand on the back of the chair, his BlackBerry in the other.

“This is the same crest that’s on the shield in the Sparring Room?”

He glanced up, nodded, and turned back to his PDA. “It’s my family crest. From Sweden.”

“What was your name?” I asked. Morgan had once told me that vampires switched identities every sixty or so years in order to keep from arousing too much human suspicion when they failed to age like their friends and families. “Ethan Sullivan” was his current name, but I assumed he hadn’t been born to that name—not in Sweden nearly four hundred years ago.

“My family name was Andresen,” he said, thumbs clicking at the keys. “I was born Jakob Andresen.”

“Siblings?”

He smiled wistfully. “Three sisters—Elisa, Annika, and Berit—although I was often away from them. I was in the army—a man-at-arms before our lieutenant asked me to run an errand. When I came back, information about our opponents’ positions in hand, he promoted me.”

Apparently done with his messages, Ethan placed the PDA on the desktop, slid his hands into his pockets, and glanced up at me. “I was an artillery captain when my time came.”

Ethan wasn’t usually this talkative about his past, so I crossed my arms over my chest and gave him my full attention. “When you were killed?”

“When I was
changed
,” he corrected. He gestured toward a spot at the crux of his left shoulder and neck. “An arrow at dusk. Night fell, and the vampires emerged, stripping the battlefield of blood, including my own. It was easy to come by on a battlefield, of course, not that they were particular. Vampires were different then, closer to animal than human. They were roaming bands of scavengers, taking what blood they could find. Within that band, that first band, there was a leader. Balthasar. He’d been watching the camps, knew my position, decided I’d know enough about war, about strategy, to be an asset to the rest of them.”

So in a way our changes had been similar. Ethan, changed in the midst of war, the victim of an attack. The change, although giving him life after a certain death, undertaken without his consent. Pulled into a corps of vampires to be a warrior, to offer his strategic services. Me, changed in the midst of Celina’s battle for notoriety, the victim of her staged attack. Changed by Ethan to save my life, without my consent. Brought into Cadogan House to be a warrior, a soldier protecting the House.

When I began the genetic change from human to vampire, he’d drugged me. He said he didn’t want me to have to experience the pain of the transition since it wasn’t a transition I’d asked for.

Maybe I now knew why.

Ethan paused, his gaze on the floor, his eyes tracking as he recalled some ancient memory. “When I arose after the change, I imagined myself a monster, something unholy. I couldn’t go home, couldn’t bring that home to my family. Not like I was. Not like that. So I joined Balthasar and his band, and we traveled together for a decade.”

“What happened after that?”

“An enterprising young vampire—a vampire Balthasar had made—decided that the band would be better under his authority. And that was the end of my relationship with those particular vampires. After that, I traveled. Wars were common in those years, and I had knowledge about strategy, skills. I joined a battalion here and there, traveled south until I found a peaceful bit of earth to call my own. I lived off the land. Learned to read and write. Tried to build a new life and not attract too much human attention.”

My voice soft, I asked, “Did you ever marry?”

“No,” he said, shaking his head. “No. As a soldier, I didn’t feel I had the luxury of keeping a family at home.” He smiled wistfully. “My sisters were children enough for me. I was a coward, I suppose, that I didn’t go back to them, didn’t give them a chance to accept what I’d become. But that was a much different time, and I’d have been returning home a demon. A true monster. I couldn’t bring myself to do it.”

“When did you join the House?”

“Many, many years after I left Sweden, I met Peter. He founded Cadogan House, and I joined him in Wales. And when he was gone, I became Master. I moved the House here to Chicago”—he spread his arms, gesturing to the mansion around him—“and here we are.”

“And here we are,” I agreed. I knew that wasn’t all of his history. But I knew enough about some of the more scandalous recent parts—his affair with Amber; his relationship with Lacey Sheridan, a former Cadogan guard turned Sheridan House Master—not to ask more than I’d probably want to know.

“A suggestion, Sentinel,” he said. “Write down the things you wish to remember, and keep those records close. Secured. It’s surprising how much you forget as the years go on.” With that advice, he pushed off the desk and walked toward me. He stopped just in front of me, our toes close enough to touch, and just . . . stood there. My heart began to pound as I waited for action—a touch or kiss—some end to the anticipation that lifted goose bumps on my arms.

I opted to end the tension myself. “You shouldn’t have shielded me when the shots were fired.”

He offered me an imperious look.

“Ethan, it’s my job. I’m supposed to protect you, not the other way around. Luc would have put my head on a pike if you’d taken a hit.”

“How do you know I didn’t?”

I opened my mouth, then closed it again. “Did you?”

His eyes went to sultry slits. “Do you want to look and see?”

“Not especially.” Liar, liar, pants on fire.

Ethan arched an eyebrow and began to lean in. . . . Then he reached around to pluck something from the table behind me. When he pulled back, folder in hand, I rolled my eyes at my reaction. The man just
unbalanced
me.

He opened the file and began to peruse it, pacing across the floor as he considered its contents. I blew out a breath, relaxing incrementally at the realization that however he might flirt, we really were here on business. Whatever the attraction between us, he was first and foremost a leader of vampires.

A knock sounded at the door.

“Come in,” Ethan said without glancing up.

The doors opened, but with considerably less fanfare than the last time food had been delivered. After giving me a devilish look, Margot wheeled in a cart sans steel covers. The pizza had been mounted on a footed platter, an army’s worth of supplies around it: red chili flakes; grated parmesan cheese; small glass bottles of water; napkins; silverware; wineglasses; and, of course, the wine.

Ethan looked it over. “You did a respectable job of finding dinner this time, Sentinel.”

I put my hands on my hips and looked over the tray and the plateau of pizza. “Well,” I said, “even a born-and-bred Chicagoan needs a break from red hots and double cheeseburgers now and again.”

“More’s the pity,” Margot snickered, and I smiled. I had a pretty good sense that I was going to like that girl. And then I was distracted by chocolate.

I pointed at two three-leveled stacks of it in varying shades of brown. “Chocolate cakes?”

“Chocolate mousse cakes,” Margot corrected. “A chocolate genoise bottom, topped by layers of milk chocolate mousse and ganache. We’re training a new pastry chef, and he wanted to practice his mousse-making skills.” She glanced at Ethan expectantly. “Anything else I can do for you, Liege?”

“I believe you’ve made our Sentinel happy enough for the both of us.”

“Very well.
Bon appétit
,” she said, then bowed a little before turning for the doors.

“Thank you, Margot,” Ethan said, and she disappeared into the hallway, the doors closing behind her, but the bounty left behind.