Hard Bitten (3 page)

Avoiding the intimacy in his voice, I smiled politely at him. “Hopefully he won’t need to see me fight. If I’m brawling in front of the mayor, things have definitely gone south. When do we leave?”

Ethan was quiet long enough that I looked over at him, saw the earnestness in his expression. It plucked my heartstrings to see him look so decided about me. But whatever fate might have in store for us down the road, I wasn’t taking that exit today.

“Sentinel.”

There was gentle reprobation in his voice, but I was sticking to my plan. “Yes, Liege?”

“Be stubborn if you wish to, if you
need
to, but we know how this will end.”

I kept my face blank. “It will end as it always does—with your being Master and my being Sentinel.”

The reminder of our positions must have done it. As abruptly as he’d turned on the charm, Ethan turned it off again. “Be downstairs in twenty minutes. Wear your suit.” And then he was gone, striding purposefully up the stairs and back into Cadogan House.

I swore quietly. That boy was going to be the death of me.

L
eaving Cadogan House used to be a bit of a trick, mostly involving avoiding the irritation of the paparazzi on the corner who were waiting to snap our pictures. Now it was actually dangerous.

We were both in black suits (official Cadogan wear) and in Ethan’s black Mercedes convertible, a slick roadster he parked in the basement beneath the House. We drove up the ramp that led to the ground level, then waited while one of the fairies stationed at the gate pushed it open. A second stood in front of the ramp, his wary gaze on the protesters who were beginning to move in our direction.

We pulled onto the street. The fairy at the gate closed it again, then joined his partner at the side of the car. We moved at a crawl as humans began to gather around us, candles in hand. They moved without sound, their expressions blank, like zombie believers. Their silence was completely unnerving. That was worse, I think, than if they’d been shouting anti-vampire epithets or obscenities.

“Apparently they’ve seen us,” Ethan muttered, left hand on the steering wheel, right on the gearshift.

“Yes, they have. Do you want me to get out?”

“As much as I appreciate the offer, let’s let the fairies handle it.”

As if on cue, the fairies took point, one at each door. “We pay them, right? For the security?”

“We do,” Ethan said. “Although, as they detest humans even more than they detest us, it’s probably a task they’d have taken on for free.”

So fairies hated vampires, but hated humans more. Some humans hated vampires and, if they had known what the fairies were, probably would have hated them, too.

And vampires? Well, vampires were like politicians. We wanted to be friends with everyone. We wanted to be liked. We wanted political capital we could trade later for political benefits. But we were still vampires, and however political and social we might have been, we were still different.

Well, most of us, anyway. Ethan often remarked that I was more human than most, probably because I’d been a vampire for only a few months. But looking out at the protesters, I felt a little more vampire than usual.

The protesters stared into the windows, holding their candles toward the car as if nearness to the flame was enough to make us disappear. Luckily, fire was no more hazardous to us than it was to humans.

Ethan kept both hands on the wheel now as he carefully maneuvered the Mercedes through the crowd. We crawled forward one foot at a time, the humans swarming in a cloud so thick we couldn’t see the road ahead. The fairies walked alongside, one hand on the roof of the petite roadster like members of the Secret Service in a presidential motorcade. We moved slowly, but we moved.

And as we moved, we passed two teenagers who stood on my side of the car, arms linked together—a boy and girl. They were so young, and they were dressed in shorts and tank tops like they’d spent the day at the beach. But their expressions told a different story. There was hatred in their eyes, hatred too intense for sixteen-year-olds. The girl had smeared mascara beneath her eyes as if she’d been crying. The boy watched the girl, his hatred for me maybe prompted by his infatuation with her.

With jarring suddenness, they began to chant together, “No more vampires! No more vampires! No more vampires!” Over and over again they cried out the mantra, zealotry in their voices, like angels ready to smite.

“They’re so young to be so angry,” I quietly said.

“Anger isn’t merely for the old,” Ethan pointed out. “Even the young can face misery, tragedy, and twist sadness into hatred.”

The rest of the crowd seemed to find the teenagers inspiring. One person at a time, they echoed the chant until the entire crowd had joined in, a chorus of hatred.

“Get out of our neighborhood!” shouted a human close to the car, a thin woman of fifty or sixty with long gray hair, who wore a white T-shirt and khaki pants. “Go back to where you came from!”

I faced forward again. “I’m from Chicago,” I murmured. “Born and bred.”

“I believe they had a more supernatural dominion in mind,” Ethan said. “Hell, perhaps, or some parallel dimension inhabited solely by vampires and werewolves and, in any event, far from humans.”

“Or they want us in Gary instead of Chicago.”

“Or that,” he allowed.

I forced myself to face forward, blocking out the sight of their faces at the window, wishing I could will myself invisible, or somehow merge into the leather upholstery and avoid the discomfort of listening to humans scream about how much they hated me. It hurt, more than I would have thought possible, to be surrounded by people who didn’t know me but who would have been more than happy to hear I was gone and no longer polluting their neighborhood.

“It gets easier,” Ethan said.

“I don’t want it to get easier. I want to be accepted for who I am.”

“Unfortunately, not everyone appreciates your finer qualities. But there are those of us who do.”

We passed a family—father, mother, and two young sons—holding a hand-painted sign that read HYDE PARK HATES VAMPS.

“Now, that,” Ethan grumbled, “I have little patience for. Until the children are old enough to reach their own conclusions about vampires, they should be immune from the discussion. They certainly should not have to bear the weight of their parents’ prejudices.”

I nodded and crossed my arms over my chest, tucking into myself.

After a hundred feet, the protesters thinned out, the urge to berate us apparently diminishing as we moved farther from the House. My spirit deflated, we headed northeast toward Creeley Creek, which sat in Chicago’s historic Prairie Avenue neighborhood.

I glanced over at Ethan. “Have we thought about a campaign or something to address the hatred? Public service announcements or get-to-know-you forums? Anything to help them realize we aren’t the enemy?”

He smirked. “Our social chair at work again?”

As punishment for challenging Ethan to a fight—although I’d been suffering from a bit of a split vampire personality at the time—Ethan had named me House social chair. He thought it a fitting punishment for a girl who spent more time in her room than getting to know her fellow vampires. I’ll admit I was a bookworm—I’d been an English-lit grad student before I was changed—but I’d been making inroads. Of course, the shifter attack had put a damper on my plans for a barbecue social mixer.

“I’m just a Novitiate vampire trying to make it through the night with a little less hatred.

Seriously—it might be something to consider.”

“Julia’s on it.”

“Julia?”

“House director of marketing and public relations.”

Huh. I hadn’t even known we had one of those.

“Maybe we could hold a lottery for one of the Initiate spots next year,” I suggested. “Get humans interested in being a Cadogan vampire?”

“I’ve got a golden ticket,”
Ethan began to sing, then chuckled.

“Something like that. Of course, if you open a spot up to the public, you probably increase the odds of adding a saboteur to the House.”

“And I think we’re rather full in the saboteur department lately.”

Thinking of the two traitorous vamps the House had lost since I joined, I nodded.

“Wholeheartedly agreed.”

I should have knocked on wood, offered up a little protection against the jinx I’d caused by talking about sabotage . . . because it suddenly looked like the protesters had called ahead.

Our headlights bounced off two SUVs that were parked diagonally in the middle of the street, six hefty men in front of them, all wearing black T-shirts and cargo pants.

“Hold on,” Ethan yelled out, pulling the steering wheel with a screech of burning rubber.

The roadster banked to the right, spinning clockwise until we sat perpendicular to the SUVs.

I looked up. Three of the men jogged around us, guns at their waists, surrounding the car before Ethan could pull away from the roadblock.

“I am not crazy about this situation,” I muttered.

“Me, either,” Ethan said, pulling out his cell phone and tapping keys. I assumed he was requesting backup, which was fine by me.

“Military?” I asked Ethan, my heart beating wildly.

“It’s unlikely official military would approach us this way. Not when there are significantly easier means with less potential collateral damage.”

“Whatever else they are, I assume they’re anti-vamp.”

Two of the three men in front of the car unholstered their weapons, approached us, and pulled open the doors.

“Out,” they said in unison. I took mental inventory—I had my dagger, but not my sword. I hoped I wouldn’t need it.

“Anti-vamp, indeed,” Ethan muttered, then slowly lifted his hands into the air. I did the same.

Steady, Sentinel,
he telepathically told me.
Say
nothing aloud unless it’s absolutely necessary.

You’re the boss,
I replied.

All evidence to the contrary.
The words were silent, but the snark was obvious.

We stepped outside onto the dark Chicago street. The vibration in the air—the buzz of steel I could feel after my katana had been tempered with blood—was intense. These guys, whoever they were, were well armed. Our hands in the air, their weapons trained on our hearts, we were escorted in front of the Mercedes. As vampires, we healed quickly enough that bullets wouldn’t generally do us in. An aspen stake to the heart, however, would do the trick without question.

Now that I thought about it, their guns didn’t exactly look off-the-rack; they looked like custom units, with muzzles a little wider than those in the House’s arsenal.

Is it possible to modify a gun to shoot aspen
stakes?
I asked Ethan.

I’d prefer not to find out,
he replied.

My stomach churned with nerves. I’d become used to the fact that my job called for violence, usually perpetrated by crazy paranormals against me and mine. But these weren’t paranormals.

These were gun-wielding humans who apparently believed they were beyond the reach of the law, who believed they had the authority to stop us and hold us at gunpoint within the bounds of our own city.

The third man in front of us—big and bulky, with acne-marked skin and a military haircut

—stepped forward.

Watch him,
echoed Ethan’s voice in my head.

Hard to miss a human tank heading right for
me.

“You think we don’t know what you’re doing to our city?” Tank asked. “You’re killing us.

Sneaking around in the night, pulling us from our beds. Enticing us, then drinking us down until there’s nothing left.”

My chest tightened at his words. I certainly hadn’t done any of those things, nor did I know of any other vampires who had, at least not since Celina Desaulniers, Chicago’s vampire bad girl, had disappeared from the scene. But Tank seemed very convinced he was telling the truth.

“I’ve done nothing to you,” I told him. “I’ve never met you, and you don’t know anything about me except that I’m a vampire.”

“Bitch,” he muttered, but he snapped his head back when the rear door opened on the left-hand SUV. Two booted feet hit the pavement, followed by another man in the same black uniform. Unlike the others, this one was handsome, with long, wide eyes and high, pert cheekbones, his dark hair perfectly parted. His hands behind his back, he walked toward us while Tank closed the SUV’s door.

I guessed New Guy was the one in charge.

“Mr. Sullivan. Ms. Merit,” he said.

“And you are?” Ethan asked.

New Guy smiled grandly. “You can call me . .

. McKetrick.” The pause made it sound like he’d only just decided on the name. “These are some of my friends. Fellow believers, if you will.”

“Your manners leave something to be desired.” Ethan’s tone was flat, but angry magic peppered the air.

McKetrick crossed his arms over his chest. “I find that insult rather comical, Mr. Sullivan, coming from an interloper in our city.”

“An interloper?”

“We’re humans. You’re vampires. But for the result of a genetic mutation, you’d be like us.

And that makes you aberrations in our town, uninvited guests. Guests that need to mind their manners and take their leave.” His tone was matter-of-fact, as if he hadn’t just suggested we were genetic aberrations that needed to hightail it out of the city.

“I beg your pardon,” Ethan said, but McKetrick held up a hand.

“Come, now,” he said. “I know you understand me. You seem to be an intelligent man, as does your colleague here. At least from what we know of her parents.”

My parents—the Merits—were new-money Chicago. My father was a real estate investor mentioned in the papers on a daily basis. Smart, but ruthless. We weren’t close, which made me that much less excited to learn I was being judged on the basis of his narcissistic press coverage.

Don’t let him faze you,
Ethan silently said.

You know who you are.

“Your prejudices,” he said aloud, “are not our problem. We suggest you put down the weapons and continue on your way.”