House Rules (15 page)

“Is there anything you won’t do for food?”

I struck a pose with a hand on one cocked hip, and grinned at him with lowered lids.
“It depends on the food.”

His gaze was appreciative. “I’m not sure if we’re discussing food or innuendo. Either
way, this may be the best conversation we’ve ever had.”

I walked over and pressed my lips to his, lingering a moment longer than I might have,
basking in the moment.

The moment before everything changed.

Before I swore allegiance to the Red Guard.

Before he pulled the House’s allegiance to the Greenwich Presidium.

Ethan tilted his head at me. “You’re all right?”

“Nervous,” I said honestly. “Big night.”

He made a vague sound of agreement. “One of the biggest. And we’ll see what comes
of it.”

Before the night was through, I was sure we would.

* * *

I had some time before the ceremony, and I did intend to make good on my promise to
visit my grandfather. Or at least check in with him before my visit to the lighthouse.

Thinking blood and food were in order before I headed downstairs, I walked down the
hallway to the kitchen to grab a snack.

There were bagels on the counter, but Margot had skipped the cream cheese, probably
as a cost-cutting measure.

I’d just tucked one into a napkin and pulled a bottle of Blood4You from the fridge
when Lacey stepped into the kitchen. Once again, she wore skinny jeans, and she’d
paired them with a trendy striped top and boots.

With no acknowledgment of me other than the mild glance she offered in my direction,
she walked to the fridge and grabbed a bottle of very expensive water. Only the best
for the best, I supposed.

She shut the door, then leaned back against it. “I’ve heard you two are seeing each
other.”

No need to ask whom she meant. I glanced back at her. “We are.”

“You aren’t good for him.”

I’d been heading for the door—hoping to avoid any drama and hit the road—when I stopped
short. “Excuse me?”

“You aren’t what he needs.”

Anger bit me with a sharp ferocity. “And what is that, exactly?”

“Not just a tool. Not just a fist. The House is precarious; although I’ve got my own
House now, don’t doubt my love for Cadogan. This place is in my blood. It’s where
I was made, and I’ll be damned if I’ll let you run it—and him—into the ground. You’re
the reason this House is leaving the GP. If it falters, that’s on you.”

I managed to form words, which was more than I would have thought possible given my
anger. “My relationship—his relationship—is really none of your business.”

“It is my business,” she countered. “This House is my business, and the Master who
made me is my business.”

Master or not, she was pissing me off. “Your business is in San Diego. You left this
House and Ethan when you went there. I don’t appreciate your poaching on what is,
quite clearly, my territory.”

Before she could answer, two other Cadogan vampires—Christine and Michelle—both in
workout clothes, walked into the kitchen. They waved at me and said polite hellos
to Lacey—Grateful Condescension, I supposed—before grabbing sports drinks from the
fridge and bananas from a bowl on the counter.

They said nothing more to either of us, but their heads were bowed together as they
left; they were undoubtedly chatting about the kitchen encounter between Ethan’s lover
and his lover-in-waiting. I didn’t even try to catch their whispers; I wasn’t sure
I wanted to know what they were saying . . . mostly for fear that they were right.

She moved a step closer. “Suppose you’re correct. Suppose it isn’t my business whom
he dates. Suppose it’s yours. Then maybe you should think long and hard about the
kind of vampire he deserves. Are you that girl? Or does he deserve someone better?
Someone loyal and true?”

“Someone blond?” I dryly asked. “Someone exactly like you, perhaps?”

My phone rang. Fearing another crisis, I whipped it from the pocket of my jacket.
It was Jonah, probably calling to ensure I’d show up at the initiation. I turned off
the phone and put it away again, but not before Lacey watched me with obvious curiosity.

“Are we keeping you from something?”

“I’m trying to solve a double murder,” I reminded her. “Just checking in.”

She smiled a little. “I have plenty of decades under my belt, Merit. Decades of having
worked with him, watched him, known him. You think, what, eight months of being fanged
is going to tell you what you need to know about a Master vampire? About what an immortal
needs?” She arched her eyebrow in a perfect imitation of Ethan. “You’re a child to
him. A momentary interest.”

If Lacey was working to make me even more insecure—to plant the seeds of doubt—she
was doing a damned good job of it.

“Leave me alone,” I said, my anger growing.

“No problem.” She walked to the kitchen door. “Just remember, I don’t trust you, and
I’m keeping an eye out.”

“What a witch,” I muttered when she was gone, but I stood there in the kitchen for
a moment, my hands shaking with vaulted anger. Was she right? Was I nothing more than
a liability to Ethan?

No
, I thought. He loved me, and he knew better than anyone what was or wasn’t right
for him and the House. He was a grown-up, by God. It wasn’t like I’d somehow teased
him into a relationship.

I snapped off the bottle cap and chugged the bottle of blood as I stood there, until
the gremlin inside me quieted down again.

I presumed her plan was to make me crazy. To make me uncertain about our relationship
until I drove Ethan crazy from neediness . . . or ended the relationship to “save”
him.

Lacey had once called me a “common soldier,” but she’d confused soldiering and martyrdom.
My job was to stand strong for my House and my Master, not give myself away like a
wilting violet because I was afraid I’d ruin him.

I wouldn’t ruin him. Just as I’d told him before when he needed to be reminded, we
were stronger together than we were apart. Two souls different from the rest who’d
found solace in each other.

She couldn’t take that away from us.

At least, I hoped she couldn’t.

* * *

My mood soured and my nerves even more jangled, I walked downstairs to the Ops Room.
Everyone but Juliet was in the room; it was her night for patrol, I guessed. Luc,
now officially entrenched as Guard Captain again, sat at the head of the table, just
as he usually did.

Lindsey’s gaze found me when I walked into the room, and the question in her eyes
was easy to read:
What’s Merit’s emotional state now that Lacey has spent an evening in the House?

Since she was highly empathic, I didn’t feel a need to inform her.

“Sentinel,” Luc greeted me. “Glad to see you’re here without your panties in an obvious
twist.”

“They’re getting there,” I said ominously. “Any word from the Ombud’s office?”

“Not a lick. We thought we’d wait for you and give Jeff a call.”

I sat down at the conference table. “Thanks. Let’s do it.”

Luc nodded and leaned over the table to the conference phone, where he hit the second
speed-dial option.

“Who’s number one?” I wondered.

“Saul’s Pizza,” Lindsey said. “You’ve ruined us for all other deep-dish.”

Damn straight
, I thought. Saul’s was my favorite deep-dish joint in Chicago, a little hole-in-the-wall
in Wicker Park, near Mallory’s brownstone. I’d introduced it to the House.

“This is Jeff,” Jeff answered appropriately.

I linked my fingers together as Lindsey moved the whiteboard closer. “Hey, Jeff. It’s
Merit in the Ops Room, on speakerphone as per usual.”

“I’ve got an update. Which do you want first? Good news or bad news?”

“Bad news.”

“The glass from the alley is a dead end. It’s safety glass from the side window of
a passenger vehicle. Could have been dozens of models, so it doesn’t really tell us
anything.”

Bummer, but not entirely surprising. Lindsey erased
GLASS
from the whiteboard, and I suddenly felt I was playing a game show in which the prizes
were disappearing with each wrong answer.

“What else did you find?” I asked.

“We checked out Oliver’s and Eve’s backgrounds. Nothing pops there. No arguments with
neighbors, no personal feuds, no money problems. If the killer picked them for a reason,
it’s not obvious to us. But I’ll send you the documents in case you want to review
them.”

Luc leaned forward. “That would be great, Jeff. Thanks. We’ve got a security consult
in for the transition. Maybe we’ll have him take a look.”

“They’re on their way. And now for the good news,” Jeff said. “I was checking out
satellite images of the registration center. Turns out there’s a bank across the street.
And banks have lots of security.”

I crossed my fingers. “Tell me there’s video, Jeff.”

“There’s video,” he confirmed. “But not much of it. I’ll send it to you.”

By the time Luc had dabbled with his touch screen, it was already registering receipt
of a new file. He hit the “play” button.

The video was grainy and dark, and it stuttered along more like time-lapse photography
than film, but the setting was right. The shot was focused on the spot directly in
front of the bank’s ATM machine, but it caught the edge of the registration center
across the street and the alley next to it.

“What’s the timing?” Luc asked.

“This starts eight minutes before Oliver and Eve show up. Now, ignore the guy at the
ATM, and watch the alley.”

The guy at the ATM was broad shouldered and dark skinned, and he wore green scrubs
as he cheerfully pulled cash from the ATM. He was easy on the eyes, but Jeff was right;
the action was behind him.

Traffic rolled past the registration center across the street. Some of the cars pulled
to the curb, where vampires spilled out to get into the line gathered outside the
door.

“There they are,” Luc said, pointing as Oliver and Eve hopped out of a car not far
from the ATM and walked across the street, hand in hand. The car took off again.

My heart clutched. I wanted to urge them back into the car, and felt utterly powerless
watching them walk into danger . . . and that much more determined to find their killer.

Oliver and Eve joined the line with the rest of the vampires. The focus at that distance
was pretty awful, the queue looking more like a snake of pixels than a distinguishable
line of vampires.

“Keep an eye on the next car up,” Jeff said.

“Watching,” Luc absently said, eyes glued to the screen. And he wasn’t the only one.
Every vampire in the Ops Room stared at the screen as a large, dark SUV drove past
the registration center.

No—not drove. It
cruised
past the registration center, barely moving, as if scoping out the center and the
line in front.

“That could be the same vehicle that followed us this evening.”

“You were followed?” Jeff asked.

I nodded. “Yeah. Ethan and I went for a run. A black SUV followed us, then drove away
in a hurry when we moved closer.”

The SUV in the video moved out of view before backing up into the alley, its headlights
shining out from the darkness just as the doorman had explained.

“And we have a car in the alley,” I quietly said.

We squinted at the screen, watching as the headlights flashed a couple of times and
figures—pixilated blobs—moved toward the car.

I knew instinctively who the blobs were: Oliver and Eve, heading for the alley and
the SUV that had parked there. The video was silent; maybe they’d heard something
in the alley we couldn’t pick up.

But before we could see what happened next, a large gray armored car crept into the
frame, parking directly in front of the bank and blocking the view of everything else.

I began shooing the screen. “Get out of the way! Get out of the way!”

The video stopped.

“The armored car sits there for forty-five minutes,” Jeff said. “By the time it leaves . . .”

“Everything’s over,” I finished.

“Exactly.”

The Ops Room was quiet for a moment. “Whoever was in the SUV lured them into the alley,”
Luc concluded.

“That’s exactly what happened,” Jeff said. “Marjorie talked to one of the staff members
in the registration office. Gal named Shirley Jackson—she’s worked for the city for
two decades—who got transferred to the office when it opened. Turns out, her desk
is next to the front window. She remembered hearing some kind of engine noise from
the alley, like a car had trouble starting. She saw a couple—a ‘nice-looking couple’—walk
past the window. She didn’t remember seeing them again, but said she didn’t think
anything of it.”

“Nor would she have,” Luc said. “You hear engine trouble, but someone goes to help
and the sound disappears? You figure some Samaritans offered their assistance, and
the problem was fixed.”

“Yeah,” I said. “But unfortunately wrong this time. Oliver and Eve were lured into
the alley. The SUV faked some kind of car trouble, and Oliver and Eve went to help.
And they were killed because of it.”

I shuddered, wondering if that’s what had been in store for me and Ethan on our run.

“And that’s why Jeff found nothing in their backgrounds,” Luc said. “The killer probably
wasn’t targeting Oliver and Eve specifically. He was targeting people outside the
registration center. He was cruising for prey.”

“For vampires,” I clarified. “He was outside a registration center, so he was targeting
vampires.”

“And the car you saw tonight?” Luc asked.

“Maybe cruising the House, looking for vampires?” I suggested. “Ethan and I happened
to be the ones on the street. Maybe he was hoping for a more subtle approach, which
is why he drove off when we got closer.”

Luc shrugged. “Hard to say.”

“Thank you for the update, Jeff,” I said.

“Sure thing. We’ll keep looking on our end. I’m going to dig through the video a bit,
see if that SUV makes another appearance.”