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Merit?
I heard his voice in my head.
Find me, I ordered, and stopped in the crossway between the stairs, the hallway, the parlors.
Down the hall, his office door opened. He stepped out, took one look at me, and moved forward.
"You did this to me."
I don't know if he heard me, but his expression didn't change. He reached me, stopped, and his eyes widened, and he searched my own. "Jesus Christ, Merit. What's happened to you?"
My sword whistled as I unsheathed it, and when I gripped it in both hands, I felt the circuit close. I closed my eyes, basking in the warmth of it.
"Merit!" This time, there was an order behind the words.
I opened my eyes, nearly flinched, wanted instinctively to bend to the will of my Master, my maker, but I fought it and through trembling limbs, I forced back the urge to yield.
"No," I heard myself say, my voice barely a whisper.
His eyes widened again, then flicked to something behind me. He shook his head, looked back at me. His voice low, intimate, insistent. "Come back from this, Merit. You don't want to fight me."
"I do," I heard, in a voice that was barely mine. "Find steel," she advised him.
We advised him.
He stood there for a long moment, silently, still, before nodding. Someone offered him a blade, a katana that glinted in the light. He took it, mirrored my stance - katana in both hands, body bladed.
"If the only way you'll come back from this is to be bloodied by it, then so be it."
He lunged.
It was easy to forget that he'd been a soldier. The perfectly cut Armani, pristine white shirts, and always shiny Italian shoes were more the workaday wrapping of a corporate CEO than of the leader of a band of three hundred and twenty vampires.
That was my mistake - forgetting who he was. Forgetting that he was head of Cadogan House for a reason, not just for his politics, not just for his age, but because he could fight, knew how to fight, because he knew how to swing a sword through the air.
He'd been a soldier, had learned to fight in the midst of a world war. She'd made me forget that.
He was amazing to watch, or would have been, had I not been on the receiving end of the slices and cuts, the kicks and turns that torqued his body nearly effortlessly. The lunges and blocks. He was so fast, so precise.
But the pain began to ease, and repressed for so long, held back by my human perceptions, misgivings fears, she - the vampire - began to fight back.
And she was faster.
I was faster.
My body knifed toward his, and I swung, used the katana in my hands to slash, to force him to move, to spin, to slice his own sword in ways that looked comparatively awkward.
I don't know how long we fought, how long we chased each other in the midst of a circle of vampires on the first floor of Cadogan House, my hair wet and matted, tears streaking my face, bloodied hands and knees, broken ribs, the sleeves of my shirt in tatters from half a dozen near misses.
His arms were equally sliced, his twists and turns still not fast enough to avoid my parries. Where he'd once let me play the game, had moved in close enough to give me an opportunity to make contact before slipping away again, now he spun to save his skin; the expression on his face - blank, focused - told that story well enough. This wasn't play fighting. This was the real challenge, the fight I'd tried to bring to him months ago, the fight that he'd mocked. He owed me a fight, a real fight, in recognition of the fact that I hadn't asked to become a vampire but had acquiesced to this authority anyway because he'd asked it of me. This was less a challenge, I thought, than an acknowledgment. He was my Master, but I'd taken my oaths and he owed me a fight. A fair one, because I'd been willing to fight for him. To kill for him. To take a hit for him, if necessary.
"Merit."
I shrugged off the sound of my name and kept fighting, dodging, and swinging, smiling as I swung the blade at him, parried and countered, torqued my own body to stay out of the line of his honed steel.
"Merit."
I blocked his blow, and as he reoriented and rebalanced his body, I glanced behind me, just in time to see Mallory, my friend, my sister, hand outstretched, an orb of blue flame in her hand. She flicked, and it came toward me, and I was enveloped in flame.
The lights went out.
Chapter Twenty-four
CH... CH... CH... CH... CHANGES
A pale golden glow of light. The smell of lemon and comfort.
Then pain and cold and nausea. Waves of it.
Pain that clenched my stomach and a fever that flamed my cheeks, my skin so warm that the tears that slipped down my face left cold saline trails.
This was what I'd hardly remembered the first time it happened.
The change. I was going through the rest of it.
I'd sobbed at pain that racked me, seizing muscle, gnawing at my bones.
And at some point in the midst of that change, I'd opened silver eyes and sought out the nourishment I knew, in that instant, that I would kill for.
And in that instant, as if he'd been watching, waiting, a wrist was placed before me.
My body shook with cold, and I heard a growl, my growl, before I tried to move away.
There was whispering. My name. An incantation.
Merit. Be still.
The wrist was put before me again.
Ethan's wrist. I looked up into his own silver eyes. He gazed down at me, a lock of blond across his forehead, hunger in his eyes. It is offered. Willingly.
I looked down, stared at the beads of vermilion that slowly, so slowly, traced twin trails down his forearm, across his skin.
"Merit."
I gripped his arm in my left hand, his hand in my right. His fingers curled around my thumb. Squeezed. His lashes fell.
I lifted his wrist, put my lips to his skin, and felt his echoing shudder of pleasure. Heard the earthy groan that accompanied it.
I closed my eyes.
Merit.
I drank.
The circuit closed.
When I came to, I was huddled in a ball, lying on my side in the cool, soft dark. I recognized the scent of it - I was at Mallory's house, in my old bedroom. Kicked out of Cadogan would have been my bet.
I blinked, gingerly touched my hand to my chest, the pain in my ribs now a dull ache.
But the darkness - and the million sounds and scents that filled it - were suddenly choking, confining. I panicked. I choked back a sob, and in the thick darkness around me heard myself scream for light.
A golden glow lit the room. I blinked, adjusted to the light, and saw Ethan in the cushy armchair across from the bed, suit neatly pressed, legs crossed, his hand drawing back from the lamp that sat on the table beside the chair. "Better?"
My head swam, spun. I covered my mouth. Voice muffled, I warned him, "I think I'm gonna be sick."
