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“Because I couldn’t. V—” I caught myself. The jukebox had gone quiet, and I was kind of afraid of what he might select next. So I settled for modifying my language. “They will push and push, to see where your boundaries are. And if you knuckle under once, they’ll expect you to do it every time.”
“Meaning?”
“That if I hadn’t left, next time it wouldn’t have been, ‘It’s only for tonight, Cassie.’ It would have been ‘It’s only for this week,’ or this month, or this year. .
. .”
“And they chose to push when they knew you were vulnerable.” He sounded like he expected nothing less.
“They didn’t choose,” I said, frowning. Because Pritkin always assumed the worst about vampires. “They probably thought I’d sleep all night and it would never come up. But it did, and in their society, you can’t afford to ignore a challenge like that. If you do, you’ll be labeled weak, and that’s a really hard thing to undo.”
Pritkin looked confused. “Are you trying to say that Marco wanted you to defy him?”
“This isn’t about Marco. He was just following orders.”
“Then Mircea wanted you to defy him?”
I laughed. “No.”
Pritkin was starting to look exasperated. “Then what—”
“Mircea wants me to do what I’m told. He’d love it if I did what I’m told. But he wouldn’t respect it. He wouldn’t respect me.”
I took a moment to work on my shake, which was thick and rich and headache-inducing cold. I’d sort of given up explaining any vamp to any mage, much less Mircea to Pritkin. But he’d asked, and I owed him one, so I tried.
“Mircea didn’t give that order expecting me to ever know about it,” I said. “But he did give it, and once he refused to rescind it, it became a direct challenge.”
Pritkin’s eyes narrowed. “And you couldn’t ignore it because it would have made you look bad?”
I had to think for a moment about how to answer that. It was surprisingly difficult sometimes to put into words things I had accepted as the natural order since childhood. But they weren’t natural for Pritkin, or for most mages, other than for those who worked for the vampires themselves. And they didn’t talk much.
“It wouldn’t have made me look bad,” I finally said. “It would have made me look like what he was treating me as: a favored servant. Someone to be petted and pampered and protected—and ordered around. Because that’s what servants do: they take orders. But that isn’t how one of his equals would have responded.”
“But he wouldn’t have tried that with one of them.”
I snorted. “Of course he would. They do this kind of thing all the time, testing each other, seeing if there are any chinks in the other person’s armor, any weaknesses that maybe they didn’t notice before. And if they find one, they’ll exploit it.”
“It sounds as if you’re talking about an enemy, rather than a . . . friend,” he said curtly.
I shook my head. “It’s part of the culture.”
“That doesn’t make it right!”
“It doesn’t make it wrong, either. It’s how they determine rank. If you knuckle under to some other master’s demands, especially without a fight, then you’re accepting that he or she outranks you. And afterward, everyone else will accept that, too.”
“But you’re not a—” Pritkin caught himself. “You’re not a master.”
“But I have to be treated as one.”
“Why?” He looked disgusted. Like the idea that any human might actually want to fit into vampire society was unfathomable. For a moment, I thought about telling him just how many humans were turned away each year by courts much less illustrious than Mircea’s. But somehow, I didn’t think it would help.
“Because there’s no alternative,” I said instead, as our artery-clogging pepperoni pizza was delivered. It was New York style, which meant the pieces were so big I had to fold one over to eat it, and a trickle of grease ran down my arm. I sighed happily.
Pritkin started working on his own meal, but to my surprise, he didn’t drop the subject. “Explain it to me.”
“There are only three types of . . . us . . . as far as they’re concerned,” I said, in between bites. “Servants, prey and threats. There’s no category for ally or partner, because that requires viewing us as equals, and they just don’t do that.”
“They are allied with the Circle, at least for the duration of the current conflict,” he argued.
