am the best thing that’s happened to this city in a long time.”
Was there no end to this guy’s ego? “Really?
By creating chaos? By drugging vampires and putting humans at risk?” I pointed at Celina. “By releasing a felon?”
Tate sat back again and rolled his eyes. “Don’t be melodramatic. And you’ll recall Celina took the fall for the drugs. Very tidy how that wrapped up. The least I could do was reward her a bit—here in the privacy of my own home, anyway.”
I guess he’d been in on the plan to fake Celina into a meeting at Street Fest—and to make a confession. She confessed because she knew Tate would let her off the hook; the confession served Tate by “solving” the V problem. I glanced over at her. She seemed to be completely unaware Tate was talking about her. She’d stopped moving at the side of Tate’s desk and begun drumming her fingers nervously across the top. It looked like the V was beginning to kick in, to give her that irritating buzz.
“Frankly, Merit, I’m surprised you don’t appreciate the tremendous boon that V offers to vampires.”
“It makes you feel like a vampire,” Celina intoned.
“She has a point,” Tate said, drawing my gaze back to him. “V lowers inhibitions. You may think me callous, but I believed V would help weed out the less agreeable portion of the vampire population. Those willing to use V deserve to be incarcerated.”
“So now you’re entrapping vampires.”
“It’s not entrapment. It’s good urban planning.
It’s self-selection for population control. I understand you aren’t susceptible to glamour.
Doesn’t that make you different? Better? You don’t have the same weaknesses. You’re stronger, with better control.”
I swung the katana in Celina’s direction.
“Make your point, Tate.”
“Do you know what kind of team we could make? You are the poster girl for good vampires.
You save humans, even when the GP would seek to bring you down, to punish you for your deeds.
They love you for it. You help keep the city in balance. And that’s what we need, if there’s any hope for vampires and humans to survive together.”
“There is no way in hell that I’d work with you. You think you’re going to walk away from this? After setting up vampires and contributing to the deaths—to the endangerment—of humans?”
His stare went cold. “Don’t be naive.”
“No,” I said. “Don’t justify your evildoing with some bogus, trite ‘this is just the way the world works’ lip service. This is not the way the world works, and my grandfather is proof of it.
You’re egotistical and completely crazy.”
Celina’s finger drumming increased in pace, but whatever magical control Tate had on her was effective. She wouldn’t act without his permission. “Can I kill her now, please?”
Tate held up a silencing hand. “Wait your turn, darling. And what about your father?” he asked me. “He isn’t crazy, is he?”
I shook my head, confused by the non sequitur. “This isn’t about my father.”
His eyes wide with surprise, Tate let out a belly-raucous, mirthless laugh. “Not about your father? Merit, everything in your life since you became fanged has been about your father.”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
He gave me a look best saved for a naive child. “Why do you think that you, of all people in Chicago, were made a vampire?”
“Not because of my father. Celina tried to kill me. Ethan saved my life.” But even as I spoke the words aloud, my stomach knotted with fear.
Confused, I dropped the sword back to my side.
“Yes, you’ve told me that before. Repeating the lies doesn’t make them truth, Merit. Awfully coincidental, wasn’t it, that Ethan happened to be on campus when you were?”
“It was a coincidence.”
Tate clucked his tongue. “You’re smarter than that. I mean, truly—what are the odds? Don’t you think it would have been beneficial for your father to have a vampire in his pocket—his daughter—when the riots ended? When humans became used to the concept of the fanged living among them?”
Tate smiled tightly. And then the words slipped from his mouth like poison.
“What if I told you, Merit, that Ethan and your father had a certain, shall we say, business arrangement?”
Blood roared in my ears, my knuckles whitening around the handle of the katana. “Shut up.”
“Oh, come now, darling. If the cat’s out of the bag, don’t you want the details? Don’t you want to know how much your father paid him? How much Ethan, your father’s partner in crime, took from your father to make you immortal?”
My vision dimmed to blackness, memories overwhelming me: the fact that Ethan and Malik were on the U of C quad at the precise moment I’d been attacked. The fact that Ethan had known my father before we met him together.
The fact that Ethan had given me drugs to ease the biological transition to vampire.
I thought he’d drugged me because he felt guilty I hadn’t been able to consent to the Change.
Had he actually felt guilty because he’d changed me at my father’s bidding?
No. That couldn’t be right.
Like I’d imagined him into being, Ethan suddenly burst into the room, fury in his eyes.
He’d come to back me up.
Tate was still in the room, but he all but disappeared from view. My gaze fell on Ethan, the fear powerful, blinding, deafening as blood roared through my veins.
Ethan moved to me, and scanned my eyes, but I still couldn’t find words to speak the question.
“Are you all right?” he asked. “Your eyes are silvered.” He looked back to Tate, probably suspected my hunger had been tripped. “What did you do to her?”
I gripped the handle of my sword tighter, the cording biting into the skin of my palm, and forced myself to say the words.
“Tate said you met with my father. That he paid you to make me a vampire.”
I wanted him to tell me that it was a lie, just more falsehoods thrown out by a politician grasping at straws.
But the words he said broke my heart into a million pieces.
“Merit, I can explain.”
Tears began to slide down my cheeks as I screamed out my pain. “I trusted you.”
He stuttered out, “That’s not how it went—” But before he could finish his excuse, his eyes flashed to the side.
Celina was moving again, a sharpened stake in hand. “I need to move,” she plaintively said. “I need to finish this
“Down, Celina,” Tate warned. “The fight isn’t yet yours.”
But she wouldn’t be dissuaded. “She has ruined enough for me,” Celina said. “She won’t ruin this.” Before I could counter the argument, she’d cocked back her arm and the stake was in the air—and headed right for me.
Without a pause, and with the speed of a centuries-old vampire, Ethan threw himself forward, his torso in front of mine, blocking the stake from hitting my body.
He took the hit full on, the stake bursting through his chest.
And through his heart.
For a moment, time stopped, and Ethan looked back at me, his green eyes tight with pain. And then he was gone, the stake clattering to the ground in front of me. Ethan replaced by—transformed to—nothing more than a pile of ash on the floor.
I didn’t have time to stop or think.
