"And what do you want, Merit?" He'd been looking down at the ground, but suddenly raised glass-green eyes to mine. The question was startling enough; the near-glow of his eyes was brutal.
My voice was soft. "What do you mean?"
"You hadn't planned it, but you're a member of an honorable House, in a unique position, a position of some power. You're strong. You have connections. If you could be in Celina's position, would you?"
Was he testing me? I searched his eyes. Did he mean to take my measure, to see if I could withstand the hunger for power that had overtaken Celina? Or was it simpler than that?
"You're assuming she went bad," I said, "that she'd been balanced as a human but lost some manner of control since her change. I'm not sure that's right. Maybe she was always bad, Ethan. Maybe she didn't get fed up, hasn't suddenly become an advocate for unified vampires. Maybe she's different from me, or from you."
His lips parted. "Are we different, Celina and I?"
I looked down and plucked nervously at my silk skirt. "Aren't you?"
When I looked up again, his own gaze was intimate and searching, maybe as he considered the question, weighed the balance of his own long life.
"Are you wondering if I'll betray you?" I asked him.
There was yearning in his gaze, in his expression. I don't think he meant to kiss me, although the thought of it - maybe the want of it, maybe the fear of it - sped my pulse.
Sotto voce, he said, "There are things I want to tell you - about Cadogan, the House, the politics." He swallowed, as uncomfortable as I'd ever seen him. "There are things I need to tell you."
I lifted my brows, inviting him to speak.
He opened his mouth, then closed it again. "You're young, Merit. And I don't mean age - I was barely older than you when I was turned. You're a Novitiate vampire, and a new Novitiate at that. And yet, not even two months into your tutelage, you've seen the violence and maneuvering we're capable of."
He looked back at the books and smiled wistfully. "In that respect we aren't so very unlike humans after all."
There was silence in the cavernous room until he looked back at me again. When he did, his expression was somber. "Decisions are made..." He paused, seemed to gather his thoughts, then started again. "Decisions are made with an eye toward history, with an eye toward protecting our vampires, securing our Houses."
Ethan nodded at a wall of books across the room, a bank of yellowed volumes with red numbers on the spines.
"The complete Canon," he said, and I understood then why the Canon was delivered to Initiate vampires in Desk Reference form. There must have been fifteen or twenty volumes on each row, and there were multiple rows on multiple shelves.
"That's a lot of law," I told him, my gaze following the line of books.
"It's a lot of history," Ethan said. "Many, many centuries of it." He glanced back at me.
"You're familiar with the origin of the House system, of the Clearings?"
I was. The Desk Reference, while apparently not offering the play-by-play that the complete collection provided, outlined the basic history of the House system, from its origins in Germany to the development of the French tribunal that, for the first time, collectively governed the vampires of Western Europe, at least until the Presidium moved the convocation to England after the Napoleonic Wars. Both acts were attributable to the panic caused by the Clearings.
"Then you understand," he continued at my nod, "the importance of protecting vampires.
Of building alliances."
I did understand, of course, having been handed to Morgan to secure a potential Navarre alliance. "The Breckenridges," I said. "I'd have considered them allies. I'd never have imagined that he'd talk to me that way. Not Nick. He called me a vampire - but it wasn't just a word, Ethan. It was a swear. A curse." I paused, lifted my gaze to Ethan.
"He said he'd come after me."
"You know that you're protected?" he quietly asked, sincerely asked. "Being a Cadogan vampire. Living under my roof."
I appreciated the concern, but it wasn't that I feared Nick. It was that I regretted losing him to ignorance. To hatred. "The problem is," I said, "not only are they not allies - they're enemies."
Ethan's brow furrowed, that tiny line back between his eyebrows. And in his eyes - I don't know