Some Girls Bite (Chicagoland Vampires #1)(68)
Author: Chloe Neill

I stared at the open shell of the phone for a long time, thinking about the phone call even as the sun pulled at the horizon, peeked above it. I finally clamped the phone closed, and when I curled into a ball, my head heavy on the pillow, I slept with the phone in my hand.

When the sun set and I opened my eyes again, I deposited the cell phone on the bedside table, and decided – it being both my day off and my twenty-eighth birthday –  that I had time for a run. I stretched, donned workout gear, pulled up my hair, and headed downstairs.

I got in a run, a loop around Wicker Park, the commercial parts of the neighborhood buzzing with dinner seekers and folks seeking the solace of an after-work drink. The house was still quiet when I returned, so I was spared the sights and sounds of a Carmichael-Bell liaison. Thirsty enough to guzzle Buckingham Fountain, I headed for the kitchen and the refrigerator.

That was when I saw my father.

He sat at the kitchen island, dressed in his usual suit and expensive Italian loafers, glasses cocked at his nose as he scanned the paper.

Suddenly, it didn’t seem coincidental that Mallory and Catcher were nowhere to be found.

"You’ve been named Sentinel."

I had to force my feet to move. Aware that his eyes were on me, I walked to the refrigerator, grabbed a carton of juice, and cracked it open. I almost reached for a glass from the cupboard, thinking it would be more polite to pour a cup than chug from the carton, but opted to chug anyway. Our house, our rules.

After a long, silent drink, I walked to the opposite side of the island, put down the carton, and looked at him. "So I have."

He made a show of loudly folding the paper, then placed it on the counter. "You’ve got pull now."

Word, even if fundamentally incorrect, had traveled. I wondered if my father, like my grandfather, had his own secret vampire source. "Not really," I told him. "I’m just a guard."

"But for the House. Not for Sullivan."

Damn. Maybe he did have a source. He knew a lot, but the more interesting question was why he’d bothered to find out. Potential business deals? Bring out the daughter’s vampire connections to impress friends and business partners?

Whatever the source or the reason, he was right about the distinction. "For the House," I confirmed, and squeezed the top of the carton closed. "But I’m a couple of weeks old, with hardly any training, and I’m probably last on Ethan’s list of trusted vamps. I have no pull." I thought of the phrase Ethan had used and added, "No political capital at all."

My father, his blue eyes so like mine, gazed at me quietly before standing. "Robert will be taking over the business soon. He’ll need your support, your help with the vampires. You’re a Merit, and you’re now a member of this Cadogan House. You have Sullivan’s ear."

That was news to me.

"You’ve got the in. I expect you to use it." He tapped fingers against the folded paper, as if to drive home the point. "You owe it to your family."

I managed not to remind him exactly how supportive that "family" had been when I’d discovered I was a vampire. I’d been threatened with disinheritance. "I’m not sure what service you think I could provide to you or Robert," I told him, "but I’m not for rent. I’ll do my job as Sentinel, my duty, because I swore an oath. I’m not happy to be a vampire. It’s not the life I’d have picked. But it’s mine now, and I’ll honor that. I’m not going to jeopardize my future, my position" – or my Master and his House – "by taking on whatever little project you’ve got in mind."

My father huffed. "You think Ethan would hesitate to use you if the opportunity arose?"

I wasn’t sure what I thought about that, but Ethan was off-limits as a paternal conversation topic. So I stared down Joshua Merit, gave him back the same blue-eyed glare he leveled at me. "Was that all you needed?"

"You’re a Merit."

But no longer just a Merit, I thought, which pushed a little grin onto my face. I repeated, my tone flat, "Was that all you needed?"

A muscle ticked in his jaw, but he backed down. Without another word to his younger daughter, birthday wishes or otherwise, he turned on his heel and walked out.

When the front door closed, I kept my place. I stood for a minute in the empty kitchen, hands clenching the edge of the island, filled with the urge to run after my father, demand that he see me for who I was, love me for who I was.

I swallowed down tears, dropped my hands away.

And as the bloodlust rose again, whether fueled by anger or grief, I went back to the refrigerator, found a bag of O positive, cradled it in my arms, and sank to the floor.

There was no intoxication this time. There was satiation, a sense of deep, earthy satisfaction, and the oblivion that accompanied the detachment I had to adopt in order to take human blood into my body. But there was no drunkenness, no stumbling. It was as if my body had accepted the thing my mind was only just becoming accustomed to –  the thing that I’d admitted to my father, to Ethan, to myself.

I was a Cadogan vampire.

No – I was a vampire. Regardless of House, of position, and despite the fact that I didn’t rave through graveyards at night, I didn’t fly (or, at least, I assumed I didn’t fly – I hadn’t fully tested that, I guess), and I didn’t cower at the sight of the crucifix pendant that hung on the mirror in the upstairs bathroom. Despite the fact that I ate garlic, that I still had a reflection, and that I could stumble groggily through the day, even if I wasn’t at my best.

So I wasn’t the vampire Hollywood had imagined. I was different enough. Stronger. Faster. More nimble. A sunlight allergy. The ability to heal. A taste for hemoglobin. I’d acquired a handful of new friends, a new job, a boss I studiously avoided, and a paler cast to my skin. I could handle a sword, knew a smattering of martial arts, had nearly been murdered and had discovered an entirely new side to the Windy City. I could sense magic, could feel the power that flowed through the metro, a metaphysical companion to the Chicago River. I could hear Ethan’s voice in my head, had seen a bad boy sorcerer shoot magic in my direction, and had lost my best friend and roommate (and room) to that same bad boy sorcerer.

For all those changes, all that upheaval, what else was there, but to do? To act? To be Cadogan Sentinel, to take up arms and bear them for the House I’d been charged with protecting.

I pushed up off the floor, tossed the empty plastic bag in the trash, wiped at my mouth with the back of a hand, and gazed out the kitchen window and into the dark night.

Today was my twenty-eighth birthday.

I didn’t look a day over twenty-seven.

Intent on making the most of the rest of my night off, I’d showered, changed, and was in my bedroom – door shut, sitting cross-legged in jeans on the comforter, a copy of Algernon Swinburne’s Tristam of Lyonesse open before me. It was outside the context of my dissertation, Swinburne’s version of Tristan and Isolde having been penned in 1852, but the despite the tragic end, the story always drew me back. I’d read and reread the prelude, Swinburne’s ode to history’s soul-crossed lovers, his ode to love itself: . . . And always through new act and passion new