Lucky Break (Chicagoland Vampires #10.5)(8)
Author: Chloe Neill

“I don’t want to impose—,” she began, but he cut her off with a nod.

“Nonsense. It is your home. Or one of them, at any rate.”

Nessa nodded, her eyes filling again, and let Vincent wrap her in his arms again. She nestled against him and wept quietly.

“You have a house?” Ethan asked.

Vincent’s smile was quick. “Not of the scale or scope of an official House,” he said. “Nothing like your Cadogan. But it is ours, and it is home.”

Astrid walked back into the room with a tray of six glasses of blood. She walked to Ethan first, bowed to lower the tray to him. “Sire.”

Ethan took a glass, glanced at Vincent.

“It is a traditional welcome for our Clan,” he said, gesturing for Ethan to drink.

I could see that Ethan was hesitant to drink something prepared at the behest of a man he wasn’t certain was a friend or enemy—but he knew diplomacy and took a drink before raising his glass. “Thank you.”

“Thank you,” Vincent said. “And welcome. It isn’t often that we find Masters in our midst.” He took the next glass Astrid offered, and the remaining glasses were distributed to the rest of us.

I took a small sip, tasted cinnamon, clove. The kind of blood a vampire might drink warm on a long and cold winter night in the mountains. Odd, but comforting.

Ethan drained his glass, set it aside. “Very nice,” he said. “Tell us about the feud.”

“Let me start at the beginning,” Vincent said. “The beginning of the Clan. I was born in Vienne in France. Made in Savannah in 1779.”

“During the Revolutionary War,” I noted, and Vincent nodded.

“I lived in Savannah for many years. Drifted, in time, to Atlanta. That’s where I met Christophe. He had come to America after losing his family in Europe, had become a vampire in a very violent encounter. He was searching for something more, something new. I felt similarly. Three of the American Houses had been set up by then, but I did not feel myself in any of them.”

Cadogan was the fourth House, established in 1883. So he hadn’t yet had an opportunity to be impressed by us.

“We met a third, Bernard. When Atlanta fell, we decided to travel west, to look for new beginnings.”

“And you settled here in the valley,” Ethan said.

Vincent nodded, lifted his gaze to the windows behind us and the valley beyond it. “There were stops along the way, a summer here, a winter there. But when we reached the valley, for all its beauty, we knew we had found our home. It was empty of people. Travel in the winter is difficult,” he explained. “There’s one narrow pass through the mountains, and it’s treacherous enough even in the best of weather. We lived peacefully, here in the quiet, for many years.”

He hadn’t yet mentioned the shifters who’d presumably also resided here, but I opted to let him tell the story at his own pace.

“As time passed, we gave shelter to a traveler or two, and word spread. Vampires who, like us, were looking for something different, for a different kind of solidarity, came here. They sought freedom over allegiance,” he said, with a glance at Ethan. A less than subtle dig, I supposed, at Cadogan Novitiates’ expected allegiance to the House.

“They joined us, took our name as members of the Marchand Clan. And so we grew.”

“We understand there are no other humans here,” Ethan pointed out. “Or at least other than Sheriff McKenzie. You drank from each other?”

“Until bagged blood became available,” Vincent said. “And then we switched to it. We’d buy bulk stores and keep them for the winter. If the season ran long, we’d supplement with vampire blood.”

“And the shifters?” Ethan asked.

“They were here at the time of our arrival. They lived primitively.” His lip curled in distaste at the term. From his dress, it seemed Vincent preferred a simple kind of life. But I supposed there were limits even for him.

“Primitively?”

“They’re mountain lions,” he said with clear disdain. “There were no permanent homesteads, at least of the variety that humans or vampires would recognize. We had no trouble from them at first. We later learned they objected to our settlement and to our growth as a community.”

“How?” Ethan asked.

“They killed livestock. Destroyed fences. Ripped shutters from our homes to let in light while we slept.”

“And that was the origin of the feud?” I asked.

“Love was the origin of the feud,” he said. “Fiona McKenzie and Christophe Marchand, one of my companions. She, a shifter. He, a vampire. They first met in their ‘human forms,’ I suppose you could say, in 1891. And against the wishes of their respective family and Clan, they fell in love.”

“You objected?” I asked.

“I was not comfortable with their relationship but did not formally object. Bernard was far more conservative than me. He objected, and vigorously. He told Christophe he’d be cast from the Clan if he proceeded. The Clan is a democracy, and Bernard won the vote.”

That was as easy a justification for prejudice as I’d ever heard.

“And so Christophe was cast out. You may know there are many ‘ghost towns’ in this part of the country. Villages were established for mining, for railroads, and abandoned when lodes ran dry or didn’t materialize. Many were optimistic in that time. Fiona and Christophe found such a place, not far from Elk Valley. Four buildings, abandoned only a few years before. They called it High Creek and made their home there.”

Vincent’s eyes darkened. “They were happy, as far as I was aware, although neither the Clan nor the family relented. Their door was bloodied.”

“Like they did to us,” Nessa said, glancing at Ethan.

He nodded. “And something happened to this couple?”

“One night, Christophe woke and found Fiona gone, along with some of her possessions and a brooch Christophe had brought from across the ocean. Laurel leaves around a dove, all of it rendered in gems. He’d planned to give it to Fiona, but no trace of her was ever found. Some suspected she’d been a plant by the McKenzies the entire time, had only ever wanted the brooch in payment for our use of the valley. Others suggested Christophe had been violent, that she’d sought escape, had taken the brooch to finance her travels.”

“And some believe she never left the valley,” Nessa quietly added, and the air in the room seemed to chill. “That she was killed—by Christophe, by another McKenzie, by another Marchand—and never found.”