Ethan’s body pressed warmly against mine, wrapping his arms around me as I stared greedily at the view, memorizing every outline, every boulder and crag and curve of trickling water.
“Perhaps the world isn’t so narrow after all,” he said.
I nodded, smiling as a warm breeze, the breath of spring, rustled my long, dark bangs. “Maybe not.”
We stood there together for a long, quiet moment, until our eyes had adjusted to the darkness and our ears to the unusual silence. Chicago wasn’t a quiet city. Even Hyde Park, which was miles away from downtown, had a constant level of noise. Air traffic from Midway, cars, neighbors, dogs, sirens.
At first, there was nothing. But as our ears grew accustomed, sounds emerged. The slip and fall of water around rocks. Wind rustling through grass, frogs and crickets hiding among the spears of it. The creak of wood as the house settled, as if it, too, was relaxing into the darkness.
The sudden pealing of the doorbell was an explosion of sound. It rang once, then again, with obvious urgency.
Ethan cursed, released me, glanced back.
I instantly went on alert. “Who knows we’re here?”
“No one in the state, as far as I’m aware, other than Nessa and her husband.”
Nessa McKenzie was our host, the owner of Ravenswood and its accompanying main house, the leviathan that lurked down the wooded path.
I followed Ethan to the door, waited beside him as he checked the security peep and pulled it open without a word.
She stood in the doorway, a vampire in the form of a voluptuous brunette.
Her hair, a dark mane of curls, pitched forward over one shoulder. Her eyes were big and brown, and streaks of blood stained her hands and her dress.
“Nessa,” Ethan said, with obvious surprise and concern as he looked her over. “What’s happened?”
“It’s Taran,” she said, her eyes filling with tears. “He’s dead.”
2
“Come inside,” Ethan said. He took her arm, pulled her gently into the foyer, and closed the door again.
“Nessa this is Merit, my Sentinel.” Taran is—was—her husband, he silently added, using our telepathic connection.
Ethan put a supportive hand on her back, the familiar line of worry between his eyes. And although he didn’t speak the words—silently or otherwise—I could read his thoughts well enough: What have we stepped into now?
“Come,” he said, walking her to the sofa and helping her sit. “Tell us what’s happened.”
She gripped the couch’s arm, shook her head. “I came home, and Taran was lying on the floor.” She looked down, eyes tracing back and forth, as if she was seeing him there again. “I thought he’d fallen. Tripped. I teased him about it—something about how he’d better get up, the clumsy man—but that’s when I realized . . . He was dead.”
She sobbed, covered her face with her hands, while Ethan stroked a hand over her back.
Her grief was obvious, palpable, and a haunting reminder. I’d lost Ethan once upon a very dark time, and even though I’d gotten him back by a miracle of broken magic, I still remembered the all-consuming grief. The pain of it, the frustration, the sense the world would never be right again.
Ethan met my eyes, acknowledging the pain he must have guessed I’d remembered.
I’ll get her something to drink, I told him. I went into the kitchen, poured water into a glass from a sealed bottle in the refrigerator, carried it back.
Ethan reached for it, our fingers brushing as I passed it over. He fitted it between Nessa’s hands, now kneading fists in her lap.
“Drink,” he said, and she nodded, tipped up the glass with shaky hands.
Ethan waited until she’d lowered it again. “Have you called the authorities?”
“The sheriff,” Nessa said with a teary nod. “Tom McKenzie. There are a lot of McKenzies in the valley. He came with a deputy and they started looking around. I went outside to get air, and then I started walking . . .” She looked around the living room as if utterly surprised to have found herself there. “I came here.”
“Will they be looking for you?” Ethan’s question was quiet, his tone cautious.
“I don’t know. Probably.” Her eyes filled again, and this time there was fear in them.
Ethan and I exchanged a glance. “Nessa,” he gently said. “What else?”
“Taran was a shifter,” she said, the words coming out in an outpouring of sound. I realized too late the faint pepper of magic she carried, shed along with her husband’s blood. “The McKenzies didn’t approve of our marriage.”
“Because you’re a vampire?” I asked.
Nessa put the glass on the floor, wiped at her eyes, nodded. “And a member of the Clan.”
Ethan’s brows lifted, his own magic piercing the air. “There’s a Clan here?”
Clans were, as far as I remembered from the official vampire Canon, groups of Rogue vampires—those who didn’t reside in a House—living together just as a human family might. Where Rogues generally preferred to live alone, vampires in Clans lived together, like unofficial Houses. Unregulated Houses, so they acted like human families to keep their profile low and rarely revealed their existence.
“The Marchands,” she said, brushing hair from her face with the back of her hand, the move streaking blood across her pale skin. She didn’t seem to notice it. “We’ve been in the valley nearly as long as the McKenzies. The conflict began not long after we arrived.”