I’d defied the hell out of Amelie already, I thought, but Shane didn’t necessarily need to know that. I walked up to the door and…stopped, because the house had a barrier. Most Morganville houses didn’t, unless they were really old or Founder Houses, but this one was different.
And it was strong.
“Come in,” Shane said, but that didn’t change anything. I was a vampire, and I wasn’t getting inside until the house resident altered the rules.
Enrique Ramos appeared in the hall behind my friend, and stared at me for a moment before he said, “Yeah, come on in.”
I passed a pile of black clothing, a mask, a leather jacket, and paused to look at them. There was also a motorcycle helmet. “Yours?”
“Sure,” he said, and threw me a cold smile. “Everybody saw me in them at the rally.”
“Then you’re not Captain Obvious,” I said.
“Why not?”
“Too obvious.”
And I was right; he was probably one of three or four decoys out there, playing the captain, leading the vampires around on goose chases. This was his house, and a good place to hold a neutral headquarters, since it had been in his family a long time; his mother had moved to a new place and left it to her son, and he’d made it a kind of secured, fortified meeting place.
The war council of Captain Obvious was in session at the dinner table in the kitchen, and as Enrique and Shane walked me in, I realized just how much trouble we were in. There were several of Morganville’s most prominent businessmen at the table, including the owner of the bank, but that wasn’t the issue.
There was a vampire sitting at the Captain Obvious table. Naomi. A blood sister to Amelie, she was a pretty, delicate-seeming vampire who looked all of twenty, if that; she had a gentle manner and sweet smile, and it concealed depths that I hadn’t understood for a long time. She wasn’t just ambitious; she was calculating, backstabbing, and determined to win.
“I thought you were dead,” I told her. I’d been informed she’d been killed by the draug, in the final battle; there’d been a whisper that it wasn’t the draug who’d done it, but Amelie, by proxy, getting rid of a credible rival for leader of Morganville.
Naomi lifted her shoulders in a very French sort of shrug. “I have been before,” she said in that lovely, silvery voice, and laughed a little. “As you know, Michael, I am hard to keep that way.” She sent me a smile that invited me to share the joke, but I didn’t smile back. For all her graces and kind manners, there was an ice-cold core to her that most didn’t ever see. “Sit and be welcome.”
“You’re not Captain Obvious,” I said, and stared at each of the human men at the table in turn. Then I turned to the woman seated across from her. “You are.”
Hannah Moses nodded. Her scarred face was still and quiet, her dark eyes watchful. “I knew you’d be impossible to fool about this. Sit down, Michael.”
I didn’t want to sit down at the Captain Obvious table. I was still angry, yeah, but I was also more than a little bit shocked, and betrayed. Hannah had been a friend. An ally. She’d protected all of us, at one time or another; she was a solid, real person, with a solid set of values.
That made it so, so much worse.
But anyway, I sat, because the alternative was to go full throttle, and I wasn’t quite there. Not yet. Shane kept standing, leaning against the wall, arms folded. He was watching Enrique, who was doing the same thing; bodyguards, I guessed, facing off in silence and ready for the other to make a move. There was muttering among the business leaders, and at least one of them got up to leave the room in protest.
“Sit down, Mr. Farmer,” I said without looking at him. “We’re going to have a conversation about your son and where he gets his funny ideas.”
Roy Farmer’s dad got an odd look on his face and sank back in his seat. “Is my son alive?”
“Yep,” Shane said, with false cheer. I wouldn’t have been quite so quick to reassure him. “Hope you don’t mind the fix-up on his car. Oh, and his arm.”
“You bloodsucking parasite son of a—”
I moved, then, slamming my palm on the table hard enough to leave a crack in the wood. “I didn’t kill him,” I said. “Shut up and take it as a gift.”
He did, looking white around the mouth. Then I looked at Hannah. “You put us in the crosshairs. You put Eve in the crosshairs,” I said to Hannah. “Why would you do that?”
“Why did you have to put her in the middle?” she asked me, in a frighteningly reasonable tone. “You know that the vampires won’t let her stay there for long; they’ll have her killed before they let humans gain power in this town through her status as a legal consort. You knew that when you married her. By putting pressure on her from the human side, we were hoping we could save her life and make her leave you. Get you to understand how dangerous this is for her, and for you. We don’t hate you, Michael. But you’re in the way.”
“Wait,” Shane said, turning his head toward her. “You had Roy Farmer beat her up to help? That’s what you’re telling us?”
“It’s hardly our fault. Roy was never supposed to do more than frighten her,” Naomi said, with that charming little way she had. “I assure you, he was never supposed to harm her badly. He was only to make it clear that she would not be accepted as Michael’s wife. As the vampires have also made it clear. I have heard that Oliver sent Pennyfeather to make that same point.”
“Eve’s not a pawn you can move around the board,” I said, spearing Naomi with a glare, then Hannah, then the others. “And neither am I.”
“But that is exactly what you are, Michael. You, Shane, Claire, Eve—all of you. You are played for one side or the other at every turn, and you fail to see it.” Naomi shook her head in what I was sure was fake sadness, but it was very convincing. “Mistakes have been made, but no one intended permanent harm to your lover. You may take my word for it.”
“My wife,” I said, pointedly. “Call her that.”
Naomi inclined her head. “D’accord.”
I looked at Hannah. She hadn’t said much so far, and left Naomi to try to make the justifications. She watched me, and Shane, with calm and careful attention, hands loose and relaxed on the table in front of her.
But she was afraid. I could feel that, hear it in the rapid beat of her heart. All of the humans were afraid. They ought to be, I thought. They were allied now with a traitorous vampire, and they’d just made an enemy of someone who by all rights should have been their friend and supporter.
“You should never have touched Eve,” I told Hannah.
“I’m sorry for what happened,” she said. “But, Michael, you all made your choices, and your choices have consequences. If you want Eve to be safe, you should allow her to come back to her own side. With us.”
“Why do there have to be sides? We’re people, Hannah.”
She shook her head. “You were people. You like to think you still are, but you’re a killer at heart. And there are always sides. If you can’t give her up just because you love her, then you’re selfish, and you’re the one putting her more at risk every day—from your own kind.”
“So what am I supposed to do?” It burst out of me in anger, and all of a sudden I was on my feet, eyes blazing, rage bringing out my fangs and my fury. “She’s my wife! This isn’t you, Hannah. It’s not like you at all, bringing innocent people into this, getting them hurt, maybe killed!”
Hannah didn’t move, and she didn’t reach for a weapon. Enrique pushed off the wall, and so did Shane in a match move, but I was the only one showing any threat.
Hannah said, “Gentlemen—could you leave me, Naomi, and Michael alone, please?”
The Morganville businessmen all got up and left the room without argument. Enrique stuck around.