Blood Games (Chicagoland Vampires 10)

We walked silently to the third-floor room they shared, and Luc opened the door.

Lindsey sat on the small bed in the wildly colored room they shared. Novitiate quarters—like the ones I’d first had in Cadogan House—were much smaller than ours. A single room with attached bath and closet. Bed, bookshelf, bureau, nightstand. One or two windows, depending on the location.

She wore long pajamas and had wrapped herself in a fringed fleece Yankees blanket. There was no accounting for taste, I supposed.

“What’s going on?” I asked, looking between them. Because something was definitely going on; I could tell by the nervous magic.

“They’ll be testing Ethan and Nicole,” Luc said. “But they’ll use magic and their psychic connection to do it. It will bleed over.”

Lindsey was psychic; Luc meant the trauma they put Ethan through would bleed over to her. It hadn’t even occurred to me that would happen. I looked at Lindsey. She wasn’t one to look worried, but she definitely looked worried now.

“How much will bleed over?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” Lindsey said. “It could be bad.” She also wasn’t one for showing fear, but it was clear in the set of her jaw and the pale cast to her skin. “We’re connected since he’s my Master, and I’m the most sensitive person in the House.”

It could be bad, and she’d be getting only the overflow of Ethan’s emotions—not the raw bulk of them. That increased my worry exponentially.

“We put her up here,” Luc said, “hoping the physical distance from Ethan would help. It’s as high as you can get in the building, other than the widow’s walk.”

And you didn’t want to be in the middle of a psychic crisis while perched on the edge of Cadogan’s roof.

I took a seat beside her on the bed, brushed her hair over her shoulder. “What can I do?”

“Just be here,” he said. “Malik’s in the room with Ethan. I’ll be right next door. He’ll come through this.” He eyed Lindsey, the love between them obvious. They’d danced at the edges of love for a very long time. But something had happened to solidify their connection—something neither had shared with me, but which I suspected involved a visit to the House from one of Lindsey’s living human relatives. They’d gone away for a few days and come back practically inseparable.

“I’ll be here,” I promised him, and when he left us alone, I unbelted my katana and propped it up against the bed, then unzipped my boots and let them drop.

“Geez,” Lindsey said, leaning back against the wall. “Make yourself at home, Merit.”

“If you’re going to lose it, and I’m going to deal with it, I’m doing it in comfort.” Worried, I looked at her. “Are you going to barf? Because I am really not good with barf.”

“I don’t know.”

She didn’t sound confident, so I glanced around the room, spied a small New York Yankees trash can in one corner. I hopped off the bed, grabbed it, and put it on the nightstand beside her.

The look she gave me was unpleasant. But as a lifelong Cubs fan, I knew I was in the right.

“Really.”

“Absolutely,” I said with a grin, and pulled her toward me. “Come here. We might as well get comfortable.”

She lay down, put her head in my lap. I stroked her blond hair and made sure the blanket covered her shoulders.

“You’ll be fine,” I said. “You’ll be fine, and he’ll be fine, and in an hour, this will all be over.”

I hoped to God I was right.

* * *

It was obvious when the test began. Magic flowed, arced, rushed through the House with the force of a tsunami. The House shook with it, a low rumble that felt like someone was jackhammering in the core of the building. And with it, a cacophonous bubble of tension, malaise, and anger that settled over the House like a low-grade fever.

Those were, I assumed, the emotions that the psychics dredged up at Lakshmi’s command. It made a horrible kind of sense. There was little point in testing the effects of joy on a vampire. It was the ability to fight through fear, sadness, anger, that mattered.

I was suddenly freezing, my hands shaking with cold. I pulled another blanket over us.

Lindsey screamed—the sound high and mewing—and clamped her hands over her ears as if the magic was something she could block out like sound. Tears pricked my eyes at her pain . . . a pain that mirrored what Ethan was feeling.

I shook with chills as hot tears slipped down my cheeks. Keep him safe, I silently said, and as the storm of emotions battered the House, as Lindsey sobbed in my lap, I cocooned her in my arms and repeated the mantra again and again.

Keep him safe.

Keep him safe.

Keep him safe.

* * *

It was undoubtedly hard on him. He was, after all, the man who endured it. But I hadn’t known how hard it would be on the rest of us.

For an hour we fought it, battered by waves of emotions that pushed the air from our lungs, that plunged us into sadness, that tested us with pain. It was an irritating tingle to me but obviously painful to Lindsey, as she absorbed the heady emotions and magic that flashed through the House.

However skilled the psychics might have been, they weren’t especially good at keeping their efforts geographically confined. Maybe they should have been tested, I grouchily thought.

An hour passed. And then, like a wave sweeping back out to sea, it was over. The sky cleared, the magic lifted, and the House was free again.

I closed my eyes, released an hour of pent-up tension. Lindsey, hair damp and eyes swollen and bruised from crying, sat slowly up.

“Careful,” I said as her body shook with exhaustion. “You all right?”

“I’ll be okay.” She closed her eyes and leaned back against the wall. I hopped off the bed and went into the small bathroom, dampening a washcloth and filling a cup of water.

I came back, handed her the cup, watched her sip greedily. When she emptied it, I set it aside, handed her the washcloth.

“Thank you,” she said, and pressed it to her face. A sob escaped her. I put the cup back in the bathroom, stalled to give her a few moments of privacy. I stared back at my own visage in the mirror, the dark circles under my eyes. I looked tired. Drained by drama and murder and tests. Drained because Ethan and I weren’t connected right now, and that both scared and frustrated me.

When the room quieted again, I walked back in, sat down next to her.

“It was bad,” I said, and she lowered the cloth again, nodded.