Dark Debt (Chicagoland Vampires 11)

My head was a jumble of words and thoughts, but I tried to order the pieces chronologically. “I was in a bed in an old-fashioned room. I think it was supposed to be like a room you’d been in before. With him. An inn, maybe? He was dressed in old-fashioned clothes, and I was, too. He wanted to talk about me, about you, about himself. He tried to be clever, to romance me.” I paused. “And when that didn’t work, he was suddenly you.”

Ethan grew very, very still, and even the buzz of magic around him seemed to freeze solid.

“He looked like you. Smelled like you.” Tears blossomed again. “I tried to get away, but there weren’t any doors, and the window was barred, and I couldn’t get the brace off.” Panic rose quickly, a shot of cold from stomach to head, and I squeezed my eyes closed, trying to erase the memory of violence at Ethan’s hands. Get it out, I told myself. Get it out, and it’s done, and you won’t have to say it again.

“And he tried to kiss me.” The words flew out and away like startled doves. “He touched me. He tried to . . .” I shook my head, tears dawning again. “Well, he tried.”

Cold magic flashed again. “Did he hurt you, Merit?” Every word was like the snap of a twig in the dark—a sharp, surprising bite of sound. And his eyes left no doubt about his intentions: Had Balthasar been in the room with us right now, he wouldn’t have made it out alive.

“No. No,” I repeated, when Ethan looked as though he might lunge for the door. “He touched me, but he didn’t . . .” Instinctively, I crossed my arms over my breasts, swallowed past the lump in my throat. “He didn’t hurt me that way. I don’t even know if he could have, really.”

Ethan struggled to understand. “You mean to say it was a dream?”

“It wasn’t a dream.” His voice had been kind, the question well intentioned. But it hit me wrong, and my voice was shaking with defensiveness.

I shook my head, collected myself, found my voice. “It wasn’t a dream,” I said again. “It was real. I don’t know how it was real, but it was.”

He frowned. “How are you so sure?”

I lifted fingers to my cheek. I didn’t want to tell him what Balthasar had done, incite him just as I suspected Balthasar wanted me to do, but he deserved the truth. And, more important, we needed to figure out what had happened.

“He slapped me. I could see the mark in the bathroom mirror.”

That flash of cold magic again, but Ethan stayed absolutely silent, clearly holding his temper in check.

I glanced around the bedroom, at the seemingly solid walls, at the fact that I was still in a tank and pajama bottoms, not the white linen shift Balthasar had put me in. But it had felt real. Impossibly real.

“It doesn’t matter,” I said.

“It doesn’t matter?” His tone was icy now, that fury only barely banked, his eyes like cold green glass, nearly translucent and undeniably deadly. “It doesn’t matter that he hurt you? That he assaulted you?”

“To Balthasar,” I clarified. “It doesn’t matter to Balthasar, because I don’t matter to Balthasar. He doesn’t care about me.” I looked up at him. “He’s using me to get to you. To show that he’s powerful. To prove that he can still hurt you. To prove that he could get to me just as he did Persephone. That he could ruin something else of yours, force your hand against him.”

“Hurting you doesn’t gain him anything.”

“But it does,” I said. “He doesn’t think you’ll run away this time, but that you’ll stay and fight, because you love me more than you loved Persephone. He believes he’ll win, Ethan. That he’ll kill you and stake a claim on the House. He’s decided he wants it, that he’s owed it, and he’ll take it however he can.”

There was a knock at the door. Ethan moved to answer it. Mallory rushed in, Catcher behind her, both of them in Cadogan T-shirts. She wore pajama bottoms; he wore jeans. Ethan must have called them while I was in the bathroom.

“What happened?” she asked. I could tell she debated whether to touch me, to embrace me, and held herself back.

“Balthasar attacked her. He got to her in this room, in this House, and I want to know how that happened.”

“Attacked her?” She looked me over, eyes wide with concern. “Jesus, Merit. What happened?”

“He got to her,” Ethan repeated, “while she slept in our bed.”

Mallory looked at me, then the room’s exterior wall. Her expression transmuted from horror to utter confusion. “I’m sorry, but I don’t understand what you mean. There’s no breach in the ward. He couldn’t have gotten in.”

“That’s impossible,” Ethan said. “She said it wasn’t a dream.”

Wordlessly, Mallory rose, turned to the wall, held out her hand. In the space of a heartbeat, with no obvious effort, a glowing yellow orb appeared in her hand. That was something new. Before, it would have taken closed eyes and concentration for her to achieve. She’d gotten better at harnessing her powers, or at least in making them look effortless.

Mal flicked her fingers, and the orb flew toward the wall like a fastball in a no-hitter. It made contact with an electric sizzle, vibrantly green light shimmering across the wall, across the ward, like dappled sunlight across the bottom of a swimming pool.

When the light faded, she glanced back at us. “The ward is in place.”

That didn’t seem debatable, but Ethan wasn’t satisfied, and his words were biting and bitter. “If the ward is in place, how did he get past it?”