CH... CH... CH... CH... CHANGES

A pale golden glow of light. The smell of lemon and comfort.

Then pain and cold and nausea. Waves of it.

Pain that clenched my stomach and a fever that flamed my cheeks, my skin so warm that the tears that slipped down my face left cold saline trails.

This was what I'd hardly remembered the first time it happened.

The change. I was going through the rest of it.

I'd sobbed at pain that racked me, seizing muscle, gnawing at my bones.

And at some point in the midst of that change, I'd opened silver eyes and sought out the nourishment I knew, in that instant, that I would kill for.

And in that instant, as if he'd been watching, waiting, a wrist was placed before me.

My body shook with cold, and I heard a growl, my growl, before I tried to move away.

There was whispering. My name. An incantation.

Merit. Be still.

The wrist was put before me again.

Ethan's wrist. I looked up into his own silver eyes. He gazed down at me, a lock of blond across his forehead, hunger in his eyes. It is offered. Willingly.

I looked down, stared at the beads of vermilion that slowly, so slowly, traced twin trails down his forearm, across his skin.

"Merit."

I gripped his arm in my left hand, his hand in my right. His fingers curled around my thumb. Squeezed. His lashes fell.

I lifted his wrist, put my lips to his skin, and felt his echoing shudder of pleasure. Heard the earthy groan that accompanied it.

I closed my eyes.

Merit.

I drank.

The circuit closed.

When I came to, I was huddled in a ball, lying on my side in the cool, soft dark. I recognized the scent of it - I was at Mallory's house, in my old bedroom. Kicked out of Cadogan would have been my bet.

I blinked, gingerly touched my hand to my chest, the pain in my ribs now a dull ache.

But the darkness - and the million sounds and scents that filled it - were suddenly choking, confining. I panicked. I choked back a sob, and in the thick darkness around me heard myself scream for light.

A golden glow lit the room. I blinked, adjusted to the light, and saw Ethan in the cushy armchair across from the bed, suit neatly pressed, legs crossed, his hand drawing back from the lamp that sat on the table beside the chair. "Better?"

My head swam, spun. I covered my mouth. Voice muffled, I warned him, "I think I'm gonna be sick."

He was up in a flash, putting a silver trash can from one corner of the room into my hands. Muscles contracted and my stomach heaved, but nothing came up. After minutes of retching, my stomach sore from it, I sat up, resting an elbow on the edge of the silver vessel, which was nestled between my crossed legs.

I risked a glance at Ethan. He stood silently at the end of the bed, arms crossed, legs braced, face completely blank.

After wiping the damp fringe of bangs from my face, I dared words. "How long was I out?"

"It's nearly dawn."

I nodded. Ethan reached into the interior pocket of his suit coat, pulled out a handkerchief, and offered it to me. Without meeting his eyes, I took it, dabbed at my eyes, my brow, then balled it into my hand. When the room stopped spinning, I set the can down on the floor, brought my knees up, wrapped my arms around them, and dropped my forehead.

Eyes closed, I heard the trash can being moved, the creak of the armchair, and lambent sounds of the city around me. I guess that predatory sense of hearing had finally come online. I concentrated to shut out the background noise, tried to turn it down to a level that would still allow me to function.

Some minutes later, when the screaming had softened to a dull roar, I opened my eyes again.

"When you went down we brought you here - just in case."

Of course, I thought. What else could they have done? I was lucky he hadn't reported me immediately to the Presidium, asked them to draw aspen and have me - as a danger to him, to the House, to the city - disposed of.

"What happened?"

Tears sprang to my eyes at the memory of the pain, and I shook my head against it.

"Celina. She was outside the House. She wanted to test me." I shook my head. "One kick, Ethan. One kick, and I went down. I panicked, couldn't fight her." Tears spilled down my cheeks, which were warm from embarrassment. The warnings he'd given me in his office hadn't worked. I was a failure. "I panicked."

"She hurt you." His voice was soft. "Again."

"And again on purpose. I think she wanted me to let her out."

Silence, then, "Let her out?"

I looked over. He was sitting in the armchair, leaning forward, elbows on his knees, body language inviting candor.

"I'm not... I'm not normal," I finally confessed and felt some of the weight of it leave my shoulders. "Something went wrong when you made me."

He stared at me for a minute, unblinking, then said, with a strange kind of gravity,

"Explain."

I took a breath, wiped a fallen tear from my cheek, and told him. I told him the vampire had somehow been separate from me, had a mind and will of her own, and had tried, time and again, to claim me. How, time after time, I'd fought her back down again, tried to keep her contained. And how, finally, the pain of Celina's single kick, her carefully crafted words, the doubt she'd sprouted in my mind, forced the vampire to the surface.

After a moment of silence, when he offered no response, I added, "I don't know what else to say."

I heard a choked sound, looked up, saw him with his elbows on his knees, head in his hands, blond hair spilling around them, his shoulders quaking.

"Are you laughing?"

"No. Not laughing," he assured me, then laughed uproariously.

Confused, I stared at him. "I don't get it."

He blew out a breath that puffed his cheeks, then ran his fingers through his hair.

"You attacked me. You attacked your Master, the one that made you, at least in part because the predator inside you was powerful enough to exist on its own - because the predator failed somehow to merge completely with your humanity. I'm not even sure how that's possible - biologically, genetically, metaphysically, magically."

He looked up at me, emerald eyes shining, and his voice went a little lower. "We knew you'd be powerful, Merit. This was a complete and total surprise." He gazed absently at the wall beside me, as if watching the replay of memories there.

"It's happened before, you said? When the vampire has... separated?"

I nodded sheepishly, wishing I'd spoken to him, to anyone, about this before today.

When the fight and pain and humiliation I knew were probably in store could have been avoided.

"Since the beginning," I told him. "When you and I fought the first time, when the First Hunger rose, when I met Celina, when I staked Celina, when I trained with Catcher, when I fought Peter. But I never... really let her out."

Brow furrowed, Ethan nodded. "That could tell us something - perhaps she, the vampire, was sick of being repressed, as it were. Perhaps she wanted airing out."

"I had that sense."

He was silent, then asked, tremulously, "What was it like?"

I looked up at him, found an expression of naked curiosity on his face. "It was like..." I frowned, picked at a thread in the blanket, trying to put it into words, then looked up again. "It was like breathing for the first time. Like... breathing in the world."

Ethan stared at me a long time, was quiet a long time, then offered softly, "I see."

He seemed to consider that for a long time. "You said Celina baited you, maybe tried to pull this reaction from you. How would she know?"

I offered my theory. "When I went to Red, Morgan's club, the first time, when she confronted me, I could feel that she was testing me. The same thing you'd done in your office after I told you about the confrontation. Maybe she had some sense of it there?

Some sense that my chemistry was off?"

"Hmm."

I wrapped my arms around myself. "I guess I succumbed to her glamour this time?"

She'd so easily swayed me, made me look for Ethan, made me blame him for my hurt and confusion. As much as I'd like to blame my alienation from Morgan and Mallory on

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Ethan, even I could admit that those things had nothing to do with him. They were about me.

"The stronger the mind," Ethan said, "the less susceptible the individual to glamour. You have withstood it before, from her, from me. But this time, you were in pain, and you've had some setbacks in your relationship with Mallory. I also assume your relationship with Morgan is not... at its strongest."

I nodded.

"Glamour can catch us in a weak moment. Not to change the subject, Merit, but while you were out, it looked as if you experienced a portion of the change again," he added.

"The chills, the fevers. The pain."

Ethan, of course, knew what the change felt like.

He also understood now the thing that I'd finally figured out. That despite the three days I'd spent making the transition from human to vampire, it hadn't completely worked.

And I had a guess why that had been the case.

"I wasn't going through it again," I told him. "This was the first full time, the completion of it, anyway."

His gaze snapped to mine, a question in his eyes. And I answered it, offering the conclusion I'd reached. "I was drugged the first time I went through the change. After you bit me, drank me, fed me, you drugged me."

His expression blanked, eyes muting to forest green.

I continued, my gaze on his. "I know other vampires' changes were different from mine.

I don't remember the things they remember. I was groggy when you sent me back to Mallory's house. It was because I hadn't fully shaken off whatever you'd given me. And whatever happened today, I remember more than I did the first time."

Including the fact that I'd taken his blood. That I had, for the first time, taken blood straight from another. I'd taken blood from Ethan, gripping his arm like it was the ballast that would anchor me to earth. I'd searched his silvered eyes as I drank, as I cried, as I shivered from the inescapable pleasure of it, of the whiskey-warm essence that still flowed through me, that healed the wounds he'd inflicted and erased the lingering pain of Celina's attack.

Erased the pain, but not the memories.

"You drugged me," I repeated, not a question.

He respected us both enough to nod - barely a nod, more a closing of the eyes in answer - but it was enough.

And then he stared at me for a long, quiet moment. This time it wasn't the House Master who stared back, but the man, the vampire. Not "Sullivan," not Liege, just Ethan and Merit.

"I didn't want you to feel it, Merit." His voice was soft. "You'd been attacked; you hadn't consented. I didn't want you to have to go through it. I didn't want you to have to remember it."

I searched his eyes and found that to be truth enough, if not the whole of it. "Be that as it may," I quietly said, "you took something from me. Luc told me once that the change, all three days of it, was like a hazing. Horrible, but important. A kind of bonding.

Something I could share with the rest of the Novitiates. I didn't have that. And that's put distance between us."

His brows lifted, but he didn't deny it.

"I'm not like them," I continued. "And they know it. I'm separate enough from them already, Ethan, with the strength, my parents, our weird relationship. They don't see me the same way." I looked down, rubbed my sweaty palms across my thighs. "They didn't before, and they certainly won't after tonight. I'm no longer human, but I'm not like them, either. Not really. And I imagine you know what that's like well enough."

He looked away. We sat quietly together, gazes everywhere but on each other. Time passed, maybe minutes, before I looked at him and he looked away again, guilt in his eyes. Guilt, I assumed, for his forcing me to relive the experience, but also for precluding, however well-intentioned, the complete change the first time around.

Still, whatever the reason, there was nothing to be done about it now. Whatever his motivation, it was done, and we had more immediate problems.

"So what do we do now?"

He looked up, green eyes instantaneously widening. Surprise, maybe, that I wouldn't push the issue, that I would let it be. And what could I do? Blame him for trying to ease the transition? Berate him for the sin of omission?

Most importantly, wonder why he'd done it?

"About this, I've no idea," he finally said, his voice the flat tone of the Master vampire, whatever had passed between us fracturing again. "If it truly was related to your incomplete change and the process is now complete, we'll deal with your strength, assess it. As to Celina, this would have been an added bonus of her Breckenridge game. Start a war between shifters and vampires, manage to capitalize on the fact that the Sentinel of Cadogan House is biologically... unstable." He shook his head. "You can't give her too much credit for being organized, for orchestrating plans. The woman is a master manipulator, a composer of vampiric drama. She knows how to set the stage, arrange her Goldberg machine, then release the trigger and let the rest of us run the game on her behalf." He glanced back at me. "She'll keep doing it. Until she brings us to the brink of war, whether with humans or shifters. She'll keep doing it."

"As long as she's here, until we can put her away again, she'll keep doing it," I agreed.

"And we can't put her away until the GP understands who she is, what she is."

"Merit, you should resign yourself to the fact that, like Harold, the rest of them fully understand who and what she is. And that they accept that fact."

I nodded and rubbed my arms.

Ethan sighed and returned to the armchair. He sat down again, crossing one leg over the other. "And why, in this particular scenario, did she send you back to me?"

"To finish you off? So you or Luc would finish me off?"

"If you'd killed me, I'd be out of the picture - a Master out of her way. It would be convenient for her if I was gone. If you weren't strong enough to best me, she may have imagined that whatever punishment I offered would keep you out of her way."

More silence while I avoided asking exactly what he had in mind re: punishment.

Ethan broke the silence. "So, Sentinel, what's the next question?"

"Identifying her allies," I finally said. "She must be staying somewhere, maybe had financial or other connections who got her back to Chicago. We need to figure out who she's working through, and why they're allowing her to do it." I looked over at him.

"Blood? Fame? A position in whatever new world order she has in mind? Or are these people who've always been her allies?"

"You're thinking Navarre."

His tone was soft, unusually gentle, and he was right. I was thinking very discomforting thoughts about the current Master of Navarre, but without more proof I wasn't going to offer him up to Ethan as a sacrifice.

"I don't know."

"Perhaps we need to rethink your position."

I looked up at him. "How so?"

"To date, you're guarding the House from the House. Patrolling the premises, working with the House guards, studying the Canon. We've given you the roles and responsibilities that, historically, a Sentinel would have had. They'd have been tied to the castle, physically guarding it, but also advising the Master, the Second, the Guard Captain, on issues related to security, politics, maneuverings."

He shook his head. "The world is a vastly different place now. We're governed by a body situated a continent away, and we interact with vampires at a distance of thousands of miles. We're no longer merely defending our own ground, but trying to establish ourselves in the wider world." He looked up at me. "In this project, we've expanded your role, at least socially, to include a broader swath of the city. It's unclear what we'll reap from that strategy. Although we seem to have forestalled the immediate Breckenridge crisis, Nicholas remains a concern. His animosity is obvious, and I don't think we can assume that we've put that problem safely to bed."

"So what are you proposing?"

"I believe we need you on the streets, rather than guarding the grounds. Our best hope of countering Celina's insurgency plans may be grassroots tactics of our own." He rose and went for the door. "I need to speak with Luc, and we'll identify some strategies."

Of which, I guessed, they'd inform me at some later date.

"Ethan, what are we going to do about... what I did?"

"You'll be punished. There's no avoiding it." He answered a little faster than made me comfortable. My stomach clenched, but not in surprise. The headline NOVITIATE

VAMPIRE ATTACKS HER MASTER wasn't going to read well unless it was followed by LATER STRICTLY PUNISHED.

"I know," I told him. "For what it's worth, I'm sorry for it."

"Partly sorry," he said. "And partly glad we had it out. Perhaps it will... clear the air."

If he meant that it might clear the air between us, I doubted that, but I nodded anyway.

"Am I out of Cadogan House?"

This question took longer for him to answer. More consideration, maybe, or more political evaluation. More strategy. He rubbed absently at his neck as he thought it out, but then shook his head. I wasn't sure whether I was relieved or not.

"You'll stay in Cadogan. Stay the day here, come back tomorrow night. See me first thing. But we'll adjust your duties, and you'll train - and not with Catcher this time. You need to be trained by a vampire, someone who understands the draw of the predator, who can help you control your - let's call it your predatory instinct."

"Who?"

He blinked. "Me, I suppose," was his answer, and then the door opened and closed, and he was gone.

I stared at the closed door for a moment.

"Fuck," was all I could think to say.

I knew who it was before the door opened, before she'd even knocked, from the cotton-candy brightness of her perfume in the hallway.

She peeked in, blue hair slipping through the crack between the door and jamb. "Is your head still spinning around?"

"Are you still trying to throw blue flaming shit at me?"

She winced and opened the door, then stepped inside the bedroom, hugging her arms.

She was in pajamas, a shortish T-shirt and oversized cotton pants, white-painted toes peeking from beneath them. "I'm sorry. I'd just gotten back from Schaumburg. I was actually on my way to Cadogan when Luc called me, said you were in a bad way."

"Why were you on your way to Cadogan?"

Mallory leaned back against the doorjamb. There was a time - a few days ago - when she'd have plopped onto the bed beside me. We weren't there anymore, had lost that easy sense of comfort. "Catcher was going to meet me, and we were going to talk to Ethan. Catcher had some... concerns."

It wasn't difficult to translate the hesitation in her voice. "About me. He had concerns about me."

She held up a hand. "We were worried about you. Catcher thought you were holding back when you trained, thought something was up." She blew out a breath, ran a hand through her hair. "We had no idea you were some kind of freaky super vampire."

"Said the woman who can shoot fireballs from her palms."

She raised her eyes, looked at me. I saw something there - pain or worry - but it was tempered by her own reluctance to be candid with me. That made my stomach knot uncomfortably.

"This isn't easy for me either," she said.

I nodded, dropped my gaze, dropped my chin onto the upthrust pillow in my lap. "I know. And I know I bailed. I'm sorry."

"You bailed," she agreed, and pushed off the door. The bed dipped as she sat beside me, wiggled into a cross-legged position. "And I pushed you about this Morgan thing.

It's just - "

"Mallory."

"No, Merit," she said. "Damn, just let me finish this for once. I want good things for you. I thought Morgan was one of those things. If he's not, then so be it. I just..."

"You think I'm in love with Ethan."

"Are you?"

A fair question. "I... No. Not like you think. Not like you and Catcher. It's stupid, I know. I have this thing, this idea. This bullshit 'Mr. Darcy' idea, about the one that changes his

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mind. That comes back for me. And I'll look up some night, and he'll be there in front of me. And he'll stare at me and say, 'It was you. It was always you.' "

She paused, then offered, so quietly, so gently, "Maybe the kind of guy worth your time is the kind of guy who's there from the beginning. Who wants you from the beginning."

"I know. I mean, intellectually, I understand that. It's just..."

Admit it, I thought to myself. Admit it and get it out there, and at least that way it won't be rolling around in your head anymore.

"I don't agree with him a lot of the time, most of the time, and he drives me crazy, but I get him. I know I drive him crazy, but I feel like he... like he gets me somehow, too.

Appreciates something about me. I'm different, Mallory. I'm not like the rest of them.

And I'm not like you anymore." I looked up at her and saw both sadness and acceptance in her eyes. I thought of what Lindsey had said, and parroted her words.

"Ethan isn't like the rest of them, either. For all the strategy, the talk of alliances, he holds himself back from them."

"He holds himself back from you."

Not every time, I thought, and that was the payoff that kept me coming back for more.

"And you're holding yourself back from me, from Morgan."

"I know," I said again. "Look, about Morgan, there are other considerations. What you know isn't the entire story." What I knew wasn't the entire story either, but I wasn't sure I was ready to tell the rest of it, to tell Mallory about the lingering relationship between the current and former Masters of Navarre. "It doesn't matter. It's done anyway."

"Done?"

"Earlier. Before she found me. We ended it." Not that it truly mattered. He didn't trust me, had never trusted me. Maybe his own insecurities, maybe the rumors that seemed to follow me, maybe the sense that I'd never been really his.

Mallory interrupted my reverie and was, as usual, right on. "There is nothing we want quite as much as the thing we know we can't have."

I nodded, although I wasn't sure if she meant me or Morgan. "I know."

The room was silent for a minute. "You looked dead," she said.

I glanced back at her, saw tears brimming at her lashes. And yet I still couldn't reach back, the barrier still between us.

"I thought I'd killed you." She sniffed, swiped absently at a tear. "Catcher had to hold me up. The vampires freaked; I think they wanted to take us out. Ethan checked your pulse, said you were alive, and he was all bloodied up. Blood everywhere. You were, too, cuts and scratches on your arms, on your cheeks. You two beat the shit out of each other.

Catcher picked you up, and someone brought Ethan a shirt, and everyone got in the car. I brought your sword." She pointed to the corner where it balanced on its pommel against the bedroom wall. It was back in the scabbard, cleaned, probably by Catcher, who'd have taken exquisite care of the blood-tempered blade.

"He carried you up here."

"Catcher?"

Mallory shook her head, then rubbed at her eyes and ran her hands through her hair, seemed to shake off the emotion.

"Ethan. He rode with us. They - the vampires, your vampires - followed him in another car."

My vampires. I'd become something else to her. A different kind of thing.

"Catcher said you needed to sleep it off, that you'd heal from it all."

I looked down at my arms, which were pale and pristine once again. I had healed, just like he'd predicted.

"So Ethan carried you up here, and Catcher took care of me, I guess, and Lindsey and Luc - we all waited downstairs." She glanced up at me. "You were unconscious the whole time?"

I looked back at her, my best friend, and I didn't tell her what I'd done.

That I'd gone through some part of the change again, and in the haze of it, the bloodlust of it, had taken blood from someone else.

His blood.

Ethan's.

And it had been like a homecoming.

I couldn't even begin to deal with that, to process it.

"I was out," I told her.

Mallory looked at me, but nodded, maybe not buying it completely, but not arguing the point. She sighed and leaned forward, enveloped me in a hug. "There's a reason they call it hopelessly romantic."

"And not rationally romantic?"

"Well-developed-thoughtly romantic."

I half chuckled and knuckled away my own tears. "That doesn't make any sense."

"Don't mock me." She squeezed, then let me go.

"You fireballed me. Knocked me out." Made me drink him, I thought, but didn't voice that aloud, being ill-equipped for the Freudian analysis that would follow the confession. "I'm entitled to mock a little."

"It's not fire. It's a way to transmit the magic. A kind of conduit." Mallory sighed and stood up. I hadn't noticed how tired she looked. Dark circles shadowed eyes already swollen from tears.

"As much as I'd like to continue this conversation, which is honestly not at all, dawn's nearly here. We both need sleep." She stood, went for the door and, hand on the doorknob, stood there for a moment. "We're going to change. This is going to change us both. There's no guarantee that we come out the end of it still liking each other."

My stomach clenched, but I nodded. "I know."

"We do the best we can."

"Yeah."

"Good night, Merit," she said, and flipped off the light, then shut the door behind her as she left.

I lay back, one hand under my head, one on my stomach, eyes on the ceiling. It hadn't been a particularly good night.