My relief at seeing him and the simple comfort of knowing I had a friend in the room vibrated from my pores like a gong.
Ronnie cringed and covered her ears. Rafe and Neil tried to hide their laughter, but I could see the shake of their shoulders. Logan narrowed his eyes, knowing his son was the cause of that sound and not liking the strength of such a reaction, not one bit.
Keagan smiled, and a twitter of chirps, pleasant and light, lit the air. I opened my mouth to ask him about his affinity toward bird sounds and hesitated. I didn’t have an affinity toward gongs; the sound had escaped from me before I’d barely even felt the emotion.
I glanced at Dominic, wondering what he was feeling and why I couldn’t hear it on him like I could hear the minutiae of everyone else’s emotions.
He shook his head. “We’ll work on that,” he said, which I suppose was answer enough.
“Where are we? What are we doing here?” I asked, glancing at the group of vampires around me. Having all of them here in one room made the absence of one obvious. “Where’s Sevris?”
No one moved or spoke or so much as blinked. In a roomful of people who didn’t even need to breathe, the silence could stretch further, deeper, and more damning than I’d ever imagined possible.
Neil broke under the pressure. He cringed and stared determinedly at the nearest wall, as if the chipped paint might produce divine intervention from my questions.
I narrowed my eyes on him. “Did something happen?”
Rafe shook his head. “That’s just it. Nothing’s happened. Sevris disappeared the night he left to fetch you from your apartment, and we haven’t seen or heard from him since. None of us have.”
I bit my lip. “Maybe he’s just gone to ground to wait out the Leveling like the rest of you. He’ll show up, I’m sure.”
Suddenly, everyone found the walls just as fascinating as Neil had.
Dominic squeezed my shoulder. “Perhaps we should start with the easier of your three questions.” He moved his hand in a flourish to indicate the room around us. “On such short notice, I constructed an underground safe house for vampires warded against the Damned. I knew we’d need it for the Leveling. Luckily, we had it for your transformation.”
“Protection against the Damned sounds great, but what about the Day Reapers?” I asked. “In seven days’ time, how did they not find us? God knows everyone is gunning for us, and leading the charge is High Lord Henry.”
Dominic’s glacier eyes cut me. “Don’t call him that,” he chided.
I grinned cheekily. “It’s his name.”
“He prefers being addressed by his full name and title, and you know it.”
“He’s not here to care how I address him, now, is he?”
Dominic glared at me, but even his stern expression couldn’t hide the rush of Christmas pine that suddenly filled the room.
I shook my head, taken aback. “You’re scared.”
“No, I’m terrified. And if you fully understood our predicament, you would be too. The Day Reapers are the Chancellor’s coven, and I stole his right as Master of that coven to transform you. Do you think he’ll allow such a slight to go unpunished?”
“That’s more than just a ‘slight,’” Rafe said on a snort. “You broke Council law, and a crime of that magnitude—” he finished his sentence on a high whistle.
“What?” Neil asked, wringing his hands. “A crime of that magnitude what?”
Dominic met Neil’s worried eyes with a steady, uncompromising gaze. “A crime of that magnitude is punishable by death.”
“So it’s true,” Ronnie breathed, her words more air than voice. “Cassidy is a Day Reaper?”
Keagan’s bird let loose a loud bleat.
“Of course it’s true,” Jeremy snapped. “Can’t you see the color of her talons?”
“We’ll have to paint them. I have polish,” Ronnie said, sounding excited to help. She gasped suddenly, and I could hear the cogs of her mind fit some unfathomable piece into the puzzle. Literally, I heard it. “Is that why Bex paints hers?”
Keagan’s bird let loose a loud string of bleats.
“What did I say?” Ronnie asked, her voice a high whine.
The bird bleated louder.
I ignored Ronnie and the telltale bleat of Keagan’s bird in favor of facing Dominic. “Maybe if I avoid sunlight and paint my nails, the Chancellor won’t discover the truth,” I suggested.
“You will hide your existence as a Day Reaper from one of the greatest, most powerful entities of this world with nail polish?” Dominic leveled me with a look. “Like how Bex hid her true self? Are you willing to build an underground fortress and avoid sunlight for millennia?”
“It worked very well for Bex,” Keagan murmured. “Until Cassidy came along.”
Dominic snorted. “It worked so well she lost her Second, her night blood, and her coven.”
“She didn’t lose her coven. She left it,” Ronnie said, her voice very small. “She left us.”
For once, Keagan’s bird remained silent.
“Can we focus? I’m seven days behind here and not getting any younger,” I said, attempting to lighten the mood.
“Technically, neither are you getting any older,” Keagan said, grinning. He’d always understood my dark humor—hence our friendship despite the age difference.
“Jokes,” Logan whispered to Theresa, as if with our heightened senses we couldn’t hear him. “Two of his brothers are dead, one is being raised by the man hunting us, we are vampires, the life I built for him is being trod underfoot like fucking crumbs, and he’s making jokes.”
Some kind of sound expelled from Keagan, but it wasn’t a bird this time. Maybe the sound of a bird being strangled.
“You don’t need nail polish,” Jeremy said, interrupting my eavesdropping. “Locked away as they are, the Day Reapers aren’t our biggest problem at the moment.”
I blinked. “Locked away? What are you talking about?”
“Maybe we should all sit for this conversation,” Dominic suggested. His hand was suddenly at my waist, leading me to the nearest couch before I’d even conceded to sitting. I pulled away from Dominic just to be obstinate and sat of my own volition next to Keagan and across a coffee table from Jeremy and Ronnie. Rafe and Neil shifted to flank Dominic.
“Happy? I’m sitting.” I said, primly. “Now, start talking.”
Dominic nodded. “We needed a safe haven, somewhere that Jillian, the Damned, and daylight couldn’t touch you. I briefly considered your apartment, but I needed to remain at your side for the transformation, and your apartment was designed beautifully to keep vampires out, not safeguard them once inside. So I brought you and everyone here,” he said, waving a hand to encompass our little dysfunctional family, “to wait out the remaining hours of the Leveling. Jillian had amassed too much of my power and strength for me to fight her and win, and combined with her army of Damned, the threat of Day Reapers, and your vulnerability as you transformed, I had no choice. My one advantage was that Jillian thought that killing you had killed me. Once the Leveling passed, I anticipated regaining my abilities and power as Master vampire of New York City, and Jillian would realize too late that I still lived.”
“But you didn’t regain your abilities and power?” I asked.
“No, I did. I regained all my strength, power, and abilities just like I thought