He seems surprised by my question. “Zurich.”
“Studying?”
His shoulders heave with a sigh. “At first. Then working.”
“Architecture, right? I don’t fully get it. Buildings are kind of boring. I’m grateful they don’t fall on top of my head, though.”
“I don’t get how one can type stuff into a machine all day and not be terrified of a robot uprising. I’m grateful for Mario Kart, though.”
“Fair enough.” I smile at his tone, because it’s the poutiest I’ve ever heard. I must have found his touchy spot. “I do like the style of this home,” I volunteer magnanimously.
“It’s called biomorphic.”
“How do you know? You learned it in school?”
“That, and I designed it as a present for my mother.”
“Oh.” Wow. I guess he’s not just an architect—he’s a good architect. “When you studied, did you do the Human thing?” Their school system is often the only option, simply because there’s more of them, and they invest in education infrastructure. In Vampyre society, and I assume among Weres, too, formal degrees are not worth the paper they’re printed on. The skills that come with them, however, are priceless. If we want to acquire them, we create fake IDs and use them to enroll at Human universities. Vampyres tend to take online classes (because of the fangs, and the whole third-degree burns in the sunlight thing). Weres are undetectable to Humans’ naked eye, and could come and go from their society more easily, but Humans have installed technology that singles out faster-than-normal heartbeats and higher body temperatures in plenty of places. Honestly, I’m just lucky they never expected Vampyres would go to the trouble of filing their own fangs and never developed the same degree of paranoia about us.
“Zurich was different, actually.”
“Different?”
“Weres and Humans were attending openly. A few Vampyres, too. All living in the city.”
“Wow.” I know there are places like that around the world, where the local history between the species is not so fraught, and living side by side, if not together, is considered normal. It’s still hard to imagine, though. “Did you have a Vampyre girlfriend?” I point at my ring finger. “Once you go Vamp, you can never go back, huh?”
He gives me a long-suffering look. “You’ll be astonished to hear the Vampyres didn’t hang out with us.”
“How snobby.” I fold my hand back in my lap, but start playing with my wedding band. “Why all the way to Zurich? Were you on the run from Roscoe?”
“On the run?” His cheeks stretch into an amused grin. “Roscoe was never a threat. Not to me.”
“That’s brave of you. Or narcissistic.”
“Both, maybe,” he acknowledges. Then quickly turns serious. “It’s hard to explain dominance to someone who doesn’t have the hardware to understand it.”
“Lowe, was that a computer metaphor?” I get another of those don’t-sass-me looks, and laugh. “Come on. At least try to explain it.”
He shakes his head. “If you met someone without a nose and had to explain to them what a smell feels like, what would you tell them?” He looks at me expectantly. And I open my mouth half a dozen times—only to close it just as many, frustrated. “Yup.” He doesn’t even sound too told-you-so-y. “It was like that with Roscoe. He was a grown adult, I was barely past puberty, but I always knew that he was never going to win a fight against me, and he always knew it, and everyone in the pack knew it, too. As much as I despise him now, I’m thankful that he gave me long enough without a reason to challenge him.”
Without becoming a despotic leader, he means. “What changed him?”
“Hard to say. His views escalated very suddenly.” He licks his full lips, looking faraway, in the grip of a memory. “I got the phone call and didn’t even have the time to stop by my apartment on the way to the airport. My mother had vocally opposed a raid. She was wounded, and Ana was defenseless.”
“Shit.”
“It was eleven hours and forty minutes from the moment I got the phone call until I pulled up Cal’s driveway and found Ana sobbing in Misha’s room.” His tone is emotionless, almost disturbingly so. “I was terrified.”
I can’t imagine. Or can I? Those first few days after Serena was gone, and I was so frantically preoccupied with looking for her that it didn’t occur to me to bathe or feed until my head pounded and my body was feverish.
“Did you ever get to go back to Zurich? To pick up your stuff? To . . .” Get closure. Say goodbye to the life you’d built. Maybe you had friends, a girlfriend, a favorite takeout place. Maybe you used to sleep in in the morning, or take long weekend trips to travel around Europe and check out . . . buildings, or something. Maybe you had dreams. Did you go back to retrieve those?
He shakes his head. “My landlord mailed a couple of things. Threw out the rest.” He scratches his jaw. “Feel kinda bad for leaving my dirty breakfast dishes in the sink.”
I chuckle. “It’s kind of your thing, isn’t it?”
“What?” He turns to me.
“Blaming yourself for being anything less than perfect.”
“If you want to wash my dishes, by all means.”
“Shush.” I lightly bump my shoulder into his, like I do with Serena when she’s being obtuse. He stiffens, stills in a breathless sort of tension for a moment, then slowly relaxes as I pull away. “So, this dominance thing. Is Cal the second most dominant Were in the pack?” This sounds foreign, like picking words at random. Magnetic fridge poetry.
“We’re not a military organization. There’s no strict hierarchy within the pack. Cal just happens to be someone I trust.”
Can’t be more dysfunctional than arbitrary councils whose membership is established through primogeniture. And Humans elect leaders like Governor Davenport. Clearly, there’s no perfect solution here. “Did he also have to challenge someone to become a second? Maybe Ken Doll?”
“It’s fucked up that I know who you’re referring to.”
I chuckle. “Hey, he has never introduced himself.”
“Ludwig. His name is Ludwig. And our pack has over a dozen seconds, who are chosen within their huddle through a caucus system.”
“Huddle?”
“It’s a web of interconnected families. Usually geographically close. Each second reports to the Alpha. After Roscoe, new seconds were elected, which means that most of them are as new to this as I am. Mick is the only one who kept his position.”
“You mean, the only one who didn’t try to kill you?”
“Yup.” His laugh could be bitter, but it isn’t. “He and his mate were close friends of my mother’s. Shannon used to be a second, too.”
“Did you kill her?” I ask, conversationally, and he’s so gonna push me off the roof.
“Misery.”
“It’s a fair question, given your precedents.”
“No, I did not kill the mate of the man who used to change my diapers.” He massages his temple. “Hell, they both did. They taught me how to ride bikes and track prey.”
“What happened to her?”
“She died two years ago, during a confrontation at the eastern border. With Humans, we think.” He swallows. “So did Mick’s son. He was sixteen.”
Not something my people would be above, but I still flinch. “That explains why he always seems so melancholic.”
“He smells like grief. All the time.”
“Well, he’s my favorite Were.” I hug my knees. “He’s always so nice to me.”
“That’s because he has a weakness for beautiful women.”
“What does that have to do with me?”
“You know what you look like.”
I laugh softly, surprised by the backhanded compliment.
“Why do you always do that?” he asks.
“Do what?”
“When you laugh, you cover your lips with your hand. Or you do it with your mouth closed.”