CHAPTER THREE

Her father took the news the way Elena had known he would: badly, loudly, and at a volume that brought half the pack house to the kitchen door within a minute of her finishing the sentence.

"You shook his hand," Garrick Voss said, for the third time, as though repetition might somehow undo the fact of it. "An Ashgrove. At the Hollow Bridge. Alone."

"I was summoned, Dad. It wasn't a garden party I wandered into by accident."

"You could have sent word. You could have waited for me."

"The letter said attendance wasn't optional, and it definitely didn't say 'bring your father to loom in the background making everyone's blood pressure worse.'" Elena crossed her arms, planting herself the way she'd learned to as a girl, feet apart, chin up, because backing down in front of her father, even an inch, tended to invite him to keep pushing. "There's an oracle again, Dad. A real one. She named me. She named him. What was I supposed to do, tell the Council of Both Bloods to reschedule the apocalypse for a day I had free?"

That, at least, landed. Garrick's jaw worked, the same tell Elena had inherited from him whether she liked it or not, and for a moment the fury in his eyes gave way to something rawer and harder to watch: fear, plain and unguarded, the particular fear of a man who had buried a brother because of a war between their two kinds and could not stomach the thought of burying a daughter to end one.

"Thornwood Pass," he said, quieter now. "You know what they did there."

"I know what happened there," Elena said, gentler than she'd meant to be. "I know it wasn't as simple as 'they did it.' I was six, Dad. I don't remember Uncle Theo's face without looking at the painting in the hall. But I know I don't want another Thornwood Pass in twenty years, one with my name on the marker instead of his, and if there's a chance, even a stupid, superstitious, six-months-to-fall-in-love-with-a-vampire chance, that agreeing to this stops that from happening, I'm going to take it."

Marta, hovering in the doorway through the whole exchange with the particular stillness of a woman choosing very carefully when to speak, chose that moment. "She's not wrong, Dad."

"Nobody asked you."

"Nobody ever does, and I say useful things anyway." Marta pushed off the doorframe and came to stand beside her sister, a show of solidarity Elena hadn't asked for and was, despite herself, grateful for. "The Council of Both Bloods doesn't call emergency sessions for nothing, and an oracle waking up after forty years isn't nothing. If Elena had said no, the Ashgroves would still be sitting on this. At least this way, we've got someone on the inside."

"She's not a spy, Marta, she's my daughter."

"She can be both. Werewolves are famously capable of multitasking."

Despite himself, despite the fury still simmering behind his eyes, Garrick's mouth twitched, the ghost of a laugh he refused to let all the way out. He looked at Elena for a long moment, the kind of look that took her all the way back to being nine years old and caught halfway up a tree she'd been told not to climb, and then he sighed, the particular sigh of a man who knew he'd already lost the argument and was only delaying the surrender for the sake of his own pride.

"Six months," he said. "And you tell me everything. Every meeting. Every letter. If that family so much as looks at you wrong, I want to know before you've finished walking away from them."

"Deal."

"And if he hurts you," Garrick added, in a voice that had gone very quiet and very level, the voice he used on pack business that mattered more than shouting could express, "prophecy or no prophecy, oracle or no oracle, I will end House Ashgrove myself."

"Noted," Elena said, and did not doubt for a second that he meant it, and found, strangely, that she didn't hate him for it. It was the kind of love that came wrapped in threats instead of flowers, but it was love all the same, and she'd take it over the alternative.

The formal letter arrived four days later: a dinner, at the waystation on the Hollow Bridge, one week out, under Council observation. Elena read it standing in the kitchen with her sister looking over her shoulder again, an old habit neither of them had bothered to break.

"A chaperoned dinner," Marta said. "How romantic."

"It's not romantic. It's diplomacy with a tablecloth."

"Sure. That's why you've read that letter four times already."

"I'm making sure I don't get the date wrong."

"You've had the date memorized since the second read." Marta grinned, the particular grin she'd worn since childhood whenever she'd caught Elena in a lie too small to be worth denying properly. "You're nervous."

"I'm strategizing."

"You're nervous about a dinner with a vampire you called cold-blooded to his face on a bridge, in front of the entire Council of Both Bloods, less than a week ago."

"I called him cold-blooded in my head. Out loud I only implied it."

"Same thing with extra steps."

Elena didn't have a good answer for that, mostly because Marta wasn't wrong, and she'd learned a long time ago that there was no version of arguing with her sister that ended in anything but Marta being smugly, infuriatingly correct. She was nervous. She'd told herself it was strategy, the same lie Damon was telling himself two territories over without either of them knowing it, and some small, honest part of her, the part that had felt that unwelcome warmth shoot up her arm at the handshake, knew it for the lie it was.

She spent the week the way she spent most weeks: on patrol with the rest of the younger pack members, running the border trails at dawn, sparring in the yard with her second, Rhys, who'd known her since they were pups underfoot at pack council meetings and had never once let her win a match out of politeness.

"So," Rhys said, circling her in the sparring ring on the third morning, sweat already soaking through his shirt despite the cold, "you're going on a date with a vampire."

"It's not a date."

"The Council calls it a courtship meeting. I call it a date. Everyone in the pack calls it a date. You're the only one insisting it's something else." He feinted left, and Elena caught the movement half a second late, his knuckles brushing her shoulder before she twisted out of range. "Focus."

"I am focused."

"You're thinking about cufflinks."

"I do not know what a vampire's cufflinks look like, Rhys, and I resent the implication that I've been thinking about them."

"You didn't deny thinking about him." Rhys grinned, ducking her retaliatory swing with the ease of long practice. "Interesting."

"You're insufferable."

"I'm observant. There's a difference, and it's usually annoying for whoever I'm being observant about."

Elena didn't dignify that with a response, mostly because there wasn't a good one, and threw herself back into the spar with more force than strictly necessary, which Rhys took, correctly, as confirmation of everything he'd just said.

By the time the night of the dinner arrived, she had changed her clothes four times, told herself each time that it didn't matter what she wore to a diplomatic meeting with an assigned seating chart and a Council of elders taking notes, and ended up, in the end, in the same deep green coat she'd worn to the bridge the first time, because it felt like armor, and because some superstitious, unexamined part of her wanted him to recognize her.

The waystation on the Hollow Bridge was smaller than she'd expected: a single stone room built into the bridge's midpoint, lit with candles instead of the harsh vampire-preferred lanterns she'd braced herself for, a long table set for two with an uncomfortable number of elders seated along the walls like a jury. Elena arrived first, which she told herself was a coincidence and not the result of leaving home forty minutes early out of nerves she refused to name.

Damon arrived seven minutes later, dressed in black that made the candlelight look almost warm against his skin, and for one unguarded second, before either of them remembered they were supposed to be performing hostility for the Council's benefit, something in his expression when he saw her looked almost like relief.

"You came," he said.

"You say that like I had a choice."

"You always have a choice." He pulled out the chair across from her, an old-fashioned courtesy that felt strange coming from someone she'd spent her whole life being warned about. "You could have sent your father in your place. He seems like a man who enjoys a good confrontation."

"He offered. Loudly. Several times."

"And you said no."

"I said this was mine to handle." Elena settled into the offered chair, aware of a dozen ancient, watchful eyes along the walls, and found, to her own surprise, that she didn't much care what they thought. "Also, he threatened to end your entire house if you so much as look at me wrong, and I thought it was only fair to warn you before dessert instead of after."

Something that was almost a real laugh escaped him before he could stop it, low and startled, like the sound had gotten past a guard that usually held. "Noted," he said, echoing, without knowing it, the exact word she'd given her father a week before. "I'll try to keep my looking strictly correct."

"See that you do."

Across the table, under the weight of eight ancient, judgmental stares, something unspoken passed between them, quick and unfamiliar and neither of them ready to name it: the recognition, small but undeniable, that this dinner they'd both dreaded might not be quite the ordeal either of them had braced for.