CHAPTER TWO

Ashgrove Hall had a way of feeling emptier every time Damon came home to it, which struck him as an impressive feat for a building with sixty rooms and a staff of forty.

He rode back from the Hollow Bridge alone, the way he'd come, and let the horse pick its own pace through the dark. Vampires didn't need horses, not really; he could have run the distance faster on foot and arrived without breaking the composure he'd spent three hundred years learning to keep. But there was something steadying about the ride, about the ordinary rhythm of hooves on packed earth, that he wasn't ready to give up yet.

Selene was waiting on the front steps when he arrived, which meant someone had already ridden ahead with the news. Selene always knew before he did. It was, depending on the day, either the most useful or the most irritating thing about her.

"You're not dead," she observed, taking the horse's reins from him without being asked. "So either the meeting went well, or the wolves have terrible aim."

"The meeting went sideways." Damon climbed the steps two at a time, coat still damp from the ride. "Gather the council. Tonight. I'd rather say this once."

Selene fell into step beside him, dropping her voice the way she did when the words weren't meant for the stable hands. "That bad?"

"That specific." He paused at the top of the steps, hand on the door. "There's an oracle again, Selene. First one in two generations. And apparently she looked into whatever oracles look into and decided the fate of both our peoples rests on whether I can convince a Voss werewolf to fall in love with me before the next eclipse."

Selene's expression didn't change, which was its own kind of answer; she'd served this house for a hundred years and had learned, long before Damon was born into his role in it, not to let her face do her arguing for her. "And what did you tell them?"

"I told them six months wasn't very long."

"That's not a no."

"No," Damon agreed. "It isn't."

The council chamber at Ashgrove Hall had been built by Damon's grandfather in an era when vampire houses still believed in intimidating their guests with architecture, and it showed: black marble, high vaulted ceilings, a long table carved from a single fallen oak that had supposedly stood since before either species kept written records. Damon had always found the room faintly ridiculous. Tonight, walking into it to face eight of the oldest and most stubborn minds in the eastern territories, he found it merely exhausting.

Lord Aurelius sat at the far end, where he always sat, in the chair that had once belonged to Damon's father and which he'd never quite stopped acting as though he were entitled to. Aurelius was old even by vampire standards, old enough to remember when the war with the wolves had been fought with swords instead of treaties, and he wore that memory like an heirloom, polished and displayed and never once questioned.

"An arranged courtship," Aurelius said, before Damon had finished explaining, in the tone of a man tasting something spoiled. "With a Voss. The same Voss pack that put three of our own in the ground at Thornwood Pass."

"The same skirmish my father started," Damon said, evenly, because he had learned a long time ago that raising his voice in this room only gave Aurelius more to work with. "I'd have thought you'd remember that part too."

A ripple of discomfort went around the table, the kind that always followed any direct mention of Cassian Ashgrove's name in this house. Damon's father was twenty years dead, and still the single most dangerous subject in the room.

"Your father," Aurelius said, "understood that peace bought with weakness isn't peace. It's an invitation."

"My father," Damon said, "started a war that killed more of our people than it ever killed of theirs, and when I ended it, half of you called me a coward and the other half called me a traitor, and I have spent twenty years proving neither of you was right. I'm not interested in relitigating that tonight. I'm here to tell you what the Oracle said, and what I intend to do about it, and you're welcome to object, but you're not going to talk me out of it."

Silence settled over the long table. Somewhere down its length, a younger council member, a woman named Cordelia who'd always struck Damon as more pragmatic than the rest, spoke up before Aurelius could recover his footing.

"What did the Oracle actually say?"

Damon told them. All of it, the wording as close to exact as he could recall it, the six months, the eclipse, the warning about war and ashes and no crown left to inherit them. He watched the words land differently on different faces: fear on some, calculation on others, and on Aurelius's face, something that looked almost like satisfaction, as though the prospect of a coming war was less a tragedy to him than a vindication.

"And you believe this," Aurelius said, when Damon had finished. "You, who has spent two decades telling this council that peace was possible without a single drop of prophecy to back it up, now believes a fortune-teller's riddle because it happens to arrive with your name attached."

"I believe," Damon said, "that the Oracle of the Hollow hasn't spoken in two generations and chose now to break that silence with both our names in the same sentence. I believe that's not something I can afford to shrug off, whatever I think of prophecy as a general principle. And I believe that if there's a version of the next six months where nobody else has to die the way my father died, or the way half of Thornwood Pass died, I owe it to this house to try it."

"Even if the price is your pride," Aurelius said. "Courting a wolf."

"My pride," Damon said, "has survived worse than a dinner with someone I don't like."

That, at least, drew a dry sound from Cordelia that might have been a laugh in a less formal room. Aurelius did not look amused. He rose from his seat, robes settling around him with the particular dignity of a man who'd practiced looking dignified for several centuries, and delivered his verdict the way he delivered everything: as though the matter had already been decided and the council's job was merely to catch up.

"Do as you like, Damon. You always have. But mark me: if this arrangement fails, and I believe it will, you will have handed the wolves every excuse they need to say House Ashgrove could not be trusted to keep its word even when its own survival depended on it. That failure will not be yours alone to carry."

He left the chamber without waiting for a response, his robes whispering against the black marble floor, and one by one the rest of the council rose and followed, until only Selene remained, leaning against the doorframe with the particular patience of someone who had outlasted worse arguments than this one.

"He's not wrong about the stakes," she said, once the room had emptied.

"He's rarely wrong about the stakes." Damon dropped into the chair at the head of the table, the one that had been his father's, the one he still hadn't decided whether he had any right to sit in. "He's usually wrong about what to do with them."

"So what do you do with them?"

Damon thought of the bridge, of the werewolf who'd looked at him like she was deciding whether he was worth the trouble of hating properly, who'd agreed to this absurd arrangement not because she liked the idea but because she'd buried someone at Thornwood Pass too and couldn't stomach the thought of anyone else joining them there. He thought of the warmth in her hand when they'd shaken on it, brief and unwelcome and, if he was honest with himself in the privacy of his own skull, more interesting than anything that had happened to him in longer than he cared to admit.

"I go to dinner," he said, "with a werewolf who thinks I'm a monster, and I try to convince her, and possibly myself, that the Oracle isn't wrong about us."

Selene raised an eyebrow. "That's not a plan."

"It's the only one I've got."

"Well." She pushed off from the doorframe, already turning to go arrange whatever needed arranging, which in this house was always something. "For what it's worth, your father would have started this arrangement with an ultimatum and ended it with a war. You started it with a handshake. I'd call that progress."

Damon didn't answer, because there wasn't a good answer to give, and because he was still turning the observation over long after Selene's footsteps had faded down the corridor: that everything he did in this house, every decision, every olive branch, every small act of restraint, was still being measured against a dead man's shadow. He had spent twenty years trying to prove he was not his father. He wondered, sitting alone in that hollow black room, whether that particular ghost would ever stop following him across a bridge he hadn't chosen to build, toward a woman he hadn't chosen to need.

The letter from the Council of Both Bloods arrived three days later, formalizing the terms neither of them had actually agreed to in detail: a first courtship meeting, to be held under Council observation, at the waystation on the Hollow Bridge, one week from the date of the letter's sending. Formal dinner. Formal witnesses. Formal everything, because the Council did not trust either house to manage an unsupervised meeting between a werewolf and a vampire without someone taking notes in case it ended in bloodshed.

Damon read the letter twice, the way Elena had read hers, though he'd never know that, and set it down on his desk with a feeling he didn't have a good word for. Not dread, exactly. Something closer to the sensation of standing at the top of a long staircase in the dark, unable to see the bottom, and stepping forward anyway because the alternative was standing still and watching the house burn down around him.

He told Selene to have the black coat pressed. He told himself, several times, that this was strategy and nothing more, an alliance dressed up in candlelight because the Oracle had decided that was the shape peace needed to take this time.

He told himself that, and did not entirely believe it, and found that the not-believing-it bothered him a good deal less than it should have.