He chuckled. "Sling as in play. I mess around with a twelve-string. Nothing formal. Just something to relax, maybe out on the back deck with a beer, staring up at the stars."
"That sounds like a pretty nice way to spend an evening." I wondered where that deck was located.
"Where are you from?" I asked again. He paused, fiddling with the edge of his plastic cup, then looked up at me. "You were right about Memphis," he finally said. "We have a den on the East Side - outside the city, so the glare doesn't get in the way of the stars." He frowned. "It's weird to be here - great city, lots of stuff to see, and I like the water - but there're no stars."
"Not many," I agreed. "But I haven't really seen too many of them anywhere else, either. I've lived in New York and California."
"You seem to like concrete."
"It does seem that way. Although the idea of sitting out on a deck with a beer in hand sounds pretty good right now, too."
"That's exactly the point, isn't it?"
I cocked my head at him. "How do you mean?"
Adam gestured at the room. "This. All this. We could all be sitting out on a deck with a beer in hand.
Instead of doing that, we're in some fancy house in Chicago, waiting to argue about our future." He shrugged. "I'll do what Gabe asks me to do, but I understand the urge to go home."
"Speaking of the drama, has there been any word from Tony? Is he taking responsibility for the hit?
Challenging Gabriel?"
Adam shook his head. "Not as far as I know. But that's a question for Gabriel."
"You know, I think we just had an actual conversation. That wasn't so bad, was it?" He raised a hand to his neck. "My carotid appears to be intact, so, no, it wasn't so hard."
"We aren't all chomping at the bit to break open a vein, you know." Well, unless you put me in a room with Ethan Sullivan.
CHAPTER TWELVE
PACK UP THE MOON
Until Gabriel stepped onto an ottoman in the middle of the Brecks' living room, it seemed, as Adam said, as though we were guests at a family reunion. Until then.
Gabriel got the crowd's attention with a fierce whistle that nearly made my eardrums pop. That sound was followed by the cacophonous clinking of a hundred silver forks on a hundred wineglasses that stopped only when he jumped atop the ottoman and lifted his hands in the air.
"Pack!" he screamed out, and the room erupted with the sound of a hundred voices - yells, hoots, whistles, screams, and howls. And along with the sounds erupted a sudden charge of magic. The air sizzled with the electric buzz of it, all at once life-affirming and frightening. After all, this was a predatory energy that wasn't mine.
I itched with the urge to move, and nearly jumped out of my skin until Ethan moved close enough to align the sides of our bodies. I wasn't sure if he was moving toward me or away from the Pack members around us, but there was something innately comforting about the feel of him at my side. It was calming, something familiar amidst sensations that my vampire sensibilities weren't too keen on.
Be still, he silently said, expressing not the words of a lover, but an order from Master to Novitiate vampire to calm myself. And as if he'd ordered it, my pulse began to slow.
Jeff, on his way to the front of the room, paused at our sides. "He's calling the Pack," he explained. "As far as I'm aware, you're the first vampires to witness it."
"In Chicago?" I queried.
"In history," he said, then moved forward.
"We are the Pack!" Gabriel announced, and the shifters began to move together, to cluster toward him.
As the back of the room cleared, I saw Nick standing alone at the edge of the crowd, a position I assumed he'd adopted since he was still on the outs with Gabriel. And being on the outs with Gabriel, I guessed, was akin to being on the outs with the Pack.
The rest of them embraced, arms linked as they tightened into a rugbylike knot. But this time, the magic didn't leak outward. It condensed as they gathered together, only the boundary tangible from our spot at the edge of the crowd. They linked arms in rings around Gabriel, and then the howls began again. Some were constant, like a four-part harmony of animal sounds; others were random yips. The sounds rose together into a frantic crescendo, the knitted rows of shifters swaying in alternating bands as they sang.
Realization struck - these weren't just vocalizations; they were communications - reassurances amongst the Pack members that they were together, that their families were safe and that the Pack was secure.
It's beautiful, I told Ethan, and considered myself fortunate to be witness to something no vampires had seen before. The calling continued for another ten or fifteen minutes, the shifters slowly disbanding - one ring at a time - until they were separate again. Gabriel still stood on the ottoman, hands in the air, his fitted dark T-shirt drenched in sweat. Calling the Pack - maybe reigning in all that magic - must have been hard work.
"Welcome to Chicago," he said, smiling tiredly and getting another hoot from the audience. "Soon enough, we will convene. We will take our collective fate to the Packs, and we will decide whether to stay or go."
The crowd quieted.
"The time will come to make that decision," he said. "But that time is not tonight." He reached down, and when he rose again, held a pink-cheeked toddler in his arms. He pressed a kiss to the child's forehead.
"Our future is clouded. But we will persevere, whatever the outcome. The Pack is eternal, everlasting." He reached down and handed the child back to the outstretched arms of his mother, then rose to face the crowd again, hands fisted on his hips.
"Tonight, we welcome strangers into our midst. We call them vampires, but we know them as friends.
They have cared for one of our own, and so we invite them here in friendship tonight." Gabriel gestured toward us, and in response the Pack members turned to face me and Ethan. Some wore smiles. Others bore expressions of outright distrust and disdain. But even those men and women nodded, begrudging acceptance of the vampires in their midst, vampires who'd saved one of their own.
Thank God for Berna, I silently told Ethan.
Thank God you were quick enough to step forward, he replied.
"All of our lives are intertwined," Gabriel said. "Vampire or shifter, man or woman, our heartbeats echo the very pulse of the earth. And ours are not the only hearts connected." He looked at Ethan, then me.
Someone handed him a cup, and Gabriel raised it to us. "We offer our friendship." Ethan's eyes went instantaneously wide, but he shuttered the emotion and offered a humble bow to the shifters around us as they drank a toast.