“No.” King of what? I want to ask, but now doesn’t exactly seem like the time.

“Oh, well, here I am.” He does a mock little bow. “The next vampire liege at your service.”

“Ooookay.” I don’t know what else to say to that revelation. Except, “It was supposed to be Hudson? But now that he’s dead…”

“Exactly.” He makes a you guessed it clicking sound with the corner of his mouth. “I’m the replacement. The new heir apparent.”

And future king. My mind boggles at the mere idea. What does a vampire king do, anyway? And is that why everyone treats Jaxon with such deference? Because he’s royalty? But what does vampire royalty have to do with dragons? Or witches?

“I am, of course, also the murderer of the former heir apparent,” Jaxon continues, “which in another species might cause some problems. But in the vampire world, you’re only as strong as what you can defend…and what you can take. So all I had to do to become the most fearsome and revered vampire in the world was to kill my big brother.”

He gives a little shrug that is supposed to show how amusing he finds the whole thing, how much he doesn’t care.

I don’t buy it for a second.

“But that’s not why you killed him,” I add, because I think he needs to hear me say it.

“I thought we already covered that motive doesn’t matter? Perception becomes truth eventually, even when it’s wrong.” There’s a wealth of pain in those four words, even though the tone Jaxon uses is completely devoid of emotion. “Especially when it’s wrong. History is, after all, written by the winner.”

I rest my head on his shoulder in a small gesture of comfort. “But you’re the winner.”

“Am I?”

I don’t have an answer for that, so I don’t even try. Instead, I ask for the truth. His truth. “Why did you kill Hudson?”

“Because he needed to be killed. And I’m the only one who could.”

The words hang in the air as I try to absorb them, to figure out what he means. “So Hudson was as powerful as you, then.”

“No one is as powerful as me.” He isn’t bragging. In fact, he sounds almost ashamed of the fact.

“Why is that exactly?” I ask.

He shrugs. “Genetics. Each generation of born vampires tends to be more powerful than the generation that came before them. There are exceptions, of course, but for the most part, that’s how it’s always been. It’s why there are so few of us—nature’s way of keeping the balance, I figure. And since my parents come from the strongest two families and wield incredible power themselves, it’s no surprise that when they mated, their offspring…”

“Can literally make the earth shake.”

He gives a half smile, the first I’ve seen from him since this conversation began. “Something like that, yeah.”

“So am I right in guessing that Hudson was not exactly responsible with his power?”

“A lot of young vampires aren’t.”

“That’s not an answer.” I raise a brow, wait for him to look at me. It takes longer than it should. “And you strike me as very responsible.”

He arches his own brows, takes a deliberate look around the disaster he made of the room when he was kissing me.

“You know what I mean.”

“I know what you think you mean. Hudson…” He sighs. “Hudson’s plans were always audacious. Always looking to give vampires more power, more money, more control, which isn’t bad in and of itself.”

I’m tempted to disagree. After all, if you plan on garnering more power, money, and control, it has to come from somewhere. And history has shown that taking any of those three things tends to be less than humane for the people it’s being taken from.

But that’s a discussion for another time, not now, when Jaxon is finally opening up.

“But somewhere along the line, he got lost in those plans,” Jaxon continues. “He got so concerned with what he could achieve and how he could achieve it that he never stopped to question if he should.

“I tried to pull him back, tried to talk reason to him, but with Lia and my mother whispering all kinds of Chosen One bullshit in his ear, it became impossible to reach him. Impossible to make him understand that his own brand of manifest destiny was not…acceptable, especially when those plans included…” His voice drifts off for a minute, and a look at his eyes tells me that mentally, Jaxon’s not here in this room anymore. He’s far away in another time and place.

“Things between vampires and shifters have always been tense,” he finally continues, a defensive note in his voice that I’ve never heard before. “We’ve never really gotten along with the wolves or the dragons; they don’t trust us and we sure as hell don’t trust them. So when Hudson worked up a plan to”—he curls the fingers of his free hand and makes air quotes—“‘put the shifters in their place,’ a lot of people thought he was onto something.”

“But not you.”

“Going after the shifters looked and smelled an awful lot like prejudice to me. And then it began to look a lot like genocide. Especially when he started adding other supernatural creatures—and even made vampires—to his list. Things got ugly.”

“How ugly?” I ask, though I’m not sure I actually want to know the answer. Not when Jaxon looks more grim than I’ve ever seen him. And not when he’s throwing around words like “genocide.”

“Ugly.” He refuses to elaborate. “Especially with our history.”

Again the blanks in my knowledge base make it impossible to understand what history he’s referring to. Instead of asking, I make a mental note to check the library or ask Macy.

“I tried to reason with Hudson, tried to talk him down. I even went to the king and queen to see if they could do something with him.”

I note how he calls his parents the king and queen instead of Mom and Dad, and for a second, I flash back to the first day I met him. To the chess table and the vampire queen and the things he said about what I thought at the time was just a chess piece.

It all makes so much more sense now.

“They couldn’t.”

“They wouldn’t,” he corrects. “So I tried to talk to him again. So did Byron and Mekhi and a few of the others who would have graduated with him. He didn’t listen. And one day he started a fight that was set to rip the whole world apart, had it been allowed to continue.”

“That’s when you stepped in.”