“Friends,” Oliver repeated, and the sound he made was almost a laugh. “Really.”

“Well, in principle. Not if you ever hit me again.”

She held the gaze until he finally leaned back against the wall and crossed his arms. His head tilted a little to the left, and she saw the gray-threaded brown hair of his ponytail tied back behind his shoulder. The lines on his face seemed to smooth out, just a bit.

“How long have you been here, Claire?” he asked, in a very different tone. “Almost two years, yes?”

“Almost.” Her eighteenth birthday was approaching fast. Once, she’d have been so focused on that milestone that nothing else would have mattered, but it almost seemed meaningless now. In every way that could possibly count, she was already adult. In Morganville, you really did grow up fast.

“I’ve only been here a bit longer than you,” he said. “Did you realize that?”

She hadn’t really. Oh, she supposed she knew intellectually that Oliver had drifted into town about six months before she’d made it to Texas Prairie University, but he’d seemed such a longtime fixture by then that imagining Morganville without him had been impossible. “What’s your point?”

“I am as ill-equipped to lead here as you,” he said. “Most vampires came with Amelie, or soon after; a few entered gradually over the long years. But I came to conquer. I came to take my rightful place as the leader of the last of our kind. I came to kill Amelie and destroy this place. And they all know it. It makes my situation somewhat … difficult.”

She knew it, too—at least she’d always suspected it; by the time she’d arrived there had been a cautious truce between Amelie and Oliver, but they were pretty much equally matched in power and ruthlessness, and Claire had always figured that Oliver had made an attempt to take over at least once before she’d come to town.

And Amelie, weirdly, had let him live to try again.

“She’s so very intelligent, and so very cold,” Oliver said. He was no longer exactly talking to Claire, more just … talking. “She knew that forcing me to act as her second-in-command would seem a worse punishment than outright death, and Amelie, above all others, dislikes to do her own violence; queens never dirty their own hands. I was … suited, and after a short time it ceased to be such a shackle dragging on me. She had—has—no reason to trust me. None. But she did, and I was forced to … respect that. And her.” He paused then, and said, “I find myself in the curious position of saving humans. Saving this town. Saving her. These are not instincts that come to me naturally.”

That was, she supposed, some kind of roundabout apology. She didn’t think she accepted it, mostly, but she did see his point, a little: Oliver wasn’t built, like Amelie, to be a calm, ice-cold ruler. He was a warlord, impatient and brutal, and he had no long-term interest in the little people.