Page 84 of Protecting His Vampire Mate

I zipped toward him.

From the corner of my eye, I swore I saw someone—a blonde woman—standing next to the binding circle. My brain was so locked up with my rage and instinct to protect myself and my mate that I hardly even processed it. She was there and gone so suddenly that I might have imagined it. A trick of the light. Unimportant.

Michael moved faster than I would have given him credit for.

I reached for him, fully prepared to crush the life from him. At the very last moment, he threw himself down into a surprisingly limber somersault.

I blinked, startled. I turned, realizing he now had unfettered access to my back.

But for the very first time since I had been turned into a vampire, I was too slow.

Michael drove the stake in his hand forward. He must have expected me to turn around, because somehow the tip of the stake was lined up with the spot in my chest where my heart was.

I felt it pierce my flesh.

In the same moment, Tobias screamed out two words in a foreign language that sounded like it might have been Latin.

The stake dissolved to ashes in Michael’s hand.

“Aw, shit.” Michael backed away from me, his eyes going round with fear.

My fangs were out. I hadn’t felt them drop. I grabbed him by the throat and lifted him off the ground with one hand, like he weighed nothing.

He gasped, unable to breathe. All I would have to do is close my hand and I could shatter his windpipe. He wouldn’t be a danger to me or to my mate any longer.

“Stop!” Danny cried, from behind me, apparently not unconscious after all. “Please!”

The raw anguish in Danny’s voice was impossible not to hear.

“Bryan, don’t hurt him! Please.”

The hunter was using my name. Attempting to reason with me. How odd. I hesitated.

He tried to kill your mate. A seductive whisper rose up in my mind, snaking through me. He tried to kill Tobias. He tried to kill you. He’ll do it again…

This was followed by the sensation of the pure need that surged up within me, hot and sudden. It was akin to abruptly being human again and suddenly not being able to breathe. It was like my throat had caught fire. It was like my body screamed at me for oxygen.

I didn’t have to suffer any longer. I could feed from him. I didn’t have to let all of that delicious, hot blood go to waste.

“He was going to kill us,” I said, my voice not sounding like my own. It was tight with my fury and hunger. “He tried to kill me.”

“Go on then,” Michael gasped out. Even though he was practically turning blue, he still had enough nastiness in him to sound the tiniest bit smug, like I’d just proven him right. “Do it.”

And I wanted to. Every bit of me wanted to.

“Don’t,” Danny said, much closer now. I whirled to face him, moving Michael effortlessly, his shoes barely scraping the ground. Danny’s face was grave, rather than afraid, and he locked eyes with me. “Don’t do this.”

“I have to,” I bit off, gritting my teeth. “If I don’t, he’ll kill us both.”

But even as I said the words, an awful, terrible, shattering truth surged up in that moment.

It was crystal-clear and ugly.

Giles had forced me to kill. It horrified me, that I had taken people’s lives away from them, that I had been forced to snuff out everything they were or ever would be. That my body had done monstrous things. I would be forced to live with those memories for as long as I lived. The awful truth was that there was no escaping that.

Then there was the strangling guilt, crushing in on me every single moment of every single day, the awful, secret fear that I hadn’t fought the compulsion hard enough, that some part of me had wanted to kill, that some dark and hidden part of me had reveled in the blood and the fear and the violence. It was a noose around my throat, strangling me, preventing me from living my life. Preventing me from actually trusting myself enough to trust anyone else.

It prevented me from being happy.

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