Page 4 of Hunting His Vampire Mate

“Yeah, it is going to be a problem,” I replied, annoyance and alarm surging through me one after the other. Michael and I hadn’t shared a bed in over two months. “I called three hours ago. You said you had a room with two queen beds available.”

“That was three hours ago,” she replied, cracking her neck side to side with an audible pop. Then she fixed me with a too-sweet smile. “Now there’s just one room left with a king-sized bed. And it’s yours if you want it.”

Dread bolted through me. Michael wouldn’t share a bed with me anymore. Not that I blamed him. But this meant a conversation—or a not-conversation—about our sleepingarrangements. Another reminder of everything that I had fucked up between us.

“You can’t tell me you don’t haveanyother vacancies.”

“There’s a funeral director’s conference in town and rooms are scarce.” She shrugged. “I’m betting it’s gonna be a similar situation at the other motels. You’re welcome to check, but this is my last room, so once it’s gone, it’s gone.”

“Danny, it’s fine,” Michael told me, glancing up from his phone. Though, despite his words, his toned was clipped and he didn’t look especially happy about the situation, either. “Chances are, I’ll be crashing elsewhere anyhow. And if I’m not, I can take the floor. Stop being weird.”

I glanced at the phone screen and saw that he was already chatting with someone on Grindr, one of the more popular gay hookup apps out there.

I felt heat wash over my face, and I grimaced.

But that was ridiculous. It shouldn’t matter who he was hooking up with, right? So long as he was ready to travel tomorrow, I didn’t really have much ground to stand on. It wasn’t like he was getting lucky with me. So why shouldn’t he go out and have some fun?

That didn’t stop my insides from knotting up into a tangled mess of jealousy, though.

I generally have a pretty decent poker face, but apparently it wasn’t as good as I thought because Michael took one good look at me before immediately turning the screen off on his phone and sliding it into his pocket.

He flashed me a dark look. “Is this really a problem for you?”

Michael might have meant the sleeping arrangements, but then again, he might not have.

Anyway, regardless of what he was referring to, there was only one correct answer here: no, everything was just fine and fucking dandy. He could keep on carving my heart out of mychest and feeding it back to me in small pieces just as long as he liked, no problem here.

The clerk’s eyes widened slightly at the exchange between us, and she looked almost crestfallen. “Ah, so you two aren’t…” She let that trail off.

The heat in my face intensified. No, we definitely weren’t.

Another awkward silence fell after that.

Michael shot me a dark look, then glanced up at her. He seemed to really notice for the very first time that we were checking into a motel and there was only one bed available, and that I was being really weird about it.

“The room with the king bed is fine,” he assured her. Then he handed over one of the many credit cards we used to fund our hunts.

The name on the card wasn’t his, of course. It was the name of a person who had been dead for the past two years. It’s not something I’m proud of, but part of what I do is hacking into the accounts of the folks we see in the obituaries to make sure that they’ve got good credit, no next of kin who can list them as deceased to the credit bureaus, and no estate that could potentially be slapped with any of the debt that Michael and I rack up. If it sounds like a lot of work to vet each potential alias, that’s because it is. But it was important to Michael and me that innocent people didn’t suffer for us to be able to do what we do. And it’s not like either one of us could have anything remotely resembling a real job, not with the type of life we led.

Without so much as glance at the name on the card, the clerk ran it.

Michael and I both waited for the machine to do its thing. That was always a bad moment. One where Michael and I never looked at each other, but I was sure that we bothwantedto. Eventually, there would come a day when the card wouldn’t work, and then we’d have to pretend to be appropriately shockedand alarmed by that turn of events. After a well-practiced performance that involved one of us stepping outside to ‘call the credit card company,’ we’d then need to leave and then find a new place to crash for the night, using a totally different card. We always had several backups on hand, just in case.

I was well aware that credit card fraud was a crime, even if we were technically only racking up credit card bills in the names of dead people. But with the way we did it, the only real victims were the credit card companies, and they could afford it. Besides, it’s not like we went nuts and bought a bunch of crazy expensive stuff, either. We each had our backpacks, a decent supply of weapons in the trunk of Michael’s car, my admittedly expensive and powerful laptop, and each other. That was all we’d needed for the last five years.

Well, that, and an industrial-sized bottle of booze.

I had been needing that more and more since realizing that my feelings for Michael were more complicated than they had any right to be. And since it had begun to feel like I didn’t really even have Michael’s friendship anymore, either. Like he already had one foot out the door.

The little machine on the counter dinged. The card went through with no problems. This time, at least. Eventually the credit card companies would get cranky when we didn’t pay the bill and they’d shut the card off. Then we’d need to start the whole process over, with a brand-new name. We actually did that anyhow, on a regular rotation, just in case. I kept an encrypted spreadsheet with names and dates and everything on my laptop.

The clerk handed us both keys to our room and gave us directions. The room turned out to be on the ground floor, with the door accessible from the parking lot. That was very good in the sense that we could leave quickly if we had to, but very bad inthe sense that literally anything could break the door down and murder us while we slept.

Also, if the lobby was bad, the room was even worse. A single bed with a lumpy mattress, a comforter that was more plastic than fabric, a lime-green shag carpet on top of that kind of hard gray low-pile carpet so popular in office buildings, a cramped vanity with a filthy mirror, and a bathroom the size of a closet.

“Home sweet home,” Michael muttered, eyeing the bed with a dubious look. “What are the odds there’s bloodstains on that mattress?”

“We won’t be here long.”

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