Page 7 of Hunting His Vampire Mate

I drove down the block and around the corner, then I pulled over and parked in a grocery store parking lot. I whipped out my phone, opened Grindr, and navigated to the conversation with the guy I had been chatting with.

If he looked anything like his profile picture, he was smoking hot.

With a regretful sigh, I texted him.Hey, sorry. Can’t make it. Something came up.

Then I closed the app, without waiting for his reply. For good measure, I uninstalled it from my phone. But that wasn’t going to help me long-term. I knew that I was just going to install it again tomorrow once we’d made our way to Ontario and accomplished our work. Then it would be another shitty motel, maybe for a couple days this time until Danny found us a new case to go take care of, and then there would be another couple of rounds ofthis.

Of me finding some nice guy, making plans to go and have a good time with him, leaving Danny behind in the motel room, with him all bent out of shape, canceling on my hookup at the last minute, and then sitting in my car and questioning pretty much all of my life choices.

I would have loved to go and mess around with this dude tonight. I was pretty sure I would’ve had a blast, too. He looked like a lot of fun. A little twinky, which wasn’t usually my speed, but then I had lots of different types, didn’t I?

The problem was Danny.

I had been in love with him since about five minutes after meeting him. After losing my boyfriend at the time, Joshua, and learning that the monsters under the bed were very real, I had been shattered. Danny had been my only way through the darkness that had descended afterward. He had helped me put the pieces back together, one case at a time. And even though I had been filled with such rage and hatred that I felt like a man possessed, I had still somehow found it in me to love him.

With his flawless brown skin, high cheekbones, straight black hair that he kept short and spiky, and his dark eyes, so deep I couldn’t see the bottom, he was objectively gorgeous. Plus, he was a little smaller than me—a hair shorter than me and definitely more compact, but still lean and masculine, something I fucking loved. Not to mention the literallyperfectass that I had found myself staring at more than once.

But that wasn’t what I loved about him.

Even though I tried my best to ignore it, my heart still swelled so much it almost hurt every time I walked in to find him hunched over his laptop, his face all scrunched up in concentration, his eyes alight with excitement as he looked up at me and hurriedly explained his research into whatever monster we were about to go hunt, so intense about it that he sounded halfway to madness. He knew more about obscure folkloric monsters than anyone else I had ever met.

Or the way he looked after he’d hacked into somewhere that should’ve been squarely off-limits to him. Even though he didn’t brag much—that was mostly a me thing—in those moments, Icould still always tell from the almost-smirk on his lips that he was proud of himself and trying not to be obvious about it.

Or my favorite of all, the quiet moments after our hunts when we’d just hang out in the motel room, passing a bottle of booze back and forth, not even bothering with glasses, and just talk, like we still knew how to be regular people after all. Those were the very best moments, where I saw him without any defenses.

They were the moments when I saw the real Danny: thoughtful, wounded, brave, and somehow—impossibly—still hiding agoodnessthat an entire lifetime of darkness hadn’t quite been able to destroy. And sometimes he’d look at me like I was something special, too. Something other than a small-town mechanic from the backwoods of Colorado turned monster hunter who was filled to the brim with such rage that it might snap me in two at any moment. Sometimes he’d look at me like I mattered to him just as much as he mattered to me.

But then he had gone and messed everything up. Because he had confessed that he was in love with me. And now everything felt insane. And there was nothing easy between us anymore. Everything was weird fucking silences, hurt feelings, and defensiveness. Every single day, the chasm between us seemed to get bigger and bigger.

More impossible to cross.

I knew I was the problem. But knowing that sure as shit didn’t fix anything. Because I didn’t know how to not be the problem. Ever since Danny had admitted he loved me, all my fears had all come rushing back to the surface and they hadn’t really left.

Joshua had been the last man I had loved. He had been murdered right in front of me. And I had just stood there, frozen in panicked disbelief, as a pair of vampires had drained him dry. My world had careened off its tracks that night. And the part that haunted me the most was the fact that I hadn’t even been ableto make myself move at all. All I could do was watch, my body rooted in place in numb shock, as monsters ate the man I loved.

I had been helpless. Useless. Powerless.

But then Danny had come crashing through the doors. He had killed both the vampires with a machete, one right after the other, and I had somehow gotten it into my head that he was invincible. I was pretty sure I had needed to believe that at the time. Until our first near miss together. And then our second. Then our third. And I had seen, all over again, just how fragile a human life really was. Especially a human life I couldn’t help but care about way too fucking much.

Danny kept calling me reckless, because I rushed in first, always.

But better something getmerather thanhim.

I would never be helpless like that again. If I went down, it’d be fighting. Fighting to protect him. Fighting to save him.

And if I let myself feel it back? If something happened between us, if that was even possible, it would give me so much more to lose. What if I was helpless again, when it mattered?

But this was completely ridiculous anyhow, wasn’t it? After all, he’d made it pretty clear to me on numerous occasions that he was straight. I’d made a couple of misguided passes at him early on and he’d shut me down in a heartbeat. I’d accepted a long time ago that it wasn’t going to happen between us. So I had taken my feelings for him, locked them into a little box, and stuck them on a forgotten shelf somewhere deep inside of me, where they’d been happily collecting dust, not hurting anyone.

And yeah, it wasbetterthat way.

But if something had changed in him somehow and he wanted to give this a shot after all, and then it didn’t work out, it would destroy everything I had been living for over the past five years. And even if itdidwork out, I would have so much more to lose every time we went into battle.

Not a good idea. Hell, my heart already wasn’t in it anymore, when it came to hunting monsters. That was dangerous and I knew it. But I couldn’t make myself leave, either.

Yet the hatred and fury that had been driving me for half a decade was gone. The monsters who had killed Joshua and shattered my life were both long dead now. And knowing that there were good people out there whoalsohappened to be vampires had somehow erased years of hatred and fear, even though I hadn’t really wanted it to.

And without it…

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