Page 3 of Hunting His Vampire Mate

Eerily pale, broad-shouldered, and so thick with muscle he looked like a linebacker, with his uncanny slate-gray eyes and brown hair buzzed almost down to his scalp, Michael probably would’ve been an intimidating figure to most. But what people generally missed about him was the kindness in his face. And the tiny speck of boyish innocence behind his eyes that flatly refused to die. I saw it every time I met his gaze, like he had somehow—impossibly—managed to hang onto the belief that everything might somehow work itself out in the end, just because it should. Or the way his lips quirked into an easy smile at the drop of a hat, the easy humor bubbling up from somewhere deep within him, even despite how grim our lives often were.

Case in point, he grinned back at me totally unrepentant. His face was coated with blood so dark it was practically black. Monster blood. “I had to make sure it was evil first, didn’t I?”

“I could have saved you some time,” I snapped, the blinding terror at seeing the man I loved an inch away from deathyet againsuddenly replaced by seething anger at knowing that it had been his own damn fault. As usual. I added, “The math is pretty simple here, Michael. It was a monster. They’reallevil.”

He gave me a reproachful look. “You know that’s not true. You sent a cat video to Bryan like four days ago. You don’t even own a cat.”

He was referring to the vampire we had crossed paths with four months back, in Poplar Creek, Oregon. Michael had tried to kill him on principle—he was a vampire, after all. And Bryan had nearly gotten him instead. But it had all worked out okay in the end. Now Bryan and his mate, Tobias—a powerful warlock—traveled around and healed people who had been hurt by the supernatural. They were our partners, in a sense. We battled the evil stuff. Then we called them and they swooped in, healed up the folks who had been harmed, and made everything all sunshine and rainbows again. As much as was possible, anyhow.

By our standards, Bryan was basically a teddy bear. And yeah, we texted back and forth pretty regularly. He might’ve actually been a friend. My only friend, in fact, apart from Michael. His mate, Tobias, was okay too.

“Okay, fine. They’remostlyall evil,” I amended, scowling at him. “But the lamia was eating people, Michael! Bryan doesn’t eat people. Why don’t we make that the deciding factor? If it eats people, we kill it instead of trying to make friends with it!”

“It’s more complicated now,” he replied, crossing his arms over his chest and fixing me with a look I was able to interpret instantly: he was about to dig his heels in.

It should’ve made me furious, but instead, I felt myself relaxing, even though I didn’t want to. Something about the familiarity of him, of knowing him inside and out, of knowing that he wasthere,made it so that I could breathe properly. And it made it really fucking hard to stay mad at him.

“You know you love me,” Michael grinned, clearly able to interpret whatever my face was doing just as easily as I’d been able to read him. He wagged his eyebrows at me. “Come on, Danny, just admit it.”

I froze and Michael’s smile faltered then vanished.

During our run-in with Bryan, when I had been sure he was going to kill Michael, I had realized in one thunderous fucking moment that my world wouldn’t make sense to me anymore if Michael wasn’t in it. And the reason for that hadn’t been hard to find, either: it was a truth I had been on the verge of realizing for years.

I was in love with Michael. And I had said those words aloud to Bryan, right in front of Michael. It had been a heat-of-the-moment confession, a hail-Mary right at the ninety-yard line, just in case Tobias had been telling us the truth all along and Bryan wasn’t as monstrous as we had feared him to be. Just in case he might actually be swayed by something like that. Ithad been a desperate act on my end, but it didn’t make the confession any less true.

Bryan had let Michael live, of course.

And now I understood exactly how I felt. And so did Michael. And everything was completely fucked up now.

The problem was, while I might’ve been in love with Michael—and we’re talking the Hallmark cards, roses, candlelit dinners, burying-bodies-together sort of love that everyone dreams of finding—my body didn’t agree with my head and my heart one bit.

“Shit, Danny. I’m sorry. Me and my fucking mouth.” Michael grimaced. “Forget I said anything.”

Somehow, that steeled me. Besides, he’d been dodging the conversation for months. Every time I brought it up, he shut me down. Maybe this time he wouldn’t.

“We should talk about it. I want to.”

“No, seriously. Forget I said anything.” Michael’s expression hardened and a wall slammed down over his eyes.

Disappointment crashed through me. Not tonight, then.

A long, awkward silence hung between us.

Silences between us had never been like this before. They used to be comfortable. Easy, in the certainty that we were best friends and that neither of us was going anywhere. But now, they were poisoned and taut with unease. Like both of us were constantly waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Michael sucked in a breath and let it out sharply. At last, he gestured to the lamia. “Anyway. We should probably bury the body, right?”

Feeling something tighten painfully in my throat, I nodded back at him without meeting his eyes. “Right.”

* * *

The motel we checked into was skeezy, even by our standards. The main office had flickering fluorescent lights, dirty windows, the smell of cigarettes and stale coffee hanging in the air, chipped tile floors, dusty fake plants, and walls that were literally the color of upchuck. I didn’t have high hopes for the room, either.

The clerk, a bored-looking middle-aged woman, raised her eyebrows at us when we walked in. But the smile she gave us was surprisingly genuine. That was due in no small part to the fact that we’d used the pack of baby wipes and paper towels we kept in the trunk to wipe away the blood from killing the lamia. Plus, we both wore all-black while on hunts. The biggest reason for that was that it hid the bloodstains. We both looked like reasonably respectable guys in our late twenties.

“All we’ve got right now is a room with a king-sized bed,” she said by way of greeting. But her eyes slid over to Michael, then to me, and finally back to Michael again. “Is that going to be a problem for you two?”

I didn’t like the knowing way she asked that, like she immediately assumed that we’d have no problem sharing a bed. She’d probably clocked us as a couple. A lot of people seemed to think that. If only it were that simple.

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