Page 20 of Hunting His Vampire Mate

The authorities would definitely take Danny away from me.

I lurched forward, tears abruptly dripping down my face, and I gathered Danny’s body up in my arms. I didn’t even check for a pulse. I couldn’t make myself do it, because if I did, I knew that I’d lose it. And I needed to clean up this mess, before someone with a badge, a gun, and questions I had no hope of answering showed up.

I loaded Danny into the back of the van. He was limp but still warm. He could’ve been sleeping. But I couldn’t make myself look at him. If I did, then he would really be—

No.

Not yet.

Not until I could break down properly and give him the grief he deserved.

I loaded the other two vamps into the van as well. They were much easier to move. They were still and lifeless and weighed almost nothing. They were just husks of what they once were. All the vitality they’d spent years murdering people for had drained out of them all at once and what was left behind was little more than a desiccated bag of bones.

After loading the bodies into the back, I closed the van doors and jumped into the driver’s seat. Lenny had very helpfully left the keys in the ignition. I turned the van on and peeled out of the alleyway, just as the wail of sirens began to split the night, somewhere in the distance behind me.

I drove through town, fighting the urge to go faster than the speed limit—oddly enough, it’snota good idea to speed whenthe back of your stolen van is filled with bodies. I got onto I-84 east without incident, heading into Idaho. Ontario was right on the border, so it didn’t take long to cross state lines. Any authorities who might be looking for a dark van would have to contact the police here and have them handle it. That type of interdepartmental communication buys a bit of time—not as much as movies and television would suggest, mind you—but it would be enough.

Because I already knew where I was going.

There was a safe house nearby. It was an abandoned cattle ranch, about fifteen miles from the Idaho state border. Danny and I had discovered it two years ago, when we’d fought a pretty nasty poltergeist who had taken up residence in the Caldwell detention center. It had already killed two inmates and a guard. The detention center was incidentally located right next door to the police department. There had been two officers involved in that situation and Danny and I had saved both of their lives. They knew what we did for a living, that we were hunters, and they’d helped us cover back then. And if all else failed, I knew they’d help us as much as they could now, too. So, just in case, it made sense to drive into their jurisdiction.

After all, they owed us.

Besides. It was a moot point. There had been gunfire, but no bodies. The three humansmightbe able to describe the van, but I doubted it. The vamps would have hypnotized them. They probably wouldn’t remember much about the experience at all, except that they’d nearly been kidnapped by some very bad people. Granted, if there were any security cameras nearby that caught what had happened in the alleyway on camera, the Ontario police department would see some pretty weird stuff if they checked the footage. But even that takes time. They’d need to get a court order, most likely.

The abandoned ranch—one of many safe houses we’d staked out over the years and loaded up with supplies—was out of the way, tucked behind two foothills, completely invisible from the freeway or anything remotely resembling a main road. No one followed me.

The entire time, my brain was numb and locked up, focused only on the task in front of me: getting to safety. Getting to a place where I could actually relax enough to process any of this. It numbly refused to do anything else.

The ranch came into view. It was a dilapidated main house, with a barn right next to it that was in even worse shape. Apart from that, there were a couple of outbuildings, and wide-open fields, fenced with razor wire. There were no neighbors for miles, just flat hard tack in all directions, dotted here and there with the occasional hardy desert plant.

I parked behind the barn and unloaded the vamps first. They’d withered even further in the forty minutes it had taken me to drive there. They were just bones with leather-like skin stretched over the top. Their fangs were out, though. I’d need to get a pair of pliers and remove the fangs. Or a rock, if I couldn’t manage that. Just in case anyone ever managed to dig up the bodies. It’s bad form to leave enough evidence of the paranormal to cause the everyday folk to ask questions they’ll never be able to answer.

I moved mechanically, hardly even aware of what I was doing.

Until I looked down and realized that Danny was in my arms.

His eyes were closed, like he might’ve been dreaming. But the way his neck hung, too limp, was all wrong. And he was cold to the touch now.

A god-awful sound tore from my lips, and I collapsed to my knees onto the hard-packed earth. I laid him down gently,unable to stand touching him any longer, because that wasn’thimanymore. It was just some awfulthingthat looked like him.

A bag of bones, just like the vamps we’d killed.

I vomited onto the ground until there was nothing left.

After, I collapsed into the dirt, clutching myself like I was trying to stop my insides from falling out. Tears turned the dirt on my face to mud. And I couldn’t stop any of it. I couldn’t stop the awful, ugly, whimpering that came from my mouth. Or the way I kept gasping and doing it all over again, as the gut-wrenching realization struck me, all over again.

Danny was gone.

I would never see him again. I would never see him hunched over his computer, his eyes alight with mad glee as he looked up and proudly informed me that he’d just hacked into whatever supposedly air-tight law enforcement agency we needed information from. I’d never hear him over-explain his research into the supernatural ever again. I’d never know the minute differences that existed between folklore and the real thing, which he was always eager to tell me.

There was more. A whole lifetime of more. And it hit me, one after the other, all of it striking me like bullets refusing to ever do more than cause me agony, rather than ending it.

Because I would never again bring him bearclaws and apple fritters in the morning, or convince him to take an aspirin and drink some goddamn water on the rare nights we got shitfaced together. I’d never hear him chide me about going into a battle half-cocked and fully loaded, his dark eyes filled with a mix of anger and concern. And I’d never know what the fuck he’d meant by giving me that hug earlier, either. And I’d never know why he left the club early tonight, without telling me. I’d never know if it was really my fault or not that this had happened to him.

My best friend, my partner—the only fucking person in the whole world who still knew me at all—was dead.

It wasn’t even like my heart was broken. That wasn’t enough. It’s like someone had scooped out my everything—the whole entire world inside of me—and stamped it all out. And there was no point to anything anymore.

---