Page 38 of Hunting His Vampire Mate

That’s understating things quite a bit, though. What actually happened was that the room fucking exploded into inky-black darkness all around us. There was no hard-packed earth below us, no pock-marked roof above us, and no rickety wooden walls around us. There was nothing except Michael. It was both inexpressibly violent and sudden—a tearing away of barriers between us, of a reality around us that apparently didn’t always need to exist. But paradoxically, it was also somehow supremely gentle at the same time. Like my soul already knew his.

And the darkness wasn’t frightening. It was the sensation of being warm, comforted, and perfectly safe in a way that I’ve never been before, not even once in my entire life.

Fuck.Michael’s mental voice bloomed in my mind. And then I could feel him. His wonder. His elation. His doubts melting from him.You can hear me, can’t you?

Yeah,I replied, my own wonder igniting in my chest, every bit as powerful as his. Somehow, I laughed without making a sound, but I knew he heard it anyway.Clear as a bell.

This is…

He trailed off, but I understood. It was hard to put it into words, but I knew I would never be the same after this. That bothof us would be irrevocably altered. We’d both still be us, but we’d be something else now, too. Something more.

Yeah, that’s exactly right,Michael agreed. I felt both startled and somehow unsurprised that he’d read my thoughts. I was pretty sure I wouldn’t be able to hide much from him anymore. Which was fine, because I’d done enough of that. I didn’t want to hide from him any longer.

Please don’t. And I won’t either. I promise.

And then he kissed me. Which was weird, because I wasn’t entirely sure we even had bodies anymore, except that his lips were perfectly real. And his arms around me were, too. And it was sweet and good and perfect. And how had I ever thought I was completely straight?

You were probably kind of in a grey area to begin with,Michael agreed.But vamps are pretty much always a little bit bisexual. Bryan told me that.

I laughed.When did you talk to Bryan about vampires?

A flicker of unease threaded through me. And then I saw a glimpse of the phone conversation he’d had with Bryan, after he had realized that I was going to become a vampire. His desperation, his willingness to doanythingto help me be okay, flooded through the connection we shared.

Danny, don’t. I don’t want you to see this.

But it was too late. Because memories swam up between us. I saw Michael vomiting onto the ground, with my body lying there motionless beside him. I saw him unleashing cries of raw agony—which I felt in every part of my body, so awful that it might crush my bones to powder. I saw as he clutched at the unyielding earth, his face a crazed mess of tears and dirt. And I felt the exact moment when he admitted to himself that he had loved me all along too, but he would never get the chance to tell me. And the bleak, numb realization that he no longer wanted to live in a world without me in it.

Fuck. Danny, look, I’m sorry. That was before I knew you were coming back.

But something broke inside me at reliving his memory of when he’d—briefly—thought that I was dead and gone forever. I had intellectually understood that he’d gone through something. Something that had changed him in an instant. Something that had compelled him to offer me his wrist and go all in, even if I was something he had always hated. Because almost anything would have been better than my being gone for good.

Stop it. I don’t care that you’re a vampire now.

But Michael—

Danny, no. I thought you were dead. And then you came back. And I don’t give a shit what you came back as, so long as you’re still Danny. And you’re fucking perfect, exactly the way you are.

Then he seemed to throw a memory at me—a very, very recent one—of seeing my fangs for the first time and thinking I was beautiful. That I was just as much Danny as I ever had been.

Oh.

So don’t sit there and try to push me away. Not now. It’s not going to work. I’m not going anywhere unless you make me go.

I wanted so much to believe him. But another memory rose up between us. It was something I took great pains to never think about. It was the moment my father had died.

He had gone off on his own, only a couple of months after my brother Kyle had been killed. It was a case involving a poltergeist in Cleveland. Should’ve been open-and-shut. You can’t technically kill a poltergeist, but you lull them into a trance with music and then trap them inside of an enchanted object. And he had several to choose from. He shouldn’t have died. But after Kyle’s death, he gave in. I watched it happen.

My father didn’t just surrender to death when it came.

He sought it out. He courted it. He welcomed it with open arms.

Anything to escape the grief. Even if it meant leaving his other son behind.

Poltergeists are, hands down, the worst kinds of ghosts out there. Revenants and wraiths are bad too, but poltergeists are the most mindless and hell-bent on destruction and chaos. And they’re the most powerful, too. They’re ghosts who have lost any and all semblance of humanity or rational thought. Instead, they possess insanely strong telekinetic powers and an irrational jealousy for the living that borders on hatred.

I was sixteen, three weeks from my seventeenth birthday. It was only two months after Kyle’s death, and my father had barely spoken since unless he had no other choice. He had taken to going on long drives by himself, leaving me behind in the motel room almost every night. I was pretty sure those were moments where he broke down and hadn’t wanted me to see. Or, more likely, moments where hewantedto break down, but couldn’t quite let himself.

The spirit we were fighting was haunting a traveling carnival and it was perhaps a bit smarter than the average poltergeist, in that it rarely attacked anyone during the hours of operation. It seemed to only go after the carnival workers, in the hour right after closing time, and it never chose any of the long-time employees. It always chose someone who was new to the staff, who had fewer relationships built up. It chose the weak ones, those who didn’t quite belong.

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