Page 49 of Hunting His Vampire Mate

I walked about fifty feet from the house and then stopped, sucking in deep lungfuls of breath and letting them out as slowly as I could manage, intent on calming myself down. Danny didn’t need to see me freak out like this. None of this was really his fault. It justwas.

I stared out across the empty fields surrounding us without really seeing them. There was a cherry-red Porsche with black leather seats, top down, parked beside the van. Thierry’s, no doubt. It was a wonder the car had made it, given that a fair amount of the road to get here was unpaved. And there wasn’t a soul around for miles.

Outside, alone, I squeezed my eyes shut and rubbed my temples. I let out a long, shuddering breath. I dragged in another, doggedly forcing myself to calm down.

I knew I was being shitty. I didn’t want that. But I couldn’t stop it, either.

Because the vampires who had killed Joshua had drained him with that same sort of mindless frenzy. Though, when they finished, they’d turned on me and I had seen that they weren’t crazed at all. They stared at me, grinning with teeth stained red as my lover’s blood dripped off their chins, watching me with the sharp, calculating gazes of predators. And then I had realized, horror flooding through me, that they had enjoyed themselves. They enjoyed making me watch. They were enjoying my fear.

Then Danny had kicked the door in. He had taken one of the vamps out immediately—a female—with a wooden bolt to the chest, fired from a crossbow. The other vamp, a burly guy with long, scraggly black hair, froze for an instant, disbelieving. Then he’d rushed Danny.

Danny took his head off with a machete in one fluid movement. The vamp’s body went in one direction, and the head went the other. And I had just stood there, completely fucking useless. The only reason I hadn’t been sobbing like goddamn child was because I was so frozen solid with stunned disbelief and denial that I couldn’t move a muscle until it was all over. It had taken Danny coiling into a crouch beside Joshua to galvanize me into action.

I dropped to my knees beside Joshua, ready to stop the bleeding.

But the blood wasn’t coming anymore. Because Joshua had already stopped breathing by then. His heart was already still in his chest. His eyes were staring. And he was the wrong color. Too pale. I had loved him and I had just stood by and watched. I hadn’t been able to do a single thing to save him. Logic told me that anything I had tried probably wouldn’t have done any good. After all, I didn’t know how to stop them then.

Everything—my entire world—had died with him that night.

I hadn’t wanted to stay in that town after that. Or in our cozy one-bedroom house, surrounded by his scent and enough memories to choke me into incoherent blubbering. I couldn’t be someone who had seen what I had seen and still be a small-town mechanic, either. So many Friday nights had been spent with Joshua in the shop we owned together, eating takeout from the little Mexican restaurant halfway down the block, drinking way too many beers, singing classic rock songs off-key together at the top of our lungs, all while I worked on the baby blue 1967 Chevy Corvette that I’d gotten for a song because every single piece of it had needed to be replaced. We’d made love in that garage so often that we had a stash of blankets and lube on-hand at all times. Those had been some of the best nights of my life, up until that night. But I couldn’t have that life anymore. Not after what I had seen. Not without Joshua. The man who had loved him had died too.

So, whoever that guy was, he wasn’t me anymore. Or I wasn’t him. Whichever. And I couldn’tbehim anymore. We didn’t want the same things at all. He had wanted to drink beer and eat tacos, get hitched to his boyfriend, have a white picket fence, and maybe even adopt a kid. He wasnormal.

And me… well, I hadn’t been that in a really long time. I was the guy who could disassemble and reassemble his trusty Glockin under forty seconds. I was the guy who knew ambush tactics. Who studied occult sigils and knew how to whip up compounds that could disable species of creatures that weren’t supposed to exist at all, except in books and scary stories. I knew what it felt like to behead something that looked human but wasn’t anymore. And all of that—literally all of it—had been driven by hatred.

And then, once we’d met Bryan and Tobias, even that hatred had mostly left me. I had been stoking it for five years and it had fizzled out, practically in one evening, all the sharp edges and claws removed from it. Because I couldn’t keep on wanting them all dead if I knew that some vamps were still people. People who never would have done what those two monsters did to Joshua.

How did I reconcile that? Not very well. But I was trying.

And now… I was in love with one of them.

A vampire.

He had been overcome by that same frenzy I had seen before. First on that night, when Joshua had been murdered, and then dozens of times since. When a vamp gives themselves over completely to their darkest urges, it’s almost impossible for them to stop, unless you kill them before they can drain whoever they’re snacking on.

But unlike them, Danny was still a person. He still had a shot at a life. And he was precious. The most precious and fragile thing in my whole world.

I had known when I let him bite me—I still did know, deep in my bones—that, even if I was bleeding in front of him and he was starving, that Danny wouldn’t have hurt me. Not in a million years. That was the bond between us, rock-solid and mystical or some bullshit, but also it was just us. It had always been that way. He and I. And it was always going to be he and I.

And his becoming a vampire wasn’t going to change that. Even after seeing him like that. His face smeared with blood,unable to listen to anyone or anything until his appetite had been sated. And the horror he had stared at me with afterward—

Christ, I was such an asshole, wasn’t I?

I should’ve dropped to my knees and put my arms around him then and there. I should have held him and let him get all of the horror and grief out. Instead, I had backed away slowly andleft him.

The realization turned my stomach. Some fucking mate I was. I didn’t deserve him.

But now I knew, didn’t I?

I wasn’t quite as cool with the vamp thing as I had thought. There were some parts of it that were going to require more effort than others to get past. But big fucking deal. Every relationship had problems. No reason for us to be the exception. It just meant knowing the shit that was there and then making a game plan for working through it.

Danny was worth that, a thousand times over. Not just because he was my mate, but because he wasDanny.Kind. Smart. Always willing to call me on my bullshit. And somehow, still deeply vulnerable, even when he was acting like a tough guy. No one else could probably see it, but I could. And it made me love him more—it always had. At the end of the day, he was the one who had taught me that bravery is a choice we make, not a quality we inherently possess. It’s okay to be scared shitless, but real courage means doing the right thing—the best thing—regardless. And the right thing—the only true thing—for me to do now was show up for him when he needed me.

I gritted my teeth.

I could have a reaction to some stuff, sure. I probably wouldn’t be able to help it. But I was just going to have to shove my way through it anyway. Because Danny wasn’t like the vamps who had hurt Joshua. He still had his humanity. He was stilla person. The best person.Myperson. My ride or die. And he always would be.

And Thierry was probably in there right now, doing damage control. I should have been doing that, not some stranger. Danny wasn’t going to need to go through this alone for a moment longer. I would be with him every step of the way.

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