Page 87 of Hunting His Vampire Mate

You won’t,I said, replying to his unspoken thoughts.Even if you wanted to, I wouldn’t let you. I made you a promise. You know that I keep my promises.

He smiled at that.I do.

“Ah.” The woman standing in front of us smiled, obviously catching the silent exchange between Danny and I. “Seeing the old magic at work truly never gets old, does it?”

“You and the ‘old magic.’” A short and thin waif of a woman with billowing fire-engine red hair bounded up to us, neon-blue drinks held in both of her hands. She shook her head at the woman, but the expression on her face was soft with affection. She turned back to us. “You’ll have to forgive Simone. She still remembers when magic was invented.” She smiled, presumably to let us know she was joking. “I’m Poppy. You’re sitting with us.”

“Go on, then,” Thierry said archly from right behind us. “Go. Mingle. Make friends. Try not to murder anyone.”

The only one I was likely to murder was him. But no more than usual. I shot him a dark look, but the blond vampire batted his eyes innocently at us and gave shooing motions with his hands. I exchanged another look with Danny, who rolled his eyes a bit at that and shook his head.

We followed Poppy and Simone to a long wooden table on the far side of the bar, acutely aware of the fact that everyone in the room was staring at us but trying to pretend like they weren’t. The company truly was mixed. About half of the patrons were vampires. The other half were humans, who were either oblivious or didn’t seem to care one way or the other that they were surrounded by vampires. It was hard to say how I could tell the vampires apart just by looking, since they didn’t appear any different than the humans in the room at first glance, but somehow, I could. Part of being a vampire, it seemed, was recognizing other vamps on sight.

Bryan and Tobias were already at the table. Tobias grinned at me as we approached. “Not under house arrest anymore, then?”

“Thierry is kicking us out,” I agreed.

“You’re goddamn right I am,” the blond vampire huffed from behind us. “You two use up all of the hot water. I haven’t had a decent shower in three months. It’s been an ordeal. No one has suffered quite like I have.”

Apparently, the standard protocol when you have a newly turned vamp is to have an older vampire babysit them until the danger has passed—usually it’s their maker, but not always. Though Nathaniel Bailey, the king of the city, had a sort of elder vampire foster program in place, Thierry had flatly declined on our behalf. He had insisted on keeping an eye on us himself.

Danny flashed him a grin. “You’re going to miss us.”

He sniffed. “I shan’t. Sadly, you two aren’t moving far enough away for me to miss you.”

Notice how he’s not quite ready to let us out of his sight,Danny said silently through the bond, amusement rippling through him.He’s totally going to miss us.

Absolutely,I agreed.

Thierry glared. “What are you two saying?”

“Thierry, don’t be an ass,” said a human man from the other side of the table. I glanced over and saw that it was a compact man with sandy-blond hair and golden-brown eyes who had spoken. His gaze was oddly intense, and he displayed zero trepidation at our presence, despite the fact that Danny and I were both newly turned vampires and this was our first test of self-control. But then, he was also holding hands with a pale, dark-haired vamp who was almost as muscular as Michael. He was probably awfully used to vampires.

He added, “Hello, by the way. I’m James.” He nodded to the vampire beside him, who inclined his head at us. “This is Pierce, my mate.”

Oddly, even though he was certainly appealing, I didn’t have the slightest urge to hurt him. Danny didn’t either. Reliefflooded through him, and I felt it when the tension drained out of my mate. It was replaced by a staggering relief.

There was no impulse to hurt James at all. He felt like himself again. And so did I.

Danny pulled out one of the wooden chairs and dropped down into it. He took in a long, steadying breath that he no longer needed and blinked back the tears of gratitude that were welling up in his eyes.

I gave the table a wave, eager to buy Danny a moment to collect himself. “So, who do we need to shake down in order to get a drink?”

“That would be me, I believe.” A tall vampire who hardly looked like a vamp at all set two pitchers of beer on the table. Beside him, a much shorter and thinner man with a shock of white hair and eerie violet eyes popped a stack of glasses onto the table. The vampire added, “I am Nathaniel Bailey. I own this bar.”

“Way to undersell,” the white-haired man grinned at Nathaniel, obvious love and affection in his expression. To us, he added, “He’salsothe king of the city’s vampires.”

Danny and I exchanged a surprised glance at that. Thierry had given us a run-down of how the city operated: Nathaniel Bailey was the leader of the city’s vampires. His council was made up of Thierry, Pierce, James, Simone, and Ethan, his husband. Somehow, he had made Nathaniel sound far more imposing. But the vampire standing before us, with his brown hair and his rugged and open guy-next-door sort of face, looked like he could have been just about anyone, someone you might not have glanced twice at. He didn’t fit with the idea I’d had in my head of what a vampire king should look like. He looked, oddly enough, like he was a fairly nice guy.

“A title which is no longer nearly as important as it once was,” Nathaniel chided the white-haired man, who had to be hishusband, Ethan. His tone was mild when he added, “Not when we’re trying to get a shared council off the ground.”

I took a seat beside Danny and held his hand under the table as everyone else settled in around us. Ethan and Nathaniel poured the beers from the pitchers and passed them around. There were conversations, warm with easy familiarity and laughter, none of which went out of their way to exclude us. Bryan and Tobias, at least, seemed pleased by our presence. Everyone else was gracious and friendly. We weren’t friends yet, but I could tell that if we tried, even a little bit, we could be.

And through it all, I could feel the deep relief flooding through Danny that he didn’t feel a single impulse to hurt anyone. The cold, alien aspect of him, which had taken him over so completely months ago, was deeply buried and silent. It hadn’t stirred since the moment in the alleyway, when he had realized that I had become a vampire for him. When he had chosen to come back to me. And now, surrounded by humans, he was realizing for the very first time that it probably never would again.

Thierry, for all of his pointed hints that we were unwelcome intruders cramping his style, sat right next to Danny, practically vibrating with tension, clearly ready to spring into action the moment our guard slipped and we went for the humans around us.

I didn’t take offense to that. I had seen the real him. Granted, it had only been for a few minutes, but that had been enough, hadn’t it? Thierry might have a prickly, icy exterior, but on the inside, he cared far more than he let on. He wasn’t just ready to protect the humans from us, he was also ready to protect us from ourselves.

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