Page 8 of Hunting His Vampire Mate

I still didn’t really have any problems with hunting the real horrors of the world: the ones who had killed before and would happily kill again, but I didn’tneedto do it anymore. I could have done something else, if I wanted to. I wouldn’t have been able to walk away before. But now I could.

Except for Danny.

He was the only reason I was still doing this.

And now he looked at me with moon eyes all the time. Or, worse, with hurt clearly visible in his face every time I shut his shit down. Like I was somehow the bad guy here, just because I didn’t want to have a conversation that would ruin everything good between us.

I sat there like that for a long time, watching the shoppers come and go, almost able to pretend I was one of them. That I didn’t eat all my meals out of a greasy fast-food bag. That I didn’t go from town to town and slay monsters that most people on earth didn’t even know existed. That I didn’t have to use a dead guy’s name whenever I wanted to buy something. That maybe I could go into the store and get groceries for the week and that maybe I’d go home afterwards and eat a home-cooked meal for a change. And that maybe my husband—who, yes, in my head, now looked suspiciously like Danny—would text me at any moment and tell me not to forget to buy eggs, becausewe were out. Sitting there, watching the mundane folks pass me by, seemingly without a single care in the world, I could almost pretend that I still had some semblance of normal.

Rather than whatever the fuckthiswas.

Then, after enough time had gone by that it would be plausible that Ihadgone and hooked up, that I had gotten my rocks off—though, sure, maybe in a hurry—I turned the car back on. Then I headed back to the motel, trying to ignore the longing in my chest. If I ignored it long enough, I could almost pretend it wasn’t there at all.

* * *

Danny was already passed out on the bed when I came back.

The nearly full bottle of tequila he’d slipped into his pack earlier was now on the nightstand, half-empty. Given that I had only been gone for about two hours and change, that had to be some sort of record. I was almost impressed.

The spirit traps and warding sigils had been drawn and activated, though. And his laptop was still open on the small table next to the window. The smiling face of a pretty twenty-something blonde girl stared back at me from the screen, perpetually frozen in time, like she thought her whole life was in front of her.

I clicked through the tabs Danny had open on the laptop. The headlines read:Local Girl Slain: Third Death in Past Month; Is there a Serial Killer in Eastern Oregon?; Ontario’s Missing Person Epidemic; Three Boise State University Students Found Dead in Local Park.

I skimmed the articles. Then I paused in my reading and scrolled up slightly, expecting it to be an article from the website of the local paper in Ontario, but instead found that it was a big-name national news site.

I let out a low groan.

The articles all mentioned throat wounds. And everyone was apparently real confused about the lack of blood at the kill sites—where could it have all gone?

Fucking mundanes.

The bad news was threefold.

The first was a near certainty; there would be lots of sudden attention on small, sleepy Ontario. Which meant that the locals would be jumpy about new folks since reporters, bloggers, and looky-loos would all be flooding into their town in droves. No one was going to be as willing to talk to us as they might have been otherwise. Plus, getting a motel room would probably be harder. We might even need to stay in Idaho. Maybe in Nampa, which was about a half hour drive from Ontario.

The second bit of bad news was a little less plausible. If the vamps were even a little bit smart, they would probably skedaddle now that they had made national news and move on to some other town, which meant that we might show up to find zip, zilch, nada. But that would only be if they were actively paying attention to the news and if they had connected the dots that national media attention on their activities meant that tons of hunters would come for them. And given the fact that they weren’t eventryingto hide their kills, or to disguise their handiwork as animal attacks, they were probably blood-drunk and high on their own immortality or whatever. Or maybe they were new and inexperienced and didn’t know any better. Most of the vamps we ran across were like that—not to mention so far gone into their bloodlust that they were practically feral. The folks who had been undead for any length of time had figured out that there are eyes literally everywhere, which was why hunters rarely ended up bagging the older vamps. And, according to Bryan and Tobias, the vast majority of vampires outtheredidn’tkill their victims. They blended in and tried to still maintain relatively normal lives.

The third bit of bad news was that we might encounter other hunters who were already in town. The etiquette was that whoever shows up first gets to slay the monsters. If the monsters eat the other hunters, then it’s cool to step in and take over. But not before that. So, if Danny and I weren’t fast enough getting to Ontario, we might end up cooling our heels while we waited.

“You’re back,” Danny muttered from the bed on the other side of the room, awake now. He was only slightly slurring his words. But I wasn’t fooled. Danny had a crazy ability act way more sober than he really was, but lately that was usually a trap, and I wasn’t fucking falling for it again. And when I looked up at him from over the laptop screen, I saw that he was sitting up in bed, bleary-eyed, fully clothed, and giving me a decidedly un-straight drunken smile.

Two months ago, the night we’d come home from the bar after making a deal with Bryan and Tobias that we should all work together after randomly running into them while on the trail of a murderous fae creature, we’d both been drunk.

And we had gotten even more shitfaced together. He’d been sitting next to me on the bed when I’d passed the bottle of Jack Daniels back his way. He’d taken a long swig of it, wincing just a little at the burn, and then put it on the bedside table beside him, very deliberately.

After that, he had given me the strangest look—hungry and filled with drunken desperation—and he had kissed me.

And I had kissed him back, something finally tearing free in my chest, so drunk that I forgot all the reasons why it wasn’t a good idea. It was only when he had reached down to start undoing my belt that I had finally stopped him.

He either didn’t remember the encounter the next morning or he wanted me to think he didn’t remember it. Either way,we hadn’t talked about it. We both pretended that it hadn’t happened. But it was seared into my brain. And maybe into his, too.

Now, I felt a flicker of sudden desire burn its way through me. Would it really be so bad to go and take him up on whatever offer he might put on the table? Would it be so bad to let him pull me close and kiss me again? To hold him close to me?

My arms ached for that. I crossed them over my chest instead.

“Yup. I’m back.” I turned my attention back to the laptop so I could avoid the temptation. Still not looking at him, I added, “I had way too much fun. Probably just gonna steal a pillow from the bed and crash out on the floor before too long.”

But then I couldn’t stop myself from looking back up, feeling an immediate—and insane—flash of guilt. I felt something in my insides twist up into knots as I watched Danny’s drunken smile crumble to nothing like a hydra with no more heads. True story, actually. We’d killed one in Cleveland together, about two years back. Nasty buggers.

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