“Master Ray Zaman, elder vampire, lord of the castle. Welcome to your dark apprenticeship.” If he was so good at ruining things, maybe—just maybe—Rahil could ruin vampirism for her.
6
MERCER
Mercer struggled to get anything else done that day.
He told himself it was because of the incident with William Douglas. He’d gotten far too many emails about holy silver, even a few phone calls, but this man had come into his yard—had violated the safe space he’d worked so hard to build for himself and his daughter—and demanded something of Mercer that he’d vowed never to return to. All while a vampire, whom William would have probably been thrilled to see that very holy silver used on, hung from Leah’s trap ten feet behind the door.
A gorgeous vampire, with a sensual edge that bordered on cheesy.
There had been a reason Mercer had swiped right when he’d first seen Rahil’s profile. It just wasn’t a good one. The romantic notions of his heart could leap for Rahil as high as it wanted, but that wouldn’t mean there was a place for him in Mercer’s life. Mercer was busy. He was accustomed to being alone. He had enough interpersonal trouble with Lydia’s sudden attitudes and disinterest in him. He didn’t even want to imagine her reaction if he had to sit down with her and tell her he was substituting her dead mother for avampire.
He’d made it clear over the years that vampires were not the villains that society made them out to be, but they’d never talked of them beyond that. They had never watched media that featured vampires, never mentioned it when vampires appeared in the news—which was daily now that Vitalis-Barron protests were sprouting up and Wesley Smith-Garcia’s trial was ongoing—never even referenced them during discussions of nonhuman lineages and what it meant to come from an identity that held trauma in their bones. Mercer couldn’t ruin that easy truce by suddenly bringing a literal vampire into their lives, much less as a partner. Especially if people like William Douglas were going to keep showing up demanding holy silver.
The only thing worse than forcing Lydia to accept a new guardian figure in her life—and that was the only option Mercer wanted out of a relationship, not a quick fuck or a casual fling, but a genuine partner—would be to go through the work of helping her accept and build a familial bond with that person only for her to lose them, too.
All of this was going to give Mercer a migraine.
He wandered around the shed, making tweaks to one piece and notes for another, too distracted to truly get anywhere as the sun sank lower and the shadows shifted across the wall. Finally he ended up back inside, downing another two glasses of water and a granola bar, then popping an NSAID in the hopes that if somethingwasbuilding in his head, it might kick the incoming storm down a notch. He gave Kat a series of back rubs and a kiss on her muzzle, for which he received ten more kisses in return, then sent a check-in text to Lydia. He was grateful to see an immediate response come through, even if it included a rolling-eyes emoji and so much sass it could have killed a less stable parent.
Completely against his will, his fingers inched toward the damn dating app. Perhaps one last glance… He wouldn’tsayanything.
Mercer nearly dropped the phone as his doorbell rang. Kat barked and bounded through the space between his legs. The frantic mishandling slid open the dating app anyway.
“Shit, shit,” he muttered, closing down the screen. He shoved the device into his pocket for good measure. Clearly, it belonged as far from his selfish, wandering gaze as possible.
The doorbell rang a second time, followed by a slew of knocks.
It doubled Mercer’s heart rate in an instant, and he could almost hear the officer’s voice the night he’d lost Leah, only now it was not his wife they were bringing him news of but—
He forced himself not to go down that road. He’d done it enough times, and always the terror had been a lie, a trap. Yet it still reared its ugly head whenever he least expected it. Mercer was afraid he knew exactly what to expectthistime, though. One person had already found his house in their hunt for holy silver…
He debated going for the butcher knife again, but he was pretty sure he’d left it out in the shed.
The knocking continued.
Mercer crept up to the door, leaning down anxiously to peek through its tiny peephole. A middle-aged man stood on Mercer’s stoop, his brown hair pulled up in a bun to reveal the overgrown fuzz of his undercut. He tugged at his teal button-up with a scowl. A patch of sweat had already formed beneath his armpit in the heat. Mercer sighed, the anxiety draining out of him to leave a tingling dread in its wake.
He opened the door. “Good evening, Anthony.”
Dr. Anthony Hilker’s face brightened, a smile blooming across it. He’d grown a little facial hair since Mercer had last seen him—and was that a bit of gray? He also looked far more worn out than he had during their last face-to-face meeting, nearly a year ago.
“Is something wrong?” Mercer stepped back. “Your most recent package arrived fine.”
“Production hasn’t been hindered; it’s something else.” Anthony shook his head. His bun bobbed, a little lopsided. “I apologize for popping in off-schedule, but I thought, with all that Vitalis-Barron has been in the news, it would be better if I spoke with you in person.”
Thatput Mercer right back on edge. He might have considered closing the door again, were Anthony not already walking through it, that charming twist of his lips a testament to how easily he got his way when he’d set his mind to something. Which had worked out great for Mercer so far.So far, being the optimal phrase. “Tell me you’re not wrapped up in this vampire experimentation shit.”
Anthony made his way through the front of the house, heading for the living room like it had been just yesterday that he’d sat with Lydia on the couch, joking about her favorite new cartoon as he drew her blood. He avoided the seat now, surveying Mercer’s book collection with a casual detachment. “Would it make a difference?”
On occasion, Mercer genuinely liked Dr. Hilker. This was clearly not going to be one of those times. “If you were hurting innocent people? Yes, it would make a difference to me.”
Anthony lifted an eyebrow. “You’d stop relying on me for your daughter’s medication, then?”
The heat in Mercer’s cheeks was sharp and sudden. He turned away, instead of stating the obvious: there was no one else hecouldgo to.
No one else would even bother with a condition as rare as Lydia’s, much less get him the drugs she needed under the table. His own migraine meds cost more per month, and they worked a quarter as well. He tried not to think of Anthony at his job; tried not to think of how selfishly Mercer had worried about Vitalis-Barron collapsing and putting Anthony out of a place to illicitly make his custom drugs.
