Hunting His Vampire Mate (Blood Bonded Mates #4)

CHAPTER ONE || DANNY

T he lamia snarled as it picked Michael Sullivan—my hunting partner of the last five years—up by the lapels of his denim jacket, clearly intent on biting his head off. Its double rows of razor-sharp teeth could chomp through bone, no problem.

Well, fuck. So much for diplomacy.

Icy terror rocketed through me at the prospect of Michael’s impending demise, but I was pretty used to working through that kind of shit on the fly.

“You can shoot it any time you like,” Michael said, somehow managing to sound way too calm even though he was inches away from a grisly death. Anyone else would’ve been shitting themselves. Or screaming. Or possibly both.

I aimed the barrel of my gun right at the lamia’s head.

The creature’s double rows of red eyes—double everything, really, since it also had two sets of arms to go with the extra-long snake tail it was sporting—flicked over to me and widened with alarm.

It seemed to understand what was about to happen, because it dropped Michael to the ground in an unceremonious heap—served him right—and immediately turned to flee for the hole it had somehow managed to burrow into the side of the solid cement basement wall.

“Yeah, that’s not going to happen,” I muttered.

The creature had already killed at least three people that we knew of in the past month. And probably a whole lot more than that over the years. It would obviously keep killing, too. Michael had even tried to talk to it, to make sure it was actually evil, which is how he’d gotten scooped up in the first place, like a goddamn idiot.

Without any further hesitation, I pulled the trigger.

The shotgun kicked, slamming into my shoulder.

I hadn’t braced myself properly—there wasn’t any time for that—so the impact jolted through my entire body. I staggered backward and my jaw snapped shut with the force of it. I was lucky I didn’t chip a tooth.

The mixture of salt and silver exploded out of the end of the gun and lodged itself in the creature.

The lamia screamed—probably, anyway: my ears were ringing too loudly to know for sure—but it thrashed around for a bit, literal smoke steaming off it.

Silver for the win.

To his credit, Michael didn’t hesitate again. He scrambled to his feet, snatched his machete off the ground, and with one sure stroke, chopped the creature’s head off.

The lamia’s body went limp at once.

Its head rolled a few feet away, its mouth still twisted into an ugly snarl, its rows of jagged teeth, like a shark’s mouth, glinting against the dim overhead light.

I doubled over, letting my terror and its accompanying nausea subside. It left me feeling jangly and wrung out. When the ringing in my ears finally stopped, I straightened up and fixed Michael with a hard glare. “Will you stop trying to talk sense into the monsters now? Before one of them finally eats you?”

Eerily pale, broad-shouldered, and so thick with muscle he looked like a linebacker, with his uncanny slate-gray eyes and brown hair buzzed almost down to his scalp, Michael probably would’ve been an intimidating figure to most. But what people generally missed about him was the kindness in his face. And the tiny speck of boyish innocence behind his eyes that flatly refused to die. I saw it every time I met his gaze, like he had somehow—impossibly—managed to hang onto the belief that everything might somehow work itself out in the end, just because it should. Or the way his lips quirked into an easy smile at the drop of a hat, the easy humor bubbling up from somewhere deep within him, even despite how grim our lives often were.

Case in point, he grinned back at me totally unrepentant. His face was coated with blood so dark it was practically black. Monster blood. “I had to make sure it was evil first, didn’t I?”

“I could have saved you some time,” I snapped, the blinding terror at seeing the man I loved an inch away from death yet again suddenly replaced by seething anger at knowing that it had been his own damn fault. As usual. I added, “The math is pretty simple here, Michael. It was a monster. They’re all evil.”

He gave me a reproachful look. “You know that’s not true. You sent a cat video to Bryan like four days ago. You don’t even own a cat.”

He was referring to the vampire we had crossed paths with four months back, in Poplar Creek, Oregon. Michael had tried to kill him on principle—he was a vampire, after all. And Bryan had nearly gotten him instead. But it had all worked out okay in the end. Now Bryan and his mate, Tobias—a powerful warlock—traveled around and healed people who had been hurt by the supernatural. They were our partners, in a sense. We battled the evil stuff. Then we called them and they swooped in, healed up the folks who had been harmed, and made everything all sunshine and rainbows again. As much as was possible, anyhow.

By our standards, Bryan was basically a teddy bear. And yeah, we texted back and forth pretty regularly. He might’ve actually been a friend. My only friend, in fact, apart from Michael. His mate, Tobias, was okay too.

“Okay, fine. They’re mostly all evil,” I amended, scowling at him. “But the lamia was eating people, Michael! Bryan doesn’t eat people. Why don’t we make that the deciding factor? If it eats people, we kill it instead of trying to make friends with it!”

“It’s more complicated now,” he replied, crossing his arms over his chest and fixing me with a look I was able to interpret instantly: he was about to dig his heels in.

It should’ve made me furious, but instead, I felt myself relaxing, even though I didn’t want to. Something about the familiarity of him, of knowing him inside and out, of knowing that he was there, made it so that I could breathe properly. And it made it really fucking hard to stay mad at him.

“You know you love me,” Michael grinned, clearly able to interpret whatever my face was doing just as easily as I’d been able to read him. He wagged his eyebrows at me. “Come on, Danny, just admit it.”

I froze and Michael’s smile faltered then vanished.

During our run-in with Bryan, when I had been sure he was going to kill Michael, I had realized in one thunderous fucking moment that my world wouldn’t make sense to me anymore if Michael wasn’t in it. And the reason for that hadn’t been hard to find, either: it was a truth I had been on the verge of realizing for years.

I was in love with Michael. And I had said those words aloud to Bryan, right in front of Michael. It had been a heat-of-the-moment confession, a hail-Mary right at the ninety-yard line, just in case Tobias had been telling us the truth all along and Bryan wasn’t as monstrous as we had feared him to be. Just in case he might actually be swayed by something like that. It had been a desperate act on my end, but it didn’t make the confession any less true.

Bryan had let Michael live, of course.

And now I understood exactly how I felt. And so did Michael. And everything was completely fucked up now.

The problem was, while I might’ve been in love with Michael—and we’re talking the Hallmark cards, roses, candlelit dinners, burying-bodies-together sort of love that everyone dreams of finding—my body didn’t agree with my head and my heart one bit.

“Shit, Danny. I’m sorry. Me and my fucking mouth.” Michael grimaced. “Forget I said anything.”

Somehow, that steeled me. Besides, he’d been dodging the conversation for months. Every time I brought it up, he shut me down. Maybe this time he wouldn’t.

“We should talk about it. I want to.”

“No, seriously. Forget I said anything.” Michael’s expression hardened and a wall slammed down over his eyes.

Disappointment crashed through me. Not tonight, then.

A long, awkward silence hung between us.

Silences between us had never been like this before. They used to be comfortable. Easy, in the certainty that we were best friends and that neither of us was going anywhere. But now, they were poisoned and taut with unease. Like both of us were constantly waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Michael sucked in a breath and let it out sharply. At last, he gestured to the lamia. “Anyway. We should probably bury the body, right?”

Feeling something tighten painfully in my throat, I nodded back at him without meeting his eyes. “Right.”

* * *

The motel we checked into was skeezy, even by our standards. The main office had flickering fluorescent lights, dirty windows, the smell of cigarettes and stale coffee hanging in the air, chipped tile floors, dusty fake plants, and walls that were literally the color of upchuck. I didn’t have high hopes for the room, either.

The clerk, a bored-looking middle-aged woman, raised her eyebrows at us when we walked in. But the smile she gave us was surprisingly genuine. That was due in no small part to the fact that we’d used the pack of baby wipes and paper towels we kept in the trunk to wipe away the blood from killing the lamia. Plus, we both wore all-black while on hunts. The biggest reason for that was that it hid the bloodstains. We both looked like reasonably respectable guys in our late twenties.

“All we’ve got right now is a room with a king-sized bed,” she said by way of greeting. But her eyes slid over to Michael, then to me, and finally back to Michael again. “Is that going to be a problem for you two?”

I didn’t like the knowing way she asked that, like she immediately assumed that we’d have no problem sharing a bed. She’d probably clocked us as a couple. A lot of people seemed to think that. If only it were that simple.

“Yeah, it is going to be a problem,” I replied, annoyance and alarm surging through me one after the other. Michael and I hadn’t shared a bed in over two months. “I called three hours ago. You said you had a room with two queen beds available.”

“That was three hours ago,” she replied, cracking her neck side to side with an audible pop. Then she fixed me with a too-sweet smile. “Now there’s just one room left with a king-sized bed. And it’s yours if you want it.”

Dread bolted through me. Michael wouldn’t share a bed with me anymore. Not that I blamed him. But this meant a conversation—or a not-conversation—about our sleeping arrangements. Another reminder of everything that I had fucked up between us.

“You can’t tell me you don’t have any other vacancies.”

“There’s a funeral director’s conference in town and rooms are scarce.” She shrugged. “I’m betting it’s gonna be a similar situation at the other motels. You’re welcome to check, but this is my last room, so once it’s gone, it’s gone.”

“Danny, it’s fine,” Michael told me, glancing up from his phone. Though, despite his words, his toned was clipped and he didn’t look especially happy about the situation, either. “Chances are, I’ll be crashing elsewhere anyhow. And if I’m not, I can take the floor. Stop being weird.”

I glanced at the phone screen and saw that he was already chatting with someone on Grindr, one of the more popular gay hookup apps out there.

I felt heat wash over my face, and I grimaced.

But that was ridiculous. It shouldn’t matter who he was hooking up with, right? So long as he was ready to travel tomorrow, I didn’t really have much ground to stand on. It wasn’t like he was getting lucky with me. So why shouldn’t he go out and have some fun?

That didn’t stop my insides from knotting up into a tangled mess of jealousy, though.

I generally have a pretty decent poker face, but apparently it wasn’t as good as I thought because Michael took one good look at me before immediately turning the screen off on his phone and sliding it into his pocket.

He flashed me a dark look. “Is this really a problem for you?”

Michael might have meant the sleeping arrangements, but then again, he might not have.

Anyway, regardless of what he was referring to, there was only one correct answer here: no, everything was just fine and fucking dandy. He could keep on carving my heart out of my chest and feeding it back to me in small pieces just as long as he liked, no problem here.

The clerk’s eyes widened slightly at the exchange between us, and she looked almost crestfallen. “Ah, so you two aren’t…” She let that trail off.

The heat in my face intensified. No, we definitely weren’t.

Another awkward silence fell after that.

Michael shot me a dark look, then glanced up at her. He seemed to really notice for the very first time that we were checking into a motel and there was only one bed available, and that I was being really weird about it.

“The room with the king bed is fine,” he assured her. Then he handed over one of the many credit cards we used to fund our hunts.

The name on the card wasn’t his, of course. It was the name of a person who had been dead for the past two years. It’s not something I’m proud of, but part of what I do is hacking into the accounts of the folks we see in the obituaries to make sure that they’ve got good credit, no next of kin who can list them as deceased to the credit bureaus, and no estate that could potentially be slapped with any of the debt that Michael and I rack up. If it sounds like a lot of work to vet each potential alias, that’s because it is. But it was important to Michael and me that innocent people didn’t suffer for us to be able to do what we do. And it’s not like either one of us could have anything remotely resembling a real job, not with the type of life we led.

Without so much as glance at the name on the card, the clerk ran it.

Michael and I both waited for the machine to do its thing. That was always a bad moment. One where Michael and I never looked at each other, but I was sure that we both wanted to. Eventually, there would come a day when the card wouldn’t work, and then we’d have to pretend to be appropriately shocked and alarmed by that turn of events. After a well-practiced performance that involved one of us stepping outside to ‘call the credit card company,’ we’d then need to leave and then find a new place to crash for the night, using a totally different card. We always had several backups on hand, just in case.

I was well aware that credit card fraud was a crime, even if we were technically only racking up credit card bills in the names of dead people. But with the way we did it, the only real victims were the credit card companies, and they could afford it. Besides, it’s not like we went nuts and bought a bunch of crazy expensive stuff, either. We each had our backpacks, a decent supply of weapons in the trunk of Michael’s car, my admittedly expensive and powerful laptop, and each other. That was all we’d needed for the last five years.

Well, that, and an industrial-sized bottle of booze.

I had been needing that more and more since realizing that my feelings for Michael were more complicated than they had any right to be. And since it had begun to feel like I didn’t really even have Michael’s friendship anymore, either. Like he already had one foot out the door.

The little machine on the counter dinged. The card went through with no problems. This time, at least. Eventually the credit card companies would get cranky when we didn’t pay the bill and they’d shut the card off. Then we’d need to start the whole process over, with a brand-new name. We actually did that anyhow, on a regular rotation, just in case. I kept an encrypted spreadsheet with names and dates and everything on my laptop.

The clerk handed us both keys to our room and gave us directions. The room turned out to be on the ground floor, with the door accessible from the parking lot. That was very good in the sense that we could leave quickly if we had to, but very bad in the sense that literally anything could break the door down and murder us while we slept.

Also, if the lobby was bad, the room was even worse. A single bed with a lumpy mattress, a comforter that was more plastic than fabric, a lime-green shag carpet on top of that kind of hard gray low-pile carpet so popular in office buildings, a cramped vanity with a filthy mirror, and a bathroom the size of a closet.

“Home sweet home,” Michael muttered, eyeing the bed with a dubious look. “What are the odds there’s bloodstains on that mattress?”

“We won’t be here long.”

The problem with the room was that, like most motel rooms, it only had one door. There was no window in the bathroom, which meant no possible exit, except through the door. One door in meant one door out. But the biggest vulnerability wasn’t the door at all. It was the massive window right next to the door. Anything at all could kick it in and jump us while we slept.

“We’ll need to draw some warding sigils,” I muttered, assessing the situation. So long as the sigils were drawn in chalk and then activated with a few drops of human blood, they’d work just fine, even though neither of us was a warlock. I didn’t really understand why, but certain symbols had power all on their own and just drawing them in the correct way was enough to make them functional. I frowned, then added, “And probably a spirit trap, just to be on the safe side. Two, actually. One for the door and one for the window.”

Spirit traps would capture any spectral entities that were dumb enough to step into them. They’d also slow down most types of fae creatures and monsters. At least the ones that weren’t vampires, witches, or werewolves.

If Michael and I slept in shifts—

Michael’s phone chimed. He pulled it from his pocket, opened the app he’d been using, then frowned at the screen. He shot me an almost embarrassed look.

“Look, I—”

“Yeah, sure. Go,” I told him, not letting him finish the rest. I didn’t want to hear it. “I’ll be fine here. Just be back in the morning. We’re heading to Ontario tomorrow.”

“Oregon again?” He grimaced with distaste. “I was kind of hoping to not go back there for a while.”

“Ontario has a nest of vamps that we need to go make dead.”

“Can’t we send someone else? We know other hunters. Aubrey—”

“Is in Denver right now. She’s dealing with the revenant that’s killing all those movie theater workers.”

“Right. Okay. Maybe we could call Charlie and Sarah.”

“They just had a kid. They’re done with hunting.”

“Right.” Michael grimaced again. “Look, are we sure these vampires are…” He trailed off, frowning at me, uncharacteristically at a loss for words.

I knew exactly what his problem was. We hadn’t encountered any vampires that had needed killing since meeting Bryan and Tobias and discovering that not every vampire—hell, not even most —were soulless monsters. He let out a low breath. “I mean, we’re friends with one of them now. Doesn’t that make it weird for you, the thought of hunting other vampires?”

There it was. In one sentence. Every single one of my worst fears.

For five years, Michael had been driven by his hatred of the supernatural. Of vampires in specific. But after learning that some of them weren’t evil—that many of them were actually pretty good people—all that hatred and fear inside of him had drained away.

Maybe it was fucked up, but without it, Michael would want to stop eventually. He’d get tired of wondering if he was doing the right thing all the time. And then he’d leave. Everyone does, eventually. And the fact that things were so weird between us now meant that would probably happen sooner rather than later.

How much time did I have left?

Could I measure it in years? Months? Weeks? Or was it less than that?

Would it blindside me when it happened? I already knew it would shatter me into a million jagged little pieces when he walked out the door for good.

I did my best to push those thoughts away, but they were getting harder and harder to shove off.

“Look, I get that not all vampires need to be put down,” I said, after realizing that it was my turn to say something to break the uneasy silence. “But this nest of vamps has been leaving a trail of bodies all the way from Boise to Baker City. They’re the bad kind, I promise.”

“Maybe we can—”

“They’re killers, Michael. If we don’t go, they’ll murder more innocent people. We can’t reason with them. End of story.”

His phone chimed again.

We both froze. Michael glanced down at the screen then looked back up at me, a wall sliding over his expression.

His hookup was waiting.

“Go,” I told him, trying to sound like it wasn’t exactly like chewing on broken glass, night after night. “It’s fine. Just don’t come back hung over again. You’re driving.”

“For sure.” He grinned at me, but it didn’t quite reach his eyes. “I should probably shower first.”

“Right.” I dropped my eyes, working on keeping my breathing steady as I busied myself with taking my laptop out of its carrying case.

With that, he ducked into the bathroom and closed the door behind him.

I heard the dull hum of the shower a moment later. When Michael came out, ten minutes later, his hair was still faintly damp, and he was dressed in clean clothes. He yanked his shoes on and headed for the door.

“I’ll be back bright and early.” He paused, turning to glance back at me. “Or maybe in a couple hours.”

Not trusting myself to speak, I nodded.

A shadow crossed his face as his gaze met mine. “Danny, look. I—if—”

He broke off, grimacing. And looking mighty guilty, too. Which he probably didn’t have any right to, did he?

Sure, he was being an ass, but I was being a coward by not saying anything.

“Go,” I told him firmly. “Have fun.”

Once he finally left, I slid the latch shut behind him. Not that the flimsy metal lock would do much to protect against most of the monsters that might try to come through the door.

I sank onto the bed, feeling miserable.

I knew I should get up and draw the warding sigils with the chalk I kept in the front pocket of my laptop bag. I knew I should draw the spirit traps, too. But I couldn’t make myself move. I realized, after several minutes of sitting there, staring at the door, and feeling sick to my stomach, that I was waiting for Michael to come back through. To tell me he’d changed his mind.

There was a nearly full bottle of tequila in my backpack. Maybe I ought to break into it. Tonight felt like one of the nights where I wanted to get so drunk I couldn’t feel my face anymore.

Maybe I’d get myself prepped first. I’d taken to doing that almost every day, after researching best practices for how to be a good bottom. I had gathered enough over the years to know that Michael was mostly a top in his sexual encounters, and I figured it made sense to be ready for that in case I ever got brave enough to really try to take us into that territory. And maybe I’d even do some more experimentation with the small dildo I had purchased about a dozen monsters ago, which was wrapped in a tube sock in the bottom of my backpack.

I’d already experimented, pretty much every chance I got. I figured it made sense to get used to it so that it wouldn’t suck so much if sex ever did happen between us. And it wasn’t like the sensation was awful or anything. It was mostly just strange. But it was becoming less so with each attempt. It wasn’t necessarily bad, once I got used to it. And, anyway, from a purely mechanical perspective, I didn’t even really need to be all that into it, if Michael was topping, right? I had watched enough gay porn recently to know the basic sexual positions.

In truth, watching the porn hadn’t done a whole lot for me, but imagining that Michael was the one entering me? That level of closeness with him? I could picture the way he’d hold me with his strong arms, his breath hot on the back of my neck as he found his pleasure inside of me.

I had orgasmed more than once during my dildo experimentation from entertaining that particular fantasy. The idea of anyone else fucking me was obscene. Unimaginable. But Michael doing it?

It got me going every time.

And that definitely wasn’t even remotely heterosexual, was it?

So maybe I wasn’t really straight at all?

Although romantic inclination and sexuality weren’t always the same thing, in my case, the only other explanation which fit was that I was at least some shade of demi-sexual. According to my research, that meant I was technically on the asexual spectrum and needed to form a strong emotional bond in order to feel sexual attraction to someone. Since my life hadn’t been especially conductive to sexual or romantic experimentation, that was a very strong maybe. After all, almost all of my limited sexual encounters so far had been in the confines of my short-lived romantic relationship with a girl named Becca when I was nineteen. And I had developed an emotional connection with her before sex had happened. And the sex was very… okay. I enjoyed myself plenty, but it hadn’t been mind-blowing or anything.

So… maybe?

But what if that ended up being wrong? How would I know for sure?

The only way to be certain would be to try having sex with Michael, right?

But what if I just couldn’t make myself do it, when the time came? What if I ruined everything by trying? And worst of all: what if I hurt him?

But, then again, even if sex with Michael was awful at first, a little pain and discomfort still would’ve been better than watching him go out and hook up with a bunch of random strangers. It would have been better than being left behind night after night, wondering if this was the time he’d finally end up meeting someone he felt a connection with, if this was the moment that I’d later look back on as the beginning of the end.

Wouldn’t it?

“Shit,” I whispered, uncapping the bottle of tequila and taking a swig that burned all the way down my throat. “What the fuck am I going to do?”