Hunting His Vampire Mate (Blood Bonded Mates #4)

CHAPTER SIX || MICHAEL

T he awful sound of Danny’s neck snapping echoed through the alleyway.

The female vamp looked up at me and grinned, her chin coated with rivulets of thick black blood, and her eyes alight with mad glee.

A noise that I hadn’t even realized my body was capable of making tore free from my lips and I cocked my gun. It was filled with wooden bullets. If I hit the heart, I could kill the vamp and stop her from—stop her from—

I sucked in a ragged breath and fired.

I cocked the gun and did it again.

The ear-splitting crack of gunfire shattered the relative silence that had descended over the alleyway. The first bullet missed, but the second one struck her in the abdomen, blowing her backward.

Away from Danny.

She didn’t get to touch him.

She didn’t get to do anything anymore.

She stood up without missing a beat, but I was used to that. Vamps heal so fast, it’s like magic.

I fired again, striking her in the chest and sending her staggering backward.

I had missed the heart, though.

How many times had I fired?

How many bullets did my gun have?

Why wasn’t Danny fucking moving?

Why couldn’t I think anymore?

My stomach rolled and I thought I might be sick. I sucked in another breath, and I might’ve just started screaming incoherently at any second—fuck it, I wanted to—but the other vamp abruptly materialized at my side.

Lenny, presumably.

Whoever he was, he clearly wasn’t that bright. He wasted the element of surprise by giving me a monstrous grin, filled with fangs and crazy eyes.

Without missing a beat, I turned and pressed the nose of my gun right up against his chest, directly over his heart.

Then I fired.

That bullet hit home.

He was a withering corpse before he even hit the ground.

“Lenny!” the female shrieked, her pale hand still pressed over her chest wound.

I spun to face her, bringing my gun back up. I still had at least one bullet left, didn’t I? The gun held six. How many times had I fired? Why wouldn’t my brain count them? Why did it stubbornly refuse to process anything at all?

And why was Danny just lying there, not moving?

Tears burned in my eyes, sudden and sharp.

The female vamp snarled at me, her face contorted with rage. Then she turned on her heel, and in a blur of speed she was gone.

The entire encounter had lasted less than a minute. With the music going, it was possible the clubgoers inside hadn’t heard the gunshots. But anyone nearby, on the streets, would have. It was late, but not that late. Someone must have heard. Thankfully, we weren’t visible from the main street, so it would probably take at least another minute or maybe longer than that for anyone to show up. But anyone who heard the gunshots might have called the police. Not to mention, the three humans who had gotten away and literally run screaming from the alley would probably call the cops too, once their instinctive horror had worn off.

I couldn’t stay here.

The authorities would definitely take Danny away from me.

I lurched forward, tears abruptly dripping down my face, and I gathered Danny’s body up in my arms. I didn’t even check for a pulse. I couldn’t make myself do it, because if I did, I knew that I’d lose it. And I needed to clean up this mess, before someone with a badge, a gun, and questions I had no hope of answering showed up.

I loaded Danny into the back of the van. He was limp but still warm. He could’ve been sleeping. But I couldn’t make myself look at him. If I did, then he would really be—

No.

Not yet.

Not until I could break down properly and give him the grief he deserved.

I loaded the other two vamps into the van as well. They were much easier to move. They were still and lifeless and weighed almost nothing. They were just husks of what they once were. All the vitality they’d spent years murdering people for had drained out of them all at once and what was left behind was little more than a desiccated bag of bones.

After loading the bodies into the back, I closed the van doors and jumped into the driver’s seat. Lenny had very helpfully left the keys in the ignition. I turned the van on and peeled out of the alleyway, just as the wail of sirens began to split the night, somewhere in the distance behind me.

I drove through town, fighting the urge to go faster than the speed limit—oddly enough, it’s not a good idea to speed when the back of your stolen van is filled with bodies. I got onto I-84 east without incident, heading into Idaho. Ontario was right on the border, so it didn’t take long to cross state lines. Any authorities who might be looking for a dark van would have to contact the police here and have them handle it. That type of interdepartmental communication buys a bit of time—not as much as movies and television would suggest, mind you—but it would be enough.

Because I already knew where I was going.

There was a safe house nearby. It was an abandoned cattle ranch, about fifteen miles from the Idaho state border. Danny and I had discovered it two years ago, when we’d fought a pretty nasty poltergeist who had taken up residence in the Caldwell detention center. It had already killed two inmates and a guard. The detention center was incidentally located right next door to the police department. There had been two officers involved in that situation and Danny and I had saved both of their lives. They knew what we did for a living, that we were hunters, and they’d helped us cover back then. And if all else failed, I knew they’d help us as much as they could now, too. So, just in case, it made sense to drive into their jurisdiction.

After all, they owed us.

Besides. It was a moot point. There had been gunfire, but no bodies. The three humans might be able to describe the van, but I doubted it. The vamps would have hypnotized them. They probably wouldn’t remember much about the experience at all, except that they’d nearly been kidnapped by some very bad people. Granted, if there were any security cameras nearby that caught what had happened in the alleyway on camera, the Ontario police department would see some pretty weird stuff if they checked the footage. But even that takes time. They’d need to get a court order, most likely.

The abandoned ranch—one of many safe houses we’d staked out over the years and loaded up with supplies—was out of the way, tucked behind two foothills, completely invisible from the freeway or anything remotely resembling a main road. No one followed me.

The entire time, my brain was numb and locked up, focused only on the task in front of me: getting to safety. Getting to a place where I could actually relax enough to process any of this. It numbly refused to do anything else.

The ranch came into view. It was a dilapidated main house, with a barn right next to it that was in even worse shape. Apart from that, there were a couple of outbuildings, and wide-open fields, fenced with razor wire. There were no neighbors for miles, just flat hard tack in all directions, dotted here and there with the occasional hardy desert plant.

I parked behind the barn and unloaded the vamps first. They’d withered even further in the forty minutes it had taken me to drive there. They were just bones with leather-like skin stretched over the top. Their fangs were out, though. I’d need to get a pair of pliers and remove the fangs. Or a rock, if I couldn’t manage that. Just in case anyone ever managed to dig up the bodies. It’s bad form to leave enough evidence of the paranormal to cause the everyday folk to ask questions they’ll never be able to answer.

I moved mechanically, hardly even aware of what I was doing.

Until I looked down and realized that Danny was in my arms.

His eyes were closed, like he might’ve been dreaming. But the way his neck hung, too limp, was all wrong. And he was cold to the touch now.

A god-awful sound tore from my lips, and I collapsed to my knees onto the hard-packed earth. I laid him down gently, unable to stand touching him any longer, because that wasn’t him anymore. It was just some awful thing that looked like him .

A bag of bones, just like the vamps we’d killed.

I vomited onto the ground until there was nothing left.

After, I collapsed into the dirt, clutching myself like I was trying to stop my insides from falling out. Tears turned the dirt on my face to mud. And I couldn’t stop any of it. I couldn’t stop the awful, ugly, whimpering that came from my mouth. Or the way I kept gasping and doing it all over again, as the gut-wrenching realization struck me, all over again.

Danny was gone.

I would never see him again. I would never see him hunched over his computer, his eyes alight with mad glee as he looked up and proudly informed me that he’d just hacked into whatever supposedly air-tight law enforcement agency we needed information from. I’d never hear him over-explain his research into the supernatural ever again. I’d never know the minute differences that existed between folklore and the real thing, which he was always eager to tell me.

There was more. A whole lifetime of more. And it hit me, one after the other, all of it striking me like bullets refusing to ever do more than cause me agony, rather than ending it.

Because I would never again bring him bearclaws and apple fritters in the morning, or convince him to take an aspirin and drink some goddamn water on the rare nights we got shitfaced together. I’d never hear him chide me about going into a battle half-cocked and fully loaded, his dark eyes filled with a mix of anger and concern. And I’d never know what the fuck he’d meant by giving me that hug earlier, either. And I’d never know why he left the club early tonight, without telling me. I’d never know if it was really my fault or not that this had happened to him.

My best friend, my partner—the only fucking person in the whole world who still knew me at all—was dead.

It wasn’t even like my heart was broken. That wasn’t enough. It’s like someone had scooped out my everything—the whole entire world inside of me—and stamped it all out. And there was no point to anything anymore.

Without him, there was no point at all.

Danny had said he loved me, and we hadn’t ever talked about it. Now I would never know if he’d really meant it, or if he’d just said it. And I’d never know if we could have tried to be something more to each other.

Because I had been a coward.

And fuck it all, who was I kidding? He had been too. And now I would never know.

And he’d never get the chance to tell me.

That thought made me want to vomit again, but there was nothing left in my stomach, so I just ended up retching useless grief and agony onto the ground.

When I was done, I felt exhausted, shuddering and shaky.

It was ironic. But now that he was gone, I could finally fucking admit it, couldn’t I? I had been in love with him since the moment we’d first met—when he’d literally put himself bodily in front of me and slain the monsters who had destroyed my whole world. And that hadn’t stopped—I hadn’t stopped feeling the way I’d felt. I had just gotten better at pretending. No amount of hooking up or shoving away my feelings could change the truth.

I loved Danny.

Somewhere, in the back of my mind, I had assumed we’d eventually talk everything out. That we’d pass a bottle of Jack Daniels back and forth between us in some backwater motel room, after a night of close calls, and we’d lay it all out on the on table. That we’d make it right, one way or another. And then I would’ve come clean about how I felt, too. I’d been waiting for that to happen. As though anything that mattered that much ever happened all on its own, easy as you please.

Danny had told me tonight that he would’ve done anything for me. Well, fuck it, I would have too. If there had been some divine merciful all-powerful being to appeal to, to fix this so that he could live, and I could take his place in death, I wouldn’t have needed even a moment to think about it. I would’ve said, take me. Please take me instead.

But I hadn’t been willing to do anything for him, had I?

Instead, I had left him with his vulnerable fucking admission standing between us like a goddamn ghost, and I had shut him the fuck down the one and only time he’d tried to act on it. And I’d been so relieved when he hadn’t remembered, and it had never come up again.

All because I hadn’t wanted to risk feeling the same pain I’d felt at losing Joshua.

But I had survived that, hadn’t I?

Because of Danny.

And now, there was no one. I already knew there was no way in hell I could survive without him. I didn’t want to. He was gone, so I wanted to be, too.

And tonight would be the last night I’d ever have with him, wouldn’t it?

After I buried him here in this lonely place, I would never see his face, ever again.

So, I fought through my grief, and I inched myself back to his side. I didn’t want to, but I forced myself to really look at him. To memorize him completely, so I could keep him with me for however many days in this world I had left. And he was so heartbreakingly beautiful, even in death. The angular lines of his face, juxtaposed with the softness of his hair. The hardness of his jaw.

The blood on his lips.

The black blood on his lips.

I stared at that for a long time, transfixed, my jaw falling open. A sharp gasp escaped my lips.

Because his entire mouth was covered in blood.

It had all happened so fast. But the female vamp had been on top of him in the alleyway, holding him down, when I had come in. I had broken into a sprint. And then I had screamed out his name.

But it came flooding back to me now.

She had jerked her wrist away from his mouth, so she could put her hands on his head and break his neck. It had happened quickly, but I was now certain of it. She had been feeding him her blood right before she’d killed him.

I pulled open Danny’s lower jaw with my thumb, as gently as I could manage, and I saw that his mouth was coated in blood as well.

A lot of blood. Black blood. Vampire blood.

Which meant that Danny wasn’t dead at all.

He was transitioning.

The female vamp had turned Danny into a vampire.

The world suddenly stopped spinning around me and righted itself. But it was like someone had taken an etch-a-sketch and shaken it violently. Nothing looked the same anymore.

Nothing at all.

But that was alright, wasn’t it?

Very abruptly, the only thing that mattered at all was making sure Danny was going to be okay. Which meant making sure he didn’t turn into a thing, like the monster who had done this to him. Like one of the creatures we hunted.

A year ago, I would’ve had no choice but to destroy his body, so he didn’t turn. But I hadn’t known any better then. And now I did. There was a chance that Danny might be okay.

He wouldn’t be human anymore, but so what? Did that even really matter, if he was still Danny ?

My grief drained away into a mingled mess of relief and wariness. I could hunt a vampire until the cows came home. But could I—someone who had loathed vampires for years and years—somehow help Danny become a better sort of monster? One who wasn’t really a monster at all?

It seemed unlikely.

But I also knew that I would do anything for Danny.

I was done being a coward about shit that mattered.

And this mattered, more than anything.

Danny and I had a pact. If one of us ever got infected by the supernatural, the other one would take care of it. I didn’t know about Danny, but I had apparently lied.

Because, as it turned out, I was going to do exactly the opposite of what I had promised him. I wasn’t just going to not destroy the body. I would facilitate this. I didn’t care what Danny came back as, so long as he was Danny. And I was hell-bent on being there for this— all of it. It wasn’t even a question anymore, but my answer was right there anyway.

For Danny, yeah, I could do just about anything. Even something that would royally piss him off. Maybe even especially that.

And I only knew one vampire who could help me.

I wiped my chin with that backs of my hands and I felt my face settle into familiar grim lines, like it did before every battle. I pulled my phone out and dialed Bryan.

He answered on the fourth ring.

“Michael? Is everything okay?” He sounded confused. But that made sense. I’d never called him before. That was Danny’s thing, not mine. He paused for a long moment, then added, sounding doubtful, “Um. Do you need to talk to Tobias?”

I couldn’t blame him for being a little hesitant. After all, we had tried to kill each other only four months ago. And he had no idea that I was now totally willing to set aside years of fear and loathing to hop on board the vampire pride parade, so long as Danny was going to be its new grand marshal.

“No,” I replied, not even caring about what this might end up meaning in the long run. Hell, I’d be Bryan’s bestie now too, if that’s what it took. If it meant helping Danny. After all, he wasn’t such a bad guy, was he? The fact that he drank—ethically sourced, mind you—fresh blood on a regular basis was entirely beside the point. He didn’t kill anyone for it, did he? And Tobias didn’t seem to mind being his feeding partner in the slightest. And I couldn’t help how ragged and desperate my voice sounded, either, when I added, “Bryan, it’s about Danny. I need your help.”