Hunting His Vampire Mate (Blood Bonded Mates #4)

CHAPTER ELEVEN || DANNY

H uh. Michael drinking my blood was a spiritual experience. Who would’ve guessed it?

That’s understating things quite a bit, though. What actually happened was that the room fucking exploded into inky-black darkness all around us. There was no hard-packed earth below us, no pock-marked roof above us, and no rickety wooden walls around us. There was nothing except Michael. It was both inexpressibly violent and sudden—a tearing away of barriers between us, of a reality around us that apparently didn’t always need to exist. But paradoxically, it was also somehow supremely gentle at the same time. Like my soul already knew his.

And the darkness wasn’t frightening. It was the sensation of being warm, comforted, and perfectly safe in a way that I’ve never been before, not even once in my entire life.

Fuck. Michael’s mental voice bloomed in my mind. And then I could feel him. His wonder. His elation. His doubts melting from him. You can hear me, can’t you?

Yeah, I replied, my own wonder igniting in my chest, every bit as powerful as his. Somehow, I laughed without making a sound, but I knew he heard it anyway. Clear as a bell.

This is…

He trailed off, but I understood. It was hard to put it into words, but I knew I would never be the same after this. That both of us would be irrevocably altered. We’d both still be us, but we’d be something else now, too. Something more.

Yeah, that’s exactly right, Michael agreed. I felt both startled and somehow unsurprised that he’d read my thoughts. I was pretty sure I wouldn’t be able to hide much from him anymore. Which was fine, because I’d done enough of that. I didn’t want to hide from him any longer.

Please don’t. And I won’t either. I promise.

And then he kissed me. Which was weird, because I wasn’t entirely sure we even had bodies anymore, except that his lips were perfectly real. And his arms around me were, too. And it was sweet and good and perfect. And how had I ever thought I was completely straight?

You were probably kind of in a grey area to begin with, Michael agreed. But vamps are pretty much always a little bit bisexual. Bryan told me that.

I laughed. When did you talk to Bryan about vampires?

A flicker of unease threaded through me. And then I saw a glimpse of the phone conversation he’d had with Bryan, after he had realized that I was going to become a vampire. His desperation, his willingness to do anything to help me be okay, flooded through the connection we shared.

Danny, don’t. I don’t want you to see this.

But it was too late. Because memories swam up between us. I saw Michael vomiting onto the ground, with my body lying there motionless beside him. I saw him unleashing cries of raw agony—which I felt in every part of my body, so awful that it might crush my bones to powder. I saw as he clutched at the unyielding earth, his face a crazed mess of tears and dirt. And I felt the exact moment when he admitted to himself that he had loved me all along too, but he would never get the chance to tell me. And the bleak, numb realization that he no longer wanted to live in a world without me in it.

Fuck. Danny, look, I’m sorry. That was before I knew you were coming back.

But something broke inside me at reliving his memory of when he’d—briefly—thought that I was dead and gone forever. I had intellectually understood that he’d gone through something. Something that had changed him in an instant. Something that had compelled him to offer me his wrist and go all in, even if I was something he had always hated. Because almost anything would have been better than my being gone for good.

Stop it. I don’t care that you’re a vampire now.

But Michael—

Danny, no. I thought you were dead. And then you came back. And I don’t give a shit what you came back as, so long as you’re still Danny. And you’re fucking perfect, exactly the way you are.

Then he seemed to throw a memory at me—a very, very recent one—of seeing my fangs for the first time and thinking I was beautiful. That I was just as much Danny as I ever had been.

Oh.

So don’t sit there and try to push me away. Not now. It’s not going to work. I’m not going anywhere unless you make me go.

I wanted so much to believe him. But another memory rose up between us. It was something I took great pains to never think about. It was the moment my father had died.

He had gone off on his own, only a couple of months after my brother Kyle had been killed. It was a case involving a poltergeist in Cleveland. Should’ve been open-and-shut. You can’t technically kill a poltergeist, but you lull them into a trance with music and then trap them inside of an enchanted object. And he had several to choose from. He shouldn’t have died. But after Kyle’s death, he gave in. I watched it happen.

My father didn’t just surrender to death when it came.

He sought it out. He courted it. He welcomed it with open arms.

Anything to escape the grief. Even if it meant leaving his other son behind.

Poltergeists are, hands down, the worst kinds of ghosts out there. Revenants and wraiths are bad too, but poltergeists are the most mindless and hell-bent on destruction and chaos. And they’re the most powerful, too. They’re ghosts who have lost any and all semblance of humanity or rational thought. Instead, they possess insanely strong telekinetic powers and an irrational jealousy for the living that borders on hatred.

I was sixteen, three weeks from my seventeenth birthday. It was only two months after Kyle’s death, and my father had barely spoken since unless he had no other choice. He had taken to going on long drives by himself, leaving me behind in the motel room almost every night. I was pretty sure those were moments where he broke down and hadn’t wanted me to see. Or, more likely, moments where he wanted to break down, but couldn’t quite let himself.

The spirit we were fighting was haunting a traveling carnival and it was perhaps a bit smarter than the average poltergeist, in that it rarely attacked anyone during the hours of operation. It seemed to only go after the carnival workers, in the hour right after closing time, and it never chose any of the long-time employees. It always chose someone who was new to the staff, who had fewer relationships built up. It chose the weak ones, those who didn’t quite belong.

It was the early hours of the morning, and the darkened tents loomed over us on either side, silent and menacing. The smell of popcorn and cotton candy still lingered in the air and there were patches of bare earth that were so soaked through with spilled soda and slushy that the soles of my shoes became sticky and caked with clumps of dirt. The ferris wheel ahead of us was black and skeletal in the distance. And nothing moved at all except my father and I.

“It’s just ahead,” he said, so low that I almost didn’t hear him.

I nodded, but his thousand-yard gaze had already slipped away from me. The expression on his face was flat and unreadable.

He led the way to the funhouse, where all of the deaths had occurred. The facade had been shaped into the likeness of a clown’s face, impossibly large, and its gaping mouth was the entrance. In the daytime, or even at night with the carnival lights everywhere, it would have seemed cheerful. In the pitch black, with only the half-moon and the smattering of stars poking through the clouds to light it, it seemed almost impossibly sinister.

Dread twisted in my stomach, but I didn’t say anything. After all, this was just a part of being a hunter. All you could do was try to be as prepared as possible, then step into the dark and hope you survived to tell the tale.

We turned our flashlights on the moment we stepped inside. We hadn’t used flashlights in the carnival grounds because that would have been equivalent to announcing our presence for the security guards who were no doubt patrolling somewhere nearby. And all of the carnival workers were holed up on the other edge of the field, but they had windows in their bunkhouse trailers, surely. They might have seen us as well. Stealth and silence were paramount when hunting in places that you weren’t supposed to be.

The mirrors were everywhere, distorting our reflections into grotesque shapes. The funhouse seemed to be holding its breath, and I could feel the presence watching us. Waiting for us to get far enough inside so that we couldn’t easily escape, perhaps. I wondered how the spirit had led workers here. Or perhaps this was sometimes a place where the newer carnies—the ones who didn’t know any better—went to party?

I wondered if the workers warned them. Probably. But anyone who didn’t know how real these things were might discount the warnings. They might chalk the warnings up to a hazing ritual, or perhaps discount them as the superstitious nonsense of an older generation. I could see it easily enough.

But there were no parties in here tonight. Just the hushed waiting of the mirrored walls, the narrow pathways that stretched around us, labyrinth-like, easy to get lost in.

“We should attract it,” I said, stopping after we rounded our third corner and wound up at a dead end.

My father paused and turned back to me. His expression didn’t change, but his gaze locked onto something just over my shoulder. “No need.”

When I turned, my blood turned to ice in my veins.

There was a clown at the end of the hallway, watching us. It was dressed in rags and so inhumanly tall that it was hunched over, like it was on stilts, its back scraping up against the ceiling. Its limbs were skeletal-thin and far too long to be human. Its mouth was filled with cracked teeth, stretched in a grin that seemed inhumanly wide, too big to fit properly on its face. And its eyes were empty sockets that oozed black ichor.

Wraiths and revenants were like that, too. Somehow, when they became dark and malevolent, they stopped looking anything like the humans they had once been. They became grotesque and twisted. No one was quite sure why: perhaps it was a reflection of the poison that had infected their souls? Or perhaps they assumed those forms only to terrify their victims.

I pulled out my weapon—a modified flare gun, filled with rock salt—and pointed it at the poltergeist. In close quarters like this, it would be loud. But it would paralyze the spirit long enough for us to—

“No,” my father said, shoving his backpack into my hands and pushing past me without waiting for my reply. “Let me.”

He advanced on the creature and started singing a song under his breath.

It was one of the old tribal songs. We had no contact with any of his family anymore, not since my twelfth birthday, after my father had taken Kyle and I from our mother. Our grandmother had begged him to take us back, to let us lead normal lives away from the horrors of the supernatural world. He had refused. The fight that had ensued had been so bitter, with so many harsh and final words exchanged, that he hadn’t spoken with her since.

I didn’t entirely blame my grandmother. Most of the men in the family—and a few of the women—had been hunters, and they had largely ended up the way most of us did sooner or later: dead at the hands of a monster. And the ones in the family who still remained, the ones who had rejected our family heritage, wanted nothing to do with us or with anything remotely related to the supernatural. But my father still remembered a few of the old legends and songs he had been taught as a boy. He told us a few of the legends when Kyle and I were children, but he refused to sing us any of the songs. The only time he sang them was when we were facing down a poltergeist. It was our last real connection to our Navajo ancestry.

The creature began swaying to the music. It lost its grin, its face going slack and receptive. Though poltergeists are hands-down the most dangerous type of ghost and cannot actually be killed, they have one critical weakness: they’re easily entranced by music.

I dropped to my knees, set the flashlight down beside me, then wrenched the backpack open. I fished out the enchanted locket we were using to imprison the spirit. It was one of those old-fashioned oval lockets with spots for photos inside it. But before I could pop it open and dart forward to suck the spirit into it—poltergeists, because they cannot be killed, must always be trapped inside of an enchanted object—my father turned to look back at me.

I glanced up at him and saw the resignation in his dark eyes.

There was relief there, too.

Horror choked the words off, all except one. “Dad?”

His gaze raked over me, like he was trying to memorize my face.

“Forgive me,” he said.

That’s when I realized he was no longer singing.

Before I could move, the poltergeist reared up and seized my father. Its fingers seemed to vanish into him. Its mouth widened again and there was a blinding light, just like there always is whenever a poltergeist sucks the life out of you.

My father’s face went slack and staring in an instant.

I rocketed to my feet, my flashlight beam going wild when my foot kicked it. I popped the clasp on the locket and darted forward with a strangled shout lodged in my throat. But I already knew I was too late.

The poltergeist screamed and kicked up a howling wind that iced over the mirrors and a large chunk of the floor as it was sucked into the locket.

And then, after I latched it shut again, there was just the darkness.

And I was alone.

That unimaginable asshole, Michael swore, gripping me tighter, like he could somehow protect me from what had already happened, years and years ago.

I fought back the grief I still felt at my father’s passing. It’s okay.

You were still a kid, and he left you! On purpose!

He was in pain, Michael. Exhaustion flooded through me at the silent words. Because I knew they were true, but it didn’t make anything better. It didn’t soothe the pain. All it did was diffuse the anger and soften the sting of betrayal. Without that, I couldn’t quite bring myself to hate him. And if I couldn’t hate him, the only thing that was left behind was the pain of being left behind. I added, He blamed himself for Kyle’s death. He wanted a way out.

By abandoning his other child? Anything could have happened to you! What if you hadn’t gotten the clasp open on the locket? He was wrong and you know it.

I did know it. And now Michael had just seen into me, into the deepest parts of me. The parts I hardly even thought about anymore, much less shared with anyone. What if he—

I’m in love with you. All of you. Even the parts you don’t like. And I will never fucking abandon you like he did.

His words hit home and for a long moment I couldn’t bring myself to look at him, or else I’d lose it. I wanted so badly to believe him.

But where did that leave us?

The darkness faded away and we were left clutching each other. Even though I was a vampire now and didn’t get cold, I still shivered. I wanted the darkness back.

“Do you fucking understand me, Danny?”

“Yeah,” I told him.

You are worth sticking around for. Nothing you could do would change that. I promise.

I wasn’t one hundred percent sure I believed him. I wanted to. But I couldn’t quite manage it. It was awfully easy for him to say, especially now that we were mystically connected by destiny or whatever the fuck, but it was different than actually figuring out how to make any of this work, now that I had become a vampire.

“I’m pretty sure we’re doing fine so far,” Michael flashed me a smile, but the stubborn set to his jaw was back. A classic Michael I’m-going-to-dig-my-heels-in sort of look. “And however long it takes to undo the damage that fucking asshole did to you, I don’t care. I’ll make you believe me.”

And because I couldn’t do anything else, I kissed him again.

The sensation of kissing another man should’ve felt weird, but it didn’t. It felt really, really good. And because it was Michael, it felt way better than good. It felt fucking perfect to have his warm, firm lips on mine, his tongue in my mouth, his big hands on my back.

I wanted his weight on top of me. I wanted to watch his eyes light up with pleasure as he entered me. I wanted him inside of me, filling me up.

He pulled back, his eyes going comically big and round, his jaw dropping open. “Sorry, what ?”

“Oh boy,” I muttered, half to myself. I flashed him an apologetic smile. “Lots of new urges. Sorry. Still figuring shit out. Probably going to be a little messy in my head for a while.”

“Messy is okay,” he breathed, still watching me. “Um. Are you—were you—”

And then the context of his thoughts supplied what his words didn’t. He wanted to know if I was serious.

And I was.

I really, really was. I’d spent months—possibly even years—in love with him, feeling frustrated that my body wouldn’t cooperate with me. Feeling terrified he’d wise up and leave me behind. And now that my body very, very much wanted to cooperate, I didn’t want to wait even a moment longer.

I wanted to try out all of the ways we were now capable of giving each other pleasure.

“We ought to shower first,” Michael informed me. “The house doesn’t have running water.”

“The motel is too far.”

“I’m covered in dirt.”

“I don’t fucking care.”

Danny… are you sure you want to do this? The first time can hurt sometimes.

“I don’t fucking care,” I repeated. “You let me bite you. You trusted me to do that. How is this any different?” I paused as doubt crept in. “Uh—I mean, unless you don’t want to.”

Michael pulled me back in for another kiss. This one more urgent and demanding. And he caught my wrist and brought my hand to his groin. He was rock hard and throbbing with need. Belatedly, I felt his desire through the bond. The desire to be inside of me. To fill me and make me his. And possibly even for me to do the same to him. It was a hornet’s nest of desires he’d—I now realized—been tamping down for years.

“Do you have lube?” I asked. I’d researched the mechanics of gay sex well enough. And pretty much every night for the last couple of months, I had done all the necessary prep work beforehand too, just in case I could make myself actually bite the bullet and go through with it. Of course, Michael had been hooking up with pretty much any random stranger he could find, so that had mostly been wasted effort. Much to my relief at the time.

“I wasn’t actually off hooking up,” Michael reminded me.

And, for the very first time, I could tell for sure that he wasn’t lying to me. I had no choice but to believe him. Relief crashed through me all over again. And wonder, too, because I could feel the reason why. He hadn’t wanted to hurt me. And something else, too. I could feel the reckless and stubborn way he loved me, a little white-hot around the edges, tinged with defiance.

“Sorry about that,” he whispered, swallowing hard, watching me. Like he knew exactly what I had just seen and was taking in my reaction. “I don’t quite know how to keep you from being completely in my head. And I’m not sure how to make myself want that enough to do it, even if I did know how.”

“I don’t mind,” I replied. A completely inadequate response. But I had never been good at anything emotional, had I?

“You’re doing just fucking fine,” Michael replied, grinning at me just a little. “And yeah, I always carry a travel-sized bottle of lube. Old habits die hard, I guess.” He paused, losing his smile. “You really would have tried to force yourself to do it, even if you didn’t want to?”

That was not a question I wanted to answer. I would have done just about anything to make him happy and if he didn’t realize that at this point, he was almost as much of an idiot as me.

“It’s not currently a problem I have now.” I brought his hand to my own groin, so he could feel the way I was growing hard through my jeans, just from fondling his cock. From thinking about him making love to me. “I want to.”

He met my gaze, and I felt the desire ignite in him like wildfire.

“Danny,” he whispered, saying my name like it was sacred or some shit. And then he kissed me again.

I’m not sure how the clothes came off, but they did, right there in the living room. Both of us had a hand in it, I figure, but I don’t remember who removed what. Only that we were naked before each other in record time.

And then I felt a thrill of fear.

For all of his concern about me, what about him? What if Michael didn’t like what he saw? What if the vampire thing ended up being too much, after all? Michael had spent years—

You’re so fucking beautiful. Perfect. My perfect mate.

The word sounded strange in our shared headspace.

Mate.

But somehow, just hearing him say it, hearing him claim me, caused something deep within my body to relax. So that meant it had to be true, didn’t it? For all of my confusion and trepidation, there had only ever been him. There had only ever been Michael. And that was… well, it was exactly right, wasn’t it?

“You’re goddamn right it is,” he whispered aloud, right into my ear. “But we don’t have to rush this, Danny. I’m not going anywhere.”

I know that, I replied, speaking silently through the bond that—somehow—seemed as natural as breathing. I want to.

Somehow, repeating it, with the full force of my conviction set behind it, some last bit of resistance within Michael finally relaxed. I felt it when it happened. A fierce sort of wonder and a need began to build up between us. I laid down on the floor, atop the heap of our clothing, my eyes never leaving his. I didn’t care what happened to the clothes. Nothing else mattered, except for him.

He climbed on top of me and kissed me again. His weight, pressing down on me, was almost enough to push me over the edge then and there. The heat from his body was delicious. He didn’t feel soft and smooth, the way a woman would have. But somehow, that was even better. It was perfect, because it was him.

I wrapped my legs around his waist, wanting to guide him into me. It might be awful, or it might feel really fucking good, and I couldn’t have in a million years ever imagined I would want to feel him inside of me, that I would be desperate for it. But even if it hurt like hell, I wanted it anyway.

“Not yet,” Michael said.

He pulled back and I instinctively reached out to stop him, but he put a gentle, steadying hand on my chest. “Be patient. There’s a certain amount of preparation we need to do first. We have to get you loosened up, so you can take me.”

“How are we going to—”

Michael flashed me a grin, then grabbed me behind my knees and rolled my body up slightly so that my entrance was exposed for him. Then he dropped down and I felt his breath on my tender flesh.

When his hot, wet tongue found my hole, my eyes widened and I let out a sharp, startled noise. The sensation of it was… incredible. Little shockwaves of pleasure flowed through me, and though it should have been weird to have another man’s tongue on me there, it was Michael. So it wasn’t weird at all. Instead, all I felt was a spreading desire and a deep satisfaction.

Yes, that spot was for pleasure. I’d never realized how good it could feel to have someone give me attention there. But as I writhed and gasped from his attentions, feeling his tongue lave against my hole, my desire for more grew.

“Michael,” I begged, my eyes rolling up in my head. “That feels incredible but stop fucking torturing me. I need to know how it feels to have you inside me.”

“Soon, I promise,” he told me, pulling his face away from my hole.

I heard a small snicking noise. Presumably the lid on the lube being popped.

Then he found my hole again with one slick finger.

I felt a moment of hesitation, of trepidation, as I realized I was about to be entered for the very first time. But before I could say anything—not that I was going to stop him—he slid into me.

My eyes widened again.

There was flickering instant of pain.

But then he found a place inside of me that I hadn’t known existed—even with all of my hesitant experimentation—and he massaged it gently. His touch sent more shockwaves of pleasure roaring through me.

“That’s it,” he breathed, his eyes on me and his lips parted. “Relax for me, Danny.”

I nodded, feeling my body do exactly that at his command. Like I wanted nothing more than to give him everything he wanted.

“You’re being so good for me,” he said. “I’m going to put in a second finger now. And if it hurts or if you don’t like it, tell me and we’ll stop. We don’t need to rush any of this.”

I bit my lip and nodded.

He slipped a second finger into me. The sensation wasn’t bad at all. It was a delicious sort of fullness that my body seemed to be craving. I wanted more. And with both fingers, he massaged the pleasure spot within me, and my cock jerked on my stomach, leaking precum.

“Does it hurt at all?”

I shook my head, letting out a groan of pleasure. “No, it feels incredible. I had no idea it would feel so good.”

Without warning, Michael took me in his mouth.

The sensation of his hot, wet lips over my aching hardness, combined with the feel of his fingers inside of me—he slid another one in while I bucked and gasped against him—was almost enough to send me over the edge.

And some last little speck of resistance I’d been feeling melted away. All I wanted was to feel Michael—all of Michael—buried deep inside of me.

He gently pulled his fingers out of me, working me in his mouth a moment longer. His practiced tongue laved over my head, eliciting another startled noise from me.

Had that ever felt so good?

If it had, I couldn’t remember. It didn’t matter anyhow. The only thing that mattered was that Michael was here with me.

He pulled off me and I watched as he lubed himself up.

“Are you sure you want to try this?” Michael asked, looking up and catching my gaze. “We don’t need to—”

“Yeah, we do,” I told him, taking him by the hand and pulling him on top of me again. “I need you inside me, Michael. I want this.”

I brought my knees to my chest so that he would have a better angle. I’d watched quite a bit of gay porn over the last few months, trying to make myself want to try any of it at all with him. And now that I did want to do this, I was grateful that I knew how some of the mechanics differed with two men.

Michael’s eyebrows shot up with surprise. You’ve been watching gay porn?

The memories of me learning how to prep myself crashed through us. Followed by the dildo I’d purchased on the sly. And my fumbling attempts to use it to get acclimated to the sensation of being penetrated. And those memories were thick with my conviction that I would force myself to be what he needed. And woven through everything, the fear that he would leave.

“Fuck,” he whispered aloud, his whole expression breaking open. I could feel the guilt lancing through him, that he hadn’t allowed us to talk about what we were to each other since my confession that I loved him. “Danny, I’m sorry. I—”

Don’t, I begged silently. It doesn’t matter. Please, just be with me now. Give me this.

He nodded and I could feel him give in to me. He maneuvered my legs over his shoulders, and I felt the head of his cock brush against my hole. My whole body shivered with anticipation. I expected to feel fear, or maybe at least some trepidation. But all I felt was desire to feel him in me, to be close to him. To give him pleasure.

“If it doesn’t feel good or there’s any pain, we’re stopping. I never want to hurt you, Danny.”

“I know,” I told him. “Though I might lay a smack-down on you if you don’t start fucking me soon.”

Michael smiled a little at that.

Then he pushed himself into me.

Even though I felt more ready for this than I’d ever felt for anything in my whole life, I still expected it to hurt a little . I didn’t expect it to feel effortless.

He paused, halfway inside me. His breath escaped in a short gasp. “Holy fuck,” he said, his eyes locked on mine, and something going primal and hungry in his expression. “You feel amazing.” He paused. “Is this okay? Are you in pain?”

I grabbed his ass—holy shit, he had an incredible bubble butt that I had plans for later—and guided him all the way into me, down to the hilt.

The feel of him buried deep in me was… perfect. It was a delicious, incredible sensation of fullness. And it was an almost too-intense pleasure that started at the base of my spine, but radiated everywhere, making my toes curl.

We both let out groans of pleasure at the same time.

Hot as fuck.

“I’m good,” I managed, letting out another gasping groan of delight as he began to work himself in and out of me.

He leaned down to kiss me while he made love to me, his tongue meeting mine. My hands gripped his back, and I gave myself over to the sensation of letting myself submit to him completely.

It could have been five minutes or five hours or five million years, and I didn’t care one bit. All I cared about was that the man I was in love with was buried inside me, destroying me and worshipping me with every thrust, and it felt good and natural and right.

He banished months of fear and doubt with each delicious movement, chasing both my pleasure and his, faster and faster, teasing out whimpers and moans from my lips.

My cock leaked a small pool of slick precum onto my stomach, aching and begging for friction.

And he seemed to somehow know, because he reached between us to take my hardness in his hand before I could even beg him to. He somehow managed to time each stroke with his thrusts.

“I’m getting close,” he told me, whispering into my ear.

“I don’t want you to pull out,” I told him, kissing the side of his neck.

He didn’t flinch or give any indication that he was worried I might bite him. Instead, a moment later he gave a little groan. He thrust into me more forcefully and his whole body went rigid. And then I felt a delicious, toe-curling warmth fill me. And it was almost like I could feel an echo of his pleasure, because the ecstasy of his climax was what sent me over the edge too.

My own orgasm came out of nowhere.

It was blinding. Devastating. Mind-blowing.

My eyes flew open with shock as wave after wave of pleasure tore through me, igniting every cell of my body, as I shot ropes of white across my stomach. I let out gasping, whimpering moans, my whole body bucking with it, my fangs dropping at last.

Michael’s eyes widened a little bit.

The reminder that I wasn’t human anymore, while he was still buried deep inside me, was probably a mood-killer for him.

Moving slowly and gently, he pulled out of me. The entire time, his gaze never left my fangs.

I turned my face away from his, not wanting to let him see how monstrous I had become. For the entire time we’d been together, Michael had made me forget what I had become. The fate I couldn’t escape.

But it all came flooding back in now, like someone had upended a bucket of water over my head.

Something went tight in my chest and shame flooded through me.

“Hey,” Michael cupped the side of my face with impossible gentleness. He turned me back to look at him. “Please don’t hide from me, Danny. You don’t ever have to hide from me.”

“I wasn’t going to bite you,” I told him. “It just happened. I’m still getting a handle on what this means for me.”

“Yeah, I know,” Michael told me, his eyes searching mine. “And I wasn’t staring because I was worried about that. I was staring because you’re so beautiful, Danny. Fangs and all.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah,” he gave me a rueful smile. “ Oh. You should know by now that I’m not going anywhere. Ever.”

And I could feel the same conviction he harbored, filtering through the bond. And for the first time, I found myself fully believing him. It was the first time in my entire life I felt like I really belonged anywhere or to anyone. But I did, didn’t I? I belonged right here. I belonged to him.

We belong together, Michael said firmly. A muscle flexed in his jaw and his breathing went a little more ragged. Danny, I’m sorry it took thinking you were dead to figure that out.

Michael, it’s—

I broke off, grimacing.

What had I been about to tell him? That it was okay? After all, was it okay that we’d apparently both been madly in love with each other and hadn’t said a word about it because we were both so terrified of losing the other?

Tough-as-nails monster-hunters my ass.

Neither of us was altogether that tough, as it turned out. Maybe more fragile than anything else. Deeply wounded and frightened.

I was saved from having to reply. Because that was the moment the front door to the abandoned farmhouse flew open. A lanky blond vampire dressed in a black velvet suit strolled in with supreme confidence, as though the place belonged to him and him alone.

Still buck naked, I scrambled to my feet in an instant.

Michael was right behind me. He, at least, had the presence of mind to reach for his gun. He pointed it at the blond vampire, even as I subtly edged myself to get between them. If anyone was going to take the hit, it would be me. I could heal from almost anything. Michael couldn’t.

I would fight to protect him.

A quiet certainty stole over me, blotting out my alarm. I would kill, if I had to. It would have hardly been the first time I had killed in order to save his life.

The blond vampire arched an eyebrow at us, his expression going from startled, to alarmed, and then settling on grim.

“Interesting. This isn’t what I expected to walk into, now is it?” His gaze raked over Michael. then fell upon me. His lips curled into a cruel, knowing smile. His too-bright blue eyes seemed to spark as they met mine. And I could somehow sense that he was immensely ancient and positively filled to the brim with dark power. His smile deepened as he studied me. “You, young one, are in very big trouble indeed.”