Chapter Four

Hunter raced his Harley down the road that bordered the Wilmington River, his vampire senses wide open to the sounds and scents of a cool December night. It was maybe high forties, with a sharp breeze from the river that made it even colder. He didn’t feel the cold the way he used to, though.

He didn’t feel hardly anything in the same way he had before.

Before he’d died. Before he’d agreed to be Turned into a vampire.

Before his Turn had gone wrong and caused him so much pain.

These days, he didn’t feel much of anything, except thirst and exhaustion and anger.

Anger at himself for agreeing to become a vampire. Maybe he should have died. Maybe it had been God’s plan.

But he wasn’t damned or broken or cursed. He was just a vampire. None of the worst myths seemed to be true. He’d even gone into his old neighborhood church one night, just to see if he’d burst into flames or if a lightning bolt would strike him dead.

Instead, he’d sat in the front pew, alone in the light of the candles he’d lit, feeling oddly comforted. He’d thanked God for this second life and the chance to continue to do good in the world, and then he’d gone back to the mansion and ripped into a few more bags of blood.

No irony there, right?

He slowed his bike just enough to take the turn without flipping and roared up the driveway to the mansion, still finding it hard to believe that he lived there.

In a mansion.

The house was more than a century old. It was a stately manor home that overlooked the river and was big enough for dozens of vampires to live there, although in fact only five did.

Well, five vampires, two staff members, one woolly mammoth they called a dog, and an angel.

An actual, honest-to-heaven angel. Half angel, at least. Dr. Ryan St. Cloud, the angel, had tried to explain how she’d found out she was Nephilim—half angel and half human—but his attention had wandered when he’d realized that the incredibly ambrosia-like scent he was smelling was probably her angel blood. That’s when Bane, the owner of the mansion and Ryan’s soon-to-be husband, had strode into the room with a glare promising Hunter’s impending death.

Since Bane was the three-hundred-year-old master vampire who’d Turned Hunter in the first place, it probably would have made him feel bad to kill his newest family member, so Hunter had speedily excused himself from the situation and gone to the basement freezer for more bags of blood.

Hunter scowled as he braked, sensing a theme.

Thirst? Bags of blood.

Stress? Bags of blood.

Impending death? Bags of blood.

Realizing you’re seconds away from attacking a beautiful woman, despite the fact that she’s holding a raccoon in her arms? Bags of blood.

He bleakly wondered if he’d ever be able to have sex again without waking up to discover that he’d ripped his partner’s throat out while climaxing. Or if he’d have to take bags of blood on all dates. Then he wondered if this was the kind of thing he felt comfortable asking Bane or Luke.

Hell, no.

“Allo! Back so soon?” Meara blinked into existence in front of him, balanced on his handlebars.

He almost crashed the bike.

“Damn it, Meara, I’ve asked you to quit doing that!”

She just laughed and gracefully flipped backward off the bike and onto the lawn. “Don’t be so boring. I get enough ‘Meara, don’t do that, Meara, don’t do this, Meara, don’t eat the tourists’ from my brother to last me another three centuries. I don’t need it from you, too, little one.”

She meant “little one” in terms of their relative ages. Although she looked maybe twenty-five, Bane’s sister had been a vampire for three hundred years. The two of them had been Turned at the same time. Something about a wild night at an English village festival, from what he’d been able to pick up. He needed to ask for the full story sometime. Although he had no idea the etiquette involved—was it bad manners to ask another vampire how they’d been Turned?

“Fine, just stop using your invisibility powers on me like a jump scare. I’m having a hard enough time figuring this all out.” He heard the snappishness in his voice and rolled his eyes at himself. “Sorry. Don’t mean to sound like a whiner. It’s been a difficult night. And yes, I’d have to agree with Bane that you shouldn’t eat the tourists.”

The thing was, he wasn’t sure whether or not she’d been kidding about that. Meara Delacourt was the kind of vampire you’d expect to meet if you believed in the movie-star version of vampires. Or if vampires all looked like Norwegian supermodels.

She was tall and slender, loved to wear designer clothes and expensive jewelry that complemented her golden hair and eyes, and she had a wicked sense of humor. In other words, if she’d decided to munch on a few tourists, they’d probably consider it to be their privilege. She was so beautiful that he’d been tongue-tied and completely unable to form words the first time he’d met her, a few years back in a nightclub.

But then one night she’d been caught out by the dawn and nearly died. Purely by chance, he’d been on his way home from work and seen a woman collapse onto the road in front of his car, smoke rising from her skin, and he’d rescued her and learned about vampires all at the same time. For some reason he still didn’t quite understand, neither she nor Bane had shown any inclination to either kill him or enthrall him to safeguard their secrets. Instead, they’d repaid him with their trust.

Vampires were definitely not about to come out of the coffin, so to speak, and announce their existence to the world. Protecting their secret was paramount. But Hunter had told them he would keep their confidences, and Meara and Bane had believed him.

To this day, Hunter didn’t know if Bane or Meara had spied on him or followed up in any way to be sure he wasn’t spilling the bloodsucking beans, but he and Bane had met for a semi-regular chess game ever since.

Now it was Hunter’s secret to protect, too.

His eyes widened as the realization punched him in the gut—he’d told Alice Darlington that he was a vampire.

That was about as far from protecting a secret as you could get.

Son of a bitch.

“You look distraught, little brother. What’s wrong? Perhaps you ate a few tourists yourself?” Meara’s intelligent golden gaze fixed on his face. “You don’t have to figure this out alone. When you and Luke tire of each other’s company, come find me.”

“You were unhappy that Bane Turned me,” he said, not in accusation but in simple fact. Unhappy was an understatement, though. She’d been furious. He’d heard a lot of their conversation, even when he’d been trapped in unconsciousness. “The last thing I wanted to do was bother you with my problems.”

She waved one hand in dismissal. “My brother takes too many chances. Turning a human to vampire is dangerous to the one doing the Turning. I don’t want to lose him, just as I don’t want to lose you, now that you’re part of our family. But you’re changing the subject. Why do you look so distressed?”

“There was this woman…” he began, reluctance fighting every word. But before he could go on, the sound of Bane’s bellow roared across the yard from the back of the house.

“Ryan! Not again!”

Hunter threw a questioning look at Meara, who started to laugh. “Our angel is trying to learn to fly.”

“What? How?”

“She keeps jumping off the roof.”

A loud, high-pitched, and decidedly female shriek rang out next, and Meara raced around the house, Hunter hot on her heels. By the time they arrived, Ryan was floating in midair, halfway between the roof of the three-story manor and the grass, laughing wildly.

Bane, almost six and a half feet of deadly vampire, levitated in the air next to her and held his hands out, palms up, clearly using his powers to keep her from smashing to the ground.

And he wasn’t laughing.

Not even a little.

“I fail to understand why you find your own impending death so funny,” Bane said through teeth gritted so hard that his fangs might be in danger of breaking.

Ryan, still laughing, raised her own hands and flicked her fingers at Bane. Twin bolts of pure white light shot out from her hands and arrowed toward Bane, who waited until the last moment and then performed a flying somersault to avoid them. The light beams struck the topmost branches of one of the graceful old southern live oaks on the gently sloping lawn and sheared the branches clear off the tree.

Bane narrowed his eyes and moved his own fingers, and Ryan suddenly plunged toward the ground, only to catch herself with a cushion of light just before she landed, bouncing gently off it as though it were some kind of celestial trampoline.

“You are the most infuriating woman I have ever met,” Bane said, floating down to the ground. “Were you planning to slice off any of my limbs with that light?”

Ryan ran over and threw her arms around him. “Of course not. I like your limbs just where they are. The beams would have bounced off you, just like I bounced off the light, instead of smashing into the ground. Nephilim, remember? You have to quit treating me like I’m fragile.”

“You’re half human,” Meara drawled, stalking toward the pair. “You are fragile.”

“Well, compared to you, an armored tank is fragile,” Ryan said, still grinning. She was shorter than Meara, maybe five foot six, and curvier, too. Her long, dark hair, blue eyes, and ready smile combined to make her a lovely woman; her intelligence and warmth made her one of the kindest and most approachable people Hunter had ever met. She’d even put her own life at risk in order to help him when she’d thought Bane had abducted him from her care in the hospital for some evil purpose.

Then she’d found out about vampires and fallen in love with Bane, who, frankly, worshipped the ground she walked on—or, in this case, floated over.

Meara had confided in Hunter that the manor had been a dreary and often angry place to live before Ryan moved in. Only a few short weeks later, the entire atmosphere in the home had lightened.

“Love,” Meara had said, with one of her characteristically French shrugs. “It makes so many things better.”

“Hunter!” Ryan beckoned him to come closer. “How are you? I’m sorry I missed you before you went out. I had to work late at the clinic.”

Ryan, a doctor with a special gift of healing, thanks to her angel father, had resigned from Savannah General to work full-time at the Delacourt Free Clinic. She was its new director and was already making improvements, according to Meara, who funded the entire endeavor.

Bane and Meara were serious multimillionaires, the nearest Hunter could figure, which was just another surreal thing about his new life. He’d been surviving just fine on his firefighter’s salary before. Now he lived in a mansion with rich vampires and an angel.

It was like he’d died and woken up in the Twilight Zone. No wonder Alice had thought he was a ghost. The thought of her—the memory of how she’d felt in his arms—short-circuited his brain for a moment.

Alice.

He realized everybody was staring at him. Right. Ryan had asked how he was.

“I’m fine,” he told Ryan. “I was out having vampire lessons with Luke.”

She studied him with perceptive blue eyes. “And something else happened, too?”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t know. Something is different about you. You’ve been so downcast these past few days, we were worried about you.” She glanced up at Bane, who’d walked up and put his arm around her waist, pulling her closer to him.

“I wasn’t worried about you, not being a girl,” Bane said drily.

Meara exploded into movement and threw a lightning-fast kick at Bane’s head, stopping with perfect precision when her booted foot was an inch from her brother’s face. “Yes, we girls are so emotional.”

Bane calmly moved her foot aside with two fingers. “Exactly. Nice form, though.”

Meara laughed and lowered her leg and then put an arm around Hunter’s shoulders. “Come, little brother. Tell us about your night. And the woman you mentioned.”

A sharp pain in his gut reminded him of the reason he’d raced back. “Okay, sure. But I, ah—”

“Yes, of course. First, we will get you a snack. Then, we will have pie and discuss all manner of things, including why you smell like a wild animal.” Meara sniffed delicately, wrinkling her perfect nose. “This is sure to be an excellent story.”

He laughed. “Well, actually, there was this raccoon named Marigold…”