Chapter Six

Hunter felt his fangs drop down—a sensation that still took him by surprise. “What the hell?”

Meara shrugged. “Anger, hunger, lust. Even shock. Extreme emotion or reactions can make your body think it’s under attack. You’ll gain more control as you get older and more accustomed to your new life. It’s a matter of time and patience.”

“Yeah, yeah, great. Patience blah blah blah. But I was mostly talking about how you just called Alice out of the blue and pretended you were going to give her a hundred grand.” Hunter looked around the kitchen, where they’d been chatting after he’d returned from privately ripping into a few blood bags in his room. Sadly, the pots and pans held no answers.

“I pretended nothing! You spent the past two hours—”

“Ten minutes.”

“—telling me about this amazing woman you met who carries forest creatures around in hotels. She is eccentric at the very least, dangerous at the most. I must protect my new baby brother.”

Hunter studied the stunning woman who looked like a supermodel and had the strength and skills of a deadly assassin and shook his head. “It’s not your job to protect me, Meara. It’s my job—my literal job as a firefighter—to protect other people.”

“Like you protected me when I almost died,” she said quietly. “You should stop arguing with me. There are so many better ways to spend your time.”

“Anyway,” Hunter stubbornly continued. “She’s probably a weirdo. Nobody that beautiful can be entirely normal.”

Meara’s smile held a hint of fang.

“Not talking about you. Although, you’re not exactly normal either, are you? It’s just that Alice thinks she talks to ghosts.”

“Says the vampire,” Mrs. C said, bustling into the kitchen and heading straight to the oven. “Maybe I’m the weirdo, since I think I talk to vampires every night.”

“But—”

“Pie, dear? It’s apple—your favorite.”

Edge sauntered in, dressed in black jeans, black T-shirt, and black leather jacket and boots. He’d either taken the idea of vampire fashion to heart or he thought colors were beneath his notice. His glowing silver gaze snapped across the room to Meara, as always.

Hunter had spent less time with Edge than with any of the other residents of the house. The former scientist kept himself separate, somehow, even in a roomful of people. From what little Bane had told him, Edge—Dr. Sebastian Edgington, in fact, with a boatload of degrees—had been a scientist working for the government on very hush-hush classified stuff. Probably weapons, but Bane had said the details were Edge’s to tell. His shoulder-length hair was prematurely white as a result of the torture a black-ops site had put him through when he hadn’t complied with a particularly heinous objective. By the time he’d escaped the torture and imprisonment, he’d been near death. Bane had found him and Turned him, but Hunter didn’t know any of the details of that, either.

Really, his total knowledge of Edge could be summed up as this: unbeatable computer hacker, brilliant scientist, and completely and utterly in love with Meara, although neither he nor she seemed to realize it.

Meara was very deliberately not looking at Edge, toying with the slice of pie Mrs. C had put in front of her, but the barely noticeable flush of rose along her cheekbones gave her away. Hunter wasn’t exactly sure what was going on or not going on between the two of them, but the last thing he’d ever do is stick his nose into Meara’s business.

People had probably died for less.

Edge smiled at Mrs. C, who gave him an enormous slice of pie, and then seated himself at the table, still watching Meara. When he finally turned that eerie silver stare to Hunter, Edge narrowed his eyes. “What’s happening? Why are you annoying Meara?”

Hunter blew out a sigh. “I’m not trying to annoy anybody. I’m just explaining that I don’t need her to protect me.”

Edge very deliberately took a bite of pie, chewed, and swallowed before he replied. “We all protect one another. I thought you realized that. Also, Meara is an alpha female, and you are now part of her flock of ducklings. She will protect you whether you need it or not, and, believe me, you need it.”

“Duckling?” Hunter laughed. “Maybe. I feel like a wobbly newborn these days, especially when it comes to this vampire stuff.”

“Speaking of this vampire stuff, who is Alice to you?”

“How did you know about Alice? Were you eavesdropping?”

Edge raised an eyebrow and tapped his ear. “I was out in the yard.”

“Oh. Right. Vampire super senses.”

“Alice is the woman Hunter just met who got his blood flowing, so to speak,” Meara said, with a laugh like music.

“So long as it’s only his blood that’s flowing,” Edge said darkly, giving Hunter the stink eye.

“I haven’t fed on any people,” Hunter gritted out. “Not one. And I sure as hell wouldn’t start with Alice if I were going to fall off the wagon.”

“Who’s Alice?” Mrs. C paused in her puttering and gave Hunter a bright-eyed glance.

“She’s just this woman I met tonight at the hotel. She was chasing a raccoon, of all the ridiculous things. She runs an animal rescue, and—”

“And she fascinated our newest brother,” Meara put in.

Hunter pushed his plate away. “Fascinated may be too strong. I’m just interested, that’s all. She was interesting. She had this way with animals, and she, well, she was just—”

“Interesting?” Edge’s smile was the definition of smug.

Meara elbowed him. “Behave. Hunter is having a hard time acclimating, as we all did when we were baby vampires. We’re going to help by giving him a present.”

Hunter shook his head. “Baby vampire? Okay, I guess I can go along with that. But I don’t need a present. You’ve been more than generous. The Harley—”

Edge whistled. “Sweet ride, isn’t it? When you really think about the science, the physics of acceleration, gravity, and momentum—”

“Stop. Please, I beg you, stop. If I have to hear another word about physics or the stupid motorcycle, I will pin you both to the ceiling and leave you there. For days.” Meara glared at them.

With her magical power to levitate objects, this was no small threat. It had only been a few days since she’d pinned Hunter to the wall in the upstairs hallway—for an hour—for leaving the seat up on the guest toilet.

“Not in the kitchen, please,” Mrs. Cassidy said briskly. Mrs. C, all pink cheeks and white curls, served as housekeeper, cook, and surrogate mom to the vampires in the mansion, and her husband worked as handyman, chauffeur, and man-of-all-work. “And remember, Tommy and I are going to visit Molly in Paris in two weeks. You’ll be on your own for Christmas. Now, I’m off to bed. Behave, you three.”

Molly Cassidy, their daughter, was studying art restoration in Paris and working at a museum. They were wildly excited about this trip, so he’d picked guidebooks up for them as a thank-you gift for being so good to him.

They all chimed in with goodnights, and then Hunter turned to Meara and held up his hands in surrender. “Sorry. I’m sorry. No more Harley talk.”

Edge said nothing, just aimed a sardonic glance at Meara.

“Anyway,” she continued, “the gift is your friendship with Alice. Already I love her. She has the name of a storybook character. Alice Darlington. It’s too perfect. And you say she is beautiful and kind, much like myself. Who could resist her?”

“Kind?” Edge raised an eyebrow. “Kind. Like you?”

Meara narrowed her eyes, and Edge quickly returned his attention to the pie.

“I can resist,” Hunter muttered. “I’m trying very hard to resist. And you can’t give me a friendship, Meara. When she finds out you were just kidding about that money, it will be bad.”

“I never joke about money,” she told him. “I’ll have the money transferred into her account today while I sleep. Then she’ll know I’m serious when I arrive at her rescue.”

“When we arrive,” Hunter said. “I’m going with you, of course.”

“There’s no ‘of course’ about it,” she said, shrugging. “If you’re awake, you may accompany me. If not, I’ll tell you all about it when I get home.”

“That’s not fair,” he said hotly. “I can’t go until after sunset, as you keep telling me.”

“For your own good, we keep telling you,” she said, frowning in frustration. “We cannot bear the sun even a little bit for the first century after the Turn. Later, much later, if you can stop being a dunderhead for long enough to learn how to survive, you will be able to withstand brief exposure in the early morning or late afternoon. Or even a bit on the cloudiest of days, bearing in mind that the sun can break through the clouds at any time, so an afternoon excursion is not a smart move even for me, even now.”

“I know. I know.” He shoved his hair back out of his eyes. “And I have to sleep most of the daylight hours. I know. It’s just so damn frustrating.”

“It’s better than being dead,” Edge put in, staring into the distance at something only he could see.

Hunter couldn’t argue with that.

Meara shrugged, clearly dismissing the subject, and moved on to another. “Why aren’t you married? You’re delicious. Those muscles. That face. You’re an actual hero, rescuing children from burning buildings. Plus, you have that bad-boy ink. I’d think the women would be climbing all over you.”

Edge narrowed his eyes and studied Hunter as if he were deciding how to dismember him. “Yes, please, tell us about how you escaped all the women climbing over you,” he said, voice dry as dust.

“Yes. The climbing women,” Hunter said, grimacing at both the topic and the awkwardness of the situation. “They climb over me to get to the guy standing next to me. I’m firmly in the friend zone. Just a nice guy. Too nice. As in, nice guys finish last.” He snorted. “The last woman I was really interested in, my best friend wound up marrying.”

Meara leaned forward, her lovely golden eyes glowing with enthusiasm, and put her hand on his. “Do you want me to kill them for you?”

“Sure, why not?” Hunter grinned but then realized she was dead serious.

Emphasis on dead.

“Damn, you gotta be careful how you joke around vampires. No, Meara, I don’t want you to kill anybody for me! Or give them a hundred thousand dollars, either. I—”

Meara pushed back from the table and stood. “Do you hate kittens and puppies, then?”

“What? No, I don’t—”

“Raccoons?”

“Well, I’m kind of indifferent to raccoons, but—”

“Then why are you arguing with me about giving Alice money to care for them?”

“I’m not!” His head started to ache.

Meara crossed to the freezer and pulled out a carton of strawberry cheesecake ice cream, then took a spoon from a drawer and waved it at him. “Is this friend-zone problem why you got the ink? To get a little bad-boy cred?”

Hunter sighed and glanced down at his arms. “No. I just like the art. And the artist is a friend. He has a shop downtown.”

Edge tapped his finger on the table. “Speaking of friends, we need to deal with your disappearance. So far, I’ve built the cover story that your burns were not as bad as originally thought. You’ve been in a private burn facility in Colorado, but it will be two or three months before you can believably return to Savannah. Or you can just leave the city. I can create an entirely new identity for you, but that’s more involved, so I’d need a little time.”

“A little time,” Hunter said, feeling dazed.

“Six to eight, maybe?”

“Weeks?”

Edge rolled his eyes.

“Days?”

“Who do you think you’re talking to? Six to eight hours.”

“You can’t leave town,” Meara said. “You need us, at least now, while you learn how to deal with your new life. And you’re part of our family now. I would be sad if you left.”

Hunter swallowed a sudden lump in his throat. He had the feeling that Meara wasn’t quick to consider anyone part of her family, so it meant a lot to him not only that she’d feel that way, but also that she’d admit it.

Plus, he was concerned that when Meara was sad, she went hunting for tourists to eat.

“You can always use enthrallment, judiciously,” Edge pointed out. “Not too much or too often, because things get confused. But on a few select friends or colleagues, to back up your story, if you run into them.”

“I can’t, though. I’m no good at it. I…” He broke off, realizing that he’d been about to tell them that he’d tried to enthrall Alice.

“When did you try it?” Meara’s gaze sharpened. “On this Alice? Did you drink from her?”

“No!” He pushed his chair back and started pacing restlessly around the kitchen. “No, I didn’t—I wouldn’t—I… Oh, fuck. Yeah, I sort of tried, I think. To enthrall her—not to drink from her,” he hastened to clarify. “Suddenly I was trying to compel her to let me in her house, because all I could see or hear or want was the pulse in her neck.”

The confession out, Hunter stood, head bowed, waiting for someone to banish him from the house and their lives forever. Or at the very least to kick his ass.

Instead, Meara laughed. “You’re very precocious for being such a new baby vampire. It took me months to work up the nerve to snack on the coachman.”

Edge paused, his fork midway between his slice of pie and his mouth. “What happened? Did you kill him?”

“He would have died a happy man,” she purred, aiming a wicked smile at the scientist, who dropped his fork.

Hunter almost smiled at the red flush that rose on Edge’s cheekbones, but he was too sunk in misery for the amusement to last long. “I’m doomed, aren’t I? I’m going to hell. The first woman I’ve been interested in…that way…for more than a year, and mostly I just wanted to get my fangs in her neck.”

“What did you mean, you ‘sort of tried’ to enthrall her?” Edge leaned back in his chair and folded his arms over his chest. “Either you tried or you didn’t. And I’m guessing it didn’t work, anyway?”

“I tried,” Hunter muttered. “It seemed to work for a few seconds, but then she yelled at me to get off her property or she’d call 911 on me. Some irony there, since I used to be the one who responded to emergency calls, not the one who caused beautiful women to make them.”

“She’s beautiful?” Meara’s eyes glowed hot. “Even better. I cannot wait to meet your Alice.”

“She’s not my Alice.”

“Listen, some people are just resistant to enthrallment,” Edge said, shrugging. “Ryan was, too, but then of course we found out she’s Nephilim.”

“There can’t be another Nephilim we just happen to discover right here in Savannah after not encountering one for hundreds of years,” Meara scoffed, but then she bit her lip and glanced at Hunter. “This Alice doesn’t glow, does she?”

“Not a bit.”

“Like I said, some people, even ordinary humans, are resistant to enthrallment,” Edge said. “We have to kill them.”

A wave of white-hot rage seared through Hunter like a flash fire—sudden, intense, and definitely flammable—and he glared at Edge through a red haze. If looks from a vampire could kill, Edge would be a blackened smudge on the immaculately clean tile floor. “You’re not killing Alice. If you even harm a single hair on her head—”

Edge rolled his eyes. “Yeah, yeah, I get it. Doom, despair, dire threats. I’ve been living with Bane for years. You think you could scare me, human?”

“I’m not human,” Hunter growled, but then he thought of what Edge had said a moment before. “But neither is Alice—at least not an ‘ordinary’ human. She thinks she sees ghosts.”

“Yeah, I heard you say that before I walked in. But maybe she does see ghosts.”

“But—”

“Bane and I can see them, too,” Meara said. “One of the side benefits—curses?—of our Turn. But since she’s a human, she must be a ghost whisperer.”

Hunter blinked. As happened so often lately, the conversation was taking a weird turn. “Ghost whisperer?”

Edge nodded. “I’ve actually heard of those. A few even advertise on the dark web. ‘Will find your grandmother’s will’ kind of thing. Might be helpful.”

Meara licked her spoon, staring at Edge. “You lost your grandmother’s will?”

Edge, eyes focused on her mouth, didn’t seem to be able to find the words to answer.

“I think he means being a ghost whisperer. And quit playing with the poor scientist, Meara.” Hunter shook his head. “Anyway, I don’t think it’s like that for Alice. She told me, when she thought I was a ghost—”

“When she thought you were a ghost?” Edge laughed. “She must not be very good at it.”

But Meara nodded, a thoughtful expression on her face. “No, I can see that. The auras must be similar. What did she say?”

“She said she only took appointments between ten and two on Wednesdays,” Hunter said flatly. “And she was talking about appointments with the ghosts, not with poor suckers willing to pay big money to talk to dear, departed Aunt Ethel or whatever.”

“I’ve only met a couple of ghost whisperers in all these years,” Meara said slowly, still eating ice cream. “They don’t usually like vampires, for some reason. And we can’t control ghosts. They mostly ignore us. One of the whisperers, a man, used his power over ghosts to force them to attack me. Very unpleasant.”

Edge stood up so fast he knocked over his chair, his eyes silver fire. “What happened? Where do I find this man?”

Meara widened her eyes. “I killed him, of course. It was self-defense. He would have killed me if I hadn’t. After he was dead, the ghosts dispersed.”

“I’m not killing Alice,” Hunter repeated, somewhat desperately, wondering how much danger he’d put her in just by having this conversation.

“Of course you’re not,” Meara soothed. “We’ll see what we see tomorrow. If there’s any killing to be done, I’ll handle it.”

“Let me rephrase this,” Hunter growled, biting off every word. “Nobody is killing Alice. Not now, not ever. Do you understand?”

A shimmer of energy formed a large oval shape just in front of the refrigerator, and Hunter had a moment to think that the contrast of ancient vampire magic forming a portal next to a brand new, expensive Sub Zero was every bit as weird as it sounded before Bane and Ryan stepped out, holding hands and laughing.

“That’s weird as hell,” Edge muttered.

Hunter wondered if the scientist could read minds. “The portal and the fridge?”

“What? No, the sight of Bane laughing.”

“Because love and happiness make an enormous difference in the world, and all the scientific apparatus in the world will never be able to measure that,” Meara said, ice edging her words.

“What’s funny?” Hunter asked the newcomers, to change the subject from the weird tension between Meara and Edge and, more important, the topic of killing Alice.

Bane aimed his glowing blue gaze at Ryan, who was still laughing. “My beloved has decided that we need to host a new form of recreation here at, as she insists on calling it, Castle Dracula.”

Ryan grinned up at him. “I only say that to you, not where anybody could hear me.”

“We have recreation,” Edge objected. “Just a few weeks ago we killed all those necromancers and zombies.”

“Plus you bought us the VR goggles,” Meara added.

Ryan shook her head, groaning. “Vampires are weird. Killing zombies and necromancers is not recreation.”

“It is if you do it right,” Bane said, showing a hint of fang, but his eyes were laughing.

Hunter agreed with the doctor about vampires being weird but knew enough not to say it, especially now that he was one. “So, what is this new recreation?”

Ryan beamed at him. “We’re going to have our first monthly supernatural volleyball tournament!”