Third of the Winterset Coven

by T. S. Joyce

  “A few times when I was sated and thought I could handle the bloodlust enough not to kill them. I only watched them from the woods, though. I was dead. I didn’t look the same, and my skin was cold and pale. My eyes stayed black back then when I didn’t have the control yet. Vampires weren’t out to the public, so I had to hide.”

  “Why did you leave Alaska?”

  “I didn’t leave Alaska. I left the memories there.”

  “You miss the sled dogs?” she asked.

  He nipped at her neck and swayed them to the side. “Yes. Very much. I try to focus on my life here, though. Looking back isn’t good for a creature like me. Moving forward keeps me steady.”

  “I like that. A wise fish once said, ‘Just keep swimming.’”

  “Did you just quote a cartoon to a vampire?”

  “Never give up,” she said, cracking a smile as she looked up at him.

  “Oh, God, you’re doing inspirational quotes.”

  “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all.” She widened her grin as he rolled his eyes heavenward. “Whatever is meant to be, will be.”

  “I actually like that one.”

  “Yeah? Why?”

  The grin fell from his lips and his eyes turned soft as he searched hers. “I think I was supposed to be Turned that night so I could live long enough to meet you.”

  Bats fluttered this way and that in her stomach. She twisted in his embrace and hugged around his neck, rested her cheek against his.

  She didn’t need to say anything else here in the darkening night, and neither did he.

  That’s how love works. Sadey’s voice whispered those words through her mind, and Nicole let off a contented sigh. This wasn’t love yet. It couldn’t be because it was too soon.

  But it was the beginnings of something important.

  It was the beginning of her realization that monsters were capable of a deeper bond than she’d ever realized.

  It was the beginning of an acceptance that maybe…just maybe…he was right.

  Perhaps this was meant to be.

  Chapter Six

  “Where the fuck is he?” Evan snarled. He raked his long claws down the middle of the old workbench in the abandoned barn and splintered it in two. Gripping one of the halves, he jerked it from the wall and chucked it against one of the support beams holding up the rickety outbuilding.

  Aric and Garret didn’t even react to the crash. They were used to his growing rage now.

  Garret leaned over the railing of the loft above them. “It’s been two weeks, Evan. We’ve searched everywhere. Every building, every hole, every shadow. He’s not here. I think the vamp has moved on.”

  “Or he’s waiting for us to stop looking. The second we stop looking for him and let our guard down, he’ll…”

  “Say it,” Aric murmured, his eyes dark and exhausted.

  Blood trickled from his palm where he’d clenched his fists so hard his claws had dug into his skin. “I can’t. Can’t say it anymore.”

  A sigh exploded from Aric’s lungs, and he sat on a musty bale of hay, rested his elbows on his knees, and clasped his hands. The dark-haired king looked up at Evan. “I’m calling off the search.”

  “What? Why?”

  “Because Garret’s right. We’ve looked everywhere, and there’s no trace of him anywhere. He disappeared the night he failed to kill Nicole. He’s not hunting her.”

  “You know as well as I do that’s not how vampires work. Especially not killers. He won’t leave her as the one who got away.”

  “You’re obsessing about this—”

  “I’m not.”

  “You are!” Aric’s voice cracked with power. “I get it, man. If I thought Sadey was in danger, I would bring hell to earth to protect her. But there’s no threat to Nicole anymore. The killings stopped, and no one has reported feeding him. He’s not in the area anymore.”

  “Dawn and I are trying for a baby,” Garret said suddenly.

  Evan jerked his attention to the tattooed behemoth above. His anger faded like fog. “Why would she want to have a baby with you?” Evan joked. “You’ll taint the genetic line. She’s smarter than you, and prettier.”

  “Shut up, man,” Garret said through a grin. “Look, she wants a baby.” He leaned his elbows on the creaking railing. “I want one, too. A little girl maybe that looks like her.”

  “I thought you two wanted a potbellied pig,” Aric said.

  “Well, we thought about it, but she wants one to relieve her mothering instincts. And I love her. I think about her looking down at our baby, and it warms my cold, dead heart. That has to mean something, right? I don’t really want her to stifle her instincts. I want her to have everything she wants in life.”

  “I shifter vamp monster baby. This is going to be interesting.” Evan sighed and rested his back against the wall. “Congrats. You’re going to be good at this.”

  The smile fell from Garret’s lips, and he shook his head. “Forget it, man.”

  “No, I was serious,” Evan called up to him. “I always thought you’d be good at fatherhood. I know you and Torunn were trying for a baby before you were Turned. You wanted to be a dad in your human life, and you got interrupted. It’s okay to want it now that you’ve met Dawn.”

  Aric crossed his arms over his chest. “The vampire community will lose its shit. Again.”

  “What else is new?” Garret muttered. “We lost most of our members, Shane is probably going to bolt any day now, we keep having wars with other vampires, got our asses handed to us by the Bloodrunner Dragon, shacked up with two shifters and a human, and no vamp in their right mind is going to sign up for this shit-show. Might as well add a bloodsucking snow leopard shifting baby. What’s it going to hurt at this point?”

  Aric snorted. “That’s the attitude. Why the fuck not?”

  “Look,” Garret called down, “Dawn has been missing me, and it’s hard to try for a baby if I’m out hunting every night. I know Sadey’s been missing Aric, and Evan? Your lady will be okay with you coming home. I see you checking your phone all the time. You two text all night long, and why do you think that is?”

  “Because she likes my dick?” Evan teased.

  “Oh, nice,” Aric admonished him.

  “Because she’s worried about you. You’re out here hunting something that scared her down to her soul. When you leave a woman alone like that, their mind goes in a hundred different directions. I made that mistake leaving Torunn for months on end, and I don’t want that to be my story with Dawn. And I don’t want that to be your story with Nicole either. You gotta stop hunting and start living.”

  Evan snorted. “Vampires don’t live.”

  “You know what I mean.” Garret jumped over the railing and landed on the old wooden barn floor with barely a dust mote disturbed. “Let’s go home. Let’s get back to our life, and if at any point that asshole shows up in Winterset again? We’ll cross that bridge when we get there.”

  They were right. Evan knew they were right. He couldn’t keep them away from their lives anymore. Couldn’t train Nicole that being with him meant being alone so much.

  He knew they were right, but he still couldn’t help the feeling that this wasn’t over. Paranoia? Maybe, but when it came to Nicole’s safety, he was okay with being cautious.

  She’d become so important to him over the last two weeks. He couldn’t remember his life without her.

  Evan followed Garret and Aric out of the old abandoned barn and into the night.

  He looked up, and there were the stars. He felt claustrophobic on nights when he couldn’t see them hanging high above him. He didn’t have sunlight anymore, but he had the stars, and his life had become about consolation prizes. Until Nicole.

  His phone vibrated in his back pocket, and he checked the screen. There was his pretty girl. She’d sent him a picture with a silly filter on it. She had cat ears and whiskers on her face.

  This wasn’t over forever. He knew it wasn
’t, but it was over for now.

  Chapter Seven

  This was the most comfortable bed in the world. Nicole felt that with her entire being.

  The boy hadn’t skimped on Egyptian cotton sheets, the down comforter, or the pillows that were the perfect combo of soft and firm.

  She missed him.

  Nicole sighed and read the last few sentences of her book again because her mind had been drifting and not paying attention to the lesson in this chapter. It was a book on love languages, one she wanted to recommend to one of her clients who had a very different love language than her spouse. They were on the brink of a breakthrough in her sessions with them, but it was volatile at times, and one of them would be on the verge of quitting the marriage every other week. Their entire problem was communication and both feeling unimportant. And in her heart, and from what she’d learned in school and in her years as a therapist, that was completely fixable if they would take a breath and put in the work to make each other feel valued in a way each of them truly understood and absorbed.

  Nicole was hopeful this book could help them, but she wanted to read it before she endorsed it.

  She missed him.

  Curling her feet under her, Nicole checked the door for the hundredth time. It was getting late. The clock on the nightstand read 2:11 in the morning, and she needed to sleep. She was lucky in that she could push her client meetings to later in the day so she could get more hours in with Evan, but he and the boys hunted the killer at nights, and…she missed him.

  The door creaked open, and for a second, it startled her. Evan leaned on the open door frame and canted his head. The way he looked at her always gave her bats fluttering around in her chest.

  “Hey, you,” she murmured, moving to pull her glasses off her face.

  “Leave them. I love when you wear those.”

  She was struck, as she had been so many times over the last couple of weeks, by how soft he was with her. Like the pillows on the bed. The perfect combination of soft and firm. He was comfort.

  Tonight, he was wearing a dark blue V-neck shirt over dark jeans that clung to his powerful legs just right. His broad shoulders and muscular arms looked even bigger when he had his arms crossed like this, and though exhaustion swam in his blue eyes, they looked at her with appreciation, feeding her unspoken compliments.

  When he pushed off the frame and closed the door behind him, she closed her book and set it on the nightstand. 2:20 now. She hadn’t realized they’d been lost just looking at each other for minutes.

  Nicole thought he would climb over her and kiss her, like he did every night he came in from the hunt. She thought he would pull her sleep shirt over her head and take her hard and quick like he did sometimes. But he didn’t.

  Instead, he laid beside her and rested his head on her stomach, wrapped his arms around her and lay there, a stone against her body.

  Something was wrong.

  He didn’t need words right now, though. He needed some sort of comfort, and she was capable of being there for him. She was happy to. Nicole scratched her nails through his hair and traced the edge of his ear, massaged his neck gently and rubbed his back, then started all over again. And as time passed, he relaxed.

  “Garret and Dawn are going to try for a baby.”

  A happy smile took her lips. “Dawn told me.”

  “I guess I never thought that was an option. Not for someone like me.”

  “Someone like you,” she repeated softly, scratching his scalp gently.

  “A monster.”

  “I’ve seen a monster, Evan. You aren’t one.”

  “I’ve done awful things.”

  She traced his ear. “Do you know why I’m here?”

  He shook his head. “That I’ll never figure out.”

  A soft laugh worked its way up her throat. “I’m here for your future.”

  The giant man rolled over but kept his head resting in her lap. A slight frown marred his chiseled face.

  She continued before he could speak, eyes on his, fingertips tracing his sharp jawline. “I’m not here for your past. In my line of work, do you know the biggest ruiner of lives?”

  Evan pulled her hand to his lips and kissed her knuckles, shook his head.

  “Pasts. The inability to move on and letting a bad past poison the present. The future. Did you hurt people?”

  He nodded. “At times.”

  “Did you kill people?”

  “If they deserved it, and in war times. Other vampires.”

  “Then it’s your responsibility to deal with that. To grow. To go after the man you want to be, and from where I’m sitting? You’ve spent two weeks obsessively hunting a terrifying creature just to keep me safe, at the risk of your own life. You’ve brought me presents, been kind to me, and showed me time and time again that I’m important to you. You take care of my emotional needs even though it isn’t natural for you. You care about my day, how I feel, and you make it impossible to feel bad about myself. You elevate me. Make me want to do better in my career and better in my life. You try. You don’t get pissed off and leave when I do something or say something you don’t understand. You ask me why and try to understand my heart. You make me happy. You’re selfless, Evan. So, whoever you were in the past, that’s not the man I know, and it’ll never be the man I judge. Your present is important to me. Your future is important to me. That’s it.”

  “You’re going to die.”

  “What?”

  “You’re mortal. When Garret told us about trying for a baby, a million things went through my head on the way home. Dawn and Sadey? They’re mortal. They’re shifters who have an expiration date. They can’t be Turned into vampires. And I began to think about Garret watching his wife and child grow old. Of having to go on living when they’re gone…” He swallowed hard and looked away. “He asked me before if I would push a stake through his heart if something ever happens to Dawn, and I didn’t even think about it. Just said ‘yes’ and went on with my life, not bothering to understand the seriousness in his eyes when he’d asked me. And then it hit me that I’ll have to watch you die someday, and I’ll want to take that stake to my heart when you go. I understand why Garret asked me now. The last time I felt fear was when I was human, out in those woods, looking for the stars, my leg caught in that trap. I died and woke up different. Dead inside maybe, and I didn’t know what fear was anymore. That emotion stayed with my old life and didn’t carry over. But tonight, I felt it again, and I hated it.” He inhaled sharply and looked back up at her. “You called me selfless, but you’re wrong. I know what I’m going to do.”

  “What are you going to do?” she whispered, tears burning at the raw emotion in his expression.

  “I’m going to ask you to stay.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m going to give you some time. Get you addicted to me. Make you so happy that you won’t be able to see your life without me. And then I’m going to ask to Turn you because one lifetime with you isn’t enough. I already know.” He clenched his jaw hard and his eyes darkened. His voice turned gritty as he said, “It’s not nearly enough.”

  He sat up and pulled her into his lap and hugged her close. Two warm tears streamed down her cheeks as she imagined their future. She was supposed to be scared now, too, right? But though she searched deep inside of her heart, fear didn’t exist in her right now. Only happiness. Relief that he was telling her he cared that much. Hope that her life here, with this coven, would go on and on, because the last two weeks had been the happiest of her life. Which was insane because she was supposed to be living in fear of the killer. She was supposed to be scared of every shadow. Instead, she’d found a safe haven with Evan.

  “It’s okay if you judge the man you know me to be now. The one who will take your life someday.”

  Nicole slipped her arms around his neck and buried her face against his chest. “Take my life to give me a life. With you. You’re choosing me, aren’t you?”

 
He kissed the top of her head so gently and murmured, “I choose you.”

  Her smile trembled. “Keep making me happy then, Evan, and someday I’ll choose you, too.”

  Holding her tighter against him, Evan rocked her from side to side, kissed the top of her head again and again as if coveting her.

  Sadey had been wrong.

  Someday, Evan was going to take the sun from her.

  But someday, that was going to be okay.

  Chapter Eight

  Evan jerked in his sleep and opened his eyes with a gasp.

  Automatically, he looked over to make sure Nicole was okay, but she wasn’t beside him. In fact, he wasn’t even in bed. He wasn’t even in his room. He was in Shane’s.

  His coven brother was sound asleep in the dark, sleeping with his arms crossed over his chest like the ancient ones did. Only he wasn’t that ancient. He was a hundred years young. A desk lamp with a red lightbulb cast an eerie glow on the room.

  How the hell had Evan gotten in here? He’d gone to sleep holding Nicole in his own bed down the hall.

  A burning pain spread through his right hand and up his arm, and when he looked down, he was holding a wooden stake.

  Evan flinched hard and dropped it with a clatter to the ground.

  Shane didn’t stir.

  “He’s having a dream,” Aric murmured from behind him.

  Evan hunched and spun on him, startled. “What the hell is happening? Why am I in here?”

  There was trouble swirling in Aric’s black eyes. He inhaled deeply and looked around the room. “Can you feel it?”

  “Feel what?” Evan asked.

  “The darkness?”

  The stake lay right by his boot. It was Nicole’s that she kept in her purse, to feel safer when she went about her life during the day away from him. He’d never been a sleepwalker before.

  “And you aren’t now,” Aric responded to his thoughts.

  “Stay out of my head, King,” Evan growled. “You know I hate that.”

  “If I had stayed out of your head, you would’ve drove that stake through Shane’s heart, and he hasn’t betrayed us yet.”