CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR || TOBIAS
T he first thing I became aware of as I swam back to consciousness was that my head hurt. Like someone had opened the top of my skull and poured in an entire nest of live hornets, which kept stinging me over and over again.
“Rise and shine,” said a man’s voice. I blinked and my vision blurred, then refocused. Michael stood in front of me, smirking. Danny stood behind him, the expression on his face grim. “Hurts like a mother, doesn’t it?”
“What did you do to me?” I demanded, fury welling through me.
Without waiting for him to respond, I reached for my power, prepared to lay the hurt on them. The moment I touched my magic, however, it slipped away from me. Like my mental fingers were coated in butter.
It was followed by a wave of red-black pain, as though my entire body had been dipped in the River Styx. Pure suffering flowed through my veins. My vision hazed again and I let out a gasp of pain, every muscle in my body cramping up at the same time.
“Sorry about that,” Michael said, losing his smirk as he studied me. “We don’t actually want you in pain, so I’m sorry about all this. But don’t try to cast any spells or use any magic, otherwise you’ll be hating life for a while. You’re in a circle of witches’ bane—iron mixed with salt and sulfur. It suppresses your powers by causing severe pain any time you try to channel magic.” He paused, growing more serious, before he added, “It won’t kill you, but it’ll make you wish it had.”
“What is this?” I panted out, trying to make sense of what was happening. I was sitting in a wooden chair in a dimly lit cavernous room. The dark shapes of pallets and industrial-looking equipment loomed all around us. “Where am I?”
“We’re in a factory at the edge of town,” Danny told me.
“You asshole,” I swore. I wanted to punch him in his smug fucking face. I wasn’t tied down or anything, so that shouldn’t have been a problem. But when I attempted to make my body stand, nothing happened. “Why can’t I move?”
“It’s a binding sigil,” Danny replied. His expression was troubled as he watched me. “We drew one on the bottom of the chair and activated it. It’s not going to hurt you, but it will prevent you from moving. It’s easier and more comfortable than ropes.”
Where the fuck had these two learned how to do sigil magic? But I didn’t ask that. I strongly suspected I wouldn’t like the answer.
“How thoughtful of you,” I spat out instead, some of the pain subsiding at last, leaving me shuddering with relief. “Let me go.”
“We can’t do that,” Danny replied. “Not until your partner joins us.”
“Leave Bryan out of this!”
Michael scoffed, dropping down to a squat next to me so that we were at eye level. “Bryan is the whole reason we’re in this mess, warlock. See, Danny here thinks that Bryan might be different from other vampires we’ve met.” He didn’t sound like he believed that for a second. Then he leaned in conspiratorially and added, “But we know better, don’t we?”
I locked eyes with him, abruptly so enraged at the hunters that I almost felt calm. A sense of crystal clarity descended over me.
“Bryan’s not a vampire. He’s a warlock. Like me.”
“Nice try.” Danny snorted. “I saw him giving you his blood on the lawn of the house. I saw his fucking fangs.”
My stomach plummeted. “If you hurt him, I’ll kill you. I swear it.”
Michael smiled at that.
“When the vampire— Bryan —proves that he’s not a soulless monster, we’ll let both of you go,” Danny told me, sounding sincere, like he believed every word. “No more questions asked. It’s our compromise.”
“I see it a lot more black and white than Danny does,” Michael put in, tearing his gaze from me long enough to shoot Danny a rueful look. Then he turned his attention back to me. “I figure that if I run across a vampire, they’re either going to kill me or I’m going to kill them. It’s as simple as that.”
“With a charming personality like yours, who could blame them?” I ground out. I met Michael’s gaze again, dead on. “I know a spell that will dissolve every bone in your body.”
“Sounds painful,” he replied, arching an eyebrow, totally unfazed. “Have you used it before?”
“Not yet.”
Michael’s lips twitched, like he was fighting back a smile. “You know, I think I might like you. It’s Tobias, right?”
My stony expression was all the answer he was getting from me.
“Anyway,” Michael continued, when it became clear that I wasn’t going to reply, “I’ve got to say, I think that in different circumstances, we might have become friends.”
“Sorry, I don’t become friends with murderers.”
“We’re not, though,” Danny put in. “I get what you must be thinking, but I come from a long line of hunters. And our first rule has always been that we vet our targets, every single time. We make sure that whatever we hunt has killed people before.”
“And that they will kill again if given the chance,” Michael added, and it sounded so automatic that it must have been ingrained into him. “But luckily for me, that includes pretty much every vampire we’ve ever run across. They’re soulless killers, completely devoid of humanity. All of them.”
“Bryan helped save an entire city. He helped stop an evil warlock that was planning on turning the supernatural factions against each other and starting a war that would have hurt everyone. Mundane people included.”
“Well, gee, that was so nice of him,” Michael scoffed, clearly not believing me one bit. “He sounds like a fucking humanitarian. I can’t wait to get to know him better.”
“Michael,” Danny chided him. “If the vampire comes for his partner and doesn’t try to kill us, that’s proof enough that he’s not like the rest. If that happens, we’re going to let them both go. We agreed on that.”
“That’s a big fucking ‘if,’” Michael snapped, shooting Danny a glare. “But yeah, I’m aware of what I agreed to. And I keep my promises. You know that.”
I stared at them, my jaw dropping open. I was too stunned to even be properly enraged anymore. Their plan was flat-out ridiculous.
“I’m his mate. And you guys are holding me captive. He already believes you’re both extremely dangerous—”
“Because we are ,” Michael put in proudly, turning to me and grinning. “We’ve got a reputation in the hunting community for a reason.”
“You don’t get it. He’s going to try to kill you the second he sees you if it means saving my life. Literally anyone would make that decision, if you put them in his shoes. And one hundred percent of that would be his humanity driving him.”
And he would kill Michael, I realized, fresh horror flooding through me. This was exactly what Ethan had seen in his vision. This is why Bryan would kill the hunter. It wouldn’t be because he had lost control. It would be to save me from them.
And then he would probably hate himself forever because of it.
Hell, he would probably let Danny stake him, once he knew I was safe.
I couldn’t let that happen.
Looking past Michael, I locked eyes with Danny. “Look, if you want your boyfriend to live through the night, you need to let me go,” I told him, meaning every single word. “Michael is going to get himself killed.”
“You sound very sure,” Danny replied, studying me intently. “You sound very certain that he will come for you.”
“First, Danny and I aren’t romantic,” Michael put in, before I could reply. He rolled his eyes, as though the thought was ridiculous. “Danny is straight like a motherfucking arrow.”
Michael was facing me, so he didn’t see the flicker of—well, something —in Danny’s expression at his dismissiveness.
Oblivious, Michael added, “And second, I doubt the vampire is even going to show up at all. Vampires don’t love anything except themselves. And they don’t give a shit about much, except where their next meal is coming from. He definitely wouldn’t risk his own skin for you. He probably skipped town the second he saw the motel room empty.”
I stared at him, realizing he meant it whole-heartedly. “What the fuck happened to you?”
“Vampires took everything from me,” Michael spat out, sudden anger transforming his features. He shoved himself up to a standing position and began pacing. I followed his movement, not trusting him for a second. “I was a regular guy, once. I had a job, a boyfriend, and friends. I had hobbies. I was happy , before all of this.”
Behind him, Danny watched with a grave expression that quickly became agonized, as though he knew exactly where this conversation was headed. The naked pain on his face was plain to see and I hated it, because I couldn’t see it and believe they were really monsters. I couldn’t hate them properly for what they were doing. Not with Danny looking at his partner like that—like he loved Michael and would have done absolutely anything to spare him the horror of what he had gone through.
“I worked as a mechanic back then—I owned my own shop. It never did all that well or anything, but I loved it. I’m a third-generation mechanic. And Joshua, my boyfriend, was there, just hanging out in the garage with me like always, drinking a beer while he watched me work. Then they came. Two vampires. They moved so fucking fast. And they went after him first.”
Michael let out a long breath that sounded agonized and grief swept across his face.
He continued, “I couldn’t make myself believe what was happening. So I just stood there like a fucking asshole, watching them suck the life out of the man I loved. They’re monsters. All of them.”
“Michael,” Danny whispered, sounding helpless. The agony on his face for his partner’s pain was obvious and it turned my own stomach to see it.
I understood, even though I didn’t want to. I did my best to cling to my rage, but it slipped through my fingers like sand. It was useless.
Because I knew. I knew, firsthand, how awful it was to watch someone you loved hurt themselves, unable to do anything to stop it. To be unable to fix it. To make it so that they could just be okay again.
And if Danny really was straight ‘like an arrow,’ they clearly had a pretty confusing dynamic going on. Because this wasn’t the level of pain you felt for your strictly platonic hunting partner. It was pain you felt when the person you loved most in the world was talking about the thing that had hurt them bad enough to destroy them.
I hated the fact that I understood it so well.
“Danny saved me from them,” Michael went on. “But it was way too late for Joshua. He was just gone, and I hadn’t done anything at all to stop it. I had just stood there, watching those things murder him. And that’s how I learned that vampires exist. That’s how I became a hunter.”
For a very long moment, there was just silence.
“I’m sorry they did that to you,” I said, because it was true. I couldn’t even imagine what he had been through. “And I get why you hate them—”
Michael blinked, then glanced over at me, as though remembering what he was doing and where he was.
“I stopped hating them years ago,” Michael told me, his voice going flat. “Once I realized they were basically just blood-thirsty corpses that killed people for the hell of it, it wasn’t worth it to hate them anymore. Any more than I could hate a bear that had eaten a bunch of hikers or something.” He paused, “I get it now. They’re dangerous. They’re monsters. And they need to be put down. But I don’t hate them. It’s not worth the effort.”
Somehow, I doubted that.
“We’re giving Bryan the benefit of the doubt,” Danny reminded him. “He saved our lives when he didn’t have to. He could have let us die. Or killed us. He should have killed us both, actually, knowing what we were. And he didn’t.”
“Which is why we haven’t put him in the ground,” Michael agreed. He shot Danny a dark look. “Yet.”
“Listen, just let me go. I swear that Bryan doesn’t hurt people. He’s not like the vampires you guys hunt. He’s still a person.”
“Oh, he’s not like other guys, right?” Michael jeered. “That’s great. Forgive me for being a little fucking skeptical.”
I hated showing any kind of belly at all to these guys, but after what he had just told me, I felt like I didn’t have much choice. “I love him. I’m in love with him. I know you understand that.”
Michael stared at me, something going darker in his expression. A wall slammed down behind his eyes. “We’ll wait for him to attack. We’re giving him the benefit of the doubt. That’s the deal. I won’t try to kill him until he comes after me first. Or Danny.”
With a sick feeling, I realized that my words were going to be useless. I understood that Bryan felt conflicted about having a future together, but I knew he loved me. He wouldn’t just let me go, knowing I might be in danger. He would come for me. He would believe the worst of the hunters. And there was no way to warn him.
He would kill Michael. And possibly Danny, too. Or they would kill him first.
Either way, I would lose the man I loved. Because even if they didn’t kill him, he would never forgive himself. It would just reinforce everything he feared about himself. And that—knowing he had hurt people, even to save me, with his own hands and under his own control—that might be enough to break him.
And I was helpless to prevent it.