CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE || THIERRY
“ Y ou brought him ?” Reed demanded, striding up to us along the idyllic street that looked like something out of one of the Hallmark holiday movies Simone always bullied me into watching each year—thousands of years old and she was still a sucker for happy endings.
His expression was wary, but memories—dozens of them, rapid-fire—swept through the bond.
Reed and Jeremy hiding in the forest as boys.
Jeremy as a teenager, confessing about his growing feelings for Ian.
Reed, a bit older, telling him to stop being a jerk.
Most recently: Reed holding Jeremy as he broke down at Ian’s funeral.
Sorry, Jeremy whispered. I didn’t mean to show you all of that.
No harm done, I replied.
But it was harder to hate Reed when his voice dropped to a harsh whisper and he gave me a dark look. “This place is swarming with vampires now!”
Jeremy blinked. “There are other vampires here?”
Reed glanced around, perhaps to make sure none of the handful of people nearby, browsing the too-cute shops and surprisingly upscale restaurants in Crescent Springs were paying attention to us.
Apparently satisfied, he said, “His name’s Aiden.
He’s Lindsey’s friend. She has him at the ski lodge, but she’s been inviting him to the commune, if you can believe that. His human mate is with him.”
A flash of anger rippled through the bond an instant before the thought followed. I had just enough time to bristle with indignation—before realizing Jeremy’s anger wasn’t for me but for Reed and the wolves’ knee-jerk distrust.
Which was silly of him. The pack shouldn’t trust an unknown vampire they’d just met.
They don’t understand yet, Jeremy said silently. They were raised with the same lies I was. It’ll take time.
I nodded.
Reed seemed to catch the silent communication, because he frowned. “You look different,” he said softly, searching Jeremy’s gaze. He hesitated. “More like you used to.”
“If Aiden is Lindsey’s friend, he’s welcome with us,” Jeremy said flatly, ignoring the opening Reed had given him. He took my hand, the small act of possessiveness leaving me melty and warm in ways it had no business doing. “Vampires aren’t what we thought.”
Reed’s eyes widened. His gaze dropped to our joined hands, then back up. “What happened to you?” he breathed. Suspicion flickered in his eyes, but obvious relief was there too. “Are you back?”
That single word did a lot of work—but I knew Jeremy understood. Reed was saying he saw his old friend again: the man he’d been before Ian’s death, before heartbreak had reshaped him into someone unrecognizable.
Jeremy didn’t answer, but I knew he caught the meaning. He squeezed my hand, met Reed’s eyes, and said, “We ought to get this over with. We need to see what we’re dealing with. The king is sending backup, and we need to let him know what to expect.”
“Why?” Reed asked, genuinely puzzled.
A spark of anger was all I needed to give him my iciest smile. “Because Nathaniel Bailey doesn’t like to lose a single one of his people. Ever. And if we tell him how bad it is, he’ll send more than he might have otherwise. That’s why.”
Reed stared. “You sound offended.”
I narrowed my eyes. “Oh, do I?”
Jeremy sighed, giving me a steady look that calmed me down immediately. Be nice to him, love. He doesn’t know any better yet. We’ll have to prove it to all of them—that vampires are actually people. My dad was a fucking asshole, and my grandfather was even worse.
I scowled, but Jeremy had defused any trace of annoyance, so it was mostly just a habit.
“Let’s go see the body,” Jeremy said aloud.
He meant the middle-aged hiker already killed by whatever had crawled out of the thin spaces between worlds. The reminder sent a thrill of unease down my spine. Dealing with murderous vampires? Nothing to it. Dealing with something like I’d seen in the dream vision with Jeremy? Horrifying.
The thought of Jeremy facing one of those creatures without me protecting him?
Over my undead body.
Reed’s expression turned grim.
“Yeah, you’re right.” He gestured toward a two-story stone building on the corner.
Jeremy had called it the “everything building” on the way in.
It housed the police station, fire department, town council, clinic, and post office—essentially everything that kept Crescent Springs running, all under one roof. “Lead the way.”
“I always do,” Jeremy muttered under his breath, low enough that even with Reed’s wolf hearing, I was certain that only I caught it.
* * *
“I never get used to this part,” Reed said, staring down at the gurney. The white sheet was stained red in patches.
“You boys sure you need to see this?” Dr. Harriet Langley narrowed her dark eyes, frowning.
Judging by her close-cropped silver hair and the lines in her dark skin, she had to be at least in her seventies.
But her presence was formidable, with a no-nonsense air that made me immediately like her.
“The body’s in rough shape. You’ll have a lot of work ahead, cleaning up the forest and making it look like nothing strange happened. ”
Reed scowled at the sheet, as if trying to muster up the nerve to see what was under it.
“Hattie—”
“When we are standing in this room, I am Dr. Langley to you.”
Reed’s expression turned sheepish. “Yes, ma’am. Dr. Langley, you already know why we need to see it. Stop trying to protect us.”
She sighed, shaking her head. Resigned, she said, “I suppose you do need to see what you’re up against, if you’re going to have any hope of stopping this before it happens again. But don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
Then she pulled the sheet back.
I looked down—and then away just as quickly.
It was bad.
As personal attendant to the vampire king of Seattle—a role that often meant taking on the less pleasant tasks Nathaniel hadn’t wanted to foist onto Pierce—I was used to seeing bodies.
I was used to seeing the occasional aftermath of sadistic vampires who murdered humans for sport.
I was even used to perfectly ordinary crime scenes—I sometimes had to rule out a vampire attack, after all.
And with eight centuries under my belt, I’d lived through plagues, famines, depressions, and wars.
I’d seen my fair share of corpses and brutality.
Yet it had been a long time since I’d seen anything like this .
The hiker hadn’t just been mauled. He had been… taken apart. Revulsion and sympathy crashed through me. I only hoped the shock had killed him quickly.
But it was clear, even from that one glance, that whatever had done this had enjoyed it.
“I told you,” Dr. Langley said grimly. “It goes without saying, but we cannot let the rest of the folks here know. They’d panic.”
“Maybe they ought to,” I muttered, scowling at the wall. I couldn’t look at the body any longer.
Her sharp eyes followed me. “An old creature like you—I figured you’d have the strongest stomach in the room.”
“Extreme suffering never gets easier,” I ground out, hardly surprised she’d pegged me so easily. Human though she was, Dr. Langley seemed to miss very little.
She nodded. “I suppose that’s true. It gets keener when you’re older, doesn’t it? You understand more about life—and what it means to rob someone else of it.”
Nodding, I forced myself to look again. She was right. I had to understand what had happened to this poor soul.
Jeremy’s eyes were filled with the same horror when they met mine, a few moments later.
Are you okay? He asked silently.
I shook my head, subtly enough that the others didn’t notice.
Me too, he replied. I felt his concern wrap around me like a warm embrace, startling me all over again. Someone cared. Someone noticed it when I wasn’t okay. It was a new feeling—but not a bad one.
Let’s protect the town, shall we?
Jeremy smiled, and I returned it.
See? That’s what I’m talking about. My vampire, the goddamn hero. Always and forever.
You forgot to mention how good I look in velvet.
You look better out of it, darling.
But an instant later, when he looked down again, the smile died. It was like the air had been knocked out of us both.
Because all at once, Jeremy recognized the wounds.
This hiker had been murdered by the same creature we’d seen in the dreamscape.
They were the same wounds Ian had borne when Jeremy found him.
* * *
The commune was a collection of log cabins set on a ridge, with an uneven dirt path leading down the side of a fifty-foot drop.
At the base of the cliff sat a meeting area: a circle of logs arranged around a massive fire pit.
It wouldn’t have looked out of place in a movie about witches dancing around a bonfire—or an eighties slasher where camp counselors were picked off one by one.
The sinking feeling I had when Jeremy led me to one of the logs and asked me to sit killed any impulse to make a remark about the moss-covered monstrosity ruining my sapphire-blue velvet suit.
Truthfully, I no longer cared. My only concern was my entirely too-mortal wolf and the rest of his pack, all of them mortal—outrageously fragile and breakable.
They sat nearby, plotting ways to kill a monster that had no business existing in our reality.
A monster that had already caused too much suffering and would cause more unless it was stopped.
It was still mid-afternoon, with hours to go before the wolves could transform and hunt the creature responsible for the hiker’s death.
The same creature that had taken Ian’s life and shattered Jeremy.
I had never been so grateful for daylight, even if it was weak, gray, and filtered through layers of steel-colored clouds that promised—but never quite delivered—a torrent of rain.
The pack—far smaller than I liked—was all gathered.