Chapter 2
Hawke remained in the office for a good five minutes after the reporter left.
It took him that long to repress the urge to follow her.
Every cell in his body screamed at him to go after the persistent woman.
And not for reasons that made any particular kind of sense.
He’d never had such a strong reaction to a human before.
A woman.
It was fucking unsettling.
From the moment she’d walked in, fiery red hair curling in crazy corkscrews all over her head—in direct contrast to the tame appearance of her business attire—it was like someone had flicked a switch inside of him.
She wasn’t a beauty in the normal sense of the word.
Her gray eyes were too bright and set a bit too far apart beneath dark brows that were refreshingly natural, not plucked into something that resembled the slash of a sharpie marker.
Her nose had exactly three freckles across the top, easily noticeable against the fairness of her skin, and her bottom lip was slightly fuller than the upper.
It made him want to bite it.
And when she’d smiled, he’d noticed her two front teeth were longer than the rest, giving her a slight resemblance to a rabbit.
She was also deaf, or very nearly so.
Most people wouldn’t have noticed. She must have worked hard to be able to speak as well as she did, cultivating her words and her voice, which only showed him how self-conscious she was that she was different.
Hawke pushed that aside. Her hearing or loss of had nothing to do with the wave of protectiveness that had washed over him, so strong he’d been momentarily lightheaded.
No, it wasn’t a wave. It was more like a tsunami.
But her perceived weakness wasn’t what drew Hawke to her. He’d met other women who had what they would consider a disability. Human women who had enthusiastically offered him their vein. None had brought out the reaction in him that Everly did.
No, it was something else. Something that brought out a side of him he’d never meant for her to see.
Which was why, against his better judgment, he’d told her to come back the following night.
He would be better prepared tomorrow and would be able to control his baser urges.
Or, perhaps it would be better to have Kohl or Andrew talk to the reporter and just avoid seeing her again altogether.
He was too distracted by her. But it was good he’d told her to come back.
That woman was up to something, and it wasn’t a story for her little newspaper.
No matter how sincere her words, the physical reactions of her body had given her away.
To her credit, she’d quickly managed to control them, but it hadn’t been quite fast enough.
Her thoughts, however, gave nothing away, because—astoundingly—he couldn’t read them. Which only added to his curiosity.
Everly Taylor was a bit of a mystery. One he needed to solve before something happened that put the coven in danger. And he would start by checking her credentials at the newspaper.
The door opened, and Kohl poked his head in. “Everything okay?”
Hawke stared at his friend, unsure how to respond to that question.
Kohl stepped inside and closed the door, his brows lowered with concern. “What’s going on?”
“I don’t know.” Feeling antsy under his friend’s scrutiny, Hawke walked around the desk and sat down.
“What did that woman want? Everly? Is that her name?”
“Yes. Everly Taylor. She claims to be a writer at Capital Press.”
“Isn’t she?”
Rubbing the scruff on his face with both hands, Hawke sighed. “I don’t know. I can’t read her. I’ll look her up and see what I can find out.”
Kohl sank down into one of the chairs opposite him. “How is that possible? I thought I was the only one you couldn’t read.”
“Until now, apparently.” Hawke’s mind spun, traveling back over hundreds of years in minutes, trying to recall any other time this had happened. But the truth was, it never had. Except for Kohl.
He’d always thought it was because his friend was a hybrid—half vampire, half dragon.
But perhaps it was something else. It had to be.
Kohl was the only one of his kind. Vampire-dragon matings were forbidden by both species.
Kohl’s birth had resulted in his dragon mother being banned from her Thunder and his vampire father abandoning them both.
If it hadn’t been for this coven of misfits that had taken them in, neither one of them would have survived.
There was no way in hell there could be two like Kohl. It had to be something else.
“Is she a shifter?” Kohl was shaking his head before Hawke had a chance to answer the question. “Nah. She can’t be. We would’ve known.”
“She certainly didn’t smell like any kind of wolf or other shifter local to the area.
” And Hawke had gotten close enough to get a really good whiff.
Everly had smelled good enough to eat, that was for sure.
Like sun-soaked peaches. Far from any kind of furry alternate personality.
“In any case, I wiped her memory.” He paused. “And told her to come back tomorrow.”
“Why?”
Another question he didn’t know how to answer. “I don’t know.”
Kohl was silent for a moment. He started to get up, then changed his mind and sat back down. Lines of worry creased his forehead as he said, “If you couldn’t read her thoughts, how do you know you could influence them?”
The thought had crossed Hawke’s mind, too. He pushed his hair back out of his face. “I don’t. Not for sure. But she did exactly as I suggested when she left, so hopefully that won’t be an issue.”
“But you don’t know for sure.”
Hawke stood. He was tired of this conversation. “No. I don’t know for sure.”
The following afternoon, after a day of tossing and turning restlessly for hours on end until he finally gave up, Hawke hit the weight room for a few hours.
Now he stood in his room, freshly showered and wearing nothing but a pair of black slacks and dress shoes.
He stared at the five pastel-colored shirts on his bed, all button down, all long-sleeved.
Fortuitously, the humidity level in the caverns was just enough to keep things wrinkle-free.
Picking up the pink and the purple, he turned around and held them under his chin one at a time, checking out his choices in the small mirror above his old chest of drawers.
He’d had the ugly chunk of wood for two hundred years, but it was still in pretty good shape.
Same with his bed, though he had updated the mattress over the years.
He chose purple. As he slid the shirt off its hanger and shoved his arms through the sleeves, he ignored the little voice inside his head.
The one that was laughing at him for worrying over his wardrobe like a female.
It’s not like he needed to go out of his way to impress the reporter.
For one thing, he rarely needed to try to impress any woman.
Most vampires didn’t. And, at the risk of thinking way too much of himself, Hawke had always known he had a little something extra in the charisma department without even trying.
To the point that he rarely showed his face in the club above ground once things really got going.
It made for one too many confrontations with the other males in his coven when their human dinner guests caught an eyeful of Hawke and started second-guessing their choice of a date.
Secondly, it’s wasn’t like she was going to be sticking around very long.
His sole purpose in having her come back again tonight was to do whatever he had to do to find out the real reason she was nosing around.
Because he was about two hundred percent positive it wasn’t for some little story about local businesses.
Hawke had made a few calls earlier that day, and her credentials checked out.
Like any coven worth its salt, he and his brethren kept a finger on the pulse of everything that happened in the city they chose to make their home, including the entire area around it.
They also had contacts throughout the country, mostly in other covens and even some shifter packs.
The supernatural world may fight amongst themselves, but they worked together to stay under the radar and to keep things from turning into another, much bloodier, version of the Salem Witch hunts.
For the truth of the matter was, even though vampires and shifters were the superior species, humans far outnumbered them.
If the overpopulated race ever decided to band together to take out the creatures roaming the night and threatening their children, the supernatural would lose. Eventually.
It was already beginning with Parasupe, the agency created by the human government here in Texas to control “rogue” vampires and other creatures.
Only their version of “rogue” was anyone they ran across who wasn’t human.
Whispers of vampires and shifters disappearing under strange circumstances had been coming to his ears for a few years now.
Nothing too close to home. Yet. But it was only a matter of time according to the info Kohl’s female had brought them.
And she would know. She used to work there, after all.
And she was going to be one of the key players in taking Parasupe down.
Checking his appearance one last time, Hawke left his room and made his way through the underground caverns his coven called home.
His path lit by subtle lighting the vampires had installed when the technology became available—because even they couldn’t see in such complete and utter darkness; he forced himself not to appear overeager as he walked through the narrow tunnels.
Water dripped in shiny rivulets down the smooth limestone, catching the light.
Over the years, it would reshape the caverns as it had since the creation of the earth.
But for now, it just added much needed moisture to the air.