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MERCER

Mercer had framed it like he was partnering with Anthony—painted himself as having an agency he wasn’t quite sure he possessed. He felt like a small cog in a machine he couldn’t see the whole of. But if he knew anything, it was the powerlessness of watching your child suffer when they should have been thriving, of doing everything he could as a parent and still coming up short. If there was someone out there with the power and means to help their vampiric kid live a normal, full life—perhaps even one in the sun, going to school and not fearing the touch of holy silver or the reaction of garlic—and more vampires through them, he wanted to do his part in that.

But, goddamn, this was harder than he’d expected.

The odd little burst of joy that Rahil—of all people; he couldn’t quite fathom it yet—granted him was slowly fading into frustration. He could feel his brow beginning to pinch and the tightness in his jaw growing uncomfortable. Each time he rubbed unconsciously at his temples, he had to pause to check himself for an oncoming migraine. Something was certainly growing behind his eyes.

Finally, Mercer sighed and pulled out his phone.

Leah’s cords slid free of Rahil and retreated into the trap’s containment unit mounted in the central crook of the shed’s vaulted ceiling. Rahil rolled his wrists and stretched his arms behind his head, at which point Mercer forced himself to stop watching. He didn’t need any more fodder for his mind to latch to in dark, private spaces where he wasn’t himself and his shame couldn’t quite reach. And after allowing the vampire to flirt so outrageously for so long, he also couldn’t support any subconscious beliefs that there might be hope yet for the two of them.

Mercer focused instead on putting back the various forms of silver he’d been experimenting with.

“No luck yet?” Rahil asked.

Merc shook his head. “Nothing I’m doing to the silver is moving it toward the holy version’s result without creating the holy version in full.”

Rahil looked like he understood half of that explanation at best, but he gave an encouraging grin. “My skin looks better in gold anyway.”

Mercer froze. “Gold, huh?” He headed across the shed to shift through his ornamentation drawers, retrieving a small stick of gleaming yellow metal. Just the feel of it in his fingers already seemed right. “It’s a low karat option, but it’s all I have at the moment.”

Rahil held out both wrists expectantly. “Hurt me, daddy.”

Mercer wasn’t sure whether to laugh or cry. Or die, perhaps. What his mouth said was, “Not today,” followed by, “Your skin is giving me a headache.”

Rahil lifted a brow with a smirk.

“Not like that,” Mercer clarified, scowling at him. The expression only made his face hurt more. He sighed again instead and found himself patting Rahil’s still-outstretched wrists like he had to comfort the vampire. “You’re free to hang out until the sun is acceptable.”

“What a radical change of treatment.”

“Don’t tempt me.”

“Honey, all I’ve been doing is tempting you, and it clearly hasn’t worked.” Based on Rahil’s smile, he was not the least bit offended by this. It was sweet, actually. As pushy as he was, he truly didn’t seem to have any expectations, just the desire to be listened to and perhaps appreciated.

It made Mercer’s chest warm and opened a soft, achy space where one absolutely wasn’t allowed to be. He slammed his ribs closed on it with a snort, beginning to shuffle the used metal pieces back into bags so he could sort them later, when his head didn’t hurt and his heart wasn’t being so disruptive. When he reached the holy silver, though, the tingle along his fingertips ignited the memory of all that he’d felt when he’d first created the metal. That had been a very different sensation, not just in his chest, but his whole body, the consuming feeling of loving and losing, the empty place in his heart coming with the eternal knowledge that someone he adored with all his being could be ripped away at a moment’s notice.

Pulling out the lockbox of holy silver, seeing the trap in the ceiling coming to life again for the first time in years, the startles of his anxiety at every knock at the door, and the warmth of blooming connection at Rahil’s laugh all made Leah seem closer than she had in years, and through that, brought closer her death—so slow for something so painful, and so fast for a thing that took the love of his life away from him.

Rahil was clearly more than just a good listener, but a good emotional interpreter too. His words gentle, he asked, “Last time I was here, you said you made that metal for one vampire in particular?”

Rahil was just a passing figure in his life: someone who’d stumbled his way into being a momentary work necessity, albeit a gorgeous one. Mercer owed him nothing. But he was a vampire who didn’t hide what he was, and with all that Mercer had seen of the world, that must have brought him as much pain as it did joy, yet he’d been willing to undergo more of that pain to be understood by Mercer.

And a tiny, traitorous part of Mercer wanted to be understood by him, too.

“Yes,” Mercer replied, crouching at the lockbox to drop the metal back into place. He couldn’t bring himself to close it afterward—to pull away from the memories it forged. Cautiously, he reached behind the silver to something he hadn’t touched in years: a little case still tucked in the back. He could never stand the thought of throwing it away.

Mercer barely looked at it as he lifted it out, snapping open the top. Crouching before Rahil, it felt like offering up an engagement ring. The thought made Mercer feel faint.

“This is the mold of their fangs,” he said, the sound of his own voice a distant thing. He could not remember the horrific casting, only the emotions that had driven him, the terror that had overwhelmed his entire being as Leah’s corpse slowly cooled around the metal, and the agonizing flood of his fae spark that had helped him sense every perimeter and ridge of the oozing bite mark.

Rahil touched the edge of the box, like he was convincing himself it was real. But he didn’t look disgusted or scared. He looked concerned . For Mercer.

“I wasn’t thinking at the time,” Mercer clarified. “I suppose I needed evidence. They didn’t want to take my wife’s body—like it was contagious, somehow—and I—I snapped.” After watching her fade through the agonizing pain, her life going out little by little, and knowing someone had inflicted that upon her—some vampire who’d drunk her so carelessly, so cruelly, that she’d become a statistic. Thirty-one point something, he’d read recently, now that someone had finally bothered to do a study on the numbers. “There is a vampire out there somewhere who threw my wife’s life away, and I could do nothing about it but make a protective shield of holy silver in the hopes that it wouldn’t happen again.”

Rahil pulled his hand back from the case, but then he reached again, settling his fingers atop Mercer’s instead. “You had every right to be angry.”

“I wasn’t.” Mercer’s voice broke. “I wasn’t angry. I was afraid.”

Rahil squeezed gently. “It’s all right to be afraid, too.” His gaze went to the mold, but Mercer couldn’t look at it, which meant he was staring at Rahil’s eyes instead, watching a shine of liquid build along the vampire’s lower lids. Rahil’s throat bobbed. “I know what it’s like to feel so—”

As he started talking, something banged against the front of the shed. Rahil flinched away at the same moment that Mercer jumped up, his heart rate rocketing. He could feel the blood already rushing to his head, a slight tilt coming into the world as his vision tunneled. His hands shook, but he balled them into fists, waiting.

Waiting.

Nothing else moved.

Slowly, Rahil started creeping toward the barn door, ignoring Mercer’s hisses for him to stop. Feeling his own life and his daughter’s and now Rahil’s stupid, beautiful existence all flash before his eyes, Mercer cautiously followed.

Rahil opened the door a crack, then a little more. “Were you expecting a delivery?” He asked, revealing an empty yard but for a shoebox-sized package outside the shed’s entrance.

Mercer’s blood ran cold. “No. Never to the shed.”

As he stepped closer, he could find no address, only his full name: Mercer Jacques Bloncourt.

Rahil lifted a brow at him, right there and yet so far away. The world seemed to tumble outward, and suddenly Rahil’s hand was on Mercer’s arm, gripping him tightly. “Are you okay, Merc?”

He shook his head. “Open it.”

Mercer’s stomach twisted, the panic sinking its claws deep into him as his brain fired unwanted images: knit beanies, locks of braided hair, ice chests with small, feminine fingers. But as Rahil broke open the folded top flaps, the crusted blood inside the cardboard box was from something entirely different. Written in sharpie beneath was the phrase love, William .

Its small body had been stabbed through by a little wooden stake, leathery wings pinned to the bottom of the package and its mouth forced open by a ball of red tissue paper shoved down its throat, revealing the dead bat’s tiny teeth.

Rahil dropped the box with a shout. It was Mercer’s turn to grab him, their eyes meeting like they both knew what the other was thinking.

“Has he been—”

“Only emails.” Emails, and now a dead bat. Did he know—how could he? He couldn’t.

Only Mercer and his daughter knew the details of Leah’s death, the blood clogging the back of her throat as her teeth turned to points.

Mercer felt faint all the same, his head so light that despite Rahil’s grip on him he had to lower himself to his knees with the aid of the shed door. He tried to reel in his anxiety, to focus on the fact that Lydia was safe, and he was safe, and even Rahil, whom Douglas surely would see killed if he knew the vampire was in the vicinity, was also safe. But Mercer’s gaze kept going back to the box. It lay crooked, the bat limp against the pins like a crucified corpse.

His mind cycled through the last thing he’d said to Anthony Hilker before the scientist left. “Do you know a William Douglas?” Mercer had asked. “He claimed to be friends with some of my previous holy silver clients.”

“Billy?” Anthony’s nose had wrinkled. “I know him. Old high school classmate—we went on a few dates after reconnecting online, but he’s… He’s too much like me. We would not have survived each other.” The way his expression had hardened was terrifying even in memory. “Be careful with him.”

Be careful with this man who’d killed and brutalized a living creature to send a message—and the message was clear: William Douglas was going to kill vampires. And if he didn’t have Mercer’s help with that, there could be consequences.

Mercer couldn’t breathe suddenly. He could feel the consequences already: his shed in flame, his house broken into, Kat’s limp body, Lydia’s blood across the carpet—

No, no, none of that had happened. But it could. It might. He was the only thing standing between the present and a hundred terrible versions of that future.

His world spun, and the one sound that came through was Rahil’s gentle voice, telling him he was safe. Safe, ironically, with a vampire.