Page 122 of Taming His Vampire Mate

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. Iwas 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 likethis.

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 existingin our reality. A monster that had already caused too much suffering and would cause more unless it was stopped.