Page 79 of Taming His Vampire Mate

“What?” I demanded.

“What if this is part of her spell?” Jeremy gestured vaguely around us. “What if that’s how Quinn got free in the first place? Poppy and Simone had no idea what caused the chain to break. What if her own magic is blocking her from being able to find him?” He paused. “I doubt much else could.”

“What makes you think that?”

He shrugged. “Well, the night we met, I felt a weird compulsion to start running north. I didn’t question it, since I was spending most of my time as a wolf, and instinct kind of takes over everything else. But it was strange. It stopped after you and I met.”

Surprise flickered through me. “I felt a compulsion as well.”

“Maybe Poppy’s spell doesn’tmanifestyour fated mate. Instead, it guides you to them,” Jeremy mused. When I glanced at him, he’d gone thoughtful. “Which means this is probably all a domino effect for Quinn to meet his fated mate. It’s all a part of her spell.”

“That’s quite the intuitive leap.”

“Even if I wasn’t aware of it at the time, I’ve been on the brunt of it before,” he said dryly. “The compulsion’s pretty hard to ignore.”

If he was right, that would have explained the broken chains binding Quinn. Her magic had done it. It also explained why Poppy’s locator spell fizzled. Her own magic was blocking any attempts to find Quinn too soon.

“Or maybe it didn’t work,” I said.

“No. I watched it happen,” Jeremy said, shaking his head. “It worked. Him getting away from us? It’s probably part of fate’s plan for him. He’s a newborn vampire. Between you and Simone, he shouldn’t have been able to get very far before you caught him.”

“Maybe,” I allowed. I hadn’t picked up even a trace of his scent. By the time I reached the back door, he’d just… vanished.

“There’s no maybe about it,” Jeremy countered. “He’s a ravenous vampire with no conscience in downtown Seattle. We should be following a trail of bodies. Instead, he comes here”—he gestured to the deserted shipping yard—“when he could have been halfway to Canada by now. Which, in my mind, means we’re supposed to find him. But not yet. Not until the time is right.”

I scowled, but mostly out of habit. Still, I was surprised by how quickly he’d put the pieces together. If he was right. Which he might not have been.

“You said you spent most of your time in wolf form,” I said after we checked two more containers and found them empty.

Jeremy grimaced. “You caught that, huh?”

“Your pack doesn’t want you around?”

He sighed, then gave in. “They’d tell you they do,” he said, carefully avoiding my gaze. “And I’m sure they want me back so I can be their alpha again.”

“Wait.” I stopped dead. “Be alpha again? Haven’t you been one all along?”

He looked like he wished the ground would swallow him whole. With visible effort, he met my eyes. “After what happened with James, after what I tried to do to him—what I forced my pack to do—I left.”

“They turned on you?”

He barked a humorless laugh. “No. Not even close. They were ready to forgive me. I hadn’t gone through with it, after all. And I know they care about me. But I couldn’t… stay. They were all so concerned. I couldn’t stand it.”

“Oh,” I said.

And suddenly, what he was saying made sense—an awful sort of sense. Because hadn’t I done the same thing, without ever leaving at all? Any time someone I cared about looked at me with concern, wanting to fix me, wasn’t my instinct to shove them away with as much force as I could muster? Their concern was just a reminder of how broken I truly was.

Jeremy had reacted almost the same way I would have, in his shoes. Except he probably didn’t have it in him to shove the people he loved away with words—so he’d left them instead.

“I spent the last year in the woods. I was in wolf form as often as I could be. It was simpler that way.”

“But you came to Seattle…”

“For the council session,” Jeremy said. “Half my pack left when it was clear I had no intention of being their alphaanymore. And now Crescent Springs is undefended. The only reason I came to Seattle was to ask for backup, because the pack thinks the bleeds are going to start again soon.”

“Right,” I said, vaguely startled by the reminder of what had pushed us together in the first place. Nathaniel had made his helping me a condition of Jeremy securing the backup for his pack. But I hadn’t realized he was doing it for people he couldn’t even bear to be around.

We weren’t so different. Not at all.