by Lexi C. Foss
She leaned her elbow on the counter and propped her head up with her palm. “I should probably look over the information you and Connor have collected so I’m fully in the loop. Damien mentioned you were able to get a hold of the police reports and one of your streak members examined the bodies?”
I ran her through everything Connor had shared with me while I made us a ham and cheese omelet and toast. She asked a few questions while we ate, but I could tell she was quickly losing stream now that she had some food in her belly. After she took her last bite, I picked up our empty plates. “Head back to bed, baby. I’ll be right behind you.”
“’Kay, thanks,” she mumbled as she stood.
It only took me a few minutes to clean everything up, and then I followed Denica into my room. It was incredibly satisfying to see her curled up on my mattress, with her dark hair spread over my pillows. She had claimed my usual side of the bed, but I didn’t move her. As long as I had my mate in my arms, I didn’t give a fuck where I slept.
Spooning my chest against her back, I pulled her close and buried my nose in the crook of her neck. The human and animal halves of my soul were in perfect harmony as I followed her into slumber.
Sunlight streamed through the cracks in my blinds only four hours later, but Denica didn’t stir. There were dark smudges under her eyes, and I wanted her to get more rest. Pulling the covers higher to help shield her from the brightness, I drifted back to sleep. When she finally began to move, I was surprised to find it was several hours later. “Morning, baby.”
She shifted in my arms and pressed a kiss to the mating mark on my chest. “It’s more like good afternoon. I can’t believe I slept so long.”
“After the day you had, I’m not surprised.” I stroked the side of my nose down hers. “I wish we could stay here until tomorrow morning, but we’d better get moving.”
“Yeah, we have a vampire to catch,” she agreed, seeming to light up from the inside at the prospect of the battle ahead.
Since she was a slayer, her anticipation wasn’t a big surprise. But how quickly she got ready after we took a lengthy—and satisfying—shower together was. I’d barely had enough time to make a pot of coffee before she joined me downstairs. “How do you take yours?” I asked as I poured the dark brew into two travel mugs.
She came up behind me and wrapped her arms around my torso. “Sugar and cream if you’ve got it.”
“Will milk work?” When I felt her nod against my back, I opened the fridge, grabbed the jug, and splashed some into her mug.
“A tiger without cream? What has this world come to?” she teased, giving me a big squeeze before coming to my side and adding some sugar to her coffee. Then she took a sip and sighed, “But this is pretty darn perfect.”
I chuckled at her joke—I’d heard plenty of them over the years—and handed her a lid. “Do you want anything to eat before we head over to Connor’s house?”
She shook her head. “Nah, we can grab lunch later.”
“Sounds like a plan,” I agreed, lacing my fingers through hers. I scanned her from head to toe but didn’t spot signs that she was carrying any weapons. “Do you have everything you need before we go?”
“I’m ready for anything,” she confirmed, patting the pockets at the top of her thighs. Remembering the sexy sheaths she used to strap the blades to her legs got me hot as fuck. My cock was painfully hard even though I’d just had her in the shower. But I couldn’t do anything about it at the moment, so I shifted the hard length into a more comfortable position while she was walking down the sidewalk in front of me. She giggled, turning to grin at me and murmured, “Busted.”
“I have a feeling walking around with a hard-on is going to be a perpetual problem for me when you’re near.” I didn’t feel any embarrassment over my body’s reaction to my sexy mate. “And that I’m not going to be able to put much past you.”
She wagged her brows in an exaggerated manner. “I didn’t even sense that through the mating bond. It was just guesstimate on my part.”
“Mating bond?” Jake echoed from across the street.
Denica laughed and shook her head. “We’ve been outside your house for what? Thirty seconds?”
“There really are no secrets in a streak of tiger shifters.” I tapped under my ear as Jake met us in front of Connor’s house. “Hearing is the most acute of our senses.”
“Yet I didn’t hear shit about you finding your mate until now,” Jake complained, slapping me on the back. “Did you find her in the wilderness while you let your tiger free for the weekend? Maybe I need to take my own nature vacation soon.”
“Nope, I found her when she dropped from the sky right over there”—I jerked my thumb over my shoulder toward the middle of the street—“in the middle of the night.”
“Whoa. Hold up.” Jake’s gaze darted back and forth between Denica and me as recognition dawned in his eyes. “You’re the first of us to find your mate, and she’s a dragon shifter who is a vampire slayer?”
I flung my arm over Denica’s shoulder and grinned. “Yup.”
He whistled. “Damn, that’s badass.”
“What a difference nine hours makes,” Connor said from behind us.
We turned to face him, and I shrugged. “The best nine hours of my life.”
“Mine, too.” Denica leaned into my side and smiled.
“I’m happy for you both,” Connor offered his congratulations without approaching us. As unattached males, he and Jake knew better than to get too close to my mate. Shifters were territorial by nature, and those instincts were fiercest when they were newly mated. I had been told that the driving need to keep everyone else away would lessen a little once the claiming words were spoken, but I didn’t see how that would ever be possible. It definitely didn’t happen in the hour or so before the four of us were getting ready to leave for Pine Ridge.
“We’ll take two cars, in case we need to split up,” Connor decided.
My tiger went alert, eyeing the two males he considered to be family with suspicion. “Denica is with me.”
“No shit,” Jake muttered, holding his hands up in a gesture of surrender. “Your furry ass would chase my car down if I tried to drive away with your mate.”
I couldn’t deny the accusation—not when it was one hundred percent accurate.
7
Denica
Trey’s flash of jealousy—as unnecessary as it was since I had zero interest in any man other than him—didn’t bother me. If we were around a group of single females, I would’ve been feeling territorial over him as well. But there was a time and place for everything...and this wasn’t the moment when either of us should be pissing figurative circles around each other.
I elbowed my mate in the side before looking at Connor. “You have a vampire problem, and I’m an E.V.I.E. slayer. The normal shifter hierarchy doesn’t apply here. I get that you're the alpha and Trey is your head enforcer, but I’m the one in charge of this situation until the bloodsucker we’re after has been neutralized.”
I was impressed when the tiger shifter inclined his head in acknowledgment of the accuracy of what I was saying. Many alphas had issues ceding control to a slayer, even when they were the one to call E.V.I.E. for assistance in the first place. Jake wasn’t going to be an issue since his inherent dominance level was lesser than mine. That only left my mate, who was bound to be the most difficult to convince because his protective instincts would be urging him to keep me safe. But he’d have to figure out a way to push those impulses down because I couldn’t afford to be worried about him trying to shield me while I was taking down a vampire who’d drained three humans in as many days. If he was following a pattern, we were in a race against time to prevent him from taking another life.
I waited until we were in the privacy of his car before I said, “You have however long it takes for us to drive to Pine Ridge to get all of the ranting and raving out of your system.”
He backed out of the driveway and pulled beh
ind Jake’s car, following him and Connor down the street. “You think I have a problem with deferring to you in anything vampire-related when I’ve never faced off against one, and you’ve been dedicated to taking them down for God only knows how long?”
After he put it that way, I wasn’t sure how to respond without sounding ridiculous. It was easier to focus on the last part, so that was what I did. “A little more than a decade.”
“What?” he asked, his brow wrinkling as he darted his gaze toward me before concentrating on the road again.
“That’s how long I’ve been a slayer,” I explained.
He shook his head and flashed me a grin. “I’m impressed by your ability to sidestep the main point of what I was saying.”
I liked that he felt comfortable enough to call me on my attempt to steer the conversation in another direction, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t going to give him a little bit of a hard time. Pressing my lips together, I huffed out a breath through my nose. “Are you going to be totally reasonable about this without any alpha male mumbo jumbo?”
“I’m not saying that it’s going to be easy for me, knowing that you’re going to be in dangerous situations,” he admitted with a sigh. “But I’ll figure out how to deal. I refuse to believe that fate would give me the beauty of you only to take it away so quickly.”
I felt his sincerity through our mate bond and was dismayed by how quickly the link between us was snapping into place. Since I traveled a lot as a slayer, I hadn’t been around when two members of my hold had found their mates over the past eleven years. Filled with a deep appreciation for being one of the lucky few who had found the person fate had intended for me, I leaned over and pressed a kiss to Trey’s cheek. “That was such a perfect answer.”
He interlaced our fingers and brushed his lips over my knuckles before setting our hands on his thigh. “It didn’t even have any alpha male mumbo jumbo.”
“I have to admit, I like that you’re not trying to go all caveman on me.” I squeezed his hand with a grin. “Especially when your urge to protect me is strong enough that I can feel it through our bond.”
His eyes flashed gold, and I felt the brief glide of fur against my hand. “If it was up to my tiger, you’d still be back at my house, curled up in my bed waiting for me.”
I snorted, picturing how shocked he would have been if he’d actually tried to pull something like that with me. “Your tiger would’ve had a heck of a time trying to keep me there when I have a job to do. I’ve been studying martial arts since I was little, and it shows when I’m fighting. Even Camden was impressed with the skills I’d acquired back when I joined E.V.I.E., and I’ve done a bunch of training with him since then.”
“Who the fuck is Camden?” he asked, tightening his hold on my hand.
“He’s one of the E.V.I.E. trainers.” I was used to keeping details about the organization to myself since everyone in E.V.I.E. tended to be more than a little secretive, but it felt natural to share things with my mate. “I don’t know a ton about him except that he’s got mad fighting skills and an innate knack for knowing exactly how far he can push when we’re training—right to the very edge of your limit without crossing over.”
He grumbled something about Camden sounding like an asshole—with more than a hint of his tiger in his voice—before asking about my favorite style of martial arts. The conversation turned into a debate over the benefits of Krav Maga versus Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu that lasted until we reached the outskirts of Pine Ridge. Glancing out the window, I realized how spread out the houses were. “There’s a lot of land to cover for a town of only two thousand people.”
“Welcome to the heartland of America.” He pointed at the road in front of us, which was empty except for Jake’s car. “Where you’ll often find miles of farmland between homes, and you could miss a town if you blink while driving through it.”
The skies were clear overhead with no planes in sight. “It’s too bad I can’t just fly over the town to do recon. I could cover a heck of a lot more area in much less time.”
“The situation would go from bad to worse if anyone spotted you. Pine Ridge is a fully human town, and they’re not clued into the fact that shifters exist—let alone dragons.”
“Hopefully, that won’t cause any problems when it comes to hunting down the vampire.” I’d had a few bounties in small towns where nobody knew about shifters, and it tended to add another layer of complication. When gossip was treated like an Olympic sport, people felt comfortable being nosy as heck, which made it that much more difficult not to attract unwanted attention. “I’m assuming I won’t have the same issue in Tigerville?”
“You might surprise the stripes off a few tigers before word gets out that I’ve mated with a dragoness,” he teased.
I giggled at the mental image his joke evoked. “I’m looking forward to seeing your tiger’s stripes up close and personal.”
“And I’d love some more time with your dragoness,” he agreed, his dark eyes heating at the prospect. “After we find the vampire, I’ll take you out to explore. Our streak owns a fuck ton of land surrounding Tigerville, so there’ll be plenty of space where she can spread her wings and show off for me.”
“Then I guess I’d better put all my slayer skills to good use so we can find the bloodsucker quickly and get to the fun stuff stat.” I winked at him, shivering a little when I saw the desire in his eyes. The chemistry between us was practically electric, and it took all of my willpower to put my game face on when we drove down the main drag in Pine Ridge and pulled into a parking spot next to Jake’s car. I’d never had a problem focusing on an assignment in the past, but I had a feeling that working with my mate was going to test my ability to concentrate on the mission because he was a distraction unlike anything I’d ever encountered before.
We climbed out of the vehicle and joined Connor and Jake on the sidewalk. There were a few people standing in front of a small diner across the street, but nobody else was outside. Lowering my voice, I reminded the guys of the plan we’d discussed before we’d left Tigerville. “If you find anyone who exhibits signs of being under the influence of a vampire, remember to be careful what you ask. We don’t know how powerful the bloodsucker is yet. He may have put safeguards in place to let him know if someone interferes with his control over the humans he’s glamoured.”
“Got it,” Connor confirmed with a nod.
Finding the vampire would be much more difficult if we had to deal with a power play first. I flashed Connor a smile, grateful he had been cool about me taking the lead on the hunt. But judging by the deep growl that rumbled up Trey’s chest, he wasn’t thrilled by the platonic moment between his alpha and me.
8
Trey
Watching my mate take charge was sexy as fuck—something I was more acutely aware of when we were near unattached males. Connor or Jake would never disrespect my mating bond by hitting on Denica, and I wouldn’t be surprised if she laid any guy who tried flat on their asses. But the jealous streak that had come to life when I found her didn’t care about logic. It only cared about making it blatantly obvious she was mine. Luckily, she got where I was coming from and humored me by patting my shoulder and pressing a kiss to my cheek before turning to scope out the north side of the street.
I had to reposition my cock because it felt as though the zipper was going to leave a permanent imprint on my hard-on. Connor flashed me a knowing look, and I shrugged my shoulders. He shouldn’t be surprised that I was perpetually hard around Denica. He hadn’t experienced it himself yet, but he knew that the attraction between shifter mates was intense.
“We’ll head south,” he announced, jerking his chin to the left. “If we find anything suspicious, we’ll let you know.”
Denica nodded, and I interlaced our fingers as we walked down the sidewalk. We passed a lawyer’s office and dry cleaner before we headed into a bakery. My gorgeous mate picked out a couple of pastries and chatted with the girl at the register while I scann
ed the handful of people seated at the tables under the guise of searching for an empty one. Nobody jumped out at me as an obvious lead, and when I took a deep breath, I didn’t catch the cold scent of death clinging to anyone. Turning back to Denica, I handed my debit card to the cashier after she slid a couple of to-go cups with coffee across the counter. Once she was done ringing us up, I followed my mate over to a table in the corner. Her focus remained on the cashier while she ate her strawberry crossover puff pastry.
“Is there something bugging you about the girl?” I asked, shifting in my seat so I could see her in my peripheral vision.
“Yeah, her reaction was off when I mentioned that she seemed as though she could use the coffee more than us. I assumed it was just because early mornings are normal for people who work in bakeries, but when I made a joke about maybe avoiding partying too much at night, I got the impression that her vague answer was more about not remembering what she was up to last night than not wanting to overshare with a stranger,” Denica explained, her plump lips curving down at the edges.
I leaned forward, stretching my arm out on the table to rest my hand over hers. Anyone looking at us would only see part of the true picture—a couple enjoying their morning together. They’d never guess the real reason we were in the bakery. “Do you think it’s because someone messed with her memories?”
She squeezed her eyes shut when flames started to swirl in the green orbs. “Yes, the pallor of her skin and bruises under her eyes aren’t because she’s not a morning person.”
“You’re that certain?” I asked, pitching my voice low.
“Absolutely.” A muscle jumped in her jaw as she pushed her empty plate to the edge of the table. “Any doubts I might’ve had were just wiped away when she tugged down the collar of her polo shirt. There are two distinct puncture wounds on her neck.”
I shifted in my seat, surreptitiously glancing toward the cashier. Denica kicked my shin under the table, and my head jerked back in her direction. I shrugged and flashed her a sheepish grin. “I guess there’s a reason they say that curiosity killed the cat.”