Page 32 of Binding His Fated Mates

My eyes had started burning at some point in the process of tearing my heart out of my chest and throwing it at his face. And when I blinked, hot tears burned tracks down my cheeks, but it was way too late and there was nowhere left to run.

“You already know all of that, though. You do.” Furious with myself, I wiped the tears away with the back of my hand. I finished with, “It’s either that you talked yourself into some bullshit or you just get off on being cruel. Which is it, Hunter?”

Hunter’s jaw worked as he stared at me in shocked silence. The emotion on his face wasn’t anger, for once, but way deeper and far more frightening than that, as if my words had cracked him open, too, and I was seeing him all the way down to the bedrock. His green eyes became glassier than they ought to have been and his lips parted slightly. The thunk-thunk-thunk of his heart in his chest told me that his pulse had quickened even further than before. He didn’t seem able to look away from me.

“Daniel—”

My phone rang, the sound shattering the moment. We both flinched.

I fumbled for the phone on the desk, my hands feeling wooden and clumsy, suddenly aware of my own heart beating rapidly in my chest.

I looked down at the screen. Reed.

Ignoring a call from your alpha wasn’t really an option, even when every fiber of your being was screaming at you to throw the phone as far as you could into the forest.

“Daniel,” Reed said, when I answered. His voice was uncharacteristically tight with anxiety. “I need you at the Crescent Moon. Come immediately. There’s been an attack.”

CHAPTER EIGHT || DANIEL

The bar was locked and all of the blinds were drawn over the windows when we arrived. There was a note in Reed’s handwriting taped to the door that read: CLOSED FOR PRIVATE EVENT.

Hunter knocked on the door and Lee opened it, his face set in grim lines. He ushered us inside and threw the deadbolt on the door.

Two tables had been pushed together in the center of the room and Robert Callahan was laid across them, unconscious, a folded jacket under his head that looked like it might’ve been Reed’s. Dr. Langley, the town’s doctor and medical examiner—the only mundane human who knew about us, apart from Sally—was bent over him, one end of her stethoscope pressed against Robert’s chest and the other in her ears, listening to his pulse.

Lee came to stand beside me, his arms folded over his chest. Hunter stopped at my other side, his eyes widening with surprise as he took in the scene before us.

“What the hell?” he breathed. “No way.”

No way was right. It wouldn’t have taken a rocket scientist to guess we were all thinking about last night’s dream. The way Robert had intruded on us and then promptly collapsed. If this was a coincidence, it was a pretty big one.

Hunter suddenly went tense and stepped forward, putting himself bodily in front of me.

Startled, I looked up from Robert’s unconscious body and saw why.

There was a vampire in the room with us.

Topher stood near the long wooden bar, apart from everyone else. He was slim with sharp features and sandy blond hair, dressed in a green long-sleeved button-up shirt and brown slacks that looked oddly formal for Crescent Springs.

He arched a brow at us, his expression hardening as it lingered on the way Hunter had put himself in front of me, but he didn’t say anything.

I didn’t really know Topher that well. He was relatively new in town—he’d only been here for a few months. He worked at the bookstore down the street and, apart from a few brief encounters where he’d sold me books, we hadn’t spoken. His sole purpose for being in Crescent Springs—at the behest of Nathaniel Bailey, Seattle’s vampire king—was to help the pack. I was pretty sure he’d been tasked with giving periodic reports to Nathaniel as well. The vampire king was concerned about the bleeds, ever since he’d learned of their existence. As far as I knew, Topher had never caused any trouble. But vampires made wolves uneasy on a fundamental level, and the fact that Reed had called him in meant this situation was serious.

“Is this medical or supernatural?” Reed asked, apparently oblivious to the silent exchange between Hunter and Topher. He’d moved to stand on the opposite side of the makeshift examination table, frowning at Dr. Langley.

She sighed, straightening up and unhooking the stethoscope from her ears. “Hard to say. We’ve got a fifty-seven-year-old man with no discernible injuries, no signs of stroke, and so far, no medical explanation for why he passed out.” She paused. “His pulse is weak and his skin is sweaty but cool to the touch. His bloodwork might tell us more about what’s going on here, but there’s nothing obvious. It could be almost anything.”

“Harris is investigating his house as we speak,” Reed said grimly. “He wants to rule out medications that could’ve interacted or something.”

Dr. Langley nodded. “That’s smart of him.”

Reed smiled, but it didn’t reach his eyes. “If there’s something to turn up, he’ll find it.” Then he added, “Robert said he had memory loss. Right before he passed out.”

Hunter stiffened beside me. “Wait. Memory loss?”

Reed nodded. “He said there was an entire month gone. The last thing he remembered was early June.”

I looked down at Robert’s unconscious face, feeling increasingly alarmed. Last night’s dream was replaying on a loop in my mind. A quick look over at Hunter and then Lee told me they’d probably landed on similar conclusions.