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“A mwuhth?” I said, my words garbled by the bag jammed against my mouth. My throat convulsed while I drank more. I couldn’t stop.
“A vampire,” the guy feeding me said. “I’m Jake, by the way. Werewolf. That’s Leanne, my mate, over next to your wife. Also a werewolf. And by the looks of you, this is relatively new.” He took the bag from me and handed me another. “This one is coffee infused. You’ll probably like the taste.”
Taste? Was that even a consideration. I just wanted all the blood, though thankfully, my desire to pounce was lessening.
“Four or five days ago,” I answered before biting into the new offering. “I was unconscious for a while, so I don’t know exactly.”
“Four days,” Avery put in. She wasn’t running, which I took as a good thing. In fact, she seemed relieved while she watched me critically, studying me as if trying to understand something new. No, that couldn’t be right. Why would she be relieved? Why wasn’t she running? And she was still keeping her distance. The couple yards seemed like a chasm.
“And you haven’t bitten her? Dude! You’ve got some hella good control. Hats off to you. Let’s go sit in the breakroom and talk about this. I have a feeling you guys had no clue about monsters.”
“Monsters aren’t real,” Avery insisted, and I fought back a laugh. I was standing before her drinking blood. What did shethinkwas going on here? Granted, it hadn’t been an option I’d been willing to entertain earlier today, but having the label placed on me by someone else, just caused all the chips to drop into place. Everything I’d been experiencing suddenly made sense. Even though I’d had the passing thought, someone else had needed to state it. Vampire. I was a vampire. And these two were werewolves. And what had those others been?
“Honey,” Leanne chided, putting her arm around Avery’s shoulder and guiding her away. I followed like a puppy, or like someone chained to Avery. She was mine. I couldn’t stand to be away from her. It was why I’d skulked in here today, feeling like a stalker. I needed to be near her. Keeping her safe. Keeping hermine.
Apparently, I hadn’t been wrong about that. Someone had tried to steal her from me. What if I hadn’t been here? I couldn’t even imagine… Didn’t want to.
“Look,” Jake started when we were seated.
Avery had taken a chair far from me, so I took the one closest the door. No one was coming in or out unless I let them.
“You two have been pushed into a world that you didn’t know existed,” he went on. “We kind of cater to that element. Monsters know they can come here and be safe, though after today I’ll have to do cleanup work. You see them all the time, Avery.”
She shook her head, her arms were crossed protectively over her chest. “No, I don’t.”
“You can’t tell me you’re not a chosen. I’m mated, and even I can feel it.”
“What’s a chosen?” I asked, having finished the blood and feeling more alive than I had in a while—longer than I’d been a vampire, actually, which said a lot about the way I’d been driving myself into the ground.
“A person destined to be a monster mate. In our circles, when a chosen gets to Avery’s age, we call them monster bait. When she turns twenty-one, every unmated monster anywhere in the vicinity will be drawn to her, with one thing in mind: making her theirs.”
I surged to my feet, flashing across the space to block Avery. “She’s mine!” I growled.
“Not until you’re fully bonded,” Leanne said calmly.
“That’s what that green meant when he said marriage didn’t matter.” Avery’s fingers clenched onto my waistband, holding onto me. Her warm hands trembled, and I knew it wasn’t because of the arousal from being near me. Not this time.
“Yeah. Greens are magicals, by the way. And not any kind of magic you’d think. It’s not hypnotism or sleight of hand. They’re born with all kinds of skills, controlling elements and emotions and weather, telekinesis, teleportation, shielding… Really many things. They’re all different.”
“Orange are shifters like us. Blue like Jared are vampires,” Jake went on. “Silver are a whole host of beings. Dragons, gargoyles, trolls, ogres…usually large scale monsters, come to think of it. And all of them want you, Avery. I’d wager it was why we had so many here today. Usually, we don’t have so many. But then you know that, don’t you?”
Chapter Six
~ Avery ~
I stared at Jake, not wanting to admit a thing. Taking slow deep breaths, I tried to calm myself.
Wake up, Avery. Wake up. This is a nightmare. Wake the fuck up!
I let go of Jared, and my arms wrapped tightly around my middle again while I pushed my chair as far into the corner as I could. I fought away the strong urge to move behind it and curl into a protective ball. None of these three would hurt me. I glanced at Jared. I didn’t think so anyway.
As much as I didn’t like it, what Jake and Leanne told me made sense of the changes I’d witnessed in Jared. And apparently, there had been far more that I hadn’t known about.
“Why would they wantme?”I demanded. I wasn’t anything special. Geez.
Leanne raised a brow at me, silently telling me to be honest with myself. “We’ve already established you can see the monsters. You have premonitions? Visions? You can sense that something bad will happen? Your skin crawls, your senses scream, and you generally feel as if you want to climb out of your body. When you have visions, a blinding headache comes with them? You can just tell is someone is bad?”
“Well, their auras are muddy or black,” I said without thinking.
