AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Jerry was still staring at my throat. His eyes changed from mercury gray to an ugly, bottomless black, and slowly, fangs elongated from his mouth.
Fear coiled in the pit of my stomach.
Colter stepped around me and put me behind him.
“Back off, Jerry.”
Jerry swallowed hard and made a strange motion with his mouth, like he was sucking on something.
“I mean it,” Colter said, and his voice had turned into a growl. “You know what I did to the last vampire who touched her.”
“You can’t afford to turn more of us against you,” Jerry said in a deep voice. Sweat broke out on his skin, and he swallowed hard again. His breathing came in ragged gasps. It looked like his control was slipping, and when it did… I didn’t have to wonder what he would do.
“I’m going to tell you one more time,” Colter said, getting right up in Jerry’s face so that Jerry had nowhere else to look but into Colter’s eyes. When Colter had his attention, it was like Jerry snapped out of the trance he was in.
“She’smine,Jerry. If you touch her, you’re dead, and if I find out you told anyone about her anomaly, you’re dead.”
The wordmineshivered through my body.
“You’re playing with fire, Colter,” Jerry said. “This isn’t going to end well for you.”
“Let me be the judge of that.”
“There are more of us than you think. You underestimate us.”
“I could say the same,” Colter said.
He stood with his legs wide, arms hanging loosely by his side, but everything about him screamed authority and power, and I had no doubt that if this turned into a fight, Colter would win.
For a moment, it didn’t look like Jerry was going to back down. I watched him over Colter’s shoulder, and the vampire—it was still tough to think of my boss that way—looked like he weighed up his options.
Finally, he stepped back to let us pass.
His eyes fell on me again, and they swirled with darkness, the gray and black mixing, but he looked like he had more control.
Still, I didn’t dare take my eyes off him until we were through the door, and I knew he wouldn’t jump on me and chew on my back.
Everything Jerry had done before made sense now. If he was a vampire, and I had the kind of blood vampires craved, his sniffing me and getting up close and into my personal space made so much more sense. It still creeped me out, and it was a miracle he’d never lost his control before. How had he done it?
Colter walked to the machine that sat on a table in the middle of the room, ready to be used.
“How are we going to do this?” I asked.
“We’ll need your blood,” he said.
“The machine tested my blood before, remember? It didn’t break any spells, then.”
“Hmm,” Colter said. He ran a finger along his chin, thinking. The motion was so human.
“Here,” Colter said, taking my hand. He intertwined our fingers for a moment before he flattened my hand onto the machine. “When that demon touched you in your apartment, what did you feel?”
“Cold,” I said. “Terrified.”
“Is that all?”
“It’s hard to remember what happened that night,” I admitted.
“Okay…” Colter thought again. “When you’re fighting with the guys, what do you feel?”
