poker nearby. His numbers had swollen to nearly fifteen over the past week as he kept going out at night and coming back with a newly sane vampire to add to his coven, as he’d begun to call them. Sixteen, if I counted Matthew, but I didn’t.
I sat back on the couch and tried to ignore the fact that Callum and one of the other vampires headed out the back door to grab their dinner. We had a strict don’t-ask, don’t-tell policy about that, though Matthew often ended up breaking it when he went out to feed every few nights. He couldn’t help telling.
Though vampires could feed without murdering humans, it took practice. Some, like my brother, were more willing to practice than others.
I tried not to focus on their eating habits, instead staring at the screen as my guys shot the heads off enemy combatants and analyzing why it was that I didn’t trust Callum. Was it my prey instinct? He did set off a little warning bell in the back of my head. But Matthew didn’t do the same, so I couldn’t wipe away my discomfort as some brain stem fight-or-flight response to vampires. Even the other vampires in Callum’s coven didn’t make ice slide down my spine. Something about Callum himself didn’t sit right with me. Maybe it was his undisclosed connection to Claude.
As soon as I thought of that bastard, red hot fury hit my insides like a brand, and they sizzled.
Yup.
That was it.
I didn’t know why they were connected and I didn’t like it.
But Callum wasn’t the sharing type, and I knew exactly what he’d want in exchange for that information. He’d want to know how Matthew had become a shifter.
I wasn’t even telling my brother that.
So we were at an impasse, and we were going to stay there.
Discomfort or no, I had no basis to break our alliance, no reason to give up our truce other than a niggling little emotion in the back of my head. Emotions were annoyances I’d suppressed for years, so I simply quelled this one, writing it off as hatred of Claude that transferred and morphed into suspicion.
That night and the next day, I tried to focus on enjoying having a brother again. I taught him everything Lundy had taught me about running, forcing him to jog down a dirt road with me in the moonlight.
Of course, he didn’t need my lessons, he could race and beat me whenever he wanted—he had the speed of the wind now. But it was nice to have the company. And it was epic when he raced ahead and then smashed face first into the ground because he hadn’t noticed the tripwire I’d strung up that afternoon between two trees.
“Bitch!” he’d moaned. But his broken nose had been healed within minutes and then Matthew proceeded to grab me by the arms and swing me in a circle so fast that my feet lifted off the ground and he dislocated my shoulder.
“Dick!” I’d cursed in fond, familiar fury as he’d carried me through a short meadow, back to the country house Gray had procured for us, safehouse number four post-rescue. Z and Andros had been able to heal me in record time, which annoyed Matthew, because it made his new vampire healing that much less special.
I’d blown a raspberry at him.
Days turned into one week, then two as we moved from location to location, the guys starting up a one-on-one round robin soccer tournament in between listening to police scanners and waiting to see if the Pinnacle had caught up to us. But, without Muller, it seemed there wasn’t a bloodhound among the pinheads. No one seemed too obsessed with finding us, particularly since this final breakout had wiped out so many vampires. As far as the Pinnacle seemed to be concerned, some rogue citizens had taken it upon themselves to relieve the government of this “problem” and gotten carried away. It turned out that most of the frozen officers hadn’t been quite dead. So the damage we’d done was far smaller than we’d thought.
We’d won.
And I found myself at a loss.
What the hell am I supposed to do now?
I shouldn’t have worried.
While I was busy looking over my shoulder, Gray was busy making a plan.
I woke up one random Tuesday evening (we’d become as nocturnal as the vampires), I turned over in bed, clutching the furnished rental home’s flowered comforter, intending to fall right back asleep. But I found Gray sitting on the