Second of the Winterset Coven (6 page)

With a steadying breath, Dawn rested on the table the picture she’d taken of them with the special filter. She’d put it in an antique black frame that said G + D in plum purple glitter across the top. In the picture, she was smiling brightly, while Garret was pretending he was going to bite her, had his hands all clawed up and everything.

She pushed it across the table to him, but couldn’t read his expression as he turned it toward himself and stared down at it. His hands were cupped around the top corners of the frame, and when he looked back up at her, his eyes were full of some emotion she didn’t understand.

“When you said you had a new filter for your phone that would show me in the picture, I didn’t believe you. I haven’t seen a picture of myself…well…ever. I didn’t understand why you would even want a picture with me. And then I saw it online, on your social media, and I was shocked, panicked because I was afraid Asmund would see me there, and you, the spitting-image of Torunn beside me. I was scared for you and angry at the risk you’d taken.”

“But I didn’t know I was taking a risk. I just really liked you and wanted pictures.”

“And I can see that now, but at that moment I was replaying Torunn’s death in my head. The thought of anything bad happening to you…” Garret swallowed hard. “But this picture…” His lips ticked up into a smile. “I’m glad my first picture was with you. This is for me to keep?” he asked, holding it up.

“Yeah.”

“I got something for you, too.”

“A date present? Did you get me flowers?”

Garret chuckled as he leaned back and gave the waiter room to set down Dawn’s iced tea. “It’s like flowers, but less romantic and more practical.”

Dawn scrunched up her face. “Does it have glitter on it?”

“No.”

“Sequins?”

Garret snorted and pulled something small from his back pocket, then slid it across the table. It was a carved wooden bat.

“Oh, it’s so cuuute,” Dawn said, drawing her shoulders up as she picked up the adorable critter. “And look, it fits right in my hand!” She wrapped her fingers over the arches of the bat wings. “Did you mean to do that?”

Garret was grinning, and sure, his fangs were still too long, but his smile was easy and his dark eyes were dancing. “Push that button.”

“A button!” Dawn studied the small-carved head of the bat, and sure enough, it was stained darker and gave when she pressed it. Nothing happened. She jammed it harder, and a long spike burst out of the bottom like a switch blade. Dawn gasped and then stared in awe at the little weapon. “Is this what I think it is?”

“Yep. It’s the perfect length to nick a vamp heart. Push the button before you stake or with the bat against his chest, either way.”

“You gifted me a weapon,” she murmured. “Did you carve this yourself?”

“Yeah. Do you hate it?” He actually looked uncertain, like she somehow
couldn’t
like the hand-carved pocket-stake he’d made just for her.

“This is way better than flowers. Garret, you like me!”

Clasping his giant hands on the table, he nodded. “That I do. I’m going to teach you how to use it.”

Dawn was slashing it through the air like a stabby maniac when Garret grabbed her hand. “Grip tighter. Don’t go crazy with the slashing. You need to get it here.” He pulled her wrist and rested the point of the stake right over his heart. “Here, feel.” He grabbed her free hand and pressed her fingertips into his muscle until she could feel his ribs. “Between them so you don’t hit bone. If you hit bone, pull back and try again immediately before he recovers. Carry this everywhere until this is done.” Garret’s tone had gone deadly serious. “Okay?”

Dawn didn’t like the stake that close to his heart, so she pulled away hard and pushed the button again. She used the table top to jam the stake back inside until it clicked into place, then slowly she nodded. “I’ll keep it on me. I promise.”

Dawn bumped Garret’s shoulder as they walked to the next halo of street light. He’d given her the choice to walk back to the coven house or to fly, but she selfishly wanted more time with him before they were back with the others. Well, as close to alone as they could get. Dawn looked behind her at where she imagined Shane and Evan to be following in the shadows. She couldn’t see them, but she had this prickly feeling of being watched that raised the fine hairs on the back of her neck.

Since Dawn was now barefoot, her heels dangling from her fingertips, she sidled around a puddle on the edge of the road. Garret was there, hand in hers, helping her keep her balance like a gentleman. When she fell into step with him again, he pulled her hand into the crook of his elbow, right against his rock-hard bicep.

“Did you learn your manners from being a Viking?” she teased.

Garret chuckled. “No. It was a very different time then. Relationships between men and women were different. Touch was different.”

“What do you mean?”

“It was rougher. The women in my village didn’t need to hold hands or hug for minutes on end. There was flirting and shoving and rough fucking and that was affection enough for most.”

“Was it enough for you?”

“Yes,” he said void of hesitation. “It was how I’d grown up. What about you?”

“You’re asking if I’m mushy?”

He flashed her a quick smile and nodded.

Dawn frowned. She hadn’t thought about it before, but she realized now she had changed so very much since meeting Garret. “I wasn’t always mushy in relationships. I didn’t need a lot from boyfriends.” Garret’s arm flexed when she said that last word, so she rushed onward. “I accepted whatever affection they gave me, but I kept them at a distance emotionally. I guess I don’t have a lot of trust in men following through.”

“Because of your dad?”

“Yeah, and my stepdad, Gary. The ones who should’ve stuck around didn’t, and Mom’s boyfriends after that pulled the same stunts until she just stopped trying. I stopped wanting a father figure because there was no benefit that outweighed the pain of saying goodbye. And when I started dating, it was the same story with every one of my boyfriends. They pulled away when things got too serious. Or maybe it was me, I don’t know. Maybe I was halfway out already, and they could tell. I wasn’t surprised when they broke up with me. I just expected it, you know?”

Music notes drifted to her on the wind, and Garret’s attention was now on a house at the end of the block with all its lights on. The smell of grilling hamburgers and the sound of muffled laughter filled the air. Someone must’ve been hosting a barbecue. The song was a slow country song, one Garret liked to play on the old jukebox that sat in the living room of the coven house. His lips curved up into a smile as he pulled Dawn in a wide circle under the street light until she was facing him. Then he eased her in close, slid his strong hand up her back, and gently held her other as he began to sway from side-to-side with the cadence of the music.

“Your dad and stepdad and those boys you dated missed out, Dawn. You got unlucky with them, but not every man is like that. Not everyone leaves.”

She could feel his loyalty, and her uncertainty settled within her just slightly. It wasn’t an instant fix to her careful heart, but it was a step in the right direction. For eleven hundred years, Garret had clung to thoughts of Torunn, the last woman he’d had as a human. So much that he had found Dawn just because she resembled her.

“How did you find me?” she asked softly. “Winterset isn’t a big town, and I haven’t been much inclined to leave and make a splash with my life. And then you showed up one day, looking at me as if we had known each other for always. You encouraged Aric to settle here, but how? How did you end up here, with me?”

“The same way Asmund found you.”

“Social media?”

Garret nodded, his cheek against her hair. “You know the facial recognition software used in law enforcement?”

“Yeah.”

“I help quietly with that.”

Dawn eased back so she could tell if he was serious. His eyes were still dark as night from hunger, but deadly serious. “I thought you didn’t have a job.”

Garret snorted. “Of course I have a job, woman. I’m not lazy. I work online so my odd sleep hours don’t affect it.”

“So you’re good at computers?”

Garret’s grin grew wicked. “I was a hacker for years and got recruited by the government to switch to their side.”

“A Viking Vampire Nerd.”

Garret bellowed out a single laugh and spun her in a circle, dipped her, and then laid a quick nip on her throat. “I had a lot of time to learn technology, and in case you haven’t noticed, there aren’t any Viking wars to fight in at the moment. I had to adjust to the changing times.”

Garret pulled her up easily and spun her in close again.

“So you found me using facial recognition software?”

“I freelanced for social media start-ups when they began running similar programs and caught you randomly one day. I was just running tests on a batch of five hundred faces, and there you were, face one-thirty-two. I panicked. For a moment, when I was scrolling back through to find you again, I thought I’d imagined you, but I hadn’t.”

She could picture him sitting at his computer, frozen, staring at her photo with a shocked expression on his face. “Which picture?” she asked softly.

“One where you were at a bar drinking with two other girls. I don’t remember what they looked like, but all three of you had your shot glasses in the middle like you were making a toast, and you were looking right at the camera with this smile that just…blew me away. You were wearing a shiny pink top, drinking a pink drink, and you had on pink…” Garret waved his fingers around his lips.

“Lipstick?”

“Yeah. You looked like Torunn but looked completely different all at once. You were just…you. The one I’d waited for.” Garret’s voice broke on the last word, and he swallowed hard, trapping her in his intense gaze. “If I had a heart, it would’ve stopped.”

“But you were so smooth every time I came to the coven house. You were so confident and flirty and easy.”

“Yeah, and do you know how fucking hard that was to pull off? When I wasn’t around you, I was thinking about you. Your laugh, your eyes, what your ass would feel like in my hands, what you would feel like all pressed up against my body, what you tasted like. I mean shit, I’ve had my dick in my hand for four months now, just fucking frustrated because I didn’t want to be with anyone else, but I couldn’t be with you.”

“Why not?” she asked too loud, pulling their dance to a halt. “I was right there, waiting for you to give me some sign that it wasn’t just flirting for you.”

“Because what kind of life could I possibly give you? What life, Dawn? One without sunlight, surrounded by supes—”

“Supes, who are my friends—”

“Who put your life in danger. In the human world, you’re safer. It’s just the way it is. If I could’ve stayed away from you, you would’ve met a nice, normal human man who could give you all the babies you want. You could’ve lived a safe life in Winterset, and watched your children and your grandchildren grow up.”

“Why can’t I have that with you?”

“Because one, we can’t have babies, Dawn. I can with other supes, shifters and vamps, but not with humans. We aren’t compatible for procreation.”

“Don’t call it like it’s some scientific thing, Garret. If I need to be a supe to have a family someday, so be it. You can just Turn me.”

Garret reared back like she’d slapped him. “What?”

“It’s legal. You get to Turn one person.”

Garret shook his head hard and loosened his grip on her, stepped back, and ran his hand over his dark hair. “D, you don’t know what you’re talking about. I would never Turn you. I wouldn’t Turn anyone.”

Now she was the one who felt slapped. “Why not?”

“Because you would be this!” He gestured to his body. His face was twisted in disgust. “You would be a vampire. Forever, Dawn, not just for one lifetime, or two. You would last centuries until you finally sickened and went mad, went on a killing spree like all the old ones do. Like my last queen and Asmund. Like I will do someday, and Aric and Shane and Evan, and fuck, Dawn, I would never want to take the sunlight away from you. You’re light and happiness. You’re glitter and I’m matte black, and I don’t want to dip you in tar and ask you to be happy suffocating in shadows for eternity. No. You aren’t made for this. No one is.”

Dawn’s legs buckled, and she sat heavily on the curb right under the streetlamp. “But…I want kids someday.”

“Welcome to the club, D. I’ve wanted a kid for a millennium,” Garret muttered, hands on his hips.

“So what’s the plan with me then?”

“There is no plan! This is why I kept my distance. The only viable option is I stay a vampire, obviously, and you stay human, also obviously.”

“Garret, I’m going to age!”

“Which is a good thing.”

“No, you don’t understand. I will get older with every year, and you will stay the same, looking”—she waved her hand around his angelic physique—“perfect!”

“At the cost of my soul. At the cost of my heartbeat, and all the people I cared about. At the cost of sunlight and fucking steak, D. You know what vampires eat, right?”

“Of course, I do. I’m your feeder.”

Garret made a ticking sound behind his teeth and paced away and then back. “You’re more than my feeder, and you know it.”

Dawn sat there stunned with all of the obstacles that now existed directly between her and Garret. He wasn’t willing to Turn her, and she didn’t want to age while he stayed eternally the same. What life could she give him then? She would get older each year, making less and less sense with a thirty-year-old model. Her face and boobs and body would sag a little more each year, as it should, but he wouldn’t change with her. He would stay firm and fit, and if he stayed with her, he would eventually be in charge of her care instead of undergoing those life phases with her. “Well, I guess I’ll be really fucking awesome at blow jobs when I don’t have any teeth left,” she quipped.

Garret snorted and tried to hide a smile.

“It’s not funny.”

“I’m not laughing.” But his eyes were doing the laughing for him, and now her anger burned even hotter. Dawn barely resisted the urge to throw her heels at him and stomped off down the street.

The squeak of bats sounded above her, and then he was there in front of her looking all sexy surrounded by purple smoke.

“Furthermore, it’s weird that your clothes stay with you. Aric’s don’t do that. I’ve seen him bare-ass naked after a shift, but here you are, being even more perfect than I realized before.”

“That’s my power,” he said, but the corners of his lips still turned up in an irritating grin, so she held fast to her grudge. “Aric and Asmund got mind control powers, and I get to shift while hiding my dick. Perfection isn’t my gig, D.”

Dawn’s anger dissipated like a Texas rainstorm. To hide her smile, she crossed her arms and looked off toward the barbecue house.

“Stop being angry. It doesn’t suit you, and I didn’t mean to piss you off. If you still want to stick with me after everything, we can…I don’t know…adopt a baby farm animal or something. A puppy maybe.”

“I like potbellied pigs. Spotted ones that wiggle their tails.”

“Of course, you do. We’ll adopt one of those.”

That did sound pretty awesome, but she wasn’t giving up on the dream of having a family someday. Garret felt like hers. He felt imperative to her life. She’d known it from the first day she’d met him that he was going to be big. Dawn could be a patient hunter, and already she was planning on slowly wearing him down. “You’re going to bite me and Turn me someday,” she said.

Garret shook his head and pulled her in close. “If only it was that easy, D. If I wanted to make you into a monster like me, it would take more than just a bite.”

“What do you mean?”

Garret’s arms tightened around her. “I would have to drain you dry and raise you from the dead. Let’s get off this subject. It’s too heavy for a first date.”

“This isn’t our first date.”

Garret twitched against her. “When was our first one then?”

“I have them written down.” Dawn eased out of his embrace and pulled her pink notebook from her purse, then flipped neatly to the middle and read aloud. “Date number one, Garret bought me tacos after he fed from me. When I asked him if this was a date, his cheeks went red, and he didn’t answer. I didn’t even know vampires could blush. Date number two, Garret asked to walk me home after I fed him, and he talked the whole way about what the sixties were like. I thought he was going to kiss me goodnight on my front porch, but he stuck his hand out and shook mine instead. It still counted. He was smiling a lot. Date number three, Garret picked me up after I called him drunk from the bar so I wouldn’t have to get a ride home from a sweaty man named Creeper Dave. I didn’t make up the name. That’s what his friends called him.” Garret was smiling beside her as they walked, so she continued. “Date number four, Garret called me two hours before dawn this morning and invited me to this pancake place with him. I forgot he couldn’t even eat pancakes until I waited for him to order, and he reminded me blood only. And then he just stared at me with his sexy eyebrow all arched up like he wanted to get his dick good and sucked—” Dawn cut herself off and cleared her throat delicately. “Maybe I shouldn’t read my journal anymore.”