Page 16 of Vampire's Hearth

Mac sighed and looked away. Silence hung in the thick, smoky air until he finally drew in a sharp breath. “Yes,” he answered, his head hung low as though it were his single greatest shame.

My eyes widened as fear surged, causing my breath to quicken.What the hell?I tried to push away from him and scrambled backward, but anytime I put weight on my ankle, pain shot through me. “Stay back.” I whimpered through the pain.

He reached his hand out and placed it on my arm. “I will not hurt you.” That icy feeling crept into my soul again, but his gaze was soft, almost longing, the gaze of a would-be lover over a bloodthirsty monster.

My heart fluttered, and I forced myself to look away as a mixture of fear and desire flooded my body, part of me desperate to get away and another relieved he was here with me. This time, there was no burning in my ring. Wasn’t he compelling me now?

This made no sense. Why did I trust him? Why wasn’t I preparing to defend myself from an inevitable death? He didn’t move under my watchful gaze. His face relaxed, and his pupils dilated as he leaned toward me.

“Don’t look at me that way,” I said, throwing sternness into my voice. “Just don’t. You’re not human; you don’t feel.”

His voice softened to match his gaze. “Who told you we don’t feel just because we aren’t human?”

My bitter laughter echoed around us. “Everyone knows that.” I tilted my head as I narrowed my eyes. I wanted to hear that he would never have genuine feelings, that there was no hope he would care for me so I could forget the last few hours and return to my coven.

“I would tell you that you were wrong, but you wouldn’t believe me anyway,” he said with a shrug before folding his legs to his chest.

A sadness in his words caused my heart to ache for him, an openness I never expected in one of his kind that drew me to him. “You’re right. I probably wouldn’t. What can someone who gave up their humanity and family know about emotions? You’d have to feel nothing to do that.”

Mac wrapped his arms around his legs and bit his cheek as though struggling with my words. “You know little about us, don’t you?”

I pressed my lips together, pretty sure the question had a double meaning. But it wasn’t one I could find. “We’ve learned a lot over the years.”

“But not nearly enough.” He sighed.

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“You,” he growled, throwing his arm out toward me. “You think you know everything when in fact you know nothing. I had a family once. One I cherished beyond all else.” He grabbed a stone from the ground and twisted it in his hands, his shoulders hunched as they rose and fell before his voice softened again. “I loved them more than you could imagine. We had lived in harmony for eight hundred years, going this way and that but always coming back together.”

My chest tightened at his words. Could it be that this vampire had a genuine family he cared about and not just a faction? “What happened?” I forced the words out after a few minutes of silence.

He clenched and unclenched his jaw before throwing the stone at the flaming log. Sparks erupted in a display reminiscent of fireworks. “Nothing I want to talk about. But they are gone, all of them. And my only chance at getting them back is hearing whatever the descendant of Donovan O’Cillian has to say.” He pointed at the lineage still on my lap.

I laid my hand on the cover. It didn’t matter how human he said his emotions were or how his words made my heart feel, this was what I had been sent to find. It had been stolen from my coven—the reason I was here.

“I can’t let you take it.” My voice strained through the words, my heart torn between wanting to help and be free of him.

He chuckled, the sound echoing off the walls in a beautiful chorus. “I could compel it from you.”

“You tried to compel me when you were waking me, didn’t you?” I needed to know if the burning had been my ring protecting me from his magic, as I suspected.

He nodded, and his lips curled slightly. “I guess your mind wasn’t in the right space for the compulsion to work. You kept fighting me.”

“I guess.” I smirked. There was no way I was telling him he couldn’t compel me. But that meant every flutter of my heart had been from me being drawn to him—his beautiful appearance and tortured soul. I gritted my teeth together, trying to snap out of it. I needed to take this lineage back to Aunt Amara—back to the coven.

“Please, Rory.” Mac’s eyes searched mine. “I may not know exactly what the Cure will tell me or what he can do, but he is the only sliver of hope I have to getting my family back. I’mfollowing an impossible trail of clues with no one to help me, and that lineage is my only lead. I must find Donovan’s descendant, the Cure of today.”

I shook my head. “There is more at play here than I can tell you. Plus, the marking on the cover matches my pendant. Someone stole this from us, and it’s time for it to be returned.”

Mac nodded, his brows knitted together. After a few minutes, he spoke. “What if we’re on the same side?”

His words echoed in my mind. Was there ever a time in history when witches and vampires worked together? The Coven of the Blood attempted to stay neutral until we had aligned with the hunters. How could I ever team up with a vampire? It went against everything I was taught. They were inhuman, impossible for a witch to kill with magic alone, and their strength and ability to heal too great. One vampire already had the ability to withstand a hunter’s arrow, and if he learned how to share that power with others, the vampire race would be impossible for us to keep in check.

A vampire’s strength.

I tilted my head. “If you’re a vampire, you have no problem getting out of this cavern.”

Mac’s smile reflected in the firelight as he nodded. “I can jump that cliff in the blink of an eye. And yes, I can take you with me.”

---