Page 17 of Vampire's Hearth

“Why didn’t you mention it earlier?”

He knit his brow. “When you thought I was a normal human?”

I smirked. “You have a point.”

He pushed at the dirt with the toe of his shoe. “I planned to wait for you to sleep and then get you out.”

I bit the inside of my cheek. Had my discovery meant he was going to leave me? “And now?”

He shrugged. “Once we get out of here, what will happen?”

The air filtered through my nostrils as I filled my lungs, seeking time by drawing in as much oxygen as I could. He couldleave me here—trapped—never looking back. He could also kill me in a heartbeat. But he could have done so at any time, yet he hadn’t. He hadn’t made a single threatening move, and even now, he wasaskingfor my help.

“Aurora—”my mother’s voice filled my head as I closed my eyes, searching for guidance.“You have what you were sent to find.”

I opened my eyes, Mac’s soft gaze waiting patiently for an answer. Patience, caring, love—all emotions I had been taught a vampire would never have. The sooner we got out of here, the faster I got away from him and the feelings he caused.

“A vampire has been killing hunters, and he always wins. He’s immune to their arrows. Even with the coven’s magic, the hunters have been unable to contain him or even find him before he attacks. He has taken over the immortal powers in Charleston. The High Priestess Regent had a vision that this will give us the upper hand.”

Mac flinched before turning away. I tilted my head, taking in his every move. What did he know? He closed his eyes, immersed in his thoughts, before looking into mine. “Your coven wants to kill him?”

I bit my lip. “Our coven needs to restore the balance. If that vampire manages to replicate his power, teach it to others, or create others with it, the vampires will become stronger than the hunters or the coven are able to contain, and the world as we know it will change forever.”

Mac’s face twisted. “What if I can help you find him?”

I folded my arms over my chest. “Why would you want to help me?”

“Only one vampire among us fits your description. Many of our kind would be happy to see him destroyed.” Mac’s words were nearly devoid of emotions before he continued, his voice soft. “With him gone, I might get my family back.”

I tilted my head. “How does finding this vampire help you bring your family together?”

“He is why my family has been torn apart. If I can help you stop him—”

“This is witch business, not vampire business. Why would we involve your kind?”

He pressed his lips into a line and stood. “Because without my kind, you will never get close enough.” He pointed at my lap. “How did your family lose that lineage in the first place? How do you not know—” He turned away from me with a huff.

“Not know what?” I spat back in anger. Who knew how old the vampire who stood before me was. He knew history I had only hoped to learn when I started training, but even then, only what the coven passed down. Was there more to this than even our history held?

“It’s a story for another day.” He turned back, looking down at me. “You had to dowse to find the lineage, meaning you did not know where it was, and you told me you were here because of a vision, which means someone hid all of this from you.”

I shook my head, refusing to acknowledge the coven was two steps behind right now. Something was missing, something didn’t add up, but I wasn’t about to tell him that. “There is no way I can bring a vampire into this.”

“Then you will fail at what you have started. The only way you can finish this is with us working together.”

I rolled my eyes. “Fate needs to rethink forcing a witch and a vampire to work together.”

As I said the words out loud, my chest tightened, and my heart sank. As soon as Mac got us out of there, I needed to be free of him and how he made me feel.

Cormac

In the nine hundred years I had been alive, I had never been so appalled with myself about lying. But I knew I had to if Aurora was going to trust me. How ironic that to be trusted, I had to be deceitful. If she knew who I was, she would trust me even less. For now, she couldn’t know I was an O’Cillian.

I had often wondered how deep the memory spell the coven was under had gone. Obviously, they didn’t recall the original hunters and coven members were O’Cillians, the magic that turned my father touching each of his siblings.

As I looked into the fire’s flames, it was as though my father sat next to them, but the conversation I recalled was almost nine hundred years ago next to a different fire. “Cormac, you must understand,” my father had said. “I am the first created by anoriginal vampire, a woman so bent on revenge she withstood the grave on her own. Nature must balance good and evil, and so, as this curse has touched me, it will consume my entire family. For our sakes and theirs, we will never meet again.”

Aurora thought the names were just a strange coincidence, and for now, I intended to keep it that way. But something about her, about her quest, had touched me and clarified my own desires. I did not want my brother dead, and with the hunters and the coven working together, it was a predictable outcome. I had to convince her I was not a threat—convince her to work with me—to understand how he withstood an arrow and remove the power from him.

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