Page 25 of Midnight Coven

CHAPTER5

BAD WAKING

As it turned out,the people they sent to pick up Nick didn’t need any excuse at all to overreact.

They’d come there to overreact.

They fully intended to react, and overreact… and react again.

Nick figured that out pretty damned fast. As soon as he swung open Wynter’s front door, he got hit with an electric prod right to the middle of the chest.

He fell to one knee.

The same asshole hit him with the prod again, harder.

Nick stayed down. His jaw clenched.

He didn’t try to get up.

He didn’t let himself move.

Nick didn’t know if they thought they were keeping him on his knees with the prod or what. They weren’t, but Nick didn’t try to demonstrate that fact. Like Morley advised, Nick didn’t do a damned thing.

He could have risen to his feet at any point. Hell, he could have ripped both of their throats with his teeth before either one managed to unholster their guns.

Nick stayed on his knees because the alternative would have been a lot worse. That jolt of electricity wasn’t strong enough to stop him physically… but it was strong enough to bring the predator raging forward in every part of Nick’s body.

His fangs extended.

Blood flushed his throat and face.

He fought a growl back in his throat.

Every muscle in his body clenched.

Nick didn’t kneel there so he’d appear more compliant. He knelt there to fight back the vampire part of him that screamed he should kill every goddamned last one of them. Nick was forced to summon every ounce of his willpower, every particle of his being in an effort not to kill them. He wondered if these dickheads had any idea just how close they’d come.

It had been a long, damned time since anyone enraged his vampire side to that degree.

Really, Morley had likely saved their lives.

He’d probably saved Nick’s life too.

He’d saved it in the long run at least, given Nick would’ve been hunted down like an animal if he’d succumbed to evenpartof that urge to defend himself.

For the same reason, Nick refused to react.

He refused to move, to even change expression.

He refused to speak.

He didn’t even try to get off his knees, not until they wanted him to.

He fought to stay calm, although he knew from his fogged vision that his eyes had flushed fully scarlet. Every instinct in his body told him to rip these assholes’ heads off and play football with their damned skulls, but he ignored those voices, too.

Nothing they did after that made that feeling go away.

While he was down there, the second of the two lead cops, the only ones who weren’t wearing the blue uniforms of the NYPD, walked behind him and began restraining him with organic binders. The whole time they did it, the first guy, who Nick presumed to be the lead detective on scene, a hipster dickhead with an auburn, retro-style, handlebar mustache and giant mutton chop sideburns, continued to press the metal rod right into the center of Nick’s chest.

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