“Enough!” Evan’s powerful voice echoed through the room. Only Evan wasn’t in his chair anymore. He was holding Shane by the throat against the wall. “Say one more fuckin’ word against Nicole, and I’ll rip your fucking head off and stay awake for a week just to watch you try to re-grow it back. Then you can talk to me about blood on my hands.”
“This is what he wants,” Nicole murmured. “This is my fault.”
Evan shoved off Shane and sauntered back to the table. The look Shane gave Evan’s back brought a sick feeling to her stomach. She’d only seen hate-filled evil in someone’s eyes like that one other time, and that was the way the monster, Vlaric, had look at her.
“I dreamed of draining her,” Shane murmured. “Maybe it’s Vlaric putting that in my head like Aric thinks, or maybe I just want to kill her and watch you suffer until the end of time.”
Evan stopped, body tensed, a look of murder on his face as his shoulders heaved with his breath. He looked at Nicole and then turned his head just enough to give Shane his profile. “Why? Why do you all of a sudden hate me so much?”
“Because, Third, I can see your bond to her. I can see them between all of you. Disgusting bonds. You’re freaks. I tried to be on board with how soft you were all making the coven, but a human, Evan? You’re a fucking vampire. A vampire. Everyone else is food. And you aren’t just fucking your food. You’re falling in love with it. How. Pathetic.”
Evan turned to Aric, and in a smooth, emotionless tone Nicole didn’t recognize, he said, “He needs to leave, or I’ll kill him.”
“Truth,” Sadey murmured, her arms crossed over her chest as she stared at the metal table before her.
Dawn nodded and agreed in a softer tone, “Truth.”
Aric stood and locked his arms against the table. He lifted his gaze to Shane and told him, “There is no more room in this coven for you.”
Shane pushed off the wall and lifted his chin in the air. His black eyes held nothing but hate. “I wish Arabella was here to see how pathetic you turned out to be.”
“My maker was a psychopath,” Aric said coldly. “Why would I concern myself with her opinion? Or yours?”
Power crackled through the air, and it was hard for Nicole to drag in a breath. The air felt like concrete, clogging up her lungs, and she couldn’t drag her gaze off her hands clasped tightly in her lap.
These vampires were so much more powerful than they let on.
She couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t breathe! Frozen in her seat, she gasped in short bursts, praying that the heavy weight in the air lifted so she could survive this.
When a cold hand slid to the back of her neck and squeezed comfortingly, she finally inhaled a long, relieved breath. Evan. Safety. Everything was okay.
Garret let out a sigh and chewed the corner of his lip. He leaned forward, his bright green eyes intent on his king. “Do we trust the Bloodrunners? After everything, can we trust them?”
Seconds stretched on as Aric looked them all in the face. “I don’t think we have a choice. He didn’t tell us what the other vision was.”
“What other vision?” Nicole asked. This was all so confusing. People—shifters—could tell the future? They were seers? Or psychics? She didn’t understand anything about these Bloodrunner people.
It was Sadey who answered. “If Beaston or Weston Novak have a vision, everyone in the shifter community knows you listen. They’re never wrong. This time they each have a different vision. One, we die. Two, we live.” She looked to Aric. “I know you were at war and things happened, but down to their core, the Novaks are good. I think we should trust him.”
Aric’s Adam’s apple dipped as he swallowed hard. With a nod of his head, he said, “Shane, it’s one pm and daylight. You can’t leave right now and survive. At six-fifteen, when the sun sets, you are banished from this house and from Winterset forever.”
“For a human? Just like that, huh?” Shane asked.
The king of the Winterset Coven offered a quick glance to Nicole and then another nod for Shane. “Just like that.”
Evan came to stand right beside Nicole, hand still comforting on the back of her neck. “Weston spoke of Nicole’s importance to this coven.” He lifted his chin higher. “He didn’t say shit about you.”
Across the table, Sadey and Dawn hid smiles behind pursed lips. Garret and Aric’s eyes were pure black and their faces fierce, fangs exposed behind their savage grimaces. They looked as if they would rip Shane’s throat out at any wrong word.
There was a shift happening in this house, in this coven, and they were choosing Nicole. She didn’t know how to feel. Part of her felt awful for shaking up a coven of people she already cared so much about, but the other part of her felt accepted at the same time.
Shane gave an evil, soulless smile and looked at Nicole. “Well done, you.”
And then he disappeared into a fog of purple smoke.
Chapter Ten
One more hour until sunset.
She, Sadey, and Dawn had been quietly cleaning the house for the last two hours while the boys slept like the dead. It wasn’t like the home needed to be cleaned, but watching television made them all feel too antsy. They’d needed to move and do something productive, so the entire kitchen and living room were now deep-cleaned.
Nicole checked the time on the microwave for the dozenth time and then folded the dishtowel she’d been cleaning the counters with and set it on the ledge of the stainless-steel sink.
While the vampires rested in the
