Third of the Winterset Coven

really?” Evan asked.
“Evan!” Aric barked.
Officer Gerald stepped forward and slapped a stack of 8x10 pictures on the table in front of Evan. “Go on and tell us how to do our job. Go on and tell us we don’t need to turn over every stone in this town. This shit didn’t happen before you existed here!”
If Evan had a heartbeat, it would’ve stuttered at the picture on top of the pile. Two paramedics were working on a woman in heels and a pant suit on the floor of a completely destroyed apartment. The furniture was all toppled and broken, the walls all cracked, chunks of ceiling adorned the wooden floors, and standing away from the paramedics was a woman. She wasn’t in focus, but he could see her well enough. Her hands were clapped over her mouth, and she was sobbing. Her hairband had loosened her ponytail, and her hair was a mess, falling around her face. Her eye makeup was running with her tears, and blood was streaming from a cut on her cheek.
He moved that picture aside. This one was a photo of a woman’s body out in the woods. She had the same cut down her cheek, but that wasn’t what had killed her. Evan looked away from the gruesome gashes that had opened the pale skin of her neck.
A vampire he may be, but he didn’t rip throats. Never had.
“You don’t want to see the other two bodies?” Officer Gerald asked.
Fury boiled through his veins as he looked the officer in the eyes, knowing full well what his looked like right now—pitch black. That’s what anger did to his kind. It darkened the eyes.
He watched the blood drain from the cop’s face as his esophagus crushed inward. Evan could move things with his mind. Could crush them. He could kill this douchebag so easily. He narrowed his eyes on his neck as the man gasped for air. His buddies were freaking out, aiming guns, yelling, but all that was just background noise. Evan could hear the air molecules struggling to reach Officer Gerald’s lungs.
Release him. Now. Aric had said the words in his mind only, and Evan’s reaction was immediate. He broke his hold on the officer and smiled when the man fell to his knees and gasped for air.
His pupils blew at the same time his buddies dropped their weapons to their sides and stared into space. Aric was always fun to watch in action. Whatever he was saying in their minds, they would have no memory of what Evan had done. If these stupid humans knew half of the power that surged through the members of this coven, they wouldn’t be so brave with their accusations.
Evan plucked the picture of the crying woman off the top of the stack and stood.
“Where are you going?” Garret, the Second of the Winterset Coven, asked darkly from where he still sat on the sofa next to his snow leopard shifter mate, Dawn.
“To do their job,” he growled, twitching his chin at the cops.
And then he walked out of the house and slammed the door behind him.
Catching a vampire was easy if one had the proper bait.

Chapter Two
Find some sort of normalcy.
That’s what the police officers watching her apartment had told her, but as she stared at her reflection in the mirror, she wondered what normal was anymore.
She looked shaken: her hazel eyes were dull and sunken, her hair laid in limp waves down her shoulders, and her lip twitched every fifteen seconds or so. Maybe a response to the shock of the attack. She had sixteen stitches on the slice down her face, and though the doctors had scheduled a second cosmetic surgery where the next set of stitches would be hidden, for now, she looked pretty gruesome. The swelling was awful, and she would always carry this scar. She touched it lightly. Every time she looked in the mirror, she would remember that monster.
“It’s a calling card,” a man rumbled from behind her.
With a shriek, she spun, and there stood a tall man with perfectly mussed black hair, a brown wool sweater over jeans, and his hands clasped behind his back. He was built like a gorilla.
She glanced back at the mirror, but he didn’t have a reflection. Vampire.
Nicole yanked the wooden stake she kept tucked in the hem of her jeans from behind her back and screamed as she slashed at him.
He blurred out of the way, leaving behind only a thin fog of deep purple smoke. When she turned, he was sitting on her bed comfortably, as if he’d been there all along.
She inhaled deep to let off a cry for help to the officers outside, but he disappeared again and reappeared behind her in the span of a blink. His hand clamped over her mouth, and his other arm held her stomach firmly, flushing her back against his chest.
“Shhhhh, I won’t hurt you. I’m not hunting you. I’m hunting the man who tried to kill you.”
When Nicole bit his hand, he yelped and released her. She turned and kicked right for his groin, but he disappeared again and reappeared across the room. “A fighter.” He nodded. “That surprised me.”
“Help!” she screamed.
The man shook his head and looked annoyed. He cocked his ear toward the window where two car doors slammed. The cops were coming. “You shouldn’t have done that.”
He took a step toward her, but she held up her stake, ready to kill that bloodsucking motherfucker.
The man snapped his fingers, and the wooden stake rocketed from her grip and sank deep into her bedroom wall. “Oh, my God,” she whispered in horror. What awful power for awful creatures.
She’d survived the last monster only to be devoured by this one.
“Have you ever flown on a plane before?” he asked.