Malik's P.O.V
I blew out a hard breath, staring at the houses along the street. There were no signs of life, all the windows dark and driveways empty. Eerie. "Think this one is it?"
"Who knows?" Madam Moreau shrugged a delicate shoulder, mouth pinched in a frown as she studied the map in her hands. "Doesn't hurt to try."
I might have agreed with her if we hadn't been trying for the last two weeks. The witches were as hard to find as we had anticipated and every time we thought we had a good lead on where to find them, it turned into a dead end. By the third time, I figured we were being fed false information on purpose to throw us off the trail. We'd ended up working our way through the state of New Hampshire because that was the one thing we knew for sure: they were here, we just didn't know the exact location.
Yet, I chanted internally. It was the only thing keeping me from going Fuck it and heading back to Rigryce and Eden. My demon was starting to get pissy at the lack of contact and I wasn't far behind. A cranky vampire, especially an alpha-natured one, was a dangerous force to be reckoned with. Her blood only did so much, my demon wanting to bask in her scent and hear her laugh. Feel her warmth as we held her close to dance. He wanted to be near her, period.
From what I'd learned during our trip, witches liked to be near each other for support and often built small communities for themselves on the outskirts of regular human civilizations. They detoured outsiders from moving in using spells fed by all the members of the community as an extra precaution. Incredibly clever if it weren't such a pain in the ass to crack. On the bright side, if we were right then all the houses on this street would be home to witches and we'd just have to keep going till we found the one we were looking for. The head of the coven, their Matriarch.
If we didn't find her, she'd find us to keep the other members safe. As if we'd want to harm them. The concept had me rolling my eyes at the ridiculousness of it. Vampires and witches had never been ones to mix and somewhere down the line, they had developed some rather bizarre notions on how we acted. Or refused to accept that we were no longer that way. I wouldn't deny that at one point we were mindless, blood-sucking beasts but we had moved beyond that into a civilized species that only took what was needed or was freely offered.
"Do you feel that?" Madam Moreau suddenly asked, yanking me out of my sour thoughts. Her head was tilted, eyes closed as she tried to hone in on what she found.
Blinking, I focused my energy and spread it out further to see what she was talking about. On the faintest corner of my awareness, I felt a weird thrumming that had the hair on my arms prickling. "What is that?" I asked, frowning in concentration. It wasn't an awful sensation. Just different.
"That, my dear boy, is magic." Madam Moreau sounded genuinely excited and without waiting for me, starting marching down the street in the direction of the thrums. For someone wearing spiky high heels, she moved with a fair amount of grace and speed.
I hurried to follow, curious about what we would find. The neighborhood we were in was part of a small town that was a good deal off the trodden path. We had spent several days searching around the area, possibly due to those protection spells Landon had warned us about. There must have been some sort of warning signal tied into it because we hadn't felt any other presence since walking around. I doubted the place was deserted, the houses and lawns too well maintained to have been abandoned for any period of time.
"Are you sure it's safe?" I asked, wary that we might willingly be walking into a trap.
"Don't tell me the big, bad vampire is scared?" She taunted without stopping. I shot a dark scowl at her back in reply, irritated she found my concerns a joke. It didn't matter what we found if we ended up dead in the process. She might not have anything worth going back to but I did. "It doesn't matter at this point. We don't have any other choice but to check it out. It's the first good sign we've had. Unless you want to continue searching?"
YOU ARE READING
Perfect Pet
Vampiros"You think I don't want you?" He snarled, his bulky arms creating a cage around me, preventing me from moving an inch. His chest pressed tightly to mine and I could feel it move with his rabid breathing. "Darling, you could never be more wrong." A c...
