Kick The Candle (Knight Games) Read Online Free

what he offered, sealing my lips around the wound and gulping his blood. Vitality dripped down my throat until my head spun—that free dizzy feeling like running downhill as fast as my legs could carry me.
    For a moment, I gave myself over to it, always knowing deep inside that this feeling was dangerous. Too close to an addiction. I’d messed up every relationship I’d ever been in, drove men away by moving too fast. My last boyfriend, Gary, had abandoned me and become a vampire. The guy before said I was too clingy. The one before that, cheated on me. I wasn’t ready to open myself up again.
    Rick and I needed each other to stay strong and fight the bad guys. What would happen if this relationship went sour? Could I even survive without him? Better I didn’t get too close. But that didn’t mean I couldn’t enjoy what we had together physically. I forced my thoughts to stop and simply relished the pleasure, the smell of him, the close, filling warmth.
    Sometime later, we rolled apart. The wound from his bite healed immediately. It hadn’t hurt at all. A side effect of our connection was that my flesh moved aside to give him access to my blood. The sexual energy bled from the room, and only then did I notice the sun had set. The moon, through his bedroom window, cast the muscles of his chest in a pale light. Face to face, his eyes conveyed soft, awe-filled wonder. The expression was an ocean to my puddle of vacillating feelings.
    “I love you, Grateful,” he whispered. “Marry me.”
    I rolled onto my back and stared up at the ceiling. “No.”
    Silence. I listened to the snow blow against the window, the tick of my watch the only other sound. Tick, tick, tick . The bed sheets rustled. I looked at my watch.
    “Looks like it's time to go to work,” I murmured.
    An awkward moment passed where I wondered if he was going to push the subject like he had in the past. Rick wanted to marry me. I wasn’t ready for marriage. End of discussion.
    “I'll get the mirror.” He rolled off the bed and headed for the closet. I blew out a relieved breath.
    Rick had been teaching me about our duties over the last couple of months, duties he'd been performing on his own in my absence. Our job was to police the supernaturals within our ward—the state of New Hampshire. It was a small ward in terms of square miles but had the third highest rate of supernatural activity. The highest was Arizona, followed by Maine. I'd learned that most supers were attracted to natural energy—forests, deserts, wide-open prairie. Trouble arose when they lived too close to humans. New Hampshire was the fifth least populated state in the country, which attracted the supers, but the small cities were spreading, putting humans closer and closer to overpopulated super territory. That's what was happening with the Carlton City vamp coven we'd discovered in September. That group was getting dangerously large and living in the city, a recipe for disaster.
    The mirror in Rick’s hands was a misshapen stretch of polished silver I'd enchanted during my second lifetime. It didn't exactly tell the future, but it did zero-in on supers who were thinking about making bad choices. Nine times out of ten, they'd act on those impulses and Rick and I would catch them in the act. Rick placed it flat on the floor where it looked like a puddle on the hardwood.
    I sat down across from him, not bothering with my clothes. It was better this way. Nature had the strongest connection with magic and clothing only complicated the clarity of the vision.
    “Ready?” I asked.
    He nodded and placed his fingers at the edge of the mirror. I did the same. Instantly the magic awakened, the silver bubbling to a boil and swirling like liquid mercury.
    “Mirror, mirror, on the floor—” I began.
    “I do not know why you insist on starting that way,” Rick said, giving me a sour glare.
    “It's funny,” I said. “It's from Snow White.”
    He rolled his eyes. “ Mi cielo ,