Roaring Dawn: Macey Book 3 (The Gardella Vampire Hunters 10) Read Online Free

and deep, and only the dauntless one and his peer shall rise up to it.”
    Thus, without Chas…she was on her own. So he’d better stick around.
    And without the dauntless one and his peer—who Al Capone, at least, had believed was Macey herself—what were their chances of stopping the “root of malevolence,” which could only be Nicholas Iscariot? Perhaps not enough.
    But no. She hadn’t missed Chas. Not in the way he implied.
    Macey chose not to respond, and the question sat there between them, seeming to pulse in the silence.
    He set his empty glass back on the counter. “Christ—it’s not like I asked if you loved me.”
    “That’d be a hell of a lot easier to answer,” she muttered, casting him a sidewise look.
    Chas’s grin flashed, then was buried as he reached for the bottle and refilled his drink. His hand was steady. “Want some?”
    “It’s seven o’clock in the morning.”
    He shrugged. “You look as if you had a rough night.”
    “Maybe I did.”
    “The question is—was it a rough night out , or was it a rough night in ?”
    He really was too perceptive. Just another reason to find him annoying. But she could turn that around, poke him back. “So where were you for three days?”
    “I had things to attend to,” he replied.
    Silence settled there, taut and tense and fraught with too many unspoken words.
    “Well this is a fine conversation,” she said, suddenly impatient. “Neither of us giving anything up.” She used one hand to vault herself over the counter, landing easily in Sebastian’s old spot behind it. She bent to dig out a short, heavy glass.
    “It’s morning here, but somewhere else in the world, where there are no bloody vampires, it’s seven at night,” she said, and slammed the vessel onto the counter. “So I’m in.”
    “Best way I know to forget things you’re better off forgetting,” he said, and tipped the bottle to fill her glass with a thin gold stream. “Well…second best way.” He gave her that look again—and this time, the shot of heat went right to the pit of her belly and below. And stayed there.
    Macey considered him, considered the offer, and lifted her glass to drink. He was right, dammit. And the way she was feeling—the way she’d been feeling the last few weeks—maybe a good, hard roll in the proverbial hay would be just the ticket she needed.
    Because if she was going to keep having those nightmares—
    “Ugh!” She pulled the glass away from her mouth and glared down at it. “What the hell is this?” Sharp and bitter and flat was what it was.
    Chas’s mouth twitched again. “Hardly a level above rotgut, if you ask me, but I don’t know where Temple is putting the good stuff anymore.”
    Macey dumped the thin liquid down the sink and slammed her glass back onto the counter. “I know where she keeps the really good stuff—the bottle Sebastian had been hiding from… Well, hiding. Turn around, if you please.”
    He rolled his eyes, but to her surprise, he complied, swiveling on the stool so his back was to her.
    Once she was certain he wasn’t watching, she pulled a narrow rack of glasses aside beneath the counter, revealing the thick metal door of a safe. A little twist of the knob and she opened it to reveal the inside, which contained three bottles of the most unusual liqueur she’d ever tasted—not that she was any expert. None were labeled, but one of them had been opened and was corked with a pyramid-shaped onyx stopper.
    She pulled it out as Chas turned around. “So that’s where she keeps it.”
    They—she, Chas, Temple, and even Wayren—had offered a toast to Sebastian from that very bottle on the night he died.
    Macey lifted a brow as she poured the rosy-gold liqueur into her glass. “I think you’d best forget whatever you might think you know, Chas.”
    He shoved his empty—again—glass toward her, then—
    “What the hell ?” Chas fairly knocked over the precious bottle, he moved so abruptly, lashing out