I knew he couldn’t say what he really felt. He didn’t know what he really felt. But I did.
A sire had to love his fledgling. It was a painful truth of vampire existence. It was what made the blood tie so unbreakable. I suppose it would have been nice if he would love me without the connection between us, but he was wounded and complicated. His emotional distance was almost a relief to me.
“You do know there will be consequences.” Nathan rested his head against my shoulder. “If I leave the Movement, I’ll be marked for death. If you don’t join, you’ll be, too.”
“So I’ll go from one death sentence to another. In fact, I’ve forgotten what it feels like to live without one.” I set the mug back on the nightstand and wiggled down onto the pillows.
“What do you say we go out tonight?” he asked suddenly. “You haven’t been out of this room for days.”
“I could really use a shower,” I admitted. “And it will do me some good to see some other people. Not that you’re not fabulous in your own way.”
“I’ll go start the water.” He bounded from the bed, a grin on his face.
“Wait,” I called after him. When he stopped, I smiled sheepishly. “Bring me my heart?”
He nodded, but appeared confused. While I waited for him to return, I rolled onto my side and waggled my fingers at the goldfish in the bowl. Before, I’d considered his three-second memory span a curse, believing that developing a new outlook on life so often would always end badly.
At the time, I’d never imagined that things might get better with each three-second change, just like I’d never considered becoming a vampire could turn out for the better.
Nathan entered the room, holding the steel box he’d purchased to keep my heart safe. Inside, it was wrapped in layers of gauze and cloth and bubble wrap, and it rested in a nest of foam packing peanuts. Only Max had been privy to the careful packaging, because I’d still been healing from the injuries Cyrus had inflicted on me. Since Nathan had padlocked the box shut and thrown away the combination, I had to take Max’s word that it was safe.
Nathan handed the precious package to me, his hands shaking. I smiled. “It’s okay. Cyrus’s heart survived all those years in a wooden box. Too bad it didn’t splinter and kill him.”
Nathan cleared his throat and gestured to the box. “What did you want with this?”
I took a deep breath. “I wanted to give it to you.”
“No.”
“Hear me out.” I pressed the box into his hands. “It’s staying with you. Not because you’re my sire. Not because of the blood tie. I’m going to stay with you because I trust you. With my life.”
He looked away. “You know what I did.”
“I do.” Marianne’s screams and pleas now haunted me, as well. “But I trust you.”
Tears shone in his eyes, but they didn’t fall. “Thank you. But I can’t trust myself.”
Later, when the sun had risen and Nathan slept at my side, I took his hand in mine. He’d started wearing his wedding ring again, either as a signal to me to forget about him or as an eternal punishment to himself. I guessed it was the latter.
But his self-inflicted penance was unnecessary. The Soul Eater was still out there, the Movement would soon enough learn of Nathan’s defection, and God knew what else lurked on the horizon. I felt pretty confident that there was plenty of stuff out there to beat us down without his guilt having to plague us.
But I wasn’t going anywhere.
I opened the drawer of his nightstand and slipped the box inside. I thought about my parents, and for the first time since their accident, I allowed myself to forgive myself. I’d come so far that I no longer recognized the person I used to be. I’d turned down the blind admiration and devotion Cyrus had offered me. I’d rejected his promises of power without consequence, because I now knew that a life without consequences was meaningless. And though I’d done things I wasn’t proud of, I didn’t regret them. In that regard, I was possibly stronger than Nathan.
Strength isn’t about bearing a cross of grief or shame. Strength comes from choosing your own path, and living with the consequences.
And as long as I had the strength to keep living, I was going to do it without regret.
Blood Ties Book Two:
Possession
Contents
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Prologue
Welcome Back
H e didn’t know how long he’d been dead. There was no time, no season, no change, only eternity.
Shadows stumbled around him on the other side of the veil. Two in particular caught his attention. He knew what they were. He’d been one of them.
The life he craved was accessible to them. Now, as in his living death, he wanted to leech it from the mortals who couldn’t protect themselves. If he could envy this undead pair, he would, but there was no time. They had no life, so they were none of his concern.
On the other side, they couldn’t see him. When he was of the world but not alive, he couldn’t see the ones who’d gone before him, either. Despite their sightlessness, they appeared to follow him. He moved away. He wanted life.
It was a fool’s errand, his never-ceasing search for that mortal energy. It throbbed in the people and animals he passed every day, but he could not touch it. Thin though the veil was, it separated him from what he craved. He could reach for it, hold it in his hands, but the film of the shadow curtain always kept him from it.
Color, alien to this existence, would have shocked his senses, if he’d had any. The lifeless pair held something between them, shimmering and frightening like the fiery sword the angel held at the gates of Eden. It drew shadows to it like moths to the flame, though he hated such cliché description. He hated more that the thing drew him, as well. The shining rift split wider, and a hand, not full of life but real nonetheless, thrust through.
The other shadows clamored for it, sliding over it. Like water on oil, they rolled off the corporeal skin. As if searching specifically for him, the intruder pushed the others aside and grasped him. He stuck.
He hadn’t felt panic since he’d died. Hadn’t felt despair since her betrayal. He felt it now as the rough, real fingers pulled him through the rift.
Thick and heavy, feelings he’d almost forgotten happened all at once. Slippery and hot, sensations he remembered being pleasant at one time engulfed him. His formless being squeezed and conformed into a shape at once familiar and horrifyingly foreign.
Too bright. Too cold. Too real.
Too loud.
One of the pair laughed like jagged glass. “We fucking did it! I can’t believe we fucking did it!”
The light stung his eyes. He blinked, but his vision didn’t clear. In his chest, he felt a thump that hadn’t been a part of him for centuries—the beating of a human heart.
Alive. He was alive.
He dropped to the floor, screaming and clawing at his mortal prison.
The one who’d done it leaned over him and slapped him on the back. The connection of flesh against flesh drove needles of sensation to the bone.
“Welcome back, Cyrus.”
1
Nightmare
“Y ou dreamed about him this morning, Carrie.”
At the sound of Nathan’s voice, my hands froz
e on my keyboard. “You’re watching me sleep again?”
This worried me. Besides being phenomenally creepy, my sire’s habit of spying on my nightmares usually flares up when there’s trouble on the horizon. Before our big fight with him two months ago, I’d often wake to find Nathan in bed beside me, staring at me as though I’d disappear if he looked away. Just three weeks after that, when our new blood donor had broken in with the intent to stake us in our beds, Nathan had been sitting in my desk chair, watching over me, waiting for something, anything to happen.
Rather than looming in my doorway, he’d come in and sat down on my bed—there really was no place else to go, the room was so small—and settled in as though he’d been invited. Not that I’d been offended. It was his apartment, and Ziggy’s old room didn’t feel quite like home to me.
I studied Nathan as he watched me. I assumed he tried to gauge my mood. He detests arguing with me, and he’d obviously had other hopes for how the conversation would go.
Tough.
“So, I’m worried.” At my arched brow, he acceded, “Fine, I’m irrationally angry with you.”
Damn him for looking good. Time stops bothering with you when you become a vampire, and Nathan was frozen at thirty-two. Despite the pallor that comes with seventy years of avoiding sunlight, he remained just as young and handsome as he’d appeared in the photographs he’d saved from his prevampire life. More so, actually, because this Nathan was in my bedroom, in living color. Dark hair, gorgeous gray eyes, a body so toned and hard he looked like he’d been a statue of a Greek god in a past life. But it was his eyes that had made me fall for him. Even though he’d been acting tough, and threatening my life the first time we’d met, I’d seen the kindness and sorrow in them. His eyes weren’t just windows to his soul. They were doors that let out things he wouldn’t have been able to hide from me even without a blood tie between us.
I’d turned back to my computer, where my latest dissertation on vampire physiology had waited with an impatiently flashing cursor. You can take the human out of the doctor, but you can’t take the doctor out of the vampire. Or something like that. I’d been working on A Case Study of Blood Type Compatibility for Metabolic Efficiency to kill time and distract me from the craziness of the past two months. But it had inevitably caught up with me, so when Nathan had burst in I’d been typing “Crazy Yellow Tube Socks” over and over again. “You said irrationally, not me.”
“I can’t help it.” His embarrassment was evident through the blood tie, but it didn’t quell my annoyance. “What’s going on?”
“Well, for one, I’m tired of this stupid research project—”
“You’re tired of it? I was the one drinking AB negative all damn week.” Though he chuckled, there was a wearing note to the sound.
“And you’ve been watching me sleep, which usually means something major is about to happen. Plus, I’ve been having these nightmares.” I covered my face with my hands, massaging my tired skin. “I’m sure it’s nothing.”
“It didn’t sound like ‘nothing.’” The bedsprings squeaked as he stood.
I dropped my hands and gave him a withering look. “Oh, he listens as well as watches.”
The ghost of a sarcastic smile crossed his face as he knelt beside my chair. “You make it sound so dirty.”
I knew he couldn’t help the surge of playful lust that reached me through the blood tie, because our brains were on a weird, telepathic party line. Unless he blocked me or vice versa, we heard each other’s thoughts and felt each other’s emotions. If one of us had even the slightest inclination toward getting physical, the other one knew—and usually acted on—it.
Unfortunately, the blood tie doesn’t filter negative emotions out, so I always got a heaping helping of after-sex guilt. Thoughts of Marianne, his dead wife, were never far from his mind, so the punishment game usually kicked in within minutes of la petit mort. Once I felt his guilt, I added some of my own over the fact I’d helped cause it, and the resultant snowball effect was a good enough reason to avoid sex with him altogether.
At least, not beyond a few just-to-get-it-out-of-our-system flings. Giving those up would be like kicking heroin cold turkey.
The thought depressed me, so I put it aside. I swiveled my desk chair around and leaned back. “Seriously, why are you watching me?”
“The nightmares.”
I shrugged, hoping to pass off my terrifying dreams as a regular occurrence. “I have a lot of nightmares.”
“You said his name.”
Nathan wasn’t my first sire. Cyrus, whom I only knew as “John Doe” when he’d attacked me in the hospital morgue, had made me a vampire. He’d also nearly made me dead when I hadn’t been willing to satisfy his twisted desires. When I’d turned to Nathan and the Voluntary Vampire Extinction Movement for help, Cyrus had removed one of my two hearts—a strange physiological trait unique to vampires—and left me bleeding to death in the alley behind Nathan’s building. When Nathan found me, I’d already died. He’d revived me by giving me his blood, and it’d had the desired effect—I was alive, after all. He just hadn’t realized he would “re-sire” me.
He’d already had a deep-seated hatred of Cyrus. Now, as my new sire, he felt it ten times stronger. He hated if I even mentioned my first sire in passing. The evil, antagonistic side of me couldn’t help but do it now. “Maybe my dreams about Cyrus are a subconscious thing to rile you.”
He raised an eyebrow. “That’s the same excuse you use for leaving the cap off the toothpaste.”
He was right. He’s usually right. Damned sire’s intuition. I shut off my computer monitor and leaned back in my chair. “I’m guessing you have some sort of theory here.”
“Not yet. I was hoping to form it while you tell me—in detail—about these dreams. Then I was going to cut you off with a big, dramatic exclamation, something along the lines of ‘aha!’ at which point you’d find yourself impressed and slightly aroused by my genius.” He shrugged. “But now, I guess I’ll just settle for the detail part.”
I rolled my eyes and folded my arms across my chest. “I never see his face, but I know it’s him.”
Nathan nodded, indicating I should continue.
“There aren’t any colors except blue.” I bit my lip. “The watercolor kind of blue I remember from when I was…dead.”
A deep frown creased Nathan’s brow, a sure sign I’d piqued his interest with my story. “Are you sure it’s not your super-conscious working through that night?”
When I had those dreams, I always saw the same things. The bright orange cat that had passed my splayed body. The thick shapes of the shadow people coming to claim me. I didn’t bother Nathan with these memories. My brief death—the second one—had traumatized him enough. “Cut the psych bullshit. You think I’m having these dreams for a reason, don’t you?”
He let out a long breath as his mind searched for nonanswers. “I suppose it could be some residue of your former blood tie to him.”
“But why now?” I shook my head. “It’s been two months. What could have happened to reactivate the tie now?”
Nathan stood, trying—and failing—to look unconcerned. “It could be anything. I’ll have Max do some digging in the Movement files.”
The Voluntary Vampire Extinction Movement was a harsh, totalitarian organization demanding the death of vampires who didn’t live by their strict code. Nathan had been on probation for seventy years for killing his wife, though it hadn’t been entirely his fault, and by siring me he’d broken one of the cardinal rules: preventing the inevitable death of a wounded vampire. Rather than wait until they found out and killed him, Nathan had chosen to go outlaw. But he maintained ties to Max Harrison, the only other vampire who knew the circumstances surrounding Nathan and me.
I smiled. “I’m sure he’ll be thrilled with the assignment.”
“He doesn’t have a choice,” Nathan said cheerfully. He no longer hid the fact he lived to make Max’s life hell. “Well, the sun�
�s long down. I’d better get downstairs and earn my keep. Are you going to work tonight? I’ve got some inventory that needs cataloging.”
“As tempting as it sounds, no.” I’d clocked enough unpaid hours in Nathan’s occult bookshop to last several lifetimes. If I never saw another Book of Shadows or packet of herbs, it would be too soon. I gestured to the computer. “I need to finish this before it drives me insane.”
“Likewise.” He made a face. “Next time you want to do some crazy experiment, use someone else as your lab rat.”
I heard the door shut behind him as he left. Usually, he locked it, but I heard no telltale jingle of keys.
Vampires take the bond between sire and fledgling as seriously as humans do the bond between parent and child. Normally, Nathan was frighteningly overprotective of me. I tried to push aside the feeling that something might be wrong. Those thoughts were like poison ivy. Once you scratch it, the infection spreads and grows. I didn’t need to spend the night on pins and needles, jumping at the slightest sound.
I flipped on the monitor, hoping to lose myself in medical jargon, but I couldn’t concentrate. My unease grew, my palms began to sweat and my stomach tingled. I ticked off the symptoms in my mind and only then recognized my body’s reaction.
Fight or flight.
The primitive response to fear had slowly built in me, but I was in no immediate danger. My heart did a panicky flip-flop in my chest as I stared at my reflection behind the words on the screen. My pupils had dilated. My face began to morph into monster mode. I stood, willing myself to calm down. There was no reason to feel this way.
Unless it was the blood tie.
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