Blood Ties Omnibus

by Jennifer Armintrout

  The girl nodded uncertainly. “I don’t think Father Bart had any—”

  “The dead priest is not my fucking problem!” He slammed his fists down on the water, sloshing it over the sides of the tub.

  The Mouse shrank away, screaming. It lifted Cyrus’s spirits considerably to see the girl frightened.

  “Get out. If you can’t find anything suitable for me, you’ll have to ask those morons upstairs.” He leaned against the curved back of the tub and closed his eyes, savoring the girl’s litany of pleas as she cowered on the floor.

  Max arrived five hours later. I was buried beneath the covers on Nathan’s bed, clinging to his scent like a life raft and trying to ignore the bedside radio he always kept on. The classic rock station was in the middle of a Fleetwood Mac Rock Block. “Gypsy” was just finishing up when I heard the front door burst open.

  “Carrie?” Something heavy hit the floor in the living room. Probably the duffel bag Max always carried with him. Loud footsteps ran down the hall and I climbed from beneath the blankets in time to see him skid to a stop at the doorway.

  “What’s going on? Where’s Nathan?” Max scanned the room as if he’d see him there.

  “Gone.” I don’t know if it was my relief at finally having an ally in my nightmare or if the reality of the situation had finally set in, but my voice cracked and tears rolled down my face. “He’s just gone.”

  “Oh, God. Carrie.” Max dropped to the bed and put his arms around me. His jacket smelled like leather and cigarette smoke where I buried my face against his shoulder. He only held me a moment before he pulled away. Making a motion of a stake going through his heart, he asked quietly, “Gone?”

  I shook my head and wiped my eyes. “Not like that. He was here. His body was here. But he wasn’t.”

  “He was possessed?”

  “Not exactly.” How could I explain it? “There wasn’t anything of Nathan left at all. Could you turn off that radio?”

  Max nodded and fumbled with the alarm clock until “Go Your Own Way” cut out in the middle. “I hate that song, anyway.”

  I covered my eyes, and he pulled me into his arms again. No matter how good the physical comfort felt, it did nothing to dull the ache in my heart.

  “What happened?” he asked softly.

  I didn’t let go of him. “I felt it through the blood tie. Something was wrong. So I went downstairs.”

  When I couldn’t finish, he shushed me and patted my back. For all his come-ons and attitude, Max was actually a very understanding man. “Listen, I’m going to go downstairs and look around. You stay up here where you’ll be safe.” He leaned back and looked me in the eye. “Okay?”

  I followed him to the living room and watched him pull some stakes from his bag. “Be careful.”

  He looked up, the most fake smile I’d ever seen on his face. “I can take care of myself, Doctor.”

  “No, not that. I mean, if Nathan is down there…”

  Max followed my gaze to the stake in his hand. When our eyes met, his expression broke my heart more than it already was. “Give me a little credit, Carrie.”

  “Sorry.” Dangerously close to tears, I turned away and pretended to be interested in something on one of the many bookshelves lining the wall. Only when I heard the door click softly closed behind me did I allow myself to wipe my eyes. When I looked up, the spines of Nathan’s ridiculously large collection of books confronted me. When I glanced away, I saw his chair, his shoes. A half-finished mug of blood atop a stack of notebooks. All of the components were there, all of the little parts that made Nathan’s life, waiting for him to return to them. It made his absence more real somehow, and mocked my pain. If we never found Nathan, these little reminders of him would remain for me to deal with.

  I don’t know how long I stood there staring at the photo, but when the rattle of the doorknob heralded Max’s return, his speed surprised me.

  He shrugged off his jacket and tossed it over the back of the chair. “There’s nothing. Just a lot of really nasty-smelling blood. I’m assuming that was his?”

  I nodded, not trusting myself to speak.

  “There’s nothing else we can do tonight.” He rubbed the back of his neck and swore. “Tell me what happened.”

  The symbols.

  “There were marks.” I scrambled for a notebook and pen I spied on the perpetually cluttered coffee table. “Strange things he’d carved all over his body.”

  “Carved? As in cut?” Max came around the chair and stood beside me, looming hopefully over my shoulder as I scribbled what I could remember of them.

  “I think they were sigils, or something.” I closed my eyes, but couldn’t get a clear picture. “It all looked like random angles with circles on the end.”

  When I handed him the paper, he frowned and traced his fingers over the symbols. “You’re sure this is right?”

  “Well, I didn’t take a picture of them, but when a bleeding, naked man with funky writing carved all over his body is pinning you to the ground, you have other things on your mind.” I chewed my lip and pointed to the page. “What do you think?”

  “He attacked you?” Max’s eyes darted over me, looking for signs of injury. “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah.” I hadn’t thought to mention the attack, and the omission seemed ridiculous now. I almost laughed at my stupidity. “He stopped. I think…I think he knew it was me. He smelled me and then he just…stopped.”

  Max considered the information for a moment, then turned back to the page. “Does Nathan speak any other languages?” He pulled his cell phone from his pocket. “Aramaic, Hindi, Greek? Something with letters that look different from ours?”

  I shook my head. “Gaelic, from childhood, but the letters look the same. He slips into it sometimes when he’s tired or drunk, but—”

  Max chuckled. “I’ll file that away for future reference.”

  The fact he believed Nathan had a future reassured me a little. I sat on the couch while Max punched up a number on his phone. “Who are you calling?”

  “Movement,” Max said casually as if he wasn’t standing in the home of two fugitive vampires.

  I lunged for the phone.

  He yelped in surprise and jumped back. “Hey, what are you doing?”

  “You can’t call the Movement,” I whispered fiercely as though they could hear me. “They’ll kill us.”

  “They’ll want to know something happened to Nathan. Besides, who’s going to help us? The oh-so-reliable spell books downstairs?” He turned away to speak into the phone. “Hola, baby. It’s Harrison. Get me Anne.”

  My heart pounded in my chest as I stood helplessly by while Nathan’s only friend turned Judas.

  “Anne, cómo está? It’s Harrison.” He paused, then burst out with a hearty laugh.

  How could he do this? I seethed, tuning out his conversation. Nathan had quit the Voluntary Vampire Extinction Movement when he’d sired me. We’d been flying under the radar ever since, and now Max was going to bring us to their attention?

  “Gotcha.” His smile widened. “We’ll be on the plane at sunset.”

  “Plane?” I barely held the word in until he’d hung up the phone. “Where are you going?”

  “We are going to Movement headquarters. In Madrid,” he added casually as if location would be my prime concern.

  “Excuse me? We? You expect me to march into a building full of assassins who’ve been commanded to kill me on sight?” I shook my head emphatically. “No way.”

  Max laughed. “You give yourself a lot of credit, you know that? There are thousands of renegade vampires roaming the earth. You’re a two-month-old who killed her sire. Even if you mentioned your name to every person in the place, I bet you wouldn’t come across one vampire who recognized it.”

  “But you told them about Nathan.” I gestured to the phone in his hand. “They’ll know to look out for him, then.”

  Max tossed the cell onto the coffee table and sat beside me. “He wa
s a good assassin. They’re upset that he’s left the fold, but they’re not going to put a bounty on him unless he really steps over the line. There are way too many vampires out there doing worse damage to humankind.”

  I knew it was true. Nathan had told me as much. If they’d wanted us dead, we would have been staked within the week after I’d killed Cyrus. “Over the line?” My heart jumped into my throat. “Like?”

  “Like killing someone or making a new vampire.” Max tried to maintain a neutral expression, but it grew more serious by degrees. “Listen, I’m not going to tell you this is an ideal situation. Nathan’s in grave danger. If I thought we had the resources to help him ourselves, I would never have involved the Movement.”

  “You won’t let them kill him, will you?”

  Max shook his head grimly, but a steel band of worry clamped around my heart. “There’s something you’re not telling me,” I murmured.

  Max sighed heavily. “We’ve been monitoring the Soul Eater. There’s been…activity.”

  Of course there had been. Jacob Seymour, Cyrus’s father and Nathan’s sire, had haunted my nightmares ever since I’d first seen him at Cyrus’s Vampire New Year party. He cannibalized other vampires, consuming their blood and their souls to stay alive after years of maniacal acquisition of power had taken their toll on his metabolism. Most of the year he slept safe in his coffin with a full retinue of guards, but a Movement strike team had thrown his feeding schedule off.

  “What kind of activity?” My fingernails bit into my palms as I clenched my fists. I wanted to scream, “Just get it over with! Tell me what’s going on!” But I couldn’t treat Max that way. He was trying to help me by breaking the news gently. He didn’t know it was like pulling a Band-Aid off slowly.

  “His known fledglings have gone missing. Even Movement guys. Carrie, there’s a reason the Soul Eater is so weak. He’s made, like, a fledgling a year for five centuries. Now they’re all disappearing.” Max shrugged helplessly. “And he’s getting stronger.”

  If I’d thought I’d hit bottom before, I’d had no idea. At Max’s words, the bottom truly dropped out. “You don’t think…” I couldn’t say it. There was only one way the Soul Eater grew stronger: consuming a vampire’s blood and soul.

  “Hey, I only know what they tell me,” he said, trying to sound encouraging, I’m sure. “But this thing…listen, there’s only one person who’s going to be able to tell us what’s wrong with Nathan. Unfortunately, she’s a little dangerous. That’s why the Movement has her.” He paused, cursed and ran a hand through his short blond hair. “I don’t like the plan, but they think it’s the best idea, and frankly, we don’t have anything else to go on.”

  With a shock, I realized my night hadn’t started out this way. I’d gotten up, spoken to Nathan, gone for a walk, with no suspicion that another hardship was waiting for us. The unfairness of the situation crushed me. All I wanted was Nathan, to have him with me, to tell me everything was all right. I tried the blood tie, but I felt nothing. Pain, so powerful I couldn’t express it with a sound, forced its way from my body, my mouth frozen open in a silent scream. I wrapped my arms around my middle and tried to stand, only to collapse to my knees on the floor.

  Max was beside me in a heartbeat, grabbing my upper arms to haul me upright and onto the couch. He put his arms around me, and I collapsed against him. His cotton T-shirt was comforting against my cheek, and for a moment I let myself pretend it was Nathan holding me.

  Then I pushed the fantasy away. It would never stop hurting if I didn’t face reality. Nathan was gone, maybe forever.

  “I don’t know what I’m going to do,” I sobbed, more to myself than to Max.

  His voice was thick as he struggled to keep the emotion out of it. “I know what you’re going to do. You’re going to get through tonight and probably tomorrow, then we’re going to get on that plane to Madrid. We’ll meet with the Movement, do some sightseeing, get gloriously drunk and catch a flamenco show. Sound good?”

  “How can you joke at a time like this?” I wiped my nose pathetically on the back of my hand, glaring at him. “What if we don’t get Nathan back?”

  “This isn’t the worst thing that’s ever happened to Nathan. He’ll come out of this.” Max hesitated. “I haven’t told anyone this…”

  I sat up. “Haven’t told anyone what?”

  He looked away. “I don’t know if it will help you if I do tell you.”

  “It’s worth a shot.” Nothing he could say would make things worse.

  “My sire died.” Before I could make any attempt at condolences, he rushed to speak again. “About ten years ago. He wasn’t Movement. I wasn’t either, at the beginning. I was living with him—nothing gay or anything—and I started talking to this girl. She was an assassin. I didn’t know. She used me to get to him, then she gave me a choice. I could join the Movement or die. After I saw what she’d done to Marcus—”

  “You don’t have to go on,” I whispered. The pain in his voice overwhelmed me.

  He nodded and smiled as though he was embarrassed to be so emotionally exposed. “I still miss him. Sometimes I think if I could just hear his voice…But for the most part, I’ve gotten better.”

  I wanted to say “I can’t imagine,” or “That must have been awful,” but I could imagine and it was awful. That was why he’d told me. If he could survive losing his sire, I could survive this separation from Nathan. Unfortunately, with that came the implied reassurance I could survive Nathan’s death. I didn’t want to think about it, so I didn’t say anything, and leaned against Max again. Like this, I could rest secure in the familial love that cements good friendships.

  “We’re going to get him back, Carrie. Nathan’s too big a pain in my ass to be gone for long. I’m not that lucky.” He gave me a quick squeeze with the arm draped around my shoulders.

  Our morose conversation died without a fight as we retreated into ourselves. Max fell asleep, leaning against me on the couch. I’m sure we made a cheerful picture: two wounded souls, both relying on the other to hold them up.

  Outside, the sun came up. Wherever Nathan was, I hoped he was okay.

  3

  Nature of the Beast

  U pstairs, a woman screamed over and over. It was a beautiful, delicious sound, and it was going to drive him mad.

  Cyrus lay in the dead priest’s narrow twin bed. The Mouse slept on the floor, where she’d cried herself to sleep, much to Cyrus’s annoyance. But she’d put clean sheets on the bed, so she wasn’t the most worthless servant he’d ever had.

  The noise upstairs died as he assumed the woman making it had. Next, they would drain her blood and eat her organs. The nostalgia of it parched Cyrus’s lips. What he wouldn’t do for a taste of blood.

  The Mouse had fed him canned soup that was too thin and too salty. Even as a vampire he’d enjoyed various culinary delights—chocolate, expensive cheeses and fine caviar. As blood had been his main source of sustenance, he’d only had to eat for pleasure. The thought of ingesting lowly fare out of necessity was brutally depressing, but it had, fortunately, restored some little bit of strength to his limbs.

  “Are you awake?” He sat up and nudged her with his toes. She lay on her side, curled into a ball with the blanket he’d spared her—generously, in his opinion—clutched to her chest. When she didn’t move, he gave her a feeble kick. “Get up!”

  She didn’t budge. For one sick, cheerful moment he wondered if she’d died. Another kick elicited a small shift. A frown creased her brow, and she turned her head. Her dull hair fell back, exposing her neck. The pulse point there leaped with seductive familiarity.

  Just one bite.

  He was no longer a vampire. He had no fangs, no blood thirst, at least not physically. But his soul still craved it. Craved the rich taste of the blood. The emotional connection from drinking. Canned soup couldn’t replace that.

  He slid to the ground soundlessly and curved his body around hers, closing his eyes to stop the room from
spinning. Though her hips and shoulders were bony, her flesh was warm and welcoming. He remembered this part, the seduction. There had been times when hurting them just to watch them fight had been enjoyable, but he wasn’t sure of his strength now, and he didn’t want her screaming to alert the vampires upstairs.

  Her hair still smelled of shampoo, the cheap, pungent strawberry variety he’d seen in the bathroom. He buried his face against her neck and tasted her skin, salty with perspiration and fear.

  His touch didn’t wake her. She moaned softly when he traced the shell of her ear with his tongue. Her hips pushed back against his, and he held them there, tight against his growing arousal.

  This was how he remembered it. The pure, physical pleasure mingled with overwhelming emotion. There was always a moment where the act made him drunk, made him forget that he’d intended to kill, and overrode his consciousness. For an instant, he’d be tricked into believing it was an expression of love and not a prelude to death. For an instant, he’d be fooled into believing they loved him.

  He squeezed his eyes shut tight and slipped his hand into the front of her dress. The warmth of her beating heart echoed his, mocking him.

  They never loved him. How could they? He’d never been worthy of love. Not his father’s, not his wives’ or his companions’. What had he ever done to earn love?

  This was where the moment of perfection took an ugly turn. Rage filled him. His hold on her bony hip turned cruel. Even without his vampire strength, he knew he would leave a bruise.

  This was what he craved. The pain. The horror. He reveled in it.

  She woke with a start. He leaned over her to see the comprehension slowly take her. First confusion at waking from such a sinfully pleasant dream. Then shame when she realized her dream had been reality. Horror, when she saw who held her, and finally, acceptance as she realized what he would do.