“All you have to do is ask for anything, and I’m not going to be able to tell you no.” He swallowed. There it was. “And that’s probably why I hate you so much.”
She smiled and kissed him, a friendly peck, thank God, and pulled him with her onto the bed.
As she arranged the covers around them, he glanced at the clock in the corner. “You know, it’s not exactly my bedtime.”
“Stay,” she implored, twining her fingers with his.
His lips quirked in a reluctant smile. “And I’m not exactly dressed for bed, either.”
“Stay,” she repeated, yawning.
He did.
During the day, while we slept, the atmosphere in the house seemed to change. If the Oracle had intended to shake our confidence by nearly killing Bella, her plan had backfired. By the time we gathered for another—hopefully uneventful—war council, we’d all found some sort of peace with each other.
Max, however, hadn’t found peace with his dining room, so we met in the library. Bella lay curled before the fireplace in a pose that betrayed her canine blood. Max sat at her side, occasionally giving her head an affectionate scratch. Each time he did this, Nathan, seated in the stiff-backed wing chair next to mine, rolled his eyes.
I gave him a warning glance and cleared my throat. “So, she can see into the Oracle’s head? Like with a blood tie?”
Bella shook her head. “No. I am not familiar with your vampire tie, but I know I cannot control what I see.”
“So, the Oracle is controlling it,” Nathan murmured pensively. He stared straight ahead, the way he always did when working out a difficult problem.
“Not necessarily.” Max tried, and failed, to make eye contact with Nathan, so he turned to me. “It sounds more like the Oracle gave Bella accidental access. Mind residue or something.”
“There are still things that are hidden to me. I know where she is going. I know someone is with her. But I cannot see who.” Bella’s smooth forehead creased in concentration. “Another vampire.”
“That narrows it down,” Max quipped. At Bella’s hurt look, he added a hasty, “Sorry.”
There was a pause. Nathan still stared into the flames of the fireplace, his steepled fingers pressed to his lips as he leaned forward, elbows on his knees. Max looked uncomfortably from him to me.
I shrugged. “So, where’s the Oracle going, then? I mean, we don’t have much, but that’s something.”
“Boston,” Bella answered quickly. “She is on a ship.”
“Do you know when she’ll arrive?” If she’d already come ashore, she could be anywhere.
Bella nodded. “Soon. She is still at sea, but she becomes restless. They will land in a few days.”
“That doesn’t give us much time.” Max seemed in danger of slipping into the same concentration coma Nathan was already in. Luckily, he snapped out of it quickly. “We’d better get moving.”
“All of us?” I’d just taken a long, perilous road trip, and I didn’t feel inclined to go on another one. Where I really wanted to be was back in Grand Rapids, living in skewed domesticity and half-assed reconciliation with Nathan. “I mean, shouldn’t someone stay behind and try to find the Soul Eater?”
“Yeah, you’re right. Maybe you and Nathan should?” Max smiled. “Seriously, though, it’s a good idea. Bella has to go to Boston, because she’s the one who’ll be able to get clues and necessary info from the Oracle’s brain. I’ve got experience with the Oracle, albeit a drugged up, restrained Oracle, but it is experience. And the Soul Eater is really your and Nathan’s area of expertise.”
“So, I guess it’s settled then,” I said slowly, looking for any reaction from Nathan. “You’ll go to Boston and we’ll…”
“Nobody is going anywhere,” Nathan said finally. His meaningful gaze locked on each of us before moving back to the flames.
“So, we’re just going to sit around until the Oracle hooks up with your daddy and they turn the world into a nightmare of chaos on earth?” Max shook his head and lifted one arm over his head. “Raise your hand if you think that’s a bad idea.”
“It is a bad idea,” Nathan agreed. “But it’s also a bad idea to rely on information from the Oracle, especially considering how we got it.”
“Information from the Oracle is rarely wrong.” Max turned to me. “Remember Anne, the receptionist? She told you the Oracle had given her a vision of her back breaking, and it happened.”
It had happened, in gruesome detail, before our very eyes. “But she didn’t know when. She told me the Oracle doesn’t give specifics, and that’s why she didn’t believe it would happen.”
“If the Oracle is telling Bella she’ll definitely be in Boston in a few days, doesn’t that seem a little suspicious?” Nathan turned to the werewolf. “I don’t doubt you’re getting visions, and that they’re genuine. But you said yourself there were things you couldn’t see.”
“You think she’s setting a trap?” While I didn’t question Nathan’s intelligence, I did question the Oracle’s sanity. “She doesn’t seem to have it together enough to do something like that.”
“While I’m going to Boston regardless of what any of you chuckleheads say, you do have a point.” Max stood and leaned against one of the massive marble columns framing the fireplace. “On the other hand, I’ve seen her tear a man’s head clean off his body, so I’m disinclined to think she’s not evil enough to set us up.”
“Well, at least we agree on something,” I grumbled. “She’s capable of killing us all.”
“That kind of thinking is not constructive,” Bella snapped, glaring at me.
“If you go to fight the Oracle, you will lose.” Nathan gripped the arms of the chair and rose to his feet. “Don’t be so stubborn about this that you get yourself killed!”
“Hey, hey!” I shouted, standing quickly to step between Nathan and Max. The testosterone level was growing to an unmanageable level. “We’re not going to get anywhere fighting.”
“That I can agree with,” Bella sulked, still lying calmly on the floor.
I shot her an angry glance and turned to Nathan. “At the very least, Max and Bella should try to find out more about this Oracle situation. Now, if that means going to Boston—”
“Which I’m going to do, anyway,” Max snarled.
I raised a palm to silence him. “If that means going, then maybe they have to go. But they don’t have to engage in full-on combat. They can do some recon, find out what she’s up to, and get back to us.”
I turned to Max. “You have to admit, it’s pretty stupid to rush in to kill her when we don’t even know what she’s got planned. What’s to say that if we kill her, the Soul Eater can’t finish whatever it is she’s started, if she’s started anything at all?”
“You have a point,” Max conceded.
Nathan wasn’t so easily swayed. “And if the Oracle has an ambush waiting?”
“Max and Bella are Movement trained assassins.” I refrained from pointing out Bella had been seriously injured and that Nathan and Max had been rendered powerless by the Oracle. “They’re more than capable of taking care of themselves. Remember your training?”
“I remember,” he said with gritted teeth. “But let’s suppose they go and follow the Oracle, and learn all her secrets. What are we going to be doing?”
“Well, we’ll check out what’s going on with the Soul Eater,” I replied lamely.
“Without any Movement contacts and no idea where to start looking?” Nathan laughed derisively. “What are you going to do? Wave a magic wand? Or are we going to go back to the tarot cards?”
His contempt steeled my resolve to be the victor in this argument. “Nope. Not tarot cards. Think about it. You’ve got a blood tie to the Soul Eater. I realize it’s a risk to contact him, but it’s even riskier to let him roam around unchecked.”
I slipped my hand into Nathan’s back pocket, jerking him forward so our pelvises bumped. Almost before the thought fully formed, before I had any time to regist
er shock at what I suggested, the words slipped past my lips: “And I’ve got Cyrus.”
Six:
Conversations with Live People
“H ello?”
I don’t know what I was expecting when I dialed the number Information had given me. I guess I was still reeling from the discovery that Cyrus even had a listed number. When his voice came across the line, I was stunned. Whatever it was I thought would happen, Cyrus answering the phone wasn’t it.
“Hello?” he repeated. “Look, I can hear you breathing, and it is neither sexy nor interesting. If you’d like to call back when you have something sexy or interesting to say, I will be happy to chat. Until then—”
“Cyrus, it’s me.” I swallowed thickly. “It’s Carrie.”
There was a long pause. I wondered if he’d hung up, anyway.
“Carrie.” His voice seemed faint and far away. “How are you?”
“I’m fine.” I glanced across the room, where Nathan sat on the overstuffed sofa, pretending to be absorbed in one of my dog-eared Terry Prachett novels.
I stood beside the bed. I’d been sitting on it when I’d first made the call, but the sound of Cyrus’s voice had pulled me to my feet. It seemed way too intimate, perverted even, to be lounging on a bed, talking to Cyrus, with Nathan in the room.
“I’m fine,” I repeated, turning my back on Nathan. “And you?”
“As well as can be expected.” His heavy sigh made a harsh, static sound on the line. “I have a job now.”
“A job?” I heard Nathan’s grunt of stifled laughter and pointedly ignored it. “That’s great. What do you do?”
“Do you promise not to laugh?” Cyrus didn’t seem too concerned, considering he was already chuckling himself. “I stock shelves in a grocery store.”
“No!” The very idea rocked the foundations of reality for me. Cyrus, my power-hungry, Euro-trash former sire, working in a grocery store?
He gave another heavy sigh. “You wouldn’t believe the number of times a day I would trade my soul for a pair of fangs. Really, the customers…my God, it’s as if they’re brain dead.”
I laughed the sympathetic laugh required for such a comment, and we lapsed into uncomfortable silence.
“So,” I began uneasily. “You’re back in Grand Rapids for good then?”
He made an affirmative noise. “I found Mouse’s sister. I can’t say I made any real progress there. But she knows what happened. At least, she knows the sanitized version.”
“How did she take it?” Cyrus had told me very little about the girl he’d named Mouse. When he’d left Grand Rapids to seek out her next of kin, I’d been under the impression he’d had little hope of finding anyone.
“She asked me for a hundred bucks and offered to, ah, compensate me for it.” He sounded as though the subject made him tired. “She didn’t even care.”
“At least you cared.” It was a stupid thing to say, but I’d never been good at condolences. “Where are you staying?”
“In a horrible apartment downtown, near the college. The absolute worst part of the city. Hippies as far as the eye can see.” I heard the smile in his voice as he added, “Near your sire’s place, actually.”
“Uh-huh.” Great. All notions of domestic bliss, or however close Nathan and I could come to it, shattered by geographical coincidence.
“It wasn’t my idea, really,” Cyrus rushed to add. “Dahlia set it up for me.”
“Oh, so you’ve been talking to Dahlia.” I turned and met Nathan’s suddenly alert glance with a worried one of my own. “That’s comforting. What did you have to do to earn her help?”
“Still jealous, are we?” Cyrus laughed. “Don’t worry. It was a trade—the mansion for one room with a kitchenette and a tiny bathroom with a stall shower and a door that doesn’t close all the way. Doesn’t seem like a fair trade, but life has been consistently unfair to me for a while now.”
“Oh, how nice. I didn’t realize I’d been invited to the pity party,” I mused.
He laughed again. “Carrie, I stock bricks of pasteurized, processed cheese for seven dollars an hour. Indulge me if I miss the comforts of my former life a bit.”
“Have you been keeping an eye on your health?” I asked, changing the subject. “You’re not immortal anymore, you know.”
“I’m painfully aware of that. I’m also painfully aware of the fact I have no insurance, and the world seems to turn on the revenue generated by insurance companies.” He waited a moment before asking, but I could feel the question coming. “Perhaps you wouldn’t mind being my caregiver. Just until things are settled. I have the most insufferable allergies—”
“I don’t think that’s such a good idea.” Historically, me and any expanse of unclothed Cyrus flesh were a potentially unstable combination. “But maybe we can go to the drugstore when I get back, take a look at some of the over-the-counter allergy meds. Some of them are just worthless, but—”
“Ask him about the Soul Eater,” Nathan interrupted. I’d pushed his patience too far. He sighed heavily and tossed the book aside, clearly weary of his role as phone chaperone.
I narrowed my eyes at him and clamped my hand over the receiver.
Too late. “Is that Nolen I hear in the background?”
Clearing my throat, I made an affirmative sound. “And it’s Nathan now.”
“I know, I know.” I could practically hear Cyrus’s eye roll. “So, how is Nathan?”
Agitated. He was still looking at me expectantly, his big arms folded across his chest. “He’s fine. He wants to know if you’ve heard from your father.”
“Oh, yes. Of course I have.”
Wow, that was easy. “Oh?” I asked cautiously.
“Yes. We went fishing and then to a baseball game, and after that he took me to the toy store and bought me everything I wanted. And a pony.” If sarcasm were liquid, it would have dripped from Cyrus’s words.
“You know I have to ask,” I snapped. “Something is going on, and so help me, if you have anything to do with it—”
“How, Carrie?” He sounded tired, in the way only a human could. Physically tired beyond anything a vampire could feel, a mass of dying tissues and an inability to stand another second of bullshit. “How could I, in this failing, mortal body, be a part of anything my father has planned? Do you think I’ve been spending any amount of time in the company of vampires? Do you know any humans who do?”
“Dahlia,” I answered, for both counts. “She hung around you.”
“Like an anchor,” he agreed.
“And you’ve been talking to her lately, if she got you the apartment.” I waited a moment, unsure if I would push him too far with the question. Then I decided to hell with it, I had to ask. “You’re not trying to become a vampire again, are you?”
The silence was so long I wondered if he’d hung up. When he spoke again, his voice was thick. “Do you think I would want to be one of you again? After what happened to…her?”
It stung that he wouldn’t say her name to me, as if I were unworthy of hearing it, or guilty by association for being part of the species that killed her.
Not that I could blame him. When his father had raised him from the dead, Cyrus had come back human. Mouse had been his human caretaker and, as often happens in cases of desperation and captivity, they’d fallen into a warped kind of love.
Then I’d completely misread the situation, kidnapped Cyrus—Mouse’s only protector against the vampires holding them—and left her to die. Not a day went by that I didn’t dream of her ruined body, lying in the bed where we’d found her. That I didn’t wake up sick with guilt at the thought I could have saved her if I’d just listened to Cyrus instead of rushing to chloroform him.
But then, anyone who’d been alone with Cyrus for more than five minutes would have rushed to the chloroform.
“I’m sorry.” I lowered my voice, but not for Nathan’s benefit. “But I’m not sorry for asking.”
“Of course you’re not
.” He snorted derisively. “You’re never responsible for anything where I’m concerned.”
“Cyrus,” I began, while Nathan stood and crossed the room, as if he’d be able to defend me over the phone.
I waved him away as Cyrus’s angry voice cut me off. “I have to go. I have a finite amount of life left and I don’t want to spend it arguing with you.”
“Fine, I’ll let you go,” I said coolly. “But first, tell me what you know about the Soul Eater.”
“I don’t know anything about him!” Cyrus snapped. There was a pregnant pause, and I could nearly hear him throwing up his hands. “Dahlia stops by every now and again with groceries or money. Next time I see her, I’ll find out what I can and I’ll contact you.”
“I would appreciate that, thank you.” What I really wanted to say was, “I’m sorry I hurt your feelings. You don’t have to wait until you hear from Dahlia to call me. I’ll always want to hear from you.”
But Nathan, good old, ever-watchful Nathan, stood so close I could feel him literally breathing down my neck.
Instead, when Cyrus asked, “Is there anything else?” I replied, “No. Goodbye, Cyrus.”
“That went well.” Nathan’s words would have seemed sharp and sarcastic if not for his soft tone. “Are you all right?”
I turned and pressed my face to the front of his T-shirt. His hard chest muffled my response. “No.”
He laid a hand gently on my hair. “It couldn’t have been that bad.”
“He called me a monster.” I looked up and shrugged. “Call me crazy, but it bothers me.”
Nathan stepped back and turned away, but I caught the grimace he tried to hide. “Well, do you blame him?”
“Pardon me?” My hands came to my hips in a horrible cliché of an angry woman, and I forced them down.
“He’s human now. We probably seem pretty damn intimidating to him.” He calmly returned to the book, this time looking far more interested in it than he had before, when he’d been listening in on my private conversation.
“Excuse me! He ripped my heart out, not the other way around!” I conveniently glossed over the fact that I had killed him another way. Still, Nathan’s attitude, that Cyrus was somehow right in lumping us together with the vampires who’d killed his girlfriend, chafed me. “You might be okay with calling yourself a monster, but I’m not!”
Blood Ties Omnibus Page 73