Blood Ties Omnibus

by Jennifer Armintrout

“I thought perhaps…” She hesitated, as though it was difficult for her to speak. Max supposed he should worry that she would say she thought the separation was a good idea, that they should make it permanent, but he couldn’t quite get to that state of hysteria. He knew Bella too well, and he was secure enough in their relationship to know that whatever she would say next would be something along the lines of “I want to do something incredibly stupid and dangerous to protect you that I know you will reject outright.”

  “I want to gather a few of the women, the other magic workers, and maintain our contact with you while you are gone. Perhaps we will be of use—”

  “Until your father finds out, hates me more, banishes you and the other women—” Max interrupted, only to be cut off again by Bella.

  “My father will not banish me. Sometimes I fear he cannot make the best decisions for the pack when acting as both my father and the pack leader.” She closed her eyes and rubbed the bridge of her nose with the back of her hand. “I worry what will happen when werewolves become involved in this fight. My father only sees himself as potentially being rid of a nuisance.”

  “Thanks,” Max interjected.

  “He has no concept of how enraged the Soul Eater will be, and what repercussions might affect the pack as a whole.” She looked to Max, golden eyes pleading. “Please, just keep in contact with me. I will rally support quietly, and when the time is right, if the time comes, I will be able to do my part.”

  One thing Bella wasn’t good at—the only thing Bella wasn’t good at, actually, if Max didn’t count being humble or ugly—was being helpless. And he sympathized with her. There were times in the past when he’d gone about crazy waiting for orders from the Movement to go ahead and do what he already knew would have to be done. But he didn’t trust her father not to banish her or, God, hurt her, even. Julian was, after all, the man who’d tattooed multiple lines of ancient prophecy into Bella’s skin when she was a teenager. It might be a cultural difference that kept Max from understanding Julian’s motives, but culture be damned, he wasn’t about to let Bella’s father’s weird vendetta against him harm her.

  But then again, Bella had been a teenager once. She’d probably defied her father’s orders hundreds of times then without being caught. And pack pecking order or no, Bella’s aunts were frightening creatures who would bristle like porcupines if anyone, Julian included, tried any funny business.

  “Fine,” he conceded wearily. “Do what you have to do. But I want no part of it. Plausible denial is the best tool one can possess in some situations.”

  “Come,” she said, putting her arms out to him. “Help me into the chair. Then get yourself some blood and we will watch the sun rise together.”

  It was as much of a goodbye as he knew he would get from her.

  I woke, disoriented, to the sound of Nathan cursing and shoes scuffing on the dirt floor. My brain became aware reluctantly, an inconvenience at a time when clearly all hell was breaking loose around me. I staggered to my feet and promptly struck my aching head on one of the overhead beams. When I was finished swearing and rubbing my head, I finally saw what was going on.

  Ziggy had woken up. He’d made it halfway up the steps, from what I could tell, and now Nathan had one of his legs in a death grip, trying to pull him away from the trapdoor. Bill leaned against the wall, hands to his throat, a look of shock—the clinical kind—on his face.

  “Carrie!” Nathan shouted, and I realized that was what had woken me in the first place. “Help Bill before he bleeds to death!”

  I walked awkwardly on my knees to Bill’s side. Blood cascaded from between his fingers to stain the front of his T-shirt. “He bit me,” he mumbled. “He bit me.”

  “I take it you’ve never been bitten by a vampire before,” I started, completely calm, completely oblivious to the struggle behind me. If I got him talking, diverted his focus, I might be able to save him. “It hurts like hell, doesn’t it?”

  His forehead shone with perspiration, and he looked not at me, but through me. “He bit me.”

  “I know. Let me just…” I gently pried his hands away from his wounded throat. I’d braced myself for the blood to spray, and thankfully, it didn’t. I replaced his hand with my own, pulling the bottom of his shirt up to press against the wound.

  Behind me, Nathan growled to Ziggy, “Sit down and we’ll talk about this!”

  “Talk, my ass!” There was a thud, and I imagined Ziggy’s foot connecting with Nathan’s chest. There was a scrabbling sound against the wood, and the trapdoor banged open. “If I don’t get back there, he’s going to fucking kill me!”

  I grabbed Bill’s hand and held it over the wound. “He didn’t hit anything critical, but you need to hold this here until the bleeding stops. Not too tight.” I felt behind me for the sleeping bag and pulled it around his shoulders. Somehow, I resisted licking his blood off my fingers. “Are you all right?”

  He nodded toward the sound of the struggle, wetting his lips. “Help him.”

  Ziggy broke free of Nathan and made it up the few steps into the bookshop. Nathan and I raced after him in time to see the door fling open, admitting scorching sunlight. Ziggy managed to close it before he burst into flame, but when he sank, panting, with his back to the thick, scarred wood, his face was orange with sunburn.

  “Fuck daylight,” he rasped, closing his eyes, his head falling back in defeat. “I’m going to die.”

  “You’re not going to die,” I reassured him, knowing he wasn’t talking about his burn.

  Ziggy shook his head and yanked up his shirt, displaying for us the scar we’d already seen. “Jacob has my heart. He’ll kill me.”

  “Jacob,” Nathan muttered behind me, disgust plain in his voice. I knew what bothered him, without feeling it through the blood tie. I’d heard that same reverence in Nathan’s voice, when he’d willingly let me into his memories. The Soul Eater’s power over his fledglings ran deeper than the blood between them. Jacob Seymour was a powerful, ruthless, charismatic man. If a person didn’t fall for his promises of power, they were frightened by his cruelty. But always, always they were impressed by his way of making them feel as though they were the only person who mattered to him.

  I knew I almost had been.

  “Ziggy, he won’t kill you,” I began, steamrollering past whatever Nathan had opened his mouth to say. I had the distinct feeling that whatever words he chose, they wouldn’t be constructive. “He has your heart, but he had Cyrus’s heart for years. He never did anything with it. And eventually, he gave it back.”

  “Cyrus never ran off on him, either.” Ziggy practically spat the words. “He’s going to think I’ve betrayed him. He’s going to think I don’t l—”

  “He’s going to think what you make him think,” Nathan interrupted. His face was a mask of pain. He didn’t want to hear that his son loved a monster. “You haven’t been blocking him from the blood tie. He knows you’ve been kidnapped.”

  “He does.” Ziggy nodded vigorously. “He does. He’ll come back and get me.”

  “Is that what you really want?” My heart ached for him. I knew what it was like to feel so strongly for someone who was so destructive. Of course, it also terrified me to think that Ziggy might send out a homing beacon, leading the Soul Eater straight to us. “You don’t have to go back to him—”

  “No,” Nathan said quickly. “No, don’t make him think about that.” I opened my mouth to protest, but he shook his head so vehemently I closed it again. He never took his eyes from Ziggy. “If he doesn’t think about it, he doesn’t have to give anything away to Jacob. And he hasn’t had the practice disguising his thoughts that I’ve had. The Soul Eater will see through him in a minute.”

  “Well, he’d better start practicing,” I said, sounding more harsh, I’m sure, than I intended. “We can’t afford to have him broadcasting all our plans to the enemy.”

  “Your enemy,” Ziggy snapped, rising to his feet.

  “Do I need to tie you to som
ething?” Nathan stalked toward his son with a decidedly unfatherly glare.

  To his credit, Ziggy didn’t flinch in the face of Nathan’s stare down. “Jacob is my sire. Some of us stay loyal.”

  “He might be your sire, but you’re still my son,” Nathan snapped, hands clenching at his sides. “And I’m not losing you again.”

  When he grabbed for him, Ziggy moved out of the way. But it wasn’t murderous intent that made Nathan reach for his son. His arms swooped around his shoulders and pulled him away from the door. And while I stood there, watching as Ziggy remained passive, stoic, Nathan embraced him.

  I didn’t know what had happened to turn Ziggy from the unnervingly self-possessed, friendly youth he’d been to the jaded drone he seemed to be now. I didn’t want to know—I’d heard enough about the Soul Eater’s cruelty to last a lifetime. But it rent my heart to imagine it.

  While Nathan buried his face in his son’s shoulder, I saw Ziggy’s hand raise to lie, comforting, on his father’s dark hair. The gesture was so private, I turned away, ducking back into the shelter to check on Bill. I had no qualms about leaving Ziggy alone with Nathan. He wouldn’t hurt him. He’d had a chance to kill him once, and he hadn’t. In fact, if Ziggy was to be believed, he thought returning Nathan to the Soul Eater would save him, not damn him. I wondered how long it would take to deprogram him from that way of thinking, and whether or not it would be worth it.

  Bill’s neck stopped bleeding without further intervention—thank God for small mercies—but the bite was still puffy and nasty-looking. “Do you want something for the pain?”

  He grimaced and shook his head. “No. I’m tough.”

  “You don’t have to impress me.” I arched an eyebrow and subtly nudged the tool kit containing our amped-up first aid kit. “I won’t tell them.”

  “You’re an all right lady, for a vampire,” he said with a forced smile. “Now, the other two…”

  “Don’t get started on the other two,” I admonished playfully.

  His smile became more relaxed and natural. “How can I not? He bit me, remember?”

  “Yeah. And bites hurt worse than everyone seems to think.” I pressed a clean gauze pad over the wound and set to sticking it down with tape.

  “They never get it right in the movies,” he mused, his eyes rapidly taking on the glassy look of someone who’d just mainlined an opiate. “They always make it look erotic. Like sex, you know?”

  “I know.” A distinctly uncomfortable memory of sitting in my apartment on a Friday night, watching Gary Oldman’s Dracula seduce and turn Winona Ryder as Mina, flashed through my mind. If I’d known how much more complicated being a vampire would be, I might not have found it so romantic then. “Of course, I don’t have to wear a corset, so I suppose it’s a trade-off.”

  “Excuse me?” Bill asked with a loopy laugh. “I don’t think I’m so far gone that I could have possibly misheard that.”

  “Nothing.” I waved a hand to dismiss the conversation. Ziggy marched down the stairs, Nathan behind him, surreptitiously wiping his eyes.

  “It’s nearly sundown,” Ziggy said, touching his quickly healed face. “They’re going to be after us soon.”

  “We need a better hideout than this,” Bill said, reaching over his head to knock on the low ceiling. “It’s not as secure as I’d like when it’s my neck that’s concerned.”

  “We’ve got a plan already,” Nathan said, wearily defensive. “But we’re all still dog tired. Let’s get some more rest. We’ll check out the apartment later and get everything secured.”

  “Personally, I don’t care what you do,” Bill interjected. “Just so long as you can find food that doesn’t have pain receptors.”

  Ziggy looked a bit sheepish as he brushed off a spot on the dirt floor. Finally, he looked up, extending a hand toward Bill. “Sorry, man. I don’t know what I was doing.”

  “You knew,” Bill responded, but it wasn’t the sound of a grudge being formed, just a simple statement of fact. “You had a hell of a disorienting day.”

  “You’re telling me.” A faint smile played across Ziggy’s mouth, a ghost of the boy he used to be. It hurt to see it, hurt more to see it vanish a moment later. “Maybe I should go back to Jacob. Not because I want to,” he corrected hastily. Then, he folded his legs up and crossed his ankles, leaning his chin on his knees. “Maybe I do. I don’t know. But if I’m here, I feel like I’m going to give you guys away. I don’t want to, but he’ll make me do it. He’s good at that.”

  “It will take time.” Nathan motioned for me to come sit beside him, as if he needed the moral support to speak to his son. “But it can be done. I’ve blocked the Soul Eater out of my head for almost a century. Carrie managed to block out Cyrus when she was living under his roof. It’s not impossible to close off the blood tie.”

  “No.” Ziggy smiled sadly. “But it’s impossible to want to do it.”

  That, I could definitely sympathize with. An orphan in the true sense of the word, I’d felt that unique pain all over again when I’d killed my sire. If I were honest with myself, I had to say that I’d felt it with each small betrayal, felt it snowball larger and larger until the moment I’d plunged the knife through his heart. For someone like Ziggy—someone with few familial ties on this earth—the bond of the blood tie was a powerful aphrodisiac. It had certainly led me to do things I wouldn’t have otherwise.

  Reluctantly, I gave in to the idea that Ziggy might still end up our enemy. He honestly believed he would never betray us on purpose, but that hunger for his sire might tempt him to do things he wouldn’t have normally. But it didn’t seem realistic that we could keep him ignorant of our whereabouts for long. All he would have to do is slip out for a pack of cigarettes and he could turn us all in.

  Nathan scooted his back against the hard wall of the cellar and leaned his head back settling in for more uncomfortable rest, his long legs almost touching Bill across the small space. The human mimicked Nathan’s posture, falling into obviously unwilling sleep. I didn’t have any hard feelings toward him for not trusting us. After all, the vampire who’d just taken a chunk out of him was curled into a seemingly harmless ball on the ground beside him.

  I got closer to Nathan, pulling my legs under me and leaning my head against his chest. How are you doing? I whispered through the blood tie.

  Scared to death. But I’ll survive. He hooked a finger under my chin and lifted my face up to his. His lips brushed mine softly, barely a touch but enough that I could feel his cold breath on me, and my toes curled. I’m sorry we fought.

  No, I’m sorry. The distance between us, first emotional, then physical, was more acutely painful now that it was resolved. Touching him was torture, because I couldn’t have him the way I wanted him. I haven’t been right since—

  He cut me off gently with a finger to my lips, even though I hadn’t spoken out loud. I know. Let’s not do this right now.

  I smiled. I doubt we’ll get a better time. Seems like things are going to be a bit hairy for a while.

  I don’t want to wait for a better time. I want to just…go back to things like nothing ever happened. His gaze flickered to the two other inhabitants of our shelter. This doesn’t seem like the right place.

  I sighed and closed my eyes, laying one palm over his chest. His big hand covered mine, held it over his dead heartbeat. I could try a thousand different ways, and no matter what I tried, I still couldn’t say it properly. But I want what I imagined that first night I met you.

  And what was that? I turned my palm upward and let him lace our fingers together. The feeling of being pulled from my own body into his memory surprised me, even after all the times I’d felt it. When Cyrus had been my sire, I’d seen into his memory often, but that time seemed years away, and Nathan rarely let me glimpse what was in his mind this way. Now, as the rushing in my ears stopped and I adjusted to the feeling of being slotted into someone else’s world, the colors in my vision began to form into objects, and I saw myself,
all those long months ago, standing in the bookshop in my black wool coat, a baseball cap pulled over my lank, blond hair. I looked furious as I ground out, “Yeah, I have questions. Who the hell are you? Why did I get attacked when I walked through that door? And what the hell makes you think I’m a vampire?”

  I’d thought that he’d been annoyed with me barging into his shop with hostile questions, but the feeling I got from his memory was amusement. He’d actually thought I was funny and…cute? The memory jerked forward, to the two of us standing in the living room of the apartment, that same night. Right after he’d told me he would kill me if I didn’t join the Movement, if I remember correctly.

  Of course, I also remember being attracted to him, however inappropriate an instinct it had been at the time. I saw myself wet my lips, trying to look braver than I’d felt, saying, “Do I look like the kind of girl who runs away from trouble?”

  I wasn’t the only one who’d felt sparks. Nathan’s memory stayed focused, but his brain fired off a series of random, scattered images. Me, beneath him in his bed. Walking through falling leaves in a park on a sunny day. My face, flushed with wine and candlelight. Cradling a child in his arms. And then, his wife’s face. God, she reminds me so much of her.

  I pulled back from the memory willingly, and when my vision cleared and I was safely back in my body, I frowned at him and whispered out loud, “I thought I was nothing like your wife.”

  He smiled. “You’re not. Not since I’ve gotten to know you. But then…ah, well, I just wanted to get you into bed.”

  I slapped his arm and leaned my head on his shoulder. Well done then. But seriously, all of that other stuff? Having babies and romantic walks and all of that? Guys really think about that kind of thing?

  Sure they do. I hope. He gave a tired laugh. And it was stupid to be thinking of those kinds of things…having children, being exposed to daylight. I don’t even know if you like children.

  The familiar, sharp pain in my heart was getting easier to ignore. Too late to think about that now.