Blood Ties Omnibus

by Jennifer Armintrout

  I felt an unexpected stab of, if not sympathy, at least understanding for the Soul Eater. How much of what he did was the product of the souls trapped inside of him, either through the madness they drove him to, or their conscious effort to manipulate him?

  It occurred to me that I was excusing him in a way, and I knew then that all that sympathy and understanding had to have come from Dahlia, because I still wanted to rip out Jacob Seymour’s throat with my teeth.

  And then that mental image filled my head, and I wasn’t sure if it was Dahlia, or myself. The scene was vivid: straddling Jacob’s lap, pulling his face to mine for a searing kiss. His bony hands clutched at my back, ripped away my shirt. My own fingernails scored deep, gory lines down his bare arms, and when I pulled back to suck the blood from my fingers, his mouth was there, fighting mine for the sticky crimson coating my skin. I nipped his jaw, drawing more blood, then his ear. And then, as he groaned in pleasure and dug his hands in my hips, I bit into his neck, hard and deep, and tore. My fangs sank through skin and corded muscle. Pulled away veins and stringy nerves. Crushed esophagus and split trachea. And when the mass of it was free and dangling from my jaw, I saw the delicate vertebrae of his spinal column, the grayish-white of unbleached bone, gleaming out through the cold red torrent that bathed my lap.

  The apartment door burst open, snapping me from my reverie. To my disgust, my heart beat fast and my body tingled as if from a sexual fantasy. I smoothed my palms down the tops of my denim-clad thighs, as if there would be a wrinkle there I could press out with my hands, and tried not to broadcast guilt from my expression. “Did you find some blood?”

  “Oh ho, did we ever.” Max dropped a large foam cooler triumphantly on the coffee table.

  “And there’s another just like it,” Bill announced, setting the second one on the floor just inside the door. “Your friend helped us out.”

  “My friend?” I had no clue who he was talking about, until Ziggy walked through the door. “You know, then?” I sighed, and he nodded.

  “And apparently, so do you,” Max said, sitting on the couch beside me. “What are the odds?”

  Bill interrupted by clearing his throat loudly. “Blood first. Well, for you guys. Blood for you, hard liquor for me, then we talk about this.”

  “Agreed.” Max stood and went to the kitchen with Bill and the coolers. It would take a miracle to get all of that in the freezer, but I certainly didn’t mind.

  Ziggy lingered by the door, his stare accusing. I spread my hands helplessly. “I didn’t know how to tell you. I didn’t even know he was alive until last night. And then there was Bill….”

  “I’m not mad.” His body posture didn’t indicate he was thrilled, though. He ran his finger along the books we’d returned to the shelves, located the large hardcover volume titled Spirits and brought it down. He turned back to me. “Anything left in this one?”

  “As far as I know.” I watched him open the book to lift the small metal flask out and unscrew the top. “Why?”

  Ziggy took a quick swallow of the scotch inside the flask. “Bill can’t drink blood yet. This might…fix the situation.”

  “Ah.” I remembered the first time I’d drunk blood. From Dahlia, straight from her hot, human veins. I pushed the memory aside. “I really would have told you.”

  “I know. But that doesn’t change the fact I found out myself.” He shook his head. “They must have brought him back after you guys got me. Because I know I would have noticed him lurking around.”

  “How is he?” I hated to ask, but I wanted to know. There it was. It wasn’t pretty, but there it was.

  “He’s on our side. That’s the only thing you need to worry about,” Max said sternly from the kitchen. “Hey, where’s your gray guy?”

  I made a face. “His name is Henry. And he’s downstairs trying to make the back room of the shop more livable for Bill and Ziggy. You can sleep on the couch, if you want to. I can’t imagine it was fun for you, sleeping down there yesterday.”

  Max stuck his head out from the kitchen. “I was fine. I’ll probably keep sleeping in the hole, actually.”

  When the blood had been warmed on the stove and we all had a mug of it—though Bill didn’t touch his, preferring to stick to the contents of the flask—they told me what had happened with Cyrus.

  “Ten days?” I shook my head, dread squeezing my heart. “There’s no way. Nathan won’t be better by then.”

  “Nathan might be out of the plan, as far as fighting goes.” Max stood and stretched. “However, you can make those handy little gray guys. How many do you think you can come up with before then?”

  I choked on the blood I’d swallowed. “You’re kidding, right?”

  “Cyrus said we’d taken out a lot of Jacob’s human soldiers. But still, we’re going to want backup,” Ziggy seconded.

  I looked at the grim faces of the men sitting around me and sighed. “I don’t know. Maybe five. Maybe. But it took a lot out of me to make just Henry.”

  It doesn’t have to anymore, Dahlia reminded me. I shoved her aside.

  “Well, you’re the best we’ve got. And I’m out of ideas. I don’t know about you guys,” Max added, pacing to the bookshelves.

  Tell him about me, Dahlia demanded, pushing so insistently to the front of my brain I could barely focus on my own thoughts. I opened my mouth to tell them that I would make copies of Henry, no problem, let’s go kill the Soul Eater. What came out was, “I’m a Soul Eater.”

  I heard the words tumble from my lips and at the same time wondered if I’d even said them. Max, Bill and Ziggy didn’t appear to react at first. Then Max said, slowly, “Wait, what?”

  I didn’t want to repeat myself, because it hadn’t been my choice to tell them in the first place. “I’m a Soul Eater. When we went to rescue Nathan, Dahlia got in my way. I just wanted to kill her. Maybe not. I don’t know. I wanted something. I wanted her to suffer. So I ate her soul.”

  The admission drained me. My hands trembled when I reached for the mug in front of me.

  “Okay…” Bill shook his head. “No, not okay. What the hell does that mean, you’re a Soul Eater?”

  Ziggy explained for me, thank God. I didn’t want to have to.

  “Jacob became a Soul Eater by consuming the blood and souls of other vampires. It’s part of what makes him so scary. It’s also a part of what makes him weak. He needs more than blood to live. He needs souls, and he can’t get them from humans.” Ziggy eyed me with something that looked suspiciously, creepily, like admiration.

  I forced the shiver crawling up my spine to retreat. “When I killed Dahlia, I did it by draining her blood. And at the end, I sort of…sucked up her soul. Without meaning to.”

  Liar! Dahlia’s rage flowed over me until my hands clenched down so tight I shattered the mug I held. Blood flowed over my fingers, staining the rug below my feet. “Oops.”

  “Nice.” Max turned away, but it didn’t help hide his emotions. Even his back looked angry. “You knew Cyrus was alive. You knew you were a Soul Eater. Anything else you didn’t plan on telling us?”

  “It wasn’t that I wasn’t planning on telling you. It’s just that directly after I became aware of those things, I had to do a heart transplant and a skin graft. I got a little distracted.”

  “How distracted?” Ziggy asked quietly. “I mean, did you tell Nate?”

  “Did I tell him what?” I shook my head to try to clear it. “I mean, he knows I’m a Soul Eater. He doesn’t know about Cyrus.”

  “None of us did. And he’s usually the last person you’re honest with,” Max snapped.

  “Hey, simmer down,” Bill barked, and I was surprised at the authority in his voice.

  More surprising was Max’s grumbled, “Sorry.” Max hardly ever listened to anyone who wasn’t Max.

  “It’s okay,” Bill said, barely sparing Max a glance. “But the important thing to remember right now is that we’re on a tight schedule in terms of taking out the Soul Eater. And
Nathan is a part of this team, even if he can’t participate.”

  “You’re right,” I agreed, but my timing was unfortunate.

  Just as I finished my sentence, Bill said, “That’s why you need to tell him everything, Carrie.”

  I looked to Ziggy. I don’t know what I was expecting. Maybe for him to rescue me by telling me I didn’t need to be a grown-up. It was a stupid expectation. There was a pitying expression on his face as he said, “He’s right. You’ve got to tell him.”

  I sighed and stood. “I should take him something to eat before morning, anyway.”

  “We’ll go downstairs,” Bill volunteered. “Give the two of you some privacy.”

  Max followed them to the door. “And I’ll be down there, too. Not that I don’t want to sleep on a bloody couch, but the sleeping bag in the shelter wasn’t the scene of an amateur heart transplant.”

  And then, just like that, I was alone. And I had to tell Nathan that Cyrus, that person he hated most in the world, more even than his sire, was alive and well again.

  As I refilled the kettle and put it on the burner, I carefully planned what I was going to say. At least, that was my intention. In reality, I became overwhelmed by all that I knew I had to say and how it collided with what I wanted to say and how that would be received in complete contradiction to what I actually meant. My careful plan was blasted apart before I even got a chance to put it into action.

  It wasn’t just as simple as telling Nathan that Cyrus was alive again. I also had to make sure he knew that nothing between us had changed just because Cyrus was back. He wasn’t my fledgling anymore. In fact, I was surprised at the change in my feelings myself. I shouldn’t have been. I’d known Cyrus in so many incarnations. Cyrus the monster. Cyrus the human. Cyrus the wounded soul searching for something to make him better than what he was. Cyrus my fledgling. It shouldn’t have come as such a shock that the Cyrus who’d stood before me in the Soul Eater’s run-down farmhouse was a completely different man than the one I’d loved most recently.

  Still, Nathan wouldn’t see it that way. And if I were to blurt it out, just like that—“Don’t worry, I won’t leave you for him”—he would see just broaching the subject as an admission of guilt. Or maybe I would. It was too difficult a situation to understand the difference.

  The teakettle whistled like a bean sídhe portending coming dread, and I resigned myself to whatever new emotional turmoil was to come. I poured some slightly burned blood into a mug and headed toward the bedroom.

  When I opened the door, Nathan gave me a sleepy smile, and I wanted to do a cartwheel just from that simple expression. “You look so much better. Except for the part where you look half-butchered.”

  He made a sound that would have been a laugh if he’d had more strength. “I feel a bit better. Still sore. But it’s the first real sleep I’ve had in a while.”

  I set the blood down on the nightstand and gingerly sat beside him. “Do you need something for the pain?”

  He slowly shook his head. “No. I want to be clearheaded now. I just want a few moments with you when I’m not drugged. Or distracted by pain.”

  “It’s nondistracting pain now?” I smoothed a few locks of his hair back from his forehead. “Well, that’s good, I suppose.”

  “You’re damn right it’s good. Now all we need to do is cure the boredom.” He leaned into my hand and kissed my palm.

  I pulled my hand away. It seemed dishonest to lull him into a sense of security that I would just shatter.

  His expression took on an oddly conflicted look. Resigned, that he knew the moment of peace was over too soon. Soft, that he knew it would be hard for me to leave the moment, as well. “Carrie, what’s wrong?”

  I’m not over him. Dahlia’s words taunted me. She tried to force them out, but I pushed her back, hard. Imagined walling her up behind bricks and a layer of cement. “Just trying to adjust. To everything.”

  “To sharing your head with Dahlia,” Nathan said, his tone sympathetic. “Sweetheart, if I could take it from you…”

  “I wouldn’t let you.” I took his hand in mine, marveling at how whole it looked in comparison to the rest of him. “I’m not being totally honest. There’s more.”

  “Oh?” He arched one eyebrow. “You’ve got a secret lesbian lover since I’ve been gone? I have to say, I won’t put up too much of a fight about it, so long as you’ve also developed an exhibitionistic streak—”

  “Har, har.” It was good to hear him joke again. Such a change from a few hours earlier when he’d thought he was better off dead. “No, it’s about Cyrus.”

  Nathan’s demeanor changed immediately. “Ah.”

  “He’s alive.” Like ripping off a Band-Aid.

  Nathan tried to sit up, and I stopped him with gentle pressure on an intact piece of his shoulder. “Don’t get upset about it. It’s not a big deal.”

  “Not a big…Wait…” he sputtered. “When did this happen?”

  “Must have been after we took Ziggy. He was as shocked as you are.” I chewed my lip. “He told us some things.”

  “How did this happen?” he asked, oblivious to what I’d said. “He died. I saw him die. You…saw him die.”

  “I did.” And even though he was alive again, I relived that moment in my nightmares. “But it’s not like this is the first time something like this has happened.”

  Nathan sighed. “When did it start to be all right to bring people back from the dead? This never would have happened fifty years ago.”

  “Maybe it would have,” I reasoned. “I mean, you weren’t quite as connected to that social circle back then.”

  “Social circle?” He closed his eyes. “Fine. What are we doing about this?”

  That was a good question. If I had all the answers where Cyrus was concerned, the past year would have been so much easier. “I guess we’re not doing very much about it right now. I mean, he did give us Ziggy’s heart back. I forgot to tell you about that. And he told the guys what the Soul Eater has planned.”

  “How much time do we have?” I knew then that Nathan was feeling more like his old self. He was so ready to go into battle, I could feel his tension reverberating across the blood tie between us.

  Unfortunately, there was no way he’d be riding into the fray with guns blazing. Not in his state, and certainly not for a while. “Ten days. Less. I mean, I’m not entirely sure. Max and Bill and Ziggy told me the story, but it was sort of all at once, with a lot of excited gestures and curse words.”

  “I’m sure.” He frowned, his fists clenched at his sides. “God, why do I have to be this way when you need me? I’m pathetic, I can’t even punch a wall to get my frustration out.”

  “Hey, don’t talk like that.” I took one of his hands in mine and tried to soothe some of the tension out of it. “You’re not pathetic. You were just skinned alive. Granted the timing was bad, but I’m not sure there’s ever really a good time to be skinned.”

  “There’s never a good time. Period.” The defeat on his face was almost too much for me. “In ten days, this will all be over.”

  “For better or for worse.” The sick irony of the words mocked me. “I mean—”

  He gave me a bittersweet smile. “I know. It was an unfortunate slip. But if something does happen to one of us…”

  “Well, nothing will happen to you. You’ll be here.” Could I not say anything right tonight? “What I meant was, you won’t be in immediate danger.”

  “I will be.” He squeezed my hand, then pulled it to his lips to kiss my fingers. “If anything happens to you, it happens to me, too.”

  I wanted to say, “Nothing is going to happen to me.” But history had proven that “Nothing is going to happen to me” is such a stupid thing for me to say. Also, what if nothing happened to me? What if after the Soul Eater was dead, I wasn’t? I was still a Soul Eater myself. What happened in a year or two, when I couldn’t hold back Dahlia anymore? What happened when my body became brittle because I could no
longer get by on just blood? What happened when I became pure evil?

  What happened when I was the monster my friends were fighting against?

  As much as these thoughts tormented me, I couldn’t let Nathan think about them now. We’d cross that incredibly frightening bridge when we came to it, but for now I had him to concentrate on.

  “If you want any chance of being in fighting shape—and believe me, the jury will be out on that one for a while—we need to work on your skinned-ness.”

  Nathan sighed. “I would rather we never, ever repeat that excruciating procedure again. But I would also rather be able to help when it’s needed. So, go to work.”

  “I have to get my stuff. And medicate you. Heavily.” I turned toward the door. He protested, but I cut him off with words and a stern glare. “It’s not for you. It’s for me. It’s very difficult to do this to a loved one. I’d rather at least one of us was unconscious, and it would be better if that person wasn’t the one with the scalpel.”

  I turned again to go and he reached out for me. I stepped back and let him take my hand. “I love you.”

  “I know you do.” I squeezed his hand and let it fall. “I love you, too.”

  And then I walked away. I couldn’t say my goodbyes now.

  Eighteen:

  Rest in Peace

  I t was dark in the alley. Too dark. And quiet. Way, way too quiet.

  Max pulled his stake from his pocket and crouched, half hiding, half preparing. The light of the nearly full moon prickled his skin. Made him want to run. Made him want to pull all of his clothes off and let the moonlight glaze him. Made him want to tackle someone, and take her, right there on the leaves and bracken of the forest floor. To pound into her mercilessly, to bite and push and scratch.