Blood Ties Omnibus

by Jennifer Armintrout

  A full moon, and he wouldn’t be with Bella.

  “When you return, I will change with you. I will not be able to run, so you cannot chase me, but I will hide and you can find me. And it will be…more than you ever imagined,” she’d promised him when he’d lamented their separation over the phone.

  But it wasn’t enough to know that they would eventually be together. He wanted her now. He wanted the assurance that he would be with her again, without the roadblocks her father could throw in his way.

  And he was bitter about it, which shocked the hell out of him. In the past, he would have wanted to be all up in the fight. Hell, he would have seen it as his duty. But here he was, less than twenty hours from go time, and all he wanted was to go home and hold Bella.

  Even knowing that a fight was coming up should have helped him get through the last few days, but it hadn’t. After waiting and mulling over the information Cyrus had given them, they’d finally made a decision on what they should do. They would hit the Soul Eater three days before his intended ceremony, in order to avoid tangling with any of the guest list. In the time between then and now, they’d all been pacing like caged tigers.

  Well, sort of. Bill and Ziggy had spent a lot of time alone. And that was fine. Max had a strict policy about same-sex relationships: do whatever the hell you want, so long as I don’t have to see it. He bent the rules when it came to sexy lesbian twins, but that was as far as he went. If Ziggy and Bill wanted to work on their relationship or do whatever in that little back room, fine. Better there than on the couch Carrie kept compulsively cleaning in the vain hope of getting the bloodstains out.

  Not that she’d had anything else to do. Max grimaced at the thought of all Carrie was dealing with. She’d nearly fixed Nathan’s skin condition and continued with his care, created several new Henries, was on a manic and ongoing mission to wash Bill’s blood out of the couch, and all while putting a friendly face on to reassure them she wasn’t going to devour their souls.

  Still, Max found himself clawing at the walls—figuratively—and wishing his friends would hurry up and get their fight on, so he wouldn’t have to stick around much longer.

  And now, it seemed there would be another delay.

  There was a distant creak of brakes needing a shoe change, and a few moments later the sound of footsteps. Prissy, Italian-loafered footsteps. And Cyrus appeared in the mouth of the alley.

  When it became apparent he was alone, Max twirled the stake in his palm and slid it into his back pocket. Like a gunslinger. Like Han Solo.

  He reluctantly conceded he still might like the fighting a little bit.

  “Very intimidating,” Cyrus said, sniffing. “Why did we need to meet here? I think they stopped paying their garbage bill.”

  “I know. It’s uncouth. I wanted to meet in a well-lit public area full of television cameras and wear matching We’re Vampires T-shirts so your dad would be sure to find out we were meeting, but I decided against that.” He rolled his eyes. “What was so damned important that we had to meet at all?”

  Cyrus didn’t pay any heed to Max’s bullshit. It was a little bit admirable. “I don’t know when you’re planning to strike, and I don’t want to know. But I thought I should tell you that father has upped his security.”

  “That’s fine. We’ve got reinforcements.” It sounded better than cursing out loud and punching a wall. Could nothing go easy for them?

  “He has a necromancer.” Cyrus actually managed to say it with a straight face.

  Max kept his expression carefully neutral. “We’ll be sure to bring our level twenty-six Elf Mage along.”

  Cyrus at least had the decency to laugh at that. “I understand your disbelief, but aren’t you a lupin? Don’t you believe in magic?”

  “I know about magic,” Max snapped, kind of hoping he’d cover up the fact that he didn’t know all that much. “But a necromancer? What’s he going to do, read the Necronomicon out loud and ruin my camping trip?”

  “He’s going to raise an army of the dead.” Cyrus didn’t even blink.

  Max shook his head. “Well, aren’t we fucked, then?”

  Cyrus shrugged. “If you went after him now, you’d come up against a veritable army of human and vampire bodyguards. If you attack on the night of the ritual, they’ll be dead.”

  And that was the last suspicious straw, right there. “So, the safest thing to do, in your opinion, is to march in as close to the time the Soul Eater becomes a god as possible?”

  “No.” The man was freaking obnoxious with his condescension. “I don’t want to tell you what to do. That is up to you and the rest of your motley band of heroes to decide. I’m merely telling you what I know. He has vampires and humans in a force that outnumbers yours. They will be sacrificed to feed my father’s ambitions and, more practically, his guests, but they will be gone by the night of the ritual. However, at that time he will have a necromancer at his disposal. He will not only be performing the ritual, but he could also raise any number of reanimated corpses to slay you. When you choose to strike is a choice that is thankfully out of my hands. But I thought it only fair that you make an informed decision.”

  Damn. Cyrus was so much easier to hate when he was doing crappy things. When he did something decent, Max felt like a fool for disliking him. “Thanks. I’ll pass that information along.” A strong pang of that dislike spiked in him, and he indulged it. “And what about you?”

  Cyrus appeared to be surprised by that, that he’d been thought of at all. “What about me?”

  Fostering that spark of dislike to a healthy flame, Max folded his arms over his chest and leaned against the wall. “Where are you going to be when we bring on the fight? Are you going to be on your daddy’s side, or are you going to be on ours?”

  “I’m on my own side,” he said simply, mimicking Max’s pose with a more relaxed one on the opposite wall. He glanced down at his nails—as if he could see them in the dark—and then looked up, practiced surprise on his face.

  “Your side?” Max sneered. “Yeah, you would be.”

  “Everyone is on their own side. Anyone who tells you differently is either lying to themselves, or to you.”

  Right. “Well, you have a good night, then, asshole.” Max turned to walk away, every muscle in his body screaming that he should rip Cyrus apart with his bare hands. And to be honest, Max wasn’t sure if that was his vampire self talking, or his werewolf self. Or, if it was just Max Harrison, intolerant of bullshit.

  “Max, wait, please.”

  And there it was again, that voice that sounded like someone who gave a damn. But it was coming out of Cyrus. It was a neat trick. Max turned, trying to broadcast his impatience more clearly. “What?”

  “How is she?” Cyrus seemed to struggle to get the question out. “I mean, is she…God, is she happy?”

  “Well, she’s a Soul Eater. And her boyfriend got skinned alive. And the fledgling she was mourning is alive again.” Max stopped himself. The guy clearly cared about Carrie. He deserved something. “But I’d say yeah, considering the circumstances, she’s not as miserable as she could be.”

  Cyrus nodded slowly. “I’m glad for that. I don’t want to see her in pain if she can avoid it.”

  “I’ll pass along the good word.” Max turned again toward the open end of the alley.

  “Don’t.” Cyrus’s voice stopped him. “Please, don’t tell her I asked. It would be…easier…in the long run. If she didn’t know I was asking about her.”

  Max was torn between wondering what the guy’s game was and actually feeling sorry for him. But it was so easy to find an ulterior motive in almost anything he did. And that wasn’t just prejudice on Max’s part; he was sure of it.

  “I won’t tell her.”

  Cyrus didn’t follow Max out of the alley. Hell, if he wanted to stay and enjoy the funky garbage smell, it was all his.

  Max was going to take a run.

  In the grand scheme of things, ten nights isn’t that
long. And when you break that down to six, one of which you’ve already wasted, the time goes by pretty fast.

  It helps when you’re busy, of course. I’d upped the rate at which I patched Nathan’s skin. Right before he went to sleep in the morning, I cut strips of skin from his back and pasted them over his torso. Right after he woke up at night, I did the same thing. He spent those six days almost constantly drugged and in pain, but he healed faster than I would have ever anticipated. By the fifth day, he was sitting up in bed, reading a newspaper. I’m not sure how much of the newspaper he comprehended, considering all the morphine I’d given him, but he found it highly entertaining.

  That night, Ziggy had gone—with Bill, under protest—to St. Mary’s to steal a wheelchair. We cleared all the furniture to the outside walls of the living room so Nathan would have at least some mobility.

  “It feels good to be up and about again,” he said, wheeling past me to the living room. He parked next to his favorite chair, gazed at it longingly, and then manfully accepted his wheelchair-bound state.

  “It’s good to have you back, man,” Bill said. He moved as though he would slap Nathan on the shoulder, but then extended his hand instead. When Nathan merely grunted the most borderline polite response possible and didn’t take it, Bill let his arm drop.

  “So…” Ziggy tried to defuse the awkwardness of the moment. “When do you get to lose the stylish bandages?”

  Nathan glanced down at his bare torso as if surprised to see his chest patched with gauze. The bandages covered a thin strip that still hadn’t completely healed that reached from his collarbones almost to the waistband of his pajama pants. What had healed looked shiny and pink and full of seams, like Frankenstein’s monster à la Robert De Niro.

  “It’s better to keep the raw stuff bandaged, so it doesn’t dry out.” I rolled my eyes. “And of course, infection, but I know that’s not an issue with us.”

  “I’m not going to be much help when you leave…what? Tonight?” He looked up at me, fearful and hopeful at once. “You should probably head out.”

  “We’re waiting for Max to get back. He was getting the inside scoop on something.” Ziggy looked at me, as if for confirmation that he should say it. “From Cyrus.”

  “Ah.” Nathan nodded. “Well, perhaps I can be of use in a planning sense.”

  Bill hopped eagerly into the conversation. “It seems like it’s all going to be pretty easy. We took out most of those superstrong humans when we came to get you. And according to Carrie, he can’t make more on his own, he needed that witch.” Bill paused. “That Carrie ate.”

  “Yes, I’m aware of what happened to Dahlia,” Nathan said drily. “I assume Max will be finding out from Cyrus exactly what kind of reinforcements the Soul Eater has dreamed up.”

  “If any. I mean, he wasn’t looking too good when we left.” Ziggy looked guiltily toward me. “Well, at least that’s what Carrie said.”

  I nodded. “You’re right, he didn’t. But that doesn’t mean he doesn’t have some bumbling henchmen to take care of security.”

  “It would be better if the bumbling henchmen were security.” Bill looked to me. “How many Henries do we have?”

  I’d been busy. Not just with Nathan, but with creating new golems.

  All the power I’d had before had come from drinking just a little bit of Dahlia’s blood. And that power had been impressive, at least, to me. Now, with all of Dahlia’s blood and her soul, Dahlia’s very essence, I also had all of her power. Creating Henry had taken so much out of me, I’d dreaded trying again. Creating Henry Two had taken a handful of dirt, a few drops of blood and the kind of concentration I would normally expend playing FreeCell. After that, it had gotten even easier. Unbelievably easy. I’d actually gotten bored of it at one point and experimented with the kinds of stuff I could make Henries out of. The first Henry had been made out of ash. For Henry Two, I’d used some gravel from a nearby driveway. Henry One turned out gray, while Henry Two was an oddly natural-looking taupe color. I used potting soil and the result was a weird dark brown with colorless specks where the vermiculite filler had been. I crushed up a shard of hot-pink sidewalk chalk I’d found outside and made a pink Henry I named Henrietta.

  I’d experimented with using more material to try and make larger golems. They always came out the same size and shape, just somewhat more dense. In the physical sense. They were all still of the same intelligence.

  I’d made thirty so far, and stored them under a canvas tarp in the far back corner of the bookshop.

  When I told Ziggy and Bill, they blanched. “You mean we’ve been walking right past them every morning? Sleeping with them right by us?” Ziggy cracked his knuckles as he talked.

  “They’re harmless. Really.” That was a stupid thing to say. They were so harmless, one of them had killed Bill. “Unless I give them some really, really stupid instructions.”

  “Let’s steer clear of that this time, okay?” I was amazed at the lack of bitterness in Bill’s tone. He’d either gotten over the shock of being made a vampire, or he was just too distracted to be mad at me.

  Ziggy shrugged the comment off. “I just want to know how we’re going to get thirty of them in the van. I mean, can we just tell them to stack themselves like cordwood?”

  “We could. If I’d known what cordwood was when I made them. Which I don’t, even now.” I paused. “You could explain cordwood to me, and then I could make another Henry and ask him to stack the rest of them like cordwood.”

  “That’s a good idea,” Bill agreed. “I can’t remember how high a cord of wood is—”

  The door opened and Max entered, looking oddly flushed and out of breath for a vampire. It might have been a werewolf thing, which would also have explained the leaves and grass stuck to his clothes. He saw Nathan in the wheelchair and gave a start. “You’re up.”

  Nathan smiled at him. “They were just debating how to pack thirty golems in the back of the van. Do you know how high a cord of wood is?”

  “Forget that,” Max ordered, halting only for a second to give us a look admonishing us for our strangeness. “We’re not going in tonight.”

  Dread clutched in my stomach. “You’re going to tell us something we’re not going to want to hear.”

  He nodded grimly. “Cyrus told me that his father has a huge security force right now. And the good news is that they’re all going to be eaten before the ritual. But the guy doing the ritual is capable of raising an army of the undead to attack us.”

  “A necromancer?” Nathan shifted in his wheelchair, a look of excitement on his face akin to the expression you’d see on a kid on the bus to Disneyland. “He’s really got a necromancer?”

  “I guess,” Max said with a shrug. “Doesn’t sound so great to me.”

  “It doesn’t sound that great to me, either,” Ziggy piped up. “I’m not a big fan of zombies.”

  “We’ve got thirty golems. Why not just stick to the plan?” Not that I was aching to possibly get killed. It just seemed terribly disappointing, that this was supposed to be the night the problem we’ve been worried about for the better part of the year got cleared up, and now we had to wait again.

  “Thirty golems who fight just like you,” Nathan pointed out. “Not exactly a crack fighting squad. They would actually be more suited against shambling zombies. If you go up against armed humans and vampires, you’re going to run through the lot of them pretty fast.”

  I slapped the back of his head. “Thanks a lot.”

  “He’s right, though,” Bill said, quickly reaching to cover the back of his head. “Don’t hit me, but he’s right. If we don’t know exactly how big a force he has, it would be a waste of our time and possibly our lives.”

  Max nodded. “And Cyrus didn’t tell me how many bodyguards the Soul Eater has. Still, we also don’t know how many zombies this necromancer guy can make.”

  “Only as many as there are dead bodies in the area.” Nathan wheeled toward the window and parted th
e blinds, as if he could see the whole city.

  Max groaned. “And Grand Rapids has more cemeteries than any other city on the planet, seems like. Fantastic.”

  Max was right. There were probably more dead people than living in Grand Rapids and its urban sprawl. If he managed to raise them all…

  Ziggy looked from Nathan to me. “That’s really simple, though. Carrie can make more Henries, send them out to the cemeteries and kill the zombies as they come out the gate.”

  “That’s impractical,” Nathan said, dismissing the idea with a wave of his hand.

  “Impractical, but it might be our only solution.” I covered my face with my hands. “Of course, we’ll have to actually find and count all the cemeteries.”

  “And how many gates are in each one?” Bill added bleakly.

  Or you morons could just ward the cemeteries and keep any magic from entering, Dahlia suggested in my head.

  “What was that?” I asked, and all of the guys looked at me.

  Ward. You. Idiot.

  How do I do that? I hated asking her for anything, but if she was in the mood to be helpful, I wasn’t going to question it.

  No, wait, I was. Why are you telling me this?

  Because if you get killed, I get free. And I think the only person strong enough to kill you is Jacob.

  Fair enough, even if her assumption that I would die at the Soul Eater’s hands didn’t inspire a lot of confidence. “We can ward the cemeteries.”

  Bill, Max and Ziggy all responded with some variation of “What does that mean?” but Nathan turned his wheelchair. “That’s an excellent idea.”

  “Okay, it’s excellent, but what does that mean?” Max asked me.

  Thankfully, before I could admit that I didn’t have the foggiest clue what I was talking about, Nathan spoke up. “It means that we would do a spell that would work as a barrier between the necromancer’s spell and the corpses he was trying to reanimate.”

  “How long is that going to take?” I didn’t want to argue with my own suggestion, but we were unfortunately constrained by time. “I have all of Dahlia’s powers—” Maybe not all, she seethed in my brain “—so I could do the spell no problem. But if it means we have to go to every single cemetery in the area, I don’t know how we’re going to make it.”