Blood Ties Omnibus

by Jennifer Armintrout

  “It’s probably a good thing he stays with his own kind, then,” Ziggy agreed.

  There was a clank, and Nathan swore. “I got the lock off.”

  Covering his laugh with a faked cough, Ziggy said, “Great. You can grab whatever it is you need from Nathan, and then we can get moving.”

  “Not quite.” Nathan came to the living room, his expression sober. “Carrie, why don’t you and Bill start stacking the Henries into the van. Did you ever find out how tall a cord of wood was?”

  “Very funny.” I knew what he wanted. He wanted to tell Ziggy goodbye. I motioned to the door. “Come on, Bill. We’ve got some Henries to wrangle.”

  The Henries were downstairs, just as I’d left them. Bill stayed by the van and let me go down to give the orders. I pulled the tarp off and stood back. “Listen to me, all of you. Form a single-file line and head to the door. The first one of you will go straight up the stairs, to the van parked at the curb. Bill will be there to put you in the van. Do everything Bill tells you. When Bill calls for you, the next in line goes. Do not go up the stairs until Bill calls for you.”

  I watched them file up the stairs, one after the other, and prayed no one driving by would notice the precise stream of identical humanoids issuing from the bookshop. It took at least an hour to get them all packed in, maybe more. The entire time I wondered what was going on upstairs.

  Technically, I didn’t have to wonder. I knew what was going on. Nathan was spending what could be the last moments he had with the son he’d already lost once. I could imagine him there, trying to be brave and reassuring in the face of uncertainty, but failing miserably. I’d realized once that if eyes were the windows to the soul, Nathan’s were floor-to-ceiling. He was so easy to read, it seemed almost unfair to look at him when he had secrets I knew he wanted to keep.

  Ziggy came down to help us just as Bill loaded the last Henry in. His eyes were swollen and red, but he shrugged off any of Bill’s attempts to find out what had happened.

  “It’s nothing,” he said finally, giving Bill a quick hug. “I appreciate you being concerned, but really, it’s just what you’d expect, okay?”

  Bill accepted this reluctantly, and I had a real stab of sympathy for him. I knew what it was like to love someone who kept things secret when they didn’t have to, when it was unhealthy for them. I wanted to tell him that things would get better, because they would, but it wasn’t the time.

  “Listen, Nate probably wants to see you, before we go.” Ziggy’s expression was surprisingly understanding. Sometimes, I let his “tough teenager” exterior fool me.

  Upstairs, I found Nathan in the bedroom. He sat on the bed with the box that contained my heart. It was open, but I couldn’t actually see the contents beyond the protective layers of bubble wrap. Bubble wrap. I suppressed a laugh at the low-tech, cheap-plastic solution to the mysterious occult problem of guarding my life.

  He didn’t look at me as I sat beside him, and then I noticed the wooden stake lying on the quilt next to him. A chill of the “someone just walked over my grave” variety went up my spine, and I tried not to stare at the object of my imminent destruction with horrified fascination.

  “We’re ready to go,” I said quietly, praying my last few words to him wouldn’t be met with catatonic response. “Nathan, I—”

  He turned and pulled me into his arms, covered my mouth with his. The kiss was almost painful in his desperation. His arms crushed me too tightly. When he released me, he trembled. “I can’t let you go. I can’t do this.”

  I closed my eyes and felt a cold tear slide down my cheek, mimicking the ones on Nathan’s face. I didn’t tell him he could do it, or that everything would be okay. So, I just said, “You have to.”

  He nodded, grief still contorting his face with a painful grimace, and he let out a ragged sob.

  I put my arms around him and then my tears came in earnest. His body felt so solid and comforting next to mine, so familiar. To think that in a few hours, maybe less, I wouldn’t be able to do this. I couldn’t even comfort myself with the knowledge that I might be brought back—I had no doubt Nathan would try, but no guarantee that it would work, either—or any illusion that I would carry this memory into the afterlife. I had been there. I had seen what it meant to be dead, at least by vampire standards. By the next morning, I wouldn’t remember who Nathan was. I wouldn’t remember who I was.

  It took more strength than I ever would have given myself credit for to let go of Nathan. Everything in me screamed that I should keep holding him, give him another kiss, tell him I loved him just one more time. But I knew that after I did, there would be another “just one more time” and another and another, and that wouldn’t help either of us. He knew it, too, and he didn’t try to stop me as I left.

  “Are you okay?” Bill asked when I emerged, and I tried hard to keep my inner turmoil from showing on my face. “I’m fine. It’s just hard to walk out and not know if I’m coming back.”

  “You’re coming back,” Ziggy said, taking my hand in his and squeezing it. It was a shock—he hardly ever touched anyone. And then I felt like a liar.

  “Let’s go,” I said, turning away from them. “Get this thing over with.”

  The Soul Eater’s farm looked a little bit better spruced up for the ritual. Nothing could make it look homey, in Ziggy’s opinion, but the torches lighting the driveway at least made it look a little less forbidding.

  “There are people walking up the drive. That’s a comfort,” Carrie said, pulling on her creepy gold mask. “As long as I’m not the only one strolling in on foot, I should be okay.”

  They’d thought of that on the way. “Remember the vampire New Year party? Cyrus had valet parking,” Ziggy had pointed out. “I think somebody will recognize this van if we pull up in it. Then, game over, man.”

  “Let’s not panic until we get there, okay?” Bill had said. He’d had those tense little crinkle lines at the corners of his eyes that he often had. Maybe he had them all the time, and Ziggy just hadn’t known him long enough to realize what an uptight son of a bitch he was.

  He laughed. He couldn’t help himself.

  “Is this funny to you?” Carrie asked, muffled behind her mask, and he laughed harder.

  “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m just…tense.” He noticed from the corner of his eye that Bill had his chin to his chest, eyes closed, shoulders shaking with laughter he tried to hold back.

  “Great.” Carrie pulled her hood up and climbed out of the car. “The Henries will do whatever you say, Bill. I’m going to head down.”

  “Carrie, wait!” Ziggy hopped out after her, ignoring Bill’s fiercely whispered pleas to get back in and keep a low profile. There were no cars on the dirt road, no low, soft rumble preceding one, so he decided it was safe. Carrie stood on the edge of the dirt road, her long purple robe draping awkwardly over the ankle-high umbrella of the mayapples growing on the shoulder.

  What should he say to her? He didn’t want to give her another long goodbye. They’d both had one too many of those tonight. So he didn’t say anything. He just threw his arms around her in a quick, totally not regrettable hug. When they both made it through this, and they had to, they wouldn’t have a lot of crazy “I think you’re going to die, so I’m going to spill my guts” type confession of feeling between them. And life could go on that way.

  Her eyes widened, ice-cold blue behind the gold mask. There was no way Jacob would miss that it was her. He’d raged endlessly at the many horrible ways he’d like to kill her, reflecting often on her “pitiless eyes.” It was her eyes he’d fixated on, and Ziggy prayed Jacob would be too preoccupied with his ritual to recognize them.

  “When the werewolves show up, release the Henries and hang back. Don’t get into the middle of things unless it’s a last resort. And when the battle is over, get the hell out of here.”

  “What about you?” he called after her.

  She didn’t turn around. Her robed figure looked like a shadow sli
nking down the moonlit road. “Every man for himself. Don’t wait for me.”

  “But—” He stopped himself. It wasn’t the time to argue.

  In the van, Bill’s laughing fit had definitely passed. “What do you think?”

  “I don’t know.” He shook his head. “She said to let the Henries go in. First wave kind of thing, I think. And if we need to bat cleanup, so be it.”

  Bill stared out the windshield, as if he would be able to see better in the dark the longer he stared. “Sounds reasonable.”

  They sat in silence for a few minutes, and a nagging, itching feeling formed in the back of his brain. “Carrie told me we should leave without her. Kind of. She said, ‘every man for himself.’”

  Bill nodded. “That’s what we talked about earlier.”

  “I know, it’s just…” Something seemed very strange, the way a movie seems strange right before the hero’s best friend is revealed to be the supervillain. “It seemed weird, the way she said it. And Nate said…ah, it’s probably nothing.”

  There was a distant howl, and Ziggy noticed he wasn’t the only one in the car that jumped.

  “Do you think that’s one of them?” Bill asked, his face gone suddenly pale. He hadn’t been a vampire long enough yet, Ziggy realized, to be pale all the time.

  He put a reassuring hand on Bill’s knee. “This is all going to work out. Mark my words, I have a good feeling about this.”

  And then he said a quick, silent prayer that the last thing he said to Bill wouldn’t be that lie.

  I held my head up as high as I could as I walked down the driveway. Project an aura of “supposed to be here,” I told myself. I looked up at the house, which seemed oddly slanted against the horizon. The sagging roof seemed to sag worse. If I were the Soul Eater, I would be praying that the place wouldn’t collapse on my little party.

  A black car rolled slowly past me down the drive, and a gold-masked face peered out from the lightly tinted back window. I fought the urge to look away. Instead, I nodded to the figure inside the car, who nodded in reply and looked straight ahead.

  Two other attendees walked ahead of me, their purple robes trailing the dusty ground. I measured my pace carefully, not wanting to catch up with them. If I did, I wasn’t sure if I should say anything, or if that secretive nod that had worked on the person in the car would work again. Best to stay by myself, since I didn’t know exactly what the tone of the event was. A spiritual gathering? A celebration? An orgy? If I judged it based just on the costumes that seemed to have been taken straight from Eyes Wide Shut, it was the latter of the three. But I really, really hoped I was mistaken.

  As I got nearer to the house, I saw the gathering through the windows. There didn’t appear to be any electric light on in the house. In the yard in front of the porch, two gigantic bonfires lit up the night, and inside were more candles than could be found in a Gothic cathedral. I followed the two figures in front of me up the stairs, wondering how I would find Cyrus among the identically garbed throng.

  A hand grabbed my wrist, low beside my body, not calling attention to the movement. The gold, featureless head jerked almost imperceptibly toward the yard, and I followed back down the steps and around the corner of the house, where we were hidden by some dying bushes.

  Cyrus took off his mask, but indicated I should keep mine on. “I just wanted you to know I’m here. Stay close to me.”

  “How did you know it was me?” I asked, my whisper distorted ridiculously by the mask.

  His jaw clenched, and he looked away. “Stay close. I’ll do what I can for you. Promise you’ll do what you can for me.”

  I nodded, not wanting to speak with the mask encumbering me.

  “I hope that whatever plan you might have comes to fruition before my father kills me. If not, you might consider…not letting him kill me.” His expression changed to one of disgust. “I can’t believe this is my life.”

  I can’t believe this is mine, either. I didn’t say it. I took his hand in mine and squeezed it, then motioned back to the house. He replaced his mask and we walked inside.

  The last time I’d been in the farmhouse, there had been a dead body rotting in the dining room and various dark and sinister shadows lurking in the corners. Now it was bright, there weren’t any dead bodies immediately visible, but it was still frightening. The bottom floor had been crudely gutted. It looked as though someone had just taken a sledgehammer to the bits of wall they could reach and left everything else behind, including the staircase. Two steps hung like a half-severed limb from the upper floor. Overhead, wires that probably hadn’t had electricity running through them for twenty years dangled from the broken plaster skeleton of the former rooms.

  In the middle of the newly open space, a large circle was drawn on the floor. The robed figures in attendance stayed well outside of the perimeter, whispering to each other in small clusters.

  Only one person stood within the circle. He was a tall, thin man, wearing the same purple garb as everyone else, but no mask obscured his pinched, hook-nosed face. A thin mustache, the same oily black as his slicked-down hair, quivered above his lips as they twitched in a mumble we couldn’t hear. He stood over a black-draped altar, lifting objects and turning them this way and that. Behind the altar, a huge, carved wooden chair—a throne, really, there were no other words to describe it—was positioned under a hanging oil lamp with a single flame.

  “That’s the necromancer,” Cyrus said quietly, nodding toward the man in the circle.

  “He’ll perform the ritual?” I asked, thinking too late that disguising my voice might be a good idea. The necromancer raised up a sword, the blade glinting sinister silver in the golden light of the room.

  “That’s him,” Cyrus said mechanically. “And that’s the blade that will split my heart and kill me.”

  I wanted to reassure him that I would do whatever I could to keep him safe, but the chance was too great that someone would overhear. I put on a tone of disinterest. “Seems a bit big. Overkill, and all.”

  The door behind us slammed shut just as the ominous chime of a grandfather clock somewhere in the room sounded midnight.

  Cyrus’s hand found mine, hidden in the voluminous folds of my sleeve, and he gripped it hard. The back door, previously down the hallway, now directly across the cavernous room, opened on screeching hinges. In walked Jacob Seymour. The Soul Eater.

  My breath caught in my throat, then tried to force itself out on a nervous giggle I had to fight hard to suppress. The Soul Eater was, for the very first time I could remember, wearing modern clothes. Ultramodern, in fact, a single-breasted black suit with clean lines that had a slight sheen to it, and highly polished black dress shoes. His long, white-blond hair lay stick-straight over his shoulders, and a golden laurel wreath crowned his head.

  I don’t know what was more ridiculous, that he’d eschewed his flowing, medieval garments on the night they would have been most appropriate, or the laurel wreath, but I bit the inside of my lip to keep my laughter in.

  His appearance caused a ripple of excitement through the crowd, and they applauded him wildly. He bowed once, stiffly, then settled into the large throne behind the altar. His expression was serious, but I saw the quirk of a shrewd smile at the corner of his mouth. “My God. He’s going to kill these people,” I realized out loud, my remaining heart pounding erratically in fear.

  Cyrus jerked my hand hard and placed one finger on his gold mask where his lips would be, to hush me.

  You included, Dahlia laughed delightedly in my head.

  Over the celebratory noises, a loud, foreboding howl echoed outside. The Soul Eater stood, nearly tipping the oil lamp—I was momentarily disappointed that he didn’t; accidental immolation would have solved so many of my problems at this point—his face a tight, pinched mask of rage.

  He knew, I realized. He knew that resistance was inevitable.

  Another howl raised the hair at the back of my neck.

  The werewolves were here.


  Twenty-Two:

  Ain’t No Party

  I t happened so fast. One minute the small clearing was crowded with men. Naked men, which Max was less than comfortable with, but clothing wasn’t such a hot idea in wolf form.

  The nightmare of the gym class locker room hadn’t lasted long. The leader, a guy Max had seen around the pack compound but had never talked to on account of his snooty, Euro-trash appearance, had thrown back his head and howled. His face had been the first thing to change, his lips pulling back from an O shape to stretch over elongating jaws. His hair, black and long and pulled back into a ponytail, broke loose from its tie and appeared to grow longer, until it was a veritable blanket wrapping around him. He fell to his hands and knees, and then those were obscured by his hair, which moved like one solid piece to coat his limbs. His arms twisted at the shoulder until the elbows faced out and popped into knees. His hands and feet shrank into themselves with a wet, popping sound that brought Max’s lunch up to his throat. Then, like a flash, it was done, and standing where the leader had been was the largest wolf Max had ever seen.

  He’d expected it to be black. Bella was black when she was a wolf. He wasn’t sure of himself, on account of the fact there were no mirrors out in the woods, but he’d assumed they would all look alike. Not this one. It was a snowy gray.

  According to Hollywood, werewolves didn’t look like wolves or dogs at all. Just guys who were considerably more hirsute. The first time Max had changed, he’d thought of An American Werewolf in London and he’d momentarily worried that whoever he might kill while hunting would be condemned to living death, following him around and popping up at the worst possible moments. But, like most things, Hollywood had the werewolf thing all wrong. When Max had first watched Bella change, moments before he’d changed for the first time, himself, he’d learned that werewolves were truly wolves, not just humans with bad body hair.