Blood Ties Omnibus
Page 126
Twenty-Four:
And They All Lived…
I don’t know how long I drifted in the blank blue, gliding over other souls, hungry for life but not remembering a moment of my own. But then I saw life, shining, grasping, reaching for me, and I reached for it with my formless, lost soul. The second it touched me, I remembered who I was, and I was terrified of losing it. I clutched at it, babbling, and only after I felt real, human hands pry mine off whatever it was I clung to, did the desperation leave me.
“Carrie!” It was Nathan’s voice, but I didn’t see him. My vision was fuzzy and the bright light hurt my eyes. I knew it was Nathan holding me, because I heard his voice rumble through his chest, but there was something different about him. Something about him I’d never seen before.
“Nathan?” I managed through chattering teeth. A blanket, rough and scratchy, draped around my naked shoulders. “Nathan, you’re human.”
Then everything was black.
I woke in a room full of sunlight. The blinds were open and it streamed in from all sides, over the blankets covering me, over my vulnerable, exposed skin. I shrieked, beating back flames that should have been there, but weren’t.
Nathan was at my side, and he pulled me against him, trying to comfort me and praise the heavens all at once.
“The sun!” I finally managed to shout.
“It won’t hurt you,” he assured me, and I thought he sounded like a crazy person. “Sweetheart, we’re fine. We’re fine. We’re human.”
I took a deep breath and felt my heart beating in my chest. My real heart, not some deformed digestive organ. And I had a temperature. Not a fever, but my skin actually felt warm. And I had to pee. Badly.
I scrambled over Nathan and raced toward the bathroom. I was human? It seemed so incredibly unlikely. My stomach rumbled, and I didn’t crave blood. I wanted…waffles. And cheese-smothered hash browns. And Diet Coke.
I sat on the toilet and sobbed. I was human. The memory of my fight with the Soul Eater rushed back to me, and even as I reconstructed the weird events that had brought me to this place, I wanted to push them as far from my mind as possible.
I was human again. Nathan was human again.
He knocked on the door, and I realized that until this very moment, bathroom protocol had never, ever come up. I finished up and wiped off, then stood on shaking legs and opened the door. He looked worried and terribly, terribly mortal.
“Are you okay?” He reached a hand out and smoothed the hair away from my face.
I looked in the mirror. Blotchy skin, bags under my eyes. I loved it. I wanted to kiss my reflection. “I’m a human again.”
I collapsed to the floor, sobbing in relief and joy.
Later, after Nathan had cooked the biggest breakfast in recorded human history, he explained what had happened after the night I defeated the Soul Eater.
“It took them almost a year to bring me back.” He poured me a cup of boiling water from the teapot that used to warm blood. He dunked in a tea bag and set the steaming pot aside. “They were waiting for a priest to die, so they could use his hand. It’s in the spell. When they brought me back, I explained how Dahlia used exotic ingredients to throw people off track.”
I smiled, but I wasn’t up to laughter. Not about this. Not yet. “How long has it been?”
“For you?” Nathan asked, as if he truly didn’t understand what I was asking. “Six months more. We tried. Believe me, we tried. But we could never find you.”
“You found me.” I reached across the table and took his hand in mine. It seemed more intimate, now that we were human. Now that we had time ticking away against us. “Nathan, why did you do it?”
He sucked in a huge breath and pushed a banana-nut muffin toward me. “I couldn’t live without you.” When I raised an eyebrow in disbelief, he insisted, “I couldn’t! Ask Ziggy and Bill. When they brought me back, the first thing I asked was if they’d brought you back.”
I thought of Nathan, when he was my sire, ruled by the pain of the blood tie, and I realized that now we didn’t have that to rely on to keep us together. “And now?”
He pulled my hand to his lips, kissing each knuckle reverently. “Now, it’s the same. I love you, Carrie. I want to spend the rest of my life with you, mortal or vampire.”
That caught my attention. “Do you want to be a vampire again?”
He gave an embarrassed laugh. “Ziggy offered to turn me, but I wanted to see…what you would want. I’ve been a vampire for over seventy years. It’s more normal than human life to me now, but…”
“But?” I prodded.
He smiled. “But I like the idea of a clean slate. Being able to start over, brand-new. With you.”
There was a long silence. I looked into his eyes, familiar gray, yet unfamiliar in their humanity. What would it be like, to grow old with him as a human? To make love to him as a human? To get married, have children, live the life that had been denied to me when Cyrus had attacked me what was now over two years ago?
“What do you want, Carrie?” Nathan asked, his expression a mixture of hope and fear.
“I want…” I spoke slowly. There was no going back from this moment. And it was a giddy feeling in my stomach. “I want to go to Vegas and get married.”
Nathan looked surprised at this, but he said nothing.
“And I want to move out of this apartment, into a real house.” I was on a roll now, and I had to rein myself in. “And I want to try to…have a child. Maybe more than one. With you. I want to have a human life with you. In twenty years, maybe we’ll decide to let Ziggy turn us. Maybe not. But right now, I want to try for my happily ever after.”
Nathan nodded, tears welling up in his eyes. I didn’t get to finish my breakfast. We made love for the first time as humans, right there on the kitchen floor. And he told me he loved me, and I knew it wasn’t because of the blood tie, because that wasn’t a part of my reality anymore. He loved me.
It’s a strange world we live in. The lines between death and life aren’t as cut-and-dried as we like to believe. Neither are good and evil.
I had to experience both extremes for myself. Extreme strength and extreme powerlessness. Love and hate. Life and death. But I know now.
No one’s place in this world is guaranteed. Not everyone is going to get a happy ending. But life isn’t about how it ends. It’s about the moments between. It’s about the small things. The way our loved ones laugh. The sight of a butterfly in the sunlight after a year or two in the darkness.
The love and support of an old friend. They might not be with us in body, but they are with us in spirit.
The feeling of something we’d thought lost to us forever returned in a single, life-changing moment. Yes, that is simple, even though it might be momentous to us as individuals.
Because every day, on this planet, people are born and people die and stranger things happen. But I know my place now, and my purpose. And no matter what trial you have to endure to find that out…
It’s worth it.
ISBN: 978-1-4268-1864-6
Copyright © 2008 Harlequin Books S.A.
The publisher acknowledges the copyright holders of the individual works as follows:
Blood Ties Book One: The Turning
Copyright © 2006 Jennifer Armintrout
Blood Ties Book Two: Possession
Copyright © 2007 Jennifer Armintrout
Blood Ties Book Three: Ashes to Ashes
Copyright © 2007 Jennifer Armintrout
Blood Ties Book Four: All Souls' Night
Copyright © 2008 Jennifer Armintrout
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