Blood Ties Bundle

Blood Ties Book One: The Turning

Blood Ties Book Two: Possession

Blood Ties Book Three: Ashes to Ashes

Blood Ties Book Four: All Souls’ Night

Contents

Blood Ties Book One: The Turning

Blood Ties Book Two: Possession

Blood Ties Book Three: Ashes to Ashes

Blood Ties Book Four: All Souls’ Night

Blood Ties Book One:

The Turning

Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

One

The End

I read a poll in the newspaper once that said the number-one fear of Americans aged eighteen to sixty-five is public speaking. Spiders are second, and death a distant third. I’m afraid of all these things. But most of all, I’m afraid of failure.

I’m no coward. I want to make that perfectly clear. But my life turned from nearly perfect to a horror movie in a matter of days, so I take fear a lot more seriously now.

I’d followed my life plan almost to the letter, with very few detours. I’d gone from plain old Ms. Carrie Ames to Dr. Carrie Ames just eight months prior to the night I now refer to as “The Big Change.” I’d broken away from the sleepy, East Coast town I’d grown up in, only to find myself in a sleepy, mid-Michigan city. I had a great residency in the E.R. of the public hospital there. The city and surrounding rural communities provided endless opportunity to study and treat injuries inflicted by both urban warfare and treacherous farm equipment. Living my dream, I’d never been more certain that I’d found the success and control over my destiny that had always seemed to elude me in my tumultuous college years.

Of course, sleepy mid-Michigan towns get boring, especially on frozen winter nights when even the snow won’t venture out. And on a night exactly like this, after only having been home for four hours from a grueling twelve-hour shift, I was back at the hospital to help deal with a sudden influx of patients. The E.R. was surprisingly busy for such a forbidding evening, but the approaching holiday season seemed to affect everyone with a pulse. Thanks to my rotten luck, I was charged with attending trauma cases that night, patients with serious injuries and illnesses that put them in imminent danger of death. Or, more specifically, carloads of mall-hoppers who showed up in pieces after hitting black ice on 131 South.

After I’d admitted three patients, I found myself in great need of a nicotine fix. While I felt guilty for sticking the other doctors with a few extra cases, I didn’t feel guilty enough to forgo a quick cigarette break.

I was heading for the ambulance bay doors when John Doe arrived.

Dr. Fuller, the attending physician and most senior M.D. in the hospital, ran alongside the gurney, barking instructions and demanding information from the EMTs in his no-nonsense Texan accent.

Distracted by the fact that Dr. Fuller’s smooth, Southern speech had been replaced by an urgent, clipped tone, I didn’t notice the patient on the gurney. I had never seen my superior lose his unflappable calm before. It scared me.

“Carrie, you gonna give us a hand here or are you on a one-way trip to Marlboro country?” he barked, startling me. The cigarette between my fingers snapped in half when I jumped, reduced to a fluttering shower of dry tobacco. My break had been officially canceled.

I brushed my hands clean on my lab coat and fell into step beside the gurney. It was only then that I noticed the state the transport was in.

The sight of the patient paralyzed me as we entered the cubical and the EMTs were squeezed out to make way for the R.N.s who rushed in.

“Okay ladies, I want splash guards, gowns, goggles, the whole space suit. Quickly, please,” Fuller snapped, shrugging off his blood-smeared white coat.

I knew I should do something to help, but I could only stare at the mess on the table in front of me. I had no idea where to start.

Blood might be the one thing I’m not afraid of. In the case of John Doe, it was not the blood that made working on him, touching him, even approaching him unthinkable. It was the fact that he looked like my dissection cadaver on the last day of Gross Anatomy.

Puncture wounds peppered his chest. Some were small, but four or five were large enough to fit a baseball in.

“Gunshot wounds? What the hell was he shot with, a goddamned cannon?” Dr. Fuller muttered as he probed one of the bloody holes with his gloved finger.

It didn’t take a forensic-science degree to tell that what had caused the wounds in John Doe’s torso had not caused the wounds in his face. His jaw, or what was left of it, hung skinned from the front teeth to the splintered end, where it had been ripped from the joint to dangle uselessly from the other side of his skull. Above the gaping hole in his cheek, one eye socket stood empty and crushed, the eye itself and optical nerve completely missing.

“I’d say someone used an axe on his head, if I thought it were possible to swing one with enough force to do this,” Dr. Fuller said. “We’re not going to get a tube down this way, his trachea’s crushed all to hell.”

I couldn’t breathe. John Doe’s remaining eye, clear and bright blue, fixed on mine as if he were totally alert.

It had to be a trick of the light. No one could endure this kind of trauma and remain conscious. No one could survive injuries of this magnitude. He didn’t cry out or writhe in pain. His body was limp and completely void of any reaction as the attending staff made an incision in his windpipe to intubate him.

He never looked away.

How can he be alive? my mind screamed. The concept destroyed the carefully constructed logic I’d built over three years of medical school. People did not live through something like this. It wasn’t in the textbooks. Yet, there he was, staring at me calmly, focused on me despite the flurry of action around us.

For a sickening moment, I thought I heard my name from the mangled hole of his mouth. Then I realized it was Dr. Fuller’s frantic voice cutting through the haze of my paralyzed revulsion.

“Carrie, I need you to wake up and join us! Come on, now, we’re losing this guy!”

I could continue to stare at John Doe or turn my face to Dr. Fuller, to see him silently lose his faith in me. I don’t know what would have been more distressing, but I didn’t get to make a decision.

I mumbled a feeble apology, turned swiftly and ran. I had barely escaped the grisly scene before I noticed the sticky splotches on the floor that stained the pristine tile a deep, glossy red. I was going to be sick. I fell to my knees in the congealing blood and closed my eyes as the bile rose in my throat. I rocked back and forth on my knees, my vomit mixing with the blood on the tiles.

A sudden hush came from the cubicle behind me, followed by the insistent whine of the heart monitor protesting the cessation of pulse.

“All right, he’s gone. Pack him up and get him to the morgue,” I heard Dr. Fuller say. His cool, Texan confidence crept back into his voice, though it was tainted with weariness and resignation.

I scrambled to my feet and ran to the staff locker room, unable to face my failure.

I was still in the locker room an hour later. Fresh from a shower, dressed in clean scrubs from central processing, I stood before the mirror and tried to smooth my wet, blond hair into something resembling a ponytail. My mascara had run in the shower and I wiped at it with my sleeve. It only served to darken the circles under my eyes. My bone-pale skin stretched sharply over my cheekbones, my blue eyes were cold and hollow. I’d never seen myself look so defeated.

When did I become so pathetic? So cowardly? Cruelly, I taunted myself with memories I couldn’t push aside. The way I’d snickered with the other students when the skinny foreign guy had tossed his cookies on the first day of Gross Anatomy. Or the time I’d chased Amy Anderson, the queen bee of the eighth grade, from the bus stop by sticking earthworms in her hair.

It appeared that I’d become one of those people I’d despised. To the entire E.R. medical staff at St. Mary’s Hospital, I had become the squeamish nerd, the shrieking girl. It cut so deeply, I’d need emotional sutures to heal.

A knock at the door pulled me from my self-pity. “Ames, you still in there?”

The door swung open. Steady footsteps carried Dr. Fuller to the end of my narrow bench.

For a moment, he didn’t say anything at all. Without looking, I knew that he stood with his head hanging down. His hands would be in the pockets of his crisp white coat, his elbows tucked in at his sides, giving him the appearance of a tall, gray stork.

“So, hangin’ in there?” he asked suddenly.

I shrugged. Anything I said would have been a lame excuse for my poor performance, one akin to those uttered by countless med students who stopped showing up for class soon after.

“You know,” he began, “I’ve seen a lot of doctors, good physicians, crack under pressure. You get tired. You get stressed, maybe you’re having personal problems. Those things happen to all of us. But some of us leave it in here—” he pointed to the lockers behind me “—instead of taking it out there. It’s what makes us capable doctors.”

He waited for me to respond. I only nodded.

“I know you’ve gone through a lot this year, losing your parents—”

“This isn’t about my parents.” I hadn’t meant to cut him off, but the words were spoken before I had a chance to think about them. “I’m sorry. But really, I’m over that.”

He sighed deeply as he sat next to me on the bench. “Why do you want to be a doctor?”

We sat there for a long time, like a coach and a star player who had fumbled the ball, before I answered.

“Because I want to help people.” I was lying. Badly. But even I didn’t know the reason, and he didn’t want a real answer, anyway. Real doctors lose the capacity for humanity and understanding before they grab their diplomas. “And because I love it.”

“Well, I love golf, but that doesn’t make me Tiger Woods, does it?” He laughed at his own joke before he became thoughtful again. “You know, there comes a time in everyone’s life when they have to carefully examine the goals they’ve set for themselves. When they have to admit their limitations and look at their capabilities in a more realistic way.”

“You’re saying I should be a dentist?” I asked, forcing a laugh.

“I’m saying you shouldn’t be a doctor.” Fuller actually patted me on the back, as though it would take the edge off his harsh words. He stood and walked toward the door, stopping suddenly as if he’d just thought of something.

“You know,” he began, but he didn’t finish his thought. Instead he shook his head and walked out the door.

My fists balled with anger and my breath came in noisy gasps as I struggled to regain my composure. I’d failed the Great One’s test. I should have told him I liked the money. It was considerably better than a stick in the eye. Though they were both reasons people entered the field, neither financial security nor desire to help others were my true motivation for becoming a doctor.

It was the power that drew me to it. The power of holding a human life in my hands. The power of looking Death in the face and knowing I could defeat him. It was a power reserved for doctors and God.

I’d pictured myself a modern-day Merlin, a scalpel for a wand, a clipboard my book of spells. I cringed at the ridiculous thought.

I could have changed into my street clothes, slunk out of the hospital and never come back. But then I thought of my dead father and remembered one of the rare pieces of paternal advice I’d ever received from him.

“If you’re afraid of something, face it. Fear is irrational. The only way to conquer your fear is to put yourself next to it.”

Just as quickly as it had come, my self-doubt subsided. This was a test of faith in myself. I wasn’t going to fail.

I got onto my feet and made my way through the packed E.R., blind and deaf to my coworkers and the patients that crowded the cubicles around me. I left the emergency and trauma ward altogether, pushing through the doors that led into the central part of the hospital.

The offices I passed were closed, their windows dark. The main lobby was empty, with the exception of one custodian who leaned on the deserted information desk, idly reading an old newspaper while his cleaning cart sat neglected in the middle of the room. He barely glanced up as I elbowed the cart in my reckless flight and knocked a stack of paper towels to the floor.

I continued to the elevators, pressed the button impatiently and tapped my foot. After what seemed like an interminably long time, the dull metal doors slid open and I entered. I pushed the button for the basement.

An irrational determination took me down the long hallway to the morgue. I had only been through there once, during my orientation tour. It was a simple route, though, and I located the unlabeled door again without much difficulty. I ran my hospital ID through the badge reader and heard the sharp click of the releasing lock.

I grabbed the handle and stopped, wondering for the first time what I intended to prove to myself. I feared I was a bad doctor, and I had come to confront my fears and view John Doe in all his mangled glory. What if I couldn’t handle it?

Terror gripped me at the thought that his body might not be as damaged as I remembered. I recalled Amy Anderson’s horrified face as she’d held the wriggling earthworm in her palm, her fear making the harmless thing a monster. Had my panicked brain exaggerated John Doe’s wounds?

No, you weren’t hysterical. You know what you saw. I entered the cool, antiseptic room before I could change my mind.

Hospital morgues are much different from morgues in the movies. They aren’t cavernous spaces with stark lighting. In fact, the morgue at St. Mary’s was small and cluttered. The on-duty attendant had left a rumpled fast-food sack on the desk, a reassuring sign of life in a room devoted to the indignities of death.

Before I approached the task at hand, I walked the perimeter of the room. I examined the cabinets, the plastic tubs of all sizes that held murky shapes of organs preserved for further study, and the autopsy tables. I avoided the one that appeared occupied.

“Hello?” I called. I winced at the volume of my voice. The room was so quiet you could hear the buzzing of the fluorescent lights. The phrase “wake the dead” sprung unpleasantly to mind. I expected to see an orderly emerge from one of the back rooms, but no one came. The lucky SOB was probably on a smoke break. I would have to do the dirty work of locating John Doe myself.

The morgue freezer held six gurneys. With the high volume of patients today, it would be full, maybe even sleeping double. Not a pleasant thought.

I stepped into the cooler and immediately wished for a jacket. The thermostat on the outside read thirty-five degrees, warm compared to the temperature outside, but it hadn’t occurred to me just how cold thirty-five degrees really was.

Shivering, I looked over the six shrouded gurneys before me. They all faced the same direction, their occupants’ feet pointed at the back wall. I glanced down at my shoes and saw a dark stain on the sticky, unwashed floor. My skin crawled as I speculated exactly how long it had been since someone disinfected this room. Not that these particular patients were in any danger of disease or infection.

I started with the body farthest to the right, not bothering to uncover them to search for their toe tags. I opted instead to read the more detailed tag on their shrouds.

The first body was a female, age sixty-eight. The second was male, age twenty-three. So it went, each tag displaying the one thing I wasn’t looking for: a name. I didn’t see any bearing the big, red “unidentified” stamp, and it seemed that my field trip would prove useless.

I rubbed my hands across my face, stretching tired skin as I pondered my next step. Where had he gone? It was unlikely that the medical examiner would have come at night for an autopsy that could wait until morning. Even if they had identified him, they couldn’t have released the body before the police finished with it.

He has to be here somewhere. But as I doubled-checked, I had to accept the fact that he was gone.

I would have to go back upstairs and face my embarrassment much to the delight of my colleagues. I’d missed the opportunity to confront my demon, but life would go on, as it always had. With the same resolve that brought me there, I left the cooler without a backward look. Someone would make a snide comment, or even pity me no matter what I did. I’d had enough experience with criticism that I could shoot down my detractors without actually having to go through the experience of looking at what was left of John Doe’s body.

My hand was on the door handle when I stopped again. From the corner of my eye, I glimpsed the sheeted figure on the autopsy table.

For all my bravado, I’d felt some relief upon finding John Doe’s body missing. To look or not to look. It had been an easy call with no body to see. An uneasy feeling crept over me as my initial relief fled. There was no doubt in my mind that John Doe lay beneath that sheet on the autopsy table.

If you leave now, you’ll always wonder, a tiny voice nagged from the back of my mind. For a fraction of a second, it seemed the gnawing fear would win. I would just walk out of the morgue and forget the whole incident ever happened.

But my father’s words and Dr. Fuller’s hurtful evaluation of my abilities bounced around in my brain. I didn’t want to be the failure I’d been in my father’s eyes. The failure I’d become in Dr. Fuller’s. It spurred me toward the table.

I was no coward.

Before I gave myself a chance to change my mind, I whipped the sheet completely off the cadaver.

Every second passed in slow motion, frame by frame. The very instant I pulled the covering off the body, I saw a brightly colored sole of an athletic shoe poking from under the sheet. There wasn’t time for this to register as I ripped away the shroud, revealing hospital-issue scrubs and the face of the morgue attendant, his features frozen in terror.

I didn’t scream right away, either from shock or the fact that the scene didn’t make sense. John Doe was supposed to be here, not this young man. The sight transfixed me.

His neck had obviously been broken. The flesh of his throat had been torn the way it would look after a dog attack. Extreme blood loss left his dark skin ashen, though the table and most of his clothing were spotless. His eyes were open. One was missing.

I saw the telephone perched on the gleaming steel counter, but it seemed miles away as I ran to it. My hands shook so badly that I could barely punch the numbers to issue a code blue. But no reassuring calm came over me when I hung up. I was still stranded, still isolated in this weird nightmare. I picked up the phone again.

I was dialing the number for the night security office when something brushed my shoulder. The touch was so light I barely noticed it, but I wound up inexplicably on my back.

The force of my landing knocked the wind out of me. Confused and frightened, I scrambled to my knees, but that was as far as I got.

In the next instant, I was airborne again. Shattering glass crashed, the consequence of my impact against the cabinets. I had flown into the glass with enough momentum to break it and splinter the wooden doors. Pain ripped down my spine. The shelves collapsed and the plastic tubs within slipped to the floor, overturning and spilling their contents. I fell to my hands and knees in a mire of formaldehyde and human livers, unable to efficiently crawl through the slippery mess.

A hand grabbed my hair and dragged me upward. When I tried to regain my footing I slipped to my knees again and writhed painfully in the grasp of my attacker. I looked up.

John Doe looked down at me.

His once-mangled face showed only the faintest remnants of injury in the form of purplish scars. His pale chest bore no marks at all, save for a long, straight scar that bisected it, obviously an old wound. His jaw was no longer torn, but had twisted, along with the rest of his features, into a demonic visage with a crumpled snout and weirdly elongated jaws. Dried blood stained his long blond hair, though his skull had neatly closed. The clear, blue eye that had stared so intently at me as he lay helpless on the gurney in the E.R. was piercing and ruthless. The other, formerly empty socket held a brown eye, the white occluded with blood.

The missing eye of the morgue worker.

John Doe bared his teeth, revealing needle-sharp canines.

“Fangs,” I whispered in horror. Vampire.

He laughed then, the sound distorted by his changed facial structure as though it had been slowed on a tape recorder.

Everything about the creature suggested the calculated fury of a predator who killed not from necessity, but from love of carnage. He stroked my cheek with one talonlike fingernail. He was a cat playing with a mouse, a thief admiring his stolen prize.

I would not be that prize. My hands groped the floor and seized a piece of broken glass, and I stabbed the shard into his thigh. His blood sprayed across my face. I tasted the coppery wetness on my lips and gagged.

Howling in rage, he wielded his free hand like a claw and slashed my neck. The burning pain followed seconds later, but I didn’t care. I was free. I held one hand to my throat, desperate to stop the warm blood that flowed between my fingers. It was hopeless, and I knew it. I would bleed to death on the morgue floor before anyone found me.

Then I saw the white shoes of the code team as they entered. I raised my free hand weakly to signal them. Only one moved toward me. The rest stood petrified by the scene.

“You’re going to be all right,” the young nurse said as he pried my fingers from the wound at my neck.

It was the last thing I remembered.

Two

A Few (More) Unpleasant Surprises

I spent nearly a month in the hospital. Detectives visited me on several occasions. They took down my description of John Doe, fangs and all, but no doubt wondered what kind of painkillers I was on. The first to arrive on the scene didn’t see him. The last police interview was short, and though they assured me the case was still being investigated, I didn’t hold out much hope for justice. Whatever John Doe was, he was probably smart enough to evade capture.

A few nurses from the E.R. came to see me. They looked uncomfortable and didn’t stay long. We joked about the Day-After-Thanksgiving sales I’d missed and the frantic shopping I’d have to do if I got out in time for Christmas. I didn’t bother mentioning I had no one to buy gifts for.

The bright side of the interminable visits were the newspaper clippings that people brought. While I wasn’t about to make a scrapbook of them, the articles offered more details of the crime and investigation than the vague answers I’d been given by the cops.

According to the press, the morgue attendant, Cedric Kebbler, had been attacked and killed by an unknown suspect, possibly an escaped mental patient. I had walked in on the murder in progress and had been attacked myself. I’d struggled, and the murderer fled through the morgue’s only window. I wasn’t interviewed due to my “critical medical condition” and “acute anxiety and post-traumatic stress,” the latter affliction diagnosed in a rush interview conducted by the staff psychiatrist while I was in a morphine-induced haze.

None of the articles mentioned John Doe’s missing body or the bizarre way the attendant’s body had been found. Either the police had neglected to mention these details, or the hospital had a crackerjack P.R. staff.

The most uncomfortable visit had been Dr. Fuller’s. Apparently, it wasn’t enough for him to have written me off as a doctor. He had to write me off as a living person, too. He’d come to the end of my bed, my chart in his hand, barely acknowledging me as he read the details. Finally, he snapped the chart shut with a deep sigh. “Doesn’t look good, does it?”

He was right. In the first week after my encounter with John Doe, I’d needed two surgeries. One repaired my damaged carotid artery, and the other removed the shards of glass embedded in my skull. In the recovery room after the first surgery, I flatlined, something my doctor noted later with a breezy wave of his hand, as though his disregard for the seriousness of the situation would somehow put me at ease.

I’d also endured a delightful course of precautionary inoculations, including tetanus and rabies vaccinations. I didn’t think John Doe had attacked me in a fit of hydrophobia, but no one asked my opinion on the matter, and I certainly hadn’t been in a position to argue.

During my lengthy hospital stay, I began to suffer strange symptoms. Most of them could be explained by post-traumatic stress, others as common side effects of major surgery.

The first malady to show itself was a body temperature of one hundred and four degrees. This struck the night of my heart failure and subsequent resuscitation. I was still heavily sedated, and I can’t say I’m sorry to have missed it. After forty long hours the fever broke and my body temperature lowered beyond the normal range, leaving me a cool 92.7 degrees.

It wasn’t until I read over my medical files that I determined this was the first indication of my change. It baffled the doctors. One doctor noted such a thing wasn’t unheard of and cited evidence of low resting temperatures in coma patients. It was the equivalent of throwing his arms up in defeat, and it seemed to be the end of the matter as far as they were concerned.

The second symptom was my incredible appetite. A nasal-gastric tube fed me without disturbing the repairs made to my throat. Still, every time the pharmaceutical fog lifted, I requested food. The nurses would frown and check their chart and then explain that while I received adequate nourishment through the tube, I missed the chewing and swallowing that accompanied the act of eating. And when the tube was removed, my voracious appetite didn’t show signs of decreasing. I ate astonishing amounts of food and, when I was sent home, smoked nearly a carton of cigarettes a day as though I’d been possessed by some nicotine-craving demon. Conventional wisdom held that smoking after major soft tissue repair was a bad idea, but conventional wisdom wouldn’t sate the maddening hunger. The masticating emptiness that plagued me was never satisfied. And the more I consumed, the wider the void became.

The third sign didn’t become apparent until I had been discharged. After weeks of being immersed in the submarine-like interior of the hospital, I expected natural light to irritate me. But nothing could have prepared me for the searing pain that burned my skin when I stepped, blinking and disoriented, into the blazing white sunlight.

Though it was mid-December, I felt as if I’d been tossed into an oven. My fever might have returned, but I wasn’t about to spend another night in a hospital bed. I took a cab home, shut the blinds and obsessively checked my temperature every fifteen minutes. Ninety, then eighty-nine, and it kept falling. When I realized my temperature matched the one displayed on the thermostat in the living room, I decided I’d lost my mind.

Whether it was a subconscious need to protect myself from further shock or a conscious decision to suppress the reality of my situation, I refused to acknowledge how odd these things seemed. It became necessary to wear sunglasses during the daylight hours, inside or out. My apartment turned into a cave. The shades were closed at all times. I stumbled around in the darkness at first, but I eventually adapted to it. After a few days, I could easily read by the flickering blue light of the television.

When I returned to my duties at the hospital, my strange habits did not go unnoticed. Because of my sudden light sensitivity, I requested night shifts. But focusing on anything amid all the beeping monitors and endless intercom pages proved impossible.

But too many things defied explanation, too many questions science couldn’t answer. I wasn’t sure I wanted the most obvious explanation, either.

I couldn’t hold out forever, though. It would only be a matter of time before I exhausted the knowledge available in medical journals and textbooks. Eventually, I came to accept the conclusion I’d dreaded.

I paced in front of my computer for a full hour. What was I thinking? Grown people didn’t believe in the things that went bump in the night. Maybe I really did need the psychologist my doctor recommended.

As a child, I’d never been allowed the luxury of watching Dark Shadows reruns, and any reading I’d done was strictly of an academic nature. Flights of fancy were discouraged in our household. My Jungian-analyst father considered them a warning sign of an underdeveloped animus and they were a red flag to my career-feminist mother who taught these things would lead me to become another foot soldier in the unicorn-lover’s army. I sat down and fired up the modem. If they were looking down on me from the heaven they’d insisted couldn’t logically exist, I’m sure they shook their heads in disappointment.

In a bizarre way, it was their fault I had the courage to explore the possibility that I was a vampire. Occam’s razor was a theory my father constantly spouted around the house. God forbid an expensive item in our museum of a home ever be broken or misplaced. I’d always lie and say I wasn’t there, it was a statistical anomaly. Whenever I did this, my father would fix me with his best stare of paternal disapproval and quote, “One should not increase, beyond what is necessary, the number of entities required to explain anything.”

In other words, if it looked like a duck, et cetera, I probably broke that lamp. Or, in the current case, if it looked like I’d become a vampire…

“Thanks, Dad,” I muttered as I lit another cigarette. I’d accepted the fact they did nothing for me physically, but the routine soothed my jagged nerves. I typed vampire into a search engine and held my breath.

Marginally more reliable than tea leaves or a magic eight ball, the Web offered possibility and anonymity, two crucial components to my quest for knowledge. Still, I felt a little silly as I clicked the first link.

The number of people interested in—and even claiming to be—vampires astounded me, but the amount of information their Web sites offered was negligible. I found one promising lead, a professional-looking site with an area to post messages. Figuring it was as good a place to start as any, I began to explain my predicament to the dispassionate white text area.

I’d never been good at expressing myself with the written word, and I felt sillier with each one I wrote. After several frustrated drafts, I gave up and shortened my entry to two fragmented sentences.

“Attacked by vampire. Please advise.”

I didn’t have to wait long for a reply. Before I could get up for a bathroom break, my e-mail program chimed.

The first response informed me I was a psycho. The second suggested I might be watching too many late-night movies. Another tried to lovingly counsel me away from my obviously abusive relationship. For people who were supposed to believe in vampires, they sure didn’t seem very open to the possibility one might actually exist.

I began deleting responses as they rolled in, until one subject line caught my eye.

1320 Wealthy Ave.

I recognized the street. It wasn’t far from where I lived. Just outside of downtown, it was a street where the college students spent money from home on Georgia O’Keeffe prints in poster stores next to bodegas where migrant families bought their meager groceries. I’d driven through the neighborhood, but I’d never stopped.

The content of the e-mail was simply this: after sundown, any night this week.

The digital clock in the corner of the computer screen’s display read 5:00 p.m. After sundown.

I didn’t have to go to work for six more hours.

I only had to get in my car and drive.

But it seemed a dicey proposition. Curiosity had nearly killed this cat already. The sender could be a deranged groupie or vampire fanatic. Sure, he or she might be perfectly harmless and just having a bit of fun, but I didn’t relish the thought of spending another month in the hospital.

How could I go to an unknown address at the advice of an anonymous e-mail? Well, it wasn’t exactly anonymous. Zigmeister69@usmail.com wasn’t exactly the most common e-mail address I’d ever seen. I logged on to usmail.com in hopes of finding a user profile, a Web page, something to give me a line on who had sent the message to me. I came up with nothing.

That sparked another, more terrifying proposition. What if the sender was John Doe himself, quietly monitoring my activities? Though it seemed a long shot that the creature of my nightmares would give himself such a ridiculous online moniker, I didn’t exactly know what he was. He could have been cleverly crafting a trap for me, finding out where I lived, how to contact me and lull me into a false sense of security.

“Fuck it.” I vigorously stubbed out my cigarette in the ashtray beside the keyboard before entering the address into the search engine.

The Crypt: Occult Books and Supplies.

There was a phone number and driving directions.

Nothing could happen to me in a public place, in a busy neighborhood. I used that line of reasoning as I grabbed my keys and headed out the door.

Though it was an hour after sunset, the sky was still bright enough to make my skin feel tight and itchy. I wore a baseball cap as a disguise. If John Doe was waiting when I got there, I wanted to see him before he spotted me. I popped a painkiller and one of the pills prescribed for my light sensitivity, then wrapped up in my wool trench coat to guard against the December cold.

The 1300 block was only about five miles from my home. It was in the middle of three crisscrossed streets and housed a cluster of eclectic storefronts and trendy restaurants. There were women in broomstick skirts and crocheted coats scurrying through the snow next to men in Rastafarian hats and corduroy pants. Most of the footprints on the sidewalk were made by Doc Martens.

I found a place to park in front of a crowded coffeehouse. With my jeans, cap and ponytail, I felt rather conspicuous. I stepped onto the sidewalk and tried to ignore the stares of the ultrahip art majors huddled behind the steamy windows. I must have looked like a mascot for the capitalist culture they all gathered to complain about.

It proved difficult to find 1320 Wealthy. I passed it several times before I spotted it. A vintage clothing store and a corner grocery, 1318 and 1322 respectively, jutted up against each other with nothing but a sandwich-board sign between them. Had I been patient enough to read the sign in the first place, I would have saved myself much frustration. “The Crypt: Occult Books and Supplies, 1320 Wealthy,” the silver lettering fairly shouted at me from the sign’s black background. A large red arrow pointed to a staircase that descended below the sidewalk in front of the clothing store.

I peered down the dubious-looking hole. The steps were wet but not icy. I took a deep breath and started down.

The door at the bottom of the stairs was old and wooden, with a window in the top half that bore the name of the shop in gold paint. Bells jingled when I entered.

The sights and smells of the place immediately overwhelmed me. Incense burned, a particularly noxious scent, and the air of the place was hazy with it. New Age music played softly, some peaceful Celtic harp composition punctuated with birdsong. I didn’t know if it was the smoke or the flaky music that made me gag.

The shop wasn’t horribly bright, but enough candles were lit to cast flickering shadows along the rows and rows of bookshelves.

I covered my nose with my sleeve to avoid the heavy smell of incense that rapidly formed a metallic taste in my mouth. I looked toward the sales counter.

The shop seemed empty. “Hello?”

I heard the heavy thunk of the door scraping shut. When I turned toward the sound, something struck me hard in the chest. Lifted off my feet, I landed flat on my back on the unfinished wooden floor.

Muscles all over my body that still weren’t used to movement after such a long recuperation screamed in agony, but an instinct completely foreign to me forced me to move. I quickly rolled to my side just as an axe blade splintered the floor right where my head had been.

With strength I hadn’t realized I possessed, I arched my back and pushed off the floor with the palms of my hands, springing to my feet in a move like something out of an action movie. Only then did I come face-to-face with my attacker.

If I had to guess, I would have placed him at about fifteen years old. But the tattoo on the back of his hand and his multiple ear and eyebrow piercings told me he must have been at least eighteen. His long, greasy-looking hair was shaved into a thin strip down the middle of his head, and despite the temperature in the shop, he wore a heavy overcoat.

I held my hands up to show I meant no harm, but he swung the axe again, this time breaking the glass display window of the counter. “Die, vampire scum!”

Like any sensible person would, I ran. Though he was fast on his feet, I managed to get past the baby-faced psycho and gained the door just as it swung open. I couldn’t raise my hands in time to protect myself. The heavy wood door smashed into my face and knocked me off balance. I hit the floor again in time to see the axe sail through the space I’d just inhabited.

“Nate, look—”

Two thoughts went through my mind when I saw the man who’d stepped through the door. The first was holy crap. He’d stopped the axe that was just centimeters from striking his very broad chest, catching the blade between his palms before the juvenile delinquent who’d thrown it could finish his shouted warning. My second thought was also holy crap.

The man was sex walking. Wide shoulders, flat stomach, wavy, dark hair…I suddenly realized the appeal of those firefighter calendars that the nurses ogled in the coffee room.

“I’m so, so sorry,” he said to me.

I took the hand he offered, nervous electricity zinging up my arm at his touch, and got to my feet. I almost said “It’s all right,” before I realized it definitely was not. My hands shook as I reached for the door.

“What the hell were you thinking, Ziggy?” he raged at the younger man before turning back to me. “Are you hurt, do you need anything? An ambulance?”

He put his hand on my shoulder, and I shrugged it off angrily. “Do most customers leave in an ambulance?”

Ziggy pointed his finger accusingly at me. “She’s a fucking vampire, man! Don’t let her out of here!”

With a ferocity that startled me, the man yelled at the boy. “Get her a compress for her head!”

Ziggy sputtered in disbelief. “Maybe I should get her a cup of my nice warm blood, too? Sprinkle some marshmallows in it?”

“Upstairs, now!”

The kid pushed past us as he mumbled furiously under his breath, slamming the door behind him so hard the glass in the window rattled.

“I don’t think he’s coming back with the compress,” I observed dryly.

“No, I don’t, either.” The man laughed quietly, holding out his hand. “I’m Nathan Grant.”

“Carrie Ames.”

Get out of here, you moron, my brain screamed. He’s still got the damn axe! Yet my feet stayed rooted to the spot, completely under the control of the morbid curiosity that had brought me this far and the ruthless attraction that urged me to stay as close to this man as possible.

Nathan cocked his head and regarded me with sparkling gray eyes. Clearing his throat, he leaned the axe against the doorpost and crossed his arms over his chest. “Ames. You’re the doctor from the newspaper?”

His voice was deep and seductively masculine, his words pronounced with a distinctly Scottish accent. I had a hard time concentrating on his question, distracted as I was by his perfect mouth. “Uh…yeah. That would be me.”

He smiled, but it wasn’t the friendliest expression I’d ever seen. It reminded me of the way the dentist looks right before he says you have to come back for a root canal. “Then we’ve got a lot to talk about, Doctor. I apologize for Ziggy. He’s got it in his head that he’s a vampire hunter. How’d he find you?”

“Find me?” Zigmeister69. I’d been set up. “E-mail.”

Nathan chuckled. “Figures. Nightblood.com?”

I coughed deliberately to hide my answer. “Yes.”

He shook his head. “Rule number one, don’t go public.”

“Rule number what? What are you talking about?”

As if he had all the time in the world to explain himself, he turned away. He stepped behind the counter and pressed a button on the CD player, cutting off the annoyingly soothing New Age droning.

“What are you talking about?” I demanded, tagging after him as he walked through the shop and snuffed the candles. “Would you stop and talk to me?”

He sighed and dropped his head, bracing his arms on a table that looked far too dainty to support his weight.

“The rules you have to follow. The rules every vampire has to follow.”

My hand was on the door before I realized I’d intended to run.

“Wait!” he called after me. He caught my arm and gently turned me around to face him just as my hand found the lock. “If you run out of here, this will only end badly.”

His grip on the sleeve of my coat unnerved me, as did the tension in his voice. My words sounded thick and strange as I spoke. “Is that a threat?”

“Listen,” he began, some of the urgency of his tone gone now. “I know you have some questions. Otherwise you wouldn’t have run into Ziggy.”

“Yeah, I have questions.” I spat the words in my anger. “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 yanked open the shop door and stepped into the pitiless cold, fishing in my pocket for my half-empty pack of cigarettes.

He followed me to the threshold and let me get halfway up the steps before he spoke again. I was struggling with my lighter when he called after me.

“What makes you think you’re a vampire? That’s why you were trolling the vampire message boards, right? That’s where Ziggy found you. It’s his M.O.” He moved up the stairs with a grace I’d thought reserved for animals and put his hand over mine. His skin was ice cold. “No matter how many you smoke, you’ll never feel satisfied. The food you eat no longer fills you up, and you can’t understand why.”

The cigarette suddenly looked ridiculous where it rested between my fingers. I trembled, and not entirely due to the cold.

Nathan spoke again, but he sounded disconnected and far away.

“Come upstairs,” he said. “I’ll try to explain.”

I took a few more steps and tried to convince myself to keep walking, to get in my car and never come back, to avoid this side of town altogether. If I never saw this place again, I could pretend none of this had ever happened. There was always the hope that I’d never actually woken from surgery, and that I lingered in a coma in the ICU. As much as I wanted that to be true, I knew it wasn’t. I dropped the cigarette and watched it roll to the next step. “No chance I’m dreaming here, huh?”

“No,” he said quietly. “We can, uh, tell our own kind.”

I looked up sharply. The blood drained from my face, and I could tell by the way his expression softened that my fear was visible. “You’re a—”

“Vampire, yes,” he finished for me when my voice trailed off.

“Well, that settles it,” I said, feeling oddly relieved despite the fact I stood in a dark stairwell with a guy who claimed to be a vampire. “I’m crazy.”

“You’re not crazy. We all go through this, when we change.” He looked up nervously as a pair of feet shuffled across the snowy sidewalk above us. “But this really isn’t the place to discuss this. Why don’t you come up to my apartment and we can talk.”

“No—thanks though,” I said, unable to help my laughter. “It was really nice meeting you, Mr. Vampire, but I’ve got to go. I have to work tonight, and I just might be able to get a call in to my psychologist first. With any luck, he’ll give me a nice, fat prescription for some antipsychotics so I can get back to my normal life.”

I turned away, but Nathan caught my arm. Faster than I could think to scream, I was pinned between his hard body and the harder brick wall. His hand clamped firmly over my mouth, muffling my terrified cry.

“I didn’t want to have to do this,” he said through gritted teeth. Then he dipped his head, and his body went rigid against mine.

When he moved his head back up, my heart stopped. The chiseled, handsome planes of his face were twisted, the skin stretched tight over a sharp, bony snout. Long fangs glinted in the dim light. He looked the way John Doe had, just before he’d ripped my throat open like a birthday present.

Only his eyes held a glimmer of control. Until the day I die, I will remember Nathan’s eyes, so clear and gray and heartbreakingly honest behind that horrific mask.

“Now do you see?” he asked.

My heart pounding, I nodded. He pulled away and covered his face with his hands. When he looked up again, his normal features had returned into an expression of kindness and compassion. It disturbed me more than when he’d been a monster.

“Come on. Let’s go inside and I’ll tell you anything you want to know.”

Numb with cold and fear and hopelessness, I let him guide me up the steps to the sidewalk. “Anything?”

“Sure,” he promised, pulling a set of keys from his pocket.

“Okay.” I swallowed the lump in my throat. “Why me?”

Three

The Movement

N athan’s apartment was small, with too much furniture. The walls were lined with bracketed shelves, the kind you’d buy in a home-improvement store and put up on a weekend. Some were so laden with books that they bowed in the middle. Notebooks and legal pads, all scribbled on in barely legible handwriting, littered the coffee table. It was cluttered but not dirty.

“Excuse our mess,” he said with an apologetic smile. His gaze flitted to the hall. A Marilyn Manson song blasted at full volume behind one of the closed doors. “Turn it down, Ziggy!”

The music dropped a few decibels. Nathan and I stood awkwardly by the door for a moment. I suspected he was as uncomfortable as I was.

“Kids,” I said with a shrug, looking in the direction of what I assumed was Ziggy’s room.

“Let me take your coat.”

I watched Nathan’s face as he helped me out of the garment. He looked awfully young, in my opinion, to have a son Ziggy’s age. But then, for all I knew, Nathan could be hundreds of years old.

After he’d hung my coat on a hook by the door, he seemed to suddenly animate. “Have you fed?” He started for the kitchen and motioned for me to follow. “I’ve got some A pos.”

I lingered in the doorway and watched as he retrieved a plastic collection bag of blood from his refrigerator. Then he lifted a teakettle from the dish rack next to the sink and ripped the top of the bag with his teeth as though he were opening a bag of chips. Snapping on the burner of the gas stove, he emptied the blood into the teakettle and set it over the flame.

The process seemed so natural that I had to remind myself normal men didn’t keep blood in their refrigerators. Of course, most normal men didn’t own teakettles, either.

“You’re not going to drink that, are you?” Med school warnings of blood-borne pathogens flashed through my mind.

Though he didn’t look at me, I saw amusement on his face. “Yeah, you want some?”

“No!” My stomach constricted. “Do you know how dangerous that is?”

“Do you know how dangerous I am if I don’t drink it?” He leaned against the counter and wiped his hands on a kitchen towel. For the first time, I noticed how truly tall he was.

According to my driver’s license, I stood five foot eight, and though my hospital stay had stripped some pounds from my frame, I was no wilting flower of a woman. Still, Nathan looked like he could easily rip me into pieces with his bare hands if he got the inclination.

But his voice held a note of sadness. His eyes met mine briefly, but before I could understand the pained look in them, he turned away.

“I’m sorry. You haven’t had anyone explain all this to you. Blood-drinking is just one of the realities of being a vampire. You’ve got to do it sometime, and there’s no time like the present.” His voice was hoarse. “Besides, if you hold out too long, you’ll snap and do something…regrettable.”

“I’ll take my chances.” The kettle had begun to give off a warm, metallic smell. To my horror, my stomach actually rumbled. “So, am I going to live forever?”

“Why is that the first thing everyone asks?” he mused. “No, you probably won’t live forever.”

“Probably? That doesn’t sound reassuring.”

“Wasn’t meant to.” He tossed the towel over his shoulder. “We’re not susceptible to the ravages of time or disease, and we have a healing ability that increases with age. But the list of things that can kill us is a mile long. Sunlight, holy water, hell, even a bad-enough car accident can take us out.”

He poured some blood into a chipped ceramic mug and motioned toward the dinette table. “If you don’t want this, can I get you something else?”

“No, thanks.” I sat in the chair he pulled out for me. “Do you keep human food in here?”

“Yeah,” he said as he sat across from me. “I like it every now and then. I just can’t live off it. And Ziggy needs to eat.”

I frowned. Ziggy had clearly lured me to the shop in order to kill me. It didn’t make a lot of sense, considering he lived with a vampire himself.

“Um…does your son know you’re a vampire?”

“My son?” Nathan looked confused for a moment, then he laughed, a deep, rich sound that warmed me. “Ziggy’s not my son. But I can see where you’d get that impression. He’s a…he’s a friend.”

A friend? I was hip. I could read between the lines. It figured that the first decent guy I’d met in this city was gay. “He’s a little young for you, don’t you think?”

An embarrassed smile curved Nathan’s lips. “I’m not a homosexual, Carrie. Ziggy’s my blood donor. I watch out for him, that’s all.”

That was the first time he’d used my name instead of addressing me as Doctor or Miss Ames. In his thick accent—I was fairly certain he was Scottish—my generic, first-pick-from-the-baby-name-book moniker sounded exotic and almost sensual. I wondered if he could sense the attraction I felt, the heat coursing through my blood.

If he did, he had the courtesy not to comment on it. I was grateful for that. “So why did he try to kill me? I mean, if you’re a vampire, and he knows it and gives you his blood and everything, what’s his beef with me?”

Nathan sipped from his mug. “It’s complicated.”

I glanced at the clock on the wall. “I’ve got a few hours.”

He seemed to consider his response for a moment. Setting his cup aside, he braced his elbows on the table and covered his face with his hands. “Listen, you seem like a real nice girl, but there’s something I have to ask you, and it’s a little personal.”

Despite the ominous tone of the question, I nodded. At this point, I wanted answers. I’d fill out a complete medical history if he asked. “Shoot.”

“I followed your story in the papers very closely and I have some concerns. Namely, why you were in the morgue that night.” When his eyes met mine, I saw the real question there.

“You think I did this on purpose?”

He shrugged, all compassion and friendliness gone from his face. “You tell me.”

I had spent the past month in a haze of depression, deprived of normal life by a mysterious illness I couldn’t shake. My bones ached twenty-four hours a day. My head throbbed at the faintest glimmer of light. If I was indeed a vampire, I certainly wasn’t living out the posh existence of a Count Dracula or a Lestat de Lioncourt. I was in a living hell, certainly not by choice.

“Please,” he said quietly. “I need to know.”

I could have slapped him. “No! What kind of freak do you think I am?”

He shrugged. “There are some people out there, sick people, who want to escape their lives. Maybe they’ve had some sort of trauma, an illness, the loss of a loved one.” He looked me dead in the eyes. “The loss of your parents.”

“How do you know about my parents?” I asked through tightly clenched teeth. I hadn’t spoken about them since the car accident that had killed them. They’d been on their way to visit me at college. Guilt had kept me from opening up about them. No one, save my distant, remaining relatives in Oregon—many of whom I’d met for the first time at the funeral—knew anything about them or the circumstances of their death.

“I have connections,” he said, as if we were discussing how he’d obtained courtside Lakers’ tickets instead of how he’d invaded my privacy. He actually had the nerve to reach across the table and take my hand. “I know what it’s like to lose someone. Believe me. I can see why you’d want—”

“I didn’t want this!”

I hadn’t meant to scream, but it felt good. I wanted to do it again. The ugliness and horror of the past month seemed to swell inside me, pushing me beyond the limits of my self-control.

“Carrie, please—” he tried again, but I ignored him.

My knees bumped the table as I stood, and Nathan’s mug toppled over, splashing warm blood across the tabletop. The sight held a sick fascination for me, and in a flash I saw a clear image of myself leaning over and licking it up. I shook my head to destroy the vision. “I didn’t want this!”

Jerking the collar of my sweatshirt aside, I jabbed a finger at the barely healed scar on my neck. “Do you think someone would ask for this? Do you think I went down to that morgue and said ‘Hey, John Doe, why don’t you rip my fucking neck open? Why don’t you turn my life to absolute shit?’”

The volume of the music from Ziggy’s room drastically lowered. Good. Let him hear.

“Do you think I wanted to sit here and watch some guy I’ve never met fucking drink blood? I just want my life back!”

No, what I wanted was to scream until my throat was raw. I wanted to stamp my feet and throw things. I wanted to be empty of these feelings of despair and frustration.

Instead, I cried. My legs buckled and I slid to the floor. When Nathan knelt beside me and put his arms out to comfort me, I pushed him away. When he tried again, I didn’t fight him.

I couldn’t control my sobs as I cried into his firm chest. His wool sweater pricked my cheek. He smelled good, distinctly male and slightly soapy, as if he’d just gotten out of the shower. So what if he was a complete stranger? I’d never been able to cry and let someone comfort me like this before.

“I know you didn’t,” he said softly.

“Do you?” I demanded, looking up at him. “Because you were sure acting like the vampire police or something.”

He gently took my face in his hands to force my gaze to his. “I know because the same thing happened to me. At the hands of your John Doe.”

His words seemed to magically patch the dam that had broken within me. My chest no longer heaved with sobs, and my tears miraculously dried.

Nathan helped me to my feet. I took advantage of the moment, resting against him as long as I could without seeming weird. I pressed my hand just below his rib cage in the guise of steadying myself and felt the solid ridges of a perfect stomach beneath the wool.

He picked up my chair—a casualty of my sudden rage—and helped me sit. Then he got me a glass of water and began cleaning up the spilled blood.

The silence between us was stifling, but my questions overwhelmed me. I started with the obvious. “How did it happen?”

Nathan stood at the sink, rinsing the blood from the kitchen towel. “He took some of your blood, you took some of his. Then you died. That’s the way it happens.”

“No,” I began. I’d meant to ask how he’d been made a vampire, if John Doe had attacked him without provocation, as he had me. Instead, I focused on his statement. “I didn’t drink his blood. I don’t think he drank mine.”

“Did his blood get in your mouth? In your wounds?” He leaned against the counter. “All it takes is one drop. It’s like a virus, or a cancer. It can lie dormant for decades, waiting for the heart to stop beating. Then it corrupts your cells.”

“Yeah, but I didn’t die. They got me to surgery to stop the bleeding—” But that wasn’t exactly true. “Oh, God. I went into v-tac, in the recovery room. I flatlined.”

“That’s when it happened.” He pointed to the living room. “Let’s go in here. We’ll be more comfortable.”

I sat on the couch while he went to the bookshelves lining the wall. He pulled a volume down and handed it to me. “This should answer some questions.”

The book, bound in burgundy-colored leather, had gilt-edged pages and seemed incredibly aged. The cover was bare, save for small gold lettering stamped in the lower right-hand corner. “The Sanguinarius,” I murmured, running my fingertips across the letters. I recognized the root word, Latin for blood. I opened it, but the usual publishing information wasn’t printed. The title page lent the only clue to the age of the book.

The Sanguinarius, it read in large print. Beneath that, in smaller type, A Practical Guide to the Habits of Vampyres. The font was uneven, as though the pages had been printed on an ancient press. The book must have been at least two hundred years old.

I flipped a few pages. “A vampire handbook?”

“Not exactly. More like a training manual for vampire hunters.”

No sooner than he’d finished his sentence, I came across a graphic woodcut of a man sinking a pitchfork into the round stomach of a raging she-demon.

“Oh.” I slammed the book shut.

“Roughly translated, the title means ‘The Ones Who Thirst for Blood.’” He smiled. “This is complicated. I’ll start from the beginning.”

I nodded in agreement, though it didn’t seem I had a choice. He sat beside me, a little closer than I’d expected. Not that I was complaining.

“For more than two hundred years, there has existed a group of vampires dedicated to the extinction of their own kind for the preservation of humanity. In the past they were known as the Order of the Blood Brethren. Today, they are known as the Voluntary Vampire Extinction Movement.

“There were fourteen clauses under the Order. But the Movement enforces only three. No vampire shall feed from any unwilling human. No vampire shall create another vampire. And no vampire shall harm or kill a human.”

“Those don’t sound like such bad rules,” I observed.

“Vampires today have it easy compared to the old days.” He sounded nostalgic. “The Movement headquarters are in Spain in some refurbished Inquisition dungeons, but Movement members are spread all over the world. I’m the only member on this side of the state, but there are assassins in Detroit and Chicago. The Movement has a fleet of private jets, in case a member needs to travel abroad. Otherwise, it would be pretty hard to get around.”

“So, I take it they’re not a nonprofit organization if they can afford jets.”

That brought a small smile to Nathan’s face. “Most of the Movement funding comes from generous benefactors, very old vampires who’ve had centuries to amass their fortunes. The Movement has been around a long time, and those donations add up. Plus, I believe they dabble in real estate on the side.”

“I’ve always said my landlord was a monster, but I never thought it might be true.” I tried to hand back the book. “Okay, no eating people, making other vampires, or murder. I’ve been able to follow those rules great up till now, and I don’t foresee any problems in the near future.”

“Good,” he said, pushing The Sanguinarius toward me again. “Because if you do, the penalty is steep.”

“How steep?” I tried to sound unconcerned.

“Death. Cyrus, the vampire who sired you—”

I snorted. “Cyrus? Is that his real name?”

Nathan looked mildly annoyed at the interruption. “Cyrus has been on the run from the Movement in America for more than thirty years, longer in other parts of the world. The injuries that brought him to your emergency room were incurred during an attempted execution.”

I sobered as I remembered John Doe’s horrific injuries, and my mouth felt dry. “Which of the rules did he break?”

“All of them. Long before he attacked you. We just haven’t been able to finish him off.”

“No one deserves that.” I tried to force the image of John Doe’s maimed body from my mind. “If you’d seen him, what they did to him…”

“I did see him,” Nathan said matter-of-factly. “I was the one sent to execute him.”

“You?” The wounds in John Doe’s chest. The missing eye. The splintered, destroyed bones of his face. The man sitting beside me had done it all. “How?”

“I started with a stake to the heart, and when that didn’t work, I thought I’d chop him into little pieces and bury him in consecrated earth, but he got in some good hits. I’m lucky to be sitting here right now. Someone must have seen us fighting, because the police showed up. The rest—”

“Is history,” I whispered.

Nathan shifted uncomfortably beside me. “Not really. He’s still out there. That’s why Ziggy’s been on the prowl for vampires. We know Cyrus is in town, and he’s the only outlaw vampire in the area. I keep an eye out for any new fledglings that pop up. I find them, kill them and report back to the Movement.” He stretched his legs to get comfortable. “They give me six hundred dollars a head. Figuratively, of course. I don’t have to bring them actual heads.”

I had to remind myself he was talking about ending people’s lives, despite the casual way he mentioned it. “You kill them? Why?”

He looked at me as if I had antennae growing out of my head. “Because they’re vampires.”

“So are you!”

“Yes, but I’m a good vampire,” he explained patiently. “Good vampires get to live, bad vampires get a one-way ticket to wherever it is we go when we die. It’s not rocket science.”

I shot to my feet. “Did you ever think maybe some of them might be good vampires? I mean, do you even check first or do you just go all kill-happy on them?”

“I give them a chance to change my mind but they all turn out the same way. It’s just not possible for them to be good vampires,” he insisted.

“And why not?”

“Because they weren’t made by good vampires.” Releasing a huge sigh, Nathan picked up The Sanguinarius. “Every fledgling I’ve encountered so far has gone the way of their sire. The blood tie is incredibly strong, which makes it nearly impossible for a new vampire to fight the will of the blood in his veins, the will of his sire. The book will explain it a lot better than I can.”

“Well, I’m here now, so why don’t you give it a shot?” I arched a threatening brow and put my hands on my hips to show I wasn’t moving until he answered my question.

“You’re a very aggravating person, you know that?” He set the book on the table. “The Movement doesn’t want any new vampires made. We’re trying to whittle our species down to nothing. Hence the extinction part of the Voluntary Vampire Extinction Movement. Some vampires aren’t so into the idea. So they start creating new vampires.

“When a vampire exchanges blood with a human to create another vampire, their blood stays in the new vampire’s veins. Forever. It builds something called a blood tie. For the sire, it’s a way of controlling their fledgling, like an invisible leash. The tie weakens as time goes by, but the fledgling and sire will still feel each other’s emotions, physical pain and hunger. The fledgling will always be ruled by the sire’s blood, and most of them don’t want to change. It lasts after death. Even if the sire dies, he can still wreak havoc on the world through his fledglings. The fledgling, forever influenced by his or her sire’s blood and whatever bent morals were handed down to them, could go out and keep making new vampires. Pretty soon, it’s goodbye human race. The way the Movement sees it, the only way to keep somebody like Cyrus from making his own vampire army and taking over the world is to kill his progeny. It’s not fair, but that’s the way it is.”

I swallowed. “You sound like you’re pretty hard-core about the Movement.”

“I have to be. When I was turned, I swore my allegiance to them in order to keep my life.” He stood and advanced on me, though for what purpose I couldn’t tell.

“It sounds like these Movement guys hold a lot of sway. How do you know they’ve really got your best interests at heart?” I was tempted to take a step back, but I held my ground. I was not going to let him intimidate me. Not after all I’d been through. If he wanted to kill me, he’d have to…well, he’d have to go through the new me first.

He didn’t answer my question, but he didn’t try to grab me or shove a stake through my heart, either. He pushed my hair aside and gently touched the scar Cyrus had left. “He really got you.”

A chill raced up my spine at his touch. I leaned into his hand. I couldn’t help myself.

Something changed in his eyes, as if an iron gate were slamming shut. He dropped his arm and turned away. “You’re going to have to make a choice, too. Whether you want to pledge your life to the Movement, or lose it.”

I snorted. “Where do I sign in blood?”

“This isn’t a joke.” He turned to face me, and I saw from his irritated countenance that it certainly was not. “I can’t guarantee the Movement will even accept you, but it’s your only shot at surviving. Your sire’s death sentence extends to you.”

My heart pounded and my legs tensed in anticipation of running. I took a step back. “You’d really kill me, wouldn’t you?”

“Yes.” He looked away, then sank onto the couch. “It’s nothing personal. But I don’t know you well enough to tell whether you’re going to play loyal fledgling to Cyrus or not. You seem like a nice girl, but I’m not willing to take that chance.”

“Nothing personal.” I laughed bitterly in disbelief. “You know, it is personal. When I get lured into a trap and almost get decapitated, it’s personal. When some guy I just met tells me he’s going to kill me, it’s personal. Because it’s my life. You’re out of your mind if you think I’m going down without a fight.”

The corner of his mouth twitched and I thought he was going to laugh. I would have punched him in the face if he did.

Good thing he didn’t. “I can respect that. But it doesn’t change my position. You need to make a decision. Ask the Movement for mercy and hope they grant it to you. You won’t get it from me.”

“Why not just kill me now?” I asked, hoping he wouldn’t take this as an invitation.

He merely shrugged and said, “Because without a kill order, I don’t get paid.”

“A kill order?” How much more like a bad horror movie could this possibly get?

“If you decide not to ask the Movement for membership, I’ll report you. You’ll be processed in their system and a kill order will be issued a few days later.” He shrugged again, as if he couldn’t care less about the conversation. “I suppose you could make a run for it, but until I have that order in my hand, I’m not going to do anything to you. I don’t work for free.”

I was about to argue that he could just kill me, then report me. Luckily, the common sense which seemed to have deserted me in the past few weeks found its way back, and I held my tongue. “How very Han Solo of you.”

He didn’t smile or laugh. In fact, he looked even more grave than before. “It’s up to you. Petition for membership or die. I can get them on the phone right now.”

“Fine.” I ground my teeth over the words. “Can I make an informed decision at least?”

He frowned and cocked his head, studying me from the corner of his eye, as if this were a trick. “What do you propose?”

I chose my words carefully. “Give me a chance to read The Sanguinarius and have some time to let all this sink in. I didn’t believe in vampires or monsters before tonight, and I’m in what we in the medical field call ‘a state of shock.’ It’s only fair to know what I’m getting into. Besides, I’m a smart girl. I’m not going to join up with some organization just because you claim they’re the good guys.”

“They are the good guys.” There was no amusement in his tone, just absolute conviction in the truth of his words.

I rolled my eyes. “Yeah, well that’s what the Nazis said about themselves.”

He slowly rose to his feet. Power, dark and barely leashed, emanated from him. And that, combined with his physical presence, made him more terrifying than John Doe had been as he’d sunk his claws into me.

Of course, John Doe hadn’t been this hot. Somehow, my physical attraction to Nathan made him seem more dangerous.

But he didn’t attack me. He just invaded my personal space and shattered my comfort zone. He leaned down so our noses practically touched. “How do I know you’re not stalling so you can get back to Cyrus and gain his protection?”

“Because until you mentioned it, the thought hadn’t crossed my mind.” I don’t know if he expected me to cower or cry or melt into his arms, but I could tell by the pronounced blink of his eyes that I’d surprised him. “Give me a couple of weeks. You can even check in on me. I’ll give you an answer at the end.”

“Or you’ll run screaming.” He tried again to frighten me, but I was confident he wouldn’t kill me tonight. Something in the way he raked his eyes over my body, like he did now, raw and hungry, told me he had something of a soft spot for women. Or a hard spot, depending on how you looked at it.

A deliberately slow smile played across my lips. “Do I look like the kind of girl who runs away from trouble?”

He folded his arms across his chest. “You ran away from Ziggy.”

Touché. “Yeah, but Ziggy had an axe. Are you going to kill me with your bare hands?”

He grinned. “I’m good with my hands.”

Holy hormones, Batman.

The door to Ziggy’s room burst open, and Nathan instantly stepped away. The teen stalked angrily into the kitchen, middle finger raised toward Nathan as he passed.

“I know, I know, I’ve got an early class, I should get my rest,” the boy called. “Psych 101, I so need to be awake for that. I’m just making a sandwich before bed.”

“Bed?” I asked stupidly, checking my watch. Ten after ten. “I have to go.”

Nathan followed me to the door. “Have you thought of what you’ll do should Cyrus come looking for you?”

I hadn’t. “I’ll tell him to go away, that I gave at the office,” I said, my uneasiness at the prospect betrayed by my forced laugh.

I couldn’t stand the thought that I shared a plasma-level connection with the monster who’d attacked me. It was bad enough he’d invaded my nightmares. His blood had become part of me, too.

Nathan studied my face for a moment, and I stared back, unable to discern a single emotion. He’d probably practiced hiding his feelings for so long that even he couldn’t find them. He looked away and handed me my coat. “If you need anything, you have my number. And this,” he said. He held out The Sanguinarius.

I took the book in one hand and awkwardly tried to slip into my coat with the other. He moved behind me to help, and it took all my self-control to keep from leaning against him. What could I say? It had been a long time since I’d engaged in threatening, pseudo-sexual banter with anyone.

“Thanks,” I said quietly, putting my hand on the doorknob.

“One more thing,” Nathan said. “If you need blood, please come to me. I always have some to spare. Just don’t go outside afterward. In the daytime, I mean. In fact, you should probably start avoiding it entirely. I’m sure after a while, even if you hold out from feeding, the change will complete itself on its own. I’m always here, if you need…help.”

“Thanks, but I don’t have any desire to drink blood.”

“You’ll feel it soon,” Nathan warned as I descended the stairs.

“Feel what?” I was more concerned by the prospect of the snow on the ground outside than his ominous tone.

“The hunger. You’ll feel the hunger.”

Four

When Carrie Met Dahlia

I didn’t give Nathan’s warning much thought until the night the hunger came over me.

I’d spent the week doing my best to live life as though nothing had changed. Faced with what might be the last fourteen days of life before submitting myself to the Movement’s judgment, I was going to savor them.

Of course, I read The Sanguinarius. It was as dry and Victorian as Lord of the Rings. I reminded myself that the course of my existence was dependent upon finishing this particular book.

Nathan called to check in on me every night. I cursed myself for having a listed number. Sometimes his call came after I’d gone to work, and soon I found myself actually looking forward to the end of my shift so I could hear his voice on my answering machine. But by the end of the week, my spare thoughts—no, my every thought—had turned to blood.

To get through my night shifts at the hospital, I snacked constantly. Coffee, pizza, popcorn, anything with a substantial aroma that covered the smell of blood. A few nurses made envious remarks about my ability to eat so much and never gain weight. I barely heard them. The obnoxious thumping of their pulses was all I could hear.

Blood became an all-consuming distraction. I took numerous, drastic measures to ensure the safety of everyone around me. On my frequent breaks, I locked myself in the staff bathroom and used a razor blade to make small, shallow cuts on the inside of my arm. Then I licked away the blood that welled up. It did little to slake my thirst, but the resultant marks piqued the interest of the psychiatry resident. I spent a great deal of time avoiding him and his softly spoken invitations to talk about my “recovery.”

Despite my hunger, I couldn’t stomach the thought of drinking human blood. Once or twice, in desperation, I’d snuck a vial drawn from a patient and brought it home with me. But the threat of tiny viruses just waiting to take up residence in my body made my skin crawl. I poured the blood down the sink and destroyed the vials.

My weight dropped dramatically. I lost ten pounds in three days. I was tired and sick. Everywhere I went, the sound of human hearts pumping blood through fat, blue veins absolutely maddened me.

The Sanguinarius recommended feeding captive vampires raw steak. Whoever wrote it had obviously never seen a 20/20 expose about slaughterhouse contamination and E. coli.

My nights off were almost worse than the nights I had to work. At least at the hospital I had to force myself to concentrate on something other than the hunger. I was struggling through a particularly bad night at home when I finally gave up and went back to Wealthy Avenue. Tears streamed down my face as I shook uncontrollably behind the wheel, like a drug addict in desperate need of a fix.

Nathan hadn’t called me that night, and it hadn’t occurred to me to call him before I showed up at his doorstep. I needed blood. I needed it badly. My hands trembled as I rang the bell to his apartment.

There was no answer. The window of the shop was dark, and no one responded to my frantic knocking.

Young men and women hurried up and down the sidewalk. The pumping of their blood drowned out the words of their conversation. Most of them looked young enough to have a curfew, but some could have been college students.

College students from other states, perhaps, with few acquaintances in their new surroundings. Like me, if they went missing, no one would look for them for days, possibly even weeks….

I was horrified at the thought, but I needed blood. Since I wasn’t up to hijacking a bloodmobile, I would have to find a donor.

I didn’t go back to my car. I needed to walk in the fresh air and open space.

I don’t know how long I searched. I was selective. One bar looked too dank and blue-collar for my tastes. It would be crowded with middle-aged men in flannel shirts watching sports on television. I wanted someone young. Someone beautiful.

I spotted her on the street.

She crossed against the light. Her pale, blond hair flew behind her like a banner in the wind. The way she clutched her coat to her chest accentuated her skinniness.

I had never felt this sort of attraction toward anyone before, let alone a woman. It was not an attraction in a sexual sense. It was an animal instinct, as pure and natural as breathing. I wanted her blood.

The girl in the black coat pushed through a small cluster of young men and women loitering on the sidewalk. As I approached, I read the name of the building she ducked into.

The covered windows of Club Cite were framed by blue neon tubes. The brick building had been painted black, but the paint job had not been kept up, revealing flecks of the original red brick. The place was dirty and run-down.

Once inside, I followed her down the stairs. The walls around us vibrated with a muffled bass line. She pulled open the door at the bottom and the entire corridor flooded with noise. The club was packed with young people, all dressed in black. Some were Dickensian, with top hats and walking sticks. More were swathed in torn fishnets patched with electrical tape. They all looked at me as though my blue jeans and freckled face disgusted them.

I couldn’t have cared less. I’d lost sight of my prey. Finding her tragic figure in this writhing mass of self-pity would be impossible.

“She went into the bathroom,” a voice said close to my ear. “But I wouldn’t go after her if I were you. She doesn’t know what you are.”

My heart could have stopped beating. My chest tightened, and the excitement of the chase vanished. I was caught.

I turned slowly, expecting to face a uniformed officer. Instead, I found myself looking down at the smirking face of a very confident young woman. She wasn’t slender by any means, and she swayed to the music with an innate grace that erased any notion she found her body bulky or unwieldy. The standard Robert Smith makeup of heavy eyeliner and deep red lipstick decorated her pale face, and a thick riot of red curls hung to her shoulders.

“You’re surprised?” she asked, putting her hands on her ample hips. “You were being so obvious.”

“Obvious?” My mouth felt dry.

She looked me over with her head cocked to one side. Her curls bobbed as she laughed. “Yeah, obvious. But don’t worry, most of the kids here wouldn’t know a real vampire if one came up and bit them on the ass. They’re here because their parents just don’t understand.”

The pulsating music, combined with the sound of beating hearts all around me, made me feel as if a speed metal drummers’ convention was getting into full swing in my frontal lobe. I squinted against the swirling light and movement of the room. “How did you know what I am?”

“You must be new to this whole vampire thing, huh?” she asked. She smiled a perfectly mischievous smile, as if she’d practiced it in a mirror for years. “That girl over there, she’ll scream like a banshee before you get two drops out of her, and then where will you be? In a whole heap of trouble, that’s where.”

Before I could protest, she grabbed my arm. Under her hand, my skin felt warm and alive, as though I’d absorbed her energy. Over the din of a hundred human pulses I could hear hers loudest of all, but I didn’t feel compelled to feed from her. She was warm and alive, but she didn’t seem wholly human.

Danger was here. Tension seethed beneath her sweet words. She moved like a dancer despite her round shape, her every movement charged with urgency.

The hunger gnawed at me, so I followed her.

As we walked, she told me her name was Dahlia. She led me from the club and down a few alleys, through an abandoned rail yard adrift with snow.

“There.” She pointed to a squat stone building that had been gutted by fire some time ago. A cement barrier separated the area from the expressway. I heard the cars racing past.

“The cops never come here,” she explained. “And if they did, they wouldn’t come back.”

The interior was large and open, as though the space had once been a warehouse or factory. In the very center, the ceiling had caved in. Someone had been industrious enough to cover it with plastic tarps. It was dark and cold. Ominous shapes huddled in every corner.

I heard heartbeats, coughing and quiet moans. The smell of fear in the room was as thick as the unmistakable odor of hopelessness.

“What is this place?” I whispered.

Dahlia shrugged off her coat and spread it on the ground. “A donor house.”

I must have appeared not to understand her, because she rolled her eyes and sighed as though I were incurably stupid.

“A place for vampires to go and get a quick bite,” she said. “A quick bite, get it?”

I nodded dumbly. “I get it…but who are these people?”

“The donors?” She plopped down cross-legged. “Who knows? Maybe they’re homeless and just need some shelter. Maybe they’re freaks that get off on the thrill of it. Or maybe they’re like me.”

“Like you?” I asked.

A skinny girl with a dirt-smudged face and greasy brown hair pushed past me. One of her bony shoulders slipped from her threadbare jacket as she shoved me aside.

“I need the money,” Dahlia said as she motioned for me to sit down. “The point is, these people are desperate enough to give you what you want. Those Goth freaks at the club don’t know shit. You’re better off trolling under bridges for homeless people than going back to that hole.”

I wanted to leave. The place reeked of sweat and smoke and despair. But I needed blood, so I knelt beside her on the crumbling cement. My heart beat faster and I shuddered in anticipation of sinking my teeth into supple pale flesh.

“Fifty dollars, cash.” She produced a wooden stake from the pocket of her coat. “And you stop when I say, understood?”

The stake quenched the animal fury building inside me. I didn’t know specifically what would happen if that thing touched me, but my imagination was fueled by the memory of the gaping wounds in Cyrus’s chest.

My numb fingers fumbled for my purse, and as I tugged on the zipper, the contents spilled onto the floor with a clatter. A compact fell open as it dropped to the ground. Through a miniature mushroom cloud of powder dust, I saw my eyes reflected in the mirror, wide and scared and excited. I thought vampires didn’t have reflections. It struck me as hilarious that I hadn’t thought of that before. I handed Dahlia the money with shaking hands.

She counted it, smirked in satisfaction and tucked the bills into her bra. “Okay, then.” She placed the point of the stake above my heart, swept her hair back and bared her throat.

I traced the line of one blue vein down her neck to her collarbone with my finger. My breath came in gasps. I thought my heart would explode the way it beat so wildly in my chest.

I felt the point of the stake as I leaned down to fasten my aching mouth to her skin. Her neck was warm and soft. I bit down. The flesh yielded crisply like the skin of a ripe peach, and her blood gushed into my mouth so fast I nearly choked.

The reality of my situation suddenly overwhelmed me. A moment ago I had not been a vampire. At least, not as far as I was concerned. Now, as I greedily gulped down the blood of this strange girl, I was truly initiated. She moaned, and the sound vibrated through me like an electrical current. The implications of what I’d done made me nauseous. The possibility that I might not really be a vampire at all flashed through my mind. Maybe I made the whole thing up. Tearing my mouth from her neck, I struggled not to vomit.

“Hey! What’s wrong?” Dahlia shouted.

I didn’t answer her. From the shadows, someone ordered us to keep quiet. I couldn’t control my sobbing. I frantically grabbed the spilled contents of my purse and tried to stuff them back inside with shaking hands.

“Where are you going?” Dahlia asked, one hand on her neck. I expected to see blood flowing from the wound, but when she moved her fingers there was nothing but a faint bruise.

I wiped my nose on the back of my hand and winced in pain. My whole face was sore.

My compact lay innocently on the ground. I picked it up and checked my reflection.

My face, usually pretty by most people’s standards, was twisted into a vision of horror. Cruel eyes peered out under a flattened brow. My cheekbones sloped down, forming a snout with my bizarrely elongated upper jaw. I pulled back my lips. My teeth were unevenly spaced in their roomy new setting, my canines lengthened into sharp points.

I’d seen Nathan transform this way, and my nightmares were filled with visions of John Doe’s monstrous face, but I’d never considered such a thing could happen to me. I screamed and scrambled to my feet.

I fled from the donor house, gulping the fresh air as if it were water and I a lost traveler in the desert. Dahlia followed me. She leaned against the scorched cinder blocks and watched me check and recheck my face in the mirror. The demon was gone. A frightened woman stared back. My breath escaped in great white puffs of steam.

“Poor baby.” She put on her long black coat and hugged it tightly around her waist. She wore the same coat, I realized, and used the same gesture as the girl I’d followed into the club. But I hadn’t followed Dahlia…

She shook her head, laughing. “You guys never learn. You think you’re so smart. ‘Oh, we’re at the top of the food chain.’”

She pulled out a pocketknife and idly ran it up and down her neck. “The fact is, there’s power out there your kind can’t understand.”

I stared at her in fascination. “What are you talking about?”

She smiled. “Poor baby. Daddy didn’t bother to tell you anything, did he? Just ran right out after he got what he wanted.” Her mouth formed a momentary picture of disgust. “That’s so like him.”

With a flick of her wrist, she punctured her taut skin with the knife. A drop of blood welled and shivered on the surface of the wound before it broke and rolled down her neck.

My tongue grew thick. My body ached for more blood, though the thought repulsed me. I forced myself to look away. “Who are you talking about?”

I wanted to watch her face when she answered, but the scent of her blood was too tempting. I feared what would happen if I looked again, so I fixed my gaze on the streetlights above the highway.

“Cyrus, you silly goose. Don’t you know your own sire?”

I’d known something wasn’t right when we left the club. Maybe I’d known from the moment I saw the phantom girl on the street. But instead of following my intuition, I’d followed Dahlia. Right into a trap.

“I can’t believe how stupid some of you can be,” she shouted, suddenly agitated. “Your stories are splashed all over the papers, and yet you have no clue that someone might recognize you. I don’t even know why he let you have his blood.” She let out a sigh and appeared to calm herself. “Now you’ve made me lose my temper, and that really pisses me off.”

I watched her as she slapped her forehead with the palm of her hand and muttered to herself, pacing back and forth. She stopped and faced me. Her expression was blank.

“Your little bookstore friend took care of the last one for me. But sometimes, if you want to do something right, you have to do it yourself.” She pointed at me with the knife.

Suddenly, I was so weak I couldn’t stand. I fell to my knees, wincing as I hit the dirt.

“Good girl.” She threw the knife at me. It pierced the frozen ground inches from my knee. She took another deep breath, laughing. “I just don’t know what’s wrong with me tonight. Do you ever have days like that, where you just feel—”

“Crazy?” I eyed the blade. It was so close. I should have been able to grab it and get to my feet before Dahlia could reach me, but my body was limp and heavy. “What do you want?”

“What do I want, what do I want?” she singsonged, scooping up the knife before I could stop her. “You sound just like the last one I took care of. You guys always try to bargain.”

She held the point of the knife to my throat. “I want to kill you.”

“Why?” It was barely a whisper. I imagined the tip of the knife puncturing my skin the way my fangs had split hers.

She leaned closer, twisting the blade against my neck but never breaking my skin. “Because you took what’s mine.”

“What? What did I take?” I wanted to swallow, but I was afraid it would kill me. “I don’t even know you.”

“You’re right. You don’t know me, bitch.” She lifted the knife and, without hesitation, plunged it into my stomach.

I gasped from the pain. I’d seen numerous stab wounds in the E.R. Never in my wildest dreams had I imagined they felt like this. The burning and tearing, coupled with the invasion of an object all my muscles tensed to reject. I couldn’t think. Couldn’t breathe.

Dahlia pulled the blade out of me and wiped it clean on the front of my shirt. “I don’t know why he keeps doing this. He knows you all die.”

“You’re not making any sense,” I wheezed, clutching my abdomen.

It was the wrong thing to say.

“I’m not making any sense?” She brought the weapon down again, piercing my side. “No! He’s not making any sense! He says he loves me. He promises to give me power. But it’s not time, Dahlia! It’s not time! Then he wastes his blood on a piece of trash like you! Look at you. You can’t even stand up.”

She kicked me. It was a dangerous thing for someone to do to a wounded vampire, and this knowledge was apparently as much of a surprise to her as it was to me.

Leaping to my feet, I lunged for her, fueled purely by agony and instinct. I wrestled the knife from her hand and brought it to her throat.

“I didn’t take anything from you,” I whispered into her ear. “He didn’t mean to make me. I was an accident. I’ve got no interest in you, your vampire boyfriend or any of this fucking vampire crap.”

I threw her to the ground. She peered up at me through her disheveled hair. Her eyes were hard and furious.

“Yeah, you were an accident all right!” she screamed. “But it doesn’t matter! You’ll be dead by morning!”

My anger deserted me, and the weakness returned. Dahlia’s voice was too loud, too shrill. Blood flowed freely from my wounds. I knew I needed to stop the bleeding, but I could think of nothing but getting away from Dahlia.

I staggered through the rail yard. Every step I took felt as though I were descending into a dark, warm pit. My pulse thrummed in my ears. It was slowing.

The impact of my footfalls on the uneven ground jarred my ankles and sent shock waves of pain up my legs. When I reached pavement, my body seemed to know where to go on its own. I moved in slow motion, but I must have been running because I reached Nathan’s apartment in a matter of minutes.

I stood stupidly on the sidewalk, unsure what to do as I pressed my hands feebly against my torn flesh. I knew my car was parked nearby, but I didn’t have my keys. I looked helplessly up and down the street, shivering. I yearned to be at home in my bed. I settled for Nathan’s doorstep. At least there I would be shielded from some of the biting wind. Dahlia might have followed me, but the more pressing desire for warmth and sleep outweighed my fear. If she did come to kill me, my exhausted brain reasoned, I would finally be able to rest in peace.

I don’t know how long I lay there before the snow began to fall. Big, fluffy flakes, straight out of a Christmas movie, floated to the ground. I watched a few land in my palm, where my lack of body heat allowed them to gather without melting. I started counting them, but when the storm picked up I couldn’t count fast enough. I contented myself by watching the swirling patterns of snow and wind on the sidewalk. My eyelids grew heavy. Unable to fight sleep and not sure why I’d tried in the first place, I closed my eyes.

A familiar voice woke me. It was Nathan. It took a moment before I realized he had hold of my shoulders. He shook me frantically. He shouted at me and clapped his hands in front of my face, but I was too exhausted to respond.

My head lolled to the side. A brown paper bag lay forgotten on the sidewalk. The contents rolled across the snowy concrete.

“Your shaving cream…it’s getting away,” I mumbled, trying to follow the canister with my eyes.

“Don’t worry about that.” He turned my face to his. “What happened?”

“I don’t know,” I said as I tried again to give up and sleep.

Nathan shook me the moment my eyes slid closed.

“What?” I whined, and tried to push his hands away.

He cursed and gripped me tighter. “Wake up!” he yelled. When I didn’t, he slapped my cheek.

My eyes flew open and I sputtered in shock. “What? Just let me go back to sleep!”

“I can’t! You’ve lost a lot of blood. If you go to sleep, you’ll die.”

Then I felt the pain, a twisting, pinching feeling in my gut. As if I’d eaten broken glass. I clutched his arm, writhing in misery. He shrugged off his coat and quickly wrapped it around me. “I’ve got to get you inside,” he murmured. He scooped me into his arms and carried me through the door, up the stairs to his apartment.

Five

Decisions, Decisions

I woke to the gentle sound of someone humming Pink Floyd’s “Brain Damage.” My eyes snapped open in alarm.

Judging from the clutter around me, I was in Nathan’s apartment. I couldn’t remember how I got there. My stomach growled, and my memory slowly returned. I’d been hungry. I’d gone in search of blood. Then I’d met Dahlia.

Being stabbed, now that’s something I definitely remembered. I lifted the blanket that covered me. My wounds were carefully bandaged. Dried blood stained the gauze wrappings, but I resisted the urge to poke at them. It didn’t take much to upset a fresh wound, and I didn’t want to start bleeding again.

I reached up and gingerly felt my face. Completely monster-free. Aching all over, I sat up. My torn sweatshirt had been carefully folded on the arm of the couch. I pulled it over my head quickly, trying not to dwell on the fact that Nathan had seen me in my ratty, laundry-day bra.

“Feeling better?” he asked as he entered the living room.

I could smell the blood in the mug he carried. My throat was a desert and my stomach was trying to digest itself, but I turned my face away.

“Drink,” he said, holding out the cup to me. He must have sensed the reason for my reluctance. “Don’t worry about it. I’ve seen a few vampires in my time.”

“Not like me.”

“Exactly like you.” He knelt in front of me, and I hid my face. My bones shifted under the mask of my fingers as he pressed the cup against the backs of my hands. “You need to drink this.”

I heard the resolve in his voice and knew I wasn’t going to win.

“Don’t look at me,” I whispered.

“Okay.” He moved to the farthest corner of the room and turned his back.

The blood was warm, as Dahlia’s had been, but thicker, as though it had already begun to clot. It coated my tongue and left a faint taste of copper in my mouth. It was like drinking penny-flavored Jell-O that hadn’t set. This repulsed me, but instead of gagging, I gulped half of it down. I felt gluttonous. If I were drinking straight from someone’s neck I probably wouldn’t have thought of manners, but it was much different sitting in Nathan’s living room, drinking from a mug like a civilized vampire.

I sipped the blood self-consciously and studied him. It was my experience that people weren’t nice to strangers. In med school it’s every student for his- or herself. In fact, most of us went out of our way to intimidate the “competition.” The eat-or-be-eaten attitude had become so ingrained in my psyche, that I’d come to expect such behavior from everyone. But Nathan had been nothing but helpful from the start, which was surprising considering he was a week away from killing me if I didn’t join his vampire cult.

It didn’t seem right that a man so attractive would be such a complete stickler for the rules. He must have worked for the IRS in a past life.

Of course, I didn’t know much about Nathan’s current life. In the brief phone conversations we’d had during the past week, he’d revealed only generic information about himself and hadn’t given me much room to ask questions. If I was going to trust anything he told me, I needed some answers.

There was no time like the present.

“How old are you?” I asked.

“Thirty-two.”

“I meant including…” I didn’t know how to phrase the rest.

“Oh, that,” he said, and it sounded as if he didn’t care to dispense that information. “I’ve been a vampire since 1937.”

I tried to conceal my disappointment. I had expected to hear he was hundreds of years old, that he’d walked the battlefield with Napoléon and discussed the mysteries of the cosmos with Nostradamus, like the vampires in the movies. “That was the year ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ became the national anthem, you know.”

“I didn’t know that. I wasn’t an American at the time.” He glanced over his shoulder, and I immediately covered my face.

“It’s okay,” he assured me. “You’re back to normal.”

I leaned over a clear patch of the glass-topped coffee table to check my reflection.

“It’s the hunger,” he said as he straightened up the room. “The worse it is, the worse you look. The same goes for anger, pain and fear. It’s very animalistic.”

How anyone could be blasé about his entire head morphing into a Harryhausen-esque special effect was beyond me.

“The scary part is that it gets worse with age. Some of the real old vampires even get horns when they change, or cloven feet. But you can control it, with practice. You just have to calm yourself, find your center, all that New Age crap. It’s very Zen.” He took the empty cup from my hands and headed to the kitchen sink.

New Age crap? This from the guy running the witchcraft minimart?

“Now, how about telling me what happened tonight?” he called over the sound of running water.

I shuddered. “Can’t we start with what the weather’s been like?”

“No.”

“It was nothing, really,” I said, trying to sound casual.

“‘Nothing’ rarely stabs people.” He came in and sat next to me on the sofa. The scent of him teased my nostrils, and I rather seriously debated whether or not to lean against him and inhale deeply.

I really need to get out more.

“I needed blood.”

Nathan frowned. “You didn’t hurt anyone, did you?”

“Okay, even if I had, did I look like I won that particular fight?”

He looked relieved that he wouldn’t have to chop off my head.

“I followed a girl into a club downtown. One of those…Goth clubs.” I lowered my voice, as if Goth were a dirty word.

“Club Cite?” he asked, and I nodded. “That was very dangerous. Clubs like that are full of all kinds of undesirables. People who think they’re vampires, wannabe vampires and vampire hunters. Amateurish vampire hunters, but with enough knowledge to kill you, even if it is just a lucky accident.”

“I know that now,” I said bitterly, remembering the metallic taste of Dahlia’s blood on my tongue. I took a deep breath. “I met a girl there. She told me she’d let me—” I stumbled over the words. “Drink her blood. I paid her.”

Nathan sighed and shook his head, reaching for one of the notebooks on the table. “What was her name?”

“Dahlia.” I looked over his shoulder as he flipped through the pages. There were crudely drawn diagrams and notes in the margins. A paper clip held a Polaroid in place at the top of one page. He handed the photo to me.

“Is this her?”

I looked at the photo. The woman did look like Dahlia, but a black Betty Page wig covered her red curls. The eyes were the same. Hard and crazy. I wondered how I hadn’t noticed that before. I told him it was her and returned the picture.

He stood, cursed and threw it down on the table. I shrank away, surprised at his sudden vehemence.

“I told you to come here if you needed blood! Why didn’t you come to me?” he shouted.

“I did! You weren’t home!”

“You should have waited!” He glared at me and braced himself for my next retort.

Raising my voice had calmed me considerably. When I didn’t respond, he swore and turned away, running a hand through his hair.

“Are you finished?” I asked.

He sighed angrily. “Yes, dammit. But you should have waited.”

“Maybe I should have. But I wasn’t thinking clearly at the time.” I scooped up the picture. “Do you know her?”

“Who?”

I rolled my eyes and held up the photo. “Dahlia.”

When he sat beside me, he seemed to take up more of the couch than before. I didn’t want to give him the impression that I was intentionally trying to be close to him, so I moved to the armchair.

“I know of her,” he said, examining the notebook. “She’s a very powerful witch.”

“A witch?” I laughed.

Nathan stared at me in annoyance before turning his attention back to the notebook. He laced his fingers together and brought them to his mouth, and his eyes glazed in deep concentration. Watching him, I realized why I’d been so disappointed to hear he wasn’t centuries old. Everything about him seemed anachronistic, as though he’d stepped from the Middle Ages into the present. He would look less out of place standing on a blood-drenched battlefield than sitting on a secondhand couch in an apartment full of musty old books. I imagined him charging into battle, face grim with purpose, his strong arms wielding a sword with both hands, his muscular thighs—

“See something you like?” His voice jolted me from my lusty historical imaginings. I was caught.

Nathan smiled that arrogant, knowing smile all males produce when their ego has been thoroughly stroked.

“Sorry, I guess I just zoned out.” Even I wasn’t buying that lame excuse, so I quickly changed the subject. “Why do you think she attacked me?”

He pushed the book aside. “I have no idea. She’s been trying for years to hook up with different vampires in the area, without much success. She isn’t someone to be trifled with. She has a lot of power.”

His grave expression worsened my growing unease. I didn’t know just how powerful Dahlia really was, but she’d been violent and dangerous enough without the aid of any spells or tricks. “She was really pissed at me. For taking Cyrus’s blood. Do you think she’s, you know, with him? Or just bat-shit crazy?”

“I’ve known Cyrus for a long time. He likes people who are easy to manipulate, and she definitely has powers he could exploit.” His brow furrowed as he considered his statement. “But I don’t think he would turn her. He’s not that stupid.”

“She said it wasn’t time. Or that he said it wasn’t time.” I threw up my arms in frustration. “So, how, exactly, do we proceed from here?” I glanced nervously at the window. “Can you kill her? Or is she off-limits because of that human thing?”

“Off-limits,” he answered automatically. “Besides, I don’t have any reason to kill her. I keep an eye on her, sure, but nearly every vampire hunter around here does. I’ve seen her around, but the vampires I’ve seen her with usually disappear after a while. As long as they don’t turn her, I don’t care where they go.”

“She kills them!” I triumphantly jabbed my finger in the air. “She said she’d killed Cyrus’s other fledglings before, so you’ve got to be able to—”

“No, Carrie, the goal of the Movement is to rid the world of vampires. She’s actually doing us a favor.” He looked away from me. “But it does trouble me to hear he’s been making fledglings we haven’t heard of. If Dahlia were a vampire…but I can’t imagine Cyrus would be foolish enough to turn her.”

“He was foolish enough to turn me,” I reminded him.

“Yes, but you’re not a witch.” His tone was the vocal equivalent of a condescending pat on the head. “A vampire’s blood is very powerful. Combine that with a witch’s abilities and you’ve got spells to raise the dead, summon armies from hell, et cetera. But as it stands, I think it would be safe to assume Dahlia merely wants to become one of us for her own selfish reasons. Is there anything else she said that might give us a clue why she targeted you specifically?”

I thought hard, but the entire evening was still a blur. “Just my ties to Cyrus.”

He looked helplessly around the apartment, as though an answer hid in the bookshelves. “Well, if she assumes you’re dead, at least she won’t come looking for you. That’s something.”

Cold, sick realization made my stomach constrict as I remembered everything in my purse spilled all over the dirty floor of the donor house. “She has all of my identification. I left my purse behind.”

Nathan frowned. “Well, that was careless of you.”

“Yeah, I guess I should have gone back for it after she stabbed me!” I snapped. I was too tired to keep up the sarcasm for long. “What am I going to do now?”

He went to the window and lowered the shades. “The sun is going to be up soon. I don’t think you’ll make it home before dawn, and I’d rather have you where I can protect you. Why don’t you stay here until dusk?”

I looked doubtfully around the cluttered apartment. There was one dead bolt on the door. It seemed a far cry from the safety and security of a building with a night watchman. Especially since a crazed witch was out to get me.

His eyes darted to the door, then back to me. “I swear, nothing will happen to you as long as you’re here.”

As if to reassure me, he stood and opened the door of the coat closet, revealing an impressive array of medieval-looking weapons.

“Beats a night watchman,” I said in awe.

Nathan suggested I take his bed. “I’m going to wait up for Ziggy, make sure he gets in okay.”

Glancing at the couch, I realized I shouldn’t argue. It didn’t look comfortable, and since it lived in the company of two men, it didn’t look very clean, either. I didn’t mention that. “You look out for him, don’t you?”

“Ziggy?” he said the name with genuine fatherly affection. “Yeah. Well, he hasn’t got anyone else.”

“Neither do you.”

I’d said the words without thinking, but their impact was visible. Nathan’s faint, unguarded smile faded. I glimpsed a flicker of pain in his eyes before the emotionless mask was back in place and he returned to being the polite acquaintance that held me at arm’s length.

I had no idea why it bothered me, but it did.

“Listen, you’ve had a rough night, and those wounds aren’t going to heal without some rest.” He pointed toward the hallway. “The bedroom’s straight back.”

I knew a dismissal when I heard one. I was halfway down the hall when he spoke again. “There are some T-shirts in the bottom dresser drawer. You can borrow one if you want.”

I went mechanically to the bureau. I’d just met Nathan. Spending the night in his bed was intimate enough. I didn’t need to wear his clothes, too. But the thought of sleeping naked didn’t appeal to me, either. I undressed, grimacing at the pain that tore through me when I moved. When I eased into the bed, I hissed in agony.

Loud footsteps charged down the hall, and Nathan burst into the room just seconds later. “Are you okay? Do you need something for the pain?”

His immediate reaction to a sound I didn’t think he’d been able to hear unnerved me. So did the sincere concern etched on his face.

He didn’t give me a chance to answer him. With a speed that surprised me, he left and reappeared with a large metal toolbox. Sitting on the bed, he placed the box in his lap and sprung the latches. “Okay, what do you want? We’ve got morphine, meperidine, Vicodin…I’ve got local anaesthetic, but I’d really like to save that.” As he continued to rattle off drug names, I peeked around his arm. The man’s first aid kit was better stocked than the Pyxis medicine cabinet in the E.R., but I was willing to bet he didn’t come by the stuff legally. “How’d you get all this?”

“Connections in the Movement.” He lifted out a bottle of pills and squinted to read the label.

“I thought you guys were all about the extinction of your species.” I reached for a syringe and the vial of meperidine. “This should put me right to sleep. Got a tourniquet?”

He handed me the stretchy strip of latex. “The rules state we can’t save a vampire’s life, not even our own. If our healing abilities don’t take care of things, that’s the end of it. Nothing in here is going to save me if I get in a bad way. There’s no rule against keeping yourself comfortable for your last few hours. Do you need a hand?”

I had the tourniquet between my teeth and tried to wind it around my arm the way I’d seen them do it in Trainspotting. I’d started enough IVs in my time that it should have been a piece of cake, but doing it yourself wasn’t as easy as it looked. When I shook my head no in answer to Nathan’s question, the stretched length of rubber shot from my lips, snapping me painfully in the face.

“Here, let me.” He chuckled as he deftly tied the tourniquet and thumped the fat vein on the inside of my forearm. “That looks like a good spot.”

I watched as he carefully filled the syringe. This obviously wasn’t the first injection he’d given. “Did the Movement teach you how to do this?” I asked.

He tapped the air bubbles toward the needle. “I picked it up somewhere. Now, hold still.”

I felt the needle slide into my unsterilized arm. I remembered what I’d read in The Sanguinarius regarding disease: The humors that delight in causing sickness and death will not touch the vampire. He will not be affected by the plagues of Pandora.

I could only assume the same went for modern-day germs and bacteria.

The medicine stung as it entered my vein, but Nathan’s touch was gentle and reassuring. Even so, I fixed my gaze on his face to keep from looking at the needle in my arm—I was never good at being the patient. “So we can heal from serious injuries on our own?”

“The depth of severity is determined by age. If someone had done to me what I did to Cyrus, I wouldn’t be sitting here right now. I would’ve healed from your stab wound in an hour, whereas you’re lucky you didn’t need stitches. By the time I found you, though, you’d already started to heal. It’s a good thing you’d fed some.” He held his thumb over the injection site as he withdrew the needle, then reached for a Band-Aid. “There. That should take the edge off, and it will help you get to sleep.”

“What about me? How long will it take until I’m completely healed?” I really hoped the answer wasn’t two months.

“You’ll be fine in the morning,” he said as he recapped the needle.

I snatched it from him. “Don’t do that. It’s a universal hazard.”

He looked amused. “A what?”

“A universal hazard. It’s been in contact with body fluids, which transmit diseases that cause death. You could stick yourself in the process and end up dead. It’s a universal hazard, and not recapping needles is a universal precaution.” Realizing I sounded like one of my old professors, I pinched the bridge of my nose in embarrassment. “I can’t believe how easily I just rattled that off.”

“It was very educational.” Nathan laughed. He had a great laugh, deep and genuine. It was the best thing I’d heard all day.

He shrugged. “But I’m not worried about diseases. I’m more worried about a stake to the heart or an axe to the neck.”

“Is that all?” I teased. “I would have thought a strapping lad such as yourself would be concerned about his cholesterol levels.”

Suddenly serious, Nathan caught my chin in his hand and forced me to look at him. “Your heart and your head. Lose either one and you’re dead.”

How will you kill me? I thought. “What about burning? Can you die from burning? Or drowning?”

As if horrified by the morbid conversation—or the realization that he’d started it—he removed his hand apologetically. “The short answer is yes, you can die from anything that causes more damage than you can heal in a feasible amount of time. But let’s not talk about this now. You need to rest.”

I wanted him to tell me more, but I just cried gratefully. “Thank you. You didn’t have to do all this.”

He didn’t look at me as he began gathering up the medical debris from the bed. “No one ever died from being too polite. Besides, you need help. The next couple of months will be rough.”

“I can’t imagine it will be any worse than it already has been.”

“You’re going to have to say goodbye to your family, your friends. Everyone.” He stood. “It’s lonely being one of us.”

“I don’t have any relatives I talk to anymore. I mean, my parents are dead, and I haven’t seen any of their family since I was little, except for at their funeral. I only moved here eight months ago, so I haven’t had time to make any friends.” I stopped myself. “Well, except for you, I guess. You’re the closest thing to a friend that I’ve got so far.”

He didn’t look pleased to be drafted into the role. “You’re going to have to quit your job. You can’t continue to work at the hospital. The people there are too vulnerable to you.”

I couldn’t argue with that. I’d stolen their blood, not exactly a move in the best interest of patient care. But the thought of giving up being a doctor was, well, unimaginable. After four tedious years of college and three grueling years of med school, I’d finally gotten the prize I’d been striving for. I’d sacrificed my personal life in pursuit of my goal. If I let it go, I’d have nothing. I wasn’t about to let fate, or anyone else, take away the one thing left that I cared about. “I’m not even going to discuss this. It’s not your call to make.”

He sighed. “You’re right. It’s not. But how are you going to explain to them that you can’t work day shifts or attend morning meetings? How are you going to play off the fact that in twenty years you’ll still look…how old are you?”

“Twenty-eight.”

“In twenty years, you’ll still look twenty-eight. What are you going to tell people?”

“Botox?” I yawned. The drug was taking effect. “Can’t I wait and work this out in a week? If I join your club they’ll tell me to quit, anyway, and if I don’t, you’re going to kill me.”

The words appeared to surprise him, as though he’d forgotten he wasn’t yet on my side. He opened his mouth to speak but turned away and snapped off the light. “Get some sleep. We can talk about this later.”

Like I had a choice. Within minutes of Nathan leaving the room, I dropped off and slept like a log.

When I woke, I blinked sleepily and tried to remember when I’d gotten a goldfish.

The creature stared expectantly at me from his little castle in the bowl on the bedside table. An odd feeling of loneliness swelled under my ribs. As messy and small as Nathan’s apartment was, it boasted homey, lived-in touches that were decidedly lacking at my place. I imagined going home to my high ceilings and bare walls, and the idea was too awful to contemplate. I buried my face in the pillow and pulled the covers over my head. It had been a while since Nathan had laundered the sheets. They smelled like him, and I shamelessly took a deep breath. I visualized him lying naked where I lay now. Did he bring women here?

I couldn’t see the Nathan I knew forming a relationship with anyone. Yes, he cared for Ziggy the way a father watched over a son, but familial love came with ready-made boundaries. I’d only met him a week ago, but it didn’t take a genius to deduce that emotional intimacy and Nathan were not terms that went hand in hand. It was probably a miracle he even had a fish.

The sun hadn’t set. No sounds of life came from the living room. Forsaking my bloodied sweatshirt, I slipped my jeans on under Nathan’s T-shirt and padded quietly to the bathroom. Despairing at my lack of a toothbrush, I brushed my teeth with my finger before venturing into the rest of the apartment.

Nathan was sprawled across the armchair with a book in one hand and a loaded crossbow in the other. A thin line of drool hung from the corner of his mouth. On the floor at his side were two wooden stakes and the axe Ziggy had attacked me with.

“Expecting company?”

He startled awake. “I wasn’t sleeping!”

I jumped aside as the bolt shot from the bow and stuck in the door.

“For Christ’s sake, I could have killed you!” He leapt to his feet. “Do you always sneak up on people like that or just when they’ve got a deadly weapon in their hand?”

I stepped back. “I’ve never happened upon a sleeping person with a weapon before.”

He stretched his arms wide and yawned loudly. Apparently, he’d slept well enough when he was supposed to be protecting me. “How’re the stab wounds this morning? Healed?”

I rolled up the edge of the T-shirt. Nathan pulled the tape from the gauze pad over my belly to reveal a faint pink scar.

“Holy crap,” I breathed, poking the spot with my finger. The tissue wasn’t even bruised. My body had mended while I slept. “How the hell did I do that?”

“The Sanguinarius says that humors in the blood we drink sustain our tissue and imbue it with a potent healing ability. I’m sure that’s not very scientific, but it’s the best answer we’ve got so far.” He paused as an idea came to him. “You’re a doctor. If you join the Movement, maybe you could work in their research department.”

If. It hung between us again, destroying the friendly truce of the morning. We stood, staring at each other as potential enemies instead of a host and houseguest.

A knock at the door broke our awkward silence. Nathan grabbed one of the stakes and motioned for me to stand back. Just as he reached for the dead bolt, the door burst open.

Nathan lunged forward, tackled the intruder and brought him to the ground. His arm was raised, poised to thrust the stake into the man’s heart.

“Hey, hey!” the trespasser shouted. He rolled out from under Nathan.

Ziggy got up and brushed off his clothes. He smoothed back his long, greasy hair and looked me over. “Sorry, Nate, I didn’t know you had company.”

Nathan snapped at his young ward with barely restrained anger. “Where the hell were you?” He turned his puzzled gaze to the door. “And I could have sworn I locked that.”

“So much for protection,” I snorted. Nathan’s warning glare stifled further comment.

“Hanging out,” Ziggy said, answering Nathan’s first question with a shrug. “I slept in the van and went to class this morning. I’m just here to donate, then I’ve got an art history night class. So, what’s up with her? Is she like, your new girl or something?”

“New girl? What happened to the old one?” I asked Nathan, raising an eyebrow.

He wasn’t amused. “There hasn’t been an old one for a while.”

I couldn’t imagine somebody who looked like Nathan going without a date for long. Then again, most women I knew—the nurses I overheard gossiping in the break room, anyway—weren’t looking for vampires as potential mates.

Nathan hung up the heavy overcoat that Ziggy had discarded on the floor. “I don’t like you going out all night, especially with Cyrus in town. And you forgot to use the special knock. I could have killed you.”

“That’s a phrase you seem to be using quite a bit today,” I interjected, but Nathan ignored me.

Ziggy went straight for the kitchen, with Nathan and I trailing behind. He pulled a can of soda, marked with a territorial Z in black marker, from the refrigerator and swallowed it in one long gulp. He wiped his mouth on his sleeve and coughed. “Once, then twice, then once again. Yeah, I know. I did it. You just went all Rambo on me.”

“You knocked four times,” Nathan said. “That’s not the same thing.”

While Ziggy consumed another soda, Nathan retrieved sterile packets of IV tubing and needles from the cupboard.

The younger man sniffed the air and made a face. “Damn, Nate, you reek.”

Surreptitiously, I leaned a little closer to Nathan. He did smell a bit like the bedsheets, but I’d thought it was a sexy smell. There’s pheromones for you.

Nathan looked mildly offended, but his expression quickly changed to amusement. “I’d value your input a lot more if you hadn’t just admitted to sleeping in that crusty old van of yours.” He handed Ziggy the medical supplies. “If you have any trouble, Carrie here is a doctor.”

Ziggy’s face blanched as he looked from Nathan to myself. “Oh, yeah, new vampire, fresh, tender Ziggy flesh. Like I’m going to let her near me when I’ve got an open vein.”

I rolled my eyes. I wouldn’t shake hands with someone who looked like Ziggy, let alone suck blood from him. “You’re totally safe, I assure you.”

Nathan headed toward the bathroom. “I paid for two pints, I want two pints.”

“Two pints!” I exclaimed once the bathroom door was closed. “You can’t give him two pints of your blood!”

Ziggy settled comfortably in a chair and tied a rubber tourniquet around his arm, much in the way I’d tried the night before. He was a bit too proficient at it.

“Sure I can. In case you get hungry, you should know I’ve got a stake in my pocket with your name on it.” He took a few trial stabs with the needle, missing the vein each time. I didn’t know what to say. I was a little insulted he thought I was some wild, uncontrollable animal. “Here,” I said gruffly. “You’re turning yourself into a pincushion.” I took the needle from him and slid it smoothly into the only undamaged vein I could find.

“Heroin?” I asked, casting a disapproving look at the track marks on his wrists and the backs of his hands.

“Not that it’s any of your business, Doc, but no. I’m the cleanest donor in the city. And Nate’s not my only customer.”

In my opinion, his cleanliness was debatable. I didn’t say so and resisted the urge to wipe my hands on my jeans after I touched him.

“You should be more careful with the needles,” I said, trying to sound as concerned as I possibly could. “You can’t just poke around in your arm like that.”

“Duly noted,” he replied, too distracted with the intricacies of plastic connector tubing to pay my warning much heed.

I dropped onto the couch and averted my eyes. I didn’t trust myself to catch sight of his blood. I heard the water running in the shower and muffled singing.

“So are you and Nate like special friends now or something?” Ziggy asked.

“No,” I replied, “and if we were, I don’t think it would be any of your business.”

He laughed. “Hey, no offense or anything. I just wondered because you’re, you know, wearing his clothes and all.”

I looked down at the T-shirt and wrapped my arms around myself. “My shirt had blood on it.”

“Listen, I don’t care. I was just trying to make conversation.” He lit a cigarette then, and noticed my expression of utter longing, he held the pack out to me.

“No, thanks.” I waved them away, knowing I’d get no satisfaction from them. “It’d be a waste.”

“Suit yourself,” he said, tossing them on the table. “But a lot of vampires smoke, you know. It doesn’t matter much what you do when you’re dead. You can’t get cancer or anything.”

“Yeah, but you can’t get anything out of it, either,” I said, my voice wistful. The acrid smoke smelled better than baking cookies.

“Not true.” He held the cigarette out.

I took it and inhaled experimentally. He was right.

“It’s the blood,” he said. “Blood rules all.”

I passed the cigarette back. “But it didn’t do anything for me before.”

“Because you were craving blood,” he explained, prodding his arm where the needle entered his skin. I cleared my throat noisily, and he jerked his hand back with a grin. “It’s like if you were craving chocolate cake, and you just kept eating SpaghettiOs. The SpaghettiOs aren’t going to do it for you, you know?”

I hadn’t even known that vampires existed until I suddenly became one. Now some smart-assed kid was telling me, a doctor, the ins and outs of my own physiology.

The collection bag filled. He kinked the tubing and switched to an empty one. I motioned to the bag. “Do you want me to put that in the fridge?”

He nodded. “So, how long have you been a doctor?”

“Less than a year.” I hesitated. “I’m not sure I’m going to be a doctor much longer. Because of the vampire thing. After I worked so hard for it…I can’t believe it’s over.”

“That’s a bitch.” He sounded genuinely sympathetic.

The sound of the water stopped, and my mind briefly diverted to a vivid flash of Nathan emerging from the shower. I tried in vain to force the image from my thoughts.

A loud crash, followed immediately by a yelp and a dull thud, snapped me back to reality. For a moment, I thought Nathan had fallen out of the shower. Then I noticed the brick rolling awkwardly across the floor. The window behind the armchair was broken. Sunlight streamed in, and Ziggy slumped to his knees, unconscious.

Nathan rushed from the bathroom, a towel wrapped around his waist. He hurried to Ziggy’s side and felt frantically for a pulse.

“What happened?” he shouted, looking from Ziggy’s lifeless form to me.

I tried to focus on the emergency at hand, but it was hard to ignore a half-naked man standing in front of me, regardless of the circumstances.

His chest was well defined and droplets of water still clung to his broad shoulders. I felt heat rush to my face as I imagined gripping those strong arms and raking my nails across his back.

Yelling from the street snapped me back to the present. “Come out, come out, wherever you are!”

I knew that voice.

“I know you’re up there! So does Cyrus! If I were you I’d come down here and burn before he gets to you!” She laughed. It was the same crazy sound she’d made the night before.

“Nathan?” I whispered, paralyzed with fear.

Ziggy tried to stand. As soon as he was upright, he crashed back to the floor and clutched his head.

“What the hell happened?” He looked the room over through barely opened eyes.

Nathan raised a hand, shiny with blood, and motioned frantically for me to help him. “I don’t know where he’s bleeding from.”

“Oh, shit!” Ziggy’s eyes grew wide at the sight of his blood on Nathan’s hands. He struggled to his feet. The window shade had nearly been torn down during the brick’s dramatic entrance. A few rays of sunlight spilled into the room. Ziggy was careful to keep those beams of light between Nathan and himself.

When the smell of the blood hit me, I understood his reaction. I felt the muscles and tendons of my face rhythmically clench, and my fangs began their aching descent.

“Not now, Carrie!” Nathan snapped.

His sharp tone surprised me, and my transformation stopped instantly.

Ziggy looked from Nathan to me, as if trying to judge the best escape route. Nathan approached him cautiously. “Remember who you’re talking to, Ziggy. I would never hurt you. I know you’re not food.”

Dahlia was still in the street, but she appeared to be running out of steam. “Are you waiting for sunset so you can come out and kick my ass? I’ll have a lot of backup by then.”

“Get out of here, Dahlia, or I can’t be responsible for my actions!” Nathan roared.

“Oh, I’m so scared,” she yelled back. “What are you gonna do, bookstore man? Read me to death? I’m going. I was just supposed to deliver the message.”

“What message?” Nathan asked.

Just then the shade fell completely from the window, flooding the room with sunlight. Nathan cursed and dropped to the floor. My reflexes weren’t as good.

Words can’t accurately describe how sunlight feels when it hits vampire skin. The worst sunburn couldn’t compare with the searing pain that rocked through me. My skin bubbled then burst into flame anywhere the light made contact with it. My shirt caught fire from my incinerating skin, spreading the flames to the rest of my torso. The only thing I could think of was that my burning flesh smelled like hot dogs. Nathan leapt up and grabbed me, smothering the flames as we tumbled to the floor.

Ziggy grabbed the blanket from the back of the couch and draped it across the window. “I’ll try to rig this up so it doesn’t fall again.”

“Are you all right?” Nathan asked, his face hovering mere centimeters above mine.

“I’m fine,” I wheezed, unable to take sufficient breaths. “Except for the third-degree burns.”

Nathan actually smiled at that. He didn’t seem in much of a hurry to move, and despite the fact that I couldn’t breathe, I didn’t really mind. Until I remembered Ziggy had an open head wound.

“And I can’t breathe. Will you let me up?” I squeaked, shifting slightly beneath him. I realized too late what effect my wriggling might have on a half-naked man.

He looked embarrassed and apologetic as he rolled off me, clutching his towel closed.

While Nathan tended Ziggy, I sat up and gingerly inspected the burned patches on my arms and chest. The skin was blackened. When I ventured an experimental poke it flaked away, revealing tender new flesh beneath. “Why didn’t I burn up?”

“Because I saved your ass with my mad blanket-throwing skills,” Ziggy answered.

Nathan made a sound in the back of his throat. I couldn’t tell if he was annoyed at Ziggy’s comment or upset by the gash in his skull.

“This is going to have to be stitched up,” he said with a sigh of resignation as he examined Ziggy’s wound.

“I can do that,” I offered, but Nathan shook his head.

“I don’t have the supplies on hand, and you don’t have enough control yet to be around this much blood.” He turned to Ziggy. “It’ll be safer if you go to the hospital. Do you mind?”

“Better than hanging around here,” he said with a shrug. “It’s like swimming in a pool of sharks with a paper cut in here.”

Nathan went to his room. He returned with pants on his body and a roll of cash in his hand. “Take this,” he ordered. “Go straight to the E.R.”

Ziggy stuffed the money in his jacket. “Where else would I go? Denny’s?”

“Knowing you, anything is possible. But I’m not kidding,” Nathan warned. “Stay off the street tonight. I want you in by curfew.”

“No problem,” Ziggy said. “They’ll probably give me some wicked pain medication at the E.R.”

Nathan watched him descend the stairs, then closed the door and turned to me. “Here we are again. Just you and me, alone together. Not completely dressed.”

The comment was so playful and unexpected, I didn’t know what to say. I wrapped my arms around my chest to cover the burn holes in the T-shirt and tried to force a laugh. “I’m not having much luck with shirts lately.”

“Well, I’d loan you another but I saw what you did to the last one.” His voice sounded weary, but he smiled, anyway. “Besides, I like the view.”

I rolled my eyes. “If you’re going to be a smart-ass, I’ll just ignore you.”

Nathan clearly dealt with stress through humor. As long as I had to deal with him, I hoped he had enough stress to cause an ulcer. He was much more pleasant when he was using his coping mechanisms.

The fading sunlight that had peeked from the edges of the blanket over the window disappeared. If Dahlia’s brick had broken the window five minutes later, it would have already been night. I checked my scorched flesh again. It had nearly healed.

“Why did that happen?” I asked, holding up my seared hand.

“Because you’re a vampire. Haven’t you seen any movies?” Nathan asked.

“I’m more of a werewolf fan, for your information.”

He made a face. “You wouldn’t be if you ever met one.”

“Werewolves are real?” I smiled in spite of myself. I’d always liked the idea of wild guys who were animals in bed. Not that I’d ever actually experienced said animalism for myself, but a girl can dream.

Sighing deeply, Nathan stretched out his legs. “Why is it you women find them so damned attractive? Is removing ticks from a guy such a turn-on?”

“I never said I was attracted to them. I just said I favored them to, well, humanoid leeches, for instance.” I spied Ziggy’s cigarettes that lay forgotten on the coffee table, and snuck one from the pack. “Anyway, why did it happen now? It’s been nearly two months since the attack, and I’ve been in the sun since then.”

Nathan pushed an ashtray toward me. “You hadn’t drunk any blood yet. You might have been light sensitive before, but after feeding, the sensitivity turns deadly. It’s in The Sanguinarius.”

“Yeah, but I haven’t finished it yet,” I confessed sheepishly. “But it makes sense. After I started…feeding, artificial light doesn’t bother me as much as it used to.”

“You were going through a prolonged transition into vampirism. Once you stopped denying your hunger, the change completed.” He snagged the cigarettes from me. “Are these Ziggy’s?”

Biting my lip, I considered the answer to that question. I didn’t want to get Ziggy into too much trouble.

I decided the best course would be the parental guilt trip. “You shouldn’t let him smoke. It’s not good for him.”

Nathan slid out a cigarette and lit up, another surprising development. “I know. These things will kill you.”

“Har, har.” I rolled my eyes. “You can make a joke about it because your lung function isn’t going to be seriously compromised in twenty years.”

“I don’t believe all that crap they say on television. I smoked when I was much younger than Ziggy, and it never hurt me.”

“Yeah, because you didn’t live long enough to get emphysema or cancer.” For the first time, I realized how wide the gap in our age really was. People from his generation hadn’t worried about carcinogens and tar and nicotine addiction. He was a century old. He was probably more concerned with the danger of women wearing pants.

He studied me, an amused smile on his face. I felt naked, and not from the gaping holes in my shirt. I plucked at them self-consciously. “Would you mind?”

He headed into the bedroom. He playfully tossed me a new T-shirt as he returned.

There was a dull thud and he yelped in surprise. He bent down and picked something off the floor. It was the brick Dahlia had thrown. She’d tied a scrap of paper to it.

“Did you see this?” Nathan asked, dropping into the chair to nurse his stubbed toe.

I shook my head. “It must be the message she was talking about.”

As he scanned the paper, his eyes lit up with alarm. He held out the note and I took it.

“‘Lady bug, lady bug, fly away home. Your house is on fire…’” I read aloud. The rhyme wasn’t complete. “You don’t think…Nathan, my whole life is in that apartment!”

“Not to mention The Sanguinarius.” He wrenched open the closet door and pulled his leather trench coat on over his bare shoulders.

“You didn’t give me the only copy, did you?” I imagined my eyes bulging from my head as I spoke.

“No, but it’s the only copy I have. The last thing I need is some firefighter finding it in the rubble and showing it off. Besides, we don’t know if this is Dahlia being vindictive, or if she’s done this on Cyrus’s orders. He might have someone waiting for you, and if he does, I can take them out.”

“I can’t see Dahlia doing anything that was going to bring me closer to Cyrus, even if he ordered it. She definitely doesn’t want me around.” I noticed that Nathan had pocketed several stakes while I spoke and had yet to hand one to me. “Planning a road trip?”

He nodded. “Yup.”

“Where?”

“To your apartment.” He turned back to his arsenal and strapped a leg holster to his denim-covered calf, dropping another stake into it.

I waited expectantly as he pulled out Ziggy’s axe. “Um…were you going to give me something to protect myself, too?”

“You’re right.” With an embarrassed smile, he headed down the hall. When he returned, he pressed something into my hand. “I’m sorry, I don’t know where my head was.”

I frowned at the cell phone in my palm. “So…is this a James Bond type of device that shoots fireballs or sprays acid or something?”

“Not exactly.” He took the phone and pressed a button, lighting up the screen. “But it does speed-dial Ziggy’s pager. If you have any trouble, call him.”

My jaw dropped. “What? Ziggy’s at the hospital and you told him to stay off the streets.”

I wanted him to be annoyed by my protestations, but he remained perfectly calm as he prepared for battle. “Ziggy is better equipped to handle an emergency than you are. I trust him to keep you safe. Besides, there are plenty of weapons in the closet that you can use, and I really doubt that Dahlia will be back.”

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “Hey, it’s my apartment burning down! I’m coming with you.”

“No.” Nathan shook his head adamantly. “Too dangerous.”

“Too dan—” I sputtered in my anger. “You’re supposed to want me to die! Hell, if you’re so loyal to the Movement, you should be shoveling vampires into burning buildings by the truckload.”

“This isn’t open for discussion. You don’t know how to fight, and you’ll be nothing but a distraction to me.” When I opened my mouth to argue further, he held up a hand. “I’m leaving. If you want to live through the night, you’ll stay here.”

Grabbing the axe, he stormed out of the apartment, slamming the door so hard the walls rattled.

“Well…fuck you!” I shouted, kicking one of the couch cushions to the floor.

How dare he! As if I were somehow incapable of looking out for myself in my own, albeit probably on fire, apartment. And what did he mean when he’d said I’d be a distraction? Did he think I was going to get in his way, asking questions with painfully obvious answers and twirling my hair while looking on with a vapid expression?

Jerk.

I tossed the cell phone on the table. It slid across the glass top, colliding with the notebooks piled there. Papers cascaded to the floor. Frowning, I knelt to straighten them. I lifted the papers one sheet at a time and shuffled them into a uniform stack. When I laid the pile aside, I noticed the top page was an Internet printout of a map. It was a map of the very affluent neighborhood on the east side of town, with a big red X drawn on in marker.

Now, this was interesting. I flipped the paper aside to examine the sheet underneath. It was a fax, dated three days before John Doe had attacked me. Sent from VVEM to N. Galbraith, the letter contained only an address. The same address on the map.

“I thought his last name was Grant,” I muttered to myself. I was about to flip to the next page when the cell phone rang.

“Nate, it’s me. I’m stuck in this emergency room. They put me in this curtained-off little room and haven’t been back since. I think they’re calling the police.”

I cut Ziggy off when he stopped for a breath. “Nathan isn’t here. Dahlia set my apartment on fire. He went to check it out.”

“No shit? And he left you there?” He sounded as surprised at Nathan’s actions as I was.

“He thinks I can’t defend myself.” I looked over at the computer desk in the corner. “Listen, a fax came after he went out. From VVEM? Is that the Movement?”

His curse resonated down the line, and no doubt through the stark, sterile emergency room. “Yeah. That’s them. I wonder what they want.”

“I didn’t read it,” I said, compounding my lie.

“It’s probably another kill order.” He cleared his throat. “Just stick it on the fridge. It’s the first place he goes after a fight.”

“Thanks, Ziggy.” I bit my lip. “When exactly did the order come down for Cyrus?”

“The original one? I don’t know, he’s got like forty by now. Hey, somebody’s here to take my blood and they’re not happy I’m on a cell phone here, so—”

“No, the last order for him,” I practically shouted into the phone. “When did that come through?”

“Why?” Ziggy’s tone was suddenly suspicious. “Maybe you should ask Nathan when he gets back. I have to—”

“Ziggy, wait!”

The line went dead. I threw the phone to the floor in frustration. This was too much of a coincidence, I concluded as I stared at the map. Three days. What were the chances he’d gotten this message about a different vampire three days before he’d attacked Cyrus?

I flipped a page. There was my answer, in black and white.

From: VVEM
To: N. Galbraith
Re: Case #372-96 Part 9Y

Assassination Order: Simon Seymour, aka Simon Kerrick, aka Cyrus Kerrick for Crimes against Humanity.

Well. There it was.

I glanced guiltily at the door and wondered how long Nathan would be gone. But did I really care if he found me missing?

Remembering his condescension earlier, I decided that I definitely would not care. This wasn’t any of his business, and I only had a few precious days left to make my decision about the Movement. I deserved to know the truth about my undead birth. As much help as Nathan had been, it wasn’t his blood flowing through my veins.

A curious ache filled me at the thought of Cyrus, and I wondered if this yearning was a symptom of the blood tie. And if it was, would this strange link protect me from more harm at the hands of my sire?

Without allowing myself to dwell on fear, I stuffed the map into my pocket. I called in to work to say I wouldn’t be in. When I hung up, a vaguely empty feeling came over me, the realization that I might not return to the hospital. I forced the thought aside and opened the closet.

Though there were plenty of weapons at my disposal, I took a stake, the smallest and easiest to conceal of the bunch. Besides, I knew what to do with a stake. The spiky-ball-on-a-stick thing looked considerably more complicated to operate. Of course, a stake wouldn’t protect me from Dahlia, if she was still waiting for me. But Nathan was a vampire hunter, not a witch hunter. I suppose I could douse her with water and melt her like in The Wizard of Oz, if it came to that.

I almost left a note for Nathan but decided against it. I realized there was nothing I could write that wouldn’t seem like I’d turned my back on all of his help. There was no way to soften the truth.

As helpful and considerate as he’d been, there were some questions Nathan couldn’t answer. For those, I’d have to face my fear the way I had that night in the morgue.

I had to meet my sire.

Six

John Doe

T he day obviously hadn’t been a warm one. The twilight air was cold enough to steal the breath from my lungs.

I’d found my wool coat hanging over the towel rack in the bathroom. It appeared Nathan had spot-cleaned the blood from it. But it didn’t keep me warm as I walked the miles from Nathan’s apartment to the address on the paper. Being dead had some serious disadvantages, like constantly assuming room temperature, no matter what that temperature might be.

While my car still sat at the curb outside the bookshop, the keys were probably still on the ground outside the donor house. There was no way I’d go back there. I preferred walking.

I was familiar with the posh neighborhood. When I’d been new to the city, I’d often drive through the winding streets and marvel at the modern mansions and fairy-tale châteaus. They looked completely out of place in the sparsely wooded area. Tall brick walls and elaborate gates wrapped around the lots. Some had privacy hedges with formidable-looking security cameras that glared at passersby with cold, glassy eyes. From the shelter of my car, I’d daydreamed about the people living in these houses and imagined living in one myself ten years down the road. The fantasies had always featured a handsome yet oddly faceless husband and our adorable, ambiguous children. Only one house had ever been the feature of a horror story in my mind.

That one turned out to be Cyrus’s.

A severe Edwardian manor, it sat far back on a lawn surrounded by a stone wall. The wrought-iron gate at the drive looked as though it hadn’t been opened in centuries. There was no intercom or bell. I gripped the iron bars and gave a push. The hinges didn’t creak, and the gate swung open to admit me.

I’d never felt so exposed in my entire life as I walked toward the house. The driveway cut a paved swath through the lawn, which glowed an eerie green in the moonlight. Any moment, they’d release the dogs, I was sure. And I hated dogs.

Lucky for me, no one seemed to notice my presence, even as I neared the front door. With every footstep my confidence built, until I got close enough to grasp the doorknob.

The door was open.

I froze. I’d believed no one had seen me coming. As I looked over my shoulder at the broad expanse of lawn, I realized how foolish that assumption had been. The full moonlight might as well have been stadium lighting. Not to mention someone was probably watching me through the security camera mounted above the lintel. I swallowed my fear and stepped inside.

“Hello?” I called, my voice sounding like the dumb female protagonist of a slasher flick. “Your door is open.”

“I know.”

Before I could turn to find the source of the voice, strong arms wrapped around me. The echo of the slamming door sounded final, like the felling of a judge’s gavel.

Whoever held me was not a vampire. I don’t know how I knew. I just did. Maybe it was the smell of his blood, or the surge of power I felt at the realization I could easily overcome him and make my escape. But the foyer was completely dark, and I had no idea where I’d find the door. Healing abilities and heightened reflexes were cool and all, but I really wished we came equipped with night vision. I cursed the total unfairness of it.

“The Master doesn’t like that kind of language,” the man holding me admonished.

My captor shoved me with surprising strength. I collided painfully with a set of double doors, which opened under my weight and spilled me into the next room.

I wiped a trickle of blood from my nose, sickened at my compulsion to taste it. My eyes adjusted to the dark, and I saw the room was very lavish. Leaded windowpanes stretched from the gilded ceiling high above all the way to the marble floor where I lay sprawled. A fresco was painted on the wall. I couldn’t make out the figures distinctly, but there was a lot of nakedness going on. It was like I’d died and been sent to a really Baroque version of hell. Somehow, though, I couldn’t imagine Satan having bad enough taste to hang red velvet drapes.

Six black-clad men stood guard around the room, two stationed at each door, including the one I’d just been thrown through. The thrower stepped in. He was dressed the same as the guards.

“Watch her,” he ordered the two closest men, and all the sentries nodded their heads.

When the thrower left, I climbed to my feet and took a few steps to the right. Each of the guards’ heads swiveled slightly to follow me. I stepped to the left, with the same results. I had an overwhelming compulsion to boogie a little and see if they copied that, too.

Just then a door opened to admit a shadowy figure.

Though the sliver of light spilling in distorted my vision, I could tell from her scent it was Dahlia. My mouth watered at the memory of her blood.

One of the guards reached out as if to prevent her from entering, but she raised her hands and he inexplicably dropped his arm. A tremor of fear seemed to go through all the sentries. It was as tangible as a tidal wave crashing over my head. They were afraid of Dahlia.

She crossed the room slowly and waved a hand at the darkness.

“Illuminate,” she commanded, and light flooded the room.

I forced myself not to retreat as she advanced. “Nice trick. I prefer the clapper, but to each his own.”

“I can’t remember where I picked it up, but it’s handy,” she said casually. “Not as useful as my other ones.”

She walked in a wide circle around me. “So, you lived. I would have thought there was a lesson in that experience.”

I shrugged. “Maybe I’m a slow learner.”

“Really? Then perhaps you need a visual aide.” She waved her hand again and mumbled a long command in a language I didn’t recognize. Nathan’s lifeless body appeared on the floor, his blood in a dark pool around him.

The sight stole my breath. I opened my mouth to scream, but no sound came. But Nathan wasn’t dead. This is just a trick, I told myself. Don’t let it rattle you.

The vision evaporated as quickly as it had appeared.

Dahlia laughed like a child with a new toy. “You bought that? For a doctor, you’re not very bright.”

I rounded on her and felt the change come over me. For a moment, I thought I saw fear in her eyes, but she stood her ground and didn’t utter a noise when I tackled her to the floor. I wanted to rip her throat out, not to feed, just to kill. The thought of her harming the one person who’d bothered to help me made me insane with rage.

A series of loud claps interrupted me before I could deliver a killing blow. I looked up, and Dahlia kicked me away with more force than I would have expected.

Cyrus himself strode toward us. His blond hair seemed longer, falling almost to the floor. He wore an ancient-looking brocade robe the color of blood, and his bare feet peeked out below the hem.

This was the monster who’d made me a vampire. He didn’t look like the creature who’d attacked me. His face was young and handsome. Only his mismatched eyes hinted at his true nature. That, and his facial expression. He looked furious.

“If you don’t want to be the next meal on my table, you won’t harm her again,” he warned Dahlia in a deep, sophisticated voice.

But he didn’t spare her a glance as he approached me. His every step resonated with predatory grace. A tremor surged through my body as our gazes connected. A smirk of satisfaction twisted his lips as he reached out to pull me to my feet.

Dahlia sniffled pathetically. Cyrus turned and pointed one finger in her direction. The deadly sharp nail gleamed in the light, manicured to elegant perfection.

“Get out!” he shouted, and she scrambled to her feet, running from the room as fast as her plump legs could carry her.

“Disobedience, you’ll find, is the one thing I cannot tolerate from my pets,” Cyrus said, turning to me with an apologetic shrug. “Please, allow me to introduce myself. I’m—”

“We’ve met before.”

He arched an exquisitely sculpted brow. “Have we?”

With lightning fast precision, he pinned me against his chest. My veins burned at the physical contact, and I held myself absolutely still, afraid that at any moment I would writhe against him shamelessly like a cat in heat. This was the blood tie Nathan had spoken of. It was terrifying and exhilarating all at once.

Never in my life had I felt as if I were spiraling out of control the way I did at that moment, nor had I felt such absolute relief as I did with my sire’s arms around me. The loneliness of the past months vanished when he touched me, as though all I had needed to satiate the agitated emptiness in my soul was to be with him. He made me feel so strangely complete that I wondered if I would ever be truly happy again without him or if I’d miss my old life if I never left this room again.

Cyrus leaned his cheek against mine and sniffed me.

I heard the blood singing in my sire’s veins, compelling me not to struggle. I can’t say I would have wanted to escape even if I could.

“Oh, yes. I know you now.” His voice was a rich, awed whisper in my ear. “You’re even more beautiful than I’d remembered.”

He ran his hands up and down my arms. I trembled. My knees buckled and I sagged backward, relying on his strength to keep me up.

Now I knew why the Movement thought of the tie in such absolute terms. It was better than love, better than success. The blood tie was the culmination and fulfillment of all human desires. I couldn’t imagine how anyone would want to resist it.

“What’s your name?” Cyrus’s cold breath teased my ear as he spoke.

“Carrie,” I answered without hesitation.

“The cards suggested I had a surprise coming. I had no idea it would be so…exciting.” He pushed his pelvis against my backside, his cock stiff and straining through the robe. His fingertips brushed the back of my hand, and he laced his fingers with mine.

A dizzying buzz forced my eyes closed, and I was overwhelmed with the unpleasant sensation of rushing rapidly forward. I forced my eyes open, and my vision swam. When it cleared, the room was gone. Instead, I saw the E.R., and my own panicked expression. I was inside Cyrus’s mangled body as he lay on the gurney. I saw myself staring in abject horror at the patient before me.

I jerked my hand from his and found myself in my own body, in the present time.

“My very own angel of mercy.” I felt his tongue, surprisingly hot, against my neck. “You tasted so good.”

Suddenly, my memory of the demon who’d carved me up broke through. The claws that had ripped my flesh. The sadistic eyes staring down as I’d cowered, terrified and unable to defend myself. I broke free. “Get away from me!”

Though he looked much different than he had in vampire form, all I could see was his resemblance to John Doe. He folded his arms across his chest as he regarded me. “Oh, you have fire in you. I’ll have so much fun with that.”

From his perversely satisfied tone, I gathered it wasn’t good, clean, car-bingo-type fun he spoke of. “I’m not interested. And speaking of fire, burning down my apartment isn’t exactly the way to a girl’s heart.”

“No,” he agreed with a frown, closing the distance between us. “I find the more effective route is directly through the rib cage.”

“What do you want?” I demanded.

Looping his arms around my waist, he drew me closer. “You came to me, Carrie. It seems you are the one who desires something.”

He nuzzled my neck, rubbing his lips across the scar there. I closed my eyes, too willing to give in to the sensations coursing through my veins. “I want answers.”

“Yet you haven’t asked any questions.” His teeth grazed my skin. “But you don’t really want to talk.”

“Yes, I do,” I insisted, trying to pull away from him.

He held me fast. “Your body tells me something entirely different. You want me. I can smell it on you.”

I ground my teeth. “It’s the blood tie. If you were any other guy, I’d have slapped you by now.”

“If you were any other woman, you’d be dead by now.” Despite his menacing words, he let me go. “I slept quite late this evening and I haven’t had my breakfast. Would you care to join me?”

“Will you answer my questions?”

“That depends on what you ask. But yes, Carrie. I will give you the answers you’ve so bravely sought.” He held out his hand for me, and I bit my lip, considering his offer. Was this a trick? A trap? But he couldn’t have known I was coming. He hadn’t even known who I was when he’d first seen me. There would have been no time to plan anything devious. At worst, I’d spend an uncomfortable meal trying to fight the effects of the blood tie. At best, I’d get a better understanding of what had happened to me. I slipped my hand into his and let him lead me to another room.

The dining room was large and windowless. It was even more ostentatious than the ballroom, if that were possible. Dark wood paneling covered the walls, and the only light came from candles held in ornate silver sconces.

Cyrus pulled out a chair from the long dining table and motioned for me to sit. Then he sat at my right, at the head of the table.

The table was long enough for twenty people, but it was only set for two. Crystal wineglasses took the place of plates. The largest covered platter I had ever seen dominated the center of the table. I wondered who he’d planned on sharing his meal with before I arrived.

“Dahlia.” Cyrus replied to my thought as he gracefully smoothed a napkin over his lap. A dainty crystal bell lay by his left hand, and he rang it. It unnerved me that he could read my private thoughts so easily.

A distinguished-looking black butler entered, followed by two of the guards. The butler reached for the shining silver dome over the platter and hesitated at the sight of me. One of the guards made a noise. The butler glared at them and whisked away the cover.

“Your breakfast, sir,” he said, a look of distaste on his age-lined features.

The nude body of a young woman lay on the platter. She was obviously dead. Her blank eyes stared sightlessly at the ceiling, one hand propped limply on her breast. Her other arm stretched high above her head, mimicking the curve of the platter. Someone had thought to garnish her with rose petals. The woman was displayed beautifully before us like a Renaissance goddess. I was horrified by my reaction. This woman was dead, her remains exploited for aesthetic purposes.

To please the man sitting beside me.

The terror I should have felt from his presence fought to the surface, then was quickly drowned once again by the blood tie. Despite all the harm he’d already done to me, it seemed absurd that he would ever hurt me again. I caught myself yearning to touch him, desperate for the security of a physical connection, and I squashed the feeling down.

He’s a monster. A murderer. You’re smarter than this.

“Thank you, Clarence, that will be all,” Cyrus said with a polite nod.

The butler and guards departed. Cyrus stood and reached for my glass. He lifted the dead girl’s arm and flicked his razor-sharp fingernails across her wrist. Dark red blood poured from the wound. She hadn’t been deceased for long.

The calm, matter-of-fact manner in which he handled the corpse made it seem perfectly normal to be dining off a dead body. I stopped reminding myself to be horrified—what good would it do me?—and concentrated on the questions I wanted answers to.

He filled his glass next and lifted it to his nose, savoring the scent. I ignored my glass, but he didn’t seem to mind.

“Now, what were we talking about?” he asked after he sat again.

“You mentioned Dahlia. Were you reading my mind?”

He drank deeply from his glass, then dabbed his lips with his napkin. “Of course. You wondered who I had planned on dining with since the table was set for two. Dahlia sometimes likes to consume human blood, and I indulge her.”

“Is she a vampire?” It was a silly question. I knew I would have recognized his blood in the taste of hers.

As I expected, he shook his head. “No. Dahlia is very sweet, one of my favorite pets, actually. But I’d never make her one of us. She’s not…special? I suppose that is the word for it.”

“And I was special?” I felt a surprising sympathy for the girl. She thought I’d taken her place when there had actually been nothing to take. But that’s not what concerned me most. “Can you read my mind all the time?”

“If I want to.” He smiled. “And to answer your first question, yes, you’re special.”

“But I was an accident,” I said as I fixed him with a piercing stare. “I remember that night, or at least, most of it. You never fed me your blood. It got into me when I stabbed you, but you didn’t mean for it to happen.”

Sighing heavily, he leaned back in his chair. He studied me for a long moment before speaking again. “You have my blood, Carrie. Even if I didn’t intend to share it with you, it still flows through your veins. It makes you precious to me.”

I glared at him. “You attacked me and left me for dead. I wasn’t so precious to you then.”

He raised his hand to stop me. “Please, excuse me. These damned eyes, they dry out so quickly.”

He lifted a small knife and plunged it into his borrowed eye. The organ fell to the table with a soft, squishy sound and flattened. A gruesome image of the dead morgue attendant flashed through my mind.

Cyrus leaned over the face of the dead girl and carved out one of her eyes. When he’d inserted his replacement, he freed the second eye from the corpse and dropped it into his glass. It sank to the bottom like an olive in a martini.

“I had two perfectly good eyes before I returned to this city. Fresh ones are hard to come by, and they wear out before you’ve gotten much use from them.”

My physician’s curiosity took over then, distracting me from our earlier line of conversation. “How does it work?”

“I don’t know.” He blinked a few times, as though he’d just put in new contact lenses. A thin line of blood ran like a tear down his cheek. “I’m assuming it has something to do with the regenerative humors in human blood.”

“There’s no such thing as humors. Does it work with other body parts? Limbs?” I scooted forward in my chair. “What about teeth?”

“How do I know? Carrie, I understand your thirst for knowledge, but there are questions even the blasted Sanguinarius can’t answer.” He sipped from his glass. The eye inside rolled around to stare at me.

I was going to barf.

Cyrus either didn’t notice or didn’t care. “I’ll have the servants prepare your room, but I fear it won’t be ready before dawn. You can stay with me today. I’m sure we can find some engaging activity to fill the boring daylight hours.”

“Whoa, whoa.” I waved my hands in front of me as though I were signaling a plane. “I’m not staying.”

Not that I wasn’t tempted. The blood tie was an incredible aphrodisiac, despite the fact I’d just watched him pick over a dead body as if it were a rotisserie chicken. But I had only come here in need of information, not an unfathomably dirty one-night stand.

Cyrus’s expression darkened. “I thought you said your apartment burned down. Surely you need a place to stay.”

“I have other options. Did you do it so I’d have no place else to go?”

“I didn’t do it at all. If Dahlia harmed your property, then I’m sorry. The drama of fire seems to hold some fascination for her. I can’t undo what she’s done. All I can offer you is a place to stay. And a few amusements.” He reached across the table to stroke my hand.

I rolled my eyes. “That’s a lovely sentiment, but there’s this organization who’ll want to kill me if I stay here with you.”

“The Movement?” His rich laughter filled the dining room. “They’d like to cage us all and let us die.”

“You don’t think much of them,” I said.

“No. I don’t. I’ve longed for a companion for years, but because of the restrictions in place by the damned Movement, I have been unable to retain any of the fledglings I’ve sired.”

So he didn’t know about his pet and her penchant for offing the competition. I couldn’t believe he would be so dense, but if he was really lonely, perhaps he purposely overlooked her transgressions. Maybe a murderous companion was better than none at all.

Cyrus stood and moved behind me, placing his long fingers on my shoulders. “Fate has put us in a unique situation. Why not come to an arrangement that will be beneficial for both of us? You become the companion I’ve been seeking, and I’ll teach you to use the full extent of your power, power the Movement would deny you.”

“What kind of power?”

He smiled like a used-car salesman. “The power to rule, of course. The power over life and death and the strength to wield it to your advantage.”

A pang of longing washed over me. I’d loved the seemingly God-like powers I’d believed I’d held as a doctor. But that illusion had been ripped apart the night Cyrus had destroyed my perceptions of death and accidentally set me apart from both.

“I thought I had that before. I ended up bleeding to death in the morgue,” I said, shaking my head. “Why should I believe you? I don’t know you that well. You might just kill me again.”

“I might,” he said finally. “I’m not generally regarded as someone to be trusted.”

I looked over the rapidly purpling body on the table. “No kidding?”

He knelt at my side. “Search your heart, Carrie. I have faith you’ll make the right choice.”

Some choice. I could live only if I pledged my allegiance to the Movement, or I could live to be Cyrus’s little wifey. Either way, I was a slave. A prisoner. A prostitute.

“I’ve made my decision. Us meeting, that was an accident. I’m not fated to be your companion, or whatever the heck you’re looking for.”

“Tell me, Doctor, do you follow many of your patients to the morgue?” he asked with a knowing smile. “You followed me. You wanted me.”

“You were dead. That’s not my bag. Sorry.”

He reached out his hands again, but I dodged them.

“If that’s what you believe, I can’t change your mind,” he said, gesturing to the door.

I stood and headed for it, but Cyrus called after me.

“Dahlia is useful. She’s only alive because she amuses me. Not because I love her. And she doesn’t love me.” His voice was quiet and sad.

“I’m sorry if you’re unhappy.” And I was. I could feel his desperation, his hurt, his anger. But I could also feel the cool edge of manipulation. He was confident I would cave in.

He continued, and his sorrow sounded genuine. “I only want to protect you.”

“I don’t need protection, Cyrus. I need time to think.” I walked away. “If I go through that door, will the guards stop me?”

Cyrus shook his head. “Will you return?”

I thought of Nathan and his undying loyalty to the Movement. Would I ever become so indoctrinated to their rhetoric? Was I even susceptible to such brainwashing? “I don’t know. Maybe.”

His sorrow instantly changed to anger. “I’m your sire, Carrie. You belong to me.”

So this was the true nature of his game. He would coerce me into staying.

“I don’t belong to anyone.” The words gave me courage as I spoke them. “I don’t belong to my job, I don’t belong to a man, I don’t belong to the Movement, and I sure as hell don’t belong to you. I have five days left to make a decision. If I choose to return to you, I will. But I’m not stupid, Cyrus. You didn’t make me on purpose. You didn’t make me out of love. You meant to kill me in the morgue. I was an accident. And I don’t owe you anything.”

I walked out the door and didn’t look back.

Seven

June 23, 1924

C yrus’s word was good. No guards accosted me as I left the house.

My head swam with a tremendous mix of emotions. The rage came from Cyrus. I could still hear his screams of fury and the crash of things breaking inside the house as I crossed the lawn.

My sadness weighed heavy on me as my feet hit the sidewalk. I didn’t know what I’d expected to find in Cyrus. A mentor? A friend? An ally against the shadowy threat of the Movement, which demanded I live for them or not live at all?

What I’d found was another dead end. Cyrus would rule me as surely as the Movement would, and that wasn’t something I could accept. My whole life, I’d been ruled by one thing or another. First, my father, who’d been so busy planning my future career, I’d wondered how he’d found time for his own.

“You’re my job, Carrie. It’s my duty to see you do well in life.”

How disappointed he’d be in me now. But then, I’d been just as bad as him, pushing aside adolescent dreams of romance for study and determination, until medicine consumed my life and any relationship that wasn’t a calculated career move seemed like a waste of time. I’d let so many trivial things get in the way of my own happiness that I couldn’t remember what the things that might have made me happy were anymore.

My body grew numb as I walked back to Nathan’s apartment. I hadn’t left a note, but I’m sure the hastily riffled-through faxes would give him a hint as to where I’d been. Tension coiled like electricity in the air as I crossed the street. The windows of the apartment were dark, but the shop’s easel sign was on the sidewalk. I steeled myself against the unavoidable stench of incense and headed down the stairs to the bookshop.

There was no need for the precaution. The air was clear and no peaceful music soothed me as I entered the room and leaned against the counter. I heard muffled cursing, followed by the distinctive thud of books hitting the floor.

“Need some help?” I called.

Swearing followed a startling bang. Nathan emerged from the shelves, one hand pressed against the top of his head.

“You’re back,” he said flatly, wincing as he ran his fingers through his hair.

“Sorry. I had some stuff I needed to do.” I couldn’t tell him, I decided. If he asked, I wouldn’t lie, but it would be suicide to volunteer the information.

He didn’t say anything. He went behind the shelves again and continued doing whatever I had interrupted.

I followed him. He slammed the books into their places on the shelf and walked past me to the other end of the shop, where he fussed with a display of tarot cards that didn’t look as though it needed rearranging.

“So, are you going to talk to me or what?” I asked quietly as he fanned out an open deck as if they were a row of magazines on a coffee table.

“I’m sorry. I’m being rude. How was your evening? Did you have a nice time with your sire while I rummaged through your burning apartment?” The sarcasm in his voice was like a slap in the face.

My temper rose. “You went to that apartment all by yourself. I didn’t ask you to go. All you wanted was your precious book!”

“This isn’t about the fucking book!” He slammed his fists on the table. A sealed deck of cards bounced onto the floor. “How long did you wait before you went snooping through my stuff to find his address? Did you give any thought to what you were going to do? No! After everything I told you, after what you lived through at his hands, you went after him unprotected. He could have killed you!”

“But he didn’t. I can handle myself,” I said.

“You don’t know what he’s like!” Nathan yelled as he put a display of candles in order.

I hoped he broke every damned one of them. “And you do?”

“Yes!” He turned to face me, a handful of orange candles still in his hand. “He’s capable of things you can’t imagine. Things you wouldn’t want to know.”

“He’s a killer. It’s in our blood to be killers. It says so in your freaking vampire bible!”

“Is it in our blood to torture? To maim? Is it in his blood to prey on the weak and exploit kids like Ziggy? Because I’ve got the same blood in my veins that he does, and I’ve never had the urge to rape and murder a sixteen-year-old girl!”

I couldn’t believe my ears. Cyrus was definitely evil. In the short time I’d known him I’d heard him refer to humans as pets and seen him casually feast on a corpse as though it were a fine cut of beef. But I knew myself, and I would never have been so attracted to someone capable of such a heinous act. “He couldn’t have done that.”

“Are you so sure? Because it was on the last order. I’ve got a newspaper clipping about her disappearance upstairs. He was awfully proud of her. Apparently, the fun for him is in killing the girls as he’s violating them. He likes to watch them die while he’s inside them.”

Nathan’s description of the obscene act made my stomach churn. I covered my mouth with my hand. “I don’t want to hear any more.”

“No, you want to experience it for yourself.” He exhaled noisily. “But you go ahead and do what you want.”

“That’s not what I want.”

“Hey, I really don’t care. Apparently, nothing I say is going to matter.” He went back to his candles.

His calm fed my growing anger. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means no matter what I say, you’re going to do what you damn well please.”

“Why shouldn’t I?” I shuffled the artfully arranged cards into a single pile on the tabletop. “The only words out of your mouth are ‘don’t do that, Carrie,’ and ‘it’s dangerous, Carrie’ and ‘I’ll kill you, Carrie,’ but you never tell me why!”

“I dispense information on a need-to-know basis!”

“You sound like my goddamned father!” I shouted, stamping my foot.

Nathan made an exasperated sound and threw his hands up in the air. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“If I ask questions, you get all evasive. You don’t want to share anything about your life, but you seem to want me to just blindly trust that you know what’s best for me.” I pointed at him. “How do I know you’re not just as dangerous as Cyrus?”

He stepped so close to me that our shoes touched. “Oh, believe me, I’m the most dangerous thing in this room right now.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“Yeah, and you’re about to see just how dangerous.”

I tilted my head so I could look him in the eye. “Is that a threat?”

“You tell me.” His breath was cold on my face.

We glared at each other in silence, tension dancing between us like a ballerina with a broken leg. I don’t think I’d ever been more infuriated.

He turned away, but neither of us had spent our anger. This was merely the eye of the storm.

He faced me again, his arms folded across his chest. “Fine. Prove to me you can take care of yourself.”

I hesitated. “What?”

“Attack me.”

“You’re not serious.” I laughed.

“The hell I’m not!” He stepped back and braced himself for a fight. “I’m angry at you. You’re angry at me, right?”

“Yeah, but I’m not about to indulge in mindless violence with a vampire.”

“Would it be better if I was a human?” He rolled his eyes. “This will work out some of that aggression. And you can prove to me that you can stand up to Cyrus. It’s a win-win situation. Besides, right now, I’d really like to kick your ass.”

“Kick my—” My mouth dropped open as I sputtered in resentment. “Oh, I’m going to put the hurt on you so bad!”

I charged him with no specific plan of attack. My shoulder collided with his midsection. He tumbled backward, and I fell to the floor on top of him. We upended the table on the way down, tarot cards fluttering around us as we struggled.

My flying hair and our flailing limbs obscured my vision. I swung at him blindly. Pain reverberated down my arm as my fist connected with his jaw.

Nathan pinned one arm behind me and rolled me onto my back. The hard floorboards bit into my knuckles, and I arched my back to relieve the pressure. Unfortunately, this motion pushed my breasts against his chest, and it was more than a little arousing.

I used my free hand to yank his hair, pulling as hard as I could. He grabbed my wrist, squeezing brutally, and I released my grip. He forced my arm above my head and held it to the floor.

The anger between us dissipated, abandoning us with only the raw, primal sound of our heavy breathing. I stopped struggling the same time Nathan loosened his grip. Painfully aware of how close our bodies were, I looked into his eyes.

He pressed his hips against mine. Apparently, I wasn’t the only one affected.

“You suck at fighting,” he rasped. He leaned forward, his mouth a millimeter from mine. I closed my eyes and tried to stop my body from trembling. His breath teased my lips, and I shivered.

The bells above the shop door chimed. Nathan sprang to his feet, using a book from the nearest table as a shield to hide his obvious state of arousal. I rose clumsily beside him and hoped I didn’t look too flushed.

The customer who entered was about fifty years old and had long, graying hair. She looked us over with knowing brown eyes. “I’ve come at a bad time. I’ll be back later.” She gave the overturned table and scattered merchandise a pointed glance before turning toward the door.

“No, no.” Nathan reached down to right the table. “What can I help you with tonight, Deb?”

The woman looked from him to me with an expression of uncertainty. I coughed and smiled, trying—quite unsuccessfully—to hide the guilt written all over my face.

At Nathan’s urging, the customer rattled off a long list of ingredients she needed to make a protection charm. He directed her to the herb pantry at the back of the shop and promised he’d be with her in a moment.

“Deb is a regular,” he explained, almost apologetically. “You might as well go upstairs.”

“Not to my apartment?” I asked hopefully.

He stared at the ground. “Yeah, I was meaning to tell you about that.”

“It’s completely gone.” I could tell by the look on his face.

He couldn’t meet my eyes. “I’m sorry, Carrie.”

I went to Nathan’s apartment, my head still spinning. What had I been thinking? I’d met this man just over a week ago, and now I was rolling around on the floor with him. And after his tall, dark and surly act. Had I really become the wilting Southern-belle type, just waiting for a big, brooding Rhett Butler to come and dominate me?

I wandered around, absentmindedly picking up clothes strewn around the living room. Once the dirty laundry was folded, I moved on to the coffee table.

I straightened the hopeless pile of books and papers. Not too thoroughly, lest I be accused of snooping again. Thinking of everything he’d said downstairs only made my blood boil, so I gathered stray dishes and dropped them unceremoniously into a sink full of soapy water. I meant to wash them, until the coffee mugs turned the water a soft pink and I lost my stomach for the task.

My manic cleaning spree continued through the house. In the past nine days, I had become homeless, hunted and, soon, unemployed. I probably had enough money in my bank account for a few months’ rent and utilities, but the point seemed moot since I didn’t have an apartment anymore.

Did the Voluntary Vampire Extinction Movement pay a salary?

Nathan had offered blood, shelter and protection. The least I could do was tidy up the place. Because he’s not getting anything else. My behavior downstairs might have raised some of his expectations. I’d have to nip that situation in the bud.

Moving to his bedroom, I stripped the sheets from the bed and threw them into the corner that appeared to be his dirty-laundry hamper. Vampire or not, it appeared men just couldn’t clean up after themselves.

A pang of sadness washed over me as I realized I no longer had a home to clean. Or clothes. Or major appliances.

How had my life suddenly become so complicated? How would I survive as a vampire? How long has it been since he’s flipped his mattress?

I eyed the goldfish bowl on Nathan’s bedside table as I wrestled the heavy mattress off the box springs. I’d read somewhere that goldfish had a memory span of three seconds. Every three seconds, that poor fish had to come to grips with a new and frightening reality. I could definitely identify with that.

I lifted the bowl, pressed my face against the cool glass and counted to three. “Surprise.”

I sighed as I set the container back in its place. It didn’t seem to phase the little orange guy. He just kept on swimming. Another three seconds passed as I wrestled the mattress over and back onto the box springs. Panting and sweating, I looked to the fishbowl. No reaction.

Fish were survivors.

I opened the closet doors to look for clean sheets, on the off chance he owned some. There were assorted bare hangers and a few shirts that hadn’t been worn in so long that the shoulders were dusty. Three mismatched tennis shoes huddled together in the corner next to a dried-out, curled-up object that resembled a dead mouse.

I found a set of sheets on the top shelf and pulled them down. Something heavy and sharp came down with them and landed on my foot. I said a few choice words and leaned over to pick up the offending object. It was a small picture frame, weighty for its size. The picture was yellow and faded.

A pretty young woman beamed at me from the photograph. She wore a simple white blouse and a long tartan skirt. She clutched a bouquet of wild flowers tightly to her chest. A young man in a plain-looking suit stood next to her. The couple posed on the stone steps of a small country church. I squinted at the man. He bore a remarkable resemblance to…

I flipped the frame over and carefully removed the photograph. There were no names, but someone had recorded the date. June 23, 1924.

I stared at the picture. Nathan, just twenty years old, stared back.

“Carrie? Sorry I took so long, but you wouldn’t believe how that woman can talk about her cats.”

I put the photograph back into the frame, replaced it on the top shelf and slammed the closet doors shut.

“Wow, this place looks great,” Nathan called from the living room, veritable appreciation in his voice. He came into the bedroom and laughed when he saw me. “You’re making the bed, too? Do I have to pay you?”

“And I flipped the mattress. That’ll be twenty bucks.” I eyed the shopping bags he held. “Or whatever’s in that Victoria’s Secret bag.”

He laughed, a tight, embarrassed sound, and dumped the bags on the bed. “I didn’t know what size you are, so if these don’t fit, we’ll return them.”

Nathan had thought of everything. There were sweaters and T-shirts in safe, neutral colors from Old Navy, jeans, and pretty silk panties courtesy of Victoria’s Secret. “I saved some of your clothes from the fire, but they were so full of smoke, I didn’t think they’d ever come clean.”

A lump formed in my throat. “Nathan, you didn’t have to do this. I—”

I didn’t realize I was crying until my voice grew too thick to speak.

“I didn’t mean to make you cry. I just thought you could use some stuff.” He cleared his throat and handed me another bag. “If I give you this, do you promise to stop?”

I snorted through my tears. “I’ll try. When did you buy all these things?”

“When I got back from the fire. You were gone and I was pissed off, so I went shopping.”

“You went shopping because you were mad at me?” I took the bag from his hands. “Remind me to stay on your bad side.”

He chuckled at that. “Must be some lingering feminine influence from a past life. If you ever catch me watching The View, go ahead and kill me. I just figured you might come back, and I wanted to make you feel really guilty.”

“Don’t worry, I do,” I said, reaching into the bag. It was plastic, stamped with the logo of a local grocery chain. I froze when my fingers closed on a familiar object. “Nathan…what?”

With trembling hands, I pulled out the small framed photo of me and my parents on graduation day. It had been on my dresser when I’d last seen it. “Oh, thank you.”

Appalled at the sight of my fresh tears, he backed away. “Whoa, whoa. I thought you were going to stop doing that.”

“I’m sorry. Nobody’s ever done anything so nice for me.” It wasn’t a lie. I’d been raised to believe that nothing came easy, nothing was free, and the only person I could depend on was myself. I reached into the bag again. “Is this my…this is my diploma.”

“I figured you might want to keep it, for nostalgic purposes.” He scuffed his shoes on the carpet. “You know, this fire might be the perfect way to break ties with your former life. People die in fires all the time.”

Former life. My photo album. My journals. Everything I’d valued as irreplaceable was gone. My father used to say our society puts too much value on the past. I wished I could scream his words back at him now. My past was all that was left of you. Now that it’s gone, so are you.

“Let’s not talk about this right now, okay?” I said as I dabbed my eyes on the back of my hand. Before Nathan could protest, my stomach growled loudly.

A look of concern crossed his face. “How long has it been since you’ve fed?”

I cringed at the memory of the dead girl. “Cyrus offered, but I couldn’t…feed. Not the way he did.”

Nathan’s jaw tightened, but he said nothing. He headed to the kitchen, and I followed.

“So, did you get The Sanguinarius back?” I watched as he pulled a bag of blood from the refrigerator and poured it into the teapot on the stove.

He shook his head. “I didn’t have time to look for it.”

Surprisingly, I found myself savoring the metallic smell of the warming blood. “But you had time to look for my diploma, and the picture of my parents?”

Shrugging his shoulders, he poured me a mug and left the rest on the stove. “I had priorities.”

Why was I a priority? Nathan had only known me a handful of days. “Your priority should have been getting the book.”

He turned to the sink and began halfheartedly washing the dishes. “The book can be replaced. Memories can’t. I know if I lost all those pictures I have of Ziggy…See, one time, when he was eleven, I took him to Disney World. We could only go out at night, of course, but we went in December, so the sun set earlier—”

“I hope you don’t think I’m going to sleep with you just because you’re being nice,” I blurted.

There was a crash and Nathan hissed. When he pulled his hand from the water, he was bleeding. He looked from his torn thumb to me, his gaze murderous. “What the hell, Carrie?”

The logic I’d used to work the accusation up to a full-fledged fear in my head suddenly seemed incredibly silly. Still, I soldiered on. “Well, you bought me clothes, you rescued my diploma from a burning building at the expense of your precious book, you’re feeding me…what am I supposed to think?”

“Maybe you’re supposed to think I’m an idiot for doing all that shit for someone who clearly doesn’t appreciate it!” He stuck his thumb in his mouth and sucked away the blood, his face contorting into the freakish features he’d displayed the night we’d first met.

I cringed, fervently hoping he didn’t notice. “People don’t just do things for other people without wanting something in return. Sorry if that offends you, but it’s a fact.”

“Is it?” He watched me for a moment with an expression of bitter amusement. “How on earth did you get so jaded?”

“Hey, you’ve lived on earth longer than I have, buddy. You can come up with a better answer than I can.” I took a swallow of blood.

Nathan chuckled and turned back to his dishes. After a long pause, he spoke without looking at me. “You can stay here as long as you need to. I don’t mind. But don’t think I expect anything because of what happened downstairs. It was just one of those weird things we can forget about.”

“Thanks,” I said softly. I managed to drink more blood without dwelling on the repulsive things I’d seen that night, like Cyrus’s choice of cocktail olive replacement. Unfortunately, all that was left to dwell on was Nathan’s comment. I didn’t consider myself the hottest tamale in the enchilada, but almost kissing me was something he could just forget? I couldn’t help but be insulted.

He continued. “And I’m sorry about what I said. And I shouldn’t have fought with you. We don’t know each other very well, but what I do know of you, I like. I want you to make good choices so we don’t have to be enemies.”

“Nathan, I’m not like him. That’s what I found out tonight.”

“Good.” He didn’t look up.

I stood next to him so he couldn’t avoid me. “He didn’t have anything I wanted. I’m not interested in that kind of life.”

When he looked at me, his gaze burned through me. “And what kind of life is that, Carrie?”

“A life without consequences.” I turned away and went to sit at the kitchen table. “But that doesn’t mean I’ve made a decision. I won’t spend my life trying to prove myself to some shadowy organization because they think they can choose whether I live or die. The only person with power over my life is me.”

“I respect that. But it doesn’t change anything.”

I sighed. He would never bend, and I knew it. We were five days from being mortal enemies, and I’d come to rely on him as a friend. An incredibly touchy, downright rude friend, but the only one I had.

I didn’t want to think about it tonight.

Nathan finished the dishes without further conversation. When the last one rested in the drying rack, he washed his hands and wiped them on the dish towel. I handed him my mug with a sheepish smile, and he made a face in good-natured annoyance as he dropped it in the empty sink. “Feel like a drink? A real one, this time?”

“I could definitely use one.” I followed him to the living room where he ordered me to sit.

He pulled a large book from one of the shelves and opened it. It was hollow, the pages carved out to form a niche for a gleaming metal flask.

“Here I thought you were a bookworm, and you’re really just an alcoholic.” I yawned. “So the shop is just a clever front for a bootlegging operation, right?”

He handed me the flask. “Scotch. Aged thirty years. I only hide the good stuff.” He motioned for me to drink. “Ziggy helps himself to the liquor cabinet and replaces what he takes with water. He thinks I haven’t noticed.”

I took a cautious sip. It was smooth and warmed me almost as much as the blood I’d drunk.

My thoughts strayed to the mystery woman in the picture. Obviously, it was a wedding photo. But Nathan didn’t wear a ring. He didn’t even have a tan line from one. Now, that’s a stupid thought, I scolded myself. He can’t go out in the sun.

There had to be some way to bring up the subject, an innocent question I could ask that would lead him to spill the whole tale.

He sat on the couch next to me, and his thigh brushed mine. I didn’t move away. Neither did he.

“Do you ever get lonely?” It seemed the best way to get the conversation started.

It was also intensely personal, judging from the look on Nathan’s face. He took the flask and swallowed deeply. “Nah. Ziggy’s here, and when he’s not, I like being alone.”

“I meant, does immortality get lonely?” I reached for the flask, deciding the best way to kill the sour aftertaste was with another shot of the stuff.

“Well, after the first decade or so, time seems to fly by. I have to admit, it gets boring every now and then. And yeah, lonely, I guess. Especially when I read about someone having his hundred and eighth birthday, or something like that. It drives home the fact I’m really, really old. I’m just not getting any older.” He gave a little laugh and looked over at me. “I’m not making sense, am I?”

“You are,” I assured him. “Though it might be because I’m slightly tipsy.”

He smiled sadly. “It’s hard to believe one day I’ll be the only person left who remembers what it was like to be alive in my time. Sure, people will remember the major things. They’ve got them written down in history books. But only I’ll be left to remember the price of eggs and milk in 1953. I’ll be the only one who remembers what Mrs. Campbell’s blackberry jam tastes like, or that Mrs. Campbell ever existed.”

I had no idea how old my sire was. Had Cyrus endured too many years of that kind of solitude? Is that what made him so desperate for a companion? My heart ached at the thought, and the tender emotion surprised me. “So it stands to reason you’d want to find someone to be with when the people you love die.”

He nodded. “I suppose. But I haven’t felt that way for a while. Maybe because Ziggy’s so young I feel like I have some time before I have to think about it again.”

I could tell from his tone that this was as close as I was going to get to the bottom of this particular subject. “So, where are you from?”

“All over.” He took another sip of Scotch. “I was born in Scotland, lived there until…” His voice trailed off for a second. “I went to Brazil in 1937. That’s where I was turned.”

“Oh?” I wasn’t sure how I should respond.

“From there, I moved to London, then Canada when the war broke out—”

“You were a draft dodger?” I interrupted.

“No.” He arched an eyebrow at me. “The Second World War. Eventually, I ended up here.”

“That’s a lot of moving.” I wondered if I would have to move that much. The idea didn’t hold any appeal.

He sighed. “That’s what happens. If you live too long in one place, never getting any older, people get suspicious. Believe me, it’s a real pain in the ass getting a new birth certificate and social security card.”

I mimicked a redneck drawl. “Especially when you’re obviously not from round these here parts.”

He chuckled, then did a pretty fair imitation of a Midwestern accent. “I don’t know who you’re talking about. I was born in Gary, Indiana, in 1971.”

“Seriously, though, how do you do it?” I took another swig of Scotch.

He leaned back, resting his long arm behind me on the back of the couch. “It’s not hard, especially in a town like this. There are a lot of illegals running around, so there are plenty of connections for forged documents. It’s all about networking. Once you’ve got the birth certificate and the social security card, you go down to the Secretary of State office and say, ‘I’m here to apply for a driver’s license, please.’”

He’d finished the last part of the statement with his ridiculously good Midwestern twang. I frowned. “Don’t do that.”

“What?” He half lifted his arm.

“The voice. I like your accent.”

Nathan looked at me as if he’d never seen me before. His eyes searched my face but provided me no clue to what was going on in his head.

“In the bookstore tonight…if I had kissed you, would you have let me?” His voice sounded deeper than usual and rough from the alcohol.

My mouth went dry. I had some more Scotch, but it didn’t help. “I don’t know.”

“Would you let me now?”

A feeble noise escaped my throat.

He took it as a protest. “No expectations. Just a kiss.”

I nodded.

His lips were soft but cold. He brushed them lightly over mine, and butterflies the size of B-52s took up residence under my rib cage. I closed my eyes. I felt dizzy, either from the Scotch or the scent of Nathan that surrounded me. Probably both.

I opened my mouth under his. The tip of his tongue slipped past my lips, and I put my arms around him, one hand resting against the soft hair at the back of his neck. Excitement tickled my stomach every time I inhaled.

Without warning, Nathan pulled away. I opened my eyes in time to see him slump sideways and fall to the floor.

Dahlia glanced over his motionless body with a surprised expression that gave way to a satisfied smile. She shrugged her round shoulders. “Just as good, I guess.”

Before I could ask her what she meant, she clapped her hands and disappeared.

Eight

A Bargain

I knelt beside Nathan’s unconscious body and rolled him onto his back. He was breathing, but just barely.

“Open your eyes!” I shouted into his face. I hoped whatever Dahlia had done was only temporary. “Nathan, open your damn eyes!” His eyelids opened a fraction and a slow smile formed on his lips. I sighed in relief.

“Marianne?” he whispered. His eyes closed again and his body went limp. As if someone had flicked a switch, my relief turned to immediate dread. I called his name again, but he didn’t respond.

Looking frantically around the room, I spotted the cell phone on the table. Ziggy.

My hands shook as I punched up the speed dial. Ziggy’s number was the only one listed. Once the call was sent, all I could do was wait.

I’d never felt so helpless in my entire life. I tried to summon the impartiality and calm I’d had when working on a patient, but I couldn’t. Not when the patient in question was someone I knew.

I sat by Nathan’s side, unable to offer anything but my presence. Was he still breathing? Did he look a little blue in the face? I was checking his pulse rate against the cell phone’s clock when Ziggy’s call came through.

“What?” was the unceremonious greeting I got when I pushed the connect button.

“It’s Carrie. I’m at your place.” I glanced down at the unconscious body beside me, not sure how to deliver the bad news. “Listen, where are you?”

“Just about to leave the hospital. It’s a good thing I wasn’t mortally wounded. I could have died six times before they bothered to help me. What do you need?”

“Nathan’s hurt.” I figured saying it really fast, like ripping off a Band-Aid, would make it easier. “Dahlia sort of poofed in here and zapped him, then poofed out again.”

“Shit!” He was so loud I had to hold the phone away from my ear.

I could only imagine the looks he was getting as he stood in the E.R. lobby swearing at the top of his lungs. “Calm down. Can you get here, fast?”

There was no answer but a dial tone. I swore and tossed the phone across the floor. If he’d stayed on the line he might have been able to tell me how to help Nathan. Now all I could do was wait for him. Again.

I didn’t want to just sit there and watch Nathan die, but it appeared I had little choice. His breaths grew more shallow, and his chest jerked with every inhalation. I hadn’t been paying much attention to my own breathing, but it suddenly seemed stifled. In fact, the air in the little apartment had become hazy.

With smoke.

“What is it with her and fire?” I wheezed. Jumping to my feet, I grabbed Nathan from under his arms and struggled to drag him. Nathan hadn’t included lack of oxygen as a potential cause of undead fatality, so I assumed smoke inhalation wouldn’t kill us, either. But even with increased vampire strength, I had no hope of getting him down the stairs if I couldn’t breathe. At least, not without dropping him and breaking his neck in the process.

I searched for an escape from the acrid smoke and I finally decided on the bathroom. The tiny, windowless room had an exhaust fan, so I flipped the switch and wet a towel to shove under the crack in the door. It kept the smoke out, but unless Ziggy hurried, Nathan and I would burn to death.

No sooner than the thought crossed my mind, I heard the front door slam open.

“We’re in here!” I called, realizing too late that the heavy footsteps clomping toward the door could belong to a fireman and not Ziggy. Though I wouldn’t turn down the help, I couldn’t come up with a convincing enough lie to keep Nathan out of an ambulance. If he lived to make it to the hospital, I doubted they’d be able to help him. He’d wind up in the morgue like John Doe had, only more dead.

Luckily, it was Ziggy who called through the door, already choking on the smoke. “Are you guys, uh, decent in there?”

“Of course,” I snapped. “He’s unconscious.”

Ziggy pushed the door open, coughing. He pulled the collar of his T-shirt over his nose. “That fucking pyromaniac bitch set the bookshop on fire. I beat the trucks here, but they’re coming. We need to get him out.”

“It’s only a couple hours till dawn. Where are we gonna go?”

Ziggy stooped and lifted Nathan by the arms. “My van. Get his legs.”

I complied, and we shuffled toward the door, Nathan hanging between us like a jump rope.

Ziggy hacked against his shoulder. “This reminds me of the scene in Return of the Jedi where the Ewoks take Han and Luke and Chewie prisoner and tie them to those big sticks.”

“Conserve your oxygen. I can’t carry you both out.”

The night air had turned freezing. The phrase “too cold to snow” sprung to mind. I slid on the sidewalk and collided painfully with the brick wall of the building. Ziggy eased Nathan to the ground and opened the back of the van.

I peered over the iron railing to look down at the bookstore. The glass in the door had been broken, and foul-smelling smoke poured out. My mind raced with thoughts of the building burning to the ground and where we’d go to wait out daylight. We didn’t have time to gather Nathan’s things. His goldfish. His wedding picture.

I thought of how Nathan had rescued my diploma and the photo of my parents from my burning apartment. Those were still upstairs, too. But the sirens of approaching fire engines squashed any notion of knickknack heroism.

“Get him in the back,” Ziggy urged, picking Nathan up by the shoulders. With a count of three, we swung him into the van and slammed the door.

“Click it or ticket,” Ziggy reminded me, pointing to the seat belt as I climbed into the passenger seat.

As the fire trucks rounded the block, he started the engine and guided the van down the street at an inconspicuous pace.

“What did she do to him?” he asked, jerking his thumb toward the heavy tarp curtain that sectioned off the back of the van.

“I don’t know. He just fell over. Bam.” I threw my hands up in despair.

“I don’t get it.” Ziggy eyed me suspiciously. “Dahlia showing up in his living room isn’t the kind of thing Nate would miss.”

I shifted in my seat. “He was preoccupied.”

“Ah.” He at least had the courtesy not to reach back and high-five Nathan’s motionless hand.

“So what do we do now?” I asked, looking fearfully at the lightening sky. “Can we fix him?”

“Not if we don’t know what it is she did to him.” He kept his eyes on the road. “Do you know where to find Dahlia?”

I did. Behind the divider, Nathan moaned in pain. I closed my eyes. “Turn right at the next light.”

I found my way back to Cyrus’s mansion with little trouble. The wrought-iron gate was shut. “Let me out here.”

“Does the guy I think lives here live here?” Ziggy asked as he put the van in Park. “You want me to wait?”

I pushed the heavy door open and stepped onto the curb. “Yeah. If I’m not back before sunup, get someplace safe.”

“Why, it’s not like he can come out and get me or anything.”

Casting my gaze up the lawn, I saw five of Cyrus’s bodyguards filing out the door. “No, but he’s got those guys.”

“Holy shit.” Ziggy’s jaw dropped as he watched them through the driver’s-side window. “You’re not really going up there, are you?”

“I have to,” I said, sounding braver than I felt. As I turned away from the van, the strangest urge came over me to look at Nathan one more time. I forced it away.

Here goes nothing. I kicked the iron gate open and headed up the driveway. The guards didn’t move, letting me come to them. But once I got near enough, I was ready.

Two of the goons came toward me with arms outstretched. I stood still until they got close enough to seize me.

I didn’t think. I just moved.

Lunging forward, I drove the heel of my right hand as hard as I could into the first guard’s nose. There was a sickening crunch sound followed by a rush of blood that cascaded down his lips as he doubled over. While he clutched his face, I brought my knee up forcefully into his crotch. He howled in agony and fell to the ground.

The second one tried to grab me from behind. His hands closed on my arms and I flipped him forward, over my head. Then I twisted his arms in opposite directions until I heard bones snap.

I had no time to regroup before the third guard came at me. I dropped down and swung my leg in a wide arc, sweeping his feet from beneath him. As soon as he stumbled to the grass, I wrung his leg and popped the knee out of joint.

The other two guards stood frozen in shock. The scent of blood from the first guard’s injuries stung my nostrils. My face shifted and I snarled at them.

“Either come down here so I can kill you, or go get Cyrus!”

But my request proved unnecessary. Cyrus stepped from the doorway, clapping his hands.

“Wonderful,” he said like a proud parent. “A little predictable. Not enough blood, but overall a fine debut. I can’t wait to see what kind of a killer you’ll become.” He motioned to the two uninjured bodyguards, then to the three who lay groaning on the lawn. Two more came out and helped the injured back inside.

“I hate to disappoint you, but I’m not here for an evaluation,” I said, my features morphing back to normal. “I’m looking for Dahlia.”

“I thought I’d see you again tonight. Please, come in.” He gestured to the door and I followed him cautiously.

The foyer was pitch-black. The only guide I had was the soft slap of his bare feet hitting the marble floor.

I felt empowered by the battle outside, and weird fantasies of carnage ran through my head. I realized that if I made my move now, I could kill Cyrus before he knew what was happening. I took a few silent steps closer.

“I wouldn’t do that if I were you.”

His words jarred me. “Do what?”

His laughter filled the darkness and sent a chill up my spine. “You’ve just gravely injured three of my employees. I’m sure you think you’re a real hero, but they were human. Fighting a vampire is another thing entirely, and I can assure you I’d come out on top.” He turned, and though there was no discernible light source in the room, his eyes glittered. “But I can promise you, you’d enjoy it.”

Moron. Of course he’d heard my thoughts through the blood tie. As charged up as I was, he probably sensed my adrenaline from across town.

I heard the clank of metal on metal and the scrape of a door as it opened. Light spilled through the wide double doors and we entered what appeared to be a study.

A fire burned in the massive stone fireplace and a Persian carpet dominated the floor. Cyrus moved around the room and lit a pair of Tiffany lamps with a pull of their chains.

“Very art deco.”

He smiled. “I’m glad you like it. Please, sit down.”

I sank into the leather couch in front of the fire. “I didn’t say I liked it.”

He laughed and sat next to me. Too close. He put one arm companionably around my shoulder and stroked my neck with his long fingernails, tracing my scar. My pulse quickened, but not from fear.

Get it together, Carrie. You managed to resist him before. Stay focused.

“Don’t you love this carpet?” he asked, pointing to the ornate rug beneath us. “When they weave these, they always put one intentional mistake in. Do you know why?”

I didn’t answer.

“Because only Allah can make perfection.” He sighed softly. “I’ve studied this one over and over, and I’ve never been able to find the imperfection.”

“What’s your point?”

“The rug reminds me of you. You would be perfect, were it not for one minor flaw.” He tickled my ear with a long talon and I shivered.

“What’s that?” I asked.

He leaned in, his icy breath hissing in my ear. “Your humanity.”

Drawing back, he tented his fingers in front of his chest. “Have you given any more thought to my offer?”

“I have.” I wasn’t lying.

“And?”

“And I’m still undecided. But I’m not going to give up my humanity, even if I choose you.”

“Why not?”

“Because it’s wrong. Killing for pleasure is wrong.” I fixed him with a cold stare. “I heard what you did to that little girl.”

“Which one?” He winked at me. “I wonder, have you even bothered to seek out others of our kind to ask them what they think of your idealistic Movement? There’s a war coming. Do you honestly think you’re on the winning side?”

“I’m not going to be on the side that gets off on murder. That’s all that matters to me.”

His face became solemn. “Carrie, you’re making yourself a martyr when I could make you a queen.”

His distress seemed real. The look in his eyes was enough to make me promise I would reconsider. I wiped a bloody tear from his cheek and a smile touched his lips.

“Stay with me, Carrie,” he whispered against my palm.

I quickly moved my hand away from his face. My fingers burned from our contact, and I shuddered with rage. “I’m here for Dahlia.”

“What on earth would you want with Dahlia? Aside from that deplorable fire incident, for which she’s been thoroughly punished, anything she’s done, she’s done under my orders. If you want to punish someone, then by all means, punish me.” A wicked grin lit his face.

I didn’t give him the pleasure of a reaction. “You sent Dahlia to kill me?”

Rage contorted his face. “What?”

“I’m sorry, did I stutter? She tried to kill me. And I don’t appreciate it.”

His frown deepened, this time in confusion. “If she’d tried to kill you, you’d be dead by now. She’s very good at what she does.”

“Well, she missed.” I stood and crossed to the floor-length windows. The curtains were not yet drawn, so he wasn’t concerned about daylight any time soon. I’d never actually watched a sunrise, so I had no idea how long they took. Or, more important, at what point it would kill me. I’ve got to get back to Nathan.

“Ah, you’ve met Mr.—what is he going by these days? Grant?”

I silently cursed myself. I hadn’t meant to think of him in Cyrus’s presence.

There was no point in lying. “Yes.”

“And I presume he’s told you about our past…involvement?” Cyrus fought to control his anger as he spoke, but I still felt it through the blood tie. “No wonder you’re on this…pro-human bent.”

I held firm, despite the volatile emotions invading my mind. “He told me he was sent to execute you. He told me you have the same blood.”

“We do. I didn’t sire him, but I was there when my sire turned him. We’re hardly on brotherly terms now.” Cyrus stood and paced the room. “So Nolen is dead, is he? I’m glad to hear it, even if I didn’t do it myself.”

Nolen? “He’s not dead. But I need Dahlia to reverse whatever she did to him.”

Cyrus laughed as though I’d told a clever joke. He pulled two cigars out of a mahogany humidor and offered one to me. I refused. “I want him dead, Carrie. Why on earth would I help him?”

“Because it’s the right thing to do.” My reply sounded embarrassingly weak to my ears.

“But, Carrie, didn’t you just accuse me of killing for pleasure?” He lit the cigar and took a few puffs.

I tried not to gag as the sickly sweet smoke assailed my nostrils. “Change my opinion. Give me Dahlia.”

He moved toward me. I sensed what he was about to do and braced myself.

He reached out too fast for me to step aside, his cigar dropping to the expensive carpet. One arm wound around my waist and brought me up tight against his chest. He pulled my hair, jerking my head back sharply.

“I want to make something clear so we don’t have any further misunderstandings. I don’t care what your opinion of me is. At the end of the day, it’s still my blood in your veins. I own you.”

“No!” My instincts told me to get free, but I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of knowing I feared him.

He leaned forward, nuzzling my throat with his lips. The cigar still burned at our feet. It gave me something to focus on besides the feeling of his tongue against my skin.

“Your carpet is going to catch fire.”

I stepped back, and to my surprise, he let me go. I didn’t know if I’d have had the will to fight him. Without even looking at it, he ground out the cigar with the ball of his bare foot.

Swallowing hard, I looked him in the eye. “If you let Nathan die, the Movement will send someone else, someone stronger. They’ll hunt you down like a dog. And I don’t want that to happen.”

“Don’t you?” A menacing joy spread across his face. It did nothing to calm my nerves.

“No, I don’t.” My mouth went suddenly dry at the realization I meant what I said. “You’re my sire.”

He shrugged as if it were out of his hands. “Well, we can’t have Nolen coming after me. You saw what he managed the last time. And I don’t like fighting. It’s ungentlemanly. Can you think of anything that could entice me to take such an ugly risk?”

Of course I could. I just didn’t want to offer it to him. “Just say it, Cyrus.”

He closed his eyes as if savoring a delicious meal. “I love the sound of my name on your lips. It’s like music.”

“I don’t have time for this, just say it!” My vehemence startled me.

He clucked his tongue. “You have no appreciation for the dramatic. Fine. Promise you’ll return to me, to stay, and I will help your precious ‘Nathan.’”

I stuck out my hand in an attempt to appear confident. Instead of shaking it, he drew my fingers to his mouth and kissed the tip of each one. He might as well have set my hand on fire, for the scorching feeling that raced down my arm.

“Then it’s settled.” He strode to the doors and threw them open. “Dahlia!” His enraged call echoed through the dark foyer. Within moments, the room beyond the door flooded with light.

“You wanted me?” I heard her purr over the click of shoes on the marble floor. Then she screamed.

His hand tightly gripping her red curls, Cyrus yanked Dahlia into the room. She was dressed much the same as she had been the night I’d met her, in a tight black shirt and long skirt. The only difference I saw now was an abundance of jewelry, rings and necklaces all bearing silver pentagrams. Cyrus threw her to the floor, and she scrambled away as he kicked at her.

Normally I would have turned my head from such violence, but it was hard to feel pity for her after what she’d done. Especially since she’d intended to kill me.

She didn’t beg for mercy when he grabbed her again and pulled her head back, exposing her throat. His face changed and he bared his fangs.

Dahlia didn’t recoil, but I did. That face summoned the memory of glass piercing my skull, the slippery pools of human organs under my knees, and the sensation of being powerless in the grasp of a killer. I covered my mouth to stifle a gasp.

Cyrus’s eyes flickered over my face for an instant. His grotesque face actually registered some emotion then, and I thought it was regret. He didn’t like that he’d scared me.

He dropped Dahlia and let his features shift back to normal. “You tried to kill her!”

Now she did whimper, as though she knew her lies would prove useless. “I’m sorry.”

“You’re sorry? You’re lucky this turned out so well for me, you sniveling bitch. Else I’d hand you over to the Fangs when they arrive.” He stalked a circle around her as he spoke.

“No!” She reached for him, clinging to his leg. “I killed that bookstore guy for you! You should be happy.”

He pulled away from her grasp as if he’d been touched by a leper. “You’re not allowed to kill whenever you please! How can you expect me to turn you when you have no self-control?”

Her face paled. “What do you want me to do? I’ll do whatever I have to. Just tell me what you want me to do!”

Cyrus rocked back on his heels, feigning consideration. “If there was a way to reverse what you did to him, what would it take?”

“An antidote,” she said as she wiped her nose on her sleeve.

“And where would I find this antidote?” he asked patiently.

Tears shone on her face. “In my room.”

“Why don’t you go and get it, then?” He dismissed her as easily as telling a child to run along and play.

“Thank you,” I whispered when she had gone.

“This is not a gift, Carrie. Don’t mistake it as such.”

“It’s not a gift, but it’s the decent thing to do. Even if you are being paid for it.” I glared at him, hoping to make him feel the true weight of my words.

He crossed to me and cupped my cheek in his palm. “Poor little girl. Is the Big Bad Wolf taking advantage of you?”

I tried to turn my face away, but he grasped my chin and forced my lips to his. I opened my mouth beneath his, my blood both searing hot and prickling cold as it coursed through my veins. His excitement fed my own. His sharp claws raked my back through my shirt, tracing the column of my spine. I couldn’t get enough of his tongue against mine, his breath against my lips.

He drew away, leaving me panting and flushed while he was as unaffected as someone who’d just received a dental exam. But when he lifted his hand to brush back a strand of his long, nearly white hair, his hands shook. “Believe that all you want, Carrie. But when you needed help, you didn’t call the Movement first. I wasn’t a last resort. I was a choice.”

My body shook with the violence of the truth.

We glared at each other in antagonistic silence until Dahlia entered. She cleared her throat at the doorway and shot me a murderous glance. “I’ve got your fucking antidote.” Cyrus reached out a hand to take the vial from her and she practically threw it at him. He pressed a kiss to her cheek and turned away. “Now, be a good girl and move your things to one of the servant’s rooms. Carrie will need the guest suite.”

I expected an outburst, but all she did was watch Cyrus. The full realization of his words—that I was usurping her place—hadn’t yet dawned on her. I didn’t want to be around when she made the connection.

Returning to my side, Cyrus slipped the vial into the palm of my hand. I stared hard at it. This was the price of my freedom. I could smash it on the floor and never have to come back.

“But you won’t.” He arched a knowing brow at my thought. “Your word means too much. You’ll take this to Nolen, see him safely recovered and return to me tomorrow night after sunset.”

“How do I know this won’t do him more harm?” I called to Dahlia. I don’t think she even saw me, though she looked right at me.

Cyrus drew my attention back. “It won’t. She knows what will happen if she’s lied.”

She broke then, her back shaking with muted sobs as she covered her face with one hand. I’d never seen anyone cry so gracefully, and I’d seen plenty of tears in my life. But Cyrus didn’t seem to notice. He kissed my forehead and gave me a push toward the door. “Go now, the sun will be up soon.”

He didn’t follow me. I hesitated as I passed Dahlia. I don’t know if I meant to offer comfort or rub salt in her wounds, but when she looked up with hate-filled eyes, I kept walking.

The foyer blazed with light as bulbs crackled and shattered with the force of Dahlia’s anger.

“Sunset,” Cyrus called after me. “Don’t make me come get you.”

Nine

Antidote

I left the house as a shower of sparks exploded from the electric fixtures in the foyer. This time, I did run down the lawn, but only to buy us a little time. With no knowledge of how Nathan would react to the antidote, I wanted to get him to a safe place before it took effect.

Ziggy had left the driver’s seat, presumably to tend to Nathan. I pounded on the back doors and stepped away as they flew open. Ziggy crouched over Nathan’s body, a wooden stake aimed straight for my heart.

When he recognized me, he dropped the weapon. “Sorry. Can’t be too careful.”

“It’s all right,” I grunted, pulling the doors closed behind me as I climbed into the van. “How is he?”

“Alive, but that’s not saying much. What’d you find out?”

I showed him the antidote, which gleamed a muddy blue in the glass vial. “Drive. I’ll pour it down his throat, and hopefully it won’t kick in until we’re back at the apartment.”

“What do you mean?” Ziggy pulled the canvas partition back and slid behind the wheel.

“Because I have no idea what it’s going to do to him.”

As the engine sputtered to life, I carefully made my way to Nathan’s head. The van lurched away from the curb, tossing me flat across his chest.

The contact was sudden and startling. Even unconscious, with no blood tie connecting us, I was still attracted to him. Despite the fact he’d lied about his identity. Or that he didn’t tell me he was vampiricly related to my sire. I reminded myself of what I’d sacrificed for this favor.

I opened the vial and poured the contents into his half-open mouth. I hope it tastes terrible, I thought with a petulant frown. Then I rocked back on my heels and waited. Why had I done this? When I’d set out to help him, I’d felt I’d been doing it for a friend. And when I found I barely knew him after all, I still plowed on ahead.

I didn’t want to acknowledge the fact that Cyrus might have been right. Nathan’s—or Nolen’s—predicament could have been handled by the Movement, but my first instinct had been to run to my sire.

I knelt over Nathan and felt for a pulse. Nothing. No breath. No reflexes.

Defeated, I lay down next to him, out of necessity more than familiarity. My body ached with fatigue. My emotions were a mess. The one person I’d thought I was safe with, well, not safe exactly, but safer, wasn’t who I’d believed him to be. That he was dead was icing on the worst cake in history. Tears rolled down my cheeks as I tried to cry without Ziggy hearing me.

Then, like a miracle, Nathan groaned and mumbled something that sounded like “get off” as he swatted at me. He gagged and choked, sputtering a little of the antidote over the front of his shirt. But he’d swallowed enough. He was alive.

I sat up in shock. “I thought you were dead!”

“I wish I were,” he said when he could finally speak. He rose on his elbows and clutched his head. “What happened?”

“We were…” I paused. “Um, what’s the last thing you remember?”

His answering grin made my face grow hot.

“Well, you just suddenly sort of passed out.”

He rubbed his temples. “Why would I go and do something stupid like that?”

“You didn’t. Dahlia did.”

He flopped back onto the goldenrod shag carpeting and closed his eyes. “We’re in the van?”

“Yeah, we had to get you out of the building. It was kind of…” I trailed off as I tried to tell him his livelihood was gone.

“On fucking fire!” Ziggy supplied from the front seat. “Oh, man, am I glad you’re awake.”

An angry car horn pulled his attention back to the road as the van swerved violently. I sunk my fingers into the dirty carpet. It was the only thing to hold on to.

“Ziggy! Eyes on the road!” Nathan commanded, though his voice was still a little weak. He turned back to me. “The building is gone?”

I shifted uneasily. “Maybe not. The fire trucks were showing up just as we left.”

“Great. Just great.” He covered his face with his hands, and I saw the hard muscles of his stomach shake beneath his T-shirt. I really hoped he wasn’t crying. But in the next instant, delirious laughter poured out of him.

“What’s so funny?” He was taking this far too well.

“Nothing, nothing.” He rubbed his hands down his cheeks, stretching the stubble-dusted skin. “You know, up until about a month ago, things were completely normal in my life. All it takes is one fax from the Movement, and I’m knee-deep in chaos again.” Nathan sighed. “So, Dahlia attacked me. She’s never done that before.”

“She was trying to do Cyrus a favor,” I told him.

“Okay, folks,” Ziggy called as the van squealed to a halt. “The sun is just below the tree line. I suggest you run like hell.”

Within seconds, the back doors burst open. The dim morning light stung my eyes. Nathan recoiled.

“Take the keys!” Ziggy shouted.

I grabbed them and jumped out.

To my monumental relief, the building still stood. The flames had been extinguished, and soot covered the firemen that milled around their truck. Two police cars with whirling lights blocked off the sidewalk. It looked as if the bookstore took the extent of the damage.

A young, cocky-looking police officer swaggered over when he caught sight of us. “Getting in a little late, are we?”

Before I could respond, Ziggy stepped from the rear of the van, Nathan leaning heavily on his shoulder. “Whoo, we need to get him upstairs before he ralphs again. Oh, my God…what happened to the bookstore? We live right upstairs.”

As I watched, Nathan lolled his head to the side like a passed-out drunk. The cop scowled at him. “There was a fire but we were able to put it out. Is your friend there gonna be okay?”

He’d aimed the question at me. Too tired to think of a lie, I opened and closed my mouth and made a few vague noises. Ziggy’s urging stare burned into the back of my skull. It must have transmitted some connection in my brain so I could speak again, because words began to pour from me. “He’ll be fine. I should know. I’m a doctor.”

“O…kay.” The officer reached into his coat pocket and withdrew a notepad. Apparently I wasn’t going anywhere for a while. “I need to ask some questions.”

The skin on the back of my neck began to blister from the sunlight. I heard Nathan do a bad impression of someone about to throw up. I turned, and Ziggy gave Nathan a shove, propelling him toward me.

“It’s your turn to deal with the puke this time. I’ll stay and talk to the officer. If he needs to ask you anything else, I’ll bring him upstairs.” Ziggy flashed a big grin at the policeman. “If that’s okay with you?”

Nathan wretched again, this time more convincingly, and the cop moved back. “Yeah, get him out of here before I have to cite him for drunk-and-disorderly conduct. It’s safe to go up. The fire marshall has cleared the building of any structural damage, and the apartment has been cleared, too.”

With Nathan hanging awkwardly on my shoulder, we hurried for the door. As soon as it was closed, Nathan rushed up the stairs and headed straight for the bathroom.

Apparently he was a method actor.

“Holy hell,” I said with a whistle as he clutched the toilet bowl and vomited. I pulled a hand towel off the rack and wetted it under the faucet. “That’s a lot of puke.”

I knelt beside him and held the compress to his forehead, putting one arm around his quivering back. “Don’t fight it.”

“You should have been a nurse instead of a doctor,” he wheezed. His body trembled with the chills that inevitably follow vomiting. “Or a mom.”

I laughed out loud. “Yeah. I’m not sure that was in the cards for me.”

“Didn’t you want to have kids?”

This didn’t sound as accusatory as it might have coming from someone else, like someone who was pushing a stroller at the time for instance. I’d always been the woman explaining why she had no desire to have children. I was about to tell him this, when he spoke again.

“It’s a moot point, anyway, since you can’t now.”

An icy pain knifed through my chest, stealing my breath. I stood and leaned against the sink. “What?”

His face went even greener, if that were possible, but I knew it had nothing to do with the potion. “I’m so sorry. I assumed you knew.”

“No, I didn’t. It’s just…it’s okay.” I waved a hand in the air, hoping to look blasé. “I hadn’t really thought about it. I never planned on being a mom. I probably wouldn’t have been very good at it.”

But now that the choice was taken away from me, I grieved for the loss of the possibility. You’re being ridiculous, Carrie.

“I think you would have been a great mother.” His words sounded pained, but it could have just been from the violent nausea.

“Yeah, well. Tell that to my last boyfriend.”

Nathan sat back against the wall for support. Sweat beaded on his skin, but he didn’t look as gray as he had moments before. His eyes searched my face. “Why do you say that?”

Turning to rewet the cloth, I shrugged. I shouldn’t have mentioned Eric. Even though we’d broken up nine months before, the wound was suddenly incredibly raw.

To my surprise, I started blabbing the whole stupid story. “Because he dumped me for not being a good-enough mom for his hypothetical children.” Despite the painful truth of it, I could still manage a chuckle. “Basically, he seemed to be under the impression that when we graduated from med school, I was going to stay home and bake cookies or something while he had the career. He decided he was going to buy a house near Boston, I told him I was coming here for my internship, and he gave me an ultimatum. When I told him my decision, that I was going to go through with my internship, he said it was for the better. He wanted children, and he couldn’t imagine me being a good mother. So that was it.”

I’d been looking at my hands, the shower curtain, the towel rack, anything to avoid the sight of Nathan’s face. But he stayed silent too long, and my eyes were drawn to his.

He didn’t look away. “He’s an idiot.” Nathan said the words as though he actually believed them. And his eyes showed the truth of it.

I’d forgotten what it was like to feel valued by another person. It was nice, even if I didn’t quite understand what had prompted such an emotional reaction from Nathan. Still, it was a feeling I wasn’t used to. I cleared my throat. “Did you ever want kids?”

He didn’t answer right away. When he did, his response was carefully measured, as if he’d calculated how much to tell without giving anything away. “Yes, I did. Having children of my own wasn’t in the cards for me, either.”

“I’m sorry,” I whispered. Behind his mask of forced cheerfulness, his eyes were hollow and tired, and the agony I saw in them caused my heart to ache.

As quickly as I’d glimpsed his inner sadness, it disappeared behind Nathan’s granite wall of self-control. “Don’t feel sorry for me. I have Ziggy. I always did want a son.”

It was the first time he’d acknowledged his true feelings for the kid. The look on Nathan’s face told me he wasn’t used to revealing so much. The angry panic that flashed across his features in the next instant told me exactly why. I recognized the expression because I’d seen it staring back at me from my own reflection too often to count.

Nathan truly believed that if he cared about something, it would eventually be taken from him.

I turned away. Unfortunately, I looked right into the vomit-splashed toilet bowl. “If I didn’t know you were a vampire, I’d say you had an upper G.I. bleed. But I’m going to assume that was your dinner.”

Nathan stood, still a bit wobbly, and rinsed his mouth under the tap before answering. “Tasted fine on the way down. Usually stale blood tastes like nail polish remover.”

“You’re familiar with nail polish remover? Did they have that in the thirties?” I dropped the toilet lid and flushed. I wasn’t going to tell him about the antidote, or how I’d gotten it.

“Of course they did. And I had a girlfriend in the eighties. It was about twenty years ago, but you don’t forget that chemical stench,” he asserted, suddenly defensive.

“That still doesn’t explain how you know what it tastes like. But I think you’re right, you must have gotten sick from the blood. Wait about half an hour before you drink anything else, to make sure you don’t barf it all up again.”

Nathan laughed. “Barf? Is that a technical term?” He eyed himself in the mirror, and before I knew what he was doing, whipped his T-shirt over his head. “What did she hit me with?”

“A spell, or something.” I knew I should be examining him with a clinical eye, but it was hard to do that when he was so…half-naked. My fingers flexed, itching to touch the chiseled ridges of his chest. I cleared my throat and looked away. “I guess.”

“Whatever it was, it didn’t leave a mark.” He turned his head and twisted his shoulders to examine his back in the mirror, and my mouth went dry as the muscles of his torso moved beneath his skin.

In the living room, the apartment door opened and slammed shut, followed by the heavy fall of combat boots against the floor. “You guys aren’t doing it, are you?”

Nathan gave an exasperated sigh. “Ziggy, manners!”

The young man appeared in the doorway, dark circles around his eyes. “I’m supposed to give you this.” He handed Nathan a card with a police-shield emblem printed beside a name and phone number. “The cop said the books and merchandise are trashed. And they want the owner of the building to get in touch with them because they can’t seem to locate him.”

“The owner?” I looked from Ziggy to Nathan. “I guess I thought you owned the building.”

“I do.” Nathan slipped the card into his jeans pocket. “I’ll call them later.”

Ziggy let out a huge yawn. “I’m going to bed. I’ve got a big test tomorrow and I don’t want to be involved in any other vampire shit today, got it?”

“Got it,” Nathan replied with a smirk. “But I’m gonna need your help in the shop later tonight to find what we can salvage.”

“Can do.” Ziggy shot me a sharp and knowing look. “You feeling okay now, Nate?”

“Yeah, I must have grabbed a stale bag, gotten a little food poisoning.”

His expression hard, Ziggy stared at me. “Yeah, that must be it. I mean, it couldn’t have been anything else.”

But he didn’t mention the trip to Cyrus’s place. I hoped he’d have the sense not to say anything. When I left, he’d believe I’d gone of my own accord. I would make him believe it.

Ziggy bade us good-night and retreated to his room. As soon as his door closed, loud rock music blasted away.

“When he gets moody like this, I just leave him alone.” Nathan yawned and strolled into his bedroom. I followed him, not sure why. His upper-torso nakedness probably had something to do with it as he moved like an R-rated pied piper.

He opened his dresser and pulled out a T-shirt. Gray, like his eyes, I thought as I watched him pull it over his head. No. I didn’t need to remember his eyes, or any other part of him for that matter.

Except for his beating heart. I could take some solace in the fact I’d added another saved life to my tally.

I tried not to think of the price that would cost me. “Nathan, who’s Nolen Galbraith?”

He ran a hand through his hair, smoothing strands that had gotten mussed from the shirt. “That would be me. Actually, I should say that used to be me. Where did you hear that name?”

“It was on the fax from the Movement. And it’s what Cyrus called you.” I placed my hands on my hips. “He said he didn’t sire you.”

Giving me a crooked smile, he sat on the end of the bed. “Why all the questions?”

Because I just traded my life for yours. “You told me your name was Nathan Grant, and you told me Cyrus was your sire. Why did you lie?”

“I didn’t lie.” He reached into his back pocket and removed his wallet. “Look.”

His driver’s license, besides having a criminally unfair good picture, bore the name Nathan Grant.

“I have to change my identity every couple of decades, remember? I like to think I can pass for forty before I have to move again.” He took his wallet back and tossed it on the dresser.

I shook my head in frustration. “But what about Cyrus? You said the same blood in my veins flows through yours. But he said he didn’t sire you.”

“He didn’t. Our blood is connected because the same vampire who sired Cyrus sired me.” Nathan cleared his throat. “I don’t normally talk about it.”

“Well, make an exception,” I snapped, and instantly regretted it. “I’m sorry. I’m just really tired, and all of this still freaks me out. Does it ever get any less weird?”

He smiled. “It hasn’t for me, so far. Maybe you’ll get lucky.” He must have realized he’d made the wrong word choice at the same time I did because an awkward silence lingered between us as we both tried not to look at the bed.

He stretched his arm behind his head and yawned to avoid eye contact. “Hey, about earlier tonight, when we—”

“Forget it,” I said quickly. I knew I would. There was no reason to hang on to the memory when we’d be enemies this time tomorrow.

I thought I saw disappointment in his eyes, but he shook it off with a contrived laugh. “Yeah, that’s probably for the best. We were just caught up in the moment and things got out of hand.”

“Absolutely,” I agreed. “It’s a total nonissue.”

“Well, then, I guess I’m going to go look over my insurance papers for the shop. Did you want to watch TV or something?”

“No, I’m actually pretty tired.” I looked at the bed. “Do you want me to take the couch tonight?”

He pointed a finger at me. “Today, Carrie. Get on vampire time. But no, I’ll be up for a while and I don’t want to disturb you. We can work out better sleeping arrangements tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow,” I said, suddenly numb.

With a look of concern on his face, he reached out and gave my arm a squeeze. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah, I’m fine. I’m just tired.” It wasn’t a lie. But when we said our good-nights and he left me alone in his bedroom, I couldn’t fall asleep. Instead, I looked around the room for a pen and paper. On the floor, between the bed and the wall, I found a sketchbook with a drawing pencil tucked into the coiled binding. It would do.

I flipped open the cover and paused. An incredibly beautiful, almost photographic-looking drawing of a sleeping child took up the first page. In the margin, in distinctly masculine handwriting that sharply contrasted the skilled lines of the drawing, was written, Ziggy, age eleven.

Turning the pages, I found a succession of similar drawings. They were mostly of Ziggy at various stages of his teen years, sleeping. From what little I knew of Ziggy, I realized the only time he’d hold still long enough to be sketched would be while he was unconscious. The few portraits of Ziggy awake were accompanied by photos paper-clipped to them. I flipped to the last pages, hoping to find some blank sheets. The final drawing froze my blood in my veins.

It was like looking at a photograph of the night we’d first met. He’d obviously drawn it from memory, as the coat I’d worn ended at the hips, not the knees, and my hair had been up, not curling softly around my shoulders. But it was unmistakably me.

I was flattered, but I couldn’t help but wonder what kind of freak spent time in moony daydreams about someone they’d known for less than two weeks.

But then again, what kind of freak trades their freedom for the life of someone they’ve known for less than two weeks?

Trembling, I pulled the page free from the binding and folded it small enough to fit into the back pocket of my jeans. Something to remember him by, I supposed. Then I tore out a blank piece and started writing.

The first letter I wrote was easier than I expected. My resignation from the hospital was simple, professional and, as it was handwritten in pencil on notebook paper, probably the last nail in the coffin of my medical career.

But it really wouldn’t matter. Nathan was right. Eventually, people would notice I didn’t age. Unlike Nathan, there was no way I’d ever pass for forty. Judging from how often I’ve been carded buying beer, I could barely pass for twenty-one. I’d have to redo college and medical school every ten years just to keep being a doctor. It would be like hell, only worse.

I’d slip that letter under the door of Dr. Fuller’s office before I arrived at Cyrus’s house tomorrow night.

I took out another sheet and began the more difficult farewell.

Nathan,

I’m not going to pretend we’ll ever see each other again, at least not on friendly terms. I’ve decided that the best place for me is with my sire. Please know that while I wish you only the best, I understand you have a job to do for the Movement. I won’t take it personally if you try to follow that assignment through, but be aware that I will fight you with my last breath. No one has the power to decide whether I live or die. If you ever felt the slightest friendship toward me, you’ll forget I ever existed.

Carrie

Ten

Sunset

A s much as I tried to ignore what I was about to do, I couldn’t quiet my mind enough to sleep. Instead, I consolidated my clothes into a shopping bag and waited, staring at Nathan’s alarm clock like a death row inmate. Soon, my time would be up.

For a while, I listened to Nathan puttering around in the living room. Though he’d claimed to be set on an evening of reviewing insurance forms and serious concentration, all I heard was the popping of microwave popcorn and Led Zeppelin. He listened to Houses of the Holy twice before I heard the springs of the couch creak as he settled in to sleep.

Ziggy left at about eight o’clock. When I heard him return at noon, I opened the bedroom door and waited for him to notice that I was awake.

It didn’t take him long. His stocky frame filled the doorway, and he toyed with the huge skull ring on his index finger to avoid looking at me. “So, my guess is you’re leaving.”

“Yes.” I sat on the edge of the bed, which was currently experiencing the foreign pleasure of clean sheets. “I don’t want to overstay my welcome.”

“You made a deal with Cyrus.” He didn’t pose it as a question. The kid wasn’t a fool.

“I’d appreciate it if you didn’t tell Nathan about it. He doesn’t need to know.”

“And I’m going to lie to Nate because you’ve done what for me lately?” Ziggy demanded.

“I’m asking you not to tell him as a friend. I don’t want him to get hurt.”

“Why? Are you going to hurt him?” he asked as he turned to look into the living room, pulling a wooden stake from his back pocket. “Nate’s my dad. He’s taken care of me since I was nine years old. There’s no reason not to kill you if you’re threatening him.”

“I’m not threatening him. I just don’t want him coming after me. Cyrus would kill him.”

Ziggy laughed. “Yeah, like you’re not trying to save your ass the only way you know how. What the fuck do you want?”

I wanted to forget all this had ever happened and get some sleep. I wanted to wake up and help them salvage smoke-damaged dream catchers from the shop. I wanted anything but to go back to Cyrus’s house. I’d spend an eternity in that house. But I just handed him my letter. “Give this to him after I’ve gotten a head start.”

He didn’t read it immediately, like I thought he would. “Fine. Anything else?”

I watched him slip the note into his pocket, and I closed my eyes. My throat suddenly went dry. “No.”

“He likes you. This is really going to tear him up.”

The softly spoken declaration should have surprised me. But since I’d found Nathan’s drawing, I’d come to that conclusion on my own. “I know.”

“But you’re still going?” There was cold judgment in his tone. “Look, it’s not like he’s going to be heartbroken or anything. But for what it’s worth, the whole time I’ve lived with him, he’s never shown this much interest in anyone.”

“That’s very sweet.” I wished I knew how to make him understand. I’d never idealized romantic love as an adolescent, but maybe Ziggy had. From his standpoint, just the possibility of a relationship should have been enough to make me stay.

“Nathan has been a big help, but I don’t think of him that way. I’ve given this a lot of thought. It’s the right choice.”

“He worked for fifteen years getting this place going. He knows you for a week and he’s right back to the beginning. And you run straight to the bad guy. It’s not fair.”

“It was a trade, Ziggy. To get the antidote, to save Nathan, I had to make a trade.”

The implication of my words sunk in and Ziggy looked like I’d slapped him. “Why would you do something like that?”

I shrugged. “I’m a doctor. I’m supposed to save lives and help people. And Cyrus needs me.” I wished I could take the words back. Not because Ziggy had heard them, but because by saying them, I’d acknowledged the truth. “Nathan can’t know about this.”

“Are you nuts?” His young face lit up with relief. “All you gotta do is tell him what’s going on. He’ll take care of everything.”

“No!” I said a little too loudly, and I heard Nathan roll restlessly on the couch. I explained more quietly, “If Cyrus kills him, what good was the deal I made? I’ll still be stuck with him, and Nathan will be dead. It will all have been for nothing.”

“Then why are you telling me?”

I chewed my lip. “I guess because…I don’t want you both to hate me.”

“If you’re going to be with him—” he stopped and shook his head in disbelief “—if you’re going to be like him, Nate is going to hate you. But I won’t let him bad-mouth you too much.”

“That’s all I can ask,” I said with a smile. The expression on Ziggy’s face was nothing if not heartbreaking. I felt my heart fly apart like a body hitting the sidewalk from forty stories above.

“I won’t give him the letter until sunup. That way, even if he wanted to do something rash, he’ll have some time to cool off.”

“Good thinking.” I reached for Ziggy’s hand and he didn’t pull away. “Thank you.”

He seemed embarrassed by my gesture and quickly withdrew his hand. “Yeah, well, if we ever meet up in a dark alley, do me a favor and don’t eat me, okay?”

“Deal.”

I lay down then and finally slept. When I woke, the apartment was dark and empty. It was time to go.

I picked up my shopping bag full of clothes, cushioning my diploma and the photo of my parents between sweaters, and made sure I had my letter to Dr. Fuller. Then I started down the stairs to the street.

On the sidewalk, I stopped at the railing of the basement stairs as I heard Nathan groan in disgust. “How many candles would you estimate have melted into this rose-scented mess?”

“Twenty?” Ziggy answered him.

There was a long pause before Nathan replied. “Yeah, that sounds right.”

I took a deep breath to ease the ache in my chest as I walked away. They would be fine without me. I’d only just come into their lives. There’d hardly been enough time to form an attachment. But I’d never had such a longing for family, warmth, comfort. Being raised by emotionally distant parents had almost entirely eradicated any notions of familial love I might have had. But with Nathan and Ziggy, just for a moment, I’d felt like I belonged.

It hurt more to give it up than I would have expected.

After delivering my letter at the hospital, I soon found myself standing before the gate of Cyrus’s mansion. In a few hours, my former boss would think I’d headed back to the East Coast. At least I wouldn’t end up on any missing-persons lists.

Two armed guards approached me, muttering into their headsets. When they reached the gate, I took a step back.

“Dr. Carrie Ames?” one of them asked.

I nodded. They didn’t offer to take my bag. The one that had spoken hitched his thumb toward the house. “Cyrus is waiting.”

The other guard stepped forward and pulled the gate open. I noticed that his hands trembled.

When I reached the front door, it opened. But instead of Cyrus, a leather-clad couple emerged. They pushed past me as they descended the steps, and I caught the sound of loud music coming from somewhere in the house.

More tough-looking vampires loitered in the foyer. Some lounged on a sofa in the center of the room, their vampire faces on full display. A few played with dice in a corner. All of them were dressed to ride in a motorcycle gang, and all appeared to be very intoxicated.

A bodyguard stood in front of the doorway to Cyrus’s study. Compared to the bikers, the black-clad guard looked like a Boy Scout, so I made a beeline for him.

“Is Cyrus in there?” I asked, juggling my bag to the other shoulder.

“I’ll take you to him.”

At the sound of the voice behind me, I spun and came face-to-face with Dahlia. My features began to shift and loosen. I bared my fangs.

“You’d be dead before you laid a finger on me.” She snapped her fingers, and the guard at the door retreated.

A low growl formed in my throat, the sound animalistic and satisfying. “I’m a lot faster than you think.”

She smiled sweetly. “You weren’t so fast when I was killing your boyfriend last night.”

I lunged at her. She raised her hands to form a spell, and I slashed them with my suddenly clawed hands. Droplets of her blood sprayed the marble floor.

The biker vampires stopped their carousing. I assumed the blood had drawn their attention, but they weren’t staring at us. They were staring beyond us.

Cyrus stood in the study doorway, clad in a lush floor-length fur dressing gown. His hair hung in two long platinum braids that fell behind his shoulders. He smiled at the bikers.

“Gentlemen,” he called over the sound of Dahlia’s swearing, “I trust you are enjoying yourselves?”

A few of the vampires raised their beers and gave a raucous cry.

When they turned back to their amusements, Cyrus gripped Dahlia by the hair and pulled her into the study. He motioned to the bodyguard, who grabbed my arm and pushed me in, as well.

When the door closed, Cyrus threw Dahlia to the ground. “What to do with a disobedient pet? Especially one that has had so many warnings.”

Dahlia wiped her nose on her bloodied wrist. “Cyrus, it wasn’t my fault, she—”

He slapped her across the face. The sound of the impact made me wince. Leaning down, he grasped her chin in his hand and twisted her neck at an uncomfortable angle so she was forced to look up at him. “What did you call me?”

Fresh tears rolled down her face, mixing with the smeared blood from her hands and the layers of makeup that coated her face.

“I’m sorry. It won’t happen again.” She choked on her words. “Master.”

He shoved her away and dusted his hands together as though he’d touched something dirty and unpleasant. He signaled to the guard. “Take her and get her bandaged up. Then lock her in her room.”

He turned to me as the guard led Dahlia away. His beleaguered expression morphed to one of pure joy as he looked me over.

Fidgeting beneath his hot stare, I laughed nervously. “I hope you don’t expect me to call you Master, because you’ll be sorely disappointed.”

Stepping behind me, he laid his hands on my shoulders. I could smell Dahlia’s blood on them. “You might surprise yourself yet, Carrie. I can make you do things you’ve never imagined.”

It’s the blood tie, I reminded myself as a wave of pleasure buckled my knees. He doesn’t have any real control over you. I clenched my fists so hard that my nails slashed my palms.

He pulled me back, slipping his hands beneath my shirt. His skin was warm, as though he’d just fed.

“Don’t I?” The phantom desire that assaulted me was replaced by a hot, electric shiver as his fingers dipped into the cups of my bra. He snickered at my soft moan. “I’m not using the blood tie now, Carrie.”

I writhed away, though my flesh cried out to be touched. “Let’s get something straight. I came here to make good on a bargain. This, you touching me, wasn’t in the terms of our agreement.”

“I bet I’ll change your mind before long,” he said with a smirk. “In the meantime, let me show you around.”

I adjusted the bag on my shoulder.

“I can have your things taken to your room,” he told me.

“I’d rather keep them with me, if it’s all the same.”

“As you wish.” His tone was gentle, but he obviously didn’t take well to not getting his way.

We attracted a few curious stares as we walked through the foyer. Cyrus didn’t acknowledge the group of vampires as he leaned over to whisper in my ear. “The Fangs,” he explained. “They’re a motorcycle club from Nevada. They’ve had some trouble with the Movement there and sought safe haven with me. Hence the appalling sofa in the foyer and the intolerable stench of, what are the kids calling it these days? Reefer?”

“Yeah, about fifty years ago.” I sniffed the air. “It reminds me of college. You ever try it?”

His deep, rich laugh echoed off the polished marble floors. “Carrie, do I look like someone who’d indulge in such a filthy habit? I prefer more elegant intoxicants.”

We entered a corridor. Long windows cast silvery squares of moonlight on the floor. Through the darkness I saw a painting on the wall that depicted the grim shape of a giant clutching a headless corpse.

“Is that…Goya?” While his subjects were gory, an original work by Goya was priceless. With a house like this, his decadent clothing, and round-the-clock security, I supposed I could have wound up with a worse sire. Remembering that Nathan was probably at that moment rooting through the ashes of his ruined shop, I instantly regretted the thought.

“You know your art, Doctor. Very good.” Cyrus let out a melancholy sigh. “It’s only a copy. The real one hangs in the Prado, despite my numerous attempts to purchase it.”

“Well, it’s a really good copy.” I reached out to touch the surface of the painting, and he caught my wrist with an apologetic smile.

“Please, don’t touch. A number of years ago, I had a pet of exceptional talent. He’s also responsible for the bacchanalian orgy depicted on the walls of my bedroom.” His thumb stroked the nearly translucent flesh beneath the cuff of my sleeve, sending a shiver up my arm. “Perhaps you’d like to see that next?”

I jerked my arm away. “Let’s not press our luck, now.”

He chuckled and slipped his arm through mine. “This way.”

At the end of the hallway were large double doors. They opened to the ballroom I’d seen on my first visit, though we entered on a different side. The room had been converted into a makeshift garage, with rows of motorcycles parked on sheets of canvas laid out to protect the floor. Cyrus viewed the objects with some distaste. “I’ll never understand the compulsion some people have to drive themselves anywhere.”

“Had chauffeurs all your life, huh?” I asked, running my hand across the chrome tank of a motorcycle.

“Not quite. I was born six hundred years before the advent of the modern automobile.”

“Six hundred—” I swallowed noisily. “So you were alive during the age of knights and armor and all that crap?”

“Yes, Carrie, all that crap.” I thought I saw him roll his eyes, but he didn’t make any further comment. Instead, he led me quickly through the room.

The dining room had been rearranged to accommodate a larger number of people and reminded me of a great hall from a medieval movie. I followed him to the kitchen where the huge, industrial stoves were cold. Pots and pans hung gleaming from the ceiling. The only person present in the room was the elderly black butler, who watched us intently as we entered.

“How can you afford all this?” I asked as we passed through the room.

“Good evening, Clarence,” Cyrus tossed off casually, as though he didn’t notice the man’s apparent animosity. Cyrus turned to me and replied, “I’ve killed some very wealthy people in my time, and invested the profit wisely. Your room will be in the family quarters, of course,” Cyrus explained as we climbed the back staircase, “but we’ll go through the servants’ area first so you’ll know where everything is.”

The servants’ quarters were made up of two narrow hallways that were crammed with small rooms. A few of the Fangs roamed the hall. I heard the buzz of a tattoo needle from somewhere.

“They’re leaving for Canada in a couple of weeks,” Cyrus whispered, a tight smile pasted on for the benefit of his guests. He spoke through clenched teeth. “I can’t say I’ll be sorry to see them go.”

“Why do you let them stay here, then?” I asked as we strode past a few of them.

He shrugged. “They’re anti-Movement. I’m anti-Movement. We have to stick together. When the Movement falls, and it will, I’d like to be poised for a leadership position. It helps to grease the wheels now.”

The second hallway was guarded by sentries armed with wooden stakes. I thought we’d breeze past them as we had all the household staff so far, but Cyrus stopped. “Gentlemen, this is Dr. Ames. I’m granting her full privilege to the cattle, any time she wishes. Please pass the word along.”

“Yes, sir,” the guards said in unison as they stepped aside to admit us.

“Cattle?” I didn’t like the sound of that.

“Pets, if you prefer. They’re humans that live here so I, and my guests, can feed.”

Most of the rooms we walked by had their doors closed. The few rooms with opened doors were unoccupied, with two small beds in each with a nightstand between them. Dark squares stood out on the faded wallpaper, as though posters or other decorations had hung there and were only recently taken down.

A door opened, and a skinny, pale girl with dark rings beneath her eyes exited. She smiled nervously at Cyrus, and kept glancing at me as she spoke. “Hello, Master.”

“Good evening. Amy, is it?” He reached for her, taking her chin in his hand to tilt her head to the side. Faded fang marks stood out against the thin skin.

“Cami.” Her voice was barely audible as his fingers curled around the back of her thin neck.

“Oh, yes. Cami. I’m sorry. So many names to remember lately,” he said, more to me than to her. “Cami, dear, how long has it been since I’ve sent for you?”

“A week.” She looked down at her hands. “Was I…was I bad at it?”

I wanted to shrink into the wall, to become completely invisible and spare her the embarrassment of this conversation, but she didn’t seem to care that I was there at all.

“No, no. I’ve just been terribly busy with…other things.” As he spoke, Cyrus discreetly laced his fingers with mine, pulling me into his memory.

My vision clouded, and I stared down into Cami’s terrified face from Cyrus’s eyes. She struggled not to cry as he moved inside her. My stomach turned at the feeling of her young limbs and barely matured body beneath his. I pulled my hand away.

Suddenly out of Cyrus’s thoughts, I returned to the present and saw Cami’s face show the tentative beginning of a hopeful smile. “Today?”

“That is, unless you’d feel slighted?” Cyrus asked me with a rueful grin. His voice invaded my head. If you refuse me, I’ll take her to my bed in the morning and she won’t live to the next sunset.

The girl looked at me with something akin to jealousy and despair. I had no doubt Cyrus would make good on his threat. I leaned close to his side. I managed, “It’s my first night here. Wouldn’t you rather spend it with me?” Concentrating as hard as I could, I silently added, You dick.

A low laugh rumbled from his throat, and he spread his hands in a gesture of helplessness. “I’m sorry, Cami, the doctor has spoken. Perhaps you’ll find company with one of my guests?”

She paled further, her eyes filling with tears. “Will they hurt me?”

“Of course not. I wouldn’t allow it.” He patted her on the head. “Run along now, I have to show Dr. Ames the rest of the mansion.”

We exited the hallway and entered a small sitting room. I glanced at the railing to one side and realized we were directly above the foyer. I heard the good-natured shouting of the Fangs below.

“You pervert,” I said as soon as the door closed behind us. “She’s only a little girl.”

“She’s fifteen. Just a year younger than my first wife.”

“This isn’t the Dark Ages anymore,” I seethed. “There are rules.”

“I find there is something beautiful in the forbidden.”

“Beautiful?” I thought of the memory Cyrus had shown me, the way her knuckles had turned white as she’d gripped the bedsheets. “What about her parents? Her family? They’re out there somewhere, looking for her, and you’re planning to kill her?”

“She’s a runaway, Carrie. Nearly all of my pets are. Now, if they don’t suit you, I wouldn’t miss a few of my guards as long as you’re discreet about it.”

“I’m not going to kill for blood. I want a willing donor.”

“The cattle are willing,” he said, pointing in the direction we’d just come from.

“Willing to die?”

He nodded. “Willing to endure a little bit of discomfort for what I give them. I kill them eventually, but for a few days, maybe even weeks, they feel like they belong. Like someone wants them. Surely you know how precious that can be.”

I did. As a child, I’d worked hard to be the best, the smartest, the most accomplished in the hopes my parents would take notice. I’d savored every word of their praise like ambrosia. I knew what poor Cami had been looking for. She’d prostituted herself for love, or at least, a shadow of it. She would never know the difference.

I was infinitely thankful that no one like Cyrus had come along when I was fifteen. I would have been easy prey. I still was. I felt a gentle probing at the edges of my thoughts and pushed away the taloned hand that rested on my arm. “Stop it.”

We began to walk again, toward a heavily guarded wing I assumed contained his room, and mine. I stopped and waited until he realized I didn’t follow.

“I’m not going to sleep with you. I only agreed to spend the day with you so you wouldn’t kill her.”

“I know. And I won’t. Today. Let me show you to your room.”

The hallway was considerably wider than those in the servants’ wing, though only two rooms appeared to open onto it. At the end, another set of bodyguards were stationed at double doors, but we stood at the only other entrance.

“Here we are,” Cyrus said, leaning closer to me than was necessary to turn the knob. Ducking past him with a minimum of contact, I entered the room.

The suite was larger than the whole of Nathan’s apartment. The first room was a parlor full of Edwardian furniture. A fire burned cheerfully in the oversize fireplace.

“If you don’t like the decor, it can be changed.” Cyrus walked slowly around the room. “Dahlia’s tastes mirror my own somewhat, though I’ve never been able to stomach so much light blue.”

I had a ridiculous urge to thank him, but I pushed it aside. “This was Dahlia’s room?”

He lifted what looked like a Fabergé music box from a plant stand by the window, frowning. “Yes. For a while, anyway.”

I dropped my bag and removed my coat, draping it over the back of the settee. “Why’d you kick her out?”

“Truthfully? I didn’t like having her so close. The jealous witch monitored all my activities. It was a bit like being married again.” He wound the mechanism of the box and an unrecognizable tune began to play. “Let me show you something.”

He walked to the small corner hutch and slightly pulled on one of the shelves. The whole thing swung forward with ease. “This leads to my chambers.”

I stared at the door as if it were ignited dynamite. “Any way we can wall that up?”

“I prefer to have unhindered access to you.” He closed the secret passage. “But I’m sure you understand why I’d want to keep Dahlia elsewhere. Under heavy guard.”

If I were him, I’d want to keep her in a different country. “She thinks you’re going to turn her.”

“Her power is beyond any I’ve ever seen.” He paused thoughtfully. “But I fear how she’d wield that power with a vampire’s strength behind it.”

I sniffed derisively. “Because you’re so moral.”

“Because I’m a realist.”

“Couldn’t you just control her with the blood tie?” I folded my arms across my chest. “I mean, since you’re so good at it.”

“You’re perfect.” A wry smile formed on his lips. “Alas, she has more power than I. And I won’t chance her ruling me.”

“Well, I’m glad to know you’re not a completely remorseless psychopath.”

Cyrus sighed with theatrical weariness. “What you perceive as evil is only an acceptance of our true nature. I only do what I am built to do. That doesn’t mean I’d want some complete nutcase steering the world toward doom.”

“Could she do that?”

“Probably. That’s the thought that keeps me awake during the day.” With a look of feral hunger, he crossed to me. “But now it seems I have a better reason for my sleepless days.”

He raised his hand and I trembled, alternately wishing he would touch me and cursing myself for wanting him to do so. When he dropped his hand, I turned away from him in embarrassment.

“I have some gifts for you. In your bedroom.”

The last place I wanted to be with him was anywhere with a convenient horizontal surface, but I went, anyway. As I passed the open door, I noticed the key had been removed from the lock, the keyhole soldered closed. I had no way to keep Cyrus out should he decide to come courting in the middle of the day. Would you want to keep him out? As disgusting as I found his predilection for pubescent girls, my revulsion didn’t dampen the power of the blood tie. I assured myself it was only the new vampire side of my nature, and that I’d simply learn to ignore it. I had no intention of acting out his perverse fantasies.

The bed was huge, larger than any I’d ever slept in, and was covered in a thick blue duvet with lace-trimmed edges. A mountain of pillows was at the head, and a half canopy with curtains brushed the high ceiling.

“This is like a fairy tale,” I said, trailing my fingers over the soft bedspread. It was hard to imagine Dahlia, in her fishnets and heavy eyeliner, curling up to sleep here.

Cyrus closed the door and leaned against it casually. “I’m glad you like it. Of course, I hope you don’t spend much time here. Look in the armoire.”

The large mahogany wardrobe was already stocked with clothes. Rich fabrics in colors I’d never imagined myself wearing crowded the space, and when I opened the drawers I found a selection of jewelry that would put Tiffany’s to shame. I nearly choked on my surprise. I was so hypnotized by the sparkling jewels that I didn’t notice he’d stepped behind me until his arms clung around my waist. I jumped, startled, when he reached for a large, pear-shaped emerald pendant.

“I’ve never had so many…liquid assets,” I rasped as he lifted the necklace to my throat.

Laughing, he brushed my hair aside. “Everything in this house is yours.” He fastened the clasp, then smoothed the chain against my shirtfront.

I stepped away, immediately reaching to remove the bauble. “As long as I’m obedient, right?”

“To a point.” He regarded me with a calculating stare. “I don’t believe I need to press my will with you.”

A chill crawled up my spine. “And why is that? Because you gave me expensive things?”

“Because I don’t want to create distance between us. You’re an intelligent woman. You’ll realize soon enough that fighting your true nature is futile. When you do, I will be there.” He turned to the door. “I’m sure you’re tired, so I’ll leave you to settle in.”

So he wouldn’t require my company after sunup. “What about Cami?”

Confusion sparked across his face. He’d already forgotten her name. Only after I angrily began to tap my foot did he understand who I was referring to. “Oh, yes, the girl. No, I think I’ll get my rest, as well. However, if you wished to join me after all—”

“I don’t foresee that happening.” I dropped the necklace into the drawer and slammed it shut.

“No, of course you don’t. But you know where to find me.”

I stood in the doorway and watched him exit through the hidden passage. When it closed, a deliberate and ruthless wave of lust washed over the blood tie. I gritted my teeth and closed my eyes.

God, help me, I pleaded to a deity I’d never bothered to speak to before. If you don’t, my sins are on your head.

Eleven

A Sleepless Day, An Uncomfortable Night

A lthough there were still hours before sunrise, fatigue forced me into the huge bed. I left the lamp on at the bedside table, as I found it slightly unsettling to be alone in the enormous room.

You don’t have to be alone. The thought couldn’t have been mine. I sat up, peering into the dark corners of the room to see if Cyrus had returned. But I was the only one present, and as much as I hated to admit it, curling up next to Cyrus was an appealing prospect compared to spending the night by myself in this museum of a bedroom.

It had to be the blood tie. Cyrus was a monster who preyed upon the weak and helpless. The attraction between us wouldn’t have been so strong if he were anyone but my sire.

But even I couldn’t believe that. I’d felt the excitement of sinking my fangs into a warm, human neck. I’d known the hot, heady feeling of blood rushing into my mouth from a tapped vein. That kind of gluttonous pleasure could be addictive. I’d done it once, I wanted to do it again, and Cyrus offered the very thing I craved.

I was attracted to Cyrus because my darker nature wanted me to give in and become like him. A predator, with no remorse or humanity to interfere with my base desires.

A horrendous scream tore through the still night. I ran to my window in time to see a half-naked girl racing across the lawn toward the dark shape of the hedge maze. Four of the Fangs followed her.

Her pale body cut a glowing streak through the darkness and I recognized her at once. Cami.

“Don’t look back,” I whispered, willing with all my might that she make it to the maze. She could hide there, maybe even until the safety of daylight.

But I knew my worry was in vain. I’d seen her kind many times in the E.R., souls so abused they were afraid to find help for their situation. Having escaped death, Cami would just slink back to the house, and death would find her again.

The vampires gained more ground. She looked over her shoulder, screaming again at the sight of her pursuers. The glass of my window muffled the sound and I was glad for it. I wouldn’t have wanted to hear the full might of her mortal terror.

Looking back proved to be a fatal mistake. Her feet tangled beneath her and she sank to the ground. All four vampires fell on her. She didn’t scream this time.

It took them only a moment to finish her. As they dispersed, I caught a glimpse of the body, or what was left of it. They’d ripped her apart and fed until not even her organs remained inside her mangled corpse. She looked like a rag doll whose stuffing had been ripped out.

I turned away from the window, my body shaking. My heart raced and my lungs burned with the exertion of my heavy breathing. But my reaction came not from horror. Not from disgust at what I’d seen. I’d liked it.

I’d wanted to be with those vampires. I’d wanted to feel her flesh tear beneath my claws, to rip skin and sinews with my teeth.

Now I, Dr. Carrie Ames, who took the Hippocratic oath before a crowded auditorium, vowing to never cause harm, never aid death, wanted to kill.

Sick to my stomach, I forced myself not to look at the grisly scene as I reached to pull the curtains closed.

I went back to bed, but sleep eluded me. Primal and raw, my hunger tormented me. The knowledge I could simply walk down the hall and pick out a tender, willing human to feed from made it ten times worse. Shuddering and sweating, I resolved to stay where I was. I could ask for blood—in a cup—after sunset.

But that seemed so very far away.

Through the day, as I lay awake, I heard the secret door to the sitting room open several times. I’d jolt upright and listen to footsteps cross the floor. They always retreated before they reached my door.

Exhausted, I fell asleep just before sunset. I’d only slept an hour when the footsteps returned.

Thinking to catch Cyrus creeping around my parlor, I pulled on my robe and headed for the bedroom door. The house was spooky enough without him lurking around. I was surprised to find that it wasn’t Cyrus who was making all that noise, but the butler. He went about his business, opening the drapes and building up the fire. I didn’t think he’d seen me enter until he spoke.

“Don’t get any bright ideas or I’ll push your demon ass into this fireplace so fast you’ll be in hell before you know what happened.”

I approached him slowly, not doubting he meant what he said. “I’m not that kind of vampire.”

If you say it enough, maybe you’ll believe it.

“Sure. I suppose you’re a good guy, right? We get a lot of those around here, so you’ll have to excuse me for not trusting you.” He pulled back the collar of his tuxedo jacket and revealed a series of bumpy, keloid scars on his throat. “Bite me once, shame on you. Bite me twice, shame on me.”

I sat in one of the stiff wing chairs and rubbed my eyes. “That’s a good personal motto. Another good one would be ‘don’t work for vampires.’”

He straightened and turned to face me. His dark eyes glittered in the firelight, and I thought it might be humor I saw in them. “For future reference, most ‘people’ don’t talk to the help. Just imagine that I’m invisible.”

“Sorry. I’m new here.”

The secret passageway opened, and Cyrus entered without knocking. I stood as though he were royalty. I’m not sure why.

He wore a silk dressing gown tied loosely enough to make me acutely uncomfortable. His torso was hard and well-defined. A perfect body, with the exception of the thick scar that ran from his collarbone to his stomach.

An injury like that would have been deadly six hundred years ago, so he must have been human at the time to keep a scar. A vampire would have healed. I touched the scar on my neck. Cyrus must have incurred the injury before he’d completely changed into a vampire.

He yawned and stretched like someone who’d had the luxury of too much sleep, and his unbound hair brushed the floor with the motion. “Rested and ready for the night?”

I shook my head. “Someone was creeping around my room all day.”

“Clarence, I hope you apologized for waking Carrie,” Cyrus admonished the butler.

“I don’t think it was Clarence who woke me.”

Like some kind of reverse genie, Clarence disappeared at the mention of his name. I heard the parlor door click softly shut.

“I did come in to check on you.” Cyrus slipped behind me and stole my chair, pulling me into his lap as he did so. I yelped in surprise as I felt his ice-cold skin through my robe and tried to rearrange the fabric over my bare legs. Sprawled as I was over him, it was hard to maintain a ladylike appearance. He took advantage of the position and slipped his hand between the slightly parted fabric. “I felt your distress at the scene in the garden. And your excitement.”

I swallowed as his fingers teased my inner thigh. “You saw that?”

“It was spectacular, wasn’t it?” He inched his fingers up the hem of my T-shirt. “They’re such vulgar creatures, but I love the way they feed, the pack mentality of it.”

“Yeah, it’s a regular nature special.” I pushed his hand away and stood, whirling around to face him. “Did you tell them to do that? So I could see?”

Standing had been the wrong move. My wriggling had dislodged the tie of his robe completely, and he made no move to cover himself. I tried to look anywhere but where carnal curiosity forced me to. Not that I wanted to look at his immensely pleased face, either. He seemed delighted by my embarrassment. “Oh, I’m sorry, am I making you uncomfortable?”

“You forget, I’m a doctor. Or was,” I added with a surprising twinge of guilt. “I’ve seen plenty of naked bodies before. They all sort of look the same after a while.”

“Really?” He stood, far too close to me.

“Did you or did you not tell them to kill Cami?” His intimidation wasn’t going to work. At least, I hoped it wouldn’t.

“You’re really no fun, do you know that?” he said. “No, I didn’t arrange that little spectacle. I rather discourage the notion of feeding outside. As large as the grounds are, her screams probably carried to the neighbors. I find police investigations tedious at best, though I do harbor a fondness for handcuffs.”

I rolled my eyes. “There’s a cliché if I ever heard one.”

“I couldn’t resist.” Cyrus circled me slowly, tapping his lips with his forefinger. “Something is off about you. I can feel it.”

“I am a bit hungry,” I admitted. “But I’m not interested in human sacrifice. Can you get any of your pets to donate blood?”

He stopped behind me and rested his hands on my shoulders. Before I could stop him, he tugged my robe backward. The tie came loose and I stood before him in only the dark blue T-shirt I’d worn to bed, the one Nathan had loaned me.

Leaning close to my neck, Cyrus sniffed at the collar. “That’s what the problem is.”

He spun me, grasping my upper arms so hard I knew I’d have bruises that would heal in a moment. “Go take this thing off and deliver it to Clarence to be destroyed, along with any other reminder of him you might have thought to bring along.”

Though I didn’t mean to, I flinched from the pain in my arms. “What happened to not pressing your will?”

With a snarl of anger, he pushed me. I landed hard on one of the delicately embroidered chairs, the impact of my fall skidding it backward.

Cyrus loomed over me, bracing himself on the polished wooden arms of the chair. “Do not abuse my patience and I won’t need to display the force of my will.”

For the first time, I felt utterly weak and vulnerable beside him. I knew he wouldn’t kill me. He was too fond of his trophy. But that served little comfort when I knew exactly how much torture a vampire could live through.

I almost apologized, but as I stared into his cold, mismatched eyes, I saw nothing to compel my forgiveness.

With a firm shove to the chair, he stomped over to the secret door, his open robe trailing behind him.

“What about my breakfast?” I called after him, a little emboldened after my staring-contest victory.

“I’ll have Clarence bring it,” he growled. “But after this, you’d better learn to drink from a human, like a real vampire. Your behavior is a reflection on me, and I won’t have anyone saying my blood is weak.”

After he’d gone, I went to the bedroom to change. As angry as he was, I didn’t think I’d see Cyrus again that night, but I wasn’t going to take any chances. I dressed in clothes I found in the armoire instead of the ones Nathan had bought me. A black turtleneck and loose-fitting slacks were the closest items I could find to my preferred uniform of T-shirt and jeans.

Clarence brought my evening meal, a still-warm carafe of blood accompanied by a selection of fresh fruit, the B-movie version of a continental breakfast. I tried to make some cheerful conversation, but he only provided the minimum requirement of polite response. I eventually gave up and finished my meal in silence.

When I ventured from my room, I found the Fangs were out in full force. Curiosity brought me to the ballroom, where a new row of bikes testified that more vampires had arrived. I expected some trouble from them, but nothing happened. On the contrary, the thugs saluted me with a fearful courtesy. I fully expected them to start bowing and genuflecting when they saw me.

The only person who seemed to want interaction with me was Dahlia. I discovered her lounging on one of the deserted sofas in the foyer, reading a magazine. She made a noise as I passed, presumably to get my attention. When I ignored her, she swept her hair back from her shoulder, revealing a fresh bite mark. She yawned loudly and stretched. “I am just so tired. But why shouldn’t I be? I was up all day.” She giggled and crossed her legs. Her already short skirt rode up, flashing a generous portion of white thigh. Fang marks scored her ample flesh there, as well.

“Do you think you’re making me jealous?” I asked. For some insane reason I was, but I’d eat raw cactus before I admitted it to her.

She shrugged. “No. I just feel sorry for you. Your first day here and he sends for someone else to spend his time with. It’s sad, really.”

“I can think of sadder things.” I dropped onto the sofa beside her and picked up a magazine from the stack at her side. “Ooh, hot spring beauty trends.”

From the corner of my eye, I saw her raise her hand.

I clucked my tongue condescendingly. “I wouldn’t do that if I were you. He’d kill you if you harmed me.”

She snorted derisively. “Whatever. He thinks you’re pathetic.”

Though I doubted the validity of her statement, it called to mind Cyrus’s earlier angry slur. I dropped the magazine and shifted to face her. “More pathetic than a vampire groupie hanging on to her last scrap of hope?”

Dahlia didn’t rise to the bait this time. “If I were you, I would seriously avoid pissing him off. He owns you. He can make your life hell.”

“I don’t think I can avoid pissing him off.” Quieter, I added, “Not if it means being like him.”

With a sigh of obvious contempt, she tore her attention away from a page detailing the best cut of jeans for different body types. “Yeah, and what is he like?”

“What do you mean?” The realization we were having an actual conversation struck me as odd, but Dahlia seemed unperturbed by it.

“What is he like?” she repeated. “I mean, since you’ve taken the time to get to know him and all.”

Ouch. She had a good point. I didn’t know Cyrus. At least, not as well as she did. I tried to imagine what it would be like if I were in her shoes. She clearly had some affection for him, to stay after all the violence I’d seen him inflict on her.

I cleared my throat. “I suppose I meant evil. I don’t want to be evil.”

She rolled her eyes, not bothering to cover her impatience with me. “News flash, not everything is good or evil.”

“I don’t follow.”

She tossed her magazine aside and twisted her body toward me, pulling one meaty leg up on the couch in a very lewd manner. “Okay, let’s pretend there was a tornado, and it destroyed like, half the town. That’s bad, right?”

I wasn’t quite sure where she was going with this analogy, but I nodded in agreement.

“So since the tornado did something bad, by your logic, it’s evil?”

“I wouldn’t call a tornado evil, no.”

“Why?” she asked in a way that suggested she knew what my answer would be.

“Because it’s just a tornado. It’s part of nature.”

“Just like vampires are a part of nature.” She didn’t seem very pleased to prove her point, but more annoyed at having lost precious seconds of her life teaching me. “Some things aren’t good or evil. Some things just…are.”

With that, she stood and gathered her magazines. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’d rather drive nails through my eyeballs than have to sit here and play nice with you anymore.”

“Well, fuck you, too,” I said under my breath as she charged up the stairs.

So we weren’t bound to become Best Friends Forever, but at least she could talk to me without trying to kill me. And to be honest, if she got so sick of being polite that she did drive nails into her eyes, well, that would be a bonus.

I looked to the magazine in my lap, the one Dahlia hadn’t bothered to collect on her way out. Beauty magazines didn’t usually appeal to me, but I didn’t usually have so much time on my hands, either. I flipped to an article about the bacterial hazards of tanning beds and assured my horrified brain that it was medical research.

I’d only read the first paragraph when the study doors burst open, admitting the sounds of male exertion and clashing steel. Cyrus glided into the room dressed in tight black leather pants and a billowy white shirt that was unbuttoned to the waist. His long hair was pulled back and he carried a fencing foil. All he needed to complete the ensemble was an eye patch and parrot. I tried not to laugh as the image formed in my brain.

Wiping droplets of bloody sweat from his brow, he tossed the foil to the guard that followed him. I pretended to be too interested in my magazine to notice their presence.

Cyrus sat next to me with an exhausted sigh as he tugged the black leather gloves from his fingers. “Good evening, Carrie.”

“Ahoy, matey. Going sailing?” Although I was still mindful of his sudden change in temper earlier in the evening, I couldn’t help but push it a little. That was my nature.

He put his arm around me, a gesture so familiar and strong that I had to force myself to pull away. He paid no mind to my reaction. “I was just brushing up on my defense. Roger is a wonderful fencer, aren’t you, Roger?”

The guard nodded sharply. “It’s Robert, sir. And yes, I am.”

I didn’t engage myself in the conversation and flipped a few pages in the magazine.

Cyrus leaned in close under the pretense of reading over my shoulder. “That’s quite an interesting look. I’ve never cared for women with too much eye makeup, but it certainly would look striking on you.”

“I’ll have to remember that in case I ever feel compelled to impress you.”

Despite my best efforts, I felt my body react to the pull of the blood tie. Everything about him seemed appealing, pirate shirt aside. He smelled wonderful. He felt even better pressed to my side. Then I thought of him with Dahlia. He’d been doing God knew what with her all day, slipping away periodically to “check” on me. I wasn’t hurt by his unfaithfulness, and rather surprised myself for expecting fidelity in the first place.

I flipped another page, hoping to cover my emotions with sarcasm. “Captain Hook called. He wants his shirt back.”

He raised an eyebrow. “You’re angry with me.”

There was no denying it. He could feel it through the blood tie. “Yeah, actually, I kind of am.”

“Because of our fight?” He circled his arm around my shoulders again, holding me fast when I tried to shrug him off. “All couples fight. It’s nothing to worry about.”

Couple? “I was single last time I checked.”

He smiled and twisted a strand of my hair around his index finger. “Then why are you so upset that I spent time with Dahlia?”

I sniffed. “Am I that transparent?”

“It’s not hard to tell. Jealously is practically radiating off of you.” He put his hand on my knee. “You’re aware of the role Dahlia plays here.”

“Executive knob polisher?”

“That’s a rather crude way of putting it, but yes. There’s no need to feel threatened by her. You’re my blood.”

“How can I help but be threatened by her? She’s your favorite.” I pushed him away and got up.

He looked me up and down, not bothering to disguise his lustful stare. Turtleneck or not, I felt naked. I covered my face in frustration. “Never mind. You won’t understand. I hate being jealous and you aren’t even listening.”

“I am listening,” he insisted.

“No,” I said as I ran a hand over my hair. “I’m just being stupid. I’ve been trained since birth to be competitive and Dahlia brings out the worst in me. But you’re not helping.”

“I’m sorry you feel that way. Let me make it up to you,” he suggested, standing to guide me back to the couch.

“How?” I’d expected him to pull me into his lap, but he sat a comfortable distance from me.

“Let me woo you. Give me a chance to show you how dear you are to me.” He drummed his fingers on the arm of the sofa. “How about dinner? We can get to know each other better.”

“I remember the last dinner date we had. I’m not interested in another postmortem.”

“No bodies, I promise,” he assured me with a smile. “For a doctor, you’re awfully squeamish.”

“It’s not about being squeamish. It’s about having an ounce of humanity left.” Every moment I spent with him faded my anger, like a photograph exposed to sunlight. I tried to find reasons to stay mad at him, but it was difficult when I was this close to him. “Wouldn’t that make Dahlia jealous?”

“I don’t think she’s the only one who’s jealous.” He lifted his hand and cupped my chin, turning my face to his. “Dahlia is a momentary distraction. I’ll have you forever.”

Forever. For the first time since I’d made the bargain for Nathan’s life, I realized the ramifications of my promise. How long would I live? Cyrus had managed to stay alive for more than six hundred years. I’d fought the fiend lurking inside me for only a night, and I’d barely been able to stand it.

Perhaps my fall was inevitable.

Gently, Cyrus pressed his cold mouth to mine. I didn’t resist. But not because I didn’t have the willpower or because the blood tie was manipulating my response. I kissed him back because I wanted to prove to him, and myself, that he made me feel nothing. That I was still in control.

It didn’t quite work out that way. I wrapped my arms around his neck and let him pull me closer. I sensed his surprise, but when he drew back he smiled as though he’d won a great battle. “Now, that wasn’t so terrible.”

It wasn’t. He leaned in for another when I heard the forgotten guard clear his throat. Annoyance danced across my sire’s face, but he quickly covered it with a smile as he stood and straightened his shirt. “Roger, what would you say to another match?”

“Robert, sir. I would be honored.” The guard tossed him his foil.

Cyrus caught it and gracefully took up a ready stance. “Dinner, in my chambers, 5:00 a.m.,” he instructed me. “Please be on time.” With that, he and the guard parried and thrusted their way out of the room.

I closed my eyes. It would have been all too easy to blame my submission on the blood tie, but I couldn’t lie to myself. There was a magnetism about him that had nothing to do with his being a vampire. Despite the horrible way he’d treated me this morning, for a moment he’d made me believe he cared for me as something more than a possession.

It was the most dangerous tactic he’d employed in this battle so far.

Twelve

A Gift

W ith 5:00 a.m. fast approaching, I paced my bedroom floor in complete indecision as to what I should wear. A chastity belt would have been nice, but he hadn’t included that item in my new wardrobe.

The absence of modern noise in our wing of the house, which had at first been pleasant, was beginning to drive me batty. I didn’t relish the idea of hanging with the Fangs to listen to the radio, but the idea grew more appealing with each passing hour. I hoped to negotiate a TV in my room if I played my cards right. After the tedious night I’d had, the idea of prostituting myself for my cable fix didn’t seem as wrong as it should.

I had almost settled on a plain black skirt to go with the turtleneck I wore when there was a soft knock at my door. Before I could open it, Clarence entered. He bore a plastic garment bag, which he dumped without a word on the bed.

“What’s this?” I asked after him as he left the room.

“Read the card” was his only reply before I heard the outer door click shut.

“Thanks for your help,” I muttered, looking down at the bag. A small envelope rested atop it. I slid the card out and read the elegant script.

I hope the gown is to your liking. It would please me greatly if you wore it this evening. Clarence will come to retrieve you at five o’clock.

Bracing myself for what I might find inside, I unzipped the bag. The dress wasn’t what I had expected—though my expectations weren’t terribly specific. Lifting the length of blush-colored satin, I grudgingly admitted Cyrus had good taste.

I would normally feel a little silly for being so overdressed, but I liked what I saw when I slipped into the gown and looked myself over in the mirror. The color complimented my blond hair, and though my skin had paled since I’d turned, it wasn’t as obvious against such a delicate shade.

I usually wasn’t so vain, but I hadn’t gotten dressed up like this since my high school prom, and the sight of myself in something other than a lab coat or jeans enticed me to the mirror. I snuck a pair of diamond earrings from the stash in the armoire and let my hair down, brushing it until it fell in soft waves around my shoulders. I looked so good I would have given myself television privileges just for standing there.

Now I look like something worth drawing, I thought, and instantly regretted it. After the T-shirt debacle, I’d taken care to hide Nathan’s sketch, but it had felt like burying a dead friend. I wondered what he was doing now. If he missed me. Or if he was just biding his time until he got the chance to kill me.

I commanded myself to stop thinking of such morose things. Whatever might have begun between Nathan and I was over now. I could continue to cling to the past, or I could try to be happy in my new life.

Staring in the mirror, I barely recognized myself. In the past, I’d been lonely and unhappy. I’d defined my life by my career, and my heart hadn’t even been in it. I’d had no idea who I was or any plans to find out. But now I had the opportunity. I couldn’t waste it.

Clarence entered my sitting room just as the clock chimed for the fifth time. His face was somber as he led me down the hallway. We stopped at the large double doors and waited while they were opened from within.

Cyrus’s rooms were much larger than mine. The parlor boasted a painted ceiling where cherubs looked down from a sunny sky. It was a striking contrast to the marble statues of nude women in the grasps of winged demons that flanked the fireplace.

Cyrus was seated at a small table in the center of the room. There were no corpses, as promised. Two champagne flutes and a large crystal decanter full of blood were laid out before him. He stood when I entered.

“Look at you.” His eyes glittered with genuine appreciation. “You’re more beautiful every time I see you.”

“You look pretty good yourself.” It wasn’t an empty compliment, though anything was better than his pirate outfit from before. He wore a simple, button-down black shirt and black pants, and his hair was tied back. He looked surprisingly modern, and I found it easy to imagine he was a different person from the man who’d wreaked so much havoc in my life.

Maybe that’s what I’d have to do. Live in denial to stand living at all. But I’d been doing that for far too long already.

I cleared my throat. “I’m glad to see the leather pants couldn’t make a return appearance.”

Clearly, he interpreted this as an insult. “I beg your pardon? Leather is very fashionable.”

“In 1997.” I sat in the chair Clarence pulled out for me and spread my napkin across my lap. “And I must tell you I’m not really big on the whole ‘Satan Goes to Versailles’ vibe you’ve got going on here.” He ignored me and poured some of the blood into my glass. It fizzed slightly as it hit the glass.

“Let me guess. Poison?” Knowing better than that, I took a sip and let the fluid roll slowly across my tongue, savoring its sweet flavor.

“Champagne. Think of it as a bloody mimosa.” He laughed at his own joke before he went on. “I thought we had reason to celebrate tonight.” He filled his glass and took a long swallow.

I eyed him incredulously. “What are we celebrating exactly?”

A wickedly satisfied smirk stretched across his face. “Your fall from grace.”

“Hold on there, buddy. I haven’t done anything yet.” I’d learned from past experience that he would try to tempt me, to appeal to the monster in me. I also knew I was more receptive to the possibility now than I had been when he’d tried to lure me before. But he didn’t need to know that. Then again, he probably already did.

Cyrus took another drink, his eyes never leaving me. “I do like that dress. You’ll have to wear it more often.”

“I don’t know.” I smoothed my hands over the silky fabric. “When I get the chance, maybe. It’s not really something I can wear around the house.”

“Why not?”

I laughed, until I realized he was serious. “Well, I’d feel overdressed, for one.”

“No one would mention it.” His champagne flute dangled from the tips of his fingers as he leaned back in his chair. “It befits your station.”

I huffed in annoyance. “My station. Because you said you could make me a queen, right?”

“I can’t make you a queen, that was a bit of a fib. More like a princess.” He made the remark without a hint of humor. “You’ve read The Sanguinarius?”

“Only about half of it. My copy was lost when my apartment burned down.”

“A pity. So, if I mentioned the name Jacob Seymour, you’d have no idea who I was speaking of?” Cyrus’s eyes were fixed on my face, as if he were trying to register something in my reaction.

He’d find nothing there. “No clue at all. Why, is he someone important?”

“Yes, you could say so. He was my father.”

I didn’t know how to respond, so I merely waited for him to continue.

“My father was not a powerful man in life. He was an old man with two wives in the grave and ten grown children when he was turned. We were serfs, what you call peasants now. We farmed land owned by a wealthy lord and tithed most of our profit to the Crown.”

“In England?” I took a sip from my glass, enjoying the effects of light-headedness from the champagne and satiation from the blood mixed with it.

Cyrus nodded. “The vampire who sired my father did so on the condition that he use all the powers gifted to him to grow strong and overcome those who would rule him. Father took it quite literally. First, he killed the noble family who enslaved us. Then he killed and fed from his sire, and finally, one by one, he sought out those of our kind already in existence. The oldest, the strongest, the most fearsome. My father slew them all. He drank their blood and stole their power.

“And then, of his seven living sons, he chose the one he felt was the most ruthless and calculating, and he sired him.”

Cyrus straightened in his chair, pride transforming his face. “And while my brother slept, on the first day of his new vampire life, I killed him and stole his blood.” He paused, and his brows furrowed as if he were trying to remember something. “Then I stabbed him in the heart and took a handful of his ashes to my father to show him what I’d done. That I deserved the place I’d been denied.”

My heart racing, I reached for my glass and drank half of it down before I could speak again. “Why are you telling me this now?”

“Because my father has now successfully killed all the oldest known vampires. He is the leader of our kind.” Though he said this in all seriousness, he shrugged it off rather quickly. “His blood runs in mine, and my blood runs in yours. We are royalty, Carrie.”

I looked around helplessly as a tremor of—was that paternal affection?—passed across the blood tie.

“So, in a roundabout way, what I’m saying is that there’s good reason for you to wear the dress again.”

“I’ll see what I can do,” I breathed.

A new, frightening possibility entered my mind. What if Cyrus wasn’t the man I thought he was at all, but merely a pawn under his father’s control? How much of the evil he inflicted on others originated from his own brain? He’d been a vampire for so long now, perhaps he couldn’t remember what it was like to be free from the blood tie.

Cocking his head, Cyrus regarded me with the amused smile of a man viewing a prize that was nearly his. “My God, but you’re lovely.”

The sentiment was a bit too heartfelt to sit comfortably with me. “Why do you say things like that?”

He lifted one shoulder in a half shrug. “Because I mean them.”

I filed his words away under “Ploys to Disarm Me.”

He nodded to Clarence, and the butler stepped forward to clear the table.

Still hungry, I handed my glass over with some reluctance. “Are we finished?”

Cyrus stood and moved to take my hand. “No. This was just an appetizer. Now we’re on to the main course.”

He stepped behind me and covered my eyes with his hands. The feeling of him so close, his body brushing against my back as he led me from the room, set my nerve endings on fire.

“Where are we going?” I asked as if I didn’t know the answer.

“Look,” he whispered as he removed his hands.

A huge bed on a raised dais dominated the room. Elegant curtains of sheer gold-and-cream fabric hung from the dark wood canopy, and in the center lay a young man, bound, gagged and shirtless.

Although his hair was clean and trimmed, and he wore trousers instead of jeans, I recognized him immediately.

Ziggy.

“He’s for you.” Cyrus walked over to the bed and held his hand out to me.

Don’t react, I urged myself, picturing a brick wall in an attempt to keep Cyrus from seeing my thoughts. Pretend you don’t know him. Deny you’ve ever met him. Just don’t do anything to endanger him.

But my panic clearly transferred through the blood tie. His face full of concern, Cyrus moved from my side. “He’s completely harmless.”

Ziggy’s eyes were wide, pupils dilated, but he didn’t struggle. I stepped closer. “What’s wrong with him?”

“Drugged.” Cyrus sat on the edge of the bed and motioned for me to join him. “They tend to gain strength when fighting for their lives, and I wanted tonight to be perfect.”

I stepped up cautiously, trying to cloak my thoughts from Cyrus while I frantically willed Ziggy not to show any sign of recognition.

Was it possible Cyrus didn’t know who this was? It would be unlike him not to gloat about his prize, especially after the way he’d acted this morning. But it made no sense for Ziggy to be in the mansion at all.

“Who is he?” I croaked, fervently praying Cyrus didn’t already know the answer.

To my immense relief, he yawned and reached up to unbind his hair. “I don’t know. Some runaway. He showed up here a few hours ago. Isn’t he breathtaking?”

The day before I wouldn’t have exactly agreed with that statement, but groomed and divested of his various piercings and odd metal jewelry, Ziggy recalled a Renaissance portrait of youthful, male beauty.

Hesitantly, I climbed onto the bed. “Why is he here?”

“For you to feed from, dearest,” Cyrus answered distractedly as he popped off his cuff links and shook out his sleeves.

“But he’s conscious.”

My mouth went a little dry as I watched Cyrus work the buttons of his shirt. “Well, that’s the point, isn’t it? No fun drinking from a victim who can’t feel it. But you’ll have to hurry. The paralytic will wear off soon.”

I frowned. Paralyzing drugs were nothing to trifle with. Ziggy could die of suffocation if his lungs were affected. In the guise of lazily stroking his chest, I measured the rise and fall of the flesh beneath my hand. His respiration was labored, but not seriously. “He can’t be too paralyzed if he’s breathing.”

Cyrus reached for me over Ziggy’s body, tracing a line up my arm, over my shoulder, to my neck. He pulled me forward. I rose on my knees and braced my hands against the smooth, cold skin of his chest beneath his open shirt.

I heard Ziggy’s blood moving faster and faster through his veins between us. I remembered the rich taste of his blood and my stomach growled. Another hunger sprang to life in me, an ache that grew as Cyrus pushed my hair aside. He pressed his mouth to my neck, grazing his teeth over the surface.

“I should have bitten you that night,” he rasped, one hand moving to cup my breast. “I should have ripped your flesh with my teeth and fed from you, rather than flee like a coward. If only I could have silenced your screams so I could have taken my time.”

I moaned, dropping my head back to give him fuller access. Memories of the attack washed over me, some his, some my own. But now they were not horrific. Now, when I saw his hand twisted in my hair, saw myself kneeling and praying—had I prayed?—at his feet, the images were searing and erotic.

I reminded myself of the blood tie, of the control he had over me, but I didn’t care. This wouldn’t be something that happened to me. This would be something that I chose to do.

Ziggy groaned at our knees. Moving behind me, Cyrus eased me onto the bed so I lay beside the boy. With one arm draped over my waist, my sire leaned close to my ear and whispered, “Drink, Carrie.”

And God, how I wanted to. But it was Ziggy. “If I do, will it kill him?”

Obviously misinterpreting the nature of my question, Cyrus chuckled. “Go ahead, take his life if you’d like. Or, let him live and we’ll play with him later. Whatever you prefer.”

When I hesitated, he reached over me to lay a lethally sharp fingernail against Ziggy’s exposed throat. “Do you want me to cut him for you?”

I sensed his impatience through the blood tie and by the way his legs rubbed restlessly against mine. If he knew who Ziggy was, if he knew why I couldn’t feed from him…

No. I could do this. All I needed to do was show Cyrus I was willing to perform the act. Even just a few drops would prove that. Then he wouldn’t hurt me or Ziggy.

Yes, I could do this. To protect Ziggy’s life, I could hurt him.

I ran my tongue over my fangs. I hadn’t even felt the change take place. It was beginning to feel natural. I leaned close to Ziggy’s throat.

“Yes,” Cyrus hissed into my ear. He bunched a fistful of my gown in his hand, pulling it higher and higher until I felt his palm against my bare thigh.

Taking a deep breath for control, I bit down. I’d expected Ziggy’s body to stiffen beneath my mouth, but he didn’t react at all.

When the blood hit my tongue, I cried out with the most intense orgasm I’d ever experienced. The sensation was so overwhelming it took me a moment to realize I hadn’t felt it at all. It was Ziggy’s memory, seeping into me through his blood. His eyes opened and I saw through them as he collapsed, sated, against the bare mattress of his bed.

There was the click of a door opening, and Ziggy flipped onto his back, panic obliterating the peace that lingered from his climax. Nathan stood frozen in the doorway, covered in grime and soot from the fire. His eyes, clouded with fatigue, flamed to life with shock and sudden anger.

He was masturbating, so what? I thought, a little surprised at Nathan’s reaction. Then I saw the third person in the room, a young man Ziggy’s age, at the corner of the bed. He clutched the rumpled sheet to his naked body and rapidly tried to explain his presence before grabbing his clothes and pushing past Nathan.

I felt Ziggy’s shame, but also his strange relief at being found out and his embarrassment at the knowledge I saw everything he remembered.

I didn’t know he was coming upstairs, his thoughts whispered in my head. I didn’t know he’d be so mad. I should have told him. I want to go home.

I jerked my head back, clamping my palm over the wound I’d inflicted to stop the bleeding. When no blood oozed between my fingers, I lifted my hand. The bite was neatly closed, but a telling scar remained.

“What’s wrong?” Cyrus sat up and tried to slip his arm around me for support.

I pushed him away. “I can’t do this.”

His face contorted in anger, but he covered it quickly. “Why not?”

Quivering, I tried to pull down my skirt. “I can see his thoughts. I can feel his emotions.”

“Oh, is that all?” With a laugh that sounded more condescending than comforting, he pulled me into his arms. “Darling, that’s the best part.”

“I didn’t like it.” I tensed a little, testing the strength of his hold.

His arms tightened around me solidly enough to prevent me from running. He licked the shell of my ear, and I felt some of my forgotten desire return. “There, there, dearest. You did very well, for your first time.” His hand fell to my lap, seeking the hem of my skewed gown. “And the night is still young. There are plenty of other exciting things we can do.”

The touch of his cold hand, separated from my flesh only by the thin material of my panties, sucked the breath from my lungs. I opened my legs for him and reached back to loop an arm around his neck.

When I heard Ziggy make another soft groan, I snapped back to reality. “Wait, wait.”

“Now what’s wrong?” His annoyance was unmistakable this time. Cyrus swung his legs over the side of the bed and stood, pulling his shirt off in one agitated motion. “Do we need scented candles and Barry White? How about mirrors on the ceiling?”

“Don’t be angry,” I said, a little tearfully, and I insisted to myself it was nerves and exhaustion that made me react in such a way. “This is just so…new.”

With a deep sigh, he removed his belt and dropped it to the floor, kicking it aside. “I know. And I know I come across as a tad impatient. But I want you, Carrie. I’m not used to waiting for gratification.”

“I’m tired,” I admitted, not caring if it upset him. “Let me sleep today, and I promise we’ll…you know, tomorrow.”

He smiled. “I suppose I can wait one more day.”

Biting my lip, I looked to Ziggy, who still lay paralyzed on the bed. “But you have to do something for me.”

I’d expected him to be insulted, possibly enraged, but he seemed pleasantly surprised. “You want to make a deal with me? Fine. For what price will I buy a night of sin with you, my princess?”

I wished he wouldn’t call me that, but now was not the time to argue. I pointed at Ziggy. “I want to keep him.”

Cyrus arched an eyebrow. “Keep him?”

“As a pet. He was my first victim. I want a souvenir.”

I held my breath as I waited for his reply. After a long moment, he finally spoke. “I don’t see why not. You may have your trophy.”

“Thank you.” I kept my eyes downcast and let him kiss me on the forehead to seal our agreement. As I walked toward the door, I heard the rustle of the mattress sinking under his weight.

I turned to see him stretched out beside Ziggy, tracing the line of the boy’s bicep with a clawed finger.

“We had an agreement,” I said cautiously.

Cyrus laughed. “Don’t worry, Carrie, I won’t kill him. He’s in good hands.”

I didn’t want to ask what those hands would be doing. I couldn’t spare Ziggy from whatever perverse activities my sire had planned. I believed Cyrus wouldn’t kill him, though, and that was all I cared about for the moment.

I went to the door and looked back once more. Ziggy’s eyes locked on mine, pleading.

I could only leave and close the door behind me.

Thirteen

Revelations and Recriminations

B ack in my room, I practically ripped the gown from my body. My fingers shook and my chest ached with sobs as I struggled to hold them back.

What was Ziggy doing here? He’d had an awkward confrontation with Nathan, but that didn’t explain why he’d come here. Not when he knew who lived here. Unless…

But he couldn’t have been running to me.

I put on my robe and rang the velvet bell pull to summon Clarence. He appeared minutes later, looking crisp and pressed as always.

“Don’t you ever sleep?” I asked as he nodded politely to me.

His face was humorless. “You needed something?”

I drew myself up as regally as I could manage in a bathrobe. “Yes. The Master—” I stumbled on the word. “He has a guest with him in his chambers. I’d like to be informed when he’s…finished. And bring the young gentleman here.”

Clarence shook his head. “I’m sorry, ma’am. I don’t involve myself with the pets.”

“He’s not a pet,” I snapped. “He’s a friend. If you don’t wish to do it yourself, tell the guards to deliver him to me.”

I thought I saw a spark of admiration in his eyes, but he didn’t smile. “Yes, ma’am. Will you require anything else?”

“Paper and a pen. Clean sheets. And medical supplies, any you might have. Gauze, disinfectant, clean towels—”

He cut me off. “I’m sure I can find an adequate first aid kit for you in the guardhouse.”

I wasn’t sure how to dismiss him. “You do that, then. Right now.”

After he’d gone, I went to my bathroom and ran the tap water until it was as hot as it could get. I grabbed a hand towel from the rack and plunged it into the water, then hurried to the parlor. I wiped off the wooden arms and carved back of the antique sofa, making several return trips to the sink when the cloth got cold. I repeated the process with the marble end table, and covered it with a clean towel. It wasn’t sterile, but it would have to do.

Clarence returned, and I nearly knocked him over to get at the medical kit he bore. I asked him to leave the folded sheets on the sofa. He surprised me by spreading them out carefully, skillfully tucking the corners around the odd shape.

I popped the latch on the beer cooler that contained my necessary supplies. Taking a seat, I examined the contents. There were all types of sutures, tape, gauze, vials of drugs, and even surgical instruments in sealed, sanitary packages. “This is what he gives the guards here?”

“He doesn’t want them going to the hospital. Raises too many questions,” Clarence said.

I looked up sharply. “What if they die?”

“Then some of the guards get burial duty.”

I looked out the window. The sky was turning pink. “What about the pets?”

“They don’t bury them out there. Guards go behind the guardhouse, that’s out past the maze. Pets go in the cellar. That’s my job.”

“The cellar? In the house?” I imagined piles of bodies festering below us. It made my skin crawl.

“In barrels. I fill ’em with cement and every other week the guards go out to the lake and dump them,” he answered.

“Like the mob.” If Lake Michigan ever dried up, I was willing to bet they’d find hundreds of such barrels. And crates, and probably shoes perfectly preserved in bricks of concrete. “Well, thank you, Clarence. That was enlightening.”

“I’ll keep an eye out for your young man” was all he said. Then he left.

I took the paper and pen he’d brought and went to my bedroom. I didn’t know how I intended to get the letter to Nathan, or what I should even say. “Hey, don’t be so hard on your runaway gay son” didn’t sound quite assertive enough, and “Get over it, you big, stupid baby” was more aggressive than I’d like to be.

Groaning in frustration, I went to the window. I’d have to close the curtains against the sunlight soon, but in this faint predawn, my gaze fell on something I hadn’t noticed before. A slight gap in the ivy-covered rock wall that surrounded the property. A gate. There were no guards.

I wanted to run downstairs and check it out immediately, but bursting into flames didn’t seem like the best way to start the day. I shut the curtains and went back to my letter.

Nathan,

Ziggy is with me. Wait for me at the gate in the sidewall after sundown. Don’t be late, I won’t be able to meet you after Cyrus wakes up.

Carrie

Dawn came, but I couldn’t sleep. Not until I knew Ziggy had survived. Eventually, exhaustion overtook me as I dozed off in one of the parlor chairs. It was around nine when I woke to the sound of labored footsteps coming through the door. Ziggy hung weakly from Clarence’s frail shoulders as the older man guided him in.

“Give me a hand,” the butler rasped, and I hurried to his side. Ziggy whimpered as he leaned against me, and I felt his nakedness through the sheet he’d been wrapped in. When I laid him on the couch, I saw the fresh bites that marred almost every inch of his skin.

And I saw the one I’d made. My stomach soured.

“Ma’am,” Clarence said, bowing stiffly as he handed a bundle of clothes toward me. It was Ziggy’s borrowed pants. On top was a folded note.

I looked from the livid purple bruise of a hand print around Ziggy’s neck to the gleaming white paper and snatched the clothing and note from Clarence’s hands. Shaking with rage, I unfolded the missive.

I only said I wouldn’t kill him. Enjoy what’s left.

I crumpled the note in my fist. “Clarence, if I needed you to send something to someone, would you do it?”

“It depends on what that something is.” He eyed Ziggy’s gray body as if mentally calculating his weight.

“No, not him. He’ll be fine.” I couldn’t ask the butler to risk his life freeing Ziggy, nor did I feel comfortable just turning the kid loose on the streets. I would hand him over to one person, and one alone. “I need you to deliver a note.”

He appeared reluctant. “You could ask the Master. He has messengers.”

“No. Cyrus can’t know about this.” Almost without thinking, I smoothed back a damp strand of Ziggy’s hair. His gaze darted over my face and his mouth moved slightly, but I could tell the drug hadn’t yet worn off completely. Had he been given another dose?

I wanted to be able to smile, to give him some reassurance, but I couldn’t. I turned back to Clarence. “Please. I want to notify this boy’s father. I want to get him out of here.”

Ziggy’s body spasmed. Great, I thought, he’s allergic to whatever Cyrus gave him, and he’s going to have a seizure. To my relief, the twitches that followed were much tamer, a sign that his muscles were slowly coming back to awareness after their paralysis.

“Give me your letter,” Clarence said somewhat reluctantly. “And tell me the address.”

“1320 Wealthy Avenue,” I said, choking back tears of relief. “The note’s on the table there. Do you want me to write down the number?”

“No, ma’am. 1320 Wealthy Avenue. Will you require anything else?”

A declaration of loyalty like the knights gave Arthur in all those Camelot movies would have been nice, but I doubted I would get one from Clarence. The only guarantee I had was the fact he hated Cyrus and probably wouldn’t go out of his way to make his master happy.

Clarence nodded as though he’d read and agreed with my thought, then he left without another word. Once he had gone, I knelt at Ziggy’s side.

His eyes searched my face, and his mouth worked feebly to speak. I laid my hand on his chest, hoping the touch comforted him. “Ziggy, I believe the drugs he gave you are wearing off. Did he give you another dose? Blink once for yes.”

With visible effort, his eyes closed briefly, then snapped open.

“You have some bite marks I think might need cleaning. Can I examine you?”

Two blinks and an angry glare.

I sighed. “I’m sorry I bit you. I really am. But I couldn’t let Cyrus know who you were. He’d kill you. You know I wouldn’t have done it in any other circumstance.”

Two blinks.

“Ziggy, please. I don’t want you to get an infection I can easily prevent.”

After a long moment, one blink.

I went to the bathroom and scrubbed my hands thoroughly. Then, with the consideration I’d give a sexual assault case in the E.R., I began my examination.

“I’m going to take this sheet off of you, but I’ll rearrange it so you’re not completely uncovered. Right now, all I’m doing is evaluating the severity of your injuries.”

And some were pretty severe. Long, but fairly shallow cuts latticed his chest. Hideous, purple bruises darkened his skin, and claw marks showed where Cyrus had gripped the boy’s shoulders. When I moved lower, I saw bite marks, not inflicted by fangs, but blunt, human teeth, on the inside of his thighs. I turned my head away.

When I looked back, I saw a tear roll from Ziggy’s eye. He wouldn’t look at me.

A few hours ago, he’d been indulging in what looked like some pretty terrific sex. Then he’d run away from the only home he’d ever known, just to come here and be violated and humiliated by Cyrus. And me.

I debraded the bites and scratches and covered the worst with squares of gauze. “Do you hurt…anywhere else?”

He answered with two blinks, but croaked a barely audible “No.”

I went to wash my hands and snag an extra blanket from my bed. When I came back, I tucked Ziggy in, then dropped wearily into a chair. He spoke again, with more strength behind his voice this time. “Thank you.”

I heard the emotion in his words and tried to sound casual. “It’s okay. If you need anything else, just let me know.”

“Some aspirin would be nice. I’m sore all over.” He swallowed with a wince.

I looked through the medicine kit and found a bottle of acetaminophen. “This will have to do. I don’t want to thin your blood, with all those…wounds.”

I couldn’t say bites. I crushed the pills into quarters so they’d go down easier and got a paper cup of water from the bathroom sink. Slipping my hand behind his head, I helped him to ingest the pills. “Why did you come here?”

He choked a little on the water, and it roughened his voice. He sounded like a man, not the boy who’d attacked me in the bookshop. “You saw what happened. He kicked me out.”

“That doesn’t explain why you’d come here. You knew who lived here.”

“I knew you lived here.” His arm jerked in an effort to wipe away his tears, but he couldn’t yet control his limbs. “I thought you’d let me stay. I didn’t know you were going to feed off me and let him do w-what he did to me.” The last part came out as a shamed whisper, and he closed his eyes. “I love irony, when it doesn’t happen to me.”

He felt he was being punished. I wanted to weep for him, trapped in his prison of self-loathing, but he didn’t need that now. He would shun my pity and turn away from me. Then he’d have no allies left. “You didn’t deserve this.”

“Yeah, well. That’s your opinion.” He laughed bitterly, and more tears rolled silently from his eyes to wet the hair at his temples.

“It’s not an opinion. It’s a fact,” I told him sternly. “You didn’t deserve what he did to you.”

He looked away, and I could practically feel the blame radiating from him.

I cleared my throat softly and decided to change the subject. “Ziggy, when you got here, did you tell anyone you knew me?”

“Yeah. The guards at the door. I told them I was looking for the doctor, that I knew you from the hospital.” He sniffled. “Don’t worry, I didn’t mention the Movement. I figured they would have probably killed me.”

Rage brought me to my feet. “I’ll be back in a minute.”

With enough strength to splinter the hinges, I wrenched the secret door open and strode into Cyrus’s chamber. Two guards stood at his bedroom door, but they stepped aside and even opened it to admit me.

Cyrus was sprawled naked across the bed, the sheets and blankets in a tangled heap on the floor. Blood spattered the linen beneath him, and he snored in the depths of a contented sleep.

I could kill him right now and he’d never see it coming. The thought came before I had a chance to guard my mind from him, and I tensed, waiting for a response. His breath hitched, but he didn’t wake.

I stepped to the side of the bed, intending to wake him, but his arm shot out and caught my wrist. He pulled me down and pinned me beneath him.

“You’re mad enough to kill me, then?” he murmured against my neck. “You should have brought a weapon, because I can guarantee you won’t be able to do it with your bare hands.”

I didn’t struggle. “How could you do that to him?”

“How could you lie to me?” He twisted a hand in my hair, wrenching my head back painfully. “‘Who is he?’ you asked, as though you hadn’t the faintest clue that he’d come asking after you. As if I were stupid enough not to notice you’d cut yourself off from the blood tie, become so closed down to me that it was obvious you hid something. Who is this man to you, Carrie?”

I wanted to spit in his face. “He isn’t a man. He’s practically a child. And he’s a friend of mine. He was looking for a place to stay.”

“And I should just open my home to every derelict who wishes to show up?” He rolled off of me, and I pointedly ignored his nakedness.

“You do for your pets.” He’d grown aroused as he lay on top of me, and I clenched my teeth to fight the mirrored feeling from our invisible connection. “Why should it be different for him?”

“It isn’t.” Cyrus reached for the crystal bell that lay on his nightstand and he rung it sharply. The door opened, and the two sentries moved into the room. Cyrus pointed to the bedding on the floor, and they wordlessly began to untangle it.

Cyrus reclined against the pillows, utterly shameless in his nudity. “I only did what I would have done with any of my pets. I took what I wanted from him, and in return he’ll get what he wants from me.”

The guards laid the covers over us both, and Cyrus pulled me into his arms.

Though I was still angry, his touch felt so good that I didn’t resist him. I rested my head on his chest. “Promise me you won’t do that to him again.”

I felt his breath on the top of my head. “Fine. I won’t touch him against his will. But I won’t promise not to try to bend that will. He was a lot of fun.”

“I don’t want to hear about it,” I snapped.

He chuckled and stroked the exposed skin at the neck of my robe. “You’d be disappointed, anyway. I don’t kiss and tell.”

I started to rise. “I’m going back to check on him. He’s pretty beat up. But you already know that.”

“Stay.” It wasn’t a request.

“You there,” he called to one of the guards. “Blast, I’ve forgotten your name.”

“Thomas, sir,” the guard replied quickly.

Cyrus nodded. “Thomas. Go and see to the young man in Carrie’s room. He’s in your care today.”

As the guard moved to do as his master bid, I called after him. “If he complains about the quality of care you give him, I’ll kill you myself. Understood?”

Thomas didn’t even blink at the warning, but I felt Cyrus’s pride through the blood tie. “Very good, Carrie. If I didn’t know better, I’d say you were enjoying your role as lady of the house.”

His arm slipped around my waist and he cupped my bottom through the robe. I pushed his hand away. “Don’t think you’re going to get any. Ever.”

He replaced his hand and pulled me tighter against his side. “Do you really think I could perform after the energy I expended with your friend?”

“I said I don’t want to hear about it.”

He laughed softly. “Sleep, princess. All I wanted was to feel you beside me. Where you belong.”

His words were like a death sentence.

Though it was nearly noon, I couldn’t sleep. I listened as my sire’s breathing grew slow and even, and his gentle snore returned. I propped myself up on my elbow and studied him.

He couldn’t have been very old when he’d been turned. Twenty-five at most. In sleep, his face was smooth and devoid of lines, unmarked by the volatile emotions that ruled him in wakefulness. His skin, though pale, stretched across a body hardened from years of physical labor. From what little I knew of the time he’d been born to, I guessed he’d worked hard as a human.

This man is your sire. This man is the blood that pumps through your heart. I pressed a kiss to his lips. No matter how much I tried to hate him, something defeated the effort. The blood tie? Or my own, insane attraction to him that grew despite his cruelty and depravity?

When I was near him, I wanted him. When he was out of my sight, I hated him. If I could just weed out my true emotions from those governed by the blood tie, I’d know how I felt. Maybe I’d be able to feel my own blood in my veins then, not just the scorching presence of his.

One of his arms secured me at his side as though he were afraid I would bolt. The other lay across his chest. I reached for that hand, surprisingly elegant despite the lethally long nails that tipped each finger. I remembered what Nathan had said about vampires looking different as they aged. If I lived long enough, what would I become?

I lifted his hand and wondered what I would see if I linked our hands the way he’d done before. If his defenses were down in sleep, would I be able to choose the direction of the visions? I laced my fingers with his and closed my eyes.

Before the rushing current took me, his body thrashed against mine, as if he were in a nightmare. Then a red film washed over me and an unimaginable pain tore through my chest. I opened my mouth, or rather, Cyrus opened his mouth, and a scream of agony burst from his raw throat. “Father!”

“Hold still, boy. Your brother didn’t carry on so!” When Cyrus opened his eyes, the face that belonged to the stern voice sneered down at me. Though his skin was weathered with age and the lines of a hard life, he bore a striking resemblance to my sire. Blood stained the front of his shirt and the ends of his long white hair. His hands were inside Cyrus’s chest, searching, pulling, ripping.

In a dizzying second, the vision changed. The face before me morphed into that of a young woman, her body limp, her eyes wide but sightless. The searing pain in Cyrus’s chest began anew. He couldn’t breathe—couldn’t move.

Couldn’t pray.

His father’s laugh echoed in his ear. Cyrus’s scream was harsh, his voice used up by his cries for mercy. A deafening roar propelled me out of the vision, and I sat up, panting, at the same time Cyrus woke from his dream.

His features transformed in his rage. “Did you get a good look?”

The Cyrus I knew was gone, replaced by the ruthless figure of John Doe. I cowered, and was ashamed of the motion. “I needed to know…” I had no idea how I would finish the sentence. “I needed to know how I really felt about you, and I thought I might get a clue by poking around in your head.” That wouldn’t leave me vulnerable to his manipulation or anything. My eyes searched the room, finally resting on the scar that divided his chest. “I wanted to see how you got that scar.”

Wrong answer. He grabbed me by my shoulders and flung me from the bed. I hit the floor and skidded painfully, the soft carpet cutting like razors as it scraped my skin.

“Get out!” He leapt from the bed and snatched his robe, angrily thrusting his arms into it.

I stood, rubbing my tender knees. “Don’t be mad. It’s not like I—”

“Did you hear me? I told you to get out!”

He paced the floor like a caged animal. I thought he’d strike me, but each time he raised his hands they closed in frustrated fists and he dropped them to his side. Eventually, he gave up and stalked to the door. He called to the two guards who blocked it after he passed. “I’ll be in my study. See that I’m not disturbed.”

Aching with physical pain and rejection, I pushed one of the guards aside. “Don’t worry, I’m not going to follow him,” I snapped when they protested. I told the truth. The sun would set in a matter of hours, and I had a meeting with Nathan. I’d need to be strong.

Because I didn’t know what Nathan would do to me when he saw me.

Fourteen

An Uncomfortable Reunion

T he guard sent to watch over Ziggy had fallen asleep at his post. I dismissed him coolly and took a blanket from my bed to tuck Ziggy in with.

Fatigue penetrated me all the way to my bones, and I groaned when I saw the time on the clock on the mantel. I’d only get a few hours of sleep before I had to meet Nathan. And sleep would not come easily. I tossed and turned in the bed, agitated beyond my own nerves. Cyrus was still awake. I could feel his anger and his restlessness, but I didn’t take it to heart. Whatever he was upset about had less to do with me and more to do with what had been going on in that vision.

I woke groggily from the little sleep I did manage to get and dressed quietly, wishing not to disturb Ziggy. As I passed through the parlor, I stopped to check on him. He didn’t look like a boy anymore. His exposure to Cyrus’s cruelty had wiped the last traces of childhood from him. If the thought broke my heart, I could only imagine how it would make Nathan feel. I made a conscious decision not to tell him what Cyrus had done.

For the most part, the mansion was still asleep. I got the distinct impression that this wasn’t an “early to bed, early to rise” kind of place. A few guards scurried around, preparing the common rooms for the occupants who’d soon fill them.

With a fearful glance at the study, I stepped furtively out the back door. A fresh blanket of snow covered the lawn. I tried not to think of how the hedge maze, frosted with shimmering crystals of ice, reminded me of The Shining. I was creeped out enough without the threat of Jack Nicholson jumping out at me.

I reached out to Cyrus with my thoughts, hoping that I sent off an innocent “just going for a walk” vibe. But it was like hitting a brick wall with my mind. Cyrus was ignoring me.

For a moment, his neglect stung me. Then I had the good sense to remember I didn’t want him to pay attention to what I was doing, anyway. I had enough to worry about without wondering if my sire would rip me to shreds for my betrayal when I returned.

Not to mention the fact I had no idea whether Nathan had even received my message, and if he had, whether or not he would actually show up. If I got caught, I was a goner. I couldn’t even lie my way out of a parking ticket. What if Clarence had sold me out after all? He didn’t like vampires, period. Why should I have expected him to help me?

I kept to the shadow of the wall. I was sure every step I took would be my last before I was finally discovered. My initial trepidation had mounted to full-blown fear by the time I reached the gate. My cover disappeared as the stone wall broke, and I gasped, startled.

On the other side of the weathered iron bars, Nathan jumped at the sound.

I hadn’t given much thought to what my reaction would be when I saw him. I guess I’d assumed I’d have to plead for my life or fight him, so I wasn’t prepared for the concern on his face or the way he gripped the bars like a man in a prison cell.

“Where is he? Is he okay?” he asked, peering past me up the lawn.

“He’s fine,” I assured him. “He’s just tired. He had a rough night.”

Nathan’s jaw set as he spoke through tight lips. “I swear, Carrie, if anything happened to him—”

“Hey!” I snapped. “Do you really think I’d hurt him?”

“Yes, I do.”

It stung too much to let it go. “You don’t know anything about me.”

I started to walk away, but then I remembered Ziggy and my reason for meeting with Nathan in the first place. Before I could turn back, Nathan called my name, and the anguish in his voice cut me to the quick.

“Please. I’ll do anything you want. Just get him out of there.” He reached through the bars as if to draw me back. “If anything happens to him…Carrie, I don’t know what I’ll do.”

I sighed wearily and went back to the gate. “Nothing is going to happen to him. I’ve made sure of that.”

Without my permission, my eyes flitted over the dark windows of Cyrus’s bedroom. I remembered my promise to be with him at dawn, and an unexpected shiver of desire raced up my spine. I turned back to Nathan, hoping he couldn’t sense my distress. “The problem is, this place is like Fort Knox. I don’t know how we’re going to get him out.”

Nathan stared up at the mansion, rubbing his hands as if he was trying to warm them.

“You’re dead. Aren’t they supposed to be cold?”

His gaze never moved from the looming edifice. “I’m thinking.”

“Tell me how that works out for you.” As I watched him study the house, I found myself wanting to touch him. Not from sexual attraction, although I knew at least one of us still felt it. This was an urge borne of homesickness. Seeing him made me feel as if I’d been on a long trip in a violent foreign country.

“Why did you kick him out?” I asked quietly, and his eyes darted sharply back to me.

“I didn’t kick him out. He left.”

“He said you kicked him out.”

“I reacted badly. There was some yelling. A lot of yelling. But I never told him to leave.” Nathan’s voice was thick with emotion. “And I damn sure wouldn’t have let him go if I knew he was coming here.”

“I’m sorry you had to find out that way. I’m sure it wasn’t easy.” But no matter what I said, it wouldn’t erase his regret. “He’s afraid you hate him.”

“That’s stupid of him!”

“Is it?” I planted my hands on my hips. “In case you didn’t notice, he was pretty embarrassed that you walked in on him like that. And all he got from you was judgment and the angry face!”

For a moment, it appeared my words had penetrated his thick skull. Then he shook his head, swore and took a step back. “Why am I even talking to you? I should be jabbing a stake through this fence right now, after you ran off like that.”

I’d almost forgotten my letter. “Ziggy gave you my message?”

“Yeah.” His voice was cold and impersonal.

“And?” I wrapped my fingers around the icy metal, hoping he’d touch my hand.

It was a foolish hope. “What the fuck do you want me to say, Carrie? You made your decision.”

“Then why are you talking to me?”

He clenched his fists around the bars and gave the gate a hard shove. Then he kicked it and swore again. I looked frantically toward the house, sure that at any moment I’d see guards streaming down the lawn. But Nathan continued to rage. With a final, violent kick to the stone wall, he spun away from me. I took that as my cue. “Are you finished?”

He limped back to the gate and nodded.

“Fine. Then why are you talking to me?” I phrased the question in a softer voice than I had before.

“Because you’re the only way I’m going to get Ziggy out of there alive.” When I didn’t respond, he reached into his back pocket. “Listen, I’ll cut you a deal—”

“I don’t need money,” I said quickly.

He gave me a melancholy smile. “Yeah, I see your boyfriend has a nice setup here.”

“He’s not my boyfriend.” I reached for the folded paper that he passed through the bars. “What’s this?”

“Information. I’m paying you for Ziggy. Do whatever you want with them.”

I scanned the paper. “Nathan, these are battle plans.”

“Do whatever you want with them,” he repeated. “But if I were you, I wouldn’t be here on the thirtieth.”

I frowned at the page. “January thirtieth?”

Nathan snorted. “Hasn’t he told you anything?”

“No. There hasn’t really been time.”

He laughed humorlessly. “I’ll bet.”

“Not because of that.” I couldn’t meet his eyes. “We haven’t. Yet.”

He shrugged. “I really don’t care. Look over those plans. You can find out what you need to from your sire. In the meantime, start thinking of how you can get Ziggy safely out of there. How can I contact you if I need to?”

“I have no idea. Maybe through Clarence. He goes out every day. Food shopping.” I just hoped he’d relay the messages he received. He’d obviously helped me this time, since Nathan had shown up, but we hadn’t exactly become fast friends.

“The guy who delivered your message? The one who lives with and works for Cyrus?” Nathan looked at me with disbelief. “How about if I want to talk to you, I’ll be right here, after sunset. Make it a habit to check every night.”

“If I can get away.” It was sort of an agreement.

He turned then, as if he was going to leave, and I called his name. The sound was desperate, almost pathetic as it passed my lips. I wanted to tell him why I stood on this side of the fence. I wanted him to know that the only reason he lived was because of the choice I’d made.

Instead, I just stared, my mouth frozen open in shock at my sudden exclamation. He stared back, his expression hard as some indiscernible war raged behind his eyes.

“Keep him safe, Carrie,” he said. Then he turned and walked quickly away.

I went back to the house, numb from the temperature outside and the mood of our chilly encounter. Telling him what I’d done wouldn’t have accomplished anything. Nathan would have rushed into battle as if I were some princess trapped in a tower by an evil magician. Then I’d be in the awkward position of explaining that this damsel hadn’t exactly decided to be rescued.

As for the evil magician, he stormed past the princess without a word when they crossed paths in the hallway outside their chambers.

“Good morning, sunshine,” I called after him, greeted only by the sound of his slamming door.

Ziggy was already awake when I entered my quarters. Clothed in the pants he arrived in the night before, he leaned greedily over a bowl of cereal as Clarence looked on.

“Hey. Did you see Nate?” Ziggy’s voice was light, though I could sense the desperate hope there.

I cast a wary glance at Clarence. It seemed awfully imprudent of Ziggy to speak so freely in front of a guy we barely knew. “Y-yes.”

With a frown, Ziggy jerked his thumb toward Clarence. “Don’t worry about him. He knows how to keep a secret, don’t you, Clarence?”

“Like a dead man,” Clarence confirmed, but I still felt a little uneasy about what he knew.

“What did he say?” Ziggy lifted the bowl from the marble-topped end table, and Clarence used the opportunity to wipe a condensation ring from the spot where it had rested.

I chose my words carefully. “He wants you to go home.”

Ziggy slurped the milk from his spoon and glared at the coaster Clarence had placed on the table. “Is he still pissed at me?”

“He never was pissed.” I dropped beside him on the sofa. “Nathan loves you.”

As unobtrusive as a ghost passing by, Clarence decanted a glass of blood and pressed it into my hand. I thanked him, but my attention was still on Ziggy. “Do you want to go home?”

“Hmm…stay here with the crazy, sadistic vampire, or go home?” He paused. “To the cold, emotionally shut-off vampire who’ll freak out if I ever bring another guy home.”

“I don’t think he will. He was just surprised. And I get the distinct impression he’s not so pleased that you’ve grown up. He would have acted the same if he’d caught you with a girl.” At least, I hoped he would have. Different generation or not, times changed and Nathan should have adapted. And he shouldn’t have cared in the first place.

Ziggy mustered enough false enthusiasm to say, “Great. When do I leave?”

Clarence coughed softly. “It’s not as simple as that.” Ziggy and I stared at the butler in silence. How could he possibly know the details of my conversation with Nathan? Were there spies?

As if sensing my distrust, Clarence shook his head. “But maybe you don’t want an old man’s help.”

He moved to collect the dishes, but Ziggy stopped him by placing a hand on his arm. “What do you know?”

Clarence gave me a frigid glare.

“What? Do you want me to leave?” I folded my arms across my chest stubbornly. “This is my room, you know.”

“I don’t want you to leave,” Clarence explained, a little condescendingly. “I want you to stop acting as if I’m going to turn sides all of a sudden.”

“I’m sorry, but how am I supposed to trust someone who’s worked for Cyrus all this time? You are on his payroll,” I pointed out.

Clarence seemed to roll this around in his mind for a moment. “I trust you a little bit, and you’re a vampire.”

Considering his stance on vampires, that was a pretty bold statement. Pulling Nathan’s plans from my pocket, I motioned for Clarence to come closer. “Apparently, there’s going to be some kind of attack here on January thirtieth.”

I realized I’d been so caught up in my new vampirehood that I hadn’t noticed Christmas had come and gone. I supposed it had saved me from a particularly miserable holiday. I couldn’t imagine snuggling up in front of the tree and listening to Bing Crosby records with Cyrus of all people.

I swallowed the knot of loneliness that formed in my throat and forced a stoic expression. “Do you know anything about this, Clarence?”

“I don’t know about any attack, but January thirtieth is the Vampire New Year.”

“Vampire New Year?” Ziggy’s question echoed my own.

Clarence nodded, his face growing more serious, a feat I’d thought impossible. “Every damn year. And they always throw a big, disgusting party.”

“What happens at the party?”

“A lot of people die.” Clarence removed Ziggy’s empty cereal bowl and placed it on the rolling service cart. “All except two of the pets will go on the ingredients list. The two Cyrus leaves off are the guests of honor.”

“That doesn’t sound too bad,” Ziggy interjected, his voice hoarse.

“Unless you’ve been his guest of honor before,” I pointed out, and his expression grew dark. “Clarence, how does Cyrus pick these guests?”

“I don’t know. He just gives me the list. I’m not invited to the party. But I do know that only one of them comes back. He turns them. Sometimes his daddy does it if he’s feeling up to it. I’m not sure what happens to the other one. If I were you, I’d get your young man out of here before then.”

I had plenty of questions, but Clarence had apparently reached his talking quota for the day. I’d have to get my answers from Cyrus.

Cyrus had either forgotten to lock the door or hadn’t expected anyone to interrupt him, but when I burst into his study, the look on his face was murderous.

“You weren’t invited into this room,” he snarled, glancing sharply up from the book in his lap.

I took in his uncharacteristically casual appearance, noting that he wore a black eye patch. “Where was that yesterday when you needed it?”

With an annoyed sigh, he closed the book. “For your information, I’m wearing this because I didn’t take an eye from your friend, and I simply don’t have the energy to seek a replacement tonight.”

“Too tired for me?” Alternating stabs of disappointment and relief sliced through me.

“No, but I’m rapidly becoming tired of you. Is there any reason for this visit?” He folded his hands across his lap.

“Yeah. I’ve got a question.”

“Well, are you sure you wish to ask, or would you prefer to sneak around in my mind while I sleep tomorrow?”

“Are you still upset over that?” I walked slowly toward him. Taking the book from him, I insinuated myself into its place. “If I had known it would make you so mad, I wouldn’t have done it.”

“Why do I have difficulty believing that?” But he smiled, anyway, pulling me against his chest. His skin seemed colder than usual.

I sat up. “You haven’t fed.”

Only then did I notice the dark circle beneath his visible eye, and the tired, pinched look of his face. He was weak, and it alarmed me.

With a shrug that came off more theatrical than carefree, he urged me to lean back against him. “I wasn’t in the mood.”

“Was it because of me?” The question came out before my mind could consent.

It seemed to take him off guard, as well. Maybe if he’d been feeling better he would have lied to me, but he nodded wearily. “There are things in my past that…put me off my appetite when I dwell on them.”

He nuzzled my neck as though seeking comfort, and I couldn’t deny him. I stroked his hair and tried to quiet my pounding heart. The contact was more emotionally intimate than any of the times he’d touched me before. I suddenly couldn’t remember why I’d been angry with him.

It felt right, holding him like this. As if someone finally needed me. Not because I was going to save their life. Not because I was going to fulfill some long-held parental expectation. Cyrus needed me because I was me.

“You wanted to ask me something?” His words were heavy with sleep.

Did I? The question drifted lazily to the surface of my consciousness. “Right. What’s up with Vampire New Year?”

He let out a low rumble of laughter. “Where did you hear about that?”

“Around.”

To my relief, he didn’t question further. “Vampire New Year is a tradition created by my father. You’ll enjoy it, if you let yourself.”

Cyrus gently moved me from his lap and stood, then walked to an intercom box beside the door. “Send for Clarence. Tell him I’ve changed my mind about breakfast.”

Static crackled, followed by a “Yes, sir.”

Cyrus smiled at me, but it was clear he’d wasted much of his energy getting to the door. I made a move to help him, but he refused me. “So you want to know about the New Year?”

I did, but his weakened state worried me. “You fed from Ziggy. Why are you having such a hard time?”

“I didn’t feed enough. I didn’t want to anger you,” he said, supporting himself on the heavy wooden arm of the sofa. “As you get older, you’ll find you need more blood to function. It makes life rather difficult if you have to go a day or two without feeding.”

I shifted into doctor mode. “If you don’t feed, will you die?”

“Not right away.” He eased onto the couch and patted the seat beside him. “But it’s very uncomfortable after a while.”

I joined him, fitting familiarly to his side. “How many days has it been for you?”

“The last time I drank my fill was the night we first met.” He kissed my forehead. “I’ve been a bit distracted since.”

And he hadn’t fed tonight because of what I’d uncovered as I’d snooped through his brain. To assuage my guilt, I changed the topic. “You were going to tell me about the New Year.”

“Oh, yes. A fitting topic, actually. You remember what I told you about my father?”

I nodded. How could I have forgotten?

Cyrus seemed to draw strength from talking about his father. “Though he hasn’t been a vampire much longer than I have, the blood of the elders he drained seems to have sped up his—blast, what’s the word for it?”

“Metabolism?” I supplied.

“Yes, exactly. Within fifty years of turning, he needed to feed from two, sometimes three bodies a night. It was too hard to keep his identity concealed for long. We moved from village to village, but suspicion followed us everywhere. Father discovered that if he ingested vampire blood, his hunger was sated longer.

“For a while, it was easy. I would turn them, and Father would feed from them. We left them with enough blood to live, but we didn’t provide them with the guidance they needed to survive. We didn’t expect so many of them to last as long as they did.”

Clarence entered without knocking, but Cyrus didn’t acknowledge him. “Carrie, would you be so kind?”

I poured him a glass from the decanter Clarence handed me, then returned to the couch. “If your father kept making vampires, there would be a lot more of them by now. What stopped him?”

Cyrus didn’t answer until he’d gulped down the first glass and handed it back to Clarence for a refill. “Fear, I suppose. My father was a brave man, but he wasn’t stupid. I think he knew that someday, one of his fledglings would do to him what he’d done to his sire.

“Now my father feeds only once a year. In the meantime, he goes into a sort of hibernation. The day will come when he can walk the earth again, but until then, I serve him at the New Year.”

“Walk the earth again? What does that mean?” All this information overwhelmed me. “Where does he live?”

With a knowing smile, he waved his index finger at me. “It’s a heavily guarded secret. For the time being, all we need to do is make sure Father is fed every year.”

“Cyrus, that doesn’t make sense. You’re weak after a few days without feeding. If your father’s metabolism has accelerated beyond that, how can he survive drinking blood only once a year?”

“Oh, he doesn’t just drink their blood.” A cruel spark of the Cyrus I recognized returned to his eyes. The blood he’d consumed flushed his cheeks. “He takes their very essence. Carrie, my father is the vampire other vampires fear most. My father is the Soul Eater.”

Fifteen

Consummation

C yrus’s proclamation shook me to the core. Once I was sure he’d fully recovered from his fast, I left him alone to finish his reading or whatever the hell he did when he was locked away in his study.

The Soul Eater. Though I’d never heard the name, it struck fear into my heart.

Cyrus had given me a brief rundown of the New Year’s festivities. They’d picked January thirtieth because of its proximity to Bride’s Day, an ancient Celtic holiday celebrating the young Sun God’s courtship of the Virgin Goddess.

“It’s all about innocence,” Cyrus had said smugly. “The point of the New Year’s festivities is to choose someone with a pure soul and turn them. When Father kills them, instead of a frothy afterlife of clouds and harps, their souls have nowhere to go. Father collects those souls, and they sustain him for another year.”

What would it be like to be forever trapped in another person’s body? I prayed I’d never find out. I had yet another incentive to stay on Cyrus’s good side. Not that staying on his good side would be any trouble after sunup, if his enthusiasm of the night before was any indication. I tried, and failed, to keep my hormones in check as dawn drew closer.

It was 6:00 a.m. when I finally decided to go to him. My senses were so attuned to his that I knew I’d find him in his bedroom. Occasionally, a thrum of anticipation shivered through the blood tie, but I couldn’t tell if it was from his or my own desire.

I didn’t change or put on any makeup. I didn’t want to appear too eager. When I was stripped of my clothing, a cool facade was the only armor I’d have left.

Cyrus’s room was much different tonight than it had been on my previous visit. The sitting room was dark and cold. No fire had been lit. Cyrus was nowhere to be seen, but the door to his bedroom stood slightly open, and warm, flickering candlelight spilled out.

If I’d had any illusions about my purpose for being there, I would have been put abruptly in my place. Still, a gentle seduction would have been nice. No one likes to know they’re a sure thing.

My heart pounding, from trepidation or anticipation I didn’t know, I pushed the door wide.

The canopied bed, cream-colored furnishings and wrought-iron accents all appeared the same. I noted with relief that no heavily sedated pet lay on the bed. The bedclothes were turned down, and black rose petals had been sprinkled liberally over the ivory duvet. Apparently tonight was all about me. I would have been more convinced if he’d bothered to acknowledge me when I entered.

Cyrus sat at his small writing desk beside the window, head bent in concentration. His hair was tied back and he wore his black silk robe. He was so absorbed in his task that I had to clear my throat to get him to look at me.

He didn’t lift his face, but I heard the smile in his voice. “I’ll be with you in a moment, Carrie. Please, make yourself comfortable.”

“You make it sound like we’re about to close on a house.” Was that my voice, tight and nervous as it scraped from my throat?

“In a way, we are closing a type of deal. Doesn’t this officially buy your little friend’s life?” Unadulterated excitement radiated through the blood tie. There was no tenderness from him, only dark, perverse lust. The intensity of it should have frightened me, but his desire overrode my fear and left me trembling in its wake.

I watched him fold the sheet of paper and noticed his hands shook. He was struggling for self-control, I realized. In a purely antagonistic gesture, I conjured a vivid picture of us in my mind, of myself naked, on my hands and knees as he pushed into me from behind, head thrown back in pleasure.

He hissed as the image materialized in his brain, and his back straightened. I heard him take a few deep breaths before he stood. “You have a very creative imagination, Carrie.”

With the deadly smile of an advancing predator, he moved toward me. His robe, open to the waist as usual, slithered against him like living skin in the candlelight. “Don’t you think this would have been more interesting?”

Blackness, then a crystal-clear vision invaded my mind. A girl, probably no more than sixteen, lay in the center of the huge bed. My hands pinned her arms to the bed and she screamed in terror as I sank my fangs into her neck. Cyrus captured her wildly struggling legs and parted them, thrusting into her as the spark of life drained from her eyes.

I shook my head to be rid of the vision, only to see anger contort his handsome face.

“Don’t ever forget whom you’re dealing with,” he warned, pulling me against him so I could feel his erection through the thin silk of his robe. “I am capable of things you couldn’t begin to comprehend.”

Just as suddenly as his sinister mood appeared, it faded. Kissing me on the cheek, he stepped back to look me over. He frowned as he took in my jeans and T-shirt. “I thought you’d wear something more…appropriate. Didn’t I buy you anything suitable for this occasion?”

He had. In the armoire were several revealing outfits, including a Catholic school girl costume that I’d stuffed far back in the drawer in disgust.

I shrugged. “I assumed I wouldn’t be wearing much for long.”

His mouth quirked at my blunt words. “Very perceptive of you.”

He motioned to the mantel above the fireplace. Just as in the outer room, no fire burned. “Would you like anything to drink?”

I eyed the green liquid in the crystal carafe and shook my head. The blood tie was intoxicating enough. I needed a clear head tonight. “No. I’d rather just—”

“Get it over with?” he finished for me, and I dared not reply.

He trailed a fingernail down my neck and followed it with his tongue. The sensation sent stabs of desire racing south, and I felt myself becoming wet. No living man had ever pulled such a response from me. I couldn’t hold back my moan.

His tongue teased the lobe of my ear, his breath stimulating the moistened flesh as he whispered, “You’re such a puzzling woman. This afternoon you were affectionate and caring. Now you hold back.”

He drew away and cupped the back of my head with his hand, forcing me to look him in the eyes. His missing eye was still hidden by the patch, but the one that remained stared hard into mine. “What am I to you, Carrie?”

Though his touch was gentle, I felt his true intent. He wanted to break me, to make me as shameless with lust for him as Dahlia and the other simpering pets in his harem.

And from what I’d experienced so far, he was very good at what he did. I swallowed. “You’re my sire.”

“Is that all I am?” There was a note of sadness in his tone, but I didn’t answer. He hadn’t been asking me.

He reached beneath my shirt and dragged his nails across my stomach. My breath hitched. Then he turned away. “Undress and come to bed.”

Wrapping my arms around my stomach, I could still feel his cold hands there.

Cyrus moved to the bed, not once looking at me. He shrugged off the robe, revealing a body so white and firm it could have been chiseled from marble.

My mouth went dry at the thought of him above me, filling me. I wanted to blame this new wave of longing on the blood tie, but I couldn’t. I wanted him.

Maybe that was his first victory. But looking at Cyrus, the ripple of his muscles moving beneath tight skin, I wondered why I’d wanted to fight at all. There wasn’t much left for me outside these walls. I couldn’t go back to the hospital. I had no home, no friends, no family. Why should I run from the one person who truly wanted me?

I pulled my T-shirt over my head and stepped out of my jeans then climbed onto the foot of the bed and crawled toward him in nothing but my black satin bra and panties. His eye flashed in hungry recognition, and he pulled the covers aside to let me under.

The linen sheets were crisp and cool and far too real against my skin. I was about to do something forbidden, to surrender fully to something I was all too aware was wrong.

But it’s something you’ve chosen. You’re in control.

How easily I could lie to myself. I was as far from control as California was from Connecticut. Even the touch of my hair as it brushed my back turned me on.

Cyrus pulled me into his arms, his naked skin made somewhat warmer from desire. “You look better than I thought you would,” he practically purred as he swept a hand down my back and over the curve of my buttocks.

Goose bumps rose on my skin. “How did you think I’d look?”

He traced lazy circles over the rise of my spine as his hands moved over my back. “I don’t know. Perhaps harder, more manly. You always hide beneath such masculine clothes.”

I pushed against him, my breasts spilling over the cups of the bra as they pressed against his chest. He dipped his head and ran his tongue across the seam between the fabric and my flesh. “But not tonight.”

Sliding the straps down my arms, he leaned away, exposing my newly uncovered skin to the cold of the room. His eye darkened as he reached for the front clasp of my bra and released it.

I wanted nothing more than to yank the blankets up to my chin and hide from his severe evaluation, but he threw them aside so his view was entirely unobstructed.

He said nothing, unsure of what I expected to hear. He took his time looking me up and down until I thought I’d scream just to break the tension.

Slowly, deliberately, he glided a sharp fingernail from the hollow of my throat to the top of my panties. I arched my hips shamelessly, and he slid his finger beneath the satin, slicing the garment with his nail. Then he took the two halves of the fabric and ripped it completely away from my body.

“Do you know how long it’s been since I’ve been with one of our kind?” he whispered, lowering his head to nibble my stomach.

I didn’t particularly want to know about his past conquests, but I asked, anyway. “How long?”

“Over half a century.” He parted my legs, running the tips of his nails leisurely up and down the insides of my thighs. “Sex with humans doesn’t compare.”

With a flick of his wrist, he made a shallow cut just above my knee. I hissed at the pain of it, then moaned when he lifted my leg and closed his mouth over the blood that welled there.

When he withdrew, red smeared his lips. He leaned to kiss me, and I zealously sucked my own blood from his mouth. How strange that such a short time ago I’d feared the consumption of blood. Now I thought nothing of it.

“You taste as good as I remember,” he murmured against my cheek. His hand skimmed farther down my thigh, and he made another cut, this one deeper.

My body burned as he slid down to lap at the new wound. His hair brushed against my aching sex, a cruel tease.

This wasn’t what I had expected. I’d never really enjoyed sex much before. It was a thing that naturally happened in a relationship, but I’d never felt I needed it. Not like this, feeling as though I’d die if he left me right now, or at least cling to his legs whimpering and begging for more. He set out to seduce, to savor each moment, and I found myself enjoying the sensation of his icy lips on my skin. His wicked fingers stroking my legs. His hard body against mine.

He made a cut in the sensitive seam where my leg met my body, and “accidentally” bumped his cheek against my mound when he moved to suck away the blood. My legs twitched and tightened around his head.

“Could it be you’re actually enjoying yourself?” he asked in mock surprise.

I closed my eyes, unwilling to see his satisfied expression when I spoke. “Yes.”

He nipped at my chin. “Tell me you want me.”

Closing my eyes, I breathed, “I want you.”

“Not the sex, Carrie. Tell me you want me.” His words snapped my eyes open. His face was filled with pure, undisguised longing. He wasn’t asking if I desired him. He was asking me to love him.

He needed me to say yes. His desperate fear of rejection saddened me. But the piece of me that was still unaffected by the blood tie held me back. It was the piece of me that hadn’t been touched by anyone. I wasn’t about to surrender it. “I’m sorry, Cyrus.”

I thought he’d push me away, put an end to the encounter. Instead, he became more focused, kissing me harder and with more passion than he’d ever shown me before. His hands seemed to be everywhere at once, threatening pain with his razor-sharp nails and pleasure with his gentle touch.

He traced a path down my body with his tongue, until he reached the hot, slick entrance he sought. Parting me with his thumbs, he blew a gentle stream of frosty breath across my quivering flesh. I tried to lift my hips against his mouth, but he pushed me down on the bed. Before I could protest, he was on top of me, pressing the rigid length of his cock against me. He yanked my head back with my hair. “Tell me you love me.”

I was speechless. I feared the actions that would be wrought by the fury etched on his face.

“Lost your voice?” He reached between our bodies and roughly shoved two fingers inside me. I shrieked in pain as his sharp talons plowed through my sensitive flesh, but he covered my mouth with his other hand. “Well, you can scream easily enough.”

As suddenly as his touch had turned violent, he became gentle. His fingers, still buried deep within me, no longer tore at me. They stroked, as if seeking to repair the damage done. The fleshy pads of his fingertips massaged and delved, swirling over the hypersensitive spot that had eluded all the other men I’d been with. I bit down on the hand that still covered my mouth to keep from moaning.

I should have fought him, should have defended myself. But I couldn’t. His excitement fed mine. He pulled his hand from my mouth to hear my sobs of pleasure.

He withdrew his fingers. I saw my blood on them, mixed with the wetness of my arousal. Cyrus brought his fingers to his lips and sucked them clean, holding my gaze as he did so.

Tell him to stop, my rational mind cried out as the prison of my body panted, waited, begged to come with words I’d never imagined saying. When Cyrus ruthlessly thrust into my torn flesh, I screamed in grateful agony.

His face was a study in blasphemous rapture as he flexed his hips, driving himself deeper. Cyrus was hard and cold inside me, like glass, and was nearly too much for my overloaded nerve endings.

“Bite,” he gasped, leaning his neck close to my mouth.

I shook my head, trying to regain some of the control I’d lost. He slapped me across the face, and I flinched. “Do it!”

I opened my mouth, trying desperately to summon my transformation, but it wouldn’t come. He growled in frustration, so to avoid another blow, I bit down hard on his neck with blunt, human teeth.

He yelped in surprise, and no wonder. I felt the force of the pain in my own throat, and it wasn’t pleasant. A fresh surge of his lust seared my veins.

“Drink.”

As the first drops fell to my lips, I came. My body shuddered and my legs twisted around his back. My mouth froze open in breathless pleasure while his blood dripped onto my tongue.

Then I was rushing forward, and though I fought it, my eyes opened and I was once again in Cyrus’s body, looking into his past.

The images were disjointed. They flickered like a broken projector, some frames repeated over and over again. One by one they slipped into place, and the hazy, dizzy feeling in my head lifted.

Cyrus sat at a long table in a candlelit dining room. The air was hot and sticky, and stale cigar smoke made his eyes water. He wasn’t seated at a place of prominence. Instead, he was grouped with a few wealthy-looking men and women.

Cyrus turned his head to gaze at the woman next to him, and just beyond her there was a man in a military uniform that was definitely not American.

A deep, accented voice cut through the chatter. “Ladies and gentlemen, before our guests of honor arrive, I’d like to thank you all for coming.”

Cyrus turned his head toward the voice. A tall, thin man stood at the head of the table. His white hair was braided into plaits so long they nearly touched the floor in front of him. Though he appeared much more frail and withered than when I’d first seen him, the straight nose and cruel eyes were unmistakable. It was Cyrus’s father.

The Soul Eater.

When the older vampire’s gaze fell on his son, something that resembled love warmed his eyes. It passed all too soon, replaced by the calculating, predatory glare he gave everyone assembled.

“I also wish to remind you all of the rules. Only one of our guests tonight is the main course.” He chuckled at his joke, and the other vampires in the room laughed politely. “The other is for me. You’ll be able to tell, as they are clearly marked.”

Cyrus’s attention turned to the large double doors at the end of the dining hall. Two servants pulled them open. Framed in the cavernous wooden doorway stood Nathan and the woman I’d seen in the photograph from his closet. Nathan looked nearly the same as he did now, with the exception of his hair, which was shorter, and the healthy golden tone of his skin.

The woman at his side had lost all the youthful good looks I’d seen in the picture. Her cheeks were gaunt and dark circles ringed her eyes. She leaned on Nathan’s arm for support.

Cyrus focused on the pendant she wore. It was a golden dragon coiled around an extraordinarily large diamond.

The doors slammed shut behind them and there was an ominous clang as a large bolt slid into place.

“Bon appétit,” the old vampire said wickedly.

The faces of those seated at the table transformed. Their change was reflected in the horror on Nathan’s face and the weak acceptance on the woman’s. He stepped in front of her, as if to shield her, but the party guests descended on them, pulling them to the floor.

Cyrus stayed in his seat, and jumped when his father’s hand touched his shoulder. “One day, we’ll be finished with all of this,” the Soul Eater hissed in his ear.

“Yes, Father,” Cyrus replied, his throat dry. “One day, we’ll rule.”

Then he moved toward Nathan.

I wanted to manifest into some form I could control, so I could lash out at the Soul Eater and stop what was about to take place. But I knew what I saw wasn’t really happening. It was a part of the past, already over and unchangeable.

A pain in my head threatened to tear me apart. My vision clouded, but I clearly heard Nathan’s screams of anguish and terror as my senses tried to join me in the present. I saw twisted limbs, mangled torsos and flames, as though the earth had been consumed in them. Rivers of blood flowed through my mind.

I was back in my body, and Cyrus groaned as he spilled inside me. It was ice-cold.

I was going to be sick. With all my strength, I pushed him off me and rolled to the side of the bed. Blood, mine and his, was smeared all over the sheets. I squeezed my eyes shut to block out the sight. “What is your father?”

The sheets rustled behind me. I suppose Cyrus sat up. “I’ve told you.”

“But you haven’t told me, really.” I wasn’t sure if the chill creeping up my back was from the cold radiating from his skin or the drafty room. “What does it mean, that one day he’ll rule?”

He heaved a sigh and flopped audibly against the pillows. “It’s all very complicated. I’d rather sleep than talk about this.”

“Sometimes in life, we have to do things we don’t want to.” I sat up so I could face him. “Why don’t you just tell me?”

Cyrus obviously wasn’t happy with my postcoital pillow talk, but I wasn’t about to back down. He considered what I’d said for a moment, as if trying to gauge whether I was joking or not, then gave another exasperated sigh. “If you really want to know.”

“I do.” I hugged my knees to my chest, suddenly aware of how vulnerable I was to him.

“For years, my father has been searching for a way to recover his power. It’s a very secret quest, and even I’m not privy to the rituals and texts he’s reviewing.” There was a note of bitterness in Cyrus’s voice.

“Then how does he get them?” One day of consciousness per year didn’t seem like a lot of time to scour the libraries.

Cyrus let out a resentful laugh. “He has an assistant who does most of the reading for him. I don’t know who it is, but he’s assured me it’s someone he can trust.”

I wasn’t about to delve into Cyrus’s father issues, so I let the comment slide. “You told me your father was a peasant before he became a vampire. What power did he have that he needs to recover?”

“It’s not power he actually possessed. It’s the power he believes has been reserved for him. It’s locked away, waiting for him. He merely needs the key.” With an elegant shrug, he leaned on one elbow, a sinful smile curving his lips. He reached to gently stroke my arm. “But we can discuss this later.”

I shifted away from him angrily. “We can discuss it now. What exactly is the Soul Eater trying to do?” But I’d pushed him too far. The easy dialogue between Cyrus and I dried up immediately, as though someone had dammed the flow of words.

He settled back and closed his eyes. “I’m tired. If all you’re going to do is bother me with incessant questions, you may leave.”

“I’m not going anywhere!” I realized how shrill my voice sounded, but I didn’t care. “Tell me what’s going on!”

“You want to know what my father is planning?” Cyrus sat up and leaned toward me, his face now mere inches from mine. “When the time is right, and all the pieces fall into place, the Soul Eater will rise to become the most powerful vampire this world has ever seen. Humans will be cattle to feed my father’s minions. Any vampire who opposes him will be consumed. He will rule the world, and the world will perish.”

The religious fervor with which he spoke chilled me to the bone. When I spoke, I could barely force a whisper from my clamped throat. “You would help him do this?”

“Carrie, you knew who I was when you walked through the front door.” Cyrus looked almost wounded. “You can’t hate me for it.”

“No,” I agreed. “That wouldn’t be fair.”

I stood and tugged the top sheet loose from the others, wrapping it around myself with nervous hands. “But life isn’t fair, Cyrus. And right now, I don’t like you very much.”

He didn’t try to stop me as I limped from the room.

Sixteen

Best-Laid Plans

I n the days following, Cyrus didn’t speak to me. I didn’t know if he was busy with party plans—his frequent excuse—or if I’d honestly hurt his feelings. It shouldn’t have bothered me if I did, but I was learning fast that where Cyrus was concerned, my heart wanted the opposite of what my brain knew was right.

The first few mornings, he called on Dahlia to share his bed. She strutted around the mansion proudly displaying her scars, but she never spoke directly to me. I wasn’t sure if this was a blessing or a curse, as it seemed everyone in the house knew I was persona non grata with their master and followed suit. The days were lonely and dull, and it was no comfort to know there were centuries of them to come.

At nightfall, Cyrus ventured from the mansion accompanied by his bodyguards and sometimes Dahlia. I didn’t know where they went or what they did, and I convinced myself I didn’t care, despite the fact I was dying to get out. It would have been a perfect opportunity to meet Nathan, but he’d stopped showing up. I pushed my worry to the back of my mind. Nathan wasn’t the person I had to protect.

What concerned me more was Cyrus’s sudden interest in Ziggy. He kept his word and never harmed the kid physically, and after the first few visits to his chambers, it seemed Ziggy had grown to genuinely like my sire.

“It’s not like we’re dating or anything, Doc,” Ziggy said when I cornered him in the kitchen one evening. He rooted through the large refrigerator of people food, claiming various items with a Sharpie pen. I didn’t bother telling him that most pets didn’t live to mooch off their host for long.

I leaned against the freezer. “I know, but Dahlia is going to kill you. And do you have to act like you’re enjoying it so much?”

He shrugged. “He’d actually be a pretty decent guy if he wasn’t an evil vampire. But more important, if I want to live through this thing he’s got planned, I need friends in high places.”

Was there more to the New Year’s party? “Well, don’t leave me hanging. What’s he got planned?” I asked.

“The party,” Clarence said as he emerged from the walk-in freezer.

I hadn’t even known he was there, and his sudden presence gave me a start. “I knew about that. But I’ve been pathetically out of the loop for a couple of weeks now. Fill me in.”

The butler didn’t look at me as he slammed a block of ice on the countertop. He no longer watched me from the corner of his eye, but there remained a sliver of unease between us, most likely because I was still a vampire. But he’d continued to relay messages to Nathan when possible, and he’d dropped the stuffy butler act and refrained from calling me ma’am every second word.

“What the hell are you doing, boy?” he barked.

Ziggy grinned sheepishly and tossed a can of soda over his shoulder. The older man caught it in his nimble fingers and popped the top. “This shit will rot the teeth right out of your dumb head.”

“I ain’t gonna live that long,” Ziggy replied as he drew a thick Z on another can.

My stomach lurched. I’d never believed all those stories from med school about patients who knew they were going to die and freely dispensed the information to everyone, but I didn’t want to hear Ziggy make such predictions.

“Don’t talk like that,” I snapped. I tested the blood tie to see if Cyrus was listening in. All I felt was a vague, alcoholic haze before the tie seemed to evaporate between us. The fact that he could so easily ignore our connection created a sick, lonely feeling in my stomach. But if he closed himself off, I at least had some time to talk about the impending event without the risk of him knowing my thoughts. “Since Cyrus won’t be back for a few hours, tell me what’s going on with this party.”

Clarence groaned and rolled his eyes. “Same as every year. A few human sacrifices and a whole lotta pain. That’s sorta his thing.”

“Human sacrifices? You mean the kids on the list?” I hoped he did.

Nodding grimly, he wiped his hands on his apron. “Them, and a few others he’ll lure in from out of town. Can’t get them all from around here or it’ll look suspicious.”

I shook my head. I wish Nathan would get his ass back here.

Every night, I’d faithfully checked for Nathan at the gate under the guise of walking the perimeter of the lawn. If I were still human, I would have considered the long distance as good cardio exercise. Now my only concern about my heart was whether someone would suddenly give it the Big Splinter. But Nathan hadn’t returned, and as the time of the New Year drew nearer and nearer, my nerves were pulled tighter and tighter.

“Don’t you worry about our boy,” Clarence drawled lazily. “He got himself in good with the Master. He ain’t on the menu.”

He pushed a sheet of paper across the island and I snatched it up.

It was a list of names. Nearly every one of Cyrus’s pets were on it, except two. “Ziggy and Dahlia are going to be spared?”

“Guess it’s not so bad hangin’ with the boss after all,” Ziggy said as he slipped a brick of cheese into the pocket of his baggy black jeans.

I relished the thought of Dahlia being selected for the Soul Eater’s consumption. But I guess she wasn’t much of a “pure soul.”

Two guards entered and I stepped away from Ziggy. “Excuse us, Doctor,” one of the thugs said curtly. He turned to Ziggy. “The Master would like to see you.”

“Duty calls,” he said with an apologetic smile. “Hey, we gotta stop by my room on the way ’cause I’ve got a book C wants to borrow,” he told the guards as they led him away.

C? I pulled one of the stools from the island and plopped myself down.

Clarence had gone quietly to work on the block of ice with a chisel and hammer, but he chuckled at my spite. “You still gonna help rescue him, even though he stole your man?”

“He did not steal my man.” I made an appalled face, hoping it would fool the old man. But I knew it wouldn’t. “I just don’t understand why Ziggy would have such an interest, after what Cyrus did to him.”

“The Master is a good one for winning somebody back after he’s wronged them. Look at you. He wrecked your life, and you still came back to him.” He turned the ice and started chipping away on the other side.

“That’s different. There’s a blood tie. You wouldn’t understand because you’re not a vampire. But it really makes a difference.”

Clarence bobbed his head up and down in agreement. “You’re right, I don’t know about blood ties. But I do know you wouldn’t be here if you didn’t want to be. You’re not that type. If you’ve got to tell yourself it’s some magical thing keeping you at his side through all his bullshit, I’m not the one to argue with you.”

His words cut me to the core. He was right. Yes, there was a blood tie, but that wasn’t why I was here. Sure I’d made a promise to return to Cyrus in exchange for Nathan’s life, but why hadn’t I called the Movement, or even asked Ziggy for help? I’d been Persephone, eating the pomegranate seeds with delight and blaming it all on big, bad Hades. I knew what I was doing when I’d committed myself to this Underworld. I’d resigned myself to accept my plight, and now I wanted to explore the life Cyrus had offered me, but I feared his interest in Ziggy might do something to usurp my place.

It sucks when your little palace o’ denial comes tumbling down.

The next night, Nathan waited at the gate.

“How’s Ziggy?” he asked as soon as I was near enough to hear him.

“He’s fine. Hello to you, too.” I stamped my feet, trying to get some feeling back in them. It had snowed during the day, and the depth of the stuff almost kept me inside.

Nathan’s hands were nearly blue where his gloveless fingers gripped the iron of the gate. “Is he on the list?”

“No.” I thought relief would register on his face.

Instead, it twisted with horror. “Tell me he’s not—”

“A guest of honor. I just don’t know which one.” I looked at my feet. “I know how you were turned.”

A muscle in his shadowed jaw twitched. “He told you?”

“I saw it.” I don’t know why I felt the compulsion to tell him how, but I did. “I drank his blood…from him. And I saw it.”

Nathan was repulsed, but I knew he was scared more than he was disgusted. Maybe he was afraid I wouldn’t help him. Or that I’d throw Ziggy to the wolves.

He cleared his throat. “That’s all in the past. I just don’t want it to happen to Ziggy. Who’s the other one?”

“Dahlia.”

“Dahlia and Ziggy, and they need to pick the one with a pure soul? Oh, that’s going to be a tough call.” Nathan looked away, but not before I saw the suffering in his eyes. “Are the Fangs staying for the party?”

“They were supposed to leave a week ago. I think they’re hanging around so Cyrus will have to invite them to the party. What’s going to happen?”

“He’ll probably invite them to the party.”

I glared at him. “You know what I meant. When you and your little friends show up. What’s going to happen?”

“We’ll bust in, I’ll grab Ziggy, and they’ll kill all the vampires.”

His pointed gaze added including you.

My heart constricted painfully in my chest. Did he really hold such a grudge? I’d thought we’d built a friendship of sorts.

That was before you left.

I cleared my throat. “That sounds dangerous.”

“It will be.” Still, he offered no assurance of my safety.

“Would it be easier to just sneak him out before the party? I could go get him. We could just boost him over the fence right now.”

“That has crossed my mind,” Nathan replied bitterly. “But I’m not allowed to do anything that might compromise the integrity of the mission. Movement orders. They think Cyrus would step up security if the compound was breached this close to the event.”

“Compound? You make it sound like I’m in some weird religious cult.”

That at least brought a half smile to his mouth, but it died quickly. “I’ve been playing host to a couple of full-time Movement guys. The terminology starts to creep in after a while.”

“Is that why you haven’t been showing up?” I sounded jealous, like a spoiled child whose playmate has made friends with the neighbor kids. It just crept into my voice on its own.

Nathan didn’t appreciate it. “I’m sorry, but you’re not a priority for me anymore.”

Anymore. That stung. Not because his feelings for me were gone, but that he’d confirmed he’d had some in the first place.

It was much easier to be angry with him than regretful over our lost friendship. “So you’re going to march in here on the night of the party and kill me, then?”

He shook his head. “Not me. I’m going to find Ziggy and get him out. But watch out for the other guys. We’ve been ordered to kill any non-Movement vampires on the premises.”

“You’re not going to tell them about me?” I hated the fear in my voice. “I took care of Ziggy, that has to be worth something.”

“It was worth the advance warning I gave you,” he snarled. “You put yourself on the losing team, Carrie. It’s a little late to back out now.”

“You know what, I didn’t come here because I wanted to!” I spat.

“What are you talking about?”

I hadn’t wanted to tell him, but there was no avoiding it now. Some deranged part of me demanded honesty, as brutal as it might sound. And really, if I stood a good chance of dying on Saturday, I didn’t have much to lose. “It was a trade, asshole. Your life for mine.”

He stepped back from the gate. I could see in his eyes that he didn’t want to believe me. “No.”

I wasn’t going to soften the blow. “I couldn’t reverse Dahlia’s spell on my own. So I went to Cyrus for help. This is what he asked for in return.”

He ran a hand through his dark hair, mussing the strands. “I don’t believe you.”

“Fine, don’t believe me.” I was too tired to convince him of a truth I hadn’t wanted to reveal in the first place. “Ziggy will tell you. He drove me here to get the antidote. And he’ll tell you what I’ve done in here to keep him safe.”

Whatever I’d said to make him change his mind, Nathan clearly felt like the jackass I thought he was. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Because it was something I had to do. I didn’t want you to die, and I didn’t want you to get killed barging in here as if I needed rescuing.” He looked so penitent, I couldn’t help but ease his guilt a little. “Besides, I wanted the chance to know my sire. There’s a reason he became the way he is.”

I thought of the scar his father had inflicted on him and the pain he’d felt. Yet Cyrus still wanted to please the Soul Eater. Could he have been a good person before his father had tempted him with the promises of wealth and power? Then again, he did kill his own brother in his sleep.

Nathan blew out a long breath as he scratched his head. There were things I wanted to say, but I didn’t know where to begin. Although I’d suffered abuse at Cyrus’s hands, I didn’t hate him. I certainly didn’t want him to die, and a part of me desperately wanted him to pursue me again.

Wow, it has been a lonely couple of weeks.

But despite what I felt for my sire, I didn’t want Nathan to leave without some sort of resolution between us. Perhaps what I’d dismissed as lust-at-first-sight had been a deeper connection than I’d been willing to admit. That terrified me more than the prospect of looming death.

Finally, Nathan spoke. “I’ve kind of been a jerk.”

“Kind of. But maybe I should have trusted you. I mean, if I had said, ‘I made this deal with Cyrus, now I’ve gotta go live with him,’ you’d respect that, right? You wouldn’t just come charging in to save me.”

He arched an eyebrow sardonically in answer.

“Which is exactly why I didn’t tell you.” With every passing second, I became more aware of how much I’d missed Nathan, and more afraid that I’d made a mistake in coming to live with Cyrus. There was no blood tie between Nathan and me to inspire my feelings for him. Did that mean they were stronger than what I felt for Cyrus?

As if in slow motion, Nathan reached through the gate, and I lifted my arm toward him. When our hands touched, a current leapt through me, different from any I’d felt from the bond I shared with Cyrus. There was no darkness in these feelings. Nathan’s thumb stroked the back of my hand as our fingers entwined, and we stared at each other for some time before he spoke.

“Carrie, do you want to leave?”

My head snapped up. “For real?”

“For real.” He laughed softly. “I can get you out the same time I get Ziggy.”

I looked back at the house. The light in Cyrus’s room was on. “I want to go, but—”

“But the tie is holding you back.” Nathan gave my hand a squeeze.

A tear fell from my eye and landed on the back of his hand, freezing almost instantly on his cold skin. Why was I crying? I wanted to escape this place, didn’t I? “I don’t know if I’m strong enough to walk away from him, Nathan.” I couldn’t meet his gaze. “When I’m not near him, I don’t miss him, but when I’m with him…I feel like he needs me. It probably doesn’t make sense to you, but I like to be needed.”

“It makes perfect sense. Why else would you have become a doctor?”

Nathan’s words brought back the memory of sitting beside Dr. Fuller in the cold, impersonal staff locker room. My mentor’s voice resounded like a requiem bell in my head.

“Why did you want to be a doctor?”

I’d thought I’d wanted power. Now I had that power and I didn’t want to use it. Was Nathan right? Had I become a doctor not out of some heartless quest for control, but from a desire to be indispensable and valued by complete strangers? Did I only feel complete when other people needed me?

The most annoying part of this revelation was that someone else had made it before I had. I must have been the most naive twenty-eight-year-old on the planet.

“Carrie, are you all right?”

I looked up at Nathan. “I want to leave.”

He cocked his head, uncertain. “You mean that?”

Leaving such sure things as shelter and regular meals should have struck me with fear, but it didn’t. When my parents died, I’d survived on my own. The only difference was this time I wanted to be an orphan.

“Yeah,” I answered finally. “You’d run like hell, too, if you saw the window treatments in there.”

Still holding my hand, Nathan reached through the gate and pulled me into an awkward and slightly painful hug. When he stepped back, a slight flush colored his face.

So, vampires blush.

“This is the plan,” he said, clearing his throat. “Lie low when we get here, and whatever you do, don’t fight anyone. Stick close to Ziggy. They’re not going to hurt him. And for God’s sake, stay away from Cyrus. He’s a main target.”

“Just don’t do anything stupid.” After the vision I’d seen, I knew he had a score to settle. It was a good thing he didn’t know what Cyrus had done to Ziggy.

“I think it’s too late for that.” The intense way Nathan’s gaze roamed over my face lent an uncomfortable meaning to that statement. But in the next moment, the intensity was gone. Nathan dug in his pocket and produced a tiny bottle. “Take this.”

Without thinking, I stuck it in my bra for safekeeping. “What is it?”

“Holy water.”

I fumbled to remove the vial. “Jesus Christ, you could have warned me!”

He laughed. “Sorry. I didn’t know you were going to stuff it down your shirt.”

“What do I do with it?” I asked as I held it in my hands.

“Be careful with it. It’ll cause a nasty burn. But use it to defend yourself if you have to.”

Hoping to ease his mind, I shook my head. “I’m not going to need it. He hasn’t paid any attention to me for a while.” Realizing I sounded wistful, I quickly added, “Not that I care, or anything.”

“You do care,” Nathan said softly. “That’s why he doesn’t deserve you.”

“Nathan—” I began, but he cut me off.

“I’ve got to go. Keep in mind what I said, and go over the plans again. I’ll see you Saturday.” He turned, took a few steps, and stopped. He didn’t look at me. “Thanks for saving my life.”

I knew him well enough to realize that when Nathan got choked up, his accent grew thicker. It was almost impossible to understand his next words.

“And maybe after we get you and Ziggy out, you’ll tell me how you liked the drawing.”

When I returned to my room, I pulled the sketch from its hiding place. After the party, I’d have to tell him it didn’t look anything like me. Because the woman on the page was a completely different person. Things used to happened to her.

This person was about to make things happen.

Making things happen proved to be more difficult than I expected. Cyrus was increasingly moody, constantly fretting over the impending fete and his seemingly permanent houseguests. A huge part of my plan to help Ziggy hinged on my ability to manipulate Cyrus, but it was hard to manipulate someone when they wouldn’t talk to you. Saturday loomed like impending death. I grew desperate, and not just because my plan might fall through.

As sick and dishonest as it seemed, I wanted to spend one last day with him. It was a death wish, considering how adept he was at reading my mind, but he either had been too busy to uncover my deception yet, or he had figured it out and was waiting to punish me for it at a more convenient time. For reasons I wasn’t willing to explore, I would risk being found out for just a few more hours with him, even after he’d made me feel so…used.

Eventually I decided that if I were to get myself back into Cyrus’s good graces, I’d have to take the first step. Friday morning, I went to his bed without an invitation. Dressed in a white silk nightgown I’d found in my wardrobe, my heart pounding so loudly I thought it would burst from my chest, I stared down the guards at his door.

When I entered his bedroom, I’d expected to find him with Dahlia or Ziggy, but he lounged on the bed beside a slender girl with blond hair. Her back was turned to me as they lay sideways across the bed, and one of her arms draped across Cyrus’s waist. He looked up with eyes of mismatched blue and the smile of a man who’d just learned he’d be having his favorite meal for dinner.

“I hope I’m not interrupting,” I said, surprised at the smoky sound of my voice. It must have been the sexy lingerie, or the perfume, or the makeup, because I was really getting into character.

Cyrus gave the girl a kick. Instead of scrambling to her feet and rushing from the room, she fell limply to the floor at the foot of the bed. Her head lolled to the side on her broken neck, and I saw her missing eye.

I almost turned back. No. Do what you came here to do.

I called over my shoulder for the guards and they stepped through the open door. I gestured to the dead girl, trying not to look too revolted as they carried her away. “I didn’t want an audience.”

“She was boring, anyway. Kept crying about wanting to go home.” He leaned up on one arm. “To what do I owe the pleasure of this visit?”

I approached him slowly, trailing my hands across the silk that covered my stomach, my breasts, then the bare skin over my collarbones. “I’ve missed you.”

Suspicion clouded his eyes. “I thought you didn’t like me very much. Those were your words, were they not?”

“Maybe I don’t like you. I might just be here for sex.” My body throbbed at the thought.

I looked down the length of his body and saw he was just as hungry for me, despite his previous encounter. “You want something more, I can tell.”

I stepped to the edge of the bed, ignoring the blood on the carpet at my feet. “Maybe I do.”

He smiled, flashing the tips of his fangs, which had not yet retracted since his feeding. The vampiric feature in his otherwise normal face made him seem more dangerous than usual. “Is this something I can give you?”

I feigned helplessness. “I don’t know. It could be.”

“Everything comes at a price, Carrie.” He sat up, swinging his legs over the side of the bed.

Taking a deep breath, I hiked my nightgown above my knees with one hand and gently pushed him to the bed with the other. I straddled him, lifting the silk to my waist, and guided his erection into my body.

He moaned and I gasped as I sank down his cold length. I lifted my hips, letting him slip almost completely out, and pressed my throat to his mouth.

The change came over him almost immediately as he pierced my neck. I forced myself to concentrate on the feeling of him inside me, the sensations that made my head swim, so he wouldn’t see the true reason for the favor I would ask.

Or the pain that suddenly knifed through my heart.

This would be the last time we’d be together. I don’t know why it bothered me so much. I blamed all the feelings I had for him on the blood tie. But maybe that blame had been misplaced. Maybe I really did care for him. But the decision had already been made. I’d promised Nathan, and I had a duty to protect Ziggy. There was no changing my mind now. If I grieved for Cyrus in the end, it would be my burden to bear.

I rose on my knees, letting just the tip of him rest against me. He strained up from the bed, trying to reenter me. I made a move to get off him completely, and he stopped fighting.

“You’re trying to hide from me,” he whispered, leaning up to run his tongue over the scar he’d created on my neck. “But you aren’t strong enough. I can see what you want. Say it.”

My hands shook as I stroked his hair back from his forehead. Was this a trick? How much did he really see? “I want to choose who the Soul Eater gets.”

His body went still at the words, and for a moment, I thought he would turn me down. Or worse, reveal that he’d seen through my ruse and kill me on the spot.

Wrapping his powerful arms around me, he flipped me onto my back and filled me in one, brutal thrust. “Whatever my princess wants.”

I suppose I should have felt like a total whore at this moment, but my relief was so overwhelming I almost laughed. I threw my head back and surrendered to the feeling of my sire’s hands on me, his cock filling me. When I came, I shouted so loud I was sure I’d woken the entire household.

Cyrus finished soon after, collapsing on top of me with a smile.

“Saturday will be a night to remember,” he rasped against my cheek.

A tear fell from my eye.

You have no idea.

Seventeen

Happy New Year

W hen I woke the next night, Cyrus was gone. I curled into the space he’d vacated, expecting warmth but finding none. Of course. Vampire. No body heat. I sat up, chuckling at my stupidity, but my good mood vanished at the sight of Dahlia leaning against the closed door.

“What are you doing?” I pulled the sheets up to my chest and groped through the bedclothes for my nightgown.

Dahlia’s face was emotionless, and she didn’t make eye contact with me. “Do you love him?”

I had no idea what to say that wouldn’t set her into a flying rage. I hoped the truth was good enough. “No.”

“Then why are you still here?” She kicked the door with a slow, deliberate rhythm.

“I can’t leave.”

“I wish you could.” She laughed, not in the crazy way I’d heard before, but in a dry, bitter laugh of weariness. “I wish I could.”

“You can.” I felt a little guilty for lying to her. In less than twenty-four hours, I planned to have her fed to the Soul Eater. I bolstered my resolve by remembering the time she’d stabbed me in the gut, burned down my apartment, attacked Nathan, and the fact she was pretty much the reason I was stuck here.

She looked me straight in the eye. “Are you familiar with the Stockholm Syndrome?”

Am I ever. I nodded. “It’s when the victim of a hostage situation forms an attachment to her captor.”

“You probably think that’s what’s going on here, right?” She ran a hand over her mussed curls.

“Maybe,” I said quietly, reaching for Cyrus’s robe at the end of the bed.

Her eyes dropped to the black silk in my hands, and narrowed when I pulled the robe over my shoulders. But she didn’t move from the door, or cease her cadenced kicking. “You don’t know shit about why I’m here.”

“Dahlia,” I began, wetting my parched lips. I needed to feed, and soon. Her plump neck was beginning to look far too good for my liking. “Are you in love with Cyrus?”

“I didn’t know he was a vampire. Not before.” She pressed her palm to her forehead as tears slid down her face. “He told me he loved me.”

I tied the robe and hurried from the bed over to her. I didn’t know what else I could do but stand beside her and offer a shoulder to cry on in her misery. “He probably did—does—love you.”

She sniffled. “He was fascinated with me, with my power. And now I’m trapped here.”

“He’s afraid of you,” I blurted. Her face was the picture of hopelessness, and it broke my heart. As much as I disliked Dahlia, I sympathized with her. “He’s afraid of your power. That’s why he won’t turn you.”

“I know,” she snapped. “But that doesn’t help me, does it.”

“It could. There are going to be a hundred vampires here tomorrow night. If you could find just one of them to turn you, you could get away from Cyrus.” The thought of Dahlia with unlimited power smacked me in the cerebral cortex about a half a second too late. But the words were already out there and I couldn’t take them back.

To my relief, she shook her head and her old venom returned. “Right. Because it’s so easy to just get a vampire to make a fledgling.”

I couldn’t help my sarcastic reply. “It was for me.”

In an instant, her hand left a stinging impression on my cheek. Her eyes flashing with rage, she whirled around and waved at the air as though she were batting away a fly. The door flew back, practically tearing off the hinges, and she stalked into the dark anteroom.

Trembling, I pulled Cyrus’s robe tighter around me. I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’d either just performed an incredible act of mercy or made a huge mistake.

Saturday night arrived with a flurry of flamboyantly gay party planners and confused teenagers who thought they’d been invited to a rave. The former were led quietly around the side of the mansion to set up a garden party in nearly freezing temperatures, and the latter were lured into the house with promises of alcohol and social drugs. Ziggy and I stood on the balcony in the foyer and watched as guards herded a group of the hapless victims toward the cellar.

“So I’m basically toast, is that what you’re telling me?” Ziggy wore a neatly pressed dress shirt and slacks, a stylish black tie draped around his neck. Even with the change in wardrobe, he looked antisocial and slightly intimidating. But not to those who knew him well. I could practically see the word fear written across his forehead.

I hoped he didn’t share my keen insight. I wouldn’t seem so reassuring if he could tell my insides shook like barren branches in the winter wind. “You’re not toast. I get to pick who the Soul Eater takes. Cyrus will turn Dahlia, and then he’ll throw you to the crowd. It’s all very simple.”

“Right.” Ziggy stretched the word out. “Thrown on the mercy of hungry vampires. And yet I’m somehow missing the part where I’m not toast.”

“You know how to fight, and Nathan will get here in time. Don’t worry about it. I’m not.” I was, but there was no point letting him know that.

“What about the secret service down there?” Ziggy pointed toward the guards below. “Nate and those guys can’t touch them. They’re human.”

“Then they’ll be easier to subdue,” I pointed out. “Besides, there aren’t many of them here tonight.” It was a protective measure, Clarence had told me before he’d left for the guardhouse earlier in the evening. Fewer humans meant less chance of a feeding frenzy. Most of the guards had been dismissed already. The mansion now ran with a skeleton crew on hazard pay.

It seemed a little strange that Cyrus would leave the party so vulnerable. Of course, there was the Soul Eater’s own security team. They were apparently scary enough that Cyrus felt comfortable entrusting them to guard a house full of Movement exiles on the most notorious night of the year.

Again, another fact Ziggy didn’t need to worry about. “Now, get back to the room before somebody mistakes you for cattle.”

His eyes were fixed on the herd in the foyer. “You’d think someone would miss these kids.”

“I guess he moves the party around every year. He said he can’t stay in one place for long without people getting suspicious.” Then the sadness in Ziggy’s words made me realize he wasn’t referring to the teenagers below us. “Nathan does miss you. He loves you.”

“Yeah, well. I guess we’ll find out tonight, huh?” With a grimace, he shoved off the banister and headed toward the hallway.

I wanted to follow him, to go into my room, lock the door and sleep wherever I fell. I’d spent the day with a pillow over my head, trying to drown out the sound of Cyrus cursing and shouting in his room as he agonized over every new development, from parking to table decorations, until I was as stressed about the party as he was.

If he thought things were going badly now, I couldn’t wait to see how he reacted when his uninvited guests showed up.

There was no telling how events would turn out. In just a few hours I could be safely away from this house and all the temptation inside. Or I could be dead. Ziggy could be dead. Cyrus could be dead. Hell, we could all be dead at the same time from some freak accident. I wasn’t ruling anything out.

To get my mind off such grim meditations, and because guests had begun to arrive, I went to my room to dress in the new gown Cyrus had bought me for the occasion. When Clarence had delivered the garment, all my bad feelings about the night had multiplied. It was a floor-length, red-and-black ball gown with thin shoulder straps and a tiered tulle skirt. I’d quickly zipped up the garment bag and assured myself it wasn’t so bad.

I was wrong. In fact, it was much worse on second observation.

“I’m going to look like a ballerina from hell,” I whined out loud as I picked at the sequined bodice.

Not to mention the fact that running—hell, even standing—in the shoes he’d bought to match would be impossible, at best.

I pulled the offending footwear from the box with a frown. I slipped the patent leather pointe slippers onto my feet and wrapped the deep red ribbons around my calves. They would have been comfortable if it weren’t for the tall spiked heel that ensured I stood on perfect tiptoe.

I teetered into the sitting room where Ziggy stood like a real gentleman, an expression of pure disbelief on his face. “You look really good.”

“Thanks.” I touched my hair self-consciously, checking to make sure the long, blond strands remained in the French braid I’d put them in. “I feel like a clown.”

“You look like a Goth boy’s wet dream. Hell, I’d go straight if you made an offer right now.”

For a moment, his wicked smile reminded me so much of Nathan it seemed impossible they weren’t blood related. “I’ll take that as a compliment. And I’ll pass.”

There was a soft knock at the door. I called out permission to enter, expecting Clarence.

One of the guards opened the door instead. “The Master wants you in the foyer, so you can greet his father.”

I wiped my suddenly sweaty palms on my skirt. “The Soul Eater is here?”

“Master Seymour is in transit,” the man corrected me in a warning tone.

“Fine,” I replied with an equally stony glare. “I’ll be down in a minute.”

The door closed, but I knew the guard waited outside. I motioned Ziggy closer. “When they bring you down for the party, stay close to me, because—”

“Because I’m your life insurance policy. I know, I know.” He blew out a long breath. “You’re not going to change your mind at the last minute and let them eat me, right?”

“I wasn’t planning on it.” My heart felt like a solid mass of lead in my chest, and I reached out impulsively to hug him.

His back tensed beneath my arms as his breath hitched. The little boy that still lived in some deeply buried part of him appreciated the comfort. But I wouldn’t offer him empty reassurances. I had no idea what would happen, and I wouldn’t pretend to. “I’ve got to go downstairs.”

I wouldn’t allow myself to look back as I went to the door. The guard waited to escort me, as though I didn’t know the way on my own. He walked fast and didn’t offer me his arm, so I kept up as best as I could without spraining my ankles.

Teetering precariously down the stairs, I caught a glimpse of the guests that were gathered in the foyer. Vampires of various ages chattered among themselves in excitement. Everywhere I looked I saw expensive fur and jewels in exotic styles. Even the Fangs seemed to have dressed for the occasion, though they probably would still be kicked out of higher-end truck stops for breaching the dress code.

Cyrus stood at the front doors. I couldn’t see his face, but I felt his excitement at the prospect of reuniting with his father, and the nagging fear that something seemed out of place, that something wouldn’t go right. I pushed through the crowd with an air of confidence. It wouldn’t do any good to let him sense my own anxiousness and have all of Nathan’s planning go down the drain at the eleventh hour.

I wobbled on my spiky heels and fell against a slender vampire with a bald head. Two small horns protruded from his forehead, and his thin black mustache quirked in annoyance. He looked like the cartoon devil on a package of Red Hots. “Excuse me,” I said, struggling to right myself and not stare.

When I finally reached his side, Cyrus slipped his arm around my waist. He pulled me close and kissed my cheek. “You look lovely.”

“Thanks. But maybe next time you could let me pick the footwear.” I peeked distractedly at the vampires around us. “Who are all these people?”

He waved dismissively. “Friends of Father’s, friends of mine. Allies, acquaintances. The Fangs.”

I smiled at the disgust in his voice. “Aw, but they’re wearing their Sunday best. Are they all vampires?”

“Yes, but some are mutts.”

“Mutts?” I looked back at the horned man. “As in mixed with something else?”

“Mmm. The vampire you just collided with has some demon ancestry. There are some lupins here, as well.” He wrinkled his nose. “Do take care around them, they’re liable to hump your leg.”

“Lupins?” I remembered something Nathan had told me. “You mean werewolves?”

Cyrus shushed me. “Werewolf-vampire hybrids. But that’s not the politically correct term. Lupins are making great strides at becoming semicivilized, and they prefer not to be lumped in with their lesser wolven brethren. My God, those creatures are still living in the woods, running in packs. Who would want to be associated with them?”

A guard stepped forward. “Sir? They’re approaching.”

Cyrus took a deep breath and turned to me. “Are you ready?”

I wasn’t certain what I was supposed to be ready for, but I nodded. Still firmly clamped to his side, I walked with him as guards opened the doors.

The night air was cold as it hit us on the top step. In the moonlight, I saw the gate at the end of the driveway open. A long sedan pulled up, followed by a hearse. Another sedan completed the motorcade. They rolled to a stop at the top of the drive, the hearse in position in front of the door.

Eight men, identical in height, features and their black suits, exited the cars. A chauffeur stepped out of the hearse. He opened the back door ceremoniously, exposing a gleaming, bronze coffin.

Cyrus straightened at my side. I thought I saw a tear on his cheek, but it might have been a drop of blood from his deteriorating replacement eye. He wiped it away with an unsteady hand.

The men lifted the casket on their shoulders and carried it to the house. Cyrus turned and guided me back inside. I glanced over my shoulder to see the pallbearers follow us.

The crowd parted and allowed our procession to pass. I saw some of them bow their heads as we walked by. Those who didn’t either looked on in interest or boredom, and the Fangs lifted their beer bottles in salute as our weird caravan moved through the foyer.

Guards opened the study doors. Inside, the furniture had been removed to make a place for a large dais, ringed with tasteful arrangements of black and white carnations. The pallbearers moved past us and slid the coffin gently into place.

“Thank you, gentlemen,” Cyrus said quietly. “My guards will see that you are adequately fed.”

The doors closed, leaving us alone with the Soul Eater. Cyrus knelt at the side of the coffin and laid his hands reverently on the bronze lid.

He bent his head, his hair falling forward, obscuring his face. He pressed his lips to the lid’s surface, and I heard him whisper, “Welcome home, Father.”

I felt guilty for watching this exchange. Cyrus was vulnerable, and I stood there as if I wasn’t about to jab the proverbial knife in his back.

He rose and turned to me, one arm outstretched to invite me closer. “Carrie, come meet my father.”

Wicked butterflies rioted in my stomach. I knelt beside the casket as I’d seen Cyrus do, and slid my trembling hands onto the lid.

Never in my life had I felt hate so strong. It radiated from the coffin beneath my fingertips and wound around me like tendrils of bloodred smoke. My arms shook as I struggled to pull them away. All I could hear were screams of death. When I closed my eyes, pain and torture surrounded me. Fangs and claws tearing flesh. Blood pumping from severed arteries. I opened my mouth to scream, and when no sound came out, I realized I hadn’t been able to move my mouth at all.

When the insidious power released me, I jerked my hands away. Sweat beaded my forehead.

Standing next to me, Cyrus didn’t appear to notice. He stroked the smooth metal of the casket as if hypnotized by its reflective surface. “Father, this is Carrie. My fledgling, and your new daughter. I hope you find her worthy of your blood.”

Something told me my new father-in-law didn’t think I cut the mustard. I bit my lip and silently prayed Cyrus wouldn’t see what I had felt and kill me right there. But whatever he experienced when he touched his father’s casket, Cyrus’s expression of serene pleasure never changed.

“I’d like to spend some time alone with my father. Will you see to the rest of the preparations for dinner?”

I nodded slowly, my gaze fixed on the casket. I was pretty sure I wouldn’t win Daddy Dear over by ensuring the napkins were properly folded, but anything was better than witnessing this macabre family reunion. “Sure. No problem.”

I wandered around for a while, scoping out the attendees more closely. It was fun trying to figure out who was a vampire, who might be werewolves, and how much money they might have spent on their outfits.

The guests milled around the foyer and dining room, sipping blood-infused cocktails and chatting about politics and art. A row of chairs had been placed along one of the dining room walls, and a few unlucky pets were chained to them. They slumped over unconscious, and thirsty vampires dispensed blood from taps in their necks. The pets who’d already expired were tossed unceremoniously onto a pile in the corner, and guards wrestled replacements in.

The Fangs had already invaded the garden. Some lounged in the delicate chairs that were rented for the occasion and rested their heavy boots on the immaculate tablecloths. Another group had brought out a beat-up stereo and blasted heavy-metal music to drown out the string quartet playing on the terrace. I thought I should remind them of their manners, but then decided against it. I wanted to see Cyrus’s face when he learned his elegant garden party had become the Head Banger’s Ball.

By eleven forty-five it seemed the entire vampire population of the world had crammed onto the grounds. At least, the entire evil vampire population. Cyrus entered the foyer at five before the hour and greeted the assembly there. Then the guards ushered them into the garden. I was right behind them when Cyrus stopped me.

“Wait.” He nodded to the only remaining guard, who then mumbled into his headset.

“You wanted the privilege of choosing. I won’t deny you.” Cyrus dropped something hard and heavy into my hand.

When I uncurled my fingers, I gasped. The dragon pendant lay against my palm, but the diamond had been replaced by a huge ruby.

“Do you like it? I thought it was time for a change.” He pressed his lips to my cheek. “You have no idea how much it means to me, to have you at my side tonight.”

Two guards escorted Dahlia and Ziggy down the stairs. She looked triumphant and sure of herself. He looked terrified.

“Hey,” I whispered, giving him a small wave.

Cyrus stepped forward to inspect the pair. “Dahlia, you look lovely as ever.”

She shot me a smug grin, and then turned back to admire Cyrus. He moved on to Ziggy. His dapper appearance clearly impressed my sire. “Are you nervous?”

Ziggy shook his head.

“Good,” Cyrus continued. “There’s no reason to be.” He paced back and forth in front of them for a moment. “As you know, every year I must make a difficult choice. Of all my pets, two must survive this night to make our celebration complete. Still, only one may take the place of honor in our festivities. Until now, I’ve been charged with deciding who receives that honor.”

Dahlia’s eyes grew wide. “Until now?”

“Don’t interrupt the man while he’s talking,” Ziggy quipped. I shot him a warning glance.

Cyrus paused. “As I was saying. Until now, I’ve had to decide who receives that honor. This year, I have the pleasure of seeing my fledgling perform this office. Carrie?”

I stepped forward, and without hesitation, pointed at Dahlia. “Her.”

Cyrus raised an eyebrow. “Interesting choice.”

“Why do you say that?”

But he had already pried the pendant from my hands. Dahlia squealed and clapped her hands, then leaned forward, lifting her hair. Cyrus slipped the chain around her neck and stepped back.

“Master, the first course is ready.”

At the sound of the guard’s voice, Cyrus turned to me. “We don’t want to keep our guests waiting.” He held out his arm and I took it, casting a reassuring glance at Ziggy. Cyrus faced forward and Dahlia was so preoccupied with her new prize, neither of them saw me mouth stay close to him.

We stepped onto the terrace to a round of applause. A guard stopped Ziggy and Dahlia from exiting with us. The glass doors swung shut, leaving them inside.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Cyrus called, his voice cutting through the excited chatter. “Thank you all so very much for coming. It warms my heart to share this night with such good friends.”

There was a polite smattering of applause. I tried not to scan the garden walls for signs of the Movement. It had to be nearly time now. Nathan promised they would come tonight.

The cavalry didn’t show up. Not during Cyrus’s longwinded speech about the importance of tradition and the looming threat of extinction.

God, it’s like he’s running for office.

Finally, he ended with some sugarcoated platitude about old and new friendships, clapped his hands and signaled the guards waiting inside the French doors.

“As you know, our guests of honor will enter in a moment. Please remember that one of them is for the Soul Eater, and the other is our traditional first course.”

Dahlia and Ziggy joined us on the terrace. As I looked at her beaming face, a pang of guilt shot through me. She thought she’d been chosen for a great honor. I’d condemned her to a fate worse than death, once Jacob Seymour consumed her soul.

Cyrus waved Dahlia forward. I expected him to bite into her, to start the process so she’d be turned quickly for the Soul Eater.

Two guards stepped forward and grasped Ziggy by the arms. I assumed they prepared to throw him into the crowd.

Nathan, where are you?

I felt sick to my stomach as I saw Cyrus’s hand twine around Dahlia’s hair.

“Ladies and gentlemen, bon appétit!”

Then he threw Dahlia off the terrace.

Eighteen

The Soul Eater

C onfusion flashed across her face as the vampires surged forward and seized her. She fought their greedy, clutching hands as she looked toward us. “Cyrus? What’s going on?”

My own panicked brain echoed her question.

“This was what you wanted,” Cyrus snarled at me before rounding on Ziggy.

“I thought you’d feed her to your father!” I gripped his arm, but I didn’t have the strength to stop him as he turned away from me.

“No fucking way!” Ziggy struggled against the guards and actually managed to break their hold. He fell to the hard stone, scrambling backward on his hands and feet like a frightened crab.

He didn’t get far.

“No!” I shouted as Cyrus descended on him. There was a sickening crunch as muscle and vein gave way under fangs. Ziggy’s agonized screams filled the air, a death rattle of blood gurgling from his throat.

I needed something, anything to use as a weapon. Ziggy’s cries slowed, then stopped altogether, and his body hung limp in Cyrus’s arms.

Dahlia faired much better. She shrieked a command and the vampires fell back in a wave. She ran toward the maze, never looking back. The Fangs followed her, whooping war cries as they disappeared into the dark hedges. The diners who were unaffected by Dahlia’s flight murmured in surprise and looked around uncomfortably.

Cyrus rose and left Ziggy unconscious where he lay. I watched, sickened, as Cyrus wiped a rivulet of blood from his chin and raised his arms. His roughened voice and savage vampire face made him seem more evil, if that were possible. “Ladies and gentlemen, enjoy the hunt.”

Behind us, the doors pushed open and a frantic group of humans flooded the terrace. They ran for their lives and would have trampled Ziggy, had I not knelt over him and shielded his vulnerable body.

“Ziggy, can you hear me?” I pulled him into my lap and pressed my hand to the oozing wound on his neck. Blood should have been spraying from his gashed throat, if there was enough blood left to spray. He opened his eyes, but they rolled back into his head as his body seized in my arms.

Most of the pets ran straight for the maze, herded toward it by the pursuing vampires. A few of the humans broke away from the crowd and were caught as they tried to climb the garden walls.

Cyrus watched for a long moment, something akin to pride on his face. Then he turned to us and raised his wrist. “Shall I turn him, or will you?”

“No!” I shouted again, trying to cover Ziggy by leaning over him, but my answer was swallowed up by the pandemonium. “I made a mistake. I wanted him to live.”

“Well, it’s not bloody likely now, is it?” Cyrus asked dispassionately. “Look, we’ll get you another one.”

Tears rolled down my cheeks, stinging my cold flesh. “This wasn’t how it was supposed to happen.”

Cyrus frowned. “What are you talking about?”

He suspected something. Amid the screams and destruction around us, I let my guard down, my guilt and terror flooding the blood tie.

Over all this, a new sound emerged. The steady thump of rotary blades chopping through the air. I’d often heard the sound at the hospital, when accident victims were brought in by helicopter.

The medical chopper had nothing on the three sleek, black, military-style copters that dipped below the tree line. I stared up at the sky, transfixed by the whirling blades. My heart swelled with a mixture of dread and hope. The hour of salvation had arrived, too late for Ziggy.

Or me, for that matter. Without him, my safety wasn’t assured. I wrapped my arms around Ziggy’s chest and stood, half lifting him. He gasped and a cascade of blood poured over my hands. He wasn’t going to last much longer.

Cyrus shouted frantically to his guards. New screams erupted from the hedge maze, the petrified cries of vampires trapped like foxes in snares, as one by one they realized what was happening. The helicopters’ floodlights snapped on and pure UV rays drenched the lawn in artificial sunlight.

The heat and glare made my skin sizzle, but there wasn’t enough direct exposure to kill me on the shaded porch where we were. Others weren’t so lucky. The few vampires who made it clear of the maze exploded into flame and burned before they could reach the terrace. Only a handful made it to the house, pushing past us and charging through the glass doors.

Long ropes fell from both sides of each helicopter and dark figures dropped onto the lawn.

The assassins had arrived.

Twenty of them slid to the ground, covered in head-to-toe black gear. On their heads they wore black hoods and dark goggles. Leather gloves and boots protected their hands and feet. Not a centimeter of their skin was exposed.

They were impressively efficient. The vampires that didn’t burn quickly enough were staked. A few were decapitated with long, studded knives.

It was gruesome. Headless bodies burst into fire, skin and muscle flaking to embers in the wind generated by the helicopters. For a brief second, all that remained of them was a flash of blue flame where their heart should be, just before their ribs turned to ash and crumbled to the lawn.

Cyrus fled past me, the right side of his face scorched by the lights. “I’ll deal with you later! Run!”

But I couldn’t leave Ziggy to die alone. I struggled backward to the door, dragging him with me, as my sire ran to cowardly safety.

The assassins surged up the lawn in a lethal wave. A thin line of smoke wafted off of the top of the head of one of the assassins. He lifted a walkie-talkie to his face, mumbled into it, and the lights cut off in sync.

I searched the lawn frantically for any sign of Nathan. How would I find him when they were all dressed the same?

One of them pointed in my direction as I gained the door.

“Don’t hurt him!” I screamed, dropping Ziggy to the marble floor of the foyer. I laid across him, wincing at the rattle I heard in his chest. “He’s human! Don’t hurt him!”

Without a word, the killer reached down and lifted Ziggy’s legs before he barked at the others filing into the house. “I want a sweep of the grounds, and the house upstairs and down. Max, Amy, get the ground lights, and for God’s sake, let’s find the Soul Eater! Carrie, get him by the shoulders!”

It was Nathan.

Numb, I grabbed Ziggy under his arms. Seeing the doors were open, I nodded in the direction of the study. It was dark, but my eyes adjusted in time to guide Nathan to the corner farthest from the door. He eased Ziggy to the ground and whipped off his hood to examine the wound.

“It’s pretty bad,” I said softly. “Even if we got him in an ambulance now—”

“Shut up!” Nathan shouted, lifting Ziggy in his arms. “He’s gonna be fine. Aren’t you, kid?”

Ziggy’s head lolled to the side, and he choked on his blood as he struggled to speak. Only two words came out clearly. One was home.

The other was Dad.

“Yeah. We’re going home,” Nathan whispered, smoothing Ziggy’s hair back from his forehead. “Daddy’s got you, and we’re going home.”

I covered my mouth as a sob threatened to tear from my throat. Outside the door, a war waged. No one knew that in this room, a father held his dying son.

No one except us, and the Soul Eater.

I’d forgotten his presence, had even run past his coffin as we’d entered the room without a second thought. Now dread overwhelmed me. My gaze fell on the casket. It was empty, the lid torn off the hinges. “Nathan…”

He would be no help, I realized, as I watched him cradle Ziggy close, half rocking on the hard floor. The sight was too painful. I had to look away.

The Soul Eater was somewhere in the house. Then I remembered the vial of holy water Nathan had given me. I’d tucked it into my bra as I’d dressed for the party. I’d just fished it out when the doorknob rattled. “Nathan!”

He was on his feet beside me, his face expressionless. “Ziggy’s dead.”

“I’m sorry,” I whispered. “Is there anything I can—”

“There’s really not time for that now.” Nathan stepped in front of me. “Whatever comes through that door, run like hell.”

“Excuse me?”

Just then the doors burst open. Cyrus stood in the doorway, rage twisting his burned face.

“I should have known,” he hissed as his one remaining eye moved between Nathan and I.

Nathan strode forward. “Simon Seymour, son of Jacob Seymour, by order of the Voluntary Vampire Extinction Movement, I charge you with the destruction of humans, the creation of new vampires, and the crime of aiding your sire, the Soul Eater, in his own offenses. How do you plead?”

A cruel smile formed on Cyrus’s lips. “I never plead for anything. Certainly not to a whelp like you.”

Nathan stood his ground as Cyrus moved closer. He watched Cyrus warily, as though he were a deadly snake about to strike.

“Dear Nolen. Stupid as ever.”

Nathan clenched his fists. “How do you plead to the charges, Cyrus?”

“Does it matter? I’m unarmed, and no match for you, should you choose to strike me down in my weakened and vulnerable state.” After a deliberate pause, he added, “Like you did your wife.”

Nathan’s body, tensed to the breaking point, snapped into motion. As his hands closed around my sire’s throat, I wanted to kill him. My heart constricted in grief and horror at the thought Nathan might hurt Cyrus.

“Do you think she’ll survive without me?” Cyrus wheezed. “The tie is too strong between us. But that doesn’t matter, does it? You didn’t even save the pathetic human boy.”

“Shut up,” Nathan growled, slamming Cyrus into the wall.

Faintly, through the frantic staccato of my pulse, I heard Cyrus laugh. “You don’t really believe you’ve changed? Just because you’ve killed a few of the bad guys?”

Nathan crushed Cyrus’s head against the wall, and I slumped to the floor, my chest tightening painfully so that I could only take fast, shallow breaths.

When Cyrus spoke, his voice was ragged, but the hate there was unmistakable. “Kill me then, Nolen. It will be worth it to see the satisfaction in your eyes. I’ll die knowing you’re worthy of our sire’s blood.”

Nathan’s hands flexed, squeezing Cyrus’s neck with fury, but Cyrus rallied one last time and shoved Nathan backward, hard. Nathan lost his balance and toppled to the floor. As he pulled himself up, he snarled, “I’m taking her with me.”

Cyrus stepped aside, rubbing his neck as he leaned against the wall. “Fine. You’re welcome to her.”

Before Nathan or I could react, Cyrus lunged forward and grabbed me by the wrist, spinning me into his arms like a dance. “How many pieces would you like to carry her out in? Two?”

He twisted my arm until the long bones of my forearm snapped like dried twigs. I’d never actually broken a bone before. Man, did it hurt.

Screaming in pain and anger like a wounded animal, I flailed my free hand to break the vial I still clutched in my fist. If I had to, I’d spray us both with it.

“What’s this?” Cyrus hissed into my ear. “A token of affection from your knight protector?”

He pried my fingers loose and snatched the bottle. Ferocious fingers seized my chin and squeezed my face roughly, forcing my jaw down.

“All this time you let me think I’d created the perfect companion, and you were just waiting to sink the stake into my heart.” He popped the lid off the vial and tilted it. A single drop hung on the edge, poised to fall directly into my open mouth. “We’re more alike than I thought.”

“Don’t do it,” Nathan warned.

“Why? Because you’ll kill me? You’ve already proved you can’t. You’d enjoy it too much.” Cyrus tipped the vial a little more. The suspended drop trembled and I closed my eyes.

I wasn’t ready to die. I might not have anything to live for, but an empty life sounded a lot better than an uncertain afterlife.

“Please,” I whimpered as best I could with limited movement of my jaw.

“Oh, shut up, Carrie. What a useless specimen you’ve turned out to be. Did you think you could betray me with no consequence?” His fingers gripped my face tighter. “What were you planning to do? Beg for mercy? Tell me you love me?”

Though it burned my soul to do it, I nodded a little, terrified my movement would bring the liquid onto my flesh. “I do love you.” It wasn’t completely a lie, but he didn’t buy it. I couldn’t exactly blame him.

“Do you think I’m stupid? Do you think I didn’t sense your betrayal?” He licked my ear. “Every moment I was inside you, I felt your uncertainty. Your fear of me. You never made your choice.”

Nathan sucked in a sharp breath, and hot shame flooded my face.

“Oh, does that bother you, Nolen?” Cyrus bit my neck softly. “I bet you thought you were rescuing a pure damsel. Don’t let her fool you. She begged for it. She let me use her like a whore and she drank my blood as payment.”

“Gentlemen don’t kiss and tell,” Nathan quipped.

How can he joke at a time like this?

“I never claimed to be a gentleman. Unlike others in this room, I don’t deny my true nature.”

Cyrus let the drop of holy water fall. I twisted away and it landed on the bare shoulder of my injured arm. The liquid burrowed through my skin and the flesh underneath like a scorching bullet. I bit my lip to stifle my cries.

“I do wish you’d scream, Carrie. You have such a beautiful scream.” He sighed and tipped the bottle again. “Ah, well, just one of the things I’ll miss about you.”

The vial flew from his hand before he could spill the rest on me, and his grip released. I fell to the floor. I couldn’t move my arm, and it felt as if it had been severed from my body while it hung lame at my side.

Nathan pinned Cyrus to the wall, his face changing as he flashed his fangs. The holy water splashed their legs, and smoke rose from the floor where it burned their feet.

Cyrus brought his knee up and kicked Nathan away. He hit the floor and rolled out of reach. I saw Cyrus withdraw a stake from his sleeve. I shouldn’t have been surprised that he’d lied about being unarmed.

I jumped on him, sinking my fingernails into his face. One finger slipped into his empty eye socket, and it was all I could do to keep from yanking my hand away in disgust. He twisted violently, dislodging me, but I landed on my feet. When he stopped to wipe the blood from his eyes I was on him again, locking my legs around his waist and pummeling him from behind. He threw himself backward, crushing me between his body and the wall. The breath rushed from my lungs in a great whoosh and I slid to the floor, clutching my chest. He stood over me, ready to strike.

Nathan got to his feet and slammed his elbow into the back of Cyrus’s head, bringing him to the ground. Once he was down, Nathan delivered vicious kicks to the back of his head until he stopped struggling.

“Is he dead?” I gasped, using Nathan’s proffered arm to climb to my feet.

He didn’t look at me. His gaze was locked on Ziggy’s motionless body. “No. And he won’t be out for long. Let me get Ziggy and we’ll go.”

As soon as he uttered those words, the doors to the foyer blew off their hinges.

A forceful and foul-smelling wind blew us both against the wall in a shower of wood splinters. Ashes exploded from the cold fireplace as flames leapt up seemingly from nowhere, and the remaining furniture turned over from the magnitude of the blast.

A tall, sickly vampire slid into the room. His eyes burned red, and his long white hair trailed behind him as he floated effortlessly above the ground. Although he looked much older, and though I was nearly overcome by the stench of decay, I recognized him.

It was Cyrus’s father.

The Soul Eater.

“Carrie, run!” Nathan shouted. He sprang toward Ziggy’s body.

I grabbed him by the arm. “No, Nathan, there’s nothing you can do for him!”

The ancient vampire slowly came closer, his bloody, dripping claws outstretched.

“Don’t go. I’m so hungry,” he said, the sound of many voices speaking all at once.

“Fuck you!” Nathan screamed, and for a moment I thought he’d charge him without a weapon. “You took everything from me!” He’d totally lost it. I’d never seen anyone so angry. All the resentment and rage that Nathan had been holding back from the world finally surfaced as he howled at the Soul Eater.

The vampire cocked his head, like a child who couldn’t understand why he was being punished. “Just let me have a taste. A little taste.”

The Soul Eater pointed to me. “You. Come to me.”

“No!” Nathan grabbed my hand and ran for the door.

“Don’t run from me, boy!” The Soul Eater’s tone was like fire. “I smell my blood on you! Why do you not serve your master?”

“I will never serve you again.”

The assassins poured down the stairs. Some had removed their hoods, and they high-fived each other on a job well done.

“Get out!” Nathan shouted. “The Soul Eater’s awake!”

It had never occurred to me their plan might have hinged on the Soul Eater’s vegetative state, but power had radiated from the old vampire. Logic and instinct collided in my brain, and I knew even this large number of assassins were no match for his awesome strength.

They knew it, as well. It didn’t take them long to move. They ran for the back door, some jumping over the stair railing to save time.

But Nathan had a different exit planned for us. I tripped over my ridiculous shoes and wrenched my ankle. Nathan never missed a beat.

“Hang on,” he ordered, scooping me up in his arms. He slung me over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes and ran out the front door, down the steps and onto the driveway, then across the snow-covered lawn.

“Just a little farther,” he repeated over and over, a determined mantra more for his benefit than mine.

I held on to him for dear life with my one usable arm as he struggled to keep his footing on the grass.

Please don’t fall and break both of our necks. Not now, not when we’re so close to getting away.

The front gate was closed. “Can you climb?”

I wiggled my good arm. “I can try.”

“Good enough for me.” He boosted me up. I scrambled to the top, but slipped going over and fell to my feet on the pavement. The wicked heel of my shoe slid from beneath me, further twisting my injured leg. I swore loudly at the pain.

Nathan was at the top when he heard me. He jumped and landed next to me, rolling to his feet. “Can you walk?”

I shook my head. “I don’t think so.”

He lifted me into his arms and ran across the street, where Ziggy’s van waited.

Nathan unlocked the door and dumped me onto the passenger seat. He hopped into the driver’s side and started the engine, and I braced myself against the dashboard as he stomped on the gas.

I looked in the rearview and watched as we sped toward safety. Behind us, three black helicopters rose into the night air as the tiny, flickering lights of distant police cars approached.

“You’re going to be okay,” Nathan said hoarsely. “We’re gonna be fine.”

I took the assurance at face value, and since there was nothing left for me to do, I slumped against the seat and closed my eyes.

Nineteen

The Assassins

I woke beside Nathan in his bed. The last rays of sunlight were fading from the sky, and all around us the room glowed a rosy pink.

I sat up, careful not to disturb him or jostle my wounded arm. He’d taken the time to fashion a makeshift sling out of an old T-shirt before we’d both collapsed with exhaustion, but I still wasn’t healed. I might have been in a lot worse shape if Nathan hadn’t helped me.

His eyes were closed, his face smudged with dirt and sweat and blood. He still wore his black uniform, but the shirt had come untucked as he slept. His flat stomach was exposed, and I lay my hand there, taking comfort in the feeling of another body beside me.

“Please tell me you’re in the process of giving me the best wake-up call I’ve had in a long time,” he mumbled sleepily.

I smiled. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to wake you.”

“It would have happened sooner or later.” He sat up and swung his legs over the side of the bed, frowning at the boots he still wore. “You want some breakfast?”

“Maybe in a little while. I think I want to go back to sleep.”

He got to his feet. “We’ve a busy night ahead of us.”

I groaned and shuffled my feet as I followed him down the hall. My injured ankle caused me to limp pathetically. As we entered the bathroom, Nathan halted at the sight of two half-used bottles of blue and magenta hair dye.

The giddy relief I’d felt at escaping death had filled me so completely that I hadn’t had room for anything else. But this reminder of Ziggy created plenty of space for sorrow, anger and, above all, guilt.

“I’m so, so sorry,” I whispered. I wanted to touch Nathan, to comfort him. But as usual, he seemed untouchable.

With an unconcerned shrug I knew he didn’t mean, he pulled his shirt over his head. His body looked less tempting than usual, as though pain and exhaustion had sapped him of some of his perfection. Or perhaps my body wasn’t in any shape to fool around.

“We’ve got to meet with the assassins tonight. Cyrus is still out there.” Nathan turned on the shower and unfastened his belt as if I wasn’t there, as if he didn’t care I was. Debating whether it would be more awkward to stay or make a fuss about leaving, I pretended to look for something in the medicine cabinet. His belt buckle jingled as he kicked off his pants, and I waited to hear the rattle of the curtain rings before I allowed my gaze to roam anywhere else.

“So, are you okay?” I said as I closed the cabinet door.

“Why wouldn’t I be?”

“Because Zi—” I couldn’t say it. “Because of what happened last night.”

“People die.”

“Yeah, they do, but he was kind of your only family.”

“Let’s not talk about it right now. I’ve got other things to worry about.”

The hairs on the back of my neck prickled.

I left the bathroom without another word. The clothes Nathan had bought me were still at Cyrus’s. I swiped a pair of Nathan’s jeans and a sweater that required some maneuvering to put on over my injured arm.

I listened as the water cut off in the bathroom. Nathan came in to retrieve some clothes, a towel wrapped around his waist. He didn’t speak to me, but eyed my attire with an expression that would have been amusement had his eyes not looked so sad.

I’d never felt so in the way in my entire life. If not for the dim light outside, I would have just made some excuse to leave. As it was, I had to settle for a different part of the apartment.

The living room looked cold and alien. A pair of Ziggy’s shoes sat by the door. A stack of heavy metal CDs took up the corner of the coffee table, and a backpack full of college textbooks leaned against the couch. It was like a pharaoh’s tomb, a museum of my failure to protect him and of Nathan’s loss.

I went to the kitchen and pulled a bag of blood from the refrigerator. I was looking for something to cut the top of the bag with when Nathan’s hand gripped my arm.

I jumped, dropping the bag. He caught it and cradled it against his chest as if it were a priceless artifact.

“What?” I demanded, rubbing my offended arm.

“It’s the last one. I don’t want to drink it.” His voice was tight and he strained to get the words out.

My heart lurched at the full import of his statement. “Oh. Oh, God.” I stared, mesmerized by the shimmering liquid contained within the dull plastic. The millions of cells were the last physical evidence of Ziggy’s life on earth.

Nathan opened the freezer door and unceremoniously dumped the bag inside. “How about we talk about this?” I said without thinking, and I was glad. I might not have said it otherwise.

“How about you mind your own business?” Nathan didn’t exactly hide his face from me, but he didn’t look at me, either, as he went through the cupboards, taking out pans, bowls and pancake mix. “You’re not a vegetarian, are you?”

I planted my hands on my hips, cringing at the sting the motion caused. “It’s kinda tough to be a vegetarian vampire. Unless you’re Bunnicula.”

He actually laughed at that.

I arched an eyebrow. “You know Bunnicula?”

He grew serious again. “I read it to Ziggy when he was younger. Will you get the bacon out of the freezer?” He turned away from me in an effort to hide his suffering. I couldn’t believe that after all we’d been through together that he would continue to shut me out. I walked over to him and placed a hand on his shoulder, and he immediately jerked away from it.

Tears of anger sprang to my eyes. “You asshole.”

Nathan turned around, his expression dark. “Fine. I’ll make sausage instead.”

I clenched my good fist. “You know what I’m talking about.”

He opened the fridge and pulled out eggs and milk, pointedly turning the side of the carton labeled Z away from himself. “I do. And I told you before, I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Well, I do!” I stamped my foot.

Nathan poured the milk and the pancake mix into the bowl without measuring, the way a mother would after years of preparing breakfast for her family. Except I’d never seen a mother with such a murderous scowl. Nathan suddenly threw down the wooden spoon in his hand. It bounced off the rim of the glass bowl and splattered half-mixed batter everywhere. “Just because I don’t want to stand here and have a Hallmark moment with you doesn’t mean I didn’t love Ziggy. I cared about him more than somebody like you could ever understand!”

“Somebody like me?” I hated the shrillness of my voice when I was mad. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

He folded his arms across his chest. “You tell me. What exactly did you have to do to keep him safe, Carrie? And so I can appreciate how indebted to you I should be, how much did you enjoy it?”

His remark twisted like a knife in my heart, just as he’d intended. Rage set my limbs trembling. I lashed out. “I did what I had to do! Unlike some people in this room!”

“What are you talking about?”

“Why didn’t you give Ziggy your blood? You could have saved him. All it would have taken was a little of your blood! Why didn’t you do it?”

The question had hung between us since the moment we left the mansion. It had been the cause for the tension we’d felt all morning.

Nathan looked at me, his eyes filled with confusion. “You think I let him die?”

The pain in his voice stole my will to fight. “Do you think you let him die?”

With a growl of fury, he shoved all the dishes and utensils off the counter. The glass bowl shattered at his feet, and the clang of metal nearly deafened me as the pans collided with linoleum. Nathan stalked forward, and I took a step back out of reflex more than fear. He wouldn’t hurt me. No matter how tough he tried to appear, he wasn’t the type to abuse someone weaker than himself.

“I would rather have him dead than be one of us!” he shouted, so close to my face that his cold breath stirred my hair. “You only know your change. You got to stay the same person you were before. Not everyone is so lucky. The blood has different effects on people. It does something to you, it makes you do things you wouldn’t normally do.”

I looked down, all too aware that I could have just as easily saved Ziggy with my own blood.

“You saw that, that thing.” Nathan spat the word, as though no reference to his sire could ever accurately describe his hideousness. “His blood is in mine. How could I put that into my son? How could I make him…”

He was running out of anger, and all that was left for him was despair. “How could I make him like me?” On the last word, his face went ashen and his shoulders sagged in defeat. He crumpled to the floor with a cry of anguish.

Faced with a man’s tears, I reacted much in the way a male would to a woman crying. I stood silently and watched his misery, feeling helpless in the awkwardness of the moment. Then I realized I had to do something, so I knelt on the floor of the tiny kitchen and put my arms around him. “Nathan, you’re nothing like them.”

I thought he’d push me away, but he returned my embrace, clinging to me like a drowning man to a piece of driftwood. “You don’t know me, Carrie. You don’t know what I’ve done.”

I wondered how long it had been since he’d let himself cry or talk to anyone or, God, even feel. Unable to think of any better way to comfort him, I held him while his cold tears wet the front of my shirt and his back shook with unrestrained sobs.

A long time later, when he’d composed himself, we salvaged the dishes that had survived his wrath. As if nothing had happened, we set about making breakfast side by side in the tiny kitchen.

Because there was nothing else to talk about, I asked about Ziggy.

At first, Nathan resisted, giving short, perfunctory answers. I’m not sure if it was talking through the tragedy that soothed him, or making breakfast, but he soon fell into an easy pattern of storytelling. “Ziggy was a runaway. He left home when he was nine. Can you believe that?”

I shook my head sympathetically and let him continue.

“His mom was on drugs, his dad was in jail. His stepdad beat him so badly that he had two broken ribs when I found him. Every few months, I’d do the rounds at the Goth clubs. I’d look for wannabes and vampire hunters, and kids who got into the role-playing and took it too seriously. Usually, I’d give them a good scare and send them home.” He motioned for me to flip the bacon I’d arranged in a frying pan, and leaned to turn down the heat.

“Ziggy had fallen in with some pretty stupid kids. They were in their early teens, but they let him hang around. They called themselves vampire hunters, but I’m glad I got to them before they could get in any actual trouble. These kids had no idea how to fight. They all ran from me. Except Ziggy. We stood in that alley for two hours, staring each other down. I even did the whole—” He waved his hands in front of his face. “He just kept insisting he was going to kill me and rid the world of, I think the term he used was ‘hell spawn.’”

I imagined a nine-year-old Ziggy staring down a killer vampire, and it brought a smile to my face. “What did you do?”

“I would have washed his mouth out with soap, if I’d known he’d had a gift for that kind of language. I took him to Denny’s to get some pie.” He smiled at the memory. “He hadn’t eaten in days. He was so skinny, you could have turned on a flashlight on one side of him and it would have shone through to the other. I asked if he had a place to stay, and he tried to play it off like he had all sorts of options. I told him he could stay with me, and he’s lived here ever since.”

He paused, clearly noticing he’d used the present tense. But he didn’t correct himself. “You know, I feel like any second now he could walk through that door.”

Before he could get too emotional again, he reached for a whisk and set to mixing the pancake batter. “He was only my donor for about a year. I don’t want you to think I was taking advantage of him.”

“I didn’t.”

“And I don’t want you to think I didn’t love him because of what happened before he left. I followed him. I looked all over town for him until the sun came up and I had to come back here. I had a hell of a burn.”

“I’ll bet.”

Without saying anything further, I got two plates and laid out some silverware. I wasn’t sure pancakes would hit the spot in the absence of blood, but cooking seemed to be therapeutic for Nathan. By the time we finished, we had pancakes, eggs Benedict, sausage and bacon. He had just gone rummaging through the cupboard, muttering under his breath about muffin mix, when I stopped him.

“I’m sure this will be enough. I mean, I don’t know if vampires can gain weight, but I really don’t want to take a chance.”

He laughed softly. “I’m sorry. I’m used to cooking for a teenage boy. It’ll take me a while to get used to this.”

Not sure how he’d react, but needing the contact to reassure me, I laid my hand over his as he reached for a plate of bacon. “Nathan, you don’t have to put on an act about this. Not with me.”

“Hey, forget about it. But I’m glad to know you’re there if I need you.” When he smiled, I recognized the Nathan I knew. The calm surface stretched over a terrifying riptide of emotions. It was a depth he probably didn’t visit, for fear of drowning in his past.

By the time eleven-thirty rolled around and we headed downstairs for the meeting, we’d sunk into an easy pattern of speaking without saying anything.

The shop looked much better than I’d expected. Last time I’d seen it, it had been full of burnt, smoke-damaged merchandise. Now it was a totally different store. New shelves were empty and draped with plastic. Sawdust covered the floor and made the air hazy, making it seem as if workmen had just left.

“It looks good,” I said, touching the freshly painted trim. I wiped my hands surreptitiously on my jeans and hoped he hadn’t noticed.

Nathan inspected the new countertop and ran his fingers over it. “The firemen said it was faulty wiring and I wasn’t going to tell him that a crazy witch was actually responsible for the fire. Insurance covered the remodel. It’ll be a shame to leave. This place looks better than it did when I first bought it. Maybe I should send Dahlia a thank-you card.”

A lump rose in my throat at the thought of him leaving. He was the only friend I had in the city. “You’re leaving?”

Nathan nodded. “I’ve been here fifteen years, Carrie. My customers are starting to comment on how well I’ve aged. It’s one of the first signs that I need to go. That, and someone called offering to teach power yoga in the back room. Power yoga. I don’t think I have the strength to put in another decade here.”

“Where will you go?” I asked, willing myself to sound casual. “Back to Scotland?”

“No, not there. I haven’t given it much thought.” He quirked an eyebrow. “Why? Are you going to miss me?”

“Ha, ha.” I tried to change the subject. “What do we have to do to set up this meeting? Do we need coffee and doughnuts?”

He smiled, a little wickedly, in my opinion. “How’s your arm?”

I lifted it uncertainly. It was sore, but practically healed. “It’s okay. Why?”

“We need chairs.” He opened the storage room door and slid out a cart of folding chairs. “Get unfolding.”

“Yes, sir,” I said with a mock salute. “So, are they going to go ballistic when they realize I’m not a part of the club?”

“Maybe.” He dropped a chair into place. “If anyone gives you a hard time, send them to me.”

“Ooh, big man.”

“You have no idea.” The devilish grin that formed on his face eased some of the anxiety I felt. The comment, however, renewed the spark of another kind of tension I’d almost forgotten existed between us. I nearly dropped the chair I held.

The bells above the door jingled. They’d melted in the fire, so rather than merrily announcing the entrance of a customer, they sounded like the arrival of a satanic ice-cream truck.

Two men entered. Though they were dressed in casual clothes, they projected an aura of menace.

Nathan was unperturbed as he hurried to greet them. “Alex, Gary! Get rested up?”

They didn’t respond. They were too busy staring at me. I wondered if maybe I had said something under my breath.

Alex spoke first. He was tall and dark-skinned, with a shaved head. “What’s she doing here?”

Unfazed by the man’s gruff demeanor, Nathan motioned me forward. “This is Dr. Carrie Ames.”

“Hi.” I extended my hand, hoping it didn’t shake.

Alex didn’t take it. But Gary shook my hand readily.

“Pleased to meet you.” He had dark hair, olive skin and a Texan drawl. And he didn’t appear to hate me outright, which scored big points in my book.

“Is she one of us?” Alex asked as he eyed me suspiciously.

Nathan smiled, a clearly antagonistic gesture. “Yeah, she’s one of us. Not Movement, though.”

Gary raised his hands as if surrendering as he stepped away from his friend.

Alex inclined his head toward me. “Any reason for that?”

Before I could answer, Nathan stepped in front of me, and in doing so, was almost nose to nose with the other vampire. “She’s not sure about it yet.”

“Not sure if she wants to be good or evil? That doesn’t sound like a tough choice to me,” Alex said, his voice liquid hate.

Nathan tried to remain calm. “She hasn’t broken a single rule since she turned.”

“Yeah, but you know the rules, man.” Gary sounded nervous, as if they might all be struck down for consorting with a renegade vampire any second.

“And we all know how well you follow the rules.” Alex stared right at him. The tone of his voice implied an intense dislike for Nathan.

Gosh, if this guy thought Nathan was soft on the rules, I’d hate to think how he lived his life.

I saw the muscles of Nathan’s back bunch beneath his shirt. More vampires would be arriving soon. I sent up a silent prayer Nathan wouldn’t flip out and start throwing punches.

I cleared my throat and tried to sound authoritative. “This isn’t about Nathan. It’s about me. I’m all for law and order and keeping the peace, but I don’t know where you Movement guys get off with your ‘join us or die’ rhetoric. I don’t do anything unless I’m asked nicely.”

I stole a glance at Nathan and saw quiet pride on his face.

“I think you better ask her nicely,” Gary said with a laugh.

Alex sneered at me. “Pretty please, with a cherry on top, would you join the fucking Movement?”

“I’ll think about it.”

With a muttered curse, Alex walked to the cluster of chairs and dropped down heavily. I secretly hoped there would be a weakness somewhere in the chair’s frame so that it would topple from under him.

Alas, it didn’t. Gary regarded me with wide eyes and went to join his friend.

Nathan leaned close as he walked past me and whispered, “Think you can do that about fifteen more times?”

He wasn’t kidding. Exactly fifteen more vampires showed up, offering fifteen lukewarm receptions. But most of them just ignored me as they socialized with one another. The situation harkened back to my high school days, when my friends would rope me into going to college parties and promptly disappear with their new frat-boy love interests. I’d just be standing there, holding a red plastic cup of two dollar beer, trying not to catch anyone’s attention.

The variety of vampires surprised me. I like to think of myself as a forward-thinking woman with feminist leanings, but I was truly surprised when almost half the team turned out to be female. Some of the women looked like stereotypical vampire seductresses, with dark clothes and heavy makeup, but most of them were very normal looking. One of them even wore a pink cashmere twinset with pearls. She looked more suited to be an attendee at a meeting of the Young Republicans than a gathering of ruthless assassins.

The males in the group were just as diverse, some so young they appeared to be teenagers and one was old enough to have been my father. The older man shook hands enthusiastically with me, explaining he’d been a doctor as well. “Well, a doctor of psychology,” he’d said, in the early 1920s. “We’ll have a lot to talk about,” he’d promised, and when he’d patted my hand, I couldn’t help but think he might be coming on to me.

When the meeting came to order, only one person voiced concern at my attending, and that was Alex. He was overruled by the tall, slender female who seemed to be in charge.

The tall, slender female Nathan couldn’t keep his eyes off of. “I asked her to let you stay, as a personal favor,” Nathan whispered, never tearing his rapt gaze from her willowy body.

“Try to keep your tongue in your mouth,” I snapped quietly.

Ms. Gorgeous paced back and forth in front of us, and I tried hard not to hate her. She had legs that seemed to go to her neck, and a fashion sense I could never hope to cultivate. With a sad smile, she began to speak. “Thanks for coming tonight, guys. I know a lot of you have planes and buses to catch, so I’ll keep this as brief as possible. As you know, we lost two members in our fight with the Soul Eater.”

I looked around at all the grave faces.

The speaker continued. “And Nathan Grant lost someone very special.”

She smiled tenderly at him, and I realized I was glaring at her. Behind me I heard quiet chuckling, and I turned to see a blond man with a friendly—not to mention adorable—face wink at me. I doubted it was Nathan’s tragedy the man found amusing.

Nathan had heard the laughing as well. “Max, do you have something to share?”

Max sobered instantly. “No, man. We’re cool. Sorry about the kid.”

With a grumpy nod, Nathan turned in his seat.

“If we can all get back to the meeting,” the alpha female said, frowning so sternly at Max I almost reminded her that Nathan had been talking, too. God, petty jealousy was turning me into a deranged tattletale. I wondered if it was a trait I’d inherited from Cyrus, or one that I’d had all along but never had a chance to use.

“While our raid on Cyrus’s mansion was successful in that we eliminated a fair number of vampires, some of you were a bit kill-happy. Three Lupins and a half-demon were mistakenly killed. I don’t think any of us wishes to increase the tension between the Movement and the Lupin council.” She waited as if to let her remark sink in. “And we didn’t achieve either of our goals.”

“What does that mean?” I whispered to Nathan.

“It means we didn’t kill Cyrus. Or the Soul Eater.”

The blond vampire behind me leaned forward, his cold breath tickling my neck. “But some of us got damned close.”

Nathan twisted around in his chair. “Cyrus is her sire. You really know how to put your foot in it, don’t you?”

I almost snapped that I didn’t care, that jerk could say anything he wanted. It certainly would have earned me some points with this crowd. But beneath my current tangle of confused emotions was a lingering ache from being separated from my sire. The pain I’d felt through the blood tie would be nothing compared to the emptiness I’d feel if he actually were killed.

I finally knew what my mother meant when she’d said, just because you love a person doesn’t mean you have to like them.

Miss Thin Dark and Annoying stopped directly in front of us. Nathan was certainly appreciative of the view.

“Since our first mission failed and the council still wishes to see Cyrus exterminated, we’ve been ordered back in.”

Angry shouts and groans of disbelief erupted around the room. Some people grumbled about nonrefundable plane tickets and jobs they needed to get back to.

Max actually stood up, like a character in a town meeting from an old movie. “Now that Cyrus knows we’re in town, he’s going to hightail it out of here. Not to mention the fact the Soul Eater is going to up his guards.”

I couldn’t tell if the outraged voices agreed with him or not.

The leader waved her hands to silence everyone. “Cyrus isn’t going anywhere. The Movement has pulled passenger lists for upcoming domestic and international flights. None of his known aliases are traveling, passenger or cargo. As for the Soul Eater, he successfully shipped himself to…” She pulled out a Palm Pilot and punched a few keys. “Washington, D.C. The council wants one volunteer to follow him—”

“Yo,” Max said as he raised his hand.

She narrowed her eyes and keyed something in. “Fine. We also need a small group to infiltrate Cyrus’s mansion and assassinate him.”

Nathan tore his gaze away from the woman, finally, and turned to me. His eyes were so intense I thought he’d shoot lasers from them as he stared at me. I knew he was making a decision from the way he furrowed his brows.

A decision that obviously concerned me.

Not that he would consult me on it. “I’ll go.”

The woman smiled. “Thank you, Nathan.”

“Then I’m going, too!” I claimed as I raised my hand, despite Nathan’s persistent attempts to block it. We ended up looking like we’d engaged in a very sissy slap fight.

“Absolutely not!” He didn’t bother to lower his voice. “He’s your sire. You’re too much of a liability.”

Anger burned hot on my face. I’d had just about enough of people telling me what I could and couldn’t do. I wasn’t going to let Nathan face Cyrus alone, partly because I feared for his safety and partly because I needed to see Cyrus die with my own eyes. “Pardon me, but I do believe she said volunteer. I’m volunteering, and I don’t think it’s any of your business!”

The speaker cleared her delicate throat. “It doesn’t matter. She’s not Movement, so she’s not eligible to take the assignment.”

“Excuse me, I’m right here,” I nearly growled at her.

“Ladies, ladies. Let’s not have a catfight,” Max urged, standing again. “Unless there’s going to be torn clothing involved. If Cyrus is her sire, I say she’s got the right to take him out herself.”

“How do we know she won’t fall to the blood tie and stab us in the back?” That bitch was becoming more irritating with every second.

“Hello!” I shrieked, rising to my feet. “I’m still right here. How do you manage to keep from going all feral and tearing people up? I haven’t done it yet, and I’m pretty sure I can avoid doing it in the near future!”

“I don’t want you going in there again!” Nathan shouted, grabbing me by the arm and tugging me back into my seat.

I wrenched out of his grasp. “You don’t have the authority to boss me around, so drop the dad act!”

His face went ashen.

“Oh, God, Nathan, I’m—”

“You know what? Go ahead and come along. If you get killed, it’s your fault, not mine. I don’t give a damn anymore.” He stood and stalked off, slamming the door behind him.

“Forget that D.C. thing. I want to go with them,” Max said, waving his hand furiously in the air.

The woman scowled at both of us and ran after Nathan.

Max shrugged and addressed the group. “I guess that means meeting adjourned.”

Tears stung my eyelids as the discordant bells above the door chimed. I don’t know what bothered me more, that I’d hurt Nathan’s feelings or that she was out there comforting him.

“Hey, don’t worry about it, he’s not really interested in her.” Max’s voice was so close to my ear, I jumped.

I turned to see he’d slid into the vacant seat beside me. “I don’t care.”

Max’s smile was boyish and held just a hint of naughtiness, as though my obvious attraction to Nathan didn’t remove me from his prospective bedding pool. “I know you don’t. I just feel like talking about it. If you don’t care, it shouldn’t bother you.”

I couldn’t help my smile. “Fine.”

“Rachel’s a good girl. But Nathan’s not her type, if you catch my drift.”

I didn’t, so I just stared at him blankly.

Max frowned. “Okay, let me put it this way. If Nathan were to actively pursue her, he’d have to get a major operation. In Switzerland.”

“Now I get it.”

“Good, I could tell you were a smart one. I’m Max Harrison.” His handshake was firm, as if he’d been practicing for a job interview. I was surprised when he slipped his hand out of mine and tried to bump fists with me.

I laughed. “I’m sorry, I’m not that hip.”

“Don’t sweat it.” He covered his soft laugh with a cough. “Rachel just looks out for her kids. They’re the vamps she took under her wing when they were new to the Movement.”

“You’re not one of her kids?” I raised an eyebrow.

He sniffed and leaned back in his seat. “No. But enough about me. I want to know about the cutie in the Goth ballerina costume.”

I blushed from the roots of my hair to the tips of my toes. “You saw me?”

“It was kinda hard to miss you.” There was nothing boyish about his expression now. He was almost predatory, the way he looked me up and down.

The bells above the door jingled again, and I was grateful for the excuse to change the subject. “Sounds like they’re back.”

Nathan and Rachel entered the shop. I could tell he was still upset, but he managed to put on an amicable face. Rachel pasted on a fake smile and walked toward me with Nathan.

“Well, Doctor, I’ve heard a lot about you,” she said, leaning casually against the counter. “Do you think you can live up to the hype?”

I smiled back sweetly, but narrowed my eyes at her challenge. “I’m sure I can, and then some.”

“I hope so.” She turned to Nathan. “I need to speak to you. Alone.”

The last word was added like a bullet aimed at both Max and me. I folded my arms, some evil little urge to antagonize her compelling me to stay.

Max threw his arm around my shoulder. “Fine. We know when we’re not wanted. Well, Miss—”

“Doctor,” Nathan snapped.

I put on my best flirty smile, making sure he saw and understood why I’d done it before I turned to Max. “Call me Carrie.”

He gave me a nod, as if to say “good play.” “Well, Miss Doctor-Call-Me-Carrie, I have a fantastic room over at the Hampton Inn on Twenty-eighth Street, complete with a mini-bar. What do you say we get slightly buzzed on very small bottles of schnapps and paint Mallsville red?”

Despite his ridiculous come-on, it was hard not to like Max. I laughed and shook my head. “Actually, I’m kind of tired, after last night. I think I’ll go upstairs to bed.”

I said a brief, polite goodbye to Rachel and Max and headed up the stairs.

The night air was cool, but the day must have been warm. The snow had nearly melted. For once in the last few hectic days, I didn’t feel as if I had to rush anywhere, or dread anything. In fact, I was actually looking forward to tying up the bathroom with a nice long bubble bath.

When I got to the door, I realized I didn’t have any keys to get into the apartment. That’s when the hair stood up on my neck, and I desperately wanted to get inside.

I didn’t know what had spooked me, but every instinct in my body screamed run. I wasn’t going to argue. I’d nearly gained the top of the stairs when something caught my hair and tugged me backward. I opened my mouth to scream, and a hand stifled the sound.

A cold, clawed hand.

A startlingly familiar hand.

My sire’s hand.

Twenty

Transfusion

H e wrenched my head back, hard. “What a nest of vipers you’ve fallen into.”

I shuddered. “All I have to do is scream, and—”

“But you won’t.” His fingers slid across my shoulders, dipping into the neck of my shirt. “Because you don’t want to fight me.”

“You’re right. I don’t want to fight you.” I clenched my teeth. “I want them to come up here and tear you to pieces.”

The unmistakable chill of metal pressed against my throat.

“I don’t think I’m the one who’s going to go to pieces here.” He drew the blade across my neck, and though I barely felt the sting of the cut, a warm cascade of blood wet the front of my shirt. Blood gurgled from my mouth.

“That should take care of your annoying talking problem.”

I heard the door open at the bottom of the stairs, but my vision swam. I couldn’t see who it was.

When I heard her call a farewell over her shoulder, I recognized Rachel’s voice.

If I could have called out, I would have. But Cyrus quickly backed into the narrow alley beside the building, dragging me with him.

“Imagine that. They’re all leaving.” He lowered his head and lapped at the blood flowing from my neck. “And you don’t have much time.”

He raised the knife again, and I was too weak to dodge it. The blade split my sternum, and for a terrifying moment I thought he’d struck my heart.

“I wouldn’t do that to you, Carrie,” he whispered against my ear as he sawed the blade upward. “If I punctured your heart, you’d be nothing but a pile of dust. No fun for Nathan to find you that way.”

As he wedged his fingers between my separated rib cage, his memories flashed through my mind.

The Soul Eater’s sadistic face filled my vision. “Hold still, boy. Your brother didn’t carry on so!”

My bones and cartilage cracked as Cyrus yanked my chest open. When I screamed in agony, I gagged on my blood.

The pictures in my head scrambled and jumped. I saw the face of the dead woman I’d seen before, the same one I’d seen beside Cyrus at the dinner party. She laughed and trailed her finger down the scar on Cyrus’s chest. “And why would I let him do that?” she asked.

Her mocking wounded him. “So we can be together forever.”

My vision cleared, and I saw Cyrus looming above me, his hands and clothes drenched in my blood. “And you’ll be with me forever.”

Those evil bells jingled again. I had no idea how long I’d been lying there. I couldn’t see Cyrus, but I heard his voice from somewhere in the alley. “If you live through the night.”

The blood on my shirt wasn’t warm anymore. It was nearly frozen to my skin. In the gap between the buildings, I saw no stars in the cold, clear sky.

Dawn would come soon.

I closed my eyes, unable to worry or care what would happen to me when the rising sun touched my flesh. It seemed simpler than being rescued. If someone found me, how would they fix me? I’d been damaged beyond repair, gutted like a fish.

I thought about what Nathan would think when he went upstairs and found the apartment empty. Maybe he’d think that I’d turned my back on his friendship again. Or that I’d been so angry with him that I’d returned to the man who’d killed his son.

Would he spend the rest of his life hating me?

Something soft and cool brushed my ear, a breeze in the windless night. I opened my eyes. All around me, the alley grew dim. Colors bled together into shapeless blobs that darkened with the rapid deceleration of my heart. The pain in my chest ebbed into a warm, focused feeling that lifted my whole body from any sensation.

Then the space that separated the shapeless blobs got smaller and smaller as the darkness became absolute. In the distance, I saw a point of light. It swelled and spiraled toward me.

In medical school, we’d been taught the Kubler-Ross theories of death. A glimmering tunnel, all your relatives and the deity of your choice waiting to welcome you.

When I’d gone on to my internship, I’d heard the nurses talk about “The Man at the End of My Bed,” a vision they claimed patients always reported on the night of their death.

Both versions of dying had been terrifying and alien to me, looming in the future like a standardized test or a root canal, something unpleasant you couldn’t avoid. What I was experiencing now was peaceful and gradual, my senses dropping away one by one as the intense light widened in my fading vision.

Instead of seeing heaven, I saw the alley and the street beyond. At my feet, I saw my lifeless body, torso splayed open like a macabre storybook.

I wished I could see the world around me all my life as it appeared now, painted in the washed-out tones of a water-color. Suddenly, where the sidewalks had been empty before, pale shadow forms drifted aimlessly in an eerie ballet. A big orange tabby cat jogged down the alley, pausing to sniff my body.

The animal’s vitality and life took my breath away. The shadows spotted it at once and reached their long fingers out to touch it before it hissed and ran back where it had come from. I wanted to follow it. I needed to touch the cat and feel the life there. But something held me down like an anchor.

A pull at my spectral chest reminded me that my body still had breath and life. I wanted to just die already.

So this is what it’s like to become a ghost.

I heard Nathan’s voice. When he passed the alley, he stopped, sniffed the air.

He howled in fury.

He dropped to his knees beside my body, arms spread as if he didn’t know what to do first. Sadly—though not too sadly, because everything I felt seemed to come through a filter—I realized he wanted to save me.

I wanted to tell him not to bother. It was too much work, and I was just too tired.

The shadows shimmered and pulsed, but they didn’t swarm Nathan the way they had the cat. I didn’t blame them. There was no life in him, no color. Just pale shades of sadness, and we already had those.

Nathan lifted my head in his hands and kissed my dead lips. A tear splashed against my cold skin. It couldn’t have been mine.

The tenderness there made me feel something. Regret?

My new companions beckoned, and I reached out to them. Not with my hands. I had no hands. Neither did they. But they surrounded me, and their embrace was warm and comforting.

Nathan raised his wrist to his mouth and bit down. Dark blood dripped into my slack mouth.

The ghost people wavered and dimmed.

No!

I tried to fight, but piece by piece I came alive again. First I heard sounds more clearly. Then I felt a little pain, and the sensation of hot, sticky blood pooling in the back of my mouth. I swallowed, and the pain grew, until all I felt was agony and hunger.

I closed my lips over his wrist. When I drew more blood into my mouth, a tremor went through him.

“You’re going to be okay,” he rasped.

He held my broken body in his arms.

“I saw them,” I whispered. I drifted away again, but this time there were no lost souls to welcome me.

I was stranded in the darkness.

Twenty-One

Born Again (Not That Way)

I had no concept of time over the course of my recovery. It moved from darkness to light, and not at regular intervals. Sometimes I opened my eyes, but my vision was as soft and unfocused as a newborn’s.

Occasionally, pictures splintered my mind. Some were unrecognizable, but a few were my own memories from a skewed perspective, as if I were watching myself in a movie. In the most frequently occurring flash, I saw my own lifeless body in the alley. It was like a scene in a horror film, and it repeated over and over.

The longer I slept, the worse my hunger grew. When it finally outweighed my fatigue, I woke, cranky and hurting.

Though my memory was fuzzy, I knew I was in Nathan’s bed. His scent was all around me, and my body reacted with surprising ferocity. It demanded I find him.

At first I was afraid to move. I remembered my throat had been cut. With no idea how long I’d been asleep, I didn’t know how much I’d healed. When I touched my neck, I felt only smooth, new skin.

“You’re awake.”

I knew Nathan had entered the room before he spoke. I sensed him. He looked haggard, as if he hadn’t slept in days.

I glanced at the clock on the nightstand. “Is it really noon?”

He nodded. “How are you feeling?”

His eyes were ringed with dark circles; his face was drawn and pinched. When he spoke, it sounded like his vocal chords had been raked across a cheese grater.

“I hurt,” I answered truthfully. “Very badly. And I’m hungry.”

He scrubbed his face vigorously with his hands and blew out a long breath, much like a man who was faced with a task he was too exhausted to undertake would do. But he smiled encouragingly. “Let me take care of the pain first, then I’ll see what I can do about getting you some blood.”

I shifted carefully in the bed, white-hot spears of pain ripping through my torso as I did so. “How long have I been out?”

“Eight days. Nine if I give you enough meds.”

“What about Cyrus?” I thought he looked angry at the mention of his name, and he had every right to be. But I had a right to know. “Did you kill him?”

Nathan looked away from me. “No, we didn’t kill him. I suggested we postpone the mission in case you survived to bitch at me when you found out that we went without you.”

At least he hadn’t lost his sense of humor. Beside the bed, he’d set up a folding card table stocked with clean towels, the first aid kit, and numerous boxes of gauze and medical tape. Most of these were empty.

He lifted a needle and measured out an injection of something. I didn’t care what it was as long as it took away the crushing feeling in my chest.

Gauze wrapped around my torso, giving me the appearance of a fashion-conscious mummy wearing a tube top. I pressed my hand to my ribs and another sharp ache pierced down my body. “I can’t breathe.”

Nathan sat next to me on the bed, carefully trying not to make any movements that would jostle me. “Yes you can. Take deep breaths. If you panic, you’ll hyperventilate.”

He pulled back the blankets and wrapped a tourniquet around my arm. I flinched when he sank the needle into my vein, and acute pain billowed through my limbs.

My memories played out like a rough cut of a movie I only knew half the plot to. The sound was bad, the visuals confusing. There were threads of a coherent story, but no pattern to weave them all together.

“What happened to me?”

Nathan’s face, lined with tension, tried to soften. “What do you remember?”

“Sounds. Pain.” And horrific, physical torment. But I didn’t want to recall that now. “I remember coming back downstairs for the keys, and after that, nothing.”

He shook his head. “You never made it downstairs, Carrie. I found you in the alley.”

The alley. I remembered the sky, that it had been almost dawn and I couldn’t move. “Did I burn?”

“No.” Gently, he removed the needle and recapped it. Although I’d already lectured Nathan about this, I didn’t bother correcting him.

I’m a completely different person.

A pang of sadness brought tears to my eyes, and Nathan looked up sharply. “What’s the matter?”

And then he shrugged, as if answering a question I hadn’t voiced. “I think I’ve been cooped up with you too long if I’m starting to read your mind.”

The lighthearted comment brought echoes of something to the surface of my consciousness. A medicated haze settled over me, and my words slurred as I spoke. “You should get some sleep. You don’t look too good.”

His hand was cold against my forehead. “Likewise, sweetheart.”

I’d been dead. That was the important detail I needed to remember. I’d been dead, and he’d been there.

But I drifted off again, and it was two more days before I woke.

Nathan lay on his side next to me, curved protectively around my body. If I turned my face, I could snuggle against him, listen to his heart beat. It felt so comforting to have him there. His hand stroked my hair, and I opened my eyes.

The gauze around my chest had been replaced by a navy-blue T-shirt that had seen better days. There was blood on it, and vomit.

“You had a bad, bad reaction to the morphine. I’d been giving you the meperidine, since you’d had it before with no trouble, but I ran out.”

His voice was hoarse. He still hadn’t slept.

“Well, reaction or not, it must be working okay. I don’t feel a thing.” The pain of my injuries was a distant nightmare, and only the lingering stiffness of a long bed rest plagued my bones.

He chuckled softly as he slowly sat up. “You’re probably healed by now.”

Like flashbulbs going off, I saw Cyrus looming over me, blood on his hands. My chest split open like a cadaver for dissection. Nathan’s stricken face when he found me in the alley.

One of the first things Nathan had explained to me about the Voluntary Vampire Extinction Movement was that they expressly forbid medical treatment for life-threatening injuries. I was dead when he found me. And here I sat. “You broke the rules.”

His back went straight at my accusation. “Yeah, I guess I did.”

I scooted up, wincing at the soreness in my unused muscles. I propped a few pillows behind me and drew the covers to my neck. “Why?”

I had a suspicion he rummaged a bit too long in the dresser for another T-shirt so he could think of an excuse. “I like to live dangerously?”

Of all the vampires I’d met so far, Nathan was the most serious, the biggest stickler for the rules. In the two weeks I’d been deciding whether or not to join the Movement, he’d called nearly every night with some new bit of information I’d never use, but that he felt was vitally important for me to know. He’d held Ziggy, the person who’d mattered most in his life, and watched him die when he could have easily turned him and spared himself the pain of loss. But he hadn’t, because of his affiliation with the Movement.

Yet, he’d saved me.

“Why?” I asked again.

When he looked at me, his expression was somber. “I can’t explain it.”

“Let me know when you can.” I made a move to get out of bed, but Nathan gruffly pulled the covers back over me.

“You need rest.”

“I’ve had plenty of rest. I want to get up.” I tried again, and he gripped my arms.

“Will you just listen to me and lie back down?” With a frustrated curse he handed me a clean T-shirt and turned his back.

“Something on your mind, Nathan?” I quickly slipped out of the soiled shirt and into the fresh one, pausing at the sight of the bumpy scar that bisected my chest.

His shoulders sagged with exhaustion. “This isn’t the first time I’ve gone against the Movement. I’m on probation as it is.”

I arranged the sheets around my bare lower half. “You can turn around now.”

When he did, I saw him eye the scrap of bare leg that peeked out from beneath the covers. He quickly averted his gaze.

“Are you sorry?” What would I do if he said yes?

Nathan didn’t answer immediately. “Carrie, when I found you, my only thought was to stay with you until you died. But it took so long. Just when I thought you’d actually…you’d pull right back. Honestly, I’ve never seen anyone fight so hard. But the damage was too much. There was no way you could have healed yourself. Not as new as you are.” He sat on the bed, facing me.

“Did you look at the scar?” He touched the front of my shirt, just below my collarbone, and a jolt went through me.

“Yes.” I couldn’t manage more than a whisper.

He closed his eyes and didn’t remove his hand. “He cut you from here—” His fingers slipped down, passing between my breasts and coming to rest on the hollow of my rib cage. He opened his hand and rested his palm against my stomach for a moment before tracing back to my neck. “To here. But it wasn’t just a cut, it was like—”

“How a book opens?” I knew what it must have looked like to someone not used to such a sight. “You can pry the ribs apart pretty wide. But I’m in one piece now.”

“I helped you along.” He smiled and pointed to the nightstand where a stack of surgical texts rested. “Like I said, you’re too new to heal something that serious.”

“Nathan, how on earth—”

“If I told you, you probably wouldn’t want to know. I didn’t exactly have high-tech surgical instruments here.” He motioned to the folding table, where the handles of rusty pliers jutted out from the first aid kit.

My stomach churned, but it could have been leftover nausea from the morphine. “Humor me.”

“I used wire to hold your…sternum?”

I nodded at the correct terminology and let him continue.

“To hold it together.” He looked away. “I had to wrap it around and around. I wouldn’t go through any metal detectors, if I were you.”

Wanting very much to change the subject, I cleared my throat. “Well, thanks for the advice. But if I couldn’t heal the damage myself, why am I better now?”

He squinted at me. “You really don’t remember that night?”

“No. I know exactly what happened. I just want to hear it from your point of view. You know, just to waste time.” I leaned back against the pillows. “If there’s something you need to tell me, I think you should just say it.”

“You’d lost too much blood. Even if you had been conscious enough to feed, it would have just run straight through you. And you did die, Carrie.” He sighed in frustration. “If I had known what would happen….”

My pulse throbbed in my ears. But more disturbingly, I could hear his, as if I had a stethoscope against his chest. “Nathan, what did you do?”

He looked me straight in the eye, and heat flashed through my body.

“I revived you the only way I knew how. I gave you my blood.”

“What does that mean?”

“At first, nothing. I was desperate, Carrie. I thought my blood might speed your healing, that’s all. Then, when I’d touch you to change your bandages, I started to see things, your memories. That’s how I knew.” He took a deep breath. “When you first became a vampire, you ingested some of Cyrus’s blood. Your heart must have stopped at some point—”

“After one of my surgeries.”

“That’s when you became a vampire. When I gave you my blood, your heart—” He looked away and cleared his throat. “You were already gone, but that didn’t seem to make a difference. The process repeated, as if you’d never been a vampire in the first place. I think I’m your sire now.”

My mouth went dry, and for the first time in my life, I was rendered speechless. But not for lack of trying. I had plenty to say, but too many thoughts whirled through my head. One was relief that Cyrus’s blood no longer pumped through my veins. But that wasn’t much of a comfort when, a second later, I remembered I knew just as little about Nathan as ever. And even he didn’t have a very high opinion of himself.

Of course, I knew it wasn’t in Nathan’s character to play the manipulative games Cyrus seemed to live for. But there had been attraction between us since the night we’d met.

That time seemed far away, and Nathan had almost become a complete stranger. He’d been guarded then, but I’d been able to glimpse the real Nathan at times.

But now he was my sire.

“I don’t understand.” My throat felt as if I’d just crossed a desert without a single drop of water. “Cyrus flatlined in the E.R. How did he survive without being re-sired?”

Nathan pinched the bridge of his nose between his thumb and index finger and closed his eyes. “Depending on our age and power, we can be dead for several hours while we heal, as long as our heart stays intact.” He stumbled over the words, then cleared his throat. “If you were as old as he is, you’d have been able to survive on your own without a problem.”

“So that’s it, then?” I took a deep breath, my chest tight and achy. “You’re my sire?” My tears were so sudden I didn’t have time to hold them back.

Unfortunately, Nathan, not having been privy to the inner dialogue preceding them, misinterpreted my hysterical sobs. He swore and stood, and before I could stop him, he charged out of the room.

I threw back the covers and followed him, grateful for the length of the T-shirt. The hardwood floor of the hallway was cold, so I tried to tiptoe across. After two weeks of barely moving them, my legs had a hard time keeping up. I tripped over my own feet and crashed into the wall.

Nathan was at my side in two seconds, his face filled with anger and annoyance. “I told you to stay in bed!”

He scooped me up, cradling me roughly against his chest. He dropped me onto the bed a little less gently than I’d expect someone to treat a person who’d been practically dissected, then headed for the door again.

“Wait a goddamned minute!” I didn’t sound as stern as I’d intended, partly because my face was buried in the pillow. I pushed up on my elbows to glare at him. “You’re not going to do this, Nathan. You’re just not!”

He met my furious expression with one of his own. “Do what?”

“Walk out!” I struggled to climb to my knees without exposing too much of myself. “You can’t just go, ‘Oh, by the way, I’m your sire, and hey, lucky you, I’m all dark and moody and too wrapped up in my own stuff to worry about your feelings!’ It’s not fair!”

“Life isn’t fair, sweetheart. I’m real sorry if it hurts your feelings, but I don’t want to stand here and listen to you work through your issues.” He took a step toward the door.

“You don’t even know what my issues are!” Regardless of the fact I knew he’d just put me right back, I got out of bed and followed him.

“Oh, I think I can guess,” he said as he stormed into the kitchen and yanked open the refrigerator.

“Can you?” I watched him for a moment as he tried to remove the cap from a beer bottle. After he made several unsuccessful attempts to twist it off, I angrily snatched the bottle from him. “Well you’re one up on me, then. Because I have absolutely no idea what your problem is.”

I searched the silverware drawer. “Where the hell is your bottle opener?”

“Right here,” he said, transforming his face. He yanked the bottle from me and punctured the bottle top with one of his fangs, wrenching it off and spitting the metal into the sink as his features returned to normal.

“I can’t believe I’m tied to you on a cellular level now.”

The comment only served to irk him more. “I’m sorry I’m not more cultured. I’ll watch PBS. And cut people open for fun. Will that be better? Will you be less embarrassed to be my fledgling then?”

I probably could have cleared up the misunderstanding right then, but his whole attitude bothered me. I called him something very uncomplimentary and stomped into the bedroom. I started pulling out clothes and flinging them onto the bed.

Nathan followed me. “What are you doing?”

“I’m getting dressed. I’m going out.”

“The hell you are!” His hand closed over my arm, and I yanked it away.

“Excuse me, I’m not your prisoner. You can’t bully me into staying.” I was so mad that my whole body shook. I found it very difficult to keep my human face on.

“Fine. Go out there and get yourself killed. This time, I’m not going to stick my neck out to help you.” His Adam’s apple twitched as he swallowed. The look in his eyes was so intense that it burned mine.

My heart pounding, I took a step backward. At the same time, he moved forward. The backs of my knees hit the bed, but he kept advancing. I slapped my hands against his chest to push him back, and he grabbed my wrists.

The surge of emotions that shot through the blood tie was astounding. There was no anger. Only incredible fear. Fear that I would leave, fear that I’d get killed, or worse, go back to Cyrus.

Even scarier was the naked desire that flared between Nathan and myself.

I knew I could fight it. At least, for a little while. I’d resisted Cyrus long enough. But I’d wanted Nathan before we’d shared blood, and my raging hormones wouldn’t take no for an answer.

Neither would his, apparently. He jerked me forward, covering my mouth in a smothering kiss.

Though it wasn’t tender, his kiss didn’t set me on edge the way Cyrus’s had. I didn’t have to brace myself for a slap, or flinch from Nathan’s touch.

He heard my thought, and annoyed hurt vibrated through the tie. His hands left my wrists and his arms wrapped around my waist, crushing me against him as his tongue slipped over my lower lip.

Trust me. His thought whispered through my head. But he didn’t trust himself. I felt him attempt to block off his emotions, to feel nothing for me beyond physical desire. I sensed confusion in him when it proved impossible.

Then it hit me. I’m his first fledgling.

He couldn’t help his urge to protect me, or his need to be close to me. That loss of control was what scared him most.

As if to prove he was still strong, still in control, he cupped my buttocks and pulled my hips forward against the bulge of his erection.

The giggling teenage girl part of me noted my new sire came with a serious upgrade.

Nathan heard the thought. I felt his lips curve into a smile against mine.

This is how it’s supposed to be. Our blood tie wasn’t evil. It wasn’t a burden or something I had to guard myself against. The blood tie is a powerful bond, and it had been corrupted and abused by my previous sire.

I had been corrupted and abused by him. Nathan’s blood in my veins and his hands on my skin eased the pain I’d felt since Cyrus had been my sire.

Nathan needed this, too, if only for the distraction. All of his thoughts were tainted by a sense of urgency. What could he focus on in the moment to keep the unfortunate realities of his past from intruding on the present? It made my head spin. I couldn’t imagine living like that every second of every day of my life.

I gripped Nathan’s shoulders as we tumbled into the same bed for different reasons. He avoided, I confronted.

“It’s been a really long time since I’ve done this,” he mumbled apologetically against my neck as his hands skimmed below my T-shirt.

His fingers raised gooseflesh on my thighs. I shivered. “You’re doing fine.”

Every inch of his body was as hard as it looked. There wasn’t a spare ounce of flesh on him, and when he pulled his shirt over his head I didn’t know where I wanted to touch first. My hands wandered restlessly over his smooth chest, his solid arms, the ridges of his abdomen.

Lying between my legs, he pushed my T-shirt up, baring my thighs, my stomach, my breasts. I pulled the shirt off and he rested his head against the curve of my stomach. When he kissed me there, I clamped my knees around his waist, my breath hitching.

With every gentle brush of his fingers, every stroke of his tongue against my flesh, he lost himself a little more in the act. His gratitude overwhelmed me.

Nathan sucked my nipple into his mouth, and I could only concentrate on his flicking tongue and the scrape of his stubble against my skin. I threaded my fingers through his hair and closed my eyes. Nathan crawled up my body, pressing kisses to my neck. “It’s the most incredible thing,” he whispered. “I can hear what you’re thinking. Where you want me to touch you. Was it like that with—”

The instant he said it, my body went cold.

He cursed. “That was probably the dumbest thing I’ve ever said.”

I wanted badly to cover myself. I was too exposed, too vulnerable. “It certainly wasn’t smart.”

“I only—” He shook his head. “You know you’re my first fledgling. This is an entirely new experience for me. I’m not used to being the one who needs information. I’m usually the answer guy.”

“I don’t know anything about being a sire, Nathan. I have no idea how it works. It’s something you’re just going to have to find out on your own.”

He rose onto his knees and it looked as though he was going to get up from the bed. His denied need throbbed painfully through my own aching body, and I reached for him. I’d never been the initiator in sexual situations. Most of the time, I’d just gone through the motions, wanting to please for the sake of approval. Now I just wanted to make him feel something other than fear or anguish. And I really wanted him.

“What are you—”

I shushed him as I reached for the gleaming button of his fly. He took a sharp breath as the button popped free. I pulled the zipper down and slipped my hand inside his pants.

Despite the interruption, he was still hard. His erection jerked as my fingers closed around its substantial girth, and his shudder passed through me. I stroked him, my head reeling from the peripheral sensations that affected me through the blood tie.

He stood beside the bed to step out of his jeans, and I slithered across the mattress to grip the tight muscles of his thighs. He groaned when I rubbed my cheek against his hip, my soft breath teasing his straining cock. I gave in to his silent urging through the tie, opening my mouth to draw him in.

He tasted salty, but not unpleasant. I swirled my tongue around the swollen head as I sucked more of him in. As his excitement built, so did mine. When he grasped my hair and gently pulled me back, I knew he’d nearly reached the end.

Laying me back, Nathan relied on the blood tie to learn how I liked to be touched. He’d rush to fulfill my requests with eager hands and lips. He reveled in my responses. Not the way Cyrus had. Nathan didn’t view my desire as a way to manipulate or control me.

This realization removed the last of my inhibitions. If I lost control with Nathan, I wouldn’t lose a part of myself. I was so relieved by this that I came as he slid two fingers inside me. From the look on his face, he was as surprised as I was.

“Apparently I’m not as rusty at this as I thought.” He sank between my legs, bracing his weight on his arms.

The movement of muscle beneath his skin fascinated me. “Watch it. I’ve got what I wanted. I could just decide I’m done with you and then where will you be?”

“Jerking off, like I’ve been for the past twenty years. But you’re not going anywhere.”

I slapped his shoulder lightly for his crude remark, and he reached between us and guided himself into the slick entrance of my body.

My lungs constricted as I stretched to accommodate him. I gasped, wrapping my arms around him. “Oh, my—oh.”

He slipped his hands beneath my back and lifted me onto his lap. I held on to his shoulders as every long inch of him slid into me.

Leaning close to my ear, he practically purred, “Told you you weren’t going anywhere.” I buried my face in his shoulder as he flexed his hips. He felt solid and real, and his skin smelled faintly of soap.

“I’ve wanted to do this since the night you came into the shop.” His voice was fueled by ragged breaths, and his words sent a shock through me.

It was nice to be wanted. Not for power or control, but wanted as a woman.

I pushed my hips down as he surged up and I bit down hard on my lip to stifle a moan. I tasted the blood my bite produced. Nathan leaned back, his eyes dark. He unconsciously licked his lip.

My heart pounded, echoing the throb of his erection that was buried deep inside me. Nathan’s eyes never left the smear of blood on my mouth.

“Go ahead,” I whispered. “I want you to.”

He hesitated only a moment. Then he caught my lip between his teeth and licked the blood away.

When I’d ingested Cyrus’s blood, I’d seen a vision of Nathan’s past death. I could only imagine what Nathan saw when he tasted mine.

Whatever it was, it tore a fierce growl from his throat. He pushed me back on the bed and stretched my arms high above my head, pinning me.

Pain. In my blood, he’d seen pain.

The tenderness in his eyes overwhelmed me. “Why didn’t you tell me what he did to you?”

I shut my eyes. “Why would you want to know?”

His lips brushed mine. There was nothing in the gesture but kindness, the love of a sire. His frustration and rage shook me to the core. “I could have made it better. I don’t know how, but I could have.”

I swallowed against tears. “You could make me forget.”

With a sad smile, he nodded. “I’ll see what I can do.”

He moved within me, slowly. Over and over, he withdrew almost completely, then slid back in, gaining a bit of speed each time. Soon, he pumped against me so furiously, an explosion of breath escaped from me with each thrust. I clenched the sheets in my fists and rocked in time to his movement.

The familiar spiraling feeling, the sense of swiftly losing control, gripped me. I needed only a little push to make it over the edge. Hearing my silent desperation, he slipped his hand between us and rubbed my swollen clitoris. The stimulation was exactly what I sought. I arched up from the bed.

It was his name I cried when I came, his face I saw when I opened my eyes. The relief was so intense that I almost sobbed.

“That’s it, sweetheart,” he groaned against my hair. He abandoned the rhythm, plunging into me with more urgency than before.

“Come,” I urged, clutching at his sweat-slicked back. He thrust almost too hard against me as he reached the end.

“Thank you,” he whispered over and over when he could speak again. He kissed my lips, my forehead, anywhere he was able to reach.

When he laid beside me, I rolled awkwardly off of the bed, wrapping the sheet around my bare body.

Nathan frowned. “Where are you going?”

I suddenly felt cold, and oddly lonely. “The bathroom. To clean up.”

When I got to the door, he spoke. “It was good we got that out of our systems. It was probably inevitable.”

“Yeah,” I agreed. Hadn’t it meant anything to him? It didn’t have to be serious, but he had to feel something more than just relief that it was over.

Exhaling in frustration, he leaned up on his elbow. “You know it did, Carrie.”

His answer to my unspoken question should have comforted me, but it didn’t.

I shuffled to the bathroom and snapped on the light. As I stared at my suddenly tired face in the mirror, a tear slid down my cheek.

No, I don’t know. And I don’t know you, either, Nathan. I turned away from my reflection, slightly disgusted with myself.

I didn’t know him any better than I ever had.

Twenty-Two

I Left My Heart in San Francisco

T hough I dreaded the fallout from our encounter, the nights that followed were too busy to be very awkward.

During my recovery, Nathan had been feeding me his blood. With nothing to replace what he’d given, he’d seriously drained himself. Combined with the marathon insomnia and the energy he’d expended with me, he could barely get out of bed the next evening.

Luckily, I was able to contact his emergency donor. A perky suburban woman, she graciously dropped off neatly labeled and dated bags of blood. The first night, he was so weak I had to hold his head up so he could drink, but he improved quickly after that.

Ziggy’s room was nearly packed up. Nathan had obviously been splitting his time between caring for me and repressing more memories. The only indication that the kid had ever lived in the apartment at all was the small collection of framed pictures on the bookcase in the living room. I rummaged through the boxes and brought out a few other items, tucking them away in places I knew Nathan would find them later. I wasn’t about to let him forget Ziggy.

Little by little, I began to learn about Nathan’s past. Not that he helped with the process. Occasionally, things would come to me in a flash of intuition from the blood he’d shared with me. That’s how I learned the photograph hidden in the closet was indeed his wedding portrait, and the woman in it was Marianne. She’d been seventeen when they’d wed, and it had been a quickly arranged affair, owing to the bundle of joy that had already been on its way. But she’d lost the baby, and subsequent others, the first sign of the tumors ravaging her organs. The feelings of guilt and desperation that blanketed those memories was too thick to see past at times.

I didn’t go to bed with him again, and neither of us mentioned what had happened before. I slept on the couch for a few days until Nathan recovered and took Ziggy’s things to storage. One day he’d tossed me a clean set of sheets when he returned and said, “Ziggy’s room is all yours.”

Apparently, he wanted me to stay. Though I balked at the fact he hadn’t bothered to ask me if I wanted to, I didn’t argue. There was nowhere else to go, and no other place I felt safe.

After another two weeks, I wondered if Cyrus would ever bother me again. At first, it had been easy to assume he bided his time, waiting for an opportunity to strike. But I knew he wasn’t patient enough to wait a full month.

The nights grew gradually shorter as spring approached. Renovations on the bookstore were nearly completed, and I found myself working with Nathan, cataloguing inventory in preparation for the upcoming grand reopening. Still, reading ISBN numbers hardly kept my mind off the nagging feeling that any moment, Cyrus would come back for me.

It didn’t help that, for the fourth day in a row, I woke to find Nathan beside me in the tiny twin bed.

I knew he wasn’t asleep. “Nathan, what’s going on?”

He leaned up behind me, propping his chin on my arm. “Max will be here tomorrow. We postponed the mission when I told him what happened to you, but the Movement is getting impatient.”

“We’ve still got to kill Cyrus?” The calm feeling that had just begun to take root in me vanished. I rolled over to face Nathan, careful not to push him off the bed.

His expression confirmed my fear before his words did. “We better get it out of the way now. Before Max goes after the Soul Eater.”

“Okay.” I tried to smile and appear unconcerned. “What’s the plan?”

I shouldn’t have bothered with the facade. He didn’t. “Don’t get killed.”

“How do we do that?” My voice wavered as a balloon of fear swelled in my chest.

He didn’t answer right away. He toyed with one strap of the tank top I’d worn to bed, sliding it off my shoulder and back again. In the semidarkness of the room, he looked tired and defeated. “I don’t know.”

He was certain he’d lose me. His terror surrounded me in waves, terror that he’d feel the same pain over me that he’d felt over Ziggy. Over Marianne.

But Nathan would never admit he felt anything toward me but the obligation any sire feels toward their fledgling. It was a good thing, too. I wasn’t sure I was ready to accept more from him.

I rolled over and let him pull me into the curve of his body. He locked his arms around me as if I would try to escape, but relaxed some when I laid my hand over his.

I wasn’t ready to accept anything more than friendship from him because I wasn’t ready to admit the depth of my feelings for him, either. As long as we both ignored our feelings, we could live, awkwardly but happily, in our dysfunction.

The workmen were just finishing up when we got downstairs that night. While Nathan engaged them in a fascinating conversation about wall studs, I went to the mailbox.

I dropped the assorted bills and catalogs on the counter, more concerned with the large padded envelope that had been stuffed in with them. It was addressed to Dr. C. Ames.

I waited until the workmen left before I presented the envelope to Nathan. “I’m not opening this. It looks like ‘discreet packaging,’ if you know what I mean.”

“Very funny,” Nathan said, snatching it from me. He ripped the brown paper open and caught the object that fell out. “This is yours. It’s nothing dirty. I hope you aren’t too disappointed.”

It was another copy of The Sanguinarius. This copy was a little more beaten up than the previous one.

Nathan frowned and headed to the storeroom. “Near mint my ass! Bluebird45 is getting some seriously bad feedback.”

“You bought this on eBay?” I flipped to a random page and started reading. “Man, you really can get anything on there.”

The shop door swung open, and the bells, which Nathan had yet to replace, announced Max’s shrill entrance.

Max was as young, confident and good-looking as I remembered. But I’d learned from Nathan that Max had a reputation as a merciless assassin. Judging from all the purple hickeys above the collar of his T-shirt, he was a merciless ladies’ man, as well.

“I love this town, I love this town!” He jumped and grabbed the lintel of the doorway to swing inside.

“Have a good flight?” Nathan didn’t look up from the stack of mail he browsed through.

“You better believe it!” Max grinned from ear to ear. “Listen, am I now in the seven-mile-high club, or does this just mark my seventh membership card?”

“Excuse me, lady present!” I turned back to the book.

Max sidled up behind me to read over my shoulder. “Whatcha doin’?”

“Not you,” Nathan snapped.

I ignored him. “Reading The Sanguinarius.”

I turned a page and was greeted by a particularly gruesome diagram of the vampire stomach. “There is no way my insides look like that. I won’t stand for it.”

Max laughed. “It’s amazing how many vampires are all caught up in that worthless book. Stake plus heart equals dead vampire. That’s all you need to know.”

“Actually, it depends on which heart you hit,” Nathan said quietly. “There are two. Or should be.”

A foreboding chill crept up my back. I studied Nathan’s face. He looked away.

I frantically flipped through the book until I found a diagram of the vampire heart. I scanned the text on the opposite page.

The main weakness in vampyre physiology is the first of the two hearts, the original human organ. Rendered obsolete by the emergence of the seven-chambered vampyre heart, it now serves as the most efficient way to dispose of the creature.

Max, apparently oblivious to my sudden frenzied state, began to hum, and something about the tune grated on my nerves. It was disturbingly familiar.

To pierce the human heart with any implement is to render the vampyre instantly deceased by incineration.

“Nathan, why didn’t you tell me?” Tears slid down my face as the physical emptiness in my chest made itself known. Or it could have been my imagination.

“I didn’t want to frighten you.”

“What?” I hadn’t intended to sound so shrill and loud. I lowered my voice. “How dare you! This is my life. You should have told me!”

Max wandered away from the conversation, feigning great interest in the tape on the bare drywall on the opposite side of the room.

Nathan leaned in close. “How was I supposed to tell you something like that? For the past four days, I’ve stayed up while you slept, watching for any sign you were going to—” He looked away. “My blood runs in your veins. I know every part of you. If I didn’t tell you what he’d done, I thought maybe…maybe nothing would ever come of it and I could forget.”

Now I understood his desperate fear, and his certainty he couldn’t protect me. But he had no right to keep me in the dark about my own mortality.

On the other side of the store, Max still hummed. The tune brought tears to my eyes.

I Left My Heart in San Francisco.

The heart that remained pounded in my chest as I ran to the door.

“Carrie, wait!” Nathan called after me.

I sprinted up the stairs to the sidewalk. The nights had grown somewhat warmer, and the rain that splashed the pavement didn’t freeze.

For whatever reason, Nathan didn’t follow me. While I hadn’t wanted company, I certainly didn’t want to think he’d just thrown up his hands and said, “Oh, well.”

Not when Cyrus could kill me at any second.

I walked past the alley. Though my blood had long since washed away, I imagined I could smell it. My old, tainted blood, my former sire’s blood.

It had been on his hands, his face, his clothes when he’d leaned over me that night.

The memory of the Soul Eater tearing through Cyrus’s chest was suddenly so much clearer. Cyrus had told me the Soul Eater had killed his own sire. So he must have removed Cyrus’s heart as an insurance policy. No one would betray someone who could kill them via remote.

Cyrus had taken my heart to ensure I wouldn’t betray him. Did he think I would return to him?

As I walked, I periodically checked my skin to make sure it wasn’t flaking away to ash and embers. Although he was no longer my sire, I knew Cyrus well enough to realize this was yet another installment of his torture. He could destroy my heart whenever he felt like it, and I’d never see death coming. All I could think of were Cyrus’s memories of his father holding him down, cutting him open. His scar had faded but it mirrored my own. Did his father still control him with possession of his heart?

I walked around all night. Occasionally, I’d question The Sanguinarius. Why did we grow second hearts? Eventually, I settled on the most likely explanation, that the vampire heart was needed to push larger quantities of blood to our abnormally strong limbs. The old heart was rendered obsolete, yet somehow maintained a vital connection to our life force, even if it wasn’t connected to us physically.

Ancient peoples believed the heart to be the seat of a person’s soul. Maybe they were on to something. The fact I could be removed from this plane of existence if my human heart is destroyed appeared to prove their hypothesis. I promised myself I’d research it, if I lived long enough.

Several times I found myself nearing Cyrus’s neighborhood and turned back. When the sun began to rise, I headed back to the apartment. My legs had grown tired hours before, but my anger propelled me to stay away.

Nathan hadn’t come to look for me. Ziggy’s van still rusted beside the curb, and I saw light in the living room windows.

Max sat on the couch, flipping through television channels with a bored look on his face. He held up a hand in a halfhearted wave to greet me.

There was no sign of Nathan. “Where is he?”

Max pointed down the hall. “He’s been in there since you left. At least he stopped playing Dark Side of the Moon. I was about to go in there and fling the damn CD player out the window.”

I stomped toward Nathan’s bedroom, but Max’s next statement stopped me.

“We’re going in tomorrow night. Nathan didn’t want me to tell you, but I thought you should know, seeing as it’s your sire and everything we’re going to off.”

So Nathan hadn’t told Max what had transpired the night of the meeting. He must have had his reasons. Maybe Max was as fanatical about the Movement as Nathan had been.

“Why didn’t he want me to know?”

“Probably because he’s crazy about you and doesn’t want you to get hurt.” Max shrugged. “Or maybe he just thinks you’re going to fuck everything up.”

I laughed. “I’ll bet it’s the second one.”

Max dropped the remote and patted the couch beside him. “Come, have a chat with me.”

I really wanted to go into the other room and give Nathan a piece of my mind, but the way Max was looking at me told me that might not be a good idea. I sat next to him, bristling when he wrapped a companionable arm around my shoulder.

“I’m not getting fresh,” he assured me. “I just think better with my arm around a beautiful woman.”

I rolled my eyes. “Then think fast, before I remove that arm.”

“Okay, okay.” He chuckled. “Just let me give you some real quick advice. I’ve known Nathan for a while now. He hasn’t had a girlfriend since, God, I think it was ’84. And she wasn’t what you would call a wild woman. I think she was a CPA.

“The point is, Nathan doesn’t get attached to people, and when he does, he has a tendency to shut down. There’s some scary shit in his past. I’m not even going to pretend to know the whole story. But he won’t let himself get close to anyone. So, if you’re thinking of going in there and tearing him a new one, keep in mind you might hurt him a little more than you intended to. And you’ll just prove his ‘love hurts’ theory right.”

I swallowed hard, remembering words Cyrus had spat in anger. “Max, did Nathan really kill his wife?”

It must have been a secret he was warned not to reveal, because he chewed his lip thoughtfully for a moment.

“Don’t lie to me, Max. I’ll know if you do.” I lifted his arm off my shoulders. “Did Nathan kill his wife?”

Max sighed. “Yes. At least, that’s what I’ve heard.”

“But it wasn’t his fault,” I said, shaking my head. “I mean, he didn’t mean to do it, right?”

“I wish I could tell you that, kiddo.” Max’s expression was heartbreakingly tender. “But he was a different person then.”

I excused myself and headed for the room I’d only recently begun to think of as mine.

The couch springs creaked miserably as Max stood. “He didn’t want you to go with us because he didn’t want you to get hurt. That was his main concern. I don’t know what’s going on with you two, but don’t waste the time you’ve got left. Take it from me, eternity gets pretty damn lonely after a while.”

I lay awake for a long time, pondering Max’s words, and the knowledge that at any moment, I could just poof out of existence.

It wasn’t fair to let Nathan and Max risk their lives to kill Cyrus. Not when he’d just end up killing me, too. No matter how many times I thought it through, I came to the same conclusion. I should go to Cyrus and kill him myself. If he took me out in the process, the only loss would be me. And as far as I was concerned, I was dead already.

I listened until I heard Max turn off the television, then I crept into Nathan’s bedroom. He woke immediately, bolting upright in bed. “Carrie? What’s wrong?”

“Shh.” I peeled off my nightgown and climbed in beside him. His arms closed around me and he pulled me beneath him.

This time, the only urgency came from his desire for me. He touched me as though reassuring himself I was still there, we still had time.

We didn’t speak. I think we were both afraid of making it mean too much. Perhaps Nathan thought to spare me the pain of his death. I know I would have done anything to spare him the pain of mine.

So when he kissed me, I kept the contact brief. When he slid down my body to tease me with his mouth, I didn’t cry out his name. And when he finally spoke to ask me what I wanted, I didn’t say I wanted him to make love to me. I told him to fuck me.

Angrily, he obliged. He spread my legs wide and plunged into me. Besides that, the most contact our bodies made was the slap of his hips against my thighs and the hard grip he had on my ankles as he held them high and apart. The bed shook and slammed against the wall, and I didn’t bother to muffle my screams of pleasure. He came with a shudder that sounded like a sob and pulled me into a fierce embrace.

I kissed his forehead and held him tight. Who was I kidding? Trying to block off my emotions for him would be like trying to stop a leak in the Hoover Dam with a cork. I had to know that eventually, the cork would shoot out and my feelings would just gush everywhere, bringing nothing but death and destruction to the valley below.

Okay, maybe it wouldn’t be that dramatic. But it was foolish of me to think that I could deny the bond created by the blood tie, or my feelings for Nathan that had existed long before our tie was created.

“Nathan,” I said softly through my tears. “Nathan, I—”

“Please, don’t say it.” His words might have hurt me had I not felt the meaning behind them.

Please, don’t say it, or I won’t be able to deny that I feel it. And I’m too afraid to let myself feel it.

“I won’t,” I promised.

He laced his fingers with mine and raised my hand to his lips. “Thank you.”

But when he fell asleep, I kissed him and whispered, “I love you, Nathan.”

Or Nolen. Or whatever. Even if I never get to find out who you are, I love you.

Minutes after sunset, I slipped from his arms and dressed quietly. I didn’t leave a note because I had no idea what I planned to do.

Only one thing was certain: by sunrise, either Cyrus would be dead, or I would be.

Twenty-Three

Welcome Home

M y vampire heart beat loud in my chest as I approached Cyrus’s mansion. The windows were dark, and for a wild, panicked moment, I thought I’d missed my chance. Cyrus had moved on, my heart tucked away in some box that was hopefully marked Fragile.

Then I saw a gentle glow in the huge, floor-to-ceiling windows of his study, and my heart sank further. Nothing would take this confrontation from me. It was time.

While charging through the front gate would have probably been the brave thing to do, I’d never prided myself on being exceptionally brave. It also didn’t seem like a good idea to walk, barely armed, up to the gates of a heavily guarded castle and politely ask to be let in.

I patted my hip pocket, where I’d concealed a stake beneath the hem of my shirt. I didn’t even know if I had the physical power to use one against another vampire, especially Cyrus, but at least I’d have something to jab into one of the guards if they got too close.

I followed the sidewalk around the end of the block. The entrance to the guardhouse was so far from the main gate that someone would naturally assume they were two separate residences. I passed the gate where Nathan and I had shared our secret meetings to plot Ziggy’s escape, and I thought of Nathan, still asleep in his bed.

It seemed like all I had to do was walk into my room and Ziggy would be there, just like all those weeks ago. I glanced up the lawn. The lights were on in my old room. I felt an unexpected pang of jealousy at the thought I’d been replaced.

A thin figure picked his way gingerly down the lawn, toward the hedge maze. I recognized that profile.

“Clarence?” I called out. My voice echoed back at me in the cool air, and I gasped.

He squinted, then straightened quickly as recognition dawned on him. “Doc?”

My heart in my throat, I watched the old man scurry across the grass. The last thing I wanted was for him to break his hip. “Be careful!”

“Be careful,” he mocked. “You’re a damn fool, coming back here. They told me you were dead!”

From the pocket of his neatly pressed trousers, he produced a key ring covered with antique keys. After much muttering, he selected one and slipped it into the gate’s lock. Instead of crumbling to dust, it actually swung inward with a minimum of screeching. A few leaves from the clinging ivy pulled off, but no one would notice the gate had moved in a hundred years.

“Get your ass in here,” he scolded, glancing nervously up at the house. “Now, you got some explaining to do. Did you eat that boy?”

“What? No!” I said, a little too loudly.

Clarence shushed me. “Keep your voice down. The master’s home, and he’s been in a real bad mood since his daddy left.”

“I thought the Soul Eater couldn’t survive without his annual feeding?”

“Ain’t nothing going to kill that bastard. Believe me, this isn’t the first time somebody tried.” Clarence shook his head. “What happened to the boy?”

“Cyrus killed him.” I thought of the barrels in the basement and what Clarence had told me. “What did you do with him?”

“I didn’t do anything with him. I had the night off. They probably burned him with the rest of them.”

At least he wasn’t crammed in some barrel. I pointed to the house. “Where’s Cyrus?”

“In the study. He’s been there since the night of the party, trying to avoid her.” His last statement was delivered in an accusing tone.

“Her? Dahlia survived?”

Clarence’s face scrunched in an almost comical expression of disapproval. “Seems somebody told her she should find herself a vampire to turn her at the party.”

I ground my teeth. It would be one thing to fight Cyrus, but Dahlia was way out of my league. “What about the guards?”

“They’re trying to steer clear of Dahlia and the Master, but they’ll find you if you go in there.” He squinted at me. “You got backup coming, right?”

“No. I might as well stake myself right here on the lawn,” I muttered, looking up at the looming facade of the house.

“I got one in my back pocket,” Clarence offered. “This is gonna be ugly, isn’t it?”

I nodded. “You might want to get out of here.”

“No, when he’s gone, someone’s got to tidy things up around here,” he said with a sad smile.

“You don’t have to stay. I’ve got friends, we could help you get a condo in Florida or something. Anywhere you want.”

“I ain’t going nowhere.” He made a halfhearted shooing motion with his hands. “I told you before. I come with the house. You give him hell, Doc.”

I wanted to hug him, but I wouldn’t ask him to lower himself to hug a vampire. I couldn’t understand why he wouldn’t jump at the chance for freedom. I also couldn’t understand the strange compulsion people had to stay in their homes to face hurricanes and floods rather than evacuate. Fear of change, maybe. Or denial of their mortality. Whatever the reason, Clarence seemed to share their stay-put mentality, and I knew I wouldn’t change his mind. I made him promise to stay near the guardhouse and not show his face until morning. I watched until he disappeared into the maze. Then I headed up to the house.

After spending weeks in close quarters with the Fangs and Cyrus’s human groupies, the house felt downright empty. Apparently, he hadn’t gotten around to replacing the numerous pets he’d expended for the feast.

The guards were there, though. The second I opened the French doors to the foyer, all hell broke loose.

Two bodyguards waited for me in the center of the room. No doubt they’d watched me as I spoke to Clarence on the lawn, because reinforcements—a lot of them—jogged down the staircase. Behind me, the front doors flew open.

I whirled to see Nathan and Max framed in the wide doorway. Relief and dread crashed through me. I’m saved, I thought. Then I thought, We’re all dead.

“Don’t put on the coffee, we’re not staying long,” Max announced with a wide smile.

“Get out of here, Nathan,” I screamed as the first guard reached me. His hands crushed my shoulders. I grasped his forearms and fell backward, flipping him over my body as another guard came at me. I sprang to my feet and elbowed the next contender hard in the face. Blood spurted from between his fingers as he covered his broken nose. I punched him in the groin. When he doubled over I grabbed his shoulders and rammed the top of his head into my knee. He dropped limply to the floor.

I looked to Max and Nathan. Max had knocked out one guard and used a stun gun to put down another. Nathan was cornered by an opponent brandishing a stake. He tried to dodge it, but the blow landed the wooden spike in his shoulder.

“No!” I charged forward. Another set of hands closed on me. In my haste to get to Nathan, I gave a hard shove and sent the man flying into the wall. He crumpled like a rag doll.

I reached Nathan’s side as he pulled the stake free and a torrent of blood spilled out. The guard pulled another stake from his belt and lunged, but not before I caught him. I bared my fangs before I realized I’d changed. If Nathan hadn’t called to me, I would have bitten into the man’s neck.

“Why not let her?”

Max and Nathan froze at the voice. I let go of the guard and turned.

Cyrus strode from the open doors of the study. His hair was half tied back in a disheveled braid, and his fur-lined robe seemed to swallow him up. Dark hollows beneath his eyes marred his pale complexion. He looked like he hadn’t slept or fed in days.

“You’ve never had the chance to see her feed, have you, Nolen?” He smiled sadly. “It’s something every sire should experience.”

Arms gripped me from behind at the same time I saw guards grab Nathan and Max. I tensed, prepared to fight, but I felt the point of a stake against my breastbone.

My gaze met Nathan’s and I heard his voice in my head. Don’t move.

Max turned his face to look at Nathan. “What the hell is he talking about?”

Cyrus crossed to me, stroking the side of my face gently with the back of his hand. With the blood tie between us dead, I felt nothing but revulsion.

His eyes, one gold-flecked green, the other his own, icy blue, turned cold and hollow. “It really is over, then.”

Howling in outrage, like a child whose mischief had been thwarted, he pounded his thighs with his fists. He rounded on Nathan. “Why? Why did you take her from me?”

“I’d like to know that myself,” Max said through clenched teeth.

Oh, God, don’t let him turn on us. I didn’t know Max well enough to tell if he’d report Nathan’s indiscretion to the Movement, or if he’d just be disgusted enough to abandon this mission.

Nathan sent me a comforting thought. Don’t worry, sweetheart. He’s not going anywhere. We’re going to get out of this.

“You’ve got no one to blame but yourself, Cyrus.” Nathan nodded in my direction. “You killed her in that alley. My blood restored her. Finders keepers.”

Just as he finished his sentence, Cyrus struck him. Nathan’s head snapped back and blood seeped from his nose. For a moment, I feared he would lose consciousness.

Cyrus shook his wrist, a pained look on his face. For hands so accustomed to violence, they were awfully delicate. “Finders keepers? Like the way I found your cast-off child and made him my own?”

Nathan struggled to break free, and would have managed, if four other guards hadn’t rushed in to hold him. Vampires are strong, but not that strong.

One of the sentries brought his knee up hard between Nathan’s legs. He doubled over with a grunt of pain.

“Cyrus, please, tell them to stop!” I cried.

My former sire snapped his fingers to the guard restraining me, and the stake at my chest pierced my skin.

Nathan stopped struggling immediately. Rather than panicking, he laughed. “Cyrus, you know staking her isn’t going to do anything.”

“Won’t it?”

The wood pressed deeper, digging into my flesh. While it wouldn’t cause me to ash-out and burst into flame, a wound to my remaining heart probably wasn’t something to sneeze at. “Stop, please!”

Don’t beg him, Carrie. I can’t stand to hear you beg. Nathan’s eyes were distraught. I looked away.

“Cyrus, knock it off,” he growled. “Look, I’m playing nice.”

“That’s noble of you.” Cyrus waved away the sentry that held me. “It’s so nice that you’d defend her after what she did to your son.”

Nathan shook his head. “Not going to work, Cyrus. I’m her sire now. I can see—”

I tried to hold back my memories from the night I’d fed from Ziggy, but in my panic, they overwhelmed me. They were powerfully vivid and painfully erotic. And I couldn’t hide them from Nathan.

His anger swelled, but no more than I’d expected. I wanted to tell you, I thought firmly, but he didn’t answer. Nathan purposely ignored the blood tie, and after decades of shutting out the Soul Eater, he’d perfected his technique. My thoughts bounced off him like tennis balls against a brick wall.

But he didn’t show any outward sign of my betrayal. “She told me everything. Sorry to disappoint you.”

“I really wish someone would have told me everything,” Max snarled. “I’m probably gonna get marked for death just for breathing the same air as all of you. I don’t know what’s going on here, but this is fucked up!”

A frown creased Cyrus’s brow. “Kill that one.”

“No!” Nathan and I shouted at the same time. I felt some of his rage toward me ebb, like a stone lifting off my chest.

“Oh, you’re going to bargain with me now? The two of you?” He laughed. “You should both know better.”

More guards rushed into the room. In groups of ten, one group for each of us, they bound our hands behind our backs.

“Take him to Dahlia’s room,” Cyrus said, gesturing to Max. “The other two can join me in the study.”

“We’ll reconvene after,” Nathan called to Max.

As if they were simply parting to spend their lunch hours in different restaurants, Max shouted back, “Sure thing. Get in a few good hits for me.” Then, to the guards I heard him ask, “So, this Dahlia, is she eighteen?”

Half the guards following us remained outside and flanked the door at Cyrus’s request. That still left us with ten on the inside, far too many for me, an inexperienced fighter, and Nathan, with his wounded shoulder, to take on alone.

“Afraid of me, Cyrus?” Nathan sniped as the doors closed behind us.

I eventually gave up trying to unbind my wrists. I could barely get the tags off a pair of new shoes. What were the chances I’d manage to Houdini my way out of a plastic zip tie?

The only light in the room came from the fireplace. I saw the elegant shape of Cyrus’s profile against the flames.

He didn’t look at us. “So it’s come to this. You’re here to take my life, when you’ve taken everything else from me.”

What was he talking about? “I haven’t taken anything from—”

“He’s talking to me,” Nathan said, his gaze fixed on Cyrus. “I’m not going to apologize for anything. You reap what you’ve sown.”

“What I’ve sown?” Cyrus whirled around, his ruthless eyes shining in the firelight. “I’ve only done what every fledgling is bound to do by the blood tie. I’ve been loyal to my sire!”

Nathan laughed bitterly. “Don’t use that tired excuse again! We have the same sire. I didn’t lose my free will when he poured his blood down my throat!”

“The very thing I’ve been trying to convince you of for years!” Cyrus shouted at him, then turned to me. “I hope you will keep that in mind, Carrie, when considering what happened to his wife.”

I glared at him but remained silent.

He circled us menacingly, like a shark in a feeding frenzy. “Did Nolen ever tell you what he did to his wife?”

“No.” I couldn’t look at Nathan. “But I know.”

“Carrie?” Nathan’s shock resonated through me.

Max told me. I wished I could reach for Nathan’s hand. Something told me he wouldn’t have taken it, though.

Cyrus leaned close to my ear. “I doubt you know the whole story.”

He moved away suddenly, motioning to the sofa as though Nathan and I were dinner party guests who’d arrived unfashionably early. “Please, have a seat. I’ll tell you all about it.”

Nathan lunged forward. I had no idea what he’d planned to do without the use of his hands, but it didn’t matter. Two guards grabbed him by the shoulders and hauled him backward.

Although his back was turned, Cyrus lifted his hand in warning. “I wouldn’t, if I were you. There’s no possible way you’ll survive, and then who will protect your fledgling?”

He turned and pointed a taloned finger directly at me. “Believe me, I won’t hesitate to kill her once you’re gone.”

“What’s stopping you right now?” Nathan asked.

He didn’t mean that. As angry as I knew he was that I’d fed from Ziggy, he wouldn’t let Cyrus kill me. He was fishing for information.

Cyrus paused. “Nothing, I suppose. But it would be a shame to waste such a fun ride.”

Nathan clenched his jaw at that.

“Oh, I see I hit a nerve. Tell me, Nolen, are you offended because you share that opinion, or because you have no frame of reference?”

“What I was getting at, dick, was why didn’t you kill her in the alley? I don’t think you’ll do it.”

I should have known something nasty was coming when Cyrus smiled. He walked up to Nathan and struck him so hard that I heard the bones of his face crack. Nathan’s head swiveled to the side, twisting his body as he fell.

Cyrus rounded on me, his eyes furious. “I suppose you think you’ll be spared? Saved by some lingering feelings I harbor for you?”

I nodded. “If you were going to kill me, you would have done it already.”

He slapped me. “I no longer owe you my patience. I’d rip your throat out now, but I wouldn’t want the taste of his blood on my mouth.”

Kicking Nathan aside, he pointed to the sofa. “Sit.”

I did as I was told to avoid inflicting any further pain on myself or Nathan, on the off chance he wasn’t dead.

Seating himself in the wing chair facing me, Cyrus folded his hands in his lap. I noticed for the first time how fragile and bony his fingers looked. I wanted to snap them one by one. Or crush them with a hammer.

One of the advantages of no longer being his fledgling was my ability to think freely without him reading my every intent. Though I no longer had to block him from my mind, I’d never been able to disguise the emotions on my face. A slow smile widened his mouth as he watched me.

“You hate me, don’t you?” It was a straightforward question, and harbored none of the sadness I remembered from our time together, when he’d asked me if I loved him.

I squeezed my hands into fists. “Does it matter? You say you’re going to kill me, anyway.”

Chuckling, he reached for something on the marble table beside him. “No, Carrie. I must concede. I was never planning to kill you.”

The object he’d reached for was a sleek, lacquered box. It reminded me of the boxes Nathan sold in the shop to hold tarot cards and crystals, except this one looked much more expensive and was fitted with an ornate lock.

Cyrus pulled the box into his lap, resting his hands protectively over it. “Now, tell me what you know about your sire. I’m dying to hear his version of the story.”

I had a good idea what was in the box, but I tore my gaze from it. “He didn’t tell me anything. Max told me Nathan killed his wife. And when I—” I stumbled over the words I didn’t want to say. “When I drank your blood, I saw what happened to him at one of your Vampire New Year parties. But I don’t know how it all fits together.”

Cyrus steepled his fingers in front of his mouth. “Yes, from what I understand, Nolen can be a very private person.”

Snapping his fingers, Cyrus motioned to Nathan. Holding the box tight to his chest, Cyrus stood and retrieved a crystal champagne flute from a tray on the mantel. Instead of filling it with the sparkling green absinthe in the decanter beside it, he moved to where the guards hauled Nathan to his feet. “Shall you do the honors, or shall I?”

Nathan was unconscious. His head drooped forward, hiding the bloody mess that was his face. It was a miracle Cyrus hadn’t killed him.

The thought had barely crossed my mind when Cyrus pulled a dagger from his sleeve and plunged it into Nathan’s side.

“No!” I tried to stand, but with my arms tied, my balance was sorely lacking. I fell to the sofa and tipped sideways.

Cyrus filled the glass halfway with Nathan’s blood, then wiped the knife clean on Nathan’s soiled T-shirt. “Let’s not overreact, Carrie. You knew he was going to die when he came through the front door. But he does need to live, for now. At least, until you can see what I need you to see.”

He drew the blade across his wrist, letting the ensuing stream of blood mix with Nathan’s in the glass. I thought they should have reacted violently toward each other, fizzing and foaming or separating like oil and water, but the dark liquid blended into one murky cocktail.

When it was full, Cyrus held the glass to my lips. “Drink it.”

Closing my eyes, I smelled the familiar scent of Cyrus and felt the call of my sire. What would happen when I drank it?

The hard edge of the knife poked my throat, an insistent, dangerous pressure.

“Drink it.”

Wetting my lips, I opened my mouth. It’s now or never. You wanted answers, you’re about to get them.

I gulped down the mixed blood of my sire and my enemy, and braced myself for the darkness that would consume me.

Twenty-Four

(Dis)Closure

T he visions flew at me, two lifetimes of memories piling into my head at once. I feared I’d burst apart, unable to contain it all. Maybe that was Cyrus’s plan. It was either that, or he wanted to make me mad with the emotions. There was fear, brief happiness, love, but above all, there was pain. I think I might have screamed, but I didn’t feel my body anymore. I slid into the memories like a ghost, disembodied from the participants, a voyeur of pure consciousness.

One night in particular unfolded like a movie before my eyes. The night of the Vampire New Year. The night Nathan had been changed.

Cyrus sat at the table beside a woman I knew was named Elsbeth. She was his fledgling, I realized. They’d been together for just over two hundred years, but it was clear that he loved her far more than she cared for him. A brief glance at their posture, the adoring way he leaned toward her while she didn’t bother to spare him a glance, told all.

It was the same room I’d seen through Cyrus’s eyes when I’d drunk his blood before, but I never saw Elsbeth’s apathy, because he hadn’t. He’d never been aware that she didn’t love him. I almost pitied him.

In an instant, I shifted into his head. There had been an argument. He’d asked her for something, to do something she didn’t want to do.

To give him her heart.

He’d meant it literally. He’d wanted her to willingly give him what he’d stolen from me. I would have been sick if I had a body left to feel.

Wrenching myself from his mind, I watched the doors to the room open. Nathan and his wife entered. I couldn’t access her mind, but Nathan’s was, for once, wide-open.

He recognized Jacob Seymour, the faith healer they’d traveled across the world to meet, but was surprised by the strange robe the man wore. And he wondered who all the people seated around the table were. Jacob’s son, he knew. The handsome young man was Simon, and the woman seated beside him was his wife, Elsbeth. But what were they all doing here? Had they arrived too early and interrupted a dinner party?

When the doors slammed shut behind them, I felt his alarm. He knew something was wrong, in the way he’d known Jacob Seymour’s promises were too good to be true.

He’d tricked Marianne, his beautiful Marianne, into hoping for a cure for her illness, because he’d wanted to believe.

I wish I’d never brought her here.

As the dispassionate faces seated at the table began to twist into their true forms, Nathan began to pray. But the Holy Spirit, Jesus Christ, and the Blessed Virgin all turned their backs, the way he’d turned away from them when his prayers did nothing to stop the cancer that ravaged his wife’s young body.

“Nolen?” Marianne whispered, her already pale face white with terror.

I fled his mind as the monsters closed in on him. If I’d had eyes to close, I would have, but there was no way to avoid the sight. Nathan tried to shield Marianne from fangs and claws, but gnarled hands dragged him from the pack.

“This one is for me!” the Soul Eater roared. Then, propelling Nathan toward Cyrus, he said, “Simon, make your father proud.”

Nathan struggled as Cyrus pulled him into his arms. He reached for Marianne, but the distance was impossible, and too many vampires blocked the way.

This is hell. I am damned.

I tried to block his panicked thoughts, but they were too strong. Cyrus slashed the buttons from the front of Nathan’s shirt in one smooth motion. He splayed his clawed hand across the tanned skin that was revealed, stroking down, over Nathan’s tightly muscled abdomen.

Marianne’s screams were weak and growing fainter by the moment.

“Let her live!” Nathan begged. “Please, let her live!”

The Soul Eater considered a moment, then clapped his hands, a gesture I’d seen Cyrus mimic many times. The vampires who’d fallen on Marianne looked up, confusion showing as best as it could on their demonic faces.

“A change of plans,” the Soul Eater snarled. “Out, all of you.”

They cleared, grumbling their displeasure. Some hissed as they slid past their master. On the floor, Marianne moaned, her fang-marked limbs deathly still. Her chest rose and fell with shallow breaths.

Elsbeth scowled at her father-in-law. “You’re always doing this, Jacob. You change your plans without consulting any of us. It’s not fair. I haven’t fed in days!”

The Soul Eater grabbed her. “You’ll find it much more difficult to feed when I snap your pretty head off your neck. Now get out.”

“Father?” Cyrus still held his prize, but his attention was focused on Elsbeth.

“We’ll let the sick one die on her own. With any luck, she’ll live to see him killed.” With a final nod to Nathan, the Soul Eater stepped out the door. “It’s been lovely meeting you, Mrs. Galbraith.”

Without willing it, I was once again in Nathan’s mind. Marianne lifted a limp hand toward him, her eyes imploring him to help her. But he couldn’t.

He was tired. Tired of chasing a cure from continent to continent, only to see one hope die after another. Tired of dreading her death, tired of the guilt he felt when he wished it would just be over. Perhaps this was his punishment. He turned his head away.

“It appears that it’s just the three of us,” Cyrus rasped against Nathan’s ear. The feeling of another man’s hands on him made the bile rise in Nathan’s throat. He squeezed his eyes shut tight as those hands moved lower, releasing the button of his trousers. The cold fingers closed over him, stroking him to arousal against his will.

He sobbed a Hail Mary as Cyrus’s fangs sunk into his neck.

Please, I begged no one in particular. Please, I don’t want to know this.

So instead, I watched the frescoed ceiling, concentrating on the fat cherubs smiling down on the horrific scene instead of Nathan’s screams of pain and terror.

The nightmare was sadistically long. After he’d broken him physically, mentally and emotionally, Cyrus left Nathan naked and violated on the freezing marble floor, small amounts of his blood leaking from a dozen open veins. He was dead by the time anyone returned.

The Soul Eater slid into the room with Cyrus at his side. “Very good, Simon. You’ve given him real potential.” He knelt beside Nathan’s abused body and cradled his head in his lap.

“I don’t know if I’d call it potential. He’ll only last until your next meal.” There was an edge of annoyance in Cyrus’s voice.

The Soul Eater stroked Nathan’s arms lovingly. “No, I think I have other plans for this one.”

He lifted his wrist and bit down hard, audibly puncturing the skin and veins. Then he pressed his wounded wrist to Nathan’s slack mouth.

The blood slowly brought animation to Nathan’s body. First, his mouth as he twitched his lips. Then his arms as they lifted to clutch at the Soul Eater. It took less than two minutes for the change to complete.

Alarm flared through Cyrus. I could feel it without entering his mind. “Father, think of what you’re doing. Your blood is weak already. It will barely keep him alive. You won’t be able to feed from him. Let me turn him, as we planned.”

Nathan lurched to his feet, his eyes wild. Hungry.

The Soul Eater ignored Cyrus, focusing instead on his new child. “Look at you. You’re parched. My old blood can’t sustain you.”

At that inopportune moment, Marianne cried out feebly. Like the moan of a dying animal, it caught the attention of the predators around her.

To his credit, Nathan tried to fight it.

“It will just get worse,” his sire taunted. “The hunger will gnaw at you. It will drive you crazy.”

Cyrus grew more anxious by the second. “Father, kill him. You can’t survive another year without feeding.”

The Soul Eater continued to ignore his son. “Nolen, please. You know she’s going to die, anyway. Look at her. She’s barely alive.”

Contrary to what he said, the haze in Marianne’s eyes lifted. I was glad that I couldn’t see inside her head, to know what she saw when she looked at Nathan. “Nolen, what are you doing?”

He covered his face. “I can’t.”

The fatherly affection in the Soul Eater’s tone vanished. “You will. You’re feeling the hunger I have carried for centuries. If you think it hurts now, imagine how you’ll feel in a week. In a month. Take her and ease your suffering, or I’ll be sure you wish you had!”

Nathan’s pain reached out and sucked me in. I’d felt hunger before, but nothing like this. The Soul Eater’s blood was already depleted. The cells and tissue of Nathan’s body tried to draw nourishment from the blood, but it was a by-product, stripped of the power needed to fuel his vampire flesh.

It was too much to fight both the hunger and the will of his sire.

Marianne screamed when Nathan grabbed her.

“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry,” he murmured against her neck an instant before he pierced her flesh with his newborn fangs.

“I don’t want to see anymore!” I cried, unaware I’d regained control of my body. But the vision didn’t end.

The Soul Eater watched with perverse satisfaction as Nathan drained the last drops of Marianne’s blood.

“Let her out of it, Cyrus!” The Nathan I saw before me in the vision hadn’t spoken, but it was his voice I heard from the present.

“She needs to see!” Cyrus’s words overlapped an echo of his voice as he spoke to the Soul Eater. “Father, kill him! He’s fed, his blood is replenished. Feed from him!”

The Soul Eater shook his head. “He is too strong. Remarkably so. I couldn’t possibly waste him. I do believe he will be of greater use to me in the future, through the tie. We must always think of the future, my son. I’ll have to find another.”

“There’s no time. If you don’t feed, you’ll die!”

On the floor, Nathan rocked Marianne and sobbed.

Cyrus met his father’s gaze, horror dawning on his face. “No.”

“She’s been a thorn in my side since you turned her.” The Soul Eater strode to the doors.

“Father, no!” He gripped Jacob’s robe.

Furious, the Soul Eater jerked the fabric from his son’s hands. “Stop your sniveling, boy. Would you rather I take you instead? You’ll find another. One who obeys. One more worthy of sharing our blood.”

He kicked Cyrus backward, and before he could rise to his feet, the doors snapped shut, barring him from the outside.

“Elsbeth! Elsbeth!” He screamed until his throat grew hoarse. His talons gouged the wood of the doors, but they remained locked. The minutes slipped past, the wait unbearable. Finally, her horrified cries shattered the silence in the house, then just as quickly subsided.

The vision became grainy. I hovered in a void, surrounded by the sound of Nathan’s weeping and Cyrus’s enraged sobs.

“She’s dying! Help her!”

I opened my eyes to the present to see Nathan struggling against the guards that held him. A third stepped in to help, but he wasn’t needed. As soon as I stopped gasping for breath and sat up, he calmed.

Sometime during the dream, I’d rolled from the sofa. My head throbbed and my back ached, from hitting the floor or as a result of some weird aftereffect of the sanguine cocktail, I had no idea.

Cyrus gripped my bound wrists and hauled me to my feet. His touch was purposely rough. “I hope that shed some light on our difficult situation here. And I hope you understand why I did what I did.”

“To whom?” I snarled. “To Nathan? Or his wife? Or your fledgling? What exactly am I supposed to understand here?”

“That he’s a killer!” Cyrus’s rage was so sudden and violent, I trembled in fear. All the anguish of the past centuries curled into his words. The pain in his voice cut into me so deeply that I felt it myself, even without the blood tie between us.

As quickly as it had come, his anger subsided. In the defeated tone of a tired child, he spoke again. “He is a killer, and you left me to be with him.”

“I didn’t.” I turned and looked him in the eyes, and the sorrow there stole my breath. “When you took my heart in that alley, you let me die. Nathan saved my life. It wasn’t my choice.”

“It doesn’t matter. What’s done is done. When he is dead, things can go back to the way they were.” Cyrus snapped his fingers to the guards. “Kill him.”

Nathan roared and rushed past the guards. With his hands bound, he could do little more than charge headfirst at Cyrus and knock him into the wall beside the fireplace. And that’s what he did. The collision was loud, and it dented the dark wood paneling, but Cyrus recovered quickly, kicking Nathan to the floor. Laughing, Cyrus grabbed the fireplace poker from the rack on the hearth and raised it over Nathan’s back.

Even if I warned him, he wouldn’t be able to get out of the way in time. With a scream of rage, I yanked my hands apart. The plastic tie cut into my skin, but it broke. I was free.

Before the guards could react, I ran toward Cyrus, barreling shoulder first into him. We toppled onto the Persian rug, knocking over two chairs as we fell.

I grabbed a handful of his hair and tugged, forcing him to face me. “If you’re going to kill me, just do it and leave him alone!”

He yanked free, leaving a white-blond lock twined in my fist. He brushed himself off and stood. “I don’t want to kill you, Carrie. But it’s out of my hands now.”

Guards lifted Nathan from the hearth and threw him into a chair. He breathed hard. The jagged wound where Cyrus had stabbed him seeped fresh blood.

“What do you mean, it’s out of your hands?” I asked. Another guard stepped forward to grab me, and I growled at him.

“Leave her,” Cyrus commanded with a smirk. “I have a proposition for her.”

I grabbed the guard and twisted his head to the side, exposing the pulsing artery in his neck. “You better start explaining or so help me God, I’ll kill him right here.”

Cyrus laughed. “What do I care? I have dozens more just like him.”

Touché.

Out of frustration, I wrung the guard’s arm until it snapped.

He sagged to the ground, howling in agony, and I kicked him forward, pinning his head to the floor with the heel of my shoe. “Talk, or you’ll be cleaning brains out of this fancy-ass rug!”

“Very good. It’s amazing you’ve come this far, with only him to learn from. The power in you…it’s intoxicating.” Cyrus moved toward me slowly. I took a step back, and the sentry crawled away, cradling his ruined arm to his chest. I backed into the marble-topped table. Cyrus kept advancing. “Think of what you could become, if only you’d come back to me. I could make you mine again. Drain your blood, bring you to the point of death and then fill you up again.”

He stroked my cheek, his fingernail scoring a painful incision through my skin. I gritted my teeth to keep from wincing. “You never filled me up before, so I can’t imagine you accomplishing it now.”

“That’s rather cheap, Carrie. I thought you knew better.” He turned away from me to face Nathan. “I sent Father a rather interesting package last night. He should be receiving it any moment now.”

Nathan shrugged. “Is this information in any way relevant to our current situation?”

“As a matter of fact, it is.” Cyrus looped his arm around my waist and pulled me forward. “Since he missed his annual feeding and the victim intended for him is deceased, I thought it only fitting to send him a little takeout. Carrie’s heart.”

Nathan’s calm facade wavered. “Why?”

“An eye for an eye.” Cyrus pushed me aside. “And, to borrow another phrase, it will kill two birds with one stone. Carrie disobeyed me, and she had to be punished. Your life cost me Elsbeth, and I deserve something in return. If you thought losing your precious human boy was bad, wait until you feel the blood tie wither and go cold. Wait until you experience her death, with no way to prevent it. But I won’t kill you, Nathan. You’ll feel her death every day of your life, as I’ve lived with the pain of losing Elsbeth.”

Disbelief froze me in place. I was going to die. Even if we killed Cyrus right now, the Soul Eater would devour my heart. I was dead already.

I opened my mouth to speak, but I couldn’t say anything.

Cyrus patted my head in a mocking gesture of comfort. “Of course, I used a personal courier. I could call him back at any time, if you wished to make an arrangement.”

A flashback of the night I’d exchanged my freedom for Nathan’s life sickened me. “Let me guess. If I stay with you, you’ll give me back my heart and let Nathan go?”

Clapping his hands, just like his father, Cyrus laughed. “No. Nolen is going to die, one way or another. But I’m giving you the choice to live. Stay here with me, become mine again, and I’ll call off my father’s feeding.”

Without thinking, I lifted my hand, aimed for his one good eye and stabbed my finger hard into the socket.

He screamed in rage and lurched away from me. Blood trickled from beneath his hand as he covered the side of his face.

“I’m not going to be your prisoner again. I’d rather die,” I snarled. And I meant it.

No matter what I’d thought he felt for me, I had only been to him what everyone else in his life was. A piece of property, a pawn. I hadn’t played according to his rules. I’d broken down the order he cherished, and in doing so, I’d destroyed his feelings for me.

Maybe I had loved him, but I could live without love if it compromised my free will.

That’s when I decided to make the most of what was left of my life. If I was going to die, I would go out fighting.

The remaining guards rushed me. If I’d been worried about the Movement’s rules, I would have tried not to do too much damage. But it seemed that the best course of action would be to grab heads and twist.

I’d killed three by the time Nathan appeared at my side. His wrists bled where he’d broken free of the binding.

“I’m sorry,” I said immediately, kicking back a guard.

“Don’t apologize, get Cyrus!”

I looked up. He’d nearly reached the door. I leapt over the back of the sofa and blocked him. “Going somewhere?”

“Guards!” he shouted, trying to get past me and still hold his eye in place.

“Go ahead, call more in! I don’t care. I’m dead.” I stepped closer, pulling a stake from my back pocket. “And as far as I’m concerned, so are you. Now, you can go out like a little bitch with your bodyguards backing you up, or you can fight me until one of us is dead. It’s your call. Unless you’re afraid.”

He dropped his hand from his bloodied face. His eye dangled from the socket on a cord of flesh. He pushed it back in and blinked to clear the blood-occluded lens. “I think I’ve underestimated you, Carrie.” Then, turning to the guards swarming Nathan, he shouted, “Everyone out!”

I glanced at Nathan. He’d collapsed to the floor, but he was alive. I could feel his strength coursing through me.

Cyrus stepped back so the guards could file out of the room. I sprang forward and plunged the stake into his skull through his borrowed eye. The bones of the socket separated with a crack. I could have rammed the stake right into his heart to get it over with, but I wanted him to suffer.

“Whoops, was I supposed to wait for a signal or something?” The absurdity of the situation and my actions forced nerve-racked laughter from my throat. It died on a hysterical sob of despair, and I clenched my hands in front of me so hard I drew blood from my palms with my nails.

He pulled ineffectually on the stake protruding from his face. My shock melted away and I seized the opportunity to grab him and pin his arms behind his back.

“You know what’s great about Nathan? His blood is ten times more concentrated than yours because he hasn’t wasted it on a bunch of loser fledglings.” I wrenched the stake from his eye, flinging droplets of blood across the room. Then I stabbed the sharpened wood into his back. “You know what? I think it makes me stronger!”

Despite the bravado of my words, my voice shook.

His legs crumpled beneath him and he tried to speak, but choked on his blood. I closed my eyes and took the deepest breath I’ve ever taken in my whole life. The part of me that still believed he could be good wanted to escape the part of me that wounded him in rage. Guilt tore through me for doing something so violent to a man I’d thought I might have loved, but my logical mind was stronger. Cyrus had earned this, and if I didn’t kill him, he would repeat this sick game with other fledglings for an eternity. Summoning more courage, I twisted the stake and he gasped.

“Drop him!”

I looked up. Dahlia entered, pushing Max ahead of her. She surveyed the scene coolly.

“Go help your friend,” she barked at Max, pointing at Nathan. “I want to have a word with Carrie.”

The last time I saw Dahlia, she’d been running from a horde of hungry vampires. Now the air around her seemed to vibrate with unchecked power.

Panic shot through me. I’d had more confidence fighting Cyrus, because I knew I would die, anyway. I hadn’t really given much thought to what would happen to Nathan and Max afterward. They might have been able to hold their own against Cyrus, but I was pretty sure that even together they were no match for Dahlia.

But Max was still alive. I guess that stood as testament to his way with the ladies. Hopefully it would get Nathan and him out of this mess when I’d burned to cinders.

Dahlia stood before me, her hands placed on her wide hips. “You marked me for death.”

Gasping for breath on the marble floor, Cyrus tried to grab my leg.

“Stay down!” Dahlia made a sweeping gesture with her hands and he fell back, pinned by invisible hands.

I swallowed hard. “I didn’t know exactly how the whole ‘marked for death’ thing worked. I thought he’d offer Ziggy to his guests, and turn you.”

“And then I’d get eaten by the Soul Eater?” There was a surprising lack of anger in her question. She didn’t accuse me so much as state a fact.

The least I could do was be honest. “Maybe. I thought Cyrus would change you, but as far as the rest of the plan went, you were on your own.”

“As usual.” She sighed. “It actually worked out better this way. I got my blood, I got my power—”

“And I’m assuming a random biker vampire got himself a very nice piece of ugly dragon jewelry in exchange for a few pints of blood,” I interrupted.

Dahlia raised an eyebrow. “Very astute of you.”

She must have released Cyrus from whatever spell she’d cast, because he climbed to his feet unhindered. Lifting a hand to his blood-streaked face, he pressed his remaining eye back into its socket. “You don’t think I turned her, did you? I wouldn’t waste my blood.”

I expected Dahlia to fly into a rage or strike him down or fall apart the way I’d seen her do before. But she just smiled. “Of course not. You never would have. You were just going to string me along until you got bored. Then you were going to kill me.”

“Oh, but for a while you believed you had me,” he said with a laugh. “God, but you were easy to manipulate.”

Cyrus turned to me. “That’s why I became so bored with her. The things I got her to do, Carrie. You thought what I did to you was bad.”

“I really don’t care to hear about it.” No matter what had transpired between Dahlia and me, she didn’t deserve whatever perverse torture he’d inflicted on her.

But she seemed genuinely unaffected by his taunting. “And I’d do it again. I got what I wanted. So did you. But you’re not going to kill me,” she said.

A strange buzzing started in my head. It was as if someone had turned on a television, but all I could hear was the high-pitched frequency noise. Dahlia’s voice filled my head. It was nothing like the communication I’d had with Cyrus or Nathan through the blood tie. This was a different connection, watery and slightly garbled, and it made my skull vibrate with pain, but I could understand it enough to get her meaning. “The package never left the premises.”

I saw her lips moving as she spoke to Cyrus, his superior expression as he answered her, but I couldn’t hear their words. I shook my head as if I were trying to clear water from my ears.

“Thank you,” I thought back to her, my words ricocheting unpleasantly in my skull. “I’ll never be able to repay you.”

“This doesn’t mean I like you. We’re not gonna go shopping for shoes or whatever the hell you’re thinking.”

There was a moment of silence, then the buzzing stopped, then her next words were crystal clear in my mind. “Kill him.” I saw her tremble as she turned to leave the room. “He will kill me eventually. I need him dead. I’d do it, but I can’t. Kill him, and I’ll pay you back with your heart.”

So, she did love him. Not enough to trust him with her life, and she shouldn’t have, but she did love him. She’d claimed it wasn’t his power that had drawn her to him. I’d had a hard time believing that, but now it was apparent. What had she said to me before?

Some things aren’t good or evil. Some things just…are.

I guess Dahlia just was, like a tornado or a tidal wave. A force of nature. I wasn’t going to try to understand her motives beyond simple self-preservation.

She paused as she passed me on her way to the door. “Make it quick. Don’t let him suffer.”

Then she left. I was so busy watching after her in awe that I forgot she’d released Cyrus.

It was Max’s shout that alerted me. “Carrie, look out!”

Cyrus clutched my blood-stained stake and rushed me with it. I leapt aside but lost my balance, tumbling onto my back. Without hesitation, he brought the stake down. I rolled away. The wood shattered as it drove full force into the floor.

Max started toward me, but I waved him away. “Stay with Nathan!” Though no longer unconscious, Nathan wasn’t strong enough to fight off a swarm of gnats, let alone anything else that might come after him. And I still didn’t trust Dahlia, bless her crazy little heart.

I jumped on Cyrus’s back, using my momentum to propel him face-first into the wall. I reached forward to gouge at his ruined eyes and felt his teeth close on my forearm. My bones cracked easily in his jaws and blood dripped from my paralyzed fingertips.

Oh, great. How are you going to fight with one arm, hotshot? He lifted me over his head and flung me across the room. I landed hard.

He wiped his hands on his robe. “Having a little trouble?”

“No, no trouble at all.” I hated the wheezing sound of my labored breathing. “Just pacing myself.”

He laughed and held out his arms. “Come on, Carrie. Let’s stop this foolishness. You know you’ll never be able to kill me. There’s too much between us.”

He didn’t sound as confident as he wanted me to think he was.

“I’ve already killed tonight. Maybe I’ve got a taste for it now.”

“You killed strangers. Men you didn’t know.” He took small steps toward me. I didn’t move, even when he put his arms around me. “Men who’d never touched you. Never been inside you. Men who’d never seen your most intimate thoughts and emotions.”

I knew he was no longer my sire, but my heart—the proverbial one that couldn’t be so easily removed—remembered when he was. “It didn’t mean anything.”

“It did,” he insisted, stroking my hair. “You know it did. You felt things for me you couldn’t ignore. You can’t ignore them now.”

“I felt things for you because you manipulated me into feeling them. And I don’t feel them now.”

I didn’t love him, I’d never loved him. Not in the way he’d wanted. How could I have?

He looked more hurt by my words than by any physical violence I’d committed against him. “I loved you.”

The admission froze me just long enough for him to get a better hold on me.

Nathan leaned up weakly on his elbows. “Carrie, get away from him!”

“Let her go!” Max got to his feet. “Don’t move a freaking muscle, Carrie!”

I felt the sting of a blade at my neck. I’d been tricked.

“I did love you, Carrie. I still do.” Cyrus’s voice was strained, and a cold tear splashed against my neck. “Why couldn’t you love me?”

Love wasn’t a word I tossed around lightly, but with a knife at my neck, my priorities changed really fast. “Maybe I did love you.”

“If you had loved me, you would have stayed with me. Why didn’t you stay?”

I heard the same desperation in his tone as my pleading inner voice that criticized me every time I’d failed to please my father. The same desperation I’d seen in Cami, in the poor dead girl’s eyes the night she’d asked Cyrus why he no longer requested her company. The dashed hope that had stolen across Dahlia’s impassive face when she’d come to Cyrus’s room and found me in his bed, in her place.

Cyrus really did want me to love him.

Though it pained me, I had to lie to save my life. “I’ll stay.”

“Carrie, no!” Nathan shouted, the look on his face as devastated as it had been the night Ziggy died. He was afraid.

Trust me.

I prayed Cyrus wouldn’t see through my ruse. “I’ll stay,” I repeated. “But I have to know I’ll be safe.”

Pulling the knife away, Cyrus spun me into his arms and crushed me to his chest. “You’ll be safe. I swear, nothing will harm you again.”

“But I can’t trust you.” I took the knife from his hand, and he let it go willingly. “You’ve already sent my heart to the Soul Eater.”

Cyrus released me from his embrace. “I’ll get it back for you.”

The relief on his face speared through my heart. You can’t feel guilty. He’s got this coming to him, Nathan told me. “I wish I could be sure,” I said, both to Cyrus and Nathan.

His gaze flickered from my face to the lacquered box he had cradled so protectively earlier.

Cyrus’s father tearing his chest apart.

Cyrus tearing mine.

I knew what lay in that box.

He smiled haughtily at me. “Of course, I knew you’d see reason and come back to me. But I also know you’re not foolish. So I’ve brought some collateral.”

He went to the table and lifted the box. “Here. Keep it safe until yours returns. But it will always belong to you.”

“What is it?” I asked breathlessly as he slipped the box into my hands.

“My heart.”

He pulled me to him and kissed me. I felt a tremendous sadness. I knew what it was to want love and have it constantly elude me. But Cyrus wasn’t like me. Where I had forced myself to fill my life with other things, he had simply tried to force others to love him. In the end, his quest for power and control would be his undoing. Because now that he believed he finally had love, he’d left himself vulnerable.

I lifted the lid of the box with my hand that still gripped the knife. I hesitated only a second, fortifying my courage with memories of every cruelty Cyrus had ever subjected me to. Leaning back, I kissed his cold, bloody cheek. “I’m so sorry, Cyrus.”

And I truly was. I was sorry he didn’t have a better life, sorry he couldn’t have been the man he should have been, and I was even a little sorry I couldn’t make myself love him, for his sake. But there was no time for regret. I plunged the knife into the box, through the dried-up object that was his heart.

Cyrus screamed.

It was done.

The flames started at his feet, but instead of traveling up his body, they burned from the inside out. He threw his head back with an anguished cry as blinding white flames shot out of his eyes, mouth and nostrils. His skin melted away, revealing the raw muscle beneath. A raging wind filled the room, stripping his bones clean, but still his scream went on and on. I clung to the marble table to keep from being swept away.

Cyrus’s bare skeleton hung suspended in the air. A ball of pure, blue flame burned where his heart should have been. Within seconds, the bones reduced to ash and blew away.

The wind stopped abruptly, and I fell to the floor.

“That was, by far, the coolest thing I have ever seen,” Max said in awe.

“Shut up, Max.” I heard footsteps, then Nathan knelt down and pulled me into his arms. “Carrie, are you okay?”

I couldn’t speak. I could only sob.

He crushed me in a hug that would have been smothering if I could have stopped crying to breathe in the first place.

“It’s all over,” he soothed, stroking my hair. “You did good.”

“We have to get her heart back from the Soul Eater,” Max said quietly. “Is there someone around here who can help?”

“Dahlia,” I said, wiping my eyes. Without questioning me, Max and Nathan helped me to my feet, and we shuffled into the foyer.

Dahlia descended the stairs, her face streaked with tears. “Did you do it?”

I nodded.

“Then come get your heart.”

She’d stuffed the grayish object into a Ziploc bag. She held it out to me, and I looked it over with uncertainty.

“That’s the one,” Nathan called. “I’d know it anywhere.”

I took the bag.

“If I ever see you guys again, I’ll probably kill you,” Dahlia warned.

“Then I hope I never see you again,” I said, and I meant every word.

I wanted to ask her if she’d stay at the mansion, or if she’d leave. More important, I needed to know if Clarence would be safe with her, since he’d rather stay here and die than face life outside these walls.

But Nathan and Max already headed toward the door, and I didn’t feel like pressing my luck by hanging around any longer.

I didn’t look back as we walked down the driveway, but I couldn’t help imagining that Cyrus’s freed soul glided through the watery afterlife beside me, all the way to the gate.

Twenty-Five

Something Ever After

I t was a week before I could get through the day without crying. Most of the time, I stayed in Nathan’s room, curled up beneath the covers of his bed.

Nathan stayed at my side when he wasn’t overseeing preparations for the reopening of the bookstore. We didn’t talk. I don’t think I said a word to him until the sixth day, when my depression lifted long enough for me to decide that I had to ask about the vision I’d seen.

“How long were you married?”

Nathan sighed and lay on the bed beside me. “This is one of those unavoidable conversations, isn’t it?”

“Yep.” I reached for the mug of blood he’d left for me on the nightstand. It had begun to clot, but I drank it anyway, grateful that my appetite had returned.

Nathan cleared his throat. “Almost thirteen years.”

“You loved her a lot.” I laid my hand over his. I’m here for you. Let me in.

When he looked at me, his eyes were rimmed in red. “I love her.”

The present tense shocked me.

He felt it, but he didn’t apologize. “I don’t want you to think I don’t care about you. I do. The blood tie sees to that, I don’t have a choice in that matter. But I can’t let her go.”

“You don’t have to.” A tear slid down my cheek. “Nathan, do you—” Love me?

“No.” He knew what I’d meant to ask him. A glimmer of pain crossed his features. My heart should have turned to stone in my chest, but I knew he wasn’t denying me. He was denying himself.

We lay in silence for a few minutes, nothing but tension connecting us through the blood tie. Finally, he rolled to his side to face me. “Now, there’s still the question of where you stand with the Movement. Have you given that any more thought?”

Of course. I was about to tell him exactly where he could stick his precious Movement, but the words didn’t make it past my lips before he spoke again.

“Because I’m getting out.”

I suddenly understood the meaning of the phrase You could have knocked me over with a feather. “Are you serious?”

He laughed. “I’ve been on probation for more than seventy years now because I killed Marianne. I’ll never stop being sorry for it, and if someone walked through that door right now and gave me the chance to switch places with her, I’d do it. But the Movement will never forgive me, and until they stop throwing it back in my face, I’m not going to be able to move on.”

There was more. I felt it just below the surface of his regret. But I didn’t push. There would be other days for that.

“That’s a big change. I’ll make one, too. I’ll start looking for my own place,” I said with a cheerfulness I didn’t truly feel.

“No.” His declaration was so vehement it scared me. Softer, he elaborated. “Carrie, you’re my fledgling. I would never ask you to leave. I don’t think I could survive if you did.”

“It’s not like I can’t drop by and visit.”

He grasped my hand. “Stay.”

I knew he couldn’t say what he really felt. He didn’t know what he really felt. But I did.

A sire had to love his fledgling. It was a painful truth of vampire existence. It was what made the blood tie so unbreakable. I suppose it would have been nice if he would love me without the connection between us, but he was wounded and complicated. His emotional distance was almost a relief to me.

“You do know there will be consequences.” Nathan rested his head against my shoulder. “If I leave the Movement, I’ll be marked for death. If you don’t join, you’ll be, too.”

“So I’ll go from one death sentence to another. In fact, I’ve forgotten what it feels like to live without one.” I set the mug back on the nightstand and wiggled down onto the pillows.

“What do you say we go out tonight?” he asked suddenly. “You haven’t been out of this room for days.”

“I could really use a shower,” I admitted. “And it will do me some good to see some other people. Not that you’re not fabulous in your own way.”

“I’ll go start the water.” He bounded from the bed, a grin on his face.

“Wait,” I called after him. When he stopped, I smiled sheepishly. “Bring me my heart?”

He nodded, but appeared confused. While I waited for him to return, I rolled onto my side and waggled my fingers at the goldfish in the bowl. Before, I’d considered his three-second memory span a curse, believing that developing a new outlook on life so often would always end badly.

At the time, I’d never imagined that things might get better with each three-second change, just like I’d never considered becoming a vampire could turn out for the better.

Nathan entered the room, holding the steel box he’d purchased to keep my heart safe. Inside, it was wrapped in layers of gauze and cloth and bubble wrap, and it rested in a nest of foam packing peanuts. Only Max had been privy to the careful packaging, because I’d still been healing from the injuries Cyrus had inflicted on me. Since Nathan had padlocked the box shut and thrown away the combination, I had to take Max’s word that it was safe.

Nathan handed the precious package to me, his hands shaking. I smiled. “It’s okay. Cyrus’s heart survived all those years in a wooden box. Too bad it didn’t splinter and kill him.”

Nathan cleared his throat and gestured to the box. “What did you want with this?”

I took a deep breath. “I wanted to give it to you.”

“No.”

“Hear me out.” I pressed the box into his hands. “It’s staying with you. Not because you’re my sire. Not because of the blood tie. I’m going to stay with you because I trust you. With my life.”

He looked away. “You know what I did.”

“I do.” Marianne’s screams and pleas now haunted me, as well. “But I trust you.”

Tears shone in his eyes, but they didn’t fall. “Thank you. But I can’t trust myself.”

Later, when the sun had risen and Nathan slept at my side, I took his hand in mine. He’d started wearing his wedding ring again, either as a signal to me to forget about him or as an eternal punishment to himself. I guessed it was the latter.

But his self-inflicted penance was unnecessary. The Soul Eater was still out there, the Movement would soon enough learn of Nathan’s defection, and God knew what else lurked on the horizon. I felt pretty confident that there was plenty of stuff out there to beat us down without his guilt having to plague us.

But I wasn’t going anywhere.

I opened the drawer of his nightstand and slipped the box inside. I thought about my parents, and for the first time since their accident, I allowed myself to forgive myself. I’d come so far that I no longer recognized the person I used to be. I’d turned down the blind admiration and devotion Cyrus had offered me. I’d rejected his promises of power without consequence, because I now knew that a life without consequences was meaningless. And though I’d done things I wasn’t proud of, I didn’t regret them. In that regard, I was possibly stronger than Nathan.

Strength isn’t about bearing a cross of grief or shame. Strength comes from choosing your own path, and living with the consequences.

And as long as I had the strength to keep living, I was going to do it without regret.

Blood Ties Book Two:

Possession

Contents

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Prologue

Welcome Back

H e didn’t know how long he’d been dead. There was no time, no season, no change, only eternity.

Shadows stumbled around him on the other side of the veil. Two in particular caught his attention. He knew what they were. He’d been one of them.

The life he craved was accessible to them. Now, as in his living death, he wanted to leech it from the mortals who couldn’t protect themselves. If he could envy this undead pair, he would, but there was no time. They had no life, so they were none of his concern.

On the other side, they couldn’t see him. When he was of the world but not alive, he couldn’t see the ones who’d gone before him, either. Despite their sightlessness, they appeared to follow him. He moved away. He wanted life.

It was a fool’s errand, his never-ceasing search for that mortal energy. It throbbed in the people and animals he passed every day, but he could not touch it. Thin though the veil was, it separated him from what he craved. He could reach for it, hold it in his hands, but the film of the shadow curtain always kept him from it.

Color, alien to this existence, would have shocked his senses, if he’d had any. The lifeless pair held something between them, shimmering and frightening like the fiery sword the angel held at the gates of Eden. It drew shadows to it like moths to the flame, though he hated such cliché description. He hated more that the thing drew him, as well. The shining rift split wider, and a hand, not full of life but real nonetheless, thrust through.

The other shadows clamored for it, sliding over it. Like water on oil, they rolled off the corporeal skin. As if searching specifically for him, the intruder pushed the others aside and grasped him. He stuck.

He hadn’t felt panic since he’d died. Hadn’t felt despair since her betrayal. He felt it now as the rough, real fingers pulled him through the rift.

Thick and heavy, feelings he’d almost forgotten happened all at once. Slippery and hot, sensations he remembered being pleasant at one time engulfed him. His formless being squeezed and conformed into a shape at once familiar and horrifyingly foreign.

Too bright. Too cold. Too real.

Too loud.

One of the pair laughed like jagged glass. “We fucking did it! I can’t believe we fucking did it!”

The light stung his eyes. He blinked, but his vision didn’t clear. In his chest, he felt a thump that hadn’t been a part of him for centuries—the beating of a human heart.

Alive. He was alive.

He dropped to the floor, screaming and clawing at his mortal prison.

The one who’d done it leaned over him and slapped him on the back. The connection of flesh against flesh drove needles of sensation to the bone.

“Welcome back, Cyrus.”

1

Nightmare

“Y ou dreamed about him this morning, Carrie.”

At the sound of Nathan’s voice, my hands froze on my keyboard. “You’re watching me sleep again?”

This worried me. Besides being phenomenally creepy, my sire’s habit of spying on my nightmares usually flares up when there’s trouble on the horizon. Before our big fight with him two months ago, I’d often wake to find Nathan in bed beside me, staring at me as though I’d disappear if he looked away. Just three weeks after that, when our new blood donor had broken in with the intent to stake us in our beds, Nathan had been sitting in my desk chair, watching over me, waiting for something, anything to happen.

Rather than looming in my doorway, he’d come in and sat down on my bed—there really was no place else to go, the room was so small—and settled in as though he’d been invited. Not that I’d been offended. It was his apartment, and Ziggy’s old room didn’t feel quite like home to me.

I studied Nathan as he watched me. I assumed he tried to gauge my mood. He detests arguing with me, and he’d obviously had other hopes for how the conversation would go.

Tough.

“So, I’m worried.” At my arched brow, he acceded, “Fine, I’m irrationally angry with you.”

Damn him for looking good. Time stops bothering with you when you become a vampire, and Nathan was frozen at thirty-two. Despite the pallor that comes with seventy years of avoiding sunlight, he remained just as young and handsome as he’d appeared in the photographs he’d saved from his prevampire life. More so, actually, because this Nathan was in my bedroom, in living color. Dark hair, gorgeous gray eyes, a body so toned and hard he looked like he’d been a statue of a Greek god in a past life. But it was his eyes that had made me fall for him. Even though he’d been acting tough, and threatening my life the first time we’d met, I’d seen the kindness and sorrow in them. His eyes weren’t just windows to his soul. They were doors that let out things he wouldn’t have been able to hide from me even without a blood tie between us.

I’d turned back to my computer, where my latest dissertation on vampire physiology had waited with an impatiently flashing cursor. You can take the human out of the doctor, but you can’t take the doctor out of the vampire. Or something like that. I’d been working on A Case Study of Blood Type Compatibility for Metabolic Efficiency to kill time and distract me from the craziness of the past two months. But it had inevitably caught up with me, so when Nathan had burst in I’d been typing “Crazy Yellow Tube Socks” over and over again. “You said irrationally, not me.”

“I can’t help it.” His embarrassment was evident through the blood tie, but it didn’t quell my annoyance. “What’s going on?”

“Well, for one, I’m tired of this stupid research project—”

“You’re tired of it? I was the one drinking AB negative all damn week.” Though he chuckled, there was a wearing note to the sound.

“And you’ve been watching me sleep, which usually means something major is about to happen. Plus, I’ve been having these nightmares.” I covered my face with my hands, massaging my tired skin. “I’m sure it’s nothing.”

“It didn’t sound like ‘nothing.’” The bedsprings squeaked as he stood.

I dropped my hands and gave him a withering look. “Oh, he listens as well as watches.”

The ghost of a sarcastic smile crossed his face as he knelt beside my chair. “You make it sound so dirty.”

I knew he couldn’t help the surge of playful lust that reached me through the blood tie, because our brains were on a weird, telepathic party line. Unless he blocked me or vice versa, we heard each other’s thoughts and felt each other’s emotions. If one of us had even the slightest inclination toward getting physical, the other one knew—and usually acted on—it.

Unfortunately, the blood tie doesn’t filter negative emotions out, so I always got a heaping helping of after-sex guilt. Thoughts of Marianne, his dead wife, were never far from his mind, so the punishment game usually kicked in within minutes of la petit mort. Once I felt his guilt, I added some of my own over the fact I’d helped cause it, and the resultant snowball effect was a good enough reason to avoid sex with him altogether.

At least, not beyond a few just-to-get-it-out-of-our-system flings. Giving those up would be like kicking heroin cold turkey.

The thought depressed me, so I put it aside. I swiveled my desk chair around and leaned back. “Seriously, why are you watching me?”

“The nightmares.”

I shrugged, hoping to pass off my terrifying dreams as a regular occurrence. “I have a lot of nightmares.”

“You said his name.”

Nathan wasn’t my first sire. Cyrus, whom I only knew as “John Doe” when he’d attacked me in the hospital morgue, had made me a vampire. He’d also nearly made me dead when I hadn’t been willing to satisfy his twisted desires. When I’d turned to Nathan and the Voluntary Vampire Extinction Movement for help, Cyrus had removed one of my two hearts—a strange physiological trait unique to vampires—and left me bleeding to death in the alley behind Nathan’s building. When Nathan found me, I’d already died. He’d revived me by giving me his blood, and it’d had the desired effect—I was alive, after all. He just hadn’t realized he would “re-sire” me.

He’d already had a deep-seated hatred of Cyrus. Now, as my new sire, he felt it ten times stronger. He hated if I even mentioned my first sire in passing. The evil, antagonistic side of me couldn’t help but do it now. “Maybe my dreams about Cyrus are a subconscious thing to rile you.”

He raised an eyebrow. “That’s the same excuse you use for leaving the cap off the toothpaste.”

He was right. He’s usually right. Damned sire’s intuition. I shut off my computer monitor and leaned back in my chair. “I’m guessing you have some sort of theory here.”

“Not yet. I was hoping to form it while you tell me—in detail—about these dreams. Then I was going to cut you off with a big, dramatic exclamation, something along the lines of ‘aha!’ at which point you’d find yourself impressed and slightly aroused by my genius.” He shrugged. “But now, I guess I’ll just settle for the detail part.”

I rolled my eyes and folded my arms across my chest. “I never see his face, but I know it’s him.”

Nathan nodded, indicating I should continue.

“There aren’t any colors except blue.” I bit my lip. “The watercolor kind of blue I remember from when I was…dead.”

A deep frown creased Nathan’s brow, a sure sign I’d piqued his interest with my story. “Are you sure it’s not your super-conscious working through that night?”

When I had those dreams, I always saw the same things. The bright orange cat that had passed my splayed body. The thick shapes of the shadow people coming to claim me. I didn’t bother Nathan with these memories. My brief death—the second one—had traumatized him enough. “Cut the psych bullshit. You think I’m having these dreams for a reason, don’t you?”

He let out a long breath as his mind searched for nonanswers. “I suppose it could be some residue of your former blood tie to him.”

“But why now?” I shook my head. “It’s been two months. What could have happened to reactivate the tie now?”

Nathan stood, trying—and failing—to look unconcerned. “It could be anything. I’ll have Max do some digging in the Movement files.”

The Voluntary Vampire Extinction Movement was a harsh, totalitarian organization demanding the death of vampires who didn’t live by their strict code. Nathan had been on probation for seventy years for killing his wife, though it hadn’t been entirely his fault, and by siring me he’d broken one of the cardinal rules: preventing the inevitable death of a wounded vampire. Rather than wait until they found out and killed him, Nathan had chosen to go outlaw. But he maintained ties to Max Harrison, the only other vampire who knew the circumstances surrounding Nathan and me.

I smiled. “I’m sure he’ll be thrilled with the assignment.”

“He doesn’t have a choice,” Nathan said cheerfully. He no longer hid the fact he lived to make Max’s life hell. “Well, the sun’s long down. I’d better get downstairs and earn my keep. Are you going to work tonight? I’ve got some inventory that needs cataloging.”

“As tempting as it sounds, no.” I’d clocked enough unpaid hours in Nathan’s occult bookshop to last several lifetimes. If I never saw another Book of Shadows or packet of herbs, it would be too soon. I gestured to the computer. “I need to finish this before it drives me insane.”

“Likewise.” He made a face. “Next time you want to do some crazy experiment, use someone else as your lab rat.”

I heard the door shut behind him as he left. Usually, he locked it, but I heard no telltale jingle of keys.

Vampires take the bond between sire and fledgling as seriously as humans do the bond between parent and child. Normally, Nathan was frighteningly overprotective of me. I tried to push aside the feeling that something might be wrong. Those thoughts were like poison ivy. Once you scratch it, the infection spreads and grows. I didn’t need to spend the night on pins and needles, jumping at the slightest sound.

I flipped on the monitor, hoping to lose myself in medical jargon, but I couldn’t concentrate. My unease grew, my palms began to sweat and my stomach tingled. I ticked off the symptoms in my mind and only then recognized my body’s reaction.

Fight or flight.

The primitive response to fear had slowly built in me, but I was in no immediate danger. My heart did a panicky flip-flop in my chest as I stared at my reflection behind the words on the screen. My pupils had dilated. My face began to morph into monster mode. I stood, willing myself to calm down. There was no reason to feel this way.

Unless it was the blood tie.

Nathan.

I ran from my room, knocking over my desk chair as I took off. Our apartment was on the top floor of Nathan’s building. The bookstore was in the basement. I tore down the stairs as fast as I could, gripping the rails as my feet tripped gracelessly over themselves. The door at the bottom seemed light-years away. I burst through it and onto the street. The chill air of the early spring night took my breath away.

Then pain took it, and I gave up hope of getting it back.

The blood tie was gone. Not in the way it felt when Nathan simply hid his thoughts from me. That was like a brick wall. This was…void. If the tie were a length of cord stretched between us, one end had simply gone slack.

Nathan was dead.

I clutched the wrought-iron rail as I edged toward the top of the stairs descending below the sidewalk. Moonlight illuminated shattered glass at the bottom. Whatever had gotten to Nathan had broken the window to get in.

Get a weapon. Get help. My heart overrode my rational mind. I needed to get to my sire.

I took the stairs down two at a time. Inside, the light at the back of the store flickered in its death throes. Broken, powdery fluorescent tubes littered the floor. Occasional sparks sputtered like snowflakes from broken wiring overhead.

The tables that usually displayed tasteful arrangements of crystals and tarot cards and other New Age bric-a-brac were utterly destroyed. They lay in splinters on the ground, crushing the merchandise they’d once held. To my right, the glass case in the sales counter had been smashed. I knew Nathan kept an ax in the cupboard behind it. I moved in that direction as quietly as I could with glass crunching beneath my shoes.

Something shuffled in the labyrinth of bookshelves behind me.

The noise froze me for an instant as I weighed the distance to the door against the odds I’d be able to effectively defend myself with the ax. I dismissed the notion of running. I couldn’t leave Nathan behind, not if there was even the barest chance he might be saved.

I sprinted the last few steps to the cupboard and retrieved the ax. I tried to force some courage into my stiff fingers as I gripped the handle. Whatever had broken in was still in the shop.

The hair on the back of my neck stood up. The thing hiding in the shadows growled.

The clock behind the counter chimed. I jumped. The creature sprang out at me.

My head bounced off the hard floor as the thing brought me down, and nasty fireworks of pain exploded in my vision. The smell of Nathan’s blood, usually a welcome, familiar perfume, filled my nostrils with a sour tang, and I gagged. I squeezed my eyes shut tight and my muscles tensed as I tried not to vomit.

The weight of the thing pressing down on me lifted. I opened my eyes in time to see it leap behind the counter, its noisy respirations nearly drowning out the repeated chimes of the clock.

“Nathan?” I shrieked, barely recognizing my own voice for the panic in it. I screamed his name again. There was no answer.

It became starkly, startlingly clear to me: Nathan couldn’t come to my aid. I was alone with this creature, and woefully unequipped to defend myself.

A loud snarl sounded behind the counter. In a split second of sheer terror, I threw the ax that way. It hit the cash register and bounced to the floor, out of my reach.

Alone. Woefully unequipped. And blindingly stupid.

I didn’t have long to worry about it. The creature leaped over the countertop and tackled me. My breath escaped in a loud whoosh, and I looked up through a haze of pain at the thing holding me down.

A man. A naked, bleeding man.

The creature hadn’t killed Nathan. The creature was Nathan.

His face twisted in a feral snarl. His eyes were cold and devoid of recognition. He gripped a shard of blood-drenched glass in his fist. Bloody symbols marred his arms and chest, and I realized with a fresh wave of nausea that he’d carved them into his own flesh.

He bent his head toward me, and I turned my face. He leaned so close his breath stirred the hair at my temple, and he sniffed me. With an audible snarl he raised the glass shard high above his head.

“Nathan, please, don’t,” I whispered, but I knew he’d never hear. This thing was not Nathan. It was a monster wearing my sire’s face.

He brought the shard down, and I flinched as it smashed to the floor beside my head. Warm, fresh blood sprayed across my face from his torn palm, and he gripped my chin and forced me to face him. He rasped in a language I didn’t understand, and pushed away from me.

Though I sat up quickly, he was gone before I could see him go. The only evidence that he’d been there were his bloody footprints on the stairs to the street.

Trembling, I lifted my hand as if to reach for him. It was wet with his polluted blood. Usually, the smell of Nathan’s blood comforted me. Now, something had tainted it, and the stench made me sick. I covered my nose with the collar of my shirt as I crawled to the door. The broken glass on the floor pricked my arms, but I barely felt it.

Like a zombie, I drifted up the stairs to the apartment, ignoring the blood dripping from my cut hands. My presence of mind returned enough for me to lock the door. Then I went to Nathan’s room and sat on the edge of his bed, clutching the cordless phone. I dialed automatically, my gaze fixed on a snag in the carpet near the edge of the runner.

“Harrison.” Max sounded chipper on the other end of the line. I wanted to be where he was, with no knowledge of what I’d just seen.

“It’s Carrie.” I swallowed hard, my tongue too thick for my mouth. “I need you.”

2

Familiar Territory

T he floor was cold, but the air was hot and too bright. Instinctively, Cyrus flinched from the sunlight touching his flesh.

His naked, human flesh.

How humiliating. He didn’t have the energy to rail against the indignation. Fatigue plagued his bones, and hunger gnawed his guts.

As a vampire, he’d equated his need for blood with hunger, but it had been far more than physical desire. Blood hunger was a need for emotional fulfillment, the urge to indulge the most primal drive of his kind. To kill. To control. Human hunger was sadistic in its simplicity. Purely physical agony he hadn’t felt in centuries.

What had happened to him?

He winced as he sat up, his muscles screaming in protest, and he collapsed again. Around him, he could make out a cavernous darkness. Above him, a cone of sunlight streamed down, casting a circle of protection, as Dahlia would have called it. Dahlia. If she’d had anything to do with this he would rip her pretty little head off her fat shoulders, human or not. As soon as he recovered, he was certain his rage would give him strength enough to take on a whole army of vampire witches.

There were voices in the darkness, but he couldn’t see who they belonged to. Though his vision hadn’t cleared, it was far better than it had been when he’d been dead.

Dead. Carrie. The pain of her betrayal came back with surprising ferocity. She’d refused his love, refused his blood. Then she’d plunged a knife through his heart without conscience. He could have almost admired that, if he hadn’t been on the losing end.

Closing his eyes, he lay on the hard, cold floor. Marble, he thought. It was funny how things were coming back to him now, piece by piece. Perhaps that was proof of a soul. Memory of past lives. Dahlia had always insisted her soul had lived several lives as assorted notorious historical figures. No, he wouldn’t start believing in a soul now. It would make the whole situation that much more ridiculous.

Like the unpleasant stretched sensation in his lower abdomen. He hadn’t felt that in months, but the meaning came back to him effortlessly.

“Hello?” he called to the voices in the darkness, though a crude American “Hey!” might have been more appropriate, considering what they’d done to him. “I need to go to the toilet.”

The voices bickered quietly among themselves, growing in intensity until someone shouted and broke the tension. “Well, then you go and get her!”

“Who?” Cyrus cried, but the noise from the darkness swallowed his words. He sincerely hoped the “her” in question wasn’t one of the pair of vampires that had pulled him back. One had possessed a voice that would put a banshee to shame, and the other had been so gruff and masculine he’d thought for a moment she was a man.

A door scraped open, then slammed shut. A bloodcurdling scream of terror set off sparks of nostalgia in Cyrus’s heart, and the door screeched open again. The her in question was apparently terrified. It gave him little satisfaction, as he wasn’t terribly safe and secure himself.

“Get moving, bitch,” a distorted voice commanded from the shadows.

A shape moved out of the darkness, pale and waifish. As she moved closer, colors swam together. The muted yellow of her dress faded into the plain brown of her hair and her paper-white skin. Blood red splashed across her torso, and ugly purple, black and blue scored her throat and ringed her eye.

She approached warily, halting about two paces from him, and knelt at his side. The sunlight touched her, but she did not burn. Human. His relief was palpable. He did not want to be food for the creatures he’d once ruled over.

“I’m here to help you,” she said, her voice barely a whisper.

Cyrus looked her over in disdain. He couldn’t stand soft-spoken women. They held no interest for him, and he considered anything that didn’t amuse him extraneous. He reached a shaking hand to push her hair from her face, and touched the dark bruise marring her eye. “I see you don’t listen well.”

Her hands clenched to angry fists, earning his respect for a moment. Then she flinched and destroyed the illusion of courage. This wasn’t the first black eye she’d received, he knew.

“Hang on to me,” she whispered, helping him to his feet. “They said you wouldn’t be able to walk.”

How humiliating. He’d been deadly and powerful. Now, he was human. The vampires lurking in the shadows knew it. Though they kept their distance, their eagerness was palpable. He knew what he would feel in their place. Desire, curiosity. Not many vampires returned from the dead that he was aware of. That fact alone made him a delicacy.

One of the vampires snarled. Cyrus heard the jingle of chains as the creature approached, and he tensed. At his side, the girl quivered and shrieked. If he could have stood on his own, he would have thrown her to them.

“He’s not to be harmed!” another vampire commanded, and the one advancing backed down.

“Where am I?” Cyrus asked, hating himself for relying on this girl.

“St. Anne’s,” she whispered. “A church.”

“I gathered that. There are so few St. Anne’s car washes these days.” The door scraped open, and he gagged at the stench of death he used to revel in. He looked past the line of gleaming chrome motorcycles parked in the church vestibule, his eyes struggling to focus amid so much detail.

“They said they were going to bury them after the sun went down,” the girl said quietly. “They never did.”

Cyrus squinted at the tangled forms of two bodies on the carpet. One was dressed in black with a cleric’s collar. The other was a woman with white hair, her button-down blouse and matronly cardigan slashed open to reveal the wrinkled skin of her chest. Her skirt tangled around her thighs, showing the tops of her knee-high stockings.

“Father Bart and Sister Helen,” the girl whispered tearfully. “They—”

“I know what they did to her.” He turned his head and reached for the wall for support. “Cover her up.”

Hello, conscience. We meet again.

When the girl returned to his side, she was trembling. He wanted to strike her for her weakness, as he would have in his former life. Now, he doubted he could lift his arm on his own. Shameful as it was, he relied on her. It wouldn’t do much good to put her off helping him.

“The rectory is downstairs.” She sniveled pathetically as she opened a door. Shag-carpeted steps led down into darkness. “I think that’s where they’ll keep us. It’s where they’ve been keeping me.”

His mind raced, trying to piece together the information he remembered from his former life, and how it might apply to his current situation. “And who are ‘they’?”

“Monsters.” The word came out as less than a whisper.

He wished he could push her down the stairs. Unfortunately, that would send him tumbling, as well. “Yes, vampires. I know. But who are they?”

She shook her head. “I don’t know what you’re—”

“Who are they? Who are they allies with? Are they the Fangs or the Celts or the Coveners?” He searched his memory for the names of other vampire gangs, and his heart seized in fear. “They’re not Movement?”

What a stupid question. Of course they weren’t the Movement. It wouldn’t make sense for the Voluntary Vampire Extinction Movement to bring vampires back from the dead.

Unless his new, human existence was some form of sadistic punishment they’d dreamed up. If it were, he could guess who’d moved his name to the top of that list.

The girl helped him down the stairs to a cinder block apartment with a cot, a reclining chair, a dented aluminum TV tray with a half-eaten microwave dinner and a copy of the TV Guide, turned to the crossword puzzle, atop it. A small bookshelf supported a television and a few books, with a bottle of holy water and a rosary nestled in the corner.

Cyrus gestured to the water. “Hide that.”

The girl propped him against the wall before moving to do his bidding. “Why?”

“Because there are a lot of vampires upstairs, and they apparently didn’t search this room thoroughly. Any potential weapon we can find would be nice to keep.” He frowned at her as she picked up the bottle and walked past him, not sparing him a glance. “What’s the matter with you?”

“Nothing.” The word was accompanied by a hysterical, terrified hiccup. “Aside from being kidnapped by vampires and watching my two best friends murdered.”

He wrinkled his nose at the thought. “If your two best friends were a nun and a priest, I’d say something is definitely the matter with you. But I meant why won’t you look at me?”

This forced her to do so, her eyes wide behind a few slashes of mousy-brown hair. “Be-because you’re naked.”

It had been a long, long while since he’d had a good laugh at another’s expense. He thoroughly enjoyed laughing now, though he wobbled precariously against the cinder blocks at his back. “Oh, let me guess. You’re a sister, too, Sister?”

She blushed as if the thought was preposterous. “No.”

“It’s a shame. I always found nuns to be the most fun. They’d all say no at first, but they’d be begging for it by the time I was through.” He shrugged and ignored her sob of horror. “I want to use the toilet and have a bath. You’ll have to help me. And then you can find some of the preacher’s clothes for me.”

“What if they come down here?” She clutched his arm, apparently more afraid of their captors than his naked flesh.

“I’d suggest you drop the innocent act quickly. They’re more likely to let you live if you’re an active participant.” He shook her off, then promptly fell to the floor. He couldn’t stand the sound of her sharp, pitying gasp, so he tried to crawl.

“Let me help you,” she said quietly, kneeling at his side. And, because he was so damn weak, he let her assist him to his feet.

The bathroom was small, nothing like he was used to in his former life. But it had a bathtub, and the hideous orange shag carpet didn’t creep past the doorway. If it weren’t for the unevenly patterned tile floor, he’d almost say this was his favorite room yet.

He endured the humiliation of another human helping him to use the toilet, then the girl set about turning on the rusted taps to fill the gleaming, porcelain tub.

She helped him into the water, and he hissed at the sting of it on his skin. She didn’t seem to care, her thin arms quaking with obvious exhaustion as she lowered him into the tub. “Will you be able to sit up?”

“I am seated in a veritable cauldron of scalding water. I’ll endeavor to keep the rest of myself out of it, yes.”

She left him alone with his thoughts then, and there were a fair amount of them. Too exhausted to do little more than think, he considered the steps he would take now. First, he’d find out who had done this to him. Then he’d contact his father. Unless it is Father who has done this. That wasn’t as far-fetched as he’d like to imagine. What didn’t make sense was why dear old dad would bring him back as a human.

Of course, it might not have been his father at all. Cyrus prided himself on being a well-known name among vampires. Perhaps a fanatical group had raised him in hopes of fame or a favor.

Or for a sacrifice.

It wasn’t unheard of. He’d helped his father sacrifice vampires for centuries. But the key word was vampire. Why was he human?

He had just gotten comfortable when a soft knock sounded.

“What?” He picked up the nearest object—a bar of soap—and flung it at the door.

The Mouse came in with a pile of neatly folded clothes. “Father Bart was shorter than you. And fatter.”

“Pick up the soap.” Cyrus watched as she bent to retrieve it. Nothing to write home about, he decided, tilting his head to study her backside.

In the past, he would have fed off her. She had long, slender legs that would have been heaven wrapped around him, and hair just the right length to pull and bare her throat for a bite. But her face was too innocent, her whole manner too timid. Her faded cotton sundress told endless tales of trips to Wal-Mart in Daddy’s pickup truck, Garth Brooks blaring over the roar of the road through the open windows.

The vampire Cyrus would have taken his pleasure and her blood in one night, and she wouldn’t have lived to see the dawn.

He missed blood more now than when he’d drifted aimlessly on the other side of the veil. He didn’t want to think of it anymore.

When she stood and handed him the soap, he snatched it away. “What are those?” he snapped, gesturing to the clothes. “Polyester?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, read the bloody tags. Are you completely worthless?” He grabbed the shirt from the top of the pile and scanned the care instructions before flinging it aside in disgust. “I only wear natural fiber.”

The girl nodded uncertainly. “I don’t think Father Bart had any—”

“The dead priest is not my fucking problem!” He slammed his fists down on the water, sloshing it over the sides of the tub.

The Mouse shrank away, screaming. It lifted Cyrus’s spirits considerably to see the girl frightened.

“Get out. If you can’t find anything suitable for me, you’ll have to ask those morons upstairs.” He leaned against the curved back of the tub and closed his eyes, savoring the girl’s litany of pleas as she cowered on the floor.

Max arrived five hours later. I was buried beneath the covers on Nathan’s bed, clinging to his scent like a life raft and trying to ignore the bedside radio he always kept on. The classic rock station was in the middle of a Fleetwood Mac Rock Block. “Gypsy” was just finishing up when I heard the front door burst open.

“Carrie?” Something heavy hit the floor in the living room. Probably the duffel bag Max always carried with him. Loud footsteps ran down the hall and I climbed from beneath the blankets in time to see him skid to a stop at the doorway.

“What’s going on? Where’s Nathan?” Max scanned the room as if he’d see him there.

“Gone.” I don’t know if it was my relief at finally having an ally in my nightmare or if the reality of the situation had finally set in, but my voice cracked and tears rolled down my face. “He’s just gone.”

“Oh, God. Carrie.” Max dropped to the bed and put his arms around me. His jacket smelled like leather and cigarette smoke where I buried my face against his shoulder. He only held me a moment before he pulled away. Making a motion of a stake going through his heart, he asked quietly, “Gone?”

I shook my head and wiped my eyes. “Not like that. He was here. His body was here. But he wasn’t.”

“He was possessed?”

“Not exactly.” How could I explain it? “There wasn’t anything of Nathan left at all. Could you turn off that radio?”

Max nodded and fumbled with the alarm clock until “Go Your Own Way” cut out in the middle. “I hate that song, anyway.”

I covered my eyes, and he pulled me into his arms again. No matter how good the physical comfort felt, it did nothing to dull the ache in my heart.

“What happened?” he asked softly.

I didn’t let go of him. “I felt it through the blood tie. Something was wrong. So I went downstairs.”

When I couldn’t finish, he shushed me and patted my back. For all his come-ons and attitude, Max was actually a very understanding man. “Listen, I’m going to go downstairs and look around. You stay up here where you’ll be safe.” He leaned back and looked me in the eye. “Okay?”

I followed him to the living room and watched him pull some stakes from his bag. “Be careful.”

He looked up, the most fake smile I’d ever seen on his face. “I can take care of myself, Doctor.”

“No, not that. I mean, if Nathan is down there…”

Max followed my gaze to the stake in his hand. When our eyes met, his expression broke my heart more than it already was. “Give me a little credit, Carrie.”

“Sorry.” Dangerously close to tears, I turned away and pretended to be interested in something on one of the many bookshelves lining the wall. Only when I heard the door click softly closed behind me did I allow myself to wipe my eyes. When I looked up, the spines of Nathan’s ridiculously large collection of books confronted me. When I glanced away, I saw his chair, his shoes. A half-finished mug of blood atop a stack of notebooks. All of the components were there, all of the little parts that made Nathan’s life, waiting for him to return to them. It made his absence more real somehow, and mocked my pain. If we never found Nathan, these little reminders of him would remain for me to deal with.

I don’t know how long I stood there staring at the photo, but when the rattle of the doorknob heralded Max’s return, his speed surprised me.

He shrugged off his jacket and tossed it over the back of the chair. “There’s nothing. Just a lot of really nasty-smelling blood. I’m assuming that was his?”

I nodded, not trusting myself to speak.

“There’s nothing else we can do tonight.” He rubbed the back of his neck and swore. “Tell me what happened.”

The symbols.

“There were marks.” I scrambled for a notebook and pen I spied on the perpetually cluttered coffee table. “Strange things he’d carved all over his body.”

“Carved? As in cut?” Max came around the chair and stood beside me, looming hopefully over my shoulder as I scribbled what I could remember of them.

“I think they were sigils, or something.” I closed my eyes, but couldn’t get a clear picture. “It all looked like random angles with circles on the end.”

When I handed him the paper, he frowned and traced his fingers over the symbols. “You’re sure this is right?”

“Well, I didn’t take a picture of them, but when a bleeding, naked man with funky writing carved all over his body is pinning you to the ground, you have other things on your mind.” I chewed my lip and pointed to the page. “What do you think?”

“He attacked you?” Max’s eyes darted over me, looking for signs of injury. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah.” I hadn’t thought to mention the attack, and the omission seemed ridiculous now. I almost laughed at my stupidity. “He stopped. I think…I think he knew it was me. He smelled me and then he just…stopped.”

Max considered the information for a moment, then turned back to the page. “Does Nathan speak any other languages?” He pulled his cell phone from his pocket. “Aramaic, Hindi, Greek? Something with letters that look different from ours?”

I shook my head. “Gaelic, from childhood, but the letters look the same. He slips into it sometimes when he’s tired or drunk, but—”

Max chuckled. “I’ll file that away for future reference.”

The fact he believed Nathan had a future reassured me a little. I sat on the couch while Max punched up a number on his phone. “Who are you calling?”

“Movement,” Max said casually as if he wasn’t standing in the home of two fugitive vampires.

I lunged for the phone.

He yelped in surprise and jumped back. “Hey, what are you doing?”

“You can’t call the Movement,” I whispered fiercely as though they could hear me. “They’ll kill us.”

“They’ll want to know something happened to Nathan. Besides, who’s going to help us? The oh-so-reliable spell books downstairs?” He turned away to speak into the phone. “Hola, baby. It’s Harrison. Get me Anne.”

My heart pounded in my chest as I stood helplessly by while Nathan’s only friend turned Judas.

“Anne, cómo está? It’s Harrison.” He paused, then burst out with a hearty laugh.

How could he do this? I seethed, tuning out his conversation. Nathan had quit the Voluntary Vampire Extinction Movement when he’d sired me. We’d been flying under the radar ever since, and now Max was going to bring us to their attention?

“Gotcha.” His smile widened. “We’ll be on the plane at sunset.”

“Plane?” I barely held the word in until he’d hung up the phone. “Where are you going?”

“We are going to Movement headquarters. In Madrid,” he added casually as if location would be my prime concern.

“Excuse me? We? You expect me to march into a building full of assassins who’ve been commanded to kill me on sight?” I shook my head emphatically. “No way.”

Max laughed. “You give yourself a lot of credit, you know that? There are thousands of renegade vampires roaming the earth. You’re a two-month-old who killed her sire. Even if you mentioned your name to every person in the place, I bet you wouldn’t come across one vampire who recognized it.”

“But you told them about Nathan.” I gestured to the phone in his hand. “They’ll know to look out for him, then.”

Max tossed the cell onto the coffee table and sat beside me. “He was a good assassin. They’re upset that he’s left the fold, but they’re not going to put a bounty on him unless he really steps over the line. There are way too many vampires out there doing worse damage to humankind.”

I knew it was true. Nathan had told me as much. If they’d wanted us dead, we would have been staked within the week after I’d killed Cyrus. “Over the line?” My heart jumped into my throat. “Like?”

“Like killing someone or making a new vampire.” Max tried to maintain a neutral expression, but it grew more serious by degrees. “Listen, I’m not going to tell you this is an ideal situation. Nathan’s in grave danger. If I thought we had the resources to help him ourselves, I would never have involved the Movement.”

“You won’t let them kill him, will you?”

Max shook his head grimly, but a steel band of worry clamped around my heart. “There’s something you’re not telling me,” I murmured.

Max sighed heavily. “We’ve been monitoring the Soul Eater. There’s been…activity.”

Of course there had been. Jacob Seymour, Cyrus’s father and Nathan’s sire, had haunted my nightmares ever since I’d first seen him at Cyrus’s Vampire New Year party. He cannibalized other vampires, consuming their blood and their souls to stay alive after years of maniacal acquisition of power had taken their toll on his metabolism. Most of the year he slept safe in his coffin with a full retinue of guards, but a Movement strike team had thrown his feeding schedule off.

“What kind of activity?” My fingernails bit into my palms as I clenched my fists. I wanted to scream, “Just get it over with! Tell me what’s going on!” But I couldn’t treat Max that way. He was trying to help me by breaking the news gently. He didn’t know it was like pulling a Band-Aid off slowly.

“His known fledglings have gone missing. Even Movement guys. Carrie, there’s a reason the Soul Eater is so weak. He’s made, like, a fledgling a year for five centuries. Now they’re all disappearing.” Max shrugged helplessly. “And he’s getting stronger.”

If I’d thought I’d hit bottom before, I’d had no idea. At Max’s words, the bottom truly dropped out. “You don’t think…” I couldn’t say it. There was only one way the Soul Eater grew stronger: consuming a vampire’s blood and soul.

“Hey, I only know what they tell me,” he said, trying to sound encouraging, I’m sure. “But this thing…listen, there’s only one person who’s going to be able to tell us what’s wrong with Nathan. Unfortunately, she’s a little dangerous. That’s why the Movement has her.” He paused, cursed and ran a hand through his short blond hair. “I don’t like the plan, but they think it’s the best idea, and frankly, we don’t have anything else to go on.”

With a shock, I realized my night hadn’t started out this way. I’d gotten up, spoken to Nathan, gone for a walk, with no suspicion that another hardship was waiting for us. The unfairness of the situation crushed me. All I wanted was Nathan, to have him with me, to tell me everything was all right. I tried the blood tie, but I felt nothing. Pain, so powerful I couldn’t express it with a sound, forced its way from my body, my mouth frozen open in a silent scream. I wrapped my arms around my middle and tried to stand, only to collapse to my knees on the floor.

Max was beside me in a heartbeat, grabbing my upper arms to haul me upright and onto the couch. He put his arms around me, and I collapsed against him. His cotton T-shirt was comforting against my cheek, and for a moment I let myself pretend it was Nathan holding me.

Then I pushed the fantasy away. It would never stop hurting if I didn’t face reality. Nathan was gone, maybe forever.

“I don’t know what I’m going to do,” I sobbed, more to myself than to Max.

His voice was thick as he struggled to keep the emotion out of it. “I know what you’re going to do. You’re going to get through tonight and probably tomorrow, then we’re going to get on that plane to Madrid. We’ll meet with the Movement, do some sightseeing, get gloriously drunk and catch a flamenco show. Sound good?”

“How can you joke at a time like this?” I wiped my nose pathetically on the back of my hand, glaring at him. “What if we don’t get Nathan back?”

“This isn’t the worst thing that’s ever happened to Nathan. He’ll come out of this.” Max hesitated. “I haven’t told anyone this…”

I sat up. “Haven’t told anyone what?”

He looked away. “I don’t know if it will help you if I do tell you.”

“It’s worth a shot.” Nothing he could say would make things worse.

“My sire died.” Before I could make any attempt at condolences, he rushed to speak again. “About ten years ago. He wasn’t Movement. I wasn’t either, at the beginning. I was living with him—nothing gay or anything—and I started talking to this girl. She was an assassin. I didn’t know. She used me to get to him, then she gave me a choice. I could join the Movement or die. After I saw what she’d done to Marcus—”

“You don’t have to go on,” I whispered. The pain in his voice overwhelmed me.

He nodded and smiled as though he was embarrassed to be so emotionally exposed. “I still miss him. Sometimes I think if I could just hear his voice…But for the most part, I’ve gotten better.”

I wanted to say “I can’t imagine,” or “That must have been awful,” but I could imagine and it was awful. That was why he’d told me. If he could survive losing his sire, I could survive this separation from Nathan. Unfortunately, with that came the implied reassurance I could survive Nathan’s death. I didn’t want to think about it, so I didn’t say anything, and leaned against Max again. Like this, I could rest secure in the familial love that cements good friendships.

“We’re going to get him back, Carrie. Nathan’s too big a pain in my ass to be gone for long. I’m not that lucky.” He gave me a quick squeeze with the arm draped around my shoulders.

Our morose conversation died without a fight as we retreated into ourselves. Max fell asleep, leaning against me on the couch. I’m sure we made a cheerful picture: two wounded souls, both relying on the other to hold them up.

Outside, the sun came up. Wherever Nathan was, I hoped he was okay.

3

Nature of the Beast

U pstairs, a woman screamed over and over. It was a beautiful, delicious sound, and it was going to drive him mad.

Cyrus lay in the dead priest’s narrow twin bed. The Mouse slept on the floor, where she’d cried herself to sleep, much to Cyrus’s annoyance. But she’d put clean sheets on the bed, so she wasn’t the most worthless servant he’d ever had.

The noise upstairs died as he assumed the woman making it had. Next, they would drain her blood and eat her organs. The nostalgia of it parched Cyrus’s lips. What he wouldn’t do for a taste of blood.

The Mouse had fed him canned soup that was too thin and too salty. Even as a vampire he’d enjoyed various culinary delights—chocolate, expensive cheeses and fine caviar. As blood had been his main source of sustenance, he’d only had to eat for pleasure. The thought of ingesting lowly fare out of necessity was brutally depressing, but it had, fortunately, restored some little bit of strength to his limbs.

“Are you awake?” He sat up and nudged her with his toes. She lay on her side, curled into a ball with the blanket he’d spared her—generously, in his opinion—clutched to her chest. When she didn’t move, he gave her a feeble kick. “Get up!”

She didn’t budge. For one sick, cheerful moment he wondered if she’d died. Another kick elicited a small shift. A frown creased her brow, and she turned her head. Her dull hair fell back, exposing her neck. The pulse point there leaped with seductive familiarity.

Just one bite.

He was no longer a vampire. He had no fangs, no blood thirst, at least not physically. But his soul still craved it. Craved the rich taste of the blood. The emotional connection from drinking. Canned soup couldn’t replace that.

He slid to the ground soundlessly and curved his body around hers, closing his eyes to stop the room from spinning. Though her hips and shoulders were bony, her flesh was warm and welcoming. He remembered this part, the seduction. There had been times when hurting them just to watch them fight had been enjoyable, but he wasn’t sure of his strength now, and he didn’t want her screaming to alert the vampires upstairs.

Her hair still smelled of shampoo, the cheap, pungent strawberry variety he’d seen in the bathroom. He buried his face against her neck and tasted her skin, salty with perspiration and fear.

His touch didn’t wake her. She moaned softly when he traced the shell of her ear with his tongue. Her hips pushed back against his, and he held them there, tight against his growing arousal.

This was how he remembered it. The pure, physical pleasure mingled with overwhelming emotion. There was always a moment where the act made him drunk, made him forget that he’d intended to kill, and overrode his consciousness. For an instant, he’d be tricked into believing it was an expression of love and not a prelude to death. For an instant, he’d be fooled into believing they loved him.

He squeezed his eyes shut tight and slipped his hand into the front of her dress. The warmth of her beating heart echoed his, mocking him.

They never loved him. How could they? He’d never been worthy of love. Not his father’s, not his wives’ or his companions’. What had he ever done to earn love?

This was where the moment of perfection took an ugly turn. Rage filled him. His hold on her bony hip turned cruel. Even without his vampire strength, he knew he would leave a bruise.

This was what he craved. The pain. The horror. He reveled in it.

She woke with a start. He leaned over her to see the comprehension slowly take her. First confusion at waking from such a sinfully pleasant dream. Then shame when she realized her dream had been reality. Horror, when she saw who held her, and finally, acceptance as she realized what he would do.

Though her body trembled, her limbs were frozen in a pathetic, helpless attempt at pushing him away that never connected with his flesh. He licked his lips and lowered his head, adrenaline fueling his weak body. His blunt, human teeth didn’t break the skin. She found her voice to scream as his jaws crushed the tender flesh of her throat, but she didn’t fight him. He tried again, and she pummeled his chest with her fists. He ignored her and bit once more, covering her mouth with his hand to quiet her.

She bit him in her struggle, and he cursed. He rolled on top of her to pin her to the cold, bare floor. Her dress rode up her thighs and he wedged himself between her legs. He felt the heat and wetness he’d pulled from her through the thin, damp cotton of her panties, when she’d thought she was dreaming. Her eyes opened wide at the intimate contact. She froze for a mere second before resuming her thrashing and squirming. She thought he would violate her, and she fought harder than when she’d assumed he would kill her.

Her terror was an aphrodisiac. The scent of her fear-tinged sweat filled his nostrils. The feeling of her wriggling for escape against his hard body aroused him further. He twisted one hand in her hair and yanked her head back. Aiming for the angry, red welts he’d left on her neck, he lunged forward and bit.

This time, he didn’t release the pressure immediately. He increased it until his jaw ached and his ears rang. She scratched at his back with her nails, dragging slashes of pain across his shoulder blades. Her scream, one long, keening wail, rose in pitch the harder he bore down.

Finally, with a sickening pop, her flesh gave way. She bled, not a gush as from an artery, but a mere trace. If he could have remembered this taste in the afterlife, he would have known he was in hell. To think of ever having been separated from the beautiful violence of drinking blood…He shuddered as he lapped gently at the torn flesh of the wound.

Her scream abated, replaced by silent sobs he only noticed by the heaving of her throat under his mouth. He’d hurt her, made her cry. He had that power again, whether human or not. It excited him.

The taste of her burned an exquisite fire in his groin. He thrust against her thighs and abandoned himself to the horrible pleasure of the blood oozing from her torn neck and the despair emanating from her soul. But it wasn’t enough. It wasn’t like before.

“Please,” she rasped, hauling in breath as though the oxygen weighed a thousand pounds. “Please, don’t.”

Her desperate whisper pushed him over the edge. He threw his head back and groaned as he came, spilling his seed on the pale flesh of her thighs. Breathing hard, he rolled away from her. She scrambled backward on her elbows then struggled to her feet with unrestrained sobs. The bathroom door slammed shut and the sound of the latch falling dropped a weight of ice in his guts.

He hadn’t enjoyed it like he had in the old days. Before, when he’d been a vampire, he wouldn’t have given a second thought to what he’d done. Now, his conscience pricked him, a sting he’d trained himself to ignore after he’d been turned. Why had it come back? It was certainly something he could do without.

He’d hurt her. A moment ago it had brought him pleasure. It should have now. He’d done worse to countless other girls, destroyed their innocence and their trust, if not their lives.

It was exactly the same as he’d done to the Mouse.

He sat up, supporting himself on shaking arms, and stared at the closed bathroom door. He couldn’t hear her soft sobs, but he imagined them as he listened to the water running in the bathtub. Her spirit had been weak already. She’d seen her friends slaughtered and violated before her eyes. But she hadn’t been completely broken. Not until now. Not until the moment he’d abused and terrorized her.

It’s what you do. You’re a monster.

Though he knew it to be true, he couldn’t force himself to believe it. Humanity had been woven back into his frayed soul, for better or for worse. Most likely, for worse.

Climbing to his feet, he went to the bathroom door, gripping objects for support as he went. “Come out of there.”

She didn’t answer.

“I said come out of there.” He had no patience for this game. He should be upstairs, demanding answers of his captors and insisting to be restored to his former state. If he could even make it up the stairs after the energy he’d expended fighting her.

“To hell with you.” His words echoed his thoughts. He limped to the small chest of drawers and pulled out some of the dead priest’s clothes. The trousers were a bit short and the waist a bit big, but he would worry about proper attire later. He shoved his arms into one of the hideous, button-down, black shirts and headed to the narrow stairs. Halfway there, his legs gave way and he toppled to the floor. Still, he kept going, pulling himself slowly to the foot of the staircase, where he had to catch his breath before he could crawl up the rough steps.

He’d expected the door at the top to be locked somehow, and it was, but only from his side. Apparently, they were less concerned with keeping him in than keeping themselves out. Still, it gave him trouble. He had to stretch to reach the knob, and only after several tries did he manage to turn it. The door opened and his poor balance and awkward position brought him face-first onto the rough carpet of the main floor.

The bodies of the priest and nun had been removed from the vestibule, but they’d been replaced with fresher corpses. Cyrus pulled himself across the floor, the carpet scraping his stomach where his shirt rode up with his motion. He reached for a wheel of one of the motorcycles, thinking to pull himself up. The vehicle tipped, and for a long moment he thought it might topple onto him. With a frustrated sob, he made his way to the wall, pulling himself upright through sheer force of will. He had dealt with these kinds of people before. They had no respect for anyone or anything, but he had a better chance facing them standing than crawling on the ground at their feet.

As he rested, propped against the wall, he glimpsed his surroundings through the dark windows. A badly cracked parking lot in an ocean of desert sand, and beyond that, a barren road. Exactly the sort of place these cretins would imagine when waxing poetic about the open road. His gaze dropped to one of the bikes, and the insignia on the side made his skin crawl.

The Fangs.

A part of him was revolted at the thought of spending another minute with the uncouth gang, but another part was grateful he’d offered them refuge in the days before his untimely death. If they had any decency at all, which he doubted, they would feel indebted to at least explain what was going on.

The large, double doors to the church were shut. Cryptic, occult markings had been drawn on them in chalk. He pulled open the door and stepped inside.

Loud, discordant music, the type Cyrus had been glad to be rid of when they’d ended their extended stay at the mansion, blared from a huge system of stereo equipment hastily arranged on a side altar. A rowdy dice game occupied most of the gang members in the center aisle. A few slept in the pews, obviously not caring what toll their dirty boots and grimy clothes took on the upholstered seats. One Fang used spray paint to draw exaggerated phalluses on the figures in a mural of the Last Supper that graced a side wall. Someone threw a beer bottle and it shattered loudly against the wall. On the whole, they conducted themselves much more respectfully than when they’d been at Cyrus’s house, swilling beer and ruining his formal dinner parties. This must be their church behavior.

When Cyrus entered, they paused in what they were doing to notice him. All except three of them. They sat in the sanctuary, where he’d been held that morning. Candles marked the perimeter of a circle around them. Their fingertips touched and they chanted in a low drone. He recognized one as the person who’d pulled him from the other side, a tall female with a gravelly voice and an ugly face, even for a vampire. The other two looked as though they’d been younger at the time of their change. One was male, with spiked black hair, the other female, with a similar coif. They all wore their grotesque feeding faces.

Rage so intense it burned in his veins took hold of Cyrus, but his limbs were so weak that when he ran toward them, he stumbled, falling flat on his face. He looked up blearily as the vampires at the perimeter of the room advanced on him. They tangled their claws in his hair, tore the clothes on his body.

A scream, painfully familiar, rent the air. The monsters holding him froze, and he looked up in time to see the Mouse, her flimsy dress clinging to her wet skin, her sopping hair hanging like a tangled mop around her shoulders. She rushed at the vampires holding him and pushed them away, an action Cyrus might have perceived as fearless if she hadn’t been trembling and shrieking hysterically. She’d shocked them, though, and that was enough. They were too stunned to attack or even resist her.

She gripped Cyrus’s wrist with her cold, wet hand, pulled him to his feet and supported him with surprising strength. He looked back once at the three vampires in the circle, considered trying again to reach them.

“Please!” The Mouse tugged his arm frantically. “Please!”

She was right to be afraid. The vampires wouldn’t stay stunned forever. They would seethe over them like a tide of death, and weak, pathetic, human Cyrus would not be able to stop them. He held tight to the Mouse, his feet twisting beneath him, boneless as she dragged him from the sanctuary.

They made it only as far as the door before the monsters pursued them. The Mouse screamed as one of them caught a handful of her hair, but she tore free, tightening her arm around Cyrus. A few more steps and they would be safe, but those steps seemed like miles due to his deadened legs and her ebbing strength. With a final, heroic burst of energy, the Mouse wrenched the basement door open and pushed him ahead of her. He collapsed and nearly tumbled down the steps. She shoved the door closed and locked it.

The vampires clawed at the door, but the clawing gave way to angry voices, and then the voices faded into heavy footsteps. The Fangs had left them.

Cyrus gasped for breath, his chest aching with the exertion of his actions. “What was that about?”

“Please, don’t ever go up there again!” She gripped the front of his torn shirt, catching the long strands of his hair in her fists.

“Do you think I’d go up there again by choice? They’ll kill me!” He wanted to take her by the shoulders, dig fingers into her thin flesh as he shook her. But there was no sport in abusing her, he decided. That explained why he’d taken no pleasure in it before.

“If they kill you, they’ll kill me!” She clutched at him, her hold impossible to shake.

“What are you talking about?” He lowered his voice. In the past, he would have rather died than show sensitivity to a squalling woman, but she knew more than he did. As loath as he was to admit it, he needed her, and he needed her calm so she could tell him what she knew.

He sank to the second step, and she eased down, too, so they were squeezed side by side between the cinder block walls of the narrow stairwell. She hiccuped pathetically and wiped at her eyes. “If you die, I’m worthless.”

I was under the impression you were rather worthless, anyhow. “What do you mean?”

“They only let me live to watch out for you. They don’t know how to take care of a…human. They kept me alive so I could take care of you.” She seemed suddenly aware that their bodies touched, and she shrank from him. “If you die, they’ll kill me. I’m disposable. That’s what they told me when they killed Father Bart and Sister Helen.”

When she turned her head, he saw the bloody imprint of his teeth in her flesh. He looked away. “What if I killed myself? What if I went into the kitchen, took a knife and slit my wrists?”

“No!” She grabbed for him again, and he evaded her, though his bones ached with fatigue.

“So, you’re charged with watching out for my well-being, at the cost of your life. Yet you’ve done little to keep me from harming myself. There’s a razor in the bathroom, knives in the kitchen drawers. Which tells me you don’t care whether you live or die.” He studied her face as she absorbed his words.

She looked down, her voice barely a whisper when she spoke. “Would you kill yourself?”

Would he? It would end this miserable human existence. But they’d brought him back once from the realm of the dead, apparently with purpose. They could likely do it again. And it wasn’t as though he could lift a razor to slash himself. “No. I don’t wish to die.” He slipped down the next step, resigned not to look at her again.

“Neither do I,” she whispered. “At least, I don’t think I do.”

That gave him some hope, something to use against her if need be. “Then you’d better keep me alive.”

“This is it,” Max announced, dropping his duffel bag on the plushly carpeted floor.

Only the faint, hollow sound resulting reminded me we were in an airplane. “Air Fang One?”

“Oh, that was bad.” Max flopped onto the cream-colored, silk sofa and kicked his feet up, as if he were on a secondhand couch in a college dorm. “Have a seat. It’s a long flight.”

I couldn’t tear my eyes from the sumptuous decor of the private jet. The walls, carpet and furniture were all in muted, neutral shades. Warm light spilled from recessed fixtures to compliment the dark wood finish of the tabletops and sprawling entertainment center at the end of the cabin. “This is nicer than my apartment.”

“There are a lot of places nicer than your apartment.” Max flipped open a console on the arm of the couch. A remote control slid up smoothly. He snagged it and turned on the television. “Like my apartment, for one.”

I eyed the small, round table and two sturdy-looking wing chairs on either side of it. They were visually appealing, especially with their color-coordinated seat belts, but probably not very comfortable. “Are you just going to hog that sofa the whole time?”

“What?” He pulled his gaze away from what appeared to be a Japanese game show with topless contestants, and sat up. “Oh, no. Sorry. You want the tour?”

“There’s more?” I would have been impressed with just this room.

Max rose and gestured to one of the fabric-covered panels in the wall. “Come on.”

Sure enough, there was a hidden door handle worked into the ivory molding. Max pulled it open to reveal a small galley, not unlike a commercial airliner’s, and beyond that, a cockpit with all manner of flashing buttons and lighted dials. Two pilots in standard uniform conferred with the tower through headsets as they flipped switches and checked instruments. They were perfectly normal. Human, even.

“The Movement has humans working for it?” I asked under my breath when Max led me back to the passenger area.

“Werewolves,” Max fairly growled. “You’ll see a lot of that at headquarters. They’re antivampire, too, so the Movement thinks it’s just great to have them on board. Wanna see the bedroom?”

“That’s subtle.” I elbowed him in the ribs. “There’d better be twin beds, or pray the flight doesn’t last long.”

“The flight probably won’t,” he admitted. “It’s the waiting for sundown on the tarmac that’s the real problem.”

At the thought of sunup, I panicked. It was one thing to be in the big, sturdy shelter of a house or even Ziggy’s old Ford Econoline van when dawn broke, but a plane seemed terribly risky. “We’re gonna be in this thing with the sun up?”

“Well, yeah.” Max seemed annoyingly unconcerned. “Long flight, short night. Especially since we’re flying through it. Why do you think they built this bad boy without windows?”

“Oh, God! What if we crash? Max, we could die!”

“So? You’d die in a crash if you were human, too. If you wanna worry, worry about the pilots offing us for their cause.” On that reassuring note, Max led me to the other end of the cabin, where he pulled open a mahogany door with gold fixtures. At the end of a narrow hall there was another equally tasteful, equally neutral room with twin beds.

“Damn.” He shook his head as if disappointed. “Unless you want to share?”

“I’ll pass. Don’t take it personally. It’s the whole crushing-emotional-pain thing I’m concentrating on right now.” It hadn’t gotten any better, but I’d tried my best not think about it. It was something I’d become very good at when my parents had died. If I ignored the grief, I wouldn’t be incapacitated by it when there were more important things that needed my attention. Closing my eyes, I sank to the bed. “I left my bag in the other room.”

“I’ll get it.”

When Max returned with the bag, I gave the contents a quick once-over. I’d decided to leave my heart in the wall safe in Nathan’s shop. After we’d retrieved it from Cyrus, I’d given my heart to Nathan for safekeeping. He’d really outdone himself in the security department. The box containing my heart was fireproof and welded shut, so nothing short of total apocalypse would harm the contents. Still, I couldn’t help the spike of fear when I thought of being separated from it. Though I knew nothing could get to it in the hidden safe—and that leaving it behind was much better than trying to sneak a human heart through customs—it was another thing entirely to convince myself my fear for my life was irrational.

A slender, friendly-looking vampire knocked gently on the doorway to alert us to her presence. A wide grin split Max’s face when he saw her. “You’re new here.”

The young woman flushed, then seemed to remember her duty to be professional. “Yes, I am. My name is Amanda. I’ll be your flight attendant.”

“I’m Max. Max Harrison. I’ll be your passenger.” He offered her his hand, and she shook it with a look of mild bewilderment.

She turned her apologetic gaze to me, and I waved dismissively. “He doesn’t belong to me.”

“The captain says we’re cleared for takeoff. You both need to find a seat and buckle your seat belts,” she said primly as if clinging to her rehearsed speech would help her resist Max’s charms.

“Will do.” He winked at her, which sent her scurrying from the room.

“Do you always sexually harass innocent young women?” I rolled my eyes at him before heading down the hall.

He laughed. “I’m sorry, have we met?”

Once we’d taken off and I was reasonably sure we weren’t in imminent danger of plunging into the sea while burning to death, I unbuckled and stood. “I’m tired. I didn’t sleep well yesterday. Mind if I crash?”

“Not the best terminology to use on a plane, but knock yourself out.” Max shook his head, his mouth turned down and his gaze still fixed on the television. “Nine hundred channels. I think I’m good here.”

“Great.” Truth be told, I was more tired of the Spanish variety show he’d been watching during takeoff than I was actually tired. “Wake me before we land, if I sleep that long.”

“Will do.”

I briefly heard the staged moans of an over-enthusiastic porn actress blare from the television as I headed to the bedroom. At least he’d have something to occupy his time.

Not that I’d been on a lot of private jets or anything, but the beds were more comfortable than I’d expected. The sheets had a thread count equivalent to Egyptian cotton butter, and the incessant whir of the machinery around me created a womblike environment, or at least what I’d imagine the womb to be like. I should have been able to drop off immediately, but my brain kept replaying the horror of my circumstances. I didn’t have a clue where Nathan was or if he was even alive. When I tried to communicate through the blood tie, all I got back was crippling pain. Did that mean he was dead? Just imagining it intensified the agony, so I shielded myself from his thoughts…or the void where they once were. All I wanted was to feel Nathan’s arms around me, to hear him tell me that everything would be all right. Instead, I cried, grateful for the mechanical noises that would keep Max from overhearing my sobs.

I wasn’t sure when I crossed the line between conscious and asleep, so it was quite a shock when I opened my eyes and found myself in Cyrus’s bedroom in his palatial mansion. The mattress beneath me was soft, the linen sheets as cool and crisp as I remembered.

Clarence has really kept the place up.

“You’re awake.”

I hadn’t heard the voice of my former sire, even in dreams, since the night I’d killed him. I’d seen him many times, but always through a murky blue filter. We’d never spoken. Still, I remembered his cloying praise and manipulative words. His gentle tone should have put me on my guard, but I somehow knew I dreamed, so he could do me no harm. I had no reason to resist him. Not that I’d ever been able to in the past.

I rolled onto my side to face him. His long, white-gold hair covered his shoulders and the pillow beneath his head. A smile formed slowly on his beautiful mouth, and I ached to touch him.

“I’m not awake.” I couldn’t force the sadness from my voice. “I’m on a plane. I’m sleeping.”

He nodded and reached for me. His hands weren’t the clawed nightmares they’d been after five hundred years of living death. They were smooth and strong when he brushed my hair from my eyes. They slid down my neck to the scar he’d left on the night he’d changed me, and a shudder of longing passed through me at his touch. In reality, Cyrus would have been pleased with that reaction. In my dream, regret softened his usually cruel face. “You’re right. You’re not awake. But now your eyes are open.”

I leaned forward and kissed him. There was none of the need for control or power in it that there had been when he was alive. I surrendered completely, willed him to do the same with my mind. In my dream, I could have him again, the parts of him that I’d loved and not feared. The parts of him that had seduced me into questioning whether my humanity was truly worth keeping.

When I opened my eyes again, I was awake, and a very startled Max was pulling away.

“I was trying to—to wake you up,” he stammered, rubbing his chin as though I’d hit him. The look in his eyes was just as accusing. “And you kissed me.”

“Sorry.” I resisted the urge to wipe off my lips. “I was dreaming.”

“Must have been a hell of a dream.” He slid his hands into his jeans pockets and rocked back on his heels while looking at anything but me. “There was something on the news I thought you should see.”

In the other room, Max had CNN on the television. The picture-in-picture function displayed MSNBC. I dropped onto the couch. “No porn? This must be important.”

“Shh, it’s on again.” He gestured to the screen. “It’s been coming on after the ‘top of the hour’ shit.”

The anchorwoman, who’d previously reported a story about a toilet-trained horse, put on a more somber expression. “Police in Grand Rapids, Michigan, are searching for a suspect in a brutal slaying that took place in front of several eyewitnesses Monday night.”

“That was last night—” The words stuck in my throat. I grabbed one of the throw pillows and hugged it tight to my chest.

The anchorwoman continued. “The victim, whose name has not been released, was jogging down a public bike path when an unidentified man tackled her to the ground and cut her throat.”

A teenager appeared on the screen, her face blotchy and red from crying. “It happened so fast, no one could do anything. His face was all messed up, like it got burned up or something. It was like he just ripped her whole neck out.”

“We’re following up with witnesses and pairing them with police sketch artists, and we’re hoping to get an arrest as soon as possible.” I recognized the middle-aged police officer on the screen as the one who’d given me a speeding ticket earlier that year. He looked a lot more forgiving of the psycho killer than he had of my measly eighty in a fifty-five.

Back in the studio, the anchorwoman fixed the camera with a somber gaze. “Police artists have compiled this drawing….”

Though it was hastily sketched in pencil and the jagged snout of his feeding face had somehow translated to a larger nose and whorled burn scars, there was no denying the man in the picture was meant to be Nathan. The reporter’s voice continued. “Police say the suspect is Caucasian, in his midthirties, with facial scars and several tattoos. He should be considered dangerous.”

“Tattoos.” I pinched the bridge of my nose between my thumb and index finger. “The sigils. Of course.”

“Hopefully, the Movement will have more information on this when we land,” Max said softly.

“They’re going to kill him, aren’t they?” I couldn’t remember ever feeling so tired. This was where Max was supposed to say something to comfort me. He remained silent.

I covered my face with my hands. “I hope they do kill him. Because if they don’t, he’ll never forgive himself.”

4

A Rabbit Hole

I f the dead priest hadn’t owned a television, Cyrus might never have known what was happening.

Not that he felt he owed the Father any gratitude. Cyrus hated television. Since its horrible birth, the blasted thing was all humans could talk about. In this wretched captivity, though, Cyrus needed something to occupy his mind, and he wasn’t about to take up Bible study.

The Mouse still slept. After she’d finished crying and he’d rested long enough to manage sitting upright again, he’d demanded she bring him a first aid kid to bandage her bruised and bloody neck. He’d let her sleep in the bed. He had no use for it. The care and, God help him, nurturing, he’d displayed had unsettled him. There’d been no chance of sleeping after that.

For the first few hours, he’d busied himself ripping pages from the Bible on the shelf to make paper cranes. He’d worked through the first half of Genesis when he grew bored and flipped on the television. It helped him cover the sounds from upstairs. Though any sensible vampire would have been sleeping by now, the Fangs seemed content to blast pounding, repetitive noise that barely qualified as music.

There were three channels, and only one showed anything of interest. The local news anchorwoman wore too much rouge and her hair looked like one perfectly molded plastic piece. Exactly the kind of woman Cyrus liked to charm, then torture to death. He leaned forward in his chair.

“Authorities in Louden County are calling off their search for three people who were reported missing after a church fire in Hudson.” The picture cut to three photos. The dead priest and nun, and a pretty girl with a bright smile wearing a cotton sundress.

The Mouse.

The anchorwoman’s nasal voice continued. “Police say Father Bartholomew Straub, Sister Helen Jacobs and Stacey Pickles were working at Saint Anne Catholic Church on Friday when the fire broke out, but the three have not been seen since. Footprints leading away from the building suggest they may have attempted to walk to safety, but with desert temperatures reaching record highs over the weekend, they are presumed dead.”

Cyrus eyed the girl on the bed, shaking his head. “Pickles?”

More disturbing than the Mouse’s ridiculous name—though barely—was the matter of the fire. Why would the authorities believe the building had burned? And if the weekend had passed…

“Get up.” He stood, glad of the little strength sleep had returned to him, and shook her. “What day is it?”

She stared at him in bleary confusion. “Tuesday or Wednesday. I lost track. You’re standing.”

Tuesday or Wednesday. Which meant he’d been raised on Monday. But they’d been here since Friday. “What happened when people showed up for Mass on Sunday?”

“I don’t know. No one came. When Father Bart mentioned it to…” She wet her lips. “That’s when they killed him. He tried to tell them people would be coming soon for services. They laughed at him and said no one was coming to help us.”

Cyrus turned away from her tears. They might spark that dangerous human guilt in him, and he had no time for it now. “Did they tell you why?”

“No. They just started killing.”

“But they kept them for two days before they killed them. Why?” The timeline didn’t make sense. If he’d taken hostages, he would have dispensed with the useless ones right away.

When he turned to face the Mouse, her eyes were wide and rimmed with red. “They were doing things. Occult things. Satan worship.”

“Impossible. The Fangs think Satanists are pussies.” When she flinched at his coarse language, it buoyed his mood. “What, exactly, were they doing?”

She curled her legs beneath her and toyed with the hem of her dress. A perverse memory of the night before came to his mind. He expected guilt, and when it didn’t come he found its absence far more disturbing than its presence would have been.

As if sensing the change in him, she wrapped her arms across her chest, hugging herself. “I don’t know what they were doing. They didn’t tell us. But I heard them say the time had to be right, they had to be sure it was him. And they needed Father Bart’s hand.”

“He had to take part in the ritual?” It made sense. Though Cyrus didn’t believe in all the Catholic tripe he’d been made to swallow as a child, the power of a priest was similar to, if not greater than, that of a practiced magician.

“Not him. Just his hand.” The words left her in a whisper. “The rest of the stuff they did to them, that was for fun.”

“Why did they spare you?” Cyrus sat beside her on the bed, ignoring the sting of shame he felt when she cringed from him. “Why not use you and feed from you like they did the nun?”

“Because I wasn’t as fun.” She trembled as she spoke. A tear slid down her cheek. “I didn’t scream or pray. That’s what they wanted. They wanted her to pray while they did it.”

The thought would have amused Cyrus in the past, but it didn’t now. Not when this girl was so visibly traumatized by what she’d seen. “Why didn’t you?”

For the first time, the Mouse looked him in the eye. He saw no life or hope in those dull brown depths. Her body steadied, and her voice was strong. “Because no one was listening.”

She sounded so like him centuries ago. He tried to keep the emotion from his tone as he spoke. “That is the most important thing you’ll ever learn. Because no one is listening, and no one is looking out for you.”

She broke down then, gulping great lungfuls of air as she sobbed.

He stood and walked to the tiny kitchenette, trying to ignore the trembling in his legs. He would not abide becoming so weak again, so fast. “We’re out of milk.”

“What’s happening?” Her face was swollen and red from crying, contrasting starkly with the white gauze at her neck. “What are they doing?”

“I have no idea.” He limped to the refrigerator and opened it, then sniffed a potentially suspicious carton of orange juice. It seemed safe enough. But his balance was not. He slammed the carton on the counter, grabbing the edge for support, but tumbled to the floor. The Mouse was at his side in an instant, helping him to his feet and guiding him to a chair.

“I don’t need your help,” he sniped, but accepted it anyway.

The Mouse took a glass from the cabinet, then, almost as an afterthought, grabbed another. Her hands shook as she poured the juice.

He considered offering some comfort to her, but dismissed it. He’d already been kind to her, and he didn’t want it to become a habit. “On the news, they said they’ve called off the search for the three of you. And the church has burned down.”

“That’s impossible.” She wiped at her eyes with the back of her hand. “They must have been talking about something else.”

“Stacey Pickles?” He watched the recognition flash in her eyes before he continued. “They think you died in the desert.”

“They’re looking for me?” Hope, then bleak terror crossed her face. “Why do they think this place has burned down?”

“I don’t know. There are spells, called glamours, that make a person see what the caster wishes them to see. But to make a whole building disappear, and do it convincingly to fool many people…that takes power I don’t believe exists.” He shook his head. “Are you going to give me any of that juice?”

She came forward slowly, like a wild animal unaccustomed to humans, and set the glass carefully before him. “They brought you back from the dead. They must know something you don’t.”

The very notion that she would speak to him so boldly struck him as ridiculous. He laughed and took a long swallow from his glass. The juice was as thick as blood, but cold and with an unpleasant texture. “I can’t get used to this.”

“To what?” She didn’t sound as if she cared.

That alone made him wonder why he’d spoken to her at all. The solitude, he guessed, not only of the last few days, but his long death, as well. It was enough to keep him talking. “Living like a human. It’s been so long since I’ve had to fuel my body with food and liquid. It’s unpleasant.”

“No. What will be unpleasant is starving to death when the food runs out.” Her expression was grim.

“That won’t happen. At least, not to me,” he said by way of reassurance. “Your life depends on it, remember. You’re supposed to be caring for me.”

She looked insulted. “I wasn’t talking about you. I was talking about me. They’re not going to worry about keeping me alive after they’re done with you.”

He pulled one of the chairs from the flimsy Formica table and sat. “And what, exactly, is it they’re going to do with me?”

“I don’t know.” She chewed her lip. “Something bad.”

“Madame, your powers of perception astound me.” He closed his eyes, mind working furiously. What he needed was a plan, some currency to bargain with the Fangs for information. What he needed was—

“You talk funny. Where are you from?”

What he needed was for the Mouse to stop talking. “England. But most recently I was confined to a watery blue purgatory. I don’t remember the address.” He paused. “Were you there? When they did the ritual?”

Her eyes grew hollow and faraway again. Her voice came out in a whisper. “Yes.”

“What did they do?” Cyrus pulled another chair from the table and motioned to her to sit. “Were there specific words they said? Did they read them from a book?”

She remained frozen in place, staring blankly at the tabletop. There was a ring from a cup there, and she seemed to have fixated on it. “I don’t remember.”

He tamped down his impatience. It wouldn’t do to frighten her again, not when she’d begun to communicate like a rational human being. “It wasn’t that long ago. I’m sure if you take a moment, you’ll remember—”

“I don’t remember!” She spun toward the counter, where a small stack of dirty dishes and utensils waited to be cleaned, and she swept them to the floor. The shock of her action outlasted the clatter it created, and she stood, her face a mask of disbelief as she stared at the broken shards on the tile floor.

There were two ways he could react, Cyrus realized. He could lash out at her in anger and impatience, destroying any scrap of trust she might have left and any chance he might have to learn more about his dire situation. Conversely, he could ignore her until she was finished with her tantrum, and reserve his feeble strength for more important matters. He chose the latter, as his actions had caught up with him and he hadn’t the stomach nor the energy to do further violence to her.

“Clean it up,” he said casually as he rose and headed for the bed. He settled in and pulled the blankets over himself, but found it difficult to sleep with the sun from the small, high window illuminating the room and the sound of the Mouse’s pathetic sniffles invading his ears.

As soon as the sun set, Max and I stepped off the private jet and onto the still-warm tarmac.

“I love this time of year. Not too hot at night, not too cold. If you were ever here in July or January, you’d know what I mean,” Max said, full of vim and vigor as he carried both our bags toward the sprawling, futuristic building that was the airport.

I hadn’t slept well during the day. My dreams had been full of weird symbols I was sure I’d never figure out, the least of which being a weird trip into the woods bearing a pig under each arm. I was in no mood for Max’s crap. “We’re not here for a pleasure trip. We’re here to figure out what’s happening with Cyrus.”

Max halted and dropped his duffel bag. “With who?”

“With Nathan.” I stopped and glared at him. “We don’t have time to monkey around. Let’s go.”

“You said Cyrus. ‘We’re here to figure out what’s happening with Cyrus’ is exactly what you said.”

My mouth gaped. Had I really said that? My first sire had certainly been on my mind lately, but I didn’t usually make such obvious slips. “I didn’t say that.”

“Yes, you did. I barely knew the guy. Why would I be mentally inserting his name into your sentences? Carrie, is something going on you’re not telling me about?” Max picked up the bag and motioned for me to walk.

Good thing, too, because I was paralyzed with shock at my own stupid mistake. The quadrant in my brain that controls my feet recognized his gesture, and I plodded along beside him. “Not exactly.”

Max let out a long, low whistle. “Uh-huh. Are you ‘not exactly’ telling me what’s going on, or is something ‘not exactly’ going on?”

“A little of both.” I stopped again and faced him. “Right before the thing happened to Nathan, he’d confronted me about a dream I’d had. Apparently, I’d said Cyrus’s name.”

“Nathan was watching you sleep again?” Another whistle. “That’s not good.”

“I knew something was up, but I couldn’t have predicted this.” We started walking once more, in silence. After a few steps, I remembered my dream on the plane and the embarrassing consequences of it. “There’s something else, too.”

“Shoot.”

“When we were on the plane, I dreamed about him.” I looked at my feet so I wouldn’t have to see Max’s face. “When I kissed you.”

“Well, that’s understandable. He’s your sire and all.” A few more steps, and Max realized what I’d meant. “Wait, you thought I was Cyrus, not Nathan?”

“I was dreaming. I can’t control what I do in my dreams.” Did I sound defensive? I needed a hot bath and a long time to recover from the monotonous flight.

Luckily, Max dropped the subject once we entered the building. The fluorescent tubes and pale yellow paint of the customs area made it seem less than friendly, and the stern faced police with automatic weapons didn’t help much, either. And I couldn’t even claim I’d packed my own luggage. I’d been so tired before we’d left, I’d trusted Max to do it for me.

“Where did you bring me? Kazakhstan?” I whispered fiercely to Max as a customs agent rifled through my underwear. “And why did you pack so many thongs?”

Max grinned. “Why do you own so many thongs?”

Once we were cleared to enter the country proper, Max hurried me out of the airport, to a taxi stand.

“Private jet, but no armored car with little flags to pick us up?” I grumbled as I slid into the back of the cramped, European-scale car.

“The Movement doesn’t like to attract unnecessary local attention,” he said in a low voice. He handed the driver a colorful Spanish bill. “Plaza del Major, por favor.”

Madrid, what I could see of it from the cab windows, was rather unlike my expectations of a Spanish city. There were no terra-cotta tiles on any of the skyscrapers we passed. Billboards for American products mingled with advertisements for Spanish movies. Except for the enormous aloe plants growing in the median of the boulevard and the signs I couldn’t understand, I could have been in Chicago.

Then we passed the modern part of town. The glossy shops and illuminated theater awnings gave way to the terra-cotta and stucco I’d imagined. The streets were less smooth here. Wrought-iron railings surrounded tiny balconies overflowing with geraniums. Laundry hung to dry on lines stretching from one building to another. I figured we’d taken a shortcut until the cab stopped.

The street was so narrow we could open only one door to get out. Max had barely pulled our bags from the backseat when the driver sped off, the taxi bouncing merrily on the cobblestones.

“Are we…Where are we?” I asked, staring up at the sliver of sky between the buildings on either side of us.

“He couldn’t drive us to the Plaza del Major.” Max pronounced it with a slight lisp, like platha my-or. “It’s a pedestrians-only kinda place.”

I followed him down a maze of alleys, impressed that he could find his way so easily. For the most part, the streets we walked were empty and dark. Vampire or not, if I’d been alone, I would have turned tail and run back the way the cab had brought us.

We emerged from one alley to find a more populated street. People enjoyed drinks on sidewalk tables in front of expensive-looking restaurants, and street performers danced and posed for the tourists. At the end of the street loomed a huge, dark wall with an arched doorway. On the other side was the Plaza del Major.

I’d never seen anything so incredibly beautiful and romantic in my entire life. Buildings the likes of which I’d imagined when I read Don Quixote as a child surrounded the square. Cafés and shops proclaimed their wares tastefully for visitors, and a huge sculpture dominated the center. There were many people, but the space felt vast. The ring of voices echoing off the buildings and the stones beneath our feet was swallowed up by the open night air, creating a gentle but unintelligible murmur. Above it all, the clear night sky sparkled with stars that seemed so close I could touch them, and its cold beauty contrasted with the warm life on the ground.

The way Max and I contrasted with the life around us. A pang of longing speared my heart. A group of teens congregated near a vendor’s cart, laughing over their ice-cream cones. Near the huge statue of a soldier on horseback, a darkly handsome man lifted a woman in his arms and spun, her blood red, broomstick skirt swirling like a rebellious flag. He set her on her feet and kissed her upturned face, and they melted against each other. It was like a romantic postcard and a cosmic jab at my feelings all at once. I envied these people in a way I hadn’t experienced since I’d turned. Oh, I missed my humanity from time to time, but the point of all that had been stolen from me had never been driven home so incredibly hard before.

“This is…”

“Beautiful,” Max finished for me. “This is my favorite part of the city. It’s so alive, you’d never know it wasn’t day.”

Miserably, I closed my eyes. “I was going to say ‘unbearable.’”

“Carrie, you okay?” He clasped my arm.

I put my hand over his. The romance of the place was getting to me, that was all. “I’m fine. Just worn out from the trip and worried about Nathan. It’s nothing, really.”

“Well, let’s get this over with, then.” He pointed to a redbrick building with beautiful white trim around the windows. At street level, patrons spilled out of a bustling café.

“That,” Max said with a note of wistfulness in his voice, “is the headquarters of the Voluntary Vampire Extinction Movement.”

I rolled my eyes. “I’m not quite sure I follow. Is it the two floors of what appear to be apartments upstairs, or the place with the dinner menu posted on the window?”

“You’ll see.” He slung my bag across his shoulder and grabbed my hand.

The café was hip with black walls and blue neon recessed lighting. The clientele dined off square plates with barely any food on them—fitting, since they were all thin as rails.

The maître d’, a handsome, haughty young man all in black, looked up from his reservation book. When he saw Max, he grinned. “Ah, Senor Harrison. And this is?”

“Dr. Carrie Ames. She’s got a reservation.” Max winked at the man, though it was barely perceptible.

The maître d’ seemed to catch the meaning behind the expression, and he smiled pleasantly. “Follow me, please.”

We wound our way among the tables toward a steel door with a black velvet rope in front of it. A small, black label bearing the letters V.I.P. proclaimed its purpose. Diners looked up with interest as we passed, probably trying to figure out how we, in our slept-in clothes, could possibly be VIP’s.

The door was an elevator. The black button blended in with the wall. The maître d’ pushed it and the panel slid open, allowing us inside.

Once the door closed, the young man turned to us. “First time visiting the Movement, Doctor?”

“First time visiting Spain, as a matter of fact.” I tried to keep my tone light. I wasn’t sure if I should give away my non-Movement status or not.

“You’ll love it here.” The man’s English was slightly accented, but very good. “After six hundred years, I’m still not sick of it.”

Our conversation was cut short by a rude electronic voice. It droned on in several different languages before it reached English. “Voice recognition confirmation required.”

The maître d’ held a finger to his lips to warn me to silence before stating, “Miguel.”

“Voice sample confirmed,” the voice informed us after a litany of foreign tongues. “Please enter security clearance code” was the next instruction I could understand.

“Miguel is the front line here at the Movement,” Max explained as the vampire flipped open a hidden panel and punched a sequence of numbers on the keypad. “Nobody gets in without his okay. Still, there’s plenty of backup.”

“The waiter thing is a, how do the spy movies put it, a cover,” Miguel said with a wry grin.

“What kind of backup?” I peered over Miguel’s arm as the keypad retracted and the panel slid back into place. “What happens if you get it wrong?”

“A debilitating electronic impulse would momentarily paralyze us and the elevator would be sent to a secure floor. Assassins would be waiting to detain and interrogate us until our credentials cleared,” Max said with a shrug. “It’s not so bad.”

“You would know,” Miguel said with a laugh, clapping him on the back. “Max is not allowed to take the elevator by himself anymore.”

Max was about to snipe back at him when the doors opened on a reception area so bright I had to shield my eyes. The walls, furniture and ceiling were stark white, the overhead fluorescents blinding. Only the floor, covered in low-pile, slate-gray carpet, and a very frightening girl at the front desk, stood out.

“Anne will take care of you from here,” Miguel said as we exited the elevator. “Buenos noches.”

“Buenos noches,” Max repeated, though the pleasantry wasn’t directed at Miguel.

“Hi, Max,” the girl behind the desk said with a smile. Her expression was a startling contrast to the bleakness of her appearance. Her black hair, pale skin and zombie-couture black clothing reminded me of the bored teenagers who worked at the goth shop in the mall back home.

Max leaned casually on the tall counter. “Miss me, baby doll?”

“Oh, yeah. You know I did,” the girl quipped with a roll of her eyes.

“This is Dr. Carrie Ames. She should be on the amnesty list.”

“Amnesty list?” I asked, looking over the counter with interest.

“The ‘do not kill’ list,” the girl clarified, holding out her hand. “I’m Anne.”

I shook it, thinking it best to be polite in case I’d been omitted from the list. After a tense second or two of looking, she found my name. “Okay, you’re cleared to meet with General Breton in an hour. Uh, and he is in a mood today.”

“General?” I snorted. “So, are you guys more like the Salvation Army or the actual army?”

Max cleared his throat with a warning look. “General Breton demands the respect afforded him as an officer of the British Army.”

“Oh, so he’s, like, a real general.” I swallowed. “Great.”

Anne patted my arm reassuringly. “Only for, like, a couple years, and only in the War of 1812.”

“Carrie is…new,” Max said apologetically. “Remember, some of us are not quite as old as you.”

Looking at the girl, I had a hard time believing she wasn’t a sixteen-year-old human, but I’m a firm believer in never asking a woman her age.

“Sorry,” Anne said sheepishly. Then, brightening, she asked, “Do you want the tour while you wait?”

“Sure,” I answered for both Max and me. I wasn’t about to stroll the halls of the Movement without him there to protect me in case some bored assassin got a hankering to kill.

Anne motioned for us to follow her as she walked to a set of double doors and slid a badge through a card reader. There was a buzz, then the lock popped loudly. She opened the door and ushered us inside.

The inner sanctum of the Movement was decorated similarly to the lobby, but doors with badge readers lined the hallway. Sentries were posted at regular intervals, clad in the same black uniform I’d seen the assassins wear the night they stormed Cyrus’s mansion.

“All the rooms with blue labels like these are safe ones in the event of a security breach.” She pulled one door open to reveal an office. A woman in a long, flowing caftan and a high turban looked up blandly from a pile of paperwork. “Something I can help you with?”

“Just pointing out the safe rooms to our visitors,” Anne said cheerfully before she closed the door again.

“So, what are safe rooms?” I had to admit, the security around Movement headquarters wasn’t as impressive as I’d imagined it to be.

“Safe rooms are exactly where you want to be when you hear the security breach countdown announcement,” Max interjected. “If someone manages to get in, Anne can pull the alarm. You’ve got thirty seconds to get into a safe room—they’re all unlocked—before the UV lights come on.”

“Frying any vampire roaming the halls,” she finished for him. “Pretty cool, huh?”

“Pretty cool,” I agreed, sounding for all the world like a mom trying to imitate her teen daughter’s speech. “But what if it’s not a vampire? What if a human gets in?”

“We have a contingency plan for that,” Anne replied smugly. “A furry contingency plan.”

“Werewolves.” Max made a disgusted noise. “They’re not affected by UV lights. They do a manual sweep of the halls and kill anything still out there.”

The idea that at any time someone could flip a switch and subject us to unnatural, but seriously harmful, daylight unnerved me, and I flinched as the fluorescent bulbs flickered above us.

“Don’t worry,” Anne said with a laugh. “Only a handful of people have the security breach code. Keeps us safer that way.”

The tour continued through a maze of downward sloping halls. Each level had heightened security, like the Pentagon back home. Anne explained what some of the rooms contained, and I nodded politely, but my mind kept wandering to my worries over Nathan.

“And this,” she said, sliding her card through a reader and opening a heavy door, “is where our tour ends. General Breton’s office.”

“Well, thanks,” I offered lamely. “This has been…educational.”

“You mean boring.” Anne sighed dramatically. She might have been hundreds of years old, but she had the sarcastic American teenager act down pat. “Just imagine living here.”

“Wah, wah, wah,” Max teased cheerfully. “We’ll see you on the way out.”

Anne left us at the door with a little wave. Before Max could enter the office, I put my hand on his shoulder. “Okay, I get it. High security, superparanoia. Why are we here?”

“We’re here because we need to help Nathan.” Max put his foot in the door and let it close a bit. “Listen, it’s pretty clear that whatever happened to him was a spell someone cast. The Movement can help us find out who.”

“How? Do they keep a database of all witches, too? It would be impossible! Do you have any clue how many fifteen-year-old Sabrina wannabes there are out there?” I wanted to kick the wall, I was so frustrated. “Can you just please give me a straight answer? You always have before!”

“Fine!” He scanned the hallway before he spoke. “We’re here to see the Oracle.”

“The Oracle?” I repeated, a ridiculous image of the magic mirror from Snow White popping into my brain.

“She’s a vampire, a really old one. She knows things. She knows practically everything, and what she doesn’t, she can find out. But she’s dangerous.” Max blew out a breath, as if he knew the inevitable was about to come. “I was hoping I could convince Breton to let me in to see her.”

“Without me, right?” What was it with male vampires that they thought I needed their constant protection? “No way.”

“Carrie, you don’t understand. She’s completely unpredictable, and she’s got this telekinesis thing…. She can kill you, Carrie. With her mind. Now, I’ve got no one depending on me. If I get poofed to dust, fine. But you need to be around for Nathan. I’m not gonna be responsible for getting you killed.” His mouth set in a grim line. “And my impassioned speech is not moving you at all.”

“Not an inch.” I eyed the door. “Do you think this general will go along with your plan?”

Max considered a moment. “I think we have a better chance with him than with some of the others. Just let me do the talking, okay?”

My jaw dropped. “You know I want to help Nathan! Do you think I’d do something to jeopardize our chances?”

“Not intentionally.” He opened the door and motioned me inside.

“What do you mean, not intentionally?” I demanded. But he wouldn’t say anything more. I sighed and walked in to our meeting with General Breton.

5

Resistance

“W hat were you like before you died?”

The question startled Cyrus. He’d thought the Mouse asleep. If anyone could sleep through the noise the Fangs made upstairs. It seemed almost as soon as the sun went down, the music started and the engines roared to life, and then there was the inevitable screaming. Usually, the Mouse endeavored to be asleep before then. Having days of experience with them, she knew the Fangs’ feeding schedule.

Cyrus would have been asleep himself, if he’d had the testicular fortitude to take the bed from her. He comforted himself by reasoning he liked the sounds of the screaming upstairs. He tugged his thin blanket in a futile attempt to cover his entire body. The hideous, polyester preacher clothes bunched with every movement, but he shuddered to imagine the rough upholstery against his naked skin, so he kept them on.

“What do you mean?” he asked now.

She rolled to face him. She’d stopped cringing from him, at least. Maybe the dark helped. “They brought you back from the dead. What were you like before you died? Were you…the way you are now?”

“Human?” Cyrus sniffed derisively. “No, I wasn’t human.”

“No.” Wrinkles of frustration creased her brow as she sighed. “Did you…hurt people?”

He flinched when her hand strayed to her bandaged throat. He hated himself for regretting he’d hurt her. It was growing tiresome, this feeling of shame at doing something he would have found perfectly natural in the past.

“Of course I did. And far worse than you got.” When she didn’t respond, a wicked impulse overtook him. The first time he’d killed, he’d been put off by it. But he’d turned it into a game then, to make it engaging. What he’d done to her before had been mindless. How foolish of him. It had always been the chase that satisfied him. “I used to love girls like you.”

She leaned up on her elbows, a hint of fear in her eyes. “What do you mean, like me?”

Shrugging, he folded the chair’s footrest and sat up. “I’m sure you know your type. Starving for affection the way a dog starves for table scraps. Just plain enough that they never get the attention they want, but pretty enough to get noticed by men who are truly desperate. I’ll bet you hiked that sundress up for your fair share of please-love-me fucks.”

She sat up, hugged her knees. “You’re wrong.”

“Of course I am.” He stood with his hands in his pockets, looking down at her. “You were one of the good girls.”

Uncertainty quivered in her watery eyes as she nodded.

“Good girls don’t exist.” He sat beside her on the bed and placed his hand on her blanket-covered knee. “No matter how they tease, no matter how they insist they want to stay pure, they’re burning to know what it’s like.”

“What…” She closed her eyes, shook her head as if to clear her thoughts. “What what’s like?”

Cyrus peeled back the blanket slowly, and she hurried to arrange her skirt over her knees. He reached beneath her legs and cupped the warm, rounded muscle of her calf. “The feeling of completely surrendering yourself to another person.”

“I’ve never—” Her breath hitched, cutting her denial short.

“You have.” He moved his hand up, skimming the bend of her knee. She shivered, but didn’t draw away.

He stilled his hand. “You don’t have to deny it. I’ve had enough girls like you to know what’s happening in your head. You’re wondering what I did to them to make them give in. What pleasure I gave them to wear them down so they would surrender to me without hesitation. And you’re wondering if I’ll do the same to you.”

He slid over her in one smooth motion. She gave no resistance, parting her thighs so he could lie between them. It was fear more than desire that made her compliant, he could tell by the look in her eyes. It encouraged him to continue.

“I’d woo them with words they’d never heard from another man, but I never told them I loved them. That was key. They thought if they gave a little more, let me do what I wanted, eventually it would be enough. They thought it would make them special to me, and I would love them.” He slipped his hand between their bodies. She’d taken off her panties and washed them in the sink, and they hung over the towel rack to dry. There was nothing to buffer the boldness of his touch as he stroked her, just once, and she gasped and clutched his shoulders even as she tried to push him away.

“See? Even though you know it’s a game, and you know what I am, you won’t ask me to stop. Oh, you feel guilty and dirty, but you think you can live with the guilt as long as you get what you need.” His mind reeled and he closed his eyes to regain control. Her body was wet and ready. He could take her. He knew she would let him, but then what? He couldn’t kill her. He didn’t have the strength.

His mind reeled again. He didn’t need such a shameful memory hanging around his neck. He had to get under control.

She trembled beneath him, looked up at him with her wide, innocent eyes. He couldn’t help himself. He slid his thumb over her slick flesh and leaned close to her face to hear her soft, stifled moan.

“I loved this part,” he whispered against her ear, still rubbing her as she rotated her hips against his hand. “But it wasn’t the best part.”

“What was?” She didn’t want to know, that much was evident from her tone, but at the same time he knew her curiosity was too great. It was the same with all of them. Their curiosity was their downfall.

“The best part…” He nipped at her throat, avoiding that horrible, guilt-inducing bandage there, and slipped one finger inside her. “The best part was biting them and listening to them die as I used them.”

She tensed. Her body offered too much resistance as he pushed the digit in farther. She was a virgin.

Nausea clawed his guts, and he withdrew, rising to his knees. He’d expected it, of course, but not the shame that paralyzed him. Where had it come from, when he’d been doing so well?

She sat up, a momentary frown crossing her face before she reached for him. Too shocked to resist, he sat motionless as she covered his mouth with hers.

It was as if he twisted helplessly in a powerful storm, relying on a woefully inadequate tether to anchor him to solid ground. He’d had this feeling before, this desperation for human touch that mirrored hers. He’d learned to guard himself against it. The crushing rejection on her face when he pushed her away shot suspicious pain through his chest. It steeled his resolve. “I won’t let you whore yourself to me in return for false affection!”

Her hurt boiled over into rage. “Why? You did it for all those other girls! You did it, then you killed them! Why not me?”

“Is that what you want?” Now that he’d touched her skin, heard her soft moans in his ear, the thought repulsed him. Perhaps he had more in common with those needy girls than he’d wanted to admit.

“I want to get it over with!” She flailed her arms and legs like a child having a temper tantrum as she screamed in frustration and despair. “I’m dead already! I just want to get it over with!”

Cyrus paced at the end of the bed, his heart hammering his ribs. How did one deal with humans when they lost control like this? In the first hours after he’d become mortal again, he’d felt panic and terror. He’d prayed for death. He knew her pain. If he could take it from her, he would.

In the weak moonlight that lit the kitchen area, he spied a block of knives on the counter. As soon as the Mouse was dead, he would have peace again, inside and out. No more doubting himself, no more fighting this frightening new humanity.

His anger dried up as her own temper subsided into small, childish sobs, and he felt like a monster again. No, monster was too strong a word. Craven. That described him better. Craven, to cower before such a formidable opponent as a weeping woman.

“Don’t cry.” He said it harshly, but he knew it was not a command she would obey. Cursing, he wrapped his arms around her shaking body and pulled her close, as if he could absorb the pain radiating from her.

“I’m just sick of waiting,” she sobbed against his shoulder. “I’m so scared, and I’m sick of waiting.”

He held her until dawn, though she’d cried herself to sleep much earlier. As sunlight filtered through the small, basement windows, the stupidity of his actions came crashing down on him.

You’re pathetic. It was his father’s voice, not his own, that echoed through his head. Look at you, staying at her side like a whimpering puppy.

As much as he hated the voice, he knew it was right. There was no room for his conscience in this place.

Still, he couldn’t tear himself from the comforting warmth of her body. And that frightened him more than any words his father might use to shame him.

In med school, I dreamed of one day owning my own practice. I’d envisioned exactly the right colors and furnishings to put my patients at ease as they waited to be seen.

The general should have called me for pointers. The waiting room of his office was as stark and white as the rest of the Movement’s underground compound. The general, however, took “stark” to a whole new level. Two cold, stainless steel chairs were the only furniture in the room. The fluorescent lights were so bright it seemed the place glowed, and the walls blended seamlessly into the floor, giving one the impression of floating in a void.

Like purgatory, only with folding chairs.

Max sat beside me, drumming his fingers on his thighs. “We weren’t supposed to keep him waiting, but he’ll keep us waiting?”

My nerves were too fried for me to bother concentrating on Max’s sarcasm. I’d anticipated the general would be a hard sell, considering the way Max and Anne had spoken of him, not to mention the fact he’d been the only staff member I’d heard of so far with a military rank before his name.

Of course, Max kept reassuring me things would be fine. I really wished I could believe that, but when the door to the inner office opened, I wanted to run.

My stomach returned to its proper latitude as my eyes bugged out of my head. A woman, tall and slender, dressed from neck to toes in black leather, strode through the door like a Bond girl. Her deep gold gaze slid over us, her slightly upturned eyes deadly serious. Her black hair fell down her back in a perfect, waist-length braid. She growled at us as she passed.

Max’s face flashed into feeding mode, his upper and lower jaws elongating to form a vaguely porcine snout with dripping canines. He snarled viciously, then his face returned to normal as quickly as it had changed.

The woman didn’t acknowledge him again, and when the outer door clicked shut behind her, he stood and kicked the chair. “Bitch!”

“What was that about? Bad breakup?”

Judging by the look on Max’s face, my humor was not appreciated. “That filthy dog? She wishes.”

I held up my hands. “Hey, I don’t know her, but I should inform you that it greatly offends my sense of sisterhood to hear you call another woman a dog.”

“That’s what she is.” He pointed accusingly to the door. “A stinking werewolf. The day the Movement let them join the ranks, I should have turned in my resignation.”

Morbid curiosity forced my gaze toward the closed door she’d exited through. “What is your thing against werewolves?”

“It’s not my thing against werewolves that makes me dislike that one. Bella DeCesare. She’s a real bitch.” He winced at the terminology. “Breton gives her all sorts of prime assignments, flies her all over because she’s his only assassin who can travel commercial. He says it’s because she’s got the best kill record of all the werewolves in the Movement. I say he’s boning her.”

“Nice.” I remembered Cyrus talking about lupins and how they’d distanced themselves from their more primitive cousins, but the way he’d described werewolves had made me picture hairy, half human beasts loping around in the woods, preying on innocent campers. The woman I’d seen had been anything but primitive. “So, they play for this side, as well. There were some lupins at Cyrus’s house, but I wasn’t sure exactly who they were.”

A look of utter disgust crossed Max’s face. “Let’s limit your use of that name to about zero times a day. But she’s not a lupin. She’s a werewolf. According to them, they’re not interchangeable terms.” He sounded as if he didn’t care two figs for their differences. “They’re not as different as the lupins want you to believe. Werewolves are still tied to the earth and moon. There was some pack council a hundred years ago where they met to discuss controlling their cycles—”

“Wait,” I interrupted. “We are talking about their changing-into-dogs cycles and not menstruation, right?”

“Yes. And let’s go ahead and put that one on the zero tolerance vocab list, as well.” He gave another disgusted look. “Anyway, werewolves have always been really into that hippie-dippy earth magic crap like Nathan’s got in his bookstore. Except they know what they’re doing, because they’re more or less ruled by nature. For centuries, they’ve dabbled in magic to alter time and skip over the days of the full moon’s influence. Then some of them turned to science, came up with an injection that will suppress the change. The resultant rift split the species into two clans, werewolves and lupins.

“The lupins believe they’re superior, because they advocate the vaccine that allows them to live as humans. The werewolves think the lupins are traitors for turning away from magic. So a war started, and since lupins have no problem feeding on innocent humans, the Movement sided with the werewolves. They join up and get the chance to kill lupins and vampires. Personally, I wouldn’t care if they lost their collective cool and ripped each other to shreds.”

“I’ll remember that, when it’s time to call in a cleaning crew to mop the fur and guts off the walls.”

I jumped at the cultured, but very commanding, British voice. So did Max. The man who’d spoken surprised me. I had definitely formed a picture in my head based around Breton’s military title. I’d expected a man in his fifties with an iron jaw, deep lines by his eyes and a haircut so precise as to be geometrical. Breton was nothing like that, except for the iron jaw. He’d probably been turned in his late thirties. His long, wheat-colored hair was pulled back in a severe horsetail, accentuating his sharp features and long, straight nose. His lips quirked in an expression that was either annoyance or amusement. It was hard to tell which.

“General Breton, I presume.” I hoped I sounded more confident than I felt as I extended my hand and prayed my palms weren’t sweaty.

The man didn’t take it. “We are not so formal here. You may call me General, Dr. Ames.”

“And you can call me…” I hesitated, rolling his words around in my brain. “Doctor?”

He gave me a cool, appraising look. “Come inside.”

We followed him through the door, Max showing Breton’s back the middle finger the whole time.

The inner office was a bit of a shock, considering the appearance of the waiting area. The walls were dark paneled wood, the carpet a deep, rich print. A huge desk with a carved emblem of a foxhunter dominated the room. Two stiff wing chairs stood before it, where Breton motioned for us to sit. It looked as if we’d entered a bad theme restaurant of British paraphernalia. A coat of arms and crossed swords rested above the mantel over a huge fireplace, and the Union Jack hung from a flag post in the corner. Behind the desk, two large windows—obvious fakes, considering we were below ground—showed a sunny country scene. Somebody’s missing the sunshine.

Not that I could blame him. I found myself occasionally longing for a lazy day of sunbathing on the beach.

“That’s very…pastoral.” I tried to sound friendly, but it came off wooden.

Breton’s eyes narrowed. They were gray, but nothing like Nathan’s. Nathan’s eyes were changeable, storm clouds with the occasional silver lining. Breton’s eyes were stone-colored, and just as formidable. “York. Lovely hunting there.” He settled into his chair, which looked infinitely more comfortable than ours, and placed a manila envelope on the desk. “These may be of interest to you.”

Max reached for the envelope. When he lifted it, glossy, black-and-white photographs slid out.

I covered my mouth, but couldn’t look away. The horrible pictures showed a woman, her head nearly severed, the column of her throat ripped away to the spine.

“I believe your friend Mr. Galbraith is responsible for this?” Breton asked, as though he needed confirmation.

A wave of sickness crept up my own throat as I nodded slowly. On the news, a witness had mentioned the victim’s throat had been torn. In reality, the whole front of her neck had been excised. The ragged edges of the wound were the impressions of teeth.

“Nathan’s been possessed by something,” Max explained, never looking at the photos. “That’s why we’re here.”

“Yes, that’s what Anne tells me. She said he attacked you, Dr. Ames. Tell me what happened.” The general leaned back in his chair as though it would fool me into believing his mind hadn’t been made up already.

I kept it short. “I went downstairs to our bookstore—”

“You live with Mr. Galbraith?” Breton tapped his lips with his forefinger. “Are you married?”

“No, he’s my…” I stopped myself before I could say “sire.” Nathan was on probation as it was, and killing this jogger definitely didn’t help matters. If they knew he’d saved my life by giving me his blood, instead of just doing away with me as Movement law dictated, he’d definitely be toast.

I tried to think of a way to explain our convoluted relationship and came up with nothing. “He’s my…lover?”

A weird expression crossed the general’s face, the physical equivalent of the phrase “too much information.” “I see. Please, continue.”

“I went down to the bookstore. It was messed up, and Nathan attacked me.” It hurt just remembering it, phantom pain from the attack, phantom pain where the blood tie should have been.

Breton pushed one of the photos toward me. “He also attacked this young woman. How did you escape when she did not?”

I bit my lip. I assumed the reason Nathan had left me alone was the smell of his blood in me. I couldn’t reveal that to Breton. “I talked to him. I asked him not to hurt me.”

“I see.” The general nodded and reached into the envelope. He pulled a slip of yellow paper from it, and Max took a loud breath.

“What is that?” I looked from the general to Max. “What’s going on?”

“It’s a kill order.” Max’s face was grim.

Before I could protest, Breton spoke. “If Mr. Galbraith could be reasoned with at the time he attacked Dr. Ames, he was not possessed.”

“What about the symbols?” I stammered. “He had symbols carved into his skin.”

“No matter.” Breton waved a hand. “Mr. Galbraith was on probation. He’s killed again, and he must be dealt with.”

“Dealt with?” I stood, knocking the chair back. Max grabbed my arm but I shrugged him off. “I was there. I saw him. Nathan would never do anything like this! Something forced him to act that way.”

“And I’m supposed to take your word for that?” Breton’s eyes narrowed. “The word of a vampire who has never joined the Movement, standing up for a vampire who turned his back on all we stand for?”

My hands shook with anger. “Fine. I’ll join the Movement right now. Where do I sign up? Because once I get my membership card, I’m going to lodge a complaint against you for being…such an asshole!”

“Harrison,” Breton barked, though his enraged gaze never left mine. “Kindly keep your visitor under control before drastic measures are taken!”

“Calm down!” Max had never used such a tone with me. That he did it now showed how afraid he was of Breton. “General, there has to be some way to fix this so Nathan doesn’t have to die.”

“The decision is final.” The general scraped the photos into a neat pile.

I turned helplessly to Max. He couldn’t look me in the eye. I knew then nothing could be done.

I glared at the slip of yellow paper. For a moment, I imagined grabbing the kill order and shredding it into a hundred pieces, but that wouldn’t solve anything. So long as the Movement wished it, Nathan was already dead.

“What about the Oracle?” I asked, hope clutching feebly for purchase in my chest. “What if she—”

Breton’s eyes narrowed. “No one has given you permission to speak to the Oracle.”

“We were going to ask you, General.” Max gave me a frosty glare. “I just hadn’t gotten around to it.”

“The Oracle is useless. I do not believe she has made an accurate prediction to date. And she is…unpredictable. We cannot risk a civilian in contact with her.”

“I think I can handle myself!” It was definitely the wrong tactic to take with him. I realized it too late.

The general shook his head. “We are finished here. See yourselves out, please.”

Max put his hand on my arm. “Let’s go, Carrie.”

Before I knew what I was doing, I reached for the kill order. “Fine. If someone is going to kill him, it might as well be me.”

“You’re not Movement.” Breton offered no further explanation.

“I’m his fledgling!” I pounded my fist on the table. There was no sense keeping it secret if he were going to be killed, anyway.

The general looked to Max, an expression somewhere between anger and mirth crossing his face. “Harrison? You told me she was sired by Simon Seymour.”

“I was!” In my anger I’d forgotten the trouble Max would get into for knowing—and not reporting—that Nathan had revived me. “Cyrus tried to kill me. Nathan gave me his blood to revive me. But Max didn’t know.”

“Is this true, Harrison?” Breton looked at Max the way a venomous snake looks at its next meal.

Max nodded, giving me a terse glance. “I don’t doubt it for a minute. Maybe you should let her go after Nathan herself. She’d know best where to find him.”

The general shook his head. “We can’t trust a non-Movement vampire to carry out this kind of job. Especially not if he is her sire. You know as well as I do the kind of pain that causes. She is not likely to inflict it on herself.”

“I’m sorry, Carrie,” Max said, taking my hand and squeezing it.

It couldn’t end like this. My mind raced. Nathan had given me some training, but I would be no match in a fight with an assassin. On top of that, I had no idea where I’d find Nathan or if I’d find him in time. For all I knew, another assassin might be headed for him this very moment.

“Let Max do it, then,” I blurted.

Max started, as though he’d just woken to find himself in an unfamiliar room. “What?”

“Please, General.” I gripped the edge of the desk until my knuckles turned white, silently willing him to bend. “Max and Nathan were friends. I trust him to get the job done. I know he won’t let Nathan suffer.”

“Your trust in Harrison does not concern me.” The comment seemed even colder in Breton’s crisp, British accent. He took a deep breath, frowning. When he exhaled, his expression lightened. “Fine. Harrison, tomorrow evening you’re on a flight back. But I don’t want her within a ten-mile radius of the final kill. Do I make myself clear?”

“Crystal.” Max picked up the kill order from the desk and folded it, slipping it into the pocket of his worn leather coat.

“Good. I trust you both know the way out.” Breton handed the pictures to Max, but I took them.

We were nearly at the door when the general spoke again. “And, Harrison, if you fail to do your duty by the Movement, I’ll send someone who won’t.”

Numb, I followed Max to the hallway. “Don’t do it,” I said flatly, once the door had closed behind us.

Max gripped my shoulders and twisted me to face him. His fingers dug painfully into my flesh, and I protested with a loud, “Ow!”

“This is not a game, Carrie.” He held his face inches from mine. “I’m going to have to kill Nathan. I don’t know what you were thinking in there, but I still have a job to do.”

He released me and turned to walk away. I rubbed one sore shoulder. “Yeah, but you don’t know where he is yet. You can stall for time while I figure out what’s going on.”

He laughed, the way someone would laugh at a child’s overly simple solution to a serious problem. “And how do you plan on doing that? You’ve got no resources, no one willing to help you. Even if you can magically cure Nathan of whatever has a hold on him, I’m still under orders to kill on sight. You’re on your own here. Nathan is as good as dead, and you’re fooling yourself if you think otherwise.”

“So that’s it then?” I shook my head in disbelief. “You’re just giving up?”

“I’m watching my own back!”

I closed my eyes. This was not the Max I knew. This was a complete stranger standing before me. “Max, please trust me. Trust that I’m not going to do anything that would put you in harm’s way.”

“You’re going to do what you need to do for yourself, Carrie.” He wiped his sleeve across his forehead. “It’s what survivors do.”

I looked at the pictures he held. Breton hadn’t bothered to put them in an envelope. The cadaver’s empty stare bore into me from the glossy surface of the photo.

“I’m not interested in helping myself,” I said, choking back tears. “I just want to save Nathan.”

“It’s too late for that,” Max said softly. “The Movement has made their decision, and no matter what happens, they’ll just keep coming.”

I shook my head. “Not from the Movement. I want to save him from himself.”

6

Oracle

M ax needed to gather some supplies before we headed out. I had no idea what kind of equipment he needed to kill my sire, but I refused to help him retrieve it. He headed to the armory after giving me strict orders to go directly to the reception area.

Not that I had a choice. As soon as he walked away, a guard came from seemingly nowhere and steered me toward the lobby.

“Nothing personal,” he said as he guided me through the doors. “Just can’t have non-Movement vampires roaming the halls.”

Anne had returned to her post at the desk, and she looked up when the doors closed. Her face brightened. “So, how’d it go with the general?”

“Not well.” Normally, I would have resented having to spill to a total stranger, but she wasn’t exactly wheedling me for information. In fact, her casual interest made me want her to wheedle. I’d never realized I was such an attention whore. “He basically shot me down.”

“What a prick.” She sounded genuinely sorry. “That’s too bad.”

I scuffed my toes on the carpet as I went to one of the plush chairs. “He’s a very stubborn man, isn’t he?”

Anne stood and came around the front of the desk, where she dropped to the floor and sat cross-legged. The shiny buckles on her knee-high combat boots caught the light as she made herself comfortable. “Well, you don’t get far in this organization if you’re not stubborn.”

“I don’t know.” I watched her toy with the black rubber bracelets that looped her wrist. “You seem to do okay.”

With a crooked smile, she rolled her eyes. “Yeah, I’m a great receptionist. Where’s Max?”

“Loading up on gadgets and supplies with which to kill my sire.” I slumped down in the chair. “I’m insane, to be waiting for him. I should be tearing off to the States.”

“Yeah, on a commercial airliner? Good luck.” She shook her head. “Max has to look tough and serious about the job. I doubt he’ll actually kill him.”

“Won’t he be penalized?” The Movement seemed to dole out “probation” like candy on Halloween.

“Nah.” She made a face to accompany the guttural sound. “Max has shirked assignments before. He’ll never come out and actually say, ‘No, I’m not going to kill this vampire,’ but I can tell when it’s going to happen. He’ll call to check in and say things like, ‘No luck yet, but I’ll find the bastard.’ You know, things like John Wayne might say in a movie.”

“That’s how Max usually talks,” I reminded her.

She rolled her eyes. “I know, right? But this is different. He puts up a much tougher front if he’s reluctant to do the job.”

Her assurances made me feel a little better. As much as Max and Nathan bickered, neither of them truly wanted the other dead. Maybe once we were away from the eyes and ears of the Movement, Max would change his mind.

“So,” Anne said brightly, grasping the toes of her boots and leaning forward. “What did you think of the place?”

“I thought it was…nice,” I offered lamely. “Not at all what I was expecting.”

“I know, right? Most people think it’s going to be stone walls and torchlight and guys with long beards, in scary robes. I mean, we have the guys with long beards, but they only wear their robes during a ritual.” She said this with a shrug, as if it was completely normal to deal with occult forces in the workplace. “Aside from them, there’s really nothing that weird here.”

“Well, except the Oracle,” I began casually. “But I guess I won’t be seeing her anytime soon. What’s she like?”

“She’s like…” Anne pursed her lips as she thought. “She’s like a magic eight ball, only she can kill you.”

I straightened a little at that. “Like, she can answer your questions?” The “like” popped from my mouth naturally. I could see how Anne had easily adopted modern teenspeak.

“Like, with her mouth? No. But she talks through telepathy all the time.” Anne shrugged again. “But she doesn’t usually say anything that makes sense. Why, did you have a question?”

I wasn’t sure if I should admit it or not. The notion of “personal boundaries” seemed to have escaped this eternal teenager, and while she was nice, I didn’t feel like examining my deepest fears with her. I settled on a diplomatic, “Yes.”

“That’s cool. I’ve asked her all sorts of questions, but she’s never answered. I mean, one time she did give me a freaky vision of my spine snapping in, like, four places, but she never actually did it so I’m not worried.” After considering a moment, Anne looked up from her bracelets. “And the general wouldn’t clear you to see her?”

“I got the distinct impression the general doesn’t care much for the Oracle’s knowledge.” I picked at the arm of the chair, though there weren’t any loose threads or pilled fabric to prompt me to do so.

Anne sighed. “A lot of people here are that way. But you know, any information you could get would probably be helpful, considering your situation. Right?”

“Well, it’s not like it matters now. From the way Max made it sound, you need special permission to see her.” I sighed loudly in frustration.

There was a long pause. I’d expected an immediate response from Anne, and when I didn’t hear one, I looked up. She dangled a key card on a black cord from her fingers, smiling. “Or friends with security clearance.”

I hesitated. “You mean, you?”

“Uh-huh. I have clearance to every place in this building. Due to my excellent years of service. And the fact I have to sometimes escort guests around the building.” Her naughty grin reached the corners of her eyes now. “So, you wanna?”

I had the uncomfortable feeling I’d gotten in high school when someone would offer me a joint or ask me to skip school. I was pretty good at resisting peer pressure, but she was persuasive, and the situation was certainly different. “Won’t you get into trouble?”

She made a plosive sound of denial, as if the answer was obvious. “Only if we get caught. Besides, it’s not like they’re gonna get rid of me.”

She made a compelling argument. Of course, it probably wouldn’t have been if our meeting with the general hadn’t been so disastrous.

Anne seemed to take the reason for my hesitation as fear. “She hasn’t hurt anyone lately. They changed her diet. She was getting too much male blood and the testosterone made her crabby. Now she’s pretty mellow.”

I felt a fleeting moment of sanity, and seized it. “Max told me to stay here.”

“So?” Anne got to her feet and went behind the desk, where she grabbed a pad of sticky notes. “We’ll leave him a message. Besides, he’s in the armory. He’ll be there awhile.”

“Men can’t resist the lure of shiny new toys,” I reluctantly conceded. “He’s going to freak out, you know.”

“Don’t worry, I know how to handle him. He’s not so tough.” She scrawled something on the paper and stuck it to her computer monitor, then offered to take my bag from me. “It’ll be safe back here,” she said, stowing it beneath her desk. “You sure didn’t bring much.”

I followed her to the doors. “Max packed it. Guess he didn’t plan on staying long. We leave tomorrow night.”

“That’s too bad.” She shrugged and ran her badge through the reader. “The hotel they’ve got you staying in is pretty nice.”

The fact we were staying in a hotel at all surprised me. “I thought you guys would have underground dormitories or something.”

“Oh, we do,” Anne assured me. “But only for the staff who are permanently on call. Like me, for instance, or the doctors who take care of the Oracle. The new assassins in training and their mentors stay here, too, but it’s not permanent.”

A tall, thin man in a frock coat and an Edgar Allen Poe haircut passed us and nodded curtly. Anne gave him a wave and continued on.

“You must be a pretty good receptionist, if they want to keep you on 24/7.” I ran my fingers along the wall as we walked, a horrible habit I’d adopted as a human and had to break when I’d learned exactly how many diseases you could pick up that way. Now that germs were no longer a concern, I didn’t mind it. It drove Nathan crazy, though.

“Actually, I’m not just a receptionist. I’m more like Miguel,” she explained, thankfully taking my mind off my sire.

“Max said Miguel was security. You must have background as an assassin, then?”

She nodded. “Three hundred years. They finally let me retire back in the fifties. Er, the eighteen fifties. Too bad, though. During that whole ‘don’t exercise or your uterus will fall out’ time period, no one would have seen a female assassin coming.”

“Three hundred years? Wait…” I stopped her with a hand on her arm. “Nathan told me the Movement was two hundred years old.”

“Yeah, but before we started calling ourselves the Movement, because it made a better acronym, we were the Order of the Brethren. Things were a lot tougher back then, let me tell you.”

We ventured farther into the building than she’d taken us on our previous tour. This area, I noticed, had fewer safe rooms and more security labels. We reached a large set of double doors with a thick, black-and-yellow-striped line around them. Huge red warning signs, printed in several different languages, plastered the doors. In addition to a key card reader, I noticed there was a palm scan device and a keypad on the wall.

“This is the most secure section of headquarters,” Anne explained. “Only high level administrators and security have access. Oh, and the scientists who monitor the Oracle.”

“Scientists?” I chewed my lip nervously as I watched her key in the codes. The English language sticker on the door warned an improper access sequence would result in a security breach alert, and I didn’t remember where I’d seen the last safe room.

“Yeah. She’s got a whole team of doctors and chemists and pharmacists keeping her medicated and fed well and under control.” The same computerized voice from the elevator informed us that the access sequence was accepted, and Anne pushed open the door with a flourish.

“If she’s drugged up, why is Max so afraid of her?” He’s not the kind of guy to be blindly afraid of anything.

Anne made another “pff” sound of dismissal. “He was on the team that moved her to the new facility back in the eighties. Really, he shouldn’t have been assigned, he was too young. He’s too young now. Anyway, her meds didn’t hold, and she twisted one of the team members’ heads off.”

“Twisted?” My guts mimicked the motion implied by my word. “She’s got that kind of power?”

“Oh, yeah. She’s got mad telekinesis. It would be cool, if she didn’t use it so destructively. But that’s why she’s constantly doped up. Ah, here we are!”

We turned left and went through thoroughly unintimidating swinging doors, into a room with black walls like an exhibit in a museum. A dark window the size of a movie screen dominated one wall, separated from us by a brass railing.

“Stand there,” Anne instructed, moving toward the window, where she turned a dial. The lights dimmed slowly on our side of the glass as the other side illuminated.

“This is like the penguin house at Sea World,” I said, my voice sounding way too loud in the quiet room, and Anne snorted in laughter.

Behind the glass, a void of still redness surrounded a murky, suspended shape. It took me a moment to realize what the redness was.

“Is that blood?”

Anne joined me at the rail. “Yup. The Oracle can’t feed in the traditional sense anymore. She requires much more blood to support her tissues. Total immersion allows her to draw the blood in through her lungs and pores as well as her digestive system. The blood cycles through purifying and oxygenating filters continually, to provide optimal nourishment for her.”

“So, you’ve got a giant heart-lung machine back there, pumping blood?” I squinted at the tank.

Anne nodded and shrugged. “Pretty much.”

As the lights grew brighter, the shape came into focus. A figure, nude and obviously female, floated in the blood. What appeared to be intravenous lines and electrode wires connected to her slender limbs and bald head. Her face was relaxed, eyes closed as if in sleep. She was perfect, except for the three pointed horns protruding from her skull.

I thought back to Cyrus’s New Year’s party, and the creatures I’d seen there. “Is she part demon?”

“No. The Oracle is pretty old, one of the oldest we know about. The horns are a natural consequence of the aging process. We get twisted when we age.” Anne held out her arm and pushed her plastic bracelets aside, revealing the faint beginning of what could only be described as a dew claw. She covered it again with a shrug. “She’s also the most psychically gifted vampire we know of.”

“You’ve got that memorized like you work at the Smithsonian,” I said, leaning over the rail. “So, she’s sealed up in there, or what?”

“Yup. She’s been held in various methods of containment since her capture in 1079, Common Era, and was given to the Movement in its first year of inception by King George the II in 1765.”

“The Movement is that old?” I asked, my awe diverted for an instant from the Oracle. “I thought back then it was the Order of the Brethren?”

Before Anne could answer, the blood in the tank surged, pounding the glass with a wave that created a thunderous echo.

“Don’t worry about that,” Anne assured me. “She’s responding to your voice because you’re new.”

Much in the way a big, scary dog is “just playing.”

“She has a staff of round-the-clock caregivers who administer sedatives. That’s why she’s not all vamped out in the face area. The drugs they give her keep her in a light coma. It’s safer, and more conducive to her visions. And her specialists monitor her psychic readouts. We can accurately monitor major world events days in advance with the information she supplies us. You know, if she chooses to supply it.”

It might have been a trick of the changing light, but I could have sworn the Oracle’s eyes opened.

“Weird,” Anne whispered. “I’m gonna page them, let them know she’s awake.”

So, it wasn’t just an eerie illusion. Neither, apparently, was the voice in my head. Carrie, it called softly. The chill tone paralyzed me. Carrie, he has come back.

“Who has?” I asked out loud. But I knew. I knew in my heart who she meant. Two months of horrible nightmares flashed through my mind. No! I shouted back at the Oracle through my mind. Cyrus is dead. No matter what bizarre scenario you try and come up with, nothing can bring him back!

You doubt me, vampire?

I’m fairly sure that’s exactly when things started to go wrong. The Oracle’s voice filled my head, and she was angry. What do you want, vampire? Why do you come to me?

You told me he’s come back, I pressed. I need to know who you’re talking about.

You’re afraid I speak of the one called Simon. But I do not. Another wave of blood rocked the tank and pounded against the glass. Anne, who’d run to the intercom, shrank against the wall. I don’t know if she’d called for help or not.

“Simon?” I asked aloud. My thoughts were so scrambled, it took me a moment to remember Cyrus’s real name. “I’m not afraid of Cyrus.”

You shouldn’t be. Though he lives again, he lives. I speak of the one who devours the essence of my blood kin. Another wave rocked the tank.

“The Soul Eater?” But another part of her statement demanded my attention. “What do you mean, Cyrus lives?”

Raised by the toothsome ones in the land of the dead. As the first rises, the second falls. Both will be devoured.

Anne edged closer, keeping to the wall. “We need to go. She’s not safe when she’s agitated like this.”

I couldn’t leave yet. Not when I was getting the first real answers I’d received since we’d arrived. “The Soul Eater possessed Nathan?”

The waves of blood came faster and faster now. I felt like a fish in an aquarium someone kept tapping on, and I struggled to keep my mind focused. From the corner of my eye, I saw Anne cover her ears.

You have your answer. Seek the toothsome ones in the land of the dead. The flesh and blood of the destroyer.

Cold fear gripped me. “What if I can’t find him? I don’t understand!”

The Oracle’s eyes snapped open again. In the same instant, Movement guards charged into the room, followed by Max. “Carrie, get away from her!”

The Oracle opened her mouth. Waves of sound rippled through the blood around her as her scream filled the air and my head. “He will become a god!”

“No, no, no!” Anne cried, clawing at the wall as if seeking a handhold. A second later, I knew why. As if she were nothing more than a feather in a breeze, her small body flew across the room. Feathers rarely make such a sickening crunch when they collide with walls, though. She crumpled to the floor in a deathly still heap. I tried to run to her, but my feet were immobilized.

“Anne!” Before Max could move, an invisible force pinned him to the wall.

Oddly, my fear fled. The Oracle’s voice blocked out the sound of Max’s frantic urging for me to run. She insisted I come closer, and I couldn’t find a good enough reason not to.

I slid under the brass rail and crossed the space to the tank. Each step reverberated through me like a thunderclap. As I drew nearer to the glass, the Oracle began to move, taking long, lazy steps through the blood. Suspended, she looked as though she walked through air.

The Oracle reached for me. I pressed my palms flat against the tank, expecting the glass to be cool and feeling slightly sickened when I realized the blood behind it was body temperature. I thought she would bring her hands to meet mine on the glass. Instead, she twisted them into claws. At the same time, my throat crushed closed.

I wouldn’t die from not breathing, but I was fairly certain I’d die from having my head twisted off my neck.

No! I pleaded in my mind. I’m not going to die like this. Why would you give me this information only to let it die with me?

Her hold was broken. The lights flared up in the room and darkened in the tank. Max’s arms were suddenly around me, pulling me from the room. Vampires in white coats rushed in to tend Anne.

“What the hell was that?” Max repeated over and over at my side as we raced down the hallway.

I couldn’t answer him. The voice of the Oracle echoed in my memory.

He will become a god.

Cyrus jerked awake screaming.

The Mouse sat up beside him and put her arm around his bare shoulders. Her skin felt too hot and dry, magnifying the slick, cold sweat coating his body.

“You had a nightmare,” she said. There was no emotion, just a matter-of-fact statement.

His first instinct was to slap her, but the now-familiar shame washed through him, and he restrained himself. He rose from the narrow bed they’d shared. He’d reveled in the feeling of holding her as she’d slept. It was a sensation he couldn’t compare to anything in his vast, lurid experience. Now, in the harsh light of day that streamed weakly through the small basement windows, the night seemed dirty somehow.

He’d been a centuries-old vampire with unlimited financial resources and powerful charm at his disposal. There had never been a time when he could not have what he wanted, and he’d certainly never wanted to comfort a sobbing woman through the dark hours of the night.

You would have for Carrie.

He grabbed his—no, the dead priest’s—shirt from the end of the bed and pulled it on, reminding himself to be annoyed with the cheap fabric. He didn’t remember taking it off, had only a dim recollection of shrugging out of it and turning over to enfold Mouse in his arms. She called after him as he stalked into the bathroom, but he ignored her and slammed the door, needing space and peace and a way to block the horrible dream from his mind.

But he’d dreamed of her. As in all things where Carrie was concerned, he couldn’t so easily forget. In the dream, he’d held her. Not a salacious embrace. He’d actually held her. She had let him stroke her hair and kiss her. She had told him she loved him. When Carrie had been his fledgling, she’d always hovered on the edge of revulsion when she’d touched him. In his dream, she’d loved him the way he’d wanted to be loved.

When he’d opened his eyes, he’d held the bleeding, heartless corpse of his beloved Elsbeth. He’d shaken her, as desperate to revive her as he had been the night she’d died. Her auburn curls and delicate features had morphed quickly into Carrie’s pale blond hair and strong-boned face. That’s when he’d woken, screaming, to find the Mouse beside him, and for a horrible moment, he was certain he’d killed her, too.

I’ve got to get out of here, he told himself as he turned on the tap and splashed cold water on his face. I’m losing my mind.

He shook the thought off. Too much had occurred in his past, too much horror, too much death, to lose his mind over a simple girl like the Mouse. If he was going to lose his mind over anything, it would not be her.

Not if I have anything to say about it, that is. His own voice sounded like his father’s in his head, and it pleased him. Finally, he was becoming like his old self again.

Why did that thought sicken him? Why wouldn’t he want to reclaim that part of himself his traitorous, human body wanted to erase?

Stupid boy, you never learn. He leaned his forehead against the mirror. Had it been his father or the Soul Eater, the creature who’d evicted Jacob Seymour’s sanity, who’d said those words to him time and again? It had been Jacob, at first, after his dear Moll had walked into the sun and burned to ash, and again, one hundred years later, when lovely Francesca had plunged herself into the bathing tub full of holy water. But by the time Elsbeth’s blood had cooled and congealed on her marble skin, Jacob Seymour was long dead, and it had been the Soul Eater who’d come to Cyrus. And when Carrie had sunk the stake into his heart, he’d heard Jacob’s voice in his head, taunting him with those same words.

Cyrus opened the medicine cabinet. There he found shaving soap, a razor and scissors. Morons. He couldn’t help his utter contempt for his captors. They’d been too busy playing at torture with the Mouse and her holy friends to think of removing potential weapons from his cell. The vampires upstairs were either stupid or so out of touch with their humanity, they didn’t realize how easy it would be for him to slit his own wrists and end the waiting.

Or would it? Everything about him was so…mortal. Would he really be capable of taking his own life, when the very thought of it, even in the abstract, sent a shudder of revulsion through him? No. He would not go back to that ghost world. Not if he could help it.

He should kill her, he decided. He would prove to himself he had learned something. He would prove to himself he could still be the vampire his father had wanted at his side, and hopefully his father would feel the same.

Cyrus’s total dependence on the Mouse for his day-to-day activities would be a hurdle. It was easy enough to overcome. If he learned to live a mortal life, just for a while until his father found him, he could be done with her.

He availed himself of the priest’s toiletries, pleased at the thought of returning to his former state. With each stroke of the razor, he hardened his resolve. Though his servants had always taken care of running the modern appliances in the kitchen, he considered himself a smart man and was fairly confident in his ability to figure things out for himself. When he was finished grooming, he would simply go out and kill the Mouse. With his hands, if necessary; with a knife, better. Either way, she would be dead.

Before she can hurt me like the rest of them. See, Father, I have learned something, after all.

He could do it. She made him weak. Killing her would make him strong.

The thought brought on a frown. He didn’t like the way it contorted his face, so he forced his features into an impassive mask.

Using the flimsy, plastic comb he’d found in the medicine cabinet, he worked to untangle his long hair. It took only a few painful snarls for him to realize the sad truth. It would have to be cut.

You’re making excuses not to kill her.

There were scissors in the medicine cabinet. He could use those to stab her. He’d once cut a man’s fingers off with hedge clippers, and that had been a pleasant-enough experience.

The memory turned his stomach, and he focused his attention on cutting.

Cyrus expected the blades to be rusty, but was pleasantly surprised to find they were sharp. A few ragged snips left his hair shoulder length. From there he clipped it shorter, mimicking the generic style he’d seen his former bodyguards wear. It took longer than he’d expected to finish the job, and his arms ached by the time he was done.

Beyond the door, a game show host inquired as to the price of dishwashing liquid, and the Mouse’s voice preceded the contestant’s answer.

Cyrus wetted his hair and parted it on the side. His own perfectly good eyes stared him down in the mirror. He no longer resembled the monster he once was.

For a frightening moment, he found he liked it. Then he picked up the scissors once more.

He opened the door as quietly as he could. She didn’t look away from the television. The sunlight streaming in through the small window above her head surrounded her in a halo of shimmering dust motes. Though she looked tired, the worry had left her face.

A contestant on the game show shouted a number, and the Mouse shook her head. “Way too high.”

Cyrus took slow steps, not wanting her to see him until the moment he raised the scissors, the second before they fell. To see her face, serene in recognition, then drawn and pale in the briefest sliver of horror as the deathblow landed. As he imagined the beauty of it, his chest tightened and he sucked in an involuntary gasp of breath.

She turned then, obviously startled.

She knows, his frantic brain shouted. Do it quick now, she knows.

The shock on her face melted into a small smile. “You cut your hair.”

He’d never seen her smile. She wasn’t beautiful, but the unguarded expression transformed her from plain to a simple kind of pretty. It was the meaning behind it, though, that froze his lungs and made the air in the room too thick to breathe. Somewhere in the night, as she nestled against his side, her fear of him had vanished.

If she noticed his distress, she didn’t show it. Her smile grew wider. “It looks nice.”

Cyrus had never felt self-conscious. It had been easy to be sure of himself when he’d known he was adored. At this moment, he would have done anything to feel so confident again. He reached to touch his shorter strands, realizing too late he still held the scissors in his hand.

Her smile faltered. Though she regained it, the expression was forced. Pained. “What’s that for?”

Lying was not something he’d lost in the transition from immortal to dead to mortal. He casually juggled the scissors from one hand to the other. “I thought they’d serve us better in the kitchen.”

“Good idea.” She rose slowly, and though his back was to her, he knew she followed him.

So, she does still fear me. The thought sickened him. He had actually planned to kill her.

Suddenly, and with shocking clarity, a vision of her slashed throat and bloody dress shot through his mind. The scissors, before a simple, common tool, seemed evil, as though his intent had somehow infused them with malice.

I can’t do it. He didn’t want to think of why. No matter what the reason, it pointed to the same harsh truth. He was as weak as his father believed him to be.

He slid the scissors into a drawer and closed it, resisting the urge to slam it tight. Was it possible his captors had imagined he would try to kill her, think of killing himself? Was this a planned torture?

Behind him, the Mouse made a small sound of relief. Cyrus turned, not sure if he was angered at her for not trusting him, or ashamed of himself for deserving mistrust. Tears pooled in her eyes, but she smiled. “I knew you wouldn’t do it.”

“Did you?” He wanted to grab a knife from the block on the counter and prove her wrong, but the rage died in him. Despair took its place, and he sat at the table, cradling his head in his hands. “Because I wasn’t sure, myself.”

7

Consequences

“H ow on earth could you be so irresponsible?” Breton paced back and forth behind his desk, reminding me, in his self-righteous anger, of Nathan. I wondered if all Movement vampires were this uptight, or just the ones from the U.K.

“In Max’s defense, General, it was Anne who took me to the Oracle,” I interjected, only to be met with a steely look from Breton.

“Yes, I know. And for that, she’ll be penalized. As for you, you’re lucky I don’t call a team in here to stake you, or do it myself!” Breton threw down the sheaf of papers he’d been clutching. They hit the desk with a loud smack and skidded toward us. “Your travel information. It’s all in order.”

“Whoa, what’s this?” Max reached for a pink, carbon-copy sheet.

“It’s the order removing you from the Galbraith assignment.” Breton’s lips twitched, and I knew he suppressed a satisfied grin, the smug bastard.

“General, please!” I clenched my hands into fists at my sides. “The Oracle gave me information. ‘Seek the toothsome ones in the land of the dead.’ That’s something we can go on! And it’s proof!”

“Proof?” Breton scoffed. “And what, pray, is it proof of?”

“That the Soul Eater is up to something!” I squinted in frustration, the gleam off the polished edge of his desk blurring my vision. How much of what I was saying came from the Oracle’s information, and how much was my own mind skewing what I’d heard? “I can’t tell you why or how, but you have to believe me. The Soul Eater is behind whatever is going on with Nathan!”

“As far as I can tell, the only problem with Mr. Galbraith is that he has killed. Twice.” Breton propped his fingertips together and rested his hands atop his desk. “But rapidly, his friends are becoming my problem. Mr. Harrison, you have been removed from the case. I will assign a more impartial third party.”

“You can’t do that!” I shot to my feet. “This isn’t Max’s fault, and it’s not Nathan’s! He deserves better than this!”

“What Mr. Galbraith deserves,” Breton shouted, leaning over his desk, his rage-contorted face inches from my own, “is to die in terror, the way his victims did.”

I felt Max’s stern presence beside me before he put his hand on my arm. “Let’s go. There’s nothing we can do about it now.”

We were silent on the way to the airport. We’d left too close to sunup, and the lighter the sky got, the more tense we became. By the time we reached the tarmac, we had to race to the plane, the frantic whirring of the jet engines urging us on.

The official reason for our quick dismissal from Movement headquarters was our safety after our run-in with the Oracle. To get us out of her “immediate scope of thought,” as they put it. Though I knew it was really because Breton was pissed at me, I was glad we were leaving. We had precious few resources and a seemingly impossible task ahead of us. I would have gone nuts pacing around a hotel room all day, waiting to figure out what was going on, knowing another assassin was out there looking for Nathan.

We made it up the steps to the plane just in time. The hot Spanish sun crested the horizon just as the flight attendant pulled the door shut. A thin line of smoke rose from the back of her hand from the contact with sunlight.

“What the hell were you thinking?” Max gave the woman a sharp look and she took the hint to skip the seat belt demonstration.

“I was thinking I had a way to get some answers, and I should take it!” I sat in one of the chairs, wanting to stand but too tired to fight my own body. “One of us had to!”

“Oh, so this is my fault?” Max gave a sarcastic laugh. “Now there’s some other assassin out there looking for him, and we’re screwed, Carrie! When it was just me, we could have bought some time!”

“No, we couldn’t have!” I covered my face with my hands. “We couldn’t have. Cyrus is alive.”

Max’s eyes narrowed. He raised his hand and rubbed his perpetually stubbled chin as he regarded me with something akin to mistrust. “No way.”

I forced back the tears of fatigue that assaulted me. “The Oracle told me. It explains why I’ve been having these dreams, but, Max…she told me things.”

“Did she tell you these things before she started breaking Anne’s spine?” Max paced like a caged tiger. “Four places. Four! It’s a miracle she wasn’t killed.”

“It wasn’t a miracle.” I blew out a frustrated breath. “The Oracle knew exactly what she was doing. Anne said she saw a vision of it years ago. It wasn’t an accident.”

“Fuckin’ A it wasn’t an accident!”

“Max, calm down!” My stern tone surprised even me, and for a moment, we stared at each other in shock.

He recovered first, but not much. “Okay.”

“What do you mean, okay?” I felt my hysteria rising again. “Cyrus is alive. But I killed him. You were there. We both watched him die. How can he be alive?”

Max shrugged. “It’s not unheard of. I know there are ways to do it, but who would want to bring the bastard back?” The Please Fasten Seat Belt light popped on overhead, and Max motioned me over to the couch.

“So, where do we go from here?” I tried to sound brave as I settled myself next to him.

“Carrie,” he said softly, as though preparing me for the worst, “you know what will happen if I disobey the Movement.”

“And you know, better than I do, what will happen if you obey them and kill my sire.” I couldn’t take any more of this, though I knew we were only steps into a very long journey. The uncertainty wore me down quickly, cast the shadow of doubt over every thought and action until I just wished this was all over, for better or worse. Because then, at least, I would know. I wouldn’t have to fear losing Nathan if I’d already lost him, wouldn’t have to squash down my hope if it was already fulfilled.

Max’s arms were strong around me when he pulled me against his chest. His voice wavered only slightly when he whispered in my ear. “It might not even come to that.”

“What’s the plan, then? I can’t just take this lying down.” I sniffled a little, sure it was the recycled air of the cabin wreaking havoc on my respiratory system, not my emotions overwhelming me.

“I know you can’t.” He paused. “What did the Oracle tell you?”

“She said I should ‘seek the toothsome ones in the land of the dead.’ All I can think is that she meant the Fangs.” I grimaced at the memory of the uncouth vampire gang I’d met at Cyrus’s mansion. “Do you think they could raise someone from the dead?”

Max sighed. “Unfortunately, yes. They actually started out as a mystic cabal. They did a lot of ceremonial magic, raising demons and stuff, before the motorcycle thing started getting mixed in. Nowadays there’s a pretty healthy blend of both. They’ve got enough mystics left that the Movement is afraid of them. They devote a huge block of training to learning about them.”

“Well, that takes a load off of my mind,” I said, sarcasm dripping from each word. “So, would they be able to make the Soul Eater into a god? Because that’s the other bomb the Oracle dropped.”

“A god?” Max’s eyes actually bulged at the suggestion. “I…hope not?”

“Great.” I leaned my head back and closed my own eyes, trying to calm my mind. If I decided it was impossible now, how would I feel when we were actually in a position to solve this mess?

“The thing is, they have these witches,” Max continued. “They still actively train them. And you know how bad it can be going up against one of them.”

Ugh. Witches. The very idea of them made my skin crawl. The granola-crunchy earth worshippers that came into Nathan’s shop calling themselves witches had no idea of the true power that existed out there. It was a frightening force, capable of destruction I’d never known. Until I’d met Dahlia.

Dahlia had been Cyrus’s most fervent admirer, until he’d made the mistake of trying to serve her as the main course at a dinner party. She’d managed to get herself turned, though I didn’t want to imagine the fate the poor vampire who’d supplied her with blood had met. After that, she’d calmed some. She was still out there, though, with the power of a true sorceress and the strength of the undead.

“Could Dahlia have had a hand in this?” I asked.

The mention of her made Max visibly uncomfortable. He’d been thrown on her mercy the night I’d killed Cyrus, but he’d somehow escaped. I didn’t want to know what she’d done to him to put that haunted look on his face. “Do you think she would want him back?”

Dahlia hadn’t been able to kill Cyrus, but she’d wanted him dead. She’d definitely felt some twisted variation on love for him. But she was as unpredictable as the wind.

“Probably not,” I had to admit, answering my own question.

“Well, let’s concentrate on ‘the land of the dead.’ I know the Fangs like it around Barstow down in California, because I’ve been sent out there a couple of times on assignment. It’s pretty dead out there.” He made finger quotes around the word dead.

I nodded slowly. “Are you suggesting we go and check it out?”

“I can’t go on a road trip. I think out of the two of us, I’m the best one to find out what happened to Nathan. You, on the other hand…”

I shook my head. “Not by myself.”

“Nathan taught you how to take care of yourself,” Max reminded me. “He taught you how to fight. You’ll run into less trouble looking for Cyrus in the middle of nowhere than you will hanging around your apartment with assassins casing the place.”

I was about to point out that Nathan had only taught me self-defense, not imbued me with nonklutziness, but Max was right. It would be no skin off my back to drive out to Barstow. It would definitely be a hell of a lot easier than waiting around for someone to hunt down Nathan and kill him, and I’d never been a good damsel in distress. I was a “hands-on” damsel.

“I just wonder who they’re going to send after Nathan.”

Max sniffed the air. “Do you smell that?”

For a second I wondered if the flight attendant had quietly burned to death in the galley, but then I caught the scent in question. It wasn’t the burning hot dog smell of vampire flesh on fire, but a smell rather like exotic perfume.

Still, it wasn’t so distracting we couldn’t ignore it. “No, I don’t, Scooby.”

“Are you sure you don’t smell that?” Max got to his feet. “Get up, take a look around.”

“What about the seat belt sign?” I asked, hesitant to unbuckle.

“Chance it.” There was no humor in his voice. He strode to the door of the galley. I stayed right on his heels. The flight attendant, who was applying a Band-Aid to the back of her burned hand, jumped.

“Is anyone on this plane except for us?” he barked.

She shrugged, her mouth gaping. “Well, the pilots. But other than that—”

Max didn’t question her further. We split up to search the other parts of the plane—I don’t know what for, but Max was so agitated I didn’t bother asking. He took the cockpit and galley, while I searched the bedroom. Though our departure from the Movement was hasty, someone had thought to leave a cellophane-wrapped fruit basket for us.

That would be nice, if we were vampire rabbits like Bunnicula. The reference pulled a bittersweet memory to the surface of my consciousness. I’d mentioned the children’s book the night after Nathan had helped me escape Cyrus. That was when Ziggy, Nathan’s adopted son, had died. I sank onto the bed, crushed by the weight of my sadness and the heartbreak I’d felt for him that night.

“You think I let him die?” Nathan’s accusing voice rang through my head. I’d said cruel, bitter things to him, but in the end it had been a kind of therapy for both of us. He’d broken down and cried, and I had held him on the floor in the ruins of a breakfast he had destroyed in his anger. We had been out of blood, and had to settle for human food rather than drink the last bag Ziggy had left behind.

I narrowed my eyes at the fruit basket. Human food was a last resort. A vampire would have left a nice, body-temperature bag of O Neg as a housewarming gesture.

Max came in just as I stood and grabbed the basket.

“Son of a bitch! I knew I smelled a dog.” He kicked the bed, then sat on the edge as I tore open the cellophane.

“I believe the expression is ‘I knew I smelled a rat.’” Inside the basket were apples, cherries, oranges and a cluster of delicate blush blossoms clinging to a slender branch. My face fell. “Oh.”

“Dogwood,” Max said with a sneer of disgust. He grasped the twig and snapped it, then ground the pale flowers on the carpet with the heel of his boot. I followed him back to the cabin, where we buckled in just in time for takeoff. “She was here. She wanted us to know she was here. And she’s already got a head start on us,” he said, raising his voice over the whine of the engines as we took to the sky. “I should have known it the second I saw that bitch in Breton’s office. He had no intention of letting me go after Nathan, not even when he gave me the kill order! She was already on the fucking job! She hopped another jet and took off while we were still in the building. She even had time to leave us a ‘gift.’”

All I could do was lean back in my chair and try to calm myself. The Movement was trying to sabotage us. The Soul Eater was going to become a god. My first sire had risen from the dead. My current sire had two assassins tailing him. And the only thing that could stand in the way of all this chaos was me.

As night drew closer, Cyrus found himself enjoying Mouse’s company. She’d made them as decent a lunch as they could manage, though that wasn’t saying much. Still, he’d appreciated her effort.

She’d been good company, too. He’d thought it detrimental that she’d stopped fearing him, but now he found her chatter an excellent way to pass the time. She still grew emotional, and that was a bother, but he trusted that would pass eventually. They’d spoken of it over their lunch. She’d told him of her family, or lack thereof. She was an orphan. Her parents had both died; she didn’t give a reason. There was a sister, but she’d moved to Los Angeles to pursue an acting career, and ended up seduced by the easy money to be found in pornographic films. The last Mouse had heard, her sister had escaped from a court-ordered stay at a rehabilitation facility for some kind of drug addiction.

After that, Mouse’s only family had been the church. Cyrus had made a face at that, and she’d taken deep offense. Her faith had sustained her this long, she’d admonished, and she wouldn’t be mocked for it.

The unfortunate, dead priest had been new to the parish. He’d been set to retire when he’d heard of the struggling church in the small, desert community, and he’d agreed to lead them until a new shepherd could be found. The nun had been with the parish since it had formed twenty-five years earlier. Both of them, Cyrus had reflected, had had awful timing.

Mouse had agreed, looking down at her untouched sandwich. It was only when she sniffled that he realized she’d started to cry.

Cyrus had wanted to take her in his arms and soothe her nerves. She’d seen too much terror at the hands of these monsters. But he’d held back. He hadn’t trusted himself not to do something unthinkably cruel to her. And he wouldn’t allow himself to be that man now.

It wasn’t that he disliked being a vampire. He’d been one for so long he didn’t know how to be anything else. He didn’t want to accept his seemingly inevitable change on the sole basis of familiarity. Given the chance, he might grow to like humanity. And what was to say he couldn’t be as happy with a human life as he’d been as a vampire? The horror of his circumstances had lessened somewhat, and he’d come to enjoy the simple, human sensations he’d learned not to miss. He hungered merely for sustenance, not power and control. He laughed during companionable conversation, not at some cruel action he’d inflicted on another. As a human, he could be kind. He found he rather liked being kind.

So, he’d done the only thing he could do. He hadn’t offered bland words of comfort or assurances that things would be all right. He’d simply changed the subject.

“We should have dinner tonight,” he’d blurted. When she’d looked up at him, her tear tracks gleaming in the sunlight, he’d continued in the hopes of seeing her expression change. “Make an event of it. I suppose I should celebrate my return to humanity.”

“I suppose,” she’d said hesitantly. “But we should save some food.”

“Don’t worry. I know those…people up there. I did some of them a favor once. I’m sure they’ll get us more.” She’d still looked doubtful, so he’d added, “They won’t let me starve to death. They raised me for a reason.”

After that, she’d acquiesced, and eagerly discussed lives of the saints and stories of the Bible. He’d tolerated it because it had made her feel better.

Now, she stood over the small stove, making God alone knew what for them to eat, but she’d bathed and combed her hair, and she hummed while she worked. He knew she watched him as he changed into fresh clothing from the priest’s dresser. The damn black, polyester, button-down shirt would serve if he left it unbuttoned over one of the pristine white T-shirts. He turned and held his arms out at his sides. “What do you think?”

Mouse didn’t reply. She flushed, embarrassed, and turned back to the stove. He waited at the table while she dished out the food—small, rubbery chicken breasts in some suspicious sauce from a frozen dinner; canned carrots; macaroni and cheese—and they were about to eat when the door at the top of the stairs opened.

“I thought that was locked,” Cyrus whispered to Mouse, not meaning to sound so accusatory.

Her eyes grew wide with fear, and the pulse in her throat leaped visibly. He wanted to reassure her, but there was no time for that. Heavy footfalls came down the stairs.

“Sorry to interrupt your dinner, folks,” a voice raspy from cigarette smoke announced, before its owner came into view. Her face was contorted into its vampire form. Her shoulders were considerably wider than Cyrus’s. It took him a moment to realize she was a woman.

Mouse screamed and stood too fast, bumping the table and rattling the dishes. She looked as though she’d run, though there was no place to go except past the monstrous woman at the bottom of the stairs.

“Calm down,” he warned Mouse, standing slowly to approach her. “Come to me.”

She launched herself at him, winding her arms around his neck. She clutched him tighter as he tried to disentangle himself, but in the end, she had to let go.

“I’m not going to let her hurt you,” he said, rubbing his throat. There would be a bruise there in the morning, he was sure of it. To the vampire, he snapped, “What’s the meaning of all this?”

“We need to talk. Get rid of her for a minute.” The vampire gestured to the table. “It won’t take long.”

“Go ahead. Go,” he urged Mouse, giving her a push toward the other half of the apartment. He followed her, his eyes never leaving the vampire. What he would do if she tried to attack, he had no clue, but he hoped his warning gaze would make her behave.

Mouse went cautiously to the bed and sat down stiffly, watching. The vampire kicked out the chair Cyrus had been seated in and pulled a pack of cigarettes from her leather vest, tapping them on the table. “Simon Seymour. At last we meet.”

“We haven’t really met. You haven’t told me who you are.” He grimaced at the realization he’d answered to his old name. “And it’s Cyrus now.”

“I’ve heard.” She extended her hand. Her grip was powerful. “Call me Angie. I hear you throw a mean New Year’s party. Sit down.”

“Some are meaner than others.” He nursed his crushed hand discreetly as he sat opposite her. “What’s going on?”

She pulled a cigarette from the pack and offered it to him. Though he’d given up smoking before his death—finding tables in restaurants had been an annoying affair in the health-conscious nineties—he accepted it gratefully. His nerves were painfully raw from the ordeal of the last few days. He’d try anything to take the edge off.

Angie leaned back and regarded him a moment, before admitting, “I just came down to make sure you survived this long. I don’t really know what I’m supposed to tell you.”

“Start with who put you up to this.” He mimicked her casual pose and inhaled a lungful of the acrid smoke. Centuries of indulgence hadn’t been wiped away by death. He didn’t cough or falter, and even produced a perfect smoke ring on the exhale. “Was it my father?”

“Does anyone else have the kind of connections required to bring someone back from the dead?” She raised an eyebrow.

He’d suspected the Soul Eater had done this. Still, icy cold crept up his spine now that his suspicions had been confirmed. “Why?”

She shrugged. “Didn’t say. He gave me two-hundred thousand to get the job done. I would have asked for more if I’d known how much work goes into it. But you don’t break a promise to the big S.E.”

“Address him properly,” Cyrus snapped, out of habit more than respect. How could his father have done this to him?

It wasn’t as if Jacob Seymour had ever held any faith in his youngest son. The very notion of him needing Cyrus for anything seemed far-fetched. But here that failure of a son was. Alive. Human.

But for how long? “I take it you’re going to change me back?”

She shook her head. “Nope.”

That didn’t surprise him. “He probably expects me to earn it. Father always did have a flair for the dramatic. Who’s coming to get me?”

“Don’t know yet.” She took a long draw off her cigarette. “We’re waiting for word.”

“I can’t wait much longer. I’m almost out of food down here.” He carefully kept the “we” out of his statement. Though companionable enough, this woman had accepted money to raise the dead. She was dangerous, and definitely not someone he wanted to further expose Mouse to.

Angie nodded. “It’ll be taken care of.”

“Good.” He rose. “I take it we’re through here?”

She smiled. The expression was monstrous on her warped face as she stood, as well. “But before I go…”

She pulled an envelope from her leather vest, offering it to him. Frowning, Cyrus lifted the flap and pulled out the contents.

Polaroids. Of him and Mouse lying side by side on the narrow bed the night before. His arm curled protectively around her slender shoulders, his head resting against the curve of her neck.

“Glad to see you’re getting on so well down here.” Angie’s face morphed back to its human form. She looked better as a vampire.

His mouth dry, Cyrus slipped the photographs into his pocket. He said nothing, but he knew what they meant. The Fangs knew he valued Mouse. That knowledge was a formidable weapon, one he hadn’t even known the existence of until he saw it with his own eyes. They could hurt her, to test him, to force him to cooperate, for no reason other than because it would be fun to torture him.

“It helps to know what we’ve got for bargaining material. Don’t you think?” Angie stubbed out her cigarette on the plastic tabletop.

His mouth dry, Cyrus nodded. “I suppose it does.”

He had to take a few steps toward the door before he could regain some of the confidence she’d shaken from him. When he did, he stopped and faced her. “Remember, I’ve got bargaining material, as well. I need her. I’m still too weak to care for myself.” A lie, but an easy one to tell. “If she dies, I die, and you lose your money.”

“Repaying your father’s money would be the least of my worries.” Angie folded her arms over her chest. “Besides, I could always just raise you again.”

Cyrus watched her until she disappeared at the top of the stairs and closed the door behind her. He raced up and locked it, mentally berating himself for not requesting the key or whatever other method Angie had used to get in.

Mouse still perched on the edge of the bed, her thin arms wrapped around her middle. She leaned over her knees, sniffling softly.

“Damn it.” Cyrus couldn’t help the curse as he hurried down the stairs. “What’s the matter?”

She looked up, large eyes red with tears. “What will happen when you’re gone? What will they do to me?”

“It will be all right.” He hated himself for the empty promise. He had no idea what would happen when his father sent for him. But he sat beside her on the bed, unable to stop the hollow vows tumbling from his lips. “I’ll make sure no one hurts you.”

You weren’t able to save the rest of them, a mean voice in his head taunted. It didn’t bother him so much to be reminded of his past failures to save his companions, but that he suddenly thought of Mouse in the same category.

“And what if they…change you?” It seemed as though the words were hard for her to say. “If you become one of them, will you kill me?”

Probably. He thought of what his father had done to Nolen, forcing him to devour the one person he’d wanted to protect with his last human breath. If the Fangs decided to change Cyrus and lock him up with Mouse, the time would come when he would kill from necessity. And if his father did the deed himself, Mouse still might die at his hands.

Cyrus didn’t tell her that, though. “No. I won’t become some mindless monster. I promise, I will never hurt you.”

But he had the distinct impression they were both already dead.

8

Victim of Circumstance

M ax Harrison had never liked Michigan. Yet somehow, he kept ending up there.

He’d seen Carrie off in Ziggy’s old heap of a van with a silent prayer and a dozen false assurances that the vehicle would make it. He didn’t like lying, but they didn’t have another option. He’d need his car to track down Nathan, and the van’s windowless back would at least give Carrie shelter from the sun.

She’d left him the keys to the apartment and told him to make himself at home, but she’d wanted to make it as far as she could before daylight.

As if he could make himself at home in a city where everything shut down at nine o’clock.

He trudged up the stairs to Nathan and Carrie’s apartment, shaking his head. The last place he’d stayed for any length of time was Chicago. Blues and booze until the wee hours of the morning. Nothing could beat it. But he couldn’t stay there for long. There were too many memories of Marcus. Too much pain.

Now, he wished he could be there. He wished he could be in Zimbabwe. Anywhere but here.

He didn’t doubt for a minute Carrie’s story. Nathan probably was possessed. But while she was full of hope and determination, all Max could muster was a lesser level of bone-weary despair.

Demonic possession of a vampire wasn’t something that could be cured without drastic measures. Those measures usually involved the sharp end of a wooden stake. Though it was hard to imagine actually killing Nathan, Max knew it would be far better for him to die than be miraculously cured and have to face the death he’d visited on innocent people.

Max dropped his bag at the end of the couch out of habit. The last time he’d stayed in the apartment had been the time he’d helped Nathan and Carrie kill Cyrus. She was a piece of work, running off to face him again after all he’d done to her. Max wasn’t sure if, given the same circumstances, he could have managed it.

In the kitchen, he looked guiltily through the refrigerator. No matter how many times someone told him to make himself at home, he always felt as if he was snooping. He grabbed a bag of blood and poured it into the teakettle, praying Carrie hadn’t tampered with the contents for one of her experiments.

The hiss of the burner reminded him how quiet it was in the empty apartment, and he went to the stereo. Glancing over the rows of CDs, he found it easy to tell which were Nathan’s and which belonged to Carrie. Nathan was all about mellow, moody classic rock. He had a decent selection of Zeppelin and some Floyd. Carrie had a small but respectable jazz collection and some pop albums of questionable taste.

Like oil and water. Max chuckled to himself as he slid a Led Zeppelin album into the CD player. The machine cycled, then the opening notes of “Babe, I’m Gonna Leave You” wafted from the speakers.

“Excellent,” Max affirmed to no one in particular. He went to the kitchen, poured the warmed blood into a mug and seated himself at the cracked Formica dinette table. With no time left to canvass the city, he decided to wait out daylight and start at dusk. Wherever Nathan was, he’d find him. He owed it to his friend to let him die at the hands of a vampire, not some werewolf assassin who reeked of dirt and campfire smoke. The only thing Max hated more than werewolves were hippies, and even he had a hard time telling them apart.

As the tempo of the music slowly picked up, he stood and wandered around the apartment, sipping his dinner. Everywhere he looked were books with creased spines, notebooks and scraps of paper, framed snapshots on the shelves. It was a home. Someone lived here.

He picked up one of the photos. It was a souvenir snapshot people buy at amusement parks, a freeze frame of a moment on a roller coaster, at night, of course. Never in the entire time he’d known Nathan had Max ever seen him look like he was having that much fun.

Carrie was good for him. An ache grew in Max’s chest. It would be hell on earth for her when Nathan died. Not just because of the blood tie. Whether or not they admitted it to themselves or each other, Carrie and Nathan were in love.

The constant, fevered wind-up of the song started to grate on Max’s nerves. He moved to change the track, and the floorboard creaked. Another creak echoed from the other end of the hall.

He straightened. So, it wasn’t the racing tempo of the music that set him on edge. Someone was there, lurking in the dark, empty rooms.

He hoped it was just a garden-variety prowler.

The only weapon at his immediate disposal was a wooden stake. He slipped it into his back pocket, just in case, and retrieved a knife from the kitchen. The plan was to charge in, knife waving, in full monster face. Whoever had broken in would go out the way they’d come and hopefully not break their necks on the way down the fire escape or drainpipe or whatever they’d shimmied up. He changed his face to feeding mode and ran down the hall.

Two steps into Nathan’s bedroom, a spike-heeled, leather boot caught Max in the forehead. The wicked thing cut across his face, and he stumbled back, the surprise flashing his vampire face back to human. Two more blows, a punch to the stomach and a knee to his groin forced him against the wall, doubled over, and brought the monster back to his countenance.

When he drew in a gasp of breath through his mouth and nose, he caught the spicy scent of her perfume. Werewolf. DeCesare.

With a cry of rage, he launched himself at his assailant. She tumbled backward and he crushed her to the floor. Though he had a good forty pounds on her, she almost wriggled free. She clawed at his face with razor sharp nails, and he leaned back. It was all the space she needed to flip him onto his back and aim a stake at his heart. He froze.

“Nolen Galbraith,” she wheezed in a strange accent, “by order of the Voluntary Vampire Extinction Movement, you are sentenced to death for the murder of Marianne Galbraith and Christine Allen. How do you plead?”

“Turn on the light,” he said between deep breaths. You dumb bitch, he added silently.

She squinted in the darkness. “Nolen Galbraith?”

“No. Nice try, though.” Max shoved her off him and stood, brushing at his clothes as though they had been soiled.

In the faint illumination from the mercury light outside, he recognized her. “You met with the general last night. Or should I say, ‘your boyfriend, the general’?”

“You turn on the light,” she demanded, an exotic lilt adding haughty authority to her words. “I do not have the same quality night vision as you do.”

“Could that be because, oh, I don’t know, you’re not a vampire?” But he turned on the light anyway, because she still had a stake and he was curiously allergic to wooden splinters through the heart. “I always thought dogs could see in the dark. Or is that cats?”

“General Breton sent me. Apparently he was worried about an assassin who is not capable of finishing the assignment.” Her last words morphed into a growl.

“That still doesn’t explain why you’re in my friend’s house. Especially when he’s running berserk on the streets. What the hell were you thinking, coming here?” The knife was on the floor at his feet. He just had to figure out a way to grab it without getting skewered.

Thankfully, she didn’t appear to have noticed his frantic glance downward. “I could ask the same of you. You are walking around, drinking their blood supply, using their appliances. It seems like you might be playing both sides.”

“There’s only one side, sweetheart. I hate to disappoint you, but Nolen—” Max sketched quotation marks with his fingers “—is on it.”

“He has killed.”

“Under very extenuating circumstances!”

Bella shook her head. “There are no extenuating circumstances. He has killed, he will be killed.”

“Unless I kill you first.” Max expected to see some reaction in her eyes, but there was none. Just the cold, calculating stare of a predator who lived only for the hunt.

Moving faster than any mortal creature he’d ever seen, the werewolf threw the stake at him. He ducked it and scooped up the knife. The wooden missile embedded itself in the wall, near where his heart would have been.

She ran for the door, grabbing a handful of clothes from the laundry hamper as she passed.

For the scent, he realized with an inward curse. He admitted with sick fury that she might have the upper hand in this fight. You could train a person to be a hunter, but animals…they were born with it.

He ran after her, nearly catching her at the bottom of the stairs, but when she threw open the door, newborn sunlight flooded the stairwell. He hissed and jumped back.

As she fled down the street, she called, “Stay out of my way, vampire. I will kill you if I must.”

I hooked up with I-94 and hauled ass over the state line before the sun rose. After a boring, cramped day in the unbearably stuffy van, I hit the road with a travel mug of cold blood from the cooler I’d brought, and set my sights west.

Just outside of Chicago I caught the junction of 80-90, which would lead me into Iowa, and the landscape flattened almost immediately. With no tape deck and a broken radio, I exhausted my voice—and repertoire of Abba songs—quickly.

With nothing to occupy my mind, my thoughts turned inevitably to Nathan. I knew he wasn’t dead. I tried the blood tie vigilantly, though all I ever got in return was the tiniest pull. I filled my mind with as much love and support as I could, and sent it his way, hoping he would get the message. Eventually, memories I would rather have ignored started popping to the surface.

I thought of all our failed attempts to play Risk. The way I’d shouted “Bad omen! Bad omen!” every time he’d rolled the dice. It had driven him mad, but not so mad he couldn’t see the humor in it.

I remembered the time we’d tried to repaint The Crypt.

“What the hell is that?” he’d demanded of the botanical border I’d begun sponging around the top of the walls.

I’d squinted at it with what I’d considered a critical eye. “A fig leaf.”

Apparently, I’d not been critical enough. He’d looked deeply offended by my artistic skills. “Apparently your idea of a leaf and my idea of a leaf differ greatly.”

Frowning, I’d dabbed at the paint protectively. “I think it looks fine.”

“All I’m saying is if you were in charge of the Garden of Eden, I’d be glad not to live there.” It had been close to dawn and we’d been working since sunset. Nathan’s tired voice and his accent, grown thick with exhaustion, had rendered his words barely distinguishable as English.

I’d been unable to resist a guttural “Och!” The ensuing paint fight had splattered the shelves and the ceiling. We would have gotten around to painting over it if we hadn’t ended up jumping each other’s bones right there on the plastic sheets on the floor.

I pulled all the happiness I could from these memories and gave it over to the blood tie. Maybe it would reassure him we were looking for him, and keep him from despairing.

I wished I could pull the van over and cry, but there was no time. I swallowed my pain and kept my eyes on the road.

What would happen if Max caught up with him? Though Anne had sounded pretty sure he wouldn’t finish Nathan off, she’d also seemed certain the Oracle wouldn’t hurt anybody, and look where that had gotten her. The thought of Max doing anything to Nathan…I wasn’t confident if I would ever be able to face him again should that happen.

Then there was the Cyrus problem. It had been easy to let my grudge against him die when I thought he was dead himself. But how could I possibly endure seeing him again? Would he still have that sick, seductive power over me?

There was very little I feared now that I had become the thing that went bump in the night. Unfortunately, my old sire figured largely in that very little. He’d had a hold over me that had surpassed the power of the blood tie. He’d made me believe he’d needed me, that I could have that power over him. For a person who’d wanted nothing more in life than that kind of control, it had been a dream come true. How would I react to him now that he was human and he really did need me?

Assuming he was still human when I got there. I couldn’t imagine him tolerating such a state for long.

Outside the windows, the miles passed by. I never knew why they referred to this landscape as “rolling plains.” They didn’t roll at all. They just stretched out endlessly into the night, with only the occasional farm or small town to break the illusion of standing still.

As close to dawn as possible, without any clue as to what state I was in, I pulled into a rest stop and climbed behind the heavy canvas curtains to sleep.

Out of loneliness more than hope, I tried the blood tie again.

We’re going to fix this, Nathan. I promise, we’re going to fix this.

At first, I thought there would be no response at all, not even the strange tug I’d felt when I’d tried to communicate before. This time, though, I heard him.

Help me.

His reply was faint, but I knew it was him and not my frantic imagination. It was definitely Nathan.

And he was in unimaginable pain.

Cyrus woke at sunup. Mouse lay curled at his side, a rare smile on her sleeping face. Whatever she dreamed of, he hated the thought of waking her.

He rose as carefully as he could to avoid disturbing her, and walked to the bathroom. He closed the door, then thought of the monsters lurking upstairs, and opened it a crack so he could hear them if they came down. Though he was sure his counterthreat had made an impact with the leader, he knew from experience a deal with a vampire was really no deal at all.

He drew a bath, hoping the thunder of water in the tub wouldn’t wake Mouse. She deserved to sleep. Every moment she slept was a moment she didn’t have to think of their dire situation.

Though he knew she had a name, he couldn’t bear to think of her as “Stacey.” Certainly not “Stacey Pickles.” He made a face at that. She deserved a better name than Mouse, but it fit her, and he couldn’t think of a better one.

He slipped into the water and slid down to submerge his head. Though he’d always enjoyed the sensation of being completely enveloped by water, he couldn’t stand it now. His mortal lungs cried for air and every faint noise seemed sinister. He sat up, gasping for breath.

He was surprised to see Mouse jump back from the tub. He hadn’t heard her come in, and his lack of awareness frightened him. “You scared me.”

“I’m sorry,” she said softly. She still wore the T-shirt she’d slept in, her skinny legs jutting from beneath the short hem, which afforded her little modesty. “I heard you get up. I didn’t want to be alone.”

He leaned into the curved end of the tub and let his arm drape over the side. “It’s okay.”

She took a tentative step forward. “The door was open. I didn’t know you were—”

“I don’t mind.” He liked having her close. At least then he knew she was safe.

Her eyes darted from his naked form beneath the water to the floor as she moved to kneel beside the tub. When he reached out and lazily stroked her hair with his damp hand, she blurted, “Today is my birthday.”

“Really?” He didn’t know why he was so interested. Captivity was doing strange things to him. “How old are you?”

She nodded earnestly and leaned against the tub as though it were his living flesh. “Nineteen.”

“Nineteen, and you’re—” He’d meant to comment on her purity, then realized the comment would be crude. It wouldn’t have bothered him with anyone else, another dangerous distinction he chose to ignore. “You’re nineteen?”

“How old are you?” She looked up at him with terrifyingly earnest eyes.

He knew the look in them, and withdrew his hand. “I don’t know. I think I may have been twenty-seven when I became a vampire. I didn’t keep track of the years after that. There were seven centuries, if that helps.”

“Seven—” She choked on the word. “I thought I was old.”

He laughed out loud at the absurdity of her innocent statement. “Hardly.”

With a sigh, she dropped her hand over the side of the tub, sliding it gracefully through the water at his side. Her fingers came mere centimeters from his flesh, and for a moment he thought she would touch him. She never did. He stared at her face to try and gauge her intent, but there was no sign of sly seduction or nervous timidity there. She gazed at the cinder block wall, but it was obvious she saw nothing.

“How can you forget how old you are? Don’t you look forward to your birthday?” She rested her head on the rolled edge of the bathtub, still twisting her fingers through the water.

One slender digit brushed against his ribs. It took all his willpower not to shudder. “I don’t know when my birthday is. My mother died a few days after I was born. From a fever. My father took a new wife, but she didn’t know what day I’d been born and my father hadn’t kept track.”

Mouse turned to him, looking very close to tears. “That’s so sad.”

“Not really,” he assured her. “Birthdays didn’t matter much then. There wasn’t as much emphasis on them as there is now.”

“You could still have one,” she offered. “Just keep track from the day they brought you back. Or the day they—”

“Let’s not talk about that.” He didn’t want her to have any knowledge of his vampire world. Didn’t want to hear their sordid terminology cross her lips. Forcing a smile, he said, “I have good news.”

He could tell she didn’t want to believe him. To get her hopes up would only serve to see them dashed again. She couldn’t seem to resist temptation, though. “What is it?”

“When I talked to the vampire woman last night, she said they’d bring us more food.” He glanced worriedly at his lean stomach. He’d have to watch his intake, or he’d grow fat. That was something he’d never had to think of before.

“Where are they getting it?” Mouse’s expression became troubled.

Whatever could be the matter with her? Did she want to starve to death? “I don’t know. Maybe they have some here. It is a church. Don’t they give out alms for the poor?”

“The food pantry is for the low-income families of the parish.”

“Yes, and they believe it has burned to the ground.” He frowned. “Mouse, we don’t have much left.”

“Mouse?” A hesitant smile crossed her lips. “Why did you call me that?”

Damn. He’d never addressed her with anything more than “You there,” before. “Because you remind me of a mouse.”

She looked deeply offended, and he rushed to correct himself. “Not physically. But you’re so quiet. If you want me to call you—”

“No. Call me Mouse. I’ve never had a nickname before.” Her smile widened, as if she knew a secret he did not. “It’s a good birthday present.”

They sat in silence, the only sound the occasional drip of water from the faucet.

“I won’t feel right taking that food.” She looked him in the eye. Something new sparked there, an inner flame that burned to banish the hopelessness she’d succumbed to before. “But I’ll take it, because now it’s every man for himself.”

“Or herself, as the case may be.” Cyrus picked up the soap. “But I’m glad to see you’ve developed some reason.”

She shrugged. “You promised nothing would happen to me. You’re the closest thing to a protector I have, so I believe you.”

His heart ached with the shameful memories of what he’d done to her, but he wouldn’t apologize. Conscience or not, he still had some pride, and he wouldn’t live with regret.

He finished his bath and gave Mouse a warning before he stood, so she could modestly turn her back. She went into the other room to change, and when she’d finished she brought him clean clothes, as well. When he emerged from the bathroom, she stood at the bottom of the stairs, looking up with a worried expression.

“What’s the matter?” He touched her arm. He wasn’t sure why.

She jumped, then nodded with an apologetic look. It hadn’t been him that had startled her. “Are they…I mean, will they come out? If we went up there?”

“They can’t go into the light. They’ll burn up. If we were in the light, we’d be fine.”

She chewed her lip. “So, once we got outside, then…we’d be fine?”

“In theory.” What was she insinuating?

Mouse started up the steps, but took them slowly. He caught her arm. “What are you doing?”

She lifted a finger to her lips to signal quiet. He didn’t want to follow her, but her single-minded concentration drew him in. He stayed close behind her, one hand on the railing, the other on her wrist. A few times, she stopped. He thought she would change her mind and turn around, but then she moved forward as though she’d screwed up her courage and forced herself on.

Once they entered the vestibule and closed the basement door behind them, her courage deserted her. She stared in terror at the sanctuary doors. A chalk sigil marred the wood. Cyrus could only guess at its purpose.

“They can’t come out,” he reminded her, pointing to the sunlight slanting across the carpet. How that sight used to terrify him, and now it seemed so harmless. No wonder she doubted its effectiveness in protecting her.

She paused before the exterior doors, bracketed on both sides by long, thin windows. And then he knew why she’d brought him here. Her shoulders, usually slumped in defeat, rose. Her face appeared less tired and sad, and a gleeful smile appeared as she surveyed the bleak landscape outside.

“We can escape.” He reached for the handle.

She grabbed his wrist, stopping him. Her shoulders slumped again, and her face regained the sad, haunted look he recognized far better than hope. “We can’t.”

“Of course we can. Look! We can go out of these doors and go find help.” His hands shook as he laid them on the metal push bar. He prayed no alarm would sound. There was a faint click and a screech of hinges, then freedom lay before him in the form of a barren, desert road. His heart fell a little, but he made a desperate attempt to bolster it. “It can’t be that far to the nearest town.”

She shook her head. “Five miles.”

“Five miles? Is that all?” He could easily walk five miles, even as a human. Five miles. He could carry her five miles! “Let’s not waste any more time!”

“No.” She shook her head sadly.

“Why not?” He felt the old violence rising in him, tempting him to break her neck and save himself.

“We’re in Death Valley. You’d never survive. Five miles through burning desert. You’ll be dead within half an hour.” Her eyes drifted shut; her head drooped on her neck. “It’s hopeless.”

“No.” Panic rose in his chest. They were so close. “What about hitchhiking? What if we…” As he watched the road, he realized that in the entire time they’d stood there, no vehicle had passed. He didn’t need to look at her to see her silent denial.

Her eyes filled with tears. “You’d never make it during the day. And at night—”

“At night, they would find us.” He ran a hand through his hair. “Well, it was a fine plan, for a moment.”

She stood uselessly in place. “If you tried to escape, would you take me with you?”

“Of course I would,” he said, and believed it to his bones. The why of it, however, was something he didn’t want to admit.

She looked at him for a painfully intense moment. What would her next action be? Would she cry? Would she kiss him? It looked as though she was leaning toward the latter when the doors to the sanctuary rattled, angry voices rising on the other side. Angry voices, and a woman’s scream.

Before they could move, the doors burst open and a woman, naked but for a torn scrap of a bra, lunged across the threshold. Bite marks marred every inch of her skin. Her lips were blue, her limbs mottled. These were her dying struggles.

Mouse stiffened at his side, her eyes wide with horror. The woman reached for them, her face twisting in a rictus of pain as she crashed to the floor. From the shadows between the sanctuary doors, the Fangs glared at them.

“They can’t come out here,” Cyrus reminded Mouse, grabbing her hand and pulling her toward the basement door. He hoped they hadn’t found a way to circumvent that law of vampire physiology. If they had, he and Mouse were truly doomed.

A gaunt vampire with hollow eyes and thick stubble on his jaw grabbed the nearly dead woman’s ankle and tugged. She raised her head, turning wide, tear-filled eyes upward. Her cracked lips formed a single, soundless “Please,” and she dug her fingers into the carpet as the Fang pulled her, screaming, back into the sanctuary.

“Get back downstairs!” another vampire growled at them. Then the doors slammed shut and they were left alone.

“Wh-what—” Mouse stammered, then sagged against Cyrus. She was fainting, he realized, and he was still not strong enough to hold up her weight. He tried for the basement door, but they slipped to the carpet, falling where the dead woman had landed in her ill-fated escape attempt. He glanced at the carpet. Fingernails. They had ripped from her hands, tangled in the fibers as she’d tried desperately to keep the Fangs from pulling her back.

Mouse raised her head, and her gasp told him she saw them, as well. “Were you…When you were…”

“No.” Cyrus couldn’t look at her, at her horrified face. “No, I was much worse. They looked up to me, even if it affords me no currency with them now.”

She pulled away, trembling. “We should go downstairs. Eventually, the sun will go down, and they’ll be angry.”

Sunlight or not, they were doomed anyway, Cyrus realized as they returned to their basement prison. The Fangs showed a horrible sense of invention, holding them here. Of course they would choose a place like this, where the climate would confine their captives during the daylight, when they themselves were most vulnerable.

Cyrus and Mouse were well and truly trapped. The danger of the situation, which had until now seemed a trivial annoyance, finally dawned on him. Mouse, the flimsy life raft he’d been clinging to, might not live through this. The thought was unfathomable. He, who’d killed with such sadistic pleasure in the past, would be spared out of necessity. Because his father willed it. But she, who’d retained her purity, body and soul, would die as a victim of circumstance.

He wouldn’t allow it. Though the realization shocked him, it was, unfortunately, the truth. When he’d told Angie that Mouse’s death would be the cause of his own, it had been the truth. And though he realized their situation had greatly influenced and intensified his emotions toward her, he couldn’t deny that the thought of losing her terrified him.

And maybe that was more frightening than the Fangs and his father combined.

9

And thou art dead, as young and fair

I pulled into a truck stop on the other side of Cheyenne. It wasn’t dawn yet, but I needed a chance to get out of the van and stretch my legs.

The place was small, with diesel pumps behind it and a dusty lot adjacent, where truckers could park for a night’s sleep. With more than a little trepidation, I pulled the van to the end of the dirt lot and headed to the tiny restaurant.

Because of the late hour, there weren’t many customers at Arlene’s Grit Stop and Five Dollar Showers. I assumed most weary travelers stopping at this particular exit would find themselves across the badly patched asphalt road, at the Happy Ending Health Spa.

The cracked pavement of Arlene’s parking lot held only two motorcycles and a rusty Cavalier. At least the van wouldn’t look out of place.

The restaurant was a narrow room that ran along the front of the building. No tables, just seven or eight plastic booths against each wall. Currently, only one such booth was taken by a grizzled biker with a long, gray beard, and a young man in a leather jacket who looked like he’d just stepped from a Calvin Klein ad.

The latter wore a big smile the moment he spotted me. Considering my limp, greasy hair and bedraggled appearance, his behavior became immediately suspect.

“Come, sit with us,” he invited. The bearded one didn’t look enthused about it, working the toothpick he gnawed on from one corner of his hairy mouth to the other.

I shook my head as I slid into another booth. “I think I’ll let you boys have your privacy.”

A waitress, apparently just as pleased with my presence, sighed deeply as she approached my table. I had the distinct feeling there was a neglected Nora Roberts novel behind the counter she’d been leaning on.

“Just coffee,” I assured her with a friendly smile.

“Uh-huh.” She clicked her pen derisively and put her order pad back in her apron. “This must be my lucky night.”

I glanced over at my fellows in late-night dining and saw that they, too, only had coffee. The waitress, Ruby, by her nametag, scratched her backside as she retrieved a brown, ceramic mug and filled it with coffee. She brought it and the pot to my table, setting the mug before me with little ceremony.

“Another refill, gentlemen?” she asked in long-suffering sarcasm.

The bearded one said nothing, but put his hand palm down over the rim of his cup. Calvin Klein pushed his mug toward her. “Absolutely. And put the pretty lady’s drink on my check, as well.”

Ruby rolled her eyes as she left them. “Seventy-five cents. You’re a real big spender.”

Without invitation or permission, Calvin Klein got up and came to my table. “Don’t mind her. She’s been a real bitch all night.”

I didn’t cover my weary annoyance. “I don’t use that word when referring to waitresses.”

“I’ve made a bad first impression, haven’t I?” His Cheshire Cat grin reminded me of the way Max had looked at the flight attendant. That day seemed so far away now. In solitude I lived in my own time, which functioned with a marked chronological difference from the one everyone else inhabited. An hour felt like a day, a day felt like a lifetime.

Yet, with as long as time seemed, I didn’t feel like wasting mine on a cheesy, clean-cut biker in a brokendown rest stop diner. “Better hurry back, before your boyfriend gets lonely.”

C.K. seemed amused by this. “If you are insinuating that this gentleman and I are in any way intimate, I’ll have you know I am one-hundred-percent heterosexual. And available.”

“I’ll take note of that.” I hadn’t noticed his strange accent until I’d heard him speak more than a few words at a time, but now it set off an alarm in my head. “Are you British, by any chance?”

“Guilty as charged,” he said with a laugh, this time putting his accent on full display. “I’m a writer. Seeing America for the first time. I hope to find a novel in it somewhere.”

“Try Borders. I’ve seen a few in there from time to time.” Still, something about him struck me as odd. “Why do you cover up your accent?”

This question seemed to catch him off guard. In the split second he hesitated before answering, I knew whatever came from his mouth would be a lie. “I suppose I just do it automatically. Probably picked up the Yank accent from him.”

I eyed C.K.’s companion, who sat with arms folded across his chest, mirrored sunglasses covering his eyes.

“He doesn’t look very talkative,” I observed casually. “How long have you been in the country?”

Now he grew visibly suspicious about my line of questioning. “About three weeks.”

“Doesn’t seem long enough for a Brit to completely drop his accent.” I reached across the table faster than he could move, and grabbed his wrist.

Ice cold.

“You liar,” I rasped, dropping his arm. “You’re a vampire.”

He shot a panicked glance at the waitress. She hadn’t looked up from her paperback.

Lowering his voice to a barely audible whisper, he leaned in. “How the hell did you know that?”

I forced my transformation, letting him view my true face for just a second. Before the waitress could notice, I shook it off.

“Holy Christ, you’re not Movement, are you?” He reached into his jacket.

“No, I’m not, so leave that stake where it is.” I looked up to make sure his friend wasn’t prepping for a slaughter, either. “But you should be ashamed of yourself!”

His eyes bugged. “Why?”

“I know what you were doing! You were going to try and charm your way into my pants, and then you were going to eat me. It’s disgusting!” I smacked my palm down on the table, and my coffee cup jumped.

This time, the waitress did look up. “Don’t let him bother you, honey. He’s been trying his same tired act on every gal what come in here tonight. And I do mean all night, Mr. Free Refill.”

“Thank you, Ruby,” C.K. muttered through clenched teeth. “For your flawless critique of my wooing style.”

She cracked her gum. “Whatever.”

I grabbed him by the front of his T-shirt and pulled him forward. “So, what’s your game? Why are you really out here?”

With a look of pure disgust, he wrenched his clothing from my grasp. “For your information, I wasn’t lying. I am a writer.”

“Bullshit.”

“No, really. Perhaps you’ve heard of me. George Gordon. More commonly referred to as Lord Byron?” He puffed up his chest like an ostrich doing a mating dance.

“Bullshit.” I leaned back in the booth and gave him the glare I used to reserve for kids in the E.R. who swore they hadn’t seen their overdosing friend using recreational drugs.

“No.” Guiltily, he held up his hands. “I’m not deliberately seeking trouble to serve as its cause. I’m looking for inspiration.”

“Inspiration?” I echoed sarcastically. “I’m supposed to believe Lord Byron has writer’s block?”

“You try writing nonstop for centuries and not need a little help getting the creative juices flowing now and then.” He reached into his jacket. “I’m just going for my cigarettes.”

“I haven’t seen any new work from you. Of course, I’m not a big reader.” I watched him closely, ready to leap into self-defense mode at the least suspicion.

“Well, of course you haven’t. Can’t exactly go by George Gordon, can I?” He produced a package covered with dramatic artwork, and pulled a cigarette made with black paper from it. He held the pack toward me. “Clove?”

I shook my head. “Do you have any idea what those do to your lungs? You’re better off smoking regular cigarettes. So, what have you been writing?”

“My last release was Blood Heat. My pseudonym is Sharon Ekard.” He reached into his pocket, slowly again, and withdrew a glossy bookmark. “You can keep this.”

I scanned the image. A tall, dark and ridiculously muscled man with badly painted fangs held a woman in a sheer, clinging gown in the crook of his elbow. Her head was thrown back, her eyes closed in ecstasy as he leaned in for a bite. “You write…vampire romance novels?”

“Guilty as charged.” He shrugged. “But I’m looking for a change of pace. One can tolerate heaving bosoms and turgid members for only so long. My friend here claims to be heading to Death Valley on some kind of top secret mission. I don’t believe a word of it, of course, but a trip like this could easily be parlayed into a humorous travel diary.”

The scary biker in the other booth grunted. Byron turned and waved to him. “That is, if he doesn’t kill me first. Which is a very real possibility, should I continue to release information so carelessly.”

Death Valley. The land of the dead.

The biker flipped the toothpick from one side of his mouth to the other and shifted in the booth, propping his boots up on the seat. The familiar insignia of the Fangs, a single tooth dripping venom, rested on the arm of his leather jacket in the form of a dusty, embroidered patch. I had to bite my tongue to keep from making a crack about the Girl Scouts, but my mouth gaped when I recognized the symbol hastily painted below it.

A dragon curled around a perfect diamond.

The dragon diamond was the Soul Eater’s pet emblem. It existed in the form of a large pendant “gifted” to the human who would be sacrificed to the Soul Eater at the vampire New Year’s ceremony. Jacob Seymour himself had given the diamond to Nathan’s wife, Marianne, and I’d selected Ziggy to be the wearer the night I’d escaped Cyrus’s house. Neither sacrifice had gone as planned.

Byron leaned over the table, a grin of pure wickedness curving his lips. “So, are you in town long? Long enough for a day of—”

“I did a paper on you in college.” I cocked my head and studied him a bit more closely. He looked more fashionably gaunt than the woodcut in the front of my copy of his collected works made him appear. “What happened?”

He sighed. “Why is it every time vampires meet, they have to share ‘how I was turned’ stories? It’s not all that interesting.”

“Most vampires aren’t major figures in literature.” I sipped my coffee and stared at him. If he lied to me, I would be able to tell. His face hid nothing, no matter how he might think he was fooling me. I could see the compulsion to lie working across his face as he considered what to say.

Finally, he took on a look of complete hopelessness and held up his hands. “Fine. Since you and the whole bloody world know about me, it was the consumption. I was near dead when one of the physicians attending me did the job. Near enough, anyway, that I made it through the burial convincingly.”

“You were buried alive?” A chill went up my spine.

“Undead, actually.” He took a draw off his sickly sweet smelling cigarette. “A writer never sneers at experience, Miss—”

“Harrison,” I lied quickly. No sense in revealing my real name in front of Grizzly Adams, who never stopped watching us for a moment. “You can call me…Maxine.”

“Maxine?” Byron’s elegant nose wrinkled in distaste. “But as I was saying, after the burial, the physician dug me up and I’ve been here ever since.”

“I have to give you credit.” I leaned back in the seat. “I couldn’t have stood it. Claustrophobic.”

“That’s how it was done in those days. Mozart did it. Hugo did it.”

I sat up straighter. “Mozart and Victor Hugo?”

“In the past, if you truly wanted eternal life, you had to work for it,” he continued as if he hadn’t heard my interruption. “Now a vampire is lucky if he or she even sees the mortician’s slab.”

“Lucky?” I thought of Cyrus cold and dead on the gurney in the E.R. “I would hardly call it lucky.”

“So, since you’re bursting to know about my change, you must be dying to talk about yours. What happened? Dark prince of love sweep you off your feet and then never call?” Byron shook his head and blew a sequence of smoke rings into the air between us. “They always promise eternity, don’t they?”

“I was attacked and turned accidentally. It’s not the most interesting of stories.” I rolled my eyes. “Nothing like Blood Heat.”

“Well, of course not. It if were, you’d be on the bestseller list, not me.” He stubbed out his cigarette. “What are you doing out in the desert, Maxine?”

“What are you doing out in the desert, George?” I put the same sarcastic emphasis on his name as he had on my assumed one.

“I already told you mine.” He looked over his shoulder at his companion. “I’m writing the great American novel.”

“You’re British.” I took another drink of my quickly cooling coffee.

His gaze, suddenly intense, never wavered. “You’re looking for something.”

Prickles ran up the back of my neck. The oddest feeling, that he was telling me something I just wasn’t picking up on, slowly worked into my hypersensitive brain. I wanted to shrug it off as paranoia, but something in his eyes told me there were parts to this encounter I had missed.

I looked at the biker. The parts I was missing were the parts Byron couldn’t tell me.

Hopefully, my distress wasn’t obvious to either of them when I looked Byron in the eye and said, “No. I’m not looking for anything.”

“Anybody?” he mouthed, then looked over his shoulder at the biker, who shifted in his seat.

He knows something is up. Don’t say another word, I pleaded inwardly. I had to disentangle myself from this conversation before I revealed too much, or he did. Luckily, the lightening sky gave me the perfect out.

I drained my mug and stood. “Well, I’ve got to be getting to shelter. What are you guys doing?”

“Painted Pony Motor Lodge. It’s on the other side of the highway, but my friend here lives dangerously.” Narrowing his eyes suspiciously, Byron took a long drag on his sickly sweet cigarette. “How about you?”

“Still haven’t found a place.” I certainly didn’t want them knocking on my door at sundown, or worse, torching the van with me in it. “I’ll probably head up to the next exit.”

“You might not make it.” Byron pulled a pen from his pocket and swiped my napkin. “If you’re still alive at sunset, here’s my cell number. Maybe we could get together in a more intimate setting.”

He scribbled hastily on the paper and pushed it back to me. Below his number, where he should have written his name, were the words St. Anne’s.

I looked up sharply, and he gave me a warning glance. I waved at the biker, who lifted two fingers in greeting. “Well, I’ll see you gentlemen down the road.”

Later, cramped in the hot, confining prison of the van, I groggily punched Byron’s number into my cell.

He answered like a man waking after a three-day bender. “What?”

“Are you alone?” I had a fleeting mental image of his hairy traveling companion curled up next to him in bed à la Planes, Trains & Automobiles, but it wasn’t nearly as funny as it should have been.

“Yes, thank God.” There was a long pause, then a noise of disgust. “Did you just call to chat?”

“Why did you write this on the napkin?” I tried, unsuccessfully, to make myself more comfortable on my pallet of sleeping bags.

He gave a lazy yawn. “What? My number? I have no idea. If I’d known you would call in the middle of the day—”

“The other thing. St. Anne’s?” I took a deep breath. “What do you know?”

“I know we’re going there, and I know any vampire in her right mind wouldn’t be traveling through the desert in a van that could break down just for fun. You’re looking for someone. I would place a sizable wager on your intended target and my companion’s being the same person.”

“Are you going to get in my way?” Out of habit, I reached for the ax and stakes tucked beneath my bedding.

“No. I can’t promise the same from my associate, however.” He paused. “Do you want me to keep our conversation between us?”

“No, I’d like that big, hairy son-of-a-bitch to hunt me down and rip my head right off my neck. What do you think?” I pressed my palm to my forehead. One of the disadvantages of being room temperature was the fact that if the “room” happened to be one-hundred-and-two degrees, you ended up one-hundred-and-two degrees, as well.

The Painted Pony Motor Inn was probably air-conditioned. Byron, you lucky bastard.

There was a heavy sigh on the other end of the line. “Sarcasm is terribly overused in your day and age.”

“You can gripe about it in your book.” I flopped back against the lumpy sleeping bags. “But thanks for the help.”

“No problem. I don’t know what you’re mixed up in, but these vampires are no group to trifle with.”

I closed my eyes, praying for strength. “I think I can handle them.”

“If you need help, feel free to call. My associate won’t room with me. He thinks I am, and I quote, ‘a faggot.’” I could hear Byron’s wry smile over the phone. “Good luck, milady.”

And what great luck I had. I didn’t need to worry about finding Cyrus. Like a bookie coming to collect on a gambling debt, Cyrus had found me.

At least, a guy who knew a guy who knew a guy who knew where Cyrus was found me. Since I’d had no idea where to go or what to do when I got there, I would have to take what I could get.

I would just have to follow Byron.

As the policeman poked his flashlight into the hedges, Max thought, This was an incredibly stupid idea.

He’d tracked the bitch-dog here, to Ah-Nab-Awen Park. Max hadn’t been far from where Nathan had allegedly ripped poor Ms. Allen’s throat out when he’d thought the werewolf had picked up his scent. Max’s first instinct had been to hide, not because he was afraid of her but because he didn’t want her to follow him to Nathan. It had never crossed his mind that the steps coming down the path might have belonged to someone else.

Someone like law enforcement.

It also hadn’t occurred to him that lurking in the very same bushes a madman had hidden in before he brutally murdered an innocent pedestrian might look a tad suspicious.

Harrison, you moron.

A loud, resonant howl caused the officer prodding the bushes to jump and drop his light. Max gave silent thanks to the dog.

The officer’s shoulder radio crackled, then a long stream of garbled jargon spewed forth.

“Affirmative,” the officer responded, groping through the foliage with a clumsy hand. “There’s nothing out here, anyway. Everybody seems to be sticking to curfew.”

The dog howled again, just as the cop’s beefy fingers closed on his flashlight. His steps were brisk as he hurried away.

Max waited until he heard a car door close, then flopped onto his back with much rustling of shrubbery. Cold sweat trickled down his back, and only when he noticed his whole body shaking did he realize he was afraid.

Mortally terrified, more like it. There wasn’t much he feared, but the police made that short list. They could cuff you, stick you in the back of their car and drive you off someplace where there was no sun-control.

“You can come out now, coward,” a thickly accented voice called.

Max slapped his hands to his face and stretched the skin out of shape. This is really my night.

Trying to extricate himself from the bushes as painlessly as possible, he stumbled onto the broken-asphalt path. The werewolf waited for him, standing in the middle of the trail in an all-leather getup that could have come from a bad action movie.

Or a very good porn movie.

“Ever hear the word inconspicuous?” He brushed off the torn knees of his jeans.

“Have you ever heard the words ‘I do not care’?” She didn’t move as he stepped closer.

“You know, lupins are usually easier to intimidate than this.” He grinned at her outraged curse. “You’re not making my job very easy.”

“I am not a lupin. Filthy traitors!” As she crossed herself and spat, her eyes flashed deadly gold. The pupils narrowed to pinpoints, then flared to encompass the irises.

The effect was unnerving, even after all Max had seen. He stepped back.

“Now who is easily intimidated, vampire?”

Was that humor in her voice? If she hadn’t been such a stone-cold bitch until now, Max would have found it easier to believe. “You scared off the cop?”

She nodded, just once.

“Why?”

She lifted one shoulder in an elegant shrug as she raised her other arm behind her head. Pulling a heavy, medieval-looking crossbow from her back, she looked it over with a critical eye while she answered. “I hate police.”

“We’re on the same page there.” Max scratched his neck and surveyed the area. “So, you think he’s going to revisit the scene of the crime?”

“No.” She popped the bolt from the bow and slung the weapon across her back again. Pulling a scrap of white fabric from her pocket, she gave the air a long sniff. She waved the cloth under her nose a few times and lifted her head. “He hasn’t been here since he killed her.”

Max groaned. “I could have told you that. He’s not a psychopath.”

“No, he is not.” The werewolf frowned and bent to touch the pavement. She lifted her fingers to her nose. “He is not acting as a vampire, either.”

“What do you mean?” Max knelt on the path, and the scent of blood caught in his nostrils. It had been days since Nathan had killed the woman, and the air was damp with rain. There must have been an enormous amount of blood for it not to have all been washed away by now. “God almighty.”

“When you kill, do you leave this much blood behind?” The werewolf regarded him with a raised eyebrow.

Max couldn’t decide if she was being intentionally antagonistic or if her poor manners were due to the fact she was, biologically, a canine. “For your information, I’ve never killed anyone.”

At least, not in the technical sense.

“But no, a vampire wouldn’t have left this behind. He would have fed on her.” Absently, Max traced the chalk outline of the dead woman’s ankle. Rising, he wiped his hands on his jeans as though he’d touched something dirty. “This place gives me the creeps. Let’s get out of here.”

She looked as surprised as he was sure he did. The words had erupted from him out of habit. They implied a kinship, teamwork, a shared goal. They were certainly not something he would say to a werewolf, of all people.

To his immense relief, she shook her head. Her long black braid slithered across her leather-covered shoulders. “I have a job to do. I will leave you to wallow in the shrubbery.”

What a bitch. Still, a wide grin curved his mouth.

He watched her walk away, her braid snapping like a whip behind her. “Bella,” he warned through gritted teeth. “If you get in my way again, I will kill you.”

Her laughter, low and throaty, floated back to him on a wave of musky perfume in the night air. “No, you will not. If I were you, I would hurry. The police are coming back.”

Max looked toward the bridge. No traffic crossed as he stood rooted to the spot, but soon enough the thin, high whine of a siren broke the evening stillness.

When he turned back, Bella was gone.

Cyrus woke in the night in a cold sweat. He wasn’t sure, but he thought he might have screamed, because Mouse woke at the same time.

“Cyrus? What’s the matter?” Her hand was hot against his shoulder.

He swallowed. His throat was so dry, it was like gulping down razor blades. “Nothing. Go back to sleep.”

When he stood, he wrapped the sheet around his waist. Though she slept beside him on the narrow bed, she still possessed a bizarre modesty.

“Tell me, please.” She pulled her legs beneath her as she sat up, a waif in her too-large T-shirt.

If he’d been asked at that very moment to describe her in one word, it would have been fragile. So how could she expect him to share the details of his nightmare?

“I said go back to sleep.”

Two days ago, his sharp tone would have intimidated her. But trapped together in this cinder block hell as they were, the days stretched like weeks, and by now she was accustomed to his moods. “You were screaming. People don’t scream if there isn’t something wrong.”

He went to the wall and leaned his head against it, his forearm over his eyes. The desert heat that had penetrated the basement in the day had escaped into the chilly night, leaving the surface cold against his skin.

“It was just a dream,” he said, more to reassure himself than to explain it to her. “I have a history of nightmares.”

There was a pause before she answered. “That’s terrible.”

“It’s to be expected, when you’ve lived a life like mine.” He straightened, scrubbing his hands over his face. “I’ll be fine in a while. I’m sorry to have disturbed you.”

A more refined person would accept his apology and let the matter rest, but Cyrus would never accuse Mouse of being refined. She swung her legs, bare under the hem of the T-shirt, over the edge of the bed, her arms braced against the mattress. A slash of brown hair covered one of her eyes. “What was it about?”

“I couldn’t tell you, in good conscience.” But a voice in his head mocked him. You protect her from your deviant nature now?

“It was just a dream. Telling me about it won’t hurt me.” Her clearheaded logic was apt to drive him mad.

He sat beside her, not close enough that she could touch him. The last thing he needed or wanted was her pity. “When I became a vampire, my father cut out my heart.”

She gasped at his words, from his casual phrasing of the horror, no doubt. But she had asked, so he continued to oblige her. “I don’t know how it comes to pass, but after turning, vampires grow a second heart. The first heart, the human one, is the heart to drive the stake through. So my father cut it out of me.”

“So you couldn’t be killed?” Her innocence was charming.

“So I couldn’t betray him. He kept my heart for seven centuries.” The familiar, sickening guilt crept over Cyrus. He closed his eyes and breathed in deeply to regain his composure, but all he got was the scent of soap from Mouse’s freshly washed skin.

“But you don’t have to worry about that now. You’re human again,” she said, the declaration like a prayer from her lips.

His gaze wandered to the toes on her dainty feet, which rested on the cold, tile floor.

“For the time being.” He didn’t know why he would say such a thing, when he knew it would bother her. Perhaps he wasn’t as changed as he’d imagined in the past few days.

But she had changed. Only a day before, she would have trembled at the prospect of his impending transformation. Now, she stood and faced him, her arms folded tightly across her chest. The motion made the hem of the T-shirt hitch up, exposing the fronts of her creamy, white thighs. The sight was painfully arousing, and he closed his eyes in shame as he remembered what he’d done to her on that first night.

“Why would you say something like that to me?” Her lower lip trembled, not in fear, but anger. Seemingly oblivious to his distress, she tightened her arms around herself, lifting the shirt a critical inch higher.

“I don’t know,” he admitted, unable to face her or look anywhere near her. “I’m sorry.”

It was the first time he’d said those words in earnest to anyone. The realization shocked him, almost as much as if he’d been struck by lightning.

He said it again, for the reprehensible way he’d forced himself on her. “I’m sorry,” he murmured over and over, for every harsh word she’d had to endure from him. And for the fact that she was caught up in his father’s treachery, and it would ultimately cost her her life.

And she would die. There was no way to stop it. He couldn’t stand up against the might of his father’s adoring cult. Cyrus was nothing, no one, with no power to offer them or riches to seduce them with.

That’s when he appreciated the full horror of his humanity. They were at the mercy of fate, he and his Mouse, as he had been at the mercy of his father’s whim for centuries.

There was one way he could make what he knew of his father’s plan work in his favor. When they turned him, he could turn Mouse.

Cyrus remembered his wives, how he’d loved each of them and lost them to his father, and how they had died hating Cyrus. But then, they’d never really loved him to begin with. Perhaps as humans they had held some affection for him. After he’d changed them, they’d become different. The first had become a mindless harlot, seeking her pleasure wherever she could find it, but never returning to Cyrus’s bed. Two had prayed fervently that the Lord would take pity on them and spare their souls. Both had taken their own lives, one by exposure to sunlight, the other by bathing in a basin of holy water. The others, including his beloved Elsbeth, had been lost to his father’s appetite for power.

Cyrus couldn’t allow Mouse to meet such an end.

Still, his mantra of apology wouldn’t stop, nor the stinging tears that rose in his eyes. “I’m sorry.”

Kneeling beside him on the bed, she transformed from the demon of lust that had unwittingly tormented him to an angel of compassion as she wrapped her arms around him.

None of them had ever comforted him this way. The closest to come to it had been wretched Carrie, just before her blade had split his heart. He let Mouse stroke his hair, and leaned against her at her gentle urging. It was a disgraceful thing, crying like a woman in front of one. In the past, he would have killed her, when he felt better. Now, her death was the only thing he feared, and it frightened him more than the prospect of his own.

His fear transformed into a landslide of gut-wrenching desperation, and he clung to her, knowing his fingers bruised the fragile skin beneath the T-shirt. She said nothing. The tone of her voice never rose above a gentle murmur as she soothed him with mindless words of reassurance.

Her tenderness only amplified his despair. She didn’t deserve this. There were so many people he would love to see die in her place, but it wasn’t to be.

He took her face in his hands and looked into her eyes. He needed to see that she understood. “If we survive this, I will give you everything you’ve ever desired.”

Taking his hands in hers, she gently lowered them to his knees. “You won’t have to.”

She said this to placate him, he knew, because she did not believe him. Or perhaps he’d frightened her. He grasped her shoulders and pulled her forward, trying to communicate the depth of his feeling with an urgent, clumsy kiss.

She didn’t resist him. She didn’t return his kiss with as much enthusiasm as he’d hoped for, either, but her warm mouth parted beneath his as a sound of surprise reverberated in her throat.

This was exactly what he’d been seeking. Acceptance. Not for what he could give her, but for the intention behind it. He had what he wanted, and he wouldn’t need to ask for more.

Mouse looked confused when he pulled away. Cyrus kissed her cheek to reassure her. “Let’s go to sleep.”

Perhaps if he pretended that the new day on the horizon wouldn’t bring them one day closer to the end, he would eventually believe it.

10

March

I was in Cyrus’s bed again. Candlelight flickered on the cream-colored walls. Gauzy curtains floated on a cool night breeze. It was a dream, I knew, because I’d gone to sleep in the back of the increasingly unpleasant van. Also, because Nathan lay beside me.

He touched my face, and I leaned into his palm. “You’re dead.”

That wasn’t what I had meant to say. I knew he wasn’t dead. His terror and pain assaulted me every moment through the blood tie. It had been so overwhelming I’d had to pull to the side of the highway and concentrate on blocking his voice from my head. Then I’d driven the rest of the night in tears, praying he didn’t think I’d abandoned him.

In my dream, he smiled. “I’m not dead. I’m right here.”

His voice echoed in my brain, pleading for help. It had a weird, stereo effect, and the sound waves visibly distorted the air around us. “Did you hear that?”

Of course he heard it. He’d said it.

But Nathan just smiled, oblivious to my distress. “Where are you running?”

The tortured screams rent the air again. “I know I’m not dreaming that.”

I wasn’t sure he’d heard me, so I tried repeating the words, only to find the screams now came from my own mouth.

Nathan pulled me into his arms, and he felt exactly the way he would have in real life, solid and cold.

“You don’t have to run,” he whispered against my hair. “Please, don’t run from me.”

A drop of crimson splashed against the pale sheets.

“You’re bleeding.” I noted the detail with disinterest. The whole scene was boring and loud and annoying. I sat up. Nathan flopped on the mattress, now soaked with red as he bled from the arcane symbols carved into his flesh.

“Carrie, please.”

I turned away. Through the magic of dreaming, I was on my feet. A single step carried me far enough from the bed that I couldn’t hear Nathan and could barely see him. Cyrus waited for me at the other side of the impossibly long room, and I went to him.

“He needs you,” my former sire said without the usual mocking in his tone. “Are you going to go to him?”

I shook my head. “It’s out of my hands now.”

Cyrus’s arms enfolded me, but his hands turned to claws that tore my flesh. I looked into his eyes, and his face transformed grotesquely, then shifted into Nathan’s. He screamed, so loudly and long I thought I wouldn’t be able to stand it.

When I feared I’d go mad from the sound, I woke. My cell phone rang at my side. Still drunk with sleep, I reached for it.

“We should pull into Nevada tonight.”

Byron. “Thank you for the update.”

He chuckled. “I thought you might like to know, so you can get a jump on us. Show up before we get your man.”

“He’s not my man.” The denial escaped before I could stop it. Wincing, I cleared my parched throat. “I mean, I’m looking for him, but—”

“I don’t care, either way.” Byron sniffed. “Have you fed?”

“No. Some of us sleep in.” Truthfully, my blood supply had run so low I’d begun to ration, and my energy had begun to wane. I didn’t know what shape I’d find Cyrus in. If they’d turned him, I’d have to keep him alive until we got back to Michigan. With what I’d managed to save, we still might both starve.

“There’s a place just over the Nevada border that caters to your kind.” The way he stressed the last words of the sentence begged questioning.

Rolling my eyes, I shifted the phone from one ear to the other and groped for my jeans in the tangled sleeping bag. “My kind?”

He chuckled again. “Lady vampires. There’s a brothel about twenty miles past the state line. All pretty men, female clientele only.”

“It’s a donor house,” I accused.

“It’s a brothel. But if you pay them extra, they’ll bare a little neck.” He gave a sigh of nostalgia. “Lucky you.”

“Sorry, I don’t feed from humans.” I’d done it twice, once on Dahlia, once with Ziggy, and both times had provided more than adequate doses of guilt.

“Really? Where do you get the blood you drink, then?”

I bristled at the monster logic that was sure to follow, the same rationalizations Cyrus had used to manipulate me. “Where I get my blood is none of your—”

“Hey, I’m not judging. I’m just trying to give you some pointers. Surviving in the harsh, untamed West is a lot different than your posh, midwestern life. At least, that’s what Road Dog has been telling me.”

“Road Dog?” I remembered his hirsute companion. “For some reason I can’t imagine him saying that.”

“Well, I read it from his body language. When he was eating a trucker.” Byron paused. “So, do you want the address?”

Eyeing the cooler, I sighed. “Can I get it in bulk there?”

“With dry ice.”

“Fine. Tell me the directions.”

It was almost sunup when I reached the elegant, redbrick manor. Despite the fact it was located on a barren back road in the middle of the desert, the lawn surrounding the house was lush and green. At least, from what I could tell between the slashing bars of the tall iron fence surrounding the place. There wasn’t a neighbor for ten miles, but I knew their security concerns didn’t extend to simple burglars.

A sleek intercom console was posted at the gate. I pushed the button to ring the buzzer.

A voice crackled over the speaker a second later. “State your business.”

I recited the password Byron had given me, feeling dirtier by the second. “Withdrawal.”

“Enter.” At once, a loud, mechanical whir set the gate in motion. It opened wide, allowing me to drive up the long, cobblestone driveway. I left the van in the care of a bored-looking valet and jogged up the marble steps to the dark wood door.

When Byron had said “brothel,” I’d imagined an Old West style whorehouse, with red, flocked wallpaper, old-time lamps with beaded fringe and prostitutes draped over velvet chaise longues. When a uniformed butler opened the door, I was pleasantly surprised. Despite the stodgy English exterior, the inside was decorated like a home from Architectural Digest. Long, white runners protected the hardwood floors and sweeping staircase. The walls were painted in very modern white, and track lighting highlighted the hanging artwork.

“The madam will be with you in a moment, madam,” the butler informed me. I almost expected a rim shot to follow his repetitive statement. His face remained humorless, as if he didn’t recognize his pun.

I refrained from pointing it out, and walked slowly through the foyer. To my left and to my right, huge double doors blocked me from further exploration, but the hallway that extended behind the curling staircase seemed to be public property. I strolled leisurely, perusing the artwork. A tall, gilded painting in an ostentatious frame stopped me in my tracks.

“Klimt.”

The rough voice startled me. I turned toward the source of it, a short, generously curved woman with long, springy gray curls cascading over her shoulders.

“Yes, I know,” I said, recovering quickly from my fright. “It’s not the original, is it?”

“You’re damn straight it is.” I couldn’t tell if she was upset by my question or enthusiastic about her property.

Smiling, I sought to correct my faux pas. “My old sire owned a lot of art, but it was all fake, so I find pretty much anything suspect.”

“Oh, shit, honey, I don’t care.” The woman came to stand beside me, pulling a pack of cigarettes from the sleeve of her flowing caftan. “If it was fake, I’d tell you.”

“I didn’t want to offend.” Though my apology probably did offend her. Something in her body language suggested she lived within a “no bullshit” zone.

The woman’s eyes lit up with a spark of amusement. “Did I hear you right? Did you say, ‘old sire’?”

That was a stupid mistake. “I didn’t catch your name.”

A knowing smile crinkled the corners of her eyes. “Because I didn’t give it. I’m March. I’m what you’d call the ‘pimp’ around here, but we say ‘madam’ because it’s more genteel sounding. Don’t worry about your little slip. I like secrets, so long as they don’t drag trouble onto my property.”

I cleared my throat and glanced at the high, arched ceiling. “Your house is beautiful.”

“Thank you. But you didn’t come here to look at the house.” She crooked her finger as she backed to the doors. “Are we on liquid lunch today, or just here for some fun?”

“I need blood.” I spread my hands helplessly. “Whatever you’d call that.”

“I’d call it your lucky day.” With a goofy flourish, March pushed open the doors to my left.

I might have envisioned the decor wrong, but I’d been right on the money about the prostitutes. Everywhere I looked, gorgeous men draped themselves over ultramasculine leather furniture. My eyes boggled at the variety. Dark, fair, longhaired or neatly trimmed, some with androgynous bodies, some overly muscled.

“Take your pick,” March said proudly. “These are the feeders.”

“Um…” I gestured to the foyer, where the butler stood with my bag. One of Nathan’s many, stringent rules was “always be prepared.” In my bag I had all the necessities for harvesting blood from a willing donor. I don’t know how I’d planned to find one in case I needed to, but I was definitely prepared.

“I’m not what you would call…traditional,” I told March. Chewing my lip, I scanned each of the men.

The madam laughed. “There’s nothing you can do to shock them.”

“No, I mean, I don’t bite.” I stepped forward and cleared my throat. Many pairs of curious male eyes turned to me. “I’m looking for someone who’s not afraid of needles.”

There was a noticeable shift in the energy of the room. Some of the men looked away, as if they’d become suddenly interested in the walls. The rest looked worried or amused, or a combination of both.

“Nothing kinky,” I assured them. “I just need blood.”

“Why not bite us?” a tall, thin man with model looks asked.

“Excuse me?” March placed her hands on her hips and raked an angry glare over the men. “Do I pay you to question my customers?”

A few of them offered a grudging, “No.”

“I can’t hear you,” March insisted, raising her hand to her ear.

One voice rose above the chorus of resulting answers. “I’ll do it.”

When I found the source of the voice, my stomach leaped into my throat. When I’d said, “Nothing kinky,” I may have lied. The guy was gorgeous, with long blond hair and a tan that would make Icarus weep with jealousy. He was shirtless, and his faded jeans rode low on his hips.

My mouth suddenly dry, I gestured for him to come closer. “What’s your blood type?”

He laughed. “You’re kidding, right?”

“No. I’ve been doing some research,” I explained, feeling like a hopeless dork. Then I wondered why I cared if some random male prostitute thought I was a nerd. Wiping my suddenly damp palms on my jeans, I continued. “Vampires are able to metabolize the blood they drink more efficiently if the donor’s type matches their own, prevampire type. By metabolize, I mean—”

“I know what metabolize means,” he said with a kneecap-melting smile. “I’m O positive. Universal donor.”

“I think you two will get along just fine,” March announced, stepping forward to loop an arm around the man’s broad shoulders, despite the fact there was a good foot difference in their heights. “Unfortunately, we need to discuss the vagaries of payment and restrictions. Shall we do that in private?”

“Why not?” I followed March and the demigod into the foyer, where I stopped. “I just need my bag.”

The butler was disinclined to release it. “After I search it, madam. Then I will bring it to your room posthaste.”

March winked at me. “It’s a technicality. We’ve had some interesting guests here, haven’t we, Evan?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Evan? He looked more like a…Tarzan, to me.

I followed them up the stairs. March took her time, filling me in on the history of the place. “This house was left to me by my late husband, Edgar, God rest his soul. I lived in it from the time we were married until I moved it here in 1973.”

At the top of the landing, she touched the wall lovingly. “I had it shipped from Massachusetts in bricks and reassembled here, then did some updating and remodeling. Of course, Edgar would roll in his grave if he knew what I was doing with it. Bless him, he never did have much enthusiasm for heterosexual sex.” She sighed and indicated a hallway to the right. “I’ll put you down here.”

Even Cyrus’s mansion, grand as it had been, didn’t rival the sprawling splendor of this house. We stopped at the seventh door on the left—at least I thought it was seven, I might have lost count—and March pulled a tiny gold key from her sleeve.

“There are twenty-nine legal, licensed brothels in Nevada, and we’re the only one that caters to vampires. There are automatic steel shutters in every room, and I do mean every room, of this house, to keep the sun out. There’s also an on-duty physician, in case your session gets a little out of hand.”

“I am a physician,” I said, feeling the familiar sting to my pride as an inner voice taunted, You mean you used to be.

March seemed impressed with this declaration, and I felt we were somehow kindred spirits. We were both professional women, struggling to get by in a man’s world.

Then again, prostitution was pretty much a girls’ club.

The spark of admiration left her eyes and she waved her hand. “In any case, I don’t want it to go that far. You seem like a nice girl. I don’t want to have to put you on my shit list, you hear?”

“Don’t worry about it.” I gave Evan a once-over. Vampires might be stronger than humans, but I was betting Evan had a good fifty pounds of rock-hard muscle on me. He looked as though he could easily snap my neck, and she was concerned for his safety? “What about money? You said we needed to cover payment.”

“I can get it from you at dusk. The standard room rate is two hundred dollars a day. You have to work out the service prices with Evan.” March pushed open the door, revealing a room so stunning it could have been on the cover of a furniture catalog. In the center, on a raised dais, sat an ultramodern four-poster bed enameled in sleek black. The bedding matched the spotless white of the carpet, which was broken at intervals by black leather armchairs and gleaming ebony end tables. The only color in the room was supplied by a vase of bright pink tulips on the nightstand.

Good thing I’ve got some wiggle room in my budget.

“And one last thing,” she said as Evan and I stepped across the threshold. “You might be immortal, but they’re not. All my guys have to use protection, no if, ands or buts. Got it?”

“Oh, we won’t be having—” The gentle, yet oddly pointed closing of the door cut me off.

“We won’t?” The demigod—Evan—actually sounded disappointed. His body heat crept into me as he stepped forward, his hard chest brushing against my back.

I turned to face him. “Don’t you ever want a night off?”

A deliciously wicked smile crossed his face. “Not usually, no.”

In that heart-stopping moment, he reminded me so much of Cyrus, I couldn’t breathe. Oh, he was much more powerfully built than my former sire had been, and definitely more tan. Cyrus had been lean and pale, his hair lighter than Evan’s, nearly white. But the vibe from him was identical: dangerous sensuality coupled with desperation so keen it struck pain in my own heart.

I’d have to have been blind to miss that part: like my first sire, Evan obviously smothered his loneliness in the surety of physical gratification. Unfortunately for him, he didn’t wield as much power over my libido as he thought he did.

A soft knock at the door brought me out of my silent reverie. My face flamed at the realization I’d been staring intently at the man before me, and he’d clearly misinterpreted quiet contemplation for dumbstruck passion. I was relieved to have a reason to turn away from him.

“Your bag, madam,” the butler intoned with a dry note of disapproval as he opened the door.

I wondered how such a stuffy old guy ended up working in a brothel. “Thanks. Just set it down.”

When I was once again alone with my hulking he-man of a donor, I took a deep, fortifying breath.

“Sit in that chair and…” I paused, taking in his shirtless state. “Well, I was going to say ‘roll up your sleeve’ out of habit, but I guess it won’t be necessary.”

“I could take off something else,” he offered, flashing his predatory grin.

“No, that’s fine. You’re about as naked as I can handle right now.” I reached into my bag and pulled out a coiled length of tubing and a collection bag, as well as a butterfly-shaped needle and some antiseptic swabs. I laid my supplies out like a torture chamber cache, expecting his cocky demeanor to waver.

It never did. He leaned against the back of the chair and aligned his arm perfectly with the armrest to display the crease of his elbow. “This is my good arm.”

I eyed the fat, blue vein there with clinical interest, but my rumbling stomach betrayed my intent. “Have your blood drawn a lot?”

“Have to, in my line of work.” He reached for one of the antiseptic pads and tore the wrapper. Sponging a wide circle of alcohol over his arm, he shrugged. “We have to get tested for STDs often, or we lose our licenses.”

“So, what’s up with your friends that they’re so afraid? I mean, they’d rather be bitten by a vampire than get poked by a tiny little needle?” I busied myself connecting the tube to the collection bag.

“That’s probably not it.” He stretched his legs out, and I couldn’t help but notice how long they were. “We get a lot of customers here, and they’re not all pillars of the vampire community. Or maybe they are, and that’s their problem. But after a while, we’ve all learned our respective lessons, and we don’t generally trust vamps who bring props.”

I made a noise of understanding as I stretched a strip of latex around his biceps. I didn’t want to think about what kind of depraved torture these guys had been exposed to. “So, why did you trust me?”

Evan chuckled, a rich, velvety sound that reverberated down my spine. “Because you look harmless. And damn good.”

“Right.” I could barely contain my exhausted laughter. “I’m driving cross-country without a shower, rationing my clean underwear. I’ve been sleeping in a van for the past couple days now. You’re going to have to do a damn sight better than that before I shell out my hard-earned cash on your compliments.”

“I’m not lying,” he said with an earnestness that didn’t sound quite rehearsed enough to not seem genuine. “You’re not caked in weird makeup or wearing all black like the rest of our customers. I’d let you bite me for free.”

It was certainly a tantalizing prospect, at least to my monster side. A brief, vivid image of being crushed beneath his hard body as I sank my teeth into his neck flashed through my mind, and I closed my eyes, shaking my head to get rid of the picture.

“So, how much do you charge?” I asked, turning my mind from impure thoughts.

“For what? The sex or the blood?”

“There will be no sex,” I insisted, a little to myself, a little to him.

“Come on,” he pressed, sliding his hand up my arm. “You can’t tell me you’re not bored, day after day in the back of a van.”

There was a note of neediness in his voice. This man wanted something from me. And there was only one thing humans wanted from vampires. To be turned.

“No,” I said quietly. “I haven’t been bored.”

I’d been kept awake all day by nightmares. As soon as the sun came up, my head filled with Nathan’s screams. Cyrus was out in the desert somewhere and I had to find him before his father got his hands on him. No way was I bored.

With an exasperated sigh, I stabbed the needle into Evan’s vein while he was still planning his next tactic. “And no amount of pretty talk will get you turned tonight.”

My head throbbed. Physical and mental fatigue overwhelmed me. “Is there a bathroom? I really need to get the road dirt off of me.”

Evan pointed the way.

I stepped into the spacious, marble bathroom and turned the taps to fill the tub. I’d collect what I needed from Evan, then pay him and kick him the hell out and take a nice, hot bath.

I leaned my forehead against the cool glass of the mirror above the sink and took a deep breath, preparing to let my guard down and open the blood tie. As soon as I did, Nathan was there, angry and screaming as he had been for the last few days. But there was another presence, too, one I hadn’t felt since the night Nathan had poured his blood down my throat while I was unconscious.

This has to be a mistake.

The steam from the running water became horrendously oppressive, and I struggled to drag in breath out of habit. I wiped my damp hair from my forehead with a trembling hand. If it wasn’t a mistake, it had been a punishment meted out by the cruelest of fates.

The sound of him, a single heart beating in his human chest, almost drowned out the sound of Nathan’s agony as my two sires fought for dominance in my mind.

I gripped the edge of the marble countertop so hard I expected to leave gouges in the stone. When I exhaled, a single word exploded from my mouth.

“Cyrus.”

Then, I was falling, and I didn’t feel it when I hit the ground.

11

Connections

T his time, when he woke, he was careful not to disturb Mouse. He didn’t want to have to explain to her about Carrie, and why he could still feel her.

Because he didn’t have the answer himself.

Trembling, he went to stand beneath the small, high window. The moon was full, filling the basement with an eerie slash of light. Upstairs, the heavy footsteps he’d learned not to hear shook the floor.

In the past few days, he’d almost forgotten he’d been like them. Carrie’s voice in his dream had reminded him. He’d heard her in his water-colored memories in the shadow world. They’d inspired a feeling as close to anger as he’d been capable of then. It had really been more of a passing annoyance. When he’d been pulled back, he’d been enraged at the thought of her. “The one who got away,” some would say, though it wasn’t with fond nostalgia in his case.

But now, he couldn’t conjure even a speck of hatred for her. It was too tiring to be consumed so fully by an emotion, and he was finished wasting time.

Maybe that’s why he’d heard her calling his name. Perhaps his subconscious had been giving him some sort of signal. After all, the school of dream interpretation couldn’t be complete bullshit.

Things were never that simple. In all his life, never once had something turned out to his advantage, and he was sure this would be no different. The dream was a warning. He would meet her again.

The thought of Carrie, who could not love him when he’d been at the height of his power and influence, seeing him in his human shell didn’t rankle the way it should have. Humanity had a few advantages. One being companionship. As a vampire, he wouldn’t have tolerated the company of someone like Mouse. He’d wanted ones who would do anything to be with him. Though timid, Mouse had a quiet dignity. She wasn’t as outspoken and abrasive as Carrie had been—qualities Cyrus had truly admired at the time. Mouse had settled into their bizarre circumstances gradually, and every day a little more of what he assumed was her original personality surfaced.

He was going to have to stop calling her Mouse. But he certainly wasn’t going to start calling her Stacey.

She’d gone to sleep with wet hair, much to his annoyance, but now it curled softly around her face. The fact that she slept so soundly in his presence gave him a little hope for himself. She trusted him to protect her from the monsters. From himself.

Let Carrie haunt me, he thought bitterly. If her memory reminded him of his shameful past, he would bear it. Shame seemed integral to humanity, and if it made him more human, so much the better.

With a shock, he realized he intended to stay this way. Perhaps he hadn’t thought of it before. Perhaps he’d only felt removal from his former species, and just this moment had learned of his intent to distance himself permanently. More likely he’d known, somewhere in the most distant, inaccessible reaches of his soul, since the moment he’d drawn human breath.

Mouse stirred. He went to her side, easing onto the narrow bed as she lifted her head and peered at him with sleepy eyes.

“Did you have a nightmare?”

He straightened the bedclothes to cover both of them and pulled her close. “No.”

She leaned her head against his shoulder. “Are you lying?”

“No, little Mouse. I’m not lying.”

In fact, when he closed his eyes, Cyrus drifted into the first dreamless sleep he’d encountered in seven hundred years.

When I woke, my head throbbed. The room was dim, thanks in part to the metal shutters, the other part to the dial-controlled recessed lighting. Two bags of blood rested in a well-stocked ice bucket on the nightstand.

Evan was gone.

I sat up, wincing at the soreness in my skull. There was a slender vial nestled in the ice bucket between the two bags, and a note attached. I had to squint to read it.

The doctor caught Evan with this. I’d keep a close eye on it, if you weren’t looking to be a sire.

March

I snatched up the vial, my face flaming with anger. How close had I been to having yet another open channel in my head? I glared down at my arm. He’d put a Band-Aid over the bend of my elbow. I didn’t need it, and anyone who’d done any research—such as reading The Sanguinarius, the most well-known and widely respected book in the vampire community—would have known that. It might be the med school in me, but I think anyone who’s about to make a life-changing choice about their physiology ought to know at least the basics of what they’re getting into.

My head buzzed and my vision jarred. It definitely felt as if I was about to have my head filled with voices, so I took a deep breath and imagined a brick wall, the way Nathan had taught me. Of course, when he’d explained it, it had been a shield of white light, but a brick wall with some nice, climbing ivy seemed a bit stronger than that New Age, hippie claptrap. It would block other minds—Nathan’s and now, apparently, Cyrus’s—from entering my own and sapping my strength.

I lifted the vial of my own blood, popped the top off and downed it, trying to ignore the taste. To my vampire tongue, human blood is amazing. Thick and warm and rich with a coppery bite, it’s like no food a human could experience. Vampire blood—at least Nathan’s and Cyrus’s, on the few times I’ve tasted it—was the same, but with an emptiness to it, as though my senses could tell I would not receive the kind of sustenance I needed from it. Plus it was the equivalent of deep-fried, sugar-loaded food for a human. It could screw up your metabolism permanently, like the Soul Eater’s, and for a vampire, permanently was an awfully long time. My own blood, however, tasted just like regular old blood, like I’d gotten a paper cut and licked it clean. It wasn’t pleasant, and I forced my uncooperative gag reflex away in order to swallow. Still, it was better than leaving it out for one of March’s boys to find.

My stomach growled at the reminder of the blood I’d been denied earlier, and I reached into the ice bucket for a bag. Under ordinary circumstances, the blood would be suspect, but I was too hungry and weak to argue myself out of drinking it. My hands brushed something definitely not ice buried under the bag. It was a note, this one folded tightly, the ink beginning to run from the moisture of the ice.

I’ve left some Tylenol in the bedside table drawer. Take it easy until sundown. And then, if you know what’s good for you, get as far away from here as possible.

Evan

I reread the note and stuffed it back into the ice bucket. No way was I taking any pills Evan had left behind. I knew better than to take candy from strangers, especially when they’d already tried to steal my blood. Besides, my headache was nothing a little food and rest couldn’t cure.

Feeling good and lazy, I skipped a glass and slid my fangs through the thin plastic of the bag. I hadn’t fed enough on the trip, and I had a hard time sleeping in the back of the van, let alone in a strange bed in a bordello. All this left me with too much time to think, and of the two people on my mind most lately, the one I didn’t want to dwell on kept forcing his way into my thoughts.

Probably because Evan had almost put me into the same situation Cyrus had been forced into. I’d always imagined Cyrus had some sinister motive for making me a vampire, though he’d insisted it was an accident, and what I could remember of the evening—aside from crawling on my hands and knees through formaldehyde and harvested human livers—didn’t suggest otherwise. As much as I hated the thought he might have been a victim of circumstance like I was, it seemed as though it was true.

What if Evan had taken my blood? When I’d become Nathan’s first fledgling, he’d been incapacitated by fear of losing me. More precisely, the fear of the pain he would feel if he’d lost me. Cyrus had tried everything short of physical restraints to keep me by his side. I knew I was stronger than Cyrus. I must have been, to look him in the eye as I stabbed a knife through his heart. I’d assumed I was stronger than Nathan, but that assertion seemed unfair now. Nathan had lost his son and gained yet another emotional burden, right along with his blood tie to me. All of this, on top of the lifetime of guilt he’d endured for the murder of his wife. How could I measure my untested strength against a man who’d been put through an unending gauntlet of emotional pain?

At times I felt Nathan had overlooked a key component of our blood bond, though. While he ached with loneliness for his wife and son, he had me. We could laugh and joke and fuck, but God forbid he ever share any emotion with me.

I hadn’t considered the possibility Nathan might hear my thoughts until a shattering pain nearly tore the bones of my skull apart. There were no words across the blood tie, only crushing regret.

Now you want to be a part of my life. I knew Nathan was locked in some unimaginable, hellish prison now, but I couldn’t stand a second more of the physical and emotional pain I felt being tied to him. I blocked off the blood tie and wiped tears of shame from my eyes.

I had been so tired, I almost overlooked Evan’s warning. “Get as far away as possible.” Was I in danger here? Would someone burst in and kill me the second I fell asleep? Snapping fully awake, I clicked on the lamp on the bedside table and flopped back on the pillows. I looked at the door. There had to be a way to secure it from the inside, even if it wasn’t immediately visible. After all, March had used a key to unlock it. I rallied what little strength I had left and wobbled to the door. There weren’t any latches immediately obvious in the vicinity of the doorknob, and there wasn’t a dead bolt. But then, why had March needed a key? I tried to turn the knob.

It didn’t budge. I’d been locked in.

Regardless of how much I needed it, I didn’t think I’d be getting much sleep, after all.

12

It’s a Small World

T he werewolf waited for someone.

Max watched her from the safety of his rental car as she sat in the small coffee shop. The Trans-Am, though badass, would have tipped her off to his presence, so he’d had to leave it behind.

He’d add that to his list of “Reasons to Extremely Dislike the Were-bitch.”

To the untrained eye, Bella would have appeared as one of those überconfident women who went to coffee shops alone. No book, no laptop, not even a newspaper to distract her from her solitude. Framed as she was in the sole window of the tiny, brick establishment, she drew the attention of anyone who passed on the sidewalk outside. One man walked into a mailbox, totally oblivious to the world around him as he stared at Bella.

She appeared to be absorbed in thought, but Max saw the way her golden eyes surreptitiously scanned the passersby, and the coffee she’d been nursing had long since gone cold. In the sky above, the moon was full. She wouldn’t assume her animal form. Few of them ever did, though they frowned on the use of science to stop it. No, they did spells, probably with gross ingredients like baby tongues and eye of newt. And they thought a little prick of a needle once a month was a sin worth killing over.

The warm light of the coffee shop’s interior spilled onto the street, illuminating her from behind like an unnatural sun. Supernaturally motionless, she seemed a figure in a painting. Her admirers had no inkling how deadly and dark this mysterious beauty really was.

Shaking his head, Max groaned. She was not beautiful. He was just horny. He’d find a way to make that her fault—not in the obvious way, because bestiality wasn’t his thing—later.

A shadowy figure, dressed far too warmly for the weather, in a heavy black coat, entered through the shop’s narrow door. In the window, Bella straightened and sniffed the air.

The motion accentuated the slender column of her neck and the tracery of blue veins that seemed visible even from across the street. Bullshit, you’re imagining things. Still, Max’s stomach growled and his dick hardened. He could take care of only one problem without getting arrested, so he fumbled in the backseat for his thermos of blood.

“You’re a fucking pervert, Harrison,” he growled to himself as he unscrewed the lid. B positive. Best blood type, hands down.

The shadowy figure sat across from Bella. It was a woman with a shiny black bob and generous cleavage. Something about her seemed oddly familiar, but then, Max could have been confusing her with a chick from the movies.

The two conferred briefly. Though he couldn’t read the werewolf’s facial expression, and the curvy woman’s face was obscured by the shadow of a hanging lamp, he could tell from their body language things were all-business at that table.

“What I wouldn’t pay to hear what’s going on in that messed up little head of yours, wolf.” He lifted the thermos to his mouth, wanting to finish off the blood quickly. He’d never cared for clots.

He’d no sooner taken a swallow than he’d noticed Bella was no longer in the window. Max’s gaze shot from the door to the sidewalk, where she was striding briskly and purposefully away.

He counted to ten before he exited the car and headed for the coffee shop. Seconds later, the werewolf’s associate exited. Max was ready for her.

He clamped his hand over the woman’s mouth as he hauled her into the alley between the shop and an optometrist’s office that had closed for the night. “Don’t make a fucking sound, or so help me I’ll—”

She bit him.

Reflexively, he released her, then cursed himself for doing it.

She laughed, loud and half-crazy. “You’ll what?”

The familiarity he’d sensed at first sight crawled up his spine, and he forced away the resultant shiver. “Who are you?”

“What, you don’t remember me?” She laughed again and grabbed a handful of her black hair. The wig slipped from her head in a smooth motion, and a riot of red curls, which seemed too voluminous to have been hidden beneath, tumbled onto her shoulders.

“How could I forget?” Max stepped forward, backing her up to the damp brick. “Though your name escapes me. Begonia?”

She made a face. “Dahlia. But I’m glad to see I made an impression.”

Max groaned as she slid her hand across the front of his jeans and the substantial bulge there. The night he’d gone with Nathan to help Carrie take out Cyrus, he’d been thrown on the mercy of this insatiable vampire. He’d never really been attracted to ladies with such generous figures, but he’d always said he’d try anything once, especially if it might save his neck.

It had been the best twenty minutes of his life.

Still, that was the past, and Max never looked back. “Darlin’—”

“Dahlia.”

“I didn’t forget.” He extricated himself from her greedy hands. “Listen, I’d never say that I didn’t have a good time with you, but—”

“But you’ve got it bad for Jo Jo the Dog-Faced Girl.” She sniffed. “I guess there’s no accounting for taste.”

He made a face he hoped conveyed pure disgust. “I’m not into the flea scene.”

“Whatever. It’s not like I can read your mind.” Dahlia arched a dramatically shaped brow. “Or can I?”

Damn, she was fun. Or would have been, if he wasn’t in a hurry to catch up with Bella before she gave his best friend a fatal case of splinters. “What did you tell her?”

“Five thousand dollars.” Dahlia held out her plump hand and wiggled her fingers.

“You’re shitting me.” The first tentacles of hopelessness wound around his ribs.

Negative thinking will get you nowhere, he scolded himself. “Come on, baby. You know I don’t have that kind of cash.”

She sighed theatrically. “That’s too bad, then.”

“Come on, cut me a break.” He grinned, slowly leaning into her. “I’ll make it worth your while.”

“That’s more like it.” She crooked her pinkie finger and led him farther down the alley.

He held up his hands. “Whoa, I was thinking more like a hotel or something. At least, let me take you back to the car like a real gentleman.”

She shoved him against the wall so hard he thought the bricks would shatter.

“What the fuck—”

“Shut up,” she hissed, grabbing a handful of his hair and forcing his head back with a resounding thud. “You think I would tell you shit? Just for a little touch?”

“Hey, I thought you were just that kind of girl,” he snarled. “You sold out your ex pretty fast once I slipped it to you.”

Keep up the hard-ass comments. Her voice invaded his head like a bolt of lightning, and he almost shouted at the pain. He squinted at her face, but her lips never moved as the voice continued. I’m gonna keep throwing out generic threats, just respond appropriately and listen to me.

“Shut the fuck up, bitch,” he managed to reply, though his face had gone numb and the insult wasn’t up to par. His head felt as if it was going to split apart. It had been a long time since he’d communicated through a blood tie, but he remembered what it felt like, and it sure wasn’t this. He tried to respond to her, focusing his thoughts through the haze of pain reverberating in his skull. What are you doing to me?

Simple mind invasion. Bella didn’t go far. She’d hear every damn word we’d say. This is the only way to communicate without her listening.

Dahlia kneed him in the groin and he doubled over with a groan.

We need to make it look like we’re fighting, so she doesn’t get suspicious. But that was for forgetting my name.

“Fuck you,” he wheezed out loud. How did she know where to find you? And what did she want?

I don’t know. Maybe she looked up all area vampires who aren’t aligned with your stupid club. I’m sure you all keep a record somewhere. Dahlia didn’t roll her eyes, but Max imagined it to go along with her tone. She wanted to know where your bookstore friend went. I don’t have a clue. I told her to try the cemeteries, but I suggest you follow her because I might not have been far off.

Dahlia leaned her face dangerously close to his and transformed into a snarling, angry vampire. It might have intimidated him if she wasn’t idly stroking the hair at the back of his neck with her fingernails.

“Listen up, bitch. You tell me what’s going on or I’ll slit your throat from ear to ear.” He pushed his hand into her coat and found the buttons of her blouse, deftly popping a few to reach inside.

She shifted her face back and leaned in to trace his ear with her tongue. God, how great she’d been with that wicked tongue. “I’d like to see you try, once I rip your fat head right off your shoulders.”

Fat head? he shot back mentally, though the strain of responding sent up a buzz of feedback in his ears.

Don’t take it personally. She punctuated the telepathic message with a physical shrug. I heard Cyrus is in Nevada.

Who’d you hear that from? “Get your hands off me,” he growled aloud, but as her hands had found the zipper of his fly, he shook his head vehemently to signal she should disregard that instruction as play-acting.

“Make me,” she snarled back at him, simultaneously explaining, The pictures in my head showed me. She made it sound so matter-of-fact he couldn’t bring himself to doubt her sources. All I’m seeing is Louden and Hudson and Nevada. And for some reason, the Virgin Mary. Don’t ask me where that all came from. Now, seriously, shove me. That’s all I’ve got, and she’s starting to think something’s up.

As if on cue, Bella stepped into the alley. Her cold gaze fixed on Dahlia. “That was a truly pathetic display. Did you think you would fool me?”

Dahlia raised her hands and shouted arcane words. A glowing ball of blue grew between her fingers. Before she could release it, Bella whipped her arm out and an arc of red light split the sphere in two, knocking Dahlia back violently.

Then the werewolf leveled a crossbow at Max’s chest. The bolt was metal-tipped, with a wooden shaft. A coward’s long-range weapon.

“I warned you,” she reminded him coldly.

He didn’t get time to negotiate. She fired.

Max Harrison doesn’t die in a dirty alley with his fly unzipped. He dodged, but the bolt caught him in the shoulder. With a roar of pain, he fell to the ground.

Bella bent over him and gripped the end of the arrow. Twisting it cruelly, she wrenched it from his flesh. “One more time, vampire. One more time, and you are dead.”

Like a shadow fleeing the light, she was gone.

Dahlia whimpered as she climbed to her feet, though Max suspected her pride hurt more than her body.

“Do you want a ride home?” he offered, though his shoulder leaked like a broken pipe.

She waved him away. “Do what you gotta do. It was good seeing you again…whatever your name is.”

“Max.”

“Yeah, like I’m going to remember that.” She rolled her eyes at him and limped down the alley on a broken boot heel.

Max checked and double-checked the area around the coffee shop before he crossed the street. The last thing he needed was another run-in with Best In Show.

In the car, he retrieved his cell phone and pulled up Carrie’s number.

I drifted in a world of white. No, not white. Light.

Why can I still hear you?

Cyrus’s voice threatened to split my head apart. I blinked against the blazing assault. Though the air was bright, it was cold. Everything was cold. “I don’t want to be here.”

The light flared brighter, and I fell. Before I hit bottom I saw them. Two bodies, tossed carelessly on the floor, like rag dolls. And blood. So much blood.

Then it sucked away, leaving me in a black void. I panicked. Was I dead? Was I dreaming? Why couldn’t I wake up, or move, or open my eyes?

Carrie, relax.

I startled at Nathan’s voice in my head, calm and coherent for the first time since he’d been taken from me.

I haven’t been taken. Not yet. But I’m running out of time.

“Nathan!” I tried to shout out loud, but no sound issued. What happened? Are you better?

No. The word sent a wave of despair across the tie between us. It’s sleeping. It has to sleep.

What has to sleep? I thought of the demon who’d worn his skin, imagined it as a slimy, scaly thing gripping Nathan in its cruel claws.

I don’t know. I don’t know what it is. There was a note of urgency to his tone. God, Carrie, I don’t what’s happening to me.

His mounting fear turned my throat to dust, and I swallowed. You’re possessed. Max is looking for you, to help you. Where are you?

I don’t know. In the dark. Carrie, please help. The last part came across as a sob wrenched from my own, dry throat. I’m not possessed. This thing…

Silence. I’d lost my link to him. I called out to him, my brain trying feverishly to connect with him, like the marrow of a broken bone reaching for a way to rebuild itself.

“Wake up!”

I gasped as I came awake and felt the pressure of a stake at my chest.

March stood over me, her face framed by the fluffy, red marabou lining the edges of her satin dressing gown. Her knuckles were white from gripping the stake. Her body trembled with rage and she twisted the wood hard, grinding the point into my skin. “Who do you work for?”

This is how I die. “I don’t work for anyone.” I resisted the urge to glance wildly around the room for an escape route. That would give her enough incentive to stab me then and there. “I’m not Movement, I told you.”

“I know that! Do you think I’m stupid? I checked you for Movement connections before you even got this room.” The pressure of the stake let up a bit. Her reason was returning, though just barely. “But it’s not the Movement I’m worried about.”

“Then who are you worried about?” I shifted a little, the wooden point still too close for comfort.

March’s eyes narrowed. She leaned forward on the stake, worming it into my sternum. I could take her, I realized. She was older than me, and therefore should have been stronger. But she hadn’t been at a prime age when she’d been turned. Plus her stance, kneeling on the edge of the bed beside me, wouldn’t support her if I kicked her away.

But then I would have a fight on my hands, and something in her expression told me she didn’t want that, either. “Who sent you?”

“Byron.” I squeezed my eyes shut and prayed it would be the right answer. When the pressure on my chest abated, I felt a little hope.

March stood and lit a cigarette with shaking hands. She held it out to me, balancing the stake in her other hand. I thought briefly about grabbing it and using it against her, but chances were I was still locked in the room, and she probably had a great security system. I wouldn’t make it out of the building.

“No, I’ve quit.” I couldn’t remember when. It hadn’t exactly been a conscious decision. Funny, the thoughts that come to you when you’re about to die.

“Evan was there when you collapsed. He said you were babbling about a simultaneous bloodtie.” She paused to suck in a lungful of smoke, and continued to speak on the exhale. “Wanna tell me about that?”

I sat up, rubbing my chest. “Why don’t you tell me what you’re so afraid of?”

She scoffed and rolled her eyes. “Why don’t you tell me who your old sire was?”

“Oh, this is fun. I think I would have preferred to be staked rather than argue like thirteen year olds.” I sat up and swung my legs over the side of the bed. If she attacked me again, I wanted to meet her on level ground.

“Fine.” March held up a hand as if to stop me coming any closer. “I know, anyway.”

“You do?” I couldn’t keep the surprise from my voice. “How?”

“A lot of forged art. The first person I thought of was Cyrus Seymour.” She cracked a shark’s grin. “That, and you apparently yelled his named when you collapsed. I put two and two together.”

“Very good.” I eyed the stake with new terror. I’d been persecuted before for simply being Cyrus’s fledgling. I’d thought those days were behind me. “How do you know him?”

In a flash, March was on her feet. Way faster than I would have anticipated. She lunged at me with the stake.

I dodged her easily—one very important thing Nathan had taught me was that being calm in a fight gave you the advantage over an opponent who had completely flipped out—and spun around, ready for her next attack. My bag still rested on the floor beside the armchair. I backed slowly toward it. “March, I’m not working for anyone. I was just on a road trip and Byron told me to look you up.”

I was two steps from the bag, but March pursued me slowly, stake raised high over her head like the psycho mom at the end of Carrie. “And do you think I don’t know what he’s up to? Following the Fangs all over the desert, doing whatever they ask of him?”

Byron! Had the little rat sold me out? I should have known not to reveal my intentions for the trip. I should have known not to trust him. How often had men with trendy haircuts and an affinity for overwrought poetry screwed me over?

I bent and scooped up my bag. It was lighter than I remembered it. I didn’t even have to look to realize my stakes were gone. I tried to dodge her next lunge, and ended up flat on my back, my head colliding with the floor in a way that made me appreciate the phrase “seeing stars.” When my vision cleared, March leaned over me, the stake still in her hand. She took a long drag off the cigarette between her fingers and cracked a sarcastic smile. “From what I understand, we have a connection. At least, your sire and my sire do.”

My head was still muzzy. “What?”

She flicked ashes directly onto the floor. A few stinging embers touched my face. “Jacob Seymour. The Soul Eater?”

13

Surrender

T hey came down the stairs at sunset.

Cyrus’s first thought was that he should have locked the door. Then he remembered he had locked the door. Then the door, some of the molding still attached to its hinges, flew down the stairway. It landed on the cheap dinette table, which overturned with a crash.

Mouse screamed and sat up beside him, scrambling backward and clutching the sheets to her chest.

There were only three of them, but Cyrus was human. Weak and human. When one grabbed him, he couldn’t break free. He could do no more than watch as the other two pinned Mouse to the bed. She screamed his name, begged him to help.

He thought of the reason she hadn’t resisted when the nun had been killed, why she hadn’t prayed or pleaded with God for help. Because no one was listening.

She hadn’t made it fun for them. Cyrus knew firsthand the joy of the kill came from breaking the victim. Now, because she had hope, she would be a sweeter plum.

You have to treat her callously. Pretend she is nothing to you, and she will stop struggling. But he couldn’t. His arsenal of cruel words, always at the ready, vanished. If they hadn’t, he wasn’t sure he could have used them, anyway.

He’d promised her safety. He’d lied. He was nothing but an ineffectual boy, playing hero. He could not save this damsel.

The beast on top of her wrenched her head back, baring her throat. At the sight of the healing teeth marks there, the vampire laughed. For a perverse second, Cyrus was relieved her blood was the only prize the monster was after. Then he admonished himself for valuing her chastity above her life. You are truly your father’s son.

The acknowledgment weighed like lead in his chest. He closed his eyes and prayed it would be quick, that she would not suffer more than she already had.

The pitch of her screams changed to startled disbelief, and the rough hands holding him released their grip. He opened his eyes to see Mouse cowering as the vampire above her burst into flame. He burned quickly, a skeleton of ash hanging suspended for a moment, his ribs disintegrating around the blue, flaming ball of his heart. Then the blazing organ extinguished and the beast fell as a cloud of black dust to the bed. The stake that had pierced his heart dropped with a thud onto the sheets beside Mouse.

The two others scrambled for the stairs. Stakes pierced them in quick succession and they met similar fates.

At the top of the staircase, Angie ground out her cigarette. “Sorry about your door.”

Cyrus wanted to rush her with a piece of the broken molding and drive it into her heart. But Mouse was silent, pale and shaking, covered in the remains of a dead vampire. His instincts demanded he go to her more than they urged him to kill Angie.

He helped Mouse stand, and carefully brushed the ashes from her hair, pushing the strands back to examine her neck. There was no fresh puncture. Nevertheless, he asked, “Did he hurt you?”

Mouse shook her head, though if it was a denial or merely the consequence of the tremors racking her body, he wasn’t sure.

Angie came down the stairs slowly, surveying the scene in the apartment with cold eyes. Mouse’s screams started again when she saw the vampire’s face.

Cyrus put himself between Angie and Mouse. “You’re terrifying her! For God’s sake, take that thing off!”

With a shrug, the vampire shook her head and transformed her features. “They hurt her?”

He turned and pulled Mouse into his arms. Her hysterical tears stung the bare skin of his chest where she buried her face against him.

“We had an agreement,” he snarled at Angie. For a moment he heard something of the old Cyrus in his voice. It gave him strength to face her. “What the hell was that?”

“That wasn’t my doing. Those morons came down here on their own.” She lit another cigarette. “Besides, I took care of it, didn’t I?”

She had. But it didn’t make him any less angry. They could have killed Mouse. It would have been akin to killing him. What reason did he have to live if she were dead?

No.

Cold, numbing fear shot through his heart.

But there was no denying it. The stealthy way his eyes sought her out during the day. The way his sinful body hardened against her innocent form as he lay awake, watching her, at night. This wasn’t only lust. He was achingly familiar with lust, and it was easy to distinguish from what he felt now.

He swallowed, and glared at Angie. “What about the door? How will we keep them out now?”

She laughed, a rough sound around the cigarette she held in her lips. “Didn’t keep ’em out before, did it? But it’ll be fixed tonight.”

“See that it is.” His voice shook as he spoke. Looking down, he saw his hands shook, as well. He willed his body to still. The vampire bitch would assume he feared her, when what he really feared stood clinging to him, her sobs finally dying away.

Angie was halfway up the stairs when she stopped. “Your father’s messenger will be here tomorrow night.”

Mouse’s fingers, sharp in desperation, dug into Cyrus’s shoulders as her body tensed in fear.

The vampire didn’t pay any heed to her reaction. “I’ll have him pick up a spare in town, if you don’t want to do her when you’ve turned.”

“Thank you.” It was an odd thing to say, but he was truly grateful he wouldn’t be tempted to kill Mouse.

At least, not tomorrow.

He led her to the bed, a sick feeling in his gut. Once they turned him, would he be able to see her as something more than food? When he’d been human before, he hadn’t held the regard for life the way he did now. Would he be a different vampire, or would the sadist lurking in his worthless soul prove itself stronger than this suspicious humanity?

She stood by, quietly crying as he shook the ashes from the sheets and remade the bed. He looked up from tucking a corner of the blanket in, to see she stood with a dustpan and a broom at the foot of the stairs.

“Let me,” he said more gruffly than he’d intended as he took the broom from her hand. He thought it would calm his nerves to focus on the task of cleaning up the monsters’ remains, but he only grew more agitated.

They’d been so much stronger than him. If Angie hadn’t shown up, he would have had to watch helplessly as Mouse died. The memory of her screams was salt in the wounds to his pride, and he threw aside the broom with a curse.

Mouse jumped, startled out of her lingering terror.

He never shared thoughts of inadequacy with others. Once they knew he doubted himself, they would begin to doubt him, as well. But he couldn’t keep these concerns secret from her. Compelled to talk, either from years of bearing his fears alone, or from the fearful emotion tearing at his guts, he muttered, “I couldn’t protect you. I can’t protect you like this.”

“Like what?” Her gaze moved up from his feet. “Naked?”

He would have laughed at that, if he’d been in a better mood. Feeling suddenly vulnerable, exposed, he grabbed his pants from the end of the bed and pulled them on. “I’m not joking. I’m worthless like this.”

She wrapped her arms around herself. “You’re not worthless.”

“I’m human!” He raked a hand through his hair, pulling it away from his forehead. “As long as I’m like this, I can’t protect you. And once they turn me, I won’t be able to protect you from myself.”

“You’re scaring me.” She climbed backward up a stair, then looked over her shoulder at the looming, open doorway and scrambled back down.

He didn’t want to scare her. He liked it so much better when she gave shy smiles and fell into stilted conversation with him. But he wanted more. He wanted her at his side willingly. He wanted to know she was safe, and wanted her to know it.

“I don’t want you to die.” He went to the bed and dropped down, covering his face in his hands. The words, once he began to speak, were surprisingly easy and terrifying. “I want you to be alive, with me. I want to leave this place, and I want you to follow me. For once, I want someone to follow me. Because I want you. I love you, and…”

She knelt at his side and laid her hand on his knee, but she didn’t speak.

God, what had he said? What would he say when he opened his mouth next?

Words he couldn’t stop poured from him like the hot tears that welled in the corners of his eyes. He lifted his head to look at her. Her expression was kind and concerned, as though he were a child who’d scraped his knees.

Her kindness was a high ledge on a tall building, one he couldn’t help but test by stepping onto it. “Could you ever love me?”

She didn’t answer right away. What fearful iron door would slam closed to him if she said no? Would he bury his hurt in cruelty, the way he’d always done when someone rejected him? That wasn’t the kind of person he wanted to be. His tongue felt thick in his mouth as he tried to repeat himself. “Could you—”

“You can’t love me,” she interrupted quietly. Her palm was warm against his face, but not as shockingly hot as it would have been if he were a vampire. No, now human touch wasn’t severe. Her eyes sad, she stroked his cheek. “You’ve only known me for three days.”

He laughed at his own stupidity. “It feels…”

“Real,” she finished for him. After a moment’s hesitation, she took his hand and laced their fingers together. “I know. And I know it can’t be real. But I’ve always prayed for something to happen. Something to make me happy. I know I’m going to die. Maybe you’re…Maybe this is all the happiness I’m going to get.”

Her reasoning pierced his heart, but he wasn’t fool enough to believe he could really love her. The same disgusting desperation he’d seen in hundreds of frightened, cast-off girls, he recognized in her. And in himself. He opened his mouth to disagree with her, to insist she would live to find better, but her mouth crushed his and she wound her arms around his neck. He lost his balance and they fell across the bed, her hands tangling in his hair to hold his face to hers.

As if he would let her go.

He was conscious of raising his arms, but had no control over the way they curved around her back and tightened, pulling her so hard to his chest he could barely breathe. She squirmed in his grip and he loosened his hold. He didn’t want to scare her. In a crazy way, he felt if she pulled away now he would lose her forever.

Her hands splayed on his chest. Their touch burned him, but he shuddered as if she were made of ice. He moved his lips from her hungry mouth to the delicate curve of her jaw—how could he have ever thought her plain?—then to her ear. She moaned, a sound at once endearingly innocent and painfully arousing. Thrusting his fingers into the gentle waves of her hair, he gathered the softness to his face.

The feel and smell of her dredged up all the nights he’d spent in the arms of lovers, wives, wishing they would return his affection, and pretending all he desired was their bodies. They never returned his love, even when he demanded it.

Perhaps she didn’t either, but he had not asked her to say the words. He’d asked her to love him. In her kiss, Cyrus had found Mouse’s answer. She could, and did, love him. For whatever reason, she trusted and loved him.

Reaching for the hem of her T-shirt, he skimmed his hands up her bare legs, over the curve of her buttocks as he bunched the garment around her waist. He rolled her onto her back, covering her with his body as he did so, and her eyes flew open in shock. For a moment he imagined she would end it, but longing glazed her eyes again. He captured her mouth with his before she could have another moment of doubt. She believed he was her last chance at happiness, so he couldn’t help but wonder if she was his, as well. If that was true, then he needed this.

She lifted her hips against his awkwardly, her brow creasing in frustration above her closed eyes. He leaned back, concentrating his gaze on the seam in the hem of the T-shirt. If he looked anywhere else, at the questioning on her flushed face, at the dark hair shadowing the junction of her thighs, he might think, might talk himself out of this.

Cyrus glanced across the darkened room to the stairs, but he knew no one would be watching. None of them would dare come down after the fate that had befallen their comrades.

Mouse rose on her elbows and helped him pull the shirt over her head. That moment of bravery was short-lived, fleeing once she was exposed before him. She folded her arms across her breasts. With shaking hands, he guided them away, leaving her bare to his gaze. Her chest jerked with her harsh breathing. Though the room was not cold, her skin puckered with gooseflesh and the rosy peaks of her nipples hardened.

Cyrus covered one breast with the palm of his hand and Mouse moaned, arching into his touch. He fought the temptation to compare her to the others, the ones he’d seduced into giving up their bodies and their lives. This was different. When this night was over, she would still be at his side. It was a frightening, comforting thought.

He dipped his head to her neck and kissed the hollow of her throat. When his lips strayed to the yellowing bruise where he’d bitten her that first night, she didn’t tense, but he stopped cold.

She touched his back, dragging her fingertips across the skin of his shoulders. “It’s okay. You didn’t mean to.”

“I did.” He rolled off of her. “I meant to hurt you. I enjoyed it.”

The gentle understanding in her eyes sent a spear of self-loathing through his heart.

She reached for her discarded shirt and held it to her chest. “I forgive you.”

He closed his eyes against the tears that threatened him. Could something as simple as her absolution save him from himself? He doubted it. Maybe he would always doubt his ability to be good.

But that was, apparently, what she was there to stop him from doing. While he was content to doubt the goodness in his soul, she seemed determined to draw him back to more earthly matters. Sliding toward him, she tentatively pressed her mouth to his chest. When he didn’t object, she continued to kiss him, stroking her palms in a maddening path from his ribs to the waistband of his trousers. She lay back again, and he lay beside her, bracketing her body with his hands as he slid down to rest his face against her thigh. As a vampire, he would have cut the tender, white flesh at the bend of her knee to drink her blood. It had always been his favorite moment, looking up at their faces when they’d gotten their first taste of the pain he would inflict on them. As a human, making love to a human, he had no desire to cause her pain. He bent his head and licked the warm crease there. She jerked on the bed, her eyes wide. He couldn’t help his smile as he moved his mouth farther up her leg, with his hand on her firm, warm calf. The closer he drew to her sex, the faster her breathing became. When he knelt on the floor and pulled her to the edge of the bed—a little roughly, for it couldn’t be all gentle—and traced the seam between her legs with the pointed tip of his tongue, she arched off the mattress and clawed at his shoulders, gasping.

The taste and smell and warmth of her intoxicated him. Her fingers tangled in his hair, pulling him closer. He groaned against her slick folds and eased one finger into her. He hadn’t guessed wrong the first time he’d touched her intimately; she was a virgin. Though now she was open and willing, the thin barrier remained.

“I know it’s a sin,” she informed him with a moan. “But I want you to. I want you to do it.”

He laved his tongue over her engorged flesh, teasing her with his teeth until her body arched again and tensed, and she pulled his hair to the point of pain. The sound of her climax started as a low moan and rose in pitch to a keening wail, and her body trembled as she peaked. Before her pleasure could subside, he rose and spread her legs. Her eyes narrowed in trepidation, then flared with panic, and she lifted her hands as if to push him away. He wondered if she would ask him to stop. He knew he would, if she did so. But her arms dropped to her sides, hands fisting as though she braced herself for what was to come.

The heat and wetness of her enticed him. His body urged him to continue, and if this was the past, he would have obliged himself. He’d taken particular delight in the cruel deflowering of many a young girl then. But he didn’t want to see that pain in her eyes, the fear that she’d begun something she had no power to stop and no strength to finish. He had to work to unclench his jaw as he stroked the side of her face with his fingertips. “Are you sure?”

She hesitated a second, then wet her lips and nodded with a huge breath. Before she could think or wonder when the pain would come, he thrust into her. The barrier released with an unpleasant gush of wetness, and it was done. Beneath him, she stiffened. He expected her to scream, and she looked for a moment as though she’d expected to, as well. The sound never came.

“That wasn’t so bad,” she whispered with a small laugh. She lifted her hips against his, gasping when he slipped in deeper. “This isn’t so bad.”

They laughed together and he kissed her, his chest tight with happiness. When she moved beneath him again, the happiness was overshadowed by the urgent demands of his body. It didn’t take Mouse long to overcome her inexperience. She rocked against him, panted and clutched at his shoulders, and he closed his eyes to avoid the erotic sight and maintain some self-control.

He couldn’t escape her moans of pleasure, though, or the hot, wet grip of her surrounding him. He sought out her swollen bud and rubbed her with the pad of his thumb until her loud breaths and frantic, senseless pleas for release signaled the approaching culmination of her pleasure. He braced himself against the mattress and abandoned all thought of gentleness or care, driving into her so hard her breath exploded from her with every pump of his hips.

She did scream then, her nails biting into his arms where she gripped him. He let himself go, shuddering over her and inside of her. When he regained his senses, he withdrew, wincing at the friction of her grasping muscles against his painfully sensitized skin.

They lay in silence for a long time, their legs hanging off the side of the bed. Cyrus studied her with detached interest. The moonlight from the small window above them dusted her skin with silver as he watched it grow rough with gooseflesh. How she could be chilled when his heart hammered as though he’d run a marathon, and sweat still poured from him, was a mystery.

“I’m cold,” she whispered sleepily, and he sat up to help her right herself on the bed. When he pulled the sheets over her, he saw her blood there, and closed his eyes. How had he ever been able to revel in the pain of others like her? How had he taken pleasure from taking life, when now he felt so guilty over a smear of virgin blood?

Those days of callous disregard were over. All that mattered now was the woman at his side, who was real and solid, and who loved him, even if she was afraid of him. Like a fool who repeatedly stuck his hand in the fire and was surprised by the burn, Cyrus once again trusted the feeble hope for happiness that grew in his soul.

This time will be different, he assured himself. It would be different, because it had to be. In his weak, human state, he wouldn’t survive if it weren’t.

But he was kidding himself. If he had the strength of a god, he wouldn’t survive losing her.

Though sunrise loomed pink on the horizon, Max gave Dahlia the benefit of the doubt and decided to check one last cemetery. The first two had turned up only sleeping homeless people and thrill-seeking teenagers. This close to dawn, both types would have moved on.

He pulled the car to a stop at the closed iron gate and ignored the scheduled visiting hours posted beside it as he climbed the stone wall. The early morning dew made the ascent slippery and wet. When he landed, his T-shirt stuck to him and his jeans were uncomfortably chilled against his thighs. “Nathan, if you are here, I’m going to kill you.”

Not that he wanted to see Nathan.

Since the day they’d spared his life, Max had made it a rule never to cross the Movement. Sure, he’d been less than diligent when tracking quarry sometimes, but there was a big difference between missing the opportunity and coming face-to-face with it, only to let it run off scot-free.

No pun intended.

Two paths curved in opposite directions around a hill dotted with leaning, broken monuments. Elaborate mausoleums lined the outside edges of the paths, marble houses that reeked of death so strongly Max couldn’t believe a human couldn’t smell it.

He started up one path, determined to get his patrol over with before he wound up with a terminal case of sunburn. Then he caught the whiff of something sinister on the air.

At first, he’d thought it was merely the smell of another body, probably another of Nathan’s victims. Then he realized the copper scent had a warm, living edge to it, and he tore off in the direction of the blood.

The first thing he saw was her leg stretching past the end of one ivy-covered crypt. The black leather boot on her foot was muddy and torn, as though the fight had been long and rough. A rip in her pant leg showed a bloody gash from knee to ankle, laid open so wide the shocking white of bone showed through.

The sight was enough to make bile rise in his throat. When she’d attacked him outside the coffee shop, she’d seemed invincible. Now, Bella had been reduced to a broken heap of ruined parts.

Whoever had done it was still there, breathing heavily, just out of sight. Max tore around the corner of the crypt and stopped dead in his tracks.

It took him a moment to recognize the monster looming over her was Nathan. When the sick comprehension dawned, Max couldn’t move to draw his weapon. The creature that used to be his best friend turned, face bloody from feeding, and snarled at him. Instead of charging, though, it looked at the lightening sky and took off, leaping to the top of a mausoleum, then disappearing behind it.

Max put his hands on the lip of the stone, preparing to chase after the beast, then heard Bella moan. If he left her where she was, someone might find her. The caretaker would probably be in to open the gate and would likely have a look around to make sure there hadn’t been any shenanigans overnight. But Max didn’t know anything about werewolves, and couldn’t be sure she would survive that long without help.

Fuck her. She tried to kill you, he reminded himself. If she’s dead, she’s one less thing to worry about.

But he didn’t work that way. He wished he did.

With sunrise just minutes away, he had no time to hunt for Nathan. To do so would probably only get them both killed. And werewolf or not, Bella was a fellow Movement assassin. He couldn’t let her die.

Cursing her stupidity good and loud so she could hear it even if she’d already shrugged her mortal coil, he bent and lifted her limp body in his arms. “You better pray Nathan’s got a primo fucking first aid kit back at the apartment, or you’re in real trouble, lady.”

It took some maneuvering to get her over the wall without breaking her neck, but the classic fireman’s carry came through in the pinch. Max wrestled her into the car and positioned her head against the window so she would appear to be sleeping and not mortally wounded. “If you bleed on the seat, you’re off my Christmas card list.”

Somewhere in the cemetery, his assignment was escaping. He looked from the jagged stones at the top of the hill to the dying woman in the seat beside him and swore. With a final, vehement curse, he pounded the steering wheel and sped away.

14

The Past Comes Back To Haunt You

M arch’s private rooms were at the back of the house. She led me to a huge conservatory, a glass bubble filled with verdant plant life and flowering trees. The floor, an intricate mosaic of tiny tiles, wound in paths around beds of soil. The snaking trails converged in the center of the room, where water trickled down the face of a craggy boulder that nearly reached the ceiling. In front of the impressive fixture, a striking red Shinto gate stood watch over an elaborately set tea service.

March indicated I should sit at the delicate, wrought-iron table, and despite my simmering anger, I did so. “That’s an aggressively spiritual symbol you have there, considering what you are.”

“What, a vampire can’t be spiritual?” She looked astonished in a worldly way, a contradiction that didn’t surprise me. The woman was as hard to read as a book written backward. “The Shinto tradition is concerned mainly with the spiritual affairs of the living. As I am eternally living, I don’t see the harm in believing something.”

“That’s not what I meant,” I explained as she poured blood from a Victorian-style teapot. “I thought it was an overtly spiritual thing for you to have, considering you’re a vampire pimp who sneaks up on people to murder them in their sleep.”

She grimaced, a smoke-roughened laugh escaping her bared teeth. “Now, why did you have to use that word? It’s such a nasty label for what I do.”

“What about ‘kidnapping’ or ‘false imprisonment’? How do those suit you?” I made no attempt to hide my suspicion as I refused the blood she offered me. She’d held me hostage—granted, I couldn’t have gone anywhere during the daylight, anyway—and tried to kill me. Just because she’d decided to offer me breakfast instead didn’t mean I’d roll over and we’d become bestest friends.

As crazy and paranoid as it seemed—and it did seem that way to me, after I’d applied said paranoia to every person I’d seen on this trip, from tollbooth operators to truck stop waitresses—I couldn’t help but suspect she knew what I was up to in the desert.

I couldn’t tell from her Cheshire Cat smile if she really did know or if she’d just picked up on my discomfort. “Well, we can just put all that behind us. Your sire is the fledgling of my sire, after all. That makes us practically family.”

I glared at her. “Practically. Except Cyrus isn’t my sire anymore.” I hesitated. “He’s…dead.”

“Is he now?” She poured some blood for herself and sipped it, her eyes never leaving my face. When she finished, she dabbed her lips with her linen napkin, leaving dainty spots of blood on it. “Isn’t that sad? You’re an orphan.”

I thought of Nathan, and the word orphan imprinted on my brain like a searing brand. “I’m not. Even if I was, I wouldn’t count the Soul Eater as my next of kin.”

“You know, I’ve never liked that name. It’s so confrontational. And it makes it sound like he’s doing something wrong.” She lit up a cigarette, every movement as casual as if we were discussing the weather.

“You’ve got to be kidding me.” I was reaching the frayed edges of my patience. “He kills vampires for food!”

“You kill people for food. What’s the difference?” The practiced naiveté with which she posed the question made me stumble over my answer.

And that hesitation told her everything she needed to know: I didn’t kill for blood. In her eyes, that labeled me weak. Prey.

“No matter how I feed, I still have ties to the Soul Eater,” I said quickly.

“So do I.” She took a long draw off her cigarette and smiled. “And I know he can’t stomach your kind. Sniveling cowards who deny their true nature.”

I couldn’t argue with her. If the Soul Eater had his way, vampires would be more far more aggressive about their status as top of the food chain.

“Did you know who I was when I came here?” It seemed too fortuitous that Byron had led me to this place, knowing my destination.

She shrugged and flicked the ashes off her cigarette into her saucer. “A friend called and mentioned that a person of interest was going to show up.”

“So, if I’m a person of interest, then you must know something of what’s going on with the Soul Eater.” I waved her smoke away with feigned annoyance.

“I know he’s up to something. But you probably know more than I do, considering you’ve come all the way out here.” March leaned back in her chair. “I suppose you thought I’d have all the answers? And that I’d just give them to you?”

Helplessly, I nodded. “Stupid me, I guess. I just thought your vampire daddy might be keeping you in the loop.”

She chewed her lip, regarding me indecisively. Then she took a deep breath and exhaled noisily. “You’re looking for the guy in the desert?”

I reached for my bag, only to remember it was still in the foyer. “I have money. I’ll pay.”

“Don’t bring the vulgarity of money into this.” She pondered a moment, a look akin to pride on her face. “I wonder what kind of kickback I’ll get if I hand you over to Jacob.”

“You’ll get killed.” I racked my brain for any detail I could use to sway her, any warning. The truth seemed the best way to go. “He’s trying to become a god. I admit, I don’t know the guy real well, but with a name like Soul Eater, I don’t want him having cosmic power. Fledgling or not, you have to admit, if he manages to go through with this, everyone is fucked.”

“It will be the end of the human race and eventually the vampire race, blah blah blah.” She sighed, making a jabbering duck mouth with one hand as she rang a silver bell with the other. “He’s talked about doing something like this for years. Worked on it a bit with his son, actually. But he’s never going to pull it off.”

“Oh, yeah?” I snapped. “Guess who’s been raised from the dead?”

To her credit, her surprise didn’t show as much as it could have. She ground out her cigarette with a muffled curse. After a long moment squinting at me with barely veiled resentment, she conceded defeat. “I love Jacob with all my heart. But loving isn’t the same as trusting, by a long shot. What do you need from me to get your part of this done?”

“I don’t have any connections here. I need a road map, at least. And old newspapers, if you have them.” Where the Fangs went, chaos followed. There was no chance a sleepy area like Death Valley was going to miss marauding hordes of vampires. Something was going to end up in print.

With a long-suffering sigh, she lifted the silver bell that rested at her right hand and rang it again. The butler appeared and bent stiffly in deference to his mistress. March handed off the saucer she’d turned into an ashtray, then massaged the bridge of her nose with her fingers. “Have you taken the recycling to be done?”

Recycling? At least, March had an environmental conscience, if no other kind.

Eyeing me with distaste, the servant cleared his throat. “I believe that takes place every other Thursday.”

“Load the newspapers in the back of her van. Just the local ones.” She turned to me again and arched a brow. “Unless you think scouring the New York Times would help?”

“Was there anything out of the ordinary in them? Anything at all you can remember that seemed…more sensational than usual?” Of course, I supposed sensational was relative to a man who worked in a vampire whorehouse.

“I am sorry, miss, I do not read them.” Turning back to March, he asked, “Will that be all, ma’am?”

She nodded. “Yeah, I think so.”

With another stiff bow, he left us.

“Sorry I couldn’t be of more help. We’ll make sure you get the proper supplies for your trip.” She grinned, looking pleased with herself.

I was still convinced she hid something. “Thanks for the hospitality.” I hoped she felt the sarcasm of my words as a bite.

“Well, sweetness, I got a whole bunch of human business coming in tonight. Episcopal Women’s Altar Society bus trip. Told their husbands they’re going to a Bible summit on gay marriage.” She stood, indicating I should do the same.

I could take a hint. She was done supplying me with information that would lead to the death of her sire. “Just one last question?”

After a moment’s hesitation, she nodded. “Why not?”

“How come he didn’t take your soul?” We began to walk down the path. I thought perhaps she’d decided not to answer.

Then, without a hint of deception or theatrics, she said simply, “He took someone else’s.”

A chill went through me at the memory of how he’d taken Cyrus’s wife, Elsbeth, without a thought for his son’s happiness.

March shrugged, as though the fact her soul was spared by the death of another’s was par for the course. “I’m not going to say it was right. But I’m glad it wasn’t me who died.”

I believe there is a defining moment in everyone’s life where they seal their own fate through words or actions. My parents did it when they got in their car to visit me in college and, six hours later, wound up bleeding to death on the side of the road. I’d done it when I’d gone to the morgue to view Cyrus’s body, and he’d gone from being another John Doe to the creature who haunted my nightmares.

A creeping wave of icy foreboding seized me. I couldn’t tell when, I couldn’t know how, but I knew March had already set in motion the events that would lead to her death.

“You’re not dead yet,” I reminded her, my throat suddenly dry. “But you will be.”

My warning didn’t alarm her as much as I imagined it should have. “Well, we’ll all be gone someday. No sense in fearing it.”

“I’ve died. Fear it.”

We sized each other up for a grueling minute. I would have paid several thousand dollars to know what she thought, but her mask of emotional obscurity was firmly in place. “Last town before the true desert is Louden. Drive like hell and you can get there before sunup.”

I didn’t see March again after she left me in the foyer. She didn’t say goodbye, so much as “pleasure doing business with you,” and even then I didn’t truly believe it.

The supplies that had been removed from my bag were returned to me, along with some I doubted I’d have any use for: sleeping pills, chloroform, bungee cords and gauze bandages. I looked them over and raised my eyebrows at the butler.

“For ‘human wrangling.’ The madam’s idea.” He didn’t sound enthused to be supporting me.

From an inside jacket pocket, he produced a map. “You’ll find the most efficient route to Death Valley is highlighted.”

“Why is she helping me, when she wouldn’t bother giving me a straight answer before?” I took my bag, heavy with its new cargo, and tucked the map into my jeans pocket. As I trudged wearily to the door, grateful to be out of this place, the butler’s voice stopped me.

“Perhaps she does not think you’ll succeed. Did it occur to you she might be helping you to your death?” His imperious tone was beginning to get on my nerves. “But I believe it is more a case of ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend.’”

I didn’t turn to face him, and resumed walking, pausing only to open the door. “I won’t fail. This is a cakewalk compared to what I’ve been through.”

“The madam also wishes you to know that if she sees you again, she will kill you on sight.”

I stepped out into the cool Nevada evening. The stars seemed to shine brighter here, and hung so close I almost felt I could touch them. The sight grounded me in the gravity and reality of what lay ahead of me.

I had most of the puzzle pieces. Now it was just a matter of fitting them together.

“She won’t see me again.” I took a deep breath of the fresh desert air. “But tell her I said ditto.”

When I left, I didn’t look back. I think I expected to see the place had been a mirage, evaporated into heat waves in the air.

The vampires sent to fix the door woke them. Cyrus held Mouse, who clung to him in mortal terror as the two creatures respectfully retrieved the broken door and carried it up the stairs. They apologized in advance for the noise they would make.

Cyrus expected them to bow and scrape as they exited, such was their cautious demeanor. Angie had most likely put the fear of God—or, more aptly, the fear of Angie—into them.

“They’re gone,” he whispered to Mouse when the vampires had trudged noisily up the stairs. “You don’t have to fear them.”

It felt like a lie the moment he said it. Hadn’t he proved himself useless in protecting her?

If she connected his words with his shameful failure before, she didn’t give it away. She let go of him by increments, easing into her space on the narrow bed. They lay in the quiet darkness for a while, listening to the low voices of the vampires working at the top of the stairs. Occasionally, a mechanical whirring or rhythmic pounding shattered the calm, but Cyrus was so tired he could have slept through it.

He didn’t, though. Polite or not, he wasn’t stupid enough to trust the creatures. Not when they had such easy access to prey.

Mouse apparently didn’t trust them, either. Though Cyrus had thought her asleep, her voice surprised him. “It’s still night?”

“You haven’t been asleep long.” A nagging protectiveness in his head reminded him she should get her rest. But a selfish part of him was relieved she stayed awake. He liked talking with another person, something he hadn’t done enough of during his former life, and he feared the changes that were about to come.

Oh, he’d probably be turned into a vampire. As much as he wanted to stay human, if his father demanded otherwise he could do little but object. The deed would still be done. But he would make certain that Mouse never met the fate his past wives had. She would never be a vampire, and therefore would never be food for his father’s insatiable craving for souls. That, he would not abide.

“What were you like, when you were one of them?” The question was startlingly familiar.

The memory brought hot shame to his face. “I told you.”

“You didn’t answer. You tried to scare me. I’m not scared of you now.” As if to prove her words, she reached up to brush the hair from his eyes.

He didn’t want to admit the truth, but he wouldn’t taint their new bond with lies. “I was trying to scare you. But I told you the truth. I’ve done…horrible things.”

Her eyes, clear and honest, searched his face in the darkness. “Why would you do those things?”

It wasn’t a question he’d bothered to ask himself. The first answer that came to mind, the one most likely to be true, was monstrous, but he had no other reason to give her. “Boredom?”

The fear and disgust he expected never registered on her face. “You killed and tortured people because you were bored?”

He made an affirmative noise in his throat. “And lonely.”

“That doesn’t make any sense.” Her frown evolved into a quirked smile. “Of course you’d be lonely, if you killed everyone around you.”

“Not everyone. There were some I tried to keep.” He tightened his arms around her. “Now that I have you, I don’t remember why I wanted to keep them.”

“I like that.” She laughed quietly and nestled her head against his chest. “You have me. It’s nice to belong to someone.”

After a long silence, she looked up. “What were they like?”

He didn’t want to talk about them now. It seemed wrong, somehow, as though he lived a double life. In a way, you have. It was a different life, but he couldn’t forget it. If he forgot his past transgressions, he might forget how to be the man he was now. And he liked that man.

“I had a wife.” He chuckled at that understatement. “I had many wives. Ten, I think. After five, it becomes hard to remember. And then there were others, ones I didn’t marry.”

“Did you love them?” There was an unspoken qualifier at the end of her question, punctuated by the quaver in her voice.

“I didn’t love them more than you.” It was a frightening truth. He’d mourned them all, but he’d come to expect losing them.

The workmen, apparently finished with their job, shut the door with a reassuring bang. Cyrus thought of locking it, but since it hadn’t kept out intruders before, he didn’t see the sense in leaving the comfort of the bed.

“Did you make any vampires?” Mouse fidgeted as though embarrassed by asking.

He was about to answer, “What would it matter?” Then he realized the reason for her interest, and he couldn’t believe his stupidity. Of course she wondered.

“I would never make you become one of them.” He sat up, dragging her with him. He knew the tight grip he had on her arms must hurt her, but he couldn’t let her go. She had to understand his devotion was not dependent on his humanity. “Tell me you trust me.”

“I trust you,” she said hesitantly. “You wouldn’t make me one of them.”

“Tell me you love me.” It was suddenly vitally important to hear it from her, without explanation or dissection of their motives.

“I love you.” A tear rolled down her cheek. “I do.”

They made love again, frantic at first, with fierce kisses as they tumbled violently across the bed. Once he was inside her, though, wrapped in the reassuring warmth of her body, the urgency melted away.

Leaning above her on his elbows, he stared into her face. “Tell me again.”

She wet her swollen lips and pressed them close to his ear. “I love you.”

She repeated it over and over, and he let her.

No one had ever said it to him before.

15

The Key

I f not for Carrie’s extensive library of medical textbooks, Bella wouldn’t have survived an hour past sunrise.

And that was saying something, considering how close Max had cut it to sunup. He’d skidded sideways to the curb in front of the apartment just as morning washed down the street in a deadly wave. He’d dragged her body from the passenger seat with little care and bolted to the shelter of the recessed doorway.

Not soon enough, he thought ruefully, sponging antiseptic over his charred shoulder. His tissue had already begun to heal, and vampires were largely unaffected by germs or bacteria, but the cool liquid took some of the sting out of his burns.

With a worried glance to the unconscious werewolf on the couch, he set aside the gauze pad and bottle of solution and reached for one of the open medical books on the coffee table. He’d managed to stop the bleeding from the wounds Nathan had given her, but werewolves healed more slowly than vampires, almost at a mortal rate. Some of her injuries would need stitching, a task he didn’t look forward to.

At least she was asleep. It would spare him the inevitable womanly shrieking he’d endure if she was awake when he did it.

If he was honest with himself, he’d have to admit his real fear came from the thought she might see him pass out when he first tried to jab the needle through her flesh.

Taking a swig from the flask of Scotch Nathan thought he’d hidden well, Max rose and approached Bella’s unmoving form.

Asleep, she didn’t look half as bitchy as she did when she was awake. But that could have been the blood loss. “Okay, we got clean towels, we got this fishing line stuff, we got a…” He swallowed a tide of nausea. “We got a needle and these sterilizing wipes. I think we’re good to go.” He hadn’t been able to find the weird pincers thing the guy was using in the picture to hold the needle, but how hard could it be to just use fingers?

Kneeling beside the couch, Max reached for her ankle. If she’d been conscious she probably would have driven a stake through his heart for daring to touch her. She was lucky she’d decided to get mortally injured when he was in a charitable mood.

The leg of her leather pants lay open to her knee in much the same pattern her flesh did. He grabbed the bottle of Bactine and squirted it liberally into the jagged wound.

“Kill off anything that decided to move in,” he said, then felt like an ass for bothering to explain himself to a half-dead werewolf.

He flipped the curling edges of the fabric back for better access to the injury, then decided the pants would just have to go. Then he felt like a pervert.

First, he tried to be civil about the process, patiently but impotently struggling against the leather with kitchen shears. When it seemed he was more likely to slip and stab himself or her than actually cut the pants, he gripped the ruined fabric and yanked, splitting them to the waist. With another tug, her leg was bare from hip to toes.

God help him, she wore black lace panties.

He took another swallow of Scotch to fortify himself and hopefully burn the devil out of his sinful soul. There she was, practically dead and not even his own species, and all he could think about was the way her tan skin stretched over her smoothly rounded hip.

Clenching his teeth, he pulled her uninjured leg free and tossed the ruined garment aside. Bracing her foot against his chest, he peered at the book. No matter how many times he studied the illustrations, he would never be ready. So he ripped the sterile packaging off the needle and threaded it with nylon floss, took a deep breath and went to work.

His stitches started out clumsy and uneven, but he soon fell into a rhythm of pinching the flesh closed, piercing the edges and pulling the thread taut. Once wet with blood and the sweat from his hands, the needle slipped from his fingers often—the reason for the pincers in the illustrations became painfully clear—but as far as he was concerned, he wasn’t doing a bad job of things. He became so absorbed in his task, a plane could have crashed into the living room and he wouldn’t have noticed.

“Not bad.”

He jumped at the sound of her voice, and she hissed as the needle scraped torn flesh.

“Don’t startle me!” He wiped perspiration from his brow with the back of his hand and glared up at her, but he couldn’t maintain his anger when he saw the state she was in.

Her usually golden skin was ashen, and sweat beaded on her forehead. Her mouth clamped in a grim line and she held her body rigidly still.

“I thought you might like some positive feedback.” Her voice rasped as if she’d swallowed a mouthful of gravel, but she gave him a tight smile with pale lips.

“You don’t look so good.” He concentrated again on the task at hand, trying and failing to ignore her stifled cries of pain as the steel passed through her skin.

Through uneven breaths, she gasped, “You can thank your sainted friend for that.”

“Because you’re injured, I’ll let that slide. Along with the fact you tried to kill me earlier this evening.” He jerked the thread a bit less gently than necessary to punctuate his statement, and watched from the corner of his eye as she gripped the couch until her knuckles went white. “You lost a lot of blood. When I’m done here, I’ll get you set up on a transfusion.”

“You know how to do that?” she asked, surprise apparent in her strange, lilting voice.

He rolled his eyes. “I’m a vampire. We’re experts in getting blood into people.”

“I know you knew about getting it out of people.” She rubbed her neck, looking vaguely shocked to find it bandaged. “But he only bit me once.”

“Maybe he didn’t like the taste of dog.” Max pushed the needle through her flesh again and winced at the pained sound she made in reply.

“You are making it hurt more on purpose,” she accused. If she hadn’t sounded so helpless, he would have shown her what it would feel like if he intentionally hurt her.

Instead, he handed her the Scotch. “Do you need a break?”

She tilted her head back to drain the flask. After she wiped her lips, she adopted a determined expression. “Get it over with.”

To distract himself from the few yelps she couldn’t hold in, and to distract her from the pain as much as he could, he asked questions. “So, how did this happen?”

“I took your girlfriend’s tip and checked the cemeteries.” Bella clenched the back of the sofa as though she was going to climb away from him.

“Relax. It’ll be harder to finish this if I have to chase you around the apartment to do it.” He took a deep breath and rolled his head to ease the stiffness in his neck. “And Dahlia is not my girlfriend.”

“Well, it was a good tip.” Belle grimaced ruefully. “In theory. I thought I had him. He seemed lucid, until I realized he was not talking to me, but to a person who was not there.”

“He was talking?” That twisted Max’s guts. If Nathan had simply gone insane, there was no help for him. Only one facility existed to deal with vampires who went south of reason, and the Movement probably wasn’t going to welcome a marked vampire in.

She nodded, blowing out a shaky breath. “For a while. Then he completely changed.”

“Into a vampire?” Max tossed his head to get his hair out of his eyes, coupling the motion with a flash of his feeding face.

Her eyes flared, a spark of anger lighting her pupils. “Do not do that. And no, he was still human looking.”

Max looked doubtfully at her shredded leg. “He did this to you in regular Nathan form?”

“He managed to do the leg with the bolt I fired into him.” She shrugged. “It was not my night for aiming.”

“Should have quit while you were ahead.” The wound was nearly closed. All that remained was to tie off the floss. “Still don’t believe he’s possessed?”

It took her a moment to answer. “I do not like to concede that I was incorrect—”

“Flat-out wrong.”

She pursed her lips. “Incorrect. But yes, I do believe you. When he attacked me, he was not in control of himself.”

Max carefully lowered her leg to the couch. “From where I stand, I think you have two options here.”

“I cannot wait to hear them.” She narrowed her eyes and folded her arms across her chest.

The defiance on her sweat-streaked, pale face brought a crooked grin to Max’s lips. If she was well enough to be a pain in the ass, she might not be in such bad shape, after all. “The first one is you can either hook up with me and help figure out what’s going on with Nathan—”

“And be renounced by the Movement.”

He resisted the urge to growl at her; it might be considered foreplay to her kind. “God forbid that happen. I mean, they’re only going to kill me. What will they do to you, fire you?”

“Point taken.” She narrowed her eyes. “Continue.”

“Or you can stay here until I can get the situation under control. It’s up to you.” He rose and stretched, giving his gently phrased threat a moment to sink in.

It didn’t have the effect he’d hoped for, though in hindsight it had been stupid of him to think she would bend easily.

“Do you think you can keep me here against my will?” She glared at him. “You have to sleep sometime.”

He reached into his back pocket and pulled out the handcuffs he’d tucked there. He’d found them in Nathan’s closet while looking for the first aid kit, and while he didn’t want to speculate on why they’d been there in the first place, he was glad to have found them. Her eyes widened as he dangled the shining restraints from his forefinger. “I’ll even let you pick where I lock you up, baby.”

“I will tear you apart,” she threatened, the last of her words turning into a growl as they escaped her throat.

“Bad dog,” he admonished, twirling the cuffs around his finger. “You’re not doing anything of the sort. At least, not in the state you’re in.”

He’d expected, hell, even looked forward to, the venom she should have spewed at him, but she only closed her eyes and rubbed her forehead with a weary sigh. “You are right. I cannot fight you. Yet.”

“So, I take it we’re going with option number two?” He sighed. “Remember, it was your choice.”

“And remember, there is still one night of the full moon. I might forget the code of my people, just this once.” Her tone was pure hatred poured into words.

He shook his head. “Sorry, honey. Max Harrison is not going out as dog food.”

If looks could kill, the one she gave him would have been a wooden stake. “I would not eat you. Your flesh would taste like carrion.”

“You wound, lady,” he mocked, laying his hand over his heart.

She held her wrists out resolutely. “Close to the toilet, please.”

Max returned the cuffs to his pocket and went to examine the shelves on the far side of the room. “I won’t lock you up until I’m ready for some shut-eye.”

“What are you going to do in the meantime?” She didn’t seem all that interested. In fact, it sounded as if she was trying to pick a fight.

Max wouldn’t give her one. “I’m going to start going through Nathan’s books, and try to figure out what’s happening with him. And if the possession has anything to do with what the Soul Eater has going on.”

“The Soul Eater?” She spoke his name with the requisite awe all Movement assassins who hadn’t tangled with the man himself displayed. “Does your friend have ties to the Soul Eater?”

Max pushed back a book on medicinal herbs. “Uh, yeah. Nathan is his fledgling. Don’t you guys do research over there anymore?”

“I do not question. They gave me a kill order and the instructions to complete it immediately.” She at least sounded a little ashamed at having missed that particular detail.

“Well, if you’d bothered to ask me, rather than shoot on sight, I could have filled you in. The Soul Eater is trying to become a god, and we’re thinking that has something to do with the fact that his son has just returned from the dead and his fledgling has gone schizo.” Max waited a minute for his words to sink in before adding, “Now don’t you feel foolish for trying to kill me?”

“Does the Movement know what is happening?”

“Not that I know of. They had us on the plane before we could figure it out ourselves. The Oracle told Carrie.” Another book on herbs. Either Nathan was a total pothead or he really put a lot of faith into the whole New Age thing.

“The Oracle?” Bella’s voice was small, almost frightened.

Turning to her, Max hooked his thumbs in his belt loops. “I didn’t mean to upset you. Here’s the deal. You help me find Nathan, I’ll trust you not to run. If we find him and we can figure out a way to cure him of whatever this thing is, you leave him alone. If it turns out he’s past the point of no return, you can stake him and take the credit back to Breton. I’ll even forfeit my pay on this one.”

She considered for a moment, and Max continued. “What’s the worst that could happen? You don’t get to kill him. But there are plenty of other vampires out there to kill. And I’ll consider it a personal favor.”

She raised a hand to shut him up. “I will help you find your possessed friend and I will not kill him when we do. At least, not until we are sure there is no hope for him.”

“That,” Max said, a new, grim determination gripping him, “is the only smart thing you’ve said since we met.”

I pulled into Louden just before sunrise and parked the van in the lot of a semideserted strip mall with a Laundromat and a shabby looking dollar store. I secured the doors, double-checked the ties of the canvas partition and slid into the back, where I dug into a huge pile of the Hudson Herald and the Louden Times. The butler had followed March’s instructions to a tee, loading up over a week’s worth of the two publications. It was tempting to just start at the date of Nathan’s possession and work forward, but med school had taught me better. Cutting corners always comes back to bite you in the end.

I’d read about some fairly innocuous local occurrences: the opening of a new Wal-Mart, an eighty-six-year-old rancher caught growing marijuana in his basement. I shifted my “read” pile away from my “to be read” pile, and there, on the top of the stack, in letters as long as the palm of my hand, was the word Fire!

I scanned the page frantically to find the date. Three days before I lost Nathan.

“St. Anne’s Catholic Church burned down early Saturday morning, and three parishioners are missing.”

Unbidden, the image from my dream flashed through my brain. Two dead, covered in blood. I’d thought it a premonition, when really my stressed brain was just having a field day inundating me with horrific imagery. The article went on to list the missing persons—a priest, a nun and a parish secretary presumed to have wandered into the desert—and an ominous warning about record temperatures making their chances of survival slim. And the missing persons had made no effort to contact authorities when the fire broke out. That struck me as a bit fishy.

I sat back on my heels, unsure what I should read into such a news item. For a sleepy town like Louden, a big fire was big news. That there were three people wandering the desert when they should have been resting in a county morgue’s cooler made it a piece of interest. If the Fangs were in town, what were the chances the victims never called the fire department because they were dead already? It would be just like the Fangs to trash a church.

I read on, searching for any other unusual news stories until I couldn’t stay awake anymore, then fell asleep with my head cushioned by the local girls’ volleyball scores. I don’t know how long I’d been out when my phone rang.

“What the hell kind of brothel did you send me to?” I hissed after I hit the connect button. “A male prostitute tried to steal my blood yesterday!”

“Um…this is Max.”

“Oh.” I’d been expecting Byron to call and gloat or give me another travel tip. “How are things in Michigan?”

“Apparently not as interesting as things in—Did you say you were in a brothel?” Max’s voice lacked his characteristic humor. In fact, he sounded pissed off.

“Well, technically…”

His loud curse soared above the crackle of static. “Oh, that’s great. I’ve been sucked into a parallel universe where everyone else gets to have sex and I get to walk around with a permanent hard-on. I’m in hell.”

“Let’s not get graphic.” I wiped a line of drool off my cheek and hoped the newsprint hadn’t marked my skin.

Max was silent for a moment. When he spoke, his voice was grim. “I found Nathan.”

Oh, God. My arm fell, as though it were no longer attached to my central nervous system. Had he killed Nathan? I tried desperately to connect to the tie I’d blocked before. I’d stupidly, selfishly shut myself off from Nathan, and now he was dead. I’d wasted my last moments with him.

“Carrie, are you there?”

I made a squeaky affirmative noise, not wanting to sob into the phone.

“He wounded the other assassin pretty bad. I haven’t seen him since.”

If I had been standing, I would have fallen down. The relief would have dissolved my knees right there. I wanted to open my mouth and shriek praises to the sky, but all I said was, “Oh?”

“Well, don’t sound impressed or anything.” He made one of his long-suffering-Max sounds. “I had to trail Bella forever, she kicked me in the face, she shot me but yeah, my hard work is nothing to get excited over.”

I held the phone away from my face and frowned at it. “She shot you? Max, are you okay?”

“Yeah, I’ll be fine. It’s just a flesh wound,” he assured me cheerily. “I’m going out again after sundown. Anything on your end?”

“I think so. It may be nothing.” I dismissed the notion because it was too unlikely. “I don’t know, this drive has been weird.”

“Oh, I understand, what with the male prostitutes and all. But it’s about to get weirder. I ran into Dahlia.”

Though the gesture would have been lost on him, I’d been prepared to raise my middle finger at the phone. I froze at his words. “Dahlia?”

“Yeah. She had some psychic vision. I’m not sure what it was about. And I wouldn’t put much stock in it before exhausting all other options, but—”

“I would.” Dahlia had powers I would never underestimate. “What did she say?”

“Louden. And Hudson.” He said the words as if they weren’t sending electric shocks straight down my spine. “Oh, and the Virgin Mary fits in there somewhere.”

“Max, I have to go.” I resisted the urge to ask him to be careful one last time, and clicked the phone shut. Grabbing at the stack of papers I’d just read through, I found the bulletin about the church fire again. There was too much coincidence, too much about Dahlia’s vision that supported my suspicions. Cyrus was at St. Anne’s, or had been before it burned down.

I forced myself to sleep—I had no clue what I would face in the desert and I needed to be prepared for it—only to be woken just after sundown by the roaring of motorcycles.

At a strip mall in Louden, the Fangs found me. My first thought was to follow them. Then I got some sense and realized a bright orange, hulking monster of a rusted-out van was probably not the best camouflage. I was on the right track. I couldn’t blow it by being impatient.

When they finally left the Laundromat—I was deeply shocked they’d make any use of that facility at all—I headed for the newspaper machine and bought a fresh copy of the Louden Times. A week had put some space between the story I looked for and the front page, but I eventually found a sidebar follow-up. Police hadn’t been able to locate the body of Stacey Pickles, age eighteen, but they had recovered the corpses of the other two victims. The state of the remains suggested foul play, and anyone with knowledge of the whereabouts of the missing girl was instructed to call local authorities.

Using details from the articles and the map March had given me, I was fairly certain I could find the place. Whether I could find it before the Fangs did whatever they planned to do with Cyrus was another thing. Then there was the small detail of actually getting him to leave with me, but I figured negative thinking would only limit my chances of success.

Besides, I still had the chloroform.

It was time. Ready or not, it was time to face Cyrus again.

A loud bang on the passenger side of the van made me practically jump through the roof. Outside the window, Byron grinned stupidly at me. “Hello! Have a nice time?”

I lunged across the seat, forced the door open and grabbed him by the collar of the poncy, ruffled shirt he wore. He protested loudly, but had no choice but to get in. I’d caught him by surprise and had more leverage.

“Hey, this is a very expensive shirt!” he howled, grabbing the fabric from my hands.

“It’s about to get dusty!” I grabbed a stake and pressed it against his chest. I hoped it tore the precious silk. “Why did you set me up?”

“Set you up?” he sputtered, his wide eyes fixed on the stake. “I never did any such thing!”

“March told me she was contacted by you. That you told her I was a person of interest!” I twisted the stake.

It was almost embarrassing the way he yelped. “I never meant any harm, I swear! I thought she might be able to help you!”

“Help me?” I released the pressure a bit. I wasn’t stupid enough to believe he’d come to me without new information, and it wouldn’t help me any if I accidentally killed him. “What do you mean?”

“I thought since you were looking for this fellow, she could help you. March is very well connected.” He pushed away the stake, and I let him, watching with amusement as he rubbed his chest in a wincing display of pain.

“She’s connected, all right. She’s connected to the Soul Eater.” I reached behind me to slip the stake into my back pocket. At Byron’s startled gasp, I raised an eyebrow. “Oh, so you’ve heard of him?”

He nodded, still rubbing his imagined wound. “Heard of him? There were rumors of him even in my time. Vampires have always been very popular. Ever read The Picture of Dorian Gray?”

“That wasn’t about vampires,” I pointed out.

With a knowing smile, he said, “Oh, wasn’t it?”

I sighed. “Listen, I don’t have time to talk about literature. Your friends down there are probably going to pick up Cyrus tonight, and I need to get to him before they do.”

“Which is precisely why I’m here.” Byron dug into the front pocket of his too-tight jeans and withdrew what looked like a glow-in-the-dark marble.

“What’s that?” I wanted to add a snide comment about him not explaining why he’d told March what I was up to. But then, he couldn’t have known we would be enemies.

“It’s a key. The Fangs are using a cloaking spell to disguise where they’re hiding your man. If you have this, you’ll be able to see what no one else does.” He smiled. “And what my uncouth companions will not be able to see, now that I’ve nicked it. But you don’t have much time. They were expecting them in an hour at least half an hour ago. And they’ll soon realize they’re missing something.”

“Wait.” It was too suspicious, his risking his life to help me. “Why are you giving me this?”

“That, you see, comes at a price.” He grew serious then, grasping my hands in his soft, elegant ones and pleading earnestly, “Let me write about you.”

“What?” I jerked back.

“I can’t get a book out of those cretins. They’re vile and uncivilized. I can’t spin a tale of desert heroism from them!”

“Oh, and you can get one out of me?” Right. Like I’d make such a great heroine.

He nodded vehemently, gesturing with his frilled sleeves as he began to proselytize on my virtues. “You’re like…a modern Corday. Striking a lonesome, yet powerful blow for your cause in a Reign of Terror you cannot abide. Readers will love it!”

I wasn’t buying it. “And the fact that you just happened to be the one who sold me the knife…”

“Naturally, I—I would have to figure into it, as the narrator. Peripherally, of course,” he stammered, at least having the good grace to look sheepish. “But the core of the story would be your valiant yet noble struggle for good.”

“Oh, like Blood Heat?” I couldn’t help the jab.

“Mock if you must. But you can’t have the key until you give me your blessing.” He held up the marble between his thumb and forefinger. It shone icy blue, as though a tiny galaxy of cold white stars existed inside.

I sighed in resignation. “You’re going to write it anyway, aren’t you?”

He nodded.

“Fine.” I snatched the key from his hand. I’d expected it to feel magical somehow, but it was only a small, smooth weight in my palm. “Where are you going to go? They’ll kill you when they find you, you know.”

“I know. That’s what she’s for.” He leaned clear of the passenger-side window so I could see the orange Volkswagen Rabbit parked beside a light post. A woman who appeared to be in her forties, with puffy, bleached-blonde hair and lipstick far too light for her orangey tan, stared back at us with worried eyes. “Her name is Penny. She’s going to give me a ride to the next town.”

“Don’t tell me how you have to pay for the gas,” I quipped as he opened the door and hopped down.

“I wish you well, dear Charlotte,” he said with a sincerity I truly believed as he swept a low bow.

I smiled, in spite of myself. “It’s Carrie.”

He straightened and turned toward the car, where Penny waited. As he walked away, he called back, “Not in my book.”

And like that, I had what I needed.

Now all I had to do was psych myself up for the job. When I’d prepared for the trip, I’d imagined actual physical combat as some far-off, never-never land probability. Now that it was a reality, I panicked. How would I fight any vampires who might give me a hard time? Nathan had taught me some simple self-defense, but these vampires served the Soul Eater, a dangerous enough task on the most mundane days. Add to that the fact most of them liked fighting and killing almost as much as they loved their bikes, and the prospect of little old inexperienced me beating one, let alone a group of them, in physical combat seemed pretty damn remote.

And if I did survive the gauntlet of hardened assassins, there was still the problem of Cyrus. If they’d turned him into a vampire again, would he be restored to his old strength? He’d crush me. Or would he still be human? Would I have to fight my own urge for revenge?

The past two months hadn’t been sufficient to numb me to the memory of his cruelty. I’d felt more pity than rage for him at the end, but I was more human than most vampires would admit of themselves. After the pain of losing Nathan, the loneliness of the last weary days, would I snap and take out my aggression toward the Soul Eater on Cyrus?

Then, there was another, more terrifying possibility. When I’d been blood tied to Cyrus, I’d been drawn to him in a way I couldn’t explain. It hadn’t been love, but a sinister parody of it. I’d been completely enthralled. Now that our mental connection was regenerating in fits and bursts, would I fall prey to that dangerous attraction again?

No. I was a stronger person, having defeated him once. Still, the prospect of seeing him again didn’t inspire a lot of confidence.

First thing first, though. I had to get to him without running into the Fangs.

The charred remains of St. Anne’s Catholic Church lay like a giant, abandoned campfire in the sand. It had burned completely to the ground. How the Fangs had hidden anyone here, with no shelter from the elements, without burning up from the desert sun, was beyond me.

I drove past the ruins, aware someone might be watching, and looked for an inconspicuous place to stash the van. Unlike the Road Runner cartoons, there were no convenient outcroppings of rock for me to hide behind, Wyle E. Coyote style, while waiting to ambush, and the Fangs from town were still out there somewhere. I pulled to the side of the road and propped the hood open, praying the flashers wouldn’t wear down the battery. All the stealth and cunning in the world wouldn’t help me if I successfully abducted Cyrus, but had no transportation away from the scene of the crime.

I felt a little foolish as I looked over the supplies March had provided. I’d never chloroformed a person before. I’d never tied someone up—at least, not for the purpose of kidnapping. I felt like a beginner skier staring down the steep face of the advanced slope. More than anything, I wanted to go back to the bunny hill.

“Where is that damn spare?” I said a little too loudly, in case someone was around. I pulled the glowing marble thing Byron had given me from my pocket and rolled it in my palm.

Instantly, a flash of light like a heat wave shivered up from the ground. A millisecond later, the roar of an engine filled my ears.

I turned toward the source of the sound and nearly rubbed my eyes, until I remembered I wasn’t supposed to be able to see the scene before me. Seemingly from nowhere, the ruined church had reassembled, the stained-glass windows illuminated from within casting weird colors on the desert sand. Bathed in the blue glow of a mercury light, a few vampires revved their motorcycles impatiently as two other figures argued animatedly in front of them.

With the sound of the engines covering their voices, I couldn’t tell what they were arguing about, but they were unconcerned by my presence at the side of the road, and that was all that mattered. They thought they were invisible, and that was all right with me, as long as they didn’t decide to take advantage of the element of surprise and come out to grab the tasty stranded motorist. After a few minutes of pretending to rummage for something in the back of the van, I retreated to the front and leaned under the hood, as though something might be wrong there.

From the few glimpses I could sneak of the parking lot, I saw the argument devolve into a shoving match, then a full-fledged fistfight. Now I could guess what they fought about. The Fangs from town had never shown up. Finally, the bikes grew louder, then began to roll onto the road, their riders intending to look for their friends, I presumed. The lumpy shape of an unconscious vampire remained on the pavement as the rest of the horde thundered away in the direction I’d come from. I wouldn’t have much time before the two groups met up with each other.

With a distinct feeling of now or never, I slipped the chloroform in my back pocket, a stake into the opposite one, and set off.

It was just my luck the vampire came to as I entered the parking lot. He cradled his head in his hands and cursed, blinking rapidly to clear his vision. As he did, his feeding face flashed on and off, like a broken neon sign. I cleared my throat to get his attention as I approached.

“Fuck,” he repeated, pinching the bridge of his bloodied nose with his thumb and index finger. The digits protruded from a fingerless black glove and were marked with bad, homemade tattoos.

“Hi. I had some car trouble. You got a phone in there?” I smiled, hoping I could squeak by before his head injury cleared up and he remembered he was supposed to be invisible.

“No, there ain’t no phone,” he growled, but his demeanor changed instantly as he dragged his gaze from my shoes to my legs and parts farther north. “Somebody musta forgot to pay the bill.”

When he laughed, it sounded like dirty bubbles popping in his throat. He smiled—I guess I was supposed to find the expression charming—and displayed broken, rotted teeth. His dirty hair hung down beneath a ratty bandanna, but he looked as though he honestly believed I found him attractive.

“Oh, darn.” I eased my hands into my back pockets, my fingers closing on the stake. I waited for the moment when he would realize something was amiss. When he was wrapped up in his confusion, I would strike.

It didn’t take as long as I expected. No sooner had I spoken than his brow wrinkled and his eyes narrowed. “Wait a minute, you’re not supposed to—”

I lunged forward, bringing the stake down hard so it would penetrate his sternum. The impact vibrated up my arm, shaking my bones painfully, but I’d hit my mark. He didn’t have time to scream before he burned.

Good thing, too, I thought as I rubbed my elbow. I wasn’t exactly in fighting shape.

It seemed too gutsy to burst through the front door. Besides, they’d spray-painted a huge, complicated mark on it, and I had the sneaking suspicion it might be another spell-type thing to keep out, or alert them to, intruders. I walked around the side of the building, where no lights indicated the presence of the Fangs.

A side door, carelessly left unlocked, opened to a dark room. I would never accuse the Fangs of being an intellectual organization. It took me a minute to recognize it was a kitchen. My gaze fell on the empty sink. If Cyrus was human, they either weren’t feeding him or they were diligently doing the dishes.

I was feeling pretty confident as I crossed to the door opposite me. Then it opened, and in stepped the ugliest vampire I’d ever seen.

I think she was a woman, but I didn’t have time to ask before she grabbed a butcher knife from the counter and hurled it at me. I dodged it, whirling toward the huge commercial gas stove. I grabbed one of the cast-iron burner plates and hurled it at her. She knocked it out of the air with a swipe of her huge forearm, and kept advancing.

Retrieving the stake from my pocket, I braced myself in a ready stance. But she didn’t attack me the way I thought she would, with full physical contact. Instead, she lunged, grabbed a handful of my hair and jerked me upward.

Plenty of experience with battered women in the E.R. had taught me a valuable piece of combat knowledge: Never let your hair go where your body doesn’t. Once the scalp was pulled free of the skull, it didn’t grow back easily. I wasn’t willing to chance it, so I stopped struggling, dropped the stake and clamped both my hands on my head as she hauled me over the top of the stove. With an expression of clinical disinterest, she flicked the dials and ignited the burners.

Pain exploded in my back as my flimsy T-shirt caught fire and seared my skin. Screaming, I kicked my feet, grappling for footing as I lay horizontal on the stove. I managed to hook my heels over the lip of the counter and arch upward, breaking free just long enough to get out of the range of the flames.

Though I was clear of the burners, I was still on fire. I dropped to the ground and rolled on the shockingly cold tiles, yelping in agony as my charred T-shirt separated from the skin beneath.

The vampire made another lunge for me as I rolled to my feet. I sidestepped her, and her miss proved to be my window of opportunity. I snatched the stake from the floor and caught her between the ribs as she rounded for another pass.

Her face contorted in disbelief as flames traveled up her body. She clenched my arm, my hand still locked on the stake, in a death grip, as though the simple action would be enough to drag me into hell with her. Then her hand disintegrated into ash and I tumbled backward onto my burned elbows.

With all the noise we’d made, I expected the room to flood with angry biker vampires. When it didn’t seem that would happen, I climbed to my feet and shrugged off the burned remains of my T-shirt.

Of course, I couldn’t have worn a decent-looking bra.

Why does it matter what you’re wearing when you find him? my all too insightful brain asked accusingly. And don’t let the fact you’ve probably got third-degree burns bother you more than your appearance, or anything.

Shaking my head as though I could knock the thoughts loose, I stepped cautiously through the kitchen door, into a wide hall. The floor bowed out to accommodate a curved inner wall. I’d never been a faithful churchgoer, but I knew enough to guess the room beyond the wall would be the important one. As I advanced along the curving hallway, the large, double doors of the main entrance came into view, along with the set of doors leading into the church proper. Another chalked-on sigil marked the latter. Beyond them, the muffled sound of music didn’t disguise angry voices.

No wonder the vampires hadn’t heard the struggle in the kitchen. I pressed my ear to the wood, avoiding the chalk marking, to eavesdrop.

“Where the hell is Angie? The glamour’s not going to hold much longer if she doesn’t get her ass back to the circle,” an agitated male voice warned.

“She’ll come back,” a calmer female replied. “She’s probably checking on the guy.”

The guy. That could only mean Cyrus. My heart pounded wildly in my chest. That someone else acknowledged his presence made my job suddenly too real.

“If she’s not back in five minutes, I’m going after her,” the male vampire declared. His footsteps thundered closer to the door than I found comfortable.

I backed away, glancing around for some way to secure the doors from the outside. A row of chairs was lined up waiting-room style beside a rack of pamphlets about natural family planning and how to pray the rosary. I grabbed the nearest chair and lifted it off the floor so its legs wouldn’t make a sound. With held breath, I eased the flat back beneath the door handles and slid it up until the rear legs were wedged against the carpet. It wouldn’t hold them indefinitely, but it would give them some trouble, if I was lucky.

Down the hall a little way I found another door. This one was plain wood, with rough edges and a flimsy doorknob. I tried the handle and found it unlocked.

Does no one care about security these days?

A set of stairs led down into a dark basement that, at first glance, appeared to be empty. My foot was on the second step when the rhythmic creak of bedsprings stopped me.

A woman gasped and a man groaned in the darkness. The hair on the back of my neck stood up. I recognized that male sound.

I guess Angie was “checking” on him, after all. Unexpected jealousy burned in my stomach. I blamed it on the sputtering blood tie between us, and the fact I hadn’t exactly planned to walk in on him mid-coitus.

I flattened myself against the wall, praying I was out of sight of the bed, wherever that was. Charging down the steps and starting a fight would only get me killed, especially considering this Angie person apparently had something to do with the spell cloaking the place. I’d had plenty of run-ins with witches—well, at least one—and I didn’t feel like taking my chances with another.

It seemed like forever before they were finished, probably because of the awkwardness and embarrassment of the situation. I started to wonder how much time had passed, and if the vampires upstairs would come looking for Angie. I hadn’t heard any pounding on the doors yet, but I might have mistaken it for the pounding of the bed against the floor. They were really going for it downstairs.

Finally, their ecstatic noises ceased, and the bed creaked as Angie climbed from it. “I’ll be in the bathroom.”

I found it strange that a vampire with the power to make an entire building vanish into ruin would speak with such timidity to Cyrus, human or vampire. Then again, mortal terror of his dear old daddy probably inspired unusual reserve in most of his followers.

I heard Cyrus’s sigh of contentment over the rustle of sheets as he arranged himself on the bed. A pang of longing speared through me, the exact feeling someone would get watching the ex they dumped shopping happily for china patterns with his new love. You can put the vampire into the human, but you can’t take the human out of the vampire.

When the bathroom door closed and I heard the sound of running water, I made my move. I came down the steps as quickly and quietly as I could, but he still heard me. My eyes adjusted easily to the darkness and I found him, staring at me in disbelief as he sat up on the bed.

He was still human. I could tell from the smell of him, and the warmth that seemed to wrap around me. He’d cut his hair.

He opened his mouth, probably to shout to Angie for help. All he managed before I covered his mouth and nose with the chloroform-soaked scrap of my burned T-shirt was “No, she’s—”

Then it was done. He dropped, limp and unconscious, to the bed, and I lifted him over my shoulder. Carrying his weight this way was easier, but getting up the stairs took a bit more effort. Luckily, the woman in the bathroom seemed to be filling the tub. She never heard me struggling up the steps, into the hall and back through the kitchen.

If my departure had set off any sort of magical alarm, it was too late. I dumped Cyrus in the back of the van and drove into the desert before anyone could pursue us.

16

Unpleasant Discoveries

D espite the fact she could barely walk, the damn woman insisted she come along with him.

Max ground his teeth as he paused for the umpteenth time for Bella to catch up. “You know, this would go a lot faster if you’d just stayed at home.”

“That place is not my home,” she snarled—actually snarled, the vicious bitch.

“You know what I meant.” He let her pass him a few steps before he started again. “You’re not exactly incognito with the smell of blood all over you.”

“If you would have done a better job patching me up, I would not smell like blood.” She limped a few steps, then visibly forced herself to straighten her leg.

Max sighed in frustration and caught up with her easily. “Do you want me to carry you?”

Her gold eyes widened, then narrowed in anger. “Absolutely not!”

Damn. It might have been fun to let her climb on him piggyback style, her legs wrapped around his waist.

“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” he cursed out loud. Thinking sexually about a werewolf was practically bestiality. And if he were going to swing that way, he’d much rather do it with something that didn’t talk as much as she did, like a goat or a pony.

Ally or not, she continued to grate on his nerves.

Her expression flickered for a moment, and she looked hurt and offended. Then he remembered he’d spoken aloud, and she probably thought his remark was directed at her.

He’d opened his mouth to explain when she cut him off. “Fine. Carry me, if you think it will be faster.”

Recovering fast, he smiled superciliously. “I do.”

She stood behind him, tentatively placing her hands on his shoulders. He stooped slightly and reached back to lift her up. The natural place to rest hands, of course, was the perfectly round curve of her ass.

Pervert. Furry. Furvert, he chastised himself as he boosted her onto his back. “Up you go.”

“This is humiliating,” she growled at him, her mouth so close to his ear her breath stirred his hair.

He hooked his elbows under her knees to help support her. Her arms around his neck didn’t choke him. She was strong enough to hold her own weight, for the most part.

“You wouldn’t have been humiliated if you’d stayed at home,” he pointed out, then corrected himself. “At the apartment.”

“Fine. You are right and I, a lowly female, am wrong. Is that better?” Was that a hint of playfulness he heard in her voice?

It buoyed his spirits some. “Much. Are we still going straight?”

She’d refused to let him drive the car while they searched for Nathan. She’d said she couldn’t get a good scent that way.

The thought turned his stomach.

She lifted up slightly, audibly sniffing the wind. “No, turn up ahead.”

Her heels dug into him and she balled the shoulders of his T-shirt in her hands and tugged. He yanked the front of his shirt flat. “Stop that, I’m not a horse.”

“Sorry,” she said in a way that implied she didn’t care what kind of animal he was. “But turn right up ahead.”

The farther she led him into the neighborhood, the more it looked familiar. Dread tightened his guts. “Are you sure we’re on the right track?”

She gave a snort of disgust. “Do you have a better way of finding him that you are not sharing with me? Using it to second-guess my sense of smell? I said turn right.”

In the guise of hoisting her higher on his back, he jostled her wounded leg. “Sorry, did that hurt?”

“You are a spiteful man. I will be glad when this is all over.” She suddenly sounded tired and even laid her head against his shoulder as he walked.

Not for the first time that night, he wondered how much pain she was in and how she could put up such a strong front. Idiot. If she would just tell him she needed a rest, he would let her. Even though she didn’t deserve his pity.

Maybe it was a good thing they were on the same team. If they hadn’t been, he might have killed her before now.

They walked in silence for a while, her weight surprisingly heavy at his back. Though she was slender, her body was all lean muscle, firm but not hard owing to the thin layer of feminine fat that softened her curves.

She could use a little more of it, he thought, shifting her so her bony pelvis didn’t bite into his back. He was not, he assured himself, not irritated at the fact her body being pressed so close to him would probably succeed in giving him a fatal hard-on. He was pissed off that she didn’t listen, and now he had to cart her heavy ass all over Grand Rapids.

She’d gone so long without talking, he wondered if she’d fallen asleep. But then she sat up abruptly, her body completely rigid. “He is close. That way.”

“Of course he is,” Max grumbled, turning in the direction indicated by her impatient shirt tugs.

The direction of Cyrus’s old place.

Anger burned in Max. Of course he would have something to do with this. “I know where he’s going.”

“Then take us there faster,” she ordered impatiently.

Max picked up the pace a little, not quite as eager to find their quarry as she seemed to be. “Why? You’re in no shape to fight, and I certainly can’t with you hanging on me like a diseased monkey.”

She slapped him on the top of the head, a pretty ballsy thing to do to someone she was riding on, in his opinion. “I am a wolf. Please do not make me any closer to your pathetic species than I already am.”

“Oh, sorry.” He rolled his eyes, despite the fact she wouldn’t see it. “But you seem to conveniently forget I’m not a human.”

“You were, once.” She said it like it was a bad thing.

He let that slide. “If I’m right—and as we’ve established, I’m rarely wrong—he’s going to Cyrus’s mansion.”

“On Plymouth Street?” She sounded as surprised that he knew about the place as he was surprised she knew.

“That’s the one. In cozy with him, were you?” It was a cheap shot. No self-respecting werewolf would get it on with a vampire.

That bothered him more than it should.

“I read the Movement files on him during my training. He was one of the best known outlaw vampires living in this area, so it seems impossible that he would not still have connections here,” Bella insisted. “Like your girlfriend, who lives here now.”

“She’s not my…” Max shook his head. “Listen, this is Plymouth. If I go that way, we’re going to Cyrus’s house.”

“Are there no other houses on that street?” She sounded so satisfied with herself, he almost dumped her on her ass.

He picked up the pace once more. “You’re gonna feel pretty stupid when you’re wrong.”

But she wasn’t wrong, at least, not right away. They walked a few blocks and got a dirty look from an elderly couple in evening clothes.

“You should have stayed home,” Max whispered as he lifted a hand in friendly greeting to the woman, who screwed up her face in a sour glare and hugged her fur wrap tighter to her chest. “They’re going to call the cops.”

“Then I will come back and eat their housecats,” Bella said close to his ear.

A completely involuntary—because he wasn’t at all attracted to her—shiver went up his back at the feeling of her lips brushing his skin.

She chuckled. “Oh, I bet you hoped I did not notice that.”

“It was from muscle fatigue, I assure you. Ever think of, like, Weight Watchers or Jenny Craig?” Another cheap shot. It was her fault. She reduced him to them.

The remark didn’t phase her. “So, I suppose I could do that again. Or maybe…”

As her voice died away, something warm and wet and rough and unmistakably a wicked, pointed tongue traced the outside of his ear. His knees buckled and he nearly crashed to the sidewalk.

“Don’t do that,” he said, a little more sharply than he’d intended, as he recovered his footing.

“Why not? Do you not like it?” She was teasing him, deliberately teasing him, when they were supposed to be working.

He blew out a frustrated breath. “Because I train my dogs not to lick. It’s bad manners.”

Her laughter was surprisingly feminine. He’d expected something throaty and seductive, like her voice. If he’d thought about it at all, that is, which he hadn’t.

She traced a fingernail down the front of his throat, then scratched beneath his chin affectionately. “You call me a dog as though you were trying to offend me. I know what I am.”

“A pain in the ass? A fat, heavy pain in the ass?” God help him, he was teasing her back.

Are you high, Harrison?

No, brain. But I wish I was.

“I am not fat. I have fat, where it is needed in human form.” As if to demonstrate what she meant, she pressed her breasts more firmly against his back.

Someone must have drugged her. That was the only explanation for this strange behavior. Or, dear God, did they go into heat?

“Are you coming on to me? ’Cause if you are—” He didn’t have time to finish with his bad barking-up-the-wrong-tree pun. Up ahead, the mansion loomed before them.

With startling clarity, he remembered that night. Or, more accurately, the drive over. He’d never seen Nathan so shaken. Too keyed up to drive, definitely, so Max’d had to drive Ziggy’s shitty old van, listening to Nathan mumble “faster” and “come on,” the whole time.

“I can’t lose her, Max. If I lose her, you have to do me a favor.”

And then he’d pressed a stake into Max’s hand.

Max wouldn’t have been able to do it then, and he wouldn’t be able to do it now. They’d have to take Nathan alive, and damn the consequences.

“Why did you stop?” Bella demanded, digging her heels in again as if she could spur him to movement. “He is not here!”

“Fine!” Max didn’t mean to shout it. The stress was getting to him. Calmer, though his voice was still ragged from tension, he started forward. “Where am I going?”

She sniffed the air again and tugged his shirt. “That way. And straight onto that lawn.”

Her directions led him to another sprawling home, past a baffled security man, who didn’t try and stop them until they were nearly to the back fence. There was a gate—thank God for small miracles—and it was unlocked, so they could slip out before the guard called the cops.

“Wasteful, to have such large homes,” Bella said, the flirtatious air completely disappeared from her speech.

Max thought of his own place and cleared his throat. “Well, maybe they’re inherited.”

“Then wasteful of their ancestors, to have such large homes.” There was clearly no arguing with her.

As they crossed the next lawn, she directed him back to the street. He groaned in frustration. “We could have just gone around the block.”

“The trail is fresh. Cross the street!” She sat up like a foxhunter rising in the saddle.

“You’re hard to carry when you’re squirming like that.” He ran across the street, glad for the absence of traffic on this side of town after nine.

They were crossing another lawn when he caught sight of Nathan, naked and bleeding, sprinting through a hedge.

“Holy shit!” Max dropped Bella, though she tried her damndest to stay on him.

“Do not leave me here!” she yelped. “I thought you needed my help.”

“I need to lose some ballast so I can chase him down!” Max ran toward the hedge, slipping on the grass.

“You will lose his scent!” Bella jogged beside him, her face contorted in pain.

“You’re going to hurt yourself,” he warned. Let her. She’ll have no one to blame but herself.

Her breathing turned to panting, but she kept up despite the pain he knew she felt. Her stamina was amazing as they scrambled over a high brick wall and landed on a vast lawn.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Max groaned as Nathan rounded the corner of a small shed.

“Wait. He has been here before. I can smell him.” Bella’s nostrils flared and she clamped a hand over her mouth. “And I smell death.”

They crept to the huge house, a stucco monster with Spanish tiles and creeping ivy. There were no lights, save for a candle in one of the ground-floor windows. Max motioned for Bella to follow him to the back door.

The impressive oak panel wasn’t locked. It led to a small, three-season room with a mosaic floor and a veritable arboretum of plants. He stumbled over something in the dark and swore quietly.

“What is that?” Bella covered her nose with her sleeve.

Max gave the bulky shape a kick, producing a sickening, dull sound. “I’d say the former owners of this place.”

“How many?” She squatted beside him and lifted an arm with a frown. It came completely free of the pile and she dropped it with a gasp.

Max did a quick check. “Two heads.”

“That is impossible. There are more than two bodies here. There have to be more.” Her pupils dilated and her breathing sped up visibly. “We are not safe here. Let’s go.”

With his shoe, Max pushed aside another pile of something moist he’d rather not think about. “Why on earth would you say that?”

“It is not a time for jokes! There is so much death here I cannot breathe.” She stiffened, her nostrils flaring. “Someone is coming. Run! Now!”

On the heels of her statement, he heard it: several pairs of feet clomping toward them. Max ushered Bella ahead of him through the door, but with her injured leg she was too slow. He scooped her up in his arms and ran across the lawn, boosting her over the wall. He vaulted over and dropped onto the grass beside her with a thud.

“What could have done that? And who has that kind of security?” she whispered, peering up at the top of the wall as she sank into a crouch.

“The Soul Eater’s guys,” Max wheezed, his fist bunching the fabric of his shirt over his chest as he struggled for breath. “Looks like someone is keeping an eye on us.”

Bella shook her head. “Or on someone else.”

Max’s blood ran colder than it should have in a vampire. “You’re right. We’ve got to find Nathan or he’s a dead man.”

It was the second time in a week Cyrus had woken cold and naked in an unfamiliar place, and he didn’t like it. A foul, chemical stench stung his nose, and he swiped at it with the back of his hand. His head throbbed and his vision swam. The only thing clear was the feeling of rough carpet at his back and the unmistakable sound of asphalt passing beneath him.

“Where am I?” He sat up, the motion of whatever vehicle he was in setting him temporarily off his balance. A nagging sense that something was wrong, beyond the fact that he’d been kidnapped naked again, plagued him.

“You’re in the back of Ziggy’s van.”

He recognized the voice in an instant of raw pain.

“Do you remember who he was?”

“Honestly, I don’t.” Cyrus rubbed his eyes and looked around the space for something to cover himself with. “No, wait. The boy. He was Nolen’s son.”

And you’re my fledgling, he added silently. Or, you were.

“Good. Glad to see you retained your memory. I worried you had forgotten.” She sounded distracted. The van lurched around a corner.

“Where are you taking me?” The feeling that he was forgetting something, something very important, crept up again.

“Back to Michigan. You’re going to help us fix what’s happened to Nathan.”

The unmistakable sensation of motion sickness overwhelmed Cyrus. “Stop the car. I’m going to be ill.”

To his surprise, the van lurched to a halt and the driver’s door ground open on rusty hinges. Seconds later, the back doors opened, revealing a dark, desert highway and endless night sky.

And Carrie.

Fear, embarrassment, pain and relief cascaded in a wave over him. Disoriented, he reached for her, but she stepped back, cold and unyielding as ever. She still wore her fair hair scraped back from her face in a severe ponytail, still glared at him with her cold, blue eyes. He’d looked into those eyes once and prayed to see a bit of warmth, some sign of loving acceptance.

That memory sparked the nagging feeling of having misplaced something, and he scrambled from the van, falling to his knees on the shoulder of the road.

Mouse!

“You have to take me back,” he insisted before he heaved up his dinner on the sand. He got to his feet, head still reeling from the effects of whatever she’d used to drug him. “I have to go back.”

“You’re not going anywhere.” Carrie followed him the few steps he managed away from the van.

“They’re going to kill her.” Words seemed impossible. He couldn’t get them in the right order, couldn’t think of the ones that would convince her to take him to Mouse. “I don’t know anything about Nolen, just let me go back. I love her.”

“Right. Like you loved me.” Carrie laughed, becoming for a moment the great, heartless creation he’d wanted her to be. He should have been careful what he’d wished for. “Listen, I’m not letting you run back to your undead girlfriend so you two can plot whatever you’ve got going.”

Undead? “No, you don’t understand.” But he couldn’t make her understand, either. He was drunk from…was it chloroform? A bitter trickle stung the back of his throat. “Please, I have to go back.”

She stepped closer, squinting at him as though she could see into his mind and detect an ulterior motive.

Let her search. She won’t find anything.

“Please.” He clenched his fists at his sides. There was some vital detail that would make her bend, he knew it. But his muddled brain wouldn’t seize on it. So he just repeated over and over, growing more frustrated by the minute, “Please.”

Something changed in her eyes. She was much harder, almost angry. “Get back in the van.”

“I won’t.” He realized he sounded like a petulant child, and must look ridiculous standing naked in the desert and refusing shelter. But he had to get to Mouse, before they knew he was gone. “I have to get back to her.”

“Get in the van, Cyrus,” Carrie repeated, pointing for emphasis.

There was nothing to be done. She was stronger than him, he knew. And he was still drunk from the chemical. So he fell into the back of the van, weeping like a child. They would kill Mouse, and he would be alone again.

As they pulled onto the road, a brown bottle wrapped in a scorched rag slid to him as if pushed by a divine hand. If he’d believed in God, he would have thanked him.

The front seats were partitioned from the back by heavy canvas drapes. He wet the rag with the chloroform and thrust his arm through the opening between the curtains.

She tried to push his hand away, and the van swerved, nearly tossing him back. He clutched at the drapes and tried again, this time managing to cover her face. She had the sense to put on the brakes, and the vehicle slowed to a crawl as she went limp. Then her foot fell from the pedal and they rolled to a stop.

“We have to go back for her, because she’s human,” he explained as he pulled Carrie’s rag doll body into the back. As he situated himself behind the wheel, he shook his head to clear it. “Human. That was the word I was searching for.”

17

The Mouse

W hen I came to, I thought I was on a ship. In a storm. Then I recognized the van, and wondered who the hell was driving so badly.

And then I remembered Cyrus.

I pulled back the curtain and he shouted in surprise, swerving even worse than he’d already been, “Get back, Carrie, or I swear to God I’ll stake you!”

“With what?” I demanded, reaching toward my back pocket.

He grabbed the stake he’d propped in the cup holder. “With this. Now sit down and shut up. We’re going back for her.”

“For who? Angie?” I laughed. “I’m sure you’ll find a replacement for her.”

“Angie?” He hit the accelerator hard, then let off abruptly. “No! Mouse. We have to go back for her before they figure out I’m gone. Damn it, is this the right way?”

A cold, sick feeling gripped my stomach. “Mouse?”

He glared at the road and hit the gas again. “Yes. It’s what I call her. Her real name is just ridiculous. She’s human.”

“She was human?” I eased into the passenger seat, shock slowly numbing my body. “I didn’t know she was human.”

“She is. Is human,” he insisted, pounding the steering wheel. “Am I even going the correct way?”

I nodded woodenly. I’d left a human being behind in that place? With those vampires? Trembling, I reached into my pocket and withdrew the key. “Take this.”

He looked down for just a second, the car heading for an instant toward the shoulder as he did. “What is that, a marble?”

“It’ll help you find the place. Unless…you want me to drive,” I offered.

“No time,” he answered tersely.

I was as eager to get the girl out of there as he appeared to be, but I wasn’t willing to die in a fiery crash to do it. “Have you ever driven before?”

“No.” He sounded impatient. “It looks much easier in the movies.”

Ahead was the intersection just before the church. In the distance, where I should have seen the small, black shape of the burned-out ruin, the ghostly outline of the church broke the line of the horizon. Whatever spell the Fangs had cast on the place was wearing off.

“Maybe they’ve just gone and left her behind,” I said hopefully. But I knew better. So did Cyrus.

The tires squealed as he pulled into the parking lot. If he thought the Fangs were still there, he was sure making plenty of noise.

Grabbing a stake, he kicked the door open. “They won’t hurt me. They’ll probably kill you, though.”

“I’ll take my chances.” I pocketed a stake, too, just in case.

“Mouse!” he shouted as we entered the dark vestibule. But his voice fell silent at the sight of the sanctuary doors ripped from their hinges and lying like splinters of firewood on the carpet.

He seemed to freeze for a minute, his Adam’s apple the only part of him moving as he swallowed. “No.”

“Cyrus, wait,” I begged as he ran toward the basement door. I wanted to go first, for some crazy reason intent on shielding him from seeing something terrible.

I was two steps behind him on the stairs. A single bulb hanging from the ceiling illuminated the apartment, and on the other side of the light I saw pale legs, barely distinguishable from the sheets, splayed at an unnatural angle across the bed.

The sight didn’t stop him, didn’t register, just as the sight of the bloody bedclothes didn’t keep him from climbing onto the half-bare mattress beside her and slapping her face lightly. “Mouse? Wake up. Wake up.”

“Cyrus…” I began, but he couldn’t hear me. The girl’s dead eyes were open. They seemed to stare accusingly at me.

“Mouse?” Grief sounded strange in his cultured, British voice. “Wake up. Please.”

He buried his face close to her ruined neck, ripped from ear to ear by claws or teeth. He laid an open hand on her bloodstained hair, but his fingers curled into a fist and he lifted his head, making a sound that was a wail and a scream and a sob all in one.

My back to the cinder block wall, I slid to the floor. I’d never seen an emotion so genuine and powerful from him as this. I’d never imagined him capable of this kind of sincere feeling.

He loved her. It struck me like a cold hand slapping my face. Had I known? Had I sensed it and intentionally left her behind? The thought made me sick. If I had done such a thing, I’d abandoned a human to die a cruel and humiliating death, and I’d done it out of spite.

You didn’t know. The voice of sanity in my head didn’t belong to me. It was Nathan, in a moment of rare lucidity. And he was more concerned for me than for himself. That broke my heart more than it should have.

Nathan. I don’t know if I can help you. I was tired, tired from my journey and tired from witnessing this carnage. I just wanted to crawl into bed and sleep for years.

Nathan’s elusive clarity disappeared again, leaving me no way to escape Cyrus’s raw hurt, which so closely resembled the agony in Nathan’s soul.

“I’m sorry,” Cyrus whispered, cradling the girl’s limp body to his. “I’m so sorry.”

Burdened by Nathan’s pain and my own guilt over the death of this innocent girl, I closed my eyes. There was nothing I could do to fix my error, no way to comfort Cyrus or make things better. The life of this girl was snuffed out forever, and I’d caused it. Her death would hang like a noose around my neck for the rest of my life.

When Ziggy had died, I’d blamed myself for not protecting him, but I’d been able to lay most of the blame on Cyrus, who’d done the actual killing. I’d even blamed Nathan some, for overreacting to finding his son in a compromising position and driving him away. But I had no way of avoiding my guilt now, no way of reasoning it away. I’d fucked up, and now this girl was dead.

No wonder some vampires didn’t enjoy the killing. How could they, with this feeling always hanging over them? For the first time, I began to understand a fraction of Nathan’s pain and heartache. The agony I felt over this girl eerily mirrored the turmoil Nathan experienced now.

Something shifted in my mind, as though one of those jumbled puzzle pieces had fallen inexplicably into place. But I didn’t have time to ponder it. When I looked up, Cyrus’s cold, blue eyes locked on me with murderous intensity.

“You did this,” he whispered. “You killed her.”

“I didn’t know.” I rose slowly, aware the gesture betrayed my fear of him. But what did I have to fear? He was human. I was a vampire. I had more physical strength and faster reflexes.

But he had nothing to lose, now.

“I tried to tell you.” His voice was that calm one I knew so well from my days as his willing prisoner. A calm that would turn to fury without warning. “You didn’t let me explain. And now she’s dead.”

“You will be, too, if we don’t get out of here.” It was an empty threat. The place was abandoned.

He shook his head with an expression of stony resolve. “I’m staying with her.”

“There’s nothing you can do for her now.” I highly doubted there was anything that could have been done for her if we had gotten there just after they’d attacked.

“I deserted her.” He kissed her bloodless forehead the way a mother would kiss her child’s head. “I’m not going to do it again.”

“You didn’t desert her. You were kidnapped,” I reminded him. Stupidly, since he’d apparently moved on from blaming me, and for a moment I’d stood a chance of not being staked while I slept. “Please, Cyrus. Let me get you out of here before your father finds you.”

The words fell like a veil over him, obscuring the strangely human Cyrus before me long enough for him to assume the cold expression of the Cyrus I knew. Though it was familiar, it wasn’t comforting.

“My father.” He rolled the words in his mouth like a bit of food he was considering spitting out. “No, I think I’d like to see my father.”

I forced away the chill that crept up my spine. “I can’t let you do that. You know I can’t.”

“Why?” He laid her on the bed and stood. “Do you think you have the power to stop me?”

He advanced with the predatory grace I remembered. The languid movements that had made me weak-kneed with desire and terror alternately. Even without his vampire charisma, he seemed dangerous.

“You have to sleep sometime.” The way he said it, as a casual comment and not a threat, made it all the more frightening. “When you do, I’ll toss you out into the hot sand and watch you burn, the way you watched me burn.”

I wanted to swallow, to soothe my suddenly dry throat, but I didn’t want him to take it for a sign of weakness. So I spoke with a voice like a pack-a-day smoker. “And how did I watch you burn?”

“Without remorse.” It didn’t take him any time to answer. “With pleasure.”

He turned away again, went to the dresser and pulled out clothes. The act shocked me. I’d grown so used to his nakedness, I hadn’t truly seen it until now.

I waited until he had some pants on to respond. “That’s not how I remember it.”

He snorted. “I’m so concerned with how you remember it. Do please write it down, so I can read it should I ever find I care.”

“Whether or not you care, you can’t accuse me of being heartless.” Shocking wetness stung my eyes, and I blinked it away. The thought that I was about to say things I wished so many times I could have said to him before lent an air of importance to the moment. It dried my words up, and I floundered to think of what I should say. “I wanted to save you so many times.”

His back went rigid, and though he didn’t face me, I saw his jaw tighten in profile. “Oh?”

“I wanted you to be a better person. I thought if I could see just a little of the good in you…” I shook my head. “But I never did. You never showed me an ounce of the good in you. If you had, I could have loved you.”

He looked at the ceiling, his head limp on his neck as if in defeat. Then he rounded on me with frightening speed, catching me off guard and pushing my back to the wall.

His grip on my shoulders was painful, but I didn’t struggle. He leaned close to my face, so close it was hard to focus on his furious eyes. “I was supposed to show you the good in me? I was supposed to make you love me?”

My breath exploded when he shoved me into the wall. He pointed to the corpse on the bed, stabbing the air forcefully as though he could wound it. “She loved me. She loved me! So maybe the problem didn’t lie with me.”

“She was trapped in a basement with you! You were the only other human here!” The words were cruel, but I couldn’t stop them. “Of course she loved you, if you protected her from them!”

He slapped me, but his heart wasn’t in it, and I barely felt the blow. “Don’t say these things to me! Do you think I haven’t thought them myself? She loved me. She loved me and I—”

His face crumpled and tears spilled over his eyelids. “She loved me,” he repeated, grasping my shoulders, shoving me against the cinder blocks over and over.

I could have reacted with anger. I could have knocked him out and dragged him back to the van. There was still the threat of the Fangs, and the even greater threat that a passerby might notice the supposedly burned-down church had been reassembled.

Despite all this, I put my arms around him and pulled his body to mine, murmuring words of apology and comfort and true remorse. I couldn’t look at the girl on the bed. She deserved better than what she’d gotten if she’d managed to crack Cyrus’s cold facade.

The Fangs might have pulled him out of the afterlife, but she had made him human. It would take a lot more than few days in captivity and a bad case of Stockholm Syndrome to manage that.

I’d wanted to treat him as a thing, an ingredient in my recipe for saving Nathan. My plan had been to swoop in and snatch him up, then drive back to Grand Rapids without a care in my heart. If I had known then how naive and insensitive that plan was, an innocent girl’s life could have been spared.

Cyrus wept so long, he ran out of tears, but the violent sobs that racked his body wouldn’t subside. With my hands on his shoulders, I gently pushed him back. “Calm down. You’ll make yourself sick.”

“Calm down?” He glared at me through reddened eyes. “How can you tell me to calm down? She’s dead!”

Okay, bad tactic. “I know she’s dead, and it hurts you. But you’re not doing her any favors if you stay here and get yourself killed.”

He nodded, though I suspect he only forced himself to appear reasonable because he thought I didn’t care or understand. “You’re right.” He rose and went to the bed. “We’re not leaving her like this, though.”

“Do you want to bury her?” It sounded extremely crass and earthy, but I didn’t mean it that way.

It didn’t bother him. I could tell by the way he looked her over, as though she were merely a fragile, valuable object and not a dead body, that he’d removed himself from the reality of her death. While the shell she’d left behind was still precious to him, he clearly didn’t associate her with it.

“No. It’s only sand out there. I don’t want an animal finding her.” His voice cracked slightly on the last words, but he didn’t cry. “Get me some towels from the bathroom, so I can clean her up.”

That’s how we spent the rest of the night. Cyrus carefully washed the blood from her skin and asked me to bandage her torn throat and the bite marks on the rest of her body. He combed her hair, despite the gore that matted it, and laid her head on the pillow. Using the technique I’d learned in medical school, we carefully changed the soiled sheets without moving her body from the mattress, then clothed her in the sundress that appeared to be her only article of clothing.

“The sun’s almost up,” Cyrus noted when we were finished, his voice strained and tired. “We should get going.”

“You’re coming with me?” I wondered at his motive. Grief or not, he was still the man who’d gleefully procured victims for his father’s blood lust and killed innocent young girls for his own, sick pleasure. I couldn’t fully trust him.

He nodded, never tearing his gaze from the girl’s dead, staring eyes. Absently, he reached out and gently closed her eyelids with his thumbs. They eased slightly open again, giving her the look of a person asleep.

“I can’t leave her here to—” he swallowed thickly, covering his eyes with one hand “—to rot.”

“Do you think we should bury her?” I looked to the sky. The stars were beginning to fade. I didn’t think we had enough time. At least I didn’t. “The police are going to notice that this place has reassembled. They’ll be here by morning. I’m surprised they haven’t been yet. Do you really want to be burying a dead body when they arrive?”

“Oh, yes. That would be the worst thing that could happen to me, going to the electric chair.” He laughed bitterly, but I don’t think he really understood yet what it was to be human again. How important his life would be to him when he was close to losing it.

He covered his face with both hands, a gesture more of fatigue than grief. “We’ll burn it.” He fixed me with a determined stare. “We’ll burn the whole place down.”

I left him alone with her while I searched the building for supplies we could use. The Fangs had, either in their haste to leave the place or out of sheer wastefulness, left a nearly full can of gasoline behind. I thanked God for small mercies and poured it sparingly in a line from the kitchen, around the pews in the sanctuary, and down the steps to where Cyrus knelt beside the bed, his hand covering the dead girl’s stiff fingers.

“Is it done?” he asked, lifting his tear-stained face to look at me.

I had to clear my throat before I could speak. “Yes. Well, except I’m going to disconnect the gas line to the stove in the kitchen and let nature take its course. You should move the van. Get it clear.”

“And what about you? How are you going to get clear?” He looked back to the girl and took a deep breath. “I don’t want you to die over this.”

“I thought you wanted to kill me,” I said, trying to inject some humor into my voice. It fell horridly flat.

“Oh, I do. At least, I’m mad enough to kill you.” His voice lowered to almost a whisper. “But I don’t want you to die.”

As bizarre as his logic sounded, I understood him. I’d stood over his bed once, wondering if I could kill him while he slept, so angry I probably could have done it. But I wouldn’t have truly wanted him dead. “I’ll be fine. But we have to hurry, before the gas evaporates.”

Leaning over the girl, he gently kissed her bloodless lips and stroked her hair. Then, with a sudden violence that startled me, he reached down and tore a strip of material from her skirt. Closing the scrap in his fist, he lifted it to his nose and inhaled, pain creasing his forehead above his closed eyes. Then, just as quickly as he’d seemed to lose control again, he tucked the cloth into his pocket and turned away from the bed. “Let’s go.”

Arson is a bit more difficult than I expected. The stove was way too heavy to move on my own, so, after I lit a phone book on one of the burners, I held it away and turned all the dials to Light and blew out the pilot. As I hurried through the vestibule, I dropped the burning phone book on the gas trail. For a moment I worried that it wouldn’t catch, and I stood, frozen in horror, as it appeared the flame would go out. Then, with a whoosh of oxygen being sucked away, flames blossomed to consume what was left of the white pages, traveling slowly down the path of saturated carpet. I turned and ran out the doors, across the cracked lot to where Cyrus waited beside the van on the other side of the road.

“Get behind the van!” I shouted, remembering too late the kind of wounds flying debris could cause. The gas in the kitchen ignited before he could move, and I dived for him, shielding him with my body until the noise of falling rubble hitting the pavement finished.

“My God,” Cyrus whispered, climbing to his feet when I finally let him up.

My gaze fixed on the burning building, I nodded. “I didn’t expect it to go up so fast.”

We stood side by side, watching the fire. I tried not to think about the girl we’d left in the basement. When I looked at Cyrus, I knew that was all he thought of, and my chest ached with my guilt.

“Do you know where my father is?” Cyrus asked quietly, tears filling his eyes.

I didn’t know if lying or telling the truth would be the best way to persuade him to leave with me, but dishonesty felt cheap after the postmortem ritual we’d just shared. “No. I know he’s planning something, and I know I needed to find you.”

He cocked his head, a bit of familiar Cyrus mannerism peeking through. “Really? How did you know?”

“The Oracle.” I didn’t bother to explain. In his vampire life, Cyrus had known the goings-on of nearly every vampire faction. I had no doubt he’d know who the Oracle was. “She told me your father is trying to become a god. But she didn’t tell me what all that entails. She did say I needed to seek you out. That you would be in the land of the dead, with the toothsome ones.”

Despite our grim circumstances, he chuckled. “Still speaks like Nostradamus. I never really cared for her, but she was on the mark with that prophecy.”

“Cyrus, what is your father doing?” He had to know. The Oracle wouldn’t have sent me all this way for nothing.

“I don’t know.” He looked back to the church. “But I’ll do what I can to help you find out.”

I blinked and turned to him. “You will?”

It seemed as if he’d never blink as he watched the flames leaping into the night sky. “If my father hadn’t decided to raise me from the dead…I blame him for her death,” he stated.

But I blamed myself. Because it was my fault. I could barely breathe with the knowledge of it.

The feeling of a piece falling into place nagged at me again, and I remembered my earlier observation, that the pain I felt from Nathan through the blood tie was the same as I felt over the girl’s death.

And that’s when I knew. Standing in the desert, watching the flames from the burning church blending in with the new day lightening the horizon, I realized the only demon possessing Nathan was his own.

I just didn’t know how to save him from it.

I can’t imagine my life without her, but every day it seems more likely that she’ll be taken from me.

Max rubbed his eyes and reread the sentence. So far, Nathan’s journal had provided insight into only one area of his life. The mopey, insecure part.

Looking up from the book, Max studied Bella. She lay on a nest of blankets and pillows she’d fashioned into a dog bed—her words, not his, tossed playfully at him when he’d asked what on earth she was doing—intently reading a tattered copy of The Sanguinarius. Max didn’t put much stock in the book himself, but it seemed easier to let her read it than try to give her his own crash course in vampire lore.

It had surprised him when she’d said she’d never read it. Though it was at the top of the required reading list for vampire assassins, she’d told him the book had never been made available to werewolves during their Movement training. Max hoped he wasn’t breaking any rules by sharing the book with her, but then remembered just how many rules they’d both broken already.

“Are you going to continue staring at me or are you going to finish invading your possessed friend’s privacy?” She didn’t look up as she spoke.

Max sighed. “I’m not getting anything here. Just pages and pages of how much he loves Carrie and how much pain it causes him.”

“That is something.” Bella sat up, the movement graceful and catlike, despite her canine heritage. “Sometimes all you need to reach the trapped soul is a piece of personal information. Perhaps if Carrie spoke to him—”

“There’s other stuff, too.” Max wanted to get Bella off that dangerous line of thinking. He wasn’t going to be the one who fessed up to Nathan that he let Carrie read his diary. “Like his ex-wife.”

“He is divorced?” She made a face. “I will never understand that human custom.”

“It’s not a custom, it’s an exception,” Max corrected. “I don’t understand it, either. If you just don’t get married at all, it makes things a lot simpler.”

“What I meant was, it is unnatural to be separated from your mate.” She tossed a pillow at him.

He caught it and threw it back. “Nathan’s not divorced. His wife died. He killed her.”

“Why would he do such a thing?” The knowledge seemed to wound Bella.

Max flipped back a few pages and read, “‘Every night I wish I’d done it differently. I wish I had let them starve me. If I had been strong then, I would be dead now, instead of living with this guilt.’” He snapped the book shut with one hand. “I’m guessing he ate her. Wasn’t that in his file?”

“Perhaps in his sealed probation file,” she snapped. “You speak of these things as though they do not matter. Because you are a creature without knowledge of death, life does not matter to you!” Her body trembled, with rage or fear or both, he couldn’t tell.

Whether she was afraid or not, her accusation made him angry. He stood, fighting the urge to favor his left leg, which was engulfed in an unpleasant prickling sensation. “Listen, I know plenty about death.” Marcus’s face flashed through his memory, knifing pain through his chest. “I don’t kill anymore.”

“But you did. At one time, you did.” It wasn’t an indictment, just a simple statement of fact.

One he couldn’t argue with. “Almost all of us have, at one time or another. And you’re an assassin. You kill vampires. What’s the difference?”

She sat up straighter, if that were possible, righteousness radiating around her like hellfire. “Because I kill those who prey upon the weak. I kill out of necessity for order and peace.”

“Right, and indulging your animal instinct is just a perk.” This was rapidly becoming an argument. One he didn’t feel like having. They’d been so peaceful for a few hours.

“I do not enjoy the killing.” She said it through clenched teeth. “Those of us who appreciate the meaning of our true nature do not seek to become one of those murdering lupins.”

To his amazement, she crossed herself and spit daintily after she said the name. He cleared his throat. “Yeah. Okay. Your true nature. Mind cluing me in?”

She reached for the zipper at the top of her high collar and tugged it down. Beneath her ever-present long-sleeved, black leather jacket, she wore only a bra. The horny department of his brain noted it matched the panties he’d glimpsed the day before, though she didn’t wear them now. They were hanging over the shower rod in the bathroom.

He didn’t have time to dwell on the thought of her naked body beneath the jeans she’d borrowed from Carrie. As Bella shrugged the jacket off her shoulders, he became more interested in the dark lines of text wrapping her upper arms.

She held one arm away from her body so he could read it. Some was Latin, some Hebrew, some a strange language he couldn’t identify, and some Italian. The words all followed their native course, up and down, right to left, left to right. He picked out a single strand of Latin and translated it easily. “‘A debt owing to the death of the God-Man, Yeshua, Joshua, Jesus the Christ of Nazareth, never to be repaid.’”

The sentence switched unfathomably to Italian, and he lost his ability to read it. Shaking his head, he grasped her other arm. “‘The seed of Pilate will be sown on barren fields, the harvest of atonement will mock him as killer of the lamb. Let his blood be on our heads and the heads of our children.’”

“Wolves,” Bella said quietly. “All of us stem from the descendants of one man. The Christ-killer.”

Max released her and stood, scrubbing his hand over his face. “Pontius Pilate?”

If he’d believed in God it would have freaked him out.

“It is a curse. We seek ways of atoning, to repay the blood debt.” She chuckled bitterly. “But how great is the debt of a dead God?”

“I’ve read the Bible. He was supposed to die.” Great, now they were having a theological discussion. “It kind of ruined the end if he didn’t.”

She shrugged, a little too easy in the acceptance of her fate. “Judas Iscariot burns in hell, as well, but the story would not have been fulfilled if he had not betrayed Christ. There is no rhyme or reason to God’s wrath. It is something I have come to accept.”

It was a heavy thought, and it weighed down Max’s mood considerably. “That seems kind of pessimistic and lazy to me.”

She pulled her jacket on, momentarily drawing his attention back to her cleavage. “We hear the story of our burden every day as children. When I came of age, my father had it branded into my skin. It is a reminder that this curse is a part of me.”

Max chuckled. “I suspect this has more to do with the differences between lupins and werewolves than either side lets on.”

A slight smile tilted her lips. “You vampires think you know everything. But you are right. The recent division over science versus magic only served to widen the rift between our factions and drive us to align with the Movement. Lupins cling to the old Roman ways, while we werewolves have embraced the earth.”

The admission seemed to close the subject. She turned back to The Sanguinarius, leafing through the pages as though her mind wasn’t really on the material contained there.

Max cleared his throat. “I’m going to get something to eat before I try and read any more of Nathan’s handwriting. Want anything?”

“Does a vampire have anything to eat, besides blood?” Some of her teasing humor was back in her voice.

It relieved a bit of the angry tension between them, even if it seemed forced. “I’m sure he’s fresh out of kibble, but, yes, there’s food. Contrary to popular belief, we can eat. Some of us even enjoy it.”

She followed him to the kitchen, which seemed smaller than usual when she was in it. Max grabbed the teakettle from the dish strainer beside the sink and turned to set it on the burner. Bella picked that moment to try and squeeze past him, and they bumped into each other awkwardly.

Their mumbled apologies did nothing to ease the other kind of tension Max felt. He was too aware of his body, definitely too aware of her body in relation to his, and far too aware of what he wanted their bodies to be doing.

“You want me.”

He opened his mouth to give her what would probably be a shocked, not witty response, but he choked on his own spit and coughed violently for a long minute before catching his breath. Smooth, Harrison.

“It is nothing to be ashamed of,” she assured him. “I am very good looking. And to a vampire I must seem very exotic.”

“I’m not attracted to you,” he wheezed, pounding his chest with his fist. “If anything, I’m barely tolerating having you around. I don’t like werewolves.”

She laughed. Not a friendly laugh. A mocking laugh. “Right.”

“Is it really that unbelievable to you that someone might not find you attractive?” He tried to sound arrogantly amused, but it didn’t come off that well. He turned to the refrigerator and opened the door, searching for another bag of the premium B positive he’d found before. “Listen, I’m sure that as far as your species goes, you’re a catch. But I’m not into the whole doggy-style thing.”

“We would not have to do it doggy-style.” She pressed against him, full body, front to his back. Her hand snaked across his shoulder, to his jaw, urging him to turn his head.

He did. His body came with it. He slipped his hands into the back pockets of her jeans and pulled her hips forward. “So, you were coming on to me earlier.”

“I did not realize how blatant I would have to be to get your attention.” She wound her arms around his neck and kissed him, not on the lips, but at the corner of his mouth. Her skin was shockingly warm, but he knew it was just because he was room temperature.

She spoke again, her voice a low, sexy whisper against his cheek. “We are not in an ideal situation. But I am attracted to you. And we are adults. What’s the harm in releasing some of that…tension?”

Max couldn’t argue with that logic, so he let her pull him to the linoleum, mentally rehearsing the apology he’d have to make for committing unspeakable acts of carnal pleasure on Nathan’s kitchen floor.

18

Rocks and Hard Places

C yrus had fantasized about two methods of killing Carrie as he drove through the stark, burning desert.

One way would have been to pull down the curtain and let the sunlight hit her sleeping body. But he’d dismissed it outright. She would probably live long enough to wrap herself in the canvas and chloroform him again. The trip would be unpleasant as it was. It would be worse if he had to spend every day lashed to the passenger seat with bungee cords. That was what she had threatened, and he knew she’d do it.

The other way was much more fun to fantasize about. He would pull over to the side of the road and climb in back with her, weeping and in need of comfort. When she tried to put her traitorous arms around him, he would sink the stake into her back.

But with no one to drive at night while he slept, the trip would, again, increase in difficulty. Not to mention the fact he had no money and only the clothes on his back. He wouldn’t get far on those.

He gripped the steering wheel tighter. No, that wasn’t the only reason. He couldn’t kill her, because every time he imagined it, he remembered the tender way she’d helped him care for Mouse, and then he thought of Mouse looking down on him from the proverbial white clouds of heaven and being disappointed in him.

It was a silly thing to think of. He’d been dead before. He knew what happened. Washed-out, blue nothingness. On one hand, he hoped Mouse wasn’t let down by the reality of the afterlife. On the other hand, his mortal soul dared to doubt she truly went to the same place he’d been when he’d died. Perhaps that realm was hell, reserved only for vampires and sinners. Despite her indiscretion with him, she’d possessed a pure heart.

Guilt, an emotion that proved to be a real nuisance now that he bothered to feel it, clenched his gut. Maybe what they’d done together had barred her forever from the heaven she’d believed in so deeply. Those blasted saints she’d prattled on about had certainly been prized for their chastity. He wished for a moment there were some number he could dial, someone he could phone up and explain it all to. Listen, it wasn’t really her fault. Extenuating circumstances. You’d really be making a mistake if you blamed her.

He thought of the stories she’d told him, the ones where the pure, good-hearted maidens believed so deeply in Christ and his Blessed Mother that even something so shameful as being unwillingly defiled by a man didn’t keep them from beatification. That certainly had to be the answer here. He’d been the demonic monster preying upon her flesh, never able to touch her soul.

Come now, let’s not be dramatic. He pressed the brake pedal with his left foot—he didn’t understand how Carrie thought he should be able to use only the right one—and rolled the van to a halt at a stop sign. There was a strange grinding noise, which he chalked up to faulty mechanics, and he rested his head for a moment on the wheel.

Of course Mouse had gone to her heaven. It was impossible that she hadn’t. No man, God or not, could turn her away. In Cyrus’s mind, she rivaled the Blessed Virgin in purity.

He pulled across the intersection and brought the behemoth van up to speed. How could what he and Mouse had done have been a sin, anyway? They were two consenting adults, and they’d done it out of love. Well, at least he had. She had as much as told him she was settling for the experience.

He wouldn’t let himself think that. She had loved him. And someone had taken her away. He didn’t solely blame Carrie for his pain. Though her actions had condemned Mouse, she would never have been looking for him in the first place if it weren’t for his father. In fact, Jacob Seymour had been responsible for the death of all of Cyrus’s loves. When he found him, Cyrus would make the Soul Eater pay.

“I’ve done everything you asked of me. How could you?”

The rustle of Carrie’s nylon sleeping bag in the back brought him to the present. Her voice sought him through the thick canvas drapes. “Are you praying?”

“You were dreaming. Go back to sleep.” Prayer! What a novel idea. He was a human, after all. That meant God, if he existed, had to care about him. Enough of those door-to-door missionaries had told him that. Of course, they’d recanted and cursed him as the devil right before he’d killed them, but they would be happy to know their message had sunken in.

God, Jesus, whoever I’m supposed to direct this prayer to, I’m sorry for what I did to her. Cyrus’s breath froze in his chest, as if someone had stopped up his lungs and the air couldn’t escape. Please, don’t hold it against her. Please, let her be okay where she is. Let her know I did—do—truly love her. It wasn’t a game this time. I swear it.

It would be the last time he admitted it, to himself or anyone else, he decided. It hurt far too much, and what purpose could the pain possibly serve? He’d keep it at the back of his mind, until he’d found his father and gotten his revenge.

It wouldn’t be easy. He would probably get himself killed in the process. But he would find the man who’d been a monstrous father and a crueler sire. He would find him and Mouse would be avenged.

When Cyrus woke me at sundown, dark circles ringed his eyes. I’d heard him a few times during the day, talking to himself in a way that suggested he didn’t realize he was actually speaking.

I probably looked as worn-out as he did. It was hard to sleep, to let my guard down when the person in the driver’s seat seemed to be slowly losing his mind.

“Are you okay?” I asked as I eased from the back of the van into the front seat.

“I have been better. I’ll survive.” He slid into the passenger seat and buckled himself in. “But I need some food.”

I thought of the dwindling cash supply in the back. “Will fast food do?”

Surprisingly, he didn’t make a face or a snide comment, or reject the idea right out. He simply shrugged and said, “So long as it isn’t the one with that insipid clown.”

We rode in silence until the next town, where we found a burger joint with a drive-through. Cyrus had a voracious appetite, and he tore through his meal with uncharacteristically bad table manners.

“You’re not a vampire anymore. That stuff is terrible for you,” I reminded him.

“This stuff is terrible, period.” He seemed to remember himself, and wiped his mouth with one of the cheap paper napkins. “It’s greasy and unpleasant, but I haven’t eaten in a day. I must bow to the demands of the human stomach.”

“So, they kept you fed, then?” What a bizarre thing to make conversation about. I understand the vampires who brought you back from the dead and held you hostage treated you well?

He didn’t look at me, but squinted at the starry sky through the windshield. “No. Mouse did most of the cooking. I do know how to microwave a hot dog, though.”

“Well, at least you won’t starve when you’re on your own.” It occurred to me then that I imagined a future for him beyond whatever would happen when we returned to Grand Rapids. With every passing moment, Cyrus was becoming more of a person and less of a monster to me.

He seemed suddenly uncomfortable with the subject, becoming more interested in his soda than our conversation. When he spoke again, it seemed a wall had gone up, closing off both the newly human Cyrus and the familiar, terrifying one who’d sired me. “So, the Oracle said the Soul Eater is trying to become a god. Did she say what type?”

Temporarily stunned by the fact he’d referred to Jacob Seymour by his common label and not as his adored father, I took a moment to answer. When the full import of his question sank in, it settled like a lead weight in my gut. “What do you mean, what kind?”

Cyrus sighed, clearly annoyed that I hadn’t done my research. “You know. A demigod? A sacrificial god? A god of seasonal rites or fertility?”

“I have no idea. She just said a god. You’ll pardon me for not inquiring further, but she was trying to twist my head off at the time.” I shifted in my seat. The long nights of driving were taking their toll on my tailbone.

“It doesn’t matter, anyway.” Cyrus waved his hand as though apologizing by way of dismissal. “They all basically involve the same process.”

“I had no idea vampires could just up and become gods.” The things they didn’t bother to print in The Sanguinarius.

“Anyone can become a god. All it takes is a collection of souls.” He paused in contemplation, his fingertips pressed together in a steeple. “They don’t even have to be dead. I don’t know why Father just doesn’t convince some UFO religion in California that he’s a messiah. It would be easier than the way he’s going about it.”

My brain shouted, Could you be more cryptic? When my mouth opened, the statement became a bit more polite. “And how is he going about it?”

With maddening slowness, Cyrus reached to fiddle with the dials on the dashboard console. He flipped the switch for the heater, then leaned his seat back. “Well, I’m here, obviously, and I wouldn’t be unless Father needed me. Since there’s only one ritual I know of that would need me alive, I can only assume he’s out to consume the souls of the vampires he created.”

I swerved the van. “What?”

Cyrus yelped in a very undignified manner as his upper body slid sideways from the seat. “What the hell are you doing?”

“You said he’s trying to eat the vampires he made?” There was a strange, hysterical edge to my voice. Funny, I didn’t feel hysterical, but maybe my emotions hadn’t caught up to my body yet.

“Well, the ones he hasn’t eaten already.” Cyrus shot me an annoyed glare as he returned his seat to an upright position. “Are we going to just sit in the middle of the road all night, then?”

Grinding my teeth, I lifted my foot from the brake and pressed the accelerator.

He made a great show of checking over his body, in case a part might have flown off, I guess, then settled against the seat once more. “There’s a ritual he was looking for back in the seventeenth century. Apparently, a soul eater who emerged in the prehistoric era endeavored to become a god who was eventually worshipped in ancient Greece. The ritual he used was one of the first recorded occult ceremonies.”

I swallowed the acidic fear that stung my throat. “Did it work?”

“Ever hear of Hades?” Cyrus laughed and shook his head as though he were speaking of an old friend. “I can’t say for certain, but Father was too obsessed with the ritual for it not to be the one he’s using now. I believe it entails consuming the souls of all those he’s killed. He must have been working on it for centuries.”

Cyrus lapsed into thoughtful silence again. Just when I was about to speak, he came to vicious life, pounding the dashboard with both fists. I jumped, accidentally colliding with the horn.

He pounded his fists again. “He should have told me. I served him faithfully—he should have told me!”

“He couldn’t tell you,” I said gently. “Then you would have known he was going to kill you.”

My words had no impact. “No wonder he wanted me to give asylum to those disgusting bikers all those years back….”

“Actually, it was only two months,” I corrected, but again, he didn’t seem to hear.

“I should have known. I should have known he was planning something like this.” Cyrus shook his head, a look of pure disgust on his face. “I worshipped him. If he’d asked it of me, I would have let him take my soul.”

“No, you wouldn’t have.” I remembered the way Cyrus had knelt beside his father’s casket as though it were a holy relic. It wasn’t a flattering truth I was about to give him, but it was truth at least. “You were too selfish to have done something like that.”

“You’re probably right.” A thin smile crossed his lips. “You know, I was thinking of killing you today.”

“I was pretty much counting on you trying.” I’d heard him mumbling to himself shortly after he’d begun the drive at sunup. So I’d kept the chloroform handy and hidden all the stakes in the van at the bottom of my sleeping bag.

“You’re not going to scream and rave at me?” He chuckled. “That’s not the Carrie I remember.”

“Well, the Carrie you remember has spent two months trying to get over you.” I nearly choked on my tongue at my Freudian slip. “I meant, trying to get over what you did to me. You don’t make me as nervous anymore.”

“You’re trying to get over me?”

Of course, he wouldn’t let it die without comment. No matter how much had changed during the past two months, it wasn’t enough to beat down his ego.

“Keep in mind when I say that, I mean everything about you.” I paused and decided I wasn’t quite willing to dwell on the implications of that statement. “You know, the sick, horrible things you did to me. Your total disregard for humanity, mine included. Things like that.”

“I’ve been thinking about that, as well.” His voice was suddenly husky, as though he was about to cry.

Please, please don’t let him have an Oprah moment right here while I’m driving. I don’t think I could handle that.

“That was, of course, until you accidentally murdered…” He turned his face away, so that when I looked at him, all I could see was his profile. “That was cheap. Of course, I can’t fully blame you for what happened to her.”

“How generous.” I swallowed the lump of guilt that formed in my throat. “I am sorry. You know I don’t like to see innocent people hurt.”

“But my father does.” Cyrus shook his head. “No matter. Let’s talk of something else, shall we?”

“Like what? The weather?” Unbelievable. He was exactly like his old self, if he thought it was appropriate to dismiss the fact he’d laid her death on me. “You’re really an asshole.”

“Carrie, I’m sorry.” He closed his eyes, grimacing.

He hadn’t meant to apologize. And he regretted it. My breath came out with an angry, disbelieving grunt. “Well, don’t kick your ass over it or anything!”

“That’s a very difficult thing for me to say to you! You rejected me!” His hand clenched to a fist on the armrest.

I remembered too well his tendency toward violence, and I edged away in my seat a little. Fat lot of good it would do me, though, the centimeter shift I managed, and it only exacerbated the stiffness in my lower back. I forced my irritation—and nervousness—away. “In all fairness, you kind of killed your chances when you ripped out my heart.”

“After you came into my home and betrayed me.” His voice dropped to a deadly murmur. “After you willingly came to my bed, plotted behind my back every moment I was inside you.”

If I could have taken my hands off the wheel, I would have slapped him. “I knew humanity wouldn’t change you.”

He looked startled and wounded by my comment. “You don’t know a damn thing about how I’ve changed.”

I shook my head. “Cyrus, we shared a telepathic bond once. I saw exactly how deviant your mind is. You’re making an attempt, and a pretty lame one at that, to convince me everything I saw in your head was a lie?”

“No, it wasn’t a lie.” He covered his face with his hands, a deceptive piece of body language that made him appear less dangerous. I knew better.

Or I thought I did. He didn’t lash out again, and I could only attribute his sudden defeat to sleep deprivation. “You’re tired. You should climb in the back and sleep.”

“No, I want to say this to you.” He rubbed his forehead with the thumb and first two fingers of one hand. “I was a monster when you knew me. I can’t change that. But I’m not that man anymore. I don’t know how else to explain it to you, except to say that she—Mouse—she did something to me that no one else ever did, and it made me different. Ah, I sound like a complete asshole.”

And he did, a little. I’d never bought into the idea that a person could be changed by something as miraculous as a bond with another person, though Cyrus had come damn close to changing me for the worse when we were blood tied. There was a genuineness in his words, though, as though he actually believed he had changed. If he believes it, that’s enough to make it so, right?

I swallowed, my tongue suddenly dry and thick in my mouth. “What did she do to you?” I hope it’s nothing disgusting. I couldn’t shake the suspicion that this outpouring of deep emotion might be a setup, another way for him to trap me into a gruesome shock. He’d always been so good at that.

“She said she loved me.” He laughed a little, but there was only sorrow in the sound.

He’d asked me once if I loved him. Well, actually, he’d demanded I say the words. But I’d refused. Guilt speared through me now. Was that really all it would have taken? If I had just kept lying to him, made him believe I’d loved him, could we have been happy together?

I pushed the thought from my mind. Of course I’d been attracted to him. He’d been an attractive man. It hadn’t helped that we’d been linked through a powerful emotional, telepathic connection. But if I’d bent to his will that night, it wouldn’t have changed him for the better. It would have condemned me to life as a monster.

You weren’t good enough to change him. The realization brought tears dangerously close to the surface, and I cleared my throat, blinking rapidly, to chase them away.

If he noticed my distress at all, Cyrus didn’t say a thing. “That was the key. No one else, not my wives, not my brothers, not even my father, ever told me they loved me. I think I must have endeavored to make myself…unlovable, for lack of a better term. I was daring someone to prove my perception of myself wrong.”

“I’m glad you know yourself so well.” Torn between remorse and rage, I kept my eyes on the road, not trusting myself to look at him.

“I had a lot of time to think today.” The noise of his seat belt releasing indicated he was preparing to move into the back. “I’m going to go to sleep.”

As he half stood, easing between the seats, he put his hand on my arm. His touched burned, just as I remembered. “I’m sorry for all the times I hurt you, Carrie. Whether or not you believe it, I needed you to hear it.”

Pointedly, I removed his hand from my body. “I appreciate the sentiment.” I knew it sounded sarcastic, and I wanted to take the words back, because I had truly meant them. It did mean something to me to know he was sorry.

I just couldn’t trust him yet.

When I was sure Cyrus slept—I could tell by the atrocious snores only truly exhausted people produce—I took the cell phone from the glove compartment and dialed Max.

It took him forever to answer, and for a moment I grew alarmed. Nothing short of death or dismemberment could stop that man from answering a phone. Finally, he did pick up, obviously out of breath as he greeted me with a curt, “Harrison.”

“What’s the matter?” My first thought was that something had happened to Nathan.

Max’s thin laughter did nothing to assure me. “Nothing, nothing. I’m just…you know…getting ready to go out and fight the good fight.”

“You’re supposed to be looking for Nathan, not fighting anyone.” I was used to Max acting nonchalant in dire circumstances, but he sounded strange, even for him. “Are you sure nothing’s wrong?”

He laughed again. There was a definite edge of nervousness in his tone. “Oh, yeah. I’m just, you know…So, are you there yet?”

I’d almost forgotten why I’d called him in the first place. “Actually, I’m on the way back.”

“With Cyrus?”

“With Cyrus.” I glanced guiltily into the rearview mirror, afraid for a second I would see him there, eavesdropping. Then he exhaled loudly in his sleep, and I almost laughed with relief. “And he snores.”

“Did he have any information?”

I chewed my lip. There was so much to the story Max didn’t have to know. My gaze met its guilty twin in the rearview mirror. I wouldn’t be able to keep silent forever about the girl in the church, or the horrible jealousy she’d inspired in me. Today was not forever, though. I’d just give him the bare minimum he needed to keep his end of this operation afloat.

“Carrie, are you still there?” He didn’t seem worried, but annoyed.

Impatient much, Maximilian? “Sorry. Keeping my eyes on traffic.”

He sighed loudly into the phone. “So, what’s the story?”

I filled him in on what I had learned about the Soul Eater’s ritual.

When I finished, Max said, “Well, I can tell you for sure we’re being watched.”

“By who?” His Movement connections really came in handy.

“The Soul Eater. I found a nest of his goons last night when I was tailing Nathan.” He yelped, then muttered under his breath, “Sorry. I pinched myself.”

“Max, is someone there with you?” Maybe he thought I would be angry with him for, er, entertaining while Nathan was in danger. I was a little irked, but I wasn’t going to rip his head off. It was Max, after all. I wasn’t entirely sure he could exist on blood alone, he was so dependant on sex.

“No, not at all.” The tone of his response was a little too bright. It wasn’t in sync with the question I’d asked.

An evil smile twisted my lips. “Then you won’t have a problem admitting that you’re gay.”

“What?” He laughed. “Why would I say something like that?”

“If you don’t say it, I know you’re with a woman right now.” Max Harrison admitting he was gay? Never going to happen, especially if an attractive female could hear.

“You’re being childish.”

Yes, I was. “Say it. Say ‘I, Max Harrison, like dick.’ Say it.”

“Fine!” He let out an annoyed breath. “I found the other assassin. She’s here right now.”

“What?” The wheel slipped from my hand for a second and I scrambled to regain my hold before I drove us off the shoulder. “What’s she doing there?”

“Calm down, she’s cool. She’s on our side, at least for now.” He cleared his throat. “The Movement didn’t fill her in entirely on her assignment, and she’s reassessed her priorities.”

“You should, too,” I snapped. “I can’t believe you’re letting the enemy waltz around my house!”

“She’s not the enemy. Christ, Carrie, haven’t you listened to a word I’ve said? Now that she knows what’s really going on, she’s going to help us!” Max shouted, and the phone crackled with feedback.

“Yeah. She’s going to help herself to Nathan’s head after you lead her right to him!” I was glad miles of highway separated us, because I was mad enough to stake him.

“Nathan attacked her!” Max followed his statement with a loud curse. “She barely survived. But she remembers the attack, and she knows he’s been possessed. And she knows the Soul Eater is involved.”

Max wouldn’t fight so hard if he had a doubt as to her loyalty to our cause. And he wouldn’t let a woman sway his judgment. He might have been a womanizer, but he wasn’t stupid. But I wouldn’t give in to him right now. I was still too angry. “Fine. Tell me more about the Soul Eater.”

“Not much more to tell. There were bodies everywhere, but no guards posted. They’ve been there awhile. I think they’re looking for Nathan, too.” He paused. “Listen, he was getting pretty close, but we chased him off. I’m thinking it’s probably not a good idea for him to be loose, if his big daddy is looking for him.”

“That’s what I was thinking, too. But what are we going to do? I mean, we can catch him, but how are we going to keep him?” I drummed the steering wheel with my fingertips.

He snorted. “We could use the handcuffs I found in his bedroom. You perv.”

“You snooped through our things, you deal with your disgust on your own time.” I was just glad Max wasn’t able to see my mortified blush as I thought of exactly what those handcuffs had been used for. The same kind of mortified blush I’d had the night Nathan had jokingly—but only by half—brought them home. A vampire who’d escaped police capture had been wearing them when he’d run into Nathan, who’d still been on Movement-training autopilot. After Nathan had staked the unfortunate jailbird, he’d retrieved the cuffs.

“Have some respect for the dead, Nathan.”

“Come on. I bet the dead, and the GRPD, would want to see these put to good use.”

And boy, did we ever put them to good use.

“Did I lose you?” Max’s voice startled me out of my steaming memories.

I cleared my throat guiltily. “No, I’m here. It’s not a bad idea, catching him and locking him up. Just be careful. Don’t kill him. And don’t let what’s-her-name do it, either.”

“No way I’m gonna let that happen.” He sounded certain.

That was enough for me. “Okay. Just—”

“Be careful?” He wasn’t mocking me. It was clear from his tone he knew exactly how much I depended on Nathan. “You know I will.”

“Thank you, Max.”

After we hung up and the sound of the road was the only thing to distract me from my situation, I relied on Max’s words as my life raft.

It kept me from imagining Nathan’s death at the hands of the monster who’d created him.

19

Rescue

T o Max, it seemed the best way to find Nathan was to retrace their search of the neighborhood they’d been in last night. As fast as possible.

“Let’s go this way.” Without waiting for Bella’s answer, because he knew it would be a contradiction of what he’d just said, Max dove into the hedges.

“Not that way!”

He heard the gentle hum of an electric fence a moment before it bit into his ankles. “Fuck!”

“It is your own fault,” she admonished, laughing as he stumbled backward and fell on his ass. “I could smell it.”

“You can smell electric fences?” He scowled at her. If this had happened to anyone else, even her, he would have found it funny. Especially if it had been her.

She shrugged. “Not anymore. Now I smell ozone and burned skin. Let me see.”

He yanked his leg back as she knelt beside him. “It’s fine.”

“I am sure it is.” She grasped his ankle. “Let me see.”

“Fine.” He rolled up his pant leg, revealing the line of pink, puffy skin where the evil wire had attacked him.

“That does not look as bad as I thought it would.” She seemed impressed.

“I aim to please.” He didn’t realize the double meaning his words could take on until she glanced away, her olive skin tinged red.

He closed his eyes and grimaced, as though his harshly drawn breath could suck the words back in. “I didn’t mean…”

Standing, she acted as if her jacket needed serious adjusting. “I have his scent, but it is old. Maybe it is from last night?”

Damn. Max thought things had gone well between them. After a good long romp on Nathan’s kitchen floor, they’d spent the day researching and trading not-so-subtle innuendos. Then he’d asked a simple question, and it had all fallen apart.

“Hey, can werewolves become vampires and vice versa?” he’d asked, looking up from A Warlock’s Demon Compendium. The book was about two miles over the Dungeons and Dragons nerd county line, and he’d needed a break.

Her face had gone pale, and she’d looked quickly down at the notebook Nathan used to keep track of local vampires. “I do not know what you mean.”

“Yes, you do. You’re a smart girl.” Max had stood and moved to join her in her nest of blankets on the floor, and she’d scooted away nervously. “Let’s pretend you bit me right now. Would I become a werewolf?”

“I would have to bite you with intent.” She’d cleared her throat noisily. “That is, I would have to really want you to become a werewolf. But I do not know if it is possible to be both.”

“Right. Okay. So, if I drained your blood and fed you mine, would you become a vampire?” A strand of hair had fallen into her eyes, and he’d reached to brush it back.

She’d leaped about a foot into the air and slapped his hand away. “No! No, it is not possible. Do you have nothing better to do than pester me with foolish questions?”

After that, she’d become worse than the coldhearted bitch who’d threatened to kill him a few nights previously. She’d become completely indifferent to him.

She headed off down the sidewalk now, her arms hugged tight around her middle. He didn’t follow. She didn’t get far before she realized she was alone.

“Are you coming, vampire?”

Vampire. A big difference from the way she’d said his name over and over the night before, when he’d had his head buried between her legs. His scalp was still sore from where she’d practically yanked his hair out.

“So, it’s back to vampire now, is it?” he asked when she finally turned around.

Stalking toward him once more, her posture rigid, she narrowed her golden eyes. “What should it be?”

He folded his arms across his chest. “Well, considering the fact I spent a great deal of last night doing things to you that are illegal in most states, I thought we were on a first-name basis.”

Guiltily, she eased her stance. “Max, last night meant a lot more to you than it did to me.”

“What?” His voice cracked. Smooth to the end, Harrison.

Bella made a face and took a step back. “I am very good at reading people. You cannot disguise your feelings.”

“What?” He sputtered this time. “I don’t have any feelings!”

“You talk in your sleep.”

If he’d been warm-blooded, Max’s blood would have run cold. Her palm burned where it cupped his jaw, and he stepped away. “Don’t!”

“I do not want to hurt you, Max.” She lifted her hands helplessly. “And I do not mean to embarrass you by saying these things. I thought you should know—”

He turned away. “Whatever.”

“Max, please!” She grabbed his arm. “I thought it was just a fling. I would never have suggested it if I had known you had feelings for me.”

“I told you, I don’t have any feelings!” As far as he knew, it was true. Sure, he’d had the passing odd thought, but he hadn’t dwelled on them, for Christ’s sake, and he certainly hadn’t consciously called them up. He wasn’t interested in her or in any other woman that way.

“I do not believe that,” she insisted. “Whatever it is you feel for me, your subconscious wanted me to know. And I do not want to hurt you when you realize you are not part of my life plan.”

“Part of your life plan?” He rubbed his temples. What had he said? What sappy things did his big mouth blab that she’d misinterpreted to be about her? “This can’t be happening. You’re on the wrong side of this conversation!”

“Max,” she began, her eyes growing wide.

“No, forget this. I’m out of here.” He turned to leave, only to collide with a solid wall of flesh and muscle.

“Max, watch out!”

It was too late. He tumbled to the ground with his attacker and rolled into the street.

The smell of ruined blood jolted his body like the electric current of the fence. They’d been out to find Nathan, and instead, he’d found them.

“The tranquilizer!” Max shouted, kicking his friend backward. They’d decided that drugging Nathan would be the easiest way to capture him. Max had just thought Bella would be faster with her Movement-issue tranq gun.

“The tranquilizer,” he repeated, then cursed as Nathan broke free and plunged through the hedge.

This time, Max made sure not to get tangled in the electric fence. By the time he fought his way clear of the branches, Nathan had already vaulted over the back wall of the yard they’d stumbled into. “Bella, hurry your ass up!”

She charged past him with speed he had no chance of matching, so he didn’t bother to try. For a moment, he considered waiting for her to bring their quarry back. She’d certainly get to him first. Then Max remembered what she’d looked like after her last tangle with Nathan, and fierce protectiveness forced him into motion.

I am not worried about her because of the things she said. I am just looking out for a friend who might be in trouble. Two friends who might be in trouble. I’m doing a good thing. And I have no feelings.

He scrambled up the wall, thanking God or the devil or whoever was responsible, for his unusual ability to scale vertical obstacles. The first thing he saw on the other side was the gun, lying uselessly in the grass. He lifted his gaze and saw Bella and, looming over her, pinning her to the damp ground, Nathan.

“Shoot him!” she shouted. Battle-calm though she might be, her eyes were wide. She was terrified. “Shoot him!”

The creature masquerading as his best friend snarled, a fierce sound that raised the hair on the back of Max’s neck. Nathan’s face twisted for a moment into feeding mode, then back to his more recognizable features. But it wasn’t the monster Max saw there. Nathan’s eyes were watery and rimmed in red, his forehead creased in inhuman concentration. He opened his mouth to issue a desperate scream. “Shoot me!”

Max didn’t hesitate, and pulled the trigger. He wasn’t sure he would have wasted time if Bella had insisted he stake Nathan. Seeing her that way, trembling and helpless, Max had a horrible realization shoot through him: that he would have killed Nathan if it was the only way to stop him from hurting her.

The shot struck Nathan in the chest, and for a moment, Max worried that killing him was exactly what he’d done. He raced toward his fallen friend.

When their eyes met, Nathan seemed to understand his concern. “It’s not in the heart. It’s not in the heart.” Then he closed his eyes.

Max collapsed on the grass beside him, but was back on his feet a second later. Bella.

She lay sprawled on the ground, taking fast and shallow breaths. When she turned her head and caught sight of him, she smiled weakly. “I am sorry, I thought I had him.”

“Are you okay? Did he hurt you?” Max dropped to his knees beside her. “You shouldn’t move, you know, in case anything is broken.”

“I should stay here until the owners of that palace call the authorities and have me hauled away for trespassing?” She stood slowly, brushing off her clothing and shooing away his hands. “I will be all right. Besides, we have to get him back to his apartment before the drugs wear off.”

“How long do we have?” Max looked reluctantly away from her, to where Nathan lay in the grass, his chest barely moving.

“Ninety minutes at the most. Only enough so I can make a clean getaway.” She shrugged one shoulder as if trying to work it back into the socket. “I have never had to transport anyone before.”

Max eyed his friend’s body, then the woman at his side. “I think he’ll be too heavy on my own, but I don’t want you to help me if you’re not up to it.”

“I am fine. Treating me like porcelain is not going to change anything,” she said firmly.

He didn’t argue. There was no point, as long as she believed he was completely infatuated with her.

That’s the problem, he decided. Her wishful thinking.

Knowing that made it much easier for him to endure the ride back to the apartment.

By the time they got Nathan up the stairs, the tranquilizer had nearly worn off. He dangled between them—Bella at his feet, Max lifting his shoulders—like a very drunk, very heavy piece of supertenderized meat.

“Take him to the bedroom,” Max ordered, nodding in the direction of Nathan’s room. “He’s got a brass headboard. We’ll be able to cuff him to that.”

“You came up with that pretty easy,” Nathan mumbled with a tired-sounding laugh. “Been fantasizing about me?”

“If he is lucid, perhaps it is unnecessary to restrain him,” Bella suggested, her gold eyes locking with Max’s for an uncomfortable moment.

He looked away. He didn’t want to be accused of staring googley-eyed at her or anything.

“No!” Nathan stiffened, and Max struggled to keep hold of him.

Grunting with the strain of supporting his friend’s body, Max motioned toward the bedroom with another quick jerk of his head. “I saw what he was going to do to you. No offense to either of you, but until we get this mess sorted out, we’re keeping him locked up.”

Bella looked as though she would argue, but closed her mouth in a tight line. “It is a good sign he is talking,” she said, clearly trying to sound cheerful for Max’s benefit.

“Is it?” he asked through clenched teeth. He didn’t need her pity optimism.

She dropped the act at once. “I do not know. Maybe?”

“It means he’s not possessed. At least, not by a demon.” If he were, he’d be completely out to lunch, with no occasional popping into the office as he’d been doing. Max wasn’t an exorcist or anything, but he’d seen a few cases of demonic possession in his time. Whatever had hold of Nathan wasn’t controlling him full-time.

They shuffled down the hall to the bedroom. Max considered making a snide comment about this being the place where they’d first met, but he didn’t want to chance giving Belle even more of a wrong impression. “Get him up here.”

Nathan groaned as they lifted him onto the bed. For the first time, Max noted the dark bruises marring nearly every inch of his body. Before, when they’d first captured him, it had been dark, and they’d been more concerned with the weird symbols carved into his skin to notice the state of the rest of him.

“Jesus Christ,” Max exclaimed on an exhale. It was all he could think of to say.

Bella covered her mouth, her gold eyes wide in shock. “What happened to him?”

“I have no idea. I’d put money down that the Soul Eater has something to do with it.” His anger was so thick it could have choked him. He turned helplessly, his hands clutched in fists. He would have slapped the lamp from the bedside table to release some of his rage through destruction. But it wasn’t his lamp to break, it wasn’t his body that was ruined and it wasn’t his sire to be pissed at. With a deep breath he released with a curse, he turned back to the bed.

“Where’s Carrie?” Nathan’s eyes, cloudy from the drugs, searched Max’s face with an intensity that made his skin crawl.

How much did Nathan know? And how much should Max tell him?

Thankfully, Bella took care of it for him. “She will be here soon. Lie down. I will get something for your bruises.”

“There’s witch hazel. In the shop,” Nathan panted. “The drugs are wearing off. Do something!”

“Give me the handcuffs.” For being afraid of him before, she was awfully take-charge now. Max went to the dresser to retrieve the cuffs. She held her hands out as if to catch them. Max shouldered past her.

“Sorry, buddy,” he said under his breath as he stretched Nathan’s arms above his head.

“Don’t let it happen again. Don’t let me go back there.” Nathan’s fingers wrapped around Max’s arm with terrifying strength.

Now I know how a life preserver feels, Max thought, carefully withdrawing from his friend’s grasp. “We’re going to try and help you.”

For a heart-stopping moment, Nathan’s face contorted into his vampire form, and he growled. Then his features returned to normal, as if they were wax melting, and he closed his eyes.

“He is unconscious again,” Bella noted.

Max wanted to snap at her, to tell her he knew Nathan was unconscious, but it would have been pointless. Sure, it would make him feel better now, but later, when he had to go back to being civil, it would only make things that much more awkward. He snapped a cuff closed around one of Nathan’s wrists and threaded it behind the brass bars of the headboard. Bella improvised a rope with the sheet, until they could find something more suitable, and tied Nathan’s feet to the end of the bed.

“He will be uncomfortable.” She stood with her arms folded across her chest, a critical, yet entirely unhelpful, look on her face.

Max bit his tongue and cuffed Nathan’s other wrist. “Better him uncomfortable than us dead.”

She shrugged, seeming to acquiesce to his logic, but with her it was hard to tell. In a bizarrely maternal gesture, she picked up a faded quilt from the floor and spread it over Nathan, folding the top back gently.

Max followed her into the living room, where she reached for one of the research texts they’d abandoned the night before.

“You should get some sleep before sunup,” he suggested. “That way, if we need anything during the day, you’ll be awake enough to go for it.” Really, he just wanted her unconscious so he wouldn’t have to deal with her, and having her sleep seemed like less trouble than knocking her out.

To his annoyance, she settled on the couch, not in the tangled nest of blankets she seemed to prefer to furniture. “I will be fine. I am going to go through these books and see if there is some way I can help your friend.”

“I’ll go down to the shop, check if there’s anything I missed.” Max left before she could offer to come with him, and bolted down the stairs two at a time.

Outdoors, the night was slowly becoming morning. Since the day after he’d been changed, Max had always been able to tell the subtle shift from one day to the next without looking at a watch.

It’s the smell of it. Night smells like death and dirt. When the morning wakes, no matter how dark the sky might still be, everything smells new again. Even this foul city.

Max swiped at his cheek, remembering his sire’s lips there. Marcus had taught him so much that night, as they’d sat on the ledge atop their building, gazing across Chicago’s impressive skyline. It had been different then, of course. When Max was home, which wasn’t often, and when he couldn’t find someone or something to distract him from his solitude, which was even rarer, he went to the roof and wondered at the changes that had been made, even in his short lifetime. Or, after-lifetime, if he was feeling particularly sorry for himself.

I wish you were here, Marcus. I have no idea what I’m doing.

But his sire would have laughed and said something so sickly sweet and inspirational, such as “I believe in you” or “Have faith in yourself,” that Max would have had to trust him. Marcus always had a way of spinning frothy sentiments to concrete.

Shaking his head at the thought, Max turned, only to find a pair of startling gold eyes studying him intently.

“Jesus Christ, make some noise when you sneak up on a person!” he shouted, trying to calm his thundering pulse.

“You should not take his name in vain.” Bella moved past him, somehow still exotic and graceful in jeans and one of Carrie’s T-shirts. “I came down to look through the herb pantry. There might be something I can use to calm him.”

“That’s a good idea,” Max said, slipping a key into the lock on the shop door and holding it open for her. And it was a good idea. He’d have thought of it himself, if he’d known there was an—“Hey, how did you know there was an herb pantry?”

She shrugged one shoulder, running her fingers idly along the spines of books on the shelves as she passed them. “When I was tracking him, I broke in. It was not hard. There is only cardboard over that broken window.”

Max looked to the door, where the tape he’d used to meticulously seal the empty box to the window frame hung limp and useless at one corner. “Did you take anything?”

“I am a killer, not a thief,” she said, tossing him a playful smile over her shoulder.

Swearing under his breath, he followed her. He’d come down here to escape her. He was fast learning that was an impossibility. “Carrie’s going to be back soon. I think it would be better for her to see him when he’s not, you know, bat-shit insane.”

Bella nodded absently, scanning the rows of neatly packaged herbs in their little plastic bags. “Your friend really knows what he is doing. He has everything a witch would need, and then some.”

“Then you can help him?” Max realized he’d resumed his awful habit of stepping nervously from side to side, something he thought he’d had under control years ago. He commanded his feet to stay in place.

“I hope so. Some mullein leaf should keep whatever that other being is at bay. I’ll give him valerian to induce sleep, and…” She traced down a column of herbs until her eyes widened at the sight of what she was looking for. “Catnip.”

Max made a face. He didn’t go in for most of this hippie, herbal remedy hoo-ha. “Catnip? Shall I fetch him a piece of string to play with, too?”

“You will be pleased to hear that I myself am not fond of it.” She faced him, tiny plastic envelopes of herbs clutched in her hands. “But it is a calmative plant. Hopefully, these can do their jobs.”

There were at least a hundred different dried herbs on the wall, not to mention whatever the bottles and vials on the shelves lining the cramped space contained. “Don’t you need some more? Like this stuff—what does this do?”

She took the bottle he offered and squinted at the label. “That is oil of orris root. You could use it for a love spell, but I will not help you.”

Quickly, he put the bottle back. “Very funny.”

“I am only using one for each purpose. These plants, though they are dead and dried, still have a very personal energy. Imagine if I asked you to come to a party to perform magic tricks—”

“Never gonna happen.”

She rolled her eyes. “Just imagine. Then I asked three other people to come and perform the same trick, because I thought you might not get the job done on your own. Would you not be insulted?”

“I suppose so. If I was some fruity magician. I might just swish my cape and go home.” He laughed. It felt good to joke, to ease some of the tension of the night.

She apparently agreed, slapping him lightly on the arm. When she raised her hand to do it again, she curved her fingers around his biceps instead.

The thought of wrecking Nathan’s herb closet in a fit of passion wasn’t as exciting as it should have been. Probably because of her insistence that Max was in love with her. Definitely Fatal Attraction territory there, and he did not want to visit it.

He brushed her hand away and turned back to the herbs. “Knock it off. We have work to do.”

“Yes, I do,” she agreed, clearing her throat. “And you should leave me alone to do it.”

His rejection bothered her, he realized as she walked away. So where was the pride that should have come with that victory?

And why did he feel like he was the one who’d lost?

20

Welcome Back, Part Two

I ’d only been gone a week, but when the lights of downtown emerged from the gentle bend of I-96, it seemed I’d been away for years.

“God help me, I haven’t been away from this stinking place long enough,” Cyrus muttered from the passenger seat.

“You know, you could sleep. I hear it’s the thing for humans to do at night.” I myself had not gotten enough sleep on the trip. I found myself longing for my bed, only to realize it wasn’t really my bed I wanted to be in.

A pang of homesickness brought tears to my eyes. I wanted to be lying beside Nathan, inhaling his scent, listening to his blood as it moved through my veins. For a moment, the pain was so intense I nearly screamed my longing like a child having a temper fit.

I needed Nathan. I loved Nathan. Everyone knew it but him.

“Are you all right?”

I still hadn’t adjusted to the new Cyrus, so it took me a moment to realize there wasn’t a hidden trap in his words. I wiped my eyes and nodded. “I’m fine. I’m just very tired.”

“You could have let me drive. I would have picked up speed. When I was more comfortable.” He paused to look out the window. “My God. Nothing has changed.”

“Well, the bus schedule changed. And they finished the bigger YMCA since you…died.” I pointed toward the south side of town. “I’d show you, but I’d rather get home before I burn to a crisp.”

He nodded. “I don’t mean to sound crass, but what exactly am I going to do here?”

Signaling to change lanes, I shifted into the exit that swooped smoothly down to the heart of town. “I haven’t figured that out yet. You can stay with us for a while.”

“I don’t think Nolen will be happy about that.” Cyrus sounded almost apologetic. Probably because he didn’t want to sleep in the van again.

“Nathan is currently indisposed to object to anything. But I’m not asking you to stay as a guest. You have to stay with us because I don’t want your father getting ahold of you.” I sent him a pointed glance. “And I don’t want you trying to find him, either.”

He gave a mock salute. “Yes, ma’am.”

“I don’t want to fight with you about this, Cyrus.” It still stung to say his name.

He frowned. “Don’t flinch. It’s not like I stabbed you in your heart or anything. I’m human now. You have nothing to fear from me.”

I opened my mouth to argue, but his deep sigh cut me off.

“I do want to find my father. But not for the reasons you suspect.”

Pushing down a huge lump of fear, I tried to sound chipper. “Well, maybe I’ve misjudged you.”

He looked at me with unwavering accusation in his eyes. “You’ve never done anything but.”

I let his comment pass—there must have been a gas leak rendering him high and a complete amnesiac to say something so profoundly stupid—and we rode the rest of the way in silence.

But I couldn’t quiet my mind as we neared the apartment. I had to forcibly remind myself that this wasn’t a joyous homecoming. Our ordeal was far from over, and I had no idea what I was going to find when we arrived. By the time I pulled up to the curb in front of the building, I could barely keep the image of Linda Blair’s spinning head from my mind.

I took a deep breath to fortify myself and grasped the door handle. “Here goes nothing.”

“Wait.” Cyrus’s fingers, startlingly warm on my dead flesh, closed over my arm. He took my shocked hesitation for compliance. “It seems like it was only a few days ago you left me. My chauffer drove me here every day, and I would park at this very curb and imagine you upstairs with Nolen.”

Cyrus clasped my free hand with a firm, earnest grip. “You hurt me. You think I didn’t love you. I didn’t. I thought I did, but now I know I was wrong. But I cared for you. I did truly care for you.”

I swallowed. Maybe if I hadn’t known he was dead, I would have prepared for this moment. If I had planned a confrontation, it would have been a spectacular one. But I hadn’t had a reason to. I didn’t know what to say now or how to react. I couldn’t even tell what I was supposed to be feeling.

“You broke my heart, Carrie.” His gaze locked with mine, and for the first time I saw nothing but honesty in the clear, blue depths of his eyes.

He leaned forward slowly, his catlike grace not lost to death and resurrection. Before I could think rationally—and it would have taken awhile, considering the totally bizarre circumstances of the moment—Cyrus kissed me.

The phrase “like riding a bicycle” came to mind. Though it had been two months, during most of which he’d been deceased, my body responded to him the way it had when we’d shared blood. Utter, uncontrolled desire that crashed over me like a tidal wave and stole every rational thought.

I didn’t touch him, but I didn’t pull away. He wrapped his arms around me. It was awkward because of the steering wheel, but he was still as good a kisser as he’d been as a vampire. My toes curled and I shifted on the seat, trying and failing to force away the tingling ache in my body.

He leaned back, his face flushed, beads of perspiration standing out on his forehead. His gaze fell to my lips, then rose to my eyes, then flitted to the windshield.

“Oh, look,” he panted, pointing dismissively to something beyond the glass. “That’s where I cut your heart out.”

It was so matter-of-fact, so remorseless. The pain of that night—my own, coupled with Nathan’s anguish, as well—sawed through me the way Cyrus’s knife had. Under the weight of the stress and worry I’d been carrying, the hurt was too much to bear. Tears gushed to my eyes and I slapped him, leaving a shocking white handprint that turned quickly to angry red.

I could tell from his expression he knew what he’d done. He reached for me helplessly, but I pushed his hands away.

“How could you do that?” I wanted to wipe his kiss from my mouth, to erase the feeling of his lips from mine. “How could you…”

I couldn’t finish. I didn’t want to say he’d kissed me. I hated knowing that he still had that seductive power over me, that it hadn’t all been because of the blood tie we’d shared. And I hated that whatever that sick attraction was, it had, for the moment, forced all thoughts of Nathan from my mind.

At the top of the stairs, the door opened to reveal a very alarmed woman with a crossbow. I recognized her long black hair and exotic features. It was Bella, the assassin from General Breton’s office. The clothes she wore were familiar, as well. They were mine.

She raked an appraising glance over Cyrus and me, then flipped the bow against her shoulder in a less-intimidating stance. “You must be Carrie.”

I nodded and opened my mouth to speak, but an earsplitting scream interrupted me.

The werewolf’s brow creased in gentle concern. “It sounds worse than it is. I have administered a decoction of herbs to soothe him, but they have not taken effect.”

I mumbled a numb “thank you.” The scream had jarred me. I’d never heard it outside of my head before.

Max emerged from the hallway, wiping his hands on his jeans. “He’s fed, at least.” He froze at the sight of us, an indecisive smile playing tug-of-war with his lips. “You’re back.”

“I know.” It probably seemed cruel of me not to rush immediately to Nathan’s side, but I couldn’t. Not after what had happened—what I had let happen—in the car.

Max frowned at me, as if he picked up on my guilty vibe. True to his damned awesome perception, he turned to Cyrus. “Hey, I’m Max.”

Cyrus betrayed nothing, a skill honed to perfection over seven centuries of intrigue and manipulation. It was like a program that clicked on automatically, and I was secretly thankful for it.

He took Max’s hand and shook it firmly. “We’ve met before. When you and your friends broke into my house and murdered me.”

Max’s good-natured smile never wavered, but I saw Cyrus’s knuckles turn white in his grasp. When he released him, Cyrus surreptitiously wiggled his fingers.

Max cleared his throat. “Nathan’s been asking for you.”

“Then he’s…” I didn’t know how to phrase the question, so I looked helplessly to Bella, who seemed, strangely, more compassionate than Max.

“No, he’s still possessed. He just got a whole lot more lucid when we shot him with the tranq dart,” Max said, throwing the bloody towel over his shoulder. “He’s messed up, physically. He’s just a mass of bruises. And he’s terrified. Maybe you could help calm him down.”

As if on cue, another scream rent the air.

“Yeah.” I wiped my sweating palms on my jeans and threw a quick glance to Cyrus. “Stay here. Max will play nice.”

I expected some comment as I walked down the hall, something to either buoy my spirits or knock me down a peg for being such a lousy fledgling. But I should have known better. Max would scold me privately, after the hard part of all this was finished.

The room was dark, probably to lessen the stimulation for Nathan. When I stepped through the door, he shouted and twisted against whatever restraints Max had come up with. His big body stressed the bedsprings and made the frame groan. The sound immediately conjured up memories of all the times I’d heard it under much more pleasurable circumstances. Then I felt suddenly guilty and perverse.

I wondered if he knew I was there. I could escape now. I don’t have to stand here with him knowing what I’ve done.

Then I remembered the blood tie, and I wanted to smack myself in the head. I hadn’t been consciously blocking him from my thoughts. Could he have heard them?

Would he understand if I spoke? The last time I’d seen him, he’d been a mindless, blood-soaked animal. We’d communicated through the blood tie, but only briefly, before whatever was wreaking havoc with his mind had taken hold of him again.

I couldn’t speak, anyway. I opened my mouth, but what would I say? I leaned against the cool, painted wood of the closed door, my breath far too loud in the tortured silence.

Finally, Nathan spoke. His voice was raw and exhausted, but it was Nathan, not the monster who’d attacked me. “Carrie?”

“It’s me.” I took a careful step forward. Though I knew he was restrained, though I knew he was my sire and I had nothing to fear from him, all I could remember was the blood splashing onto me from his torn skin. Morbid as it seemed, Nathan’s blood had always smelled like home to me. The memory of the putrid stench of it the night he’d attacked me kept my feet rooted stubbornly to the ground.

“They’ve tied me up, dotaír.” His slurred endearment, Gaelic for doctor, brought a sad smile to my mouth. After a drunken sigh, he added, “And drugged me.”

“I’ve missed you.” I had to force the words past a lump that felt dangerously like impending tears. “How do you feel?”

“Drugged,” he repeated with an inebriated chuckle. “I’ve missed you, too.”

“You sound a lot better than you did the last time I saw you, at any rate.” I tried to inject some humor into the statement, but it fell flat.

Only silence greeted me. For a moment, I wondered if Nathan had fallen asleep. Then, very quietly, he said, “Did I hurt you? I don’t remember.”

With sudden violence, he strained against his bonds and shouted in the frightening language he’d used the night he’d been possessed. He finished his angry tirade with a growling, “Let me up!”

“I can’t do that, Nathan.” I tried to be firm, but my voice shook. So did my hands, as I stepped closer to the bed and laid just my fingertips on his chest.

He sank back onto the mattress almost immediately. “Carrie?”

After all I’d been through in my life, the death of my parents, the heartbreak of failed relationships, the physical pain of having my heart literally ripped out, nothing had ever hurt as bad as watching my sire struggle against this unseen enemy.

His helplessness evaporated the last of my fear. “It’s me.”

“Don’t leave me alone,” he begged, clawing frantically at the cuff around his wrists.

“I won’t.” I climbed onto the bed, into the slim space between his body and the edge of the mattress. “I’m not going to leave you, Nathan.”

He relaxed more when I pressed myself flush against him and draped my arm over his chest. Despite the darkness, I saw something change in his eyes. They were still glazed from whatever herbal concoction the werewolf had given him, but now I recognized him there.

His foot found its way from under the blankets and he hooked it around my ankle. “I’ve made a mess of things, haven’t I?”

“No,” I assured him, reaching to smooth a stray lock of hair from his forehead. “We’re going to fix this.”

He shook his head. “I meant with you.”

I couldn’t hold back my tears anymore, but I refused to let him see them. I buried my face against his side. “I’m not afraid of you, Nathan. You haven’t done anything to hurt me.”

“You were my second chance,” he said sleepily. “And I screwed it up.”

I stayed with him, partly because I’d promised, partly because I needed to touch him to assure myself of his presence, physical if not mental. Being there seemed to keep the beast at bay, and if nothing else, I could assure him some rest.

Still, his words echoed in my brain. “You were my second chance.”

I didn’t want to apply any hidden meaning to them, but as in most things, what I wanted and what I got were two different creatures.

Was I his second chance at love? That sounded incredibly corny, like the title of a movie you’d see on the women’s channel. His second chance to have a relationship with someone he didn’t end up killing? I should certainly hope so.

Or did the words even apply to me? He was drugged and possessed, drifting in and out of lucidity. What were the chances he was talking to some demon creature in another dimension?

Or this one? I cast a fearful glance around the shadowy room, then dismissed that notion. I was too old to be afraid of the dark, especially since the other half of me was consumed by fear of the light.

Well, maybe not half. There had to be room for guilt. I’d banished that useless emotion for two months. Why was it leaking into me now at every available chance, like water into a sinking ship? I didn’t like the feeling. I wondered how Nathan could live with it.

Then it hit me, as obvious and absurd as a fish falling from the clear, blue sky.

He couldn’t live with it. And that was what kept him in this state. His guilt kept him prisoner.

As soon as Carrie had left the room, Cyrus found himself descended upon by the two assassins that remained.

“Make yourself useful,” Max growled, and the woman handed Cyrus a thick book with yellowing pages. As she leaned over him, he caught a whiff of what could only be described as “wet dog” smell.

He brightened instantly. “You’re lupin?”

He should have realized his mistake before he made it, he noted as she lunged for him. Her fingernails sank into his shoulders and her teeth snapped inches from his throat before the vampire hauled her off.

“Filthy, murdering beast!” She spat at him, kicking out with such vehemence that she left the floor, the vampire’s grip the only thing keeping her upright.

“Whoa, calm down, it’s an easy mistake,” Max said, turning her away.

Poor bastard’s going to get it now, Cyrus thought with an inward chuckle. If the most demeaning insult to a lupin was being called a werewolf, it was ten times worse the other way around. “I apologize, deeply. I meant no offense. In the past, my only experience has been with your estranged brethren.”

“They are not our brothers, murdering coward!” Her voice still held an edge of hysteria, but she was controlled enough to brush the vampire’s hands aside without seeking to do more damage immediately after. “I know who you are!”

“Have we met?” It was an intentionally cruel remark. He folded his arms across his chest and waited for what she would inevitably say.

“I read the files! I know of your cruelty to my kind. The hunts you arranged for the pleasure of the lupins. Only you called them dogfights when you joked with your friends!” Her golden eyes widened. Would she weep?

The vampire put his arm around her in a proprietary, protective gesture. Very interesting.

“He’s done a lot of things.” Max glared at Cyrus. “But we need him, for the time being.”

Sighing deeply and theatrically, Cyrus spread his hands. “Look, I’m very sorry for any wrong I’ve committed, intentionally or accidentally, against any member of your pack or kennel or whatnot. I mean that truly and sincerely, from the very core of my being. But I’m tired. Please imagine what it’s like to be raised from the dead by a deranged vampire-motorcycle-gang-religious cult, only to be dragged across the country in a van driven by your ex-lover and fledgling who hates you and no longer sympathizes with the human need for waste elimination. I have neither the energy nor the inclination to write a ten page statement officially apologizing for the evils of my past, and if you expect me to, kindly throw yourself beneath the wheels of a moving train.”

When he’d begun to speak, the words didn’t sound so bad. They weren’t tactful, but they didn’t seem confrontational in his mind. Apparently, the vampire had a different perception of things. This time, he lunged forward, only to be held back by his woman. “Don’t talk to her that way!”

“I’ll talk any way I please.” Cyrus’s patience, worn thin by grief and too many hours without sleep, had reached its limits. “I’m not here by choice. If I had it my way, I’d walk out that door and never see any of you again.”

Except Carrie. He’d already lost her once. Since being with her again, he felt too keenly the heartbreak that had still been with him when he’d died. But if she’d have let him, he would have stayed with Mouse, in the desert, until death came to him again.

It seemed death was the only time he had a moment’s peace.

“No one’s stopping you,” the vampire growled, his face shifting to take on the fearsome snout and snarling teeth that marked his true identity.

For a moment, the werewolf stepped back. As if feeling her horror himself, Max shook his features back to a more human visage. Then, apparently aware she’d hurt his feelings, she laid her hand on his arm. “We need him to help us, Max. He is tired and he has been through much. We cannot expect him to react any differently. He is only human.”

The words were intended to wound him, but Cyrus was glad he no longer fit into the bizarre, parallel reality they inhabited. He picked up the book and dropped into an armchair, flipping the pages without really seeing them.

It was strange and uncomfortable to be here, in Nolen’s personal home. Here and there, photographs in cheap frames cluttered the bookshelves and end tables. Some of them depicted Ziggy, the young man Nolen had called son.

Cyrus remembered the boy with fondness. He’d been bright and pleasant, and very talented in the bedroom. And Cyrus had repaid him with cruelty, drawing the youth to him and pushing him away by turns.

Shame burned in him at the memory. “You do know your father and I have a history, don’t you? Of course, he wasn’t nearly as responsive as you are. Does that excite you? To know you’re a better lay than he was? God, what would he think of you if he saw you, on your hands and knees, begging me to fuck you?”

And he had begged. Cyrus had made sure of that.

Absently, he reached out and flipped down the nearest picture, so he wouldn’t have to see the smiling faces of father and son staring back at him.

Max immediately stepped forward and righted the frame.

Ah, so that’s how it would be then. It made sense. In his life, Cyrus had done abominable things, and worse. Now, he was receiving retribution. But if this puffed up child-masquerading-as-tough vampire thought he could dole out the worst of the punishment, he was sadly mistaken. Some vampires in the desert had already claimed that particular prize.

Morbidly, Cyrus’s mind made its way back to the church basement. Did the fire still smoke? Had anyone found her? Had her body burned away? It seemed wrong that he’d left her there, helpless in her death. His logical mind recognized the fact she felt no pain, but his emotions played havoc with his brain, showing pictures of her serene face contorted with terror as she woke to find herself abandoned to the flames.

He should have made Carrie leave him with her, so he could have said goodbye in private. Oh, he wouldn’t have used her the way he had done the girls he’d killed himself. The thought was disgusting when applied to a person he cared about, a person whose life he’d valued. But it had seemed rushed. He’d wanted to hold her, to lie beside her, close his eyes and pretend she lived, despite the stiffness creeping into her limbs and the coldness of her skin. Maybe he would have stayed a few days, never moving. Maybe he would have died of a broken heart.

It was a possibility that eluded him now. His grief, left untended, had subsided some. He didn’t want to survive losing her, but circumstance had forced him to heal to a cruel plateau. He ached for her, but he could not bring that ache to drive him to the madness required to harm himself.

The werewolf—Bella, Max had been calling her—walked in a few lazy circles around a pile of blankets before lying down. She pillowed her chin on her arms, stretched in front of her like a dog’s paws, her eyes scanning a book.

Max stretched on the couch, trying valiantly to read something handwritten. His eyes flitted occasionally from the pages to the woman on the floor.

Cyrus wanted to urge caution. Love was fleeting, and it could be taken so easily. But he didn’t care enough about either of them to impart this knowledge, and if they were smart, they would have known it on their own.

Instead, he gestured to the book in Max’s hands. “What is that?”

“The Big Book of None of Your Business.” He frowned at the lines as if he’d been concentrating on the words and not the object of his obvious desire.

The rejection rolled off Cyrus like water. “It looks like a journal. A book of shadows?”

Max didn’t look up. “It is a journal, and you can stop talking at any time.”

“I’d like to know what I’m supposed to be looking for. Unless you’d just like a comprehensive report on the entire text?” Cyrus closed the book with a loud snap that sent up a puff of dust. Emblazoned in cheap, gold ink across the cover were the words Vou Dou Spells of Possession and Control.

Lovely.

Max finally deigned to glance up, cold fury etched in every line of his face. “You’d know better than we do what he’s up to.”

“He?” Cyrus shrugged innocently. “If by that you mean my father, you are mistaken. I haven’t heard from him since before I died, and he wasn’t happy with me then.”

“Right, and we’re supposed to believe that. I suppose you have no idea why he brought you back from the dead?” Like a shark circling a reef in search of dying fish, Max stood and paced around the room.

It wasn’t quite intimidating enough. In fact, the absurdity of the situation brought a bubble of laughter from Cyrus’s throat, which he quickly suppressed. “No, I do know that. Carrie told me. He’s trying to become a god. But you’re not going to find anything in here to stop him.”

“Where would we find it?” Her attention finally captured by the conversation, Bella sat up. Cyrus would have found her attractive, if not for the fact she was a dog, but he didn’t believe it would be wise to make a pass in front of her boyfriend, especially when he was so obviously besotted with her.

Instead, Cyrus gave her an answer simple enough even the caveman vampire could understand. “I don’t know. As I discussed with Carrie, my father was obsessed at one time with the quest for an ancient spell that would help him achieve such status. But I have no idea if he found that spell in particular, or if he did, where. And I would certainly have no idea how to stop it. If it’s anything like most of these ancient rituals, it will require some impossible undertaking to stop it once he’s begun. Which he must have, if I’m here. Father sticks to a very rigid schedule when it comes to any occult business. Things run more smoothly that way.”

“We are trying to find a way to help Nathan. We think your father may have done something to him,” Bella volunteered, ignoring Max’s glare.

“Oh, he’s absolutely done something to him,” Cyrus agreed. Turning to Max, he admonished, “Isn’t it amazing what you find out when you ask civilly?”

“Shut up and tell us what you know, asshole.” Max leaned against the frame of the doorway that led, presumably, to the kitchen.

Cyrus’s stomach rumbled. “I’m hungry. Does Nolen have anything to eat that isn’t blood?”

“Get him something,” Bella ordered Max. The vampire gaped at her in rage, but turned to do her bidding.

Oh, yes. God save us all from a vampire in love. Only when Max had left the room did Cyrus begin to speak. It was an intentional slight, to put Max in his place.

“If my father is using the ritual I believe he is using, he’ll need to purify the souls of all those he’s turned. The only way to do that is to consume them, at which point he’ll perform another part of the ritual. I’m not sure what exactly that entails. But after it’s done and all the souls are destroyed—”

“Destroyed?” Bella’s eyes widened in shock.

It took Cyrus a moment to remember how barbaric that should sound. A soul was all a mortal creature had—did he have one now?—and humans prized theirs very highly.

“Yes. Once the impurity has been obliterated, he’ll be able to finish the ritual as written.” Cyrus laughed, shrugging. “That will be the best way to stop him. Keep him from collecting the souls he needs.”

“That’s what we plan to do.” Max returned from the kitchen, a crumpled bag of some snack food in his hands. “Here. Kitchen’s closed.”

Though they were stale and horrid tasting, Cyrus pretended to enjoy the “cheese puffs,” as the bag proclaimed, with gusto. “Well, I’m assuming Father has simply used his blood tie to Nathan to call him back.”

“Blood tie?” Max smirked. “I’m pretty damn familiar with that, and it couldn’t make me carve myself up and go on a killing rampage.”

Cyrus shook his head. “No, but perhaps you’d go a little mad if you spent most of your time trying to block it out. I know my father. He used to torment me day and night with visions of—”

No. He wouldn’t share those horrors with these strangers. “With visions of unpleasant things. He’d do that until I gave him what he wanted.”

“Whatever he’s doing, it’s a lot worse than a scary picture show.” Max shook his head. “If we could just figure it out…”

“We will keep looking,” Bella said, lifting another book. “Nathan has an impressive collection. We will find something.”

As the hours ticked by, Max on the couch glancing furtively at the werewolf while she pretended not to notice, Cyrus feigning interest in the dusty text cradled on his lap, he felt a bizarre peace. Though his companions didn’t accept him, he felt involved in their single-minded task and the hope that fueled them. He might not die this week, or the next. He might live a whole year, maybe even two. As long as he had this optimism afforded only to the good guys.

I’m a good guy now, Mouse, he thought, believing with all his heart she could hear him. I think I might stay this way.

21

The Dark Night of the Soul

I woke before sundown. Drugged into oblivion by whatever potion he’d been given, Nathan didn’t stir when I eased from his side. It hadn’t been a restful day. Every time I’d dozed off, I’d come dangerously close to falling off the bed. I’d jerk awake, disturbing Nathan in the process, and have to assure him I was not leaving him. I made a mental note to ask Bella to double his dose tomorrow, so I could get some sleep.

In the living room, Max lay sprawled on the couch, an old-looking book over his face. I sincerely hoped the thing didn’t have paper lice. Bella lay in a pile of blankets on the floor, whimpering like a dog having a nightmare. There was no sign of Cyrus, but my bedroom door was open a crack.

I leaned against the frame and gently eased the door open, hoping to avoid the creak of the sticky hinge. Inside, everything was as I had left it, with one notable exception.

Cyrus lay curled in the fetal position on my bed, the blankets twisted artistically across his nude body.

He was too bizarre, too out of place there. My stomach pitched as though I’d just gone over a particularly nasty hill on a roller coaster. I grabbed the doorjamb for balance.

There had always been a neat division between my current and former lives. The apartment I’d lived in as a human had burned down, so there was no tie left to that time. My only encounters with Cyrus had taken place at the hospital, where I no longer worked; at his home, which I assumed now belonged to Dahlia and therefore I was in no danger of visiting; and in the alley outside the bookshop, where he’d cut my heart out, a place I strenuously avoided. In my mind there were Cyrus Spaces and Nathan Spaces, and they rarely overlapped. To have the two collide so violently and under such stressful circumstances was…well, it was just plain creepy.

“What are you doing?”

I jumped at the sound of Max’s voice and turned to see him stretch sleepily and scratch his stomach.

I nodded to the open door. “Visiting the scene of my nightmares.”

Max chuckled. “Aw, the little asshole’s all tuckered out.”

“You were supposed to be nice to him,” I admonished. Though I shouldn’t care how they treated Cyrus, so long as they left him alive, every time I tried to make myself indifferent to him I remembered the dead girl in the desert and the pain her death had caused him.

Max didn’t have that problem. “Well, he was supposed to be dead. If he can’t return common courtesy, why should I?”

“He’s different now.” I wondered if he really slept, or if he was just faking it, and listening to every word we said.

With a deep, pained sigh, Max shook his head. “What is it with you and this guy, Carrie? I mean, I know he’s your—was your—sire, but he’s not anymore. And after the stuff he did to you, and what he’s doing to Nathan now…why can’t you just let him go?”

Whatever hackles are, mine were raised by that comment. I knew I was being overly defensive, but I couldn’t help it. My feelings for Cyrus, no matter how convoluted, were something I protected like a cherished family heirloom. I closed the door as quietly as I could and faced Max. “You wouldn’t understand.”

“Explain it to me in a way I would. We’ve got nothing but time.” He leaned against the wall and folded his arms across his chest, daring me in his cocky, silent way to defy him.

I could have brushed him off with a simple refusal, but that would have closed off a part of me to him, and that was something I was unwilling to do. Max was a friend, and it wasn’t as if I had those in spades these days.

“When I lived with him, Cyrus played so many mind games I had a hard time sorting out what feelings were mine and what ones he manipulated me into feeling.” I took a deep breath. I didn’t like talking about personal matters to anyone, even Nathan. At least with him, he knew what I was feeling before I did, and our “conversations” were little more than telepathic exchanges of emotion. “I didn’t get it quite sorted out before he died, and now that he’s back, some of those feelings are back, too.”

“Do you love him?” The question was so blunt and naked, it sounded perverse.

“No. I don’t love him. Not in a romantic sense.” At least I could deny that much.

“What about other senses?” Max’s tone implied his bullshit detector was reading off the charts.

That was one of the main problems with men. They couldn’t accept the concept of love unless it applied to sex.

“I don’t love him. But I see the potential in him to become a good person, and I have a lot of admiration and yes, affection, for the man he is when he lets his guard down. But that doesn’t mean I’m going to run off with him or anything.” I thought of Nathan lying in the other room, and what might happen if we couldn’t save him. Was I ready to live a lifetime alone?

“But I didn’t ask you to go easy on him because of any feelings I might have for him.” It seemed almost cruel to betray such private information about my old sire, but Max needed to understand my pleas for sensitivity where Cyrus was concerned. “Something happened in the desert. Not between him and me, but it was my fault. He wasn’t the only human being held by the Fangs. There was a girl—I guess they were keeping her alive to watch him or care for him. But they were…intimate. And I made a stupid mistake and got her killed. Max, I think he really loved her. She managed to reach some place inside of him I knew existed but had no clue how to unlock. Now that she’s gone, I’m afraid he’s closed that part of himself off again, and that’s going to make him susceptible to anything the Soul Eater might offer. I don’t want him to be a monster again.”

Max didn’t speak. What could he have possibly said? Of course, before we could say any more, my bedroom door opened and Cyrus, clad only in the black slacks he’d worn on the trip, stepped out. “Whispering sweet nothings in the hallway? How romantic.”

Max straightened instantly, looking a little disturbed by the implication. “No.”

Cyrus laughed, and I flinched at the sound. It was too much like the monster who’d sired me. “I was joking. I know you’ve got your eye on the werewolf,” he stated.

Now it was my turn to laugh. “Of course he does. He’s Max, and she’s female.”

A patient smile formed on Cyrus’s mouth, and Max looked away, rubbing his neck in a classic gesture of social discomfort.

“Oh.” I cleared my throat. “Well, I’m impressed, Max. I was beginning to think you were always going to be the love ’em and leave ’em type.”

He let out an exasperated breath. “Hey, I am the love ’em and leave ’em type. And I don’t love her. It was just…boredom fucking.”

I exchanged an uncomfortable glance with Cyrus, the ocular communication equivalent of “thanks but no thanks for the details.”

“I’m going to take a shower,” Cyrus announced, striding purposefully toward the bathroom. “I’ll leave you to your awkward moment.”

I followed Max into the kitchen, where he rooted in the fridge for blood. When he reached for the teakettle, I offered, “I can do that.”

He shook his head. “Nah. I need something to keep myself busy, or I’ll be in there waking Nathan up by worrying over him. How’d he do?”

“Fine.” I sat at the table, apologizing for the loud scrape the chair made against the floor.

“Don’t worry about waking her up, she sleeps like the dead. At least, like the dead who aren’t currently possessed.” Max winked at me as he set the kettle on the burner. “Did you get any sleep?”

“None at all. So, what’s going on with you and Bella?” At his pointed look, I raised my hands helplessly. “I’m sorry, I’m a doctor. We’re supposed to ask questions.”

“About people’s personal life?” He raised an eyebrow.

Squirming under his knowing gaze, I shrugged. “Sometimes.”

“You’re not that kind of doctor.”

“And what kind of doctor is that?” For a second I thought he’d respond with a smart-assed answer about venereal disease.

Instead, he took the other chair and rested his big forearms on the cracked Formica tabletop. “A head doctor. A shrink. Just admit you have a case of nosy frienditis.”

“Fine. I have a case of nosy frienditis. Now answer the question.” It wasn’t a command, but gentle urging.

Something was warring inside Max. I could see it in his boyish, blue eyes. He sighed and leaned back in his chair. “I have no idea. One minute we hated each other, the next I’m finding her split open like an overcooked hot dog. I bring her back here and bam, we’re all involved.”

“That must have hurt for her,” I observed sagely.

He gave me a look that suggested I keep my mouth shut lest I enrage him further. “It wasn’t like that. I had to finished stitching up her wounds first. Thank God you have so many boring medical books.”

“I live to serve.” I drew patterns on the table with my fingertip, trying to figure out a way to delicately phrase my next question. “So…does this mean you’re…her mate or something?”

“Well, we did ‘mate,’ so to speak. And I owe you guys for some broken dishes—”

“Yikes.”

“Yeah.” He shook his head. “The thing is, she thinks I’m in love with her.”

“I take it you’re not?” I chuckled. “Max, you could save yourself a lot of trouble if you just kept your pants zipped.”

“It’s not like that, this time. She thinks I love her, and she doesn’t love me, so she thinks she’s hurting my feelings or something.” The teakettle’s whistle sputtered, and Max jumped up to turn off the burner. Once blood boils, it burns, making for an unpleasant, scorched-pot-roast taste.

“Well, you’ve really got no problem then, right?” I moved past him to snag a couple mugs. “If neither of you love each other, then you’re free and clear.”

“And she walks away thinking she dumped me?” He swore, though I couldn’t tell if it was at the idea of being rejected by another sentient being, or if he’d made contact with a hot part of the kettle.

“Is that the worst thing in the world?” I knew Max had a major pride problem, but I hadn’t realized it went so deep.

He poured the blood into the mugs and set the remainder on the back burner. I assumed he left that portion for Nathan, and his thoughtfulness brought unexpected tears to my eyes. I quickly shooed them away, blaming my overemotional state on the fact I hadn’t had any sleep.

“It’s not the worst,” Max conceded as he returned to the table with our breakfast. “But it’s not good. I got a rep to uphold.”

I reached across the table to slap him lightly on the shoulder. He laughed, but the levity was brief. “Besides, I couldn’t be with her permanently. I think of that, then I think about Marcus—”

“Your old sire?” I asked for clarity.

He gave an affirmative nod. “I think about the fact that he’s gone, and all I’ve been carrying around is this yearning for him, wanting to feel what I felt with him. You know, in a totally not gay way. But then I think, wow, love. That’s a thing I have no power over, and it might feel good to know I’m not alone, and it’s like I’m betraying him.”

“You’re not betraying him by moving on.” I spoke so vehemently the sound of my own voice startled me. Embarrassed, I cleared my throat and continued more softly. “What is it with you men, you think you have to hang on to everything.”

“What do you mean?” He took a swallow of blood, his eyes meeting mine in a silent question over the rim of the mug.

“You know exactly what I mean.” And if not all the details, well, it wasn’t my place to spill Nathan’s personal beans. “Nathan thinks he has to carry around a sack load of guilt over Marianne, and because of that, he can’t just get over it. You’re doing the same thing. Your guilt over the way your sire died is so precious to you, you refuse to give it up for even a second in case you might actually get over it and move on.”

“You should have been a head doctor,” Max said in a way that didn’t quite sound like a compliment.

We sat in silence, sipping our breakfast and doing our best to ignore the conversation we’d just had. Occasionally, Max would look up at some imagined sound from the living room, but when Bella didn’t appear he settled down in a disappointed funk.

I thought he was imagining things again when he swore and shot up from the table, nearly toppling it as he tore from the kitchen. “What are you doing?”

Despite the fact Bella still slept, he raced through the living room, turning on lights and lifting books, swearing repeatedly.

Bella sat up sleepily, a crease on the side of her face from the blankets she’d slept on. “What’s going on?”

“Where’s the book you were reading last night?” Max tossed aside an expensive-looking volume with gilt-edged pages.

Rubbing her eyes, Bella frowned. “Which one?”

“Max, what are you doing?” I saved a particularly prized text from knocking over a glass of water on the coffee table.

“You said Nathan is carrying around loads of guilt over killing Marianne. Who, besides you and me, know about that?” He grabbed the book Bella held out to him and began flipping through the pages with such force I worried he would rip them from the binding. A lock of golden hair fell across his forehead, accentuating the madness that seemed to have gripped him.

“Well, Cyrus knows. He was there. And so was the Soul Eater.”

“Max, you don’t think that has something to do with…” My stomach roiled. I had a feeling the blood I’d drunk would soon be wasted.

Strong hands closed over my shoulders, and I realized belatedly I no longer heard the water running in the shower.

“Has something to do with what?” Cyrus’s breath stirred the hair at the back of my neck.

Max coughed and I stepped out of Cyrus’s proprietary embrace.

“Do you remember the name of the spell Bella told us about last night?” Max asked, the proverbial look that could kill on his face.

Cyrus and Bella answered at the same time, in two different languages. Cyrus’s words were the ones I could understand. “Dark Night of the Soul.”

Fully awake now, Bella stood beside Max and tried to take the book. “You are going the wrong way, it is in the back!”

I turned to Cyrus, dismayed to see he wore only a towel draped low across his hips. “We think we know what your father is doing to Nathan.”

“I told them exactly what he’s doing. They didn’t believe me, until she ran across it in that blasted book.” He rolled his eyes. “Apparently, my word is only good if I can back it up with written proof.”

“What is he doing?” I took his hands in mine, not caring what Max would think. “Please, Cyrus. I have to have him back.”

“Do you love him?” The words sucked the air out of the room. Even Max and Bella stilled.

I swallowed what felt like a ball of razor blades. “Does it matter?”

We stared at each other a long moment. In Cyrus’s eyes, I saw the hurt he felt at losing the girl in the desert, and the hurt he would feel if he thought there was no chance I’d ever return to him.

I felt the word leave my lips before I thought to say it. “Yes.” The admission sliced something open inside me, and I felt the poison that had festered there for the past two months spill free and evaporate. “Yes, I do love him.”

Whatever had opened in me corresponded to something closing off in Cyrus. He shrugged as though indifferent to the entire conversation, and looked away. “Dark Night of the Soul goes way back. It started out as a spell to test the faith of a shaman or mystic. Basically, it forces them to live the most troubling, painful moments of their life over and over. The only thing that keeps them from going mad is the strength of their mind and their belief in the training they’ve received. For example, a very religious person might call on the Judeo-Christian God for strength when enduring such a trial, and their very faith would break the spell.” He stopped, a hard set to his jaw, but the emotion in his eyes was unreadable.

“But if you used it on someone who had no hope to begin with…” I knew instantly what Nathan’s Dark Night entailed. “He’s killing her.”

“Over and over again,” Cyrus agreed grimly. “Father wouldn’t let him off too easily.”

“But why?” Bella asked, looking up for a moment from the book. “What purpose does it serve to make him insane?”

“He’s not insane,” Cyrus explained. “He’s sane enough to know what he’s doing, but he can’t control the memory. It’s already happened, so he’s helpless to repeat his actions. He knows who is responsible, at least who is responsible for making him kill his wife in the first place. Father needs to gather to him the souls he’s corrupted. What better way than enrage and torture them until they seek him out to end it?”

“If we kill the Soul Eater, will the spell stop?” Good old Max, always ready to hack and slash his way out of any problem. Not that I blamed him. At this point, I wanted to kill Jacob Seymour myself.

Cyrus shook his head. “That’s the beauty part. Even after the caster is dead, the spell continues.”

“The sigils,” Bella interjected. “They are the anchors.”

Cyrus nodded, looking a bit too impressed with his father’s cleverness. I turned away, disgusted. “Well, then what, he’s just screwed?”

“No.” Bella’s golden eyes scanned the pages. “It will not be easy, but there has to be a way to fix this.”

“Does there?” Max laughed, a weary sound despite the fact he’d just gotten up. “Well, that’s a relief.”

“Everything has an opposite. No spell exists that cannot be broken.” She sniffed derisively and snatched the book from his hand. “I will be downstairs. I assume I have the supplies there at my disposal?”

“Of course.” I was fairly certain Nathan would have given away his entire inventory to escape the hell he was in.

Bella closed the book and slipped it under her arm as she walked toward me with unnerving grace. “Do I have you at my disposal?”

“Of course,” I repeated, though this time I sounded less certain. “What will I have to do?”

She tossed her hair and gave a thoroughly European shrug. “Maybe nothing.”

As she passed Cyrus she paused to give his near nakedness an appreciative once-over. Then she took the keys from the hook on the wall and left.

“Don’t you have any clothes?” Max growled.

An antagonistic grin twisted Cyrus’s mouth. “They are, unfortunately, the same ones I’ve been wearing for nearly a week now.”

“I’ll loan you some of mine. And keep them on.” Max shoved past us and went to the foot of the couch, where his duffel bag lay open. He pulled out a pair of jeans and a T-shirt and tossed them to Cyrus. With an angry glare my way he added, “I’m going to go feed Nathan.”

“Stay away from my girl,” Cyrus muttered in an exaggerated American accent when Max emerged from the kitchen and stalked down the hall.

“Leave him alone. He’s kind of having a rough time.” I turned my back as Cyrus let the towel drop. He’d been naked in the desert, but those were extenuating circumstances. I didn’t need to see it every chance I got.

“Having a rough time? Is that emblazoned on some twisted family crest you people wear?” His words were muffled, indicating the shirt was going over his head.

I turned in time to see him hitch the jeans up his hips. They were at least an inch too big around the waist.

“The way you people are intermittently feeding me, my weight won’t be a problem,” he quipped.

“I’m sorry. Help yourself to anything in the kitchen.” If there was anything in the kitchen. I hadn’t even looked since returning home. Funny, that when I was a human woman food had seemed to dominate every facet of my life. Was I eating too much? How many calories were in that slice of pizza? Were eggs good or bad that particular week? Now that I was a vampire, the necessity for food had completely slipped my mind.

Not the enjoyment of it, though. Nathan kept a huge stock of junk food. I looked forward to the nights the supply seemed to be waning, as it often resulted in a manic trip to the twenty-four-hour grocery store. We’d load up on all the bad-for-humans treats we could find, from Doritos to birthday cake, head back to the apartment, snack ourselves into a sugar coma and fall asleep watching videos. Nathan preferred war movies and intense psychological dramas. I always voted for romantic comedies or historical movies with sumptuous costumes. Inevitably, our disagreement would be settled with a screwball comedy like Young Frankenstein or Half Baked.

“He’s going to be all right, you know,” Cyrus said, interrupting my reverie. With an apologetic smile, he added, “You had that look.”

“What look?” It seemed too intimate, too soon for him to be able to read my thoughts from my facial expression. Part of me didn’t want to give him that power. The same part worried that if Cyrus knew how important Nathan was to me, it would give him ammunition to hurt me. In my logical mind I recognized the changes in him, but my emotions still lived in a place where Cyrus was my manipulative sire.

“You have a look when you’re thinking of him. It used to drive me crazy.” What began as a smile on his face faded to a tight grimace of regret. As if he could still read my thoughts—maybe he could—Cyrus said quietly, “What would yours be? If the spell had been cast on you? That’s all I could think of, when I realized what had happened. What if my father had put that spell on me?”

“My parents?” I laughed at how absurdly human that seemed now, compared to all the hell I’d faced since. “Or you. I don’t know.”

“Me?” He didn’t sound at all surprised. “When I first turned you, I suppose? It wasn’t an ideal circumstance.”

“No. When I killed you.” The tear that slid down my face surprised me, and I swiped it away. Not before Cyrus saw, though, and came to my side.

An emotion that would have been sadness if it hadn’t held so much relief clouded his face. “I heard what you said to your friend this morning. About me.”

I’d suspected as much, but I hadn’t wanted to discuss it. “I didn’t intend for you to hear—”

“You don’t have to worry about making me a monster. You weren’t the one making me a monster when you lived with me. I chose to behave the way I did. Yes, there were times you hurt me. Particularly when you stabbed a knife through my heart and sent me to some bizarre purgatory. But you were not so devastating as to destroy my humanity with your rejection. There wasn’t any left to destroy, by the time I met you.”

Unexpected tears sprang to my eyes. I wiped them on the back of my hand. “I’m not so egotistical that I thought…Well, I don’t know what I thought.”

Nathan screamed, the sound ripping down the hallway and pushing me over the edge. A loud, hiccuping sob tore from my throat.

Cyrus held out his arms, but didn’t embrace me, clearly waiting for me to make the first move. I walked into his embrace, for the first time not doubting his motives or his humanity, because he was human, he saw my pain and he wanted to help.

His arms were strong around my back, his face warm where he buried it against my shoulder. If he’d been this honest when he was my sire, I could have fallen in love with him.

He drew back, smoothing a tendril of hair from my face. “May I ask you a question?”

I nodded, feeling a bit foolish for my breakdown. “As long as it’s not ‘Will you marry me.’”

We laughed liked old friends reunited after a long time apart, not an easy laughter, but one that suggested we were at least working up to that comfortable place.

His expression turned serious. “Let me kill my father?”

The easy moment dissipated like vapor into the air. “Absolutely not!”

“Why? Afraid I’ll turn to the dark side?” He scoffed. “You’ll never believe I’ve changed.”

I swallowed the lump of tears that formed in my throat. “I believe you’re changed. I do. But I’m not willing to take that kind of risk.”

Nathan screamed again, the headboard thumping the wall and echoing through the house. This time, I ignored the way it unsettled me, and concentrated on Cyrus.

“The risk that I’ll return to my father? That I’ll become the monster you remember?” He shook his head. “That’s not going to happen.”

I didn’t respond, trying to block out the sounds of Nathan’s frantic, pleading voice coming from the bedroom.

“Right. I’m just a weak-minded human who’ll succumb to the Soul Eater at the first promise of power and wealth.” Cyrus twisted angrily away, marching down the hallway to my room. I followed.

The way he paced inside the small room alarmed me. I worried he would snap and do something violent or break something. Instead, he grabbed the framed picture of Ziggy off of my desk and thrust it at me. His face twisted with remorse. “I killed this boy. I killed him, because that’s what I was told to do.”

Ziggy’s face smiled at me from the photo. The glass of the frame caught the light in a glare, and I could only make out his mouth and eyes, giving him the faded appearance of an accusing ghost. My chest tightened.

“My father taught me to kill for fun and pleasure. He asked me to do terrible things for him, and I did them. How did he repay me? By taking away everyone I loved, until I couldn’t feel love anymore. I could only feel this burning, selfish want. I desired to possess them, that was all.” He sounded as though he would break down and sob. I didn’t know how I would handle it if he did.

On the other side of the wall, Nathan had become more restless. I closed my eyes and pressed my hands to my temples. Cyrus was there in an instant, this time wrapping his arms around me without looking for permission. He kissed my hair, whispering, “If my father is dead…As long as he’s alive there is always a chance I’ll turn to him, return to the way I was. I never want to become that man again! Do you understand? I want to kill my father.”

Another pained howl rent the air, and I gasped, shocked by the violence of the sound and the hurt that had caused it. “I have to go. I can’t stand this.”

I ran out of the room, to the front door, ignoring Cyrus’s call of, “Carrie, wait!” I took the steps two at a time, burst through the door at the bottom before I took a breath. I dragged the chilled night air into my lungs, wanting to drown in it. From here, I couldn’t hear Nathan crying out, but the memory haunted me. It was worse now that I knew what caused it. The thought of Nathan forced to kill his wife every second, the wife he still loved so much he could not let her go, was too much for me to fathom. I stumbled to the van parked at the curb and leaned my forehead against the side, not bothering to stop the shuddering sobs that racked my body.

Behind me the door opened and closed, and I knew it was Cyrus just from the sound of his footsteps. He put one hand on my shoulder, and I spun at his touch, startling him.

“I don’t think you’ll become a monster,” I blurted, a bit too loudly, but I didn’t care who heard. I just needed to get some of the crushing, confusing emotion off my chest. “I don’t want you going to him because I don’t want you to die! I don’t know what I’d do if—” I choked on the rest of my words, but they echoed in my head. If I lost you again.

Though I hadn’t spoken them, Cyrus heard them. He stared at me, hard, his blue eyes, which had always looked so cold boring into me with an intensity he could have been pretending.

I thought of Nathan upstairs, struggling and in pain. I thought of the agony Cyrus must be going through, over what his father had done to him and the girl in the desert. I wanted the pain to be somehow deeper in me, fearing I wasn’t feeling it enough to truly understand. And then I realized that was all I had been doing—feeling all that horror and guilt until it felt normal, numb.

When Cyrus kissed me this time, it wasn’t passion and anger overcoming him. His hands tangled in my hair, his mouth crushed against mine as if through touching me he could erase my pain. He did care that he had hurt me in the past, and now he sought to make up for that.

I didn’t resist him. I still loved Nathan. He was my sire; it was impossible not to feel something for him. But too much lay unresolved between Cyrus and me. It wasn’t betrayal, it was closure.

Cyrus fumbled beside me for an instant, and I heard the back door of the van swing open. He never let me go, never moved his mouth from mine as he shifted me toward it and laid me back on the horrible gold carpet inside. Maybe he thought if he broke contact and gave me a second to think, I would tell him to stop. I wouldn’t have. I hurt. I wanted for just a moment to feel something that didn’t.

I scooted back as he climbed in beside me and pulled the door shut. There was a second of hesitation on his part where I saw the thought, We shouldn’t be doing this, flicker across his face. I pulled my shirt over my head and grabbed him, smashing my lips across his. He straightened with shock, then relaxed again, laying me back and covering my body with his.

When he shrugged out of his borrowed T-shirt, I forced every thought from my mind, for better or worse. We didn’t speak, but moved in a strangely easy dance of pulled clothing and hurried kisses on reachable skin. It wasn’t romantic and it wasn’t tender. It was fucking, in the most disconnected sense of the word.

He slipped inside me easily and I gasped involuntarily at how warm and alive he felt. Vampires were cold, room temperature. He was human. When his hands closed over my hips to pull me harder, faster against him, they were human hands, not the twisted talons of a monster.

I clutched at his back and shoulders, shocked all the more by the warmth of him. When he spilled into me I shuddered, but I didn’t come. He withdrew immediately, not looking at me.

“That was a mistake,” he said, his voice hoarse.

I nodded, trying to find my voice. “Let’s forget it, then.”

We dressed silently, feeling dirty and used without really blaming each other. Only when he pushed open the door to the van and the clean, night air spilled in did I speak.

“You asked me what I would see, if the Soul Eater had put me under that spell. What if it had been you?” I asked, and he looked at me, his face grim. “What would you be living, if it were you under the spell?”

“Fire,” he said without hesitation, and my heart twisted at the thought of the girl in the desert. “I would remember fire.”

22

Do-Over

A good, long walk always helped Max clear his head, but for some reason, wandering the streets with the Soul Eater’s goons in town seemed like a bad idea. He’d headed downstairs to the shop, remembering belatedly that Bella was there. So he sat on the steps in the misting rain, paralyzed by the maelstrom of thoughts whirling around his head.

How could she? He’d just finished drugging Nathan for the night when Carrie and Cyrus had stumbled in, clothes disarrayed, post-sex guilt written over both their faces. It was bad enough that Carrie had brought that bastard into Nathan’s house, but sleeping with him? After what he’d done? The very thought of it made Max feel used. Betrayed.

Oh, other words were hot on the heels of that one. Words like conned and slut and bitch. Then, more forgiving words. Stressed. Hurting. Confused. He forced those resolutely away. He didn’t want to rationalize her behavior. The cold, hard fact of it was Carrie had fucked her old sire while the new one lay practically dying in their bed, trapped in his nightmares.

Fine, it wasn’t their bed, per se. Nathan and Carrie hadn’t really committed to each other, aside from the blood tie. But in Max’s opinion, that was commitment enough.

Even if he wasn’t practically dying—that had been an exaggeration, and Max hated to exaggerate—Nathan was still out of commission. Every second, Nathan relived the worst night of his life, a night whose horror Cyrus had taken part in.

Max was a smart man. He could fool himself with anger for only so long before it would inevitably desert him. When it did, he would have to face the real reason her betrayal bothered him so much.

It mirrored his own.

A light drizzle made the pavement wet. He ducked his head and brushed his palms over his hair, slicking it back from his face with the rain. It would be morning way too soon. He should be seeking shelter. But if he went upstairs, Carrie was there, either waiting for Nathan to get better so she could dump him, or waiting for him to die so she wouldn’t have to, and downstairs was Bella.

And temptation. God forbid Max forget that one.

Whether from a natural attraction or the revulsion between them, Bella made him painfully aware of his body. She made his blood vibrate in his veins just by speaking. His cock got hard at the sight of her. The memory of her taste and smell tormented him. Even her weird, canine habits seemed sexy in a disturbing way. He hadn’t slept the last two days because she was too damn there.

In that time, he’d barely thought of Marcus.

He had no right to forget. Hell, he had no right to have to remind himself that his own stupid actions had gotten his sire killed. The image of the girl with the sweet smile and cold eyes flashed through his brain. As always, the parade of what-ifs followed. What if he’d resisted the ridiculous urge to meet her again? What if he’d told Marcus about her before things had gotten out of hand?

No, he knew why he hadn’t. Marcus would have told him to end it, whether he’d known the girl’s true identity or not. Marcus had loved Max fiercely and far too protectively.

If only Max had realized she’d been an assassin. The signs should have been obvious, if he hadn’t been so horny and stupid and young and in love. But now he knew better. Love didn’t get you anything, and it was more trouble than it was worth. Not that he loved Bella, or the bitch that had killed his sire. It just seemed better to nip the notion in the bud before things went any further.

With the air growing warm despite the drifting rain, he chose Bella, and stepped into the bookshop.

She’d taken to the place the way only a truly strange person could. It had good “energy,” she’d claimed. Max had explained that the pipes had broken earlier in the year; the good energy was probably the lingering mildew smell. Yet another example of how different they were. He could squirrel it away in the back of his mind, with the others he’d been squirreling away for days now as ammunition against his attraction to her.

When he opened the door, the bells announced his intrusion, and she looked up. Her eyes narrowed and her body tensed in the split second before she recognized him and smiled.

Her smile was amazing, but then, nothing about Bella was less than incredible. The way she moved, as though she were aware of every muscle in her body at every moment. The way she kept her expression maddeningly neutral, so there was no hope of discerning what was going on in her mind.

She’s too good for you, anyway, he decided. Then, firmly, to soothe his reality-bruised ego, No, not too good. Too complicated.

“You are all wet.” How did she manage to make such a simple statement sound like a proposition?

The accent, probably. “I was taking a walk,” he lied, hating himself for lying to her. “Thinking.”

“Oh?” She turned back to the counter, where an odd assortment of candles, bottles and herbs lay in neat piles. She lifted a notebook and frowned at the page. “No. You were outside the door. I could smell you.”

“I don’t love you,” he blurted. Very smooth, Harrison.

She looked up, clearly startled, and it gave him some satisfaction to see that he could shake her cool demeanor. “Good.”

“Oh, whatever. I just broke your heart, lady. You know, and I know it.” He tossed his hands up in a gesture of total defeat. “Otherwise you wouldn’t be pulling all this ‘I don’t want a relationship’ bullshit.”

Slowly, as though he were a rabid dog about to attack—great analogy, Harrison—she set her notebook aside. “I meant all of that. And although you repeatedly assure me I am wrong, I am still afraid you do not understand.”

“A lot of women have said a lot of things, trying to tie me down, babe. You’re not the first to play hard to get.” The moment the words left his mouth, he had the distinct feeling he’d made a complete ass of himself. “You’re not playing, are you?”

“And yet you did not believe me the first one hundred times I said it.” She laughed softly. “I am not trying to trick you or trap you. I like you. You are funny and good in bed. But there honestly is not room in my life for a relationship.”

“Mine, either,” he agreed emphatically. If this was the outcome he wanted, why did it feel as if he was losing a very important game in the final quarter?

With a roll of her eyes, she went back to her inventory. “No, you are tied up in your own obligations.”

“Why did you say it like that?” He went to the counter and pulled himself up to sit on the end.

“Count these,” she instructed, handing him a neatly tied bundle of candles. “There should be seven.”

He didn’t bother to look at them before tossing them aside. “You think I’m not too busy with other things for a relationship?”

With a heavy sigh, she braced her arms against the counter and hung her head. “Do you forget I have animal instincts? Do you think I cannot sense what you are feeling when you are inside of me?”

Her blunt words drew graphic pictures in his brain. “I know that when we’re…I know I feel nothing from you.”

“You are holding on to guilt I cannot fathom. Whoever you lost, you cared for them very much. But the only thing standing between you and another love is your unwillingness to let the past die.” She didn’t answer his accusation.

He rarely let himself get angry. It seemed the last few days he’d found compelling reasons to allow that part of him to slide. “Why don’t I feel anything from you?”

“Because there is nothing to feel.” The words came quickly, as though they were rehearsed.

Or used often.

Cold fury coiled in his gut. He jumped down and faced her, his hands balled to fists in his sides. As long as his nails bit into his palms, as long as that pain kept him aware of his body, he wouldn’t be tempted to take his anger out on her physically. “Was this all a trick?”

“What?” Confusion crossed her face.

“You know what!” His disgust and pain overwhelmed him, forcing bitter laughter from his chest. “You’re playing with me, trying to get me to fall for you so you can get some sick pleasure from rejecting me. How many men have you done this to?”

“None!”

Were those tears in her eyes? They were a nice touch. “Right. This isn’t some sick game you play to get your kicks. You came on to me on a whim. I can’t believe I fell for it.”

“It was not a trick!” She folded her arms across her chest. No, not folded, wrapped, as though hugging herself for support or comfort. “You were the only one.”

The air in the shop felt tight, as though the oxygen had been sucked out of it. Max swallowed. “What?”

“You were the only one. Ever.” She looked away. “I have been so stupid.”

There must have been a gas leak somewhere in the shop that was making him dizzy. “That’s impossible. You said—”

“Before I was a liar. Now everything I have ever said is true?” She cried openly now, a sight he’d never imagined he would see. “Decide for me which it is, because it is not fair to change the rules!”

“Why didn’t you tell me? I would have…” He wouldn’t have. That’s what he would have done. Virgins weren’t for him. He liked an experienced girl, a girl who didn’t need to be coddled, a girl he could—

God, he was going to hell.

“The rules are different for my people. We must pretend to be human in a world where our culture is constantly attacked as being old-fashioned. This, casual sex, it is not the kind of thing a werewolf does. But I am to pretend I am a normal human female? Perhaps, if I were, things would be less complicated.” She smiled sadly, a tear sliding down her face. “Werewolves mate for life. I could not…experience what I did with you with another of my kind without grave commitment. I wanted to pretend, for just a minute, with you, that I am a normal human female. I do not know why I chose you. It was not a trick. I thought, from your reputation at the Movement, that you were a man who would go to bed with a woman and think nothing of it. We would both be safe. But I do like you, even if there is no chance we could be anything more than a happy memory in a month’s time.”

Women’s tears were a weakness Max couldn’t stand. He reached out and pulled her in, reveling in the warmth and life of her.

She was the sensible one. Of course they had no future. He was little more than a glorified corpse. She was a cursed dog person. What kind of life could they have, besides one of complications?

It was all a pretty fantasy. How could he be offended, when she’d used him to build something so beautiful in her mind?

He touched his lips to her forehead, intending only comfort. His body, dead though it might be, wasn’t satisfied with a tender moment, and soon he was kissing her without any idea how he’d gotten to that point.

“The ritual,” she mumbled against his lips, turning her face slightly away from his.

“We’ve got time,” he promised. The clock on the wall chimed 6:00 a.m. “It’s probably too late for me to make it back upstairs, anyway.”

“So I should take pity and have sex with you?” Her smile curved against his.

“No.” He lifted his head and gazed down at her. Had there ever been any clue to her innocence in her face? Something hidden there he might have noticed if he hadn’t let her looks and hard demeanor fool him? “Let’s pretend we’ve never done this before.”

She seemed hesitant. “What do you mean?”

He brushed a wisp of sleek, black hair from her face. “Let me do this right. If I’d had any idea I wouldn’t have been so…”

“Advanced?”

He didn’t want her to think he was laughing at her, but he couldn’t hold his amusement back, either. “That’s one way of putting it.” He felt the smile die on his lips as he stroked the side of her face with his thumb. “I could have made it better for you.”

“It was good. Not great.” The Bella he remembered was back, her mysterious expression teasing him. “We will try it your way. I will do anything once. Or twice.”

Max wanted to believe he’d found some peace of mind by confronting her, but as he sank into her on their makeshift bed of discarded clothes, he knew he’d only lost himself more.

23

Fear and Loathing

I was waiting in the living room with Cyrus when the sun went down and Max and Bella returned from the bookshop. I hadn’t gotten much sleep. I’m sure I didn’t look any better than they did, though I hoped my expression wasn’t quite so grim as theirs were when they came through the door. I noted the way they gripped each other’s hands, and for a terrifying moment, I thought the worst had come to pass.

“Oh my God,” Cyrus whispered beside me. “There’s no hope then, is there?”

Max frowned. “Why the hell would you say something like that?”

I found my voice, buried under layers of potential grief. “Because you look like something horrible has happened.”

“Nothing horrible has happened. In fact, I came up with a way to cure Nathan.” Bella gently pulled her hands from Max’s grasp. “But it is not ideal.”

“By not ideal, she means it will definitely work, but it’s crazy. And you’ll probably go along with it. At least, if you’re any kind of fledgling you will.” Max stood and paced behind the couch, but offered no further comment.

“Does someone want to tell me what I’m supposed to be going along with?” I stood and moved away from Cyrus, too aware of his nearness. I knew Max and Bella had noticed it, as well.

So did Cyrus, apparently. He went to the other side of the room entirely, leaning on a bookcase to put as much space between us as he could.

“The Dark Night of the Soul only works if someone has a shameful memory or a regret,” Bella began, looking to Max as though inviting him to jump in anytime. “Max told me you knew better than any of us what that memory would be.”

Cyrus scrubbed a hand over his face, appearing wearier than I’d ever seen him. But I wouldn’t excuse him from hearing what I had to say.

“I got a fly-on-the-wall view of the night Nathan was turned.” I focused on Bella’s clear, unprejudiced eyes. If I looked at Cyrus and saw his remorse, or at Max and saw his anger, I wouldn’t be able to continue. “Cyrus showed me, by combining his blood and Nathan’s. Nathan had taken his wife, Marianne, to see the Soul Eater, thinking he was some kind of faith healer.”

I recounted the whole tale in the graphic details I’d seen, and the back story I’d heard from Nathan himself. Marianne had been young and beautiful once, until cancer had ravaged her body and left Nathan with precious few options to save her. He’d taken his weak and emaciated wife to Brazil on the word of a doctor who’d recommended Jacob Seymour as a faith healer. Nathan couldn’t have known, but the Soul Eater had set a trap for them on the night of the Vampire New Year, a trap Cyrus had helped plan. When they’d arrived, Marianne and Nathan had learned too late the kind of monsters they’d fallen in with. Cyrus had brutally used Nathan in front of his dying wife. I shut my eyes as I recounted his horrified screams and the way he’d pleaded with Cyrus, not to stop for his sake, but to do whatever he wished and only leave Marianne alive.

As I spoke, Cyrus slid to the floor, sobbing openly, and Max glared down at him with hate-filled eyes.

“His father made him do it,” I said quietly when it seemed Max would stalk across the room and tear Cyrus limb from limb. “Leave him be.”

Still, I held nothing back for Cyrus’s sake as I explained to Bella how he had drained Nathan’s blood and left him weak for the Soul Eater. “After Jacob turned him, he tormented Nathan. The Soul Eater’s blood was already diluted from a year of not feeding, and it wasn’t enough for Nathan. But he didn’t offer him any hope of relief, and Nathan was helpless. He killed Marianne and fed from her because of the hunger.”

Cyrus sat with his arms wrapped around his bent knees, his face down. When he looked up, his eyes were rimmed with red.

He opened his mouth as if to speak, but Max cut him off. “If you talk now, I swear to God I’ll rip your fucking head off.”

“Max—” I began, but Bella interrupted.

Her voice was stern yet kind, like a mother admonishing her child. “You cannot change the past by killing him.”

To my utter astonishment, Max returned to her side, still shooting murderous looks at Cyrus, but seemingly pacified.

Bella looped her arm through his. “Has he confronted Cyrus about this?”

I nodded. “They didn’t have a big, tearful reconciliation or anything, but they exchanged angry words.”

“And the Soul Eater is controlling him now, so they have an open link.” Bella nodded decisively. “It will work.”

“That’s wonderful,” I said, dabbing my moist eyes with the sleeve of my shirt. “But do you mind cluing me in on what ‘it’ is?”

“Bella thinks that if Nathan has made peace with himself, the Soul Eater can’t use the memory to control him,” Max said, the muscles of his jaw ticking as he clenched his teeth.

“He has faced two of the parties involved, but it is the third he really desires closure with,” Bella explained patiently. She hesitated, clearly waiting for my light bulb moment before she continued.

“Marianne,” I breathed. Of course, Marianne. “But she’s dead.”

“So was I,” Cyrus interjected, his voice thick with recently spent tears. “But here I am.”

“You can bring Marianne back?” My stomach clenched in anticipation of her answer. If Marianne lived again, where would that leave me?

I scolded myself silently for my selfishness. What did it matter where my path lay in the scheme of things? I should just be happy Nathan could be with his wife and be happy again. If I could give him happiness, even through my own misery, I should want to. He was my sire. It would be the right thing to do. It wouldn’t make up for betraying him with Cyrus. But I’d do it, gladly. He deserved that, at least.

“Not exactly,” Bella said, glancing uncertainly to Max. I should have been somewhat grateful for her admission, but what she said next destroyed my relief. “I am not as advanced as some members of my race, but I did have an opportunity to study necromancy during my training with the Movement. I can call Marianne’s soul forth from the astral plane for a short time.”

“The astral plane, is that where I was when I died?” I asked, a cold chill running up my spine at the thought of the shadowy figures that were probably gliding unseen through the very room we sat in.

She shook her head. “Not unless you died human. The astral plane, or heaven, or the Summerland—whatever you call it—is only for uncorrupted souls. Vampires, anyone who is cursed, goes to an in-between world. Hell, for those who believe in the Judeo-Christian God. Those spirits still exist on this physical plane, but they are separated from the living.”

“Limbo?” Max asked, lines creasing his forehead. “I thought the Catholic Church did away with that teaching years ago.”

I gave a soft laugh. “Well, the universe must have missed that memo, because I’ve been there.”

The room fell so silent all I could hear was the ticking of the clock in the kitchen. It worried me, that Nathan was so quiet. “What did you give him?”

“He’s getting worse. The herbs didn’t help him at all. I had to shoot him again with the tranquilizer to keep him from gnawing off his hands to escape.” Max winced at his phrasing. “I probably could have spared you that detail and just said I took care of it.”

I couldn’t stand the thought of Nathan panicking like a trapped animal. He was usually the one who calmed me down, the one who kept things under control. “We’ve got a stash of drugs in the emergency first aid kit, morphine and merepidine, some Valium, I think. When the tranquilizer wears off, I’ll try a pharmaceutical cocktail before you go shooting him again.” I chewed my thumbnail and stared at a spot on the carpet as my brain worked furiously over the details of the night.

Marianne. My undeclared rival for Nathan’s affection. So far, she was winning, and she didn’t even have a pulse. I had no doubt if we used Marianne’s soul as bait to pull him back from whatever dark place he’d gone to, it would be for nothing when we had to return her.

“I don’t know. Let’s say it works, for just a minute or so, and when we send her back to the astral plane, he flips out again. Then what? We’d be back to where we are now. Is this the only way?” I didn’t want to sound confrontational, but the tension in the air made me jumpy. I hated having the decision rest solely on me, to the point I almost resented being involved at all. If we’d returned from our lapse in judgement to find they’d already done it—“Sorry we didn’t wait for you, but we raised Nathan’s dead wife and fixed his possession problem”—I wouldn’t have necessarily minded.

“As long as he breaks free, even for a second, the spell is over. The Soul Eater would have to recast it.” Bella looked at Cyrus as though expecting him to speak, but he was lost in his own shame, staring blankly ahead through swollen eyelids. “And ultimately, it would be impossible for him to do so, if we can get Nathan to stop feeling guilt over her death.”

“That’s not going to happen,” Max said with a tired sounding laugh. “We guys, we like to hang on to stuff.”

I hated that he would use our private conversation to mock me. “Shut up.”

“What, I’m just telling it like it is,” Max said, but the tone of his voice implied anything but innocence. “Your little friend there raped your sire and forced him to murder his wife, and now he’s messed up in the head over it. And you’re afraid to fix it because you’re afraid that once Nathan has seen Marianne again, he’s not going to want you anymore!”

“Shut up,” I repeated, the words a hurt whisper.

“Max, you’re not helping,” Bella snapped.

“Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t realize I was supposed to be a pillar of goddamn strength here while everyone else starts making bad choices!” Max jabbed his finger at his chest so hard it made a thumping noise. “I’m sorry, but it’s my turn to fall apart. That’s my friend in there, and I’ve been caring for him, feeding him, cleaning up his puke and his blood and sitting at his side while he freaks out, while she runs around with the bad guy! Only he’s not a bad guy anymore, because now he’s human. It’s bullshit!”

“Max!” Bella shouted, rising to her feet.

He didn’t look at her, but glared directly at me. “It’s bullshit and you know it, Carrie! Why aren’t you jumping at the chance to save Nathan?”

“Because I’m afraid of losing him!” The words tore from my throat in an agonized wail. “You’re right, I am afraid of what will happen when he sees Marianne again! I’m afraid of the pain he’ll feel when she’s taken once more, because I honestly think it will destroy him. And I’m not strong enough to live without him!”

I dropped my head to my hands, and in the next instant, strong arms enfolded me. I knew from the cold radiating from his skin that it was Max.

Another set of hands rested on me, one on my head, the other rubbing my back gently. Bella leaned close to my ear to whisper soothing words in her native tongue. Then, softly, she said, “I need you to be strong for this. What I will ask you to do will be very hard.”

I looked up to meet her guileless, golden eyes. I don’t remember what I said through my tears, but it must have been something that convinced her of my strength, because she responded, “I need you to be a host for the soul.”

Fear knifed through me at the thought of the in-between world and the possibility of being lost forever. “What do you mean, be a host?”

“You will remain in your body,” she said quickly, as if she could read my thoughts. “But you will not control it. Most of you will belong to Marianne, for as long as I can keep the spell going. Through you, she can speak to Nathan and hopefully forgive him for what he did to her.”

“Hopefully?” Max asked quietly, lifting his face from my hair.

“I will not lie. If Marianne’s spirit is angry, if she does not forgive him, I cannot make her. But perhaps just the confrontation will be enough.” Bella tried to sound hopeful, but it was clear she had as much doubt as she did optimism.

“I’ll do it,” I said firmly.

From his corner, Cyrus almost whimpered, “No.”

“I have to.” I looked to Cyrus, then to Max, and then to Bella, beseeching them silently to understand. “If we don’t do this, Nathan is already gone forever. Even if things don’t work, I’d rather be able to say we tried everything we could.”

There was a moment of silence before Cyrus spoke again. “But my father is still alive. This will never be over. He’ll never let it be as long as he needs Nathan’s soul to complete his ritual.”

Max rubbed a hand over his chin, working the flesh of his face out of shape in a gesture that betrayed his exhaustion. “After we get Nathan tip-top, I’ll call the Movement and get a strike team assembled. We’ll take the bastard out once and for all. No offense.”

Cyrus shook his head. “None taken. I would most definitely like to see someone ‘take the bastard out.’”

“So, when do we do this ritual?” Although I was truly supportive of whatever Bella had planned, a part of me prayed for more time. To do what, I wasn’t sure. But I wanted to stave off the inevitable.

She rose and retrieved a notebook from the coffee table, flipping pages as she paced before the couch. “I need to gather supplies and do more research, but the spell must be performed by midnight. It is the last night of the waning moon.”

She’d said the words as if I’d know what they meant. I stared back at her, clueless. “Which means?”

“The waning phase of the moon is the best time for banishing magic. Minor banishing can be performed at any time, but this…”

“Is not minor,” I finished for her. “And if we don’t do the ritual tonight?”

“It will be another month before we could successfully perform it.” She let the statement hang in the air for a moment before saying, “I will go and make preparations. Please be ready at midnight.”

Midnight. Before I could think about it too much, I nodded. “Sounds great.”

Damn the consequences, at midnight, Nathan would be reunited with his wife, and I would abandon myself to an uncertain future.

24

First Impressions, Reconciled

T hough I was exhausted mentally, I wasn’t physically ready for sleep. It was too early in the night. Bella went to the shop to further prepare for the ritual. Max mumbled something about needing time to himself, and left. I don’t know where he went, but I hoped it wasn’t far. Cyrus remained where he was on the floor. He refused all my attempts to comfort him.

“I just need some time to think, Carrie,” he said, brushing my hand away when I laid it on his arm. “It’s nothing personal.”

I told him I understood, and I did. Still, I didn’t want to be alone. If I was alone, I could think, and the only thoughts my mind was particularly interested in were frightening ones of what would happen at midnight.

I showered, letting the water wash away some of my tension, but more importantly the feeling of Cyrus’s hands on my body, the smell of him that still clung to me.

What a stupid thing to have done. What misfiring synapse in my brain had convinced me having sex with Cyrus, even just as a “one last time” thing, was a good idea? Had it ever been a good idea before?

I stepped from the shower and toweled off, strenuously avoiding my reflection in the mirror. Sex should just be off-limits for me. I never made good choices where it was concerned.

All of my clean clothes were still in Nathan’s room, but I didn’t want to disturb him. At least my duffel bag was still packed from the trip. I went to my bedroom to retrieve some of the more gently used clothes in it.

Cyrus had seemed pretty safely comatose when I’d left him in the living room, so it was a shock to find him in my room, sitting motionless in the dark on my bed.

I pulled my towel tighter around my body, not that it would cover much more. “I didn’t know you were in here, I’ll—”

“I wish we hadn’t done that.” When he looked at me, his eyes were filled with tears.

I sat beside him and awkwardly maneuvered my arm around his shoulders while trying not to expose myself. “Yeah, I know what you mean.”

He wiped his nose on the back of his hand—a very un-Cyrus thing to do—and shook his head. “No. You have no idea what I mean.”

He stood, but there was no place to go in the closet-size space. It was a miracle I’d fitted a bed and a desk in there, let alone two people and a duffel bag. He unzipped the bag and pulled out a shirt and jeans, making a face—I assumed at the smell and not the style. “Put something on.”

“You’ve seen me naked before,” I said softly as I pulled the shirt over my head, while he stared resolutely at the wall. “And I do know what you’re thinking about.”

“Really?” His laugh was short and harsh. “Then tell me, oh wise one, why exactly do I regret our ill-advised tryst?”

“You can turn around now.” I shimmied the jeans over my hips as he did. “You’re feeling bad because of the girl.”

“She has a name.” Until he pointed it out, I hadn’t noticed my reluctance to use it.

“Because of Mouse.” That crazy, jealous part of me that had reared its head in the desert wondered why he’d given her that nickname. “You think you betrayed her.”

“Did I?” He leaned over my computer and parted the dusty, never-opened blinds. The window faced the narrow alley behind the building, where he’d left me for dead. It took a moment for the recognition to settle in. When it did, he let the thin, metal blinds snap decisively closed. “I can’t betray her. She’s dead.”

My door stood open a few inches. He moved to it and closed it the rest of the way, then leaned his back against it. “I’m never going to be rid of you.”

“Excuse me?” I put my hands on my hips. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

His beautiful lips bent in a sad smile. “Don’t take it personally. There was a time I would have done anything to keep you. But I’m human now.”

“And the people around you aren’t,” I finished for him.

“I’m never going to get away from this life. The blood and sex and horror. I knew what was going to happen between us. It was just a matter of time. And I knew what it would mean when we did it. I was willingly giving in to that part of me I should be fighting against.” He paced the tiny area in front of the bed, no more than three steps, his forefingers pressed in a steeple at his lips. “I could have just killed you in the desert and disappeared.”

“There’s a cheery thought.” I eyed the nail file on the edge of my desk, thinking I could use it as a weapon if he tried to attack me. You could use yourself. You are a vampire.

He cleared his throat, actually looking remorseful. “I’m sorry, it’s not meant to be insulting, it just is what it is. I could have started over, completely new, and had all the things I wanted the first time I was a man.”

“What did you want?” I imagined the Soul Eater’s corruption had begun early. The thought Cyrus had, at one time, had wishes and needs of his own seemed impossible.

He knew exactly what I was thinking. “He didn’t become so hungry for power until he fell in with his own sire.”

“What did you want?” I repeated quietly.

There was a long pause. He was no longer with me, in my room. The faraway look in his eyes suggested he’d removed himself from me by seven centuries. “A peasant knows better than to want more than a reasonable life and an easy death. In my wildest fantasies, I had a home of my own and a real bed. As it was, my first wife had to spend her wedding night on the hard-packed dirt of my family’s cottage, with my brothers and father and their wives not a foot from us.”

He gave a grim chuckle. “That was how it always was then, there was no help for it. But I was a shiftless dreamer, like my father. That’s probably why we managed to tolerate each other for so many long years.”

“Did you have any children?” When I’d been his fledgling, he’d dispensed information on a need-to-know basis—namely, what he thought I needed to know. The subject of his family had never come up.

“No. I wanted them. And it wasn’t as if I didn’t do my husbandly duty by her. I just never got a child on her.” The corners of his eyes lifted at the mention of his wife, then fell when he seemed to remember how long ago and unalterable the past was. “She killed herself, after I turned her.

“That’s why I didn’t want to fall back into this life. This was supposed to be my second chance.”

The similarity between his words and Nathan’s was jarring.

“It still can be,” I insisted, but I wasn’t speaking only to him. “You can have anything you want. You just have to get through this.”

“The ritual Bella mentioned, it made me think…” His words died on his lips. “It was a foolish thought.”

“Tell me.” I liked the human Cyrus, and I wanted to encourage him. Maybe it was a comparison exercise. If he could survive all this, I could survive what lay ahead of me. Stranger things had happened.

“If making peace is all Nathan has to do to be well, maybe I should look into it myself.” Cyrus laughed. “But, no. I have too much to atone for.”

“It wouldn’t hurt to try.” If anything, it would steer him away from another fall. Despite his pretty words of apology and lament, he was still dangerously unstable. He might want to make amends, but he’d likely fall to evil again like an alcoholic falling off the wagon. As long as he was making a conscious effort to avoid his old ways, I would sleep easier during the day.

“I suppose you’re right.” He smiled, an expression meant more for himself than for me, and ran a hand through his hair. “Or maybe I’m agreeing out of exhaustion.”

I rose and made a sweeping gesture of invitation toward the bed. “Please, make yourself at home. I’m going to sit up with Nathan.”

As I turned to leave the room, Cyrus caught my wrist. I let him pull me in. Hooking his normal, human fingers, which seemed so out of place on him under my chin, he tilted my face up. “I wasn’t using you.”

“I know.” I rose on tiptoe and kissed him chastely on the side of the mouth, the way an old friend would.

It wouldn’t hurt to let him believe that of himself, that he hadn’t merely used me to satisfy some need. But as I sat beside Nathan’s sleeping form through the long night, I knew why Cyrus and I had done what we’d done.

We were lonely, and we were punishing ourselves for it.

25

The Heart’s Filthy Lesson

I don’t know when I fell asleep, but I woke to the gentle touch of Bella’s hand on my shoulder. I lifted my head and saw Nathan. He was awake, but clearly drugged. I’d pulled a chair to his bedside just hours before. When I’d finally collapsed from exhaustion, I’d rested my head on the bed next to him. Now, my back ached and a cold sheen of drool coated my cheek. “Good morning.”

“We must talk,” she said humorlessly. “About the ritual.”

I didn’t think we’d talk about the weather, but now wasn’t the time for sarcastic quips. “Just tell me what I need to do.”

She led me to the kitchen, where Max and Cyrus waited. The former handed me a mug of blood and the latter rose to offer me his chair. I waved for him to sit, and turned to Bella. “Okay, give me the gory details.”

The basic form of the ritual sounded simple enough. Despite his unreliable state, Bella insisted Nathan not be given another sedative. It would ensure he could become conscious during the ritual and reap the full benefits. But since he was still crazed, Max would stand in for him, a proxy or a magical power of attorney, I supposed, as Nathan wasn’t truly able to give his consent. The whole thing seemed oddly democratic for a magic ritual. Of course, my notion of “magic” came from various sensational news reports about witches, and David Copperfield specials. The combination created a strange picture in my mind of Max wearing a hooded robe and waving burning herbs while Bella sawed me in half.

I shook the scene away and tried to concentrate on Bella’s instructions. Thankfully, she didn’t seem to notice I’d drifted. “You will be fully conscious of what is happening around you, but you will not be able to control your physical or astral bodies. Once you get there, it will be important that you do not panic.”

“Get where? Where am I going?” I hadn’t realized bilocation or astral travel or any of the other mind-numbingly boring topics that interested Nathan would be involved, and I certainly wasn’t prepared to actually do any of those things.

Bella hesitated, looking at Max and Cyrus before saying, “You will be going to the night Marianne died.”

I waved a dismissive hand in the air and made a plosive sound like a slow leak. “No problem. I’ve been there before.”

“But you didn’t see it through her eyes,” Cyrus interjected quietly. “Are you sure you can do this? Are you ready to know what it’s like to have Nolen kill you?”

Though Cyrus’s words sent a shock of horror down my spine, I forced myself to project an illusion of bravery. “Will everyone stop looking like you’re preparing for my funeral? I can handle it.”

Max looked at Bella, one hand over his mouth as if trying to hold in the words he couldn’t help but say. “I think we should slow down and think about this a little more.”

“No!” I stamped my foot. “Would everyone stop treating me like I’m so damn fragile? If it’s going to fix Nathan, let’s get it over with!”

I don’t know why it took a total, public hissy fit to kick my compatriots into gear every time a monumental task was ahead of us, but it was starting to get on my nerves. Of course, that wasn’t fair of me. They probably weren’t as used to harrowing escapes and heart-pounding adventures as I was. It made me feel worldly and a little proud when I looked at it that way, though I would gladly trade it for a few consecutive years of boredom.

Bella explained the rest of the process to me without sensitivity or second-guessing my ability to participate, and for that I was very grateful. The more she talked, the more I doubted, and the last thing I needed was for them to offer me another out clause.

At midnight, Max, Bella and I filed down the hall to the bedroom.

Cyrus hung back, and when I asked him what he would do during the ritual, he shrugged and said, “Take a nap?”

“I did not think it would be wise to include him, considering he was involved in…well.” Bella cleared her throat and smoothed her shirtfront, then placed her palm flat against the door. “Are we all ready?”

“Ready as I’ll ever be,” Max said, rolling his head to one side and cracking his neck. “How about you, Carrie?”

I took a deep breath. I was about to surrender my body completely to a long dead and possibly pissed off ghost-woman, whose husband I had been sleeping with for the past two years. “Let’s do it.”

Bella pushed open the door and motioned for us to be quiet. Nathan still slept soundly, and I prayed he would continue. We couldn’t afford to have anything go wrong.

As she had instructed us to do earlier, Max and I took our places: him at Nathan’s bedside, myself kneeling on the floor at the foot of the bed. She walked the perimeter of an irregular circle from one side of the bed to the other, pouring white sand from a clay jug as she did so. The circle broke where it intersected the bed, so she poured the line right over the pillows, as though it were perfectly normal to dump two good handfuls of dirt into someone’s bed.

Between the four corners of the room she placed four candles. In the little space left within the circle she paced, fanning the smoke from a burning bushel of herbs with a long, brown feather. Then, in a quiet voice that was much less impressive than the mighty shouts of the wizards in the movies, she said simply, “I consecrate this space, seeking only to do good within it.”

Max’s skeptical gaze met mine, and I pushed back a twinge of unease. This felt too much like a twee game, something a young hippie girl with a guitar would do to invoke a muse. She’s the only one who’s come up with a solution, I reminded myself sternly.

At each of the candles, she mumbled an incantation asking the spirits of each direction to lend their power to our “circle.” When the candles were lit and the circle consecrated, she handed a thick, white candle to Max and another to me.

“Hold his hand,” she instructed Max. Then she drew a single quartz point from her pocket and held it over her head. “Badb, Anubis, Hades, Lucifer, Kephas, and all the keepers of the underworld and afterlife in your many names, join us now in this circle.”

She brought her arm down in a fast arc, kneeling so the crystal connected with the ground. The candle flames flickered, throwing eerie shadows on the walls. It must have been a trick of the light, but I could have sworn I saw the shape of a jackal’s head grow into the shadows of the corner, a raven flicker across the ceiling. My throat went dry. While I’d been busy reassuring everyone I was up to the task at hand, I suppose I hadn’t really thought about how serious things were.

This is for Nathan, I reminded myself, looking away from the shadowy shapes that seemed to grow and multiply as we stood helplessly beneath them.

“Bella…” Max’s voice was a hoarse whisper in the silence of the room.

But it wasn’t silence. A strange, humming tension filled the air, dousing the circle with loud, soundless noise.

Bella raised a hand to motion for quiet, then began to murmur words of thanks to each entity she’d called forth. Badb, a crone goddess. Anubis, a death god. Hades, lord of the dead. Lucifer, God’s fallen. Satan, if I remembered my Catholic upbringing correctly. I couldn’t see how he would be on our side, if the stories were true. The hair stood up on the back of my neck. I tried to reason with myself that I shouldn’t fear the beings she’d invited in. For all intents and purposes, I was dead myself. Still, I couldn’t ignore the malevolent cloud that seemed to surround me. I imagined a million fingers of darkness closing around my throat, crushing my windpipe, severing arteries. I imagined Cyrus’s claws slitting my throat in the hospital morgue six months earlier. And I wanted to run.

Max appeared uncomfortable, as well. He clenched his shoulders as if he wanted to rub the back of his neck, but couldn’t, as both his hands were occupied. Nathan began to stir, one long leg sliding from beneath the sheets to drape over the side of the bed. He mumbled something, his voice gaining volume as his struggles continued. Only when he was thrashing and shouting did I recognize what he said. It was the prayer to the Archangel Michael.

“How are they gonna like that?” Max whispered, as though the deities surrounding us wouldn’t be able to hear him.

“He is crazed,” Bella reminded Max, or maybe the spirits. “He does not mean to offend.” She raised her voice over Nathan’s fervent prayer. “We humbly beg the release of the soul of Marianne Galbraith, soul-bound through the sacrament of marriage to this man.”

A chill knife went through my heart at her words. Soul bound. It seemed so much stronger than blood tied. If my heart was destroyed, there would be nothing left binding me to Nathan. Marianne had been gone for years, but her bond with him was still strong enough to control his mind. Strong enough to call her back from the dead.

When it came down to it, my bond with Nathan could decompose. A human soul…that was eternal. I wanted to vomit.

“I need Nathan’s consent now,” Bella reminded Max.

He sputtered and looked at me, then at his friend writhing in panic on the bed. “Bella, I don’t know about this. Carrie doesn’t look so good—”

“You are here to give consent on his behalf. That is your only function in this circle. If you cannot do this, you should leave!” Bella snapped. Her eyes were hard and furious, but her hands trembled. She was afraid.

Her fear intensified my own.

Max swallowed and looked to me. I wanted to communicate with him somehow, but I didn’t know whether I wanted him to stop this or continue. Something paralyzed me. I wondered if Marianne was already inside of me, if that’s why I couldn’t think clearly or even move my limbs, or if it was just crippling fear and sadness.

Like a judge’s gavel falling after the pronouncement of a sentence, Max cleared his throat and whispered, “Yes.”

With a warning noise and a flinty look, Bella stepped forward and lit Max’s candle. Then, turning to me, she asked for my permission, as well.

Only now could I find my voice. But when I opened my mouth, I didn’t tell them I’d changed my mind, that this wasn’t the way. I opened my mouth and issued a calm, “Yes.”

And then it was out of my hands. Bella lit my candle, but instead of stepping back to her place, she gripped my wrist and raised the crystal point above her head again. “Keepers of the afterworld, return now the soul of Marianne Galbraith to this circle.”

Bella’s eyes closed. Her hand burned where it gripped my wrist. Her entire body seemed to vibrate power.

I kept inhaling huge quantities of air, like a drowning person anticipating being claimed by the waves. It would have helped if I could have known what was happening, but this was, conveniently, the part Bella had left out. The air buzzed with even more tension, if that were possible. As Nathan fervently shouted the Lord’s Prayer, I sent up one of my own.

When the wait seemed interminable, when it looked as though we had failed, Marianne’s soul entered the circle. I could pinpoint the exact moment her spirit arrived. Nathan’s madness subsided for a moment, then returned as a fierce panic. His body arched from the bed like the string of a drawn bow, and he screamed, the most pitiable sound of pain and fear I’d ever heard. He was terrified he’d hurt her. I couldn’t help but remember the way he’d pinned me to the floor in the shop, threatened me with a chunk of broken glass. He hadn’t been afraid to hurt me.

Max was visibly shaken. He clasped Nathan’s wrist and turned wide, frightened eyes to Bella. “We have to stop this!”

“Marianne Galbraith,” Bella shouted over Nathan’s voice. “Take this empty vessel and do with her what you will!”

Before I could wrench away, she pulled me forward and pressed the crystal to my forehead. The splitting pain couldn’t have been worse if she’d used an ax. The cool, smooth surface of the stone focused the pain into a thread that wound down my spine, into my torso, branching into my limbs. The thread widened, opening like a telescope until I was filled to bursting. There was no room left for me in my body, and the thing kept growing, crowding me farther and farther back.

My eyes rolled back in my head. The last thing I saw was Max’s face as he screamed, but a tremendous roar filled my ears, thundering over him. Then my vision flared silver and I was falling. It was nothing like the gentle, backward suction I’d experienced when my sires had shared their memories with me. That had been mildly disconcerting. This was nothing but pain and horror. And then, I was gone.

Standing before the big, oak double doors, Marianne didn’t bother to disguise her observation of the man at her side. My husband is so handsome. I’m nearly a corpse.

Nolen gave her a smile and squeezed her hand. She knew the smile. It was not the one that had charmed her when she’d been young and pretty and not aching with every step. Not the one that had made her give into him in the stock room of her father’s shop. She hadn’t seen that smile for a year now. Not since the last baby wasn’t born. Not since she’d begun to fall apart.

No, this was the pity. He would never look at her the way he used to, not even if this “faith healer” did help her.

“Do I really look all right?” Marianne toyed with the heavy chain around her neck. How many more times will you drag me across the world on my father’s money? How many more cures will I be forced to endure before you let me die?

“You’re a vision.” He smiled and touched the heavy pendant hanging at her throat. His fingers never touched her flesh. He’d become so good at withholding all but the most sterile of touches. “Although I don’t think this suits you. It’s a decent sign, though. No one would give away a bauble like this on a whim.”

“Unless it’s meant to be a rejection gift.” The thing was too heavy. Her shoulders ached. What would he do if she collapsed right now and ruined the good impression he hoped to make?

A faith healer. I’d have to have some first. She hadn’t told him, but she’d given up believing in God. Every night, when he held her hands and they said their prayers, she recited empty words. She was too angry to speak with the Lord or the Virgin Mother. It was considered holy to share Christ’s pain, but on the worst days, when the cancer seemed to be dissolving her very bones with acid claws, she envied him. Christ had only suffered for two days. And it was too cruel to venerate the Blessed Mary. What praise did she deserve? She may have endured the pain of losing a child, but Marianne had lived through that hell five times, and she’d never been able to hold her children. They’d gone to their Golgotha inside of her and ascended into heaven on a rush of blood. The fruit of her own womb was less than holy, the disease that now destroyed her from the inside out.

Nolen believed, though, that God would send them a miracle, that the future hadn’t been denied, only delayed. To ease his mind, she acted the part of the pious wretch.

The doors before them opened. Marianne had assumed they’d be meeting with Jacob, Simon and Simon’s beautiful young wife, Elsbeth, as they had the two times they’d both been invited to dine at the mansion. Oh, Nolen had been invited far more often than she. Jacob had taken an almost fatherly interest in him, sending invitations that called Nolen away in the evenings, entreating him to leave his diseased wife at home to rest. She did not know what had transpired those nights, but the group assembled around the table now, bored-looking and beautiful, surprised her. Their gazes all held a strange hunger as every pair of eyes examined her. With a sudden, crashing clarity, she realized something was terribly wrong.

There wasn’t enough time to bend her intuition into action. Those guests who’d seemed so impressive and imposing a moment before transformed into demons before her eyes. They moved faster than Nolen could and tore her away from him as he tried to shield her.

Marianne’s world narrowed to a void of claws and fangs. They cut and tore her flesh, but she welcomed the pain. It felt different than the slow burn of the disease devouring her body. Faster. It would be better this way.

And then she was dying. The thing she’d not been above praying for, even after she’d shunned God, was finally upon her. Vision dimmed, then returned like a tide teasing the shore, but it wasn’t disorienting. In fact, it was disappointing when clarity returned, because she wanted to see what was on the other side of the darkness. Wanted to see if she was damned for her lack of faith, or if she’d be proved correct. The prize at the end of the race seemed so very close when it was cruelly yanked from her grasp. Pain exploded in her head as she connected with the floor. The groping hands had dropped her.

They were alone with the one she knew as Simon. Nolen was praying, invoking the aid of Mary and the archangel against the demon that embraced him. Simon’s hands caressed her husband like a lover’s hands. Give in to him, she urged wordlessly. It will be finished sooner. He will grow bored and kill you.

But Simon didn’t intend to rape Nolen. His violation was more sinister. He was gentle and tender, aiming to seduce his unwilling partner into consent, forcing Nolen’s body to betray him, making him take pleasure from unforgivable sin.

This is my fault. The sadness and regret gripped her then. A fine time to get her heart back, when she lay dying a world away from home.

Simon took his time with Nolen, and Marianne, too weak to turn away, watched her husband weep as he came, trembling, beneath Simon’s mouth and hands, even as the monster penetrated him.

“Your husband did this to you, Marianne.” Simon groaned, hissing in pleasure as his hips pumped against Nolen’s body. “Tell him how you hate him for it.”

She found her voice then, to whisper a weak, “No.” For all she resented him, she loved him. She would not have him die thinking she’d scorned him. Her gaze lingered for a moment on Nolen’s fingers clutching futilely at the slick marble floor. Then her eyes slipped closed.

As life continued to slowly ebb from her, Marianne wished for the strength to cry for joy. They would both be gone soon, abused to death at the hands of these monsters. And then she would be free of a worse pain, the pain of walking the earth in a faltering shell, watching her husband transform her from an object of desire to an untouchable martyr in his eyes.

I have to tell Nathan. The thought startled me, namely because it had rung through my mind so clearly. I remembered instantly where I was, what was happening, but where had I been? I’d seen it all, but it hadn’t been me. Marianne had truly taken me over. Now, as she died in the past, her control slipped.

Concentrating hard, I felt myself detach a little from her flickering soul. Silvery threads of pain webbed around my mind, but I fought past them. It was like running through knee-deep water, but the struggle was worth it. I heard sounds from my own time, namely, Bella commanding me to stop fighting.

“It’s important.” I didn’t recognize my own voice. Was it Marianne’s voice, or was I Marianne, not recognizing Carrie’s voice? Where did she end? Where did I begin?

“I want to die.” I felt the carpet beneath my knees now, at the same time the marble cooled my back. I shook my head. No, I shook Marianne’s head, and she shook mine. I stood on weak legs, while she delighted in my strong ones. “Nolen, I want to die.”

We were alone in the Soul Eater’s dining room. Nathan’s bed was here, now, with him handcuffed to it, but there was no sign of the madness that had tormented him.

I touched him with Marianne’s hand and felt his skin beneath my own in another time and place. His throat convulsed as he swallowed, and a tear slid from his eye. “I don’t want to kill you again. I kill you every time I close my eyes.”

“You can’t keep me here any longer. It hurts to be in this body.” Was I talking, or was she? Did she speak of the past or what she lived through now? “It hurt, Nolen. You answered my prayers. You blessed me with death. Now let me go.”

In the past, a phantom hand closed over Marianne’s wrist as she reached to unlock her husband. In the present, Max restrained my arm as I tried to release Nathan.

“Let her,” Bella urged, and then Nathan was free.

He fought it at first, trying to hold back the madness. “I can’t. I want to stay with you.”

“You can’t have me.” I heard my voice speaking in a gentle Scottish lilt. Marianne’s voice. “Kill me. For the last time. Set us both free.”

When his arms closed around her body, they crushed the air from my lungs. When his fangs pierced my neck, she cried his name.

Tears poured down his face as he drank my blood. That was a part of me I couldn’t mistake. Though Marianne’s soul was in my body and I was crowded into her mind, my blood was his. It mocked him as he tasted it, but in it he saw the truth and acceptance. No matter how many times he replayed this night, he couldn’t change what he’d done to her, and now he knew he shouldn’t wish to.

As I died, so did Marianne, but I had a much farther distance to fall. Her eyes closed on Cyrus’s ballroom, her second death as much a relief as the first one, and this time she died with her husband’s name on her lips.

When her soul left my body I came jarringly awake, shivering uncontrollably from the blood Nathan had consumed from me. His mouth was still fastened to my neck, but he no longer drank. He kissed my wounded flesh and sobbed, crushing me to the rock-hard wall of his chest.

“She is gone,” I heard Bella say, and for a terrifying minute I thought she meant me.

Nathan lifted his head. His eyes met mine and went cold. My heart froze with them. It wasn’t me he wanted. For a moment, he’d held his wife in his arms again. Now that she was gone, only I remained.

To his credit, he masked his grief quickly, trying to smile for me as though his tears were joyous at being reunited with me. “Did I hurt you?”

More than you know. I didn’t trust myself to answer him. Instead, I eased from his grip and tried to stand.

When I collapsed, Max caught me. Instead of easy encouragement, he whispered, “I’m sorry I let you do this.”

He’d seen it, I realized. He’d seen Nathan’s disappointment when he’d found it was me in his arms.

“I will tend to Nathan. You make sure she is all right,” Bella instructed.

I wanted to lash out at her, to slap her or scream at her, but I didn’t have the strength and it wasn’t her fault, anyway. All she had promised was to cure Nathan of his possession, and her ritual had done just that. She’d never guaranteed I wouldn’t be left empty and hurt in the process.

Max scooped me up in his arms and carried me to the living room, to lay me on the couch. “We’ll get some blood into you.”

“You could let the rest out of me.” I tried to make it sound like a joke, but the horror of the suggestion was evident on his face.

“Don’t say that. You’re just upheaved by this whole ordeal.” He squeezed my hand. “I can’t imagine what you went through.”

“Hell.” The word bubbled from my throat and I coughed, spilling wetness onto my lips. When I wiped it away, I saw it was blood.

Max went to the kitchen and made a horrible racket. He hurried as if my life depended on it, and in a way, I guess I was in danger. But it would take a lot more to kill me.

The floorboards in the hall creaked, and Nathan emerged from the shadows. His hair was still matted, his skin marred by the sigils he’d carved there in a time that seemed ages ago. But he was at least half-dressed, in a pair of jeans, and the feral anger was gone from his eyes.

The tenderness on his face broke my heart as he stroked my hair back from my forehead with the palm of his hand. “Thank you.”

“It was no problem. It’s still not the worst dinner party I’ve been to.” I smiled weakly, but inside I fell apart. I loved him enough to sacrifice myself, at least symbolically, on the altar of his pain. While he clearly appreciated my devotion, it was impossible for me to forget who he really wanted. I could never be Marianne. And he wasn’t ready to give her up.

And he knew that I knew. He lifted my hand in his and kissed my palm. “Don’t hate me.”

“I can’t hate you. I love you too much.” I didn’t fight my tears any longer. He held me, but it was a bittersweet comfort. Touching him, smelling him, feeling the pull of the blood tie between us wasn’t enough. It would never be enough.

At least now we were acknowledging it.

The floorboards in the hall creaked again as Bella joined us. Max stepped out of the kitchen and Nathan reluctantly let me go.

I wiped my eyes as I watched Bella ease open the door to my bedroom. After what I’d seen and been through, I didn’t have the strength to explain why Cyrus was in our apartment. “Maybe now isn’t a good time to—”

“Where is he?” Bella stepped into my room. The light clicked on and she swore.

“Who is she talking about?” Nathan asked as I used his shoulder for support to stand.

Before she returned with the folded paper in her hand, I knew where he’d gone. There was no time to shield Nathan’s feelings. “She’s talking about Cyrus. And I know where he’s heading.”

26

Desperation

“H ow could you have let him into my house?” Nathan raged for the third time since our conversation had started.

I took another hurried swig of blood as Max wrenched open the weapons closet. Inside, axes and crossbows and sharpened stakes were stockpiled, as though we were planning a return trip to the dark ages. Not that I’d be good for much. I was still weak from blood loss, but I was quickly recovering. Whatever strength I had to contribute, I would.

“I’ve already explained. He’s human now, and we needed to keep him away from the Soul Eater.” Nathan was never one to see the big picture if it didn’t suit him. I added that to the list of reasons I should be glad we would never have a relationship other than the blood we shared.

Max lifted an ax and handed it to me. My arm fell under the weight and the mug in my other hand tipped, sloshing blood onto the floor. Max steadied me and took the ax back. “You’re not going, you’re still too weak. Bella and I will handle this.”

“Nobody is going,” Nathan growled, pulling the weapon from Max.

I was of the opinion somebody was going to get killed if they didn’t stop recklessly tossing axes around, but I didn’t interject that into the conversation.

“You’ve been off the scene for the duration of this mess, so maybe you don’t understand what will happen if the Soul Eater gets ahold of Cyrus.” Max got right in Nathan’s face, so they were almost nose-to-nose. “We don’t have a lot of time to go over it in detail again, so I’ll give you a brief summary. Bad things will go down if the Soul Eater eats tonight!”

Nathan dropped the ax to the floor with a clatter. “I don’t care, you’re not going to go save him!”

“No one is going to be eaten tonight,” Bella pointed out, not helping our cause at all. “We do not know that the Soul Eater is here in this town. His minions are, though, and I agree with Max and Carrie that we should not let Cyrus fall into their hands.”

“Cyrus is reformed,” I said, hating the way I sounded—as if I was defending his past actions. “But his father is persuasive. If he turns him—”

“I’ll kill him and I’ll make damn sure he stays dead this time.” Nathan spun away. “This isn’t a discussion. I’m telling you, we are not going to save him.”

“Fine. I won’t save him. I’ll go kill the Soul Eater’s guys.” Max grabbed a larger ax from the closet and hefted it over his shoulder as if daring Nathan to make a wrong move.

“Are you nuts?” Macho posturing was one thing, but the Soul Eater had a seemingly endless retinue of guards. Even Max, Bella and I together couldn’t take out all of them. “We’ll get killed.”

“It is not a bad idea,” Bella said, shocking us all into silence. “If you kill them, it might draw the Soul Eater out of hiding. Then we can exterminate him.”

Nathan stood in front of the door. “I’m not going to let you risk it. Any of you.”

“I don’t want Cyrus to die!” I blurted, unthinking. The loss of blood had made me stupid with fatigue. Choose your words carefully, a cautious inner voice urged. You might not think things could get worse between the two of you, but you proved tonight that they always can.

I looked at Nathan, but offered no apology. “I don’t want Cyrus to die. He doesn’t deserve it. You killed Marianne! He didn’t. And as for the other crimes he’s committed, he’s served his penance!” It felt good to vent some of my hurt on him, though I knew I should feel ashamed for taking such a low road.

“Every time I go to sleep in the morning I remember holding your dead body in the alley.” Nathan pounded his chest with his fist. “Every time I close my eyes, I see Marianne’s face—”

“That’s your fault, not his!” I laughed at the ridiculousness of it, a bitter, explosive sound. “Didn’t you learn anything tonight? Marianne was dead long before you walked into that trap. It’s not Cyrus you hate, or even the Soul Eater. It’s you! You hate yourself because you couldn’t save her, not from the cancer, not from yourself. And you hate that she wanted to leave you! But it’s over, Nathan. It’s over!”

He nodded, his expression tight and pained. “You’re right, Carrie. It is over.”

Brushing past me, he growled at Max, “Do whatever the hell you want. I’m not one of your Movement flunkies anymore. Look to someone else for help.”

The bedroom door slammed so loudly I thought it would break off the hinges. It was so final, so jarring, I couldn’t even feel sadness.

With grim resolve, I turned to Max and Bella. “Let’s go find Cyrus.”

“We can’t just leave Nathan here. If the Soul Eater’s guys came, he’d be alone,” Max began.

I cut him off. “Nathan has lived in the same building for fifteen years now, worked the same business for just as long. If the Soul Eater really wanted him, really wanted any of us, he would have sent someone by now. Don’t you see? He’s just playing with us, waiting to drive us out! And I, for one, am sick of being toyed with!”

“She is right,” Bella said softly. “The Soul Eater knows where we all are, every moment. Why else did he have men here in town?”

“So, what, he’s not really all that into becoming a god? Have you all lost your damn minds?” Max punched the wall with the side of his fist and the plaster crumbled beneath his hand. “You’re not thinking straight!”

“And you are not listening!” Bella placed a palm on his shoulder and it actually appeared to calm him some. “Whatever the Soul Eater’s plans are, he is not finished with your friend. He will not come for him tonight.”

“You sound so sure of that,” Max said bitterly. He shrugged off her hand and headed through the door, slamming it behind him.

But she was sure of it, I realized as we stood silently staring at each other. Whatever the Soul Eater wanted with Nathan, it wasn’t to kill him, yet.

And that terrified me more than anything we’d encountered so far.

Bella was able to locate Cyrus with stunning speed. I couldn’t help but find it comical that she did so with her head stuck out the window, sniffing the air as we drove around the neighborhood where they’d first found evidence of the Soul Eater’s minions.

“Left!” she shouted, and Max jerked the steering wheel, nearly pulling the car onto two wheels as we careened down the street.

“This is a one-way!” I shrieked, grabbing at the dashboard.

“I’ll honk the horn so they hear me coming,” Max said through clenched teeth. “It’s not like anyone’s going to be out jogging at this—”

“Watch out!” Bella screamed as a figure stumbled into the road.

Max hit the brake and we spun sideways, skidding to a halt just feet from the man, who stared at us from blackened, swollen eyes.

Thick, bloody trails dripped from a wound at his hairline. His garments were torn, not so much clothing him as draping over him.

“It’s Cyrus.” I pushed open the door and raced to his side.

He looked at me with a dazed expression, as if he didn’t recognize me.

I took his hand in mine, careful not to startle him. He was warm, thank God. I took it as a sign he had not been turned again.

“Cyrus, it’s me. Carrie. Do you know who I am?” I tried to lead him to the car as I spoke, but he resisted.

“He wants me dead. He sent them…. He really wants me dead.” His words sounded as though they came from an empty room. I’d heard the phrase “I was beside myself” before, but I’d never actually seen someone in the literal state. Wherever he was, Cyrus was not in his mind at the moment.

“Come on, let’s get someplace safe.” I looked in the direction he’d come from. The Soul Eater’s men would be searching for him any second now.

Max had exited the car, but stayed safely behind it, watching us from a distance. When I called for his aid, he sprinted to my side.

“The vampires you two found. Do you remember which place it was?” I asked Max quietly. The huge houses looked sinister in the early morning darkness, like horror movie sets crammed onto one lot.

“Not far from here. They could be anywhere.” At an imploring look from me, Max nodded, his face grim. “I’ll check it out.”

“Be careful,” Bella called after him as he jogged down the street. She approached us as though Cyrus were a wild animal I’d tamed, and she didn’t want him to run away.

“He needs medical attention. Can you get him to the hospital? I’d take him, but there aren’t many more hours until sunup and I don’t want to get trapped in the ER.” Or spotted by anyone I knew. It would make an awkward reunion with my former coworkers if I shambled in with a confused, bleeding man.

“Can you not care for him?” Bella wasn’t challenging me, but I could tell she didn’t want to be left alone with Cyrus. After what I’d seen in the circle, I wouldn’t have wanted to, either.

“I can’t take him back to the apartment. Nathan.” I shrugged helplessly. Cyrus had been through enough tonight, and he wasn’t likely to live through much more.

Neither could I. The entire business of the ritual and its aftermath had been too confusing. I needed time to myself, to think. Another cruel irony, as days ago I’d been going mad from the isolation of living on the road.

Max reappeared, brushing dried leaves from his hair. He’d apparently jumped—or tumbled through—a few hedges.

“Did you find them?” I called, jogging toward him.

“The vampires? Gone. I saw a couple combing a park over that way, but I don’t think they saw me. So I went back to the house, tripped the burglar alarm. The cops will be here soon, and that’ll hopefully set them running.”

As if on cue, the distant, tinny sound of approaching sirens wafted to us on the breeze. I sighed heavily. “Damn.”

“Let’s go,” Max urged. We ran back to the car, where, with Bella’s help, I coaxed Cyrus into the backseat. We all piled in and Max drove the few short blocks to the nearest emergency room. He stopped to let Bella and Cyrus out at the ambulance bay, and I gave her strict instructions not to let them admit him to the psychiatric ward.

I didn’t know if Bella would bring him back to the apartment, or if he’d just wander off on his own. My throat stuck shut at the thought of Cyrus, homeless and with no money, trying to survive in the mortal world.

Or worse, going back to Dahlia.

Still, he wasn’t coherent enough for a tender goodbye and there wasn’t time for Max and I to waste. The sun would rise soon and we had to get back.

It was a short drive, but somehow we managed to hit every red light on the way. Max and I sat in uncomfortable silence for a long while, until he turned down the radio and said, “You could come back to Chicago with me.”

“What do you mean?” I asked nonchalantly, as though he hadn’t just witnessed a perfectly awful non-breakup between Nathan and I.

He shrugged. “You’ve been through a lot. Hell, if I’d done what you just did for somebody, and they treated me the way Nathan acted toward you, I’d need some cool-off time.”

“Cool-off time. Sounds like a good idea.” I tried to force a smile. “Chicago, huh?”

“Yeah. I have a pretty sweet condo overlooking Grant Park.” He chuckled. “Not my style, but it was a gift. I don’t spend much time there. The place probably needs a good airing out.”

I chewed my lip as I rolled the thought around in my mind. Chicago wasn’t far. I could make it in a night’s drive if I desperately wanted to get back to Nathan. And it would get me out of town, so I could have a clearer perspective on things. Max wouldn’t hover over me the way Nathan would. But then again…

“I don’t know. I have to think about it.” I worried what Nathan would do alone, if the Soul Eater tried another spell. I also had no clue where Nathan would go. It wasn’t as if he could stay in town, whether the Soul Eater was just toying with him or not. Plus, I didn’t want to screw up any romantic plans Bella and Max might have. “And you’ll want to ask Bella, of course.”

“I don’t think Bella is going to be a problem. We’re probably not going to see each other again after this.” His tone was light, but I could tell from the way his smile faltered he would be bothered by losing her.

“I’m sorry.” I didn’t have enough energy to come up with a better comfort for him. “Maybe it will be fun, then. Two rejected vampires, living it up in the big city.”

“There are some awesome blues clubs,” he said, gently wheedling.

“I don’t want to leave Nathan behind. I’m worried about him.” I paused, the stupid hope swelling up beneath my ribs. “Let me talk to him. See if we can’t work it all out.”

“It’s an open invitation,” Max said, turning his eyes back to the road. “It’s a big place. I’m always glad to have company. Makes it seem less empty.”

“That’s not why you don’t go back often.” I studied the way his expression changed from friendly to defensive. “You lived there with your sire.”

He nodded. “It’s a funny thing, when you’ve got a blood tie with someone and it suddenly goes away. Things you’d never thought would bother you really…hurt.”

“I know.” I laughed bitterly. “Believe me. I know.”

Bella returned to the apartment later that morning. Nathan was asleep, so when she asked if she should let Cyrus come up, I told her it would be all right.

We sat across from each other at the kitchen table while he stared bleakly at the peanut butter and jelly sandwich I’d made for him. His eyes were still ringed with ugly, purple bruises, but the blood had been washed from his face. Small lines of stitches stood out against his pale skin at his hairline and chin. His lips were swollen and split, and he winced when he tried to drink the soda I offered him.

“What were you thinking?” I didn’t mean to sound so angry, but he’d frightened me. I remembered all the times my mother, upon reclaiming me from a department store security guard or the yard of a playmate she wasn’t acquainted with, would grip my arms and sternly admonish that I’d scared her to death. When we’d discovered Cyrus missing, I finally understood what she’d been feeling.

He didn’t look up. “I don’t know. I wanted to die. But when I got there, and my father’s guards…When they were beating me, I realized I didn’t want to die. I fought them so hard. But when I got away, it was back. This pain. I don’t know what it is, Carrie. It makes me want to die. But when I get close…Why does this hurt so much?”

“It’s guilt. It’s supposed to hurt.”

I looked up sharply. Nathan stood at the kitchen door, his eyes hard and his face lined with fatigue. Below the sleeves of his T-shirt I saw the dark lines of scabbed-over sigils.

I didn’t know what to do. If Nathan went after Cyrus now, there was no way I’d be able to intervene. Nathan was too strong and a way better fighter than me. Besides, I hadn’t been able to make myself fight him when he’d been pinning me to the floor in the bookshop.

Cyrus’s posture straightened a little, but no discernable emotions crossed his face. “Nolen.”

Nathan’s gaze met mine, but there was no clue in his eyes as to what he would do. “Run into your father?”

Shaking his head, Cyrus lifted the soda can to his mouth. “His goons.”

“I can’t say I’m not sorry you didn’t get killed.” Nathan leaned against the doorframe, frowning down at him.

Cyrus swallowed and wiped his mouth. “I can understand that.”

Nathan pushed off the wall and came to stand in front of us. “What, no snide comment? You’re not going to lord your intellectual superiority over me?”

“Stop it,” I warned.

“Let him.” Cyrus sighed, weary and resigned. Nathan opened his mouth, but no words came out. Looking up at him, Cyrus smiled sadly. “It’s my gift to you, Nolen. Spew whatever bile you need to.”

“Why? So you can feel better about what you did to Marianne?” His voice choked with emotion and tears, I could barely understand Nathan’s words. “What you did to me?”

“I was sick.” Cyrus wasn’t apologizing, but he wasn’t justifying, either. “I did far worse to many others.”

“Like Ziggy?” Nathan laughed bitterly. “I could rip you to pieces right now.”

“I wish you would. It would be much easier for me.” Cyrus rested his forehead on the table and covered the back of his head with his hands.

Nathan’s own hands clenched to fists at his sides. He looked at me, his eyes rimmed red and teary, then back at Cyrus. He cleared his throat and scrubbed a hand over his face. “I’m not here to make things easier for you. And I’m not going to forgive you. I want you to remember all the fucked up things you’ve done. I want them to torment you at night. But do me a favor.”

Lifting his head, Cyrus met Nathan’s eyes. “What?”

“If you ever feel like committing suicide again, let me do the honors.” Nathan turned around and left the kitchen without a word to me.

Cyrus and I sat in stunned silence for a long time. Nathan hadn’t forgiven him, but he’d made some sort of progress by not simply tearing him to shreds right there.

“What will you do now?” I asked when Cyrus finally moved.

He picked up the sandwich and took a bite, chewing thoughtfully before he answered. “No one has notified Mouse’s next of kin yet, I assume.”

“The police are bound to have found her…” I trailed off. It seemed dirty to refer to someone he’d loved as “remains.”

He nodded. “I know. But they wouldn’t be able to find her family. She was very much like me in the respect she didn’t have many earthly ties.”

When he finished his sandwich, he stood, wordlessly moving toward the door. Sadness, more keen than I’d felt when I’d stood before him and plunged a knife through his heart, gripped me. I clenched my hands into fists to stop them from trembling, and felt the wetness of blood where my nails bit into my skin.

“If you ever need anything, money or—” I began, but he cut me off.

“I’m not going to ask you for anything. You’ve done enough.” He laid his palm against my cheek and cupped my jaw, his gaze moving over my face as though he was committing my features to memory.

I put my arms around him and buried my face against his shoulder. “I don’t want you to disappear.”

He smoothed my hair and kissed my forehead, but he didn’t promise anything. The funny thing about a broken heart, you don’t remember how it feels until it happens again. Even if it happens twice in one day.

“Goodbye, Carrie.” He kissed my cheek and stepped away, then turned and walked out the door.

Despite all he’d put me through over the course of our acquaintance, I sat on the floor and cried for him.

27

Loose Ends

M ax had nearly loaded the Trans-Am with his meager luggage when Bella came to say goodbye. She stood on the sidewalk and watched him pretend to be busy with something in the open hatchback.

“When does your plane leave?” he asked without looking at her.

“The charter is in Africa. I will be here for two more days.” She stepped closer to him. “Your friend has graciously offered me his living room couch.”

The thought of Bella staying with Nathan alone twisted his guts. Not that he thought Nathan would try anything. In his logical mind, he knew his friend was too busted up over what had happened to him to even think about romance. But the caveman part of Max wanted to challenge Nathan to some sort of wrestling match to protect his woman.

“If you are ever in Spain, you know where to find me,” she said, clearly attempting humor.

Against his better judgment, and the litany of “Max Harrison does not beg” that had been chanting through his brain through the long, sleepless day, he said, “Stay with me.”

“You know I cannot.” Her response came easily, as if she’d known the question would come and it had only been a matter of time.

That made Max hate himself even more for asking. “I don’t know that. We have something together, Bella.”

She flinched at the sound of her own name. “You are confusing sex with love.”

“Really?” He laughed angrily. “I’m glad you know what I’m feeling. Can I get a number to your direct line, in case I’m ever stuck in a rut and can’t decide if I’m angry or just need to take a shit?”

“Do not be crude! Just because you have let yourself believe some fantasy that I would, what, melt into your arms? Forsake my life as I know it to be with you?” She folded her arms across her chest. “I told you from the beginning what this was. It was purely physical.”

“That’s a lie!” He slammed the hatch and stalked toward the apartment. If they didn’t get on the road soon, they might not make it before sunup. But he couldn’t leave Bella like this. If she was going to walk out of his life forever, she was going to damn well listen to what he had to say.

When he turned back to her, she still stared at him with her expressionless gold eyes. It was as if she stayed merely to pacify him. As if she would indulge him by taking whatever verbal abuse he wanted to dish out so she could walk away guilt free.

He wouldn’t give her the satisfaction. “I like you, Bella. Not because of the sex, not because of the circumstances we were thrown into. I like you. Just you, without all that other shit cluttering things up.”

Tears rose in her eyes, but she didn’t display any other outward show of emotion.

“And you know we could have something together, if you were willing to try.” His voice was hoarse, and he swallowed, trying to force away the ragged sound.

She closed her eyes. “I am sorry I hurt you.”

“That makes two of us.” He walked away from her, not wanting this to be the memory of her he carried, but his pain had tainted the good memories with a bitter edge.

So he left her standing on the sidewalk and went inside. He just hoped she would stay away until he left. No sense in ruining a perfectly angry goodbye with social awkwardness.

“You’ll call?” Nathan stood by as I packed, trying to seem worried and supportive, but radiating anger and relief. His emotions were too strong. There was no sense in him trying to hide them from me; I would have felt them anyway.

I’d expected him to argue with me when I proposed the idea of leaving and letting us take a break from each other. The speed with which he’d agreed stung me to the core.

I grabbed another handful of underwear—probably more than I needed, but it gave my hands something to do—and jammed it into my bag. On the road again. “As soon as I get in. Are you sure you’ll be all right?”

“I’ll be fine. I just need time.” He grabbed my watch off the nightstand and handed it to me.

Snatching it from him, I turned back to my packing. “Time away from me.”

“You need time away from me, too.” He fell silent then, and I bit my lip to keep from picking up the thread of the argument. I zipped the bag closed. Whatever I might have forgotten, I could pick up in Chicago. Right now, I just wanted to get away. “You should leave,” I tried for the last time. He hadn’t been swayed before, so I don’t know why I bothered. “It’s not safe for you here. Max says Dahlia is still in town. The Soul Eater had men here. You’ve got to get out.”

“No,” he said quietly, shaking his head. “He’s taken everything else away from me. He’s not driving me out of my home.”

“You’re so stubborn.” He’d be willing to get himself killed just to prove to his sire he wasn’t afraid? We definitely had different ideas of winning.

“I know you don’t understand.” His expression softened. “I’ve been here fifteen years, Carrie. It’s the first thing I’ve ever truly owned. This apartment has everything I’ve ever cared about. This is where Ziggy grew up. This is where I met you. This is our home.”

A small sob escaped my throat, and I covered my mouth.

His hand closed over my wrist. “You’re still my fledgling. Don’t forget that.”

“How could I?” The tide of hurt in me surged, spilling cold tears onto my cheeks. He tried to take me into his arms, but I shook my head vehemently and jerked the strap of my bag over my shoulder. “I’m your fledgling. But that’s not enough for me, Nathan.”

I didn’t kiss him goodbye. That would have confused things in my heart, the traitorous organ that frequently won over my mind. If I kissed him, I would tell him that I wanted to stay. I’d convince myself it was worth the pain of staying by his side, knowing he would never choose me over the woman he could never have again. And I was afraid of believing that.

Max waited for me at the car. He pasted on his stock, carefree face for me. “Ready?”

I nodded. “As I’ll ever be.”

Tossing my bag into the back, I climbed into the passenger seat. Low-riding cars made me motion sick. This was going to be a long five hours.

“You think he’s going to be okay? I mean, what about the Soul Eater’s guys? They could still—” he began.

I shook my head decisively. “He wants to stay. To stand his ground. And he wants me to go.”

“He’ll come to his senses,” Max said with forced certainty. “You wait and see.”

Wait and see. The question was, for how much longer?

How long should Nathan wait for his sire to call him back home? The Soul Eater wouldn’t give up after just one setback. No, he would regroup and come back stronger than before. And the Movement wouldn’t give up looking for Nathan. And he would be waiting for them both, too brave to leave, too weak to protect himself against the threat.

How long would I wait before my sire was dead, my heart broken all over again? How long until the next calamity would come to test me?

Wait and see. We could start now, stay on guard, be ready for whatever came at us. Or we could lie down and wait and see.

From where I sat, we didn’t have that kind of time.

Blood Ties Book Three:

Ashes to Ashes

Contents

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Prologue

“H ey, Baker! You give her the seven o’clock meds yet?”

Don swung his legs from where they’d been propped on his desk, knocking the tower of empty soda cans from the corner. “Yes. I did. At seven o’clock. Check the sheet.”

Leave it to Sanjay to ask a stupid question. Don shook his head and watched the new guy retrieve the clipboard from the hook beside the door and frown at the words. How he’d managed to live a hundred years was a mystery. Hell, Don had had close scrapes in his own twenty years as a vampire, more in his thirty years previous. How someone with double the lifespan could wander around in a state of constant confusion—

“Then this doesn’t make any sense.” Sanjay flipped the pages on the clipboard, but it was clear from the rapidity of his movements that he couldn’t possibly be reading the charts. “It doesn’t make any sense!”

“What doesn’t make sense?” Always with the drama, these Movement scientists. “I gave her the meds.”

Sanjay’s worried brown eyes flicked up to meet Don’s gaze. “I know you did. I see it on the chart. But her brain activity is…too active. It’s like she hasn’t been sedated at all.”

“Chill out, chill out. There’s a reasonable explanation for this.” The newly assigned guys tended to flip out over every little thing, but he’d seen what had happened the last time the Oracle had shrugged her meds. “I’ll feed her another tranquilizer, keep her as down as I can until morning report. Dr. Jacobson will take it from there.”

The meds for the Oracle were fed to her hourly, through a tube that first dissolved the sedative in warm blood, then injected the whole solution through intravenous lines. It was so simple. And Don hated it.

It wasn’t as if he wanted glory, like the big guys got. Or danger, like the assassins. He just wanted a job that a trained ape couldn’t pull off.

Hell, at least he could watch TV between doses. And the faster he got things under control, the faster he could get back to Will and Grace reruns.

Slipping the key to the tank room from his pocket, he slid it through the card reader. The door popped open with a hiss, and he stepped inside. It was ten degrees colder than the rest of the facility—the monitoring equipment and various pumps and containment machinery would overheat if it wasn’t—and the rest of the facility was damn cold. Don rubbed his hands together and blew into them. It smelled like blood in this room, but it always did.

“Honey, I’m home,” he called to the slumped figure of the lab assistant asleep at his workstation. Couldn’t handle the day shift.

The blinding white of the room was interrupted on one side by the huge, dark wall of glass. Inside, floating suspended in gallons and gallons of blood, was the Oracle. Sleeping, if the tranquillizer had worked. He popped two tablets out of the meds cabinet and strolled to the access tube, whistling while he did so, hoping to annoy the lab tech enough that he’d wake up. “I hope they check the security tape in the morning. Because you will be so busted.”

The meds pump was attached to the wall just below where the glass ended. He knelt down and pulled the drawer open. The tablets would be inserted into a clear, glass chamber inside and dissolved. The whole process was a pain in the ass, but she’d built up a resistance to nearly all the sedatives that came in liquid form. Don didn’t know why it worked, but he was glad it did. The bitch could get downright nasty when she woke up.

He blinked in disbelief at what he saw in the drawer. The glass chamber, which should have been empty to receive the next dose, was still filled with blood. Hands trembling, he followed the intravenous line to where it disappeared into the wall. A chunk of a pill that hadn’t dissolved was stuck in the thin plastic tube, forcing the flow of the blood to a trickle.

The Oracle had never gotten her sedative.

The rest happened too fast. He looked up, saw the face of the Oracle, pale and inquisitive, touching the glass. Her eyes were open. He staggered back, screaming, tripped over his own feet and landed at those of the sleeping lab assistant. Blood pooled around the guy’s sneakers. He wasn’t just sleeping.

Don opened his mouth to scream, but the sound never made it out.

One:

Inevitability

“C arrie, I think it’s time you call Nathan.”

I knew that statement would come, sooner or later. I’d just been hoping it would be much, much later.

We were lounging in Max’s bedroom, the only room in his spacious, opulently furnished condo that had a television. For the past three weeks, all we’d done was lie around during the days and prowl various blues clubs at night. It wasn’t as though I hadn’t had time to talk to Nathan. I just hadn’t wanted to.

When I didn’t answer, Max sighed heavily. He folded his arms and leaned against the carved headboard of his antique bed, the only piece of furniture in the room that wasn’t modern. He seemed strange and anachronistic on it. Having been turned in the late seventies, Max was the youngest vampire I knew. Besides myself, of course. He’d adapted to the changing times much more easily than some vampires did. Max kept his sandy-blond hair cut short and spiky, and his uniform of T-shirts and jeans helped him blend so perfectly with the twenty-something population of Chicago, I forgot at times that he was really old enough to be my biological father.

Clearly, he was about to pull chronological rank. “It’s been almost a month now. I don’t mind you crashing here. Hell, most nights you’ve been one mojito away from a rebound fling, and being the only male here, I’m digging the odds. But Nathan is my friend. If you’re splitting up permanently, he deserves to know.”

I refused to argue that the only thing my sire and I had between us was the blood tie, our weird psychological link that made us privy to each other’s thoughts and emotions. Even that didn’t connect us so much, lately. Nathan seemed to be blocking me from his mind. The few times I’d tried to communicate with him, I’d gotten only terse, vague answers. I supposed it was better than begging me to come back, but it stung nonetheless.

Still, Max wouldn’t take simple logic for an answer. The many, many times I’d tried to explain my nonrelationship with Nathan, Max had refused to see reason. “He wouldn’t have asked you to stay if he didn’t love you,” he’d insisted. “Just because he doesn’t admit it doesn’t mean it’s not true.”

“Oh, kind of like you and Bella?” I’d quipped, effectively ending the conversation. I should have cut Max a little more slack. After all, he had just gone through a nasty breakup himself, no matter how he denied it. Obviously, he had transferred the situation with Bella onto Nathan and me to avoid dealing with his feelings.

“I don’t think I can handle talking to him right now,” I said, knowing full well how lame that sounded.

“It’ll only get worse the longer you wait.” Max knew he had a perfectly valid point. I could tell from the gleam of triumph in his blue eyes. “And if it’s horrible, so what? We’re going down to Navy Pier tonight. You can drown your sorrows in cotton candy. No one can be sad with cotton candy.”

I raised one eyebrow. “Not even a vampire with a profoundly screwed up love life?”

“Cotton candy is to vampire suffering as kryptonite is to Superman.” He reached for the cordless phone on the nightstand and handed it to me. “Call him.”

Helpless, I looked from the alarm clock to the phone. The days had gotten longer. Though the sun wasn’t down yet in Chicago, it was almost nine Michigan time. Nathan would be getting ready to open the store. If I called now we wouldn’t have long to talk. That was a good thing, considering I had no clue what I would say to him.

I took the phone and punched in the number, a pang of homesickness assailing me as I imagined Nathan navigating the cluttered living room to get to the phone in the kitchen. An overwhelming desire to be home again gripped me, and my heart pounded in my chest in anticipation of speaking to him. The line clicked and I wet my lips, preparing to answer his “Hello?”

“Nathan Grant’s residence,” a sleepy, female voice purred over the line.

As quickly as my heart had warmed to the prospect of speaking to Nathan, it froze again with the realization of who this was.

“Hello?” she asked, the word marked with a distinct Italian accent. “Is anyone there?”

Bella.

With shaking hands, I hung up the phone. I couldn’t look at Max. How would I break it to him that Bella, the only woman he’d ever had feelings for, no matter how he tried to deny them, had apparently extended her stay at Nathan’s apartment by a good three weeks?

I was having a hard enough time explaining it myself. My mind jumped from one possibility—Bella’s employers, the Voluntary Vampire Extinction Movement, had discovered she’d helped us find a cure for Nathan, leaving her with no job or residence—to the next—she’d missed her plane and had to wait for a much, much later flight—but none of them dislodged the sick feeling in my stomach.

“Carrie, what’s wrong?” Max frowned at me as though he’d be able to discern my thoughts if he stared hard enough.

I opened my mouth cautiously. I wasn’t sure I wouldn’t throw up. “He wasn’t home. I guess I dodged that bullet.”

“Yeah, well…you’re still calling him when we get back.” He eyed the window, where rosy sunlight sneaked in around the edges of the curtains. “I’m gonna go take a shower. By the time we’re ready, the sun will be off the streets and we can head out.”

I nodded and watched him start for his bathroom before I left for my own room.

Max’s penthouse condo took up three stories in a corner of an old building near the museum campus, the lakeshore park where the city’s big attractions clustered. It wasn’t the hip, happening part of Chicago I’d imagined Max inhabiting, but he hadn’t had much choice in the location, as he had inherited it.

Marcus, the former owner of the place and Max’s late sire, stared accusingly from an oil painting on the landing. Max had always described his sire with glowing words, but it was hard to imagine the grim-faced man in the powdered wig as being “loving” and “fatherly.”

Though it had happened twenty years prior, Marcus’s death still haunted Max. I saw no need to heap another broken heart on him by revealing his werewolf almost-girlfriend was boning Nathan, the man he considered a close, loyal friend.

How could he? I fumed silently as I took the stairs to the guest rooms on the lower level. I flopped onto the ornately carved bed in my neoclassical guestroom and pulled the duvet over my head.

Cold tears escaped the corners of my eyes. Nathan had made it clear from the beginning that there would never be anything between us except the blood tie, but each new reminder stung more than the last, because I’d never really believed him.

I thought it had been settled the night Bella’s spell let Nathan relive losing his wife. He’d as much as said there would never be anything between us. I thought it was because he hadn’t yet gotten over killing his wife. Now, less than a month later, he appeared to have moved on. So either he’d needed seventy years and a month to get over his guilt, or it hadn’t been the memory of Marianne at all. He just wasn’t interested in me.

My parents had raised me to be a logical thinker. Logic insisted that the most plausible assumption was the correct one. Nathan was probably still screwed up, he just wasn’t going to be screwing me.

Because I didn’t want to break the news to Max yet—he was still in deep denial over Bella—I acted as if nothing was wrong as we gorged ourselves on cotton candy and elephant ears on the pier.

Unfortunately, Max picked up on my vibes. “Carrie, what’s going on? You’re not acting right.”

“I’m acting fine,” I snapped, then instantly regretted it. It wasn’t his fault I had nonstop images of Bella and Nathan engaged in myriad sexual positions. “I’m sorry, I’m just—”

“Homesick?”

Worried the man I love is at this very moment fucking the woman you refuse to admit you love.

“Yeah, I guess.” I tried to sound more cheerful when I said, “You know what’s a good cure for homesickness? Alcohol.”

Max grinned. “Now you’re speaking my language. Let’s take a turn on the Ferris wheel, then we’ll find some.”

I’ve never been a fan of heights, so I should have been grateful to be preoccupied on the halting trip to the top. Somehow, I couldn’t be grateful for the torrid images of Nathan and Bella that swamped my mind.

It occurred to me that he’d never be able to hang on to Bella, who had Call of the Wild stamped all over her. Knowing they were probably doomed to failure cheered me up a little.

Still, I couldn’t shake the torturous scenes, or the self-deprecating commentary that went with them. Of course he’s attracted to her. She probably doesn’t wear pajama pants in public or go a day without washing her hair. She’s also a size four around her hips and the size of a small solar system around her chest.

Feeling fat, ugly and petrified of falling to my doom, I closed my eyes and sighed.

Max apparently took it for an expression of contentment, because he looped an arm companionably around my shoulders and sighed in turn. “I know, this is awesome, isn’t it?”

“I’m not really into being off the ground. But the view is nice.”

“The view is gorgeous.” He looked at me as though I was insane for not appreciating the experience. “But that’s not what I was talking about.”

It was my turn to give him the are-you-insane? look.

“This.” He gestured broadly, as though he could encompass the entire city with his arms. “Hanging out, screwing around, just being normal people.”

“Normal people who drink blood and burst into flame in sunlight?” I snorted. “But far be it from me to interrupt your little delusion.”

He settled against the seat and replaced his arm around my shoulder. “You know what I mean. For the past three weeks there hasn’t been any occult shit going on. Not a peep from the Soul Eater. No faxes from the Movement. No drama.”

Except for in our love lives. But you don’t know that part yet.

“Well, there was that whole thing where I broke up with my sire and you got dumped by Bella.” I’d sworn to myself I wouldn’t bring her up again, but I was desperate to get him off his life-is-great kick. The way he talked with his hands when he was happy seemed bound to tip us out of our car.

Not that I begrudged him his I’m-on-top-of-the-world attitude—okay, maybe a little—but when he found out about Bella and Nathan he would come crashing down from his high as quickly as if he’d fallen from the Ferris wheel.

Instead of arguing with me, he chuckled. “You’re trying to pick a fight.”

“Guilty as charged.”

He inhaled deeply. The air smelled of the city—hot cement and traffic exhaust—and carnival food, the scents of humanity only a vampire could truly appreciate. “Try all you want, I ain’t gonna bite. Nothing can ruin tonight for me. Nothing.”

With a parody of his contented sigh, I leaned my head on his shoulder. “If I don’t get a drink soon, I’m going to stake you.”

As promised, when we escaped the Ferris wheel of doom, we headed for our nightly circuit of bars and blues clubs. At a few we were becoming regulars. At the rest, Max had already established himself as one.

We’d thrown back enough alcohol to kill a small rhino by the time our final stop on the booze tour announced last call.

Squinting at his watch through heavy-lidded, red-rimmed eyes, Max frowned in drunken confusion. “What? It can’t be last call yet.”

“It is,” I insisted with the knowing, superior tone of a complete inebriate. “And it sucks.”

“It does.” He looked around the bar, his mouth set in a grim line. “The band is going to leave.”

“Yeah.” I rested my forearms on the table and dropped my head onto them. I heard the scrape of his chair, and when I looked up he was swerving across the empty dance floor toward the musicians on the tiny stage. He spoke to them a minute, pointed at me, then returned with a confident, drunken swagger. The band started a slow blues ballad and he gestured for me to join him.

If I’d learned anything since coming to Chicago with Max, it was that he enjoyed any activity that required putting his hands on a woman. I stumbled toward him. It wouldn’t be the first time we’d danced drunkenly in a bar at closing time. And that struck me as just a tad pathetic.

Not so pathetic I wouldn’t do it again. I liked being close to Max, in a totally platonic way. He was the guy friend I’d never had. Actually, until I’d become a vampire, I’d never had any friends. It was nice being with someone who didn’t expect anything from me short of just hanging around.

Unlike Nathan. I was supposed to stay at his side, waiting for him like a faithful dog, should he ever need me. The unfortunate comparison put me in mind of Werewolves, and I had to blink back cold tears.

Max’s arms tightened around my waist and he leaned his head against mine as we shuffled clumsily to the music. “Can we just keep doing this forever?”

“Dancing?” I mumbled, toying with a lock of hair at the back of his neck.

I felt his chuckle deep in his chest. “No, stupid. Just doing this. Going out and having fun and not worrying about falling in love or being alone. Nothing ever has to change, we’d never have to worry about getting hurt. Wouldn’t that be great?”

If I hadn’t been drunk, it would have sounded as messed up as it really was. Instead, I looked up at Max as though he’d cured cancer and world hunger simultaneously. “That’s so smart.”

“I know.” He frowned. “I always get my best ideas when I’m drunk.”

The bartender called us a cab—rather ungraciously—and I’m sure Max overpaid the driver when we got out at his building.

“This place—” I interrupted myself with a dainty belch. “This place looks like Dracula’s castle.”

“I know. It’s depressing.” A fleeting look of sadness crossed his face. “That was Marcus for you.”

When we got into the elevator, Max stood a little closer than usual. When we got out, he took my hand for the short walk to the door. Instead of opening it, he pulled me flush against his body and kissed me, the scent of Bell’s Two-Hearted ale lingering on his mouth.

I had consumed a lot of alcohol myself, but not so much to silence the alarm bells going off in my head. I jerked back so fast our teeth clinked.

“Max, what the hell are you doing?”

Dazed, he squinted at me for a few seconds before he focused his eyes, then grinned. “Oh, come on, Carrie. You know you’re curious, too.”

I was. Max was like the star quarterback every girl wants to date. Still, he was an emotional wreck and not thinking clearly. “I know you’re upset about Bella—”

“This isn’t about Bella.” He laughed a little too loudly. “Jeez, you’re always talking about her. Are you sure you don’t want to fuck her?”

“No, but if we went to bed now, you wouldn’t be fucking me.” I jabbed my finger into his chest, not merely to make a point but because touching him just seemed good.

He grinned again. “Believe me, this isn’t about Bella.”

“It is.” I slid my hands across the front of his T-shirt—Max has great pecs—and gave him a shove.

Rolling his eyes, he held up his hands. “Okay, it’s about Bella. Peri…peri—you know, when you see out the corner of your eye?”

“Peripherally.” I nodded. “How so?”

He linked his arms around my waist and pulled me forward so I stepped on his toes and our feet tangled dangerously. “I like women. Everyone knows it. I don’t fall in love with women, though. So, how come I haven’t had casual sex since Bella?”

“Because that wasn’t casual sex. You really liked her.” I leaned against him, purely to regain my balance, I’m sure.

“You’re insane. You women all are. You think men have to be in love to stick their cock in somebody.” He inclined his head for another kiss, but halted. “You know that’s not true, right?”

I quirked an eyebrow. “Gee, we’re drunk, we both just got dumped—”

“You got dumped.”

“Whatever.” I rolled my eyes. “Do I think you love me? No. I think you’re trying to get laid to prove to yourself you don’t care about Bella.”

“Is that so evil and wrong?” His lips were a millimeter from mine.

I shrugged. “I guess not.”

He kissed me again. Max is an insanely good kisser. But there was desperation in it, and sadness. I didn’t need a blood tie between us to feel it.

“Let’s do this, Carrie,” he whispered, sinking his fingers into my hair. “Let’s just have fun.”

It made an insane sort of sense. As we tumbled through the door to land on the Persian rug in the foyer, I convinced myself that this wasn’t terrible. People did this every day.

Max’s mouth never left mine as he rolled us both over so that I straddled him, still fully clothed. With a chuckle, Max sat up. I felt him, hard and eager, through his jeans, but he didn’t appear uncomfortable. In fact, he seemed more at ease and himself in this intimate situation than he ever did while doing mundane things. I wondered if I was with the real Max now, or just another character. Maybe that was part of his practiced magic. I pitied the women who didn’t see it for what it was, because they could fall in love with a man like Max, who made them feel they were the most important woman he’d ever touched.

Luckily for me, I couldn’t fall in love with him. I was already in love with a man who didn’t find me very important at all.

As if on cue, the phone rang.

Max glanced at me, half imploring. Then guilt crept into his expression, and I couldn’t look at him anymore.

I groaned and climbed to my feet, more wobbly than I had been when I’d been plastered. The realization that I had been about to have sex with Max forced the rest of the alcoholic haze from my system, leaving awkwardness it its wake.

“Hey, while you’re up, can you get that?” Max asked sheepishly.

“Fine. But if it’s one of your girlfriends, I’m not going to be very good cover.”

I was surprised anyone would hang on the line for as long as it took me to reach the telephone in the kitchen. Every ring seemed sure to be the last, until I picked up the phone and said tiredly, “Hello?”

“Carrie?”

Nathan.

Two:

Reconnected

“C arrie?” Nathan repeated over the crackling of the line, his soft Scottish accent curling around my heart like a possessive hand.

I swallowed the lump in my throat and tried not to focus on the fact I was standing in Max’s kitchen wiping his kisses off my neck. “Yeah, it’s me.”

There was a long, heavy pause. “It’s good to hear your voice.”

My throat went dry. I will not cry, I will not cry.

But my emotions were too raw. The alcohol left me with nothing to buffer them. I wiped at my eyes and prayed my voice wouldn’t fail me when I spoke. “It’s good to hear from you, too.”

“I tried to get ahold of you earlier. You must have been out.” He probed gently at the edge of the blood tie, and I shut him out firmly. He laughed softly. “Got something you don’t want me to know?”

“I’m a little tipsy, is all. We just got in.”

“Ah.” Nathan didn’t sound as though he believed me.

He hadn’t yet offered any information about Bella. The suspense had me twisting the phone cord around my arm. It would be better to do it like a Band-Aid, I decided—as quickly as possible so the pain wouldn’t last. “I tried to call you earlier.”

He cleared his throat. “Yeah, that’s what Bella said.”

I rolled my lips over my teeth, pressing them until they were numb.

“She said you hung up.”

I managed a tight laugh. “Yeah, I thought I had the wrong number. I didn’t expect her to be there. Do I still have a room?”

My chuckle sounded so lame, if it had been a horse, some farmer would have shot it.

“Of course you do,” Nathan said, his voice so soft I had to strain to hear it over the static. “Listen, has Max heard anything from the Movement?”

I tried to stay out of Max’s personal business, but I did remember the comment he’d made on the Ferris wheel. “No, he said he hasn’t heard anything lately.”

“Bella has.” His casual use of her name sent spears of agony through my heart. “There’s too much to explain on the phone. We’re headed down there right now.”

I imagined her in the seat next to his, looking gorgeous and out of place in the rusty old van. “I’ll tell Max. I don’t think he’ll be happy about her coming here.”

“Why not?” Apparently, Nathan had gone brain dead.

Then I remembered he’d been possessed by the Soul Eater’s evil spell the whole time, and probably missed the weird dynamic going on between Bella and Max. Still, she should have had the common decency to clue Nathan in. “No reason. Forget I said anything.”

“Okay…” He cleared his throat again. “Listen, we’re about an hour out of the city. We’re hoping to get to Max’s before sunrise, but if we can’t, is there a parking garage or something nearby I can shelter in?”

“Yeah, there’s parking under the building. If you buzz up from there you can get straight in.” I winced as I said those words. I should have told him he’d be better to stop in Gary, Indiana for the day. Better yet, he should have turned around and headed back to Grand Rapids.

The kitchen door swung open behind me, nearly flattening me to the wall. Max strolled in and stretched his arms over his head. His shoulders popped and he groaned loudly. “You know what’s just as good as sex? Ice cream. Nah, that’s a lie. I’d rather have had sex.”

I covered the mouthpiece, but it was too late.

“Is Max having trouble getting reacquainted with the city?” Nathan asked, amused.

“I think I’m cramping his style.”

On the other end of the line I heard muffled talking. You’re on the phone to me, your fledgling, your blood, and you can’t wait a few seconds before you talk to her?

Without being able to stop it, my annoyance filtered over the blood tie. Nathan got it, and I felt his relief at our renewed connection. “You’re right, that’s rude of me. Listen, I’m going to let you go. I can explain everything when we get there.”

We. It was like he used the word as a weapon against me. “Fine. We will be here.”

He hesitated. “Okay…well, goodbye, sweetheart.”

Sweetheart. It was all I could take. I hung up the phone and crumpled to the floor.

Max knelt at my side before I could draw two sobbing breaths. “Carrie? Are you okay?”

I couldn’t speak. I could only cry against his shoulder.

“What’s the matter? Is something wrong?” He sounded as alarmed as any man faced with a woman’s tears. It must have been doubly distressing, considering what we’d almost done in his foyer. “Is it me? Was it something I did?”

Shaking my head, I wiped my nose on the back of my hand, but I couldn’t control my sobbing enough to make an intelligent sound.

Max pulled me tighter to his side, as if trying to absorb my suffering through his skin. “You’re really freaking me out. What’s the matter? Is it Nathan?”

It most definitely was Nathan. Anger roared to life in me, drying my tears. Nathan and Bella were coming here. I’d come here to get away from Nathan and clear my head, and he was bringing more pain my way? He was like the opposite of an ambulance; he brought portable disaster.

“That was him,” I muttered. “He’s coming down here with Bella.”

“Bella?” Max frowned. “I thought she was going back to Spain, like, a month ago.”

I gave him a minute. Max was a smart guy. I was confident he would figure it out.

He wasn’t as quick to believe as I had been, but the comprehension slowly crept over his face. “No. No way.”

I nodded vehemently. “When I called the apartment this evening she answered the phone.”

“Well, that doesn’t mean anything.” He was assuring himself as much as me. “Maybe something came up, she got reassigned. It happens all the time.”

“She hasn’t been using my room.” I was half-glad. I couldn’t imagine going back there if she’d usurped my boyfriend—no, my sire; I’d have to get used to the difference—and my bed.

Max nodded. “Well, I’m sorry he hurt you.”

Fresh tears filled my eyes at the ragged pain in his voice. “I’m sorry she hurt you.”

“For the last time, she didn’t hurt me! I don’t give a shit about her!” He stood and stormed angrily through the door.

Numb and cold on the kitchen floor, I stared at the container of ice cream Max had left on the counter.

I don’t know how long I stayed there, watching condensation form on the cardboard. It was leaving trails and pooling around the softening bottom when I finally moved.

I had to pull myself together. It was bad enough I would have to face Nathan knowing he’d chosen Bella over me. I didn’t have to let him know how destroyed I was.

I headed downstairs to my bedroom. In the bathroom, I flipped the shower on, as scalding as I could make it, and stood under it until the water turned frigid and the steam dissipated. Outside, the sun would no doubt be coming up. They would be here any minute.

No sooner had I thought it than there was a soft knock at the door. “Carrie?”

Max peeked around it, eyes modestly shielded, and threw me a towel. “They’re here.”

“Thanks, I’ll be right up.”

“Okay.” He stepped out, then came back. “He looks like hell, Carrie.”

“Good.”

I meant it. Nathan had played me the entire time I’d known him, refusing to get into any kind of relationship with me, but oh, he could have sex with me. That was okay. I could live in the same house with him. He could beg me not to leave him, and tell me constantly how destroyed he would be if I did. But he wouldn’t give up the memory of his dead wife for me.

But he would for Bella. She possessed some magic key, some ingredient I didn’t have, that changed his mind and made him want to be in a relationship with someone.

In a relationship with her.

I dressed, not bothering to try and look good. It would be transparent if I spent another half hour blow drying my hair and putting on makeup.

At the top of the stairs I found Nathan and Bella sitting at opposite ends of the couch. Though I registered their distance, it wasn’t enough to stop my knees from going all watery.

Once we’re turned, vampires never age. Nathan had remained frozen in time at thirty-two years old. A very fit, very attractive thirty-two. Once, I’d jokingly mentioned he must have had a pretty tough exercise regimen in life to get such great arms. He’d chuckled and said, “No, it was from carrying Marianne. She couldn’t walk, toward the end.” His gray eyes had shone with sadness for a moment, then just as quickly changed back.

Now, his gaze snapped to me and he lifted his dark head as I ascended the last few steps.

Max turned as I came fully into the room, and he winked at me encouragingly.

Nathan rose as if expecting, I don’t know—a hug? For me to leap into his arms?

Whatever it was, it wasn’t something I wanted to give him. I waved him aside and flopped into the armchair near the kitchen door. “No need to get up on my account.”

His fingers clenched and worried against each other before he sat down again.

Bella looked from him to me, her eyes slightly narrowed and her mouth quirked in an amused smile, but she said nothing.

“Now that you’re both here, I guess I can break the bad news.” Nathan leaned forward and rubbed his hands on the knees of his jeans. It was a nervous habit, and the denim on his thighs was nearly white with wear. “I’m just going to say it.”

“Get it over with,” Bella practically snarled.

Trouble in paradise? I shot Max a look, but his gaze was fixed on Bella.

“I was trying to.” Nathan slid her a sideways glare. “Something happened at Movement headquarters. That’s why you haven’t had word from them. The Oracle got loose.”

“No.” Max’s exclamation came as a whisper. Not much scared Max, but I knew the Oracle did. An ancient vampire with powerful telekinesis, she had been held under strict supervision by the Movement. Max had actually been on a team assigned with moving her to the high-tech facilities she’d been kept in of late. Not all the team members had survived.

Nathan didn’t respond, but I’d seen that expression on his face many times. He was just as scared as Max. “She killed her handlers, most of the staff. Miguel is gone. So is Breton. She was located in the hospital wing, so most of the destruction is centered there.”

“Anne is dead,” Bella said dispassionately, never looking at Max. “The Oracle set fire to everyone in the hospital wing.”

“Like, with mind powers?” I asked quietly.

Bella frowned at me as though trying to comprehend my stupidity. “No. With the rubbing alcohol from the supply room and someone’s lighter.”

Max moved to the window, his jaw clenching as Nathan droned on about procedures during cessation of communication, and whether or not it was safe for me or himself to be involved.

I went to Max and laid my hand on his shoulder. “Are you okay?”

He nodded. “Yeah. I’m just…You know, I knew it. All those years ago, when we moved her to the new facility, it’s like I could feel that she was planning something.”

Bella snorted. “How could you know the mind of the Oracle?”

“I don’t believe the mind of the Oracle concerns you,” Max growled at her. “How many werewolves died at her hand?”

Her exotic face went pale, but Bella’s golden eyes narrowed. “I am sorry she could not be of better service to you in your campaign of hatred against my people.”

“Everyone just calm down.” Nathan stood, entirely too reasonable for the emotional climate of the room.

When I’d first seen him, I’d just been relieved to be in the same room with my sire. I hadn’t noticed how tired he appeared, hadn’t taken in the dark circles beneath his eyes or the grim set of his mouth.

His gaze flickered over me a moment, and his exhaustion seemed to intensify. “The Oracle didn’t break out on a whim. Like Max said, she must have been planning it. Let’s all turn it in for the day and discuss this like reasonable adults after sundown.”

“Great, I’ll show you guys to your rooms.” Max emphasized the plurality. It comforted me to know that though they would probably end up together Max was letting them know he disapproved of it.

Nathan seemed surprised. He looked at me, then back to Max with a shrug. “Sounds good.”

“Okay. Night, all.” I gave a noncommittal wave and turned to the stairs.

Look back.

The suggestion over the blood tie was so strong, I had to give in. When I glanced over my shoulder, Nathan’s gaze locked with mine. I couldn’t discern the emotion there, whether it was guilt or apology or a silent plea for me to come to him.

I shook my head, refusing them all.

Though I was tired, sleep did not come immediately. My brain swam with imagined horrors. I’d experienced firsthand just a taste of the Oracle’s power. I’d seen what she’d done to Anne, the cheerful, eternally teenaged receptionist of the Movement. The Oracle had tormented her with a vision of her spine being shattered, then, years later, she’d made it come true. What had she made those poor vampires in the hospital wing see? It must have been agony for them.

Despite the fact their agenda and my continued existence were mutually exclusive, the vampires I’d met at Movement headquarters had been nice to me, especially Anne, who’d taken me to see the Oracle despite the restrictions against it. That had ended with a skirmish in which the Oracle had tossed Anne around like a rag doll, and tried to rip my head off my shoulders. We’d been relieved, afterward, to learn that Anne had survived her injuries. But in hindsight it seemed she’d been doomed from the start. Because of the Movement’s strict policy against medical treatment for life-threatening injuries, Anne would have been slowly recuperating, with no help but her body’s own healing ability. She would have been completely defenseless when the Oracle torched the place. I think Nathan was right. The Oracle didn’t seem to do things willy-nilly.

I rolled onto my side. The bed seemed bigger and oddly empty, now that my sire had arrived. I ached to lie at his side, listening to his gentle snores and occasional nonsensical sleep babble. Now, that was for someone else.

It made me feel a bit better to review their icy behavior toward each other in the foyer. Maybe Max’s idea of deliberately putting them in separate rooms wasn’t so crazy, as neither seemed inclined to crawl into bed together today.

How could Nathan have kept this from me? Despite the distance that always remained between us, I’d been honest with him, hadn’t I? And I’d put my soul on the line in order to save him from the Soul Eater’s torturous spell. In my mind, he owed it to me to be honest, even if it inconvenienced him a little.

I wish he had used that same, compassionate line of reasoning.

Nathan had Bella. She was exotic and passionate and dangerous. She was so different from plain, white-bread me. With all the sex and romance, Nathan probably just didn’t have time to think about me and how much I might be hurt.

Not for the first time, cold tears streamed down my cheeks over my sire.

I’d nearly cried myself to sleep when there was a soft knock at my door. Probably Max coming to commiserate. I wiped my eyes hastily. If he could pretend not to be bothered, I certainly could do the same. I might even start to believe it.

“Come in,” I said, hoping my voice sounded thick with sleep and not tears.

The door eased open a crack and Nathan, not Max, slipped inside.

I sat up, clutching the covers defensively to my chest as though he would be able to see through my T-shirt to my broken heart—had it been there. My actual heart was in my suitcase, removed from my chest by Cyrus, my first sire. “What are you doing here?”

He held up his hands like someone anticipating an attack. “Please, just hear me out.”

“Do you really think we have anything to say? After the way things went when I left?” I scoffed. “Or especially now?”

“I know. And I’m sorry. I should have been honest with you.” His words further confirmed my fear.

I drew in a shaking breath, forcing myself not to break down in sobs. “That would have been nice.”

“I can’t apologize enough. I know that. And I know I’ve put you through hell.” He looked down at his hands. “But I’ve missed you so much.”

“It would appear otherwise.” I would not let his wounded-little-boy demeanor soften my righteous anger.

For a second, he appeared taken aback. “I don’t want to be separated from you like this again. You belong with me.”

A sick feeling wound through my stomach, something like hope with reservation.

Though I didn’t speak, he came to the bed and sat down. “I’ve been selfish. I wanted to hang on to a past that I can’t change. But I had no right to string you along the way I did. I swear, Carrie, if you come home, that will all change.”

I blinked back tears. Here were the words I’d longed to hear from him, and yet…

“What about Bella?”

Nathan frowned. “What about her?”

“I don’t know if she’d be too keen on having me around. Maybe, if she were another vampire, she could understand, but she’s a werewolf. They don’t have any concept of the relationship between a sire and a fledgling.” Or how frustrating they can be.

A horrible scene played through my mind where Nathan replied, “You know, that makes sense. Good night,” and returned to her.

Instead, he stared at me as though I’d lost my mind. “Carrie, Bella and I…I think there’s been some miscommunication. We’re not involved with each other.”

“She was staying at the house,” I stated stubbornly. “Why has she been there for a month then? Why didn’t she go back to Spain?”

“She did,” Nathan insisted. “She followed the Soul Eater to San Francisco, did recon, then went to Spain. She had to take commercial airlines because she couldn’t contact the Movement. When she got to headquarters, she found it destroyed, and came back to Grand Rapids, because it was the only way she knew how to contact Max.”

“But you said she wasn’t using my room…and you were shielding your thoughts the whole time.” I was beginning to feel like a total ass, and I didn’t like it. It would almost have been worth it to hear he had been sleeping with Bella, just to keep from realizing how crazy I’d been acting.

A slow smile spread across Nathan’s gorgeous mouth. “You really thought I was cheating on you?”

“It wouldn’t have been cheating, since we don’t have a relationship.” I looked down at my hands and found them twisting the bedspread. “Nathan, I don’t want to be your fledgling. I want to be the woman you love. It’s never going to happen as long as you can’t let go of Marianne.”

I thought he would flinch or turn away at her name, the way he used to, but he held my gaze, drawing me into his steel-gray eyes. “Marianne is gone. It makes me sick to say it, but in a way, everything turned out better for us the way it did. She wasn’t the woman I married. She’d given up. I know I painted her as a saint, and I don’t mean to. But something about the illness twisted her. She was often depressed, sometimes openly hateful. She blamed me, once, near the end.”

“Oh, Nathan.” I couldn’t help interrupting.

It was as if he hadn’t heard me. “Even if she had lived—that is, if I hadn’t done what I did to her—she would have died later. If I’d made her a vampire…well, she was too scarred. She still wouldn’t have wanted to live.

“I could have given Marianne new life, could have protected her and cherished her for the rest of our time on earth, but I couldn’t have given her her soul back. She’d lost that long before I killed her. The spell Bella did…that you did…it made me realize that. It sounds melodramatic, but really, you saved me.”

Tentatively, I reached for his hand. I seriously expected to wake up when I touched him, but his fingers closed over mine, almost crushing, until he realized what he was doing and relaxed his grip.

“You’re my fledgling. No matter what else happens between us, it’s my blood in your veins. You’re the only family I have. It’s you I want to be with.” He lifted my hand to his lips and pressed a soft kiss there.

My pulse pounded. “But not the way I want it to be. That’s the part you keep glossing over.”

A sad look came over his face, and his gaze dropped to our clasped hands. “If I told you now that I’m ready to…to love you, I would just be setting us up for disaster. The spell showed me the truth, but there are still parts I can’t accept, even though I know them to be true. When the time comes that I can completely let it go—and it will come—it’s not going to be some werewolf I choose. It’s going to be you.”

Instantly, guilt crashed over me. Nathan had been soul-searching, and I’d been…whoring it up. “I have to tell you something.”

A wary look crossed over his face, followed by an obviously forced smile. Trepidation vibrated down the blood tie. He thought I was going to reject him. He let go of my hand. “Okay.”

“Well, I thought you were…involved…with Bella.” I closed my eyes and resisted the urge to slap my forehead with my palm. “Obviously, I jumped to a conclusion. A stupid, stupid conclusion.”

He nodded, the oppressive fear of rejection letting up a bit. “And?”

“And?” I bit my lip, deciding the best way to do this was quickly. “I almost slept with Max.”

I mentally counted to three, waiting for Nathan to explode. He did, but not as I expected. With a howl of laughter, he fell sideways off the bed.

“Nathan! It’s not funny!” I pounded the mattress. “I almost slept with Max!”

Peering over the edge of the bed, I saw Nathan wipe tears of laughter from his eyes. “Oh, I heard you. I bet it was dead romantic, too.”

“Oh, shut up,” I admonished with an involuntary laugh. “I can’t believe I thought you slept with Bella.”

“I can’t believe you did, either. I can barely stand her. Do you know she chews her toenails? I mean, she doesn’t clip them off like normal people, she puts her foot in her mouth and chews them!” He shuddered in disgust. “I thought you’d give me a little more credit.”

Our laughter subsided into charged silence. Nathan sat up, resting his forearm on the bed as he studied me. “Carrie, I don’t want you to do anything you don’t want to. If you don’t want to come home, tell me.”

Home. Our home. My chest squeezed as though it would suddenly collapse. My mind raced for some proof that this was an elaborate trick to break my heart again. “I do want to come home. But I can’t promise I’ll wait for you. It’s too unfair to ask that of me. So…”

“So?” he asked, a reluctant smile quirking the corner of his mouth.

I hated to kill the happy expression that might grow there. “So, I’ll think about it.”

His smile held the promise of happiness. Realistic happiness, but still, more happiness than we’d had. “Carrie?”

The way he said my name, the way it sounded heavy and meaningful on his lips, gave me chills up my spine. “What?”

“I’ve been dying to kiss you.”

At those words, the chills ran straight from my spine to my stomach, raced down my arms and pulled a soft, “Oh,” from my throat. I swallowed thickly and nodded, wetting my lips, which had become suddenly parched in anticipation.

Wordlessly, he climbed into bed beside me and we kissed as though we’d never done it before. Not because it was clumsy and awkward, but because there was more to it on both ends than there ever had been. There was a fierceness in him I’d never experienced before, not born of desperation, or fear of losing me, as when I’d first become his fledgling. It was something between determination—determination to let go and make this right—and confidence I would be there when all was said and done.

I wished I could be as sure as he was.

But my body was certain of what it wanted. No matter what had transpired between us, I needed him on a primal, visceral level. His blood was in me, making me a part of him. I couldn’t seem to touch him enough, even as his mouth covered mine again and again, even as his hands found their way to my back, pulling me tight against him.

I rose on my knees before him, and he mimicked my action, pulling his shirt off in the process. I actually moaned at just the sight of him, his pale skin pulled taut over hard muscle. The scars from the Soul Eater’s spell still marred his chest and arms, and I wondered briefly at the power of a magic that could leave permanent marks on a vampire. But rational thought fled when he reached for me. Like always, Nathan could make the complications of the world disappear for me when I was in his arms. Not because I was an affected flower prone to swooning, but because everything about him—his body, his mind, his scent, his touch, his problems—everything was larger than life.

And you always get caught up in it, and you always fall, and he’s never there to catch you.

I ignored that warning voice, ignored every thought in my self-righteous brain, because Nathan was touching me, so everything was all right.

He slipped my T-shirt over my head and bent his face to my neck. It was nearly impossible to stay upright with his skin rubbing on mine, his mouth burning a trail across my collarbones. It was too much sensation after being apart too long, and when I moaned, felt an echoing shudder in his body.

“I’ve missed this,” he rasped, lifting my breasts in his hands to kiss the tops of them. “God, I’ve missed this. I’ve missed you.”

I clutched his hair in my fingers and held his face close. He smelled wonderful, like the sandalwood of his soap and the heavy opiate smell of the incense he burned in the shop. I almost screamed in need when his hands slid to my back and curved over my buttocks, pulling my vulnerable, naked flesh forward to make contact with the rough denim of his jeans. I reached between us and fumbled with the button at his waistband, and he pushed my hands away. “Wait, wait. Slow down. We’ve got all day.”

“I don’t want to take all day,” I panted, punctuating my statement with a firm tug at his jeans.

His eyes darkened and he stared down at me for a long, silent moment. “I’m so glad you said that.”

In a few frantic seconds, he’d shucked his pants and pulled me to straddle him as he lay back on the bed. I gripped the base of his cock and squeezed, gliding my fingers up, over all the hard, straining length of him. He hissed and clutched at my thighs, and the desire I felt through the blood tie magnified my own. I rose above him and positioned him at my entrance. My flesh throbbed at the first touch of him; my body shuddered when he flexed his hips and slid inside.

“God, Carrie,” he managed through clenched teeth. “You feel so good.”

I wanted to answer him, to say something witty and self-assured, but he pressed his thumb to the hot, tingling bit of flesh at my center and all I could do was let out a hoarse cry.

It had been far, far too long since I’d been with him like this. It was more than a physical connection. With the blood tie between us, I could read his thoughts, feel his desire and experience the pleasure he felt as if it were my own. My skin burned where his hands touched me, my body tensed and spasmed around his cock as I rode him. I lost track of the times I cried out in release, lost to the feeling of his thickness stretching and spreading me, the hard, ridged length of him pounding into me. When he grabbed my hips and jerked me down, so hard against him it was almost painful, I felt him throb inside me and fell forward onto his chest, my arms too weak to support myself.

The tears that came to my eyes were unexpected. I swiped them away and carefully moved off of him, blocking him from the blood tie with what little mental strength I had left. He’d felt my sudden overload of emotion, though. The relief at being reunited with him. The uncertainty whether I could trust him to heal the wounds inflicted on him by his sire. But most of all the fear that I would be hurt again.

His hands shook as they smoothed my tangled hair from my face. “You can trust me now, Carrie. You can trust me, because I can trust myself not to hurt you.”

I leaned against his cold skin, buried my face in his neck. The scent of my sire’s blood, primal and familiar, filled my senses.

I’d missed him so much—the feel of him under my hands, the weight of him, solid and sure, at my side. As much as I hated the codependent notion of needing another person to make you “whole,” the blood tie did make us two halves that were only completed by each other.

It would be so much easier if I didn’t love him.

Three:

Possessed

M ax couldn’t believe her nerve.

There Bella sat at the kitchen island, her head bent over a book, occasionally turning to take a bite from the sandwich she held in her left hand. She perched on a stool, her right foot on a higher rung than her left, so she could rest her elbow on her knee and still turn pages.

How could she look so relaxed after all that had happened? When people he’d known for years—he assumed she’d known them, too—were dead. Tortured to death by the Oracle, who now roamed around unchecked. Oh yeah. Perfect time for a sandwich.

If I kick that stool right now, there’s no way she’d be able to get her balance before her ass hit the floor. The thought brought a bitter smile to his face.

“Making yourself at home, huh?” He strolled to the refrigerator and opened it, noting with annoyance she’d used all but the dregs of the mayonnaise and replaced the jar, anyway.

He pulled out a bag of blood and popped it in the microwave. “So, get a good day’s sleep?”

She didn’t look up. “You know I do not sleep more than a few hours at a time.”

“Oh, right.” He snapped his fingers. “It’s a dog thing. So, do you have to circle around three times before you can lie down?”

This time, she gave him a warning glance before wordlessly returning her attention to her book.

“Sorry, didn’t mean to interrupt story time.” He set the timer and then turned, leaning back against the counter. “Here’s a funny story. Tell me if you’ve heard it. A building full of vampires gets roasted from the inside out and everyone dies.”

She didn’t look up. “You think I do not care about what has happened to the Movement?”

“You’re right. That is what I think. See, you haven’t shown much love for vampires. None of your kind have. And maybe what I thought was you being brave and stoic was just you…not giving a shit.”

The microwave dinged and he pulled out the pleasantly warm bag. Eschewing a cup, he bit through the plastic and purposely let some blood dribble down his chin, for good measure.

Her nose twitched at the coppery smell. With a noise of disgust, she tossed her sandwich down and slammed her book shut. “You are a pig.”

“And you’re a bitch. Yet here we are.” He drained the bag, though he really hadn’t been hungry to begin with, and tossed it aside. It landed with a wet smack on the floor beside the trash can.

Bella looked as though she might throw up. Nothing would have pleased Max more.

But it wasn’t in the cards. Instead, she stood, tucked her book beneath her arm and headed toward the door. Her hand was on the smooth, painted wood when she whirled to face him. Her stony, cool facade had cracked, her high cheekbones coloring deep red.

“I am sorry you cannot accept my rejection of you for what it is. That is, that you cannot see beyond your pride, to the many reasons we could not be together.” Her voice quivered slightly on the last word. “And I am sorry it taints your view of the situation we are in.”

He chose to ignore that final part. “Oh, please. If you think I’m nursing a broken heart, don’t waste your time feeling sorry for me. It’s Carrie I’m smarting for.”

Bella snorted derisively, than sobered. “What are you talking about?”

“I think you know.” He folded his arms across his chest. “I knew you were going to make a move on him. I had a sick feeling about it when I left you at his place. How could you do it? When you saw how torn up Carrie was, how could you do that?”

“How could I do what?” Bella raised her hands in the classic pose of innocence. “I think you have finally lost your mind, vampire.”

“Stop trying to play dumb! You know exactly what you did. You’ve been fucking Nathan!” Max rounded the island and stepped so near to her he had to ball his hands into fists to keep from touching her. This kind of closeness was dangerous. He could lose his temper and grab her, or lose his willpower and—

No. You went down that road before and it sucked.

“You think I am sleeping with your vampire friend?” She had the nerve to laugh at him, as though the idea was ridiculous. Placing her palms flat on Max’s chest, she gave him a shove. “You dare to accuse me of this when last night I could smell her all over you?”

Ouch. But what he had been doing didn’t matter, Max reminded himself. It was Bella’s immorality they were talking about. “Listen, what Carrie and I do is our business. But you knew how messed up she was when she left Nathan, and you still moved in for the kill. For your information, she was really hurt when she found out about the two of you. She could have slept with me to get her mind off it. But she didn’t.”

“When she found out about us?” Bella snorted again. Max wanted to hit her. “How, exactly, did she find out?”

The uneasy feeling that maybe something was amiss, maybe some critical piece of information had slipped through their keen investigative fingers, crept into the back of his mind. “I don’t know. When she called, I guess.”

Bella only nodded.

In the eerie quiet of the kitchen, even the buzzing of the fluorescent lights could be heard, layered with the drumming of water dribbling into the sink and the ticking of the sleek steel clock on the wall. From the rest of the house, not a sound.

So, where are Nathan and Carrie, genius?

Almost the exact moment he thought it, a smug smile began to grow on Bella’s face. “I am sorry the only outlet for her troubled mind was in clumsy foreplay with an inadequate partner.”

He threw the rest of her sandwich at the swinging door as she passed through it.

When I opened my eyes to find myself in an empty bed, my fuzzy brain snapped to alert. Okay, it snapped to panic.

You made it all up. It was a dream.

There was no way the day before hadn’t been real. No way I hadn’t spent the last few hours sleeping comfortably in Nathan’s arms.

I’d tossed back the blankets and was about to swing my legs over the side of the bed to begin a frantic search for him when he stepped out of the bathroom, a toothbrush in his mouth and a towel wrapped around his waist. He paused in his brushing long enough to give me a look implying I had lost my mind, then retreated to the bathroom again.

Flopping back on the pillows, I smiled. The curtains were open, the sky had faded to twilight and Nathan had turned on the bedside lamp. The soft, golden light shone through my eyelids when I closed them, and it felt almost like turning my face to the sun. I wondered if I’d ever woken up so happy.

The faucet turned on, as briefly as possible because, as I’d heard many, many times, water conservation is everyone’s responsibility. I slipped out of bed and padded across the thick carpet to the bathroom. Nathan leaned over the sink, spitting toothpaste into the basin.

It’s demented that you find that sexy, I told myself. I yawned and leaned against the door frame. “You know why vampires have to brush their teeth?”

He raised an eyebrow as he wiped his mouth with a hand towel.

“So they don’t get bat breath.”

Drying his hands, he considered me silently for moment. “I’m rescinding my offer of letting you come home.”

I slapped his shoulder. “Listen, don’t be too hard on Max today, okay?”

Nathan looked as crestfallen as a child who’s had his favorite toy taken away. “Why not?”

“Because I have a feeling he’s going to feel pretty foolish about all this. You know, when he finds out.” I shuffled my feet on the carpet.

“Why, because you feel foolish?” He shook his head. “Don’t you have any faith in me? Any trust?”

I raised an eyebrow in answer.

He rolled his eyes. “Fine. I won’t give him a hard time. You women are so picky about these things. And by you women, I mean you and Max.”

“Get out,” I ordered. “I’m going to take a nice, long, water-wasting shower.”

With a grin, he asked, “Will you require assistance with that?”

“You’ve already taken a shower,” I pointed out, gesturing to the towel.

“I’m dirty enough to take two.” He winked.

We’d found that although the blood tie didn’t come with built-in sexual attraction, it did ramp up whatever attraction already existed. Now that we were on familiar footing again, it didn’t surprise me that he was suddenly in a randy mood.

“I don’t doubt that. But we’ve got bigger things to worry about than your libido.” I pushed him toward the door.

He went, grudgingly. “Fine. But you are in such trouble in the morning.”

I don’t doubt that, I thought, grim reality intruding unpleasantly. I’m sure by morning, we’ll all have jumped feetfirst into trouble.

We found Bella upstairs, stretched out on the leather sofa in the foyer with a book in her hands. Though I now knew the truth of what had transpired between her and Nathan, her treatment of Max still kept me from warming to her.

She sat up, her eyes moving from me to Nathan and back again. “Max is in the kitchen.”

Nathan seemed to sense the reason for her trepidation, and, because it’s the kind of person he is, he snarled, “I’m going to kill him,” before tearing toward the kitchen.

Bella didn’t look nearly as alarmed as Nathan had probably expected. She lifted one elegant eyebrow and glanced back to her book. “Is he really going to kill him?”

“No. I banned him from teasing Max. I never thought to forbid him from teasing you.” I slid my hands into the pockets of my jeans. “Listen, I’m sorry.”

She looked up, mild surprise registering on her face. “For what?”

I thought for sure she knew, the way she’d been hesitant to tell Nathan where to find Max. I jerked my thumb toward the kitchen door. “Be-because I almost slept with Max.”

“Ah, I understand. You would be more sorry if you had completed the act.” Her attention once again drifted to her book.

“That’s not what I meant. He’s kind of your…territory.” I winced at the dog terminology. “That didn’t come out quite right.”

“Max does not belong to me, and I do not wish him to.” Bella closed the volume with a frustrated sigh. “I do not wish to continue this conversation, either. There is much we need to do. Tell the men we will all meet in the dining room in fifteen minutes.”

She left without another word.

I knew Max was in full-blown denial about his feelings for Bella, but I hadn’t realized the reverse was true. According to Max, she’d ended their fling, but in typical Max fashion, he was sure she still wanted a relationship with him, while he, on the other hand, couldn’t care less about her.

Maybe he was right. A definite angry vibe had radiated from Bella, the same type I’d projected to her when I thought she was competition for Nathan.

In the kitchen, Nathan leaned against the counter, sipping blood from a mug, while Max wielded a mop angrily across a vicious blood spill on the floor beside the trash can.

“Did we kill someone this morning?” I crossed my arms and eyed the mop, which was soaked pink and seemed to be doing nothing but spreading watery blood over the bright white tile.

Nathan made a snort of disagreement into his cup. He swallowed with a grimace and licked a bit of blood from his upper lip. “Max threw a tantrum.”

“You’re a guest in this house,” Max snapped, jabbing the mop at Nathan’s feet. “Remember that.”

“And I appreciate your hospitality. Speaking of which, when do I get to nearly have sex with you?” Nathan took another sip from his cup, ignoring Max’s murderous scowl.

I smiled, covering it with my hand when Max’s glare fixed on me. “Well, Bella wants us to meet her in the dining room.”

“I guess it was too much of an inconvenience to stop in and tell us herself?” Max tossed the mop aside in disgust. “Maybe I had plans or an agenda or something. She can’t just move in and start ordering us around!”

“I didn’t think you’d mind so much if she moved in.” Nathan barely dodged the saltshaker, the object nearest Max when the comment enraged him.

“Methinks you hit a nerve.” I went to the refrigerator and pulled out a bag of blood.

Nathan took it and handed me his nearly full mug. “I’ve already had two cups. You finish this off.”

I stood, sipping my blood in silence, while Nathan studied me covertly, pretending to be interested in his bare feet, the floor tiles and the pots and pans suspended over the island. He knew I hated being watched while I fed, but his surreptitious looks made my stomach fill with butterflies.

Max cursed fluently as he scrubbed the stained tiles with a roll of paper towels and an absurd quantity of glass cleaner. As the minutes ticked by, it became painfully apparent none of us wanted to be the first to appear at Bella’s meeting.

“What do you think we’re going to talk about?” I ventured finally.

My voice ruptured the quiet so suddenly, Max hit his head on the counter as he straightened in surprise.

Blind to his distress, Nathan shrugged calmly. “A battle plan, I assume. With the Movement gone, we have no centralized form of communication. We won’t be able to get information from other operatives, and we don’t have the means to track the Oracle without Movement connections.”

“Not to mention the Soul Eater,” I added softly. A flicker of pain crossed Nathan’s face at the mention of his sire. “He’s still out there.”

“I hate to say it, but that might have something to do with the Oracle’s disappearance,” Max commented, still holding a hand to the top of his head.

As though the air had been sucked from the room, I gasped, and Nathan took a great, hissing breath at the realization the two vampires were likely connected.

“What could the Oracle want with the Soul Eater?” I asked quietly.

“What wouldn’t she want with him?” Nathan replied grimly. “She has power, but she’s been isolated for centuries. Think of what that would do to you.”

Max nodded in agreement. “You’d definitely lose touch with a lot of your connections.”

“And it would be easier picking up an evil coup in progress than starting your own from the ground up.” My throat clenched. “My God…You don’t think…”

Max looked from me to Nathan and back again, his jaw tight. “It would be handy to have a god in your pocket, and totally possible if you got in on the ground floor.”

The door from the dining room swung open and Bella stuck her head in with a disgusted look. “I did say fifteen minutes, did I not?”

Max shot us a withering glance and mimed choking the life out of what I assumed was an imaginary werewolf.

Like the rest of the condo, the dining room was oversize and ostentatious. I had seen it only a few times—once on the tour, another when I’d become disoriented and taken the wrong door from the foyer. Max rarely used the room at all. He preferred to drink his meals in the stark, antiseptic kitchen, rather than mahogany-paneled, windowless grandeur.

Bella had set up at one end of the massive table, in the clean, golden light of one of the dual chandeliers. She seated herself at the head of the table, behind a miscellany of archaic-looking objects, some of which I recognized as items Nathan sold in the bookstore. The others—a piece of black, concave glass resting atop a wire stand, and a large collection of what appeared to be desiccated chicken bones—were totally foreign.

Max took the chair to her left and scoffed at the heap of bones. “Dinner?”

Nathan pulled out a chair for me on her right and sat between Bella and me.

Though she’d clearly heard his comment, Bella didn’t give Max the pleasure of a response. “I tried diligently all day to make some kind of contact with my fellow assassins. Unfortunately, the werewolf contingency has all but fled Spain to return to our ancestral forests, and I know very few vampires.”

“Surprise, surprise,” Max muttered under his breath.

“I do not want to alarm you.” Bella turned in her chair so she faced Nathan and me. “But I feel we are at a marked disadvantage against the Oracle. And I fear…”

“That she might be looking for the Soul Eater?” The question slipped automatically from my mouth.

She nodded, her expression hard, and continued. “I have pored over the meager library Max keeps—”

I glanced his way, sure his head would blow off his neck at that. The “meager” library had belonged to Marcus, and Max took all slights against him, intentional or not, very seriously. His face remained impassive, and he leaned back in his chair, arms folded over his chest.

Bella, ignorant of her affront, continued speaking. “It appears there was a breakdown in Movement communication in France during the Nazi occupation. A handful of assassins found themselves unable to contact headquarters or track their quarry. They turned to divination to reestablish communication and monitor the whereabouts of their mark.

“Though in this case it would be unrealistic to try and open a line of communication with the Movement, we could certainly use those same means to glean information about the Oracle and what she intends to do now that she is free.”

“Or Nathan could do it.” Max’s voice seemed overloud, and we all turned to stare at him in varying degrees of horror as he continued. “He has a blood tie with the Soul Eater. If he’s working with the Oracle, Nathan would know it.”

At the thought of Nathan making contact with his terrifying sire, the one who’d possessed and tormented him, the blood in my veins turned to ice. “No!”

My denial was echoed by Bella. “He was possessed once by the power of his sire. My spell freed him, but I cannot guarantee I could do so again.”

“She’s right,” I agreed vehemently. “Nathan, you can’t even consider doing something like that. He would find you in a minute.”

Beside me, Nathan drummed his fingertips on the table. “I think you’re right. We try Bella’s way, first.”

Max snorted. “Listen, I’m not trying to shoot down the one solution anyone has come up with, but I’m not sure this is exactly the most efficient way to go about finding the Oracle and figuring out what her plans are.”

“What would be more efficient?” Bella demanded. “Traveling the world door-to-door, knocking and asking if the Oracle is inside?”

Rolling his eyes, Max turned to Nathan and me. “Listen, you guys can’t really believe this is our best bet? Random patterns of cards and gazing into a crystal ball?”

Though I felt as though I was betraying him, we didn’t have much else to go on. I spread my hands helplessly. “Well, it couldn’t hurt to try. If the Movement has fallen apart, it’s just a matter of time until every non-Movement vampire figures it out and we end up with a crisis on our hands.”

“So, we’re going to prevent this from happening with our super New Age mind rays?” He shook his head. “I’m sorry, I just think we’re barking up the wrong tree.”

Nathan grimaced as though he hated being cast in the peacekeeper role. “Listen, Bella hasn’t been able to contact anyone. I’ve been out of the Movement for two years, so I don’t know anyone’s number or location anymore. You might be able to track somebody down, but even if you do, how are we going to find the Oracle? We’ve got documented evidence that this approach works. Why not try it before we declare ourselves royally screwed?”

“Max, you were still in the Movement. You have to have the company directory or something, right?” I hoped he did. I didn’t like the looks of those chicken bones any more than he did.

Max shook his head. “It was Movement policy never to reveal the identities of their assassins, even to other assassins.”

“Any assassins who knew each other, like Max and me, chose to contact one another outside of the Movement.” Nathan glanced briefly at Max. “Sometimes I wonder why I chose to contact him.”

“It was a policy that applied only to vampires,” Bella added. “The werewolves involved in the Movement were all from the same pack. You would consider that family, or extended family. We have a code of honor, and our own consequences if we should break it. But the vampires…imagine if one vampire knew how to find all of the assassins? And then they found themselves in the company of a creature like the Soul Eater?”

“So, they kept your locations, and to some extent, your identities, secret so the information couldn’t be tortured out of you?” I looked to Nathan for confirmation.

“Or sold to the highest bidder.” He gestured to Max. “Max and I became acquainted when we were given an assignment together. But if we hadn’t both agreed that it would be handy to know another assassin nearby—or relatively nearby—we might not have exchanged contact information and stayed in touch.”

“But what about the meeting? You had a dozen Movement assassins in your bookshop.” I shuddered at the thought of some of them coming after us as we’d been living peacefully in the apartment upstairs.

“That was a strike team Rachel personally assembled. They already knew who I was and where I could be found. And I trusted them all for a reason.” Nathan put a reassuring hand on my knee.

“Nathan was never quite as secretive as some of us.” The way Max spoke the words implied he thought Nathan was an idiot for trusting anyone. “I do have a blood donor who’s pretty active in the city. I might be able to get some contacts out of him.”

“We may still be, in Nathan’s words, royally screwed,” Bella pointed out. “Of the four of us, I have the most experience with the occult, but divination has always escaped me. I may be able to pick up a few clues, but I will not know if they apply to our situation or not. Have any of you ever done anything like this?”

“I own an occult book and supply store,” Nathan reminded her, not a little sarcastically. “I’ve used tarot cards before.”

“Ah, good.” Bella’s face lit up. She reached for a box of cards and slid them across the table to him. “That can be your job. Since he has expressed disinterest in helping us, Max can try to reach other assassins through his donor.”

“What about me?” I eyed the pile of bones. I wanted to be included, but maybe not that included. “I’m a quick study. Give me something to do.”

She considered the array of objects before her and pushed a jewelry box toward me. I opened it to find a slender crystal dangling from a delicate chain.

“A pendulum,” Bella informed me. “Nathan, can you instruct her? I thought perhaps it could be used to try and pinpoint the Oracle’s location on an atlas.”

“I’m sure she’ll get the hang of it.” He winked at me.

“Good. We should all keep track of our results.” She sounded like one of my old professors explaining the etiquette of laboratory experiments. “Until we know specifics about our situation, everything is important.”

She reached for a bottle of what looked like ink and poured it into the glass bowl, which she lifted from its stand to swirl it a few times. Then, taking a lighter from her pocket, she lit the charcoal in the small, tabletop cauldron at her left.

“So, are we dismissed then?” Max asked, his tone dripping with sarcasm.

Caught up in sprinkling foul-smelling powder onto the burning block, Bella didn’t look at him. “Yes, of course. We need to get to work immediately.”

Max waited until we were in the foyer, at least, before he exploded. “You’ve got to be kidding me! She comes into my house, assigns us jobs, declares herself Dwight fucking Eisenhower of the occult, and stinks up my dining room with…whatever that was?”

“Honeysuckle and camphor,” Nathan supplied. “They’re powerful divination aids, but they smell better fresh than burning.”

“No shit.” Max’s face had turned a queer shade of red. “Listen, she’s got to go. I don’t care where, she’s just got to get out of my house.”

A terminally stupid person could see his problem wasn’t with incense and tarot cards. Still, I had to proceed cautiously. Any mention of his feelings for Bella caused a total shutdown, in which Max would storm off and nothing would be resolved. “I know you’re having a hard time with her here, but look at us. Three of us against the Oracle? Possibly against the Soul Eater, as well?”

He didn’t respond, but the muscle at the corner of his jaw ticked. He didn’t like what I was saying, but he knew I was right.

“Bella has an advantage over us,” Nathan added. “She can go out in the daytime. We need her for that, at the very least.”

It was clear from the way Max shifted his gaze silently between Nathan and me that he didn’t want to admit we were right. He groaned and tossed his hands up. “Fine. But you guys are paying for the air fresheners when she’s done in there.”

Nathan laughed. “It’s a deal. Now, where can we go to work?”

“In the library. Or the parlor. Or one of the fine guest accommodations, either upstairs or down.” Max shrugged. “Do it in the hot tub, I don’t care.”

A warm flush crept up my neck as I caught sight of Nathan’s lascivious grin. “That’s not a good idea. But thanks,” I said. “We’ll be in the library.”

“Do me a favor and keep her out of it. If it’s so ‘meager,’ she’ll have read everything already,” Max said petulantly. “I’ll be upstairs, trying to get answers out of Bill.”

“We could have done it in the hot tub,” Nathan groused as I led the way to Marcus’s library. “It would have been more fun than this divination business.”

The look I gave him made it clear “this divination business” was all we were going to be up to.

The library, situated at the front of the building, was by far the most impressive room in the condo. The ceiling reached to the second floor of the apartment. Books lined the walls. Iron spiral staircases led to the balcony that wrapped three sides of the room, holding the second tier of literature. I wondered how many personal libraries Bella had seen, and what they must have been like to make this collection seem unimpressive.

Nathan whistled in awe. He set the cards down on one of the leather armchairs near the enormous fireplace and scratched his head as he glanced around. “Not too shabby.”

“I’d offer to leave you two alone for a minute, but I fear what you would do.” I motioned him to the far wall. The huge windows overlooked Grant Park and the shore of Lake Michigan beyond. I pointed out the aquarium at the edge of the view. “Max has connections. He got us in after hours.”

“Weren’t all the fish sleeping?” Nathan chided. He stood silently, taking in the lights of the city for a minute, then turned to me. “You don’t…like him, do you?”

“No, of course not.” I suppressed the urge to tack on You idiot. “Not the way you’re thinking.”

He smiled, probably mentally adding the “you idiot” part himself. “I’m sorry. I know it’s stupid to think that. But you know, here he is, nice house in a big city, young guy—”

“You’re a young guy,” I reminded him. “Young looking, anyway.”

A faint flush colored his usually pale face. “I know that. But I’ve been alive a hundred years, and I’m starting to act my age.”

Starting to? “In all fairness, Max is technically in his fifties.”

“Max is a teenager, no matter how old he gets.” Nathan’s cool gray eyes scanned the street below us. “I understand why you came here. You wanted to be around someone you can identify with.”

“What I want is someone who can love me.” I studied him carefully to gauge his reaction. “Someone who can love me as much as I love him. But I wasn’t looking for that in Max.”

Nathan lifted a hand as though he would touch me. I brushed it aside and pointed toward the fireplace. “We have things to do.”

He taught me how to use the pendulum. First, he showed me how to hold the cord so the crystal hung perfectly still over a book. I asked two questions. The first, “Is this a book?” caused the pendulum to swing in tight, clockwise circles. The second question, “Is this a dead fish?” resulted in wide, counterclockwise swoops.

“That’s all there is to it,” Nathan explained. “Clockwise for yes, counter for no. At least, for you. It varies from person to person.”

It was much easier than Bella made it sound. She either had a gift for overcomplicating things, or she had greatly underestimated my intelligence. Probably the latter, as werewolves didn’t put much stock in the intellectual equality of other species.

I dangled the crystal point over a map of the world, moving it from area to area and asking, “Is the Oracle here?” while Nathan laid out one complicated spread of cards after another. As soon as I made inroads to the continent North America, I flipped to a new page in the atlas and started working on the states and provinces. Occasionally, the pendulum would swing erratically, and I’d have to go through the process of recalibrating it. Then I’d start over from my last reasonable answer, sometimes to find it had changed. Every yes I got, I wrote down. Though the Oracle couldn’t really be in all those places at once, Bella had said to write everything down. I would let her sort out the details.

We’d sat in silence for an hour before Nathan looked up and frowned. “Do you hear that?”

Now that he mentioned it, I did. Every few minutes, a rhythmic bang came from the upper level of the library.

I rose slowly, staring at the walls. The sound grew louder and more violent, actually shaking the crystal chandelier suspended high above us. “It sounds like it’s coming from—”

“The dining room,” Nathan said, breaking into a run toward the doors.

We were coming up the stairs to the foyer just as Max ran down from the third floor. “What the hell is that?”

Nathan didn’t answer, but rushed to the doors leading to the dining room.

Before he could touch them, they flew open, as if with a gust of wind, but as there were no windows in the dining room, the force must have come from an unnatural source. Nathan toppled back and I rushed to help him up.

“Holy shit,” Max whispered, his eyes wide.

I followed his gaze through the open doors. Bella hung lifeless, suspended in the air as though nailed to an invisible crucifix. A supernatural wind howled in a cyclone around her, the various objects she’d carefully spread on the table caught up in the maelstrom. They whirled around her like ornaments on a mobile, almost merry as they weaved and bobbed, the occasional chicken bone or rune stone flying free to smash into a wall.

Bella’s head, limp and heavy on her neck, snapped up. Her eyes, usually preternatural gold, were opaque with blood, her olive skin pale and her lips the blue of a corpse.

As the three of us stared, horrified or dumbstruck or maybe both, Bella’s lips began to move.

But the voice that issued forth wasn’t Bella’s.

It was the Oracle’s.

Four:

Oracle

“Y ou have sought me, and now you have found me, children.”

The voice, which I’d heard outside of my head only once before, sent chills down my spine. Even under Movement control—and heavy sedation—the Oracle had been able to maim Anne, one of Max’s few friends at headquarters, and she’d nearly broken my neck. If she’d been able to hurt Bella from wherever she was, she could still damage us.

Nathan reached for me, snagging my arm and pulling me behind him, as if he could shield me from her wrath.

Bella’s head turned, her blood-occluded eyes fixing on him with startling intensity. “Do not move again.”

“Listen to her, Nathan,” Max warned. “She’ll kill you.”

Her eyes moved to Max. “I know you.”

“Yes, you do. And that’s a friend of mine you’re possessing.” Max took a step toward her. “And you’re going to have to leave.”

“You fear me, vampire?” Bella’s head sagged for a moment, then snapped up again. “I have no power over you now. Any harm you visit upon me in this form will only hurt her.”

“If you don’t have any power, how are you here?” I asked, trying to keep my tone reasonable. She might have tried to kill me before, but she’d also given me key information in finding Cyrus. It seemed unlikely she’d contacted us so dramatically only to slaughter us where we stood.

“Listen well, vampires. The age of your reign is drawing to a close. Those who resist will be killed. Those who do not may be spared. Chaos shall rule, order shall be abolished. Do not stand in my way and you may live.” Bella’s arm twitched. The Oracle’s control seemed to be slipping.

“What if we help you?” Nathan edged forward. “If we don’t oppose you, we may live. If we help you, will you offer us asylum?”

A laugh filled the air, but it didn’t come from Bella. Her head drooped forward, her body slouching in midair. “You wish to help me?”

“It’s better than dying.” Nathan shrugged, as if he didn’t care either way. “Better than trying to fight you.”

“That path will surely lead to death,” the Oracle warned, her now bodiless voice shaking the walls. “If you wish to gain my favor, abandon your pursuit of the pawn I need to ensure my rule.”

“The Soul Eater?” Max whispered, as if she wouldn’t hear us.

“He goes by many names. Abandon your pursuit of him and you may know my mercy.” Another wall-rattling boom split the air. “Upset my plans and you will know my wrath!”

The wind came again, this time sucking into the dining room as the Oracle’s presence left us. The doors slammed closed, shutting us out, just as Bella’s body dropped to the floor. We heard the noise of her impact, and Max darted forward.

When he grabbed the door handles, he cursed. “It won’t open!”

“She must have meant the Soul Eater.” Nathan rushed forward to help him, but in true Nathan fashion his mind was on the bigger picture. “When you said his name, she didn’t deny it.”

Max didn’t respond, pulling so hard at the door the wood splintered around the handle. “Come on!”

“Let’s try through the kitchen,” I urged, but no sooner did I say it than the doors let go easily. Nathan stumbled backward and landed on the marble floor with a curse. Max, who’d obviously braced himself in the certainty they’d get the door open, managed to stay on his feet. He ran into the dining room, shouting Bella’s name.

I helped Nathan to his feet and hurried after Max. “Don’t move her! She could have broken her neck in the fall.”

It was too late. Max had already pulled Bella into his lap, and was slapping her ashen cheek lightly with his palm. “Bella, come on!” He looked up at me. “Carrie, she’s not breathing!”

“Lay her down!” I caught her wrist as Max moved her to the floor. “No pulse!”

“Do something!” He pounded his fists on his thighs. “There has to be something you can do!”

“Do you know CPR?” I asked, tilting her head back.

Max shook his head. “Only from movies. Tell me what to do.”

“Pinch her nose shut and breathe into her mouth when I tell you to. I’ll do chest compressions.” I turned to Nathan. “Call an ambulance.”

“No!” Max shook his head. “The full moon is tomorrow night. If she’s in the hospital all doped up, she’ll change.”

“Nathan, get the phone.” I met Max’s worried gaze. “If we don’t get her back in two tries, we’re calling an ambulance.”

Grim-faced, Max nodded.

I’ve always hated doing CPR. Most of my experience with it came from the E.R., on seventy-and-over patients who’d gone into cardiac arrest. Their ribs were usually so brittle from bone loss they cracked like wishbones under my hands.

Bella was built stronger than that, whether by virtue of being younger, or because of her species, I have no idea. I got through the first set of compressions without breaking her bones. “Breathe now!”

Max didn’t hesitate. Bella’s chest inflated with the force of the incoming oxygen, but it fell again when Max pulled away.

I gripped her wrist—still nothing—then began another set of compressions.

At the cessation of compressions, blood traveling through the heart slows. Resuming the process doesn’t bring the circulation back up to speed. It’s like accelerating to seventy, dropping to fifty, speeding up to sixty, then dropping to forty. Bella’s fingernails showed signs of cyanosis. Blue is never a promising color.

But we didn’t have to call for help. This time when Max breathed for her, her body shuddered and she choked to life, taking great, panicked breaths.

“Bella, you’re fine, you’re fine,” I assured her, checking again for a pulse. Though a little slow, it was strong. I nearly sobbed with relief.

“Calm down, baby,” Max urged, brushing her hair back. “Just calm down. You’re fine.”

She opened and closed her mouth, vomited spectacularly, then visibly relaxed, shutting her eyes as her head dropped back to the floor.

“Let’s get her to a bed,” Max said, scooping her up.

Bella’s eyes opened to slits and she laughed weakly. “Always trying to get me into your bed, vampire.”

“You know it.” If Bella’s eyes hadn’t closed again, she would surely have seen the mix of relief and sadness, and the determination not to show them, that crossed Max’s face.

“You take care of her. I’ll tell Nathan not to call the paramedics,” I offered. Max and Bella needed time alone. If near death wouldn’t inspire them to talk without sniping at each other, nothing would.

I found Nathan in the kitchen, slumped over the island with the phone in his hands. When he looked up, his eyes were rimmed with red. “Is she—”

“She’s fine.” I pulled out the stool next to his and climbed onto it. “Banged up, but she’ll pull through. I’m not so sure about you, though.”

Nathan sniffed and tried to cover it with a laugh. “Oh, I’ll be fine. Just rattled my nerves, is all.”

Because she was possessed.

My gaze dropped to his arm, where he’d rolled up the sleeve of his sweater. Though vampires heal quickly, for some reason the self-inflicted marks he’d carved under the Soul Eater’s influence had never completely faded.

I went to his side and put my arms around him. “It still bothers you.”

“You’re damn right it bothers me!” he snapped, pushing away from the island and stalking to the other end of the kitchen. “Jesus, Carrie! She found us. She nearly killed Bella!” He looked instantly repentant for his outburst. “She could have chosen you. She could have done that to you.”

“Nathan,” I whispered, my heart twisting in my chest. “She didn’t pick me. She attacked Bella. There hasn’t been a time since I’ve know you that we haven’t been in danger. Why is it so different now?”

“Because now…” His hands fisted at his sides, and he looked away. “It’s just different.”

Because now you love me, I finished for him across the blood tie. He shook his head. The denial didn’t skewer my heart the way it would have before. “You love me, and you’re afraid to lose me.”

“We’ve got to take care of this,” he said, changing the subject smoothly. “We have no idea if anyone else even knows what happened. If we’re the only ones, and we wait…I don’t even want to think of the consequences.”

He was right. I hated it, but he was right. “What do you suggest we do?”

“Tonight? Nothing. There’s no time. But tomorrow night we meet up again and we make an actual plan. Something concrete. Something—”

“Bloody and violent?” The rage emanating over the blood tie was almost frightening. “You know, we might have a better chance of success if we didn’t make this personal.”

Nathan jerked his head toward the door. “Tell that to Max.”

“Good point.” I went to Nathan and leaned my head against his chest, waited for him to put his arms around me. He hesitated, until I said, “We’ve been through worse, haven’t we?”

I felt the low rumble in his chest, but the laughter wasn’t enough to produce sound. “No. But there is a first time for everything.”

Though I wanted to stay there, held by him forever, my thoughts strayed to the pair upstairs. “I’m going to go check on Bella.”

There was a smile in Nathan’s voice when he spoke. “Always on call?”

“Old habits die hard.” I tilted my face up, expecting a gentle peck and receiving instead a long, thorough kiss that left my limbs trembling. “What was that for?” I nearly gasped when we parted.

“If anything like that ever happened to you—” He broke off, his fingers bunching my T-shirt where his hands rested against my back. “I swear, Carrie. I don’t like what I am, but I would kill anyone who hurt you. I’d kill them, and I’d enjoy it.”

I didn’t know what to say. I don’t think I’d ever seen Nathan so angry before. At least, not an anger that wasn’t fueled by grief. I pulled away from him, tried to smile. But he’d frightened me a little, and the expression felt fake. “I know, Nathan. I know.”

And I didn’t doubt him for a second.

I had no idea where Max had put Bella, but she wasn’t in any of the guest rooms on the upper floor. A quick check of Max’s room revealed it empty. I suppose, given the carnage of empty ice cream boxes and drained beer bottles we’d left there, it was no kind of environment for a patient.

I was about to try the rooms downstairs when I noticed the imposing double doors to Marcus’s room were open a crack. The brass key with its heavy tassel, which Max usually hung from his bedpost, dangled from the keyhole.

“Now, what are the chances that got there by itself?” I mumbled, easing the door open a bit farther.

I’d never been in this room, and though I’d never met Max’s sire, the moment I peered in the place screamed Marcus. Stern, heavy furniture; ugly, masculine colors; scratchy-looking, expensive fabrics. No wonder Max kept it locked up at all times.

The room was dim. A bedside lamp with a gold shade and beaded fringe provided muted, warm light. Bella lay in the center of the bed, dwarfed by the antique monstrosity. The huge canopy nearly touched the ceiling, and I estimated there would be room for four people on either side of her. Max sat with her, holding her limp hand in his.

For a minute it looked as though he would lean forward and kiss her forehead. I cleared my throat, so he wouldn’t go all “emotional shut-down Max” on me when he noticed I was there. “Knock knock.”

“Who’s there?” he asked with a note of black humor in his voice. “If you say banana, I’m going to hit you.”

I walked slowly into the room, feeling somehow criminal for invading this private sanctuary. On the nightstand, in dark wood frames, sat an assortment of snapshots of Max. It was an uncomfortably intimate thing to see. “She’s out again?”

He nodded. “But she’s still breathing, if you couldn’t tell from the snores.”

I dutifully took her pulse and monitored her respiration, timing it by the ticking of the ornate gold clock standing in the corner. “She’s going to be fine. Whatever the Oracle did—”

“Don’t. Not around her.” He positioned her hand on her chest in a way that made her eerily resemble a corpse.

“If there’s anything else you need—”

Max waved a hand dismissively. “Go. If she wants to do this again, it’s not like the two of you will be able to stop her. And I think if she makes a return appearance, Bella’s gonna need a lot more than CPR to help her.”

“Don’t talk like that,” I begged quietly. “Listen, we can talk about this tomorrow night. Right now, we all just need some time to think. But this isn’t a lost cause.”

Max shook his head. “I hate to tell you, but life isn’t always like this for us. You came into our world at a really bizarre time. I wish I could tell you this kind of high-concept shit goes down every couple of months, but it doesn’t. So pardon me if the Pollyanna shtick doesn’t make me feel all warm and fuzzy inside.”

Our world? That stung more than the aspersions he cast on my optimism. I might not be as old as he or Nathan, and I’d never been a part of the Movement. Sure, there were things I didn’t know, but I was learning. I’d killed Cyrus—even if it hadn’t stuck—and I’d kept the Soul Eater from devouring Nathan. I’d willingly been possessed by the soul of his dead wife to break an evil spell. I might not have a vampire extermination record as impressive as Max’s, but I thought I’d earned some pretty impressive street cred.

The thought that I might be wrong, that I may not have seen anything yet, froze the marrow in my bones.

Five:

Defenses

M ax woke at the sound of Bella’s scream.

He’d been curled up at the end of her bed like a dog—he’d hoped in her post-possession panic she wouldn’t notice—where he’d fallen asleep watching over her.

There was no time to berate himself for napping on the job. Bella clawed at the blankets, then her clothing, shrieking in utter panic.

Grasping her shoulders, he called her name, shaking her lightly. “You’re okay, baby. I’m here. I’m here.”

Her pupils changed size as she tried to focus. Frowning, she pushed back the hair that had escaped from her long braid. “I know. That is why I was screaming.”

The fact she could make a wisecrack bolstered his faith that she would be all right. At least, for now. “You scared the bejesus out of me.”

“That is what I was going for.” Her voice broke a little, as though she might cry. Of course, she didn’t. Max was reasonably sure werewolves were born without tear ducts. Or hearts.

“Can I have a glass of water?” Her voice was hoarse, probably from screaming. She’d always sounded like that, after they’d—

He didn’t just force the thought aside. He clubbed it unconscious, threw it into a crawl space and walled it up alive.

He grabbed a bottle of water from the bedside table—he’d come prepared—and twisted the top off before handing it to her. Partly to see the look of annoyance on her face when she realized he thought her weak and incapable of caring for herself, partly because he took bizarre satisfaction in caring for her. He waited until she’d gulped down half the water before asking, “Are you okay?”

She nodded. “I am fine. I am sore all over for some reason, but I am fine.”

“Well, after you blacked out, we all took turns kicking the shit out of you.” He smiled weakly. “Do you remember what happened?”

She shook her head vehemently, then winced and rubbed her neck. “The last thing I remember, I was looking into my scrying bowl, and I was starting to get a picture. Then I woke up here. I had the most terrible dream.”

“Do you remember what it was about?” He briefly considered grabbing a pen and paper, but decided that might seem insensitive. Not that he would normally treat her with perfect sensitivity, but she’d had a rough ordeal. She deserved at least a day to rest before the interrogating began.

When her gaze met his, her eyes held a hint of hopelessness. “I saw a man. He had white hair…. And the Oracle. She was there, feeding off of his blood. And she was becoming strong from it. I do not know why it was so disturbing, it just was.”

“The Soul Eater.” He shook his head. “When you blacked out, the Oracle…she took over your body.”

“What?” Bella shrieked, her face pale.

He laid a hand on her knee to calm her. Even through the blankets and her clothing, he imagined her skin searing his. “Don’t be freaked. She didn’t make you go crazy or kill anyone, like the Soul Eater did to Nathan. She used you to speak to us. Basically, she just popped in to announce her presence.”

Bella’s brow furrowed. “I knew that.”

“Well, then you weren’t as bad off as we thought,” he stated, for lack of anything better to say. He could have murmured, “Tomorrow is another day,” or “Every cloud has a silver lining.” That would have been just as brilliant.

“Somehow, I knew that.” She started to shake, her eyes wide. “How did I know that?”

“It probably leaked into your subconscious. I mean, she could have left, like, psychic residue….”

Bella quirked her eyebrow. “Residue?”

“I’m sorry, I’m not hip to the whole mental communication scene.” He tossed his hands up.

“You are a vampire. What about the blood tie? That does still happen, does it not?”

You have no idea. Everywhere Max looked—at Marcus’s bed, Marcus’s chairs, Marcus’s obscenely expensive rugs—all he saw was a hole where his sire should have been.

Of course, he couldn’t expect a werewolf to be sympathetic with that. “I’m just trying to help.”

“I know.” Her voice was uncharacteristically soft. “She is on her way to meet the Soul Eater.”

Max frowned. “We assumed that—”

“She is on a boat. It is a cargo ship of some kind, headed for…Boston.” Bella shook her head. “Why would she give you that kind of information?”

He decided to ignore the chills racing up his spine for a moment. “She didn’t.”

They stared at each other for a long minute. Vaguely, he noted the ticking of the clock in the corner, and the click that registered it was about to chime. When it sounded, they both jumped.

“How did I—”

He cut her off. “I don’t know. Do you know anything else?”

“Many things.” She trembled openly now, and a tear slid down her cheek. “She killed a sailor sent to check on something in the hold. Hold. That is not a word I would use.”

“It doesn’t come up in a lot of my conversations, either.” He brought his clasped hands to his mouth. “Maybe it’s a fluke.”

“Fluke? I have her memories in my head. You think that is a fluke?” Bella moved as if to get out of bed, and Max put his arm out to stop her.

“You’ve had a bad night. Just take it easy.” He tucked the blankets in around her legs.

“Take it easy?” she screamed, kicking the covers back. “Do not tell me this! I have been used as a puppet!”

“Look, there’s no reason to panic. At least, not yet. She didn’t have enough power to continue inhabiting you.”

Bella covered her face with her hands. “Why me? I am not one of you. Why did she not seek one of her kind?”

“I don’t know.” He’d wondered the same thing. More specifically, he’d wondered why it had to be Bella instead of himself. He would have gladly changed places.

She tried again to get out of bed, but her arms shook, not up to the task. She fell back on the bed with a startled cry, as if pain and muscle fatigue were things she’d never experienced.

He moved to help her, repeating, “Take it easy. You really took a beating tonight.”

“A beating?” She snorted. “I am strong. Nothing the Oracle could do to me would matter.”

“You were suspended five feet off the ground and she dropped you. And I’m sure your ribs hurt after the CPR.”

Smooth, Max.

“CPR?” She frowned.

Max rolled his eyes. “Cardiopulmonary resuscitation. You kind of…died.”

“Died?” She bolted upright.

“Just for a second!” He held out his hands, prepared to stop her if she tried get up again. “Minutes at most. Carrie brought you right back.”

Bella raised her fist as though to strike him. He braced himself, so he wouldn’t flinch when she hit him.

But she didn’t. She broke into sobs.

Max, having long ago dismissed the idea that werewolves, Bella in particular, had feelings, had no clue how to deal with the situation. In his mind, female tears were like acid, and he had never willingly wetted himself with that.

Still, Bella was usually so unshakable, so collected, so stone cold…. It killed him to know something could bother her so much.

“Hey, don’t cry.” He reached to put his arms around her, painfully aware of how awkward he felt. When she didn’t lash out at him or drive a stake through his heart for trying to help, he gave her a hug and a brotherly pat.

It didn’t surprise him at all that his gesture didn’t help.

“I hurt so much,” she sobbed, her words almost incomprehensible, given her tears and her accent. “It hurts to cry and I cannot stop.”

“Just…you know, get it out.” He rubbed her back gently. Physical contact had always distracted him from his troubles. She couldn’t be much different.

“That feels good,” she sniffed. “My back is like a fishing net, it has so many knots.”

He let the opportunity to ridicule her primitive, old-world folkism pass, and slid behind her on the bed.

“What are you—”

“Nothing sleazy. A back rub will help.” Before she could argue, he pulled her between his legs and went to work on her shoulders.

She groaned and her muscles seemed to melt under his hands. “Wait.”

Here we go. This is where she goes off on her “You’re getting it all wrong, I don’t feel that way about you” kick.

To his surprise, she leaned forward and pulled off her shirt. “The fabric was chaffing.”

Faced with the smooth expanse of her warm back, he suddenly couldn’t trust himself. He fixed his gaze on the dark lines of the curse tattooed on her arms, silently vowing not to notice the black straps of her lacy bra or the two tiny moles just above the small of her back, the ones he’d bent to kiss as he’d taken her from behind….

Just a friendly back rub for an injured person. Keep your dick out of her. It! Keep your dick out of it!

She moaned a little as his hands worked the base of her neck, and he shifted to keep her as far from his growing erection as possible.

“How long was I unconscious?” she asked, pulling her braid forward over her shoulder.

The silky rope of hair brushed his knuckles, sending shivers up his arm. “Well, we weren’t with you when it started, and you were…gone when we got there. But after Carrie got you back, I brought you up here and that was about…six hours ago?”

Bella turned her head slightly. They couldn’t make eye contact, but in profile he saw her mouth curve into a smile. “You carried me here?”

He shrugged. “You couldn’t exactly walk.”

“And you stayed with me?”

“Every second.” He cleared his throat. “Except for when I went to get the water and the extra towels and the first aid kit. Those seemed kind of important to have, just in case.”

“Ah.” She faced forward again and wiggled her shoulder, signaling he should continue what he hadn’t even realized he’d stopped.

Trying hard to infuse every brush of his fingers against her skin with platonic feeling, he kneaded her back, then her shoulders and finally her upper arms, trying the entire time to block out her satisfied groans and whimpers.

When his hands started to ache, he tentatively pulled away. “That better?”

“Yes. Thank you.” She didn’t withdraw.

In fact, to his great and keen dismay, she leaned against him and reached back to loop an arm around his neck. “I missed you.”

“Did you?” He’d missed her. At least, part of him had.

She gave a little sigh. “Do you know you are still the only man I have ever slept with?”

“Congratulations. You went a whole month without boning someone else.” He felt her laugh, and smiled, though it hadn’t been meant as a joke. Somehow, the thought of her with another man horrified him more than the dangers posed by the Oracle and the Soul Eater combined. “Listen, I should go.”

“No.” Her arm tightened around his neck. “Stay with me.”

What would it hurt? He didn’t particularly want to travel down the road his thoughts were leading him on, but he couldn’t help it. Every moment of every day, he thought of her. Not because he wanted to, but because there was some broken pipe in his brain that kept sputtering out toxic drops of her until his head was completely polluted. Now the leak had become a flood, and his fear—a very real, paralyzing fear—was that his brain would never dry out. He’d just stagger through the rest of his life drowning in her.

But it infuriated him that he couldn’t just turn off the way he had with all those other women. She was dangerously close to becoming an obsession, and if he didn’t control himself now, he might never be able to.

He shoved her off him under the guise of clumsy gentleness, and tucked the blanket around her, pointedly ignoring the hint of dark color that peeked over the lacy edge of her bra. “You had a bad night. We both did. You’re not physically up to anything…physical.”

“Werewolves heal quickly.” She cocked her head.

“Yeah, well.” He scratched his neck, a nervous tic that seemed to emerge only around her. “I’m not up to it.”

Frowning, she crawled forward, rising to her knees to loop her arms around him again. “Did you get hurt?”

He didn’t return her embrace. “Yes.”

She finally got it. It took her long enough.

With a wounded look, she eased away from him. “You are not still angry about what happened between us?”

“Of course I am!” he cried. “Jesus Christ, it’s only been a month! What kind of inhuman bitch are you, to ask me that?”

Her eyes flew open in shock, then narrowed again. “Not a human. I did not think that was news to you.”

“Don’t change the subject!” He stood and paced angrily at the side of the bed. “You can’t do this. You can’t just decide we’re chums when you’re lonely or horny or—”

“I am scared!” she shouted over his tirade, her voice hoarse. “I do not want sex, I wanted you to stay with me. You have an annoying habit of cuddling. I thought if we had sex, you would stay, and I would not be alone here. I am sorry if I opened your wounds regarding me, but what was I supposed to do?”

She was more human than she gave herself credit for. He felt like an asshole, and he hated that she could make him feel that way. “First of all, I don’t have any wounds because of you.”

She glared at him, hurt shining in her eyes even as she prepared for another round of fighting.

He let her stew for a minute, then sat beside her on the bed. “And second, all you had to do was ask.”

The way his voice went rough, the way he had to clip his words short to get them out made him crazy. He was going to say something stupid. He knew it, and wouldn’t be able to stop it.

“All you have to do is ask for anything, and I’m not going to be able to tell you no.” He swallowed. There it was. “And that’s probably why I hate you so much.”

She smiled and kissed him, a friendly peck, thank God, and pulled him with her onto the bed.

As she arranged the covers around them, he glanced at the clock in the corner. “You know, it’s not exactly my bedtime.”

“Stay,” she implored, twining her fingers with his.

His lips quirked in a reluctant smile. “And I’m not exactly dressed for bed, either.”

“Stay,” she repeated, yawning.

He did.

During the day, while we slept, the atmosphere in the house seemed to change. If the Oracle had intended to shake our confidence by nearly killing Bella, her plan had backfired. By the time we gathered for another—hopefully uneventful—war council, we’d all found some sort of peace with each other.

Max, however, hadn’t found peace with his dining room, so we met in the library. Bella lay curled before the fireplace in a pose that betrayed her canine blood. Max sat at her side, occasionally giving her head an affectionate scratch. Each time he did this, Nathan, seated in the stiff-backed wing chair next to mine, rolled his eyes.

I gave him a warning glance and cleared my throat. “So, she can see into the Oracle’s head? Like with a blood tie?”

Bella shook her head. “No. I am not familiar with your vampire tie, but I know I cannot control what I see.”

“So, the Oracle is controlling it,” Nathan murmured pensively. He stared straight ahead, the way he always did when working out a difficult problem.

“Not necessarily.” Max tried, and failed, to make eye contact with Nathan, so he turned to me. “It sounds more like the Oracle gave Bella accidental access. Mind residue or something.”

“There are still things that are hidden to me. I know where she is going. I know someone is with her. But I cannot see who.” Bella’s smooth forehead creased in concentration. “Another vampire.”

“That narrows it down,” Max quipped. At Bella’s hurt look, he added a hasty, “Sorry.”

There was a pause. Nathan still stared into the flames of the fireplace, his steepled fingers pressed to his lips as he leaned forward, elbows on his knees. Max looked uncomfortably from him to me.

I shrugged. “So, where’s the Oracle going, then? I mean, we don’t have much, but that’s something.”

“Boston,” Bella answered quickly. “She is on a ship.”

“Do you know when she’ll arrive?” If she’d already come ashore, she could be anywhere.

Bella nodded. “Soon. She is still at sea, but she becomes restless. They will land in a few days.”

“That doesn’t give us much time.” Max seemed in danger of slipping into the same concentration coma Nathan was already in. Luckily, he snapped out of it quickly. “We’d better get moving.”

“All of us?” I’d just taken a long, perilous road trip, and I didn’t feel inclined to go on another one. Where I really wanted to be was back in Grand Rapids, living in skewed domesticity and half-assed reconciliation with Nathan. “I mean, shouldn’t someone stay behind and try to find the Soul Eater?”

“Yeah, you’re right. Maybe you and Nathan should?” Max smiled. “Seriously, though, it’s a good idea. Bella has to go to Boston, because she’s the one who’ll be able to get clues and necessary info from the Oracle’s brain. I’ve got experience with the Oracle, albeit a drugged up, restrained Oracle, but it is experience. And the Soul Eater is really your and Nathan’s area of expertise.”

“So, I guess it’s settled then,” I said slowly, looking for any reaction from Nathan. “You’ll go to Boston and we’ll…”

“Nobody is going anywhere,” Nathan said finally. His meaningful gaze locked on each of us before moving back to the flames.

“So, we’re just going to sit around until the Oracle hooks up with your daddy and they turn the world into a nightmare of chaos on earth?” Max shook his head and lifted one arm over his head. “Raise your hand if you think that’s a bad idea.”

“It is a bad idea,” Nathan agreed. “But it’s also a bad idea to rely on information from the Oracle, especially considering how we got it.”

“Information from the Oracle is rarely wrong.” Max turned to me. “Remember Anne, the receptionist? She told you the Oracle had given her a vision of her back breaking, and it happened.”

It had happened, in gruesome detail, before our very eyes. “But she didn’t know when. She told me the Oracle doesn’t give specifics, and that’s why she didn’t believe it would happen.”

“If the Oracle is telling Bella she’ll definitely be in Boston in a few days, doesn’t that seem a little suspicious?” Nathan turned to the werewolf. “I don’t doubt you’re getting visions, and that they’re genuine. But you said yourself there were things you couldn’t see.”

“You think she’s setting a trap?” While I didn’t question Nathan’s intelligence, I did question the Oracle’s sanity. “She doesn’t seem to have it together enough to do something like that.”

“While I’m going to Boston regardless of what any of you chuckleheads say, you do have a point.” Max stood and leaned against one of the massive marble columns framing the fireplace. “On the other hand, I’ve seen her tear a man’s head clean off his body, so I’m disinclined to think she’s not evil enough to set us up.”

“Well, at least we agree on something,” I grumbled. “She’s capable of killing us all.”

“That kind of thinking is not constructive,” Bella snapped, glaring at me.

“If you go to fight the Oracle, you will lose.” Nathan gripped the arms of the chair and rose to his feet. “Don’t be so stubborn about this that you get yourself killed!”

“Hey, hey!” I shouted, standing quickly to step between Nathan and Max. The testosterone level was growing to an unmanageable level. “We’re not going to get anywhere fighting.”

“That I can agree with,” Bella sulked, still lying calmly on the floor.

I shot her an angry glance and turned to Nathan. “At the very least, Max and Bella should try to find out more about this Oracle situation. Now, if that means going to Boston—”

“Which I’m going to do, anyway,” Max snarled.

I raised a palm to silence him. “If that means going, then maybe they have to go. But they don’t have to engage in full-on combat. They can do some recon, find out what she’s up to, and get back to us.”

I turned to Max. “You have to admit, it’s pretty stupid to rush in to kill her when we don’t even know what she’s got planned. What’s to say that if we kill her, the Soul Eater can’t finish whatever it is she’s started, if she’s started anything at all?”

“You have a point,” Max conceded.

Nathan wasn’t so easily swayed. “And if the Oracle has an ambush waiting?”

“Max and Bella are Movement trained assassins.” I refrained from pointing out Bella had been seriously injured and that Nathan and Max had been rendered powerless by the Oracle. “They’re more than capable of taking care of themselves. Remember your training?”

“I remember,” he said with gritted teeth. “But let’s suppose they go and follow the Oracle, and learn all her secrets. What are we going to be doing?”

“Well, we’ll check out what’s going on with the Soul Eater,” I replied lamely.

“Without any Movement contacts and no idea where to start looking?” Nathan laughed derisively. “What are you going to do? Wave a magic wand? Or are we going to go back to the tarot cards?”

His contempt steeled my resolve to be the victor in this argument. “Nope. Not tarot cards. Think about it. You’ve got a blood tie to the Soul Eater. I realize it’s a risk to contact him, but it’s even riskier to let him roam around unchecked.”

I slipped my hand into Nathan’s back pocket, jerking him forward so our pelvises bumped. Almost before the thought fully formed, before I had any time to register shock at what I suggested, the words slipped past my lips: “And I’ve got Cyrus.”

Six:

Conversations with Live People

“H ello?”

I don’t know what I was expecting when I dialed the number Information had given me. I guess I was still reeling from the discovery that Cyrus even had a listed number. When his voice came across the line, I was stunned. Whatever it was I thought would happen, Cyrus answering the phone wasn’t it.

“Hello?” he repeated. “Look, I can hear you breathing, and it is neither sexy nor interesting. If you’d like to call back when you have something sexy or interesting to say, I will be happy to chat. Until then—”

“Cyrus, it’s me.” I swallowed thickly. “It’s Carrie.”

There was a long pause. I wondered if he’d hung up, anyway.

“Carrie.” His voice seemed faint and far away. “How are you?”

“I’m fine.” I glanced across the room, where Nathan sat on the overstuffed sofa, pretending to be absorbed in one of my dog-eared Terry Prachett novels.

I stood beside the bed. I’d been sitting on it when I’d first made the call, but the sound of Cyrus’s voice had pulled me to my feet. It seemed way too intimate, perverted even, to be lounging on a bed, talking to Cyrus, with Nathan in the room.

“I’m fine,” I repeated, turning my back on Nathan. “And you?”

“As well as can be expected.” His heavy sigh made a harsh, static sound on the line. “I have a job now.”

“A job?” I heard Nathan’s grunt of stifled laughter and pointedly ignored it. “That’s great. What do you do?”

“Do you promise not to laugh?” Cyrus didn’t seem too concerned, considering he was already chuckling himself. “I stock shelves in a grocery store.”

“No!” The very idea rocked the foundations of reality for me. Cyrus, my power-hungry, Euro-trash former sire, working in a grocery store?

He gave another heavy sigh. “You wouldn’t believe the number of times a day I would trade my soul for a pair of fangs. Really, the customers…my God, it’s as if they’re brain dead.”

I laughed the sympathetic laugh required for such a comment, and we lapsed into uncomfortable silence.

“So,” I began uneasily. “You’re back in Grand Rapids for good then?”

He made an affirmative noise. “I found Mouse’s sister. I can’t say I made any real progress there. But she knows what happened. At least, she knows the sanitized version.”

“How did she take it?” Cyrus had told me very little about the girl he’d named Mouse. When he’d left Grand Rapids to seek out her next of kin, I’d been under the impression he’d had little hope of finding anyone.

“She asked me for a hundred bucks and offered to, ah, compensate me for it.” He sounded as though the subject made him tired. “She didn’t even care.”

“At least you cared.” It was a stupid thing to say, but I’d never been good at condolences. “Where are you staying?”

“In a horrible apartment downtown, near the college. The absolute worst part of the city. Hippies as far as the eye can see.” I heard the smile in his voice as he added, “Near your sire’s place, actually.”

“Uh-huh.” Great. All notions of domestic bliss, or however close Nathan and I could come to it, shattered by geographical coincidence.

“It wasn’t my idea, really,” Cyrus rushed to add. “Dahlia set it up for me.”

“Oh, so you’ve been talking to Dahlia.” I turned and met Nathan’s suddenly alert glance with a worried one of my own. “That’s comforting. What did you have to do to earn her help?”

“Still jealous, are we?” Cyrus laughed. “Don’t worry. It was a trade—the mansion for one room with a kitchenette and a tiny bathroom with a stall shower and a door that doesn’t close all the way. Doesn’t seem like a fair trade, but life has been consistently unfair to me for a while now.”

“Oh, how nice. I didn’t realize I’d been invited to the pity party,” I mused.

He laughed again. “Carrie, I stock bricks of pasteurized, processed cheese for seven dollars an hour. Indulge me if I miss the comforts of my former life a bit.”

“Have you been keeping an eye on your health?” I asked, changing the subject. “You’re not immortal anymore, you know.”

“I’m painfully aware of that. I’m also painfully aware of the fact I have no insurance, and the world seems to turn on the revenue generated by insurance companies.” He waited a moment before asking, but I could feel the question coming. “Perhaps you wouldn’t mind being my caregiver. Just until things are settled. I have the most insufferable allergies—”

“I don’t think that’s such a good idea.” Historically, me and any expanse of unclothed Cyrus flesh were a potentially unstable combination. “But maybe we can go to the drugstore when I get back, take a look at some of the over-the-counter allergy meds. Some of them are just worthless, but—”

“Ask him about the Soul Eater,” Nathan interrupted. I’d pushed his patience too far. He sighed heavily and tossed the book aside, clearly weary of his role as phone chaperone.

I narrowed my eyes at him and clamped my hand over the receiver.

Too late. “Is that Nolen I hear in the background?”

Clearing my throat, I made an affirmative sound. “And it’s Nathan now.”

“I know, I know.” I could practically hear Cyrus’s eye roll. “So, how is Nathan?”

Agitated. He was still looking at me expectantly, his big arms folded across his chest. “He’s fine. He wants to know if you’ve heard from your father.”

“Oh, yes. Of course I have.”

Wow, that was easy. “Oh?” I asked cautiously.

“Yes. We went fishing and then to a baseball game, and after that he took me to the toy store and bought me everything I wanted. And a pony.” If sarcasm were liquid, it would have dripped from Cyrus’s words.

“You know I have to ask,” I snapped. “Something is going on, and so help me, if you have anything to do with it—”

“How, Carrie?” He sounded tired, in the way only a human could. Physically tired beyond anything a vampire could feel, a mass of dying tissues and an inability to stand another second of bullshit. “How could I, in this failing, mortal body, be a part of anything my father has planned? Do you think I’ve been spending any amount of time in the company of vampires? Do you know any humans who do?”

“Dahlia,” I answered, for both counts. “She hung around you.”

“Like an anchor,” he agreed.

“And you’ve been talking to her lately, if she got you the apartment.” I waited a moment, unsure if I would push him too far with the question. Then I decided to hell with it, I had to ask. “You’re not trying to become a vampire again, are you?”

The silence was so long I wondered if he’d hung up. When he spoke again, his voice was thick. “Do you think I would want to be one of you again? After what happened to…her?”

It stung that he wouldn’t say her name to me, as if I were unworthy of hearing it, or guilty by association for being part of the species that killed her.

Not that I could blame him. When his father had raised him from the dead, Cyrus had come back human. Mouse had been his human caretaker and, as often happens in cases of desperation and captivity, they’d fallen into a warped kind of love.

Then I’d completely misread the situation, kidnapped Cyrus—Mouse’s only protector against the vampires holding them—and left her to die. Not a day went by that I didn’t dream of her ruined body, lying in the bed where we’d found her. That I didn’t wake up sick with guilt at the thought I could have saved her if I’d just listened to Cyrus instead of rushing to chloroform him.

But then, anyone who’d been alone with Cyrus for more than five minutes would have rushed to the chloroform.

“I’m sorry.” I lowered my voice, but not for Nathan’s benefit. “But I’m not sorry for asking.”

“Of course you’re not.” He snorted derisively. “You’re never responsible for anything where I’m concerned.”

“Cyrus,” I began, while Nathan stood and crossed the room, as if he’d be able to defend me over the phone.

I waved him away as Cyrus’s angry voice cut me off. “I have to go. I have a finite amount of life left and I don’t want to spend it arguing with you.”

“Fine, I’ll let you go,” I said coolly. “But first, tell me what you know about the Soul Eater.”

“I don’t know anything about him!” Cyrus snapped. There was a pregnant pause, and I could nearly hear him throwing up his hands. “Dahlia stops by every now and again with groceries or money. Next time I see her, I’ll find out what I can and I’ll contact you.”

“I would appreciate that, thank you.” What I really wanted to say was, “I’m sorry I hurt your feelings. You don’t have to wait until you hear from Dahlia to call me. I’ll always want to hear from you.”

But Nathan, good old, ever-watchful Nathan, stood so close I could feel him literally breathing down my neck.

Instead, when Cyrus asked, “Is there anything else?” I replied, “No. Goodbye, Cyrus.”

“That went well.” Nathan’s words would have seemed sharp and sarcastic if not for his soft tone. “Are you all right?”

I turned and pressed my face to the front of his T-shirt. His hard chest muffled my response. “No.”

He laid a hand gently on my hair. “It couldn’t have been that bad.”

“He called me a monster.” I looked up and shrugged. “Call me crazy, but it bothers me.”

Nathan stepped back and turned away, but I caught the grimace he tried to hide. “Well, do you blame him?”

“Pardon me?” My hands came to my hips in a horrible cliché of an angry woman, and I forced them down.

“He’s human now. We probably seem pretty damn intimidating to him.” He calmly returned to the book, this time looking far more interested in it than he had before, when he’d been listening in on my private conversation.

“Excuse me! He ripped my heart out, not the other way around!” I conveniently glossed over the fact that I had killed him another way. Still, Nathan’s attitude, that Cyrus was somehow right in lumping us together with the vampires who’d killed his girlfriend, chafed me. “You might be okay with calling yourself a monster, but I’m not!”

Nathan looked up, true concern on his face. “I had no idea this bothered you so much.”

“Well, it does.” I shook my head. “All of it does.”

He returned to my side, this time a little more cautious. “Don’t let him get to you. You’re putting a lot of importance on what he thinks of you.”

“I know.” I wiped my eyes with the back of my hand. “And I know that has to worry you. ’Cause of what happened before.”

“What do you mean?” Bless his heart, he honestly didn’t understand.

“When I left and went to Cyrus.” I looked away from the hurt in Nathan’s eyes. “I wouldn’t blame you if you thought I’d do it again.”

His expression darkened. He seemed truly wounded that I would think he would think I was capable of that kind of betrayal twice. “Don’t ask me to mistrust you. Carrie, you went to him because you were saving my life. I have no doubt that if you were put in that situation again, you’d do the same thing. It’s one of the reasons I—”

My heart leaped up like a puppy begging for table scraps. It must have shown on my face, because he quickly cleared his throat and looked away.

“Well, that I trust you, anyway.” He turned away and headed toward the door. “I’m going to get some blood. Want any?”

I patted my stomach a little too enthusiastically and injected syrupy cheer into my words. “Nope, made a pig of myself already.”

“Okay,” he answered, in a tone that clearly conveyed my cheerful act wasn’t working. The door clicked shut behind him and I slumped on the bed.

It’s not that I wished him to think I was going to go tearing back to Cyrus at any moment. I wanted Nathan to trust me. But another part of me wanted to protect him from myself. He was clinging to the belief I’d only gone to Cyrus before because Nathan’s life was on the line. The truth was, I’d have ended up there, anyway.

Now, Cyrus was human. There wasn’t anything left of the monster he had been. I’d been afraid of him then, but oddly in love with the bit of humanity I’d glimpsed beneath his surface. Now that he was all humanity, I couldn’t trust myself where he was concerned, and I certainly didn’t want Nathan to.

“Why do you want to go with me?” Bella asked.

Max ground his teeth. First Nathan wanted to keep him from heading east, now Bella? “Because you can’t take care of yourself.”

“I have the same assassin training as you,” she pointed out.

“Is this national See How High Max Harrison’s Blood Pressure Will Go day?” He slammed a wadded T-shirt into his duffel bag and turned back to his dresser. It helped him avoid the sight of Bella lounging on his bed. “If the Oracle gets inside your head again, do you think you’ll be able to take care of it on your own?”

He jumped at the touch of her warm hands on his shoulders, unexpected, as he hadn’t heard her leave the bed. “Stop worrying about something you cannot anticipate or change.”

He didn’t want to take comfort in her touch, but the sick, needy child in him forced his hand up to cover one of hers. “You’re really going to exploit that whole I-can’t-say-no-to-you thing, aren’t you?”

Gently, she turned him to face her. Instead of answering, she rose on tiptoe and brushed her lips across the corner of his mouth.

“Don’t.” He pulled her hands away and forced them down.

She smiled, her practiced, seductive smile. “I thought you said you could not tell me no.”

“I can on this.” He swallowed to wet his suddenly dry throat, and turned away. “I can when it’s for my own good.”

When she moved, his suffering body felt the distance. He heard her flop down on his bed and sigh. “So, you will follow me to Boston and put yourself in danger, but you will not touch me?”

“Nothing personal. I just can’t separate my emotions from my dick where you’re concerned.” He ducked the pillow she hurled at him.

“Do not be crude!” Her outrage couldn’t cover her laughter, but even that had to fade, leaving nothing but uncomfortable silence. “Do you love me?”

Max grabbed a few more shirts and another pair of jeans and returned to the bed to cram them into his bag. He couldn’t look at her, and waited as long as possible to respond. “I don’t know. Maybe?”

“I told you that you did.” Was that smug satisfaction in her voice?

“I said maybe.” He sounded a bit more gruff than he’d intended, and it helped rebuild a little of the wall he’d let crumble where she was concerned. “So, what’s the plan?”

“We will have to take your car.” She shrugged. “As for everything else, I have no plan.”

Max zipped his bag shut forcefully. “Let’s go to Marcus’s library and go online. We’ll find directions and get driving.”

“At night only.” She raised her hands helplessly at his sharp glance. “I do not know how to drive. My people…we do not use cars.”

No, you just hang out the passenger window with your tongue waving in the wind. Proud of his restraint for only thinking his latest dog joke instead of speaking it, he folded his arms across his chest. “Fine, we’ll have to stay somewhere during daylight hours.” Max eyed the cigar box on his nightstand. It held about two thousand dollars in cash. That would be enough to buy her food, bribe someone for extra blood if he ran out, and put them up. “Are you still packed?”

“I do not travel with much.” A strange expression crossed her face, something between sadness and anger. She shook it off with a laugh. “I do not have much.”

For some bizarre reason, he wanted to ask her why that was, why she didn’t have a closet stuffed with clothes and enough makeup to whore up a whole brothel—not that she needed it—but he couldn’t form the words. She’d made it clear to him they were separate entities and would remain so just about forever. That kind of distance didn’t invite the free exchange of personal information.

Not that Max was interested in that touchy-feely crap, anyway. They had a job to do, and it would be a lot easier if they both ignored the fact they’d made the dirty bad fun.

An unwanted image of her flushed, sweat-dampened face contorted in a grimace of pleasure filled his mind. He could almost taste the salt on her skin, feel her hips pushing up beneath him—

“I’d like to leave at sundown. After we talk to Nathan and Carrie,” he blurted, to clear the vision from his mind. The last thing he needed was a sudden, reckless spate of sexual hallucinations.

“Yes, I am interested to hear how Cyrus has fared since I saw him last.” Bella said these words as if Cyrus was a friend who’d recently moved out of town, not a soulless killing machine.

Max had never actually felt his eyes bug out before, and he hoped he would never feel it again. “Why the hell do you care?”

She frowned at him, as if he was the one being weird and irrational. “Because I have thought of him and worried about him. Is that so wrong?”

“Um, yeah,” Max exploded. “He’s a murderer!”

“Former murderer,” she pointed out, rolling her eyes. “You sound very much like Nathan.”

Max scowled at her. “Usually, that comment would get you decked. Luckily for you—”

“You do not hit women?” she finished for him.

He shook his head. “No. I was going to say, ‘Luckily for you, I’m on Nathan’s side on this one.’ Ever compare me to him again and I’ll pop you one.”

“You are much too hard on him.” She unzipped the duffel bag and pulled out two T-shirts. “These look horrible on you.”

“They do not.” He stuffed them back in. “And Nathan is too hard on himself. I love the guy—not in a gay way or anything—and I hate to see him mired down in guilt. I mean, you were there for that ritual thing. He managed to get over killing his wife. What’s left?”

Bella’s shocked laugh illustrated her disbelief. “Nathan is by no means over his wife’s death. He accepts that she forgives him, and allows her spirit to rest, but he holds himself responsible. And her death is not the only burden he bears.”

“Yeah, I know, everyone has emotional scars.” Max snorted. “Thanks for that, Oprah.”

Bella didn’t react to the barb. “Everyone has scars. It is how we heal them that matters. Nathan has worked to heal himself, and you would mock him?”

Not knowing how to respond, Max watched her walk toward the door. She paused, one hand on the door frame, and turned just slightly, not quite facing him. “Do not mock him for achieving what you cannot.”

Before he could think up a smart-assed reply, she turned the corner and was gone.

Seven:

Homecoming

“I think we should go back to Grand Rapids.”

Nathan’s voice dragged me, unwilling, from my sleep. We’d stayed up most of the day doing, well, what we usually did when we were alone with a convenient horizontal surface, and I was exhausted. I knew it was long past sundown, but my body protested the intrusion of consciousness. I muttered a groggy “What?” and struggled to stay awake for the answer.

He touched the side of my face, lifting a strand of my mussed hair and smoothing it against the pillow. “We would be just as safe there as here. And we’d have more research material at our disposal. Not to mention there’s the store to run and I’ve got inventory scheduled for next week—”

“Stop,” I mumbled. “Stop talking.”

He paused. “What do you think?”

“I think you should stop talking and let me sleep.” I turned away from him, onto my side, groaning when he leaned over me to snap on the bedside lamp. The light cut through my eyelids and I groggily sat up. “Don’t you think it’s a little silly to go back to the one place the Soul Eater knows to find you?”

“I think it’s silly to let my fear run my business into the ground. It’s not as if I have centuries of vast wealth to fall back on.” There was a bitter note to his voice, and I knew he thought of his sire. “Besides, you’ll have a better chance of manipulating Cyrus for information if you can see him face-to-face.”

“Manipulate him?” I frowned. “You think I’m manipulative?”

Nathan smiled—no, half smiled—and dropped a kiss on my shoulder. “I think you’re smart enough to do what you have to. Unless you don’t think he’ll be of use to us?”

I chewed my lip. Of course I thought Cyrus would be of use to us. Oh, I had doubts he was involved with his father, but he’d told me himself that he’d been seeing Dahlia. And if there was one thing Dahlia wanted, it was the kind of power the Soul Eater could offer her. If I had to use Cyrus to get to her, I would. “I think you’re right. I think we should go back.”

Later that evening, when Nathan, Bella, Max and I had done the requisite cell number confirmations and synchronizing of watches—okay, not really, but at times the three can lapse into their Movement regiment training—Nathan went to load up the van and Bella went with him to make sure she hadn’t left anything behind. Max and I were left to our own devices in the foyer.

It only took a couple seconds before the realization that we’d been alone in this very room not long ago crashed through my brain like a rampaging wildebeest. At the exact same time, I saw an uncharacteristic flush color Max’s face.

“So. This is weird.” It was all I could think of to break the silence.

Max didn’t appreciate it. “You know, sometimes it’s better just not to talk.”

I frowned at him. “Hey, so we made a mistake. It’s not a big deal. At least, not a big enough one to ruin our friendship over.”

“I know, I know.” He went to the plastic console beside the door, which looked painfully anachronistic among the antique furnishings, and flipped it open. “But it wasn’t a mistake. It’s just that…”

“You’ve never had anyone you’ve gotten physical with stay in your life before,” I finished for him.

He gave me an exasperated look, the one he often gives me when I’m a hundred percent sure I’m right. Turning back to the alarm console, he sighed. “And now I have two of them.”

“Well, you’ll only be saddled with one of them for the next couple of weeks, if that’s any consolation.” It was certainly better than having him shut up here any longer. All the memories of his late sire brought out a morose side of Max I’d never seen before and certainly didn’t like. I wasn’t sure it would do him any good to be stuck with Bella for an extended period of time—their mutual attraction was equaled only by their mutual desire to drive each other insane with rage—but at least the object of his unrequited love would be a living and breathing person.

“When we’re talking about her, could you refrain from using words like saddle?” He punched in a few more codes and a loud, electronic beep sounded. “We’re locked in.”

I laughed. “Oh, good.”

“It is good. It will buy us some time before she gets back, so you can give me some advice.” Max motioned for me to follow him to the couch.

“Advice?” I sat at one end of the sofa and curled my feet under my legs so we didn’t actually touch. Immature though it might seem, I couldn’t get past what we’d almost done.

He nodded, his body posture as rigid and withdrawn as mine. “About Bella.”

For a moment, I was confused. “I don’t think she’s going to have any lasting medical implications, if that’s what you mean. Though she is a werewolf, and I can’t claim to have a lot of experience treating them.”

“No, nothing like that.” Max looked around the room as if Bella were going to jump from behind a potted plant or something, and take us by surprise. “She’s acting weird. You know. Like a woman.”

I rolled my eyes. “Perish the thought.”

Max didn’t quite get my sarcasm. “It’s making me crazy. One minute she acts like she wants to be with me and I’m the one rejecting her. The next, she’s got this barbed wire fence and barking dogs around her, like I can’t even ask her the simplest questions.”

“And here I was assuming you didn’t care about her.”

Stabbing his fingers through his hair, he groaned. “I don’t!”

“And you make it perfectly clear.” Men. Idiots. “Did you ever think maybe she has had a change of heart, but she’s afraid of your rejection?”

“I told her I wouldn’t reject her!” He lowered his voice with obvious difficulty. Clearly, he wanted to scream the house down. “What else am I supposed to do?”

“I don’t know.” And I didn’t. If I were the relationship guru, I wouldn’t have spent the last four months stumbling through an equally bad situation. “Bella obviously doesn’t have much experience communicating with the opposite sex. You don’t have much experience communicating with the opposite sex without talking dirty. Maybe this trip will be good for both of you.”

“Yeah, until I die of lack of oxygen to the brain caused by a permanent hard-on.” He stood and paced. “What’s taking them so long?”

“Maybe they’re screwing in the back of the van,” I suggested drolly.

“That’s not funny!”

“No, but you are. You’re completely out of your mind over her, you want her to be out of her mind over you and she probably is, but neither of you wants to make a move. It’s so junior high, Max!” I stood and stalked to the door. “How do I get out of here?”

“Are you pissed at me?” Disbelief filled his voice, as if the idea was completely unfathomable.

“No. I’m just tired of watching you run in circles over someone when you’re not committed enough to tell her how you feel.” The second I said it, I realized how painfully his actions mirrored Nathan’s. “Never mind.”

But it was too late to take it back. He shut down immediately. “Listen, I’ll call you from the road. If anything comes up. If you can be bothered to listen.”

“Max!” My heart crumbled at his words. Maybe just at the realization of how selfish I’d been to cast him as the villain just because Nathan had hurt me in the past.

Max shook his head. “That was low. But you’re going to have to talk to him sometime.”

I know. Before I said it, however, someone pounded on the door. It was Nathan, uncharacteristically cheerful. “Hie ye hence to the van, wench, afore the sun comes up!”

“You really want to spend eternity with that guy?” Max’s scowl bent into a reluctant smile.

“I’m having second thoughts.”

In the garage, the four of us said our goodbyes. Nathan grudgingly shook Bella’s hand—I could picture the word toenails flashing through his disgusted mind—and Max hugged me.

He whispered in my ear, squeezing me tighter as though it would help me comprehend. “Don’t waste time on this, Carrie. The four of us might not have much left.”

“Same to you,” I whispered back.

Nathan and I had pulled out of the garage and onto Wabash Avenue before he asked me about the exchange. “So, what did Max say to you by the car?”

I could tell he was dying to know, but I couldn’t share. To share would mean to explain, and to explain was to launch us into a confession I didn’t want to make.

I smiled brightly, teasing, “It’s a secret.”

Nathan chuckled and turned back to the road.

At around midnight, Grand Rapids emerged from behind a curve as northbound I-96 turned into the Gerald R. Ford Freeway. When I was a child, I used to pass a few boring minutes in school pressing the heels of my hands into my eyes and watching the grid of sparkling lights flare up in the dark behind my eyelids. That was how the city looked at night, with my eyes opened.

“Are you awake?” Nathan asked gently from the driver’s seat. He’d refused my offer of splitting the driving, citing my “long day” as reason for being rewarded with some extra sleep on the trip.

I nodded and smiled. I’d dozed a bit during the boring stretch of highway from I-94 to here, but I’d spent most of it watching Nathan. He’d hummed some of the time, occasionally singing soft lyrics from a song I didn’t recognize, probably some relic-of-the-seventies classic rock monstrosity waxing poetic about Lord of the Rings. Every now and then he would smile and turn to look at me, and I’d close my eyes to feign sleep. I didn’t often get a chance to observe him without his knowing, and I couldn’t pass it up.

I put my hand on his knee, smiling when his leg jumped under my touch. “I was enjoying watching you be happy.”

He glanced at me, his expression suddenly tender. “You’re not used to it.”

“You’re right. When I left, you were grumpy, morose Nathan. It will take me some time to adjust to happy, humming Nathan.” I swallowed the knot my sudden tears made in my throat. “But I like the change.”

I reached for his right hand, resting on the gearshift, and covered it with my own. We rode the rest of the way to the apartment in silence. Though I’d only been gone a few weeks, the sight of familiar neighborhood landmarks—La Vitesse, the courthouse, the veterans’ memorial, heck, even the Brandywine Inn on the corner of our block—nearly had me dissolving in tears of relief. We parked down the street—all the convenient spots were full—and headed toward the building.

Nathan stopped me before he unlocked the outer door. “Listen, before you see the apartment—”

“It’s a total nightmare of clutter and unwashed dishes?” I snorted. “Believe me, I’ve braced myself for this possibility before tonight.”

“No, that’s not it.” He paused. “Well, it is a nightmare of clutter, but I washed the dishes. What I meant is, I made some changes. To your room.”

“Oh.” My heart sank. “What kind of changes?”

He scratched his forehead and looked down the street, as if the answer would drive up and rescue him. “Maybe it’s better if you see it, and then you can scream at me. Or not.”

I tried not to charge up the stairs once he got the door open, and I waited with unbelievable patience as he unlocked the one at the top. In the living room, books were scattered and stacked on every available surface. Despite his assertion that he’d washed dishes, I spotted four or five blood-crusted mugs he’d missed, and the couch seemed to have become some sort of holding pattern for laundry of indeterminate cleanliness. In the hallway, the door to my room stood open.

“Go look,” he said quietly.

When I clicked on the light, the first thing I noticed was the new paint job. Somehow, Nathan had managed to cover with pale lavender the matte black walls Ziggy had preferred. My desk and computer were just as I’d left them, but a sheet of plastic speckled with paint and sawdust draped over them. Brand-new built-in bookcases lined the wall where my bed used to be.

I leaned against the doorjamb and tried to catch my breath, collect my thoughts, anything to help me comprehend without getting my hopes up too much.

“I know I was taking a chance, but I thought you needed a proper office. Or, at the very least, a place where you can get away from me when I drive you crazy.” Nathan hovered behind me for a moment, then brushed past me to enter the room. He gestured to the bookcases. “I had the same contractor who fixed up the store work on this. Do you like it?”

“It’s very nice, but…” The thought of the few research projects I’d begun with the intent to distribute the information to the vampire community reminded me of our current situation. Without the Movement, there was no communication network among vampires. It wasn’t as if my metabolic studies and dissertations on vampire digestion were publishable in the New England Journal of Medicine. And they certainly weren’t going to hit the bestseller fiction lists. “Nathan, I really don’t have any reason left to continue my projects.”

“Because of the Movement?” He fell silent, running his hand along the edge of a shelf. “That would be a stupid reason to give up all the work you’ve done.”

There was admiration behind his words, and it seemed somehow worth more coming from him. In my entire career as a human doctor, I’d tried to sustain myself on praise from my professors and bosses, to no avail. Nathan’s unspoken praise was like water to a dying plant, and I was strangely moved.

My emotion waned a little as I stared at the place where my bed used to be. “Um…where’s the bed?”

“Oh, I put it downstairs, in the back room of the shop.” He thumped one of the shelves with his knuckles, as if testing for sturdiness. “Do you like the color? I thought it might be too girlie—”

The back room? The cement-walled, spider-infested utility room with the water heater and a single bulb for illumination? I glared at him. “Well, I definitely prefer it to lime stains from where the pipes drip!”

He frowned in confusion. “What are you talking about? Carrie, I don’t want you to sleep down there, I just put your bed in storage.”

I threw my hands up in frustration. “Well, what the hell do you expect me to do, sleep on the couch?”

“I expect you to sleep in my bed with me, like a proper girlfriend!” He stared at me, baffled for a moment, then laughed. “Christ, can’t we get anything right?”

I stepped up to him and looped my arms around his neck. “We’re not so bad at the naked, sweaty part.”

He grinned at me, and I was struck all over again by how much taller he was than me. He leaned down to kiss me, breaking his motion to ask, “So, do you like it?”

“I like the office,” I admitted. “I like just being home more.”

“You’re not going to like it tomorrow night,” he warned. “Did you see all the books in the living room?”

“I did. I was trying to ignore them.”

He brushed his lips against mine again and stepped back, motioning for me to follow him to the living room. “We’re going to have to look through them for any mention of the ritual the Soul Eater was collecting the souls of his fledglings for, some information on the spell he was using to control me, and anything else that might come in handy for him now that he’s got the Oracle on his side. It’s going to take awhile. If you’re not too tired—”

“I’m too tired,” I interrupted, before he could suggest we begin work right away.

“Then I hope you’re not too tired to get in that kitchen and cook your man some dinner.” He affected a Midwestern accent to enhance the misogyny of the statement.

I rolled my eyes. “Oh, like a proper girlfriend?”

“You said it, not me.” He had the nerve to smack my backside as I turned toward the kitchen.

“I’ll chalk that up to the fact you’re too tired to realize how very close to death you are,” I called over my shoulder. In the kitchen I put the kettle on the stove and snagged a bag of blood from the refrigerator. “So, what have you found out so far?”

I expected to hear sounds of shuffling papers and opening books, but didn’t. “Nathan?”

“Sorry.” Judging from the tone of his voice, Nathan was a million miles away. “Yeah, Bella found two more versions of the spell she thinks I was under. The three we’ve got now are remarkably similar. What scares me is the number of variations that are probably out there.”

I cut off the top of the bag with the kitchen shears and dumped the contents into the kettle, licking a smear of red off my thumb. Four months ago, I would have stopped to analyze that action. Now, consumption of blood was background noise.

In the foreground was my concern for Nathan and the realization we’d never actually talked about what had happened to him just weeks before.

I lit a burner and set the kettle over the low heat. Once it’s warming, blood can’t be left untended for long. I went to the doorway and looked into the living room. Nathan sat in his armchair, elbows on his knees, leaning forward and staring at the impossible pile of books on the coffee table.

“Do you think he’ll try it again?” The possibility terrified me. When the Soul Eater had possessed Nathan, he’d driven him mad. Tormented by reliving the moment he’d killed Marianne, Nathan had become like a wounded animal, with no reason or control. Though Bella had managed to break the spell, it had been at a cost. Nathan had nearly killed me, and our relationship had been destroyed, as well. I wasn’t about to accept those consequences again.

Nathan shrugged. “I don’t know. But I didn’t know he was going to do it last time.”

I shifted uncomfortably. “Bella said that if you didn’t feel guilty anymore, since Marianne forgave you—”

The teakettle gave a low, mournful whistle, and I hurried to remove it before our dinner burned.

“Well, that sounds simple enough. But it’s not easy to forget that you’ve killed the woman you loved.” His voice startled me. I hadn’t heard him come into the kitchen.

More startling was the fact he’d said “loved,” past tense. Though the look on his face made it clear he’d done so on purpose, I didn’t know if he was trying to make me believe it, or himself. I took two mugs from the cupboard and poured the blood into them. “Maybe, since we’re trying to make these great strides in our personal relationship, you could talk to me about it.”

“I could.” He took his mug and headed back to the living room.

I ground my teeth. “Well, are you going to?”

When I followed him, I found him sitting in his chair again, rubbing his eyes with the heels of his hands. “The Soul Eater is my sire. He knows everything about me.”

“Through the blood tie?” It seemed so strange, that although Nathan and his sire were enemies, they were still bound. “Do you hear him?”

He looked up, his eyes rimmed in red from fatigue. “If he wants me to. And he can hear me. He knows how to hurt me. He did it with Marianne, and he could do it again.”

“With your memories of Ziggy?” The thought hadn’t crossed my mind until now. No wonder he was afraid. “Nathan, if that happens, we know how to stop it. You won’t have to go through what you did before.”

“When he put that spell on me, I didn’t know it was a spell. I was reliving the night I killed Marianne, over and over. I could live with it, because it isn’t as though I hadn’t already lived it on my own every night. But Ziggy…” Nathan looked away. “Once was enough.”

“The Soul Eater was only able to control you because you felt responsible for Marianne’s death. You’re not responsible for Ziggy dying,” I pointed out.

He laughed bitterly. “Have you noticed my habit of blaming myself for things I can’t control?”

I remembered the look in Nathan’s eyes as he’d pleaded with me outside Cyrus’s mansion to keep Ziggy safe, and the way he’d cradled his dying son in his arms when I failed. If Nathan was peripherally responsible for Ziggy’s death, I was the central figure in his demise. I’d been the one who’d inadvertently marked him for death.

“You could blame me,” I said quietly, but I added a smile in case Nathan was more comfortable interpreting it as a joke. “I had more of a stake in it than you did.”

“If he’d been a vampire, that would have been a pun.” Nathan’s eyes crinkled as he smiled. “I don’t want to blame you, Carrie. I just want to talk to you.”

“I’m not going to complain. You kept everything in before.” It is the central irony of my life that when I want something and end up getting it, it makes me profoundly uncomfortable.

Shaking his head, Nathan reached for one of the many books on the coffee table. “Grab a book and start reading.”

“I said I was too tired,” I protested.

“I know. Consider it payment for your new office.” He settled back in his chair and turned his attention to the open page.

I grumbled, but complied. I’d only managed to halfheartedly scan two pages when the phone in the kitchen rang.

Nathan stood and went to answer it, taking his mug with him. “Want me to top you off while I’m in there?”

I shook my head and covered the rim of my mug with my palm.

On the page, the letters swirled and blurred before my tired eyes, and I had to double my concentration. I wasn’t paying attention to the phone call, until I noticed the change in Nathan’s tone.

“Fine. I’ll tell her.” He hung up without saying goodbye and returned to the living room. “That was Cyrus. Dahlia is going to be there tomorrow after sundown. You should go over at ten.”

“You didn’t let me talk to him.” It was part accusation, part question.

Nathan shrugged. “He didn’t ask for you.”

I tried to not look as rejected as I, for some reason, felt. “Are you going with me?”

“I’d rather not.” He resumed his position in the armchair and picked up his book. “You can take my cell phone if you’re worried he’ll try something.”

“No, nothing like that.” I waved my hand to dismiss the idea that Cyrus would try to harm me. “But you don’t mind me going, do you?”

“Of course not,” Nathan said, a little too confidently. “It’s the reason we came back here.”

Something in his tone said he wished we hadn’t, but it didn’t matter. Tomorrow, I was going to see Cyrus.

Eight:

A Bad Case of Nerves

O f all the horrible things Max could have envisioned happening on their trip, Bella being horrifically carsick every fifty miles was not one of them.

“You know, we could get a lot farther if I didn’t have to stop and hose puke off the back seat four or five times a night,” he grumbled, wiping his hands on coarse, gas station bathroom paper towels.

Bella lifted her head from the toilet seat—it was proof of her bravery, or stupidity, how close she let her face get to the damn thing—and tried to respond, only to let loose a spectacular arc of vomit.

“No more vending machine sandwiches for you.” He crumpled the paper and tossed it on the pile spilling over the sides of the wastebasket. “Can you hold back the tide for a couple minutes so I can get us to a hotel?”

Her answer was the resounding echo of retching into the bowl.

Max leaned against the wall, then changed his mind and straightened quickly. “This place reeks.”

“I am sorry I could not wait until the Ritz-Carlton,” she spat, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand.

He grabbed a handful of paper toweling and offered it to her. “Don’t get bent out of shape. Clean off your face and we’ll hit the road.”

Snatching it, she hissed, “A fine way to treat a sick person!”

“Carsick is not sick. It’s an annoyance, but it’s not sick.” He met her glare head-on. Her eyes seemed duller, and dark circles ringed them. “Oh, shit.”

“What?” Her face blanched. She looked around the bathroom as if planning an alternate escape route.

“You’ve got some weird dog disease, don’t you?” He backed away.

Her panicked expression turned to anger. “I do not have a dog disease. I am a little under the weather. Most likely from being violated by one of your kind.”

Max couldn’t help his grin. “So, are you talking about the Oracle now, or—”

“Go to hell!” She turned back to the toilet and groaned with a painful-sounding dry heave.

He wet a paper towel and knelt beside her to press it to her forehead. “Take it easy. Getting pissed at me will only make things worse.”

“Perhaps I should not go on this trip with you,” she whispered. “I will not be useful if I am vomiting and ill. I certainly cannot fight in this condition.”

“Who said you’d be doing any fighting?” The thought hadn’t crossed his mind. Not that he didn’t believe Bella could hold her own. He’d seen her fight plenty, and been on the receiving end of her ire. But lately she seemed more fragile, far too mortal for his tastes. Before, he wouldn’t have cared if she’d gotten maimed or killed. In fact, when she’d had him pinned to the floor in Nathan’s bedroom, ready to drive a stake through his heart, he would have laughed his ass off at her demise.

Sex, no matter how meaningless, changed things. Who was he kidding? If she got so much as a stubbed toe on this trip, he’d call the whole damn thing off, Oracle or no.

“I am a Movement trained assassin. I will do my part in a physical skirmish.” She didn’t sound confident about it. Probably because of all the vomiting.

“Come on. We’ll find a Motel 6 or something and call it a night.”

He helped her to the car with an arm around her shoulders. For someone who’d just been squatting on the floor of a gas station bathroom, she smelled fine.

“You throw up lilacs and perfume in there?” he joked, but her sense of humor, nearly nonexistent to begin with, had taken a nosedive since her unfortunate stomach bug.

“I do not feel like talking,” she snapped as he opened the passenger door for her.

He slammed it closed behind her, and waited to retort until he’d rounded the car and dropped into the driver seat. “Good. Because every time you open your mouth, puke comes out.”

He pulled out of the parking lot a little less gently than he normally would have, not because he wanted her to barf all over the dashboard, but it wouldn’t hurt to put the fear of it into her.

By the time they checked into a motor lodge a few exits down the highway, Bella was sweating and pale again. She pushed past him and rushed through the shabby room to the bathroom.

In the light of the floor lamp, Max examined the two beds and took the rough, brown flannel blanket with the most suspicious stains and draped it over the window, tucking it behind the blinds rod. Hopefully, that would keep the sun out, once it rose.

In case it didn’t do the trick, he stripped the bed the rest of the way and laid the sheets on the floor next to the bed farthest from the window. He’d be trapped between the wall and the platform box springs all day, a lot like lying in a coffin, but better that than being a human fire hazard.

More disgusting retching sounds came from the bathroom. It was amazing Bella had anything left to choke up, considering how her output had far surpassed her input. “I’m gonna go get our stuff out of the car. Will you be okay for a sec?”

More heaving, then a muffled, “I will be fine.”

“Yeah. Okay.”

The air outside seemed colder and newer. It could have been from leaving the musty stink of the motel room, but it smelled more like morning. The exact moment night clicked over to day had happened while he’d been inside.

He was sorry he’d missed it.

He pulled his duffel bag and the leather satchel containing Bella’s things from the trunk. Out of paranoid instinct, he scanned the parking lot for vans, semis and hearses that could contain other vampires. There was no doubt in his mind the Oracle knew they were coming.

He also noted the length of the awnings over office and motel room doors. He did a quick mental calculation of the shadows they might cast, though the time of day would be an uncertain variable, and the space between each in case he and Bella needed to make a quick getaway.

He just hoped it wasn’t at high noon. If so, Bella would have to finish the “mission” by herself.

Of course, there was a small chance they would escape detection altogether, tail the Oracle to wherever she was going, race in with metaphorical guns blazing and save the day. He was sure he had a better chance of winding up living in the suburbs with Bella and their furry kids, mowing the lawn on a sunny July day.

He didn’t like the feeling of being adrift, not knowing exactly what to do or how things were going to go down. He never thought he would miss Movement briefings so much.

Cursing, he reached for his cell phone. Carrie and Nathan were probably busy wearing out their bedsprings, but Max felt no remorse at the thought of interrupting them.

“Hello?” Nathan answered, sounding tired, but awake.

“It’s Harrison. You’re still up?” He checked his watch.

“It’s only midnight.” Nathan paused. “Where are you?”

“Just crossed the Indiana border into Ohio. I thought you guys would hit the sack right after you got home.” Max intentionally softened his suggestion of what he thought they’d be doing there. Ever since he and Carrie had done what they’d done in the foyer, things had seemed a little weird. More so now that Nathan knew about it.

“And I thought you guys were going to drive until dawn. What happened to that?”

“Well, I just like Ohio so much, I thought we would really be missing out if we didn’t stop for the night in the purgatory of the Midwest.” Max coughed to get rid of the tightness in his throat. “We had to stop. Bella’s sick.”

“Sick? Is it serious?” There was a rustling sound, indicating Nathan had put his hand over the receiver. It didn’t mask his words when he said, to Carrie, Max presumed, “Max says Bella is sick.”

“It’s nothing serious.” He raised his voice to recapture Nathan’s attention. “She just doesn’t do well in the car. I thought it would be better to air the vehicle out and try to make up the time tomorrow night.”

There was muffled conferring on the other end before Nathan returned. “Carrie said try ginger ale to settle her stomach.”

“An M.D. and that’s the best she’s got?” He supposed it beat cleaning up the car again. “I hope she didn’t pay too much for med school.”

“Yeah, well.” Nathan’s voice died out, then returned. “Was there anything else?”

“Ah, no. Just wanted to know if you’ve heard from any other Movement, if you had a heads-up for me, that kind of thing.” What a lame excuse. It had been four hours since he’d seen them; what were the chances they knew anything else? He was as transparent as the windshield he’d had to clean at their last stop.

There was a noncommittal grunt from Nathan. “We haven’t been at it long. Carrie will speak to Cyrus tomorrow, and I hope to know more then.”

Max whistled. “She’s going to see Cyrus? How do you feel about that?”

“The only way I can.” What he meant, Max knew, was he couldn’t elaborate because Carrie is within earshot.

“Give her a curfew.” Not that Max didn’t trust Carrie, but she had major boundary issues where her old sire was concerned. “I’ll talk to you later.”

“Yeah. Goodbye, Max.”

Inside, Bella was still in the bathroom. Max went to the door and knocked softly. “Are you okay in there?”

Her answer may have been muffled by the door, but he still heard the tears in her voice. “I need to be alone.”

The hell she did. “Carrie thought some ginger ale would help. Do you want me to go out and get you some? I mean, I’ve got time to kill. It’s not going to be light for at least six hours.”

“No. I will be fine. I just need to get myself…under control.” There was a hesitant sniffle.

He leaned his forehead against the door. Part of him wanted to order her to stop being such a big baby. Another part wanted badly to comfort her. She wasn’t a fragile, wilting flower. She was Bella, the ice princess, the stone cold assassin, the hottest, sexiest, meanest woman he’d ever had the great good fortune to fuck. She hadn’t cried when he’d stitched up her slashed leg sans local anesthetic in Nathan’s living room. Something had to be seriously bothering her to create such a reaction, and he had a feeling he knew exactly what that something was.

She didn’t like being helpless. More specifically, she didn’t like being helped.

Max knew the feeling well. People who spent their lives—or afterlives, as the case may be—alone liked to believe they were islands unto themselves. If they needed someone once, they might need someone again, and that someone might not be there a second time. Max had been through that pain. From the way she was acting, he knew Bella had, too.

Still, he couldn’t leave her crying on the bathroom floor. “Do you want anything out of your bag? Pajamas or anything?”

Stupid thing to ask. All the question did was bring painfully arousing memories to mind. Bella didn’t wear pajamas. It was almost unbelievable that she wore underwear.

“I do not have any.” She gave another sniff. “May I borrow your shirt?”

Max threw a glance to his duffel bag on the bed. “Yeah, I’ll get you one.”

“No. May I have the one you are wearing?” she requested, timidly, if she could manage such a humble state.

He plucked the fabric between his thumb and forefinger and pulled it away from his chest, frowning at it. She was sick, he reminded himself, so it wasn’t his place to argue. “Yeah, sure.”

The door opened a crack as he peeled the garment over his head. Bella’s naked arm snaked out to grab it, and the door closed again.

Shaking his head, Max went to his makeshift bed next to the wall. He shucked his jeans and lay down, wincing as his muscles, cramped from the long drive, adjusted to the hard floor. He pulled the sheet over his lower half—no use having her think he was insensitive enough to proposition her after her barf-fest—and tried to convince his body that going to sleep at this early hour was a good idea. He’d need to be well rested once they reached the Oracle.

A click alerted him that Bella had emerged from the bathroom. Her hair, usually scraped back severely into a long braid, hung limply around her face. Max realized he’d never seen her with her hair down, even when they had slept together. She pushed a few dark strands behind her ears and folded her arms over her chest. She wore the shirt like a suit of armor, hugged it like a security blanket.

“It has your smell,” she said quietly. “I have missed it.”

“That’s…” He closed his eyes. If he didn’t look at her, if he couldn’t see how vulnerable she was, he could stay mad at her for walking out of his life. “Creepy.”

No, it wasn’t that she had walked out; it was that she’d done it so easily. His anger was fading now that he knew it not to be true, and that was dangerous.

Her voice was uncharacteristically small. “You always make a joke.”

His throat tightened. How did she manage to make him feel like shit with a few simple words? Did she practice? “It never bothered you before.”

He felt her warmth as she knelt beside him. His leg jerked when she placed her palm on his knee.

When he opened his eyes, the look on her face made him bolt upright. She was pale, paler than sickness should have made her, and her eyes were wide and scared.

“Christ, Bella, what’s wrong?” He put his hand on her arm and she reached for it, entwining her fingers with his.

“Promise me,” she begged, squeezing his hand. “Promise me whatever happens, whatever comes of the time we have left together, that when I am gone, you will do what is right in my memory.”

As if touched by the hand of Death himself, Max felt a chill run up his spine. “What are you talking about?”

“You know I saw through the Oracle’s eyes.” She dipped her head, and a tear rolled down her nose.

“We don’t know anything yet.” He pulled her hand down, capturing the other and bringing them both to her lap. “Some of that stuff you’re seeing might not be true.”

“I know it to be true.” Bella looked up, eyes blazing. It was a comforting sight. She appeared more like herself than she had before. “And I see horrible things. If I do not live, there will be things left to take care of. Promise me you will do what needs to be done.”

“Fine. You want me to notify your next of kin, I will.” He tried to laugh it off. “But I’m telling you, you’ll be fine.” He nearly bit his tongue to stop himself from adding, “Because I won’t let anything happen to you.”

She didn’t argue, but he could see she wanted badly to tell him he was wrong.

He didn’t want to hear it. “You’re tired. You were sick. You’re probably dehydrated. Go drink some water and get some sleep.”

“I do not want water.” She lifted one of his hands to her lips. “Sleep with me?”

“No offense, but watching you gag up two days’ worth of chow isn’t a big turn-on for me.” He pulled his hand back. “Another time, maybe.”

She smiled. “No. I meant, sleep beside me. Hold me.”

“I can’t tell you no.” He pointed to the window and the dubious sun protection provided by the blanket. “But if that doesn’t hold, I could be fried in a few hours.”

“Then get up in a few hours and move.” She clasped his hand as she rose, and tried to bodily haul him onto the bed, where they collapsed in a laughing heap. The playful moment didn’t last nearly long enough for Max.

Later, when he thought she was asleep, and took the chance to wind a lock of her hair around his finger, she whispered, “I am afraid to die.”

His heart squeezed painfully in his chest. There was no way he was letting her die, but a part of him warned he should stop this reckless closing of the gap between them, just in case.

But he was tired of constantly living on the defensive. He couldn’t do it anymore, not where Bella was concerned. He pulled her tighter to his side, hoping he wasn’t just making the most of the time they had left.

I tried not to make it obvious to Nathan, but I was climbing the walls as the time to meet Cyrus drew nearer. What would I say to him? What would he say to me? Would we fight? Would I pity him? Would I do something stupid, like I had the last time?

Would I find the place?

It hadn’t occurred to me until then that I didn’t know where Cyrus lived.

As soon as we’d crawled from bed, Nathan had gone right back to the books. I’d had to politely remind him to dress himself, he was so immersed in his research. After the dramatic grumbling and complaining he’d done then, I hated to bother him for anything else.

But this was kind of an important detail. “When you were on the phone with Cyrus, did he happen to give you directions?”

“Hmm?” Nathan looked up from the volume in his lap. “To do what?”

“Directions to his house.” I rolled my eyes. “How am I supposed to get there if I don’t know where it is?”

“You could call him. I’m sure he’s awake.” Nathan turned back to his book with a derisive sniff. “He is human now. He’s probably eating dinner.”

I looked at the clock. It was nine. Dahlia had probably been and gone by now. I dialed Cyrus’s number.

When he answered, he sounded distracted and slightly out of breath. I didn’t let myself dwell on the possible reasons why. “How do I find you?”

“Very well, thanks.” He paused. “You mean, how do you find where I live?”

I groaned an affirmative.

With a sigh, he said, “I’d hoped it wouldn’t come to this. Listen, I live very close to you. Why don’t I meet you on the corner in front of the Brandywine?”

I frowned. Aggressive raindrops battered the windowpanes, and I’d heard a rumble of thunder not long before. Why was he being so difficult? “How about you just tell me where you live?”

“Fine.” He gave another heavy sigh. “I live, you will be pleased to know, just down the street from you, in the big gray house with the rainbow-striped American flag out front.”

In the spirit of friendship—no matter how weird and disordered—I held off a foghorn laugh and just snorted.

“Oh, it’s terribly funny. It will please you more to hear that my apartment is in the basement. You have to go around the back and down the stairs.” The bitterness in his voice tugged a little pity from me. “I assume it used to be a servants entrance, before the place was divided up.”

“It can’t be all bad,” I began, but he cut me off.

“I have to go. I’ll see you tonight.” He hung up without saying goodbye.

At nine-thirty I kissed Nathan on the cheek to draw his attention out of his book.

“Leaving already?” He captured my hand and gave it a squeeze. Though he tried to block it from the blood tie, I felt his desperation.

Stop worrying. It’s you I’m coming home to.

He smiled up at me. “I know, sweetheart.”

“Then let me go, and don’t worry about me.” I didn’t think he would follow my instructions, but it was worth a shot.

At least he pretended to be okay until I left. That was a huge step for him, and I was proud he could manage it. Besides, I couldn’t feel guilty. This was what we’d come back for.

The house Cyrus described wasn’t far. Despite the rain, I walked. The wet had never bothered me, at least not since I’d learned in med school that it wasn’t wet hair but a virus that caused the common cold. In fact, I kind of liked the rain.

As Cyrus instructed, I went to the back door, which opened onto a bare landing. My choice was up or down, and both passages were illuminated by lightbulbs swinging from cords.

“Snazzy,” I whispered with a little amusement. Truly, it was a case of the mighty falling far.

At the bottom of the stairs was a laundry room with no door, and a single apartment marked B. I was about to knock on the door when it opened.

There was a weird second when my brain registered that it wasn’t Cyrus standing there. My first thought was, It’s the wrong apartment. My second was, Oh shit.

Dahlia seemed to be having the same thought process. Hers ended just a bit before mine. Her reflexes were better.

She grabbed me by the throat and pinned me to the wall.

Nine:

In the Flesh

I had no time to react. Dahlia’s face hovered centimeters from mine, and her hand at my throat tightened. The tips of her nails dug into my skin.

“What are you doing here?” She slammed my head into the wall. I felt the plaster crumble beneath my skull.

I pulled my feet up and kicked her, kangaroo style, so hard she bounced off the opposite wall. “I was invited, bitch!”

“Lucky you.” She held up her hands and formed a flaming blue ball of energy. I lifted my arms to shield my face. Before she could release her spell, the door beside me flew open.

“Dahlia!” Cyrus strode into the hallway, a towel slung around his hips. I don’t know if it was a reflex left over from her days as Cyrus’s obedient pet, or if she was as overwhelmed as I was by his presence, but Dahlia condensed the murderous energy between her palms. When she opened her hands, it was gone.

“What the hell is she doing here?” she demanded, planting her fists on her wide hips in a bizarre imitation of an exasperated housewife. The gesture seemed all the weirder owing to her vampire face, which she made no move to cover.

In the tone Cyrus had used to placate me many, many times, he asked, “Why so jealous now? You know the history between us. She’s an acquaintance, nothing more.”

I made a point of ignoring his remark. I’d seen him wheedle Dahlia this way before, and it nauseated me. Not to mention the fact that I found myself slightly bothered by the label “acquaintance.”

We’d been enemies. We’d been lovers. We’d been friends. Sometimes all at once. I loved Nathan, but a part of me wouldn’t, would probably never, give up loving Cyrus.

Dahlia wasn’t stupid. She knew this. It was why she glared at me, though her expression softened a bit. Her animosity gave me a frightening glimpse into the truth of Cyrus’s feelings for me.

“Besides,” he continued, “I’ve made it very clear to you that I’m not interested in having you around too often, haven’t I?”

Her angry gaze jerked from me to him. “If I hadn’t promised your father I wouldn’t kill you, I would kill you.”

I chuckled at her poorly worded threat. It was a mistake. She shoved Cyrus away and stalked toward me. “Do you have something to say to me?”

Shaking my head, I smiled. “No, I don’t.”

She turned back to Cyrus. “You better pray I don’t tell your daddy I saw her here.”

“My ‘daddy’ doesn’t give a damn about me,” Cyrus said with a shrug. “Tell him whatever you want. Just don’t bother coming around here again, if you do.”

Her manner changed immediately. “Sweetie, you know I’m just playing. Where’s your sense of humor?”

“In my other pants, apparently.” He kissed her forehead and gave her a shove toward the stairs. “See you next week?”

She glowered at me as she answered, “We’ll see.” Then she swept up the stairs, and the sound of the slamming door signaled her departure.

Cyrus turned to me with absolutely no humor in his expression. “You’re early.”

“I didn’t realize she’d still be here.” I followed him into his apartment. The bathroom was immediately to my right as we stepped through the door. I could see the shower, a bleak white stall, with the water still running.

“We lost track of time.” Cyrus walked over—well, took a few steps, the bathroom was so tiny—and turned it off. With absolutely no pretense of modesty he dropped his towel and reached for the jeans slung over the towel rack.

I turned my back. “Whoa, a little warning would be nice.”

“It’s nothing you haven’t seen before,” he reminded me smugly. “Well, except for this damn soft stomach I’m getting.”

I heard the smack of a hand against wet skin and rolled my eyes. “I always thought you could use a little meat on your bones. Your hips were always so sharp when…”

I let the sentence die. We both knew the when, and it made at least one of us profoundly uncomfortable. I wandered on into the apartment. A sofa bed, unfolded and in disarray from his tryst with Dahlia, took up most of the room. On the far wall were counters, cupboards, a sink, a stove, and a lime-green refrigerator that had probably existed long before my birth. A small bookcase held a few volumes, including a Bible. I looked over my shoulder to make sure he was still in the bathroom before I picked it up.

True to my luck, he came out the second I touched the cover.

“Snooping through my private things, exactly how I remembered you.” He took the Bible from me and tossed it back on the shelf.

“I never pegged you for the religious type.” I started to sit on the bed and thought better of it, considering who’d just left.

Cyrus gave me a withering glance, as if to say, Oh, grow up. He folded the mattress and replaced the cushions while I waited. “Maybe you’ve misjudged me. Again.”

“I prefer to think you constantly surprise me.” I shrugged. “I didn’t mean anything by it.”

He sighed heavily as he tossed two throw pillows onto the couch. “She wanted me to read it.”

Of course. Cyrus’s lost love, the other human hostage of the Fangs. “Oh.”

“Don’t we feel the tiniest bit insensitive now?” He flashed me a smile that was clearly meant to cover his lingering touchiness about the girl he’d called Mouse.

Changing the subject held the promise of alleviating this awkwardness. And I handled Cyrus a lot better when I was being a hard-ass and not a friend. “What was Dahlia here for?”

“Sex.” He dropped onto the couch and leaned against the cushions. “So I hope you weren’t looking for some. My mortal body is exhausted. And sore.”

“I don’t need to hear it.” I held up my hand. “I know she had a major hard-on for you before, but she was trying to become a vampire. Why would she want you now? You’re just a grocery store clerk.”

“Yes, make a joke, Carrie. You were always so funny.” His inflection implied the word was used meant ironically.

I held up my hands in mock defenselessness. “Hey, you were the one who was supposed to be getting information. And I’m sorry, you can’t possibly be buying it with sex. She’s a vampire now. She could have anyone she wants.”

“I was getting information. What little she’ll give me,” he grumbled. “I used to be one of the most powerful of our kind, now I’m just…” He let the statement die with a groan of disgust.

I sat down next to him. “Well, what do you know?”

“Apparently, Jacob is still working toward his demented goal of godhood. And he has an ally.” Cyrus raised an eyebrow. “Anything you haven’t heard before?”

I shook my head. “He’s working with the Oracle. That we knew. She’s been speaking through Bella.”

How much should I tell Cyrus about the situation? Too much of his former nature had returned. Was it possible he played both sides?

As if he could read my mind, he leaned forward and put a hand on my knee. I jumped at the contact, and expected to see a smug grin spread across his face, but he remained deadly serious. “Carrie, do you think I want my father to succeed in this?”

“I don’t know. Two months ago you were…broken down or something. Now it’s like you’re back to normal. But that’s bad. I remember how you were.” I closed my eyes. I will not cry in front of him. I will not let him know how much what he did to me still hurts.

“I’m not that person anymore.” He touched my cheek, and when I opened my eyes, I saw his shone with tears. “I can’t be. I know you think what happened between Mouse and me was all just the result of living in fear for our lives, but I can’t believe that. If I did, I wouldn’t be able to get out of bed in the morning. I loved her. I have to believe she loved me, because she told me. I never hid who I was from her, and she still loved me. I can’t go back to being that monster. If I did, I would be letting her down.”

I wiped at my eyes, not wanting to shed tears for him. It would seem weak, and a part of me feared he would laugh as if I’d fallen for an elaborate prank.

“Of course, I’ve had to do certain distasteful things to survive….” He trailed off. “But never mind about that.”

I bristled at the quick way he’d changed the subject. But since he was on our side, I assumed I could trust him. “All we know is that the Oracle is heading to Boston. We don’t know how to find the Soul Eater or how to fight either of them.”

He nodded. “Dahlia said she was contacted by one of his men. They want her to do some spell to ferret out a weapon the Oracle prophesied.”

“A weapon?”

“Apparently it’s something she said centuries ago. There’s some sort of weapon, and whatever side controls it will have the loyalty of every earthly vampire. ‘A sword forged of the flesh of all vampires, bathed in the blood of the traitors.’ If the Oracle is free, I’m sure he’s worried that she remembers, and is simply trying to beat her to it. Or stay close to her to con her out of it.” Cyrus inclined his head. “Actually, it is something my father has been working on for some time. Very complicated stuff.”

I leaned forward, squashing my hopeful eagerness. “Do you remember what it was?”

“He didn’t tell me.” Cyrus rubbed his forehead. “Jacob gave me tasks and I obeyed. I never questioned.”

I covered my face with my palms. “So, there’s a weapon out there. And who will get it first is anyone’s guess.”

“It’s an almost one hundred percent certainty that our side won’t get it,” he pointed out. “Since the Movement clearly isn’t looking for it.”

“Our side?” It seemed so strange that he’d attached himself to a cause that wasn’t entirely self-serving.

He sent me another withering look. “The side that is not my father’s. Anyone with half a brain should be on it, by now.”

“Nathan and I will research this sword. Hopefully, we’ll get a break before Max and Bella find the Oracle.” The prospect of reading well into the daylight hours made me suddenly sleepy.

Cyrus tapped his lips thoughtfully with his forefinger. “I wonder if it is some kind of riddle. You said Bella has heard the Oracle’s thoughts? What if that’s indicative of some kind of power Bella has?”

“She is a werewolf. They specialize in magic.” I rolled my eyes. “You know, the kind of magic spelled with a k at the end.”

“The kind your boyfriend peddles in his shop,” Cyrus pointed out. “The kind that pays your rent.”

“Touché. I’ll give Max a heads-up.” Nathan’s cell phone, tucked in my back pocket, began to sound a classical melody. “Yikes, that will be him. I have to go.”

“Max?” Understanding caused a scowl to cross Cyrus’s face. “Oh, the other him.”

I ignored the ringing, though I knew I would play a game of twenty thousand questions when I got home. “Listen, don’t give Dahlia the brush-off right away, if you can stand her for a bit longer. Any information you get would help us out.”

“Oh, I think I can stand her.”

“God, not only are you human, you’re a fourteen-year-old boy.” I shook my head. “Listen, find out what you can about Dahlia, but be safe.”

“Do you honestly believe she’ll harm me?” He laughed. “She was obsessed with me.”

“Yeah, and she asked me to kill you. Besides, you have no idea where she’s been. I haven’t really looked into whether STDs can be transmitted from vampires to humans, but best play it safe for now.” I didn’t know what the appropriate goodbye gesture would be, so I held out my arm for an awkward handshake.

When he pulled away, he looked anywhere but at me. “I’ll try to find out where Jacob is. I’m sure Dahlia must know. She’s on his payroll.”

“That would great. Thanks.” I turned to go, and I’d reached the door when his voice stopped me.

“Thank you for not giving up on me, Carrie.”

I glanced back and gave him a tremulous smile. “I don’t know if I ever could.”

When I reached the street I ran the short distance home, invigorated by new hope and relief that something finally seemed to be going right.

Bella had slept for the rest of the night and all day, though she’d made valiant attempts to stay awake the few times she rose to get a drink or use the bathroom. Finally, just before sunset, Max had been forced to wake her.

She’d grumbled and shuffled around, getting ready, but hadn’t gotten sick again, and as far as Max was concerned, that was all that mattered.

“I had the flu just before I was sired,” he said, trying to sound sympathetic as they zoomed down the freeway. “It sucked.”

She only nodded. “I do not have the flu. Are you sure you are driving the speed limit?”

Definitely not. “No one ever gets pulled over in Pennsylvania,” he assured her.

“I would not know. I have never broken the law here before,” she chided, leaning forward to fiddle with the dials on the radio. “Can we listen to something that is not so violent sounding?”

Max frowned. He’d had the classic rock station on since they’d crossed the Ohio border, but the signal had begun to fade. Still, he didn’t want to end up listening to some late-night, lonely-hearts-sappy-dedication hour, either. “I wouldn’t call Tom Petty violent sounding, but if you can find something else, go for it. Just no chick music.”

“Chick music?” Amusement colored her voice, and when he took his eyes from the road for a second he saw a smile bend her mouth.

“Yeah, chick music. Alanis Morisette, Fiona Apple,” he shuddered. “Tori Amos.”

Bella laughed and turned her attention back to the radio.

This is nice, he decided. Driving along as though they were on a road trip, not a suicide mission. Teasing each other like old friends. Holding her as she drifted to sleep wearing his T-shirt.

This is too nice. What the hell was he doing, letting his defenses down so she could wedge herself into his life? What if she got hurt? What if she hurt him?

It was all the time he’d spent listening to Carrie’s love woes over Nathan. Somehow, he’d let himself be talked into needing a relationship. God, the word used to hold as much appeal for him as audit or classical music. Now it caused an ache in his chest and a sudden need to touch Bella. It didn’t matter how, as long as he could assure himself of her physical presence.

He cleared his throat. “There’s some Carol King in the CD case under the seat. Tapestry. And if you tell anyone, I won’t hesitate to kill you.”

Bella laughed again. He heard her shuffling as she looked for the CDs, then the click of the disk as she put it in the portable player. She turned the volume down as “I Feel the Earth Move” started, and she placed her hand on his knee. “I like your chick music.”

“With my bare hands,” he warned playfully.

Without warning, her fingers dug into his flesh and her body spasmed. Max jerked the wheel and hit the brake, bringing the car to rest on the shoulder of the highway. Damn hard to do when it felt as if his knee was caught in a vise. His bones creaked under her hand, and when he got the car into park he tried frantically to dislodge her grip. He’d heard of people in the throes of a serious seizure injuring others. He didn’t need to limp through the Midwest.

“I warned you to stay away!” The voice that hissed from Bella’s mouth dismissed any notion she was having a simple mortal convulsion.

Max froze. “I’m…sorry?”

The Oracle crawled Bella’s body forward with jerky motions, like a freaky puppet. Max flattened himself against the driver’s door, feeling slightly ridiculous for being afraid of Bella.

That feeling fled when she twisted his knee. The bone and cartilage gave way with a sickening crunch, and he screamed.

“Every mile you come closer to me, the greater my power over you grows.” As if to illustrate the point, Bella’s body flew backward, her head striking the passenger window with a sickening thud.

Almost instantly, the Oracle’s hold receded. Bella blinked, winced in pain, then wrapped her arms around her middle and cried out in panic. “Did it happen again? Did she do it again?”

Struggling to keep his head straight despite the pain, Max reached for her to offer whatever comfort he could give. He was afraid that if he opened his mouth he would start crying like a baby, from the pain of his knee or the fright that he was once again unable to protect her.

“What did she do to me?” Bella slapped away his hands, her voice escalating in pitch. “Did you see what she did?”

Her panic took him aback. “Bella, you’re fine.”

“I am not fine!” She pounded the dashboard, then raked her hands across her bound hair. Then repeated, more quietly, “I am not fine.”

What was he supposed to do? He’d tried to hug her. That hadn’t worked. Now she was crying softly and doing a fine job of withdrawing, leaving him in a damned awkward position.

And there was his knee. It was broken, no doubt about it. If Bella went all weepy and catatonic, he wouldn’t be able to cart her to safety. Heck, he might not even be able to cart himself to safety.

And there was the Oracle’s warning. It wasn’t a threat he was going to take lightly.

A couple months ago, he would have hit the gas and laid on the horn to let the Oracle know they were coming. But with Bella in the car beside him, all he wanted to do was turn and run. Funny how a person can grow on you.

“Let’s stop for the night. I thought I saw a motel at the last exit. I can turn around up there.” He pointed to a gravel access lane across the median.

Pure disdain crinkled her brow above tear-filled eyes. “Was your brain damaged? We have gone perhaps two hundred miles tonight.”

“I’m not brain damaged, I—” He sighed. “I just don’t think it’s a good idea to go any farther until we know more about what the Oracle might be up to.”

“What?” All the fear fled from her expression. “You are afraid.”

“I am not afraid.” Of course, he would have to end up defending his bravery and probably his masculinity—though she had no room to doubt that—when all he was trying to do was keep her from getting killed. “Listen, my knee is completely shot. You just had a scary experience. Let’s find someplace where we can settle in. I’ll have to heal for a few days, anyway.”

“Your blood rations will run out,” she argued. “And I will not let you feed from me.”

He covered his frustration with an explosive laugh. “Oh, like I would want to. I prefer the taste of the human stuff. I’ve been known to stoop to cow, and I’ll have to if I run out. But I’ve never eaten dog before.”

A complete change came over her. The argumentative bitch disappeared, replaced by a mischievous girl. “Yes, you have.”

That was all it took—her easy acknowledgment of the dirty, wonderful things they’d done together—and he couldn’t be on the defensive anymore. “I don’t want to go any farther, because the Oracle threatened you when you were…out.”

“What did she say?” Bella’s chin jutted bravely, and she looked as if she was forcing herself not to cry again.

There was no point in protecting her from the truth, especially since it was making it so damn hard to actually protect her. “She said she’s going to get stronger the closer we come.”

“She said that?” Bella shook her head. “That cannot be. I do not remember it.”

“Do you remember anything from the last time she possessed you? Do you remember breaking my knee?” He hadn’t planned on raising his voice, but he was too angry, too rattled by the whole experience, to keep his cool. “Bella, I was sitting right here.”

They glared at each other in silence. He desperately wanted her to be the first to speak, but his stubbornness had frayed around the edges where she was concerned. “Listen, we can keep going and get you killed, or we can turn around and take a day or two to figure this out. At least give me the time to heal, so I have a fighting chance if you don’t make it.”

“Fine. We will stop tonight. But we cannot lose any more time. I do not think I can…” She waved a hand in the air. “I am tired. Speaking nonsense. You are right, we should turn around.”

He started the car and pulled back onto the highway, grateful for the sparse traffic. He managed to cross the lanes to the median without having to play Frogger. Once they were headed safely in the opposite direction, he reached over and turned the music back on.

Fucking Carole King, he thought with a grimace.

They drove in silence for a while, with only Tapestry to distract him, until finally, releasing a tired sigh, Bella spoke.

“I saw something.” Her shoulders sagged and a few strands of hair fell forward, obscuring her face from his view.

This uncharacteristically timid and bedraggled Bella was becoming far too common. He turned his attention back to the road. “Anything I should know?”

“The Oracle has arrived. She is in a place called Danvers. Have you ever heard of it?”

“Can’t say I have. Not to make any prejudgments based on nerdiness, but I bet Nathan has a book with lots of arcane facts about it.” Max reached toward the glove compartment, where his cell phone was stored.

Bella jumped, avoiding his hand. “I am sorry. I am still…guarded.”

“I understand.” But he didn’t. He hated the Oracle more than ever, simply for putting this distance between them.

Bella reached into the compartment and retrieved his phone, but she didn’t hand it over immediately. “There is more.”

He didn’t know how much more he could take. “Lay it on me.”

“She has sent something via courier. A package.” She hesitated. “It sounds crazy, but…I believe it could be her heart.”

“What?” This just kept getting better and better. Max shifted in his seat, hoping he could use his left foot to push the gas and brake pedals and take the strain off his broken knee. “Do you know where she sent it?”

Bella waited far too long before answering. When he looked at her, she stared back with hard eyes. “Where do you think she sent it?”

Max turned back to the road and clenched the steering wheel tighter.

Ten:

Sire

“W hat? Is she okay?”

I looked up from the incredibly dull book in my lap—no great sacrifice—at Nathan’s startled exclamation. The only time he ever sounded so worried was over something evil-forces related, or when we were running low on beer. Now, he stood in the kitchen, phone in hand, frown lines creasing his brow.

He noticed me watching him, and turned his back so I couldn’t see his expression. Still, no matter how much he lowered his voice, I could hear him.

“Not off the top of my head, I don’t.” The disdain in Nathan’s voice tipped me off. He was talking to Max. “How should I…I don’t know, get an atlas!”

I snorted. Nathan turned and gave me a sharp look, but it faded into concern as he listened to Max. “I have no idea what he would want with it. I know what I would do if I had it.”

I joined him in the kitchen. I didn’t know what I could do, other than stand beside him posing wordless questions with facial expressions and hand gestures. But at least I felt like I was doing something.

“Well, keep an eye on her. And let me know what you decide.” There was a long pause. “We’ll find out. Just stay put. Give yourself time to heal. Let us know if you need any help.”

Time to heal?

“What the hell happened?” I demanded when Nathan hung up the phone.

He rubbed his eyes. He was just as tired as I was. “The Oracle popped into Bella again. Used her to break Max’s knee.”

“Is she okay?” It was an unnecessary question. If something had happened to Bella, I’d have been able to hear Max screaming over the phone.

“She’s fine. It was nowhere near as bad as the last time. Well, for her, that is.” Nathan went to the cupboard over the sink and pulled down a bottle of Bailey’s Irish Cream. “I’m going to make coffee. And I’m going to put a lot of alcohol in it. You want some?”

“Yeah, I could use some.” I dropped into one of the kitchen chairs and plunged my fingers through my hair. It was only 2:00 a.m., but we’d spent the whole night inside and my internal clock was screwed. Even my scalp felt tired. “Well, we were expecting the Oracle to make another attack on them. They had to know it was coming, too. They’re smart.”

“Yeah, but Max isn’t thinking logically. He wants to turn around and come back.” Nathan slipped a filter into the coffeemaker and reached into the refrigerator for the can of coffee. “I almost wonder…”

“Wonder what?” Usually, if Nathan had a hunch, he was right.

He smiled and shook his head. “Nothing. I’m tired. My brain is misfiring.”

Once the coffeemaker was merrily dripping away, he headed toward the living room. I grabbed his arm as he passed. “I can’t face all those books without liquid fortification. Sit with me a minute, take a break.”

Reluctantly, he took the other chair. “Bella did have more information for us. The Oracle is going to a place called Danvers. And she sent a care package to the Soul Eater. Bella thinks the Oracle sent him her heart.”

“Why would she do something like that?” Truthfully, I was surprised she even had it. It seemed someone at the Movement would have taken it from her, in case she ever got loose. Right now would have been fine. But it wasn’t the first time the Movement had dropped the ball. “Well, let’s look at a map of Massachusetts, see if she picked Boston for a reason.”

“You’re right. That’s the logical place to start.” He exhaled noisily. “But you should call Cyrus, find out if he knows anything.”

“He probably won’t, but Dahlia will know. She’s still working for the Soul Eater.” I bit my lip, feeling somehow like Judas for what I was about to say. “I’m worried. That he might be…”

“A double agent?” Nathan tried to imitate a Sean Connery as James Bond accent and failed, Scottish though they both might be. “I’m sure this will come as no surprise to you, but I’ve considered it. Unfortunately, he’s the only source we have.”

I rested my chin on my hands. “Has your life ever been, you know, boring?”

“You mean, have I always been on the side of good, battling against the greatest evils known to vampire-kind?” He gave me a lazy grin. “No. I think that all came about when this bossy woman stepped into my shop about four months ago.”

“And nearly had her head chopped off by your juvenile-delinquent son.” Though I’d said it in jest, I wished I could unsay it. Not because I thought Nathan would take offense to my poking fun at Ziggy, but because we rarely, if ever, spoke of him. The pain was still too fresh.

Nathan laughed softly, lost in memory. I reached across the table to take his hand, but he stood and went to check on the coffee, which was doing fine on its own.

“Sorry,” I offered lamely.

He shook his head. “Don’t be. You’re trying to acclimate me to talking about him. It’s for my own good. There are times I forget he’s gone, and talking about it, especially here…”

“Makes it more real.” I knew exactly how he felt. When I’d first gotten the call about my parents’ accident, I could have run across my college campus screaming, “My parents are dead, my parents are dead.” But once I’d gone home for the funeral, I’d clammed up. For good.

I didn’t want that to be the case with Nathan. “You can’t just hold on to things forever. You tried that before. Look what it got you.”

“I know.” He stared at the liquid dripping into the carafe. We waited a long time in silence until the coffee was done. Then he poured out two mugs and spiked them both with the liquor. “Blood?”

“Please.” I watched as he poured a little blood into each mug, and waited for him to bring them to the table. “Muddy pink. Just the way I like it.”

He smiled. “Do you know how many times Ziggy accidentally drank human blood?”

I had to remember to smile encouragingly, lest Nathan clam up again. Gross, though.

“I used to trick him, too. You’d be amazed at how much corn syrup and red food coloring look like blood when you mix them together.” Nathan got that faraway look on his face again. “Carrie, am I betraying him?”

That wasn’t the question I expected. “How do you mean?”

He looked down at his mug. “Shouldn’t I want to kill him? For what he did to Ziggy? A part of me is ashamed for not wanting retribution. But isn’t it better, at least in the long run, that I don’t feel that responsibility?”

“You’re not betraying him.” I took his hands in mine. “It hasn’t been that long. I’m actually impressed that you’ve gotten beyond blaming yourself. It’s much healthier that way. And besides…”

How much should I tell him? That Ziggy had actually grown to like Cyrus? That he’d respected him and trusted him in small ways? That it had been me who’d unwittingly killed him, regardless of whose fangs had been involved?

There was no way Nathan was ready to hear that. “Ziggy wasn’t a vengeful kind of person. And he would understand that you’re just doing what has to be done.”

Nathan nodded. “Well, I’m not doing what needs to be done now, am I? I’m having coffee with you.”

He stood and made a shooing motion toward the living room. “So, what are your theories about this heart business? You’d be the foremost expert in losing one.”

“You have no idea.” I stood and kissed him. His mouth tasted like the coffee, sweet and coppery.

When I pulled back, he smiled. “You’re not going to lure me away from research with sex. I like books too much.”

I rolled my eyes, then collected my mug and followed him to the living room. How did he always see the ulterior motives behind my cunning actions? “Well, I suppose the Soul Eater could consume the Oracle’s soul by eating the heart, couldn’t he?”

“But why would the Oracle send it to him then?” Nathan groaned as he settled onto the couch. “God, this is uncomfortable.”

My back protested as I sank into the armchair. “Well, if she didn’t know he was going to eat her soul—”

Nathan gave me a withering look to point out my stupidity. Of course the Oracle would know what the Soul Eater intended to do with her heart. She could see into the future.

“What about this sword Cyrus mentioned?” I moved on quickly to avoid the inevitable taunting. “Maybe it’s a metaphor, and her heart has something to do with it?”

Nathan took a sip from his mug. “Could be. We won’t know until you talk to Cyrus. Do you think he’s awake?”

I looked at the clock. “I don’t know. He works third shift, so he’s probably not even home.”

“If he is, I won’t lose too much sleep over disturbing his. Why don’t you call him?”

I went to the kitchen and dialed Cyrus’s number. After two rings, the answering machine picked up.

“Hi, Cyrus, it’s me. Carrie.” I winced at how lame I sounded. “Listen, we got more news about what the Oracle is up to. I could really use your connection to Dahlia right now. But be careful with her, okay? I mean, I don’t want her to know that you’re looking for the information, because she’ll know that I know that she’s working for the Soul Eater.”

I hesitated a minute before I hung up the phone. It’s a shame they didn’t make answering machines with a “never mind, erase that” feature.

“And maybe after that, you two can go to the soda fountain and get a milk shake,” Nathan said without looking up from his book.

I wished I had something to throw at him.

We spent the rest of the night thumbing through texts. I’d become a bit fed up with this hurry-up-and-wait scenario. The sun came up just about the time my eyes were too tired to keep reading. “I’m sorry, but I have to go to bed.”

Nathan closed the book he’d been thumbing through, and rubbed his eyes. “I’m right behind you.”

As we climbed into bed, I’d never been more appreciative of the too-soft mattress and worn sheets. “You can go ahead and let me sleep through tomorrow night.”

He flopped against the pillows with a loud groan. “No way. If I’m going to suffer through another night like this, so are you.”

I snuggled against him, rubbing my face against his T-shirt. It was thoroughly bizarre, going to sleep with him like a normal couple. We’d spent so long trying to maintain our independence from each other that the only way we’d ever wound up sleeping in the same spot was if we got naked and sweaty together. Sleeping beside each other, with no sex involved, clothed in sleepwear, seemed more intimate than lying together in a naked tangle of limbs.

He must have sensed part of my thoughts through the blood tie, because he chuckled. “Don’t get used to this. Now that I can finally have you without the inevitable guilt that I’m using you, you’re not going to leave this bed for days.”

It took me a minute to decipher his words in his sleep-thickened accent. “You felt guilty about using me?” I’d known he felt guilty.

“Oh, aye. I’m a Catholic. We feel guilty all the time.” He reached up and clicked off the bedside lamp, muttered something, then fell onto the pillows and was instantly asleep.

Though Nathan had no trouble sleeping through the day, I hovered stubbornly on the edge of unconsciousness, trying to stay alert for Cyrus’s call. Every noise or creak of the apartment woke me, and once I even stumbled from bed before realizing that the phone I heard ring had just been a dream.

Finally, because I feared my tense state was disturbing Nathan’s rest, I wrapped up in his bathrobe and padded to the living room.

The day was overcast, so I chanced a peek through the blinds. The startling brightness of late afternoon seared my retinas, and I blinked away blood tears. From the living room I could see the roof of Cyrus’s house, if I craned my neck, but I couldn’t see anything in detail. There was no sense going blind when I wouldn’t learn anything new.

I glanced at the clock above the dinette table. Four-thirty. Why hadn’t he called back?

I decided I would phone every half hour, until I got an answer. At sundown, if I still hadn’t heard from him, I would go investigate. All I ever got were busy signals.

By the time Nathan woke, at six, I was already dressed and pacing the floor, waiting to be absolutely certain it was safe to go out.

“You’re afraid Dahlia changed him,” Nathan said over the rim of his breakfast mug.

I knew he’d picked that up through the blood tie. “He said he doesn’t want to be a vampire again, and he’s got a good reason not to be. But something’s wrong, and I can’t help but jump to conclusions.”

“Maybe not.” Nathan set his blood aside and came to stand behind me as I dialed the phone again. His big, strong hands kneaded my shoulders as I listened to the insistent busy tone.

“He could have a human girlfriend, or boyfriend, he’s staying with. He might be grocery shopping or having lunch or doing any of the million things humans do every day. You remember those, don’t you?” Nathan punctuated his question with a kiss on my neck, then added cheerfully, “Maybe he got arrested.”

I knew Nathan was just trying to help, but I couldn’t shake the feeling something was very, deeply wrong. I shrugged off his hands and stuck my arm behind the blinds to check the burn factor. Getting lower.

“Something is wrong. When he was in the desert, I could feel him sometimes. I don’t know how it works or why it does, but I just have this…It’s not the blood tie anymore, but it’s intuition. I’m still connected to him, and I know something isn’t right.”

“Do you want me to go with you?” All the humor had left Nathan’s tone.

I shook my head. “You should stay here, in case he calls. And if something has happened, if he’s changed…I don’t think he’ll hurt me, but he would hurt you.”

I tried the phone twice more before realizing I’d actually have to go to his house. I kissed Nathan goodbye, took the stake he gave me “just in case,” and headed out the door in a sweatshirt with the hood pulled up to protect my face from the last rays of sun that gilded the clouds.

Cyrus didn’t answer the buzzer rigged up near the back door, but a sliver of light showed through one of the basement windows. I forced the door—not a difficult feat even for someone without enhanced vampire strength—and clattered down the stairs in a rush.

What I saw at the bottom stopped me in my tracks. Cyrus’s apartment door, open a crack.

I swallowed my fear and stepped forward, knocking timidly. The door creaked and swayed a little, and I choked as I called, “Is anybody in there?”

No answer. I gave the door a push. It opened wider. At least a body wasn’t blocking it. The bathroom light was on, illuminating a wedge of the main room. The cupboards on the far wall hung open, their shelves bare. The dishes and nonperishable food were scattered on the floor. The cushions were thrown from the couch. A high-pitched, three-tone whine sounded from somewhere, followed by a muffled, “If you would like to make a call, please hang up and dial again” announcement. I spotted a loop of coiled phone cord poking out from beneath one shredded pillow on the unfolded sofa bed. I grabbed it and reeled in the phone and very broken answering machine.

My message.

A sob clawed its way up my throat as my brain reconstructed the events that must have led to the destruction around me. Of course, Dahlia would have heard the message. And of course, she would have flown into a rage and wrecked the place. But had she taken Cyrus with her when she’d gone? Had he staggered to the hospital or called the police for help?

I wrote the latter off. With my senses on hyperalert all day, I would have heard the sirens.

I paced the floor, breathing deeply, willing my blood to stop beating in my ears. Then I caught the coppery, warm scent of external blood. Maybe he’d left a trail. If it was fresh enough, I could follow it.

Two steps out the door, I remembered the one room I hadn’t checked.

How I’d missed the bathroom, I would never know. The cracked tile floor was coated with blood. Scarlet handprints smeared the walls. It was like a scene out of a horror movie, and splayed right in the middle of the floor was Cyrus.

“No!” I knelt at his side in what seemed like way too much blood for one human being to lose and still be alive. My brain flashed back to the night I’d first seen him, in a bloody mess much worse than this. But he’d been a vampire then. I checked for a pulse, though it seemed futile. He must have lain here all day. Unbelievably, he was still alive.

His eyes slowly opened, slid from side to side before focusing on me. “Carrie?”

I laid one hand on his chest to gauge his shallow respiration. “I’m here.”

My fingers were sticky with blood when I pulled them back. A dozen deep cuts scored his arms, to the bone in some places. Three long slashes banded his chest.

“I thought—” He struggled to breathe, wincing as the wounds on his torso parted with the motion. “I thought you were…Mouse.”

My vision swam with tears. “No. No, you’re not going to see her for a long time.”

“Don’t…lie. Carrie.” Red bubbled past his lips. “Dahlia knows. Everything.”

“I’m so sorry.” I stroked his hair back from his forehead, not sure whether the action was too familiar or if I wasn’t being tender enough. They taught comforting the dying in med school, but somehow it always got lost in memorizing muscle groups and dissecting cadavers.

Dying. Cyrus was dying. Right now, as I touched him, he faded more with each passing second. There was nothing I could do to stop it.

“I needed…to tell…I know where he is.” He coughed and more blood spilled from his lips. I was amazed he had any left.

He couldn’t speak anymore. Though he still breathed, his eyes rolled back in his head.

I was alone, with a dying human, in an unfamiliar place. My immortality felt false and traitorous. I might as well have been a fixture in this bathroom, for all my humanity.

I needed Nathan. Desperately needed him. I crawled to the phone in the other room, because it seemed I wasn’t abandoning Cyrus as long as I didn’t stand and walk away. My hands trembled as I punched in the numbers.

Nathan picked up on the first ring. “Carrie, what’s going on?”

A calm wave flowed over me through the blood tie. He’d felt my shock and sorrow; he’d just waited for me to reach out to him for help.

“He’s dead. Or almost.” Tears spilled from my eyes and my breath caught on a hiccup as I tried to drag it in. I had the fleeting thought that I shouldn’t grieve for Cyrus so openly to Nathan, considering their shared past. I dismissed it. No matter what I tried to show Nathan, he wouldn’t be blind to my feelings. “Oh God, Nathan. He’s going to die!”

“What happened? Can you do anything for him?” The earnestness in his voice brought more tears to my eyes. “Should I bring you the med kit?”

Staring down at my blood-drenched clothes, I felt bile rise in my throat. I closed my eyes. “There’s nothing I can do.”

Unless…

There was an audible hitch in Nathan’s breathing.

“Forget it, forget I thought that.” My words tumbled out in a rush as I desperately tried to cover my mental ramblings.

“Carrie…” Nathan’s voice held a pitiful note of pleading.

I wanted to slam the receiver back into the cradle and flee from the scene of my heinous crime. It would have been the sensible thing to do. Instead, I kept talking. “He knows something. He knows where the Soul Eater is, but he couldn’t tell me.”

“We can find another way—”

“He’s going to die!” I gripped the phone so hard the plastic creaked.

The silence seemed endless. For all I knew, this could have been a pointless argument. Cyrus might already be dead.

“I’ll be over in a minute with the med kit.” Nathan’s voice sounded tight, strained. The tension shattered with a guttural sob. “Please, don’t do anything until I get there!”

But it was far too late. The seed of the evil notion had been planted, and I would see it through to harvest.

“I’m sorry, Nathan.” I hung up the phone with shaking hands and slowly stood. Every step I took toward the bathroom seemed to require more effort than the last, as though I were wading into deeper and deeper water. When I finally reached Cyrus’s side, I knew I couldn’t hesitate. He was so close to death I could feel the angel in the room with us.

“Sorry to send you back empty-handed,” I muttered, rolling up one of my sleeves. There was a cup with a toothbrush and a razor on the edge of the sink. My hands shook so badly I knocked it the floor when I reached for it.

The noise, coupled with my jostling of him while I groped for the razor, brought Cyrus back from the brink for a moment. His eyes searched my face, his mouth worked soundlessly as understanding cascaded over him.

He managed one word. “No.”

I flicked the blade across my wrist. The pain surprised me. In the movies, it never looks as though it hurts. The blood didn’t well up gracefully. It spurted, hot, wet jets from my torn veins.

He gathered enough strength to rise on his elbows and pull back. His mouth clamped in a tight line, and I had to force his jaw open with my free hand.

“No,” he begged, trying to spit out the blood that had already fallen on his lips. “Not this…”

I couldn’t bear to hear it, to hear him say he would rather die than let me save him. I gripped his shoulder to pin him to the ground, and pressed my slashed wrist to his mouth to stifle his protests.

Cyrus had once warned me not to test his will. His might have been strong, but mine was stronger.

He stopped struggling, jaw going slack beneath my wrist, but he didn’t draw the blood into his mouth willingly. It didn’t matter. All he needed was to ingest some.

The process didn’t appear to be working. I’d never changed someone, so I didn’t know exactly what I was supposed to be feeling. There was no blood tie forming, though, no bond I could notice. All I felt was light-headed from lack of blood, and Cyrus seemed to fade faster and faster. His chest no longer moved with breath. His face turned blue.

What mistake had I made? My blood should have made him a vampire, the way his had made me when our blood had exchanged in the morgue.

Exchanged! Carrie, how could you be so stupid?

I needed to drink his blood—if there was any left—to complete the process. I just hoped it worked out of order. Pressing my lips to one of the gaping wounds on his chest, I gently touched my tongue to the gory, exposed muscle there. We’d accidentally exchanged blood when he’d turned me, so little I hadn’t even noticed it. A few drops now had to do the trick. I sucked against the wound and a hot trickle slipped past my lips.

The change was immediate, unpleasant and violent. Cyrus’s body bucked against the floor. Pain ripped through my chest, my head, my heart. I think I screamed. White-hot light flashed behind my eyes, and I collapsed on top of Cyrus’s dead, yet somehow curiously alive, body.

A familiar, yet different channel opened in my head. It was Cyrus, and he was filled with hate, even as he drifted between the worlds of the living and dead.

He was my fledgling.

I was his sire.

Eleven:

Fools Rush In

A s much as Max hated being cooped up in the Prancing Pony Motor Inn, he was relieved that so far, the Oracle hadn’t messed with Bella.

In fact, Bella seemed to actually enjoy their captivity. During the day she slept at his side, except for the few times she’d sneaked away to buy food from the gas station across the road. At night, she took almost domestic pleasure in caring for him, propping pillows beneath his injured knee and warming bags of blood in hot water from the tap.

“I think the diet of Twinkies and chips is agreeing with you,” he said with a laugh when she brought him his breakfast on the third night.

She smiled and helped him sit up, fluffing the pillows behind his back as she did. “Perhaps. Perhaps I am just a nice person and you never gave me credit for that.”

He shook his head. “You’re not a nice person.”

She slapped his injured knee lightly, and he yelped.

“Not nice at all,” he grumbled, taking the bag of blood from her and biting off a corner.

He took a few long swallows and carefully lowered the bag, pinching off the opening between his fingers. Motel staff, no matter how low-rent the establishment, didn’t tend to appreciate blood on their bedding. And Bella didn’t have to look so damn disgusted when he ate.

“So, what’s with you lately? Why are you so…happy?” He adjusted his wounded leg gingerly. It would be healed in a day or two more, but he planned to milk the injury for as long as he could, until he figured out what to do about the Oracle situation. In the time he’d wasted so far, he’d consulted an atlas and found a town called Danvers just north of Boston. Next to Salem, oh joy of joys, and he was sure it wasn’t just a coincidence. The thought of coming up against a horde of witches like Dahlia made his whole body tense, but it wasn’t as if Bella and he were helpless. When not puking her guts out, she had some fierce magical powers.

Unaware that he’d just counted her as a part of their arsenal, Bella reclined on the bed beside him, her head propped on her arms. “I am happy to be spending what could be our last days doing something useful.”

It took a moment for her words to sink in. When they did, he had an overwhelming urge to push her off the bed. “You know, that’s just great.”

If he could have gotten up and stalked away from her, he would have, but if he could do that, he could drive the car, and she’d have them on the road in an hour.

She sat up, a heartbreaking, wounded look on her face. “I do not understand. Why are you angry?”

“Because you won’t stop harping on this death shit!” He pounded the mattress with his fist. “You’re not going to die.”

“You do not know that,” she insisted, her tone a little too reasonable. “Neither one of us knows when death will come for us.”

“You don’t know shit!” He sat up in turn. “And if you think you’re going to die, you don’t know much about me.”

“You cannot prevent everything.” She put her hand on his arm. “It could be out of your hands.”

“Is this something the Oracle told you? Because she could be trying to trick you.” How could Bella blindly believe anything that crazy bitch planted in her head?

“I have feared her since the moment I first saw her, the day I came to the Movement.” Bella gave a soft laugh. “It is not unlikely she will be the death of me. Or you.”

She knelt beside him and tenderly put her hands on his face, turning his head so she could look into his eyes. He didn’t resist her.

“I am not lying. But she did show me something.” A tear rolled down Bella’s cheek. “A long time ago, when I first saw her. She showed me that I would find you.”

Injured knee be damned. Max pulled Bella into his arms and kissed her, hard, as if the intensity of his physical actions could keep her safe from her own mortality.

“I thought you were hurt,” she whispered against his cheek when his mouth moved from her lips to her jaw.

He smiled and brushed her ear with his lips. “Not so much as I let on.”

Trying to ignore the gentle pressure against his chest, he kissed her mouth again. She turned her head.

“What’s the matter?” he asked, leaning up on his elbows. But he already knew.

“Why would you lie?”

He groaned and flopped onto his back, sucking in a breath at the surprising pain that ripped up his leg. “I didn’t lie. I really am hurt. Just not as badly as I let on.”

“You pretended to be hurt more than you are. That is a lie,” she said quietly, accusingly.

“No, it’s not, really.” How could he explain it to her? “I just didn’t want to go any further on this trip before we got some concrete information. I don’t want to rush headlong into something bad.”

She shook her head. “We do not have to rush headlong. We simply need to get there. It is a long drive. How can you waste our time so?”

“I’m not wasting our time, I’m preserving your life!” He swore. If she wasn’t going to let him protect her from the Oracle, he wasn’t going to protect her from the truth. “She told me, through you, that the closer we come to her, the more power she has over us.”

“I know this!” Bella sat up, uttering some angry words in Italian. “I swear you think I am a child, Max.”

She rarely spoke his name, at least, not to him. He covered his face with his hands. “Bella, listen to me. You’re afraid of the Oracle. You admit she’s a danger to us.”

Bella nodded.

“Maybe, just maybe then, if we don’t go find her, we won’t die.” He bracketed her face with his palms. “We can get in the car and drive. It doesn’t matter where we go, as long as it’s away from her.”

Bella’s hands came up to cover his, to grip his arms and gently force them down. “What about Nathan and Carrie? They are depending on us to help them.”

“We can throw out the cell phone and forget them.” He didn’t know what shocked him more, the fact he suggested leaving his friends—and the world—at the mercy of the Oracle and the Soul Eater, or the desperation required to talk about it. Or what that desperation meant. “We can just forget everything. No one will ever find us.”

“No.” She lifted his hands to her lips and kissed them. “We would always be running from our pasts.”

He shook his head. “I’m not going to take you to her. Not if you have this feeling of dread. Not if you’re certain you’re going to die. Never gonna happen.”

“If you do not, I will find a way by myself!” Closing her eyes, clearly an attempt to calm herself, Bella asked, “Why does this bother you so? You used to want to kill me.”

“Well, things have changed.” He’d rather pull out his tongue than confess any more feelings for her, but he didn’t want her to die, either. Maybe it would take some kind of grand gesture to knock some sense into her.

Maybe that was exactly what she was looking for.

He closed his own eyes, because if there was any mocking in her expression he wouldn’t be able to stand it. “Bella, I—”

“I love you,” she blurted, her voice hitching, as if she couldn’t believe she’d said it, or she wanted to take it back.

Opening his eyes, he caught a glimpse of Bella as he’d never seen her before. Frightened, not of an enemy or unseen force, but of her own actions. Terrified of rejection. Ashamed that she’d displayed human feelings.

His chest constricted so painfully he wondered if it were possible for vampires to have heart attacks. He didn’t know what to say, didn’t have any words. What could he say when faced with such an unlikely reflection of himself?

Taking his silence for rejection, she looked down at her hands. “Now you will mock me.”

“No.” His voice was oddly hoarse. He cleared his throat. “At least, not for this.”

“You are mocking me now.” Her shoulders slumped. She didn’t wear defeat well.

Having never been in love—at least, not this way—he found himself in wholly uncharted territory. It wasn’t fair he had to feel so vulnerable.

“I’m not making fun of you.” He slid two fingers under her chin to turn her face to his. “If I had said what you just did, would you have made fun of me?”

She lifted one eyebrow in a mocking expression, and for a second the Bella he knew was back. Just as quickly, though, she grew serious. “If you had said it to me, it would have been different. Because I would have wanted to hear it.”

“I wanted to hear it.” He dropped his hand and shook his head. “But something tells me you won’t believe that.”

“Why would I?” She laughed bitterly. “You wish me to believe that you do not love anyone. That you drown yourself in meaningless sex. That was fine, when it was what I wanted from you. But you wanted more from me than that, and I would not give it. And now, you will reject me as a punishment.”

“I didn’t want more then,” he insisted, out of habit. “I mean…I used to do the meaningless sex thing. Because I did love someone, once. He died. And no, it wasn’t a gay thing. He was my sire. I know you think the whole vampire thing is disgusting, and I know you’re not going to believe this, but the blood tie…does something to you. And when he died…It was easier for me to think I wasn’t lonely if I was going home with a different woman every night. Then things happened with you. And when I tried the meaningless sex thing again, it just didn’t work.”

He groaned and swung his legs over the side of the bed, sitting up. “I better stop talking. I’m just fucking this up more.”

“You are not fucking up anything.” Color rose in her cheeks. He realized he rarely heard her use profanity. “Max, we must talk about this or we will not be happy.”

“We won’t be happy anyway. We’re going to die, remember?” The bitter retort rode a wave of bile up his throat, and he choked it back. “God, this is really happening to me again. I’m gonna fall for you and some horrible shit is going to happen.”

She put her arms around his shoulders, rested her cheek against his. “Let’s not think about that now.”

He shook his head. “This isn’t how I wanted it to happen.”

“It is not how I wanted it to happen, either.” Her voice was a whisper that tickled his ear.

His mouth went dry at the thought of the month he’d spent apart from her, a month he would never be able to reclaim. “We wasted so much time.”

“Then let’s not waste any more.” She buried her face against his neck and he felt the hot wetness of her tears. “Do you love me?”

He twisted slightly to face her. “What a stupid question. Of course I love you.”

“Then let’s not waste any more time,” she repeated softly, pulling her shirt over her head.

If he had walked away from her, maybe he could have rebuilt some of his armor. Maybe he could have protected himself a little from the pain of her death.

But he couldn’t walk away, and he wouldn’t force himself to.

I don’t know how much time passed between when I blacked out in Cyrus’s bathroom until I woke up in Nathan’s bed, but I felt as if I’d aged twenty years. My head throbbed and the faint light in the room seemed to have a personal grudge against me. My muscles were painfully tight, like I’d done a grueling workout without stretching properly. I groaned and my throat felt as though it would crack and bleed, it was so dry.

“You’re awake. Thank God.”

Nathan. I turned my head and tried to focus, but the light assaulted me. “Where’s Cyrus?”

Nathan stroked the back of my hand. “He’s on the couch. He woke up a few hours ago, but he’s still healing from what she did to him.”

“He lived.” I took a deep breath, wincing at the soreness in my chest. “Well, that’s something.”

“Are you okay?” Nathan’s voice held an edge of neediness that set my teeth grinding.

Pathetic as ever.

“That wasn’t me.” It was Cyrus’s voice in my head, criticizing Nathan.

“What wasn’t?” Nathan sat beside me on the bed. The mattress dipped and the axis of my world twisted.

“Nothing, nothing.”

Tell him you can hear me. It will kill him.

I covered my ears. “You shut up!”

Gently, Nathan put his hands on my shoulders, but I barely felt it. “Calm down. It’s just the blood tie. Take a deep breath.”

This was the blood tie? Oh, I had plenty, and I mean plenty of experience with the fledgling end of things, hearing projected thoughts and viewing selected images, maybe even sharing a memory or two. And I’d instinctively shielded my thoughts from both my sires. I didn’t realize how crystal clear they would have come through to them.

“Is this what you felt when you accidentally sired me?” I forced my eyes open so I could see Nathan as he answered. At the sight of him, a curl of disgust and shame wound through me. I couldn’t tell if it was mine or Cyrus’s.

Nathan nodded. “That’s how I knew we’d formed a blood tie between us. Your babbling.”

“I do not babble,” I snapped, raking my hair back from my face.

“You did then.” He pointed to the bedside table, where his pet fish had lived before its peaceful demise from old age. “A lot of it was about Shish’s tiny goldfish memory span.”

“Mmm. That was my pet metaphor for a while.” I drew my knees up to my chest and rested my arms on them. “How long have I been out this time?”

“Probably not as long as you think. About twelve hours. And you weren’t completely out. When I found you, I was able to rouse you enough to walk to the van. He wasn’t as lucky.” Nathan looked away. “Why did you do it?”

“I had to.” At the memory of Cyrus’s wounds, I felt my hands clench to fists. Nathan had saved me in the alley when I’d been damaged beyond repair, but he wouldn’t understand this. If it were anyone else but Cyrus, he would know exactly why. “He has information about the Soul Eater.”

Nathan shrugged. “We could have found him on our own. So, why?”

Tell him why.

“No.” I clutched my pounding head, fingers digging into my skull like daggers.

But Cyrus was relentless. Tell him I begged you not to. Tell him you took me when I was so close to death it almost killed you. Tell him you’d rather have me than him.

“He’s the same. He’s exactly the same.” I looked hopelessly to Nathan, but any trace of pity was gone from his face.

With cold resolve, he stood. “This isn’t real, Carrie. But it’s real enough that I won’t sympathize with you over your bad choices.”

“Not real?” I asked, hating the plaintive whine in my voice. But he stalked from the room.

I stood to follow him, but I couldn’t find the door. That’s when I realized I was dreaming. I stumbled, my legs twisting, and fell. Unable to catch myself, I hit the bare wood floor head-on, my face shattering like glass.

Then I woke up.

I gingerly felt my face. Still there, but I was alone. I eased out of bed, every muscle in my body protesting, and stumbled to the dresser for support.

“I packed your bags.” Nathan stood in the doorway. His clothes were rumpled and dark circles ringed his eyes.

“Why were you in my dream?” I asked, hating the tremor in my voice.

“I could talk to you there without…Well, it was just safer to discuss what we had to in here.” He tapped his temple with his forefinger, stopping midmotion. “I’m your sire. I have a duty to help you when you need it. And you’re going to need it. But I didn’t trust myself with you. I’m too angry.”

My throat constricted. There were so many things I wanted to say, but there was no point. I’d known, I must have known, that Nathan wouldn’t just blindly accept this. Cyrus had been a monster. The extent of his cruelty toward Nathan was such that even he didn’t know the whole of it.

But I loved Nathan. Things had just become right between us, or at least close to right.

“You fucked it up, Carrie.” He read my thoughts as easily as I’d heard Cyrus’s in my dream.

Nathan jerked his thumb toward the hallway. “When you’re ready, he’s in there.”

I looked toward my old bedroom. “Is he awake?”

“Has been for a while. I’ve got him tied down. He’s been out of control.” Nathan’s tone implied he hadn’t exactly appreciated having to deal with my problem.

“Thank you.” I took a few, wobbling steps forward, forcing myself to ignore the shakiness in my limbs. My clothes, stiff with dried blood, rustled as I moved. I knew Nathan was behind me, and I made a conscious decision not to react when I saw Cyrus. That decision flew right out the window the second I stepped into my room.

Sometime in the night, Nathan had moved my bed up from storage. With the new bookshelves in place, the bed took up the entire floor space, except for a small square near the doorway. It was like a mausoleum crypt, and Cyrus lay on the bed, wide-awake, bungee cords and loops of duct tape securing him there like Hannibal Lecter on his little cart. All he needed was the muzzle.

I gave Nathan a brief, openmouthed look of dismay before rushing to my fledgling’s side.

I’d heard that new mothers, after enduring the prolonged pain and exertion of labor, feel oddly detached from their offspring. I’d always thought there must be something profoundly screwed up in these people that they didn’t feel an instant connection with the child they’d brought into the world. I could definitely sympathize with them as I knelt beside the bed. All my former notions of Cyrus—John Doe, my sire, a wounded, grieving human—fled. Though the blood tie connected us, he was a stranger. When his cold blue eyes raked over me, I shuddered.

“Why?” His demand scraped from an obviously dry throat.

Rather than answer Cyrus’s accusation, I turned to Nathan with one of my own. “You didn’t feed him?”

“You’re lucky I didn’t stake him.”

“It’s true,” Cyrus stated in a voice that was at once chillingly familiar and repulsively alien. “He stood in the doorway for a good twenty minutes, trying to work up the nerve.”

He’s the same. He’s exactly the same. My dream words mocked me with their truth.

“What did you expect, Carrie?” Nathan turned from me, disgusted. “I’ll get him some blood. Stay clear of him, in case he breaks free.”

“I can get it,” I offered, backing away from the bed.

Nathan’s tone warned me against arguing. “Stay clear of him.”

Stay clear? There wasn’t enough room to stay clear of anything. But his warning proved unnecessary. Cyrus didn’t struggle. He lay perfectly docile, fixing me with an accusing stare.

I could remain silent only so long. “Listen, Cyrus, I’m—”

“Spare me your self-serving apologies.” His voice was flat, emotionless.

Stunned and hurt, I brushed away unexpected tears. “If I hadn’t done it, you would have died.”

“That crossed my mind, yes.” He looked away, up at the ceiling. “If I had died, I could have been with her again. I think I tried to tell you that. In fact, I distinctly remember trying to fight you off.”

My stomach churned at the memory of his dying words. “I had to. Not for me. Only you can tell us where your father is.” It sounded as lame as it had when I’d said it in my dream. Was that really the reason I’d forced my blood down his throat?

“A brothel in Nevada. Now give me my mortal self back,” he snarled, baring his fangs.

I’d never really been afraid of Cyrus before now. When he’d been my sire, I’d feared my reactions to him and what he might manipulate me to do, but I’d never considered he’d physically harm me. He was different now. This Cyrus wouldn’t seductively lead me to a destruction of my own making. He’d destroy me outright.

“You know I can’t do that,” I whispered, my tongue like lead in my mouth. I moved toward the bed, drawn by some strange instinct to be near him.

“Get away from him.”

At Nathan’s frighteningly calm warning, I turned. That was all it took. Cyrus tore free of his bindings. One arm, empowered by rage and reborn vampire strength, locked around my neck. The other grasped my forehead. He intended to break my neck.

Nathan didn’t let it get that far. A stake flew from his hand. It missed Cyrus completely and embedded in the wall. He pulled another from his back pocket and flung it. This one struck Cyrus in the arm. With a sickening crack, the long bones of his forearm separated and he released his hold, screaming.

I dropped to the floor, my head spinning from shock and the force of Cyrus’s hatred rocking through me. Nathan pinned him to the bed, a knee in his chest.

“Just like old times, Nolen?” Cyrus laughed. “I remember you liked it rough.”

I squeezed my eyes shut tight. There was a thud, like someone dropping a side of beef onto wet pavement, and Cyrus was silent.

Nathan stood over me, nursing his sore fist. “Why did you do it?”

“I couldn’t let him die.” The admission came from numb lips. It hurt, but the pain was distant. “I still…”

Nathan was silent for a moment, considering. When he spoke again, I wished I hadn’t heard him. “Get out.”

“What?” The shock and hurt were almost overwhelming. But what had I expected? That he would welcome Cyrus into his home with open arms? “I don’t have anywhere to go. You know that.”

“And you knew it before you turned him. That means you made an informed decision.” Nathan turned away from me, and when he did I felt the blood tie between us seal shut.

I tried a new tactic. “If we leave, where do you think he’ll go? He’s going to end up with his father again. Maybe I will, too.”

Nathan seemed to consider this a moment. No matter how he tried to block it, I felt his panic and his primal need to protect me—his fledgling, not his pseudo girlfriend—from his sire. After a long moment, he sighed wearily and gestured to the stake jutting from Cyrus’s arm. “Get me the medical kit. It’s in the living room.”

It certainly wasn’t the reaction I was expecting from him. I stumbled out and retrieved the heavy red toolbox that contained our medical supplies.

When I brought it to Nathan, he didn’t bother with so much as a thank-you. He focused solely on Cyrus, who twisted in pain on the bed as he slowly came to some watered-down form of consciousness. “You’re going to be all right. Hold on a minute and we’ll take care of the pain.”

Throwing me a worried look, Nathan filled a syringe with a local anesthetic. “This is going to need stitching. Can you do it?”

I wanted to say, Can you refrain from embedding more projectiles in my fledgling? Instead, I folded my arms across my chest, tightening them to hold in my anger. “Do you have a needle driver?”

Nathan made a sustained suspense noise as he dug through the tool kit, then pulled out the shiny, scissorslike implement. “This?”

“Yes. I need to go wash my hands.” When he rolled his eyes, I threw up my arms helplessly. “It’s a habit. My parents didn’t spend the better part of their stock earnings putting me through med school for me to just forget simple sanitary precautions.”

It would also give me some time to get my head together. I’d expected Nathan to be difficult about this whole situation. I loved him, but I wasn’t living under the delusion that he was abnormally selfless and cooperative. Still, a part of me had held out hope that this wouldn’t destroy any slim chance we had together.

It couldn’t be over. Not because of this.

And yet, did I really care? I had Cyrus.

I knew it.

Firmly, I shoved the thought—mine and his—from my mind. I didn’t have Cyrus. He was my fledgling, and I had a duty to do by him, and that was it. At least I thought I had a duty toward him. I wasn’t exactly sure what a sire was supposed to do. Cyrus had manipulated and tortured me. Nathan had given me a place to live and protection from the numerous dangers of an undead life. It seemed as if I should try and do the latter, not the former.

At the same time, I understood the seductive power I held. Cyrus had abused the blood tie, and now I had the opportunity for the sweetest kind of revenge—to give him a taste of what he’d done to me. And I understood, too, why he’d done it. Because he could. Because the ability was there.

I dried my hands and returned. Nathan stood silently outside the door: Cyrus lay on the bed, seemingly unaffected by the fact that he was bleeding all over the place. Nathan had a dark look on his face, but I ignored it and set to my task, still able to go on autopilot months after abandoning my medical career.

And oddly, as I worked, Nathan’s feelings of anger subsided, giving way to…pity?

You pity him? What, I’m the big, mean sire and you’re on his side now? I made a face and blocked the resentment I felt from flowing through our tie.

I’m not on his side. There aren’t any sides.

I looked up at Nathan. He stepped into the room, his arms crossed as he watched me repair Cyrus’s wounds.

Pursing my lips, I looked back to my work. You act like you’re more worried about him than I am.

Right now, focusing on him is all that’s keeping me from walking out of here. Nathan handed me a clean towel so I could wipe away some of the blood.

You’re supposed to hate him. I clipped the thread and moved on to the next site that needed my attention.

I know what he’s going through.

I didn’t need to ask what Nathan meant. He’d become a vampire against his will, just as I’d made Cyrus a vampire against his will.

Nathan gave me a pointed look and went to his bedroom.

I finished my work in stony silence. Occasionally, I glanced at Cyrus, to find him staring with grim fascination at the needle sliding through his flesh. My arms broke out in goose bumps. I’d seen that expression on him before. In his vampire days, when pain—it didn’t matter whose—gave him satisfaction unmatched by anything else in his life. I avoided looking at him again.

When Cyrus was patched up, I didn’t bother to tie him again. He was angry, but not stupid, and he’d been a vampire long enough in the past to know his limits in the present. We heal, but it takes time. He wouldn’t be able to effectively attack again tonight.

I washed up and went to Nathan’s bedroom. He lay on the bed, a book in his hands, but his thoughts were so jumbled I knew he couldn’t possibly be reading. “A little early to turn in, don’t you think?” I tried to make my tone light. I failed miserably.

He looked up, said nothing, and returned his gaze to the page.

The argument hadn’t even begun, and I so didn’t want to be at the shrieking point yet, but I couldn’t control myself. “He knows where the Soul Eater is! We need him!”

“Oh, come on, Carrie!” Nathan tossed the book angrily aside and threw the covers back, swinging his feet to the floor. “We could have found the Soul Eater on our own and you know it!”

“No, I didn’t!” I stalked toward the living room, then remembered Cyrus was in the apartment, and slammed the door instead. Lowering my voice so he wouldn’t be able to hear me as easily, I advanced on Nathan, jabbing my finger at him accusingly. “We can’t use your blood tie to find him, we’ve been over and over this! You could become possessed again. He could find you and then be one step closer to completing his ritual. As usual, I had to make the choice between doing something easy or doing something that was going to screw up my life! That’s what it always comes down to, and I’m sick of it because it’s not fair! But it’s just how things happen.”

With shocking speed, Nathan seized my wrist. “Not fair is having the guy who sodomized you and bled you dry, while your wife lay dying not two feet away, sleeping down the hall.”

“Gee, and just a few minutes ago, you sympathized with him.” I jerked against his hold. “Let go of me!”

Nathan growled a warning, his face flashing to vampire form, but he released my arm. I rubbed my wrist as he stalked toward the door. “Where are you going?”

“To the shop,” he barked.

I glanced at the clock. It was only a few hours until sunup. “What for?”

He disappeared from view at the end of the hall, and I heard his keys jingle. “For the day.”

The slam of the door punctuated his statement.

I spent the day in the bedroom with the door locked, but I wasn’t able to sleep. Alternating between my anger toward Nathan and my fear that Cyrus would burst in and stake me while I slept, I watched the light behind the blinds grow stronger and brighter.

Once, a knock on the door startled me out of a light sleep. I threw back the covers and stood, calling, “Nathan?” before I realized he couldn’t have come back upstairs without first walking through broad daylight.

“No.” Cyrus’s voice was uncharacteristically timid. “Are you all right?”

Let me in.

“I can hear your thoughts,” I told him. “You know that.” My palms itched to open the door, but I didn’t know what his intent was. Why didn’t I tie him back up? My reasoning that I would be safe and secure while he healed seemed insubstantial now.

“I know. I want to be near you.” I heard him swallow a sound of disgust, even through the door. “Never mind.”

A vision of Cyrus and me lying beside each other in bed, not in a sexual embrace but a comforting one, assembled in my mind. It took me a moment to realize I hadn’t dreamed it up on my own. It came from him.

I listened to his footsteps retreat down the hall as I stood with my palm against the cool wood of the door, pretending I could feel him on the other side.

Twelve:

Back to Not Normal

T he nights after Cyrus’s rebirth into vampire form were almost unbearable. After my first and only rejection of him, Cyrus became even more sullen and difficult. When he wasn’t verbally antagonizing me, he abused the blood tie to his advantage, sending graphic visions of us performing lurid acts. The first few days I could tolerate it. After a while, the joke—and my resolve to resist him—wore thin.

Nathan came back to the apartment. I didn’t kid myself that it was because he’d forgiven me. There wasn’t a bed in the storage room of the bookshop anymore, and the floor probably wasn’t very comfortable. We barely spoke, and with Cyrus equally frosty, I found the apartment a chilly place to be, indeed.

Not to mention the fact that, after countless hours of research, we hadn’t gotten any more information about the Soul Eater and what he might be up to with the Oracle. I’d called the brothel the Soul Eater had supposedly been staying at. That is to say, I called the only brothel it made sense for him to be staying at. I wasn’t entirely surprised to find that March’s phone number no longer existed and her establishment had been removed from the list of licensed brothels in Nevada.

“They’re not going to stay put, waiting for someone to come find them,” Cyrus had said, an edge of taunting in his voice. “Unless you want to waste another week visiting the desert?”

And I didn’t. Neither did Nathan. Though we agreed on little else, we knew that the Soul Eater moved around too much to justify going after him. And that he moved much faster than we could.

If the Soul Eater didn’t want to be found, we wouldn’t find him. And I had the distinct impression that when he wanted to, he would come to us.

“I’ve run out of ideas,” I complained to Nathan as I sat beside him on his bed one morning. We hadn’t made up after our fight, but for the time being we were politely ignoring the spat. It seemed he wouldn’t be tempted to even consider making amends. It would probably be only a matter of time and defeating the Soul Eater before he kicked Cyrus and me onto the street.

Nathan laid his book on his chest—he would often read until I’d gone to bed, probably to avoid talking to me—and rubbed his eyes. “Don’t worry about it now. It’s been a long night.”

“Well, I am worried about it, as we have a finite amount of time before Max and Bella find the Oracle.”

Max had called that evening to update us on their status. They would reach Danvers by sunup, install themselves at a base of operations and begin networking. Nathan agreed that it wouldn’t be long before the Oracle’s minions sought them out.

Nathan sighed. “I’m aware of the time issue, Carrie. But there’s nothing we can do about it right now.”

With a grunt of utter annoyance, I rolled onto my side so I wouldn’t have to look at him. My mind wouldn’t settle down, though, racing to every dead end it had already visited ad nauseum. “What about Dahlia?”

“What about her?” Nathan’s voice held that weary, just-drop-it-already tone he’d perfected. “She’ll kill you, and we certainly don’t want her around Cyrus.”

Stop talking about me like I’m not right down the hall.

I pushed Cyrus’s thoughts out of my mind.

“I know. Maybe I could break in. Or something.” To Cyrus, I asked, Do you have any ideas?

What about Clarence? Cyrus’s voice echoed through my head. He helped you betray me, and I know for a fact he cared even less for Dahlia. At least, he did when I was around.

“That’s a thought,” I murmured out loud, accidentally.

“What’s a thought?” Nathan tried to sound bored and disinterested, but I still had a blood tie to him, as well. His annoyance and his jealousy, which had been radiating off him in waves since I’d turned Cyrus, spiked.

“Nothing.” I waved a hand dismissively, but a mean, antagonistic part of me added, “It was supposed to be mental.”

He closed his eyes and his brow creased in frustration. For a second I expected an angry outburst. Cyrus must have felt my fear, because a deeply protective vibe thundered through the blood tie. The role reversal startled me. I never thought I’d see the day when Cyrus cared if I lived or died.

But Nathan didn’t lose it. He opened his eyes and looked at me, really looked at me for the first time in days. “I hate this.”

Before I could ask what he meant, he went on. “I hate that he’s in your head again. Actually, I didn’t really hate it before. But I do now.”

For some reason, his admission stung. “You didn’t care that he was my sire when we first met?”

Nathan shrugged. “No. It was a bit of a relief.”

“Not for me. As I recall, you threatened to kill me.” Some of the tension seemed to ease between us, but I tread carefully. “Why does it bother you now?”

“Because I know you loved him.” He made it sound so definite, so matter-of-fact.

Even I couldn’t have said it without immediately following it up with a qualifier like “in a way” or “sorta.”

Is that true? Did you love me?

I put Cyrus off for a moment. “Do you think I chose him over you? Is that what all this is about?”

“How could it be about anything else?” Nathan smiled sadly. “I can’t offer you unswerving devotion. I can’t give you all of my heart. Not after this. But I don’t want to lose you, either.”

“Well, you can’t really have me, can you? If you’re not willing to give me something in return?” I wanted to reach out to him, to touch him, because that always seemed to make everything all better. But it would be a lie. “You’re not going to lose me. Cyrus is…different now. He doesn’t need me.”

Don’t be so sure….

“He doesn’t need me,” I repeated, for myself, for him. “I think that was what made him so endearing before. Despite all the manipulation and torture, he really needed someone to love him. He’s had that now, and he won’t want the brand of love I can give him.”

And what is that?

“And what brand is that?” Nathan echoed Cyrus’s telepathic question.

I made sure to leave my link to my fledgling wide open as I spoke. “The false kind. The pitying kind.”

Sweet girl.

Nathan smiled. “The type you think I’m giving you.”

“Maybe it’s what I’m giving you,” I suggested, not unkindly. “In any case, he doesn’t want me the way he did then, so he won’t pursue me as he did before.”

And I wouldn’t be tempted the way I had been then, because I wouldn’t want the secondhand, watered-down kind of love he could offer me, if he did see fit to do so.

I wouldn’t be the next best thing to yet another lost love.

Nathan had heard the unspoken portion of my statement. “Then why do you want mine?”

Why did I? I’d been attracted to Nathan from the moment I’d met him. I’d been infatuated with his devotion to his mysterious dead wife and unofficially adopted son. Then he’d become my sire, and that brought its own kind of feeling. But why did I love Nathan?

I opened my mouth cautiously, not sure what would come out. “Because I see the way you loved Marianne. I see the way Cyrus loved Mouse. And I wonder…” My unexpected sob interrupted my words. “I wonder if someone could ever love me that way.”

Wordlessly, he pulled me into his arms.

I couldn’t stop crying. Although I considered myself pretty much in touch with my feelings, there was obviously one emotional area I’d boarded up. Now, all my frustration and pain crashed through the barrier I’d erected, and I couldn’t hold it back any longer.

Someone could love you that way. I would have, if you’d given me the chance. Cyrus’s thoughts stung me with a barrage of images, of moments that had never occurred between us. Lying with him in his big bed at the mansion, my lips curved in a contented smile as he held me. Cyrus watching me with pride as I moved gracefully across the ballroom, the picture of beauty and elegance in a couture gown. The same gown in a rumpled heap on the floor as I climbed into bed with an unidentified young man, then a flash of his dead eyes as I feasted from his throat.

Gagging, I sat up.

“Carrie, what’s wrong?” Nathan went from comforting to urgently protective in a split second.

Tell him, Carrie. Tell him what’s wrong.

Blood running in rivulets from my scarlet-stained mouth, flowing down my neck, between my breasts. Cyrus’s cold hands on my shoulders, his rough tongue lapping the blood off my skin.

“No!” I clutched my head, desperate to make the visions stop, but terrified Nathan would guess the root of the problem and harm Cyrus in some way.

He did guess, but instead of tearing to the living room and ripping Cyrus to pieces, he gripped my shoulders and shook me gently. “Come on, Carrie, you can stop him. You’re in control. Just concentrate and shut him out.”

I’d had plenty of practice switching the blood tie between Nathan and me on and off. It turned out to be much easier from the sire’s side of things. I took deep, metered breaths and mentally constructed a brick wall. Nathan had once suggested a bubble of white light, but I preferred my creative visualization more heavily fortified. I was relieved when Cyrus’s barrage of hateful images faded, then disappeared altogether.

“What did he show to you?” Nathan’s brow creased in concern, the kind he routinely exhibited before he completely lost his mind in anger.

There was no way I was going to admit to him what had happened, not when he’d almost chopped Cyrus apart in the past. “I’ll take care of it tomorrow.”

He gazed at me as though I might lose it again at any moment. “Are you sure?”

I nodded and gave what I hoped was a reassuring smile. “Yeah. Just…hold me?”

Nathan stroked my hair as we lay close together beneath the covers. Whether he thought I was asleep or not I couldn’t be certain, but after a long, long time he kissed my ear and whispered, “I’m sorry we fought, sweetheart. That doesn’t mean I’m not right, but I’m sorry we’re in this again.”

I drifted to sleep with a bittersweet smile on my face and my head blessedly empty of horrors.

I woke to hands on my breasts, my stomach, dipping between my legs. I smiled against lips that pressed to mine, and I stretched, slowly and lazily, enjoying the attention. Winding my arms around Nathan’s neck, I moved against him so his cold, firm body was flush to mine.

He guided my leg over his hip, his thick cock hard and eager against my sex. I was wet and ready for him, so he slipped into me easily, and I cried out at the intense pleasure of it. His fingers traced shivering trails down my arms, up my neck.

Another set of hands slid between our bodies. My eyes flew open and I shrieked in alarm.

Nathan smiled, seemingly unperturbed that another person was in bed with us. Cold flesh brushed my back, and I craned my neck to find Cyrus there, his body curved to mine. As he teased my intimate flesh with his hands, he gave me the same knowing smile I’d seen on Nathan’s face. I leaned against Cyrus, eyes sliding closed with the pleasure.

This is wrong, my brain screamed. This can’t be happening.

But it wasn’t happening. It was a trick, a dream.

It felt so real.

I opened my eyes and glanced down to where Nathan slid in and out of me. Cyrus’s fingers bracketed Nathan’s cock, slick with my secretions, and Nathan buried his face in my neck with a groan. I felt his features change against my skin, and his fangs pricked me tentatively. Cyrus’s erection prodded my backside as his fingers danced wickedly over my flesh. The pressure in my tortured body grew almost unbearable. I begged mindlessly, held Nathan’s mouth to my neck. Cyrus guided his cock to my ass and pushed inside as Nathan’s fangs pierced my neck.

I cried out in surprise at the discomfort and fullness of Cyrus’s entry, but his skilled assault on my intimate flesh, coupled with Nathan’s mouth drawing at my neck and his cock pumping inside me, drove me over the edge. Impaled between them, I screamed in release.

My eyes snapped open. Though I was alone in the bed, my body throbbed from the ecstasy of the dream, and the wetness between my legs testified to the very real physical effect it’d had on me. I rolled over, pushing sweat-damp hair from my forehead, and grabbed the note Nathan had left on his pillow: “Working. Nathan.”

I went to the kitchen and put on the kettle, adding enough blood for Nathan and me. I would take it to him downstairs and lend him a hand in the shop, whether he needed it or not. Anything to strengthen the fragile peace between us and get me away from my perverted fledgling.

As the blood heated, I forced myself to ignore the contents of the dream. Of course, Cyrus had sent it, torturing me by day the way he assaulted me during the night. What had prompted this ruthless return of the man who’d tortured and abused me four months ago? He’d claimed his time with Mouse had saved him, yet he’d reverted to his old ways as if I’d flipped a switch when I’d changed him. Was it the simple state of being undead that made vampires go bad? Or was it just Cyrus?

Or was it me? When he’d been my sire, it had been his blood that tempted me to self-destruction. Was it my blood that brought out the worst in him now?

Wisps of steam had just begun to rise from the kettle’s spout when Cyrus ambled in from the living room, loose limbed and relaxed, clad in nothing but linen pajama bottoms. “That lovely mental interlude and breakfast? I’m flattered.”

“It’s not for you,” I snapped, removing the kettle from the heat.

“So it’s starvation then? Until I behave?” He stood behind me, too close, his lips brushing my ear as he spoke. “I’d rather hoped it would be a more physical form of punishment.”

I elbowed him in the gut. He’d tensed for the blow, but still doubled over.

“Don’t ever touch me again!” I grabbed the nearest available weapon, a barbecue fork, from the hanging rack on the cupboard door, and brandished it menacingly.

Instantly, the old Cyrus fled. Reformed, mortal Cyrus stood in his place, his hands up in a protective stance. “Carrie, I was only teasing.”

“It’s not just teasing. You invaded my mind, you put perverse thoughts in it—”

“I put perverse thoughts in it?” He shook his head. “No. I was the one woken this morning by your lewd fantasies.”

Oh. No. “That’s crazy. There is no way I would ever—”

He nodded patiently. “And do you think I would ever? Have I ever wanted to share you with him? Have I ever tolerated the thought of his hands on you? Do you think I would do it now?” Smiling a little cruelly, he wagged a finger at me in admonition. “I may be a bit twisted, but I can’t be blamed for what’s lurking in your head. You were the tormentor with that dream, not me.”

Legs shaking, I stumbled to the kitchen table. Cyrus pulled out a chair for me and I sat, careful not to brush against him as I did so. “That’s impossible. I would never…do those things.”

“I know that’s not true. You did some of it with me.” I heard his intake of breath and he apologized hastily. “I’m sorry, I had no right—”

“You know what I meant,” I interrupted, not wanting to dwell on the past, specifically the sordid things I’d done with him. “I would never ask Nathan to…I would just never.”

Cyrus poured me a mug of blood and sat opposite me, looking genuinely sympathetic. “You don’t need to explain. It’s your subconscious doing this to you.”

“I subconsciously want a three-way with you and Nathan?”

He rolled his eyes. “Listen, if you don’t want my help, say so. But don’t go on like this, angry with me for being in your dream. Against my will, I might add.”

I sighed and dropped my head to the table. “Sorry. Stay.”

He touched my hair hesitantly, cupping the back of my skull with his palm and flexing his fingers in a friendly, comforting motion. “Don’t despair. I’m sure it’s difficult, being blood tied to two men you’ve had relationships with.”

I sat up, smoothing my hair back. “No matter how sick those relationships were.”

“I’d drink to that, if I had anything to drink.” He smiled as I slid my mug toward him. “Good to see you’re not above sharing breakfast with me.”

“What can I say? I’ve got a weak spot when it comes to you.” I thought of Nathan in the shop, and worried he might have seen the dream, too.

Not to worry, Dotair, I tuned it out. His thoughts were uncomfortable, but not unkind. He apparently understood I had no control over my dreams, so why couldn’t I get it?

“So, still planning to see Dahlia?” Cyrus swirled the mug a bit and dipped his pinkie in to pull out a still-congealed clot. “You could have left this on a bit longer.”

I made a face and took my cup back. “We already know she has information we can use. Probably more than you’ve already gotten from her.”

“Good luck getting it.” He sounded weary, as though if he never heard her name again it would be too soon. “You’d almost have to learn to read minds. Or get her very drunk. She does ramble on when she’s had too much to drink.”

“The flaw in that plan is she’s hardly going to go out bar hopping with me. Or you.” I chewed my thumbnail as I thought.

“No,” Cyrus agreed. “Our last rendezvous didn’t go very well at all.”

I drummed my fingers on the tabletop. “Do you think Clarence will help me if I asked?”

Cyrus blew out a long breath. “If you can find him, he might.”

“Well, where did he go when he worked for you? What were his habits?” I vaguely remembered he was allowed to come and go from the mansion, but where exactly he went or came from I had no idea. “Did he buy groceries or something?”

“No. Food for the guards and pets was delivered by vendors.” Cyrus’s brow creased in thought. “I did send him to shop for my favorites and to get my chocolates. And all the little extras I might find myself in need of.”

“I’d hate to ask.” I took a sip of blood.

Cyrus shrugged. “Coercion items. Alcohol for the girls, indecent magazines for the boys.”

“I didn’t ask. I just said I would hate to.” Pinching the bridge of my nose, I closed my eyes. “What would Dahlia have him do?”

“Dig up corpses for spare parts,” Cyrus snorted.

“If that’s all the help you’re going to be—”

“Here’s a thought,” he interrupted. “Why not wait a discreet distance from the mansion and find out where he goes?”

It made sense. Cyrus didn’t have to use such a smart-assed tone, but it made sense. “Fine.” I glanced at the clock. “Well, there’s no time like the present.”

He followed me when I stood and took the mug to the sink. “Why don’t you let me come with you?”

“Do you think that’s wise?” I arched an eyebrow. “I mean, what with Clarence thinking you’re dead and all?”

“Why wouldn’t it be?” Cyrus looked as though he truly didn’t understand the effect such a shock could have on a mortal human being. “Believe me, Carrie, he’s familiar with the paranormal.”

I considered. It probably did make more sense to take him with me than leave him behind with Nathan. God knew what could happen.

“Fine. But you’re staying in the car.”

I dressed and took Nathan his breakfast while Cyrus got ready—he took the longest showers of anyone I’d ever met—so I could discuss the plan with Nathan alone.

“Mmm, O negative,” Nathan murmured appreciatively after a long sip. “To what do I owe this treat?”

I smiled, swallowing the sudden knot in my throat. “Cyrus and I are going to find Clarence.”

“By yourselves?” From his tone of voice it was clear Nathan was trying to be nonchalant. He failed miserably.

I let him have his delusion of fooling me. “Is that a problem?”

“Maybe.” He straightened when the bells above the door jingled, and gave a wave to the customer who entered.

I waited until the man disappeared behind a bookshelf to clear my throat and recapture Nathan’s attention. “So, is it a problem?”

“A bit,” he answered, keeping his eye on the shop. “That’s a dangerous part of town.”

It’s not, I shot back mentally. Nathan, stop treating me like a teenage girl who can’t be trusted with her boyfriend.

After your dream this morning? He glared at me as he thought it.

“Well, I’m not going alone,” I reminded him, trying to keep my voice light for the sake of our charade. The customer’s shoes scuffed on the floor. Humans might not be aware of the blood tie, but they were certainly aware of the tension it created. “I’ll be going with Cyrus.”

“Oh, that’s right.” And who’s going to protect you from him?

I rolled my eyes. “That’s right.” I don’t need protecting from him. He’s my fledgling. And I’m not going to do anything stupid.

That doesn’t mean he won’t try something stupid. At least take a stake with you. “Have a good time.”

I snorted. “Yeah, a good time.”

The customer came to the register with a book on summoning spirits, and I quickly made my exit while Nathan was too busy to argue.

When I got upstairs, Cyrus was in his room, probably still getting ready. I considered what Nathan had said, that I should arm myself when alone with Cyrus. Though I doubted my fledgling—wow, that was still weird—would try anything, I admitted to myself it would be stupid to blindly trust him. I slid open the door to the closet that contained Nathan’s weapons and pulled a crudely carved stake from the duffel bag on the floor.

“What are you doing?” Cyrus sounded curious and amused, but his face fell when his gaze dropped to the stake in my hand. “Oh.”

“It’s nothing p-personal,” I stammered. Sighing, I dropped the stake back into the bag. “It is. I’m sorry. Nathan just thought…”

With a rueful chuckle, Cyrus nodded. “Of course.”

I shifted my weight from foot to foot. The moment was painfully, stiflingly awkward. “It’s just, when you were a vampire before—”

“Stop!” Through the blood tie, his shame and anger washed over me. “It will never be enough for you, will it?”

“What?” My fingers itched for the stake. Not that I would be able to use it against him. The thought of killing my own blood sickened me. Still, it would have been a comfort to have some means of self-defense. “What will never be enough?”

“Anything I ever do. You’re always going to see me as the monster who attacked you that night in the morgue, the vampire who manipulated and degraded you. But I was a man since then, Carrie, a good man. And now I’m your fledgling. Anything I’m capable of doing now, it’s because of you.” He clenched his fists impotently at his sides.

I looked away. “And if I did to you what you’ve done to me, you wouldn’t trust me, either.”

I heard his footfalls on the floor as he came closer. When I looked up, his face was a breath from mine. My heart pounded with uncertainty as he leaned closer. “If I wanted to kill you, I could do it anytime. We wouldn’t have to be alone.” His voice was a deadly whisper. “And you did do to me what I did to you.”

He stepped around me, and I swallowed hard.

“I’ll meet you in the van.” His words were clipped and he left no room for another feeble apology from me, slamming the door resolutely to punctuate his sentence.

I sagged against the wall, willing all the tension from my body. Then I realized it wasn’t my agitation, but Cyrus’s. I closed my eyes, my chest aching with the knowledge that I’d hurt him.

Still, before I went to the car, I slipped a stake into my purse, just in case.

Thirteen:

Triangle

“T hat’s him, it has to be.”

I ignored Cyrus’s declaration of certainty. He’d spotted Clarence at least five times since we’d parked a discreet distance from the mansion.

“That’s not him.” I barely had to open my eyes to tell. “What is the matter with you? Did you never look at the man?”

“I looked at him,” Cyrus admitted a little sheepishly. “But not often.”

“Because you’re a stuck-up, imperialistic bastard.” I leaned my head back and closed my eyes. It wasn’t because I hadn’t had enough sleep. It just made it easier to ignore Cyrus if I could pretend to be unconscious.

The dream had really screwed up my head. Even he, shameless though he was, felt it. Now that I was blood tied to him again, the old attraction returned with a vengeance. But it hadn’t ever really gone away. I suppose it had just lain dormant during his brief stint of humanity.

There was no chance of a return to that relationship. I loved Nathan, and he almost loved me—at least he had until I’d fucked that up again. Even if we weren’t on the best of terms, sleeping with Cyrus would be a slap in Nathan’s face.

Cyrus looked more petulant by the minute. “Why not let me go in and speak with Dahlia on my own?”

“Because she filleted you the last time you were alone together and…” I blinked. “You’re just trying to get sex from anyone, aren’t you?”

“Well, someone has been bombarding me with pornographic dreams.” He pointed down the street. “That’s him!”

“It’s not him. That man is six feet tall at least, and probably twenty years younger than Clarence.”

“At least,” Cyrus repeated, giving me an unreadable look. “I’m sorry, he just looked so similar.”

“Why? Because he’s black?” Of course I’d have to sire a white supremacist.

“Because it’s dark and I can’t see that well. Apparently, losing both eyes in a past incarnation has that effect.” He raised his hands helplessly. “I’m as surprised as you.”

“We should get you some glasses,” I mused, scanning the sidewalk. “That’s him!”

I could tell by the way the figure hunched over and kept close to the wall. His clothing was anachronistic to say the least—in the mansion, he didn’t seem out of place when paired with antique furnishings, but on the street he looked positively Victorian—and he scurried like a spider toward the house.

“That is him,” Cyrus observed. “I never realized how very strange he looked.”

“You stay here,” I commanded, pushing open the door. “I’ll be back.”

I didn’t give him a chance to argue before I slammed the door. Clarence had nearly reached the gate to the servants’ lodgings, and I had to jog to catch up with him.

“Clarence!” When I called his name, it was as if a shock went through him. He saw me, and for a moment I thought he would bolt. Something in his servant’s nature seemed to stop him, and he waited patiently until I reached him.

“Doctor, what are you doing here? Are you trying to get killed?” He cast a worried glance at the house. “She’s out of her head over something you did. I can’t tell what, but she is not happy.”

“That’s why I’m here,” I explained. “I need to speak to her.”

Clarence’s deep brown eyes widened. “Didn’t you hear what I said? She’ll kill you. She’s been ranting and raving and doing God knows what. If you go into that house, you’re dumber than I thought you were.”

I ignored the implication that he’d apparently thought I was dumb before. “That’s why I need your help.”

“What kind of help?” He eyed me suspiciously. Then the meaning became clear as glass, and he started to turn away.

“No, I don’t want you to kill her! Just waylay her a little bit. Cyrus said—”

“Cyrus?” His voice leaped with fear. “He died.”

“He’s back now.” I wasn’t supposed to let that slip. I might as well have let Cyrus spring out at Clarence in full vampire face. But then, maybe someone coming back from the dead wasn’t that weird to him. After all, he did work for vampires. He’d probably seen worse.

“He can’t come back here.” Clarence shook his head as though his denial could stop it.

“I hope he doesn’t.” This could be a bargaining tool. If Clarence feared Cyrus…“It’s really Cyrus who’s sent me to do this. He wants to know how Dahlia is involved with the Soul Eater.”

A visible shudder went through him. “They’re tangled up. I don’t know how.”

“Maybe you could help me figure it out. It might keep Cyrus from coming back to find out for himself.” I wielded the name like a weapon.

Clarence saw through the ploy. “You can’t keep him from doing anything. Don’t even try to play that hand.”

I’d always underestimated this man. “How about the ‘I’m your friend, you should help me’ card?”

He laughed. “How about you ain’t my friend and why don’t you come back when you’ve got something to bargain with?”

He moved toward the gate, and I stepped forward as if to stop him with a hand on his shoulder.

Bad move.

He whirled before I could lay my palm on him, his eyes flashing rage. “Vampires don’t ever get to touch me.”

I remembered the second night I’d spent in Cyrus’s house, when Clarence had displayed his scars from a past attack. I should have remembered.

He walked into the shadows between the stone columns, and the gate began to creak closed. I thought it was a lost cause, until his voice drifted back to me from the darkness. “I know how to take care of myself. And your friend up there. You come back tomorrow night, you’ll get your answers.”

I stood on the sidewalk, my mouth gaping like a carp’s. “So, you’ll help?”

“I won’t repeat myself!” he snapped. I heard his quick steps up the paved drive, and turned toward the car.

Cyrus stood on the sidewalk, his arms folded arrogantly over his chest. “That went well.”

“Get in the car before I run you over with it.” What the hell did Clarence mean, that I’d get my answers?

Cyrus was quiet on the ride home, but he kept his smug smile. I parallel parked in front of the building, then turned to him to ask what his problem was. That was a big mistake. He lunged—no, more like launched himself—across the car, and I found myself pinned between the door and his body.

“What the hell are you—” My outrage was smothered beneath his lips. I was too shocked to fight him.

He pulled back and smoothed my hair from my face. “You still have feelings for me. You wouldn’t have had that dream—”

“It was just a dream!” I insisted. “You know, those pictures in your head you can’t control?”

“That come from your subconscious and betray your deepest desires?” He paused. “And fears. Do you still fear me, Carrie?”

A thrill of frightened excitement raced up my spine. “No. I don’t fear you.”

“You’re lying.”

He was coming in for another kiss when the door behind my back released. I tumbled onto the sidewalk in a heap. My head collided painfully with the concrete and bursts of light blurred my vision.

Before I could register what had happened, Cyrus exited the car as well, clearly not under his own power. I heard him offer up a feeble excuse—or was that an apology?—then he was silenced by the dull snap of flesh pounding flesh.

I struggled to my feet. I must have bitten my tongue in the fall, because I tasted blood. My vision cleared as I swayed in place, and I saw Cyrus pinned to the raw brick of the building, with Nathan’s thick forearm across his throat. Nathan’s fist connected with Cyrus’s nose, and a sickening wet snap crack through the air.

I stood transfixed by the sight of Nathan losing control, lashing out. I’d never seen him like this, even when he’d been fighting Cyrus for my life. Cyrus’s eyes rolled back in his head and he slumped in Nathan’s grasp.

The pain in my head was unbearable. Cyrus’s bleak thoughts entwined with my own dread, and I screamed at Nathan to stop. I hated the pleading in my tone, but I would have bargained, offered anything, to keep him from hurting Cyrus further.

On my knees, I wept and begged for his life. For Cyrus, the man who’d tortured and abused me, who’d wanted to kill me, who’d sent my heart like takeout to his deranged father.

A change came over Nathan. He released Cyrus, letting him slide to the ground, unconscious. Nathan’s face held a mix of emotions, and for a second I thought he felt real remorse for his actions. It disappeared as he came nearer and seized my upper arm, his fingers digging into my flesh. He dragged me toward the door and I resisted, unwilling to leave Cyrus behind. My legs twisted and I couldn’t get on my feet as Nathan hauled me up the stairs, every step digging painfully into my back when I slipped and fell. I finally stopped resisting, letting him pull me into the bedroom. He shoved me through the door and slammed it shut. I yanked on the knob, but Nathan held it from the other side.

My reason fled. I needed to get to Cyrus. The certainty that if I didn’t get to him, if I didn’t protect him, he would die, consumed me. “Let me out!”

He didn’t answer.

“Nathan, let me go to him! He’ll die out there!”

“Let him burn!” I heard the floorboards creak as he settled with his back to the door.

I’ve never felt more helpless than I did at that moment. It was terrifying to me that my hands were tied while my fledgling lay defenseless on the street. My frustration exploded from me in a series of cruel accusations—that Nathan didn’t care for me, that he was incapable of caring for anyone, that he would let Cyrus die the way he’d let Ziggy die, the way he’d let Marianne die.

Though I knew the effect my words would have on both of us, I couldn’t stop them from coming. I couldn’t even summon the strength to apologize for them. Until that moment, I’d thought I understood the power of the blood tie. I’d grossly underestimated it, and found myself destroying my relationship with my own sire in an effort to protect my fledgling. And there was no doubt in my mind that destruction was absolute.

Nathan remained silent on the other side of the door, but I could feel his rage as I gave one final, futile shove. There was no strength left in me, so I lay on the floor, drifting in and out of sleep, until I woke enough to realize time had passed. The door was open. Nathan was gone.

It was still dark out. I checked the clock in the kitchen and saw it wasn’t long until sunup. There was still time for Cyrus. I jerked the door open and was about to tear down the stairs when I saw the note taped there for me to find: “Check your room.”

There were no other words, no explanation of where Nathan was or what his intentions were. I went to my room and stood in the doorway. Cyrus lay on the bed, on top of the tangled covers, his bloodstained clothes twisted on his body. His face was wiped clean, but the damage Nathan had inflicted would take more than a day to heal.

Nathan had done this. He’d done it to hurt me, to hurt Cyrus. He’d done it to ease some murderous need for vengeance in himself, without thought for how it would affect anyone else. I was torn between rage and admiration. I’d been waiting for so long to see Nathan act on his volatile emotions after repressing them for so long. My only regret was that he’d acted out on my fledgling.

My only regret is that he isn’t waiting on the corner for the sun to come out and burn him to a crisp. He has no moral compass. Cyrus opened one swollen eye in an attempt to punctuate his thought with a matching sarcastic expression, but the motion made him whimper. He was so pathetic, I couldn’t help but pity him.

The part of me that was Cyrus’s sire agreed with him. I wanted to feel badly for the things I’d said to Nathan, but all I could think was how he’d separated me from my fledgling, and how would he feel if someone beat me and left me on the sidewalk to die? I eased into the small space between the door and the foot of the bed and knelt beside Cyrus.

I don’t want your pity. His voice filled my head again.

I pulled off his shoes and socks, and he wiggled his toes gratefully. “I know you don’t,” I said with a smile. “But you’re my fledgling. I’ve got to look out for you.”

He reached for the button of his fly and I pushed his hands away to do it for him. “Let me take care of you, okay?”

Thank you. He clasped my hand briefly, then sagged against the pillows. I think he might have lost consciousness again.

I finished stripping him of his blood-stiffened clothes and drew the covers over both of us as I maneuvered myself beside him on the tiny bed. I kissed his forehead and stroked his hair, feeling nothing but absolute, unconditional love for him.

The floorboards in the hallway creaked, and I looked up to see Nathan watching us. He didn’t apologize in words, but the look on his face told me everything I needed to know. He felt remorse for his actions, and that remorse sapped much of my anger.

He gestured toward Cyrus like someone swatting a fly. “That’s how I feel about you, you know.”

“No. I didn’t.” I turned back to Cyrus and let all my relief at his survival and my love toward him—some of it residual from the time I actually did love him—cross the blood tie to Nathan. “Because you never tell me.”

I don’t know if he hesitated from surprise at my words or because he’d underestimated my feelings for my fledgling. When he spoke again, his voice was low and hoarse. “I feel all of that for you. More.”

The uncertainty of the moment hung like a blanket of tension around my shoulders. Was this where we made up, or finally broke up?

Nathan’s gaze held mine as he spoke. “And I would feel it even if you weren’t my fledgling.”

I moved as if to go to him, but Cyrus’s mind invaded mine. Please, stay with me.

Understanding my reluctance, Nathan nodded. “He has you today. I’ve got you every day.”

The gnawing guilt in my chest wouldn’t let me turn my back on Nathan now. “All those things I said—”

“Don’t apologize.” He shook his head as if he could dissipate the hurt I’d caused him.

“Nathan, I—”

“Don’t apologize,” he repeated. “Because you meant everything you said.”

“You know that’s not true.”

He held up a hand. “Don’t. Carrie, you wanted to hurt me. If you hadn’t meant those things, they wouldn’t have hurt so much. So don’t apologize.”

Tears spilled from my eyes and a sob welled in my chest, blocking my words. I couldn’t have spoken if he’d wanted me to.

Nathan straightened in the doorway and put his hands in his pockets. “I’ll see you after sunset.”

He turned to go and I found my voice. “Don’t you want to know what happened with Clarence?”

I saw the muscles beneath Nathan’s T-shirt bunch. I knew he felt my hope and, admittedly, pride at how well things had gone at the mansion. In other words, he knew that I was about to tell him exactly how I would proceed to put myself into danger in phase two of my plan. “Fine. How did it go?”

“It was okay. He agreed to help us.” I wished I had some details to give him, now that I’d brought it up.

“Help doing what?” There was a note of amusement in Nathan’s voice now. An easy, friendly tone that warmed me from the inside.

“Don’t know. I have to go back tonight.”

He took a deep breath, to stem the tide of warnings that would come flowing from his mouth if he let them. “We’ll talk about it tonight.”

I watched as he turned to the corner toward his bedroom. “I’m going, you know,” I called after him.

He echoed back, “We’ll talk about it tonight.”

Fourteen:

Clarence

I n the end, Nathan agreed that it should be me meeting Clarence, because I’d made the arrangement and because the butler would likely try to kill Cyrus if he set foot on the grounds.

“Or you, for that matter,” I’d tacked on. “Clarence doesn’t like vampires.”

Nathan had smiled at that. “Funny how his line of work always seems to lead him to them, huh?”

It had felt much too easy, his acceptance of my “I’m going and you’re not” decree, and I’d wondered if he was actually still mad at me and hoping Dahlia would finish me off. Then I’d wondered if he was still mad at Cyrus, and what he would do to him when I left.

He’d felt my doubt and it had clearly hurt him. “You’re my fledgling. Do you think I would cause you that sort of pain?”

Without waiting to think about it, I’d snapped, “You were going to this morning.”

We’d parted on less than warm terms, with Nathan trying to act as though he wasn’t angry with me and me pretending the whole exchange had never happened. Still, before I’d left, he’d reassured me again that he wouldn’t harm Cyrus, and it was all I had to comfort me on the walk to the mansion.

I refused to think of the place as Dahlia’s house. When I’d first entered the grounds it had been Cyrus’s home, and he had been my sire. He’d wanted me to consider it my home, as well, though I’d never been truly comfortable in the palatial rooms full of armed bodyguards. So I must admit it was a shock when, upon meeting Clarence at the back gate, I found no watchful, black-clad men with walkie-talkies and grim faces. Clarence looked behind him, to where my gaze sought any sign of a trap, and he shook his head. “She ate them. Or fired them. Mostly ate them. I got to keep their building, though. More room than I had in the house, and I can get away from her for a few minutes if I want.”

“Is she treating you well?” I asked as I followed him up the path toward the house.

He stopped and gave me that “stupid vampire” look. “Of course she is. Didn’t I just say she gave me a house? And she’s been giving me days off. Not just one a year like your old man did.”

My old man. I snickered at the thought of Cyrus being in any way fatherly to me. Then I remembered my grim purpose for being there, and sobered. “If she’s so great, why are you helping me break into her house?”

Clarence stiffened at that, pulling his noble dignity around him like a suit of armor against my scurrilous accusations. “What you’re doing tonight isn’t going to hurt her. It’s going to hurt the big man. I’ve got no love for him.”

“So, what’s going on? Did you send her out so I could snoop, or what?”

He shushed me urgently. “I drugged her, but I don’t know if it took yet. She’s got a resistance to most things.”

“Try to poison her often?” Clarence had definitely had no love for Cyrus, but as far as I know, he’d never tried to kill him. And if he was so damn fond of Dahlia, he wouldn’t have tried to kill her.

He shook his head, a look of sadness on his creased face. “No. She’s tried to kill herself, though. It’s a shame, she wasn’t a bad girl. She wasn’t a nice girl, but nobody should want to take their own life.”

Dahlia had tried to commit suicide? Color me surprised. “Well, how will we know if she’s drugged or not?”

“You’ll know if she doesn’t kill you when you go in there.” We’d come to the terrace, and I found myself looking guiltily over the flagstones, wondering if there would still be a stain from the night Ziggy had been killed. I’d been back to this house once after he’d died, but I’d been too preoccupied with my status as noble human sacrifice to think of looking. To my relief—and oddly enough, disappointment—the stone was clean, and I waited patiently for Clarence to unlock the French doors to the foyer.

I’d wondered if Dahlia would have redecorated when Cyrus was gone. She hadn’t changed much, except to add potted plants and a simple wrought-iron café table and chairs to the foyer. The doors to the study were closed, but for the strangest instant I wanted to rush to them and throw them open, to find Cyrus there, the old Cyrus, waiting for me.

“She’s upstairs,” Clarence said, correcting what he thought was my presumption that I would find Dahlia in the study. He pointed to the curving staircase. From the foyer I could see that the second level was dark. “You know the way.”

I started up the steps. Clarence made no move to follow me. My heart leaped farther up in my throat with each step I took. I’d never been back to the rooms where I’d lived with Cyrus, where I’d made love to him—no, had sex with him; I had to keep that straight, at least. Where I’d bargained for Ziggy’s life. I ached for those months. I don’t know why. When I was living them, I’d been in hell. But things hadn’t improved too much since, and I realized with a shock that maybe I had loved Cyrus then more than I loved Nathan now.

There wasn’t time to mull over my relationship problems, though. The huge double doors to Cyrus’s room loomed ahead. As I passed my former quarters, my fingers itched to touch the door handle, and I indulged myself. I had no doubt my things had probably all been thrown away, but I had to go back, just for a moment.

I hadn’t changed the decor of the room when I’d inherited it from Dahlia, so it was no surprise to see it remained exactly as I had left it. In fact, a light film of dust on everything suggested it hadn’t been inhabited for quite some time, either.

I paced quietly around the furniture in the parlor. There was the sofa Ziggy had slept on. There was the chair Cyrus had thrown me into in a fit of rage.

And there was the secret door he’d used to spy on me and intrude into my space. The hutch in the corner remained as it had been, but a tiny latch was installed now. I wondered if that had been during Dahlia’s post-Carrie return to power, brief though it had been.

From the window I caught a glimpse of the rusty, unused gate where Nathan and I had met to plot Ziggy’s freedom. A lump formed in my throat. I would have given anything then to be with him, away from Cyrus. Why was I so torn now?

Memories of my captivity—my willing captivity—crashed over me. The humiliation I’d faced at Cyrus’s hands, the power he’d exerted over me to make me act against my nature. I’d forgiven him of all these things and effectively erased them from my consciousness. But they would never be gone from my heart. God, how I’d taken Nathan for granted since he’d freed me.

The door to my old bedroom was closed. I stalked to it, flung it open and crossed to the mammoth bed. With one hard shove, I managed to move the frame, and heard the unmistakable whisper of paper slipping. I felt in the gap blindly until I found what I was looking for. The drawing Nathan had made of me, the one I’d carried with me when I left him for Cyrus.

The paper was as crisp as the day I’d hid it. I unfolded it and looked down at the woman Nathan had seen standing in his shop. It was by no means accurate. For one, I rarely wore my hair down. And my eyes weren’t quite as big and innocent-looking as he’d made them. And I was older now. Sure, I hadn’t aged physically, but sometimes, like now, I wanted to get in a time machine and go back and give the younger me a good hard slap.

Of course, this was presuming I’d learned anything at all. In another six months, would I want to come back to this moment and slap myself, too?

The clock on the mantel in the parlor chimed, and I remembered I wasn’t here to sightsee. This wasn’t my room anymore, this wasn’t Cyrus’s house. And I had a job to do.

I went to the hutch and lifted the latch—how she thought something this flimsy would have kept Cyrus out, I had no clue—and ducked through the secret door.

The anteroom was the only part of Cyrus’s suite I’d been in, besides his bedroom. I’m sure there were more secret doors, but I’d never seen them or known where they led. My suspicions were raised solely by the seemingly effortless way the guards and Clarence could be summoned. The door to the bedroom was open, though, so I slipped through it.

I was expecting a more visceral response to the sight of the bed where Cyrus and I had shared our intimate times. I didn’t know it then, but he’d let his guard down with me. When he’d asked if I loved him, he’d opened himself up, despite his past hurts. No wonder my rejection had sent him over the edge.

Still, I didn’t freeze up or break down once I was back in this room that had terrified and excited me before. It looked different, for one thing. The walls were still white, the carpet still ivory, but she’d hung posters up, and it appeared she’d raided Pier One Imports of every remotely gothic wall sconce they carried. The room was way too much of a fire hazard for hyperflammable little me, but I supposed if she wanted to sleep in a death trap, I couldn’t complain.

Dahlia lay on the bed, dressed as though she’d been ready to go out for the night. On the bedside table, in front of a metal tree sculpture with twisting branches, from which hung a dozen or more necklaces, spiked collars and chokers, was an empty glass with bloody residue. I lifted it and sniffed. Whatever drug Clarence had used to render her unconscious, he’d wisely picked one that didn’t leave a scent.

From her shallow breathing, I could tell Dahlia truly was asleep. So I had her where I wanted her, I guessed. But what the hell was I going to do with her?

I paced the room, from the fireplace to the writing desk. I thought of Cyrus sitting there the night I’d come to him. Dahlia’s laptop was there now, but the gold-plated desk set was, too, albeit covered in a layer of dust. I pulled out the letter opener and wiped the blade on my shirt, not entirely sure what I intended until my gaze rested on the empty glass at the bedside.

If I had seen Cyrus’s and Nathan’s pasts in their blood, could I see Dahlia’s? Or did it only work if there was a blood tie? I supposed there was no time like the present to find out.

I wouldn’t drink directly from her. It would be too weird, considering she was the first person I’d ever fed from, and now we were enemies. Plus, things hadn’t gone so well for me that first time. I wanted to escape this with as few stab wounds as possible.

I wiped the inside of the glass with my shirttail, hoping the residue of the drug wouldn’t knock me out, and I rolled back the rubber bracelets on Dahlia’s wrist. I took a deep breath, closed my eyes, and stabbed the point of the letter opener into her arm.

Blood squirted out, and I wiped some from my face, gagging, before I managed to direct the flow into the cup. When it was full enough for a few swallows, I set it aside. I ripped a strip from the sheets and wrapped it tight around her wound.

Lifting the cup to my lips, I caught the scent of her blood. It had changed, just as she had, from human to vampire, but beneath the stale, dead scent of vampire blood I caught the smell I remembered from the night I’d fed off her. You never forget your first time.

I swallowed the blood quickly, concentrating on the taste of it, willing myself to access the cellular memory it might carry. The room spun as if I were drunk, and I slid to the floor, my head lolling back to rest on the mattress. Slowly, my vision blurred and a rushing sound built in my ears. Dahlia’s memories seeped into my consciousness without any goading from me.

Was this something that happened with all vampires? Human blood didn’t affect me this way, at least not often. It had happened when I’d fed from Ziggy, but he’d been trying to communicate with me then, I think. Was Dahlia conscious enough to manipulate my brain now?

I became too absorbed in the pictures flashing through my mind to think further on it. Dahlia’s thoughts were concerned mainly with Cyrus, a fact that didn’t surprise me. A noisy club packed with writhing bodies—the club where I’d met Dahlia?—seethed around me; the monotonous pounding of industrial music filled my ears. The crowd parted like something out of a movie—perhaps Dahlia embellished this part—and she caught sight of Cyrus across the crowded room.

This was the first time she’d seen him. And she’d wanted him at first sight. She approached him purposefully, and when he noticed her, I recognized his expression. Hunger, and deviant lust. He’d wanted her, too.

It made me oddly jealous to know he’d felt this way for her. I wanted to believe she’d been more passionate for him than he had been for her, but there was no mistaking his intent as he rose, took her hand and lifted it to his lips.

“I’m Cyrus. And you are?” he asked, and she had to strain to hear him, as he didn’t raise his voice over the loud music.

“Going home with you tonight,” she responded boldly. Then I was rushing forward in time, to the car where Dahlia sat in Cyrus’s lap as he tugged her head back by her hair and bit her neck, not to feed but to arouse. Then to his room, where he pinned her to the bed and showed her his true face. She feared him, but she didn’t show it, and he liked that. That’s why he didn’t kill her like the other girls. That, and when he held her down and fed from her while he fucked her, she invaded his mind and gave him a sense of her true power. If there was one thing Cyrus hadn’t been able to resist in his former life, it was the promise of power.

I lost track of time as I watched her short life unfold from that moment. It was like watching a movie on a broken projector. Sometimes the images moved too fast to comprehend, sometimes so slowly it seemed they would burn up. Still, I wasn’t frightened. I felt I could pull myself out at any time, though I couldn’t control what I saw or heard.

Then I saw Max, standing in the parlor of what used to be my room, and I jolted. This must have been the night we came to kill Cyrus. I knew he’d been delivered to Dahlia’s room. But why would she remember him? That had been months ago, and as I’d witnessed, Dahlia was fairly Cyrus-centered then.

The guards who’d wrestled him up the stairs pushed him through the door and slammed it behind him. In true Max fashion, he flashed a huge grin despite the fact his arms were bound behind his back and he was completely vulnerable at the hands of his enemy.

Dahlia didn’t waste much time looking at him. She turned back to whatever she had been doing, which involved a mortar and pestle, a Bunsen burner and a beaker, and a huge, leather-bound book with handwritten lines. She took a carafe of blood that rested to her right and poured a glass, then removed the beaker from the heat and mixed the contents with the blood. The scent of burned cloves stung my nostrils, and my stomach clenched with dread.

With little ceremony, Dahlia picked up the knife—an athame, as she thought of it—and the blood, and approached Max. She cut the plastic tie holding his hands and gave him the glass. “Drink.”

“Yeah, honey, I wasn’t really looking forward to turning into a toad tonight.” He tried to hand the glass back. “I mean, I’m sure you’re a wonderful cook and all—”

“Drink it or I’ll kill you.” She went back to her book, but I couldn’t read the writing before she snapped it shut. “I was saving it for Cyrus, but he doesn’t seem to have any interest in helping the cause.”

“Helping the—” Max began, only to be cut off again by Dahlia.

“Drink it or I’ll kill you.” She turned to watch him finish off the glass, then strode forward and wrapped her arms around his neck. He resisted her a little, but she rose on her tiptoes to kiss him. “Now fuck me.”

Max obliged with relish, and Dahlia was no slouch, either. We were going to have to have a serious talk when I saw him next. He’d never mentioned any of this to Nathan or me. Normally, I wouldn’t care to hear details of Max’s sex life, but Dahlia was the enemy. He should have at least mentioned that he’d had sex with her.

When they were done—her memory skipped mercifully ahead—she ordered him to get dressed, and pushed him toward the door. The rushing sound started in my ears again, and I was pulled out of the scene. I was back in Dahlia’s room, sprawled on the floor, with a wicked hangover.

“See everything you needed to?”

The voice startled me enough that I sat up despite the splitting pain in my skull. Dahlia glared at me, her eyes accusing slits, but she did not move. “Get out.”

“Tell me what ‘the cause’ is, and I’ll consider it.” I reached into my back pocket for the stake I’d brought for protection.

“I’m not going to tell you anything.” Even her voice sounded tired. “I want you out.”

“Are you going to make me leave? You don’t seem to be in any position to fight me off.” I climbed on the bed and pressed the point of the stake into her chest, making sure she could feel it through her clothes. “What’s ‘the cause’?”

Her eyes narrowed. “Fuck you!”

“You leave me very little choice.” I raised the stake as though I was going to plunge it through her heart, hoping she would change her mind and tell me.

I should have known better. She just glared at me while I hesitated with the stake in midair. Then I felt something at my back, and turned to see Clarence there, brandishing a crossbow.

I dropped the stake. “Clarence, what are you doing?”

“I’m sorry, miss. But I can’t let you kill her.” He kept the bow leveled at my chest to show he was serious. “I think it’s about time you leave now.”

“Wait, wait.” I shook my head. “She knows you drugged her. She knows you worked with me. She’ll kill you once it wears off.”

Dahlia laughed behind me. “Damn straight I will.”

“She can’t kill me,” Clarence said, and he sounded as if he truly believed it.

“Think about what you’re doing. She’s a vampire.” I raised my hands, my gaze flitting between the point of the bolt aimed at me and his face. “Besides, you can’t kill me, either. I don’t have a heart in my chest.”

He shook his head. “Oh, I might not kill you outright, but I can put you out long enough to stoke up that fireplace and toss you in.”

“Fair enough.” I looked at Dahlia, then back to Clarence. “Fine. I’ll go.”

“You know your way out,” he said. “I won’t be seeing you around here again.”

“No, you won’t.” I paused at the door. “Why are you protecting her?”

“Because I come with the house. And she’s better than some of them that’s been here.” He nodded in the direction of the door. “Like the old master and his father.”

The Soul Eater? I wanted to ask more, but he dropped the bow and turned to tend his mistress. I didn’t want to make him any more of an enemy that I already had, so I left.

Exactly how old was Clarence, and how long had he worked in the house? I knew he had a peculiar affection for it, so much so that he would not escape his vampire employers even when he had a chance. It was a riddle I would probably never know the answer to.

I was crossing the foyer to the front door when I stopped. The doors to the study were closed, but I knew they would not be locked. I don’t know how I knew this, but I moved toward them automatically and pushed them open.

Maybe it was the lingering influence of Dahlia’s blood in mine, maybe it was my own memory, maybe it was just instinct, but when I opened the doors, the first thing my gaze rested on was the spot where I’d killed Cyrus. The pain and sorrow of that night rushed through me, as fresh as the moment it had happened. I’d kissed him and plunged a knife through his heart. How could I have done such a thing? It was the blood tie between us now that caused me pain. Then, I’d understood what had to be done; now I was horrified by it.

I tore my gaze away and there it was. Lying on the leather sofa, beside a Cosmopolitan magazine, of all things, was the leather-bound book I’d seen Dahlia reading on the night she’d given Max the mysterious elixir.

I looked over my shoulder. Clarence must have still been upstairs. I clutched the book to my chest, gave one last scan of the room, and tore into the foyer and out the door.

I didn’t stop running until I reached the street, then doubled over, panting. I slipped the book beneath my shirt and hugged it tight all the way back to the apartment, certain at any moment I’d turn and Clarence would be there, ready to kill me for stealing from his mistress.

But I was equally certain that whatever was in the book was the missing piece that would make all the others fit.

Fifteen:

The Cause

N athan wasted no time at all delving into Dahlia’s handwritten notes.

“This is amazing,” he murmured, his dark head bent over the pages as he sat at the kitchen table. Cyrus and I stood in the doorway, watching in tense silence. Sometimes, when lovers fight, the guilty party will bring flowers home. To appease Nathan, all I had to bring home was the notebook of a notorious witch. I wondered how I’d top it the next time he nearly kicked me out.

“Just amazing,” he repeated, turning a page.

Cyrus was the first to snap. Thank God, because I’d been on pins and needles, but I hadn’t wanted to be the one to break Nathan’s reverie. Cyrus, however, had no problem doing so. “Well, what is it?”

Nathan looked up and gave a weary sigh. “It’s a grimoire. A spell book. Haven’t you seen this before?”

“No,” Cyrus sniffed. “I didn’t really take much of an interest in what Dahlia did.”

“You should have,” Nathan said, a little smugly, as he looked back to the book. “There are things in here that would interest you.”

Now Cyrus looked at the pages. “Like what?”

“Aphrodisiacs, love potions, all things she apparently used on you.” Nathan snorted and read aloud, “‘Tried this and he couldn’t get it up.’”

“I was probably very tired!” Cyrus snapped.

“I’m sure you were.” I patted his head condescendingly. “What do you know about ‘the cause’?”

Cyrus ducked my hand and smoothed his hair with an annoyed glare. “What cause?”

I shrugged. “Dahlia said it. It’s why she had sex with Max.”

Nathan looked up sharply. “She had sex with Max?”

“Believe me, I was as surprised as you are.” I suppressed a shudder of revulsion. “I thought he had better taste.”

Cyrus reached for the book. “Did she tell you any thing else?”

As I tried to remember, pain ripped through my head, either from the blood or the poison. “She was making something…a potion. It smelled like burned cloves….”

From somewhere faraway, I heard Nathan say, “Grab her, she’s going to fall.” When I opened my eyes I was on the couch, and it felt as if someone had hurled an ax into my head. Nathan leaned over me, his face full of concern.

And anger.

“How did you get this information from Dahlia?” His stare seemed to cut through me and blanket me in his worry all at once.

“She…told me?” I wasn’t a good liar on my best day. Nathan saw through my words easily.

He laughed, a tight, humorless sound, and I got the distinct feeling he was close to losing it. “She told you? You walked into the mansion, sat down over tea and she said, ‘By the way, I had sex with your friend and I’m working on a shadowy purpose I’ll only call ‘the cause’? Now, please leave my home unhindered so you can tell all your friends?”

“Of course not,” I snapped, trying to sit up. I caught sight of Cyrus through the kitchen doorway, his fair head bent over the spell book. His lips moved silently as he read, making him look more boyish than I’d ever seen him, and my heart swelled at the sight.

“Carrie, focus.” Nathan sounded tired and irritable, and I realized I hadn’t shielded him from my feelings for Cyrus.

I wanted to reach out to Nathan and assure him I still loved him best, but something in his stiff, annoyed demeanor suggested that would be a bad idea.

“You knew Clarence was helping me,” I hedged. Then I sighed, my brain too fuzzy to keep up a convincing lie. “He drugged her, and I drank her blood.”

Nathan recoiled in horror. “Why would you do something like that?”

“Nostalgia?” Cyrus suggested blandly from the kitchen.

Nathan ignored him. “Carrie?”

“I drank your blood, mixed with Cyrus’s, and I saw your…history. I thought if I drank her blood…” How could I have been so stupid? If I drank her blood, and she had been drugged, I’d ingested the drug myself. “It’s hard to believe I ever passed the MCATs.”

“It’s hard to believe you lived past the age of ten!” Nathan stood and stalked away, then turned and paced back to the couch. “For someone smart enough to be a doctor, you have remarkably little common sense!”

“Well, it seemed like a good idea at the time!” Why did those words always follow an abysmally stupid action? “Besides, it bought us some information!”

“That might be false!” Nathan paused in his agitated pacing and sat at the end of the couch, elbows braced on his spread knees. “When you drank our blood, you saw what you did because we’d both been blood tied to you. We couldn’t lie to you because we didn’t have the capacity to control what you saw. But Dahlia has no tie to you. She could have shown you anything she wanted.”

I cast a sidelong glance at Cyrus, remembering his face as he loomed over Dahlia in his bed. “She was drugged. How could she have planted things in my head if she was unconscious?”

“She might not have made them up,” Nathan conceded. “But she may have left out crucial details that would have changed the order or meaning of what you saw.”

“She’s crazy, don’t forget. Some of what you witnessed might not ever have happened, even if she believes it did.” Cyrus interjected his comment in an offhand way. He was still absorbed in the book, probably wondering what exactly his ex-girlfriend had tried on him.

“There’s that, too.” Nathan seemed loath to admit Cyrus had said something helpful. “The point is, we still don’t know anything. We just have this book, and her convoluted memories. It wasn’t worth the risk you took.”

Underneath his anger, I felt his love. He worried about me. I reached for his hand, and he took mine willingly, giving a gentle squeeze.

“I’m sorry, I wasn’t thinking. I was just so consumed with wanting to find something, any sort of break to help us.” I shook my head. “It was so easy before.”

Nathan sighed. “You didn’t fail. You got us this book. That’s something.”

He leaned down to kiss me, and jealousy surged through me from Cyrus’s direction. I heard him push back his chair, then his footsteps as he came into the living room.

“Really, the only thing we need to know is where my father is going next. He won’t stay in one place too long. It isn’t his way.” Cyrus sat on the floor beside the couch, and I couldn’t help but lay my hand on his head. He leaned back, into my touch, and Nathan looked away.

I couldn’t take much more of this. Being the object two men competed for wasn’t as glamorous as it sounded in the movies. The two men who both wanted one hundred percent of my time weren’t dashing, international playboys. They were undead and surprisingly immature, considering the youngest was just over a hundred years old.

Oblivious to my distress, Cyrus went on. “That might be easier to find out than just charging into the mansion and drinking people’s blood.”

“Oh?” Nathan’s annoyance was practically tangible. “Why didn’t you mention this before Carrie risked her life?”

“Because you wouldn’t listen to me unless it was your very last option,” Cyrus retorted. “And you didn’t take the time to ask me when you were pummeling me the other night.”

“I’m sorry about that,” Nathan said quietly, and though there was a bitter edge to it, his apology sounded genuine. “What’s your idea?”

“My father travels rather conspicuously. A full retinue of armed guards, black sedans, a hearse. Do you think those things are easy to ship?” He raised an eyebrow, as if in challenge.

Nathan and I both shook our heads.

With a satisfied smile, Cyrus continued. “Do you know of many places you can rent a hearse? All we have to do is look up records for hearse sales in the last few days.”

“What?” I thought I could feel my eyes bugging out of my head at his suggestion. “How do you expect us to do that?”

“I don’t know,” he said with a shrug. “They do it in the movies all the time. Someone always conveniently knows someone who can get the information.”

I smacked the back of his head and rolled my eyes. “I’m so glad we’ve reached the but-they-do-it-in-the-movies phase of desperation. It inspires a lot of confidence.”

There was a long moment of silence before Nathan spoke. “I know a way.”

“Whether you know a way or not, it’s stupid and we’re still screwed.” I shook my head. “It’s impossible.”

“I believe Nathan is alluding to another solution. One we have denied from the very start.” Ominous silence followed Cyrus’s statement.

Then Nathan turned to Cyrus, his eyes hard. He spoke, and his voice was as raw as the pain I felt through our blood tie. “Believe me, I’ve considered it.”

Cyrus contemplated him for a moment, then shrugged. “I’m merely stating the obvious. You’re all too eager to send Carrie out to do your spying, but when it comes to something that might endanger you—”

“Oh? I should expose her to the danger I pose when I’m under his influence?” Nathan shouted.

His sudden change of tone startled me, and the motion sent another pain ripping through my head. Whatever Clarence had given Dahlia, I pitied the hangover she would have when she fully recovered. “Cyrus, he can’t open up the connection to the Soul Eater. He was possessed—”

“By a spell. A spell Dahlia probably cast.” When I didn’t immediately agree, Cyrus point toward the kitchen. “It’s in the book. You can see for yourself.”

With considerable determination, I pushed myself up and staggered to the kitchen. There, on the page he’d left open, were the symbols I’d seen carved into Nathan’s skin, some of which he still bore as nasty scars. Next to the neatly printed sigils, Dahlia’s handwriting proclaimed, “Cannibalized from various sources. My version works better.”

I should have staked her when I had the chance, the smug bitch.

“My father isn’t capable of something like this,” Cyrus said quietly. “Dahlia did it. In fact, if you look closely at this book, you’ll see she’s been behind most of the magic done on my father’s behalf. She even wrote the spell that brought me back from the dead. It’s all there. And I suggest we anticipate my father’s next move, as there are far nastier spells that she’s come up with.”

“Nathan?” I asked tentatively. “Nathan, do you want to come look at this?”

He gave a barely perceptible shake of his head.

“We’ve had the best tool for tracking my father right here the whole time,” Cyrus continued. “He just won’t use it, Carrie.”

What was I supposed to feel? In my heart, I understood Nathan’s reluctance to open up to his sire. The man had taken his wife from him, tried to take his soul. Nathan’s life, faith and dignity had been destroyed. Why on earth would he want to feel anything his sire wanted to give him?

Another part of me, though, was angry. Nathan had sent me into danger. Sure, he’d worried about me, but he’d been more worried about himself, about what would be easiest for him. I tried hard to keep my bitter feelings from the blood tie, but he felt them.

“That’s not it at all, Carrie.” He stood and walked toward the bedroom, adding a mental, You should know me better than that.

I looked helplessly at Cyrus. He touched my face, his fingertips skimming my cheek. “Talk to him.”

When I went to the bedroom, I found Nathan sitting on the edge of the bed, staring bleakly at the wall. But I knew he didn’t see it. He was in another time, another place entirely.

I knelt beside him on the bed.

“You think I was being selfish.” His voice sounded hollow.

I considered. “Yes. Out of self-preservation. You don’t know what he’s going to do to you.”

“I shouldn’t have let you go to that house tonight.” He scrubbed his hands over his face. His eyes were raw looking. “I have the perfect weapon, and I’m too cowardly to use it.”

“It’s not cowardly. He has incredible power over you.” When Nathan scoffed at that, I took his palm and laid it over the place where my heart used to be. “Like you have power over me.”

“What power, Carrie?” He threw up his hands. “I can’t make you do anything you don’t want to.”

Alarms went off in my head at that. “Why would you want to force me to do something I didn’t want to?”

“To keep you away from him,” he sputtered. “To keep you from constantly running to him for solutions, for comfort. To keep you from loving him.”

“I love you.” Stunned as I was by this unprovoked outpouring, it took me a minute to comprise a more intelligent statement. “I feel for him what I presume all sires feel for their fledglings. Am I wrong?”

Nathan’s gaze was so intense it could burn. “And what do you think that feeling is?”

He’d never come so close to saying the words. I was speechless for a moment. He took advantage of my state to continue. “If I open myself up to my sire, I don’t know what will happen. Maybe he’ll ignore me. Maybe we’ll learn everything we need to. But maybe I’ll get lost again, and this time you won’t need me enough to get me back.”

I pulled him to me, wanting to draw some of his fear into me, to relieve him of the burden of it. “How could you think that? I love you. When you were under his control before, I risked my life and my soul to save you. I would do that a hundred times more if I had to.”

“But I wouldn’t.” His throat moved as he swallowed. “I couldn’t go through that again. Not with what he has to use against me.”

Ziggy. “Nathan, he can only use it to control you if you still feel guilty. And what happened to Ziggy wasn’t your fault.”

“Wasn’t it?” he snapped, as if angry that I would even suggest otherwise. “I kicked him out—”

“He ran away.”

“Well, I didn’t try to stop him!” Nathan stood and paced, and I eased back a little farther on the bed. Not that I thought he would hurt me, but I’m always uneasy around people in such an agitated state.

“Nathan, this is your problem. You push everything down until you’re forced to deal with it, and when that time comes, you can’t. This guilt is like…it’s like gangrene. If you don’t treat it, it eats you up.”

“That’s a fine example, but the only procedure I know for treating a morbid limb is amputation. I’ll be damned if I’m going to cut off my memories of my son.” He sat again, as if it was too much effort to bear the weight of standing and the weight of his grief at once. “But it’s not just for myself I’m worried.”

He took my hands in his and lifted them to his lips, kissing my palms, then my fingertips. Nathan rarely indulged in such intense physical contact unless it would lead to sex, but through the blood tie I felt only desperation. When he looked at me, I saw the meaning behind his fear before he spoke the words.

“He’s taken everything from me,” he whispered, squeezing my hands almost too tightly. “Marianne. Ziggy. He’ll take you, too.”

I tried to stammer out a generic reassurance, but he would have none of it. “Don’t argue, Carrie. You don’t know him. He wants. That’s all he is, a creature made of want. If you thought Cyrus was bad, he is just a watered down version of his father. He’ll take me back, and you with me. I can’t have that happen to you.”

“I’m not going anywhere.” I jerked my hands from his, clenching them to fists. “You really underestimate me, don’t you? I’m not property. I can’t be owned or taken. Not by Cyrus, not by you, and definitely not by the Soul Eater.”

I eased my defensive posture. “You said yourself we have the perfect weapon. That you’re too afraid to use it. That’s him. Don’t you get that? Your fear of him is how he’s controlling you.”

“I know that.” Nathan looked as though I’d slapped him. “I’ve known that for years. Why do you think I was alone for so long? Why do you think I had only Ziggy in my life when I met you? I know my sire controls me. He keeps me isolated. I can shut him out, Carrie, but not permanently, and not forever. Eventually, I’m going to hear him again.”

“So, why not today?” I’d spoken the question without thinking about it, but I’m glad I did. I might not have said it otherwise.

For a moment, he wavered between emotional breakdown and an outburst of righteous indignation. Then his shoulders sagged and he rubbed the bridge of his nose, eyes closed in fatigue. “Fine.”

“What?” I couldn’t possibly have heard him correctly.

He lay back on the bed, staring at—no, through—the ceiling. “You’re right. I should just get it over with. We’re sunk otherwise. We don’t have any other weapons available, and I’m just being cowardly.”

He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. I grabbed his wrist, snapping him back to attention. “You’re not going to do it right now, are you?”

“No time like the present.”

I waited, not daring to move, barely breathing, my gaze trained on his face. Would he go all screwy and possessed again? Would I have to run for my life? I mentally calculated the time it would take me to stand after kneeling so long, weighed it against my speed on legs that had fallen asleep, and realized if he did go into mindless-monster mode, I was pretty much a goner.

When his eyes snapped open not a full minute later, I jumped back and gasped.

“Christ, woman, you scared me!” He pressed a hand to his chest. “Were you just staring at me the whole time?”

“No,” I lied. “Kind of. In case. You know.”

He smiled. “Sorry to disappoint you.”

“So, it didn’t work?” It couldn’t have, in that short a time, could it?

He blinked, as if clearing his vision. “Oh, it worked. He’s headed to the mansion, to pick up Dahlia. And to move back in.”

“Wait…I thought the mansion belonged to…” I rose and wandered to the living room. Cyrus was in the kitchen still, reading through Dahlia’s notes. I took the chair across from him.

“Cyrus, who owns your mansion?” I watched his face for any flicker of emotion, but none showed.

“My mansion? If I had a mansion, would I be staying here?” He turned a page casually.

I rolled my eyes. “You know what I’m talking about. The house on Plymouth Street. Who owns it?”

“My father.” He touched his tongue to his forefinger and turned another page. “Why do you ask?”

“So Clarence, then, he works for your father?”

Cyrus nodded. “He comes with the house.”

“How long has your father owned that house, Cyrus?” I had the strangest feeling I’d overlooked something important. “Twenty years? Thirty?”

“One hundred and fifty.” He stretched his arms over his head and yawned. “He liked Michigan because it had a lot in common with England, climatewise.

I leaned on the table and scanned the page in front of me. “Is there some connection, then, between this area and the Oracle?”

Cyrus shook his head. “No. He wasn’t interest in her then. I don’t know why he’s interested in her now. He just liked the weather.”

I glanced behind me to where Nathan stood in the doorway, his face grim. I turned back to Cyrus. “So, how can Clarence come with the house, then? He’s old, but not a hundred and fifty years old.”

Cyrus looked at me as if I’d gone out of my mind. “You don’t think he’s alive, do you?” He started to laugh, a chuckle that grew to full-out laughter such as I’d never seen from him, until he pounded his knee with his fist and wiped tears of mirth from his eyes. “Oh, that’s priceless.”

“So, he’s a vampire then?” I snapped, not nearly as amused as Cyrus. “He’s working for your father?”

“He’s a ghost, Carrie.” Cyrus gave one last, soundless hitch of laughter. “I can’t believe you didn’t know that.”

“That’s not possible,” I scoffed. “There are no such things as ghosts.”

“You said the same thing about vampires,” Nathan reminded me. “And werewolves.”

“Yeah, but—”

“I watched one of my father’s minions do it,” Cyrus interrupted calmly. “Do you remember when I cut your heart out?”

I glared at him. “That’s a stupid question. Of course I do.”

“Do you remember what it was like to die?” He paused, waiting so I could think it over.

Not that I needed to search my memory. Dying, and what happened after, was never far from my mind. It wasn’t that I was a morbid person, but the memory of leaving my body and floating among a bunch of faceless, vaguely similar ghost people was all the motivation I needed to keep myself from danger.

“But it must be different for humans.” I flinched at the word. I still hated to think of myself as somehow apart from my birth species. “They have souls.”

“Do you think we don’t have souls, Carrie?” Nathan asked softly, putting his hands on my shoulders. “Do you think you don’t have a soul?”

“That’s not what I meant. Not a soul in the philosophical sense. I meant in the Judeo-Christian sense. That there’s something in a person that goes to heaven. Obviously, we don’t go there. We go to the weird blue shadow world.” I shuddered at the thought of it. Drifting with no sense of time or identity, and worse, not caring that you were.

“Well, I won’t argue. But wherever he was expected after death, Clarence didn’t go. Oh, we made a great game of cornering him in the dining room and chasing him around the table. He even did that feint where it seemed he’d go one way, but then turned and went another.” Cyrus smiled, lost in reminiscing, and the hairs stood up on the back of my neck. He looked first at me, then Nathan, and a guilty expression came over his face. “Well, at any rate, Geoffrey caught him, drained him and left his corpse on the floor. Father was livid. You know how they say it’s hard to find good help? The same was true then. He was raving, ranting, tearing through his parlor like a man possessed—you remember the parlor in my suite, Carrie?—until he finally calmed down enough to kill Geoffrey as punishment. Imagine his surprise when, just as Geoffrey’s body burned down to ash, Clarence walked in and politely asked if we required him to clean up the mess!”

As neither Nathan nor I were laughing, Cyrus wisely swallowed his amusement.

“What I don’t understand is, if Clarence is tied to the house, and he’s working for the owner, how was he able to help me against you and Dahlia?” I tapped the nail of my index finger on my teeth as I stared at the book.

“Well, Dahlia and I didn’t own the house. My father’s name has always been on the deed, in one form or another.” He turned another page and started reading. “So, my father wanted me dead, and wanted you to find this.”

“But why?” As I pondered the question silently, Cyrus turned back to the spell book, apparently unconcerned with the fact his father had wanted to kill him. It seemed so bizarre, to want to kill your own flesh and blood. And Dahlia…she’d been human once. What would the Soul Eater want with her?

“Oh, God.” I heard Nathan’s quiet exclamation and looked up. Cyrus had pulled his hands back from the book as if it had burned him. I turned to Nathan. He stared, wide-eyed in horror, at the spell book.

I looked down, finally coming to the party, albeit late. Scrawled in Dahlia’s hand was the heading “Vitality Elixir,” and, after a lengthy list of ingredients and incantations, “used on that Movement guy. Didn’t work.”

“What the hell could that mean?” I guessed “that Movement guy” could have been Max, but “Vitality”?

Nathan took the book, his eyes moving so fast as he scanned the words I wasn’t sure he could possibly be processing the information. “This is…What the hell was she trying to do?”

He strode to the living room and grabbed a notebook. On a page he drew three columns. “There are so many different components…. I don’t know them all. I’ll divide up the ingredients list by three. I’m going to have to contact one of my customers versed in Roman magic and curses for the incantations.”

“Don’t bother,” Cyrus said, finding his voice. “Look.”

Nathan glanced up from his notebook and I leaned over the spell book. In the margin, in cramped, tiny handwriting, Dahlia had added: “For forging the ‘sword’(born vampire). Used on Cyrus. No effect. Used on blond vampire. No effect. Needs work.”

“What is it?” Nathan asked, coming to stand in the doorway. Nausea gripped my stomach as I continued to read.

“Perhaps it will work in cross-species breeding, human-to-vampire or vampire-to-werewolf.”

Cyrus’s voice was hoarse. “She used this on me?”

Nathan frowned at the writing, scrubbing a hand over his face. “There are definite fertility elements to the spell. It looks like she was trying to make exactly what it says, a born vampire.”

“She used it on Cyrus. The other vampire…I bet that was Max.” My thoughts spun faster and faster, rushing to a horrible conclusion I knew I didn’t want to reach.

Nathan shook his head, forehead still creased in concentration. “It says here it didn’t work. But…oh.”

Bile rose in my throat. “It didn’t work because she was a vampire, too. But she gave it to Max.”

Max. Bella. Her unexplained fatigue and carsickness.

But it wasn’t carsickness at all.

Bella was pregnant.

Sixteen:

Vitality

T hey arrived in Danvers the night before the full moon.

“You’re not going to go all, you know—” he gave a mocking, horror movie version of a wolf’s howl “—are you?”

“Max, imagine if I behaved that way toward your customs and traditions,” Bella admonished, grabbing her bag from the car.

“You do! You hate vampires.” He slammed the trunk closed and followed her inside. The place was pretty standard—two beds, a television with bolted-down remote, a sink outside the bathroom for no reason that made sense. But if anything could be said for the East Coast, at least their cheap roadside motels were clean.

Bella began unpacking. He’d only ever seen her remove clean underwear and a toothbrush from her bag, but apparently it held all manner of interesting things. Like a studded collar and wire cable leash.

“Nice,” he said, following it up with a whistle. “So, am I the submissive or…”

“It is not for sex.” She looped the lead through a double ring on the front of the collar. “It is to keep me restrained tomorrow night.”

“I thought you could force yourself not to change. That it was some sort of code of your…people.” Still, he found himself scanning the room for a place to hook the leash.

After a long moment, she answered. “It is our code not to harm humans. But there are other factors. I may not be able to keep from changing. I am under much stress.”

“I get it.” Max cut her off. He didn’t want to hear her tell him again that they were as good as dead. “So, will you recognize me or will you rip me to shreds?”

“I do not know.” She lifted one shoulder in an elegant shrug. “If I did attack you, I would not eat you. Vampires taste terrible.”

“That’s a comfort.” If being maimed could be considered a comfort.

She reached into the bag and withdrew a vial. “Just in case I am unmanageable, you can use this.”

He took the bottle, examining the shimmering blue liquid inside. “A sedative?”

“Something like that.” She gripped the radiator and gave it a tug. When it creaked, she shook her head. “Perhaps I should attach this to the leg of the bed. I will probably succeed in moving it, but it will not cause structural damage we would have to pay for.”

“There’s another comfort.” He slipped the vial into his front pocket. “In the event I do need to give you the night-night drug, how do I get it into you? I mean, are you going stop being a crazed werewolf long enough to swallow it?”

She knelt on the floor and slipped the bar of a thick padlock around the leg of the bed. Attaching the looped end of the cable, she snapped the lock shut with an ominous click. “No. You will have to feed it to me in something.”

“Like giving a dog a pill in a piece of cheese.” He smiled, to show he was half joking.

“I do not like cheese. I am fond of orange juice.” She paused for a moment, her palms coming to rest on the front of her jacket, but she forced them down. Her expression grave, she put her hands into his. “Promise you will only use it if I become a danger. I am a very calm wolf, but we all have the potential for fury. Especially under the circumstances. The potion is very powerful, and I do not want to be incapacitated by an overdose.”

“Fair enough.” He eyed the lead in his hand. “You know, since you might be a wolf for, what? Is it three nights with you guys? We should put this to good use.”

With a low, playful growl, she moved closer to him. Then she stopped. Her body tensed.

“Bella?” Oh God. Not again.

Before he could complete the thought, Max flew backward, propelled by an evil wind that seemed to come through the walls. Nothing else moved—the curtains didn’t even stir—but Bella rose slowly from the floor, her head tipping back. Her mouth fell open, blood dribbling from her lips as the Oracle spoke through her. “Bring the weapon to me!”

“You want a weapon? I’ll bring you a weapon, you crazy bitch!” He reached into his back pocket for the stake there, then remembered it was Bella, not the Oracle, he would kill if he used it. How did she get so far into my head? The thought of what he’d been about to do sickened him, but there was no way to retaliate against the power that was destroying Bella.

“Bring the weapon to me!” the voice raged from Bella’s throat. Then, as quickly as it had come over her, the Oracle’s power was gone. Bella dropped in a heap on the floor, lay still for a moment, then snapped up, her eyes cold with hatred.

Max stepped warily toward her. “Bella, is that you?”

“It is me,” she gasped, choking up more blood. “She is here. She has people here. They know we are coming.”

He scrubbed a hand over his face, hating that his hand was trembling. “You rest. I’ll keep watch. And I’ll call Nathan, see if he got any information on reinforcements.”

“No.” She shook her head, drawing herself up slowly. “No. I will not wait for them to come after us. Get back in the car.”

“Bella,” he began, ready for a fight. He walked toward her, and she was on her feet before he reached her, brandishing a stake.

She leveled the point in front of his chest. “Get back in the car.”

Max kept one eye on the road and one on Bella as she leaned out the car window, scenting the air. For the first time, he was tempted to snap at a passenger for not wearing a seat belt. She was hanging way too far out.

When had he become so like Marcus? If this was what love did to someone, no wonder Max had avoided it for so long.

“Are you getting anything?” he asked, gripping the steering wheel tighter, as if that would hold her in. If she fell and broke her neck, he’d kill her.

She slipped into her seat again, thank God, but didn’t buckle up. “Turn at the next available right.”

“The next available right is a dirt two track.” He leaned forward. “Or less.”

“That is where you must go.” She wrinkled her nose. “I smell vampires.”

“How many?” The last thing he needed was to drive into an ambush, though it seemed too late for regrets as he steered the car onto the dirt path. “There are things I need to know before we get there.”

She shrugged. “There were many. Now, there is only one distinct scent. Two, three at most.”

“One is still a possibility?” He downshifted, wincing at the scrape of the rutted road against the undercarriage of the vehicle.

“Of course. Better to be prepared for more, though.” She reached into the back seat and pulled two stakes from Max’s supply. “May I?”

“Help yourself. What happened to yours?” Max leaned forward. The windshield had begun to fog, a phenomenon he hadn’t had to deal with since he’d become a vampire. Mortal passengers were such a pain in the ass. He rubbed the glass clear with his forearm.

“They are in the trunk. I have everything else. Holy water, my crossbow—”

He shushed her. “Is that it?”

Ahead, a ramshackle cabin with two windows and a bowed porch stood at the place where the track ended. Bella rolled down the window and sniffed, then gave a short nod.

Max raised his hand and lifted three fingers. She shook her head and replied with one finger. One vampire. No problem. Breathing a sigh of relief, Max eased the car door open. He didn’t close it once he was outside. No sense in letting the poor sap know they were there.

Bella retrieved her weapons from the back seat and followed suit, waving to signal he should follow her.

Like hell he was going to let her charge in there unprotected. He jogged ahead, grabbed her shoulder and used her moment of surprise to push her behind him. He heard her cluck her tongue in annoyance, and he held up his hand for quiet.

The steps to the cabin were damp and broken, and probably prone to squeaking. Max placed one foot on the first step, his face frozen in a preemptive wince as he anticipated a loud creak, or worse, the whole thing splintering under his weight.

When it didn’t, he motioned Bella forward.

The porch was only about four feet wide. The sagging roof didn’t allow for much vertical clearance, and Max had to stoop. The door to the cabin didn’t even have a handle. A beam of light projected from the hole where the knob used to be.

Are they making it easy on purpose? He pushed aside the feeling he and Bella were walking into a trap, and gave her a thumbs-up. When she replied in kind, he kicked the door in.

If he’d had any doubts they’d found the right place, they vanished the second they stepped inside. The furniture in the tiny room consisted of a kitchen table, a rusty utility sink, a minirefrigerator and a dirty cot with a stained pillow. A lone figure sat at the table, hunched over with his head in his hands.

“I knew you were coming.” He lifted his bald head, and Max saw the man’s eyes were ringed with dark circles.

“Are you a vampire?” Max asked calmly, pulling a stake from his back pocket.

The man nodded.

“What’s your name?” He weighed the wood in his palm. The tiny voice in the back of his head that always popped up during moments like this sing-songed That could be you.

The vampire at the table resumed his slouched posture. “Ford Prefect.”

“Ford Prefect?” Odd name. “Well, then, Ford Prefect, by order of the Voluntary Vampire Extinction Movement—”

“That is not his name,” Bella said quietly from behind him. When he gave her a questioning glance, she shrugged. “It is the name of a character from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.” As if in defense, she added, “I like to read.”

It took him a minute to get the flow back, but Max managed. “Oh, I get it, you think you’re going to smart off to me and go out like a real badass, huh?”

“More or less.” The vampire leaned back in his chair, trying—and failing—to affect nonchalance. He had a ring through the center part of his nose and he toyed with it, sliding it back and forth between his fingers.

“Well, nice try, but—” The thunk of the crossbow releasing a bolt cut Max off. The projectile sliced through the air, sinking deep into the vampire’s shoulder.

He screamed, and Max rounded on Bella. “What the hell was that?”

“A clean shot with the intent to maim.” She reached to the quiver at her back and pulled out another bolt, snapping it in place and cranking the handle as if nothing was amiss.

“We’re supposed to get information from him, not kill him outright!” Max grabbed the bow and jerked it from her grasp, and the bolt snapped free, whizzing past his ear to embed in the dirty wall.

“I will get our information,” Bella said, rolling her eyes. “Perhaps you should try to not kill yourself outright.”

“Oh, I’ll try not to kill myself outright.” Somehow, repeating her remark with added sarcasm didn’t come off with the bite he’d hoped it would. He tossed the bow aside, cursing himself as she stalked toward their prey, her braid snapping lethally behind her.

She leaned over the groaning vampire and grasped the end of the arrow, giving it a sharp tug. When he howled, she said, “Oh, I am sorry. Did that hurt?”

“Fuck you, bitch!” He spat at her, but she dodged it.

With a twist of her wrist, the vampire was screaming again. “You should be more polite to the person holding your life in her hands. Will you be more polite?”

There was a litany of curses, and she responded with a downward jerk of the arrow. “It would not be in your best interests to bring this wood closer to your heart.”

The vampire went deathly still. He raised his hands. “I don’t know anything. Why would I know anything? Do I look connected? I don’t even have a phone.”

Bella’s eyes darted around the room. They widened and she nodded toward the minifridge. “But you do have duct tape.”

She didn’t have to say it twice. Max grabbed the dusty roll of tape from the top of the refrigerator, stepped forward and started immobilizing their friend.

“Leave one of his arms free. Tape that hand to the table, palm down.” She jerked the bolt from his shoulder, and blood gushed out, first a strong pulse, then a trickle.

“You’re not going to let him bleed to death, are you?” Max pulled a strip of the tape free and morphed his face, using his fangs to bite through the heavy material.

Bella laughed at him. “No, but he will wish for death when we are finished.”

“I told you, I don’t know anything.” The vampire let them lay his arm across the table, too distracted by their threats to put up any resistance.

Max had seen this too many times. The realization hit him like a ton of bricks, and he paused in his bondage duties to absorb the blow. He’d gone soft somewhere between his last job and this. He didn’t want to cause pain and death anymore. He didn’t want any part of this.

Most of all, he didn’t want to see Bella do these things. He wanted to pull her from this cabin and drag her to the car, start driving somewhere else and never look back.

“Max?” Bella frowned at him. How long she’d been doing so he had no clue. When his gaze met hers, her eyes flared, then narrowed in silent understanding. She pursed her lips and nodded toward the tape in his hand. “Keep going.”

If asked to describe Bella’s methods of torture, the words cruel efficiency would have been the only appropriate answer. She didn’t bother with a lot of talk once her victim was secured.

“What is your name?” she asked him.

When he answered, “Arthur Dent,” she stabbed the arrow that had previously been lodged in his shoulder straight through his hand.

“I take it that’s another fake one, huh?” Max asked, raising his voice to be heard over the vampire’s screams.

She wrenched the bolt free and repeated her question. “What is your name?”

“Patrick! It’s Patrick!” he howled, straining against his bonds.

To Max’s surprise, they didn’t break. All that stuff they said about duct tape was true.

“Patrick, do you work for the Oracle?” She twirled the arrow through her fingers and held it poised above his already healing hand. The speed with which the injury closed was an indication of Patrick’s age. And power.

Careful with this one, baby. As soon as he’d thought it, Max saw her eye the wound. She took a step back, her retreat so subtle Patrick would never notice. She motioned Max in with a tilt of her head.

He pulled a leather glove from his back pocket and slipped a small vial of holy water from one of the fingers. He set the vial on the table in plain view while he pulled on the glove, then retrieved it and unscrewed the top. “We’re waiting, Patrick.”

“I w-work for the Soul Eater,” he stammered, eyeing the liquid.

“The Soul Eater?” Bella gave Max an arch look. “What are you doing here then?”

“Yeah, the Soul Eater is in San Francisco.” It was a lie, but to Max’s relief, Bella played along.

So did Patrick. “San Francisco?”

The vampire’s outrage spurred Max’s story along. “Yeah, didn’t you know? Man, they keep you way out of the loop.”

“Bullshit!” Patrick tried to raise his hand. “If they’re in San Francisco, why would they send me up here?”

Max snorted. “That’s what we want to know. What is the Soul Eater up to with the Oracle?”

Suddenly brave again, Patrick spat once more at Bella. “I’m not telling you shit!”

She nodded to Max. He let a drop of holy water fall onto the freshly healed skin of Patrick’s hand. A cloud of foul steam rose from the wound as the skin scalded away under the droplet.

“Plenty more where that came from, sport.” Max tilted the vial theatrically.

Patrick stopped his howling long enough to dissuade him. “Okay, okay. I’ll tell you.”

When he didn’t answer fast enough, Bella nodded to Max.

“No! No!” Patrick begged. “I’m here to pick something up.”

Now they were getting somewhere. Max pulled the vial back a few inches. “Pick what up?”

Patrick calmed a little once he saw he was out of immediate danger of scorching. “A weapon. I don’t know what it is.”

“This weapon…You will take it to the Soul Eater?” Bella’s voice sounded strange and tight.

Max didn’t register that until it was too late. Patrick lunged in his chair, not quite breaking his bonds, but twisting enough to flip the table and tear his hand free. Max fell back just as the other vampire lurched awkwardly to his feet. He swung the chair still taped to his back against the wall, shattering it. With a cry of fury, he ripped a piece of the splintered chair from the tape that still dangled from his elbow. He advanced on Bella, brandishing his makeshift stake.

“Hey, no!” Max climbed to his feet, pulling a stake from his pocket.

Though she wasn’t a vampire, Bella was mortal, and she would have been stupid to ignore the consequences of having something plunged through her heart. With lightning fast reflexes, she grasped her assailant’s forearms. Her face contorted in fighting rage as she tried to subdue him, but she wasn’t strong enough. He threw her off and she fell, bringing her legs up to connect with his chest as he lunged toward her.

Max jumped across the overturned table, knocking Patrick off of Bella. He had him pinned to the floor with a foot against his throat before she got to her feet.

“Where’s the Oracle?” Max dug the point of the stake into Patrick’s chest.

The vampire laughed. “I could take you to her.”

“Fuck you! Where is she?” Max pushed harder and saw blood well around the edges of the stake. “Where the fuck is she?”

“Max! You will kill him!” Bella’s voice cut through the red haze of Max’s anger. This asshole had tried to kill her. He’d tried to push a stake through her heart. He’d put his hands on her in anger.

“Max, please, we will not get any information from him this way.” Bella grasped his arm.

Relenting with the stake, just a little, Max twisted his foot. Patrick’s face went purple.

“You’re going to die. You can tell us where to find the Oracle and I’ll send you out fast, or you can hold out. I could make this last all night. What do you say?”

Patrick grasped Max’s ankle, trying to dislodge his foot, but when it didn’t work, he settled for giving him the finger.

“Get the holy water,” Max growled. He dropped to a knee on the vampire’s chest and gripped his jaw, forcing his mouth open.

Patrick’s loud, angry sounds of protest changed in pitch to frenzied panic when he saw the vial in Bella’s fist.

“You gonna talk?” Max reached toward Bella for the vial, but something in the way she clutched it tighter warned him off.

It didn’t translate to Patrick. “Fine, fine. I don’t know exactly where. Her people came here the other night.”

“Are they coming back?” Max struggled to keep a grip on the stake. Why were his hands suddenly sweaty?

“In two nights.” The whites of Patrick’s eyes were becoming a spiderweb of broken vessels. “They’ll be here right at sundown. They’re supposed to take me to the Oracle. She’ll have what she wants by then. She thinks…she thinks I’ve got a message from the Soul Eater that can only be delivered to her.”

“It is never the same ones twice,” Bella interjected with a delicate sniff. “Many have been here since you arrived…two weeks ago.”

“You’re good,” Patrick said, with a sneer to show he didn’t appreciate it. “Another guy was here before me. One of the Soul Eater’s own babies.”

Max applied a little more weight to his knee. “What’s the message?”

“No message,” the vampire groaned. “It’s a sham. I’m supposed to go in and get what the Soul Eater wants. The other guy has his own instructions.”

“What’s that?” Max asked, something cold clenching in his guts.

Patrick looked at Bella, a crazed light coming to his eyes. His mouth parted in a sickening smile. “You’re going to die. You know it. You should have let me stake you.”

“Shut up.” Max pressed the stake into Patrick’s chest.

He didn’t pay any attention to his imminent demise, his eyes still trained intensely on Bella. “You’ll suffer. And you’ll die. And you’ll know you are powerless to protect your child.”

“What?” Max looked to Bella for a denial. She backed away with her hand over her mouth.

This can’t be happening. The last few weeks unspooled in his mind. The riddle was so obvious now that he knew the answer.

The vampire beneath him laughed. “You didn’t know?”

He burned before he could scream.

Max grabbed Bella’s arm and jerked her from the cottage, oblivious to her protests. He knew he should have investigated the room for more evidence. No, he didn’t care they’d come all this way for nothing.

Once they were in the car, driving way too fast down the dirt road, he exploded.

“What the hell was he talking about? A kid? It sure as hell can’t be mine!” The vehicle went airborne for a minute when they reached the road. For a second, he wasn’t sure they wouldn’t sail into the ditch.

Bella sobbed silently beside him. “It has to be! I have not been with anyone except you.”

“Hate to burst your little lie bubble, but vampires aren’t exactly fertile!” He gunned the engine to make it through a yellow light. “Meaning that can’t be mine!”

“Well, how else would you explain it?” She pounded the dash with her fist. “I do not know how it happened. But it happened! And now the Oracle will take our child!”

“There is no child!” He clenched the steering wheel almost hard enough to snap it. “We’re going back to Chicago. We’ll get this all sorted out there.”

She nodded, for once being reasonable. “You are right. We will leave. We will leave.”

“Finally, something you say makes sense.” They’d get as far away from the Oracle as Max could get them. As for Bella’s story of how she got knocked up…well, they could figure that one out later.

He relaxed a little, settling back in his seat. Things would work out. Bella wouldn’t die, they’d be finished with this Oracle business and everything would work out.

He saw the headlights of the car just before it hit them, crumpling the passenger side and spinning them into a ditch.

Seventeen:

Mother

“T hat’s not possible,” Nathan insisted, shaking his head. “If Bella were pregnant, wouldn’t the baby end up—”

“A lupin.” Cyrus shook his own head. “But that wasn’t her intention. Dahlia assumed she’d be the one impregnated, obviously, or she wouldn’t have used it on me.”

“A lupin is just a werewolf who aligns with technology instead of magic.” Nathan’s definition didn’t sound as confident as it might have in the past.

“That’s what your precious Movement tells you. The wolves know better. Among them, lupin is a blanket term for any vampire who’s been bitten by a werewolf, or a werewolf who’s exchanged blood with a vampire. They might retain all of the distinct powers from both species, or just take on a few key characteristics.” Cyrus didn’t cover up his smirk. “Our side has known for years.”

Still reeling, I reached for the book. “How long was Dahlia working on this?”

“Your guess is as good as mine. I remember drinking a potion, but she was always giving me potions.” He wouldn’t look me in the eye. “For various…sexual reasons.”

“And you never wondered what they were for?” Nathan asked, arms folded, expression incredulous.

Sheepishly, Cyrus looked at us. “No. The first few times I did, of course. But they were always herbal concoctions. To enhance the act. She took them as well, so I assumed they were safe.”

Nathan snorted. “You know what assuming does. It makes an—”

“That’s not constructive,” I snapped. A wave of sickness rose in my throat. Memories of the first time I’d been with Cyrus overwhelmed me. It had been tense, violent, deviant…and I had no doubt he’d treated Dahlia the same. She’d done those sick things to conceive a child?

“Why would she want a baby? Did she think it would make you turn her? Stay with her?” Nathan didn’t so much ask us these questions as throw them out for brainstorming.

“Well, it’s obvious she thought a natural-born vampire would have something to do with the Oracle’s prophecy about the weapon.” I tried not to imagine what the baby would be used for.

“Or it is the weapon.” Nathan’s words gave form to my dread. He lifted the book and scanned the page. “Though it seems unlikely to me that she could have achieved all this in the time between the Vampire New Year and the time we killed you. I wish she would have dated this.”

“No, she didn’t start after the Vampire New Year. That’s why I can’t imagine her purpose. But she gave me the potion the first night I was with you.” Cyrus realized too late the effect his words had on me.

I stumbled into the living room, breathing hard. I heard Nathan mutter something, and the scrape of a chair. But it was Cyrus who came to stand awkwardly behind me. “Carrie?”

“Don’t!” I marched down the hall, raging with the things I wanted to scream at him. The fact his little “pet” had tried to take away my reproductive freedom—albeit freedom I didn’t really know I’d had—should have been at the top of the list. How could he have not suspected? She’d never hidden her ambitions, from him or anyone else. So how could he have not known? And what would have happened to the child we might have created?

Another, more haunting possibility—that we could have had a child together, that I could have been a mother—tore my heart. But what kind of child would it have been? An unholy monster, like its father? Would I have lost all my humanity in protecting and caring for it?

To his credit, Cyrus didn’t try to give me space. He followed me to my room and sat on the end of the bed after I flung myself across it. Two tear tracks, tainted pink with blood, wet his face as he looked at me. “I didn’t know. Carrie, I swear to you, I didn’t know.”

He pulled his legs into the small space at the end of the bed and closed the door, shutting us in the dark. He didn’t turn on the light.

“How could you not know?” But that wasn’t what I wanted to ask him, and he knew it.

“You mean, ‘how could you take potions from her?’” His voice was thick with emotion. “‘How could Dahlia have done something you weren’t aware of, when you were the person closest to her? Didn’t you care about her? Didn’t you take an interest in her beyond what she could do for you?’ I wish I could tell you that I was forced. I wasn’t. I took what she gave me, like a common drug addict. I can’t lie and tell you that I knew all about it, or that I cared about her, or that I ever asked her a single question that wasn’t a proposition. I don’t even know her last name.”

“How could you be that way?” I hated how my voice trembled when I cried. I sounded like a seventeen-year-old breaking up with her boyfriend. “How could you treat her like that?”

“I don’t know. I’m ashamed of myself. Not because you want to hear it, but because I am. And you know I’ve changed. But I can’t change the past, no matter how much I wish it.”

We sat in silence for a long time. I measured the seconds by the beating of his heart, which sounded as loud as my own in the silence of the room.

“It would have been a lovely child,” he said finally. “We’re not unattractive people.”

I smiled, in spite of the pain that twisted in my chest. “Nursing a vampire baby might have proved problematic.”

He chuckled, then there was more silence.

“Why did she do it?” I asked, though I knew what the answer would be.

“Because my father asked it of her.” Cyrus sounded miserable, and lost. “I’ve no doubt of that.”

“But she did it before the Vampire New Year,” I reminded him.

He shook his head sadly. “I wouldn’t be surprised at all if my father had arranged my meeting her from the start. He has that kind of power. He can make anyone do anything.”

It was true. Cyrus had been so desperate for the Soul Eater’s love and approval he’d killed his own brother to become their father’s fledgling. He’d sacrificed his own happiness, his humanity. He’d even admitted he would have given Jacob Seymour his very soul if he’d required it. But why? I’d seen the Soul Eater. It certainly wasn’t his good looks and charming demeanor that commanded such suicidal loyalty.

Sensing my thoughts, Cyrus tensed beside me. “He wasn’t always like that, Carrie. You saw him at the end of a yearlong fast. He’s little more than a glorified corpse at that time. My father…my father is selfish, but he tricks you into thinking he deserves all you do for him. And he acts grateful. That gratitude is like a drug for people like Dahlia and me. For anyone who’s lived a life like mine.”

Cyrus seemed to struggle with something. His confusion and pain were evident through the blood tie. Images of Mouse, interlaced with images of a time long ago, flashed in his thoughts.

I took his hand in mine. “Tell me.”

With a sad, quirked smile, he lifted my hand to his lips. “I’ll show you.”

It was an intimate thing between us, the sharing of memories. We’d done it before, when he was the sire and I was the fledgling. Though our roles had reversed, it felt as natural as before, and comfortingly familiar. It was something I’d never dared to do with Nathan. He’d seen flashes of memories through the blood tie, and the few times he’d tasted my blood, but I’d never invited him into my head the way I had Cyrus. Maybe I didn’t trust him. Maybe I thought he would judge me for what he saw. Maybe I was trying to protect him from seeing something that might hurt him.

With Cyrus, I didn’t care. Nothing I had ever done had been more shameful than the things I knew from his past. And nothing he saw could hurt him. He knew the extent of my betrayal. He knew me better than Nathan did. Probably better than I knew myself, since he’d seen and reveled in the dark side of my personality that I denied.

We lay together on my tiny bed, our hands still twisted together. “Are you sure?”

“What do I have to lose?” he asked, drawing in a shaking breath. And then I was rushing forward, through absolute blackness, through emotions too numerous to feel, let alone name.

On the other side of the blackness, I saw a woman. For a moment, I thought she must be very tall. She towered over me, her hip bones at my eye level as we faced each other. Then I remembered I was not myself, but was looking through Cyrus’s eyes. Cyrus as a child.

The very thought of it, that somewhere, before the scheming and murder, he’d been, well, as innocent as a baby, would have choked me up, if I’d been in my body.

I took advantage of the moment to study the woman. She wasn’t an adult so much as a girl. Rail thin, with limp, dirty blond hair and dark circles under her eyes, she looked like she would drop from exhaustion as she stirred the huge iron cauldron that hung over the hearth. A chubby hand tugged on her skirts, and she looked down. A genuine smile lit her tired face, then a look of alarm replaced it. “Simon, no! Very hot. You’ll burn yourself, mark me!”

It was something young Cyrus heard often. She was terrified of the children burning themselves. Lifting him up, she kissed his forehead and wiped his nose with her apron. Setting him on his feet, she handed him a wooden bucket. It was heavy, and the rope handle made his palms itch, but he was a good boy. He knew how to get the water and bring it back for his stepmother.

“Out with you,” she said, giving his backside a pat. From his halting gait, I imagined he was three or four years old. He stumbled through the oiled canvas flap over the doorway, tripping a bit on the hard-packed earth, and I was rushing forward again, to the spot where Cyrus, with no way to brace himself from the impact, smacked his forehead on the ground.

Young Simon Seymour was a hardy child, despite his surroundings. He stood, brushed off his scraped knees and took a few steps before he heard his stepmother’s voice.

“Simon? Are you all right?”

Dropping his bucket, he plopped down in the dirt and summoned the best fake tears a three-year-old could produce. When the girl ran from the broken-down cottage, her face showed only concern. No annoyance that her work had been interrupted, no resentment that she had to tend a child that was not her own. She scooped him up, holding his probably dirty face close to her own, kissed him and murmured reassurances that he’d be all right.

I was touched to the core to see that, no matter how the rest of his life had gone, he’d had at least one person who’d loved him unconditionally.

The scene changed. Cyrus was still a child, perhaps a few years older. His footing was surer, his thoughts more sophisticated. He carried a wooden bucket, probably the same one from the earlier memory, toward the river. It was hot, and the water level was low. He’d have to climb down the bank to get any at all.

He’d set the bucket down carefully and was about to begin his descent when he heard the screams. It wasn’t uncommon to hear a woman shouting in the village. Women screamed at their children, screamed when giving birth, screamed when they were being beaten. Women screamed all the time over the smallest things, in his opinion. Except his mother.

That’s why he didn’t recognize her voice right away.

He realized it was her when she burst onto the lane, wailing in pain and terror. Flames consumed her clothes, burned away her hair. She beat at her blazing skirts with bloody hands. The skin fell away in huge chunks.

She was trying to get to the river, he realized, his small heart beating furiously in his chest. She needed water, needed help. Without a thought for the sharp rocks and protruding roots, he grabbed the bucket and slid down the bank.

It seemed to take forever, while the screaming went on and on. The bucket filled slowly, as if with tar instead of water. The weight was insubstantial, though, and he bounded up the slippery bank faster than he’d ever managed before. His legs and arms should have ached from the exertion, but he gained the top and raced to where his mother had fallen, her body still smoldering, blackened skin indistinguishable from her burned garments. When he threw the water over her, steam rose.

She didn’t move. She made no sound. Made no sound, but he couldn’t stop the screams in his head.

Men and women from the village had crowded around. More ran toward them. And there was his father, fists clenched so hard blood ran from where his nails bit into his palms, though his face was an impassive mask. “Go home, Simon. Finish making supper.”

In an agonizing second, like pulling off a Band-Aid, I returned to the present. Cyrus looked at me with pity. After what I’d seen him go through, he pitied me?

“For having seen it.” He stroked the side of my face, and I realized it was wet with tears.

Sniffling against the threat of more, I asked, “How old were you?”

“Seven, as far as I know. I’m not sure when I was born.” His hand stilled, coming to rest on my hair. “She was my father’s third wife. He didn’t love her, but…I think it was the horror of it. It changed him. Very shortly after that he met the man who would sire him. The man bought our bond and we moved away from the village to live in fealty to him. Father told us to forget everything before. It was a new start.”

“How did it happen?” If someone had told me even an hour ago that I would feel something other than hatred for the Soul Eater, I wouldn’t have believed it. But the look I’d seen on his face, the suppression of emotion that was clearly intended to hide his pain from his son…

“She was hanging the pot over the fire, and her skirt brushed the embers. That’s all it took.” Cyrus cleared his throat. “It wasn’t uncommon, then.”

“Whether common or not, it was horrible.” I couldn’t stand it anymore. I put my arms around him. “For you and your father.”

It didn’t absolve Jacob Seymour of all the sins he’d committed, but it did explain them a bit. It also explained why Cyrus was so desperate for affection from any female at all, regardless of whether she was willing to love him in return, or was even capable of doing so.

Our eyes met. His were red, from unshed tears. “The only women who ever loved me were taken from me. Once by fate, the rest by my father. I can’t forgive him that.”

“You shouldn’t have to.” I wanted badly to tell him how much I’d loved him, but it would have been a lie.

“You didn’t love me.” Even though he was now on the opposite side of the blood tie, my emotions were still transparent to Cyrus. “But I believe you wanted to.”

“I did.” I couldn’t hold back my tears. Not over this. “I did.”

“If it makes you feel any better, it’s a credit to your character that you couldn’t.” He smiled a little, but it faded quickly. “I know that now.”

“You hated me for it.” I leaned my forehead against his. Our lips were so close to touching. My mouth went dry. I touched my tongue to my lips, and he was on top of me, smothering my mouth and crushing my body beneath his.

I still do. But his thought was swallowed up in a tidal wave of longing and…fear?

Cyrus leaned back and gave a curt nod to the door. “The last time I did this, your boyfriend beat me up.”

“He’s not my boyfriend.” I paused at the sound of the door in the living room closing. “And I don’t want to talk about it.”

I did, just not to Cyrus. It’s just a kiss, I projected to Nathan through the blood tie. The cold that met my thought from the other end forced a tangible shiver down my spine.

“Forget him, Carrie.” Cyrus’s arms tightened around my back. “You’ve given him so many chances.”

“What is it to you how many chances I give him?” I snapped, pulling away.

“It doesn’t mean anything to me.” There wasn’t malice in his words. “I know you’re mine, whether I want you or not.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” This was a side of him I hadn’t missed, the possessive, arrogant side.

He sat up, but not beside me. “Let’s look at this reasonably. After I attacked you, when you knew I was a monster, you sought me out.”

“Because of the blood tie,” I reminded him.

“Fair enough.” He shrugged. “After that, when you needed help with Nathan, you turned to me.”

“I needed your pet to undo what she’d done to him.”

He sighed. “You’re rationalizing. In the end, you kept coming back to me. Even to kill me, you wanted it to be between us alone.”

He was right. There was no arguing that. When something concerned Cyrus, I wanted to be the only one involved. Whether I was fighting him or rescuing him.

“I’m not laying claim to you, Carrie.” His elegant hands kneaded my shoulders. “But it seems you’ve already laid claim to me.”

I turned and leaned into him when he curved his body around me. “But you let me.”

“I did.” His lips brushed my jaw, my ear. His mouth came to rest on my throat, the opposite side from where the scar of his first attack still marked me. “I suppose it’s meant to be, then.”

His fangs pricked my skin, threatening to break through and asking permission all at once. “What about Mouse?” I asked, stopping him.

“What about Nathan?” he retorted, lifting his mouth. “There is a part of me that is still in the desert with her. While I was there, a part of me was still with you.”

“I seem to have a gift for falling in love with men who are in love with their pasts.”

My admission seemed to freeze him in place. I didn’t apologize for it or explain it away. I’d been in denial for far too long.

He faltered a little when he tried to speak, cleared his throat, then started over. “Well, that may be true. But I’m no fool. I know who’s here now.”

In the past, I might have looked for a trick or a trap in his words. Now, they brought tears of relief to my eyes.

This time, when he asked me if I loved him, I could say the words without fear of what I would become.

Eighteen:

Crash

“G et them inside and get them restrained!”

The words came to Max as through water, garbled and hard to decode. When he understood them, he struggled. Nothing held him down, but something definitely pinned him from the sides. Canvas, if his eyes weren’t fooling him.

“Bella!” He thrashed in his hammocklike prison, but he couldn’t quite get his arms free. “Bella!”

“We’ve got her. You’re going to be okay.” A pale face peered over the edge of the litter. “What’s your name?”

“She’s pregnant. Is she okay? She’s pregnant.” He closed his eyes, willing himself to focus on the noise around him. If he could just hear her voice…“Bella!”

“She’s fine. What’s your name?” the medic repeated.

What the hell had happened? Where was he? What were these people doing?

The car. Rolling down the embankment. Blood. Everywhere, there had been blood.

Oh, God, he wasn’t with the paramedics, was he? They could put him in the hospital, sedate him, stick him in a nice, sunny room with an eastern exposure….

“I’m allergic to sunlight!” he shouted, finally freeing his hand to reach for the face before him. “I can’t be in the daylight!”

The woman’s face twisted into a demonic vision. Max had never been so happy to see something so nightmarish in his entire life.

“We know,” she said with curt efficiency. “What’s your name?”

“Max Harrison. I’m—” He’d almost blurted, “I’m Movement.” That would have been smooth.

What the vampire said next was music to his ears. “Max Harrison, by authority of the Voluntary Vampire Extinction Movement, I’m placing you under arrest.”

“I’m Movement.” He gave a tired laugh. It was increasingly difficult to stay awake. “When there was one.”

“What?” The woman’s pale face went paler. “What did you say?”

“Leave him alone, he’s not in any shape for interrogation,” another voice admonished. “Get him into the van.”

“Bella. Where’s Bella?” Max’s stomach turned. Why wouldn’t they tell him anything? “I need her. I need to see Bella.”

“You will,” the male vampire assured him. “You will.”

Something pricked Max’s arm. Sleepy warmth spread through his veins, and everything went dark.

When Max woke again, he was in a hospital bed. He started, scanning the room frantically for a window. When he didn’t find one, fragmented memories came back to him. He was with Movement. He was fine.

He tried to sit up. His arms were tied to the bed rails.

With a frustrated groan, he tugged futilely at his restraints. Leather. Not too shabby. Nothing he couldn’t break free from on a good day, but this was definitely not a good day.

“Anybody out there?” No one answered his call. “Hey, can somebody hear me?”

“I hear ya, I hear ya.” Heavy footsteps thudded toward the bed. Max turned his head. The vampire who stalked toward him probably weighed in at three hundred and fifty pounds of intimidating bulk stacked seven feet tall. His bushy red beard and beady black eyes looked more suited to a plaid shirt and overalls than the white doctor’s coat he wore.

“Paul Bunyan?” Max said before he could stop himself.

The doctor didn’t find it very humorous. “What do ya need? Keep in mind, I ain’t lettin’ you up, not ’til your Movement cred is established.”

“Bella,” Max wheezed. His chest ached with uncertainty. “Where is she?”

“She’s over there.” Dr. Lumberjack indicated a curtained-off cubicle not far from where Max lay. Fluorescent lights within cast ominous shadows of large medical machines.

At least Max could hear the steady beeping of a heart monitor. “Is she okay?”

“She’s fine. We’ve got her sedated to keep her from moving around and opening her stitches, but she’s gonna pull through.”

“And the baby?” He wet his lips. “I mean, you knew she was pregnant?”

“We figured it out.” The doctor raised an eyebrow. “Got a personal stake in it?”

“What do you think?” Max snapped. Then he softened. “I’m just looking out for her.”

“The baby is fine. We did an ultrasound for her file. Do you wanna see?” Before Max could answer, Dr. Bunyan flipped open a chart.

The picture he held over Max’s face didn’t look like anything at all, at first. Just a weird swoop of grayish lines against blue-black. Only when the doctor tapped the printout and said, “That’s the kid, right there,” did Max understand what he was seeing. Within a dark area shaped like a jelly bean was a grayish object that bore an uncanny resemblance to a shrimp.

“That’s the baby?” Max asked, looking from the image long enough to see the doctor nod. Max’s chest constricted as if his ribs were in a vise. “That’s…amazing.”

“Is there something you wanna tell us?” the doctor asked, whisking the picture into the chart.

Max shook his head. “I told you everything I know.”

The big man grunted in disbelief, but let the subject drop.

“Can I see her?” The fact she hadn’t spoken yet troubled Max. He didn’t think there was a sedative on earth that would shut her up.

“Sorry, can’t let you up yet.” The doctor tapped the chart in his hands cheerfully. “We’ll let you know when your Movement cred checks out, and then we’ll talk. But you can push this button—” he pressed a plastic control into Max’s palm “—if you want to talk to someone before then.”

“You mean if I want to spill something about the baby?” Max narrowed his eyes at him.

“Not necessarily.” Whistling, the doctor walked away.

The sound of a door closing echoed in the space. Max was alone. “Bella?” he whispered. When she didn’t answer, he dropped his head to the pillow and stared at the exposed pipes on the ceiling.

He had no idea how long he’d been asleep when Bella woke him.

“Max?” She sounded terrified. “Max!”

“I’m here, baby.” He tested the restraints. Still strapped in. “Keep your voice down, or they’ll come back.”

“They?” Her voice quivered. “Max, where are we?”

He studied the concrete ceiling and exposed ventilation system. “A warehouse, apparently. We’ve been arrested by the Movement.”

There was a pause in which Max heard her release a long, slow breath. When she spoke, she sounded much calmer. “Thank God.”

He hated to get her worked up again, but he’d never coddled her before and he wouldn’t start now. “Don’t be thanking him yet. They know about the baby.”

She paused again. “Oh?”

“Yeah, and I think they know where it came from.” He craned his head to look for any sign of recording devices. Though he didn’t see any, he wasn’t sure they were a hundred percent in the clear. “Though I’m not entirely certain, myself.”

She sniffled. Damn it, he’d made her cry.

“Don’t do that. I’m sorry.” When she didn’t let up, he said, as brightly as he could manage, “Hey, they showed me an ultrasound of it.”

“It survived?” The hope in her voice was tremulous. She was holding back, in case he answered in the negative.

He kept his voice intentionally light. “Oh, yeah, everything is fine. Looks like a shrimp, but seems fine.”

She laughed tearfully. “Thank you, Max.”

“I’m the last person you need to be thanking.” He closed his eyes, resisting the urge to bang his head against the bed rails. It was his fault they were here. If he’d just calmed down, slowed down…

They’d probably have been captured by the Oracle. Brilliant.

“How did they find us?” Bella had dredged up her business voice. “No one knew we were there.”

“I don’t know. I suppose they’ll tell us, once they figure out we’re not working for the Oracle.” He thought about pressing the button to call someone in so he could demand some answers.

As if reading his mind, Bella protested. “No. Let them come to us in their own time. I want to be with you right now. Even if we cannot see each other.”

A reluctant smile tugged at his lips. “You know, I’ve always wanted to try bondage. I guess it works better when one person is untied.”

“I would prefer that person to be me.” She laughed, and when it died away, turned serious again. “Do you think they will harm the baby?”

“I think if they try, I’ll be busting some heads.” He said it extra loud, so if their captors were listening, they’d hear. Then, more quietly, only for Bella’s ears, he added, “You know I won’t let that happen.”

“Thank you,” she replied. “Max?”

“Yeah?” God, he wanted to have her right there next to him. Seeing the ultrasound had made the idea of the baby oddly real. He wanted to put his arms around her, to lay his hands protectively over her stomach. Did a baby move when it was just a tadpole-looking thing? Would he be able to feel it?

Bella’s voice trembled when she spoke. “I love you. You are the only one I love.”

Or have loved, was the unspoken part of her statement, Max knew. She was still worried he thought he wasn’t the father.

Well, was he? It seemed impossible, but there it had been, photographic proof. And Bella had said before that wolves were different when it came to sex. Even the most sexually active werewolf wouldn’t have more than one partner in an entire lifetime. It probably wasn’t as if she’d been banging some human guy in the busy month they’d been separated. She’d told Max as much, and as unbelievable as the whole situation seemed, he believed it.

“Yeah, I know. Don’t you worry about that.” He hoped that was enough. “And I love you.”

After a long silence, he realized she was sleeping again.

“Max, wake up!”

The room was pitch-dark. Someone had come in—day or night? he’d lost all sense of time—and turned off the overhead fluorescents.

“Max! Did they drug you or something?”

“Probably,” he rasped. That voice was so familiar.

“Open your eyes, you dork.”

He did. Anne, the eternally teenaged receptionist from Movement headquarters, stood over him, her porcelain-doll face etched with worry.

Max sighed in relief. “Oh, good. Can you go tell them I’m Movement so they’ll let me up? Or feed me?” Then he blinked, crucial details rising to the surface of his groggy mind. “Wait, you’re dead.”

“Um, obviously I’m not, ’cause I’m standing right here.” She leaned over him, squinting in annoyance at his restraints. “We’ve got to get you out of here.”

“What?” He raised his head as far as he could from the pillow. “They’re Movement.”

“They’re not Movement.” She slipped a bobby pin from her hair, which she’d pulled back in a tight configuration of dark coils. A thin black feather floated down from the marabou trim of her leather coat to tickle his nose as she leaned close. “Hold still.”

Max watched with grim amusement as she slipped the pin into the small brass padlock that secured the restraints around his left arm. Within seconds, his hand was free and she’d set to work on the other one.

“Okay, Velma, if they’re not Movement, who are they?” When his right arm came free, he rubbed his wrists with a grimace. Leather would never sound sexy again.

“They’re the Soul Eater’s people.” She grinned in triumph as she freed his right leg. “You have no idea what I’ve had to do to get in here.”

“How did they know where we were?” He sat up, finding it hard to be still while she worked to unlock his left leg.

She shrugged. “They knew you were at the cabin in the woods. They’ve been watching that place like crazy. So were we. I hear you really tore it up.”

“I had help.” It had never felt so good to be out of bed before. “Thanks, Care Bear.”

“You’re welcome.” She motioned toward the curtained area where Bella lay. “Now let’s get her.”

Max pulled back the drape and froze.

He hadn’t seen Bella since before the accident. Well, during the accident, really. The stitched-closed gashes on her head and face came courtesy of the passenger window. Or the former passenger window, if he wanted to be technical. The shards had rained over them, and he’d seen her blood hang suspended in the air for a split second before it splattered across the dash. The bruise across her neck and upper chest bore an uncanny resemblance to a seat belt. He didn’t want to think about what the lap belt had done to her. The black eyes were unexplainable, but probably had something to do with her smashed, slightly out of shape nose and the tape across the bridge of it. Her right leg—the one closest to the point of impact—was bracketed by some weird metal contraption.

“It’s an external fixator,” Anne cheerfully explained as she lowered the side rails. “That takes me back to my last assignment. I fell the equivalent of sixteen stories out of a hot air balloon. Ended up with metal screws in my pelvis. Good old Movement medicine. They were thinking up things like that long before real MDs were.”

“How are we going to get her out of here?” There was an IV in her right arm and a catheter tube taped to her leg.

“I have a wheelchair in the car. You’ll have to carry her that far, if you can.” Anne untied the catheter bag from the rail and grabbed the IV bag from the pole. She tossed them onto the bed between Bella’s legs and pulled the bottom sheet free. “I guess scoop her up and carry her. That’s probably our best bet.”

“I think you’re right.” He leaned over Bella and pressed his lips to her forehead, trying not to smell the blood in the cut over her eyebrow. “Wake up, baby. We gotta go.”

“Go where?” she mumbled sleepily, a smile slowly spreading across her face. Her drowsy eyes shot open as she remembered their circumstances. “How did you get free?”

Anne stepped closer, touching Bella’s arm. “You’re not safe here.”

“With the Movement? Do not be absurd.” She looked to Max. “Tell her. Tell her what is going on.”

“She knows what’s going on.” He checked over his shoulder, sure that at any moment Grizzly Adams, M.D., would come in and shut down their whole operation. “These people are not Movement. They’re the Soul Eater’s guys. They were watching the cabin.”

There was a noise at the door. “They’re coming. I barred it from the inside, but they will get through,” Anne warned.

“Let’s go.” Max scooped Bella up as carefully as he could, though she cried out when he jostled her leg. “I’m so sorry, baby.”

“There’s another door.” Anne gestured to the side of the room, which had been blocked by the curtains. “Come on!”

They charged through the door, into a maze of industrial shelves coated in a thick layer of dust. At the other end—they had to run about the length of a football field with Bella crying out at each step—an illuminated exit sign glowed an eerie red.

It wasn’t a shaft of heavenly light, but he’d take it.

Anne ran ahead and kicked the door down.

“Was it locked?” he called over his shoulder as she let him pass through.

“I don’t know. The car’s over there!” She ran ahead again, sliding over the gravel in her platform combat boots.

“Easy, baby,” he soothed against Bella’s damp hair as he leaned down to put her in the back of the car. “Why the hell does the Soul Eater want us?”

“You know why!” Anne closed the door as soon as he slid inside beside Bella. The locks popped into place automatically.

There were no handles.

“Anne?” He pounded the window with his fist. The glass thumped dully. Bulletproof. Break proof.

Outside, three vampires ran from the building. Anne pulled three slim stakes from the waistband of her black plastic pants and threw them one after another without pausing to check her strikes. She didn’t have to. As she dropped into the driver’s seat, the vampires burst into flame.

“It doesn’t matter what the Soul Eater wants with her,” she managed through rapid breaths as she started the car. She turned toward him, leaning over the seat.

Max didn’t see the hypodermic until she stuck him with it. His vision swam and went dark. The last thing he heard before he blacked out was Anne saying smugly, “Because the Oracle wants her more.”

Nineteen:

Hocus Pocus

I was still asleep when Nathan burst into the room. So, apparently, was Cyrus. He sat up beside me, glowering and squinting against the illumination from the overhead light.

Nathan looked from Cyrus to me, then scowled. “Get up. We’ve got problems.”

He slammed the door so hard a light rain of plaster fell from the ceiling.

“Well, that is a somewhat less pleasant wake-up call than I’d hoped for.” Cyrus eased from the bed, wincing as he stood. “And I think I’ll go back to sleeping on the couch.”

“Yeah, and he’ll stake you as soon as you fall asleep.” My muscles protested as I sat up. “Oh, it’s going to be a long night.”

“It was a long day. I’d forgotten how much you snored. And drooled,” Cyrus said, casting me a sidelong glare.

“I forgot how much you exaggerated.” I rubbed the corner of my mouth anyway, just in case he was right about the drool.

We limped out to the living room. Nathan looked like a man who’d rather be breaking someone’s legs with a golf club. It was going to be a long night.

“What’s going on?” I asked, sitting on the couch. When Cyrus sat beside me, I scooted away.

It didn’t go unnoticed, by either of them. Jealousy hit me from both sides of the blood tie, for different reasons, and I had to consciously divert my focus to the task at hand.

To my relief, Nathan cut me off from the tie on his end. “I got a call from some Movement vampires in Canada. It seems Max and Bella were in a car accident. Max was okay, but Bella was in bad shape.”

“Was?” Cyrus put his hand on my knee. Not possessively, though Nathan would probably see it that way.

I didn’t brush it aside. “But they survived the crash?”

Nathan nodded. “As far as they knew. But they’re not there anymore. They killed three Movement doctors and escaped. He left everything behind. Money, car, phone…there’s no way to contact him.”

“Why would they run from the Movement?” It didn’t make any sense. Max was still an active member. He didn’t have a mark on his head, like Nathan did. He wasn’t even hanging out on the fringe like I was, waiting for someone to get the notion to pick off some nonthreatening vampires.

Nathan considered a moment, then held up his hands. “I don’t know. They think they had help.”

“Help against the Movement? That doesn’t sound promising. Who would help them against the Movement?” Cyrus said this without his trademark sarcasm. It was a good thing. Neither Nathan nor I would have appreciated it.

“They could have been kidnapped,” I offered helpfully. “Like, maybe somebody took them?”

Nathan shook his head. “Who would be able to get a vampire and a half-crippled, pregnant werewolf out of a warehouse under heavy Movement guard?”

“Someone they trust,” Cyrus said quietly, not looking at either of us.

“Excuse me?” Barely leashed rage swam beneath the surface of Nathan’s too polite inquiry.

Cyrus looked up, first at him, then me, then back to Nathan. “If someone in the Movement that they trusted helped them, they might not have resisted.”

“It’s impossible.” Nathan stood and turned away, raking a hand over his stubbled jaw. He looked as though he hadn’t slept. “No, it’s not possible.”

“Consider the situation,” Cyrus continued calmly. “You said they were heavily guarded. If someone wanted to get in or out, they would have to kill a lot more than three people.”

“The only person who could pull it off would have been an assassin,” I interjected. “Someone who could take on three vampires at the same time.”

Cyrus made an affirmative sound. “And convince your friends to go with them.”

“What are you talking about?” Nathan whirled, his face twisted with rage. He stabbed his finger through the air in Cyrus’s direction. “First of all, you’ve never been part of the Movement, so you don’t know anything about how we operate.”

“I know how we infiltrated and subverted it time and again,” Cyrus replied calmly.

“He has a point.” Why did I suddenly feel as if we were ganging up on Nathan?

A moment later, I didn’t care. Nathan glared at me, his eyes cold. “You certainly wouldn’t have any clue about the Movement works. It’s a group of vampires loyal to a common ideal. The key word being loyal.”

The bottom dropped out of my stomach. “What did you say to me?”

“You heard me.” Across the blood tie I felt a wave of shame at the way he was acting, but his anger was too great to suppress.

“That is enough!” Cyrus shot to his feet, and for a moment I thought he would try something stupid, like punching Nathan. Instead, he swallowed audibly, unclenched his fists and spoke in a calmer tone. “We are not in an ideal situation. I will seek to rectify that as soon as I can get my house back from my formerly human former girlfriend. But we have larger problems at hand than the issue of your romance with Carrie.”

My heart ached at his words. I did love Cyrus, now that I was morally free to do so. But I loved Nathan, as well, and I hated causing him pain after all he’d been through for me.

Cyrus shot me a cold look. You’ll never know what you want. Now is not the time.

Nathan looked from Cyrus to me and sighed. “What’s our next step, then, oh wise one?”

Thankfully, Cyrus let the jibe slide. “We go back to our only source of information. My father.”

“Oh yes. Your father. The one who controlled you for how many centuries? Let me drive you right over there.” Nathan laughed.

“Nathan!” I clutched my head, unable to bear another moment of this pointless bickering. “Max and Bella are clearly in danger. We need to find out where they are, so we can keep the Soul Eater from getting his hands on the baby. We know him well enough to know whatever he wants with it probably isn’t good. And what he’d do to Bella and Max wouldn’t be good, either. Can we all at least agree on that?”

“Of course we can,” Nathan grumbled. “But I’m sick of sitting around talking about it. We’ve been stuck here for days just reading and researching and waiting, while they’re off getting killed.”

“That was what we agreed on.” But I could definitely sympathize. I’d felt helpless for the past few days, as well. It was hard, after being so active in our past dramas, to be a bit player in this one. “We don’t have anything else to go on. We don’t know where the Soul Eater is. We don’t know where Max and Bella are. All we can do is wait.”

“You’re half-right.” Nathan looked as tired as he sounded. “I know where Jacob—” He stopped himself, grimacing. “I know where the Soul Eater is. He’s coming back. For Dahlia.”

Her name forced my hands into fists. Jealousy and anger burned through me. Yes, I was still jealous of her, after all this time. “Fine. I’ll go and find out what we need to know.”

“Are you insane?” Cyrus actually laughed at me. “My father will kill you. Dahlia will kill you before he gets the chance.”

I shook my head. “Clarence will help me. He talks a tough game, but he hates vampires. He’ll do anything to get them out of the house.”

“He can’t help you, Carrie. As long as my father’s name is on the deed, Clarence can’t do anything that will directly harm him. He—”

“Comes with the house, I know, Cyrus,” I interrupted. “But I have to try. I’m the only one who isn’t blood tied to him, vampirewise or through genetics.”

“Absolutely not!” Nathan shook his head vehemently. “It’s ridiculous and dangerous.”

I tossed up my hands, though I knew I didn’t sound one hundred percent reasonable. “We have a chance here to do something. I’m the only one in this room who hasn’t been manipulated or enslaved by the Soul Eater. We think he wants Bella, for the baby. So, why don’t we do more? Why don’t we go over there, to the mansion, and find out what he’s up to? Why don’t we do something—”

“Something suicidal!”

“But something!” I shouted, jumping to my feet. “I’m sorry if I can’t think of exactly what you want to do, but we have to do something!”

Nathan’s hands clenched to fists at his sides. “You’re sorry? Since when do you care about what I want?”

I drew a deep breath, willing myself to calm down. It took great effort. “You’re right. I’ve never done anything with your best interests at heart. I never traded your life for mine. I never risked myself to protect your son. Never let your dead wife’s soul invade my body to free you from an evil spell.”

“Not without throwing the facts back at me over and over,” he snapped. “If you want to go get yourself killed, fine.”

“Who says we’re going to get ourselves killed?” Cyrus asked, leaning to pick up Dahlia’s grimoire from the table. “I’m sure she has something in here we can use as protection.”

Nathan regarded him for a moment with icy contempt. He softened a bit as he took the book from him. “These spells are far too advanced for a beginner. There’s no way you’ll pull it off.”

“What about you?” Cyrus demanded. “You own that shop downstairs. Do you mean to tell me you don’t know any…hocus-pokery?”

I snorted, despite the tension in the air. Both men glared at me.

Nathan shook his head. “I don’t actually practice witchcraft. I’m only in the New Age business to take advantage of the rampant consumerism.”

I looked at the book in Nathan’s hands as though it were a deadly viper. “Well, what could it hurt? I mean, we’ve looked through it. She has all sorts of things we could try.”

“Hexes, counterhexes, invisibility spells.” Cyrus rattled off the list. “That last isn’t a bad idea. I know she had one.”

“Invisibility spells are rarely literal,” Nathan protested. “Often, they’re just to help keep a low profile.”

Cyrus stepped forward and took the book back, flipping pages with a frown. “Ah!” He jabbed his finger at the top of one page and held it up so we could see “Invisibility Spell (Literally)” scribbled across the top.

There was a long moment where no one spoke. I have no doubt we were all considering the implications. It would take a lot of nerve to try and sneak into a witch’s house cloaked by an invisibility spell, if it even worked. It would be dangerous.

Of course, no more dangerous than what I’d already done. “I’ll do it.”

They looked at me as if I’d suggested I would make the Statue of Liberty disappear.

“How?” Nathan folded his arms across his chest as if daring me to prove him wrong. “Do you even know the basics of spell work?”

“No,” I reluctantly admitted. “But I did participate in the ritual to get you back from the scary side. And I used to play that light-as-a-feather game at slumber parties.”

Nathan actually smiled a little at that. “I quiver in fear.”

“From what I understand, our options are fairly limited. We can either charge in, guns blazing, so to speak, or try and sneak in to gather the information and then go rescue your friends.” Cyrus tapped the book. “I think we should try the one where my father doesn’t kill us all, and we have a chance to save their lives as well.”

Nathan watched us, his expression tight. “What about me?”

“What about you?” Cyrus asked offhandedly.

He rolled his eyes. “I have a blood tie to your father, you stupid bastard! He’ll know we’re coming!”

“There’s no need for name calling,” I interrupted. “You’ve closed him off for years. He won’t suspect anything.”

“That’s not true,” Cyrus said quietly. “Nathan’s absolutely right.”

I turned to Cyrus. “So, it’s just you and me, then?”

“The hell it is!” Nathan roared. “I’m not letting you go in there with him!”

“If she can’t go with me, she has to go alone. You’ve already made it clear you don’t like that option, either.” Cyrus sighed. “Neither do I. But it is our best option.”

“Cyrus—” I began, but he cut me off.

“I’m still susceptible to him.” He looked down, as if ashamed. “He’s a very…charismatic man.”

“She managed to fight off your charms for a while, anyway. Maybe she has a chance against him.” Nathan sounded resigned and very, very unhappy. “I’ve got to go downstairs and open the shop. If you promise not to be trouble, the two of you can come down and help me find the ingredients for these spells. Carrie, you’ll have to practice.”

He sounded like a music instructor. Practice! As if I could practice for something so dangerous. In fact, the less I thought about it, the less likely it would be that I would back out.

“Fine. You two see what you can do. I’ll rejoin you shortly.” Cyrus issued his proclamation with the air of someone who knew exactly how to order people around.

“What are you going to do? Wish us luck?” I planted my hands on my hips.

“No, I’m going to take a shower. Unlike others in this apartment, I don’t let personal hygiene fall by the wayside when catastrophe strikes.” He nodded to Nathan and me and disappeared down the hallway.

Nathan said very little as we walked down to the shop. He unlocked the door, and I stepped inside and waited for him to turn on the lights. I never touched the switches behind the counter. They always gave me static shocks.

The banks of fluorescents clicked and buzzed, illuminating the store from the back to the front. I blinked against the changing light and headed toward the counter.

On the floor behind the glass display cases containing gaudy pentacles and ridiculously expensive crystal wands, I spied a sleeping bag. Nathan stooped down and began rolling it up. I watched for a moment, until he glanced up and asked, “Well, are you going to give that spell a look?”

“You’ve been sleeping here?” I winced, imagining what the hard wooden floor would have done to my back had I been in his place.

He zipped the sleeping bag with great purpose. “It’s not permanent. I’m not going to just hand my apartment over to you.”

“I would never ask you to.” My fingers flexed on the edge of the countertop. “I never asked you to.”

There was a long silence. When Nathan looked at me again, his eyes were rimmed with red. “Why him, Carrie?”

My voice caught in my throat. “Would it have been better if it was someone else?”

“No.” He didn’t turn away, just kept staring at me with an intensity that burned. “No, it wouldn’t have been.”

I glanced down to hide the tears in my eyes. “He loves me. Or, he wanted me to love him once, and now that’s just…enough.”

“You wanted to love me once, too,” Nathan reminded me.

I nodded and swallowed against my tears. “He’s different now. When he was my sire, I wanted so badly to give in to him. To let my humanity go just so I could be with him. But I couldn’t. I don’t know why.”

“Because you’re a good person.” He smiled sadly. “So, you love him now because he deserves it?”

“Nathan, I would never want to hurt you. But…” I closed my eyes. “But no matter what, I’m going to be with someone who doesn’t love me more than he loves a memory. He’s my fledgling. I do feel like…like I owe him my affection.”

“I know exactly how that feels.” Nathan’s words sent a dagger through her. “Except for the bit about owing my affection. You see, I never felt I owed you anything. What little I could give you, I gave freely.”

My chest constricted, and I couldn’t hold back my sob. “Nathan—”

“No.” He turned away. “No, I get the last word in this one, Carrie. Read the spell. I’ll go look for a book on basic magic.”

I slumped over the counter, resting my forehead on my palms. It would have been so nice to break down, to sob my eyes out at the unfairness of it all. Once again, I was pulled between the same two men. Once again, I would never be certain I’d made the right choice.

But there was no time for self-pity. Wiping my eyes, I willed myself to stop crying. Time to get down to business.

The spell was broken down into two parts, an ingredients list and various directions, numbered, renumbered, crossed out and scribbled over.

“We need heliotrope,” I called.

“The herb or the stone?” Cupboard doors scraped open somewhere in the back of the shop.

“Both, actually.” I scanned the ingredients. “And a blue candle. And a bunch of stuff that is, like, way too disgusting to even consider.”

Nathan returned and leaned over my shoulder. His closeness did nothing to calm my strained nerves. “Why would she include these things?” he mumbled, his finger pausing near the item “baby teeth.”

“Maybe to get someone off track?” It came to me in a flash of inspiration. “If I were to look at this spell, I would think all this weird, exotic stuff was the most important.”

The bells above the door jingled, and Cyrus strolled in casually, a carefully composed expression on his face. “So, what have I missed?” He stopped at my side, one hand possessively on the small of my back, and leaned over the book. “Do you really have all these ingredients?”

“That’s what we were just discussing,” Nathan explained. “We have the heliotrope. Not much else.”

“Mmm.” Cyrus squinted at the list. “Well, we’re sunk. The calf’s heart we can get from a butcher, but human toenails…I’d give mine up, only they’re not human anymore.”

“See?” I smiled triumphantly. “I bet these are all a distraction. Whoever attempts the spell will break their back finding all these morbid components, and leave out one or two small details. Only, the small details are the only truly important ones.”

“I have to admit, I’m impressed.” Nathan rubbed a hand over his jaw. “How did you know that?”

“Recipes. My mother used to complain that her mother-in-law always left something important out, or labeled it optional. It was like cracking a code.” I turned my attention to the actual instructions for the spell.

“Women are devious,” Cyrus observed, as if realizing it for the first time.

I pointed to the page. “See here, she has you anoint the heliotrope stone with oil of heliotrope, but everything else gets thrown in a cauldron and burned.”

Cyrus sniffed in distaste. “Imagine the stench.”

“I’d rather not.” Nathan shook up the small bottle of oil. “Let’s hope this is the real stuff, not a synthetic. I’m paying enough for the real deal, but suppliers can be a bit shady.”

“Oh, I’ve heard the herb trade is brutal,” Cyrus quipped.

I elbowed him. “If you’re not going to help, there’s a sinkful of dishes upstairs.”

“Are you ready to try this?” Nathan asked, lifting the rock so I could see it.

It was green, with subtle red flecks the color of dried blood.

“Also known as bloodstone,” Nathan said, turning it so the red flecks sparked in the light. “An obvious choice for a vampire.”

I held out my palm and he dropped the stone there. It seemed to burn my skin. “What do I have to do?”

“Anoint the stone with the oil, apparently,” Cyrus observed with a bit of amusement. “And carry it with you to remain invisible.”

An involuntary shiver went up my back. I’d volunteered to do it, but now I wasn’t so sure I liked the idea of being invisible. So much of the human psyche is tied to the physical body…. I wondered what effect it would have on a person to be unincorporated, for lack of a better term.

Nathan put a reassuring hand on my arm. “Likely, it won’t make you physically invisible. Most of these spells just cause anyone who sees you to not notice you.”

I closed my fingers over the stone. “Okay, here goes nothing.”

Nathan unscrewed the cap of the oil bottle and held it tentatively toward me. “Now, this isn’t the whole of the spell. What makes it work is your intent. Focus your mind, all of your energy, on becoming invisible.”

I’d certainly had enough experience with that. Calmly, I set the stone on the counter, imagining shrinking down in my chair in my high school English class when the teacher asked a question. I thought of walking through a bad part of town at night, keeping close to the buildings, sticking to the shadows.

I thought of sneaking across the lawn behind Cyrus’s mansion to meet with Nathan at the gate, and pictured the guards looking at me and seeing nothing.

Then I realized I was already an expert at invisibility. No one had seen me without me wanting them to for years. My face, my build, even my hair color were so nondescript I could rob a bank without anyone identifying me. This would be a piece of cake.

At the same time I thought it, another wave of confidence rose within me. It was darker, ego driven and wild. Crazy.

It was Dahlia.

“I drank her blood,” I heard myself saying, as if from far away. “I think it’s doing something to me.”

Cyrus stepped back. Even Nathan seemed frightened.

I am invisible, I chanted in my head as I wiped the oil on the stone. The flowery scent calmed me, even as the stone seemed to burn from my concentrated energy. All my thoughts and visualizations flowed from my body through the fingertips of my right hand, into the stone.

Then, just as abruptly as the sensations came, they stopped. The dark energy left over from Dahlia’s blood soaked into the stone, leaching some of me with it, and I jerked my hand back.

“She did it,” Cyrus said, almost breathlessly. “I can’t believe she really did it.”

“What? What did I do?” Before they could answer, I picked up the stone, so cold it burned, and gasped as my hand, then my wrist, then my arm vanished as though dissolving. I looked at my feet, only to see the floor they should be standing on. I waved my fingers in front of my face, but they weren’t there anymore.

The room spun around me. Without visual confirmation of my body in its own space, I lost my sense of balance for a moment, stumbling against the counter.

“Grab her!” Nathan shouted.

“How? I can’t see her!” Cyrus reached out uncertainly and I grasped his arms. The second the stone touched him, he vanished as well.

We stood perfectly still, holding each other for balance. I would have paid anything to see the expression on Cyrus’s face.

“Well, we know it’s not just figurative invisibility now, don’t we?” he said with a rueful laugh, and I laughed with him.

Something was finally working to our advantage.

Twenty:

Origins

S itting up, Max blinked in an effort to bring his vision into focus. When he tried to rub his eyes, chains rattled and his arms met with marked resistance. Waking up in another dark, strange place, restrained.

Perfect.

“I wondered when you would wake.”

Bella. He wished he could see her. “Did she hurt you?”

There was a squeak. Something nudged his foot. When he looked up, he saw her face.

“The drugs will make it hard to see for a while. Relax, and let it pass.” Her fingertips brushed his face. She wasn’t bound.

“Did they hurt you?” he repeated. His tongue felt as if it were covered in fur. He’d kill for a drink.

The scent of her blood assaulted him, and he involuntarily lunged toward her. He heard her startled intake of breath, felt her withdraw a bit. He’d scared her. “Sorry, can’t help it.”

“I know.” She placed her cool palm against his forehead. “No, they did not hurt me. They tended me better than the Movement did. At first, I did not know why, but…”

“Why didn’t they tie you up?” Not that he wanted her restrained. He just wondered why she was free and hadn’t tried to make a break for it yet.

“I could not go far. I am…in a wheelchair.” She whispered the word like a curse. “I am crippled.”

He closed his eyes, though he couldn’t see worth a damn, anyway. “I’m so sorry, baby.”

“Do not be sorry. They followed us from the cabin. You could not have prevented it.” She moved away, and he wondered why he hadn’t recognized the sound of the wheelchair as it moved across the dirt floor of the room.

“You sound awfully calm.” Too calm. Something was wrong. He couldn’t put his finger on what.

Anne. That bitch had sold them out. When he got his hands on her, he’d rip her black little heart right out of her chest.

“I have had time to think.” Bella returned with a bag full of blood. He didn’t know where it came from, and he didn’t care. She held it to his mouth and he tore into it, not caring that some of the contents probably ran down his chin and stained his shirt. Only when he’d drunk half of it did he consider it might have been drugged. He jerked away, the remains of his meal sloshing onto his lap.

Bella shrieked and jumped back. “You should have drunk all of it!”

“Why?” He struggled against his shackles. “Are you in on this? What do they have planned?”

“I did not know. Not before Anne brought us here.” Her voice dropped to almost a whisper. “I was never involved in this in any way. Until we were brought here, I knew only what you knew. You must believe me.”

She flung her arms around his neck despite his bloody clothes. He wished he could put his arms around her. It had been too long since he’d been able to. “I believe you, baby. But tell me what’s going on.”

“It was a setup,” she sobbed against his shoulder. “The cabin, the car accident. The Movement got there before the Oracle’s people could collect us, but when we went with Anne…She is not on our side.

“I woke in the car. You were drugged. When we arrived here, they took me to a medical facility. I do not know what they did to me. When I woke again, they did not argue when I asked to be brought to you.”

“They treated you okay?” That didn’t bode well for her, somehow. “What about the baby? Is it okay?”

“Yes,” she said quietly. “That is what they want.”

If ever there was a moment he could imagine busting iron chains, now should be it. Max roared, his face shifting as he struggled against the shackles.

“Calm yourself,” Bella soothed, laying a hand on his brow. With a heavy sigh, she withdrew. “I think perhaps it is time to tell you something very few of your kind know.”

He swallowed thickly. “Is it anything I want to know?”

“It is something you must know, now.” She hesitated for a moment, then, with a deep breath, plunged in. “You know of the division between werewolves and lupins?”

It wasn’t the question he expected. “Yeah. It’s something the Movement teaches. Werewolves are into the earth spirituality, and using magic to control their change, while lupins figured out a way to do it medically, and think they’re all better than you.”

“No,” Bella said with a note of sadness in her voice. “They have been lying to you for years.”

The Movement lied? It should have come as more of a surprise to him, but lately it was hard to disbelieve any nasty thing someone had to say about them. “Is that so?”

His vision had cleared enough that he made out her emphatic nod. “The real cause for our division is…Perhaps I should start from the beginning.

“You recall what I told you about the blood debt that can never be repaid? The curse that is branded on my body?”

“Sure.” Max searched the corners of his still-foggy brain. “Something about all werewolves being descended from Pontius Pilate and that’s why you’re all cursed, right?”

“The division between werewolves and lupins started there, though both factions kept it quiet until lately. When the children of Pontius Pilate, and their children, became aware of their affliction, naturally, they hid it. It was a superstitious time, and they were surrounded by godly people. Some of them returned to Rome, where their animal state was worshipped as a gift from the gods, an allusion to Romulus and Remus, who founded the city.

“But the ones who stayed behind in the land of the Hebrews learned quickly to control their change. They lived their lives as quietly as possible, though some began to piece together the reason for their curse. It took generations. In time, the gospel of the carpenter messiah was preached even in Rome. The werewolves there were persecuted, as were followers of the old gods. I pity them, in spite of their later alliance. They were if not divinity, then royalty in the Roman Empire. They fled, their numbers now rivaling Rome’s most populous legion, to their roots in the Holy Land.

“Though their brother wolves welcomed them with open arms, it was not long before the falling out occurred. You see, the werewolves in Jerusalem now understood the nature of their curse. This knowledge was not accepted by the Roman wolves. Already bitter at the rise of Christianity, which had stolen their prosperity in Rome, they were not about to die to repay the blood of a Hebrew carpenter.

“What happened next is not entirely clear. There are too many versions of the story to say that the one I tell you is the absolute truth, but it was taught to me as a child and it is the version I know best. There was a Roman noblewoman, Julia, living in Jerusalem. Her husband had been a prefect there, and when he died she had become stranded, without money enough to return to Rome. How she continued to survive was a great debate, but it was said that men could be seen entering her house during the night, and she always had enough coin to pay for bread. She never left her house, not by day or by night, but she sent many letters and entertained guests from far-off lands.

“Somehow, she became aware of the werewolves in the city and their situation. She sent for three of the Roman expatriates, Titus, Cicero and Lucius, and held a dinner in their honor. After the rest of the guests had left, she met with the wolves in private, and here is where the story of the lupins and werewolves becomes a tale of feud. After the meeting with Julia, the werewolves were never the same. They were cursed with an insatiable blood hunger. They transformed at will, no longer enslaved by the full moon. You see, Julia was a vampire, and out of boredom or for her own evil ends, she turned them. They were the first lupins.”

“Oh, fuck,” Max whispered, almost unaware he’d spoken.

Bella didn’t admonish him for interrupting. “Of the three, Titus was the least pleased with his change. He had begun to accept the blood debt we inherited from Pontius Pilate, and had secretly been studying the gospels with another pack of werewolves. When he revealed his new nature to them, they shunned him. Word spread quickly through the Jerusalem faction. They grew mistrustful of all Roman wolves and declared war on them. The Roman wolves scattered again, but they vowed to destroy the werewolves. One by one, they were turned, either by Cicero or Lucius. Titus disappeared, though a rumor surfaces every now and then that he runs a monastic sanctuary for lupins who have changed their ways and wish to repay the blood debt.”

“By killing other lupins.” It was all becoming too clear. Horrifyingly clear.

Bella nodded.

“And Julia? The noblewoman who started it all?” Max asked, dreading the answer.

“Why do you think the Movement did not share this information with you? She is the Oracle, whom you helped hold captive all those years.” There was no mocking in her tone, but Max still felt like a fool.

“Sons of bitches. They knew all along what the lupins were and they never told us? Why?”

“I do not know. When the Order of the Brethren formed, they attempted to apply their code to lupins. The lupins were…not pleased. That is why the Brethren turned to the werewolves, instead. They offered help in exterminating lupins as long as werewolves—”

“Kept their mouths shut and killed some vampires, and lupins, which should have paid the blood debt.” It seemed all too clear now. But why had they kept the Oracle? She’d made powerful predictions, but they were often too abstract to really understand until after the foretold event had taken place.

As if reading his mind, Bella said, “The Oracle was an insurance policy. We knew we could not win the fight if they had her on their side. After the Movement captured her, they kept us under their control with the constant threat of her release.”

“Wonderful. I’m glad it worked out so well for them.” Max yanked at his restraints. “So, lupins are half werewolf, half vampire. Stands to reason that our baby—”

“Is a natural-born lupin,” she answered sadly. “The only one of its kind.”

“Which is why the Oracle wants her.” Just great. He’d never wanted kids until he found out he was going to get one whether he wanted it or not, and now she was going to be taken from him.

“Her?” Bella asked, her amusement audible. “I thought you said it looked like a shrimp.”

“It did. I just…” He hung his head. “We’ve got to get out of here.”

She looked away. “They told me, after they brought me here…you are to be an example.”

“And example of what? The most stupid vampire on earth?” He flopped back on the cot, wincing as the cuffs bit into his wrists.

“They have some Movement holdouts as prisoners. They are going to…torture you, and kill you. To frighten them into changing sides.” Bella sobbed openly now.

It made him feel a little better to know she was upset at the prospect of his imminent death, even if he couldn’t be. He was, stupidly, more worried about her. “Well, I always did want to go out in a Braveheart kind of way. I’ll just have to think of something cool to yell before they cut my head off.”

His attempt at humor failed to lighten the mood, and he swore. “Come over here, Bella. If I’m gonna die, I at least want to spend my last hours with you.”

She rolled her chair to his side. Groping blindly, he found her hand. Their fingers entwined as she lay her head on his chest.

“Don’t count me out yet, baby,” he murmured reassuringly. “We’re all coming out of this one alive.”

He just hoped it wasn’t a lie.

When we turned in for the morning, all three of us agreed: I would go to the Soul Eater’s mansion at dusk.

With all the nervous tension coiling in my stomach, I couldn’t sleep. It didn’t help that my bed was barely large enough to sleep one person comfortably, let alone both Cyrus and me.

“If you don’t stop tossing around, I’m going to tie you down,” he warned sleepily. “And not in a sexy way.”

I burrowed my face against his cold chest. “I’m sorry. I can’t sleep.”

“Really? If you hadn’t said so I might not have noticed.” He pulled me closer and I wriggled to face away from him. His arm relaxed where it lay over my stomach, and I thought he’d fallen asleep again when he spoke. “Carrie, don’t go.”

“What?” I half sat up.

“Don’t go,” he repeated. “Let’s pack up right now, steal the van and just drive.”

“You know we can’t.” But my heart shouted, Go! I would listen to my mind this time, I decided firmly. So many decisions I’d made lately based on my feelings had turned out horribly wrong.

“We can! We won’t have to face my father. We’ll find someplace nice—well, maybe not nice, but a place to stay, nonetheless—and we’ll hide until all of this nonsense is over,” he insisted, his tone pleading.

I wanted to give in to him. The look of utter desperation on his face nearly overwhelmed me. Then I thought of Nathan in the next room. I imagined him waking to find I’d gone, and realizing he had to fight his sire alone.

“I can’t lose you, Carrie. I just can’t.” Cyrus pulled me tight to him, his fingers digging into my back. Had he always been this fragile, even when he was a monster?

“You won’t lose me,” I soothed, freeing a hand to stroke his hair. “But if we don’t go after your father, who will? Nathan? Is he going to sneak into the mansion? Is he going to rescue Bella and Max?”

There was no way he’d be capable of it. Resisting his sire’s will alone was a dicey proposition. But to expect him to pull it off and free Max and Bella was ridiculous wishful thinking.

“I’m not going to leave Nathan behind.” I repeated, “You won’t lose me.” Then I realized I’d never even imagined I might lose him, or Nathan.

Suddenly, I understood too well where Cyrus was coming from.

We were mostly silent as we prepared for the night. Nathan dug out his old Movement uniform for himself and a matching set for Cyrus. I thought of making a joke about the Doublemint twins, but figured it would go over like a lead balloon.

I dressed for comfort—I was going to be invisible anyway, I argued when they objected to my decidedly non-blacked-out attire—and armed myself simply. A few stakes and a couple vials of holy water were the weapons I hoped I wouldn’t need. If all went according to plan, I would get into the mansion, poke around until I found what I was after, and slip back out without a fight.

Of course, when had things ever gone according to plan? The gods of physical humor seemed inclined to watch me try to fight as often as possible.

Nathan, on the other hand, had a pile of weapons beside him as he sat in the armchair inspecting his crossbow.

“Is that all you’re taking?” I asked sarcastically, dropping onto the couch.

He smiled wryly. “Where’s Cyrus?”

“Showering and changing into his spiffy new Movement attire.”

Nathan raised an eyebrow.

“He says if he’s going to die again, he’s going to die clean.” I surreptitiously sniffed my armpit. I didn’t want to be the one who died with B.O.

“No one is going to die,” Nathan assured me in the gruff, detached way he always spoke when his hands and eyes were otherwise occupied. “This is probably the easiest thing we’ve ever done, on account of your unexpected talent for the occult.”

“I told you, that was Dahlia’s blood doing it. Let’s hope she doesn’t pick up on the trick while I’m in there.” I looked around the apartment. All the furniture was visible. “Where’s the stone?”

“It’s in the shop, on the table when you first come through the door, so don’t walk into it.” He set the crossbow aside with a heavy exhalation. “I want you to be extremely careful tonight.”

How like him, to turn an inconsequential moment into a too-serious-for-comfort pep talk. I put on my brave face for him. “You know I will be. When have I ever marched into danger recklessly before?”

Another sardonically arched brow.

“Okay, but those times were life-and-death. And once, it was your life on the line, so you can’t really complain.” On impulse, I stood and went to his chair, knelt beside him and laid my head on his knee.

I think he was too startled to say anything at first, but after a moment he put his hand on my head. “I love you, Carrie.”

If he had hit me in the chest with a sledgehammer, it would have had about the same effect. I couldn’t breathe. It was like he’d knocked the wind out of me.

I wanted to ask what he meant by that. Did he love me the way a sire is supposed to love his fledgling? Or did he love me like a man is supposed to love a woman when there isn’t a bunch of screwed up emotional baggage and vampire history thrown in the mix? And why now? Why wait until we were about to do something dangerous to confess his love? Did he think one of us wouldn’t survive to feel awkward about this later?

But I didn’t ask any of the questions I was dying to have answered. I’d finally heard what I’d wanted to for so long. I just took it for what it was, for now.

“I listened to my blood tie with the Soul Eater last night,” Nathan said, changing the subject as naturally as if he’d just said, “The weather’s been fine, hasn’t it?”

I did not recover so easily. My “Oh?” was forced and transparent.

He nodded. “He has the Oracle’s heart.”

This time my “Oh?” was surprised and strangled.

“Yes. He is planning on devouring it, and with it, the Oracle’s soul. Do you want to hear what I think?”

I knew it was a rhetorical question, so I didn’t answer. He’d tell me anyway.

And I was right. A spark that had been missing for so long lit Nathan’s eyes. “I think we should change our objective a little. Are you up to finding the Oracle’s heart and destroying it?”

I laughed a little to cover my shock. I’m sure it worked about as well as all my attempts to cover my emotions. “Well, um. I suppose so.”

“The way I see it, we’d kill two birds with one stone.” He smiled. “Or you would. If the Oracle has Max and Bella—hell, even if it’s the Soul Eater’s people who have them—the death of the Oracle is going to throw things into a tailspin. It’ll be easier for them to get away, and it cleans up our problem with her forever.”

“It will also ruin the Soul Eater’s current plans and buy us more time to regroup.” I nodded. “Okay. I’ll do it. If father is anything like son, I have a feeling it won’t be too difficult.”

“Father is indeed like son.” Nathan suddenly turned serious. “They are very much alike, Carrie. If something happens, if things go wrong…if you’re forced to confront him, don’t underestimate him. He is very manipulative and seductive.”

Seductive? I’d seen the Soul Eater a total of one time in the flesh. He’d been half-decayed and reeking of death, calling out for blood and souls in an inhuman chorus of horror. I’d seen him in memories, but he’d been a filthy peasant then, and dung is not a look I find attractive on a man. “I’ll try to resist his charms.”

Nathan didn’t laugh with me. “It isn’t a joking matter, Carrie.”

For the first time, he purposely forced his own memory into my mind. At first, I didn’t realize what was happening. I was used to the feeling of sharing memories with Cyrus, and seeing them through blood. I’d even seen Nathan’s memories via his dead wife’s soul, but I’d never, in all the time I’d known him, actually seen something Nathan had chosen to show me.

In an unpleasant flash, I went from sitting calmly on the living room floor to running half-naked across a vast lawn. The rain slashed Nathan’s face and his feet slipped on the grass. Behind him, the sound of barking dogs increased as they gained ground. The tall iron fence, impossibly faraway, mocked him with the chance of freedom. He was doomed.

The dogs were at his heels now. He turned, flashing his fangs at them, feeling guilty and absurd at having to use the tools that monster had given him. More guilty at the thought that he could kill one of these animals and feed. Hunger gnawed his guts, the intensity mounting as his steps slowed and he admitted defeat on the cold, wet lawn. Despair crashed over him. He would never survive here.

Not that he wanted to. Not after what he’d done to Marianne. He thought of her body, still lying in the ballroom, and he fell to the grass weeping, heedless of the dogs that tore at his flesh. They wouldn’t bite for long. They didn’t like the taste.

Rough hands dragged him to his feet. “Take him in to the master,” a voice ordered. Nathan knew they were tiring of his constant escape attempts.

He didn’t resist as they dragged him across the lawn, up to the house. I didn’t recognize the place, but I assumed it was still the house in Brazil. The palm trees lining the walk gave it away.

Inside, they took him to a large parlor. A man in a deep red robe stood at the fireplace. I couldn’t see his face, but his white hair hung in a long braid down his back. I recognized Cyrus, lounging in a chair beside the fire. Annoyance crossed his face at the sight of Nathan. I’d expected a more volatile reaction, considering his wife had been killed as a sacrifice to the Soul Eater’s hunger in Nathan’s place. Then Nathan’s gaze fell to the sling that cradled Cyrus’s arm, and the bruises that marred the shadowed side of his face. Apparently, Nathan had already exacted some revenge.

“Kneel before the master,” the guard holding him commanded, shoving him toward the man in red. Nathan stood his ground.

“Kneel!” Cyrus kicked him, an agonizing blow to the kidneys, dead and useless though they might be. Nathan crumpled to the floor.

“Enough!” The man in red turned, his eyes furious as he regarded his son. Jacob Seymour, his body refreshed from feasting on his daughter-in-law, turned his gaze to his new fledgling. His sharp, regal features softened. “Nolen. Nolen, Nolen. Why are we still running?”

Nathan hung his head. Shame filled him, absurd though it seemed. He hated this monster who’d taken Marianne and taken his mortal life. He hated that he could still taste Jacob’s blood on his mouth, that he craved more. And he hated the part of himself that kept him from escaping.

It shouldn’t be impossible to leave this house, but it was. There was pain, physical pain when he was separated from his sire. The word burned like a brand through his mind, which was also under this man’s control.

The Soul Eater stooped, elegantly somehow, his moves fluid and spiderlike. “You haven’t fed in so long. You look positively worn-out.”

His hands on Nathan’s shoulder’s took away some of the pain and longing. It sickened Nathan and comforted him at the same time.

I could see now what he meant by “seductive.” The lines were blurring in Nathan’s mind, crucial lines between torment and relief, what he wanted and what he was forced to do.

“Bring him something,” the Soul Eater commanded one of his guards, straightening. “Something…pretty.”

“And that screams,” Cyrus added cruelly.

Nathan struggled to stand, but he’d expended the last of his energy trying to flee.

Jacob straightened, bringing Nathan gently to his feet as he did so. “Why do you do this to yourself? Why do you deny yourself the satisfaction of feeding?”

“I don’t know,” Nathan half sobbed. He shook from cold and exhaustion.

The Soul Eater wrapped Nathan in his arms, cradling him against his cold chest. “It hurts me that you would rather die than stay with me. You’re like a son. My son.”

Cyrus scoffed. “Lucky him.”

Contempt radiated off Jacob Seymour like a wave. It even reached Nathan through the blood tie, though it wasn’t directed at him. “Better than a son, in some ways.”

The guard returned, pushing a girl through the doors. Nathan turned, instantly aware of the scent of fear and blood.

The girl wrestled with the guard who held her captive. Her arms were bound behind her back. The buttons of her dress were fastened out of order and the thin fabric hung, limp and dirty, around her body. Her feet were bare, and bloody with scratches.

“This one has tried to escape a few times, as well,” the Soul Eater said, stroking Nathan’s hair. “It’s your right, you know. You’re not like them anymore.”

Above the strip of cloth that gagged her, the girl’s eyes widened. Her hair was dark, like Marianne’s.

“Do what you will with her. She is yours.” The Soul Eater stepped back, and Nathan turned, looking for reassurance, an absolution, maybe.

The girl screamed, and he ran. He was on her in an instant, holding her down, whispering apologies that weren’t meant for her, before he tore into her throat.

And I was in the apartment again, shivering.

“You know I would never do those things, not on my own,” Nathan said, his voice pleading. “But that is what he’s like. He finds your weakness and he chips away…. You don’t know he’s doing it.”

“I’ll be careful.” But I couldn’t stop shaking, and I couldn’t get the sound of the girl’s screams out of my head. Or the touch of the Soul Eater. Though his hands had been on Nathan, they might as well have been clutching me.

And I feared they soon would be.

Twenty-One:

From Bad…

T hey came for them, eventually. Max had no idea what time it was. Since the accident, time seemed to be constantly slipping away.

When the door opened, Bella woke with a start, her face creased in confusion. Then she seemed to take in her surroundings, and horror replaced it. “No!”

“Hey, you stop that,” he admonished. “Have I ever died before?”

Really, it was going to be hard enough to get tortured without having to remember her sobbing and wailing as they dragged him from this room. He’d much rather hold the image of ice-cold-bitch Bella making fun of him for being a pussy, while they did God knew what to him.

“Good morning, good morning,” a mocking voice called from the door. A vampire stepped in, cocky smile pasted on his face.

The smile that usually preceded a gory, horrible death for the smiler. Things were looking up.

Two more vampires followed him, both carrying crossbows. They had stakes in holsters at their hips, like gunslingers-in-training, and they acted bored with their work, a sure sign they were overconfident.

Bella noticed, too. Her despair turned at once to flinty resolve. She mouthed, “The one on the right first,” kissed Max and wheeled herself out of the way.

The one on the right. A nervous guy about an inch shorter than Max, with his finger already itching to pull the trigger and send a bolt into Max’s heart. He would be a problem. New guys.

The first one who’d entered unlocked Max’s shackles. “Get on your feet.”

He then marched him to the door, a little more roughly than necessary. Oh yeah, he was begging for death.

“I love you, baby,” Max called over his shoulder. He got a last glimpse of Bella as they shoved him out of the room.

One of them stayed behind. That threw Max off a little. He didn’t want some vampire alone with Bella, where he couldn’t protect her.

“What are you doing?” he heard her ask.

He didn’t like the reply. “You’ve got to get ready. The Oracle wants you presentable for the entertainment.”

Great. Max had planned on busting free right there in the hallway, backtracking and grabbing Bella on his way out. This was going to make things more difficult. He scrapped the plan. No way was he leaving without Bella, and he certainly wasn’t going to set off a chain reaction of increased security when he had no clue where she was or how to get to her.

They marched him down a series of hallways and up a couple sets of stairs. They’d been in a cellar—a huge old one, with arches and support columns you didn’t find in your everyday suburban home. When they reached the surface the air was prickly with daylight. No direct contact, but that morning smell was in the air, and the feeling of wearing too-tight skin.

They took him to a large room in the center of the second floor, if he’d guessed his location right. The marble floor was cold under his bare feet. They must have taken his shoes when they’d chained him up. The dark wood of the walls stretched to a vast, domed ceiling swimming in ugly, fat angels. He had a feeling the cherubs and seraphim eternally paused in their harp playing to smile down on him weren’t the decor choice of the current owner.

If they were, he’d enjoy killing her even more.

The windows were covered over with matching wooden shutters. They were huge, so there was no chance they’d be throwing those open soon, not if they weren’t fond of barbecue. The covered oculus in the center of the ceiling troubled him, however. Especially with the rope that dangled from the shutter.

Another rope hung from the ceiling, this one passing through a pulley and ending in leather gauntlets. Cocky and Twitchy tied Max’s wrists into the leather cuffs and jerked the rope, hauling him up to his tiptoes.

“I didn’t peg you guys for the type who’d be into this sort of thing,” he quipped through clenched teeth as his shoulders dislocated. They had him at a real disadvantage now.

“What did you say to me?” Cocky demanded, grabbing the front of Max’s T-shirt. His feet slipped from beneath him and he spun on the rope, squeezing his eyes tight against the disorienting twirling of the room. Cocky laughed. “Not so tough now, are you?”

Twitchy laughed with him, but nervously. He had a right to be. Before Max left this place he was going to fuck them up.

“Get out of here.”

The quiet command caught the attention of all three vampires, and Max craned his neck on his next turn to see who had issued it.

Anne ambled slowly through the arched double doors. She’d gotten rid of the feathery coat, but her hair looked the same, a thick fall of springy coils scraped back so tight her skin looked like it might pop off. Max stretched his legs, toes grasping at the slick marble. He managed to stop his spinning, but the effort was hell on his calves.

“Don’t you look comfy?” Anne observed as she circled him, the buckles on her knee-high combat boots rattling with each step. She regarded him for a moment with an unreadable look, then smiled the same girlish smile she’d always given him when he’d visited Movement headquarters. “Max.”

“Care Bear.” He tried to nod, but the effect was ruined by his arms stretching above his head. “So, what’s the plan here? Truss me up and let these morons spin me until I vomit to death?”

She laughed, the unrestrained, mindless laughter of an eternal teenager. “You always were funny.”

“Apparently not enough to save my ass.” He pulled himself up, the muscles in his arms screaming. “Any chance of letting me down a little? I’m tall enough.”

“You’re going to be as tall as a pile of ashes when I’m done. The Oracle’s gonna let me kill you.” Her tone implied he should be greatly impressed, or happy for her.

“Well, why don’t you pull that rope and get it over with?” It was a risk, but he was ninety-nine percent sure she wouldn’t do it. Not yet. “I’m not one for pointless small talk.”

“Cha, right. Like that’s going to work on me.” She gave a long-suffering sigh. “Not that I’m not used to people underestimating me.”

Cry me a river, bitch. “Well, that’s kind of why you were such a good assassin. No one saw it coming. Shit, I didn’t think you’d lie to my face and stab me in the back.”

“I know, right?” Her face lit up in appreciation of his recognition. “People never got it! They think just because I look young, I don’t have the experience or the smarts to pull stuff like this off. Not that sucking up to me is going to get you off the hook or anything, but thanks for, like, getting it.”

“It appears I live to get things. Like shafted by my supposed friends.” He tugged on the rope. Synthetic. It stretched a little. He could get the balls of his feet down now. And she was so wrapped up in her own drama, she didn’t notice.

“The Oracle gets it, too.” Anne turned away and walked to a long table at the side of the room. “She says it’s one of my strengths.”

With a flourish, Anne pulled back the canvas draping the table to reveal an assortment of weapons, branding irons, power tools and surgical implements.

Keep her talking, Harrison. Keep her talking or your worst trip to the dentist is about to be grossly outdone. He twisted his wrists in the cuffs, but they held. Damn bondage weirdos and their escape-proof fetish gear. “So, what’s her game, anyway? I mean, is she working with the Soul Eater or what?”

“Oh, please!” Anne snorted when she laughed. “Do you think I’ve never seen a James Bond movie before? Right, I’m going to spill all my secrets to you.”

“The only reason Bond villains were stupid to spill their secrets was because Bond always got away.” Max tugged the rope for effect. “Not like I’m going anywhere.”

She cocked her head, considering. “Yeah, okay.”

Suppressing a sigh of relief when she dropped a cordless drill, Max gave the rope another discreet pull. All he needed was a little more slack…

But he also needed to hear what she’d tell him.

“What do you already know?” She eyed him warily.

This was where playing it cool would come in handy. He had to act as if he was casually interested in the stuff he really wanted to know, but not so casual that she’d decide to quit wasting her time and get on with the torture. “Not much. Why don’t you give me the rundown. It’ll kill some time.”

“Right, like you don’t just want to keep me from carving into you.” She rolled her eyes. “Fine. Did you know that the Soul Eater was, like, trying to become a god?”

“Yeah, that was the message your boss gave us. Right before she broke your back? Remember that?” He gave her a sarcastic look.

Anne clearly didn’t appreciate it. “Yeah, I remember. Now, do you want to hear the rest of the story or what?”

He inclined his head. “Continue.”

“Okay.” After a dramatic pause, she did. “Well, you know how she, like, blew up the Movement? She was talking to me for the whole month that I was healing from when she broke my back. I could hear her voice in my head. So she freed me, I helped her pick off a few Movement staffers, and now I get to be, like, her right hand.”

“That’s great, but I wasn’t really curious about your life story here. I figured most of that out myself.”

She rolled her eyes again. “I’m getting there. Anyway, this whole time I’m in a coma, I hear about how the Soul Eater is trying to become a god, and she’s gonna string him along and make him think she’s helping him when she’s, like, furthering her own agenda.”

Surprise, surprise. “And that agenda includes?”

“Chaos.” Anne laughed. “Oh my God, did I ever tell you what I thought about the Movement?”

“Apparently, you didn’t think too highly of them.” He wriggled his hands again. When her sharp gaze snapped toward his wrists, he shook his head. “I’m just trying to get comfortable. So, the Movement pissed you off enough you’d want the Oracle to have free reign on planet Earth?”

“Okay, I went from being the highest paid assassin on their roster to being a receptionist. A receptionist? I could have stayed human and done something dumb like that.” She paused. “You know, if I’d been born, like, ten centuries later. But the point is, I was told they had a contingency for when assassins couldn’t work anymore. I didn’t know it meant getting busted down to secretary.”

“So, you’re going to help her destroy the world because you’re unhappy with your retirement benefits?” Max laughed. “Yeah, no, you’re way more mature than you look.”

“Oh, shut up. You’re so righteous and everything because you’re not filing papers all day for room and blood.” She crossed her arms and pouted. “Like it matters, anyway. I’m not stupid. I know that once she gets some power, a lot of us will be stupid enough to stick by her. The smart ones, like me, are going to lay low.”

“And you don’t think she’ll find you?” Here it was. The desperate bid for freedom. He hoped she didn’t peg it as such. “Listen, you can stop all this now. There are Movement people working against you guys, and you’re gonna lose. But if you get me out of here, if you get Bella out of here—”

“Oh, that’s sweet.” Anne snorted. “You want to save your doggy girlfriend from certain death and you think you can scare me into doing it. Yeah. That’s not going to work. I have a vaultful of money waiting for me, and part of that payment is contingent upon my new boss getting her hands on your illegitimate baby.”

Max swallowed his anger. It wouldn’t help him burst out of the cuffs, and she would probably end their little dialogue and start cutting him up like a jack-o-lantern. “Yeah, that’s the part of all this I can’t figure out. Was she just waiting for someone to achieve the impossible? I mean, I don’t like to brag, but vampires don’t get chicks knocked up every day.”

“Don’t give yourself too much credit there.” Anne made a disgusted face. “For one thing, it was supposed to be your little blond friend, the lady with the ugly shoes you brought in to see the Oracle a couple of months ago. And when that didn’t work, that witch thought she’d try it out with you. And then it was back to the drawing board, because we didn’t think it would ever happen. ‘We’ being the Oracle and the Soul Eater. They’ve been working together for a while now, and the Movement never knew! Anyway, she only needed a natural-born vampire to fulfill her prophecy. But a natural-born lupin? I mean, wow! Could you ask for a happier accident than that?”

Max closed his eyes. Of course. The night with Dahlia. He could almost taste that potion again, all sugary and hot in his mouth. “Yeah. Lucky you.”

“Well, once the Oracle gets the baby, she’s gonna try and lure the Soul Eater up here to drain it and eat its soul. When he gets here, boom. No more Soul Eater.” Anne dusted her palms together as if the old vampire’s ashes already dirtied them.

“And the baby?” Max didn’t bother covering his intent as he pulled on the rope. A hard jerk, and the cuffs miraculously slipped a fraction of an inch. “What are you going to do with the baby?”

Anne noted his struggle with a wry smile. “Oh, don’t worry. She’s not going to hurt her. She’s going to raise her, like a daughter. And stop wriggling, you’ll never get free.”

She turned, apparently tired of the game. “I was going to wait until they brought your girlfriend in to watch, but I’m not that mean. You used to be on my side. I’ll just rough you up a little so it leaves marks.”

“Gee, thanks.” He pulled again on his restraints, more motivated than before when he saw her pick up a pair of wire cutters from the table.

Anne returned, eyeing his twisting hands. She held up the implement. “Shall we?”

The Soul Eater’s mansion—I’d stopped thinking of it as Cyrus’s—was as frightening as I remembered it. Of course, it was frightening for more sensible reasons now. Before, when I’d come to steal Dahlia’s blood, I’d been afraid of my past. My current fear was deeply rooted in the present and near future.

We crouched beside the back wall. I’d never seen the grounds and mansion from this angle. I doubted many people had, including those who owned the huge lot we’d encroached upon to get to our location. We’d sneaked past a night watchman, across a dark lawn, past tennis courts and a swimming pool, and found the crumbling brick wall that separated a normal looking garden shed from the Soul Eater’s guardhouse.

I understood now how the mansion had been so isolated. Though the house was visible, distinct figures were not. We spotted shapes moving in the windows, but couldn’t tell what they were doing. Sounds didn’t carry this far, either. Dense hedges surrounding the place absorbed the noise before it could reach us—high hedges forming a maze.

“We’ll all go through the maze,” Cyrus said at my elbow. “I know the way to the other side, and Nolen and I can easily hide there until you come back.”

“But how will she find us?” Nathan hissed through the darkness. “We need a rendezvous point.”

I held up my hand. This wasn’t the time for them to start arguing. “I’ll remember the way. We’ll meet at the end. If there’s trouble, if someone discovers us, it’s every man for himself, okay?”

“No!” they both whispered in unison.

I shushed them. “Do you want someone to hear you? Listen, I can take care of myself. I’ll be invisible. It’s you I’m worried about.”

“I’m not going to leave here if you’re in trouble. That’s asking too much!” Nathan shook his head vehemently. “I won’t do it.”

“Listen to me!” I grabbed his hand and squeezed it. “I have blood ties to both of you. You can keep track of me that way. If something happens that you lose me, or I can’t communicate, you’ll know it’s too late. Promise me that if you can’t hear me, you’ll leave.”

The pain that flashed through Nathan’s eyes was visible despite the darkness that surrounded us. He nodded once in agreement.

“Then let’s go,” Cyrus said softly, motioning toward the wall. “Carrie, I’ll boost you up.”

We’d found a spot where the barricade had broken near the top, so the climb wouldn’t be too difficult. The drop on the other side might be another thing entirely, so I braced myself mentally as I placed one foot into Cyrus’s cupped hands.

Carrie!

I looked at his upturned face, his features sharp with desperation in the faint moonlight. I touched his cheek. “Hey, we’re not going to the firing squad. Boost me up.”

It wasn’t the death drop I’d anticipated on the other side. In fact, the wall seemed to be taller on the side we climbed. After landing, I stayed low, crawling to hide behind a nearby tree. It wouldn’t provide great cover, but it was nice to have something tangible between me and the guardhouse.

Cyrus followed, then Nathan. I beckoned to them, but Cyrus shook his head, motioning toward the maze. Apparently, we’d done all the planning he thought we needed.

In the time I’d stayed with Cyrus at the mansion, I’d never ventured into the hedge maze. I’d see the Fangs go into it. I’d seen Dahlia run to it to escape pursuing vampires at the New Year’s party. But I’d never braved it myself. Mazes have always given me the creeps. I don’t like the uncertainty of not knowing where to go or how to get back. It wasn’t any better tonight, when possible death was thrown into the mix.

I followed Cyrus, Nathan close behind me. A rule I’d learned about mazes as a child was “always go left.” I saw now it wasn’t a fail-proof rule. We twisted right and left, following angles, then curves, through narrow corridors and wide, circular spaces.

“How do you remember this?” I asked, feeling secure enough in the cloistered darkness that I raised my voice.

“Shh!” Cyrus whispered urgently. “There could be guards. This path intersects theirs several times.”

“There won’t be. Dahlia ate them all.” I wished I hadn’t said that. Thinking of people being eaten destroyed the modicum of confidence I’d built up since coming over the wall. “But how do you remember your way?”

“Practice. Also, concentration and patience. All things that I am out of,” he said, distractedly. “She ate them? All of them? I rather liked a few.”

It seemed too short a time before I had to leave the cover of the maze. I’d dreaded the close, confusing space, but I dreaded the house at the top of the hill more.

“Okay, got the stone?”

I held out my palm. Nathan pulled a leather pouch from his pocket. Leather, for some reason, was unaffected by the charm, something we’d discovered when he, but not his watch, had disappeared when he’d handled the stone. He opened the pouch now, spilling the amulet into my hand.

“You’re good to go,” he said quietly. “Be careful, Carrie.”

“I will.” I could already feel myself vanishing. “I’m going in now.”

They watched me all the way up the hill, even though they couldn’t see me. I know, because I stopped halfway and looked back. There was something voyeuristic about it, watching them watching me and knowing they didn’t know. They stood side by side, too visible at the opening of the maze. They should have known better, but I wasn’t going to blow our cover by shouting at them. Nathan’s features, sharpened by stress and the eerie shadows of the maze, showed his pain and fear more acutely than I’d ever seen them. Because he’d admitted to me, and to himself, that he loved me, he thought I was doomed.

It was the same for Cyrus. How alike they were. They both thought their love would be the thing that killed me. How alike, and how self-centered.

Keep moving, sweetheart, Nathan prompted through the blood tie.

A little guilty that he’d heard my thoughts, and surprised that he knew I’d stopped, I turned and continued the long walk to the house, and to the Soul Eater.

Twenty-Two:

To Worse

“S o, you didn’t tell them anything? In the whole time you were there, you didn’t tell them why you were coming here or who you were looking for?”

Max lifted his head. Sweat mingled with blood dripped into his eyes. “What did I tell you?”

Anne regarded him coldly for a moment. “Why do you have to make this so difficult? I really liked you. I was even going easy on you. But you just keep pushing and pushing.”

There was a sickening crunch, one he’d come to identify as bone being crushed between the blades of a wire cutter. He concentrated on the sound in an effort to ignore the pain as she snipped another finger to the first joint. If this was taking it easy, he silently thanked himself for being so nice to her all those years.

“I don’t like doing this,” she said with a sigh. “Well, I do like it. Reminds me of the old days. Torture was kind of my thing.”

Another section. He’d been keeping track. So far, she’d done away with his pinkie and half his ring finger on his left hand. He’d looked down once, saw the split flesh and splintered bone littering the floor, and puked. Now he kept his eyes up, focusing on the oculus that would eventually open and let in frying sunlight.

Don’t pass out before Bella gets in here. Pull yourself together, ’cause she is going to freak.

The huge doors scraped open. Anne spun him to face them. “Oh, look who’s here!”

A vampire pushed Bella’s wheelchair. They’d dressed her in a black velvet gown with laces on the front, and her hair was down, like some princess in a low budget fantasy movie. Only this princess looked worried and tired. He tried a lame attempt at a wave and realized he’d only managed to wiggle his injured hand, flinging droplets of blood across the marble floor. She gasped and paled.

“You look like Morticia Adams,” he quipped, but his voice was hoarse from screaming.

She moved as if to lunge from her chair, and the vampire behind her gripped her shoulders. “Don’t move again.”

“Do not hurt him again and I will not be tempted to,” she said, as threateningly as she could manage.

Max hoped the tremor in her voice was from fatigue and not worry over him. I’m not dead yet, he thought, willing the words to materialize in her brain. But he didn’t have telepathy, and he knew it was pointless.

“I was just trying to get your baby daddy here to tell me what you two were up to.” Anne knelt beside him and lifted his bare foot, fitting the wire shears over his little toe. “You wouldn’t want me to maim him any more than I already have, would you? Why don’t you spill it?”

Bella lifted her chin and looked away in casual defiance. “Why should I? You will kill him anyway.”

Good girl, Max thought, digging his fingers—the whole ones—into the leather cuffs as Anne snipped the toe away. He didn’t want to scream in front of Bella. Hell, he hadn’t wanted to scream when it was just him here. But it was a losing battle. He didn’t scream now, but a low, shuddering whimper escaped him, possibly more pathetic than crying out.

“Stop it!” Bella shouted, again trying to rise. The vampire behind her pushed her down, striking her across the face.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Anne threw her implement of torture down and stalked toward Bella.

“Stay away from her,” Max shouted, but he wasn’t entirely sure how he’d back up that command, with his hands tied and blood leaking out of him all over the place. Still, if she was going to do something to Bella…He pulled on the restraints, wincing at the pressure on his mangled digits. His hand slipped down a fraction. The brutal, agonizing pain put a damper on the tiny victory.

Ignoring him, Anne confronted the vampire behind Bella. “If you touch her again, you’ll fry right along with him.”

At least Anne didn’t seem interested in hurting Bella. That took a load off Max’s mind. Anne was very, very good at hurting. The thought of Bella learning that firsthand…Jesus, he had to get her out of there.

“Speaking of frying, when does that happen, exactly?” He jerked at the gauntlets again, half praying he’d get free and half afraid of how he’d fight two vampires when he wasn’t exactly in fighting shape. “I mean, this is getting kind of boring.”

“Oh, this is boring you?” Anne returned to him, spinning him to face away from Bella. Anne went to the table and rubbed her hands together like a kid looking at a dessert cart. “We can move on to something else. Like…this?”

She came forward with the cordless drill, giving the trigger a few experimental squeezes. “How about it?”

“I’m not telling you anything. Obviously, she’s not.” He jerked his head to indicate Bella. “So, I guess if you really want to torture me, go ahead, but you’re wasting time.”

Anne grabbed the rope securing him and gave it a tug, pulling him up so his feet had no chance of touching the floor. “I’ll decide whether or not I’m wasting my time.”

“There has to be something left to burn, when the boss gets here,” the other vampire warned. “Or I won’t be here when she does.”

“You won’t be here anyway, because you’re not invited.” Ever the teenager, Anne delivered the blow with practiced snottiness that would have been devastating to someone in the eleventh grade.

Max couldn’t see what effect it had on the vampire. “So, when does she get here?”

“What, are you afraid?” She took a step closer, still holding the rope. A second tug set him swaying, just a bit.

He thrashed his legs. He hoped it looked like an attempt to keep her away.

“Is little Max afraid of the big, bad girl?” She squeezed the trigger again.

Almost close enough. She was almost close enough, and his hands were nearly out of the cuffs. He’d have to time it exactly….

She took another step forward, raising the drill. “How about…the eyes?”

“How about, no?” Max swung forward with the momentum he’d built up, knocking the drill from her hand as he locked his legs around her rib cage. She’d made a mistake starting with his fingers, one that had worked to his advantage. Wet with his blood, the leather had become slippery. The missing digits made his hands small enough to slip from the cuffs, and the weight of his body did the rest.

He took her down with him. They landed with a thud, skidding across the bloodied marble. He didn’t want to think about the sticky pieces of his former fingers getting crushed beneath them. He had her pinned now, so it would be a damn lousy time to get distracted. Before she could collect her wits to scream, he grabbed her head and twisted, snapping her neck. It wouldn’t kill her, but it would sure incapacitate her.

The vampire who’d been guarding Bella raced forward with a roar. Max grabbed the drill, depressed the trigger and caught him in throat as he charged. “Sorry, couldn’t have you calling for help.”

The vampire writhed on the floor, directly under the oculus. Max grabbed Anne’s limp, unconscious body by the legs and pulled her beside her cohort. “Sorry, kid. You were a good egg, for a while.”

Shielding his eyes, he pulled the rope, flooding the room with light.

“Max, no!” Bella screamed. In the blinding pain of the moment he saw her stand, and fall.

“Damn it, Bella!” If she’d have stayed put, his chances would have been much better. He skirted the direct beam of light, his skin sizzling from the limited exposure. He managed to scoop her up and deposit her into the chair again before he burst into flame.

“Will you be quiet? Do you want the whole freaking house to come in here?” He stopped, dropped and rolled into a shadowed corner. “Wheel yourself over here and let’s go.”

The horror on her face as she approached broke his heart. He knew how he must look. Blood on his arms, dried and fresh. Mangled hand, missing toe. He couldn’t have looked too hot before he’d inadvertently set himself on fire.

The sickening stench of burned vampire reached them. Bella gagged and covered her nose. Lifting his head, Max saw the piles of ash where the bodies had landed. The blue ball of flame of Anne’s soon-to-be-ex heart extinguished with a fizz.

“Hang on,” Max instructed Bella. Then the wind came, making a maelstrom of the cavernous room, destroying the wooden shutters over the windows. Bella dived from the chair to shield him from the light.

“I have killed many vampires and that has never happened,” she said, almost accusing.

“She was old,” Max explained. “Despite what she looked like, she was really, really old.”

During the night, when he’d lain awake relishing what might have been his last few moments with Bella, he’d realized he would probably have to kill Anne. He’d imagined himself being somewhat more…sorry about it. Funny how having his fingers cut off a little bit at a time had changed his attitude.

Bella touched his shoulder, then recoiled. “You are badly burned. How will we escape here? You cannot fight. I will applaud you if you can walk.”

“Well, prepare to give me a standing ovation, ’cause we’re getting out of here.” He climbed to his feet and flattened himself against the wall. “Forgive me if I don’t help you up, but I think I’ve had enough barbecue for today.”

Jumping down in her chair, Bella groaned. “If it comes to pass that I will never walk again, please do me the favor of killing me.”

“At least you’ve still got all your body parts, working or not.” He waggled his ruined hand at her. “Follow me.”

He inched along the wall, avoiding the sunlight that now flooded across the floor. Getting to the door would be the hardest part. Once they were outside it, the chances of finding another open window were slim. Unless the Oracle didn’t mind looking for new employees every dawn.

Another few steps and he would be there. If he didn’t lose his balance and fall into a shaft of sunlight first.

As if in answer to a prayer he hadn’t uttered, the light dimmed.

“Max, what is happening?” Bella asked, her last word nearly drowned out by the clang of steel shutters. The windows and oculus were covered, leaving them in darkness.

Not a good sign. “Go!” he shouted, racing to grab her. But it was too late. The doors slammed shut before them.

“We are trapped,” Bella whispered, eyes wide.

A mechanical whirring drew their attention to the other side of the room. A section of the tall paneling began to shift. Improbably, the whole section swung around, reversing itself. On the other side was an attached dais with a large, ornate throne.

And on that throne sat the Oracle.

Invisibility wasn’t a subject I’d given much thought to. Still, I think my logical expectation would have been that being invisible would make you lose your inhibitions and become a little reckless. In reality, it made me feel exposed and overcautious.

Maybe the situation would have been a little different if I were using my invisibility to spy on the men’s locker room at the gym instead of sneaking into a house I’d tried desperately to escape from before.

When Cyrus ran the place, it had been crawling with guards. But he’d been paranoid. As I eased open one of the French doors leading from the terrace to the foyer, I noted that the Soul Eater seemed pretty confident no one would try and oppose him.

Then the alarm went off.

For a split second I panicked. Since when had there been an alarm system? And I’d thought Dahlia had killed all the guards? Then I remembered that, though I might not have anyplace to hide, I was wearing the best camouflage possible. Still, being invisible didn’t make me noncorporeal. Which became a real concern as the room flooded with guards.

Oddly enough, some of them I recognized. They were the Soul Eater’s personal retinue, trained to obey their master’s whims, most likely on pain of death. They’d been there the night of the Vampire New Year, accompanying their master to his feeding. I’d probably get an extra helping of torture before they killed me.

I slipped into the corner under the stairs and watched as they assembled, praying none of them copied my get-out-of-the-way idea and discovered me. Fourteen of them milled about, weapons drawn—shiny, black stakes with gleaming metal tips—scanning the room in a state of determined readiness.

“Nothing here,” one of them barked, both to the guards in the room and into his headset. “I want two men at the top of those stairs, and stay there. Another team searches the servants’ wing. I want two more casing the kitchen, dining room and ballroom. Go in threes to search the grounds. The rest of you get back to your posts, and keep your eyes open. They might have tripped the alarm to distract us. Go, go, go!”

The guards scattered as quickly as they’d assembled. Somewhere, someone turned off the alarm, and an unnerving silence descended.

Creeping from my hiding place, I willed myself to stay calm. Someone hypervigilant—or a vampire—might be able to hear me.

The door to the study was open. I noticed no one had been posted there, so it seemed a good place to start. I was halfway across the foyer when I heard steps coming down the stairs.

Dahlia swept into the room, clad in a diaphanous black gown. Her sleeves fluttered behind her as she stalked toward the study. I froze, holding absolutely still to keep from making a sound. My palms grew damp. It became a little more difficult to keep my grip on the slick stone, my only camouflage.

She paused, turned her head slightly. Then, without warning, she spun and held out both hands. “Illuminate!”

The room flared with bright, white light. It penetrated the space where I stood and destroyed any shadow on the floor. Her eyes narrowed. She knew someone was in the room with her, she just couldn’t see me.

“Let the guards handle it, my darling,” a deep, cultured voice called from the study. It sounded almost like…

A visible tremor racked Dahlia at the sound of his voice. An almost identical reaction to what Nathan had experienced in the presence of his sire.

Oh, God. Dahlia was the Soul Eater’s fledgling.

It made sense, now. Why Dahlia had been feeding Cyrus information. She knew that eventually, she would find herself on the Soul Eater’s dinner table. If she played both sides, someone might rescue her.

She’d lied to me. I was outraged, but not surprised. Dahlia was clever in ways that continued to mystify me. If I’d thought I’d had her—or her motives—completely figured out, I’d been a fool. No one would ever really know what she was up to. My mistake had been believing that she’d been sired by one of the Fangs, as she’d told me. She’d been in relentless pursuit of Cyrus’s blood. Why would she have settled for a lesser prize? She could have had my blood the night I’d fed from her and she’d stabbed me. But she’d wanted power.

I followed her to the door of the study, timing my steps to echo hers. She tried to trip me up, once. I’d been counting on it. She’d have noticed by now that her spell book was missing. I’m sure she had a clue as to why the guards hadn’t—and hopefully wouldn’t—find the intruder.

In the study, a fire burned in the fireplace. All of the lamps, delicate art nouveau creations, lit the room cheerfully. Seated at the desk, his long, white hair bound in a single braid that coiled on the floor, was the Soul Eater.

He turned at the sound of Dahlia’s entrance, and smiled. He looked so much like Cyrus, but with the added mystery and elegance of age. My heart lurched in my chest.

But he’s not me, Cyrus reminded me through the blood tie. He’s so much worse than I ever was.

“You look lovely tonight,” Jacob Seymour said, inclining his head in Dahlia’s direction. “Is there some occasion?”

“None, really.” She sank into a large, leather armchair with a winged back, looking like a queen on a throne. There was no way that was an accident. “I thought we could try the potion again, if you wanted to.”

He made a noise of disgust. “We have been over this time and again. Julia has captured the werewolf and her vampire companion. We’ll have the child soon enough.”

“There’s no reason not to continue as planned, though!” Dahlia sat up straighter, pounding the arms of the chair with her fists. Her knuckles were white with tension. “We have no idea if the child will be born vampire or werewolf. Or lupin.”

“The baby will be a lupin,” the Soul Eater retorted calmly. “A natural-born vampire and werewolf combined. What use would I have for a mere vampire child?”

“A right hand?” Now Dahlia was reaching. She’d outlived her usefulness and she knew it. “A son. With the power of a natural-born vampire. Maybe if Cyrus had been—”

“My son is not the issue!” The Soul Eater stood so fast he knocked over his chair and the delicate writing desk. Papers fluttered to the ground, all scribbled on in handwriting that I was sure belonged to him. I moved cautiously toward the desk as he continued to rage.

“I have warned you never to speak of him in my presence!” He advanced on Dahlia, throwing aside his overturned chair. It bounced off my legs and I muffled a shout of pain and surprise. Luckily, neither of them noticed, wrapped up in their rage and fear, respectively.

Dahlia crawled backward like a crab on her hands and feet, too tangled in her voluminous dress to create much room between her and the Soul Eater.

“I should destroy you now!” As his voice raised in volume, it grew in intensity, the voices of his past victims joining in the hellish chorus. I’d heard that voice once before, and I shuddered to hear it again.

“No!” Dahlia screamed, holding up her hands. “You need me!”

“Need you?” He continued to advance.

Carrie! Go, find what you have to and move on! It was Nathan’s voice in my head, involuntarily replaying images of the night we’d both barely escaped this room with our lives. The night Nathan’s son, Ziggy, had died at the hands of his sire.

I dropped to my knees and scrambled toward the mess of papers. Letters, a sequence of them, made out to Julia. The second I touched one, it disappeared. I had to read them silently where they lay, transmitting their contents through the blood tie.

Julia,

I hope this letter finds you well. I have arranged a transport for you and the werewolf for the week of the seventh. This will ensure it is well past the time of the full moon.

I noticed, along with the fact his notorious charisma did not translate to paper, that beside the scattered letters were a handful of envelopes. All were addressed, simply, to “Oracle.” There were no addresses.

Father uses personal couriers. Cyrus’s contempt echoed through my head. You won’t find the address there. But he will have it. Look in my bedroom.

His bedroom, I snapped back. I’ll go when I can move.

The Soul Eater grabbed Dahlia by the hair and hauled her to her feet. At least, sort of to her feet. She tripped and her legs tangled, leaving her to twist by the handful of red curls he grasped. “Do you know how many there are like you? Who will do as I say and not make ridiculous demands? Witches are not hard to find. It’s an obedient one I’ve yet to come across!”

He released her hair and grabbed her throat with his clawed hand. “You will not speak to me of this again! Do we have an understanding?”

A tear escaped the corner of her eye, forced out by the pressure of suffocation. She gasped and scratched at his hand, squeaking out a pained “yes” before he threw her backward. She knocked over a table as she fell.

I sprinted for the door, thinking to escape when I wouldn’t be heard over the ruckus Dahlia’s weeping and falling caused.

“And you! Don’t move another inch!”

I froze.

Twenty-Three:

Back from the Dead

“Y es, I know you’re there.” The Soul Eater moved closer to me, as though he could see me despite my invisibility. He sniffed the air, a smile twitching the corners of his mouth. “Do you think I can’t smell my fledgling’s blood in you?”

I clutched the stone tighter. Run! Just get the hell out of there! Nathan screamed in my head. I tensed, ready to follow his advice.

The Soul Eater laughed. “Oh, Nolen. He was always so dramatic. You have nothing to fear from me.”

Carrie, don’t listen to him! Cyrus’s thoughts set up a panicked buzz in my mind. I clapped my hands to my head, trying desperately to keep my wits under the onslaught of my sire’s and my fledgling’s frantic urging.

“Be calm,” the Soul Eater advised. His tone was patient and reasonable, cutting through the pandemonium in my head. “You know how to quiet them.”

Block the blood tie? In my confusion and pain I dimly remembered telling Cyrus and Nathan that I wouldn’t, that they could stay in contact with me and know everything was all right. It was so tempting to follow the Soul Eater’s directive. So I did.

“There,” Jacob said, stepping toward me. “Now, show yourself. I won’t hurt you.”

For some horrible reason I couldn’t fathom, I believed him. I let the stone tumble to the floor.

His eyes lit up with cold fire in recognition. A smile bent his lips, lips that were so like Cyrus’s. “Oh, this is a pleasant surprise.”

“You remember me?” Why did that make me feel special, somehow?

Dahlia staggered to her feet, her face cut and bleeding. “You!”

“You may leave now, Dahlia. I am quite finished with you.” He didn’t look at her, until she opened her mouth to protest. Then he fixed her with a piercing glare. “Unless there is something else you wish to offer me?”

She backed to the door, her eyes wide with fear, and left us alone in the study.

As if he hadn’t just threatened to steal a person’s soul right there in front of me, he beckoned me closer. “Come here, let me get a look at you.”

I went to him, drawn by some invisible cord that seemed to bind us. Nothing like the blood tie. It was pure charisma.

“Of course I remember you. You were my son’s…well, plaything seems so crude.”

“Because it is.” But I don’t know why it didn’t offend me.

“Pity, what had to occur between you. But you weren’t suited for each other.” He reached out, gripped my wrist. “You’re much too strong for him.”

“Is that a compliment?” It was hard to tell. It was hard to think at all. His hand burned where it touched my skin.

“It’s an…observation.” He lifted my wrist to his lips. I didn’t resist him, even though it seemed certain he would bite. Instead, he pressed a kiss there, and I shuddered. “When you killed him, that created much trouble for me.”

“Did it?” I pulled my hand back slowly, actually reluctant to break contact. “I won’t apologize.”

The Soul Eater chuckled. “I wouldn’t expect you to.”

“Because you know me so well?” I heard the sarcasm in my voice, but I didn’t feel the conviction that bolstered my words.

He laughed again. “I can see why my son enjoyed your company. Please, sit. Talk with me. After five centuries, the days grow tedious, especially with such…pointless companions.”

“And you two seemed to get along so well.” I sat on the couch, where he instructed.

He righted the chair and turned it to face me before sitting. “She has her uses. I must admit, I found her enjoyable for a time. But I grow tired of people so quickly. It’s a character flaw on my part, and I accept it. So, tell me. What have you come for?”

“I want to know where the Oracle is.” There was no point in hiding it from him. I doubted I would survive to make it out of the place. If I could get the information, maybe I could relay it to Cyrus or Nathan. “The Oracle has my friends. Tell me where they are.”

He laughed. “Now you underestimate me, Carrie.”

“You won’t let me live to get out of here. Might as well tell me. Satiating my curiosity could be…fulfilling my last wish.” Even as I said it, I knew he wasn’t stupid enough to fall for it. He didn’t have a pathological need to gloat over his impending victory.

He stood and paced leisurely behind his chair, then to the fire. There was a cut-crystal decanter of amber liquid on the mantel. He poured a glass and offered it to me.

I declined with a motion of my head. “I need to stay dry. I hear you can be dangerous.”

“In more ways than you know.” He moved toward me and pressed the glass into my palm. “Drink it.”

I took the glass. “Is it poisoned? Spiked with holy water?”

“I wouldn’t do such a nasty thing to you.” He poured himself a drink, as a show of good faith, probably, and sank into his chair. “I do remember you. I remember when you knelt beside my coffin and put your devious hands on it. And I remember how wounded you were when I did not fall into the same trap that my son did. How naive you were, how refreshingly stupid.”

“I can’t say Cyrus was much better.” I couldn’t help glancing at the floor. We sat in the very room where I’d first encountered the Soul Eater. The room in which I’d killed his son.

“No, Simon was always too headstrong. From the time he killed his brother, I knew it. He could never accept that he wasn’t my first choice as fledgling. He would never see the larger scope of my actions, only how they affected him.” The Soul Eater shook his head ruefully.

“Talk about not seeing the broader scope! You killed his wives, you didn’t care when the only maternal figure in his life burned to death, your goons killed the girl in the desert—”

“What girl in the desert?” Jacob leaned forward, clearly intrigued and…amused? “I hadn’t heard about any girl.”

“I won’t be the one to tell you.” The fact I’d even mentioned it disgusted me. “But you can’t blame him for becoming blinded to betrayal. After living with you for so long, it probably felt natural.”

“Very good, my dear.” The Soul Eater laughed, a deep, seductive sound that didn’t have the callow edge of his son’s. “Well, I did kill a few of his companions. But his first two wives, they killed themselves. And his stepmother, what a useless woman. I suppose he told you his suspicions of me.”

I glared at him. “Never. When I knew him, he was blinded by his loyalty to you. He acted like the sun shines out of your ass.”

“Do you have to be so crude?” Jacob clucked his tongue. “I must say, I’m proud he never spoke ill of me to you. It showed he had at least some sense.”

“It shows less sense that he stayed under your thumb for so long.” I let the comment hang in the air for a moment. “Tell me what you did to his mother.”

“Stepmother,” the Soul Eater corrected. He propped his steepled fingers in front of his mouth, cold blue eyes glinting in the firelight. “She was useless. Perpetually pregnant and useless. I had two daughters by her. Neither of them lived past infancy, thank the Lord for small mercies. But the experience of bearing a child and watching it die…well, it ruined her. Chores were neglected, my children ran wild. All except Cyrus, foolish brat that he was. He doted on her, as if anything he could do would break her from her self-pitying spell.

“The day she burned, I’d had enough. I came in from the field—I was a simple farmer then, with no land of my own, toiling day after interminable day for another man’s gain. I came into my house, and the fire had died. It wasn’t a cold day, mind, but with no fire came no supper, and my bones fairly ached with hunger. I thought of my sons, scattered to the winds, doing God alone knew what while their stepmother wallowed in her sniveling sorrow, and I’d had enough. I went for kindling, built up the fire and when it was large enough, I pushed her into it.”

Cyrus’s tortured memories flashed through my mind. The loving mother figure, enrobed in flames. His only friend and ally in the cruel world of his childhood, burning to death before his eyes. And Mouse, left to burn away in the desert as he watched.

The Soul Eater made a disgusted noise. “Well, in any case, he’s dead now.”

So, he didn’t know the truth then. How could he? Dahlia had obviously meant to kill Cyrus, and probably reported the deed finished when she’d told the Soul Eater.

“You’re a monster,” I rasped, still trying to swallow my shock.

“And you’re a simpering fool!” His hand shot out to grab me by the throat. Rage lit his eyes and hard lines bracketed his mouth. Still, he wasn’t the Soul Eater I’d feared meeting tonight. I hoped that creature didn’t show his face while I was around.

He took a deep breath and released me, smiling tightly. “I’m sorry. Forgive me. I have no wish to harm you.”

I find that hard to believe, I thought, but said nothing.

“You intrigue me, Carrie.” He regarded me with an intensity that burned. “You may have been too strong for my son, and certainly too strong for my fledgling, but you’re no match for me. A challenge, certainly. It would take us a long time, I think, to tire of each other.”

“Well, I’m already getting tired of you,” I retorted. But it wasn’t true. When Cyrus had been my sire, I’d been drawn to the danger in him. In him I’d seen reflected all my basest desires. He’d offered me a life of indulgence and hedonism, and I’d been able to turn away in disgust. But the Soul Eater…Everything about Jacob Seymour seemed right. As if he could do no wrong simply because he believed nothing was wrong. It made him powerful, and power remained my weakness.

I begged myself to remember what had happened before, how unhappy I knew I would have been if I’d stayed unquestioningly at Cyrus’s side. The Soul Eater didn’t need me. I’d wanted that so much, someone to need me. Now, it seemed the furthest thing from my mind. I wanted to need someone else, and the best possible person to need would be one who could provide.

I was falling under his hypnotic spell again.

“Think of it, my dear. I have but a few full-time companions, none that I share my interests with.” He gave me a pointed glance, leaving me no illusions as to what those interests were. “And you’d benefit from our alliance in other ways.”

“What? When you get tired of me my soul gets a gala installation in your lower intestine?” I shook my head. “No way.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t have to consume you, Carrie.” He waved his hand as if shooing away my foolishness. “Use your head. My fledgling knows what I’m up to, and he’s likely told you as well. Why would I need or want your pathetic little soul? I didn’t sire you. I have no use for you.”

“A minute ago you were practically down on one knee, and now I’m pathetic? You sure know how to win a girl’s heart.” I stood as if to leave. “So, if that’s all—”

He threw out his hand and an invisible force knocked me back to the sofa. “Impressive, yes? The power…it’s all you’ve ever dreamed of, and more.”

I glared at him. “And you’ll use it against me every day of my life, making me your mindless puppet. I’ve already been through that with your son. What is the price you ask, oh great one, for this dubious honor?”

With an evil smile, he came toward me. I couldn’t move as he leaned down, his teeth bared. He had fangs, even though he wasn’t in feeding mode. At least I hoped he wasn’t. His nose almost touched mine, and his breath was cold against my face as he spoke. “This is why my son couldn’t tame you. I will not have the same problem.” He slapped me hard across the face. It caught me off guard and I tasted blood.

“The price for letting you live,” he hissed, gripping my hair to punctuate his last word, “is that you will bring my fledgling to me!”

“Nathan?” I gasped through the pain. “No way. Kill me now.”

He lifted me by the throat and flung me across the room, literally. I bounced off the wall and landed in a broken heap on the floor. In my head, breaking down the wall I’d created to block him out, Nathan’s anger—with me, with his sire—and his pain assailed me, skewering my mind in a thousand agonizing places. “Nathan, no!” But I’d meant to call out to him with my mind.

The Soul Eater laughed, and the sound twisted into the tortured screams of the souls trapped inside him. His eyes glowed red and his face contorted. “Let him come. Let my wayward child come home to me, as he’s longed to do so many times.”

“No!” I scrambled to my feet and broke for the door, but the Soul Eater was on me in a second, holding me back.

“Struggle! He’ll feel your fear and it will quicken his pace.” Jacob’s hands turned to claws around my arms, and the stench of decay overwhelmed me. “You will be rewarded for your compliance.”

Bile rose in my throat. I choked it back. “He’ll kill you! And I’ll help, I swear it!”

“And you’ll die like all the others who’ve tried.” His words died into an anguished cry, the chorus of voices in him raising to protest their eternal torment.

The door of the study ricocheted off the wall as it burst open. “The hell she will!”

“Nathan, no! Get out of here!” I tried to escape from the Soul Eater’s grasp, and to my surprise, he let me go easily. I hadn’t anticipated it, and wound up on my face on the hard marble.

When I looked up, I saw what had taken Jacob Seymour so off guard.

His son Cyrus, presumed dead, standing in the doorway.

Cyrus showed no hint of bravado as he entered the room where he’d once died. He met the Soul Eater’s astonished gaze head-on. “Hello, Father. There are a few things we need to discuss.”

In all the time he’d worked for the Movement, Max had never seen the Oracle conscious. She actually seemed less frightening, and that was dangerous.

She sat on a carved wooden throne with a back that pointed up like a church steeple. Her head, normally bald, was covered in an Egyptian-style wig, her thin body robed in a loose red dress. She held her head regally, but appeared fragile, like a mental patient in the starring role of the asylum’s Cleopatra. Her frailty actually caused a stab of pity in him.

He knew better, but Bella…she might have been through assassin training, but she was still a woman, and women had sympathy. Sympathy that would get her killed.

“Come.” The Oracle pointed at Bella and crooked her finger. The wheelchair shot forward with such speed that when it stopped, Bella fell out, spilling to the floor.

When Max tried to run to her, he couldn’t. He added telekinesis to the list of shit he hated about the Oracle.

“Hey, bitch!” he shouted, hoping he’d catch her attention with his boldness and she wouldn’t just twist his head off his shoulders. “You know, for wanting that baby, you’re not being too gentle with the mother.”

“What happens to the wolf does not concern me, only what happens to the child she carries, and it is in no danger.” The Oracle turned back to Bella. “My daughter is strong in you.”

“She is not your daughter,” Bella shrieked, pushing herself up with her arms. “She will never be yours!”

“You presume to correct me?” The Oracle laughed. “I, who know all?”

“For knowing all, you sure don’t have much common sense,” Max shouted, desperate to get the Oracle’s attention off of Bella. “Why would you hook up with the Soul Eater? He’ll double-cross you faster than you can come up with one of your stupid prophecies.”

The Oracle crooked her finger and pulled him forward, his feet tangling together as he resisted her. She brought him to within inches of Bella, smiling cruelly. “You doubt the legitimacy of my prophecies?”

Trying for bravado, he laughed. “I do. Hell, half the time we can only figure out what they’re about after the thing happens. That’s not a real handy skill, making general observations and then pinning them on an event after the fact.”

“I have never done such a thing. It was your Order of the Brethren that decided I spoke of a future that would include them.” She closed her eyes, hands clutching the carved arms of the throne. When she looked at them again, her eyes were obscured with a haze of blood. “Their time is over.”

“Yeah, kinda got that when you toasted the place.” Max tried to move his arms, and when he managed, there was nothing to do with them. It wasn’t like he could fight the Oracle. It was a losing battle before it even started. “But you’re still asking for a world of hurt teaming up with the Soul Eater. He’s not a real trustworthy guy.”

The Oracle laughed. “He is a pawn. He has no power over me. He has my heart. He could have killed me at any time. But he doesn’t, because he is weak, and he does not know how to proceed without my help.”

“But you sent him your heart,” Bella said, wiping a trickle of blood from her split lip. “He has your heart.”

“He does.” She gave another eerily knowing laugh. “He does.”

Max shook his head. “He’s totally going to kill you.”

The Oracle leaned back, her eyes fading slowly back to normal. “He desires power above all else. He will not kill the source of it.”

“But he won’t coexist with someone who has more than him. He’s trying to become a god. God means all-powerful.” The Oracle’s hold on Max had slipped a bit, and he bent to help Bella.

The Oracle made a fist and drew his spine painfully straight. “He will never reach that level. I will use him up and discard him.”

“For what? To get yourself killed for free? Hell, I could have done that for you.” Max grimaced as her invisible hand tightened around his spine. “If you’re going to kill me, kill me!”

The Oracle relinquished her hold. “My vision is not clouded by lust for power. I will not fall as easily as him.”

Max stretched his neck, hoping his back wouldn’t collapse into dust. “Then what’s your vision? Lay it on me, babe. I got time.”

“You have less time than you believe.” The Oracle pointed at him, but didn’t use her destructive powers. “I am establishing a new order. With the Soul Eater’s help, I will destroy all those who would oppose me. When he has exceeded his usefulness, I will dispose of him. Those loyal to chaos will reign.”

“Chaos?” Max raised an eyebrow.

Seemingly pleased at his interest, the Oracle nodded. “The world will become a vampire’s paradise. Mortals will weep in fear at our feet and tremble before us. The earth will become saturated with the blood we cannot drink for the abundance of it.”

“Sounds…nice.” He cleared his throat. “But that doesn’t sound like chaos. I mean, you’re using the term ‘order,’ you’re talking about people worshipping you. Sounds kind of like what the Soul Eater is doing.”

“Let me finish!” She held up her hand and snapped it closed, and his jaw tightened, teeth shifting against each other under the pressure. “Lowly ones will rejoice, powerful ones will seek more power. It will be as it is now, but only for a time. They will soon realize they are not bound by laws or sides in a never-ending war. They will begin to turn on each other.

“Vampires will hunt vampires, new Soul Eaters will rise. Others will kill them. No leader will emerge who can sustain his rule. All the earth will be lost in darkness and blood.”

“Why would you want that?” Bella whimpered.

Tenderly, the Oracle reached down to touch her face. “I would not expect a lowly werewolf to understand.”

“What does the kid have to do with it? I mean, if you’re superpowerful, why do you need a baby to help you?” Why do you need my baby? He fought to keep the unspoken question from surfacing. The bitch might get him, might get Bella and their daughter and everything important to him, but she wouldn’t know it. He didn’t know how, but if she didn’t know what they meant to him, he got to keep a part of them. Just for himself.

“The prophecy.” It was Bella who spoke, her sorrow cutting straight to his heart. “I didn’t want to tell you. I wasn’t ready to let you know.”

“What prophecy?” He looked from the Oracle to Bella. “What prophecy?”

“There is a prophecy among my people, made by the Oracle long ago.” Bella’s head dipped. She wouldn’t look at him.

When the Oracle spoke, her voice was low and mechanical. “The sword forged of blood. A natural-born vampire.”

“But she’s not a vampire. Bella’s a werewolf. The baby will be a lupin,” Max protested, though he was pretty sure it wouldn’t matter.

The Oracle spread her hands, an expression of bewilderment on her porcelain face. “So, I may control the wolves, as well. It is not a setback. Be proud. The child you gave me will rule after my one hundred years of chaos.”

“You’re doing this all for just a hundred years?” Max sputtered in disbelief. “That’s like a blink of an eye to you!”

“If I have the child, the natural-born vampire, the course of events in those hundred years can be altered considerably.” She leaned forward with a predatory smile. “Through her, chaos could rule without end.”

So that was the plan. She would make his child a monster. Even though it was a kid he’d never seen or held, the thought made him ill. “Fuck you.”

“I do not appreciate your vulgarity.” The Oracle turned to one of her sentries. “I want him dead.”

The vampire approached, pulling a stake from her belt. This is it. I’m going to die. Max swallowed, but the lump in his throat wouldn’t go down. He’d always wondered if he’d be afraid. And he was. I’m going to die, and it’s going to be some third-rate vampire crony who does the honors.

“No, not you.” The Oracle held up her hand as the vampire paused midstrike. “Bring the one who just arrived. The present from dear Jacob.”

There was an interminable wait as the vampire crony, looking more than a little pissed off at not being allowed to kill him, left the room. While she was gone, the Oracle didn’t speak. She sat, looking bored, on her throne, occasionally tapping her fingernails on the carved wooden arms.

“Max,” Bella whispered, as if the Oracle wouldn’t hear them only a few feet away. “I do not think we will survive this.”

“No. I do not think you will.” The Oracle’s laugh filled the room, pounding Max’s brain like a sledgehammer.

It was echoed by the slamming of the big doors behind them. The Oracle’s face lit up. “Ah, there you are. Come here. Kill this vampire.”

“Why?”

The voice sent a shock of recognition through Max. But he couldn’t place where he’d heard it.

The Oracle’s eyes narrowed. She obviously didn’t like being questioned. “Because I asked it of you. Call it a test of loyalty.”

“I call it a poor excuse to drag my ass out of bed before sunset.” The voice moved closer with a jingling of chains. “But yeah, no problem.”

The body that went with the voice passed Max, insinuating himself between the Oracle and his intended victim. He was stocky, his brown hair shaved from the sides of his head in what would have been a Mohawk if it weren’t so long. “So, give me a stake.”

The vampire guard threw him one, and he caught it before it could pierce his chest. “Nice one, lady. Thanks.”

Then he turned.

It was the kid. Nathan’s dead son.

It was Ziggy.

Twenty-Four:

Ashes to Ashes

E veryone always says, “You should see the look on your face,” or, “I wish I’d had a camera.” Both of those statements went through my mind as the Soul Eater laid eyes on his formerly dead son.

Cyrus strolled into the room like he still owned the place, head held high. “Surprised to see me?”

Nathan followed close behind him. His steely expression softened with relief when he saw me, but the emotionless mask snapped quickly back into place. “It’s a dysfunctional family reunion.”

“She told me you were dead.” Jacob’s right arm flailed, reaching for something to brace himself on. He seemed a tad more flappable than you’d expect someone to if he walked around calling himself the Soul Eater.

And Cyrus fed off his father’s shock like a fire sucking up oxygen. I knew Cyrus well enough to know this was the first time he’d been in this position. “She tried. She failed. But what I want to know is, why did you send her to do it?”

“I didn’t!” The Soul Eater backed up as Cyrus advanced on him.

Before Jacob could call for the guards, Nathan grabbed the overturned couch and flung it at the doors. They slammed closed under the weight, and the sofa fell neatly to the floor, effectively barring anyone from entering. The guards would be strong, but they were still just humans. The Soul Eater’s taste in furniture ran to heavy, expensive pieces. If anyone came sniffing around, the sofa would at least buy us time.

“We don’t need any extra company,” Nathan said coldly, advancing on his sire.

“Get back, Nolen!” Cyrus commanded, stopping him in his tracks. “This is my fight and mine alone.”

I felt the conflict in Nathan. He wanted to honor Cyrus’s wishes—it was his father about to be killed, after all—but he was driven by his desire to avenge his wife. To avenge himself.

It’s okay. I waited until he looked at me, and put out my hand. He came to stand at my side.

There were tears in his eyes. It’s really going to be over.

Nathan had never been this stupidly optimistic before. The Soul Eater wasn’t dead yet, and I’d learned never to believe in the logical course of the future. Logical didn’t really apply in the vampire world.

The Soul Eater drew himself up straight, regaining some of his regal manner. “Dahlia is a troublesome and disobedient girl. I warned her repeatedly to stay away from you, but she didn’t listen. If she turned you, it was her own initiative.”

“Oh, she didn’t turn me.” Cyrus took a few steps toward the fire. “She bled me and left me for dead.”

“Then she didn’t do a good enough job of it!” The Soul Eater stalked off on his own path. It was almost comical, the way father and son paced identically, alike in their rage. “You are weak. Even a human could have fended off that cow of a witch!”

Then, as if he was struck by lightning, the Soul Eater’s eyes narrowed. He turned to Cyrus. “But you did. She told me as much. She didn’t turn you. How do you stand here if she did not turn you?”

And in another flash of inspiration, he rounded on me. “You!”

I backed up as he came forward, and Nathan got between us. The Soul Eater knocked him aside as though he were made of straw.

“Nathan!” Torn between wanting to dive for him, to protect him and see if he was hurt, and my instinct to flee the Soul Eater, I found the latter winning out. But I wasn’t fast enough. Jacob had centuries of reflex training over me. The instant I thought about running, he had me.

“Perhaps you were the weak one.” He spun me, my back pulled up tight against his chest as his clawed hands gripped my arms. Nathan and Cyrus stood, their helplessness written in the dire expressions on their faces, unable to save me. Unable to do anything, really, until the Soul Eater made his next move, and that might leave me dead.

“Now your resistance toward me seems all the more peculiar. Nolen at least had some fire in him, some passion. Simon…oh, my dear Simon.” His hold relaxed, and he brought one hand up to stroke my neck. “What ever are we going to do with you?”

I couldn’t tell if he was talking to Cyrus or me, so I didn’t answer him. Through clenched teeth, I whispered, “Let me go.”

For a moment, he seemed to consider it. Then he gripped my chin and pulled my head up. “Isn’t it funny, that my son is your fledgling, and my fledgling is your sire? We’re blood related, in a way.”

“Then what you were proposing before would be incest,” I wheezed, barely able to catch my breath.

“Why are you doing this, Jacob?” Nathan attempted to draw the Soul Eater’s attention away from me. It worked, but only a little. I could breathe again, but my head was still pulled up at an uncomfortable angle. My spine popped and my muscles screamed in protest.

Still, I sent Nathan a mental Thank you.

Hang on, sweetheart. His gaze met mine for just a second before he addressed the Soul Eater again. “Why are you on this demented quest? Do you really think there isn’t going to be another vampire just as ambitious as you are, gunning for you once you become a god? Imagine the kind of trophy you would make!”

“More ambitious?” The Soul Eater cackled at that. “Have you met an ambitious vampire in your life? Look at yourself. You could have stayed with me, never wanting for anything, if only you would have done what I’d asked of you. Instead, you chose to live out your pathetic existence serving those who would see us subjugated and exterminated. Living in a filthy apartment and running your pathetic shop full of superstitions you’ve never believed.

“And you, Simon! All I ever asked is for you to carry out my wishes, to be my eyes when I could not rouse from my slumber. But you were more concerned with finding a woman to adore you, as if that would make you more of a man. You embarrass me!” He gave a grunt of disgust. “If you intend to serve me, I suggest you rid yourself of your insipid humanity.

“A new age is dawning, my children. Vampires will rule this earth, as we’re meant to. No more of this ‘the meek will inherit’ preaching from the Movement. Let the meek have the kingdom of heaven. The strong shall rule on earth.” As he spoke, his hand tightened around my neck. His body trembled with rage. “The Oracle has fulfilled her role. She has secured the child I need. She sees a vision of chaos, thinking to impress me with horror. But the true horror will come when I rule, when I kill the Oracle and reign in her stead.”

His hand at my throat relaxed once again, stroking down the column of my windpipe. He took me by the hand, the strength of his grip a warning, and turned me to face him. “Despite your failings and your naive alliance to those who would destroy me, your death is not essential, Carrie. You’re of my line. You could serve me. Or can die here tonight.”

“If they die, I die.” I said it with as much steel as I could inject into my voice, but I was terrified.

The Soul Eater smiled. “So brave. I should kill you for that alone. But I am feeling kind tonight.”

“Thank you?” I looked over Nathan and Cyrus, saw their grim faces. They knew better than I how the Soul Eater displayed his kindness.

He hooked his index finger beneath my chin, lifted my face and gazed into my eyes. “You may pick which one of them lives.”

“Excuse me?” I blinked rapidly, as if that would help me clear my head. I couldn’t have heard what he’d said.

“You can pick which one lives.” He shrugged elegantly. “Oh, they’ll both die eventually. I need Nathan’s soul to complete my ritual, and I’m sure my son will do something to rouse my anger before long. But at your word, one of them can leave this house tonight.”

I looked to Nathan. What do I do?

I trust you. The reply didn’t help me, but it was the only communication we could manage. The Soul Eater made a move….

I’m not sure what he intended to do. But in that second, Cyrus rushed forward, a stake drawn. He swung the weapon at his father, and before my eyes could track the Soul Eater’s movements, he had Cyrus’s arm bent at an unnatural angle behind his back.

“Why do you fight me?” Jacob sounded pained as he twisted Cyrus’s arm. I heard the bones crack and saw the stake fall from his fingers as he screamed. The Soul Eater grimaced. “Why would you make an attempt on my life?”

“Because I know you’re a coward! You’ll kill her, just like you kill anyone else who threatens your power!” Cyrus shouted. The tears rolling down his face were from the pain in his arm and the grief he felt. Both sensations overwhelmed me, and I clutched my chest, crushed under the weight of his sadness and frustration. “You won’t steal her from me!”

The Soul Eater looked taken aback. “She is worthless. You value her life above mine?”

“Yes, I do!” Cyrus cradled his ruined arm to his chest, mouth frozen open in a silent cry of anguish as he dropped to his knees in defeat. “I don’t know. I’m tired of this pain.”

I wanted to go to his side and wrap my arms around him. But it was his father who comforted him, placing a hand on his head. “And I can take it from you. My son. I can take it all from you.”

Don’t listen to him, I begged him silently, but my thought bounced back to me with a desolate echo. Cyrus wasn’t listening to me. He’d made up his mind.

“Let me help you, son.” The Soul Eater knelt at his side. “Come home to me.”

He’s going to drain him! I screamed silently at Nathan. He’s going to drain him and re-sire him.

Calm down, Carrie. Don’t say a word.

If I’d been in the right frame of mind, maybe I would have recognized the sense in Nathan’s words. But all I felt was unimaginable pain that my fledgling would be stolen from me, that my life would be meaningless.

That’s why I didn’t see the stake Cyrus had pulled. My gaze was focused on the Soul Eater’s face as it changed, his fangs as they pierced Cyrus’s skin.

So I screamed, “He killed your stepmother!”

The Soul Eater paused. I couldn’t stop talking. “He pushed her into the fire. He was the one who killed her.”

The Soul Eater actually withdrew, as if to apologize. He saw the stake in Cyrus’s hand and raised his arm to strike him.

Cyrus was faster. He kicked his father’s feet from beneath him. Jacob landed hard on his back and couldn’t recover before Cyrus pinned him with a foot to the chest.

“You killed her?” His face contorted in rage. “You killed her?”

“She was a worthless cow,” the Soul Eater wheezed. The sound of his ribs slowly crunching under Cyrus’s foot was followed by a gurgle of blood from his mouth. “And now, I’ll send you to join her!”

He planted his feet on the floor and sprang up, grabbing Cyrus’s arm. But he grabbed the wrong one. It took only a second for Cyrus to implant the stake firmly in his father’s chest.

I braced myself for the whoosh of wind and the violent storm of ashes that was sure to follow. But nothing happened. The Soul Eater’s shout of pain died into sinister laughter.

I thought of Cyrus’s heart, how he’d kept it in a box.

I thought of my own heart in its casket in Nathan’s bedside table.

The Soul Eater’s hand closed around Cyrus’s neck. He lifted him off the ground with one arm and wrenched the stake from his chest, releasing a spurt of blood.

Then, without another word, he stabbed Cyrus in the heart. There was no rush of wind, no spectacular flame. Cyrus’s second vampire life ended in an inconsequential burst of ash.

Crippling pain gripped me, almost exactly what I’d felt when I’d sired him. But that pain had been a sort of stitching together. This was an agonizing rending of the fabric that had bound us. And the last thing I heard through the blood tie was his scream of terror.

I collapsed to the floor at the same moment the Soul Eater did. He clutched his chest as though his hand could stop the blood that poured from him. A ball of blue flame shot upward from the wound, but still he didn’t burn.

“It’s not his heart,” Nathan whispered, staring in horror.

The doors flew open. Dahlia rushed in, screaming.

Kill me. Let her kill me. When it seemed I couldn’t stand another second of the pain, it doubled, tripled, multiplied into oblivion. I stared at the spot where my fledgling had stood, rocking with my knees drawn up to my chest.

“No!” I’d never heard Dahlia sound so crazed, and for her, that’s saying something. But it didn’t register with me immediately. Not until Nathan was pulling on my elbow—how long had he been doing that?—urging me to my feet. When I didn’t stand, he swept me up in his arms, cradling me to his chest, and charged through the window. A flash of light illuminated the study—probably a spell of Dahlia’s intended for us—and then we were slipping down the lawn the way we had the night Nathan had lost Ziggy in the very room I’d just lost Cyrus.

The irony would have been more poignant if I hadn’t been losing my mind to grief at an accelerated pace.

Once we were off the grounds and hidden for a moment, he slowed. I noted from a faraway place the blood streaming down his face from cuts left by the shattered window glass.

“Carrie, are you all right?” He shook me. “Carrie, say something. Say something!”

I turned my eyes to the sky. “I can’t see the stars.”

And then I couldn’t say another word.

Twenty-Five:

Bite

I t only took a second for the kid to make up his mind. Max saw the decision-making process in slow motion: recognition, realization that the plan must be changed, new plan taking shape.

Ziggy lifted his arm as if he was going to drive the stake into Max’s chest. Bella screamed. The kid spun and let the stake loose. It punctured the Oracle’s chest, fast and clean, but she didn’t burn.

She laughed. The laughter grew louder as the guards approached them, stakes drawn. Without hesitation, the kid slipped two from his sleeves straight into his hands, and let them fly in quick succession. This time, the strikes hit home. The vampires exploded into dust.

Ziggy turned to the Oracle. “Hold still, bitch, unless you want another abnormally large splinter.”

“You think you can kill me?” The Oracle laughed again, twisting the stake free from her chest. “You think you can cause me pain? You have no idea of pain. No concept!”

“Oh, lady. You have it so fucking wrong.” He reached into the back of his shirt and pulled out another stake, twirling it in his hand as he raised his arm.

Max had worked with a lot of assassins in the past. The Movement had the most specialized hand-to-hand training program outside of the Israeli military. But Max had never seen reflexes like this, let alone spatial accuracy in the blink of an eye.

But the kid didn’t get a chance to use his mad skills. Without warning, the Oracle burst into flames, from the feet up. Fire shot from her eyes and mouth, her fingers melted and flames licked up her arms from the stumps.

“Looks like the Soul Eater had the balls to do it, after all! This one is gonna be bad,” Max called to Ziggy, dropping to cover Bella. “Grab something and hang on.”

The Oracle screamed—no, roared was more like it—as the flames burned her body. The skin dissolved slowly, leaving her a creature of raw muscle and tendons for a split second before they flaked away to ash, leaving nothing but a skeleton suspended around a ball of blue flame. When the flame extinguished and dropped to the ashes on the ground, the wind came.

The shutters tore from the windows. The sun had set—at least that was in their favor—but being sliced in half with a piece of metal would be just as bad.

“Keep your head down,” Max shouted over the howl of the wind. The last word had just left his mouth when a chunk of debris whacked him in the back of the head. His arms gave out and he fell onto Bella. A sharp pain in his shoulder a second later indicated another piece of flying something had taken a chunk out of him. “Son of a bitch!”

The Oracle’s bones, still suspended, were surrounded by a cyclone of her own ashes. They eroded away as if being scourged by a superaccelerated desert sandstorm. And when they were gone, so were the ashes, and the wind.

“You guys okay?” Ziggy helped Max to his feet. “Dude, are you okay?”

Max brushed him aside. “Bella, are you all right?”

“Yes. A little…dizzy.” She trembled as he helped her into the chair. “I will be fine.”

Max turned to Ziggy. “Yeah, we’re fine.”

“She’s fine.” Ziggy gestured to Max’s shoulder. “You’re bleeding.”

Max touched his shoulder and winced. “Yeah, something hit me. And then something else hit me.”

“Something bit you,” Bella said quietly. When Max looked at her, questioning, she dipped her head. “It was the only opportunity I thought I would have.”

Ziggy’s eyes went wide. “Wait a minute, you’re a—”

“Werewolf,” Bella finished for him.

“And you bit him. That would make him—”

“A lupin.”

Max froze. “My God. Bella. Why—”

“We will need a place to hide. To hide our baby. The clan will not accept you if you are not one of us.” She stated it like he just had to accept it, like there was no other way. “They will know you are a lupin, of course. But the elder will understand the circumstances. She will let you stay. And if not, we will seek out Titus’s sanctuary.”

“What the fuck, Bella?” Max spun away, kicking a twisted chunk of what used to be a shutter. “What the hell happens now? When the full moon comes or the daylight gets me? What the hell happens now?”

He felt her approach, felt her at his side before she got there. It was so like the blood tie he’d shared with Marcus…but not violent or fearful. This was like….

Coming home.

She laced her fingers with his. “Whatever comes, we will figure it out together. The three of us.”

He squeezed her hand. “This isn’t how I expected to end up, you know?”

“Guys, I hate to break up your moment, but we have to get the hell out of here. Those weren’t the only guards in the place, and I can guarantee others are headed up those stairs right now.” Ziggy ran toward the section of wall that had rotated to reveal the Oracle. “They’ll be behind here, too. Are you ready for a fight?”

“It’s all we’ve been doing for the past week. I think we’ll manage.” Max looked at Bella. “What about you?”

“Have you ever known me to back down from a fight?” She smiled encouragingly at him. “Even half-crippled?”

“Listen, guys, if we make it through this, you gotta do something for me, okay?” Ziggy held Max’s gaze so long it became a little uncomfortable.

Still, Max nodded. “Sure, kid. I think I’ve got a pretty good idea what you want.”

“Good.” Ziggy put his hand on one of the wooden panels. “Ready?”

Max took Bella’s hand and squeezed it. “I love you.”

“I have always told you that.” She smiled up at him. “We will be fine. It is not our destiny to die today.”

“Good. Then let’s kick some ass.”

Ziggy pushed on the panel, and they started to move.

Twenty-Six:

Grave

A t the end, we went underground. Literally.

We stopped at the apartment briefly, where Nathan loaded up on blood and weapons, then he took me down to the bookshop. He put a Closed for Remodeling sign on the door and locked us in, then began pushing aside the counter. I wondered what he was doing, but it was from a faraway place, and not enough to motivate me to speak. The counter, which I’d always assumed was fixed to the floor, moved aside after a lot of work on Nathan’s part. Beneath it, a trapdoor slid aside to reveal a narrow wooden staircase leading into a subbasement.

It was what I’d heard people in the area refer to as a Michigan basement, with a dirt floor and stones packed into concrete to form the rough walls. There was a sleeping bag and a cooler, a camping lantern and a utility sink connected to a single hose that disappeared into the floorboards above. Nathan unrolled the sleeping bag and helped me into it, and I could feel the dampness from the floor seeping into my bones already. He went back up the stairs and I heard him pulling the counter in place to cover the hole, before he slid the trapdoor closed.

“We’ll be fine for now,” he said, taking the stairs faster than he would have if they’d been a bit less steep. “Max will be on his way, and we have enough blood for a couple days. And anyone who comes into the shop probably won’t…” He stopped when he looked at me, and cursed.

I know what he probably saw. My eyes, glassy and blank as I stared at nothing, seemingly checked out of my head. But I was there. I saw everything, took in everything that was happening. I knew when the Soul Eater recovered, he’d come looking for us. I just couldn’t make myself not long for death. And my despair was so complete, I couldn’t speak to tell Nathan not to bother, to save himself.

I heard his thoughts, though, and his anger. Anger at me for mourning Cyrus, anger at himself for being angry with me, and fear that we would be found. If I sleep, I won’t think, and he won’t be able to find us.

So he climbed into the sleeping bag beside me and held me close, despite the fact that I’d probably assumed the temperature of the floor beneath us. We lay like that, probably for days, in the dark, because Nathan was afraid the light from the lantern would show through the cracks in the floorboards and give us away. He barely spoke to me, except to offer me blood, which I refused. Twice we woke to voices and footsteps upstairs. Nathan went completely still with fear beside me as we heard the intruders overturn bookshelves and tables in their destructive search.

The seclusion was good for me, though. With nothing else to concentrate on and nothing to distract me from my grief, I moved through it quickly. I didn’t talk to Nathan—I wouldn’t ask him to understand—but I did talk to myself, inside my mind. I began to understand why I couldn’t speak. It wasn’t a prison, but a retreat. I wouldn’t have been able to put my pain into words, anyway. I taught myself to forget the pain of losing Cyrus, and remember the joy of loving him. The hatred I’d felt for him when he’d been my sire was important to remember, as well. It kept my sorrow in perspective. I had loved him, but I couldn’t divorce him from the monster who’d made me, or it would hurt all the worse.

And when I woke one night—or day; it was hard to tell with no windows—I could talk again.

I rolled to my side and touched Nathan’s face. He snapped awake as if waiting for me to come back to my senses, his eyes full of concern. “Carrie, are you all right?”

No, I’m not. “Why didn’t you ever tell me about this place?”

A quick intake of breath warned me of the explanation ahead. “In case I ever had to use it. In case you…went to the other side again.”

“Oh.” I picked at the zipper on the sleeping bag. “I was never on the other side.”

“You were always on the other side, Carrie.” He touched my cheek. “Or on your own side. You’ve never truly been on my side.”

“I have to be on my side. If I’m not, who is?” I thought of Cyrus. No, he was never on my side. No one was.

“I would have been.” Nathan said it so earnestly, I think he believed it.

“No. You wouldn’t have.” And it was something I had to learn. No one was ever truly devoted to anyone else.

There was a long silence. Then Nathan put his hand over mine. “I do love you. I didn’t say it because we were going to die.”

“It has nothing to do with love.” I didn’t say that to wound him. “I love you. But you hurt me. And I hurt you. Whether we love each other or not, we can’t ignore that, or we’re just…building our foundation on sand.”

“I know.”

We didn’t say anything else. I think we reached some sort of understanding. Our timetables were off once again. One of us was ready to open up and love, the other was retreating into solitude. But I needed time to grieve and think and let what had happened change me. At the end of that change, maybe I could build a relationship with Nathan out of the ruined components of our previous attempts. Or maybe I’d be strong enough to start from scratch. Maybe it would be easier, both of us coming from a place of loss. Perhaps that unequal footing had been our problem all along. But right now, I needed to be me, not “us.” And it wouldn’t be fair to give him anything less.

It was the damnedest thing, life. Once you decide exactly how things are going to go, something—or someone—comes along and messes it all up.

Max looked at Bella, really looked at her for the first time in days. She sat ramrod straight on the bench at the T station in Salem, working hard to keep her balance on the seat without the aid of her legs to steady her. They’d ditched the wheelchair—the Oracle’s people would be looking for a werewolf in a wheelchair—and had used all manner of tricks to get themselves this far.

Her eyes drifted shut a moment, then snapped open, a new, more firm resolve visibly gripping her. Max smiled. Now that they weren’t in mortal peril, weren’t walking blindly into danger, he realized how stupid he’d been. Of course he loved her. And yeah, there was a chance something might happen to them. It wasn’t fair, it wasn’t the life he would have picked for himself, but there it was. And he would be an idiot to throw away what he had because someday, something might hurt him again the way Marcus’s death had.

God, he could be dense sometimes.

“When the train arrives, we will take it to North Station,” she repeated for the fifth time since they’d sat down. More to keep him awake than to actually reiterate the facts in her mind, he was sure. Bella’s mind was like a steel trap. “There will be a car there for us, to take us to the airport. The helicopter will be there.”

“Now, is this the helicopter that takes us to your clan, or the helicopter that takes us to the sanctuary?” He hadn’t listened in on Bella’s whispered phone conversation in Ziggy’s car. Max didn’t want to jinx things somehow.

“To New York City. My father’s jet will be waiting at JFK, to take us to Rome.” She closed her eyes, intentionally this time, and breathed deeply. “Back home.”

He didn’t know what to think about the prospect of meeting Bella’s family. Her obviously rich family. “Listen, if they don’t like me—”

“It does not matter if they like you. What matters is keeping this child safe. They will understand that.” She placed a hand on his knee and gave a comforting squeeze. “Now, don’t you have a call to make?”

Reluctantly, he pulled the phone Ziggy had given him from his back pocket and flipped it open. “How do you do this?”

“Dial the number and talk.” She pointed out, arching her eyebrow as if to imply he had lost his mind.

“That’s not what I mean.” He glanced at the sky, starless thanks to the bright lights of the nearby condo development. “How do you tell someone goodbye? How do you say, ‘Nice knowing you, I’ll never see you again?’”

Bella’s eyes took on a faraway look for a moment, then turned with pity to him. “You do it knowing that it is for the best.”

He opened the phone and dialed.

Later, I finally ate. Nathan had to prop me up on his arm and hold the bag for me to drink, but the blood restored me somewhat. By the end of the second bag, I could sit up and remain conscious. But I tired quickly, and I’d nearly nodded off again when the sound of Nathan’s cell phone, muffled in the sleeping bag, woke me. Groggy, I sat up, fumbling for it. “I think you have voice mail. I can’t believe you didn’t put that on silent.”

Nathan reached for the phone, glancing up at the ceiling of our little tomb. After a long moment, when he’d decided no one was lurking upstairs, he opened the phone and punched in some numbers.

I watched his face scrunch up with tension, then melt in relief at whatever he heard. “Oh, thank God. Max and Bella are all right.”

He listened to the rest of the message, then handed the phone to me. It was already replaying, Max’s voice sounding better than it ever had as he assured us of the Oracle’s death and informed us of his plan to go into hiding with Bella.

“I can’t go into details. You guys just have to trust me that this is for the best. And I really hope you’re okay. If you need someplace to hide, use the penthouse. It has great security, and Carrie is still cleared with the doorman.

“Something else went down up here. I have no idea how to tell you this, but here’s the deal—” A loud burst of static cut off his words, and the message ended.

“I wonder what that was about?” I looked up at Nathan for some kind of enlightenment.

He shrugged. “I have no clue.”

We fell silent for a minute. My voice shook a little as I said, “So, I guess that’s the last of him.”

“Sounds like.” Nathan moved to the bottom of the stairs and reached up to open the trapdoor. “We’re all clear. No one has been back for days.”

I followed him up the stairs. It felt good to get out of the hole. To stretch and get my feet under me.

It was less good to see what they’d done to the shop. The door was torn from the hinges. Tables were overturned, merchandise crushed underfoot.

“Jesus,” Nathan whispered beside me, and his horror at the scene pierced my heart.

“Most of this stuff…I mean, it’s not like we could have been hiding in a box of tarot cards. Most of this they did just for the hell of it.” I covered my face.

“Well, it’s a good thing we’re going to Chicago, then,” Nathan said in that manful, stiff-upper-lip way only guys have perfected.

I bent and scooped up a few tumbled stones—amethyst, if I remembered the inventory right—and juggled them from one hand to another. “Are you going to be okay?”

“It hurts my customer base to close down without warning. There are special orders waiting to be called, things like that. But since I’m obviously not coming back, I don’t think it will be an issue.” Nathan paused. “I’d rather lose my money than my life. Or your life, especially. But it’s the memories that really hurt when I think about leaving. Ziggy was a child here. Some days I wake up and swear I can hear him running down the hall.”

“We don’t have to leave forever,” I said hopefully. I certainly couldn’t foresee spending the rest of my unlife camped out in Marcus’s condo.

“I know.” Nathan drummed his fingers on the thin strip of metal that used to surround the glass of the counter. “But who knows what they’ll do to this place while I’m gone.”

The thought of leaving Nathan’s home—my home—twisted my heart. Like so many times before, I wondered if it was worth it. Had it been worth it to go into that morgue after John Doe? Had it been worth it to lose my mortal life, if this was where it all led?

Yes. A resounding yes. Despite the horrible things I’d endured, being a vampire wasn’t the worst thing that could have happened to me. I’d experienced paralyzing sadness, but I’d also had incredible joy. I had a new perspective on where my place was in the world.

I had a new perspective on myself, too. I didn’t have to be a wannabe human, hating myself every moment for being what I am. I didn’t have to be a monster, either. I could be a sort of…ethical vampire. Or not. I had the rest of my life to figure it out, if I wanted to take that long.

And I had Nathan. He’d waited out my unhealthy relationship with Cyrus. Twice. He’d proved he would wait again, until I figured more out. Because it had taken him so long to tell me he loved me, I knew he really meant it.

Of course, as always, I have no clue what lies ahead. We stand on a fearful precipice and the currents of events beyond our control push us closer to the edge, with no way of turning back.

But at least now, I’m not alone.

Blood Ties Book Four:

All Souls' Night

Contents

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Prologue: Daymare

S ome days, I dream of the time that I spent in Marianne’s soul. Or is that the time that she spent in me? In reality, it was horrible, but in the dreams, it feels wonderful. Powerful. Another soul gliding over mine like silk, whispering in my head.

I stand over Nathan. He’s still restrained, babbling, senseless with fear and the spell his sire had cast over him, bleeding from the wounds scored deep into his flesh by his own hand. Marianne leans tenderly over her husband, kisses his mouth, calms him. And then the power swells up inside me, and she screams for mercy in my head. All I know is blood and tearing flesh. Darkness and warmth with the copper-tinged smell of slowly ebbing life urging on my bloodlust.

I don’t even consciously drink. I don’t feel or taste the blood, and though I know, somehow, that I am dreaming, I find it unsettling, as if some understanding is just out of my reach. If only I could see the greater picture.

I consume without drinking, reach my fill without satisfaction. And when I raise my eyes to the evaporating darkness, I see the ballroom where Marianne met her fate. All around me are the bodies of people I know: Nathan, Max, Bella, even old friends long since dead, like Cyrus and Ziggy. Their blood is on my hands. Their life in my veins. Their tortured screams rolling through my head like the sweetest symphony I’ve ever heard.

And then Jacob Seymour is there, seated at the head of the massive dining table. He wears a crown of thorns and the blood that drips from his wounds is black tar, staining his white hair and shining golden robes. A huge, silver-domed platter covers the table, and I remember—in that dream memory that doesn’t quite see reality the way it happened, but still manages to catalog every horror you’ve ever known—what will come next. Clarence appears, as if from nowhere, his dark, regal face a mask disguising the hate he feels for the task, and removes the cover. On the platter, arranged in a way that is familiar, yet shocking, is Dahlia, her skin pale and mottled blue with death, a carpet of rose petals beneath her halo of red curls.

And then, with the voices still screaming in my brain, I laugh. Blood flows from my mouth, splashing to the tabletop, my hands, my lap that is suddenly and inexplicably dressed in a voluminous gown to match Jacob’s attire, and I laugh.

But when I wake, I’m screaming.

One:

A Shot In The Dark

T his day, when I bolted upright in the bed, throat tensed, vocal cords poised to emit a scream as soon as the gasping breath I’d drawn forced its way out, a hand clamped over my mouth. Nathan was already awake.

Don’t make a sound, he warned through the blood tie, his body rigid with tension that jumped through our mental connection, filling me with his anxiety.

Something was seriously wrong. In the past few weeks, since we had fled Grand Rapids and come to Max’s Chicago penthouse, Nathan’s entire focus had been my recovery. I’d gone mute and practically catatonic after Cyrus, once my sire, then my fledgling, had died. After I’d wake from one of my many nightmares—daymares, I supposed, since we vampires are third-shifters on account of that pesky sun thing—Nathan would hold me and try to reassure me that it had all been a dream, that he wouldn’t let anything harm me. Now, though, I felt his irritation and acute distraction through the blood tie, the telepathic and empathic connection that coursed between a fledgling vampire and their sire, and I knew something wasn’t right.

Before he could explain, I heard a thud and some violent cursing upstairs.

There’s someone in the apartment, I practically screamed into his head, and the pressure of his hand on my jaw subsided slightly.

I know. That’s why I said not to make a sound. I’m going to check it out. He let go of my face and threw back the blankets. I could tell from the faint light outlining the heavy curtains that it was still the middle of the day, but Max’s apartment was specially designed to be dark as a tomb and just as protected from unwanted sunlight.

Be careful, I warned. As if someone could be careful apprehending an intruder in their home. At least Nathan would be armed.

Crap. He wasn’t armed.

“Nathan!” I whispered after him, so the cause of the disturbance wouldn’t hear me. Unfortunately, neither did Nathan. He was probably halfway up the stairs by now. Rolling my eyes, I got out of bed and pulled on the jeans I’d discarded the night before, realizing how ridiculous a silk camisole nightgown looked with jeans. Good thing this wasn’t a fashion show. I grabbed a stake from the drawer in the bedside table. Forget something? I shot across the blood tie, letting him feel all my aggravation at having been pulled out of a comfortable bed. I hoped it would cover the fear that pounded through my veins.

Besides pants? he quipped. He was scared, joking with me to disguise it.

We’d been sleeping in the room I’d used when I’d stayed with Max, after the spell we did to free Nathan from his sire’s possession went all sorts of haywire. No, that wasn’t true. The spell had worked perfectly. It was our relationship that had gone all kinds of haywire. I’d left with Max to try and sort through the disaster of my personal life, but—as seemed to be the case ever since I’d become a vampire—the preternatural world didn’t slow down for boyfriend-girlfriend drama. Nathan’s sire, the Soul Eater, was still out there, trying to become a god and turn the world into his own personal feeding trough.

Though I’d spent a lot of time in the penthouse, I still wasn’t familiar enough with the halls to navigate in the dark. The place was huge and, as huge places often were, decorated with lots of expensive and sharp-edged little tables bearing fragile objects that held the potential for lots of noise if they came crashing down. The guest rooms were on the first floor. Who or whatever had broken in would have had to access the place through the main entrance on the second floor, or the roof door on the third. I felt along the wall, recoiling whenever I encountered the shape of a painting or a light switch. My toes painfully found the bottom step of the stairs to the next floor, and I wondered why I hadn’t heard Nathan tripping and falling over himself on his way. I gripped the rail and went slowly up the stairs, quelling the urge to race up, making heavy clomping sounds on each step. There was no light at the top. I’d just keep on going until there weren’t any more stairs, I supposed.

Or, until I ran into something. Nathan turned abruptly as I collided with him. He grabbed my arms as if to flip me onto my back, but stopped before I even needed to tell him it was me. Don’t do that, he admonished through the blood tie.

“Sorry,” I whispered, craning to see past him in the dark. We were at the top of the stairs. The marble floor of the foyer gleamed in the faint glow from the recessed wall lights set at shin level around the perimeter of the room. When Max’s sire, Marcus, had designed this place, he’d obviously done it with daytime stumbling in mind. Too bad he hadn’t employed that feature in the rest of the house. In the darkness, a shadow moved, fast, from the bottom of the stairs to the third floor to the kitchen door.

Well, there’s at least one, Nathan told me grimly. You stay here.

I pressed the stake into his hand and watched him go, wondering how long I’d have to wait before following him. He knew me well enough that he’d expect me to disobey his command, but if I waited long enough he’d be too busy with the intruder to stop me.

The kitchen door opened and light spilled out. No burglar I’d ever heard of turned on lights. Well, at least, they didn’t in the movies. But burglars didn’t break in during the day, either. Unless this burglar knew who and what he was dealing with.

How did they find us so quickly? my mind screamed as I watched Nathan disappear behind the door. It swung shut and I was left to adapt to the darkness again. It isn’t fair. We haven’t had any time.

And just like that, fair blew right out the window. There was a shout, not Nathan’s, and the clatter of metal-on-metal that seemed to go on and on. A grunt, a thud, something hit the wall. I charged up the stairs, my heart in my throat, a distinct feeling of having done something very like this many times before fogging my brain.

I pushed through the door. Nathan’s stake lay on the pristine white tile. The rack of pots over the kitchen island was half-empty, most of its stock scattered on the floor. The island itself was completely bare, like a body had been thrown or dragged across it. Nathan’s body, from the looks of things on the floor. His assailant had him pinned, no small feat for a human fighting a vampire, and he was definitely human. I could smell his blood, and his fear. The man lay across Nathan’s chest, the muscles of his back straining against his black T-shirt. Judging by the V of sweat growing there, he would tire soon. And judging by the shape of the gun tucked in the waistband of his jeans, he’d come here betting on a fight.

I knew why Nathan was losing. He didn’t want to hurt a human, even if they were out to hurt us. I, on the other hand, didn’t care all that much when the human in question could be one of the Soul Eater’s day staff. I grabbed one of the pans off the floor, a heavy, copper-bottomed saucepan. I’d just raised it up when Nathan’s gaze met mine and knew my intention. He gripped the intruder’s wrists and forced them down, then pushed him off. His strength was enough to send the man flying across the room, safely out of my range. He didn’t want me to kill a human, either.

Nathan was on his feet in an instant, charging as I screamed, “Nathan, don’t! He’s got a gun!”

The shot rang out before I’d noticed the man had climbed to his feet. Nathan crumpled to the floor, and there was a second of horrible silence before he rolled onto his back, groaning and whimpering. The intruder stood, face drawn in shock. I leaped after him, easily clearing the corner of the island between us, and knocked him to the floor. His fingers tightened around the gun. I had to slam his closed fist into the floor over and over, until the tile cracked under his knuckles and he howled in pain, releasing the weapon. I hated to give him credit, but the guy was tough.

I grabbed the gun, hoping my shaking hands and the way I held it didn’t mark me as a total novice. A novice can still pull a trigger, I thought, and, through his haze of pain, Nathan admonished, Squeeze, Carrie, not pull. You squeeze a trigger.

I rolled my eyes and pressed the point of the gun into the stranger’s forehead. Imagining a bullet lodging and blossoming in fatty brain tissue, I pulled it back, just in case my trigger finger squeezed when I didn’t mean to.

“Don’t move,” I barked when he cradled his bleeding hand to his chest.

“Shouldn’t you check on your friend there?” His voice had an appealing, everyman tone to it. Like the professor I had who’d been from upstate New York and could make a pharmaceutical lecture sound like a retelling of a softball game victory. It was a dangerous quality in an armed assailant, because it put me slightly at ease.

I’ll be fine, Nathan sent on a wave of agony. It was a little hard to believe when he was writhing on the floor and making strangled cries as though he’d just hit a ten on the pain scale. I turned back to my captive. “He’ll be fine. Who sent you?”

“Well, no one. I’m here once a month.” He nodded to the refrigerator. On the floor beside it was a small cooler, white with a red top that swings back, the kind that you’d pack a transplant organ in. “I’m Max’s blood supplier.”

I lowered the gun a little. “Right. And you just waltz in here all the time.”

“Well, once a month,” he corrected with a shrug.

I was about eighty percent sure he was lying. “Sorry. I think that Max would have mentioned you to me. Or, at least, that I would have seen you before.”

“No, I’m quiet. And I’ve got keys. How the hell else do you think I got in here? There’s a doorman and great security.” He ran his uninjured hand through his sandy-colored hair, his gaze flicking to Nathan, still on the floor. “Listen, I knew your friend there was a vampire, or I never would have shot him.”

“Right.” Trembling, I moved to tuck the gun into the back of my jeans.

“I wouldn’t do that. Not with it ready to fire and the safety off.” He held out his hand for it. I turned, fired a hole into the side of the plastic wastebasket, then looked for the safety switch and pushed it before sliding the gun into my waistband. I felt oddly empowered with a gun in my hands, and very grateful that the bullet hadn’t ricocheted and wounded me.

I knelt beside Nathan and tried to roll him onto his back. He resisted, arms clamped tight around his stomach. “Let me see,” I said, urging his hands away from the wound.

“Don’t…you should…tie him….” Nathan managed between wheezing breaths.

“I’m not moving. Trust me.” The stranger paused. “Just like I’m trusting you guys not to eat me.”

“I’m not really hungry at the moment,” I snapped. “If you move, I might change my mind.”

Nathan reluctantly let his arms drop to his sides. Blood gushed, and I quickly replaced his hands with mine. “Burglar, get me a towel or a pot holder or something.”

There was a noise of rummaging, then a blue-and-white checked towel thrust in front of my face. “I’m not a burglar.”

“I don’t care. Go back to where you were.” I snatched the towel. The bullet hole in Nathan was perfectly round, identical to the one in the trash can, but for the torn flaps of skin around it. It looked like some kind of diseased tropical flower. I pressed the folded cloth to it and held it, noting the time on the clock. With my other hand, I reached up and touched Nathan’s face, clammy with sweat. “When the bleeding stops, I’ll give you something for the pain.”

“He can heal from this, right?” our visitor asked. “I swear, I thought it would just slow him down.”

I nodded. “It will slow him down. And he can heal from it. But not the way you see vampires do it in the movies, where the bullet oozes out and the wound closes up instantly. If you’d gotten his heart, he would be dead now.”

The guy made a noise of self-loathing. “God, I’m sorry. But you understand my position, right?”

I did. If I had been a human fighting with a vampire who could have easily killed me with his bare hands, I would have used any method at my disposal to stop him. Understanding didn’t stop me from being pissed off at the guy who’d shot my sire. I turned back to Nathan. “Do you think you can walk?”

He gave a shaky laugh. “Oh, I could run a mile. Just point me in the right direction.”

“Do you think you can walk with help?” I fixed him with a no-nonsense glare. The medical kit is downstairs, and I don’t want to leave you alone with him.

Then tell him to get the hell out, Nathan said, his gaze flicking to the stranger. He’s the one who broke in and shot someone. I’m not worried about hurting his feelings.

Neither am I. But the bullet needs to come out so you can heal faster. I helped him sit up, intending to get him on his feet and downstairs, so he could rest.

“You stay right where you are,” I ordered the intruder. “I’ll be back.”

The hell you will. I’m not going anywhere, Nathan argued.

“You have a recently fired piece registered to me, with my fingerprints on it. I’m not leaving,” the burglar assured me. “You want help getting him wherever he needs to go?”

“Stay where you are,” I repeated, and, to Nathan, Yes you are. You’re going downstairs, away from the crazy man who shot you.

Before I could get him on his feet—and before he tried to argue with me—he stabbed two fingers into the wound and, barely restraining his grunts of pain, pulled the bullet out himself. When he withdrew his fingers, a cold, wet jet of blood shot out, and I clamped the towel over his stomach with a curse.

“What the hell were you thinking?” I scolded, reminding myself firmly that any of the various germs and bacteria he’d just introduced into the wound wouldn’t affect him.

“Now the bullet is out,” he said, infuriatingly calm despite the beads of sweat standing out on his forehead. His teeth chattered and he sagged against me. “And I’m staying right here.”

Swearing, I pulled him to rest against the wall, his legs dragging two wet trails of blood after him.

“You’re an idiot,” I muttered, placing his hand to hold the towel over the wound. I turned back to the assailant. He’d remained exactly where I’d expected him to be, nursing the knuckles I’d bloodied.

“Is your friend okay?” he asked, with enough grace to appear genuinely remorseful.

“He’ll be fine.” I leaned hard on the word “fine,” so he’d know I was still dangerously pissed off. “What were you doing here?”

“Dropping off blood. Max pays me to come by and stock the place—the mini fridge in his room and the big one here. I do it once a month. Sometimes he pays me between visits to drop in and give the bum’s rush to any overnight guests that might be…disinclined to leave without saying goodbye.” He shrugged. “I’ve got a key, and you can ask Dolores, the morning doorman. She thinks I’m the cleaning lady.”

I arched a brow at him. “Okay, cleaning lady. What’s your name?”

“Bill. William. Bill.” He reached behind him. So did I, looking for the gun. He smiled. “Don’t worry, I’m just going for my wallet.”

“I don’t need to see ID, Bill.” Interrogation was harder than I’d imagined. I wished Nathan was up to the job. It seemed that in the movies the questions all flowed in a seamless pattern of logic. My thoughts were all over the place, would probably come out all scattered. “So, if you and Max are so chummy, why do you carry a gun when you come to his place?”

Bill shrugged. “I always carry a gun.”

“Why?” I had definite issues with people who just carried concealed weapons around. I wasn’t a card-carrying member of the NRA for a reason.

He snorted, as if I couldn’t possibly be serious. “Why not?”

I didn’t want to get drawn into a gun-control argument with someone who just exercised his second amendment right in Max’s kitchen. Staring him down, I crossed my arms and waited.

“Well, for one, it’s kind of like my sidearm. I was in the Marines for twelve years, and I just never got used to not having a gun with me. I also need it, in my line of work. Max isn’t my only client. But this is the first time there have been other vampires here that he didn’t tell me about. Usually, he’ll give me a heads-up when bloodsucking guests are going to be here. That’s why I attacked you guys, because as far as I know, you’re not supposed to be here.”

“Well, you’re wrong. Max offered us a place to stay. But still, a gun? Why not a stake?” I realized I still had him cornered on the floor. There was a small first aid kit in the odds-and-ends drawer in the island—nothing that could help me with Nathan’s wounds—and I retrieved it. “Have a seat, and I’ll bandage your hand.”

“Thanks, I’d appreciate that.” He slid onto one of the stools, glancing ruefully over the pots and pans littering the floor. “Hell of a fighter, your boyfriend.”

“He’s my sire,” I said, not elaborating any further on the messed-up nature of the relationship between Nathan and I. The guy might have just ambushed us in our sleep, but he didn’t deserve that kind of punishment.

I opened the first aid kit and took his hand in mine. His knuckles were swollen and split, and I felt a little sick knowing I’d caused the damage. Still, Nathan was far more damaged. I looked to him, and he gave me a weak wave from his spot on the floor. His face was gray, but he’d dropped the towel and I saw that the bleeding had stopped. I faced Bill again. “You haven’t answered my question.”

“I don’t carry a stake because it’s not a sure thing. A gun, I can shoot and take someone down, at least long enough to get the hell away from them. With a stake, you’ve got to hit the heart. I’m not a doctor. I don’t know where somebody’s heart would be.” He winced as I swabbed the blood from his hands with a disinfectant pad. “I mean, really, do you think you know where the human—sorry, vampire—heart is?”

“Yes. But I’m a doctor.” I dabbed at a particularly nasty cut and reached into the first aid kit for some bandages. “So, you deal with vampires you don’t trust and feel the need to arm yourself. Sounds like you should make a career change.”

He chuckled, and there was an edge of bitterness to it. “This pays better than anything I could get. The job market is tough.”

“So is the market for blood donors, I guess. Since you have to service more than one vampire.” I eyed the cooler. “So, exactly how much blood do you have left in your body, if you don’t mind my asking?”

He grinned. “You’re a smart lady. Okay, you caught me. It’s not all my blood. I get it from other donors, ones who don’t mind providing so long as they don’t have to deal with actual vampires. I take it, and give it a little markup for my troubles.”

I shook my head. Was nothing sacred anymore? “You profit from trafficking human blood?”

“Got by honest means.” He nodded to his injured hand. “And really, it’s not like I don’t have my fair share of trouble trying to deliver the stuff. What are you two doing here, anyway? Where’s Max?”

“Max is…” I hesitated. Not knowing exactly what kind of guy Bill was, I didn’t want to tell him that Max was the first vampire in known history to father a baby, or that he’d used that awesome power to knock up a werewolf. “Indisposed. I don’t know when he’s coming back. There are some strange things happening in the vampire world lately, and Nathan and I needed a place to hide out.”

Good girl, Nathan sent across the blood tie. He had a way of saying something like that without sounding completely patronizing. My heart, which was slowly thawing out from the death of my fledgling, warmed a little at Nathan’s approval.

Apparently, Bill accepted my answer. He cleared his throat and asked, “So, Nathan is your sire and your name is?”

“I’m Carrie.” I frowned down at his hand. Bandages never stuck right to joints.

“I’d shake your hand, but you’ve already crushed my other one.” He looked around the kitchen. “So, if you’re staying here, you need blood. I can cut you a good deal.”

I shook my head. “Even after we beat you up?”

“I don’t know what fight you were watching, but I had your sire pinned. Human on vampire, that’s got to count for something.”

“I was suitably impressed.” It was very strange, how easily he had gotten me to trust him. He was either a genuinely nice person, or a master manipulator. The thought made me uncomfortable. “Listen, the other vampires you…service…are they affiliated with the Voluntary Vampire Extinction Movement, by any chance?”

He nodded. “Some of them were.”

“They haven’t had any communication from other members, either?” My heart sank. Scores of Movement vampires out there and no way to contact them. And if they were anything like Nathan had been when he’d been under the Movement’s control, they would just sit tight and wait for word, as they’d been trained to do.

The Voluntary Vampire Extinction Movement had been the final word in the battle between good vampires versus bad vampires—until a really bad vampire blew it up. But before their headquarters went kablooie, vampires had two choices: join the Movement and follow their rules, or don’t and they’d kill you. In return for the privilege of not being killed, Movement vampires killed the vampires who didn’t follow the rules. If we could find Movement members who were still committed to the organization’s ideals, we could put together a fighting force capable of wiping out the Soul Eater and any of his cronies who might be hanging around. But the Movement had never established any kind of communications system outside of their own records, and with good reason. When a vampire went bad—and some did—they didn’t need to have the names and addresses of their new enemies. Still, in an emergency like this it made it impossible that we’d find enough support to even put a dent in the Soul Eater’s plan. There was no way to prove that a vampire we might meet worked for the Movement, or the Soul Eater. Of course, I was a non-Movement vampire, and so was Nathan. But I knew we were okay. When it came to networking, hearing someone was aligned with the Movement was like a seal of approval. Non-Movement vampires could be good, but they could be very, very bad, and I liked to err on the side of caution.

Nathan pulled himself to his feet, wincing, and shuffled over to the island in a stooped-over kind of walk. I wanted to admonish him for not resting, but his signature look of single-minded determination stopped me from saying anything. “We need you to supply us with the names of your customers,” he said, so curtly that I wanted to tack on a “please” to soften the sharp edges of his command.

Bill appeared to be of the same mind as me, because he snorted at the request and shook his head. “No. Even though you asked so sweetly, I have a privacy policy with my clients that I can’t break. It would ruin my reputation and my business.”

“Listen, you were the one who came in here, armed, and shot me.” Nathan gestured to his stomach, where the wound was now pink and tight and shiny. “Maybe you should give us, the injured parties, some kind of recompense. And as for confidentiality, you have no idea the kind of danger we’re involved in. Just knowing that we’re here, well…let’s just say we vampires have our own ways of keeping our affairs private.” He changed his face, though I could see it took a lot of his already taxed strength, and stepped closer to Bill.

I knew Nathan would never kill a human. He might knock one out and throw him out the door, maybe scare him a bit, but not kill him, no matter how we’d been threatened. It wasn’t Nathan’s way. But Bill didn’t know that. He paled a little, then regained some of his confidence. “Buddy, I was in the Corps. You’re not going to intimidate me with a pair of fangs and a few threats.”

A smile twitched at the corner of Nathan’s mouth. “Yes, I see you’re a very tough guy. Especially when taking on an unarmed vampire.”

There’s a point in every tense situation where someone loses their stomach for the argument and gives in. Bill had reached his. Nathan took my seat at the kitchen island while I went to the refrigerator—to get some blood for Nathan, to replace what he’d lost, and something, preferably alcoholic, for Bill, whose hands trembled as he drummed his fingers on the tabletop.

“I’m not usually in the habit of attacking people,” Bill said apologetically. “But since the Movement fell apart, it’s been a little like the Wild West in the city.”

Nathan made a casual shrug, but I saw how he watched Bill. He would note every breath, every twitch, to analyze later.

Bill continued, oblivious to Nathan’s scrutiny. “I’d lay even money that Chicago isn’t the only place getting weird. Am I right?”

“You’re probably right. We’ve only been here, and where we came from.” Nathan shrugged. “Which is why I could really stand to talk to some of your other customers.”

“I don’t know.” Bill took a swallow of liquor. “I’d have to find someone willing to talk. But you guys…how do I know you’re not going to bust in and kill them? I mean, I just met you.” He stopped, a wry smile on his mouth. “I’m not sure I want to vouch for you. I don’t know you all that well and maybe I don’t want to be involved in whatever you’re involved in. I’ve already heard rumors of some Soul guy trying to become a supervamp. I really don’t want to get tangled up in that.”

“Supervamp?” I blurted, at the same time Nathan shouted, “You heard what?”

Bill looked back and forth at the two of us, frozen in indecision. “I’m not sure who I should answer first.”

“What do you know about Jacob Seymour?” Nathan asked, overlapping my, “When did you hear this?”

“I don’t know him. All I know is that every vampire in the city is either working for this Soul guy, or they get killed by him. And the last time I heard mention of him was a couple of days ago, at a bar downtown.” Bill shook his head vehemently and said, “I don’t want to get involved.”

“You became involved when you shot me,” Nathan said, reaching to squeeze the other man’s shoulder in a gesture of camaraderie. “Now, you just have to decide your level of involvement. If you give us the names of your clients and leave, you’re not too involved.”

“And yet there’s still the problem of losing my livelihood.” Bill laughed. “No, thanks. Look, I’ll do some work around here for you, same as I did Max. He’s still paying me, after all. And I’ll spy on my other clients. But I’m not going to hand over their names and compromise their safety. I work for good people.”

Nathan leaned back, letting his arm drop. “Fair enough. Let’s set down our terms.” He opened a drawer on the island, then looked dismayed that it contained only kitchen gadgets. “Carrie, do you have a pen?”

“I’m sure there’s one in the mess on the dining room floor,” I said, backing to the door. I wanted to keep an eye on Bill for as long as possible. “Scream if you need me.”

I wasn’t sure I trusted Bill. He had that smooth, friendly way about him that most con men worked hard to perfect. Maybe I was just being cynical, but I never trusted people like that. Plus, something he’d said had set off alarms in my brain. Every vampire in the city was either working for the Soul Eater or had been killed by him. Which meant if Bill was still in business, he was working with the Soul Eater’s goons.

I found a pen in the rubble of the dining room, and paper in a drawer of the sideboard. I hurried back to the kitchen, where Nathan drew up a list of “terms” for both sides. He requested that Bill not breathe a word of our presence in the city, and promised to match anyone’s offer of payment for that information. Of course, we had no money, but there was no reason to tell him that. I suggested that Bill make us a priority over his other clients. And Bill asked simply that we “not act like assholes.”

“Good idea,” Nathan agreed.

“Most of my clients don’t talk business in front of me. In fact, most of my clients don’t talk to me.” Bill glanced from Nathan to me. “I’m a little intimidated by the idea of spying. Not that any of them would do anything to me. They’re all as meek as kittens.”

“I’m sure,” Nathan agreed drily.

Bill spread his hands. “I just don’t want you to think I’m going to waltz in here with a ton of information in two weeks.”

“We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it,” Nathan told him, sounding menacing and reassuring at the same time. “But if you tell anyone that we’re here, and what we’ve asked you about, I can guarantee you’ll come away from this place with more than a bruised-up hand.”

Since we’d pretty much covered everything and made all the threats we could reasonably make, we all sealed the deal with an awkward three-way handshake.

“What do you think?” I asked Nathan later as I stood at the windows in the library, watching the traffic pass on the street below. The sun had set, but twilight kept the sidewalk around Grant Park bright with a diffused glow. In the reflection in the glass, I saw myself, just as blond and pale and plain as ever, and Nathan, coming to stand behind me, all brooding dark, like an undead Heathcliff with his mussed black hair and hard, chiseled features.

He wrapped his arms around my waist and leaned his face close to mine, so that his deep voice, softly accented with his native Scots Gaelic, stirred my hair and tickled my ear. “I don’t know. I think that we will either find information that will be helpful to us and get us into a lot of trouble, or we’ll find information that isn’t helpful to us and we’ll still get into a lot of trouble.”

“Trouble is inevitable.” I turned and stepped out of his embrace, putting some distance between us. Being close to Nathan always affected my judgment. “Do we really need to find it for ourselves? You’ve already been shot. Speaking of which, let me look at it.” I crossed the space between us and reached for the bottom of his T-shirt. I pulled up the fabric to see the wound, nearly healed, just a paler patch of white against his normal pallor. “It looks okay. Thank God.”

He pulled his shirt down, a little reluctantly, as if he didn’t want to break the contact of my fingers against his skin. “It’s like any wound. Nothing to be alarmed about.”

“Nothing to be alarmed about? Nathan, I would be worried if you had a paper cut, let alone a gunshot wound.” I rubbed my temples to ease a headache I didn’t have, but I suspected I would later on. “I’m worrying needlessly, aren’t I?”

“It’s nice to be worried about,” he assured me. The corners of his eyes crinkled when he fake smiled the way he was now. “Really, it’s just nice to know you still worry about me.”

I didn’t respond with more than a smile. He wanted a different answer, that much was clear. But I wasn’t in a position to give it to him.

It was the story of our relationship, it seemed. From the moment we’d met, we’d both been on very different pages with each other. At first, he’d been in love with his dead wife, and I’d been enthralled by Cyrus, my first sire. When I’d finally gotten over that—and Nathan had accidentally resired me and saved my undead life by giving me his blood after I was attacked by Cyrus—Nathan realized he wasn’t anywhere near finished grieving for his lost wife. Then, when he finally was, Cyrus had come back into my life, and departed it just as quickly and painfully. Every day I began to appreciate more the way Nathan must have felt when I had pressed him again and again to give me love he just hadn’t felt. I wasn’t whole enough to give him love now, but I could certainly give him sympathy.

“Ah, well,” he said to break the awkwardness between us. Still, I couldn’t think of anything to say, so I was relieved when Nathan’s cell phone chirped.

“Nathan Grant,” he said after he’d flipped the phone open. I’ll never understand why men always seem to answer the phone that way, stating their names instead of just saying “hello.” I shook my head as I turned toward the fireplace. A fire might be nice, in the morning.

I heard the soft drum of something falling to the carpet, and I turned. Nathan stood, empty-handed, the phone still open on the floor. He stared at it as though it were a talking frog or a shimmering mirage, something you hear about but never see. A mixture of fear, disbelief and, strangely, happiness warred on his face.

As he made no move to pick up the phone, I knelt and lifted it to my ear.

The voice through the speaker was tinny and broken by static, but a chill of recognition ran up my spine. “Hello? Hello? Nate, are you still there? Dad?”

It was Ziggy.

Two:

Unhappy Returns

“S cusilo, dove è il deposito di pattino?”

“That sounds terrible. Your accent is all wrong.”

Max turned from the mirror and pulled his headphones from his ear, hitting the pause button on his iPod. “You know, your ‘helpful’ criticism really isn’t helping. We’ve been here three weeks and I still can’t talk to anyone. It doesn’t hurt to try and learn something new.”

With a sympathetic look, Bella held out her arms, and Max crossed the bedroom to join her on their bed. The French doors to the balcony stood open and afternoon sunshine poured in. He stepped around a band of it on the floor, forgetting, as usual, that he no longer needed to fear it. Taking a deep breath, he walked through the warm rays and slid onto the crisp white bedspread.

“Why do you always do that?” Bella asked, her voice still rough from sleep. She slept all the time lately, but Max couldn’t fault her for it. It was common, apparently, for pregnant women to be exhausted, and he guessed that doubled for pregnant women who were recuperating from nearly mortal injuries, as well.

“I don’t know,” he admitted, turning his gaze back to the sunlit windows. “I just always have my fingers crossed.”

His full change from vampire to half-vampire, half-werewolf hybrid creature—the word lupin was as hated as he’d expected it would be in a werewolf pack, so he never used it—had been more gradual than he would have liked. The worst part was, they’d had no idea what traits would stick until after he’d actually shifted into his wolf form. After that, a whole world of weirdness opened up to him, and between hairier legs and a sadistic urge to pull riders off their bicycles and devour them, the vampiric aversion to sunlight had somehow vanished.

It had been a fortunately happy accident that they’d discovered it at all. From the moment they’d arrived to, in Max’s opinion, a hostile welcome in Italy, members of Bella’s family had made it very clear that no concessions to his vampirism would be made. And, since the family—the entire family—lived in the same, window-covered villa on a sunny, sun-drenched cliff, he’d found himself confined to Bella’s bedroom every day. Only when one of Bella’s “well-meaning” aunts had come into the room while they slept and opened the curtains, flooding the room with frying light, had he realized that he no longer had to worry about such “well-meaning” people burning him to death with UV rays.

He’d also realized that it would take a lot more than Bella’s love for him to convince her family he was an okay guy. Hence the studying Italian, so that he could fit in and also, admittedly, so he could tell what they were saying about him.

More importantly, he’d realized that he really didn’t give a damn about what they might try to do to him. He was actually, really, truly in love with the woman who was carrying his child, and, despite having to drink blood and change into a wolf at the full moon, he felt more normal than he had in years.

He dipped his face to sniff Bella’s neck and planted a kiss on her sleep-warmed skin. Rather than simply patting his thigh and rolling away from him, as she had been doing for the past few weeks, she stretched her neck and writhed her body against his. Jackpot.

He loved her. God, did he love her. And he understood that pregnancy could be rough on a woman, even one as strong as Bella. But it had been a long, long time, and he was only…not human.

“So, is this official, or are we just getting my hopes up to dash them again?” He smiled against her neck and gave her jaw a playful nip, so she would know he was half joking. And he ground his hard-on into her hip, so she would know he was half-serious, too.

Bella laughed, a sound that was so oddly delicate coming from a creature that was all dark and smoky. “If I told you now, that would spoil the fun.”

“You’re a devious bitch, aren’t you?” He slid one hand down the length of her body, bunching the white satin of her nightgown higher by fractions, revealing the tight, olive-tinged skin over her thighs. He danced his fingers from her hip to her knee, watching her face for any flicker of change. “Can you feel that?”

She moaned a little and gave a nod, and relief clutched in his chest. The car accident that had paralyzed her while they’d been in pursuit of the Oracle had at first left her with no feeling below the waist. The doctors who’d examined her in Italy had warned him that the loss of sensation might be permanent, and Max, stupid, stupid man that he acknowledged he was, had only been worried about whether or not she would be able to have sex again. He knew he wouldn’t want to live a life condemned to never getting off again, that was for damned sure.

Luckily, they’d already discovered that wouldn’t be a problem for her.

Moving her legs gently apart, he pushed the nightgown to her waist. Her fingers worked fast, undoing the button and then the zipper of his jeans, letting him spring eagerly into her soft, warm hands. He almost came right then, just from being touched after so long. “I have to be inside you,” he groaned, and she whimpered her agreement into his ear as he leaned over her. The tip of his cock was poised, trembling, at the glistening pink core of her and he pushed in, taking it slow, just a centimeter at a time it seemed. So painstakingly slow that he ground his teeth to keep from ramming hard into her. It took more willpower than he’d known he had to ignore her pleas to go faster. There was no way he was going to mess this up, not after the wait he’d had. Just a few moments more and he’d be home, encased in her sweet, clutching body. All he needed was infinite patience…

A voice and violent banging on the door brought everything to a crashing halt.

Infinite patience, and for all of his in-laws to die in a horrible explosion that rained body parts all over the picturesque Italian countryside.

“Oh, no,” Bella said softly, though her voice held more disappointment at the interruption than dismay over the words muffled by the door. “My father needs to see you.”

“Now?” He thought they called Italian a romance language. Words to summon him away from imminent sexual pleasure shouldn’t even exist in it.

Bella gave him a sympathetic nod and he reluctantly withdrew, reminding himself firmly that grown men do not cry. “Fine. Tell this guy I’m on my way.”

If there was one thing he’d learned about pack life, it was that when the paterfamilis called, you answered, or else…well, there was no “else.” You just did it.

Bella yelled something to the door, and the banging stopped. “You should hurry. He is not in a pleasant mood lately.”

“I wonder why,” Max muttered, pulling her nightgown down so that she was decently covered again. He let his hand linger a moment on her stomach, which had been flat before and now bowed just slightly out in a hard little bump. It was hard to imagine a whole person fitting in there, even one that looked like the tiny shrimp he’d seen on the ultrasound picture.

He stood and zipped his jeans, hoping his erection would calm down, fast. Nothing got on a man’s bad side faster than obvious, physical evidence that you’d just been fucking his daughter. “Do you need anything before I go?”

Bella smoothed her nightgown, repeating Max’s action of petting her stomach. “Send for my cousin. Maybe I will take a walk.”

Max arched an eyebrow at her.

“I will take a wheel, then,” she said with a laugh, and threw a pillow at him as he retreated through the door.

The man waiting outside, a skinny, swarthy guy in a faded Van Halen T-shirt, was a runner, a lower-ranking member of the pack who carried messages for the family. Usually, Max had learned, runners weren’t related to the pack or they were family members in disgrace, and he wondered how long it would be before he ended up an errand boy. “Go get one of Bella’s cousins. She wants some company.”

The man said something that Max guessed sounded affirmative and went off on his way, leaving Max to his awkward visit.

It wasn’t that Max didn’t like Bella’s father. After all, he’d granted Max safe haven and let him stay with Bella. That alone was deserving of eternal gratitude. But the man knew it, and he was definitely going to cash in the eternal gratitude coupon as much as possible. He had also made it clear that Max was staying on a trial basis, and could be kicked out on his half-werewolf ass at any time.

The house—the “den,” as the pack called it—was the kind of place that made Max wish he’d managed his money better, so he could have one all to himself. Not that his digs back in Chicago had been shabby, but this place made the penthouse look like a condemned building full of sick cats. It was built on a cliff overlooking Lake Lugano. From the drive, it appeared to be a long, low, Roman-style villa. For all Max knew, it dated back to actual Roman times. Inside, though, it was way, way bigger, just the tip of an iceberg that carved into the cliff face. Most of the time, you couldn’t tell you were underground, owing to the windows facing out at the lake, but the lowest floor was windowless, the walls unfinished rock. Bella’s father kept his meeting rooms in that section of the house, and there weren’t any elevators, so Max had to trudge down eight flights of stairs, quickly, to get where he was going. The pack leader’s meeting room was kind of a throne room, with guarded doors and all that medieval jazz. He gave his name and waited to be allowed inside.

The smooth marble columns flanking the doorway were the last bit of added ornamentation. The meeting room was a cave. Max couldn’t tell if it was a natural one or if it had been blasted out to accommodate the pack leader. The furniture was comfortable and modern and very European, but moisture trickled down the walls and the whole place definitely smelled like it was underground.

“Ah, Maximilian.” The pack master stood in the middle of the room in his sleek tailored suit, trying hard to look pleased to see his daughter’s vampire boyfriend.

Lupin, Max reminded himself, then struck the word from his mental vocabulary again as Bella had taught him. Vampire-werewolf hybrid.

“Pack Master,” he replied. “You wanted to see me?”

A polite smile creased the man’s face as he crossed the room. He looked oddly similar and at the same time very different than Bella. She’d inherited her father’s exotic, tipped-up eyes, though hers were golden and his gleamed black. His hair was as midnight dark as hers, but it was white at the temples and wavy. Bella’s was as straight as a line. They had the same gestures, which must have been genetic, and the same lithe grace that Max had wrongly assumed all werewolves possessed.

“I did want to see you,” the man said, coming closer. “And call me Julian. We are family now, are we not?”

“We are,” Max agreed. He would agree with anything Julian said, because to disagree might mean banishment, and banishment would mean being apart from Bella, forever. That was something he wasn’t willing to risk.

As if reminded by his own words of their connection, Julian delicately sniffed the air. His expression hardened for a moment, then the mask of expedience glazed his face in false friendship again. “And how is my daughter?”

It was a sick little pleasure, to know the man smelled her on him, to have that sort of olfactory flag to wave and silently shout, “She’s mine now.” But Max kept his features neutral. “Happy. Happier than I think she’s been in a long time.”

Julian nodded. “I will go directly to my point, then.” He hadn’t even asked Max to sit down. “You must return to the United States. Tomorrow.”

Max almost choked on the torrent of curses that rose in his throat. All he managed to say was, “Why?”

With a sympathetic smile, Julian shook his head. “Not forever. Do not despair. But the child my daughter carries is a weapon, as you have said. And the man who desires this weapon is still very likely to come into his power and claim the child.”

Shit. Of course, the Soul Eater was still out there. And he was still an evil bastard. And he would still want to get his hands on the baby. “I’ve got friends back in the States who are taking care of that whole mess.”

“Maximilian, may I be frank with you?” Julian asked, as if he hadn’t been so already.

Max steeled himself for whatever the man would say next. It probably wouldn’t be something he wanted to hear.

“You are not one of us. My daughter has feelings for you, and whatever is between the two of you is enough to earn you my mercy. But my concern for Bella’s safety, eh, trumps, I believe is the word, any concern for her happiness.” He steepled his fingers at his mouth and appeared to consider his next words. “I will not remind you of my responsibility to the pack, and the consequences that would befall them if this Soul Eater were to come after the baby.”

But you just did, Max thought irritably. “I understand your concern. But Jacob can’t use the baby until he’s become a god. He wants her for her destiny, and I’m guessing that destiny won’t come into play until at least preschool, right? In the meantime, I don’t understand how my leaving Bella when she needs me most will ultimately benefit her. I mean, there is no one in this pack who will fight harder to keep her safe.”

Julian’s face turned to stone. “I do not think that is correct.”

He hadn’t come to argue. But he was sure as hell not leaving Bella behind. “No. If I go, she leaves with me.”

“Maximilian, this is not permanent.” Julian laughed, as if it had been clear from the very beginning and Max had just been too stupid to figure it out. “If you say this vampire will have no interest in my grandchild until after he’s become a god, then I believe you. But I wish for you to see that even this small victory for him is prevented. If he is defeated, and if you survive, then you will be welcome to return to my daughter.”

So that was it. He was being shipped off in the hopes that he wouldn’t return. “I’m not a vampire anymore. I’m a werewolf. Vampire hybrid,” he added quickly, before Julian could shoot him down as an outsider. “How do you know anyone is still going to want to include me in their plans?”

Julian spread his hands and smiled, as if he knew he had his prey cornered. Not cornered. Served on a platter. “I trust that you will be able to find a place in this fight. Besides, did you not just assert that you would do anything to keep my daughter safe?”

Max didn’t have an answer to that.

“Your plane will leave in the morning. Try and break the news gently to my daughter.” And then Julian left. Left Max standing there in the cavernous room, left him holding the bag. How was he going to tell Bella that her father was sending him away to die?

On the other hand, Max thought as he stalked angrily back to Bella’s room, there’s no way Nathan and Carrie won’t be involved in this thing. And if Julian is making noise about it right now, something is going on.

He couldn’t stand by and let his friends finish what he’d helped to start. But he couldn’t leave Bella.

Of course, he knew what she would say if he told her. Go, help them, go where you are needed. Go and be the warrior you are supposed to be. It was a big argument for just not telling her. The argument against not telling her was that he respected her, damn it. It didn’t make sense, considering that a few short months ago he would have liked nothing more than to jam a screwdriver into her ear, but now she was the mother of his child. Also, the love of his life. Hell, even memories of his sire had begun to fade gently into the background since Max had realized how much he loved Bella. He had to tell her why he would be leaving, because he couldn’t lie to her.

He came to their room just as two of Bella’s aunts were on their way out. They gave him shifty looks as he entered and one muttered under her breath, probably complaining that he hadn’t knocked on the door, but they looked relieved at the same time. It was starting to appear that his outplacement was a group decision.

Bella was on the balcony, still clothed in her white nightgown, but wrapped in an equally pristine terry cloth robe. Her long, black hair was unbound, spilling down the sides of her face and over her shoulders in dark slashes.

“The wind off the lake is cold,” he said, and she didn’t startle at his sudden reappearance.

“I like to be in the sun. And the cold does not bother me.” She wrapped her arms protectively around her stomach and smiled up at him. “And she is warm enough in here.”

She’ll be in piss-poor shape if her mother dies of pneumonia, Max thought, but he didn’t say it. He didn’t want to spend some of what could be their last day together arguing. “Listen, I have to talk to you about something.”

“Oh?” Bella gestured gracefully to the other lounge chair, closer to the railing.

Max pulled the chair up close to Bella’s, though he wasn’t sure he’d ever be close enough to her. The thought of spending mornings away from her, of not waking to her beautiful smile, her warm, clean scent…He pushed those grim thoughts aside. “You know, he’s still out there.”

He saw her chest hitch in a sharply drawn breath, but she caught it before it could make a sound and pretended—badly—not to comprehend. “Who?”

Better to do it like ripping off a Band-Aid. “The Soul Eater. He’s still out there, and he’s still going to go through with the ritual that will make him a god.”

“What does this have to do with us?” Bella’s voice held a note of steel, as if she could will Max’s past to vanish. “You are no longer one of them. It is not your concern.”

He smiled and pushed some of her hair off her face. The very first time he’d seen her, she’d been wearing her hair back. She’d always worn it that way, scraped back from her face so severely that her skin had looked tight. It had made her seem hard, and she was, to people who didn’t know her. But now Max knew her, and he saw the currents below her deceptively smooth surface. She was frightened for him, and for their child, and she looked as vulnerable and young as he knew she was.

“You’re right. I’m not one of them. But I’m half of them,” he reminded her, and he dropped his hand to place it over the bump of her abdomen. “And she’s half, too. I don’t want to take the chance of his goons waltzing in here and grabbing you. I’m going back to the States to get this all sorted out.”

She whipped her head up sharply to glare at him. “You will leave me here?”

“I’m not going to drag you into a war zone. I’m sorry.” He looked away, to the vast expanse of black water on the lake. “If I don’t go, and he becomes a god, I’ll be here, trying to protect you from a god. If I go, and we can beat him, yeah, I’ll be away from you, but you’ll be safe.”

“My father put you up to this.” She said it flatly, providing no room for him to argue.

And it was damned tempting to say, “Yeah, your father is a real prick and he’s sending me to fight the Soul Eater knowing that the odds are pretty good I won’t be coming back.” But what good would that do? He’d still get sent away, still might die, and then Bella would be estranged from the one person who had the power to protect her. Not that her anger toward her father would stop him from watching over her—in fact, it might make her a virtual prisoner for the rest of her life, and that was something else Max just couldn’t accept.

“He didn’t put me up to it. We talked out this solution together.” It ground his guts to have to make the man look decent through a lie, but Max forged on. “Besides, you know that Nathan and Carrie will still be involved. They’ll need me.”

“If they are still alive,” Bella snapped, then her expression softened. “I am sorry. I do not mean to speak evil thoughts out loud. But you do not know where they are or how they fared in their mission. And you cannot do this thing alone.”

They sat in silence, both staring out at the lake, the occasional foam cap peaking on the dark surface. The wind had picked up. Bella’s hair whirled in it and slapped against her face.

“Let’s get you inside,” Max said quietly, and before she could argue he lifted her into his arms.

“You are right. You have to go,” she said as he settled her onto the bed. “It would be against everything you believe to leave your friends in peril. And it would be against everything I believe to be with a man who would do that to the people he cared for.”

He lay down beside her and took her hands in his, frowning down at his, the way his missing fingers and gnarled scars seemed grotesque against her perfect skin. “I’m glad you have so much faith in me. Because I’d much rather stay with you.”

She lifted his hands to her mouth and pressed a kiss to each of his palms. “No. You would go where your friends needed you.”

He wanted to argue, but she opened her mouth and sucked one of his fingertips inside, swirling her tongue around it. She laughed at his groan and released him, her hands wandering down, over his chest, to lift his T-shirt.

“Finishing what you started earlier?” Max asked, trying to keep the hopefulness out of his voice. “Because otherwise, this is just cruel.”

Her golden eyes glittered as she slipped her fingers inside the waist of his jeans. “I cannot let you leave without a proper goodbye.”

He couldn’t say he didn’t agree.

Three:

Resurrected

“H ello? Is anybody there?”

There was no way it was possible. Ziggy was dead. I’d seen him die—or had I? Nathan had told me of his death, but I’d never checked. Still, there was no way he could have survived the injuries. No human could have.

Please, God, no.

Nathan took the phone from my shaking hands. I could hear Ziggy calling, “Are you still there? Is anyone still there?” over the line.

Nathan heard it, too. I covered my mouth and nose with both hands, eyes wide as I watched him. Slowly, he lifted the phone to his ear. I watched his face as he listened. One moment he stood before me, holding the phone, listening to his dead son’s voice imploring him to talk to him. The next, his knees shook, collapsing him to the floor. He held the phone like a drowning man clutching a piece of debris after a shipwreck, unable to believe his luck, terrified he’d lose his hold on the one thing saving his life at the moment.

Ziggy’s pleading on the line halted. My heavy breathing seemed to only heighten the tense silence. I caught the tinny whisper of Ziggy’s voice in Nathan’s ear. “Dad?”

Nathan’s lips pulled back in a grimace or a smile—I couldn’t tell which—as his shoulders shook with silent sobs and he covered his eyes with his hand. “I’m here,” he managed, his voice strangled.

“Don’t cry. Christ, Nate, don’t cry.” Even at reduced volume, I could tell Ziggy struggled to follow his own command.

Nathan’s emotions overwhelmed him to the point he couldn’t stop them from slamming into me like waves in a storm. I’d never stopped to imagine what I would feel if, after believing them lost forever, someone I loved, my parents, perhaps, could suddenly come back into my life. To know exactly how it felt—relief so sharp it cut through the cascade of doubt, hope shadowed by fear, a million questions meshing and conforming until they incapacitated the mind totally—wasn’t a gift. It was a burden. I staggered backward a few steps to one of the chairs and fell into it.

Nathan pulled in a shuddering breath, but he still couldn’t speak without tears clouding his voice. “Where are you?”

I didn’t hear Ziggy’s answer, but I felt Nathan’s sharp shift in emotion. He was afraid. Terrified. “You have to get out of there, now. The Soul Eater will be looking for me. I don’t want him to find you instead.”

“He’s at the apartment?” I whispered. Of course he would have gone there. But why hadn’t he gone home before now?

“I don’t care if you think you can handle yourself, get out of there now!” Nathan growled. It was a little comical, the way he lapsed into full-on dad mode so quickly.

Something horrible pulled at the back of my mind. Some vague, terrible knowledge that wouldn’t come readily to the surface, as though I wasn’t ready to know it. “Nathan…”

“I’m going to give you directions to somewhere we can meet up.” He ignored me. “What do you mean, you can’t come right now?”

“Nathan, something about this isn’t right.” I held out my hand. “Hang up the phone.”

He covered the phone with his palm. “No, I won’t hang up!” Returning the phone to his ear, he demanded, “Stay right where you are, I’m coming to get you.”

I watched with growing dread as Nathan folded up the phone. No goodbye. He couldn’t tell his son goodbye, when he’d done it more permanently once before. Turning to me, he said, more gruffly than he probably intended, “Stay here. I’ve got to go get Ziggy.”

As he brushed past me without waiting for an answer, I grabbed his elbow. “Nathan, wait!”

“What?” He jerked his arm back. It hurt me to see the impatience in his eyes, knowing I would have to tell him that I sensed a trap.

“This isn’t right. Why didn’t Ziggy contact us before now?” I wasn’t sure I believed it wasn’t Ziggy, but I wasn’t sure I believed it was him, either. “Please, think about this!”

“The only thing there is to think about is that my son is alive!” He stalked up the stairs to the second level of the library, where the doors were.

I followed him, pushing words past my puffing breaths as I ran after him. “Exactly! Why do you think he’s alive? There were two other vampires in that room besides us when Ziggy died. Why do you think he’s alive now?”

“I know this!” He whirled, catching me off guard, and I stumbled. He didn’t see it, though, too focused on the time that was slipping away from him. “Do you think I didn’t realize it the moment I heard his voice? But I’ve got to go, Carrie. He’s my son!”

I couldn’t argue with that. But it still wasn’t right, still didn’t make any sense. Why now, after all this time? “Please, don’t go. There are other ways of contacting him. But going alone, when you don’t know where he’s been or what he’s been doing…that’s crazy, Nathan.”

“You think he’s going to betray me?” His expression grew colder than I’d ever thought possible. “Do you think my son is going to stab me in the back?”

“I think,” I began, choosing my words carefully, “I think that you know as well as I what a sire’s influence can make a fledgling do. We know that Dahlia was somewhere on the grounds being turned. She would have been too weak to make another vampire. Cyrus didn’t make him. I would have seen it when I sired him. So that leaves the Soul Eater. You said yourself he forced you to do things you didn’t want to do.”

The war between dying anger and acceptance raged for a few seconds in Nathan’s eyes. I prayed common sense would win, but some primal, protective instinct in Nathan forced a curse from his lips and he stalked out of the room.

Something desperate welled up inside me. I didn’t want him to go to Ziggy. He could get killed. And I didn’t want another person in Nathan’s life.

Do you hear yourself, the way you’re thinking? I scolded myself. It’s his son. His son!

But I didn’t care. All I cared about was the sadness, the crushing sadness I felt at the thought of him choosing someone else, anyone else, over me. I didn’t know where it came from, and I knew better than to try and justify it. I was acting like a big baby. I knew it—anyone who was privy to my deranged thought process would know it—but I couldn’t stop myself. And above everything else, I hated being out of control.

I caught up with Nathan in the foyer. He didn’t look at me, focusing instead on opening the coat closet and rifling through it. “I have to get on the road.”

“On the road?” I glanced up at the shuttered window.

“Once I get a few things together. I don’t want to leave unarmed.” He pulled out a crossbow, one of the weapons we’d spirited across state lines hidden in a spare tire. “I’m going to get Ziggy.”

I fought back the urge to tell him one last time not to go. I had to curb this ridiculous jealousy. I’d lost Nathan once—okay, probably countless times by now—and I didn’t feel like doing it again.

“He asked me to meet him. Back in Grand Rapids. I’d ask you to go, but as you said, it might be—”

“A trap?” I forced the hands I’d placed on my hips firmly down to avoid appearing too confrontational. “You think?”

“My son is alive. And I’m going to go get him.” His eyes were hard, daring me to argue with him further.

I don’t respond well to dares. “Don’t be stupid! Nathan, how much time has gone by? Why didn’t he contact you before now? You know that if you go after him, you’re going to end up dead. You’re not thinking!”

“No, I’m not thinking about you!” He threw the crossbow down and it bounced with an earsplitting clatter on the marble floor. “You’re pissed off because for a moment, my focus isn’t on you. I’ve been Carrie-centric nonstop since the first night we met! How much longer do you expect me to hang on to you while you punish me?”

“Punish you?” The shrillness of my voice startled me. “Why am I punishing you?”

“I don’t know! But ever since you came to Chicago with Max you’ve done nothing but punish me. I’m sorry, okay? Does that end this asinine vendetta you’ve had against me? I’m sorry that I couldn’t love you at first sight and give up my memories of my wife and give up my love for my son. I’m sorry I couldn’t get myself together for you on your time!”

“That’s not what this is about!” I followed him as he stalked into the kitchen, barely caught the door before it swung back to slam into my face. “What have I done to you?”

He spun, face contorted in rage. “You slept with Cyrus! I’m not an idiot, and I can read your mind. You slept with Cyrus while I was possessed, then you left for Chicago because you thought we needed time apart. And when I came back, ready to tell you that, yes, I love you and I want to be with you, you ran off and you fucking sired him!”

“I didn’t have a choice!” The fight had become like some sick exploratory surgery, cutting through scar tissue to see how deep it ran. I’d thought we were finished fighting over Cyrus, but Ziggy’s sudden return from the grave seemed to have opened all kinds of old wounds.

I knew what he would come back at me with even as he spoke the words. “You did it because you wanted to. You get so lost and so desperate when the focus of someone else’s life shifts from you, and you’ll do anything to get it back. If you’re constantly pulling me in two directions, begging me to be with you, pushing me away, then you’ve got your captive audience.” His voice dropped, deadly soft in the deafening quiet of the room. “Now, I’ve helped you when no one else could. I helped you through your change. I helped you when you turned your back on me to go to Cyrus, and it cost me my son. I even helped you mourn his murderer. I’ve never asked for anything in return from you, but I’m damned sure you wouldn’t give it, even if I did. So, I’m taking. I’m taking my focus off of you, to go and get my son and bring him here where he will be safe, with me. You can be as jealous as you want. You can hate me. But I’m not giving you anything else.”

He went to the door without his weapons, just blind fury and determination, and left.

I wanted to run after him, to scream at him, but not to warn him of danger or assert that I had been right in the argument. Because just his mention of Cyrus had opened the blood tie I’d had to him in my mind. There was no connection at the other end. Cyrus was dead, lost in the watery blue world where vampires went when they died. It was raw, almost physically painful, like a severed nerve straining to reconnect with its missing end. Coupled with the stress already building in me, it bowled me over. I had to brace myself against the rail as I nearly fell down the stairs to the third-floor guest rooms. Everything was wrong. Surreal.

I stormed into the bedroom and stared in outrage at the curtains, the bed, the television. How dare those objects exist while I was in pain? How dare the drapes hang so perfectly, almost cheerfully stirring in the breeze from the central air?

The last time I’d been in Chicago, I’d been staying with Max, nursing my broken heart over Nathan. I’d been mourning then, too. Mourning my broken connection with Nathan, still mourning the loss of my normal life. And it was here, in this very room, that I’d called Cyrus, heard his voice.

I would never hear him again. Never hear the way his soft, cultured accent turned my name into a sinful prayer against my ear. Never feel his body pressed to mine. But it was more than just a sexual connection. I’d never been able to do the things I’d longed to when he was alive. I wanted to sit and dream of a future with him without thinking I was twisted. I wanted to lie in his arms and feel safe, not as though I should be on guard.

And I wanted Nathan. I would never stop wanting a life with him. I was torn in so many different directions at once, I wanted so many things that I couldn’t have, could never have had even if circumstances had been perfect. And it made me angrier than I’d ever been before.

The pain and the rage built up inside me, forcing my mouth open in a silent scream. My chest constricted, allowing only a tiny breath to escape in a thin, high wail. It grew and deepened as the pain deepened, until I was screaming, and I rushed at the curtains, yanking them down. They tore easily, too easily, and I turned to the bed, my empty hands spasming open and closed until they fell on the duvet cover. I threw it from the bed, shredded it with my fingers, pulled handfuls of blanket and sheets away from the mattress. All the while I screamed, my chest caving in, my heart breaking all over. It would never end. I would feel this horrible feeling forever, I was sure.

My hands actually trembled from the force of the emotions that had been loosed, and I pressed my forehead to the carpet, feeling my cold breath bouncing back at me to chill the tears on my cheeks. There was more to think of now than my pain. Nathan’s words had hurt. Not because he’d said them in anger, but because every one of them was true. I was selfish, I was jealous. I’d just never realized how deeply.

Had I slept with Cyrus that night in the van because I was genuinely disturbed by Nathan’s suffering as he lay, possessed by his sire, upstairs? Or had I done it because I knew, in some dark part of my heart, that he would get better and the whole nasty business would come to light? And when it hadn’t, at least, not right away, I’d run away with Max and almost slept with him, as well. And when none of that had worked, when Nathan had still seemed so close to giving me what I’d thought I’d wanted from him, I’d turned one of his worst enemies into my fledgling, brought him into Nathan’s home.

All the while, I’d accused him of not being understanding, blamed him for making my life complicated. My God, had I ever been responsible for my own actions? Ever, in my entire life?

I dropped my head in my hands and let the tears come, beat myself down with memories of Nathan’s kindness in the face of my selfishness. When I’d run from him, he’d pursued. When I’d destroyed things between us, again and again, he’d always been willing to rebuild. And I’d abused that, pushing further every time, trying to push him past the breaking point.

He’d broken, finally. I’d pushed him far enough, and he’d pushed back. I’d sent him running headfirst into a trap because I couldn’t stop being so caught up in my own drama to support him in his.

The buzzer sounded, and my head snapped up. I ran to the foyer, mashed the intercom button and spoke, not caring how desperate my voice sounded. “Nathan?”

“No, it’s Bill.” He sounded embarrassed for me. “I left my cooler here. Can I come up and get it?”

“Yes, of course.” I let go of the button, my mind racing. Nathan had walked into a trap, I was sure of it. And it was time for me to stop being selfish.

It was time for me to save Nathan, for a change.

“Well?” Dahlia tapped her foot. She wore those stupid slippers with the feather stuff around the toes, like she was some old-time movie star.

Ziggy folded up his phone. “He wants to meet at a safe place.”

Dahlia snorted, lifting up a couch cushion that had been slashed by something. Probably a knife. Maybe a claw. The thought of those monsters coming here, tearing up the place…

It had been hard enough, coming back. Seeing the place he’d called home for the tail end of his childhood abandoned and destroyed made it worse. And with Dahlia here. It was like betraying Nate before he actually betrayed him.

It’s not betrayal, he thought angrily, feeling the sudden need to wipe tears from his eyes. He blinked them back. It wasn’t betrayal. He had Jacob’s word. All he had to do was deliver Nate, just to talk. No harm would come to him. And then Ziggy got his freedom, and everything could go back the way it was.

Only now, he’d be a vampire. It would make Nate’s schedule easier to deal with.

“This place looked a lot better the last time I was here,” Dahlia sniffed, arranging the cushions on the couch and sitting. “You know, when I tried to kill your dad?”

“Right. I remember.” He squeezed his hands into fists. He wanted to kill her, had been wanting to for a while now. He pushed the rage down. It made him a monster, and he’d been Jacob’s pet monster for way too long. “Let’s get out of here.”

“What? Don’t you want to sit and reminisce? Go through your old things?” She paused to glance dramatically around the room. “Oh, gee…I don’t see much left.”

She wasn’t as good at hurting him as she thought she was, but there was no arguing with her. “Shut up, let’s get out of here.”

“No, I’m curious. I wonder how long it took for him to move her in here, once you were gone.” She giggled. “So, tell me, are you real jealous of her? You don’t honestly expect me to believe you never had a little crush on dear old daddy.”

He had his hand around her throat before she could move. She might have magic, but magic didn’t work so well when your head was snapped off your neck, and he was definitely stronger. “If you ever fucking say that again, I’ll kill you.” He tossed her across the room, easy as throwing a doll. There were advantages to having a powerful sire. Advantages he wished to God he didn’t have to know about.

Dahlia gagged and wiped blood from her lips as she stood. “Jacob would never let you. You might be the favorite, but I’ve got the power. He needs me.”

“That’s great, Dahlia. He won’t let me kill you because you’re a tool he can use. You must be real proud. Why won’t he let you kill me?” That would get her. Jacob had barely spoken to her beyond giving orders since he’d given up on that stupid potion of hers. And she hated him for it. “Get your fat ass up. We’re leaving.”

She picked her way through the rubble of ruined books and furniture. “Fine. There’s nothing here I’d want to keep anyway. Slut-tastic only wore ‘sensible’ clothes.”

“Nice, Dahlia.” He opened the door for her and resisted the urge to kick her down the stairs.

The car was waiting for them, the driver leaning against the door. It struck Ziggy for the first time how many human servants he interacted with every day, and how he never knew their names. Heck, he didn’t even really look at them or wonder how the hell they started working for vampires.

“Are you going to open my door, or are you going to just stand there and stare at the man meat?” Dahlia pushed Ziggy aside and grabbed the handle of the door. “You gross me right out sometimes, you know.”

I won’t kill her. I won’t kill her. He repeated the mantra all the way to the highway, leaning his forehead against the cold glass. Grand Rapids seemed empty and alien. It was just knowing that Nate wasn’t there. He’d left. Even after the message he’d had Max relay to him. “I’m coming home. Wait for me. I’ll be there in five days.” How much clearer did he have to be? He knew Max wasn’t the kind of guy to forget something that important. He would have at least mentioned, “Hey, by the way, your dead son isn’t that dead.” So, knowing Ziggy was alive, knowing what Jacob was like, why hadn’t Nate waited for him?

Dahlia babbled on and on about something stupid. The girl’s mouth never stopped running. When she was in his presence, it was usually “you’re a fag this,” and “you’re a homo that.” He could tune that out pretty easily. He’d even been able to shut her up for days at a time when he’d first started pointing out that he’d slept with Cyrus, making Dahlia’s first vampire lover a “homo,” too. Whenever she was around Jacob, though, butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth. It was a perk to being crazy, Ziggy figured. It was easy to be different things to different people when there really were different people living in your head.

It was a trick he needed to learn. Especially around Jacob.

The car pulled off the South Beltline, onto 37, and took a right at the spot where it became a plain old two-lane road. They passed by some small houses, ranch style with aboveground swimming pools and swing sets in the yards. People lived there. Kids lived there. So close to evil, oblivious to its presence. He suppressed a shudder to think of those people and what would happen to them if Jacob got some sadistic whim to toy with them.

He would, eventually. He always had some fun new “game.” “Come, play a game with me, favorite son,” he would purr, and the game would always be something to make Ziggy feel dirty and used.

Jacob liked to watch.

“What the hell, you’re not even listening to me.” Dahlia puffed air between her pursed lips. “I swear, you’re about the most boring person on the planet.”

He snorted, leaning his head against the window. “What side of the conversation were you on?”

Dahlia mumbled something unintelligible. If it had sounded like a spell, he would have been more worried. Jacob had laid down some strict rules about her spell casting, but, as Dahlia often liked to point out in these situations, Jacob wasn’t there.

They pulled onto a dirt road, lined with cattails and other weeds that warned drivers not to stray from the path if they didn’t want their car to be forever known as the swamp buggy.

The new digs Jacob had moved them into weren’t as nice as the mansion. But since they’d been infiltrated once, it could happen again, and Jacob was nothing if not paranoid. They pulled off the road onto a little covered bridge that creaked as though it was seriously considering dumping the car into the swamp. It was dark as hell, and that was probably a good thing. He really didn’t want to see what condition the wood was in, because he’d have to cross it again sometime. The rumbling of the wheels on the boards stopped and they emerged onto a rutted dirt two-track that wound through the swamp. The house, a sagging farmhouse done up in plantation style, gleamed bone white in the moonlight. Two willow trees drooped in front of it, like the tattered edges of a corpse’s Sunday suit.

“I hate this place,” Dahlia said, and for a moment he felt some solidarity with her, until she followed up with, “It’s so far from the mall.”

“Yeah, that’s the feature it’s really lacking.”

The car pulled up in front of the broken porch, and Ziggy didn’t wait for the chauffeur to open his door. He slipped out and thumped up the steps, his boots ringing hollow on the rotted wood.

“Where are you going?” Dahlia stood by the car, a chubby hand on her round hip.

“Uh, inside. The opposite of outside, where the mosquitoes are.” He slapped at one that had taken an interest in his neck—he wasn’t sure if drinking his blood would make a mosquito a vampire, since they already kind of were—to illustrate his point. “I’ve got to tell Jacob what’s going on and get permission to take some of them out with me.”

“I want to come, too,” she said petulantly. “It’s not like you can control them the way I can.”

Oh, hell no. “No, no way. You’re not going along on this one.”

Dahlia’s eyes narrowed unpleasantly in her chubby face. “Well, we’ll just see what Jacob has to say about that.”

Ziggy had a pretty good idea what Jacob would say about it. That there was no way in hell Dahlia was going anywhere near his fledgling. Ziggy had already warned their sire of what Dahlia had done to Nathan in the past. “Yeah, let’s go and talk to him.”

“No. I’ll go and talk to him.” She smirked and jerked her chin toward the darkness behind the house. “It’s your turn to feed them.”

Ziggy wished the chill up his spine was from actual cold. But no. There was nothing he would rather not do than go into that filthy, stinking barn tonight. “Fine. Give Jacob my regrets, will ya?”

Of course she would. The bitch. Feeding them would keep him tied up long enough for her to climb onto Jacob’s lap and beg and plead and promise all sorts of perverted things in order to wheedle her way into “helping” retrieve Nathan.

The barn sat a comfortable distance from the house, not too far for the old owners to walk to it in the winter, not too close for the smell of the animals that used to inhabit it to reach the house. But these were an entirely different kind of animal, and their stink did reach the house on some days. He could smell it now, the ripe, unwashed stench of them and the stale piss odor of their waste. They were awake and restless behind the big sliding door. He strained to move it, but the wood had swelled in the humidity. Sometimes you could get it open without them hearing. Not tonight. Tonight they stood in an uneven semicircle around the door, eyes shining in their unwashed faces, their clothes filthy.

They flinched when he took his knife from his pocket, then relaxed when he rolled up his sleeves. He drew the blade across his wrists and held out his arms. They came at him from all sides, swarming, fighting for his blood.

Bracing himself, he muttered, “Come and get it.”

Four:

Double Cross

W e pulled up next to the curb in front of the apartment, and I launched myself from Bill’s car. For the entire ride from Chicago, I’d imagined countless horrible scenarios. Now, standing on the sidewalk in front of our home, just footsteps from either terror or relief, I almost didn’t want to go up.

“Jesus, I hope there’s a bathroom up there,” Bill groaned as he climbed out. “We couldn’t have stopped even, you know, along the highway?”

“Next time, bring an empty coffee can,” I sniped, my hands shaking as I fumbled for the keys to the front door.

“You could be a little nicer to the complete stranger who drove you all the way here from Chicago. I was just trying to get my cooler back, lady.”

“You’re the complete stranger who shot the man we’re coming to save. You owed him.” I scanned the street. The van wasn’t there, but Nathan might have parked somewhere else, to remain inconspicuous. I prayed I would find him in time. I flipped through my keys again, to unlock the door at the top of the stairs. “Back me up.”

“Whoa, whoa. You’re not going to just charge up there, right?” Bill put a hand on my arm as I stepped through the front door. “I mean, you said he was walking into a trap. Call me crazy, but if someone’s walking off the edge of a cliff, you don’t go running blindly after them.”

“What do you suggest I should do?” Normally, I wouldn’t mind advice from someone, but something about Bill’s tone rankled me.

I figured out what it was when he moved ahead of me, protectively, as if he were on some kind of macho, soldier-guy autopilot. “Let me go up and check it out first.”

“How about no?” I followed him halfway up the steps and grabbed the back of his shirt to stop him. “You’re human. I’m not putting you between me and whatever might be up there.”

“Yeah, but you’re a—” He stopped, wetted his lips, his gaze darting around above my head as he searched for a different word than the one he’d been about to say.

I stepped close to him, getting as in-his-face as I possibly could, with my height disadvantage and the two steps lower than him that I stood. “I’m a what?”

“You’re a dead vampire.” The voice came from the top of the stairs, and my heart—the only one I had left—stopped beating.

Dahlia stood at the top of the stairs, juggling a bright, blue sphere of light between her hands.

“Holy shit,” Bill breathed beside me.

I spoke through clenched teeth. “Run.”

“I don’t think he’s going anywhere,” Dahlia said with a laugh, hurling the sphere toward us. Bill turned and tried to follow my directive, but the crackling light hit him square between the shoulder blades. He fell forward, his face bouncing off a step as he landed.

There was no time to worry about helping him. He was likely already dead. But I had myself—and Nathan—to worry about. “Where is he?”

“Where’s who?” Dahlia lowered her hands, shaking them as though she were flicking water from them. “You might want to rearrange that. Before it wakes up.”

“He’s going to wake up?” I shook my head, willing my face to change shape and become a monster’s mask.

Dahlia laughed and mimicked me, her face becoming a strange, almost dragonlike countenance with bony ridges where her nose should have been. “Doesn’t scare me anymore. Oh, wait…it never did.”

“Where is he?” I repeated, advancing up the stairs. She didn’t try to stop me, and didn’t try another spell. I didn’t know if it was because she truly wasn’t afraid of me or if she couldn’t do more magic again so soon.

“Where is who? Jesus, you think the world revolves around you and your little boyfriend?” She scoffed and turned from the door, disappearing into the apartment.

I flipped Bill onto his side, so his face wasn’t smashed into the steps and he wouldn’t drown in it if he vomited, since I didn’t know the possible side effects of the spell. Then I followed Dahlia.

The apartment had been ransacked by the Soul Eater’s men after Cyrus’s death. Nathan and I had been hiding beneath the floor of the bookstore in a secret shelter he’d built there. We’d been back in the apartment before fleeing to Chicago, but I’d forgotten how awful it looked. Now, seeing Nathan’s prized books on the floor, covered with dirty footprints where they’d been trampled, and our furniture overturned, made me sick to my stomach.

Dahlia standing in the middle of all of it didn’t help. She flopped onto the couch, one of the few pieces of furniture that hadn’t been tossed around the room, as if I’d invited her to make herself at home. She’d let her feeding face drop. I didn’t. I couldn’t. I was too angered by her presence. “If you didn’t know who I was talking about, then why are you here?”

She smiled and kicked up her feet onto a pile of ruined books. “I like it here. I mean, I never did before. You know, when I was here trying to kill your little sweetie pie? But Ziggy brought me by and it kind of grew on me. I mean, there are enough books here to keep me busy for ages. And yeah, the decor is ugly as all hell and someone left behind some really tacky clothes, but I can overlook all that in favor of having a really cool place to hang out all by myself.”

“Get the fuck out of my house.” My hands balled into fists at my side. My rational mind knew I shouldn’t engage her. She was more powerful than I was, even on my best days. “And if I find out you did anything to him, I swear—”

“You swear what?” She snorted, picking up a leather-bound book by its cover, the binding dangling away from the spine. “You’ll get really, really mad at me and I’ll end up kicking your ass?”

“I don’t remember it going down that way in the past,” I reminded her, my voice hoarse and distorted from the shape of my face and the blind fury pushing up in my chest.

She laughed, throwing her head back. There was a scar, fresh, on her neck, and it wasn’t made by fangs. It was the shape of a human mouth, opened wide to make a large bite. Disgusting.

“Yeah, you wouldn’t remember it going down that way,” she said, rolling her eyes. “Cyrus was always there to smack me down for you. And he’s not here now.”

I lunged for her, but she was on her feet, putting the couch between us before I could grab her.

“Ooh, don’t like me talking about your little ex-fledgling, do you?” She giggled, the girlish, crazy sound that haunted my nightmares. “You know, the last time I fucked him, it wasn’t your name he shouted into my ear. It was hers. The little mouse girl. He would never talk to me about her. What happened to her to make him hate you so much?”

It was exactly the kind of remark Dahlia was so good at dispensing. Cruel, cutting.

But she was better at hurting in another kind of way. She could have hurled a spell at me, could have just gone for it and tackled me to the floor, two vamps go down, one comes up. But she did neither of those things.

“What’s your game, Dahlia?” I paced a wide circle around the living room, noting that she moved away, keeping the same amount of space between us. “What are you really doing here?”

“What do you mean?” It wasn’t like her not to have a smart-ass answer. Posing a question to my question was a sign she was delaying physical aggression. Which meant…“Dahlia, what are you trying to keep me from?”

She giggled, but said nothing.

“It’s a trap, isn’t it? Ziggy set up a trap.” I watched her from the corner of my eye as she moved behind me. I tensed, listening to her footsteps. If she hesitated, even for a second, I would turn and take her out in a heartbeat.

But she didn’t try anything at all. She just wandered past me, to the bookshelf, where she pulled out a leather-bound journal and began ripping pages from it, slowly.

“Fuck it,” I muttered under my breath, my heart beating hard against my rib cage. She was trying to delay me. And I had to find Nathan.

Where are you? I called out with the blood tie. Dahlia followed me to the top of the stairs, threatening me with words I didn’t bother listening to. I was focused too intently on the blood tie, on what might come back to me.

Bill lay at the bottom of the stairs where I’d left him, his eyes squeezed shut, an indication he was conscious. “Jesus…” he rasped. “My head is killing me.”

“Get up,” I ordered, grasping him under his arms and pulling him to his feet. He could worry about his headache later. “We’ve got to get out of here.”

“You’ll never find him,” Dahlia called from the top of the stairs, sounding truly angry for the first time since we’d arrived. “He’s probably already dead!”

“No, he’s not,” I retorted calmly, putting myself between her and Bill while he staggered out the door. “If the Soul Eater wanted him dead, he could have done it years ago. He wouldn’t need the help of some second-rate witch to do it.”

I made it out just as another bolt of whatever spell had knocked out Bill hit the door. I slid into the driver’s seat of the car and grabbed the keys from him. “Are you okay?”

“I feel like my skull is going to crack open. I feel like my brain has been in a centrifuge. No, I’m not okay.” He leaned his head against the dashboard as I pulled away from the curb. “Where are we going, and who was that?”

“That was Dahlia,” I said, scanning the road as I drove for any sign of Ziggy’s big, crappy van. “And I don’t know.”

I hope you brought backup, sweetheart. Nathan’s thought shot through my head with an urgency that definitely indicated there was a problem.

I did, but he got a little damaged. Where are you?

You won’t believe me….

It was the location that made him doubt Jacob.

Ziggy paced around the alley, the place where he’d first met the only real parent he’d ever had. He’d been a stupid, stupid kid then, thinking he was some big shit who could hunt down vampires. Only then, a real vampire had shown up, and it had gone from being a cool game where the bigger kids included him to a life-or-death situation. And he’d lucked out. It could have been someone like Cyrus, out to find a kid to feed off, or torture to death. But it had been Nate, out to scare the hell out of stupid kids who thought it would be cool to hunt for vampires. And he’d taken a stupid kid out for pie and coffee, and then home to a normal life.

Now, to repay that, Ziggy was going to return Nate to his sire? Jacob had made it seem like common sense. “Bring my son, my true son, home to me,” he’d said, and he’d looked so pathetic and sad and pained. Something inside Ziggy had ached to comfort his sire, to do the right thing. He’d thought of being separated from Jacob for so long, imagined the immense effort it would require to seal himself off from the blood tie the way Nate had for something like seventy-five years. It would be hell on earth, and Jacob had made it seem that tricking Nate into coming home was something necessary for Nate’s happiness. Now that he was here, though, and Nate was on the way, Ziggy wasn’t so sure.

So why are you still selling him out? Why don’t you get the hell out of here and stay away from him forever? Ziggy forced the voice away. His conscience had never worked before, so why the hell did it think he needed it now? He wasn’t hurting Nate. He was saving him.

On the street outside the alley, he heard the squeaking hubcap from when he’d driven the van over the curb in front of the apartment. The engine sounded a little better—Nate probably changed the oil when he was supposed to—but the driver’s side door still screeched when it opened.

Nate was here. He was here, and Ziggy couldn’t stop panicking. What the hell would happen? Would he be glad to see him? Would he still be ashamed? Jesus, was he just coming to pass judgment again?

And then Nate was in the mouth of the alleyway, and Ziggy saw him, and they both froze.

“Ziggy?” It was a whisper that ended like a shout, and Nate ran at him.

Since he’d run away from home, he’d wondered a thousand times how things would have been different if he’d never left. Now, with his dad’s arms around him—and Jesus, was he crying?—he realized nothing would have been different. Nate would still love him. He still did.

“Hey, come on. Don’t cry.” He stepped back a little, his arms on Nate’s shoulders, worried that if he didn’t hold on he’d crash to the ground. “Come on, Dad. Don’t cry.”

“I can’t believe you’re alive.” Nate staggered back, sniffling, as though he was crazy or drunk. Or standing in front of a person who was supposed to be dead. “I held you. While you died.”

“I know you did.” Now Ziggy’s throat felt tight, like he was going to start blubbering, too. “I remember.”

“I never would have left you. If I had known—”

“I know. I know.” But if he’d taken you with him, you would have died. He didn’t turn you. He wouldn’t. He was going to let you die. Ziggy hated his sire’s voice in his head. And he hated that he was right. Nate could have saved him, but he didn’t.

It helped him overcome some of his guilt at tricking him like this. “Listen, I wanted you to come here for a reason.”

“Of course. But we’ll talk about it on the road. It’s not safe for you here.” Nate grabbed his wrist, but Ziggy stood firm.

“No.” He took a deep breath. Somewhere, he’d heard that the moment a guy really becomes a man is when he first hits his father. No way in hell was he going to hit Nate. But he wasn’t going to let him walk off. Not now. “No, you’re not going anywhere.”

“Ziggy, you can be honest with me. For Christ’s sake, it’s me. What’s going on?”

Stay strong. Ziggy cleared his throat. “You can’t leave. You’re supposed to come back with me.”

“Come back with you?” Nate’s brow crumpled with confusion, but the trust never left his eyes. “Where?”

“You know where. To our sire. You’re supposed to come back with me.” If he kept his fists clenched, the tension could support his whole body, and he wouldn’t crumble.

Even when he realized what Ziggy was talking about, Nate still didn’t look angry or betrayed. It was a low blow. “You’re supposed to take me back so he can kill me? Why would you agree to that?”

“He’s not going to kill you!” Ziggy rushed to clarify. “He just wants you back home.”

“Ziggy, he has to consume the souls of every vampire he’s sired before he can become a god.” Nate did sound angry now. “I don’t know what line he’s been feeding you—”

“No, listen! It was a mistranslation. He doesn’t need you. He needs someone else. He’s got it taken care of, and he’s going to let us live.” He swallowed. Why did it sound so implausible now? “He wants you back because he misses you.”

“And you believe that? I raised you better than that.” Nate turned, as if he was going to leave.

Ziggy looked up, signaled to the tops of the buildings on either side. They waited up there, hungry and mindless. “Oh, yeah. You did a good job raising me. Why, exactly, am I a vampire now?”

When Nate turned back, they made their move.

Jacob’s human soldiers were disgusting, filthy, stinking and strong. A steady diet of vamp blood did that to a human. Made them dangerous, addicted and loyal. Twenty of them dropped from the rooftops, landing on their feet, ready to fight rather than howling in pain with broken legs. They formed a circle around the two vampires, blocking off Nate’s escape.

Please don’t let them hurt him, he pleaded to no one in particular. I’d have to kill them and he would know I can’t really force him to go back.

“Ziggy,” Nate began, and there was panic in his voice.

Good. It gave him strength. “I’m not a kid anymore, Nate. And you’re coming with me.”

Turn left off Cherry Street. Do you see it?

I scanned the street frantically for the sight of the van. It was parked in the shadows, across from a building I knew too well. I see it.

“I see it,” Bill said, pointing ahead. “Why are you slowing down? It’s right there!”

“I know it’s right there,” I snapped. I pressed the gas pedal, suddenly aware that I had slowed.

Club Cite was a squat brick building with a peeling coat of black paint. All the goth kids and wannabe vampires hung out there. I knew, because it was the place I’d first met Dahlia. And the place Nathan had first met Ziggy.

“How could he have not known this was going to be a trap?” I whispered, shaking my head in disbelief.

Carrie! I need help!

I pulled the car up to the curb and hurtled out before it was fully in Park. I heard Bill yell out behind me, but I cut him off, barking, “Stay in the car until I call for you!”

I rounded the building, to the alley where Nathan and Ziggy stood, surrounded by…junkies?

The people closing in on them were not vampires. I could tell by the smell of their blood. As disgusting as it sounds, humans smell like food, and they were definitely food. But when one grabbed Nathan and he spun, landing a punch squarely to the thing’s jaw, nothing happened. Well, a close approximation to nothing. Its head snapped back the way anyone’s would when taking a punch. But these…people, for lack of a better term, looked half-starved. Their dirty skin showed through ragged clothes, their eyes were sunken, skin tight across the sharp bones of their skulls. They looked like famine victims. Nathan is strong, even by vampire standards. The one he hit should have ended in a shower of exploded skull and bits of brain.

The surprise on his face mirrored my own when the skeletal man shook off the pain, wiped the blood from his nose, and repaid the blow with a right hook that came so fast and hard I heard the bones of Nathan’s face crack.

I rushed forward, a stake drawn. Even if they weren’t vampires, a stake to the heart will kill most things. Ziggy caught sight of me and held his hands out in front of himself, as if from the distance he stood he could stop me. “Don’t!”

I ignored him, my stake sinking into the back of the creature that had hit Nathan. The man screamed and fell forward. His body stiffened up, the wounded muscles contracting to lock the stake in place. I had to plant a foot in the small of his back and use both hands to jerk the weapon free, releasing a tremendous arc of blood.

Going in, my intent had been to save Nathan. I don’t know if I thought it would be enough to cause a distraction, or if I thought killing one would scare the others off, but neither plan panned out. As I stepped back from the dying creature, two more attacked me. I killed the first easily, jamming the stake in her throat as she charged me. The second grabbed my shoulders from behind, holding me in a punishing grip. My flesh turned to pulp under the squeezing fingers, my bones audibly cracked. I couldn’t fight. I could barely breathe from the pain. I watched as the others caught Nathan and dragged him, struggling, to the other open end of the alley, and Ziggy followed.

“Bill!” I screamed, taking a deep breath to gear up for another when the creature holding me let go, dropping me to the pavement with a blow to the back of the head. I managed to keep my face from smashing into the ground, but I couldn’t get up. The world spun, and in the whiteouts of light from the pain exploding in my skull I saw the taillights of a car at the other end of the alley.

They didn’t want to kill Nathan. They wanted to take him.

Behind me, I heard the squeal of tires, and the sound sent pain like jagged glass through my brain. I focused on Bill’s voice shouting, “Get up, we’re going to lose them!” and managed to climb to my feet and to the car. My door wasn’t completely closed yet when Bill hit the gas. The tires squealed and the car jolted after the vehicle in front of us.

“We don’t have enough…” I cradled my head in my hands and searched for the words between the flashbulbs of pain popping behind my eyelids. “We can’t go after him alone. They’re going to the Soul Eater.”

“I hate to tell you, but we are alone. I don’t know anybody around here, and your crowd is apparently not too friendly.” He dropped his speed and changed lanes, putting at least four cars between us and the car carrying Nathan.

“What are you doing? You’re going to lose him!” I leaned forward, gripping the dashboard as if the pressure from my hands could make the car go faster.

Bill glanced at me sideways, an annoyed kind of look. “I’m not going to lose them. I know how to follow people without being obvious. Believe me, they’ll think we lost them, and they’ll be wrong.”

I settled back reluctantly, keeping my eyes on the car as it zoomed ahead of us. “I don’t know what I’m worried about. If they get away, I can always get directions from Nathan.”

“Yeah, that’s a handy trick,” he said offhandedly as he barely squeaked through a yellow light. “Do you know where we’re headed?”

“We’re going south.” I shrugged. “Pretty soon we’ll run out of city, so keep an eye on them. Wherever they’re going has to be within a few more miles.”

But it turned out I was wrong. They skipped all the major numbered streets and just kept heading south on Division Avenue, until there were no more streetlights and the buildings gave way to swamps and trees. Soon, we were the only cars on the road. There was no way they didn’t know we were following them.

“What’s the plan, Stan?” Bill asked, jerking the wheel to make a hard turn onto a dirt road. The car ahead of us roared and shot farther from us.

“We have to get Nathan before they get him to the Soul Eater.” I closed my eyes. “I just wish I knew how to do that.”

“Well, I could run them off the road,” Bill suggested, clearly uncomfortable with the idea. “It’s dangerous. But it’s not like they’re going to stop to get gas out here and we could just grab him then.”

I nodded, remembering something Nathan had told me when I’d first become a vampire, that a car crash could kill me if the damage done to my body was bad enough that I couldn’t heal it quicker than it killed me. He’d used it as an example back then. I’m sure he didn’t expect that I’d be using it to brace myself mentally for ramming a car he was riding in off the road. “Let’s do it.”

I suppose I should have felt more guilty for endangering a human, but things went so fast. Bill hit the gas and we swerved as the tires resisted the pull of the loose gravel. We caught up with the other car fast enough that we nudged them with our bumper, but it wasn’t enough. I watched, wary, as the needle of the speedometer went higher and higher.

Seventy on a dirt road. Might as well have shot ourselves in the head right then.

It took two tries—bumping, scraping, screeching tries—to edge past the car enough to make a good hit. Before I could revise the plan, Bill shouted, “Hang on!” and jerked the wheel hard to the right, crashing us against the other car. They pushed back, just for a second, before spinning across the road. As the driver, another of the skeletal superhumans, struggled to turn the vehicle, Bill reversed, revved the engine and shifted into Drive, T-boning the car and spinning it into the ditch.

We both got out, Bill drawing his gun. “More effective than a stake,” he said with a shrug, and I couldn’t argue with him, though I didn’t think a bullet would stop those things in the car.

“Nathan? Are you okay? Can you hear me?” I eased down the bank and wrenched the back door open.

“I can hear you,” Nathan said as he pulled himself out. Inside the car, the humans were either unconscious or dead. At least something could hurt them.

Nathan’s face was bruised and misshapen where he’d been hit, bleeding where a shard of broken glass protruded from his forehead just below his hairline. “You couldn’t think of a better way to rescue me?”

I threw my arms around him. I knew but didn’t really care that one of those superfreaks could wake and we’d have another fight on our hands. I just wanted to touch him, to make sure he was okay. Well, aside from the gash across his forehead.

He put his arms around me for just a moment, squeezing me tight. Then he let me go and gestured up the bank, to where Bill stood, his eyes wide as he surveyed the damage he’d done. Nathan gestured to the open door, and Ziggy’s unconscious form inside. “I need your help, my son is in the car.”

I stepped aside while they pulled him out. It took some maneuvering from all three of us to get him up the steep slope, but we managed to get him into the backseat. The car groaned as we pulled away, and something squeaked ominously, but Bill assured us we could make it back to the bookshop.

“Before sunrise, if you don’t mind,” Nathan added. He sat in the back with Ziggy, cradling his head in his lap.

“What happened?” I asked, my heart still aching with relief. I didn’t want to believe what I couldn’t deny was true. Ziggy had set Nathan up.

Nathan looked down at his son’s face, a shadow of hurt crossing his battered features. “He was trying to take me back to the Soul Eater. Jacob has him brainwashed into believing that he doesn’t want to hurt me, that he wants us all to be a family. He’s Ziggy’s sire.”

A lump of tears I couldn’t shed formed in my throat. Of all the things Nathan feared, his sire was number one. And now, the Soul Eater had his son. “What are we going to do?”

Nathan shook his head, stroking the hair back from his son’s face. “I don’t know. It’s up to Ziggy. I can’t force him to turn his back on his sire.” He laid his hand gently, almost reverently, on the front of Ziggy’s T-shirt and frowned.

“What?” I asked, leaning over the seat, though I had a terrible inkling of what Nathan had felt there.

With trembling hands, Nathan jerked the fabric of Ziggy’s shirt up, exposing a long, puckered scar bisecting his torso from his collarbones to his navel. My breath froze in my chest. I knew what that scar was. I had one, myself. So had Cyrus, when he was alive the first time.

“Jesus,” Bill said, his eyes fixed on the rearview mirror. His skin paled, and he turned his gaze back to the road. “That must have been some serious injury.”

But he had no clue how serious it was. Nathan and I did. The Soul Eater had taken Ziggy’s heart.

My eyes filled with tears as they met Nathan’s. “What are we going to do?”

“I don’t know.” His voice was tight, hopeless. “I don’t know.”

Five:

Heartless

Z iggy was still unconscious when we returned to the bookshop.

“Stay with him,” Nathan ordered, motioning me into the backseat. “If he wakes up…knock him out again.”

It wasn’t the most tender, fatherly suggestion, but he was right. If Ziggy could, he would go back to his sire.

On the chance Dahlia was still inside somewhere, Nathan searched the bookstore. When it was clear, they carried Ziggy downstairs, to the hidden shelter that Nathan kept below the shop floorboards.

“I can’t say I’m glad to see this place again,” I muttered as I followed them down the steep few steps.

There was a thud, and Bill swore. “There isn’t much head clearance down here,” Nathan warned belatedly.

The hideout was a short, narrow space with a dirt floor and stone masonry walls that were crumbling. The sleeping bags, medical kit and camping lantern we’d left behind were still there, as well as the empty bags from the blood we’d consumed while in hiding. But we didn’t have any blood now, and Bill was human. “We’re not going to be here long, I hope?”

I’d whispered the question to Nathan, but the space was too crowded and confined for secrecy. Bill’s gaze darted from me to Nathan and back as he helped to maneuver Ziggy into a sleeping bag. “I don’t feed from the vein, okay? So you guys need a plan in place.”

“We’re going back to Chicago as soon as the sun goes down,” Nathan answered tersely. “That’s the plan.”

He settled on the floor, his back propped against the rough stone and crumbling cement of the wall. Bill retreated to the other side of the shelter and I sat beside Nathan.

“Do you really think that’s smart?” I asked, my voice low not to keep our conversation private—that would have been impossible—but to indicate that Bill should try to politely ignore us. “I mean, with the Soul Eater having his heart and every—”

“I know what the Soul Eater has!” Nathan exploded. He banged the back of his head against the stone, just once, and dropped his forehead to rest on his hands. His next words were softer, full of heartrending dismay. “What a mess this is.”

I leaned against him, my head on his shoulder, one hand on his back. Comforting with words isn’t something I’m good at.

“We can’t go back to Chicago,” I said, quieter. “At least, not now. The Soul Eater will be looking for us, and he’ll follow us there. At least here we have the resources to protect ourselves.”

“And there we have security,” Nathan argued, but I cut him off.

“What about those creatures? Who do you think will stop them? The doorman? The janitor? The head of the building association?” My voice had grown louder, and I lowered it. “Have you thought of how many people will die when he lets those things loose in Chicago?”

“But the book, Dahlia’s spell book—”

“Is in the car. I’m not an idiot, Nathan. I wouldn’t leave something like that behind. We have to stay here, where we can keep a closer eye on what the Soul Eater is up to.” I watched as he tried to form another protest, and then as defeat finally registered on his features.

He looked up, acknowledging Bill for the first time. “Thank you. For your help. You’ve done more than I ever would have asked you to.”

Bill held up one hand, letting it fall in obvious exhaustion. “It’s nothing. I mean, it’s something. If it were my kid, I’d want someone to help me.”

“Do you have kids?” It was something I hadn’t thought of. Had I dragged him away from his family, possibly to get him killed?

“No. But if I did.” He shook his head. “You’re right. If we head back to Max’s place, they’re going to follow you guys. And if this Soul Eater guy is going to track you down wherever you go, well, why not stay where you can keep a closer eye on him, rather than be surprised when you wake up dead?”

Nathan snorted. “Well, when you—a human who has little knowledge of the situation aside from vague rumblings in the Chicago underground—frame it that way, in the context of the knowledge you don’t have, I really can’t argue.”

When he tries to, Nathan can be an incredible ass. “I filled him in on the details on the drive up here. To save you. Which he helped with. You’d be in your sire’s living room sipping tea right now, if he hadn’t. So, can you at least pretend he’s a human being, worthy of respect?”

We sat in silence for a minute. I studied Nathan’s face, amazed as ever to watch it visibly healing. My head still throbbed. I probably had—and would have—a fractured skull for a few days. The pressure behind my eyes forced my eyelids closed, sleep making my thoughts heavy. Just as I dropped off, I roused myself. “I’m sorry, I’m falling asleep,” I mumbled, rubbing my eyes.

Nathan patted my shoulder, urging me to lean against him. “Go ahead, get some rest.”

“No,” I protested. “We’ve got to keep an eye out, in case—”

With a beleaguered sigh, he wrapped his arm around me. Not around my shoulders, but around my head, bringing his hand to neatly cover my mouth as he pulled me close to him.

Bill chuckled, and Nathan dropped his arm to my shoulders. My eyes eased open for a moment and I saw Ziggy, still unconscious, like something out of a dream. He was alive. And he was back home.

Morning came too soon.

Lately, it always seemed to come too soon, Max realized. When night was the time for him to be up and moving around, cleaning, doing laundry, going to the bar, hanging out, the night seemed to be plenty of time to get everything done. He’d even found himself bored on occasion. But now, when he had to tear himself away from Bella’s warm, soft body, the night seemed unfairly short.

Now, the dawn loomed on the horizon, and with it inevitable separation. He was trying hard not to be morose, but it was more difficult than he’d expected. A few months ago, he would have been aching for a fight, any kind of danger to break up the monotony of the everyday. And it never occurred to him then to worry about what would happen if he didn’t survive. Bella was his everyday now, and it terrified him to think he might not get back to her.

He supposed he was the perfect example of “be careful what you wish for.”

Rising from the bed as gently as he could, trying not to wake Bella until absolutely necessary, he reached for the jeans wadded up on the floor. He pulled them on, set a teakettle of blood on the hot plate by the bathroom sink and went out to the balcony while he waited for it to warm.

The sky over the lake was a black-tinged blue, turning slowly golden near the eastern horizon. Some mornings he saw pink reflected on the clouds. Some mornings, the sun seemed to just appear; one moment it was night, the next, day, without him even noticing. It wasn’t something he’d ever experienced in his human life, definitely nothing he’d purposely hung around to watch in his vampire days. Usually, it put him in a great mood. Now, as the sun rose in the east, his gaze was drawn to the runway at the cliff’s edge. The jet parked there had its lights on, a small truck was stopped next to it.

“Great, don’t rush me along or anything.”

“Max?” Bella’s sleepy voice called. “You are already awake?”

He strolled into the bedroom, his heart catching in his throat a little bit at the sight of her, struggling to sit up, reaching for her robe that was impossibly far away. How would she fare when he was gone? Sure, one of her surly relations would probably help her, but how could they be there for everything she needed? How could anyone take better care of her than him? It was another reason that he would have to make damn sure to stay alive and get back to her.

As if she’d read his thoughts, Bella’s expression turned dark. “Do not look at me with such pity. I am capable on my own.”

“I know you are,” he said, trying not to sound patronizing but handing her the robe all the same. “I’m just worried that you won’t have everything you need here. That you’ll be…neglected.”

She arched a sardonic brow. “You think I would tolerate being neglected?”

“I think your family will take better care of you than they would me, were the situation reversed.” Max helped her ease her arms into the robe, lamenting the loss of all that tight, tanned skin from his view. He didn’t want to be so shallow as to add “see my girlfriend naked again” to his list of reasons to survive.

“That is probably true,” Bella agreed, then, slowly, she said, “I…have been thinking. About you leaving.”

The smell of the blood alerted him to the imminent prospect of overwarming, and he went to the bathroom to retrieve the kettle. “I’m listening.”

“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 something?” 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.

He sighed, and the pain in it cut my heart to ribbons. Then, with forced cheerfulness, he pointed out, Actually, it might be a blessing. Having no reason to question it. If we were human, we might not agree and then where would we be? Not together.

Did that ever bother you with your human girlfriends? I felt a little curl of jealousy, ridiculous as it sounds. He’d mentioned having a girlfriend before, but I’d never questioned him further. I mean, did it ever create a problem?

The only woman after Marianne—besides you—was Linda. And she…ugh, what a mess that was. Under my cheek I felt his laughter, a low, dismayed sound deep in his chest.

Still, I wondered if he was right, if we would still be together even without the bond that held us. Nathan and I might have been through a lifetime’s worth of emotional woes, but our relationship stood the chance of lasting far longer than a single lifetime.

The thought struck me like a hammer. Nathan was my sire…as long as he lived and I lived, we were stuck with each other. And if our romantic relationship didn’t last that long—and so far things looked bleak—what then? But if it did last that long, what then? For the first time, I very seriously considered what was involved in vampire relationships, and it scared me more than any monster I’d faced thus far. Nathan and I could, for all intents and purposes, end up together forever, literally. And would it be because we truly wanted to be, or because some mystical force made it that way?

Clearly picking up on my freaked-out vibe, he cupped my jaw in his palm, stroking my face with his index finger. That relationship ended because she was ready for something I wasn’t. Bad timing. That, and it was a hardship trying to pretend that I wasn’t a vampire. Neither of those reasons apply to us.

My face scrunched up in embarrassment as I laughed at myself. “I know that.”

“And you love me?” he asked, running his thumb over my bottom lip as he leaned forward to kiss me.

Those momentary fears—and the ones that had stacked up on me for months—seemed so ridiculous now in the face of nearly losing him. I smiled against his mouth. “Yes. I love you.”

He kissed me, so long and gentle and thorough that I lost track of time before it ended and yet it seemed torturously short when it actually did.

Ziggy stirred. “You guys aren’t making out, are you?”

Nathan reached over and smacked the back of his head, playful in that rough way men have. “Go back to sleep. This is grown-up time.”

Ziggy’s back shook with laughter we couldn’t hear. “Yeah. Just don’t let it get too adult. I’m a kid, remember.”

“You’re a pain in the ass, is what you are,” Nathan said, his voice full of relief and love and happiness despite the fact that so much still lay ahead of us. “I’m glad you’re back.”

I heard Ziggy’s rustling movements, then a small noise of approval. “I knew it.”

“Knew what?” Nathan asked.

Ziggy yawned. “You two. I knew you’d hook up.”

“Ah, well, I knew that, too,” Nathan said offhandedly. “Just wasn’t sure how it would happen.”

“I’m glad somebody let me in on it,” I said sleepily, my eyes drifting closed. “But you’re forgetting, there’s a very large piece of information Ziggy doesn’t know.”

“What’s that?” he asked, suddenly alarmed and eager all at once.

“Nathan’s my sire,” I responded on a yawn.

Before Ziggy could respond, Nathan interjected, “It’s a very long story. Best saved for another time.”

“Whatever,” he replied amid more rustling of his coat. “Wake me when the sun is down.”

Try to get some sleep, yourself, I mentally nagged Nathan, and he pressed a kiss to the top of my head. If he responded, I didn’t hear it.

Six:

Reconnection, cont.

O ur first order of business when we emerged from the shelter was to make things more livable in the apartment. It didn’t take as long as I had expected, though Nathan was dismayed every time we turned up another ruined notepad or book that was too damaged to be salvaged.

Something about the apartment had changed in our absence. Nothing physical, but the atmosphere had shifted. After I’d first been changed, I’d seen Nathan’s home as a fortress, a refuge. Sanctuary. And then, after I’d become a permanent resident, as home. Now it was cold and unfeeling, as if the walls were living things who would just as soon give us all up to our enemies and be done with us as abide us living within them.

“I hate to point this out, but you guys kind of destroyed my car and put a giant kink in my livelihood,” Bill said, sliding a stack of mutilated notebooks onto a shelf. “The least you can do is give me a ride back to Chicago.”

“Not right now.” Nathan’s reply came out as if it had been at the ready for most of the night. “I’m sorry, but you’re too much of a liability to us. We don’t know you that well, and we don’t know what kind of people you work for.”

“So, he’s a hostage, then?” Ziggy asked, something bloodthirsty and eager in his voice that strangely suited him.

Nathan shrugged. “For all intents and purposes. But we’ll find a way to compensate you for the time and income you’ll lose. I just can’t think of a way now.”

Bill considered, plainly unhappy. “I guess I can think of worse places to be stuck. But I can’t say I’ve ever been a hostage before, and I’m not entirely cool with this idea. I’m not here to help you with some grand, world-saving plan.”

He had a very valid point, and every right to be angry with us. We’d never asked him to help us this far, and we’d definitely taken advantage of the little assistance he’d offered us. Now, he was our hostage. I wondered again if there was a family waiting for him at home that we were keeping him from.

“Thank you so much, Bill, for all your help.” Of course, my thanks seemed too little too late, considering he’d just been told he was a prisoner, but I wanted him to know he was at least appreciated. “Really, you’ve done more than necessary.”

“And will continue to do,” Nathan said cheerfully. “He’s a good man.”

Ziggy wandered to the bottom of the stairs that led to the street. “So, how are we going to secure this place? It’s not exactly the Reichstag here.”

“Two men awake, two men asleep, take turns on four-hour watch,” Bill answered quickly. “One up here, one down in the bookstore seems reasonable. Do you guys have walkie-talkies?”

“You used to be in the A-Team or something?” Ziggy quipped, and I smiled to myself. He was beginning to sound like the kid I remembered.

“Bill used to be in the Marines,” Nathan said in the same patient tone someone would use to explain the bizarre behavior of a mentally handicapped relative.

I picked up the spell book, which I had snagged from the car on the way up to the apartment. “What about something out of here? She has all sorts of protection spells. There has to be something that will work on the building.”

Nathan took the book from me with a frown. “Probably nothing useful. Dahlia seemed to be more concerned with destructive magic than anything that would do anyone any good. There might be some lesser wards worth checking into, though.”

“Good. We’ll do that, and Bill and Ziggy can go look for blood.” I turned to the door and wrenched it open. “We’ll do it in the bookstore.”

“Kinky.”

The voice came from the bottom of the stairs. My mouth went dry and my throat closed up. Which was unfortunate, because my heart had just leaped into it.

“Aren’t you even going to say hi?”

“Max!” My voice came back before he reached the top of the stairs, and once he stood in the doorway, my reflexes returned, as well. He stiffened, bracing for the impact as I lunged to embrace him, but relaxed as my arms closed around him.

“I’m glad to see you, too.” He laughed, giving me a gentle squeeze. “I would have been even happier to see you in Chicago. It would have saved me five hours in the car.”

Nathan was right behind me, and, to my surprise and Max’s, I’m sure, hugged Max as soon as I stepped back. “We’ve been worried about you, friend.”

Slapping Nathan on the back, Max stepped away. “I should disappear without saying goodbye more often. You guys are in a better mood when I turn up.”

“Don’t you dare ever do that again,” I admonished, aching to hug him again. “We were so worried.”

“I called. I left a message. If you would ever check your voice mail—” He paused and looked into the living room. “Bill?”

“And Ziggy. He’s alive,” Nathan said, his brow furrowing. “You don’t seem surprised to see him.”

The friendly vibe fled the scene, replaced by something electric and cold. Something ready to escalate, like the feeling of doom right before you grab the doorknob that gives you a wicked electric shock.

“Like I said, you should check your voice mail.” Max shrugged, then half smiled, but I could tell from the nervous glint in his eyes that he knew he’d said the disastrously wrong thing.

Nathan grabbed him by the front of the shirt and pushed him against the wall. Some plaster fell from the ceiling, and the wall creaked ominously. “You called me to tell me that my son was still alive and instead of talking to me you left it in a voice mail?”

We all stood silent in the dying echo of Nathan’s shouted accusation. If everyone was on the same page as I was, they were trying to figure out a way to end this confrontation without Nathan hurling Max down the stairs.

“Nate,” Ziggy said cautiously. “It’s not like he had another option.”

“He had another option. He could have gotten you out of there and brought you home!” He shoved Max again, and something fell somewhere in the other half of the apartment.

“He didn’t want to come with me,” Max said. He wasn’t angry, and that only infuriated Nathan more.

I felt his rage spike through the blood tie, and scolded him mentally, Not quite as fun when the person you’re beating up just sits there and takes it.

Stay out of it, Carrie, he warned, turning his head to glare at me. “Of course he wanted to come with you. He was scared out of his mind when he called me!”

“When I called you, it was a trap.” Ziggy stood and shrugged his jacket on, not making eye contact with any of us. “Don’t blame him. I’m the fuckup.”

Nathan tried to hold on to his anger at Max, but it was a losing fight. He let go, and Max dropped a few inches—I hadn’t realized that Nathan had managed to lift him off the ground—but he quickly recovered, brushing himself off. There was a sizable dent in the wall behind him. “I tried to get him to come along, really, I did. But I had Bella with me—”

“Bella!” I couldn’t believe I’d forgotten to ask about her, regardless of the dustup I’d just witnessed. “Is she with you?”

“No, she had to stay behind,” Max said, his gaze flitting distractedly from me to Nathan, keeping alert to another possible attack. “She’s not able to walk yet.”

“My God, what happened?” I asked, but I didn’t get an answer. Ziggy pushed past us without a word and charged down the stairs. A person would have to be blind to miss the anger in his posture. I can’t say I wouldn’t have reacted similarly to see Nathan behave the way he was on my behalf. As if I were helpless or something.

“Ziggy!” Nathan moved to go after him, and I stopped him, gripping his arm.

Let him go. His moodiness would pass. He’d been through a lot and needed time on his own. And Nathan must have agreed with me, because he let him go.

He turned to Max and held out his hand, unable to meet his gaze. “I’m sorry.”

“Yeah, I don’t have tact.” Max took Nathan’s hand and shook it, then gestured to the sofa. “Maybe we should catch up a little. I’m here for a reason, and I’m betting it’s a little project you’re going to want to help work on.”

“Listen, guys,” Bill said, his words swallowed by a yawn. “I need to go to bed. Your schedule is killing me. Is there someplace semiprivate I can sleep?”

Nathan eyed him suspiciously, looking for a split second in the direction where Ziggy had just departed. “You know, the best way to adapt to it is to just tough it out.”

I sent Nathan a warning vibe to go with my arched eyebrow. When I managed to catch his eye, he looked away. Do you know how old he is, Carrie?

Do you know how old “Jacob” is? It was a low blow, but we didn’t have time for Nathan to play protective father. I smiled at Bill and said, “You can crash in the back room of the bookshop. We’ll leave you alone there. Just don’t let the bedbugs bite.”

“Or anything else,” Max said with a snort, which he immediately squelched at Nathan’s angry glare.

“Before we start discussing battle plans—” Max knew Nathan almost as well as I did “—there’s something I need to tell you guys.”

As he gestured, I noticed something strange about his hand, out of the corner of my eye. I reached for his wrist and brought his hand up easily. He was missing two fingers.

“And a toe,” he said, before I could say anything. “It was a torture thing. That’s not important.”

On that grim note, we settled into the living room—Max on the couch, Nathan in his chair and I on the arm of it—and listened, trying not to ask too many questions as he told us what had happened with the Oracle.

I was able to accept that he’d gotten Bella pregnant under the influence of one of Dahlia’s potions. We’d figured that much out on our own. I was able to accept that Bella had been maimed in a horrific car accident and that she’d turned Max into a lupin. But I was a little stuck on the part where Max could walk around in broad daylight.

“I know, I’m as mystified as you are.” He shrugged helplessly and stood, prowling around the living room like, well, a caged animal. “You have no idea how much it changes you, after all those years of not seeing a sunrise or, hell, even being awake at the same time everyone else is.”

There was something sad in Nathan’s eyes as he nodded, even though he smiled. “Congratulations on the baby. There’s something that will change you.”

Max turned serious then. “If I can get back to her. That’s kind of why I came to find you. My father-in-law has more or less banished me from the pack until this unseemly business with the Soul Eater is taken care of.” He made a noise of disgust. “Because I’m going to be held personally accountable for the actions of every vampire on the planet until the day I die, apparently. Probably beyond that.”

“Well, we’re not going to be much help.” Nathan looked at me as if to reassure me he was okay, but I felt his sadness and even a little bit of envy through the blood tie. The thing he’d wanted most in life was a family, and if the Soul Eater hadn’t taken it from him, his wife’s fragile condition already would have. I knew how much it must have stung to find out that Max was going to be a father. “We haven’t gotten very far, ourselves. But Carrie has some experience in working magic that could prove handy.”

“If I don’t die of starvation first.” My stomach grumbled loudly to illustrate my point.

Max laughed. “I have some blood downstairs. It won’t keep us going for long, but we’ve got enough that we won’t starve for a couple of days.”

Max and Nathan went downstairs together to grab the blood, which I warmed up for us and managed not to guzzle down on my own. Before Max fell victim to our “weird” schedule—though from his drooping eyelids and the six-hour time change he’d endured, I believed he was actually tired—we filled him in on the Soul Eater’s new minions and all that had occurred with Ziggy.

“I know he’s your kid,” Max said, his voice full of genuine sympathy. “But we need to keep an eye on him.”

Nathan agreed easily. “I hate to say it, but it hasn’t been far from my thoughts.”

“Well, I think I need to find a place to sleep, myself.” Max stood and stretched, and I found my gaze following his maimed hand.

“Max,” I said, meaning to tell him thank you for helping us, thank you for being horribly tortured in the line of duty, but that wasn’t the kind of thing he would have wanted to hear. “You could take Ziggy’s old room.”

He cracked a reluctant smile. “No, I think the kid will need it. I’m a dog now. Just dig me a hole out back and throw some straw in it and I should be good to go.”

“Well, there is the emergency shelter under the counter,” Nathan said, and I elbowed him. “What?” he protested loudly, cradling his bruised ribs. “He said all he needed was a hole.”

“Hey, at least that one has a sleeping bag in it. It’s one up from straw.” Max slung his duffel bag over his shoulder and started down the stairs. “If I see the kid, I’ll tell him to get up here and grab some chow.”

When Max was gone, and we were left alone in the apartment, Nathan opened a book and settled into the chair, but I could tell from the look on his face that he wasn’t reading a word.

“Strategizing?” I guessed, sitting on the arm of the chair he occupied. I ruffled his hair and kissed his forehead.

“No. I was actually thinking of which of my rebellious children to discipline first.” He closed the book and looked up at me, dismay giving his face a tired expression.

“Don’t do that, it’s gross. Calling me your kid,” I added for clarity.

He closed his eyes and inhaled deeply, as if the oxygen would clear his head. “I suppose you’re going to tell me to go talk to him?”

I shook my head. “No. Give him time to cool down.”

“Am I a bad father if I say that I’m very glad you suggested that?” He leaned his head back, eyes closed. “Where did this go all wrong?”

“Six months ago. Six hellish months ago.” I laughed. “And it’s getting better every moment.”

His hand slid up my arm, under the sleeve of my T-shirt to my shoulder, where he slipped his fingers under my bra strap. “It hasn’t all been bad.”

He pulled me into his lap, and I didn’t resist him. The spells and protection wards could wait twenty minutes, and I refused to feel guilty or wary about ignoring them for the moment.

I pulled my shirt over my head, grateful that I’d worn one of my form-over-function bras today and not some cotton comfort thing. Not that I’d planned on having sex. It wasn’t something we’d done in quite a while.

Nathan murmured his appreciation for the pink lace against the pale tops of my breasts—I’d lost a lot of skin color in the past six months, I noted with dismay—and kissed a path up to my neck.

Briefly, I worried. “What if Ziggy comes back? Or Bill or Max?”

Nathan shook his head, breathing faster as I reached between us to slide his shirt up. As he pulled it over his head, he mumbled, “They won’t.”

It was a good enough answer for me, after nearly a month of self-imposed celibacy. I stood just for a moment, to pull down my jeans, and Nathan assisted with trembling hands.

“What’s the matter?” I laughed as he fumbled with the zipper. “Nervous?”

“Actually, a little.” He looked embarrassed to admit it. “I can’t help it, it feels like it’s been forever.”

We laughed, and he yanked the jeans down over my hips, my panties with them. He unzipped his own fly, and I climbed onto the chair to straddle him. When he slipped inside me, he groaned and a little thrill shot through me at the sound.

It might have been a while since the last time, but that proved no real hurdle for us that I could determine. I gripped the back of the chair to gain leverage, whimpering in frustration when it finally proved too difficult to raise and lower myself on him.

“Hang on, sweetheart,” he rasped against my ear, and he lifted me in his arms as he rose. He carried me the few steps to the small kitchen table and swept our dirty mugs from it with one arm. I gasped in protest at the sight of the mugs cracking to pieces as they hit the linoleum, but all thoughts of collateral damage fled when the cold, hard plastic tabletop met my back, and Nathan thrust into me, deeper and harder than he’d been able to in the chair.

I opened my eyes to take in the sight of him, naked and hard, white skin gleaming like marble in the weird yellow glow of the ceiling lamp. My gaze slid over the scars from the Soul Eater’s possession, which still hadn’t healed, probably never would, that marred his arms, down to where his hands flexed as they gripped my hips and pulled me tighter against him as he drove deeper inside of me. I watched the way the muscles of his stomach bunched as he moved, the dark line of hair that fanned out over his chest, noted with strange fascination that I could see his pulse leap at the base of his throat.

As I raised myself up he slipped his arms around my back to support me. “Can I bite you?” I whispered against the hollow of his elbow. Though he didn’t answer in words, I took his noise of strained self-control as an affirmative. I let my face change, just long enough to puncture his skin with my fangs, then let it ease back to normal, fastening my lips to the wound I’d made.

He’d hissed in pain when I’d first bit him, but now he only groaned and took great, gasping breaths. All sense of rhythm abandoned, he shoved inside me so hard the table rocked on its pedestal. He captured one of my hands and brought it to his mouth, twisted into his feeding face, and bit down on my palm at the base of my thumb. It hurt. I hissed at the pain, and then again at the pleasure that shot through me.

I closed my mouth over the wound I’d made on him and sucked hard. I felt everything. Him inside me and what it was for him to be inside of me. What it was for him to feel what I felt. The taste of my blood in his blood, his blood in my blood. It was a never-ending loop, a whirlpool of sensation that dragged me under, left me gasping, shaking as my body tightened around him, my legs locking around his back as he surged into me.

After a moment, he withdrew, kissed the spot on my palm and slumped to the floor. I opened my eyes and saw him wince as he flexed his arm. I could only lie sprawled on the little table, my feet brushing the floor as my legs dangled over the side.

I heard a dull rip, the rending of fabric, and Nathan pressed something into my hand. Half of his T-shirt, I noted with a giggle.

“What’s that about?” he asked, out of breath.

I smiled, sitting up and winding the shirt around my bleeding palm. “Nothing. I just feel good.”

“I’m glad you feel good,” he said, eyeing me warily. “I didn’t take too much, did I?”

“No.” I giggled again. I couldn’t help it. “Did I?”

He bent his arm with a grimace. “No, but it hurt like hell. It’s been a long time since I’ve been bitten.”

“Me, too.” I reached for my jeans and pulled them on. “But it was nice.”

He grinned, a little embarrassed, if I guessed correctly from his expression. “It was. I don’t know why you asked to do it, though.”

And I realized then that I didn’t know, either. Biting had seemed so…bad. So dirty in the past. But it hadn’t this time. It had been as erotic as hell. “I don’t know. It just felt right.”

In fact, it had felt more than right. It had felt like something a vampire would just do.

And I felt more like myself than I had in a long time.

Seven:

Spirited Away

G rand Rapids was no kind of city for a vampire.

Ziggy lit another cigarette and peered at the clock behind the bar. They kept it dark enough in the place, they should have at least invested in a clock that lit up or glowed in the dark or something.

He wished he hadn’t stormed out the way he had. Nate probably thought he was mad at him. Maybe he was. But he couldn’t tell. Jacob could be sneaky like that, putting thoughts in when you weren’t looking and just leaving them there for you to stumble over. Half the time, Ziggy wasn’t sure he had an original idea about anything anymore. Maybe it was all Jacob, filling up his head, making him crazy as shit when all he wanted was to just fix things with Nate and get back to life as normal.

But who decided what was normal? Coming back from the dead, was that normal? And how did you fix things with someone when you knew they’d be happier if you were dead? When they’d even left you for dead in the past?

He swore and gulped down the last of his beer. It wasn’t good, but it was tricking his stomach out of its hunger for now. The bartender gave him the fish eye when he picked up the empty glass and refilled it. Ziggy’s fake ID hadn’t fooled him, but he didn’t look like the type who’d take an argument over a tip, especially when the bar was as empty as it was.

The heavy door scraped open on its sticky hinges. It was a terrible sound. Worse, because it could mean that one of Jacob’s hired goons was sneaking up right that very second. Ziggy put his hand casually on the hunting knife concealed beneath his jacket, then relaxed when the guy behind him let out a mock-impressed whistle.

“Wow. Flashy.” Bill sat down on the stool beside him and motioned to the bartender. “Seven and seven, and another one of whatever my friend here is having, for him.”

The bartender, who would have looked like Santa Claus but for the stained polo shirt he wore and the toothpick hanging out of the corner of his mouth, gave Bill the same suspicious look he’d given Ziggy. Maybe he was just a naturally suspicious person. It wasn’t the best part of town, and the town was infested with vampires, after all.

“Unless you’d rather go grab a bite,” Bill said, the corner of his mouth twitching. “In which case I’d just as soon stay here.”

Ziggy didn’t respond. It was kind of fun to watch the guy scramble mentally while his joke fell flat as a pancake.

Bill’s throat moved as he swallowed. “See, it was a joke. Because you bit me.”

“Yeah, I got it,” Ziggy assured him, still not cracking a smile.

Running away from the conversation as if it were on fire, Bill turned his head and nodded to the small television attached to the wall above the corner booth. The screen showed some sports channel. Guys in suits, talking about statistics that didn’t mean anything important except to guys like Bill. “Tigers are doing good this year, huh? They’ve actually got a shot at the postseason again.”

“I don’t like baseball.” Ziggy took a slow drink.

“I’m a Sox fan, anyway. White, not red. But neither of them are doing so hot this year.”

“What the hell are you doing here?” Ziggy turned on the stool and let his coat fall open, so the guy could get a glimpse of the knife strapped inside. “Nate send you after me?”

The guy didn’t flinch. Ziggy had to admit, he was tough. He’d even tried to fight him off when he’d bitten him. Somebody like that, you could respect.

He took a swallow of his drink before he answered. “No, he did not. And I did not come here to look for you. It’s the only place open within walking distance.”

“You didn’t walk far enough,” Ziggy muttered. You could practically see the bar from Nate’s bedroom window. There was no way Bill wasn’t there on a spy mission.

They sat in silence for a while. Ziggy turned back to the bar and stared into the bottom of his glass, waiting for Bill to leave. No dice. The guy took another drink and said, “So, you got a girlfriend, Ziggy?”

Nice. The guy was as transparent as a piece of glass. Real easy to read. After a while with people like Dahlia and Jacob, it was a refreshing change. “Not so much with the girls. But I’m betting that’s why you asked.”

“I had a hunch. I’m good like that.” He didn’t look embarrassed at being caught or anything. Just like…whatever. Again, a nice change from people who freaked if you guessed their little mind games. He didn’t even look away when he asked, “So, any other…friends?”

Ziggy didn’t want to laugh, but he let himself smile a little bit. “You’re pretty direct.”

“As a nonstop commuter flight.” Bill laughed, then nervously added, “Yeah, that’s another joke. Because they’re nonstop, so you don’t have to get a connection—”

“Yeah, got that one, too. And I might even laugh if you manage to be funny.” Ziggy stubbed out his cigarette and reached for another one. “So, you’re a groupie, huh?”

That question actually managed to rattle Bill a little. Good. Showed he was healthy. He stuttered a little as he started to answer. “No, uh…just a blood donor. And I organize a couple other blood donors, take part of their profits.”

Ziggy nodded. “So, you’re not a groupie, you’re a vampire profiteer?”

“I prefer ‘donor pimp,’ but yeah,” he said with a shrug.

Now Ziggy let himself laugh. “Donor pimp. That’s funny.”

“Wasn’t meant to be.” Bill grabbed Ziggy’s lighter and flicked it open against his thigh, lighting it in the process before he held it out for him.

Okay, that was pretty smooth, Ziggy conceded to himself as he leaned toward Bill to light up.

“So, how long have you been doing that?” he asked as he straightened back up. “The donor pimping, not the lighter trick.”

Bill made a sort of humming noise while he thought, finally answering, “I started when I was thirty-two, so eight years now? Something like that.”

“Took a while to get established, huh?” Ziggy did a quick mental calculation. “You look good for your age. You sure you’re not drinking some of your clients’ blood on the side?”

“Hey, thanks.” He looked genuinely pleased at that. “You don’t look a day over eighteen. How old are you?”

“Don’t tell Papa Smurf over there, but I’m only twenty.” Ziggy was less pleased to hear he looked like a kid. It was going to make eternity pretty unbearable if he was going to have to start with a new identity every five years.

Bill chuckled and slid the lighter across the bar to Ziggy. “No, what I meant was, total. How old are you in total?”

“Twenty.” Ziggy met his confused stare head-on. “Really. I got turned a little bit before my last birthday.”

“Wow.” Bill seemed to contemplate that a moment.

A little flame of disappointment flickered in Ziggy. Now he would be just a kid in this guy’s eyes, which was a damned shame. He was fun to relate to as an adult, and not many adults seemed to be taking Ziggy seriously these days. Steering the conversation away from the weirdness of the moment, he said, “So, what did you do before you started donor pimping? The army or something, right?”

Bill smiled before taking another gulp of his drink, and it wasn’t the kind of indulgent smile you’d give a kid. Bonus. “I was in the Marines.”

“So, you’re a big, tough fighting guy?” Ziggy didn’t really care for military types. Jacob’s place was always surrounded with them. Ziggy had started thinking of them as servants, and it lowered Bill’s status a little bit in his mind. That was a good thing. Meant he’d still have the upper hand or whatever if anything started. Not that he wanted anything to start. Humans are food, not our friends, Jacob admonished from his memory.

Bill looked nervously back at the television, then at the bartender, then back to his drink. His body language spoke volumes. He didn’t want to talk about whatever it was he used to do. “Yeah. I mean, no. I never saw any combat or anything. But I didn’t like it. The whole scene was a little too structured for me.”

“Is that why you quit?” He took a pull off his cigarette and tapped the end against the ashtray. “Too much structure?”

“Quit isn’t really the word for it.” Bill looked down at the bar and rubbed his neck. “I was…Let’s just say I was politely asked to leave. My services were no longer required.”

“Ah.” Ziggy had heard the correct terminology for that somewhere. Probably from one of Jacob’s guards. But he didn’t really care, one way or the other. “I don’t think I could do the whole army thing. I’m not big on taking orders.”

Bill snorted. “It wasn’t the army. It was the Marines. And yeah, I can see where you’d have a problem. I got axed because I have a hard time keeping my mouth shut when I think I have something useful to contribute. For instance, if I thought up a more efficient way to do something, I would tell my commanding officer—whether he asked me or not. And that wasn’t exactly what they wanted.”

“They wanted a cog in a machine.” Ziggy knew how that felt. He got that feeling from Jacob sometimes. As if he was just another employee, no matter what his sire said or did to him. He cleared his throat. “Listen, you don’t have to stay here with me. I’m not going to escape.”

“Hey, I’m as much a hostage as you are. In fact, maybe I should be tied to a radiator or something.” From the tone of Bill’s voice, Ziggy knew he was telling the truth. “But I didn’t come over here because I thought you were going to escape.”

And fuck, wasn’t that weird? Having some guy—some actually pretty good-looking guy—sitting there, saying he wasn’t there for an ulterior purpose.

Of course, he’d never said that, Ziggy realized. He’d said he wasn’t there because he was worried about him escaping. Maybe he was there because Nate had sent him. Maybe he was just bored, or an alcoholic. Maybe he was a vampire groupie, after all, and he was just better at covering it up. Maybe he’d come here looking for Ziggy, but for an entirely different reason.

“I’m not trying to pick you up,” Bill said quietly.

Ziggy stared back at him. “Did you read my mind?”

“No.” Bill laughed, but his smile didn’t show in his eyes. “But I read your facial expression. Jesus, have you had some rough relationships in the past or something?”

“Or something. Let’s change the subject.” Ziggy stood and stubbed out the cigarette, threw some money down on the bar. He started for the door, half wanting Bill to go the fuck away and half wanting him to follow. Weird.

But he didn’t do either. He just sat where he was. “You don’t have to be a hard-ass with me. I mean, I know I’m supposed to be wicked impressed here, but the unapproachable act gets stale fast.”

Funny. Ziggy smiled, but he wiped it off when he turned to face Bill. “I don’t get what you’re saying.”

From the way he laughed, it was hard to tell if Bill was annoyed or not. “I’m saying drop the rebellious teenager who doesn’t give a fuck act and be real with me for a few minutes. We might find that if we’re not trying to top each other’s carefully crafted banter, we’d actually get along.”

This time, Ziggy let Bill see the smile. “I thought we were getting along.”

“And here I thought we were just rehearsing for a bad romantic comedy.” Bill gestured to the chair. “Have a seat. We’ve got time before last call.”

So, they talked. And talked. And every time the urge to be himself came along, Ziggy followed the instinct. And every time Jacob—no, the Soul Eater, it hurt less to think of him that way—tried to push into his head and fill his mind with strange insecurities and assurances that he would never be loved or even respected by a person other than his sire, he shoved those away, too.

Bill was actually a cool guy. He had funny stories about vampires, soldiers, just about anything. Even his stories that weren’t funny were funny, because something about him was just…well, he was a funny guy.

Yeah, he was great. So great that last call came too soon, which really sucked.

And when they got back to the apartment, the upstairs door was locked, and that really sucked.

“I have a feeling that it’s locked for privacy reasons, rather than safety,” Bill said with a snicker, and Ziggy glared at him. He cleared his throat then and at least pretended to look remorseful. “I’m sorry. No one likes to think about their dad having sex.”

At least the bookstore was unlocked. Ziggy ushered Bill in and pointed to the farthest corner of the shop, behind the toppled bookshelves. “My old bed might be in the back room of the bookstore. You can sleep there and be comfortable.”

“Where are you going?” Bill asked as they picked their way through the wreckage. “Back out on the street to be a brooding vampire?”

He bristled at that. “I’m not going to run away, if that’s what you think.”

“I already told you I don’t. But it seems kind of lonely, just wandering around a town that seems to close up shop at 9:00 p.m. when you’ve got perfectly good company here.”

“I like to be alone.” Ziggy turned and headed for the door.

“Okay, I get it. You go roam the streets, and I’ll somehow pick this padlock and then you can lock me in so I don’t get away.” He gestured to Ziggy. “Give me one of those safety pins off your boots.”

Nate had never padlocked the storage room before. But then, judging from the rest of the place, it was probably good that he had. Ziggy forced down his growing irritation and made his way to Bill’s side.

“I’ve got a better idea.” Ziggy gripped the lock and jerked it down sharply. It held together a hinged metal rectangle that slotted over a U-shaped loop attached to the door. The whole thing snapped free from the bolts, bending the door a little where the closure was attached. The whole destruction took less than a second, and Ziggy felt pretty pleased with himself, until he saw the look on Bill’s face. He appeared to be torn between being impressed and just plain being scared shitless.

“My sire is pretty strong, and I drink his blood, so…” That was the worst thing to say. He just shut his mouth and went inside.

“Why didn’t he have the rest of the place this secure?” Bill asked as Ziggy found the pull cord for the dusty lightbulb overhead.

“I don’t know. It used to be. Stuff changed.” Stuff like Carrie. Stuff like dying. Stuff like dying because Carrie let Cyrus nearly rip his head off.

Bill pulled the door closed. As closed as he could now that it was bent, anyway. “Well, I’ll just have to improvise. You don’t have to stay.”

“Nah, it’s all right. Not like I have anything better to do.” And wasn’t that the truth. Vampires in New York, Chicago, those were lucky vampires. Stuff stayed open late.

But he supposed it could have been worse. He could live in Alaska.

Bill ran his hand across one of the dusty shelves as if he was testing it for stability. “You fed already, right?”

“Jesus.” Ziggy leaned against the wall and closed his eyes. That was officially the very last thing he needed, for Bill to be afraid that he was looking at him like some all-you-can-eat buffet.

“You know, you bit me once already. I’m just playing it safe.” Bill sounded defensive.

Ziggy laughed, and he could taste the bitterness of it in his throat. Of course this guy wouldn’t trust him. Why should he? Why should any human trust him?

They’re not the same as us, Jacob whispered in his mind. You deserve someone to match your power.

It was a huge struggle not to respond to him. In fact, it made him feel a little bit like crying, and that was the last thing he wanted to do in front of Bill.

“Hey, are you okay?” Bill was right beside him in the next second, looking worried as hell.

“Yeah, I’m fine.” He wiped his forehead with the palm of his hand and started for the door. When he glanced down at his hand, he saw red. Great. Sweating blood. That was probably really healthy.

“I don’t know if I’ve made it clear or not,” Bill said, quiet enough that it wasn’t normal volume, but too strong and self-confident to be a whisper. “But I like you. Despite the fact you bit me. That doesn’t mean I expect anything. But just so you have that information handy.”

Ziggy swallowed hard as Bill’s footsteps came up close behind him. A big, warm, human hand touched his shoulder. And then, without asking permission or giving any sort of warning that he was going to do so, Bill spun him to face him, and kissed him.

And Ziggy realized that he hadn’t been kissed since…well, since before he died.

It wasn’t a timid, gentle kind of kiss, either. It reminded him of one of those movie kisses that he used to think looked painful. Now he knew better. They felt damned good.

True, the only guy he’d ever kissed before was Jeremy and look how well that had turned out. But Jeremy had been a fling, a sort of test to see if he was really, really gay. He definitely hadn’t been into Ziggy as much as Ziggy had been into him. And Bill sure seemed to be into him.

That was the best part. Oh yeah, Bill’s hands in his hair and his tongue in his mouth, those were good parts, too. But knowing that the other guy had an interest in him besides getting laid—hell, at least suspecting the guy had an interest besides getting laid—that made it more than a kiss. It made it a validation somehow.

It was a shame that it ended too soon. Suddenly, Bill jerked back, leaving Ziggy dazed and disappointed.

“Did you hear that?” Bill looked at the door of the shed as if he could see through it. “I thought I heard…”

And then Ziggy heard it, too. It was Carrie, screaming.

We were on the way down to the bookshop when it happened. Maybe we were too sex-drugged to be observant, and that was our big mistake. When we stepped onto the sidewalk, Nathan’s arm around my waist, hips bumping as we walked, loose limbed and giggling, headed just a few feet to the steps down to the shop, we caught their scent on the air.

A dozen of the Soul Eater’s foul humans shuffled out of the alley, like deceptively slow monsters in a horror film. Nathan looked up, and my gaze followed his, to the rooftop, where more stood.

“Carrie, grab me,” he said, sounding oddly calm as he locked his arms around me. I had no choice but to grab his shoulders and squeeze my eyes shut tight as he vaulted us both over the iron railing and down the stairwell.

He hit first, landing on his feet on the lip of one step. We both tumbled, rolling down, every other stair finding a new part of me to bite into. We crashed through the door at the bottom and I was on my feet first, pushing it closed and locking it while Nathan wheezed and groaned on the floor.

Of course, the door wasn’t as secure as it had been in the past. The window, smashed out months ago, was still covered only in flattened cardboard boxes. The tape keeping them up had lost much of its hold, so all that really separated me from the monsters was a bit of cardboard now pinned over the opening only by my shoulder.

“Help!” I screamed, not knowing who would come to our aid. Max was asleep in the shelter, so I pounded on the floor with my foot as hard as I could while Nathan got to his feet and ran to the trapdoor.

The door to the storage room scraped open and Ziggy and Bill rushed out, Bill with his gun drawn. I’d never been more happy to see a firearm pointed at me in my entire life.

Then, two skinny but ruthlessly strong arms crumpled the cardboard on either side of me and clutched my shirt, pulling me into the hole where the window had been.

Nathan shot forward and grabbed my arms, but I pushed him back. “My shirt,” I wheezed as the collar cut into my throat. He grabbed the fabric and ripped, and the whole thing tore away, sucking out of the hole with the arms and the cardboard.

Max rushed up the stairs, bare chested and jeans unzipped, a stake in his hand. He looked from my near-topless state to the clutching, blood-crazed humans outside the door and shouted, “Cover the window!”

It didn’t matter. Before I could move out of the way, the door creaked under their weight and fell in, almost in slow motion, and the creatures rushed in after the four of us.

I didn’t have time to think things through. I just started fighting. The first one I came up against wasn’t armed. It was a good thing, too, because I couldn’t get to any kind of weapon before the first one struck. It was a short, middle-aged woman with a grown-out bleach job and sagging skin. Her dirty, broken fingernails dug into my shoulders as she pulled me against her. She was going to bite me.

The hell she was. Despite the enormous pressure on my shoulders, I raised my arms and grabbed at her head, her ears, anything to distract her, and I pulled. I held two handfuls of bloody hair before she realized what had happened and let me go. She staggered back, but her eyes were empty as she charged at me again. Without full comprehension of why I did it, I grabbed one of the overturned wooden tables that used to hold metaphysical merchandise and held it up in front of me. She twisted to make another grab at me and managed to get my wrist, forcing me to drop the table, but her listless legs tangled and fell backward onto the upturned legs. Oh, for fuck’s sake, I thought, falling on top of her and ramming her as hard as I could onto the table. Her hold released immediately and I staggered to my feet before another one could fall on us and inadvertently stake me. The blonde didn’t get up, her mouth opening and closing, body jerking. One square table leg protruded through her forehead and the bridge of her nose, another through her abdomen. The end of the leg jammed through her head was smeared wet and sticky with harsh gray bits of bone and chunks of flesh.

I felt the vomit rising in my throat. I turned away from the scene when another set of hands grabbed me. There was nothing elegant about this attack. Whoever had me lifted me over their head and hurled me into the counter. I saw the cracked top of the display case before I hit it, but it was too late. I crashed through, feeling the bite of a thousand shards of glass as they exploded around me.

Still, it was advantageous in that when I got to my feet, I had a weapon. A weapon that scored my palms and coursed blood down my arms, but still, a weapon. And when the creature who’d thrown me, a thin, young-looking guy with greasy black hair slashing across his eyes, came at me to finish the job, I sank a huge piece of glass into his body just under his rib cage and ripped up with all my might, praying my fingers wouldn’t get severed in the process. But you know that old saying about an object in motion—what holds true for rear-ending car accidents also holds true for eviscerating a human with a jagged piece of broken glass. The thing moving fastest causes the most damage. The man dropped, spewing a huge arterial spray, and my hand came away just a little bit worse for wear.

I turned and caught sight of Bill, who was holding his own, shooting anything that moved. He had a worrisome gash across his forehead and a fresh bite on his forearm, but he moved like a total killing machine. I revised my battle plan against the Soul Eater. We didn’t need an army. We needed the Marines.

Max wasn’t doing too bad himself. He wasn’t, to my disappointment, in werewolf mode, but he battled the guy who’d had him in a headlock previously with just his fists, and though the guy was a bull, he didn’t appear to be winning.

I was about to jump back into the fray when I saw Ziggy, and horror made my blood run colder than it already was.

Ziggy didn’t have a weapon. He didn’t need one. In the space of time it takes to blink, he grabbed a woman, twisted her head to the side, and ripped her throat out with his teeth, spitting a huge wad of flesh to the ground as she fell, almost instantly dead. Another rushed at him, and he punched straight through the man’s chest, jerking his bloody fist back as the man fell. There was a broken neck. Then a head torn off, spine dangling from the skull like the fuse of a bomb. Ziggy threw it aside nonchalantly and moved on to the next one.

If he’d been in some primal rage, if he’d shown some sort of emotion while killing, I wouldn’t have been so bothered. And I wouldn’t have been bothered enough to be distracted. And that distraction wouldn’t have cost me Nathan.

I’ve never been staked before. And I suppose, technically, since my heart wasn’t in my chest but in a little metal box under the guest bathroom sink back at the penthouse, it wouldn’t kill me. But when the creature sank the sharpened wood into my chest—how could anyone move so fast, so quietly?—I thought I would die. Prayed I would. I looked down, horrified, at the thick wood protruding from my chest, and my vision went hazy. The pain intensified tenfold, the way skinned knees always did as a child when I would look at them. I tumbled backward, little black spots of agony forming in my vision.

“Carrie!” Nathan shouted, and I heard a scuffle. He rushed at the creature who’d grabbed me, but the man knocked him aside as if he were a fly. Nathan tumbled onto his back, and two of the other creatures spotted him. They advanced, but they threw their makeshift weapons aside.

I watched in horror as one of them hit Nathan with a punch that sent him flying across the room. He landed with a sick crunch against one of the broken bookcases and went limp, though he tried for a moment to raise one of his hands. He slid to the floor, eyes rolling to the back of his head. Blood pooled on the wooden planks beneath him, a bright red streak behind him showing the path of his fall.

I got to my feet and started to run for him, but the one who’d staked me held me back. The awful smell of him, whether from his filthy, tattered clothing or his grimy body, made me gag.

Max headed for the two who closed in on Nathan, only to be tossed aside like a broken toy. Bill shot one of the pair, but, like the others that he’d shot, they were only slowed down. A dark-complected creature with a bullet wound in his neck gurgled, blood pouring from his mouth, but he still managed to get behind Bill and restrain him.

Ziggy had better luck. One of them took a swing he easily dodged. The other made a clumsy grab for him.

Immediately, alarms went off in my head. Either the Soul Eater had sent out his B squad, which I found doubtful, or they weren’t here to kill us. They were here for Nathan.

I struggled against my captor and did the only thing I could think of: I screamed for help, as loudly and shrilly as I could.

“Poor baby, does she need some help?” The voice behind me sent a fresh wave of anger and despair through me.

Dahlia strolled into the room, clicking her long, black fingernails against a length of black vinyl tarp. She unrolled it to reveal a zipper. It was a body bag.

She actually had the nerve to step close to me and pat me on the head. I spit in her smug face.

All the humor went out of her expression. She produced a black handkerchief—she was nothing if not a perfectly color-coordinated cliché—and daintily wiped her cheek. A streak of white pancake makeup stained the cloth when she pulled it away. “Break her arm.”

The monster jerked sharply where he hung on to one of my wrists and bone instantly splintered under his hand. I stared, too stunned to feel pain, at the jagged end of my ulna emerging from a split in my skin.

She unrolled the bag beside Nathan and lifted one of his arms, letting it drop back to the ground.

“Is he alive?” I screamed, stamping my foot in a futile effort to get their attention. “I want to know that he’s alive!”

With a giggle, she raised one bloodied palm to her mouth and darted her tongue out to taste Nathan’s blood.

I howled in rage and lunged forward, but the shock of the broken bone had worn off and my knees buckled. I hung helpless in my captor’s grasp, only able to watch as Dahlia rolled Nathan into the bag and zipped him in.

“You two, carry him,” she ordered, and one of the humans holding Max clubbed him over the back of the head. He fell with a curse and tried to stand, but the creature hit him again, and he wisely stayed down. They moved forward and grabbed the body bag containing Nathan.

“Please, just tell me if he’s alive!” I screamed at them as they disappeared through the door.

Dahlia sniffed delicately as she passed me on her way out. “Kill them,” she ordered.

As the creatures moved to do her bidding, Ziggy shouted, “Jacob is going to kill you when he finds out what you did.”

“Who do you think sent me?” she asked, then stopped in her tracks and turned, a sick smile on her face. “Besides, I don’t recall seeing you here. Alive. They must have killed you before I got here. What a tragic, tragic accident.”

“What about me, baby?” Max wheezed from the floor. “We got along, didn’t we?”

A laugh exploded from her, a burst of pure evil. “You weren’t that good.”

And then, she was gone. There wouldn’t be any further bargaining. Once, she’d told me that not everything was as black-and-white as I painted it, that evil was more a force of nature. Just the way you couldn’t reason with a tornado ripping your town apart, you couldn’t reason with Dahlia when she was ripping a life apart.

My only consolation was that the awful feeling I’d gotten when Cyrus had died—the rending of the blood tie that had bound us—hadn’t happened when they took Nathan away. And because of that, I knew I had to fight.

I couldn’t just let these creatures kill us. I didn’t need a weapon. Dahlia being so close, her power so close to me I could taste it, made me realize I already had a weapon. I closed my eyes. I’m sure the others saw it as anticipation of the death blow. I remembered Dahlia using illuminate to turn on lights, how easily it had come to her. I remembered the way Nathan had taught me to visualize what I wanted to achieve when we’d used Dahlia’s invisibility spell. The word flame came to me as easily as if it were printed on the backs of my eyelids. I knew the difference between what I wanted to do and now, and the difference between what I’d seen Dahlia do and what I wanted to happen. I didn’t want to light something up. I wanted to burn it down.

In my mind, the word unfurled in fury, with a roar like an explosion that rang off the inside of my skull. I opened my eyes, and the word burned from my lips, so hot I thought they would blister. And with the word, came the flames. They coiled out of my mouth like grasping hands, lighting the creatures’ clothes and skin instantly. They screamed and fell back, consumed before they hit the ground, and Max, Ziggy and Bill ducked away from the flames.

Something in Dahlia’s blood responded to fire, I realized as the flames died around us. When I’d consumed her blood and taken in her power that night in the mansion, the power hadn’t changed its shape. A burst of energy, as hot as any flame, shot through me and I stumbled over a smoldering corpse and toward the door. Bill, Ziggy and Max were right behind me, but by the time we reached the top of the stairs, it was too late.

A black limo careened down the street, bearing Nathan away from us, to the arms of his sire.

Eight:

Creation

T he evening went by in a weird, dreamlike way. I let Max pull the stake from my chest. It hurt almost as much as when it had first gone in. Bill’s limited experience with field medicine was enough to help mend my arm, and with some direction from me he set my wrist with a makeshift splint and an Ace bandage after he picked out the bone shards that protruded through my skin. Inwardly, I was a sea of freakish, calculating calm. Outwardly, I must have been a wreck. I saw Ziggy and Bill give each other “looks” indicating they were extremely concerned for my mental well-being. I wondered what had happened in that storage room and when, exactly, they’d started to use “looks.”

I let the guys think I was crazy, or grieving. They didn’t bother me, and it gave me time to think.

I’d used Dahlia’s magic before. It wasn’t all that difficult to do. Nathan believed that everyone had the capacity to perform magic on a small scale. It stood to reason that after I’d imbibed Dahlia’s blood and some of her power in the process, my own magical capabilities had amped up considerably. All I had to do was learn to use it. Not in the heat of the moment, fueled by extreme emotion. I’d seen enough movies to know that kind of talent was unreliable. I needed to learn how to get control of the power I had, and find out how it could work for us, against the Soul Eater.

The problem was that I didn’t know where to start finding answers. That was usually Nathan’s job. I just tagged along.

“Carrie, you okay?” Max looked at me with concern etched into every line of his face, but I could tell he thought he was covering it up.

“I’m thinking.” I bit the thumbnail on my uninjured hand. “About what happened downstairs.”

“Oh, you mean when you opened your mouth and fire poured out like a dragon in a bad fantasy movie?” Ziggy slowly rubbed his palms up and down his face, the way Nathan always did when he was stressed-out and tired.

“Yeah, what was up with that?” Max grabbed Dahlia’s spell book from the coffee table where we’d left it. “Was that in here?”

“No.” How could I explain it to them, in a way that would make sense and also not make me feel like a total flake saying it out loud? “It was just heat-of-the-moment. An improvisation based off of things Nathan had told me and things that I’d seen Dahlia do. But that’s not the point. I obviously have an advantage here, and we’re not exploiting it.”

“Why would you want to?” Ziggy finished cleaning the blood off his hands with a towel that had once been white and now sported several mottled shades of pink.

“Because that was badass,” Max said, his eyes practically boggling out of his head. “We were sucking against those things, whatever they were, and she unleashed hell and fried them where they stood. Why wouldn’t we want her to do it again?”

Ziggy shrugged, but though his body language was casual, his voice was cold as stone. “I’ve watched Dahlia use her ‘talents’—” he made air quotes around the word “—and yeah, she can do some really awesome tricks. But she’s insane, and there is no way she’s been that way her whole life without someone noticing.”

“You think Dahlia’s power drove her mad?” That was an intense thought. One I didn’t want to entertain. If she’d had the kind of limitless power she wielded now at a young age, someone would have noticed her playmates getting immolated. Maybe the more she’d used her power, the more it had chipped away at her sanity. I certainly didn’t need anything else to chip away at mine.

I already had the fact I was a vampire working against me. It seemed that the younger a vampire was, the less evil it was. I wondered if evil was a product of age, like crow’s feet or cholesterol for humans. Did the years stack the decks against vampires? I’d been changed for less than a year now, and I could easily see how several centuries of the kind of crap we’d been going through would push me to the dark side. It just seemed easier to be evil, because for as long as I’d known there was evil out there, things always seemed to go in its favor.

I blew out a breath and dropped my head to my hands, my elbows resting on my knees. “You’re right, Ziggy. It could be dangerous. Nathan believes magic is very dangerous, and he would know better than I would. But we still need to get more help than we’ve got. Maybe this is the best place to start.”

“And we have to save Nathan. We all want to get him back as quickly as possible, before the Soul Eater can do anything to him,” Max put in quietly, his gaze leveled dead on Ziggy’s face. “But I’m not sure you do.”

Ziggy’s back straightened at that. “What the hell do you mean?”

I wanted to stop this line of conversation, and at the same time let it crash to its inevitable conclusion. I needed to know—I think Max and I both did—that Ziggy wasn’t going to give in to the will of his sire at the last minute and, if not double-cross us, at least back down from the conflict to protect his sire.

“I mean,” Max said, as though he was picking up my mental broadcast signal, “I want to know if you’re going to stab us in the back to help your sire.”

Ziggy turned to me. “Carrie, come on. You gotta have my back here. You know I wouldn’t fuck you guys over.”

“No, I don’t.” I didn’t let myself back down, not an inch, not even when I could feel Ziggy’s hate radiating off him in waves. “I know you’re torn. I know you would never hurt Nathan, but you admitted that you find it hard to resist the blood tie to him. How do we know you didn’t lead him to us? You haven’t been completely honest so far. You know things about these creatures, but you’ve never volunteered that information.”

I hadn’t expected Bill to back me up. I thought he would stay quiet, waiting for a safe time to speak. But he surprised me by putting his hand on Ziggy’s shoulder in a supportive gesture. “Tell us what you know.”

I watched the conflict inside Ziggy bubble to the surface. He was so angry—nothing at all like the boy I remembered. It didn’t take a blood tie to tell what he was feeling. He blamed himself for so much. For his sire’s anger, for his father’s capture. For becoming a vampire in the first place.

He reminded me of me, right after I’d been turned. I’d been mad at myself, mad at Cyrus, even mad at Nathan, who I’d barely known then, because my life had spun out of control. In Ziggy’s case, I was betting it was ten times worse, because it was a delayed reaction. He’d blithely accepted the horrific changes in his life in characteristic Ziggy style. I wondered if it had ever occurred to him to be angry before we’d entered his life again. That anger could definitely be misdirected, and I didn’t want us to bear the brunt of it. Ziggy had a blood tie to the Soul Eater. He could pretend to go along with our plans and spill them to the Soul Eater the whole time, either giving away our position or hiding important information about his sire. If he wasn’t letting us in on the things happening in his head, was he maintaining that same radio silence on the other end of the blood tie?

Even though I didn’t want to, I had to know. “Did you tell the Soul Eater to send them tonight? Are you working with him, listening to him through the blood tie?”

“Do you wanna know what he’s telling me?” Ziggy cracked his knuckles, glaring at all of us. I’m sure he thought he looked tough, but my heart ached for him. “I’m being urged every second to kill you and return to him. I’m seeing really vivid fucking images of him just handing over my heart to Dahlia—and it’s not like there’s any love from her, so I know what she’ll do with it. And he knows I’m not dead, and I’m trying not to tell him that you’re still alive, and at the same time I kind of want to kill you and get back to where I was a week ago.”

Ziggy stood and approached Max, every fall of his heavy boots sounding like ominous drumbeats on a movie soundtrack. “Right now, I don’t know what to do. Do I tell you guys these things? No, because what good does it do? Especially when I’m not sure if I want to be here, or back with him. Do you really want that kind of running commentary from me? Because I can tell you every time I think of killing you. Every time I think of how easy it would be to get my life back and never see you again.”

He was halfway to the door when Max called after him, “If your life was so great, if you don’t want anything else, why did he need to take your heart?”

Ziggy’s back went rigid. So softly I could barely hear it, he said, “Shut up.”

Max shook his head. “No, I want to know. Really. If you’re so important to him, why does he keep you on a leash? If you’re so content in your ‘life,’ why does he need that insurance?”

Ziggy turned, looking more enraged than I’d ever seen him. When he reached Max, his fists clenched and unclenched, but he didn’t strike him. Then, the anger left his expression, and he did something I’d never have expected Ziggy to do. He cried.

It was as though his tears deflated him. He slumped onto the couch and, at first, he covered his eyes with his hand. When his back began to shake, Bill slid an arm around his shoulders, and Ziggy turned into the embrace, sobbing openly.

I itched to do something. I always feel that way when someone cries. But I could never think of a productive way to make them feel better, even now, when faced with Ziggy’s tears. So, I did nothing.

Bill looked at me over the top of Ziggy’s head, and though I hadn’t known him long, I could read the look. He didn’t want me to go easy on Ziggy. He liked that we were getting results.

“Ziggy, tell me what you know about these creatures he has. Anything you’ve done to betray us—” the ugly word slipped from my lips before I could stop it “—or anything you think you’ve done…. It doesn’t mean anything if you tell us what those creatures are.”

He sat up a little, as if reluctant to break contact with Bill. “Dahlia says they’re ghouls. But Ja—the Soul Eater doesn’t call them that. He said his are better. Different, because they started with his blood, but we fed them. They got something from both of us.”

“What did they get?” Bill’s voice was soft, soothing. I don’t know what it did for Ziggy, but it sure put me at ease.

“From Dahlia, they got her…power.” Ziggy sniffed manfully and straightened. “I don’t know what they could have gotten from me. My physical strength, maybe? He said I had more than any fledgling he’d ever sired. I guess it was supposed to be a compliment.”

My fingers twisted the hem of my T-shirt of their own volition. “Forget about that for now. Do you think Nathan is still alive? Do you think we have time?”

Ziggy shrugged. “I know that he wants Nathan for something. But I don’t think it’s to kill him. Wherever Nathan is, he’s with the Soul Eater.”

I stood and paced to the door and back. “We’re going to get him back. Tomorrow night.”

“Why not now?” The restlessness had returned to Bill’s voice. “We’re sure where he is. Let’s go get him.”

“And get killed.” Ziggy laughed hopelessly. “He’s got dozens of those things. I mean, at least a hundred.”

“A hundred dozen?” My knees went out from under me.

Ziggy waved his hands in front of him. “No, no. Total. A hundred total, maybe more. I’ve never bothered to count.”

“What can kill them?” Max asked, and I was glad he could focus all of our ready-to-go energy on something constructive.

Ziggy shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe nothing. We’ve never tried before.”

“They were strong,” I noted, hearing a little of my old, stupid confidence creeping into my words. “But still human. I’m willing to bet they’re like anything else—destroy the heart, burn it up, cut off the head and they’re no more problem to us.”

“Heads off, check.” Max stood and rubbed his hand across his jaw. “This is going to be dangerous.”

“It’s not the first time,” I said, suddenly feeling the weight of the last year full on my shoulders. “It probably won’t be the last.”

“Well, it should be!” Max stomped a few paces away, then stopped, covering his face with his hands. “This is ridiculous. I was right there. Right there! And I let them get by me.”

“It wasn’t your fault—” I began.

Bill interrupted. “I was right there, too. Are you blaming me?”

“Of course I’m not!”

“And I’m not blaming you,” I interjected. “Or Bill or Ziggy. No one is to blame. But Nathan was taken and we have to get him back.”

In the moment that Bill didn’t look as though he believed either of us, I realized something. Something that was a little bit silly, something that completely detracted from the seriousness of the situation. But it seemed to be needed, so I said it. “Bill, I think you’re officially one of us.”

“Fantastic,” he grumbled, then smiled grudgingly. “Listen, I’m not used to this sort of thing.”

“Neither am I,” Ziggy said with a sympathetic nod. “But she is. And so is Max. So I say we listen to them.”

“Okay, guys, you stockpile weapons, whatever you need to get this done.” I looked nervously at my watch, cursing the shortened summer nights. “I’m going to see what I can learn from Dahlia’s book.”

While everyone went to prepare, I locked myself in the bedroom. Past situations of dire peril would have found me weeping at my powerlessness, or at least worrying over the horrible fate Nathan might have met. But not tonight. Tonight, I wanted to arm myself with more than a wooden stake. I wanted to wield the horrible power Dahlia had shown me.

I opened the book, and the moment my fingertips skimmed the pages, I felt calm. In control. More like myself.

Imagine how good you would feel if you set that evil thing on fire.

I blinked, twitching my head and shoulders. Why would I have such a crazy thought?

There’s nothing useful in it. All the spells you’ve been able to do, you’ve figured out on your own.

That seemed reasonable. I lifted the book and saw the word flame coiling like a snake in my mind, gathering power and pulsing with an evil energy. The image had come far too easily, and it looked so different from how I would have imagined it.

You must be getting more powerful. Don’t worry about that now. Burn the book.

I was poised to do so when my common sense broke through. The book was the only solid piece of enemy intelligence that we had. What was I doing?

Anger burned through me as I remembered the casual way she’d ordered our deaths. And it had all been a game. She knew we weren’t dead.

“Dahlia!” I shouted, knowing that she would hear me, even though a physical distance separated us. “Dahlia, I know it’s you!”

You’ll know better next time you steal someone’s blood, my inner monologue taunted, and then, to my horror, the voice of my thoughts laughed Dahlia’s unmistakable, crazy laugh.

The bitch. The consequences of drinking her blood hadn’t occurred to me at the time I’d done it. But I’d done what I’d thought I’d had to to stop the Oracle. Now, the ramifications of my actions hit me full force. I’d drunk the blood of a vampire, sired by one of the most powerful vampires I’d ever seen, who’d been a force to reckon with while still a human witch. Nathan had warned me of her power before she’d ever been turned.

“A vampire’s blood is very powerful. Combine that with a witch’s abilities and you’ve got spells to raise the dead, summon armies from hell…”

Dahlia’s powers had been dangerous before she’d become a vampire. It was the addition of vampire blood that had turned her into a supersorceress.

And I had that blood. A very little bit, but it seemed to work.

I threw the spell book away from me before I could do anything rash. I didn’t want to raise the dead. Did I?

No, zombies—if they existed—were definitely a last-resort kind of option. And armies from hell? I was officially putting that on the “not an option” list. I’d gotten my ass kicked by enough supernatural creatures already.

So, Dahlia could get inside my head. Fantastic. I wondered how many of my thoughts had been my original thoughts, and how many had been hers. Had I really fought my attackers earlier? Or had her thoughts held me back? Had my decision to go after Nathan been my own, or a trap planted by Dahlia?

I could second-guess myself all day, and it wouldn’t make a difference. We had to rescue Nathan. There was no other option. And I couldn’t worry about Dahlia messing around with my head. Worrying about it would just mean she’d succeeded in doing it.

I was done waiting, done trying to find someone to rely on. I was going to do something, even if it seemed totally crazy. If the Soul Eater had raised an army, then so would we. He had used Dahlia’s power to do it. So would I.

The book lay where I had tossed it in my panic. The pages that had been bent in its fall flipped back of their own accord, free from the resistance of the floor, and settled open on a page titled “Golem.”

I chewed my lip. The name seemed so familiar. Instantly, I recalled my father sitting in his study and me, playing on the floor in front of his desk. The place was decorated with relics of psychiatry. Busts of the human head marked off with dashed lines for phrenology references, bottles of curatives from the Victorian era, even a leukotome and mallet kept under glass. I remembered asking what they were for, and the nightmares I had when I got my answer.

“It was a very old school of thought that if you damaged the brain of an unhealthy patient, you would restore their health.”

“You mean, they made the bad brain part go away?”

“That was their intention. But they didn’t know enough about the brain and how it works to isolate the bits that were unhealthy. They ended up doing much more harm than good.”

“But I thought doctors weren’t supposed to harm people. It’s in the hippopotamus oats.”

He’d laughed then and hugged me. He was never a very affectionate man, but I remember, at least that time, that he hugged me.

“They don’t do that to people anymore, do they? They don’t do it to kids?”

“No, they don’t do it anymore. But sometimes I wonder if we should do it to you. Stick you in the eye with an ice pick and make you as docile and obedient as the Golem of Prague.”

It hadn’t sounded horrific to me, because all the while he’d tickled me and blown raspberries on my cheek, making me squirm and wriggle and scrunch up my neck. Then, the phone had rung and he’d had to take the call from a patient in the middle of an episode and I’d been shooed away. I’d asked my mother what a golem was and she hadn’t known. Or, she had and didn’t have time to explain it. There were so many instances where my questions had gone unanswered because of this patient on the phone, or that newspaper reporter calling to talk to an “expert.”

I set the spell book aside and went to the darkened living room to find a dictionary. I found one—a miracle, considering how very few non–New Age books Nathan owned—and flipped to the correct page. “‘A man artificially created by kabbalistic rites; robot,’” I read aloud. The robots part certainly sounded like the humans the Soul Eater had sent after us. Could the Golem spell be the one Dahlia had used?

Her handwriting was abnormally small and cramped. Through most of the book, she wrote with big, round loops, but here the writing scrunched in on itself, almost as though she were trying to hide the words from each other. The ingredients list, unlike those of her other spells, was very simple. A ball of clay, a drop of blood.

Looking around the room, which I was sure lacked clay, I despaired a little. Then, I realized I actually planned to do the spell, and chills ran down my arms.

What was I doing? Would I really be able to create some monster to fight on our side? What if I couldn’t control it? What if the spell didn’t work, or something horrible, Monkey’s Paw caliber horrible, happened?

You’d never know until you try, that reasonable voice in my head nudged, and I wondered if it was really me or Dahlia planting a trick there. The book seemed to pulse with energy under my hands. I opened it and stared down at a page containing what appeared to be a love spell. It was ridiculous, and I laughed as I ripped it out. Without any conscious effort on my part, the page burst into flame and the ashes rained to the floor in a neat little pile.

Use the ashes.

I knew that was Dahlia’s blood in me, feeding my excitement, calling me to go ahead with the spell before I could think rationally. But there was no malice in the message that I could feel. Maybe that was her trick, but somehow I couldn’t believe it. She was as curious and excited as I was. Ever the opportunist, Dahlia wouldn’t resist the chance to see if her spell worked, even if it was to the detriment of her own cause.

I knelt on the floor and scooped the ashes into my cupped hands, then let them fall again, watching with fascination as the dust settled into serpentine patterns on the wood. I thought of my parents, their earthly remains reduced to ash, their urns resting in expensive marble vaults miles and miles away. I imagined touching the carbon that used to be my father, used to be my mother. I changed my face and used one fang to puncture the tips of two fingers. The blood welled there, red, violent, immediate. I thought in a far-off way of mixing my two parents together and giving them life, the way I would give these ashes life. Could I make them whole again, like before the accident? I saw the blood fall from my fingertips, as if in a dream, to strike the gray ash that filled my vision. Could I mix it all together—my father, my mother, my blood, my dead fledgling, his ashes scattered in places I couldn’t find? Could I mix them all up and come out with something whole?

I imagined the end product would be me, but made of ash. A creature of various grays, moving brittle limbs that would flutter away in a draft. I saw lips that looked like mine, eyes that looked like mine, but liquid and bloody, running into the spaces between the ash, abnormal cracks in the gray, like a grim artistic parody of a harlequin fetus.

The creature I imagined reached toward me, began to speak, but it had no words. I had no words. For the spell to work, to create my golem, I needed words. I’d used words to create fire and to put it out again. Those elements seemed so trivial in the face of this power of creation I worked now. As the creature’s mouth moved, so did mine, and I saw, from the space between my heart and my stomach, a word form. It coiled and writhed like the serpent of fire I’d seen in my mind, then burst forward, as if to strike the creature. I couldn’t understand what I said, or even begin to guess at the meaning. But when the voice of scales and fury poured from me, I was left an empty vessel. I collapsed, the sound of the strange words in my voice ringing in my ears: “Shem. Shem gal’mi. Gal’mi emet. Azel Balemacho!”

I opened my eyes and saw a man. He didn’t resemble the creature I’d imagined. His skin, while gray, was solid and very definitely real, not some figment of ashes bound together with blood. His lips and eyes weren’t the bloody things I’d seen, either, but gray as the rest of him. His head was bald, his appearance generic. Nothing was unique about him but his grayness. That, and the fact he hadn’t been standing there before.

He stared down at me, not confused, not intelligent, not pitying me or even curious as to my presence. He was tabula rasa, a completely blank slate, waiting for my instruction.

“I have to sleep now,” I told him, my voice scraping from a throat coated in razors. “Stay right there.”

He nodded, once, and I fell into an uneasy, but inescapable, sleep.

Nine:

Falling

T he water was getting cold.

Ziggy opened his eyes and stared up at the showerhead. It felt good to get the blood off him. Made him feel more human than animal.

He dunked his head under the frigid spray one last time. He hated getting out of the shower with half-dry hair, and he wanted to make sure he’d gotten all of the blood out of it anyway. His mouth opened in an involuntary O of surprise at the sting of the cold against his scalp and he decided he’d had enough. He stepped out of the shower, wrapping a towel around his waist.

This has to stop. Jacob’s voice, smooth as silk, wound through Ziggy’s brain, taking away all the conflict and confusion. You did what you thought was right. I can’t fault you that. You are impetuous and you never believe that which you cannot see with your own eyes. I wouldn’t have you any other way.

“Get out of my head, old man,” Ziggy whispered, staring hard at his reflection in the mirror over the sink. The fog on the glass had begun to recede, framing him in mist. He concentrated on the drops falling from his hair, down his face. One slithered down the bridge of his nose to hang, trembling, at the tip, and he focused on that as he forced his sire’s mind from his own.

Now you’ve seen what it is, to be on their side. What it makes you.

He scrubbed his hands over his face. “I’m fine, I’m fine,” he chanted. The smell of blood, emanating from the clothes he’d discarded in a damp, crusting heap on the floor, made his stomach alternately sour and growl. It would be better when he got something to eat.

Emerging from the bathroom, he rummaged through the box of clothes Max had hauled up from storage for him. For a minute he worried that all it contained were jeans with the crotch worn out and ripped-up poet shirts he’d worn in his “I want to be Robert Smith” phase, but there was a pair of plaid flannel sleep pants that fit, and some T-shirts that had been washed so many times they were as soft as butter. He used to make fun of Nathan for saving everything, but if they managed to get him back, he never would again.

He got himself dressed and headed for the kitchen. He could leave the laundry until later. Right now, he needed some time on his own to think, and something in his stomach to keep him from thinking too deeply.

The light in the kitchen was on. Sitting at the cracked Formica dinette table, hunched over a glass of something clear that was sure as hell not water, Bill looked up as Ziggy entered. “Hey.”

“Hey, yourself.” Ziggy watched him from the corner of his eye as he went to the refrigerator. There was a bottle next to Bill’s left hand, and it was half-empty. “You’re up late. Or early. Whatever it is for you.”

“Couldn’t sleep.” Bill raised the glass, hesitated for a moment, then gulped it down. He reached for the bottle. “You want some of this? Or wait, no…you’re underage, aren’t you?”

“Never stopped me before.” Ziggy grabbed a mug from the dishwasher and held it out to Bill. “What is it?”

Bill waited until the cup was safely filled and back on the countertop before answering. “Gin.”

Ziggy set the mug aside while he poured a bag of blood into the teakettle on the stove. He wondered what the hell had happened to the microwave while he’d been gone. All the while, he felt Bill’s stare boring holes into his back. The air crackled with the kind of high-alert energy most humans gave off when they knew they were dealing with a monster. “You don’t have to be afraid of me. I’m not going to do anything to you.”

A picture of what he must have looked like, tearing those creatures apart with his hands and teeth, flashed into his brain and his sire’s voice murmured, It must have been beautiful.

“Stop,” Ziggy said before he could help it, and then he knew he looked like a crazy person and a murderer, and things were just not going his way.

“Are you okay?” Bill’s voice was dry and scared sounding, miles away from the guy who’d hugged him and comforted him earlier. “Do I need to go get Carrie?”

“No.” Ziggy turned and pasted on a fake smile that he hoped didn’t look sinister. A kid in elementary school had told him once that his smile looked like an evil jack-o’lantern’s, and even though he was pretty sure it was because of the snaggly state of his baby teeth at the time, the last thing he wanted to project to Bill was evil. “Let her sleep. I’m just keyed up, is all.”

“Me and you both.” Bill seemed to relax a little, or at least, he seemed to want to relax. He took another swallow from his glass. “I don’t know if I can take much more of that kind of thing.”

“I thought you were a big, tough army guy.” He leaned against the counter. “You afraid of a few little creatures of the night?”

“First of all, I was a Marine, smart-ass. Second, no. No, I’m not afraid of those things. I’m afraid of you.” The look he gave Ziggy was so pointed, it could have been a sword. He turned back to his glass, staring straight ahead as he gulped it down.

“Damn. That’s harsh.” Ziggy took a swig of the foul stuff and forced himself to maintain a straight face. He’d covertly snuck booze from Nathan’s personal stock since he was fourteen years old, but he’d never gotten used to the taste of it solo. Gin, if he remembered correctly, tasted best mixed with Kool-Aid. “I mean, especially after you were all strong, silent, supportive type just a couple of hours ago.”

“A couple of hours ago I wasn’t dumping bodies with their heads nearly chewed off into a lake with my new vampire-werewolf buddy.” At least he had the decency to look a little ashamed. “I’m sorry. I’m just trying to get my head around the transition from sweet kid to…”

“To monster?” The feel of flesh crushed to pulp zinged along the nerves in his fingers, and he wiped his hands against the flannel pajama pants.

Part of him was ashamed of what he was. He wanted to apologize to Bill, to do anything to take away that fear he said he felt. Because he did like Bill, and he did want something to happen. He didn’t know when, but he did want it.

But another part of him—the selfish, childish part—wanted to tell him off. Who the hell did he think he was, telling a vampire how he should act or feel or whatever? He was just a human. A cute human, but still…

Bill shook his head, but his expression was still grim. “I’m not making judgments. I’m just saying, I’m not used to the guys I’m interested in tearing people’s throats out with their teeth.”

“I did that?” Ziggy searched his memory, but the teakettle whistled, bringing him back to the conversation at hand. “Hey, I did what I had to do. Don’t fault me for it. I’m not a human. You knew that when you followed me to the bar.”

“Yeah. I knew it.” Bill turned back to his drink, and Ziggy poured the warm blood into his own mug, mixing it with what remained of the gin. He would need it, to put up with this bs.

Bill reached for the bottle again, and Ziggy’s conscience forced him to intervene. “Hey, take it easy there, cowboy,” he said, trying to sound friendly as he put his hand on Bill’s arm to keep him from pouring more booze that he didn’t need down his throat.

The way he moved, Ziggy was almost a hundred percent sure Bill was going to slug him. He even let go of his arm and stepped back defensively, because the last thing he needed was a broken nose and to have to fight a drunk human. Not to mention the fact it would make him seem more monstrous in Bill’s eyes.

But he didn’t hit him. He grabbed him, a hand on each shoulder, and pulled up hard against him. Bill’s mouth touched his, just a little touch, and it was like electricity running through his entire body. And then he had no willpower. He should have. He wasn’t the one who was drunk and had some weird prejudice against vampires. If this went too far, Bill would probably regret it, and that would make Ziggy regret it, but he just couldn’t make himself care.

Bill’s hands slid under Ziggy’s shirt, the warmth of human skin a shock to his chilled flesh. “You’re freezing,” Bill said, his voice half-muffled by the proximity of his lips to Ziggy’s, and Ziggy couldn’t help but laugh.

“I’m dead,” he whispered back, and then he wished he hadn’t said that. Bill didn’t like that he was a vampire, that much was clear. No need to remind him, when he was so close and it felt so good to be pressed against him.

I’m just not going to think anymore, Ziggy decided, smothered under another of Bill’s kisses. He ached to be touched, not in a way that only seemed gentle, but in a way that was gentle, with no threat of pain to follow. Or, if it was rough, roughness for its own sake, not because he was a plaything to be dominated or tortured for someone else’s amusement.

He wanted to be treated like a person. It had been a while since he had been.

Bill’s hands slid under his T-shirt again, lifting the fabric up. Ziggy broke the connection of their mouths and put his hand out to stop him. “What if Carrie or Max comes in here?”

“What if?” Bill retorted drunkenly, and when his mouth descended again, sliding from lips to jaw to neck, Ziggy really couldn’t argue with his logic. Hell, if the Pope walked in right now, Ziggy wouldn’t care. He leaned back, feeling the bite of the counter in the small of his back, and pulled his T-shirt off. Bill mercifully skipped past the physical inspection, that moment that always left Ziggy to mentally narrate all the flaws the other guy was finding with him, like the fact he didn’t have washboard abs—hell, any visible abs—and he’d never grown more than a few chest hairs. Whether Bill was too drunk to care or he really just didn’t care, either way, Ziggy was glad when, once he’d whipped his own shirt over his head, Bill reached for him again, pushing him a little awkwardly to lean against the refrigerator door. The cold, smooth surface hitting his back coincided with the hot skin of Bill’s chest meeting his, and Ziggy shuddered at the contrast.

Bill dipped his head to kiss Ziggy’s left collarbone, hands locked firmly on his hips through the flannel sleep pants. He gave the fabric a short, experimental tug as he stooped to spread more kisses over his chest, then paused, looking up with such a serious expression that Ziggy was sure rejection was about to follow. Instead, Bill said, a little nervously, “You’ve done this before, right?”

Ziggy smiled down at him, unable to work up even a little sarcasm for a guy as nice as Bill. “Yeah. You’re not being a creepy old man, if that’s what you’re wondering.”

“No, it’s not that, it’s just…” Bill laughed and bent his head, nibbling and sucking a little trail to the waistband of the pants before he finally pulled them down. Ziggy’s cock, hard to bursting, leaped at the first touch of Bill’s hand and his warm, hesitant breath. “You got a condom on you?”

Oh, shit, Ziggy thought, then remembered with a mental palm to his forehead that he wasn’t some human teenager anymore. He cleared his throat and tried not to sound like “that guy” when he said, “No, it’s cool. I’m dead. No diseases.”

Bill didn’t respond. Ziggy saw the muscles of his back tighten up a little, as though he would push away and call the whole thing off, and then, in a moment like an electric shock, Bill slid his mouth over Ziggy’s cock and sucked him in, as far as he would go.

The proper response was probably something like, “Jesus” or “God yes,” but all that came out was a strangled noise. Ziggy’s hands curled into fists and one of them pounded backward against the gleaming steel face of the refrigerator as white-hot neurons fired jolts of pleasure through his brain. The hot wet of Bill’s mouth, the fingers digging into his thighs and the palm cupping his balls, every pleasure-feeling nerve in his body seemed right there, right wherever Bill touched him. And there was no fear of pain, no thought that now he would draw back and sink fangs into his thigh or more sensitive places. Everything felt good. Beyond good. Fucking incredible.

Too fucking incredible, after a few short minutes. “Hey, stop, stop,” Ziggy gasped, planting his hands on top of Bill’s sandy-blond hair to push him away. “I’m sorry, I was just really close there for a second.”

“That’s kind of the point,” Bill said, standing to kiss him. To clear his head—and to get his mind off his hyperaroused dick pressed between them—Ziggy reached for the fly of Bill’s jeans and tugged the button open. He slid a hand inside and found his cock, hard and eager and weeping a drop of silky fluid.

“Commando, huh?” Ziggy mumbled against Bill’s neck, sliding his fist up and down. Bill trembled against him, and Ziggy smiled against the shell of his ear, flicking his tongue out to trace it.

“I want to fuck you,” Bill groaned, thrusting against his hand. “Can I?”

His hand stilling on the thick, hot flesh under his palm, Ziggy considered. It didn’t take much to sway his decision, just the steady pulse beneath his fingers. “Yeah.” His breath caught in his throat as Bill traced his lower lip with his thumb. “Oh, definitely.”

“Turn around,” Bill said, his voice as low and rough as the gin they’d drunk. Ziggy complied, kicking the pajamas aside. He braced his hands on the counter, his sudden vulnerability a little frightening. Bill’s hands came to rest on his shoulders, then stroked down over the plane of his back, returning to repeat the motion again and again, pulling shivers from his spine.

He’d felt secure before now, but it went against every fiber in his body that he would turn his back—his naked back, at that—to a stranger. Jacob had done it to him before, to test him. He’d stripped him, made him kneel, made him wait. And then, when he’d just begun to let down his guard, the lash had fallen over his back.

The memory made his knees buckle, and he hoped Bill thought it was a reaction to what he was doing, not an emotional scar. That was the last thing Ziggy needed, to miss out on some really hot sex in order to explain his mental dysfunction.

To take his own mind off things, he reached for one of Bill’s hands, pulled it to his mouth and sucked the thumb in. Bill groaned and pressed against him, full body contact, and Ziggy wondered when exactly he’d gotten rid of his jeans. He pushed back against him, just to be antagonistic, and Bill pulled his hand back, tracing his fingers down Ziggy’s spine, to the small of his back, the line of his tailbone and farther.

“You get right to the point, huh?” Ziggy gasped as Bill’s thumb, still wet with saliva, pressed inside. Had anything ever felt this good with someone else? A pang seized him at the thought that, when all was said and done, he would still be a monster and Bill would still be afraid of him. And then it would be over. And this would be the big mistake that hung between them for the rest of the time they had to be around each other, until one of them found a tactful way to get the fuck out of Dodge.

Bill’s lips were against his neck, his cock nudging him from behind, and he whispered, “We might have a little problem.”

Ziggy tensed. This was the moment he could be the sober, responsible party. This was the moment he could easily save them both from the consequences of an ill-advised hookup.

Leaning forward, bringing his whole body into clumsy contact with Ziggy’s, Bill reached for something on the counter. He sounded much more cheerful, proud of himself, even, when he said, “Wait…never mind, we’re back in business.”

Ziggy half turned. “Back in—” His words were cut off by the shock of something cool and wet spilling onto the small of his back. After a split second of confusion he recognized the scent with a perverse thrill. “Is that…is that olive oil?”

“What, you wanted to do this the real rough, manly way?” Bill asked with a quiet laugh. Ziggy laughed with him, until Bill’s fingers, slippery with oil, slid down to press inside of him. First two, then a third that took all the breath from him and buckled his knees with a jolt of pleasure that shot straight to his groin.

Pleasure that mixed with nervousness as Bill’s hand withdrew, replaced by the wide, firm tip of him.

“Is this okay?” he asked in a strained voice, and Ziggy had to admire his restraint. He took a deep breath and nodded, held that breath as the pressure increased, then gave over to stinging release when the head of Bill’s cock was finally inside of him.

There was pain. A dull burn that reminded him that Bill wasn’t a small guy, and all the benefits of that were soon to come. Bill asked if he was still okay with it, still wanted to take all of him, and Ziggy could only mumble something incoherent and impatient in response. Something half-begging, half-demanding, that made Bill chuckle hoarsely and push forward, and Ziggy squirmed back until he was more filled than he’d ever been before.

Then Bill began to move, and Ziggy wasn’t sure when he’d stopped supporting himself and started to just rely on Bill’s weight pinning him to the cabinets to keep him from falling. He reached down to touch himself and Bill’s oil-slick hand snaked around to get there first, grasping the base of Ziggy’s cock, jerking him off with firm tugs timed so that Ziggy didn’t know what he wanted more—to thrust into his fist or push back and hinder Bill’s withdrawal. He turned his head, mouth open, breathless, and Bill kissed him, his tongue moving in time with his hips.

When he broke away, it was to apologize. “I’m sorry, I can’t…” and a deep, throaty groan rolled over whatever else he was going to say as his body stiffened. His hand tightened, almost too hard, but he didn’t stop stroking as he came. Ziggy almost shouted at the feeling of Bill inside of him, the way his cock twitched as the warmth of his come spilled from him. And then he was coming, too, making a strangled half sob as his dick jerked in Bill’s hand.

Even if he was supposed to be the stronger creature, Ziggy’s legs were weak, so weak he had to lean on Bill after he’d withdrawn, and they both slid to the floor to get their breath.

Bill leaned back against the base cabinets, his eyes closed. A single bead of sweat rolled down his temple and Ziggy had the weirdest urge to lick it away. In the name of not looking like a total psycho, he restrained himself.

“Jesus,” Bill said when his breathing returned to normal. “That was…”

“Regrettable?” Ziggy supplied for him, wincing as he shifted on the cold linoleum.

Bill actually looked wounded. “I was going to say great. Obviously we didn’t just have the same experience.”

Way to say the right thing, dumb-ass. Ziggy closed his eyes and rubbed his forehead with the back of his hand to keep from making eye contact. “No, it was, really great. I was just trying to say that we shouldn’t have, before you did.”

“Ah. I see.” Bill climbed to his feet and found his jeans. After he pulled them up over his hips, he turned to face Ziggy again. “And why do you think we shouldn’t have?”

It wasn’t fun being the naked, interrogated one. Ziggy grabbed the T-shirt and pajama bottoms and got them on as quickly as he could without falling over on his trembling legs. “You’re drunk, for one—”

“I’m not drunk anymore,” Bill interrupted with a lopsided smile that made something inside Ziggy’s ribs squeeze up.

Still, since one of them had to be the voice of reason, he continued. “Second, you don’t like the fact I’m a vampire. You sat there and said, ‘Hey, nice of you to kill those people, jackass,’ and then just decided you wanted to fuck me. I get being attracted to me, all right? I know I probably come across as some wounded charity case, the abused boy wonder or some shit. But that doesn’t hold anybody’s fascination forever.” He swallowed, and it was like a lump of gravel going down. “Not that I’m saying I want the whole forever thing. I’m not going to be possessive and weird now. It was just a figure of speech.”

Bill nodded gravely, his eyebrows slightly raised. “You done now?”

Ziggy nodded in reply.

“Fine. Then let me clear up some misconceptions you seem to have.” He stepped close, so close their lips were almost touching, and just before they did he turned his head just slightly to say softly into Ziggy’s ear, “I’m not looking to make forever out of this right this minute, either.” He stepped back, letting the statement sink in a moment before continuing, a little more pissed-off sounding. “But at least I’m open to the possibility that you’re someone I could spend some serious time with. And yes, you’re a vampire. I don’t like that. I don’t like Republicans, either, but I don’t cut them out of my social pool. I realize that this, between you and me, is a shock. It has sure shocked the hell out of me. But from the minute I met you—after the bleeding stopped—I was never thinking you were some little lost boy I could save. From the minute I met you I knew I was in some serious trouble, and that I could fall for you hard if I wasn’t careful.”

“Way to be careful,” Ziggy said with a snort.

Bill’s serious expression cracked only a little. “I didn’t say I’d fallen hard yet. But I’m definitely on the way down. I want to know, is this the point where you want me to bail out? It’s only fair to tell me now. But don’t throw up a bunch of imagined or perceived roadblocks on my behalf.”

Ziggy had to be careful when he spoke. The squeezing pressure in his chest was almost unbearable, and he didn’t know what sound would come out when he tried to talk. He took a deep breath and blinked, surprised to find there were actually tears waiting to be shed. “No. I think I can safely say I don’t want you to bail.”

Stupid boy, Jacob raged inside his head. No one will care for you, protect you as I have.

Yeah, I know. Ziggy kept the thought to himself. He’d given enough to his sire already. But let’s give him a chance.

Ten:

Here’s…Henry

I woke with a searing pain in my head, centered right behind my eyes. When I opened them, I panicked, thinking that I might have gone blind. Then I remembered I’d fallen asleep on the bedroom floor. I sat up and looked around. Sunlight showed through around the edges of the blinds. How long had I slept? Why hadn’t anyone woken me up? My back ached as I slowly sat up, feeling every crack and pop in my spine.

Maybe they had tried to wake me up, but just hadn’t been able to rouse me. My dreams had been strange, a jumble of weird birth imagery and memories of my parents. I reached a hand out in the semidarkness to touch something. I didn’t care what; I just wanted to assure myself I was awake and not in another freaky dream. My fingers skimmed something soft and warm, like human skin, but without the energy of something living.

I scrambled backward, ignoring the pain in my head. “Don’t touch me!” I shouted to whoever was in the room with me. “Help! Max, Ziggy!”

When they didn’t immediately come, I got to my feet, still calling for them, feeling blindly for obstacles as I made my way to a light switch. I knocked my shins painfully on the dresser, swore, and only then remembered I could use a spell to get some light going. “Illuminate,” I commanded. The lightbulbs in the wall fixture and the bedside lamp popped on and my gaze immediately flew to the man standing in front of me.

There was no concrete way to describe him. Actually, concrete would be a good way. He was completely gray from hairless head to toe. In fact, his whole body was hairless. No eyebrows, no body hair. Just a plastic-looking expanse of gray stretched over a generic male form. If not for the distinct genitalia, he could have been a Ken doll. He looked at me with gray eyes, but said nothing and made no move to come near me.

I remembered more clearly what had transpired the night before. Using the ash to cast Dahlia’s spell, feeling all the power and all my memories rush out of me to form this thing. I could only stare at him, mute, as one thought ran through my mind: I did it.

I approached him cautiously, though I was pretty sure I remembered something from mythology that said a golem couldn’t do anything unless commanded. I decided to try it out. “Put your finger on your nose.”

He didn’t even give me a funny look as he did it. Just unquestioning obedience.

“Turn around,” I ordered, and noticed that he did literally what I said. He didn’t just turn three hundred and sixty degrees. He kept going until I told him to stop.

“Okay.” I tapped my lips with my forefinger as I watched him. What were the limitations on golem actions? If I told him to prepare a soufflé, could he do it?

“Do the Hokey Pokey,” I ordered, as a test.

“You put your left foot in, you take your left foot out,” he sang in a dull monotone as he performed the actions he described.

“Put some pep into it,” I barked, but I couldn’t hold back my laughter to make it sound serious. Even so, he continued his song with more enthusiasm. “Stop,” I called out, and he stopped immediately, his overdrawn expression of happiness fading immediately to the blank-slate look he’d been wearing before. “Well, you know the Hokey Pokey, at least. What else do you know?”

He simply stared at me.

“Tell me what else you know,” I prompted.

Immediately, he began to speak. “I know anything that you can command me to do. I know exactly as much as you know.”

I thought about that for a minute. “So, if I told you to sing the entire score of Rigoletto…”

“You do not know the entire score of Rigoletto,” he replied in his flat voice.

“Right.” I was still wondering just what I had created when the bedroom door burst open. Bill and Ziggy ran in, looking haggard and sleep-disturbed.

“Carrie, are you all right?” Bill asked, but Ziggy immediately caught sight of the golem and charged it. The creature made no move to defend itself. It stood, rooted in place, as Ziggy tackled it to the floor.

“Ziggy, no,” I shouted, pulling him off the golem. “He’s mine. I made him.”

There was a moment of confused silence. Then, very cautiously, Bill asked, “Made him?”

The floor in the hallway creaked and Max appeared at the door. His gaze went directly to the golem, and then met mine, full of confusion. At least he didn’t rush him with the intent to kill, the way Ziggy had. “What the hell is going on?”

The golem lay on the floor were he’d landed. “Get up,” I said softly to him, offering my hand for help. He wouldn’t take it. Of course, I realized, feeling like an idiot. You told him not to touch you.

I turned back to Bill and Ziggy, who were staring at me as if I were a crazy person. “I used a spell from Dahlia’s book. We needed help. I mean, we’re going to need help to get Nathan back. More manpower. And this seemed like a logical solution.”

“So, what, he’s like, a zombie?” Ziggy cautiously approached the creature, reached out to touch him as if he hadn’t just full body tackled the thing to the floor. “He feels like rubber or something.”

“He’s made out of ash. And blood. I don’t know why he feels the way he does. To be honest, I only touched him by accident, just the once.” I shrugged. “He’s a golem.”

“Like the fairy tale?” Max asked incredulously. “The guy who has to do everything you tell it?”

I nodded. Bill considered for a moment, then motioned with his head to the golem. “Hey, you. Do the Hokey Pokey.”

The creature didn’t move. “I think I might be the only one who can do it,” I suggested. “Since I’m the one who did the spell. Golem, do whatever Bill tells you.”

“Now do the Hokey Pokey,” Bill said, but as the golem began to comply, I stopped him.

“I don’t think that’s going to get us anywhere right now,” Ziggy said, his voice full of amusement. “Can it fight? Will it be any good to us?”

“I don’t see why it couldn’t fight. It can do anything I can do.” I hoped they wouldn’t point out my lack of grace and ability in the combat arena. “That’s the catch. He can’t do something if I don’t know how to do it.”

“So, welding is right out, hot-wiring a car, that kind of stuff?” Ziggy gave the golem a little push. “What if you learn how to do it?”

“Yeah, what if I learn it?” I asked the golem. When he didn’t answer, I rolled my eyes and said, “Answer my question.”

“You would have to create another one of me,” he said, staring straight ahead.

“So, you can’t upgrade him, you just have to get a whole new model. That’s a drawback.” Max came forward to join Bill and Ziggy in examining the creature.

Ziggy shook his head. “No, man, think about it. Carrie is a doctor. This could be really useful. Not to us, but think about it on a global scale. She could drop him off at a hospital and he could help out with organ transplants and stuff.”

“I was an emergency room doctor,” I pointed out. “Didn’t do a lot of complicated surgeries.”

“Yeah, but think about how helpful he’ll be to us. Especially if she can create more.” Bill stepped away from the golem, clearly weirded out by it.

I thought of the agony of the process, the splitting pain in my head that hadn’t faded yet. “Let’s hold off on it for now, if you don’t mind. I don’t think I’m quite experienced enough to do it again right away.”

“So, we’re it then?” Ziggy asked, his expression dark. “I mean, when we go get Nathan. We’re it?”

I swallowed the lump of trepidation in my throat. “We’re it. We didn’t do so good against those creatures, did we?”

Bill’s jaw tightened as he stared at me. He didn’t say anything, and I wondered if he was waiting for me to think up something. Then, like a man coming out of a trance, he rubbed his hands together and looked from Ziggy to me, his gaze sliding over the golem as if he wasn’t any more than a piece of furniture. “Okay, you can do this, and you can do the fire thing. What else can you do?”

Ziggy cut him off, shaking his head. “Bad idea. She looks like hell right now. And Nate has always said magic has a way of draining people. Like, you might get something, but it’s going to take something in return.”

“Well, thanks, I’m glad I achieved the look I was going for.” I was too tired to be truly offended. “But you’re right. I don’t think we can rely just on me for this.”

“We can run in blind, hacking and slashing our way through the place,” Ziggy said, without a trace of sarcasm. “I know my way around, and I actually think we have a pretty good chance of taking them out. At least, long enough to get Nate out.”

“I’m up for anything at this point,” Bill agreed. “We’ve wasted enough time.”

We sat in silence for a minute, then Max asked, “But just in case…Carrie, what else can you do?”

I knelt down and picked up the spell book from where I’d left it on the floor. “There are a couple of spells in here that I think I recognize. For instance, one says it will knock out your intended target. It must be the same thing she used on Bill. And one will shove them backward, so they can’t reach you. But I think I make things up on my own, as well.”

“Things like?” Max asked, and instead of answering, I went to the living room. I knew they would follow me, but I wasn’t being intentionally mysterious. I was thinking.

Aside from the potions and amulets listed in the book, most of Dahlia’s spells required nothing more than a word and a focused intention. As written, they should have required all kinds of occult materials, but those were only listed as distractions, a lot of flash and stage dressing that would have little impact on the final outcome. In some cases it would discourage someone from trying altogether. But now that I knew her secret, that her power came from within and not from toads’ eyes and graveyard dirt, I could, in theory, create any effect I wanted.

In the living room, I went to the bookshelf and trained my eye on the spine of one of the books with a crescent moon as the publisher’s logo. I knew Nathan wouldn’t mind losing it—“Another Wicca 101 book,” he would scoff after a customer left with such a volume—so I figured it would be of more use to us if it was sacrificed for the cause. I held out my hand, directing my concentration at the book, and it slid off the shelf, suspended in midair. I imagined what would happen next. The covers would open, the pages would rip out one by one, then the whole thing would dissolve into sand. I visualized the word “apart” as it came from my lips, each letter tipped with acid, the whole word sharp as a razor blade. It sliced into the book, and, when I opened my eyes, I saw exactly what I’d imagined happening, and the guys’ horrified expressions as they witnessed it all.

“Can you do that to…to people?” Bill asked in quiet awe. He seemed to remember himself, held up his hands and said quickly, “I mean, I don’t want a demonstration or anything, but…can you teach us that?”

“I don’t know. I mean, I can do it. I suppose if I can, anyone can.” I sat down and noticed that the three of them flinched as I did so. Ignoring it, I explained to them my thoughts on how magic worked. Namely, that I didn’t know how, just that it did, and how I managed it.

After I brought down a pile of books from the same publishing company—glossy covered books with titles like To Sip From A Goddess’s Chalice and written by authors with names like “Golden Crowfox”—Max and Ziggy set to merrily tearing them to shreds with their new knowledge.

Ziggy did far more damage than Max did. In a battle situation, being able to rip the limbs off someone was handy, but considering what we were potentially up against, I really wished he could do it a little faster, and with less muttering under his breath.

Max, though…I remembered learning about werewolves and their abilities. Most notably, that they practice magic. Max must have gotten a lot of practice. He obliterated his first book almost faster than I could see it fall apart, and he didn’t have to actually say anything.

“Wow.” I knew I was staring at him as though he were a circus freak, but I couldn’t help it. He seemed almost more powerful than Dahlia.

He just shrugged. “I suppose it comes with the hairy palms.”

“I might not be cut out for this kind of thing.” Bill sounded a little embarrassed, still holding an undamaged copy of Merlin’s Majikal Almanac.

Ziggy finished destroying a copy of Wiccan Sex Magic For One, which I made a mental note to tease Nathan about later, and turned to me. “Why is that? Why wouldn’t he be as good at it as we are? Is it a vampire thing?”

“It can’t be just a vampire thing. Dahlia could do it before she was a vampire.” I wondered if witches were born, not made. Maybe Nathan was right when he said that the dangerous witches were the ones with talent. The kind of power Dahlia had would have been venomous even without a knowledge of spells and potions.

Of course, I didn’t think I had any inborn talent toward the occult. If I did, I would feel awfully gypped that I didn’t use it to do better in medical school. No, it probably had more to do with Dahlia’s blood.

Max, I could understand. He was some strange monster hybrid, and to my mind that explained all sorts of weirdness. But then, why was Ziggy so good at magic? Could it be the Soul Eater’s blood, or—

“Did you drink Dahlia’s blood?” I asked, the question out before I could cushion it with tact.

Ziggy didn’t—maybe couldn’t—look me in the eye.

“It’s not a big deal. I’ve had Dahlia’s blood before.” But it was a big deal, and it was a little uncomfortable trying to compare my experiences, which were probably tame next to what he’d been through, to his. “You don’t have to tell us how or why. I’m just wondering if it has anything to do with why you’re able to do magic.”

He nodded, not at anything I said, though. More like he was psyching himself up to answer me. He looked up, and the expression on his face spoke of things I would never want to hear out loud. “Yeah. I’ve had her blood.”

“So, if I drank this Dahlia’s blood, I’d get magical powers, too?” Bill’s expression changed to one of utter disgust. “I can’t believe I just said ‘magical powers’in a serious way.”

“It’s okay, you’ll get used to it,” Max reassured him.

I cleared my throat, a little amazed myself at the way the conversation was spinning. “If you drank Dahlia’s blood, you’d become a vampire. Or, maybe you would when you died. I don’t know what would happen.”

“If you drank a vampire’s blood and they didn’t exchange with you, you’d become like the humans the Soul Eater keeps.” A visible shudder went through Ziggy as he spoke. “That is seriously bad news.”

“Okay, so, I’ll rely on the little bit I’ve managed to do here, and this.” Bill pulled his gun from behind his back and put it back just as quickly. “You can shoot these things, right?”

“Absolutely,” Ziggy said, looking a little disappointed at not having a firearm himself. “It might not stop them entirely, but it will definitely knock them down. They aren’t immortal, just really, really strong.”

“Okay, I think we have a plan of attack.” I couldn’t believe how close we were getting, how soon we would be doing all the dangerous things we’d talked about. “When do you want to do this?”

“Right now,” Max answered, but his words were covered up by Ziggy’s.

“The humans usually get fed at one. They lose strength between feedings, so if we hit them at like, twelve, twelve-thirty, we have a really good chance of getting them at their weakest.”

I considered that bit of information. “What about the Soul Eater? Will he be there? Or Dahlia? What are their schedules like?”

“Ten kinds of crazy,” Ziggy answered without hesitation. “They’ll either be there, or they won’t. We need to be prepared.”

“I’m prepared. They have Nathan. There could be ten Soul Eaters in there, and I would take on every one of them.” And I meant it. I leaned so I could see the clock in the kitchen. “Okay, midnight gives us two hours to get our heads together and get things ready to go. Is that enough time for you guys?”

Ziggy nodded, and Bill affirmed with a loud “hell yes.”

“Good. Get what weapons you need. And…” Struggling for some other good, inspiring advice, I finished with, “Wear comfortable shoes.”

“What are you going to do?” Max called after me as I walked down the hall.

“I’m going to worry, and pace,” I said, but as I closed the bedroom door behind me, I admitted to myself that what I was actually going to do was pray.

Bill wanted to ask him something. It wasn’t as if Ziggy was psychic or anything. He could just tell that when someone kept giving you sideways looks, they were probably working up the courage to ask you something.

With their arsenal collected and safely stored in the van, Max had excused himself to call home. Left alone, Ziggy and Bill sat on the couch, drinking coffee because beer seemed like a bad idea, and besides, they probably didn’t have time to run to the liquor store. Drunk might be more comfortable than sober when facing a life-or-death situation, but it probably cut your chances of living through it in half.

“So, what do you think about this?” Bill asked, but Ziggy could tell that wasn’t the question that was bothering him.

He could wait him out. “I think it might be suicide. But we don’t have anything else we can do. You?”

Bill shrugged. “Never know. We might have a chance. You’re pretty good with that spell thing. And I’m an okay fighter. And Max is pretty good, even though he seems pretty distracted by stuff at home. But if it really came down to it…would you go out fighting?”

“What, to bring Nate back?” That was a kind of hard question. In the past, it wouldn’t have been an issue. He would have done anything for Nate then. But after the last couple of months…

“What the hell happened to you?” Bill asked suddenly. “With your sire or whoever he is? What did he do to make you so…cold?”

“I’m not cold.” It came out more defensive than he’d meant it to. “I mean, there’s just other things to consider right now. Nate has definitely put his butt on the line for me, tons of times. But I did not survive the last couple of months through self-sacrifice, okay?”

“I get that.” Bill put his arm across the back of the couch, trying to appear casual and relaxed. “But this is the guy you consider your father. How can you be in self-preservation mode when it’s him you’re talking about?”

“Because I’m always in self-preservation mode.” Ziggy startled himself with his easy answer.

“And that’s why, when you were with your sire, you did whatever he wanted you to. And the things he wanted you to do just made you feel worse,” Bill said, and it was as if he’d read Ziggy’s mind. “I was in kind of the same situation, when I was younger. With my father, actually.”

Ziggy felt something tug in his chest, but that self-preservation forced him to ignore it. “Really? You think your dad did anywhere near the damage my sire has done to me?”

“Yes.” Bill didn’t hesitate. “Not the same kind of damage, but he certainly did damage me.”

Ziggy leaned back, letting his head rest on Bill’s arm. What he really wanted to do was hug him, but that would breach both of their defenses.

Bill shook his head. “I won’t go into all of it now, but…if you get to the point where you start adapting, trying to become what other people want you to be, no one will ever know you. The real you.”

Sighing, Ziggy closed his eyes. “You want to know who I really am? I’m a condemned fucking building. There are so many things wrong with me that I know I’m not going to get over.”

“You’re not a condemned building. And you don’t have to get over anything. You have to move on from them, and you have to get beyond thinking because someone degraded you, that’s what you’re worth.” Bill looked at him, not with pity, but understanding, and it had the same effect as if he’d stripped the skin and muscle from Ziggy’s bones. It sucked to be the one who gets their defensive wall blown all to hell.

“How do I know that’s not all that I’m worth, though?” Ziggy leaned forward, not wanting to touch any part of Bill, afraid his bruised feelings would seep through his skin and translate into a clear picture of how damaged he was in Bill’s brain. “You don’t know what he did to me. How could he do those things to me if I was really worth anything at all?”

“Because he’s a sick bastard, apparently.” Bill’s jaw clenched, like he wanted to punch something. It was a good feeling, to know someone wanted to hurt someone else for hurting you. “Ziggy, you are amazing. And I don’t mean amazing in a sexual sense. You are, but that’s not the point I’m trying to get across right now. You’re amazing because you’ve lived through all that you have, and it’s torn you down and you’ve made your own armor to protect yourself. But I don’t want you to feel like you have to do that anymore.”

“Why, what are you going to do about it?” Oh God, did that sound desperate? Did it sound as though he was pushing for some kind of big declaration?

He opened his mouth to take back his question, but Bill seemed to shrug off the words anyway. He took a sip of coffee before he spoke. “Nothing, really. What the hell can I do? But, as I’ve said before, I like you. I don’t want you to suffer.”

“Thanks.”

“And I think you would suffer if you didn’t do everything you possibly could for Nathan.”

Ziggy had never cared for people who had that kind of common sense. “Doesn’t matter. We’ll probably be dead before we get the chance to do anything truly heroic.”

Bill laughed quietly at that. “You’re probably right. Just promise that if something really horrendous happens to me, you’ll put me out of my misery.”

“Like, I should eat you or something?” Ziggy was relieved when the joke actually made Bill smile, not recoil in terror.

Bill leaned forward, so their lips were almost touching, his breath teasing Ziggy’s mouth as he said, “I can think of worse ways to go.”

And then he took Ziggy’s hand and pulled it to his neck, where the scar from that first bite was, and Ziggy shuddered. “I’m really sor—” he started to say, only to have his words cut off by Bill’s mouth on his.

And then he didn’t feel like apologizing for anything anymore.

Before we left, I dressed Henry—I had decided the golem needed a proper name—in some clothes Max loaned me. Henry had the same lean-muscled build that Max had, and I wondered if subconsciously I’d chosen that form for him. The clothes didn’t quite disguise the gray skin completely, but I figured if anyone noticed him in the short walk to the van we could say it was a rare side effect of iron supplements.

“He is not sitting in the back with me,” Ziggy said, shaking his head when we met him and Bill on the sidewalk. “Too creepy.”

“He can sit in the passenger seat.” I opened the passenger side door for him and commanded, “Get in. And buckle your seat belt, too.”

I watched as Henry did what I’d asked, that same blank expression on his face the entire time. Bill pulled the back doors open and motioned us in, giving Ziggy a playful shove. It was as if we all felt lighter, somehow, despite the ugly circumstances. Taking action seemed to spark hope I hadn’t realized was gone.

Bill closed the doors, and I winced at the loud creak of the hinges. Ziggy settled against the side wall and leaned his head back, closing his eyes, while Max stationed himself against the opposite wheel well.

“I can’t wait to get this thing done and get back home,” Ziggy said, as if we were headed to the Secretary of State’s office to get our license plates renewed, and I wished I had some of his bravado, even if it was mostly put on. He rolled his head, popping his spine loudly. When he straightened, I saw a fading bruise peeking out above the neck of his T-shirt.

“Oh my gosh, is that still there from the fight?” I leaned toward him to touch it, and he jerked his collar over it.

The mark faded with the red that crept up his neck. “No. Not from the fight.”

Oh. Right. I looked away from him so I wouldn’t stare at the hickey. “So, you and Bill are—”

The driver’s side door opened with a screech and Bill climbed inside. “Getting along well,” he supplied from the other side of the canvas drape, and the door closed.

Ziggy’s flush deepened, but a pleased smile tugged the corners of his mouth.

As obvious as it all seemed—now that it had been pointed out to me—I couldn’t quite get my head around their hookup. It was none of my business, but I couldn’t help it. The situation was exactly like when my best friend got a boyfriend during junior year and the rest of our clique wondered obsessively over whether or not they’d “done it” yet.

In a more maternal way, I worried that Bill didn’t appreciate what Ziggy had gone through with Cyrus and Jacob, if Ziggy had even mentioned it at all. Ziggy was a very private person, and if he didn’t warn Bill to tread carefully, he could wind up getting very hurt by his own omission. If Bill thought they were just having fun with no strings attached, would Ziggy even bother telling him if he felt different? Or, would he just hold all that hurt inside and go along with whatever Bill wanted?

And would I ever stop projecting my own relationship crap on others? I shook my head and grimaced at my own idiocy. Ziggy had done a lot of growing—had been forced to do it, actually—and Bill wasn’t a teenager. I was worried about things that not only were beyond my control, but also probably not worth worrying about in the first place.

You know why you’re doing it, right? I asked myself, and I had to agree that I did. I hadn’t heard anything through the blood tie from Nathan. It didn’t mean he was dead—I carried the broken connection between sire and fledgling around in my heart every day; I would know if he’d died. It did mean that he was experiencing things he didn’t want me privy to. A sick part of me worried he’d been seduced into following his sire’s whim, the way Cyrus had always fallen to the machinations of his father. But Nathan had made that mistake before, and it had cost him dearly. He wouldn’t do it again.

The most likely—and horrific—explanation was that whatever they were doing to him was so terrible, he didn’t want me to know about it. I tried to imagine the most vile, cruel thing the Soul Eater could be capable of. I had to stop myself to keep from bursting into tears.

“Next stop, certain death.” I tried to make it a joke, but the sick fear wound tighter and tighter through me as we pulled away from the sidewalk.

“I hope we make it back here,” Ziggy said, as if he’d read my thoughts.

I nodded. “I know how you feel.”

Eleven:

Skin

T he Soul Eater’s new residence was a far cry from the mansion I’d met him in. That had been pristine brick-and-marble columns with a fine manicured lawn and lots of clean-cut henchmen. The building I surveyed through my binoculars was all peeling paint and dangling gutters, and I was pretty sure the grass hadn’t been mowed so much as worn off the ground by feet and cars.

“The Soul Eater lives there?” I hissed from the back of the van. I don’t know why I whispered. We had parked the van a safe distance down the road from the house, where Ziggy had assured us we could see the house but no one on the property would think to look our way.

Ziggy made a noncommittal noise, his body rigid in the passenger’s seat he’d evicted Henry from. “Yeah. Well, he needed to go somewhere no one would try to find him while he healed.”

The last time I’d seen the Soul Eater, he’d just killed my fledgling. But he’d also made the mistake of replacing his own heart with the Oracle’s heart. It may not have killed the Soul Eater when Cyrus sank the stake into his chest, but it had killed the Oracle, and the heart had combusted inside the Soul Eater. It had done plenty of damage, and Jacob Seymour had already all but destroyed his ability to function as a normal vampire by constantly cannibalizing others. It wasn’t a long shot to think he was still healing. Unless…

“How is he doing? I mean, after what we did to him before?” I hoped the answer was that he was still twisted and crippled by the attack, and I’d be able to single-handedly take him out, thus ending our problem forever.

I knew that wasn’t to be when Ziggy shrugged. “He’s dangerous now. He’s been feeding on his fledglings. The last one was some woman from Nevada who came up here thinking he just wanted to talk. I don’t get how these people can be so dumb.”

It must have been March, the madam of the vampire brothel I’d met on my travel to rescue Cyrus. I couldn’t feel too bad about her. There were just some people who made my life easier by dying.

“So we should steer clear of the guy?” Bill asked.

I answered for Ziggy. “Yes. I think our plan should be simple. We fight our way in, or as far in as we can. I’ll get myself into the house and look for Nathan. There’s nowhere else they would be keeping him, right?”

Ziggy shook his head. “No place I can think of.”

“Then I’ll go in and find him. If I run into Dahlia or the Soul Eater, I’ll try to make it back out.” A spark of hope ignited in my chest. “Unless you think they’re not here.”

“No, they’re here.” Ziggy took the binoculars, scanned the area quickly and handed them back. “Look, the humans are out and about. When he’s not home, the humans are locked in the barn. Just in case one of them comes to their senses and tries to get away. If the Soul Eater and Dahlia and me—when I lived here—were home and somebody tried to take off, we just…”

“I get it,” I said, not wanting to hear the rest. “Fine. So, the humans are out, the Soul Eater is in, and we’re going after Nathan. There’s no time like the present.”

Ziggy and Bill got out, then opened the back doors for Max and Henry and I. We gathered our weapons quickly, as if attack could come at any moment. And it could.

I’d planned my weapons for speed. A stake in each back pocket, a few vials of holy water in a passport holder hanging around my neck. I’d lined the pouch with a plastic bag, just in case the vials broke, and tucked the whole thing inside my shirt. A knife was concealed by my pant leg. I didn’t have a neat holster or anything to hold it there, so it stayed in place with a strip of duct tape. I hoped I wouldn’t have to use it, not because it was my last line of defense, but because it would hurt like hell to rip it off.

Ziggy and Bill were more heavily armed. Ziggy had Nathan’s big, scary ax in one hand, his crossbow strapped across his back. I couldn’t help but remember the first night I’d met Ziggy, when he’d shouted, “Die, vampire scum!” and charged at me with the very ax he held now. It seemed years away. It was hard to believe it had only been a matter of months. Bill, on the other hand, was content to take his gun and a couple of knives I was pretty sure he’d taken from the kitchen drawer. Still, both of them had stakes in every available pocket, and a few, I’m sure, duct-taped the way my knife was. Max had stakes, but when I had offered him other weapons, he’d just shrugged them off and said, “I won’t need them.”

“They’ll see us coming up the driveway,” Ziggy said, handing Henry a stake and a knife. We figured he would know what to do with them.

“Well, if they’re going to see us anyway, might as well make an entrance,” Bill reasoned. “Get back in the van. I’m driving us down there.”

“Try to take out a few of them on the way in,” I said, silently praying we wouldn’t get ourselves killed in a car accident before we could get ourselves killed in the assault on the house.

“Will do,” Bill assured me cheerfully as we piled into the vehicle. The engine roared to life and Bill did indeed make an entrance. He ignored the gravel driveway, charging the van instead through the low-lying brush that lined the road. “Element of surprise,” he shouted over the noise of branches clanging against the underside of the van. He was enjoying himself way, way too much.

“We do need this to get back, you know,” Max yelled as I braced myself against the backs of the seats. I squeezed my eyes shut as we passed between two trees. When I opened them, the driver’s side-view mirror was gone.

The house was surrounded by a huge lawn, and on either side abandoned fields. Bill plowed through the field, toward the house, where a few startled human servants clustered. They didn’t have time to get out of the way, and I heard body parts hitting the undercarriage of the vehicle. It reminded me of the way dandelion heads sounded smacking against the bottom of my little red wagon as I’d pulled it through the backyard as a child.

“Here’s good,” Ziggy yelled, pushing the door open. He jumped out, ax swinging.

Bill took advantage of the cover of the car to shoot a few of them from where we sat. I hadn’t even seen him open the window. I clapped my hands over my ears, thinking I would never be able to hear again. Soon, a ring of dead and critically wounded humans surrounded the van.

Ziggy let us out of the back. “More coming. From the barn,” he said, helping me down. Bill joined us at the back, reloading.

I looked toward the house, my goal. We were about a hundred feet away, and the distance seemed impossible. More humans came from that direction, and some vampires. I could tell that was what they were from the fact they weren’t wearing heavily soiled clothes like the humans. “Great. Bill, keep clear of the clean ones, they’re probably vampires.”

“Will do.” He tried to pick off a few of the approaching humans in the direction of the barn, but they were too far out of range. All we could do was wait for them to get to us.

Henry stood beside me, holding his stake in one hand, the knife in the other. “Henry, follow me and…Max.”

“I’ll kill anyone who tries to get in your way,” Max vowed.

Bill looked at me for a minute as though he might be one of those people, his hand flexing around his gun. Instead, he said in a tight voice, “We’ll back you up. You just worry about getting inside.”

“What about the ones coming that way?” Ziggy jerked his head toward the creatures nearing from the direction of the barn.

Bill shrugged. “I guess we end up in the middle and go down in a blaze of glory.”

I guess that must have seemed reasonable to all of us, because it only took a briefly shared look and we were off, running headlong into the mass of humans—it seemed, frighteningly, as though their number had grown. Over my left shoulder, Ziggy’s ax flashed, and a stream of blood sprayed the side of my face.

“Sorry,” I heard him shout from somewhere, though the volume wasn’t necessary. The only noise was our own exertion. The creatures didn’t make much sound. No screams, no wisecracks, just an occasional grunt as one of them fell. It was an eerie kind of quiet, because you expect a battle to have more sounds, like in the movies. All I heard was the rhythmic slash of Ziggy’s ax and the crack of Bill’s gun.

The first one to try and hit me, a rail-thin man with eyes that seemed to bug out of his dirty face, missed. I grabbed his arm as it swung past and forced it down, feeling the pop as the joint of his shoulder separated.

“They haven’t been fed yet,” Ziggy called, and I turned in time to see him twist a woman’s head completely off her body. I shuddered at that and turned back to my goal: the house.

Another of the humans grasped my leg. I looked down to see a scrawny girl, her hair thinning in patches over the mottled skin of her scalp. I wondered if she clutched me for help or to harm me, but I didn’t need to wonder further when she sank her teeth into my leg. I kicked her free and fended off another set of snapping teeth at my right arm.

“You’re right, they haven’t been fed!” I elbowed a shockingly elderly woman in her throat, praying she wasn’t someone’s beloved grandmother.

“Watch your blood, everybody!” Max warned, and I saw him hit one of the creatures in the side of the face so hard its jaw completely detached and flew into the melee. He really didn’t need weapons, after all, as it appeared werewolves were a lot stronger than vampires.

Bill screamed, and I turned to see him press the barrel of the gun into the top of a sandy-blond head that had latched on to his forearm. He squeezed the trigger, sending a spectacular stew of brain, blood and bone over the front of his shirt before the body dropped, teeth still embedded in his flesh.

“Careful you don’t shoot yourself, for fuck’s sake!” Ziggy yelled, bringing his ax down on the back of a creature he’d kneed in the groin. “Carrie, get to the house!”

I turned to Henry, who waited patiently at my side. “Why the hell are you just standing there?”

A creature grabbed him, dragged him back and released him when it realized he had no blood in him…something I hadn’t realized until that moment, either. But even under attack, Henry waited to act. “Henry,” I called as we became separated in the action, “kill all these humans!”

That was all it took. Suddenly Henry, a weapon in each hand, began to plow through the humans like a killing machine. It was a bizarre dance; Henry grabbed a human, pulled them close, jammed the knife low in their abdomen and slit them upward, as though he was opening an envelope. The hot, foul smell of open bowel filled the air by the time he gutted his second creature.

“Carrie, watch out!” Bill shouted, bringing me back to the reality at hand. Another human reached for me. I got a sick feeling in my gut when I saw how young she was—probably sixteen and, under normal circumstances, scared for her life. But this wasn’t a normal circumstance, and she was definitely not a normal girl. Her eyes registered nothing but feral hunger and a desire for destruction. She gripped both my arms and pulled, and I thanked God she hadn’t been fed tonight, or I might have had no further need for sleeves. I tried not to think of Cyrus—the first time I’d known him—and the perverse joy he would have had watching me destroy this poor girl. But she was beyond help, there was no doubt in my mind. I lifted one foot and kicked at her, not caring where my foot connected, and then, because I couldn’t reach my knife, I found a stake with the hand I’d freed and jammed it hard into her chest. In my mind I saw the view from the inside, skin, sinew, cartilage splitting and splintering under the force and point of the wood. I saw the pumping core of her and kept forcing, until my hand followed the hole the stake had made and buried with a wet sucking sound into her chest. Her eyes rolled up, displaying only white, and blood gushed from her mouth and nose. I yanked my hand back, horrified and ashamed at my actions, and let her drop.

Through a heady rush of bloodlust, I viewed the house ahead of me. I needed to get there, fast, before I did something else. Something I would regret more than jamming my fist through a teenager’s rib cage, if I could ever possibly top that. I started just throwing the humans aside for Max and Henry to deal with, buying myself time and forward momentum. For a split second, I felt guilty at leaving the guys to fight all of the creatures on their own. But some weird elation at being closer to my goal filled me, made me feel more powerful, ready for anything.

That was Dahlia, and I knew it in a second.

I don’t know if she thought she was driving me closer to my doom. Maybe she and the Soul Eater were waiting just inside the weathered front door, and they would kill me instantly when I stepped inside. But whatever reason she had for messing with my mind now, she reminded me of one crucial detail.

Using a spell I’d improvised, I imaged the word back shooting from my mouth like a gale-force wind. The creatures were knocked back long enough for me to scream, “Remember to use that spell!” I saw Ziggy’s face brighten under a mask of blood. I turned back to the house, but I heard one of the creatures scream—finally scream—and the sound of flesh tearing like the pages of a book.

As soon as I got free of the battle, I ran to the house as fast as I could. My lungs burned and my legs ached as I pushed myself up those final steps, but I didn’t let myself stop. The door was unlocked, so I abandoned all pretense of stealth. Dahlia knew I was there. If she was in the house, she would hear me.

“Nathan!” I screamed, and I was impressed in some detached corner of my mind at how desperate and horror-movie damsel-ish I sounded. “Nathan, where are you!”

Carrie, get out!

For the first time in far too long, I heard Nathan’s thoughts through the blood tie, soaked in fear and pain. And weak. More weak than I’d ever heard him.

“I’m not leaving here without you!” I shouted, scanning the wide hallway for any of the creatures, or other vampires. “Tell me where you are!”

The house was built like an old Southern farmhouse, though how it got to the middle of Michigan I had no clue. The entrance hall was long, with a staircase leading to the second story. Beyond the staircase I could see the back door. On a hot summer day, when the doors were both open to let in the breeze, you would be able to see all the way through the house.

Unluckily for me, it wasn’t a hot summer day. It was night, and though I could make out the general layout of the house, I wouldn’t be able to see if something was shuffling around in the darkness.

Come on, baby, you’ve got to tell me where you are, I thought, partly for him and partly to urge myself on the search. There was no answer. Maybe they had him drugged, and he couldn’t remain conscious.

Of course, it could be much worse. I prayed he was just drugged.

I ducked through a doorway to my right. It was a large dining room, with remnants of the last meal still on the table. The overwhelming stench of the corpse made my eyes water and my throat flex closed. There was a large kitchen knife buried in the body’s face. The whole thing was hacked to pieces and in some places partially skinned. I couldn’t tell if the poor soul was a man or a woman, but it had certainly been fed better than the mindless zombies they’d made the humans outside into. Sticky globs of jelled fat gleamed on the table in the moonlight from the windows, and the beefier parts left on the corpse wobbled as I disturbed the floorboards by walking on them. I pulled the collar of my T-shirt over my nose and moved to the door I assumed led to the kitchen. No leftovers there. In fact, nothing at all, except for a few blood-crusted cups in the sink. I moved on.

Back in the hall, I considered my chances of finding anyone in the rooms to the left side of the house, and weighed them against getting trapped upstairs if the humans from outside came in after me.

They won’t. They’re not allowed. Nathan was conscious again.

Where are you? I tried to keep my mental voice even, despite the panic I truly felt. Please, Nathan, I can’t do this alone.

Get out of here, he insisted, and then the connection broke again. I wanted to scream my frustration. Instead, I ran through the door near the foot of the stairs, which led to a small living room scattered with broken furniture and then, guided by the miraculous appearance of a sliver of light under another doorway, to a back bedroom lit by candles and, tied to a narrow bed, Nathan.

It was a strange sort of relief, finding him. I would have preferred to find him in a much different state. He lay on his stomach, arms stretched above his head, wrists tied apart to the white-painted iron spindles of the headboard. His feet weren’t tied, but he didn’t try to move. There were marks on his back, long slashes indicative of a whip or a scourge. My gaze darted—guided by Dahlia’s urging in my head, no doubt—to the old-fashioned washstand at the end of the bed. It was a scourge, all right, a wicked weapon with a surfeit of leather straps, all ending in some terrible, sharp object that appeared to have been added as a homemade afterthought. I saw at least two broken razor blades tied to it before I tore my tear-filled eyes away.

“Nathan,” I said quietly, approaching the bed. The blood on his back was still sticky; the wounds hadn’t healed. Either Dahlia had just been here, or he was wounded beyond healing. It doesn’t look that bad, I argued with myself.

I knelt beside the bed, gagging a little at the smell of his blood. Usually, it would have been a comfort, but not when there was so much of it soaked into the sheets and mattress below him.

“Oh,” I whispered, reaching to touch what little skin on his back remained unmarked. I couldn’t help the pity in my voice, or the half sob.

He turned his head to me, his eyes black and swollen shut. The lids flickered as if he would try to open them, and they did open, just a little. “You’re really here?”

“I’m really here.” I touched his hair, matted and sticky with blood. Underneath it I felt hard, scabbed over wounds. “You’re going to be okay, we’re getting you out.”

“No!” He tried to shake his head, but it was a pathetic half movement that caused him to whimper in pain. “No,” he began again, more subdued. “You can’t move me.”

“Bill is here, Ziggy is here. They’ll help me carry you.” I didn’t mention Henry. There was no time to explain, and he had no energy to be pissed at me.

The ropes binding his arms weren’t tied in any sort of complicated knot. If he had wanted to get free, he would have. I wondered why he hadn’t tried, then chastised myself inwardly. He was wounded and weak, though a sick part of me couldn’t pity him too much, as I’d seen much, much worse.

I pulled the binding free and his arms, hands purple from lack of circulation, dropped to the bed. He screamed when the movement jostled him.

“What’s the matter?” I asked, feeling suddenly that something was definitely far worse than I had anticipated, but not knowing exactly what.

“Don’t move me,” he pleaded, but I couldn’t heed him. If he was severely injured, I had to know the extent.

“I’m sorry, I have to.” I eased one hand under him and he screamed again. I’d never seen him like this, so completely delirious with pain. “Roll over, please. I can’t lift you.”

“No,” he sobbed, but he did help me a little as I slid my other hand beneath his torso and tried, gently as I could, to ease him onto his back. The sheet stuck to his chest and stomach the way a wet washcloth sticks to skin. It pulled away with a sloppy, sucking sound, revealing flesh so bloody I couldn’t tell where the injury originated from. Once he was completely on his back, and unconscious as a result, I lifted one of the tall pillar candles from the bedside table for more light. I looked around the room for a light switch, but saw nothing. I wondered if the place even had electricity.

Hesitantly, I raised the candle, widening the circle of light it cast over the bed. And at what I saw, I dropped it.

Nathan had been skinned. There was no other word for it. From his collarbones to the tops of his knees, nothing but muscle and in some places, bone showed through. I tried to choke back the bile that rose in my throat, but I couldn’t hold it. I doubled over and vomited on the floor, on my shoes, wishing I never had to look at my sire again and see him this way. But I had to look. I had to figure out a way to get him out, to save his life.

Tears streamed down my face as I finally got the courage to examine him again. In Gross Anatomy, you start with your cadaver from the outside and go in. The feeling of my scalpel slicing into skin to make a buttonhole incision, dividing the flesh into large strips that could be peeled away, came back to me, and I almost threw up again. How long had this taken? How long had he suffered like this? The pain was unimaginable.

The worst was, she hadn’t stopped at skinning. It appeared she’d gone as low as his knees and then grown bored, only to return to the top of his chest and begin on the muscle. His ribs were exposed. His two, pulsing hearts were visible behind the bloodstained bones. His lungs, his liver, all of it hung there unprotected.

I don’t know when or why in the course of all of this that I decided Dahlia was the culprit, but I’d never been more recklessly sure of anything in my life.

“Like my work?”

When I heard her voice behind me, smug and superior, confirming all my suspicions, I lunged for her.

Twelve:

Soul Eater

D ahlia paled and stepped back as I ran at her. I wished I had whatever implements she’d used to torture Nathan. I would have jammed them into her throat. I would have carved her into pieces that didn’t die, just wriggled in agony on the floor. I would have smashed those pieces one by one under my shoes.

I didn’t reach her. She held up her hand and knocked me back, the way I had knocked back the humans outside. I felt as weak and inconsequential as a human in the face of her power. She’d done things to me before, but I’d never sensed how incredibly dangerous she was until now.

“I suppose I could have done that with magic,” she purred, nodding toward Nathan. “But I like getting my hands dirty.”

I struggled to my feet, spat, “Apart,” imagined it like a razor blade, but she held it off and knocked me down again.

She stalked toward me. “Well, for some things. I like to get my hands dirty when it’s fun.”

I was the only thing between her and Nathan. If I died doing it, I was going to at least try to protect him. “Apart,” I tried again, and again she shook it off.

“Please, bitch. You think you can hurt me? I bet you think you know everything, just because you have that little book of mine.” She raised her hand again and conjured a ball of crackling purple energy. She released it at me and it was as if every inch of my skin had become fiberglass, splintering and prickling with the slightest movement, even breath.

“That’s amateur stuff,” she continued, looking down at me the way someone would look at a mouse smashed by a trap, dispassionate, just waiting for the death throes to end so they can throw the disgusting vermin in the trash.

I drew a deep breath, despite the pain it caused in my ribs, my lungs. “Apart.”

This time, it worked a little. She didn’t rip apart and she definitely didn’t turn to sand, but a long slash opened on her cheek. Some of my magic had gotten through. And hers faltered.

She looked as surprised as I did.

“I drank your blood, bitch.” I put as much emphasis as I could on the word, hurling it back at her with as much venom as she’d wielded against me. “I’ve got your power.”

“Not all of it.” She sounded confident, but she took a step back.

“Yet.” I don’t know why I said it. Maybe to scare her. But the fact that I meant it, that scared me.

“You wouldn’t dare!” she shrieked. It did scare her. She took another step backward, and another.

“I would do more than you could imagine to protect him.” I advanced on her. “Apart!”

She gasped and tried to protect herself, but a little too late. Another long slash opened across her neck, red weeping from it like wax dripping from a candle.

I reached into my shirt for a vial of holy water. I pulled one out, hurled it at her. It missed and exploded against the wall. She ducked, and only a few drops splashed across her face.

Dahlia smiled and licked one of the drops away, a little wisp of smoke curling up from her pointed tongue.

I looked at Nathan, all torn apart on the bed. I thought of Cyrus, feeding me information and then going back to laugh at me with Dahlia. And I got angry. Angry at being defeated over and over, at gaining ground only to have it ripped from under me, at watching the people I loved being hurt over and over.

“Dahlia?” I asked, hearing the feigned weariness in my own voice, evilly anticipating the shock she would receive.

She snorted again, a look of pure joy on her face at having won so easily. “What? Going to beg me for mercy now?”

I was on her before she could even think to run. She tried to form the words to create a spell. I crushed her windpipe. She raised her hand to zap me with another ball of energy. I slammed her hand down and pulled her fingers back, toward her wrist, until I heard them snap and splintered white bone erupted from her skin. She tried to scream, but without the air to do it, it came out like a death rattle. I looked into her eyes and saw fear. She knew she was going to die.

Maybe, if I had been in my right mind, I would have just killed her outright. I would have had pity. But the smell of her blood leaking from her neck and the intoxicating feeling of power at finally, finally being able to do something I’d wanted to do for a long time—to hurt her as much as she’d tried to hurt me, a fraction of what she deserved for what she’d done to Nathan—clouded my senses. She communicated with me frantically through the hold she thought she had on my mind, trying to impress me with visions of the consequences of my actions, but I ignored her.

When I bent my head to her throat and bit, tearing away all the flesh at the front of her neck, I knew I could kill her now and stop. But I wouldn’t. I gulped down Dahlia’s blood, felt her cease struggling by degrees, and I still didn’t stop. I drank until I knew she was dead, and when the blood no longer moved, I sucked it from the wounds. And then, suddenly, the taste of her blood became the taste of something else, something liquid blue and resistant, fighting against me so that I wanted whatever it was even more.

“Carrie,” I heard Nathan say, weakly, behind me. “Carrie, stop now. Please.”

I ignored him, ignored the impassioned pleas in my head from both him and Dahlia. Hers became increasingly incoherent, until all I heard was senseless, terrified babbling. But still, I drew the blue essence into myself, felt it fill my veins and imagined them burning white-hot under my skin.

A rushing started in my ears. I saw through Dahlia’s eyes. It was a sight without sight, moving backward through a reality I’d never seen before. From the moment I bit her, to her glee as she carved into Nathan—she had laughed at his screams, and for that I wanted to kill her all over again—to her days as Cyrus’s pet, the images flashing through my brain faster and faster, more time elapsing backward as it was lost to the speed of her thoughts.

It was Dahlia’s life flashing before her eyes, I realized, and when I did, everything slowed. I saw a man, a priest, in white-and-gold vestments, and he seemed so tall, like God himself, as he leaned down to the prayer rail and placed the wafer on Dahlia’s tongue. The taste was sharp, sharp like the sudden pain in her tiny, gloved hands. And before she looked down, the priest’s face went pale, the girl next to her shrieked. She couldn’t swallow the host, her first Holy Communion, as she gazed down, transfixed, at the sudden wounds in her wrists. Rivulets of blood poured onto her crisp, white communion dress.

The white of her dress blazed with blinding intensity, overlapping the bloody spots until all that filled my vision was light. Then, the white burst through me and my vision cleared. I looked around the room—it took me a moment to remember where I was, and why—and everything seemed to be in sharper focus. It seemed as though the pattern on the peeling wallpaper could cut me if I touched it.

Dahlia still begged and pleaded, but I found it easy to ignore. Probably because she lay dead in my arms. Really, truly dead. I wasn’t sure where the crying came from, but it didn’t really matter. I found that if I made a concentrated effort, I could block it out.

Carrie, what have you done? Disgust, fear and a sliver of admiration—which gave way to more disgust—flowed across the blood tie from Nathan.

“I don’t know,” I said out loud. “I killed her.”

“You didn’t just kill her.” Another voice, this one from the doorway, snapped my head up. Jacob Seymour loomed over me, but he didn’t appear as godlike and impressive as he’d seemed in the past. In fact, he seemed angry, and perhaps a little sad.

Letting Dahlia’s body flop unceremoniously to the floor, I stood to face him. “Are you going to kill me?”

A sinister smile formed on his weathered face. The sadness faded from his countenance, leaving behind only rage. “I’m not just going to kill you.”

I shook my head. “I won’t let you take my soul.”

“You don’t have a choice!” he roared, and he grabbed me by the throat, lifting me from the ground. He hurled me through the door, into the ruined parlor. I landed on an overturned chair, and the graceful arch of the padded wooden arm embedded in my back. If I’d been human, it probably would have broken my spine.

“You are a fool!” he raged, storming after me. I couldn’t stand fast enough, and he got hold of me again, this time grasping one wrist and one ankle. When he threw me this time, I spun. I couldn’t get my bearings before I fell, and I crashed through a marble-topped end table. This time, I felt blood pour down my back. If I let him toss me around like a doll caught in the middle of a child’s temper tantrum, I wasn’t going to last long.

“Did you think you could become my equal?” He knocked aside the sofa as if it were made of nothing. “From one puny soul?”

Still dazed from my injuries and the heady feeling of Dahlia’s soul running like a drug through my brain, I didn’t fully process his words. In my fight with Dahlia, my hatred had spurred me on. But strangely, I didn’t hate the Soul Eater as much as I’d hated his fledgling. I had nothing to fuel me, and my body ached, not just from the blows Jacob had dealt me, but from all the stresses and pains of the last week.

If you die, he will kill Nathan. I couldn’t argue with myself on that point. It was only for Nathan’s sake that I managed to stagger to my feet, put up my hands and shout, “Back!”

The priceless, gratifying look of surprise on the Soul Eater’s face as he flew backward was an expression I would remember forever. It probably mirrored my own, as the power came to me as effortlessly as it ever had to Dahlia. He hit the wall and it crumbled, the cloth wall covering split over the splintered boards and a fine mist of plaster dust surrounded him.

Dahlia’s blood must have been more powerful in large quantities.

He realized it, as well. When he staggered to his feet, he headed straight for Nathan.

“No!” I ran after him, pure fear pumping through my veins. I felt all of it rush straight to the word “Apart!” as I screamed it at Jacob Seymour. He’d nearly reached the door to the room where Nathan lay, but he fell backward, his body jerking like a marionette whose strings had been cut. I hadn’t managed to completely kill him, but he was out for the moment, at least.

Kill him, Nathan ordered. The strength of his mental signal had faded considerably. I had to get him out, fast.

Pulling my last stake from my back pocket, I moved cautiously to the Soul Eater’s side. My hands trembling, anticipating the moment that would come next, when everything I’d been fighting since the moment I’d become a vampire all vanished in a shower of ash, I adjusted my grip and knelt down beside him, ready to strike.

The Soul Eater’s arm shot up, his hand closed over my throat. I dropped the stake and clawed at his hand, noting with satisfaction that it wasn’t as attached as it had been before my spell hit him.

“Inconvenient, isn’t it?” His fist flexed tighter around my neck, as if he was trying to squeeze my head off. “If you can’t speak, you can’t cast any more of those nasty spells.”

Tears leaked from the corners of my eyes. Jacob’s grip on my throat put merciless pressure on my jugular and carotid. My brain, starved of oxygenated blood, began to punch black holes in my peripheral vision.

“Father, stop.”

The Soul Eater immediately released me, but I still fell to the floor. I wondered if I’d been mistaken, if he’d actually killed me. Because standing in the doorway was Cyrus.

It was as if he’d never died. His hair was a little longer than the last time I’d seen him; now it brushed the collar of his shirt. He was dressed all in black, from the laced front of his shirt to the tight, black leather of his pants. A long, straight scar slashed down his chest, and I realized with sickening clarity that he’d been sired again, that his father had taken his heart again. He was as unobtainable to me as he’d ever been.

He didn’t look at me. He kept his eyes on his father, expression bored and disinterested. “You owe her some gratitude. If it weren’t for her, you wouldn’t have the final component of your ritual.” He gestured to himself as he said it, and I saw blood on his hands.

“Cyrus?” I whispered. All of the air had been forced from my lungs, and I couldn’t pull any back in. And I couldn’t look away from him. “Cyrus?”

He didn’t acknowledge me at all. But the Soul Eater did. He glowered down at me, then turned back to his son with the movements of a vulture circling the most likely prey. “Gratitude? It was not her, but my money that brought you back. And more than once. Who let you out?”

“Dahlia.” Cyrus examined his nails, which I noticed matched his clothes. “She wanted me.”

“She doesn’t want anything, anymore,” Jacob hissed, stalking toward his son. “This sniveling whore killed her.”

Cyrus shrugged. “Did she? That is disappointing. I suppose I’ll just have to go back to my cell without the pleasure of Dahlia’s company. Perhaps I can slam my hand in the door over and over again to compensate for that loss.”

“This is not the time for jokes!” The Soul Eater moved so fast I barely saw him hit Cyrus, but deep slashes marred his cheek a second later, weeping blood down his neck.

Slowly, deliberately, he touched his face, then licked his own blood from his fingers. “Thank you, Father. I didn’t get a chance to feed tonight.”

Jacob moved again, and this time it was slower. I saw the motion, and I saw Cyrus’s gaze flicker to me, almost imperceptible, and the slightest incline of his head in a nod toward me.

And it didn’t take more than that for me to decide that this was the moment to act.

Dahlia hadn’t used any words when she’d done her spells. Maybe she was just more powerful. But she was inside of me now. I opened my mouth in a weak pantomime of the word back, but in my head I imagined the letters like battering rams slamming into the Soul Eater, one after another. The Soul Eater jerked backward and slammed into the wall again. This time it crumbled away and he fell through the hole, onto the lawn where Max, Ziggy and Bill still fought the human creatures.

I climbed to my feet, awed at what I’d done for only a second before another kind of amazement came over me. I turned, expecting to see Cyrus had evaporated, that he’d been a part of my imagination. But he was there. He didn’t take his eyes off me as I staggered, weak-limbed, toward him. “You’re alive?”

He didn’t answer. As I got closer to him, I saw a muscle in his jaw tense. Though I was within his reach, he made no move to touch me. And when I put up my hands to touch him, he grabbed my wrists and forced them down, then stepped back quickly. He reached into the gaping neck of his loose silk shirt and withdrew a plastic bag with a grayish, blood-smeared object in it and pressed it into my hands.

“Now get Nolen and get the hell out of here, before I kill him myself.” His face was hard, and though I thought I saw pain in his eyes, his words cut me to the core.

I turned back to the hole in the wall. Nearly all of the humans were dead. Only about a dozen remained, and the men, aided by Henry, were making short work of them. I glanced down at the Soul Eater’s unconscious form on the lawn. Two of the humans had caught his scent and they ran for him, lapping the blood from his wounds.

I definitely wouldn’t want to be them when he woke up.

When I turned back, Cyrus had gone. I almost called out to him, then remembered what he’d said. “Max! I need help getting Nathan to the van!” I shouted. At my words, Ziggy broke away from the fighting, leaving Henry to assume his place. He easily held his own against the few remaining humans.

Bill loped off in the direction of the van while Max corralled Henry, and Ziggy mounted the steps to the porch. As he came closer, I saw the faint purple lines of minor wounds that had already begun to heal. “Much easier than I thought it would be,” Ziggy said cheerfully, though I could see a glint of grim steel in his expression. “How bad is he?”

I didn’t mince words. I wouldn’t be able to protect him from what he would see. “She skinned him.”

He looked as if he might vomit, but he got it under control. “Fine. Let’s go.” He moved a few steps ahead of me, then stopped. “Is that my heart?”

I’d almost forgotten about the bag in my hand. I handed it over to Ziggy, then went in and covered the worst of Nathan’s injuries. “If we wrap him up in the top sheet, it will give him some protection against dirt and other things getting in the wound,” I explained to Ziggy. Diseases and infections wouldn’t be able to take hold in a vampire body the way they did in a human body, but cleaning dirt out of someone’s skinned torso probably wouldn’t be any fun for the person doing the work or the person getting worked on.

Once we had him securely wrapped in the sheet, Ziggy lifted his feet and I very carefully grasped him under the arms, trying not to touch the ragged edges of removed skin. We went as fast as we could through the house, but the broken furniture and general squalor inhibited us greatly.

Outside, the van roared up to the porch. Bill laid on the horn.

“That doesn’t sound like a good sign,” Ziggy said, nodding toward the door.

We rushed the rest of the way, almost dropping Nathan at the threshold. At the top of the driveway, four sleek black cars pulled in, tires kicking up gravel as they spun out on their way down.

“Guards,” Ziggy explained. “The house was too small, so they live in a house off-site, down the road. And there are more. We have to get out of here, now.”

My heart leaped into my throat. “You could have mentioned that before, Ziggy!”

Bill left the car running as he hopped down from the driver’s seat to open the back doors of the van. He looked from the bloodied sheet covering Nathan to me, and I shook my head, indicating there wasn’t time to waste.

Ziggy got in first, and Bill took over for me, helping to load Nathan in the back. All I could do was stand by, wincing every time they jostled him, repeating things like “Be careful” and “Hurry.”

I was about to climb into the back with them when Ziggy asked, “What about Henry?”

I’d forgotten about him. “Henry, come on, we’ve got to go!”

“More specific, Carrie,” Bill reminded me tersely, jumping down from the back. “Henry, come and get in the van!”

The cars screeched to a halt and black uniformed men climbed out, running across the lawn toward us.

“Forget him, you can make another,” Ziggy shouted as I climbed out.

“Henry,” I called, and, over Bill’s shoulder, I saw him dart around the front of the van. For a moment I was grateful to see him. Then he raised his knife and, without any change in his blank expression, brought it down.

Bill turned, his face frozen in disbelief, the knife handle jutting out of his chest.

Thirteen:

How to Save a Life

“B ill!” Carrie screamed, putting her arms out to grab him as he fell. But Ziggy grabbed him faster than she could and slung him over his shoulder. “Max, get in and drive.”

How the hell had he managed to say that without screaming? It was all he felt like doing, dropping to the ground and wailing at the unfairness of what had just happened. But he managed to get Bill’s body in the back, beside Nathan’s, and Carrie crawled in beside them. That ghoulish gray thing sat in the seat beside Max. Carrie pushed the canvas curtains back and screamed at it. “Why did you do it? Answer me!”

It didn’t even turn its head. “‘Kill all of these humans.’”

The transmission scraped as Max forced it into Drive and stomped on the gas, and Carrie fell back, nearly crushing Nathan.

“Bill, can you hear me?” Ziggy slapped his face. This was not happening. It was not happening. “Bill, come on, you fucker! Wake up!”

If he had paid better attention in Boy Scouts, he would know first aid beyond a vague idea of CPR. Jesus, he couldn’t even tell if Bill had a pulse. “Carrie, what do I do?”

It was a really long time before she said anything. At least, it seemed that way with Bill’s blood pumping slower and slower out of the hole in his chest and Carrie staring at him like she was in shock.

“Put pressure on the wound. Not too much. If it’s his heart…”

“If it’s his heart, what?” He tried really hard to keep the panic out of his voice, to keep from screaming at her for being so stupid. It wouldn’t help, and Bill was opening his eyes, kind of moving his head around. “Bill, can you hear me?”

He opened his mouth as if he would talk, but instead a bloody bubble pushed out.

“Oh God.” This time, Ziggy couldn’t care less the way his voice sounded. And he didn’t care all that much about the tears in his eyes, as long as Bill didn’t see them.

“Shut up…I’m fine,” Bill wheezed, choking on more blood. “I think. I’m lying…on a…” He reached a hand out to touch something in front of him, but nothing was there.

“You’re going to be all right, okay?” He pulled back the canvas flap. “Can I move him? He’s lying on something.”

“No.” Carrie shook her head. “He’s not lying on anything. Internal bleeding is putting pressure on—”

“Shut up!” Ziggy shouted, and he realized he sounded like Nate had the night he’d been dying in Cyrus’s study. It made a horrible chill go up his spine, and he shut his eyes tight.

When he opened them again, there were light droplets of sweat on Bill’s skin, but if you didn’t look into his eyes, you’d think he was the most stoic motherfucker on the face of the planet. “Not thrilled…about dying.”

“Shut up, you’re not going to die.” Ziggy ignored the thump at the side of the van that made them swerve again.

Max cursed loudly, then shouted, “I think I lost them!”

Somehow, Bill’s hand managed to find Ziggy’s. “Sorry…we won’t—”

“You’re not going to die,” Ziggy said, but he couldn’t be as vehement this time. Because he was starting to believe that Bill might have a very serious problem. “Just rest now, okay?”

“We don’t have far to go,” Carrie reminded him, but as the minutes passed and they seemed to hit every red light in Grand Rapids, Ziggy started to lose hope.

“Bill?” he said quietly, touching the side of his face. Bill didn’t answer.

And that was it. He was gone. Ziggy felt for a pulse. And then Carrie did, holding her hand at his neck for a long time before letting it drop hopelessly to the dirty, bloodstained carpet. There was nothing. Bill was really, truly gone.

A feeling Ziggy despised formed a giant fist in his chest, pushing up, trying to push the air and voice and tears out of him. He tried hard to swallow it down the way he had whenever one of his mom’s boyfriends had hit him, whenever he’d found himself sleeping in a doorway in the dark, by himself. Whenever someone or something he loved was taken from him. It should have gotten easier every time. It didn’t. And it wasn’t now.

I told you, foolish boy. Jacob’s voice was cracked and weak, but there was the seductive warmth he always had, hiding beneath the surface.

“I’m not listening to you,” Ziggy whispered, barely louder than a breath.

I told you no one would care for you as much as I. Look at him. Mortal. Dead. How stupid of you. There was a sound, almost as though Jacob was trying to laugh, but didn’t have the strength. It was absurd, since the blood tie was a mental connection. Carrie must have really messed him up.

No matter. My heart is open to you, as always. You are my fledgling. The moment of silence that followed was either a dramatic pause, or Jacob had lost consciousness. It gave Ziggy some time to regroup. Come home to me. Come home to me, son.

I’m not your son! Ziggy shot back, bombarding his sire with images of all the perverse, abusive things he’d done to him. Images of pain and humiliation. You don’t do that kind of sick shit to someone you love!

Bill’s body jerked, just a little. The kind of spasm dead bodies always have, right after.

What did you do for someone you loved? If it was the exact opposite of what Jacob had done, then the thought Ziggy was beginning to have was definitely out. But what if it was a sliver of what Jacob had done to him? Jacob had saved his life, after everyone had already thought he was dead. That was something, wasn’t it? Didn’t that count for something?

“Ziggy, I’m so sorry.” Carrie’s voice was a ghost of what it usually sounded like.

“No. He’ll be fine. He’ll be fine.” Ziggy heard the wobble in his voice, felt the tears that had escaped against his will.

But Bill wasn’t fine, and wouldn’t be fine, unless he did something now. And even then, it could be too late.

He leaned close to Bill’s ear, praying his words would penetrate to whatever part of him hadn’t left yet. They said that hearing was the last thing to go, and Ziggy knew that firsthand. “Please, forgive me. I have to do this.”

Waiting for some sign, some indication to proceed or not to, was the hardest thing Ziggy had ever done. But there was nothing left in Bill to answer.

“We’re almost home, Ziggy, hang on,” Carrie urged. As if she knew what he was considering. And she might have. He wished she would come out and say it. Say no, say don’t, say do it, he didn’t care. As long as she took the decision from his hands. But she couldn’t and he knew that.

There were two options available to him. Let Bill die. Or not. And he didn’t know if he could live with either one.

I suppose I could just kill him if he doesn’t like it or it doesn’t work out. Right? What if he didn’t mind being a vampire but really wasn’t big on the whole tied forever to Ziggy thing? What then?

You really don’t have time to consider a future broken heart. When it came down to it, he realized it didn’t matter. If he could have stopped that knife going into Bill’s heart, he would have, whether or not they had any kind of relationship future. He couldn’t turn back time and keep him from getting stabbed. But he could help him now, and that should be his only consideration.

So, while the van pulled to a stop, he rolled back his sleeve, spit on his wrist to wash away the blood that had crusted there, and then bit down.

He’d tasted Bill’s blood before. That would be enough. How many times had Jacob warned them never to feed off the humans in the barn, to wait for clean feeders who’d never tasted vampire blood? That had to mean something, or he wouldn’t have been so careful about it. So, he held his bleeding wrist over Bill’s mouth and pressed down.

A few seconds passed. Nothing.

“It’s too late,” Carrie whispered, tugging gently on his shoulders.

Ziggy ignored her. “Come on. Come on.” He willed Bill to come alive somehow. Maybe coughing and sputtering like drowning victims in the movies. Something to tell him it worked. Just so he didn’t have to wait any longer.

He began imposing time limits. Two more seconds. If Bill wasn’t alive again in two more seconds, he was giving up. But then two seconds passed, and he couldn’t give up. Four, six, he kept extending the deadline.

At a minute, he knew Carrie was right. He’d debated too long, he’d been selfish, and now Bill was dead.

Really dead. The no-coming-back kind.

He was really gone.

“I can’t believe that just happened.” Ziggy hadn’t meant to speak. But then, he hadn’t meant to cry, either, and that hadn’t stopped the tears. Probably nothing would.

Jesus. It wasn’t as if the guy was like, his long-term boyfriend or anything. They’d just met. This was so fucking stupid.

Stupid, and he couldn’t stop crying.

“This just can’t…” he said, his voice breaking as he leaned down to kiss Bill’s forehead. And then he wrapped his arms around Bill’s head and pulled him into his lap, curling over him and crying.

Stop. The voice in his head came on a wave of pain so intense he cried out at it. He let go of Bill and clutched at his temples, gritting his teeth. It was like someone was ripping a hole in his brain and pumping something in. Not matter or anything, just something…energy. He cried now for a totally different reason.

“Don’t cry. I’m fine.” The voice was outside his head now. “I don’t know how, but I’m fine.”

He looked down, tried to open his eyes against the splitting pressure in his head and saw Bill, his mouth streaked with blood, his face still ashen. “It worked.”

“My God,” Carrie breathed, and then she fumbled for Bill’s wrist, a disbelieving smile spreading over her face. “It worked!”

But then Bill coughed up more blood, and his head fell back. The energy that had flowed into Ziggy’s brain stopped, and that hurt almost as much as it had when it started coming in.

“No.” Ziggy shook his head, as if denying it—and making the worst headache of his life even more painful—would undo it all. “No!”

The van pulled over. A second after he heard the driver’s door open, Max flung open the back doors. “Henry, get Bill,” Carrie ordered, and Ziggy put himself between them, pronto.

“That thing has done enough damage to him.” Even as Ziggy spoke, Henry reached out for Bill. He kicked him back, hard. “You aren’t going to touch him!”

“Fine,” Carrie said, nodding to Max. “Get Bill. Henry, you help me with Nathan.”

“We have to get inside fast. I don’t know if any of them followed us,” Max warned, lifting Bill up in his arms as though he was a huge rag doll.

Once up the stairs, Carrie and Henry took Nate into the bedroom. Ziggy laid Bill on the couch, wishing he had a more stable surface, thinking it would probably do less damage to him, what with the knife sticking out of his chest.

If there was any damage to be done. Bill still hadn’t moved, and that weird hole in Ziggy’s head, while not closed up, wasn’t feeling any better.

Carrie came back down the hall carrying Nate’s big red box of medical supplies, her face full of worry, and Ziggy felt instantly bad for thinking anything even halfway mean about her.

“Did he turn him?” Max looked from Carrie to Ziggy to Bill on the couch, his hands opening and closing as if he desperately wanted to do something.

Ziggy shrugged, suddenly too tired to be emotive about it. “I thought I did. But he…he woke up and then…nothing.”

Carrie spoke quietly. “I hate to say this, but I think it could be because of the knife. Because it’s in his heart.”

“What do you mean?” Fuck that, he didn’t want to know what she meant. Not if she meant what he thought she did.

She reached down and felt for a vital sign. “There’s a pulse, but it’s weak. I could…I could take a look, but it would be messy.”

“I don’t care. Just do it. Do whatever.” As long as he didn’t have to watch. He’d seen enough blood and gore, he didn’t need to see it on someone he…well, someone he knew well.

He turned his back, fixed his eyes on one thing as long as it would hold his attention, then darted off to the next. He started to anticipate things he could concentrate on to keep from looking at Bill. He heard Carrie’s soft, “Oh, no,” and still he didn’t turn around. Not until she put her hand, that smelled like Bill’s blood and his own, on his shoulder.

“Ziggy, I’m sorry. But the knife…it’s almost like he didn’t turn all the way. Half of his organs still appear human, the other half…” She pressed something into his hand and he looked down at the pages of The Sanguinarius, open to an anatomy drawing. He pushed it away.

“It’s kind of a blessing, maybe?” Max didn’t have to sound so halfheartedly positive. “If he had changed, the knife would have instantly staked him. The heart of a vampire stays human. We grow another one, but the one that matters, the one that kills us…that’s the one with the knife through it right now.”

“How is it a blessing?” Ziggy managed through gritted teeth. “How is it a blessing that he’s going to die?”

Max faltered a little when he started to speak. “I don’t know. Maybe…you could give him a proper burial. Somehow. You could have closure.”

“I don’t want closure. I want Bill.” Ziggy knew how childish it sounded. He turned back to Carrie. “Listen, I just…Is there anything you can do?”

“Short of give him a new heart?” She sounded defeated. She’d given up.

Heartless. They are all heartless, Jacob pushed into his brain. Come home to me.

Heartless. The word fired off a network of lightning-fast memories in him. “Wait. The Oracle sent Jacob her heart, and he put it inside him.”

“Yes,” Carrie said, as if she already knew what he was going to say and didn’t like it at all.

He turned then to look at Bill. He was splayed open like a gutted fish, and the knife really was sticking into him. It was weird. Looking at it head-on, it seemed that maybe there was only a little bit of blade in there, that there wasn’t room for more. But it had made room. Six inches deep, all the way through his heart, into the squishy bits behind it. But Carrie was right. There was only one heart.

“Take mine.”

It took surprisingly less consideration than he’d given turning Bill in the first place. Shucking his coat, he reached into his shirt and pulled out the slimy plastic bag containing his heart.

“Ziggy, it won’t work. The Soul Eater was already a vampire. It’s not which heart is in the vampire at the time, but whose. She could stick your heart in him, pull out his, the change might complete and then whoosh, he goes up with your heart in him and kills you, too.” Max’s face turned red. It was a weird thing to see on a vampire.

Carrie was uncharacteristically quiet, considering how much she usually argued in this kind of situation. It gave Ziggy the will to press on. “If you put my heart into him, do your doctor thing, hook it all up, while he’s still human, then it’s like a transplant. While he’s human. And then we let him change the rest of the way and it’s like it’s been his heart all along, right?” The more he described it, the more it seemed as though it could probably work.

Finally, Carrie spoke. But she didn’t sound as if she believed her own words of denial. “Ziggy, no. It sounds interesting. I might even try it if…But I couldn’t endanger you like this. What would Nathan—”

“You and Nate left me for dead at the Vampire New Year party. You put that death sentence on me and told me everything was going to be all right, when you had no clue what was going to happen.” His voice rose as he remembered it, and he forced it down. He couldn’t let his anger get in the way of proving his point. “You owe me. You didn’t protect me, and now you owe me.”

“Bullshit, she owes you!” Max raged, his fists curling at his sides. Let him hit me, Ziggy thought, his vampire heart beating faster in his chest. I don’t care. I have to do what I have to do.

He looked into Carrie’s eyes. They were hollow and rimmed red. She still felt guilty. Good. She should feel guilty, and it would work to his advantage if he played it like that. “You got Bill killed, too. It was your monster that did this. Carrie, you have to fix him. You owe me. And you owe him.”

She sighed, her shoulders sagging. “I’m not a surgeon, Ziggy. I don’t know how to do a heart transplant. Besides, it takes a whole team of people to do one of those.”

“Right, but they want their patients to live. We just need him to…not die right away. Can you just do a half-assed job?” Half-assed wasn’t the best word choice, he supposed, but he stared at her, hard, daring her to meet his eyes. “Please. You could always just tell Nate I was wounded or something.”

“Of course. ‘Nathan, your son is dead. He was wounded or something. Never mind this vivisected human and all these surgical tools,’” Max grumbled, raking his mutilated hand through his hair. “I can’t believe you’d even consider this, Carrie!”

Ziggy couldn’t argue anymore, and he didn’t have anything to bargain with. It all rested on her now. “Please, Carrie. Please.”

She looked at the box of medical supplies, then held up her hands, helpless. “Fine. But we have to do it now.”

Ziggy swallowed the lump of stones in his throat. A nagging doubt grew in him, telling him he should be overwhelmed by near-painful relief. That he wasn’t might be a sign that he’d made the wrong choice.

“This is crazy,” Max exploded, pacing back and forth behind them. “Bill is dead! Nathan is close to it! What the hell are you doing?”

Carrie’s expression was grim as she settled beside Bill, the bag with the heart in her hand. “I’m trying to save life instead of taking it for once.”

Fourteen:

Wounded

T ransplanting Ziggy’s vampire heart for Bill’s human one was, by far, the stupidest thing I’ve ever done.

It also turned out to be the most brilliant. Even before I completed the sloppy job, a technique I improvised with common sense, a copy of Gray’s Anatomy and liberal amounts of guessing and prayer, the change started to creep through his other organs. I watched, horrified and dazzled all at once, as the vampire blood began to flow into his heart, mending the places where I’d poorly patched veins to ventricles, occasionally bursting a connection. The left atrium and ventricle split completely away, and I held my breath, wondering if Ziggy was about to die or the transformation was about to complete. The left half of the heart fell back, pressing into the lung, and regenerated its missing right half. However, unlike the right half of the human heart, the right half of the vampire heart was covered in soft, pointed spines, and it beat with its own weird rhythm. A long, purple vein snaked from the left side, slithering past the other organs, out of view. I assumed it must attach to the stomach, as in the diagram from The Sanguinarius. Forcing back a shudder at the memory of that horrible illustration, I watched the remaining half of Ziggy’s human heart regenerate its left side, free from those nasty, dark spikes, and, for just a moment, cease beating. The veins connecting it to any blood source pulled free, and, with nothing but memory to account for it, the heart started up again, thumping but not processing any blood through it. Just a spectral beating heart, the only human thing that remained in Bill’s chest. Before my eyes the pericardium, the sack around the heart and lungs, lashed itself back together. His sternum closed, too, but the skin over it did not. The healing power of Ziggy’s blood stopped short right there. I would have to stitch him up.

“When will he wake up?” Ziggy asked as I reached for the needle drivers again.

I shrugged. “I don’t know. It took two months for me to change, because I didn’t feed. He won’t be completely finished until he feeds the first time. You should probably give me some of your blood to transfuse into him to make the healing go faster.”

“You should open up a vampire hospital,” Max said angrily. He’d stood by and watched as I’d worked, interjecting unhelpful comments and muttering under his breath about how crazy I was. “Not like anyone can stop you. At least, not with rational arguments or common sense.”

A vampire hospital. Now there was an idea worth considering. I tucked it away for a time when I was less tired. “I need to go tend to Nathan.”

“And I need to wash the van so no one comes asking about the blood and hair stuck in the grill,” Max snapped, heading downstairs and slamming the door behind him.

I let him go. There were already so many sparks flying in my overloaded brain, I didn’t feel like adding to the commotion by fighting with Max over something he’d get over on his own.

Nathan lay exactly as we had left him, on top of the blankets on the half-made bed. The pinkish fluid of white blood cells mixed with dried blood from his wounds had seeped through the sheet he was wrapped in. I’d have to get him free from it before it healed to his skinned torso.

I was shocked by the sudden realization that I’d left Nathan alone to help Bill. I guess there was still something of a doctor in me. I’d helped the one who’d needed it most first and trusted that Nathan wouldn’t die in the meantime. It was something I’d done on autopilot, because there was no way I’d have taken the chance if I’d been thinking right.

Hell, if I’d been thinking right, I wouldn’t have transplanted a vampire heart into a half-changed human.

Pushing aside those thoughts—because I didn’t want Nathan to hear them right now—I got a large mixing bowl from the kitchen and filled it with scalding hot water from the tap. Then I grabbed every clean washcloth I could find. By some miracle, the vampires who’d ravaged the apartment hadn’t trashed the linen cupboard. Nothing fun to smash there, I guessed.

“Hey,” I said softly, gently shaking Nathan’s shoulder.

His eyes opened, just a little, and he half smiled at me, but didn’t speak.

“I’m going to have to clean all of this out.” There was no other way to put it. “Do you want anything for the pain? Maybe something to make you loopy?”

“No.” His throat sounded parched, and I cursed myself for not bringing him something to drink. “No, save it. For when…we need it.”

“If this isn’t when we need it, I shudder to imagine what those circumstances will be.” Slowly, I peeled back the sheet covering him. “This might hurt, if it sticks.”

“I might cry.” If he’d been less tired, less injured, it would have sounded like a joke. But I knew it wasn’t when he said, “I thought I should warn you.”

I had to struggle to keep from crying, myself, as I viewed again the damage that had been done to him. “I wouldn’t blame you if you did.”

“I’m so sorry, Carrie.” Nathan did start to cry then, and before I could wonder what he meant, something in my mind showed me.

Dahlia. Dahlia showed me. I saw the little room where I’d found Nathan, saw him tied to the bed, not as he’d been when I rescued him. He lay on his back, his pale, nude skin still intact, still stretched smooth over his tightly corded muscles. And Dahlia was there, burning something in a metal dish beside the bed. The smoke was strong and sickly sweet. She climbed onto the bed beside Nathan and kissed him, sliding her hands over his chest. He didn’t resist her, though I saw a flash of confusion and regret in his drug-clouded eyes.

I shook away the image, forced Dahlia to the back of my mind. “Don’t apologize. It was a spell. You couldn’t help yourself.”

He looked at me with confusion that slowly faded to horror. And through the blood tie, I saw him make the connection between what I knew of Dahlia and what I’d done to her. His lips moved, but I barely heard the word from his mouth. Instead, I heard it through the blood tie, like a death sentence. Soul Eater.

Whether I’d acknowledged it or not, I had known it. I had known what I was doing when I’d gulped down Dahlia’s blood. And I had known why I heard her voice in my head, so clear it was a part of me I had to forcibly ignore. I was a Soul Eater. There was no way to deny it.

So, I didn’t. I just didn’t mention it.

I finished peeling back the sheet and reexamined Nathan’s wound. I lifted the edges of his skin, which made him wince, but I had to see how much he’d healed, if at all. The torn flesh tried to mend. There was just too much to regenerate.

I dunked the washcloth into the substantially cooler water and started cleaning the skinless patches as best as I could. Vampires don’t get infections the way a human would, but I at least wanted to get the linen fibers and gummed-up blood off of him. It couldn’t do any more damage, at least, to be clean.

“Why did you do it?” Nathan asked. For someone who’d been half skinned alive, he was remarkably unconcerned for himself. Maybe it was helping him ignore the pain that made his lips go blue with shock and his whole body tremble.

Since I didn’t have an answer right away, I concentrated on washing his wound. When he made a noise of impatience, I sent all the answers I could think of over the blood tie. That I didn’t know why I’d done it; that I hadn’t known what I was doing; that I had known; that I’m still a flawed human masquerading in a body with far too much power and far too many possibilities and no compass to guide me.

“You did it because you hate her,” he said, when the torrent was finished flowing into him. “You can lie to yourself, but not to me. You hated her so much, you wanted to do something to her that you could never undo.”

“You’re right.” I swished the washcloth in the now-pink water and wrung it out. “I did hate her. But this wasn’t a planned revenge, okay? I didn’t sit around for days formulating how I would do it. And I didn’t go there intending to…eat her soul. I went there to get you back.”

He reached one arm—oddly half-whole in that the front had been skinned, but not the back—up to touch my face. “You should have left me.”

I knocked his hand away, not caring if it hurt him. Hell, I hoped it hurt him. “That’s a great thanks, you know? Bill almost died. We all almost died. And you can’t even try to be grateful?”

“For nothing?” He wasn’t mad, and he wasn’t really arguing. Just stating a fact. “I’m going to die.”

“No. Maybe not.” I couldn’t think of a way to heal him or ease his pain, but I knew I couldn’t live without him. “I’ll figure out a way to fix this. For now, let’s just get you bandaged up. And stop talking about dying. I went through too damned much to get you back.”

Despite his pain, he laughed. “That’s not self-serving at all, is it?”

“My selfishness is what’s going to save you,” I reminded him. Then I worked in silence, because there was nothing left to say and small talk would only exhaust him.

When the wound was clean, I went to the kitchen and retrieved the plastic wrap. I needed something to cover the wound that wouldn’t stick when I needed to change the dressing, and I’d seen how well the sheet had worked. I took the plastic wrap with me to the bedroom, throwing a quick glance at Ziggy, who still sat beside Bill’s sleeping form.

I cut the plastic wrap in pieces large enough to reach from one side of Nathan’s chest to the other, and secured it around three edges with medical tape. I gently taped the seam between the first piece and the second, and continued down to his hips. From there, I wasn’t sure how to proceed. His legs were each skinless from hip to knee. I bandaged those with the plastic wrap, then turned my attention to parts still uncovered.

For whatever reason, Dahlia hadn’t done anything to his genitals. She tried, Nathan explained through the blood tie. She didn’t have the stomach to do it.

I almost gagged at the thought myself. “Thank God for small favors, huh?”

He nodded grimly. “She did try, though. Believe me, she did try.”

I didn’t want to know. “I think what I’ll have to do for your hips—” I looked away from the hips in question, where the white of bone actually showed through where she’d cut too deep and stripped away muscle “—is just put on a pair of underwear. It will probably stick, but you won’t have much mobility any other way.”

“I’m not going to run a marathon,” he grumbled, his eyes sliding closed in exhaustion. “Do what you have to.”

I went to one of the drawers that had been overturned when the apartment had been ransacked and found a clean pair of briefs. The waistband would put pressure on some of the skinned areas of his lower body, so I used the scissors from the med kit to cut it off. I did the same to the elastic around the legs, and I slit one side to make it easier to put them on him. After I’d carefully rolled him to get the makeshift bandage under him, a lot like the way you roll an injured person to change their bedsheets, I taped the open side together. What he ended up with was a white cotton version of Tarzan’s loincloth. At least, the Hollywood version of Tarzan who had to hide his junk from the camera.

“You’re too good to me,” Nathan said, gripping my wrist as I carefully arranged the fabric so it wouldn’t pull on his wound. His words didn’t make up for the fact he’d told me he’d rather have been left for dead, but they did soften the blow a little, after the fact.

I rationed a little blood out for him—we’d have to find a way to get more at dusk—and got him to swallow a few Tylenol for the pain, but he refused anything else for his comfort. “Just stay with me while I fall asleep,” he asked, and I did, climbing onto the bed beside him and trying to find a place to lay my hand that wouldn’t hurt him. I settled for lacing my fingers with his, and he squeezed in acknowledgment before falling unconscious once more.

“What the hell happened?”

Ziggy raised his head and tried to shake some of the sleep out of it. The light in the living room was rosy. It gave the whole place a surreal familiarity. He’d seen the light look exactly like this a hundred times.

But he’d never seen the living room all torn apart and covered in bloody tools, and he’d never seen it with this weird channel in his head. Hello? he asked across it.

Bill answered him out loud. “Hey. What happened?”

“Um…” How did you break it to someone that they were—surprise!—a vampire?

“You just did, genius.” Bill tried to sit up, groaning as he did, and Ziggy helped him.

“Your chest is going to be sore for a while. I’m guessing. Carrie had to…” He didn’t want to go into what Carrie had done. Looking back, it was incredibly stupid to have even tried. “She got the knife out, at least.”

“Was that what it was? I couldn’t remember. All I knew was I turned around and something hit me. But you’d think that if it was a knife, it would have hurt more. I always imagined I would feel it go in, if I was stabbed.” He shrugged, winced and rolled one of his shoulders to ease the ache. “So, I’m guessing that, from the voice I heard in my head when you were thinking, that I’m a vampire?”

Ziggy nodded, unable to think of anything to say.

“Son of a bitch.” Bill half laughed, an expression caught between amused and totally, murderously pissed-off on his face. “That would explain why I’m so thirsty.”

“I’ll get you some blood.” Ziggy stood, and stopped when Bill’s hand closed over his arm.

“No. Get me water. I don’t think I’m ready for the other.” When he finished speaking, he released his hold, as if Ziggy was dirty or something.

Great. He went to the kitchen and filled up a glass from the tap and took it silently to Bill.

Bill gulped down the water, and Ziggy had to refrain from telling him that it wouldn’t do any good. No matter how much he drank, even if he swallowed the ocean, nothing would feel right until he’d had some human blood. He wouldn’t push it until it was a life-or-death thing, but he really hoped it wouldn’t get that far.

“So, I’m blood tied to you now, right?” Bill wiped his mouth and set the glass aside. “Isn’t that what you call it?”

“That’s it.” A hard edge was creeping into Ziggy’s tone, a defense against the steel in Bill’s words. “Us crazy vampire folk call it that.”

“All right, knock it off!” Bill snapped, and the air in the room seemed to crackle with pent-up anger. He cleared his throat and looked away, visibly trying to calm himself. “Why did you do it?”

“Because it didn’t feel right to let you die.” There was no other explanation. No excuses. No big declaration of love. Sometimes, the cheesiest moments in movies turn out to be the ones you wish for in real life.

Bill sniffed at that, looking around the room as if it was going to be different somehow now that he was a vampire. “So, it didn’t feel right to let me die, but it felt just fine to change me into a vampire without knowing what I would have wanted?”

Damn. Put that way, it did seem like a dickweed thing to have done. “Fuck you, you’re alive. It’s not like you were wearing some MedicAlert bracelet that said, ‘Hey, don’t turn me into a vampire, okay?’”

“You’re right! That’s the kind of thing you know about a person after you actually know them!” Bill pounded his chest with his fist and flinched, but he didn’t crumple the way someone else would have in that kind of pain. Instead, he put his hand down slowly and glared at Ziggy, as if he could funnel all of that pain into him.

Ziggy stood, slowly, and tried to do his best impression of Nate during an argument over curfew. “Listen, I understand that you’re upset, okay? But I was in a situation where I either had to let you die, which is irreversible, or take a chance and try to save you.”

“Irreversible? And being a vampire isn’t irreversible?” Bill kicked the overturned coffee table and the corner splintered, sending a leg skittering across the debris-covered floor.

“No, it’s reversible.” Ziggy leaned down and scooped up the table leg. “Let me know when you’re ready.”

They stood, frozen, glaring at each other. A pulse leaped in the hollow of Bill’s throat, but that was the only clue to his fear.

That, and the raging emotions flowing over the blood tie. Ziggy had thought it was a damned powerful connection on the fledgling end. That was nothing compared to what it was like to be a sire. Still, he kept his face completely neutral, even raised his eyebrows in an expression of “come on already” as he juggled the table leg from one hand to the other.

He had no clue what he would do if Bill didn’t back down. If he said, “Do it. Stake me,” he wouldn’t be able to. It would kill him, too, both figuratively and literally. Then what? Bill would still be pissed-off and Ziggy would have lost all kinds of respect and there would be nowhere to go from there.

Great, he loved unfixable situations where everyone ended up unhappy.

Bill’s mouth compressed into a tight line, and he took a deep breath before his shoulders sagged in defeat. “I don’t want to die.”

“Great, then I saved your life. And you can stop being so goddamned judgmental.” Ziggy tossed the table leg aside and went to the kitchen, where he took the last of the blood that was left from the freezer. It had gotten freezer burned; he could tell as soon as he opened the bag and dumped the frozen brick of blood into the teapot.

He did everything by muscle memory. Light the burner, put the lid on the kettle, find a mug, all while listening to Bill in the living room. It was difficult, with the stream of garbled emotion that flooded in through the blood tie. Anger was the most heavy, but there was fear underneath it, all sorts of different flavors of fear. Fear of what he might become now that he was one of them. Fear that he wouldn’t be able to drink human blood to survive. Fear of rejection.

Whoa. Ziggy did a mental backup and probed a little deeper into that one. It wasn’t wishful thinking. It was actually there, in Bill’s head, available to him courtesy of the blood tie. He was afraid that now the relationship he’d hoped for with Ziggy was way, way too final, and that would freak one or both of them out and the whole thing would be over, in the messiest way possible. He’d wanted to keep flirting, to maintain the casualness for a while, to gradually fall in love with him, to build a bond that would mean something. And now the chance was gone, because there was an artificial bond between them that he didn’t want.

Ziggy closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose, trying to think, but not so Bill could hear him. That would be a disaster and a half. But anything he wanted to hide wouldn’t stay hidden for long. He had plenty of practice shutting out a sire, but not a fledgling. That was going to be damn near impossible. It hurt just imagining closing himself off from Bill.

“Listen,” he said, not bothering to walk into the living room. He knew Bill would hear him. “As far as I’m concerned, this whole sire-fledgling thing? It’s just what happened. I don’t expect anything from you. We can keep going the way we were. In fact, I would prefer it. Because I’m freaked out knowing that as long as I live, I’m bound to you.” He took a deep breath. “To know that even if this thing doesn’t work out, you’ve got my heart.”

Bill’s heavy footsteps brought him to the door, and a wave of defensiveness rushed through the blood tie in time with his arrival. “See, that’s exactly it. You say something like that, and where does it leave me? What if I say I don’t feel the same way? You’re all crushed and hurt and I’ve got to put up with it because you happened to be the one who made me a vampire.”

“I wouldn’t feel all crushed and hurt. I don’t mean my love and romance heart. I mean my actual, physical heart.” Ziggy looked down, unable to watch the horror on Bill’s face. “Yours was ruined, so Carrie gave you mine.”

“You put your…” Bill staggered away, and Ziggy followed him a few steps behind. When Bill sat on the couch, Ziggy stood at the end of it. What he really wanted to do was sit down next to him, put his head on his shoulder, kiss him. Do something so he would feel the way he’d felt a few hours ago, when they’d lain on a pile of blankets in the storage room, not talking, just touching each other and enjoying how new everything was to them. It sucked to think that was all over, and it actually caused a pain in Ziggy’s chest where his heart should have been.

Bill looked up, his eyes rimmed red. “I can’t believe you would do that for me.”

“Well, I didn’t. Carrie did it.” God, he wanted to find out where the cocky, defensive Ziggy who was snapping at his fledgling hid out and wring his fucking neck. “I mean…I couldn’t let you die.”

“But your heart…if something happens to me, then you die, too?” He said it as though it was unbelievable that someone would do something like that for him.

He sounded, Ziggy realized, just like himself.

Sitting beside him on the couch, Ziggy tentatively touched his face. “I didn’t do it to trap you or anything. But I looked at you, lying there, almost dead. And maybe it was a little selfish, but I couldn’t let you die and never know if…” He caught himself before he did something really stupid, like maybe cry. But he had to force his next words out, because they hurt where they were stuck in his throat. “If you were the greatest thing that ever happened to me.”

Bill put his arms around him then, and Ziggy heard his own heart beating in his chest. When their lips touched, it didn’t feel the way it had the day before. It felt as though they had skipped over a lot of the fun stuff that was a part of being with someone. But maybe, if they gave it enough time, they could get back to that.

It wasn’t as if they had anything but time ahead of them.

The sun had just started rising when Max made it back to the apartment. The cooler at his side was full—someone had to think of the practical necessities while everyone else was busy playing mad scientist—but he didn’t feel like going upstairs. The blood would keep, and he needed his space.

And he needed Bella. The longing almost choked him as he made his way down the stairs to the bookstore. Damn, he needed her. Not just in the physical sense, but he needed to be able to talk to her for longer than a few garbled minutes over the cell phone.

Behind the counter he located the trapdoor to Nathan’s underground shelter and ducked down the few stairs. It wasn’t a bad place, for a werewolf. A vampire would go nuts down there in a couple of days, he was sure, but it was small enough that it calmed the primal need in him to hide.

There was also a small utility sink fed by a hose. Not a proper bath by any means, but he’d do about anything to get the blood and dirt off him. He plugged up the sink, went back up the couple of stairs to find the faucet the hose was attached to, got it running and gave it some time to really fill up before he shut it off and went back down.

He was pleased to find he’d judged it about right when he saw the half-full sink waiting for him. He stripped down and dunked his dirty T-shirt into the water, trying to get the worst of the gunk out before using it to wash himself. When he was clean—cleaner, anyway—he rinsed out his clothes and left them draped over the edges of the sink. He’d worry about the dirty water after he got some rest.

When he lay down, he expected to fall asleep right away. But the sleeping bag under him didn’t smell all that great, and his mind wouldn’t calm down. He thought about calling Bella, then remembered he’d left his phone upstairs, and he didn’t want to deal with the inevitable drama that he would encounter there. He was beginning to wonder if there would ever be a time in his life when he could be around these people and not be tangled up in some crisis.

So much had changed since the last time he’d been here. It was like finally having Bella all to himself made him resent anything that took him away from her. And that wasn’t healthy. But neither was constantly fighting to stay alive. There had to be a happy medium.

Just above his head, a phone rang, and he remembered, with the kind of joy he imagined a crack addict felt when they found a rock they’d forgotten, that Nathan’s shop had a landline. He wrapped himself in the sleeping bag and climbed out of the hole, then waited for the caller to hang up before he grabbed the receiver. The lengthy process of connecting to an international operator, getting through to the compound, actually getting the call to Bella’s room, and then miraculously catching her awake and alone, was a little more bearable this time, as he didn’t get cut off three or four times by the crappy reception on his phone. When her voice, breathy and seductive all at once, came over the line, he almost passed out with relief.

Yeah, he definitely had problems.

He filled her in briefly on the way the evening had gone, and she’d taken it in stride, the way only Bella could. Then, with no hesitation whatsoever, she said, “My father brought your replacement by today.”

“Excuse me?” She’d better not mean what he thought she meant, or he would be on a plane back to Italy so fast her father wouldn’t have time to stop him.

She actually laughed, as if the whole thing was funny. “You are not angry with me, are you? I did not even speak to him. But according to my father, this man is more than willing to accept my bastard child as his own. And I believe he is only a second cousin, so future children would be pure members of the family bloodline.”

“That’s disgusting.” Max couldn’t help but laugh. Bella would never leave him for some flea-ridden, banjo-playing country cousin. But his guts still boiled at the thought of his father-in-law being so damned sure of his imminent demise. “Tell him not to count his chickens, okay? Because I’m definitely coming back.”

“I will tell him you are of sound mind and body,” she giggled over the line.

He sighed. “That’s not quite true. I’m not sure whether it’s my mind or my body, or a little bit of both, but I’m going crazy without you.”

Quietly, she replied, “I understand. I miss you. I do not want to sound as though I do not love all of the time I spend with you, but what I miss the most, at least, at this moment, is—”

“Believe me, I get it.” He couldn’t hear her say the words, or he would explode. His cock was already hard just talking vaguely about having sex with her. “Let’s not dwell on that just now.”

It took her a long time to respond. Then, very clearly, she made one of those low, growling moans the way she did when they were—Oh, sweet Christmas. She wasn’t…was she?

“Bella, that’s not funny.” He balled up a fistful of sleeping bag and squeezed it, hard. “Really not funny.”

“Are you not alone?” she whimpered into the phone, and her words ended on a gasp.

“No, I’m alone. I’m just not in an appropriate place.” If he could reach her now, he would be undecided whether to fuck her or kill her. “I’m in the bookshop.”

“Why is that an inappropriate place? Do you forget what we did there?” She gave another moan, then purred, “I am touching myself, Max.”

“Yeah, I kind of guessed that you were.” He tried not to think of what they had done in this room, hell, not even ten feet from where he was standing. He looked at the broken door and the faint sunlight outside. Would someone come down here? Would anyone even bother to be up this early? There was the occasional noise from a car on the street, but beyond that, nothing.

Ugh, come on, man! How can you even be considering this? It’s phone sex, for God’s sake. If you need a reason not to do it, think of how dated and cliché it is.

Bella moaned again, and he gripped the base of his erection. “I’m right there with you, babe,” he groaned, and she breathed a throaty little laugh into the phone.

“Does it feel good?” she asked innocently.

It did. Oh, it did. He flexed his fingers, imagining her wet, tight flesh rippling around him as he tugged up. “It doesn’t feel as good as you.”

“I wish you were here,” she whimpered, echoing his thoughts. “On top of me. Inside of me.”

“Baby, if I was inside of you right now, I wouldn’t last two seconds.” As it was, he was almost ready to blow.

“Neither would I,” she gasped. “Oh, Max…I…I…” Her words dissolved into a loud, keening wail, and he pumped his fist harder, almost dropping the phone when he came.

“Max?” she asked a few seconds later, her voice raw from shouting. “Are you still there?”

“In a manner of speaking. Hang on, I’ve got to find something to clean up with.” He grabbed a handful of out-of-date flyers for a tree-planting party and tried carefully to wipe himself off without giving himself the worst paper cut of his life.

“I am becoming very tired,” Bella said apologetically. “But I do want to tell you, before we hang up, that there are others here besides you and I who feel my father is not making wise decisions. I cannot tell you any more today, but I sense we will soon be able to help you.”

“What do you mean, help me? You’re not going to do anything stupid or dangerous, are you?” It was less question, more warning.

It didn’t matter, because she ignored him anyway. “I cannot tell you more now. Please trust me. I love you.”

“I love you,” he replied, but she had already hung up.

Fifteen:

Patch Job

I dreamed about making a piñata out of strips of papier-mâché, and when I woke up, I knew how to fix Nathan.

When I told him how I came about my groundbreaking solution, he wasn’t entirely thrilled at the comparison.

“So, in this scenario, I’m a piñata?” Just being fed had given him back a lot of his strength, at least enough to make sardonic quips while I tried to make him an informed patient. “Am I to assume that when the treatment is all done you’ll string me up and beat me with a stick?”

“I might do it before the treatment is done if you don’t shut up.” I couldn’t help but smile though. He wasn’t telling me I should have let him die, and that was enough for me.

I explained to him what I planned to do. To remove a few strips of healthy skin from his back, the way doctors did to perform a skin graft. But I would take narrower strips, so that the hole I made would heal in a day, and I could harvest the fresh skin again the next evening. The skin I took I would graft onto the front of him, wherever it was needed. The edges of the wound would, in theory, heal to the skin the way it does when we get a cut: the two edges come together and just sort of meld. By the next night, the patch of missing skin would be smaller, as it would be every night until he was completely covered again.

“I don’t know how well it will actually work. In the worst-case scenario, it doesn’t work at all. In the second-worst case, you end up with lots of pink, shiny, patched-together skin like a burn victim. You wouldn’t have chest hair. Maybe not nipples. Or a belly button. But you’ll be able to function.”

“I liked my nipples,” he grumbled. Then he sighed. “You’re asking me to consent to you skinning the other bits of me. I have to admit, I’m reluctant.”

“I’ll be doing it under local anesthetic.” When he started to protest, I spoke over him. “I’m not going to listen to you sit and tell me that you can take the pain. You’re going to get the anesthetic every night like a good boy and shut up. We can always get more somehow.” I wasn’t sure where, but that wasn’t the point. I wasn’t going to do to him what Dahlia had done.

He turned his head, looking at the nightstand as if it would lovingly advise him. “I suppose it’s a good thing she couldn’t go through with…you know. Down there, then.”

“Yes. I would say it’s a very good thing.” Once a nerve was gone, it was gone. No fixing it. Call me a mindless hedonist if you will, but I don’t think I could live without ever getting off again.

It just seemed too cruel, Dahlia said in my head, and I pushed her firmly out. She might be trapped in me, but I didn’t have to acknowledge her.

“It’s up to you, then. Do you think you could still love me if I looked all pieced together like Frankenstein?” Nathan said it in all seriousness and self-pity.

I laughed at him. “I love you now and you look like The Visible Man. I think I could love you better with some skin on you.”

“I’m being an ass, I know.” He gave another heavy sigh. “Fine. Do it.”

I left Nathan with a firm order to try and get some more sleep while I gathered my supplies and refreshed my skinning skills on some of the frozen chicken breasts in the freezer. Actually, I left off that last part. I didn’t think he would appreciate it any more than the piñata comparison.

Ziggy and Bill were still asleep on the couch, half sitting up, leaning on each other. I was glad to see Bill had woken, but less happy to see that the remaining blood was gone. I took the kettle off the stove and put it in the sink to rinse it out. I barely heard Ziggy, wouldn’t have if it weren’t for the chain on his wallet jingling as he walked into the kitchen behind me.

“I was thinking about hitting Club Cite tonight and looking for a donor. Do you think that’s too risky?” He leaned on the door frame, trying too hard to appear casual.

“I don’t think it’s too risky. I think it’s too risky for all of us to sit around starving.” I nodded toward the living room. “Are you going to take him with you?”

Ziggy nodded. “Probably. He’s better at networking than I am. He did it for a living.”

I made a noise in agreement, and let the silence hang for a minute before I said, “You’re taking him with you so you don’t have to explain to Nathan.”

“That’s not it,” Ziggy said, his denial coming too quickly. “The last time he found out I had a boyfriend, nothing good came of it. Maybe you could put in a word or two? Like, after we’ve left?”

I squirted some dish soap into the kettle and reached for the little spongy, macelike thing that we used to clean out glasses. I gave the kettle a few good swishes before I spoke again. “Don’t you think you should just speak up and be honest with him?”

“I’m not saying I won’t,” Ziggy protested. “I just want you to…break the ice. You know?”

I looked up at him, his adorable, boyish face that would always look young, no matter how old he got, and my heart caved in. He wasn’t asking me to talk to Nathan because it would be easier for him. He was asking me to protect him from the rejection of his father. “Of course. I’ll talk to him.”

Of course, I still had to talk to him about Cyrus being alive, as well. I’d just made myself a bearer of unbearable news, twice over.

Max came up the stairs, wearing stiff, dirty clothes from the night before, but looking to be in a better mood than I’d seen him in for a long, long time. He had a cooler with him. “Blood. Not much, but enough for right now.”

“You were busy,” I noted, nodding to the cooler. “Thanks.”

He smiled a smile that told me all was forgotten from the night before. “I live to serve. But we need a donor. There are five of us now, all vampires, and we all need to eat.”

“We’re on it,” Ziggy said, indicating himself and Bill. “We’re going to Club Cite in a few hours. Want to come with us?”

“You should,” I interrupted, before Max could decline. “I’ve got to perform a…procedure on Nathan. I don’t think you want to be here for that.”

Fortunately, they all agreed with me. A few hours and a bag of skinned chicken breasts later, they headed out for Club Cite. I waited until I heard the van chug away from the curb to wake up Nathan.

He gave me a sleepy smile as he woke, and I kissed him. I’d missed him so acutely, even that small contact was irresistible.

“I’d be happier to see you if I didn’t know you were here to carve me up,” he murmured sleepily. “Are you ready? Should I have faith in your skills now?”

“You should have faith in my skills, always.” I laid the scalpel, which I had sterilized in boiling water after using it to carve up the chicken, on the bedside table. I don’t care if vampires are impervious to disease, there was no way in hell I would use the instrument on Nathan without purging the salmonella demon from the blade.

At the sight of the gleaming silver, Nathan paled. Which is an impressive feat for someone as pale as Nathan already was. I put my hand on an unskinned portion of his leg and gave him a squeeze. “It’s not like the last time.”

He took a deep breath that trembled when he released it. “I know. And I trust you.”

Since he couldn’t actually lie on his stomach, I used pillows and balled up towels to prop him on his side, exposing his back. The marks from where he’d been scourged were missing now. I traced my finger over one of the lines I remembered, and for a moment, I almost lost my nerve. I didn’t know if I could cut into Nathan’s skin, if I could deal with causing, if not pain, damage to his body.

Suck it up and get on with it. Let’s see some blood, Dahlia said in my brain, sounding incredibly bored with the whole proceeding. I wished I could somehow blindfold her so she would take no pleasure in what I would do. But I found it was simply better not to think of her at all.

I took a syringe and the vial of local anesthetic and set to work injecting Nathan and ignoring his flinching when I did so.

“Can you feel that?” I asked when I was done, sticking him a little with the needle. I jabbed a little perimeter around the injection sites where he indicated the skin was numb, then took a Sharpie marker and drew a rough rectangle within the numbed area. Taking a deep breath, I picked up the scalpel and started to cut.

It was the most difficult thing I’d ever done. Harder than giving stitches to a squirming two-year-old, harder than cleaning pebbles out of a motorcyclist’s leg while he panted and turned gray from the pain. Cutting into someone I knew, someone I loved, even knowing it was for the best and they were going to be fine and feel no pain, was the worst thing. Ever.

Just when I thought it would go better if I started talking to distract myself, Nathan decided on the same tactic. “Is Ziggy okay?”

Thank you, I sent to him over the blood tie. “Yes. He’s out at Club Cite, trying to get us a new donor.”

Nathan made a noise of acknowledgment, then was silent for a moment. When he spoke, his voice was quieter. “Did Bill die?”

He had to give me an opening, didn’t he? I sighed and pulled the flap of skin I’d excised free. I laid it over Nathan’s side for safekeeping and he squirmed and groaned in pure disgust. “Sorry,” I said quickly, moving the piece to rest on his plastic-wrapped thigh. “Funny thing about Bill. He’s um…”

“Ziggy turned him, didn’t he?” Nathan didn’t need me to answer his question, judging from the agitation that sizzled across the blood tie. “Great. I suppose he loves him?”

“It would be pretty soon in their relationship to say love, I think.” I started working on another strip of skin. “Besides, you don’t have to love someone to change them.”

“Yes, you do.” Nathan reached slowly to scratch behind his ear. “Otherwise, there would be a hell of a lot more vampires in the world.”

My heart caught a little bit at what he’d said. “Well, it can’t be true. Because you turned me after Cyrus killed me. And you weren’t in love with me then.”

The little boost I’d gotten deflated when Nathan said, “Well, I didn’t know I was going to turn you, did I? I thought it was more a blood transfusion than a siring.”

“That’s true,” I agreed quietly, hoping he thought my change in tone was due to focused concentration. But, to be honest, after eight chicken breasts, I could skin anything in the dark with my eyes closed while answering SAT questions.

He turned a little, hesitant because of the knife at his back, I was sure, and looked at me until I was forced to make eye contact with him. “Carrie, I think I loved you from the second I saw you.”

“No, you didn’t.” But even though I honestly believed he hadn’t, I couldn’t help the flip-flop in my chest. I dipped my head and smiled, pulling another strip of skin free. How romantic.

“You think I’m lying to make you feel good.” He laughed quietly, and I smiled with him. He laid his head back down on the pillow and closed his eyes. “No. I think that most people are in love at first sight. They don’t know it until after, of course. But I try to remember what it felt like not to be in love with you and I can’t.”

I paused in my work, then remembered the time limit on local anesthetic. Right now, blood was rushing its merry way to the deadened area, and soon all the painkiller would be washed way with it.

I came away with three small strips of skin. I waited until the areas I’d excised showed signs of healing, then I covered them with gauze and rolled Nathan onto his back. “If all goes as planned, those will heal up before you feel them,” I reassured him. After I pulled back the makeshift bandages I’d used to cover his chest, I put the few flaps of skin against the left edge of his wound. The seam between them closed up almost immediately, and I wanted to jump for joy at my success.

“Going that well, hmm?” Nathan asked through clenched teeth.

I pressed the back of my hand to his clammy forehead. “Hurts that much?”

All he could do in response was nod. I thought it would be better if we waited to try again when he’d had some blood, and more rest. But now, after this slight repair, his injury seemed greater somehow. It was as though we were close to the finish line and had hit the wall.

“You’re naturally impatient,” he said, some of the color coming back into his face as I covered his wound again. “Just give it time. It’s not like I’m going to go anywhere.”

I chewed my lip. “There is that to think of, you know. How are we going to get you back to Chicago?”

“We won’t.” His words were cloaked in trademark Nathan steel.

Shaking my head, I started to gather up my medical supplies. “You’re irrational from the pain.”

“I’m not.” He grabbed my arm to stop me moving around the room. “Carrie, we’re not going back there.”

I hesitated. While I was glad to be back home, in our home, staying would be suicide. I told him as much, both through the blood tie and out loud, and he sighed.

“They know where we are. They came right into the apartment to get me. But the same could happen in Chicago. And this is my home.” He shifted on the bed and grunted a little in pain. “Your plan has failed. My back stings horrible.”

“It’s waking up,” I explained offhandedly. “At least in Chicago, we have distance between us. And better security than a dead bolt and a chain lock.”

“And here we have four perfectly capable vampires to guard me. And one of them is a Soul Eater with a witch’s blood.” Nathan wasn’t going to let that point go anytime soon. Not that I could blame him, but it was devastating to my argument. Still, he plunged on, further destroying my objections. “Do you think, from a tactical standpoint, that being as far away from the enemy as possible is a really smart idea?”

“I’m not a tactical thinker. I’m a survival thinker,” I sniped, tossing the vial of anesthetic into the med kit. “Why is this our responsibility? Why do we need to take care of all this…crap?”

“Because it is. And if we don’t, no one will, and he’ll win.” He knew he’d just repeated the same thing I’d told myself over and over. “We stay,” he started again, his tone gentle. “We stay. And we fight. And if we can’t fight, then…”

“Then we die knowing we didn’t just wimp out.” I leaned down and kissed him. “Should we maybe put this in front of Max and Ziggy and Bill and see what they say?”

“Oh, we’re including Bill in big decisions now?” The sarcasm fairly dripped off Nathan’s words.

“If you were smart, you would.” I didn’t want to face his questions when he found out the circumstances surrounding Bill’s change, but the longer I put it off, the worse it would be. “Bill has Ziggy’s heart.”

Nathan was quiet for a long time. “You did this?”

“I did. And you can yell at me about it all you want. But when you’re done being pissed, you’ll know why I did it.” And then I braced myself for his outburst.

It never came. He might have been too tired. Or he might have, miracle of miracles, realized that he couldn’t keep his son safe from every possible hurt in his life. But he did ask, “Did you know it would work? Or was Ziggy in danger?”

“He was in danger.” I held out my hands helplessly. “I did what he asked me to. Out of respect for him.”

“What about respect for me?” He closed his eyes and seemed to lose all the strength I thought he had. “Carrie, if I lost him again…I don’t know.”

“You might lose him again.” I didn’t say it to be cruel. “If not the Soul Eater, you’ll lose him because you treat him like a child.”

“If you had a child, you’d understand.” The instant he said it, his eyes came open and they were full of grief. “You know I meant—”

I waved his words away. “I know what you meant. And you’re right. I will never know what it’s like to fear the loss of someone that close to me. But I do remember what it was like to be a young adult, trying to get out from under my father’s expectations of me. I think I still am.”

He beckoned me closer, and I knelt beside him and kissed him. He put his hands in my hair, ran his fingers down my neck, then groaned in frustration. “If Dahlia wasn’t already dead, I would kill her,” he swore.

“You won’t be like this forever,” I reminded him. “You’re much better already. Yesterday night you could hardly talk, let alone move or think about sex.”

I doubted he heard me. His eyes were sliding closed as I watched him. When he was deeply asleep, I went to the living room. Bill and Ziggy still hadn’t returned, and for a weird moment it felt as though I stood in a different time. In a time before I had to worry about the Soul Eater, in a time before I’d even met Cyrus. It felt like the night I’d stood in this living room, listening to Nathan vow to kill me, still denying I was a vampire at all.

It hadn’t been that long, less than a year, and it felt like a century away.

How had I gone from that person, who wanted nothing more than to return to her lonely apartment and pray for her old way of life back, to a person who made life-and-death decisions and damn the consequences. To a person who thought of all the truly terrifying things that lay ahead with some fear, but mostly with anger.

You should fear, Dahlia warned in my head. You have no clue what he is capable of. What I’m capable of doing to you now.

I went to the window and looked out on the town. The orange streetlights transformed the trees into shimmering, skeletal shadows against the dark voids of the buildings. At one time I would have worried about the things lurking out there, going bump in the night. But I’d seen them.

Dahlia’s laugh rang through my head. You haven’t seen anything yet.

“Bring it on, bitch,” I whispered, my cold breath misting the window glass. “Bring it on.”

Sixteen:

A Shock

T he club was just as loud and pathetic as Ziggy remembered it. Club Cite had never been one of his favorite places, but he’d endured it back when he’d been human in order to help Nate track vampires. It seemed like this was the first place vampires new to the city, or just plain new, ended up. And that was pathetic.

To get into Club Cite you had to find the place first, and it was intentionally nondescript. The building was brick, but someone used a really glossy exterior paint to cover it with black. The result was a brick building with peeling black blobs, and the whole thing reminded Ziggy of skin cancer. Once inside, the only place to go was down. He assumed there were offices upstairs, but the actual club was on the bottom level. It had a bar, but they only served alcohol on Thursday nights, the one night a week they didn’t let in anyone under eighteen. The rest of the time, you could get coffee and French sodas from the Manson wannabe behind the counter.

The atmosphere was the same every night, though. Frenetic, smoky, loud. Some generic metal song with wailing soprano vocals à la Nightwish blasted from the speakers, inexpertly coupled with an industrial beat. The tangle of bodies on the dance floor moved like Soul Train with a bad case of ennui: listless gyrations and halfhearted attempts to find the beat. It was depressing to think that people actually chose to spend their free time this way, all trying to out-goth each other with their Hot Topic wardrobes and grossly inflated attitudes of made-up depression. Ziggy leaned against the crescent-shaped back of the booth and tried to focus on the conversation Bill was having with a skinny punk in white face paint.

“And that was when I realized that my soul would be forever devoted to the Lord and Lady of the Darkness,” the kid said, his hand trembling dramatically as he lifted his black-papered cigarette to his lips. “That I would wander forever. Lost in the darkness.”

“Wow. Well, that’s…” Bill looked at Ziggy, then back at the kid. “That’s just fantastic. Did you hear that, Ziggy? The Lord and Lady of Darkness.”

“Your sarcasm is not appreciated,” the fishnet-shirt-wearing loser said with a dramatic flourish as he stood, almost knocking over the chair he’d pulled up to the table. Seating was at a premium. He took the chair with him.

“You’re batting pretty low tonight,” Ziggy observed with a smile. He touched the back of Bill’s neck, tracing his hairline until he couldn’t keep up his stoic expression and shivered a little.

He knocked Ziggy’s hand away. “Stop that. We’re supposed to be inconspicuous here, and making out in a room full of teenagers would definitely draw some attention.”

Taking in Bill’s appearance, Ziggy laughed. On an average street during daylight hours, Bill’s gray T-shirt, tucked into his dark blue jeans, wouldn’t look that out of place. But here, in the land of plastic pants and duct-taped-over nipples? He might as well have walked in naked. It would have drawn fewer stares. “Yeah, you look real inconspicuous.”

“Hey, I tried. But we’ve got limited resources.” He nodded to a girl with green streaks in her hip-length black hair who eyed them with some interest from the bar. “She looks like she’d be up for it. What’s the story? Are we looking for a chick to bang in a threesome?”

“As long as we don’t have to actually bang a chick in a threesome, yeah, fine.” Ziggy wanted to drop his head to the table and cover his ears to block out any more of Bill’s scheming. He had no idea—and really didn’t want to know—how good Bill was at lying to people.

Before Bill could wave over their next mark, Max slid into the booth beside Ziggy. “Any luck?”

“No, but you’re going to spoil our cover,” Bill said, giving the girl at the bar an exaggerated wink. Her face contorted as if she was trying not to laugh, and she cocked her thumbs and forefingers like guns at Bill before turning away from him.

“Nice,” Ziggy said, trying not to laugh himself. “How are you doing?”

Max shrugged. “Okay. I got a line on a group of ‘real’ vampires. You know, the kids who get together and drink about a teaspoon of each other’s blood on the night of the full moon?” His eyes got big and he reached his hands out like Frankenstein’s monster, then dropped them and laughed ruefully. “Most of them would shit themselves if they met a real vampire, but every now and then you find one who plays along. I got a few numbers.”

“Bill’s been using a line about us looking for a third, if you get my drift.” Ziggy pulled out his cigarettes and lit one. “But so far, he’s not having much luck.”

Looking him up and down, Max grinned wryly. “Yeah, wonder why that is.”

At least, Max had taken some initiative in the disguise department. They’d found a box of Ziggy’s old clothes in the bookshop storeroom, and though Max was a few sizes too small and a few inches too tall to fit into most of the stuff, he’d at least embellished his black T-shirt and jeans ensemble with some heavy silver rings, rubber bracelets and a liberal amount of black eyeliner.

Bill had declined anything in the Mary Kay department.

“This music is killing me,” Max groaned, covering his ears. “If we’ve got nothing now, chances are things won’t improve. Let’s get back to the apartment before I go deaf.”

“You know, I really do find this kind of thing fascinating,” Bill shouted to Ziggy as they pushed their way across the dance floor and toward the exit. “The whole ‘look at my dark soul’ thing going on here. I can almost take this better than eternally upbeat people.”

“What, like you?” Ziggy chided back, but when he turned his head to see Bill’s reaction, he froze.

You didn’t forget the face of someone who’d done to you what that son of a bitch had done to him. And you definitely noticed when someone who’s supposed to be dead is walking around in one of his old haunts.

It didn’t seem possible, even though Ziggy knew it was. Still, seeing Cyrus there almost knocked him out.

“Max!” He turned and reached blindly, but it wasn’t Max he grabbed. It was a painfully thin girl with blue hair in long braids who gave him a look that said she was ten heartbeats away from screaming rape. “Sorry,” he said, distracted by the sight of Max moving through the crowd, toward Cyrus. “Bill, turn around, go that way!” Ziggy shouted over the music.

The creep was in one of the large corner booths, far enough away from the dance floor that the light was dimmer, and the cigarette haze in the air was thicker than the shadows. But there was no mistaking Cyrus, his nearly white-blond hair, his perpetual sneer. His black silk shirt, open almost to his navel, revealed one hell of a scar down his muscled chest.

Ziggy had to shake himself away from the memories that crashed into him. Mental scenes that were shameful and degrading and somehow so, so hot at the same time. He hadn’t had much contact with Cyrus since Carrie had killed him. He’d accidentally answered a few of his phone calls to Dahlia and gotten the hell off the line. But he wasn’t sure Cyrus had realized it was him. In fact, he wasn’t sure Cyrus remembered him at all. And that hurt somehow. If someone did terrible things to you—no matter how nice he was to you after the fact, and how much you actually bought into that nice act before he ripped your throat out—you wanted them to remember you.

There were other people in the booth, too, young kids lining up to get a taste of what Ziggy had already experienced. Worse actually, because they wouldn’t have someone to protect them. Ziggy knew without a doubt that if it hadn’t been for Carrie’s intervention, Cyrus would have thought nothing of killing him that first night in the mansion.

Cyrus saw Max first. His eyes flared wide with something that looked like fear, then narrowed into an expression of forced indifference. He didn’t speak above a whisper. “If it isn’t the father of the sword. How is the whelp doing?”

Max took a step forward, as if he would jump across the whole table to get at Cyrus, but Bill put up a hand to stop him. “Bouncers,” he said meekly, looking like someone who really didn’t want to be stuck between two vampires if they were going to go toe-to-toe.

“It’s okay.” Ziggy knew he didn’t have to say it out loud, knew he could use the tie between himself and Bill, but he couldn’t stand there any longer, waiting for Cyrus to notice him. It was like torture.

Bill felt the thought. At least, Ziggy was sure he must have, because he looked at him sharply and then away just as fast.

“It’s okay,” Ziggy repeated, clapping a hand on Bill’s shoulder. “This guy’s a total pussy. He isn’t going to bother Max.”

“It wasn’t Max I was worried about,” Bill grumbled.

At last, Cyrus noticed Ziggy. It was a blow to the heart when he said, “Ah, you’re Nolen’s son! You know, father has been extremely cross with you. With all of you, in fact.”

“I don’t give a damn if he is,” Bill said, moving as though he would stand between Cyrus and Ziggy.

Calm down. He’s harmless. Ziggy tried to project as much sincere feeling into the message as possible, but an uninvited image of Cyrus, naked and pale and gleaming in candlelight, flashed into his mind. He knew Bill saw it, and that shamed him more than the memory.

Bill didn’t flinch or look at him, but kept his anger trained directly on Cyrus. “How is your dad, by the way? I hear Carrie did a real number on him.”

Cyrus flinched at Carrie’s name. Ziggy filed that away to keep in his back pocket for later. Right now, though, there were too many people around, fragile, human people who could really wind up in a bad way if an all-out fight broke out. “Let’s take a walk.”

“Yes, a fine idea. You all take a walk, and leave me to enjoy my evening and—” he reached to touch one of his companions, tugging on one of the kid’s blond curls “—my company.”

“How about we tell the cops sitting down the street about your ‘company’ and you talk it over with them?” Max asked, lifting an eyebrow. “Or do you really think that kid is eighteen?”

“Jail cells can get awfully sunny,” Bill added.

With an annoyed glance at the boy beside him, Cyrus slid around the table and out of the booth. Somehow, he managed to do it gracefully. The guy was obnoxiously like a vampire out of the movies.

They left the club as inconspicuously as possible, but Bill drew attention to himself by being too normal, and Cyrus drew attention by being too damn glamorous. When they got up the stairs and to the street, Cyrus didn’t run, which was a relief. He followed them to the alley and leaned against the peeling, painted-over brick wall, arms crossed. “Well, you have me. Now, what will you do with me?”

Max put on an act of thinking really hard before he said, “I’d like to bash your skull in and rip out your heart, but history has proven that killing you doesn’t seem to stick.”

“We need information, though,” Bill said pragmatically. “And if you really didn’t want to give it to us, you would have gotten out of that club before you did.”

“Or not shown up at all,” Ziggy added, feeling weirdly like a tagalong. “Jacob has been really concerned with this ritual lately. Let’s start there.”

“Fine. Could we discuss this somewhere more comfortable? I do have a mansion—”

“No.” Ziggy shook his head. “We’re not going anywhere with you. We’ll probably get ambushed by guards the second we drive through the gates.”

Cyrus’s eyes narrowed and he leaned forward. “I really think we’ll all be more comfortable sharing information there.”

“Let’s go,” Bill said, suddenly looking around the alley as though it would come alive and swallow them.

Ziggy wanted to argue, but something in the urgency Bill, Max and Cyrus moved with warned him against it. Cyrus obviously thought he’d been followed, possibly that they were being watched. They passed a sleek black limo parked at the curb, and Cyrus ducked his head. The driver waiting inside was sleeping, though, so they slipped by unnoticed.

“Go, quickly,” Cyrus ordered, once they were inside the van.

“What’s going on? Are we in serious danger, or are you just paranoid?” Max demanded from the back of the van.

“Let us hope it is the latter. Turn here,” he instructed Bill.

The mansion was every bit as fucking creepy as Ziggy remembered it. A long driveway led up the sprawling lawn to the front of a house that looked as though it was modeled directly on the Haunted Mansion at Disney World. No, the Haunted Mansion was less scary. This mansion was freaking terrifying if you knew what went on inside.

They parked the van in the shadows near the side of the house, up on the lawn, at Cyrus’s insistence. Rather than entering through the front door, he led them to the kitchen entrance.

Ziggy put one foot over the threshold and shivered. He remembered vividly standing in this room, defending Cyrus to Carrie, certain that he was safe where he was. The cold, porcelain-tiled walls flickered with sinister shadows in the dim light of one buzzing neon tube overhead.

“Are you okay?” Bill asked, not quite whispering but not speaking loud enough that the others would hear him, even at their close proximity.

There isn’t time to explain, Ziggy told him through the blood tie. But this is easier than whispering to me. Ziggy kept up with Cyrus, who led them through the kitchen to the dining room. A table was set for one, and Cyrus seated himself behind the place setting of a single crystal winesglass and napkin. “Please, sit. Are you gentlemen hungry? I’ll have Clarence set another place.”

“This isn’t a social call,” Max snapped. “Get to your fucking point and let us get the hell out of here.”

Cyrus rang the little bell beside his glass anyway. “You were out looking for blood at the club. I’m not an idiot.”

“That’s debatable,” Max said, but a little more politely, if possible. Maybe because now they were going to get fed, and he didn’t want to insult their host.

“You’re hoping to stop my father. I applaud you. Someone has to, and I don’t have the strength.” Cyrus looked down at the scar on his chest, and Ziggy noticed Bill touched his own chest in sympathy, then dropped his hand quickly. “However, if you’re going to stop him, it will have to be soon.”

Clarence appeared, as skinny and spiderlike as Ziggy remembered, in his overly formal clothes. He’d come with a tray and three extra glasses and napkins. Cyrus hadn’t even had to ask for them.

He indicated to Clarence to lay the places for them. “The ritual is to take place at the time of the full moon. You have about twenty days. You’ve killed most of his damnable creatures off, so it shouldn’t be too much of a strain on you to kill him in the days before the ritual.”

Ziggy shook his head. “Not too close to it. Knowing Jacob, he’ll have plenty of company coming so he’s got someone on hand to worship him once he makes the transition from Soul Eater to god.”

“Yes, he does enjoy the attention,” Cyrus agreed. “Perhaps something in the next ten days would be best.”

“And you’re sharing this with us, why?” Bill looked from Ziggy to Max, then back to Cyrus. “I’m the new guy here—”

“And what is your name?” he interrupted smoothly.

That flustered Bill for a minute. As if he wasn’t used to being interrupted. “Bill. Like I was saying, why would you share this kind of information with us? This guy is your father—”

“And his sire,” Max put in.

“Sure.” Bill shifted uncomfortably. “It doesn’t seem like the kind of thing a son would do.”

“You’re right,” Cyrus agreed. “Perhaps you are too new to understand the nuances of this situation.”

Clarence reappeared, this time from the kitchen, with a covered platter; Ziggy recoiled. He’d seen Cyrus eat enough dinners in his life to know that whatever was under that silver dome wouldn’t be good. And judging from the size, it either wasn’t a whole body, or it was a very, very small whole body.

Clarence set the tray on the table and whipped the dome off without much ceremony, considering the drum-roll of dread in Ziggy’s heart. Instead of some unspeakable horror, which had become the mealtime norm for the past six months of Ziggy’s life, the tray just held a carafe of blood. Cyrus indicated that Clarence should pour it before continuing to speak.

“I have had a very enlightening year. I’ve been resurrected from the dead twice, turned into a vampire twice, lost two women who I loved very much, one more than once, and it has all been at my father’s whim these things took place. I see the solution to my problems as simple, but unachievable without help. My father must die, and stay dead, for my life to return to normal.”

“How normal could it possibly be, if you’re a vampire who’s been dead twice already?” There was a sadness in Bill’s voice that Ziggy hadn’t heard before, but he didn’t feel it over the blood tie. Was Bill already learning to hide his emotions? That was fucking depressing.

Ziggy realized too late that Cyrus was staring at him. “Not as normal as it was in my past, I swear to you.”

It was enough to make Ziggy’s throat go dry. Good thing Clarence had just finished pouring his blood. He gulped it down, fast.

“I’ve got to admit, that worries me, too,” Max said. “How do we know we’re not just choosing the lesser evil?”

“Speak to your doctor friend.” Cyrus’s voice softened. “You’ve never cared for me, but I swear, I will not play you false. Not after all that has happened to me this year.”

He leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes, long hands curling to fists on the tabletop. “I used to enjoy cruelty. Relish it. Now I can’t find it in myself to kill my own father.”

“Ten days?” Max asked, as if clarifying. “You stay in touch with us, keep us updated. Try to rally some more help and we’ll do the same. And we’ll take care of daddy dearest.”

“We’ll try,” Ziggy corrected. “But we’re going to need help. Specifically, blood.”

“Yes, of course. Clarence will get you all you need and more before you leave here tonight.” Cyrus looked at them all hopefully. “Please believe me when I say that I want this over with as much as you do. And I am not on my father’s side.”

Max drained his glass and stood. “Fine. Get your man to load up a cooler.” He turned to Bill. “Drink that.”

Bill paled and tried hard not to look at the blood in front of him. “No, I’m okay. I’m not exactly ready to—”

“I’m not ready to watch you chomp into an innocent pedestrian tonight, so you’re going to drink that now.” There was absolutely no question, hell, not even a please or a thank-you implied in Max’s tone.

“You’re disgusted by it now, but you’ll get used to it.” Cyrus lazily stroked the rim of his glass. “You’ll find that sadly true of so much in your future.”

Before he could stop himself, Ziggy remembered a torrent of violent, sexual images from his time with Cyrus, and he couldn’t shield Bill from them. He saw that telltale tic in Bill’s jaw, just before he picked up the cup, drained it in several long gulps, then slammed it back down so hard, Ziggy expected the stem to break. Bill’s face shifted into the monster snout and sloping brow of a vampire, then shifted back just as quickly.

“There,” he said breathlessly, wiping his mouth on the back of his hand. “Now we can get the hell out of here.”

True to his word, Cyrus gave them the blood he’d promised. Max waited in the kitchen while Clarence packed the plastic collection bags in a foam cooler, and Bill, wordlessly, had pushed through the kitchen door, out into the yard.

“Follow him,” Max had said, his face full of sympathy. “I’ll help this guy out.”

The second he made it outside, Bill yakked up all the blood he’d drunk into the bushes. He stayed hunched over, his hands braced on his thighs, as though he might do it again.

When it seemed safe, Ziggy ventured a, “You all right?”

Bill didn’t answer right away. He stood, wiped his mouth on the bottom of his T-shirt and leaned against the van. “I really didn’t want to drink that.”

Ziggy went to him and put his arms around him, knowing he wouldn’t resist. Bill hugged him tight, fingers digging into his back.

“You’re going to have to get used to it.” Ziggy turned his head slightly to kiss Bill’s ear. “I wish I could tell you there was another way, but there isn’t.”

After a moment, Bill stepped back. He wiped his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose, as if it was a switch to turn off his frustration. “I know. And I know I have to…drink blood. I’m so thirsty and hungry and tired and nothing helps. But I’ve spent so long on the other side of things. You know, when I found out about vampires, that they were real, that they were all around, that I could make money feeding them, I didn’t believe it. And I feel a little bit of that feeling now. The horror, the feeling that my life had changed, the not remembering what it was like before I knew.”

Ziggy nodded slowly. “I think every one of us went through that. I don’t think anyone becomes a vampire without a shock.”

“Yeah, a shock.” Bill laughed bitterly. “Hey, at least I got a pretty decent sire, though, right? I mean, you got kind of a raw deal. At least I got sired by someone I don’t mind being with.”

The little flicker of hope in Ziggy’s chest flared, and he quickly squashed it out. “Well, for now you don’t. I mean, in the future—”

“Stop it.” Bill came forward, like he would kiss him, then seemed to think better of it, considering what he’d just done in the bushes. Instead, he touched his cheek and pulled him close. “It’s been too long a night. I just want to go home, get drunk enough to drink some blood and keep it down, and then climb into a warm bed with you.”

“That might be a problem. I don’t think there is a free bed. You might have to settle for the storeroom floor again.” A nervous laugh bubbled in Ziggy’s chest, and he coughed to hide it. He also stepped back, wanting to put a little space between them. “Can I ask you something?”

Mild surprise lit Bill’s eyes. “I don’t see why not.”

Ziggy took a deep breath, and the question tumbled out on it. “When you say you want to be close to me like that, is it you, or is it the blood tie that makes you feel it?”

The silence between them was important. One of those silences right before something really significant happens.

That significant thing was Bill’s shake of the head, and his quiet, “I don’t know.”

“What do you—”

“Okay, let’s load ’em up and move ’em out,” Max called, muscling two huge coolers out the door.

“Damn, guy, you got superstrength or something?” Bill hurried over and took one of the coolers from him. “It’s going to be a tight ride back to the apartment.”

Max agreed with a shake of the head. “And the first thing I do when we get back is to tear the top off of one of these suckers and go straight to town.”

A cold dread squeezed Ziggy’s chest. “No. It’s not.”

He turned to Bill and Max, not wanting to say the words, because the task was going to be so incredibly unpleasant.

“First, we have to tell Carrie.”

Seventeen:

Confession

W hile the guys were gone, I had time to think.

Scratch that. Dahlia had time to think.

Once, while I checked in on Nathan, I found myself standing over him with a stake in my hand. Luckily, I realized what I was doing. Equally lucky, he didn’t wake up and see me standing there.

She was a constant presence in my mind, so much so that I had to second-guess everything I did. Did I really want a cup of coffee, or was that Dahlia? Was I really too tired to block her out of my consciousness, or was that what she wanted me to think? And once I had blocked her, was I sure she was gone? It was worse than before, when she’d invaded my head. Now, she didn’t have anywhere else to go.

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.

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 the 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.”

“You wouldn’t have to go.” Nathan tapped his index finger against his lips. “I have at least seven warding spells we could take a look at tonight. Most of them involve doing a simple spell over ingredients and then sprinkling them around the perimeter of the area you want to ward.”

“So, we could do the spell, and then split up and sprinkle the dust?” I brightened at that. “Max can go out in the daylight now. Whatever we don’t cover, he can do.”

“But I want to be there, as well,” Nathan said quickly. The desperation he felt was written clearly across his face. “I’m not going to be able to help in the big fight. I want to at least be able to do this.”

“Like Carrie said, we could split up,” Bill interjected, rubbing the knees of his jeans nervously. “She could go with Ziggy and I could go with you.”

“And I could pick up the day shift,” Max finished for him. “Perfect. Let’s make with the magic, guys.”

Nathan wheeled forward, trying hard not to look at Bill. “Maybe I should go with Carrie. Assuming the spell even works to begin with. I’m still very fragile, and I’m sure she wouldn’t want me to be—”

I saw through his plan. He wanted to avoid being alone with Bill. While I wasn’t sure it would make him any more accepting of his son’s relationship, it probably wouldn’t hurt any, either. That’s why I said, a little too enthusiastically, “No, it’s fine! You’ll be fine, I’m sure.”

“Tell me what books you need, and I’ll grab them,” Max offered helpfully. “I have to go downstairs and call Bella anyway.”

Nathan sighed heavily. “Get me a pen and I’ll write them down.”

Do you really think you can pull it off? Dahlia mocked in my mind.

I shoved her aside. Remember, if you trip me up, I might just waltz through this thing alive. For your sake, you’d better cooperate, so Jacob can avenge you.

She laughed. Or, at least, her soul trapped in me replicated the crazy sound of her laughter. In that moment I almost called off the entire idea of warding the cemeteries.

And then I wondered if that was what she wanted me to do all along.

Nineteen:

Army of One

T hough it was plenty warm in the bookstore, Max’s blood pumped cold through his veins. “Could you repeat that?”

Bella sounded far too cheerful and way, way too oblivious to the implications of what she’d done as she explained. “My father has been deposed. After I informed several pack members of the situation with the Soul Eater, they called a special meeting of the council. They were enraged to find that my father had hidden this information from them, and I was correct in my assumption that they would view a vampire god as a threat to our continued existence. They voted, and cast my father out.”

“My God, Bella, are you okay?” Max had never known his father, but he was pretty sure he’d take it hard if he had and some council had voted him into exile.

“Oh, yes.” She sounded like someone talking about their breakfast, not their father. “He was not sentenced to death. He will probably retire to the Sanctuary, or perhaps meet with the outcast clan on Corsica. I will still be able to speak with him if necessary.”

“You’re taking this remarkably well.” Almost too well. What if he was exiled somewhere? Wouldn’t she be upset about it?

And then he remembered that he had been exiled, in a way. Worse, he’d been sent to die. And she hadn’t been too demonstrably upset. But she had done something to ensure his return, as much as something like that could be ensured. If she’d done this to her own father, she’d thought far enough ahead to plan the best possible outcome.

That was his girl.

“I have had time to accept it. Now, do you wish to hear the council’s decision on the Soul Eater?” She didn’t give him time to answer her. “They are sending a core group of warriors to assassinate him. I, unfortunately, was not invited to go. But I will stay behind and perform the battle rites with the priestesses of the clan. Fighting would be an honor, but this is an honor greater than I have dreamed of.”

“Pardon me if I don’t immediately concentrate on that last part. You said they’re sending warriors?”

“Yes. Fifty, perhaps more. They wish to make an example of him.” She paused. “Max, this means you do not have to fight now.”

Damn. That put him in a hard spot. There was no way in hell Carrie and Nathan weren’t going to fight. They would argue that it would be too dangerous to leave it up to someone else. They had a responsibility to the world or something like that. And he had a responsibility to them, even if he wasn’t entirely vampire anymore.

“I’m sorry. But I’m going to have to fight. You know they’re not going to back down, and I’m not going to be able to let them go in on their own.” He could feel her disapproval over the phone. “I promise to be careful. I’ll stick to the fringes, all of that—”

“You are not one of them, Max. You are one of us.”

“I know that. But I can’t turn off my feelings for my friends like a faucet. They’ll get themselves killed if I don’t help out.” He stopped, cold reality smacking him in the forehead. “If they’re there, at the Soul Eater’s house when the werewolves show up, they’re going to die, aren’t they?”

“Our soldiers will not distinguish one vampire from another,” Bella admitted.

Rage boiled in Max’s stomach. “You were going to tell me this when?”

“It does not affect you, Max. They know that you will be there and they will not harm you. But what description should I have given them of your friends? It would be impossible to tell one vampire from the next.” Bella sounded exasperated and tired. “If they wish to stay and die, that is theirs to decide. But you have a responsibility. To me and to the pack, and to your child, as well. You must come home now.”

It was the hardest thing he’d ever done, he was sure of it. He wanted so badly to return to her, to forget about the life he’d led as a vampire and start a new one. One where he didn’t have to kill or battle mystic forces. Where the last year—hell, the last couple of decades—didn’t exist.

But what kind of a man would that make him? Running from his friends in their time of need, when they were walking straight into a massacre. They didn’t have many illusions about their survival, but at least they thought they stood a chance. Max had seen the warriors train and fight in practice. They would be lethal in battle, tearing through vampires without a thought about what they were doing.

The picture of blood and carnage that filled his mind made his mouth go dry and his cock grow hard. The sick thing was, he couldn’t tell if it was the vampire in him or the werewolf that craved the destruction.

“Bella, I can’t.” The second he said it, he wondered what kind of moron he was that he actually went through with it. “I can’t let my friends walk into this blindly.”

She made a noise that could have been a sigh or a held-back sob. “Max, I am frightened for your life.”

“I know you are. So am I. But I’ve come through worse things than this. I’m sure I have.” He neglected to add that he wasn’t entirely sure what worse situations those might be, because that would be unhelpful. “When will the warriors get here?”

“They plan to attack at the time of the full moon, but they will arrive a few days before. If you do not wish to come home, at least promise me you will go into battle with them, not with the vampires. Do not shame the pack.” She was so sure, so goddamned sure that vampires were these evil, filthy creatures. Max wondered how she’d ever fallen in love with him.

He wondered if she would ever accept him for what he was, what he really was. A vampire who happened to get bitten by a werewolf. Would she ever admit to herself that he hadn’t been born as she had, that he was something else? Or, would it become the thing they never spoke of, until one of them exploded?

His goodbyes to her were mechanical. Not cold, but he didn’t feel the longing for her as he had in the past. And when he hung up, he still felt that crushing pain of loneliness in his chest, but it was for a different reason.

They might save the world from a rampaging hell god. They might be able to fix everything that had gone so terribly wrong over the last year.

The way we decided what warding spell we would use was not as scientific or mystical as I thought it would be. We flipped through the books, wrote up ingredients lists and decided to use the one we had the most components for. After that, Nathan went to work cross-referencing magical substitutions by planetary influences, elemental correspondences and mythical connotations. I’ll never stop being amazed that the same man who prayed the rosary every morning when he thought I was safely asleep knew more about witchcraft than any other person I had ever met.

Well, that wasn’t entirely true. I was pretty intimately acquainted with Dahlia now, though I wished that wasn’t the case. There were times I wanted to scream, just to drown out the sound of her in my head. Even if I blocked her from communicating with me, she was there, like a high-pitched frequency whine in my brain. Like water in my ear, rolling around and blocking out the sound of everything else until I wanted to claw it out to make it stop.

As it seemed not an entirely wise decision to claw my head to let the voices out, I would try to concentrate on something else. And luckily, Max gave me that exact distraction. I’d thought we’d seen the last of him for the night when he burst through the door looking like someone who’d just heard they needed a tooth pulled.

“Listen up, guys,” he said, coming into the living room to shake Ziggy awake where he lay passed out on the end of the couch. “You’re not going to believe this.”

“Not going to believe what?” I had to poke Nathan to get his attention out of his book. “Now that we’re all listening.”

“We don’t need any spell. We’ve got reinforcements.” Max went on to explain about the pack Bella belonged to, and what she’d done for us. Just when I was about to be grateful to her, he added, “And she doesn’t want you to fight.”

“What?” I shrieked.

“Carrie, wait—” Max said, but it was too late. I was on a roll, fueled by the horrible crap going on in my head courtesy of Dahlia, and the horrible crap going on around us, courtesy of the Soul Eater.

I stood and marched up to Max, though I’m sure the effect was diminished somewhat by the fact that I’m several inches shorter than him. “We were here when this thing started. At least, some of us were. And we’re going to stick it out until the end. Just because she doesn’t understand what it means to be loyal—”

“I told her no,” Max interrupted. “I told her there was no way you’d agree to sit at home and let someone else take care of it when there was so much on the line.”

“So, when do we go?” Nathan left the book on the kitchen table and wheeled into the living room. “I’m ready.”

“You’re not going,” I reminded him, but Max answered the question anyway.

“We’re going in on the night of the ritual. It won’t be easy. For one, you guys will have to avoid the werewolves. They’ll kill any vampires they come across.”

I cut him off. “But you’ll be there. You can tell them—”

“I won’t be able to tell them anything.” He wouldn’t look me in the eye. “It will be the full moon. I’ll change. The warriors will change, too. But I…I don’t know how much I’ll remember. About you guys or anything. Just make sure you stay clear of anything even remotely wolflike.”

“There’s more to it than just running in and saving the day, though,” Bill pointed out. “If this Soul Eater guy is a big nasty, how do we fight him?”

“I think fifty werewolves can handle him,” Max said, almost contemptuously.

“I don’t.” Nathan looked around the room, making eye contact with everyone. “In any situation where a crowd gathers intent on destroying him, what happens?”

A chill of memory crept up my spine. “He gets away.”

“He uses the confusion as a distraction,” Ziggy added.

Nathan nodded. “Our odds are better if, in the confusion, one person goes after him specifically. And only one person here has the kind of power to kill him.”

It was a weird feeling. I wanted to yell at Nathan for wanting to send me into danger, but in the past, when he’d wanted to stop me from getting involved in something for my own good, I’ve yelled at him for that. It was a true case of “be careful what you wish for,” I guess.

“Come on, man. That’s stupid,” Max said quietly, fulfilling his role as the person who spoke reason on my behalf.

I didn’t have the conviction to argue. “At least having Dahlia trapped in my head will end happy. Not entirely happy. I mean, she’ll still be trapped in my head. But at least I’ll be able to use her for something.”

Use me. That sounds so dirty. And so unlike poor, pure little you.

I bombarded her with images of Cyrus and I together, that first time, when I’d torn at his throat with my human teeth and reveled in the pain we’d caused each other. It wasn’t mature, but for some reason I wanted her to know that I was better than her, and a hundred times better than she ever was, at anything she was proud of.

“Carrie, are you okay?” Nathan’s voice came to me as if through a fog. “Carrie?”

I snapped myself back to reality. Unfortunately, in reality, I’d clenched my fists so tightly my nails had dug into my palms hard enough to draw blood, which now dripped onto my clothes.

“Sorry,” I said, smoothing my shirt down out of nervous habit. The blood from my hands stained the cloth and I crossed my arms over my stomach to hide it. “What were we talking about?”

“We need exact details of what the ritual will entail,” Max said, eyeing me warily. “Only Cyrus can give us that information. Unfortunately, he’s only speaking to us in riddles right now. Maybe you could…”

“Of course, I’ll talk to him.” I didn’t want to sound as though I was jumping at the chance to see him again, though maybe I was. “He’ll be honest with me. At least, as honest as he feels like being.”

“I’ll call him and set it up.” Max turned toward the door.

“Wait, can’t we—” Nathan stopped himself. “Never mind. This way will work.”

Thank you, I sent him silently, but he looked away.

“I guess we’ll go downstairs, then,” Ziggy said awkwardly.

Bill stumbled as he stood. “Leg’s asleep,” he said sheepishly, following Ziggy.

Alone with Nathan, I could barely face him.

“You know what I saw, Carrie.” The words scraped out of his throat as if they were coated with razors. As if it was physically painful for him to speak.

I couldn’t deny it. He had an all-access pass to my head and I’d just been replaying “Carrie and Cyrus’s Greatest Hits” in my mind. There was no hiding anything from him. “I know.”

“When is this going to end?”

I had a horrible feeling that I knew the answer, but I couldn’t say it out loud. Instead, I asked him if he wanted a cup of tea, and he said he’d love one, and we pretended that nothing had happened, nothing was happening, and nothing would happen.

It was a pretty fairy tale for a few hours, at least.

Max called Cyrus and arranged to meet him at midnight, in the old section of the sprawling graveyard on the east side of town. It wasn’t a terribly long walk from the apartment, and I wondered if Cyrus suspected I might show up.

The night was cooling off rapidly, and fog hung in the air, shrouding the ground. Half-sunken gravestones thrust up from the ground like broken teeth biting at the thick haze. I felt as though I’d wandered into a cheesy vampire movie.

Cyrus stood with his back to the path I stumbled down, his hand gripping the foot of a cement angel perched just above his shoulder. In the dim light I saw he wore a red brocade robe, like the ones he’d worn when I’d first met him. His hair was shorter now, and the effect wasn’t quite the same as it had been then. Now, he looked a little like those kids Ziggy had known, who dressed up to play vampire.

“Kind of a cliché, isn’t it?” I asked, but not with the mocking I would have directed toward him in the past. “You know, meeting in a cemetery at midnight?”

His back stiffened at the sound of my voice, and he spun, pure rage in his face. “Where is your werewolf? Baying at the moon?”

“No need to be nasty,” I admonished, coming to stand in front of him. “I wanted to come. I wanted to see you.”

“Why?” He turned away and stalked toward a leaning crypt. “So you can tell me that it’s me you want? That it’s me you love? And then change your mind when it becomes convenient to love someone else?”

“I’m not the only one guilty of that,” I said, my limbs trembling with rage. “You ran back to Dahlia as fast as your little legs could carry you, didn’t you?”

“I did what I had to in order to survive!” He stabbed a finger at his chest and advanced on me. “It’s all I’ve been doing since you came into my life!”

“So you blame me?” I tossed up my hands and laughed bitterly. “It’s all my fault your life has been miserable for the past year. Well, I never asked you to attack me in that morgue. I never asked you to make me a vampire. And I never asked anyone to bring you back.”

“I know!” He gripped my upper arms and pushed me into the base of the cement angel. Concrete chips fluttered from behind me and I heard the angel, apparently attached only by its weight and gravity, rock on its pedestal.

Cyrus didn’t seem to notice that we were about to be killed by a falling monument. His face was inches from mine, teeth bared, features crumpled into his vampire form. “You didn’t bring me back! You had Dahlia’s spell book! You could have brought me back!”

It took me a moment to decipher his words, choked by anger and hindered by his vampire face. His features morphed into his smooth, human visage and he stepped back, still trembling with rage. I stood by, my hands clenching and unclenching as I tried to think of something to say.

I didn’t get the chance. He uttered a sound of disgust and strode away from me, down the path.

“Wait!” I jogged after him. “You mean, I could have brought you back instead of your father?” I didn’t know whether to be insulted that he expected me to in the first place, or feel bad that I hadn’t thought to do it myself. “You’re back. Why does it matter who did it?”

“Why does it matter?” he repeated, wrath and bewilderment plain on his features. “My father pulled me back to sacrifice me. I’ll be going back to that damnable blue world and there’s nothing I can do to stop it.”

He grabbed me again, but this time I was ready for him. He wasn’t as strong in this incarnation as he had been in the past, and I pushed him off me, hard. He fell back, and I loomed over him. “You want to stop it? Than quit whining and help us! Help us without doing it on your own terms and worrying about your hurt feelings!”

“Do you really want that?” He pulled himself up, warily. “Do you really want me to be in your life again? Won’t it destroy the perfect solution I provided you with my death?”

My heart lurched in my chest. “You think I wanted you dead?”

He couldn’t meet my eyes. “It certainly made your choice easier. Which one to pick, your sire or your fledgling?”

It felt as though I’d had the wind knocked out of me. My heart raced and I became dizzy. But I didn’t collapse or lose my balance. I’d had a revelation.

“Cyrus, even if you had never died…there wouldn’t have been any choice. I don’t love you.”

Now I knew exactly what people meant when they said the weight of their world was lifted off their shoulders. It was true, I didn’t love Cyrus. I was drawn to him, inexplicably, but I could never be happy with him. I could only be happy with Nathan. Whatever feelings I had for Cyrus had been a result of the blood ties we’d shared, or nostalgia for those feelings. But Nathan…I’d had feelings for Nathan almost immediately, before we ever shared a blood tie. They’d been lost amid the physical attraction and my desperation to learn about the world I’d been thrust helplessly into, but they had been there all along. Nathan was right; there was such a thing as love at first sight. No other kind existed.

And I wasn’t the only one who knew it. Cyrus knew it. I saw it cross his face as he watched me. I hadn’t loved him, just as he had never loved me. What a fine pair we’d made.

Hanging his head in defeat, he laughed. “You’re right. You’re right. You don’t love me, and I’m doomed. This has turned out to be a merry meeting, indeed.”

My breath escaped me on a guttural exhalation. “Stop with the self-pity. Why would your father bring you back just to kill you again?”

“He’s finally streamlined the ritual he needs. Remember Dahlia’s pleasant little trick of including all sorts of impossible ingredients and tasks in her spells? It seems that’s not an original idea. He didn’t need the souls of all of his fledglings. The ones who’d been killed either at his own hand or due to their own misdeeds won’t be missed in the metaphysics of the ritual. But he does need a certain number, and to reach that number, he now needs two of us.”

I shook my head. “But why you? He could have picked up a drifter and turned him and used him. Why go to all the trouble of raising the dead?”

“To punish me.” He sighed heavily and pinched the bridge of his nose, tilting his head back. When he opened his eyes, they shone with tears like the stars we couldn’t see beyond the city’s light pollution. But Cyrus wouldn’t cry in front of me. Not now, when he was so vulnerable in other ways. “He gave me life, not just once. And he believes I wasted those lives. He wants to punish me, and to send a message that my weakness can’t be tolerated.”

“And you were going to go along with it?” We started to walk down the gravel path. The graveyard seemed somewhat less sinister, though nothing about the physical atmosphere had changed.

He took my hand in his as we walked. “He has my heart. Whether I ‘go along with it’ or not, it doesn’t matter.”

“It didn’t occur to you to just…escape?” True, the Soul Eater had his heart, but if he wanted Cyrus for the ritual, he wouldn’t stake him. “Unless he only needed your heart, you’d be free and clear.”

“He’d find me.” Cyrus shook his head. “And besides, as much as I hate being dead, I hate being alive much more these days.”

It killed me to hear him say this. I might not have loved him, but I certainly didn’t want him to suffer this way. “It doesn’t matter, anyway. He still needs another fledgling, right? Unless he’s got one willing to go to the slaughter, he can’t do the ritual.”

“He has one. Or a part of one, at least.” Cyrus gave me a pointed look. “I’m sure you’ll figure this part out. You’re a smart girl.”

A splinter of confused panic lodged in my chest. He couldn’t mean Ziggy’s heart, because Bill had that. And he couldn’t mean Nathan’s heart, because I’d actually seen that with my own eyes as it beat in his chest. “I don’t—”

“His skin, Carrie.” Cyrus sounded as if he would gag on the word. “Dahlia is an inventive torturer, but I can’t believe she would have thought that up on her own.”

The marks. The symbols carved into Nathan’s body. “The spell was called ‘The Dark Night Of The Soul,’” I stammered. “Does that mean…”

“My father has access to call Nolen’s soul back. It’s how the spell was done in the first place. Whatever you did to free him of the spell freed his soul and returned it to him. But my father can use those symbols to call it back. All he has to do is consume the symbols and Nathan’s soul is his, forever.”

My stomach heaved at the thought of the Soul Eater tucking in to eat Nathan’s discarded skin, but I held back the vomit. “So, Nathan will die, then, if your father completes the ritual?”

“No.” Cyrus said it matter-of-factly. “He would go on living, I suppose, until he did finally die. And then, instead of going into that blue world, he would go into my father. Or, wherever the souls consumed by him will go after he’s become a god.”

The idea of Nathan’s soul being taken from him was something so horrific and wholly unacceptable that I bypassed anger and went straight into cold, calculated fury.

“We’re planning to attack during the ritual. Whatever information you can give me would be helpful. And I can either try to save you, or—”

“Oh, there are all kinds of details father has delighted in torturing me with. Who will be there, what it will entail.” He stopped walking and faced me. “It’s going to be dangerous, Carrie. I’d rather not see you get hurt.”

“I’m not going to back down from a fight, you know that. Can you be on my side? Maybe sneak me in? When I…ate Dahlia’s soul, that made me the most powerful of our little group. I’m going to fight your father myself.” I shrugged, suddenly feeling foolish. “Not that I’m trying to sound invincible here. I will still need help.”

He clucked his tongue mockingly. “Now, now. If you’re so sure you’ll fail before you even start, you’ve doomed your entire enterprise.”

We resumed our walk, but we didn’t speak for a long time. It was a comfortable silence, until he stopped again to look at me. “There are times that I wish I could have done things so much differently with you.”

“Is this one of those times?” I knew that sounded too prying, but I couldn’t stop myself. “What would you have done?”

“I wouldn’t have tried to dominate you. And I wouldn’t have tried to seduce you. I wouldn’t have tried at all.” He laughed softly. “I think you recognized that. That I was trying. And you resented it.”

“That’s very insightful of you.” The way I felt about Cyrus, my sire, wouldn’t have been quite as forgiving as the portrayal he’d given himself, but I let him keep his delusion, a little. “You could also have toned down the psychotic narcissism.”

“Yes, that has always been my downfall in relationships.” He leaned forward as if he would kiss me, then stopped himself a hairbreadth from my lips. “No, that would be a bad idea.”

I couldn’t help my breathlessness when I whispered back, “I’m glad one of us remembers that.”

He straightened and looked up at the sky. “I miss the stars. After this is all over, I’m going to go someplace where I can see stars.”

“After this is all over, I’ll be dead.” The words slipped out as if finally freed. I couldn’t have said it to Nathan. I would have worried about upsetting him. And maybe that was the true difference between the two men. Nathan, I could love and yet not speak the truth to, not all the time, especially not if it would hurt him. I couldn’t love Cyrus, but I could be selfish and self-focused with him. When I’d thought I loved Cyrus, I’d just loved the way I could be around him. It was a little sad.

Cyrus didn’t argue with my sudden, fatalistic turn. “It’s really what will be best for you. You’ll go crazy, spending eternity with Dahlia.”

Now that it was spoken out in the open, I wanted to cry. I didn’t want to die, and yet I’d said the words and sealed my fate. I felt suddenly tired and overly emotional. I choked down my sobs. “I have to get back to Nathan. He was pretty damaged when I took him from your father’s place.”

“I want you to know I had nothing to do with that,” Cyrus said, quickly and earnestly. “She tried to get me to join in, but I fear I disappointed her. In truth, I didn’t want to see Nolen, and I didn’t want him to see me.”

“That’s fine.” I didn’t want to hear any more, in case he told me a lie. I couldn’t take any more lies from him. “Tell me how you can help me.”

“I can get you into the ritual. The participants will all be dressed the same, so it won’t be difficult for you to go unnoticed once you’re inside. From there, I assume you’ll have your own plan?”

I nodded. “We’ll think of something.”

“And you can help me, if I wanted it?” I could tell he tried to keep the hope from his voice, so I responded noncommittally, telling him I would do what I could. He seemed to accept this and said, “Very well. I will send you a disguise. On the night, you should be able to enter unmolested.”

“Thank you.” We shook hands awkwardly, and I turned away from him.

I was a few steps up the path when he called after me. “Carrie. There was something, wasn’t there? I mean, we did have some part of each other?”

I couldn’t look at him. It was too much to know that months from now, we might pass each other in that weird, blue-spirit realm and not recognize who the other was. After all we’d shared, we would be ultimately alone.

“Yes. I think we did.”

Unlike Orpheus, I didn’t look back as I left the land of the dead. But the end of the story would have been the same, either way.

Twenty:

Loose Ends; Further Unraveling

W hen I came through the door, Nathan was waiting for me in the dark living room.

I tried to keep my voice light. “Where is everyone?”

“Downstairs.” He didn’t humor me by pretending nothing was wrong. “I want to talk to you.”

I sat in the armchair, and I didn’t bother to turn on the lights. I knew what he wanted to talk about. There was no way I’d reached the conclusion I had in the graveyard on my own. Left alone, it was only a matter of time before we could no longer avoid thinking beyond the problem at hand.

“Nathan,” I began, trying to find the impossible way to cushion the words. “There was a reason that Dahlia…did what she did to you.”

He nodded, resigned, as he looked at where the tight, transplanted skin met the unblemished part of his arm. “I can’t say I didn’t wonder about that, myself.”

I wondered what else had been tormenting Nathan while I assumed he was just concentrating on healing. “Cyrus thinks that his father will consume the symbols and take your soul back. Nothing would happen to you, at least, until you died. But he would be able to complete the ritual.”

“Nothing would happen to me,” he repeated softly. “I would lose my soul.”

“Nathan—” I began, but what was I going to say? That he didn’t need a soul? I wasn’t a spiritual person and I still wanted mine. And Nathan owned a New Age bookstore and was still a devout Roman Catholic, even if he couldn’t go to Sunday-morning mass. That was more than a conflict of interest. It was a clear sign that he was still searching for something. Whether he shared those feelings with anyone or not, he clearly still valued his soul.

“What will happen after you kill the Soul Eater?” There was a tension in his voice I’d never heard before.

The only answer I had for him was, “I don’t know.”

“I think you know.” Slowly, painfully, he pulled himself up from the wheelchair and stood, leaning with one hand on the back of the couch for support. “At least, you’re afraid of what will happen.”

“I’m afraid of dying. That I know for sure. And I’m afraid I’ll fail, and I’m afraid I’ll be too late and the world will suffer for it. And I’m afraid that I’ll succeed and I won’t be able to stop myself…” I cleared my throat and tried to hold back tears. “I’m afraid I won’t be able to stop myself from draining him and taking all of that evil into me.”

“And even if you do manage to kill the Soul Eater and you don’t feel the compulsion to take his soul, you’ll still be a Soul Eater. You’ll need to feed again. And I don’t think you’ll be able to,” he finished for me, grimly. “And if you can…I’m not sure what I’ll do if you go down that road.”

My breath caught in my throat. “What are you suggesting?”

“Only what you thought of on your own.” He sounded angry and tired.

“So, what do I do?” I stood and paced the living room. “Kill the Soul Eater and then let someone kill me? It’s not like they can stake me.”

“Maybe one of the Henries could cut off your head,” Nathan said, sitting heavily back into the wheelchair. “Or we could entrust Ziggy to do it—”

“Stop!” I covered my face with my hands and stretched my tired skin out of shape. “I can’t sit here and listen to the man I love talk about ways to kill me!”

“Do you think it’s something I want to talk about? In terms of ways to spend our last days together, it’s pretty fucking low on my list!” He struck the arm of the wheelchair and the hard plastic armrest shattered. “I don’t want you to die!”

My mind raced toward some indefinite point, but I knew I had to get there. “Wait! Wait! We have Dahlia’s book! It has the spell that brought Cyrus back! We could—”

Nathan shook his head vehemently. “No, no, I’m not going to do that. I’m not going to count on something to bring you back when I don’t know if it’s going to work!”

Rage, such as I’d never felt before, propelled me toward him, and I slapped him across the face so hard I heard a bone in my hand crack. “Then that’s it? You just kill me, and what? Life goes on because you don’t want to get your hopes up? Fuck you!”

I watched, aching to hit him again, wanting to hit anything just to make the pain in my chest go away, as he slumped over, cradling his jaw.

My hand hurt. My heart hurt. All of the energy drained out of me and into the floor, and I followed it. It felt good to lie there, unmoving. It was actually taxing to speak, but it helped some. “I can’t believe we’re discussing the way I’m going to die.”

For the moment, we didn’t. I listened to the clock ticking in the kitchen. I’d noticed that morning that it didn’t show the correct time anymore.

Finally, I lifted my head and said, quietly, “You could stake me.” When Nathan didn’t say anything, I continued. “I know the box is soldered shut, but it’s not like we can’t get the tools to open it. You could wait until I killed the Soul Eater—you could tell through the blood tie—and then you could stake me.”

“And what am I supposed to do then?” He lifted his head slowly, and when he looked me in the eyes, he let all the pain and anger he felt wash over me. “You say I’m going to go on with my life. What do you suggest I do? Find someone else? Maybe some human woman to ease my pain? Isn’t that what they write about in all of those stupid romance novels?”

He stood and took a few, shuffling steps out of the living room. In the back of my mind I noted that some of his strength had returned. Not to the point that he would be any help to us when the fight came, but enough that I would be assured he would be all right when I was gone.

“That’s a fairy tale, Carrie,” he said, turning just enough to look at me over his shoulder. “When you’re gone…I might as well be, too.”

I stayed where I was. Nathan was too pissed at me, at himself, at the world, for me to follow him. I lay on the floor, my head blessedly empty of thoughts, until the sun came up and my aching back forced me to retreat.

Nathan was in the bedroom, but he wasn’t sleeping. He sat on the side of the bed, still dressed, most likely still in the pose he’d been in when he’d first sat down. I sat beside him, not touching him, and he didn’t look at me.

“I don’t like the thought of you going on with your life, either. But you will. You’re like that, Nathan. No matter how bad you think you are at it, you survive. And you’ve definitely survived worse than this.” I stopped, feeling tears well up and forcing them away. “Maybe this is happening for a reason. Maybe I happened for a reason. If I’d just stayed on my own, tried to deal with being a vampire all alone, maybe I would have never met you or Cyrus and never learned about the Soul Eater. I would never have been around to help destroy him.”

“Well, forgive me if I don’t praise God for your divine purpose.” Bitterness dripped from his words like poison. “You’re right, I did survive through killing the woman I loved once. I never thought I’d have to survive it again.”

He stood up, stumbled, then regained his footing and limped weakly to the dresser, where he braced his hands on the top of it. “I went seventy years between Marianne and you. I love you, Carrie. Maybe more than I ever loved my wife. And not just because of the blood tie, and not because I’m a different man now. I love you and I don’t think I’ll be able to move on after this. I can’t imagine being with another woman, not even physically, and have no interest in the idea. It makes me sick to think that one day, I’m supposed to be holding some stranger the way I hold you. Touching her, telling her I love her. It’s not possible.”

“It will be.” I couldn’t believe I was endorsing the prospect, but it was the truth. “Someday, it will be.”

“No.” He turned, still supporting himself on the dresser. “You’re the second woman I’ve said those words to. After everything went so wrong with Marianne, not just her death, but everything that went wrong between us before she died, I never thought I would be able to love someone again. And now I have you, and I can’t believe how blind I was back then. But what we have is different, Carrie. I won’t get another chance at this.”

“You’ll try the spell,” I said, willing him to trust the words I didn’t quite believe myself. “You’ll try it and if it works everything will be the way it was. And if it doesn’t work, you’ll go on. And you’ll never stop missing me, just like you’ll never stop missing Marianne. And it will hurt and you’ll suffer, but, Nathan, you’ll live forever. You’ll have another chance.”

He came to the bed and sat down beside me. “I’ll live until something else like this happens. Until another witch skins me alive.”

“Then you’ll have to choose your dates more carefully.”

We laughed. It would have been masochistic to resist the break in tension. He kissed me, holding my face between his palms, and I covered his hands with my own. When he pulled away, he linked our fingers on the bed between us and rested his forehead against mine. “There won’t be any others. I mean it, Carrie. I’ll spend the rest of my life trying to bring you back if I have to.”

I didn’t argue with him. He meant for his words to be a comfort, but if bringing people back from the dead were a simple thing, there would be more dead people walking around.

You have no idea how hard it is, Dahlia hissed. You’re not coming back.

I didn’t need her to tell me that. I could feel it.

Nathan kissed me again, this time with a much different intention. I laid a palm flat against the tight, shiny skin of his healing chest and pushed him back gently. “You’re not better yet.”

“Then you’ll have to be gentle with me.”

And it was more gentle than we’d ever been with each other, slower and much, much longer. I’m sure he felt the same urgency I did in the face of the uncertainty ahead, but it created an incredible tension to have that urgency denied. But the biggest difference was that this time, for the first time, when he told me he loved me, it didn’t sound forced for my benefit.

Afterward, when he lay in an exhausted sleep beside me, I thought about what he’d said. He loved me, maybe more than he’d loved Marianne. Selfishly, I’d wanted to hear that. Now, when it was the thing that would make it most difficult to give him up, now was the time I heard it.

It wasn’t fair, but I would take it.

The night of the Soul Eater’s ritual came too quickly. Of course, Ziggy was fairly certain a death row inmate’s execution date came too soon, too. But that was negative thinking, and Bill had been trying, in the short time they’d been together so far, to break him of that.

Bill half woke and rolled over. “You’re still awake?”

“Can’t sleep. I guess I’m just so damned excited.” Ziggy scooted down on the pile of blankets. “Like a kid on Christmas morning.”

“We never had big Christmas mornings when I was growing up.” Bill rolled to face away from him again. “Try to get some sleep.”

Ziggy lay down beside him and looped one arm across Bill’s waist. “I don’t want to waste the entire day sleeping. What if one of us dies tomorrow?”

“Look, I’m really tired. But as arguments for sex go, yours is pretty strong.” Sleepily, Bill turned to Ziggy and leaned his head against his neck, nibbling the skin there.

Ziggy pushed him away. “That’s not what I meant.”

“And I woke up for nothing,” Bill quipped, sliding his hand down Ziggy’s stomach.

“Wait, wait.” Ziggy gripped Bill’s wrist, even though his mind was changing fast on the sex issue. “I don’t want to go and get killed and not have said…some things.”

“Oh, you mean you don’t want to get killed without telling me goodbye? In that case, I really did wake up for nothing.” Bill tried to turn over, and Ziggy stopped him.

“I don’t want to say goodbye. If you get killed, it’s not like we’ll be separated for that long.” Ziggy sighed in frustration. “I just want to make sure you know some stuff, in case.”

Bill shook his head. “It’s the same thing. But go ahead. Whatever you have to say, I’m listening.”

Now that he had the go-ahead, Ziggy wasn’t sure where to start. He might be Bill’s sire, but they still hadn’t known each other that long, and it wasn’t as if they’d made great strides in their relationship beyond memorizing who liked what where in bed.

So how did he say what he wanted to say without sounding like a psycho? How did he launch into a long, long list of all the things he liked about Bill, from the in-between color of his hair to the way he pronounced the letter R, without turning into that really clingy guy who goes out on one date and then decides to start naming their children?

“I love you,” he blurted, and then he realized that maybe the laundry list of cool things about Bill might have been a better way to go.

“I see.” Bill didn’t look him in the eye. “Well, that’s a stupid thing to say, considering.”

Ziggy flopped onto his back and stared up at the exposed beams of the floor above and tried to ignore the sound of Pac-Man dying, which currently echoed through his head. “Yeah. That’s me. Stupid guy.”

Bill didn’t seem to hear him. “I mean, when I was almost killed, you gave me your heart without having any idea how I would deal with it or what would happen if we didn’t end up together. And you’ve been hurt so many times in the past by people, it would have made more sense just to let me die and protect yourself. But you didn’t. And the stupidest thing is, you thought you had to tell me you love me for me to know it.”

The knot in Ziggy’s stomach relaxed and he covered his face, unsure whether to laugh or cry. He chose laughter. “Don’t you ever fucking do that to me again.”

When he uncovered his face, Bill had risen up on one elbow and looked down at him. He smoothed some of Ziggy’s hair away from his face and let his hand linger at his jaw. “I know you love me. And I know how lucky I am to have somebody like you in my life, even if we did find each other in really strange circumstances. And I hope you stay in my life. So I’m not going to tell you that I love you, because no matter what you call it, before a thing like this, it’s goodbye. And I don’t want to tell you goodbye.”

It should have made him feel better to know he’d said it, Ziggy thought later as, still sleepless, he held Bill and stroked the tight muscles of his back. But the truth was, Bill had been right. It felt more like goodbye than I love you, and Ziggy wasn’t ready to tell him goodbye, either.

The sun was almost down. Max could feel it under his skin, like something wanting to get out. He’d been too keyed up to sleep, and he definitely hadn’t wanted to listen to Ziggy and Bill doing it in the back room, so he’d come upstairs to the apartment to ignore Carrie and Nathan doing it in their bedroom. Now, he was trying to figure out the best way to say “See ya later—forever” in a note so he could take off and join up with his kind.

His kind. God, he hated that. Bella had a point, and he knew it. He wasn’t just a vampire anymore. He could spend time with vampires and try to live like a vampire, but he just wasn’t one anymore.

Still, he wasn’t a werewolf. He was a lupin. And he knew Bella wanted him to forget the vampire side of himself because it was the very thing that made him a lupin. It seemed as though his only option was to choose one half of himself and run with it.

And of course he would choose the half with Bella. That was a no-brainer. It just seemed so unfair that he had to choose at all.

Growling low in his chest, he ripped the first page of the notebook off and wadded it up. He didn’t want to write a stupid note. He wanted to see the moon and become the beast that was rampaging through his veins. He wanted to run and hunt and howl. He wanted to get the big fight over with so he could go home to Bella. He wanted…hell, he just wanted.

“You’re up early.” Carrie came down the hall, tying the belt of Nathan’s ratty old bathrobe.

“Same to you,” Max said, trying hard not to smile at the picture she presented with her bare feet and badly mussed hair. “And it didn’t sound very restful in there.”

She blushed and looked away, smoothing her hair. “We weren’t loud.”

“No, but the bed was.” Max chuckled. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t tease you.”

Carrie dropped into the armchair and moved a rumpled-up ball of paper with her toe. “Great American novel not going well?”

Sheepishly, Max crouched down and picked up the trash. “Not exactly Moby Dick. More like a Dear John. Or Dear Carrie, Nathan, Ziggy and Bill. I’m leaving.”

“I didn’t think you’d be sticking around.” Carrie’s voice held a note of sadness, as though she was trying hard to be brave.

It was exactly the reaction he hadn’t wanted to face, and the reason he’d wanted to be out of the house when they all found out. “Yeah. That’s the thing about the family life, you know. Not as much time for running around with your old college buddies.”

“Well, there is that. And the fact that when night falls you’ll be a vampire-killing machine.” She tried to smile, and it faded too quickly. “You aren’t coming back again, are you?”

“I don’t know.” And he really didn’t. It probably would have been better to let them think he wouldn’t, then surprise the hell out of them ten years later. “To be honest, I’m not even sure you’ll be here to come back to.”

Her face went ashen, but she visibly forced the expression away. “Yeah, well. I mean, I hope you’ll check. I mean, I hope you’ll be there for Nathan if something happened to me. God forbid.”

“I wouldn’t worry about Nathan. For one, nothing is going to happen to you. And for two, he’s got Ziggy. And Bill now.” Though Max was pretty sure he knew how Nathan felt about that. If Max was uncomfortable thinking of the kid getting it on with a guy at least a decade older than him, he could guess that Nathan was even less enthusiastic about it.

Carrie laughed. “Yeah, I’m sure that will be a real comfort for him.”

They fell silent, until she said, “Max, I’m going to miss you.”

“Hey, you might see me again. You never know.” But it seemed like a lie.

She didn’t play along, either. “No. I won’t.”

He had the strongest urge to hug her. And who was he to deny that urge?

She stood when he came over to her and squeezed him so hard he was pretty sure she would break his neck. “No funny business,” he assured her. “I’m not going to try anything.”

“Because you’re not drunk.” He heard tears in her laugher, and he buried his face in her shoulder.

He should have been sadder when he left. Maybe he should have looked back over his shoulder. But by the time his feet hit the pavement, his muscles bunched to run, ready to find the warriors through the call of the wild in his veins, his vampire life was already behind him.

Twenty-One:

Battle Lines

T rue to his word, Cyrus sent me a disguise. The sun had just set when a shaking, frightened teenager knocked on the door bearing a package wrapped in brown paper. I took it from him and advised him not to return to his master, but whether he did or not was out of my hands.

A lot of things were out of my hands now.

“What is it?” Nathan asked grimly, looking up from the unpleasant task he was working on. When he’d packed away my heart for safekeeping, he’d put it in a box and padlocked it, not bothering to retain the key for any reason. He’d been sawing through the padlock for a while now, with very little progress to show for it. If I were going to be alive after this, I would definitely purchase more of that company’s locks in the future.

I set the package on the table and carefully untied it. A glimpse of vibrant purple peeked from between the edges of the paper. “I think it’s my disguise for tonight.”

The Soul Eater, like his son, had very ornate tastes. The costume for the ritual was apparently a floor-length-and-then-some, hooded, purple brocade robe. The pattern woven into the fabric was a near-exact rendering of Jacob Seymour’s personal symbol, a serpentine dragon wound around a huge gem. Lilies were bizarrely incorporated into the design, and I turned the fabric this way and that, hoping the pattern looked less tacky from a different angle. “This is not exactly the look I imagined for my funeral clothes.”

“Don’t say that,” Nathan said quietly. He reached for the golden mask that had come lovingly wrapped in the robe. “Does this fit?”

The mask was smooth and featureless, a perfect, generic oval with two holes roughly where a person’s eyes would be. Definitely not a “one size fits all” situation, but obviously meant to be. I raised it to my face, ignoring the stab of dread in my stomach, and tied the leather thongs behind my head. “I think there are going to be some very uncomfortable people at this ritual.”

“Probably more uncomfortable when they’re ripped limb from limb by werewolves.” Nathan went back to work on the box. “Get that out of my sight. I don’t want to see it again.”

I did as he asked, tucking the robe and the mask into the open bag of weapons he’d prepared for Ziggy and Bill. “Where are they?” I asked, knowing Nathan would know who I spoke of. “We need to leave soon.”

“Don’t be in too much of a hurry.” Nathan didn’t look at me as he spoke. “I’m certainly not looking forward to it.”

I took one of his hands in mine. He didn’t resist me. “This is not hopeless.”

“Let’s not talk about it.” He pulled his arm away. “I’m not ready to say my goodbyes just yet.”

Ziggy and Bill came upstairs, and Nathan and I both put on masks of indifference, as though we were just waiting to get the fight started. We’d agreed that telling Ziggy and Bill what was about to happen would only cause another argument, and we didn’t have time for it. We let them in on the part where I infiltrated the ritual, but kept a tight lid on the fact that after I went in, I wouldn’t be coming out.

“The van is in some rough shape,” Bill said, wiping his hands on a grease-streaked towel. “The stuff I can fix, I don’t have the equipment for. The stuff I can’t fix, I just don’t know how to.”

“But will it get us there? All of us?” I thought of the Henries. They would certainly look a little strange walking as one big group toward the Soul Eater’s farm. Not exactly something the Soul Eater’s goons could overlook.

“There, but maybe not back,” Bill answered grimly.

“Maybe we should set up a place to meet after the whole thing goes down, and Nate can come pick us up?” Ziggy asked, looking from me to Nathan.

Nathan didn’t even look up from his work on the box. “No. I’m still too weak to drive.”

“You don’t look very weak with that hacksaw,” Ziggy said, nodding toward the table. “What are you doing with that, anyway?”

“There’s something inside that Carrie needs to fight the Soul Eater. Something I stole from him when I left Brazil, after he sired me,” Nathan lied smoothly. “I lost the keys for the padlock.”

Ziggy didn’t look as if he believed him, but he didn’t argue. “Well, that was smooth. So, should we figure out a place to meet?”

“How about an ‘every man for himself’ scenario?” I suggested, mentally crossing my fingers that they wouldn’t sense something was wrong. “It’s such a long way…maybe we’ll say that if the van still works, whoever gets there first drives to a predecided location and waits for the rest of the group. And then gives them until two hours before sunrise to show up. That way, if the van stops working on the way back, there will still be time to call a cab and get back before the sun fries everyone.”

“But what about the Henries?” Bill appeared to be honestly concerned about them. “Are we just leaving them?”

I hadn’t thought of what we would do with them, once they had served their purpose. “I guess I can tell them to find their way back here. As long as they don’t do it in a group. Then, they can store themselves in the shop, where they have been.” I bit my lip. “Is that okay with you, Nathan?”

“Doesn’t matter,” he grunted, sawing at the padlock with renewed vigor.

“What about Max?” Ziggy asked, looking around the apartment. “I thought he would be up here, raring to go.”

I looked at Nathan and, seeing that he would be no help, sighed. “He left this morning. To find the warriors Bella sent. He won’t be coming back.”

“That’s a hell of a thing,” Bill said quietly.

“It’s a traitorous thing. Kind of.” Ziggy shrugged. “I mean, just taking off. Even if he is on our side.”

“No, I think we just can’t understand.” Bill’s face took on a look of momentary panic, expecting us, I suppose, to tell him that we understood and not to call us stupid. When he didn’t get that reaction, he went on. “His life has been turned upside down. He’s been a vampire for over twenty years and now he’s suddenly a werewolf. Think about what it felt like being turned into a vampire. He just did that again. His entire life just changed. And it’s going to change again when his wife back in Italy pops their kid out, right?”

I hadn’t tried to look at it that way. I really hadn’t tried to look at it from any way except how it affected me. “You’re right. It’s probably better, anyway. He’s pretty sure that when the full moon hits him, he won’t be able to remember who we are and keep from killing us.”

“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 slinking 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.

Once their leader changed, they all started changing. Max stood there for a long moment, the urge he’d been feeling all week—the primal urges to hunt and fight and fuck and kill all rolled into one big, confusing, pushing need—grew in him to unmanageable proportions. His chest tightened. He couldn’t breathe. He fell to his knees, tried to clutch at the burning pain in his ribs that seemed to spread out to his limbs, only to find that he couldn’t quite bend his arms the way they used to.

Not as bad as last time. It was an oddly calm thought to have when he felt as though his body was being ripped limb from limb. He looked down at his ruined hand and saw it in stark black-and-white, the edges kind of fuzzy. It shrank to a wide, flat paw, half of it missing.

The pain passed, and he tried to stand, realizing belatedly that he was standing, but on his wolf legs and feet. He wasn’t sure he would like being so short in a fight.

The leader barked, and the pack surged forward. Another dog, a steel-colored one with mismatched eyes of gray and blue, snarled at him and he cowered instinctively, then hated himself for doing it. But the wolf was appeased, and moved in front of him.

They ran, and Max found himself straining to outpace the whole pack. Only real, conscious effort kept him from running off wildly into the woods around them. He had a goal. The details of it were a little murky now, but he knew he had to stay the course.

Something in the air changed. He could smell it. It was a bright, crisp note of ozone, like after a lightning strike. It smelled like magic. He didn’t know how, but it did.

The pack sped up, bursting through the trees into a wide, open lawn. Nothing was there. Nothing to fight. No chance to rend some enemy’s flesh and feast on his innards.

A low rumble shook the ground, growing in intensity. The leader turned and growled at them. It wasn’t Patton, but it was as inspiring a prebattle speech as could be accomplished by a dog.

Cracks appeared in the ground. The enemy was here. They were just early.

“They’re here. Raise them!” The Soul Eater’s lips were white with fury as he shouted at the necromancer. “The rest of you, get out there and protect me!”

The purple-robed attendants looked at each other from behind their faceless gold masks. A ripple of fear went through them. Obviously, they weren’t prepared or inspired to fight.

“Do it,” the necromancer commanded. “Or I can finish you all off!”

They crowded toward the front door, and Cyrus pulled me after him.

“Not you, Cyrus,” the Soul Eater called. “We’ll need you.”

He stopped, still clutching my hand. His eyes were large and pleading behind his mask, but I shook off his hold. If I stayed, the Soul Eater would know, and he’d be able to call his minions back to kick my ass. Once they were outside and distracted by their own fight, it would be safe to begin mine. I just hoped I could think of a way to save Cyrus in the meantime.

I turned away from him and followed the crush.

The vampires all stopped in a cluster at the bottom of the stairs. I looked in the same direction they all stared. Forty or fifty werewolves, in wolf form, stood, visible only from their shimmering eyes, at the trees lining the edge of the yard.

The vampires began to whip off their masks, and I panicked. If I took off mine, the Soul Eater could recognize me. Or, maybe one of the goons here would recognize me. I’d been to the vampire New Year party, and I’d been in March’s brothel. The chance that some of these vampires might have seen me on either occasion was slim, but disturbingly real.

I didn’t have long to worry about it. The ground at our feet began to rumble, and I staggered for balance as it began to shake and split. The house behind us creaked and groaned, and I wondered what would be safer, running toward the werewolves or staying right next to a collapsing house. From the steaming fissures that formed in the ground, the stench of sulfur and something worse, something unspeakably disgusting, rose up.

A skeletal hand appeared, clawing at the ground, pulling an arm swathed in tattered flesh and fabric. And from every other crack in the trembling ground, body parts in varying states of decay emerged.

We’d warded the cemeteries, but we’d never thought about what might have been buried around the house.

The zombies were barely out of the ground when the werewolves rushed to attack. I turned toward the driveway, looking to the trees lining the road. My eyes only had to scan back and forth twice before I saw the Henries marching down the lawn in militaristic rank and file. I knew who I could thank for that.

“What the hell are those?” a vampire next to me shouted, drawing the attention of the others to the lines of Henries, who broke file and ran, shouting, oddly uniform, as they rushed the vampires.

The werewolves tore into the zombies, breaking bones in their jaws and spitting out putrid flesh. But the parts of corpses that fell didn’t die. They just fought harder.

Above the occasional yip of an injured dog or a scream of a vampire falling to either the Henries or the wolves or the zombies—who didn’t seem to know or care what side they were on—I noticed a strange silence from the house. It seemed like there should be, I didn’t know, chanting or something. I didn’t see anyone through the windows, and I needed to get back to Cyrus and kill the Soul Eater before he became a god.

I edged my way back to the porch steps and had one foot up when someone pulled me back. I looked down in horror at the hand grasping the hem of my robe. Rotting red flesh with a few hanging tags of green skin still clinging to it half covered stained finger bones like a tattered glove. The long bones of the forearm appeared to be fused together, until I noticed that it was soil and grass impacted between them. A large, mucus-covered white larva curled out of it and fell to the ground.

The arm, horrible as it was, was nothing compared to the creature it was attached to, a zombie missing half its skull and the rest of its body beneath the rib cage. The piece of head that was left had slipped down the spinal column and hung there like a grim necklace, a rotting black eye held in the socket by bloated facial skin.

The thing held me with its one arm, trying to climb up my robe, dragging its decomposed body behind it. I pulled the purple velvet over my head, shaking the grasping fingers free of my leg beneath the fabric. I lurched up the steps, then realized too late that I didn’t have a weapon.

It was part of the plan Nathan had objected to and that I had insisted on. Not knowing if there would be security measures at the door, I hadn’t wanted to walk in strapped with weapons only to blow the whole plan the second someone checked me for them.

Unfortunately, this left me with some difficulty. While it seemed the vampires around me hadn’t thought twice about bringing knives and stakes and swords, it wasn’t as if there were vampires dying all around me and leaving me with anything I could use. I considered pulling a piece of the porch rail up to use as a stake, but I wanted something with a longer range.

At the corner of the porch, a vampire with long, red hair wielded a sword clumsily against a snarling werewolf. I made my move fast, before she could actually hurt the animal. I pulled myself up to stand on the rail and launched myself onto her, praying I’d miss the sword. The werewolf backed down a little, obviously surprised, and she turned, face frozen in an unflattering expression of confusion. We both tumbled to the ground, and either her inexperience or lack of preparedness caused her to drop the sword. I grabbed it and while she still scrambled for my hands, turned it and speared it through her chest. She exploded into a puff of flame and ash, and I jumped back up, brushing myself off. My hair flew wildly around my face, and I realized that in the confusion my mask had been knocked off.

The werewolf regarded me for a moment, then, apparently deciding that I was on its side, turned its attention to a shambling zombie.

A vampire near me had seen what I’d done. He still wore his mask and robe, but I could tell from his height and build that he would be trouble. He charged at me, and I ran, around the side of the house facing the woods, and prayed no more wolves waited in the trees. The vampire in the mask pursued me, and he was fast. Faster than I was. He overtook me by a few crucial steps, picked me up and slammed me into the neglected rosebushes at the side of the house.

The impact knocked the wind out of me, otherwise I would have shouted at the pain of the thorns pricking through my clothes. I tried to pull my double vision into focus as the vampire removed his mask and shrugged back the hood of his cloak.

“Remember me?” he purred, his face twisted into his vampiric visage.

I couldn’t tell from his face, but his long blond hair and his body seemed familiar. He was muscular now, but he’d been even more so when I’d met him at March’s brothel. The disease that had been killing him had obviously taken a toll before he’d been changed. “Evan.”

He laughed, the sound demonic due to his twisted face.

“You got turned,” I said, shrugging helplessly in his grasp. “Congratulations.”

“No thanks to you.” He flashed his teeth. “You were going to let me die.”

I forced myself into feeding mode and snapped my jaws at him. “So what? So, I didn’t turn you into a vampire. Waaah. I don’t have time for your stupid personal vendetta.”

“Why, because you have to kill the Soul Eater?” He shoved me hard against the siding. “I saw you kill that other vampire.”

“And you’re not going to let me get away with killing Jacob blah blah blah.” I punctuated my sentence with a sharp head butt that forced him to drop me.

The sword lay on the ground where I’d dropped it, and I dived after it. He recovered quickly, and made his own dive for the sword. I got my hands on it first, but he got his hands on me, preventing me from getting up. He crawled over my body, toward the sword clutched in my outstretched hands. I tried to turn over and smash him with it, but he was too close for me to do much with the blade, and I knew if he got it, I was as good as skewered.

Still, I had to try. As I flipped onto my back, trying to wriggle free and still keep the sword out of his grasp, he screamed. And then he lifted off me. I watched as he flew at least six feet off the ground. He crashed back down, and his assailant was upon him again.

It was a werewolf, a dirty, yellowish-gray werewolf. It loomed over him, biting down on his throat to keep him from screaming.

I took my chance and climbed to my feet, scooping up the sword. As I turned to run, the wolf howled, and I turned, ready to strike him down if I had to. “I’m one of the good guys,” I reassured it, and it pawed at Evan’s motionless chest. I looked down, and saw that the paw was little more than a ruined stump. And it was where Max’s maimed hand would have been.

I covered my mouth and dropped the sword in shock. I knew, of course, that he would be here. I just hadn’t thought I would see him in his wolf form. It was bizarre, and I was torn between wanting to pet him and thinking of how strange vampire-form Max would have found that.

He barked at me, then trotted away from Evan’s immobile form. I wondered how long it would take Evan to heal, and hoped the werewolves weren’t just doing half their job out there. But I didn’t have time to worry about that. I hurried to Evan’s side. He was still unconscious, which made it much easier to line up the point of the blade with his chest and jam it down without resistance. I didn’t stay to watch his ashes settle into the grass.

The backyard was oddly calm, considering what was happening in the front yard. At the farthest back corner I spotted a crude graveyard, evidenced by dark, humped mounds of dirt. They appeared undisturbed, though, and I wondered if the necromancer had been able to raise just the corpses in the front yard, without disturbing the ones in the backyard.

The back door was on another, smaller porch, so I didn’t see until I was actually up the steps that there was no one inside the house. The circle on the floor was exactly as it was before, and the altar was set up exactly as it had been. They had left. And they’d also left behind all of their impressive-looking tools.

As if I was being sucked backward into the blood tie, my own memories rampaged through my mind. I thought of all the spells I’d cast from Dahlia’s book, all of the flashy ingredients that had been meant to throw people off the track of actually completing the spell.

They were doing the ritual somewhere else. I spun, scanning the yard helplessly.

The barn!

The side yard between the barn and the house was littered with body parts, but there was no immediate fight to impede me. My feet pounded on the hard earth, so loud I was sure the Soul Eater would hear me coming. I forced myself to slow and creep the last few feet. A short earthen rise angled up to the doors, one of which was open a crack. Light and a terrible smell leaked out. I covered my mouth with my shirtsleeve and tried not to gag as I peeked through the opening.

One glance inside revealed where the smell was coming from. All of the Soul Eater’s human victims—and those of his guests—must have been stored here for later disposal. Rotting bodies, bloated from the heat and the early stages of decay, were stacked around the perimeter of the barn like sandbags. They created walls at least six feet high. It was a good thing the necromancer hadn’t animated these corpses, or the werewolves and the Henries would have been overcome way too easily.

Then I realized this might be the last line of defense, the reserves, so to speak, and I wanted to make a run for it.

Then I saw the proceedings inside, and I knew I had to do something.

Cyrus lay spread-eagled on the ground, staked out with short ropes. His robes were gone, and his pale chest was bare above the waist of his black trousers. The Soul Eater sat on a throne, much like the one in the house, but this one appeared to be made out of human limbs and torsos. He was at ease on the grisly pile, actually smiling as he watched the necromancer dip a large stick tipped with a bundled-up rag into a simmering cauldron. When he removed it, the rag dripped with something tarry and black. He slapped it onto Cyrus’s chest, painting it over his skin in a scalding line. He grimaced and strained against the ropes, but they held.

This is all flash, Dahlia informed me witheringly. This guy thinks he’s David Copperfield or something. All Jacob has to do is drink the potion, then drink Cyrus, then release all the other souls trapped in him. Then this necromancer guy has to worship him, and then it’s done.

The necromancer just has to worship him? Weren’t there already enough babbling sycophants who worshippeds Jacob Seymour? What stopped him from being a god before?

He had to perform certain tasks first. You know, like when a saint has to do three miracles to become a saint? Guided by Dahlia, I saw Jacob instructing her to give Cyrus the potion that had been intended to create a natural-born vampire. He’d achieved that goal easily. Then, I saw Dahlia snarling and rounding up five vampires—March, the vampire madam, among them—so that Jacob could destroy his own vampire progeny. And finally, she showed me Jacob clutching a dried-up, withered object in his fist and plunging it into an eerie green flame leaping out of a cauldron. The same cauldron, I realized, as the one in the barn right now.

Forge the sword, spill your own blood, and then the test of fire. He’s not a vampire anymore. He’s more like…more like a god in waiting.

So, he’ll be harder to kill? I didn’t need her to answer the question. I dried my hands on my jeans, then gripped the sword in one hand and braced the other one on the door. What about Nathan’s skin? The symbols on it, to call his soul back.

What do you think is in the cauldron? Besides various herbs and holy water, of course.

Mentally, I shushed her. It’s showtime now. Are you with me, or against me?

Against you, she responded with no hesitation. But lucky for you, that means I’m going to help you.

I’d never pretended to understand Dahlia in the past. “Whatever,” I said under my breath, fully prepared to weather a change in her mood that might lead to me fighting her internally, and the Soul Eater externally.

I pushed the door open. Both the Soul Eater and the necromancer looked up at once. Cyrus, still writhing in pain from the burning, tarry potion on him, took longer to notice me. When he did, his face slid from a pinched expression of agony to an exhausted smile of relief.

“Jacob Seymour!” I shouted, raising the sword in both hands, ready for the fight. I couldn’t believe that was my voice, loud and echoing off the walls of the barn.

The Soul Eater stood, his eyes blazing with fury. “By order of the Voluntary Vampire Extinction Movement, which is no longer functioning, I am sentenced to death for my crimes against humanity. I’ve heard it all before.”

“I’m not here for them.” I tightened my grip. “This is all for me.”

Twenty-Three:

Endgame

“H ow’s it look?”

Ziggy lowered the binoculars and passed them to Bill, so he could see for himself. “The zombies are almost gone. Some of the Henries are having problems with the vampires, but I don’t see too many dead werewolves. One or two, at the most.”

“Guess they won’t be needing our help after all.” Bill sounded disappointed at that. “Not that I really need to go in and start killing people left and right. But it would have been nice to get my hands a little dirty.”

“It’s not over yet,” Ziggy reminded him. “Carrie might need our help, still.”

Though she had said over and over that it was every man for himself, he and Bill had agreed that it would be stupid to let her get killed when they might be able to save her.

Nate had said something along those lines, too, now that Ziggy had a chance to slow down and think about their talk back at the apartment.

“Carrie knows what she has to do. Don’t get yourself killed trying to save her. Let her do what she has to. And let me do what I have to, okay?”

He’d agreed then, thinking it sounded a little bit like a mother scolding her kid for climbing too high on the jungle gym at the playground, but he’d really just said the words to make Nate feel better.

Ziggy leaned back in his seat, pressing his knuckles to his mouth. The torn leather of his fingerless gloves scraped his lip. “Bill, what do you think Carrie’s chances are? Of doing this thing alone, I mean?”

“Not good.” The answer came fast, and Bill lowered the binoculars, looking a little guilty at pronouncing her dead on arrival. “I mean, that’s why we agreed to go after her, right?”

Ziggy nodded slowly. “Yeah. But she wasn’t the only one who said we shouldn’t meddle in the fight. Nate said it, too. He said we needed to let her do what she needed to do, and let him do what he needed to do. What do you think about that?”

“I think it sounds kind of fatalistic,” Bill said with blunt honesty. “It sounds like they don’t want to be responsible for leading lambs to the slaughter.”

“That’s what I thought, too.” Ziggy shook his head. “I think there’s something going on.”

As Bill looked through the binoculars again, Ziggy thought of all the possible scenarios he could come up with. Did it have something to do with the fact Carrie was a Soul Eater now? He’d never actually seen Jacob fight. Was it possible that Soul Eaters became demonic killing machines, and Nate and Carrie knew this and didn’t want Bill and him to get caught in the cross fire?

What about the werewolves down there? Max had said he didn’t know if he would recognize them in his wolf form. Maybe Carrie had done a spell to make her recognizable as a good guy, but she just didn’t have enough juice left to cast the same spell on two other people? And that was why they needed to stay out of the fight?

Or, it could have been that they would be a distraction. Ziggy knew how hard Carrie would fight to protect another person. She’d done it when they were trapped in Cyrus’s mansion together. She’d done it when she’d agreed to put Ziggy’s heart in Bill. It seemed as if she cared too much about everyone, and Nate was afraid she’d be too busy protecting them to fight.

That seemed more reasonable than any of the other possibilities. He absently scratched his chest through his T-shirt, feeling the bumpy ridges of his scar beneath.

Then, he remembered the box. And Nathan’s secrecy regarding it. And he felt more stupid than he had in a long, long time.

“I need you to know before you leave here tonight that I love you. You might not be my flesh and blood, but you’re my son. And I’ve been so stupid, letting you think I would reject you over something as trivial as…who you go to bed with. No matter what happens tonight, I need you to know that I love you, and that I have always been proud to call you my son.”

“We’ve got to get back to the apartment,” Ziggy said, sitting up in the seat and snatching the binoculars out of Bill’s hand.

“What? Why?” Bill at least started the van while arguing. “What’s going on?”

It took a lot of Ziggy’s effort to keep the tears from coming out when he said, “I think Carrie is going to die. And I think Nate is going to be the one who does it.”

The Soul Eater’s eyes sparkled with genuine amusement as he stalked toward me. “What a wonderful performance. Remind me to thank Nolen for sending you along. You have such a flair for the dramatic.”

“As do you,” I said, nodding to the throne made of people parts. “But I didn’t come here to banter with you.”

“No, you came here to kill me.” He chuckled. “It’s a pity that you won’t succeed—”

“Because you have some grand plan and I’m too late and you’re going to tell me all about it before putting it into action and you have never, ever seen a single movie in your whole life, otherwise we wouldn’t be having this discussion.” I wouldn’t have normally wasted the time I just had, either, but my irreverence in the face of his grand act seemed to infuriate him even more, and odds seemed to be more in my favor if I could incapacitate him with rage before striking.

“Fine,” he said with false graciousness. He nodded at the necromancer. “Kill her.”

I rushed at him. He raised his hands. I cut one of them off.

I’d meant to kill him outright, but it was harder to aim my strikes than I’d anticipated. I’d never used a sword before. By the time I got the blade back under control, he shouted a spell.

You’re so dead, Dahlia giggled in my head.

The rows of dead bodies wriggled and squirmed, coming to life before my eyes. I didn’t give them a chance to get to me. I held out my hands and screamed, “Apart!”

I saw the word leave me like a sonic boom that spread across the air in the barn. It knocked the necromancer to the ground. It even tossed the Soul Eater back into his now-reanimated throne of flesh. The wave of disruption hit the bloated bodies, exploding them to a shower of meaty, putrid sand that rained wetly over all of us.

Cyrus made a noise of disgust and thrashed, spitting, against his restraints. One arm came free. Blood poured from nearly a dozen wounds on his chest and face, probably because I hadn’t thought to exclude him from the spell that had just obliterated the would-be zombies around us.

“Nicolas, say the words!” the Soul Eater screamed, lurching for Cyrus. His teeth sank into Cyrus’s shoulder. The necromancer began to chant.

I could leave Cyrus to be devoured in an instant by his father, or stop the Soul Eater’s transformation by killing the necromancer.

I knew I would regret it. But I went for Cyrus.

My sword sank into the Soul Eater’s back and shoulder, and he released Cyrus immediately, blood dripping from his mouth.

Cyrus was too weak to get away. I was awed at how fast the Soul Eater had drained him. His lips were blue—I had no idea we could look like that—and he trembled as he tried to crawl to safety.

While the Soul Eater struggled to remove the sword from his body, I pulled Cyrus to his feet and helped him limp to the door of the barn, where he collapsed against it. “Don’t go out. There are still vampires.”

He nodded that he understood and I spun, weaponless, ready to attack the necromancer, hoping I would be in time.

The necromancer was still chanting, cradling the stump where his hand used to be in his robe. I charged him and he faltered in his chanting, backing away from me.

“Don’t stop, you fool!” the Soul Eater ordered.

Nicolas the necromancer was a much more loyal henchman than I’d ever seen. He sputtered in fear, but he kept chanting. I made a grab for him and he dodged me, running behind the bubbling cauldron. I charged around it, but he managed to keep the distance between us. I saw only one option. I dived across the cauldron, grabbed him by the head and pushed him in.

I screamed as my arms sank into the boiling tar, but I held him down. I saw chunks of skin float to the surface and prayed it wasn’t mine, then nearly vomited at the thought it could be Nathan’s. But I didn’t let go, not until Nicolas stopped thrashing.

“Carrie!” I heard Cyrus scream, and I pulled my scalded arms from the cauldron, shaking as much of the boiling potion off of them as I could.

The Soul Eater was suspended in the air, glowing an eerie green-gold that seemed to dim the candlelight in the barn. He’d thrown his head back, a rapturous expression serenely gilding his face. His clothes melted away. His hair fell in shimmering, green-gold strands that floated to the ground and disappeared. His skin turned paper white. When he opened his eyes, they were bloodred. No pupils, no iris. Just a curtain of blood.

He looked the way the Oracle had looked. I wondered if she’d been on the path to godhood, and had just been interrupted. It seemed so logical now.

“Cyrus, get out of here,” I commanded. When I spoke, a huge wind blew through the barn, tumbling me over the hard, slippery ground.

“No!” he screamed back, trying to get to his feet. “Carrie, run! Don’t stay here with him!”

You know what you have to do, Carrie. It was Nathan’s voice, across the blood tie. He’s a god. Dahlia can tell you what to do. You can invoke him. Bring him into you.

“How do I do that?” I asked aloud, shouting over the raging wind.

“Carrie!” Cyrus screamed. I saw him clinging to the doors. Tears streaked his face. I wondered what he was crying about, until I looked down at my hands.

The skin was gone. Some of the muscle. I saw a chunk of blond hair rip free and fly into the maelstrom surrounding the Soul Eater. I was literally blowing away.

“Cyrus, get out of here!” I shouted back, struggling to my feet. My jeans were tattered and ripping apart fiber by fiber. I stumbled closer to the Soul Eater. He didn’t appear to see me, but the wind increased and knocked me down.

Carrie, try. Try to invoke him. Nathan’s words were infuriating, because I had no clue what they meant.

Dahlia didn’t tell me anything. But I pried her memories away from her. I saw her standing, naked, in a grove of trees. She was much younger, maybe thirteen or fourteen. There was no makeup on her face, and her red hair hung down her back in softly brushed waves, except for the beaded braids at her temples.

“Mother Goddess! Mother Goddess! Mother Goddess!” she called out, stretching her arms wide. “I humbly beg that you join with me, merge your energies with mine!”

I pulled myself to my feet again, raising my arms against the onslaught of debris that sanded the flesh off my bones. “Jacob Seymour!”

He looked at me then, a truly evil smile on his face.

“Jacob Seymour! Jacob Seymour!” I took a huge breath, and when I spoke, I imagined the words surrounding him. “I humbly beg that you join with me. No, fuck that! I order you to merge your energy with me! Do it, goddamn it!”

The green-gold energy that surrounded him sucked into me, and I drew it in. Reveled in it. I felt drunk. I felt invincible.

The Soul Eater’s body fell to the floor, wrinkled, pale and useless. “No!” he shouted, pounding at the hard-packed dirt like a child throwing a temper fit.

I wanted to stay just as I was, swaying in the currents of the awesome power I’d pulled into myself. But I knew in the back of my power-drunk mind that I had to end it.

I staggered to the sword lying on the ground. It glinted ethereal white, but it might have been because everything in my vision had a strange aura around it.

“No,” the Soul Eater rasped as I approached him. “No, please. Take pity….”

I thought of all the people he had hurt in his life, those I knew of and those I didn’t. And I thought of what he’d done to Nathan. I thought of Nathan’s face as he held his dead wife. And the rage that built up in me wasn’t my own. It was Nathan’s, pouring through the blood tie. When I raised the sword and screamed, it was with Nathan’s rage and pain. It was Nathan’s hand that struck Jacob Seymour, cleaving his head from his neck in one stroke. It was Nathan who raised the bloody sword in his hand and screamed to the sky in triumph.

It’s done, I told him, though there was no need. But it felt good to give the signal myself.

I love you, he told me. I already felt the pain in my chest, where my heart should have been.

It wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. I heard Cyrus screaming my name, felt my body falling to ash around me. But the last thing I knew was Nathan telling me again, over and over, that he loved me.

And then it was only peace and the endless, murky blue.

“Nate!” Ziggy heard the panic in his voice as he crashed through the apartment door. Bill stumbled across the felled wood after him, but he didn’t stop. “Nate!”

He tore down the hall. The light was on in the bedroom. He shouldered that door down, as well. Nate didn’t say anything or even look at him. He had a stake in his hands, the tip positioned against his bare chest.

“Dad!” Ziggy screamed, but it didn’t seem to penetrate Nate’s brain. He shoved hard, embedding the stake in his chest. He exploded into ash, all but his heart, which flamed blue for a moment before falling to the bed in another puff of ash.

Ziggy fell. He didn’t feel the floor beneath him. He barely felt Bill’s arms around him. Nate was dead. The only man who’d ever truly loved him like a son, the first person to care for him without expectations in return…was gone.

“Ziggy!” Bill shouted, but he could barely hear him. Then Ziggy realized it was because he was screaming and sobbing.

“I can’t believe it! I can’t fucking believe it!” He pushed Bill away and fell full on the floor. It seemed as if the flatter he got, the less it hurt.

Bill picked something up from the bed. A book.

It took a long minute for Ziggy to realize what it was.

Bill’s eyes were rimmed in red, and his voice trembled as he turned it so the pages faced out. “I don’t think he intends to stay dead, Ziggy.”

Max followed the warriors back to Italy. He wasn’t sure what had happened to Carrie and the guys. He was more shocked to realize that it wasn’t his problem.

The plane touched down on the pack’s private runway just after dusk. He helped unload the wounded, left the others to unload the body bags of those who hadn’t made it through the battle. He needed to see Bella.

The change in attitude at the compound was apparent immediately. The first people Max saw spoke to him in English—he’d been suspicious that they could, but just hadn’t wanted to—and they spoke warmly of Bella and how glad she would be to see him back.

A lingering anger at Julian burned through his veins, but he pushed it away. He didn’t want to see Bella that way. He felt as though he’d come home, and he wanted her to feel that way, too.

The door to their room was unlocked. He pushed it open and found it empty, but the curtains over the balcony door wafted in a soft breeze, and he knew he would find her there.

She didn’t look at him when he stepped onto the balcony. She sat in her wheelchair, facing the mirror black of the lake. “Max. You have returned.”

“Yeah. Don’t sound too enthused.” Great. He’d wanted to show her how different things were, now that he knew where he belonged. Now that he knew his place in the world, and that it was with her. All he’d done was fall back on sarcasm just as he’d always done.

Bella’s hands grasped the arms of her chair, and she pushed as though she would stand. But it was impossible. Wasn’t it?

She did stand, and Max felt hot tears coursing down his face.

“I was worried that you would not live,” she said, her voice choked on her own tears. “I never thought I would see you again.”

“I’m here now, baby,” he said quietly, not wanting to take a step toward her, not wanting to do anything that might ruin this moment.

But there was something he had to say to her. “I’m glad you can stand up. That is the best present I could have possibly come back to. But I think you should sit down.”

Her brow creased with confusion, but she did as he asked, and wheeled her chair around to face him. “Max?”

“I need to tell you something. And I have to be honest with you. And it’s going to be hard, because I haven’t been honest with myself.”

“All right.” She smoothed down the ivory silk of her nightgown. He noticed that her hair was loose around her shoulders, but the top was pulled back, held away from her face with combs. He loved when she wore it like that. She must have known they were returning this evening. She’d done it in the hopes he would be coming back, he realized.

Brutally suppressing the urge to take her in his arms and make love to her until neither one of them could move, he cleared his throat. “I’m a vampire.”

She laughed, and it was like music to him. “I know this. Max, you are behaving very strangely. You used to be a vampire, I know.”

“No.” He shook his head vehemently. “I am a vampire. I will always be a vampire. But I will always be a werewolf, too.”

How to explain it to her, the woman who was content to accept his unfortunate disability and spend the rest of her life with him? How could he make her understand?

“I’ll never be just a werewolf. There will always be a part of me that doesn’t fit in. But I know where I belong. For the first time, maybe in my whole life, I know where I belong. And it’s with you. Not because I’m a werewolf or a vampire, just because I’m me. And I want you to love me because I’m me, not because someday I’ll forget what I was or where I came from.” He stopped himself, before he sounded like a total wuss. “Can you do that?”

There were tears in Bella’s eyes, and she wheeled a little closer to him. “Max, I had no idea you felt this way. I do not love you because I believe that one day you will no longer be a vampire. I loved you when you were a vampire and nothing more. I would love you if you were a human. I would love you if it meant I had to leave my pack behind. I would love you if it meant I must sacrifice my very life.”

He caught her up then, and whirled her around. Then he set her on her feet, but she was too weak from her earlier display of her progress, and he had to support her. He carried her inside and laid her on the bed. It was almost more than he could endure not to rip the nightgown from her body and have her, right then. He ran his hands down her sides, then smoothed one palm over her expanded abdomen.

A tiny, hard lump brushed his palm and retreated, and his breath froze in his body. Torn between a feeling of wonder and disgust, he could only laugh. “That’s the baby? It’s really in there?”

Bella nodded and pulled his face to hers, kissing his stubbled cheek. “Yes, it is really in there.”

He pulled away from her and pressed his cheek to her stomach. “That’s kind of gross. And kind of cool.”

They both laughed then, Bella stroking his hair as he waited for another tiny wriggle, his child, proving it was there.

“We could leave, if you wish to return to your old life,” Bella said, and it wasn’t just to appease him. She meant it, in every syllable she meant it.

“No.” He pulled himself up the bed to nestle his head in her neck. “No, my home is where you are. And you’re here.”

He meant it. Frightening as it was, he meant it. And even more frightening, he knew he wouldn’t miss his old life.

He had a new one, and it was right here.

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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