The Turning-Blood Ties 1 (35 page)

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 watercolor. 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

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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.

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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

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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.

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“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.”