The Turning-Blood Ties 1 (37 page)

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.

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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.

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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

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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-milehigh 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.”

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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.