The Turning-Blood Ties 1 (8 page)

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, laundryday 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.”

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“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 StarSpangled 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

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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?”

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“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 blooddrenched 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.

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“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

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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.