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

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.