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

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

Though 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.