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 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.”

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.

Ancient peoples believed the heart to be the seat of a person’s soul. Maybe they were on to something. The fact I could be removed from this plane of existence if my human heart is destroyed appeared to prove their hypothesis. I promised myself I’d research it, if I lived long enough.

Several times I found myself nearing Cyrus’s neighborhood and turned back. When the sun began to rise, I headed back to the apartment. My legs had grown tired hours before, but my anger propelled me to stay away.

Nathan hadn’t come to look for me. Ziggy’s van still rusted beside the curb, and I saw light in the living room windows.

Max sat on the couch, flipping through television channels with a bored look on his face. He held up a hand in a halfhearted wave to greet me.

There was no sign of Nathan. “Where is he?”

Max pointed down the hall. “He’s been in there since you left. At least he stopped playing Dark Side of the Moon. I was about to go in there and fling the damn CD player out the window.”

I stomped toward Nathan’s bedroom, but Max’s next statement stopped me.

“We’re going in tomorrow night. Nathan didn’t want me to tell you, but I thought you should know, seeing as it’s your sire and everything we’re going to off.”

So Nathan hadn’t told Max what had transpired the night of the meeting. He must have had his reasons. Maybe Max was as fanatical about the Movement as Nathan had been.

“Why didn’t he want me to know?”

“Probably because he’s crazy about you and doesn’t want you to get hurt.” Max shrugged. “Or maybe he just thinks you’re going to fuck everything up.”

I laughed. “I’ll bet it’s the second one.”

Max dropped the remote and patted the couch beside him. “Come, have a chat with me.”

I really wanted to go into the other room and give Nathan a piece of my mind, but the way Max was looking at me told me that might not be a good idea. I sat next to him, bristling when he wrapped a companionable arm around my shoulder.

“I’m not getting fresh,” he assured me. “I just think better with my arm around a beautiful woman.”

I rolled my eyes. “Then think fast, before I remove that arm.”

“Okay, okay.” He chuckled. “Just let me give you some real quick advice. I’ve known Nathan for a while now. He hasn’t had a girlfriend since, God, I think it was ’84. And she wasn’t what you would call a wild woman. I think she was a CPA.

“The point is, Nathan doesn’t get attached to people, and when he does, he has a tendency to shut down. There’s some scary shit in his past. I’m not even going to pretend to know the whole story. But he won’t let himself get close to anyone. So, if you’re thinking of going in there and tearing him a new one, keep in mind you might hurt him a little more than you intended to. And you’ll just prove his ‘love hurts’ theory right.”

I swallowed hard, remembering words Cyrus had spat in anger. “Max, did Nathan really kill his wife?”

It must have been a secret he was warned not to reveal, because he chewed his lip thoughtfully for a moment.

“Don’t lie to me, Max. I’ll know if you do.” I lifted his arm off my shoulders. “Did Nathan kill his wife?”

Max sighed. “Yes. At least, that’s what I’ve heard.”

“But it wasn’t his fault,” I said, shaking my head. “I mean, he didn’t mean to do it, right?”

“I wish I could tell you that, kiddo.” Max’s expression was heartbreakingly tender. “But he was a different person then.”

I excused myself and headed for the room I’d only recently begun to think of as mine.

The couch springs creaked miserably as Max stood. “He didn’t want you to go with us because he didn’t want you to get hurt. That was his main concern. I don’t know what’s going on with you two, but don’t waste the time you’ve got left. Take it from me, eternity gets pretty damn lonely after a while.”

I lay awake for a long time, pondering Max’s words, and the knowledge that at any moment, I could just poof out of existence.

It wasn’t fair to let Nathan and Max risk their lives to kill Cyrus. Not when he’d just end up killing me, too. No matter how many times I thought it through, I came to the same conclusion. I should go to Cyrus and kill him myself. If he took me out in the process, the only loss would be me. And as far as I was concerned, I was dead already.