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

I wanted to hug him, but I wouldn’t ask him to lower himself to hug a vampire. I couldn’t understand why he wouldn’t jump at the chance for freedom. I also couldn’t understand the strange compulsion people had to stay in their homes to face hurricanes and floods rather than evacuate. Fear of change, maybe. Or denial of their mortality. Whatever the reason, Clarence seemed to share their stay-put mentality, and I knew I wouldn’t change his mind. I made him promise to stay near the guardhouse and not show his face until morning. I watched until he disappeared into the maze. Then I headed up to the house.

After spending weeks in close quarters with the Fangs and Cyrus’s human groupies, the house felt downright empty. Apparently, he hadn’t gotten around to replacing the numerous pets he’d expended for the feast.

The guards were there, though. The second I opened the French doors to the foyer, all hell broke loose.

Two bodyguards waited for me in the center of the room. No doubt they’d watched me as I spoke to Clarence on the lawn, because reinforcements—a lot of them—jogged down the staircase. Behind me, the front doors flew open.

I whirled to see Nathan and Max framed in the wide doorway. Relief and dread crashed through me. I’m saved, I thought. Then I thought, We’re all dead.

“Don’t put on the coffee, we’re not staying long,” Max announced with a wide smile.

“Get out of here, Nathan,” I screamed as the first guard reached me. His hands crushed my shoulders. I grasped his forearms and fell backward, flipping him over my body as another guard came at me. I sprang to my feet and elbowed the next contender hard in the face. Blood spurted from between his fingers as he covered his broken nose. I punched him in the groin. When he doubled over I grabbed his shoulders and rammed the top of his head into my knee. He dropped limply to the floor.

I looked to Max and Nathan. Max had knocked out one guard and used a stun gun to put down another. Nathan was cornered by an opponent brandishing a stake. He tried to dodge it, but the blow landed the wooden spike in his shoulder.

“No!” I charged forward. Another set of hands closed on me. In my haste to get to Nathan, I gave a hard shove and sent the man flying into the wall. He crumpled like a rag doll.

I reached Nathan’s side as he pulled the stake free and a torrent of blood spilled out. The guard pulled another stake from his belt and lunged, but not before I caught him. I bared my fangs before I realized I’d changed. If Nathan hadn’t called to me, I would have bitten into the man’s neck.

“Why not let her?”

Max and Nathan froze at the voice. I let go of the guard and turned.

Cyrus strode from the open doors of the study. His hair was half tied back in a disheveled braid, and his fur-lined robe seemed to swallow him up. Dark hollows beneath his eyes marred his pale complexion. He looked like he hadn’t slept or fed in days.

“You’ve never had the chance to see her feed, have you, Nolen?” He smiled sadly. “It’s something every sire should experience.”

Arms gripped me from behind at the same time I saw guards grab Nathan and Max. I tensed, prepared to fight, but I felt the point of a stake against my breastbone.

My gaze met Nathan’s and I heard his voice in my head. Don’t move.

Max turned his face to look at Nathan. “What the hell is he talking about?”

Cyrus crossed to me, stroking the side of my face gently with the back of his hand. With the blood tie between us dead, I felt nothing but revulsion.

His eyes, one gold-flecked green, the other his own, icy blue, turned cold and hollow. “It really is over, then.”

Howling in outrage, like a child whose mischief had been thwarted, he pounded his thighs with his fists. He rounded on Nathan. “Why? Why did you take her from me?”

“I’d like to know that myself,” Max said through clenched teeth.

Oh, God, don’t let him turn on us. I didn’t know Max well enough to tell if he’d report Nathan’s indiscretion to the Movement, or if he’d just be disgusted enough to abandon this mission.

Nathan sent me a comforting thought. Don’t worry, sweetheart. He’s not going anywhere. We’re going to get out of this.

“You’ve got no one to blame but yourself, Cyrus.” Nathan nodded in my direction. “You killed her in that alley. My blood restored her. Finders keepers.”

Just as he finished his sentence, Cyrus struck him. Nathan’s head snapped back and blood seeped from his nose. For a moment, I feared he would lose consciousness.

Cyrus shook his wrist, a pained look on his face. For hands so accustomed to violence, they were awfully delicate. “Finders keepers? Like the way I found your cast-off child and made him my own?”

Nathan struggled to break free, and would have managed, if four other guards hadn’t rushed in to hold him. Vampires are strong, but not that strong.

One of the sentries brought his knee up hard between Nathan’s legs. He doubled over with a grunt of pain.

“Cyrus, please, tell them to stop!” I cried.

My former sire snapped his fingers to the guard restraining me, and the stake at my chest pierced my skin.

Nathan stopped struggling immediately. Rather than panicking, he laughed. “Cyrus, you know staking her isn’t going to do anything.”

“Won’t it?”

The wood pressed deeper, digging into my flesh. While it wouldn’t cause me to ash-out and burst into flame, a wound to my remaining heart probably wasn’t something to sneeze at. “Stop, please!”

Don’t beg him, Carrie. I can’t stand to hear you beg. Nathan’s eyes were distraught. I looked away.

“Cyrus, knock it off,” he growled. “Look, I’m playing nice.”

“That’s noble of you.” Cyrus waved away the sentry that held me. “It’s so nice that you’d defend her after what she did to your son.”

Nathan shook his head. “Not going to work, Cyrus. I’m her sire now. I can see—”

I tried to hold back my memories from the night I’d fed from Ziggy, but in my panic, they overwhelmed me. They were powerfully vivid and painfully erotic. And I couldn’t hide them from Nathan.

His anger swelled, but no more than I’d expected. I wanted to tell you, I thought firmly, but he didn’t answer. Nathan purposely ignored the blood tie, and after decades of shutting out the Soul Eater, he’d perfected his technique. My thoughts bounced off him like tennis balls against a brick wall.

But he didn’t show any outward sign of my betrayal. “She told me everything. Sorry to disappoint you.”

“I really wish someone would have told me everything,” Max snarled. “I’m probably gonna get marked for death just for breathing the same air as all of you. I don’t know what’s going on here, but this is fucked up!”

A frown creased Cyrus’s brow. “Kill that one.”

“No!” Nathan and I shouted at the same time. I felt some of his rage toward me ebb, like a stone lifting off my chest.