Possession-Blood Ties 2 (20 page)

This has to be a mistake.

The steam from the running water became horrendously oppressive, and I struggled to drag in breath out of habit. I wiped my damp hair from my forehead with a trembling hand. If it wasn’t a mistake, it had been a punishment meted out by the cruelest of fates. The sound of him, a single heart beating in his human chest, almost drowned out the sound of Nathan’s agony as my two sires fought for dominance in my mind. I gripped the edge of the marble countertop so hard I expected to leave gouges in the stone. When I exhaled, a single word exploded from my mouth.

“Cyrus.”

Then, I was falling, and I didn’t feel it when I hit the ground.
11

Connections

T his time, when he woke, he was careful not to disturb Mouse. He didn’t want to have to explain to her about Carrie, and why he could still feel her. Because he didn’t have the answer himself.

Trembling, he went to stand beneath the small, high window. The moon was full, filling the basement with an eerie slash of light. Upstairs, the heavy footsteps he’d learned not to hear shook the floor.

In the past few days, he’d almost forgotten he’d been like them. Carrie’s voice in his dream had reminded him. He’d heard her in his water-colored memories in the shadow world. They’d inspired a feeling as close to anger as he’d been capable of then. It had really been more of a passing annoyance. When he’d been pulled back, he’d been enraged

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at the thought of her. “The one who got away,” some would say, though it wasn’t with fond nostalgia in his case.

But now, he couldn’t conjure even a speck of hatred for her. It was too tiring to be consumed so fully by an emotion, and he was finished wasting time. Maybe that’s why he’d heard her calling his name. Perhaps his subconscious had been giving him some sort of signal. After all, the school of dream interpretation couldn’t be complete bullshit.

Things were never that simple. In all his life, never once had something turned out to his advantage, and he was sure this would be no different. The dream was a warning. He would meet her again.

The thought of Carrie, who could not love him when he’d been at the height of his power and influence, seeing him in his human shell didn’t rankle the way it should have. Humanity had a few advantages. One being companionship. As a vampire, he wouldn’t have tolerated the company of someone like Mouse. He’d wanted ones who would do anything to be with him. Though timid, Mouse had a quiet dignity. She wasn’t as outspoken and abrasive as Carrie had been—qualities Cyrus had truly admired at the time. Mouse had settled into their bizarre circumstances gradually, and every day a little more of what he assumed was her original personality surfaced. He was going to have to stop calling her Mouse. But he certainly wasn’t going to start calling her Stacey.

She’d gone to sleep with wet hair, much to his annoyance, but now it curled softly around her face. The fact that she slept so soundly in his presence gave him a little hope for himself. She trusted him to protect her from the monsters. From himself. Let Carrie haunt me, he thought bitterly. If her memory reminded him of his shameful past, he would bear it. Shame seemed integral to humanity, and if it made him more human, so much the better.

With a shock, he realized he intended to stay this way. Perhaps he hadn’t thought of it before. Perhaps he’d only felt removal from his former species, and just this moment had learned of his intent to distance himself permanently. More likely he’d known, somewhere in the most distant, inaccessible reaches of his soul, since the moment he’d drawn human breath.

Mouse stirred. He went to her side, easing onto the narrow bed as she lifted her head and peered at him with sleepy eyes.

“Did you have a nightmare?”

He straightened the bedclothes to cover both of them and pulled her close. “No.”

She leaned her head against his shoulder. “Are you lying?”

“No, little Mouse. I’m not lying.”

In fact, when he closed his eyes, Cyrus drifted into the first dreamless sleep he’d encountered in seven hundred years.

When I woke, my head throbbed. The room was dim, thanks in part to the metal shutters, the other part to the dial-controlled recessed lighting. Two bags of blood rested in a wellstocked ice bucket on the nightstand. Evan was gone.

I sat up, wincing at the soreness in my skull. There was a slender vial nestled in the ice

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bucket between the two bags, and a note attached. I had to squint to read it.

The doctor caught Evan with this. I’d keep a close eye on it, if you weren’t looking to be a sire.

March

I snatched up the vial, my face flaming with anger. How close had I been to having yet another open channel in my head? I glared down at my arm. He’d put a Band-Aid over the bend of my elbow. I didn’t need it, and anyone who’d done any research—such as reading The Sanguinarius, the most well-known and widely respected book in the vampire community—would have known that. It might be the med school in me, but I think anyone who’s about to make a life-changing choice about their physiology ought to know at least the basics of what they’re getting into.

My head buzzed and my vision jarred. It definitely felt as if I was about to have my head filled with voices, so I took a deep breath and imagined a brick wall, the way Nathan had taught me. Of course, when he’d explained it, it had been a shield of white light, but a brick wall with some nice, climbing ivy seemed a bit stronger than that New Age, hippie claptrap. It would block other minds—Nathan’s and now, apparently, Cyrus’s—from entering my own and sapping my strength.

I lifted the vial of my own blood, popped the top off and downed it, trying to ignore the taste. To my vampire tongue, human blood is amazing. Thick and warm and rich with a coppery bite, it’s like no food a human could experience. Vampire blood—at least Nathan’s and Cyrus’s, on the few times I’ve tasted it—was the same, but with an emptiness to it, as though my senses could tell I would not receive the kind of sustenance I needed from it. Plus it was the equivalent of deep-fried, sugar-loaded food for a human. It could screw up your metabolism permanently, like the Soul Eater’s, and for a vampire, permanently was an awfully long time. My own blood, however, tasted just like regular old blood, like I’d gotten a paper cut and licked it clean. It wasn’t pleasant, and I forced my uncooperative gag reflex away in order to swallow. Still, it was better than leaving it out for one of March’s boys to find.

My stomach growled at the reminder of the blood I’d been denied earlier, and I reached into the ice bucket for a bag. Under ordinary circumstances, the blood would be suspect, but I was too hungry and weak to argue myself out of drinking it. My hands brushed something definitely not ice buried under the bag. It was a note, this one folded tightly, the ink beginning to run from the moisture of the ice.

I’ve left some Tylenol in the bedside table drawer. Take it easy until sundown. And then, if you know what’s good for you, get as far away from here as possible.

Evan

I reread the note and stuffed it back into the ice bucket. No way was I taking any pills Evan had left behind. I knew better than to take candy from strangers, especially when they’d already tried to steal my blood. Besides, my headache was nothing a little food and rest couldn’t cure.

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Feeling good and lazy, I skipped a glass and slid my fangs through the thin plastic of the bag. I hadn’t fed enough on the trip, and I had a hard time sleeping in the back of the van, let alone in a strange bed in a bordello. All this left me with too much time to think, and of the two people on my mind most lately, the one I didn’t want to dwell on kept forcing his way into my thoughts.

Probably because Evan had almost put me into the same situation Cyrus had been forced into. I’d always imagined Cyrus had some sinister motive for making me a vampire, though he’d insisted it was an accident, and what I could remember of the evening—aside from crawling on my hands and knees through formaldehyde and harvested human livers—didn’t suggest otherwise. As much as I hated the thought he might have been a victim of circumstance like I was, it seemed as though it was true. What if Evan had taken my blood? When I’d become Nathan’s first fledgling, he’d been incapacitated by fear of losing me. More precisely, the fear of the pain he would feel if he’d lost me. Cyrus had tried everything short of physical restraints to keep me by his side. I knew I was stronger than Cyrus. I must have been, to look him in the eye as I stabbed a knife through his heart. I’d assumed I was stronger than Nathan, but that assertion seemed unfair now. Nathan had lost his son and gained yet another emotional burden, right along with his blood tie to me. All of this, on top of the lifetime of guilt he’d endured for the murder of his wife. How could I measure my untested strength against a man who’d been put through an unending gauntlet of emotional pain?

At times I felt Nathan had overlooked a key component of our blood bond, though. While he ached with loneliness for his wife and son, he had me. We could laugh and joke and fuck, but God forbid he ever share any emotion with me. I hadn’t considered the possibility Nathan might hear my thoughts until a shattering pain nearly tore the bones of my skull apart. There were no words across the blood tie, only crushing regret.

Now you want to be a part of my life. I knew Nathan was locked in some unimaginable, hellish prison now, but I couldn’t stand a second more of the physical and emotional pain I felt being tied to him. I blocked off the blood tie and wiped tears of shame from my eyes. I had been so tired, I almost overlooked Evan’s warning. “Get as far away as possible.”

Was I in danger here? Would someone burst in and kill me the second I fell asleep?

Snapping fully awake, I clicked on the lamp on the bedside table and flopped back on the pillows. I looked at the door. There had to be a way to secure it from the inside, even if it wasn’t immediately visible. After all, March had used a key to unlock it. I rallied what little strength I had left and wobbled to the door. There weren’t any latches immediately obvious in the vicinity of the doorknob, and there wasn’t a dead bolt. But then, why had March needed a key? I tried to turn the knob.

It didn’t budge. I’d been locked in.

Regardless of how much I needed it, I didn’t think I’d be getting much sleep, after all.
12

It’s a Small World

The werewolf waited for someone.

Max watched her from the safety of his rental car as she sat in the small coffee shop. The Trans-Am, though badass, would have tipped her off to his presence, so he’d had to leave

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it behind.

He’d add that to his list of “Reasons to Extremely Dislike the Were-bitch.”

To the untrained eye, Bella would have appeared as one of those überconfident women who went to coffee shops alone. No book, no laptop, not even a newspaper to distract her from her solitude. Framed as she was in the sole window of the tiny, brick establishment, she drew the attention of anyone who passed on the sidewalk outside. One man walked into a mailbox, totally oblivious to the world around him as he stared at Bella. She appeared to be absorbed in thought, but Max saw the way her golden eyes surreptitiously scanned the passersby, and the coffee she’d been nursing had long since gone cold. In the sky above, the moon was full. She wouldn’t assume her animal form. Few of them ever did, though they frowned on the use of science to stop it. No, they did spells, probably with gross ingredients like baby tongues and eye of newt. And they thought a little prick of a needle once a month was a sin worth killing over. The warm light of the coffee shop’s interior spilled onto the street, illuminating her from behind like an unnatural sun. Supernaturally motionless, she seemed a figure in a painting. Her admirers had no inkling how deadly and dark this mysterious beauty really was. Shaking his head, Max groaned. She was not beautiful. He was just horny. He’d find a way to make that her fault—not in the obvious way, because bestiality wasn’t his thing—

later.

A shadowy figure, dressed far too warmly for the weather, in a heavy black coat, entered through the shop’s narrow door. In the window, Bella straightened and sniffed the air. The motion accentuated the slender column of her neck and the tracery of blue veins that seemed visible even from across the street. Bullshit, you’re imagining things. Still, Max’s stomach growled and his dick hardened. He could take care of only one problem without getting arrested, so he fumbled in the backseat for his thermos of blood.

“You’re a fucking pervert, Harrison,” he growled to himself as he unscrewed the lid. B

positive. Best blood type, hands down.

The shadowy figure sat across from Bella. It was a woman with a shiny black bob and generous cleavage. Something about her seemed oddly familiar, but then, Max could have been confusing her with a chick from the movies.

The two conferred briefly. Though he couldn’t read the werewolf’s facial expression, and the curvy woman’s face was obscured by the shadow of a hanging lamp, he could tell from their body language things were all-business at that table.

“What I wouldn’t pay to hear what’s going on in that messed up little head of yours, wolf.” He lifted the thermos to his mouth, wanting to finish off the blood quickly. He’d never cared for clots.

He’d no sooner taken a swallow than he’d noticed Bella was no longer in the window. Max’s gaze shot from the door to the sidewalk, where she was striding briskly and purposefully away.

He counted to ten before he exited the car and headed for the coffee shop. Seconds later, the werewolf’s associate exited. Max was ready for her. He clamped his hand over the woman’s mouth as he hauled her into the alley between the shop and an optometrist’s office that had closed for the night. “Don’t make a fucking sound, or so help me I’ll—”