Possession-Blood Ties 2 (25 page)

Not soon enough, he thought ruefully, sponging antiseptic over his charred shoulder. His tissue had already begun to heal, and vampires were largely unaffected by germs or bacteria, but the cool liquid took some of the sting out of his burns. With a worried glance to the unconscious werewolf on the couch, he set aside the gauze pad and bottle of solution and reached for one of the open medical books on the coffee table. He’d managed to stop the bleeding from the wounds Nathan had given her, but werewolves healed more slowly than vampires, almost at a mortal rate. Some of her injuries would need stitching, a task he didn’t look forward to. At least she was asleep. It would spare him the inevitable womanly shrieking he’d endure if she was awake when he did it.

If he was honest with himself, he’d have to admit his real fear came from the thought she might see him pass out when he first tried to jab the needle through her flesh. Taking a swig from the flask of Scotch Nathan thought he’d hidden well, Max rose and approached Bella’s unmoving form.

Asleep, she didn’t look half as bitchy as she did when she was awake. But that could have been the blood loss. “Okay, we got clean towels, we got this fishing line stuff, we got a…”

He swallowed a tide of nausea. “We got a needle and these sterilizing wipes. I think we’re good to go.” He hadn’t been able to find the weird pincers thing the guy was using in the picture to hold the needle, but how hard could it be to just use fingers?

Kneeling beside the couch, Max reached for her ankle. If she’d been conscious she probably would have driven a stake through his heart for daring to touch her. She was lucky she’d decided to get mortally injured when he was in a charitable mood. The leg of her leather pants lay open to her knee in much the same pattern her flesh did. He grabbed the bottle of Bactine and squirted it liberally into the jagged wound.

“Kill off anything that decided to move in,” he said, then felt like an ass for bothering to explain himself to a half-dead werewolf.

He flipped the curling edges of the fabric back for better access to the injury, then decided the pants would just have to go. Then he felt like a pervert. First, he tried to be civil about the process, patiently but impotently struggling against the leather with kitchen shears. When it seemed he was more likely to slip and stab himself or her than actually cut the pants, he gripped the ruined fabric and yanked, splitting them to the waist. With another tug, her leg was bare from hip to toes. God help him, she wore black lace panties.

He took another swallow of Scotch to fortify himself and hopefully burn the devil out of his sinful soul. There she was, practically dead and not even his own species, and all he could think about was the way her tan skin stretched over her smoothly rounded hip. Clenching his teeth, he pulled her uninjured leg free and tossed the ruined garment aside. Bracing her foot against his chest, he peered at the book. No matter how many times he studied the illustrations, he would never be ready. So he ripped the sterile packaging off

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the needle and threaded it with nylon floss, took a deep breath and went to work. His stitches started out clumsy and uneven, but he soon fell into a rhythm of pinching the flesh closed, piercing the edges and pulling the thread taut. Once wet with blood and the sweat from his hands, the needle slipped from his fingers often—the reason for the pincers in the illustrations became painfully clear—but as far as he was concerned, he wasn’t doing a bad job of things. He became so absorbed in his task, a plane could have crashed into the living room and he wouldn’t have noticed.

“Not bad.”

He jumped at the sound of her voice, and she hissed as the needle scraped torn flesh.

“Don’t startle me!” He wiped perspiration from his brow with the back of his hand and glared up at her, but he couldn’t maintain his anger when he saw the state she was in. Her usually golden skin was ashen, and sweat beaded on her forehead. Her mouth clamped in a grim line and she held her body rigidly still.

“I thought you might like some positive feedback.” Her voice rasped as if she’d swallowed a mouthful of gravel, but she gave him a tight smile with pale lips.

“You don’t look so good.” He concentrated again on the task at hand, trying and failing to ignore her stifled cries of pain as the steel passed through her skin. Through uneven breaths, she gasped, “You can thank your sainted friend for that.”

“Because you’re injured, I’ll let that slide. Along with the fact you tried to kill me earlier this evening.” He jerked the thread a bit less gently than necessary to punctuate his statement, and watched from the corner of his eye as she gripped the couch until her knuckles went white. “You lost a lot of blood. When I’m done here, I’ll get you set up on a transfusion.”

“You know how to do that?” she asked, surprise apparent in her strange, lilting voice. He rolled his eyes. “I’m a vampire. We’re experts in getting blood into people.”

“I know you knew about getting it out of people.” She rubbed her neck, looking vaguely shocked to find it bandaged. “But he only bit me once.”

“Maybe he didn’t like the taste of dog.” Max pushed the needle through her flesh again and winced at the pained sound she made in reply.

“You are making it hurt more on purpose,” she accused. If she hadn’t sounded so helpless, he would have shown her what it would feel like if he intentionally hurt her. Instead, he handed her the Scotch. “Do you need a break?”

She tilted her head back to drain the flask. After she wiped her lips, she adopted a determined expression. “Get it over with.”

To distract himself from the few yelps she couldn’t hold in, and to distract her from the pain as much as he could, he asked questions. “So, how did this happen?”

“I took your girlfriend’s tip and checked the cemeteries.” Bella clenched the back of the sofa as though she was going to climb away from him.

“Relax. It’ll be harder to finish this if I have to chase you around the apartment to do it.”

He took a deep breath and rolled his head to ease the stiffness in his neck. “And Dahlia is not my girlfriend.”

“Well, it was a good tip.” Belle grimaced ruefully. “In theory. I thought I had him. He seemed lucid, until I realized he was not talking to me, but to a person who was not there.”

“He was talking?” That twisted Max’s guts. If Nathan had simply gone insane, there was

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no help for him. Only one facility existed to deal with vampires who went south of reason, and the Movement probably wasn’t going to welcome a marked vampire in. She nodded, blowing out a shaky breath. “For a while. Then he completely changed.”

“Into a vampire?” Max tossed his head to get his hair out of his eyes, coupling the motion with a flash of his feeding face.

Her eyes flared, a spark of anger lighting her pupils. “Do not do that. And no, he was still human looking.”

Max looked doubtfully at her shredded leg. “He did this to you in regular Nathan form?”

“He managed to do the leg with the bolt I fired into him.” She shrugged. “It was not my night for aiming.”

“Should have quit while you were ahead.” The wound was nearly closed. All that remained was to tie off the floss. “Still don’t believe he’s possessed?”

It took her a moment to answer. “I do not like to concede that I was incorrect—”

“Flat-out wrong.”

She pursed her lips. “Incorrect. But yes, I do believe you. When he attacked me, he was not in control of himself.”

Max carefully lowered her leg to the couch. “From where I stand, I think you have two options here.”

“I cannot wait to hear them.” She narrowed her eyes and folded her arms across her chest. The defiance on her sweat-streaked, pale face brought a crooked grin to Max’s lips. If she was well enough to be a pain in the ass, she might not be in such bad shape, after all. “The first one is you can either hook up with me and help figure out what’s going on with Nathan—”

“And be renounced by the Movement.”

He resisted the urge to growl at her; it might be considered foreplay to her kind. “God forbid that happen. I mean, they’re only going to kill me. What will they do to you, fire you?”

“Point taken.” She narrowed her eyes. “Continue.”

“Or you can stay here until I can get the situation under control. It’s up to you.” He rose and stretched, giving his gently phrased threat a moment to sink in. It didn’t have the effect he’d hoped for, though in hindsight it had been stupid of him to think she would bend easily.

“Do you think you can keep me here against my will?” She glared at him. “You have to sleep sometime.”

He reached into his back pocket and pulled out the handcuffs he’d tucked there. He’d found them in Nathan’s closet while looking for the first aid kit, and while he didn’t want to speculate on why they’d been there in the first place, he was glad to have found them. Her eyes widened as he dangled the shining restraints from his forefinger. “I’ll even let you pick where I lock you up, baby.”

“I will tear you apart,” she threatened, the last of her words turning into a growl as they escaped her throat.

“Bad dog,” he admonished, twirling the cuffs around his finger. “You’re not doing anything of the sort. At least, not in the state you’re in.”

He’d expected, hell, even looked forward to, the venom she should have spewed at him, but she only closed her eyes and rubbed her forehead with a weary sigh. “You are right. I

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cannot fight you. Yet.”

“So, I take it we’re going with option number two?” He sighed. “Remember, it was your choice.”

“And remember, there is still one night of the full moon. I might forget the code of my people, just this once.” Her tone was pure hatred poured into words. He shook his head. “Sorry, honey. Max Harrison is not going out as dog food.”

If looks could kill, the one she gave him would have been a wooden stake. “I would not eat you. Your flesh would taste like carrion.”

“You wound, lady,” he mocked, laying his hand over his heart. She held her wrists out resolutely. “Close to the toilet, please.”

Max returned the cuffs to his pocket and went to examine the shelves on the far side of the room. “I won’t lock you up until I’m ready for some shut-eye.”

“What are you going to do in the meantime?” She didn’t seem all that interested. In fact, it sounded as if she was trying to pick a fight.

Max wouldn’t give her one. “I’m going to start going through Nathan’s books, and try to figure out what’s happening with him. And if the possession has anything to do with what the Soul Eater has going on.”

“The Soul Eater?” She spoke his name with the requisite awe all Movement assassins who hadn’t tangled with the man himself displayed. “Does your friend have ties to the Soul Eater?”

Max pushed back a book on medicinal herbs. “Uh, yeah. Nathan is his fledgling. Don’t you guys do research over there anymore?”

“I do not question. They gave me a kill order and the instructions to complete it immediately.” She at least sounded a little ashamed at having missed that particular detail.

“Well, if you’d bothered to ask me, rather than shoot on sight, I could have filled you in. The Soul Eater is trying to become a god, and we’re thinking that has something to do with the fact that his son has just returned from the dead and his fledgling has gone schizo.” Max waited a minute for his words to sink in before adding, “Now don’t you feel foolish for trying to kill me?”

“Does the Movement know what is happening?”

“Not that I know of. They had us on the plane before we could figure it out ourselves. The Oracle told Carrie.” Another book on herbs. Either Nathan was a total pothead or he really put a lot of faith into the whole New Age thing.

“The Oracle?” Bella’s voice was small, almost frightened. Turning to her, Max hooked his thumbs in his belt loops. “I didn’t mean to upset you. Here’s the deal. You help me find Nathan, I’ll trust you not to run. If we find him and we can figure out a way to cure him of whatever this thing is, you leave him alone. If it turns out he’s past the point of no return, you can stake him and take the credit back to Breton. I’ll even forfeit my pay on this one.”

She considered for a moment, and Max continued. “What’s the worst that could happen?

You don’t get to kill him. But there are plenty of other vampires out there to kill. And I’ll consider it a personal favor.”

She raised a hand to shut him up. “I will help you find your possessed friend and I will not kill him when we do. At least, not until we are sure there is no hope for him.”

“That,” Max said, a new, grim determination gripping him, “is the only smart thing you’ve

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said since we met.”

I pulled into Louden just before sunrise and parked the van in the lot of a semideserted strip mall with a Laundromat and a shabby looking dollar store. I secured the doors, double-checked the ties of the canvas partition and slid into the back, where I dug into a huge pile of the Hudson Herald and the Louden Times. The butler had followed March’s instructions to a tee, loading up over a week’s worth of the two publications. It was tempting to just start at the date of Nathan’s possession and work forward, but med school had taught me better. Cutting corners always comes back to bite you in the end. I’d read about some fairly innocuous local occurrences: the opening of a new Wal-Mart, an eighty-six-year-old rancher caught growing marijuana in his basement. I shifted my

“read” pile away from my “to be read” pile, and there, on the top of the stack, in letters as long as the palm of my hand, was the word Fire!

I scanned the page frantically to find the date. Three days before I lost Nathan.

“St. Anne’s Catholic Church burned down early Saturday morning, and three parishioners are missing.”