“I have connections,” he said, as if we were discussing how he’d obtained courtside Lakers’ tickets instead of how he’d invaded my privacy. He actually had the nerve to reach across the table and take my hand. “I know what it’s like to lose someone. Believe me. I can see why you’d want—”
“I didn’t want this!”
I hadn’t meant to scream, but it felt good. I wanted to do it again. The ugliness and horror of the past month seemed to swell inside me, pushing me beyond the limits of my self-control.
“Carrie, please—” he tried again, but I ignored him.
My knees bumped the table as I stood, and Nathan’s mug toppled over, splashing warm blood across the tabletop. The sight held a sick fascination for me, and in a flash I saw a clear image of myself leaning over and licking it up. I shook my head to destroy the vision. “I didn’t want this!”
Jerking the collar of my sweatshirt aside, I jabbed a finger at the barely healed scar on my neck. “Do you think someone would ask for this? Do you think I went down to that morgue and said ‘Hey, John Doe, why don’t you rip my fucking neck open? Why don’t you turn my life to absolute shit?’”
The volume of the music from Ziggy’s room drastically lowered. Good. Let him hear.
“Do you think I wanted to sit here and watch some guy I’ve never met fucking drink blood? I just want my life back!”
No, what I wanted was to scream until my throat was raw. I wanted to stamp my feet and throw things. I wanted to be empty of these feelings of despair and frustration.
Instead, I cried. My legs buckled and I slid to the floor. When Nathan knelt beside me and put his arms out to comfort me, I pushed him away. When he tried again, I didn’t fight him.
I couldn’t control my sobs as I cried into his firm chest. His wool sweater pricked my cheek. He smelled good, distinctly male and slightly soapy, as if he’d just gotten out of the shower. So what if he was a complete stranger? I’d never been able to cry and let someone comfort me like this before.
“I know you didn’t,” he said softly.
“Do you?” I demanded, looking up at him. “Because you were sure acting like the vampire police or something.”
He gently took my face in his hands to force my gaze to his. “I know because the same thing happened to me. At the hands of your John Doe.”
His words seemed to magically patch the dam that had broken within me. My chest no longer heaved with sobs, and my tears miraculously dried.
Nathan helped me to my feet. I took advantage of the moment, resting against him as long as I could without seeming weird. I pressed my hand just below his rib cage in the guise of steadying myself and felt the solid ridges of a perfect stomach beneath the wool.
He picked up my chair—a casualty of my sudden rage—and helped me sit. Then he got me a glass of water and began cleaning up the spilled blood.
The silence between us was stifling, but my questions overwhelmed me. I started with the obvious. “How did it happen?”
Nathan stood at the sink, rinsing the blood from the kitchen towel. “He took some of your blood, you took some of his. Then you died. That’s the way it happens.”
“No,” I began. I’d meant to ask how he’d been made a vampire, if John Doe had attacked him without provocation, as he had me. Instead, I focused on his statement. “I didn’t drink his blood. I don’t think he drank mine.”
“Did his blood get in your mouth? In your wounds?” He leaned against the counter. “All it takes is one drop. It’s like a virus, or a cancer. It can lie dormant for decades, waiting for the heart to stop beating. Then it corrupts your cells.”
“Yeah, but I didn’t die. They got me to surgery to stop the bleeding—” But that wasn’t exactly true. “Oh, God. I went into v-tac, in the recovery room. I flatlined.”
“That’s when it happened.” He pointed to the living room. “Let’s go in here. We’ll be more comfortable.”
I sat on the couch while he went to the bookshelves lining the wall. He pulled a volume down and handed it to me. “This should answer some questions.”
The book, bound in burgundy-colored leather, had gilt-edged pages and seemed incredibly aged. The cover was bare, save for small gold lettering stamped in the lower right-hand corner. “The Sanguinarius,” I murmured, running my fingertips across the letters. I recognized the root word, Latin for blood. I opened it, but the usual publishing information wasn’t printed. The title page lent the only clue to the age of the book.
The Sanguinarius, it read in large print. Beneath that, in smaller type, A Practical Guide to the Habits of Vampyres. The font was uneven, as though the pages had been printed on an ancient press. The book must have been at least two hundred years old.
I flipped a few pages. “A vampire handbook?”
“Not exactly. More like a training manual for vampire hunters.”
No sooner than he’d finished his sentence, I came across a graphic woodcut of a man sinking a pitchfork into the round stomach of a raging she-demon.
“Oh.” I slammed the book shut.
“Roughly translated, the title means ‘The Ones Who Thirst for Blood.’” He smiled. “This is complicated. I’ll start from the beginning.”
I nodded in agreement, though it didn’t seem I had a choice. He sat beside me, a little closer than I’d expected. Not that I was complaining.
“For more than two hundred years, there has existed a group of vampires dedicated to the extinction of their own kind for the preservation of humanity. In the past they were known as the Order of the Blood Brethren. Today, they are known as the Voluntary Vampire Extinction Movement.
“There were fourteen clauses under the Order. But the Movement enforces only three. No vampire shall feed from any unwilling human. No vampire shall create another vampire. And no vampire shall harm or kill a human.”
“Those don’t sound like such bad rules,” I observed.
“Vampires today have it easy compared to the old days.” He sounded nostalgic. “The Movement headquarters are in Spain in some refurbished Inquisition dungeons, but Movement members are spread all over the world. I’m the only member on this side of the state, but there are assassins in Detroit and Chicago. The Movement has a fleet of private jets, in case a member needs to travel abroad. Otherwise, it would be pretty hard to get around.”
“So, I take it they’re not a nonprofit organization if they can afford jets.”
That brought a small smile to Nathan’s face. “Most of the Movement funding comes from generous benefactors, very old vampires who’ve had centuries to amass their fortunes. The Movement has been around a long time, and those donations add up. Plus, I believe they dabble in real estate on the side.”
“I’ve always said my landlord was a monster, but I never thought it might be true.” I tried to hand back the book. “Okay, no eating people, making other vampires, or murder. I’ve been able to follow those rules great up till now, and I don’t foresee any problems in the near future.”
“Good,” he said, pushing The Sanguinarius toward me again. “Because if you do, the penalty is steep.”
“How steep?” I tried to sound unconcerned.
“Death. Cyrus, the vampire who sired you—”
I snorted. “Cyrus? Is that his real name?”
Nathan looked mildly annoyed at the interruption. “Cyrus has been on the run from the Movement in America for more than thirty years, longer in other parts of the world. The injuries that brought him to your emergency room were incurred during an attempted execution.”
I sobered as I remembered John Doe’s horrific injuries, and my mouth felt dry. “Which of the rules did he break?”
“All of them. Long before he attacked you. We just haven’t been able to finish him off.”
“No one deserves that.” I tried to force the image of John Doe’s maimed body from my mind. “If you’d seen him, what they did to him…”
“I did see him,” Nathan said matter-of-factly. “I was t
he one sent to execute him.”
“You?” The wounds in John Doe’s chest. The missing eye. The splintered, destroyed bones of his face. The man sitting beside me had done it all. “How?”
“I started with a stake to the heart, and when that didn’t work, I thought I’d chop him into little pieces and bury him in consecrated earth, but he got in some good hits. I’m lucky to be sitting here right now. Someone must have seen us fighting, because the police showed up. The rest—”
“Is history,” I whispered.
Nathan shifted uncomfortably beside me. “Not really. He’s still out there. That’s why Ziggy’s been on the prowl for vampires. We know Cyrus is in town, and he’s the only outlaw vampire in the area. I keep an eye out for any new fledglings that pop up. I find them, kill them and report back to the Movement.” He stretched his legs to get comfortable. “They give me six hundred dollars a head. Figuratively, of course. I don’t have to bring them actual heads.”
I had to remind myself he was talking about ending people’s lives, despite the casual way he mentioned it. “You kill them? Why?”
He looked at me as if I had antennae growing out of my head. “Because they’re vampires.”
“So are you!”
“Yes, but I’m a good vampire,” he explained patiently. “Good vampires get to live, bad vampires get a one-way ticket to wherever it is we go when we die. It’s not rocket science.”
I shot to my feet. “Did you ever think maybe some of them might be good vampires? I mean, do you even check first or do you just go all kill-happy on them?”
“I give them a chance to change my mind but they all turn out the same way. It’s just not possible for them to be good vampires,” he insisted.
“And why not?”
“Because they weren’t made by good vampires.” Releasing a huge sigh, Nathan picked up The Sanguinarius. “Every fledgling I’ve encountered so far has gone the way of their sire. The blood tie is incredibly strong, which makes it nearly impossible for a new vampire to fight the will of the blood in his veins, the will of his sire. The book will explain it a lot better than I can.”
“Well, I’m here now, so why don’t you give it a shot?” I arched a threatening brow and put my hands on my hips to show I wasn’t moving until he answered my question.
“You’re a very aggravating person, you know that?” He set the book on the table. “The Movement doesn’t want any new vampires made. We’re trying to whittle our species down to nothing. Hence the extinction part of the Voluntary Vampire Extinction Movement. Some vampires aren’t so into the idea. So they start creating new vampires.
“When a vampire exchanges blood with a human to create another vampire, their blood stays in the new vampire’s veins. Forever. It builds something called a blood tie. For the sire, it’s a way of controlling their fledgling, like an invisible leash. The tie weakens as time goes by, but the fledgling and sire will still feel each other’s emotions, physical pain and hunger. The fledgling will always be ruled by the sire’s blood, and most of them don’t want to change. It lasts after death. Even if the sire dies, he can still wreak havoc on the world through his fledglings. The fledgling, forever influenced by his or her sire’s blood and whatever bent morals were handed down to them, could go out and keep making new vampires. Pretty soon, it’s goodbye human race. The way the Movement sees it, the only way to keep somebody like Cyrus from making his own vampire army and taking over the world is to kill his progeny. It’s not fair, but that’s the way it is.”
I swallowed. “You sound like you’re pretty hard-core about the Movement.”
“I have to be. When I was turned, I swore my allegiance to them in order to keep my life.” He stood and advanced on me, though for what purpose I couldn’t tell.
“It sounds like these Movement guys hold a lot of sway. How do you know they’ve really got your best interests at heart?” I was tempted to take a step back, but I held my ground. I was not going to let him intimidate me. Not after all I’d been through. If he wanted to kill me, he’d have to…well, he’d have to go through the new me first.
He didn’t answer my question, but he didn’t try to grab me or shove a stake through my heart, either. He pushed my hair aside and gently touched the scar Cyrus had left. “He really got you.”
A chill raced up my spine at his touch. I leaned into his hand. I couldn’t help myself.
Something changed in his eyes, as if an iron gate were slamming shut. He dropped his arm and turned away. “You’re going to have to make a choice, too. Whether you want to pledge your life to the Movement, or lose it.”
I snorted. “Where do I sign in blood?”
“This isn’t a joke.” He turned to face me, and I saw from his irritated countenance that it certainly was not. “I can’t guarantee the Movement will even accept you, but it’s your only shot at surviving. Your sire’s death sentence extends to you.”
My heart pounded and my legs tensed in anticipation of running. I took a step back. “You’d really kill me, wouldn’t you?”
“Yes.” He looked away, then sank onto the couch. “It’s nothing personal. But I don’t know you well enough to tell whether you’re going to play loyal fledgling to Cyrus or not. You seem like a nice girl, but I’m not willing to take that chance.”
“Nothing personal.” I laughed bitterly in disbelief. “You know, it is personal. When I get lured into a trap and almost get decapitated, it’s personal. When some guy I just met tells me he’s going to kill me, it’s personal. Because it’s my life. You’re out of your mind if you think I’m going down without a fight.”
The corner of his mouth twitched and I thought he was going to laugh. I would have punched him in the face if he did.
Good thing he didn’t. “I can respect that. But it doesn’t change my position. You need to make a decision. Ask the Movement for mercy and hope they grant it to you. You won’t get it from me.”
“Why not just kill me now?” I asked, hoping he wouldn’t take this as an invitation.
He merely shrugged and said, “Because without a kill order, I don’t get paid.”
“A kill order?” How much more like a bad horror movie could this possibly get?
“If you decide not to ask the Movement for membership, I’ll report you. You’ll be processed in their system and a kill order will be issued a few days later.” He shrugged again, as if he couldn’t care less about the conversation. “I suppose you could make a run for it, but until I have that order in my hand, I’m not going to do anything to you. I don’t work for free.”
I was about to argue that he could just kill me, then report me. Luckily, the common sense which seemed to have deserted me in the past few weeks found its way back, and I held my tongue. “How very Han Solo of you.”
He didn’t smile or laugh. In fact, he looked even more grave than before. “It’s up to you. Petition for membership or die. I can get them on the phone right now.”
“Fine.” I ground my teeth over the words. “Can I make an informed decision at least?”
He frowned and cocked his head, studying me from the corner of his eye, as if this were a trick. “What do you propose?”
I chose my words carefully. “Give me a chance to read The Sanguinarius and have some time to let all this sink in. I didn’t believe in vampires or monsters before tonight, and I’m in what we in the medical field call ‘a state of shock.’ It’s only fair to know what I’m getting into. Besides, I’m a smart girl. I’m not going to join up with some organization just because you claim they’re the good guys.”
“They are the good guys.” There was no amusement in his tone, just absolute conviction in the truth of his words.
I rolled my eyes. “Yeah, well that’s what the Nazis said about themselves.”
He slowly rose to his feet. Power, dark and barely leashed, emanated from him. And that, combined with his physical presence, made him more terrifying than John Doe had been as he’d sunk his claws into me.
/> Of course, John Doe hadn’t been this hot. Somehow, my physical attraction to Nathan made him seem more dangerous.
But he didn’t attack me. He just invaded my personal space and shattered my comfort zone. He leaned down so our noses practically touched. “How do I know you’re not stalling so you can get back to Cyrus and gain his protection?”
“Because until you mentioned it, the thought hadn’t crossed my mind.” I don’t know if he expected me to cower or cry or melt into his arms, but I could tell by the pronounced blink of his eyes that I’d surprised him. “Give me a couple of weeks. You can even check in on me. I’ll give you an answer at the end.”
“Or you’ll run screaming.” He tried again to frighten me, but I was confident he wouldn’t kill me tonight. Something in the way he raked his eyes over my body, like he did now, raw and hungry, told me he had something of a soft spot for women. Or a hard spot, depending on how you looked at it.
A deliberately slow smile played across my lips. “Do I look like the kind of girl who runs away from trouble?”
He folded his arms across his chest. “You ran away from Ziggy.”
Touché. “Yeah, but Ziggy had an axe. Are you going to kill me with your bare hands?”
He grinned. “I’m good with my hands.”
Holy hormones, Batman.
The door to Ziggy’s room burst open, and Nathan instantly stepped away. The teen stalked angrily into the kitchen, middle finger raised toward Nathan as he passed.
“I know, I know, I’ve got an early class, I should get my rest,” the boy called. “Psych 101, I so need to be awake for that. I’m just making a sandwich before bed.”
“Bed?” I asked stupidly, checking my watch. Ten after ten. “I have to go.”
Nathan followed me to the door. “Have you thought of what you’ll do should Cyrus come looking for you?”
I hadn’t. “I’ll tell him to go away, that I gave at the office,” I said, my uneasiness at the prospect betrayed by my forced laugh.
I couldn’t stand the thought that I shared a plasma-level connection with the monster who’d attacked me. It was bad enough he’d invaded my nightmares. His blood had become part of me, too.
Blood Ties Book One: The Turning Page 4
