Blood Ties Book One: The Turning

by Jennifer Armintrout

  “Don’t apologize, get Cyrus!”

  I looked up. He’d nearly reached the door. I leapt over the back of the sofa and blocked him. “Going somewhere?”

  “Guards!” he shouted, trying to get past me and still hold his eye in place.

  “Go ahead, call more in! I don’t care. I’m dead.” I stepped closer, pulling a stake from my back pocket. “And as far as I’m concerned, so are you. Now, you can go out like a little bitch with your bodyguards backing you up, or you can fight me until one of us is dead. It’s your call. Unless you’re afraid.”

  He dropped his hand from his bloodied face. His eye dangled from the socket on a cord of flesh. He pushed it back in and blinked to clear the blood-occluded lens. “I think I’ve underestimated you, Carrie.” Then, turning to the guards swarming Nathan, he shouted, “Everyone out!”

  I glanced at Nathan. He’d collapsed to the floor, but he was alive. I could feel his strength coursing through me.

  Cyrus stepped back so the guards could file out of the room. I sprang forward and plunged the stake into his skull through his borrowed eye. The bones of the socket separated with a crack. I could have rammed the stake right into his heart to get it over with, but I wanted him to suffer.

  “Whoops, was I supposed to wait for a signal or something?” The absurdity of the situation and my actions forced nerve-racked laughter from my throat. It died on a hysterical sob of despair, and I clenched my hands in front of me so hard I drew blood from my palms with my nails.

  He pulled ineffectually on the stake protruding from his face. My shock melted away and I seized the opportunity to grab him and pin his arms behind his back.

  “You know what’s great about Nathan? His blood is ten times more concentrated than yours because he hasn’t wasted it on a bunch of loser fledglings.” I wrenched the stake from his eye, flinging droplets of blood across the room. Then I stabbed the sharpened wood into his back. “You know what? I think it makes me stronger!”

  Despite the bravado of my words, my voice shook.

  His legs crumpled beneath him and he tried to speak, but choked on his blood. I closed my eyes and took the deepest breath I’ve ever taken in my whole life. The part of me that still believed he could be good wanted to escape the part of me that wounded him in rage. Guilt tore through me for doing something so violent to a man I’d thought I might have loved, but my logical mind was stronger. Cyrus had earned this, and if I didn’t kill him, he would repeat this sick game with other fledglings for an eternity. Summoning more courage, I twisted the stake and he gasped.

  “Drop him!”

  I looked up. Dahlia entered, pushing Max ahead of her. She surveyed the scene coolly.

  “Go help your friend,” she barked at Max, pointing at Nathan. “I want to have a word with Carrie.”

  The last time I saw Dahlia, she’d been running from a horde of hungry vampires. Now the air around her seemed to vibrate with unchecked power.

  Panic shot through me. I’d had more confidence fighting Cyrus, because I knew I would die, anyway. I hadn’t really given much thought to what would happen to Nathan and Max afterward. They might have been able to hold their own against Cyrus, but I was pretty sure that even together they were no match for Dahlia.

  But Max was still alive. I guess that stood as testament to his way with the ladies. Hopefully it would get Nathan and him out of this mess when I’d burned to cinders.

  Dahlia stood before me, her hands placed on her wide hips. “You marked me for death.”

  Gasping for breath on the marble floor, Cyrus tried to grab my leg.

  “Stay down!” Dahlia made a sweeping gesture with her hands and he fell back, pinned by invisible hands.

  I swallowed hard. “I didn’t know exactly how the whole ‘marked for death’ thing worked. I thought he’d offer Ziggy to his guests, and turn you.”

  “And then I’d get eaten by the Soul Eater?” There was a surprising lack of anger in her question. She didn’t accuse me so much as state a fact.

  The least I could do was be honest. “Maybe. I thought Cyrus would change you, but as far as the rest of the plan went, you were on your own.”

  “As usual.” She sighed. “It actually worked out better this way. I got my blood, I got my power—”

  “And I’m assuming a random biker vampire got himself a very nice piece of ugly dragon jewelry in exchange for a few pints of blood,” I interrupted.

  Dahlia raised an eyebrow. “Very astute of you.”

  She must have released Cyrus from whatever spell she’d cast, because he climbed to his feet unhindered. Lifting a hand to his blood-streaked face, he pressed his remaining eye back into its socket. “You don’t think I turned her, did you? I wouldn’t waste my blood.”

  I expected Dahlia to fly into a rage or strike him down or fall apart the way I’d seen her do before. But she just smiled. “Of course not. You never would have. You were just going to string me along until you got bored. Then you were going to kill me.”

  “Oh, but for a while you believed you had me,” he said with a laugh. “God, but you were easy to manipulate.”

  Cyrus turned to me. “That’s why I became so bored with her. The things I got her to do, Carrie. You thought what I did to you was bad.”

  “I really don’t care to hear about it.” No matter what had transpired between Dahlia and me, she didn’t deserve whatever perverse torture he’d inflicted on her.

  But she seemed genuinely unaffected by his taunting. “And I’d do it again. I got what I wanted. So did you. But you’re not going to kill me,” she said.

  A strange buzzing started in my head. It was as if someone had turned on a television, but all I could hear was the high-pitched frequency noise. Dahlia’s voice filled my head. It was nothing like the communication I’d had with Cyrus or Nathan through the blood tie. This was a different connection, watery and slightly garbled, and it made my skull vibrate with pain, but I could understand it enough to get her meaning. “The package never left the premises.”

  I saw her lips moving as she spoke to Cyrus, his superior expression as he answered her, but I couldn’t hear their words. I shook my head as if I were trying to clear water from my ears.

  “Thank you,” I thought back to her, my words ricocheting unpleasantly in my skull. “I’ll never be able to repay you.”

  “This doesn’t mean I like you. We’re not gonna go shopping for shoes or whatever the hell you’re thinking.”

  There was a moment of silence, then the buzzing stopped, then her next words were crystal clear in my mind. “Kill him.” I saw her tremble as she turned to leave the room. “He will kill me eventually. I need him dead. I’d do it, but I can’t. Kill him, and I’ll pay you back with your heart.”

  So, she did love him. Not enough to trust him with her life, and she shouldn’t have, but she did love him. She’d claimed it wasn’t his power that had drawn her to him. I’d had a hard time believing that, but now it was apparent. What had she said to me before?

  Some things aren’t good or evil. Some things just…are.

  I guess Dahlia just was, like a tornado or a tidal wave. A force of nature. I wasn’t going to try to understand her motives beyond simple self-preservation.

  She paused as she passed me on her way to the door. “Make it quick. Don’t let him suffer.”

  Then she left. I was so busy watching after her in awe that I forgot she’d released Cyrus.

  It was Max’s shout that alerted me. “Carrie, look out!”

  Cyrus clutched my blood-stained stake and rushed me with it. I leapt aside but lost my balance, tumbling onto my back. Without hesitation, he brought the stake down. I rolled away. The wood shattered as it drove full force into the floor.

  Max started toward me, but I waved him away. “Stay with Nathan!” Though no longer unconscious, Nathan wasn’t strong enough to fight off a swarm of gnats, let alone anything else that might come after him. And I still didn’t trust Dahlia, bless her crazy little
heart.

  I jumped on Cyrus’s back, using my momentum to propel him face-first into the wall. I reached forward to gouge at his ruined eyes and felt his teeth close on my forearm. My bones cracked easily in his jaws and blood dripped from my paralyzed fingertips.

  Oh, great. How are you going to fight with one arm, hotshot? He lifted me over his head and flung me across the room. I landed hard.

  He wiped his hands on his robe. “Having a little trouble?”

  “No, no trouble at all.” I hated the wheezing sound of my labored breathing. “Just pacing myself.”

  He laughed and held out his arms. “Come on, Carrie. Let’s stop this foolishness. You know you’ll never be able to kill me. There’s too much between us.”

  He didn’t sound as confident as he wanted me to think he was.

  “I’ve already killed tonight. Maybe I’ve got a taste for it now.”

  “You killed strangers. Men you didn’t know.” He took small steps toward me. I didn’t move, even when he put his arms around me. “Men who’d never touched you. Never been inside you. Men who’d never seen your most intimate thoughts and emotions.”

  I knew he was no longer my sire, but my heart—the proverbial one that couldn’t be so easily removed—remembered when he was. “It didn’t mean anything.”

  “It did,” he insisted, stroking my hair. “You know it did. You felt things for me you couldn’t ignore. You can’t ignore them now.”

  “I felt things for you because you manipulated me into feeling them. And I don’t feel them now.”

  I didn’t love him, I’d never loved him. Not in the way he’d wanted. How could I have?

  He looked more hurt by my words than by any physical violence I’d committed against him. “I loved you.”

  The admission froze me just long enough for him to get a better hold on me.

  Nathan leaned up weakly on his elbows. “Carrie, get away from him!”

  “Let her go!” Max got to his feet. “Don’t move a freaking muscle, Carrie!”

  I felt the sting of a blade at my neck. I’d been tricked.

  “I did love you, Carrie. I still do.” Cyrus’s voice was strained, and a cold tear splashed against my neck. “Why couldn’t you love me?”

  Love wasn’t a word I tossed around lightly, but with a knife at my neck, my priorities changed really fast. “Maybe I did love you.”

  “If you had loved me, you would have stayed with me. Why didn’t you stay?”

  I heard the same desperation in his tone as my pleading inner voice that criticized me every time I’d failed to please my father. The same desperation I’d seen in Cami, in the poor dead girl’s eyes the night she’d asked Cyrus why he no longer requested her company. The dashed hope that had stolen across Dahlia’s impassive face when she’d come to Cyrus’s room and found me in his bed, in her place.

  Cyrus really did want me to love him.

  Though it pained me, I had to lie to save my life. “I’ll stay.”

  “Carrie, no!” Nathan shouted, the look on his face as devastated as it had been the night Ziggy died. He was afraid.

  Trust me.

  I prayed Cyrus wouldn’t see through my ruse. “I’ll stay,” I repeated. “But I have to know I’ll be safe.”

  Pulling the knife away, Cyrus spun me into his arms and crushed me to his chest. “You’ll be safe. I swear, nothing will harm you again.”

  “But I can’t trust you.” I took the knife from his hand, and he let it go willingly. “You’ve already sent my heart to the Soul Eater.”

  Cyrus released me from his embrace. “I’ll get it back for you.”

  The relief on his face speared through my heart. You can’t feel guilty. He’s got this coming to him, Nathan told me. “I wish I could be sure,” I said, both to Cyrus and Nathan.

  His gaze flickered from my face to the lacquered box he had cradled so protectively earlier.

  Cyrus’s father tearing his chest apart.

  Cyrus tearing mine.

  I knew what lay in that box.

  He smiled haughtily at me. “Of course, I knew you’d see reason and come back to me. But I also know you’re not foolish. So I’ve brought some collateral.”

  He went to the table and lifted the box. “Here. Keep it safe until yours returns. But it will always belong to you.”

  “What is it?” I asked breathlessly as he slipped the box into my hands.

  “My heart.”

  He pulled me to him and kissed me. I felt a tremendous sadness. I knew what it was to want love and have it constantly elude me. But Cyrus wasn’t like me. Where I had forced myself to fill my life with other things, he had simply tried to force others to love him. In the end, his quest for power and control would be his undoing. Because now that he believed he finally had love, he’d left himself vulnerable.

  I lifted the lid of the box with my hand that still gripped the knife. I hesitated only a second, fortifying my courage with memories of every cruelty Cyrus had ever subjected me to. Leaning back, I kissed his cold, bloody cheek. “I’m so sorry, Cyrus.”

  And I truly was. I was sorry he didn’t have a better life, sorry he couldn’t have been the man he should have been, and I was even a little sorry I couldn’t make myself love him, for his sake. But there was no time for regret. I plunged the knife into the box, through the dried-up object that was his heart.

  Cyrus screamed.

  It was done.

  The flames started at his feet, but instead of traveling up his body, they burned from the inside out. He threw his head back with an anguished cry as blinding white flames shot out of his eyes, mouth and nostrils. His skin melted away, revealing the raw muscle beneath. A raging wind filled the room, stripping his bones clean, but still his scream went on and on. I clung to the marble table to keep from being swept away.

  Cyrus’s bare skeleton hung suspended in the air. A ball of pure, blue flame burned where his heart should have been. Within seconds, the bones reduced to ash and blew away.

  The wind stopped abruptly, and I fell to the floor.

  “That was, by far, the coolest thing I have ever seen,” Max said in awe.

  “Shut up, Max.” I heard footsteps, then Nathan knelt down and pulled me into his arms. “Carrie, are you okay?”

  I couldn’t speak. I could only sob.

  He crushed me in a hug that would have been smothering if I could have stopped crying to breathe in the first place.

  “It’s all over,” he soothed, stroking my hair. “You did good.”

  “We have to get her heart back from the Soul Eater,” Max said quietly. “Is there someone around here who can help?”

  “Dahlia,” I said, wiping my eyes. Without questioning me, Max and Nathan helped me to my feet, and we shuffled into the foyer.

  Dahlia descended the stairs, her face streaked with tears. “Did you do it?”

  I nodded.

  “Then come get your heart.”

  She’d stuffed the grayish object into a Ziploc bag. She held it out to me, and I looked it over with uncertainty.

  “That’s the one,” Nathan called. “I’d know it anywhere.”

  I took the bag.

  “If I ever see you guys again, I’ll probably kill you,” Dahlia warned.

  “Then I hope I never see you again,” I said, and I meant every word.

  I wanted to ask her if she’d stay at the mansion, or if she’d leave. More important, I needed to know if Clarence would be safe with her, since he’d rather stay here and die than face life outside these walls.

  But Nathan and Max already headed toward the door, and I didn’t feel like pressing my luck by hanging around any longer.

  I didn’t look back as we walked down the driveway, but I couldn’t help imagining that Cyrus’s freed soul glided through the watery afterlife beside me, all the way to the gate.

  Twenty-Five

  Something Ever After

  It was a week before I could get through the day without crying. Most of
the time, I stayed in Nathan’s room, curled up beneath the covers of his bed.

  Nathan stayed at my side when he wasn’t overseeing preparations for the reopening of the bookstore. We didn’t talk. I don’t think I said a word to him until the sixth day, when my depression lifted long enough for me to decide that I had to ask about the vision I’d seen.

  “How long were you married?”

  Nathan sighed and lay on the bed beside me. “This is one of those unavoidable conversations, isn’t it?”

  “Yep.” I reached for the mug of blood he’d left for me on the nightstand. It had begun to clot, but I drank it anyway, grateful that my appetite had returned.

  Nathan cleared his throat. “Almost thirteen years.”

  “You loved her a lot.” I laid my hand over his. I’m here for you. Let me in.

  When he looked at me, his eyes were rimmed in red. “I love her.”

  The present tense shocked me.

  He felt it, but he didn’t apologize. “I don’t want you to think I don’t care about you. I do. The blood tie sees to that, I don’t have a choice in that matter. But I can’t let her go.”

  “You don’t have to.” A tear slid down my cheek. “Nathan, do you—” Love me?

  “No.” He knew what I’d meant to ask him. A glimmer of pain crossed his features. My heart should have turned to stone in my chest, but I knew he wasn’t denying me. He was denying himself.

  We lay in silence for a few minutes, nothing but tension connecting us through the blood tie. Finally, he rolled to his side to face me. “Now, there’s still the question of where you stand with the Movement. Have you given that any more thought?”

  Of course. I was about to tell him exactly where he could stick his precious Movement, but the words didn’t make it past my lips before he spoke again.

  “Because I’m getting out.”

  I suddenly understood the meaning of the phrase You could have knocked me over with a feather. “Are you serious?”

  He laughed. “I’ve been on probation for more than seventy years now because I killed Marianne. I’ll never stop being sorry for it, and if someone walked through that door right now and gave me the chance to switch places with her, I’d do it. But the Movement will never forgive me, and until they stop throwing it back in my face, I’m not going to be able to move on.”