Читать книгу 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 - Jennifer Armintrout, Jennifer Armintrout - Страница 27

I Left My Heart in San Francisco

Though I dreaded the fallout from our encounter, the nights that followed were too busy to be very awkward.

During my recovery, Nathan had been feeding me his blood. With nothing to replace what he’d given, he’d seriously drained himself. Combined with the marathon insomnia and the energy he’d expended with me, he could barely get out of bed the next evening.

Luckily, I was able to contact his emergency donor. A perky suburban woman, she graciously dropped off neatly labeled and dated bags of blood. The first night, he was so weak I had to hold his head up so he could drink, but he improved quickly after that.

Ziggy’s room was nearly packed up. Nathan had obviously been splitting his time between caring for me and repressing more memories. The only indication that the kid had ever lived in the apartment at all was the small collection of framed pictures on the bookcase in the living room. I rummaged through the boxes and brought out a few other items, tucking them away in places I knew Nathan would find them later. I wasn’t about to let him forget Ziggy.

Little by little, I began to learn about Nathan’s past. Not that he helped with the process. Occasionally, things would come to me in a flash of intuition from the blood he’d shared with me. That’s how I learned the photograph hidden in the closet was indeed his wedding portrait, and the woman in it was Marianne. She’d been seventeen when they’d wed, and it had been a quickly arranged affair, owing to the bundle of joy that had already been on its way. But she’d lost the baby, and subsequent others, the first sign of the tumors ravaging her organs. The feelings of guilt and desperation that blanketed those memories was too thick to see past at times.

I didn’t go to bed with him again, and neither of us mentioned what had happened before. I slept on the couch for a few days until Nathan recovered and took Ziggy’s things to storage. One day he’d tossed me a clean set of sheets when he returned and said, “Ziggy’s room is all yours.”

Apparently, he wanted me to stay. Though I balked at the fact he hadn’t bothered to ask me if I wanted to, I didn’t argue. There was nowhere else to go, and no other place I felt safe.

After another two weeks, I wondered if Cyrus would ever bother me again. At first, it had been easy to assume he bided his time, waiting for an opportunity to strike. But I knew he wasn’t patient enough to wait a full month.

The nights grew gradually shorter as spring approached. Renovations on the bookstore were nearly completed, and I found myself working with Nathan, cataloguing inventory in preparation for the upcoming grand reopening. Still, reading ISBN numbers hardly kept my mind off the nagging feeling that any moment, Cyrus would come back for me.

It didn’t help that, for the fourth day in a row, I woke to find Nathan beside me in the tiny twin bed.

I knew he wasn’t asleep. “Nathan, what’s going on?”

He leaned up behind me, propping his chin on my arm. “Max will be here tomorrow. We postponed the mission when I told him what happened to you, but the Movement is getting impatient.”

“We’ve still got to kill Cyrus?” The calm feeling that had just begun to take root in me vanished. I rolled over to face Nathan, careful not to push him off the bed.

His expression confirmed my fear before his words did. “We better get it out of the way now. Before Max goes after the Soul Eater.”

“Okay.” I tried to smile and appear unconcerned. “What’s the plan?”

I shouldn’t have bothered with the facade. He didn’t. “Don’t get killed.”

“How do we do that?” My voice wavered as a balloon of fear swelled in my chest.

He didn’t answer right away. He toyed with one strap of the tank top I’d worn to bed, sliding it off my shoulder and back again. In the semidarkness of the room, he looked tired and defeated. “I don’t know.”

He was certain he’d lose me. His terror surrounded me in waves, terror that he’d feel the same pain over me that he’d felt over Ziggy. Over Marianne.

But Nathan would never admit he felt anything toward me but the obligation any sire feels toward their fledgling. It was a good thing, too. I wasn’t sure I was ready to accept more from him.

I rolled over and let him pull me into the curve of his body. He locked his arms around me as if I would try to escape, but relaxed some when I laid my hand over his.

I wasn’t ready to accept anything more than friendship from him because I wasn’t ready to admit the depth of my feelings for him, either. As long as we both ignored our feelings, we could live, awkwardly but happily, in our dysfunction.

The workmen were just finishing up when we got downstairs that night. While Nathan engaged them in a fascinating conversation about wall studs, I went to the mailbox.

I dropped the assorted bills and catalogs on the counter, more concerned with the large padded envelope that had been stuffed in with them. It was addressed to Dr. C. Ames.

I waited until the workmen left before I presented the envelope to Nathan. “I’m not opening this. It looks like ‘discreet packaging,’ if you know what I mean.”

“Very funny,” Nathan said, snatching it from me. He ripped the brown paper open and caught the object that fell out. “This is yours. It’s nothing dirty. I hope you aren’t too disappointed.”

It was another copy of The Sanguinarius. This copy was a little more beaten up than the previous one.

Nathan frowned and headed to the storeroom. “Near mint my ass! Bluebird45 is getting some seriously bad feedback.”

“You bought this on eBay?” I flipped to a random page and started reading. “Man, you really can get anything on there.”

The shop door swung open, and the bells, which Nathan had yet to replace, announced Max’s shrill entrance.

Max was as young, confident and good-looking as I remembered. But I’d learned from Nathan that Max had a reputation as a merciless assassin. Judging from all the purple hickeys above the collar of his T-shirt, he was a merciless ladies’ man, as well.

“I love this town, I love this town!” He jumped and grabbed the lintel of the doorway to swing inside.

“Have a good flight?” Nathan didn’t look up from the stack of mail he browsed through.

“You better believe it!” Max grinned from ear to ear. “Listen, am I now in the seven-mile-high club, or does this just mark my seventh membership card?”

“Excuse me, lady present!” I turned back to the book.

Max sidled up behind me to read over my shoulder. “Whatcha doin’?”

“Not you,” Nathan snapped.

I ignored him. “Reading The Sanguinarius.”

I turned a page and was greeted by a particularly gruesome diagram of the vampire stomach. “There is no way my insides look like that. I won’t stand for it.”

Max laughed. “It’s amazing how many vampires are all caught up in that worthless book. Stake plus heart equals dead vampire. That’s all you need to know.”

“Actually, it depends on which heart you hit,” Nathan said quietly. “There are two. Or should be.”

A foreboding chill crept up my back. I studied Nathan’s face. He looked away.

I frantically flipped through the book until I found a diagram of the vampire heart. I scanned the text on the opposite page.

The main weakness in vampyre physiology is the first of the two hearts, the original human organ. Rendered obsolete by the emergence of the seven-chambered vampyre heart, it now serves as the most efficient way to dispose of the creature.

Max, apparently oblivious to my sudden frenzied state, began to hum, and something about the tune grated on my nerves. It was disturbingly familiar.

To pierce the human heart with any implement is to render the vampyre instantly deceased by incineration.

“Nathan, why didn’t you tell me?” Tears slid down my face as the physical emptiness in my chest made itself known. Or it could have been my imagination.

“I didn’t want to frighten you.”

“What?” I hadn’t intended to sound so shrill and loud. I lowered my voice. “How dare you! This is my life. You should have told me!”

Max wandered away from the conversation, feigning great interest in the tape on the bare drywall on the opposite side of the room.

Nathan leaned in close. “How was I supposed to tell you something like that? For the past four days, I’ve stayed up while you slept, watching for any sign you were going to—” He looked away. “My blood runs in your veins. I know every part of you. If I didn’t tell you what he’d done, I thought maybe…maybe nothing would ever come of it and I could forget.”

Now I understood his desperate fear, and his certainty he couldn’t protect me. But he had no right to keep me in the dark about my own mortality.

On the other side of the store, Max still hummed. The tune brought tears to my eyes.

I Left My Heart in San Francisco.

The heart that remained pounded in my chest as I ran to the door.

“Carrie, wait!” Nathan called after me.

I sprinted up the stairs to the sidewalk. The nights had grown somewhat warmer, and the rain that splashed the pavement didn’t freeze.

For whatever reason, Nathan didn’t follow me. While I hadn’t wanted company, I certainly didn’t want to think he’d just thrown up his hands and said, “Oh, well.”

Not when Cyrus could kill me at any second.

I walked past the alley. Though my blood had long since washed away, I imagined I could smell it. My old, tainted blood, my former sire’s blood.

It had been on his hands, his face, his clothes when he’d leaned over me that night.

The memory of the Soul Eater tearing through Cyrus’s chest was suddenly so much clearer. Cyrus had told me the Soul Eater had killed his own sire. So he must have removed Cyrus’s heart as an insurance policy. No one would betray someone who could kill them via remote.

Cyrus had taken my heart to ensure I wouldn’t betray him. Did he think I would return to him?

As I walked, I periodically checked my skin to make sure it wasn’t flaking away to ash and embers. Although he was no longer my sire, I knew Cyrus well enough to realize this was yet another installment of his torture. He could destroy my heart whenever he felt like it, and I’d never see death coming. All I could think of were Cyrus’s memories of his father holding him down, cutting him open. His scar had faded but it mirrored my own. Did his father still control him with possession of his heart?

I walked around all night. Occasionally, I’d question The Sanguinarius. Why did we grow second hearts? Eventually, I settled on the most likely explanation, that the vampire heart was needed to push larger quantities of blood to our abnormally strong limbs. The old heart was rendered obsolete, yet somehow maintained a vital connection to our life force, even if it wasn’t connected to us physically.

Ancient peoples believed the heart to be the seat of a person’s soul. Maybe they were on to something. The fact I could be removed from this plane of existence if my human heart is destroyed appeared to prove their hypothesis. I promised myself I’d research it, if I lived long enough.

Several times I found myself nearing Cyrus’s neighborhood and turned back. When the sun began to rise, I headed back to the apartment. My legs had grown tired hours before, but my anger propelled me to stay away.

Nathan hadn’t come to look for me. Ziggy’s van still rusted beside the curb, and I saw light in the living room windows.

Max sat on the couch, flipping through television channels with a bored look on his face. He held up a hand in a halfhearted wave to greet me.

There was no sign of Nathan. “Where is he?”

Max pointed down the hall. “He’s been in there since you left. At least he stopped playing Dark Side of the Moon. I was about to go in there and fling the damn CD player out the window.”

I stomped toward Nathan’s bedroom, but Max’s next statement stopped me.

“We’re going in tomorrow night. Nathan didn’t want me to tell you, but I thought you should know, seeing as it’s your sire and everything we’re going to off.”

So Nathan hadn’t told Max what had transpired the night of the meeting. He must have had his reasons. Maybe Max was as fanatical about the Movement as Nathan had been.

“Why didn’t he want me to know?”

“Probably because he’s crazy about you and doesn’t want you to get hurt.” Max shrugged. “Or maybe he just thinks you’re going to fuck everything up.”

I laughed. “I’ll bet it’s the second one.”

Max dropped the remote and patted the couch beside him. “Come, have a chat with me.”

I really wanted to go into the other room and give Nathan a piece of my mind, but the way Max was looking at me told me that might not be a good idea. I sat next to him, bristling when he wrapped a companionable arm around my shoulder.

“I’m not getting fresh,” he assured me. “I just think better with my arm around a beautiful woman.”

I rolled my eyes. “Then think fast, before I remove that arm.”

“Okay, okay.” He chuckled. “Just let me give you some real quick advice. I’ve known Nathan for a while now. He hasn’t had a girlfriend since, God, I think it was ’84. And she wasn’t what you would call a wild woman. I think she was a CPA.

“The point is, Nathan doesn’t get attached to people, and when he does, he has a tendency to shut down. There’s some scary shit in his past. I’m not even going to pretend to know the whole story. But he won’t let himself get close to anyone. So, if you’re thinking of going in there and tearing him a new one, keep in mind you might hurt him a little more than you intended to. And you’ll just prove his ‘love hurts’ theory right.”

I swallowed hard, remembering words Cyrus had spat in anger. “Max, did Nathan really kill his wife?”

It must have been a secret he was warned not to reveal, because he chewed his lip thoughtfully for a moment.

“Don’t lie to me, Max. I’ll know if you do.” I lifted his arm off my shoulders. “Did Nathan kill his wife?”

Max sighed. “Yes. At least, that’s what I’ve heard.”

“But it wasn’t his fault,” I said, shaking my head. “I mean, he didn’t mean to do it, right?”

“I wish I could tell you that, kiddo.” Max’s expression was heartbreakingly tender. “But he was a different person then.”

I excused myself and headed for the room I’d only recently begun to think of as mine.

The couch springs creaked miserably as Max stood. “He didn’t want you to go with us because he didn’t want you to get hurt. That was his main concern. I don’t know what’s going on with you two, but don’t waste the time you’ve got left. Take it from me, eternity gets pretty damn lonely after a while.”

I lay awake for a long time, pondering Max’s words, and the knowledge that at any moment, I could just poof out of existence.

It wasn’t fair to let Nathan and Max risk their lives to kill Cyrus. Not when he’d just end up killing me, too. No matter how many times I thought it through, I came to the same conclusion. I should go to Cyrus and kill him myself. If he took me out in the process, the only loss would be me. And as far as I was concerned, I was dead already.

I listened until I heard Max turn off the television, then I crept into Nathan’s bedroom. He woke immediately, bolting upright in bed. “Carrie? What’s wrong?”

“Shh.” I peeled off my nightgown and climbed in beside him. His arms closed around me and he pulled me beneath him.

This time, the only urgency came from his desire for me. He touched me as though reassuring himself I was still there, we still had time.

We didn’t speak. I think we were both afraid of making it mean too much. Perhaps Nathan thought to spare me the pain of his death. I know I would have done anything to spare him the pain of mine.

So when he kissed me, I kept the contact brief. When he slid down my body to tease me with his mouth, I didn’t cry out his name. And when he finally spoke to ask me what I wanted, I didn’t say I wanted him to make love to me. I told him to fuck me.

Angrily, he obliged. He spread my legs wide and plunged into me. Besides that, the most contact our bodies made was the slap of his hips against my thighs and the hard grip he had on my ankles as he held them high and apart. The bed shook and slammed against the wall, and I didn’t bother to muffle my screams of pleasure. He came with a shudder that sounded like a sob and pulled me into a fierce embrace.

I kissed his forehead and held him tight. Who was I kidding? Trying to block off my emotions for him would be like trying to stop a leak in the Hoover Dam with a cork. I had to know that eventually, the cork would shoot out and my feelings would just gush everywhere, bringing nothing but death and destruction to the valley below.

Okay, maybe it wouldn’t be that dramatic. But it was foolish of me to think that I could deny the bond created by the blood tie, or my feelings for Nathan that had existed long before our tie was created.

“Nathan,” I said softly through my tears. “Nathan, I—”

“Please, don’t say it.” His words might have hurt me had I not felt the meaning behind them.

Please, don’t say it, or I won’t be able to deny that I feel it. And I’m too afraid to let myself feel it.

“I won’t,” I promised.

He laced his fingers with mine and raised my hand to his lips. “Thank you.”

But when he fell asleep, I kissed him and whispered, “I love you, Nathan.”

Or Nolen. Or whatever. Even if I never get to find out who you are, I love you.

Minutes after sunset, I slipped from his arms and dressed quietly. I didn’t leave a note because I had no idea what I planned to do.

Only one thing was certain: by sunrise, either Cyrus would be dead, or I would be.