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 28

Welcome Home

My vampire heart beat loud in my chest as I approached Cyrus’s mansion. The windows were dark, and for a wild, panicked moment, I thought I’d missed my chance. Cyrus had moved on, my heart tucked away in some box that was hopefully marked Fragile.

Then I saw a gentle glow in the huge, floor-to-ceiling windows of his study, and my heart sank further. Nothing would take this confrontation from me. It was time.

While charging through the front gate would have probably been the brave thing to do, I’d never prided myself on being exceptionally brave. It also didn’t seem like a good idea to walk, barely armed, up to the gates of a heavily guarded castle and politely ask to be let in.

I patted my hip pocket, where I’d concealed a stake beneath the hem of my shirt. I didn’t even know if I had the physical power to use one against another vampire, especially Cyrus, but at least I’d have something to jab into one of the guards if they got too close.

I followed the sidewalk around the end of the block. The entrance to the guardhouse was so far from the main gate that someone would naturally assume they were two separate residences. I passed the gate where Nathan and I had shared our secret meetings to plot Ziggy’s escape, and I thought of Nathan, still asleep in his bed.

It seemed like all I had to do was walk into my room and Ziggy would be there, just like all those weeks ago. I glanced up the lawn. The lights were on in my old room. I felt an unexpected pang of jealousy at the thought I’d been replaced.

A thin figure picked his way gingerly down the lawn, toward the hedge maze. I recognized that profile.

“Clarence?” I called out. My voice echoed back at me in the cool air, and I gasped.

He squinted, then straightened quickly as recognition dawned on him. “Doc?”

My heart in my throat, I watched the old man scurry across the grass. The last thing I wanted was for him to break his hip. “Be careful!”

“Be careful,” he mocked. “You’re a damn fool, coming back here. They told me you were dead!”

From the pocket of his neatly pressed trousers, he produced a key ring covered with antique keys. After much muttering, he selected one and slipped it into the gate’s lock. Instead of crumbling to dust, it actually swung inward with a minimum of screeching. A few leaves from the clinging ivy pulled off, but no one would notice the gate had moved in a hundred years.

“Get your ass in here,” he scolded, glancing nervously up at the house. “Now, you got some explaining to do. Did you eat that boy?”

“What? No!” I said, a little too loudly.

Clarence shushed me. “Keep your voice down. The master’s home, and he’s been in a real bad mood since his daddy left.”

“I thought the Soul Eater couldn’t survive without his annual feeding?”

“Ain’t nothing going to kill that bastard. Believe me, this isn’t the first time somebody tried.” Clarence shook his head. “What happened to the boy?”

“Cyrus killed him.” I thought of the barrels in the basement and what Clarence had told me. “What did you do with him?”

“I didn’t do anything with him. I had the night off. They probably burned him with the rest of them.”

At least he wasn’t crammed in some barrel. I pointed to the house. “Where’s Cyrus?”

“In the study. He’s been there since the night of the party, trying to avoid her.” His last statement was delivered in an accusing tone.

“Her? Dahlia survived?”

Clarence’s face scrunched in an almost comical expression of disapproval. “Seems somebody told her she should find herself a vampire to turn her at the party.”

I ground my teeth. It would be one thing to fight Cyrus, but Dahlia was way out of my league. “What about the guards?”

“They’re trying to steer clear of Dahlia and the Master, but they’ll find you if you go in there.” He squinted at me. “You got backup coming, right?”

“No. I might as well stake myself right here on the lawn,” I muttered, looking up at the looming facade of the house.

“I got one in my back pocket,” Clarence offered. “This is gonna be ugly, isn’t it?”

I nodded. “You might want to get out of here.”

“No, when he’s gone, someone’s got to tidy things up around here,” he said with a sad smile.

“You don’t have to stay. I’ve got friends, we could help you get a condo in Florida or something. Anywhere you want.”

“I ain’t going nowhere.” He made a halfhearted shooing motion with his hands. “I told you before. I come with the house. You give him hell, Doc.”

I wanted to hug him, but I wouldn’t ask him to lower himself to hug a vampire. I couldn’t understand why he wouldn’t jump at the chance for freedom. I also couldn’t understand the strange compulsion people had to stay in their homes to face hurricanes and floods rather than evacuate. Fear of change, maybe. Or denial of their mortality. Whatever the reason, Clarence seemed to share their stay-put mentality, and I knew I wouldn’t change his mind. I made him promise to stay near the guardhouse and not show his face until morning. I watched until he disappeared into the maze. Then I headed up to the house.

After spending weeks in close quarters with the Fangs and Cyrus’s human groupies, the house felt downright empty. Apparently, he hadn’t gotten around to replacing the numerous pets he’d expended for the feast.

The guards were there, though. The second I opened the French doors to the foyer, all hell broke loose.

Two bodyguards waited for me in the center of the room. No doubt they’d watched me as I spoke to Clarence on the lawn, because reinforcements—a lot of them—jogged down the staircase. Behind me, the front doors flew open.

I whirled to see Nathan and Max framed in the wide doorway. Relief and dread crashed through me. I’m saved, I thought. Then I thought, We’re all dead.

“Don’t put on the coffee, we’re not staying long,” Max announced with a wide smile.

“Get out of here, Nathan,” I screamed as the first guard reached me. His hands crushed my shoulders. I grasped his forearms and fell backward, flipping him over my body as another guard came at me. I sprang to my feet and elbowed the next contender hard in the face. Blood spurted from between his fingers as he covered his broken nose. I punched him in the groin. When he doubled over I grabbed his shoulders and rammed the top of his head into my knee. He dropped limply to the floor.

I looked to Max and Nathan. Max had knocked out one guard and used a stun gun to put down another. Nathan was cornered by an opponent brandishing a stake. He tried to dodge it, but the blow landed the wooden spike in his shoulder.

“No!” I charged forward. Another set of hands closed on me. In my haste to get to Nathan, I gave a hard shove and sent the man flying into the wall. He crumpled like a rag doll.

I reached Nathan’s side as he pulled the stake free and a torrent of blood spilled out. The guard pulled another stake from his belt and lunged, but not before I caught him. I bared my fangs before I realized I’d changed. If Nathan hadn’t called to me, I would have bitten into the man’s neck.

“Why not let her?”

Max and Nathan froze at the voice. I let go of the guard and turned.

Cyrus strode from the open doors of the study. His hair was half tied back in a disheveled braid, and his fur-lined robe seemed to swallow him up. Dark hollows beneath his eyes marred his pale complexion. He looked like he hadn’t slept or fed in days.

“You’ve never had the chance to see her feed, have you, Nolen?” He smiled sadly. “It’s something every sire should experience.”

Arms gripped me from behind at the same time I saw guards grab Nathan and Max. I tensed, prepared to fight, but I felt the point of a stake against my breastbone.

My gaze met Nathan’s and I heard his voice in my head. Don’t move.

Max turned his face to look at Nathan. “What the hell is he talking about?”

Cyrus crossed to me, stroking the side of my face gently with the back of his hand. With the blood tie between us dead, I felt nothing but revulsion.

His eyes, one gold-flecked green, the other his own, icy blue, turned cold and hollow. “It really is over, then.”

Howling in outrage, like a child whose mischief had been thwarted, he pounded his thighs with his fists. He rounded on Nathan. “Why? Why did you take her from me?”

“I’d like to know that myself,” Max said through clenched teeth.

Oh, God, don’t let him turn on us. I didn’t know Max well enough to tell if he’d report Nathan’s indiscretion to the Movement, or if he’d just be disgusted enough to abandon this mission.

Nathan sent me a comforting thought. Don’t worry, sweetheart. He’s not going anywhere. We’re going to get out of this.

“You’ve got no one to blame but yourself, Cyrus.” Nathan nodded in my direction. “You killed her in that alley. My blood restored her. Finders keepers.”

Just as he finished his sentence, Cyrus struck him. Nathan’s head snapped back and blood seeped from his nose. For a moment, I feared he would lose consciousness.

Cyrus shook his wrist, a pained look on his face. For hands so accustomed to violence, they were awfully delicate. “Finders keepers? Like the way I found your cast-off child and made him my own?”

Nathan struggled to break free, and would have managed, if four other guards hadn’t rushed in to hold him. Vampires are strong, but not that strong.

One of the sentries brought his knee up hard between Nathan’s legs. He doubled over with a grunt of pain.

“Cyrus, please, tell them to stop!” I cried.

My former sire snapped his fingers to the guard restraining me, and the stake at my chest pierced my skin.

Nathan stopped struggling immediately. Rather than panicking, he laughed. “Cyrus, you know staking her isn’t going to do anything.”

“Won’t it?”

The wood pressed deeper, digging into my flesh. While it wouldn’t cause me to ash-out and burst into flame, a wound to my remaining heart probably wasn’t something to sneeze at. “Stop, please!”

Don’t beg him, Carrie. I can’t stand to hear you beg. Nathan’s eyes were distraught. I looked away.

“Cyrus, knock it off,” he growled. “Look, I’m playing nice.”

“That’s noble of you.” Cyrus waved away the sentry that held me. “It’s so nice that you’d defend her after what she did to your son.”

Nathan shook his head. “Not going to work, Cyrus. I’m her sire now. I can see—”

I tried to hold back my memories from the night I’d fed from Ziggy, but in my panic, they overwhelmed me. They were powerfully vivid and painfully erotic. And I couldn’t hide them from Nathan.

His anger swelled, but no more than I’d expected. I wanted to tell you, I thought firmly, but he didn’t answer. Nathan purposely ignored the blood tie, and after decades of shutting out the Soul Eater, he’d perfected his technique. My thoughts bounced off him like tennis balls against a brick wall.

But he didn’t show any outward sign of my betrayal. “She told me everything. Sorry to disappoint you.”

“I really wish someone would have told me everything,” Max snarled. “I’m probably gonna get marked for death just for breathing the same air as all of you. I don’t know what’s going on here, but this is fucked up!”

A frown creased Cyrus’s brow. “Kill that one.”

“No!” Nathan and I shouted at the same time. I felt some of his rage toward me ebb, like a stone lifting off my chest.