Blood Ties Book Three: Ashes To Ashes. Jennifer Armintrout

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СКАЧАТЬ you go to fight the Oracle, you will lose.” Nathan gripped the arms of the chair and rose to his feet. “Don’t be so stubborn about this that you get yourself killed!”

      “Hey, hey!” I shouted, standing quickly to step between Nathan and Max. The testosterone level was growing to an unmanageable level. “We’re not going to get anywhere fighting.”

      “That I can agree with,” Bella sulked, still lying calmly on the floor.

      I shot her an angry glance and turned to Nathan. “At the very least, Max and Bella should try to find out more about this Oracle situation. Now, if that means going to Boston—”

      “Which I’m going to do, anyway,” Max snarled.

      I raised a palm to silence him. “If that means going, then maybe they have to go. But they don’t have to engage in full-on combat. They can do some recon, find out what she’s up to, and get back to us.”

      I turned to Max. “You have to admit, it’s pretty stupid to rush in to kill her when we don’t even know what she’s got planned. What’s to say that if we kill her, the Soul Eater can’t finish whatever it is she’s started, if she’s started anything at all?”

      “You have a point,” Max conceded.

      Nathan wasn’t so easily swayed. “And if the Oracle has an ambush waiting?”

      “Max and Bella are Movement trained assassins.” I refrained from pointing out Bella had been seriously injured and that Nathan and Max had been rendered powerless by the Oracle. “They’re more than capable of taking care of themselves. Remember your training?”

      “I remember,” he said with gritted teeth. “But let’s suppose they go and follow the Oracle, and learn all her secrets. What are we going to be doing?”

      “Well, we’ll check out what’s going on with the Soul Eater,” I replied lamely.

      “Without any Movement contacts and no idea where to start looking?” Nathan laughed derisively. “What are you going to do? Wave a magic wand? Or are we going to go back to the tarot cards?”

      His contempt steeled my resolve to be the victor in this argument. “Nope. Not tarot cards. Think about it. You’ve got a blood tie to the Soul Eater. I realize it’s a risk to contact him, but it’s even riskier to let him roam around unchecked.”

      I slipped my hand into Nathan’s back pocket, jerking him forward so our pelvises bumped. Almost before the thought fully formed, before I had any time to register shock at what I suggested, the words slipped past my lips: “And I’ve got Cyrus.”

       Six: Conversations with Live People

      “Hello?”

      I don’t know what I was expecting when I dialed the number Information had given me. I guess I was still reeling from the discovery that Cyrus even had a listed number. When his voice came across the line, I was stunned. Whatever it was I thought would happen, Cyrus ans wering the phone wasn’t it.

      “Hello?” he repeated. “Look, I can hear you breathing, and it is neither sexy nor interesting. If you’d like to call back when you have something sexy or interesting to say, I will be happy to chat. Until then—”

      “Cyrus, it’s me.” I swallowed thickly. “It’s Carrie.”

      There was a long pause. I wondered if he’d hung up, anyway.

      “Carrie.” His voice seemed faint and far away. “How are you?”

      “I’m fine.” I glanced across the room, where Nathan sat on the overstuffed sofa, pretending to be absorbed in one of my dog-eared Terry Prachett novels.

      I stood beside the bed. I’d been sitting on it when I’d first made the call, but the sound of Cyrus’s voice had pulled me to my feet. It seemed way too intimate, perverted even, to be lounging on a bed, talking to Cyrus, with Nathan in the room.

      “I’m fine,” I repeated, turning my back on Nathan. “And you?”

      “As well as can be expected.” His heavy sigh made a harsh, static sound on the line. “I have a job now.”

      “A job?” I heard Nathan’s grunt of stifled laughter and pointedly ignored it. “That’s great. What do you do?”

      “Do you promise not to laugh?” Cyrus didn’t seem too concerned, considering he was already chuckling himself. “I stock shelves in a grocery store.”

      “No!” The very idea rocked the foundations of reality for me. Cyrus, my power-hungry, Euro-trash former sire, working in a grocery store?

      He gave another heavy sigh. “You wouldn’t believe the number of times a day I would trade my soul for a pair of fangs. Really, the customers…my God, it’s as if they’re brain dead.”

      I laughed the sympathetic laugh required for such a comment, and we lapsed into uncomfortable silence.

      “So,” I began uneasily. “You’re back in Grand Rapids for good then?”

      He made an affirmative noise. “I found Mouse’s sister. I can’t say I made any real progress there. But she knows what happened. At least, she knows the sanitized version.”

      “How did she take it?” Cyrus had told me very little about the girl he’d named Mouse. When he’d left Grand Rapids to seek out her next of kin, I’d been under the impression he’d had little hope of finding anyone.

      “She asked me for a hundred bucks and offered to, ah, compensate me for it.” He sounded as though the subject made him tired. “She didn’t even care.”

      “At least you cared.” It was a stupid thing to say, but I’d never been good at condolences. “Where are you staying?”

      “In a horrible apartment downtown, near the college. The absolute worst part of the city. Hippies as far as the eye can see.” I heard the smile in his voice as he added, “Near your sire’s place, actually.”

      “Uh-huh.” Great. All notions of domestic bliss, or however close Nathan and I could come to it, shattered by geographical coincidence.

      “It wasn’t my idea, really,” Cyrus rushed to add. “Dahlia set it up for me.”

      “Oh, so you’ve been talking to Dahlia.” I turned and met Nathan’s suddenly alert glance with a worried one of my own. “That’s comforting. What did you have to do to earn her help?”

      “Still jealous, are we?” Cyrus laughed. “Don’t worry. It was a trade—the mansion for one room with a kitchenette and a tiny bathroom with a stall shower and a door that doesn’t close all the way. Doesn’t seem like a fair trade, but life has been consistently unfair to me for a while now.”

      “Oh, how nice. I didn’t realize I’d been invited to the pity party,” I mused.

      He laughed again. “Carrie, I stock bricks of pasteurized, processed cheese for seven dollars an hour. Indulge me if I miss the comforts of my former life a bit.”

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