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

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СКАЧАТЬ followed me to the threshold and let me get halfway up the steps before he spoke again. I was struggling with my lighter when he called after me.

      “What makes you think you’re a vampire? That’s why you were trolling the vampire message boards, right? That’s where Ziggy found you. It’s his M.O.” He moved up the stairs with a grace I’d thought reserved for animals and put his hand over mine. His skin was ice cold. “No matter how many you smoke, you’ll never feel satisfied. The food you eat no longer fills you up, and you can’t understand why.”

      The cigarette suddenly looked ridiculous where it rested between my fingers. I trembled, and not entirely due to the cold.

      Nathan spoke again, but he sounded disconnected and far away.

      “Come upstairs,” he said. “I’ll try to explain.”

      I took a few more steps and tried to convince myself to keep walking, to get in my car and never come back, to avoid this side of town altogether. If I never saw this place again, I could pretend none of this had ever happened. There was always the hope that I’d never actually woken from surgery, and that I lingered in a coma in the ICU. As much as I wanted that to be true, I knew it wasn’t. I dropped the cigarette and watched it roll to the next step. “No chance I’m dreaming here, huh?”

      “No,” he said quietly. “We can, uh, tell our own kind.”

      I looked up sharply. The blood drained from my face, and I could tell by the way his expression softened that my fear was visible. “You’re a—”

      “Vampire, yes,” he finished for me when my voice trailed off.

      “Well, that settles it,” I said, feeling oddly relieved despite the fact I stood in a dark stairwell with a guy who claimed to be a vampire. “I’m crazy.”

      “You’re not crazy. We all go through this, when we change.” He looked up nervously as a pair of feet shuffled across the snowy sidewalk above us. “But this really isn’t the place to discuss this. Why don’t you come up to my apartment and we can talk.”

      “No—thanks though,” I said, unable to help my laughter. “It was really nice meeting you, Mr. Vampire, but I’ve got to go. I have to work tonight, and I just might be able to get a call in to my psychologist first. With any luck, he’ll give me a nice, fat prescription for some antipsychotics so I can get back to my normal life.”

      I turned away, but Nathan caught my arm. Faster than I could think to scream, I was pinned between his hard body and the harder brick wall. His hand clamped firmly over my mouth, muffling my terrified cry.

      “I didn’t want to have to do this,” he said through gritted teeth. Then he dipped his head, and his body went rigid against mine.

      When he moved his head back up, my heart stopped. The chiseled, handsome planes of his face were twisted, the skin stretched tight over a sharp, bony snout. Long fangs glinted in the dim light. He looked the way John Doe had, just before he’d ripped my throat open like a birthday present.

      Only his eyes held a glimmer of control. Until the day I die, I will remember Nathan’s eyes, so clear and gray and heartbreakingly honest behind that horrific mask.

      “Now do you see?” he asked.

      My heart pounding, I nodded. He pulled away and covered his face with his hands. When he looked up again, his normal features had returned into an expression of kindness and compassion. It disturbed me more than when he’d been a monster.

      “Come on. Let’s go inside and I’ll tell you anything you want to know.”

      Numb with cold and fear and hopelessness, I let him guide me up the steps to the sidewalk. “Anything?”

      “Sure,” he promised, pulling a set of keys from his pocket.

      “Okay.” I swallowed the lump in my throat. “Why me?”

      Three

      The Movement

      Nathan’s apartment was small, with too much furniture. The walls were lined with bracketed shelves, the kind you’d buy in a home-improvement store and put up on a weekend. Some were so laden with books that they bowed in the middle. Notebooks and legal pads, all scribbled on in barely legible handwriting, littered the coffee table. It was cluttered but not dirty.

      “Excuse our mess,” he said with an apologetic smile. His gaze flitted to the hall. A Marilyn Manson song blasted at full volume behind one of the closed doors. “Turn it down, Ziggy!”

      The music dropped a few decibels. Nathan and I stood awkwardly by the door for a moment. I suspected he was as uncomfortable as I was.

      “Kids,” I said with a shrug, looking in the direction of what I assumed was Ziggy’s room.

      “Let me take your coat.”

      I watched Nathan’s face as he helped me out of the garment. He looked awfully young, in my opinion, to have a son Ziggy’s age. But then, for all I knew, Nathan could be hundreds of years old.

      After he’d hung my coat on a hook by the door, he seemed to suddenly animate. “Have you fed?” He started for the kitchen and motioned for me to follow. “I’ve got some A pos.”

      I lingered in the doorway and watched as he retrieved a plastic collection bag of blood from his refrigerator. Then he lifted a teakettle from the dish rack next to the sink and ripped the top of the bag with his teeth as though he were opening a bag of chips. Snapping on the burner of the gas stove, he emptied the blood into the teakettle and set it over the flame.

      The process seemed so natural that I had to remind myself normal men didn’t keep blood in their refrigerators. Of course, most normal men didn’t own teakettles, either.

      “You’re not going to drink that, are you?” Med school warnings of blood-borne pathogens flashed through my mind.

      Though he didn’t look at me, I saw amusement on his face. “Yeah, you want some?”

      “No!” My stomach constricted. “Do you know how dangerous that is?”

      “Do you know how dangerous I am if I don’t drink it?” He leaned against the counter and wiped his hands on a kitchen towel. For the first time, I noticed how truly tall he was.

      According to my driver’s license, I stood five foot eight, and though my hospital stay had stripped some pounds from my frame, I was no wilting flower of a woman. Still, Nathan looked like he could easily rip me into pieces with his bare hands if he got the inclination.

      But his voice held a note of sadness. His eyes met mine briefly, but before I could understand the pained look in them, he turned away.

      “I’m sorry. You haven’t had anyone explain all this to you. Blood-drinking is just one of the realities of being a vampire. You’ve got to do it sometime, and there’s no time like the present.” His voice was hoarse. “Besides, if you hold out too long, you’ll snap and do something…regrettable.”

      “I’ll take my chances.” The kettle had begun to give off a warm, metallic smell. To my horror, my stomach actually rumbled. СКАЧАТЬ