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 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 СКАЧАТЬ