Blood Ties Book Three: Ashes To Ashes. Jennifer Armintrout
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in a randy mood.
“I don’t doubt that. But we’ve got bigger things to worry about than your libido.” I pushed him toward the door.
He went, grudgingly. “Fine. But you are in such trouble in the morning.”
I don’t doubt that, I thought, grim reality intruding unpleasantly. I’m sure by morning, we’ll all have jumped feetfirst into trouble.
We found Bella upstairs, stretched out on the leather sofa in the foyer with a book in her hands. Though I now knew the truth of what had transpired between her and Nathan, her treatment of Max still kept me from warming to her.
She sat up, her eyes moving from me to Nathan and back again. “Max is in the kitchen.”
Nathan seemed to sense the reason for her trepidation, and, because it’s the kind of person he is, he snarled, “I’m going to kill him,” before tearing toward the kitchen.
Bella didn’t look nearly as alarmed as Nathan had probably expected. She lifted one elegant eyebrow and glanced back to her book. “Is he really going to kill him?”
“No. I banned him from teasing Max. I never thought to forbid him from teasing you.” I slid my hands into the pockets of my jeans. “Listen, I’m sorry.”
She looked up, mild surprise registering on her face. “For what?”
I thought for sure she knew, the way she’d been hesitant to tell Nathan where to find Max. I jerked my thumb toward the kitchen door. “Be-because I almost slept with Max.”
“Ah, I understand. You would be more sorry if you had completed the act.” Her attention once again drifted to her book.
“That’s not what I meant. He’s kind of your…territory.” I winced at the dog terminology. “That didn’t come out quite right.”
“Max does not belong to me, and I do not wish him to.” Bella closed the volume with a frustrated sigh. “I do not wish to continue this conversation, either. There is much we need to do. Tell the men we will all meet in the dining room in fifteen minutes.”
She left without another word.
I knew Max was in full-blown denial about his feelings for Bella, but I hadn’t realized the reverse was true. According to Max, she’d ended their fling, but in typical Max fashion, he was sure she still wanted a relationship with him, while he, on the other hand, couldn’t care less about her.
Maybe he was right. A definite angry vibe had radiated from Bella, the same type I’d projected to her when I thought she was competition for Nathan.
In the kitchen, Nathan leaned against the counter, sipping blood from a mug, while Max wielded a mop angrily across a vicious blood spill on the floor beside the trash can.
“Did we kill someone this morning?” I crossed my arms and eyed the mop, which was soaked pink and seemed to be doing nothing but spreading watery blood over the bright white tile.
Nathan made a snort of disagreement into his cup. He swallowed with a grimace and licked a bit of blood from his upper lip. “Max threw a tantrum.”
“You’re a guest in this house,” Max snapped, jabbing the mop at Nathan’s feet. “Remember that.”
“And I appreciate your hospitality. Speaking of which, when do I get to nearly have sex with you?” Nathan took another sip from his cup, ignoring Max’s murderous scowl.
I smiled, covering it with my hand when Max’s glare fixed on me. “Well, Bella wants us to meet her in the dining room.”
“I guess it was too much of an inconvenience to stop in and tell us herself?” Max tossed the mop aside in disgust. “Maybe I had plans or an agenda or something. She can’t just move in and start ordering us around!”
“I didn’t think you’d mind so much if she moved in.” Nathan barely dodged the saltshaker, the object nearest Max when the comment enraged him.
“Methinks you hit a nerve.” I went to the refrigerator and pulled out a bag of blood.
Nathan took it and handed me his nearly full mug. “I’ve already had two cups. You finish this off.”
I stood, sipping my blood in silence, while Nathan studied me covertly, pretending to be interested in his bare feet, the floor tiles and the pots and pans suspended over the island. He knew I hated being watched while I fed, but his surreptitious looks made my stomach fill with butterflies.
Max cursed fluently as he scrubbed the stained tiles with a roll of paper towels and an absurd quantity of glass cleaner. As the minutes ticked by, it became painfully apparent none of us wanted to be the first to appear at Bella’s meeting.
“What do you think we’re going to talk about?” I ventured finally.
My voice ruptured the quiet so suddenly, Max hit his head on the counter as he straightened in surprise.
Blind to his distress, Nathan shrugged calmly. “A battle plan, I assume. With the Movement gone, we have no centralized form of communication. We won’t be able to get information from other operatives, and we don’t have the means to track the Oracle without Movement connections.”
“Not to mention the Soul Eater,” I added softly. A flicker of pain crossed Nathan’s face at the mention of his sire. “He’s still out there.”
“I hate to say it, but that might have something to do with the Oracle’s disappearance,” Max commented, still holding a hand to the top of his head.
As though the air had been sucked from the room, I gasped, and Nathan took a great, hissing breath at the realization the two vampires were likely connected.
“What could the Oracle want with the Soul Eater?” I asked quietly.
“What wouldn’t she want with him?” Nathan replied grimly. “She has power, but she’s been isolated for centuries. Think of what that would do to you.”
Max nodded in agreement. “You’d definitely lose touch with a lot of your connections.”
“And it would be easier picking up an evil coup in progress than starting your own from the ground up.” My throat clenched. “My God… You don’t think…”
Max looked from me to Nathan and back again, his jaw tight. “It would be handy to have a god in your pocket, and totally possible if you got in on the ground floor.”
The door from the dining room swung open and Bella stuck her head in with a disgusted look. “I did say fifteen minutes, did I not?”
Max shot us a withering glance and mimed choking the life out of what I assumed was an imaginary werewolf.
Like the rest of the condo, the dining room was oversize and ostentatious. I had seen it only a few times—once on the tour, another when I’d become disoriented and taken the wrong door from the foyer. Max rarely used the room at all. He preferred to drink his meals in the stark, antiseptic kitchen, rather than mahogany-paneled, windowless grandeur.
Bella had set up at one end of the massive table, in the clean, golden light of one of the dual chandeliers. She seated herself at the head of the table, behind a miscellany of archaic-looking objects, some of which I recognized as items Nathan sold in the bookstore. The others—a piece of black, concave glass resting atop a wire stand, and a large collection of what appeared to be desiccated chicken bones—were totally foreign.
Max took the chair to her left and scoffed at the heap of bones. “Dinner?”
Nathan pulled out a chair for me on her right and sat between Bella and me.
Though she’d clearly heard his comment, Bella didn’t give Max the pleasure of a response. “I tried diligently all day to make some kind of contact with my fellow assassins. Unfortunately, the werewolf contingency has all but fled Spain to return to our ancestral forests, and I know very few vampires.”