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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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. “So, am I going to live forever?”
“Why is that the first thing everyone asks?” he mused. “No, you probably won’t live forever.”
“Probably? That doesn’t sound reassuring.”
“Wasn’t meant to.” He tossed the towel over his shoulder. “We’re not susceptible to the ravages of time or disease, and we have a healing ability that increases with age. But the list of things that can kill us is a mile long. Sunlight, holy water, hell, even a bad-enough car accident can take us out.”
He poured some blood into a chipped ceramic mug and motioned toward the dinette table. “If you don’t want this, can I get you something else?”
“No, thanks.” I sat in the chair he pulled out for me. “Do you keep human food in here?”
“Yeah,” he said as he sat across from me. “I like it every now and then. I just can’t live off it. And Ziggy needs to eat.”
I frowned. Ziggy had clearly lured me to the shop in order to kill me. It didn’t make a lot of sense, considering he lived with a vampire himself.
“Um…does your son know you’re a vampire?”
“My son?” Nathan looked confused for a moment, then he laughed, a deep, rich sound that warmed me. “Ziggy’s not my son. But I can see where you’d get that impression. He’s a…he’s a friend.”
A friend? I was hip. I could read between the lines. It figured that the first decent guy I’d met in this city was gay. “He’s a little young for you, don’t you think?”
An embarrassed smile curved Nathan’s lips. “I’m not a homosexual, Carrie. Ziggy’s my blood donor. I watch out for him, that’s all.”
That was the first time he’d used my name instead of addressing me as Doctor or Miss Ames. In his thick accent—I was fairly certain he was Scottish—my generic, first-pick-from-the-baby-name-book moniker sounded exotic and almost sensual. I wondered if he could sense the attraction I felt, the heat coursing through my blood.
If he did, he had the courtesy not to comment on it. I was grateful for that. “So why did he try to kill me? I mean, if you’re a vampire, and he knows it and gives you his blood and everything, what’s his beef with me?”
Nathan sipped from his mug. “It’s complicated.”
I glanced at the clock on the wall. “I’ve got a few hours.”
He seemed to consider his response for a moment. Setting his cup aside, he braced his elbows on the table and covered his face with his hands. “Listen, you seem like a real nice girl, but there’s something I have to ask you, and it’s a little personal.”
Despite the ominous tone of the question, I nodded. At this point, I wanted answers. I’d fill out a complete medical history if he asked. “Shoot.”
“I followed your story in the papers very closely and I have some concerns. Namely, why you were in the morgue that night.” When his eyes met mine, I saw the real question there.
“You think I did this on purpose?”
He shrugged, all compassion and friendliness gone from his face. “You tell me.”
I had spent the past month in a haze of depression, deprived of normal life by a mysterious illness I couldn’t shake. My bones ached twenty-four hours a day. My head throbbed at the faintest glimmer of light. If I was indeed a vampire, I certainly wasn’t living out the posh existence of a Count Dracula or a Lestat de Lioncourt. I was in a living hell, certainly not by choice.
“Please,” he said quietly. “I need to know.”
I could have slapped him. “No! What kind of freak do you think I am?”
He shrugged. “There are some people out there, sick people, who want to escape their lives. Maybe they’ve had some sort of trauma, an illness, the loss of a loved one.” He looked me dead in the eyes. “The loss of your parents.”
“How do you know about my parents?” I asked through tightly clenched teeth. I hadn’t spoken about them since the car accident that had killed them. They’d been on their way to visit me at college. Guilt had kept me from opening up about them. No one, save my distant, remaining relatives in Oregon—many of whom I’d met for the first time at the funeral—knew anything about them or the circumstances of their death.
“I have connections,” he said, as if we were discussing how he’d obtained courtside Lakers’ tickets instead of how he’d invaded my privacy. He actually had the nerve to reach across the table and take my hand. “I know what it’s like to lose someone. Believe me. I can see why you’d want—”
“I didn’t want this!”
I hadn’t meant to scream, but it felt good. I wanted to do it again. The ugliness and horror of the past month seemed to swell inside me, pushing me beyond the limits of my self-control.
“Carrie, please—” he tried again, but I ignored him.
My knees bumped the table as I stood, and Nathan’s mug toppled over, splashing warm blood across the tabletop. The sight held a sick fascination for me, and in a flash I saw a clear image of myself leaning over and licking it up. I shook my head to destroy the vision. “I didn’t want this!”
Jerking the collar of my sweatshirt aside, I jabbed a finger at the barely healed scar