LITMIR.BIZ

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rubbing my head, I finally saw what was going on.

      Ziggy had woken up. He’d made it halfway up the steps, from what I could tell, and now Nathan had one of his legs in a death grip, trying to pull him away from the trapdoor. Bill leaned against the wall, hands to his throat, a look of shock—the clinical kind—on his face.

      “Carrie!” Nathan shouted, and I realized that was what had woken me in the first place. “Help Bill before he bleeds to death!”

      I walked awkwardly on my knees to Bill’s side. Blood cascaded from between his fingers to stain the front of his T-shirt. “He bit me,” he mumbled. “He bit me.”

      “I take it you’ve never been bitten by a vampire before,” I started, completely calm, completely oblivious to the struggle behind me. If I got him talking, diverted his focus, I might be able to save him. “It hurts like hell, doesn’t it?”

      His forehead shone with perspiration, and he looked not at me, but through me. “He bit me.”

      “I know. Let me just…” I gently pried his hands away from his wounded throat. I’d braced myself for the blood to spray, and thankfully, it didn’t. I replaced his hand with my own, pulling the bottom of his shirt up to press against the wound.

      Behind me, Nathan growled to Ziggy, “Sit down and we’ll talk about this!”

      “Talk, my ass!” There was a thud, and I imagined Ziggy’s foot connecting with Nathan’s chest. There was a scrabbling sound against the wood, and the trapdoor banged open. “If I don’t get back there, he’s going to fucking kill me!”

      I grabbed Bill’s hand and held it over the wound. “He didn’t hit anything critical, but you need to hold this here until the bleeding stops. Not too tight.” I felt behind me for the sleeping bag and pulled it around his shoulders. Somehow, I resisted licking his blood off my fingers. “Are you all right?”

      He nodded toward the sound of the struggle, wetting his lips. “Help him.”

      Ziggy broke free of Nathan and made it up the few steps into the bookshop. Nathan and I raced after him in time to see the door fling open, admitting scorching sunlight. Ziggy managed to close it before he burst into flame, but when he sank, panting, with his back to the thick, scarred wood, his face was orange with sunburn.

      “Fuck daylight,” he rasped, closing his eyes, his head falling back in defeat. “I’m going to die.”

      “You’re not going to die,” I reassured him, knowing he wasn’t talking about his burn.

      Ziggy shook his head and yanked up his shirt, displaying for us the scar we’d already seen. “Jacob has my heart. He’ll kill me.”

      “Jacob,” Nathan muttered behind me, disgust plain in his voice. I knew what bothered him, without feeling it through the blood tie. I’d heard that same reverence in Nathan’s voice, when he’d willingly let me into his memories. The Soul Eater’s power over his fledglings ran deeper than the blood between them. Jacob Seymour was a powerful, ruthless, charismatic man. If a person didn’t fall for his promises of power, they were frightened by his cruelty. But always, always they were impressed by his way of making them feel as though they were the only person who mattered to him.

      I knew I almost had been.

      “Ziggy, he won’t kill you,” I began, steamrollering past whatever Nathan had opened his mouth to say. I had the distinct feeling that whatever words he chose, they wouldn’t be constructive. “He has your heart, but he had Cyrus’s heart for years. He never did anything with it. And eventually, he gave it back.”

      “Cyrus never ran off on him, either.” Ziggy practically spat the words. “He’s going to think I’ve betrayed him. He’s going to think I don’t 1—”

      “He’s going to think what you make him think,” Nathan interrupted. His face was a mask of pain. He didn’t want to hear that his son loved a monster. “You haven’t been blocking him from the blood tie. He knows you’ve been kidnapped.”

      “He does.” Ziggy nodded vigorously. “He does. He’ll come back and get me.”

      “Is that what you really want?” My heart ached for him. I knew what it was like to feel so strongly for someone who was so destructive. Of course, it also terrified me to think that Ziggy might send out a homing beacon, leading the Soul Eater straight to us. “You don’t have to go back to him—”

      “No,” Nathan said quickly. “No, don’t make him think about that.” I opened my mouth to protest, but he shook his head so vehemently I closed it again. He never took his eyes from Ziggy. “If he doesn’t think about it, he doesn’t have to give anything away to Jacob. And he hasn’t had the practice disguising his thoughts that I’ve had. The Soul Eater will see through him in a minute.”

      “Well, he’d better start practicing,” I said, sounding more harsh, I’m sure, than I intended. “We can’t afford to have him broadcasting all our plans to the enemy.”

      “Your enemy,” Ziggy snapped, rising to his feet.

      “Do I need to tie you to something?” Nathan stalked toward his son with a decidedly unfatherly glare.

      To his credit, Ziggy didn’t flinch in the face of Nathan’s stare down. “Jacob is my sire. Some of us stay loyal.”

      “He might be your sire, but you’re still my son,” Nathan snapped, hands clenching at his sides. “And I’m not losing you again.”

      When he grabbed for him, Ziggy moved out of the way. But it wasn’t murderous intent that made Nathan reach for his son. His arms swooped around his shoulders and pulled him away from the door. And while I stood there, watching as Ziggy remained passive, stoic, Nathan embraced him.

      I didn’t know what had happened to turn Ziggy from the unnervingly self-possessed, friendly youth he’d been to the jaded drone he seemed to be now. I didn’t want to know—I’d heard enough about the Soul Eater’s cruelty to last a lifetime. But it rent my heart to imagine it.

      While Nathan buried his face in his son’s shoulder, I saw Ziggy’s hand raise to lie, comforting, on his father’s dark hair. The gesture was so private, I turned away, ducking back into the shelter to check on Bill. I had no qualms about leaving Ziggy alone with Nathan. He wouldn’t hurt him. He’d had a chance to kill him once, and he hadn’t. In fact, if Ziggy was to be believed, he thought returning Nathan to the Soul Eater would save him, not damn him. I wondered how long it would take to deprogram him from that way of thinking, and whether or not it would be worth it.

      Bill’s neck stopped bleeding without further intervention—thank God for small mercies—but the bite was still puffy and nasty-looking. “Do you want something for the pain?”

      He grimaced and shook his head. “No. I’m tough.”

      “You don’t have to impress me.” I arched an eyebrow and subtly nudged the tool kit containing our amped-up first aid kit. “I won’t tell them.”

      “You’re an all right lady, for a vampire,” he said with a forced smile. “Now, the other two…”

      “Don’t get started on the other two,” I admonished playfully.

      His smile became more relaxed and natural. “How can I not? He bit me, remember?”

      “Yeah. And bites hurt worse than everyone seems to think.” I pressed a clean gauze pad over the wound and set to sticking it down with tape.

      “They never get it right in the movies,” he mused, his eyes rapidly taking on the glassy look of someone who’d just mainlined an opiate. “They always make it look erotic. Like sex, you know?”

      “I know.” A distinctly uncomfortable memory of sitting in my apartment on a Friday night, watching Gary Oldman’s Dracula seduce and turn Winona Ryder as Mina, flashed through my mind. If I’d known how much more complicated being a vampire would be, I might not

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