Blood Ties Book Three: Ashes To Ashes

“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.”

“Surprise, surprise,” Max muttered under his breath.

“I do not want to alarm you.” Bella turned in her chair so she faced Nathan and me. “But I feel we are at a marked disadvantage against the Oracle. And I fear…”

“That she might be looking for the Soul Eater?” The question slipped automatically from my mouth.

She nodded, her expression hard, and continued. “I have pored over the meager library Max keeps—”

I glanced his way, sure his head would blow off his neck at that. The “meager” library had belonged to Marcus, and Max took all slights against him, intentional or not, very seriously. His face remained impassive, and he leaned back in his chair, arms folded over his chest.

Bella, ignorant of her affront, continued speaking. “It appears there was a breakdown in Movement communication in France during the Nazi occupation. A handful of assassins found themselves unable to contact headquarters or track their quarry. They turned to divination to reestablish communication and monitor the whereabouts of their mark.

“Though in this case it would be unrealistic to try and open a line of communication with the Movement, we could certainly use those same means to glean information about the Oracle and what she intends to do now that she is free.”

“Or Nathan could do it.” Max’s voice seemed overloud, and we all turned to stare at him in varying degrees of horror as he continued. “He has a blood tie with the Soul Eater. If he’s working with the Oracle, Nathan would know it.”

At the thought of Nathan making contact with his terrifying sire, the one who’d possessed and tormented him, the blood in my veins turned to ice. “No!”

My denial was echoed by Bella. “He was possessed once by the power of his sire. My spell freed him, but I cannot guarantee I could do so again.”

“She’s right,” I agreed vehemently. “Nathan, you can’t even consider doing something like that. He would find you in a minute.”

Beside me, Nathan drummed his fingertips on the table. “I think you’re right. We try Bella’s way, first.”

Max snorted. “Listen, I’m not trying to shoot down the one solution anyone has come up with, but I’m not sure this is exactly the most efficient way to go about finding the Oracle and figuring out what her plans are.”

“What would be more efficient?” Bella demanded. “Traveling the world door-to-door, knocking and asking if the Oracle is inside?”

Rolling his eyes, Max turned to Nathan and me. “Listen, you guys can’t really believe this is our best bet? Random patterns of cards and gazing into a crystal ball?”

Though I felt as though I was betraying him, we didn’t have much else to go on. I spread my hands helplessly. “Well, it couldn’t hurt to try. If the Movement has fallen apart, it’s just a matter of time until every non-Movement vampire figures it out and we end up with a crisis on our hands.”

“So, we’re going to prevent this from happening with our super New Age mind rays?” He shook his head. “I’m sorry, I just think we’re barking up the wrong tree.”

Nathan grimaced as though he hated being cast in the peacekeeper role. “Listen, Bella hasn’t been able to contact anyone. I’ve been out of the Movement for two years, so I don’t know anyone’s number or location anymore. You might be able to track somebody down, but even if you do, how are we going to find the Oracle? We’ve got documented evidence that this approach works. Why not try it before we declare ourselves royally screwed?”

“Max, you were still in the Movement. You have to have the company directory or something, right?” I hoped he did. I didn’t like the looks of those chicken bones any more than he did.

Max shook his head. “It was Movement policy never to reveal the identities of their assassins, even to other assassins.”

“Any assassins who knew each other, like Max and me, chose to contact one another outside of the Movement.” Nathan glanced briefly at Max. “Sometimes I wonder why I chose to contact him.”

“It was a policy that applied only to vampires,” Bella added. “The werewolves involved in the Movement were all from the same pack. You would consider that family, or extended family. We have a code of honor, and our own consequences if we should break it. But the vampires … imagine if one vampire knew how to find all of the assassins? And then they found themselves in the company of a creature like the Soul Eater?”

“So, they kept your locations, and to some extent, your identities, secret so the information couldn’t be tortured out of you?” I looked to Nathan for confirmation.

“Or sold to the highest bidder.” He gestured to Max. “Max and I became acquainted when we were given an assignment together. But if we hadn’t both agreed that it would be handy to know another assassin nearby—or relatively nearby—we might not have exchanged contact information and stayed in touch.”

“But what about the meeting? You had a dozen Movement assassins in your bookshop.” I shuddered at the thought of some of them coming after us as we’d been living peacefully in the apartment upstairs.

“That was a strike team Rachel personally assembled. They already knew who I was and where I could be found. And I trusted them all for a reason.” Nathan put a reassuring hand on my knee.