He gave me a nod, as if to say "good play." "Well, Miss Doctor-Call-Me-Carrie, I have a fantastic room over at the Hampton Inn on Twenty-eighth Street, complete with a minibar. What do you say we get slightly buzzed on very small bottles of schnapps and paint Mallsville red?"

Despite his ridiculous come-on, it was hard not to like Max. I laughed and shook my head. "Actually, I'm kind of tired, after last night. I think I'll go upstairs to bed."

I said a brief, polite goodbye to Rachel and Max and headed up the stairs.

The night air was cool, but the day must have been warm. The snow had nearly melted. For once in the last few hectic days, I didn't feel as if I had to rush anywhere, or dread anything. In fact, I was actually looking forward to tying up the bathroom with a nice long bubble bath.

When I got to the door, I realized I didn't have any keys to get into the apartment. That's when the hair stood up on my neck, and I desperately wanted to get inside.

I didn't know what had spooked me, but every instinct in my body screamed run. I wasn't going to argue. I'd nearly gained the top of the stairs when something caught my hair and tugged me backward. I opened my mouth to scream, and a hand stifled the sound.

A cold, clawed hand.

A startlingly familiar hand.

My sire's hand.

Twenty

Transfusion

He wrenched my head back, hard. "What a nest of vipers you've fallen into."

I shuddered. "All I have to do is scream, and-" "But you won't." His fingers slid across my shoulders, dipping into the neck of my shirt. "Because you don't want to fight me."

"You're right. I don't want to fight you." I clenched my teeth. "I want them to come up here and tear you to pieces."

The unmistakable chill of metal pressed against my throat.

"I don't think I'm the one who's going to go to pieces here." He drew the blade across my neck, and though I barely felt the sting of the cut, a warm cascade of blood wet the front of my shirt. Blood gurgled from my mouth.

"That should take care of your annoying talking problem."

I heard the door open at the bottom of the stairs, but my vision swam. I couldn't see who it was.

When I heard her call a farewell over her shoulder, I recognized Rachel's voice.

If I could have called out, I would have. But Cyrus quickly backed into the narrow alley beside the building, dragging me with him.

"Imagine that. They're all leaving." He lowered his head and lapped at the blood flowing from my neck. "And you don't have much time."

He raised the knife again, and I was too weak to dodge it. The blade split my sternum, and for a terrifying moment I thought he'd struck my heart.

"I wouldn't do that to you, Carrie," he whispered against my ear as he sawed the blade upward. "If I punctured your heart, you'd be nothing but a pile of dust. No fun for Nathan to find you that way."

As he wedged his fingers between my separated rib cage, his memories flashed through my mind.

The Soul Eater's sadistic face filled my vision. "Hold still, boy. Your brother didn't carry on so!"

My bones and cartilage cracked as Cyrus yanked my chest open. When I screamed in agony, I gagged on my blood.

The pictures in my head scrambled and jumped. I saw the face of the dead woman I'd seen before, the same one I'd seen beside Cyrus at the dinner party. She laughed and trailed her finger down the scar on Cyrus's chest. "And why would I let him do that?"

she asked.

Her mocking wounded him. "So we can be together forever."

My vision cleared, and I saw Cyrus looming above me, his hands and clothes drenched in my blood. "And you'll be with me forever."

Those evil bells jingled again. I had no idea how long I'd been lying there. I couldn't see Cyrus, but I heard his voice from somewhere in the alley. "If you live through the night."

The blood on my shirt wasn't warm anymore. It was nearly frozen to my skin. In the gap between the buildings, I saw no stars in the cold, clear sky.

Dawn would come soon.

I closed my eyes, unable to worry or care what would happen to me when the rising sun touched my flesh. It seemed simpler than being rescued. If someone found me, how would they fix me? I'd been damaged beyond repair, gutted like a fish.

I thought about what Nathan would think when he went upstairs and found the apartment empty. Maybe he'd think that I'd turned my back on his friendship again. Or that I'd been so angry with him that I'd returned to the man who'd killed his son. Would he spend the rest of his life hating me?

Something soft and cool brushed my ear, a breeze in the windless night. I opened my eyes. All around me, the alley grew dim.

Colors bled together into shapeless blobs that darkened with the rapid deceleration of my heart. The pain in my chest ebbed into a warm, focused feeling that lifted my whole body from any sensation.

Then the space that separated the shapeless blobs got smaller and smaller as the darkness became absolute. In the distance, I saw a point of light. It swelled and spiraled toward me.

In medical school, we'd been taught the Kubler-Ross theories of death. A glimmering tunnel, all your relatives and the deity of your choice waiting to welcome you.

When I'd gone on to my internship, I'd heard the nurses talk about "The Man at the End of My Bed," a vision they claimed patients always reported on the night of their death.

Both versions of dying had been terrifying and alien to me, looming in the future like a standardized test or a root canal, something unpleasant you couldn't avoid. What I was experiencing now was peaceful and gradual, my senses dropping away one by one as the intense light widened in my fading vision.

Instead of seeing heaven, I saw the alley and the street beyond. At my feet, I saw my lifeless body, torso splayed open like a macabre storybook.

I wished I could see the world around me all my life as it appeared now, painted in the washed-out tones of a watercolor.

Suddenly, where the sidewalks had been empty before, pale shadow forms drifted aimlessly in an eerie ballet. A big orange tabby cat jogged down the alley, pausing to sniff my body.

The animal's vitality and life took my breath away. The shadows spotted it at once and reached their long fingers out to touch it before it hissed and ran back where it had come from. I wanted to follow it. I needed to touch the cat and feel the life there. But something held me down like an anchor.

A pull at my spectral chest reminded me that my body still had breath and life. I wanted to just die already.

So this is what it's like to become a ghost.

I heard Nathan's voice. When he passed the alley, he stopped, sniffed the air.

He howled in fury.

He dropped to his knees beside my body, arms spread as if he didn't know what to do first. Sadly-though not too sadly, because everything I felt seemed to come through a filter-I realized he wanted to save me.

I wanted to tell him not to bother. It was too much work, and I was just too tired.

The shadows shimmered and pulsed, but they didn't swarm Nathan the way they had the cat. I didn't blame them. There was no life in him, no color. Just pale shades of sadness, and we already had those.

Nathan lifted my head in his hands and kissed my dead lips. A tear splashed against my cold skin. It couldn't have been mine.

The tenderness there made me feel something. Regret?

My new companions beckoned, and I reached out to them. Not with my hands. I had no hands. Neither did they. But they surrounded me, and their embrace was warm and comforting.

Nathan raised his wrist to his mouth and bit down. Dark blood dripped into my slack mouth.The ghost people wavered and dimmed.

No!

I tried to fight, but piece by piece I came alive again. First I heard sounds more clearly. Then I felt a little pain, and the sensation of hot, sticky blood pooling in the back of my mouth. I swallowed, and the pain grew, until all I felt was agony and hunger.

I closed my lips over his wrist. When I drew more blood into my mouth, a tremor went through him.

"You're going to be okay," he rasped.

He held my broken body in his arms.

"I saw them," I whispered. I drifted away again, but this time there were no lost souls to welcome me.

I was stranded in the darkness.

Twenty-One

Born Again (Not That Way)

I had no concept of time over the course of my recovery. It moved from darkness to light, and not at regular intervals. Sometimes I opened my eyes, but my vision was as soft and unfocused as a newborn's.

Occasionally, pictures splintered my mind. Some were unrecognizable, but a few were my own memories from a skewed perspective, as if I were watching myself in a movie. In the most frequently occurring flash, I saw my own lifeless body in the alley.

It was like a scene in a horror film, and it repeated over and over.

The longer I slept, the worse my hunger grew. When it finally outweighed my fatigue, I woke, cranky and hurting.

Though my memory was fuzzy, I knew I was in Nathan's bed. His scent was all around me, and my body reacted with surprising ferocity. It demanded I find him.

At first I was afraid to move. I remembered my throat had been cut. With no idea how long I'd been asleep, I didn't know how much I'd healed. When I touched my neck, I felt only smooth, new skin.

"You're awake."

I knew Nathan had entered the room before he spoke. I sensed him. He looked haggard, as if he hadn't slept in days.

I glanced at the clock on the nightstand. "Is it really noon?"

He nodded. "How are you feeling?"

His eyes were ringed with dark circles; his face was drawn and pinched. When he spoke, it sounded like his vocal chords had been raked across a cheese grater.

"I hurt," I answered truthfully. "Very badly. And I'm hungry."

He scrubbed his face vigorously with his hands and blew out a long breath, much like a man who was faced with a task he was too exhausted to undertake would do. But he smiled encouragingly. "Let me take care of the pain first, then I'll see what I can do about getting you some blood."

I shifted carefully in the bed, white-hot spears of pain ripping through my torso as I did so. "How long have I been out?" "Eight days. Nine if I give you enough meds."

"What about Cyrus?" I thought he looked angry at the mention of his name, and he had every right to be. But I had a right to know. "Did you kill him?"

Nathan looked away from me. "No, we didn't kill him. I suggested we postpone the mission in case you survived to bitch at me when you found out that we went without you."

At least he hadn't lost his sense of humor. Beside the bed, he'd set up a folding card table stocked with clean towels, the first aid kit, and numerous boxes of gauze and medical tape. Most of these were empty.

He lifted a needle and measured out an injection of something. I didn't care what it was as long as it took away the crushing feeling in my chest.

Gauze wrapped around my torso, giving me the appearance of a fashion-conscious mummy wearing a tube top. I pressed my hand to my ribs and another sharp ache pierced down my body. "I can't breathe."

Nathan sat next to me on the bed, carefully trying not to make any movements that would jostle me. "Yes you can. Take deep breaths. If you panic, you'll hyperventilate."

He pulled back the blankets and wrapped a tourniquet around my arm. I flinched when he sank the needle into my vein, and acute pain billowed through my limbs.

My memories played out like a rough cut of a movie I only knew half the plot to. The sound was bad, the visuals confusing. There were threads of a coherent story, but no pattern to weave them all together.

"What happened to me?"

Nathan's face, lined with tension, tried to soften. "What do you remember?"

"Sounds. Pain." And horrific, physical torment. But I didn't want to recall that now. "I remember coming back downstairs for the keys, and after that, nothing."