Blood Ties Book Two: Possession

Jennifer Armintrout was born in 1980. She has been obsessed with vampires ever since the age of four and her first crush was on Vincent Price. Raised in an enormous Roman Catholic family, Jennifer attributes her interest in the macabre to viewing too many funerals at a formative age. Jennifer lives in Michigan with her husband and children.

Also by Jennifer Armintrout

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

Blood Ties

Possession

Jennifer Armintrout

www.mirabooks.co.uk

For my family, who encourage me and support everything I do, but especially for Ryerson Louden, who always listened to a child’s wild stories and pretended he actually believed them.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Credit is due:

As always, to my critique group, Mary, Marti, Cheryl, Chris and Michele, even though she swears she’ll never read another book by me ever again.

To Sasha Bogin, an editor and a cheerleader, and Kelly Harms, my agent, who I imagine would make a wonderful pirate or hostage negotiator.

To Joe, for listening to me rant about my characters the way some people rant about their co-workers: “Jen, are we talking about a real person now, or someone in your book?”

And to Kevin Park, whom I forgot to mention in the last book, for literally saving my life and not holding the whole disgusting trip to the ER against me. Hopefully, subsequent birthdays have gone much better for you.

Prologue

Welcome Back

He didn’t know how long he’d been dead. There was no time, no season, no change, only eternity.

Shadows stumbled around him on the other side of the veil. Two in particular caught his attention. He knew what they were. He’d been one of them.

The life he craved was accessible to them. Now, as in his living death, he wanted to leech it from the mortals who couldn’t protect themselves. If he could envy this undead pair, he would, but there was no time. They had no life, so they were none of his concern.

On the other side, they couldn’t see him. When he was of the world but not alive, he couldn’t see the ones who’d gone before him, either. Despite their sightlessness, they appeared to follow him. He moved away. He wanted life.

It was a fool’s errand, his never-ceasing search for that mortal energy. It throbbed in the people and animals he passed every day, but he could not touch it. Thin though the veil was, it separated him from what he craved. He could reach for it, hold it in his hands, but the film of the shadow curtain always kept him from it.

Color, alien to this existence, would have shocked his senses, if he’d had any. The lifeless pair held something between them, shimmering and frightening like the fiery sword the angel held at the gates of Eden. It drew shadows to it like moths to the flame, though he hated such cliché description. He hated more that the thing drew him, as well. The shining rift split wider, and a hand, not full of life but real nonetheless, thrust through.

The other shadows clamored for it, sliding over it. Like water on oil, they rolled off the corporeal skin. As if searching specifically for him, the intruder pushed the others aside and grasped him. He stuck.

He hadn’t felt panic since he’d died. Hadn’t felt despair since her betrayal. He felt it now as the rough, real fingers pulled him through the rift.

Thick and heavy, feelings he’d almost forgotten happened all at once. Slippery and hot, sensations he remembered being pleasant at one time engulfed him. His formless being squeezed and conformed into a shape at once familiar and horrifyingly foreign.

Too bright. Too cold. Too real.

Too loud.

One of the pair laughed like jagged glass. “We fucking did it! I can’t believe we fucking did it!”

The light stung his eyes. He blinked, but his vision didn’t clear. In his chest, he felt a thump that hadn’t been a part of him for centuries—the beating of a human heart.

Alive. He was alive.

He dropped to the floor, screaming and clawing at his mortal prison.

The one who’d done it leaned over him and slapped him on the back. The connection of flesh against flesh drove needles of sensation to the bone.

“Welcome back, Cyrus.”

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