Free The Turning-Blood Ties 1 by Jennifer Armintrout

room, drinking from a mug like a civilized vampire. I sipped the blood self-consciously and studied him. It was my experience that people weren’t nice to strangers. In med school it’s every student for his-or herself. In fact, most of us went out of our way to intimidate the “competition.” The eat-or-be-eaten attitude had become so ingrained in my psyche, that I’d come to expect such behavior from everyone. But Nathan had been nothing but helpful from the start, which was surprising considering he was a week away from killing me if I didn’t join his vampire cult. It didn’t seem right that a man so attractive would be such a complete stickler for the rules. He must have worked for the IRS in a past life. Of course, I didn’t know much about Nathan’s current life. In the brief phone conversations we’d had during the past week, he’d revealed only generic information about himself and hadn’t given me much room to ask questions. If I was going to trust anything he told me, I needed some answers.
    There was no time like the present.
    “How old are you?” I asked.
    “Thirty-two.”
    “I meant including…” I didn’t know how to phrase the rest.
    “Oh, that,” he said, and it sounded as if he didn’t care to dispense that information. “I’ve been a vampire since 1937.”
    I tried to conceal my disappointment. I had expected to hear he was hundreds of years old, that he’d walked the battlefield with Napoléon and discussed the mysteries of the cosmos with Nostradamus, like the vampires in the movies. “That was the year ‘The StarSpangled Banner’ became the national anthem, you know.”
    “I didn’t know that. I wasn’t an American at the time.” He glanced over his shoulder, and I immediately covered my face.
    “It’s okay,” he assured me. “You’re back to normal.”
    I leaned over a clear patch of the glass-topped coffee table to check my reflection.
    “It’s the hunger,” he said as he straightened up the room. “The worse it is, the worse you look. The same goes for anger, pain and fear. It’s very animalistic.”
    How anyone could be blasé about his entire head morphing into a Harryhausen-esque special effect was beyond me.
    “The scary part is that it gets worse with age. Some of the real old vampires even get horns when they change, or cloven feet. But you can control it, with practice. You just

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    have to calm yourself, find your center, all that New Age crap. It’s very Zen.” He took the empty cup from my hands and headed to the kitchen sink. New Age crap? This from the guy running the witchcraft minimart?
    “Now, how about telling me what happened tonight?” he called over the sound of running water.
    I shuddered. “Can’t we start with what the weather’s been like?”
    “No.”
    “It was nothing, really,” I said, trying to sound casual.
    “‘Nothing’ rarely stabs people.” He came in and sat next to me on the sofa. The scent of him teased my nostrils, and I rather seriously debated whether or not to lean against him and inhale deeply.
    I really need to get out more.
    “I needed blood.”
    Nathan frowned. “You didn’t hurt anyone, did you?”
    “Okay, even if I had, did I look like I won that particular fight?”
    He looked relieved that he wouldn’t have to chop off my head.
    “I followed a girl into a club downtown. One of those…Goth clubs.” I lowered my voice, as if Goth were a dirty word.
    “Club Cite?” he asked, and I nodded. “That was very dangerous. Clubs like that are full of all kinds of undesirables. People who think they’re vampires, wannabe vampires and vampire hunters. Amateurish vampire hunters, but with enough knowledge to kill you, even if it is just a lucky accident.”
    “I know that now,” I said bitterly, remembering the metallic taste of Dahlia’s blood on my tongue. I took a deep breath. “I met a girl there.