Possession

Blood Ties

Book II

Jennifer Armintrout

ISBN: 978-1-55254-847-9

Copyright © 2007 by Jennifer Armintrout.

Content

Dedication

Credit is due:

Prologue Welcome Back

Chapter 1 Nightmare

Chapter 2 Familiar Territory

Chapter 3 Nature of the Beast

Chapter 4 A Rabbit Hole

Chapter 5 Resistance

Chapter 6 Oracle

Chapter 7 Consequences

Chapter 8 Victim of Circumstance

Chapter 9 And thou art dead, as young and fair

Chapter 10 March

Chapter 11 Connections

Chapter 12 It’s a Small World

Chapter 13 Surrender

Chapter 14 The Past Comes Back To Haunt You

Chapter 15 The Key

Chapter 16 Unpleasant Discoveries

Chapter 17 The Mouse

Chapter 18 Rocks and Hard Places

Chapter 19 Rescue

Chapter 20 Welcome Back, Part Two

Chapter 21 The Dark Night of the Soul

Chapter 22 Do-Over

Chapter 23 Fear and Loathing

Chapter 24 First Impressions, Reconciled

Chapter 25 The Heart’s Filthy Lesson

Chapter 26 Desperation

Chapter 27 Loose Ends

Dedication

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.

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 coworkers: “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 E.R. 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.