Rachel Vincent - Blood Bound

I nodded, and the knot of tension inside me eased just a little. Work questions, I could handle. “I was on Adam Rawlinson’s team for three years. They taught me to shoot and fight—Rawlinson himself trained me on the nine mil—and I quit last year and went into business for myself.”

Cam stopped at the parking-lot exit, the car’s V8 rumbling all the way into my bones. “Which way?”

I set the sock on my lap and opened the bag, then ran my fingers over the damp, sticky material and closed my eyes. “West.” Shit . Tower’s side of town. Not a promising start to the afternoon.

“What happened with Rawlinson?” Cam asked, turning left onto the street. “You didn’t like the company?”

“No, it was nice.” Good money, decent benefits and an upstanding boss. Rawlinson had a sterling reputation and got the bulk of the business from anyone who didn’t want to get tangled up with either Tower or Cavazos. Including a lot of unofficial police “consultations.”

“So why’d you quit? You obviously took a cut in Pay….”

I laughed, and it almost felt good. “Is that a dig at my liquor cabinet?”

Cam smiled. “That wasn’t liquor, it was swill. And that wasn’t a cabinet, it was a drawer.”

“The money will come, once I get my name out there.” For too many years, I’d been known only as Rawlinson’s top Tracker, “You know, that girl.” I’d almost started answering to the unofficial title.

“So you quit over money?”

“No.” I glanced at him, looking for judgment in his eyes, because there’d been none in his voice. “I wanted to be my own boss.”

The irony of my lie stung. Good thing I wasn’t bound to tell the truth.

I’d quit my job after Cavazos inked his mark on my thigh and ruined my whole life. I did it to keep Rawlinson and the rest of his employees safe. He would have fired me anyway if he’d found out. No syndicate-bound employees—that was both company policy and common sense. Never hire someone whose loyalty belongs to someone else. Especially someone with the power not only to kill you, but to make the world forget you ever existed. And that was only one of the reasons I had to keep my binding secret.

“Well, then, I guess you got what you wanted.”

Hardly . I stared at my lap. I hadn’t gotten a damn thing I’d wanted since that night six years ago.

When the road curved to the right, I looked up. The blood wanted us to go straight. “Take the next left and veer toward the market district,” I said, staring out the window to avoid looking at him. Being with Cam was harder than I’d thought it would be. Some things hadn’t changed—he still smelled like good coffee and cheap shampoo—and some things were totally different. Like that dark, scruffy stubble, as if he hadn’t gotten a chance to shave. And maybe he hadn’t. The stubble made him look older, and at first that had bothered me, because it reminded me how much had changed since we’d been together. But now that stubble was kind of growing on me.

Wonder what it feels like …

I’d actually pulled my hand from the plastic bag before I realized what I was doing, and when he glanced at my bloody fingers, I felt myself flush.

“What’s wrong?” he asked. “Did you lose the pull?”

“No.” I shoved my hand back into the bag and ran my fingers over the stiffening material, staring straight out the windshield. He couldn’t guess at my thoughts if he couldn’t see my face. “Just keep heading west.” Deeper and deeper into Jake Tower’s side of town.

“So … how long have you been bound?” Cam asked, when I motioned for him to take the next left.

My heart jumped so high I could practically taste it on the back of my tongue. “I told you, Cavazos doesn’t—”

“I meant Anne. How long have you and Anne been bound to the others?”

Oh. Yeah.

I tried to relax, but that was hard to do, considering I was clutching the bloody evidence from a murder scene, riding into the territory of a man who’d kill me as soon as look at me and sitting next to the man I’d thought I’d spend the rest of my life with. “Fifteen years. Since I was twelve.”

Cam whistled, as if he was impressed. Or horrified. “So, the whole time we were together, you were bound to your three best friends?”

“And vice versa.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“After high school, it didn’t seem to matter. We hardly saw one another.”

“Anne said it was an accident …?” he prompted, and I wondered how much else she’d told him.

“Yeah. We didn’t know what we were doing. Some guy at school made Anne cry, so Kori made him cry. Then we went back to Kori’s house to comfort Anne with junk food, and we wound up swearing lifelong loyalty and assistance instead.”

“How do you accidently sign and seal a lifelong binding?”

“We didn’t know it was a binding.” I twisted to half face him, and only then realized how comfortable that felt. How easy talking to him had become—again—as if we could just pick up right where we’d left off.

But we couldn’t. Ever. And forgetting that would get one of us killed.

“It was different then, you know?” I made myself stare out the window to avoid looking at him. “The revelation was still recent, and our parents hadn’t told us we were Skilled. They were afraid that if we knew, we’d be in danger. Turns out ignorance is more dangerous than the truth.”

“It usually is,” Cam said, and suddenly my throat felt thick. He was talking about his own ignorance, about all the things I still couldn’t— wouldn’t —tell him.

“We were just being kids. Best friends standing around the kitchen, making promises we probably never would have kept, just to make Anne smile. But then Kori’s little sister, Kenley, came in and overheard us, and she wanted to help. She said it wouldn’t be official unless we wrote it down.”

Cam’s brows rose halfway up his forehead, and he looked away from the road long enough to make me nervous. “Kenley Daniels was your Binder? Sixteen years ago?”

I nodded. “If we’d known that ran in her family—turns out her mother’s a Binder, too—we probably would have realized what she was doing, even if she

didn’t.”

“Displaying the first instinctive manifestation of a very serious Skill?”

I couldn’t resist a smile. “Good guess.”

“How old was she?”

“Ten.”

“Damn. It doesn’t usually show up so early.”

“I know.” I’d met more than my share of Binders since that day fifteen years ago, and not one of them had displayed a stronger Skill or instinct than Kenley Daniels had at ten years old. Without even knowing what she was.

“So … she what? Scribbled a promise in crayon and told you to sign it?”

I laughed again, but more out of nerves than amusement. He wasn’t far off. “It was pink glitter pen, actually. And after we signed, she said it still didn’t feel right. She said it wouldn’t be ‘real’ unless we used blood.”

The four of us had been losing interest by then, but Kori had perked up when she realized that meant she’d get to use her knife. And I have to admit, I was curious—perhaps the beginnings of my own talent with blood.

“Oh, shit!” Cam glanced at me again, then back at the road. “Kenley’s a blood Binder? I thought she worked with signatures….”

“Actually, it turns out she’s a double threat.” Blood binding was a much rarer Skill than name binding—binding a written oath with a signature—and those who could do both were rarer still. And someone with the power to do both at such a young age was almost unheard of.

“So, I’m guessing that contract is ironclad …?” Cam said, flicking on his turn signal when I pointed toward a side street ahead.