Hello hello! Welcome to Blood Ties.

Notice: This story is a sequel to Blood Bound. So, if you would like to read this then I very strongly recommend that you read Blood Bound first. It would save a lot of confusion.

Otherwise, enjoy!

--

For Jazz, whom I miss dearly, and Eden, my fellow vampire admirer.

And, of course, for everyone who enjoyed Blood Bound.

--

1. Death and All His Friends

--

Before everything, Daphne Holland had never put much thought into the idea of her death.

She was rather too occupied with living. After all, it was a very normal and human thing to do: live one’s life in ignorance of death. It seemed that everyone had that strange mindset in which they would live forever. Humans were immortal, but only in their minds.

But the thought was always there. It was a vague sort of idea crammed into the back of Daphne’s head. It was one that could be attended to later, or when the time came. There were more important things to worry about, such as life.

Life provided her with enough worry to fill three heads, because living life was like one big mess of worry – like the cake Ernie Cunnings had requested for his grandmother’s ninety-fifth birthday: A six layer cake, each layer boasting a different flavour, with fresh strawberry icing in between and chocolate on top, all cut into the shape of Tajikistan.

Truthfully, Daphne had more important things to worry about than her expiry date; her appointment with Death; her meeting with the man upstairs. Or whatever happened when one died.

Death was an absolute thing to her. It happened, it was terrible, and even if you didn’t want it to, life went on. Daphne knew it was not a good idea to dwell on Death any more than that. It was absolute, but it was also fickle. It was best not to tempt it.

Nine years earlier the Holland family home had caught fire. Regrettably and quite unluckily, both Mr and Mrs Holland had still been inside. It had occurred during the day – a result of volatile magic being tampered with a bit too much – and Daphne had been at the local sorcering academy. The house had burned to the ground, taking her parents with it.

Fires caused by magic were temperamental things and better left alone. At least, that was the attitude of the local fire department. Silly lot, they were.

So, her parent’s names had been called over the great hypothetical intercom for their scheduled appointment in Death’s office. One o’seven in the afternoon, to be precise.

Daphne had missed her appointment by an hour or so and she’d had to pick up another number. Although she didn’t know what it was she was fairly sure that there was a sizable line-up of people waiting in front of her. A line up so long that she wouldn’t have to worry about getting a seat in the waiting room for some time. She was certain that she wasn’t even near the door.

She hoped she would be eighty or so when that happened – old enough to have some respect as well as a found sense of indifference towards Death. She didn’t want to care about dying when it finally came. She wanted one of those peaceful deaths, perhaps one in her bed while sleeping. Or during an afternoon nap. Something calm and stress free. Something she didn’t have to think or worry about.

Of course, this was before - before she’d gotten herself mixed up in a whole lot of trouble that wasn’t going to go away now that it had found her. Aforementioned trouble came in the form of a war of wills between a couple of vampires.

It had not been a good place to find herself in. Vampires were not a thing that most people saw in their lifetime, and no one in their right mind would want to.

For Daphne, it was much like being caught in the midst of a dragon squabble over a slab of raw, bloody meat. It was a fair analogy: dragons and vampires (or at least she thought so). They both had fangs and they both terrified her. If it wasn’t enough for her to realize that two overgrown carnivorous reptiles wanted to eat her, even more frightening was the idea that one of them would win over the other, and yes, she was probably going to end up someone’s dinner either way.

Of course, it hadn’t actually been a dragon squabble. It had been a vampire squabble – which is probably just as bad if not worse because it still involved the eating of the prey. Poor prey. Poor Daphne.

Things had a funny way of playing out, though. The night she met her own Death, it was in the form of a vampire lord named Malachi. He was not a nice fellow in the least, having taken to targeting sorcering families with Old Blood (usually ancient family lines that had Old Magic). Old Blood had often been rumoured to have potent and powerful side effects (the most powerful sorcerers in history had Old Magic in their blood), so the vampire lord set about draining as many families as he could, cultivating his own powers as he went. Perhaps he wished to take over the world. It was a greedy ambition, and one that Daphne hadn’t much cared about when she’d seen him.

She hadn’t seen him. Not until it was too late, anyway. He and several of his followers had ambushed her on her way home from work. He had then proceeded to make her his supper.

Or he had tried and nearly succeeded in making her his supper. At the time, she had more or less resigned herself to her less than fortunate fate (when faced with several hostile vampires one tended to believe that they were not going to make it out alive.)

The second dragon stepped in at this point (Or vampire). At the time, Daphne had only been concerned with getting away. Not that she’d had much of a chance until Greyson had showed up and changed a few things. Namely her fate – and her second appointment with Death (so sorry, Death). And, as it turned out Greyson was less of a dragon wanting to share in the meal and more of knight in shining armour who arrived just in time to deter the real dragon.

The problem was that vampires weren’t to be trusted. But then where did Greyson fit into the picture?

Before, Daphne was content with her life, her friends, and her job. Her world had centred around the bakery at July’s only café, the Jam Jar. It was owned by the Donnes, Dottie and Gabe, who were family friends. There, she had enough company to keep her mind of such dark things as her past. While her hands were full of lemon filling and pastry bags she’d had no reason to be morbidly fixated on the idea of Death.

Now, though, she had a completely new set of problems to deal with. Her days of worrying if her bread dough would rise or if she’d put enough pecans in the Pecan Crunch Muffins or wondering if the oven charm was going to behave, were over. They had been pushed aside none too nicely to make way for a vampire and the heap of trouble that came along with him.

This wasn’t to say that she regretted meeting Greyson. No, he was everything Daphne could have ever hoped for – in a vampire. Speaking as such, he was reasonably well mannered and not prone to drinking her blood, which she appreciated.

The problem was that now she had him, he wasn’t going anywhere soon. The night he’d saved her from being an unwilling addition to Malachi’s growing list of deceased, he’d made a decision that had perhaps been a bit too hasty on his part. But desperation breeds even more desperation.

Malachi had gotten his fangs into her arm. He’d been having a nice feast of her blood when Greyson had intervened. Now, one thing about vampire blood is that it is highly venomous. A bite from a vampire causes paralysis, making the victim unable to escape as the vampire takes their pleasure. However, if some unlucky individual survives the draining (or the vampire manages to stop gorging themselves), the venom will spread through the live human and slowly turn them into a live vampire. Not very nice in the least.

It was reasonable that Daphne should have been concerned. She’d been bitten by a vampire and then left alive. Then, she found herself in the company of another vampire – albeit a confusing one. To put it bluntly, Greyson sucked the venom from the bite.

It wasn’t quite enough, though. Malachi’s evil was strong and strong evil can’t be destroyed so easily.

One thing many people don’t know about vampire blood is that it heals. However, consuming the blood of a vampire is tricky business. Daphne certainly hadn’t wanted to do it. But things Daphne wanted rarely ever happened, so she drank the blood, and it had changed something.

In removing the venom from her arm, Greyson had consumed some of Daphne’s blood. And to heal Daphne, Greyson persuaded her to drink his blood. Neither expected that their actions would create a blood bond – a sort of vampire matrimonial bond – between the two of them. Nor did they think as a result of their bonding that he would reawaken her magic in full and she would pass on some of said magic to him.

Now she was stuck with him. And not in a leech-like way that one would think. It was more like a metaphorical shackle and chain way. It was an uneasy, confusing thing. In the span of one night, Daphne had gone from being magically barren to overwhelmingly witchy. Greyson went from uneasy acquaintance to teacher, then lover. All in one nice little package, which was something she could never complain about.

However, this was no longer before. Being with Greyson made her question her mortality. This was not only because he was a vampire (but not really in the traditional sense, as he was less prone to drink human blood than animal blood), and vampires in general made one question one’s mortality. Immortal and all.

No, the reason was that when Daphne was with Greyson she was continually reminded that there were bigger and more bad things out there than him. And he was quite bad, though never to her.

Since meeting Greyson, Daphne had to grapple with the idea that there was a whole world out there that she didn’t understand because she’d never been privy to it before. She’d experienced only a tiny bit of it with the arrival of the vengeful Malachi – who hadn’t yielded in his plan to destroy her until he himself was dead along with his followers (Greyson preferred the word gang, but that brought up images of bikers and tattoos that just didn’t suit the former vampire lord).

But Malachi was nothing. He was just one of many of his kind. One of many vampires. And vampires were just one of the many creatures that belonged to a world of nonhumans which Daphne didn’t understand – not any more than what she had learned from textbooks or headlines.

It was a world that went about its business while humans (sorcerers, dregs, or barren folk) remained wilfully oblivious to it. It was a world, Greyson had explained, that did not follow the laws enforced by sorcery. It had its own laws that were brutally enforced by only the strongest and most powerful.

Creatures fought with each other over territory. Like animals. Goblins disputed with grooks, weres bickered among themselves over authority, vampires fought to control access to entire cities – their own self appointed right to use human populations to satisfy themselves. To gain more power. More land. More control. To usurp the world from beneath human feet.

The most frightening revelation about this was that humans were blissfully unaware. To be to narrow sighted, to not see the obvious, was deadly. For so long people had preferred not to notice because ignorance was bliss. It was safe, like the action of a child pulling the blankets over his head so the monsters couldn’t see him.

But this world had become terrifyingly real, so undeniably vivid that Daphne could no longer ignore its existence. She could not longer do as others of her kind had, turning a blind eye to the darker side of the world. She could not longer overlook the fact that they were there, always present.

Especially when they came knocking on her door.

--