“And who?” Winter added.
“And why?” Patrick asked.
Everyone looked at him. He lifted one broad shoulder in an elegant shrug. “Red Express,” he said. “The guy that moved the body was trying to help. It wasn’t until I – the detective – figured that out that the entire murder unravelled.”
“Roman,” Sebastian said instantly.
Nial shook his head. “He would have come to us for help. If he had found Garrett in that condition, he would have reached out, no matter what ‘side’ he thinks he’s on.”
“He knows about me?” Winter asked uneasily.
Nial shook his head.
Sebastian squeezed her shoulder. “Nial’s the only other vampire around. That’s all.”
Nial’s mouth turned up in an odd smile. Winter filed the reaction away to ask him about it later. Patrick Sauvage was getting far too much information as it was. Sebastian and Nial might feel fine handing it over to him, but after their lecturing and the scare Finka Zupan had given her, Winter was a bit more wary. “For all you know, the bottle rolled under the sofa. Did any of you check?”
Everyone looked at each other.
She rolled her eyes. “You’re all forgetting Occam’s Razor,” she chided them.
“Occam?” Patrick asked.
“Scientific principle,” Sebastian replied. “The simplest theory – or explanation for us – tends to be the truth. In this case, we should assume the bottle rolled under the sofa until we know otherwise.”
“Most of our questions could be answered by Garrett himself,” Winter pointed out.
“And here he is,” Nial murmured.
The trailer door opened slowly. Garrett took the steps down to the dirt one at a time, then moved carefully over to the swing seat and sat just as warily on the cushions. He had all the physical markers of a man with an acute hangover, except that Winter knew the only thing he was suffering was a headache. But for a vampire who had enjoyed good health unmarred by so much as a snivel, allergies, or the petty irritation of a scratch or hangnail for centuries, coping with a headache would be hard enough. Pain was a novel concept he was getting re-acquainted with in a hurry.
Sauvage sat next to him and Garrett winced as the swing set rocked at the movement.
Sebastian and Nial moved closer but Winter hung back. She saw no need to coddle the man for something that was self-inflicted. She had no questions the others weren’t capable of asking.
Garrett propped his head on his hand, his fingers digging into the temple. “What happened?”
“You first, leathcheann.” Sebastian’s tone was unforgiving, which matched calling Garrett an idiot.
Winter smiled. She wasn’t the only one with no patience for self-flagellation, then. Good.
Garrett heard the impatience in Sebastian’s Irish curse and understood it. He had been all sorts of idiot. He still was. “I have no idea where to start,” he confessed.
“What happened that made you try to crawl into a bottle of scotch?” Nial asked. His tone was gentler, but there was underlying plate steel there. He was ready to pounce, too.
“What happened when you went to speak to Kate?” Sebastian added. “Because you were not planning on killing yourself before then.”
“Killing…?” Pat repeated and choked. “It kills you?” he asked, sounding horrified.
“I suppose, yes, it would have,” Garrett said. “I hadn’t considered that at all. I didn’t know what it would do to me. I just knew I had to have a drink or…” He gave a hollow laugh.
“Or die?” Nial finished dryly.
“I wanted to get drunk,” Garrett said. “Blind drunk. I wanted to shut my brain down.”
“Well, you managed that, didn’t you?” Nial’s wife said. She was standing further away, distancing herself from all of them. From him, Garrett realized. Judging him.
“Did I?”
She straightened up. “For at least forty minutes that we know of, yes, you did.” She explained to him the state she had found him in, what the scotch had done to his vampire and human systems and how she had corrected it.
Pat shuddered next to him.
“I don’t remember any of it,” Garrett confessed.
“Which doesn’t match my experience,” Nial replied. “I was aware and able to hear everything.”
“This happened to you?” Garrett turned his head carefully to look at Nial in amazement. “I don’t believe you would ever have a need to get drunk, Nathanial.”
Nial grinned. “I ate a mouthful of food.”
“That, I can believe.”
“Alcohol affects the brain directly. Food doesn’t. It has to be the difference. How much did you drink?” Winter asked him.
He just looked at her.
Sebastian laughed. “Don’t be silly, Winter. He drank the whole bottle.”
Winter rolled her eyes. “Enjoy your headache, Garrett.” She turned and walked away.
“I think she’s pissed at me,” Garrett observed.
“You deserve it,” Sebastian said.
Garrett nodded.
“It really kills you?” Pat insisted, next to him. There was distress in his voice.
“Well, what do you think would have happened to me, if Winter wasn’t around?” Garrett asked reasonably.
“But don’t you people know?” Pat glanced at Nial and Sebastian. “Surely this has happened before. Garrett and you can’t have been the first vampires to want to blot out a memory, or been overwhelmed by the desire to eat a cookie.”
“Probably not,” Nial replied. “But you know we don’t have a written history. We’ve preserved ourselves by never lingering in each other’s company. If one of us has succumbed to this in the past, no one would know about it. The victim would have simply disappeared from our ranks, while the humans around him would have assumed he had slipped into a coma and died from unknown causes.”
“Perhaps they wake up after a while. Like you say, you don’t know,” Pat said.
“There’s no out for you, Patrick,” Sebastian said. “Once you become a vampire, you don’t get to eat…or drink. Even if you want to.”
Pat licked his lips. “God, are you telling me I’ll still want to?”
Garrett sighed. The fear in Pat’s voice was painful to listen to. “You’ll have wants and desires, but they’ll be intellectual things. Muted. Left over habits from when you were human. You’ll find them much easier to divert and ignore. The blood hunger, though – the need to feed – is something your vampire physiology supplies and that you will not be able to ignore.”
Pat swallowed. He nodded. “Good. Okay. Alright, then.” He gave a small smile. “Sorry. You had me worried.”
Nial leaned against the edge of the table, stretched out his legs and crossed his arms. “Where did you do the drinking, Garrett?”
Garrett frowned. “Here. I’m not stupid.”
“Then someone took the bottle once you…passed out.”
“I locked the trailer door.”
“Who has the key?”
“Your wife, MacDonald, Sebastian.”
“You trust your lawyer enough to give him a key to your trailer?” Sebastian asked.
“I gave you a key, didn’t I?” Garrett returned.
“He’s your lawyer. That’s a business relationship.”
“I trust him well enough for a human,” Garret replied.
Sebastian stared him down.
Garrett curled his lip. “John McDonald has been my corporate lawyer for nearly twenty years. Do I trust him? No! I don’t trust lawyers as far as I can throw ‘em. But I do trust him to do his job. I trust him enough that he’s become a millionaire working for me. That buys a lot of loyalty.”
Sebastian looked unhappy.
“Besides, the insurance company and site security and safety insist a key be kept with the accounting office of the site, in the admin trailer.”
“So basically, anyone could have got in,” Patrick said.
N
ial shrugged. “The locks on these trailers are ten seconds jobs, even without a key. A credit card is enough.”
Patrick’s mouth opened. “That’s not just the movies?”
“It’s really not,” Nial assured him.
“My locks are custom fitted,” Garrett pointed out.
Sebastian glided over to the door and opened it. “Forty-five seconds with a lock pick,” he announced, moving back to the seats.
“Bollocks,” Garrett declared.
“Want a demonstration?” Sebastian asked him. “I’m a bit rusty, so I gave myself a ten second margin, but I bet I could shave some time off.”
“The point is, your trailer is wide open and anyone could have taken the bottle,” Nial said, his voice a little louder. “We’re not going to be able to figure out why until we know who, so the question gets shelved for now.”
“Or it’s still under the sofa where it rolled,” Sebastian added. “Let me look.” He climbed into the trailer and silence settled on the small group for the forty-five seconds he was gone. He leaned out of the door, holding up a nearly-empty bottle. “I dibs-out from telling Winter.”
Nial sighed. “That leaves me. Coward.” He looked at Garrett. “I’m more interested in knowing why you wasted a bottle of 40 year old Fettercairn single malt in the first place.”
“How did you know—” He made himself stop. “My local distillery. Of course you’d guess.”
Nial raised a brow. “How long have you had the bottle with you?”
“It was a gift from a business associate. Years ago. He knew my ‘family’ were from Kincardineshire, descendants of the Bruces.”
“Did the bottle get him the deal?”
“No, but it got him some favours, later on.” Garrett managed a smile despite the pounding in his head. “It was a step beyond the usual Glenfiddich piss.”
“Spoken like a true Scottish clansman,” Sebastian said. “I still want to know why, Garrett. You scared the crap out of Patrick and you’ve inconvenienced everyone with this stunt. You’d better have a rock solid reason.”
Garrett sighed. “I don’t.” He found he couldn’t quite look anyone in the eye.
The silence, this time, was thick.
“We’ll take any reason at all,” Nial said, finally.
Garrett brought both hands up to his temples. His head felt like the skull was trying to contract and squeeze his brains into paste. He felt wretched and wondered if Winter had left the headache in place deliberately.
“Garrett…” Sebastian said, his tone both warning and coaxing.
“I kissed Kate,” he said, spitting it out.
“That’s a reason to jump off the end of the world, for sure,” Sebastian shot back, his Irish thicker than usual. “She’s such an ugly lass, after all.”
“Bastian,” Nial said quietly. Warningly.
Garrett could almost feel Nial’s gaze, sizing him up. “It wasn’t just a kiss, was it?” Nial said.
Garrett started to shake his head and instantly stopped and waited for the pounding to cease. “No,” he whispered, clutching his skull.
Silence. Again. When the pounding faded, he dared to look up. All three of them were watching him. Waiting.
“You want it painted by numbers for you?” he asked, irritated.
“We want you to say it out loud,” Sebastian said. “Admit it to us and to yourself instead of trying to pickle it with 24% proof alcohol and hope it goes away.”
“This isn’t a girlie confession circle.”
“See any of us painting our nails?” Sebastian asked. He moved over to the table. “I’ve got all night. Patrick’s scene roster for tomorrow is night shooting, so he can sleep all day.” He sat next to Nial. “You kissed her and it wasn’t that you didn’t like it, Garrett. You liked it too much. That’s what’s making you toss your mental cookies right now. A bint of a human chickie has stirred your dusty reflexes and it scared you so much you dived into a two-four of Fettercairn.”
“You seem to think I’ve been a monk up until now. You’re wrong,” Garrett replied, keeping his reply as calm as possible, even though Sebastian’s cruel teasing had come close enough to the truth to make him uncomfortable.
“Not that wrong. Your heart just started beating,” Sebastian replied. “I can hear it. This is stirring things up for you.”
Patrick turned his head sharply to look at Garrett.
Garrett calmed himself, trying to control his heart, but it wouldn’t halt. He let it be. “You are, however, missing the point,” he replied.
Nial stood up. “No, he was probing to establish the point, and you just confirmed it, Garrett. The fact that you couldn’t see what he was doing, despite the years you’ve been firing salvos across boardroom tables shows just how much this has disoriented you. If the circumstances were different, if the players were not personally invested, I’d pull you off the board. But you’re committed now.”
“You’re talking double-dutch, Nathaniel.” Garrett rubbed at his forehead. “I was committed before.”
“Your body was committed. But not your heart.”
A hot wave of…something swept over him and churned in his gut and his chest. Garret surged to his feet, propelled there by indignation, horror and fear.
“I don’t love her!” He spoke the words with force, inches from Nial’s face.
Then the pounding headache caught up with him, punishing him for moving in the first place. He swayed, staggering, bringing his hand to his head. “ohh…”
Nial grabbed his arms, steadying him.
When Garrett could focus again, Nial’s astonishing blue-eyed gaze was steady on his face, waiting.
“I don’t love her,” Garrett repeated.
“Not yet,” Nial replied. “But you’re getting there.”
“No.”
“Why not? Because she’s human?”
Garrett licked his lips.
“Or because she’s not Roman?”
He closed his eyes, unwilling to let Nial see his reaction. He realized that was telling enough and opened them again.
But surprisingly, Nial’s expression was one of empathy. Understanding. He let go of Garrett’s arms and patted his shoulder. “One last question. When was the last time you felt this way? Something this intense?”
Garrett’s heart was thundering. As soon as Nial asked the question he knew the answer. It leapt into his mind and glowed there like neon.
Roman.
Nial nodded, as if he had read the name for himself in Garrett’s eyes or expression. “We will play this differently now, Calum. We will try to find a way to see you don’t get your heart carved up at the end.”
Garrett nodded. He worked his way carefully back to the swing seat and waited for his head to clear, then caught Nial’s eye again. “Mine isn’t the only heart in this.”
Sebastian smiled, looking at Nial, who glanced at him.
“What?” Garrett demanded.
“It’s just that,” Sebastian said, “We weren’t sure you had a heart at all, until tonight. Now you’re worrying about everyone else’s into the bargain. That Fettercairn is a potent drop indeed.”
“So it was a crappy excuse to go on a bender. Take your free shots, boy,” Garrett growled. “Tomorrow you’re my employee again and I’ll take it all out of your hide in spades.”
“What makes you think it was a crappy excuse?” Nial asked. “You got blindsided by one of the most powerful human emotions out there and you’ve been ducking this stuff for centuries. I don’t believe there’s a better reason for thinking single malt was a good way to duck it for a while longer.”
“You’re lucky Winter was around,” Patrick added.
“Am I?” Garrett asked sourly.
“You’d be dead, otherwise. Well, technically dead.”
Garrett leaned back carefully into the corner of the swing. “Affairs of the heart have never been kind to me, Pat. Death by Fettercairn seems pleasant in comparison.” As his head gave out an extra h
ard, heated throb, he closed his eyes. “I would have been spared this bloody headache, too.”
Chapter Thirteen
Thumping on the trailer door woke her, making her jump. Kate rediscovered she was sitting at her desk, with her head pillowed on her arms. She straightened up, feeling her neck and the small of her back scream in protest. “Coming!” she yelled, but it emerged as a croak.
Too much tequila. Now she remembered. She glared at the nearly empty bottle on the desk where her elbow had rested. She had cracked the seal about five minutes after arriving back at the trailer last night and that had been about fifteen minutes after Garrett’s kiss. Three of those minutes had been spent convincing Adrian she had work to do at her desk, so don’t bother trying to coax her to bed tonight. Another five of them had been spent acquiring the tequila.
Then she had tried to get shit-faced and wipe Garrett from her mind. It hadn’t worked so well, for while her body had cooperated and shut down on her nicely, her brain had continued to fire on all cylinders, circling around the kiss endlessly, playing it out from all camera view points and perspectives.
The kiss…and Garrett’s fucked-up reaction afterwards.
No matter how she pulled it apart and tried to refit it, no matter what motives she applied to Garrett, she couldn’t get the pieces to fit.
It just didn’t make sense.
Kate pushed the trailer door open, rather than suffer another pummelling on the metal. She threw her arm up to protect her eyes as a shaft of early morning sunlight pierced her eyes. The sun was just lifting over the horizon.
“Jesus! What time is it, for fuck’s sake?” she demanded, wincing.
“Nearly five,” came the answer.
“Brittany?” Kate forced her eyes to focus despite the glare and saw the P.A. standing at the bottom of the steps. “What the hell?”
“Sorry to wake you,” the teenager said in her high, innocent voice. “But Mary-Ann says you’d better get over to the extras tent pronto.”
“She did? Why?” Mary-Ann was their on-site media coordinator, a sweet young thing carrying a freshly minted communications degree from Stanford. She had been another of Garrett’s perfect finds – she had graduated summa cum laude, but she came at a ridiculously cheap price. As they were parked in the middle of nowhere, the chances that she’d actually have to do anything seriously challenging until they returning to L.A., where there was a whole agency to back her up, was next to zero.
Blood Stone Page 16
