Blood Stone

by Tracy Cooper-Posey

  “And these people, these Pro Libertatis…they’re all vampire?”

  “Vampires that don’t want humans to know there are vampires in the world,” Sebastian confirmed. “They intend to stop Nial from his revelation next year, in any way they can.”

  “So they took Garrett and Winter. Why?”

  “To stop us,” Nial replied and for the first time she heard emotion in his voice. There was anger there. “By holding them hostage and milking them at the same time to learn what it is I intend to do so they can out-manoeuvre me.”

  Sebastian briefly rested his hand on Nial’s shoulder and he breathed in deeply, and let it out. “Roman, you didn’t just get to say no and walk away. It’s not that simple.”

  Roman grimaced. “Of course it isn’t. They’re watching me.”

  “You knew that?” Sebastian breathed.

  “I know when I’m being followed. I’ve had a long-distance tail since we got back from the desert. A bad tail. They got too close once and I made them for vampire, so I let them be until I could figure out what to do with them. Vampire told me they were either Pro Libertatis or your guys. Until just now I didn’t know which. Now I know they were Pro Libertatis.”

  “Who else have they been observing?” Sebastian wondered.

  “Probably all of us,” Nial answered. “I would. And they knew enough to pick up Winter straight out of the restaurant.” He moved over to the desk and rested against it, stretching his legs out. “They know about the Blood Stone. That’s why they wanted you,” he told Roman.

  Roman rolled his eyes. “That much, I figured.”

  Kate glanced at them both. “Blood stone?” she asked.

  “It’s a mythical artefact known to vampires,” Sebastian told her. “The Libertatis think you might have dug it up in Turkey last year, and that Roman might have found it among the props here at the hangar. They’re watching him to see if he moves any stone-like or suspicious looking objects out of the hangar.”

  She looked at Roman. He was watching her steadily, his gaze unwavering.

  “This is why you and I met?” she asked.

  “Yes,” he said flatly.

  “So you really did have an agenda, after all.”

  “Everyone does, Kate. Even if it’s just to meet someone, fall in love and never be lonely again. It’s still an agenda. It’s still an ambition. It’s still hope. You wanted to make a movie. I wanted to find the Blood Stone. Micheil wanted to further Nial’s cause.” Roman smiled a little. “None of us planned to fall in love.”

  Sebastian grinned. “It turns lives upside down, that one.”

  Nial stood up. “Garrett had faith in you, Roman. For now, I’ll rely on his gut instinct. I don’t have time to test for myself and the Libertatis can bury their tracks deep. It will be easy enough to deal with you later if we’re wrong about you.”

  Kate drew in a breath that shook. Nial’s threat sounded off-hand and casual, but she knew there was real intent behind it.

  And so did Roman. He didn’t smile. He didn’t scowl, or show any emotion at all. He just looked back at Nial steadily.

  “For now, you can help us find them,” Nial added.

  Roman nodded. “How?”

  “You three spent the night together last night? After the party?”

  A cascade of quick images from the night she had spent with Roman and Garrett spilled through her mind. Her body throbbed and tightened as she recalled them.

  Sebastian glanced at her. “That would be yes,” he said.

  Kate blew out her breath, her cheeks burning, as she realized that Sebastian had read the signs of arousal in her body – heard her heart rate elevate and possibly sensed her body grow warmer. Then she saw the sparkle of amusement in Roman’s eyes, even though he wasn’t smiling and she let herself smile ruefully back at him. Privacy took on a different meaning amongst vampires.

  “Yes, we were together,” Roman answered Nial, bringing his gaze up to meet Nial’s.

  “So the Libertatis would have seen you together,” Nial concluded. “And our marriage is an acknowledged fact among vampires. That’s a commonality. How did you get home from the party?”

  “Rented limousine,” Roman replied.

  “I’ve used Barney for every event since I started directing,” Kate interjected. “He’s more reliable than clockwork.”

  “Winter said she was taking a cab back to the hotel,” Sebastian said. “She didn’t want to wait for me. After talking to Kate, she’d had enough and wanted to get back to you, Nial. She said she’d get the restaurant to call her a cab. That was the last I saw of her.”

  “You didn’t go back to your hotel last night?” Roman asked.

  “Not until early this morning.” Sebastian shrugged. “Winter and I have been living in cramped quarters for weeks, in that trailer. I wanted her and Nial to have some time alone together.”

  Kate stared at him, as she pressed her teeth together to prevent her jaw from dropping. This was an aspect of a ménage arrangement she hadn’t considered before. There was a lot about a ménage she was going to have to think about.

  “Garrett caught a cab here this morning,” Roman said. “He never made it here, either.”

  “Cabs,” Nial said flatly, looking at Sebastian.

  Sebastian nodded and left the trailer, moving fast.

  “Where’s he going?” Kate asked.

  “He’s going to hack into the footage of any security cameras capturing the street view in front of the restaurant last night and in front of your house this morning. With luck, we’ll see the cab picking up both Garrett and Winter.”

  “Cabs,” Kate corrected.

  Nial shook his head. “If I’m right, it’s the same cab, both times and we’ll find it’s not registered to any dispatch company in the city.”

  “And that’s going to help us find Garrett and Winter?” Kate asked. “Because that sounds a lot like a cut-off.”

  “Then you don’t properly grasp the full extent of Sebastian’s skills,” Nial told her, with a small smile. He looked at Roman. “You know what you have to do.”

  Roman nodded.

  “What does he have to do?” Kate asked.

  “Deal with the devil,” Roman replied, pulling out his switchblade and testing it with a complicated spin of the blade and handle that was almost a blur in Kate’s vision.

  “Just for a while,” Nial amended.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  “Winter,” Garrett said again, trying to inject authority and snap into his voice.

  Winter didn’t move from the slumped position where they had dropped her onto the sofa two hours ago, when they had finished with her. Garrett had been an unwilling witness to it all. He now knew something about his past that had been a blessing in disguise: Not being there for Mary’s death.

  The hour they had questioned Winter had been one of the worst in Garrett’s life – far worse than his own interview. He had been able to accept and absorb the pain, healing himself instantly.

  Watching Winter writhe under the blows and the cuts, until she began to scream with the agony of it, was pure torture for he had been unable to help her. The anonymous humans had chained him to the heavy office chair he was still in, the chains wrapping around his arms and the chair itself and around his chest, holding him down more thoroughly than a dozen vampires.

  The humans’ knowledge about his strength and vampire nature and their lack of caution about hiding their faces from him and Winter had worried him from the beginning. Then they had begun to question him. Garrett first – using knives to cause discomfort and momentary pain and disorientation until he could heal himself. They stabbed him repeatedly, forcing him to heal himself over and over, until his blood loss bought on the need to feed…and then he realized what they had intended. They used his blood lust as leverage, holding out human blood as enticement.

  The questions seemed easy enough to answer. They wanted to know about his life. His concerns. His friends.

 
Garrett had known that answering even one question truthfully would have started him down the path they wanted him upon, so he had lied and evaded and given bullshit answers. Even in the depth of his raging thirst for blood, he had been able to hang on to that one thread of reasoning: Not to give them what they wanted, even while he didn’t know what they ultimately sought from him.

  And finally, they had let him feed. The hot, rich and spicy liquid had soothed his fever and helped restore his functioning mind. He felt soft flesh under his lips as full awareness returned.

  “He’ll kill her,” he heard, behind him.

  “He’ll weaken her,” another voice murmured. “Which is just what we want.”

  Garrett blinked, forcing his vision to focus. He stopped feeding and let his incisors retract as he saw a strand of long red hair in the corner of his eye. He tried to draw his head back, to look at who it was he was feeding from. But he already knew.

  Three of them held Winter down in the perfect position for Garrett to batten on to her neck. Her arms were wrenched up behind her back and another one had a hand over her mouth, although by now the aphrodisiac would have hit her system and she was long past any need to scream.

  They lifted Winter up as Garrett pulled away from her throat. Then they had unchained him from the chair and propped her in it, while he had been chained up upon the sofa instead. The office chair, he saw, had the wheels removed and the legs had been screwed into the floor for stability and security. They strapped her arms down.

  Winter’s eyes were open, but they were glazed and unfocused and her head was tilted to one side, like she could barely hold it up. She was very weak. Garrett hadn’t stinted himself.

  Guilt churned in his gut. She wouldn’t withstand what was to come if these humans went at her with the same gusto they’d used on him. How good was their intelligence? Did they understand exactly what she was? Did they think she was human? They’d let Garrett feed from her, so they knew she wasn’t vampire, at the very least.

  They didn’t want either of them dead…yet. They’d let Garrett feed instead of letting the blood fever take him. They’d been careful to stop him from feeding before he’d drained Winter.

  But it was a temporary reprieve. They still didn’t care about them seeing their faces. And their crass get-the-answers-now methods hinted that both Winter and Garrett were expendable commodities. These people wanted something or someone else and they were merely a means to getting them.

  That meant they were looking for leverage to deal with Nial or they were looking for the Blood Stone. Or both.

  Winter’s questioning had begun immediately after he had fed, while she had still been groggy and disoriented. They had begun by slapping her face until she had been able to focus. Then they had started the questions – the same questions they had asked Garrett. They had wanted to know about her marriage, her friends, her life.

  Winter’s green eyes had met Garrett’s only once during the entire ordeal and that had been at the very beginning of her questioning. After that, her focus had shifted inwards. She had been healing herself as the questioning proceeded, even as she gave a series of nonsense answers that Dr. Seuss himself would have been proud of. But she was already weak and her voice grew softer and slower as the blood dripped to the floor around her, draining her.

  Garrett strained at his chains, sickened and inflamed with a fury that wanted to engulf the entire room.

  Winter’s answers eventually ceased and her head drooped.

  That was when they dumped her onto the sofa next to him and he had been re-chained to the heavy chair.

  The room had abruptly emptied of humans.

  Two hours had passed while Garrett monitored Winter for signs of life, listening to the delicate sound of her breathing and the barely-there beat of her heart. It sounded wrong. It sounded laboured and her breath had a metallic tinge to it that all sick and badly wounded humans acquired. The room was rich with the scent of her injuries, calling to his predator instincts, which he tamped down with an impatient thrust.

  She had to gain full consciousness to heal herself, but she wasn’t responding when he called. He couldn’t reach her from where he sat.

  So he was going to have to go to her. He considered the chair he was chained to. There was no way he was going to remove the chains. Each link was three inches across. He’d need an oxy-acetylene blowtorch and an hour to cut just one link.

  He bent over as far as the chains around his chest would let him, to look at the legs of the chair, but couldn’t see that far. The chair shifted at his lateral movement, though, and made a sighing sound. He paused, thinking.

  With a smile, he planted his feet squarely on the ground and with a grunt of effort, attempted to lift himself, the several hundred pounds of chain wrapped around him and the chair itself, up a few inches.

  The chair rose, with a sucking sound of air rushing into a vacuum. The chains made a collective clinking and rattle that was alarming in the silent room.

  He let the chair drop back, listening for any reactions to what he had just done. When no one came bursting into the room, he let out the breath he wasn’t aware he had been holding.

  Then he braced himself again. With another thrust of his thighs and abdomens, he pulled the chair up the central post it was seated upon, fighting against the vacuum holding it in place, until the stub of tubing screwed to the base of the chair that inserted inside the post that rose from the splayed legs of the base lifted far enough out to break the seal. Then it was simply a matter of moving the extra weight of the chair and chains around while he was bent over and chained into that position.

  He stepped toward the sofa carefully, maintaining precarious balance, then lowered the chair to the floor right in front of Winter’s knees. It put his head at the height of the sofa seat and tilted him over at a crazy angle, for the post at the bottom of the chair thrust him sideways.

  His shoulder thrust against the edge of the sofa, keeping him upright. “Winter,” he said sharply, one more time.

  No response.

  He focused on her thigh. She was still wearing the pale green silk trousers she wore at the party last night, but they were wrinkled and blood splattered now. Silk was organic and no barrier to him. He traced the line of her thigh, visualizing the great artery that ran its length. The artery pumped directly to her heart and brain.

  He closed his eyes for a moment and thought of Roman and Kate. He deliberately provoked images of last night. The touch of Kate’s hand on his body. Roman’s lips. Sliding into her.

  When his body was tight with need, with throbbing-hard desire, he let his teeth descend and rocked forward, burying them in Winter’s thigh, right through the silk, into the big artery, injecting pure aphrodisiac, a much bigger dose than usual, prompted by his visualizations.

  She moaned softly, her head rolling.

  “That’s it,” Garrett whispered. “Come on, wake up,” he coaxed.

  Winter lay still for long minutes, but her breathing grew deeper and Garrett could hear her heart beat steady and grow stronger.

  Finally, one eyelid slid open, showing a sliver of green.

  “Welcome back,” he murmured.

  * * * * *

  The Los Angeles City Hall has an observation deck on the twenty-seventh floor and many people mistakenly think that is the top floor of the building, but it isn’t. The building has thirty-two floors and like most public buildings, Roman found there was a way to gain access to the roof from the thirty-second floor. It helped that he was expected and that doors with mechanical bars he might have had trouble with had been conveniently chocked open.

  He emerged into the cool of the evening, with a light breeze blowing on his face, as the sun was dipping into the Pacific, red blazing on the low horizon, while indigo blue filled the rest of the night sky. The sun itself was a fiery ball of pulsing pink and crimson as the sea swallowed it.

  It matched his mood, he decided, as he turned his back on the dowsing fireball, and looked
along the narrow catwalk. It was empty, but there was a fine trembling in the metal plates beneath his feet which told him there was someone else moving about the edge of the roof, on one of the other sides, where he couldn’t see them yet.

  Then they turned the corner and threaded their way along the three foot wide galley way, their hands on the high metal balustrades on either side.

  There were three of them and from the sunglasses, white shirt, and non-descript suit of the one in front, Roman judged him to be a guard of some sort – either private security or FBI, or possibly plain clothes cop — one of the covert specialty divisions that L.A. ran to these days.

  Roman leaned back against the balustrade, making it look casual, but trying to see who was behind the guard. It didn’t help him see any better. The gangway was too narrow.

  The front man reach Roman and stepped past with a sway of his body. He took another three steps then turned around. Roman heard the steps, but he wasn’t watching them.

  He was examining the face of the man following the guard.

  “I know you,” Roman said flatly, for his face was one he’d seen on television hundreds of times. Usually behind a podium, with the American flag and the Los Angeles county flag behind him and the seal of the city on the front of the podium.

  The man smiled. “We know each other, Roman Xerus. Look to your personal history.”

  Roman studied his face anew, trying to strip away the modern suit, the contemporary haircut and the Los Angeles downtown skyline behind him. He studied his eyes and re-heard again his voice…and heard it bawling orders on a bloody battlefield.

  “Europe. The Hundred Day Offensive. Berlin and the surrender,” Roman murmured. “I do remember. Colonel Drysdale of the Royal Welch Fusiliers.”

  “Nasty business, that. Over one million allied troops were lost.” His accent was suddenly very British.