Page 168 of Blood Stone

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.