Page 79 of Blood Stone

“Maybe,” Nial said. “It just doesn’t make any sense. Not an open, in public shooting like that. The Libertatis want vampires to remain hidden. That’s their entire mandate. The League, too. Why shoot me in public where I’ll be exposed as not-human in front of six cinema quality cameras for the world to see?”

“The shot wasn’t for the head,” Winter pointed out. “They went for the gut. A human just might have survived it.”

Sebastian smiled at her. “My wife,” he said proudly.

Nial turned her face up to his and kissed her. “That’s it,” he said. “They were trying to get me off the set. If a humanhadsurvived the shot, they would have been bundled off to intensive care for weeks of treatment, neatly out of the Pro Libertatis’ way. Either way, if that shot had been noticed by any of the humans on the set, I would have had to leave, as either dead or critically wounded.”

“Thanks to Garrett’s quick reaction, you don’t have to do either,” Winter pointed out.

“Maybe he’s not the prick I took him for,” Sebastian mused.

Winter felt Nial breathe in deeply and let it out, relaxing. “He’s learning how to be human again, Bastian. You never forgot in the first place. Give him a break.”

“Besides,” Winter added. “I think he has huge potential.”

“Now, we just need to draw the Libertatis and the League out, instead of having them take pot shots at us from dark corners,” Nial said. “We need faces and names. The second part of the game begins.”

* * * * *

Feeding was a challenge on the set, but there were wandering homeless souls, even out here in these wastelands and although it took him some time, Garrett tracked down a campsite of men just north of the Mexican border, about five miles away from the shoot. They were heavily armed and had posted a guard. Garrett found them by their scent and the scent of their drugs, stashed in the side panels of the trucks they had parked too close to the fire, letting the flames and the metal panels bake the drugs into useless powder. They were destroying their profits as they slept, but they were amateurs. The lack of trouble he had dealing with the guard told him that much.

He fell on them and fed deeply, for his next feed would be uncertain.

He would have left them alive and free to tell their story to whomever would believe them, except that one tried to shoot him even after he had let them go and was walking away.

It had been a long day and an even longer night. Garrett turned to look back at the drunken fool, holding up his ripped and bleeding arm, feeling the tendon and muscle knit back together, a tired anger washing over him. The man had been such a shoddy shooter he’d missed the bone altogether.

The idiot tossed the revolver onto the ground and scrambled backwards, fear finally registering on his face.

“Too late,” Garrett told him and walked back towards him.

He made it quick, which he figured was considerate, under the circumstances. What he really wanted to do was roast them all over an open fire. But no one deserved that sort of death. Not even child prostitute mongering drug runners.

He made it back to the film location inside ten minutes and made a great circle around the lights, noise and bustle of the cast and crew, heading for the shower truck. He needed to clean up before anyone saw him.

The shower stalls were all empty and blessedly quiet when he stepped inside. He relaxed his guard and stripped off, moving fast. He checked his arm, twisting to look at the back of it in the badly lit mirror over the stainless steel sink. The mirror was too small and too high up for him to see enough.

“Your arm looks fine, Calum.”

He jerked in surprise, spinning to check the doorway.

Roman was leaning against the frame. He straightened up and moved toward him, his gaze on Garrett’s arm. “It looks the way it always did from here.” He stopped in front of him. “Turn around.”

“You slipped in silently on purpose.”

“Yes. Turn around.”

“Why?”

“I saw you wearing the latest design in blood splatters and trying to sneak passed everyone. So I followed you. Turn around, let me see the back of your arm. I assume it was a gunshot?”

Garrett turned around, abruptly aware of his nakedness. He fought to control his heartbeat. Roman would read far too much into a runaway heart.

Roman prodded at the back of his arm. “Perfectly normal,” he declared. “Did you choose the wrong dinner?”

“Something like that.” Garrett picked up his shirt from the floor, ran the cold water faucet and started washing the blood stains out. With luck, the denim shirt would end up looking damp and dirty, instead of blood splattered.

“Take a shirt from the costume department,” Roman said. “You’re never going to make that look like anything other than washed out blood. I’ll get it for you.”