Blood Stone

by Tracy Cooper-Posey

  Garrett got the door of the taxi open and was about to fold himself into the back seat when he heard his name called. It wasn’t just any name.

  “Micheil!”

  He shut the door and turned to face her, relief and happiness battling for first place in his chest. Kate threw herself at him, her whole body weight slamming into him. She wrapped her arms around his neck and clung. “I’m sorry,” she told him. “That was such a shitty way to do it. But I couldn’t get past my own sense of betrayal. I just wanted to hurt you back. I never stopped to think how it must be for you, all the time.”

  “It had to come out sooner or later. You just beat us to it.” He lifted her chin, making her look at him. “We were trying to figure out how to tell you, Kate. You have to believe that. But it’s a hard thing to say. One of the hardest things to tell—” He glanced at the taxi driver. “Someone like you,” he amended.

  He peered more closely at her face. “You’ve been crying?” He touched under her eyes and felt the dampness.

  “It’s nothing.” She smiled at him. “Adr…Roman, all this time knew M…my movie guy. The time I could have saved.” She grimaced.

  “But that’s not why you were crying. Really.”

  She shook her head. “I feel like an asshole for this. I was angry. I reacted like a hormonal teenager. It was pathetically melodramatic. Micheil, I’m so sorry.”

  He brushed her hair out of her face. The words were right there behind his lips. The love. He was afraid to speak in case the truth tumbled from him. Instead he bent his head and kissed her. He poured the words and the feelings into the kiss instead and it was a heady, thought-stealing one.

  Kate blinked and pressed her hand against his chest. “I felt your heart…start,” she whispered.

  “You did that,” he told her.

  “But I normally can feel your heart.” She bit her lip. “More lying? You can control your heart?”

  “We can control it under most circumstances. Highly emotional or physically taxing ones will take that control from us. Or we can simply surrender to autonomy. Let our heart beat as it will.”

  “Is there a price for autonomous heartbeat?” she asked, her voice still low.

  “More frequent feedings.”

  Kate shook her head. “So much to learn. To revise. I feel like I have to go over every conversation we’ve ever had and put it back into context.”

  “That’s natural.”

  She looked at his chest again. “Where is your shirt?” She pulled his jacket aside to look at his chest in the steadily darkening evening light.

  “In your kitchen garbage can,” he told her. “I couldn’t walk around wearing it like it was.” He reached into his jacket. “There’s something I didn’t leave behind, though, that I wanted to.” He pulled out the chain and held it out. “Here.”

  Kate rested the wooden pendant on her palm and peered at it. “It looks gorgeous. Like filigree, or lace, but it’s all wood. You can see all the way through the heart. It has two sides, like there’s…yes, there’s something inside.” She looked up at him. “Do you know what is in there?”

  “Maybe.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Where did you get it? It’s beautiful.”

  “Before tonight, I would have given you a long story about Tiffany’s or a Sotheby’s auction.” He shrugged.

  “You made it?”

  “I learned how to make pretty things with lumps of useless wood from sitting around camp fires at night on campaigns and wars and battles too many to itemize. And recently, I got my favourite whittling knife back. Remember a week ago, when some jerk sawed off the back inch of the arm of your chair on the set?”

  Kate’s mouth opened. She held up the pendant. “This is it? My chair arm?”

  “It was something to do with my hands on the set. Under the circumstances, Kate, you may not want to wear it. At least, not openly. But keep it. I’d like you to have it.”

  She closed her hand around it protectively. “It’s mine.”

  He grinned. “You’d better go back in. Roman is ready to finish the job on me that you started.” He nodded toward the front door. Roman stood with his back against the front post of the veranda, his arms crossed. Even from the roadside, his glare was recognizable.

  Kate slid the pendant carefully into her pocket. “See you on the set, Micheil.”

  “Tomorrow,” he agreed and got into the taxi.

  Halfway back to the studio, as he was composing a long email to Nial about their disclosure to Kate, Kate’s Twitter reached him.

  @DoveAngel. I’d wish you sweet dreams, but you don’t, do you? Just torrid fantasies, huh?

  His cock – his entire body – came to the alert and began to pound. There was nothing he could do about it. She was tucked up with Roman for the night. He could help himself, but it was a hollow meaningless venting at the best of times.

  Garrett gripped the padded door handle and forced his mind on to any other track at all and struggled to keep it there.

  It was going to be a very long night.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Kate shut the front door and leaned against it.

  Roman was sitting halfway up the curved staircase, his hands gripped together again. “That was a very touching scene,” he said dryly. “Two hankies at least.”

  “I owed him an apology. I wasn’t going to let him leave without one.”

  “I saw it. The ‘apology’. A doozie.”

  She just looked at him.

  Roman dropped his gaze.

  Kate relented. She climbed to the step two below where Roman was sitting and rested her back against the wall. “You and Garrett know each other. You told me that before, but you had to imply it was just a few years. How long have you really known each other?”

  Roman looked at her. In the building dark, his dark eyes were black orbs. “Do you truly want to know this?”

  “I wasn’t ready for the reality of it, before. Now, I really do want to know. I’m…curious.”

  He hesitated. She could understand his caution. So she reached out and plucked one of his hands away from the other and held it. “Please,” she said simply.

  Roman moved over to the wall and leaned against it like she was. His lower leg rested on the step beneath her higher knee. “I grew restless at the end of the sixteenth century. Constantinople grew too small, which was a mild understatement as it was the biggest city in the world for fourteen centuries. But I got restless and itchy and I started to wander. And I ended up in Scotland, in the middle of their endless bloody squabbles with the English. I met a Scotsman with flaming red hair, eyes snapping fire and passion for his clan, swinging a broadsword at anything that defied his cause.”

  “Garrett,” Kate breathed.

  “Mmm. He was a breath of fresh air and I was a jaded Byzantine civil servant. When the bloody English ambushed him and stabbed him in the back with their long staves one night, I killed them all. Then I turned him.”

  She shuddered at the picture his simple words painted. “You’re Garrett’s…maker? Is that what you call it?”

  “Yes. That’s one name for it.”

  “What are the others?”

  “We use lots of different words. It depends on where we come from. Who trained us. There’s one word you will know, though.” He gave her hand a little squeeze for emphasis. “Lovers.”

  Her stomach gave a little drop. Her heart lurched. But at the same time, her brain was mentally nodding, going ‘of course’. Because it seemed…right. “It’s like I should have been able to see that for myself if I could have focused an extra half an inch closer,” she told him. “You gave yourselves away so many times. The details were there to be seen. I just didn’t see them.”

  “Most people don’t. It’s not a failure. We – the blood – count on that to be able to pass as human on a daily basis.” He hesitated again. “You’re not running away in horror, Kate.”

  “Because you were lovers? God, why should I? I just wis
h I’d known sooner. It explains so much about the pair of you that I couldn’t answer. But it does complicate things, doesn’t it?” She stroked the back of his hand with her thumb. “I haven’t made life easy for either of you.”

  “It has been…interesting,” he agreed.

  “Chinese curse interesting,” she amended. She shifted her hips. “Jesus, these stairs are killing my backside. Couldn’t you have found somewhere more comfortable for a human ass?”

  He chuckled. “My ass is growing numb, too.”

  She pushed herself up off the step and turned and straddled his hips. He steadied her, his thumbs stroking over her midriff in light semi-circles, making her stomach muscles twitch and quiver.

  “I do a good massage,” she offered.

  “Oh, you do, do you?” He yanked her top off in one blindingly fast movement that made her gasp.

  “Now you’re just showing off,” she complained.

  “Absolutely.” He kissed her, his hands swooping up her torso to cup her breasts and squeeze the nipples, tweaking them to taut silvery sensitive peaks. His lips trailed down her throat and paused over her frantic heartbeat. He licked the pulse and moved on, down to her breast and sucked in the tip.

  As she moaned and became lost in the pleasure of it, he picked her up, his arm around her waist, lifted her up two more steps and propped her against them.

  Then he tore her jeans from her. He shredded them, barely without effort. He didn’t even look strained.

  Kate shivered at the demonstration of physical strength. He plucked away her panties with no effort at all.

  Then he stood between her thighs and stripped, watching her face the entire time.

  “I can barely see you,” she whispered.

  “I can see every inch of you perfectly.”

  He slid his hand under her ass, lifting her hips to meet his. His other hand gripped the stairs above her head for leverage as he drove into her. It was hard and powerful and Kate moaned with satisfaction at being taken so masterfully. He was grinding his hips as he thrust so his cock stroked along the sides of her pussy in ways that it normally didn’t and she could feel every inch of him touching her.

  Her climax didn’t build at all. It arrived fully formed and exploded over her like a fireworks display, a surprise that sparkled and dazzled, and left aftershocks glowing on her retinas.

  Roman thrust even deeper in a series of swift little strokes and dropped his head to press it against hers. He came, his body tightening and growing still and he muttered something in a language she didn’t know, his lips brushing the nape of her neck.

  Maybe ten seconds passed in silence. Then Roman picked her up, his cock still inside her, and climbed the stairs.

  “Where now?” she asked.

  “I want that massage,” he told her. “But first, I want to hear you scream.”

  On her third orgasm, with the butt plug and Roman’s cock inside her, she did. But even as Roman tucked her into bed to sleep, she found her drowsy mind drifting back to Garrett. He followed her down into her sleep.

  * * * * *

  Moving through the darkened house, his ears tuned to the sound of Kate’s gentle breathing as she slept, Roman picked up the trail of clothing and garment fragments they’d cast about the stairs.

  He was feeling light. Hollowed out. There was an enormous sense of relief and release in having Kate know it all, to have her know the worst and still have her in his bed and his arms. Somehow, a miracle had occurred.

  He was feeling very lucky.

  As he picked up the section of her jeans with the pockets sewn in, something fell out. He moved quickly to catch it and held it up. A chain. He let the pendant dangle so he could examine it.

  He recognized it with a sick, sinking feeling.

  When had Garrett given this to her? Had he told her what it really meant? Surely, Kate would have mentioned it if he had. She wouldn’t have casually stuffed such a thing in her pocket.

  He stood on the stairs, debating with himself what to do. He could put the chain back in the scrap of denim and let it be thrown out with the rest of the garbage. Plead ignorance if Kate remembered the pendant and went looking for it.

  The smell. He could still remember the smell. May as a month was his least favourite time of year. He tended to avoid Britain and most of Europe in May.

  He climbed the stairs again, the sick feeling evolving, growing into a railing hatred for doing this to himself, for helping Garrett, but knowing it was the right thing to do, anyway. He laid the pendant on the side table next to Kate’s pillow, where she would find it in the morning.

  Then he left the house.

  * * * * *

  It still early in the evening, so Garrett only fed enough to keep the fever silent. He would have to hunt and feed properly in another day or two, but he would be able to pick the time and location better. After tonight’s trauma and the emotional upheavals around it, his hunger had arrived early and with a vengeance.

  He was still quartering his feeding area, cleaning it of traces, when Roman stole into the lane like a mist and a rumour. One minute Garrett was alone. Next, Roman was by his side.

  Garrett nodded and finished his fine filtered scan of the pavement for blood and other bodily fluids before he straightened up.

  “Figured you’d be out tonight,” Roman murmured.

  “Not a hard one to call, considering,” Garrett replied, just as quietly. He moved off, heading for the street, light and human-ness.

  Roman caught up with him. “Hey.”

  Garrett didn’t answer.

  “You’re pissed with me?”

  He kept walking.

  Roman caught at his arm. “Wait.”

  Garrett waited. He simply looked at him.

  “What don’t I get?” Roman asked.

  “You so did not want to tell Kate. Having her find out about me, first, put nearly all the pressure on me. Then you just had to step up and say ‘me, too’ and your bit was over.”

  Roman’s eyes widened almost comically. “You motherfucker. You think I set you up for that? That I would drop the bomb on Kate like that? Some anonymous tip off that screwed with her head so much she’d pig-stick you to test it?”

  “Is that how she found out?” Garrett started walking again.

  “I don’t know. We didn’t get that far. It has to be something like that for her to suddenly be certain enough to ram a knife in your innards and figure you wouldn’t die.”

  “She’s got guts,” Garrett told him. “What if she had been wrong?”

  “Guts or good information? I figured…”

  Garrett glanced at him. “Who?”

  Roman shoved his hands into his pockets and glanced at Garrett from under his brow. “I though Nial might be trying to push the chess pieces around a little faster.”

  Garrett considered it. “It would be a good strategic move under certain circumstances, but Nial isn’t that heartless. He wouldn’t do it without warning us.”

  “Would his wife?” Roman asked. “A woman looking out for another woman?”

  “Her name is Winter,” Garrett told him, irritated.

  Roman gave a semi grin. “I know that. I’m surprised you do. You can barely remember your secretary’s name…or that they’re not called secretaries anymore.”

  “Keep telling you. I’m not that man anymore.”

  Both of them could move silently when they needed to, so their footsteps barely sounded in the pre-dawn air as they passed silently along the street. Finally, Roman sighed. “I’m starting to understand that,” he acknowledged softly. “I guess the world can change if Calum Garrett can.”

  * * * * *

  Garrett was just out of the shower when the tap came on his trailer door. It was still pre-human hours, so Garrett answered it, tying his robe hastily, fully expecting Sebastian or perhaps Nial.

  Kate bit her lip. “Roman took off,” she said. “Some time in the middle of the night. He’s not back.”

  Ga
rrett glanced around the hangar. There was no one within visual distance to see Kate at his door, so he drew her into the trailer quickly and shut the door. “He’s fine,” he assured her. “I’ve seen him.”

  She stood by the armchair, her fingers digging into the leather. “I think he’s upset.”

  “Why?”

  She pulled open her shirt, which was, for a change, a white button-down with the sleeves rolled up. His pendant sat inside the shirt. “He found it last night and put it next to my bed. And he wasn’t around when I woke up. Does he know something about this, Micheil? Does the design mean something?”

  Too intuitive. Too close to the mark. Garrett weighed up and discarded a dozen lies in the space of two heartbeats, then realized he’d hesitated too long.

  “It does,” she confirmed. “That’s why you told me to be discreet about wearing it. Is it some sort of Scottish Claddagh thing, Micheil? Am I bonded or some shit like that because I took it from you?”

  He started to laugh. He couldn’t help it. The strident wariness of her voice, along with the hodgepodge of cultural references, all while she was standing there in jeans, shirt and boots, looking lovely, fresh and so very modern and independent, spilled over the top of his humour meter and he had to let loose.

  Kate smiled. “Good,” she said, with a sigh, moving closer. “‘coz you don’t get to marry me without asking me first.” She halted and her eyes widened as she looked at him.

  Garrett let the moment go deliberately. He kissed her cheek. “I get the feeling that if you marry anyone at all, Kate, you’re the one that’s going to do the asking.” He tugged her gently into the armchair. “Sit and relax.”

  “Is Roman coming back?” she asked.

  “Yes,” Garrett told her, although that was something he was going to have to make sure of, later.

  She sank down onto the edge of the cushions. “Shit. I need a vacation,” she said with a sigh. “I can’t cope with my personal life blowing up while I’m doing a movie, too.”

  “Is that what this feels like? Your personal life exploding?”

  She pushed a hand through her hair, lifting it back from her face with an impatient motion. “Honestly, Micheil? I thought Roman would be a nice distraction while I was filming. You, I didn’t count on at all. I just wanted to kill you and roast your balls after the contract signing. It’s all so fucking complicated now.”