Chapter Twelve
Winter woke to find Nial’s hand on her shoulder. It was quite dark in the trailer, but thanks to the enhanced vision she had inherited from Sebastian, she could see Patrick Sauvage standing behind Nial. Outside the trailer, the site was quiet and still. Everyone had found beds already. It must be quite late.
“What’s wrong? What’s happened?” she asked Nial.
“It’s Garrett. I need your help.” He stood and reached for her robe hanging over the back of the trailer door. “We’ll wait for you outside.”
He shepherded Sauvage back out the door and shut it.
Winter got out of the bed and reached for her jeans, ignoring the robe Nial had laid over the end of the bed. She looked down the other end of the tiny trailer, through the door that accessed the one other room. Sebastian was sitting up in bed, wide awake. “Want me to come with you?” he asked.
“Yes,” she told him. “Nial might need your help, too.”
Nial had clearly dropped the body-guard/baby-sitter role temporarily, or he would not have asked her to help. The way he had asked, the hour of his asking, meant he needed her healing talents, not Annette the executive assistant.
But it was the big unknown why – why a vampire might need her unique skills – that troubled her.
* * * * *
Garrett’s trailer was, of course, the most luxurious one on the lot. It was the most exorbitant, house-like trailer Winter had ever seen. It was as if the 1950’s style of conspicuous consumption had returned with a vengeance.
Winter had never ventured further inside the trailer than the “front” room, but the décor and comfort in that one room was impressive enough to leave her awed and make her feel slightly claustrophobic when she returned to her cramped quarters.
She followed Nial into the trailer with barely a glance at the darkened room, her heart racing, wondering what was about to greet her.
Garrett lay on the butter-coloured leather sofa. He was very pale and very still. He looked unconscious, which simply wasn’t possible. One arm hung to the floor, his knuckles scraping across the carpet carelessly.
Nial leaned down and grabbed the end of the coffee table. “Sebastian.”
Sebastian grabbed the other and they moved the iron and oak table away from the sofa, closer to the other cherry-wood panelled wall, where an antique desk sat.
“Do you think I can turn on some lights?” Patrick Sauvage asked, his voice hushed. “You may not need them to see, but I do.”
“Sure,” Sebastian said. “But shut any blinds and curtains and the door, first.”
“Shouldn’t he go back to his trailer and get some sleep?” Winter asked, settling down next to Garrett’s still form. She was uncomfortable about doing this in front of him, especially after Nial and Sebastian had just spent hours hammering security into her after Finka Zupan had tried to blackmail her.
“No,” Nial said flatly. “He stays with me.”
Sebastian turned on a lamp standing on the desk and grimaced. “Nial takes his babysitting seriously.”
“With reason,” Nial said flatly. He looked at Winter. “There’s no way around this, Winter. Pat is close to being one of us and getting closer every day.”
“Your call,” she replied and turned to Garrett. She picked up his hand and pushed inside him. Almost immediately, she had her answer. “Oh, for heaven’s sake.” She shook her head. “He’s been drinking. It’s fired up his digestive system — his whole human endocrine system. His human id is fighting his vampire ego and neither of them is winning.” She looked at Sebastian. “What happened tonight after I left? What made him think diving into a bottle was a good idea?”
Sebastian pushed his hand through his hair. “You saw it all. You tell me. Just as Adrian wrenched himself loose from me and started heading outside after Kate, Garrett busted through the doors, looking like he’d done ten rounds with Lucifer and lost ‘em all. You could practically see the internal bleeding. That made Adrian happy. Then Kate walked in and he went over to her and Garrett stalked away trailing storm clouds.” Sebastian shrugged. “I figured he was pretending to turn in for the night, so I had a couple more beers and did the same thing myself. For real.”
Nial touched her shoulder. “He’s shut down, like I was?”
She bit her lip, looking down at Garrett’s face. “Yes. But he’s taken so much more booze on board that a few sips of coffee like you did.”
“Just try,” Nial told her. “I suspect you can work it the same way.” He stepped around her and went into the inner rooms.
Patrick Sauvage took Nial’s place at the end of the sofa, staring down at Garrett with fascination. “Booze did this to him?”
“I need to concentrate,” Winter told him. “Excuse me.”
She slipped inside Garrett’s body and read the confusion, the locked stillness of two competing systems in death grip with each other. One was trying to awaken, the other trying to repress it and neither of them was winning. As a result, everything had come to a grinding halt.
She had to find a way to break the deadlock.
Nial had once suffered through this experience. His had been the result of sampling a sliver of food, which had activated his salivary glands. She had resolved his dilemma by fixing the symptoms: removing the amylase proteins and shutting down the glands, which let the human system go back into hibernation once more.
Drinking alcohol produced slightly different symptoms in a human physiology, but if she adjusted those symptoms, the results would be the same. She could put the human system back into hibernation and Garrett’s vampire physiology would “wake” once more.
She hoped. But the theory was sound, so she reached for and found the alcohol in Garrett’s blood and converted it to harmless sugars. After so many years of tweaking molecules, the bio-chemistry came to her barely without thought. This was simple stuff.
Because he had swallowed the alcohol he, too, had irritated his digestive tract, so she neutralized the amylase and stomach acids and shut down the glands.
She felt Nial’s hand on her shoulder. “Need anything?” he asked softly.
“The bat I’m going to take to his head for pulling this stunt,” she said. “Otherwise, elbow room and silence.”
She heard Sebastian’s wheezy laugh, quickly smothered. Then the silence she had requested fell.
She had left the tricky stuff for last. Now she braced herself and carefully eased her way into his brain. Alcohol did nasty things to brainpans. It dried them out, stealing spinal fluid and moisture that the brain sat in most of the time. She converted the alcohol she found there, creeping around with the most delicate touch possible. Then she shut down all signs of human physiology, letting the ghostly vampire activity take over and withdrew. There was nothing she could do about the dehydration. But it was fitting Garrett should at least have a killer headache for this.
She placed his hand back on the sofa and stood up, stretching the small of her back. She found Sauvage was staring at her. “What are you?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” she replied curtly, more tempted to tell him it was none of his business. But he was asking out of genuine interest, not simple morbid curiosity.
“He’s not waking,” he replied.
“He’s not asleep,” she told him.
“Did you manage it?” Nial asked her.
“I think so.”
“Then you’d better get out of the way,” he suggested, pushing her gently to one side.
“Why?”
“agh, me fuckin’ christ…” Garrett muttered in a thick brogue. He gripped his head. Then he sat up. “Sweet Mary, mother of god,” he whispered. All coloured drained from his face as he clutched his stomach.
“Here,” Nial said helpfully and thrust a bucket at him.
Garrett fumbled at it, leaned over it and vomited hard. The smell of used Scotch, acrid, hot and peaty, swamped the trailer.
“I’m out of here,” Winter declared, lunging for the door.
“You, too, Patrick,” Nial said, behind her. “Winter, don’t go too far.”
She sighed and stopped outside the trailer, under the awning where a full patio set, with a fold-up swing seat, crouched in the dark. She took full deep breaths of fresh air.
Nial, Sebastian and Patrick stepped down onto the hard-packed dirt and Sebastian shut the door after them.
They gathered around Winter.
“That was a lot of Scotch,” Sebastian observed.
“So where was the bottle?” Nial asked.
“Damn, yes.” Patrick straightened up, shocked. “Unless…he was hiding it. I would have.” He said it apologetically.
“He wouldn’t have had time,” Winter told him. “This reaction is instantaneous.”
The silence was broken only by the desert wind stirring the fringing on the swing seat.
“So…did someone come into the trailer and take the bottle after he was knocked out? Or did they bring him back here and dump him?” Sebastian said, keeping his voice low.
“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.
Nial 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 hard, heated throb, he closed his eyes. “I would have been spared this bloody headache, too.”