Blood Unleashed (Blood Stone) Read online

  Chapter Seven

  Cyneric heard the key slotting into the lock on the front door, but didn’t get up. There were four people who had a key to the house, besides him, and three of them wouldn’t enter without knocking or ringing first. The fourth one would.

  Rick stayed where he was and brought his mind back to the problem at hand.

  “Rick?” Erik’s voice was moving. He was looking for him.

  Rick brought his mind back to the subject once more, a small sigh escaping. Gently, he swiveled the chair, bringing a different perspective into view.

  “What the hell?” Erik was standing at the door of the second bedroom, looking around. “What are you doing?”

  Rick sighed again, loudly, and uncrossed his legs. He stood up. “I’m working,” he said shortly.

  “This is how you work?” Erik stepped further into the room and began to edge very slowly around the path Rick had left clear, in a rough circle surrounding the chair he had been sitting on. He examined the display.

  For a moment Rick saw it from Erik’s perspective. Hundreds of photos and printed-out images tacked to all four walls. Objects that represented thoughts or ideas sat beneath them. A backpack for travel, one of America’s oval footballs for sport, and more. There were pages with single words or phrases, and lists with each item separated from the other. Running between them all, connecting and interconnecting them, was lengths of yarn in symbolic colors. They led to list items, back to photos of people, on to objects on the floor. It looked crazy. It looked like he had dropped off a mental cliff.

  “I don’t always work this way,” Rick explained.

  “What other way, then?” Erik asked, still shuffling around and checking out every item. He was good looking in a blond, pale way and he wore suits well. The one he was wearing now was a dark blue, which made the most of his eyes. He’d loosened the tie. “You use a computer instead?”

  “I just think,” Rick said flatly. “Look, I appreciate that you’re here, but I really have to finish this.”

  Erik stopped at the two nearly identical pictures of Lowenstein’s apartment window, blown up to show just the window and tapped them. “Two copies of the same window? What gives?”

  Irritation stirred and Rick tamped it down. “If you observe properly, it’s perfectly obvious they’re not the same.”

  “Well, excuse me,” Erik said, with a grin. He took another step and pointed to another photo. “Isn’t that…Lowenstein? The guy who is missing?”

  “Richard Lowenstein, your House Speaker,” Rick said flatly. “Don’t you know your own political representatives?”

  Again, Erik didn’t answer. He peered closely at the print out of the grainy vintage photo Rick had found on-line. It showed a petite brunette woman, wearing stylish 1940’s street clothing, resting the butt of a machine gun on her hip. Her expression was one of anger or defensiveness. Behind her, the streets of Paris were easily identifiable, because the Eiffel Tower could be seen in the far distance. “Hard skinny bitch,” Erik said. “She looks like she ate testicles for breakfast.”

  Rick suppressed yet another sigh of frustration.

  Erik reached the photo of Danich Wulfson. He leaned in and whistled. “Now, that’s a babe.”

  Wulfson had been caught on camera leaving a Fifth Avenue building, for Central Park was visible just over his shoulder. He wasn’t alone in the photo. The woman with him was small, with olive skin and black hair, with black eyes to match. She was proportionately sized for her height. She was wearing a strapless cocktail dress in flaming red that clung to her waist and hips and made the most of the fact that despite her tiny size, she was voluptuous, with curves in all the right places. A sparkling ruby and diamond necklace and earrings polished the effect. Her hair was loose, slightly wavy and flowing over her shoulders.

  She looked bored or completely indifferent.

  There was a piece of red yarn stretching from Wulfson’s photo to the Second World War photo and Erik ran his finger along it, back to the vintage image. He looked at the photo again, then at the Wulfson one. “Wait, are they the same…” He shifted back to the Wulfson photo. “They look like the same woman. But they can’t be.” He looked at Rick.

  “Great grandmother and great granddaughter,” Rick lied without a quiver.

  Erik leaned forward again, studying the Wulfson photo with great care. “She looks just like her grandmother. A ball-breaker of the worst sort.” He straightened up and turned to face Rick. “The heteros can have ‘er. That’s the sort of cunt that gives the double exes their deserved reputation.”

  Rick suppressed his heart, which had begun to beat heavily. Then he took a step closer to Erik. “Give me the key.”

  Erik snorted. “What?”

  “The key to this apartment that I gave to you two weeks ago. Give it to me.”

  Erik’s smile faded. “Why? Because I called her a ball-breaker? Do you know her?”

  “You’re going to give me that key inside twenty seconds, or I’m going to make you give it to me.”

  Erik looked at him for ten of his twenty second allotment. Then he pulled out his key chain and unthreaded a chrome key from his collection. He held it out to Rick silently.

  Rick slid the key into his pocket. “Now get out.”

  Erik’s face darkened with anger. “You’re a fucking freak, you know that?”

  “Fifteen seconds,” Rick replied.

  “I’m going. I’m fucking going. Jeez Louise.” Erik moved toward the door. “But just so you know, you idiot fucking savant, the idiot part of that applies more than the savant. You’re inhuman.”

  He left and Rick listened to him hurry down the stairs, then over the tiles to the front door. The door slammed shut.

  “Of course I’m inhuman, you moronic beast,” Rick murmured into the air. He settled on his chair once more, then lifted his legs up and crossed them. Something sharp dug into his hip and he reached into the pocket and pulled out the key. He flipped it over a few times then tossed it across the room in a high parabola. It landed in the rubbish bin with a satisfying loud rattle.

  Rick let the silence gather around him once more, staring ahead until peace washed over him. Then he let himself absorb the details of the second collage he faced. With a shift of his hips, he swiveled the chair a few inches around and took in that section for a few minutes longer.

  Gradually, the concerns of the human world and all the emotional baggage that came with it slipped away, until he was completely immersed in the problem, searching every tiny combination and possibility for connections and potential answers.

  The solution was there. He just had to see it.

  * * * * *

  When the afternoon sea breeze arrived, whipping the curtains about the doorframes, which tended to happen close to the same time the sun dropped into the sea at this time of year, Marcus shut up the house and let the curtains drift back into place.

  That was when he cracked the seal on the bottle of Jim Beam. He ate supper but it tasted like chalk. So he had another glass of Jimmy B for dessert, watching the last of the sunlight play out in red and oranges and pinks across the face of the last wisps of cloud.

  The JB wasn’t doing it. He realized that after four glasses and half the bottle was gone. It wasn’t killing his thoughts, or stopping the memories, which were now all mixed up with what happened yesterday in Pershing Square.

  So he grabbed the half-used joint and finished it. The stuff was stale…god knows when he had smoked the first half of it. He couldn’t even recall what he had been doing while smoking it. Probably sitting on his ass in this same chair, feeling sorry for himself.

  He sat back and waited for the high to fracture his thoughts and let his mind wander across the surface of memory without dipping into the bleak shit below. Despite the buzz and the alcohol, he grew aware of his surroundings. He focused on it, on what was wrong.

  It was quiet. Far too quiet. It was the sort of stillness he remembered from Karelia. The intense, t
hick, throbbing silence, broken only by the sound of the wind whispering of the cold in the tops of the high fir trees. The crunch of the snow when he took a step, except that he was frozen into stillness, unable to move because he didn’t know if moving would trigger them into action. He stood like a startled, wary wild thing, watching her. She was only two hundred yards away, bathed by a full moon, which showed her arms pulled behind her back. She had seen him at the edge of the clearing and she kept her eyes on him, right up until the last second. She had been crying.

  Then the shot, which had shattered the silence—

  Marcus staggered to his feet, sloshing JB from the glass he still held. He dropped the glass on the coffee table and bent over it, propping himself up. His arms had goose bumps....from the cold.

  He waited until his breathing was normal and he wasn’t dizzy anymore. Then he moved around the two sides of the room and opened all the doors again, letting in the softly cool night air, the wind and the smell of the sea. Surf pounded in the distance.

  The glass of JB beckoned. He sat on the edge of the armchair and picked it up, swirling the ice cubes. His head was pounding, with the sort of throbbing that he knew if he moved his head too swiftly, would explode and sent shooting pain through his head, his neck, his back and make his vision fade.

  Marcus put the glass back on the table and wasn’t surprised to see his hand was shaking. He gripped his hands together.

  He could still feel the cold. He could still hear the wind.

  He pushed himself to his feet again and walked carefully over to the kitchen bar and pulled out the amber bottle of Lexapro and shook one out. He looked down at it, remembering the last time he had taken one. The sleepiness. The brain fog was the worst of it. He hadn’t been able to recall his last name or his cellphone number.

  The Whisper is coming, remember. He could be bumping into furniture, or asleep at the wheel when The Whisper arrived.

  With a shudder he shoved the pill back into the bottle, capped it and threw it back in the drawer and shoved it closed. He pushed his fingers through his hair and gripped his skull, squeezing.

  “Ah, fuck it,” he muttered and strode over to the refrigerator. He pulled out the bowl of congealed bacon fat and dug into it and pulled out the key. He washed the key under a stream of hot water and headed for the basement.

  It was cool in the basement, but not a nerve-biting cold. It was just pleasantly cool. The bank of neons overhead made the room bright and shadowless. There were no windows, so the room looked the same every time he came down here – a reliable retreat.

  He ran his gaze across the two benches, butted together to form a large L shape. Everything was in order. Nothing had been shifted from where he had left it. He moved over to the end of the L, where a large steam still was set up. He checked the receiving vessel. It was half-full.

  It would take hours to fill the three liter glass bowl. Tonight was a good night to finish the job.

  Marcus pulled on the ragged lab coat hanging over the back of the stool and got to work, already laying out in his mind the steps necessary to start the distillation process once more.

  * * * * *

  Garrett tossed the stir-fry in the wok, enjoying the way it sizzled. The aroma roused memories—not of eating, because he had never eaten Asian cuisine, but of times when he had inhaled the same cooking smells. There were a few. Singapore came most sharply to mind, during the Second World War. There were dozens of times he’d pretended to eat in Chinatown in south Boston, too, for business lunches.

  It was the way that cooking provoked his memories that made Garrett enjoy the activity. He couldn’t salivate and couldn’t taste the food, but the memories that cooking and food triggered were generally happy ones.

  He spooned a serving of the stir-fry onto the plate he had standing by. Kate and Roman were sitting on the other side of the island, talking. Kate had a glass of red wine by her elbow that Roman had poured for her, but it was mostly untouched. The Perrier bottle next to it was empty. Garrett slid the plate onto the placemat in front of Kate and leaned on the counter. “Try that.”

  Roman leaned over and checked it out. “Looks good. You’re getting better at cooking, Mikey.”

  Kate picked up her fork. “I really don’t care how it tastes. It’s hot and it’s not moving. That’s good enough for me, right now.” She ate a forkful, chewing as her eyes widened. “But it’s good,” she mumbled around the mouthful, her fingers to her lips.

  “It’s a better meal than you would eat if you were left to take care of it yourself,” Roman said. He looked at Garrett. “She subsists on cookies and coffee when she’s in production. I had to shove real food down her throat as she was falling asleep, when she was filming Warrior King.”

  Kate shrugged, still eating. “I get distracted,” she confessed.

  “We know,” Garrett said. “That’s why I learned to cook modern-style.”

  Roman grinned. “Last time he cooked anything for anyone was in the highlands. He brought down a deer with his bow and cooked a chunk of it on an open fire, caveman like. I watched him hacking pieces off with his dirk and stuffing it into his mouth like someone might take it away from him at any second.”

  “They might have,” Garrett replied. “The bloody English hounded us into the hills and beyond. They could have swept down on us at any time.”

  Kate held her fork halfway between the plate and her mouth. “I keep thinking there’s a story there, somewhere, that should be on film. You were both there. Research would be a doddle.”

  Roman pushed her hand, and the loaded fork, up toward her mouth. “Eat,” he said firmly.

  Kate ate.

  “You were at Nial’s this afternoon?” Garrett asked Roman, who nodded. Garrett had only just arrived back from Boston, where the chore of running his world-wide conglomerate of companies grew less attractive, each time he had to leave Los Angeles to head back east. He had been gone two weeks this time and he had been almost giddy with relief when he boarded the LA morning flight yesterday.

  His bags, with all his Boston things, were still sitting at the foot of the stairs, waiting to be taken up to the bedroom. He had dropped them there yesterday before rushing upstairs to get ready for the gala Kate had insisted he return to L.A. for.

  He had been on the run all day today, too – he’d spent a few hours at Nial’s house, catching up on events there, and had a series of quick meetings with business contacts here in the city. When he had got home, he’d heard Kate and Roman talking in the kitchen and come in here instead of taking his gear upstairs as he had intended. A glance at his watch and the empty place in front of Kate, plus the pristine state of the kitchen, told him she hadn’t eaten dinner yet. He’d kissed them both then stepped over to the fridge to figure out what to make.

  That had been forty minutes ago and Garrett could feel peace settling into his bones. It was so damned good to be back.

  Kate lifted her fork. “I had looping. All freaking day. Now, looping is one of the best ways of figuring out who is a real professional. Elizabeth had two to do, which is a lot less than some of them. She came in smiling, nailed them almost the first take and thanked me for letting her correct the errors. The others....” She rolled her eyes. Then she put her fork down and looked at Roman. “By the way, if you were at Nial’s place this afternoon, did you by chance talk to him about Patrick?”

  Roman shook his head. “Winter and Sebastian were leaving on some mysterious errand. Something personal, I think. They had mounds of gear and Nial was pretending he wasn’t worried about whatever it was they were doing, but trying to talk to him was like trying to talk to a cat that’s spotted a squirrel. It just wasn’t happening.”

  Garrett straightened up. “Maybe they were going to steal something.”

  Roman lifted his brow while Kate smiled. “Steal something?” she repeated.

  “It’s what they used to do, the pair of them.”

  “Hold up 7-11’s?” Roman asked.

  �
��Cat burglars. They were good. World-class, the sort of thieves that corporations hire to steal secrets from their competitors. Very big money stuff.”

  Both of them looked at him wordlessly.

  “Winter told me, last year on the set.” He shrugged. “It’s not an occupation you can put on your resume, so I didn’t tell anyone.”

  “That’s how they met,” Kate murmured. “I’ve often wondered.” She sipped at the wine. “I spoke to Nial early this morning. He still thinks Patrick isn’t ready, but I don’t know how long I can schedule post-production around him. He has some looping to do as well and don’t get me started on publicity.”

  Roman nodded. “Next time I’m over there, I’ll hammer the point home.” He looked at Garrett. “What do you think? Is Nial being overly cautious?”

  He was asking Garrett for his opinion because he had turned Patrick. Because Garrett was such a public figure and needed to travel back to Boston regularly, Nial was supervising Patrick’s transition and adaptation. Garrett lifted his shoulders in a small shrug. “I’ve never turned anyone before. You have. How long did it take me to start behaving normally? The very beginning is still hazy to me and there were no calendars around right then.”

  “You don’t remember? I thought you guys remembered everything,” Kate said.

  “There’s not too many higher human functions operating when you are first turned,” Roman told her. “Mostly animal instincts and the insatiable need to feed. Once those calm down, you have to learn how to pass as human. Some find it difficult. Some find the animal instincts are very strong.”

  “Pat was an addict,” Garrett said. “It is probably slowing down his adaptation.”

  “Patrick is the most disciplined actor I’ve ever met,” Kate replied. “If he’s sober, he’s brilliant. I need him for the film. It’s starting to really screw things up not having him available. I’ve put stuff off as long as I can.”

  “Well, he’s been sober for more than eight months now, so I’ll talk to Nial,” Roman promised, “as long as that machine god isn’t there skewing everything I say.”