Free First Do No Evil: Blood Secrets, Book 1 by Carey Baldwin

don’t believe it’s true. Now, if you’ll excuse me…” She turned her back and marched out the door.
    Danny tailed her outside. “You should warn Garth. If I’m right, and the bad guy’s still out there, he could be after anyone who was in the diner that morning.”
    “I can make it to my car without an escort, thank you.”
    “Be careful out there.”
    She jumped into her car and leaned away from Danny.
    Before she could close the door, Danny lowered his head, ducked it inside the car and whispered in her ear, “Sky, he could be after you .”

Chapter Five
    “Dear God.” Garth’s voice was strangely hushed, almost worshipful.
    Being fully ensconced in her novel, and having always had a flair for the dramatic, Sky’s imagination conjured the image of a sinner offering confession to a priest. She turned the corner of her page down to mark her place, tucked her legs beneath her under the quilt and motioned for her brother to join her on her front-porch swing.
    “For a heartbeat, I thought you were Isabella,” he said.
    With the full moon side-lighting Garth’s face, she could make out vestiges of disappointment creasing the corners of his eyes. But she took no offense. On more than one occasion, she’d caught her own reflection in a distant mirror and for an instant believed she’d seen her mother staring back at her from across the room. That ephemeral moment of joy was inevitably followed by a gut-wrenching sense of loss. “I miss her too,” she said.
    As Garth climbed the steps leading up to her wrap-around porch, they groaned beneath his weight. He was dressed in a double-breasted trench coat, and she spied Calfskin oxfords peeking out below the cuffs of his pleated trousers. Trousers so expensive the material gleamed in the moonlight. “You’ve come straight from work then.”
    “I have.”
    “At this hour.”
    “Your point, please.”
    “I was hoping once Bella was approved and in use, you’d cut back on your hours.” Older than Sky by a half-decade, Garth had no wife, no children, not even a girlfriend. Whenever she tried to encourage him to build a personal life, he’d just shake his head and say there were only two things in this world he cared for: Bella and her.
    “My work is important, Sky. I don’t mind a bit of personal sacrifice for the sake of it, besides which, you, of all people, are in no position to lecture me. At least not according to my spies.”
    By spies, of course, he meant Soyla. He’d had the woman charmed from the get go. As usual, Garth was turning the tables on Sky. He had a knack for that, and she knew when she was beaten, or at least when she was about to be. Waving her hands in front of her face, she said, “Uncle. I’ll drop the subject if you will.”
    “Excellent call.” Folding down beside her, Garth set the swing in motion, and the world rocked beneath them. He’d brought with him a zip-lock bag containing an icepack, and from the bag, he pulled a syringe. A small space heater she’d placed near the spindly rails of the porch suffused the amber liquid in the syringe, imparting it with a fiery glow.
    Garth rolled the syringe between his palms. Then he stretched one arm around her. “You said you had an urgent matter to discuss with me. I hope that means you’ve come to your senses about Bella.”
    He always called his vaccine by its name, as if Bella were human; as if Bella were the woman for whom it was named, not some mere chemical compound with risks and benefits to weigh.
    Drawing the quilt tighter about her shoulders, she shook her head. “I’m afraid not. You know I can’t take your vaccine. Not now, anyway.”
    “You mean you won’t.” Across her back his arm stiffened, and then he pulled it away. “Why in God’s name are you being so stubborn?”
    “You know why.”
    “Explain it to me again. And this time, try not to make it sound like a load of horseshit.”
    Ridiculous. They’d had this argument so many times. Garth simply