Bloodbound [Alpha-series (II)]

Chapter 23

"I hoped you would sleep through the Council’s visit", Henry said, softly trailing his knuckles down my cheek. Once our uninvited guests had left, he had come straight to our bedroom.

"They came to get me", I whispered, naked fear causing my voice to tremble.

"... and they didn’t succeed", he finished. "They never will."

He hugged me closer to him and brushed a soft kiss to my forehead.

"Never", he vowed.

I leaned into his embrace, his arms around me a welcome source of comfort.

"What are you going to do about the video?"

He pulled back and flashed me a mischievous grin.

"Turn you into a movie star."

Had my mate spoken Chinese, the effect would have been the same: total incomprehension.

His grin widened.

"You look adorable when you are confused", he teased, pinching my cheek. His chipper mood didn’t unravel the tight knot that had formed in my stomach when I had woken to see the whole Council on our doorstep, but the knot loosened a little.

"Care to share some details of your brilliant plan with your mate?"

Instead of an explanation, I was presented with another video file. The first sequence was a clip from the original, a closeup from a distressed looking Shaman Maya saying directly into the camera: "I don’t have much time so I'll get straight to the point: vampires are real!"

Afterwards, a collage of different scenes flashed over the screen, consisting of fake news segment snippets about political talks between vampires and humans on the one side, and various brutal fighting and chasing scenes on the other side. Sometimes, the vampires looked like humans, sometimes, they resembled a monstrous demon with exaggeratedly elongated fangs and nails, disheveled hair and bat wings spreading from their backs – human superstition at its best. The short film ended with a vampire savagely biting into the neck of a soldier, the blood dripping down his neck forming the words "Dawn of the Vampire – coming soon", followed by a list of unfamiliar names such as Steven Cortega.

"Uhm ... What exactly did I just watch?"

With the help of Henry, June, Jane and the others, I was slowly catching up on human media and technology, but I wasn’t far enough to make sense of what I had seen yet.

"The movie trailer for Dawn of the Vampire", he supplied. "As you noticed, you’ll have a small guest appearance in the film."

At last, the penny dropped.

"You want to make it seem like the clip was just a movie scene!"

A surprisingly simple solution, but an effective one – especially since, as the Council, Henry had the resources to pull it off. The leaked video would be interpreted as a mere marketing stunt to promote the movie.

"Humans long for reasonable explanations. I gave them one", he stated. "They are more likely to believe the trailer to be real than to believe the leaked video proof of vampiric existence."