It took us an hour and a half to get to Letham, and a few more minutes to find the location where Mark was being held. The entrance to the drive was cleverly hidden by a straggly looking climbing rose, and a few weedy trees. We passed it twice before we spotted the tracks leading off the road.
The tracks became a cracked tar driveway covered in thistles which scraped the underside of my car. Elderly trees lined the driveway and leaned with disapproval over our intrusion. We ignored them, and drove until they thinned out slightly and transformed into a bleak clearing with another track leading off it. I wound the window down and leaned my head out of the window, and then I turned the car around and drove straight back out of there. This was clearly the place we'd been looking for. It stank of vampires.
I parked the car a couple of miles away, and Oliver and I made our way back to the clearing, running through dense thickets of trees and walking nonchalantly through more populated areas, until we reached our target a few minutes later.
It was worse than we'd expected.
What looked like flat green acres translated into rough terrain filled with gorse and boulders, until a few hundred metres from the stone building, when it suddenly became as flat and open as a bowling green. We stood in the dark just beyond that smooth and exposed expanse, and reached out with our minds. And there they were. Two snipers, wide awake. They'd both spotted us, and one was about to pull a trigger. We ducked as a bullet ricocheted off a nearby boulder. Close. Too close.
One bullet in the brain could end it for us. Strong as we were, with all our phenomenal healing powers, one bullet might be all it took. It was something Marcus had never gotten around to testing on us, for obvious reasons. I wasn't ready to die, so I ran, and so did Oliver.
I heard the low grunt of a high velocity rifle and Oliver stumbled and would have fallen, but I had smelled the blood as the missile had sliced through his skin, and I'd reached out to grab his arm as he fell. I swung him up over a shoulder in a fireman's lift and ran faster.
I was impressed. It took skill and experience to hit a moving target at almost five hundred metres. We were not dealing with amateurs, or that ragtag bunch of blood feeders Jack had sent after us. These guys were good.
This was going to be much harder than we had anticipated.