2 Blood Trail (9 page)

He returned it. “Multitalented though I may be, I’d rather not try to read a map while driving on strange roads. You’ll have to do it.”

Fingers tight around the folded paper, Vicki pushed it back at him. “I don’t know where we’re going.”

“We’re on Airport Road about to turn onto Oxford Street. Tell me how long we stay on Oxford before we hit Clarke Side Road.”

The streetlights provided barely enough illumination to define the windshield. If she strained, Vicki could see the outline of the map. She certainly couldn’t find two little lines on it.

“There’s a map light under the sun visor,” Henry offered.

The map light would be next to useless.

“I can’t find it.”

“You haven’t even looked. . . .”

“I didn’t say I wouldn’t, I said I couldn’t.” She’d realized from the moment she’d agreed to leave the safe, known parameters of Toronto that she’d have to tell him the truth about her eyes and couldn’t understand how she’d gotten herself backed into that kind of a corner. Tension brought her shoulders up and tied her stomach in knots. Medical explanation or not, it always sounded like an excuse to her, like she was asking for help or understanding. And he’d think of her differently once the “disabled” label had been applied, everyone did. “I have no night sight, little peripheral vision, and am becoming more myopic every time I talk to the damn doctor.” Her tone dared him to make something of it.

Henry merely asked, “What’s wrong?”

“It’s a degenerative eye disease, retinitis pigmentosa. . . .”

“RP,” he interrupted. So that was her secret. “I know of it.” He kept his feelings from his voice, kept it matter-of-fact. “It doesn’t seem to have progressed very far.”

Great, just what I need, another expert. Celluci wasn’t enough?
“You weren’t listening,” she snarled, twisting the map into an unreadable mess. “I have
no
night sight. It drove me off the force. I am piss useless after dark. You might as well just turn the car around right now if I have to solve this case at night.” Although she hid it behind the anger, she was half afraid he’d do just that. And half afraid he’d pat her on the head and say everything was going to be all right—because it wasn’t, and never would be again—and she’d try to rip his face off in a moving car and kill them both.

Henry shrugged. He had no intention of playing into what he perceived as self pity. “I turn into a smoldering pile of carbon compounds in direct sunlight; sounds like you’ve got a better deal.”

“You don’t understand.”

“I haven’t seen the sun in four hundred and fifty years. I think I do.”

Vicki shoved her glasses up her nose and turned to glare out the window at a view she couldn’t see, unsure of how to react with no outlet for her anger. After a moment she said, “All right, so you understand. So I have a comparatively mild case. So I can still function. I haven’t gone blind. I haven’t gone deaf. I haven’t gone insane. It still sucks.”

“Granted.” He read disappointment at his response and wondered if she realized that she expected a certain amount of effusive sympathy from the people she told. Rejecting that sympathy made her feel strong, compensating for what she perceived as her weakness. He suspected that the disease was the first time she hadn’t been able to make everything come out all right through the sheer determination that it would be. “Have you ever thought about taking on a partner? Someone to do the night work?”

Vicki snorted, anger giving way to amusement. “You mean you helping me out as a regular sort of a job? You write romance novels, Henry; you have no experience in this type of thing.”

He drew himself up behind the wheel. He was Vampire. King of the Night. The romance novels were just the way he paid the rent. “I wouldn’t say. . . .”

“And besides,” she interrupted, “I’m barely making enough to keep myself going. They don’t call the place Toronto the Good for nothing you know.”

“You’d get more jobs if you could work nights.”

She couldn’t argue with that. It was true.

His voice deepened and Vicki felt the hair on the back of her neck rise. “Just think about it.”

Don’t use your vampiric wiles on me, you son-of-a-
bitch. But her mouth agreed before the thought had finished forming.

They drove the rest of the way to the farm in silence.

When they pulled off the dirt road they’d been following for the last few miles, Vicki could see only a vague fan of light in front of the car. When Henry switched off the headlights, she could see nothing at all. In the sudden silence, the scrabble of claws against the glass beside her head sounded very loud. She didn’t quite manage to hold back the startled yell.

“It’s Storm,” Henry explained—she could hear the smile in his voice. “Stay put until I come around to guide you.”

“Fuck you,” she told him sweetly, found the release, and opened the car door.

“Yeah I’m glad to see you, too,” she muttered, trying to push the huge head away. His breath was marginally better that of most dogs—
thanks, no doubt, to his other form being able to use a toothbrush
—but only marginally. Finally realizing that without better leverage the odds of moving Storm were slim to none, she sat back and endured the enthusiastic welcome. Her fingers itched to dig through the deep ruff, but the memory of Peter’s naked young body held them in check.

“Storm, that’s enough.”

With one last vigorous sniff, the wer backed out of the way and Vicki felt Henry’s hand touch her arm. She shook it off and swung out of the car. Although she could see the waning moon, a hanging, three-quarter circle of silver-white in the darkness, it shed a light too diffuse to do her any good. The blurry rectangles of yellow off to the right were probably the lights of the house and she considered striding off toward them just to prove she wasn’t as helpless as Henry might think.

Henry watched the thought cross Vicki’s face and shook his head. While he admired her independence, he hoped it wouldn’t overwhelm her common sense. He realized that at the moment she felt she had something to prove and could think of no way to let her know she didn’t. At least not as far as he was concerned.

He put her bag into her hand, keeping his own hold on it until he saw her fingers close around the grip, then drew her free arm gently through his. “The path curves,” he murmured, close to her ear. “You don’t want to end up in Nadine’s flowers. Nadine bites.”

Vicki ignored the way his breath against her cheek caused the hair on the back of her neck to rise and concentrated on walking as though she was not being led. She had no doubt that the wer, in wolf form at least, could see just as well as Henry and she had no intention of undermining her position here by appearing weak to however many of them might be watching.

Head high, she focused on the rectangles of light, attempting to memorize both the way the path felt beneath her sandals and the way it curved from the drive to the house. The familiar concrete and exhaust scents of the city were gone, replaced by what she could only assume was the not entirely pleasant odor of sheep shit. The cricket song she could identify, but the rest of the night sounds were beyond her.

Back in Toronto, every smell, every sound would have meant something. Here, they told her nothing. Vicki didn’t like that, not at all; it added another handicap to her failing eyes.

Two sudden sharp pains on her calf and another on her forearm, jolted her out of her funk, reminding her of an aspect of the case she hadn’t taken into account.

“Damned bugs!” She pulled her arm free and slapped down at her legs. “Henry, I just remembered something; I hate the country!”

They’d moved into the spill of light from the house and she could just barely make out the smile on his face.

“Too late,” he told her, and opened the door.

Vicki’s first impression as she stood blinking on the threshold was of a comfortably shabby farmhouse kitchen seething with people and dogs. Her second impression corrected the first:
Seething with wer. The people are dogs. Wolves. Oh, hell.

 

It was late, nearly eleven. Celluci leaned back in his chair and stared at the one remaining piece of paper on his desk. The Alan Margot case had been wrapped up in record time and he could leave it now to begin its ponderous progress through the courts. Which left him free to attend to a small bit of unfinished business.

Henry Fitzroy.

Something about the man just didn’t ring right and Celluci had every intention of finding out what that was. He scooped up the piece of paper, blank except for the name printed in heavy block letters across the top, folded it twice, and placed it neatly in his wallet. Tomorrow he’d run the standard searches on Mr. Fitzroy and if they turned up nothing. . . . His smile was predatory as he stood. If they turned up nothing, there were ways to delve deeper.

Some might call what he planned a misuse of authority. Detective-Sergeant Michael Celluci called it looking out for a friend.

“I’m Nadine Heerkens-Wells. You must be Vicki Nelson.”

The woman approaching, hand held out, shared a number of features with Peter and Rose; the same wide-spaced eyes and pointy face, the same thick mane of hair—in this case a dusty black marked with gray—the same short-fingered, heavily callused grip.

Her eyes, however, were shadowed, and lurking behind that shadow was a loss so deep, so intense, that it couldn’t be completely hidden and might never be completely erased. Vicki swallowed hard, surprised by the strength of her reaction to the other woman’s pain.

On the surface, Vicki had absolutely no doubt she faced the person in charge, and Nadine’s expression proved that the welcoming smile had originally developed out of a warning snarl.
Still, I suppose she has no reason to trust me right off, regardless of what Henry’s told her
. Keeping her own expression politely unchallenging, Vicki carefully applied as much force to the handshake as she received, despite the sudden inexplicable urge to test her strength. “I hope I’ll be able to help,” she said in her public service voice, meeting the other woman’s gaze squarely.

Force of personality weighted with grief struck her almost a physical blow and her own eyes narrowed in response.

The surrounding wer waited quietly for the dominant female’s decision. Henry stood to one side and watched, brows drawn down in a worried frown. For Vicki to work effectively, the two women had to accept one another as equals, whether they liked it or not.

Nadine’s eyes were brown, with a golden sunburst around the pupil. Deep lines bracketed the corners and her lids looked bruised.

I can take her
, Vicki realized.
I’m younger, stronger. I’m . . . out of my mind
. She forced the muscles of her face to relax, denying the awareness of power. “I hadn’t realized London was so far from Toronto,” she remarked conversationally, as though the room were not awash with undercurrents of tension.

“You must be tired from your long drive,” Nadine returned, and only Vicki saw the acknowledgment of what had just passed between them. “Come in and sit down.”

Then they both looked away.

At that signal, Vicki and Henry found themselves surrounded by hearty handshakes and wet noses and hustled into seats at the huge kitchen table. Henry wondered if Vicki realized that she’d just been accepted as a kind of auxiliary member of the pack, much as he was himself. He’d spent long hours on the phone the last two nights arguing for that acceptance, convincing Nadine that from outside the pack Vicki would have little chance of finding the killer, that Vicki would no more betray the pack than she’d betray him, knowing as he did that Nadine’s agreement would be conditional on the actual meeting.

“Shadow, be quiet.”

The black pup—about the size of a small German shepherd—who had been dancing around Vicki’s knees and barking shrilly, suddenly became a small naked boy of about six or seven who turned to look reproachfully up at Nadine. “But, Mom,” he protested, “you said to always bark at strangers.”

“This isn’t a stranger,” his mother told him, leaning forward to brush dusty black hair up off his face, “it’s Ms. Nelson.”

He rolled his eyes. “I know
that
, but I don’t know
her
. That makes her a stranger.”

“Don’t be a dork, Daniel. Mom says she’s okay,” pointed out one of two identical teenage girls sitting on the couch by the window in a tone reserved solely for younger brothers.

“And she came with Henry,” added the other in the exact same tone.

“And if she was a stranger,” concluded the first, “you wouldn’t have changed in front of her. So she
isn’t
a stranger. So shut up.”

He tossed his head. “Still don’t know her.”

“Then get to know her quickly,” his mother suggested, turning him back to face Vicki, “so that we can have some peace.”

Even though she was watching for it, Vicki missed the exact moment of change when Daniel became Shadow again. One heartbeat a small boy, a heartbeat later, a small dog. . . .
Not that small either, and I can’t call them dogs. And yet, they aren’t quite wolves.
A cold nose shoved into the back of her knee and she started.
And does that make this, him, a puppy or a cub? Ye gods
,
but this is going to get complicated
. Trying not to let any of this inner debate show on her face, she reached down and held out her hand.

Shadow sniffed it thoroughly then pushed his head under her fingers. His fur was still downy soft.

“If you start scratching him, Ms. Nelson, you’ll be at it all night,” one of his sisters told her with a sigh.

Shadow’s nose went up and he pointedly turned his back on her, leaning up against Vicki’s legs much the way Storm had leaned against Rose that night in Henry’s condo. Which reminded Vicki. . . .

“Where’s Peter and Rose? Peter. . . .” She paused and shook her head. “I mean, Storm, met the car and I was sure I saw Rose—I mean, Cloud—when I first came in.”