3 Blood Lines (13 page)

Celluci began ticking points off on his fingers. “Everyone we talked to, and I mean everyone, was surprised that an empty sarcophagus had been resealed. The only item that the intruder destroyed has been identified as part of a powerful spell. The only items stolen were a suit of clothes and a pair of shoes.” He took a deep breath. “I don’t think the sarcophagus was empty. I think Reid Ellis was poking around where he shouldn’t have, woke something up, and died for it. I think the creature took a little time to regain its strength and then got up out of the coffin and destroyed its wrapping and the spell that had held it. I think Dr. Rax interrupted, was overpowered, and killed. I think that the naked mummy then dressed itself in the doctor’s suit and shoes and left the building. I think I’m losing my mind and I want you to tell me I’m not.”

Vicki sat back, caught their waiter’s attention, and indicated they wanted the bill. Then she adjusted her glasses again although they didn’t really need it. “I think,” she said slowly, fighting a strong sense of déjà vu—it had to be coincidence that
both
of the men in her life currently thought they were going crazy, “that you’re one of the sanest people I’ve ever met. But are you positive that your recent . . . experiences aren’t causing you to jump to supernatural conclusions?”

“I don’t know.”

“Why doesn’t anyone at the museum remember a mummy?”

“I don’t know.”

“And if there
is
a mummy, how and why is it killing people?”

“Goddamnit, Vicki! How the hell am I supposed to know that?” He scowled down at the bill, threw two twenties on the table, and stood. The waiter beat a hasty retreat. “I’m working on a gut feeling, circumstantial evidence, and I don’t know what the fuck to do.”

At least he didn’t sound tentative anymore. “Talk to Trembley.”

He blinked. “What?”

Vicki grinned and got to her feet. “Talk to Trembley,” she repeated. “Go down to 52 Division and see if she actually saw a mummy. If she did, then you’ve got yourself a case. Although,” she added after a moment’s thought, “God only knows where you’re going to go with it.” She tucked her hand in the crook of his elbow, less for togetherness than because she needed a guide out of the dimly lit restaurant.

“Talk to Trembley.” Shaking his head, he steered her around a Peking duck and toward the door. “I can’t believe I didn’t think of that.”

“And if
she
says she didn’t see a mummy, check her occurrence reports. Even if this thing of yours is playing nine ball with memories, it probably knows bugger all about police and procedure.”

“And if the report’s negative?” he asked as they went out onto Dundas Street.

“Mike.” Vicki dragged him to a stop, the perpetual Chinatown crowds breaking and swirling around them. “You sound like you
want
to believe there’s a mummy loose in the city.” She slapped him gently on the face with her free hand. “Now we both know better than to deny the possibility but sometimes, Sigmund, a cigar is just a cigar.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“Maybe it’s a mummy, maybe it’s a slight Oedipal complex.”

He caught her hand and dragged her back into motion. “I don’t know why I even brought it up. . . .”

“I don’t know why you didn’t think of talking to PC Trembley.”

“You’re going to be smug about that for a while, aren’t you?”

She smiled up at him. “You bet your ass I am.”

“Did you have the dream?”

Henry nodded, his expression bleak. “A yellow sun blazing in a bright blue sky. No change.” He leaned back against the window, hands shoved deep into the front pockets of his jeans.

“Still no voice-over?”

“No what?”

“Voice-over.” Vicki dropped her purse and a bulging shopping bag on the floor and then flopped down onto the couch. “You know, some kind of narrative that explains what’s going on.”

“I don’t think it works that way.”

Vicki snorted. “I don’t see why it shouldn’t.” She could tell from his tone that he wasn’t amused and she sighed. So much for easing stress with humor. “Well, it still seems essentially harmless. I mean, it’s not actually compelling you to do anything.”

She didn’t see him move. One moment he was at the window, the next leaning on the arm of the couch, his face inches from hers.

“For over four hundred and fifty years I have not seen the sun. Now I see it in my mind every night when I wake.”

She didn’t exactly meet his eyes; she knew better than to hand him that much power when he was in a mood to use it. “Look, I sympathize. It’s like a recovering alcoholic waking every morning with the knowledge that there’ll be an open bottle of booze on the doorstep that evening and having to live all day wondering if he’ll be strong enough not to end the day with a drink. I think
you’re
strong enough.”

“And if I’m not?”

“Well, you can stop with the fucking defeatist attitude for starters.” She heard the arm of the couch creak under his grip, and kept going before he could speak. “You told me you didn’t want to die. Fine, you’re not going to.”

Slowly, he straightened.

“I wasn’t here for you this morning and I’m sorry about that, but I spent most of the day thinking about this whole thing.” Celluci’s phone call had given her confidence a boost when it had needed it most. She’d always managed to keep up her half of
that
relationship and she’d be damned if
this
one would defeat her.
And in return for your trust, Henry, I’m going to give you your life.
She pulled her purse up onto her lap and dug a hammer and a handful of u-shaped nails out of its depths. “I’ve got a blackout curtain in here.” She prodded the shopping bag with the toe of her shoe. “I bought it this afternoon from a theatrical supply house. We’ll hang it over the door to the bedroom. After you go out, I leave. The curtain will block the sunlight coming in from the hall. From now on, until your personal little sun sets, I tuck you in every morning and if the time comes when you can’t stop yourself from heading for the pyre, I stop you.”

“How?”

Vicki reached into the shopping bag. “If you go for the window,” she said, “I figure I’ve got about a minute, maybe two, before you get through the barrier. You proved rather definitively last summer that though you heal quickly you can be hurt.”

“And if I should try for the door?”

She smacked the aluminum baseball bat against the palm of her left hand. “Than I’m afraid it’s a frontal assault.”

Henry stared at the bat for a moment, brows drawn down into a deep vee, then he raised his head and gazed intently at Vicki’s face. “You’re serious,” he said at last.

She met his eyes then. “Never more so.”

A muscle jumped in his jaw and his brow smoothed out. Then the corners of his mouth began to twitch. “I think,” he told her, “that the solution is as dangerous as the problem.”

“That’s the whole idea.”

He smiled then, a softer smile than she’d ever seen him use. It made him look absurdly young and it made her feel strong, protective, necessary. “Thank you.”

She felt her own lips curve and the knots of tension slip out of her shoulders. “You’re welcome.”

Henry set the points of the last nail against the curtain and pushed it into the wall without bothering to use the hammer. Behind him, he heard Vicki mutter, “Show-off.” The curtain was an inspired idea. He wasn’t so sure about the baseball bat although clubbing him senseless had a certain brutal simplicity to it he could appreciate in the abstract. When it came right down to it, he still felt Vicki’s presence would be enough to remind him that he didn’t want to die.

Stepping down off the chair, he twitched the edge of the curtain into place. It extended about three feet past the door, similar, in form at least, to the tapestries that used to hang in his bedchamber at Sheriffhuton to block the drafts. Hopefully, it would be more effective.

Vicki had laid the bat on the bureau where it gleamed dully against the dark wood like a modem mace awaiting the hand of a twenty-first century warrior. There had been a lord at his father’s court, a Scot if memory served, whose preferred weapon had been a mace. Just after his investiture as the Duke of Richmond, he had watched in open-mouthed awe as the man—who mostly certainly
had
to have been a Scot—reduced a wooden door to kindling and then defeated the three men behind it with identical strokes. Even his majesty had been impressed, clapping a beefy hand on his bastard’s slender shoulder and declaring heartily,
“You can’t do that with a sword, boy!
”

His royal father and that half-remembered lord had long since returned to dust. Although the mace quite probably still hung over a lowland mantel between the stag heads and the claymores, it no doubt had been centuries since it had been lifted in battle. Henry ran one finger down the smooth, cool length of aluminum.

“Penny for your thoughts?”

He could feel Vicki’s unease in spite of her matter-of-fact tone. He could almost hear her thinking,
What do I do if he decides to get rid of the bat?
Or more likely, knowing Vicki,
Would a kidney punch break his grip if he decides to hold
on? “I was just considering,” he told her, turning slowly, “how battle has become a stylized ritual with forms that change to fit the seasons.”

Both her brows arced above the upper edge of her glasses. “Oh, there’s still plenty of real battles going on,” she drawled.

“I know that.” Henry spread his hands, searching for the words that would help her to understand the difference. “But all the honor and the glory seem to have been taken from reality and given to games.”

“Well, I’ll admit there’s very little honor and less glory in having your head bashed in by some biker with a length of chain or having a junkie in an alley go for you with a knife or even in having to take your nightstick to some drunk trying to do you first, but you’re going to have to go a long way to convince me that honor and glory ever went along with violence of any kind.”

“It wasn’t the violence,” he protested, “it was the . . .”

“Victory?”

“Not exactly, but at least you used to know when you won.”

“Maybe that’s why they’ve given the honor and glory to games—you can fight for victory without leaving an unsightly mound of bodies behind.”

He frowned. “I hadn’t actually thought of it like that.”

“I know.” She ducked under the curtain and out into the hall. “Honor and glory mean bugger all to the losers. Prince, vampire; you’ve always been on the winning side.”

“And what side are you on?” he asked a little testily as he followed her. She hadn’t so much missed the point of what he’d been trying to say as completely changed its direction.

“The side of truth, justice, and the Canadian way.”

“Which is?”

“Compromise, for the most part.”

“Funny, I’ve never thought of you as a person who compromises well.”

“I don’t.”

He reached out and took hold of her wrist, pulling her to a stop and then around to face him. “Vicki, if I said I was tired, that I’ve lived six times longer than the natural human span and I’ve had enough, would you let me walk out into the sun?”

Not bloody likely.
She bit back the immediate emotional response. He’d asked her the question seriously, she could hear that in his voice and see it in his face, and it deserved more than a gut reaction. She’d always believed that a person’s life was his own and that what he did with it was his business, no one else’s. That worked fine in general, but would she let
Henry
choose to walk out into the sun? Friendship meant responsibility or it didn’t mean much and, come to think of it, they’d settled that once already tonight. “If you want me to let you kill yourself, you’d damn well better be able to convince me that dying does more for you than living.”

She’d gotten angry just thinking about it. He heard her heart speed up, saw muscles tense beneath clothes and skin.
“Could
I convince you?”

“I doubt it.”

He lifted her hand and placed a kiss gently on the palm. “Has anyone ever told you that you’re a very pushy person?” he murmured against the soft skin at the base of her thumb, inhaling the blood-rich scent of her flesh.

“Frequently.” Vicki snatched her hand away and rubbed it against the front of her sweatshirt. Great, just what she needed, more stimulus. “There’s no point in starting something you’re not going to finish,” she muttered a little shakily. “You fed last night from Tony.”

“True.”

“You don’t
need
to feed tonight.”

“True.”

It always annoyed her that he could read her physical reaction so easily, that he always
knew
and she could only guess. Occasionally, however, the question became moot.

“I am too old for frenzied fucking in the hall,” she informed him a moment later. “Stop that.” Walking backward, she towed him toward the bedroom.

Henry’s eyes widened. “Vicki, be careful . . .”

She tightened her grip and grinned. “After four hundred and fifty years, you should know that it won’t pull off.”

 

“I had dinner with Mike Celluci tonight.”

Henry sighed, and lightly traced the shadow of a vein in the soft hollow below Vicki’s ear. Although he’d taken only a few mouthfuls of blood he felt replete and lazy. “Do we have to talk about him now?”

“He thinks there’s a mummy walking around Toronto.”

“Lots of mummies,” Henry murmured against her neck. “Daddies, too.”

“Henry!” She caught him just under the solar plexus with an elbow. He decided to pay attention. “Celluci seriously believes that an ancient Egyptian has risen from his coffin and killed two people at the museum.”

“The two people who died of heart attacks?”

“That’s right.”

“And you
believe
him?”