3 Blood Lines (38 page)

“No bet.” Vicki threw herself against a glass handle with no more effect than if she’d been the wind. “Not when the son of a bitch has locked the doors at the bottom.”

Henry wrapped both hands under Vicki’s and pulled. With a crack that echoed up the tower and back from the Skydome, the handle snapped off.

“Shit!” She glared at the tinted glass door and then at Henry. “Can you break through it?”

He shook his head. “Not without some kind of weapon. That’s three-quarter-inch solid glass. Even I’d break bones first.”

It almost seemed as though the tower designers had thought ahead to such a possibility; nothing in the immediate neighborhood could be used to shatter the door. Even the various levels were joined by solid masses of poured concrete, no metal banisters, no steel safety rails.

“Don’t bother,” Vicki snapped as Henry squatted and attempted to pry up a paving block. “We’re wasting our time trying to get in here when Celluci’s most likely right about the elevators.”

Henry straightened. “We have to get him tonight, now. Before those people are sworn. We have to stop his god from gaining enough power to create more of him.”

“I know. We take the stairs.”

Celluci shook his head. “Vicki, that door’s going to be locked, too.”

“But it’s a metal door with a metal handle—not likely to pull off in Henry’s hand.” She was moving before she finished speaking, limping around the reflecting pool and up to the back of the tower. “I am not,” she snarled as they arrived at the entrance to the stairwell, “going to have this place turned into the world’s tallest freestanding Egyptian fucking temple. Henry—!”

The heavy metal door bowed on his first pull, layers of paint cracking and dropping to the ground, a battleship gray avalanche of paint flakes. The second pull ripped it free of its hinges and dragged the very expensive security system out through the door frame nearly intact.

It made surprisingly little noise, all things considered.

“Why no alarms?” Celluci demanded suspiciously, frowning at the tangle of ripped wires.

“How should I know?” Muscles protesting, his strength tested to its limit, Henry leaned the door against the tower. “Perhaps Tawfik’s providing burnt offerings and he doesn’t want to set off the sprinkler system.”

“Or it’s silent and there’s a fleet of patrol cars on the way.”

“Also possible,” Henry agreed.

“Then maybe you’d better stop wasting time talking about it.” Although the ambient light did Vicki little good, it provided contrast between the concrete giant and the jagged black hole that was their only entrance. She charged toward it only to be brought to a rocking halt by Celluci’s grip on her arm.

“Vicki, wait a minute.”

“Let go of me.” The edge on her voice threatened to remove his arm if he didn’t.

He took the chance. “Look, we can’t just go charging up there without a plan. You’re letting your emotions do the thinking for you. Hell, we’re letting your emotions do the thinking for us. Just stop and consider for a second—what happens when we get to the top?”

She glared at him and twisted free. “We take out Tawfik, that’s what happens.”

“Vicki . . .” Henry moved forward into her line of sight. “We probably won’t be able to get close to him. He has protections.”

Her eyes narrowed. “If you’re still afraid of him, Henry, you can wait down here.”

Henry took another step toward her, his silence nearly deafening.

“I’m sorry.” She reached out and touched him lightly on the chest. “Look, how hard can it be? Mike’ll shoot him from the doorway. I doubt he has a protection up against that. You
do
have your gun?”

“Yeah, but . . .”

“It does have a certain simplicity that appeals,” Henry admitted. “But I doubt he’ll let us get that close. He’ll have warded the temple area and the moment we cross those wards . . .” His voice trailed off.

“So you distract him and Mike shoots him,” Vicki ground out through clenched teeth. “As you said, simple. And surprise is essential and
we are wasting time
!” She started for the tower again and again Celluci stopped her.

“You wait down here,” he said. He’d already nearly lost her once this week. He wasn’t going through that hell again.

“I
what
?”

“You’re in no shape to face natural opposition let alone supernatural. I doubt you can even make it to the top; you’re at the end of your resources, you’re already limping, you’re . . .”

“You. Just. Let. Me. Worry. About. Me.” Each word emerged as a separate, barely controlled explosion.

Henry laid a hand on her shoulder. “You know he’s right. I distract Tawfik and he shoots him; you didn’t include yourself in your simple plan.”

“
I
am going up there to watch him die.”

“
You
are putting yourself at unnecessary risk,” Celluci growled. “And what happens if we fail? Who’s left to take a second shot?”

Vicki yanked her arm out of his hands and shoved her face up close to his. “What? Did I forget to mention plan B? If you two screw up, I’m there to pick up the pieces. Now either give me your gun and I’ll shoot him myself, or get the fuck up those stairs.”

“She has the right to be there,” Henry said after a second that lasted several lifetimes, and it was obvious from his tone he liked it no more than Celluci did.

Vicki turned on him. “Thank you
very
much.
You
could have been at the top of the goddamned tower by now!” She stomped into the stairwell and groped for the first stair. Then the second. The emergency lights were a distraction so she closed her eyes.
Two down, one thousand, seven hundred and eighty-eight left to go
.

“Vicki?”

She hadn’t heard Henry come up behind her, but she could feel his presence just back of her left shoulder. She didn’t want to listen to apologies or explanations or whatever he had to say. “Just go.”

“But you’re going to need help getting to the top. I could carry . . .”

“You could worry about Tawfik and not about me. Get moving.” Through gritted teeth, she added, “Please.”

The presence moved past, touched her lightly on the wrist, just at the spot where the vein lay closest to the surface, and was gone.

“He’s right. You’ve barely got that drug out of your system not to mention the overt physical abuse. You won’t make it to the top without help.”

She glared at the vaguely man-shaped bit of dark on dark. “Fuck you, too, and stop worrying about
me.
”

Celluci knew better than to say anything further although she heard him snarl something under his breath as he brushed by.

She tried to match his speed, and anger actually kept her to it for a while, but the distance between them gradually grew. Finally, the sound of single footsteps blended into a staccato background to the pounding of her heart.

Ten steps and a landing. Ten steps and a landing. It was going to take her a little longer than nine minutes and fifty-four seconds this time. Her lack of vision made no difference—after establishing the pattern, her feet were well able to find their own way—but with each movement the last two days made themselves felt on her body. Everything ached.

Ten steps and a landing.

Her lungs began to burn. Each breath became purchased with greater denominations of pain.

Ten steps and a landing.

Her left knee felt as though a spike had been driven up under the bone.

Ten steps and a landing.

Lift the right leg up, pull the left leg forward. Lift the right leg up, pull the left leg forward.

She peeled out of her jacket and let it lie where it fell.

Ten steps and a landing.

Ten steps and a landing.

Ten steps and a landing.

Ten steps and a landing.

Ten steps and a landing.

She’d read an article once about an American Medal of Honor winner who’d been hit twenty-three times by enemy fire and still managed, despite his injuries, to run across a bridge to save another member of his unit. She’d wondered at the time what he’d been thinking of when he did it. She suspected now that she had a pretty good idea.

Ten steps and a landing.

Leg muscles began to tremble, then jump. Every step became an individual battle against pain and exhaustion. She stumbled, lost the rhythm, and slammed her shin into a metal fronting.

Eight, nine, ten steps, and a landing.

With so much of her weight pulled ahead by hands and arms, the gauze wrapped round her split knuckle sagged—wet with sweat or blood, she neither knew nor cared. When it became more hindrance than help, she ripped it off and dropped it.

Ten steps and a landing.

Lesser angers burned away until only the anger at Tawfik remained. He’d drugged her and jailed her, but worst of all, he’d perverted something she believed in.
That
stretched between them like the rope she’d hang him with and she dragged himself toward him on it.

Ten steps and a landing.

 

Henry felt the wards as he crossed them, a faint sizzle along the surface of his skin that jerked every hair on his body erect. He had no idea what information they conveyed back to Tawfik, whether general or specific, but either way time now became critical. He raced up the last two flights of stairs. Far below he could hear Celluci laboring, and below that, Vicki’s crippled progress. Their heartbeats echoed in the stairwell, their breathing so loud it sounded as if the whole structure inhaled and exhaled with them. It seemed he’d be on his own for some time.

Only one in four of the fluorescents were on in the hall that wrapped around the central pillar of the tower and Henry, exiting out of the dim confines of the stairwell, gave thanks. Very often the level of light that mortals preferred placed him at a handicap and tonight he’d need every advantage.

Silently, he moved around the sweeping curve, following the hum of chanting. The background murmur in at least a dozen voices, consisted of nothing more than the name Akhekh repeated over and over with a kind of low-key intensity that worked its way beneath the surface and throbbed in bone and blood. Senses extended, Henry wasn’t surprised to hear one single, all encompassing heartbeat where there should have been a multitude.

Rising over the chanting, a single voice spoke in a language that Henry didn’t know, using cadences that sounded strange even to ears that had heard four and a half centuries of changes. Whatever else they were—and Henry had no doubt they held layers of meaning wrapped around each syllable, each tone—the words were a calling. Only the outermost edges brushed against him and he could feel himself urged closer.

He burst through the disco’s main entrance, past an arc of empty tables. The background chanting grew louder.

Tawfik stood on the raised platform, inside an arc of padded rail where the dee jays usually sat, arms raised in the classic high priest pose. He wore a pair of khaki colored pants and an open necked linen shirt—not exactly the style of ancient Egypt, but then he didn’t need a costume to declare what he was. Power crackled around him in an almost visible aura.

Crowded to either side of the dance floor, gazes riveted on Tawfik, were high-ranking officers from both the Metro and the Ontario Provincial police, two judges, and the publisher of the most powerful of the three Toronto daily newspapers. Henry had thought he’d heard a dozen voices, now, if he’d had to rely on hearing alone, he’d have said six although there were clearly more than twenty people involved. Individual tones and timbres were dissolving into the chant.

The most incongruous part of the entire scene had to be the giant silver disco ball that hung from the ceiling and spun slowly, flinging multicolored points of light over both Tawfik and his acolytes.

All this, Henry took in between one heartbeat and the next. Without breaking stride, he gathered himself up to spring forward at Tawfik’s apparently unprotected back.

“AKHEKH!”

For a single voicing of the name, Tawfik joined the chant, the points of light began to coalesce, the silver ball stopped spinning, and Henry barely got his arm up over his eyes in time. He staggered, almost fell, and tried to blink away the afterimages left by the tiny fraction of the brilliance that had actually gotten through.

The volume of the chanting rose, then fell to a nearly subliminal murmur, almost easy to ignore, and Henry realized that the overlay of spell-casting had stopped.

“You are interfering in things you have no understanding of, Nightwalker.” The voice was cold, distant, a counterpoint to the golden sun now burning in Henry’s mind, larger and more brilliant than it had been only two days before.

Teeth clenched, Henry ignored the pain and wrapped the sun in his anger, dimming the overpowering life of the wizard-priest to the point where he could function. Through dancing patterns of light he saw Tawfik frown, an elder disturbed by the actions of a youth; those actions not a threat but merely an annoyance.

“Fortunately,” Tawfik continued, still parent to child, teacher to student, “we have reached a point in the ceremony where a short pause will not affect the final outcome. You have time to explain your presence here before I decide what to do about you.”

For an instant, Henry felt himself sliding into the role the wizard-priest defined. Snarling, he thrust it aside. He was Vampire, Nightwalker. He would not be made subordinate again by mere words. The confusion Tawfik had used and twisted before had all been burned away in his rage at Vicki’s disappearance and the elder immortal’s part in it.
He has hurt one of mine. I will not have that.