3 Blood Lines (4 page)

“We’ll only lift the lid.” He was using the voice he used to get funds out of the museum board, guaranteed to charm. Dr. Shane didn’t appreciate it being used on her. “And I think all that hard work deserves a look inside.”

“What about Xrays?”

“Later.” He pulled on a clean pair of gloves as he spoke, the action serving to hide the trembling of his hands. “As the handles that were used to lower the lid into place appear to have been removed, I will take the head. Ray,” he motioned to the largest of the researchers, “you will take the feet.”

It could have stopped there, but when it came down to it, they
were
all anxious to see what the artifact held. As the assistant curator offered no further objections, Ray shrugged, pulled on a pair of gloves, and went to his place.

“On three. One, two, three!”

The lid lifted cleanly, heavier than it looked.

“Ahhh.” The sound came involuntarily from half a dozen throats. Placing the lid carefully on another padded trestle, Dr. Rax, heart slamming painfully against his ribs, turned to see what might lie revealed.

The mummy lay thickly swathed in ancient linen and the smell of cedar was almost overpowering—the inside of the casket had been lined with the aromatic wood. Someone sneezed although no one noticed who. A long strip of fabric, closely covered in scarlet hieroglyphs was wrapped around the body following the path the serpent had taken around the coffin. The mummy wore no death mask, but features were visible in relief through the cloth.

The dry air of Egypt was good to the dead, preserving them for the future to study by leeching all the moisture from even protected tissue. Embalming was only the first step and, as sites that predated the pharaohs proved, not even the most necessary one.

Desiccated was the only word to describe the face beneath the linen, although other, more flattering words might have been used once, for the cheekbones were high and sharp, the chin determined, and the overall impression one of strength.

Dr. Rax let out a long breath he hadn’t been aware of holding and the tension visibly left his shoulders.

“You were expecting maybe Bela Lugosi?” Dr. Shane asked dryly, pitched for his ears alone. The look he turned on her—half horror, half exhaustion—made her regret the words almost instantly. “Can we go home now?” she asked in a tone deliberately light. “Or did you want to cram another two years of research into this evening?”

He did. He saw his hand reach out and hover over the strip of hieroglyphs. He snatched it back.

“Pack it up,” he said, straightening, forcing his voice to show no sign of how he had to fight to form the words. “We’ll deal with it Monday.” Then he turned and, before he could change his mind, strode from the workroom.

“My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”

Detective-Sergeant Michael Celluci frowned at his companion. “What the hell are you babbling about?”

“Babbling? I was not babbling. I was ruminating on the monuments that man builds to man.” Pushing her glasses securely into place, Vicki Nelson bent, stiff-legged, and laid both palms against the concrete at her feet.

Celluci snorted at this blatant display of flexibility—obviously intended to remind him of his limitations—tilted his head back and gazed up the side of the CN Tower. From their position at its base, foreshortening made it appear simultaneously infinite and squat, the radio antennae that extended its height, hidden behind the bulge of the restaurants and observation deck. “Cows ruminate,” he grunted. “And I assume you mean man in the racial sense rather than the genetic.”

Vicki shrugged, the motion almost lost in her position. “Maybe.” She straightened and grinned. “But they don’t call it the world’s tallest free-standing phallic symbol for nothing.”

“Dream on.” He sighed as she grasped her left ankle and lifted the leg up until it rose into the air at a better than forty-five-degree angle. “And quit showing off. You ready to climb this thing yet?”

“Just waiting for you to finish warming up.”

Celluci smiled. “Then get ready to eat my dust.”

A number of charitable organizations used the one thousand, seven hundred and ninety steps of the CN Tower as a means of raising money, climbers collecting pledges per step from friends and business associates. The Heart Fund was sponsoring the current climb; as well as a starting time, both Vicki and Celluci had starting pulses measured.

“You’ll find the run pretty clear,” the volunteer told them as he wrote Vicki’s heart rate down on a slip of paper. “You’re like the six and seventh up and the others have been serious racers.”

“What makes you think we aren’t?” Celluci asked belligerently. With his last birthday, he’d started on the downhill run to forty and was finding himself a little sensitive about it.

“Well . . .” The younger man swallowed nervously—very few people do belligerent as well as the police. “. . . you’re like both wearing sweats and normal running shoes. Climbers one to five were seriously aerodynamic.”

Vicki snickered, knowing full well what had prompted Celluci’s question. He glared but, recognizing he’d probably come out the worse for any comment, kept his mouth shut. With their time stamped, they ran for the stairs.

The volunteer had been both right and wrong. Neither of them cared about racing the other climbers or the tower itself, but they couldn’t have been more serious about racing each other. Competition had been the basis of their relationship from the day they first met, two very intense young police constables both certain that they were the answer regardless of the question. Michael Celluci, with four years’ seniority, an accelerated promotion, and a citation, had some reason for believing that. Vicki Nelson, just out of the academy, took it on faith. Four years later, Vicki had become known as “Victory” around the force, they’d discovered a number of mutual interests, and the competition had become so much a part of the way they operated that their superiors used it to the force’s advantage. Four years after that, when Vicki’s deteriorating eyesight compelled her to choose between a desk or leaving, the system broke down. She couldn’t stay and become less than what she was, so she left. He couldn’t just let her go. Words were said. It took months for the wounds left by those words to heal and more months where pride on both sides refused to make the first move. Then a threat to the city they’d both sworn to serve threw them together and a new relationship had to be forged out of the ruins of the old.

“Blocking me is cheating, you long-armed bastard!”

It turned out not to be significantly different.

The yellow metal steps switchbacking up the side of the CN Tower were no more than three and a half feet wide—easy enough for a tall man to keep one hand on each banister and use his arms to take some of the strain on the muscles of his upper body. And, incidentally, make it impossible for anyone behind to pass.

Six landings up, Vicki put on a burst of speed and slid between Celluci and the inner wall, the damp concrete scraping against her shoulder blades. She pulled out ahead, two stairs at a time, feeling Celluci climbing right on her heels. At five ten it was almost easier for her to climb taking double strides. Unfortunately, it was definitely easier for Celluci at six four.

Neither of them paused at the first water station.

The lead switched back and forth twice more, the sound of high tech rubber soles pounding down on the metal stairs reverberating throughout the enclosed space like distant thunder. Later in the day, the plexiglass sheets that separated the climbers from the view would begin to cloud over with the accumulated moisture panted out of hundreds of pairs of lungs, but this early in the morning, the skyline of Toronto fell away beside them with vertigo-inducing clarity.

Giving thanks in this one instance that she had almost no peripheral vision and therefore no idea of how high they actually were from the ground, Vicki charged past the second water station. Three hundred feet to go. No problem. Her calves were beginning to protest, her lungs to burn, but she’d be damned if she’d slow and give Celluci a chance to get past.

The stairs turned from yellow to gray, although the original color showed through where countless feet had rubbed off the second coat of paint. They were into the emergency exit stairs for the restaurant level.

Almost there . . .
Celluci was so close she could feel his breath hot against her back. He hit the last landing seconds behind her. One, two strides to the open door. On level ground, his longer legs brought them even. Vicki made a desperate grab at the edge of the doorway and exploded out into the carpeted hall.

“Nine minutes, fifty-four seconds. Nine minutes, fiftyfive seconds.”

As soon as I have enough breath, I’ll rub it in
. For the moment, Vicki leaned against the wall, panting, heart pounding with enough force to vibrate her entire body, sweat collecting and dripping off her chin.

Celluci collapsed against the wall beside her.

One of the Heart Fund volunteers approached, stopwatch in hand. “Now then, I’ll just get your finishing heart rates . . . .”

Vicki and Celluci exchanged identical glances.

“I don’t think,” Vicki managed to gasp, “that we really want . . . to know.”

Although the timed portion of the climb was over, they had another four flights to go up before they reached the observation deck and were officially finished.

“Nine minutes and fifty-four seconds.” Celluci scrubbed at his face with the lower edge of his T-shirt as they moved back into the stairwell. “Not bad for an old broad.”

“Who are you calling old, asshole? Let’s just keep in mind that I can give you five years.”

“Fine.” He held out his hand. “I’ll take them now.”

Vicki pulled herself up another step, quadriceps visibly trembling under the fleece of her sweatpants. “I want to spend the rest of the day submerged in hot water.”

“Sounds good to me.”

“Mike?”

“Yeah?”

“Next time I suggest we climb the CN Tower, remind me of how I feel right now.”

“Next time . . .”

 

His kind never dreamed, or so he’d always believed—they lost dreaming as they lost the day—but in spite of this, for the first time in over four hundred and fifty years, he came to awareness with a memory that had no connection to his waking life.

Sunlight. He hadn’t seen the sun since 1539 and he had
never
seen it as a golden disk in an azure sky, heat spreading a shimmering shield around it.

Henry Fitzroy, bastard son of Henry VIII, romance writer, vampire, lay in the darkness, stared at nothing, and wondered what the hell was going on. Was he losing his mind? It had happened to others of his kind. They grew so that they couldn’t stand the night and finally they gave themselves to the sun and death. Was this
memory
, then, the beginning of the end?

He didn’t think so. He felt sane. But would a madman recognize his condition?

“This is going nowhere.” Lips tight, he swung his legs off the bed and stood. He certainly had no conscious wish to die. If his subconscious had other ideas, it would be in for a fight.

But the memory lingered. It lingered in the shower. It lingered as he dressed. A blazing circle of fire. When he closed his eyes, he could see the image on his lids.

His hand was on the phone before he remembered; she was with
him
tonight.

“Damn!”

In the last few months Vicki Nelson had become a necessary part of his life. He fed from her as often as it was safe, and blood and sex had pulled them closer into friendship if not something stronger. At least on his side of the relationship.

“Relationship, Jesu! Now
that’s
a word for the nineties.” Tonight, he only wanted to talk to her, to discuss the dream—if that’s what it was—and the fears that came with it.

Running pale fingers through short, sandy-blond hair, he walked across the condo to look out at the lights of Toronto. Vampires hunted alone, prowled the darkness alone, but they had been human once and perhaps at heart were human still, for every now and then, over the long years of their lives, they searched for a companion they could trust with the truth of what they were. He had found Vicki in the midst of violence and death, given her his truth, and waited for what she would give him in return. She’d offered him acceptance, only that, and he doubted she ever realized how rare a thing acceptance was. Through her, he’d had more contact with mortals since last spring than he’d had in the last hundred years.

Through her, two others knew his nature. Tony, an uncomplicated young man who, on occasion, shared bed and blood, and Detective-Sergeant Michael Celluci, who was neither young nor uncomplicated and while he hadn’t come right out and said
vampire
, he was too intelligent a man to deny the evidence of his eyes.