Blood Bank (22 page)

"And no more than the rest of us, wights don't feed from the dead," Lilah finished. "And all the pieces but one fall neatly into place. You don't honestly think a wight would pick its victim from the personal ads, do you, hon?"

Unclean creature of darkness seeks life essence to suck.

"I don't honestly think it can read," Henry admitted. "That whole personals thing had to have been a coincidence."

"And now that we've answered that question, why don't we head for this great after-hours club I know?"

"I don't have time for that, Lilah. I have a silver letter opener at home I can use for a weapon."

"Against?"

She sounded so honestly confused he turned to look at her. "Against the wight. I can't let it keep killing."

"Why not? Why should you care? Curiosity is satisfied, move on."

Traffic on Fourth Avenue turned his attention back to the road. "Is that the only reason you came tonight? Curiosity?"

"Of course. When a life gets sucked and it's not me doing the sucking, I like to know what is. You're not really...?" He could feel the weight of her gaze as she studied him. "You're not seriously...? You are, aren't you?"

"Yes, I am. It's getting careless."

"Good. Someday, it'll get caught by the dawn, problem solved."

"And when some forensic pathologist does an autopsy on the remains, what then?"

"I'm not a fortune-teller, hon. The only future I can predict is who's going to get lucky."

"Modern forensics will find something that shouldn't exist. Most people will deny it, but some will start thinking."

"You do know that they moved
The X-Files
out of Vancouver?"

Henry kept his eyes locked on the taillights in front of him. The depth of his disappointment in her reaction surprised him. "Our best defense is that no one believes we exist so they don't look for us. If they start looking..." His voice trailed off into mobs with torches and laboratory dissection tables.

They drove in silence until they crossed the Burrard Bridge, then Lilah reached over and laid her fingers on Henry's arm. "That's a nice, pragmatic reason you've got there," she murmured, "but I don't believe you for a moment. You're going to destroy this thing because it's killing in your territory. But it has nothing to do with the territorial imperatives of a vampire," she added before he could speak. "Your territory. Your people. Your responsibility." She dropped her hand back onto her lap. "Let me out here, hon. I try to keep my distance from the overly ethical."

His fingers tightened on the steering wheel as he guided the BMW to the curb. "You
weren't
what I was looking for when I placed that ad," he said as she opened the door. "But I thought we..." Suddenly at a low for words, he fell back on the trite. "...had a connection."

Leaning over she kissed his cheek. "We did." Stepping out onto the sidewalk, she smiled back in through the open door. "You'll find your Robin, Batman. It just isn't me."

*

Henry returned to the beach just before high tide, fairly certain the wight hadn't survived so long by making the same mistake twice. He blocked the entrance to the lair with a silver chain and waited.

The fight didn't last long. Henry felt mildly embarrassed by taking his frustrations out on the pitiful creature, but he'd pretty much gotten over it by the time he fed the desiccated body to the crabs.

He broke a number of traffic laws getting home before dawn. Collapsing inside the door to his sanctuary, he woke at sunset stiff and sore from a day spent crumpled on a hardwood floor. He tried to call Lilah and tell her it was over, but whatever connection there'd been between them was well and truly broken. Her phone number was no longer in service.

The brief, aborted companionship made it even harder to be alone.

For two nights, he Hunted and fed and wondered if Lilah had been right and he should have been more specific.

Overly ethical creature of the night seeks sidekick.

The thought of who'd answer something like that frightened him the way nothing else had frightened him over the last four and a half centuries.

Finally, he picked up the list of e-mail addresses and started alphabetically.

*

The man who came in the door of the cafe was tall and dark and muscular. Shoulder-length hair had been caught back in a gold clasp. Gold rings flashed on every finger and dangled from both ears. He caught Henry's eye and strode across the cafe toward him, smiling broadly.

Stopped on the other side of the table.

Stopped smiling.

"Henry?"

"Abdula?"

They blinked in unison.

"Vampire."

Henry dropped back into his chair. "Djinn."

Perhaps he ought to have his ad placed somewhere
other
than Alternative Lifestyles.

Another Fine Nest

*

There were three other people in the small bookstore. Vicki hesitated to call them customers, since in the ten minutes she'd been standing in front of the new releases shelf ostensibly reading the staff reviews—her favorite the succinct
Trees died for this?
—none of them had given any indication they were planning to actually buy a book. Two were reading, the third attempting to engage the young woman behind the cash register in conversation but succeeding only in monologue.

Without ever having seen him before, Vicki easily identified her contact. Male Caucasian, five eight, dark hair and beard, carrying a good twenty kilos more than was healthy; she could hear his heart pounding as he stared down at the pages of the novel he held. Since he was holding it upside down, it seemed highly unlikely his growing excitement had anything to do with what he wasn't reading. He smelled strongly of garlic.

He was clearly waiting for the other two customers to leave before approaching her.
"They mustn't find out I've called you."

"Who?"

"Them."

Screw that.
Suddenly tired of amateur cloak and dagger theatrics, she walked deeper into the narrow store until she stood directly behind him. Unfortunately, a massive sneeze derailed the impression she'd intended to make. Up close, the smell of garlic was nearly overpowering.

He spun around, dark eyes wide, the heavy gold cross he wore bouncing between the open wings of his jacket.

"Hey." She rummaged in her pocket for a tissue. "Vicki Nelson. You have a job for me?"

*

Sitting at one of the coffee shop's small tables, Vicki took a drink from her bottle of water and waited for Duncan Travis to pull himself together. His hands, clasped reverently around the paper curves of his triple/triple, were still trembling. She stared at her reflection in the glass, beyond that to the bookstore now across the street, and wished he'd get to the freakin' point.

"I could see your reflection in the glass!"

So could she, but since the glass and her reflection were behind him...

"I checked everyone out as they came into the store."

Oh. Her reflection in the glass at the store. That made a little more sense.

"That's why I didn't know you were you."

"You didn't?"

"No." Duncan detached one hand from the paper cup just long enough to sketch a quick emphasis in the air. "I know, you know."

"You know what?"

"About you. What you are."

"I kind of assumed you did, since you called me." Her emphasis on the last three words didn't seem to make the intended impression.

"Not that! People talk, you know. And there's stuff, on the Web..." Grabbing the base of the cross, he thrust it toward her, the chain biting deep into the folds of his neck.

Vicki sighed. "People say I'm Catholic? Religious? What?"

"Vampire!" He dropped his voice as heads turned. "Nosferatu. A member of the bloodsucking undead."

"I knew what you meant." She sighed again. Maybe keeping a lower profile over the last couple of years
would
have been a good idea. "I was just messing with your head. You've got garlic in your pockets, don't you?"

"I am not so desperate that I'd trust you not to drain me and cast my body aside. I have taken precautions." From his expression, Duncan clearly believed his tone sounded threatening. He was wrong.

"Okay." Vicki leaned back in her chair and massaged the bridge of her nose, attempting to forestall a burgeoning headache. "A quick lesson in reality as opposed to the vast amounts of television I suspect you watch. One. Garlic, crosses, holy water—not repelling. Except for maybe the garlic, because frankly, you reek. Two. A biological change does not suddenly start reversing the laws of physics. I had a reflection before I changed, I still have one now. Three. If that's a stake in your pocket and, trust me, I'd much prefer it to be a stake 'cause I don't want you that happy to see me, have you considered the actual logistics of using it? You'll be trying to thrust a not very sharp hunk of wood through clothing, skin, muscle, and bone before you get to the meaty bits. I have no idea what you expect I'll be doing while you make the attempt, but let me assure you that I'll be doing it faster and more violently than you can imagine. Four. Unless you immediately tell me why you called and said you had a job only I could do—giving me, by the way, your credit card number—not very smart, Duncan—I will make you forget you ever saw me." Dropping her hand to the tabletop, she leaned forward, her eyes silvering slightly. "Eternity is too short for all this screwing around. Start talking."

Duncan swallowed, blinked, and wet his lips. "Wow."

"Thank you. The job?"

"King-tics."

"What?"

"We don't know if they're alien constructs or if they've risen from one of the hell dimensions..."

Oh yeah, way too much
Buffy, Vicki acknowledged silently.

"...but they're infesting the city. Their nest has to be found and taken out."

"Okay. We?"

"My group."

"AD&D?"

"Third edition."

"Right. Nest?"

"They're insectoids. The ones we've seen seem to be sexless workers, therefore they're likely hive-based. That means a queen and a nest."

"You guys seem to have a pretty good grasp of the situation; why not take them out yourselves?"

Duncan snorted. "In spite of what you seem to think, Ms. Nelson, our grip on reality is fairly firm. Three of us are computer programmers, two work retail, and one is a high school math teacher. We know when we're out of our depth. You turned up on an Internet search—you were local and certain speculations made us think you'd believe us."

"About King-tics?"

"Yeah."

"So let's say I do. Let's say, hypothetically, I believe there's a new kind of something infesting the city. Why is that a problem? Toronto's already ass deep in cockroaches and conservatives; what's one more lower life form?"