Blood Bank (28 page)

The black candles, one at either end of the skinny child laid out on the tomb, shed so little light Henry entered without fear of detection. To his surprise, Carradori looked directly at him with wild eyes.

"And so the agent of my Dark Lord comes to take his place by my side." Stripped to the waist, he had cut more glyphs into his own flesh, new wounds over old scars.

"I am no one's agent," Henry spat, stepping forward.

"You set me free, vampire. You slaughtered those who had imprisoned me."

"You may choose to give yourself fully to the darkness."

"That had nothing to do with you."

Holding a long straight blade over the child, Carradori laughed. "Then why are you here?"

"Or you may choose to begin making amends."

"I was curious."

"Then let me satisfy your curiosity."

He lifted the knife and the language he spoke was neither Latin nor Greek, for Henry's father had seen that he was fluent in both. It had hard consonants that tore at the ears of the listener as much as at the throat of the speaker. The Hunger, pushed back by the Franciscan, rose in answer.

This would be one way to get enough blood.

Then the child turned her head.

Gray eyes stared at Henry past a fall of ebony curls. One small, dirty hand stretched out toward him.

But the knife was already on its way down.

He caught the point on the back of his arm, felt it cut through him toward the child as his fist drove the bones of Carradori's face back into his brain. He was dead before he hit the floor.

The point of the blade had touched the skin over the child's heart but the only blood in the tomb was Henry's.

He dragged the knife free and threw it aside, catching the little girl up in his arms and sliding to his knees. The new wound in his arm was nothing to the old wound in his heart. It felt as though a glass case had been shattered and now the shards were slicing their way out. Rocking back and forth, he buried his face in the child's dark curls and sobbed over and over, "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry."

"... confessed to having relations with the devil, was forgiven, and gave her soul up to God."

"And I am the devil Ginevra Treschi had relations with."

Loving him had killed her.

*

When he woke the next evening the old Franciscan was sitting against the wall, the shielded lantern at his feet making him a gray shadow in the darkness.

"I thought you'd bring a mob with stakes and torches."

"Not much of a hiding place, if that's what you thought."

Sitting up, Henry glanced around the alcove and shrugged. He had left the girl at the tenements, one grimy hand buried in the ruff of the scrawny dog he'd wakened and then, with dawn close on his heels, he'd gone into the first layer of catacombs and given himself to the day.

"Why didn't you?"

"'Vengeance is mine,' sayeth the Lord. And besides..." Clutching the lantern, he heaved himself to his feet. "... I hate to lose a chance to redeem a soul."

"You know what I am. I have no soul."

"You said you loved this Ginevra Treschi. Love does not exist without a soul."

"My love killed her."

"Perhaps." Setting the lantern on the tomb, he took Henry's left hand in his and turned his palm to the light. The wound began to bleed sluggishly again, the blood running down the pale skin of Henry's forearm to pool in his palm. "Did she choose to love you in return?"

His voice less than a whisper. "Yes."

"Then don't take that choice away from her. She has lost enough else. You have blood on your hands, vampire. But not hers."

He stared at the crimson stains. "Not hers."

"No. And you can see whose blood is needed to wash away the rest." He gently closed Henry's fingers.

"Mine..."

The smack on the back of the head took him by surprise. He hadn't even seen the old monk move.

"The Blood of the Lamb, vampire. Your death will not bring my brother Dominicans back to life, but your life will be long enough to atone."

"You are a very strange monk."

"I wasn't always a monk. I knew one of your kind in my youth and perhaps by redeeming you, I redeem myself for the mob and the stakes I brought to him."

Henry could see his own sorrow mirrored in the Franciscan's eyes. He knew better than to attempt to look beyond it.

"Why were you a prisoner of the Inquisition?"

"I'm a Franciscan. The Dominicans don't appreciate our holding of the moral high ground."

"The moral high ground..."

"Christ was poor. We are poor.
They
are not. Which does not mean, however, that they need to die."

"I didn't..."

"I know." He laid a warm palm against Henry's hair. "How long has it been since your last confession...?"

*

"The Tribunal's buildings were destroyed in an earthquake in 1783. They were never rebuilt. When I went back to Messina in the 1860s, even I couldn't find the place they'd been."

Tony stared out into the parking garage. They'd been home for half an hour, just sitting in the car while Henry talked. "Did you really kill all those people?"

"Yes."

"But some of them were bad people, abusing their power and... that's not the point, is it?"

"No. They died because I felt guilty about what happened to Ginevra, not because the world would have been a better place without them in it, not because I had to kill to survive." His lips pulled back off his teeth. "I have good reasons when I kill people now."

"Speaking as people," Tony said softly, "I'm glad to hear that."

His tone drew Henry's gaze around. "You're not afraid?"

"Because you vamped out three hundred and fifty years ago?" He twisted in the seat and met Henry's eyes. "No. I know you
now."
When Henry looked away, he reached out and laid a hand on his arm. "Hey, I got a past, too. Not like yours, but you can't live without having done things you need to make up for. Things you're sorry you did."

"Is being sorry enough?"

"I haven't been to Mass since I was a kid, but isn't it supposed to be? I mean, if you're
really
sorry? So what kind of penance did he give you?" Tony asked a few moments later when it became obvious Henry wasn't going to elaborate on how sorry he was.

"Today?"

"No, three hundred and fifty years ago. I mean, three Hail Marys aren't gonna cut it after, well..."

"He made me promise to remember."

"That's all?" When it became clear Henry wasn't going to answer that either, he slid out of the car and leaned back in the open door. "Come on, TSN's got Australian rugger on tonight. You know you love it."

"You go. I'll be up in a few minutes."

"You okay?"

"Fine."

"I could..."

"Tony."

"Okay. I could go upstairs." He straightened, closed the car door, and headed across the parking garage to the elevator. When he reached it, he hit the call button and waited without turning. He didn't need to turn. He knew what he'd see.

Henry.

Still sitting in the car.

Staring at his hands.

Critical Analysis

*

"You! You're a police officer, aren't you?"

Detective Sergeant Michael Celluci stared down at the pale, long-fingered hand clutching his arm and then up at the tall, unshaven, young man who'd stopped him on the steps of police headquarters and asked the question. "I am."

Pink-rimmed, bloodshot eyes locked onto Celluci's face. "I need your help."

"With what?"

"Someone's going to kill me."

"Uh-huh." The man was sincerely frightened. Celluci'd seen frightened often enough to know it. Sincere... well, not so much. Not in his line of work. He nodded toward the doors where condensation beaded the glass barrier between warmth and January in downtown Toronto. "You want to talk about this inside?"

*

"His name is Raymond Carr and it started with threatening e-mail." Celluci passed Vicki the file folder and headed over to the coffeemaker. "It escalated to someone hacking his system and sticking the threats into his work."

"What's he do?"

"He's a writer. Did you make this when you got up, or is it sludge left over from this morning?" The mug of coffee he'd just poured stalled halfway to his mouth.

"What do you care? You'd drink the sludge anyway. What's he write?"

"Pretty much anything people will pay him for. Of course, people are paying him a lot less when their ad copy comes complete with death threats."

"You'll save, save, save while we beat in your head with a bat?"

"Less wordy. Oh, and he's working on a book."

"Yeah, isn't everyone." She frowned at the top printout. "I assume the word
die
isn't meant to be in here?" A few more pages in. "Or here? Actually, since it's repeated about a dozen times, forget I asked. What did he do and who did he do it to?"

"He doesn't know."

"Well, he clearly pissed off someone with some hacking abilities," she muttered, scanning the rest of the file.

Celluci pulled out a chair and sat down on the other side of the kitchen table. "He says he didn't."

Fingertips against the edge of the table, she leaned back, balancing on two legs of her chair. "So you think it's some kind of a sick joke? Just some bored techno-nerd getting his jollies by screwing with a stranger?"

"That's possible. Point is, Carr's terrified. We wrote him up, but there's not much we can do until we have more to go on than electronic threats."

"Don't you guys have technonerds of your own now?" She beat out a drum roll. "Several someones who can trace an e-mail like this back to the sender?"

"Apparently, we can't do squat without Carr's computer and he won't hand it over. Says his whole life is on that machine."

"Really? I hope he remembers to do backups." She flipped the folder closed and let her chair drop flat. "What does he expect you—-where 'you' refers to Toronto's finest, not you personally—to do?"

"Protect him."

"I think I just figured out where this is going."

Cellcui smiled and drained his mug. "Carr's address is on the outside of the folder. I told him you'd be by this evening."

"Mike, I'm not hired muscle."