Blood Debt (32 page)

Waiting.

For what?

He just wanted them to go away. He had his mouth open to demand that they leave him alone when he remembered. It wasn't him they wanted.

“Who's there?”

They were coming closer, whoever they were.

“There's a safe in the bottom left-hand drawer of my desk. Just take the money and leave me alone.” The last word slipped from her control and rose almost to a wail before it faded.

The doctor's feet continued to push against the Mexican tile on the floor. The window creaked behind her.

He could feel her life. She wasn't in the next room, but it didn't matter. Her heart beat so loudly he could have heard it from the other building had his own heart not been pounding nearly loud enough to drown it out.

I am Henry Fitzroy, once Duke of Richmond and of Somerset, Earl of Nottingham and Knight of the Garter. My father was a king and I am become Death. I do not cower before the dead.

The Hunger rose to meet the fear and gained him ground enough to rise to his feet. Dark eyes narrowed. “Well,” he demanded, “are you going to let her get away with it?”

There could, of course, be only one answer.

Dr. Mui had dealt out life and death with brutal efficiency, protected from pangs of conscience and wandering regrets by armor built of diamond-hard self-interest. The accusation in the donors' eyes when they realized their escape from poverty and the streets was not the escape they'd dreamed of making had never touched her.

It had nothing to do with her.

Until now. When it had everything to do with her.

The dead howled denial; a howl torn from those who'd first seen a fragile hope betrayed and then had lost the only thing they had remaining to them, their lives, taken without even the excuse of passion.

The doctor flung her head back against the glass, over and over. The glass held, but crimson rosettes appeared with each impact.

Despair closed her eyes, closed her mouth, her nose, choked off air from her lungs, closed over her like a layer of wet earth. Suffocating. Burying.

She fell forward on her hands and knees, gasping and retching, the damp ends of her hair drawing bloody lines against her face.

“I. Will not. End. Like. This.” Armor so arrogantly forged could not be breached so easily. “I am,” she breathed. “I live. And you are dead.”

Triumphant, she lifted her head and saw the shadows move. Saw the last two boys, the one they hadn't used, the one before dumped unceremoniously in the harbor, the others, all the others . . .

They looked down at her.

And they were dead.

Their mouths were open. They screamed denial. Despair. Vengeance.

Forcing her to recognize the death she'd given them.

The body hit the roof of the cable van with a wet crunch. One leg flopped limply over the side, swung back and forth, and was still.

Ten feet away in the parking lot, miraculously unharmed by falling glass, Patricia Chou clutched at her cameraman's arm with a white-knuckled grip. “Did you get it?” she panted, ignoring a throat ripped raw by the force of her initial reaction. Professional or not, she was, she felt, entitled to that one scream of shock and horror. Later, she'd wonder if she'd been trying to drown out the cry of the falling woman, preferring to remember the sound of her own voice rather than the frenzied denial that had grown louder as gravity won, but for now she had more pressing concerns. “Did you get it?”

Brent nodded, still peering through the eyepiece with the detachment of cameramen from Northern Ireland to Lebanon. “I thought the windows on those new buildings were shatterproof.”

“Shatterproof can be broken.”

“Yeah? Then what did she break it with?” There had been glass and, with the glass, the body—alive as it fell, but inevitably a body for all of that.

Reporter and cameraman stood in silence for a moment, then, handing Brent her cell phone and suggesting he call the police, Patricia Chou hurried toward the van, making mental lists of what to do and who to call and how to best use the rapidly disappearing light. “Now this,” she said, as she reached inside for her microphone, ducking under the dangling foot that would provide a suitably ghoulish backdrop, “is a story.”

“We all knew that was going to happen,” Celluci said, hands pressed flat against the glass. “We all knew.”

Vicki pulled him away from the window and turned him around. “No, we didn't,” she said softly.

“Yes, we did. We knew the ghosts killed. They've killed before.”

“She jumped through an unbreakable window, Mike. They didn't push her.”

“We knew,” he repeated, shaking his head. “We knew.”

Vicki caught his face between her hands and tipped his gaze down to meet hers. It flared silver. “No, we didn't,” she said.

When the police came to take their statements—along with the statements of everyone in a unit overlooking the accident—they got a pleasant surprise.

“Michael Celluci? That name sounds really familiar.” The young constable frowned. “Did you report your van stolen, Detective?”

“Not his van, mine.” Vicki leaned forward, silently willing Celluci to be quiet. It was too easy for him to forget that the police weren't necessarily on their side. “He said he misplaced it. That he knew where he'd left it, he'd just ended up on the other side of town and hadn't gotten around to going back for it yet.”

“There's no point in him going back for it now, because it isn't there. Couple of uniforms found it just as it was about to be stripped. Nuts were loose, but nothing was missing. But the only ID they could find was
Michael Celluci
scribbled on a crumpled piece of paper in the glove compartment. They've probably run the plates by now, but they wouldn't be able to find you, Ms. uh,” he checked his notes, “Nelson.”

“
Probably
run the plates by now?” Vicki repeated, brows raised in a sardonic arch.

He blushed and was unable to stop himself from responding like some kind of rookie idiot instead of a three-year veteran of the Vancouver Police Department. “Well, there's been a whole lot of gang violence lately, and things have been pretty busy, and the system crashed two days ago, and we just got it up and running this morning.”

“But my van's okay?”

“Yes, uh, as far as I know, yes.”

“Good.”

When she smiled at him, he was suddenly glad he had his notebook in his lap. There was something about her that made him feel like rolling over and wagging his tail when she scratched his stomach. “Now, uh, about the fall . . .”

“Actually, we didn't see anything.”

“Nothing?”

“We were busy.”

“Busy?” He felt himself redden again. “Oh.”

He left soon after; envying the detective his relationship and hoping the old boy's heart was up to it.

“The whole world is getting younger,” Celluci growled when the door closed behind the irritating young punk in the blue uniform. “I can't say that I like it much.”

Vicki put her arms around his waist and leaned into his chest. “For what it's worth, you're not getting older, you're getting better.”

“Spare me,” he snorted tilting her chin up so he could look into her face.

“What?”

You've always been a lousy liar, but that constable believed everything you told him.

“Mike?”

“Nothing.” Sighing, he rested his cheek on the top of her head. “Just feeling old.”

She pressed herself closer until she resonated with his heartbeat.

“So, you and Henry are, uh . . .” Celluci looked down at his spinach salad and found no answers, so he looked back up at Tony to find the younger man smiling. “What?”

“You're living with a vampire, Celluci. Why do two men cause you so much trouble?”

“We're not exactly living together, but I take your point. I guess it is a little ridiculous.” He speared something green he couldn't identify. Why the hell couldn't he have fries with his burger? Everything in Vancouver was too goddamned healthy; he'd be glad to leave. “But you didn't answer my question.”

“I'm moving out. But we'll still be friends.”

“So you're staying here in Vancouver?”

Tony shrugged. “My life is here. I have a job, I have friends, I'm going to school; why would I leave?”

“
He's
here.” Resting his forearms on the table, Celluci leaned forward. “You'll never be free of him, you know. You'll expect to see him in every shadow. Separating your life from his won't be that easy.”

“He doesn't own me, Detective, no matter what it might have seemed like. It was time for me to leave, and we both knew it.” Tony toyed with his salad a moment, started to speak, stopped, then finally said, the words spilling over each other in the rush, “And it's not that hard. You could leave, too.”

After a moment, Celluci smiled and shook his head, remembering all the days and all the nights that had followed. “No. I couldn't.”

“They didn't even come back to say thank you?”

“If it's all the same to you, I'm just as glad that they're gone.” The dead had stopped shrieking when the doctor's heart had stopped beating. And only the doctor's heart. This time, in spite of the heightened intensity, no one else had died. In the end, vengeance, or justice, had been surgically precise. Henry, whether from proximity or awareness, had been the only other casualty. Retching and trembling, he'd had to force himself to walk out of the closet—he'd wanted to crawl. He completely understood why the doctor had gone eleven stories straight down to get away from the sound.

Vicki read some of that time on his face and reached out. Just for an instant, her hand covered his.

Henry stared down at his hand, then up at her. Less than a week ago, he'd have wanted to kill her for that. Now he regretted the touch could last so short a time. Six days out of four hundred and fifty years and they'd changed the way he defined what he was. “Do you always rewrite the rules?”

“If they're bad rules.”

He shook his head. “I wonder how we managed for all those years before you came along?”

Vicki snorted. “You and me both. Most of our kind changes for passion's sake, Henry—you told me that yourself—and no one does passion like a teenager. You were seventeen. How old were the rest? I could be the first adult to come along in centuries.”

“You're still a child to this life.”

She grinned. “Don't sulk, Henry. It's unattractive in a mortal man and
really
unattractive in one of the immortal undead.”

“Centuries of tradition,” he began, but she cut him off.

“Haven't changed that much. We're still solitary predators, but now we know why. The scent of
another's
blood drives us dangerously out of control. We'd kill so indiscriminately we'd be impossible to ignore. In time, we'd be hunted down and destroyed, our strength no defense against their numbers. For the safety of all of us, we have to Hunt apart. But we don't have to be apart. Given enough time, territorial imperatives can be overcome.”

Henry raised his hand, palm up toward her. When she mirrored the motion, he moved his hand toward hers. They never touched. “Mostly overcome,” he said with a sad smile, letting his arm drop down to his side.

Vicki nodded, her smile perhaps more rueful than sad. “Mostly,” she agreed. “Before Mike gets back, I want to thank you for what you did in that clearing.” Her expression changed as she looked back at that night, back at what she'd almost destroyed. “I couldn't stop myself. I
was
going to kill Sullivan no matter how much Mike would have hated me for it.”

“I know. You may have been an adult when you came to this life, but you're still a child in it. Greater control will come in time. It's the hardest thing our kind has to learn.” Looking down at the lights of the city, his city, he listened for a moment to its heartbeat. “That, and how to hide what we are without becoming less than we are.” He paused again then continued gravely. “You can't let the detective know what you're capable of, Vicki. He won't be able to stand it.”

“What are you talking about? He knows . . .”

“No. He thinks he knows. It's not the same thing. Tell me, how did you feel that night in the warehouse?”

“You ought to know, your hands were doing the feeling.”

“Vicki!”

Arms folded across her chest, she shook her head. “I don't like to think about it.”

He turned to face her, and his eyes were dark. “How did you feel?”

“I don't know.”

“Yes, you do.”

After a moment of facing herself in his gaze, she said quietly, “Free. I felt free.”

The darkness lifted. “Can he ever know that?” Henry didn't wait for her to answer. “There are very few we can trust with what we are and fewer still of them with all we are.”

“You were Mystery to me . . .” The memory came out of her mortal life.

“Then be Mystery to him.”

“You're not going to walk us to the van?” Vicki asked as Celluci lifted his hockey bag onto his shoulder.

Henry shook his head, glancing around the borrowed condo. “No, I don't think so. I'll say good-bye here and start cleaning up.”

“Hey! I cleaned up!”

“Who cleaned up?” Celluci grunted.

Vicki elbowed him in the ribs, careful of her strength but hard enough that he felt it. “I helped.”

“I'm sure you did,” Henry broke in before they started fighting. “I merely want to be sure that there are no questions left behind.”

“You can't trust me to have taken care of that?”

“It's not a matter of trust, Vicki. It's a matter of responsibility. My territory, my responsibility. If I visit you in Toronto, it will be your responsibility.”