Blood Shot

by Tanya Huff

  *

  The portal wasn’t opening.

  The stone under the symbol remained solid.

  He should have known this magic shit wouldn’t have a hope in hell of working. Charging around the crypt, Mike smacked the wall with both palms. “God damn it! Open up!” And again. And then with his fists. “Open the fuck up!”

  There was a whoosh behind him.

  He turned to see the mixing bowl melting in the heat of the flames.

  Turned again to see the centre of the circle flare white, then grey under a smear of blood.

  *

  “All right, you’re going to have to…” The flash of light she caught in the corner of her eye had probably been nothing more than an indicator that dawn was closer than she thought, but Vicki turned toward it anyway.

  “Is that?” Ren’s fingers closed around her arm hard enough to hurt.

  “It is.”

  “But what if it doesn’t lead home?”

  Vicki took another look across the road. She couldn’t see the snake. Probably not a good thing. “Trust me, we’ll still be trading up.” It was hard to find the Hunter this close to sunrise, but somehow she managed it. “Gavin! Star! Wake up and come here. Quickly!”

  Still wrapped in her imperative, they did as they were told.

  Vicki shoved Ren out into the road and the other two out behind her. “Get them through the portal,” she growled. “Get them home.”

  “What will you be doing?”

  “I’ll be right behind you.” She could hear the slithering now. “Run!”

  To her credit, Ren grabbed her friends’ hands before she started to move.

  They’d made maybe twenty metres when the rush of wind at her back had Vicki spin around and squeeze off five quick shots.

  Giant snake.

  With arms, of a sort.

  And no visible eyes.

  The bullets dug gouges in the charcoal grey scales. It paused, head and arms weaving about three metres off the ground, but seemed more puzzled than injured.

  “Vicki!”

  “Keep running!” Next time she ended up on another world with teenagers, she’d add don’t look behind you.

  On the bright side, the giant snake thing had to be keeping the rat things under cover.

  Fifty metres further and hunger apparently won over annoyance. Vicki felt air currents shift as the snake lunged. She dropped, rolled, came up, and grabbed the nearest limb above the… well, fingers given their position, snapping it at the elbow.

  Leaping clear of the flailing, she raced down the street and hauled Gavin back up onto his feet. He’d torn his jeans and his palm was bleeding and desperate times…

  She dragged her tongue across the torn flesh and shoved him toward Ren adding what should have been a redundant, “RUN!”

  Pain didn’t seem to make the creatures of this world cautious. If forced to guess, Vicki’d say the snake thing was pissed.

  Diving under its charge to the far side of the road, she got a grip on its other arm, braced herself against a piece of broken pavement, and hauled it sideways. There was a wet crack at the point where the arm met the body.

  And more flailing.

  Ren had shoved Star through the portal and was working on Gavin by the time the snake got moving forward again.

  Another time, another place, and Vicki might have admired its single-minded determination, but not here and not now. She grabbed the polished leg bone of the creature she’d killed when they arrived, made it between the snake and the portal just in time, and slammed it as hard as she could on the nose.

  “Vicki, come on!”

  A glance over her shoulder. The kids were through.

  And the portal was about twice as big around as the snake.

  The snake didn’t seem to know the meaning of the word quit.

  She hit it again.

  “Vicki! It’s closing!”

  Mike.

  The portal was still bigger than the snake.

  And the sun was rising.

  She threw the bone. It skittered off scales. When the snake lunged, she stood her ground and emptied the Glock into its open mouth. Changed magazines, kept firing. Ignored the pain as a fang sliced into her upper arm.

  Stumbling back, she could smell burning blood.

  A hand grabbed her shirt, then she was on her back, on the floor of the mausoleum, still firing into the snake’s open mouth.

  The portal closed.

  The snake head dropped onto her legs.

  “Vicki!”

  She felt Mike pull the weapon from her hand. Grabbed his hand in turn and sank her teeth into his wrist. Mike swore, she hadn’t been particularly careful, but he didn’t pull away. One swallow, two, and she had strength enough to tie up a couple of loose ends. “Star, Gavin, forget this night ever happened!”

  “I don’t…” Ren began.

  Vicki cut her off. “Your choice.”

  “I want to remember. Well, I don’t really want to remember but…”

  Raising a hand to cut her off, Vicki managed to growl, “Sunrise.”

  “Got it covered.” Mike lifted her and dropped her into the open crypt. The open occupied crypt.

  And then the day claimed her.

  *

  “Okay, I’m impressed with your quick thinking…” Vicki shimmied into the clean jeans Mike had brought her. “…but waking up next to a decomposed body was quite possibly the grossest thing that’s ever happened to me.”

  “At least the body didn’t wake up,” Mike pointed out, handing her a shirt. “Given our lives of late, that’s not something you can rule out.”

  “True.” She shrugged into the shirt and moved into his arms, head dropping to rest on his shoulder.

  “You need to feed.”

  The wound in her arm had healed over, but was still an ugly red.

  “Later.” She needed more than he could give, and right now, she needed him. “The kids?”

  “They’re all home. The two you told to forget are…” She felt him shrug. “I don’t know… teenagers. The other girl, Ren, she’s something. You’re going to have to talk to her.”

  “I know. Cameron?”

  The arms around her tightened. “Teenagers run away all the time.”

  She could tell he hated saying it. “I was too late to save him.”

  “Yeah, Ren told me.” He sighed, breath parting her hair, warm against her scalp. “There isn’t enough crap in this world, they had to go looking for another.”

  Vicki shifted just far enough to press the palm of her right hand over his heart. “There isn’t enough love in this world, they had to go looking for another.”

  Author’s Note

  I’ve always considered this a linking story between the Blood series (Blood Price, Trial, Lines, Debt, and Pact) and the Smoke series (Smoke and Shadows, and Mirrors, and Ashes) as it’s Tony and Henry talking about Vicki with a bit of Celluci and Lee on the side. (Stop it. Not like that.) Written in 2008, it holds up pretty well except for the lack of smart phones. Even I winced at Tony’s PDA.

  Also, this bit of business advice: When asked to be in an anthology with Charlaine Harris, say yes.

  BLOOD WRAPPED

  “What do you think of that?”

  “The window display?”

  “The shawl!”

  Henry stepped closer to the Treasures of Thailand window and examined the lime-green silk shawl draped more-or-less artistically over a papier-mâché mountain. “Nice,” he said after a moment, “but not your colour. If I were you, I’d wear the turquoise.” A wave of his hand indicated a similar shawl hanging in the window’s ‘sky’.

  “It’s not for me!” Tony Foster shot a scathing look at his companion.

  “Ah, for Lee then. In that case, you need a deeper green.”

  “It’s for Vicki!”

  “Vicki?” Henry turned, frowning slightly, to see Tony staring at him with an expression of horrified disbelief.

  “You didn’
t forget. Don’t tell me you forgot. You must have gotten Celluci’s email.”

  “Emails.” Over the last few weeks there had been a series of messages from Detective Sergeant Michael Celluci. Each of them had been as direct and to the point as the detective himself tended to be, falling somewhere between terse and rude, and each of them had been read and promptly deleted. “About Vicki’s birthday.”

  “Right. So…” Looking relieved, Tony nodded toward the shawl. “…what do you think?”

  “I think you’re unnecessarily concerned,” Henry told him. “It’s just a birthday.”

  Tony stepped out into the middle of the sidewalk and stared at the bastard son of Henry VIII, once Duke of Richmond and Somerset, Marshal of the North, now vampire and romance writer like he’d just grown another head. “Are you insane?”

  *

  Tony took a long drink of his latte, set the mug carefully back on the artfully distressed surface of the coffee shop’s round wooden table, leaned forward, and looked Henry right in the eye. It was something not many people could or would do and not something he dared on a regular basis, but he needed to make sure Henry understood the seriousness of the situation. “She’s turning forty.”

  “She’s essentially immortal,” Henry pointed out, keeping the Hunter carefully masked despite the other man’s provocation.

  “What difference does that make?”

  He spread his hands. “An infinite number of birthdays.”

  “So?” Taking the opportunity to look away without backing down, Tony rolled his eyes. “She’s still only going to turn forty once.”

  “And someday, God willing, she’ll turn a hundred and forty, two hundred and forty…”

  “You just don’t get it, do you?”

  “Apparently not.” Taking a swallow from his bottle of water, a modern conceit he appreciated since it granted him an accepted public behavior—and there were many in Vancouver who drank neither caffeine nor alcohol—Henry studied Tony’s reaction and shook his head. “Apparently not,” he repeated. That Vicki Nelson, who had been the first child of his kind he’d created in almost four hundred and seventy years, would care about something so meaningless as a birthday was hard for him to believe. Granted, she’d been definitely human before the change, strong-willed, opinionated, with a terrier-like determination… No, not terrier. That implied something small and yappy and Vicki was neither. Pit bull then. Aggressive on occasion, but more often badly handled and misunderstood. He grinned at the thought of anyone attempting to put a muzzle on Vicki Nelson.

  “What? You’re wearing one of your I’m so clever smiles,” Tony told him as his thoughts returned to the coffee shop. “Have you thought of something to get her?”

  Best not to mention the muzzle. Toronto, and Vicki, were three thousand odd kilometers away, but the idea of that getting back to her gave him chills the way nothing had in the last four centuries. “I’ve known her for years and I’ve never given her a birthday present.”

  “Forty, Henry.”

  “And why is that so different from thirty-nine?”

  Tony sighed. “You write bodice rippers, Henry. I can’t believe you know so little about women!”

  “No woman in my books has ever approached forty.” Grocery bills might be negligible, but he still had condo fees and car insurance to pay, and middle-aged heroines didn’t sell books.

  “Yeah, and your fans?”

  From the mail he got, his fans were definitely closer to middle age. Given that they thought he was a thirty-five-year-old red-head named Elizabeth Fitzroy, he declined all invitations to romance conventions. “We don’t exactly converse, Tony.”

  “Maybe you should. Look…” Elbows planted on the table, he leaned forward. “…forty is a big deal for women. It’s either the age where they have to stop pretending or have to start pretending a lot harder.”

  “Pretending what?”

  “Youth, Henry.”

  “Vicki will be forever young.”

  “No,” Tony shook his head. “You’ll be forever young; you were changed at seventeen. Vicki was thirty-four when you drew her over to the dark-side—you know, dark? Literally.” As Henry frowned, he waved at hand at the coffee shop’s window and the night sky just barely visible behind the lights of Davies Street. “Never mind. The point is, she was human twice as long as you were. And she was in her thirties. And she’s a woman. Trust me, forty counts. And if you can’t trust me, trust Celluci. He’s living with her.”

  Vampires did not share territory. By changing her, Henry had lost her to his mortal rival. He winced. That had sounded like a line from a bad romance. Rubbing his forehead, he wondered what had happened to make his life so complicated. Stupid question. Vicki Nelson, ex-Wonder Woman of the Metropolitan Toronto Police, had happened. Vicki had seen past the masks and gotten him involved in life in a way he hadn’t been for hundreds of years. Vicki had pushed Tony into his life and had, with her change, been at least indirectly responsible for the two of them ending up in Vancouver. Forty years to such a woman should mean nothing.

  “Look at it this way, Henry,” Tony’s voice interrupted his musing. “Vicki’s essentially immortal; that’s a long time for her to be pissed at you.”

  On the other hand, who was he to say what forty years should mean to such a woman? He moved his water bottle, creating concentric rings with the condensation. “What are you getting her?”

  Tony, ex-street hustler, ex-police informant, third assistant director on the most popular vampire detective series on syndicated television, and the only practicing wizard in the lower mainland, sagged against the wrought iron back of his chair. “I have no fucking idea.”

  *

  There were two messages in Henry’s voice-mail when he woke the next evening. Both were from Tony. The first was, predictably, about Vicki’s birthday. According to the script supervisor working on Darkest Night, women of her age appreciated gifts that made them feel young without reminding them of their advancing years. Given that Vicki’s years weren’t exactly advancing, Henry had no idea of what that meant.

  Assuming it contained more of the same, Henry intended to delete the second message without listening to it but he hesitated a moment too long.

  “Henry, there’s a little girl missing from up by Lytton, and someone called Kevin Groves about her.”

  Kevin Groves who worked as a reporter for The Western Star, one of the local tabloids, had the uncomfortable ability of recognizing the truth. Given that his byline had once run under the headline OLYMPIC ORGANIZERS RELOCATE FAMILY OF SASQUATCH, this was occasionally more uncomfortable for those who knew about his skill than it was for him. Over the last year, he’d become an indispensable way of keeping tabs on the growing metaphysical activity in Vancouver and the lower mainland.

  Like attracted like. Henry had experienced this phenomenon over his long life and as Tony gained more control over his considerable power, he was discovering it in spades. While Henry would move heaven and earth for those he claimed as his own—allowing the rest humanity to go its own way—Tony had bought into the belief that with great power came great responsibility and become something of a local guardian for the entire lower mainland. A policeman, as it were, for the metaphysical.

  Henry, because he considered Tony his, very often found himself acting as the young wizard’s muscle. Vicki referred to them alternately as Batman and Robin or the new Jedi Knights and for that alone deserved to have her birthday forgotten.

  Occasionally, Henry wondered if he wasn’t using Tony as an excuse to become involved. Celluci had called him a vampire vigilante once. He’d meant it as an insult, but when Henry thought of little girls gone missing, he also thought that the detective had been more perceptive than he’d been given credit for.

  Moving quickly into the living room, Henry picked up the remote and turned on the TV.

  “…while playing in the backyard with her mother working in the garden only metres away. There is rising fear in this traumatiz
ed community that a bear or cougar or other large predator has come out of the mountains and is devouring their children.”

  Henry suspected the reporter had taken advantage of a live feed to get that last line on the air.

  The young woman stared at the camera with wide-eyed intensity and the certain knowledge that this was her time in the spotlight, “Julie Martin’s distraught father has declared his intention of taking care of who or whatever has made off with his precious little girl. A spokesperson from the Ministry of Natural Resources has suggested that it would be dangerous for search parties to head into the wood unless accompanied by trained personnel but admits that their office is unable to provide trained personnel at this time.”

  She makes it sound like the Ministry should have grizzled trackers standing by. Henry waited until they cut back to the news anchor who solemnly reiterated that four-year-old Julie Martin had disappeared without a trace in broad daylight, then as the screen filled with a crowd of angry and near-hysterical townspeople standing outside the RCMP office, berating two harassed looking constables for not having found the child, he turned off the set.

  If Kevin Groves had gotten a call about Julie Martin’s disappearance and felt it had validity enough for him to call Tony then the odds were good it wasn’t a police matter. Or a matter for the Ministry of Natural Resources as it was currently mandated.

  At 6:47 pm Tony would likely still be on the soundstage, so rather than leave him a message Henry went straight to the source.

  “Western Star; Kevin Groves.”

  “It’s Henry.”

  Very faintly, Henry heard the reporter’s heartbeat speed up. Everyone had a hindbrain reaction to vampires, the most primal part of them gibbering in terror in the presence of an equally primal predator. Kevin Groves knew why.

  “So, are you… that is, I mean… You’re calling about the missing Martin kid?”

  “I am.”

  “Werewolves.”

  “I beg your pardon.”

  “I had a tip that there’s werewolves in the mountains.”

  There was, in fact, a pack working an old mining claim just outside of Ashcroft. “And you believe that a werewolf took Julie Martin?” It wasn’t unheard of for a werewolf to go rogue, they were more-or-less human after all.