by Tanya Huff
“Yes. But that’s usually not a factor . . .”
“No, of course not.” He released the panel and stepped back. Maybe Dave was right. Maybe he was fixating on this nonexistent mummy. “Just a random observation. You, uh, get used to throwing strange details together in this job.”
“In my job, too.”
She really did have a terrific smile. And she smelled great. He recognized Chanel No. 5, the same cologne Vicki used. “Look, it’s . . .” He checked his watch. “. . . eleven forty-five. How about lunch?”
“Lunch?”
“You do eat, don’t you?”
She thought about it for a moment, then she laughed. “Yes, I do.”
“Then it’s lunch?”
“I guess it is, Detective.”
“Mike.”
“Rachel.”
His grandmother had always said food was the fastest way to friendship. Of course, his grandmother was old country Italian and believed in no less than four courses for breakfast while what he had in mind was a little closer to a burger and fries. Still, he could ask Dr. Shane—Rachel—her opinion on the undead while they ate.
The second time Celluci left the museum that day, he headed for the comer and a phone. Lunch had been . . . interesting. Dr. Rachel Shane was a fascinating woman; brilliant, self-assured, with a velvet glove over an iron core. Which made a nice change, he observed dryly to himself, because with Vicki the gloves were usually off. He liked her wry sense of humor; he enjoyed watching her hands sketch possibilities in the air while she talked. He’d gotten her to tell him about Elias Rax, about his often singleminded pursuit of an idea, about his dedication to the museum. She’d touched on his rivalry with Dr. Von Thorne and Celluci made a mental note to look into it. He hadn’t brought up the mummy.
The closest they’d actually gotten to an analysis of the undead had been an animated discussion of old horror films. Her opinion of those had decided him against mentioning, in even a theoretical way, the idea that seemed to have possessed him.
Possessed . . . He shoved his hands deep into his jacket pockets and hunched his shoulders against the chill wind. Let’s come up with another word, shall we. . . .
When it came right down to it, there was only one person he could tell who’d listen to everything he had to say before she told him that he’d lost his mind.
“Nelson. Private investigations.”
“Christ, Vicki, it’s one seventeen in the afternoon. Don’t tell me you’re still asleep.”
“You know, Celluci . . .” She yawned audibly and stretched into a more comfortable position in the recliner. “. . . you’re beginning to sound like my mother.”
She heard him snort. “You spend the night with Fitzroy?”
“Not exactly.” When she’d finally gone to bed, having slept most of the day, she’d had to leave the bedroom light on. Lying there in the dark, she couldn’t shake the feeling that he was beside her again, lifeless and empty. What sleep she’d managed to eventually get, had been fitful and dream filled. Just before dawn, she’d called Henry. Although he’d convinced her—and at the same time, she suspected, himself—that this morning at least he had no intention of giving his life to the sun, guilt about not actually being there had kept her awake until long after sunrise. She’d been dozing off and on all day.
“Look, Vicki,” Celluci took a deep breath, audible over the phone lines, “what do you know about mummies?”
“Well, mine’s a pain in the butt.” The silence didn’t sound all that amused, so she continued. “The ancient embalmed Egyptian kind or the monster movie matinee kind?”
“Both.”
Vicki frowned at the receiver. Missing from that single word had been the arrogant self-confidence that usually colored everything Mike Celluci said. “You’re on the ROM case.” She knew he was; all three papers had mentioned him as the investigating officer.
“Yeah.”
“You want to tell me about it?” Even at the height of their competitiveness, they’d bounced ideas off each other, arguing them down to bare essentials, then rebuilding the case from the ground up.
“I think . . .” He sighed and her frown deepened. “. . . I’m going to need to see your face.”
“Now?”
“No. I still work for a living. How about dinner? I’ll buy.”
Shit, this is serious. She pushed her glasses up on her nose. “Champion House at six?”
“Five thirty. I’ll meet you there.”
Vicki sat for a moment, staring down at the phone. She’d never heard Celluci sound so out of his depth. “Mummies . . .” she said at last and headed for the pile of “to be recycled” newspapers in her office. Spreading them out on her weight bench, she scanned the articles on the recent deaths at the museum. Forty minutes later, she picked up a hand weight and absently began doing biceps curls. Her memory hadn’t been faulty; according to Detective-Sergeant Michael Celluci, there was no mummy.
It was cold and it was raining as he walked from Queen’s Park back to his hotel, but then, it was October and it was Toronto. According to the ka of Dr. Rax, when the latter conditions were met, the former naturally followed. He decided that, for now, he would treat it as a new experience to be examined and endured, but that later, when his god had acquired more power, perhaps something could be done about the weather.
It had been a most productive day and the day was not yet over.
He had spent the morning sitting and weighing the currents of power eddying about the large room full of shouting men and women. Question period they called it. The name seemed apt, for although there were plenty of questions there seemed to be very few answers. He had been pleased to see that government—and those who sought positions in it—had not changed significantly in millennia. The provinces of Egypt had been very like the provinces of this new land, essentially autonomous and only nominally under the control of the central government. It was a system he understood and could work with.
Amazed at how little both adult ka he had devoured knew of politics, he had convinced a scribe—now called a press secretary—to join him for food. After using barely enough power to ripple the surface of the man’s mind, he had sat and listened to an outpouring of information, both professional and personal, about the Members of the Provincial Parliament that lasted almost two and a half hours. Taking the man’s ka would have been faster, but until he consolidated his power he had no wish to leave a trail of bodies behind him. While he couldn’t be stopped, neither did he wish to be delayed.
Later this afternoon, he would meet with the man now called the Solicitor General. The Solicitor General controlled the police. The police were essentially a standing army. He would prepare the necessary spells and begin his empire from a position of strength.
And then, having set the future in motion, there were loose ends that needed tying off; two ka still carried thoughts of him that must be erased.
Vicki pushed a congealing mushroom around her plate and squinted at Celluci. The light levels in the restaurant were just barely high enough for her to see his face but nowhere near high enough if she actually wanted to pick up nuances of expression. She should have thought of that when she suggested the place and it infuriated her that she hadn’t. Next time it’s MacDonalds, right under the biggest block of fluorescent lights I can find.
He’d told her about the case while they ate, laying out the facts without opinions to color them; the groundwork had been laid and now it was time to cut to the chase.
She watched him play with his teacup for a moment longer, the ceramic bowl looking absurdly small in his hand, then reached across the table and smacked him on the knuckle with one of her chopsticks. “Shit or get off the pot,” she suggested.
Celluci grabbed for the chopstick and missed. “And they say after dinner conversation is dead,” he muttered, wiping sesame-lemon sauce off his hand. He stared down at the crumpled napkin, then up at her.
It might have been the lack of light, but Vicki
could’ve sworn he looked tentative, and as far as she knew, Michael Celluci had never looked tentative in his life. When he started to speak, he even sounded tentative and Vicki got a cold feeling in the pit of her stomach.
“I told you how PC Trembley said there’d been a mummy when I talked to her that morning?”
“Yeah.” Vicki wasn’t sure she liked where this was heading. “But everyone else said there wasn’t, so she must’ve been wrong.”
“I don’t think she was.” He squared his shoulders and laid both palms flat on the table. “I think she did see a mummy, and I think that it’s responsible for both of the deaths at the museum.”
A mummy? Lurching around downtown Toronto, trailing rotting bandages and inducing heart attacks? In this day and age the entire concept was ludicrous. Of course, so was a nerd with a pentagram in his living room, a family of werewolves raising sheep outside London, and, when you got right down to it, so was the concept of Henry Fitzroy, bastard son of Henry the VIII, vampire and romance writer. Vicki adjusted her glasses and leaned forward, elbows propped, chin on hands. Life used to be so much simpler. “Tell me,” she sighed.
Celluci began ticking points off on his fingers. “Everyone we talked to, and I mean everyone, was surprised that an empty sarcophagus had been resealed. The only item that the intruder destroyed has been identified as part of a powerful spell. The only items stolen were a suit of clothes and a pair of shoes.” He took a deep breath. “I don’t think the sarcophagus was empty. I think Reid Ellis was poking around where he shouldn’t have, woke something up, and died for it. I think the creature took a little time to regain its strength and then got up out of the coffin and destroyed its wrapping and the spell that had held it. I think Dr. Rax interrupted, was overpowered, and killed. I think that the naked mummy then dressed itself in the doctor’s suit and shoes and left the building. I think I’m losing my mind and I want you to tell me I’m not.”
Vicki sat back, caught their waiter’s attention, and indicated they wanted the bill. Then she adjusted her glasses again although they didn’t really need it. “I think,” she said slowly, fighting a strong sense of déjà vu—it had to be coincidence that both of the men in her life currently thought they were going crazy, “that you’re one of the sanest people I’ve ever met. But are you positive that your recent . . . experiences aren’t causing you to jump to supernatural conclusions?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why doesn’t anyone at the museum remember a mummy?”
“I don’t know.”
“And if there is a mummy, how and why is it killing people?”
“Goddamnit, Vicki! How the hell am I supposed to know that?” He scowled down at the bill, threw two twenties on the table, and stood. The waiter beat a hasty retreat. “I’m working on a gut feeling, circumstantial evidence, and I don’t know what the fuck to do.”
At least he didn’t sound tentative anymore. “Talk to Trembley.”
He blinked. “What?”
Vicki grinned and got to her feet. “Talk to Trembley,” she repeated. “Go down to 52 Division and see if she actually saw a mummy. If she did, then you’ve got yourself a case. Although,” she added after a moment’s thought, “God only knows where you’re going to go with it.” She tucked her hand in the crook of his elbow, less for togetherness than because she needed a guide out of the dimly lit restaurant.
“Talk to Trembley.” Shaking his head, he steered her around a Peking duck and toward the door. “I can’t believe I didn’t think of that.”
“And if she says she didn’t see a mummy, check her occurrence reports. Even if this thing of yours is playing nine ball with memories, it probably knows bugger all about police and procedure.”
“And if the report’s negative?” he asked as they went out onto Dundas Street.
“Mike.” Vicki dragged him to a stop, the perpetual Chinatown crowds breaking and swirling around them. “You sound like you want to believe there’s a mummy loose in the city.” She slapped him gently on the face with her free hand. “Now we both know better than to deny the possibility but sometimes, Sigmund, a cigar is just a cigar.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“Maybe it’s a mummy, maybe it’s a slight Oedipal complex.”
He caught her hand and dragged her back into motion. “I don’t know why I even brought it up. . . .”
“I don’t know why you didn’t think of talking to PC Trembley.”
“You’re going to be smug about that for a while, aren’t you?”
She smiled up at him. “You bet your ass I am.”
Six
“Did you have the dream?”
Henry nodded, his expression bleak. “A yellow sun blazing in a bright blue sky. No change.” He leaned back against the window, hands shoved deep into the front pockets of his jeans.
“Still no voice-over?”
“No what?”
“Voice-over.” Vicki dropped her purse and a bulging shopping bag on the floor and then flopped down onto the couch. “You know, some kind of narrative that explains what’s going on.”
“I don’t think it works that way.”
Vicki snorted. “I don’t see why it shouldn’t.” She could tell from his tone that he wasn’t amused and she sighed. So much for easing stress with humor. “Well, it still seems essentially harmless. I mean, it’s not actually compelling you to do anything.”
She didn’t see him move. One moment he was at the window, the next leaning on the arm of the couch, his face inches from hers.
“For over four hundred and fifty years I have not seen the sun. Now I see it in my mind every night when I wake.”
She didn’t exactly meet his eyes; she knew better than to hand him that much power when he was in a mood to use it. “Look, I sympathize. It’s like a recovering alcoholic waking every morning with the knowledge that there’ll be an open bottle of booze on the doorstep that evening and having to live all day wondering if he’ll be strong enough not to end the day with a drink. I think you’re strong enough.”
“And if I’m not?”
“Well, you can stop with the fucking defeatist attitude for starters.” She heard the arm of the couch creak under his grip, and kept going before he could speak. “You told me you didn’t want to die. Fine, you’re not going to.”
Slowly, he straightened.
“I wasn’t here for you this morning and I’m sorry about that, but I spent most of the day thinking about this whole thing.” Celluci’s phone call had given her confidence a boost when it had needed it most. She’d always managed to keep up her half of that relationship and she’d be damned if this one would defeat her. And in return for your trust, Henry, I’m going to give you your life. She pulled her purse up onto her lap and dug a hammer and a handful of u-shaped nails out of its depths. “I’ve got a blackout curtain in here.” She prodded the shopping bag with the toe of her shoe. “I bought it this afternoon from a theatrical supply house. We’ll hang it over the door to the bedroom. After you go out, I leave. The curtain will block the sunlight coming in from the hall. From now on, until your personal little sun sets, I tuck you in every morning and if the time comes when you can’t stop yourself from heading for the pyre, I stop you.”
“How?”
Vicki reached into the shopping bag. “If you go for the window,” she said, “I figure I’ve got about a minute, maybe two, before you get through the barrier. You proved rather definitively last summer that though you heal quickly you can be hurt.”
“And if I should try for the door?”
She smacked the aluminum baseball bat against the palm of her left hand. “Than I’m afraid it’s a frontal assault.”
Henry stared at the bat for a moment, brows drawn down into a deep vee, then he raised his head and gazed intently at Vicki’s face. “You’re serious,” he said at last.
She met his eyes then. “Never more so.”
A muscle jumped in his jaw and his brow smoot
hed out. Then the corners of his mouth began to twitch. “I think,” he told her, “that the solution is as dangerous as the problem.”
“That’s the whole idea.”
He smiled then, a softer smile than she’d ever seen him use. It made him look absurdly young and it made her feel strong, protective, necessary. “Thank you.”
She felt her own lips curve and the knots of tension slip out of her shoulders. “You’re welcome.”
Henry set the points of the last nail against the curtain and pushed it into the wall without bothering to use the hammer. Behind him, he heard Vicki mutter, “Show-off.” The curtain was an inspired idea. He wasn’t so sure about the baseball bat although clubbing him senseless had a certain brutal simplicity to it he could appreciate in the abstract. When it came right down to it, he still felt Vicki’s presence would be enough to remind him that he didn’t want to die.
Stepping down off the chair, he twitched the edge of the curtain into place. It extended about three feet past the door, similar, in form at least, to the tapestries that used to hang in his bedchamber at Sheriffhuton to block the drafts. Hopefully, it would be more effective.
Vicki had laid the bat on the bureau where it gleamed dully against the dark wood like a modem mace awaiting the hand of a twenty-first century warrior. There had been a lord at his father’s court, a Scot if memory served, whose preferred weapon had been a mace. Just after his investiture as the Duke of Richmond, he had watched in open-mouthed awe as the man—who mostly certainly had to have been a Scot—reduced a wooden door to kindling and then defeated the three men behind it with identical strokes. Even his majesty had been impressed, clapping a beefy hand on his bastard’s slender shoulder and declaring heartily, “You can’t do that with a sword, boy!”
His royal father and that half-remembered lord had long since returned to dust. Although the mace quite probably still hung over a lowland mantel between the stag heads and the claymores, it no doubt had been centuries since it had been lifted in battle. Henry ran one finger down the smooth, cool length of aluminum.