1 Blood Price

by Tanya Huff

“. . . you saw a man-shaped form in what appeared to be a loose, flowing garment cross between you and the lights. Is that it?”

  “Essentially.” Stripped of all the carefully recorded details, it sounded like such a stupid thing to have done.

  “Right.” He closed the notebook and scratched at the side of his nose. “You, uh, going to stick around?”

  Vicki squinted as the police photographer snapped off another quick series of shots. She couldn’t see Mike, but she could hear him down in the tunnel barking commands in his best “God’s gift to the Criminal Investigations Bureau” voice. Down in the tunnel . . . The hair on the back of her neck rose again as she remembered the feeling of something lingering, something dark and, well if she had to put a name to it, evil. She suddenly wanted to warn Celluci to be careful. She didn’t. She knew how he’d react. How she’d react if their positions were reversed.

  “Vicki? You sticking around?”

  It was on the tip of her tongue to say no, that they knew where to find her if they needed further information, but curiosity—about what the police would find, about how long she could remain so close to the job she’d loved and not fall apart—turned the no into a grudging, “For a while.” She’d be damned if she’d run away.

  As she watched, Celluci came up the stairs onto the platform and spoke to the ident man, sweeping one arm back along the tracks. The ident man protested that he needed a certain amount of light to do his job, but Celluci cut him off. With a disgusted snort, he picked up his case and headed for the tunnel.

  Charming as ever, Vicki thought as Celluci scooped her coat off the floor and made his way toward her, detouring slightly around the coroner’s men who were finally zipping the body into its orange plastic bag. “Don’t tell me,” she called as soon as he was close enough, her voice carefully dry, almost sarcastic, and hopefully showing no indication of the churning emotions that had her gut tied in knots. “The only prints on the scene are mine?” There were, of course, a multitude of prints on the scene, none of which had been identified—that was for downtown—but the bloody handprints Vicki had scattered around were obvious.

  “Dead on, Sherlock.” He tossed her the coat. “And the blood trail leads into a workman’s alcove and stops.”

  Vicki frowned as she reconstructed what had to have happened just before she reached the platform. “You checked the southbound side?”

  “That’s where we lost the trail.” His tone added, Don’t teach Grandpa to suck eggs. He held up a hand to forestall the next question. “I had one of the uniforms talk to the old man while Dave was dealing with you, but he’s hysterical. He keeps going on about Armageddon. His son-in-law’s coming to pick him up and I’ll go see him tomorrow.”

  Vicki shot a glance across the station where the old man who had followed her off the bus and down the stairs sat talking to a policewoman. Even at a distance he didn’t look good. His face was gray and he appeared to be babbling uncontrollably, one scrawny, swollen-knuckled hand clutching at the constable’s sleeve. Turning her attention back to her companion, she asked, “What about the subway? You closed it for the night?”

  “Yeah.” Mike waved toward the end of the platform. “I want Jake to dust that alcove.” Intermittent flashes of light indicated the photographer was still at work. “It’s not the sort of case where we can get in and out in a couple of minutes.” He shoved his hands into his overcoat pockets and scowled. “Although the way the transit commission squawked you’d think we were shutting it down in rush hour to pick up someone for littering.”

  “What, uh, sort of case is it?” Vicki asked—as close as she could get to asking if he, too, felt it, whatever it turned out to be.

  He shrugged. “You tell me; you seem to have gone to a great deal of trouble to land right in the middle of this.”

  “I was here,” she snapped. “Would you have preferred that I ignore it?”

  “You had no weapon, no backup, no idea of what was going down.” Celucci ticked off an identical litany to the one she’d read herself earlier. “You can’t have forgotten everything in eight months.”

  “And what would you have done?” she spat through clenched teeth.

  “I wouldn’t have tried to kill myself just to prove I still could.”

  The silence that fell landed like a load of cement blocks and Vicki gritted her teeth under its weight. Was that what she’d been doing? She looked down at the toes of her boots, then up at Mike. At five ten she didn’t look up to many men but Celluci, at six four, practically made her feel petite. She hated feeling petite. “If we’re going to rehash my leaving the force again, I’m out of here.”

  He held up both hands in a gesture of weary surrender. “You’re right. As usual. I’m sorry. We’re not going to rehash anything.”

  “You brought it up.” She sounded hostile; she didn’t care. She should’ve followed her instincts and left the moment she’d given her statement. She had to have been out of her mind, putting herself in this position, staying in Celluci’s reach.

  A muscle in his jaw jumped. “I said I was sorry. Go ahead, be superwoman if you want to, but maybe,” he added, his voice tight, “I don’t want to see you get killed. Maybe, I’m not willing to toss aside eight years of friendship. . . .”

  “Friendship?” Vicki felt her eyebrows rise.

  Celluci drove his hands into his hair, yanking them through the curls, a gesture he used when he was trying very hard to keep his temper. “Maybe I’m not willing to toss aside four years of friendship and four years of sex because of a stupid disagreement!”

  “Just sex? That’s it?” Vicki took the easy way out, ignoring the more loaded topic of their disagreement. A shortage of things to fight about had never been one of their problems. “Well, it wasn’t just sex to me, Detective!”

  They were both yelling now.

  “Did I say it was just sex?” He spread his arms wide, his voice booming off the tiled walls of the subway station. “It was great sex, okay? It was terrific sex! It was . . . What?”

  PC West, his fair skin deeply crimson, jumped. “You’re blocking the body,” he stammered.

  Growling an inaudible curse, Celluci jerked back against the wall.

  As the gurney rolled by, the contents of the fluorescent orange bag lolling a little from side to side, Vicki curled her hands into fists and contemplated planting one right on Mike Celluci’s classically handsome nose. Why did she let him affect her like this? He had a definite knack for poking through carefully constructed shields and stirring up emotions she thought she had under control. Damn him anyway. It didn’t help that, this time, he was right. A corner of her mouth twitched up. At least they were talking again. . . .

  When the gurney had passed, she straightened her fingers, laid her hand on Celluci’s arm and said, “Next time, I’ll do it by the book.”

  It was as close to an apology as she was able to make and he knew it.

  “Why start now.” He sighed. “Look, about leaving the force; you’re not blind, Vicki, you could have stayed. . . .”

  “Celluci. . . .” She ground his name through clenched teeth. He always pushed it just that one comment too far.

  “Never mind.” He reached out and pushed her glasses up her nose. “Want a lift downtown?”

  She glanced down at her ruined coat. “Why not.”

  As they followed the gurney up the stairs, he punched her lightly on the arm. “Nice fighting with you again.”

  She surrendered—the last eight months had been a punitive victory at best—and grinned. “I missed you, too.”

  The Monday papers had the murder spread across page one. The tabloid even had a color photograph of the gurney being rolled out of the station, the body bag an obscene splotch of color amid the dark blues and grays. Vicki tossed the paper onto the growing “to be recycled” pile to the left of her desk and chewed on a thumbnail. Celluci’s theory, which he’d grudgingly passed on while they drove downtown, involved PCPs and some sort of strap-on claws
.

  “Like that guy in the movie.”

  “That was a glove with razor blades, Celluci.”

  “Whatever.”

  Vicki didn’t buy it and she knew Mike didn’t really either, it was just the best model he could come up with until he had more facts. His final answer often bore no resemblance to the theory he’d started with, he just hated working from zero. She preferred to let the facts fall into the void and see what they piled up to look like. Trouble was, this time they just kept right on falling. She needed more facts.

  Her hand was halfway to the phone before she remembered and pulled it back. This had nothing to do with her any longer. She’d given her statement and that was as far as her involvement went.

  She took off her glasses and scrubbed at one lens with a fold of her sweatshirt. The edges of her world blurred until it looked as if she were staring down a foggy tunnel; a wide tunnel, more than adequate for day to day living. So far, she’d lost about a third of her peripheral vision. So far. It could only get worse.

  The glasses corrected only the nearsightedness. Nothing could correct the rest.

  “Okay, this one’s Celluci’s. Fine. I have a job of my own to do,” she told herself firmly. “One I can do.” One she’d better do. Her savings wouldn’t last forever and so far her caseload had been embarrassingly light, her vision forcing her to turn down more than one potential client.

  Teeth gritted, she pulled the massive Toronto white pages onto her lap. With luck, the F. Chan she was looking for, inheritor of a tidy sum of money from a dead uncle in Hong Kong, would be one of the twenty-six listed. If not . . . there were over three full pages of Chans, sixteen columns, approximately one thousand, eight hundred and fifty-six names and she’d bet at least half of those would have a Foo in the family.

  Mike Celluci would be looking for a killer right now.

  She pushed the thought away.

  You couldn’t be a cop if you couldn’t see.

  She’d made her bed She’d lie in it.

  Terri Neal sagged against the elevator wall, took a number of deep breaths, and, when she thought she’d dredged up a sufficient amount of energy, raised her arm just enough so she could see her watch.

  “Twelve seventeen?” she moaned. Where the hell has Monday gone, and what’s the point in going home? I’ve got to be back here in eight hours. She felt the weight of the pager against her hip and added a silent prayer that she would actually get the full eight hours. The company had received its pound of flesh already today—the damned beeper had gone off as she’d slid into her car back at 4:20—so maybe, just maybe, they’d leave her alone tonight.

  The elevator door hissed open and she dragged herself forward into the underground garage.

  “Leaving the office,” she murmured, “take two.”

  Squinting a little under the glare of the fluorescent lights, she started across the almost empty garage, her shadow dancing around her like a demented marionette. She’d always hated the cold, hard light of the fluorescents, the world looked decidedly unfriendly thrown into such sharp-edged relief. And tonight. . . .

  She shook her head. Lack of sleep made her think crazy things. Resisting the urge to keep looking over her shoulder, she finally reached the one benefit of all the endless hours of overtime.

  “Hi, baby.” She rummaged in her pocket for her car keys. “Miss me?”

  She flipped open the hatchback, heaved her briefcase—This damn thing must weigh three hundred pounds!—up and over the lip, and slid it down into the trunk. Resting her elbows on the weather stripping, she paused, half in and half out of the car, inhaling the scent of new paint, new vinyl, new plastic. and . . . rotting food. Frowning, she straightened.

  At least it’s coming from outside my car. . . .

  Gagging, she pushed the hatchback closed and turned. Let security worry about the smell tomorrow. All she wanted to do was get home.

  It took a moment for her to realize she wasn’t going to make it.

  By the time the scream reached her throat, her throat had been torn away and the scream became a gurgle as her severed trachea filled with blood.

  The last thing she saw as her head fell back was the lines of red dribbling darkly down the sides of her new car.

  The last thing she heard was the insistent beep, beep, beep of her pager.

  And the last thing she felt was a mouth against the ruin of her throat.

  On Tuesday morning, the front page of the tabloid screamed “SLASHER STRIKES AGAIN.” A photograph of the coach of the Toronto Maple Leafs stared out from under it, the cutline asking—not for the first time that season—if he should be fired, the Leafs being once again at the very bottom of the worst division in the league. It was the kind of strange layout at which the paper excelled.

  “Fire the owner,” Vicki muttered, shoving her glasses up her nose and peering at the tiny print under the headline. “Story page two,” it said, and on page two, complete with a photo of the underground garage and a hysterical account by the woman who had found the body, was a description of a mutilated corpse that exactly matched the one Vicki had found in the Eglinton West Station.

  “Damn.”

  “Homicide investigator Michael Celluci,” the story continued, “says there is little doubt in his mind that this is not a copycat case and whoever killed Terri Neal also killed lan Reddick on Sunday night.”

  Vicki strongly suspected that was not at all what Mike had said, although it might have been the information he imparted. Mike seldom found it necessary to cooperate with, or even hide his distaste for, the press. And he was never that polite.

  She read over the details again and a nameless fear ran icy fingers down her spine. She remembered the lingering presence she’d felt and knew this wouldn’t be the end of the killing. She’d dialed the phone almost before she came to a conscious decision to call.

  “Mike Celluci, please. What? No, no message.”

  And what was I going to tell him? she wondered as she hung up. That I have a hunch this is only the beginning? He’d love that.

  Tossing the tabloid aside, Vicki pulled the other city paper toward her. On page four it ran much the same story, minus about half the adjectives and most of the hysteria.

  Neither paper had mentioned that ripping a throat out with a single blow was pretty much impossible.

  If I could only remember what was missing from that body. She sighed and rubbed at her eyes.

  Meanwhile, she had five Foo Chans to visit. . . .

  There was something moving in the pit. DeVerne Jones leaned against the wire fence and breathed beer fumes into the darkness, wondering what he should do about it. It was his pit. His first as foreman. They’d be starting the frames in the morning so that when spring finally arrived they’d be ready to pour the concrete. He peered around the black lumps of machinery. And there was something down there. In his pit.

  Briefly he wished he hadn’t decided to swing by the site on his way home from the bar. It was after midnight and the shape he’d seen over by the far wall was probably just some poor wino looking for a warm place to curl up where the cops would leave him alone. The crew could toss the burn out in the morning, no harm done. Except they had a lot of expensive equipment down there and it might be something more.

  “Damn.”

  He dug out his keys and walked over to the gate. The padlock hung open. In the damp and the cold, it sometimes didn’t catch, but he’d been the last man out of the pit and he’d checked it before he left. Hadn’t he?

  “Damn again.” It had just become a very good thing he’d stopped by.

  Hinges screaming in protest, the gate swung open.

  DeVerne waited for a moment at the top of the ramp, to see if the sound flushed his quarry.

  Nothing.

  A belly full of beer and you’re a hero, he thought, just sober enough to realize he could be walking into trouble and just drunk enough to not really care.

  Halfway down into the pit, his eyes growing
accustomed to the darkness, he saw it again. Man-shaped, moving too quickly to be a wino, it disappeared behind one of the dozers.

  As silently as he was able, DeVerne quickened his pace. He’d catch the son-of-a-bitch in the act. He made a small detour and pulled a three foot length of pipe from a pile of scrap. No sense taking chances, even a cornered rat would fight. The scrape of metal against metal rang out unnaturally loud, echoing off the sides of the pit. His presence announced, he charged around the dozer, bellowing a challenge, weapon raised.

  Someone was lying on the ground. DeVerne could see the shoes sticking out of the pool of shadow. In that pool of shadow—or creating it, DeVerne couldn’t be sure-crouched another figure.

  DeVerne yelled again. The figure straightened and turned, darkness swirling about it.

  He didn’t realize the figure had moved until the pipe was wrenched from his hand. He barely had time to raise his other hand in a futile attempt to save his life.

  There’s no such thing! he wailed silently as he died.

  Wednesday morning, the tabloid headline, four inches high, read: “VAMPIRE STALKS CITY.”

  Two

  He lifted her arm and ran his tongue down the soft flesh on the inside of her wrist. She moaned, head back, breath coming in labored gasps.

  Almost.

  He watched her closely and when she began to go into the final climb, when her body began to arch under his, he took the small pulsing vein at the base of her thumb between the sharp points of his teeth and bit down. The slight pain was for her just one more sensation added to a system already overloaded and while she rode the waves of her orgasm, he drank.

  They finished at much the same time.

  He reached up and gently pushed a strand of damp mahogany hair off her face. “Thank you,” he said softly.

  “No, thank you, ” she murmured, capturing his hand and placing a kiss on the palm.

  They lay quietly for a time; she drifting in and out of sleep, he tracing light patterns on the soft curves of her breasts, his fingertip following the blue lines of veins beneath the white skin. Now that he’d fed, they no longer drove him to distraction. When he was sure that the coagulant in his saliva had taken effect, and the tiny wound on her wrist would bleed no more, he untangled his legs from hers and padded to the bathroom to clean up.