1 Blood Price

by Tanya Huff

  “Well, thank you very much.” She watched him scrape his plate clean, then asked, “Tony, do you believe in vampires?”

  He flicked a tiny crucifix out from inside his shirt. “I believe in stayin’ alive.”

  Outside the restaurant, turning collars up against the wind, she asked him if he needed money. She couldn’t get him off the street, he wouldn’t accept her help, so she gave him what he’d take. Celluci called it white-middle-class-guilt-money. While admitting he was probably right, Vicki ignored him.

  “Nah,” Tony pushed a lock of pale brown hair back off his face. “I’m doing okay for cash.”

  “You hooking?”

  “Why? You can’t arrest me anymore; you wanna hire me?”

  “I want to smack you. Haven’t you heard there’s an epidemic going on?”

  He danced back out of her range. “Hey, I’m careful. Like I said,” and just for an instant he looked much, much older than his years, “I believe in stayin’ alive.”

  “Vicki, I don’t care what your curbside guru says and I don’t care what the ‘feeling on the street is’; there are no such thing as vampires and you are losing your mind.”

  Vicki got the phone away from her ear before Celluci slammed his receiver down. Shaking her head, she hung up her own phone considerably more gently. All right, she’d told him. She’d done it against her better judgment and knowing full well what his reaction would be. No matter what went down tonight, her conscience was clear.

  “And it’s not that I believe in vampires,” she pointed out to the empty apartment, pushing back to extend the recliner. ‘I believe in keeping an open mind.” And, she added silently, grimly, her mind on Tony and his crucifix, I, too, believe in stayin’ alive. Beside the chair, her bag bulged with the afternoon’s purchases.

  At 11:48, Vicki stepped off the northbound Woodbine bus at Mortimer. For a moment, she leaned against the window of the small garden store on the corner, giving herself time to grow used to the darkness. There, under the street lamp, her vision was functional. A few meters away, where the overlap of two lights created a double-shadowed twilight, she knew she wouldn’t be able to trust it. It would be worse off the main street. She fished her flashlight out of her bag and held it ready, just in case.

  Across a shadow-filled distance, she saw a traffic signal work through its tiny spectrum and decided to cross the street. For no reason really, the creature could appear on the east side of Woodbine just as easily as on the west, but it seemed like the thing to do. Moving had always been infinitely preferable to waiting around.

  Terry’s Milk Mart on the north side of Mortimer appeared to be open—it was the only building in the immediate neighborhood still brightly lit—so she crossed toward it.

  I can ask a few questions. Buy a bag of chips. Find out. . . . SHIT! Two men from homicide were in the store talking to a surly looking teenager she could only assume was not the proprietor. Eyes streaming from the sudden glare of the fluorescents, she backed down the six stairs much more quickly than she’d gone up them. She spotted the unmarked car south across Mortimer in the Brewers Retail parking lot—trust the government to light a square of asphalt at almost midnight—and headed in the opposite direction, willing to bet long odds that Celluci had included her in his instructions to his men.

  If she remembered correctly, the houses that lined the street were small, virtually identical, detached, two-story, single family dwellings. Not the sort of neighborhood you’d think would attract a vampire. Not that she expected the creature to actually put in an appearance on Woodbine; the street was too well lit, too well traveled, with too great a possibility of witnesses. No, she was putting her money on one of the quiet residential streets tucked in behind.

  At Holborne, for no reason she could think of, she turned west. The streetlights were farther apart here and she hurried from one island of sight to the next, trusting to bureaucracy and city planning to keep the sidewalk under her feet. She slipped at one point on a pile of dirt, her bag sliding off her shoulder and slamming hard edges against her knees. Her flashlight beam played over a tiny construction site where a skinny house was rising to fill what had once no doubt been a no larger than average side yard. The creature had killed under circumstances like these once before, but somehow she knew it wouldn’t again. She moved on.

  The sudden scream of a siren sent her heart up into her throat and she spun around, flashlight raised like a weapon. Back at the corner, a fire engine roared from the station and, tires squealing, turned north up Woodbine.

  “Nerves a bit shot, are they, Vicki?” she muttered to herself taking a long, calming breath. Blood pounded in her ears almost loud enough to echo and sweat glued her gloves to her palms. Still a bit shaky with reaction, she made her way to the next streetlight and leaned back against the pole.

  The spill of light reached almost to the house, not quite far enough for Vicki to see the building. The bit of lawn she could see looked well cared for—in spite of the spring mud—and along one edge roses, clipped short to survive the cold, waited for spring. It was a working class neighborhood, she knew, and, given the lawn, Vicki was willing to bet that most of the families were Italian or Portuguese as both cultures cared about—and for—the land. If that was the case, many of the houses would be decorated with painted icons of saints, or of the Madonna, or of Christ himself.

  She wondered how much protection those icons would offer when the killer came.

  Up the street, two golden circles marked a slow moving car. To Vicki, they looked like the eyes of some great beast for the darkness hid the form that followed and the headlights were all she could see. But then, she didn’t need to see more to identify it as a police car. Only police on surveillance ever drove at that precise, unchanging speed. She’d done it herself too many times to mistake it now. Fighting the urge to dive out of sight, she turned and strode confidently up the walk toward the house, digging in her bag for an imaginary set of keys.

  The car purred by behind her.

  Making her way back to the sidewalk, Vicki doubted that her luck could last. Celluci had to have saturated this area with his men. Sooner or later, she had to run into someone she knew—probably Celluci himself—and she wasn’t looking forward to explaining just what she was doing roaming about in the middle of a police manhunt.

  She continued west along Holborne, marshaling her arguments. I thought you could use an extra pair of eyes. But then, so could she. I doubted you’d be prepared to deal with a vampire. True, but it’d go over like rats in the drunk tank. You have no right to keep me away. Except that they/he did. Every right. It was why there were laws against suicide.

  So what am I doing out here anyway? And is this more or less stupid than charging down into a subway station to single-handedly challenge God knows what. The darkness pressed close around her, waiting for an answer. What am I trying to prove?

  That in spite of everything I can still be a fully functioning member of society. She snorted. On the other hand, there’re a number of fully functioning members of society I’m not likely to run into out here tonight.

  Which brought the silent interrogation back around to “just what was she trying to prove,” and Vicki decided to leave it there. Things were tough enough without bogging them down further in introspection.

  At the corner of Woodmount, she paused. The triple line of streetlights disappeared into the distance to either side and straight ahead. The suspended golden globes were all she could see. Casting about like a hound for a scent, she drew in a deep lungful of the cold night air. All she could smell was earth, damp and musty, freshly exposed by the end of winter. Normally, she liked the smell. Tonight, it reminded her of the grave and she pulled her jacket tighter around her to ward off a sudden chill. In the distance, there was the sound of traffic and farther off still, a dog barked.

  There seemed little to choose between the directions, so she turned to her left and headed carefully back south.

  A car door slammed.


  Vicki’s heart slammed up against her ribs in response. This was it. She was as sure of it as she’d ever been of anything in her life.

  She started to run. Slowly at first, well aware that a misstep would result in a fall or worse. Her flashlight remained off; she needed the stations of the streetlights to guide her and the flashlight beam confined her sight. At Baker Street, she rocked to a halt.

  Where now? Her other senses strained to make up for near blindness.

  Metal screamed against wood; nails forced to release their hold.

  East. She turned and raced toward it, stumbled, fell, recovered, and went on, trusting her feet to find a path she couldn’t see. Fifty running paces from the corner, shadow sight marked something crossing her path. It slipped down the narrow drive between two buildings and when Vicki followed, responding to the instinct of the chase, she could see red taillights burning about a hundred yards away.

  It smelled as if something had died at the end of the lane. Like the old lady who’d been found the third week of last August but who’d been killed in her small, airless room around the first of July.

  She could hear the car engine running, movement against the gravel, and a noise she didn’t want to identify.

  The evil that had lingered in the subway tunnel had been only the faintest afterimage of the evil that waited for her here.

  A shadow, its parameters undefined, passed between Vicki and the tailight.

  Her left hand trailing along a wall of fake brick siding and her right holding the flashlight out before her like the handle cf a lance, Vicki pounded up the drive paying no attention to the small, shrill voice of reason that demanded to know just what the hell she thought she was doing.

  Something shrieked and the sound drove her back a half dozen steps.

  Every dog in the neighborhood began to howl.

  Ignoring the cold sweat beading her body and the knot of fear that made each breath a labored fight, Vicki forced herself to move forward again; the six steps regained, then six more. . . .

  Half sprawled across the trunk of the car, she turned on the flashlight.

  Horro flickered just beyond the beam’s farthest edge where a wooden garage door swung haphazardly from a single twisted hinge. Darkness seemed to move within the darkness and Vicki’s mind shied away from it so quickly and with such blind panic that it convinced her nothing fingered there at all.

  Caught in the light, a young man crouched, one arm flung up to shield his eyes from the glare. At his feet. a body; a bearded man, late thirties, early forties, blood still draining from the ruined throat, thickening and congealing against the gravel. He had been dead before he hit the ground, for only the dead fall with that complete disregard of self that gives them the look of discarded marionettes.

  All this Vicki took in at glance. Then the crouching man stood, his open coat spreading and bracketing him like great black leather wings. He took a step toward her, face distorted and eyes squinted nearly shut. Blood had stained his palms and fingers a glistening crimson.

  Scrambling in her purse for the heavy silver crucifix she’d acquired that afternoon—and not really, God help her, expected to need—Vicki drew breath to scream for backup. Or maybe just to scream. She never found out which for he took another step toward her and that was all she saw for some time.

  Henry caught the young woman as she fell and eased her gently to the gravel. He hadn’t wanted to do that, but he couldn’t allow her to scream. There were too many things he couldn’t explain to the police.

  She saw me bending over the body, he thought as he snapped off the flashlight and shoved it into her purse. His too sensitive eyes welcomed the return of night. They felt as though they’d been impaled with hot irons. Got a good look at me, too. Damn. Common sense said he should kill her before she had a chance to expose him. He had strength enough to make it look no different from the other deaths. He would be safe again then.

  Henry turned and looked past the body—meat now, nothing more—into the torn earthen floor of the garage where the killer had fled. This night had proven the deaths were in no way his responsibility.

  “Damn!” He said it aloud this time as approaching sirens and a car door slamming at the end of the drive reminded him of the need for immediate action. Dropping to one knee, he heaved the unconscious young woman over a shoulder and grabbed up her bag in his free hand. The weight posed no problem; like all of his kind he was disproportionately strong, but her dangling height was dangerously awkward.

  “Too damn tall in this century,” he muttered, vaulted the chain link fence that bordered the back of the yard, and disappeared with his burden into the night.

  Six

  Dumping the contents of the huge black purse out on his coffee table, Henry dropped to his knees and rummaged through the mess for something that looked like ID; a wallet, a card case, anything. Nothing.

  Nothing? Impossible. These days no one traveled without identification, not even those who traveled only the night. He found both card case and wallet at last in the bag itself, tucked in a side pocket, accessible without having to delve through the main compartment.

  “Victoria Nelson, Private Investigator.” He let out a breath he hadn’t been aware of holding as he went through the rest of her papers. A private investigator, thank God. He’d been afraid he’d run off with some sort of uniformed police officer, thereby instigating a citywide manhunt. He’d observed, over the centuries that the police, whatever else their failings, took care of their own. A private investigator, though, was a private citizen and as such had probably not yet been missed.

  Rising to his feet, Henry looked down at the unconscious woman on his couch. Although he found it distasteful, he would kill to protect himself. Hopefully, this time, it wouldn’t be necessary. He shrugged out of his coat and began to compose what he’d say to her when she woke up . . .

  . . . if she woke up.

  Her heartbeat filled the apartment, its rhythm almost twice as fast as his own. It called to him to feed, but he held the hunger in check.

  He glanced at his watch. 2:13. Sunrise in four hours. If she was concussed. . . .

  He hadn’t wanted to hit her. Knocking someone out with a single blow wasn’t easy no matter what movies and television suggested. Sporadic practice over the years had taught him where and how to strike, but no expertise could change the fact that a head blow slammed the brain back and forth within the skull, mashing soft tissue against bone.

  And it’s quite an attractive skull, too, he noted, taking a closer look. Although there’s a definite hint of obstinacy about the width of that jaw. He checked her ID again. Thirty-one. Her short dark blond/light brown hair—he frowned, unable to make up his mind—had no touch of gray but tiny laugh wrinkles had begun to form around her eyes. When he’d been “alive,” thirty-one had been middle-aged. Now, it seemed to be barely adult.

  She wore no makeup, he approved of that, and the delicate, pale gold down on her cheeks made her skin look like velvet.

  And feel like velvet. . . . He drew back his hand and clamped the hunger tighter. It was want, not need, and he would not let it control him.

  The tiny muscles of her face shifted and her eyes opened. Like her hair, they were neither one color nor the other; neither blue, nor gray, nor green. The tip of her tongue moistened dry lips and she met his gaze without fear.

  “Son of a bitch,” she said clearly, and winced.

  Vicki came up out of darkness scrambling desperately for information, but the sound of blood pounding in her ears kept drowning out coherent thought. She fought against it. Pain—and, oh God, it hurt—meant danger. She had to know where she was, how she’d gotten there. . . .

  A man’s face swam into view inches above her own. a man’s face she recognized.

  “Son of a bitch,” she said, and winced. The words, the movement of her jaw, sent fresh shards of pain up into her head. She did what she could to ignore them. The last time she’d seen that face, and the bo
dy it was no doubt attached to, it had risen from slaughter and attacked her. Although she had no memory of it, he had obviously knocked her out and brought her here; wherever here was.

  She tried to look past him, to get some idea of her surroundings, but the room, if room it was, was too dark. Did she know anything she could use?

  I’m fully clothed, lying on a couch in the company of an insane killer and, although the rest of my body appears to be functional, my head feels like it’s taken too many shots on goal. There seemed to be only one thing she could do. She threw herself off the couch.

  Unfortunately, gravity proved stronger than the idea.

  When she hit the floor, a brilliant fireworks display left afterimages of green and gold and red on the inside of her eyelids and then she sank into darkness again.

  The second time Vicki regained consciousness, it happened more quickly than the first and the line between one state and the next was more clearly delineated. This time, she kept her eyes closed.

  “That was a stupid thing to do,” a man’s voice observed from somewhere above her right shoulder. She didn’t argue. “It’s entirely possible you won’t believe this,” he continued, “but I don’t want to hurt you.”

  To her surprise, she did believe him. Maybe it was the tone, or the timbre, or the ice pack he held against her jaw. Maybe her brains had been scrambled, which seemed more likely.

  “I never did want to hurt you. I’m sorry about,” she felt the ice pack shift slightly, “this, but I didn’t think I had time to explain. ”

  Vicki cracked open first one eye and then the other. “Explain what?” The pale oval of his face appeared to float in the dim light. She wished she could see him better.