1 Blood Price

by Tanya Huff

  Vicki looked down at the book of the Tudor age, spread open on her lap, and tapped a paragraph. “It says here you died at seventeen.”

  Shaking off his lethargy, Henry turned to face her. “Yes, well, I got better.”

  “You don’t look seventeen.” She frowned. “Mid-twenties I’d say, no younger.”

  He shrugged. “We age, but we age slowly.”

  “It doesn’t say so here, but wasn’t there some mystery about your funeral?” One corner of her mouth quirked up at his surprised expression, the best she could manage considering the condition of her jaw. “I have a BA in History.”

  “Isn’t that an unusual degree for a person in your line of work?”

  He meant for a private investigator, she realized, but it had been just as unusual for a cop. If she had a nickel for every time someone, usually a superior officer, had dragged out that hoary old chestnut, those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it, she’d be a rich woman. “It hasn’t slowed me down,” she told him a little pointedly. “The funeral?”

  “Yes, well, it wasn’t what I’d been expecting, that’s for certain.” He clasped his hands together to still their shaking and although he fought it, the memories caught him up again. . . .

  Waking—confused and disoriented. Slowly, he became aware of his heartbeat and allowed it to pull him back to full consciousness. He’d never been in a darkness so complete and, in spite of Christina’s remembered reassurance, he began to panic. The panic grew when he tried to push the lid off the crypt and found he couldn’t move. Not stone above him, but rough wood embracing him so closely that the rise and fall of his chest brushed against the boards. All around, the smell of earth.

  Not a noble’s tomb but a common grave.

  Screaming until his throat was raw, he twisted and thrashed through the little movement he had but, although the wood creaked once or twice, the weight of earth was absolute.

  He stopped then, for he realized that to destroy the coffin and lie covered only in the earth would be infinitely worse. That was when the hunger began. He had no idea how long he lay, paralyzed with terror, frenzied need clawing at his gut, but his sanity hung by a thread when he heard a shovel blade bite into the dirt above him.

  “You know,” he said, scrubbing a hand across his face, terror still echoing faintly behind the words, “there’s a very good reason most vampires come from the nobility; a crypt is a great deal easier to get out of. I’d been buried good and deep and it took Christina three days to find me and dig me free.” Sometimes, even four centuries later, when he woke in the evening, he was back there. Alone. In the dark. Facing eternity.

  “So your father,” Vicki paused, she had trouble with this next bit, “Henry VIII, really did suspect?”

  Henry laughed, but the sound had little humor. “Oh, he more than suspected. I discovered later that he’d ordered a stake driven through my heart, my mouth stuffed with garlic and the lips sewn shut, then my head removed and buried separately. Thank God, Norfolk remained a true friend until the end.”

  “You saw him again?”

  “A couple of times. He understood better than I thought.”

  “What happened to Christina?”

  “She guided me through the frenzy that follows the change. She guarded me during the year I slept as my body adapted to its new condition. She taught me how to feed without killing. And then she left.”

  “She left?” Vicki’s brows flew almost to her hairline. “After all that, she left?”

  Henry turned again to look out at the lights of the city. She could be out there, he’d never know. Nor, he had to admit a little sadly, would he care. “When the parent/ child link is over, we prefer to hunt alone. Our closest bonds are formed when we feed and we can’t feed from each other.” He rested his hand against the glass. “The emotional bond, the love if you will, that causes us to offer our blood to a mortal never survives the change.”

  “But you could still. . . .”

  “Yes, but it isn’t the same.” He shook himself free of the melancholy and faced her again. “That also is tied too closely to feeding.”

  “Oh. Then the stories about vampiric . . . uh . . . .”

  “Prowess?” Henry supplied with a grin. “Are true. But then, we get a lot of time to practice.”

  Vicki felt the heat rise in her face and she had to drop her gaze. Four hundred and fifty years of practice. . . . Involuntarily, she clenched her teeth and the sudden sharp pain from her jaw came as a welcome distraction. Not tonight, I’ve got a headache. She closed the book on her lap and carefully set it aside, glancing down at her watch as she did. 4:43. I’ve heard some interesting confessions in my time, but this one. . . . The option, of course, existed to disbelieve everything she’d heard. To get out of the apartment and away from a certified nut case and call for the people in the white coats to lock Mr. Fitzroy, bastard son of Henry VIII, etcetera, etcetera, away where he belonged. Except, she did believe and trying to convince herself she didn’t would be trying to convince herself of a lie.

  “Why did you tell me all this?” she asked at last.

  Henry shrugged. “The way I saw it, I had two options. I could trust you or I could kill you. If I trusted you first,” he spread his hands, “and discovered it was a bad idea, I could still kill you before you could do me any harm.”

  “Now wait a minute,” Vicki bridled. “I’m not that easy to kill!” He was standing at the window; ten, maybe twelve feet away. Less than a heartbeat later he sat beside her on the couch, both hands resting lightly around her neck. She couldn’t have stopped him. She hadn’t even seen him move. “Oh,” she said.

  He removed his hands and continued as though she hadn’t interrupted. “But if I killed you first, well, that would be that. And I think we can help each other.”

  “How?” Up close, he became a little overwhelming and she had to fight the desire to move away. Or move closer. Four hundred and fifty years develops a forceful personality, she observed, shifting her gaze to the white velvet upholstery.

  “The demon hunts at might. So do I. But the one who calls the demon is mortal and must live his life during the day.”

  “You’re suggesting that we team up?”

  “Until the demon is captured, yes.”

  She brushed the nap of the velvet back and forth, back and forth, and then looked up at him again. Light hazel eyes. I was right. “Why do you care?”

  “About catching the demon?” Henry stood and paced back to the window. “I don’t, not specifically, but the papers are blaming the killings on vampires and are putting us all in danger.” Down below, the headlights of a lone car sped up Jarvis Street. “Until just recently, even I thought it was one of my kind; a child, abandoned, untrained.”

  “What, purposefully left to fend for itself?”

  “Perhaps. Perhaps the parent had no idea there was a child at all.”

  “I thought you said there had to be an emotional bond.”

  “No, I said the emotional bond did not survive past the change, I didn’t say that it had to exist. My kind can create children for as many bad or accidental reasons as yours. Technically, all that is needed is for the vampire to feed too deeply and for the mortal to feed in return.”

  “For the mortal to feed in return? How the hell would that happen?”

  He turned to face her. “I take it,” he said dryly, “you don’t bite.”

  Vicki felt her cheeks burn and hurriedly changed the subject. “You were looking for the child?”

  “Tonight?” Henry shook his head. “No, tonight I knew and I was looking for the demon.” He walked to the couch and leaned over it toward her, hands braced against the pale wood inlaid in the arm. “When the killings stop, the stories will stop and vampires will retreat back into myth and race memory. We prefer it that way. In fact, we work very hard to keep it that way. If the papers convince their readers we are real, they can find us—our habits are too well known.” He caught her gaze, held it,
and grimly bared his teeth. “I, for one, don’t intend to end up staked for something I didn’t do.”

  When he released her—and she refused to kid herself, she couldn’t have looked away if he hadn’t allowed it—Vicki swept the stuff on the coffee table back into her bag and stood. Although she faced him, she focused on the area just over his right shoulder.

  “I have to think about this.” She kept her voice as neutral as she could. “What you’ve told me . . . well, I have to think about it.” Lame, but the best she could do.

  Henry nodded. “I understand.”

  “Then I can go?”

  “You can go.”

  She nodded in turn and reaching into her pocket for her gloves, made her way to the door.

  “Victoria.”

  Vicki had never believed that names held power nor that speaking names transferred that power to another, but she couldn’t stop herself from pivoting slowly around to face him again.

  “Thank you for not suggesting I tell all this to the police.”

  She snorted. “The police? Do I look stupid?”

  He smiled. “No, you don’t.”

  He’s had a long time to perfect that smile, she reminded herself, trying to calm the sudden erratic beating of her heart. She fumbled behind her for the door, got it open, and made her escape. Despite proximity, she took a moment on the other side to catch her breath. Vampires. Demons. They don’t teach you about this sort of shit at the police academy. . . .

  Seven

  Because the streets in the inner city were far from dark, and as she’d managed so well out at Woodbine with much less light, Vicki decided to walk home. She turned her collar up against the wind, shoved her gloved hands deep in her pockets, more out of habit than for additional warmth, and started west along Bloor Street. It wasn’t that far and she needed to think.

  The cool air felt good against her jaw and seemed to be easing the pounding in her head. Although she had to be careful about how heavily her heels struck the pavement, walking remained infinitely preferable to the jostling she’d receive in the back of a cab.

  And she needed to think.

  Vampires and demons; or a vampire and a demon at least. In eight years on the police force, she’d seen a lot of strangeness and been forced to believe in the existence of things that most sane people—police officers and social workers excepted—preferred to ignore. Next to some of the cruelties the strong inflicted on the weak, vampires and demons weren’t that hard to swallow. And the vampire seemed to be one of the good guys.

  She saw him smile again and sternly stopped herself from responding to the memory.

  At Yonge Street, she turned south, waiting for the green more out of habit than necessity. While not exactly ablaze with light, the intersection was far from dark and the traffic was still infrequent. She wasn’t the only person around, Yonge Street never completely emptied, but the others whose business or lifestyle kept them out in the hours between midnight and dawn stayed carefully, unobtrusively, out of her way.

  “It’s ’cause you walk like a cop,” Tony had explained once. “After a while, you guys all develop the same look. In uniform, out of uniform; it doesn’t matter any more.”

  Vicki saw no reason to disbelieve him, she’d seen the effect for herself. Just as she saw no reason to disbelieve Henry Fitzroy; she’d seen the demon for herself as well.

  Darkness swirled in darkness and was gone. She’d seen no more than the hint of a shape sinking into the earth, and for that she gave thanks. The vague outline she remembered held horror enough and her mind kept shying away from the memory. The smell of decay, however, she remembered perfectly.

  It had been neither sight nor smell that had convinced her Henry spoke the truth. Both could be faked, although she had no idea of how or why. Her own reaction convinced her. Her own terror. Her mind’s refusal to clearly recall what she had seen. The feeling of evil, cloying and cold, emanating out of the darkness.

  Vicki pulled her jacket tighter, the chill that pebbled her flesh having nothing to do with the temperature of the night.

  Demon. At least now they knew what they were looking for. They knew? No, she knew. She cracked a smile as she thought of explaining all this to Mike Celluci. He hadn’t been there, he’d think she was out of her mind. Hell, if I hadn’t been there, I’d think I was out of my mind. Besides, she couldn’t tell Celluci without betraying Henry. . . .

  Henry. Vampire. If he wasn’t what he claimed, why would he go to all the trouble of creating such a complicated story?

  Never mind, she chided herself. Stupid question. She’d known pathological liars, had arrested a couple, had worked with one, and why was never a question they concerned themselves with.

  Henry’s story had been so complicated, it had to be the truth. Didn’t it?

  At College Street, she paused on the corner. Only a block to the west, she could see the lights of police headquarters. She could go in, grab a coffee, talk to someone who understood. About demons and vampires, right. Sudden y, the headquarters building seemed very far away.

  She could walk past it, keep walking west to Huron Street and home, but, in spite of everything, she wasn’t tired and didn’t want to enclose herself with walls until she had banished all the dark on dark from the shadows. She watched a streetcar rattle by, the capsule of warmth and light empty save for the driver, and continued south to Dunclas.

  Approaching the glass and concrete bulk of the Eaton’s Center, she heard the bells of St. Michael’s Cathedral sound the hour. In the daytime, the ambient noise of the city masked their call but in the still, quiet time before dawn they reverberated throughout the downtown core. Lesser bells added their notes, but the bells of St. Michael’s dominated.

  Not really sure why, Vicki followed the sound. She’d chased a pusher up the steps of the cathedral once, years ago when she’d still been in uniform. He’d grabbed at the doors claiming sanctuary. The doors had been locked. Apparently, not even God trusted the night in the heart of a large city. The pusher had fought all the way back to the car and he hadn’t thought it at all funny when Vicki and her partner insisted on referring to him as Quasimodo.

  She expected the heavy wooden doors to be locked again, but to her surprise they swung silently open. Just as silently, she slipped inside and pulled them closed behind her.

  Quiet please, warned a cardboard sign, mounted in a gleaming brass floor stand, Holy Week Vigil in progress.

  Her rubber soled shoes squeaking faintly against the floor, Vicki moved into the sanctum. Only about half of the lights were on, creating an unreal, almost mythical twilight in the church. Vicki could see, but only just and only because she didn’t attempt to focus on anything outside the specific. A priest knelt at the altar and the first few rows of pews held a scattering of stocky women dressed in black, looking as though they’d been punched out of the same mold. The faint murmur of voices, lifted in what Vicki assumed was prayer, and the fainter click of beads, did nothing to disturb the heavy hush that hung over the building. Waiting; it felt like they were waiting. For what, Vicki had no idea.

  The flickering of open flame caught her eye and she slipped down a side aisle until she could see into an alcove off the south wall. Three or four tiers of candles in red glass jars rose up to a mural that gleamed under a single spotlight. The Madonna, draped in blue and white, held her arms wide as though to embrace a weary world. Her smile offered comfort and the artist had captured a certain sadness around the eyes.

  Like many of her generation, Vicki had been raised vaguely Christian. She could recognize the symbols of the church, and she knew the historical story, but that was about it. Not for the first time, she wondered if maybe she hadn’t missed out on something important. Peeling off her gloves, she slid into a pew.

  I don’t even know if I believe in God, she admitted apologetically to the mural. But then, I didn’t believe in vampires before tonight.

  It was warm in the cathedral and the nap she’d had that afternoon
seemed very far away. Slowly she slid down against the polished wood and slowly the Madonna’s face began to blur. . . .

  In the distance something shattered with the hard, definite crash that suggested to an experienced ear it had been thrown violently to the floor. Vicki stirred, opened her eyes, but couldn’t seem to gather enough energy to move. She sat slumped in the pew, caught in a curious lassitude while the sounds of destruction grew closer. She could hear men’s voices shouting, more self-satisfied than angry, but she couldn’t catch the words.

  In the alcove the spotlight appeared to have burned out. Wrapped in shadow, illuminated only by the tiers of flickering candles, the Madonna continued to smile sadly, holding her arms out to the world. Vicki frowned. The candles were squat and white, the wax dribbling down irregular sides to pool and harden in the metal holders and on the stone floor.

  But the candles were enclosed . . . and the floor, the floor was carpeted. . . .

  A crash, louder and closer than the others, actually caused her to jerk but didn’t break the inertia holding her in the pew.

  She saw the ax head first, then the shaft, then the man holding it. He charged up the side aisle from the front of the church, from the altar. His dark clothes were marked with plaster dust and through the gaping front of his bulging leather vest Vicki thought she saw the glint of gold. Candlelight glittered off colored bits of broken glass caught in the folded tops of his wide boots. Sweat had darkened his short hair, blunt cut to follow the curve of his head, and his lips were drawn back to reveal the yellow slabs of his teeth.

  He rocked to a halt at the entrance to the alcove, caught his breath, and raised the ax.

  It stopped short of the Madonna’s smile, the haft slapping into the upraised hand of the young man who had suddenly appeared in its path. The axman swore and tried to yank the weapon free. The ax stayed exactly where it was.

  From Vicki’s point of view it appeared that the young man twisted his wrist a gentle half turn and then lowered his arm, but he must have done more for the axman swore again, lost his grip, and almost lost his footing. He stumbled back and Vicki got her first good look at the young man now holding the ax across his body.