by Tanya Huff
Paper tucked under his arm—he’d have taken two, but a single weekend edition was bulky enough on its own—he continued into the small corner store for a bag of briquettes. He had only one left and he needed three for the ritual.
Unfortunately, he was seventy-six cents short.
“What!”
“The charcoal is three dollars and fifty-nine cents plus twenty-five cents tax which is coming to three dollars and eighty-four cents. You have only three dollars and eight cents.”
“Look, I’ll owe it to you.”
The old woman shook her head. “Sorry, no credit.”
Norman’s eyes narrowed. “I was born in this country. I’ve got rights.” He reached for the bag, but she swept it back behind the counter.
“No credit,” she repeated a little more firmly.
He was halfway around the counter after it, when the old woman picked up a broom and started toward him. Scooping up his money, he beat a hasty retreat.
She probably knows kung fu or something. He shifted the paper under his arm and started back to his apartment. On the way past, he kicked the newspaper box again. The closest bank machine closed at six. He’d never make it. He’d have to head into the mall tomorrow to find an open one.
This was all that old lady’s fault. After he worked out a suitable punishment for the demon and made sure that Coreen got hers, maybe he’d do something about the immigrant problem.
The throbbing grew louder still.
“Look at this!”
Scrubbing at her face with her hands, Vicki answered without looking up. “I’ve seen it. I brought them over, remember?”
“Is the entire city out of its mind?”
“The entire city is scared, Henry.” She put her glasses back on and sighed. Although she had no intention of telling him, she’d slept last night with the bedroom light on and still kept waking, heart in her throat, drenched with sweat, sure that something was climbing up the fire escape toward her window. “You’ve had since 1536 to come to terms with violent death. The rest of us haven’t been so lucky.”
As if to make up for the lack of news over Good Friday, all three of the Saturday papers carried the seventh death as a front page story, emphasized that this body, too, had been drained of blood, and all three, the staid national paper finally jumping on the bandwagon, carried articles on vampires, columns on vampires, historical and scientific exploration of vampires—all the while claiming no such creature existed.
“Do you know what the result of all this will be?” Henry slapped the paper he held down on the couch where the pages separated and half of it slithered to the floor.
Vicki swiveled to face him as he moved out of her limited field of vision. “Increased circulation?” she asked, covering a yawn. Her eyes ached from a day spent reading occurrence reports and the news that their demon-caller had turned to more conventional weapons had been all she needed to hear.
Henry, unable to remain still, crossed the room in four angry strides, turned, and came back. Bracing his hands on the top of the couch, he leaned toward her. “You’re right, people are afraid. The papers, for whatever reasons, have given that fear a name. Vampire.” He straightened and ran one hand back through his hair. “The people writing these stories don’t believe in vampires, and most of the people reading these stories don’t believe in vampires, but we’re talking about a culture where more people know their astrological sign than their blood type. Somewhere out there, somebody is taking all this seriously and spending his spare time sharpening stakes.”
Vicki frowned. It made a certain amount of sense and she certainly wasn’t going to argue for the better natures of her contemporaries. “One of the local stations is showing Dracula tonight.”
“Oh, great.” Henry threw up both hands and began to pace again. “More fuel on the fire. Vicki, you and I both know there’s at least one vampire living in Toronto and, personally, I’d rather not have some peasant, whipped into a frenzy by the media, doing something I’ll regret based on the tenuous conclusion that he never sees me in the daytime.” He stopped and drew a deep breath. “And the worst of it is, there’s not a damned thing I can do about it.”
Vicki pulled herself to her feet and went to stand beside him at the window. She understood how he felt. “I doubt it’ll do any good, but I have a friend who writes a human interest column at the tabloid. I’ll give her a call when I get home and see if she can defuse any of this.”
“What will you tell her?”
“Exactly what you told me.” She grinned. “Less the part about the vampire actually living in Toronto.”
Henry managed a crooked grin in return. “Thank you. She’ll likely think you’re losing your mind.”
Vicki shrugged. “I used to be a cop. She thinks I lost my mind ages ago.”
Her eyes on their reflection in the glass, Vicki realized, for the first time, that Henry Fitzroy, born in the sixteenth century, stood four inches shorter she did. At least. An admitted snob concerning height, she was a little surprised to discover that it didn’t seem to matter. Her ears as red as the young constable’s had been that afternoon, she cleared her throat and asked, “Will you be going back to the Humber tonight?”
Henry’s reflection nodded grimly. “And every night until something happens.”
Anicka Hendle had just come off an exhausting shift in emergency. As she parked her car in the lane behind her house and stumbled up the path, all she could think of was bed. She didn’t see them until she’d almost reached the porch.
Roger, the elder brother, sat on the top step. Bill, the younger, stood in the frozen garden, leaning against the house. Something—it looked like a hockey stick although the light was too bad to really tell—leaned against the wall beside him. The two of them, and an assortment of “friends,” rented the place next door and although Anicka had complained to their landlord on a number of occasions, about the noise, about the filth, she couldn’t seem to get rid of them.They’d obviously spent the night drinking. She could smell the beer.
“Morning, Ms. Hendle.”
Just what she needed, a confrontation with Tweedledee and Tweedledum. “What can I do for you, gentlemen?” They were usually too dense, or too drunk, for sarcasm to have any effect, but she hadn’t given up hope.
“Well . . .” Roger’s smile was a lighter slash across the gray oval of his face. “You can tell us why we never see you in the daytime.”
Anicka sighed; she was too tired to deal with whatever idiot idea they had right now. “I am a night nurse,” she said, speaking slowly and enunciating clearly. “Therefore, I work nights.”
“Not good enough.” Roger took another long pull from the bottle in his left hand. His right hand continued to cradle something in his lap. “No one works nights all the time.”
“I do.” This was ridiculous. She strode forward. “Now go back where you came from before I call . . .” The hands grabbing her shoulders took her completely by surprise.
“Call who?” Bill asked, jerking her up against his body.
Suddenly frightened, she twisted frantically trying to free herself.
“Us three,” Roger’s voice seemed to come from a distance, “are just going to stay out here till the sun comes up. Then we’ll see.”
They were crazy. They were both crazy. Panic gave her the strength she needed, and she yanked herself out of Bill’s grip. She stumbled on the porch stairs. This couldn’t be happening. She had to get to the house. In the house she’d be safe.
She saw Roger stand. She could get by him. Push him out of the way.
Then she saw the baseball bat in his hand.
The force of the blow knocked her back onto the lawn.
She couldn’t suck enough air through the ruin of her mouth and nose to scream.
Her face streaming blood, she scrambled up onto her elbows and knees and tried to crawl back toward the house. If I can get to the house, I’ll be safe.
“Sun’s coming up. She’s trying to g
et inside.”
“That’s good enough for me.”
The hockey stick had been sharpened on one end and with the strength of both men leaning on it, it went through jacket and uniform and bone and flesh and out into the ground.
As the first beam of sunlight came up over the garage, Anicka Hendle kicked once more and was still.
“Now we’ll see,” Roger panted, retrieving his beer.
The sunlight moved across the yard, touched a white shoe, and gently spread out over the body. The blood against the frozen dirt burned with crimson light.
“Nothing’s happening.” Bill turned to his brother, eyes wide in a parchment pale face. “She’s supposed to turn to dust, Roger!”
Roger took two steps back and was noisily sick.
Ten
“All stand for the word of the Lord. We read today from The Gospel According to St. Mathew, Chapter twenty-eight, Verses one to seven.”
“Praised be the word of the Lord.”
“In the end of the Sabbath as it began to dawn toward the first day of the week, came Mary Magdalene and the other Mary to see the sepulchre. And, behold, there was a great earthquake: for the angel of the Lord descended from heaven, and came and rolled back the stone from the door, and sat upon it. His countenance was like lightning, and his raiment white as snow: and for fear of him the keepers did shake, and became as dead men. And the angel answered and said unto the women, Fear not ye: for I know that ye seek Jesus, which was crucified. He is not here: for he is risen, as he said. Come, see the place where the Lord lay. And go quickly, and tell his disciples that he is risen from the dead; and, behold, he goeth before you into Galilee; there shall ye see him: lo, I have told you. Thus endeth the lesson.”
The Gloria almost raised the roof off the church and just for that moment the faith in life everlasting as promised by the Christian God was enough to raise a shining wall between the world and the forces of darkness.
Too bad it wouldn’t last.
“Back up, please. Move aside.”
Hands cuffed behind them, the brothers were brought out through the police barricade and into the alley. Curious neighbors surged forward, then back, like a living sea breaking against a wall of blue uniforms. Neither man noticed the onlookers. Roger, smelling of vomit, dry retched constantly and William cried silent tears, his eyes almost closed. They were shoved, none too gently, into one of the patrol cars, shutters clicking closed in a half dozen media cameras.
Ignoring the reporters’ shouted questions, two of the constables climbed into the car and, siren hiccuping, maneuvered the crowded length of the back lane. The other two added their bulk to the living wall that blocked the view of the yard. “No one speaks to the media,” the investigator in charge of the case had told them, his tone leaving no room for dissension.
The body came out next, the bouncing of the gurney moving it in a macabre parody of life within the body bag. A dozen pairs of lungs exhaled, the shutters closed again, and over it all a television reporter droned in on the-spot coverage. The faint antiseptic smell of the coroner’s equipment left an almost visible track through the damp morning air.
“I seen her before the cops stuffed her in the bag,” confided a neighbor to an avidly listening audience. She paused, enjoying the feeling of power, and cinched her spring coat more tightly over her plaid flannel nightgown. “Her face was all bashed in and her legs were apart.” Nodding sagely, she added, “You know what that means.”
Listeners echoed her nod.
As the coroner’s wagon drove away, the police barricade broke up into individual men and women who hurriedly stepped out of the way as Mike Celluci and his partner came out of the yard.
“Get statements from anyone who saw something or who thinks they saw something,” Celluci ordered. At any other time he would have been amused at the reaction that invoked in the crowd as half of them preened and the other half quietly slipped away, but this morning he was far beyond amusement. The very senselessness of this killing wrapped him in a rage so cold he doubted he’d ever be warm again.
The reporters, for whom the story had more reality than what had actually happened. surged forward, demanding some sort of statement from the police. The two homicide investigators pushed through them silently until they got to their car, a rudimentary instinct of self-preservation keeping the reporters from actually blocking their way.
As Celluci opened his door, Dave leaned forward and murmured, “We’ve got to say something, Mike. or God knows what they’ll come up with.” Celluci glowered at his partner, but Dave refused to back down. “I’ll do it if you’d rather not.”
“No.” Scowling, he looked out at the pack of jackals. “Anicka Hendle is dead because of the asinine stories you lot have been spreading about vampires. You’re as much responsible as those two cretins we took away. Quite the story. I hope you’re proud of it.”
Sliding in behind the wheel, he slammed his car door closed with enough force to create echos between the neighboring houses.
A single reporter moved out of the stunned mass, microphone raised, but Dave Graham shook his head.
“I wouldn’t,” he suggested quietly.
Microphone still in the air, the reporter stopped and the whole pack of them watched as the two investigators drove away. The unnatural stillness lasted until the car cleared the end of the alley then a voice behind them prodded the pack back into action.
“I seen her before the cops stuffed her in the bag.”
“You still have that friend at the tab?”
“Celluci?” Vicki settled back into her recliner, lifting the phone onto her lap. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“That Fellows woman, the one who writes for the tabloid, are you still seeing her?”
Vicki frowned. “Well I’m not exactly seeing her. . . .”
“For Chrissakes, Vicki, this is no time to be coy! I’m not asking if you sleep with her; do you talk to her or not?”
“Yeah.” In fact, she’d been going to call her that very afternoon to see what could be done to ease Henry’s fears about peasant hordes with stakes and garlic. What weird serendipity had Celluci thinking about Anne Fellows on the same day? They’d only met once and hadn’t hit it off, had spent the entire party circling each other like wary dogs looking for an exposed throat. “Why?”
“Get a pen and paper, I’ve got some things I want you to tell her.”
His tone sent Vicki scrabbling in the recliner’s side pocket and by the time he started to talk she’d unearthed a ballpoint and a coffee-stained phone pad. When he finished, she swore softly. “Jesus-God, Mike, can I assume the higher-ups don’t know you’re passing this along?” She heard him sigh wearily and before he could speak, said, “Never mind. Stupid question.”
“I don’t want this to happen again, Vicki. The papers started it, they can finish it.”
Vicki looked down at the details of Anicka Hendle’s life and death, scrawled across three sheets of paper in her precisely readable handwriting, and understood Celluci’s anger and frustration. An echo of it brushed her spine like a cold finger. “I’ll do what I can.”
“Let’s hope it’s enough.”
She recognized the finality in that statement, knew he was hanging up, and yelled his name. The seconds she had to wait before she knew he’d heard her were the longest she’d faced in a while.
“What?” he growled.
“I’ll be home tonight.”
She could hear him breathing so she knew he was still on the line.
“Thanks,” he said at last and the click as he put down the receiver was almost gentle.
From where she sat by Druxy’s back wall, Vicki could see the door as well as most of Bloor and Yonge through the huge windows. She’d decided this story was too important to chance a possible misunderstanding over the phone and had convinced Anne to meet her here for lunch. Face-to-face, she knew she’d have a better chance of convincing the columnist that the press had a responsibili
ty to ensure that there wouldn’t be another Anicka Hendle.
She picked at the rolled cardboard edge of her coffee cup. Henry wanted the press coverage of the “vampire situation” stopped to protect himself, and Vicki had been willing to do what she could. She should have realized that Henry wasn’t the only one in danger. The cardboard ripped and she swore as the hot coffee spilled over her hand.
“Some detective. I could’ve smacked you on the head with a two by four and you’d never even have noticed I was there.”
“How. . . ?”
“I came in the little door in the east corner, O investigative one.” Anne Fellows slid into the seat across from Vicki and dumped the first of four packages of sugar into her coffee. “Now, what’s so important you had to drag me out in the rain?”
Prodding at her pickle with a stir stick, Vicki wondered where to begin. “A woman got killed this morning. . . .”
“I hate to burst your bubble, sweetie, but women get killed every morning. What’s so special about this one that you’ve decided to share it with me?”
“This one’s different. Have you talked to your paper today? Or heard the news?”
Anne rolled her eyes over the edge of her corned beef on a kaiser. “Give me a break, Vicki. It’s Easter Sunday and I’m off. It’s bad enough I have to wallow in this shit all week.”
“Well, then, let me tell you about Anicka Hendle.” Vicki glanced down at her notes, more to settle her thoughts than for information. “It started with the newspapers and their vampire stories. . . .”
“Not you, too! You wouldn’t believe the nut cases that’ve been calling the paper the last couple of weeks.” Anne took a swallow of coffee, frowned and put in another sugar packet. “Don’t tell me—the kids are scared and you want me to write that there’s no such thing as vampires.”
Vicki thought of Henry, hidden away from daylight barely two blocks from the deli, and then of the young woman who’d been impaled with a sharpened hockey stick, the force of the blow not only killing her but nailing her to the ground like a butterfly on a pin. “That’s exactly what I want you to write,” she said through clenched teeth. She laid out each gruesome detail of Anicka’s story as if she were on the witness stand, all emotion leeched from her voice. It was the only way she could get through it without screaming or throwing something.