1 Blood Price

by Tanya Huff

  This is crazy, Greg realized suddenly. I should be here after sunrise, when he’s sleeping. His fingers moved nervously up and down the ridges on the croquet mallet. I can get the passkey, and be sure, one way or another and. . . .

  The door opened and his mouth with it as he stared at the tousle-haired woman who gazed sleepily out at him, a man’s bathrobe more or less clutched around her.

  Vicki had turned off all the lights except the one directly behind her in the front hall, hoping its dazzle would block anything her body didn’t. She filled the space between the door and the molding, leaning on both, and just to be on the safe side, let the upper edge of the bathrobe slide a little lower. She wasn’t intending to blind the guard with her beauty, but if she read the elderly man correctly this was exactly the kind of situation that would embarrass him most.

  So maybe it was a stupid idea. It was also the only thing she could come up with.

  “Can I help you?” she asked, covering a not entirely faked yawn.

  “Um, no, I, that is, Is Mr. Fitzroy home?”

  “He is.” Vicki smiled and pushed her glasses up her nose. The robe shifted a little further of its own volition. “But he’s sleeping. He’s kind of . . .” She paused just long enough for the guard’s ears to finish turning scarlet. “. . . exhausted.”

  “Oh.” Greg cleared his throat and wondered how he could gracefully get out of this. It was obvious that Henry Fitzroy hadn’t been out of his apartment in the last few hours. It was equally obvious he hadn’t been driving fangs into this young woman’s neck, or most other parts of her anatomy. Which Greg wasn’t looking at. “I just, uh, that is, there was an incident in the ravine and I just thought he might have seen something, or heard something as he’s usually up at night. I mean, I know his windows don’t face that way. . . .”

  “I don’t think he noticed anything. He was . . .” Again the pause. Again the blush rose on the guard’s face. “. . . busy.”

  “Look, I’m real sorry I bothered you. I’ll talk to Mr. Fitzroy another time.”

  He looked so depressed, Vicki impulsively put out a hand. “This incident, did it happen to someone you knew?”

  Greg nodded, responding to the sympathy in her voice. “Mrs. Hughes and Owen. Owen was her dog. They lived just down at the end of the hall.” He pointed and Vicki’s breath caught in her throat when she saw what was in his hand.

  He followed her gaze and grew even redder. The brightly painted stripes on the top of the croquet stake seemed to mock him. He’d forgotten he was carrying it. “Kids,” he hurriedly explained. “They leave stuff lying around all over. I’m just taking this back where it goes.”

  “Oh.” With an effort she forced her gaze away from the stake. Showing too much interest in it would ruin everything and ripping it out of his hand and throwing it down the elevator shaft—which is what she wanted to do—could probably be considered showing too much interest. “I’m sorry about the woman and her dog,” she managed.

  He nodded again. “So am I.” Then he straightened and Vicki could practically see duty and responsibility settling back onto his shoulders. “I’ve got to get back to my post. I’m sorry I bothered you. Good night, ma’am.”

  “Good night.”

  He waited until he heard her turn the lock and then he headed back to the elevator. As the doors slid closed behind him, he looked down at the stake and shook his head. The last time he’d been so embarrassed he’d been nineteen, it was World War II, and he’d wandered into the WRENS’ bathroom by mistake. “Vampires, ha! I must be getting senile.”

  Vicki sagged against the inside of the door, reaction weakening her knees. That had been too close. Flipping the living room light back on, she picked her way carefully back to Henry.

  His eyes were open and he had flung one arm up to shield them from the glare.

  “Feeling better?” she asked.

  “That depends . . . better than what?” He swung his legs off the couch and dragged himself up into a sitting position. He hadn’t felt this bad in a very long time.

  Vicki reached out and steadied him when he almost toppled. “Apparently Mr. Stoker didn’t exaggerate when he mentioned the recuperative powers of vampires.”

  Henry tried a smile. It wasn’t particularly successful. “Mr. Stoker was a hack.” He rotated his shoulders and stretched out both legs. Everything seemed to work, although not well and not without pain. “Who was the boy?”

  “His name’s Tony. He’s been on the street since he was a kid. He’s very good at accepting people for what they are.”

  “Even vampires?”

  She studied his face. He didn’t look angry. “Even vampires. And he knows what it’s like to want to be left alone.”

  “You trust him?”

  “Implicitly. Or I’d have thought of something else. Someone else.” Although what or who she had no idea. She hadn’t even thought of Celluci. Not once. Which only goes to prove that even half-conscious, I’m smarter than I look. Celluci’s reaction would not have been supportive. I suppose I could’ve robbed the Red Cross. “You needed more, but you wouldn’t . . .”

  “Couldn’t,” he interrupted quietly. “If I’d taken more, I’d have taken it all.” His eyes below the purple and green bruise that marked his forehead were somber. “Too much blood from one person, and we risk losing control. I could feel your life, and I could feel the desire rising to take it.”

  She smiled then, she couldn’t help it.

  “What?” Henry saw nothing to smile about. They’d both come very close to death this night.

  “A line from a children’s book just popped into my head, it’s not like he’s a tame lion. You’re not at all tame, are you? For all you look so civilized.”

  He thought about it for a moment. “No, I guess by your standards I’m not. Does that frighten you?”

  Both brows went up and fell again almost immediately. She was just too tired to maintain the expression. “Oh, please.”

  He smiled then and lifted her hand, turning the wrist to the light. “Thank you,” he said, one finger softly tracing the line of the vein.

  Every hair on Vicki’s body stood on end and she had to swallow before she could speak. “You’re welcome. I’d have done the same for anyone.”

  Still holding her hand, his smile grew slightly puzzled. “You’re wearing my dressing gown.”

  Pushing her glasses up her nose, Vicki tried not to glance at the pile of clothing dumped on the dining room table. “It’s a long story.” She let him pull her down beside him and nervously wet her lips. Her skin throbbed under his hand. And he’s not even touching anything interesting.

  Then his expression changed and she twisted to see what had caused such a look of horrified disbelief. One door of the wall unit, glass still surprisingly intact, swung open.

  “The demon,” Henry told her, his voice echoing his expression, “has the grimoire.”

  Thirteen

  Henry lurched to his feet and stood swaying. “I must. . . .”

  Vicki reached up and guided him down onto the couch as he fell. “Must what? You’re in no shape to go anywhere.”

  “I must get the grimoire back before the Demon Lord is called.” He shook off her hands and stood again, shoulders set. “If I begin now, I might be able to track the demon, In order to carry the grimoire it must maintain a physical form.”

  “Track it how?”

  “Scent.”

  Vicki glanced at the balcony and back to Henry. “Forget it. It has wings. It’ll be flying. I don’t care what you are, you can’t track something if there’s nothing for it to leave its scent on. ”

  “But . . .”

  “But nothing. If you weren’t what you were, you’d be dead. Trust me. I may not have seen the centuries of death you have, but I’ve seen enough to tell.”

  She was right. Henry walked to the window and rested his forehead gently against the glass. Cool and smooth, it helped to ease the ache in his head. Everything worked, b
ut everything hurt. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d felt this weak or in this much pain and his body, now that the initial rush of energy that came with feeding had passed, was insisting he rest and allow it to heal. “You saved my life,” he admitted.

  “Then don’t throw it away.” Vicki felt a faint echo of warmth surging up from the cut on her wrist. She ignored it. Maybe they’d get a chance to continue where they’d left off, but this certainly was not the time. And anything more energetic than heavy petting would probably kill both of us. Scooping up her clothes, she moved into the kitchen and pulled one of the louvered doors closed. “You did what you could, now let someone else take over.”

  “You.”

  “You see anyone else around?”

  Henry managed half a smile. “No.” She was right about that as well. He’d had his chance and failed.

  “Fine.” She zipped up her jeans and shrugged out of the bathrobe. “You can join me after sunset if you’re mobile by then.”

  “Give me a day of rest and I should be back to normal. Okay, not quite normal,” he amended at Vicki’s snort of disbelief, “but well enough to function.”

  “That’ll do. I’ll leave a message on your machine as soon as I know where I’m likely to be.”

  “You’ve got less than twenty-four hours to find the person with the grimoire in a city of three million people. You may have been a good cop, Vicki. . . .”

  “I was the best,” she informed him, carefully stretching the neck of her sweatshirt around her glasses.

  “All right. You were the best. But you weren’t that good. No one is.”

  “Maybe not,” her tone argued the point even if her words didn’t, “but while you were spending your nights waiting for the demon to strike, I haven’t been spending my days just sitting on my butt.” Carefully picking her way through the glass, she came back to the couch and sat down to put on her shoes. “One of the items the demon picked up was a state of the art computer system. Apparently, they don’t make them smarter or faster than this particular machine. I went out to York University today—enough bits and pieces have pointed in that direction to convince me there’s a connection—and spoke to the head of the Computer Science Department. He gave me a list of twenty-three names, students who could really make a system like that sing.” She straightened and pushed her glasses up her nose. “So instead of one in three million, I’ve got one in twenty-three in about twenty thousand.”

  “Terrific.” Henry tore off the ruin of his shirt as he walked back across the room. Dropping carefully onto the couch, he tossed the ball of fabric at the destroyed face of the television. “One in twenty-three in twenty thousand.”

  “Those aren’t impossible odds. What’s more I won’t have to deal with all twenty thousand. The men and women on the list are part of a pretty narrowly defined group. If I can’t find them, I think I can flush them out.”

  “In a day? Because if that grimoire is used tomorrow night, that’s all the time you have before the slaughter begins.”

  Her chin rose and her brows drew down. “So what do you suggest? I give up because you don’t think it can be done? You thought you could defeat the lesser demon, remember?” Her eyes swept over his injuries. “You’re not exactly infallible where this stuff is concerned.”

  Henry closed his eyes. Her words cut deeper than any other blow he’d taken tonight. She was right. It was his fault the grimoire had been taken, his fault the world faced pain and death on a scale few mortal minds could imagine.

  “Henry, I’m sorry. That was uncalled for.”

  “But true.” She’d moved closer. He could feel her heartbeat tremble the air between them. Her hand closed lightly around his, and he waited for the platitudes that would do nothing to ease his guilt.

  “Yes,” she agreed.

  His eyes snapped open.

  “But you wouldn’t have lived as long as you have if you hadn’t figured out how to learn from your mistakes. When I find this person, I’m going to need you for backup.”

  “Well, thank you very much.” Just what he needed, being patronized by someone whose ancestors had no doubt been grubbing out a living on a peasant’s plot when he’d been riding beside a king. He pulled his hand out from under hers and tried not to wince when the motion twisted the wound in his arm.

  “Before you get snooty, Your Royal Highness, perhaps you should consider who the hell else I can use? Trust me on this one, suspicion of demon-calling is not likely to impress the police. I don’t even think it’s a crime.”

  “What about young Tony?”

  “Tony goes his own way. Besides, this isn’t the sort of thing he can help me with.”

  “So I’m the only game in town?”

  “We’re the only game in town.”

  They locked eyes for a moment and Vicki suddenly realized that was a stupid thing to do—all the stories, all the movies about vampires warned against it. For a moment, she felt herself teetering on the edge of an abyss and she fought against the urge to throw herself into the depths. Then the moment passed, the abyss replaced with a pair of tired hazel eyes and she realized, her heart beating a little more quickly, that it had been the man, not the vampire she’d been reacting to. Or perhaps the man as vampire. Or the vampire as man. Or something. Wonderful. The city—the world even—is about to go up in flames and I’m thinking with my crotch.

  “I’m going to need an early start. I’d better get going.”

  “Perhaps you had.”

  There were several dozen things left unsaid.

  He watched her shrug into her jacket, the sound of her heartbeat nearly overpowering. Had he taken even a little more blood from her, he wouldn’t have been able to stop himself from taking her life as well. That feeding was the sweetest of all to his kind and acquiring a taste for it had brought down many a vampire. Bringing him the boy had saved them both. She truly was a remarkable woman, few other mortals would have had the strength to resist the pull of his need.

  He wanted more. More of her. If they survived the next twenty-four hours. . . .

  She paused on her way to the door, one hand clutching a chair back for support. “I just remembered, where were you earlier? I kept calling and getting your machine.”

  “That was why you came so late?”

  “Well, no point in coming over if you weren’t here.”

  “I was here. I turned on the machine to screen calls.” His brows went up as hers went down. “You don’t do that?”

  “If I’m home, I answer the phone.”

  “If I had, and you’d been here when the demon arrived. . . .”

  “We’d both be dead,” she finished.

  He nodded. “Vicki?”

  Her hand on the knob, she turned back to face him.

  “You do realize that there’s a very good chance we’ll fail? That you may come up blank or nothing we can do will stop the Demon Lord?”

  She smiled at him and Henry discovered with a slight shock that he wasn’t the only predator in the room.

  “No,” she said, “I don’t realize any such thing. Get some rest.” Then she was gone.

  The city streets ran with blood and all of the wailing people who dragged themselves through it looked to her for their salvation. She raised her hands to help them and saw that the blood poured out through great ragged gashes in her wrists.

  “He’s coming, Vicki.” Henry Fitzroy dropped to his knees before her and let the blood pour over him, his mouth open to catch the flow.

  She tried to step back and found she couldn’t move, that hardened concrete covered her feet to the ankles.

  “He’s coming, Vicki,” Henry said again. He leaned forward and began to lap at the blood dribbling down her arms.

  A cold wind blew suddenly on her back and she could hear the sound of claws on stone as something huge dragged itself toward her. She couldn’t turn to face it; Henry’s hands and the concrete held her in place. She could only fight against her bonds and listen to it com
ing closer, closer. The smell of rot grew more intense and when she looked down, it wasn’t Henry but the old woman’s decomposing corpse whose mouth had clamped onto her wrist. Behind her stood what was left of Mike Celluci.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” he asked through the ruin of his mouth. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  Vicki groped for the light switch and sat panting in the sudden glare, her heart drumming painfully. The dream that wakened her had been only the latest in a series. Fortunately, she remembered none of the others in detail.

  Hands trembling, she pushed the arms of her glasses over her ears and peered at the clock. 5:47. Almost three hours sleep.

  She turned off the useless alarm—she’d set it for 6:30—and swung her legs out of bed. If the demon-caller followed the established pattern, the Demon Lord would show up at midnight. That gave her eighteen hours to find him or her and stuff the grimoire down his or her throat one page at a time. The dreams had terrified her and nothing made her more angry than fear she could do nothing about.

  Slowly, carefully, she stood. The liter of orange juice and the two iron supplements she’d taken after arriving home might have helped to offset the blood loss, but she knew she wasn’t going to be in top condition. Not today. Not for some time. The cut on her wrist appeared to have almost healed although the skin around it was slightly bruised and a little tender. The memory of the actual feeding had become tangled up with the memory of the dream, so she set them both aside to be sorted out later. There were more important things to worry about at the moment.

  She’d have stayed in the shower longer, trying to wash the dream away, but she couldn’t shake the feeling that something was behind her. With sight and sound blocked by the spray, she felt too vulnerable and exposed to linger.

  With the coffee maker on, and another liter of orange juice in her hand, she stood for a moment staring out at the street. One or two other windows were lit and as she watched, young Edmond Ng came yawning out onto his porch and started down to the corner to pick up his route’s copies of the morning paper, completely unaware this might be his last trip. In eighteen short hours, the hordes of hell could be ripping the city and its people apart.