Blood Bank

by Tanya Huff

  He broke a number of traffic laws getting home before dawn. Collapsing inside the door to his sanctuary, he woke at sunset stiff and sore from a day spent crumpled on a hardwood floor. He tried to call Lilah and tell her it was over, but whatever connection there'd been between them was well and truly broken. Her phone number was no longer in service.

  The brief, aborted companionship made it even harder to be alone.

  For two nights, he Hunted and fed and wondered if Lilah had been right and he should have been more specific.

  Overly ethical creature of the night seeks sidekick.

  The thought of who'd answer something like that frightened him the way nothing else had frightened him over the last four and a half centuries.

  Finally, he picked up the list of e-mail addresses and started alphabetically.

  *

  The man who came in the door of the cafe was tall and dark and muscular. Shoulder-length hair had been caught back in a gold clasp. Gold rings flashed on every finger and dangled from both ears. He caught Henry's eye and strode across the cafe toward him, smiling broadly.

  Stopped on the other side of the table.

  Stopped smiling.

  "Henry?"

  "Abdula?"

  They blinked in unison.

  "Vampire."

  Henry dropped back into his chair. "Djinn."

  Perhaps he ought to have his ad placed somewhere other than Alternative Lifestyles.

  Another Fine Nest

  *

  There were three other people in the small bookstore. Vicki hesitated to call them customers, since in the ten minutes she'd been standing in front of the new releases shelf ostensibly reading the staff reviews—her favorite the succinct Trees died for this?—none of them had given any indication they were planning to actually buy a book. Two were reading, the third attempting to engage the young woman behind the cash register in conversation but succeeding only in monologue.

  Without ever having seen him before, Vicki easily identified her contact. Male Caucasian, five eight, dark hair and beard, carrying a good twenty kilos more than was healthy; she could hear his heart pounding as he stared down at the pages of the novel he held. Since he was holding it upside down, it seemed highly unlikely his growing excitement had anything to do with what he wasn't reading. He smelled strongly of garlic.

  He was clearly waiting for the other two customers to leave before approaching her. "They mustn't find out I've called you."

  "Who?"

  "Them."

  Screw that. Suddenly tired of amateur cloak and dagger theatrics, she walked deeper into the narrow store until she stood directly behind him. Unfortunately, a massive sneeze derailed the impression she'd intended to make. Up close, the smell of garlic was nearly overpowering.

  He spun around, dark eyes wide, the heavy gold cross he wore bouncing between the open wings of his jacket.

  "Hey." She rummaged in her pocket for a tissue. "Vicki Nelson. You have a job for me?"

  *

  Sitting at one of the coffee shop's small tables, Vicki took a drink from her bottle of water and waited for Duncan Travis to pull himself together. His hands, clasped reverently around the paper curves of his triple/triple, were still trembling. She stared at her reflection in the glass, beyond that to the bookstore now across the street, and wished he'd get to the freakin' point.

  "I could see your reflection in the glass!"

  So could she, but since the glass and her reflection were behind him...

  "I checked everyone out as they came into the store."

  Oh. Her reflection in the glass at the store. That made a little more sense.

  "That's why I didn't know you were you."

  "You didn't?"

  "No." Duncan detached one hand from the paper cup just long enough to sketch a quick emphasis in the air. "I know, you know."

  "You know what?"

  "About you. What you are."

  "I kind of assumed you did, since you called me." Her emphasis on the last three words didn't seem to make the intended impression.

  "Not that! People talk, you know. And there's stuff, on the Web..." Grabbing the base of the cross, he thrust it toward her, the chain biting deep into the folds of his neck.

  Vicki sighed. "People say I'm Catholic? Religious? What?"

  "Vampire!" He dropped his voice as heads turned. "Nosferatu. A member of the bloodsucking undead."

  "I knew what you meant." She sighed again. Maybe keeping a lower profile over the last couple of years would have been a good idea. "I was just messing with your head. You've got garlic in your pockets, don't you?"

  "I am not so desperate that I'd trust you not to drain me and cast my body aside. I have taken precautions." From his expression, Duncan clearly believed his tone sounded threatening. He was wrong.

  "Okay." Vicki leaned back in her chair and massaged the bridge of her nose, attempting to forestall a burgeoning headache. "A quick lesson in reality as opposed to the vast amounts of television I suspect you watch. One. Garlic, crosses, holy water—not repelling. Except for maybe the garlic, because frankly, you reek. Two. A biological change does not suddenly start reversing the laws of physics. I had a reflection before I changed, I still have one now. Three. If that's a stake in your pocket and, trust me, I'd much prefer it to be a stake 'cause I don't want you that happy to see me, have you considered the actual logistics of using it? You'll be trying to thrust a not very sharp hunk of wood through clothing, skin, muscle, and bone before you get to the meaty bits. I have no idea what you expect I'll be doing while you make the attempt, but let me assure you that I'll be doing it faster and more violently than you can imagine. Four. Unless you immediately tell me why you called and said you had a job only I could do—giving me, by the way, your credit card number—not very smart, Duncan—I will make you forget you ever saw me." Dropping her hand to the tabletop, she leaned forward, her eyes silvering slightly. "Eternity is too short for all this screwing around. Start talking."

  Duncan swallowed, blinked, and wet his lips. "Wow."

  "Thank you. The job?"

  "King-tics."

  "What?"

  "We don't know if they're alien constructs or if they've risen from one of the hell dimensions..."

  Oh yeah, way too much Buffy, Vicki acknowledged silently.

  "...but they're infesting the city. Their nest has to be found and taken out."

  "Okay. We?"

  "My group."

  "AD&D?"

  "Third edition."

  "Right. Nest?"

  "They're insectoids. The ones we've seen seem to be sexless workers, therefore they're likely hive-based. That means a queen and a nest."

  "You guys seem to have a pretty good grasp of the situation; why not take them out yourselves?"

  Duncan snorted. "In spite of what you seem to think, Ms. Nelson, our grip on reality is fairly firm. Three of us are computer programmers, two work retail, and one is a high school math teacher. We know when we're out of our depth. You turned up on an Internet search—you were local and certain speculations made us think you'd believe us."

  "About King-tics?"

  "Yeah."

  "So let's say I do. Let's say, hypothetically, I believe there's a new kind of something infesting the city. Why is that a problem? Toronto's already ass deep in cockroaches and conservatives; what's one more lower life form?"

  "King-tics are smarter than either. And they drink blood." Confident that he now had her full attention, Duncan stretched out one leg and tugged his pants up from his ankle.

  Vicki stared at the dingy gray sweat sock and contemplated beating someone's head—hers, his, she wasn't sure which—against the table. "Try using hot water and adding a little bleach."

  "What?" He glanced down and flushed. "Oh."

  A quick adjustment later and Vicki found herself studying two half-healed puncture wounds just below the curve of Duncan's ankle. Slightly inflamed and about an inch apart, they were right over a vein that ra
n close to the surface. "Big bug."

  "Yeah. But they move really, really fast. They use the crowds in the subway stations as cover. Bite. Drink. Scuttle away. Who's going to notice a couple of little pricks when we're surrounded by bigger pricks every day of our lives?"

  "Cynical observation?" Vicki asked the expectant silence.

  "Uh, yeah."

  "Okay." He'd probably been saving it up too. "You didn't feel the bite?"

  "No. I'd have never noticed anything except that my shoe was untied and I knelt to do it up and I..."

  Screamed like a little girl?

  "...saw this bug. It looked at me, Ms. Nelson. I swear it looked at me..."

  She believed him, actually. She could hear the before and after in his voice.

  "...and then it disappeared. I sort of saw it moving but it was just so fast. We started looking for them after that and well, once you know what you're looking for..." He paused then and his gaze skittered off hers but she had to give him credit for trying. "Once you admit what you're looking for, it becomes a lot easier to see."

  Yeah. Yeah. You know what I am. I got that twenty minutes ago. "Go on."

  "I told the group what had happened and we started looking for the bugs. The King-tics. I mean, we spotted them so we figured we should get to name them, right?" When she didn't answer, he sighed, shrugged, and continued. "At first we only saw them at Bloor and Yonge, at the Bloor Station, probably because it's lower. More subterranean. But then, we saw a few on the upper level, you know, the Yonge line. Yesterday, I saw three at Wellsley."

  Vicki fought the urge to turn her head. Wellsley Station was a short block south of the coffee shop.

  "Thing is," Duncan laughed nervously, "they saw me too. They were watching me from the shadows. First time I'd ever seen them still. Usually you catch a sort movement out of the corner of one eye but this ... It was creepy. Anyway, we talked it over and decided to call you."

  "So I can...?"

  "I told you. Destroy the nest and the queen. One way or another the subway system hooks up to every major building in the downtown core. The whole city could become a giant banquet hall for these things."

  Vicki sat back in her chair and thought about giant intelligent bloodsucking bugs in the subway for a moment. When Duncan opened his mouth to... well, she didn't know what he was planning to do because she cut him off with a finger raised in silent warning. Giant, intelligent bloodsucking bugs in the subway. Feeding off the ankles of Toronto. Another predator— predators—feeding in her territory, true, but it was somehow hard to get worked up about something called a King-tic.

  Giant, intelligent bloodsucking bugs in the subway.

  She couldn't believe she was even considering taking the job.

  Still, that sort of thing always ended badly in the movies, didn't it?

  *

  The Wellsley platform was empty except for a clump of teenagers at the far end discussing the appalling news that 'N Sync would be on the Star Wars Episode II DVD. On the off chance that the six simultaneous rants would suddenly stop and silence fall, Vicki pitched her voice too low to be overheard. "That's where you saw them?"

  Duncan nodded. "Yeah. Right there. In the corner. In the shadows. Three of them. Staring at me."

  "If you're talking like a character in a Dashiell Hammett novel on purpose, you should know I find it really annoying."

  "Sorry."

  "Just don't do it again." Stepping closer, Vicki examined the gray tiled corner for webs or egg casings or marks against the fine patina of subway station grime and came up empty. Sighing, she turned her attention back to Duncan. "What were you doing while the bugs—the King-tics—were staring at you?"

  He shrugged. "I stared at them for a while."

  "And then?"

  "They left." He pointed up the tunnel toward Bloor.

  "Right."

  His expectant silence took her to the edge of the platform. A train had gone by just before they'd entered the station. She could hear the next one a station, maybe a station and a half away. Plenty of time. "You wouldn't have a... artist's conception of these things, would you?"

  "Not with me. I could fax it to you when I get home."

  "You do that. Go now."

  "What are you going to do?"

  "What you're paying me to do."

  "You're going into the tunnel!"

  He sounded so amazed, she turned to look at him. "It's where the bugs are, Duncan. What did you expect me to do?"

  "Go into the tunnels," Duncan admitted. "It's just..." He shifted his weight from foot to foot and flashed her an admiring smile. "…well, you're actually doing it. And it's so dangerous."

  "Because of the bugs?"

  "No. Because of the subway trains."

  "Trust me, trains aren't a problem."

  Behind the beard, his jaw dropped. "You turn into mist?"

  Vicki sighed. "I step out of the way."

  *

  There were bugs in the subway tunnels. There were also rats, mice, fast food wrappers, used condoms, and a pair of men's Y-front underwear, extra large. The bugs were not giants, not bloodsucking, and, although one of the cockroaches gave her what could only be interpreted as a dirty look just before she squashed it flat, not noticeably intelligent. The rats and mice avoided her, but then, so did pretty much all mammals except humans and cats. The fast food wrappers and used condoms were the expected debris of the twenty- first century. Vicki didn't waste time speculating about the underwear because she really, really didn't want to know.

  At Yonge and Bloor she crossed the station and slipped down to the lower tracks, easily avoiding the security cameras and the weary curiosity of late commuters.

  There were maybe—possibly—fewer rats and mice scrabbling out of her way.

  Maybe—possibly—sounds that didn't quite add up to the ambient noise she remembered from other trips.

  It depressed her just a little that she'd been down in these tunnels often enough to remember the ambient noise.

  When the last train of the night went by, she fought the urge to brace herself against the sides of the workman's niche, rise up to window height, and give any passengers a flickering, strobelike look at what haunted the dark places of the city. Something about being an immortal, undead creature of the night really changes the things you find funny, she sighed, allowing the rush of wind to hold her in place as the squares of light flashed by.

  The maintenance workers traveled in pairs, but it wasn't hard to separate the younger of the two from his companion. A crescent of white teeth in the darkness. A flash of silver eyes. A promise of things forbidden in the light.

  Like shooting fish in a barrel. Grabbing a fistful of his overalls, Vicki dragged him into a dark corner, stiffened her arm to keep him there, and locked her gaze with his. "Giant intelligent bloodsucking bugs."

  He looked confused. "Okay."

  "Seen any?"

  "Down here?"

  "Anywhere."

  Dark brows drew in. "The cockroaches seem to be getting smarter."

  "I noticed that too. Anything else?"

  Broad shoulders shrugged. "Sometimes I think I'm hearing things, but the other guys say it's just me."

  If they're really intelligent and nesting in the tunnels, they wouldn't want the maintenance workers to find them, would they? Even if they did cross over from some television-inspired hell dimension, a couple of TTC-issue flamethrowers would still take them out. They'd wait, hiding quietly, feeding where it wouldn't be noticed until. . .

  Until what?

  Until there were enough to them to ... to...

  The heat under her hand and the thrum of blood so close weren't making it any easier to think. Not that she'd ever thought well on an empty stomach.

  Later, when she lifted her mouth from an open vein in the crock of a sweaty elbow, she had the strangest feeling of being watched. Watched in an empty section of tunnel with no feel of another life anywhere near.

  Watched and weighed.<
br />
  *

  Mike Celluci was asleep when Vicki got home an hour or so before dawn. He was lying on his back, one arm under the covers, one flung out over the empty half of the bed. She slipped in beside him and snuggled up against his shoulder, still damp and warm from the shower, knowing this was how she felt the most human—body temperature almost normal, skin flushed. She felt him wake, felt his arm tighten around her.

  "So how'd the job work out?"

  "Giant intelligent bloodsucking bugs in the subway." She was beginning to enjoy saying it.

  "Seriously?"

  "Well, so far I'm pretty much taking the word of my employer. I had a look around the tunnels in question and saw sweet FA but he truly believes there's something nasty down there and I think he may be right."

  "There's a lot of nasty in the tunnels."

  Memory called up the underwear. Vicki winced. "Yeah. I know." After a moment, spent pushing back against the large hand stroking her back, she sighed and murmured, "Any rumors going around Toronto's finest about strange shit in the subway?"

  "Sweet talker."

  "Just answer the question."

  "No one's said anything to me but I'll ask around. You should probably talk to TTC security."

  "Tomorrow. Well, technically, later today."

  "You... hungry?"

  Which wasn't really what he was asking her but feeding had gotten so tied up with other things it had become impossible to separate them. They'd tried. It hadn't worked.

  "I could eat."

  She only took a mouthful or two from him these days. Enough for mutual sensation, not enough to worry about bleeding him dry over time. Every relationship had to make compromises—she never told him she when she got a bite downtown, he didn't die.

  Tonight was... different.

  Sitting up, sheet folding across her lap, she rolled the taste of his blood around in her mouth.

  Sharp. A little bitter.

  Like something had been... added?

  "S'matter?" he asked sleepily, rubbing the toes of one foot against the ankle of the other.

  "Mike, have you been in a subway station lately?" She crawled to the end of the bed.

  "Sure."'

  "Bloor and Yonge?"

  "Yeah."

  Two half healed puncture wounds under the outside curve of his left ankle.