Blood Bank

by Tanya Huff

  He was using them to see if the way was clear, Henry realized. Clever. Ginevra had been clever, too.

  Murmured Latin drew his attention back to the bodies of the Dominicans. Kneeling between them, a hand on each brow, the elderly Franciscan who'd emerged from the other cell performed the Last Rites.

  "In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti. Amen." One hand gripping the edge of the rack, he pulled himself painfully to his feet. "You can come out now. I know what you are."

  "You have no idea, monk."

  "You think not?" The old man shrugged and bent to release the ratchet that held the body on the rack taut. "You are the death that haunts the Inquisition. You began in Venice, you finally found your way to us here in Messina."

  "If I am death, you should fear me."

  "I haven't feared death for some time." He turned and swept the shadows with a rheumy gaze. "Are you afraid to face me, then?"

  Lips drawn back off his teeth, Henry moved into the light.

  The Franciscan frowned. "Come closer."

  Snarling, Henry stepped over one of the bodies, the blood scent wrapping around him. Prisoner of the Inquisition or not, the monk would learn fear. He caught the Franciscan's gaze with his but, to his astonishment, couldn't hold it. When he tried to look away, he could not.

  After a long moment, the old monk sighed, and released him. "Not evil, although you have done evil. Not anger, nor joy in slaughter. I never knew your kind could feel such pain."

  He staggered back, clutching for the Hunger as it fled. "I feel nothing!"

  "So you keep telling yourself. What happened in Venice, vampire? Who did the Inquisition kill that you try to wash away the blood with theirs?"

  Over the roaring in his head, Henry heard himself say, "Ginevra Treschi."

  "You loved her."

  It wasn't a question. He answered it anyway. "Yes."

  "You should kill me, you know. I have seen you. I know what you are. I know what is myth..." He touched two fingers to the wooden cross hanging against his chest. "...and I know how to destroy you. When you are helpless in the day, I could drag your body into sunlight; I could hammer a stake through your heart. For your own safety, you should kill me."

  He was right.

  What was one more death? Henry's fingers, sticky with blood already shed, closed around the old man's skinny neck. He would kill him quickly and return to the work he had come here to do. There were many, many more Dominicans in Messina.

  The Franciscan's pulse beat slow and steady.

  It beat Henry's hand back to his side. "No. I do not kill the innocent."

  "I will not argue original sin with you, vampire, but you're wrong. Parigi Carradori, the man from the cell next to mine, seeks power from the Lord of Hell by sacrificing children in dark rites."

  Henry's lip curled. "Neither do I listen to the Inquisition's lies."

  "No lie; Carradori admits it freely without persuasion. The demons hold full possession of his mind, and you have sent him out to slaughter the closest thing to innocence in the city."

  "That is none of my concern."

  "If that is true, then you really should kill me."

  "Do not push me, old man!" He reached for the Hunger but for the first time since Ginevra's death it was slow to answer.

  "By God's grace, you are being given a chance to save yourself. To find, if you will, redemption. You may, of course, choose to give yourself fully to the darkness you have had wrapped about you for so many months, allowing it, finally, into your heart. Or you may choose to begin making amends."

  "Amends?" He stepped back slowly so it wouldn't look so much like a retreat and spat into the drying blood pooled out from the Dominicans' bodies. "You want me to feel sorrow for the deaths of these men?"

  "Not yet. To feel sorrow, you must first feel. Begin by stopping Carradori. We will see what the Lord has in mind for you after that." He patted the air between them, an absentminded benediction, then turned and began to free the man on the rack, working the leather straps out of creases in the swollen arms.

  Henry watched him for a moment, then turned on one heel and strode out of the room.

  He was not going after Carradori. His business was with the Inquisition, with those who had slowly murdered his Ginevra, not with a man who may or may not be dealing with the Dark One.

  …you have sent him out to slaughter the closest thing to innocence in the city."

  He was not responsible for what Carradori chose to do with his freedom. Stepping out into the square, he listened to the sound of Dominican hearts beating all around him. Enough blood to finally be enough.

  ". .. seeks power from the Lord of Hell by sacrificing children in dark rites."

  Children died. Some years, more children died than lived. He could not save them all even were he willing to try.

  "You may choose to give yourself fully to the darkness. Or you may choose to begin making amends."

  "Shut up, old man!"

  Torch held high, head cocked to better peer beyond its circle of light, a young monk stepped out of one of the other buildings. "Who is there? Is that you, Brother Pe...?" He felt more than saw a shadow slip past him. When he moved the torch forward, he saw only the entrance to the prison. A bloody handprint glistened on the pale stone.

  *

  The prisoners had left the gate open. Most of them had taken the path of least resistance and stumbled down the Via Annunziata, but one had turned left, gone along the wall heading up toward the mountain.

  Carradori.

  Out away from the stink of terror that filled the prison, Henry could smell the taint of the Dark One in his blood.

  The old man hadn't lied about that, at least.

  Behind him, a sudden cacophony of male voices suggested his visit had been discovered. It would be dangerous to deal further with the Inquisition tonight. He turned left.

  He should have caught up to Carradori in minutes, but he didn't and he found himself standing outside a row of tenements pressed up against the outer wall of the necropolis with no idea of where the man had gone. Lip drawn up off his teeth, he snarled softly and a scrawny dog, thrown out of sleep by the sound, began to howl. In a heartbeat, a dozen more were protesting the appearance of a new predator on their territory.

  The noise the monks had made was nothing in comparison.

  As voices rained curses down from a dozen windows, Henry ran for the quiet of the necropolis.

  The City of the Dead had tenements of its own; the dead had been stacked in this ground since the Greeks controlled the strait. Before Venice, before Ginevra, Henry had spent very little time with the dead—his own grave had not exactly been a restful place. Of late, however, he had grown to appreciate the silence. No heartbeats, no bloodsong, nothing to call the Hunger, to remind him of vengeance not yet complete.

  But not tonight.

  Tonight he could hear two hearts and feel a life poised on the edge of eternity.

  The houses of the dead often became temples for the dark arts.

  *

  Warding glyphs had been painted in blood on the outside of the mausoleum. Henry sneered and passed them by. Blood held a specific power over him, as specific as the power he held over it. The dark arts were a part of neither.

  The black candles, one at either end of the skinny child laid out on the tomb, shed so little light Henry entered without fear of detection. To his surprise, Carradori looked directly at him with wild eyes.

  "And so the agent of my Dark Lord comes to take his place by my side." Stripped to the waist, he had cut more glyphs into his own flesh, new wounds over old scars.

  "I am no one's agent," Henry spat, stepping forward.

  "You set me free, vampire. You slaughtered those who had imprisoned me."

  "You may choose to give yourself fully to the darkness."

  "That had nothing to do with you."

  Holding a long straight blade over the child, Carradori laughed. "Then why are you here?"

&nb
sp; "Or you may choose to begin making amends."

  "I was curious."

  "Then let me satisfy your curiosity."

  He lifted the knife and the language he spoke was neither Latin nor Greek, for Henry's father had seen that he was fluent in both. It had hard consonants that tore at the ears of the listener as much as at the throat of the speaker. The Hunger, pushed back by the Franciscan, rose in answer.

  This would be one way to get enough blood.

  Then the child turned her head.

  Gray eyes stared at Henry past a fall of ebony curls. One small, dirty hand stretched out toward him.

  But the knife was already on its way down.

  He caught the point on the back of his arm, felt it cut through him toward the child as his fist drove the bones of Carradori's face back into his brain. He was dead before he hit the floor.

  The point of the blade had touched the skin over the child's heart but the only blood in the tomb was Henry's.

  He dragged the knife free and threw it aside, catching the little girl up in his arms and sliding to his knees. The new wound in his arm was nothing to the old wound in his heart. It felt as though a glass case had been shattered and now the shards were slicing their way out. Rocking back and forth, he buried his face in the child's dark curls and sobbed over and over, "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry."

  "... confessed to having relations with the devil, was forgiven, and gave her soul up to God."

  "And I am the devil Ginevra Treschi had relations with."

  Loving him had killed her.

  *

  When he woke the next evening the old Franciscan was sitting against the wall, the shielded lantern at his feet making him a gray shadow in the darkness.

  "I thought you'd bring a mob with stakes and torches."

  "Not much of a hiding place, if that's what you thought."

  Sitting up, Henry glanced around the alcove and shrugged. He had left the girl at the tenements, one grimy hand buried in the ruff of the scrawny dog he'd wakened and then, with dawn close on his heels, he'd gone into the first layer of catacombs and given himself to the day.

  "Why didn't you?"

  "'Vengeance is mine,' sayeth the Lord. And besides..." Clutching the lantern, he heaved himself to his feet. "... I hate to lose a chance to redeem a soul."

  "You know what I am. I have no soul."

  "You said you loved this Ginevra Treschi. Love does not exist without a soul."

  "My love killed her."

  "Perhaps." Setting the lantern on the tomb, he took Henry's left hand in his and turned his palm to the light. The wound began to bleed sluggishly again, the blood running down the pale skin of Henry's forearm to pool in his palm. "Did she choose to love you in return?"

  His voice less than a whisper. "Yes."

  "Then don't take that choice away from her. She has lost enough else. You have blood on your hands, vampire. But not hers."

  He stared at the crimson stains. "Not hers."

  "No. And you can see whose blood is needed to wash away the rest." He gently closed Henry's fingers.

  "Mine..."

  The smack on the back of the head took him by surprise. He hadn't even seen the old monk move.

  "The Blood of the Lamb, vampire. Your death will not bring my brother Dominicans back to life, but your life will be long enough to atone."

  "You are a very strange monk."

  "I wasn't always a monk. I knew one of your kind in my youth and perhaps by redeeming you, I redeem myself for the mob and the stakes I brought to him."

  Henry could see his own sorrow mirrored in the Franciscan's eyes. He knew better than to attempt to look beyond it.

  "Why were you a prisoner of the Inquisition?"

  "I'm a Franciscan. The Dominicans don't appreciate our holding of the moral high ground."

  "The moral high ground..."

  "Christ was poor. We are poor. They are not. Which does not mean, however, that they need to die."

  "I didn't..."

  "I know." He laid a warm palm against Henry's hair. "How long has it been since your last confession...?"

  *

  "The Tribunal's buildings were destroyed in an earthquake in 1783. They were never rebuilt. When I went back to Messina in the 1860s, even I couldn't find the place they'd been."

  Tony stared out into the parking garage. They'd been home for half an hour, just sitting in the car while Henry talked. "Did you really kill all those people?"

  "Yes."

  "But some of them were bad people, abusing their power and... that's not the point, is it?"

  "No. They died because I felt guilty about what happened to Ginevra, not because the world would have been a better place without them in it, not because I had to kill to survive." His lips pulled back off his teeth. "I have good reasons when I kill people now."

  "Speaking as people," Tony said softly, "I'm glad to hear that."

  His tone drew Henry's gaze around. "You're not afraid?"

  "Because you vamped out three hundred and fifty years ago?" He twisted in the seat and met Henry's eyes. "No. I know you now." When Henry looked away, he reached out and laid a hand on his arm. "Hey, I got a past, too. Not like yours, but you can't live without having done things you need to make up for. Things you're sorry you did."

  "Is being sorry enough?"

  "I haven't been to Mass since I was a kid, but isn't it supposed to be? I mean, if you're really sorry? So what kind of penance did he give you?" Tony asked a few moments later when it became obvious Henry wasn't going to elaborate on how sorry he was.

  "Today?"

  "No, three hundred and fifty years ago. I mean, three Hail Marys aren't gonna cut it after, well..."

  "He made me promise to remember."

  "That's all?" When it became clear Henry wasn't going to answer that either, he slid out of the car and leaned back in the open door. "Come on, TSN's got Australian rugger on tonight. You know you love it."

  "You go. I'll be up in a few minutes."

  "You okay?"

  "Fine."

  "I could..."

  "Tony."

  "Okay. I could go upstairs." He straightened, closed the car door, and headed across the parking garage to the elevator. When he reached it, he hit the call button and waited without turning. He didn't need to turn. He knew what he'd see.

  Henry.

  Still sitting in the car.

  Staring at his hands.

  Critical Analysis

  *

  "You! You're a police officer, aren't you?"

  Detective Sergeant Michael Celluci stared down at the pale, long-fingered hand clutching his arm and then up at the tall, unshaven, young man who'd stopped him on the steps of police headquarters and asked the question. "I am."

  Pink-rimmed, bloodshot eyes locked onto Celluci's face. "I need your help."

  "With what?"

  "Someone's going to kill me."

  "Uh-huh." The man was sincerely frightened. Celluci'd seen frightened often enough to know it. Sincere... well, not so much. Not in his line of work. He nodded toward the doors where condensation beaded the glass barrier between warmth and January in downtown Toronto. "You want to talk about this inside?"

  *

  "His name is Raymond Carr and it started with threatening e-mail." Celluci passed Vicki the file folder and headed over to the coffeemaker. "It escalated to someone hacking his system and sticking the threats into his work."

  "What's he do?"

  "He's a writer. Did you make this when you got up, or is it sludge left over from this morning?" The mug of coffee he'd just poured stalled halfway to his mouth.

  "What do you care? You'd drink the sludge anyway. What's he write?"

  "Pretty much anything people will pay him for. Of course, people are paying him a lot less when their ad copy comes complete with death threats."

  "You'll save, save, save while we beat in your head with a bat?"

  "Less wordy. Oh, and he's working on a book."<
br />
  "Yeah, isn't everyone." She frowned at the top printout. "I assume the word die isn't meant to be in here?" A few more pages in. "Or here? Actually, since it's repeated about a dozen times, forget I asked. What did he do and who did he do it to?"

  "He doesn't know."

  "Well, he clearly pissed off someone with some hacking abilities," she muttered, scanning the rest of the file.

  Celluci pulled out a chair and sat down on the other side of the kitchen table. "He says he didn't."

  Fingertips against the edge of the table, she leaned back, balancing on two legs of her chair. "So you think it's some kind of a sick joke? Just some bored techno-nerd getting his jollies by screwing with a stranger?"

  "That's possible. Point is, Carr's terrified. We wrote him up, but there's not much we can do until we have more to go on than electronic threats."

  "Don't you guys have technonerds of your own now?" She beat out a drum roll. "Several someones who can trace an e-mail like this back to the sender?"

  "Apparently, we can't do squat without Carr's computer and he won't hand it over. Says his whole life is on that machine."

  "Really? I hope he remembers to do backups." She flipped the folder closed and let her chair drop flat. "What does he expect you—-where 'you' refers to Toronto's finest, not you personally—to do?"

  "Protect him."

  "I think I just figured out where this is going."

  Cellcui smiled and drained his mug. "Carr's address is on the outside of the folder. I told him you'd be by this evening."

  "Mike, I'm not hired muscle."

  "Did I say you were? You have special abilities."

  "Special abilities?" Her smile was both threat and invitation.

  He cleared his throat. "And," he continued emphatically, ignoring the invitation and disregarding the threat, "you may be an undead creature of the night, but you were a cop, and a good one, for years. Use those skills for a change. Find out who's threatening him. Do some detecting. While you're there, see that no one beats his head in with a bat."

  *

  Raymond Carr lived on Bloor Street in a third-floor flat over the Korona Restaurant. As Vicki made her way up the steep, narrow stairs, she avoided touching the grimy banister and wondered if he could afford her services. Mike sometimes forgot she wasn't on the public payroll anymore. Or he was indulging in some weird passive-aggressive "let me take care of you" macho thing. She wasn't sure which.