by Tanya Huff
The site gave no reasons for the company's fall, and the best Vicki managed to find elsewhere on the Web was a LiveJournal thread discussing the monitors. Apparently, they weren't just 60 percent sharper— according to the half dozen people in the thread who'd owned them, they made images so clear new details came into focus in the background and even the written word seemed somehow real.
Real. There was that word again.
As she shut down her machine, she decided not to repeat the word to Mike. Although forced to become more open-minded than he'd been, speculation outside the boundaries covered by the crime lab and some good old-fashioned legwork still annoyed him, and an annoyed Mike Celluci was no fun to live with.
Besides, no one knew better than she did that reality came with qualifiers.
But she popped the copy of the book out of her laptop just to be on the safe side.
*
No one attacked Raymond Carr in the hospital, and the day he was released, the police handed back his computer.
"There was no crime committed," Celluci explained that evening when Vicki commented on the speedy return. "Just a man who slipped off his meds and had an accident."
"You told me it looked like he was taking his meds."
"Let it go, Vicki." Elbows braced on the kitchen table, he rubbed his temples. "I've got two teenagers dead because some asshole in a car thought it would be fun to shoot at strangers. I don't have time to protect Raymond Carr from himself. You think he needs supervision, you do it."
She thought it wouldn't hurt to drop by.
This time the door was unlocked and the blood scent was stronger.
Carr hadn't had time to put a new lock on his office door and his landlord's rudimentary repairs hadn't included replacing the latch mechanism. When Vicki laid her palm against it, it swung open, unresisting.
The only light in the room came from the monitor, but even before the change that allowed her to miss his heartbeat and the song of his blood, she would have known Raymond Carr was dead. The living were never so completely still.
His chair had been tipped back—flung back considering the distance from the desk. He was still in it, his arms outstretched, fingers curled. His feet in old-fashioned, scuffed, leather slippers were in the air, his head rested in a puddle beginning to dry to a brackish brown around the edges. It was difficult to tell for certain without moving the body, but the back of his head looked flat and there were three distinct points of impact.
The police would assume they'd been wrong. That there'd been an assailant the first time. That this mysterious assailant had somehow gotten into and then out of a locked room in a locked apartment and that today—late afternoon by the smell—he or she returned and finished the job. If they'd found no evidence of a second person in the room, they had to have missed something and, blaming themselves for Raymond Carr's death, they'd work like hell to make up for their mistake.
Except...
Vicki pulled a latex glove out of her pocket—even the bloodsucking undead left fingerprints—and walked to the desk. There was a single word in the center of the monitor.
Dead.
She moved the cursor down to the next line and typed Harticalder?
Then she felt a little foolish when nothing happened.
"Right," she muttered, deleting the name and snapping off the glove. "Vampires exist, werewolves exist, wizards exist, so therefore it's logical that characters can be made so real that they climb out of a new and improved monitors and bash the brains in of the bastard who put them through so much shit. Which is not to say," she added to Raymond Carr, "that you didn't deserve it. You slaughtered the entire village, for Christ's sake!"
Then she frowned as her eyes flared silver for an instant, reflecting the light of the monitor.
When she turned, there was still only one word on the screen.
Dead.
There'd be no marks on Carr's body because no matter how real they seemed, imaginary characters didn't leave marks. Or fingerprints. Or worry about locked doors. Or climb out of monitors and take vengeance on the creator who killed their wives and children to make a plot point.
Vicki pulled the glove back on and reformatted the hard drive. Pulled the plug on the machine, then took a cheap pen from the desk and drove a hole into the corner of the monitor. The part of her that had been a good cop for all those years hated the thought of compromising a crime scene. The rest of her slid the book's backup disk out of its hidden sleeve, snapped it in half, and put the pieces into her pocket.
Half a block away, from the pay phone inside the front door of the Brunswick Hotel, she made an anonymous phone call.
"Obviously, it had to do with the book. This time the hard drive was reformatted—not just erased but refucking formatted—and the copy taken. Carr must have written something that really pissed someone off. I guess it's a good thing you made that illegal..." Celluci paused in his pacing to stress the word, "...copy, or we'd have nothing."
"Sorry, Mike." Vicki moved a red queen onto a black king and looked up from the laptop. "I copied my notes from the voodoo case onto the disk."
"You what?"
"Well, how would I know you'd need it? You said the lab determined he fell. That it was an accident."
She could hear his teeth grinding. "The evidence at the time..."
"Except for the missing book," she interrupted.
"And the destroyed monitor!" he interrupted in turn.
They stared at each other for a long moment.
"You never mentioned a destroyed monitor," Vicki sighed at last. "Fine, except the missing book and the destroyed monitor, what evidence do you have this time? Prints? Witnesses? Fibers? Anything?"
"Vicki, no one accidentally slams their own head into the floor three times with force enough to flatten the back of their own skull!"
The volume as much as the content of his protest answered her question; he had nothing. The police had nothing. She set the laptop to one side, stood, and crossed the room to lay a sympathetic hand on Mike's arm. "I'm not saying it was an accident. Maybe he destroyed his own book and then killed himself."
He caught up her hand in his and pulled her around to face him. "No one kills themselves by slamming their own head into the floor three times! Where the hell did you get that idea?"
"I don't know." Raymond Carr had created a village filled with amazingly real characters and then slaughtered almost all of them to make a plot point. Harticalder had ridden away to wreak vengeance on those who'd done the slaughtering. Maybe he'd traveled a little farther than planned. And if not him, well, there'd still been half a dozen other characters left behind to mourn.
"Vicki?"
She shrugged. "I guess I read it in a book."
So This Is Christmas
*
"So what do you think? The blue or the black?"
Vicki Nelson turned to stare at her companion in some confusion. "The blue or the black what?"
"Scarf." Detective Sergeant Mike Celluci held up the articles in question. "Last time I saw Angela she was doing a sort of goth-lite, so the black might work better, but I like the blue."
"Who is Angela?"
"My sister Marie's oldest girl." he grinned and pulled a virulently fuchsia scarf from the pile. "Maybe I should get her this just to hear her scream."
Vicki rolled her eyes and fought the urge to do a little screaming of her own. She wondered what had possessed her to accompany Mike to a suburban mall on Christmas Eve. At the time, concerned about how little they'd seen each other lately, going with him as he finished his shopping had seemed like the perfect solution. Now, not so much. "Maybe you should do something about the earrings those teenagers have just slipped into their pockets. Over there," she added, when it was clear she had his attention. "Blonde girl in the short red jacket and the dark-haired girl in brown."
"You're sure?"
Her eyes silvered faintly. "I'm sure."
As he walked across the store, she fought down
the Hunger that had risen with even such a small display of power. Being stuck in an enclosed space with hundreds of people all sweating inside heavy winter coats as they rushed frantically from one store to another was like sitting a dieter down next to an enormous plate of shortbread cookies. The urge to nibble was nearly overwhelming.
She snarled slightly as someone careened into her, stepped back into the shelter of the scarf display as a harried looking young woman rushed by pushing a stroller piled high with packages, and turned to find Celluci back by her side. "Well?"
"They both think I should get the black scarf." He put the blue scarf back on the pile. Apparently he'd taken them with him.
"And earrings?"
"They put them back."
"Then you left them with store security."
"I gave them a warning and sent them home."
"You what?"
"Oh come on, Vicki, it's Christmas." Angela's gift in hand, he started toward the nearest cash register.
"What the hell does Christmas have to do with it?" she demanded, falling into step by his side. "It's not like they were stealing a fruitcake for their dear old mom. They'd have lifted those earrings if it was Easter or the first of July. Are you going to let them off because the baby Jesus died for their sins? Or because they're wearing red and white for Canada Day? Or..."
"I get it." He stopped at the end of a long line and sighed. "This is going to take a while."
"I could move things along." She smiled, her upper lip rising off her teeth.
"No."
"Fine." Hands shoved into her pockets, she turned the smile on the young man crowding into the line behind her. He paled, dropped his penguin-imprinted fleece throw, and raced away. Vicki snorted as she watched him go. Running screaming from the mall seemed like a good idea to her.
*
She liked to watch Mike eat, so the trip to the food court wasn't quite as bad as it could have been. Screaming, tired, overstimulated children—more perceptive than their parents—fell silent around her and not even Mike had objected when she'd leaned toward the two very loud young men at the next table and softly growled, "Shut up."
One of them had whimpered but they hadn't said anything since.
"There're definitely things I love about this time of the year," she said watching Mike lick a bit of ketchup from the corner of his mouth. "Hard to complain about an early sunset and a late sunrise."
He swallowed and grinned. "Here I thought you meant Christmas."
"What this?" One hand waved at the red velvet bows wrapped around every stationary surface and a few that hadn't been stationary until they'd been tied down. "Or maybe," she added scornfully, "you mean the hordes of happy shoppers panicked they won't buy the right piece of name brand garbage, running up their credit cards so far they miss a few payments, lose their house, and end up living with their kids in the back of a van." She paused long enough to duck under a heavily laden tray passing a little too closely. "Next thing you know, Dad's doing five to ten for taking a swing at the cop who ran him in for pissing behind a Dumpster, Mom's turning tricks on Jarvis, and the kids are in juvie. All because of Christmas."
Mike started at her in astonishment. "Who stole your ho ho ho?"
"I'm a realist," she told him. "You do remember that violent crimes increase over the holiday season? A little too much alcohol, a little too much family..."
"I have a great family. Which you'd know if you'd come with me tomorrow."
"Mike."
"I love you, I love them. At Christmas you should be with the people you love. I get home from work, you eat, then we spend the evening with them. And don't say you won't go because they'll expect you to eat. Dinner will be long over and I know you're fast enough to fake snacks. You could always fake a food allergy."
"It won't work."
"Why not?" He brushed the graying curl of hair off his forehead and glared at her over the cardboard edge of his coffee cup.
"It's not who I am."
"It's not who you choose to be," he snapped, tossed the empty cup down on his tray and stood. Vicki beat him to the garbage cans. "You're taking too many chances," he grunted, glancing around the food court. "Cut it out. This could be the day some twenty-first century Van Helsing came to the mall to buy his kid Baby's First Vampire Staking kit."
"You're babbling."
The muscle jumping in his jaw suggested he was aware of it. "If you can function here, you can function at my mother's house."
"Is that why we're here?" she asked as they headed toward the exit. "To prove I don't lose control in crowds?"
"I talked to Fitzroy. He said you can handle it."
"You called Henry?" Astonishment brought her to a full stop by the fence separating Santa's Workshop from the food court. "You actually called Henry?"
"He thinks you should come with me tomorrow."
And astonishment gave way to pique. "I don't care what he thinks!"
"Come on, Vicki, it's Christmas."
"I know." The warmth in Mike's brown eyes was not going to get to her. "And Christmas is a ..." A screaming child about to be lifted onto Santa's lap cut her off. "Can you believe that," she demanded as Santa settled back and adjusted his beard. "You spend all year trying to street-proof kids and all of a sudden their parents are shoving them onto the lap of some strange old man and paying an arm and a leg for a fuzzy picture that costs about eight cents to produce."
"Who crapped in your stocking?"
The voice came from about waist level. Vicki peered over the fence and into the face of one of Santa's elves—although given his height, the breadth of his shoulders, and the beaded braids in his beard, this one looked more like a dwarf in spite of green tights and red pointy-toed shoes.
"Take a picture," he snarled. "It'll last longer."
"Sorry."
"Yeah, like that sounded sincere." He crossed heavily muscled arms over a barrel chest and glared up at her from under bushy brows. "So what's your problem?"
"With what?"
"With Christmas, for crying out loud. Come on. I haven't got all night."
She glanced up at Mike, who was staring in dopey fascination as a laughing older woman wrestled a pink and frilly little girl back into her snowsuit.
The elf pointedly cleared his throat.
"Look, I have no problem with Christmas. You want to dress up and play Santa's Workshop, that's fine with me. Someone else wants to go into debt until next November, their choice. I just want to be left alone to celebrate Christmas my way."
"Bet you don't."
"Don't what?"
"Celebrate Christmas."
"Maybe I'm Jewish. You ever think of that?"
"Are you?"
"No, but..." She waved at hand at Mike, suddenly wanting the elf's too-penetrating gaze pointed somewhere else. "He's working all day."
Dark eyes remained locked on her face. "So the cops with families can have the day off and then I betcha he's spending the evening with about sixty people from nine to ninety who'll be glad to see him. Big Italian-Canadian family. Lot of hugging. You should go with him."
"You should mind your own business."
"Except we're not talking about me," he snorted. "We're talking about you."
"You don't know anything about me." She let the Hunter rise enough to silver her eyes.
To her surprise, the elf met her gaze. "All right, you're not so tough," he muttered after a long moment. "And you need to get moving, lady. The mall's about to close."
Vicki blinked, looked around, and realized that a number of the stores had already pulled down their security grids and the food court was rapidly emptying. Santa had disappeared and his helpers were packing things up.
"I forgot things closed so early on Chrismas Eve," Mike said as he wrapped her hand in his and continued their interrupted walk to the exit. "I hope you didn't still have shopping to do."
A little unsettled, she let him pull her along. "No, I'm good."
"I've always th
ought so."
His tone of voice made her feel warm, wanted, and unworthy all at once but she recovered enough to snarl at a group of carolers outside the doors. "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen" went up an octave and changed key twice.
It wasn't until they got to the car that she thought to wonder how the elf had known Mike was a cop.
*
Mike was working a twelve-hour shift—six am to six pm—so Vicki woke him up at five with lips and teeth and kept him distracted for long enough that he had no time to do anything but throw on clothes and race out the door. No time to start in on it being Christmas Day. Time enough to say, "Think about tonight, that's all I'm asking," as he left.
She'd thought about it. She thought it was a bad idea, her mingling with Mike's extended family as if they were a couple like any other.
"And what does your girlfriend do, Michael?"
"Well, Mom, Vicki spends her days unconscious in a lightproof packing crate in my crawl space and after sunset she works as a private investigator."
"That sounds interesting."
"Have her tell you about the reanimated Egyptian wizard who tried to take over the world sometime. Oh, and did I mention she's a vampire?"
Okay, not likely, but still not a good idea. Besides, with luck she had a couple of hundred Christmases to look forward to. She needed to pace herself.
"A couple of hundred years of Chia pets, dogs in antlers, and Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree,'" she muttered, sitting down at her laptop. "I can't wait."
At fifteen minutes to sunrise, she shut down, took her cell phone from the charger, and headed for the crawl space only to find that Mike had hung a wreath on the end of the crate that opened.
"You'd think I could get away from the whole Christmas thing down here," she sighed as she stripped..Sinking into the slab of memory foam, she locked up, slipped under the duvet, and turned off the flashlight.
By sunset, Christmas would be nearly over.
*
Vampires don't dream.
"All right, if I'm not dreaming, what the hell is going on?" Vicki got out of the enormous wingback chair and peered around the room. There was a window and door and a fireplace, but beyond that, the room seemed a bit undefined—as though only the essentials were in place. There had to be walls, hard to have either a window or a door without them, but they were present more by inference than actuality.