by Tanya Huff
Another look at Henry’s face and he knew the offer wouldn’t be made at his expense. Somewhere, somewhen, they’d gone beyond that.
“I’ve got to get out of here.” His voice brusk but determined, Celluci stood. I can’t believe I’m doing this. “I need a nice long walk to clear my head. Help me think.” Half a dozen long-legged strides took him to the door. He yanked his jacket off the coat stand and charged out into the hall before they had a chance to try and stop him. ’Cause I sure as shit can’t offer this more than once.
Safely outside, door closed behind him, he sagged against the wall and closed his eyes for a second, amazed at what he’d just done. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, see a man act like a fool completely of his own free will.
But he had the day.
Was it fair to deny Fitzroy the night?
And anyway, he shoved both hands up through his hair. It should be Vicki’s choice. Not a choice forced on her by my presence.
If you love something, let it go. . . .
“Jesus H. Christ. What kind of idiot takes advice from a fucking T-shirt?”
Vicki stared across the room at the apartment door and then turned to stare at Henry. “Did he just? . . .”
“Leave?” Henry nodded, more than a little amazed himself. “Yes.”
She couldn’t get her brain around it. “Why?”
“I believe he is removing himself as an obstacle between us.”
“Between us? You mean so we can? . . .”
“Yes.”
“Why that arrogant shit!” Her brows snapped down, but she was so tired the exclamation had little force. “Didn’t he think I might have something to say about that?”
Henry spread his hands, the fine red-gold hairs glinting in the lamplight. “No one’s stopping you from saying it, Vicki.”
She glared at him for a moment longer, then sighed. “All right. Valid point. But I think you two are getting along too god-damned well.”
“Wouldn’t it make things easier for you if Detective-Sergeant Celluci and I got along?”
“That depends.” She sank back against the sofa cushions and added dryly, “On how well you get along.”
“Vicki!” Her name dripped with exaggerated shock. “Surely you don’t think . . .”
It took her a moment to catch the implication and when she did, she couldn’t stop herself from giggling. It had to be the exhaustion; she never giggled. “You wish. Michael Celluci is straight enough to draw lines with.”
Henry’s smile changed slightly and his eyes darkened, enough of the hunter showing to make his desire plain. “Then I shall have to find someone else.”
Vicki swallowed, if only to move her heart down out of her throat. He was making no attempt to catch her gaze, to draw her into his power. If she said no, and she could taste the word on her tongue, he would hunt elsewhere. But he needs me. Even from across the room, she could feel his Hunger. It wouldn’t be a betrayal. There was nothing more she could do for her mother tonight. More important, his needs covered hers and behind their camouflage, she could, if only for the duration, let go.
He needs me. Repeated, it drew attention from the more dangerous, I need him.
“Vicki?”
His voice stroked heat into her skin. “Yes.”
Celluci watched Henry cross the parking lot, and worked at unclenching his teeth. There was nothing in the way the other man—vampire-slash-romance writer, Celluci savagely corrected the thought—moved to give any indication of what had gone on in the apartment. Well, he doesn’t brag. I’ll give the little fucker that.
“Detective.”
“Fitzroy.”
“Be quiet when you go into the apartment. She’s asleep.”
“How is she?”
“Some of the knots have loosened. I wish I could say they’ll still be that way in the morning.”
“You shouldn’t have left her alone.” I left her alone and look what happened. They both heard the corollary. They both ignored it.
“I’m listening to her heartbeat, Detective. I can be at her side in seconds. And this is as far as I’ll go until you’re ready to take over.”
Celluci snorted and wished he could think of something to say.
Henry lifted his face and breathed deeply of the night. “It’s going to rain. I’d best not linger.”
“Yeah.” Hands shoved into his jacket pockets, Celluci pushed himself up off his car. All right, so he hadn’t walked far. He hadn’t said he was going to. He wanted to believe that Fitzroy had left her no choice but he knew better; he wouldn’t have left if that had been even a possibility.
“Michael.”
Pulled around by his name, he tried not to let any of what he was feeling show on his face. It wasn’t hard. He didn’t know exactly what he was feeling.
“Thank you.”
Celluci started to ask, For what?, but he bit it back. Something in Henry’s tone—he’d call it honesty if forced to put a name to it—denied a facetious response. Instead, he nodded, once, and asked, “What would you have done if she’d said no?” Even before the last word left his mouth, he wondered why he was asking.
Henry’s gesture seemed to move past the overlapping yellow-white of the streetlights. “We’re in the middle of a small city, Detective. I’d have managed.”
“You’d have gone to a stranger?”
Red-gold brows, darkened by shadow, rose. “Well, I wouldn’t have had time to make friends.”
Sure, take the cheap shot. “Don’t you know there’s a fucking epidemic on?”
“It’s a disease of the blood, Detective. I know when someone is infected and am therefore able to avoid it.”
Celluci tossed the curl of hair back off his forehead. “Lucky you,” he grunted. “I still don’t think that you should . . . I mean . . .” He kicked at the gravel and swore when a rock propelled by his foot clanged off the undercarriage of his car. Why the hell was he worrying about Fitzroy anyway? The son of a bitch had lasted centuries, he could take care of himself. Trusting him is one thing. And I’m not sure I do. I am certainly not beginning to like him. Uh-uh. No way. Forget it. “Look, even if you can sense it, you shouldn’t be . . .” Be what? Jesus, normal vocabulary is not up to this. “. . . doing it with strangers,” he finished in a hurry.
Henry’s lips curled up into a speculative smile. “That could be difficult,” he said softly, “if we stay here for very long. Even if she were willing, I can’t feed off Vicki every time the Hunger rises.”
The night air suddenly got hard to breathe. Celluci yanked at his collar.
“And after all,” Henry continued, the comers of his eyes crinkling with amusement, “there’s only one other person in this city who I can’t consider a stranger.”
It took Celluci the same moment it had taken Vicki. “You wish,” he snarled, whirled on one heel, and stomped toward the apartment building.
Smile broadening, Henry watched him go, listening to the angry pounding of Celluci’s heart as he charged around the comer and out of sight. It had been less than kind to tease the mortal when he’d been honestly concerned but the opportunity had been impossible to resist.
“And if I wished,” he reminded the night when he had it to himself again. “I would.”
Nine
The night held countless different kinds of darkness, from the wine-dark sky arching over the Mediterranean, to the desert cut into sharp relief by edged moonlight, to cities that broke it into secret pieces with a kaleidoscope of bright lights. Henry knew them all. He was never certain whether the night had more faces than the day or if he’d merely had more time to find them—four hundred and fifty years rather overshadowed barely seventeen. Were those faces each, in its own way, truly beautiful, or was he finding beauty in inevitability?
Walking south along Division Street, toward the university, he drank in yet another night. The return of a sun he would never see had warmed the earth and the scent of new growth nearly overwhelmed asphalt and concrete and s
everal thousand moving bits of flesh and blood. Infant leaves, still soft and fragile, danced tentatively on the wind, the whispers of their movement a counterpoint to the hum of electrical wires and the growl of automobiles and the never-ending sounds of humanity. He knew if he took the time to look in the shadowed places of the city, he would find others pulled back to the hunt by the rising temperatures; some on four legs, most on two.
He crossed Princess Street, eyes hooded against the blaze of light bracketing the intersection. A young woman waiting for the opposing green studied him as he passed and he acknowledged her interest with a slow smile. The heat of her reaction followed him for several paces. When it came right down to it, cities, and their people, were very much the same the world over.
And thank God for that, he conceded with a silent salute to the heavens. It makes my night so much easier.
Division Street spilled him out onto the actual campus and he slid into the shadow of a recessed doorway as a police car drove by. Twenty-four hours after a murder, they were likely to ask a number of questions he didn’t want to answer. Questions like, where are you headed and why. Over the centuries, he’d found that the easiest way to deal with the police was not to deal with them at all.
By the time he reached the tiny hidden parking lot where the murder had actually occurred, he’d avoided that same cruiser twice more. The Kingston constabulary were taking their media-delivered promise of increased patrols very seriously.
Senses extended, Henry ducked under the yellow police tape and slowly crossed the asphalt. At the blurry chalk lines that isolated the victim’s final resting place, he crouched and laid his fingers lightly on the pavement. The boy’s death lingered; the scent of his terror, the imprint of his body, the instant of change when flesh became meat. Layered over it, layered over the whole area, was the other death; the scent of putrefaction, of chemicals, of machines, of death gone very, very wrong.
Straightening, trying not to gag, Henry’s hand traced the sign of the cross. Abomination. The word lodged in his brain and he couldn’t shake it loose. He supposed it was as good a word as any to describe the creature whose trail he had to follow. Abomination. Perversion. Evil. Not of itself perhaps, but evil in the creation of it.
When he tracked the creature to its sanctuary, if he found Marjory Nelson beside it, he would take steps to ensure that Vicki never saw what had been made of her mother. The one quick glimpse she’d already had was all that anyone should be required to live with.
“Geez, Cathy, don’t you ever go home?”
Catherine looked up from the monitor and frowned. “What do you mean?”
“You know, home. ” Donald sighed. “Home with a bed, and a television, and a refrigerator full of condiments and half a container of moldy cottage cheese.” He shook his head and laced his voice with exaggerated concern. “I’m not getting through to you here, am I?”
It was Catherine’s turn to sigh. “I know what home is, Donald.”
“Can’t prove it by me. You’re always here. ”
Catherine’s gaze swept the lab and her expression smoothed into contentment. “This is where my work is,” she said simply.
“This is where your life is,” Donald snapped. “Don’t you even go home to sleep?”
“Actually,” pale cheeks darkened, “I have a bit of a place set up down in the subbasement.”
“What? Here? In this building?”
“Well, sometimes the experiments can’t be left or they have to be checked three or four times in the night and my apartment is way out on Montreal Street by the old train station and, well, it just seemed more practical to use one of the empty rooms here.” The explanation spilled out in a rush of words. She watched, lower lip caught between her teeth, as Donald propped a buttock on the comer of a stainless steel table, pulled a candy from his pocket, unwrapped it, and popped it in his mouth.
“I’ll be damned,” he said at last, grinning broadly. “You never struck me as the squatting type.”
“It’s not squatting!” she protested hotly. “It’s . . .”
“Caretaking.” When she continued to scowl, he tried again. “Behaving in a responsible manner toward your experiments?”
“Yes. That’s it exactly.”
Donald nodded, his grin returned. “Squatting.” She could rationalize any way she liked, but that’s still what it was, not that he disapproved. In fact, he considered it an amazing show of initiative from someone he considered too tied to her test tubes. “Why the subbasement?”
She glared at him for a moment before she answered. “There aren’t any windows to seal off.” They both glanced at the plywood covered west wall. “And I’m less likely to be disturbed.”
“Disturbed?” His brows jumped for his hairline. “What are you doing down there besides sleeping?”
“Well . . .” Catherine rubbed the top edge of the monitor with the ball of her thumb, her eyes on the screen.
“Come on, Cathy, you can tell me.”
“You won’t mention it to Dr. Burke?”
He traced an X across his chest. “Cross my heart and hope to die.”
“I’ve got a small lab set up down there.”
Rolling his eyes, Donald pulled out another candy. “Why am I not surprised? You’ve got yourself a secret hideout, a perfect opportunity for debauchery, and what do you do in it? You work.” He dropped off the table and walked across the room to a clutter of microscopes and chemicals and a small centrifuge. “You work all the time, Cathy. That’s not normal. I can’t remember even being in this lab without you being here, too.”
“Like you said, I have a sense of responsibility to my work.”
“Like I said, you’re looney tunes.”
Her chin rose. “It’s late. What are you doing here?”
Instead of answering, he began to wander around the room, fidgeting with the laser array, peering at a readout, finally drumming his fingers down the length of one of the isolation boxes. “Hey! Hang on!” He jerked a thumb at the shadowed cubbyhole between the isolation box and the wall. “What’s he doing out? Dr. Burke said . . .”
“To remove them from their boxes only when absolutely necessary. To never leave them alone and unconfined. He isn’t alone, I’m here with him. And I think that it’s absolutely necessary for him to be out of his box as much as possible. He’s got to have the stimulus He’s thinking, Donald.”
“Yeah, right.” But for all the bravado in his voice, Donald couldn’t meet number nine’s gaze. “So why don’t you let them both out and they can play rummy or something. Look, Cathy,” he came around the bank of monitors and threw himself down on the other chair at the computer station, legs straddling the back, arms folded across the top, “can we talk?”
She swiveled her own chair around to face him, her expression confused. “We are talking.”
“No, I mean talk.”Staring down at his hands, he picked at a hangnail beside his left thumb. “Talk about what we’re really doing here. I’ve got to tell you, Cathy, I’m getting kind of concerned. This has gone way beyond the stuff Dr. Burke said we were going to be doing. I mean we’re definitely doing more than just developing a repair and maintenance system.”
“Is this about what happened last night?”
“Sort of, but . . .”
“It won’t happen again. I’m going to be very careful to never leave them alone. We were so lucky they didn’t damage themselves out walking around unsupervised.”
Donald’s gaze snapped up to meet hers. “Geez, Cathy, some guy died last night and all you can worry about is the effect of a little mileage on the Bobbsey Twins?”
“I’m sorry that happened,” she told him earnestly, “but worrying about it won’t bring him back. Number nine made an amazing breakthrough last night and that’s what we should be concentrating on.”
“What if he was just reacting?”
She smiled. “Then it wasn’t a programmed reaction and he had to have learned it on his own.”
&
nbsp; “Yeah? From where?” Donald twisted around and stared at number nine sitting impassively against the wall. “Those are my brain wave patterns bouncing around in there and I certainly never strangled anyone.”
“That’s a very good point.” Catherine considered it for a moment, brow furrowed. “Perhaps we should bring a psychologist in?”
“Sure. Great.” Donald faced her again, arms waving. Behind him, number nine tracked his movement. “Put him into therapy. The answer of the decade. Time for a reality break here, Cathy. This guy was dead and I don’t think he is anymore. It’s time to ask ourselves—what have we created?”
“Life?”
“Full points. Now then,” his gestures grew broader as his voice rose, “what does that actually mean? Besides getting up and walking around and all that scientific bullshit about interfacing with the net, and ignoring for the moment whether it’s an old life or a new one. It means we’ve got a person here. Just like you or me. Except,” he flung a hand back in number nine’s direction without turning, “he’s rotting on his feet.”
On his feet.
It was almost the command. Slowly, number nine stood.
He liked to hear her talk. Liked to listen to her voice. He didn’t like the other one. The other one was loud.
Moving carefully, a hand braced against the container he recognized as his, he walked forward quietly.
“So what you’re saying is that we have a live man in a dead body?”
“Yes! And what are we going to do about it?”
Catherine regarded him calmly. “The bacteria are keeping the body functional.”
“Yeah, but only for a limited time. He’s alive and he’s decomposing, and doesn’t that bother you just a little bit! I mean, ethical considerations about grave robbing aside, that’s one hell of a thing to do to somebody!”
“Of course it bothers me.” She brushed her hair back off her forehead and noted how well number nine was controlling his movements. Any residual lurching probably resulted from mechanical failure in the knees and hips. “What I really think we need are fresher bodies. I have high hopes for number ten.”