by Tanya Huff
A muscle shifted behind the purple bruises on the throat.
Gray-blue lips parted.
“Kill . . . me . . .”
“Holy Mary, Mother of God, he’s alive.”
In the box, the dark eyes slid slowly back to Celluci. “No . . .”
“No? What the hell do you mean no?”
“He means he’s not alive, Mike.” Vicki could hear a part of herself screaming. She ignored it. “He’s like my mother.” Hands splayed against the glass. Mouth moving soundlessly. “He’s dead. But he’s trapped in there.”
“Kill . . . me . . . please . . .”
Her fingers digging into the bend of Celluci’s elbow, Vicki backed away, pulling him with her. She stopped when the high rim of stainless steel replaced Donald Li’s face with her own. “We have to do something.”
Celluci continued to stare in the direction of the box. “Do what?” he demanded harshly.
Vicki fought the urge to turn and run, thankful Celluci seemed frozen to the spot because she didn’t have the strength to stop them both. “What he asks. We have to kill him.”
“If he’s alive, killing him is murder. If he’s dead . . .”
“He’s dead, Mike. He says himself he’d dead. Can you walk away and leave him like that?”
She felt the shudder run down the length of his body and barely heard his answer.
“Vicki, we’re out of our depth here.” This was the stuff of nightmares. Not demons or werewolves or mummies or a four-hundred-and-fifty-year-old romance writer—this. He’d thought that thirteen years of police work had equipped him to deal with anything and that the events of the last year had covered everything else. He’d been wrong. “I can’t . . .”
“We have to.”
“Why?” Weighed down by horror, his voice hardly rose above a whisper.
“Because we found him. Because we’re all he has.”
There’s a whole world out there. Let someone else deal with it. But when he turned and looked down into Vicki’s face, he couldn’t say it. He recognized the look of someone very nearly at the end of her resources, someone who’d been hit too hard and too often, but he also recognized the determined set to her jaw. She couldn’t walk away leaving Donald Li trapped in his prison of dead meat. He couldn’t walk away and leave her. Although he had to force his mouth to form the words, he asked, “How do we do it?”
Speaking slowly—if she lost control even a little she’d lose it all—Vicki laid out what they knew. “He’s dead. We know it. He says so. But his . . .” Twentieth-century attitudes added difficulty to expressing what was so terrifyingly clear. “. . . his soul is trapped. Why? The only difference between this corpse and any other . . .” Except my mother’s. She felt herself begin to slide toward the edge. No! Don’t think of that now. “. . . is that someone has given it an artificial resemblance to life. That has to be why he’s trapped.”
“So we unhook his life support?”
“Yeah. I guess.”
“Vicki. One of us has to be sure.”
She lifted her head and met his gaze.
After a moment, he nodded. “Let’s do it.”
It didn’t take long for them to unhook the tubes and hoses, training and practice shoehorning distance in between what had to been done and feelings about doing it. Neither of them touched the body any more than was absolutely necessary. When they’d finished, although Donald Li said nothing, they saw him still staring up out of dead eyes and knew it hadn’t been enough.
“We should’ve known. The others are up and walking around.”
Then Vicki found the input jack hidden under a thick fringe of hair and traced the cable back to the computer. She squinted at Catherine’s message on the screen and tried to keep her hands from shaking just long enough to work the keyboard.
“It seems to be loading programming into . . .” There was only one place it could be loading programming. “Okay. Odds are good that if programming can be loaded, it can also be erased.” Wiping her palms on her thighs, she dropped into the chair.
“You sure you know what you’re doing?” Celluci asked, grateful for an excuse to walk away from the horror in the box. “This setup’s more complicated than the gear you’ve got at home.”
“How complicated can it be?” Vicki muttered, making a note of the destination file. “It all comes down to ones and zeros. Besides,” she added grimly, hitting the reset button, “how could I possibly make it any worse?”
She scanned the main menu. “Mike, what does initialize mean to you?”
“Something to do with starting up?”
“That’s what I thought.” Under the list of things that could be initialized was the destination code the program had been downloading into.
“Well?”
“I just told it to reinitialize Donald’s brain.”
“And?”
“And that should wipe it clean.”
“Are you sure?”
“No, but I wiped my hard drive that way once.” Shoving the chair back from the desk, Vicki stood and pushed at her glasses. “Hopefully, it’ll release him.”
“And if it doesn’t?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know.” If it didn’t work, they’d have to leave him there and hope that as the body slowly decayed so would whatever held him to it. To know you’re dead. To watch your body rot. To have that be your only hope. . . . She clamped down hard on the hysteria she could feel rising. Later, she told it. Later, when Henry’s safe and my mother’s . . . my mother is . . . ”
Celluci’s voice cut through the thought. “No change.”
“Give it a minute.” One step at a time, she managed to return to the box and to Celluci’s side. If he hadn’t gone back before her, she didn’t think she could’ve made it. With her arm pressed up against the warm resilience of his, she looked down at Donald Li’s face.
Dark eyes caught her gaze and held it. Wrung dry, Vicki didn’t even attempt to pull away. Suddenly, she realized that as all encompassing as her terror and revulsion might be it was nothing next to the terror that shrieked from behind the eyes of Donald Li.
She had nothing to be afraid of in comparison.
As the fear faded, anger rose to take its place.
What sort of a person could do this to another human being?
All at once, the dead man’s eyes widened and just for an instant his expression changed to one of incredulous joy.
Then his face held no expression at all.
Vicki released a breath she didn’t remember holding. “You see that?”
“Yeah.”
“Any doubts that we did the right thing?”
“Not one.”
Together they reached up and pulled the lid closed.
Alone in the dark, Henry wondered how much of the night he had left. Surely he’d endured a dozen hours or more since sunset. Why can’t I feel the dawn? With the Hunger clawing for freedom and steel wrapped about him like a shroud, he yearned for oblivion even as he dreaded it.
He’d run through all the moments of Vicki he had. Unfair that a year slips through memory so fast. While some of what they’d shared had added to the Hunger, most had helped to force it back. Vicki had given him her life, not just her body and blood. Had forged friendship out of circumstance. Had helped him when he needed it. Had come to him for help. Had trusted him. Been trusted in return.
Passion. Friendship. Need. Trust.
Together, love. Considered in that light, he supposed it wasn’t actually necessary for Vicki to say she loved him. Although it would have been good to hear. . . .
He tried to remember how many times he had heard the words. A hundred voices cried out; women’s voices, men’s voices—he quieted them all, searching the past for the glint of gold among the dross. A thousand nights slipped by, a hundred thousand, and out of all the shared passion and friendship and need there were only four, three women and a man, with whom there had also been trust enough for love.
�
�Ginevra. Gustav. Sidonie. Beth.” He murmured their names into the darkness. So many others he’d let go of, forgotten, but those he still held. “Only four in all those years. . . .”
Two had been taken from him by violence, one by accident, one by time.
He could feel the melancholy gathering into a tangible presence, threatening to crush him under its weight.
“Vicki.” A fifth name. A living name. “And as they say . . .” Although he knew it would do no good, Henry pressed his uninjured hand up against the lid as hard as exhaustion and pain allowed. “. . . where there’s life, there’s hope.”
Muscles strained, the darkness developed a reddish hue, then the arm collapsed down across his chest and he was nearly deafened by the sound of his heart slamming up against his ribs. He had no idea what he’d been trying to prove.
One last effort for the sake of love? He shifted slightly, changing his position as much as he could, the plastic padding beneath him tugging at the bare skin of his back. At least this time I won’t be the one left behind to mourn.
Melancholy turned to despair and closed icy fingers around him.
It would be so easy to surrender.
I am Henry Fitzroy, Duke of Richmond, the son of a king.
I am Vampire.
He was too tired. It just wasn’t enough anymore.
Vicki wouldn’t quit.
Vicki won’t quit. Not until she finds you. Find strength in that. Trust her.
She will come.
Christina had come. She had birthed him from the darkness, nourished him, guarded him, taught him, and finally let him go.
“Listen to what your instincts tell you, Henry. Our nature says we hunt alone. This is your territory, I give it to you, and I will not stay to fight you for it.”
“Then stay and share it with me!”
She only smiled, a little sadly.
He paced the length of the room and back to throw himself down on his knees at her feet. Even a short time before, he would have finished the motion by burying his head in her lap but now, in spite of the position, he was unable to close the distance.
Her smile grew sadder still. “The bond of your creation is nearly broken. If I stay,” she added softly, “one of us will very soon drive the other away and that will wipe out even the memory of what we shared. ”
The voice of the Hunter growing louder in his head told him she spoke the truth. “Then why,” he cried, “did you change me, knowing this would happen? Knowing we would have so little time together?”
Ebony brows drew down as she considered it. “I think,” she said slowly, “I think I forgot for a while.”
His voice rose, echoing off the damp, stone walls of the abandoned tower. “You forgot?”
“Yes. Perhaps that is why we are able to continue as a race.”
He bowed his head, eyes squeezed shut, but his nature no longer allowed tears. “It hurts. As though you cut my heart out and take it with you.”
“Yes. ” Her skirts whispered as she stood and he felt her fingers touch his hair in gentle benediction. “Perhaps that is why we are so few.”
He never saw her again.
“And that,” he told the darkness as despair’s grip tightened, “is not helping.” Surely there were pleasanter times to use as weapons against the knowledge that he was trapped, and alone. . . .
“No. There have been prisons and prisoners before,” he snarled. “I can survive it.”
You can survive the nights, despair whispered, but what of the days? So much blood has been taken. How much more will they take? How much more can you lose and still have a night to return to? What else will they do that you will be unable to prevent?
Lips drawn back from his teeth, Henry tried to twist away from the voice. It surrounded him, sounded within him, echoed against the metal that enclosed him. “Vicki . . .”
She doesn’t know where you are. What if she doesn’t find you in time? What if she doesn’t come?
“NO!”
He released his hold on the Hunger and let the Beast take him as it clawed its way free.
It was all he had left to fight with.
“As long as these are working, we have no guarantee that she’s going to leave Henry in one place.” Vicki squinted in the brightly lit interior of the elevator and switched off her flashlight. “She can keep rolling him around this building with us two steps behind like some kind of bad Marx Brothers movie.”
“So we jam them?” Celluci asked, stepping over the threshold and matching his companion’s don’t-fuck-with-me tone. That either of them was still functioning at all, he considered to be some sort of miracle. Let’s hear it for the human animal’s ability to cope.
Vicki shook her head and hit the button for the subbasement with enough force to nearly crack the plastic cover. “Not good enough. The elevators are in opposite ends of the building. She can unjam them as fast as we can jam them. We’re going to shut them off.”
“How?”
“By shutting off the power supply to the building.”
“I repeat, how?”
Vicki turned to stare at him through narrowed eyes. “How the hell should I know? Do I look like an electrician? We’ll find the electrical room and pull the plug.”
“Metaphorically speaking.”
“Don’t give me any of your fucking attitude, Celluci.”
“My attitude? Nelson, you’ve got one hell of a nerve.”
“Nerve!”
“You want attitude?”
Their voice overlapped, the sound slamming up against the confining walls and crashing back. Words got tangled in the noise and were stripped of meaning. Toe to toe, they stood and screamed invective at each other.
The elevator reached the subbasement. Stopped. The door opened.
“. . . patronizing asshole!”
The echoes changed. The words shot into the darkness and didn’t come back.
They realized it together and together fell silent.
Vicki was trembling so violently, she wasn’t sure she could stand. Her legs felt like cooked pasta and there was a metal band wrapped so tightly around her throat that breathing hurt and swallowing was impossible. Her glasses had slid so far down her nose they were almost useless. She peered over them, through the tunnel the disease had pared her vision down to, and tried to focus on the face just inches from her own. Her hand came up to push them back into place but instead continued moving until it brushed the curl of hair off Celluci’s forehead. She heard him sigh.
Slowly, he raised his arm and, with one finger against the bridge, slid her glasses back into place. “We okay?”
His breath was warm against her cheek. She nodded jerkily and stepped back, out of the range of that comfort.
“What about the tracks?” he asked.
She switched on her flashlight and walked out into the subbasement, a little amazed her legs would obey even such basic commands. “We look for tracks after we immobilize Catherine.”
Celluci paused for a moment on the threshold of the elevator, his presence preventing the door from closing. “We turn off the power to the building,” he said, “and we’ll turn off any other experiments she might be running.”
Vicki stopped and half turned to face him. “Yes.”
He recognized the raw anger that spit the word out. Recognized it because he felt it himself. It had nothing to do with the contest in vitriol they’d held in the elevator—that had been nothing more than tension given voice—and everything to do with the horror they’d found in the lab. He wanted to find whoever had been responsible, take them by the throat and. . . Words didn’t exist for what he wanted to do.
Over the last week, layer after layer of Vicki’s control, of her protection, had been stripped away. He was afraid there was nothing left to keep her anger from being acted on.
He was afraid that if they found Henry the way they’d found Donald Li, she’d go right over the edge and he wouldn’t be able to stop her.
H
e was more afraid that he wouldn’t even try.
On the second floor, in a utility cupboard that shared a wall with the elevator shaft, Marjory Nelson worked the muscles of her face into the closest she could come to a frown. She heard voices.
Voices.
Voice.
She knew that voice.
She had been told to stay. It was one of the commands enforced by the neural net. One of the commands that had worn a rutted passage into memory.
Stay.
Trembling, she stood. . .
Stay!
. . .shuffled toward the door. . .
STAY!
. . . opened it and lurched out into the hall.
There was something she had to do.
Fourteen
“Radio room. Constable Kushner.”
“This the police. . . stashun?”
“Yes, ma’am, it is.”
Dr. Burke took a deep breath and, enunciating very carefully, said, “I’d like to speak to De-tective Fergusson, plead. . . please.”
“I’ll put you through to homicide.”
“You do that.” Eyes nearly closed, Dr. Burke sagged against the receiver.
“Homicide. Detective Brunswick.”
“Right. De-tective Fer-gusson, please.”
“Detective Fergusson’s not here right now, can I help?”
“Not here?” She pivoted the receiver around on her mouth, just far enough so she could glare blearily at it. “Whadda you mean, not here?”
By the time she remembered that the other half had to stay against her ear, she’d missed the first part of Detective Brunswick’s reply. “. . . but can I take a message?”
“A meshage?” Sipping at her Scotch, she took a moment to think about it. “Well, I was gonna . . . confesh. Theories say confeshun is necess . . . ary. But if he’s not. . . there, maybe I won’t.”
Detective Brunswick’s voice picked up a distinct, let’s-humor-the-crazy-person inflection. “If you give me your name, I can tell him you called.”
Heaving herself more-or-less erect in the chair, Dr. Burke declared in ringing tones, “I am the Director of. . . Life Sciencesh. He knows who I am. Everyone knows. . . who I am.” Then she hung up.