by Tanya Huff
A blow struck him hard in the side. He lost his hold, twisted as he fell and landed on his back, staring up at a dark-haired male who dared to take him from his prey.
Another blow. He grabbed at the leg and heaved it away, surging back onto his knees as part of the same motion.
Vicki winced as Celluci hit the wall but kept her eyes locked on Henry. Just for a second, she’d felt the Hunger falter. She could reach him. She had to reach him. It was the only chance for all three of them.
Right hand clamped tourniquet tight above the wound—from the pain involved she suspected his teeth had torn a hole significantly larger than her initial incision—she again offered her left.
He started to dive at her, checked, and slowly raised his eyes up from the welling blood to her face.
The Hunger bucked and writhed, but he held it tight, pulling strength from the blood he’d already taken. Pulling strength from her blood.
“Henry?”
Henry. Yes. A name to leash the Hunger with. He forced his lips to form a name to help recage it.
“Vicki.”
She frowned as he swayed, and shuffled toward him, still on her knees. “Henry, you’ve got to keep feeding. You haven’t taken nearly as much as you need. Besides. . .” She glanced down at her wrist and looked quickly away again. “Besides,” she repeated, “we’re just wasting it on the floor.”
Henry moaned and crumpled.
Vicki caught him, smearing his back with blood. Holding him awkwardly, she dragged her legs out from under, and gathered him onto her lap.
“No . . .” He pushed her wrist away as she laid it against his mouth. The brief taste of her nearly catapulted the Hunger to freedom. The bloodscent alone tore at hastily erected barricades. “I don’t trust . . . myself.”
She laid her wrist against his mouth again, blood dribbling down over lips clamped shut and staining his cheeks. That he was too weak to stop her merely proved her point. “Oh, for Christ’s sake, Henry, stop being a martyr. I trust you.”
She felt him hesitate, then she felt his lips part. The torn flesh wrapped barbed lines of pain around her arm as he pressed against her and began to suckle. Muscles tensed, but she managed not to pull away and slowly the familiar rhythm pushed the pain to one side, her body responding with something very like post-coital lassitude. Resting her cheek against the top of Henry’s head, she sighed.
“Isn’t that nice,” Celluci grunted, glaring down at the tableau and wiping at the blood on his face. “Love conquers all.” Sucking his breath through his teeth, he squatted beside them and peered into what he could see of Vicki’s face. “Are you okay?”
Caught in the incessant pull of Henry’s need, she didn’t bother to raise her head, wouldn’t have even bothered to answer except that the concern in his voice demanded a response. “I’m fine.” And then, because she belatedly realized Celluci deserved more than that, added, “I think I’m fine.”
“Great.” He shifted position. Somehow, this was more intimate than watching them make love. He barely resisted the urge to grab Henry and violently stuff him back into the isolation box. “How do you know when he’s had enough?”
“He’ll know. He’ll stop.”
“Yeah? What if he needs more than you can spare?”
Vicki sighed again, but this time the exhalation had an entirely different sound. “He won’t take more than I can spare.”
Celluci reached up for the open lip of the box and hauled himself to his feet. “You’ll excuse me if I don’t put a lot of faith in that. A few minutes ago he was ready to kill both of us.”
“That was then . . .”
“And this is now? Very deep, Vicki. Very deep bullshit. He stops in fifteen seconds or I’m yanking him off the tit.”
“There’ll be no need, Detective.” The statement, although barely audible, left no room for argument. Henry, having pulled away just enough for speech, molded his mouth back over the wound, pressing the edges of the torn flesh together in order for the coagulant in his saliva to work. He could feel Vicki’s life wrapped around his own and, while the last thing he wanted right at this moment was to break free of it, continuing to feed would only endanger them both. She would die from loss of blood and he would die from loss of her. He had taken all he was going to.
This was the second time she had saved him. The first time, she hadn’t known the risks and, defeated by the demon, the Hunger had lain in darkness with him beyond the need for control. This time, she knew what she was offering and offered in spite of the Hunger raging free. I wanted to hear her say I love you. I just heard it.
And what had he given in return?
“I’m sorry, Vicki.” He rested his head against her breast, conserving the little strength he’d regained. “I can stop most of the bleeding, but I can’t repair the damage. You’re going to need a dressing of some kind.”
Vicki glanced down at her wrist and her stomach twisted. “Jesus H. Christ.” She swallowed bile. “It looks like it should hurt a lot more than it does.” Then suddenly, it did. “Oh, damn . . .”
Celluci grabbed Henry’s shirt out of the box and dropped to his knees. “I think Jesus H. Christ about sums it up. Fuck, Fitzroy, you’re a god-damned animal!”
Henry met the detective’s stormy glare with a calm gaze of his own. “Not when I can help it,” he said quietly.
“Yeah. Well.” Celluci looked away first, burying his confusion—He almost kills both of us. He chews a big fucking hole in Vicki. And I feel sorry for him?—in the wrapping of Vicki’s arm. “You’re lucky,” he grunted as he began to bind Henry’s shirt around the wound. “It’s messy, but I don’t think there’s any tendon damage. Move your fingers.”
“It hurts.”
“Move them anyway.”
Muttering profanities under her breath, Vicki did as instructed, all three of them anxiously watching the digits perform.
“What did I tell you.” Relief made Celluci’s own fingers tremble as he tied off the thick bandage and held a sleeve up in each hand. “We’ll use these as a sling, to immobilize it, but you’re going to Emergency as soon as we get out of here.” Vicki bowed her head as he knotted the cuffs at the back of her neck and he rested his cheek for a moment against her hair, much as she’d done earlier with Henry—who still reclined against the support of her good arm. “I thought . . .” He’d thought she was going to die when he’d kicked the teeth away from her throat. He’d thought she was suicidal when she’d presented herself again. And when it had actually worked, he’d thought. . . he’d thought. . . He didn’t know what he thought anymore. “I thought it was all over,” he finished lamely and sat back on his heels. And if she asks me what I meant by all, I don’t know what to tell her.
Then his eyes widened, and he snickered.
Henry looked startled and pulled himself up into a shaky but nearly erect sitting position.
Vicki’s brows snapped down. “What the hell are you laughing at?” she demanded.
Celluci waved a hand at the two of them and snickered again. “Just for a minute there I was reminded of Michelangelo’s Pietà. You know, the statue of the Madonna holding the body of Christ across her lap?”
“And you think me an inappropriate Christ?” Henry asked.
Celluci took a good long look at the other man—at the bruising, at the horror that still lurked around hazel eyes, at the mixture of physical youth and spiritual age, at the nearly visible sense of self now firmly back in place—and shook his head. “Actually,” he said, “as Christs go, I’ve seen worse. But the Madonna . . .” The snicker returned at Vicki’s indignant stare. “But the Madonna has definitely been miscast.”
Vicki’s lips twitched. “You rotten bastard,” she began. Then she lost it and howled with laughter.
Which pushed Celluci over the edge.
Henry hesitated, nerves scraped raw and unsure if he should be finding insult when Vicki didn’t or blasphemy where none was intended—although honesty forced him to admit tha
t Celluci had a valid point. Unable to withstand the purge of emotion, he joined in.
If some of the laughter had a slightly hysterical tone, they all agreed to ignore it.
“Hey, Fergusson! What are you doing back here, man?”
“Forgot something.” Detective Fergusson picked a long narrow paper bag up off his desk and pulled a bottle of bubble bath shaped like a ninja turtle out far enough for the other man to identify it. “My daughter sent me back for it. Informed me on her way to bed that broken promises make blisters.”
“How old is she now, four? Five?”
“Five.”
Detective Brunswick shook his head. “Five years old and she’s already got you asking how high on the way up. Man, when she becomes a teenager, she’s going to run you ragged.”
Fergusson snorted, cramming bag and bottle into his coat pocket. “By that time maybe her mother’ll be slowing down.” He leaned over and squinted at the piece of pink message paper topping a stack of reports like a square of icing. “What the hell’s this?”
“Just some drunk calling you to confess.”
“Confess to what?”
“The sinking of the Lusitania? The shooting of JFK? Repatriating the constitution? I don’t know. She didn’t want to confess to me.”
“Geez, why do I always get them?”
Brunswick grinned and snapped his gun. “Because you’re such a sweetie.”
“Fuck you, too,” Fergusson muttered absently, reading the actual message. “Director of Life Sciences? . . .”
“She seemed to think I should know who she was. In fact, she told me that everyone knew who she was.” He watched the other man’s face for a moment and his grin faded. “You don’t think there’s actually anything in this, do you?”
“I don’t know.” He crumpled the paper and stuffed it in the pocket with his daughter’s bubble bath, his expression resembling that of a hound worrying at a bone. “Maybe.” Then he shrugged and sighed. “Maybe not.”
“You haven’t even begun to convince me that we shouldn’t haul ass out of here right now,” Celluci growled. “You,” he jabbed a finger at Henry, “are operating on half a tank. And you,” the finger moved to wave in front of Vicki’s nose, “are about three pints short.”
“Not that much,” Vicki protested, although from the way she felt, she wasn’t going to bet on it.
Celluci ignored her. “We all look like we’ve been through the wars. Let’s just clear out of here and leave the mopping up to the police.”
“Mike . . .”
“Don’t Mike me. And I want that wrist of yours looked at by a doctor before you get gangrene in it and have to have your fucking hand chopped off.”
“The wound won’t infect,” Henry said with quiet assurance. “And I am going to the lab.” He stretched out both arms. Although the bruising had faded from purple to green and the broken bones in his hand had begun to knit, the marks of needles were still very evident. “If, as you say, Catherine didn’t move me until late afternoon, any samples, any test results, will be there. They have to be destroyed.”
“Oh, come on, Fitzroy,” Celluci sighed. “No one’s going to believe anything these people say after their attempt to play Dr. Frankenstein has been discovered.”
“I can’t risk that.”
Celluci looked from Henry to Vicki and back again, then he savagely shoved both hands up through his hair. “Jesus, there’s nothing to choose between you. All right, all right, we’ll go.”
“I said I was going,” Henry pointed out. “You don’t have to come with me.”
“Fuck that,” Celluci told him bluntly. “We went through too much to find you. You’re not moving out of our sight until we stuff you back in that god-damned closet come morning. Unless? . . .” He raised an eloquent brow.
Henry half smiled. “You’re both perfectly safe. Although I still hunger, Vicki’s blood was more than enough to return my control.”
Celluci’s hand rose involuntarily to the place on his throat that Henry’s teeth had grazed. Angrily, he turned the motion into an abrupt gesture at the wall of wiring and electrical panels. “We still shutting off the power?”
Vicki nodded and instantly regretted the motion as her head seemed to want to keep on falling. “The reasons for doing it haven’t changed. If there’re any more of those. . . experiments in this building, I want them shut down.” She paused and swallowed, hard. Dr. Burke had said her mother was up and walking around. It wouldn’t be so easy to turn her mother off; to see that her mother died a second time. “We should have about forty-five minutes on the emergency lighting—not that it’ll make any difference to me. Plenty of time to get to the lab, do what we have to, and get out. Then the police can handle the rest.” She caught Celluci’s gaze and held it. “I promise.”
“Fine.” He moved toward the comer of the room where a thick plastic pipe came through the wall and disappeared into a metal box about two feet square. “This is the main feed, so this must be the main disconnect box.”
Close behind him, Vicki peered over his shoulder. “How do you know? I thought your father was a plumber?”
“It’s a guy thing, you wouldn’t under. . . Ow! Damn it, Vicki, that was the last bit of unbruised flesh I had.”
“Had,” Vicki repeated, flicking on her flashlight. “Just pull the switch.”
The switch, about a foot long and rust-pitted down its entire length, refused to surrender so easily. “This thing,” Celluci grunted, throwing his weight on it, “hasn’t been moved since they wired the building.” He managed to force it down to a forty-five-degree angle but could budge it no farther. “I need something to lever it with. The pipe we used on the door . . .”
“May I?” Henry reached past Celluci, wrapped long pale fingers around the switch, and slammed it down in one, fluid motion, snapping it off at the base.
The light in the electrical room went out.
“I thought you hadn’t regained all your strength.” Celluci squinted in the circle of illumination thrown by Vicki’s flashlight.
Henry, who’d stepped back to shield sensitive eyes, shrugged, forgetting for the moment that he couldn’t be seen. “I haven’t.”
“Jesus H. Christ. How strong are you?”
Resisting the urge to brag, to further advance himself over a rival who had somehow become much more, Henry settled for a diplomatic, “Not strong enough to get free on my own.” Which was, after all, only the truth.
Catherine frowned down into the microscope. There had to be a way to use the regenerative properties of the vampire’s cells to extend the limited life of her bacteria. Once found, she could tailor new bacteria for number nine and keep him from decomposing like all the rest. She looked up and shot a smile across the room to where he sat patiently watching her from the edge of the bed.
All at once, the lights went out and the constant hum of her computer was swallowed by the silence that swept in with the darkness.
“It’s her!” Catherine gripped the table tightly with both hands until the world steadied. “She’s done this. She wants you to die.” Knocking over her stool, she stood and stumbled to the door, arms stretched stiffly out before her. A moment’s fumbling with the lock and she stepped out into the hall.
At each bend of the corridor, battery-operated emergency lights provided enough illumination for movement.
“This has gone far enough. We have to get to the lab. Come on,” she called back over her shoulder. “We’ll stop her together.”
Number nine could just barely see her outlined in the doorway. He stood and slowly shuffled toward her.
Together.
He wished he could see her better.
Gaze jerking from one shadow to the next, searching out the possibility of Dr. Burke, Catherine never noticed that number nine’s eyes now shone in the darkness with the faint phosphorescence of rot.
Fifteen
The sudden darkness hurled Dr. Burke up against the wall, heart in her throat, palms
prickling with sweat. She could feel the jolt of adrenaline eating away at the alcohol-induced distance and struggled to calm herself. Being sober, in this building, was no part of her plan.
“I knew, I knew, I knew I should’ve brought the resht . . . of the sec. . . ond bottle,” she muttered, her voice very nearly lost in the passage of throat and teeth and lips it had to negotiate before it could clear her mouth.
The equally sudden appearance of light from the battery-operated floods at each end of the hall brought a victorious wave of Donald’s jacket. “Ha, ha! Let’s hear it for modem engin . . . eering! Power goes off, emer . . . gency lights. . . go on. Rah! Damn good thing they did, too,” she continued, stumbling forward again. “Never find the damn lab. . . otherwise. Wander around here for. . . days. Maybe even . . . months.”
She squinted down the length of the corridor. “Speaking of . . . which. Where the hell am I?” It took a moment’s concentrated effort before she recognized the upcoming t-junction. The left wing, after crossing a lecture hall and going down a small flight of stairs, was a dead end, she thought, but the right, with a little luck, would eventually lead her to the back door of the lab. The small wooden door led into the storeroom; they’d never used it, but Dr. Burke had seen to it in the beginning that she carried the key.
“Maybe I knew something like this was. . . going to happen,” she confided to a fire extinguisher. “Maybe I was just being. . . prepared for crazy-Cathy to pop her. . . cork.”
And were you prepared, asked the voice of reason, for what happened to Donald?
Not even a bottle of single malt whiskey could shut the voice up, but it did make it very easy to ignore. So Dr. Burke did.
While Vicki could see the emergency lights as white pinpricks in a black shroud, her companions apparently found them more than sufficient illumination. Given that Henry needed so little light, he could probably see quite clearly, and she knew from experience that Celluci had better than average night vision. God, how she envied them; to be able to move freely without fear of misstep or collision, to be able to see movement in the shadows in time to . . .