4 Blood Pact

by Tanya Huff

  To what?

  Vicki pushed the question away and concentrated on not outpacing her circle of sight. Although she kept the flashlight beam trained closely on the floor in front of her so as not to blind the two men, she allowed a small part to overlap onto Henry. After everything they’d been through—everything all three of them had been through—she wasn’t letting him slip into darkness just because of her lousy eyes.

  Henry was safe.

  They’d saved him.

  Her mother was dead, but Henry was alive and he was safe with them.

  That made up for a lot.

  Breathing heavily, Celluci’s hand tucked into the elbow of her good arm, she followed the little bit of Henry out of a stairwell and squinted up at the red pinprick in the darkness that had to be the exit sign. “You guys sure this is the right floor?”

  “I’m sure.” Henry’s voice was flat and atonal. “The stink of perverted death is strongest here.”

  “Henry . . .” Shaking free of Celluci’s grip, Vicki reached out and poked him gently in the hip with the side of the flashlight. “It’s going to be worse in the lab.” They’d told him about Donald down in the electrical room. All three of them had needed a moment to recover from the telling. “You can wait in the hall if you think it’s going to be too strong.”

  “It’s only a difference of degree,” Henry told her abruptly, not turning. He could see the outline of the door at the end of the hall. “I might as well go into the lab because I can’t smell anything else even here.” Then he reached back and brushed his fingers over the warmth of her hand, softening his tone. “We’ve all moved past the time for running. Now it’s time to face those last few fears and . . .”

  “And get the hell out of here,” Celluci finished. “Which we won’t do if we continue to stand here flapping our lips. Come on.” He caught hold of Vicki again and dragged her forward, forcing Henry to move ahead or be run down. If they lost momentum, they’d never get this finished. He hadn’t wanted to see anything finished quite so much in a very long time. “It can’t possibly be worse than the last visit, for any of us.”

  Vicki tightened her hand around the barrel of the flashlight, giving thanks the grip was heavy ridged rubber. Her palm was so wet that a slicker surface would’ve squirted right out of her grasp. Face our last few fears. Oh, God, I hope not.

  The lab—possibly because it was such a large room, possibly because after a century of renovation the building just generally defied logic—rated an emergency light of its own.

  “Well, thank God for small favors,” Celluci muttered as they entered. “I didn’t much want to be in the dark with that. ”

  Vicki let her light lick over that, the stainless steel blazing momentarily then sliding into shadow again. All the horror lay in memory now for the body the isolation box contained was merely dead, and they’d all dealt with death before. He’s really most sincerely dead. She bit back a giggle and stomped down hard on the thought. It would be frighteningly easy to lose control.

  Henry ignored the box and strode quickly down the length of the room to the one remaining computer, trench coat flapping back from his naked torso. With the power off, he had no way to tell if it contained the files concerning him, but he had to assume that if Catherine did the tests in this lab then she entered the data into this machine.

  “Fitzroy.”

  He turned, fingers already wrapped around a fistful of cables.

  “You might want to clear this out of here as well.” Celluci offered him the wallet he’d picked up off the floor, various pieces of ID stuffed loosely inside. “Let’s not give Detective Fergusson a chance to cash in on the obvious.”

  “Thank you.” A quick check, and Henry shoved it all into his coat pocket. “If the police managed to connect me to all of this, I’d have had to disappear.” One comer of his mouth twisted in the detective’s direction. “Maybe you should have left the wallet on the floor.”

  Celluci mirrored both expression and tone. “Maybe I should have.”

  Setting cables and monitor keyboard carefully to one side, Henry lifted the actual computer over his head and threw it into the comer as hard as he could.

  Catherine jerked back at the sound of plastic shattering, eyes snapping open impossibly wide. “It’s her. She’s wrecking things.” Her fingers wrapped around number nine’s arm, molding imprints into the increasingly malleable flesh. “We’ve got to stop her!”

  Number nine stopped moving, obedient to the pressure. He would do what she wanted.

  From the lab up ahead came the sound of further destruction, small pieces being made smaller still until they were beyond all hope of repair.

  “All right.” Catherine rose on her toes and rested her forehead on number nine’s skull just below where the staples held the cap of bone in place. “This is my plan. I’ll distract her, get her to chase me and lose her in the halls. You go in and get Donald. He should be viable outside the box by now. Don’t let anything stop you.”

  He couldn’t feel her breath, warm against his ear and neck—the nerves in the skin had never regenerated—but he could feel her closeness and that was enough. He reached up and awkwardly patted her arm.

  “I knew I could count on you!” She squeezed his hand in return, never feeling the tiny bones shifting out of their moorings, tendons and ligaments beginning to let go. “Come on!”

  While Henry smashed hardware into progressively smaller pieces and Celluci snapped disks, Vicki, flashlight tucked under her chin, flipped through reams and reams of printout.

  “Finding anything?” Celluci asked, reaching for yet another plastic square.

  Vicki shook her head. “Mostly EEG records.”

  He craned his neck and peered down at the paper bisected with a black ink trail of spikes and valleys. “How the hell do you know that?”

  She snorted. “They’re labeled.”

  “Stop it”

  All three of them jerked around.

  “Stop it this instant!”

  Vicki’s flashlight just barely managed to pick out a pale circle of face and hair over a paler rectangle of lab coat in the doorway at the far end of the long room.

  “Stop it! Stop it! Stop it!” Fury and madness were stridently obvious in her voice.

  “Catherine.” Leaping the wreckage at his feet, Henry charged forward.

  The figure in the doorway disappeared.

  “Fitzroy!”

  “Henry!”

  He ignored them, intent on the hunt. This madwoman had imprisoned him, tortured him, left him alone in the darkness; she was his. Knowing what she was, he would avoid sinking into the emptiness of her eyes. He would take her down. Her blood was not tainted even if her mind was. And she owed him blood.

  In spite of his speed, not yet fully returned but still greater than mortal, she was out of sight when he reached the hall. Her scent lay buried under the clinging stench of death perverted, which not only filled the air but covered the inside of his mouth and nose like a noxious film of oil. He could hear her life so he sped after it.

  But sound became a twisting and uncertain trail, easy to lose track of in the maze of rooms and passageways and, so long used to hunting by sight or scent, Henry found it more difficult than he’d believed possible to close the distance. Her life grew closer, but embarrassingly slowly.

  Madness gives strength of limb even while it destroys strength of mind. He couldn’t remember who had said that to him, so many years ago, but it appeared that madness gave fleetness of foot as well as strength for Catherine continued to elude him, using the peculiarities of the building to her advantage.

  Around a corner and through a lecture hall and out a small door only someone with intimate knowledge of the building would know existed, her heartbeat led him on. The emergency lighting provided patches of too bright light alternating with bands of shadow much easier on his eyes. He was beginning to grow tired, his body protesting the demands he was making on it so soon after the punishment it ha
d endured. Vicki’s blood could only do so much.

  In the instant before flight, Catherine had recognized the vampire and it hadn’t taken her long to realize that she couldn’t outrun him. Her knowledge of the building was her only advantage and while it prevented an immediate confrontation, she soon saw it wasn’t enough to throw him off her trail.

  She had no idea what he would do when he finally caught her, nor did she care. Her only thoughts were for number nine and how she’d been forced to leave him alone and outnumbered in the lab. She had to get back to him.

  Rounding a comer, the angle of the emergency light caught her eye and she skidded to a stop. The heavy battery contained in the base had proved too much for the antique plaster and lath expected to hold the screws and the unit had sagged away from the wall. Chest heaving, she jumped for it and hooked her fingertips over a narrow metal lip.

  Henry followed Catherine’s life around another corner and down a corridor much darker than the rest had been. Her heartbeat grew louder. Then he saw her outlined against the institutional gray of the wall; cowering, cornered.

  His lips drew off his teeth and the Hunter closed in on his prey.

  She straightened, her body no longer blocking the object cradled in her arms.

  Brilliant white light drove spikes of hot metal into night-sensitive eyes. Crying out in pain, Henry fell back, hands raised, an ineffectual barrier now that the damage had been done. He heard her go by, recoiled as her life brushed its shattered edges over him, and could not follow.

  Celluci had taken three quick steps after the running vampire, saw he was fast being left behind and stopped. “God damn him!” He flung the disk he was holding at the wall, as hard as he was able, and found his feelings were not in the least relieved by its shattering. “After all we went through to haul his ass out of danger, that god-damned undead bastard runs off on us!”

  Vicki merely shook her head, hand clutched tightly around the barrel of her flashlight. Although the sound of her own heartbeat nearly deafened her, she felt surprisingly calm. “It’s not,” she said softly, “like he’s a tame lion.”

  Celluci turned on her, both hands driving up through his hair. “And what the hell is that supposed to mean?”

  “It’s a line from a children’s book. I used it to describe him last spring, when we met.”

  “Great, just great. You’re taking a literary trip down memory lane and Fitzroy’s buggered off.” He took another step toward the door, then changed his mind, whirled, and stomped back to her side. “Vicki, that’s it. We’re out of here.” Feelings of betrayal outweighed worry and concern. “If Fitzroy’s able to go running off like some kind of bloodsucking avenging angel, he can manage without us around and . . .”

  All at once, he realized she wasn’t listening to him. Which was, in itself, not particularly unusual but her expression, pointed fixedly down the flashlight beam, was one he’d seen on her face only once before—about an hour and a half before when they’d opened the metal coffin and Donald Li had opened his eyes.

  The flesh between his shoulder blades crawling, he spun around.

  Standing in the doorway, was a parody of a man.

  She had told him to rescue Donald. She had not mentioned the people standing beyond the box, so number nine ignored them.

  He shuffled forward.

  Celluci’s right hand came up and sketched a quick sign of the cross. “That girl, the witness the night the boy was killed, she said that he was strangled by a dead man.”

  The creature continued to shuffle forward, the stink of it growing with every step.

  A sane man would run. But his feet and legs refused to obey. “This has got to be the thing that killed the boy.”

  “Odds are good,” Vicki agreed, her voice sounding as though she’d forced it through clenched teeth. “So what are you going to do? Arrest it?”

  “Oh, very funny.” Without taking his eyes off the lurching obscenity, he moved sideways until his shoulder came in contact with hers; the warmth of another life suddenly important. “What do you suppose it wants?”

  He felt her shrug. “I’m afraid to guess.”

  It arrived at the isolation box and reached out for the latch.

  “Fuck that!” Barely aware he was moving, Celluci charged forward. After what they’d gone through to save Donald Li—after what Donald Li had gone through—he’d be damned if he’d let the kid be dragged back into the ranks of the undead. Ranks of the undead . . . Jesus! I sound like the cut line on a made-for-TV movie. He rocked to a halt at the end of the box and bellowed, “Go on! Get away from there!”

  It ignored him.

  “God damn you, I said get away!” He didn’t remember pulling his gun, but there it was in his hand. “Just back away from the box! Now!”

  Finally recognizing some sort of threat, it turned its head and looked right at him.

  Get Donald. Don’t let anything stop you.

  Number nine stared at the man by the box. The voice had held command, but the words had not been words he had to obey.

  Don’t let anything stop you.

  The words were not enough to stop him. The man could be ignored.

  He turned his attention back to the latch, trying to get his fingers to close.

  The worst of it wasn’t the grave-gray of the skin, lips and fingertips greenish-black, nor was it the line of staples across the forehead or even the obvious signs of the triumph of decay. The worst of it was that there was someone in there—that not only an intelligence but a personality existed within the ruin.

  Trembling violently with horror and pity and revulsion in about equal proportion, Celluci braced his gun with his left hand and, whispering a “Hail Mary” through dry lips, pulled the trigger. The first shot missed. The second creased the back of the creature’s skull with enough force to spin it around and throw it over the stainless steel curve of the isolation box. He never got the chance to fire a third.

  The blow caught him just below the shoulder, knocking him into the trio of oxygen tanks lined up under the window. He lost his grip on the gun, was vaguely aware of it skittering away across the floor, and saw Vicki charging around the end of the box, flashlight raised like a club.

  Vicki had watched Celluci advance on the creature with a curious detachment. It was as though, when she’d seen it appear in the doorway and realized both what it was and what it wasn’t, an overload switch had been tripped and she could no longer react, only wait. Her mouth had moved in response to comments made, but her mind had been disconnected. After the last few days of constant internal turmoil, charges and countercharges and just general hysteria, the peace and quiet was kind of nice. She kept the flashlight beam trained on the creature as it shuffled along and refused to wonder what it was she waited for.

  She thought she understood what motivated Celluci to try and prevent the opening of the box, but she couldn’t seem to make it matter. She heard him speak, but the words got tangled and made no sense. When he pulled his gun, the only thing she felt was mild surprise.

  Muscles spasmed with the first shot, her brain slamming back and forth between her ears. The crack of the second shot jerked her out of her retreat and shook her awake.

  She saw the creature’s arm come up and Celluci fly back. She started moving before he hit the floor. Keeping the beam pointed along her path until she got near enough to finish blind, she raised the heavy flashlight like a club and slammed it down. Contact had a strangely muffled feel.

  Although she’d come so close that the slightly sweet stink of decomposing flesh wrapped around her, she couldn’t actually see the creature she faced. And thank God for small mercies. It had been terrifying enough from a distance. Unfortunately, neither could she see the return blow.

  With only one arm for balance, she went down hard, more concerned with hanging onto her only means of sight than with breaking her fall. She struck, rolled, and crushed her injured wrist against the floor.

  Celluci heard her gasp of pain as
he launched himself back at the creature. What are you doing? screamed the still rational part of his brain. But even while recognizing that the question had merit, the night had gone on too long for him to listen to it.

  With a dull squelch, his shoulder drove into the creature’s ribs, forcing it back toward the door. They went down together, grappled, rolled. He lost track of time, lost track of place, lost track of self until he found himself staring up at the hall ceiling as his spine smashed into the tile. He grunted as the heavy muscles of his back absorbed most, but not all, of the blow. He tried to kick free. Was lifted. Thrown against a wall of shelves. Slid down them. Saw a door closing. And was suddenly alone in darkness.

  Number nine had put the last intruder in the box. She had been pleased with that. So he found a box for this intruder as well.

  Pressing down with both hands, he bent the round metal thing until it would no longer turn.

  Now the intruder would stay in the box.

  It was undoubtedly a storage closet—not that it mattered. Celluci flung himself against the door. It didn’t budge. And when, screaming Italian profanity, he finally found the knob, it didn’t turn.

  Vicki levered herself up onto her knees, head spinning. She assumed the sounds of impact she heard were Celluci and the creature, but at the moment she was physically incapable of going to his aid. Curled around her injured arm, she dry retched, fighting the waves of dizziness that threatened to knock her flat again.

  Damn it, Vicki, get it together! Mike needs you! So you’ve lost a little blood, big fucking deal. It isn’t the first time. Get UP!