Blood Debt (9 page)

Gaze still on the floor, Vicki murmured, “Tell you what, Henry. I promise to not go on a childish rampage through your territory if you promise to let go a little.”

“It won't be easy.”

“Nothing worthwhile ever is.”

“Oh, spare me,” Celluci muttered.

Henry stepped away from the window and Vicki backed up, carefully maintaining the distance between them. He paused for a moment, as though testing their relative positions. When neither of them seemed inclined to move closer, he said, a little wearily, “I've got the supplies you'll need to secure that window down in my locker. Why don't you two check out your accommodations while Tony and I go get them?”

Barely suppressing the urge to snarl as he went by, Vicki nodded, not trusting her voice. Celluci took one look at her face and pulled her carefully to his side. She jerked her arm free but remained close, using his scent to mask Henry's.

“There,” she said when the door closed and they were alone, “that wasn't so bad. We've definitely made progress.”

“So unclench your teeth.”

A muscle jumped in her jaw. “Not yet.”

When it seemed that time enough had passed to give them a clear path out the door and down the hall, they made their way to number 1409.

“Jesus H. Christ.”

“On crutches,” Vicki added.

The walls had been marbled. The windows wore four different types of swag. The furniture appeared to have been upholstered in raw silk. The overlapping carpets were Persian. Artwork, two dimensional and three, had been arranged for effect. Number 1409 looked like it had been decorated for the benefit of photographers from
Vancouver Life Magazine
.

“I didn't think people actually lived like this.” Turning her back on the splendors of the living room, Vicki started down the hall. “Do you think the rest of the place is the same?”

A pair of concrete Chinese temple dogs guarded a huge basket of dried roses in one corner of the master bedroom. One end of the king-sized bed had been stacked with about fifty pillows in various shapes and shades. The silk moire duvet cover matched the wallpaper. The drapes, although the same fabric, were several shades darker.

“This room probably cost as much as my whole house,” Celluci muttered.

“Certainly classier than the Holiday Inn,” Vicki agreed, stepping back into the hall and opening the door to the smallest of the three bedrooms. “Oh, my God.” She froze in the doorway. “I can't stay in this.”

Celluci peered over her shoulder and started to laugh.

A huge doll, with a pink-and-white crocheted skirt, sat in the middle of the pink satin bedspread. The pink frilly bedskirt matched the pink frilly curtains which complemented the pink frills on the pale pink armchair tucked into a corner. The dresser and the trunk at the foot of the bed were antique white. The bed itself was the most ornate brass monstrosity either of them had ever seen, covered in curlicues and enameled flowers, with a giant heart in the center of both the head and footboard.

Laughing too hard to stand, Celluci collapsed against the wall clutching his stomach. “The thought,” he began, looked from Vicki to the bed, and couldn't finish.

“The thought . . .” A second attempt got no further than the first.

“What's the matter, chuckles? Can't handle the thought of a vampire in such feminine surroundings?”

“Vicki . . .” Wiping his streaming eyes with one hand, he waved the other into the room. “. . . I can't handle the thought of
you
in these surroundings. I hadn't even started thinking about the other.”

Her lips twitched. “It does look like it's been decorated by Polly Pocket, doesn't it?”

A few moments later, Tony found them sitting shoulder-to-shoulder on the hall floor, wearing the expressions of people who've nearly laughed themselves sick. “No one answered when I knocked,” he explained. “What's so funny?”

Vicki nodded toward the room and gasped, “A pink plastic crypt that fits in the palm of your hand.”

“Yeah. Okay.” He glanced inside, shrugged, and looked back down at the two of them. “I have no idea of what you're talking about, but the stuff to block the window's outside. Henry thought it would be best if he didn't come in. You know, keeping his scent out.”

Braced against the wall, Vicki got to her feet, extended a hand down to Celluci, and stopped herself just before she lifted him effortlessly upright—displays of strength bothered him more than anything else. When she noticed Tony watching her and realized he understood what she'd done, she clenched her teeth in irritation. “This is not a case of a woman being less than she can to save the machismo of some man,” she growled. “This is a person making a compromise for someone she cares about.”

Tony backed up, both hands raised. “I didn't say anything.”

“I could hear you thinking.”

As she stomped by him, Tony glanced over at Celluci. “Has she always been that moody?”

Celluci ignored him. “What machismo?” he demanded following her down the hall. “What the hell are you talking about?”

Tony sighed, “Never mind.” Trailing along behind, he waited for a break in the argument and announced, “Henry says that once you get the stuff inside and before you put it up, we should all meet in his apartment to discuss the case.”

Resting two sheets of three-quarter-inch plywood against the wall, Celluci frowned. “Wouldn't finding neutral territory make more sense?”

“He says his place'll do since Vicki's already scented it.”

“He what?”

“Hey! Victory!” Eyes wide, Tony backed up until he hit a sideboard and he stopped cold, one hand flung out to steady an antique candelabra rocked by the impact. “Chill. I'm just repeating what Henry said.”

“He makes it sound as though I've been spraying the furniture.”

Remembering his earlier conversation with Celluci, Tony didn't think it would be wise to add that Henry had also drawn in a deep breath, his expression had softened, and he'd murmured, “
God, how I miss her
.” At the time, Tony had been tempted to remind him none too gently that Vicki was just down the hall and that if he missed her it was his own damned fault. That wasn't, however, a tone one took with Henry Fitzroy.

“While Vicki and I secure that room, I suggest you head over to the city morgue at Vancouver General and ID a corpse.”

Henry looked down the length of his dining room table and raised a red-gold brow. “I beg your pardon?”

“If there's a ghost, odds are good that somewhere there's a body.” Fully conscious that their precarious truce would need constant maintenance, Celluci buried his initial reaction to being patronized by a man who wrote romance novels and managed to keep his voice calm and his body language noncommittal. “The odds are better that a handless body, if found, is going to make the paper. So this afternoon, while you two were getting your beauty sleep, I went through your recycling.” He picked up the folded newspaper and tossed it down to Henry. “A handless body got pulled out of the harbor right about when your ghost showed up.”

“It isn't my ghost,” Henry told him tersely.

Celluci shrugged. “Whatever. Body's still going to be at the morgue. Police haven't been able to ID it or that would be in a later edition.”

“And if it is the right body?” He slid the paper back down the length of the table.

“We find out what the police know,” Celluci began, “and then . . .” Cold fingers closed around his wrist like a vise.

“Mike. My case. Before you solve it, don't you think you ought to maybe talk things over with me?”

He half turned to face her. Fully aware of the danger, he didn't quite meet her eyes. “Vicki. Our case. I assumed we'd talk things over while Henry was at the morgue. Or would you rather I just bunked with Tony and went on vacation until you decide to go home?”

Eyes narrowed, she let go of his arm. Unwilling to look at either him or Henry, she swept her gaze around the room and suddenly laughed. “I think Tony's terrified you might actually make good on that threat.”

“Not terrified,” Tony protested as the other three turned to stare at him. “It's just I'm staying with friends and they haven't got room and it's not like . . .” His voice trailed off, and he directed a withering gaze at Vicki. “Thanks a lot.”

“You can come home,” Henry reminded him. “My initial plan seems to have been . . . discarded.”

“Nah.” The younger man shifted in his chair. “I already moved my stuff, and John and Gerry made room for me, so it'd be rude to just leave.”

“Suit yourself.” His brow furrowed thoughtfully, but just as he was about to speak, Celluci, who'd been watching Tony's face carefully, cut him off.

“Better see if you can get a copy of the autopsy report while you're at the hospital.”

The red-gold brow rose again, but if Henry suspected the other man's timing, he let it go. If Tony wanted to keep secrets with Michael Celluci, that was none of his business. “Anything else?” he asked dryly as he stood.

“Yeah, write out a full description of your ghost—especially noting any differences between it and the body in morgue.”

“And the other spirits? Those within the scream?”

“Can you describe them?”

Never fond of admitting inability, and less fond of it under these circumstances with these listeners, Henry shook his head. “No.”

“Then let's just forget them for the moment and stick with the description you can give.”

“You can put it in with the autopsy report,” Vicki declared, standing as well. “Now, if you'll excuse us . . .” Her tone made it clear he could excuse them or not, it made little difference to her. “We're going to seal off my sanctuary while you put flesh to your ghost.”

“Vicki.”

She paused, one hand on the back of her chair.

“As I said before, it isn't easy putting aside a tenet I've held for over four hundred and fifty years. Even if I've never tested it, even if it's no longer true, the belief that vampires are incapable of physical contact is, if nothing else, a strong tradition.”

Her hand moved up to Celluci's shoulder and gripped it reassuringly as it tensed. “I'm not exactly a traditional vampire, Henry.”

He smiled, and it was the smile she remembered from before the change. “Then stop being such a deliberate pain in the ass.”

Five

THE city morgue was in the basement at Vancouver General Hospital. Henry supposed it worked on the same principle as the crypts under cathedrals—the deeper in the ground, the cooler the ambient temperature, the less chance of the rot seeping into the rest of the building.

Hospitals had never been one of Henry's favorite places. Not because of light levels kept painfully high for eyes adapted to darkness. Not even because of the omnipresent and unpleasant odor of antiseptic mixed thoroughly with disease.

It was the despair.

It hung in the halls like smoke; from the patients who knew they were dying, from the patients who feared they were dying. That modern medicine resulted in far more successes than failures made little difference.

Predators preyed on the weak. The defenseless. The despairing.

Even though he had already fed, the Hunger strained against Henry's control as he stepped over the threshold and into the building. His reaction wasn't about feeding; it was about killing, killing because he could, because they were all but asking him to. As the door closed behind him, he could feel civilization sloughing away, exposing the Hunter beneath.

He'd decided to gain access through Emergency, reasoning that he could hide his movements in the chaos that always seemed to exist in the ER of big city hospitals. As far as it went, the reasoning was sound, but the bloodscent hanging over the crowded waiting room came very close to loosing the Hunger. Acutely conscious of the weak and injured around him, their lives throbbing in an atmosphere reeking of despair, Henry stepped away from the door and moved deeper into the building.

No one tried to stop him.

Those who saw him quickly looked away.

Passing as swiftly as possible through the crowded emergency waiting room, he slipped unnoticed into the first stairwell he found. The air was clearer there, but he had no time to compose himself.

Folklore aside, vampires not only showed up in mirrors but in security cameras as well.

There are times
, he thought, racing down the stairs at full speed, a dark flicker across a distant monitor,
when I hate this century
.

Two flights down, he opened a door marked, CITY MORGUE/PARKING LEVEL TWO and stepped gratefully into a dimly lit corridor. While he suspected that budget cuts were the reason for two out of three fluorescent banks to be off—there'd be no patients wandering about down here after all and, given the hour, few staff—it was hard not to appreciate the atmosphere created by the lack of light. The hall leading to the morgue
should
be barred with shadow.

Teeth bared but more comfortable than he'd been since leaving his car, Henry followed the trail of death to an unlocked door. Pulling on a pair of leather driving gloves, he passed silently through an outer office and into the actual morgue.

Here, he breathed easier still. In these rooms, the blood spilled was lifeless and the dead were past fear.

Only six of the refrigerated drawers were in use. Five were labeled with the occupant's name. The sixth held the body of the handless man pulled out of Vancouver Harbor.

His face had taken a beating—although it was unclear whether it had happened in the water or before—but enough areas of definition remained for Henry to recognize his ghost. Had he any doubts, the fuzzy blue homemade tattoo of a dripping dagger on the left forearm would have convinced him.

Although there were computer files as well, paper copies of recent autopsy reports were stored in a huge filing cabinet against one wall of the office. It only took a moment to match the number on the drawer with the number on the file folder and a moment more to set the first page on the photocopier.

He heard the jangle of keys in the hall the instant after he pushed print.

Kevin Lam tossed his car keys from hand to hand as he hurried down the corridor. It had been one hell of a shift and all he wanted to do was go home, eat something that didn't taste like disinfectant, and see if maybe there was a ball game on. He didn't actually like baseball that much, but a ten-hour shift had left him so brain dead he figured it had the only plot on the tube he'd be able to understand.

Once I'm in the car, I'm safe. They can't call me back. I can go home.
Eyes locked on the entrance to the parking garage at the end of the hall, he almost missed the flash of light from the morgue office.

The supposedly deserted morgue office.

The frosted glass in the upper half of the door was dark. From the hall outside, it seemed that no one was working late.

“So who the hell is running the photocopier?” Kevin glanced toward the parking garage and sighed. If he called hospital security, he could be stuck here for hours even if it turned out to be nothing. And if it did turn out to be nothing, he'd be the butt of every morgue joke in the hospital. “I'll just open the door and turn on the light, see that it's nothing, and then go home.”

And if it is something?
he asked himself as he shoved his keys in his pocket and reached for the door. He shook his head.
Yeah, right. Like someone's actually going to be standing in a dark morgue at midnight making photocopies
.

Henry had plenty of time to hide. He just didn't bother.

In the instant the orderly stood silhouetted in the open door, one hand reaching for the light switch, Henry grabbed the front of his uniform, dragged him into the room, and closed the door.

The Hunger roared in his ears, restraints rubbed raw by Vicki's presence, then further torn by his passage through the massed despair and bloodscent in the building above. Self-preservation barely held him in check as he shoved the young man down onto a desk.

It wasn't completely black in the room. LEDs gleamed on various pieces of equipment and an exit light glowed over the door. Kevin saw the pale oval of a face bend over him, felt himself fall into the bottomless depths of dark eyes, and choked back a scream when a cold voice told him to be silent.

Strong fingers gripped his wrist, the touch both chilling and burning, sensations racing up his arm with his pulse and causing his heart to pound. His breathing quickened. It might have been fear. It might have been something darker.

He didn't understand when the pale face withdrew and that same cold voice muttered, “And I accused her of acting like a child.” When the face returned, when the voice told him to forget, he forgot gladly.

Tony had left just after Henry had. She'd sent Celluci to bed at about two. All the lights were out except a small crescent moon lamp on a shelf in the entryway. With the curtains open, the city spilled into the living room, banishing anything approaching darkness for those who lived at night. Having carefully moved two days' worth of unopened mail to one side, Vicki sat at the mahogany desk staring down at a blank piece of paper and waiting for Henry.

He'd be back soon. He had to be if he wanted to give her any chance to study the autopsy report and maybe come to a few conclusions before dawn.

If she thought about waiting for
Henry
, she was fine. When she started thinking about what Henry was, her thoughts were tinted red.

Vampire.

But he always had been—he wasn't the one who'd changed.

She fidgeted with the heavy fountain pen she'd found in one of the desk drawers, turning the smooth black weight over and over, the repetition vaguely soothing.

All right I'm not what I was, but I'm still who I was. I accepted the limitations of the RP—okay, not gracefully
, honesty forced her to admit,
but I accepted them. I didn't let it keep me from living my life exactly as I pleased. I am here to find a murderer, and I'm not going to let Henry Fitzroy change the way I operate. He's my friend, and we're going to act like friends if I have to rip him open and feed on his steaming entrails!

The pen snapped between her fingers.

“Shit!”

Breathing heavily, Vicki barely kept herself from throwing the pieces aside and spraying a room full of very expensive upholstery in ink. Trembling with the effort, she set both halves of the pen gently in the middle of the desk then surged to her feet and viciously kicked the chair away.

While a small voice in the back of her head wondered where the hell this was coming from, she headed for the door, the Hunger rising. Eyes gleaming silver in the mirror wall of the entry, she reached for the doorknob and realized another heart beat in unison with hers.

Henry.

In the corridor. Almost at the door.

Vampire.

Then memory added Celluci's opinion.

Romance writer.

Vicki grabbed onto that and used it to bludgeon her instinctive response back into the shadows. Her breathing slowed and the roaring in her ears dimmed to a gentle growl. Vampires did not share territories with other vampires, but there was nothing that said vampires could not share a territory with romance writers.

As Tony had said. It was an attitude thing.

And if there's one thing I excel at, it's attitude
. Holding tightly to that thought, she opened the door and said, “What the hell took you so long?”

Henry recoiled a step at her proximity, eyes darkening, a snarl pulling his lips back off his teeth. “Don't push it, Vicki.”

“Hey . . .” She spread her hands, the gesture serving a double function of emphasis and of readiness should she need to go for his throat. “I just asked you a question, you're the one who's overreacting.” Somehow it came out sounding like a challenge which was not at all what she'd intended. It had been easier with the door between them; face-to-face, her visceral reaction to the threat he posed was harder to ignore. “Look, Henry, it was getting late, I was getting worried; okay?”

“Why worried?”

Because you're old and slowing down
 . . .
Where the hell did that come from?
Shaken, Vicki shoved the thought back into her subconscious. “Forget it. What did you find out?”

Forgetting was safer for them both than responding. He'd seen the threat surface, seen her push it away. Considering the short time she'd spent in the night, her control was nothing short of incredible. A faint hint of jealousy, that she should so easily push aside the demands of her nature, added itself to the emotional maelstrom below his barely achieved surface calm. “The ghost has a body. As requested, I made a copy of the autopsy report and added a full description.”

“Thanks.” Her fingers crumpled the yellow file folder and, stepping backward, she closed the door between them once again. Acutely aware of the moment he lingered, when she finally heard him walk away and go into his own condo, she sagged back against the carved cedar. “So much for the romance writer defense.” Old instincts told her to follow and patch things up. New instincts told her to follow and destroy him.

Leaning on the door, she breathed deeply until his scent had been thoroughly mixed with the nonthreatening, expensive potpourri scent of the apartment. “This is really starting to piss me off. Nothing runs my life like this. Nothing!” Returning to the desk, she slapped the creased file folder down on the polished wood. “I am going to beat this . . .”

She trapped the tag behind her teeth. Under the circumstances, adding “if it kills me” seemed a little too much like tempting fate.

Down the hall, Henry stood staring out at the West End, rubbing his throbbing temples. It could have been much worse—he'd expected it to have been much worse. Neither of them had actually attacked, and their conversation, while short, had been essentially civil. It was beginning to look as though Vicki had been right all along. Perhaps the old rules could be changed.

After all, coyotes had been solitary hunters for centuries and
they
were learning to hunt in packs. One corner of his mouth quirked up as he remembered a recent news report of coyotes eating household pets in North Vancouver.

“On second thought, perhaps that's not the most flattering of comparisons,” he murmured to the night.

Vicki's strength had surprised him, although he supposed it shouldn't—her strength came from who she was, not what. After he worked past the jealousy, he found a tenuous faith in that strength beginning to push aside his expectations, beginning to allow him to have faith in himself.

The desire to throw her out of his territory in bleeding chunks persisted, but, for the first time, he realized the feeling didn't necessarily have to be acted upon.

Suddenly hopeful, he headed for the shower to wash off the lingering stink of the hospital.

“Mike, wake up. We need to talk before sunrise.” Only experience allowed her to translate his mumbled response as “I'm awake,” but since his eyes remained closed and his breathing had barely changed, she chose not to believe it.

Rather than use borrowed bedding, he'd rolled his sleeping bag out in the center of the king-sized bed but hadn't bothered to zip it up. Kneeling by his side, Vicki reached through the gap and wrapped her fingers around the warmest part of his anatomy.

“Jesus H. Christ, Vicki! Your hands are freezing!”

She grinned, having jerked back too quickly for his wild swing to connect. “
Now
you're awake.”

“No shit.” Squinting past her, he managed to focus on the clock beside the bed. “4:03. That's just great. Whatever we need to talk about had better be fucking important.”

“You actually heard me say we needed to talk?”

“I told you I was awake.” He yawned and dragged in another pillow to prop up his head. “So what is it?”

“If it's
our
case, then
we
should discuss it.”

“
You
couldn't have left
me
a note?”

“What, and let you sleep?” Picking up the file folder from the end of the bed, she crossed her legs and started to read. “Henry's ghost was a male Caucasian between twenty and twenty-five, a smoker who probably died of a beating he'd received sometime before he went into the water, who'd had a kidney surgically removed within the last month which was not, by the way, what killed him. After death, his hands, wrists, and about two inches of forearm were removed, probably with an ax. His body was later found in Vancouver Harbor.” She frowned down at the photocopy of the autopsy pictures. “We can assume, since he's still lying unnamed in the morgue, the police scanned his picture into the system and didn't find a match. At this point, there're three things they should be doing.”