1 Blood Price (14 page)

The car purred by behind her.

Making her way back to the sidewalk, Vicki doubted that her luck could last. Celluci had to have saturated this area with his men. Sooner or later, she had to run into someone she knew—probably Celluci himself—and she wasn’t looking forward to explaining just what she was doing roaming about in the middle of a police manhunt.

She continued west along Holborne, marshaling her arguments.
I thought you could use an extra pair of eyes
. But then, so could she.
I doubted you’d be prepared to deal with a vampire
. True, but it’d go over like rats in the drunk tank.
You have no right to keep me away.
Except that they/he did. Every right. It was why there were laws against suicide.

So what am I doing out here anyway? And is this more or less stupid than charging down into a subway station to single-handedly challenge God knows what.
The darkness pressed close around her, waiting for an answer.
What am I trying to prove?

That in spite of everything I can still be a fully functioning member of society.
She snorted.
On the other hand, there’re a number of fully functioning members of society I’m not likely to run into out here tonight.

Which brought the silent interrogation back around to “just what was she trying to prove,” and Vicki decided to leave it there. Things were tough enough without bogging them down further in introspection.

At the corner of Woodmount, she paused. The triple line of streetlights disappeared into the distance to either side and straight ahead. The suspended golden globes were all she could see. Casting about like a hound for a scent, she drew in a deep lungful of the cold night air. All she could smell was earth, damp and musty, freshly exposed by the end of winter. Normally, she liked the smell. Tonight, it reminded her of the grave and she pulled her jacket tighter around her to ward off a sudden chill. In the distance, there was the sound of traffic and farther off still, a dog barked.

There seemed little to choose between the directions, so she turned to her left and headed carefully back south.

A car door slammed.

Vicki’s heart slammed up against her ribs in response. This was it. She was as sure of it as she’d ever been of anything in her life.

She started to run. Slowly at first, well aware that a misstep would result in a fall or worse. Her flashlight remained off; she needed the stations of the streetlights to guide her and the flashlight beam confined her sight. At Baker Street, she rocked to a halt.

Where now? Her other senses strained to make up for near blindness.

Metal screamed against wood; nails forced to release their hold.

East. She turned and raced toward it, stumbled, fell, recovered, and went on, trusting her feet to find a path she couldn’t see. Fifty running paces from the corner, shadow sight marked something crossing her path. It slipped down the narrow drive between two buildings and when Vicki followed, responding to the instinct of the chase, she could see red taillights burning about a hundred yards away.

It smelled as if something had died at the end of the lane. Like the old lady who’d been found the third week of last August but who’d been killed in her small, airless room around the first of July.

She could hear the car engine running, movement against the gravel, and a noise she didn’t want to identify.

The evil that had lingered in the subway tunnel had been only the faintest afterimage of the evil that waited for her here.

A shadow, its parameters undefined, passed between Vicki and the tailight.

Her left hand trailing along a wall of fake brick siding and her right holding the flashlight out before her like the handle cf a lance, Vicki pounded up the drive paying no attention to the small, shrill voice of reason that demanded to know just what the hell she thought she was doing.

Something shrieked and the sound drove her back a half dozen steps.

Every dog in the neighborhood began to howl.

Ignoring the cold sweat beading her body and the knot of fear that made each breath a labored fight, Vicki forced herself to move forward again; the six steps regained, then six more. . . .

Half sprawled across the trunk of the car, she turned on the flashlight.

Horro flickered just beyond the beam’s farthest edge where a wooden garage door swung haphazardly from a single twisted hinge. Darkness seemed to move within the darkness and Vicki’s mind shied away from it so quickly and with such blind panic that it convinced her nothing fingered there at all.

Caught in the light, a young man crouched, one arm flung up to shield his eyes from the glare. At his feet. a body; a bearded man, late thirties, early forties, blood still draining from the ruined throat, thickening and congealing against the gravel. He had been dead before he hit the ground, for only the dead fall with that complete disregard of self that gives them the look of discarded marionettes.

All this Vicki took in at glance. Then the crouching man stood, his open coat spreading and bracketing him like great black leather wings. He took a step toward her, face distorted and eyes squinted nearly shut. Blood had stained his palms and fingers a glistening crimson.

Scrambling in her purse for the heavy silver crucifix she’d acquired that afternoon—and not really, God help her, expected to need—Vicki drew breath to scream for backup. Or maybe just to scream. She never found out which for he took another step toward her and that was all she saw for some time.

 

Henry caught the young woman as she fell and eased her gently to the gravel. He hadn’t wanted to do that, but he couldn’t allow her to scream. There were too many things he couldn’t explain to the police.

She saw me bending over the body
, he thought as he snapped off the flashlight and shoved it into her purse. His too sensitive eyes welcomed the return of night. They felt as though they’d been impaled with hot irons.
Got a good look at me, too. Damn
. Common sense said he should kill her before she had a chance to expose him. He had strength enough to make it look no different from the other deaths. He would be safe again then.

Henry turned and looked past the body—meat now, nothing more—into the torn earthen floor of the garage where the killer had fled. This night had proven the deaths were in no way his responsibility.

“Damn!” He said it aloud this time as approaching sirens and a car door slamming at the end of the drive reminded him of the need for immediate action. Dropping to one knee, he heaved the unconscious young woman over a shoulder and grabbed up her bag in his free hand. The weight posed no problem; like all of his kind he was disproportionately strong, but her dangling height was dangerously awkward.

“Too damn tall in this century,” he muttered, vaulted the chain link fence that bordered the back of the yard, and disappeared with his burden into the night.

Dumping the contents of the huge black purse out on his coffee table, Henry dropped to his knees and rummaged through the mess for something that looked like ID; a wallet, a card case, anything. Nothing.

Nothing? Impossible. These days no one traveled without identification, not even those who traveled only the night. He found both card case and wallet at last in the bag itself, tucked in a side pocket, accessible without having to delve through the main compartment.

“Victoria Nelson, Private Investigator.” He let out a breath he hadn’t been aware of holding as he went through the rest of her papers.
A private investigator, thank God
. He’d been afraid he’d run off with some sort of uniformed police officer, thereby instigating a citywide manhunt. He’d observed, over the centuries that the police, whatever else their failings, took care of their own. A private investigator, though, was a private citizen and as such had probably not yet been missed.

Rising to his feet, Henry looked down at the unconscious woman on his couch. Although he found it distasteful, he would kill to protect himself. Hopefully, this time, it wouldn’t be necessary. He shrugged out of his coat and began to compose what he’d say to her when she woke up . . .

. . . if she woke up.

Her heartbeat filled the apartment, its rhythm almost twice as fast as his own. It called to him to feed, but he held the hunger in check.

He glanced at his watch. 2:13. Sunrise in four hours. If she was concussed. . . .

He hadn’t wanted to hit her. Knocking someone out with a single blow wasn’t easy no matter what movies and television suggested. Sporadic practice over the years had taught him where and how to strike, but no expertise could change the fact that a head blow slammed the brain back and forth within the skull, mashing soft tissue against bone.

And it’s quite an attractive skull, too
, he noted, taking a closer look.
Although there’s a definite hint of obstinacy about the width of that jaw
. He checked her ID again. Thirty-one. Her short dark blond/light brown hair—he frowned, unable to make up his mind—had no touch of gray but tiny laugh wrinkles had begun to form around her eyes. When he’d been “alive,” thirty-one had been middle-aged. Now, it seemed to be barely adult.

She wore no makeup, he approved of that, and the delicate, pale gold down on her cheeks made her skin look like velvet.

And feel like velvet. . . . He drew back his hand and clamped the hunger tighter. It was want, not need, and he would not let it control him.

The tiny muscles of her face shifted and her eyes opened. Like her hair, they were neither one color nor the other; neither blue, nor gray, nor green. The tip of her tongue moistened dry lips and she met his gaze without fear.

“Son of a bitch,” she said clearly, and winced.

 

Vicki came up out of darkness scrambling desperately for information, but the sound of blood pounding in her ears kept drowning out coherent thought. She fought against it. Pain—and, oh God, it hurt—meant danger. She had to know where she was, how she’d gotten there. . . .

A man’s face swam into view inches above her own. a man’s face she recognized.

“Son of a bitch,” she said, and winced. The words, the movement of her jaw, sent fresh shards of pain up into her head. She did what she could to ignore them. The last time she’d seen that face, and the body it was no doubt attached to, it had risen from slaughter and attacked her. Although she had no memory of it, he had obviously knocked her out and brought her here; wherever here was.

She tried to look past him, to get some idea of her surroundings, but the room, if room it was, was too dark. Did she know
anything
she could use?

I’m fully clothed, lying on a couch in the company of an insane killer and, although the rest of my body appears to be functional, my head feels like it’s taken too many shots on goal
. There seemed to be only one thing she could do. She threw herself off the couch.

Unfortunately, gravity proved stronger than the idea.

When she hit the floor, a brilliant fireworks display left afterimages of green and gold and red on the inside of her eyelids and then she sank into darkness again.

The second time Vicki regained consciousness, it happened more quickly than the first and the line between one state and the next was more clearly delineated. This time, she kept her eyes closed.

“That was a stupid thing to do,” a man’s voice observed from somewhere above her right shoulder. She didn’t argue. “It’s entirely possible you won’t believe this,” he continued, “but I don’t want to hurt you.”

To her surprise, she did believe him. Maybe it was the tone, or the timbre, or the ice pack he held against her jaw. Maybe her brains had been scrambled, which seemed more likely.

“I never did want to hurt you. I’m sorry about,” she felt the ice pack shift slightly, “this, but I didn’t think I had time to explain. ”

Vicki cracked open first one eye and then the other. “Explain what?” The pale oval of his face appeared to float in the dim light. She wished she could see him better.

“I didn’t kill that man. I arrived at the body just before you did.”

“Yeah?” She realized suddenly what was wrong. “Where are my glasses?”

“Your . . . oh.” The oval swiveled away and returned a moment later.

She waited, eyes closed, as he pushed the ends in over her ears, approximately where they belonged, and settled the bridge gently against her nose. When she opened her eyes again, things hadn’t changed significantly. “Could you turn on a light?”

Vicki could sense his bemusement as he rose. So she wasn’t reacting as he expected: if he wanted terror, she’d have to try for it later, at present her head hurt too much to make the effort. And besides, if it turned out he was the killer, there wasn’t a damn thing she could do about it now.

The light, although it wasn’t strong enough to banish shadows from far corners, helped. From where she lay, she could see an expensive stereo system and the edge of a bookshelf with glass doors. Slowly, balancing her head like an egg in a spoon, she sat up.

“Are you sure that’s wise?”

She wasn’t. But she wasn’t going to admit it. “I’m fine,” she snapped, closing her throat on a wave of nausea and successfully fighting it back down. Peeling off her gloves, she studied her captor from under beetled brows.

He didn’t look like an insane killer.
Okay, Vicki, you’re so smart, in twenty-five words or less, describe an insane killer
She couldn’t tell what color his eyes were, though an educated guess said light hazel, but his brows and lashes were redder than his strawberry-blond hair—coloring that freckled in the sun. His face was broad, without being in the least bit fat—the kind of face that got labeled honest—and his mouth held just the smallest hint of a cupid’s bow.
Definitely attractive.
She measured his height against the stereo and added,
But short
.