1 Blood Price (16 page)

Henry shook the hand free. Never to go to Sheriffhuton again. Never to see her again. Never to hear her laugh or feel her touch. Never to touch her in return. He clenched his teeth on the howl that threatened to break free. “You don’t understand,” he growled out instead, and strode off down the corridor before the tears he could feel building shamed him.

 

“Christina!” He ran forward, threw himself to his knees, and buried his head in her lap. For a time, the world became the touch of her hands and the sound of her voice. When at last he had the strength to pull away, it was only far enough to see her face. “What are you doing here? Father and Norfolk, at least, suspect and if they find you. . . . ”

She stroked cool fingers across his brow. “They won’t find me. I have a safe haven for the daylight hours and we will not have so many nights together that they will discover us.” She paused and cupped his cheek in her palm. “I am going away, but I could not leave without saying good-bye.”

“Going away?” Henry repeated stupidly.

She nodded, her unbound hair falling forward. “It has become too dangerous for me in England.”

“But where. . . .”

“France, I think. For now.”

He caught up her hands in both of his. “Take me with you. I cannot live without you.”

A wry smile curved her lips. “You cannot exactly
live
with me,” she reminded him.

“Live, die, unlive, undie.” He leapt to his feet and threw his arms wide. “I don’t care as long as I’m with you.”

“You’re very young.”

The words lacked conviction and he could see the indecision on her face. She wanted him! Oh, blessed Jesu and all the saints, she wanted him. “How old were you when you died?” he demanded.

She bit her lip. “Seventeen.”

“I shall be seventeen in two months.” He threw himself back on his knees. “Can’t you wait that long?”

“Two months. . . .”

“Just two.” He couldn’t keep the triumph from his voice. “Then you will have me for all eternity.”

She laughed then and pulled him to her breast. “You think highly of yourself, milord.”

“I do,” he agreed, his voice a little muffled.

“If your lady wife should come in. . . .”

“Mary? She has rooms of her own and is happy to stay in them.” Still on his knees, he pulled her to the bed.

Two months later, she began to feed nightly, taking as much as he could bear each night.

Norfolk posted guards on his room. Henry ordered them away, for the first time in his life his father’s son.

Two months after that, while revered doctors scratched their heads and wondered at his failing, while Norfolk tore the neighborhood apart in a fruitless search, she pulled him to her breast again and he suckled the blood of eternal life.

“Let me get this straight; you’re the bastard son of Henry VIII?”

“That’s right.” Henry Fitzroy, once Duke of Richmond and Somerset, Earl of Nottingham, and Knight of the Garter, leaned his forehead against the cool glass of the wincow and looked down at the lights of Toronto. It had been a long time since he’d told the story; he’d forgotten how drained it left him.

Vicki looked down at the book of the Tudor age, spread open on her lap, and tapped a paragraph. “It says here you died at seventeen.”

Shaking off his lethargy, Henry turned to face her. “Yes, well, I got better.”

“You don’t look seventeen.” She frowned. “Mid-twenties I’d say, no younger.”

He shrugged. “We age, but we age slowly.”

“It doesn’t say so here, but wasn’t there some mystery about your funeral?” One corner of her mouth quirked up at his surprised expression, the best she could manage considering the condition of her jaw. “I have a BA in History.”

“Isn’t that an unusual degree for a person in your line of work?”

He meant for a private investigator, she realized, but it had been just as unusual for a cop. If she had a nickel for every time someone, usually a superior officer, had dragged out that hoary old chestnut,
those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it
, she’d be a rich woman. “It hasn’t slowed me down,” she told him a little pointedly. “The funeral?”

“Yes, well, it wasn’t what I’d been expecting, that’s for certain.” He clasped his hands together to still their shaking and although he fought it, the memories caught him up again. . . .

Waking—confused and disoriented. Slowly, he became aware of his heartbeat and allowed it to pull him back to full consciousness. He’d never been in a darkness so complete and, in spite of Christina’s remembered reassurance, he began to panic. The panic grew when he tried to push the lid off the crypt and found he couldn’t move. Not stone above him, but rough wood embracing him so closely that the rise and fall of his chest brushed against the boards. All around, the smell of earth.

Not a noble’s tomb but a common grave.

Screaming until his throat was raw, he twisted and thrashed through the little movement he had but, although the wood creaked once or twice, the weight of earth was absolute.

He stopped then, for he realized that to destroy the coffin and lie covered only in the earth would be infinitely worse. That was when the hunger began. He had no idea how long he lay, paralyzed with terror, frenzied need clawing at his gut, but his sanity hung by a thread when he heard a shovel blade bite into the dirt above him.

“You know,” he said, scrubbing a hand across his face, terror still echoing faintly behind the words, “there’s a very good reason most vampires come from the nobility; a crypt is a great deal easier to get out of. I’d been buried good and deep and it took Christina three days to find me and dig me free.” Sometimes, even four centuries later, when he woke in the evening, he was back there. Alone. In the dark. Facing eternity.

“So your father,” Vicki paused, she had trouble with this next bit, “Henry VIII, really did suspect?”

Henry laughed, but the sound had little humor. “Oh, he more than suspected. I discovered later that he’d ordered a stake driven through my heart, my mouth stuffed with garlic and the lips sewn shut, then my head removed and buried separately. Thank God, Norfolk remained a true friend until the end.”

“You saw him again?”

“A couple of times. He understood better than I thought.”

“What happened to Christina?”

“She guided me through the frenzy that follows the change. She guarded me during the year I slept as my body adapted to its new condition. She taught me how to feed without killing. And then she left.”

“She left?” Vicki’s brows flew almost to her hairline. “After all that, she left?”

Henry turned again to look out at the lights of the city. She could be out there, he’d never know. Nor, he had to admit a little sadly, would he care. “When the parent/ child link is over, we prefer to hunt alone. Our closest bonds are formed when we feed and we can’t feed from each other.” He rested his hand against the glass. “The emotional bond, the love if you will, that causes us to offer our blood to a mortal never survives the change.”

“But you could still. . . .”

“Yes, but it isn’t the same.” He shook himself free of the melancholy and faced her again. “That also is tied too closely to feeding.”

“Oh. Then the stories about vampiric . . . uh . . . .”

“Prowess?” Henry supplied with a grin. “Are true. But then, we get a lot of time to practice.”

Vicki felt the heat rise in her face and she had to drop her gaze. Four hundred and fifty years of practice. . . . Involuntarily, she clenched her teeth and the sudden sharp pain from her jaw came as a welcome distraction.
Not tonight, I’ve got a headache
. She closed the book on her lap and carefully set it aside, glancing down at her watch as she did. 4:43.
I’ve heard some interesting confessions in my time, but this one
. . . . The option, of course, existed to disbelieve everything she’d heard. To get out of the apartment and away from a certified nut case and call for the people in the white coats to lock Mr. Fitzroy, bastard son of Henry VIII, etcetera, etcetera, away where he belonged. Except, she did believe and trying to convince herself she didn’t would be trying to convince herself of a lie.

“Why did you tell me all this?” she asked at last.

Henry shrugged. “The way I saw it, I had two options. I could trust you or I could kill you. If I trusted you first,” he spread his hands, “and discovered it was a bad idea, I could still kill you before you could do me any harm.”

“Now wait a minute,” Vicki bridled. “I’m not that easy to kill!” He was standing at the window; ten, maybe twelve feet away. Less than a heartbeat later he sat beside her on the couch, both hands resting lightly around her neck. She couldn’t have stopped him. She hadn’t even seen him move. “Oh,” she said.

He removed his hands and continued as though she hadn’t interrupted. “But if I killed you first, well, that would be that. And I think we can help each other.”

“How?” Up close, he became a little overwhelming and she had to fight the desire to move away. Or move closer.
Four hundred and fifty years develops a forceful personality
, she observed, shifting her gaze to the white velvet upholstery.

“The demon hunts at might. So do I. But the one who calls the demon is mortal and must live his life during the day.”

“You’re suggesting that we team up?”

“Until the demon is captured, yes.”

She brushed the nap of the velvet back and forth, back and forth, and then looked up at him again.
Light hazel
eyes.
I
was right
. “Why do you care?”

“About catching the demon?” Henry stood and paced back to the window. “I don’t, not specifically, but the papers are blaming the killings on vampires and are putting us all in danger.” Down below, the headlights of a lone car sped up Jarvis Street. “Until just recently, even I thought it was one of my kind; a child, abandoned, untrained.”

“What, purposefully left to fend for itself?”

“Perhaps. Perhaps the parent had no idea there was a child at all.”

“I thought you said there had to be an emotional bond.”

“No, I said the emotional bond did not survive past the change, I didn’t say that it had to exist. My kind can create children for as many bad or accidental reasons as yours. Technically, all that is needed is for the vampire to feed too deeply and for the mortal to feed in return.”

“For the mortal to feed in return? How the hell would that happen?”

He turned to face her. “I take it,” he said dryly, “you don’t bite.”

Vicki felt her cheeks burn and hurriedly changed the subject. “You were looking for the child?”

“Tonight?” Henry shook his head. “No, tonight I knew and I was looking for the demon.” He walked to the couch and leaned over it toward her, hands braced against the pale wood inlaid in the arm. “When the killings stop, the stories will stop and vampires will retreat back into myth and race memory. We prefer it that way. In fact, we work very hard to keep it that way. If the papers convince their readers we are real, they can find us—our habits are too well known.” He caught her gaze, held it, and grimly bared his teeth. “I, for one, don’t intend to end up staked for something I didn’t do.”