1 Blood Price (32 page)

“He’s never acted like this before,” she explained. “All of a sudden he just started barking, like he’d been possessed. I thought if I got him outside. . . .”

“It’d be quieter, anyway,” he agreed. “Can I give you a hand?”

“Please.” Her voice had become a little desperate. Between the two of them, they dragged the still barking mastiff into the elevator.

“I don’t understand this,” she panted. “He usually wouldn’t hurt a fly.”

“Well, he hasn’t hurt anything but a few eardrums,” he reassured her, moving his blocking knee out of the way as the doors closed. “Good luck!”

He could hear Owen’s deep chested bark still sounding up the elevator shaft, could hear the frenzied barking of his own two. Then, as suddenly as it began, it stopped. He paused, frowning, heard one final whimper, and then complete and utter silence. Shaking his head, he went inside.

Dribbling viscous yellow fluid from a number of wounds, it snatched up the grimoire and limped out onto the balcony. The names and incantations made the book of demon lore an uncomfortable weight, by far the heaviest item it had yet retrieved. And it hurt. The not-mortal it had fought had hurt it. Much of its surface changed sluggishly back and forth from gray mottled black to black mottled gray and its right wing membrane had been torn.

It must return the grimoire to the master, but first it needed to feed. The injured membrane could carry it from this high dwelling to the ground and once there it must quickly find a life to heal it. There were many lives around. It did not think it would have difficulty finding one to take.

It dropped off into the night, yellow fluid glistening where it had been standing.

Mrs. Hughes smiled as she listened to Owen bounding around in the bushes. To her intense relief, he’d calmed down in the elevator and had been a perfect lamb ever since. As if aware of her thought, he backed out into a clearing, checked to see where she was, wuffled happily, and bounded off again.

She knew she was supposed to keep him on the leash, even in the ravine, but when they came down at night with no one else around she always let him run—both for his enjoyment and for hers. Neither one of them was happy moving at the other’s pace.

Tucking her hands into her pockets, she hunched her shoulders against a sudden chill wind. Spring. She was certain, had arrived before Easter when she was a girl and they’d never had to wear gloves sixteen days into April. The wind made a second pass and Mrs. Hughes wrinkled her nose in distaste. It smelled very much like something at least the size of a raccoon had died over to the east and was now in an advanced stage of decay. What was worse, from the way the bushes were rustling, Owen had already found it and was no doubt preparing to roll.

“Owen!” She advanced a couple of steps, readying the leash. “Owen!” The fetid smell of rotting meat grew stronger and she sighed. First the hysteria and now this—she’d be spending the rest of the night bathing the dog. “Ow. . . .”

The demon ripped the second half of the word from her throat, caught the falling body in its other hand, and pulled the wound up to the gaping circle of its mouth. Sucking noisily, it began to ingest the blood it needed to heal. It staggered and almost dropped its meal as a heavy weight slammed into it from the back and claws dragged lines of pain from shoulders to hip. Snarling, drooling red, it turned.

Owen’s lips were drawn back, his ears were flat against his skull, and his own snarl was more a howl as he threw himself forward again. He twisted in midair, spun around by a glancing blow, and landed heavily on three legs, blood staining his tan shoulder almost black. Maddened by the demon’s proximity, he snarled again and struck at the dangling bit of wing, crushing it in his powerful jaws.

Before the dog could bring his massive neck and shoulder muscles into play, the demon kicked out. One long talon drove through a rib and dragged six inches deep through the length of the mastiff’s body, spilling a glistening pile of intestines into the dirt.

With one last, feeble toss of his head, Owen managed to tear the already injured wing membrane further, then the light blazing in his eyes slowly dimmed and with a final hate-filled growl, he died.

Even in death, his jaws kept their hold and the demon had to rip them apart before it could be free.

Ten minutes later, a pair of teenagers, searching for a secluded corner, came down into the ravine. The path had a number of steep and rocky spots and with eyes not yet adjusted to the darkness it was doubly treacherous. The young man walked a little out in front, trailing her behind him at the end of their linked hands—not from any chivalrous need to test the path, he was just the more anxious to get where they were going.

When he began to fall, other arm windmilling, she cast the hand she held away lest she be dragged down, too. He hit the ground with a peculiar, damp sound and lay there for a moment, staring into shadows she couldn’t penetrate.

“Pat?”

His answer was almost a whimper and he scrambled backward and onto his feet. Both his hands and knees were dark as though he’d fallen into mud. She wrinkled her nose at a smell she could almost but not quite identify.

“Pat?”

His eyes were wide, whites gleaming all around, and although his mouth worked, no sound emerged.

She frowned and, after taking two very careful steps forward, squatted. The ground under her fingertips was damp and slightly sticky. The smell had grown stronger. Gradually her eyes adjusted and, not bound by any social expectations of machismo, she screamed. And continued to scream for some time.

Vicki squinted, trying desperately to bring the distant blur of lights into focus. She knew the bright white beam pouring down into the ravine had to be the searchlight of a police car, although she couldn’t actually see the car. She could hear an excited babble of voices but not make out the crowd they had to be coming from. It was late. She should be at Henry’s. But there might be something she could do to help. . . . Keeping one hand on the concrete wall surrounding the ManuLife head office, she turned onto St. Paul’s Square and aimed herself at the light.

It never failed to amaze her how quickly an accident of any kind could draw a crowd—even at past midnight on a Monday. Didn’t any of these people have to be at work in the morning? Two more police cars screamed past and a couple of young men running up the street to watch nearly knocked her down. She barely noticed either of them. Past midnight. . . .

Fingers skimming along the concrete, she began to move faster until one of the voices rising out of the babble stopped her in her tracks.

“. . . her throat gone just like the others.”

Henry had been wrong. The demon had killed again tonight. Although why here, practically at the heart of the city, miles from any of the possible names? Henry, and the
feeling
that kept him at his apartment tonight. . . .

“Damn!” Trusting her feet to find their own path, Vicki turned and started to run, thrusting her way through the steadily arriving stream of the curious. She stumbled over a curb she couldn’t see, clipped her shoulder against an ill-defined blur that might have been a pole, and careened off at least three people too slow to move out of her way. She had to get to Henry.

As she reached his building, an ambulance raced by and a group of people surged up the circular drive and after it, trailing along behind like a group of ghoulish goslings as it squealed around the corner onto St. Paul’s Square. The security guard must’ve been among them for when Vicki pushed through the doors and into the lobby, his desk was empty.

“God
double
damn!”

She reached over and found the switch that opened the inner door but, as she’d feared, he’d locked it down and taken the key with him. Too furious and too worried even to swear, she gave the door a vicious yank. To her surprise it swung open, the lock protesting as a metal tongue that hadn’t quite caught pulled free. She dashed through, took a second to shut it carefully behind her—old habits die hard—raced across the inner lobby and jabbed at the elevator buttons.

She knew full well that continued jabbing would do no good, but she did it anyway.

The ride up to the fourteenth floor seemed to take days, months even, and adrenaline had her bouncing off the walls. Henry’s door was locked. So certain was she that Henry was in trouble, it never even occurred to her to knock. Scrambling in her bag, she pulled out her lock picks and took a few deep breaths to steady her hands. Although fear still screamed
Hurry!
she forced herself to slowly insert the proper probe and more slowly still work on the delicate manipulations that would replace the key.

After an agonizingly stretched few moments during which she thought the expensive lock was beyond her skill, just about when she was wishing Dirty Harry would show up and blow the door off its hinges, the last of the tumblers dropped. Breathing again, thanking God the builders hadn’t gone with electronics, she threw the picks into her bag and yanked open the door.

The wind whistling in from the balcony had blown away much of the stench, but a miasma of rot lingered. Again she thought of the old woman they had found six weeks dead in high summer, but this time her imagination gave the body Henry’s face. She knew the odor came from the demon, but her gut kept insisting otherwise.

“Henry?”

Reaching behind her, she tugged the door closed and groped for a light switch. She couldn’t see a damned thing. Henry could be dead at her feet and she’d never. . . .

He wasn’t quite at her feet. He lay sprawled over the tipped couch, half covered in torn upholstery. And he wasn’t dead. The dead have a posture the living are unable to imitate.

Impossible to avoid, glass glittered in the carpet like an indoor ice field. The balcony door, the coffee table, the television—the part of Vicki trained to observe in the midst of disaster inventoried the different colored shards as she moved. Henry appeared to be in little better shape than his apartment.

She wrestled the solarium door closed, forcing it through drying, sticky puddles of yellow fluid, then dropped to one knee by the couch and pressed her fingers against the damp skin of Henry’s throat. His pulse was so slow that each continuing beat came almost as an afterthought.

“Is that normal? How the hell am I supposed to tell what’s normal for you?”

As gently as possible, she untangled him from the upholstery and discovered that, miraculously, no bones seemed broken. His bones were very heavy, she noticed, as she carefully straightened arms and legs and she wondered wildly if he’d gotten them from the vampirism or from a more mortal heredity—not that it mattered much now. He’d been cut and gouged in a number of places, both by the shards of glass and by what she had to assume were the demon’s talons.

The wounds, even the deepest, bled sluggishly if at all.

His skin was cool and damp, his eyes had rolled back, and he was completely unresponsive. He was in shock. And whatever the validity of the vampire legends, Vicki knew they were wrong about one thing. Henry Fitzroy was no more undead than she was; he was dying now.