1 Blood Price (36 page)

“What about young Tony?”

“Tony goes his own way. Besides, this isn’t the sort of thing he can help me with.”

“So I’m the only game in town?”

“We’re the only game in town.”

They locked eyes for a moment and Vicki suddenly realized that was a stupid thing to do—all the stories, all the movies about vampires warned against it. For a moment, she felt herself teetering on the edge of an abyss and she fought against the urge to throw herself into the depths. Then the moment passed, the abyss replaced with a pair of tired hazel eyes and she realized, her heart beating a little more quickly, that it had been the man, not the vampire she’d been reacting to. Or perhaps the man as vampire. Or the vampire as man. Or something.
Wonderful. The city
—
the world even—is about to go up in flames and I’m thinking with my crotch.

“I’m going to need an early start. I’d better get going.”

“Perhaps you had.”

There were several dozen things left unsaid.

He watched her shrug into her jacket, the sound of her heartbeat nearly overpowering. Had he taken even a little more blood from her, he wouldn’t have been able to stop himself from taking her life as well. That feeding was the sweetest of all to his kind and acquiring a taste for it had brought down many a vampire. Bringing him the boy had saved them both. She truly was a remarkable woman, few other mortals would have had the strength to resist the pull of his need.

He wanted more. More of her. If they survived the next twenty-four hours. . . .

She paused on her way to the door, one hand clutching a chair back for support. “I just remembered, where were you earlier? I kept calling and getting your machine.”

“That was why you came so late?”

“Well, no point in coming over if you weren’t here.”

“I was here. I turned on the machine to screen calls.” His brows went up as hers went down. “You don’t do that?”

“If I’m home, I answer the phone.”

“If I had, and you’d been here when the demon arrived. . . .”

“We’d both be dead,” she finished.

He nodded. “Vicki?”

Her hand on the knob, she turned back to face him.

“You do realize that there’s a very good chance we’ll fail? That you may come up blank or nothing we can do will stop the Demon Lord?”

She smiled at him and Henry discovered with a slight shock that he wasn’t the only predator in the room.

“No,” she said, “I don’t realize any such thing. Get some rest.” Then she was gone.

Vicki groped for the light switch and sat panting in the sudden glare, her heart drumming painfully. The dream that wakened her had been only the latest in a series. Fortunately, she remembered none of the others in detail.

Hands trembling, she pushed the arms of her glasses over her ears and peered at the clock. 5:47. Almost three hours sleep.

She turned off the useless alarm—she’d set it for 6:30—and swung her legs out of bed. If the demon-caller followed the established pattern, the Demon Lord would show up at midnight. That gave her eighteen hours to find him or her and stuff the grimoire down his or her throat one page at a time. The dreams had terrified her and nothing made her more angry than fear she could do nothing about.

Slowly, carefully, she stood. The liter of orange juice and the two iron supplements she’d taken after arriving home might have helped to offset the blood loss, but she knew she wasn’t going to be in top condition. Not today. Not for some time. The cut on her wrist appeared to have almost healed although the skin around it was slightly bruised and a little tender. The memory of the actual feeding had become tangled up with the memory of the dream, so she set them both aside to be sorted out later. There were more important things to worry about at the moment.

She’d have stayed in the shower longer, trying to wash the dream away, but she couldn’t shake the feeling that something was behind her. With sight and sound blocked by the spray, she felt too vulnerable and exposed to linger.

With the coffee maker on, and another liter of orange juice in her hand, she stood for a moment staring out at the street. One or two other windows were lit and as she watched, young Edmond Ng came yawning out onto his porch and started down to the corner to pick up his route’s copies of the morning paper, completely unaware this might be his last trip. In eighteen short hours, the hordes of hell could be ripping the city and its people apart.

“And the only thing in the way is one half-blind ex-cop and the bastard son of Henry VIII.” She took a long pull at the jug of juice and pushed her glasses back up her nose. “Kind of makes you think, doesn’t it?” Except she didn’t like what it made her think about.

Find one in twenty-three in twenty thousand. Actually, as far as a lot of police work was concerned, the odds weren’t all that bad. Even if she could get the students’ addresses out of the administration of the university—and frankly, without a badge she doubted she could—talking with the students themselves would likely get her further. The top of the heap usually knew who shared the view with them and if one of the twenty-three was the person she was looking for, then at least one of the others should be able to point the finger.

Of course, the possibility existed that she’d assembled all the bits and pieces into the wrong picture. That she was not not only barking up the wrong tree but searching in the wrong forest entirely.

Sweat prickled along her spine and she resisted the urge to turn. She knew the apartment was empty, that nothing stood behind her, and she wasn’t going to give in to phantoms—there were enough real terrors to spend fear on.

There was time for breakfast before she headed up to York; no point in arriving empty at an empty campus. At 6:35, scrambled eggs eaten and a second cup of coffee nearly gone, she phoned Mike Celluci, let it ring three times, and hung up. What was she going to tell him? That she thought she knew who the killer was? She’d known that since the night out at Woodbine when she’d met Henry. That one of twenty-three computer geniuses out at York University was calling up demons in his or her spare time and that if not stopped was going to call up more than he or she could handle and destroy the world? He’d think she’d flipped.

“Everything comes back to the demon. Everything. Shit.” The computer that pointed, however tenuously, to one of those twenty-three students had no tie to the murders Celucci worked on except through the demon. “And how do I know about the demon? A vampire told me.” She drained the mug and set it down on the table with more force than was absolutely necessary. The handle broke off in her hand. With a quick jerk of her arm, she threw the piece across the room and listened with satisfaction as it smashed into still smaller pieces against the wall.

The satisfaction faded a heartbeat later.

“One half-blind ex-cop and the bastard son of Henry VIII,” she repeated, as it sank in, really sank in, that she wasn’t a cop anymore. In spite of everything—her eyes, her resignation—for the last eight months she’d still thought of herself as a police officer. She wasn’t. There’d be no backup, no support. Until sunset she was completely on her own and if anyone needed to have complete information, it wasn’t Mike Celluci, it was Henry Fitzroy.

“Damn.” She rubbed her sleeve across her eyes and slammed her glasses back down on her nose. It didn’t make her feel any better to know that she couldn’t have gotten this far if she’d still been on the force, that rules and regulations—even as flexible as the top brass tried to be—would have tied her hands. Nor could she have gotten this far if she’d
never
been on the force, the information just wouldn’t have been available to her. “I seem to be exactly what the situation calls for—a one-woman chance of stopping Armageddon.”

She took a deep breath and her jaw went out. “So, let’s get on with it.” The eggs sat like a lump of lead in her stomach and her throat had closed up into an aching pillar that bore little relation to flesh. That was okay. She could work around it. With luck, there’d be time to sort her feelings out later.

She should’ve taken a copy of the list to Henry’s the night before. She didn’t want to take the time now—not to copy it, not to drop it off.

“Henry, it’s Vicki.” Fortunately, his machine took an unlimited message because the list of names and her plans for the day used over five minutes of tape. “When I know more, I’ll get back to you.”

Five to seven. Seventeen hours. Vicki threw the list into her bag, grabbed her jacket, and headed for the door. An hour to get out to York would leave her only sixteen hours to search.

She was already at the door, fumbling with its lock, when the phone rang. Curious about who’d be calling so early, she waited while her message ran through and the tone sounded.

“Hi, Ms. Nelson? It’s Coreen. Look, if you’ve been trying to reach me, I’m sorry I wasn’t around, but I’ve been staying with some friends.”

The lock slipped into place. She’d talk with Coreen later. One way or another, by midnight the case would be closed.

“It’s just I was pretty upset because the girl who got killed, Janet, was a good friend of mine. I can’t help but think that if I hadn’t been so stupid about Norman Birdwell she’d have waited for me to give her a ride home.”

“Shit!” The lock proved as difficult to reopen as it had been to close. Norman Birdwell was one of the names on the list.

“I guess if you find the vampire that killed Ian you’ll find the one that killed Janet, too, won’t you? I want it found now more than ever.”

She paused and her sigh was almost drowned out in the rattle of the chain falling free.

“Uh, I’ll be at home all day if you want to call. . . .”

“Coreen? Don’t hang up, it’s me, Vicki Nelson.”

“Oh. Hi.” She sounded a little embarrassed, caught talking to a machine. “Did I wake you up? Look, I’m sorry I’m calling so early, but I’ve got an exam today and I want to get over to the library to study.”

“It’s no problem, trust me. I need you to tell me about Norman Birdwell.”

“Why? He’s a geek.”

“It’s important.”

Vicki could almost hear the shrug. “Okay. What do you want to know?”

“How well do you know him?”

“Puh-leese, I said he was a geek. He’s in my Comparative Religions Class. That’s all.”

“How were you stupid about him?”

“What?”

“You said earlier if you hadn’t been so stupid about Norman Birdwell, Janet might have waited for a ride home.”

“Yeah, well. . . . I wouldn’t have gone with him if I hadn’t had the beers, but he said he could prove that vampires existed and that he knew who killed Ian. Well, I guess he didn’t really say that . . . but something like that. Anyway, I went up to his apartment with him, but all he wanted to do was score. He had nothing to do with vampires.”