4 Blood Pact (17 page)

He’d be there to comfort her, she’d realize Fitzroy had nothing to offer, and the two of them would settle down. Maybe even have a kid.
No.
The vision of Vicki in a maternal role, brought revision.
Maybe not a kid.

He paused at the curb while a panel van pulled out of the apartment building’s driveway, turning south toward the center of the city. A moment later, the food lay forgotten in the gutter as he sprinted forward to catch hold of the wild-eyed figure charging out onto the road.

“Vicki! What is it? What’s happened?”

She twisted in his grip, straining to follow the van. “My mother . . .” Then the taillights disappeared and she sagged against him. “Mike, my mother . . .”

Gently, he turned her around, barely suppressing an exclamation of shock at her expression. She looked as though someone had ripped her heart out. “Vicki, what about your mother?”

She swallowed. “My mother was at the living room window. Looking in at me. The lock stuck, and when I got outside she was gone. She went away in that van. It’s the only place she could have gone. Mike, we have to go after that van.”

Cold fingers danced down Celluci’s spine. Crazy words tucked in between shallow gasps for breath, but she sounded like she believed them. Moving slowly, he steered her back toward the apartment. “Vicki.” His voice emerged tight and strained, her name barely recognizable, so he started again. “Vicki, your mother is dead.”

She yanked herself free of his hands. “I know that!” she snarled. “Do you think I don’t know that? So was the woman at the window!”

 

“Look, I only left her alone for a few minutes.” Even as he spoke, Celluci heard the words echoed by a thousand voices who’d returned to find disaster had visited during those
few minutes
they were gone. “How was I supposed to know she was so close to cracking? She’s never cracked before.” He leaned his forearm against the wall and his face against the cushion of his arm. After that single outburst, Vicki had begun to shake, but she wouldn’t let him touch her. She just sat in her mother’s rocking chair and rocked and stared at the window. Years of training, of dealing with similar situations, seemed suddenly useless. If Mr. Delgado hadn’t shown up, hadn’t cajoled her into swallowing those sleeping pills—“And how can you be strong tomorrow if you don’t sleep tonight, eh?”—he didn’t know what he would have done; shaken her probably, yelled certainly, definitely not done any good.

Henry rose from his crouch by the window. There was no mistaking the odor that clung to the outside of the glass. “She didn’t crack,” he said quietly. “At least not the way you think.”

“What are you talking about?” Celluci didn’t bother to turn his head. “She’s having hallucinations, for chrissakes.”

“No. I’m afraid she isn’t. And it seems I owe you an apology, Detective.”

Celluci snorted but the certainty in Henry’s voice made him straighten. “Apology? What for?”

“For accusing you of watching too many bad movies.”

“I don’t need another mystery tonight, Fitzroy. What the hell are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about,” Henry stepped away from the window, his expression unreadable, “the return of Dr. Frankenstein.”

“Don’t bullshit me, Fitzroy. I’m not in the . . . Jesus H. Christ, you’re not kidding, are you?”

He shook his head. “No. I’m not kidding.”

Impossible not to believe him.
Werewolves, mummies, vampires; I should’ve expected this.
“Mother of God. What are we going to tell Vicki?”

Hazel eyes met brown, for once without a power struggle between them. “I haven’t the faintest idea.”

“I think we should tell her.”

Arms crossed over his chest, Henry leaned against the wall near the windows. “Tell her that we think someone has turned her mother into Frankenstein’s monster?”

“Yeah. Tell her exactly that.” Celluci rubbed at his temples with the heels of his hands. It had been a very long night and he wasn’t looking forward to morning. “Do you remember that little
incident
last fall?”

Henry’s brows rose. There could be little doubt what the detective was referring to, although he’d hardly describe the destruction of an ancient Egyptian wizard as an
incident
. “If you’re speaking of Anwar Tawfik, I remember.”

“Well, I was thinking of something Vicki said, after it was all over, about there being a dark god out there who knows us and that if we give in to hopelessness and despair it’ll be on us like a politician at a free bar.” He sighed, a long, shuddering exhalation, and was almost too tired to breathe in again. “If it hasn’t noticed her yet, it’ll be on her soon. She’s on the edge.”

“Vicki?”

“You didn’t see her.”

Henry had difficulty believing Vicki would ever give in to anything, least of all to hopelessness and despair, but he recognized that under the present circumstances even the strongest character might succumb. “And you think that if we tell her what we suspect? . . .”

“She’ll be furious and there’s nothing that wipes out hopelessness and despair faster than righteous anger.”

Henry thought about it, arms crossed, shoulder blades pressed against the wall. Tawfik’s dark god continued to exist because the emotions it fed on were part of the human condition, but the three of them—he, Celluci, and Vicki—knew its name. If it wanted acolytes, and what god didn’t, it would have to go to one of them. If Celluci was right about Vicki—and Henry had to admit that the years the mortal had known her should make him a fair judge—giving her anger as a protection would be the best thing they could do. There was also one other factor that shouldn’t be ignored. “She’d never forgive us if we didn’t tell her.”

Celluci nodded, lips pursed. “There is that.”

Silence reigned for a moment as they considered the result of having Vicki’s fury directed at them. Neither figured their odds of survival would be particularly high, at least not as far as maintaining a continuing relationship went. Henry spoke first. “So, we’ll tell her.”

“Tell her what?” Vicki stood in the entrance to the living room, clothing creased, eyes shadowed, cheek imprinted with a fold from the pillowcase. Stepping forward carefully, she swayed and grabbed for the back of a chair, bracing herself against its support. She felt distant from her own body, an effect of the sleeping pills she’d barely managed to fight off. “Tell her that she’s out of her mind? That she couldn’t have seen her dead mother at the window?” Her voice rode crazy highs and lows; she couldn’t seem to keep it steady.

“Actually, Vicki, we believe you.” Henry’s tone left no room for doubt.

Taken by surprise, Vicki blinked then tried to focus a scowl on Celluci. “You
both
believe me?”

“Yes. ” He met her scowl with one of his own. “We
both
believe you.”

Celluci flinched as the Royal Dalton figurine hit the far wall of the living room and smashed into a thousand expensive bone china shards. Henry moved a little farther away from the blast radius.

“Goddamn, fucking, shit-eating bastards!” The rage that turned her vision red and roared in her ears, stuck in Vicki’s throat, blocking the stream of profanity. She scooped up another ornament and heaved it as hard as she could across the room. As it shattered, she found her voice again. “How DARE they!”

Breathing heavily, she collapsed back onto the couch, teeth clenched against waves of nausea, her body’s reaction to the news. “How can someone do that to another human being?”

“Science . . .” Celluci began, but Vicki cut him off—which was probably for the best as he wasn’t entirely certain what he was going to say.

“This isn’t science, Mike. This is my
mother.”

“Not your mother, Vicki,” Henry told her softly. “Just your mother’s body.”

“Just my mother’s body?” Vicki shoved at her glasses with her fist so they wouldn’t see her fingers tremble. “I might not have been the world’s best daughter, but I know my own mother, and I’m telling you that was my
mother
at the window. Not just her fucking body!”

Celluci sat down beside her on the couch and caught up one of her hands in both of his. He considered and discarded four or five comforting platitudes that didn’t really seem to have any relevance and wisely decided to keep his mouth shut.

Vicki tried halfheartedly to pull her hand away, but when his fingers only tightened in response, she let it lie, saving her strength to throw into the anger. “I saw her. She was dead. I
know
dead. Then I saw her again at the window. And she was . . .” Again, a wave of nausea rose and crested and sullenly retreated. “She was
not dead.”

“But not alive.” As the words themselves denied consolation, Henry offered them as they were, unadorned by emotion.

Once again, her mother’s face rose up out of the darkness, eyes wide, mouth working silently. Celluci’s grip became a warm anchor and Vicki used it to drag herself out of the memory. “No.” She swallowed and a muscle jumped in her jaw. “Not alive. But up, and walking.” For a moment, the thought that there’d been only a pane of glass between them, made it impossible to go on.
I want to scream and cry until all of this goes away and I don’t have to deal with it. I want it to be last Saturday. I want to have answered the phone. I want to have talked to her, to have told her I love her, to have said good-bye.
Her whole body ached with the effort of maintaining control but of all the maelstrom barely held in check by will, she could only release the anger. “Someone did that to her. Someone at that university has committed the ultimate violation, the ultimate rape.”

Celluci flinched. “At the university? Why at the university?”

“You said it yourself, science. It’s hardly going to be someone at the fucking grocery store.” She knuckled her glasses again, then bent forward and swept her notes off the coffee table, the force of the blow scattering them as far as the apartment door. Her voice, in contrast, had gained rigid control. “This changes everything. We can find her now.”

Reluctantly, Celluci released her hand; she’d accepted all the comfort she was going to. He watched in silence as she pulled a blank sheet of paper toward her, wanting to shake her but not entirely certain why.

“All right. We know the body is still in the city, so we know where to look for the lowlife, sons of bitches who’ve done this to her.” The pencil point snapped off against the paper, and she fought against the urge to drive it right through the table. “She’s in the city. They’re in the city.”

“Vicki.” Henry crossed the room to kneel by her side. “Are you sure you should be doing this now?” When she raised her head to look at him, the hair on his arms lifted with the tension in the air.

“What am I supposed to do? Go to sleep?”

He could hear her heart pounding, hear the effects of the adrenaline pumping through her system. “No . . .”

“I need to do this, Henry. I need to put things together. Build some sort of a structure out of this. I need to do it now.” The alternative was implicit in her tone.
Or it will eat away at me until there’s nothing of me left.

The hand that settled on his, just for an instant, was so hot it nearly burned. Because he could do nothing else, Henry nodded and moved to the rocker by the door, from which he could watch her face. For the moment, he would let her deal with her horror and her anger in her own way.

He found it interesting that Celluci looked no happier about it than he felt.
We want to ride to her rescue and instead we find ourselves allowed to help. Not exactly a comfortable position for a knight errant to be in.
But then, Vicki wasn’t exactly a comfortable woman to love.

“All right, shifting the emphasis from finding my mother’s body to finding the people who did this to her, what are we looking for?” With a new pencil, she etched “What?” across the top piece of paper. “Someone who can raise the dead. Discounting the Second Coming, as I doubt it was as simple as
pick up your bed and walk,
we turn to science.” She wrote “A scientist” under the heading, then shuffled out a fresh page and wrote “Where?”

Celluci leaned forward, old patterns winning out over his concern. “All signs point to the university. One, it’s where you find scientists. Two, who can afford a private lab these days, especially containing the equipment they’d have needed to . . .”

“Three,” Vicki interrupted. The last thing she wanted to deal with right now were the details of what had actually been done.

“Not the last thing,
” said a little voice in the back of her head.

“Three,” she said again, slamming it over the certain knowledge that somehow, if she’d just answered the phone, all of this could have been prevented. “We’ve already determined it had to be someone who knew she was going to die. She worked at the university. Her friends were at the university. She had tests done at the university. Four, the campus is less than ten blocks south on Division Street. We’re close.” Her laugh held more hysteria than humor. “Even a dead woman could walk it.”