4 Blood Pact (13 page)

Reluctantly, Celluci agreed. Years of training seemed to have gained a foothold in Vicki’s emotional response and she was now searching for the person instead of just blindly clutching at the name. “Detective Fergusson says he’ll try to free up the police artist tomorrow.”

“Why do I get the feeling that Detective Fergusson doesn’t think that’s necessary?”

“It’s not that. It’s resources. Or specifically
lack
of resources. As he pointed out, and this is a quote, ‘Yeah, it’s a terrible thing, but we can’t hardly keep up with indignities done to the living.’ ” Celluci’s lips thinned as he remembered various “indignities” he’d witnessed done to the living that had gone unpunished due to lack of manpower, or departmental budget cuts, or just plain bad management. He didn’t, by any means, approve of Vicki’s recent conversion to vigilantism, but, by God, he understood it. The satisfaction of
knowing
that Anwar Tawfik was dust and this time would stay dust, of
knowing
Mark Williams had paid for the innocents he’d slaughtered, of
knowing
that Norman Birdwell would loose no further horrors on the city, all of that weighed heavily against law in the scales Justice held.

He peered blearily at Henry Fitzroy from under heavy lids. How many others had there been? Hundreds? Thousands? While he’d been busting his butt and walking his feet flat, had Fitzroy and others like him been spending the night methodically squashing the cockroaches of humanity? Celluci snorted silently. If they were, they were doing a piss poor job.

Vampires. Werewolves. Demons. Mummies. Only for Vicki would he even consider accepting such a skewed view of reality. Maybe he should’ve listened to his family, married a nice Italian girl, and settled down. Much as Henry had done earlier, he shot a glance over his shoulder toward the bedrooms.
No. A nice girl, Italian or otherwise, couldn’t hope to compete.
Vicki was a comrade, and a friend, and, as asinine as it sounded, the woman he loved. He’d stand by her now when she needed him, regardless of who, or what, stood by her other side.

He didn’t want to have anything to do with Henry Fitzroy. He didn’t want to respect him. He sure as shit didn’t want to like him. He appeared to have no choice regarding the first point, had months ago lost the second, and strongly suspected, in spite of everything, that he was losing the third.
Jesus. Buddies with a bloodsucker.
Responses had to be filtered through the memory of power he’d been shown in Vicki’s living room.
Safer to play with a pit bull.

Henry felt the weight of Celluci’s gaze and tried to remember the last occasion on which he’d spent this much time alone with a mortal he hadn’t been feeding from. Or hadn’t intended to feed from. The situation was, to say the least, unusual.

In all his long life, Henry had seldom felt so frustrated. “We can’t resolve this,” he said aloud, “until the body is found and interred, and her grieving is over.”

Celluci didn’t bother pretending to misunderstand what
this
referred to, although he was tempted. “So find the body,” he suggested, a yawn threatening to dislocate his jaw.

Henry arched a brow. “So easy to say,” he murmured.

“Yeah? What about that funny smell Vicki says you ran into last night?”

“I am not a bloodhound, Detective. Besides, I traced it as far as it went—to the parking lot.”

“What did it smell like?”

“Death.”

“Not surprising. You were in a body parlor.” He yawned again.

“Funeral homes go to a great deal of effort
not
to smell like death. This was something different.”

“Oh, lord, not again,” Celluci groaned, dragging a hand up through his hair. “What is it this time? The creature from the Rideau Canal? The Loch Ness fucking monster? The Swamp Thing? Godzilla? Megatron? Gondor? Rodan?”

“Who?”

“Didn’t you ever watch Saturday afternoon monster movies?” He shook his head at Henry’s expression. “No, I guess you didn’t, did you? Every weekend thousands of kids were glued to their sets for badly dubbed, black and white, Japanese rubber monsters stomping on Tokyo. Not to mention
Jesse James Meets Frankenstein’s Daughter, Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy, The Curse of the Werewolf.”

A car door, slamming in the parking lot, suddenly sounded unnaturally loud.

“Jesus H. Christ.” Celluci’s eyes were fully open. Still tired, he no longer had any desire to sleep. He sat up and swung his feet to the floor. “A motive. You don’t think . . .”

“That Tom Chen was playing Igor to someone else’s Dr. Frankenstein?” Henry smiled. “I think, as I said before, that you watch too many bad movies, Detective.”

“Oh, yeah? Well, you know what I think? I think . . .”

Bam. Bam. Bam.

They faced the door, then they faced each other.

“The police,” Celluci said, and stood.

“No.” Henry blocked his way. He could feel the lives, hear the singing blood, smell the excitement. “Not police although I suspect they’d like us to think so.”

Bam. Bam. Bam.

“A threat?”

“I don’t know.” He crossed the room. When he stopped, Celluci moved up to stand behind his left shoulder. It had been a very long time since he’d had a shield man. He opened the door.

The flash went off almost before he could react. A mortal would have recoiled—Henry’s hand whipped out and covered the lens of the camera before the shutter had completely fallen. He snarled as the brilliant light drove spikes of pain into sensitive eyes and closed his fingers. Plastic and glass and metal became only plastic and glass and metal.

“Hey!”

The photographer’s companion ignored both the sound of a camera disintegrating and the accompanying squawk of protest. Sometimes they got a great candid shot when the door opened, sometimes they didn’t. She wasn’t going to worry about it. “Good evening. Is Victoria Nelson at home?” Elbows primed, her notebook held like a battering ram, she attempted to push forward. Most people, she found, were just too polite to stop her.

The slight young man never budged; it felt like she’d hit a not very tall brick wall. Time for plan B. And if that didn’t work, she’d go right through the alphabet if she had to. “We were so sorry to hear about what happened to her mother’s bo . . .” Her train of thought derailed somewhere in the depths of hazel eyes.

Henry decided not to be subtle. He wasn’t in the mood and they wouldn’t understand. “Go away. Stay away.”

Darkness colored the words and became threat enough.

Not until they were safely in the car, cocooned behind steel and locked doors, did the photographer, cradling the ruins of his camera in his lap, finally find his voice. “What are we going to do?” he asked, primal memories of the Hunt trembling in his tone.

“We’re going to do . . .” With an icy hand and shaking fingers, she jammed the car into gear, stomped on the gas, and sprayed gravel over half the parking lot. “. . . exactly what he said.”

Together they’d been threatened a hundred times. Maybe a thousand. Once, they’d even been attacked by an ex-NHL defenseman swinging a hockey stick with enraged abandon. They’d always gotten the story. Or a version of the story at least. This time, something in heart and soul, in blood and bone recognized the danger and overruled conscious thought.

Inside Marjory Nelson’s apartment, Celluci glared enviously at the back of Henry’s red-gold head. If he hated anything, it was the press. The statements they insisted on were the bane of his existence. “I wish I could do that,” he muttered.

Henry wisely kept from voicing the obvious and made sure all masks were back in place before turning. This was not the time for Michael Celluci to see him as a threat.

Celluci rubbed at the side of his nose and sighed. “There’ll probably be others.”

“I’ll deal with them.”

“And if they come in the daytime?”

“You deal with them.” Henry’s smile curved predator sharp. “You’re not on duty, Detective. You can be as rude as . . .” Just how rude Celluci could be got lost in a sudden change of expression and a heartbeat later he was racing for the bedroom.

To mortal eyes, one moment he was there, the next gone. Celluci turned in time to see Vicki’s bedroom door thrown open, swore, and pounded across the living room. He hadn’t heard anything. What the hell had Fitzroy heard?

 

How could she have forgotten?

She dug frantically at the tiles in the kitchen. As they ripped free, she flung them behind her, ignoring the fingernail that ripped free with them, ignoring the blood from her hands that began to mark its own pattern on the floor. Almost there. Almost.

The area she cleared stretched six feet long by three feet wide, the edges ragged. Finally only the plywood subfloor remained. Rot marked the gray-brown wood and tendrils of pallid fungus grew between the narrow boards. Fighting for breath, she slammed her fists against this last barrier.

The wood cracked, splintered, and gave enough for her to force a grip on the first piece. She threw her weight against it and it lifted with a moist, sucking sound, exposing a line of gray-blonde curls and perhaps a bit of shoulder.

How could she have forgotten where she’d left her mother?

Begging for forgiveness, she clawed at the remaining boards. . . .

 

“Vicki! Vicki, wake up, it’s only a dream.”

She couldn’t stop the first cry, but she grabbed at the second and wrestled it back where it came from. Her conscious mind clung to the reassurances murmured over and over against her hair. Her subconscious waited for the next board to be removed. Her hands clung of their own volition, fingers digging deep into the shoulder and arm curved protectively around her.

“It’s all right, Vicki. It’s all right. I’m here. It was only a dream. I’m here. I’ve got you . . .” The words, Henry knew, were less important than the tone and as he spoke he drew the cadence around the fierce pounding of her heart and convinced it to calm.

“Henry?”

“I’m here.”

She fought the terror for control of her breathing and won at last. A long breath in. A longer breath out. And then again.

Henry almost heard the barriers snap back into place as she pushed away, chin rising defiantly.

“I’m okay.”
It was only a dream. You’re acting like a child.
“Really, I’m okay.” The darkness shifted things, moved furniture that hadn’t been moved in fifteen years.
Where the hell is the bedside table?
“Turn on the light,” she commanded, struggling to keep new panic from touching her voice. “I need my glasses.”

A cool touch against her hand and her fingers closed gratefully around the heavy plastic frames. A second touch helped her settle them on her nose just as the room flooded with light. Squinting against the glare, she turned to face the switch and Michael Celluci’s worried frown.

“Jesus. Both of you.”

“I’m afraid so.” Henry shifted his weight on the edge of the bed and asked, without much hope of success, “Do you want to talk about it?”

Her lip curled. “Not likely.” Talking about it would mean thinking about it. Thinking about what she’d have found, what she’d have seen, if she’d managed to tear up just one more piece of floor. . . .

 

“Celluci? Fergusson. Med school’s got three Chens. One of them’s even a Tom Chen—Thomas Albert Chen. And guess what, the kid’s got an airtight alibi not only for that night but for the whole two and a half weeks our boy was at the body parlour. Rough luck, eh?”

Celluci, receiver pinned between shoulder and ear, washed down a forkful of scrambled eggs with a mouthful of bitter coffee. He hadn’t thought Fergusson a subtle enough man for sarcasm. Obviously, he’d been wrong. “Yeah, rough. You take his picture around to Hutchinson’s just in case?”

“Give it up, Celluci, and stop wasting my fucking time. You and I both know that we’re not looking for any Tom Chen.” Fergusson sighed at Celluci’s noncommittal grunt, the sound eloquently saying
give me a break.
“Tell Ms. ex-Detective Nelson that I’m sorry about her mother, but I know what the fuck I’m doing. I’ll get back to you if we get any
real
information in.”

Celluci managed to hang up and shovel another pile of eggs into his mouth before he succumbed to Vicki’s glare and repeated the conversation.
She
might have dropped off, reassured by Fitzroy’s supernatural protection but
he’d
spent a restless night stretched out in the next room, straining to hear any sound that might make its way through the wall, wondering why he’d so easily surrendered the field.
You’ve got the day,
he reminded himself, reaching for another piece of toast. Which was really no answer at all.
Goddamn Fitzroy anyway.
Hopefully, massive quantities of food would make up for lost sleep.

Vicki pushed her plate away. She knew she had to eat, but there was a limit to how much she could choke past the knots. “I want you to check that alibi.”

Oh, God, not again.
He’d really thought that she’d shaken her obsession that Tom Chen could be the actual name of their suspect. The profiling she’d done had been good solid police work and he’d taken it—
prematurely as it turns out—as
an indication that she was beginning to function. Hiding concern she wouldn’t appreciate, he reached across the table and covered one of her hands with his. There was no point in restating the obvious when she refused to hear him, so he tried a different angle. “Vicki, Detective Fergusson
knows
his job.”

“Either you check it or I do.” Pulling her hand free, she regarded him levelly. “I won’t let this go. You can’t make me. You might as well help; it’ll be over sooner.”

Her eyes were too bright and he could see the tension twisting her shoulders and causing her fingers to tremble slightly. “Look, Vicki . . .”

“I don’t need a babysitter, Mike. Not you. Not him.”