by Tanya Huff
“So easy,” she sighed, “for you to betray her.”
Memory returned as the music faded.
“Mike! Hello! Where the hell are you off to?”
“Back to the club.” He shook off Dave’s grip and pushed past him toward the door. “There’s a loose end I need to tie up.” But he’d have to beat the sunset to do it.
*
The second evening in a row, Vicki woke to a flood of memory.
The look on Mike’s face, equal parts fear and arousal, as she bent toward his throat.
Remembered the effort of moving against the music as she turned the Hunger back into the city.
Remembered the feel of flesh compacting under her grip as she dragged the dealer into an alley, his customers scattering. Remembered the hot splash of his blood. The dark taste of his terror.
It was easier as she fed to fight the music.
Easy enough to finally throw the first body aside and Hunt for another. One appetite fulfilled, others still needing to be.
So many people on the streets. Unaware.
An arm broken in passing, caught on the upswing between one blow and the next. So far beyond when he collapsed to the ground that the screams of his companion were nearly lost in the sounds of the city.
Blue eyes and broad shoulders and hair long enough for her to grip. His pulse pounding. Hips rising to meet hers. His blood tasted of desire. He was weak when she stopped but alive.
The look on Mike’s face…
*
Vicki ripped the back door of the club off its hinges and threw it across the alley. Before it landed, she was running into the dressing room at the end of the corridor, ready for Lorelei’s song when it hit her, When the Levee Breaks pounding into her ears at about a hundred decibels. She’d got her hand around fistful of hair when a bullet whistled past her cheek and smashed the mirror.
Lorelei’s comb caught the wires as Vicki turned, pulling the earbuds free. The song changed. Caught her.
On the other side of the room, his back pressed up against the clothing on the rack, Mike lowered his weapon, his movements as much beyond his control as hers were.
“Kill him,” Lorelei sang. “Kill him.”
Vicki could feel the Hunger rising along the notes of the song. “Mike, run!”
“The hell I will!”
She heard his heart pounding. Inhaled the scent of his fear. Her tongue swept over his throat, tasting… Fuck! She didn’t remember moving. The hard ridge of his gun dug into her hip, and she managed to find enough control to grunt, “Shoot me!”
“Not going to happen.”
“Do it!”
“No!”
He titled his head to the side, giving himself to her. Trusting her. Vicki’s teeth broke the skin and she froze in place, fighting the music with everything she had. Fighting the need to rend and tear. Fighting what she was. She licked at the blood welling slowly to the surface…
Home.
Humanity.
…and used the strength it gave her to turn, shards of the mirror grinding into the tile under her shoes.
Mike’s hand caught her elbow as she swayed, suddenly free of the song.
On the other side of the room, Lorelei stood and stared at them like she’d never seen a cop and a vampire hold each other up before.
Vicki was pretty sure she still had every intention of breaking the singer’s neck, but Mike’s grip on her arm held her in place.
“In spite of everything, you’d rather die—both of you would rather die than live with the pain of killing the other.”
“Because of everything,” Vicki growled.
To her surprise, Lorelei smiled, suddenly looking young and hopeful and…
Translucent.
Vicki stepped back, pushing Mike with her, as a vaguely Lorelei-shaped puddle of water ran down through the drain.
“Is she…?”
“An apparently undereducated guess says she’s gone. Free.” Vicki bent and picked up the comb. “Albert Droege is going to be pissed.” The plastic sounded like a distant gunshot when it snapped. “Can’t say that I care.”
*
Chris Adams’ grave had one of the bronze memorial markers set into a granite base, the whole thing flush with the ground. Easier for groundskeepers, but Vicki preferred the old slab markers. As much as it bordered on cliché, she liked cemeteries to look like cemeteries.
She’d gone to the hospital and pulled Duncan Riley up out of the darkness. Gave him back his life. Unfortunately, death’s embrace was a little more final. A lot more final.
“You weren’t responsible.”
“Reading minds now?”
Behind her, Mike huffed out a half laugh. “I know how you think. And you weren’t responsible.”
“For the condition of his arteries? No. For his heart giving out when it did…”
“Vicki, she was controlling you.”
Pushing back against Mike’s body, centring herself in the circle of his arms, grounding herself on the beat of his heart, Vicki remembered.
“I give you the freedom to be yourself, Vampire.”
But that truth was a line Mike couldn’t cross, so she smiled, touched the broken comb in her pocket, and said, “I know.”
Author’s Note
So, if you’ve read the Blood books, you know that (If you haven’t read the books, stop reading now.)(Although to be fair, if you’ve read the first two stories, you know that at the pivot point of Blood Pact, Vicki becomes a vampire.)(Where was I? Right…) you know that Mike stepped away from his relationship with Vicki in order to save her. He had no idea how it was going to turn out—all he knew at the time was that if it came to a choice between her dying and him never seeing her again, there was no choice.
I wonder if Vicki will be as strong when it comes time for her to chose…
IF WISHES WERE
Vicki had always hated the smell of hospitals—the smell of cleansers so overpowering that the trained police officer part of her wondered what they were hiding while the anti-social, easily annoyed part wondered why they couldn’t use scent-free products. Nor was she fond of fluorescent lighting, the horrible, pale green paint they clearly bought in bulk, and staff cutbacks that meant nurses were working their asses off to cover the basics and, as a result, were barely maintaining a white-knuckled grip on civility.
Bottom line, she hated hospitals for the same reason everyone else did. If she was in a hospital, it meant one of two things. She’d been hurt. Or someone she loved had been hurt.
She didn’t get hurt anymore. Not in ways modern medicine would understand. Not since she’d had to choose between changing and death. Not since she’d lost everything in her old life but Mike.
She listened to his heartbeat and told herself he’d be fine.
“It’s creepy when you hang around and watch me sleep.”
“Tough.” There was enough light for her to see him and not nearly enough for him to see her, but he always knew when she was there. Moving out of the shadows to the side of Mike’s bed, she wrapped her fingers gently around his right hand, careful not to disturb the cannula. Most of the damage was on the left—arm broken in two places, collarbone broken in one, three cracked ribs, multiple cuts from broken glass, and impressive bruising for those impressed by that sort of thing. “Besides, it’s not like you’re providing anything else to watch.”
“Excuse me for being boring.” He cleared his throat, and she offered him a drink; laid the straw against his bottom lip, and studied him while he swallowed. He had a purpling bruise on his cheek, but his body had absorbed enough of the impact that, by the time his head had hit, he’d gotten away with only a concussion.
“How are you feeling?”
Pushing the straw away with his tongue, he snorted. “Like I went out a second-floor window and hit a Buick.”
“You hit a Toyota.”
“Buick’s funnier.”
The plastic glass shattered in her hand.
“Not ready to joke about it?” he asked as she knelt to wipe up the water with a handful of tissues.
Not ever. The aluminum bar running along the lower edge of the bed buckled in her grip. “Do you remember anything?” she asked as she stood.
“No more than I did yesterday.”
“So S-F-A.” The wet tissues hit the garbage with a dismissive splat.
“Pretty much.”
The doctors called it retrograde, post-traumatic amnesia. Pointed out that it was relatively common in cases of moderate to severe concussion. Offered a not-even-remotely reassuring number of recovery statistics involving hockey players.
He remembered going to Scarborough to question a witness. After a non-illuminating interview, he and Dave Graham, his partner, had gone into a Second Cup for a coffee, where Dave had run into one of his exes. As Dave and Cynthia caught up, Mike had taken his coffee outside to enjoy the spring sun. Someone had screamed. Mike had yelled at Dave to call it in, and he’d run toward the sound. The next thing he remembered was waking up in hospital.
Dave remembered Mike flying out the second-floor window in a shower of glass, clearing the sidewalk, and landing on the roof of a parked sedan. Police found the apartment empty of both the tenant, Amy Shaw, and of anyone who could toss a six-foot-three, heavily muscled police detective out a window. Shaw, at five-two and barely a hundred pounds according to the neighbours, was considered more a witness than a suspect.
“You going to whammy me?”
Vicki raised a brow at Mike’s question. “Whammy?”
“The vampire mind-meld.”
“You’re on the good drugs, aren’t you?”
He ignored her. “I know, you promised to never whammy me, but as I want the name of the jackass who threw me out a window, I’m asking.”
“You have a concussion. I’m not playing with your brain while it’s bruised.”
“Vicki…”
“No.” She slid back into the shadows as a nurse came into the room and returned to Mike’s side when she left. “You should listen to the scary lady, Detective Celluci, and get some sleep. I’m going to go have a look at the apartment.”
“Be nice when you whammy the uniforms,” he murmured, eyes closing.
She bent forward, pushed a strand of hair off his forehead, and tried not to notice how much of it was grey. Kissed the damp skin exposed, nose wrinkling at the scents of so many other people. “I always am.”
*
The apartment looked more like a junk shop than a residence. Every horizontal surface was piled high with old dishes and magazines and, occasionally, a second horizontal surface, also piled high. Vicki spotted six old rotary phones, a Commodore 64, three waffle makers, and two nearly complete sets of thirty-year-old, grocery-store encyclopedias. Lamps—electric and oil—velvet paintings—Elvis and otherwise—and a stack of soup tureens—recognized from binging Downton Abbey. Stepping around a disemboweled vacuum cleaner, Vicki found herself reluctantly impressed that when Mike had been thrown out the window, half the contents of the apartment hadn’t gone with him.
The refrigerator held a litre of milk and an assortment of aging condiments.
In the bedroom, a twin bed had been shoved into a corner, the rest of the floor space taken up by a maze of bookcases. The contents were eclectic at best.
Vicki could smell dust, a variety of moulds, and the fear stink of a human female, recently but not currently present. Her clothes were in the closet. Her toothbrush and medications were in the bathroom. The stack of mail on top of a box labeled “cat toys”, held bills and beg letters and a flyer from Canadian Tire. Vicki took photos of the bills. She found no computer, but a tangle of chargers filled some of the limited space on the kitchen counter.
Amy Shaw would be back.
And she’d walk right into the waiting arms of the law—who got enthusiastic about making an arrest when one of their own had been attacked.
Vicki wanted a crack at her first. For exponentially the same reason.
She acquired a copy of Amy’s picture from the uniform in the stairwell; white female, slender, mid-thirties, short green hair, dark rectangular glasses, and an apparent fondness for liquid eye-liner. Amy clearly didn’t cook, and without a car, it was unlikely she traveled far to eat. Unfortunately, sunset had been at 8:01. Vicki hadn’t gotten to the hospital until after ten, and there wasn’t a restaurant in the area that stayed open after eleven on a Tuesday. She might be the only person in Toronto who missed January and darkness by five.
For all that she’d bitched more than once about Mike using her as a hunting dog, she couldn’t track the scent of a single woman she didn’t know through Scarborough when that scent was nearly ten hours old. The trail led down the stairs, out the back door into an alley, along the alley to the sidewalk, and then disappeared under half a hundred footprints. A stranger in the midst of strangers.
With Mike in the hospital, she saw no point in returning to the house they shared in Downsview and drove instead to her office. She caught a familiar scent on the west wind as she got out of the car. A familiar fear. When she was three metres from the entrance to the building, the slender, green-haired woman sitting on the step raised a trembling hand.
“Don’t come any closer.”
Vicki stopped. “Amy Shaw?”
“That depends.”
Sometimes it did. Appearances could be deceiving. Arbitrary identities were far from the strangest things Vicki dealt with.
“Are you Vicki Nelson?”
“I am.”
Amy’s arms tightened around the bundle in her lap. “I need your help.”
*
Getting both of them inside while maintaining the two-metre distance Amy swore was necessary had been an inconvenience given double doors and keyed locks. Fortunately, the building’s other tenants had learned to ignore both Vicki and her clients, although most of them weren’t sure why.
“The detective came too close. I warned him, but he didn’t listen.” Leaning against the inside of the office door, Amy gently rocked a roll of purple fabric back and forth. “I don’t like being touched, right? So that’s what I asked for, to make it so no one touches me.”
Vicki perched on the edge of her desk and shoved her office chair across the room. “Sit. And asked who?”
Amy unrolled the fabric—it turned out to be a Ryerson University hoodie—and held up…
“A brass gravy boat?”
“It’s a magic lamp. With a genie inside.” Amy frowned, pulled the chair closer, and sat down. “They told me you dealt with the weird stuff.”
“I do,” Vicki sighed. “But hope springs eternal.” With luck, the smell of scorched metal came from the lamp and not the building’s wiring. Again. “Let’s see if I understand the situation. You found the lamp.”
“I bought it at a charity yard sale with a hand-held vacuum and an old Underwood typewriter. I know a place I can get ribbons. For the typewriter,” she added when Vicki frowned.
“Okay, sure. When you got it home, you rubbed the lamp.”
“It was really tarnished.”
“Then the genie appeared.”
“Not what I expected.” Amy shook her head. “I mean, even if I’d been expecting a genie—and I wasn’t, right?—I wouldn’t have expected that.”
“What?”
“Fire that didn’t burn.” Her heartbeat sped up. Her breathing grew shallower and faster. “A voice I could hear…” Trembling fingers touched her forehead. “…in my head, not my ears. It said it was a genie, and as I was the owner of the lamp, it would grant me three wishes.”
Fire that didn’t burn would make a fairly persuasive case, Vicki acknowledged. “So you wanted to not be touched, and the genie interpreted that as toss anyone who comes within two metres out a window?”
“Only people intending to touch me!” Amy protested. “Not random people in a crowd.”
She was so defensive, Vicki frowned and wondered if she’d been at Victoria Park stati
on yesterday morning. Two teenage boys had gone off the platform and were nearly killed by the next train. Police had assumed they’d shoved each other. Maybe not.
Amy pushed at her glasses. “I don’t want anyone to get hurt.”
…arm broken in two places, collarbone broken in one, three cracked ribs, multiple cuts from broken glass, and impressive bruising…
“You sure about that? I doubt Detective Celluci intended to touch you.”
“He wanted me to calm down.”
Which might not have put touching entirely off the table. And then Vicki remembered why Mike had been in Amy’s apartment. “You screamed. Why? Was it the genie?”
“It was my second wish.” Her shoulders rose protectively, and she curled around the lamp. “I wanted to find something that would make me special.”
Given the state of her apartment, it wasn’t hard to work out what something meant. A lost da Vinci. The Arkenstone. Metal arm with a star on the shoulder. “And did you? What was it?” she asked when Amy nodded. Mike wouldn’t have responded to happy screams.
Instead of answering, Amy set the sweater and the lamp on the floor and stood. She unzipped her over-sized windbreaker and let it slide off her shoulders. She was naked to the waist, but, in the grand scheme of things, bare breasts weren’t particularly notable next to a second and third set of arms…
Not arms, tentacles, Vicki corrected.
…that unwrapped from around Amy’s waist and stretched out to either side, bifurcated tips spreading. “I found them…” All four tentacles twitched when she sketched quotes around the word found. “…when I took my sweater off. Special.”
Vicki wasn’t sure if special emerged on a laugh or a sob. “Can you control them?”
“What difference does it make? I’m not keeping them!” She grabbed her jacket off the chair and shoved her arms back into it. The tentacles writhed, apparently unhappy about being hidden away again. “You need to fix this!”
“What was your third wish?”
“I only made two.” Elbows clamped against her sides, she struggled with the zipper. “What does my third wish have to do with…”
