4 Blood Pact

by Tanya Huff

  Henry lifted the offered arm, then looked up at Celluci, his eyes dark, the smallest hint of a smile brushing against the outside comers of his lips. “You know, it’s a shame there’s so much between us, Detective.”

  Celluci felt the heat and tossed the curl of hair back off his forehead. “Don’t press your luck, you undead son of a bitch.”

  As he carried her out the door, her life still balanced on the razor’s edge, Henry paused. “Doesn’t it gnaw at you,” he asked at last, unable to leave with knowing, “that at the end she chose me?”

  Celluci reached out and gently tucked her glasses into the pocket of her coat. Her purse and her suitcase had already been loaded in Henry’s car.

  “She didn’t choose you,” he said, stepping back and rubbing at the bandage on his wrist. “She chose the one chance she had to live. I refuse to feel bad about that.”

  “She could still die.”

  “See that she doesn’t.”

  A thousand thoughts between one faltering heartbeat and the next. “I’ll do my best.”

  Celluci nodded, acknowledging truth; then he bent forward and kissed her gently on lips that felt less warm than they had.

  “Good-bye, Vicki.”

  And there wasn’t anything more he could say.

  He dealt with Detective Fergusson. Explained Vicki had had a bit of a breakdown, perfectly understandable under the circumstances, and gone back to Toronto with a friend. “I’ll let her know what happened . . .”

  He dealt with the contents of her mother’s apartment, calling an estate auctioneer and putting everything in his hands. “Just sell it. The money goes to the lawyer until the will clears probate, so what’s the problem.”

  He dealt with Mr. Delgado.

  “I saw her leave in his car; through my window.” The old man looked up at him and shook his head. “What happened?”

  Just for a moment, Celluci wanted to tell him—just for a moment, because he desperately needed to tell somebody. Fortunately, the moment passed. “There’s an old saying, Mr. Delgado, ‘if you love something, let it go.”

  “I know this saying. I read it on a T-shirt once. It’s bullshit, if you’ll excuse my language.” His head continued to shake like it was the only moving part of an ancient clockwork. “So she made her choice.”

  “We all made a choice.”

  He dealt with driving back to Toronto not knowing. He wouldn’t call Fitzroy. He’d bent as far as he could. Let Fitzroy call him.

  He dealt with the message when it finally came and thanked God he only had to deal with Fitzroy’s voice on the machine. Even that was disturbing enough. He tried to be happy she was still alive. Tried very hard. Almost managed it.

  He found out what was happening next by accident. He hadn’t intended to walk by her apartment. It was stupid. Ghoulish. He knew she wasn’t there. He’d gone in once, the night he’d arrived from Kingston, cleared out his stuff, and without knowing why, had taken a picture of the two of them that he hated off her dresser. When he got home, he shoved it up on the shelf in his hall closet and never looked at it again. But he had it.

  “Hey, Sarge.” A slender shadow detached itself from the broad base of the old chestnut tree and sauntered out onto the sidewalk. “There’s no point in going in, her stuff’s all gone. New tenants coming next week, I expect.”

  “What are you doing here, Tony?”

  The young man shrugged. “I was dropping off the key and I saw you coming around the comer, so I figured I’d wait. Save me a trip later. I got a message for you.”

  “A message,” he repeated, because he couldn’t ask who from.

  “Yeah. Henry said I was to tell you that you were one of the most honorable men he ever met and that he wished things could’ve been different.”

  “Different. Yeah. Well.”

  Tony shot the detective a glance out of the comer of his eye and hid his disappointment. Henry wouldn’t tell him what he meant by different, if he meant with Vicki or what, and now it looked like Celluci was going to be just as closedmouthed. Although he’d been given the overall story behind that last night in Kingston, he had none of the details and curiosity was almost killing him. “Henry also wanted me to tell you that a year is a small slice of eternity.”

  Celluci snorted and started walking down Huron Street, needing the distraction of movement. “What the hell does that mean?” he asked as Tony fell into step beside him.

  “Beats me,” Tony admitted. “But that’s what he wanted me to tell you. He said you’d understand later.”

  Celluci snorted again. “Fucking romance writer.”

  “Yeah. Well.” When they reached the comer at Cecil Street, and the detective hadn’t spoke again, Tony sighed. “Mostly she sleeps,” he said.

  “Who sleeps?” A muscle jumped in Celluci’s jaw.

  “Victory. Henry’s still pretty worried about her, but he thinks things are going to be all right now that the hole in her leg finally healed up. We’re moving to Vancouver.”

  “We?”

  “Yeah. She’s pretty helpless right now. They need someone who can deal with the sun. And . . .”

  “Never mind.” Vancouver. All the way across the country. “Why? For the sea air?”

  “Nah. So nobody recognizes her when she starts to hunt. Apparently they’re pretty messy at first.”

  They’d eaten a thousand meals together. Maybe two thousand. “Tell him she’s not likely to get a lot neater.”

  Tony snickered. “I’ll tell him. Anything you want me to tell her?”

  “Tell her. . .” His voice trailed off and he seemed to be staring at something Tony couldn’t see. Then his face twisted and, lips pressed into a thin, white line, he spun on one heel and strode away.

  Tony stood and watched him for a moment, then he nodded. “Don’t worry, man,” he said softly. “I’ll tell her.”

  He dealt with everything until Detective Fergusson called from Kingston about the inquest.

  “Look, she’s moved to Vancouver, all right. Other than that, I don’t know where the fuck she is.”

  Detective Fergusson jumped to the obvious conclusion. “Dumped you, eh?”

  In answer, Celluci ripped the phone off his kitchen wall and threw it out the back door. A few days later, after he’d been brought in by a couple of uniforms for racing a jet down the runway at the Downsview Airport, the backseat of his car rattling with empties, the police psychologist suggested that he was suppressing strong emotions.

  Still painfully hung over, Celluci barely resisted the urge to suppress the police psychologist.

  “I hope she’s worth you flushing your career down the toilet, because that’s what you’re doing.” Inspector Cantree’s chair screeched a protest as he leaned back and glared at Celluci. “You know what I’ve got here?” One huge hand slapped down on the file folder centered on his blotter. “Never mind. I’ll tell you. I’ve got a report from the department shrink that suggests you’re dangerously unstable and that you shouldn’t be allowed out on the street carrying a gun.”

  Lips compressed into a thin, white line, Celluci started to shrug out of his shoulder holster.

  “Put that the fuck back on!” Cantree snapped. “If I was going to listen to the pompous quack, I’d have had your badge days ago.”

  Celluci shoved the curl of hair back off his face and tried to ignore how much the motion reminded him of her. “I’m fine,” he growled.

  “Bullshit! You want to tell me what’s wrong?”

  “Nothing’s wrong.” His tone dared Cantree to argue the point and Cantree’s expression did just that. Celluci had heard the rumors making the rounds about ex-Detective Vicki Nelson’s hasty relocation to the West Coast—although he’d heard them second or third hand because no one had the guts to speculate to his face. Obviously, Cantree had heard them, too. “It’s personal.”

  “Not when it affects your job, it isn’t.” The Inspector leaned forward and held Celluci’s gaze with his. “So here’s what
you’re going to do. You’re going to take a leave of absence for at least a month and you’re going to get out of the city and you’re going to find wherever it is you’ve left your brains and then you’re going to come back and have another little talk with Dr. Freud-enstein.”

  “What if I don’t want to go?” Celluci muttered.

  Cantree smiled. “If you don’t take a leave of absence, I’ll suspend you for a month without pay. Either way, you’re out of here.”

  Betting in headquarters had three to one odds that Mike Celluci’s leave of absence would begin on the first available flight to Vancouver. Several people lost some serious money.

  A week after the interview in Cantree’s office, Celluci found himself escorting his ancient grandmother onto a plane bound for Italy and a family reunion.

  “Jesus, Mike it’s good to have you back.” Dave Graham’s grin threatened to dislodge the entire lower half of his face. “I mean, one more temporary partner like the last one and I’d have taken six weeks off.”

  “Who the fuck left coffee rings all over my desk!”

  “On the other hand,” Dave continued thoughtfully as Celluci began accusing coworkers of messing with his stuff, “it was a lot quieter while you were gone.”

  “You buying one of those, Mike?”

  “What?” Celluci looked up from the paperback book display and scowled at his partner.

  “Well, you’ve been staring at it for the last five minutes. I thought that maybe you were in the mood for a little light reading.” Dave reached past his head at the blond giant cradling a half-naked brunette on the cover. “Sail into Destiny by Elizabeth Fitzroy. Looks like a winner. You think you know a guy . . .” He flipped the book over “. . . think you know his tastes, and then you find out about something like this. You figure Captain Roxborough and this Veronica babe are going to get together in the end or is that a given?”

  “Jesus H. Christ, we’re in a mall! Someone might see you.” Celluci grabbed the book and shoved it back on the shelf.

  “Hey, you were the one who stopped to browse,” Dave protested as the two detectives started walking again. “You were the one . . .”

  “I know the author, all right? Now drop it.”

  “You know an author? I didn’t even think you knew how to read.” They watched a crowd of teenage boys saunter past and into a sports store. “So what’s she like? Does she live in Toronto?”

  He’s a vampire. He lives in Vancouver. “I said, drop it.”

  There were bits of Vicki scattered all over the city and whenever he ran into one—her old neighborhood, her favorite coffee shop, a hooker she’d busted—it gouged the scabs off his ability to cope. Now, he was finding bits of Fitzroy as well and every copy of the book he saw ground salt into the wounds. Fortunately, he’d gotten better at hiding the pain.

  He’d even convinced the police psychologist that he was fine.

  “. . . and the Stanley Park murders continue in Vancouver. Another known drug dealer has been found by the teahouse at Ferguson Point. As in the three previous cases, the head appears to have been ripped from the body and sources in the Coroner’s Office report that, once again, the body has been drained of blood.”

  Celluci’s grip tightened around the aluminum beer can, crushing the thin metal. His attention locked on the television, he didn’t notice the liquid dripping over his hand and onto the carpet.

  “The police remain baffled and one of the officers staking out the teahouse during the time the murder occurred freely admitted having seen nothing. Speculation in the press ranges from the likelihood of a powerful new gang arriving in the Vancouver area and removing competition, to the possibility of an enraged sasquatch roaming the park.

  “In Edmonton . . .”

  Drained of blood. Celluci shut off the sound and stared unblinkingly at the CBC news anchor who silently continued the National without him. Not a sasquatch. A vampire. A new, young vampire learning to feed. Rip off the heads to hide the first frenzied teeth marks. Fitzroy was strong enough. Leave dead drug dealers in the park to make a point. He could see Vicki all over that.

  “God-damned vampire vigilantes,” he muttered through teeth clenched so tightly his temples ached. Back before Fitzroy, Vicki had realized that law was one of the few concepts holding chaos at bay. As much as she might have wanted to behead a few of the cockroaches that walked on two legs in the city’s gutters, she’d never have taken matters into her own hands. Fitzroy had changed that even before he’d changed her.

  Vicki was alive, but what had she become? And why didn’t he care?

  Celluci didn’t want to face the answer to either question. The TV continued to flicker silently in the comer as he cracked open a bottle of Scotch and methodically set about searching for oblivion.

  Time passed but only because there was nothing to stop it.

  She stood outside for a while and watched his shadow move against the blinds. There was a tightness in her chest and, if she didn’t know herself better, she’d say she was frightened. “Which is ridiculous.”

  Wiping her palms against the thighs of her jeans, the movement dictated no longer by need but by habit, she started up the driveway. Waiting would only make it worse.

  Her knock, harder than she’d intended for she still didn’t have complete control of her strength, echoed up and down the quiet street. She listened to him approach the door, counted his heartbeats as he turned the knob, and tried not to flinch back from the sudden spill of light.

  “Vicki.”

  She felt as though she hadn’t heard her name spoken for a very long time and couldn’t hear his reaction over the sound of her own. With an effort, she kept her voice more or less even. “You don’t seem especially surprised to see me.”

  “I heard about what happened last night to Gowan and Mallard.”

  “No more than they deserved. No more than I owed them.”

  “The paper says they’ll both live.”

  The night flashed for an instant in her smile. “Good. I want them to live with it.” She rubbed her palms against her jeans again, this time wiping clean old debts. “Can I come in?”

  Celluci stepped back from the door. She was thinner, paler, and her hair was different. It took a moment for the most obvious change to sink in.

  “Your glasses?”

  “I don’t need them anymore.” This smile was the smile he remembered. “Good thing, too.”

  Closing the door behind her, he felt like an amputee who’d woken up to find his legs had grown back. He couldn’t seem to catch his breath and it took a moment to identify the strange sense of loss he was feeling with an absence of pain. He almost heard the click as the piece that had been gouged from his life slid back into place.

  “You know the potential problems with the RP never even occurred to me that night in the lab,” she continued, leading the way into the kitchen. “Can you imagine a vampire with no night sight? Biting by braille-God, what a mess that would be.”

  “You’re babbling,” he said shortly as she turned to face him.

  “I know. Sorry.”

  They stared at each other for a long moment and a number of things that needed to be said were discussed in the silence.

  “Henry owes you an apology,” Vicki told him at last. “He never mentioned to you that vampires can’t stay together after the change is complete.”

  “It’s been fourteen months.”

  She spread her hands. “Sorry. I got off to a slow start.”

  Celluci frowned. “I’m not sure I understand. You can’t ever see him again?”

  “He says I won’t want to. That we won’t want to.”

  “The bastard could’ve told me.” He dragged a hand up through his hair. “Henry wanted me to tell you that a year is a small slice of eternity.” Taking a deep breath, he wondered what he would’ve done had their positions been reversed. “Never mind. Henry doesn’t owe me anything. And the son of a bitch already apologized.”

  Vicki looked
doubtful. “Yeah? Well, I’m not buying into his tragic separation bullshit even if we can’t share a territory.” Brave words, but she wasn’t so sure that they meant anything, that her new nature would allow a bond to remain without the blood.

  “I’m not giving you up without a fight. ”

  Henry turned away from the lights of a new city and sadly shook his head. “You’ll be fighting yourself, Vicki. Fighting what you are. What we are.”

  “So?” Her chin rose. “I don’t surrender, Henry. Not to anything.”

  “He’s got a cellular phone and he just bought a fax machine, for chrissake; I think we’ll manage to stay in touch.”

  “Really?” Celluci propped one hip on the counter and crossed his arms over his chest. “You never called me.”

  “I wasn’t able to until just recently—things were a little chaotic at first. And then . . .” She rubbed a pale finger along the edge of his kitchen table, glad she’d lost the ability to blush. “And then, I was afraid.”

  He’d never heard her admit to being afraid of anything before. “Afraid of what?”

  She looked up and he found his answer in the desperate question in her eyes.

  “Vicki . . . ” He made her name a gentle accusation. Couldn’t you trust me?

  “Well, I’m different now and . . . What are you laughing at?”

  How long had it been since he laughed like that? About fourteen months, he suspected. “If that’s all you’re worried about; Vicki, you’ve always been different.”

  The question faded, replaced by hope. “So you don’t mind?”

  “I’d be lying if I said it won’t take getting used to, but, no, I don’t mind.” Mind? There wasn’t much he couldn’t get used to if it meant having her back beside him.

  “It won’t be the same.”

  “No shit.”