Chapter Text
“That first dose will keep him out for four or five hours, and I can safely give him two, maybe three more without ill effects.” Setting the syringe aside, he pulled a key ring from the discarded jacket and passed it back without turning. “Search the house. If you find her, restrain her, and bring her directly here.”
“Restrain her, boss?”
“I suggest you use a generous amount of duct tape.”
*
There were people in the house. Two of them. Given that their years together had taught her all the rhythms of his life, Vicki could say with confidence that neither of the hearts currently pounding out barely contained fear about two and a half metres above her head belonged to Metropolitan Toronto Police Detective Mike Celluci—which was interesting, because the house did.
As she slid out the end of the packing crate, an alarm went off, freezing her in place. Watch alarm probably. Maybe cell phone.
“Shit! Sunset!”
They were speaking quietly—high emotion, but low volume. Not that it mattered.
“So what? She’s not in here.”
“You one hundred percent positive about that, Steve? You sure that she’s not tucked in between the floors or buried in the insulation in the attic or behind a false wall?”
Whoever he was, he wasn’t stupid, Vicki acknowledged as she lifted the section of the false wall away and moved out into the crawlspace. This was unfortunate because he’d headed toward the door as he spoke, his footsteps and Steve’s beating a fast tattoo against the floor.
Fast enough to survive?
Good question.
The crawlspace slowed her a little—at just under a metre high it had been chosen for safety not speed of exit. Out into the laundry room. Up the stairs as the door closed. Across the kitchen in time to see Steve and the smart guy throw themselves into the car they’d parked in the driveway.
Also smart. Parking in the driveway made them look like they were friends visiting and gave them faster access to their wheels if, say, they’d stayed a little past sunset and had to haul ass or die.
Vicki’d bet the smart guy hadn’t planned on letting Steve drive and was therefore not the short, bearded, white man but the taller, clean-shaven, black man sliding behind the wheel. She’d have been inclined to say they didn’t look like criminals, except she’d been a cop long enough, back before it had come down to change or die, to know criminals didn’t actually have a look.
She could have caught them before they got the engine started. A closed car door meant nothing to her, but the whole sleeping-naked thing made her hesitate a moment too long. February in and of itself didn’t mean a lot, but she could hear Peter Yuen and his sister arguing as they headed up the driveway of the house next door and flashing the neighbour’s teenagers would definitely cause trouble for Mike.
As the black Jetta sped away, she considered the few inarguable facts she had. Not only did Smart Guy and Steve have a pretty damned good idea of what she was, but also thought they knew where she spent the day and were willing to break into a police officer’s house in order to do something about it.
The edge of the counter cracked under her grip.
“Just what I need,” she growled, heading back to the crate for her phone. “A pair of modern Van Helsings. Like my life isn’t complicated enough.”
Of the two halves of her life, maintaining some semblance of a normal relationship with Detective Mike Celluci seemed to be giving her the most problem. It required careful socializing with people who’d known them before she’d changed, and a safety net of lies complex enough to give the most jaded politician pause. The creature of the night thing? That she had down.
Never growing old had lost a little of its shine as she watched Mike’s hair grey and the lines around his eyes deepen, but being stronger and faster, being able to deal with the human and not-quite-human things that haunted the nights of a big city seemed a fair trade for being helpless between sunrise and sunset.
Or had been a fair trade.
Until today.
Still naked, she headed back upstairs, listening to Mike’s phone go straight to voicemail. Theoretically, he finished at three and by 5:47 PM shouldn’t be doing anything that would keep him from answering. And anyone who believed cops had half a hope in hell of keeping regular hours was in a prime position to buy some Saskatchewan beach-front property.
“We have a situation.” A situation; their personal code for someone knows. “Call me as soon as you can. Oh, and I’m heading into the office, so you can meet me there.”
She couldn’t stay at the house. Not and think clearly.
Pausing by the notepad on the fridge, she scrawled down the four numbers on the license plate that she remembered—AAK, blank, dash, blank, blank, 2—then went into the bedroom to dress. Half her clothes were here, half at her office downtown. She hadn’t spent the day there for months, but the belief that she maintained two separate residences allowed for a greater plausible deniability when friends couldn’t find her before sunset.
Smart Guy and Steve hadn’t been subtle in their search. Both bed and dresser had been shifted and both closets emptied enough to check the back walls. They didn’t bother moving anything too small to hide a body. “Definitely knew what they were doing,” she snarled, yanking on a pair of jeans.
She repeated the sentiment a few minutes later, slamming the kitchen door behind her and locking it. It was the door Smart Guy and Steve had come in through, and they’d taken the time to not only pick the lock on the door but also the lock holding the chain rather than take a pair of bolt cutters to it. The cold, and the pungent hand lotion used by whichever one of them had actually handled the door, made it difficult to get any kind of a scent, and they’d both obviously been wearing gloves while they were in the house. Winter clothes blocked most of the fear sweat.
Scent would have allowed her to pick them out of a crowd regardless of how good a look she’d got at them. As it was, she might recognize their voices, but that wasn’t much to go on.
Still, she’d found other men with less.
“Picked the wrong damned vampire to stake this time,” she growled, forcing herself to relax her grip on the steering wheel before she broke it. Again.
Winter driving in Toronto was never fun. Winter driving at rush hour, Downsview to her office on King Street East, barely maintaining a grip on her temper was less fun by an order of magnitude.
As the door to her office closed behind her, Vicki exhaled what felt like the first actual breath she’d taken since sunset and admitted that just maybe the break-in—not to mention the possibility of true death that came with it—had left her a little tense.
Any lock could be picked, but the two heavy steel bolts and the two-by-four slid through steel brackets that secured the office door required an entirely different skill set. And tools. And would likely attract unwanted attention from the other tenants in the building, three-quarters of whom ignored the clause in their lease that stipulated studios in the renovated warehouse were not live-in.
She was safer here in the day than she was at Mike’s.
She’d given up that safety for Mike.
But then Mike had given up normal for her, so if someone, somewhere was keeping score, the game was tied as far as Vicki was concerned.
“By sunrise,” she muttered, crossing the room to her desk, “I’d like that to be completely irrelevant.” Find the car. Find out who owned it. Neutralize the threat. A few months ago, she’d had dinner with a man who designed digital storage protocols for the Ministry of Transport. He didn’t know it, but after she’d fed, he’d built her a back door into the system and set up the search protocols that allowed her to make the best use of it. With the day denied her, it was nothing more than a way of evening the odds. That said, she hadn’t mentioned it to Mike. It wasn’t like he shared all the details of his job.
Model and license information had just been entered when her office phone rang. The caller ID showed Mike’s cell number.
Speak of the devil.
“Hey. In case you didn’t get my message, we have a situation.”
“You have more than that, Ms. Nelson. You have one chance to save Detective Celluci’s life.”
She didn’t recognize the voice.
Or her own when she answered, but then her lips were pulled so far back off her teeth that was hardly surprising. “You’re a dead man.”
“One chance,” he repeated. He didn’t sound particularly worried about her reaction. “My people will meet you in front of your building and bring you to me.”
It didn’t seem like she had much of a choice. “When?”
“As soon as you can get out there. Leave your cell phone behind.”
He’d hung up without waiting for a response, but she called him a few choice names anyhow as she shrugged back into her coat and pulled her phone out of her pocket.
*
The black Jetta. Big surprise.
Smart Guy was still driving. Steve sat in the back and held up a phone as she closed the door. “Boss can hear every word. Try anything, and the cop dies.”
Vicki twisted around and smiled at him, giving the Hunger free rein. They thought they knew what she was. They weren’t even close.
There was a sudden, sharp smell of urine, and Steve whimpered. He hung onto the phone though.
“Stop terrifying my people, Ms. Nelson.” The speaker crackled as they pulled out into traffic, passing under a triple layer of overhead wires. “I can see you, I can hear you, and only your full co-operation will keep Detective Celluci alive.”
“If you kill him…” The small webcam had been mounted on the rearview mirror. She turned to stare directly into it. “…I will make you scream.”
“I don’t doubt it. I am, however, banking on the fact that you will do nothing to endanger Detective Celluci’s life. Your phone?”
“In the office.”
“Excellent.”
“You’re going to take my word for it?”
“If I find out you’ve been lying, you won’t be the one to suffer for it. Put the blindfold on. You’ll find it on the seat beside you.”
She found it on the seat between her and Smart Guy, almost covered by the spread of his grey wool winter coat.
Smart Guy hadn’t looked at her once, his eyes locked on the road. At the speed they were traveling along the snow-covered city streets, she could kill him and take control of the car without endangering anyone else on the road. From the trickle of sweat running down his temple and behind the curve of his jaw to disappear behind his fleece scarf, it seemed he knew that.
“Ms. Nelson?”
The threat was implicit in the question.
“Fine. I’m putting it on.”
It wasn’t just a strip of black cloth, it was a strip of black cloth that had clearly been designed as a blindfold—thicker where it passed over the eyes, the ends thin enough to tie securely. Whoever this guy was, he probably knew if anal retentive had a hyphen.
“Good. Now, since your hearing is undoubtedly good enough to pick up environmental sounds that may give my position away, Daniel, if you would.”
Smart Guy had a name.
Vicki heard the shush as the fabric of his coat brushed against itself, felt the air currents in the car shift, heard the click of switch, the whirr of a CD, and the dulcet tones of Celine Dion at a decibel level that had to be causing as much pain to the other occupants of the car as it was to her.
Unless, of course, her Van Helsing had recruited his minions from gay-men-trapped-in-the-nineties-dot-com.
“Couldn’t you just distract me by telling me your evil plan?” she muttered, hands up over her ears. A whimper of agreement from Steve in the back, but no reply from the big man. “Whatever he’s paying you guys, it isn’t enough.”
It might have still been possible to separate out distinct traffic sounds, but Vicki didn’t bother trying. She didn’t memorize the turns or try to time the sections of the trip. Wherever they were headed, she’d never need to find it again. The moment they’d laid their hands on Mike, everyone involved had died. Steve had died. Daniel had died. And their boss had died. Oh, they were still up and walking around, still apparently breathing, but it was only a matter of time. The only actual question remaining was just exactly how long their deaths would take. And that depended on the shape Mike was in.
Celine slid into My Heart Will Go On.
Vicki sang along. No reason they shouldn’t start suffering now.
Fourteen and a half songs later, they turned onto what felt like unploughed ruts. Before the fifteenth song finished, Daniel turned the car off and Celine fell silent.
All three of them breathed a simultaneous sigh of relief.
“Stay in the car, Ms. Nelson, until Daniel comes around and opens your door.”
By having Daniel do it, both minions were on the same side of the car as she was. Easier for one to react if she killed the other. Van Helsing was wasting his redundancies, since no one would die until Mike was safe.
She stretched as Daniel closed the door behind her.
“Turn to your right, Ms. Nelson.”
Vicki turned.
“Now walk twenty paces.”
Four paces took her through a doorway and inside an unheated building. Her heels made no sound against the concrete floor. Approximately two metres behind her on the left, Daniel matched his pace to hers, while on the right Steve’s boots thumped out an arrhythmic beat, the echoes defining a large, empty space. The air reeked of cloves, but sixteen paces in, she caught a whiff of a familiar scent under the spice.
Mike.
He wasn’t bleeding.
There weren’t spices enough in the city to cover that.
At twenty paces she stopped. Two heartbeats in front of her; four, maybe five metres away. Mike sounded drugged, his heartbeat slow, but steady. Van Helsing sounded excited, but not afraid.
“You may take off the blindfold, Ms. Nelson.” He sounded as calm up close and personal as he had over the phone.
The calm before the storm. Vicki stuffed the blindfold in her pocket and slowly opened her eyes, her vision sensitive enough that even the low light in the empty warehouse caused painful starbursts.
When she blinked them away, the first thing she saw was Mike. Arms, legs, and chest duct taped to a wheelchair, his eyes closed, his mouth slightly open, a glistening line of drool running down his chin, a small vapour cloud blooming with each breath.
Her would-be Van Helsing stood slightly to the left of the wheelchair, holding a gun to Mike’s head. He wasn’t particularly tall, had brown hair and brown eyes, was expensively dressed and vaguely attractive in an I’m confident enough to kidnap a decorated police officer in order to get the drop on a vampire sort of a way. Vicki had to admit she appreciated that kind of confidence—if only on an intellectual level.
She kept a tight grip on the Hunger. As much as she wanted to let it loose, allowing herself to give into blood lust would very likely add Mike to the body count, and that was the one thing she wanted to avoid.
“We meet at last, Ms. Nelson.” His words created a vapour cloud.
Hers didn’t. “You do know that it’s entirely possible I could kill you before you could pull the trigger?”
“I know.” He seemed impressed. “Which is why my men are also armed. If you begin to move toward me they will shoot.”
“They couldn’t hit me.”
“They won’t be aiming at you.”
Although she could smell the fear rising like smoke off the two men behind her, if she had to attach an emotion to this man, she’d say it was anticipation. He was studying her like she was the answer to the only riddle he’d never been able to solve. “You don’t want to kill me.”
His brows rose. “I beg your pardon?”
He knew what she was. He suspected she lived with Mike—knew about the connection between them at least. He got the keys to the house from Mike when he grabbed him, but finding her there had been incidental to his plan or he wouldn’t have waited until the end of Mike’s shift and the chance she’d wake. He took Mike because Mike’s life was the only thing that would allow him to control her. And if he wanted to control her…
“What is it that only I can do for you?”
He smiled then. “Make me like you.”
Vicki blinked. “Like me?”
“Yes. “
“You have no idea what I am.”
“Faster, stronger, immortal, nightwalker, vampire.” He gestured with his free hand. The hand holding the gun remained rock steady. “A piece of evidence here. A rumour there. A camera you weren’t aware of. Oh, don’t worry, it’s all been taken care of.”
“If you think this is a worried expression, you’re more delusional than I thought.”
“I was merely making it clear that you needn’t start ripping throats out to cover your tracks. It’s all been taken care of.” His brows lifted slightly. “I don’t want anyone else to put the pieces together, do I? I assigned Daniel and Steven to you exclusively, and I did what research was necessary myself. The only thing I haven’t discovered, is why.”
“Why what?”
“Why would you take the risks involved in tying yourself to a mortal life.”
She couldn’t stop her lips from lifting off her teeth. In all honesty, she didn’t try very hard. “There’s a lot of backstory.”
“I’m sure there must be.” He actually sounded bored. “And it’s not really important, here and now. The point is, I know exactly what you are, Ms. Nelson, and in return for the detective’s life, you will give that gift to me.”
Vicki hadn’t had a headache since she’d started walking the night, but the effort of holding herself back and trying to figure out what the fuck was going on had combined to wrap a band of pressure around her temples. “Okay, let’s leave what you think you know about me for a moment; who the hell are you?”
“You don’t know?”
If she had to bet, she’d say he honestly thought she should.
“My name is Damon Shea, and I am the CEO and majority stock holder of…”
“Shea Pharmaceuticals, a multinational, multimillion-dollar corporation run by a man too ambitious not to cut corners and too smart to get caught.”
A dimple flashed in one cheek. “See, you do know me.”
“And you want to become a vampire.”
“Think of what I could accomplish.”
Vicki snorted. “Yeah, I am. You kidnapped a police officer, drugged him, and are holding him at gunpoint—strangely enough, that doesn’t say using immortality to work for the greater good.” She spread her hands, carefully, aware of the weapons behind her. “But that could just be me.”
“Needs must, Ms. Nelson.” Shea shrugged. “As long as you co-operate, Detective Celluci will wake up with nothing worse than a dry mouth and a temporary craving for carbohydrates.”
“And you’ll release him when I agree to change you?”
“I will.”
She sighed. “The change isn’t instantaneous.”
“I said I did my research, Ms. Nelson. While I am changing, Daniel and Steven will keep an eye on your detective, as an insurance policy. You’ll have left him a note explaining enough to keep him from searching for you. After the change, you won’t be able to kill me because of the blood bond. Neither will I be able to kill you. You’ll be free to go, and I will then change Daniel and Steven as payment for services rendered.”
She wondered if Daniel and Steven believed that.
Didn’t matter.
“So,” he continued, “here’s what’s going to happen. You’re going to sign the note I’ve already written, then you will allow me to secure you. Daniel and Steven will take the detective home, and after they call to inform us that he’s awake and fine, we’ll get started. There is no way out of this, Ms. Nelson. I’ve covered every contingency.”
The bang of a fist against the warehouse door was so loud and unexpected the shouting wasn’t entirely required. “Open up! This is the police!”
One of them, she expected it was probably Daniel, kept his head and pulled the trigger as she began to move. The round caught her just under her left shoulder and the pain broke the last of the Hunger free.
Her hand around Shea’s hand and the gun, she crushed the bones against the metal.
He screamed.
“A gunshot. A scream. Police’ll be breaking the door down.” He smelled liked terror now. Vicki smiled and said, “Time to leave.”
Flicking the bloody remains of Shea’s trigger finger out of the way, she turned just far enough to put a bullet into both Daniel and Steven’s heads then threw the moaning man up over her good shoulder and ran for the other end of the warehouse, not caring that blood from his hand left a trail on the floor.
She could have broken the door down, but she shot the lock off and shoved it open carefully enough to keep from ripping it off the hinges. Scuffing her feet through the snow to keep from leaving a clear impression, rage keeping her moving at nearly full speed in spite of the wound and the struggling man, she stopped by a set of tire tracks then made an impossible jump across them to a bit of bare rock. Looked down, smiled again, and dropped down into the ravine. She’d thought they were by the waterfront, but given the terrain, it was more likely they were in one of the recession-hit warehouses on Riverside Drive.
When she figured she was far enough from the warehouse to delay discovery, she tossed Damon Shea down into the snow. He stared up at her, eyes wide and shocky, heart racing, cradling his ruined hand to his chest, not so much holding the gun as unable to release it.
“You… called…”
“The police? Yeah, before I left my phone in the office.” One of the benefits of fighting to maintain some semblance of a life with Mike was that she still had friends on the force. She’d reported the threatening phone call and passed on the information about the car she’d seen lurking around the house.
“Research…”
“That whole vampires-are-lone-predators thing? That we never share our territory? That we’re top of the food chain? That we walk alone? You researched vampires, Mr. Shea.” Crouching in the snow beside him, she gave his shoulder a friendly pat. “You didn’t research me. And you know what you also missed considering? People in the process of breaking the law tend to overreact when the police show up.”
The banging on the door had caused one of the minions to panic, shooting the boss, who shot them both, and ran for it.
There were likely drops of her blood in the warehouse as well as Shea’s, but given the way budget cuts had created a massive backlog in the labs and given that the scene was pretty self-explanatory, the odds were good they’d never run the tests. In case the scene wasn’t self-explanatory enough, she’d have a talk with the uniforms on site before they wrote up their reports.
She thought about explaining all that to Shea, but the scent of his blood, steaming a little in the cold, loosened the last of her self-control.
*
“They lost Shea’s trail for a while, but they found his body later down in the ravine. Bastard slipped, cracked his head on a rock, and between that and the blood loss, well it was minus twenty-seven when they found him. And there wasn’t much left. A pack of feral dogs or maybe coyotes had torn the body apart, probably before it was even cold, but they found his weapon, three shots fired, two into his men and one into the lock on the rear door. Running ballistics is just a formality really.”
“Thank you, Constable.” Eyes silvered, she held his gaze with hers. He shivered as her voice whispered across his skin.
“Do you…”
“Shhhh.” She laid her finger against the swell of his lower lip. “I wasn’t here and you didn’t tell me any of this.”
When he nodded, she slipped past him and into Mike’s hospital room. Although he’d been essentially unharmed, the drugs had left him too out of it to protest a night under observation as vigorously as he could have.
He looked completely wiped, but he opened his eyes when she took his hand, obviously having been waiting for her to show up. After a moment, he closed his fingers around hers and squeezed. “What time is it?”
“Five fifty.”
“You’re cutting it close.”
She stayed to make sure that the police who found Damon Shea’s body found what she’d wanted them to find. “I’ve got time. You’ve got to love a February night.”
Mike’s mouth twisted into something that wasn’t quite a smile. “No, I don’t actually.”
“Well, maybe not this February night.”
“Vicki…” He paused and searched her face. Hospital rooms were never entirely dark and she had no idea how much he could see. He often saw more than she wanted him to. If he asked for her version of the story, she wondered what she’d tell him. Finally, he sighed, yawned, and said, “I’ve been lying here trying to figure out why Damon Shea of all people would grab me. I mean, there’s a lot of assholes out there who might want to get their own back, but Shea? It doesn’t make sense.” He met her gaze then, one of the very few who still could, and said, “You have blood on your sleeve.”
That was impossible, she’d changed her…
When Mike’s brows rose, she sighed.
“That’s what I thought.” And she was just as glad he didn’t say exactly what he thought, given the blood that wasn’t on her sleeve. “Shea was using me to get to you.”
“It didn’t work.”
“This time. But I’m a danger to you.”
“Given that you were the one grabbed and drugged…” Seemed reasonable to skip telling him about the gun to his head. “…I’d say I was a danger to you.”
“So…” He dragged her hand over onto his chest. “What are we going to do about it?”
She supposed she’d always known it would come to this. It wouldn’t be easy finding another territory, but she’d have to get out of the city entirely to put enough distance between them.
To her surprise, he laughed before she could say anything. “You’ve always thought too loud, Vic. And you’ve always been my weakness, from the moment I first met you, same way that I’ve been yours. And we’ve always lived the kind of lives where people could use that against us. So we’ll do what we’ve always done.”
His heart beat slow and steady under her hand. “We’ll watch each other’s backs.”
“We’ll watch each other’s backs,” he repeated. With that settled, his eyes drifted closed.
Vicki glanced over at the clock. If she stayed another twenty minutes, she’d still have time to get to her office before sunrise. As she watched Mike sleep, she realized that Shea had entirely missed the point. Mike was her weakness, but he was also her strength.
And should she ever be threatened the way he’d been tonight, he’d kill to keep her safe.
She just hoped he never had to.