Blood Debt

herself, never going away.
    Only two of the three errands had been done. The third, she had no intention of fulfilling in front of a witness and had returned home, Patricia Chou still on her heels.
    Her station won't let her sit there forever. When she's called in, I'll make my move. Almost everything has been prepared, and there's no reason to panic. You are in no danger of discovery if you remain calm. Her nails scraped against the glass as her fingers curled into fists. She could just barely make out one slender, denim-clad leg thrust out of the van's interior. Oh, for a truck to go by and take that off at the knee…
    All afternoon she'd watched as Patricia Chou had traded on local recognition and interviewed almost everyone coming or going from the building.
    It had been a very long afternoon.
    "Patricia, please," Brent pleaded, digging his knuckles into bloodshot eyes. "Let's go. We're not going to get anything else today, and I'm wiped."
    "Just a little while longer."
    The cameraman sighed, collapsed back against a bag of equipment.
    "You've been saying that for the last hour."
    "This time I mean it." She twisted out the door until she could see the red and gold streaking the bottom of the clouds. "Just wait until sunset."
    "Why? What's going to happen at sunset?"
    Between one heartbeat and the next, a silver shadow flickered in her eyes. "I have no idea…"
    "Then why… ?"
    "… but I've been promised a story."

    7:43. Celluci looked up from his watch and squinted out the window. The setting sun had turned the other building a brilliant white-gold. Whatever was going to happen, wasn't going to happen for another five minutes. He still had time to stop it.
    His right thumb rubbed the scabbed puncture in the hollow of his left elbow.
    Four minutes.
    Still time.
    Three minutes.
    It wasn't because she was responsible for, at the very least, the deaths of the two young men whose spirits haunted Henry. It wasn't because of what she'd done to him personally.
    She'd used their hope when hope was all those people had.
    Two minutes.

    The law could deal with murder, but if Henry's ghosts didn't have the right to deal with the death of hope, who did?
    He saw the flaw in the plan at 7:47. By then, it was too late.

    Henry'd spent the day wrapped in a theatrical blackout curtain, lying on the floor of the walk-in closet. Although wide open to suggestion, the Pettits had not been easy to get rid of. Having found him, they wanted to stay with him. He'd barely had time to gain his sanctuary and twist the door handle into an unusable chunk of metal when sunrise claimed him.
    7:48. Sunset.
    They were there. He could feel their presence more strongly than he'd ever felt it before. The air around him was uniformly cold, and when he drew in his first breath, it seemed to move reluctantly into his lungs, coating the inside of his mouth and throat with a frigid film.
    Wormwood and gall . He swallowed reluctantly.
    His hand rested on the switch of small desk lamp he'd brought into the closet with him. Too bright an illumination would be of no more use than the darkness; the overhead light would blind him and wash the spirits out to near invisibility.
    When he turned the switch, he could see the two ghosts who'd haunted him from the beginning pressed up tight against his feet. All around them—all around him—were others. He couldn't count their numbers, they kept shifting in and out of focus—here a young woman with the corner of her upper lip pierced, there tormented eyes peering out from under a fringe of hair. Faces. Bodies. The invisible chorus made manifest.
    Fear.
    It rose off them like smoke, filling the space too thickly for even Henry to endure.

    Dr. Mui turned from the window and peered into the shadows of her apartment. One hand rose, an involuntary warding against the sudden feeling she wasn't alone.
    "I should turn on a light."
    Her voice traveled no farther than the edge of her mouth, unable to make an impression on the silence.
    One step back. Two.
    Her shoulders pressed against the glass.
    Henry found himself pressed back into the corner without remembering how he'd gotten there. The closet had filled with the amorphous shapes of the dead, only the original two maintaining form. And they seemed to be waiting.

    Waiting.
    For what?
    He just wanted them to go away. He had his mouth open to demand that they leave him alone when he remembered. It wasn't him they wanted.

    "Who's there?"
    They were coming closer,