Blood Debt

gas station parking lot. With the station closed and the only illumination coming from the stars and Celluci's flashlight, it seemed as though they were the last people alive in the world. She hated that feeling and she'd felt it for most of the night as she'd sped away from Lake Superior toward Kenora and the Ontario/Manitoba border. At 3 a.m. even Winnipeg was a little short of people up and about—except for a sleepy clerk at the 24-hour gas station/donut shop where she'd filled the van and two transients spotted sleeping in the shelter of an overpass. She'd cut through the middle of Portage la Prairie rather than take the Trans-Canada Highway loop around, but it was still too early for anyone to be up and about.
    Used to living, and hunting, among three million people, at least one million of whom never seemed to sleep, the isolation made her feel vulnerable and exposed.
    "Give me that." She reached down and snatched the partially folded map out of Mike's hands. "All you have to do is follow the original creases. Why is that so difficult?"
    Vulnerable, exposed, and in a really bad mood.
    Meeting Celluci's astonished glower with a half-apologetic wave of the map, she growled, "All this scenery is beginning to get to me."

    Recognizing that on a perfectly straight, completely flat stretch of road no one was going to drive at one hundred kilometers an hour, the speed limit through Saskatchewan was one hundred and ten. Almost everyone did one twenty. Considering his cargo, Celluci compromised at one fifteen.
    A lifetime's worth of wheat fields later, at 7:17 p.m. local time, he pulled into a truck stop just outside Bassano, Alberta, and turned off the engine wondering if there was a Sonny and Cher revival going on he hadn't heard about. If he had to listen to "I Got You, Babe" one more time, he was going to have to hurt someone. Parking the van so that Vicki could exit without being seen, he walked stiffly across the asphalt to the restaurant. Sunset would be at 8:30, so he had little better than an hour to eat.
    Soup of the day was beef barley. He stared down into the bowl and remembered all the meals he and Vicki had eaten together, all the gallons of coffee, all the stale sandwiches grabbed on the run. All at once, the thought that they'd never again go out for dim sum, or chicken paprikas, or even order in a pizza while they watched Hockey Night in Canada left him feeling incredibly depressed.
    "Is there something wrong with the soup?" A middle-aged woman in a spotless white apron peered down at him with some concern from behind the counter.
    "The, uh, the soup's fine."

    "Glad to hear it. It don't come out of a can, you know. I make it myself." When he couldn't find an immediate response, she shook her head and sighed. "Come on, buddy, cheer up. You look like you've lost your best friend."
    Celluci frowned. He hadn't exactly lost her. Vicki remained everything to him she ever had been, except a dinner companion and weighed against the rest that shouldn't mean much. But, right now, it did. I thought I'd dealt with this…
    He barely noticed when the waitress took the empty bowl away and replaced it with a platter of steak and home fries.
    Vampire, Nightwalker, Nosferatu—Vicki was no longer human.
    Granted, she'd made a commitment to him in a way she'd never been able to before the change, but, given immortality, how important could the few years of his life be?
    The rhubarb pie tasted like sawdust and he left half of it on the plate.
    Shoulders hunched and hands shoved into his jacket pockets, he headed back across the parking lot toward the van. Vaguely aware he was wallowing in self-pity, he couldn't seem to stop.
    When the van's engine roared into life, it took him completely by surprise. Standing three feet from the front bumper, Celluci stared through a fine film of bug bodies smeared over the windshield and into the smug face of a young man in his late teens or early twenties.
    He didn't realize what was happening until the young man backed the van away from him, cranked the steering wheel around, and laid rubber all the way out to the highway.
    The van was being stolen.
    Instinct sent him racing after it, but halfway across the parking lot, the fact he didn't have a chance of catching up penetrated and he rocked to a halt. He checked his watch. 8:27.
    Vicki would be awake in three minutes.
    She'd know immediately that something was wrong, that he wasn't driving. She'd pull open the partition behind the