Blood Debt

off.
    "Better see if you can get a copy of the autopsy report while you're at the hospital."
    The red-gold brow rose again, but if Henry suspected the other man's timing, he let it go. If Tony wanted to keep secrets with Michael Celluci, that was none of his business. "Anything else?" he asked dryly as he stood.
    "Yeah, write out a full description of your ghost—especially noting any differences between it and the body in morgue."
    "And the other spirits? Those within the scream?"
    "Can you describe them?"
    Never fond of admitting inability, and less fond of it under these circumstances with these listeners, Henry shook his head. "No."
    "Then let's just forget them for the moment and stick with the description you can give."
    "You can put it in with the autopsy report," Vicki declared, standing as well. "Now, if you'll excuse us…" Her tone made it clear he could excuse them or not, it made little difference to her. "We're going to seal off my sanctuary while you put flesh to your ghost."
    "Vicki."

    She paused, one hand on the back of her chair.
    "As I said before, it isn't easy putting aside a tenet I've held for over four hundred and fifty years. Even if I've never tested it, even if it's no longer true, the belief that vampires are incapable of physical contact is, if nothing else, a strong tradition."
    Her hand moved up to Celluci's shoulder and gripped it reassuringly as it tensed. "I'm not exactly a traditional vampire, Henry."
    He smiled, and it was the smile she remembered from before the change. "Then stop being such a deliberate pain in the ass."
    Five
    THE city morgue was in the basement at Vancouver General Hospital. Henry supposed it worked on the same principle as the crypts under cathedrals—the deeper in the ground, the cooler the ambient temperature, the less chance of the rot seeping into the rest of the building.
    Hospitals had never been one of Henry's favorite places. Not because of light levels kept painfully high for eyes adapted to darkness. Not even because of the omnipresent and unpleasant odor of antiseptic mixed thoroughly with disease.
    It was the despair.
    It hung in the halls like smoke; from the patients who knew they were dying, from the patients who feared they were dying. That modern medicine resulted in far more successes than failures made little difference.
    Predators preyed on the weak. The defenseless. The despairing.
    Even though he had already fed, the Hunger strained against Henry's control as he stepped over the threshold and into the building.
    His reaction wasn't about feeding; it was about killing, killing because he could, because they were all but asking him to. As the door closed behind him, he could feel civilization sloughing away, exposing the Hunter beneath.
    He'd decided to gain access through Emergency, reasoning that he could hide his movements in the chaos that always seemed to exist in the ER of big city hospitals. As far as it went, the reasoning was sound, but the bloodscent hanging over the crowded waiting room came very close to loosing the Hunger. Acutely conscious of the weak and injured around him, their lives throbbing in an atmosphere reeking of despair, Henry stepped away from the door and moved deeper into the building.
    No one tried to stop him.
    Those who saw him quickly looked away.
    Passing as swiftly as possible through the crowded emergency waiting room, he slipped unnoticed into the first stairwell he found.
    The air was clearer there, but he had no time to compose himself.
    Folklore aside, vampires not only showed up in mirrors but in security cameras as well.
    There are times, he thought, racing down the stairs at full speed, a dark flicker across a distant monitor, when I hate this century.
    Two flights down, he opened a door marked, CITY
    MORGUE/PARKING LEVEL TWO and stepped gratefully into a dimly lit corridor. While he suspected that budget cuts were the reason for two out of three fluorescent banks to be off—there'd be no patients wandering about down here after all and, given the hour, few staff—it was hard not to appreciate the atmosphere created by the lack of light.
    The hall leading to the morgue should be barred with shadow.
    Teeth bared but more comfortable than he'd been since leaving his car, Henry followed the trail of death to an unlocked door. Pulling on a pair of leather driving gloves, he passed silently through an outer office and into the actual morgue.
    Here, he breathed easier still. In these rooms, the