Blood Debt

need to. Now, try to get some sleep. You're going to have a busy day tomorrow."
    Tomorrow. The word lingered in the room long after the doctor had left.
    "Check the IV in about an hour and give him a bowl of broth."
    "Ball game'll be on in an hour," Sullivan protested, looking sulky.
    Somewhat surprised at the way she'd opened up to the detective, Dr. Mui ignored him. Her world had been built from certainties, and if she hadn't believed that Sullivan would obey her implicitly, she'd have left him where she found him.

    Lips pulled back off her teeth, her fingers closed around the carved handle with enough force to crack the wood, Vicki yanked open the door and stepped into the clinic.
    Michael Celluci's life no longer added its familiar beat to the muted roar.
    "Shit god-fucking-damn!"
    "Very expressive." Entering on her heels, Henry managed to slide by without actually making physical contact. Keeping her under careful surveillance in case her anger should widen its focus, he added,
    "And given that the detective has apparently left the building, what exactly does it mean?"
    Vicki jerked her head toward the nurse's station. "It means it's a different shift and there's a different nurse on. She's not going to know squat."
    "Not that the last one was particularly helpful," Henry observed quietly to himself, allowing a prudent distance before he followed Vicki across the lounge. With her attention so fixated on rescuing Celluci, the ride to the clinic had involved nothing worse than an extended snarling match—unpleasant but survivable and no worse than he'd seen Celluci live through on a daily basis. He wasn't sure whether this meant their relationship had progressed or deteriorated, but if she'd growled "old woman" at him one more time, he'd have been sorely tempted to have defined it by tossing her into traffic.
    Unaware that death stood behind her, the nurse turned from the drug cabinet and found herself falling into the dark light of silver eyes.
    The brown glass bottle she held slipped from suddenly nerveless fingers.
    Henry caught it before it hit the floor. "We were here later last night," he said as he straightened. "I can feel healthy lives mixed in with the sick. I doubt all the visitors have left yet. Do what you have to do quickly and don't attract any attention." It was the voice he'd used while teaching her to Hunt; with any luck she'd listen to it. Setting the bottle carefully on the edge of the desk, he moved to stand in the doorway.
    Awareness narrowed to the life she held and the life she searched for, Vicki heard Henry's voice as part of the clinic's ambient noise, a noise all but drowned out by the cry of the Hunt ringing within her head. "Last night," she said with quiet menace, "there was a man being held in the hidden room. Where is he now?"
    Confusion battled fear. "What hidden room?"
    "The room at the back of the building."
    "You mean the old laundry? There was no one in there."
    The menace grew. "He was there."
    Caught between what she knew to be true and the truth she saw in the silver eyes, the nurse whimpered low in her throat.
    "He was there!" Vicki repeated. The Hunger rose. Her fingers closed around a white-clad shoulder and soft flesh compacted under her grip. "Where is he now?"
    "I don't know." Tears trickled down cheeks blanched of color, and the words barely made it past trembling lips.
    "Tell me!"
    "I don't…" A strangled sob broke the protest in half. "… want to die."
    The staccato pounding of the nurse's heart, the panicked racing of her blood, made it difficult to think. The Hunger, barely held in check, urged Vicki to take the fear and make it hers. To rend. To tear. To feed. She took a half step forward, head slightly back, nostrils flared to drink in the warm, meaty scent of life seasoned with terror. After the exhilarating experience in the warehouse, it would be so easy to let go.

    " Do what you have to do quickly …"
    Yes.
    "Those of our kind who learn to control the Hunger, have eternity before them. Those the Hunger controls are quickly hunted down and put to death."
    Henry's words again, but a deeper memory, an older lesson.
    Nothing controls me.
    If "Victory" Nelson lived by any maxim, that was it.
    She released the nurse so quickly the woman swayed and would have fallen had she not taken another, less threatening hold. "You have not seen us and you will not see us while we are here."
    "I will not see you," the nurse repeated almost prayerfully. "I will not see