Blood Lines

plan. Did they actually think I wasn't aware of the shape I'd be in at the top of this thing?
    I'm going to be lucky if I can stand.
    Ten steps and a landing.
    "She has a right to be there." Jesus H. Christ.
    Ten steps and a landing.
    Damned right I'm going to be there. And I'm going to spit on Tawfik's corpse.
    Ten steps and a landing.
    She'd read an article once about an American Medal of Honor winner who'd been hit twenty-three times by enemy fire and still managed, despite his injuries, to run across a bridge to save another member of his unit. She'd wondered at the time what he'd been thinking of when he did it. She suspected now that she had a pretty good idea.
    You can fall down when this is over, not before.
    Ten steps and a landing.
    Leg muscles began to tremble, then jump. Every step became an individual battle against pain and exhaustion. She stumbled, lost the rhythm, and slammed her shin into a metal fronting.
    Eight, nine, ten steps, and a landing.
    With so much of her weight pulled ahead by hands and arms, the gauze wrapped round her split knuckle sagged- wet with sweat or blood, she neither knew nor cared. When it became more hindrance than help, she ripped it off and dropped it.

    Ten steps and a landing.
    Lesser angers burned away until only the anger at Tawfik remained. He'd drugged her and jailed her, but worst of all, he'd perverted something she believed in. That stretched between them like the rope she'd hang him with and she dragged himself toward him on it.
    Ten steps and a landing.
    Henry felt the wards as he crossed them, a faint sizzle along the surface of his skin that jerked every hair on his body erect. He had no idea what information they conveyed back to Tawfik, whether general or specific, but either way time now became critical. He raced up the last two flights of stairs. Far below he could hear Celluci laboring, and below that, Vicki's crippled progress. Their heartbeats echoed in the stairwell, their breathing so loud it sounded as if the whole structure inhaled and exhaled with them. It seemed he'd be on his own for some time.
    Only one in four of the fluorescents were on in the hall that wrapped around the central pillar of the tower and Henry, exiting out of the dim confines of the stairwell, gave thanks. Very often the level of light that mortals preferred placed him at a handicap and tonight he'd need every advantage.
    Silently, he moved around the sweeping curve, following the hum of chanting. The background murmur in at least a dozen voices, consisted of nothing more than the name Akhekh repeated over and over with a kind of low-key intensity that worked its way beneath the surface and throbbed in bone and blood. Senses extended, Henry wasn't surprised to hear one single, all encompassing heartbeat where there should have been a multitude.
    Rising over the chanting, a single voice spoke in a language that Henry didn't know, using cadences that sounded strange even to ears that had heard four and a half centuries of changes. Whatever else they were-and Henry had no doubt they held layers of meaning wrapped around each syllable, each tone-the words were a calling. Only the outermost edges brushed against him and he could feel himself urged closer.
    He burst through the disco's main entrance, past an arc of empty tables. The background chanting grew louder.
    Tawfik stood on the raised platform, inside an arc of padded rail where the dee jays usually sat, arms raised in the classic high priest pose. He wore a pair of khaki colored pants and an open necked linen shirt-not exactly the style of ancient Egypt, but then he didn't need a costume to declare what he was. Power crackled around him in an almost visible aura.
    Crowded to either side of the dance floor, gazes riveted on Tawfik, were high-ranking officers from both the Metro and the Ontario Provincial police, two judges, and the publisher of the most powerful of the three Toronto daily newspapers. Henry had thought he'd heard a dozen voices, now, if he'd had to rely on hearing alone, he'd have said six although there were clearly more than twenty people involved. Individual tones and timbres were dissolving into the chant.
    The most incongruous part of the entire scene had to be the giant silver disco ball that hung from the ceiling and spun slowly, flinging multicolored points of light over both Tawfik and his acolytes.
    All this, Henry took in between one heartbeat and the next. Without breaking stride, he gathered