Blood Lines

fought to keep the stream spraying across the dance floor, slamming Tawfik's puppets off their feet.
    The chant abruptly shut off and with it the power he pulled from the acolytes. He felt thumbs press harder against his windpipe and his will drawn into the trap of agate eyes. To dissolve the spell of acquisition was no longer an option, in order to win, in order to live, his will must prove stronger and he must absorb the Nightwalker's ka. All or nothing. He released his personal power into the spell.
    On a platform on the far side of the dance floor, Vicki saw Henry locked in combat with a tall, dark-haired man.
    Tawfik. It had to be. She felt Celluci push up against her side and shoved the hose into his hands, bellowing, "Keep…
    them down." Then she staggered back out into the hall for the fire ax.
    'Vicki? Goddamnit, Vicki, what are you doing?"
    She ignored him. It was all she could do to drag herself across the dance floor using the heavy ax as a kind of wedge-headed cane. Leg muscles had begun to spasm by the time she reached the platform and Tawfik's hair had gone from black to gray.
    Teeth locked down on her lower lip, desperately fighting for enough air through flared nostrils, she stepped up behind the wizard-priest. It took her two tries to lift the ax over her head.
    The sun became a burning weight, a thousand, a hundred thousand lives bearing down on him. The smell of his own flesh burning began to bury the blood scent. Ebony depths promised a cooling, an end. Henry pushed past the Hunger to reach them.
    The ax went into the center of Tawfik's back with a meaty thunk and sank haft deep. Vicki'd put everything she had left into the blow. Fingers with no strength in them slid off the handle and the weight of her arms falling drove her back an involuntary step. Her hips slammed into the platform rail, her legs folded, and she dropped straight down to sit, more or less upright, against a padded support.
    Tawfik's head jerked up and his mouth opened, but no sound came out. His hands released their hold on Henry's throat and groped behind him. He spun around, pulling free of Henry's grip, staggered, and fell, back arched against the pain, mouth still silently working.
    Henry's shoulders straightened and his lips came up off his teeth. Now, finally, he would feed…
    'No, Henry!"
    Snarling, he lifted his head toward the voice. Dimly, through the Hunger, he recognized Vicki, and turned to see what she stared at with such terror.
    Two red eyes burned in the air at the edge of the platform. A faint crimson haze hinted at a bird's head, strangely winged, and an antelope's body.
    Tawfik lifted one hand toward his god, trembling fingers spread, silently begging to be saved.
    The red eyes burned brighter.
    Gray hair turned white, brittle, and then fell to expose a yellowed dome of skull. Cheeks collapsed in upon themselves.
    Flesh melted away and skin stretched tight, tighter, gone. One by one, the tiny bones dropped from Tawfik's outstretched hand as tendons rotted and let go.
    Finally, there were only clothes and the ax and a fine gray powder that might have been ash.
    And the red eyes were gone.
    'You guys okay?"
    Henry reached across the remains and touched Vicki lightly on the cheek. In four hundred and fifty years, he had never felt the Hunger less. Vicki managed to nod. Together they turned to face Celluci.
    'We're okay." Henry's throat closed around the words and they emerged with all the highs and lows scraped off. "What about you?"
    Celluci snorted. "Fine. Just fine." He looked down at the powder, his movements jerky and tightly controlled. "All things considered. Why didn't…"The pause filled with a common memory of glowing red eyes. "…it save him? I mean, it made him."
    Henry shook his head. "I don't know. I guess we'll never know. But I could feel Tawfik's life right until the last second. He was aware the whole time he was… was…"
    'Dying. Jesus H. Christ." It was more a prayer than a profanity.
    A collective moan that broke down into a babble of near hysteria drew their attention back out onto the dance floor.
    Most of Tawfik's ex-acolytes appeared to be in a state of shock. Most but not all.
    Shirt wrapped in a makeshift bandage around his leg, supported by one of the two judges and the Deputy Chief of the OPP, Cantree dragged himself out of the crowd and scowled at the three on the platform.
    'What the hell," he demanded, "has been going on here?"
    'Go ahead, Mike." Vicki's head lolled back