Blood Lines

definitively last summer that though you heal quickly you can be hurt."

    'And if I should try for the door?"
    She smacked the aluminum baseball bat against the palm of her left hand. "Than I'm afraid it's a frontal assault."
    Henry stared at the bat for a moment, brows drawn down into a deep vee, then he raised his head and gazed intently at Vicki's face. "You're serious," he said at last.
    She met his eyes then. "Never more so."
    A muscle jumped in his jaw and his brow smoothed out. Then the corners of his mouth began to twitch. "I think," he told her, "that the solution is as dangerous as the problem."
    'That's the whole idea."
    He smiled then, a softer smile than she'd ever seen him use. It made him look absurdly young and it made her feel strong, protective, necessary. "Thank you."
    She felt her own lips curve and the knots of tension slip out of her shoulders. "You're welcome."
    Henry set the points of the last nail against the curtain and pushed it into the wall without bothering to use the hammer.
    Behind him, he heard Vicki mutter, "Show-off." The curtain was an inspired idea. He wasn't so sure about the baseball bat although clubbing him senseless had a certain brutal simplicity to it he could appreciate in the abstract. When it came right down to it, he still felt Yield's presence would be enough to remind him that he didn't want to die.
    Stepping down off the chair, he twitched the edge of the curtain into place. It extended about three feet past the door, similar, in form at least, to the tapestries that used to hang in his bedchamber at Sheriffhuton to block the drafts.
    Hopefully, it would be more effective.
    Vicki had laid the bat on the bureau where it gleamed dully against the dark wood like a modern mace awaiting the hand of a twenty-first century warrior. There had been a lord at his father's court, a Scot if memory served, whose preferred weapon had been a mace. Just after his investiture as the Duke of Richmond, he had watched in open-mouthed awe as the man-who mostly certainly had to have been a Scot-reduced a wooden door to kindling and then defeated the three men behind it with identical strokes. Even his majesty had been impressed, clapping a beefy hand on his bastard's slender shoulder and declaring heartily, " You can't do that with a sword, boy !"
    His royal father and that half-remembered lord had long since returned to dust. Although the mace quite probably still hung over a lowland mantel between the stag heads and the claymores, it no doubt had been centuries since it had been lifted in battle. Henry ran one finger down the smooth, cool length of aluminum.
    'Penny for your thoughts?"
    He could feel Vicki's unease in spite of her matter-of-fact tone. He could almost hear her thinking, What do I do if he decides to get rid of the bat? Or more likely, knowing Vicki, Would a kidney punch break his grip if he decides to hold on ? "I was just considering," he told her, turning slowly, "how battle has become a stylized ritual with forms that change to fit the seasons."
    Both her brows arced above the upper edge of her glasses. "Oh, there's still plenty of real battles going on," she drawled.
    'I know that." Henry spread his hands, searching for the words that would help her to understand the difference. "But all the honor and the glory seem to have been taken from reality and given to games."
    'Well, I'll admit there's very little honor and less glory in having your head bashed in by some biker with a length of chain or having a junkie in an alley go for you with a knife or even in having to take your nightstick to some drunk trying to do you first, but you're going to have to go a long way to convince me that honor and glory ever went along with violence of any kind."
    'It wasn't the violence," he protested, "it was the…"
    'Victory?"
    'Not exactly, but at least you used to know when you won."
    'Maybe that's why they've given the honor and glory to games-you can fight for victory without leaving an unsightly mound of bodies behind."
    He frowned. "I hadn't actually thought of it like that."
    'I know." She ducked under the curtain and out into the hall. "Honor and glory mean bugger all to the losers. Prince, vampire; you've always been on the winning side."
    'And what side are you on?" he asked a little testily as he followed her. She hadn't so much missed the point of what he'd been trying to say as completely changed its direction.
    'The side of truth, justice, and the Canadian