Blood Pact

One
    "Mrs. Simmons? It's Vicki Nelson calling; the private investigator from Toronto?" She paused and considered how best to present the information. Oh, what the hell. . . "We've found your husband.”

    "Is he . . . alive?”

    "Yes, ma'am, very much so. He's working as an insurance adjuster under the name Tom O'Conner.”

    "Don always works in insurance.”

    "Yes, ma'am, that's how we found him. I've just sent you a package, by courier, containing a copy of everything we've discovered including a number of recent photographs, you should receive it before noon tomorrow. The moment you call me with a positive ID, I'll take the information to the police and they can pick him up.”

    "The police thought they found him once before, in Vancouver, but when they went to pick him up he was gone.”

    "Well, he'll be there this time." Vicki leaned back in her chair, shoved her free hand up under the bottom edge of her glasses and scrubbed at her eyes. In eight years with the Metropolitan Toronto Police and nearly two years out on her own, she'd seen some real SOBs; Simmons/O'Conner ranked right up there with the best of them. Anyone who faked his own death in order to ditch a wife and five kids deserved exactly what he got. "My partner's going to talk to him tonight. I think your husband will decide to stay right where he is.”

    * * *
    The bar was noisy and smoky, with tables too small to be useful and chairs too stylized to be comfortable. The beer was overpriced, the liquor over-iced, and the menu a tarted-up mix of at least three kinds of quasi-ethnic cooking plus the usual grease and carbohydrates. The staff were all young, attractive, and interchangeable. The clientele were a little older, not quite so attractive although they tried desperately hard to camouflage it, and just as faceless. It was, for the moment, the premier poser bar in the city and all the wannabes in Toronto shoehorned themselves through its doors on Friday night.

    Henry Fitzroy paused just past the threshold and scanned the crowd through narrowed eyes. The smell of so many bodies crammed together, the sound of so many heartbeats pounding in time to the music blasting out of half a dozen suspended speakers, the feel of so many lives in so little space pulled the Hunger up and threatened to turn it loose. Fastidiousness more than willpower held it in check. In over four and a half centuries, Henry had never seen so many people working so hard and so futilely at having a good time.

    It was the kind of place he wouldn't be caught dead in under normal circumstances, but tonight he was hunting and this was where his quarry had gone to ground. The crowd parted as he moved away from the door, and eddies of whispered speculation followed in his wake.

    "Who does he think he is . . .”

    ". . . I'm telling you, he's somebody . . .”

    Henry Fitzroy, bastard son of Henry VIII, one time Duke of Richmond and Somerset, Lord President of the Council of the North, noted, with an inward sigh, that some things never changed. He sat down at the bar, the young man who had been on the stool having vacated it as Henry approached, and waved the bartender away.

    To his right, an attractive young woman raised one ebony brow in obvious invitation. Although his gaze dropped to the pulse that beat in the ivory column of her throat and almost involuntarily traced the vein until it disappeared beneath the soft drape of magenta silk clinging to shoulders and breasts, he regretfully, silently, declined. She acknowledged both his glance and his refusal, then turned to more receptive game. Henry hid a smile. He wasn't the only hunter abroad tonight.

    To his left, a wide back in a charcoal gray suit made up most of the view. The hair above the suit had been artfully styled to hide the thinning patches just as the suit itself had been cut to cover the areas that a fortieth birthday had thickened. Henry reached out and tapped lightly on one wool-clad shoulder.

    The wearer of the suit turned, saw no one he knew, and began to scowl. Then he fell into the depths of a pair of hazel eyes, much darker than hazel eyes should have been, much deeper than mortal eyes could be.

    "We need to have a talk, Mr. O'Conner.”

    It would have taken a much stronger man to look away.

    "In fact, I think you'd better come with me." A thin sheen of sweat greased the other man's forehead. “This is just a little too public for what I plan to . . .” Slightly elongated canines became visible