Blood Pact

her!" Catherine gripped the table tightly with both hands until the world steadied. "She's done this. She wants you to die."
    Knocking over her stool, she stood and stumbled to the door, arms stretched stiffly out before her. A moment's fumbling with the lock and she stepped out into the hall.

    At each bend of the corridor, battery-operated emergency lights provided enough illumination for movement.

    "This has gone far enough. We have to get to the lab. Come on," she called back over her shoulder. "We'll stop her together.”

    Number nine could just barely see her outlined in the doorway. He stood and slowly shuffled toward her.

    Together.

    He wished he could see her better.

    Gaze jerking from one shadow to the next, searching out the possibility of Dr. Burke, Catherine never noticed that number nine's eyes now shone in the darkness with the faint phosphorescence of rot.

Fifteen
    The sudden darkness hurled Dr. Burke up against the wall, heart in her throat, palms prickling with sweat. She could feel the jolt of adrenaline eating away at the alcohol-induced distance and struggled to calm herself. Being sober, in this building, was no part of her plan.

    "I knew, I knew, I knew I should've brought the resht . . . of the sec . . . ond bottle," she muttered, her voice very nearly lost in the passage of throat and teeth and lips it had to negotiate before it could clear her mouth.

    The equally sudden appearance of light from the battery-operated floods at each end of the hall brought a victorious wave of Donald's jacket. "Ha, ha! Let's hear it for modern engin . . . eering! Power goes off, emer . . . gency lights . . . go on. Rah! Damn good thing they did, too," she continued, stumbling forward again. "Never find the damn lab . . . otherwise. Wander around here for . . .
    days. Maybe even . . . months.”

    She squinted down the length of the corridor. "Speaking of . . . which. Where the hell am I?" It took a moment's concentrated effort before she recognized the upcoming t-junction. The left wing, after crossing a lecture hall and going down a small flight of stairs, was a dead end, she thought, but the right, with a little luck, would eventually lead her to the back door of the lab. The small wooden door led into the storeroom; they'd never used it, but Dr. Burke had seen to it in the beginning that she carried the key.

    "Maybe I knew something like this was . . . going to happen," she confided to a fire extinguisher. "Maybe I was just being . . .
    prepared for crazy-Cathy to pop her . . . cork.”

    And were you prepared, asked the voice of reason, for what happened to Donald?

    Not even a bottle of single malt whiskey could shut the voice up, but it did make it very easy to ignore. So Dr. Burke did.

    While Vicki could see the emergency lights as white pinpricks in a black shroud, her companions apparently found them more than sufficient illumination. Given that Henry needed so little light, he could probably see quite clearly, and she knew from experience that Celluci had better than average night vision. God, how she envied them; to be able to move freely without fear of misstep or collision, to be able to see movement in the shadows in time to . . .

    To what?

    Vicki pushed the question away and concentrated on not outpacing her circle of sight. Although she kept the flashlight beam trained closely on the floor in front of her so as not to blind the two men, she allowed a small part to overlap onto Henry. After everything they'd been through, everything all three of them had been through, she wasn't letting him slip into darkness just because of her lousy eyes.

    Henry was safe.

    They'd saved him.

    Her mother was dead, but Henry was alive and he was safe with them.

    That made up for a lot.

    Breathing heavily, Celluci's hand tucked into the elbow of her good arm, she followed the little bit of Henry out of a stairwell and squinted up at the red pinprick in the darkness that had to be the exit sign. "You guys sure this is the right floor?”

    "I'm sure." Henry's voice was flat and atonal. "The stink of perverted death is strongest here.”

    "Henry . . ." Shaking free of Celluci's grip, Vicki reached out and poked him gently in the hip with the side of the flashlight. "It's going to be worse in the lab." They'd told him about Donald down in the electrical room. All three of them had needed a moment to recover from the telling. "You can wait in the hall if you think it's going to be too