Blood Pact

decided to keep his mouth shut.

    Vicki tried halfheartedly to pull her hand away, but when his fingers only tightened in response, she let it lie, saving her strength to throw into the anger. "I saw her. She was dead. I know dead. Then I saw her again at the window. And she was . . ." Again, a wave of nausea rose and crested and sullenly retreated. "She was not dead .”

    "But not alive." As the words themselves denied consolation, Henry offered them as they were, unadorned by emotion.

    Once again, her mother's face rose up out of the darkness, eyes wide, mouth working silently. Celluci's grip became a warm anchor and Vicki used it to drag herself out of the memory. "No." She swallowed and a muscle jumped in her jaw. "Not alive. But up, and walking.” For a moment, the thought that there'd been only a pane of glass between them, made it impossible to go on. I want to scream and cry until all of this goes away and I don't have to deal with it. I want it to be last Saturday. I want to have answered the phone. I want to have talked to her, to have told her I love her, to have said good-bye. Her whole body ached with the effort of maintaining control but of all the maelstrom barely held in check by will, she could only release the anger. "Someone did that to her.
    Someone at that university has committed the ultimate violation, the ultimate rape.”

    Celluci flinched. "At the university? Why at the university?”

    "You said it yourself, science. It's hardly going to be someone at the fucking grocery store.” She knuckled her glasses again, then bent forward and swept her notes off the coffee table, the force of the blow scattering them as far as the apartment door. Her voice, in contrast, had gained rigid control. "This changes everything. We can find her now.”

    Reluctantly, Celluci released her hand; she'd accepted all the comfort she was going to. He watched in silence as she pulled a blank sheet of paper toward her, wanting to shake her but not entirely certain why.

    "All right. We know the body is still in the city, so we know where to look for the lowlife, sons of bitches who've done this to her." The pencil point snapped off against the paper, and she fought against the urge to drive it right through the table. "She's in the city. They're in the city.”

    "Vicki." Henry crossed the room to kneel by her side. "Are you sure you should be doing this now?" When she raised her head to look at him, the hair on his arms lifted with the tension in the air.

    "What am I supposed to do? Go to sleep?”

    He could hear her heart pounding, hear the effects of the adrenaline pumping through her system. "No . . .”

    "I need to do this, Henry. I need to put things together. Build some sort of a structure out of this. I need to do it now.” The alternative was implicit in her tone. Or it will eat away at me until there's nothing of me left.

    The hand that settled on his, just for an instant, was so hot it nearly burned. Because he could do nothing else, Henry nodded and moved to the rocker by the door, from which he could watch her face. For the moment, he would let her deal with her horror and her anger in her own way.

    He found it interesting that Celluci looked no happier about it than he felt. We want to ride to her rescue and instead we find ourselves allowed to help. Not exactly a comfortable position for a knight errant to be in. But then, Vicki wasn't exactly a comfortable woman to love.

    "All right, shifting the emphasis from finding my mother's body to finding the people who did this to her, what are we looking for?" With a new pencil, she etched "What?" across the top piece of paper. "Someone who can raise the dead. Discounting the Second Coming, as I doubt it was as simple as pick up your bed and walk, we turn to science." She wrote "A scientist" under the heading, then shuffled out a fresh page and wrote "Where?”

    Celluci leaned forward, old patterns winning out over his concern. "All signs point to the university. One, it's where you find scientists. Two, who can afford a private lab these days, especially containing the equipment they'd have needed to . . .”

    "Three," Vicki interrupted. The last thing she wanted to deal with right now were the details of what had actually been done.

    ”Not the last thing,” said a little voice in the back of her head.

    "Three," she said again, slamming it over the certain knowledge that somehow, if she'd just answered the phone, all of this could have