Blood Pact

to work his way around the lack of an external handle, he could do nothing about the alarm. From the outside, he couldn't even destroy it. Somewhere, there had to be another way in.

    Plywood covered the first floor windows between the wire grilles and the glass and a quick tour of the entrances showed them to have been similarly barricaded and wired besides. Frustrated and back by the fire door, Henry shoved his fingers behind the lower edge of a grille and gave an experimental tug. If the direct approach is necessary . . .

    The bolts pulled out of the concrete and the side bars began to bend, metal screaming.

    Bad idea. He froze, listening for reaction. In the distance, he heard leather soles slap against concrete and felt two lives, coming closer. Stepping away from the building, he became part of the night and waited.

    ". . . so he said, 'Chicago? In four? You've got to be out of your mind. I'll bet you twenty bucks they don't even make it out of the quarterfinals.' So I took the bet and in a couple of days, I'll take the twenty.”

    "Ah, man, how can you think of hockey at a time like this?”

    "A time like what?”

    "Baseball season, man. Opening day was the sixth. You got no business thinking about hockey, talking about hockey, playin'
    hockey, after baseball season starts.”

    "But hockey season isn't over.”

    "Maybe not, but it should be. Shit, this keeps up they'll be giving out ol' Stanley's cup in June.”

    They wore the uniform of university Security; two men bracketing forty, both with flashlights, both with billies in their belts.
    One of them carried his weight forward on his feet, daring the world to try something. The other balanced an impressive gut with enormous shoulders and arms. They passed inches from the shadow where Henry stood and never knew they were observed.

    "This the door?”

    "Yeah." The steel rattled under a slap from a beefy hand. "Some asshole genius student probably cutting through from the new Life Sciences building.”

    "Cutting through? In the dark?”

    "What dark? They keep one in four lights on in there just in case.”

    "Just in case what?”

    "Beats the hell out of me, but the place still has power.”

    "What a friggin' waste of money.”

    "No shit. Maybe if they turned off the lights and saved the dough they could afford to tear this ratbox down and build that parking garage.”

    "A parking garage? Now, man that's a building we could use around here.”

    From the Parthenon to the parking garage; how much further can civilization deteriorate? Henry wondered as the patrol moved on. Hands shoved into his pockets, he turned toward the new Life Sciences building, a brightly lit contrast to the dark and boarded structure it had replaced. So the buildings are connected. The creature went into the old and Dr. Burke works in the new, along with a couple of hundred other people. Just exactly the sort of not quite information that Vicki and Celluci have been collecting all day.

    Let's see if the night can find some answers for them.

    The guard at the front entrance noticed only the brief touch of a breeze that ruffled her newspaper but missed the movement that had made it. Once inside, Henry headed silently for the lower levels at the north end of the building. As the connection had not been visible, it had to be underground.

    In the basement, he crossed a scent he knew. Or rather, the perversion of a scent he knew. He'd spent the last three days in the dark of Marjory Nelson's closet surrounded by her clothes and the stored bits and pieces of her life. The scent of her death, robbed of its peace and twisted back into a grotesque existence, clung to the tiles and paint much the way it had clung to the apartment window.

    It led him to the passage, through it, up a flight of stairs, down a hall, up another flight of stairs, across an empty lecture hall with scars in the floor where the seats had been. Finally, it led him to a corridor, so thick with the stench of abomination, he could no longer separate individual paths.

    Halfway down the corridor, a razor's edge of light showed under a door.

    He could hear the low hum of electronic equipment, he could hear motors, and he could hear a heartbeat. He couldn't sense a life.

    When he tried to step forward, his legs refused to obey.

    Henry Fitzroy, Duke of Richmond and Somerset, bastard son of Henry VIII, had been raised to believe in the physical resurrection of the body. When the Day of Judgment came and the