Blood Pact

away from his eyes. The last thing they needed was for both of them to be wandering around blind. "Let me open the doors," he suggested quietly, turning her to face him.

    "No." She shook her head. "You don't understand. She's my mother.”

    "Vicki . . ." Then he sighed because there really wasn't anything he could say that would change things and if the thought of opening a door and finding Marjory Nelson staring at them out of a corpse's eyes had him scared spitless, God only knew what it was doing to Vicki. Donald Li had been bad enough, but Marjory Nelson was, as Dr. Burke had so kindly reminded them, up and walking.
    Up and walking and dead. But if Vicki had the guts to face it, he'd face it beside her. Besides, as much as he might wish that Henry Fitzroy had never appeared on the scene, he couldn't abandon him to the kind of living death that Donald had been trapped in. "Let's shut that power off, find Fitzroy, and get out of here.”

    She nodded, head barely moving, the motion more intent than actuality, and twisted out from under Celluci's hands. The shadows pressed against her, trying to undermine the precarious balance she maintained. We're going to find Henry. To do that, we're going to confine him to one floor. So we're going to shut the power off. Then we're going to tear this place apart, one floor at a time. We're going to find Henry. I will not fail him. Like I failed my mother. As long as she clung to that, she could function. Let the shadows push as they would.

    The air in the subbasement tasted of damp concrete and rust and disuse and the building itself, creaking, settling, hiding secrets, made more noise than both of them; although the sound of their breathing seemed to linger where they passed. The rooms to the right of the corridor were up against the outside wall and so every one of them had to be checked; the door opened, the light shone in, the potential horror realized. They'd found two small electrical substations with panels labeled "labs three" "labs four" and "lecture one"
    but hadn't touched the breakers. "All at once," Vicki had growled. "So we don't warn her.”

    One door remained before the corner; one door, one room and they'd finished the north side of the building. Celluci checked his watch as they hurried toward it. 11:17? Is that all? They still had over half the night. Not so long, he amended as he realized it was probably all the time they had.

    A square shadow of darker paint at eyelevel, metal dimpling all four corners, indicated a missing sign. A security bar resting loosely over a steel eye suggested that the room had once held something worth guarding.

    "This could be it." Jerking the bar free, Vicki hauled the heavy door open. Stiff hinges shrilled a clichéd protest that scraped against the inside of her skull like nails on a blackboard. She gritted her teeth and scythed the flashlight beam across the darkness.

    Something moved just beyond the edge of the light.

    She froze. The circle of illumination froze with her.

    Just past it, something moved again.

    All she had to do was direct the flashlight less than a meter to the left. All she had to do . . .

    The single, naked bulb hanging caged from the ceiling cut black silhouettes around a complex arrangement of pipes. About four feet off the ground, a humped brown body and naked tail disappeared down an impossibly narrow crevice.

    Vicki remembered how to breathe. "Rat," she said, because she had to say something.

    "Or a mouse trying out for the Olympics," Celluci allowed, his hand still covering the light switch. He wet his lips and tried to push his heart down out of his throat. "I'm beginning to think that finding her would be better than the constant fear that we will.”

    Wiping at her streaming eyes, Vicki battled the knot in her stomach. You will not puke! she commanded herself, swallowing bile.
    After a moment, she lifted her head and muttered, "I'm beginning to think you're right." She jabbed her glasses back into place. "This is obviously the sprinkler room. Not what we're looking for.”

    Out in the hall, she paused and said, before he could follow, "Leave the light on.”

    He caught up to her as she was about to check the first room on the west wall. Frowning, he squinted down the length of the corridor, attempting to isolate the sheen of polished metal that had caught his eye.

    "Vicki, there's a padlock on that door down there.”

    Vicki turned. The cone of light stretching out from her hand