Blood Price

grabbed his coat, and managed to appear within the parameters of normality as he exited into the hall. He slid the key into the lock, then headed for the stairs, hating the charade that kept him to a mortal's pace.

    In the dim light of the stairwell, he let all pretense drop and moved as quickly as aching muscles would allow.

    There were slightly less than two hours until midnight.

    He completely forgot that the stairwell was part of the building's random monitoring system.

    * * *
    Vicki drifted up into consciousness thinking, This has got to stop. Every time she tried to move, every time she tried to raise her head, she drifted back down into the pit. Occasionally, the blackness claimed her when she was doing nothing more than lying quietly, trying to conserve her strength for another attempt at getting free. I'm going to have to think of something else.

    All her intermittent struggling had accomplished was to exacerbate her physical condition and to uncover her watch.

    Seven minutes after ten. Henry's probably throwing fits. Oh my God, Henry! Her involuntary jerk brought another flash of pain. She ignored it, lost it in sudden horror. I forgot to warn him about that security guard. . . .

    * * *
    Although he recognized the necessity of the surveillance cameras, Greg had never liked them. They always made him feel a bit like a peeping Tom. Two or three guards on constant patrol with one manning a central position at the desk, that's the kind of job he'd prefer to work.
    A camera just couldn't replace a trained man on the scene. But trained men had to be paid and cameras didn't so he was stuck with them.

    As the attractive young lady in the whirlpool stepped out and reached for her towel, he politely averted his eyes. Maybe he was just getting old, but those two scraps of fabric were not what he'd call a bathing suit. When he looked back again, that monitor showed only orderly rows of cars in the underground garage.

    He sat back in his chair and adjusted the black armband he wore in honor of Mrs. Hughes and Owen. The building would be different without them. As the night went on, he kept expecting to see them heading out for their last walk before bed and had to keep reminding himself that he'd never see them again. The young man he'd relieved had raised an eyebrow at the armband and another at the explanation. Young people today had no real concept of respect; not for the dead, not for authority, not for themselves. Henry Fitzroy was one of the few young people he'd met in the last ten years who understood.

    Henry Fitzroy. Greg pulled at his lower lip. Last night he'd done a very, very foolish thing.
    He was embarrassed by it and sorry for it, but not entirely certain he was wrong. As an old sergeant of his used to say, "If it walks like a duck, and it talks like a duck, and it acts like a duck, odds are good it's a duck." The sergeant had been referring to Nazis, but Greg figured it applied to vampires as well. While he had his doubts that a young man of Mr. Fitzroy's quality could have committed such an insane murder-there'd been nothing crazy about the look Greg had seen in Mr. Fitzroy's eyes so many weeks ago, it had, in fact, been frighteningly sane-he couldn't believe that a man of Mr. Fitzroy's quality would allow a young lady visiting him to answer the door a deshabille . He'd have gotten up and done it himself. When he'd calmed down enough to think about it, Greg realized that she had to be hiding something.

    But what?

    A movement in one of the monitors caught his eye and Greg turned toward it. He frowned.
    Something black had flickered past the fire door leading to the seventh floor too quickly for him to recognize it. He reached for the override and began activating the cameras in the stairwell.

    Seconds later, the fifth floor camera picked up Henry Fitzroy running down the stairs two at a time and scowling. He looked like any other young man in reasonable shape-and a bad mood-who'd decided not to waste his time waiting for an elevator. While Greg himself wouldn't have walked from the fourteenth floor, he realized there was nothing supernatural about Henry Fitzroy doing it. Nor in the way he was doing it.

    Sighing, he turned the controls back to their random sequencing.

    "And what if it doesn't act like a duck all the time?" he wondered aloud.

    * * *
    Henry had reached the sixth floor when the abuse his body had taken the night before caught up with him and he had to slow to something more