Blood Price

then shoved her disturbed glasses back up her nose. "Didn't the old man at the subway say something about the apocalypse?"

    "Nope. Armageddon."

    "Same thing."

    Celluci sighed with exaggerated force. "You trying to tell me that it's not one guy, it's four guys on horses? Thanks. You've been a lot of help."

    "I suppose you've checked for some connection between the victims? Something to hang a motive on?"

    "Motive!" He slapped his forehead with the heel of his hand. "Now why didn't I think of that?"

    Vicki stabbed at a mushroom and muttered, "Smart ass."

    "No, no connections, no discernible motive. We're still looking." He shrugged, a succinct opinion of what the search would turn up.

    "Cults?"

    "Vicki, I've talked to more weirdos and space cases in the last few days than I have in the last few years." He grinned. "Present company excepted, of course."

    They were almost back to her apartment, her hand tucked in the crook of his arm to guide her through the darkness, when she asked, "Have you considered that there might be something in this vampire theory?"

    She dug her heels in at his shout of laughter. "I'm serious, Celluci!"

    "No, I'm Serious Celluci. You're out of your mind." He dragged her back into step beside him. "Vampires don't exist."

    "You're sure of that? 'There are more things . . .' "

    "Don't," he warned, "start quoting Shakespeare at me. I've had the line quoted at me so often lately, I'm beginning to think police brutality is a damned good idea."

    They turned up the path to Vicki's building.

    "You've got to admit that a vampire fits all the parameters." Vicki no more believed it was a vampire than Celluci did, but it had always been so easy to rattle his cage. . . .

    He snorted. "Right. Something's wandering around the city in a tuxedo muttering, 'I vant to drink your blood.' "

    "You got a better suspect?"

    "Yeah. A big guy on PCPs with clip-on claws."

    "You're not back to that stupid theory again."

    "Stupid!"

    "Yeah. Stupid."

    "You wouldn't recognize a logical progression of facts if they bit you on the butt!"

    "At least I'm not so caught up in my own cleverness that I'm blind to outside possibilities!"

    "Outside possibilities? You have no idea of what's going on!"

    "Neither do you!"

    They stood and panted at each other for a few seconds then Vicki shoved her glasses up her nose and dug for her keys. "You staying the night?"

    It sounded like a challenge.

    "Yeah. I am."

    So did the response.

    Sometime later, Vicki shifted to reach a particularly sensitive area and decided, as she got the anticipated inarticulate response, that there were times when you really didn't need to see what you were doing and night blindness mattered not in the least.

    * * *
    Captain Raymond Roxborough looked down at the lithe and cowering form of his cabin boy and wondered how he could have been so blind. Granted, he had thought young Smith very pretty, what with his tousled blue-black curls and his sapphire eyes, but never for a moment had he suspected that the boy was not a boy at all. Although, the captain had to admit, it was a neat solution to the somewhat distressing feelings he'd been having lately.

    '"I suppose you have an explanation for this," he drawled, leaning back against his cabin door and crossing sun-bronzed arms across his muscular chest.

    The young lady-girl, really, for she could have been no more than seventeen-clutched her cotton shirt to the white swell of bosom that had betrayed her and with the other hand pushed damp curls, the other legacy of her interrupted wash, off her face.

    '"I needed to get to Jamaica," she said proudly, although her low voice held the trace of a quaver, "and this was the only way I could think of."

    "You could have paid for your passage, " the captain suggested dryly, his gaze traveling appreciatively along the delicate curve of her shoulders.

    "I had nothing to pay with."

    He straightened and stepped forward, smiling. "I think you underestimate your charms."

    "Come on, Smith, kick him right in his windswept desire." Henry Fitzroy leaned back in his chair and rubbed at his temples. Just how much of a shit did he want the captain to be? Should the hero's better nature overcome his wanton lust or did he even have a better nature? And how much of a hero would he be without one?

    "And frankly, my dear," he sighed, "I don't give a damn." He saved the night's work, then shut down the system. Usually he enjoyed the opening chapters of a new book,