Blood Price

him about the cracks, find out if he'd been withholding any more information from her, and . . . no. Given his mood the last time they'd talked and given that he hadn't called over the weekend, if she showed up now she'd just interfere with his work and that was something neither of them ever did. The work being what it was, the work came first and the cracks were added questions, not answers.

    She was out of the building entirely when she realized that the thought of seeing another cop sitting at what had been her desk had not influenced her decision one way or another. Feeling vaguely like she'd betrayed her past, she hunched her shoulders against the late afternoon chill and started for home.

    For years Vicki had been promising to buy herself a really good encyclopedia set. For years she'd been putting it off. The set she had, she'd bought at the grocery store for five dollars and ninety-nine cents a volume with every ten dollars worth of groceries. It didn't have a lot to say about vampires.

    "Legendary creatures, uh huh, central Europe, Vlad the Impaler, Bram Stoker. . . ." Vicki pushed her glasses up her nose and tried to remember the characteristics of Stoker's Dracula.
    She'd seen the play years ago and thought she might have read the book in high school-only a lifetime or two back.

    "He was stronger, faster, his senses were more acute. . . ." She flicked the points off on her fingertips. "He slept all day, came out at night, and he hung around with a guy who ate flies. And spiders." Making a disgusted face she turned back to the encyclopedia.

    The vampire," she read, "was said to be able to turn into bats, wolves, mist, or vapor. " The ability to turn to mist or vapor would explain the cracks, she realized. The victim's blood, being heavier, would precipitate out to coat the narrow passageway. "And a creature that rises from the grave should have no trouble moving through earth." Marking her place with an old phone bill, she heaved herself out of the recliner and turned the television on, suddenly needing sound in the apartment.

    "This is crazy," she muttered, opening the book again and reading while she paced. Fantasy and reality were moving just a little too close for comfort, definitely too close for sitting still.

    The remainder of the entry listed the various ways of dealing with the creatures, from ash stakes through mustard seed to the crucifix, going on in great detail about staking, beheading, and burning.

    Vicki allowed the slender volume to fall closed and raised her head to look out the window.
    In spite of the street light glowing less than three meters from her apartment, she was very conscious of the darkness pressing against the glass. For a legendary creature, the methods of its destruction seemed to be taken very seriously indeed.

    * * *
    Behind the police barricade, something crouched low over the piece of sidewalk where the fourth body had been found. Although the night could hide no secrets from him and, unlike the others who had searched, he knew what to search for, he found nothing.

    "Nothing," Henry murmured to himself as he stood. "And yet there should be something here." A child of his kind might be able to hide its tracks from human hunters but not from kin.
    He lifted his head and his nostrils flared to check the breeze. A cat-no, two-on hunts of their own, rain that would fall before morning, and. . . .

    He frowned, brows drawing down into a deep vee. And what? He knew the smell of death in all its many manifestations and laid over the residue of this morning's slaying was a faint miasma of something older, more foul, almost familiar.

    His memories stretched back over four hundred and fifty years. Somewhere in there. . . .

    The police car was almost up on him before he saw it and the tiny sun in the heart of the searchlight had begun to glow before he moved.

    "Holy shit! Did you see that?"

    "See what?" Auxiliary Police Constable Wojtowicz stared out her window at the broad fan of light spilling out from the top of the slowly moving car.

    "I don't know." PC Harper leaned forward over the steering wheel and peered past his partner. "I could've sworn I saw a man standing inside the barricades just as I flipped the lighten."

    Wojtowicz snorted. "Then we'd still be able to see him. Nobody moves that fast. And besides," she waved a hand at the view out the window, "there's nowhere to hide in that." That included the sidewalk, the barricades, and an expanse of muddy