Blood Price

hadn't looked human.

    And then the attack became something she had long ago learned to deal with and the moment passed.

    "Men are such bastards," she informed the elderly, and somewhat surprised, East Indian gentleman waiting at the ground floor.

    At the door, she discovered that one of her new red leather gloves had fallen out of her jacket pocket during the scuffle and was still in Norman's apartment. "Great, just great." She considered going back for it-she knew she could take Norman in a fight-but decided against it. If she got the opportunity to close her hands around his scrawny neck, she'd probably strangle him.

    Shoulders hunched against the wind, she stomped out to her car and soothed her lacerated feelings by burning rubber the length of the parking lot.

    As the pain receded, the anger grew.

    She laughed at me. I shared the secret of the century with some stupid girl who believes in vampires, and she laughed at me. Carefully, not certain his legs would hold him, Norman stood.
    Everyone always laughed at me. Last one chosen to play baseball. Never wearing quite the same clothes as the other kids. They even laughed when I got perfect marks on tests. He'd stopped telling them all about it eventually; about the A plus papers, about the projects used as study aids by the teachers, about winning the science fair three years in a row, about reading War and Peace over the weekend. They weren't interested in his triumphs. They always laughed.

    Just like she laughed.

    The anger burned away the last of the pain.

    Knees carefully apart, Norman shoved the trunk up against the wall, then grabbed the afghan off the sofa and hung it on the half dozen hooks he'd put over the apartment door. The heavy wool would trap most of the odors before they could reach the hall. For the rest, he opened the balcony door about two inches and used one of the mushroom shaped air fresheners to keep it from slamming closed. Ignoring the sudden stream of cold air and the increase in noise from above, he pushed the fan up tight against the crack and turned it on.

    Then he went into the closet for the hibachi and the plastic milk crate.

    The tiny barbecue he set up as close as he could to the fan. He built a pyramid of three charcoal briquets, soaked them in starter fluid and dropped in a match. The fan and the high winds around the building took care of almost all of the smoke and, as he'd disconnected his smoke detector and the four that covered the ninth floor hallway, he didn't worry about the small amount of smoke that remained. He let the fire burn down while he got out the colored chalks to draw the pentagram.

    No-wax tile flooring doesn't hold chalk well, so Norman actually used chalk pastels. It didn't seem to make a difference. At each of the five corners of the pentagram, he set two candles; a black one nine inches high, and a red one six inches high. He'd had to cut them both down from twelves and eights and had discovered that a few of the blacks were actually dark purple. That hadn't seemed to matter either.

    Candles lit, he knelt before the now glowing coals and began the steps to call the demon.

    He'd bought six inches of the eighteen karat gold chain at a store in Chinatown. With a pair of nail scissors, he clipped off three or four links and let them fall into the glowing red heart of the charcoal briquettes. Norman knew that the hibachi couldn't possibly deliver enough heat to melt even that little bit of gold but, although he sifted the remaining ash every time, there was never an answering gleam of metal.

    The frankincense came from a trendy food store on Bloor Street West. He had no idea what other people used the bright orange flakes for-he couldn't imagine eating them although he supposed they might be a spice. The half handful he threw on the heat ignited slowly, creating a thick, pungent smoke that the fen almost managed to deal with.

    Coughing and rubbing the back of one hand across watering eyes, he reached for the last ingredient. The myrrh had come from a shop specializing in essence oils and the creation of personal, signature perfumes. Ounce for ounce it had been more expensive than the gold.
    Carefully, using the plastic measuring set his mother had given him when he moved out, he dribbled an eighth of a teaspoon over the coals.

    The heavy scent of the frankincense grew heavier still and the air in the apartment picked up a bitter taste that coated the inside of Norman's mouth and nose. The