Blood Price

appeared to have almost healed although the skin around it was slightly bruised and a little tender. The memory of the actual feeding had become tangled up with the memory of the dream, so she set them both aside to be sorted out later. There were more important things to worry about at the moment.

    She'd have stayed in the shower longer, trying to wash the dream away, but she couldn't shake the feeling that something was behind her. With sight and sound blocked by the spray, she felt too vulnerable and exposed to linger.

    With the coffee maker on, and another liter of orange juice in her hand, she stood for a moment staring out at the street. One or two other windows were lit and as she watched, young Edmond Ng came yawning out onto his porch and started down to the corner to pick up his route's copies of the morning paper, completely unaware this might be his last trip. In eighteen short hours, the hordes of hell could be ripping the city and its people apart.

    "And the only thing in the way is one half-blind ex-cop and the bastard son of Henry VIII."
    She took a long pull at the jug of juice and pushed her glasses back up her nose. "Kind of makes you think, doesn't it?" Except she didn't like what it made her think about.

    Find one in twenty-three in twenty thousand. Actually, as far as a lot of police work was concerned, the odds weren't all that bad. Even if she could get the students' addresses out of the administration of the university-and frankly, without a badge she doubted she could-talking with the students themselves would likely get her further. The top of the heap usually knew who shared the view with them and if one of the twenty-three was the person she was looking for, then at least one of the others should be able to point the finger.

    Of course, the possibility existed that she'd assembled all the bits and pieces into the wrong picture. That she was not only barking up the wrong tree but searching in the wrong forest entirely.

    Sweat prickled along her spine and she resisted the urge to turn. She knew the apartment was empty, that nothing stood behind her, and she wasn't going to give in to phantoms-there were enough real terrors to spend fear on.

    There was time for breakfast before she headed up to York; no point in arriving empty at an empty campus. At 6:35, scrambled eggs eaten and a second cup of coffee nearly gone, she phoned Mike Celluci, let it ring three times, and hung up. What was she going to tell him? That she thought she knew who the killer was? She'd known that since the night out at Woodbine when she'd met Henry. That one of twenty-three computer geniuses out at York University was calling up demons in his or her spare time and that if not stopped was going to call up more than he or she could handle and destroy the world? He'd think she'd flipped.

    "Everything comes back to the demon. Everything. Shit." The computer that pointed, however tenuously, to one of those twenty-three students had no tie to the murders Celluci worked on except through the demon. "And how do I know about the demon? A vampire told me." She drained the mug and set it down on the table with more force than was absolutely necessary. The handle broke off in her hand. With a quick jerk of her arm, she threw the piece across the room and listened with satisfaction as it smashed into still smaller pieces against the wall.

    The satisfaction faded a heartbeat later.

    "One half-blind ex-cop and the bastard son of Henry VIII," she repeated, as it sank in, really sank in, that she wasn't a cop anymore. In spite of everything-her eyes, her resignation-for the last eight months she'd still thought of herself as a police officer. She wasn't. There'd be no backup, no support. Until sunset she was completely on her own and if anyone needed to have complete information, it wasn't Mike Celluci, it was Henry Fitzroy.

    "Damn." She rubbed her sleeve across her eyes and slammed her glasses back down on her nose. It didn't make her feel any better to know that she couldn't have gotten this far if she'd still been on the force, that rules and regulations-even as flexible as the top brass tried to be-would have tied her hands. Nor could she have gotten this far if she'd never been on the force, the information just wouldn't have been available to her. "I seem to be exactly what the situation calls for-a one-woman chance of stopping Armageddon."

    She took a deep breath and her jaw went out. "So, let's get on with it." The