Blood Debt (4 page)

“Suit yourself, but remember who's driving nights while you're sleeping.” She mimed steering around a corner and did a fairly good impersonation of tires squealing against the road.

As Vicki's driving style hovered between kamikaze and Montreal cabbie, Celluci shuddered and checked his watch. Unfortunately, if they planned on leaving before daybreak, they didn't have time to fight about either the bed or Vicki's driving—and if he couldn't do anything about the latter, he certainly wasn't going to insist on removing the padding from the former. “Let's get going, then. It's four-twelve and sunrise is in less than forty-five minutes.” When Vicki lifted both brows, he pulled a battered paperback out of his back pocket. “
Farmer's Almanac
. It's got sunrise and sunset for the whole year. I decided it might be best to be prepared.”

“For what?” Vicki drew herself up to her full five-feet ten, her expression dangerous and purely human. This argument, or variations on the theme, long predated the change. “What's the matter, Mike? You still think I can't take care of myself?”

“Not between sunrise and sunset,” he reminded her mildly, refusing to be drawn.

Vicki deflated. Unfortunately, he was completely and absolutely and inarguably correct. She hated that—not so much that he was right, but that it left her no room for argument.

And he knew it. Eyes crinkling at the corners, he shoved the book back into his pocket.

Stepping forward, she brushed the overlong curl of dark brown hair back off his forehead and murmured, “Come evening, however, no one messes with me.”

Lying in the coffinlike bed, vibrating along with the van's six-cylinder, no-longer-entirely-to-company-specs engine, enclosed in a warm darkness so deep it draped over her like black velvet, Vicki could feel the sun. The flesh between her shoulders crawled. Two years a vampire and she still hadn't gotten used to the approach of the day.

“It's like that final instant, just before someone hits you from behind, when you know it's going to happen and you can't do a damned thing about it. Only it lasts longer.
 . . .”

Celluci hadn't been impressed by the analogy, and she supposed she couldn't blame him—it didn't impress her much either. While he'd pulled the van up under the security light and methodically checked for pinholes that might let in the sun, she'd almost gone crazy with the need to get under cover. He hadn't listened when she'd told him she'd already checked, but then, he'd always believed she took foolish risks.

Risks, she took.

Foolish risks, never.

Okay, hardly ever.

Wondering why she was suddenly doing numbers from
HMS Pinafore
, she licked her lips and tasted the memory of Celluci's mouth against hers. He'd wanted to wait for sunrise before he started driving, but Vicki'd insisted he start right after she closed herself up in her moving sanctuary. She didn't think she could cope with both of them waiting for . . .

. . . oblivion.

At that hour of the morning, traffic was heading into Toronto, not out of it and, for all its disreputable appearance, the van handled well. Fully aware he would not be able to explain the apparent corpse in the back should he be stopped by the OPP, Celluci drove a careful five kilometers over the limit and resigned himself to being passed by nearly every other car on the highway.

“Get your picture taken,” he muttered as an old and rusty K-car buzzed by him. Unfortunately, the new Ontario government had recently pulled the photo radar vans, insisting they'd shown no positive effects. Celluci had no idea where the idiots at Queen's Park had gathered their information, but in his personal experience, the threat of the vans had kept paranoid drivers actually traveling at slightly less than the limit.

He stopped at Barrie for breakfast and a chance to stretch his legs. A tractor trailer accident held him for an hour just outside Waubaushene and by the time he stopped for lunch at the Centennial Diner in Bigwood, he'd heard Sonny and Cher sing “I Got You Babe” on three different oldies stations and was wondering why he was putting himself through rock-and-roll hell for Henry-fucking-Fitzroy.

“I should've tried harder to talk her out of it.” He yanked a tasseled toothpick out of his club sandwich. So what if there were no PI's on the West Coast Fitzroy could trust. “How's he supposed to make new friends if he never talks to strangers.”

“Is anything wrong?”

Celluci manufactured a smile and tossed it up to his teenage waitress. “No. Nothing's wrong.” Watching her watch him on her way back to the kitchen, he sighed.
Great Not only does he expect Vicki to risk her life traveling across three quarters of the country, but now he's got me talking to myself
.

On the flyspecked radio above the pie rack, Sonny Bono once again declared his love in the face of everything they said.

“WaWa?” Knuckles on her hips, Vicki rolled the kinks out of her shoulders. “Why WaWa?”

Celluci shrugged, eyes appreciatively following her movements. “Why not WaWa? I thought you might want to see the goose.”

“The goose?” Slowly, she turned and peered up at the nine-meter-high steel sculpture silhouetted against a gray sky streaked with orange. “Okay. I've seen it. I hope we're not sharing the high point of your day.”

“Close,” he admitted. “How're you feeling?”

“Like my body spent the day bouncing around inside a padded box. Other than that, fine.”

“Are you, uh . . .” He broke off in embarrassment as a car pulled into the small parking lot and a pair of children exploded out of the back and raced up the path toward the bathrooms.

“Hungry?” Stepping into the circle of his body heat, she grinned. “Mike, you can say
hungry
in front of kids—they'll assume I'll be having a Big Mac, not Ronald MacDonald.”

“That's disgusting.”

“Actually, it's given me an appetite.”

He grabbed her upper arms, halting her advance. “Forget it, Vicki, I'm too old for a quickie in the back of a van.” But his protest had little force, and after the kids and the car disappeared, he allowed himself to be convinced.

It didn't take much.

Twenty minutes later, as they climbed up into the front seats, Vicki reached out and caught a mosquito about to land on his back. “Forget it, sister,” she muttered, squashing the bug between thumb and forefinger. “He gave at the office.”

“We're just past Portage la Prairie?” Celluci looked up from the map of Manitoba with a scowl. He hadn't slept well, and the thermos of coffee Vicki'd handed him when he'd staggered out of the van could peel the residue off a garbage truck. He drank it anyway—after fifteen years drinking police coffee, he could drink anything—but he wasn't happy. The last thing he needed to be told was that they'd gone considerably past the point where he'd expected to take over. “You must've been doing between a hundred and twenty-five and a hundred and thirty kilometers an hour!”

“What's your point?”

“Let's start with the speed limit being a hundred kilometers an hour and take it from there. It's not just a good idea,” he added sarcastically, fighting to refold the map. “It's the law.”

Vicki clamped her teeth down on a complaint that a hundred K to someone with her reaction time was ridiculously slow, and merely shrugged. Her opinions didn't make the speed limit any less the law. If he'd suggested she'd been driving unsafely, then she could've given him an argument.

Leaning back against the van, she stared out at the farmland surrounding the gas station parking lot. With the station closed and the only illumination coming from the stars and Celluci's flashlight, it seemed as though they were the last people alive in the world. She hated that feeling and she'd felt it for most of the night as she'd sped away from Lake Superior toward Kenora and the Ontario/Manitoba border. At 3 A.M. even Winnipeg was a little short of people up and about—except for a sleepy clerk at the 24-hour gas station/donut shop where she'd filled the van and two transients spotted sleeping in the shelter of an overpass. She'd cut through the middle of Portage la Prairie rather than take the Trans-Canada Highway loop around, but it was still too early for anyone to be up and about.

Used to living, and hunting among three million people, at least one million of whom never seemed to sleep, the isolation made her feel vulnerable and exposed.

“Give me that.” She reached down and snatched the partially folded map out of Mike's hands. “All you have to do is follow the original creases. Why is that so difficult?”

Vulnerable, exposed, and in a really bad mood. Meeting Celluci's astonished glower with a half-apologetic wave of the map, she growled, “All this scenery is beginning to get to me.”

Recognizing that on a perfectly straight, completely flat stretch of road no one was going to drive at one hundred kilometers an hour, the speed limit through Saskatchewan was one hundred and ten. Almost everyone did one twenty. Considering his cargo, Celluci compromised at one fifteen.

A lifetime's worth of wheat fields later, at 7:17 P.M. local time, he pulled into a truck stop just outside Bassano, Alberta, and turned off the engine wondering if there was a Sonny and Cher revival going on he hadn't heard about. If he had to listen to “I Got You, Babe” one more time, he was going to have to hurt someone. Parking the van so that Vicki could exit without being seen, he walked stiffly across the asphalt to the restaurant. Sunset would be at 8:30, so he had little better than an hour to eat.

Soup of the day was beef barley. He stared down into the bowl and remembered all the meals he and Vicki had eaten together, all the gallons of coffee, all the stale sandwiches grabbed on the run. All at once, the thought that they'd never again go out for dim sum, or chicken paprikas, or even order in a pizza while they watched
Hockey Night in Canada
left him feeling incredibly depressed.

“Is there something wrong with the soup?” A middle-aged woman in a spotless white apron peered down at him with some concern from behind the counter.

“The, uh, the soup's fine.”

“Glad to hear it. It don't come out of a can, you know. I make it myself.” When he couldn't find an immediate response, she shook her head and sighed. “Come on, buddy, cheer up. You look like you've lost your best friend.”

Celluci frowned. He hadn't exactly lost her. Vicki remained everything to him she ever had been, except a dinner companion and weighed against the rest that shouldn't mean much. But, right now, it did.
I thought I'd dealt with this
. . . .

He barely noticed when the waitress took the empty bowl away and replaced it with a platter of steak and home fries.

Vampire, Nightwalker, Nosferatu—Vicki was no longer human. Granted, she'd made a commitment to him in a way she'd never been able to before the change, but, given immortality, how important could the few years of his life be?

The rhubarb pie tasted like sawdust and he left half of it on the plate.

Shoulders hunched and hands shoved into his jacket pockets, he headed back across the parking lot toward the van. Vaguely aware he was wallowing in self-pity, he couldn't seem to stop.

When the van's engine roared into life, it took him completely by surprise. Standing three feet from the front bumper, Celluci stared through a fine film of bug bodies smeared over the windshield and into the smug face of a young man in his late teens or early twenties. He didn't realize what was happening until the young man backed the van away from him, cranked the steering wheel around, and laid rubber all the way out to the highway.

The van was being stolen.

Instinct sent him racing after it, but halfway across the parking lot, the fact he didn't have a chance of catching up penetrated and he rocked to a halt. He checked his watch. 8:27.

Vicki would be awake in three minutes.

She'd know immediately that something was wrong, that he wasn't driving. She'd pull open the partition behind the seats . . .

. . . and their young car thief was about to be in for one hell of a surprise.

Watching the grimy back end of the stolen van disappear into the sunset down a secondary road, Celluci started to laugh. His only regret was that he wouldn't be there to see that punk's face when Vicki woke up. He was still laughing when the waitress met him at the door of the restaurant, a worried frown creasing the smooth curves of her face. “Wasn't that your van?”

“It was.” He grinned down at her, feeling better than he had in hours.

“Would you like to use our phone to call the police?”

“No, thank you. But I would like another piece of that delicious rhubarb pie.”

Completely confused, she followed him across the restaurant and watched wide-eyed as he dropped onto a counter stool. She shook her head as he looked at his watch and snickered. He'd seemed like such a nice man and although she was glad to see that whatever had been bothering him obviously wasn't bothering him any longer, she couldn't understand his attitude. “But what about your van?”

The corners of Celluci's mouth curved up as he reached for a fork. “It'll be back.”

Something was wrong.

Vicki lay in the darkness and sifted through sounds and scents and sensation.

The van was still moving. Celluci had insisted, for safety's sake, they be parked at least half an hour before sunrise and sunset. Somehow, considering the completely unnecessary fuss he'd made over it, Vicki doubted he'd changed his mind. Either he'd lost his little book, he'd been unable to get off the highway, or he wasn't the driver.

The smell of the engine—gas and oil and heated metal—laid over the lingering scent of Celluci clinging to the padding of the bed made an enhanced sense of smell next to useless. The three little pigs could be driving, and she wouldn't be able to sniff them out.