Many Bloody Returns

Blood Wrapped Tanya Huff

Tanya Huff lives and writes in the wilds of Southern Ontario. Her twenty-two books run the gamut from heroic fantasy to space opera although she is probably best known for the Vicki Nelson Blood books—recently adapted for television as Blood Ties and showing on Lifetime in the United States and a CHUM affiliate in Canada. Her twenty-third book, The Heart of Valor, was a July 2007 release, and the sequel, Valor’s Trial, will be out in the spring of 2008. The following story is in the world of the Smoke books—Smoke and Shadows, Smoke and Mirrors, and Smoke and Ashes.

“What do you think of that?”

“The window display?”

“The shawl!”

Henry stepped closer to the Treasures of Thailand window and examined the lime green silk shawl draped more-or-less artistically over a papier-mâché mountain. “Nice,” he said after a moment, “but not your color. If I were you, I’d wear the turquoise.” A wave of his hand indicated a similar shawl hanging in the window’s “sky.”

“It’s not for me!” Tony Foster shot a scathing look at his companion.

“Ah, for Lee then. In that case, you need a deeper green.”

“It’s for Vicki!”

“Vicki?” Henry turned, frowning slightly, to see Tony staring at him with an expression of horrified disbelief.

“You didn’t forget. Don’t tell me you forgot. You must have gotten Celluci’s e-mail.”

“E-mails.” Over the last few weeks there had been a series of messages from Detective Sergeant Michael Celluci. Each of them had been as direct and to the point as the detective himself tended to be, falling somewhere between terse and rude, and each of them had been read and promptly deleted. “About Vicki’s birthday.”

“Right. So”—looking relieved, Tony nodded toward the shawl—“what do you think?”

“I think you’re unnecessarily concerned,” Henry told him. “It’s just a birthday.”

Tony stepped out into the middle of the sidewalk and stared at the bastard son of Henry VIII, once Duke of Richmond and Somerset, Marshal of the North, now vampire and romance writer, like he’d just grown another head. “Are you insane?”

Tony took a long drink of his latte, set the mug carefully back on the artfully distressed surface of the coffee shop’s round wooden table, leaned forward, and looked Henry right in the eye. It was something not many people could or would do and not something he dared on a regular basis, but he needed to make sure Henry understood the seriousness of the situation. “She’s turning forty.”

“She’s essentially immortal,” Henry pointed out, keeping the Hunter carefully masked despite the other man’s provocation.

“What difference does that make?”

He spread his hands. “An infinite number of birthdays.”

“So?” Taking the opportunity to look away without backing down, Tony rolled his eyes. “She’s still only going to turn forty once.”

“And someday, God willing, she’ll turn a hundred and forty, two hundred and forty…”

“You just don’t get it, do you?”

“Apparently not.” Taking a swallow from his bottle of water, a modern conceit he appreciated since it granted him an accepted public behavior—and there were many in Vancouver who drank neither caffeine nor alcohol—Henry studied Tony’s reaction and shook his head. “Apparently not,” he repeated. That Vicki Nelson, who had been the first child of his kind he’d created in almost four hundred and seventy years, would care about something so meaningless as a birthday was hard for him to believe. Granted, she’d been definitely human before the change: strong willed, opinionated, with a terrier-like determination…. No, not terrier. That implied something small and yappy and Vicki was neither. Pit bull then. Aggressive, yes, but more often badly handled and misunderstood. He grinned at the thought of anyone attempting to put a muzzle on Vicki Nelson.

“What? You’re wearing one of your I’m so clever smiles,” Tony told him as his thoughts returned to the coffee shop. “Have you thought of something to get her?”

Best not to mention the muzzle. Toronto, and Vicki, were three thousand odd miles away but the idea of that getting back to her gave him chills the way nothing had in the last four centuries.

“I’ve know her for years and I’ve never given her a birthday present.”

“Forty, Henry.”

“And why is that so different from thirty-nine?”

Tony sighed. “You write bodice rippers, Henry. I can’t believe you know so little about women!”

“No woman in my books has ever approached forty.” Grocery bills might be negligible but he still had condo fees and car insurance to pay and middle-aged heroines didn’t sell books.

“Yeah, and your fans?”

From the mail he got, his fans were definitely closer to middle age. Given that they thought he was a thirty-five-year-old redhead named Elizabeth Fitzroy, he declined all invitations to romance conventions. “We don’t exactly converse, Tony.”

“Maybe you should. Look”—elbows planted on the table, he leaned forward—“forty is a big deal for women. It’s either the age where they have to stop pretending or have to start pretending a lot harder.”

“Pretending what?”

“Youth, Henry.”

“Vicki will be forever young.”

“No.” Tony shook his head. “You’ll be forever young; you were changed at seventeen. Vicki was thirty-four when you drew her over to the dark side—you know, dark? Literally.” As Henry frowned, Tony waved a hand at the coffee shop’s window and the night sky just barely visible behind the lights of Davies Street. “Never mind. The point is, she was human twice as long as you were. And she was in her thirties. And she’s a woman. Trust me, forty counts. And if you can’t trust me, trust Celluci; he’s living with her.”

Vampires did not share territory. By changing her, Henry had lost her to his mortal rival. And that sounded like a line from a bad romance. He rubbed his forehead and wondered what had happened to make his life so complicated. Stupid question. Vicki Nelson, ex–Wonder Woman of the Metropolitan Toronto Police, had happened. Vicki had seen past the masks and gotten him involved in life in a way he hadn’t been for hundreds of years. Vicki had pushed Tony into his life and had, with her change, been at least indirectly responsible for the two of them ending up in Vancouver. Forty years to such a woman should mean nothing.

“Look at it this way, Henry.” Tony’s voice interrupted his musing. “Vicki’s essentially immortal; that’s a long time for her to be pissed at you.”

On the other hand, who was he to say what forty years should mean to such a woman? He moved his water bottle, creating concentric rings with the condensation. “What are you getting her?”

Tony, ex–street hustler, ex–police informant, third assistant director on the most popular vampire detective series on syndicated television and the only practicing wizard in the lower mainland, sagged against the wrought iron back of his chair. “I have no fucking idea.”

There were two messages in Henry’s voice mail when he woke the next evening. Both were from Tony. The first was, predictably, about Vicki’s birthday. According to the script supervisor working on Darkest Night, women of her age appreciated gifts that made them feel young without reminding them of their advancing years. Given that Vicki’s years weren’t exactly advancing, Henry had no idea of what that meant.

Assuming it contained more of the same, Henry intended to delete the second message without listening to it but he hesitated a moment too long.

“Henry, there’s a little girl missing from up by Lytton and someone called Kevin Groves about her.”

Kevin Groves, who worked as a reporter for the Western Star, one of the local tabloids, had the uncomfortable ability of recognizing the truth. Given that his byline had once run under the headline OLYMPIC ORGANIZERS RELOCATE FAMILY OF SASQUATCH, this was occasionally more uncomfortable for those who knew about his skill than it was for him. Over the last year he’d become an indispensable way of keeping tabs on the growing metaphysical activity in Vancouver and the lower mainland.

Like attracted like. Henry had experienced this phenomenon over his long life, and as Tony gained more control over his considerable power, he was discovering it in spades. The difference was that while Henry would move heaven and earth for those he claimed as his own, he was generally willing to let the rest of humanity go its own way. But Tony had bought into the belief that with great power came great responsibility and become something of a local guardian for the entire lower mainland. A policeman, as it were, for the metaphysical.

Henry, because he considered Tony his, very often found himself acting as the young wizard’s muscle. Vicki referred to them alternately as Batman and Robin or the new Jedi Knights, and for that alone deserved to have her birthday forgotten.

Occasionally, Henry wondered if he wasn’t using Tony as an excuse to become involved. Celluci had called him a vampire vigilante once. He’d meant it as an insult, but when Henry thought of little girls gone missing, he also thought that the detective had been more perceptive than he’d been given credit for.

Moving quickly into the living room, Henry picked up the remote and turned on the TV.

“…while playing in the backyard with her mother working in the garden only meters away. There is rising fear in this traumatized community that a bear or cougar or other large predator has come out of the mountains and is feeding upon their children.”

Henry suspected the reporter had taken advantage of a live feed to get that last line on the air.

The young woman stared at the camera with wide-eyed intensity and the certain knowledge that this was her time in the spotlight. “Julie Martin’s distraught father has declared his intention of ‘taking care’ of who or whatever has made off with his precious little girl. A spokes-person from the Ministry of Natural Resources has suggested that it would be dangerous for search parties to head into the wood unless accompanied by trained personnel but admits that their office is unable to provide trained personnel at this time.”

She makes it sound like the Ministry should have grizzled trackers standing by. Henry waited until they cut back to the news anchor who solemnly reiterated that four-year-old Julie Martin had disappeared without a trace in broad daylight, then, as the screen filled with a crowd of angry and near-hysterical townspeople standing outside the RCMP office, berating two harassed-looking constables for not having found the child, he turned off the set.

If Kevin Groves had gotten a call about Julie Martin’s disappearance and felt it had validity enough for him to call Tony, then the odds were good it wasn’t a police matter. Or a matter for the Ministry of Natural Resources, as it was currently mandated.

At 6:47 p.m. Tony would likely still be on the sound stage, so rather than leave him a message Henry went straight to the source.

“Western Star; Kevin Groves.”

“It’s Henry.”

Very faintly, Henry heard the reporter’s heartbeat speed up. Everyone had a hindbrain reaction to vampires, the most primal part of them gibbering in terror in the presence of an equally primal predator. Kevin Groves knew why.

“So, are you…That is, I mean…You’re calling about the missing Martin kid?”

“I am.”

“Werewolves.”

“I beg your pardon.”

“I had a tip that there’s werewolves in the mountains.”

There was, in fact, a pack working an old mining claim just outside of Ashcroft. “And you believe that a werewolf took Julie Martin?” It wasn’t unheard of for a were to go rogue; they were more or less human after all.

“No. Just that there’s werewolves in the mountains, but if that’s the case then…”

“Then?” Henry prodded when Kevin’s voice trailed off.

“Well, you know. Werewolves!”

“Is that it?”

“One of the Martins’ neighbors saw something large and hairy carrying a small body.”

“In its mouth?”

“No, but…”

“Werewolves don’t have an intermediate state. They look like wolves or they look human.” Essentially like wolves and essentially like humans but close enough. “It’s not werewolves.”

“The old lady seemed pretty sure it wasn’t a Sasquatch.”

Even six months ago Henry would have believed it wasn’t a Sasquatch went without saying. “Large and hairy?”

“That’s what she said.”

They couldn’t save every child who went missing in British Columbia but large and hairy pointed toward something the police might not be able to handle. “Give me the witness’s name and we’ll check it out.”

“So”—just past the Spuzzum exit, Henry pulled out and passed an empty logging truck then tucked his 1976 BMW back into the right lane—“where’s Lee?”

“He’s down in L.A. for a couple of days, auditioning for a movie of the week.”

“He’s leaving Darkest Night?” Lee Nicholas, Tony’s partner, was one of the leads in the popular syndicated vampire detective show.

“What? No.” That pulled Tony’s attention off the screen of his PDA. “They’ll be shooting in Vancouver; he figures he can do both. C.B.’s willing to adjust our shooting schedule if necessary.”

“That doesn’t sound like him.” Chester Bane was notoriously inflexible when it came to situations that might cost him money.

“He’s hoping he can scam some free publicity.”

Henry snorted. “That does. What,” he asked a few kilometers later when it became obvious Tony wasn’t going to pick up the conversational ball, “are you finding so fascinating on that thing?”

“Sorry, I was just going over the list of possible…um, things.”

“Things.”

“Suspects who might have taken the kid. But they’re not exactly people.”

Eyes nearly closed in the glare of oncoming headlights, Henry sighed. “Let’s hear the list.”

“Well, there’s Bugbears, a kind of a hairy giant goblin. Or Chimeras, because the lion and goat parts are hairy and that might have been all they saw. It could be any one of a number of different demons but then we need to find out who’s calling them. Uh…” He squinted at the screen as he scrolled down. “Displacer Beasts look like cougars except they’re black and have tentacles so it wouldn’t necessarily be carrying the kid in its mouth. Ettins are two-headed giants that live in remote areas and—”

“Tony, where did you get this list?”

“Sort of from Kevin Groves.”

“Sort of?”

“He lent me an RPG monster index. RPG: role playing game,” Tony expanded when Henry’s silence made it obvious he had no idea what that meant. “Like Dungeons and Dragons.”

“I’ve never heard of it.”

“Really? Because it’s old. Well, oldish.” When Henry replied with more silence, he sighed. “I wanted to go in with more information than hairy thing that eats children and hopefully isn’t a werewolf.”

“So you went to a game?”

It was Tony’s turn to snort as he powered down and twisted around to slip the PDA into a side pocket on his backpack. “Yeah, well believe it or not, Googling big hairy eats children doesn’t pull up anything useful.”

“But imaginary…”

“Henry, whatever this is, I guarantee it’ll be considered imaginary by most of the world. Hell, we’re considered imaginary by most of the world.”

“I’m sure more people than you expect believe in third assistant directors.”

“You’d be surprised.” Slouching down as far as the seat belt would allow, he propped his knees up on the dashboard. “Ninety-nine percent of the world’s population is in denial about something. Take you, for instance.”

That drew Henry’s attention off the road. “Me?”

“You’re still in denial about Vicki’s birthday.”

“I said I’d get her something.”

“Yeah, but it has to be something good and I don’t think you’re giving it much thought.”

“There’s a child missing….”

“You want to talk about that all the way to Lytton? Because I don’t.”

“Fine.” Henry pulled out and passed a pair of trucks. “What about a gift certificate?”

“Dude, it’s a good thing you’re hard to kill.”

The village of Lytton was about a two-hour drive from Vancouver. Henry had picked Tony up at his apartment in Burnaby at twenty to eight, and it was a quarter to ten when Henry left the highway and steered the BMW down Main Street.

“You think they usually roll the sidewalks up this early,” Tony wondered, staring out at the dark windows, “or is this a reaction to the Martin kid getting grabbed?”

“Bit of both, I expect.”

“I feel like we’re being watched from behind lace curtains.”

“Why lace?” Henry asked.

“I don’t know.” Tony waggled the fingers of his left hand in front of his face, sketching in the air lacy lines of power that dissipated almost instantly. “It’s creepier I guess.”

“I don’t know about the lace, but we’re definitely being watched.” Henry could feel the fear and anger roiling through the town. Could feel some it directed toward them. With a child missing in a village of only three hundred and eight souls, any and all strangers would be suspect. “It might be best if we were…unnoticed.”

“Do you have to use such cheesy setup lines?” Tony muttered, laying two fingers against the metal strip between the front and back windows. In the last few months, he’d gotten enough practice in with the Notice-me-not spell that he no longer needed to consult the instructions on the laptop. Of course, there were still one hell of a lot of spells he wasn’t as adept at, so the laptop remained close at hand.

From their perspective within the car, nothing changed but Henry felt the watcher’s attention drift away.

“Could be a troll under the railway bridge.”

“Julia Martin wasn’t anywhere near the bridge,” Henry reminded him. “And a troll would never hunt that far from home. They’re creatures of habit.”

Grace Alton, the witness who’d spoken to Kevin Groves, lived out past Eighth Street where Main began to curve toward Cache Creek, three houses closer to town than the Martins’. Old enough to be part of the original settlement, the small, white frame house was set back from the road at the end of a long, gravel driveway.

Henry pulled in behind an aged Buick and parked. “There’s lights on in the front room. She’s still up.”

“It’s just ten. Why wouldn’t she be?” When Henry turned and lifted a red gold brow, Tony shrugged. “Right. Country.”

Standing on the front porch, Tony fingered the ball bearing that anchored his personal Notice-me-not and glanced back toward the car. Because he knew exactly where the BMW had been parked, he could almost see a shadowy outline—anyone else would have to bump into it to find it. Which was how he’d found it the first couple of times, although it had been more slam into it than bump. His right knee ached remembering.

“One heartbeat. She’s alone.”

“Does it matter?”

“Makes it simpler,” Henry said as he opened the door.

“The door’s not…Right. Country,” Tony said again as he followed Henry into the house. By the time he reached the living room, Henry was on one knee beside an ancient recliner holding the hand of an elderly woman who was staring at him like he was…something elderly women really got into. Tony had no idea of what that might be although from the décor, crocheted doilies and African violets figured prominently. The place smelled like cat piss and the fat black-and-white cat staring disdainfully at Henry from the sofa seemed the most likely culprit.

Unlike dogs, cats had no issues with vampires.

Or wizards, Tony noted as the cat turned that same unblinking green stare on him, and if there was a spell they deigned to acknowledge, he hadn’t found it yet.

“Just tell me what you saw,” Henry said softly, and by the way the old lady leaned toward him, Tony knew his eyes had gone dark and compelling.

“I was out back, wasn’t I, checking to see how the trellis at the end of the old summer kitchen had come through the winter. I have roses in the summer, pink ones; they climb right up to the roof. I saw something moving down by the river. There’s nothing wrong with my eyes.” Her upper lip curled. “I don’t care what that constable says. I can see at a distance as well as I ever could. All right, fine, up close maybe I should wear my glasses, but at a distance I know what I saw.”

“What did you see, Grace?”

She preened a little, an involuntary response to Henry’s attentions, which, given the visible as opposed to actual age difference, was kind of creeping Tony out. “It was passing between those two clumps of lilac bushes. They’re nothing much now, but you should see them in the spring. Lovely. And the smell. Snotty young pup from the Ministry wanted to tear them out. I tore him a new one, that’s what I did. Those lilacs are older than he is.”

Tony wasn’t without sympathy for the guy from the Ministry, whichever ministry it happened to be.

“What did you see passing between the lilacs, Grace?”

“I saw something bigger than a man but hunched over. And it had a big, hairy hump. The shape looked wrong. It looked…evil!” She drew out the final word with obvious enjoyment, and Tony, who’d seen some terrifying things over the last few years, suppressed a shudder. “It was moving fast but I saw, I saw clear as anything, that it was holding a child. I saw the leg kick and the poor little thing had on a red rubber boot. Julie Martin was wearing red rubber boots when she disappeared, you know. I yelled for it to stop but then it was gone, so I came inside and I called the Mounties and they didn’t believe me. Oh, they were polite enough, those young men, but they didn’t believe me not for one minute. ‘Are you sure the boot was red?’ they said. Like I couldn’t see a little red boot against a big, hairy creature. Not like a Sasquatch, I told them. They’re just misunderstood, poor dears. This was ungroomed, ratty. I don’t like to judge but it was clearly a creature of evil appetites come down out of the mountains to feed. He asked me what kind of creature, and I said how would I know; did I look like I knew creatures? And he said maybe the light was playing tricks so I said it was a lot better back when I saw it because they hadn’t exactly hustled to get here, you know. When they left, I said to Alexander”—she gestured toward the cat, who looked bored—“I said, we’ll involve the fifth estate, that’s what we’ll do, and I called the paper.”

A messy pile of tabloids, topped by a copy of the Western Star, had a place of prominence beside her chair. The only visible headline screamed, IT’S NOT A RACCOON! Tony rubbed at a healing bite on his calf. It had actually been a Pekinese with a really bad temper.

“The man at the paper, he believed me.”

“I believe you, Grace.”

She patted Henry’s cheek with her free hand. “I know, dear.”

As amusing as it was to see Henry Fitzroy, vampire, treated in such a way, Tony couldn’t see how this was getting them any closer to finding Julie Martin. They’d gotten as much information from Kevin.

Then Henry leaned closer. “What did you hear, Grace?”

Her eyes widened. “Hear?”

“What did you hear?”

She frowned, slightly, and cocked her head to one side. “I heard rustling through the bushes, but that might have been the wind. I heard the river, of course. I heard…” She looked surprised. “I heard a car door slam.”

“Werewolves drive.”

“Some of them,” Henry admitted as they crossed the backyard. “But not very well.”

“It’s been a long winter and kids are easier to hunt than elk. Maybe they’re taking food back to the pack.”

“It’s possible but unlikely that there’d be enough rogue were around to form a pack.”

“You just don’t want it to be were,” Tony muttered, staring into the gap between the lilac bushes. The gap was only minimally less dark than the bushes themselves. The sky had clouded over and he could barely see his hand in front of his face. “You’ll have to guide me through to the other side. I don’t want to risk a light until I’m blocked from the road. There’s only so much a Notice-me-not can cover.

“Guide me,” he repeated a moment later as Henry set him down. “Not carry me.”

“This was faster. You need to put more work into that Nightsight spell.”

“Yeah.” Tony snapped on his flashlight, beam pointed carefully at the ground. “I’ll get right on that in my copious amount of spare time between working and saving the world. You got anything?”

Crouched, Henry brushed a palm over the crushed grass. “Unfortunately, the police believed Grace enough to check this out. There’s no scent here now but theirs.”

The tracks—the mess the police had made visible even to Tony—followed a path behind the lilacs probably created by deer or some other non-small-child-eating animal. The police appeared to have reached a set of tire tracks that lead up between two houses and back to the road and stopped their search.

“Do you think Ms. Alton told the Mounties about the car door?”

“No. She didn’t remember it until I asked her specifically what she heard. I think because this”—Henry indicated the tracks—“is the obvious place for a car but the tracks just as obviously haven’t been used this spring, the police assumed Grace was…”

“Making things up to get attention?” Tony offered diplomatically.

“Possibly. And you can’t exactly blame them; there’d be no reason to bring an abducted child down here unless you had a car and this”—he waved at the unused tracks again—“this says there was no car. But because we know there was a car involved we need to find another place you can bring in a vehicle. Wait here.”

“Why—”

“Because I’ll be moving quickly and I don’t want you to fall in the river.”

Tony sighed and turned off the flashlight. He couldn’t see the river, about three meters away and down a steep bank, but the sound of rushing water filled the night, drowning out every other sound.

Five minutes. The scar on his left palm itched and he thought about conjuring a Wizard lamp. Ten minutes. When he got his first decent job in Vancouver, he’d bought a cheap watch with a luminescent dial, tired of spending unacknowledged time in the dark. Fifteen minutes. He yawned and nearly swallowed his tongue as Henry’s pale face appeared suddenly out of the shadows.

“Just past those cedars, it’s all bare rock. It wouldn’t be impossible to get something with four-wheel drive and a high clearance along the edge of the river and then back up to Highway Twelve right at the bridge.”

“Just because it ‘wouldn’t be impossible’ doesn’t mean there was a car there,” Tony pointed out as they headed for Grace Alton’s driveway and the car. “I doubt Ms. Alton heard anything over the sound of the river, Henry. That track’s likely got nothing to do with—”

Henry held up a small red boot.

Boot in one hand, laptop balanced on his knees, Tony scrolled through his spell directory. “Here it is. Pairbonding: joining two halves back into a whole. I cast the spell on the boot and it acts like a compass leading us to its mate.” He pulled a black marker from the pack between his feet and slowly drew a rune on the instep of the boot.

“Whatever has the child reeks of old blood, old kills,” Henry growled, driving up onto the bridge. “The stench hides its nature.”

“If it isn’t rogue were, there’s nothing that says some of the smaller giants couldn’t drive. I mean, as long as the car was big enough.” Rummaging in the pack, Tony pulled out a plastic grocery bag of herbs, removed a spray of small red berries almost the same color as the rubber, and dropped it in the boot. “Belladonna,” he explained. “To clear the way. I’m working the sympathetic magic angle. It’s a diuretic, makes you piss, and that’s clearing that way anyway.”

“I didn’t ask.”

Boot balanced on his palm, Tony reached for power and carefully read the words of the spell.

The boot slammed against the middle of the inside of the windshield.

Henry’s nostril’s flared.

Tony sighed, powered down the laptop, and performed a quick Clean Cantrip. “Yes, I pissed myself,” he muttered defensively, cheeks burning. “Like I said, it’s a diuretic but at least the boot didn’t blow up. Or melt. Or break your windshield.”

“But you’re still using too much power.”

“Am not. New spells always need a bit of fine-tuning.”

“Fine-tuning? My car—”

“Is clean. Fresh. All taken care of.” He slouched down in the seat. “Whether they believed Ms. Alton or not, the cops had to have searched the riverbank. How come they didn’t find the boot?”

“I found it by scent down deep within a crack in the rock. The RCMP would have needed to go over the riverbank with a fine-tooth comb to find it, and I doubt they have sufficient manpower even for this given the foolishness of the recent budget cuts.”

“You sound like Vicki. Only with less profanity.”

Although she hadn’t been a police officer for some years before Henry changed her, Vicki continued to take government underfunding of law enforcement personally.

“Speaking of Vicki”—because speaking of the boot or the child or the thing that had taken her would only feed his anger and that would make it dangerous for Tony to remain enclosed with him in the car—“do you think she’d like one of those purple plants?”

“Purple plants?”

“Like all those plants Grace owns.”

“Would Vicki like an African violet? For Christ’s sake, Henry, she’s turning forty, not eighty.”

Reaching across the front seat, Henry smacked him on the back of the head. “Don’t blaspheme.”

Just before the sign for the Nohomeen Reserve, a gravel road led off to the east, into the mountains. The boot swung around so quickly to the passenger window, it nearly smacked Tony in the head. As Henry turned off the highway, it centered itself on the windshield again, bouncing a time or two for emphasis.

“Not exactly a BMW kind of road,” Tony pointed out as a pothole nearly slammed his teeth through his tongue.

“We’ll manage.”

The road ran nearly due north, past the east edge of the Keetlecut Reserve and farther up into the wild. They passed a clear-cut on the right—the scar on the mountainside appallingly visible even by moon and starlight—then three kilometers later the boot slid hard to the left, the rubber sole squeaking against the glass.

Leaning out past Henry, Tony stared into the darkness. “I don’t see a road.”

“There’s a forestry track.”

“Yeah.” Tony clutched at the seat as the car bounced through ruts. “Remember what you said earlier about a high road clearance and four-wheel drive? And hey!” he nearly shrieked as they lost even the dubious help from the headlights. “Lights!”

“We don’t want them to see us coming.”

“You don’t think the engine roar will give us away? Or the sound of my teeth slamming together?”

A moment later, Tony was wishing he hadn’t said that as Henry stopped the car. Except that he didn’t want the engine to give them away. He didn’t want to walk for miles up a mountain through the woods in the dark either but then again Julie Martin hadn’t wanted to be snatched out of her backyard so, in comparison, he really had nothing he could justify complaining about.

He crammed handfuls of herbs into an outside pocket on his backpack and wrestled the red rubber boot into the plastic bag. When he held the handles, it was like a red rubber divining rod…bag, pulling with enough force that it seemed safest to wrap the handles around his wrist. As he leaned back into the front seat for his backpack, it started to rain. “Wonderful,” he muttered, straightening and carefully closing the door. “Welcome to March in British Columbia. Henry, it’s almost one and sunrise is at six oh six. Unless you want to spend the day wrapped in a blackout curtain and locked in your trunk, we need to be back at the car by three. Do we have time…”

“Yes.”

That single syllable held almost five hundred years of certainty. Tony sighed. “I don’t want to leave her out here either but…”

“We have time.”

The flash of teeth, too white in the darkness, suggested Tony stop arguing. That was fine with him except he wasn’t the one who spontaneously combusted in sunlight or bitched and complained for months after he spent the day wrapped around his spare tire and jack. And it wasn’t like camping out was an option. He skipped the Brokeback Vampire reference in favor of suggesting Henry head for his sanctuary and he go on alone. “I’m not entirely helpless, you know.”

“You’re wasting time,” Henry snarled.

The evil that had taken the child was close. The drumming of the rain kept him from hearing heartbeats—if these things had hearts—and the sheets of water had washed away any chance of a scent trail, but Henry knew they were close nevertheless. Vicki would have called it a hunch and followed it for no reason she could articulate so he would do the same.

For twenty minutes they moved up the forestry track, his hand around Tony’s elbow both to hurry his pace and to keep him from the worst of the trail invisible to mortal eyes in the dark and the rain. The white bag pulled straight out from Tony’s outstretched arm, a bloodhound made of boot and belladonna. A step farther and the bag pulled so hard to the right Tony stumbled and would have fallen had Henry’s grip not kept him on his feet.

The track became two lines in the grass that led to a light just visible through the trees. Not an electric light, but not fire either. A lantern. Behind a window.

“Were build shelters,” Tony muttered, ducking under a sodden evergreen branch. “Or the pack could be squatting in a hunting cabin.”

“I hear nothing that says these are were.” But also nothing that said they weren’t. The rain continued to mask sound and scent but its tone and timbre changed as they drew closer to the building and a pair of large, black SUVs. The cabin, crudely built and listing to the left, did not match the cars.

Lips drawn back off his teeth, Henry plucked a bit of sodden fur from where it had been caught in one of the doors. “Dog. And the stink of old death I caught by the river lingers still.”

“It was wearing dog? Okay.” A moment while Tony assimilated that. “Still could be giants then. These things”—a nod toward the SUVs—“are fucking huge. Hang on.” Releasing one handle, Tony reached into the bag and used the ball of his thumb to smudge out the rune. With the boot now no more than a reminder that a child’s life hung in the balance, he wrapped the plastic tight and shoved it into his jacket pocket. “I’ll likely need both hands.”

The rune in his left hand throbbed with the beat of his heart.

As they stepped under the eaves of the roof and out of the pounding distraction of the rain, Henry felt something die. Not the child—he could hear her heartbeat now, too slow but steady, probably drugged—but an animal who had died terrified and in great pain. Growling deep in his throat, he looked in through the filthy window.

Half a dozen kerosene lanterns hung from the rafters of the single room. One lantern alone made shadows, mystery. Six together threw a light that was almost clinical.

There were two men, middle-aged and well-fed, standing at each end of a wooden table stained with blood. Henry saw nails and a hammer and didn’t need to see any more. Over the centuries he had seen enough torture to recognize it in the set of a torturer’s shoulders, in the glitter in the eye. Both these men were smiling, breathing heavily, and gazing down on their work with satisfaction.

He had seen their expressions on priests of the Inquisition.

They might have started by accident, inflicting pain on a hunting trophy wounded but not killed. Over time, they had come to need more reaction than an animal could provide, and to answer that need Julie Martin lay curled in the corner of an overstuffed sofa wearing one red rubber boot and one filthy pink sock. Her face was dirty but she seemed unharmed. From what he knew of men like these, Henry suspected the drugs that had kept her quiet had kept her safe. There was no point in inflicting pain on the unaware.

The raw pelts draped over the back of a chair had probably been worn when they took the girl. Perhaps as disguise. Perhaps as a way of working themselves up to the deed, reminding themselves of pleasures to come. Grace Alton had seen the evil. Had seen clearer than anyone had believed.

“They’re just men.” But not even Tony sounded surprised.

“There is no such thing as just men,” Henry growled, barely holding the Hunter in check. “Angels and demons both come of men. To say these two are just men is to deny that. Is to deny this. I want the girl safe first.”

“I’ve got her. Just open the door.”

Henry didn’t so much open the door as rip it off its hinges, rusted nails screaming as they were torn from the wood, the blood scent roiling out to engulf him.

He sensed rather than saw Tony hold out his scarred hand and call. A heartbeat later the young wizard staggered back under the weight of the child and grunted, “Go.”

Henry smiled.

And the two men at the table learned what terror meant.

Tony slid the boot onto Julia’s foot and lifted the sleeping child off the backseat of the car, settling her against his shoulder. As they drove back to Lytton, the drugs had begun to release their hold and, to keep her from waking, he’d sung her a lullaby from his laptop. It hadn’t seemed to matter that the words were in a language she’d never heard nor would probably hear again. She’d sighed, smiled, and slipped her thumb into her mouth. Now he wrapped them both in a Notice-me-not and carried her up the road to her parents’ house. Although it was just past two in the morning, all the lights were still on when he laid her gently on the mat and rang the bell.

Rolling the ball bearing between his thumb and forefinger, he walked back to the car, listening to the crying and the laughing and wishing he could bottle it. The sound of hearts mending and innocence saved: that would make the perfect present for Vicki.

“You think she’ll remember anything?”

With the Notice-me-not wrapped around the car, Henry drove back toward Vancouver at considerably more than the legal speed, racing the sunrise. “I hope not.”

“You think they’ll ever find the bodies?”

He shrugged, not caring. “I expect someone will stumble over them eventually.”

“You didn’t leave anything that would lead the cops back to you? I mean”—Tony slouched against the seat belt strap—“these were men.”

Henry turned just far enough that Tony could see the Hunter in his eyes. “Would you have preferred we left them to the law?”

“Hell, no.” He scraped a bit of mud off his damp jeans. “They hadn’t done anything to that kid yet but they were going to. It’s just, monsters are one thing, but those—”

“Were also monsters. Do you have to throw up again?”

It had been a reaction not to what Henry had done but to suddenly realizing just what they’d prevented. It had also been incredibly embarrassing, but the rain had washed the stink off his boots.

“No.”

“Good. It doesn’t matter if or when they find the bodies, Tony. There’s nothing that can link them back to us. To me.” His teeth were too white in the headlights of a passing transport and his eyes were too dark. “No one believes in vampires.”

Tony stared at the face of the Hunter unmasked and shuddered. “Dude, we’re doing a hundred and fifty-five k. Could you maybe watch the road?”

“All right, I still don’t understand how forty is any more important than one hundred and forty, but I think I’ve got Vicki’s birthday covered.” Henry pulled a jeweler’s box from his jacket pocket and opened it. “One pair half-carat diamond earrings.”

Tony stepped aside to let Henry into his apartment, peered down at the stones, and nodded. “Good choice. Diamonds are forever and so is she.”

“Now read the card.”

“Ah, you’ve included a newspaper clipping about the miraculous return of Julie Martin. Very smart. Almost makes up for the pink, sparkly roses on the front of this thing. Blah, blah, blah, as you approach the most wonderful years of your life, blah, blah, young as you ever were, blah, in your name a pair of evil men have been sent to hell where they belong.” Tony looked up and grinned. “Man, they really do make a card for every occasion.”

“I added the last bit.”

“No shit? Seriously, Henry, it’s perfect. You don’t have to wrap it, she doesn’t have to find space for it, and you can’t beat the sentiment.”

“You think she’ll like it?”

“Like it?” Tony snorted as he tossed the card onto his kitchen table. “I think she’ll want to collect the whole set. You should start thinking about what you’re going to do when she turns fifty.”

“Fifty.” Halfway across the apartment, Henry froze.

“Fifty. Sixty-five. Seventy-five. Ninety. One hundred. One hundred and twenty-seven.”

“One hundred and twenty-seven?”

“Kidding. You get her something really fine at one hundred and you’re probably good until at least one-fifty…”