Tanya Huff - Blood Debt (Blood Ties)

By

Tanya Huff

CONTENTS

Copyright 1997 by Tanya Huff.

All Rights Reserved. Cover art by John Jude Palencar. DAW Book Collectors No. 1056.

All characters and events in this book are fictitious.

Any resemblance to persons living or dead is strictly coincidental.

If you purchase this book without a cover you should be aware that this book may have been stolen property and reported as "unsold and destroyed" to the publisher. In such case neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this "stripped book."

For Sean "Sebastian" Smith,

who not only mapped out the

city but brought it to life.

"HOW are you feeling?"

The young man attempted a shrug but didn't have the energy to actually lift his shoulders. " 'M okay," he muttered, watching the doctor warily. The incision throbbed, and he was too tired to take a piss without the huge orderly holding his pecker, but he wasn't going to tell the doctor that. Some people said he had authority problems. So what.

He had his money; all he wanted now was a chance to spend it.

"When can I go?"

"Go?"

"Leave," he growled.

"That's what I came in to tell you." Her face expressionless, she stepped away from the bed. "You'll be leaving this afternoon."

"When?"

"Soon."

When she was gone, he swung his legs out from under the covers and carefully lowered them to the floor. Straightening slowly, he released the rail and stepped forward. The room whirled. He would have fallen except that a beefy hand wrapped around his arm and effortlessly kept him upright.

"You walk too fuckin' quietly, man," he said, turning to face the orderly. "Damn near scared me to d"

The last word got lost in sudden pain as the fingers tightened.

"Hey, man! You're hurting me!"

"I know." Something glittered in the depths of soft brown eyes, something usually buried beneath an expression of unquestionable docility.

The setting sun brushed molten gold over the waves of English Bay, gilded a pair of joggers on Sunset Beach Park, traced currents of gleaming amber between the shores of False Creek, shone through the tinted glass on the fourteenth floor of the Pacific Place condominium tower and into the eyes of a young man who sighed as he watched it set. Nestled between the mountains and the Strait of Georgia, Vancouver, British Columbia, enjoyed some of the most beautiful sunsets in the worldbut that had nothing to do with the young man's sigh.

Lifting a hand to shade his face, Tony Foster stared out the window and counted down the minutes. At 7:22 p.m., his watch alarm began to buzz. Pale blue eyes still locked on the horizon, he shut it off and cocked his head back toward the interior of the condominium, listening for the sounds that would tell him the night had truly begun.

Lying in a darkness so complete it could only be deliberate, Henry Fitzroy shook off the bindings of the sun. The soft sound of the cotton sheet moving against the rise and fall of his chest told him he had safely survived another day. As he listened, the rhythmic whisper became lost in the heartbeat waiting in the room beyond his bolted door and then in the myriad noises of the city beyond the walls of his sanctuary.

He hated the way he woke, hated the extended vulnerability of his slow return to full consciousness. Every evening he tried to shorten the time he spent lying helpless and semiaware. It didn't seem to do any good, but the effort made him feel less impotent.

He could feel the sheet lying against his skin, the utter stillness of the air

And a sudden chill.

Which was impossible.

He'd had the air conditioner disconnected in this, the smallest of the three bedrooms. The window had been blocked with plywood, caulked, and curtained. The door had flexible rubber seals around all four sidesnot air-tight by any means, but the cracks were far too small to allow such a rapid change in temperature.

Then he realized that he wasn't alone.

Someone was in the room with him. Someone with no scent. No heartbeat. Fleshless. Bloodless.

Demonic? Possibly. It wouldn't be the first time he'd faced one of the Lords of Hell.

Forcing a sluggish arm to move, Henry reached over and switched on a lamp.

Sensitive eyes half closedeven forty-watt bulbs threw enough light to temporarily blindhe caught one quick glimpse of a young man standing at the foot of his bed before the faint, translucent image disappeared.

"A ghost?" Tony propped one leg on the wide arm of the green leather couch and shook his head. "You're kidding, right?"

"Wrong."

"Cool. I wonder what he wants. They always want something," he added in answer to the question implicit in Henry's lifted red-gold brow. "Everyone knows that."

"Do they?"

"Come on, Henry. Don't tell me in four-hundred-and-ninety-five odd years you've never seen a ghost?"

One hand flat against the cool glass of the window, the other hooked in the pocket of his jeans, Henry Fitzroy, bastard son of Henry VIII, once Duke of Richmond and Somerset, remembered a night in the late 1800s when he'd watched the specter of a terrified young queen run screaming down the hall to beg her king once more for a mercy she'd never receive. Over two hundred years before, Katherine Howard had attended his wedding to her cousin Mary. He hadn't gone to hersher marriage to his father had occurred four years after his supposed death. Made a queen in July, 1540, she'd been beheaded in February, 1542, nineteen months later.

She'd been young and foolish and very likely guilty of the adultery she'd been charged with, but she hadn't deserved to have her spirit trapped, replaying over and over the soul-destroying moment when she'd realized she was going to die.

"Henry?"

"Whatever he wants," Henry said without turning, "I doubt that I'll be able to give it to him. I can't change the past."

Tony shivered. The centuries had gathered about the other man in a nearly visible cloud, wrapping him in a shroud of time and memory.

"Henry, you're freaking me out."

"Am I? Sorry." Shaking off his melancholy, the ex-prince turned and managed a wry smile. "You seem somewhat nonchalant about being haunted."

Glad to have him back, Tony shrugged, a trace of the street kid he'd been lingering in the jerky movement. "He's haunting you, not me.

And besides, between living with you for the last two years and dealing with the weirdos at the store, I've learned to take the unexpected in stride."

"Have you?" Not at all pleased with being compared to the weirdos at the video store where Tony worked, Henry's smile broadened, showing teeth. When he heard the younger man's heartbeat quicken, he crossed the room and wrapped an ivory hand around a slender shoulder. "So I've lost the ability to surprise you?"

"I didn't say that." Tony's breathing grew ragged as a cool thumb traced the line of his jaw.

"Perhaps not exactly that."

"Uh, Henry"

"What?"

He shook his head. It was enough to know Henry would stop if he wanted him to. More than enough, considering he didn't want him to.

"Never mind. Not important."

A short while later, teeth met through a fold of skin, the sharp points pierced a vein and, for a time, the dead were washed away with the blood of the living.

The warm evening air lapping against her face, Corporal Phyllis Roberts cruised along Commissioner Street humming the latest Celine Dion hit and tapping her fingers against the top of the steering wheel.

Although the new Ports Canada Police cars had air-conditioning, she never used it as she disliked the enclosed, spaceship feeling of driving with the windows rolled up.

Three hours into her shift, she was in a good mood. So far, nothing had gone wrong.