Blood Debt - By Tanya Huff Page 0,45

wasn't stupid enough to ask. She didn't miss Fitz?roy-the undead royal bastard was still around-she missed what they'd had, and he didn't want to remind her of that because she could never, ever have it again, and while he reveled in the certainty, he had no inten?tion of coming across as an insensitive prick.

"Need to feed?" he asked instead.

Melancholy gone, she grinned and her eyes frosted. "No, thanks, I'm dining out."

"Yeah. Right." Actually, he found the thought of her gorging on the blood of Vancouver's crime lords less problematic than her gentler meals. Those were the nights he didn't want to think about. Standing sud?denly, he joined her on the way to the door. "Hang on and I'll go with you as far as the lobby. Tony's working till nine. I think I'll head over to the video store and see if he wants to join me for a bite." When both her brows rose, he sighed. "You know, eating never used to come with this many double entendres."

She'd half turned to answer him as he closed the door. By the time they became aware they weren't alone in the hall, it was too late to do anything that wouldn't seem like a retreat.

"Henry."

"Vicki."

Oh, shit. Still, they're sounding practically conversa?tional, so maybe this won't be a complete disaster. They both wore black jeans and black T-shirts. Vicki wore sneakers and a black cotton sweater. He knew it was cotton; he'd bought it for her. Fitzroy wore desert boots and a black linen blazer. He knew it was linen; he had one just like it, which he was going to get rid of the moment he got home. Celluci'd never noticed before how much alike they looked.

It wasn't the clothes. Thousands of vampire wanna?bes all over the world dressed with more undead style than these two.

It wasn't their coloring. Although both were fair, Fitzroy's hair had more red in it and Vicki was a defi?nite ash blonde. It said so on the box.

It was just, merely, simply, purely the way they were. They shared a belle morte-a deadly beauty. Celluci wasn't sure why the words came to him first in Italian; he was family-fluent only, and it wasn't a language he'd ever thought in, but somehow English- plain old workaday English-didn't seem sufficient.

And not only a deadly beauty; they also shared a complete and utter certainty in themselves and their place in the world.

Certainty, Vicki had never been short of, but her sheer, bloody-minded belief that she was as right as anyone had been refined during the moment she locked eyes with Henry Fitzroy; refined and sharpened to a razor's edge. Fitzroy, of course, had always had it. It was one of the things Celluci'd always hated. Always responded to.

His heart began to beat in time to the power that throbbed between them. That surrounded them. That surrounded him. In that hallway, at that instant, watching the two of them watch each other, he under?stood the declaration, I am.

And that is quite enough of that! Italian description arriving out the blue he could cope with, but blas?phemy was something else again! Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned; it's been two years since my last confession, but that's only because I've been sleeping with a vampire. Yeah. Right.

As a musical chime shattered the silence, he lifted his right foot, put it down, and almost miraculously followed the movement with his left-walking directly through their line of sight. "I hate to break up a Kodak moment, kids, but the elevator's here."

For a heartbeat the power gained a new focus. He could feel it flaying his back, simultaneously hot and cold, and he had a brief vision of Vicki's pale fingers shredding that chair. A little amazed he was still able to move, he stepped over the threshold into the eleva?tor and turned around. As expected, they were both staring at him. Vicki's mouth twisted up in a half smile; her sense of the ridiculous overwhelming the melodrama. Fitzroy had on his Prince of Darkness face. Celluci squared his shoulders, resisting the pull. No one survived a relationship with Vicki Nelson- alive or undead-without an equally strong sense of self and he was not going to bend the knee to Henry Fucking Fitzroy. "You coming, Vicki?"

When she nodded and stepped toward the elevator, he stepped back to give her room.

She paused, just inside, and her smile sharpened. "Coming, Henry?"

Even Celluci could hear the challenge. Hell, a deaf man in the next building could've