Blood Debt - By Tanya Huff Page 0,6

"Even if you're not a supernatural creature, even if all you are is biologi?cally different... "

"All I am?"

"Henry!"

Henry graciously indicated he should continue al?though his lip remained curled.

"Look, there's a whole shitload of myth about you. Okay, not you specifically, but about your kind. It's all around you... " He spread his arms. "... like a kind of metaphysical fog. I bet that's what the ghost is attracted to. I bet that's what pulls him to you."

"Metaphysical fog," Henry repeated. Shaking his head, he leaned back in his chair. "Did you talk like that in Toronto?"

"You needn't get so damned superior!" His relaxed posture gone, Tony jabbed a finger in Henry's direction. "It's a perfectly valid theory. Or have you got a better one?"

Surprised by the young man's vehemence, Henry admitted he didn't, but before Tony could continue, he cut him off with an uplifted hand. "Something's happening in the hall."

Tony's scowl deepened. "I don't hear any... shit." There was no point in continuing. Henry was already at the door.

He'd heard the ambulance attendants. As he stepped out into the hall, they were rolling the stretcher out of apartment 1404. The tiny figure under the straps lay perfectly still, one thin hand dangling limply off the side. The attendants were performing CPR even as they rushed toward the elevator, but Henry knew Lisa Evans was irretrievably dead.

He barely managed to keep himself from leaping back and snarling as Mrs. Munro clutched at his arm.

A few moments later, after bundling the sobbing companion into his car, he was speeding toward St. Paul's Hospital after the ambulance while Tony passed Mrs. Munro tissue after tissue from the box in the glove compartment.

The emergency room doctors took very little time before they agreed with Henry's diagnosis. They, too, had seen death too often to mistake it.

"She was very old," Dr. Zvane told them softly.

"There's older!" Mrs. Munro protested. Tony handed her another tissue.

"True." The doctor shrugged, and knuckled weary eyes. "All I can say is that it was her time. We did everything we could, but she'd gone on and had no intention of coming back."

Gripping Henry's hand hard enough to crack merely mortal joints, Mrs. Munro sniffed. "That's just like her. You could never get her to change her mind once she'd made it up."

She'd stopped crying by the time she got back into the car. Although Henry had offered to drive her wherever she wanted to go, she'd asked to be taken back to the condo. "I have to get my things. My daughter will pick me up there.

"We were watching Jeopardy," she continued, able to talk about what had happened now that it was offi?cially over. "It was the championship round. Miss Evans had just shouted out, 'Who is Captain Kirk?' when all of a sudden, she sort of whimpered and clapped her hands over her ears. She looked like she'd heard something horrible except I didn't hear anything at all. The next thing I knew, she was... gone."

Henry met Tony's eyes in the rearview mirror. It was obvious they were thinking the same thing.

"I don't think he's doing it deliberately."

"I don't care. He is responsible for that old lady's death, and I say he can go handless into hell."

Back in his circle of light, Tony shivered. Henry's voice had cut through the distance between living room and bedroom like the distance didn't exist, and every word had held an edge. When he appeared a moment later, Tony took in his change of clothes- his face and hair seemed luminescent above all that black-and asked, although he didn't really need to, "Where are you going?"

"Hunting."

It was almost impossible not to respond to the ghost's anticipation.

"You can stand there as long as you like," Henry growled, "but I am not going to help you."

The ghost threw back its head and screamed.

An unseen, unheard chorus of the dead screamed with it.

"I thought you weren't going to ask it any more questions!"

"I didn't." Henry stared down at the city, listening for the sound of a siren, his fingers splayed against the glass, the muscles rigid across his back. "I told it, it could expect no help."

"It didn't seem to like that."

"No. It didn't."

They stood together in silence, waiting for the sounds of another death.

Finally Tony sighed and threw himself down on the sofa. "Looks like we got lucky; nobody old enough, close enough. Tomorrow night, why don't you say nothing at all."

It waited. And it waited. When Henry tried to leave