Blood Price - By Tanya Huff Page 0,40

feet and threw his arms wide. "I don't care as long as I'm with you."

"You're very young."

The words lacked conviction and he could see the indecision on her face. She wanted him! Oh, blessed Jesus and all the saints, she wanted him. "How old were you when you died?" he demanded.

She bit her lip. "Seventeen."

"I shall be seventeen in two months." He threw himself back on his knees. "Can't you wait that long?"

"Two months... "

"Just two." He couldn't keep the triumph from his voice. "Then you will have me for all eternity."

She laughed then and pulled him to her breast. "You think highly of yourself, milord."

"I do," he agreed, his voice a little muffled.

"If your lady wife should come in... "

"Mary? She has rooms of her own and is happy to stay in them." Still on his knees, he pulled her to the bed.

Two months later, she began to feed nightly, taking as much as he could bear each night.

Norfolk posted guards on his room. Henry ordered them away, for the first time in his life his father's son.

Two months after that, while revered doctors scratched their heads and wondered at his failing, while Norfolk tore the neighborhood apart in a fruitless search, she pulled him to her breast again and he suckled the blood of eternal life.

"Let me get this straight; you're the bastard son of Henry VIII?"

"That's right." Henry Fitzroy, once Duke of Richmond and Somerset, Earl of Nottingham, and Knight of the Garter, leaned his forehead against the cool glass of the window and looked down at the lights of Toronto. It had been a long time since he'd told the story; he'd forgotten how drained it left him.

Vicki looked down at the book of the Tudor age, spread open on her lap, and tapped a paragraph. "It says here you died at seventeen."

Shaking off his lethargy, Henry turned to face her. "Yes, well, I got better."

"You don't look seventeen." She frowned. "Mid-twenties I'd say, no younger."

He shrugged. "We age, but we age slowly."

"It doesn't say so here, but wasn't there some mystery about your funeral?" One corner of her mouth quirked up at his surprised expression, the best she could manage considering the condition of her jaw. "I have a BA in History."

"Isn't that an unusual degree for a person in your line of work?"

He meant for a private investigator, she realized, but it had been just as unusual for a cop. If she had a nickel for every time someone, usually a superior officer, had dragged out that hoary old chestnut, those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it, she'd be a rich woman. "It hasn't slowed me down," she told him a little pointedly. "The funeral?"

"Yes, well, it wasn't what I'd been expecting, that's for certain." He clasped his hands together to still their shaking and although he fought it, the memories caught him up again...

Waking-confused and disoriented. Slowly, he became aware of his heartbeat and allowed it to pull him back to full consciousness. He'd never been in a darkness so complete and, in spite of Christina's remembered reassurance, he began to panic. The panic grew when he tried to push the lid off the crypt and found he couldn't move. Not stone above him, but rough wood embracing him so closely that the rise and fall of his chest brushed against the boards. All around, the smell of earth.

Not a noble's tomb but a common grave.

Screaming until his throat was raw, he twisted and thrashed through the little movement he had but, although the wood creaked once or twice, the weight of earth was absolute.

He stopped then, for he realized that to destroy the coffin and lie covered only in the earth would be infinitely worse. That was when the hunger began. He had no idea how long he lay, paralyzed with terror, frenzied need clawing at his gut, but his sanity hung by a thread when he heard a shovel blade bite into the dirt above him.

"You know," he said, scrubbing a hand across his face, terror still echoing faintly behind the words, "there's a very good reason most vampires come from the nobility; a crypt is a great deal easier to get out of. I'd been buried good and deep and it took Christina three days to find me and dig me free." Sometimes, even four centuries later, when he woke in the evening, he was back there. Alone. In the dark. Facing eternity.

"So your father,"