Blood Price - By Tanya Huff Page 0,97

toasted tomato sandwich, and another iron supplement, she called Henry.

"... so the moment Coreen gets me to some kind of an address, I'll call and let you know. From the sound of it, he's not going to be that difficult to take care of if there's no demon around. I'll have Coreen take me back to York and I'll wait for you there."

With her finger on the disconnect, she sat listening to the dial tone, staring off into the distance, trying to make up her mind. Finally she decided. "Well, it can't hurt." Whether he believed her or not, it was still information he should have.

"Mike Celluci, please. Yes, I'll hold."

He wasn't in the building and the young man on the other end of the phone was significantly unhelpful.

"If you could let him know that Vicki Nelson called."

"Yes ma'am. Is that all?" The young man obviously had never heard of her and he wasn't impressed.

Vicki's tone changed. She hadn't reached her rank at her age without acquiring the ability to handle snot-nosed young men. The words came out parade ground clipped. "Tell him he should check out a student at York University, name of Norman Birdwell. I'll tell him more when I know more."

"Yes, sir! I mean, ma'am."

She grinned a little sadly as she hung up. "Okay, so I'm not a cop anymore," she told an old photo of herself in uniform that hung over the desk. "That's no reason to throw the baby out with the bath water. Maybe it's time to forge a whole new relationship with the police department."

As she had the time, and nothing much else to do with it, Vicki took transit up to York. A childhood spent pinching pennies kept her out of taxis as much as possible and although she bitched and complained about the TTC along with most everyone else in Toronto, she had to admit that if you weren't in a screaming rush or too particular about who you spent time crammed up against, it got you where you needed to go more or less when you needed to get there.

During the long ride up to the university, she pulled everything she knew into one long, point-form report. By the time she'd reached her final transfer, she'd also reached a final question. When they had Norman Birdwell, what did they do with him?

So we take the grimoire away and get rid of the immediate threat. She stared out the window at a gray stretch of single-story industrial buildings. What then? The most he can be charged with is possession of stolen property and keeping a prohibited weapon. A slap on the wrist and a few hours of community service work-if they don't throw the whole thing out of court on a technicality-and he'll be back calling up demons again. He had, after all, managed to kill seven people before even getting his hands on the grimoire. There had to be an answer beyond the only permanent-and completely out of the question-solution she could think of. Maybe if he tells the court where he got the computer and the jacket and the various and sundry, he'll be ruled insane.

Find him.

Get the grimoire.

Let the police deal with the rest.

She grinned at her translucent reflection. Let the police deal with it-it had a certain attraction from where she now sat.

Coreen was waiting outside the main doors of Burton Auditorium, red hair a blazing beacon in yet another drizzly, overcast spring afternoon. "I finished the exam faster than I thought I would," she called as Vicki approached. "Good thing you're early; I would have been bored spitless out here much longer. My car's parked in the back." As Vicki fell into step beside her, she pushed a curl back off her face with a clash of day-glo plastic bangles and sighed. "I'm never sure whether finishing in the minimum time is a good thing or not. Like it means you either knew everything cold, or you didn't know squat and you just thought you knew everything cold."

She didn't appear to need a response, so Vicki kept silent, thinking, I was never that young.

"Personally, I think I aced it. Ian always said, there was no point in thinking you'd failed when it was too late to do anything about it." She sobered suddenly, remembering Ian, and said nothing more until they were in the car and out on Shoreham Drive.

"Norman's really doing it, isn't he?"

Vicki glanced over at the younger woman whose knuckles were white on