4 Blood Pact Read Free

for a moment, nodded, and left the apartment, gently pulling the door closed behind him.
    Vicki felt her ears grow hot. She jerked around as a cross between a sneeze and a small explosion sounded from Celluci’s direction. “What are you laughing at?”
    He shook his head, arms waving as he searched for the words.
    “Never mind.” She reached up and pushed the curl of dark brown hair back off his face, her own mouth twisting up in a rueful grin. “I guess it was pretty funny at that. Although I’m going to spend the rest of the day with this vaguely unfinished feeling.”
    Celluci nodded, the thick curl dropping back down into his eyes. “Like not remembering if you’ve eaten the last bite of doughnut.”
    “Or drunk the last swallow of coffee.”
    They shared a smile and Vicki collapsed into the black leather recliner that dominated the small living room. “Okay, what do you need to know about the late Mr. Balland?”
     
    Vicki moved away from the warm cliff of Celluci’s back and wondered why she couldn’t sleep. Maybe she should have told him to go home, but it’d seemed a little pointless making him drive all the way out to his house in Downsview when he was expected back downtown at headquarters in barely six hours. Or less. Maybe. She couldn’t see the clock unless she sat up, turned on the light, and found her glasses, but it had to be nearly dawn.
    Dawn.
    In the center of the city, eighteen short blocks away from her apartment in Chinatown, Henry Fitzroy lay in his sealed room and waited for the day; waited for the rising sun to switch off his life; trusted that the setting sun would switch it on again.
    Vicki had spent the day with Henry once, held captive by the threat of sunlight outside the bedroom door. The absence of life had been so complete it had been a little like spending the day with a corpse. Only worse. Because he wasn’t. It wasn’t an experience she wanted to repeat.
    She’d run from him that night, the moment the darkness had granted her safe passage. To this day she wasn’t sure if she’d run from his nature or from the trust that had allowed him to be so helpless before her.
    She hadn’t stayed away for long.
    In spite of late nights, or occasionally no nights at all, Henry Fitzroy had become a necessary part of her life. Although the physical attraction still tied her stomach in knots and caught the breath in her throat—even after a year of exposure—what bothered her, almost frightened her, was how much he had invaded the rest of her life.
    Henry Fitzroy, vampire, bastard son of Henry VIII, was Mystery. If she spent a lifetime trying, she could never know all he was. And, God help her, she couldn’t resist a mystery.
    Now Celluci—she rolled onto her side and layered herself around the curve of his body—Celluci was the yin to her yang. She frowned. Or possibly the other way around. He was a shared joke, shared interests, a shared past. He fit into her life like a puzzle piece, interlocking and completing the picture. And now she thought of it, that frightened her, too.
    She was complete without him.
    Wasn’t she?
    Lord, oh Lord, oh Lord. When did my life start resembling country and western music?
    Celluci stirred under the force of her sigh and half roused. “Almost forgot,” he murmured. “Your mother called.”
     
    The late morning sun had nearly cleared Vicki’s bay window when she sat down at the kitchen table and reached for the phone. Returning her mother’s call while Celluci was dressing would make it easier to deal with the questions she knew she was going to have to answer. Questions that would no doubt start with, Why was Michael Celluci in your apartment when you weren’t? and escalate from there to the perpetual favorite, When will you be coming to visit?
    She sighed, fortified herself with a mouthful of coffee, and wrapped her fingers around the receiver. Before she could lift it out of the cradle, the phone rang. She managed, just barely, to keep