Blood Lines by Tanya Huff Read Free Book Online Page B

looked a little dubious. "I guess you must've been working too hard, what with the cops keeping you away from your stuff until this afternoon." He went back behind his desk, still watching her with a wary eye. "So, they gonna take the mummy away?"
    'Mummy?"
    'Yeah. They say Reid Ellis bumped into a mummy up there in the dark and it scared him to death."
    'Oh, that mummy…"It was amazing how rumors got started. She smiled and shook her head. With the police in and out of the workroom there was no real point in the department keeping quiet to save face. They'd just have to convince the scientific community that they'd meant to buy an empty sarcophagus. "There never was a mummy, Andrew. Just an empty coffin. Which I suppose is frightening enough in the middle of the night."
    Andrew looked a little disappointed. "No mummy?"
    'No."
    He sighed. "Well, that certainly makes the story less interesting."
    'Sorry." Dr. Shane paused with one hand on the outside door and fixed the security guard with a look she kept just on the edge of intimidating. "I'd appreciate you spreading the real story around."
    He sighed again. "Sure thing, Dr. Shane. There never was a mummy…"
    His fingers had torn through the bottom sheet and his heartbeat echoed off the walls of the bedroom. He'd woken again to the memory of a brilliant white-gold sun centered in an azure sky.
    'I don't want to die!"
    But then, why the sun?
    One night he could force himself to ignore; wash it away in the hunt, in blood. Two nights made it real.
    He fought himself free of the sheet and sat up on the edge of the bed, hands turned up on his thighs. His palms were moist. He stared at them for a moment, then frantically scrubbed them dry, trying to remember if in over four hundred and fifty years he'd ever sweated.
    The stink of his fear filled the room. He had to get away from it.
    Naked, he padded out into the condo and over to the plate glass window that looked down on Toronto. Pressing palms and forehead against the cool glass, he forced himself to take long, slow breaths until he calmed. He traced the flow of traffic down Jarvis Street; marked the blaze of glory a few streets over that was Yonge; flicked his gaze over the bands of gold in nearby office towers marking where conscientious employees worked late; knew that as dusk deepened to full dark, the other, still human, children of the night would emerge. This was his city.
    Then he found himself wondering how it would look with dawn reflected rose and yellow in the glass towers, the interlacing ribbons of asphalt pearly gray instead of black, the fall colors of the trees like gems scattered across the city under the arcing dome of a brilliant blue sky… and wondering how long he would last, how much he would see, before the golden circle or the sun ignited his flesh and he died for the second and very final time. "Jesu, Lord of Hosts, protect me." He jerked himself back off the glass and sketched a sign of the cross with trembling fingers.
    'I don't want to die." But he couldn't get that image of the sun out of his head. He reached for the phone. "Nelson."
    'Vicki, I…"He what? He was having hallucinations? He was losing his mind? "Henry? Are you all right?"
    I need to talk to you . But he suddenly couldn't get the words out.
    Apparently, she heard them anyway. "I'm on my way over." Her tone left no room for argument. "You're at home?"
    'Yes."
    'Then stay put. I'll grab a taxi. I'll be right there. Whatever it is, we can work it out."
    Her certainty leeched some of the tension out of his white-knuckled grip on the phone and his mouth twisted up into a parody of a smile. "No hurry," he told her, attempting to regain some control, "we've got until dawn."
    Although guilt was a part of the reason that Dr. Rax remained at his desk plugging away at the despised paperwork long after Dr. Shane had gone home-he had let the pile achieve mammoth proportions-it was more a vague sense of something left unfinished that kept him in