Blood Pact by TANYA HUFF

Author:TANYA HUFF
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 2012-01-19T07:07:54+00:00

Ten

Vicki woke first and lay staring blindly at the ceiling, uncertain where she was. The room felt unfamiliar, the dimensions wrong, the patterns of shadow that made up the world without her glasses not patterns she , recognized. It wasn’t her bedroom, nor, in spite of the man still asleep beside her, was it Celluci’s.

Then she remembered.

Just past dawn, the two of them had lain down on her mother’s bed. Her dead mother’s bed. Two of them-where there should’ve been three.

All three of us in my dead mother’s bed? The edge on the sarcasm very nearly drew blood. Get a grip, Nelson.

She slid out from under Celluci’s arm without waking him and groped on the bedside table for her glasses, the daylight seeping around the edges of the blinds providing barely enough illumination for her to function. Her nose almost touching the surface of the clock radio, she scowled at the glowing red numbers. Ten minutes after nine. Two hours’ sleep. Add that to the time Henry had granted her and she’d certainly functioned on less.

Pulling her robe closer around her, she stood. She couldn’t go back to sleep now anyway. She couldn’t face the dreams-Henry burning and screaming her name while he burned, her mother’s rotting body a living barrier between them. If she wanted to save Henry, she had to go past her mother. And she couldn’t. Feelings of fear and failure combined, lingered.

My subconscious is anything but subtle.

Bare feet moving soundlessly over the soft nap of the carpet-it was still nearly new; Vicki could remember how pleased her mother had been to have replaced a worn area rug with thick wall-to-wall plush-she made her way to the walk-in closet where Henry had been spending his days. After a moment’s groping to find the switch, she flicked on the closet light and closed the door silently behind her.

It was, as Henry had said, just barely large enough for a not-so-very-tall man. Or a not-so-very-tall vampire. A pad of bright blue compressed foam, the sort commonly used for camping, lay along one wall under the rack of woman’s clothes. On it, a neatly folded length of heavy blackout curtain rested beside a leather overnight bag. Another piece of curtain had been tacked to one side of the door which itself had been fitted out with a heavy steel bolt.

Henry must’ve put it up. Vicki touched the metal slide and shook her head. She hadn’t heard hammering but, given Henry’s strength, hammering might not have been necessary. We ‘d better remember to take it down or it ‘II confuse the hell out of the next tenant.

The next tenant. It was the first time she’d considered the apartment as anything but her mother’s. Only reasonable, I suppose. She let her head fall back against the wall and closed her eyes. My mother’s dead.

The scent of her mother’s cologne, of her mother, permeated the small enclosure, and with her eyes shut it almost seemed that her mother was still there. Another time, the illusion might have been comforting-or infuriating.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.