Blood Debt

whoever they were.
    "There's a safe in the bottom left-hand drawer of my desk. Just take the money and leave me alone." The last word slipped from her control and rose almost to a wail before it faded.
    The doctor's feet continued to push against the Mexican tile on the floor. The window creaked behind her.
    He could feel her life. She wasn't in the next room, but it didn't matter. Her heart beat so loudly he could have heard it from the other building had his own heart not been pounding nearly loud enough to drown it out.
    I am Henry Fitzroy, once Duke of Richmond and of Somerset, Earl of Nottingham and Knight of the Garter. My father was a king and I am become Death. I do not cower before the dead.
    The Hunger rose to meet the fear and gained him ground enough to rise to his feet. Dark eyes narrowed. "Well," he demanded, "are you going to let her get away with it?"
    There could, of course, be only one answer.

    Dr. Mui had dealt out life and death with brutal efficiency, protected from pangs of conscience and wandering regrets by armor built of diamond-hard self-interest. The accusation in the donors' eyes when they realized their escape from poverty and the streets was not the escape they'd dreamed of making had never touched her.
    It had nothing to do with her.
    Until now. When it had everything to do with her.
    The dead howled denial; a howl torn from those who'd first seen a fragile hope betrayed and then had lost the only thing they had remaining to them, their lives, taken without even the excuse of passion.
    The doctor flung her head back against the glass, over and over.
    The glass held, but crimson rosettes appeared with each impact.
    Despair closed her eyes, closed her mouth, her nose, choked off air from her lungs, closed over her like a layer of wet earth. Suffocating.
    Burying.
    She fell forward on her hands and knees, gasping and retching, the damp ends of her hair drawing bloody lines against her face.
    "I. Will not. End. Like. This." Armor so arrogantly forged could not be breached so easily. "I am," she breathed. "I live. And you are dead."
    Triumphant, she lifted her head and saw the shadows move. Saw the last two boys, the one they hadn't used, the one before dumped unceremoniously in the harbor, the others, all the others…
    They looked down at her.
    And they were dead.
    Their mouths were open. They screamed denial. Despair.
    Vengeance.
    Forcing her to recognize the death she'd given them.

    The body hit the roof of the cable van with a wet crunch. One leg flopped limply over the side, swung back and forth, and was still.
    Ten feet away in the parking lot, miraculously unharmed by falling glass, Patricia Chou clutched at her cameraman's arm with a white-knuckled grip. "Did you get it?" she panted, ignoring a throat ripped raw by the force of her initial reaction. Professional or not, she was, she felt, entitled to that one scream of shock and horror. Later, she'd wonder if she'd been trying to drown out the cry of the falling woman, preferring to remember the sound of her own voice rather than the frenzied denial that had grown louder as gravity won, but for now she had more pressing concerns. "Did you get it?"
    Brent nodded, still peering through the eyepiece with the detachment of cameramen from Northern Ireland to Lebanon. "I thought the windows on those new buildings were shatterproof."
    "Shatterproof can be broken."
    "Yeah? Then what did she break it with?" There had been glass and, with the glass, the body— alive as it fell, but inevitably a body for all of that.
    Reporter and cameraman stood in silence for a moment, then, handing Brent her cell phone and suggesting he call the police, Patricia Chou hurried toward the van, making mental lists of what to do and who to call and how to best use the rapidly disappearing light.
    "Now this," she said, as she reached inside for her microphone, ducking under the dangling foot that would provide a suitably ghoulish backdrop, "is a story."

    "We all knew that was going to happen," Celluci said, hands pressed flat against the glass. "We all knew."
    Vicki pulled him away from the window and turned him around.
    "No, we didn't," she said softly.
    "Yes, we did. We knew" the ghosts killed. They've killed before."

    "She jumped through an unbreakable window, Mike. They didn't push her."
    "We knew," he repeated, shaking his head. "We knew."
    Vicki caught his face between her hands and tipped his gaze down to meet hers. It flared silver. "No, we didn't,"