Blood Debt

translucent image disappeared.

    "A ghost?" Tony propped one leg on the wide arm of the green leather couch and shook his head. "You're kidding, right?"
    "Wrong."
    "Cool. I wonder what he wants. They always want something," he added in answer to the question implicit in Henry's lifted red-gold brow. "Everyone knows that."
    "Do they?"
    "Come on, Henry. Don't tell me in four-hundred-and-ninety-five odd years you've never seen a ghost?"
    One hand flat against the cool glass of the window, the other hooked in the pocket of his jeans, Henry Fitzroy, bastard son of Henry VIII, once Duke of Richmond and Somerset, remembered a night in the late 1800s when he'd watched the specter of a terrified young queen run screaming down the hall to beg her king once more for a mercy she'd never receive. Over two hundred years before, Katherine Howard had attended his wedding to her cousin Mary. He hadn't gone to hers—her marriage to his father had occurred four years after his supposed death. Made a queen in July, 1540, she'd been beheaded in February, 1542, nineteen months later.
    She'd been young and foolish and very likely guilty of the adultery she'd been charged with, but she hadn't deserved to have her spirit trapped, replaying over and over the soul-destroying moment when she'd realized she was going to die.
    "Henry?"
    "Whatever he wants," Henry said without turning, "I doubt that I'll be able to give it to him. I can't change the past."
    Tony shivered. The centuries had gathered about the other man in a nearly visible cloud, wrapping him in a shroud of time and memory.
    "Henry, you're freaking me out."
    "Am I? Sorry." Shaking off his melancholy, the ex-prince turned and managed a wry smile. "You seem somewhat nonchalant about being haunted."
    Glad to have him back, Tony shrugged, a trace of the street kid he'd been lingering in the jerky movement. "He's haunting you, not me.
    And besides, between living with you for the last two years and dealing with the weirdos at the store, I've learned to take the unexpected in stride."
    "Have you?" Not at all pleased with being compared to the weirdos at the video store where Tony worked, Henry's smile broadened, showing teeth. When he heard the younger man's heartbeat quicken, he crossed the room and wrapped an ivory hand around a slender shoulder. "So I've lost the ability to surprise you?"
    "I didn't say that." Tony's breathing grew ragged as a cool thumb traced the line of his jaw.
    "Perhaps not exactly that."
    "Uh, Henry…"
    "What?"
    He shook his head. It was enough to know Henry would stop if he wanted him to. More than enough, considering he didn't want him to.
    "Never mind. Not important."
    A short while later, teeth met through a fold of skin, the sharp points pierced a vein and, for a time, the dead were washed away with the blood of the living.

    The warm evening air lapping against her face, Corporal Phyllis Roberts cruised along Commissioner Street humming the latest Celine Dion hit and tapping her fingers against the top of the steering wheel.
    Although the new Ports Canada Police cars had air-conditioning, she never used it as she disliked the enclosed, spaceship feeling of driving with the windows rolled up.
    Three hours into her shift, she was in a good mood. So far, nothing had gone wrong.
    Three hours and fifteen minutes into her shift, Corporal Roberts stopped humming.
    Turning into Vanterm, as of this moment her least favorite of the harbor's twenty-seven cargo and cruise ship terminals, Corporal Roberts squinted to make out the tiny figures of three men dwarfed by the bulk of a Singapore-registered container ship. The pole lights that turned the long wooden pier into a patchwork of stacked containers and hard-edged shadows washed away features so thoroughly she was almost on top of them before she recognized one of the men.
    Leaving her cap in the car, she picked up her long, rubber-handled flashlight, touched her nightstick, more out of habit than any thought she might have to use it, and walked toward them. "You night-loading, Ted?"
    Ted Polich, the shortest of the three longshoremen, jerked a balding head upward at the gantry crane that loomed over the dock like a mechanical bird of prey. "Controls have stiffened up and the son of a bitch is jerking left. We're trying to get it fixed tonight, so it doesn't slow loading tomorrow."
    "God forbid," the corporal muttered. A huge increase in Pacific Rim trade had the port scrambling to keep up. "Where is it?"
    "Up by