Blood Price - By Tanya Huff Page 0,4

to pick him up and I'll go see him tomorrow."

Vicki shot a glance across the station where the old man who had followed her off the bus and down the stairs sat talking to a policewoman. Even at a distance he didn't look good. His face was gray and he appeared to be babbling uncontrollably, one scrawny, swollen-knuckled hand clutching at the constable's sleeve. Turning her attention back to her companion, she asked, "What about the subway? You closed it for the night?"

"Yeah." Mike waved toward the end of the platform. "I want Jake to dust that alcove." Intermittent flashes of light indicated the photographer was still at work. "It's not the sort of case where we can get in and out in a couple of minutes." He shoved his hands into his overcoat pockets and scowled. "Although the way the transit commission squawked you'd think we were shutting it down in rush hour to pick up someone for littering."

"What, uh, sort of case is it?" Vicki asked-as close as she could get to asking if he, too, felt it, whatever it turned out to be.

He shrugged. "You tell me; you seem to have gone to a great deal of trouble to land right in the middle of this."

"I was here," she snapped. "Would you have preferred that I ignore it?"

"You had no weapon, no backup, no idea of what was going down." Celluci ticked off an identical litany to the one she'd read herself earlier. "You can't have forgotten everything in eight months."

"And what would you have done?" she spat through clenched teeth.

"I wouldn't have tried to kill myself just to prove I still could."

The silence that fell landed like a load of cement blocks and Vicki gritted her teeth under its weight. Was that what she'd been doing? She looked down at the toes of her boots, then up at Mike. At five ten she didn't look up to many men but Celluci, at six four, practically made her feel petite. She hated feeling petite. "If we're going to rehash my leaving the force again, I'm out of here."

He held up both hands in a gesture of weary surrender. "You're right. As usual. I'm sorry. We're not going to rehash anything."

"You brought it up." She sounded hostile; she didn't care. She should've followed her instincts and left the moment she'd given her statement. She had to have been out of her mind, putting herself in this position, staying in Celluci's reach.

A muscle in his jaw jumped. "I said I was sorry. Go ahead, be superwoman if you want to, but maybe," he added, his voice tight, "I don't want to see you get killed. Maybe, I'm not willing to toss aside eight years of friendship... "

"Friendship?" Vicki felt her eyebrows rise.

Celluci drove his hands into his hair, yanking them through the curls, a gesture he used when he was trying very hard to keep his temper. "Maybe I'm not willing to toss aside four years of friendship and four years of sex because of a stupid disagreement!"

"Just sex? That's it?" Vicki took the easy way out, ignoring the more loaded topic of their disagreement. A shortage of things to fight about had never been one of their problems. "Well, it wasn't just sex to me, Detective!"

They were both yelling now.

"Did I say it was just sex?" He spread his arms wide, his voice booming off the tiled walls of the subway station. "It was great sex, okay? It was terrific sex! It was... What?"

PC West, his fair skin deeply crimson, jumped. "You're blocking the body," he stammered.

Growling an inaudible curse, Celluci jerked back against the wall.

As the gurney rolled by, the contents of the fluorescent orange bag lolling a little from side to side, Vicki curled her hands into fists and contemplated planting one right on Mike Celluci's classically handsome nose. Why did she let him affect her like this? He had a definite knack for poking through carefully constructed shields and stirring up emotions she thought she had under control. Damn him anyway. It didn't help that, this time, he was right. A corner of her mouth twitched up. At least they were talking again...

When the gurney had passed, she straightened her fingers, laid her hand on Celluci's arm and said, "Next time, I'll do it by the book."

It was as close to an apology as she was able to make and he knew it.

"Why start now." He sighed. "Look, about leaving the force; you're not blind,