Free 2 Blood Trail by Tanya Huff

“Multitalented though I may be, I’d rather not try to read a map while driving on strange roads. You’ll have to do it.”
    Fingers tight around the folded paper, Vicki pushed it back at him. “I don’t know where we’re going.”
    “We’re on Airport Road about to turn onto Oxford Street. Tell me how long we stay on Oxford before we hit Clarke Side Road.”
    The streetlights provided barely enough illumination to define the windshield. If she strained, Vicki could see the outline of the map. She certainly couldn’t find two little lines on it.
    “There’s a map light under the sun visor,” Henry offered.
    The map light would be next to useless.
    “I can’t find it.”
    “You haven’t even looked. . . .”
    “I didn’t say I wouldn’t, I said I couldn’t.” She’d realized from the moment she’d agreed to leave the safe, known parameters of Toronto that she’d have to tell him the truth about her eyes and couldn’t understand how she’d gotten herself backed into that kind of a corner. Tension brought her shoulders up and tied her stomach in knots. Medical explanation or not, it always sounded like an excuse to her, like she was asking for help or understanding. And he’d think of her differently once the “disabled” label had been applied, everyone did. “I have no night sight, little peripheral vision, and am becoming more myopic every time I talk to the damn doctor.” Her tone dared him to make something of it.
    Henry merely asked, “What’s wrong?”
    “It’s a degenerative eye disease, retinitis pigmentosa. . . .”
    “RP,” he interrupted. So that was her secret. “I know of it.” He kept his feelings from his voice, kept it matter-of-fact. “It doesn’t seem to have progressed very far.”
    Great, just what I need, another expert. Celluci wasn’t enough? “You weren’t listening,” she snarled, twisting the map into an unreadable mess. “I have no night sight. It drove me off the force. I am piss useless after dark. You might as well just turn the car around right now if I have to solve this case at night.” Although she hid it behind the anger, she was half afraid he’d do just that. And half afraid he’d pat her on the head and say everything was going to be all right—because it wasn’t, and never would be again—and she’d try to rip his face off in a moving car and kill them both.
    Henry shrugged. He had no intention of playing into what he perceived as self pity. “I turn into a smoldering pile of carbon compounds in direct sunlight; sounds like you’ve got a better deal.”
    “You don’t understand.”
    “I haven’t seen the sun in four hundred and fifty years. I think I do.”
    Vicki shoved her glasses up her nose and turned to glare out the window at a view she couldn’t see, unsure of how to react with no outlet for her anger. After a moment she said, “All right, so you understand. So I have a comparatively mild case. So I can still function. I haven’t gone blind. I haven’t gone deaf. I haven’t gone insane. It still sucks.”
    “Granted.” He read disappointment at his response and wondered if she realized that she expected a certain amount of effusive sympathy from the people she told. Rejecting that sympathy made her feel strong, compensating for what she perceived as her weakness. He suspected that the disease was the first time she hadn’t been able to make everything come out all right through the sheer determination that it would be. “Have you ever thought about taking on a partner? Someone to do the night work?”
    Vicki snorted, anger giving way to amusement. “You mean you helping me out as a regular sort of a job? You write romance novels, Henry; you have no experience in this type of thing.”
    He drew himself up behind the wheel. He was Vampire. King of the Night. The romance novels were just the way he paid the rent. “I wouldn’t say. . . .”
    “And besides,” she interrupted, “I’m barely making enough to keep