Blood Memories

Chapter 5

Maggie and I stepped out of a taxi on Madison.

Downtown Seattle struck me as a cultural smorgasbord. Portland isn't exactly conservative, but the Seattle waterfront was like nothing I'd ever seen. The two of us fit in so well I felt at home immediately-not because we looked like everyone else, but because no one looked quite the same.

During the day, these shining glass skyscrapers housed brain-dead executives who wore twelve-hundred-dollar suits, but at night the doorways were crowded with starving bums hoping some heat would leak through the cracks. On every street corner stood some guy playing a guitar or trumpet, his case left open on the concrete sidewalk for donations. Prostitutes, drug dealers, and cross-dressers lived and breathed right in the midst of yuppie corporate sharks who earned four hundred thousand a year and wouldn't throw a quarter to a bag lady.

In a city like this, no one would even blink at a dead body. I'd never want to leave.

"Has it always been like this?"

"No." Maggie smiled. "Of course not. Places grow and change, like people. It started out as a logging town."

"Why did you come here?"

"New territory. None of us ever lived this far north. I wanted to be alone."

That made sense. This must have been a wonderful place to run away to. "What year?"

"What year?" Her dark eyebrows knitted. "In 1932, I think. Middle of the Depression."

"Where were you during the Civil War?" I asked, finding the tale of her past intriguing-as Edward's and mine had been so intertwined.

"New Hampshire," she answered. "You?"

"Manhattan."

None of this century's wars had affected us much, but in 1861 the Civil War hit America so hard even we couldn't help feeling its backlash.

I suddenly realized we'd walked quite a ways, and the buildings were looking dingy. "Hey, where are we going?"

"My favorite bar," she said. "Just watch me for a little while. I usually pose as a hooker from a wealthy but sordid past."

"Is that what you tell them?"

"Not really. I just drop hints. My clothes and accent do the rest."

"Doesn't anyone get suspicious when all of your customers turn up on the back of a milk carton?"

"Don't be dense. Of course they don't all turn up missing. I have to keep up appearances."

For a moment that confused me and then I stopped walking. "You mean you…?"

"I what?"

"You actually have sex with some of them?"

Her low laughter echoed down a dark alley. "For God's sake, Leisha. What did you think? If no one recommended me and all the men who employed me turned up dead, I wouldn't be in business very long, now would I?"

She thought me naive, and I found it humiliating. "No, that makes sense. I just never touch them unless I'm feeding."

"Really? I told you that you've been too wrapped up in William. I once lived with a professional baseball player for eight months."

Maybe I was naive, because that did stun me. "You lived with him? Did he know what you are?"

"Yes, but it didn't matter. He was in love with me, and he made me feel alive."

"Where is he now?"

"Dead. Things went sour after a while, and I had to kill him."

She related the last statement with all the passion of someone discussing the rising price of tomatoes. That was one basic difference between many of my kind. We all viewed death differently. Julian liked killing, Maggie didn't give it much thought, and I hated it.

"Here we are."

She stopped in front of a small, barely noticeable wooden door. The building was sandwiched between a run-down Chinese restaurant called Yan's and an H amp;R Block tax office. A sign above the blacked-out window read "Blue Jack's."

"Why here?" I asked. "It looks like a dive."

"You'll see."

For the first moment after she opened the door, all I could see was blue smoke and black leather. It hardly seemed like a place where Maggie would hang out. I had some expensive cocktail lounge in mind, like the Red Lion, or at least someplace popular like Neumo's or even Chop Suey, where she would look sad and down on her luck, someplace where she could make people feel superior and let them believe they were taking advantage of her.

The smoke cleared slightly, and we walked in. A guy with spiked hair and a pewter cross in his ear smiled at me. I didn't smile back.

"Maggie, I don't like this."

"You will."

The bar itself seemed bigger on the inside than on the outside. Large neon Budweiser signs glowed off the walls, and overworked waitresses in short skirts hurried from table to table as they laughed with one customer and then listened to the next one complain.

"Hey, Maggie! Where you been?" a deep voice called.

A huge man in a black T-shirt with a tattoo of a palm tree on his arm put down his pool cue and started walking toward us.

"Ben." She smiled. Her white teeth glittered through the blue smoke haze and a thick mass of wavy hair fell forward over one eye. "I've missed you."

"Bullshit. You never missed anyone in your…" He stopped at the sight of me. "Who's your friend?"

"Just a friend."

He shrugged and pointed to the pool table. "Hey, I got a game going. Come watch for a while?"

The idea of watching two unwashed bikers play pool didn't exactly strike me as appealing. What were we doing in this place?

Maggie pulled me along while following him, but she whispered, "Not that one. He's here too often."

Something in her statement made sense to me. This must be a transient place, a lot of people coming and going. And for all his rough manners, I did notice that Ben revered Maggie. He didn't treat her like a prostitute. He actually pulled a chair out for her, then went to the bar and bought us each a glass of cheap red wine before resuming his pool game.

"He's nice," I whispered.

She gave me an inquisitive look and then motioned slightly toward Ben's opponent. "I don't know that one. When they take a break, find out where he's from."

"Okay."

I took a long look at him. He was tall-no visible tattoos-wearing a black T-shirt like Ben's. His hair was long and kind of stringy, and his nose looked as if it had been broken about six times since childhood. He glanced over at me, and I smiled.

A lot of people in the place seemed to notice us. My usual game was to stay unnoticed until I chose a mark. This whole routine was uncomfortable and alien. It felt weird to have so many people looking at me.

"Does your bartender have a degree?" I asked Maggie while watching him draw beer as fast as his hands could move.

"Doctorate," she said, nodding. "Classical mythology."

Ben won the pool game. His opponent followed him to our table, and they both sat down. There weren't really any formal introductions. Ben laughed a lot and always kept the conversation going. His face glowed whenever he looked at Maggie. Somewhere, somebody mentioned that his friend's name was Gunner-I didn't ask what it meant.

Soon, Maggie and Ben drifted off toward the bar. The night seemed to be moving along quickly.

"You been in Seattle long?" Gunner asked.

So far I hadn't said much of anything, but instinct told me to drop back into my usual frightened, hesitant act. "No, just a few days. I didn't have anywhere else to… Maggie's been helping me out."

He glanced over at her dress. "Has she shown you around much?"

"No, this is the first time we've gone out."

"Really?"

That got his attention. I wondered what he was thinking. This actually wasn't all that different from my own routine, just a little more glitz and a little more dirt.

"I pulled in yesterday," he went on. "Came up from California. Got a buddy in Canada I haven't seen for a while."

"Passing through?"

"Yeah, don't know anyone in town."

"You just met Ben?"

"Uh-huh."

I made a point of not looking at him and kept running my finger around the top of my glass as if I was nervous. He reached out and stopped my hand.

"You don't like it very much in here, do you?" he whispered.

"No."

"I've got a room a few blocks away. You want to just go there and talk?"

"I don't know… What about Maggie?"

"She looks pretty busy."

I didn't say anything. He stood up and held out his hand. "Let's just get out of here."

My own hands are so little that when I reached up he suddenly seemed afraid to grasp one. "Okay," I said, "but I've got to tell Maggie where I'll be. What motel are you in?"

"Green Clover Inn, room eight."

"Wait here."

Maggie was sitting at the bar, laughing with Ben. The buzz in the place drowned out my words as I leaned over to her ear.

"Just a drifter. Green Clover Inn. Room eight. Ten minutes."

She nodded very slightly without breaking her smile and turned back to Ben.

Gunner came up behind me and put his hand on my back. He talked to Ben for a few seconds, and then steered me toward the door. "You'll feel better once we're outside," he said. "It's pretty smoky in here."

That was kind of funny since he was holding a lit Marlboro between his teeth.

The streets were busy outside. I stopped to put a few dollars in an open guitar case but didn't talk much to Gunner-what a stupid name. At that point I didn't want to talk.

"Is your friend back there trying to get you into her line of work?" he asked suddenly.

"I'm already in her line of work."

"You don't act like it."

"How should I act?"

That made him uncomfortable, and he shut up for a few seconds, then spat out, "How much?"

How much? Oh, great. Maggie didn't tell me anything about that. I had no idea what to say. "Don't worry about it."

He glanced at me sideways. Yeah, that was the ticket, just convince him he was such a stud I'd get him off for free. Maybe he'd believe it. I hoped so. Maggie had a lot of questions to answer later.

"This is it."

He stopped in front of a run-down motel sans any porch lights. Pulling a key from his pocket, he opened the door to room 8 and motioned me in.

"You hungry?" he asked. "We could order a pizza or something."

I wondered if most guys offered to buy pizza for hookers, but that seemed unlikely. It bothered me that he was being so nice.

"No, I'm okay. But go ahead if you want one."

He sat down on the bed. There were dead cockroaches in the air vent over his head, and the bedspread sported two gaping cigarette burns.

"I don't think I ever caught your name," he said.

"Eleisha."

"Hey, listen…"

A knock sounded on the door. His eyebrows wrinkled. "Someone's probably got the wrong room." He opened the door and Maggie walked in.

"Just thought I'd check on you." She smiled with an odd light in her dark eyes.

"What about Ben?" Gunner asked.

"I told him I wanted to show Eleisha a few things. He understood."

Every time I looked at her it took me by surprise. It was hard to believe anything so perfect could be walking around. She obviously had the same effect on Gunner, but he'd been caught off guard by her sudden appearance. Before he could move, she ran her hands up his chest. I stood staring in rapt interest. The whole scene took on the same unreal quality as Maggie's bedroom.

His expression went blank. Then something close to pain, but not quite, flickered through his eyes. Staring down into her beautiful face, he seemed to forget my existence. Maybe he even forgot his own. With one hand he grasped the back of her thick mane and pulled her mouth up to his. I couldn't take my eyes off them. She'd achieved absolute control in a matter of seconds.

But she didn't waste any time.

I'd killed hundreds of people since the nineteenth century, but until that night, I'd never actually watched one of my own kind feed. With the exception of Edward, I'd never seen one of them kill. He operated hard and fast, like a machine. I used to go to horror movies and grimace every time some supposed vampire's face distorted into a grotesque demonic mask and his fangs grew to epic proportions. It isn't like that. Our fangs don't grow. Our eyes don't turn red. We don't hiss or spit or turn into slaughter-crazed animals.

Maggie didn't do any of those things. She just moved her mouth down to his neck, pinned him back against the wall, and bit down until she punctured his jugular. He didn't scream. He didn't struggle- much. I'm not even sure he knew what was happening to him. Quiet and simple.

I just stood there, watching.

She let his body slide to the floor and knelt there, drinking for a while. Then she looked up at me. "Hurry up. His heart's still beating."

It's not just blood that we take in. It's life force. Both Maggie and I would feed on energy through his blood. Without letting myself think, I walked over and crouched down, putting my mouth on his neck. Of course none of us could drink all the blood in a grown man's body. All those stories about us draining bodies are lies. We don't leave neat little snake-eye puncture wounds either. No one could feed like that. Most victims die from blood loss, but more than half of it ends up on the floor. This guy's throat was a mess. Even if we didn't drink from him, he'd bleed to death in a matter of minutes.

I sank my teeth in and drew down… and then as always, while feeding, images of his life passed through my mind. This was a side effect of absorbing his life force. I'd grown accustomed to it many, many years ago.

This time, I saw a small, decaying house on a run-down street, an unshaven man-Gunner's father-drinking from a bottle. I saw a thin woman with a sad face, and then flashing visions of different motorcycles… a pretty girl with long black hair, laughing in one moment and slapping him in the next. I saw a long string of bars and pool tables…

Maggie must have taken a lot because I held his head with one hand and drew fluid out of his throat until his heart stopped beating. It's a cold experience to feel someone's heart just stop like that.

"He's dead," I said woodenly, pulling back.

"Good," she said from the bathroom, cleaning up. "Get his wallet, wash up, and let's go."

"What about the body?"

"Leave it. Nobody cares. Without his ID, he's just another John Doe."

"He must have given his name to the clerk."

"I doubt it. Cash-and-carry business around here."

Hiding or disguising or dumping bodies was a natural part of hunting for me. Leaving him made me nervous, but Maggie was already outside. I washed up and followed.

I didn't feel so reckless anymore. We walked more than a mile before she said, "You did good back there. Better than I'd expected."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean you pegged that guy in a hurry. I was watching you from the bar and you had him in less than ten minutes. Surprised me."

Her praise had an odd, soothing effect. I hunted to survive, so that I could go on living and taking care of William. No one had ever judged my technique and said "Good job" like that before. The opinions of others didn't really matter much to me, but for some reason I liked hearing how pleased she was.

"Can we go to a higher-class place next time?"

"Oooooooh." She laughed. "Getting snooty already? People in the higher-class places get missed. Better get used to smoke and tattoos."

"Fabulous."

Warmth glowed from her pale face in a way that made me feel welcome. She'd been alone too long. It's funny how she thought herself so worldly and couldn't recognize the scars of loneliness.

She broke into a run down an alley-still wearing those heels. I watched her hair blow back like a cloud and then followed her into the darkness. I felt right somehow. Happy.

Maybe I'd been lonely, too.