Blood Memories

Chapter 7

Five weeks later I sat by the fire in Maggie's living room watching her play chess with William. He often forgot the rules, and she patiently but firmly reminded him that his bishop could move only diagonally on the same color.

"No, William," she said. "That's your rook. It moves ahead or backward or to the side."

The stimulation of someone new had made William more interested in his surroundings. Maggie was good for him. She had changed a great deal since our arrival as well. Every time I brought up the subject of leaving, she'd say something like, "Don't worry about it yet."

I thought about the hate-filled look on her face the night after we arrived, when she had told me to keep William out of her sight. Maybe she feared being forced to remember. William was such a stark image of the link between our own dead era and the present. We were all tied to the same dark secret: Maggie, Philip, Julian, myself, and Edward. William was the keystone, a blinding, undeniable example of what could be.

But Maggie surprised herself by discovering what I had always known. There was joy in William. He wasn't an abomination. He was our history. It was okay to look him in the face and smile… and remember.

"Checkmate. I win." She laughed.

"Eleisha lets me win."

"Eleisha lets you cheat, and that's why you win."

He looked to me for support, his long, wispy hair hanging at odd angles around a narrow, once-handsome face. I did let him cheat. For some reason, Maggie found it very important that he play everything by the rules. I had little concern for most rules.

"Cheating helps him. It makes him think," I said in my own defense.

"Yes, but he'll never learn anything that way. You've spoiled him for anyone's company but yours."

Oh, that was rich, as if people were beating the door down to spend time with William. Maggie must have realized how stupid her last statement sounded because she dropped it.

"One more game?" she asked him.

"I'm tired. I'll stoke up the fire."

He didn't know how to stoke or build a fire, but it was something he liked to talk about. A few minutes later he was sleeping in his chair.

"We're going to have to call Julian pretty soon," I said. "We've been here six weeks. He'll need to know what's going on."

"He already does."

"What?"

"I called Philip last week and told him what happened. He said he'd take care of it. Julian won't care who you're staying with as long as he doesn't have to see William."

I sat stunned for a moment, and then said, "You should have told me."

"Why?"

"Because you don't know Julian like I do."

"Oh, spare me the martyr syndrome. He wants you out of sight and out of mind. That's all."

"No, I didn't mean that. You just shouldn't… You're putting yourself at risk for us. What if you get hurt?"

The hard lines of her face softened. "Don't worry. I can take care of myself."

Guilt was a new emotion for me. I hated it.

"Maggie, there's something else. Something I didn't tell you."

"What?"

"Do you remember me telling you about that cop who felt Edward die? The one who fell on the lawn?"

"I told you that's impossible."

"No, he felt it. I know because… I felt him."

Her expression sharpened again. "What do you mean, you felt him?"

"He was inside my head. I didn't want to tell you earlier because you might make us leave. He tracked me into a bar in Portland. That's why I sounded so scared the night we came here. I was just sitting at a table in a bar, and pictures from his thoughts flashed into my head."

"What did you see?" Her voice was tight.

"Half-decomposed bodies in Edward's cellar, the photograph of me over his mantel, and the oil painting of me from his storage room. The police have all those things. He thought in scattered waves about his partner, Dominick, too. They both were chasing me."

"How close was he before you felt him?"

"Inside the room."

She sat back in her chair, thinking, staring at William's sleeping form. She didn't seem angry or anxious. Now that we were openly discussing this, I had a lot of questions. Except for Edward, I'd never had a chance to talk like this before-and he didn't know much more than I did.

"Maggie, why do we see images when we're feeding… I mean of our victim's thoughts and life?"

Her head jerked at the word "thoughts."

"I don't know," she answered.

"And why are there so few of us? I used to read accounts of mortals dealing with our kind all over Europe. Now there are six-five, with Edward gone." I paused, remembering a painful talk I'd had with Edward a hundred years ago. "What happened to the rest? Edward told me… he thought Julian killed some of us, but he didn't know why."

"Stop it, Leisha." She closed her eyes.

"Don't you ever wonder why we all came from the same generation? That we were all made within thirty years of each other?"

"It doesn't matter!"

"How can you say that?" I was angry. It seemed so foolish to fear discussing our own state of existence. "You think you're some woman of the world and I'm this ignorant little girl who doesn't know anything beyond caring for an old man. But you follow Julian's and Philip's laws. You don't ask any questions, and you've been rotting in this house by yourself because they said you should!"

My outburst disturbed her, but I realized that even if she did know more, she wasn't going to tell me. Opening her eyes again, she stared at me-as if she was frightened.

I got up and moved to her. "You're glad we're here, aren't you? Otherwise you never would have called Philip."

"What do you want me to say?" Her low, breathy voice shook slightly. "That I didn't expect things to turn out like this? Okay, I didn't. That I'm scared you might take William and leave? Okay, I am. Is that what you want?"

I got down on my knees and laid my head in her lap. "We're not going anywhere if you want us to stay. But those cops are still looking for me."

"I don't care," she said. "Could that man who's tracking you be one of us?"

"No, I'd have picked that up. He's confused."

"I don't think he'll find you here, then. Not if he has to be in the same room."

She reached out and began stroking my hair. I stopped talking and enjoyed her attention. Her emotions toward me were difficult to read, but I seemed to fit in a niche somewhere between sister and daughter. William had become father or grandfather. We were forming a family. I thought it natural. She thought it strange.

"Let's get dressed and go hunting," I said suddenly. "We need to get out for a while."

"Should we wake William and feed him first?"

Her concern for the old man touched me. Last week, she and I had set up rabbit hutches in the backyard. Her willingness to help with something so menial surprised me. But she had simply said, "It's been a long time since I built anything."

"No," I said to her question about feeding William. "Let him sleep. I'll feed him when we get back."

Maggie called for a cab. Twenty minutes later, we were both made-up, miniskirted, and out the door. We decided to head back for Madison.

The streets downtown were busy. I didn't feel like sitting in a bar, so we just walked around talking to people we knew. Maggie was still a bit shaky about our earlier conversation. I didn't want to hurt or confuse her, but she could be such a sheep sometimes.

The streetlights felt good.

"Why did you leave Philip?" I asked suddenly. I'm sure she was sick of my questions, but now that the floodgates were open, I couldn't seem to stop.

She didn't brush me off. Instead, she kept walking, looking for words. "You had to know him before he was turned. We had one of those stupid, storybook romances where he was willing to give up his title and his family home just to marry me." She smiled cynically. "It was all quite romantic unless you knew the whole truth. His father was a bastard, beat him with a riding crop from the day he learned to walk… even burned him once with a lit cigar. His mother was no help, too spineless to do anything besides needlepoint. Philip needed an escape."

"And he picked you?"

"Yes, and then he disappeared for a few months. I couldn't stop crying. But he showed up in my bedroom in Gascony one night with white skin and wild eyes. He couldn't remember my name."

"After he was turned? Why?"

"I don't know. But for some reason he'd lost all memories of his mortal life. Perhaps because he'd been so unhappy, but my Philip, my schoolgirl's-wet-dream Philip had died, leaving a sorry stranger in his place."

"When was all this?"

"It was 1819. I was twenty-three. Philip had just turned twenty-nine. Some of my friends were planning a birthday party for him." She whispered now, lost in her own past. "He kept coming back late at night, like an animal that's forgotten its home but still remembers its master. For a long time he couldn't talk in complete sentences or hold my hand. Then, about a year later, just as things started getting better, one night he pinned me to the floor and-you know how the story goes."

"Yeah, I know."

"He thought it would bridge the gap between us. And it did for a while. But I never stopped missing the way he'd treated me before."

"Is that why you left?"

"No, he went to Harfleur in the winter of 1825. Said he needed to spend some time with Julian. I was glad to see him happy, to see him visiting. But he never came home again, not to live, only to visit now and then, and he was always nervous after that. Something happened to him that winter."

Her beautiful face seemed on the brink of sorrow, so I dropped my questions, feeling almost guilty. Why did my own past make me so insensitive to the needs of others? Just because blood and pain and violence colored the path of my own memory didn't make me an exclusive victim.

We neared the Seattle Center, where the white steel-boned Space Needle loomed up into the sky. Right outside the Coliseum I spotted a small crowd with a few vaguely familiar faces.

"Hey, Eleisha."

Two girls I'd met a few weeks ago at Neumo's were waving to me from the next block. Neither Maggie nor I had been in the mood to hunt that night, so we'd gone out dancing with a couple of Maggie's friends, Jennifer and Theresa.

"Wait, Jen, we'll be right there." I stepped off the curb.

Everything seemed fine, normal, one second, and then it hit me.

Wade's consciousness pushed its way into mine like a lost bull. He jerked out quickly in surprise, and then his thoughts scattered and began grasping at mine in panic. I couldn't see him.

"Maggie!"

My own screaming voice sounded far away. People stared. Wade's mind locked on to the images of bodies in Edward's cellar, the air-brushed photograph of me over his mantel, and the oil painting from 1872 in the storage room.

"Maggie!"

The sight of her running toward me cut through my terror. I felt her hands on my shoulders and realized I was kneeling on the ground.

"What? Are you hurt?"

"It's him. Run."

Her soft body stood up over me, and she looked around. The hatred in her eyes scared me more than the thought of Wade finding us.

"Don't!" I said. "You've got to get out of here."

I couldn't keep talking much longer. It was like living in the center of two distant worlds. Wade tried to run, but somebody had to help drag him. Glimpses of his sight line kept sliding in and out of mine. A wooden fence. A brick alley wall. The sweating face of his partner, Dominick. His fear of Dominick.

Maggie jerked my arm over her shoulder and bolted. I tried to keep up but kept going blind to what was actually in front of me.

"Hold on," she said in my ear. "I'll get us down to Blue Jack's. Ben will hide us."

Ben. I tried to concentrate on the thought of his broad face and palm-tree tattoo. Wade thought about his home. He'd been born in North Dakota, and his dad was a farmer. He wanted to know what I was. He wanted to know why Edward's death had caused him so much pain.

I became dimly aware that the farther Maggie ran, the more concrete Wade's thought patterns became.

"Wrong way," I tried to get out.

She didn't hear me. I tried focusing all my energy on pushing Wade out. For a few seconds it worked, but then the effort became unbearable, like swimming against a tidal current.

Maggie stopped.

I lifted my head and groaned. We were in some kind of alley, and Dominick stood panting and sweating in front of us. He was stocky and muscular, with dark hair and at least three days' growth on his face. Instead of a uniform, he wore faded jeans and a brown canvas coat-with Wade draped over his shoulder.

He dropped Wade and pulled a gun, a revolver.

"Freeze."

I couldn't talk. I couldn't separate my own past from Wade's. Could Maggie feel him, too?

Wade raised his head off the ground and looked at me. I remembered that he was tall, but the thin quality of his face suddenly struck me as beautiful and eerie at the same time. He was part of me.

"You," he whispered.

Why couldn't Maggie feel him?

"Put the girl down and step back," Dominick's voice echoed, flat and ugly.

No, he'll kill you.

Was that me or Wade? It didn't matter, and it was too late. Maggie whirled around, still holding me, and tried to run back down the alley. An explosion shook the graffiti-covered brick walls. The ground rushed up to my face, but it didn't hurt.

Crawling to all fours, I stared at a bloody, gaping hole in Maggie's back.

This can't be happening.

Was that me or Wade?

Dominick's footsteps sounded behind me. I half turned to see him, my mind screaming to try and grab hold of the gun, but I still couldn't clear my thoughts. When he reached down toward us, a flash of wavy, brown-black hair brushed over my cheek as Maggie suddenly pushed up off the ground and whirled around, swinging hard with her left hand and making a grab for his throat with her right. Her swing connected, and the gun landed on the ground with a thud.

"No," I tried to tell her. "Run."

But their bodies seemed locked together now, and they both fell backward. I could hear Dominick's desperate breathing. Undeads aren't supernaturally stronger than mortals. Pain stops people from running too fast or lifting too much or hitting too hard. But we don't have active nerve synapses, so that type of pain doesn't stop us.

I tried to crawl toward them, but the world started spinning, and my eyesight blurred again. When my vision cleared, he had her pinned down. Even without the pain to stop her, she wasn't a match for him. Creatures like us relied on our gifts. We rarely had to fight.

The light from a rooftop glowed off her dress and turned it dark orange. She looked so soft and violent. Blood covered one side of Dominick's face, but it must have been Maggie's.

She hissed and clawed at him-fighting for me-trying to freak him out. I couldn't move. Wade was still in my head, but out of my sight. Dominick had Maggie pinned with one hand, and a glint flashed as he managed to pull a long machete from a sheath under his coat. With his face locked in a mad grimace, he shoved the edge down against her throat.

"No!" I tried to scream, but the word came out in a rasp.

He didn't hear me. She made a gurgling sound. He kept wildly pushing the blade down, down through her throat to the bone at the nape of her neck. I heard a loud crack.

It's too bad undead can't cry.

The force of a thousand lives burst from Maggie's body, and Wade screamed. Maybe I did, too. Waves and waves jolted through and over and past me until I lay twitching on the alley floor. I don't know how much time passed. Seemed like hours.

Dominick knelt beside Wade. "What is it? What's wrong?" he kept saying.

Wade's consciousness was no longer inside me. His head lay at a twisted angle, and his eyes were closed. Maggie's headless body lay on the ground by a trash can.

She died for me. I struggled to my feet, choking in disbelief.

Dominick looked up in surprise and scrambled toward his absent gun. His china-blue eyes and black facial stubble burned a permanent picture in my memory. Murderer. I couldn't fight him. I didn't know how. Instead, I turned and ran like a child down the alley.

He yelled something after me, but didn't follow. I stumbled on, lost in a nightmare. Maggie was dead, and I'd led her killers here. Now there were four of us. Only four.

My first thought was to race home and move William, but then my head cleared. Of all the places in the country, how had they known to look for me in Seattle? I could think of only one connection. Moving wasn't the answer. Running wasn't the answer.

I had to kill Wade.