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  Blood Memories

  ( Vampire Memories - 1 )

  Barb Hendee

  Eleisha Clevon has the face of a teen angel, but she is no angel. Unlike most vampires, she doesn't like to kill, but self-preservation comes first.

  When an old friend destroys himself by walking into sunlight right in front of her, Eleisha is shocked. And what she finds afterwards points to how very sick of his existence her friend had become — piling drained corpses in the basement and keeping records of other vampires' real names and addresses. That's a problem.

  Because now, there are policemen on the case: two very special humans with some gifts of their own. They know who Eleisha is, and, even more dangerous, what she is.

  Barb Hendee

  Blood Memories

  For J. C. and Elaine, who never quite got the hang of people, but always save lost kittens from the rain.

  Chapter 1

  I was with Edward the day he killed himself.

  It happens to us sometimes, especially the old, the ones who've lost the joy of then and can't quite grasp the now. I don't know why. But I'd never seen it until that morning Edward jumped off his own front porch and exploded in the sun like a gas fire.

  We'd been friends for a long time. I know everyone else thought we were mad for living in the same city. But he stayed out of my hunting territory, and I stayed out of his. Besides, sometimes it was nice to talk to someone without lying.

  I was on my way out at about two o'clock that morning when the phone rang.

  "Hello."

  "Eleisha, it's me. I wanted to tell you good-bye."

  He'd never called me before, but Edward's accent combined traces of a British accent with a New York pace. I'd have known it anywhere.

  "What do you mean, good-bye?"

  "This house is bright and loud," he whispered. "I don't think I can live here anymore."

  That didn't make sense. He'd been in the same house since 1937.

  "Did you buy a new place? Do you need me to help you move?"

  "No. That wouldn't help. One place is the same as another. I don't belong now, Eleisha. A new house would be worse."

  Something in his calm whisper frightened me, like tiny invisible fingers digging under my skin.

  "Edward, stay there. I'm coming over."

  "Do you think that will help? I don't think so."

  "Just stay there."

  Money isn't really a problem for me, so neither are traffic tickets… although attracting police under any condition is a bad idea. But not caring who pulled me over, I hit ninety on the freeway that night driving to Edward's. I just couldn't see him freaking out. He wasn't the type. We'd both been warned about time adjustments, but he did all the right things: read contemporary magazines, updated his wardrobe, and saved a collection of personal items from the past to keep his history intact.

  Everything.

  I tended to interact a lot more with the general populace than he did. He might have been a bit of a recluse, but not to the point of being unusual. He even took occasional trips back to Manhattan or London just to unwind.

  When I pulled up to the house, the music of his Tchaikovsky album was pouring out the windows at max volume, loud enough to wake the neighbors. Thinking about his albums made me remember I'd been buying him CDs for the past five years and he never played them.

  "Turn it down," I said, slipping through his front door, "before some pissed-off housewife calls the cops."

  "Eleisha," he said, smiling. "What are you doing here?"

  I almost backed up when he stepped onto the soft carpet of the front hallway. Dressed in an old pair of sweatpants-and nothing else-he looked half starved, with blue-black circles under both eyes.

  "Edward, what are…? What's wrong with you?"

  "Wrong? Nothing. I've been cooking. Do you remember cooking? I went shopping last night and found a leg of mutton in the meat department at Safeway. Can you believe it? In this cultural wasteland? A leg of mutton?"

  I felt cold. "Jesus, have you been trying to eat?"

  "Cooking. Cooking is a lost art."

  He looked about thirty-three, with mink-brown hair and dark green, bloodshot eyes. I'd never seen the whites of his eyes completely clear. He loved simple pleasures and elitist luxuries like imported tobacco and suits from Savile Row. People were attracted to him because he played the perfect, sweet, vogue, vague snob. He was the sanest vampire I'd ever known.

  "What did you eat?" No wonder he was sick.

  "Come and see."

  "Turn the stereo down first."

  The smell from the kitchen nauseated me. Looking through the bar-styled doors, I saw what he'd been doing, and I'd never felt so lost.

  A dead Doberman lay on the table, dried blood crusted on its black and brown muzzle. Three decomposing cats had been thrown into a heap of rotting vegetables on the counter. He'd also been shopping. There were brown Safeway bags strewn all over the floor. I couldn't take it all in at once: cartons of spoiled milk, broken lightbulbs, whole fryer chickens, mashed potatoes, and dirty dishes. Streaks of dried blood smeared the walls.

  He pushed past me and picked up a grocery bag.

  "Paper or plastic?" He smiled.

  I grabbed it out of his hand. "We've got to clean this up. What if somebody comes in here when you're asleep? Are you listening to me? What do you think will happen if someone sees this? They'll think you've lost it."

  "I have lost it, baby." He fell into his uptown cool routine. "So have you. Just two little productive members of society, aren't we? Keeping the population down. You know, I've been thinking we might move to China. They could certainly use us there."

  "Stop it. You're scaring me."

  "Really? We can't have that, now can we?"

  My kind has no doctors or lawyers or psychologists to help us. We don't have group therapy for undeads who slip out of reality. I remember feeling angry at myself because I didn't know what to do. How bad off was he? Would he get better?

  I handed back his grocery bag and pushed the hair out of his eyes. "Don't take this out on me. Let's just clean up this mess and go hunting. We haven't been hunting together since that New Year's Eve party at the Red Lion in 'seventy-eight."

  That was a great party. Edward always looked hot in a black tux.

  "Can't," he whispered.

  "What do you mean, you can't? You have to feed."

  "I can't. I don't want to."

  "Okay, then come and stay with me and William for a few months. Maybe you're spending too much time alone."

  William is an old man who lives with me. I'll talk more about him later.

  "And then what?" He dropped the bag and looked straight at me through his cold, green, bloodshot eyes. "A few months? Hardly worth noticing to someone like you, is it? Nothing would change in the world around us besides the skirt length in Paris and Tom Cruise finding his next wife. What happens in ten years? Twenty? I see the same face every day when I look in the mirror. It never changes."

  "I know. You just have to deal with it."

  "Don't you get tired of seeing the same face every day?"

  "Sometimes."

  He smiled again and picked up a butcher knife lying by the dead cats. "I could change it for you. But that wouldn't matter either, would it? You'd look the same in a week, so it wouldn't do you any good, unless I cut your head off."

  I backed up. "Do you want me to leave?"

  "I don't care what you do."

  "Fine. You stay here in this pig pit and talk to yourself. But you'd better get it together and clean this mess up by morning, or it's going to stink and get some nosy neighbor poking around in your stuff."

  "By morning it won't matter," he whispered.

  I turned back to him i
n frustration. "Edward, what's wrong? Let's just get out of here. Let's go to my place."

  "No, it's too late… I'm sick of it all, Lady Leisha."

  He hadn't called me that in over a hundred years. It was a nickname he'd picked for me when I first stepped off the boat from Wales in 1839, looking like a frightened, half-drowned mouse. He'd been so nice to me back then.

  Softly grasping his wrist, I pulled him down to a crouched position on the floor. "Talk to me."

  "Do you remember church? I don't mean the religion itself, but how we used to wonder about death?"

  "I remember, but I don't think about it very often. Should we?" He pushed me back against the bloody kitchen wall, and then he lay down on the floor with his head in my lap. I wrapped my arms around him, and his butcher knife clattered harmlessly onto the checkerboard linoleum.

  "You're going to kill yourself, aren't you?"

  "I'm tired," he whispered.

  "Don't do it."

  He didn't answer, and we just sat there like that, not saying anything until five thirty, when I saw streaks of light peeping through the eastern sky.

  I tried lifting him. "We've got to get underground."

  He crawled to his feet but didn't head toward the cellar door. Instead he walked into the living room and restarted the Tchaikovsky album at max volume. Francesca da Rimini screamed out the front windows.

  I panicked.

  "Stop it! Turn it off. We've got to get below."

  Looking back now, I think he wanted the neighbors to complain. He wanted someone to find what he'd been doing in the house. He wanted the police to show up, and I never did understand why.

  But my stomach lurched when the blue and red flashing lights pulled up in front of his house.

  Grabbing his shoulder, I tried pulling him for the cellar door. He threw me off easily and looked at me with something close to contempt. "We don't really live forever, baby. We just cheat for a while."

  Rays from the morning sun filtered in through the living room window and touched the carpet. Two policemen and a tall, blond guy in faded Levi's were walking up Edward's front lawn. The whole world shifted into slow motion as he kissed my forehead and started running toward the door.

  Nothing could have stopped him. As his half-naked form burst out onto the front porch, screaming like an animal in pain, one of the cops pulled a gun. I just stood there.

  He loved imported tobacco and Savile Row suits. He loved sitting by the hearth and playing chess. He loved dancing at midnight and watching Monty Python films. He loved Sir Arthur Conan Doyle novels. He looked hot in a black tux. The sanest vampire I'd ever known.

  He was on fire before his feet hit the grass. Both uniformed cops jumped back, and the guy in Levi's just stood his ground, staring-like me. I had to go, to run before somebody spotted me, but I stayed frozen by the window watching as Edward sank down in a burning heap on the lawn. He had once told me what happens when we die. At the time I hadn't believed him.

  It hit me like a wall falling down, almost visible. The psychic energy of a thousand lives burst from Edward's mind like prisoners fleeing their cage. I saw a thousand deaths, a thousand lives lost. The terror and anger and pain cut through me in an unstoppable flow. The carpet rushed up, and I lay there writhing until the pain faded. Edward had told me that only others of our kind would feel this agony… this release, and would know that one of us had passed over.

  Poor Edward.

  Fear and instinct pushed me up onto all fours.

  The police would be calling for backup or entering the house on their own any second. But while crawling toward the cellar, I heard someone else screaming, and I forced myself to look back outside. The light hurt my eyes. The guy in jeans was rolling on the ground, holding his head.

  Something touched my mind, something alien-not Edward. It was the blond man on the ground, frightened and suffering. I could feel him, see the scattered, disoriented terror running through him. But he was mortal. He shouldn't have felt anything.

  The house. What would they learn when they searched the house? I looked about wildly for anything to take with me. I'd never been awake this late. My eyes burned, and my legs were weak. Edward's personal address book lay under the phone. I grabbed it and stumbled for the cellar door, looking back only once at the large, framed photograph of myself hanging over his fireplace.

  Chapter 2

  My eyes opened to darkness. Like an infallible clock, my internal second hand woke me precisely at twelve minutes past sundown. In our inverted world, this almost physical connection to time was a blessing and a curse-or that's what Edward once told me. He never liked his world to be too regulated.

  Edward.

  I lay on his mattress.

  He had divided his cellar into four dingy storage rooms, with no soft carpets or velvet furniture, not even linoleum-just aging floorboards. Most of us keep mementos of past time periods, reminding us to flow and change and evolve with each new generation. Edward had never purchased a bed, though, and he had been sleeping on a sheet-less Posturepedic mattress for years. That old folktale about coffins is a lie. I'd get claustrophobic.

  Like projections against a blank wall, images from that morning flashed before me: his face, hair, and fingers bursting into flames. Had it hurt? Did death hurt us? I couldn't mourn him yet, or I'd get lost inside myself, and survival always outranks emotion.

  What had happened while I slept?

  The police had probably searched the house from floor to ceiling. The tiny space I now occupied was hidden behind an invisible door in the west wall. At least they hadn't found me.

  Listening for a full minute, I heard nothing. I pushed on the sliding panel once to release it.

  Empty room.

  Odd smell, sweet and musty.

  Was it floating down from the mess in his kitchen? God, what had the cops thought of that? Slipping Edward's address book inside my jacket, I stepped out to find the stench growing stronger, and to see a pile of torn-up floorboards. They'd torn the floor up? Why? Rotting shards of wood and fresh, uneven piles of dirt lay all around me.

  Then I noticed a small, gray-white spot in the dirt and leaned down to look closer. It was a bone, part of an index finger.

  "No."

  My mind couldn't accept the implication. We disposed of bodies, dumped off or disguised, as far from ourselves as possible-meaningless dried husks no longer connected to us. Had he been carrying corpses home or luring live victims into his house and draining them here? A madman. Two facts shone brightly through this haze. First, he'd been sliding in and out of reality long before last night, and second… this situation was far from over.

  How many bodies had they found? The authorities would probably consider Edward a psycho killer who'd finally lost it and committed suicide.

  Maybe they were right.

  It was all a matter of perspective. But right now, the whole sordid story was being aired on the evening news.

  I had to get out of the house.

  Apparently, the police had removed the bodies. In fact, they'd gutted the entire basement. I kicked up cold, loose dirt running for the stairs. The upper floor was a shambles, but nothing seemed to have been removed yet. However, I didn't stop for inventory and moved straight for the front door.

  And there, parked right in front of the house, in all its bright red glory, was my main concern. Since I'd been trapped inside all day, my little Mazda had been just sitting there for the police to go over with a fine-tooth comb.

  I looked up and down the street. Well… other cars were parked nearby, so perhaps they'd run a check on all of them.

  In any event, it was likely the authorities had done a search on my license plate by now and located my name and address. Bastards.

  Managing to keep the needle under sixty all the way home was difficult, but getting pulled over could have been a tragedy.

  William had been home alone all this time. Fear and anger surfaced slowly through my numb layers of skin. The house w
e lived in was perfect: back in the trees, high fence, deep basement, few neighbors-and private ones at that. Now we were going to have to move. Where? There wouldn't be time to find us someplace secure or permanent. Whatever I came up with would have to be fast and temporary.

  Not bothering to put my car in the garage, I ran up the outdoor steps and through our back door.

  "William?"

  The interior wasn't exactly gothic. Our kitchen was actually quite cheery in spite of the fact that we didn't use it for much, decorated in soft yellow tones. I'd bought the house new back in 1912, but it had undergone several major renovations since then. Keeping up normal appearances was an art that Edward had drilled into my head nearly a hundred and seventy years ago.

  A tall, wrinkled old man shuffled in, wearing brown trousers and a faded burgundy smoking jacket. Silver hair hung past his shoulders with tiny dry wisps floating now and then across his narrow face. Veins in his hands, once blue, lay flat and purple beneath flesh so dry it crackled at contact with anything else. Milky white eyes gazed out at me in hurt confusion.

  "You weren't here for dinner last night. Left me hungry," he said.

  "I'm sorry, William. We have to move again. Edward Claymore killed himself this morning, and the police found bodies in his cellar. They'll be looking for people to question."

  "Have you called Julian?"

  Sometimes William surprised me with a flash of memory or clarity of thought.

  "No," I answered. "We have enough money to relocate. I'll call him once we're settled." Explaining all this to Julian was going to be a nightmare. I'd put it off as long as possible.

  William's momentary comprehension faded. His eyebrows knitted slightly. "What about dinner?"

  "Of course." I pulled a kitchen chair out for him. "Just sit down, and we'll fix you up."

  Rows of rabbit hutches lined the back of our house. A large part of my job was caring for these small creatures that nourished William. He'd always been too weak to absorb human life force.