Blood Memories vm-1 Page 3

His face grew animated at my words. These people I spoke of were links between ourselves and the past, a distant past no longer connected to us except by such sweet champagne memories. Maybe that's why I loved William. He was my chain to reality, my line to what once had been.

  "Yes," he whispered. "I remember."

  I reached over and grasped his wrinkled old hand. "Nothing is going to hurt you. We're going to get inside a large steel bird and fly to a different city. We'll be safe before morning, and we'll live with Maggie for a while. Understand?"

  He stared out through misty, milk-white eyes in confusion but nodded just enough for recognition. "Is Maggie expecting us?"

  "Yes."

  He relaxed but held on to my hand tightly. When we stopped at the airport terminal, his fingers tensed.

  "It's all right," I whispered and handed our fare-plus a twenty-dollar tip-to the cabdriver.

  The trip might have been easier if we hadn't been so pressed by the clock. Passing time never stopped haunting me. We couldn't miss our flight, and we had to get to Maggie's before dawn.

  Bright lights in the airport's wide corridors hurt William's eyes, but he held my hand and followed me. I kept his cloak pulled low over his face and tried to avoid attention. A few perfectly curled check-in girls stared at us curiously, but I dropped the helpless routine and glared at one of them. She didn't give me any trouble and handed over our boarding passes.

  Getting through security wasn't as bad as I expected because the line was short at that hour. I'd kept several IDs for William updated, and he stayed quiet, just following my lead.

  After that, the rest of the flight involved waiting. Once William was down the covered on-ramp and settled inside the plane, he fell asleep. Severe stress put him into a state of exhaustion. That's why I protected him from it as much as possible. Sitting strapped in my aisle seat from Portland to Seattle, I allowed myself the luxury of seething in hatred and blame toward that psychic cop-if he was a cop. He ran with cops, so he must be one.

  It's funny how I never once blamed Edward. Maybe because he was dead. I only blamed the man named Wade, who'd tracked me into Mickey's Bar. All of this fear and flight was his fault. I'd never really wanted to kill anyone in my life, but all the way to Seattle, I mulled over fantasies of ripping his throat open after listening to him scream for a while.

  Pity for William filled me again when the plane landed at Sea-Tac. He'd been through enough.

  "Wake up. Just a little farther now."

  He was too heavy for me to carry, and that would have attracted undue attention. But I had to half drag him anyway. Thank God a lot of really weird people hang out at airports. Nobody more than glanced at us on the way out.

  I hailed another taxi and almost melted in relief when the driver stopped for us. By that time, I was so exhausted that I couldn't do more than hand him Maggie's address and whisper, "Here. Take us here."

  William fell asleep again. The driver was a young guy wearing three days' growth and a Seattle Mariners baseball cap. He glanced at me with something akin to concern on his face, and then changed his mind and pulled out onto the street. We must have looked pretty wiped out.

  Streaks of pale yellowish white were running through the sky when the cab pulled up to a large brick house covered in dark green ivy and built way back behind a chain-link fence.

  "Here you go," the driver said. "That'll be thirty dollars."

  I handed him two twenties and tried to wake the comatose William.

  The driver's face wrinkled as if he was wondering what to do. "Do you need some help with him? I can get him up to the house for you."

  "No… thanks. I've got him."

  With all the strength left in my body, I wrapped William's arm around my neck and dragged him from the cab. Without looking back, I held on and half carried him up to the house.

  "Almost there," I told him over and over. "We're almost there."

  The place looked old but well kept. The brick stairs to the front door seemed like an endless flight upward. Only the light from the east kept me from collapsing into sleep like William. How lucky he was, just to sleep. I blinked once and pictured the comfort of relaxing all my muscles and drifting away into oblivion, not caring about anything.

  Reaching the top, I dragged William across the porch. Before my finger touched the bell, the door opened, and a pale, angry, perfect face stared out at me. Even in my state of fatigue, I couldn't help being jolted by Maggie's ivory face. She wasn't just beautiful. She was different. Even in mortal life, I'd never seen any woman who looked quite like her.

  "Get inside," she hissed. "And get him below."

  When she turned around, a mass of brown-black curls shifted with her and bounced softly all the way down to the small of her back. She withdrew, and I followed her curls blindly down into some sort of basement. I don't remember what anything looked like except for her hair and her small, curving shoulders.

  She opened a door and pointed to a bed in a windowless room. "Go to sleep. You'd better have a very special story to tell me tonight, or I may just call Julian myself."

  I nodded, beyond caring, and dragged William to the bed. I don't remember falling onto it or even hearing the door close.

  Chapter 4

  My internal clock woke me up that night. It seemed as though I'd barely closed my eyes. For the second night in a row, I found myself in a strange place, not my home. At least William was with me. He'd never developed any connection to dusk or time, so he lay dormant. I watched him sleep for a little while and then got up to find Maggie. She would be awake and waiting for me by now.

  The door was unlocked, and I walked out into a basement storage room that was remarkably empty and clean. Obviously Maggie didn't save things as Edward had. She did appear to keep a "guest room" in the basement, though. Who else had slept there in the past hundred years or so?

  Finding the stairs, I came up from the basement onto a main level of polished hardwood floors.

  "Maggie?"

  "Up here," her deep voice answered from what sounded like far away.

  Following the sound of her voice, I walked up a curved stairway with cream carpeting, Impressionist paintings lining the wall, proving to me once again that it was possible to be born outside of nobility and still have excellent taste.

  My hands clenched and unclenched as I wondered what to say. I'd have to make this good.

  Once upstairs, I entered the first bedroom. My breath caught slightly. Julian had sparse taste. His estate house in Wales, called Cliffbracken, had always been cold and bare. That was once my concept of the rich and noble. Not until after coming to America did a slightly different picture take shape. Here, money meant extreme comfort.

  But Maggie's bedroom went beyond comfort. It was decadent in an almost surreal way-like Maggie herself. Every square inch of the floor and walls was covered by something cream or deep brown. Satin drapes, giant antique fans, dried flowers, and long, lace wall covers. Above her cherrywood bed stretched a lace canopy with countless yards of cream satin pouring down around it. Resting perfectly on the polished dressers and wardrobe and end tables sat antique toiletry sets, fragile perfume bottles, and silver hand mirrors.

  "Stop staring and sit down."

  She sat at a dressing table. Chocolate and sleek and ivory, her hair and the perfect pale lines of her face set off her dark eyes. She wore a faded Armani dress and torn, black nylon stockings. While making her look like a lady of means down on her luck, the dress accented her tiny waist, curved hips, and high-set breasts.

  Her stark, sexual visage in the center of all that lace made me wonder if she were real.

  "Did you hear me?"

  Her voice cut through my haze like a hatchet.

  "Yes, I'm sorry."

  "I doubt you're sorry enough."

  She was real, all right, in full color, exuding the power of her gift. When we are turned by our makers, the strongest trait of our personality intensifies to an alluring, alarming degree. That's how we
either draw or paralyze our prey. Maggie's gift of sexual attraction made her nightly hunting easy. Victims literally fell into her lap. But in this situation, I had the advantage-nearly immune to her gift, while she was not immune to mine.

  "I am sorry, Maggie. Where else could we go?"

  After walking in, I crouched to my knees on the floor, so she would be forced to look down at me.

  "What happened?" The cutting edge of her voice faded slightly.

  "Edward just… he just lost it. He seemed fine, and then he called me the night before last and started talking crazy. He'd been going to Safeway and buying mutton… bringing dead animals into his kitchen. He wouldn't hunt. I didn't know what was wrong with him."

  "You shouldn't have been living so close to him in the first place."

  "It all happened too fast. He waited until morning and then turned the stereo up so loud the neighbors called the police. When they pulled up, he jumped off his front porch… They watched him burn. I got trapped inside."

  For a second, her expression shifted into something vaguely resembling pity and then hardened again. "That doesn't explain what you're doing here."

  What should I have said about the next part? I barely believed it myself. "One of the cops-at least he might be a cop-felt Edward die."

  "That's impossible."

  "No. It's not a lie. He felt it, and then I ran downstairs. When I woke up that night, Edward's basement had been all torn up, and I found a human bone."

  "Oh, no." Her face became even paler, and she seemed to grow less accusing of me and more caught up in my nightmare story. I decided not to tell her everything about Wade, that he had pushed inside my head and shown me visions of his own thoughts.

  "It gets worse," I went on. "My car was parked outside his house all day, so they have one of the names I use and my home address. Edward had a photograph of me over his fireplace… that he shot ten years ago, and an oil painting in the cellar from 1872."

  She gasped and then snapped, "How stupid can you be? Why did I even let you in here? Julian wouldn't blame me for pitching you out right now."

  "I didn't think-"

  "That's pretty obvious, Eleisha. Your job is to take care of that old senile abortion. That's why Julian made you. None of this has anything to do with me."

  Staring at the carpet, I let my shoulders turn in. "Please, just for a week or so, until I can find us someplace else. Maybe living so close to Edward was a mistake, but he helped me. No one else taught me anything. I've never been without him, Maggie. Don't make me leave."

  She was silent for a moment. I knew her dilemma had more complications than the surface details we were discussing. Maggie and I had different makers. The children of different makers avoid each other in the name of survival. If Julian came looking for me, he wouldn't have a second thought about killing Maggie.

  "Please," I whispered. "We'll be out in a week."

  "Oh, Leisha."

  I knew she was looking down at the top of my silky head. Every dormant mothering instinct inside of her was fighting against reason, the helpless, little-girl emanation of my gift rushing through her psyche like a white wind.

  "You'll keep the old man out of my sight?"

  "Promise."

  She sighed. "You can stay a week as long as Julian never finds out you were here. He can't find out I had anything to do with this."

  "He won't. It'll be at least a month before he figures out we're not in Portland anymore. By then we'll be settled someplace else. We'll probably rent for a while, and I'll tell Julian… I'll tell him something."

  Maggie nodded. "But I want you to know that I don't like this, and it isn't fair of you to ask this of me."

  The room suddenly felt too soft. "I'm hungry. We need to hunt."

  Instead of telling me to go hunt by myself, she reached down and picked up a lock of my hair. "You can't go anywhere looking like this. Did you bring any other clothes?"

  "Not much. We left in a hurry."

  "Come look in my closet. You're small, but I might have something that works."

  Her abrupt change in attitude caught me off guard. I looked up at her beautiful face, but saw no malice or guile. Now that she had given in, she was letting her emotions take over. Good.

  "What do you usually do with your hair?" she asked.

  The question threw me. "Brush it."

  Raising her eyebrows, she said, "Stay here."

  She left and came back with a set of hot rollers. Then she opened the door of a walk-in closet at least the size of her bedroom. She disappeared inside and came out holding a small, red minidress with a rip in one side.

  "Try this on."

  I undressed immodestly in front of her. She watched me with a detached interest.

  "You have a pretty body," she said. "Too fragile maybe, but some people like that."

  I listened to her comments, surprised by how enjoyable I found this entire conversation, different than my talks with Edward-more personal.

  "How long have you lived alone?" I asked.

  She moved up to help me zip the dress. "How long? I left Philip in 1841 and sailed from France to Boston. Sometimes it feels like yesterday and sometimes it feels like forever."

  Philip was her maker. I wanted to ask Maggie why she left him in the first place, but thought better of it and looked in the mirror, quite startled.

  The dress fit tightly, snug all the way from my shoulders down over my hips just to the tops of my thighs. I looked different.

  "Good." Maggie smiled. "Now sit down and let me do your hair."

  This felt strange, like missing something I'd never had. She seemed pleased to be fussing over me. It started to make me nervous. Using her was one thing, allowing myself to become involved was another. But I didn't move, just sat there letting her touch me and put curlers in my hair.

  "You might find this look easier," she said. "We can change our gifts for the moment, baby. You don't always have to stay with the same routine."

  I assimilated two important facts from her words. One, the fact that she'd called me baby meant that she was completely seduced, and two, I could learn a great deal from this woman.

  "You can alter your gift?"

  "Sometimes," she answered. "It depends on the situation. What you do should always depend on who you're with."

  "Like how?"

  "I'll show you when we get downtown. I haven't seen your own routine yet, but I can guess what it is."

  Odd how she was smart enough to see me for what I was and still allow herself to be influenced. Maybe she had been alone too long.

  "What are you doing to my hair?"

  "Hang on, and you'll see."

  While the rollers rested in uncomfortable heat against my head, she tilted my chin back and put black liner under my eyes and a russet-brown lip gloss on my mouth. Then she took the rollers out.

  "Shake your head, Eleisha. Then look in the mirror."

  I did what she asked… and stood staring. I hardly recognized myself. Wheat-gold hair spread out in a mass across my shoulders. My hazel eyes looked huge, and my mouth stood out like a dark heart in my small face. "What did you do?"

  "Didn't take long, did it? Don't worry. In a couple of days you'll be doing it by yourself."

  Yeah, right.

  A voice from the hallway startled me into reality. "Eleisha! Where are we?"

  Maggie's face clouded. I bolted away from the mirror and out into the hallway in my bare feet.

  "William, it's okay. Don't you remember? We're at Maggie's. We came on that big silver bird last night."

  He looked frightened and lost, starting at the sight of me. "Eleisha?"

  "It's me. I've been playing with Maggie. Remember Maggie?"

  Sad sweet thing, my William. Maggie appeared in the bedroom doorway, none too pleased. I'd promised to keep him out of sight.

  "Maggie," he whispered, "always wore red dresses and held Philip's arm. Katherine hated her because she was pretty and poor. Philip used to talk about
marrying her."

  Something clicked across her features, something like pain. I jumped forward and took his arm. "Let's go back down to the basement. We'll talk there."

  "What about dinner?"

  "I have to catch your dinner. We're not at home anymore, are we? That will make quite a story. I'll catch you a wild alley cat in downtown Seattle and tell you about the hunt."

  "No," Maggie said suddenly. "He's all right. There's a leather chair in the living room by the fire. Go settle him there."

  "You sure?"

  She nodded and turned away. What changed her mind? I made William comfortable and went back to the bedroom. She sat, looking into the mirror.

  "I thought you didn't want to see him?"

  "You make me remember things," she whispered. "Both of you. Things I haven't thought about for a long time."

  "Do the memories hurt?"

  "A little. Maybe sometime I might ask you what really happened to William. You and Julian are the only ones who seem to know."

  Maybe mortals die so quickly because none of us were meant to live forever. William and I had been comforted in the cab talking about the distant past, when we lived in a world where we belonged. Maggie must have experienced the same thing. Only she had a lot more to miss than I did. I had just been Lord Julian's serving girl. Philip had turned her undead out of love.

  "Do you miss him?" I asked.

  She knew who I meant. "Sometimes, but not the way you think."

  "Then why'd you leave? I'd never have left Wales if Julian hadn't forced me."

  "I know." She turned from the mirror and looked at me. "I felt sorry for you. But… maybe you'll understand someday. Not now. You've lived a long time without really learning anything because you're so tied to William."

  "I take good care of him."

  "Yes, and that's all you do. That's all you've ever done."

  Her words amused me. What did she know? I'd learned quite a bit since coming to America. I wielded my gift as well as anyone, including her.

  "So why don't you show me a new side of life?" I smiled. "Why don't you show me this city?"

  This room made me feel reckless. I wanted to roll in satin bed drapings and run my hands through thick carpets. Maggie almost smiled back. Then she got up and walked into the closet.