Blood Memories vm-1 Page 6

  "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 pi
cture 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.

  Chapter 8

  Ten minutes later, I doubled back about two blocks behind them and crouched down. I waited for Wade to wake up, not knowing how close he needed to be for mental contact. I wanted to stay as near as safety allowed, but with enough distance to get away from him if he tried to track me down.

  It was hard not to think about Maggie, hard not to wallow in hatred. I'd never seen a man so unaffected by Maggie's beauty. Dominick hadn't even flinched.

  As my mind ran back over the horrible scene of him pinning her to the ground, I began to focus on a few things more clearly. He hadn't seemed surprised when his gunshot didn't kill her, even though he'd caught her square in the back. The memory of his face floated in front of me so solid and sharp it might have been there. The emotions flowing across it had run a rapid course-fear, hysteria, hatred-but not surprise, never once surprise. Why? Wade didn't know what I was, so he couldn't possibly know about Maggie. Yet Dominick severed her head. How had he known to do that?

  The only way to permanently destroy one of us is to somehow destroy the body: decapitation, fire, explosion… A stake through the heart is not enough. I've read that old European vampire hunters believed after staking an undead they also had to cut its head off-something about saving the soul. A stake through the heart would probably incapacitate any of us long enough for some zealot to perform a decapitation. The shock alone would cause temporary paralysis.

  But how had Dominick known what to do?

  It suddenly occurred to me that his gun had been lying on the ground somewhere close to me after the psychic pain of Maggie's death faded away. All I'd had to do was pick it up and shoot him. But no, I'd run off like a scared rabbit.

  Something began stirring softly inside my head. Wade was awake. Without attempting to push him from my mind, I thought about nothing. I pictured a huge black hole covering the world. He would still be able to read my presence, but hopefully couldn't pinpoint my location or extract any information.

  I didn't try to read his thoughts or do anything besides crouch there, picturing a black hole. He cast about for me in weak thought patterns and then stopped, probably exhausted. I moved toward the alley until Dominick's voice became audible.

  "Just stop it then! She's long gone by now. If I had half a brain, I would've gone after her. Jesus, Wade, I thought you were dead."

  When Wade answered, he startled me. Dominick's voice sounded exactly like he looked-mean and ugly. But Wade's voice was clear, kind of breathy. It didn't match his roughly scattered thought patterns.

  "You killed her, Dom! You killed that woman. What are we going to do?"

  "We're going to get the hell out of here. Can you walk?"

  "We can't just leave her. There's a bullet from your gun in her back."

  "No, come here and look. It went straight through her."

  "Then it's still here somewhere. You know the routine. They'll find it."

  "Come on, Wade. She looks like just another hooker. Nobody's gonna search this alley."

  I'd never seen a dead vampire before. I mean… we're undead, but Maggie was dead now. Edward once told me that our bodies would begin cracking within moments, and then start turning to ash. This would eradicate any evidence of her existence. I had a sick feeling Dominick knew that or he wouldn't have been so flippant about the missing bullet.

  Their argument grew muffled, and I could pick out only bits and pieces. Then they started moving. I kept the black hole in my mind in case Wade tried to search again, but I was beginning to realize that he didn't know much more about focusing his psyche than I did.

  I followed them as closely as possible. It would have been a lot easier if I simply could have gone inside Wade's head and viewed his physical surroundings through his eyes, but that would have given my position away.

  They eventually ended up on Fourth Avenue and got into a silver Mustang. I panicked for a second. Having to follow them in a car never occurred to me. The dark streets were nearly empty. Then I spotted an overweight teenager unlocking a dented Ford Escort.

  The Mustang pulled out from the curb.

  I ran to the pudgy kid. "Hey," I said, smiling. "Do me a big favor? Quick. For twenty bucks?"

  His face melted in a simultaneous mask of suspicion and interest. "What kind of favor?"

  "Follow them," I said, pointing to the disappearing Mustang.

  He stared at me. "You're kidding."

  "Just do it, okay?"

  "Old boyfriend?"

  "Something like that."

  "Okay, get in."

  "You're a prince."

  He was actually pretty good behind the wheel and caught up to the silver moving target within a few seconds.

  "Not bad," I said. "You practice this?"

  He lit a cigarette and held it between thick lips. "My girlfriend dumped me for a hockey player. I used to follow 'em around sometimes."

  "What happened then?"

  "I got over it."

  "Good for you. I heard hockey players make lousy lays, anyway. Too many bruises."

  "Yeah." He smiled. "That's what my dad said."

  Dominick drove all the way out to old Highway 99 and parked by a single-story motel called the Rosewood. But daylight was only a few hours away, so whatever I was going to do had to be fast.

  "Here's my stop," I said. "Everyone please depart in a calm and orderly fashion."

  The kid laughed softly, and I handed him thirty dollars.

  "Thanks a lot," I said. "I gotta go."

  "Hey, wait." He wrote something quickly on a book of matches and gave it to me. "That's my number. If you get over this guy, give me a call."

  Sometimes I forget that I look seventeen. "Just might have to do that. Always did like a man who can drive."

  As he pulled back onto the street, I fell out of charming mode and crouched down behind a Chevy pickup. Dominick slipped into room 6. Wade went into room 10. Instinct told me to ignore Wade and cut his partner's heart out, but common sense pushed that vision away. Dominick might know more than he should, but he was useless and blind without Wade.

  For a moment, I considered knocking on Wade's door and taking him by surprise when he opened it. But the scene of Maggie's death flashed by me, and I decided he'd have to be caught while sleeping. For that I'd need a key.

  The lobby of the Rosewood Motel was dead at three o'clock in the morning. A middle-aged clerk sat reading a tattered issue of Playboy behind the front desk. After peering through a set of glass front doors, I used my teeth to tear my own left wrist open and then smeared blood all over my arm and face before staggering into the lobby, bleeding on the cheap, indoor-outdoor carpet.

  "Please, help me."

  The clerk's stunned expression would have been comical at another time. Dropping the magazine, he hurried toward me, muttering, "Oh, dear. Oh, dear."

  I hadn't heard that in years.

  "Did someone cut you?" he asked, grabbing my arm.

  For an answer, I started crying, and his face contorted in distress.

  "This way, dear. Come back here and we'll tie up your arm and call someone to help."

  His manner was so sweet and reassuring that I didn't like the idea of hurting him. With one hand on my shoulder and one holding my injured arm, he led me around to a TV room behind the front desk.

  "Just a minute now and we'll have the bleeding stopped," he said. "Put your fingers here behind the wound, and I'll get you a bandage."

&n
bsp; He trotted off and came back quickly with a first-aid kit. "Now, let me see."

  When he leaned over to take a closer look, I brought my right elbow down on the back of his head hard enough to drop him. He fell like a sack of grain and lay unconscious.

  He'd been nice. It bothered me to give any kind deed such a shoddy return, so I made sure he was breathing and then pushed two hundred dollars into his jacket.

  The keys were hanging in shiny rows on nails behind the front desk. Wade must be asleep by now. I quickly found the key to room 10 and bolted out the door.

  Room 10 was close. Putting my ear to the door, I listened for him. Nothing. Tentatively, I cast about with my mind, trying to pick up conscious thought patterns. Nothing. The key fit smoothly into the lock.

  Click.

  We have several advantages that I rarely, if ever, think about: like night vision. Many of my concepts of vampire lore were picked up from American culture. Film portraits of some handsome romantic undead hero bemoaning the fact that he'll never again see the sunrise have always made me gag. Edward and I used to go to the theater when we were bored and giggle during those silly scenes. We probably annoyed a lot of people. But after the first few adjustment years, I never missed the sun. My world is dark, and if I want light, I just stay home and run up the power bill. Why should anyone living an unnatural existence long for natural light? Ridiculous.

  From the doorway I watched Wade breathing softly on his bed. The curtains by his head moved slightly in a night breeze. Moving in, I let the door close behind me. His clothes lay neatly across the back of a chair with his shoulder holster positioned on top. A streetlight outside the window reflected glittering points off the handle of his gun. This would be too easy.

  I quietly unsnapped the little leather thong over the trigger guard and found myself pulling out a 9mm Beretta. It felt heavy and alien in my hand. For some reason, I had a feeling it had never been fired outside a target range.

  Wade's breathing changed slightly, but he just rolled over in his sleep. How had Dominick known to cut Maggie's head off? I just couldn't get that out of my mind. How much did Wade know? Who else had they told about all this? Who else believed them?