Blood Memories vm-1 Page 7

  Without really thinking, I walked over and pointed the gun at his head, but not close enough for him to grab.

  "Wake up."

  He stirred.

  "Wake up, or I'll just kill you now."

  Two very light brown eyes looked up at me from a narrow face.

  "You stay out of my head," I whispered.

  He gasped and sat up.

  "Don't," I said. "Is this thing loaded?"

  He nodded slowly, realization dawning. "What are you doing here?"

  "Murdering you."

  "No! I didn't know Dominick would kill your friend. We never talked about that. He's just gone off the deep end trying to figure this thing out."

  "What thing?"

  "You know."

  "Don't cops have their own laws? If you're so sorry then why didn't you do something? Why haven't you at least turned him in? Shooting a woman in the back and then cutting her head off might be construed as slightly overzealous. Don't you think?"

  He didn't answer for a moment, but watched my face and the gun. He seemed fascinated, like he wanted to spit out a thousand words but couldn't find them. "I can't turn him in."

  "Why not? You jack-offs stick up for each other? Even for something like this?"

  "No, it isn't that. It's… We don't work for the Portland police anymore."

  At first, that surprised me, but then again, I remembered Dominick was no longer wearing a uniform.

  "Then why are you here?" I asked. "Why are you following me?"

  He struggled for an answer. The corner of his left eye twitched as if with effort. His almost-white hair looked as if it had once been worn short and layered, but had long since outgrown its cut and simply rested in shaggy, messy tufts over his ears.

  "Eleisha, I can't-"

  The sound of him speaking my name made me jump. "Don't do that."

  He pushed the blankets back and put his feet on the floor. All he had on was a pair of gray drawstring pajama pants.

  "No, listen. I won't hurt you," he said. "I can't believe you're standing here, but I don't know how to tell you all this. It would take forever."

  "I've got some time."

  "There's a faster way." His face was guarded now.

  "No."

  "I want to help you!" he almost shouted. "Please… put the gun down and come here. Aren't you curious? If you just got inside my head for two seconds, you'd believe me. Please."

  I didn't move.

  "You need to see my thoughts when we aren't running," he rushed on. "I've been dreaming about this since that first morning when you reached inside my head."

  Reached inside his head? He had pushed into mine.

  "I can read everybody's thoughts." His voice was shaking. "No one but you can read mine."

  How should I answer? Somehow, on some level, his words meant something to me. It's hard to explain. I still hated him for what he had helped do to Maggie, but I couldn't stop listening to him.

  "You can read other people's thoughts?" I asked.

  "Yes, everyone's." He nodded excitedly. "I can… Eleisha, just come here. We don't have to use words."

  Slowly, I put the gun down. He looked tall and slender and white-blond-almost like an angel sitting there in his pajama pants. An angel. What a joke.

  "What now?"

  "Just sit down," he said.

  "Don't touch me."

  "I don't have to. But if you're standing you might fall… like earlier. It doesn't have to be like that."

  When I didn't move any closer, he dropped down on the carpet. "Here, come sit on the floor."

  It's strange how he judged me by normal mortal reactions, mortal fears. What did he think I was afraid of? That he'd rape me? Is that what he thought? I'd been playing the frightened little street urchin so long that maybe it just emanated from me. What would he think if he knew what I was really afraid of? That he'd find out I was undead. That I lived off the blood of others. What would he do when he found out about William?

  "You don't have to show me anything," he said quickly, as though reading my face. "Just learn to focus. Just search inside me, and I can show you all of the past six weeks. I can show you pieces of my whole life."

  It was urgent for me to learn about him and about Dominick, why they were here, how much they knew, what they wanted.

  Crossing over, I knelt down on the floor. Wade's features were animated, excited. We didn't say anything. For a moment we didn't do anything. Then, with my mind, I reached out cautiously and tried to see through his eyes. For nearly an hour, that's the last conscious thought I had.

  Chapter 9

  Wade

  Wade Sheffield was born in North Dakota in 1977, the fourth son of a wheat farmer. He was seven years old before realizing that no one else could hear other people's thoughts. His older brothers thought him weak because he cried while helping with daily chores like delivering baby calves or butchering chickens. His sisters sometimes cried when chickens were killed, but the men in his family couldn't figure tears over a new calf.

  "She hurts so much," he would say, stroking the heifer in labor.

  At the age of twelve, he began responding verbally to people's thoughts. This made several of his teachers nervous-especially the ones who quietly hated teaching, and Mr. Rhinehard, who was sleeping with a fifteen-year-old student named Phyllis Dunmire.

  Wade knew all this. He knew what they thought of him. Most of the boys hated him because he was different, and most of the girls wouldn't be seen with anyone so unpopular. Lisa McKendrick had a secret crush on him for a few years, but she also worried much of the time about her private nose-picking habit.

  By reading the thoughts of animals, he could always tell when a storm was coming. Animals knew a lot about weather.

  One year, when he was fourteen, he stopped off for hamburgers with two of his brothers and mentioned to Mr. Masterson and Mr. Hinthorn that they should bring their cattle in early because of a thunderstorm. The weatherman on the radio had predicted no storm.

  That night, every farm within a seventy-mile radius of the Sheffields' lost half their wheat. In anger and frustration, people blamed Wade because he'd warned them.

  Within a week, three farmers caught him alone on the way to school and beat him with pitchfork handles until his left leg and four ribs were broken. His oldest brother, Joshua, put him in the back of a Ford pickup and drove him to the Whitman County Hospital, where he was also diagnosed as suffering from a concussion. The next few weeks were hazy. He didn't remember much besides a lot of bright lights, but when he woke up, a miracle happened.

  Dr. Geoffrey Van Tassel leaned down over him and smiled.

  "Welcome back," the round-faced man said. "Tell me what I'm thinking."

  Wade had grown practiced at hiding the extent of his gift, but now he picked up bits and pieces of very focused thought patterns. "A garden," he whispered. "Strawberries that your mother planted a long time ago."

  The eyes above him grew warm. "I have an interesting proposition for you, young man, when you're feeling better."

  Wade often viewed that moment as the real beginning of his life. Six weeks later, he arrived at the Psychic Research Institute of Northern Colorado, on a set of rented crutches, and began to realize his own self-worth. Suddenly, being able to do something no one else could do had turned into a plus instead of a severe minus.

  Dr. Van Tassel was often with him then. Apparently, Wade talked a good deal while in his state of delirium. He'd been speaking aloud whatever the nurses happened to be thinking. Sheila Osborne, a young nursing student from the Psychic Institute, had been working on her internship at the Whitman County Hospital during Wade's stay.

  The night before first seeing him, she'd experienced the worst blind date of her life. The guy her best friend had fixed her up with looked like he belonged on the cover of Muscle Fitness. He wouldn't eat the popcorn she bought at the movies because it had salt and butter. He called her babe and lectured her most of the night about the best kin
d of workout for slimming down her thighs. And then he actually expected her to sleep with him after his cellulite comment.

  Slamming bedpans into the cupboard of a hospital room, she heard soft murmuring from the bed.

  "I don't have cellulite. And I was wearing Levi's. What would he know?"

  She stopped in shock. A semiconscious young man on the bed was rolling slowly in sweat-soaked sheets and whispering her recent thoughts. Forgetting her own hurt vanity, she leaned over him and wiped his face.

  "Yeah, I had Levi's on," she said. "What kind of shirt was I wearing?"

  "No shirt-that pink sweater your mom bought you last Christmas."

  His voice was barely audible, but she heard him. Ten minutes later, she was on the phone to Dr. Van Tassel in Colorado. "I think you'd better come up here. There's someone you need to see."

  That was the beginning. Sheila returned to the institute and remained his friend. Although he never did remember much about his stay at Whitman County, she related an embarrassing story about him exposing an affair between a prominent neurologist and his youngest male lab assistant. That hadn't gone over well in North Dakota.

  Wade found some of the experiments he participated in to be pointless. But he continued high school with other young people like himself. Well, not quite like himself. No one in the history of the institute had demonstrated anything close to Wade's telepathic ability. He was the golden boy. Everyone wanted to be like him. But as the years passed, they kept asking him a lot of redundant questions.

  "What do you see in my mind, Wade? Do you see words or pictures?"

  "I see what you feel. Pictures, I guess. I don't know."

  Scores of PhDs in fields he didn't understand wrote papers about him.

  The frightened, barely literate farm boy from North Dakota slowly fell away, and a self-assured, young-adult version of Wade took his place. In time, he began to verbalize his responses on a higher level.

  "What do you see in my mind, Wade? Do you see words or pictures?"

  "What do you see when I speak?" he answered. "Do you see words coming from my mouth? How does your mind know what I'm saying?"

  In his senior year of high school, he stopped studying for exams. Why should he study when the answers were right there in the teacher's head? He took Russian and began speaking the language fluently in three weeks just by concentrating on the instructor.

  He lost his virginity to Sheila, but then left quickly afterward when she began thinking that he'd been okay but didn't compare to her last boyfriend, Steve.

  His teachers started making him take his exams in a private room.

  But most of them understood his sometimes difficult behavior. He was different, and they did not expect his schooling to be normal.

  However, when new arrivals came to the institute, he was often put in charge of helping the young children adjust to their new environment. Early on, Wade exhibited strong-almost obsessive-tendencies toward protection over the institute's children, especially any who had been abused or neglected by their families… due to their abilities. He remembered all too well how it felt to be blamed and punished for his gift.

  The children responded well to his assurances that everything would be different now, and he always let them talk to him, even though he could simply read their thoughts.

  One thing Dr. Van Tassel did discover was that if he, or anyone else, put a conscious effort into blocking Wade, it wasn't difficult to lock the young man out. But the doctor never stopped thinking about the possibilities for Wade's gift.

  "You could be anything you wanted, my boy. Anything."

  The problem was that Wade didn't know what he wanted. At nineteen, his self-assured nature wavered when he was faced with choosing a university. The memories of fear and ostracism from his childhood had never quite passed away. The people in Colorado seemed to like him, and Dr. Van Tassel was the closest thing he had to a father. He hadn't seen his own since leaving for the institute.

  His first thought was to go into social services-specializing in child protection. But he wasn't certain that his motivation was correct, and he had no idea where he wished to attend college.

  The issue eradicated itself when he found out that he didn't have to make a choice. The institute arranged a full scholarship for him at Colorado State University in Fort Collins. All he had to do was go back and work with Dr. Van Tassel during summers and breaks on new tests or research projects. Relief flooded through him. That was safe and perfect.

  "What are you majoring in, son?"

  "I don't know. What should I major in?"

  "That's up to you. As long as you continue working with the doctors at the institute several times a year, you can choose anything you want."

  More choices. All his life he had hidden behind one wall or another. Now he was going back into mainstream society, where people had once beaten him with pitchfork handles.

  College turned out to be quite different than he expected, though-full of pretty girls, liberal professors who questioned the government, and law students in black wool coats walking past Peace Corps soon-to-bes. It was amazing. But the pull to remain part of the institute, part of a safer world, still influenced him. He decided to major in psychology.

  Dating, football games, and a part-time job in the university bookstore became part of his life and made him feel normal. Knowing how his girlfriends really felt about him wasn't an insurmountable problem. He simply took it for granted that even people deeply in love had evil thoughts about each other once in a while. He had long since grown used to reading the casual malice behind someone's smile. Those emotions were human.

  His friends and lovers, however, didn't take his abilities so lightly. In his junior year, he fell hard for an anthropology student named Karen. She had long, brown hair and hazel eyes. He loved even the tiny freckles on her nose.

  "This isn't working," she told him after six months. "I can't stand that you know what I'm thinking every minute, and you're a blank wall to me. I never know what you're feeling."

  "Then ask me."

  "I shouldn't have to."

  That particular brand of pain and loss was new to him. He flunked statistics and had to retake it in his senior year.

  After that, nothing of real note happened in his life until midway through graduate school. When he was twenty-three and working on his master's in developmental psychology, an inspector from the Los Angeles Police Department flew out and made an appointment to speak to him while he was on summer break at the institute. Dr. Van Tassel instructed Wade to make an effort to stay out of the inspector's mind.

  "I'm Will Redington," said a tall man in a business suit, extending his hand. "Dr. Van Tassel's told me a little about you. We need you to do something for us."

  "What?" Wade asked, immediately suspicious. This situation smelled as if he would have to make a decision.

  "Just listen to one of our departmental psychologists talk to an officer," Redington said calmly. "That's all we want you to do. You'll be in a separate room with me, on the other side of a two-way mirror. You can see and hear everything that goes on. I just need you to tell me what the officer is thinking during the interview."

  "Is he being accused of something?"

  "I can't tell you that."

  Wade looked to Dr. Van Tassel for help.

  "It's your choice, son. You don't have to do anything you don't want to."

  "What would you do?"

  "I'd use my gift to help as many people as possible."

  That wasn't much help. The inspector looked as if he flossed with a bicycle chain.

  "Okay," Wade said uncertainly. "When?"

  "Two days." Redington smiled. "We'll fly to California tomorrow."

  Two days later, Wade found himself in an air-conditioned Los Angeles precinct. The interview room turned out much like Wade expected it to be-small and windowless, with an empty table and chairs. The officer in question's name was Mark Taylor. Wade was placed in an adjoining room on the othe
r side of the two-way mirror Redington had promised. He was told to watch and listen to what went on.

  Officer Taylor had a stoic, passive expression and answered the questions being asked him with all the emotion of a brass chess piece.

  "Mark," the psychologist began, "how are you feeling about Christopher's death right now?"

  "No one forgets something like that right away," Taylor answered. "I'm angry, but I'm dealing. It doesn't affect my job performance."

  His answer sounded healthy and logical. Wade gently reached out into the man's mind, and then fell forward out of his chair in shock. Hatred and rage and visions of violent death flashed before him like an NC-17 film.

  "Wade." Someone was shaking him. He looked up to see Inspector Redington's face looming over him. "What do you see?"

  "Christopher…" Wade choked. "He's dead. They cut his throat open and pulled his tongue through the hole."

  Slight surprise registered on Redington's face. "Yes, we know that. But what is Officer Taylor thinking?"

  "They killed Christopher," Wade shouted, "and you don't even care!"

  "Sssssh, keep your voice down."

  Wade started shaking. Christopher was Mark's partner. They'd been working under cover with some small-time cocaine dealers, trying to flush out big game.

  "Who killed Christopher?" Redington asked suddenly.

  Wade glared at him. "You know. You all know."

  "Then tell me."

  "Juan Merinchez and the rest of those spics."

  Wade seemed to be lost inside Mark's mind.

  "And Juan deserves to die, doesn't he?" Redington asked.

  "He's already dead, you worthless piece of shit. Somebody had to handle it."

  "If he's dead, then where's his body?"

  "Eddy's Junkyard, in the trunk of a 'sixty-seven Fairlane."

  Redington went to the door quickly and spoke to someone outside. Then Officer Taylor was taken away from the little room on the other side of the mirror.

  "Wade," Redington said, "are you all right?"

  Ugly pictures moving like worms crawled around the inside of Wade's skull. He couldn't stop shaking or get up off the floor. Redington yelled out, "Somebody get me a glass of water!"