Blood Memories

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.
She came out, handing me a pair of black pumps. “You are interesting, little one. Just don’t make me regret any of this.”
“We should hunt,” I said. Then I looked at the shoes and shook my head. “Something flat.”
“Flat? With that dress? You need a heel.”
Upon this point, I would not budge. “No. I won’t wear anything I can’t run in. Find me something flat.”
She frowned and dug out a pair of lightweight, flat sandals.
“Good,” I said, putting them on. “Where’s your car?”
She seemed slightly put off by the question and said, “I called a cab.”
“You don’t have a car?”
“I don’t drive.”
Really? And she’d accused me of not learning enough. I let it go.
William sat by the fire in his leather chair when we walked past him toward the front door. Maggie touched his sleeve and said, “We won’t be long.”
Rejoicing inwardly, I knew that somehow, in some way, a very quiet little battle had been won with me as the victor. An hour ago this woman would have gladly dropped us into a pit. Now she seemed concerned for William’s feelings and was letting us live in her home.
I watched her open the door and followed her out into the cold night air. Everything around us glowed with life. Looking at her, I felt careless and wild. We both wanted to watch each other and learn, to get lost in the hunt.