Barb Hendee: Blood Memories

"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.

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."