Blood Memories

CHAPTER 10
Wade pulled away from my mind suddenly and shut me out. For a second I felt disoriented. Who was I?
“Eleisha,” he said aloud.
The past few hours came rushing back. Maggie was dead. I glanced at Wade’s watch. An hour had passed. An hour, and I knew his life story—or most of it. I braced both hands against the cheap carpet.
“Let me back in. What happened after you found the bodies in Edward’s cellar? Did you tell anyone?”
His narrow face glowed softly in the darkness. He didn’t say anything.
“What’s wrong?” I asked. “Why did you push me out?”
“I always wondered what that must feel like,” he breathed. “I’ve read so many minds, judging sanity by what I see, but no one has ever . . . What do you think of me now?”
The intensity of his question threw me. I was worried about getting William out of Dominick’s reach, and Maggie’s death kept flashing by like a real-life horror film. Somehow, Wade wanted me to turn my thoughts to him, to the questions and fears that had haunted him most of his life. No, it wasn’t even that. He didn’t seem conscious of such a self-centered desire. But in one hour, he had poured his life—his private life—all over the floor for me to see.
How else could he feel? Yet such concern was difficult, almost impossible for me to achieve. I was a survivor.
Was my human life so far behind me that I no longer understood it? Maggie had told me, “I once lived with a professional baseball player for eight months.” The concept had stunned me. Could she have comforted Wade? Could she have conjured up pretty words and put his mind at ease?
“What do you want me to say?”
He blinked. “I don’t know. Say anything. Now do you understand why I’ve been following you?”
“No, you shut me out too soon.”
“It hurt to relive all that. It started hurting too much, and I couldn’t tell what you were feeling.” His voice began to grow excited. Pale streetlight from outside the window washed over his hair, making its fine strands turn white. “It was you in the house that day, wasn’t it? You felt him die, too, didn’t you?”
The words cut like a sharp edge into my eyes. “Yes.”
“What was he? What are you?”
“I can’t tell you. I came here to kill you so you wouldn’t follow us anymore.”
“Us?”
“Stay away from me, Wade. I mean it.”
“This isn’t happening like I’d planned.” The pain in his words almost moved me.
“What do you mean, ‘planned’?”
He suddenly turned away and sat half facing the bed. “I took the painting with me when we left the house that day. That’s why I shut you out. I didn’t want you to see that part of the memory. The painting was physical evidence, and I took it.”
“Why?”
“Because I couldn’t stop looking at it. I kept asking Dom to touch it and tell me things about you. The girl in the painting had to be the same presence I felt inside the house, even if the painting was a hundred and thirty-six years old.”
I stood up suddenly and started backing toward the window. “What do you want?”
He looked at me helplessly, the tiny lines in his forehead crinkling. “Someone to see inside my head . . . for once.”
“Why?”
Maybe he really didn’t know, because the helplessness on his face turned to misery. Moving back over slowly, I crouched down next to him. “Dominick knows more than he’s telling you. He knows what I am. He knew what Maggie was.”
“What do you mean?”
“He knew how to kill her.”
“He shot her in the back.”
“Yeah, and then he cut her head off.”
Wade’s expression shifted to confusion, as if he struggled to remember. “She attacked him.”
“You were so out of it you don’t know what happened.” I paused, determined to learn the rest of his story. “What did you do after finding those bodies in Edward’s cellar?”
He blinked and then looked down at the floor. “Once all six victims were recovered, we turned in the license-plate numbers on the Mazda and a few other cars, but Dom didn’t think we’d get much out of that. So that night, we just started driving around. By then he believed me . . . that I’d felt someone else at the house, and he wanted me to try and pick up your location psychically. But he was talking crazy . . . He was so worked up that I just went along.” Wade stopped and took a few loud breaths. “We looked in restaurants, bars, alleys, stores . . .” he said. “We just happened to walk into Mickey’s—pure chance. My knees almost buckled. Nobody’d ever pushed into my head before.”
“Why do you keep saying that? I didn’t push into your mind.”
“That’s what it feels like.”
I thought about that for a minute. Maybe Wade and I couldn’t help getting tangled up in each other’s thought patterns. Maybe there was some mental magnet between us that we hadn’t learned how to control.
“But how did you know to come here?” I asked. “Why would you come to Seattle? I didn’t leave a trace.”
“How did we ...? Oh, that. Yes, you did. The next morning we checked back on the Mazda’s registration, along with a few other cars, and decided to check out some addresses. When we got to twenty-seventeen Freemont Drive, Dominick . . . he got agitated. We went up to the house, but no one answered the door, so he picked the lock—I told him not to—and we found a lot of British antiques inside. He touched a hairbrush in the bathroom and went into convulsions.”
That was almost too much for me. The thought of Dominick breaking into our house and digging through our things made me tense up. “Nothing in that house would have clued you in to looking for us in Seattle.”
When I said “us” again he glanced over curiously but didn’t push it.
“No.” He shook his head. “I dragged Dom back outside . . . By then he seemed to be having waking nightmares. We hadn’t slept in two nights, and I was getting dizzy. We went back to the precinct, and I ran a check on all the airlines out of Portland. I caught two tickets to Seattle charged on a MasterCard registered to a Shelby Drake at twenty-seventeen Freemont Drive . . .” He faltered, looking up at me.
My stomach lurched. How could I have been that stupid? I led them right to Maggie. It was my fault.
He went on. “Dom was never the same after we left your house. He told Captain McNickel and our sergeant everything . . . They put him on suspension pending psychiatric investigation.”
“McNickel did that? To Dominick?”
At the time, neither Wade nor I found it strange that I spoke of Captain McNickel as if I knew him. The visions from Wade’s past were as real to me as they were to him.
“Dom just sounded crazy, even to me, and I believed him. The next day he quit and told me he was driving up to Seattle to look for you.”
“And you quit, too?”
“What else could I do? He’s my friend, and he was right. They’re all too blind to look for the truth.”
“That’s Dom talking, not you.”
He winced, and I sat there watching the streetlights from outside reflect off his cheekbone. I didn’t hate him anymore. Maybe I couldn’t feel like Maggie. Maybe I couldn’t understand his nature or comfort him, but I felt that I knew him, and I wouldn’t hurt someone I knew.
“You have to stop tracking me, Wade. If Dominick finds me, he’ll kill me.”
“But what are you? Tell me what you are.”
“I can’t.”
His fingers dug into the carpet. I watched the blue swirl of veins under the flesh on his hands. “You’re so perfect . . . The images I pick up from you don’t match. I can’t even follow some of your thoughts. So cold. They aren’t human.”
Did he even know how close he was to the truth?
I stood up. “Wade, please. If you care about Dom, you’ll get him to stop tracking me, or I’ll kill him. Don’t let him know about this. Just pretend you can’t find me. I’ll find a way to disappear, and you’ll never see me again.”
“Is that what you think I want?” he asked harshly, sounding frustrated. When I didn’t answer, his voice lowered. “So none of this, none of the trip down my memory lane, means anything to you?”
What did he want?
I walked to the door. “Just keep him away from me. I didn’t ask you to quit your job and come here. I didn’t ask to see your life. Remember that.”
Before he could answer I slipped out the door. But his narrow, intelligent face lingered in my mind, his troubled expression.
What did he expect me to do?
In the back of my mind, a very small part of me wanted to know.