"Stop it, Leisha." She closed her eyes.
"Don't you ever wonder why we all came from the same generation? That we were all made within thirty years of each other?"
"It doesn't matter!"
"How can you say that?" I was angry. It seemed so foolish to fear discussing our own state of existence. "You think you're some woman of the world and I'm this ignorant little girl who doesn't know anything beyond caring for an old man. But you follow Julian's and Philip's laws. You don't ask any questions, and you've been rotting in this house by yourself because they said you should!"
My outburst disturbed her, but I realized that even if she did know more, she wasn't going to tell me. Opening her eyes again, she stared at me-as if she was frightened.
I got up and moved to her. "You're glad we're here, aren't you? Otherwise you never would have called Philip."
"What do you want me to say?" Her low, breathy voice shook slightly. "That I didn't expect things to turn out like this? Okay, I didn't. That I'm scared you might take William and leave? Okay, I am. Is that what you want?"
I got down on my knees and laid my head in her lap. "We're not going anywhere if you want us to stay. But those cops are still looking for me."
"I don't care," she said. "Could that man who's tracking you be one of us?"
"No, I'd have picked that up. He's confused."
"I don't think he'll find you here, then. Not if he has to be in the same room."
She reached out and began stroking my hair. I stopped talking and enjoyed her attention. Her emotions toward me were difficult to read, but I seemed to fit in a niche somewhere between sister and daughter. William had become father or grandfather. We were forming a family. I thought it natural. She thought it strange.
"Let's get dressed and go hunting," I said suddenly. "We need to get out for a while."
"Should we wake William and feed him first?"
Her concern for the old man touched me. Last week, she and I had set up rabbit hutches in the backyard. Her willingness to help with something so menial surprised me. But she had simply said, "It's been a long time since I built anything."
"No," I said to her question about feeding William. "Let him sleep. I'll feed him when we get back."
Maggie called for a cab. Twenty minutes later, we were both made-up, miniskirted, and out the door. We decided to head back for Madison.
The streets downtown were busy. I didn't feel like sitting in a bar, so we just walked around talking to people we knew. Maggie was still a bit shaky about our earlier conversation. I didn't want to hurt or confuse her, but she could be such a sheep sometimes.
The streetlights felt good.
"Why did you leave Philip?" I asked suddenly. I'm sure she was sick of my questions, but now that the floodgates were open, I couldn't seem to stop.
She didn't brush me off. Instead, she kept walking, looking for words. "You had to know him before he was turned. We had one of those stupid, storybook romances where he was willing to give up his title and his family home just to marry me." She smiled cynically. "It was all quite romantic unless you knew the whole truth. His father was a bastard, beat him with a riding crop from the day he learned to walk… even burned him once with a lit cigar. His mother was no help, too spineless to do anything besides needlepoint. Philip needed an escape."
"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.