He dropped Wade and pulled a gun, a revolver.
"Freeze."
I couldn't talk. I couldn't separate my own past from Wade's. Could Maggie feel him, too?
Wade raised his head off the ground and looked at me. I remembered that he was tall, but the thin quality of his face suddenly struck me as beautiful and eerie at the same time. He was part of me.
"You," he whispered.
Why couldn't Maggie feel him?
"Put the girl down and step back," Dominick's voice echoed, flat and ugly.
No, he'll kill you.
Was that me or Wade? It didn't matter, and it was too late. Maggie whirled around, still holding me, and tried to run back down the alley. An explosion shook the graffiti-covered brick walls. The ground rushed up to my face, but it didn't hurt.
Crawling to all fours, I stared at a bloody, gaping hole in Maggie's back.
This can't be happening.
Was that me or Wade?
Dominick's footsteps sounded behind me. I half turned to see him, my mind screaming to try and grab hold of the gun, but I still couldn't clear my thoughts. When he reached down toward us, a flash of wavy, brown-black hair brushed over my cheek as Maggie suddenly pushed up off the ground and whirled around, swinging hard with her left hand and making a grab for his throat with her right. Her swing connected, and the gun landed on the ground with a thud.
"No," I tried to tell her. "Run."
But their bodies seemed locked together now, and they both fell backward. I could hear Dominick's desperate breathing. Undeads aren't supernaturally stronger than mortals. Pain stops people from running too fast or lifting too much or hitting too hard. But we don't have active nerve synapses, so that type of pain doesn't stop us.
I tried to crawl toward them, but the world started spinning, and my eyesight blurred again. When my vision cleared, he had her pinned down. Even without the pain to stop her, she wasn't a match for him. Creatures like us relied on our gifts. We rarely had to fight.
The light from a rooftop glowed off her dress and turned it dark orange. She looked so soft and violent. Blood covered one side of Dominick's face, but it must have been Maggie's.
She hissed and clawed at him-fighting for me-trying to freak him out. I couldn't move. Wade was still in my head, but out of my sight. Dominick had Maggie pinned with one hand, and a glint flashed as he managed to pull a long machete from a sheath under his coat. With his face locked in a mad grimace, he shoved the edge down against her throat.
"No!" I tried to scream, but the word came out in a rasp.
He didn't hear me. She made a gurgling sound. He kept wildly pushing the blade down, down through her throat to the bone at the nape of her neck. I heard a loud crack.
It's too bad undead can't cry.
The force of a thousand lives burst from Maggie's body, and Wade screamed. Maybe I did, too. Waves and waves jolted through and over and past me until I lay twitching on the alley floor. I don't know how much time passed. Seemed like hours.
Dominick knelt beside Wade. "What is it? What's wrong?" he kept saying.
Wade's consciousness was no longer inside me. His head lay at a twisted angle, and his eyes were closed. Maggie's headless body lay on the ground by a trash can.
She died for me. I struggled to my feet, choking in disbelief.
Dominick looked up in surprise and scrambled toward his absent gun. His china-blue eyes and black facial stubble burned a permanent picture in my memory. Murderer. I couldn't fight him. I didn't know how. Instead, I turned and ran like a child down the alley.
He yelled something after me, but didn't follow. I stumbled on, lost in a nightmare. Maggie was dead, and I'd led her killers here. Now there were four of us. Only four.
My first thought was to race home and move William, but then my head cleared. Of all the places in the country, how had they known to look for me in Seattle? I could think of only one connection. Moving wasn't the answer. Running wasn't the answer.
I had to kill Wade.
Chapter 8
Ten minutes later, I doubled back about two blocks behind them and crouched down. I waited for Wade to wake up, not knowing how close he needed to be for mental contact. I wanted to stay as near as safety allowed, but with enough distance to get away from him if he tried to track me down.
It was hard not to think about Maggie, hard not to wallow in hatred. I'd never seen a man so unaffected by Maggie's beauty. Dominick hadn't even flinched.
As my mind ran back over the horrible scene of him pinning her to the ground, I began to focus on a few things more clearly. He hadn't seemed surprised when his gunshot didn't kill her, even though he'd caught her square in the back. The memory of his face floated in front of me so solid and sharp it might have been there. The emotions flowing across it had run a rapid course-fear, hysteria, hatred-but not surprise, never once surprise. Why? Wade didn't know what I was, so he couldn't possibly know about Maggie. Yet Dominick severed her head. How had he known to do that?
The only way to permanently destroy one of us is to somehow destroy the body: decapitation, fire, explosion… A stake through the heart is not enough. I've read that old European vampire hunters believed after staking an undead they also had to cut its head off-something about saving the soul. A stake through the heart would probably incapacitate any of us long enough for some zealot to perform a decapitation. The shock alone would cause temporary paralysis.
But how had Dominick known what to do?
It suddenly occurred to me that his gun had been lying on the ground somewhere close to me after the psychic pain of Maggie's death faded away. All I'd had to do was pick it up and shoot him. But no, I'd run off like a scared rabbit.
Something began stirring softly inside my head. Wade was awake. Without attempting to push him from my mind, I thought about nothing. I pictured a huge black hole covering the world. He would still be able to read my presence, but hopefully couldn't pinpoint my location or extract any information.
I didn't try to read his thoughts or do anything besides crouch there, picturing a black hole. He cast about for me in weak thought patterns and then stopped, probably exhausted. I moved toward the alley until Dominick's voice became audible.
"Just stop it then! She's long gone by now. If I had half a brain, I would've gone after her. Jesus, Wade, I thought you were dead."
When Wade answered, he startled me. Dominick's voice sounded exactly like he looked-mean and ugly. But Wade's voice was clear, kind of breathy. It didn't match his roughly scattered thought patterns.
"You killed her, Dom! You killed that woman. What are we going to do?"
"We're going to get the hell out of here. Can you walk?"
"We can't just leave her. There's a bullet from your gun in her back."
"No, come here and look. It went straight through her."
"Then it's still here somewhere. You know the routine. They'll find it."
"Come on, Wade. She looks like just another hooker. Nobody's gonna search this alley."
I'd never seen a dead vampire before. I mean… we're undead, but Maggie was dead now. Edward once told me that our bodies would begin cracking within moments, and then start turning to ash. This would eradicate any evidence of her existence. I had a sick feeling Dominick knew that or he wouldn't have been so flippant about the missing bullet.
Their argument grew muffled, and I could pick out only bits and pieces. Then they started moving. I kept the black hole in my mind in case Wade tried to search again, but I was beginning to realize that he didn't know much more about focusing his psyche than I did.