by Hendee, Barb
Within moments, he spotted a pretty redhead wearing a pink dress and tan sandals. Pink was a bad color on her, but otherwise, she appealed to him. She was looking at bras.
He took a black lace bra off the rack and moved up behind her.
“Pardon me,” he said, and he let his gift begin to flow.
She stiffened and then turned around, staring at him. Up close, she was quite lovely, with ivory skin and a few tiny freckles.
“I am buying a present for my sister,” he said. “Can you help me decide?”
She glanced at the bra in his hand. “You’re buying that for your sister?”
He smiled and let the power of his gift increase. “Maybe not. But I am buying a present.”
Her eyes were getting bigger as she focused on his face, as if she couldn’t believe he was real.
He picked up a cream lace bra by Vanity Fair. “This one is good too. Come with me to the dressing room,” he whispered. “We can see them in a better light.”
She followed him without a word, without a question, as if it was the most natural thing in the world to follow a complete stranger into the dressing room in the Macy’s lingerie department. He checked inside first, to make sure the corridor between the stalls was empty. To his glee, he could hear several women trying on clothes behind the doors, but no one could see him. Their veiled presence gave this part of the game more spice. Looking down at the red-haired girl, he put a finger to his lips, urging her to silence, and led her inside a stall. He closed the door.
Let Eleisha try to top this!
The girl was breathing hard and watching his face expectantly, and then suddenly Philip’s sense of fun drained away. Alone with her, he was overwhelmed by a desire to hunt in the same fashion he always had. To put one hand over her mouth, bite down savagely, and drain her until she stopped moving. He wanted to feel her fear, to feel her struggle, to see all her memories, and feel her despair in the moment she realized she could not stop him and that she was going to die.
But he could not do this.
Eleisha might come in and find the mess.
So, instead, he reached out with his thoughts and entered the girl’s mind.
“You are so tired,” he whispered. “Sleep.”
He caught her as she dropped, and he positioned her carefully on a small bench attached to the wall. He fed from her wrist this time, focusing on keeping her asleep, taking no joy in feeding at all. The blood tasted like memories of bland water to him, almost like nothing. He saw a few flickering images of a dirty kitchen, a mother smoking a cigarette, a dented Honda Civic . . . a boyfriend named Ricky.
Philip took only what he needed, and then he used his teeth to connect the holes—as Eleisha had taught him. Looking around the dressing room stall, he saw some decorative square boards painted purple and nailed at equal intervals up and down the door. Quietly, he reached out and jerked one loose, exposing the nail.
Then he reached into the girl’s mind again, erasing her memory of meeting him and replacing it with one where she entered the stall, cut herself on the nail, and fainted from the blood and pain.
Then he slipped out, left the dressing room, and went to find Eleisha—still standing among the nightgowns and slippers.
“Everything okay?” Her tone suggested worry.
“Yes, go and look. She’s still alive and not lying alone in the street.”
“I don’t need to look. Did you alter her memory?”
“Of course!”
She reached out and touched his arm. “What’s wrong then?”
“Nothing.”
She tried to smile. “So it’s my turn?”
He tried to smile back. “Yes, your turn.”
Rather than make the hunt more fun, his game had only made him hungrier for what he’d lost.
As they walked back onto the dark street outside, he knew he would need to go hunting alone—and soon.
Wade sat on the floor of the empty sanctuary, looking at the open letter in his hand. Eleisha and Philip had gone hunting, and for the first time in five nights, she’d been too preoccupied to check the mailbox.
But after she left, Wade checked it.
The first thing he’d seen was a DVD he’d ordered for Philip, and then he saw the letter lying there beneath it. He recognized the handwriting.
He’d stuffed it inside his shirt and then gone back inside with no intention of opening it, and he found ways to keep himself busy. The new television had finally arrived, so he hooked everything up, noting how homey the sitting room in the downstairs apartment was becoming. He much preferred Eleisha’s taste in furniture to Maggie’s, as Eleisha tended to choose pieces that were functional and comfortable as opposed to impressive. She’d ordered a sage green couch with a lot of pillows. She also liked little tables and lamps to read by.
But no matter how hard he tried, he could not stop thinking about the letter.
He went back upstairs, through the sanctuary and then outside, through the gate to the street, looking up and down. Eleisha was nowhere in sight. If only she would come home, he’d hand the letter over, and then he was certain she’d let him read it. But to open her mail? Something addressed to her? That felt wrong.
He walked slowly back to the sanctuary, closed the doors behind himself, and sank down onto the floor.
He felt torn between Eleisha and Philip. He didn’t have to read their minds to see where they stood. Eleisha trusted Rose completely. Philip clearly believed this whole arrangement was a trap.
The problem was, Wade had no idea which of them was right, and he wasn’t used to leaning upon his own instincts. All his life, Wade could read minds. Other people could not feel him doing this, so they couldn’t stop him. He was never invasive without a reason, but he’d been a police psychologist, with tough calls to make every day. Knowing what was going on inside somebody’s head was a unique advantage in offering diagnoses.
However, Eleisha and Philip could feel him inside their thoughts, and if they chose, they could keep him out . . . and the three of them had set up some ground rules anyway.
No, if he was going to protect Eleisha, and himself, from a trap, he was going to have to rely on his own judgment. What if he didn’t read the letter, didn’t know what was in it before giving it to her, and his caution resulted in her being hurt?
Reaching inside his shirt, he took the letter out and opened it. Even while doing this, a part of him felt it was wrong, and another part felt that it was the only right thing to do.
He read.
Eleisha,
I cannot tell you what your letter meant to me. The church . . . the underground, sounds like a haven and a fortress.
There are so many things I long to say that cannot be written down on paper. You keep promising the danger is over, that you brought Julian to his knees and sent him away. But you speak of things you do not understand . . . could not understand.
I still tremble on the nights I must leave my apartment.
You have shown trust in me, and it is my turn to show trust in you. Because of you, I believe that we do not have to exist alone anymore. I reside at:
2743 Jones Street Apt. 2-A, San Francisco, CA
I will expect you soon.
With hope,
Rose
Wade sat staring at the page, and a feeling he could not explain washed over him: that Rose was the wisest of people, that she could be absolutely trusted, that her words rang true.
He lowered the letter and looked away. The feeling passed.
What was that?
He shook his head to clear it.
Then he heard Eleisha’s voice outside, and he shoved the letter inside his shirt again. The front doors opened.
Mary materialized just inside the churchyard, around the back, keeping well hidden among the rosebushes. In her current state of existence, one thing that surprised her was than anyone could see her if she changed locations without knowing exactly where she would appear . . . and she ended up materia
lizing out in the open.
She’d scared the hell out of a couple of old ladies at the Seattle Center before realizing they could see her—and then she blinked out again. But she was learning tricks to avoid this.
She hadn’t told Julian, but she was learning how to manipulate her abilities far beyond the scant instructions he’d given her.
For instance, she’d found that she could materialize right inside the walls of a building. This didn’t hurt her, and no one could see her. The problem was that she couldn’t see or hear either. But she was discovering new ways to spy and eavesdrop without being spotted, and she was gaining a much stronger grasp on wishing herself into “nothingness” or a state of limbo where she was invisible to people until she either wished to materialize again . . . or Julian called her.
She thought of this as being able to “blink in and out.”
She’d also learned that she had a powerful advantage over the other spirits who’d remained here in what she called “the real world.” From what she understood—by talking to other ghosts—spirits of the dead could exist on three different planes: 1) the real world of the living, 2) the gray in-between plane, and 3) the afterlife. She had no idea what the afterlife looked like, as she had never seen it, but during her time on the gray plane, she’d come to believe the vast majority of ghosts ended up there, as she once could have . . . had she been willing to leave the in-between plane of the spirits who refused to accept death, who still longed to find a way back here, back to the living.
While first hunting for Eleisha in Seattle, she realized she couldn’t yet tell the difference between various forms of the dead. So she’d ended up finding several other ghosts. They weren’t common here in the real world.
But the few she’d met had all been trapped here the moment they died by strong ties to either a person or a place, and many ghosts spent their time in the relaxed state of “nothingness” beyond the sight of living people. However . . . being tied down to a person or place, they could not move with the ease that she could, even if they wished to. As of yet, she hadn’t met a single spirit who’d crossed over from the other side, like she had.
She was unique.
She liked it here. She could go anywhere. See anything. She wasn’t tied to anyone.
Well, that wasn’t true. She was tied to Julian. Bastard. He hated her. She could see it in his dirty face. But when he threatened to send her back, she believed him. She was terrified of going back to that ugly gray plane of nothing, with only other ghosts like herself who shouldn’t be dead . . . who knew they couldn’t be dead, who struggled and fought and wept to find a way to get back here.
She was here.
And she wasn’t leaving.
Once she was done with Julian’s tasks and he released her, she was going home to her parents. They were never abandoning her at home again. They were never getting rid of her.
She’d considered popping in on them several times but decided against it just yet. She wanted to wait until she had her freedom first. Then, boy, would they be surprised. This was all their fault! They left her to go see some stupid art opening, not even asking if she wanted to go. They never asked her if she wanted to go with them, and her dad was selfish enough to turn his phone off so she couldn’t even call. They’d practically murdered her. They’d be sorry soon.
Looking around, she realized she was alone outside the church and floated up a few feet to look in one of the stained windows. Peering through a piece of yellow glass, she could see the blond guy sitting on the floor of the empty sanctuary, reading a sheet of paper.
He suddenly looked up and crammed the paper in his pocket. The front doors opened and Eleisha and the other one—Philip—walked inside.
Mary had to find a way to listen. Julian was getting sick of her just reporting on their whereabouts, and he had started demanding she give him reports on what they said to each other. Ugh.
She put her face against a piece of red glass and let the side of her head pass through just enough so she could hear what was being said.
No one would see her against these thick, colored windows.
“Of course you won,” Eleisha said, opening the front doors. “It was no contest. The best I could do was lure a 7-Eleven clerk into a back room.”
She’d cut her own hand and then gone into an empty convenience store and turned on her gift, and the clerk had fallen all over himself to help her. Philip’s success had been much more clever and creative.
But she hoped he would not wish to play his game again, and she could not understand why he’d been so quiet afterward. She chatted to try to cheer him. She was half-tempted to try reading his mind, but he’d feel her and push her out if he was hiding something private. What could he be hiding? She had agreed to his “more fun” change of plan tonight. She’d done exactly what he wanted.
Then she stepped inside the church and was surprised to see Wade sitting on the floor of the empty sanctuary.
He stood up. “Philip, I’ve got the DVD player hooked up to the TV, and a movie came in that I think you’ll like, an early nineties action film called Universal Soldier with Jean-Claude Van Damme. Lots of machine guns and some good hand-to-hand fight scenes.”
Philip took a step toward him, the dark look on his face vanishing. “Oh, Wade . . .”
He stopped. Philip didn’t know how to express gratitude. It wasn’t that he didn’t feel it; he’d just lost the ability to express it long ago.
“Will you watch it with me?” he asked.
“Sure, just go downstairs and get the film put in, and I’ll be right down. I want to talk to Eleisha for a minute.”
A tense pitch in his voice made Eleisha pause and look at him. Philip bounded off down the stairs, and she waited until he was out of earshot.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
Wade tightened his mouth in indecision, and then he blurted out, “A letter arrived from Rose today. I read it.”
As he said this, he pulled a crumpled letter from his shirt and held it out.
Rose sent a letter! And so quickly.
“What did she say? Did she tell us what to do?” Eleisha took the letter and scanned it, exclaiming, “An address! She wants us to come, and she’s trusted us with her address.”
Her mind drifted into the future, of finding Rose in her apartment, bringing her here, making a room for her, building their community . . .
“Aren’t you angry?” Wade asked in surprise.
“About what?”
“That I read her letter, and it was written to you.”
“I don’t mind. I already showed you all her letters. I only wish Philip would read them. Then he’d understand.”
Suddenly, Wade tensed up again. He reached out and took the letter from her. “That’s right. Philip hasn’t actually read any of these, has he?”
“No, except that first short one. I wish he would.”
“Eleisha, what is Rose’s gift?”
The question threw her. Why would he ask that? She shook her head. “I don’t know. We never talk about things like that.”
“Is she telepathic?”
“I don’t know that either, but if she’s not, then she’s still killing to feed and you’ll have to teach her how to wake her abilities, like you woke mine and Philip’s. You will, won’t you?”
“Of course I will.”
She smiled. “I knew it. You’ll be saving so many lives.”
He stared at her. Had that never occurred to him before? That by teaching her, by teaching Philip, he was saving mortals who would have died at their hands?
A plan, a vision, had been growing in her mind for weeks now. Sinking down to the floor, she motioned for him to sit as well.
Slowly, still staring at her, he followed, sitting crossed-legged with his knees close to hers.
“We shouldn’t just stop with Rose,” she whispered. “What if she’s right and there are others like her, alone, like Philip was? We can find them. We can bring them her
e, and you can wake their telepathy, and I can teach them to hunt without killing. We can build a community here.”
She was frightened, telling him this, wondering how he would react.
Currently, Wade’s life lacked purpose, and he needed a purpose. But Eleisha also knew she’d been somewhat deceptive lately, first by hiding her communication with Rose for a month, and then hiding her plans to buy the church—and then springing it on him while he stood in the basement . . . and now trying to win his agreement for her own vision, for her hopes.
“That’s what you want?” he asked. “To build a community here? For you and me to find hidden members of your kind and teach them to feed without killing?”
At a loss for words, she nodded.
He looked away, but he wasn’t angry. She could see him thinking on her words, and she just sat there for a while, letting him think.
“Are you with me?” she asked finally.
He looked back at her, studying her face.
“So . . . what do we do now?” he asked.
“First, we go to San Francisco. We get Rose.”
Julian was alone at the manor. When he woke up a few nights past, both the remaining servants were gone. He could not feel their warmth from anywhere on the estate.
The revelation annoyed him. He’d have to contact the agency again. If he was going to reside here, the main floor should be kept clean.
But for now, he rather enjoyed having the entire place to himself, and he wandered outside, among the abandoned stables. He’d spent more time on the estate this past month than the previous hundred years. He owned a town house in Yorkshire, but he’d come to prefer the south of France these past few decades.
Yet now, he felt safe only here.
It had been so long since he’d had anything to fear that he’d forgotten the cold safety of Cliffbracken. Foolish really; with the possible exception of his familiarity with the entire place, he was no safer here than anywhere else. But he could not bring himself to travel again. Not yet.