In Memories We Fear (5 page)

“Philip,” she began, uncertain how to even broach the image in her mind. But they could be leaving for London as early as tomorrow night, and then they would all be embroiled in a difficult search. “I wanted to try something new tonight . . . to try showing you a memory.”

He dropped down into the chair beside her bed and pulled his boots off. “You’ve shown me memories.”

“Not like this. I want to try showing you a memory I saw in someone else.”

He stopped moving, and the muscles in his arms tensed. “Who?”

“Robert.”

As soon as she said it, she’d let out a secret she couldn’t take back. Philip looked up, and she wasn’t sure what she saw in his eyes. Anger or anxiety? Maybe both.

“Robert showed you his memories?” He bit the words off. “How many?”

She stood up and hurried over, crouching down beside him. Sharing memories was a deeply personal act. “More than he wanted. We got locked inside his past, and they just kept coming. Don’t be angry.” She put her fingers on the arm of the chair. “Philip, do you remember the gypsy girl you once saw with him, way back when you were first turned? Jessenia?”

He wasn’t ready to stop being angry yet and didn’t answer. He just looked at her.

“They spent hundreds of years together,” she went on. “They were close like us . . . but different.” She had no idea how to explain the next part. “They shared more than we do.”

His tight expression relaxed slightly. “What?”

“I can’t . . . tell you. I don’t know how. Will you let me try to show you the memory? It happened about a week after Jessenia turned him.”

Philip glanced away, and his jaw twitched. “Eleisha, I don’t want to see anything from Robert’s life. I don’t know why you are—”

“Please. This isn’t about Robert. It’s about us.”

She didn’t know why this was so important to her, but she couldn’t stop dwelling on that one memory, and she needed to show it to Philip. She needed him to know.

He let out a frustrated sound, like a growl, and stood up, moving to the window to make sure the oversized shade was drawn and the heavy curtains were closed. If they got lost inside a shared memory, the sun could rise before they came out.

He pulled his T-shirt over his head and dropped it on the chair. Then he sat on the bed, putting his back against all the pillows.

Eleisha went to him quickly. He didn’t want to do this; he didn’t want to try this. But if he was even half-willing, she wouldn’t let the chance go. Once he saw what she’d seen, felt what she’d felt, he’d understand.

“Remember how Robert’s gift was protection, how he made people feel safe,” Eleisha said quickly. “Jessenia’s was a sense of adventure. She infected people with a seduction of adventure.”

Eleisha crawled up beside Philip and grasped two of his fingers, reaching her thoughts into his while simultaneously letting her mind flow back.

 

Philip was accustomed to Eleisha’s communicating feelings to him through memories, and he’d never minded before, never worried about it before. But she’d never looked this intense before either—and she’d certainly never begged.

He wanted to stop this before it began, but how could he refuse? She asked so little of him.

So he let her grasp his fingers, and he opened his mind, feeling her inside him immediately. Normally, during a shared memory, he would be sucked away into her past, seeing through her eyes and reliving the experience through her.

But this time, when he closed his eyes, he felt her struggling for a few moments, and then the scene changed.

To his shock, he was looking out through Robert’s eyes.

He became Robert.

 

Robert had decided upon a journey to France, so he and Jessenia made their way to the coast and found passage on a ship to cross the Channel. Once settled in their cramped quarters below decks, he looked forward to the crossing. Jessenia made every moment enticing, and he was still reveling in his newfound existence with her.

So much was new to him now.

The air was nearly black outside the small porthole, and he felt sharply aware and awake. Somehow, she seemed different to him tonight. She kept studying his face almost as if she were hungry. He never tired of looking at her. He loved the sight of her thick black hair.

She looked to be about nineteen years old, with the pale, glowing skin of someone who seldom went outdoors. Her nose was small, and her mouth was heart-shaped. She wore a forest green skirt and white blouse with a thin vestment over the top, laced up tightly. She was slender and her hips were narrow, yet the tops of her breasts swelled above the laced vest. Gold rings dangled from her ears, and bracelets clinked on her wrists.

She came to him, sitting beside him on his bunk. “I can feel your gift,” she said. “It’s getting stronger.”

So much she said was still a mystery.

“I love your gift,” she whispered, “as you love mine.”

She reached up and kissed him. He pushed her back to lie on the bunk, and he pressed his mouth down hard over hers, running his hands down her slender waist as she moved her hands up to grip the nape of his neck.

In spite of his desire, his body did not respond in its usual way, and he ran his hand over the tops of her breasts. His need for her, his urgency grew, but his body betrayed him.

Then . . . he felt Jessenia inside his mind, her thoughts reaching for and entwining with his. Her sense of adventure and her joy in journeys suddenly became part of him, drawing upon him; as he thought of them together in strange places, a feeling of fierce protection began to build inside. No matter where they went, no matter what they saw or what they did, he would protect her, from people, from the sun, from poverty, from everything.

Her passion for adventure began to combine with his desire to protect . . . inside him . . . inside her . . . until he could no longer tell the difference. The joining and meshing of half-mad drives went on and on in waves through his body until he felt it build to an almost-intolerable bubble. Then it burst, and his body shuddered in a shock of intense pleasure. Jessenia was still gripping the nape of his neck, and she gasped aloud—as if she still needed to breathe.

“Robert,” she was saying over and over in his ear. “I knew, I knew.”

He pressed his nose against hers. He was still shaking.

He had never imagined emotions like this, drives and needs like this. She had been inside him, and he inside her.

What had she done to him?

Her body began to relax beneath his, and she turned her head to one side.

“I knew as soon as I saw you,” she said.

 

“No!”

Philip jerked away, gasping, as if he, too, needed to breathe. He pulled away from Eleisha and jumped up off the bed, running both hands through his hair. He couldn’t go on with that memory, feeling that intimate connection of others.

“No,” he said again, pacing toward the dressing table.

“Philip.”

The sad quality of her voice made him whirl back around. She was curled up with her arms around her knees. She looked small and forlorn.

“What does it mean?” she whispered.

And then he wasn’t angry or even anxious anymore. She wasn’t trying to force him to see or experience something he didn’t want to. She genuinely hadn’t known how to explain her questions. If there was one thing Philip understood, it was the inability to speak thoughts. She’d seen—and felt—something she couldn’t comprehend, and she’d wanted to share it, wanted his help.

He took four strides back to the bed. Dropping down, he pulled her up against his chest and held her there. In his mind, he could still feel Robert pressing his mouth on Jessenia’s—as a mortal would—and how much Robert had liked it. He could still feel their gifts meshing into each other and the intense pleasure that followed. Philip had often kissed his victims before feeding, but he’d never felt anything like Robert had. Kissing was just a prelude to feeding, something he did to relax a victim right before he shut off his gift and reveled in the onslaught of fear.

“Philip, what does it mean?” Eleisha whispered again, pushing her face against his shoulder.

He gripped her tightly. “I don’t know.”

Twenty minutes later, the sun crested, and he fell dormant while holding on to her.

 

Just before dawn, Wade decided to knock on Rose’s door. He didn’t like the idea of disturbing her if she wanted privacy, but it was unlike her to spend most of the night in her room. Usually, she would work with either Wade or Philip on developing her telepathy, spend time in the garden with Eleisha, or read in the sanctuary with Seamus, turning the pages for him. If she wished to be alone, Wade did not want to intrude, but he felt she should be informed of the situation.

He knocked on her bedroom door.

“Rose, it’s me.”

“Come in,” she called.

He opened the door to see her sitting in a chair, reading a Dick Francis novel. She wore a loose white dress with a black belt at the waist. But she also wore gloves that came up past her wrists. Recently, she’d manifested a new telepathic power: psychometry. She had to be cautious of touching anything with her bare hands, or she might be flooded with unwanted images of where an object had been or who had been holding it.

Rose wasn’t pretty like Eleisha, but Wade always thought of her as a handsome woman. She was tall and looked about thirty years old, with long brown hair sporting a few white streaks. Rather than make her older, the streaks simply made her more exotic. He’d always liked them.

After seeing him in the doorway, she glanced down at her watch.

“Oh . . . ,” she said in surprise. “I’d no idea it was so late. I won’t even have time to change.”

He smiled at her. “Good book?”

“Yes, very good. I forgot the time.”

Vampires seldom forgot the impending dawn—they automatically fell dormant the second the sun crested—but she had the windows completely closed off, so he could see how she might have become lost in her novel.

She stood up and started toward the bed. “Thank you for checking in.”

“I sent Seamus back to London. I just wanted to let you know.”

She stopped. “London. Again?”

“Yes, on the same lead. Another news story appeared tonight, and I’m hoping he’ll find something this time.”

Her face was impassive. “Let us hope.”

Rose was a quiet, driving force behind their operation. She wanted to find every last vampire in hiding and offer him or her a place here.

The first hints of the sun must have peeked up beyond the covered window, because she wavered on her feet, and he rushed in to help her. She raised one hand quickly, stopping him.

“No, it’s all right. I can manage.”

She dropped down onto the bed, fully clothed. For some reason, her refusal hurt him. He felt rebuffed, as if she didn’t want him to touch her for any reason. He backed away, about to tell her good night even though it was morning, but she had already fallen dormant.

Wade closed the door and stood there in the main-floor hallway for a moment. The nights were getting longer, and so he was spending less time awake and alone during the daylight now. He’d long since adjusted his hours to those of his companions, but he never needed to sleep all day as they did.

He knew he should go cook himself something to eat, and then go to bed himself, so he went downstairs to the basement apartment. But instead of turning right to head into the kitchen, he turned left and went down the hallway to undergo a somewhat twisted ritual he performed every morning.

He often had long talks with himself, insisting that he find a way to stop doing this, but he could not. He did the same thing every morning shortly after the sun rose.

Opening the door to Eleisha’s room (she never locked it), he walked over to the bed and gazed down to watch her sleeping with Philip—both of them completely dormant, unaware. However, the instant he saw them, he knew something was wrong. She usually slept either curled up against Philip or with her head on his stomach.

This morning, their positions were different. Philip was leaning back against the headboard, gripping Eleisha in both his arms in a tight gesture that looked possessive and protective at the same time.

Wade frowned. What had led to that?

He wished Eleisha would talk to him as she used to. His mind often drifted back to the short period when it had been just the two of them alone, before Philip, before Rose. Philip’s entrance had not been unwelcome. Wade was well aware that they needed him, but still . . .

He stood there for a long time, watching them.

Then he walked back out and closed the door.

 

The next night, Eleisha was in the garden, cutting off some of the last of the fading rosebuds. She had a number of rosebushes that had bloomed into midautumn, but now they were getting ready to go dormant for the winter.

She was so hungry, she could barely hold on to the shears.

Gripping harder, she tried to concentrate. Seamus had not returned, and she was worried he might materialize at any moment, spurring Wade to purchase plane tickets and forcing them all into action. She was not up to a flight to London, followed by an exhaustive search, and she didn’t know what to do.

Should she just slip away into the night and go feed by herself?

If her absence were discovered, it would cause a commotion—and not just with Philip. Wade and Rose would be troubled as well, as they had sworn to the same agreement. One of them breaking it might render their pact void, and who knew where that might lead?

Her only other choice was to tell Philip the truth, but this would disappoint him and let him know that she’d suggested the game entirely for his sake, not her own, and then he’d always insist on their previous method of hunting . . . which he found dull and tasteless.