Redlisted (27 page)

The deck sensed my
intent, and I felt the pull. I walked down the corridor to a corner.
The deck pulled me to the right, but the hallway went left. I
frowned. This hadn’t ever happened before.

I turned left,
walked down the next corridor, and found myself faced with another
left turn. I turned around. Perhaps if I backtracked? I turned right,
walked down the same stretch I’d just covered. At the end was
another right-hand turn where the deck wanted a left. Frustrated, I
took the right, jogging down the hall to a corner. Another right.

And after it
another. And a third. And a fourth.

I was trapped in a
loop.

I went around a
second time just to be sure. It was just as before, with no forks in
the road, no ways of escape. I turned the other way, went around a
third time in the opposite direction. No exits. Nothing.

Maybe if I waited
long enough, the labyrinth would shift? Certainly this knot would
eventually undo itself. I sat down on the floor by a corner and
waited, glancing at my watch every so often. Ten minutes passed, then
twenty. I took out the deck and began shuffling through the cards.
Maybe if I picked another destination? I could feel the pull change
as I changed cards—first for my suite, then for the garage,
then for the ballroom—but the landscape stayed the same.

After an hour
nothing had changed.

Losing my nerve, I
stood up and circled the loop counter-clockwise. I was on the verge
of trying to kick in a wall when I saw that an exit had finally
materialized: the ornate entrance to the seraglio. At the sight of
the doors, a metallic taste—the anticipation of blood—hit
the back of my mouth, and the tearing sensation overcame my chest.
Hunger overwhelmed dread, overwhelmed disgust. I opened the doors and
walked inside.

The seraglio was
smaller than I remembered, and darker. No longer was it full of
people and the gentle static of their murmured conversations. I saw
only a single silhouette among the screens and curtains, and I heard
only a single heartbeat.

I exhaled and let
my shoulders relax. This way would be so much easier, so much less
humiliating. I could control myself around a single human. I could
suppress the feeding urge long enough to speak with them first.

Slowly I
approached the figure, wondering what the etiquette was in this
situation. What was I supposed to do? What was I supposed to say?
Hopefully they would know. Hopefully they’d understand I’d
never done this before.

“Hello?”
I called, my voice wavering.

Behind the thin
curtain that separated us, the figure whirled around.

“Who is it?”
she called back, abject terror resonating in her voice.

“My name is
Adam,” I said, taking a few steps closer. “I’m
Julian’s, um... son, or whatever. I’m sorry to disturb
you—“

“Who’s
Julian?” she cried. “Where am I?”

“You don’t
know?” I grimaced. “Oh God. Okay. Look, I’m not
going to hurt you. I’m trying to get out of here too. Maybe we
can help each other escape—“

I passed through
the curtain and found myself face-to-face with someone I recognized
immediately.

“Elena! What
are you doing here?”

She shrank away
and cowered in a corner. I could tell she didn’t recognize me,
but I was sure it was her. It was her face, her eyes, her bearing.
Her hair was even in the same style as she’d worn it over ten
years ago: parted in the center, cut to fall just short of her
jawline.

“Elena,
please, it’s just me,” I said, extending a hand towards
her.

“Elena?
Who’s Elena? Where am I?”

“You don’t
remember?”

She shook her
head.

“What do you
remember? Anything?”

“I don’t
know.” She started to cry. “I woke up here just a few
hours ago...”

I closed my eyes
and pressed my pointer fingers to my tear ducts. “Jesus
Christ...”

“Are you
going to drink my blood like the other one did?” she whispered.

“What other
one?”

“The
brown-haired man with the green eyes.”

Julian.

“No,”
I spat. “No, I’m not going to.”

She shielded her
face with her arm. “Please don’t hit me! I’m
sorry—“

“God! No,
I’m not angry at you. Please don’t be frightened. I’m
nothing like him. I’m not going to hurt you. I’m going to
do whatever I can to help. Okay?”

Slowly she turned
back towards me, took a deep breath and forced herself to stop
crying. I took her hand and helped her to her feet. She looked at me
with dread; my touch made her shiver. Her mind was a wasteland,
desolate, empty of anything but fear. I had to say something to fill
the void—something that would bring her back to herself. I
placed my hands on her shoulders and gazed into her eyes until mine
lost focus.

The words wouldn’t
come.

Suddenly something
in my mind snapped into place. It wasn’t just her hair that was
the same, I realized; nothing about her appearance had changed. There
were still only the most delicate creases around her eyes and mouth.
Her hair was the exact same color, black and peppered only slightly
with gray. If anything, she looked younger than she had before.
Impossible. Twelve years had passed and altered nothing?

This wasn’t
Elena at all. This was some composite of my memories of Elena.
Something superimposed on another woman, or perhaps even a complete
illusion created in the whole cloth of my consciousness. I could feel
the warmth of her skin against my hands, smell the scent of her hair,
but even that could be an illusion, a false impression of contact.
What if this was all some elaborate delusion—the loop in the
labyrinth, the deserted seraglio, all of it?

I stumbled
backwards several paces. The lamps and candles dimmed to
near-blackness. A spectral figure emerged from the shadows,
collecting all the light in the chamber into itself, eclipsing the
illusion of Elena.

As the room went
black, the figure came into focus: a woman, with white-blond hair and
translucent alabaster skin, naked and emaciated.

Mnemosyne.

She reached her
left hand towards me, gesturing; not beckoning, but pulling,
siphoning my consciousness through her bony fingers. She consumed it
as she’d consumed the lamplight.

I crumpled to the
floor and fell into a deep, dreamless sleep.

{Kate}

Adam nudges my
shoulder until I wake up.

“I’m
sorry, Kate, we need to go. You can sleep in the car if you want.”

I groan and force
myself to sit, rubbing at my eyes.
What
the hell just happened?
I wonder, thinking of the bizarre vision with the spectral woman.

“What do you
mean?”

I
was in your memories again,
I explain.
You
were in the seraglio, and you saw your ex-girlfriend, but then this
ghost lady appeared, and you passed out. I’m confused.

He makes a face.
“That’s not something I like to think about.”

Shit, I’m
sorry. I don’t mean to bring up a sore subject—

“No, it’s
fine,” he says, then he mumbles to himself, “she’s
probably not listening...”

Who’s
not?

“Don’t
worry about it,” he says with a dismissive shake of his head.
“My experience in the seraglio was a hallucination Mirabel
created. She wanted me to drink the blood of a particular victim,
someone she’d... infected, sort of. She can use blood to create
very deep-seated compulsions. Fortunately for me, Mnemosyne was
watching, and she intervened.”

Mnemosyne?
You mean the
headless
corpse
in Julian’s backyard?

“Yes.”

She can see
things?

“Yes, and
hear them, and use manifestations,” he says. “Nothing
like she could before she was beheaded, but...”

Right, but
isn’t she, you know, evil?

“A better
word might be amoral. And she absolutely despises Mirabel.”

I think about this
for a second.

“It’s
gotten colder,” he says. “I pulled a coat out from your
bag.” He hands me the black jacket Haruko bought for me.

I climb out of bed
and pull it on.

We walk out into
the late autumn air. It’s early enough in the evening that the
sky hasn’t gone entirely black; the moon hasn’t yet
risen. The lights in the car are on. Haruko is in the back seat,
slumped against the car door. She has a winter hat on her head that
obscures her head wound. It’s not impossible to imagine that
she could just be asleep. Aya sits in the back seat next to her.

Let
me drive,
I
tell Adam.

“Are you
sure?”

Yes.

“Aren’t
you tired?”

No. I feel
awesome. Ever since Tara healed me, I’ve felt great.

He shrugs and
hands me the keys. “All right,” he says. “I want to
talk to Tara again for just a moment. Could you get in the car and
turn on the radio? Listen to a news station.”

I’ll come
with you! I want to thank her—

“Please? I’d
really appreciate it.”

I frown.
Well,
okay...

“Thank you.”

I get in the
driver’s seat and wait, playing out in my head what we’ll
need to do next. We’ll need gas again soon—maybe we can
stop some place where I can eat and pee. Then we’ll need to get
back on the highway and drive north as fast as we can.

Why didn’t
he want me to come with him? I don’t get it.

I put the keys in
the ignition and turn on the radio. I adjust the tuner until I find a
public radio station playing a news program. The commentators report
on a bunch of stuff I don’t care about: the results of some
football games, a movie review, some grisly details about a
senatorial sex scandal. Why aren’t they talking about the
murders in DC? Aren’t they sensational enough? Maybe they’ve
stopped, and that’s why all this stupid trivia is getting
airtime.

Perhaps fifteen
minutes later Adam emerges from the house, walks to the car and gets
in the passenger seat. As soon as he sits down, he cuts off the
radio.

“Where are
we going now?” Aya asks.

“We can’t
make it all the way to Red Hook in a night,” he says, pulling a
map out from the glove compartment, “so we’re going to a
safe house in Erie, Pennsylvania. Eight hours from here.”

“I see,”
says Aya.

I pull out of the
driveway in reverse and turn onto a road that leads back into town.

“Did you
hear anything about the murders?” Adam asks me.

No.

A thought pops
into my head.

Adam, do you
think Mirabel is suppressing the story?

“I don’t
see why she would...”

But why else
wouldn’t they be talking about it? It’s kind of a big
deal!

For a moment he
doesn’t respond.

“I suppose
it’s possible,” he concedes.

Something even
more horrible occurs to me.
Oh
God! Do you think she orchestrated the murders?

“I don’t
have any idea,” he says. “I don’t know what she
could accomplish by killing a bunch of people at random.” He
turns his attention to the map.

I narrow my eyes.
You
know something you’re not telling me.