Vampire Memories #5 - Ghosts of Memories (12 page)

“We can use that table over there…”

“Do you like five-card draw…?”

“Watch out for Philip,” Wade said. “He cheats.”

“I do not!”

Within a few moments, cards and chips were produced, and then Vera, Philip, Wade, and Ivory began sitting down around a small table. Christian was on a settee reading a book, and Eleisha now stood near the fireplace.

Wade looked over at her. “Are you playing?”

“I think I’ll just watch,” she answered.

He nodded while picking up the deck, and Eleisha sank into relief that she could just be alone with her thoughts for a little while and not responsible for entertaining anyone else.

She noticed an open archway on the other side of the living room, and she crossed over to see into the next room. It was just as overstuffed as the rest of the house, but this room boasted a large round table with a candelabra and a number of Egyptian statues. She recognized it from Seamus’ description and realized this was where the séance would be held.

Walking in, she touched the table.

“I know it’s a bit of a cliché, but trust me, this is what the clients expect.”

Eleisha jumped slightly and turned to see Christian standing in the archway. He seemed to be studying her with his strange light eyes. Candlelight glinted off the ring in his ear, and she didn’t know how to respond.

“Maybe it’s time you and I had a real talk,” he said. “I have a few questions.”

For some reason she couldn’t explain, she took a step backward.

Watching the girl as she touched the table, Christian couldn’t believe how charming she looked in a simple loose skirt that hung to her ankles and what appeared to be a man’s sweater. It was probably Philip’s, and that thought rankled him. At the pub last night, he hadn’t minded pretending to be helpless, acting as if he’d needed both Philip’s protection and his sword. In truth, Christian had been knife fighting in the streets of Paris before he was twelve years old.

But he’d been shortsighted not to have noticed the possessive way Philip looked at Eleisha, and as a result, he’d been caught off guard when Philip so pointedly corrected him by asking for only two rooms.

Christian didn’t like being caught off guard.

Worse, if the girl belonged to Philip, it complicated matters. Nothing he couldn’t handle…but it was a complication.

However, just now, when Eleisha’s eyes widened slightly and she took a step away from him, excitement began building in Christian’s chest again, and he knew he’d started down a path he had to finish.

“What do you want to know?” she asked.

He moved closer and delighted in watching her struggle not to step back again.

“Everything,” he answered. “Where did you come from? How did Philip survive? How did you find each other?”

At his open barrage of questions, she suddenly smiled. “What do you want to know first?”

Her expression changed to the same one she’d worn in the pub last night—of wishing to please him—and it hit him harder than her anxiety had. How long since one of his own kind, someone who
knew
what he was, had looked at him like that?

“Who made you?” he asked. He was well aware by now that she’d never agreed to be turned. Someone like her would never give consent. That meant one of his own had broken the third law.

Her smile faded. “Julian.”

“Julian? No. He hates other vampires. He’d never make one.”

She nodded. “He did. His father became ill from old age, senile, and Julian turned him, trying to save him. But it didn’t work. His father was still sick and senile…and immortal. Julian wanted a caretaker for him, and he needed someone who wouldn’t die.”

“So he forced you?”

She glanced away, as if embarrassed to answer, and he was tempted to reach into her mind and see more of her thoughts for himself, but that might scare her off, and he didn’t know how quickly she could block him.

He glanced out toward Philip, who was cheerfully calling Vera’s last bet.

“I can already guess his gift,” Christian said, “but you are more of a mystery. What’s yours?”

She met his eyes and seemed to gain some composure. “It’s my turn to ask. I answered one of your questions.”

Her flash of courage surprised him. He didn’t like it.

“Ask away,” he said.

“What’s your gift?”

He wasn’t quite ready to answer that yet. His gift was unique. So instead, he changed the subject, looking pointedly at her sweater. “Explaining that may take some time, and my client will be arriving in a few hours.” He paused, as if the next topic pained him. “It’s important that we all look the part for this to work. I took the liberty of borrowing a dress from Ivory earlier, and I know this is awkward, but I need you to…” He trailed off as realization dawned on her face.

“Oh, you want me to change?”

“If you wouldn’t mind. I also have some of my things laid out for Wade. Could you come up to my room?”

“Your room?”

Her voice wavered with anxiety again, and he managed an expression of offended hurt. “I don’t see how we’re ever going to become better acquainted if you can’t even accept an offer to properly dress for the evening.”

“Oh, no. I didn’t mean… Of course I’ll come up and change.”

She seemed horrified at the thought of offending him, and pleasure swelled up in his chest anew. She was delightful. So easy to manipulate. He might not even have to use his gift.

“This way,” he said, pointing to the archway at the back of the sitting room.

“I’d better go back and tell Philip first.”

“He’s busy, and we won’t be long.”

She hesitated but did not seem to want to offend him again. Nodding, she followed him out the back of the room toward the stairwell.

Fifteen minutes later, Eleisha was wondering how she’d let Christian talk her into changing her clothes right there in his room. But she was behind a large Asian screen, pulling Philip’s sweater over her head, and she could hear Christian clinking brushes, combs, and small glass jars over at the dressing table.

Every time she tried to refuse him something, he made her feel as if she were the one in the wrong—and maybe she was. After all, she’d led Julian right to him and Ivory, and Christian had been good enough to arrange an invitation for them here so that he might come to know them better.

Wasn’t this what she wanted?

“That dress unzips in the back,” he called from somewhere out in the room, “but the zipper is well hidden. Let me know if you need help.”

“I’m all right.”

After pulling off her skirt, Eleisha lifted the gown hanging from the screen and turned it around. She could see what he meant. The zipper was indeed difficult to spot. But the gown itself intimidated her. It was silk, in a shimmering shade of off-white pearl. Slipping into it, she realized it was backless, so the zipper came up only a few inches above her tailbone. The dress was snug and slinky, with spaghetti straps that fastened at the back of her neck. In her entire existence, she’d never worn anything like it. The long, shimmering skirt fell around her feet, but the top half seemed to include very little material.

“Christian, I don’t know about this. Doesn’t Ivory have anything else?”

“Let me see it.”

Reluctantly, she stepped out from behind the screen, and when he turned to look at her, his eyes brightened with intensity.

“It’s perfect,” he said.

Something about this felt wrong—all wrong—but she had no idea what. It wasn’t unreasonable of him to expect her and Wade to look their parts in the séance, and in order to wrangle their invitations here, he’d had to claim they were members of his circle.

He motioned to a chair in front of the dressing table. “Come and sit here. I need to do your hair.”

“You know how to style a woman’s hair?”

“Of course. I used to do Ivory’s all the time.”

She didn’t miss the “used to,” and it reminded her of something else that had been nagging at her. For two vampires who worked and traveled and lived together, Christian and Ivory did not seem close. They never spoke to each other, and Eleisha couldn’t help wondering why. Had something happened between them? It frustrated her that she knew so little about this situation.

But she sat down, and he began brushing her hair. She wondered what the séance would be like and considered that a safe topic.

“How does it work?” she asked. “The séance itself. Wade found a newspaper article that said your clients are sometimes weak and dizzy afterward. You don’t feed on them, do you?”

He picked up a can of mousse and sprayed a dollop into one hand. “Feed on them? No.” He paused. “How developed is your telepathy?”

She had no intention of letting him know that just yet, not when it was her only weapon. She hadn’t even let Rose know that much for a while. “Developed enough. Strong enough that I’ve taught several vampires how to follow the first law.”

“Really? Good. Then just stay with me when the show begins tonight. Stay inside my mind, and you’ll see how it’s done.” He rubbed his hands together and began working the mousse into her hair. “I want you to see how it’s done. But I have to read detailed images and emotions from the clients, and sometimes I have to go so deep it drains them.”

That startled her. “You don’t do any damage?”

“Nothing lasting.”

Once he’d made her wavy hair even wavier, he pulled her long bangs back and pinned them at the crown of her head with a jeweled clip. Then he picked up a black eye-lining pencil.

“Oh, Christian, no…,” she said. “I don’t wear that.”

“Just sit still.”

He put eyeliner at the corners of her eyes. He also used mascara and then a light lip gloss.

“Perfect,” he said again, and the relief in his voice bothered her. Looking into the mirror, she saw a stranger looking back, but he seemed to much prefer her like this, as if he wanted to change her.

She stood up, moving away.

Warning bells were going off inside her head. What did he want? Was this just about making her look presentable for the séance?

She decided it was time to push guilt aside and start listening to her own instincts. In the end, it would be safer for Christian and Ivory to come back to the underground—perhaps pick up their business from there. Portland had its areas of affluent society. Or if they really decided they didn’t want to come back, they could just vanish for a few months, perhaps change their names, and then set up with another patron like Vera someplace else—and keep themselves out of the newspapers.

But suddenly Eleisha realized that no matter how civilized Christian appeared, she wasn’t going to bring him near Rose or Maxim until she knew a good deal more.

Glancing at a clock on the dressing table, she saw they still had hours until the séance.

Maybe it was time to push a few of his buttons.

Slowly, gently, she let a hint of her gift seep out, making him see her as helpless, but she was careful, ready to shut it off if he noticed what she was doing.

“Christian,” she said, pitching her voice to a tone of deference. “I’ve answered every question you’ve asked me, and you’ve told me almost nothing. Would you do something for me?”

He stepped toward her, seeming intrigued. “What?”

“Philip, Wade, and I have learned how to look inside each other’s minds and see memories, not just thoughts and images but real memories. If you would let me see a few of your memories, it would help me to know you better, to trust you more.”

“You don’t trust me?”

“I don’t know you.”

He wavered, and she let the aura of her gift grow a little stronger, making him see her as something so far beneath himself that he need fear nothing she could do.

Of course she didn’t tell him that if he agreed, once he let her inside his mind and he focused on a past memory, she could lock onto it, get him lost completely in the past, and force him down a chronological line for as long she wanted—seeing anything and everything she wanted. None of the elders had learned to do this, and they’d had no idea it was possible. This was something new that she and Wade had discovered in their early days together, and Eleisha was very, very good at it.

“Please,” she said. “Just let me see a few of your early memories, of where you come from. It will help me understand you.”

“Where I come from?” He seemed hesitant but still intrigued.

She sat down on the bed. “Just come sit beside me. If you think back, I’ll be able to see scenes from your life.”

She knew how he was imagining this, that he might show her a few carefully chosen memories and thus please her by doing something so simple…and she knew she’d tempted him by sitting down on the bed.

He came to join her, sitting slowly.

“I need to touch your hand,” she said.

“By all means.”

Reaching out, she grasped his hand.

“What do you want to see?” he asked.

“Go back to before you were turned.”

“That wasn’t a pretty time.”

“Please show me,” she said, reaching her thoughts toward his. “Let me in.”

Reaching her thoughts into his, she could feel his reluctance, but then unbidden, unwanted, the image of a squalid, crowded room began to form in his mind.

She locked on hard, and the world around her vanished.

chapter eight

P
ARIS
, 1752
C
HRISTIAN

C
hristian’s first real memory was hunger.

Early years of malnourishment may have affected him, because he could barely recall his mother’s face or the seemingly endless mass of brothers and sisters crowded into single filthy room on a filthy street.

But when he was about eight years old, he clearly remembered the fierce pain in his stomach and the emptiness eating away at his body, and he remembered the sight of a pouch hanging from a belt. Two well-dressed men were arguing loudly in front of a flower seller’s cart, and other people had begun gathering around them.

But Christian saw only the pouch hanging from the belt of a bystander. Like all boys who’d survived there to the age of eight, he carried a knife, and he pulled it out, hiding it in one hand. As he slipped through the crowd, no one noticed him. He was small.