“I don’t.”
He stared at me.
“Okay. I don’t date because the last and only guy I kissed out with wound up with a concussion from a flying stereo.”
The poor guy had rented the house next to my parent’s house with a few other guys. He never talked to me again.
Rune smiled, and my mortification turned to anger.
“How long ago was that?”
“Eight years.”
Mr. Nosey
.
“You haven’t kissed a man in eight years?”
“Well. You. Last night. And that was just to drain power. Wait, I don’t see how this is helping me, or how it pertains to the problem at hand.”
He sat back on the couch.
“You’re right. I apologize for embarrassing you. It’s just that very little surprises me anymore, and you seem to do it at least every five minutes.”
“Oh yeah, that’s me, a surprise a minute. Never know what’s gonna happen.”
I looked back to the fish tank and envied them their mundane existence.
“You would be no more content in a glass cage than would I,” he said.
“Stay out of my head.”
The purr of the aquarium pump and the fizzing of the bubbles freeing themselves on the water’s surface dominated the room.
“I just want to go home and be bored again.”
“I’m afraid this Dr. Sarkis has other plans. Are you sure you have never heard of him?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. I just can’t place it, like it was a long time ago.”
“Search your memory. It is important. If we can figure out what he wants with you, we will be one step further.”
I racked my brain, searched every memory I could find.
“No. I can’t remember. It may be there. I just can’t grab onto it.”
He was suddenly crouched in front of me, and I jumped.
“I can find the memory if you’ll allow it.”
I pressed back into the chair.
“I don’t know.”
“I will not hurt you.”
“Having someone traipsing around in my head is not something I consider safe.”
He put his hand on my knee and my body instantly erupted in tiny fireworks. My hair lifted and one of the pillows flew from the bed. I expected him to remove his hand, but instead he slid his hand up my thigh a few inches and held on. My hair floated back into place. The tingling along my skin drained downward to my leg and disappeared into him. My heartbeat quickened and muted alarms sounded in the back of my mind.
“I won’t harm you,” he murmured. “I will try to respect your privacy and find only what I need to find.”
My brain screamed,
No, don’t do this
. A brief nod of my head and his eyes became the only thing in the room.
He slid into my mind and filled me. He paused for a moment as I adjusted to the full, tight feeling of him inside me. My breath caught as he slid through my thoughts, my past, my being. Flashes of the last few months rushed by with one or another staying in focus for a few seconds and then speeding on. Tears flowed down my cheeks as I stood next to my grandmother’s open grave. I winced as the first shovel full of soil thumped against her coffin.
Memories blurred by again and again with several pauses of my waking in the morning and rising from my bed in the burgeoning sunlight. High school passed, junior high, elementary, kindergarten, five years old, four—
I huddled, blanket-wrapped on my bed. The mattress sat on the floor of my room with no frame or box spring. Painted plywood covered the window, fastened by screws spaced every two inches. The closet gaped empty with no door.
Rune’s voice floated in my brain. “Why is your room this way?”
“At this age, I have no control while I’m sleeping. Dreams and nightmares are dangerous,” I said to him through the memory-vapor.
My parents stood over four-year-old me, my mother in her subservient head-bowed stoop even then. My father held a bloody cloth to his head with one hand and beer in the other.
“Damn it, Eunice,” he yelled. “If you can’t control her better than that, I’ll call Sarkis and have him come get her like he did Tibby.”
“No,” my mother sobbed.
He leaned down and put his face so close to hers their foreheads touched.
“Then make her stop it, or I will.”
My father looked at me, his face a turmoil of emotion—mostly rage. Then he turned and walked out.
My mother stared at me, her left eye swollen shut and wet.
Had I done that to her? Had all of my mother and father’s problems stemmed from me? My heart constricted in anguish, and I jerked Rune and I out of the memory into blackness.
We floated for a while, connected to each other’s minds. When the nothingness became too overwhelming, I tugged us back in the direction I thought we’d come from. I needed to return to the here and now and escape the smothering blackness. No sensory input existed in the blackness, only thoughts and memories.
We moved a ways, then landed in another memory, but this memory wasn’t mine.
Rune crouched on the ground, holding the body of an older man. They were both dressed in white flowing robes fastened at the shoulders with golden leaf ornaments, their feet clad in leather strapped sandals. The man had Rune’s determined jaw line and aquiline nose. His dark, wavy hair glistened with blood from his torn throat. Rune lifted his tear-streaked face and
wailed
with anguish, his face covered in blood, eyes glowing, and long canine teeth protruding from his mouth.
A man in dark robes walked forward. “You fed well, my young sophist. Consider this your father’s last lesson to you.”
The man threw back his head and laughed, and Rune’s hatred for him and for himself thrummed through the room.
The scene jolted out of sight, and I came to on Rune’s chair with a start.
Rune stared at me wide eyed. Tears pooled before sliding down his cheeks. I reached out to wipe the tears away but drew my hand back and gasped as his skin sucked the shiny trails back into his body.
He pulled his hand away from me and wiped it on his pant leg. With a blur of motion, he stood in the kitchen, holding the refrigerator door open.
He pulled a bottle of Gatorade out and slammed the door. Another blur of motion and he sat on the couch, pouring the Gatorade into my glass.
So vampires cry.
“Every five hundred years or so.” His strained smile was more heartbreaking than his tears.
Stay out of my head.
Stay out of mine.
His lips were still stretched into his painful parody of a smile. They hadn’t moved. He hadn’t spoken aloud.
“Until now,” he said aloud, making me jump, “people have only heard my thoughts when I projected those thoughts directly to them.”
“And no one has ever read your memories as you’ve read theirs?” I asked.
“Not since my transformation. No.”
He handed me the glass, careful not to touch me as I took it, then just a bit too quickly pulled his hand away. The movement smacked of they way my father had treated me all my life, like I was too unclean to touch. I thought I’d reached the depths of feeling abnormal until that moment. Just as I was beginning to think someone understood, this new isolation twisted my gut, and out of that churning, anger blossomed.
“Great, just great.” I slammed the glass onto the coffee table. “Now a vampire is so weirded out he doesn’t want to touch me. That’s a new personal low.”
He looked away.
“It’s just fine for you to go fishing around in people’s heads but let a mere mortal go poking around in your gray matter and all of a sudden you’re feeling a little awkward?”
The aquarium light flashed, popped, and went out with a faint sizzling noise. The fish took cover behind rocks and under vegetation.
“Crap.” I slouched down on the couch, leaned my head back on the cushions, and looked at the ceiling. “Sorry, fish.”
Energy marched like thousands of ants along my skin. I drew a deep, slow breath and blew it out in a steady stream, concentrating on smashing the tiny energy ants into oblivion.
The glass of Gatorade flew off the table and crashed against the fireplace.
Okay, maybe smashing imaginary bugs into smithereens wasn’t quite the calming effect I was looking for. I tried to concentrate on the soothing sound of the aquarium bubbles, but when the motor cut on and off a few times, I decided it was too dangerous for the fish.
A tentative touch brushed my knee. I felt Rune’s impulse to draw his hand away and the iron will it took for him to keep it there.
With tremendous effort, he forced himself to open the connection between us and the tingling along my skin once again drained into him.
His thoughts and memories waited on the edge of the connection, but unwilling to invade his privacy further, I forced myself not to look at them. It looked like I’d found an aspect to my abilities that was even more of a turn off to men than flying stereos.
Rune chuckled. It seemed invading my privacy wasn’t so much of an issue for him.
“Ass,” I mumbled toward the ceiling.
“Among other things,” he murmured.
My energy drained to a comfortable level. Rune must have sensed it, because he lifted his hand from my knee and returned to the couch.
I still stared at the ceiling trying to figure out what my next move should be. I couldn’t go home. Mr. Smith knew where I lived. I couldn’t stay here—could I?
“You may stay as long as you wish,” Rune said.
That answered that. I couldn’t stay here with Cerebral Peeping Tom.
Rune chuckled again.
“Stay out of my head.” My tone was flat and bored. The idea of recording that phrase on my cell phone voice recorder and just pushing the button when he intruded crossed my mind.
He chuckled again.
“Hey!” I said, but only halfheartedly. I knew it wouldn’t do any good.
“You have such a refreshing sense of irony, Marlena. Irony takes a higher intelligence—it’s both right-brained creative and left-brained logical.”
“Well, I guess that’s better than being an anomaly.”
“Actually, it makes you more of one.”
“Grrrreeeaaat,” I drawled.
My energy level was rising again.
“Okay, I have a question,” I said. “Since you’re all Nosferatu undead and everything, and you emit no energy that I can pick up on, where is all this energy coming from that I’m absorbing?”
“The nightclub above us and the boardwalk outside is full of people. Something about the way this building is made funnels muted energy down here. I believe it might have something to do with the steel reinforcements and the silica in the sand all around us.”
“Sand. Are we at the beach or the desert?”
“Venice Beach.”
“Ahhhh.” I really needed to decide what to do next, but my mind just wasn’t coming up with anything.
The refrigerator door swished open, and I lifted my head from the back of the couch. Rune took another bottle of Gatorade out and sat it on the breakfast bar for me.
“How did you know about the Gatorade?” I asked.
“There were twelve coupons for it in your backpack.”
That would do it.
“I believe our next step is to speak with your great-aunt Tibby. Until we know what this Dr. Sarkis wants with you, we won’t know how to proceed.”
I sat up. “Why can’t I just call the police and report all this? I mean, that would probably scare him off. Right?”
Rune poured the Gatorade into a glass and shook his head.
“No. We need to find out if he has connections.”
“Connections?”
He walked back to me, and I tried to not think of how fluidly he moved and how great he looked in those black pants and polo shirt. The heated look in his eyes told me I sucked at not thinking of things. His finger brushed my hand as he handed me the glass, sending shivers up my arm that had nothing to do with energy.
He sat back on the couch and continued.
“Military, political, police. I felt military backgrounds in at least two of the men who tried to abduct you.” He picked up a phone from the side table. “Did your great-aunt’s accident have anything to do with Sarkis?”
I sipped my drink. “I don’t know for sure. We really didn’t talk about her much. My dad just used to tell me if I used my telekinesis, I’d wind up a daffy brainless bitch like Aunt Tibby.”
“So, do you know your aunt’s phone number or address?”
“No.”
“Who does?”
“I don’t know. I guess my mother might, but she’ll never tell me.”
“That’s not a problem.”
Rune dialed a number and put the phone to his ear.
“Griss,” he said to whoever answered. “I need a favor. Because you owe me several . . . Okay, go to . . .” He put his hand over the mouth piece.
“Marlena, what is your mother’s address?”
The address flashed in my mind. “I’m not giving you my mother’s—”
Rune took his hand off the receiver.
“423 Hollybrook in Brea.”
“Hey!” I shouted.
Rune switched to another language to finish his conversation. I’m lucky to be considered monolingual most days, so I had no idea what language it was. I knew it wasn’t Spanish or French but beyond that, it was a mystery. I heard some names I recognized like Tibby, Marlena, and Eunice.
I stood and stalked toward him. “That man better not hurt my mother. If he harms so much as a hair on her head, I’ll wait till daybreak and run a stake right through your heart!”
Rune put his hand over the receiver again. “No harm will come to your mother. Griss will just get your great-aunt’s phone number and address. Your mother won’t even remember his visit.”
“Of course she’ll remember she—wait, you’re sending a
vampire
over to my mother’s house?”
Glasses and plates crashed out of a cabinet in the kitchen, and a bottle of liquor shot upward and shattered against the ceiling.
“Griss. I’ve got to go. Call me when it’s done.”
Rune reached out and grabbed my wrist. The phone shot from his other hand and landed on the bed.
I felt him trying to drain my energy before I damaged anything else in the room, but I was replenishing the energy faster than he could take it away.
The lid to the aquarium flew open. Rune stood and pulled me to him. Energy arced between our lips just before they met. I fought the kiss at first, but he held on.