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"It smells like sewage."
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He hoped the odor wasn't strong enough to clear her head. He needed her a
little fuzzy. "No sewage, I promise. Just a little comfrey, myrrh, and garlic
juice."
"Well, at least I'm safe from vampires for the night." She watched him warily
but didn't pull her leg away. "Teryn had a grow light over herbs in his
office. Did he teach you about them?"
"I taught him."
She cocked her head curiously, but didn't reply.
Reminding himself firmly to think of the object he held in his hands as a
task, not a long, sexy leg attached to a long, sexy lady, he smoothed the
paste around the edges of the wounds in slow, careful circles. He looked up to
make sure he wasn't hurting her, and found her face dewy soft. She closed her
eyes and stretched like a cat on a sunny windowsill.
Now was his chance, while she was relaxed. Now was the time to reshape her
memory.
By damn, he didn't want to do it. Hated the thought of the invasion, the
manipulation. But what he wanted didn't matter. It had to be done.
He searched his mind for a way to bring her chase after Von to the forefront
of her thoughts. To take her mind back to the tenement.
He needn't have bothered. She was already there.
A giddy smile, full of glee, slowly spread across her face. "Deny it all you
want, Nathan, but I know what I saw tonight. I know whatyou saw."
His fingers tightened on the delicate bones of her ankle. His heart struck
low and deep, like a kettle drum in his chest. "What did we see?"
"A monster. After all these years I finally saw another monster." Her glazed
green eyes flickered open, but her eyelids hung sleepily.
Ever so gently he probed with his mind and found the wispy edges of the
memory. She was standing outside the doorway Von had rushed through. Her heart
was pounding furiously he could feel it in his own chest. He saw the green
glow of feral eyes with her. Heard the animal snuffles and snorts. Fear
coursed through her like a bullet train trying to make up time, but with the
fear there was another emotion. Elation. The sweet taste of victory.
She smiled like the proverbial cat that got the pet canary. "Too bad all
those social workers and psychologists couldn't have been there. I'd liked to
have seen them call me crazy then."
His stomach turned. She wasn't just looking for monsters in order to avenge
her parents' deaths, he realized. She was trying to prove to herself that she
wasn't crazy.
Now that she finally had the proof she'd sought so long, he had to take it
away.
Pushing back the sickness in his gut, he delved deeper into her mind,
focusing his thoughts to a sharper point. He tried to drown out the glowing
eyes with remembered darkness, the sounds with silence. She frowned, but the
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gauzy fabric of her memory held. He had to take her back, to before she'd seen
Von in Gargoyle form.
"You believe me, don't you?" she said dreamily. "You have to believe me this
time."
"Tell me what you saw. All of it, from the time you left me and Jenny."
He visualized her memory as a glass ball with the events playing out inside,
and cupped it in his palms. He felt it warming to his touch, molding to the
shape of his hands so that he could manipulate it.
She rubbed her forehead absently. "I chased him down the stairwell and into a
long hall. It was dark. There were faces in the shadows. They leered at me, a
few yelled at me. I was gaining on Von and then I tripped, and when I looked
down I realized an old man had hold of my ankle. I was breathing so hard I
couldn't scream."
He felt the deep drag of air in her lungs. Heard the rasp.
"But he let go. He was just some vagrant we'd woken up with all the running.
Von turned and went up another stairwell."
"You followed him to the third floor. At least, you thought that's what floor
he went to," Nathan suggested.
He pictured an empty corridor and tried to force that image over the one of
Von running down that hall. The malleable memory hardened, resisted his view
of what had happened.
Her forehead furrowed. "I'm sure he went to the third floor. I mean& I saw
him. I think I saw him."
"You were mistaken. You lost him, but you decided to check out that floor
anyway. You walked down the hall."
"I stopped at the last room," she said, sounding less certain now.
"But you didn't see anything. The room was empty."
He squeezed the imaginary memory in his hands. She whimpered. Her back arched
as if she was in pain. "I saw& That is, I thought& It was dark."
His shoulders ached with strain, tension. He mopped the sweat off his
forehead with his sleeve. "The window was broken. The moon was shining in. You
could clearly see there was no one in the room."
Her head thrashed left and right. Her chest heaved as she breathed in
desperate little pants. "No, it was dark. The window was boarded over. I
peeked around the doorframe."
"But you didn't see anything. You didn'thear anything."
He focused all his energy into her mind, into the memory, but again she
resisted his attempts to alter what she'd seen. Recollections of other moments
in her life assailed him her father steadying her while she rode a grocery
store mechanical rocking horse, her mother spreading a picnic blanket beneath
a maple tree in a green meadow. Each time he thrust aside one of those family
moments, a bolt of pain lanced through his skull. She wasn't just resisting
now; she was fighting back.
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How the hell could a human, a woman, do that?
Gritting his teeth, he held steadfast to the memory of the tenement hallway.
The room.
The empty room.
"Not at first," she said, rubbing her temples in earnest.
Apparently the war they waged took its toll on her, too, even if she wasn't
aware of fighting it. "I was about to go inside when that god-awful whistle
started."
Nathan lost his mental grasp on Rachel's memory as if it were a bar of soap
he'd squeezed too tightly with wet hands. "What whistle?"
"Didn't you hear it? That earsplitting screech a minute or two before you
came out of the stairwell after me. Everybody within two blocks must have
heard it. I thought Von had pulled a fire alarm or something for a minute. It
only lasted a few seconds, but it was so loud it sounded like it was coming
from inside my head, not outside."
His body temperature dropped from overheat to subarctic in the span of a [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]