Redlisted (4 page)

“I’ll
stay here with her,” the woman says.

“No,”
Adam says. “I don’t want to leave her again. I need to
explain what happened. You and Aya go.”

“You need to
eat,” the woman says. “You can’t keep bleeding
yourself dry if you’re not going to eat.”

“Well, when
you get back, I could—“

“No.”

“Come on,
Haruko.” He glances into the kitchen, at the black lockbox
sitting on the counter.

“Fine,”
she says, annoyed. “But just once.”

“Thank you.”

Haruko walks out
the front door without replying.

Adam turns to me,
looks at me through those cold grey eyes, and walks towards me. I
sputter, trying to speak and failing. I want to tell him to get away
from me. He shot me. He kidnapped me. But worse than that, he’s...
I don’t even want to think about it.

“You’d
probably call me a vampire,” he says.

I feel a sickening
surge of adrenaline. I drank his blood! Does that make me a vampire
too?

“No,”
he says. “You’re a dhampyr. An altered human, you might
say.”

Oh God. He can
read my mind.

He sits down
across from me in an armchair and says nothing.

You
can read my mind
,
I think at him.

“Yes.”

I bring my hands
to my head and take a deep, shaky breath.

You shot me.

“It was an
accident. I thought you were Mirabel.”

Mirabel. The name
is familiar. I know she and I look alike; I know she was in charge of
the Project; I know I was afraid of her. I can’t remember
anything else about her.

“She’s
a revenant. A vampire, like me,” Adam says. “We were
initiated—brought back from the dead—by the same man. If
I were fond of her I might call her my sister.”

I think of my
dream just now. That girl, Aya, mentioned something about an
initiation.

“You had a
dream about Aya?”

I look away,
feeling embarrassed.
Sort
of. I had a dream about you.

“Really.”

I
was
you.

“Interesting.”

Are you going
to kill me?

“Of course
not.”

But you drink
people’s blood.

“Mostly
you’ve been drinking my blood. Or hadn’t you noticed?”

I bring a hand to
the scar on my chest.

“Without it
you’d be dead. Of course it’s the least I can do, after
shooting you...”

Why do you
care?

“What do you
mean? I shot you. I couldn’t leave you there to die.“

But you’re
a vampire! You must kill people all the time!

“I’ve
never killed anyone,” he says flatly, like it wouldn’t
matter either way.

I stand up and
start walking towards the bedroom. I don’t believe him, and I
can’t stand him reading my thoughts. I want to be alone.

“I’m
sorry,” he says, standing, “but the last time I left you
alone you ran. I can’t let you do that again.”

Don’t
touch me!
I think at him, commanding him like I commanded the deer.
Don’t
put me back to sleep!

“Calm down.
I won’t touch you. But Mirabel may have conditioned you with a
compulsion to return to Atlanta. And if you don’t stay here
with us, you will die. The wound will re-open and you will die.”

I hesitate.
Why?

“After I
shot you... you were bleeding out fast. You had minutes left at best.
You wouldn’t have made it to the hospital.”

So?

“So I did
what I had to do to save you—I gave you the blood. And I’ll
keep giving it to you—as much as you need. I’m not going
to let you die.”

So
if I don’t keep drinking your blood, the wound will open up?

“Exactly.”

But after the
wound heals completely—

“You don’t
understand. It never will.”

What are you
saying?

He takes a deep
breath. “At first, while you’re still healing, you’ll
need a lot of blood. Revenant blood, like mine. And then, well,
you’ll need small increments, every day... for the rest of your
natural life.”

The rest of my
life?

I can’t
believe it. I won’t believe it. I won’t even think about
it.

“I’m
sorry for putting you in this situation,” Adam says.

I give him a
burning glare for just a moment, and then I start crying. He takes a
step forward, holding out a hand.

Leave
me alone,
I think at him.
For
the love of God.

He retreats into
the kitchen.

I curl into a
corner, covering my face and crying silently. I try to pretend I’m
alone, but I know he’s still there. I can only hope that he
can’t read my thoughts from those five yards away.

I don’t
believe that he wants to help me for my sake. He wants me with him
for a reason. Maybe he shot me by accident; maybe he even feels
remorse for it. But he wants me with him for a reason.

He’s wrong
about me, in any case. I don’t want to go back to Atlanta.

I just want to be
alone.

After just a few
minutes car doors slam outside, one-two. I look out into the main
room. Haruko bursts through the front door, her face stony. “We’ve
been followed.”

“What?”
Adam says. “How? We got rid of all of her things—“

“How the
hell should I know?” she spits. “Get your gun. They’re
coming.”

“They must
have put a tracker in her clothing somewhere...”

“Or in
her
somewhere,” Haruko says. “We never should have taken her
with us.”

Adam looks at me.
“Go to the bedroom and take off your clothes. Underwear too.”

My eyes widen.

“I’ll
bring you some of Haruko’s,” he says. “We don’t
have time to argue, all right?”

I shake my head
no, but I turn and walk towards the bedroom anyway. I’m scared
to find out what will happen if I don’t cooperate. I close the
door behind me and start stripping off my ruined clothing, my hands
shaking. I can hear the three of them rush up and down a set of
stairs on the other side of the hallway, to and from a basement as I
stand waiting, naked, shivering.

Then the house
goes quiet. I put my ear to the surface of the door.

“Adam,”
I hear Haruko say in a low voice, “she’s a liability.”

“Haruko...”

“I don’t
like it any more than you do, but we can’t take her with us,
and we sure as hell can’t leave her here.”

Oh God. They’re
going to kill me.

I stumble away
from the door. I’m only on the first floor—maybe I can
jump out the window. And then what? What the hell am I going to do
with myself, naked and alone in the woods?

The door swings
open.

Haruko throws a
wad of clothing at me. “Get dressed,” she says. She slams
the door behind her.

What do I do?

I start pulling on
Haruko’s clothes: underwear, sports bra, jeans, socks, and
T-shirt. It’s all black, and it’s all too tight. I go
over to the window and try to pull it open, but I can’t; it’s
bolted shut. I go into the bathroom, hoping there will be something
else, some other exit, but there’s nothing.

I’ll have to
go back out into the hallway.

I open the door.
Adam is waiting for me, crouching by the corner to the living room.
He has a pistol in one hand and the handle of the black lockbox in
the other.

“They’ll
be here any minute,” he says in a low voice.

Who
is ‘they’?
I ask.

“Mirabel’s
people.”

Are they
looking for me?

He shakes his
head. “No. They’re looking for this.” He lifts the
box.

The bedroom window
shatters. Adam grabs my arm and pulls me into the living room. I
hurry into the kitchen, where Haruko is waiting, knife in hand,
hidden behind the archway. Adam ducks behind the armchair. Aya is
nowhere to be seen.

Three armed men
dressed in black rush from the hallway into the living room. Aya
emerges from thin air behind them. They turn, firing at her. Adam
comes out of his crouch and shoots at one of the men; Haruko rushes
out into the living room and stabs another in the back. He screams.

Aya falls. So does
the man with the knife in his back. Adam gets back behind the chair.
“Get down!” he hisses at me.

I hide behind the
refrigerator, shaking. More gunshots. I can’t see what’s
happening. I don’t care. I don’t even know what I’m
hoping will happen. I just don’t want to get shot again.

The front door
swings open. Mirabel walks into the kitchen. I know it’s
her—she has my face, my hair, my body.

“There you
are,” she says. She smiles crookedly and reaches into her
purse. She takes out a small handgun and shoots me in the arm.

A dart. It stings
like hell. I want to pull it out, but my hand won’t move.

The room blurs,
then goes dark and silent.

{Adam}

I followed Aya
through a series of labyrinthine halls lined with oil paintings and
electric lamps made to look like gaslights. As we walked I heard
footsteps in the distance, smelled the faintest body odor. The
sensation in my chest became a pulsing, almost as if my heart had
started beating once more, beating so forcefully it seemed on the
verge of failure.

Human blood.

A small group of
somberly-dressed men and women rounded a corner in front of us and
walked in our direction. At the sight of them, their scent and the
warmth of their bodies and breath, my gums began to tighten against
my teeth, which sharpened into points. My muscles hummed with
tension. My mind began to race. The weakest one would be the smaller
of the two women—thin arms, not muscular enough to put up a
fight. She’d be easy to pin against the wall—the jugular
easy to find under her pale skin—

I stopped in my
tracks and turned toward the wall. I closed my eyes, pressed my
fingertips against my eyelids. I could hear them retreating down the
corridor. It was all I could do not to run after them, to seize one
of them from behind, to—

“Dr.
Fletcher?”

I opened my eyes,
looked both ways down the hall. Aya and I were alone again, alone
with the portraits.

“Are you all
right?”

I stared at the
painting in front of me without really seeing it. “Sorry. Yes.
I’m fine.”

“It’s
not a problem. As long as you’re okay.”

She followed my
eyes to the painting. It was a portrait of a thin, tall man just shy
of middle age, dressed in what I supposed was Victorian or Edwardian
clothing, all black and white. His face, shown in profile, was pale
and somewhat severe. His dark hair was pulled back in a short
ponytail at the nape of his neck.

“That’s
a portrait of Master Radcliffe’s late brother,” Aya said.
“You look a little like him.”