Vampire Memories #5 - Ghosts of Memories (32 page)
Read Vampire Memories #5 - Ghosts of Memories Online
Authors: Barb Hendee
But he seemed to enjoy her feisty nature, and she seemed to thrive on finally being able to express herself. After two hundred years of Ivory being pressed under Christian’s thumb, Eleisha didn’t blame her.
“If we put the new desk here,” Ivory insisted on the other side of the office door, “for at least part of the month, I’m going to have moonlight reflecting off my screen. It has to go over there.”
“You can’t put it there,” Wade answered back. “We’d have to move Tuesday’s bed.”
“Well, I don’t think Miss Princess Kitty would mind having her bed moved.”
Smiling, Eleisha walked past the office, on down the hallway.
Wade was having the time of his life.
She reached the stairs and headed down into the apartment below. The sounds of gunfire echoed in her ears before she stepped into the living room. Philip, Seamus, and Mary were all watching
Predator
with Arnold Schwarzenegger on Philip’s big flat-screen TV.
Only Seamus seemed less than thrilled with the choice of film.
“I just don’t see why we can’t watch an old John Wayne Western sometimes,” he said.
“Yuck,” Mary answered.
The corners of Philip’s mouth twitched. Philip had never been comfortable with anyone besides Eleisha or Wade. He was decent to Rose, and he tolerated Maxim and Seamus, but to Eleisha’s pleased surprise, he actually liked Mary. Like him, she was easily bored, and they had a similar taste in films.
Of the two newest additions, Mary was the most damaged, even though she had great potential to help the group. For now, it was good for her to just hang around with Philip and Seamus—and heal a bit.
Both Seamus and Mary appeared to be in cross-legged sitting positions, floating a few inches off the floor. Eleisha was not surprised when Mary suddenly turned her transparent head toward Seamus and said, “I’m just kidding. You pick the movie next time.”
She was clearly grateful for her place here in the underground, and she gave the credit to him.
Philip’s long body was stretched out on the couch, but his eyes flicked toward Eleisha as she walked into the room, and he motioned to the empty space on the couch beside him. She smiled but didn’t sit down and just kept going, passing through into the kitchen.
There, she stopped and looked down at a porcelain teacup someone had left on the table. The kitchen counters were somewhat cluttered by herbs that Rose grew in various colored pots, along with Wade’s Crock-Pot and microwave. The place looked just like anyone else’s kitchen.
Her mind drifted back to the previous spring when she’d first become determined to make this empty, lonely church into a home…and she’d dubbed it the “underground.”
Nothing since then had worked out the way she’d imagined, but in just a year, the church had gone from being empty to being filled with five vampires, one mortal, two ghosts, a small cat, and an old pit bull.
And there were more lost vampires out there who didn’t even know they had nothing left to fear.
Julian was gone.
Eleisha walked back into the living room and went to the couch, curling up against Philip’s side. But she kept thinking on Wade’s words out in the garden a few weeks before. They could look for vampires without fear now. They never had to look over their shoulders again.
“What are you thinking?” Philip asked.
“I’m thinking that…we’re free.”
Table of Contents
