Redlisted (13 page)

Okay...

He closes the door
again, pops the trunk and removes two suitcases. The doors lock with
a bang as he walks away. I hide my face in my hair again and wait,
feeling like a mouse among cats. I sip at my cold coffee and take
deep breaths, trying to calm myself, but it’s useless.

I keep my face
hidden behind the veil of my hair even as I hear them return to the
car for the rest of the luggage and walk away a second time. Minutes
pass. I start to wonder if Adam doesn’t plan to leave me out
here for the day. I guess I might be safer out here. The sun would
protect me.

After maybe
fifteen minutes, Adam returns. He unlocks and opens the car door.

“Come on,”
he says under his breath. “Aya has him distracted.”

I nod and stand
up, grabbing the black backpack from the seat next to me. It’s
much heavier than I expected; it takes a great deal of effort just to
haul it onto my back.

“I’ll
take that,” Adam says. He grabs it from me before I can
protest.

Adam leads me
inside the crumbling house, past a narrow hallway that seems to lead
around the entire perimeter of the building, surrounding what amounts
to a smaller, windowless house inside the larger structure. He opens
a door to the interior and gestures for me to enter first.

The space is dank,
heavy with earthy moisture and nearly pitch black. As Adam shuts the
door behind us I feel an awful sense of dread, a feeling of being
buried alive, and it’s all I can do not to run for the exit.

Adam opens a door
to our left. The room beyond is windowless, long and narrow,
illuminated by a bare bulb hanging from the ceiling that flickers
erratically. The room is furnished with an antique-looking couch and
several overfull bookcases. Numerous photographs hang on the walls.

I follow him
inside. My eyes fall on a framed picture of a strawberry-blonde woman
whose perfect features I find sickeningly familiar. I take several
steps backwards and run into someone. Vincent. I didn’t hear
him approach. I look at the floor, hoping he didn’t see my
face.

“Everything
all right?” he asks.

“Yes—everything—everything’s
fine,” Adam stammers, sounding nearly as alarmed as I am. “I
know this is a strange question, but who is the woman in this photo?”
He points at the portrait.

“Her? Her
name is Claire Llewellyn. She’s Tara’s daughter. My
sister. Why do you ask?”

“I’ve
seen her before,” Adam says.

“I’ve
never met her myself,” Vincent says. “She’s many
years my senior, and Tara speaks of her little.”

“Did they
have a falling out?”

Vincent walks back
to the door we entered through, closes and locks it. He walks to the
far side of the room and locks the door on that side as well.

“I see,”
Adam says. “Not a falling out as such. She fell in with someone
else.”

“Yes.
Someone with influence.”

Vincent catches my
eyes as I look up.

“Someone who
looks quite a bit like your traveling companion,” he continues.

My cheeks burn.

“I know what
this looks like, but she’s not my concubine,” Adam says.
“She’s not redlisted. We’re trying to bring her to
Red Hook to meet with Desmond Schuster. We’re hoping she can
testify in front of the Watchers of the Americas. Testify against
Mirabel.”

“Why on
earth did you bring her here?”

“We got her
out before they could do the voice modification. But she’s
mute,” Adam says. “And obviously she can’t testify
if she’s mute.”

Vincent frowns, a
line appearing between his eyebrows. “I don’t know if I
can help you,” he says. “And Tara...” He shakes his
head.

“What’s
wrong with her?”

“She’s
foresworn blood,” Vincent says. “She’s abjectly
withered.”

“Just...
blood?” Adam asks. “All blood?”

“She won’t
even take mine.” Vincent looks to me. “Here. Will you
sit?” He gestures to the couch.

I hurry to the
couch and sit down. The cushion is hard.

He kneels in front
of me, his eyes at the level of my throat, a look of deep
concentration on his face.

“Something
is wrong,” he says after a long moment. “Something
subtle, with her nerves. It’s not something I have the skill to
correct.”

“Shit,”
Adam says.

Vincent stands.
After a long pause, he asks, “She’ll testify against
Mirabel?”

I nod vehemently.

“Very well,”
he says. “I will attempt to revive Tara.”

“Thank you,”
Adam says, sighing.

“Keep her
away from Gabriel,” Vincent says. “Claire was the one who
sent him here—ostensibly to watch over Tara in her weakened
state, but...” He trails off.

“I
understand.”

“Come with
me,” Vincent says. “There is a room around back where she
can sleep.”

We follow Vincent
through the door on the far wall into what looks like it might have
been a dining room at one point. It’s currently set up as a
guest bedroom, with two cots made up in fading, mismatched linens.

We continue
through another door to a second bedroom, this one smaller than the
last. A sink, cabinet and tub sit along one wall. There is just
enough space along the other wall for a double bed on an
old-fashioned brass frame. A door on the back wall presumably leads
to the outer hallway. Adam puts the black backpack down by the bed.

“I have to
apologize,” Vincent says. “We don’t have a toilet.
You see, we don’t usually entertain mortal visitors...”

I shrug. It seems
like the least of my concerns.

“There are
some towels in the cabinet,” he says.

I nod.

“I will need
to go into town now if I am going to be able to revive Tara,”
he continues. “Mr. Radcliffe, you couldn’t, uh, ask
Gabriel to come with me, could you?”

“You mean
compel him? No.” Adam shakes his head. “I can’t.”

“I see.”
Vincent brings a knuckle to his lips. “In that case I will do
my best to be brief.”

With that, he
leaves through the door to the outer hallway, closing it behind him.
I sit down on the edge of the double bed.

“I can wait
out the day in here,” Adam says very tentatively, “if
that would make you feel more—“

No.

“All right,”
he says, “but I don’t feel safe leaving you by yourself.”

It’s
fine. Gabriel hasn’t seen my face.

Adam’s mouth
flattens into a tense line. He sits down on the rim of the bathtub
and folds his arms across his chest.

I look away.
I just want some time to myself.

“All right.
I can understand that. We’ll just lock both doors and...”
He trails off.

You’re
awfully concerned about me
.

“Is that a
problem?”

I shrug.
So
what exactly is it that you want me to do?

“What do you
mean?”

This entire
business with testifying.

“Right.
Okay, well, here’s the deal. Revenants are governed by a body
called the Watchers of the Americas, and within it there are... not
political parties, exactly, but factions. The Wardens control most of
it, but there are factions even within the Wardens.” He
scratches under his chin. “Haruko’s uncle, Desmond
Schuster, is the de facto leader of one major Warden faction—the
only one with any interest in neutralizing Mirabel.”

Okay...

Long story short,
we hope that if you testify in front of the Watchers, it can help us
build a case against her,” he says, shrugging. “And
hopefully allow us to have her replaced.”

You don’t
think it will work.

“No, I
don’t,” he says. “But I had to tell Haruko
something to convince her not to shoot you. And I needed to tell
Vincent something to convince him to help us.”

So
what
do
you want from me?

“Do I have
to want anything from you?” He stands up. “Why don’t
you get some sleep. Maybe take a bath. Hopefully there’s hot
water.” He walks over and locks the door to the outer hallway.

So
now you’re just going to go?
I
think, frowning.

“Didn’t
you say you wanted to be alone?”

I sniff loudly.
Fine.

With that he
leaves, closing the door to the other bedroom behind him.

I stare at the
closed door for a moment, then get up and lock it, annoyed. I was
going to ask him for more blood and then tell him to leave.

Am I using him?

What a stupid,
naïve thing to think. He shot me. He owes me. And he’s
clearly using me, even if I don’t know for what.

I look at myself
in the mirror over the sink, shudder, and consider the bathtub. But
it’s too cold and I’m too tired to want to take a bath. I
unzip the black backpack and look for pajamas, but I don’t find
any. I strip naked and slip under the blankets.

I fall asleep with
the lights on.

{Adam}

I gave up trying
to sleep after a week of consistent failure.

I started taking
an hour or so every day around high noon to write in a notebook. I’d
never been able to keep a journal before; I’d always given up
after a few entries and abandoned the practice. Whenever I returned
to what I’d previously written, I’d get so annoyed by my
own thoughts that I’d always end up ripping the pages out or
throwing the whole book away.

As I began
recalling events in order to write them down, I realized I could
remember ever minute of my afterlife thus far in detail. I had a
condition, it seemed, the technical name for which was hyperthemesia.
Eidetic memory, in other words. The inability to forget.

Even still there
were things I refused to write down. I wrote nothing about my life
before dying. I wrote nothing about Alison.

I felt guilty over
what happened to her, of course. Guilty and ashamed. Still, I was
somehow relieved to be dead, to be removed from the situation. I was
relieved to be done with my career, my research, the slow grueling
march towards tenure; relieved to be separated from my few surviving
family members, my colleagues, my students; relieved not to have to
worry about the banal details of everyday life any longer. The relief
seemed wrong, even immoral, but there it was.

Maybe it was
better not to care. I couldn’t hope to get Alison back. I
couldn’t hope to get my job back. Even if I could figure out
how to get Julian’s memories back, and even if he released me,
I couldn’t move back to Baltimore. I had no idea where I’d
go if and when I left the estate. I was dead. A non-person, really.
My accounts were frozen, if my brother hadn’t emptied them
already. My social security number was rendered invalid.

At times I
entertained the fantasy of working a night shift at a hospital
somewhere, anywhere, maybe out on the West Coast or the Midwest,
somewhere I wouldn’t be recognized. But I knew this too was
impossible. I couldn’t expect to work among other doctors
without anyone noticing I didn’t have vital signs.

There was only one
thing from my living life I had any hope of salvaging, and it was
Elena.

I’d met her
while I was still in graduate school for clinical psychology, before
I ended up in medical school instead, before I met Alison. I was
under her supervision as a research assistant. She was married, she
had a young son, and she didn’t seem particularly interested in
me, but I was young and stupid and she was gorgeous and intelligent
and helpful and kind. It was hopeless. I was hopeless.