He tried to run. She'll remember that later, the little spike of adrenalin as the prey attempts to dart out of her reach – pathetic, how easy it was to catch hold of him, spin him round, her hands closing over his upper arms so tightly the bones broke as she jerked him towards her.
He tried to fight. She'll remember that too, the sting across her chest as the scalpel he had snatched up sings ineffectually across her breastbone, clatters to the ground.
He never begged, and she'll remember forever the look of animal panic in his eyes as she darts her head forward, buries her face in his throat and tears into his flesh.
But after that, memories – even her exceptional, vivid memories – can't quite capture the bliss of drinking and drinking and not having to stop, the living blood running into her and into her. He is in her too, his memories flowing inside her, every tawdry little triumph and petty little terror, filling her up with a metallic loathing, but the blood is still the blood, rich and hot and satisfying every gnawing want she's ever known.
She can hear her own animal moans as if from far off, hear Fiskel gurgle desperately as his own blood fills his windpipe. She draws back from the ruin of his throat only to tear a fresh wound in his wrist and drink and drink and drink.
Time stops. As he dies, his life slipping out of his body and into hers, a total silence fills the universe, and in that silence, truth falls clear and plain as rain. The blood is the key. The blood remembers. My blood remembering his blood. His body remembering his blood in mine. Madeline squeezes the body in her arms like a lover, sucks at the wound as if at a juiced orange, tongue lapping desperately for more, more, more-
And then it's over. He is over. Madeline returns to herself and finds that she is clinging to a corpse. Already it reeks to her of its decay. She shudders away from it, backs against the wall, dazzled by the crystalline precision with which her blood-infused senses render everything she sees and smells and feels. The world roars with reality; she has never been so present, felt so alive.
A soft, rasping sound from the gurney whips her round. Jessica's chest is barely moving; her breath is coming in long, slow groans – the death rattle.
Madeline is beside her without even thinking it, lifting her sister in her arms as easily as if she was made of paper, cradles her against her chest. She feels her cheeks wet, watches deep red tears speckle her sister's chalk-white face.
"Please," Madeline begs. "Please Jessie, please don't die. I'm sorry, I'm so sorry…" Jessica gives what might have been a sigh. The tip of her tongue flickers out and brushes a drop of Maddy's blood tears from her pale, cracked lips.
Her limp body suddenly goes rigid. Her eyelids flutter, trying to open. Her lips tremble as more blood tears drip into her mouth.
The blood remembers.
Madeline suddenly knows what she has to do.
She lifts her sister's face to the wound on her chest.
"Jessica? Drink. You have to. Jessica!"
For a terrible moment, she thinks it's too late. Her sister gives a sigh, and then goes still. And then, Madeline feels her mouth brushing the wound, then lick, then latch on.
The pain is like nothing that she has ever known. She feels everything that she is being dragged out of her through the thin wound, shredding her muscles, scouring her veins. Even as she collapses forwards, she can feel the strength returning to her sister's arms, feels herself being lifted like a cup to the insistent mouth that takes and takes and takes from the very core of her being.
Her vision is swimming, the lights above her head impossibly bright. She hears a labored breath hissing out of her as the dreadful pain finally slips away, and Jessica raises herself up, whole and healed, radiant, her eyes wide with wonder, her lips red with blood.
"Who are you?" she asks again, just as Madeline blacks out.
When she comes to again, her body aches. The wound on her chest, which would normally have healed over by now, is still reddened and tender to her tentative touch. She sits up sharply, whips her head around to see Jessica watching her warily from the other side of the room.
"You're awake," the older girl observes. Madeline nods. "Where are we?"
Maddy gets unsteadily onto her feet, almost trips over the mangled corpse of Fiskel. She jerks away in horror, almost backs into Jessica who has come to stand beside her. Her sister is looking down at the pulped wreck of a man with a look of grim satisfaction on her pretty face.
"Did you kill him?"
Madeline flushes, looks away.
I did. I killed him. I killed him and I nearly killed you too. She can't speak. A bone-deep shame and horror threatens to come out in unhinged screaming if she unseals her lips. Jessica doesn't seem to notice, simply nods.
"Good. He brought me here. He hurt me. And he wouldn't even tell me why." She gave the corpse a vindictive kick, then turned back to Madeline, looks at her warily.
"Who are you? What are you? What happened? Everything's – kind of muddled. You were here; but then something happened… I think I was passed out, except I dreamed. And then when I woke up, you were the one unconscious, and he was lying there, dead…" She shook her head. "I can't remember anything properly. But you. I know you, don't I? But… but you can't be you. You're dead. So if you're here… am I dead? None of this can be real. None of it makes any sense!"
Madeline looked into her sister's eyes. It is me. I'm not dead. I never was. I would have died for you. But I lived instead, and now I'm a monster, but I love you, I love you, I love you and I never meant to hurt you, I never wanted to hurt anyone.
The words were there. But she couldn't say them. She looked into her sister's confused face, then back at the body on the floor, the blood on her own hands, all down her chest, his blood and hers and Jessica's, and knew that there was nothing she could say, no way back to a place of safety.
She turned her back on Jessica's questioning gaze, walked numbly to a pharmacy cabinet on the far side of the ward room.
"No," she heard herself saying. "None of it does make any sense. It's just a bad dream. A fever dream. You're sick, and lost, and far from home. But don't worry; I'm going to take you back. And it'll be like none of this ever happened."
Jessica's bare feet slapped the cold parquet floor as she strode up behind Maddy.
"What are you talking about? It's not a dream, I'm not asleep-" but her voice was cut off by the chloroformed pad of cotton Madeline was suddenly holding gently but firmly over her sister's face. She sank to the ground awkwardly with Jessica slung limply across her arms.
"I'm so sorry," Madeline whispered, but to who, and what for? She couldn't even begin to atone for what she'd done.
She stole a car. She had never stolen anything in her whole life before. But what was a little larceny to a murderer?
Jessica slept the whole way back to Oregon. Madeline was worried at first, thinking that her apparently miraculous recovery had been a false dawn; but apart from being exhausted, there didn't seem to be too much wrong with her. Her vital signs were all strong, her injuries were healed. Somehow, the reinfusion of her own blood mixed with Maddy's own seemed to have completely restored her, physically at least. Whether she would ever be able to make any kind of sense of what had happened to her, Madeline tried not to think about.
When she arrived at the little clapboard house where she had passed the few, unhappy years of childhood before Fiskel's clinic, she didn't get out of the car immediately. She sat for about half an hour, listening to Jessica's regular breathing, and trying to nerve herself up for a confrontation that had been coming for over thirteen years.
Finally she found herself stood in the porch and ringing the bell, Jessica sleeping in her arms. As she reached for the knocker, the sense of blank unreality that had been clinging to her all the way from Omaha was suddenly lifted, and a burst of genuine panic shot through her as the chain shot back and revealed a wedge of her mother's suspicious face. The door flew open wide as she registered Jessica.
"Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God. Frank!" Madeline was jerked across the threshold, as her father shambled into the room, stood open-mouthed and blinking at the tableau in his sitting room.
Madeline's mother was the only one of the three of them who didn't seem slightly stunned.
"Frank, take Jessica upstairs. Do it now!"
She had to give him a little push; but he did then take Jessica from Madeline, flinching when their skin touched as she handed her over. With not so much as a word, he climbed clumsily up the stairs, Madeline craning to catch one last look at her sister as she disappeared behind his hunched back. Madeline turned around to face the one she really had a reckoning with.
"Mommy?"
The older woman's face scrunched in distaste.
"We're all a bit past that now, don't you think? How did you find her? Where did he have her?"
Madeline flinched at the questions, fired off peremptorily like bullets from a gun. Those clipped, disapproving tones made her want to stand up straighter.
"Same place he had me. For years."
Her mother shuddered, scowled.
"I thought as much. But what could we do? We had nothing to bargain with. He wanted you. Why did you run away? You brought all this down on us."
Madeline stared. A burst of pure fury cut through her exhaustion.
"I brought this down on you? You sold me to him when I was five. You used me for spare parts and then you sold me! Your own child!"
Her mother scowled as Maddy's voice rose to a shout.
"Be quiet! Jessica's sleeping! And don't be so melodramatic. I did what I had to, to save my little girl. It was the only way. Sacrifices have to be made sometimes, that's just they way of life."
Madeline was shocked to feel tears on her face. She thought, after Omaha, that she'd no more tears left. She stared at the floor, trying to get her feelings under control, hearing the rage and hurt throbbing through her low words.
"But it was my life. Not yours. My sacrifice. Not yours. It was my choice – not yours!"
Her mother shook her head.
"You were a child. How could you understand what was necessary? And anyway, can you really tell me you would have chosen any differently? Given what was at stake? You love her too, I admit that. And look, when she needed you now, you've made that choice again. You've put her first. Because that's what you were born to do."
Madeline's head snapped up.
"It may be what I was born to do. It is NOT all that I'm worth."
Her mother backed up sharply, horror suffusing her face.
"Dear God, what's wrong with your face? What are you?"
Confused, Madeline glanced at the dusty mirror hanging over the mantelpiece, saw her pale face streaked with dark blood tears. She took a step towards her quailing mother.
"I'm what you made me, Mommy. Whatever that is. What I want to know is why. Why are we so different, Jessie and I? Why did you love her and not me? Why am I like this and she isn't? Why?"
She heard a soft reproving cough behind her, spun around to see her father hovering in the doorway, his hands fluttering indecisively. Madeline rounded on him.
"Why don't you tell me? Daddy? Why? What did I ever do to you to deserve this? To deserve to be this?" His mouth opened and closed dryly, and he blinked his pale, protruberant eyes at her, but no words came out. Her mother gave a short, bitter laugh.
"If you're expecting him to come to the rescue, you'll have a long wait. I learned that nineteen years ago, had to take matters into my own hands."
The old man's scalp showed red through his thinning hair. His mouth worked for a moment more, then he turned on his heel and abruptly left the room. Madeline turned back to her mother, helpless with confusion.
"What are you talking about?"
Her mother rolled her eyes.
"He was never good for much, even before Jessica got ill. He was useless afterwards. He went all to pieces, left me to deal with everything. I needed another child, for Jessica; and he couldn't even manage that. So I had to find someone who could."
Madeline went cold.
"What are you saying?" she asked numbly. Her mother's face was sour with distaste.
"I went to a bar. Lipstick, heels, hair lacquer. Like a whore. And it worked. I was no beauty, even with all that paint – the man was so drunk he could hardly see. But even drunk, he could do what that waste of space in the next room couldn't. He got me pregnant with you."
Madeline sat down heavily on an overstuffed armchair.
"Who was he?" she whispered. Her mother shrugged.
"Some big black-haired cage-fighter. A thug. He served a purpose, nothing more."
Madeline felt the fury rising up in her again. She sprang onto her feet.
"How can you say that? He was my father. He might be able to explain why I'm like this!"
Her mother pursed her lips, looked away.
"What do you want from me? It's the past. All I ever wanted was the daughter I had. You've brought her back to me. So thank you. But there's nothing more between us. There never was."
Madeline was astonished to find, after all she'd already been through, that words could still hurt her so badly. But underneath the pain, for the first time, she felt a furious rage. She didn't know if it was the blood, or having killed a man, or just having it thrown in her face after all these years how little she had ever meant to the woman who gave her life.
"You know something?" she murmured, staring at her feet. "When I was a little girl, I tried to imagine why. What I could have done so wrong to deserve what was happening to me. It was only later on I realised nothing I could have done could be that bad. That it couldn't have been anything I did; it must be worse than something I'd done. It must be something that I was."
She looked into her mother's face, and was outraged to see she looked impatient; bored. A snarl broke out of Madeline, and she took a step closer to the older woman, who flinched, but jutted her chin out defiantly
"What are you going to do now? Kill me like the monster you are?"
"But now I know," Madeline continued, as if she hadn't spoken. "It isn't me. It was never me. It's you."
She took another step closer, saw her mother's pupils shrink, felt the surge of predatory hunger lurch up in her – then with every ounce of will she had, she forced it down. No matter how overpowering her urge to drink, she thought, she didn't want that woman's thoughts in her.
"I'm not going to hurt you – Mommy. I don't know what I am; but I know what you are. You're the monster. The only thing you've ever loved is Jessica. So I give her to you. And every time you look at her, you're going to remember me. Remember what you did. And if the memory of that haunts you – if it overshadows every smile she gives you – I hope you live a very, very long time."