to wrench himself away.
He grabbed Eleisha’s shoulder and pushed her. She struck the bathroom door and fell. Her expression was wild and confused.
He wanted to kill her.
She had invaded him and seen everything, all his private thoughts and his past. He had relived it all. He could still taste Jessenia in his mouth.
“I’m so sorry . . . ,” Eleisha choked out. “Robert, I’m so sorry.”
He crawled toward her, wanting to get his sword and take her head.
“If you were sorry, you wouldn’t have done it!” he spat.
“Jessenia,” she whispered, her eyes still lost. “I’m so sorry.”
He stopped.
She covered her face with her hands. “Why did you show me all that? You said one memory.”
“Show you? You took it!”
Then he wondered how. How could she make his life pass by to the degree of reliving it?
“No, you went all the way back. . . . Robert, you loved her so much. I wish you hadn’t shown me. . . .” She faltered and lowered her hands. “Angelo caused all this. Philip doesn’t even know.”
Robert’s rage began to fade. She was as distraught as him. Her blond hair covered part of her face, but he could still see her pained expression.
“Oh, God . . . and Philip,” she went on. “That’s why you didn’t know him at first.”
Crawling closer, Robert felt a strange release in talking of these things. He had never spoken about the past, but she knew it all anyway. Nothing would change that now.
“At first, I didn’t even recognize him in the park,” he whispered.
“But he looked more familiar when he walked into the kitchen with his hair a mess and his shirt off?”
“Yes, and then I saw him again, and it all came back. I think he remembered, too.”
Her face was only a few inches from his, and he could see how rapidly her mind was working.
“The laws,” she said softly. Then she pushed herself to sit up. “None of us know anything. None of us were taught anything.”
“It’s not your fault.”
Her voice was beginning to calm, and he still couldn’t comprehend what she’d just done to him, but if she hadn’t forced those memories, if she hadn’t tried to invade his past, then she was taking in a great deal of unwanted information about a past that had spawned her existence.
“Only the first one applies,” she whispered.
“What do you mean?”
“That we don’t kill to feed.” She huddled against the bathroom door with her arms crossed. “I can see now . . . understand everything you’ve been saying since you found us. I swear, Robert, that I would help you teach those laws and live by them. But I won’t ever make another vampire. Neither would Philip now, and Rose wouldn’t even think it. Only the first law applies, and I’ve taught Philip how to hunt without killing.” She paused. “I haven’t talked to Rose about that, taught her anything. Have you?”
“Yes, the first night I arrived.”
“Then we’ll be okay, Robert. . . . We will.” Her face twisted in sorrow again. “I’m so sorry about Jessenia.”
Her sympathy was so raw. It didn’t help. Nothing would help, but she mourned for his loss as if it happened yesterday.
And yet she knew far too much about him. She even knew he’d killed the gardener to survive. He was not certain how he could come to terms with how much she knew.
“That book on Angelo’s table,” she said. “Philip told me that Angelo taught him about you from a book, one that Angelo had written himself, called The Makers and Their Children.”
Robert tensed. “What?”
“Yes, he told me that Angelo believed he and Julian should know about other vampires sharing their existence.”
A knock sounded on the other side of the inner door.
“Eleisha,” Philip called. “The sun will be coming up. Let me in.”
Philip had done exactly as Wade asked, and he left Eleisha to talk to Robert, but they’d been in the other cabin for a long time, and he didn’t like it. He understood that Eleisha should be the one to tell Robert to stop ordering everyone around.
He knew the others sometimes thought he was simple, but he understood.
It’s just that he’d expected a short conversation, and they’d been in there for hours. What could they possibly be saying all this time?
Finally he knocked on the door.
“Eleisha, the sun will be coming up. Let me in.”
Wade had already prepared the lower bunk for Rose, and he was in the process of pulling out the top bunk for himself.
Eleisha slid