Bloodline. Maggie Shayne

aroma so pungent and wonderful and evocative that it overwhelmed almost everything else. It was comforting, that scent. I heard the sound of cars that had not yet come close enough to see, and I could smell their exhaust.

      My brows drew together, and I pressed my fingertips to my forehead. “What am I?” I whispered.

      Lights came into view then. Headlights, as a vehicle rolled closer and closer on the road below. I started to move carefully down the hill. My feet seemed extremely sensitive to every pebble, and I sucked air through my teeth, tasting everything it carried in its breath, but I hurried all the same.

      I stopped halfway down just as the car rolled under the bridge, and I heard the brakes engage as the vehicle came to an abrupt stop, still ten feet from where I stood.

      I didn’t move toward it. I just stood there, naked and waiting. There was something tingling up the back of my neck that felt like unease. Like a warning.

      The car was black. Big and black. An SUV, I thought. An expensive one. My eyes slid toward the manufacturer’s logo on the front of the thing, and I saw laurel leaves encircling a shield, with blocks of color on its face. I thought I should remember it, though I wasn’t certain why. As I stared, unsure whether to move closer or turn away, the driver’s-side window, which was deeply tinted, moved downward just a little. A man’s voice said, “Get in.”

      The chill along my nape turned icy. I shivered, and everything in me went tense and tight. I felt as if I were coiling up inside myself in preparation for flight, though I didn’t know why I should feel the urge to run. I ignored the impulse, but still I didn’t move.

      And then, through the tiny gap in that window, I saw the black barrel of a gun, pointing right at my head, and the voice was cold this time. “I said get in.”

      The spring that had been coiling up inside me released all at once. My body sprang into motion as if propelled by some outside force. I turned, I lunged, I leapt, soaring from the embankment to the pavement beyond the bridge, behind the car, where the rain was pounding down. Barely had my feet settled on the macadam before I was moving again. I accelerated into a dead run, the speed of which astounded me.

      I heard tires spinning behind me, and then gunshots, three of them, so loud I thought my eardrums had split, but no pain came with those shots. The bullets, though certainly fired at me, had missed their mark. And when I dared to glance over my shoulder, I saw those headlights falling farther and farther behind me as I ran.

      That didn’t make any sense at all. The car was chasing me, speeding after me along the same stretch of road. And I was on foot, running through the pouring rain. And yet I was pulling away.

      Almost as an afterthought, I veered left, away from the pavement, and sped over uneven terrain, through an open field that was lush with grass and far easier on my tender feet. I ran until the car was long out of sight, and then I kept on running, because there was an ecstatic rush to it that I couldn’t understand.

      I leapt over boulders and limbs that appeared in my path. I jumped over the stream I’d heard from so far away, expecting to land somewhere in the middle of it, but clearing it instead. I ran alongside a doe that I startled, and while she flared her nostrils and bounded away with her white tail flying its warning, I passed her, and kept on going.

      God, what was this? How was this possible?

      Finally, when I began to tire at last, I stopped and again tried to take stock of who and what I was, but I found nothing there.

      Tabula rasa. The phrase echoed in my mind. Blank slate. It was as if whatever I had known or been before had been erased.

      So instead of searching within me for answers, I took a look at my surroundings, because I would need, I thought, food and shelter and probably some clothing, if I hoped to survive long enough to figure out anything more. Those were the immediate requirements. And they were easier to face than the emptiness inside my mind. Thinking on that brought me to the edge of panic, and I had the feeling that, should I give in to it, I might never return.

      I had run into a stand of forest, a woody little paradise, its floor lined with fallen leaves, and its trees awash in russet and scarlet and gold. I walked through it now, following my senses to its edge, where I could look out and see what lay beyond.

      Another stretch of pavement, curving into what appeared to be a small town. I saw a tall pointed church steeple. I saw several oversize barns, and lots of little houses. They were clustered together in some places, farther apart in others. Smoke wafted from chimneys, and I smelled the wood burning, and the oil, too. But my eyes fell on one place in particular, a place well beyond a cluster of homes. I didn’t know why. It was far away in the distance. A red house with white shutters. It had a red barn and a lot of green land around it, all of it enclosed by white wooden fences.

      And then a flash in my mind. A man, kissing me. Unfamiliar, powerful, wonderful feelings rushing through my body. Lips on mine. My hands tangling in dark hair.

      And then it was gone. Gone, just that fast.

      I wanted it back. I wanted more of it. But it had receded into the deep black waters inside my mind.

      Sighing in disappointment, I returned my attention to that little red farmhouse. It was that place that drew my attention, though I had no idea why. Another place would have been far easier to reach. That one, the one that caught hold of me and held me in its grip, was well past the rest of the town, situated on a hillside and only visible from here because of the angle at which I stood. The town itself was close at hand. That place…that place was miles from me. Isolated. Lonely.

      Calling out to me.

      I had to go. And I had no idea why I was so compelled.

      Yet, I rationalized, I’d had no idea why I’d felt a sense of panic when that car had stopped. And that feeling had proven accurate. So common sense dictated I should pay attention to my feelings. If my senses were somehow heightened beyond normal—which certainly seemed to be the case, since I could see and hear and smell things I shouldn’t be able to—and if my physical speed was also magnified—which it clearly was, since I had outrun a deer and a Cadillac…

      Yes. A Cadillac Escalade. That was what that car had been. I smiled a little, slightly gratified to think tiny things were coming back to me.

      But the point was, if all these other senses and strengths were somehow heightened, then maybe my intuitions were sharper than usual, as well. Though I couldn’t, just then, have said what “usual” might have been for me.

      I would, I decided, trust my intuitions. I would go to that red farmhouse—no, I would go to its barn, which would be safer. That would be my shelter for the moment. And from there I would plan my next move.

      So I walked down the slight grassy incline, away from the autumnal beauty of the woods, to the curving country road, and then, keeping to the softest part of the shoulder, I began walking, naked, toward that tiny town. And as I walked, I began to feel aware of a demanding, urgent hunger unlike any I had ever known before.

      21 Years Ago

      Serena blinked the drug-induced haze from her head and glanced up at the man in the white lab coat, with the stethoscope around his neck. He wasn’t looking at her, but at her chart.

      “Where’s my baby? Can I see her now?” Then she smiled a little, through the fog. God, they must have given her a lot of drugs, she thought. “I’m already saying ‘her,’ when I don’t even know for sure, but I expected her to be a girl. Was she? Is she perfect and wonderful? How much did she weigh? Why haven’t the nurses brought her in to me yet?”

      The doctor lowered the chart, replaced it on its hook at the foot of the bed, and then he came closer and reached down to pat her hand. Not hold it, just pat it. He wasn’t smiling.

      Something clenched tight in the pit of Serena’s stomach. And suddenly she didn’t want to hear what he was going to say.

      “It was a girl, yes. But…I’m very sorry, Serena. Your baby was stillborn.”

      A