Free Redlisted by Sara Beaman

“given I’m pretty sure I just tried
to kill myself.”
    ///
    I spent most of
the next three days alone in the suite. It seemed to get smaller and
more confining with every passing minute. I tried to distract myself
by reading, but I had no interest in my textbooks, nor in any of the
other books they’d provided. Yet there was nothing else to do,
except to sit and think and get more and more agitated.
    Nothing else but
to wander the halls. I made several attempts at that. Each time I
left the suite, the configuration of passages had shifted. Their
permutations seemed endless; they were never the same way twice.
Still I wandered, but it was never long before Aya caught up with me
and insisted in guiding me back to my suite.
    I didn’t
have to feel emotional to be angry. The two of them—Julian and
his submissive girlfriend, or whatever she was to him—were
holding me against my will. Why? What did they hope to get out of me?
I couldn’t surmise what they wanted. Something to do with
curing amnesia, perhaps. Why couldn’t they just tell me? I
would do it. I would do almost anything for the freedom to leave.
    What bothered me
most was the flashback I’d channeled, Aya’s memory of
Markus. I thought of it every time I glanced at the four-poster bed.
If I could trust what Julian had said about the sun, Aya must have
forced Markus to become a ghoul. She’d exposed him to the sun,
severed the link between his soul and his body and turned him into a
blood-sucking zombie.
    As much as I hated
to admit it, Aya frightened me. Part of me still wanted to die, but
none of me wanted to become a ghoul.
    ///
    One of the few
diversions I was allowed were my daily trips to Julian’s
office. They always came complete with a lecture. The first two were
meandering diatribes about some secret vampire society he called the
Watchers of the Americas. He peppered these monologues with seemingly
irrelevant asides and personal accounts, talking for hours just to
talk.
    His lecture on the
third day, however, was short.
    “Have you
had any interesting dreams lately?” he asked from behind a
bookshelf. “Since you’ve come here, that is?”
    This was his
habit. He would start speaking as soon as he heard the doors to his
office open, before he emerged from the mess. Sometimes he wouldn’t
even bother to come out. He’d leave it up to me to follow the
sound of his voice and find him. I hated it.
    “I haven’t
been sleeping,” I replied—neither a lie nor the truth.
    “Really?”
He stepped out into view. “Why not?”
    “I haven’t
felt tired.”
    “What have
you been doing all day long, then?”
    “Reading.
Thinking about what’s happened.” Trying to figure out how
to escape.
    “I only ask
because dreams of peculiar insight are one of our family traits. It’s
not a gift I possess, sadly, but it’s one that often
accompanies telepathy.”
    “I see.”
    He walked towards
the study. “Oftentimes, members of our line dream the memories
of other people. Especially those whose blood they’ve
consumed.”
    “If you’re
asking me if I’ve dreamed anything about you, I haven’t.”
    “That’s
a shame.”
    “Why? What
could I tell you that you don’t already know?”
    He opened the
doors to the study and gestured for me to step inside. “Someone
of my advanced age must expect to suffer a few holes in their
memory,” he said, smiling.
    “Wait. Is
that why you’re so interested in retrograde amnesia? Because
you’re senile?”
    He laughed. “Well,
no, not exactly.”
    I sat down and
folded my arms across my chest. “Why don’t you just tell
me what it is that you want from me?”
    “I suppose
that’s fair.” He reached for a glass. “If it’s
not too much trouble, perhaps you can have something to drink... and
if you happen to have any strange dreams, do tell me about them, will
you?”
    He filled the
glass from the amphora and placed it in front of me.
    “Julian...”
    “Yes?”
    “Who was
Markus?”
    He