Memory Soup...Part 2

With Naomi fading away, I was left feeling more than a little empty. We had built a small, tenuous, but tangible emotional connection that for a moment had transcended each of our deaths.

Seeing her in her full, natural beauty also triggered a rushing flood of faded memories and half thoughts from that part of Daniel that I had absorbed. Those thoughts ranged from the barely suprressed lust the Daniel had felt for the girl, to fleeting reminders of something that had been planning to get for her right before I had snatched him in Windsor...

It was disturbing, because it was very clear that Daniel had every intention of ‘doing right by her and the baby’ before I grabbed him, but the completion of that thought escaped me for the moment.

I sat back, looking up into the leaves of the Tree, seeing them flutter gently in the soft breeze, the sounds of it washing over me without forming any intelligent words-thus the Tree was not interested in talking at the moment.

Something was there in the recesses of Daniels’ memories, something that he had been trying to hide from me, even as I was stripping the memories of his own children from his brain. Something that he had kept secret even from...Drake.

Oh shit. Daniel had been playng his own game with fate...something about his work for Drake was not on the complete up and up. I could almost see the walls of the defenses he had tried to build, had been building for all of the years he had worked with and for Drake.

I became lost in puzzling this all out. I began a sort of mental housekeeping that was not at all easy. Trapped in my already cluttered head were memories fragments from Ma Grendel and her various and sundry incarnations and, including even more fragments from her many hundreds of victims and events that spanned thousands of years. Mixed in with those were my own memories, although in the melding with Ma Grendel, some of those have become scrambled and less reliable than they once were. Now, I was trying to assimilate the entire set of adult memories of a very intelligent, introverted man who invested an enormous amount of time learning-the more I scanned through these things, the more impressed I became with his drive to learn everything he could about the human body and how it functioned.

Trying to separate and sort these...engrams-to borrow a term I had found in Daniels’ memory, was proving to be quite a challenge. But it was a challenge that was becoming increasingly necessary if I was ever to have a chance of maintaining my own sense of Self. And now, there was an even more important incentive...to find out what secret (or secrets) was so powerful, so dangerous, that Daniel was willing to risk Drake’s wrath to keep it. Drake was not someone who tolerated such duplicity.

As I searched for clues as to what that secret might be, I kept running up against a rather recent engram of an e-mail message that Daniel had received from Drake the night before he had contacted me:

“Daniel,

I am glad to hear that you are well. I have been looking forward to our upcoming meeting VERY much. We have a great deal to discuss, you and I. My people will be there for you the day after next. I have a very generous offer for you--return those things that you have taken from me, and the Jackson woman is yours to do with as you please, although the baby is non-negotiable-she is mine. I’ll even let you keep the money that you have stolen from me over years. Yes, I know about the money, but I am willing to overlook even that much money-the items you have taken from are far more valuable to me than mere money. Return them to me, and you shall have your respite from my agents!

-Drake”

Everry time that engram came up, it played as fresh and clear as a movie in my head, but it ended in the hard, steely gray wall of the defeneses that the man had set up inside himself.

What the Hell could this scared little man have taken from Drake and then hid so well that Drake wouldn’t be able to find it himself? What the Hell would Drake value more than money? And speaking of money, how much dough had this man stolen from Drake and where was it?

I immediately set to work trying to puzzle those answers out of the tangled mess of mixed engrams in my head...