by J. R. Rain
The wind whipped up some of the dust along the ledge. The dust swirled and danced and formed mini dust devils, then dissipated again.
“So, where does that leave us, Sam? It doesn’t have to leave us anywhere, quite frankly. I could leap from this cliff and fly off and you would never hear from me again. Perhaps this is something you wish. If so, I do not blame you, or anyone. I am hardly anyone’s type. You surely did not ask me to be here, or to help you, or anything. Yet, here I am, shoehorning myself into your life. Or, at least, entertaining the idea, and asking you to entertain the idea, too. Maybe. Quite frankly, I am not sure what I am asking of you, or even of myself. I am truly thinking out loud; so, perhaps, it is a good thing that you are in your changeling form. It helps me do all the thinking and talking. Trust me, I have spent decades alone. I do not mind your company, even if it’s silent and regarding me with big, monstrous, black eyes.”
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, came a voice in my head. Beware of this one, Sam.
You know of him?
I do, of course. There are only so many of us who connect with you. And those that do have been specially selected. I am told that the entity within the one you call Dracula is particularly dark, and particularly cunning.
I had no doubt about that, being, from my understanding, the strongest of the dark masters. I thought: Can you tell me more?
Like you, Dracula is free of the entity within while in his changeling form. Unlike you, the entity within has control over much of what he says, although the man called Dracula does occasionally fight free. It is only when he has transformed into one of us that he is truly free, and even then, it takes many minutes, often hours, for Dracula to find himself again. It is only in the brief minutes following his return to human form that you are most likely to trust the man. It is only then that he is, as you would say, his old self again.
Until the entity within regains its grip on him, I thought.
Correct, Sam.
I thought about this. Indeed, the man before me seemed clear of mind, clear of speech. I didn’t sense an internal struggle. Then again, he had also just transformed into his human form.
I waited for Dracula to continue, and as he continued squatting on the cliff edge, free as a bird and as naked as the devil, I couldn’t help but note that the hands that had been idly running through the loose dirt, had recently turned into something closer to claws. Now, they dug harder, leaving deeper furrows.
He’s fighting it, I thought.
I believe so, Sam.
“So, why am I here, Sam? When I have not much interest in you, although, from all appearances, you seem a delightful creature?”
I continued waiting, noting the blood that now trailed in the dirt, blood that poured from his bloodied fingertips.
“Why am I here when I have much better things to do? No, that’s a lie. I have done everything I wanted to do. I have seen everything I wanted to see. I have killed and raped and pillaged the entire fucking world, Samantha Moon.”
Dracula shook his head and his long hair billowed forward. Now, I could see red splotches appearing over his bare skin. This was a first for me. I had not seen such splotches before, even on myself. What it meant, exactly, I didn’t know.
It’s indicative of his internal struggle, Samantha Moon. There is a war going on for his mind, even now.
Dracula continued, unaware of my internal dialogue with Talos. “But I am here because he wants me here, Sam. He wants me to appeal to your sensitivities. He wants me to persuade you to allow us into your life, into your world. To allow us to be a part of what you are building.”
I wasn’t aware that I was building anything. But I was aware that Dracula’s voice was changing. He was going from mild-mannered and, dare I say, polite, to something closer to agitated. The smoothness of his voice was giving way to something gravelly and angry.
“I want in, Sssamantha Moon. Whether you allow it or not. I want in, and I want my Elizabeth.”
Okay, there it was. Dracula shook his head and grabbed at his hair, pulling. Large, bloody chunks tore free. He threw both handfuls of long, black hair fluttering over the cliff face and I watched, in amazement, as the skin healed over... and fresh shoots of hair sprouted free.
“Forgive me, Sam. Forgive me. As the good book says, I know not what I say. Usually...” He twisted his head, stretched his jaw, showed his perfectly white teeth. His eyes rolled back into his head. “Usually my host and I get along swimmingly. But not always. Sometimes, I want the limelight, as they say. Sometimes, I want to be free. Sometimes, I want more time. But he gives... so little. His roots run deep. His hold... tenacious. My fault, all my fault...”
I watched him turn his head this way and that... and I watched as his body seemed to swell, as if he were taking in more air, his lungs and chest expanding. Or...
Just maybe...
He was growing a little before my very eyes.
Indeed, that seemed to be the case. The once and past king, who had been, by my estimates, standing at around five foot, nine inches, now stood well over six feet tall. Maybe even by an inch or two.
“Never mind him, Sssamantha Moon,” came a soft and hissing voice, spoken from lips that, as far as I could tell, hadn’t moved. At least, not by much. “He is a good enough vessel. We have shared many adventures. We have feasted on many, and, I suspect, we will feast upon many more. But he needs to remember his place. He needs to remember he summoned me, he called to me, and I fulfilled his heart’s desire. I gave him the very thing he wished for, and he, in turn, has given me a perfectly suitable vessel. He is, of course, listening to us, wishing to make his presence known, but even I was getting tired of his doggerel, as I’m sure you were, too, Samantha Moon. You see, I think he might fancy you, which could fare well for me. Because, you see, I fancy she who is within you. And not just fancy, Samantha Moon. I need her. I need my Elizabeth. We need each other. We have great things planned for this world.”
Careful, Samantha Moon, intoned Talos’s words.
“Let me speak to her, Samantha Moon. For only a few minutes. Only a few seconds. I want to see her. Hear her. Touch her. Taste her.”
Talos’s words came to me again: I can teach you how to safely release her, Samantha, if you should so desire. But now is not the time and place. You will need careful training.
I nodded at his words, although the naked man before me would not know why I nodded, and if he did, I didn’t care.
“It is not so much to ask, is it? You have already heard her. Felt her. You know her deeply, Sam, for she is the reason you are alive now. She is the reason you are not dead and buried. The reason you can see your kids. The reason for, well, everything. Do you not think you owe her this small favor? Is it not so much to ask?”
I continued staring down at the man who had gone from medium-sized to extra-sized within minutes. His chest was full. There was more body hair on him, but not much more. And his jaw, if possible, seemed slightly straighter, his nose a tad smaller. He still looked like Dracula, but he had taken on the semblance of another. Gerard, I presumed. I could expect, I figured, Elizabeth to take on a similar look, too. Taking over not just my mind, but my body, too. My very shape.
“Please, Sam. I am humbly requesting an audience with my beloved. Surely, you have been in love? Surely you know the private hell I am going through.”
I continued doing nothing, as a hot wind rose up from below, and pummeled us cliff-dwellers.
“Do it now, you fucking bitch!”
With one clean swipe, I unfurled my massive wing, and sent Dracula/Gerard tumbling over the cliff face, to ricochet off the many boulders below, and to land in a heap in the deepest of shadows.
No, I thought. Fuck you.
I took in some air that I doubted Talos needed, and leaped off the cliff edge, flapped once, twice and was soon rocketing high above the desert landscape...
Chapter Twenty-three
We were in bed together.
I’d made
a big dinner for everyone. Spaghetti, and lots of it. Between my son and Kingsley, we had gone through three bags of organic noodles and a massive, bubbling cauldron of homemade meat sauce. Maybe I had been a witch in a past life. Even after all the spaghetti, and garlic bread, salad, and homemade chocolate pudding—I caught my son in the kitchen, scraping the cast iron pot clean with the wooden spoon.
“Your son can eat,” said Kingsley, one arm under my head and curled around my shoulder, exactly where it should be. “Maybe even more than me.”
“Now, that’s scary.”
“He’s a growing boy, Sam.”
“Growing into what, though?” I asked.
“I think,” he said, turning onto his side and resting his massive, lion-like head on one paw, er, hand, “that remains to be seen.”
I nodded, suddenly concerned about the sheer amount of food my son was eating—where did it go? And how was I going to afford it all? Mostly, I worried about my daughter and her friends and how I was going to hack into her phone with or without her knowledge. Okay with, since nothing got past her. I worried about Luke still out there and, presumably, alone. Whether he was alive or dead, I didn’t know.
“You got quiet,” said Kingsley. And for the umpteenth time, I was relieved there was at least one man (two, if you counted Fang), who didn’t have access to my thoughts.
I had spent the evening mostly avoiding any talk of work, of the mutilated boy, or of my latest prophetic dream about Tammy. Especially the latest prophetic dream of Tammy. If anything, it had been even more detailed: the blue eyes of the big rig driver, his mouth opening in a scream, the whump whump of the tires going over my daughter’s torso, the blood bursting from her eyes and mouth, her body broken beyond repair, dead instantly.
“I’m not sure I want to talk about it yet,” I said.
He reached out a hand—it could have been a low-flying eagle coming at me—and swiped away some of the stray hair hanging over my face. “I’m here when, or if, you’re ready.”
Okay, that was damn sweet of him. Truth was, I wasn’t ready to discuss the dream. Short of kidnapping my daughter for the next week—which was what I very well might end up doing—there wasn’t a damn thing anyone could do to stop the accident. In fact, I knew from past experience, only I could stop the probable outcome. No, that wasn’t necessarily true. In the past, I had acted alone. But couldn’t I recruit a team to watch her around the clock, whether she knew they were there or not?
I mulled that over. Another immortal, someone proficient at keeping their mind sealed off from her, could keep an eye on her. I knew only two immortals well enough to even ask for help: Kingsley and Fang. And Fang was still a newbie, as I liked to remind him as often as I could. Kingsley, on the other hand, was quite adept at shielding his mind. One problem, he was as big as the Matterhorn. She may not read his mind, but she would spot him a mile away. Two miles away.
That left Fang—except Fang, so far, could not go out into the light of day. And if he did, not for very long, and not very effectively. Of course, the accident would happen at night. I knew that much. The exact time, not so much.
That was the thing with these prophetic dreams: the more I dreamed them, the more the details came to me. For instance, I was just beginning to see the shape of what appeared to be mountains behind the vehicles. Mountains to where, I didn’t know. So far, no street signs had appeared, or any recognizable landmarks.
I don’t know where the accident is going to happen, at least, not yet.
Or I could just lock Tammy up in Kingsley’s dungeon of horror for the next week. She could hate me for the rest of her life, but at least she would be alive.
Kingsley had rolled onto his back, which meant he was, officially, taking up more than half of the king-sized bed; hell, two-thirds. Honestly, he was bigger now than even when I’d met him four years ago, when he’d first appeared in my office, looking for help. I knew that with each full moon—and each subsequent turning—he gradually grew closer and closer to the beast within. It made sense. The closer he was to the size and shape of the creature within, the easier the turning, the faster the turning, the quicker he could hunt—or, in Kingsley’s case, unearth dead bodies to feast upon. Thank God for Franklin, Kingsley’s faithful butler and assistant, who locked him up each full moon, and provided Kingsley with the rotting corpses of local Chino Hills State Park deer. I was certain that hunting wasn’t permitted. Say that to the werewolf, and his faithful assistant who might or might not be the real Frankenstein’s monster. There, I’d said it.
Anyway, I thought of the missing boy, the giant catfish, and my daughter, as Kingsley now snored quietly next to me, his great, hairy chest filling and rising and expanding. Yes, Kingsley needed to breathe; I didn’t. All told, we were both damn weird. We were both products of the powerful entities within us, as were all those whose lives we touched. A sort of spilling over of power, a leakage of dark energy.
I tapped Kingsley’s slowly rising bare chest. Of course, bare was relative. It was covered in thick hair that you either loved or hated. Trust me, on him, you loved it. It fit him, his persona, and his wolfish yellow eyes, perfectly. He continued snoring lightly, his wide nostrils flared, sucking in most of the oxygen in the room. Indeed, I watched the finite particles of swirling luminescence rocketing up his nose with each inhalation, and blasting out with each exhalation. Yes, I can watch people breathe. No, I am not happy about it, although it can be fascinating... for about a half minute.
I patted his chest again, this time a little harder. He snorted and was about to swing his wide shoulders around to move away from me, except I held him down and shook him. Maybe a little harder than I should have.
“You awake?” I asked.
“I’ve never been more awake.”
I sidled up next to him, pressing my mostly naked flesh against his. Mostly. My kids were home after all. His body was, as usual, gloriously warm. I was addicted to the warmth. If I could wrap myself around him all day and night, I would. And the big oaf would probably not even miss a step.
I said, “I’m ready to talk about it.”
He sat up a little, his arm flexing powerfully, and his belly shifting. Yes, he had a belly, and yes, I loved it unendingly.
“Okay,” he said, rubbing his eyes, “let’s talk.”
Chapter Twenty-four
I spent ten minutes telling him about the dream.
Kingsley, true to form, remained quiet, listening—or maybe asleep. One thing the man had going for him: he always, always listened to me carefully, processing everything I said, before responding. Perhaps it was the attorney in him, and the need to know his client’s story intimately, perfectly, exactly. Of course, in the past, he had represented the scum of the Earth, and I let him know that, and let him know that I was not happy about it. To date, the quality of his clientele had improved, but Kingsley, in no uncertain terms, reminded me that people were innocent until proven guilty, and that one shouldn’t jump to conclusions, and to let him do his job and let justice take its course. Oh, and to not control him; that he was, ultimately, going to do what he wanted, and I had to respect him and his choices.
It’s hard to rail against such logic and, ultimately, he was right. He was his own man. I didn’t have to be with him, and I shouldn’t want to change him...
Too much.
Maybe a few tweaks here and there.
So, yeah, I’ve come around. I’ve turned a blind eye to some of his more objectionable clients. Hard as it was, I let him do his thing... and he let me do mine. Life, admittedly, was easier that way. I learned to trust him and his choices. Truth was, I had enough to worry about. And Kingsley was a big boy. A very, very big boy. Maybe the biggest boy ever.
“How long until the accident?” he finally asked.
Hearing the certainty in his deep voice was jarring; it gave my dream a legitimacy that I wasn’t entirely prepared for. Prior to this, the dream had existed only as a fantasy, a flight of imagination, a memory. P
erhaps I had been wrong. Perhaps I had read too much into it. Perhaps it was only a dream. Except I knew the danger of entertaining such thoughts. When I dream, I dream hard, and I dream of the future. Ignoring the dream would be foolish, and would almost certainly not end well for my daughter. It would end, in fact, tragically.
Before answering, I scanned my home and saw that my daughter was fast asleep. She was. Or appeared to be.
“Hard to say for sure,” I said, and found myself clinging to Kingsley’s arm like a lifeline. That is, if lifelines had the size and girth of low-hanging tree branches. “The dreams are getting sharper, clearer, more real. My guess is about three or four days. Maybe as little as two, or as long as a week.”
To know that if I did nothing, my baby girl would be dead within a week was too much to bear. A really, really high-pitched squeak escaped out of me, involuntarily, an inhalation of air through restricted throat and chest muscles.
Kingsley squeezed my shoulder, and somehow, managed to pull me in even closer. Had I been a mortal woman, he might have broken my collarbone. “We could always lock in her my cellar,” said Kingsley. “She won’t like it, but at least she will be alive.”
I shuddered again at the thought of my poor daughter a prisoner in Kingsley’s werewolf-proof “cellar.” Prison was more accurate. How many dead and putrid carcasses had he consumed down there? Was the interior furrowed in deep claw marks? And just how clean was it? I shook my head, and shuddered. The thought of it repulsed me all over again, but yet...
Yet...
It could keep my daughter alive.
As I contemplated this terrible answer, I heard the footsteps a fraction of a second before my bedroom door was thrown open, and there stood Tammy in her sweats and t-shirt, her hair pulled back and her makeup off. Her chest rose and fell, and I could see the heat around her cheeks and the wetness in her eyes.