by J. R. Rain
Jacky was finally calming down, breathing easier, although the sweat and splotches continued forming and reforming, dripping and beading and splotching, like a live-action Pollack painting.
“Sam, please tell me that this was some sort of...” he searched for words, licked his lips, blinked hard once, twice, three times, “some sort of magic trick or something.”
“It’s closer to the ‘something’ part, Jacky.”
“What’s happening, Sam?”
“To me, in general? I don’t know. What’s happening in here, in your office, to my hand, is a demonstration.”
“A demonstration? I don’t understand, Sam.”
He was breathing hard again. Harder than I liked hearing. I decided to give him a small suggestion. Relax, Jacky. Good. Deep breaths, calm down, down. Good.
He took three hard, long, deep, steady breaths. Then looked at me and nodded.
I said, “You always knew I was different, Jacky.”
“Yes, but—”
“A part of you, perhaps a very deep part of you, perhaps a part that you didn’t listen to, always suspected I wasn’t like anyone, ever. But you ignored that part.”
“I did. I had to. You hit too hard. You move too fast. You punch through the goddamn body bags. Who does that?”
“I do,” I said. “And I’m not even really trying, Jacky. I have yet to hit the body bag as hard as I can. I have yet to hit it with all my strength.”
“What are you saying, Sam?”
What was I saying? How should I tell him? How much could I trust him with? I suspected I could trust him with as much as I wanted to.
“Look at my hands, Jacky,” I said and turned them over and gave him a full view of my sharpened, thick nails.
“Oh, Sam. What’s happening?”
I turned my hand over again for good measure, and the dark red, thick, pulsating scar was now pinker, and not so fresh-looking. It looked, if anything like a two- or three-day-old wound.
Easy, Jacky. Good, we are friends. I won’t hurt you.
The bitch inside me liked his uncertainty, liked his growing alarm. The bitch inside me had issues.
I was having a different reaction, though. My little demonstration—and the growing horror on Jacky’s face—was yet another reminder of the ghoul I had become. That I would forever be. No more sugarcoating. No more pussyfooting. Jacky had been around the block, had seen things, surely. Monsters were real. I was living proof of it. And we are here, among you.
“I’m a vampire, Jacky,” I said.
He opened his mouth to speak, but no words came out. Just as well.
I continued: “Ten years ago, I was attacked by a very old and powerful vampire. The attack changed me forever, Jacky. In effect, it killed me, but I did not die. And now, something very dark and sinister lives within me, waiting to emerge. But I fight it every day. Every day, every hour, every minute is a fucking fight. I may not be a professional boxer, Jacky, but I am in the fight of my life. And it never ends, and it will never end.”
Jacky’s lower jaw twitched, moving and jerking and spasming, but no words came out. His bright-ish blue aura had turned a tumultuous green, swirling and streaming and billowing. This was a lot to absorb, especially for a guy whose own mental faculties may or may not be one hundred percent. But Jacky was street-smart, worldly tough, a fighter in every sense of the word. Not a lot was going to shake him, which was what I was counting on. He had seen the evidence. He had seen my strength in action. He’d now seen the wound in my hand heal before his eyes. Now, it was just a matter of allowing the information to sink in, for understanding to dawn on him.
He wasn’t there yet, and I didn’t want to influence him or prod him. He needed to get there on his own terms.
Outside, through Jacky’s closed office door, I could hear grunting and some hee-yawing. Jacky also ran a kickboxing studio. Jacky was a businessman, too, although I doubted he would go so far as to provide spin classes. I closed my eyes and saw light just behind my pupils, swirling and morphing and forming and reforming. Even with my eyes closed, I am never truly in darkness.
We are the darkness, Sam... came a distant, hissing voice in the deepest recesses of my mind.
“And your son?” asked Jacky.
I opened my eyes and the swirling stopped and the old boxer came instantly, sharply into view. 20/20 vision for the rest of my life. Not a bad deal. Jacky had wiped his brow, and the turmoil in his energy field had steadied, although the occasional green spark blasted through it.
“My son is a lot like me,” I said.
“You did say ‘vampire,’ right, Sam?”
“I did, Jacky.”
“We know of vampires where I’m from.”
I nodded, waiting, suddenly tired. It was still early afternoon. The sun was still out. In the gym behind me, my son was sparring with one of Jacky’s top young recruits. My daughter, now a freshman in high school, opted to walk home with her friends these days. I had asked who her friends were, but she wouldn’t tell me. Bad move. But I had my ways.
“We had stories from the town I grew up in. Rumors of a young man who may or may not have been a vampire. Some sheep had ended up dead. One person had gone missing. Months later, the young man went missing, too. Some claimed he was a vampire. I didn’t know. I was only a kid. I didn’t get out much. No TV, only newspapers, books and magazines.”
I nodded, listening. I had no doubt that vampires have been among us for centuries. At least for as long as the great purging, or whatever the hell Archibald Maximus, aka The Librarian, called it. Back when a sect of highly advanced dark masters had been banished from the Earth.
How the hell did they get banished? And who had banished them?
The answer, I suspected, was an order of highly advanced alchemists, of which I was an extension. The Librarian was such an alchemist, too. Very powerful, very adept, and the son of Elizabeth. Yes, the same Elizabeth who currently paced like a hungry tiger within the cage of my mind.
There had been, I suspect, a great war of some sort five hundred years ago, a war of good and evil, a war that had set the stage for today’s currently supernatural climate. A war that, I suspected, wasn’t quite over. And somehow, I’d found myself in the middle of it, with a bloodline that went all the way back to the greatest Alchemist of all time—and now, his greatest enemy was currently residing within me.
A tangled web we weave, I thought.
Except, of course, all I had done was gone for my nightly jog. I had been unaware of any of this. Unaware that vampires were among us. Unaware of werewolves and angels and alchemists. And witches.
I only wanted to go for a run, I thought. That, and no more.
“You say you were attacked ten years ago, Sam?”
“Yes.”
“You want me to kick that sumbitch’s ass?”
I laughed, but it came out kind of funny. I laughed it again, and now, it definitely came out funny. In fact, it came out as a sob, and now, I quit trying to laugh and found myself crying into my hands, sitting there in front of Jacky, in his back office. Except, of course, he wasn’t sitting there for long, was he?
No, he had come around the desk and pulled me in close and held me tighter than I deserved, and he kept holding me, even as I turned my face into his shoulder, and stained the crap out of his shirt with my flowing tears...
Chapter Eight
“Are you done blubbering, lass?”
“No,” I said, and held him tighter.
I heard him sigh, but he continued patting my head. I wondered briefly if my hair felt cold, then nearly laughed at the thought of it. These days, I kept a semi-permanent shield in place to block my thoughts. The shield was a bit of a pain, but better to keep it in place, then have errant thoughts slipping out.
“Did you just say something about your hair being cold?”
I sighed. Apparently, when I cried like a baby, my shield wobbled a little.
I pulled away. “No, Jacky. You heard my thoug
hts.”
He opened his mouth to speak. Then closed it. Then opened it. Then closed it again.
I said, “Why don’t you sit here?” And I eased him down into the chair I’d just been using.
“Sam,” he said, finally finding his voice, “I heard your voice, but really. It was almost as if... you were thinking for me.”
“A scary thought, to be sure,” I said. “But yet, another example of who I am.”
“So you’re saying this is all real, Sam?”
“I am. Unless it’s not.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, a part of me thinks I might be imagining all of this. I might be, in fact, crazy.”
He laughed and wiped his brow. He blinked a few times at his own pale hands, the backs of which were mostly covered in age spots. “Is there room in your padded cell, because I’m seriously thinking I’m losing it, too. I mean, did I just see what I thought I saw?”
“You did, Jacky.”
“Your hand, let me see it again...”
I showed him my palm.
“You mind?” he asked.
I shook my head and he traced the rapidly-healing scar with a none-too-steady finger. He pressed the scar, pushed on it, and finally leaned down and examined it.
“Doesn’t seem fake, Sam.”
“Ya think?”
He next examined my nails, and I was certain no one, not even Anthony and Tammy, had examined them so closely. He ran an increasingly shaking finger over my right index nail. Tapping the tip. Looking under. Examining the cuticle. He saw, as I saw, a thickly grotesque nail that reached a little beyond the tip of my finger. A sharp triangle that I did all I could to hide from the world. Why the long, sharp nails, I didn’t know. But it spoke of the evil within me. On that note, I thought of the man I’d met many months ago, a man I had not seen, a man who was not a man at all, but the king vampire, so to speak.
Dracula.
Wasn’t he also called the Dragon? Wasn’t Dracula, in fact, translated as “Son of the Dragon”? His father, if my shaky history was correct, was Dracul, which, I’m guessing, probably meant Dragon. And didn’t dragons have claws, too? And didn’t I sprout claws every time I summoned the giant bat within me, Talos? But maybe Talos wasn’t a bat after all. Maybe Talos was a dragon, too. Or maybe something in-between.
I didn’t know. But it felt right...
Jesus, was I, too, a dragon? Even if only sometimes? And what, exactly, was a dragon? A flying lizard? Did that mean, I dunno, that I could breathe fire, too? Or, rather Talos, could? And weren’t Talos and I one and the same when I summoned him from his world into mine? Never mind what happened to my own body during those exchanges. I didn’t really want to think about it. Such thoughts hurt my head.
A dragon, I thought.
Of course, I’d been turning into Talos now for years. That I turned into something epic and awesome wasn’t the question. But going from a giant vampire bat... to a dragon, took some getting used to. I mean, dragons had cache.
I recalled again the flying creature I’d seen a few months ago, the creature that had been keeping pace with Talos and me in the skies high above. It had very much looked like a dragon. But it had been far away and there was a very real chance I had imagined it.
And didn’t dragons guard, you know, treasures?
They also ate virgins, if I was correct.
“Sam,” said Jacky, releasing my hand and sitting back in his client chair. I had slumped down on the corner of his desk. “That was a lot of dragon talk.”
“Dragon thinking,” I said.
“This is a lot for me to take in.”
“I bet,” I said, and zipped up my mind nice and tight. “Any chance you can forget that I can also turn into a dragon/bat thing?”
“I don’t feel so good, Sam.”
“I bet you don’t.”
I slipped into his mind quickly and gave his subconscious mind a suggestion to remove his memory from the last thirty seconds. The old guy didn’t need to know about Talos.
He blinked and looked at me. “What were we talking about, Sam?”
“We were talking about my son, and how he has an unfair—and supernatural—advantage over other fighters.”
“Ah, yes. ’Tis a shame.”
“It wouldn’t be right, Jacky.”
He nodded. “I know, and are we really having this conversation, Sam?”
“I’m afraid so,” I said. “Can you keep this to yourself, Jacky? Not even your wife?”
He snorted. “I wasn’t exactly in the church choir growing up, Sam. The wife doesn’t know that half of what I’ve done.”
“Well, she doesn’t need to know this half, either. Deal?”
“Deal.”
He looked at me. I looked at him. He said, “Your face, Sam, it was so cold. Even your tears were cold. Like ice, really.”
I nodded. “Welcome to my life.”
He nodded sadly. “Are you going to be okay, lass?”
“I hope so.”
“If you ever need anything, Sam, come see me. I can still kick some arse.”
“Thank you, Jacky.”
“And your son...” his voice broke off, and he turned away.
“He’s going to be okay, too,” I said. “I think my son might, just might, be part superhero.”
Jacky tried to smile, but all of this was just too much for him. Too much for anyone. He wiped his eyes and looked away.
“You care about him, Jacky.”
“More than you know, Sam.”
He nodded and now, I was the one swooping down, and holding the old Irishman tight, an old Irishman who had sort of adopted my son right here in his boxing gym...
God bless him.
Chapter Nine
It was late and I was running.
The run had started as a jog, but I got bored with the jog. With my knapsack secured tightly to my back, I soon found myself sprinting down street after street.
It was just past 2 a.m. Probably not the vampire hour, but pretty damn close. I sped down Bastanchury. Had I continued for another five miles or so, I would reach Master Kingsley’s stately manor. Except, of course, tonight was a full moon, and Master Kingsley—as Franklin, his butler, referred to him—would be highly indisposed. Kingsley, after all, dealt with a darkness of a different kind, a darkness that emerged once a month, every month. A darkness that took hold of him completely and totally. A darkness that would destroy anything living in its path, a darkness that preferred to feed upon the rotting dead.
And I kiss those lips, I thought, shuddering, as I turned left and headed up Imperial.
Kingsley had reached a sort of agreement with the darkness within. He fed it rotting meat (which Franklin hunted in the hills behind the estate home), and the thing within Kingsley left him alone throughout the month. How much inner torment Kingsley went through, I didn’t know, and wouldn’t ever know. But I suspected the darkness within him—a darkness I’d personally spoken to before—no doubt slipped into his thoughts here and there. Hard to say. On the outside, Kingsley seemed normal enough.
Of course, the very nature of Kingsley’s supernatural existence—a werewolf—dictated that the thing within would make a full appearance each month. Kingsley, of course, didn’t have to be so accommodating. He could have chained himself up all night, rather than let the creature roam within a secured cell. He could have denied it rotting meat, too. Kingsley didn’t give it much, but the agreement seemed to work, and my werewolf boyfriend led a mostly normal life.
I, of course, had no guarantee that Elizabeth would ever relinquish her hold on me. I suspected her goal would be, and would forever be, to gain complete control of my body, mind and soul, forever and ever.
I shook my head at that, and picked up my speed. How I picked up speed, I don’t know, since I was already blazing down the empty sidewalk. But I somehow willed myself to go faster, somehow willed my legs to run faster and faster, and they responded. Boy, did they respond.
>
Of course, my situation wasn’t all bad. Elizabeth had given me much of her strength and supernatural abilities. From where she had gained such abilities, I didn’t know. My guess: a pact with the devil. Or something damn close to the devil. Or not. Maybe they had tapped into humankind’s limitless potential. Maybe she and others like her had figured out how to unlock the inner superhero in all of us.
Again, I didn’t know, but I knew a handful of people who might know. And I was getting closer and closer to needing more answers. This was, after all, personal. Damn personal.
Anthony and Tammy were with Mary Lou tonight. I hadn’t gotten to the point where I trusted the kids alone, all night. Okay, I didn’t trust Tammy. Not these days. Not with all the skipping class and questionable friends. Not with the drinking last year and now the cigarette smoke I smelled on her. Not with her coming home way past her curfew.
I’m losing her, I thought, and somehow, some way, found yet another gear. I sped past parked cars and driveways and houses and lamp poles. I sped through green lights and red lights, through intersections and around bends and over hills. Imperial is scenic... and quiet at night. I soon found myself running through Brea and then, Placentia. Over the 57 freeway, which sped below me in a blur. At an intersection, I leaped over a car turning left in front of me. The driver never knew I was there. Hell, maybe I wasn’t.
I’m here, I thought, and I was running faster than anyone had any right to run.
The speed. The wind. The pounding of my Asics. The streaking lights. Total control of my body, of my legs. Seeing everything. I could have been running backward through time, or forward. Everything a blur, a big blur. Yet, I saw everything, too. Everything.
Backward in time... something tugged at me, but I let it go, or tried to, and continued forward.
Faster, I prodded myself. Go faster and faster.
Time, I thought again. Had I gone backwards in time? I didn’t know, couldn’t remember, but the thought felt right. What the hell had happened to me in New Orleans? I didn’t know. Maybe I didn’t want to know.
In one movement, I reached around and pulled off my backpack without breaking stride. And as I crested a hill and headed down toward Yorba Linda, I leaped as I high as I could, and saw the single flame in my mind. And the creature within.