by J. R. Rain
Most important, I could also see Luke as Raul saw the boy; in particular, the bright aura that surrounded the boy’s body. The aura itself consisted mostly of primary colors, with only a few strands of brown and black. The darkness represented natural fears and doubts and perhaps evidence of something or someone clinging to him. Something was attached to the boy, but I had seen it dozens of times with others. Many people had many such unhealthy attachments.
If they only knew, I thought, as I looked deeper into his aura, through the murky reds and blues and patches of yellow. I could have been looking at a living, pulsating painting. But this was no portrait. This was a living, breathing, and highly active aura, itself described to me as energy leakage. Spillover, so to speak. Of the soul.
I didn’t know, but I could see it, and so could Raul, and what I next saw weaving through it was a first for me. As the shape wove in and out of the boy’s light body, it occasionally turned to look at me. Well, at Raul, at the time.
Yes, turned and looked.
Attached to the boy, was, I was certain, a serpent. And not just any serpent. It was a golden dragon.
***
What does it mean? I asked Raul, as the memory ended, and I blinked my way back to my senses and equilibrium. It was always jolting to exit another’s mind.
I wish I knew, Samantha Moon.
Did he ever talk about running away?
Not to me. But did he had a reason to run away? Yes. Many reasons, in fact.
Luke recently started a lawn mowing business?
He did.
When was the last time you saw Luke? I asked.
The day before he disappeared. He had just returned from a day of mowing lawns.
Would you mind replaying that last conversation for me?
He didn’t mind and opened up, and I watched a very sweaty Luke Jensen pushing a grass-covered lawnmower into Raul’s garage. Raul chastised him for not cleaning the machine, and Luke got right to it, using a rag to wipe it down, and then a broom to sweep up the refuse. The boy was bright-eyed and talking quickly. I wondered how much Raul understood of the excited boy. But through the muddled memory and all the jabbering, I heard one name clearly: Aimee.
Raul’s memory trailed off, and I waited. I let him work through his emotions, and when he was done, I had a bright idea. I brought up a Google map of the local area, chose the satellite view, expanded it, and had Raul touch all the houses that he was certain were clients of Luke’s lawn mowing business. As he touched the homes on the aerial map—none very far from this location—Google was nice enough to drop down pins on each, marking the homes for me. Technology at its best.
After seven such pins were dropped, I held my tongue, and my mind, when I saw the eighth pin drop down on Lake Elsinore’s famous landmark.
I shouldn’t have been surprised, but I was.
Before I left, I asked Raul a question. I asked if he could see my aura, as well.
The old guy looked at me from under thick, wiry, gray brows. He held my gaze for a moment, then shook his head. No, Samantha. You have no aura.
I nodded. I knew that, of course. Allison couldn’t see it either. But I just chalked that up as her being closer to something like men, than to her human self. She was, after all, a reincarnated witch of considerable power. I had been one, too.
Still, I had held onto hope that others might be able to see my soul. That there was evidence of it somewhere. But first Allison, and now Raul. No, aura. No soul. What the hell did that mean?
Do you believe in monsters, Raul? I asked at his door.
Oh, yes.
Lake monsters?
All monsters.
I thought about that as I stepped away from his dimly lit front porch and headed out into the night.
Chapter Thirty-two
The Castle.
Everywhere I turned, it seemed to come up in this investigation. That could mean something, or it could simply mean that Lake Elsinore wasn’t a very big city, and the structure itself dominated the landscape. One couldn’t help but see it, or cross paths with it.
Still, I knew that when something comes up more than once in any investigation, that something needed to be investigated. And I needed to investigate the crap out of this place. Besides, it’s a castle, for God’s sake. It was just begging to be checked out by an ace vampire detective like myself.
The waning moon was out. So were about seven stars. The sky was clear, which was no surprise. Wind tugged at me, and brought with it the small stink of the lake, which stretched out far below. I wondered how the four yahoos were faring in their search for the lake monster. And just as I thought that thought, I suddenly had a very bad feeling. A premonition? I didn’t know.
Before I knew it, I found myself approaching the biggest house in Lake Elsinore. And that’s because it wasn’t a house, was it?
No, I thought, as the white structure came into view from around a corner. The massive white structure.
It was Aimee’s Castle.
***
The castle itself rested upon a hard-packed dirt hill, high above Lake Elsinore, and looked more like a medieval fortress than a home in Southern California.
Then again, if I let my imagination really run wild, I could almost imagine camel caravans trucking through here with their bundles of spices and cloths and mohair rugs. Where that image came from, I didn’t know. But it was real and exciting, and called to my heart. Called to what, I didn’t know. No, I did know, as I stood there, looking up at the massive structure on the hill. It called to me of adventure and distant lands. It was, I was certain, the first time I had ever felt such a calling, and I suspected it might have something to do with a past life.
I listened to the water lapping along the rocky shore far below. From my aerial reconnaissance, I knew the hill sloped steeply down into the lake. Had this been a seashore, the castle might have been a lighthouse. A high stone wall surrounded the property, with a main gate opening up onto the sidewalk. Another gate opened for cars to enter through a side entrance.
I wasn’t tall enough to see over the wall, but the structure itself continued up a hill, and was easy enough for anyone to see from the street. There were no other homes on the hill. Just the castle, and it was hulking and brooding and oddly ominous, despite the white façade.
The high stone wall wasn’t quite high enough. I landed on top smoothly, easily. From here, I had a view of the surrounding gardens and footpaths. All of which looked inviting.
Invitation accepted, I thought, and dropped down inside the fence.
Chapter Thirty-three
I had that tingly, slightly disorienting feeling I sometimes get when I’m somewhere I shouldn’t be; i.e., when I’m trespassing.
Perhaps more disconcerting was my inner alarm. That sucker had been buzzing just inside my ears, the closer and closer I’d gotten to the castle. And now that I was inside the fence, well, it continued at a steady, nearly painful hum.
I scanned the empty gardens around me. Nothing and no one. And yet, the humming continued. More so now than ever.
“Okay then,” I said to myself, opening and closing my jaw, trying to ease the uncomfortable vibration in my inner ear. But the hum was not to be denied.
I reminded myself that it was meant to be uncomfortable, and it was meant to keep me on high alert. Oh, I was on alert, all right.
I headed up toward the castle.
***
The slapping waves grew louder as I mounted the hill. The wind grew stronger, too, whipping my shirt and hair around me. I fished a hair tie from a front pocket and pulled my hair back tight.
It was coming around midnight, and the night air felt just about perfect. In fact, I felt as strong as I’d ever felt, and a little hungry, too. The two or three bright spots moving through the plants—field mice and kangaroo rats—were looking mighty tempting, which was a terrible thing to say. Who looked at a mouse and licked their lips?
Monsters did.
I sighed and contin
ued hoofing it up to the castle on the hill.
***
The castle. Up close, up here, I could feel the weight of it, heavy on the earth, built to last even the coming zombie wars. It was massive and foreboding and, well, kind of badass. And it had been here for nearly half a century. And it had been built by a preacher’s daughter, of all things.
I took it in: the massive bricks, the soaring minarets, the mosque-like dome that capped the whole structure. I was briefly reminded of a well-known structure in Riverside, The Mission Inn, another vaguely medieval building that had no place in our modern times.
But this, well, there was nothing vaguely medieval about it. This was full medieval, and it took my breath away.
I followed a path that led away from the well-watered gardens and brought me closer to the cliff’s edge. The wind was stronger up here, whipping through the scraggly grass that somehow clung to life upon the hard-baked, dry soil; soil that sometimes saw temperatures climb over 110 degrees. The deserts just outside of Los Angeles and Orange counties were no joke. They meant business. And they would kill you dead. Especially vampires.
That so many people lived here was a testament to, well, housing prices in Orange County. The high prices pushed people further and further away from metropolitan areas, all the way out to a desert outpost, into the kind of remote wilderness that could wipe a man off the face of the Earth, bones and all.
Of the many such desert outposts, where developers had thrown up all sorts of strip malls and grocery stores and Home Depots, where people tried to forget the heat and the two-hour commutes to work, Lake Elsinore boasted a beautiful lake. From here, with the castle rising behind me and the lake spread before me, I could almost forget I was in the middle of fucking nowhere.
As my hair whipped in the hot wind and low clouds scuttled across the sky, my inner alarm reached an all-time high, a crescendo of ringing and humming. I spun, searching. Something was coming for me. And it was coming now.
I saw nothing, just the long sweep of grounds that led back to the castle. I looked to either side, nothing. I looked into the sky, nothing as well.
The ringing, the ringing...
When I turned again, I caught a brief glimpse of something appearing over the cliff’s edge, something bounding, loping, and moving faster than anything I’d ever seen run before, even the werewolves, and it was upon me.
Chapter Thirty-four
I sidestepped to the right, and it sidestepped with me, altering course in a blink, and before I knew it, the damn thing hit me full on, harder than anything had ever hit me before. And it didn’t just hit me. It lifted me up in the air, and drove me down into the hard-packed dirt.
The sheer speed, the ferocity, the power. The thing kept me pinned to the dirt with one hand, an iron grip to my throat that crushed tendons and windpipe and my spine itself, while it delivered lightning strikes to my face, faster and harder than anything I’d ever felt before. Blow after blow after blow, shattering cheekbones and my orbital ridge. A particularly strong blow shattered the right side of my skull. He drove his knees into my chest, drove them and drove them, until I felt my sternum collapse and my lungs burst.
Air and blood burst from my mouth...
And still, he punched me, over and over again... all while screaming something I couldn’t quite make out, a guttural, primal, animalistic scream, asking me something over and over. Demanding something I couldn’t quite hear, but that was because my eardrums had burst and a loud, whooshing sound of escaping air filled my head, and I knew that if I didn’t do something now, I would die here on this hill, on this night, at the hands of this thing. He would, I knew, tear me to pieces.
I did the only thing I could think of.
I focused the bright light that now filled my head into a single flame, and with each punch, the flame wavered and snapped, but still, I focused on it. Just when I saw the bastard above me raise both fists together, in a blow that I knew would concave my face and drive me into the hill itself, I saw the great flying beast within the flame.
***
The transformation was instant.
Talos, unlike my broken body, was powerful and whole. And now, so was I, so to speak, although I was still disoriented and reeling from the ferocity of the attack.
One moment, I had been lying on my back, watching a pair of massive—and oddly misshapen hands—hurtling toward my face, the next, I was on my feet and screeching loudly into the night.
The thing that had been on top of me, back away, and as he did so, I saw him clearly for the first time. A big man, but his proportions were off. One arm was longer the other. Hell, the skin itself was darker than the other arm. Scars crisscrossed his neck and face. He was naked, and the scar tissue on him could have been a roadmap to hell. He continued backing away, limping due to his legs being of different lengths. He was, I was certain, composed of many different body parts.
He continued backing away from Talos, as well as he could. He stumbled over a low wall, and soon found himself in the perfectly manicured gardens of the castle estate.
I bore down on him, step for step, still trying to wrap my brain around what just happened, still grappling with who and what he was. Rather than attack, I studied and fought for clarity.
Perhaps I should have attacked.
But I didn’t, and soon, the creature pulled open a concealed basement door in the ground, and dropped down into the darkness.
Chapter Thirty-five
The flight back was spent in silence.
I had abandoned my minivan on the side of the road. I had to. There was no way I could transform into my broken body. Not out there, and not alone.
Later, as I flew in slow circles high over my house, dreading the return to my abused —and quite possibly dying—body, I waited for a late-night dog walker to continue past my home and move up the street. The dog looked up, once, and growled. While I circled, I prayed that my broken body was doing some healing in Talos’s world.
When the coast was clear, I dropped down into my backyard—not the first time an actual dragon had appeared in my backyard.
I paused, waited, summoned my courage, along with the single flame, within which I saw my broken body. I saw my concaved head and crushed cheeks, and soon I found myself in the grass, gasping and writhing and weeping.
***
It didn’t take long for my daughter and Allison to hear my cries for help. A light turned on in the backyard, and there was Tammy, then Allison, and now, Anthony... all rushing toward me...
Allison pulled a sheet from the clothesline and threw it over me. I felt strong hands carefully lift me off the wet grass, and realized it was only wet because of my own bleeding, and as Tammy shrieked hysterically, I heard Allison take control of the situation and order Anthony to bring me into my bedroom.
I rested my shattered skull on his shoulder, and soon, I was resting on a soft pillow of daggers, and that was all I remembered of that night.
Chapter Thirty-six
I spent that night and all the next day gone to the world. Or dead to the world. To Allison, I was nothing more than a corpse, and a mangled one at that. No breathing, no real pulse (although if you wait long enough, you’ll find one). That is, until she finally saw me healing in my sleep. Right before her very eyes.
When I finally opened my eyes, I saw again the monster pummeling me into mush, and shot up screaming. Allison screamed, too, from her chair next to me, dropping her Kindle reader. She rushed over to my side.
I babbled incoherently about the monster and the beating, and Allison took my hands and told me I was okay.
I touched my face, my cheekbones, my eye ridge, the side of my skull. All intact. I took in some air... my lungs were working again, my sternum strong and sure.
I pulled Allison into me and held her tightly and wept into her shoulder. She patted my head and made soft, reassuring noises. “The kids?” I said, mumbling the words into her now-wet neck.
“Are with Mary Lou.”
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I nodded, then said, “Is it...”
“Yes, Sam?”
“Is it too early to drink?”
***
“My poor kids,” I said, drinking wine that did nothing for me. “I can’t imagine what I looked like.”
“You looked like pulp,” said Allison. “Bloody pulp with arms and legs. If you would have told me that a train hit you, I would have believed you.”
“Worse,” I said.
“Worse than a train?”
“I think it would be easier to show you,” I said, and tapped my head.
I opened my memory to her, reliving the most violent night of my life, violence that should have left me dead, many times over. I heard her gasp once or twice. She was probably covering her mouth, but I wouldn’t know it. I kept my eyes closed, concentrating on the details of the attack and, in particular, the details of my attacker.
When I was done, Allison and I did another round of hugging. And after just reliving every horrid detail again, I really needed that hug.
“He looked like a science experiment gone wrong,” said Allison.
“Or right, depending on how you looked at it. Do you have any idea what he was saying?”
“His speech wasn’t normal. Or human. But I think he was asking something over and over. Let me listen again. Try to isolate his speech.”