by J. R. Rain
* * *
I was calmer. We were back in Kingsley’s office, minus the murderous scumbag, who had apparently left holding a bag of ice to his face. Someone had cleaned the blood off the table, although I could still smell the sharp hemoglobin radiating off the freshly polished wood surface. Must be the vampire in me.
My stomach growled, and I hated myself for that.
“You can’t keep killing my clients, Sam,” said Kingsley. His right butt cheek was sitting on the corner of his desk. I was sitting in one of his client chairs. Everywhere around me were depictions of moons: moon photographs, paperweights, lamps. Even a moon screen saver. The moon bookends, each by itself a half moon, seemed to be the newest edition to his office.
Yeah, the man had a moon obsession, which stands to reason. His obsession was also how he had found me in the phone book so many months ago. Under “Moon”, of course.
“Well, your clients are scumbags,” I said.
“Be that as it may, they deserve a fair trial.”
“Whatever helps you sleep at night, big guy.”
“Why are you here, Sam?”
I stared at him...no doubt icily. He calmly returned my gaze. We did this for about ten seconds before I finally lowered my eyes and looked away. “I’m sorry,” I said. “That wasn’t cool. I guess I’m desperate.”
“A desperate vampire is a sight to see.”
“A desperate mother is worse.”
He nodded and eased off the corner of his desk. He sat next to me and adjusted the drape of his pants. Kingsley, as always, smelled of fine cologne and that special something else. Something wild. He waited. As he waited, I gathered my thoughts.
Finally, I said, “The medallion that’s in my possession...”
He looked at me sideways, turning his head just a fraction of an inch. “What about it?”
“Is it really true that it can reverse vampirism?”
Although I wasn’t looking at him, I knew he had narrowed his eyes. Kingsley was nearly impossible for me to read psychically. I wondered if it was like that for all other immortals, too.
He said, “That’s the legend about it.”
“What else do you know about it?”
“I know that a lot of people are looking for it.”
“People? Or vampires?”
“Vampires are people, too,” he said, grinning easily. And then he grew serious. “Why, Sam?”
The smell of blood wafting up from the desk was diminishing. The growling in my stomach subsided accordingly. I told Kingsley about my plan, minus any references to Fang. There was no need to make the big werewolf jealous. Fang might be a freaky dude, but he was no physical match for Kingsley. At least, not presently.
Make me into a vampire, Moon Dance.
Yeah, I still haven’t forgotten those words.
Anyway, I laid the plan out to Kingsley, and as I did so, he leaned a meaty elbow against the chair’s arm and took me in, watching me closely as I spoke. And as I spoke, I couldn’t help but notice that the slight amber in his eyes caught some of the office lighting and reflected it back to me twofold. Tenfold. He can look so wild sometimes.
When I was done talking, Kingsley’s reply was instant and heart breaking: “I don’t like it, Sam.”
“What’s not to like?” I said, jumping up. I paced behind him. “I save my son and later, I return him to being human. It’s perfect.”
He was shaking his head, and the amber glow was gone from his eyes, replaced with something close to alarm. And also something else. Concern. “Unless it doesn’t work, Sam.”
“But why wouldn’t it work?” I heard the desperation in my voice, which had risen an octave or two. I spun on Kingsley, standing before him.
“Because it’s just a story, Sam. A legend.”
“All legends have some basis of truth. Look at us. And quit looking at me that way.”
“What way?”
“Like I’ve lost my mind.”
He stood suddenly and towered over me. “I don’t think you’ve lost your mind, but I think you’re desperate, and dangerous, and if you would for one second listen to yourself you would see how scary you sound.”
I looked up at him as he looked down at me. He was breathing hard, and I could hear his heart thumping through his wide chest. “Who do I need to talk to?” I asked. “Who would know more about the medallion?”
He looked at me long and hard. “Sam, please.”
“I’m going to do whatever it takes to save my son, goddammit.”
“Even if it means turning him into a monster, Sam? Even if it means draining the blood from his body? And what if you can’t turn him back? What then, Sam?”
I heard footsteps just outside Kingsley’s office door. His new secretary was there. How much she’d heard, I didn’t know, but I suspected his doors were quite thick. If anything, she was concerned for her boss’s welfare.
I said nothing. How could anyone answer that question? Hell, has that question ever been posed before? Ever? In the history of mankind?
Kingsley continued, “I’ll tell you what would happen if you can’t change him back, Sam. Your son will be undead, like you. He will feed on blood, like you. He will be a monster.”
“Like me?”
“For all eternity, Sam. Your boy. Your little boy. Don’t do this to him, Sam. You can’t take this chance.”
I held his gaze long and hard. “Who do I talk to, Kingsley?”
He took in a lot of air, crossed his arms, and looked away. “Let me ask around, Sam.”
I nodded and felt a combination of joy and dread, fear and hope. “Thank you,” I said.
But he didn’t answer me or look at me, and shortly after that I left his office.
Chapter Forty-three
I had just slipped into my car after practically sprinting across the baking asphalt when my phone rang. Gasping and in real pain, I looked at the faceplate:
Caller Unknown.
Heart thumping and still reeling from my singed skin, I clicked on the phone.
“Hello,” I said. My face and hands were on fire, despite the copious amounts of sunscreen—and a sunhat that was wide enough to shade a small Balkan country.
“Hi,” said the tiny voice, a voice that was somehow even tinier than I remembered.
“Maddie!”
“You know my name.”
“Of course I know your name, honey.” But as much as I wanted to comfort her and reassure her, I needed information. “Maddie, honey, how many people live with you?”
“Two grownup men now.”
“Are they black or white?”
“Bofth. The white man is new. He’s really mean.”
Maddie had a slight lisp and it was the most precious sound I had ever heard. I absently started my car and turned my air conditioner full blast on me, while huddling as far away from any sunlight as I could. My van’s side windows were equipped with pull-down shades, which I rarely, if ever, pulled up. The windshield sunshade was still in place, blocking most of the sun, although laser-like beams still found their way through here and there.
So there was a black guy and a white guy. The white guy, I knew, could have been Hispanic or even Asian. Maddie was only five. I doubted she saw race and color like an older child would. Or as an adult would.
Sherbet had confirmed the worse, that some kind of child swapping was going on. Children for drugs. Children for money. Children for sex. A slave trade where lives meant little, and no doubt most kids disappeared or ended up dead. Along with the mothers.
“Maddie, honey, are you in a house?”
“A house?”
“Or is it an apartment?”
“Peoples live here. We take the vader.”
The vader? My head was swimming. Jesus, I had had my questions rehearsed for when and if I heard from Maddie again, but now all my questions had gone out the window.
Think. Focus.
“Honey, what can you see from the window? Can you see anything?�
�
There was a slight pause. I heard her pushing aside what sounded like blinds. “I see a big house.”
“Where?”
“It’s high on top of the biggest mountain I’ve ever seen!”
My heart started hammering. I knew Simi Valley. The federal agency I had worked for, HUD, used a facility outside of the city to hold seminars and training. The facility was away from prying eyes, up against the base of a majestic, sweeping mountain range. Or, perhaps, a very big hill. Certainly big enough to call a mountain if you were a small girl from the streets of Buena Park.
And at the top of the hill, majestically overlooking the city was a museum. Not quite a mansion, but it looks like one from a distance.
The Ronald Reagan Museum.
The Moon Feather Indian casino, if I recalled correctly, wasn’t too far away from our training facility, either.
She’s in Simi Valley. I knew it. I felt it in every fiber of my being.
I also sensed something else. Or, rather someone else. And from somewhere over the phone line, I heard what sounded like a door slam followed by a man’s yell. The yell sounded drunken and angry.
“I have to go,” said Maddie, whispering into the mouthpiece. Her whisper sounded nearly as loud as her little voice.
The line dropped before I could say goodbye.
Chapter Forty-four
I was back at the hospital, sitting in a chair at the foot of my son’s bed. He was sleeping quietly. Too quietly. I would have thought he was dead if not for the hospital equipment that chirped out a heart beat.
The dark halo around him was bigger than ever. My son, to my eyes, seemed lost in a cloud of black smoke.
Sitting on my lap was a clipboard with a mostly blank sheet of paper I had found in the backseat of my car. The paper had my daughter’s name on it and the beginning of an assignment. I wondered idly if she ever finished the assignment.
I held in my hand a Pilot Gel Ink Rolling Ball pen, which I preferred to use when I did my automatic writing sessions.
Automatic writing is still new to me. In fact, I’d only done it a couple of times, and both times I was certain I was going crazy.
In essence, as it was initially explained to me by Fang (and verified by a little online research) the process of automatic writing is a way to communicate with the spirit world. In particular, with highly evolved enlightened beings who know what the hell they’re talking about.
At least, that was the idea.
Who or what came through in these sessions was certainly open to debate. And, yes, there was a part of me that seriously suspected I was moving my own hand, and giving myself the answers I wanted to hear.
Just a part of me.
The other part of me, perhaps the part that was still human, believed that I was getting messages from beyond. By spirit guides, or spiritual beings.
Or, for all I knew, Jim Morrison, unless he was alive, too, and working as a bounty hunter in Hawaii.
I went through the various steps of centering myself, imagining silver cords attaching themselves to my ankles and lower spine and reaching down through the many hospital floors, the building’s foundation, through the very ground itself, down through Hell and a lost world of dinosaurs, and all the way to the center of the earth, where I mentally tied them tightly around three massive boulders.
Now firmly anchored, I closed my eyes and attempted to empty my mind by focusing on the physical act of breathing, drawing air in through my nose and out my mouth, even if it was air I didn’t need. Except I kept thinking about my son, lying there just a few feet away, fighting for his life.
Focus, Sam.
I closed my eyes and, as I breathed, I pictured the stale, medicinal hospital air flowing over my lips and down deep into my lungs. I breathed in, holding the air, and then exhaled it.
I did this over and over, breathing and picturing, and any time I thought of my son, I gently released the thought.
In and out, in and out.
Breathe, breathe.
My hand twitched.
I kept reminding myself to breathe, and as I breathed I imagined the air currents tinged with gold, and the golden air flowing into my mouth and filling me with golden light.
My hand twitched again, followed by a full-blown spasm.
The pen gripped in my fingers moved back and forth.
It’s coming, I thought. Whatever it is.
Keep breathing. Breathing. In and out. Golden light.
Jesus, my hand is moving.
Don’t think about it. Good, good.
But now I couldn’t deny that something seemed to have settled in me. I actually felt another presence. A warm and loving presence.
And then my hand moved again, and again, and I realized it was writing. I looked down at my clipboard as two words appeared:
Hello, Samantha.
Chapter Forty-five
“Hello,” I said quietly, feeling slightly silly, but also feeling like something very important, and very exciting, was happening. “Um, how are you?” I added lamely.
My hand twitched again and again, and it kept on twitching until it wrote out a reply. I could only watch in stunned silence. My hand, in these moments, did not feel like my own.
I’m doing very well, it wrote. It’s a great day to be alive, is it not?
I thought of my son, and a great pain filled my heart. I had come here now to ask about Anthony, but suddenly I wasn’t sure I really wanted to hear the answers.
My son was showing signs of stabilizing. This should be good news, but it wasn’t. Not to me. I knew better. His black halo was growing. How do you convince a doctor that you need a second or third opinion when the patient seems to be responding to treatments?
Responding for now. I knew that would all change.
I had called children’s hospital after children’s hospital, burning up my phone, demanding to speak to other infectious disease specialists. Few would speak to me, and those who did were generally guarded. I begged them to come see my boy, that I felt something was very, very wrong, and they reassured me that my son’s doctor was one of the best in the business.
One specialist in Chicago told me he would look into it, and later called to tell me that he was flying in to see my son. I thank him profusely, crying nearly hysterically, but in my heart of hearts, I knew he would fail.
Modern medicine would fail. I needed a miracle. And thanks to Fang, I had an idea what that miracle might entail.
For now, though, I simply said, “Am I really alive?” My voice was barely above a whisper. “There are some who believe that beings such as myself are dead.”
More twitching and tingling. More writing. Do you feel dead, Samantha?
“No, but I feel very...different.”
Twitch, write. You should feel different. We are all different.
“But am I dead?” I asked. “And please don’t say: ‘Do you feel dead?’”
Your body went through a massive transformation, or metamorphosis, Samantha, but it did not die.
“Then why don’t I breathe? Why can’t I eat?”
That’s one of the metamorphoses of which I speak. Or write. Your body, quite literally, is not the same, and thus does not have the same requirements.
“Like food or air.”
Exactly. Yes.
“But I still need blood.”
Of course. This is your new body’s requirement.
“And so my new body is a killer, if it must feast on blood.”
Does all blood need to come from that which is dead?
“No,” I said, and my voice trailed off. I thought about something Kingsley had said earlier, about blood donors. Those who donated willingly...and those who most certainly did not. Blood debt perhaps.
Yes, Samantha, you are a far more powerful being than you were before, but what you make of your new physical form is up to you.
“I could choose to kill. Or not to kill.”
Exactly. Yes. Just like everyone else.
“So I have a new body...but I still have the same moral code.”
You are still you, sweet child, no matter what shape you take.
“Don’t call me sweet child. It makes me want to cry.”
Why?
“Because it sounds like you care about me. That you love me. But I don’t know who you are or what you are.”
Understood. But remember, all you have to do is ask.
“I have asked, but you’ve avoided the question.”
I did not avoid. I simply gave you the answer you were ready for. Are you ready for the answer now?
I thought about that. I looked at my son sleeping on his back. My God, had the black halo actually grown in just a few minutes?
“Yes,” I said.
We are many, Samantha. There are many of us here who have taken an active interest in you.
“So you are not Sephora?” A sense of alarm rang through me. Who was I talking to? Sephora had been the loving being I had spoken to in my last sessions.
She is here, of course, overseeing this dialogue. She is your personal guide, after all, who has been with you for all eternity.
“And who are you?”
With her blessing, I have come through.
“I don’t understand.”
I am a specialist in the arcane, Samantha.
“Arcane?”
In immortality. In the magicks of your realm, so to speak. Some would call them dark magicks, but they would be mistaken.
“Who are you?”
My hand paused, then wrote: I am called by many names, through many lives, but I’m most commonly called Saint Germain.
I’d heard of the name, of course. Saint Germain had been a European mystic. An alchemist of the highest order. He supposedly lived for centuries. And, from most accounts, never died. They say he ascended; that is, turned to light. A heavenly being who was just as comfortable in the spirit world as the physical world, often alternating between the two. And helping those in need. Immortal indeed.
And no, Samantha, I’m not a vampire, either.