by J. R. Rain
“Not now, Kingsley.”
“Right, right. The medallion. So, what are you going to do?”
I looked back...and up at him. “I’m going for a swim.”
Before I headed out into the water, I caught Allison watching me from the shadows of the cave. I was quite certain she was smiling. A big smile. A very big smile.
* * *
I stepped into the foaming surf, Asics and all.
I might be immortal. I might be cold to the touch. But that didn’t mean I relished the idea of stepping into what appeared to be the coldest ocean ever.
“Think warm thoughts, Sam,” called Kingsley behind me. For some reason, he seemed to be enjoying this. Asshole. Then again, the big yeti had recently made his own journey across this very body of water.
If he can do it, I can do it.
And so I started running, splashing through the ankle-high water. Shortly, the water rose to my knees, and when it got to my thighs, I took a massive, instinctive breath and dove forward, under a coming wave. I stayed under, kicking hard, using my strong arms to propel myself under the raging ocean.
I continued on, just a few feet under the surface. The occasional wave still rocked me, but shortly, I was ten feet or more underwater. Soon, I was deeper than that. Far deeper. I kicked hard, pulling myself forward with powerful strokes. The sound of the waves crashing above receded, and soon I found myself in a place of silence. Complete and utter silence.
I liked that.
I held the image of the cave system in my mind’s eye. Luckily for me, the incandescent flashes of light that only I could see were just as prevalent down in the deep. That didn’t mean I could see far, granted. No, in fact, I could barely see a dozen or so feet in front of me.
Good enough.
I wasn’t worried about sharks or killer whales or even mermaids. A merman might be damn interesting, and I briefly found myself wondering again if such creatures really did exist.
Hell, why not? I existed.
Life down here was not abundant...at least, not this close to shore. I did see silver fish that scattered before me. Once, I sensed a darker shape above me, but nothing that triggered my inner alarm system, and so I continued on...down into the deep.
Down, down.
And there it was...
A dark opening emerging through the dark waters. It could have been the maw of a great beast, waiting for something cute and curvy and stupid.
Stupid was right...
I plunged straight into the tunnel.
Anything could have been waiting in there.
Anything.
Chapter Forty-seven
I trusted my inner warning system.
For now, all appeared safe, and so I swam down through the wide tunnel, past scurrying crabs and smaller fish. I tore through swaying seaweed, and startled something big that could have been a grouper; that is, if I knew anything about fish, which I didn’t.
Either way, it flicked its thick tail and shot past me.
Well, excuse me.
I continued down. The walls seemed alive, as various plant life clung to it, all moving and swaying in the currents. Beautiful, I supposed. But I wasn’t here to admire the ocean’s beauty. I was here to recover something seemingly lost forever.
Seemingly.
My kids were a distant memory. Kingsley was a distant memory. Russell Baker and his beautiful biceps were a distant memory. All that I knew was right before me: a cave, the cold water, the ocean depths. I did not think of idle things. What Tammy and Anthony were doing right now didn’t cross my thoughts.
I only knew the tunnel. I continued into it, swimming quickly, pulling at the water, kicking the water, moving faster than, no doubt, most experienced divers. I was a superhuman immortal on land or sea, apparently.
The tunnel twisted and turned. At times, it grew wider. At other times, I was forced to pull myself through small openings. I doubted scuba divers had ventured this far. Scuba equipment was limited...and wouldn’t fit through the many crawl spaces I was presently pulling myself through.
And still I swam, keeping the image of the medallion firmly in my thoughts. It was my beacon...and I knew exactly where that sucker was.
I plunged into a small opening, not so small that I had to pull myself through this time, but small enough that I aimed my hands in front of me and brought my legs together. I was a mommy-shaped torpedo, plunging through the black water.
Black water that was alive to me.
Blazing with light.
I emerged into a massive underwater cavity. A cavern perhaps, but filled completely with water. That someone could have been here before me was an amazing concept. But someone had.
Another immortal.
The Librarian. The alchemist.
I swam down to a grouping of smaller rocks and saw the satchel there, swaying in the currents. How a satchel could have survived so long in salt water was beyond me. Then again, much of what the Librarian could do was beyond me.
I grabbed the bag, paused briefly, then turned, kicking hard, and shot up through the water, up through the tunnel and then, after an indeterminate amount of time, surfaced far from shore.
I saw Kingsley waiting anxiously near the crashing surf.
Holding the satchel, I grinned and began swimming for the beach.
Chapter Forty-eight
We were back in the tunnel.
I wasn’t shivering, although I should have been. Then again, I should have been dead somewhere deep inside that tunnel system, too. But I wasn’t, of course.
The freak lives on.
Allison crowded me eagerly, her mind still closed off to me. Did she know her mind was closed off to me? I didn’t know, but would talk to her about it later.
Kingsley, admittedly, took up most of the tunnel. A ceiling that I had thought was high actually got brushed by his big head.
The satchel sat dripping on a rock before us. The bag itself had been leather at some point, but was now black and seemed to be deteriorating with each passing minute.
Perhaps it had been held together by alchemical means.
Waiting just for me.
Perhaps.
I looked at my friends. Kingsley nodded. Allison’s eyes were alight with an inner fire. Then I began opening the bag. And by the time I’d done so, the material irreparably fell away in tatters.
Revealing a single coin.
Not a coin, actually. A golden medallion inlaid with three opal roses. It caught the light of Allison’s silly flashlight app, refracting it beautifully.
That such a medallion was presently in me was hard to fathom. That my son had consumed one in a potion was another hard reality to accept. That a demented entity was bent on releasing his trapped sister within me, was, of course, the hardest to believe of all.
But it was all true.
Every bit of it.
Further proof that I was undoubtedly in an insane asylum, far away from here, rambling to myself incoherently while nurses and staff stared at me sadly.
Perhaps, perhaps not.
For now, I was standing in a mostly-dry cave, staring down at the third of four priceless medallions. Priceless, that is, to me and my kind.
The vampire kind.
“Well, now we know why the others couldn’t find the medallion,” said Kingsley. “It was meant for you to find, Sam.” He held my gaze. “You and only you.”
I nodded. Of that I had no doubt. Except how and why Archibald Maximus knew I would be here 100 years later was, of course, the greater mystery.
“The first medallion reversed your son’s vampirism,” said Kingsley.
“Mostly,” I said.
He nodded. He knew all about my son. No, we hadn’t been romantic over these past few months, but we had kept in touch, and I had consulted with him on Anthony’s growing powers.
“And the second one...” he began.
“The second helps me exist in daylight.”
“So, one has to wonder,” sai
d Kingsley. “What will the third one do?”
“A good question,” said Allison, who had remained silent up until now. “But one that must, sadly, go answered.”
I turned to her, frowning. God, she’d been acting so weird...
And then I saw it...what had been a miniscule black thread, so tiny that it had gone unnoticed by me, quickly swelled before my eyes. I had a brief image of a garden hose coming to life, engorged with water, swelling, thickening.
The black, ethereal ropes encircled her aura, weaving in and out. Lariats of death. It was as if Satan himself had lassoed my friend.
Her dark eyes, once beautiful and full of sweet mischief, now shone with fear—even while her lips curled into a Cheshire cat-like smile, the corners of her lips pushing up deeply into her rounded cheekbones.
“Is your, um, friend okay?” asked Kingsley.
“She’s fine,” answered Allison, in a voice I now recognized, its inflection similar to what had come from Edwin and Tara. And now from Allison. “She’s just sort of taking, let’s say, a temporary back seat.”
“Sam...” said Kingsley, now facing Allison. “What the devil is going on?”
“He’s here,” I said. “In Allison, except I don’t...”
“You don’t understand how, Samantha Moon? Perhaps some things you aren’t meant to understand, my dear. But let’s just say this: your friend was right, she is indeed distantly related to the Thurman clan.”
I grabbed the medallion and backed away. I had no idea what the entity within could do, what sort of powers it possessed. But if it was truly a highly evolved dark master then it might be capable of anything.
“There is no escape, Samantha Moon,” said Allison. Or, rather, said the entity within her.
I looked at the hulking Kingsley next to me. “I like our chances,” I said.
“Surely you wouldn’t hurt your friend, Samantha Moon,” it said. Tears appeared in Allison’s horror-filled eyes, and poured down her cheeks.
“Just give me the medallion, Samantha Moon, and I will release your friend.”
“Don’t do it, Sam,” said Kingsley.
“Or would you prefer to watch your friend drown herself in the ocean? Or, even better, bite off her own tongue and bleed to death in front of you?”
Allison’s eyes widened, and I might have—might have—detected her shaking her head no. She was fighting the entity, I was sure of it, and one thing I was also sure of: she didn’t want me to give it the medallion. I suspected I knew her reasoning: for now, the entity needed her alive. For now, she was safe.
“Why do you want my son?” I asked suddenly.
“I think you know why we want your son, Samantha Moon.”
I took a threatening step toward Allison—my sweet and silly friend Allison. The entity only grinned broader, which seemed impossible to do, but it somehow managed to pull the corners of her lips even higher up. Tears continued pouring from Allison’s pleading eyes.
“Would you like to strike me, Samantha? If so, I strongly encourage it.” The entity turned Allison’s face toward me and chuckled lightly. “As the good book says, turn thy other cheek and all that.”
“You’re evil.”
“I am motivated, Samantha, by that which is important to me.”
“You want to release your sister,” I said. “From me.”
“That, my dear, is a very, very strong motivation.”
“And you need the four medallions to do it.”
It nodded, raising Allison’s eyebrows. “I see you have done your homework, Samantha Moon. You never cease to impress us.”
“I have one such medallion in me, and my son has the other in him. I’m holding the third. Where is the fourth?”
Allison turned to face me. Kingsley, I noted, had moved close to my side. He was ready to pounce at a moment’s notice. Kingsley might be a womanizing bastard, but he was certainly all hero.
The entity continued regarding me through Allison’s eyes. “I see you do not remember, Samantha.”
“I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about...”
“Sssister,” hissed Allison. “Speak to her, remind her of what she has seen and forgotten.”
I knew instantly of whom he spoke: the female entity within me. His sister. Even as I shuddered, a memory materialized within me, summoned, I suspected, by the dark entity who shared my body.
It was an image of Fang.
I gasped, and Allison grinned.
The image clarified, took on more shape. It was an image of Fang back before I knew he was Fang, back when he was just a flirty bartender. He always gave me and my sister so much attention—and now I knew why, of course. He’d stalked me, relentlessly. He’d also fallen in love with me. So many emotions with Fang: from anger to love to everything in between.
The image clarified further...the longish teeth that hung from his chain...teeth that I had once falsely assumed were shark teeth. They weren’t, of course. They were his teeth, pulled cruelly in an insane asylum...pulled from his very mouth.
The image clarified further still. It was Fang smiling broadly at me and my sister, leaning an elbow on the scarred counter at Hero’s in Fullerton.
There was something on his chest.
Just behind the fangs that hung from the leather strap.
Was it a tattoo?
No.
The image clarified further, coming into even sharper focus.
It was a circular-shaped pendant hanging from his neck. But I hadn’t recognized it because it had been flipped over, revealing only its golden backside.
The fourth medallion?
“Fang,” I whispered.
Allison grinned broadly, even as her eyes pleaded for me to help her. “Ah, sssister. I see she remembers now. The fourth medallion is, in fact, not very far at all.”
“Sam...” said Kingsley next to me, pulling me out of my reverie. “Sam, you might want to see this...”
I blinked and looked to where he was pointing.
Through the cave opening, I saw people coming. Slowly, deliberately, plodding through the sand along the beach. Toward the cave. Toward us.
I recognized them all.
The Thurmans. From the very old, to the very young, a dozen of them or more.
Sweet Jesus.
I snapped my head around and looked at Allison. The entity within her tilted her head slightly. “We are legion, Samantha Moon, and we will have the medallion—all of the medallions.”
Chapter Forty-nine
“We can’t hurt them,” I said. “They’re innocent.”
“They might be innocent,” said Kingsley grimly, “but they look like they mean business.”
They also looked like zombies. Already many of them were appearing at the cave entrance, compelled by forces they might not have entirely understood.
Edwin was there, and so were his many cousins. There was Tara, too, just behind him. Old and young, all the Thurmans looked confused. Most were shivering from the cold, drenched, unprepared for the weather.
The dark cords that bound them—that cursed them—were all engorged, filled with hate, with venom. The cords pulsated and rotated and twisted through their otherwise beautiful auras.
Somehow, the entity had possessed them all, simultaneously—and it was a heinous, horrible thing to see.
In that instant, Edwin charged, baring his teeth, dashing supernaturally fast through the short tunnel. Kingsley leaped in front of me and, with one mighty swipe of his meaty arm, sent Edwin flying hard into the stone wall to our side.
A dull thud...and now Edwin was slumping to the ground, bleeding from a head wound. He was alive, but unconscious.
Kingsley looked at him only briefly, and immediately turned his attention to an older gentleman, an uncle, who next made his own charge. The result was similar, although Kingsley, I noted, didn’t hit the guy quite so hard.
“They’re stronger than they look,” said the werewolf.
“It’s him,” I sa
id. “He’s making them stronger.”
Kingsley nodded as the older gentleman shook his head and picked himself up. I suspected that if all of the Thurmans attacked at once, things would to get very ugly. “Are you sure we didn’t step onto the set of a George Romero movie?” he asked.
“Sadly, no,” I said.
“I think,” said Kingsley, surveying the bizarre group before us, “something else is controlling them, from afar.”
“Why do you say that?”
Kingsley reached back for me and took hold of my hand. “Who brought this curse upon the family?”
“Conner Thurman,” I said. “Ninety years ago.”
“We need to find him, Sam.”
“He died,” I said. “A long time ago.”
Kingsley looked back at me and, amazingly, gave me a sardonic smile. “That,” he said. “I seriously doubt. Trust me on this, Sam. I’ve seen some weird shit in my time. Granted, the walking dead is about as weird as it gets. But a curse like this needs a primary source. A head, so to speak. And that source—or head—would be Conner Thurman himself.”
“He’s entombed in the family mausoleum,” I said. “Here on the island.”
“Find him,” said Kingsley, squeezing my hand. “And cut off the head of the snake. And I don’t mean that figuratively.”
“Jesus,” I said.
“Pray all you want, but until Conner Thurman is found and destroyed, this curse will never, ever end—and they will never, ever stop coming for you and your son.”
I thought about that as the Thurmans converged together. It was definitely about to get very ugly in the cave.
“I can hold them off, Sam,” Kingsley said over his shoulder. “I can do so a lot easier and safer for them if I don’t have to worry about you, too.”
“But—”
“Go, Sam. Now!”
Chapter Fifty
As a male cousin dashed forward, sprinting supernaturally fast, Kingsley met him. This fight was more even, and Kingsley, I saw, had his hands full.
“Go, Sam!” growled Kingsley, finally heaving the young man off him, just as another sprinted forward. “Go now!”