Sam I Am

by Heather Killough-Walden

  Smart girl. Good witch. It was a pity she’d messed up on something as important as Samhain.

  Dietrich opened the door and rushed inside the room just in time to find Katelyn Shanks crouched over Meagan’s very pale, very still body, her hand hovering over the sterling silver spiral of life draped around Meagan’s neck.

  “Stop!” He held his hand out toward her and shoved as much influence into the word as he could muster. Katelyn froze where she was and her hand began to shake.

  Meagan was clearly unconscious. The effort she’d expended to keep Katelyn at bay and her parents asleep had drained what little strength she’d had left.

  Dietrich wasted no time. “Logan, take the medallion from Meagan’s neck and put it on!” he ordered as he strode toward Katelyn.

  Logan raced forward and grasped the necklace just as Katelyn was shrugging off Lehrer’s hold. He watched as her hand lowered toward Logan’s, her nails digging deep furrows in the back of Logan’s hand.

  Logan hissed in pain, but held tight to the necklace. It seemed to be the source of so much desire and pain and danger that there was no way in hell she was going to allow it to fall into Sam Hain’s grasp, despite the deep wounds now welling blood on the back of her hand.

  She pulled her face back out of the way just in time to dodge Katelyn’s make-shift claws a second time as her best friend attempted to carve her up in any way she could.

  “Mr. Lehrer!”

  At that moment, Lehrer managed to wrap his arms around Katelyn’s torso and yank her back long enough for Logan to pull the chain over Meagan’s head and then put it on herself.

  “No! You stupid bitch!” Katelyn hissed, fighting wildly in Lehrer’s grasp. “Give me the necklace!”

  “Logan, get out of here! Get to the school and I’ll meet you there when I can!” Mr. Lehrer was in the process of pinning Katelyn’s arms to her sides as Logan nodded and dashed for the door. She threw it open and ran down the hall, her mind moving as quickly as her legs.

  She didn’t know exactly what time it was or at what time, exactly, the dance was supposed to start, but there had to be at least three or four hours to go before it would begin. Mr. Lehrer wanted her to head there straight away, but she’d seen Sam there. It wouldn’t be safe at the school until Mr. Lehrer was there as well.

  Logan was supposed to open the bakery for a birthday party. There was also Taylor and his truck to contend with. He would probably look for her at the school.

  She needed time. She needed somewhere to hide, and she needed to think. If she headed to the bakery right now, she could also get something to eat – and that, she needed almost most of all.

  It took her ten minutes to get to the bakery, and luckily the parking lot was still empty. The sign on the door read closed; it looked deserted. Logan turned off the truck, got out, and slammed the door.

  She was striding across the gravel in the lot when she felt someone watching her.

  It was something she had read about and seen in movies. She’d even heard others mention the sensation, in passing. But she’d never truly felt it before herself, and so she’d always thought it was an exaggeration – a general term used to describe some sort of inkling that one wasn’t alone.

  However, now she felt his eyes on her like a brand. It was a sort of weight, like when someone put their hand on your shoulder to get your attention.

  Logan stopped in her tracks and turned around. Traffic sped by on both Cooke Street and 34th, the two roads running by the corner bakery and its parking lot. Logan’s gaze skirted the streets and sidewalks, the trees lining the road, and even the rooftops of opposite buildings. But there was no sign of him.

  Yet, she was positive that Sam Hain could see her at that moment. If she’d possessed any, she would have bet real money on it.

  Instinctively, she placed her hand over the necklace around her neck and closed the remaining distance to the bakery shop door. She unlocked it hastily and went in, making sure to lock it behind her. A wave of dizziness washed over her and she leaned back up against the door, closing her eyes to regain her bearings.

  “Food,” she whispered. When she could, she pushed away from the door and made her way to the kitchen in the back.

  Ten minutes later, she’d downed the half-sandwich Randy had left in the refrigerator, two cookies, and half a can of Coke, which she’d also kept in the refrigerator.

  Her stomach cramped a little, but she could feel her strength returning and was no longer dizzy. The clock read 2:43. Seventeen minutes until the kids’ parents would begin to show up for their birthday party. She had most of the decorations up and the cookies and cupcakes were set out on a side table.

  Now all she had to do was be ready to plaster a smile on her face and pretend that there was nowhere she would rather be and nothing else she could possibly be doing, at that moment in time, but hosting a seven-year-old’s birthday party while the allotted two hours ticked away at the reverse speed of light.

  That was all she had to do.

  And then, at five o’clock, she could head to the school and hopefully put an end to this nightmare she’d so unwittingly brought to life.

  Logan was afraid to turn on her phone. It had been off all afternoon and she was certain that Taylor would have called their parents by now. In turn, they would have almost certainly called her. She probably had no fewer than a dozen messages waiting to scold her and was only surprised that her father hadn’t yet driven by the shop to speak with her in person.

  Logan had cleaned up the birthday party mess in record time and locked the shop behind her with a heart that pounded progressively harder in her nervous chest. Again, she felt that she was being watched – and again, she saw no one.

  She climbed into the truck, locked that door as well, and started the engine. It reliably roared to life and she hastily pulled out of the lot. It was late in the afternoon and the sun was already setting behind the ring of mountains around the town. It would be dark very soon and that left Logan feeling distinctly uncomfortable.

  She had never before feared the night. In fact, she had always preferred it.

  Sam Hain was turning her world upside down.

  The sooner she made it to the school, the better. Mr. Lehrer said he would meet her there. He must have some plan; some idea of what to do with the necklace that Logan had been too afraid to take off. Maybe he was going to cast a spell.

  He was obviously some sort of warlock. Or was it wizard? She had no idea. She just knew that Meagan was a witch and that Mr. Lehrer was somehow linked to her and that he had done something to the nurses at the nurses’ station in the hospital. She’d heard the words he had whispered – they weren’t English. At least, not an English she was familiar with. Maybe a very, very old English?

  As Logan pondered all of this, her foot grew heavier on the gas pedal. She truly just wanted to be there, in the school, safely beside her history teacher, solving the problem that was Sam Hain. The gorgeous Sam Hain. The enigmatic, powerful, handsome, impossibly perfect Sam Hain. Lord of the Dead.

  Logan felt it again, then. She was being watched. She glanced in the rearview mirror to find that the street behind her was dark and empty but for the street lamps that were just now beginning to go on all over town.

  She looked at the sidewalks on either side of the road, but no one walked them. It was a relatively cold night and people had stopped going out hours before. Her town rolled up its sidewalks at five, and on the weekends, sooner, even, than that.

  She was alone.

  Maybe she wasn’t being watched, after all. Maybe I’m imagining it. I’m having some sort of pre-diabetic sugar high or low or whatever and I’m getting paranoid. A lot had happened in the last few days. And she was tired. She ran a hand over her face and returned her attention to the road ahead of her.

  Finally, she turned onto the street that led to the school and recognized administration buildings all along one side of the avenue. She bit her lip and allowed herself to hope a littl
e – she was almost there.

  Another instinctive glance in the rear view mirror, and Logan was suddenly gasping as the reflected image of a skeleton gazed sightlessly back at her from where it sat in the back seat of the Ford.

  Logan jerked the wheel to the right and hit the curb on the side of the street. She hopped it with a painful jump and a grinding, crunching noise, and then went over the edge to begin sliding down the green slope of a hill that led to a park down below.

  It was one of the very few places in town where the city had attempted to water and feed the fescue in order to maintain it long into the winter months. As a result, the truck’s tires slipped and slid along the slick, sprinkler-soaked turf and Logan fought with the wheel. Terror yanked her heart into her throat and blocked all air from moving in or out of her lungs as she tried, with all of her might, to keep the truck from flipping.

  She must have done something right, for within a few short moments, the truck came to a skidding stop and she glanced once more into the rear view mirror. The skeleton was gone.

  Logan threw open the door to the truck and hurtled out into the night, falling at once to her knees. The ground that the city had fought so hard to preserve had been destroyed in places by the truck’s wheels, resulting in a torn turf of mud and patches of grass that clung to her jeans as she forced her legs under her once more.

  She managed to come to her feet, leaning on the truck for support, her lungs now pumping air in and out with renewed and dizzying speed. She considered the truck for one tense moment, and realized that there was no way she was going to get it back onto the road by herself.

  So, she pushed off of the truck bed and spun around, ready to run the remaining distance to the school.

  But Sam Hain stood before her on the grass, blocking her path. He didn’t move; he simply studied her with those unnaturally blue eyes, a tall, still figure in black garb and dark calm. In the draperies of night, he appeared more ethereal than usual. Unnaturally beautiful. Wholly dangerous.

  “I can hear your heart pounding,” he told her. “Did I scare you?”

  Logan tried very hard not to faint. She focused on her body, on the ground beneath her feet, on the feel of the early evening air against her skin.

  She didn’t answer him, of course. So he smiled, this time displaying straight white teeth with slightly elongated canines that only hinted at the true predatory nature of their possessor.

  “You can’t outrun me, Logan.” He shook his head at the clearly ridiculous notion. “No one can.” He shrugged, his smile at once boyish and evil. “No one ever has.”

  Logan bolted to the right, heading for the green hill that she had slid down moments before. Her Doc Martens slipped beneath her, the footing unsure, the terrain treacherous. She fell at one point, but quickly caught herself and pushed up off of the ground.

  She wasn’t completely certain that she was headed in the right direction. She was no longer capable of entirely rational thought. She only knew that Death was on her tail, and she wasn’t quite ready to die.

  At the top of the hill, the overhead lamplight hummed and buzzed, its haloes of fluorescent glow finally free of the swarms of insects that had died off during the first freeze. The street stretched out before Logan and, in the distance, she could make out the sheltering shape of the school’s front entrance beneath its awning and banners and the American flag. It waited about a half a mile down the road.

  Logan broke into a sprint toward it and hope once more stubbornly burgeoned to life within her. She had Meagan’s bag of tricks in the pocket of her denim jacket. She had her Celtic spiral of life medallion around her neck. Mr. Lehrer was probably waiting for her somewhere inside.

  He could fix this.

  I just need to get to the school….

  As she neared the parking lot adjacent to the entry way, she sped up, now almost certain that she could make the double doors before Sam stopped her.

  But as if on cue, a tall, dark figure stepped out from behind a long black car that had been parked on the edge of the lot, and once more blocked her path.

  Chapter Eight

  Dominic Maldovan could barely believe what he was seeing when he looked up from behind the wheel of his Torino-Talladega in time to see a Ford King Cab go spinning out of control, hop the curb across the street, and slide down out of sight on the other side.

  It was the sound of its squealing tires that had drawn his attention from the phone in his hands. But what shocked him the most about what he found when he looked up was the fact that Logan Wright was behind the wheel.

  That wasn’t what she normally drove. He would know. He hadn’t admitted as much to her, as she was the kind of girl who possessed enough sense to be alarmed by such a thing, but the truth was, he definitely knew more about her than was strictly necessary. He found himself watching her all the time. He knew she liked Coke better than Pepsi, dark chocolate better than milk chocolate, classic rock better than anything made today. He knew when she had to stay late after school and he always tried to schedule things so that he was there, in the deserted hall, when he knew she would be too.

  So, it was with questions spinning in his head, and a distinctly nasty breed of fear blossoming to life in his gut, that he threw open the door of his classic, black muscle car and sprang out of the seat.

  He had parked his car in the administration building parking lot, far from the swinging doors of neighboring parked cars. It also helped that it was across the street and about a quarter of a mile down from the high school, so when he wanted to take a break from playing with the band, he could disappear for a while – answer email, send a few text messages, and even have a real live phone conversation without any of the students eaves dropping.

  However, though he had long legs and wasn’t a slow runner, it took him longer than he would have liked to get to the spot where he had seen the white truck disappear.

  He slowed near the edge of the hill and looked down. The truck waited down below and Dominic was relieved to see that it hadn’t flipped. At a cursory glance, it looked like it was stuck in the mud, useless but unharmed. The grass was destroyed. He knew from experience that the wheel carriage was most likely damaged to some extent.

  But there was no one behind the wheel. The truck door was thrown open and Logan was nowhere in sight.

  Maybe she fell out, he thought, as he took off down the hill, his eyes scanning the dark surroundings for any sign of a body.

  But nothing else made itself visible to him, and nothing moved in the night-filled park beyond. There was no sound but the ticking of a heated engine cooling down and the buzzing of the lamplight up on the road overhead.

  Dominic’s gaze narrowed on the turf around the truck. There were horrible, deep tracks in the grass, formed by the Ford’s tires. However, in one muddy groove, there was a smaller groove. And the slightest indentation of a shoe print.

  She ran up there…. He looked up, his dark gaze following the path to the top of the hill on the other side. Without hesitating, he sprinted up the hill, stopping to look around at the top.

  And then he found her. There.

  She must have run from the truck – and not slowly, either. Now, she was standing beside the shining black hearse that principal Kaboren had rented for the Halloween dance. The new guy was standing across from her. Sam Hain. Dominic’s jaw clenched tight and his hands curled into fists at his sides.

  Hain had as good as cornered her in the gymnasium earlier that day. Dom had watched the entire thing. What was he doing – stalking her?

  “Logan!” he called to her, cupping his hands around his mouth.

  He could see her jump from here. Sam Hain looked up as Logan spun around at the sound of her name. Dominic once more broke into a run.

  Logan gazed up at Sam, her heart sinking, her mind reeling dangerously out of control. This is it, she thought. He’s going to end it here. And looking up at his form, so striking and tall, draped in leather and night, she wasn’t sure she entire
ly minded any more. She was tired and not feeling so good. Her heart hurt, her stomach hurt, and Sam Hain was everything she had ever wanted in a man. She actually felt ugly there, standing before him.

  He began to advance toward her. “Why me?” She shook her head, taking a step back, feeling weary beyond words.

  The question clearly took him by surprise. He stopped in his tracks, his brow slightly furrowed, and cocked his head to one side. “Seriously?”

  I don’t understand, she thought. Just because he read my stories? It wasn’t possible. Men didn’t fall in love with women because of their words or their ideas. They fell in love with big boobs and tiny waists and great blow job skills.

  Sam threw back his head and laughed, the sound echoing through the night air as if the darkness were its domain, and he, its king.

  Logan shivered and hugged herself.

  “Logan!” A voice called to her from somewhere behind her, in the darkness. She jumped at the sound and spun around to find Dominic Maldovan racing toward her.

  She didn’t know what to think of that, but was spared the job of making up her mind as, just when Dominic reached the side walk on her side of the street, he abruptly slowed – and then stopped, coming to stand at ease, his arms at his sides, his expression suddenly distant and dead. He didn’t move any further. He just…. Stood.

  Logan’s eyes widened. She turned back around. Sam lowered his head and now peered at her through the tops of eyes that were growing ever darker with black intent.

  “What did you do to him?” she asked. Her bottom lip was shaking; she could feel it. Was it the chill in the air? Or terror?

  “This has nothing to do with him,” he told her. “If you value his life, put him out of your mind.”

  She blinked, the blood rushing from her face. He was serious. All he needed was an excuse and he would kill Dominic. She fought then, with her own inner voice. She tried to take her mind off of the boy with the long jet black hair and the jade eyes who had apparently run across the street in an attempt to come to her rescue.