by J. R. Rain
You onccce told me you would walk into the sssun if I made you harm your children. I have done my part. It would be amusssing if they came to harm becaussse of your gamble. The image of Elizabeth trying to laugh makes my skin crawl. And I know you cannot ssstand to be without them for so many yearsss. Go as I direct, and you shall find a man who will help.
“Umm, how about no. I already told you I am not giving you control. Ever.”
Her sigh grates across my mind and makes my spine seize up.
Not control, Sssamantha. I will provide a feeling only. A feeling...
Out of nowhere, a weak urge to travel off to the right comes on. It’s nothing I can’t ignore, even weaker than the lingering doubt that I must get home to my children as soon as possible or something truly horrible will happen to them. Every minute I waste here in the past is inviting disaster. My brain tortures me with hopes of what my life might’ve been like had I not been turned. Danny and I had been so truly in love at one time, before my death broke him. I’m sure that’s what happened. He loved me too much, and that moment when he finally accepted that I had died, it killed him inside. He’d stopped caring about everything but the kids, giving up on his law practice, his health, and even involving himself in managing a sleazy strip club. Got into dark magic, too. At first, he’d hoped to find a ‘cure’ for me, but whatever forces he tampered with invaded his soul and changed him for the worse.
And well, that cost him his life. I’m as horrified at myself for how little it hurt to lose him as I am that it happened. He’d been such a shit to me, but part of me clings to the thought that hadn’t really been Danny. Danny stopped existing that night in our hallway, the night he’d finally accepted I had died. He thought that ‘some creature’ replaced his wife, but I know some creature replaced Danny. The man I married would never have tortured me by denying me access to my kids or limiting me to one fifteen-minute phone call a week.
Argh!
Oh, to hell with it. A tiny chance I could actually pull it off and avoid undeath isn’t worth the risk of making it worse or simply wasting a century and change. I stand and orient myself toward the direction she’s pushing me to go.
You can trussst me, Sssamantha.
“Honestly? No. I can’t. But… on this, I think I don’t have much choice.”
Chapter Two
In my life, I’ve done some dumb things.
As a little girl, I used to sneak into a big company farm down the road from where I lived to steal vegetables at night. Hey, it wasn’t a vandalism-type thing. I wanted food. We were kinda poor, okay? I accidentally tried weed (a brownie edible left on my father’s nightstand) when I was around ten. Full disclosure: my dad had a joint permanently grafted on his lower lip. Anyway, the exact effect escapes my memory, but I do recall it being so unpleasant I never tried it again―and I got all sanctimonious on my brothers whenever they did.
Of course, I can’t not mention the queen mother of dumbshit moves… I went jogging alone in the middle of the night.
But, that’s neither here nor there.
Today’s dumb move is brought to you by the letter E―Elizabeth. Though, I suppose I don’t have to listen to her. She has, however, successfully set up a situation where I can’t tell where my fears stop and her manipulation begins. My half-baked idea to just sit on my ass and wait for 1996 to come around again naturally might have an eighty-percent chance of putting my mortal life back on course like none of this ever happened. (This being the hell that is my life.) However, I can’t shake the doubt that it might be more like a two-percent chance and even trying will mess my family up even worse.
So, yeah. I decide to follow Elizabeth’s guiding mental nudge and walk in the direction that feels right to me. For hours. Across forest, fields, and dale. Or something poetic like that. That is, it would be poetic if it wasn’t so damned hot.
One thing that’s nice about being a vampire―I don’t get tired.
You don’t ssseriously wish to give this up?
“It’s not the power I’m thinking about,” I answer, allowing Elizabeth, for now, the space she needs to communicate. But I am keeping my inner eye on her. “It’s all the associated craziness that’s happening to my family. There’s not a thing I wouldn’t do if I thought it would spare them. If Anthony could be a normal kid, not some vampire half-breed, and if Tammy wouldn’t turn into the world’s most psychic melodramatic teen.”
If thingsss had not happened as they had, your ssson would be dead. Hisss time had completed for thisss iteration of his sssoul. He had learned all he needed. You interrupted his circle.
I close my eyes, trying to weather the horrible memories of when Anthony had gotten sick and nearly died. The only reason he survived is because I did the most unthinkable thing a mother could possibly ever do: I’d turned him into a vampire. Backed into a corner where I could either do that or lose him forever, I broke down. However, I’d had the alchemical means at hand to immediately restore him to life. But it changed him. He’s something more than a simple mortal even though he remains alive. I still don’t fully understand what happened other than at the moment I took his life, I broke the connection he had with his guardian angel, so when he came back to life, the universe tried to compensate. I guess it’s kind of like the way a blind person gets better hearing and smell.
At least, that’s what I chose to believe.
A little more than an hour after nightfall, I wander onto the grounds of a remote country house. A single weak lantern flickers inside on the upstairs floor, so I decide to take a meal of opportunity from one of the three cows out in the yard behind it.
They give me the ‘wild eyes’ and shift restlessly as I approach the fence. The one I lock stares with stands there like a deer in the headlights of an oncoming truck while the other two beat hooves for the far corner of the yard. Fortunately, there’s enough distance that they’re not trapped close enough to me to make noise.
“Easy there, girl,” I whisper to her. “I’m only going to take a little. You won’t even notice.”
Her tongue hangs out as the effect of my mental manipulation grabs hold of the critter’s brain. Biting a human on the neck can be intimate or awkward depending on who it is and where I am (although, truth be known, I haven’t done much of that). Biting a cow on the neck? That’s super awkward, no matter what. I know, I know… I promised myself I would never bite anyone again, but I also never planned on getting stuck back in the 1800s. And technically, well, this is a cow.
I pat the animal on the shoulder as I stand there trying to calm it down for a moment. Despite my situation, it still takes me a bit of doing to work up the nerve to extend my fangs. Ever since I screwed up in that supermarket so many years ago and a little girl freaked out at the sight of me, I’ve had this mental block about fangs. I try to forget I even have them. They’re tangible proof I’ve become a monster, and in the modern world, they’re largely unnecessary. At least for me.
Sure, some vampires are into it for the kink factor. I’ve heard stories of them biting during sex, even if they’re with other vampires, where feeding is pointless. Some actually prey on humans, thinking of mortals the way most people consider pigs or beef cows. Me? I’m purely a bottle baby, so to speak. Alas, I’m not exactly in the modern world at the moment. ‘Extenuating circumstances,’ as Danny might’ve said.
Grr. The mere thought of him and all the shit he put me through sends a shiver of rage down my body. The cows in the distance sense it and press themselves into the fence.
“All right, Bessie,” I whisper. “You won’t feel a thing.”
With that, I arrange myself as best I can and puncture the cow’s carotid artery. There’s something to be said for a heart the size of a cow’s. I don’t really need to suck from them. It’s almost like being in college again and drinking straight from a keg tap.
Right as I’m finishing up and sealing the bite wound, a man’s voice breaks the near total silence.
“Lord in Heaven, save
me.”
I jump and somehow manage not to scream or whip around and stare at him with my fangs out. After retracting them, I perform a graceful (and somewhat ladylike) turn.
“Why good sir, you most certainly startled me,” I say.
A dark-skinned man in his later twenties, wearing simple clothes, no shoes, points at me. “You’s drinkin’ on the blood of a cow. What devilry is this? Witchcraft?”
“Not witchcraft,” I say.
Sadly, I missed that train. Who knows how my life would have turned out had I joined Allison’s trifecta of witches.
You would have been mortal, Sssamantha. You would have been dead before your life truly began, only to be reborn again and again in a stupid, senseless cycle.
I sigh inwardly. That’s one way to look at it.
The only way.
Meanwhile, my new friend is losing it, and fast. “Witch!” he yells. “Demon!”
Crap. I stare into his eyes. Calm down.
He tilts his head a little to the side, arms going slack. I lift a name from his thoughts, Polidore. Wow. Poor guy. Good thing there’s no high school for him to suffer through with that moniker. The jackasses I went to school with would’ve called this guy ‘Polly’ for sure.
“Much better,” I say, and telepathically add, “You did not see anything unusual. Just a woman walking alone at night.
“Yes’m,” says Polidore. “Muggy night ta be out on yer own, ma’am. Ain’t good times we in.”
I walk away from the cow—much to her delight—and approach the man. “A little birdie led me here in search of someone who might be knowledgeable in the ways of the loas. A practitioner of the art. Do you know anyone like that?”
Polidore’s eyelids flutter.
“The Frenchman be in Richmond,” says Polidore. “I do not know his name.”
At least he’s not lying. His thoughts flick to an older woman here who saw the Frenchman and spoke of him.
“I’d like to speak to Chloe if that’s all right,” I say, in my best Southern accent.
Polidore nods and walks off. I follow him around the side of the house to the back of the property where two much less grand structures stand about fifteen feet apart. They’re roughly the same size, generally house-shaped, and made from unpainted wood. While they don’t seem in disrepair, they still look like one good storm would knock them to the ground. He approaches the hut on the right and knocks.
A nervous girl in her later teens answers a few minutes later, her eyes wide with fear. Despite her living conditions, she appears reasonably healthy. Polidore nods back toward me and whispers about Chloe. I sense the young woman’s hesitation and imminent dismissal, so I take the liberty of a slight mental prod.
“This way, ma’am,” whispers the teen while backing inside.
Polidore makes no move to enter, so I duck under the low-hanging top of the doorway. The inside is equally as plain as the outside, with a single table, three chairs, and six ramshackle beds arranged around the walls. Five women ranging in age from the teen who let me in to an elder who’s probably in her sixties live here.
The girl gestures at the oldest one, on her side in bed with her back to the room. “Miss Chloe, there’s a lady here, requestin’ to see you.”
“Oh, is she now?” asks Chloe. With a grunt, the woman rolls away from the wall to lie on her side, and looks up at me. “Who are you?”
I walk a few steps closer with my most disarming smile. “I’m someone who’s lost where they aren’t supposed to be. And I don’t mean your house.”
“No, I reckon you’re quite far from where you want to be.” Chloe sits up and eases her legs over the side of the bed, but doesn’t stand.
Great. Am I wearing the future on my sleeve or something? Though, I suppose it’s a good sign she can see something, right? Meaning, she’s the real deal. “I need to find someone who is skilled in certain magical arts. Someone who would be powerful enough to undo something that happened.”
Chloe regards me with a stare for a long moment, part knowing, part searching. The eyes of the other women all fix on me, mostly in a sort of what’s a white lady doing in here way. They can’t possibly know I don’t have it in me to think of them as lessers. My world, the world I came from, is so vastly different. Granted, it’s still far from perfect, though. The younger women are cautious, waiting for me to bring trouble while the two eldest after Chloe give me a resigned do whatever you’re gonna do stares.
“There may be a man,” says Chloe. “I did not speak to him, but he might speak to you. No promises.”
“Who is he?” I ask.
“He is like you.” She waves dismissively. “You will find him. In Richmond.”
Oh, crap. I hope she doesn’t mean vampire. Please tell me there’s no way she can just see that. And oh hell no, lady. You’re not leaving me with some fortune-cookie level cryptic muttering. I barge into her head again. Her thoughts circle around a somewhat foppish-looking man with shoulder-length black hair who looks a bit like a much tidier version of Captain Jack Sparrow with anemia—and tiny round sunglasses. Chloe had passed him on the streets of Richmond in broad daylight a day ago. The way the man had looked at her, almost through her, sends a shiver down my spine.
“I got a bad feelin’ from that man,” says Chloe. “Baron Samedi livin’ in dem eyes.”
That’s gotta be some manner of voodoo reference.
The other women in the room mostly fall silent at the name, although two muffle gasps.
“Great,” I say. “Is that a bad sign? Or does it just mean he has enough power to help me?”
Chloe reaches out and takes my hand. Her calloused fingers, rough from many years of hard work, scratch at my tender skin. The instant we make contact, her irises dilate so much that the brown practically disappears. As if the ack! factor of staring at two enormous pupils didn’t unsettle me enough, she makes this face like she’s either fixin’ to go full Exorcist and start barfing in 360 degrees, or someone’s about to pass a kidney stone. Actually, no. Neither of those are as strange as what happens inside her head: her thoughts momentarily close off to me so I can’t see what’s going on in there. Holy crap! This woman is the real deal.
After about forty seconds, she sways from side to side.
“Are you all right?” I ask in a tentative tone.
A glimpse of a rather me-like silhouette walking along a path of glowing blue light flickers into Chloe’s thoughts an instant before her eyes go back to normal.
“My goodness,” says Chloe in a weak half-whisper. “You really are far from home.”
I fidget at my dress. “Yeah. Just a bit.”
“Seek the five paths. They shall lead you where you wish to be.” Chloe turns away and stretches out on the bed again.
Whoa. This woman saw me walking on a trail made out of blue light. Now she’s talking like a cheesy kung-fu movie. Must be on the good stuff.
“What five paths?” I ask.
Chloe doesn’t react. Not at first. Her dark eyes flick toward me, having returned to normal.
“That is all I have been given,” she says evenly, quietly, her voice meant for my ears only. “Samantha Moon.”
I blink, startled to hear my name.
“Now leave us be, bloodsucker.”
The others watch me with unblinking stares as I let myself out, none of them likely breathing until I’ve shut the door. Hmm. I really hope this guy isn’t a vampire. With the luck I’m having, I half-expect to wind up stuck in some supernatural political mess. Ugh. I can’t let anything distract me from getting back to my kids.
‘Baron Samedi…’ I’m not entirely sure who that is, but he kinda sounds like someone important. Or someone I don’t want to piss off. Usually, those two things go together.
Alas, I often have a habit of pissing off those people who are better left un-pissed-off. Sometimes, it’s as easy as simply existing. Anyway, I suppose that means I have to find this guy in Richmond. As if on cue, Elizabeth’s little p
rodding sense of direction returns. This sounds like a spectacularly bad idea, but it’s not as if I have voodoo priests and priestesses lining up to help pull my wayward vampiric butt back through a time wormhole.
All three cows give me bug-eyed stares as I walk by the yard on my way toward the woods.
I point at them. “No comments from the peanut gallery. I have no patience for udder nonsense.”
Ugh. I really have been out in the sun too long, even if it is dark at the moment.
Chapter Three
Talos helps me cover the ground to Richmond pretty fast, though “winging it” forces me to look for a secluded alley.
No sense throwing the locals into a complete panic. Honestly, people back then—well, now—are so stuffy I think they’d be more disturbed at seeing a woman walking around in shorts than a flying half-dragon creature. So I’m certainly not going to let them catch me in the middle of putting my clothes on. Still though, my flight form doesn’t have what one would call an ‘approachable face.’
I’ll try not to take offense, Sam.
You have what’s called inner beauty.
I’ll have you know, in my world, I am considered quite the looker.
Did you just say ‘looker’?
He gives me a mental shrug. I draw words from your mind, Sam. In effect, you said ‘looker.’
I chuckle and apologize to my giant, flying friend, over whom I have complete control. He actually says, “No worries,” and that gets me chuckling again.
Once safely on the ground, I summon the single flame, see my spunky little self within it, feel the powerful pull towards her/me, and soon find myself standing naked and barefoot in a puddle, a knapsack at my feet. The knapsack had been airlifted by one of Talos’ massive talons and contains my essentials.
Honestly, I don’t know how the women of this time period coped with these dresses. They’re such a giant pain in the ass to scramble into in a hurry while hiding behind rain barrels outside at night. Makes me wonder what the vampires of old did when they had to fly somewhere. If I ever bump into Dracula again, I’ll have to ask.