by Ira Robinson
Mortimer nodded, but the girl narrowed her eyes. Sam did not like the look, and her impatience flared up once more beneath it.
"What the hell is your problem?" Sam shouted, slamming the table. The echo of it cracked through the room as all of her frustration went into it.
The girl's head moved backward as if Sam struck her, putting her back against the chair as her eyes flew wide. Her mouth, as well, gaped for a second before her demeanor changed, melting into confusion.
Her lips closed into a pout as she turned toward Mortimer.
The man reached his fingers to take the woman's own. Sam saw him squeeze it tightly.
"Tamara means no harm or disrespect, Samantha," he said, using his free hand to pat the top of the woman's.
"I'm sorry," she heard Tamara say, her voice quavering. In that moment, Sam came to the realization of just how young she must be. Barely past a child, perhaps, playing the role of an adult.
While still angry, Sam softened a little at the reaction the girl had to her yelling, an abused puppy attempting to be good.
"I don't enjoy feeling like I am in a zoo, on display." Sam brought her arms back to her chest, trying to keep her tone even. "I've answered your questions. Now tell me the truth."
Mortimer let Tamara's arm fall away as he nodded at her. "Go ahead, dear."
The girl took a deep breath and shook her head, the bangs in front of her eyes shifting. She moved her hands aside from Mortimer and put them on the book, though she did not look at it. Her view fell on Sam once more, careful to avoid keeping in contact with Sam's own for long.
"What you have seen," she began, her voice soft and breathy, "this shadow man, is called a revenant." She tapped her fingers on the cover of the book. "More than a ghost, less than alive. Not quite human. It takes powerful magic to make one."
Revenant? It sounded like something from ancient Egypt.
"Two days ago, I might have laughed in your face for saying such a thing." Sam looked around the room, scouring the paintings once more. The remnants of the man on the canvass silently mocked her.
"What could this thing want? Why me?"
Tamara's sight flitted between Sam and Bart, coming back to Sam once more. "It wants you because you are connected to it. Because you have power even you do not realize."
Before Sam could ask anything else, Tamara leaned forward. "Most of all, it wants you because you are family."
Both Sam and Bart shifted, their bodies moving as one, hands coming to the table forcefully.
"What?" Bart demanded, his voice booming.
Sam saw Mortimer nod. "Your father."
Chapter 22
Sam and Bart exploded, her face etched with shock as she gasped loudly and he jumped to his feet. The chair crashed to the floor behind him.
Tamara winced toward the table and shuddered when Bart slammed his palm on it, smashing it so hard the book in front of her twitched.
"Mort, you can't be serious!" Bart exclaimed. "There is no way..."
He stammered for a moment while Sam burst out her own questions. Through it all, Mortimer held up his hand, trying to bring them to a calm.
What was he talking about? How could the monster she saw, the thing that attacked her and tried to take her life, be her father? As the words came out, she swung from confusion to ridiculousness. The old man had to be off his rocker.
But he kept his arm up while he waited for them to stay their shouting and probing for answers. When it was obvious to both they would hear nothing until they stopped, Sam put her fingers in front of her mouth, stilling herself, while Bart slammed the chair back into place and huffed into it once more. He glowered with anger but fell into silence, as well.
He waited a moment more until he was sure they would be listening before saying, "As I said before, there are connections here none of us expected."
His eyes flitted between the two of them before turning and letting them rest on the young woman who had remained mute through it all.
"You already know this, Bart, but for Samantha's sake, I will explain. One of Tamara's many gifts is to see patterns, to connect in some way to the web of fate and trace the lines of what has been, and what could be." He nodded at Tamara, who finally looked up from the table and the book before her to meet his own gaze. "She tells me the patterns here have opened to become distinct."
Tamara pushed the bangs away from her eyes, revealing them fully to Sam for the first time. She wondered once more, fleetingly, how those scars came to be on her pretty face.
"They show a connection between you that can only come from him." She seemed almost regretful as she said it aloud.
"How?" Sam let her arm drop as the words poured out. "I didn't know him at all."
Bart still seethed with anger as he stared at Tamara, his voice low as he said, "This makes no sense. The man I knew could not be this... thing." His eyes pass over them all, finally resting on Sam, who perched back under his gaze. "I saw it for myself."
She grimaced. "It's not as simple as that, though. A revenant is created only through the use of very dark magic."
"Now wait a minute," Bart said, incredulity plastered across his lips. "Are you telling me that a man like my father, someone as great as him, would turn himself into that wicked thing?" He glanced to Sam, who remained quiet, trying to keep up with what they were revealing while the shock ran through her system. "Come on Tamara. You can't expect me to believe that."
Mort sat forward, his frail bones creaking nearly as much as the chair beneath him. "You don't have the whole story, Bart. You only have a part." He brought his hand to his chin and rubbed softly. "Do you know how your father died?"
Bart pursed his lips, his mustache coming down to cover the bottom one almost entirely. He hesitated a moment before saying, "Only what it says in the files. He was sent out to investigate a breach, and was killed while doing it."
"That's partially correct." Mort's gaze turned sympathetic as he took both Bart and Sam in. "It's how things got started."
He sat back once more and ran a hand through his balding hair, smoothing out the side while the rest waited for him to go on. When he finally did speak again, it was in hushed tones.
"Jackson was sent to close a breach, and he was able to succeed, but he was attacked in the process and severely injured. By the time he came back, his injuries from the entity in the breach were beyond anything his body - or we - could help."
Mort's eyes glanced toward the ceiling, remembering what happened. "He tried to dispel the dark magic that attached itself to him, but he failed and was lost to us."
Bart took the hat from his head and ran his fingers absently across the brim. Beads of sweat poured down his face.
Sam found her voice, though it trembled. "Is that when he was changed into that.. thing after me?" She still did not know whether she believed what was coming from these people, but was at least listening.
"No," Mortimer replied, fixing his stare on her. "That came after your mother tried to bring him back."
The hat flew out of Bart's hand, landing on the table with a muffled chuff. "What? What the hell, Mort! You never told me any of this."
Sam could see his leg trembling, surging up and down as pent up anger and confusion raged through her brother. Her own stomach churned at the words the old man said. As close as she was to her mother, she never suspected anything of this part of her life, and could not be sure she was not just being taken for a ride with it all. That Bart, a person she had always known to be stoic and against any kind of 'nonsense' believed it all professed the seriousness of what she was hearing.
If all of this was true, how could she get a grip on her life? Things were already so out of control. To add all of this on, too?
"Think about it, son," Mort said, his arms resting on the table in front of him. "What good would it have done? Would it have fostered any difference to the choices you have made?" Mortimer tried to give a partial smile, but it fell flat. "It was kept from you for your own sa
ke, Bart. It was not necessary for you to know, and if it were not for all of this being directly related to your family, I would have preferred you never found out. The only reason I am telling you now is because it could be useful to you in stopping what is happening to your sister." He glanced once more at Sam as he said the words. "It's too late to do anything about it at this point. Anger does nothing for you."
"Well, do it then," Bart spat, waving his hand toward the old man across the table. "Why not go ahead and wreck everything else I've held dear."
"You know that's not my intention, Bart," Mort said, "but I will go on."
He took a deep breath and leaned into the chair again, his eyes closing for a moment as he adjusted to the new position. Sam wondered how much the man really must hurt.
"Your mother, Heather, tried to use magic of her own to bring your father back from the grave. She knew it was not right, and she was dealing with things that would lead to ruin, but her grief was just too strong for us to do anything to stop her."
Sam frowned. Was the quiver in his voice merely a remnant of the pain he was feeling? Or something else?
"I believe she thought, since she was pregnant at the time, she could use not only her own power, but that of a second person, one deeply connected to them both, to be able to succeed." Mort glanced between both Sam and Bart, coming to rest once more upon her. He held it as he said, "Her spell was incomplete, though, and the only thing she brought back was the darkest part of Jackson. That eventually became what you have been encountering."
Both siblings were silent, trying to process everything said in their own way.
Even with all of the wild concepts Samantha explored, nothing prepared her for what she was hearing from these people surrounding her. Her stomach punished her, an aching in the deep pit of it, as the talk about her mom in such a dark light sank in. Could the woman she adored so much really be involved in actions like this? Magic? Not only just magic, but the darkest of it. Grief or not, she simply could not picture her mother doing it.
Yet, reaching up her hand to touch the necklace around her neck, she remembered the way it felt so hot after the shadow man attacked her. It had nearly burned her when she picked it up from the dirt outside of Odessa's house.
Could she believe them? She had seen magic - real magic - for herself. She might not be able to explain how it worked or why, but it happened, and no matter if she believed what these people were telling her, she could not deny the power she had been exposed to.
But could her mother have been a part of it?
Before Sam had a chance to voice anything, Tamara lifted her own to those around her.
"The revenant - this dark of your father - is trying to feed off of you, Sam. You're tied to it not only because you are family, but because you were present at the time of the ritual your mother tried. That was his creation." She held up her fingers. "It was the moment he was brought into the state he is in."
Tamara's hand dropped again, drifting to the book before her. "He's feeding from you to become more real and whole. That takes power, and the best energy he can use for that is fear."
Bart's legs still trembled. The chair beneath him squeaked with each bounce of his large frame, but he remained in silence, biting at a nail on his long fingers. He seemed to believe everything that was said.
Who were these people, really? They called themselves a society, but Bart was genuinely left in the dark until tonight as to the history of their family, and was obviously as deeply affected by it, perhaps even more so, than she. How was she supposed to feel about it, when he had apparently not only known about magic, monsters, breaches and whatever the hell else they had going on, but declared she was crazy for thinking such things could be real.
How should she accept it?
Mort and Tamara seemed to be waiting for one of them to speak, to move on from the explanations, but Bart was too mired in his own emotions to talk. Sam did not know whether she should tell them all they were nuts and demand to be shown to the door, or to take it all as it was given and try to put the pieces of her life back together again under a new paradigm.
"So, now what?" she asked, deciding to acknowledge what they were saying was real. As she did, the tension in her gut released, at least in a small way.
Mort nodded, accepting her question as concession she was willing to move forward.
"We have to take steps to protect you from the revenant, Samantha," he said, his voice stronger. "And not just you, but Tanglewood, itself. If it becomes more whole, it can start hunting others, too, and we cannot allow that to happen." He gave a wan smile. "That is, after all, what we are here for."
Sam looked around the room, taking in all of the people she never expected she would see in this place, wondering how all of this got started and who else might be involved. She finally found herself peering once more at the paintings lined up against the wall behind Tamara.
The discomfort of staring at them came once again, but this time she tried to pick out any features of the man her father was in them. But there was nothing human in them, beyond some horrific vestige of something that might once have been.
"I realize that thing is in stuff I made, even though I don't remember putting my brush to them. I know" - she said, pointing to her head - "that it's there. But what about the white object?"
Mort turned, looking at the paintings. Bart did, as well, but he seemed terribly disturbed by the question.
"That," Mortimer answered, "is something else entirely."
Chapter 23
The walk to the room she woke in was quicker, but subdued, as both Bart and Sam mulled over what had been said in the conference.
She could not even bring herself to be upset over going back to what she originally perceived as a prison cell, though she unconsciously glanced toward the ceiling to see the camera she ripped from the light remained missing. The bare wire hung loosely from the edge of the metal frame, holding out its ends in silent protest of the damage she did.
When Mortimer dismissed the meeting, he asked Bart to return Sam to the room until the next steps could be decided. It was a long time after the old man walked away with Tamara in tow before her brother finally stood and led her through the hall. By then, the other two disappeared into whatever part of the bowels of the building they called their own, and Sam's befuddled mind could find no clue of their passage.
It did not matter. The things the old man confessed disturbed her too much for her to worry about where he might be, though, in the back of her head, she did wonder what kind of plans he had to protect her.
Sam perched herself on the bed, legs dangling from the side as the odor of antique fabric wafted through the room at her disturbance. She came down harder than intended, but the weight of information running contrary to her idea of history was too much.
She could not think straight. What she was told veiled across her mind, dulling her down beyond melancholy. After so many years, the grief over the loss of her mother still bore her down, and if what Mortimer said about her was true, it added even more to her already sorrowful spirit.
Should she believe him? Could she?
While so much fell into the realm of the inane, he seemed so serious and the reaction her brother was having to the information spoke to the veracity of it all. If she let herself ride that crazy train, would she be able to get a handle on it?
Would she even want to?
She looked up from the floor, letting her eyes come to rest on her brother who sat on his chair just as silent as she. What was going through his mind? He obviously knew much more about their parents than she did, and the feeling of guilt over that surprised her.
Why should she feel guilty? The people she had cared about the most in her life had these deep secrets they apparently thought she was better off not knowing, but why the need to have it that way? Why could they not have trusted her? Did Bart know about the Black Rose Society and their parent's involvement in it before their mom died?
&nbs
p; Maybe they approached him after her passing. Though Sam wanted to ask him all of the questions swirling through the thick feeling in her brain, she kept silent. The hard edge of grief, regret and betrayal vied inside of her over and over, all within the span of a few quiet moments.
Her heart hurt, pressure squeezing in her chest as tears threatened to come, but she cut them back, struggling to breathe slowly through the waves. Though he was not looking at her, his own eyes pinned to the floor, she did not want him to see her cry. Not again. Her disappointment with him for keeping all of the things she heard was winning out over anything else she felt for him, turning bitter at her core.
How many times had he made fun of her for thinking the world were different than it appeared? Dozens? Hundreds?