by J. R. Rain
“All the time.”
“And when you look into mirrors...” I began.
Her head snapped around and she gasped. “I never talk about that! Never told a living soul...”
“I bet you didn’t.”
Now, she was shaking her head, and I saw the tears appearing in her eyes. She kept shaking her head and I gave her a few seconds to work through her emotions before I prompted her to tell me about the mirrors.
She did, and I could relate, although her own unique experience would have been far more confusing. After all, she hadn’t known she was possessed. And she certainly hadn’t known she was possessed by not just any entity... but a dark master in training. An entity who knew just enough to influence her, and whose powers were just enough to alter her. Her experience with mirrors had led her to have a complete breakdown. She could see herself, yes, but barely. She could, in fact, only see a hint of herself, a ghost image of herself. She had gotten to the point where she thought she had died. That she was, in fact, a ghost. That she was living in a sort of ghost world. As I said, a breakdown.
It wasn’t until years later that she just sort of... let it go. She quit worrying about it. She accepted it. Hell, she quit thinking about it altogether. She suspected, on some level, that she might have gone insane, but she quit worrying about that, too. She was who she was, and that was just fine. She was allowed to be a weirdo. She was allowed to even be dead, if she was, in fact, dead. After all, it had been many years now since she had even gotten sick. And didn’t she heal much faster, too? She did, within days sometimes.
A part of her suspected she was a vampire. She certainly had shown traits of it. But she didn’t put much thought into that either. Life was easier when she quit searching for answers. Life was easier when she just let herself be. Even if letting herself be meant that sometimes she had some very strange and erratic thoughts. Even when she got so mad sometimes that she wanted to kill someone.
But those thoughts passed, too, as they always did. And so, she had gone about her life, hating the sun, reveling in her strength, hungering for blood, shying away from mirrors, healing far too rapidly, thinking thoughts that weren’t her own, looking far younger than she should, and just basically getting along, certain that she had, at some point in her life, gone completely insane. But she was okay with that, too. She was okay with all of it.
“In fact,” she summed up, sitting back in my front passenger seat, her window halfway down, her face toward the sun, “I kind of like who I am. I mean, it’s fun and all. I like being different. I like being stronger than most guys. I like it all. Except for maybe the mirror part. I still can’t really get used to that. I mean, what is that about?”
“I think I know,” I said.
“You do?” she asked. “Truthfully, I haven’t talked about any of this in years. Maybe ten years. Maybe longer. I don’t even know why I’m talking about it to you now.”
“I know that, too.”
She looked at me sideways. “What’s going on, Samantha?”
“The sun...” I began. “Is it bothering you now?”
She blinked at me, then looked out her side window—and directly up at the sun. She squinted, and I saw the first real signs of minor crow’s feet spreading from the corners of her eyes. I was certain those fine lines hadn’t been there just a few minutes earlier.
“No,” she said, shaking her head slowly. “No, it doesn’t.”
Then she looked down at her hands. I saw it, too. Her nails, which had been thicker than most—but not as thick and pointy as my own—had shrunk to a very normal size. They looked normal, in fact. The backs of her hands, I also noted, were not quite as smooth as they had been. The skin buckled and raised a little, just like my sister’s did, just like everyone’s did in their mid-to-late thirties and early forties. Everyone, that is, but people like us.
Although now... yes, now, she was not one of us, was she?
“What’s happening, Sam?” she asked, sitting up and pulling down the sun visor and flipping open the hidden mirror there. And as she checked herself, touching her face and opening her eyes and mouth, the color drained from her face.
She flipped the visor back up and took a deep, deep breath. Something we hadn’t discussed: her breathing had probably slowed, too. Now, she was forced to take in more air, forced to use somewhat dormant lungs, which she was doing now, like a babe breathing for the first time.
“My breathing... my lungs...” she gasped, taking more air. “There’s something wrong with me...”
I reached out and calmed her mind, but it took a number of suggestions before she finally did calm down. Now, she was breathing easier, although not quite normally. The very act seemed a little foreign to her. Her nostrils flared and her cheeks puffed. Her chest, rising and falling, sometimes shuddered with the effort.
“It’s gone, Sam. Whatever I had… is gone.”
“I know,” I said.
She rolled her head toward me, nostrils flared, still fighting for breath—or, rather, struggling to control her breathing. “You know what happened to me, don’t you?”
“I do,” I said.
“Tell me!” she said, her eyes flashing with anger. “Tell me everything.”
Chapter Ten
I was in Jacky’s gym, doing real damage to both the punching bag and Jacky himself.
No, I didn’t enjoy hurting Jacky, but the little bugger seemed to, I dunno, like it or something. He kept hanging in there, kept holding that bag steady, even as I pounded it into mush. Granted, the sun was not yet down, and so, the bag—and Jacky—were mostly spared. But once it descended... all bets were off. One clean punch might just send Jacky and the bag flying across the gym.
It was after school, and, for once, I actually believed Tammy was home studying. Her near-miss with death last year had prompted her to take life a little more seriously, and to recognize that bad decisions often led to bad results. Granted, the runaway big rig that had nearly stolen my baby girl from me wasn’t her fault, but she most certainly should not have been drinking and out that late, with a new set of friends she barely knew and could not trust.
She saw the light, so to speak. Granted, that didn’t stop the continuous eye rolls or the “whatevers” or any other sound or gesture that was cleverly designed by teenagers the world over to remind mothers that we were super lame and that we “just didn’t get them.”
Still, she was keeping better hours and working harder in school and being a little more picky with her friends. Honestly, was there anything more a mother of a teenage daughter could ask? Oh, and perhaps the biggest change of all: she had decided to take a break from dating boys.
Music to my freakin’ ears.
Now, halfway across the gym and in one of the sparring rings, Anthony was circling a full-grown man. Both had gloves on, and both were displaying perfect footwork. I knew about such footwork, having now been trained by the best, Jacky.
And once Jacky had understood that my son was, well, different—very, very different—he put the brakes on Anthony’s fast-track to boxing stardom. Yeah, it had been time to let Jacky in on a family secret, and, so far, the old Irishman seemed to be handling it well. No weird sidelong glances. No weird questions. No ridiculous fear of us. Then again, I could never, ever imagine Jacky being afraid of anything.
But once it had been understood that my son had an unfair advantage, Jacky understood that my boy should never be allowed to box mere mortals in competition. Instead, Jacky had taken to using my son to train his mortal protégés, so to speak. It was understood by Jacky’s young boxing studs that if they could last a round with my thirteen-year-old boy, then they, the boxers, were clearly on their way up.
Now, as I glanced into the ring, I suspected this young mortal boxer—who was about twenty, maybe—was clearly not on his way up. Even with head gear on, he staggered about the ring as my son landed punch after punch. Anthony stepped back and let the guy regain his balance. This was practice after all. Not
a death match.
As for me, I wasn’t done with the heavy bag yet. I needed to hit something, and I needed to hit something hard and often, as I worked out what the devil I was dealing with. Which was exactly the problem.
I was dealing with the devil.
And while I punched, I relived the last few moments I’d had with Sandy Damayanti. She had wanted to hear it all, except I didn’t think she was ready to hear it all. In fact, I was pretty damn sure she wasn’t ready to hear any of it.
Turned out, she liked being a partial vampire, even if she didn’t know she was a partial vampire. There was a lot to like, admittedly. The problem was, she was providing a safe house to the entity within, an entity whose time had run out. The devil and his three-headed dog had found them, and they were going to drag him down to hell, even if it meant killing her in the process.
She didn’t deserve to die. She was just someone who had recklessly played with a Ouija board—someone who had inadvertently opened herself up to an entity on the run. No doubt, a case of bad timing. As in wrong place, wrong time.
That Sandy had darker tendencies was a different story. In the end, she didn’t mind being different. She also didn’t seem to mind the darkness within her, which helped me to understand how some vampires seemed to easily co-exist with the entities possessing them.
They enjoyed hosting the dark entities, I realized, as I circled the bag, punching with a flurry of jabs. Jacky circled with me, keeping the bag between him and me. Not all who become vampires were good people. Had I been a good person? I liked to think I was. I was certainly the best wife I could have been. The best federal agent I could have been, putting the bad guys behind bars. And certainly, the best mother I could be, then and still.
Obviously, some people leaned toward the darkness. Some people bonded with the darkness. Some people reveled in the darkness.
Sandy had been such a person. She and her entity had been a match made in heaven. Or hell.
Or because of hell.
As I sat with her in the minivan, as she waited for my answer—and growing impatient, frustrated and scared—I had weighed my choices. I could tell her that I had removed the entity within her, an entity she honestly hadn’t minded hosting, the entity that had been the source of her considerable power (even if her power was far less than a full vampire). She might or might not believe my story about the devil coming for her. More than likely, she would resent me. More than likely, she might become suicidal. To lose so much power was to lose, well, her identity. I decided to take the easy way out, which might or might not bite me in the ass later.
Although there was no way I could replace a lifetime of memories that featured her unusual gifts and talents and curses, I could alter how she perceived them.
So, I had given her some not-so-subtle suggestions, planted deep in her subconscious, that she was better off being free of the entity, that she was normal again, healthy again, happy again. Now, she could lead a normal life. Of course, I wrapped a lot of good feeling around the word “normal,” knowing her predilection for the macabre. How long such suggestions held, I didn’t know. I suspected for a while. Perhaps a long while. What would happen if and when they wore off? Well, she wouldn’t be a happy camper. That I knew.
Once done, I sent her off, hoping like hell that I hadn’t just created the world’s next super-villain.
Or my own next great enemy.
***
We took a break, and I watched Jacky stagger over and collapse into a ringside chair. There, he kept an eye on his latest protégé, a young Mexican kid who seemed faster than greased lightning. That is, until he sparred with my own son.
I took a seat on a rolled mat, wiping my considerable sweat with a towel of suspect cleanliness. Then again, what did I care about germs or even diseases? I could come down with the worst case of bubonic plague, only to watch it disappear before my very eyes.
I shook my head and marveled again at the powerful dark magicks that fueled my body. You were messing with some dark juju, Elizabeth.
It was, I think, the first time I had spoken to her directly in a long, long time. Speaking to her directly seemed to give her the wherewithal to rise up from my consciousness and acknowledge my words. Perhaps, permission was the better word. Either way, I heard the words, clear as a bell, even if whispered from seemingly a great distance away:
You have no idea, Sssamantha...
I shrugged. She was probably right. What the hell did I know of black magic—or whatever it was that Elizabeth and the other highly evolved dark masters practiced? Maybe it was their own form of magic. Maybe they had inadvertently tapped into something very powerful and dark, something that existed beyond even heaven and hell.
And I was presently hosting one of the strongest of them all.
Grrreat, I thought, and sipped from my water bottle.
How all of this didn’t end badly for me someday, I didn’t know. I mean, surely there was going to be some great, epic battle in my future, a battle in which I would be forced to stare down a legion of dark masters, perhaps with the alchemist and his army of Light Warriors by my side—an army that had already made it known it wished to recruit my son.
My son...
Who was presently dancing around the boxing ring with footwork that Floyd Mayweather, Jr. would die for. The young Mexican boxer, maybe twenty years old, did all he could to get a bead on Anthony. My son was wearing a tank top that did little to hide his already-impressive physique, a physique that was only getting more muscular as the months progressed. And not just muscular but... thicker. His shoulders were broadening. His chest was expanding. He was already five feet, eleven inches tall, with no sign of slowing down. Now, as I watched from the shadows, as he danced smoothly around the ring, I could have been watching a full-grown man, a professional, himself teaching the up-and-coming fighter. But that wasn’t the case, was it? The Hispanic fighter had seven years on my son.
“When it comes to your son, years matter little.”
I gasped, startled. It’s not easy to sneak up on me, but someone had. And not just anyone. My ex-guardian angel, an angel who had abandoned me at my hour of greatest need, an angel who had, in fact, allowed my attack ten years ago. Perhaps even orchestrated it. After my attack had rendered me immortal, his guardian duties had been severed. Once severed, he was free to pursue another type of relationship with me, a romantic one—and one I had no interest in at all. Not now, not ever. I would never, ever forgive him for allowing my attack. He was, quite frankly, the worst guardian angel. Ever. Not exactly boyfriend material.
I said, “Well, he’s still my son, and he’s only thirteen, and just last night, I watched him smell his own armpits... and he seemed to enjoy it. Lord help me, he seemed to enjoy it. So, in case I have to spell it out for you, he’s just a kid, a boy, a teenage boy, despite the fact that he could probably beat you to smithereens.”
I doubted it, but it felt good saying it.
He didn’t defend himself, or feel a need to correct me. He just stared at me. Stared and stared and stared. So creepy, but also kind of exciting, too. Terrible at his job or not, he was still beautiful to behold. Too beautiful. I noted there was no impression in the tightly rolled mat where he sat, whereas my own booty put quite a dent in it. I wasn’t sure how I felt about the dent differential.
“I am invisible, Sam. More so, I am without body.”
Despite my residual anger for him, I was always fascinated by the beautiful bastard. “Are you always invisible?”
“Usually, Sam.”
“Can you take a body when you need to?”
“I can manifest a body, yes.”
“You don’t need to possess the living?” I said. I noted that my inner alarm remained quiet, dormant, content, at peace. All of which was good news to me.
“Never, Sam.”
Angel magic—or whatever it was called—was certainly beyond my own experience. To be able to manifest a corporeal, physical body from thin air seemed a
true miracle.
“We are all miracles, Sam.”
“Thank you for that, Deepak,” I said.
Ishmael cocked his head to one side, no doubt probing my brain for the reference. He seemed to find it, and nodded without comment. My ex-guardian angel was a big fellow. He was, by my estimates, exactly twice as big as me, maybe bigger. Of course, this was his non-physical form. I had no idea if his physical form would be just as big. I had seen him many times now, and each time, I had only seen his energetic form. He wore a suggestion of what might have been a robe or a tunic. His was a mottled gray. He wore no shoes, and his feet were big ol’ honkers. His hands were clasped together in his lap. A sort of soft wind seemed to emanate from him, which I didn’t understand at all. It was as if he powered his own solar windstorm.
“You are close, Sam Moon. And as always, your intuitiveness is remarkable.”
“Remarkable, how?” I asked. And, hey, if I was getting a compliment, I at least wanted to know why the hell I was so amazing and what I’d inadvertently intuited.
He waited for me to catch up, and, my mind being what it was, I played over my last sentence. And then, it hit me, and it hit me hard. “The sun,” I said.
“Yes, Sam.”
“You are the sun.” My words startled me. Never in my life had I ever expected to utter them, but here they were, pouring out of me, and they felt... right.
He said nothing, only cocked his head a little more, and now I saw his wavy, brown hair lift and fall, his bangs blowing a little more, the hem of his tunic-thing ruffling. I felt the wind, too, and I was certain, damn certain, it was coming off of him. And now, I felt the heat, too. A mild heat. But I could feel it, and it was coming off him in waves.
“We are forged in the fires of the sun, Samantha Moon, just as other entities of your world are forged in the heart of Mother Earth.”
“The in-betweeners,” I said.
“I know your reference, but it is not accurate. These entities are natural, rather than unnatural, forged with love, rather than hate, confusion, desperation or ego.”