by J. R. Rain
“Does he talk to you?”
“No, not really.”
“What does that mean?”
“I can feel him sort of, well, sort of checking in on me.”
I looked at my cute little daughter with the haunted look in her eye, knowing that few would know just how haunted it was. For the first time in a long time, I didn’t know what to do to help my baby.
“It’s okay, Mommy. Everything will turn out okay,” she said, and held my gaze. Then she turned back to her book.
I didn’t like the way she held my gaze, and I especially didn’t like what I thought I saw just behind her pupil. The smallest hint of fire.
Chapter Twenty-three
All this was because Danny—that worthless piece of shit—had turned tail and hid in his own son.
Yes, I knew my daughter was reading my mind, even through her door—hell, even if I was a mile or two away. Which is exactly why the devil wanted her. How much mind reading he could do, I didn’t know. He didn’t appear to have access to my mind back when I’d first met him at the Jamba Juice. If not, then, of course, he needed Tammy. And like my daughter said, anyone would want to use her. Hell, how valuable would she be in the hands of the government? Spy agencies? Criminal organizations? Other immortals? All would want her, all would exploit her, all would use her up and, ultimately, destroy her. The devil, I suspected, was just one of many who might come knocking. He’d just happened to be the first. And, perhaps, the most persuasive. And, perhaps, the nastiest.
If I can deal with the devil, I thought, I can deal with anything. And if you are listening, Tammy, and I know you are, then hear this: I will fight for you until my last dying breath, whether you hate me or not, I will not lose you.
I stood there in the hallway, just outside her door, trying to decide what to do next. Ultimately, I glanced at another door. My son’s door.
***
“Knock, knock,” I said, slowly easing the door open. One thing I knew about teen boys: they could be doing homework one moment, and something else entirely the next. That something else is why moms everywhere knock, pause, then open the door slowly. Real slowly. Of course, I took even further precautions...
“You can open your eyes, Mom. Sheesh, I’m just doing homework.”
I prayed like hell Danny was giving our son privacy, too, if that were even possible.
“Hi,” I said, stepping in and shutting the door behind me, although a shut door was a moot point with Tammy’s eavesdropping.
And you should really mind your own business, I thought.
“You okay, Mom?”
“Yes, I’m okay. I was just telling Tammy that she really needed to mind her own business.”
“Does she ever talk back? You know, like in your mind? The way I can hear Daddy?”
I frowned at his enthusiasm. “No, I don’t think she can do that. She just listens.”
“Yeah, I didn’t think so. I’ve never, you know, heard her. But I can kind of feel her in there sometimes. When I catch her snooping around I just think of Miss Penelope.”
I knew the name. “Your English teacher?”
“My pretty English teacher. Trust me, all I have to do is think of Miss Penelope and Tammy shoots right out of there, ha ha. Then I can usually hear her gagging in her bedroom. That’s what she gets for spying on me.”
I giggled, despite what I was hearing. Pretty clever way to get rid of his snooping sister. No teenage girl really wanted to know what’s going on in the mind of their teenage brother.
“Well, don’t you think Miss Penelope is a little old for you?” I asked.
“It’s just a fantasy, Mom. Sheesh, that’s what Dad said, too, but then he told me all about a crush he’d had on his math teacher. You should hear the nickname they had for her.”
“I’d rather not,” I said. I blinked and gathered myself, slightly taken aback by my son’s candidness.
Unlike me and other immortals, my son hadn’t been possessed by a highly evolved dark master. Now, thanks to Danny, my son presently sported his own dark master in training, as I understood it. Although the thought of Danny being a dark master at anything nearly made me pee myself.
Highly Evolved Douchebag, I thought, and immediately heard the burst of laughter from down the hallway. From Tammy’s room.
“Hey, what’s so funny?” asked Anthony. “Why’s Tammy laughing?”
“It’s nothing,” I said.
“Are you two making fun of me?”
“No, sweetie. Never.”
He looked at me from over crossed arms, his muscular chest pushed up nearly to his chin. His forearms rippled, pulsed. I think he might have grown an inch since the last time I saw him, but that was probably my imagination. Each and every day, he looked more and more like the man he would become, and less like the boy he had just been.
“I want to talk about you, Anthony. Is that okay?”
He shrugged. “If you want.”
I sat down on the floor in front of him. I said, “You saw the dog again today.”
He nodded. My son was many things, but one of them wasn’t telepathic, although his actual hearing seemed to be stronger than most.
“Are you okay?” I asked. “You weren’t hurt?”
Anthony shook his head.
“This was the second time you turned into the fire man, right?”
“Fire warrior, Mom. And yes.”
“Do you... do you have any questions?”
“Where does he come from? Is he always waiting for me?”
I thought about how to answer that, fully aware that Danny was also looking through my son’s own eyes, fully aware that I was talking to two people at once, and not liking any of it. Then again, that’s how Allison felt, too, wasn’t it? Allison felt that she was talking to two people: myself and Elizabeth. No matter how deep I stamped down the demon bitch within my mind, she was always there, listening. Which was why Allison had cut me off from her thoughts. And I didn’t blame her one bit, although it annoyed me to no end.
It was the same with Kingsley, Fang, Dracula, Franklin... we all had entities within us. We all had entities listening and conspiring later, while we slept. One thing I had learned in the past few years was that all immortals, or partial immortals like Kingsley, slept like the dead, whether during the day or night. Either way, we were dead to the world—and during that time the entities within us were free to leave, and free to return from whence they came. And from whence they came was a place beyond time and space, apparently, a space safe from the devil himself. Where this place was, I didn’t know. But I suspected it was created from the ether and given life, somehow, similar to how Charlie Reed had created his own fantasy world.
With enough vision. With enough determination. And enough love—and perhaps even hate—a world could spring forth from those adept at such things.
I thought of all of this and more as my son looked on, and just behind his eye, I could see a small flame dancing. A very, very small flame. Nearly nonexistent. Surely, I would have missed it before, had I not known to look for it. The flame, I knew, was an indicator of my son’s possession. Of Danny, his own father, watching us.
“You can ask him,” I finally said.
“Ask the fire warrior?” Anthony’s eyes widened.
“Yes. When you are ready, try talking to him. He will tell you who he is, and where he’s from, because I don’t know.”
“Is he an alien?”
“In a way, yes. But you will need to ask him.”
“You think he speaks American?”
I gave my son a half smile, waited.
“English! I meant English.”
“He will understand you,” I said. “And you will understand him. Language won’t be a problem.”
“Okay, I will do that someday. Maybe. The problem is, he’s so dang big. I mean, I could see on top of the roof, Mom. You should have seen me.”
“And no neighbors saw you?”
Anthony shook his head vigorously. “No one.
The street was empty. It was like the devil knew.”
“The jogger?”
“Yes. It was the same person I met in the warehouse. Just different bodies. She had the same weird tattoo. And the same dog!”
“And you weren’t afraid?”
“With the fire warrior, I don’t think I will ever be afraid again. And even without him, I think I can take care of myself. In fact...”
He paused, turned red.
“What, baby?” I asked.
“I think I can take him.”
“The devil?”
Anthony nodded, vigorously at first, but then looked away, perhaps hearing his own words again. I let it go. That my son was confident was a good thing. I had seen the video where he had taken on four or five men at once—and not just any men—unchanged werewolves. Like me, Kingsley was supernaturally strong in his day-to-day life, too. And so had those men, many of whom had been flattened by my thirteen-year-old son.
“Anthony, do you know why the devil came today?”
“He’s looking for Daddy.”
I nodded. Anthony knew that, of course. Hell, the devil himself had spelled it out to Anthony back in the warehouse months ago, back when the devil had given my son a fighting chance to live. The devil had—and this was something I was still processing—saved my son. Granted, the piece of shit had merely freed my son, leaving my boy alone to fight against a half dozen fully transitioned werewolves. Still, he had given my son a fighting chance.
I said, “Not just your dad, baby. He’s coming for you too.”
“Why?”
“Remember how he helped you?”
Anthony snorted. “Some help. He just ripped the arrows out, meat and all. But I guess he did free me. He didn’t actually, help, though. He left me to fight the werewolves alone.”
“He did, yes. But the devil never does anything for free. He always, always wants something in return.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know, baby.”
“Mom, don’t call me that.”
“Sorry, baby.”
I laughed, and so did he. We needed something to lighten the moment here. And as we laughed, something occurred to me, and it occurred to me in a flash of insight that I would ponder later: the devil had been created to fulfill a role. If he could be created, he could also be destroyed, too. The problem, of course, was that he could body-jump. I had come across such an entity before in the Pacific Northwest.
To destroy him, I had to destroy not his current body, which was only fleeting, but the source body. The original body. I nodded at that. Yes, find the devil’s home base, and you found the source of evil. Kill the base, and you killed the devil—
Anthony’s door slammed opened open, scaring both of us. Standing in the doorway was Tammy, staring at me.
“Mom, her eyes,” said Anthony.
I saw it too. The flames had grown, lapping just behind her pupils.
“The world needs the devil, Mom,” she said, almost automatically. “You cannot know the light without the dark. Sound familiar?”
“He wants to use you. He wants to use Anthony too. If the devil had his way, he would take both of you from me.”
“No one can use me, Mom,” said Anthony. “No way, no how.”
“You see, Mom,” said Tammy. “No one will be using us. They can maybe try but they won’t succeed.”
“Baby, you do realize we’re talking about the devil,” I said, and heard myself all over again. The devil? Really?
“Yes, Mom. Yes, the devil. And, yes, your life is much different than it was ten years ago. All of our lives are. All because of you. Do you think I want to be a freak? Do you think Anthony likes being a freak? The kid has no friends. None, Mom.”
“Hey, I have some—”
“And the friends I have all think I’m weird. Look at the burden I have. Every day I listen to stories of self-doubt, self-hate, of running away, of disappearing, of suicide, of hurting themselves and others. Every day. And all because of you.”
“Baby, you know I didn’t have control over what happened to me—”
“I know that, Mom,” Tammy said. “But you decided to stay around. You decided to raise us normally. Except there was no normal, not anymore. Dad knew that. He knew you would hurt us in the end. And look at all the trouble you caused us. Anthony is a walking freak show—”
“Hey—”
I said, “That’s not nice—”
“No, it’s not nice,” said Tammy, cutting me off. “It’s a terrible thing to say about your little brother. A brother who could beat up a dozen men at once—”
“Well, it was like four. Maybe five—” Anthony said.
“A son who can turn into a goddamn monster—”
“That’s enough, young lady—”
“The fire warrior isn’t a monster,” said Anthony. “He’s a warrior. It’s in his name. Duh.”
“A name you gave him, dumbass.”
“You will go to your room, young lady—”
“You know I’m right. And you know that you have been selfish by staying around. You know that we would have been better off if you had run away. Far away. I wouldn’t be what I am. And Anthony would be—”
“Dead,” said her little brother. “I would be dead.”
“Or so Mom says. We have to take her word for it, don’t we? The doctors might have saved you. You were at St. Jude’s, the best children’s hospital in the world.”
Except I knew my daughter could see what I had seen in those dark hours. The black halo of death around my son. He had been on the brink of death, and she knew it. But was there a sliver of truth to what she said? Could he have survived and I unnecessarily and irrevocably altered my son’s life?
“The answer is yes, Mom. You are selfish and terrible, and you are the real monster here.” And with that, she marched out and slammed the bedroom door. Then slammed her door too.
Anthony looked at me and whistled. “Bitches be crazy.”
Chapter Twenty-four
After chastising Anthony for calling his sister a bitch—and implying that all women were bitches—I called Kingsley and asked him to come over. Kingsley reminded me that he was a very important defense attorney with many high-stakes cases pending. I reminded him what we’d done a few nights ago, in bed. He said he would be right over.
Kingsley was with them now, and she wasn’t very happy about it. Kingsley arrived bearing pizzas. Lots and lots of pizzas. Enough for ten people. Hell, twenty people. I made the boys promise to save a slice or two for Tammy. She still wasn’t talking to me, and that was fine. I wasn’t sure I wanted to talk to her either, not right now, not after her outburst.
Besides, she had given me a lot to think about.
Which is exactly what I had done, high overhead. In fact, I spent the rest of the evening flying and thinking and mulling over just about every decision I’d ever made. Talos listened and offered advice, and in the end, I knew I had to accept responsibility for everything. Maybe not for my initial attack, but everything after that.
Talos reminded me that I needed to be easy on myself and that I had done the best I could, under the circumstances, and I thanked my flying friend, but, ultimately, I knew Tammy was right. I had been selfish, and I had put everyone in harm’s way. I liked to believe that I had also been loving and kind and helpful, that I had been there for them in ways that other mothers couldn’t, but that didn’t stop the burden of guilt from weighing me down and making me feel like shit all over again.
I flew and I flew and I might have kept on flying—and giving my daughter her wish—except I still had a job to do, and it was almost midnight.
***
I dropped down on Charlie Reed’s roof, alighting quieter than most people would believe. There, I saw myself in the single flame—a rare chance for me to actually see myself from head to toe—and immediately transitioned from something big and scary, to something cute and maybe a little scary.
I’d carried wi
th me a small tote bag with my essentials: rolled jeans and sweater, Asics, wallet and my phone. No bra and no panties. I was changing on his rooftop, for crissakes. Who had time for all that? Besides, I’d been blessed—or cursed, depending on who you asked—with a small chest, which only seemed to have shrunk in my immortality. They don’t tell you that in all those vampire romance books.
In two shakes of a lamb’s tail, as my mother would say, I was dressed and dropping down from the roof. That it was two stories high mattered not at all. I landed easily, my knees painlessly absorbing the drop. I stumbled maybe only a fraction. Good enough.
Charlie had cameras all around his place, hence the reason I’d dressed on his roof. Had Charlie cared to really study my image, he might have noticed I was missing ears, or part of my neck, wherever the make-up foundation had failed to reach. So far, cameras hadn’t been an issue with me, although there were undoubtedly hundreds of hours of strange security footage of vampires the world over, me included.
Although Allison possessed the kind of magic that Criss Angel could only dream of, she was still only human with mostly human limitations, hearing included. As yet, she hadn’t realized I was coming up behind her. She stood on a wide, lighted footpath that led from the driveway to the front door. As I approached, she checked her phone, then scanned the street, then checked her phone again. She repeated this again and again.
I crept closer, noting the smooth sweep of her neck. Most vampires would find the smooth sweep of her neck irresistible; however, most vampires didn’t have their inner demon under some semblance of control. I’m proud to say that I did. Mostly.
I crept closer, then closer still.
She was just about to check her cell phone again when I seized her shoulders, and said, “I vant to suck your blood!” in my best Boris Karloff impression.
Except I had barely gotten the words out when I found myself flying through the air. And then slamming hard into Charlie Reed’s front door. What little air I had burst from my lungs as I slumped to my rump. Strange electrical currents crackled over my skin like living glow worms. I thought my hair was smoking.