“I know,” she said. “I’ll try.”
“Good. Please call me later to check in and let me know how Dominic is.”
“I will.”
They disconnected and Logan slipped her phone back into the front pocket of her jeans. It bit into her hip bone, but she ignored it. She wanted the phone close by and her jacket was downstairs.
She looked at Dominic’s broad back and chewed on her lip some more. He had yet to turn around to face her, but he had to have heard at least her side of the phone conversation. She wanted to explain to him what Lehrer had told her about the writing.
On impulse, she raised her hand, her fingers poised just centimeters above his shoulder. But then she lowered it again, completely unsure of what to say. He was clearly in more pain than even her words could heal.
She was saved from having to say anything at all, however. The doorbell rang, its loud, crystal-clear chime emanating throughout the entire mansion like a hymnal round. Logan’s head snapped toward the door that led to the hall. She wondered who it could be. Dominic’s father probably hadn’t even been reached yet, much less made his way back state-side.
The police?
Beside her, Dominic stood. She went still as his green, green eyes found hers. They seemed more a deep, almost bluish emerald than jade now. They were so vivid, so brightly mesmerizing, she felt strange looking up into them. She felt caught.
“I have to get that,” he told her. His voice sounded gruff, as if choked by something. She wondered whether a sob were stuck in his throat, held in check by Dominic’s force of will. That would explain the near glow to his eyes; maybe they were unshed tears.
Logan nodded and rose as well. They made their way out of the room and down the hall, down several flights of stairs, and finally to the front door. By that time, the doorbell had been rung a second time, and someone had begun knocking.
Dom opened the door to reveal two of his band mates, Nathan McCay the drummer, and Shawn Briggs, the bass guitarist and keyboardist.
Logan knew at once why they were there. The stricken, pale looks on their faces told her everything. They’d obviously heard about Alec.
Nathan looked from Dominic to Logan, and Logan suddenly felt way, way out of her league. Too far left field. She felt conspicuous, as if she were trespassing. She shouldn’t be there; this was guy time. They’d lost one of their own.
“Logan,” Nathan said, and some strange emotion crossed his features. His hazel eyes focused on her and he frowned in seriousness. “I’m glad you’re here with him,” he said, and Logan could swear he sounded like he actually meant it.
Shawn brushed past his companion and stepped across the threshold, taking Dominic in a hard hug. “We heard, Dom. My dad’s friends with one of the cops.” His voice was tight, strained with the same unshed tears Logan had been wondering about with Dominic. “Fuck, I’m so sorry, man.”
Nathan made his way inside as Shawn pulled back from the hug, releasing Dominic. Logan did the only thing she could think of doing and closed the door.
Nathan ran a hand through his long blonde hair. “Dom… what the hell happened?” He shook his head. “I mean, I heard it, but I don’t believe it. Alec went nuts or some shit? Was he high?” He seemed desperate for some kind of explanation that would make sense. Alec Sheffield had been one of their closest friends, one of the gang, a band mate. This kind of thing just didn’t happen.
Dominic looked from Nathan to Logan, and there were secret, hidden messages galore in his emerald gaze.
“He wasn’t himself,” Dom said without looking away. He shoved his hands into his jeans pockets. “That’s all I know.”
Chapter Thirteen
Logan left Dominic’s home shortly after his band mates showed up. Dom hadn’t wanted her to leave. At least, that’s what he’d said. But she’d felt like a fourth wheel, if there could be such a thing. Or maybe it was more like a fifth wheel, where one of the wheels was a ghost wheel…. Anyway, she’d told him that she should be heading home so her parents wouldn’t worry.
Reluctantly, he’d agreed. It was hard to argue with something like that, especially in the face of murders and escaped Death Gods. In the end, even teenagers understood that family came first.
It was too bad families couldn’t understand as much.
Now Logan squinted against the stark lines of the road highlighted by her headlights. She ran her hand over her face. It felt flushed and feverish, and she wanted a shower. As she navigated the winding streets back home, she wondered what would be waiting for her. Another fight? Would everyone be asleep, or would Taylor still be up?
She braced herself for whatever she’d find and turned onto her driveway.
*****
This was bullshit. He was wasting time.
Sam swore internally and pinched the bridge of his nose. This human body was frail compared to his true form. He’d been rejuvenated, re-energized, and now the bulk of his power swirled and swelled just beneath the surface of Dominic Maldovan’s form, stretching this puny reality until Sam was afraid he would come apart at the seams. What was worse was that he was at a fraction of the strength he could be. What Logan had given him was fuel on a fire that burned and craved more fuel, a catch-22 of epic proportions, and it was driving him rather mad.
The actual result was that he was getting a fairly bad headache, and he wasn’t sure how much longer he would be able to keep his eyes from glowing. As it was, their true color was barely being masked… and he was growing tired of wearing a mask at all.
“Yo, Dom?”
Sam let the words slide over him. They felt like sandpaper on his already raw nerves. Maldovan’s friends were still here. Despite his wishes, Logan had left, and these two boys had remained behind. It was the opposite of what he wanted.
They lounged in Maldovan’s living room, their faces ashen, their quiet demeanor so typical of the human reaction to traumatic loss. They’d asked him to fill them in on what had transpired, and because he needed the time to figure out what he was going to do next, and also because he couldn’t have cared less what they thought, he’d obliged. He gave them the same story he’d given the cops because it never hurt to be careful.
But now enough was enough. The inferno raging to life inside of him wanted to be fed. It wanted Logan’s words.
It wanted Logan.
First things first. Lehrer had to go. The witches were too dangerous, and Sam wasn’t going to allow anything to stop him this time.
As for Maldovan, Sam would remain in his body for now. The disguise might yet come in handy, and in order to leave his form, he would have to orchestrate the Maldovan’s death. Experience had shown him such a task was never as simple as it would seem to be. He would stay hidden, build his power, and gain a better footing on this veritable chess board. Then he would move in for the kill and return to his realm with the prize.
Sam lowered his hand, raised his head, and stood from where he’d been seated at the bar. Maldovan’s band mates looked up at him.
They had dressed up as vampires at the Halloween dance. Vampires, Sam mused, liking the idea. As he recalled, they’d looked fairly convincing in their costumes, too.
Vampirism suited them.
Sam smiled. And this time, he didn’t bother hiding his fangs.
*****
Meagan rifled through the leather backpack with a combination of care and restless impatience. She pulled a small bottle out and then wrestled with a larger metal one she had braced between her legs in the passenger seat. It was hard to do while the car was moving, but one after another, she managed to get the ingredients from several different small bottles all mixed up into one big one.
“I think that’s everything,” she said. “The sand from an equator island, candle made of summer beeswax, melted snow from the last snowfall, and ink from a pen Logan used.” She screwed a metal cap on tight and slipped the flask into the pocket of her leather jacket.
“At least that’s taken care of,” sai
d Mr. Lehrer as he continued to watch the road ahead. His tone was strained with stress, and every muscle in his erect form seemed to be pulled taut as a bow string.
It had begun to rain, and the wind was picking up. Road conditions were deteriorating quickly. It didn’t help the situation.
The ingredients Meagan had just poured together were components for a protection spell she and Mr. Lehrer had cast earlier that night at the library just after Katelyn had headed home for bed. The spell was intended to protect Logan, hence the pen ink, and existed in two chronological parts. Half of each ingredient was used at the casting of the spell; the other half had to be placed together in one safe receptacle. The spell would then last for as long as the components and their container were unharmed.
That last ingredient, the ink from a pen Logan had used, had been Meagan’s job to procure. Thankfully, they didn’t need very much of it, and Logan could pretty much be counted on to make use of every pen within any kind of proximity to her. Logan had stayed for sleepovers a few times and used some of Meagan’s pens to jot down ideas she’d awoken with in the middle of the night. All Meagan had had to do was break the pens open and let some of the ink spill out into a bottle of water.
She and Lehrer cast the protection spell, which focused on the possibility that Samhain would again take on the form of a vampire or other creature Logan had created if and when he came after her. But half-way through the casting, Meagan received a disturbing call from Dominic Maldovan. The sound on the line had been scratchy and muffled, as if the connection were terrible. Dominic sounded frantic. He said something about the railroad tracks south of town, and about Sam. The rest of the message, Meagan couldn’t comprehend. But before she could ask Dom to repeat himself, the line went dead.
She tried to call him back of course, as did Lehrer, but both calls went to voicemail. Their texts went unanswered as well. So Lehrer instructed Meagan to grab the spell components and her backpack and told her she could finish the spell in the car.
Now they drove hastily through the empty, wet streets of a sleeping town. Lehrer switched his windshield wipers into high gear and adjusted his headlights so that there wasn’t so much back-glare. They were headed for the unfinished development just south of the city. There were railroad tracks there that intercepted with city limits; this was Mr. Lehrer’s best guess as to the location Dom had been talking about.
They couldn’t call the cops; they’d figured out that due to the proximity of the police during the accident with Alec, Sam might now be one of them.
The most they could do was quickly finish the protection spell for Logan – which Meagan had just done – and then actually contact both Logan and Katelyn and fill them in on what was happening.
Meagan attempted to do that now as she dropped her leather backpack back onto the floor boards of Lehrer’s car and pulled the cell phone out of her other jacket pocket. She’d forgotten to plug it in earlier that night, and the battery was down to 36 percent. She hated that. She hated it when it wasn’t at least at 91 percent. It was just a sort of OCD thing with her. She would normally never let it get this low… but then nothing about life had been normal lately.
With a frustrated face and a pursing of her lips, she pressed the phone icon on her screen – and was blinded by the sudden glare of headlights up ahead.
“What the – ” Lehrer sat back in the driver’s seat beside her, squinting against the blinding light. A distant rumble on the road grew in volume, a building roar. It sounded as if the ground were shaking, as if a massive engine vibrated toward them down the dark, wet street.
The headlights grew brighter, closer. Meagan shielded her eyes with her phone hand.
An image of death, fate, and possibility flashed before her mind. The witch in her, that beautiful magical being open to the infinite, complex fractals of the universe, recognized the split-second moment where roads connected and paths crossed and destiny could be decided.
And in that moment, she reached out with her free hand and pulled the steering wheel out of Lehrer’s grip. The car careened off the road with frenzied speed. The wheels wobbled, skidded insanely, and the car shot into the bushes to the accompanying cacophony of a semi truck screaming past.
The car bounced painfully as it flew through tangled underbrush and soared nose-first into a ditch. For the briefest moment, there was the smooth nothingness of air beneath the tires. Then the ground rushed up to swallow them, the airbag in front of Meagan detonated, and she felt a force so powerful, she went instantly numb.
There was a ringing in her ears as her vision receded, and she had the strangest instant of complete clarity. She absolutely, positively knew that Samhain had sent that truck after them to kill them. She absolutely knew that she’d managed to pull them off the road just before they would have hit the bridge crossing Southside Ravine and would have had nowhere to go. And she knew that they would live now.
We will live, she thought – just before unconsciousness claimed her.
Chapter Fourteen
At just after three in the morning, the house was dark and quiet, and Logan remained wide awake, her mind spinning. She’d come home earlier that night to a rare silence. All of the lights were off and there were deeply breathing bodies in all of the beds. Of everything she had experienced recently, this was perhaps the most unrealistic event of them all. A home like hers – at peace.
She almost resented it. Why was it that her family chose a time when she wasn’t around to finally get along? And why now, when her own little world was falling apart so dramatically?
But then, albeit reluctantly, she recognized it for what it was – a blessing. No one was being hurt right now. It was something to be very thankful for. And it was one less thing to worry about. And so she let it go.
Now she took a deep breath, exhaled softly into the evening, and rolled over in her bed to stare out the windows across the room.
Something moved on the other side of them.
Logan gasped, sitting bolt upright. Her blankets slipped from her shoulders. Her heart hammered; blood roared through her ears. She was on the second floor – what the hell could have moved in front of the windows?
A bird, she thought. A bat. A really big moth?
But her heart wouldn’t listen. It continued to pound relentlessly as she gazed steadfastly at the darkness beyond her white, gauzy windows and wished with all her might that she’d remembered to close the blinds.
She stared, and she stared some more. She stared until her eyes hurt and she realized she hadn’t blinked. She blinked – and the shadow came again, shifting just beyond the glass, in that indistinct blur that was half reflection and half night.
Oh God! Logan jumped from the bed, fighting the instinct to curl more deeply into it and burrow beneath her covers. Against every dictate of self preservation, she inched forward, squinting to try to get a better look at what lay beyond the glass.
The shadow moved again. She opened her mouth to cry out, her second instinct to call for her parents. Parents were always the ones you wanted when the monster came in the middle of the night, no matter how old you were.
But before she could make a sound, the windows slammed open, swinging inward on a violent fury of wind. Logan shielded her face with her arms as her hair whipped madly around her and loose objects in her room began to shift or fly. Her feet retreated along the carpet until the backs of her legs bumped into the edge of her bed and she fell, plopping onto the mattress as the contents of her room continued to whirl about.
Hesitantly, she peeked from behind her forearms, squinting her eyes to avoid the lashing punishment of her strands of hair.
In the darkness just beyond her windows, two red dots burned bright. They gazed into her eyes, spearing through to her soul. She stared open-mouthed, unable to move more than to draw breath.
It’s not Sam, she thought. It was an odd thing to realize, but it was a very definite thing as well. Who ever, what ever, this was, it was probably working for Sam.
Maybe it was a part of him somehow, but it wasn’t him.
The burning red dots disappeared, and there was a sudden, pulling rush all around Logan. She almost screamed when the drawers in her dresser flew open. Sitting atop her socks, undergarments and folded t-shirts were stacks of loose leaf paper upon which she’d written story after story. These papers at once began to lift away, shuffling into the wild, churning air like large, thin playing cards. Logan watched them for a moment, still too stunned to do anything.
And then, as the first dozen sheets made their butterfly-like ways out the window and into the night, she realized what was happening. This was her writing, the exact kind of writing that had given Sam Hain corporeal form a little over a week ago. The words on the pages told tales of forbidden romances between women who dared to dream of something darker – and powerful men who fulfilled that darkness to perfection.
Now those stories were flying right out of her room and into enemy hands.
With a start, Logan rushed forward, but the mad swirl of pages around her threatened to rip her to paper cut shreds. One sliced across her forearm, another across her cheek. She shielded her face with her hands and backpedaled. The stories continued to fly out the window, and finally, as the wind began to die down, Logan made one final effort at salvation.
She lowered her hands, uncovering her face, and rushed forward once more, making a grab for the last of the pages moving toward the window.
She caught them, clutching them tight in desperate fingers. The pages pulled and yanked and vibrated as if they were live, terrified insects willing to sacrifice a wing in order to stay alive.
They began to rip, and Logan adjusted her grip, crumpling the pages between both hands until they were tight balls. As if in angry retribution, the windows to her room slammed shut, the glass vibrating dangerously in its panes.
The air calmed. Her curtains settled.
Logan stood still, her heart hammering, her lungs working overtime. She peered beyond the glass at the pure, unfathomable darkness. There was no sign of her lost pages, no sign of the red eyes that had gazed in at her before.
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