James was tempted to ignore him, or at least to show the world the inferior strength of humans compared to his kind, but Sarah was nearly liquid in his arms and he had to make this as easy on her as he could.
“I’m coming,” James said. “I’m saying good-bye to my wife.”
“She’ll be all right, James. I’m here to help.”
Jennifer appeared like an auburn-haired angel out of the crowd and slid her arm around Sarah. Howard and Timothy and Steve and Jocelyn were there too, Howard huddled close to his son, who was also being hounded about the train.
“Where’s Chandresh?” James asked.
Jennifer shook her head, her eyes red and swollen. “He’s already on board. He’s not very good at good-byes.” Jennifer pushed her long hair from her eyes, no longer pretending to hide her tears. “Don’t worry, James. We’ll be fine. Right, Sarah?”
Sarah stood between them, James holding onto one of her arms, Jennifer holding onto the other, and he marveled at how limp she stood, ready to be broken like a wish bone, left to see who was left with the larger piece of whatever shards were left of her. Jennifer tried to smile, tried to make light of the darkness surrounding them, but her usual playfulness deserted her long before she arrived at the train station.
“Can’t you snap your fingers and make this go away?” James asked.
“I wish I could, James.”
James put his arm around Sarah’s waist, then grabbed Jennifer’s arm so tightly she flinched under his strength. “You promised me three wishes,” he said. “That Halloween at the Witches Lair, you promised me three wishes. You said I used my first wish for the spell to bring me back after I saw Hempel in the sunshine. This is my second wish, Jennifer. Take care of Sarah and Grace. Whatever you need to do, however you need to do it, you make sure they’re all right. You help them stay strong, even if you have to use your magic.”
Jennifer smiled through her sadness. “Are you giving me permission to cast a spell?”
“I am.”
“And what about a spell for you? Do you give me permission for that too?”
James watched the swarm of soldiers barking orders, and he saw the vampires parting from their loved ones. He thought of Chandresh when the blue-suited officers ransacked his house and his muscular, manly friend could only look on, unable to do anything to protect his wife and children. He looked at Jocelyn and Steve as they whispered their own tearful good-byes. James nodded. “I’ll take whatever I can get right now,” he said.
“I’ll call Martha and the rest of my coven,” Jennifer said. “We’ll have a special ceremony. I have an acorn and white, yellow, and orange candles for Sarah’s spell for inner strength, and I have colored threads, scissors, and a screw-top jar for your spell for protection.” She hugged Sarah close. “And my mother, the great and powerful Olivia, will cast the spells for you. This way they’re guaranteed to work.”
“Don’t forget us,” Howard said.
“We won’t forget any of you,” Jennifer said.
Howard clutched his son to his chest with one arm and reached for James with the other. “You’ll watch Timothy, James?” Howard said. “You’ll make sure he’s safe.”
“You know I will,” James said.
Howard nodded, but James saw his friend’s furrowed eyes under his heavy, close-knit brows and he knew Howard wasn’t convinced. Howard was thinking what James already knew, that there were forces even James, with all his preternatural strength and extraordinary senses, couldn’t control.
“You should get on the train,” Howard said to his son. “It’s all right. Everything will be fine.”
Timothy threw his arms around his father’s neck. “I love you, Dad.”
“I love you, Timothy. I always thought I would never have a family because I was so different, but then I found you and suddenly my life made sense. I’m proud to be your father.”
They hugged tightly, but Howard stepped away. “I’m going to do everything I can to get you out, Tim. And I’m coming to see you. On the night of the full moon next month I’ll be there. Wherever you are I’ll find you. Do you understand what I mean?”
“Howl and I’ll know you’re there,” Timothy said. “Just be careful. We don’t want them to come after you next.”
“Don’t worry, Son. I’ll be fine. And you will too.”
Timothy looked at James with a sarcastic grin. “Guess what?” he said. “I got a call from that publisher this morning. He wants to have a look at my vampire book after all.”
“What did you say?” James asked.
“I told him I was a little busy right now. Maybe some other time.”
“I bet you could start a bidding war over your memoirs when you get out,” Jennifer said. “Then everyone will want to publish your book. A guaranteed New York Times bestseller.”
Timothy smiled. “Maybe,” he said. “Vampires are even hotter than they already were. Some movie called ‘The Vampire Killers’ is number one at the box office right now. It’s like vampires and cowboys and Indians. It’s the stupidest premise for a movie I’ve ever seen, but people are eating it up. I heard they’re already planning a sequel.”
James looked at Sarah but said nothing. Jocelyn took Timothy’s hand.
“We should go, Timothy,” she said. “Everyone else is on board and they’re waiting for us.” Jocelyn kissed Steve one last time, managed a weak smile for her husband, then helped the vampire boy onto the train, holding his hand, gently leading him forward as though she was afraid of how the shock of it all might affect him, forgetting, even turned as she was, that he was a young man trapped in a fourteen-year-old’s body. They hopped onto the train, found Chandresh waiting for them by the door, and they stuck together in a cluster, afraid to let any of the others out of their sight. James saw Geoffrey through the window of the next car, his long face pressed against the glass, his nose flat, his mouth blowing steam circles like a boy at the window of a candy shop. They caught eyes, and Geoffrey nodded. James didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.
The guards barked again, and James stepped toward the train but Sarah clung to him, her fingers fastened into his shirt, oblivious to anything but him. The train’s engine stuttered, and the guard next to James waved at other guards, who saw him, the last vampire on the platform. They shouted at more guards, and five armed guards ran toward him.
“I have to go, honey,” James whispered in Sarah’s ear. “I’ll be home soon.”
“I love you, James. I’ve always loved you. Even when I didn’t know your name I loved you.”
“Sarah, I have loved you every night for three hundred and twenty years.”
He kissed her, passionately, because this kiss had to last awhile. He kissed her the way he kissed her after more than three hundred years of missing her. His lips burned, as his unbeating heart did, for the love of her.
As the guards reached him he flashed onto the train and out of their grasp. He saw his wife weeping, limp with grief, and he saw Jennifer, Steve, and Howard rush to her side to embrace her, to keep her strong, because together they would see this through. James, praying for one of the few times since he was turned, asked God to send strength Sarah’s way. Please, God, he begged. She needs to stay strong. I need to stay strong. We need to see this through so we can be together again. I can’t wait another three hundred years before I see her again.
The train chugged away, faster and faster away from the woman he loved, her beautiful face pulled in a spasm of torture as though she were trapped between the walls again, feeling the cracks in her bones and the ache in her muscles and he wanted to scream. Most of all, he felt an overwhelming urge to vomit back every ounce of the blood that consumed his life and allowed him to live that unnatural way. It was just as he had told his father all those years before—it was always about the blood.
As the train picked up speed, James decided he needed to see his wife one last time. He jumped over the railing onto the ground below, flashing back to the platform with his
supernatural speed, the human heads popping from side to side as they watched him race the wind to take his wife into his arms one last time. Sarah saw him as he drew closer to her, and she ran to him and threw her arms around his neck. James swept her up, clutching her tightly to him, and he kissed her passionately, basking in her warm softness, savoring strawberries and cream, letting his lips linger on hers. When he heard the rushing footsteps and angry yells from the stampede of guards charging toward him, he stepped away.
“I love you, Sarah,” he said. “I love you more than anything in this world.” Finally, he remembered what he wanted to tell her. He reached into his pocket, took out the antique-looking key, placed it into her palm, and closed her fingers around it. “When you get home, look in my old desk near the window. This key will unlock the bottom right drawer, and there are papers in there—notes and letters—I want you to read. You were right, Sarah. They’re letters for my girlfriend.” He smiled. “I want you to see how much time I spend thinking about you when you’re gone. You are always on my mind. You are my Sarah. My Sarah. And remember Miriam’s prophecy. I will return. I will.”
“I love you, James.”
“I love you more.”
He turned, saw the guards closing in on him, and he flashed away. With a deft cat-like leap he grabbed the railing of the train that was already miles away from the station. He knew he was too far, a speck in the distance to Sarah, but he could still see her lean into Jennifer for support, see her hide her face away from the place where he disappeared. He heard the smacking footsteps of the guard behind him.
“Let’s go. You won’t be pulling that again.”
The guard led James back to the compartment where the other vampires sat. “Stay here,” the guard said. James saw Jocelyn, Timothy, Chandresh, and Geoffrey and sighed. This should be interesting, he thought, grateful that for now, at least, they would be together. As much as he ached at the loss of Sarah, he knew he had to stay watchful, aware. He needed to stay strong. Just as he promised his wife. He needed to triumph over this damned curse that sent him away from her. He needed to get out of this so he could go back to his life with the woman he loved and their little girl. He had to. It was their destiny.
Epilogue
Sarah stared at her wooden gabled house as though she had never seen it before, as though she had only known it in her dreams. It was nearly silent outside that spring afternoon, the dusk settling as pink and gold on the break in the horizon, the crooked oak tree bent even closer to the ground, as though it had grown older in the family’s absence. The fresh blooms flittered in the bay breeze, and everywhere Sarah looked was oddly deserted of people, as though everyone stayed away in deference to the old house’s new mournfulness. Usual traffic flows, the earliest tourists of the season, even walking locals were nowhere to be seen. For decades, neighbors saw the wooden gabled house, noticed the phantasmal man in the shadows, and they were convinced the old house was haunted—by memories. Now, with Sarah and Grace back without James, that intuition was more right than ever—the memories would be hard again. The house had a reprieve from the specter-like recollections for a while, nearly a year, but now there was more sadness, more worries, more madness to overcome. For a moment, Sarah thought she saw the long wooden slats of the exterior walls shudder and bend under the weight of the heavy beams of the gables, and she wouldn’t have been surprised if the house bowed in prayer then disintegrated into dust before her eyes. But even as she felt the agitation, the old place called her name—Sarah or Elizabeth, it was all the same to her now. Just as it had when she saw it when she first arrived in Salem, the house spoke to her, she knew it, and it knew her, and James or no James, it was her home. She and that house still shared their secret, and she needed it. She thought of the poem she shared with her dear and loving husband, and it brought her some comfort.
“I prize thy love more than whole mines of gold…”
Sarah sighed. She pulled herself slowly from Olivia’s silver Prius, it still hurt to move, and Olivia helped her unstrap Grace from her seat in the back. Sarah held her daughter to her chest as she walked to her green front door with determination. This would be hard, she knew, but she and Grace would get through it because they had to. James was strong and immortal. He would be all right. It was just as he said. This was a roadblock, a bump in the road, but she would be strong enough for all of them.
“Or all the riches that the East doth hold…”
Inside the great room Olivia took Grace from Sarah’s arms.
“You’re still recovering, Sarah. Let me have her. She’s getting bigger every day.”
Sarah nodded though her arms ached with the emptiness.
Olivia stopped, clutched Grace to her chest, and watched Sarah, her detective seeking clues look on high alert. “You don’t need to stay here by yourself, dear. You can stay with me as long as you need.”
“I want to be home,” Sarah said. “I need to be home.”
“What about Child Services?”
“Mrs. Jackson said as long as I can prove I’m human they won’t take Grace.”
Olivia smiled with the motherly compassion Sarah loved her for, then carried Grace into her bedroom to lay her down for a nap.
Sarah was mesmerized by the old house, looking around as though everything inside were new to her, as though she had awakened from an odd dream and she knew this house from somewhere only she wasn’t sure where or how or why. She looked at the remodeled kitchen, the hearth empty without the black cauldron, the books on the shelves, the diamond-paned casement windows. She looked up at the loft-style attic and the seventeenth century wooden desk.
Then she remembered. She reached into her pocket, pulled out the antique-style key, and wandered to James’s desk. His laptop computer was closed, his lecture notes filed, everything in its place as he always left it. She imagined him sitting at his desk, writing something, reading something, thinking something, and she walked to his chair and imagined that she pressed her hands into his strong shoulders and he smiled at her and brushed her hair from her face. She wanted to talk to him. She wanted him to hold her and she wanted to feel his strong arms clutching her close and she wanted to hear his strong, sweet voice tell her everything was going to be all right. But he wasn’t there.
For now, she reminded herself. For now.
How quickly things changed. At first, after their wedding, it seemed as if no time had passed since their first marriage in 1691, but now everything was different. Whenever she wondered about what James must be facing on his journey to the camp or the prison or whatever it was, she had to force those thoughts from her mind because she couldn’t go there. She filled herself with happy memories instead.
“My love is such that rivers cannot quench…”
She sat before the old desk and pushed the key into the lock on the bottom right drawer, the same drawer from where he had pulled the newspaper clipping of President Jackson. She saw a manila folder with the words ‘For Sarah’ in her husband’s calligraphy-like handwriting, and she pulled it from the drawer and saw a stack of timeworn papers inside. With trembling fingers, she pulled out the pages, staring at them, reading and rereading them as though to verify they were really there and not a figment of her imagination, something she wanted to see. She read them again, one by one, and saw the proof of James’s everlasting devotion. They were letters to his girlfriend. They were letters to her:
…But now I am here and you are still gone. I cannot live without you, and yet I cannot die. What do I do? Oh my God, Elizabeth. What do I do?
…Dear God, Elizabeth. Where should I go?
…I am writing to you because you are still all I have to live for.
…I am certain that here, nestled high in this nook in the mountains, that I can kiss the close-looking stars, kiss you, if I stretch hard enough.
…I want to help them, Lizzie. The fear you can hold in your hands like sharp-edged razors—can you feel it? The wails of the mothers as they’re dragged from th
eir children—can you hear it?
…They look the way I felt when I watched the constable drag you away. This is torture, Lizzie. No other word will do.
… I will find water for as many of them as I can, Lizzie. You will be proud of me.
As she read his words of love, words he wrote to her even when he thought she was gone from him forever, words he needed to share with her even when he thought she would never read them, she realized that neither space nor time could keep them apart. Their love was, just as her father-in-law predicted over three hundred years before, eternal. And James knew what she would need when he was gone and, planning for an event such as this, they had lived through something similar after all, he left it behind for her so she would know how he thought of her wherever she was, wherever he was. He knew her so well.
Suddenly, she felt his strength envelop her, as though he slid his strong arms around her from wherever he was, and she knew that, whatever may come, she would be strong. That wisp-like iridescent thread she felt lassoing around them and pulling them together the first time she saw him outside this very house, that invisible connection that held them tight to each other over three hundred years, was still there, spread wider now to cover the miles between them, but it was still there, keeping them close. And just as he wanted her to be proud of how he handled himself while helping the people on the Trail of Tears, now she wanted him to be proud of how she navigated their own difficult path. She would not give up on him, not now, not after everything they had been through to find their way back to each other. They would be all right again. They had to be.
It was their destiny.
Acknowledgments
I had the opportunity to visit the town of Salem, Massachusetts in the summer of 2011, and I loved it so much I wanted to move there. My worst fear was I’d get there to discover I had the town’s landmarks all mixed up. Fortunately, everything was where I thought it would be. For anyone with an interest in the Salem Witch Trials or in the beginning traces of American history, a trip to Salem, and Boston, is mandatory.
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