Secretly Sam (19 page)

She also understood why she and “Dominic” had been able to escape “Sam” so easily back at the train tracks. Nathan McCay hadn’t actually been Sam. He’d been
pretending
to be Sam and probably worked for him now. And the body that slammed into McCay? Another one of Sam’s evil concoctions, no doubt, and most likely just an illusion. It had been meant to throw her off and give her the chance to “escape,” which would allow the real Sam to get close to her and to manipulate her using Dominic’s body.

It had worked. It had
all
worked and it all made so much horrible, terrible sense!

Fury coursed through Logan. She was raging inside, more angry than she’d ever been, but not just at Sam for pulling the wool over her eyes and possessing Dominic’s body. She was mad at herself for allowing any of it to happen.

She was so stupid.
Stupid, stupid, stupid!

“If it were anyone else calling you such a thing, I would turn them into a pumpkin and carve them out.”

Logan skidded to a fast halt, her heart leaping into her throat and her hair flying before her eyes. She hurriedly brushed it aside.

Katelyn was indeed gone, having been separated from her somewhere along the route, either by accident or by Sam’s magical doing.

Sam stood above her on the uphill trail and stared out at her through Dominic’s eyes, now fully blue and utterly alien to her. The moon illuminated him from behind, giving him an eerie, ghost-like aura. He looked different. There was an otherworldliness to him now, a sensation that he was something more than the sum of his parts. He was the king of another realm, the emperor of an entire universe. He looked taller.

He looked
mean
.

The strong, intelligent, and beautiful rock god she’d fantasized about for the duration of her entire childhood had become a Death Lord vampire, composed of fast, hard angles and pale skin and sharp, sharp fangs.

And there was no point to running any longer.

“How long?” she demanded breathlessly. Her stomach was tied in nauseated knots, and her body trembled. Her knees felt weak beneath her, as if they would buckle any second now. But she wanted to know. “How long have you been wearing that mask, Sam? Since the very beginning? Since the school dance? How long?!”

Sam’s gaze was ever steady, ever piercing. “Long enough,” he said. “But no. Sheffield was the first body I inhabited.”

Logan processed that. It hit her like a ton of bricks. “Oh my God,” she whispered. “You took Dominic’s body in the cornfield! You’ve been in him since the hospital!”

He smiled, showing her those fangs she knew would be her guillotine. “Yes.”

She felt sick; the nausea was getting worse. He’d orchestrated everything so perfectly. She’d been right about any lie he told; it
would
be elaborate. It
was
a work of art. Down to the speech about life and death and change that Nathan had given her at the railroad tracks, it had all been perfect.

“What are you going to do to me?” she asked, trying to pull her reeling mind away from the way he’d manipulated her into writing LEGO poetry words in Dominic’s bedroom and an entire mini-story in Katelyn’s car. If she didn’t stop thinking about it, she would end up trying to strangle him with her bare hands. Which would be worse than useless.

“What
exactly
are you going to do to me?” she clarified. She wanted to know. She wanted to know just what she would experience as she died.

“Logan,” he said, his tone intimate and suddenly gentle. He came toward her down the hill, each step deliberate and slow. “Sweet Logan. Don’t you see, I’m going to make you a
queen
? I’m going to make every dream you’ve ever had come true, and then some.”

“I’ve never –” She broke off as terror temporarily closed her throat. But she swallowed, took a step back, and managed to go on. “I’ve never heard murder described so beautifully.”

“You’re thinking mortal thoughts again,” he reprimanded, shaking his handsome head as he continued to close in on her. “And you’re fearing mortal fears. You must look beyond all of that, Logan. You’ll feel no pain. No loss. You’ll cease to exist here and begin living somewhere else. It’s as simple as that.”

“
Nothing
is that simple, Sam,” she said. “What about my family? My friends?” She stumbled back and nearly tumbled when her heel caught on a vine. She righted herself with a palm braced against a nearby tree trunk. It was no use retreating, but her body was fueled by Old Brain self preservation. “What about the people you killed?”

“If you wish to see them again so badly, then there’s no need to despair,” he told her. “Everyone shows up in my realm eventually.” He stopped two feet away, the distance between them now so small, she could feel his power lick along her skin like mild electricity. “
Everyone
,” he repeated for emphasis.

Logan pressed her fingers to the trunk of the tree behind her. An idea occurred to her, and her fingernail curled against the wood. “Then let me go,” she said. “Let me live out my life. If I have to come to you eventually anyway, then let me have what is rightfully mine here.”

“No.”

Logan’s chin lifted defiantly. Her gaze hardened. “No? Just like that? Fairness is not in your makeup, Sam?”

“Death isn’t meant to be fair, Logan. It is the counterpart to life, after all.”

Logan steadily scraped her fingernail into the tree, hoping she was smart enough to do what she was doing right.

“I’m worried about my little brother,” she told him. “My parents. Can’t you understand that? Have you no sympathy?”
Scrape
.

“I know what you’re doing, Logan,” he suddenly sighed. “I can read your mind, remember? And it doesn’t work that way. Your words don’t hold that kind of power here.” He offered her his hand then. The universe quieted. “But come with me to my world, and you’ll see that there they do.”

Logan let her hand drop from the tree. Maybe he was right and it didn’t matter. But at least she’d tried. And she was finished anyway.

An odd sense of calm stole over her. She peered into Sam’s blue, blue eyes and felt the salt of the sea on her skin. Thoughts of her family faded. Concern for her classmates slipped slowly away.

The blue wrapped around her. She heard the sky and fell into it. It felt like cotton balls and gentle breezes.

She looked down at his hand, waiting and offered. Slowly, she slid her hand into his. Sam’s fingers tenderly closed over hers.

She was moving forward, walking on nothing. A breath and a heartbeat later, his free hand cupped her cheek.

She closed her eyes as she began to drown, and his lips found hers. They brushed against her, cool and dry and soft as silk. She smelled cinnamon and pumpkin spice and
night
. She heard something tinkling, like pixie dust or magic. A breeze brushed through her long locks, and it felt like the gentlest fingers combing her hair.

She sighed across his lips.

And Sam deepened the kiss.

Chapter Thirty-Five

Meagan eyed the alleyway warily. Weak secondary lighting from the streets on either end of the grocery store illuminated the stretch of cement. Nothing moved in this murky, misty pre-dawn darkness. But she couldn’t shake the feeling that something was about to. It was like the shadows were waiting for something to emerge from their depths.

She and the wizard Draper had moved Lehrer’s body as far away from the mini-mall and that area of street as they felt they needed to go. They’d retreated to the alley behind a grocery store a few blocks away. The parking lot was deserted at this hour, but no doubt a manager or someone to do the stocking would be along any minute now. Meagan had no idea what time it was; she didn’t own a watch because like every other teenager in the world, she used her phone to tell time. But by the temperature in the air and the absolute calm of almost everything around her, she would guess it was around four in the morning.

This night had taken a veritable eternity.

Meagan remained knelt beside her teacher, her eyes on the enigmatic Hugh Draper. The wizard from the past was rummaging through the underbrush beside the alley. He reached over the low-lying cement wall that bordered one side to pick through and collect red and gold leaves that had fallen from the Maples and Oaks lining the store. Meagan watched him for a few silent minutes, and then finally asked, “What are you doing?”

“Collecting magic,” he told her distractedly, his attention clearly on his task.

“In leaves?”

He looked up. “Magic moves through every living thing around us,” he told her.

She blinked. “What, you mean like ‘The Force’?”

He cocked his head to one side and gave her a quizzical look. “I have to admit that the travel spell does allow me to interpret the language of each time period with liberation, but I’m afraid I’m not familiar with that particular colloquialism. The Force?” he asked curiously.

Meagan shook her head in wonder. “Never mind.” She ran a hand over her face and let out a sigh. “Those leaves are dead. You said magic was in
living
things.”

“Some of these leaves still have just enough life left in them that I can use it. No sense in wasting it, and no sense in destroying a living plant when I can get what I need here instead.”

He moved back to Lehrer’s side and began to place the leaves, about three dozen of them, in a circle around Lehrer’s still body. Meagan tried to move back to afford him space, but he stopped her.

“Stay inside the circle. This will help with your broken nose too.”

It had been hurting her, throbbing gently but persistently. She was guessing she must have black eyes or something for him to know it was broken.

When Draper had nothing but a small opening in the circle remaining, he moved inside of it and knelt once more beside her teacher. Then he closed the circle with his last few leaves.

Meagan watched in apt silence as he began to chant. A few seconds later, the leaves started to glow, each one intensifying in its yellow, orange, or red color. All at once, streams of the same colored light erupted from the leaves’ surfaces and shot toward Draper. He continued to chant, apparently absorbing this energy, until the streams of light at once shot out from him to hit both Meagan and Mr. Lehrer.

It felt like liquid candy, like a sugar high and sunshine and taking a bath in a rainbow. Her nose made a crackling sound, a funny Pop Rocks kind of sensation, and the pain ebbed. It was wonderful.

Eventually, the leaves ceased to glow and, as Meagan looked on, they browned and curled at their edges, drying out completely. The streams of light dissipated.

“The poison in his system will no longer harm him,” Draper said, opening his eyes. “I have managed to neutralize it.”

“Thank you for healing me,” Meagan said, “but who are you
really
and where did you come from that you know so much magic?” They were fair questions, she thought. It was dangerous to trust too willingly.

“I told you,” Draper said lightly, as he stood from where he’d been kneeling. “My name is –”

“Hugh Draper,” Meagan said. “I know. But that’s not what I mean.”

“Oh?” he asked, throwing her a questioning glance.

Meagan took a deep breath and stood as well. “I mean, you just popped out of time in the
nick
of time to save me, scared away a
vampire
, healed my broken nose, and stopped my teacher’s transformation into a monster. That’s a hell of a lot of magic.”

“Well, actually I’m unable to stop his transformation,” corrected Draper, who was again watching Lehrer.

Dietrich Lehrer looked no different now than he had twenty minutes ago. His skin was stone gray, circles further darkened the spaces beneath his closed eyes, and the tips of wicked sharp fangs pressed against both lips, upper and lower, of his closed mouth. “He’ll be physically changed until we can find a reversal spell. However, his mind has been restored.”

“You mean, he’ll look like a monster and act like my grove leader?”

“If that’s what he was before,” said Draper, “then yes.”

Meagan ran a hand through her long black hair.

“Now why don’t you tell me what
exactly
is happening here and we’ll figure out where to go from there?” Draper suggested. He looked at the ground, found a dry and relatively clean space on the low cement wall beside them, and gestured for her to sit.

Meagan shook her head. “No thank you. I can’t sit still right now.”

Draper nodded and sat down himself, folding his hands in his lap.

Meagan met his brown eyed gaze and considered her options. So far, the stranger had only helped. She didn’t get any kind of creepy or negative feelings off of him, and she was really short of other choices. So she gave up and took a deep breath. “Okay, but you’re not going to believe it.”

She told Draper about Sam, about the ritual she’d performed and messed up, about the blue moon this month and how it affected the door to Samhain’s realm, about the dance, about the spell she and Lehrer had cast to protect Logan – about everything. She hadn’t expected him to believe her, though she didn’t know why. Maybe it was that he was an adult. Adults never believed anything.

But Lehrer was an adult, and right now, he was so entrenched in magic, he was a freaking monster. So her organization of adults and magic into separate categories wasn’t exactly valid. Plus, this Draper guy was clearly a magic user in his own right, a self proclaimed wizard. He had come from some other time, and had somehow scared away Shawn Briggs.

Come to think of it, she wondered where the vampire was at that moment….

All in all, she wasn’t overly surprised when she finished conveying everything she could think of and Draper nodded thoughtfully, placed his fingers to his lips in contemplation, and said, “So now we need to get this bard friend of yours some place safe until the final day of the month and then make certain to close the door to Samhain’s realm once more.”

“The spell Mr. Lehrer and I cast on her should keep her safe for a while as long as the phylactery bottle we placed the other half of it in stays out of Sam’s reach.”