Suddenly Sam (The October Trilogy) (21 page)

“SEE
!”
Meagan exclaimed at the tops of her lungs.

The word came out amplified
not only by Meagan’s magic, but by Logan’s as well. It was the magic of a witch
and
of a bard, and not just any bard – the
chosen
bard, the one who would be Samhain’s queen.

A spark of magical flame erupted in Logan’s palm, raced over her hand, and spread up her arm like wildfire. Logan felt it pass through her, like a hot flash times a hundred, and she gasped, rendered speechless at the sensation. But it was gone as quickly as it had come, shooting out the other side to rush down her other arm and pool in the
hand she had pressed to Sam’s chest.

The fire erupted there, and the Death God cried out. He threw back his head and bellowed into the heavens.

The spell engulfed them both.

Logan closed her eyes –

and Samhain at last opened his.

Through him, she saw what he would now see. And through her, he saw life as he had never been able to before.

He saw
her
, in her home, holding her younger brother in her arms and rocking him back and forth, her sweet voice humming a melody that would bring him peace. His lip was broken and raw. A bruise was forming on his jaw. Sam saw this and understood what had happened. He also understood that Logan was the boy’s only solace, his only comfort, his only hope. And he was only a child.

Through Logan’s curse of empathy, Sam saw a
living person, breathing, heart beating, soul burning bright, and understood the boy’s need. And the pain the boy would endure if his older sister was taken from him.

But the scene changed, shifting from bedroom to hospital room, and Sam was suddenly witnessing a man, standing still and alone at the side of a bed. A woman, wasted away but once obviously beautiful, lay unmoving beneath the thin sheets. The smell of
antiseptic permeated the air. The man leaned down, brushed a long black lock from the woman’s bony cheek, and sucked back a sob that threatened to overwhelm him.

Out in the hall, a young boy
with black hair and green eyes listened. He listened for the sound he had been dreading. The sound of his father’s tears. Because then he would know she was gone.

The boy’s name was Dominic Maldovan. He, too, was a child. This time, in every sense of the word.

In another hospital room, in another time and place, Sam beheld a young mother, her heart ripping itself to shreds as she sat on the edge of a bed and leaned in to steal one last hug from her baby girl’s limp, still warm form. For a short, terrible instant, because of Logan’s spell of empathy, Sam
was
this mother – this mother losing her child to disease.

Sam cried out, the pain overwhelming. He never could have imagined it.

And Logan cried as well. Because she always would.

We live and lose, Sam. We surrender in the end – to you. You’re right. Everything comes your way in the end. But it’s everything before then that is important.
This is what you have not known and therefore cannot understand.

Sam listened to her, to the magic of her spell, as she showed him what it
really
meant to be alive. He had no choice. The magic of what she was showing him was more powerful than he was. It was more powerful than death.

He moved on,
witnessing births and deaths and sicknesses and recoveries. He saw children learning to ride their bicycles, couples wedding their best friends, gatherings and parties and funerals and wakes. He saw celebrations and birthdays – and his spirit held its breath as he beheld children in costumes. They were trick-or-treating, smiling and laughing and wishing that every day could be Halloween.

They were wishing that e
very day could be Samhain.

They
trusted
him. Of all creatures. Children looked up to him. The faithful worshiped him. And all this time, he had looked down on them, the mortals who were but drops in the ocean of time, whose spirits entered his realm in the masses and whom he had never cared to know or understand.

Logan showed him the graves of the people he stood among, the graves of those that made up the border between October Land and the Realm of the Dead. She thought of the illnesses that had taken them, both physical and mental. She thought of the tears shed on their behalf, of the pain suffered for them even after their deaths.

Life comes with a quid pro quo, Sam.

It was something she, herself, had only just come to realize. Just as it is for a child who is given permission to go out but must return at a c
ertain time, there were rules. There were curfews.

It comes with conditions
, she told him.
Life is given, and it truly is a gift. It is given in exchange for responsibility… and hardship.

She thought of the g
rave of the four-year-old girl. Annie.

For some more than others.

She thought of her own brother, Taylor, and the way so many people assumed he was her cross to bear, her burden. His sickness made him violent, left him trembling, and haunted his every waking moment. He had unwittingly tortured his family with this illness for the duration of his life.

But how many people on the verge of death, if given the choice of further life in exchange fo
r the care of a man such as Taylor would say no? How many?

Logan realized that Taylor
was her curfew. He was her
life condition
. And probably only the first of many.

And
something else she realized – just then, just in that
very
moment – was that Taylor’s life condition was so much worse than her own. His curfew had begun at birth. What he had to give in exchange for existence was literally unimaginable. It left him virtually destroyed.

Sacrifice.

All of the best magic required sacrifice.

And life was the most magical of all magic spells.

Chapter Thirty-One

When the visions faded and
the spell ended, Logan opened her eyes.

She let her
hand drop from Samhain’s black-clad chest and watched as he slowly lowered his head, his eyes closed. But upon his cheeks were the remnants of liquid proof. He had felt the empathy he had until now been incapable of feeling. It was the empathy of the living, felt by the Lord of the Dead.

In the aftermath of the spell,
the world seemed winded. It was out of breath and dipped in silence. Logan could feel everyone watching – Alec, Dominic, Meagan, Lehrer, Draper, Katelyn, the Harvesters –
everyone
.

Sam
opened his eyes.

Where there had been cold gray steel and the wicked glow of liquid lightning, there were storms now, deep and dark and troubled. There was a wretchedness to the knowledge in their depths, taking their mesmerizing pull deeper than ever before.

Samhain had always been beautiful. But now he was perfect.

And there was a part of Logan that loved him. Always had.

“Send them to their home, Sam.”

Sam gazed down at her for a long, long time.
“No,” he said, and his voice was choked with the empathy of a billion-billion deaths. “Not
their
home.
Your
home.”

The portal on the hill in the not-too-far distance at last cracked open to its widest breadth, and a swirling light built up inside. Sam stepped back from Logan,
his eyes remaining locked on hers, and as he did, he waved his hand.

The necklace around her neck unclasped and tumbled to the thorn covered ground.

That ground rumbled a second time, as if in echo of the promise she had made only moments ago. It rumbled now with a new promise, a new spell.

Sam stopped several feet away. There, he raised his hands at his sides, palm-up.

His gaze searched hers, his spirit touching her soul. He swallowed hard, and smiled a small, tender smile. “I will see you in seventy years,” he said softly. “Give or take.”

“No,” she corrected him.
No,
she thought.
Please not that long.
She needed him. She needed the magic and the mystery. She needed Samhain in order to stay sane as she paid life’s dues and kept her curfews and met its conditions. “I’ll see you every night in my dreams,” she told him.
Our dreams
, she thought.

And he heard her.

Because his smile spread, and she caught just a hint of wicked, promising fang – before he spoke the single, powerful command that caused his spell to erupt like a furnace blast over Fall Fields.

Everyone cried out as the wind hit th
em hard, knocking them backward. Somewhere along the way, as they tumbled through the air, things began to change.

*****

Dietrich Lehrer watched, suspended in the supernatural, as his hands shrunk and the hair that had sprouted over them like a thick fur rug began to recede and disappear.

He felt his tusks shorten, his head crackled, and clothing he’d left in his closet in his home somehow, miraculously, found its way onto his body.

Strength ebbed away, so vastly different from his own, that it was noticeable as it left, even though he floated in a white and blurry nothingness.

He was no longer a goblin. The Hell Hound’s poison had been removed from his system. He was a history teacher once more.

*****

Shawn Briggs became aware that he was floating. There was no up and no down, only light and blurriness. Memories flashed before his mind’s eye – things he’d said and done. He saw Meagan Stone’s face, her beautiful eyes. And then he felt his teeth, long and sharp and deadly, begin to diminish in his mouth. The ache, the need for blood that had been with him since his transformation began to recede. He felt weaker… but wiser. He felt human.

*****

Alec Sheffield stopped in his tracks. His boots made a scuffing sound on the wet pavement. He looked around himself to find he was in an alley. Fall Fields was gone. The Harvesters were nowhere around. Sam was gone – Dom….

Alec lowered his arm, dropping the leather backpack he’d been carrying. He knelt, rummaged quickly through it, and withdrew the sterling silver lighter he’d been given one year for his birthday. He raised it to the light and peered into its shiny surface.

It was his own visage reflected back at him, his own face, his own eyes.

He opened his mouth – no fangs.

Slowly, wrapped in awe and wonder and a slew of warring emotions, Alec got back to his feet.
Somehow, things had been set right. Logan had done something. She had somehow gotten through to Sam, and he had reversed every wrong he’d committed.

Alec closed his eyes.

Now it was his turn. He, too, had done some terrible things. There were people he had well and truly hurt. People who meant a lot to him.

Amends would have to be made.

*****

Dominic threw back his head and cried out in agony and unutterable relief as Alec’s spirit was ripped from his and he was once more free of possession. His mind was his own.

His body, coasting in some bizarre never-where of white and nothingness, came next, its transformation less immediate. It was more than Alec’s possession that had forced him to take vampire form. It was a truth that burned him like a brand. It was the very essence of who he was and what he wanted from Logan that had carved out the path he took as he went from man to monster.

He
wanted
to bite her again. Hell, he’d wanted to taste her for years.

When Alec had pierced Logan’s wrist with his teeth,
Dominic
had pressed the fangs deep. When Alec pulled her blood into his mouth, Dominic pulled harder.

Until he had finally realized what he was doing. It hit him like a sledgehammer, sudden human reason in the mind of a maniac, and then and there, as he swallowed her up and drank her in, he loathed himself as no man ever has.

He won out, forcing Alec to release her, and even managed to do so with some semblance of the tenderness, of the
love
he felt for her.

He knew – he knew deep down – that if it had been him and
only
him, he never would have hurt Logan. But he felt unsure now, of his own strength, of his own will. But he had learned a lot about desire. It had to be tempered. It had to be controlled.

This was the lesson learned that separated a boy from a man.

And Dominic Maldovan was a child no more.

*****

Logan watched the others slip through the magic of Sam’s spell and enter the portal that would take them back to the mortal realm.

But she remained.

Only for a moment.

There in the field of black roses overlooked by the castle of
her one-day king, she stood toe-to-toe with the spirit of Halloween.