Samantha Moon Phantasm, page 115
part #9 of Vampire for Hire Series
“Sam, although the connection is faint—indeed, barely discernible—I am being told there is a link between you and the Red Rider. Your father learned much in his years chasing the Red Rider, but he never learned of this magical connection. This would be, as the kids say, brand-new information.”
I opened my mouth to speak, but found no words. I was about to tell them that I had no link when Max, whose head had been cocked to one side, continued:
“I’m being told it has to do with the physical act of the consuming of flesh, blood and magic. Magic-eaters, much like vampire sires—as you recently learned—remain connected to their victim.”
“Except their victims die.”
“But the magic never does, not really. It merely transfers, from them to him.”
“So you’re saying some of my old magic is still attached to him?”
“It’s a part of him, actually. Sam, I’m being told that you can learn to tap into this magic. In fact, I’m being told this is how you will find the Red Rider.”
“An entity that traverses through the frequencies?”
“Yes, Sam.”
“Have you ever traversed through the frequencies?”
The Librarian gave me a sad smile. “Not recently. And not for very far. There is a limit to just how far a human—and even angels—can go, although I see you were given a vision once, of such frequencies and dimensions.”
I had, long ago, on an island in the Pacific Northwest. It had been, well, a glorious vision.
“But merely a vision, Sam. You didn’t actually traverse the frequencies. You didn’t, for instance, exist in these higher dimensions. You were merely granted a glimpse of them. An important glimpse, nonetheless, for this was intended to give you a framework for how the universe and multiverse is structured.”
“Whoa, that was like... years ago.”
“Time and space mean little to the higher entities.”
“Has anyone traversed the frequencies?” I asked.
“A good question. There are rumors of only a few—and when I say few, I am only aware of two—who have traveled the full range of dimensions.”
“The full range?” I asked. “How many are there?”
“A hundred in all.”
“And God is at the top?” I asked. Except I knew this. I had seen this. I had seen the vast, swirling entity that existed beyond space and time.
“Indeed. There is no vibration, dimension or frequency higher than the Origin.”
“And two have traveled to him?”
“Yes.”
“Is the Red Rider one of them?”
“No, but I am being told he got close.”
“And the others?”
“One is a holy man in England.”
“Is he still alive?”
“Sadly, no. The other is in India.”
I nodded. “How high have you traveled, Max?”
“Only to the fifth dimension.”
“Only? Okay. And the angels?”
“They exist in the fourth and can go no higher.”
I nodded, taking this all in.
“What’s the fifth dimension like?” I asked.
“Wild, Sam. But that’s a discussion for another day.”
“And you expect me to chase this thing through the higher dimensions? Something only two other people have done before?”
“Two known people, and yes.”
“But I don’t know what to do... or even where to start.”
Max tilted his head to one side, seemed to be listening to something beyond my hearing, and nodded. “I’m being told that you’ve been given the starting place.”
“I have?”
He smiled. “Think back. A clue was recently given to you.”
I blinked. The only thing given to me recently was...
“The painting?” I asked.
“That would be it.”
I bit my lip, and was about to protest that it was just a painting. But I had recently seen that some paintings could be more than paintings. I saw it again in my mind’s eye... in particular, the two figures walking hand-in-hand in the field. The two blurred figures. Blurred, yes... but also oddly familiar, too.
The small, dark-haired woman was...
“She’s me,” I said.
The Alchemist only shrugged.
“And the man?” I asked.
“Think, Sam.”
A name popped in my head... a name I couldn’t believe, but I found myself uttering it anyway. “Van Gogh.”
“That would be the one. He was, of course, a creator. Or perhaps better stated, he is a creator. More importantly...”
I held up a finger, suddenly sure where Max was going with this. “Let me guess: he paints the higher frequencies.”
“Yes. I’m being told that Vincent painted himself into immortality. He is waiting for you.”
“Waiting where...” But I stopped myself. I knew exactly where. “In the purple fields.”
“That would be the place.”
“Fine,” I said. “But before I do anything, before I travel the frequencies, whatever the hell that means, before I meet Van Gogh, whatever the hell that means... first, I must find this missing little girl.”
The End
(of Part One)
To be continued in:
Moon Master
Return to the Table of Contents
MOON MASTER
Vampire for Hire #16
by
J.R. RAIN
MATTHEW S. COX
(Red Rider: Part 2)
Moon Master
Published by Rain Press
Copyright © 2019 by J.R. Rain
All rights reserved.
Dedication
To Eve, the best ever.
Moon Master
Chapter One
The crew was assembling.
Okay, admittedly it felt a bit like the Avengers coming together. Kingsley helped me with my bags, carrying them as easily as most men would carry a loaf of bread. Allison sat quietly with Tammy on the couch, laughing and holding hands like old friends. My daughter was maturing. I’d been hearing rumors of a boyfriend (and by rumors, I meant Anthony had been mercilessly teasing her), but I hadn’t seen hide nor hair of the poor bastard, at least not yet. Tammy was, undoubtedly, nervous to bring him around. I reminded her that I had my ways to sniff him out. She rolled her eyes and told me they were just friends, but I could see it. Oh, yes, I could see it. As those eyes were rolling up, up, up, I saw something in them. Something close to love.
Just friends, my ass.
In fact, I seriously suspected Allison was getting the scoop even now, and probably promising not to tell me anything. The bitch. I’d torture the information out of her if I had to. Or guilt it out of her, whatever worked best.
And there was Anthony, only fifteen years old, but already over six feet. Yeah, he’d shot up like two or three inches in the past six months. His shoulders seemed to be broadening by the minute, too. He still walked like a kid though, slouched, slightly duck-footed. He picked up the habit of keeping his hands in his jeans pockets. He kept them in there when he walked, talked, and sometimes when he sat. It was, I suspected, “his look.” Like all kids, he’d gotten stuck in a nowhere land trying to find himself, and so I quietly snickered, as he strolled by me, shoulders slouched, feet pointing out, hands in pockets. He looked like an extra on the set of West Side Story. He saw me giggling and shot me a look, but I kept a mostly straight face.
“What?” he asked.
“You’re cute.”
“Gross.”
I snickered as he moseyed past me, and laughed a little harder when he tried opening the screen door with his hands still in his pants pockets. Amazingly, he did.
“He’s so weird,” Tammy said to Allison, who promptly stated all boys are weird in an attempt to defend Anthony that didn’t really sway my daughter all that much.
I shot Tammy a mental rebuke, reminding her he’s her brother and she loves him and has his back. She reminded me that he had spent nearly an hour this morning popping zits. I reminded her that her boyfriend was probably doing the same, even now. She rolled her eyes, got up and stormed out.
Allison blinked at my daughter’s dramatic exit and came over to me. “I take it the two of you had a telepathic fight.”
“Not a fight. Just a lesson in manners.”
“It’s okay for siblings to bicker, Sam. Didn’t you bicker with your brothers and sisters?”
I shrugged. “Yeah, maybe. But I’m also only close with one of them.”
“Siblings don’t have to be friends.”
“But I want my kids to be friends. I want them to be like me and Mary Lou.”
“And they probably will be. They have a bond that few siblings have. They have seen things, experienced things. Don’t worry, they do have each other’s backs when it really matters. In fact, you should be happy they tease each other. It comes from love.”
“By the way, have you seen Anthony and his new look?”
“The hands in the pocket thing?”
I giggled. “Yes.”
“When I was his age, I thought it was super cool to hook my thumbs in my belt buckle. I did that everywhere.”
“You still do,” I said.
“When a look works, it works.”
“Do I have a signature look?” I asked.
“You fold your arms a lot and lean against things.”
“What do you mean?”
“Like this.”
She folded her arms and leaned her hip on the couch. As she did, she squinted her eyes and scanned the room.
“What’s with the eyes?”
“That’s what you do. You are always scanning, looking at everything. Nothing gets past you.”
“You look like you’re hurting yourself.”
“It’s not easy being you.” She kept doing the ‘me’ pose.
“What’s with the squinting?”
“You squint during the day, Sam.”
“That much?”
“More, sometimes.”
“I didn’t know.”
“Makes sense. I mean you do have a bit of a sun problem.”
“Okay, you can stop doing that now.”
“But I like being Sam Moon.” She moved away from the couch but kept the same posture, arms folded, body leaning. Awkwardly.
“Such a bitch,” I said.
“Look. I’m Samantha Moon.”
“No, you’re a bitch.”
“Look at me, everyone. I’m a vampire with kids and a hunky man.”
“Wait, what?” I asked.
“Oh em gee,” said Tammy, sweeping out of the hallway. “You two are such dorks.”
I slid in behind her, running my fingers through my hair and walking in the same uptight way my daughter sometimes walked. Allison did the same thing, and we followed her through the living room. “Look at me,” I said. “I’m too cool for school.”
“No one says that anymore, and I don’t walk like that. All uptight.”
“Sometimes you can walk a little... stiff,” said Allison.
“Is that wrong?”
“Not at all,” said my friend.
“But you think I can loosen up a little?”
“I think you are perfect,” I added.
“Just tell me, please you guys. What should I do different?”
I think her eagerness might be related to this new boy.
“Just tell me how I’m supposed to walk. You’re my mom. You’re supposed to show me these things.”
“But am I? I don’t recall seeing that on the job description.”
“But you think I can loosen up a little.”
“Fine, maybe.”
“Loosen up how?”
“Like this,” piped in Allison. She walked away from us, hand on her hip, her bubbly butt rolling this way and that.
“Okay, not that loose,” I said.
“Is that really how women are supposed to walk?”
“Yes,” said Allison.
“No,” I said.
“It’s how I walk,” said Allison.
The fact that Allison used to be a stripper in Vegas didn’t come up often, but no one could keep secrets from my daughter so I left that alone, knowing she picked up that very thought.
“There’s nothing wrong with the way anyone walks,” I said. I stepped in front of Tammy. “Baby, my only wish for you is to be happy.”
She brushed me off. “Yeah, yeah, whatever. Like this, Allison?”
Tammy pushed past me, knocking me aside with her hip of all things, as she sashayed through the living room.
“Perfect!” said Allison. “But more lift at the high end.”
“Lift?”
“Like this...”
“No, like this,” I said, and used my hip to knock Allison to the side... so hard she stumbled into the recliner.
“Sam!”
With Tammy giggling, I rocked the hip swivel all the way out the living room and through the front door and even down to the driveway, where I helped Kingsley load the minivan, certain that I could still hear my daughter giggling in the house behind me.
Chapter Two
We’d packed the Momvan to overflowing.
Kingsley drove with the seat pushed as far back as it could go, which still wasn’t enough as he could have used another foot or two. Anthony sat in the front passenger seat, which left us girls in the back seat, where Allison and I did our best to get more boyfriend information out of Tammy. From the front seat, Anthony informed us that the boy in question was a loner at school and looked kinda weird. Tammy shot back that that was like the kettle calling the pot black. I let her know she got the saying backward and she let me know it was a stupid saying anyway. Pots weren’t black and what the heck was a kettle anyway. She had a point.
The two-and-a-half-hour drive up the coast was mostly spent in silence; after all, my crew knew we went there on business, not fun. The Red Rider had abducted a young girl named Annie. It didn’t help my emotional state that the missing girl was only ten years old… as far as I knew, substantially younger than any of his other victims. This kid was in a boatload of trouble, and only my daughter knew the full extent of the story, since she always looked into my mind. Allison knew a lot too, having unprecedented access to my head thanks to our months of blood exchange. As in, me drinking often from her finger, a transfer which gave me strength and also emboldened Elizabeth, something I hadn’t been aware of at the time. The process also increased Allison’s witchy powers, too. Now, it gave us a helluva one-sided telepathic neural connection. I say one-way, because her mind, by orders of her witchy triad, was closed off to me. Well, not me, but Elizabeth... who saw and heard everything.
But... Allison’s access only went so far. I doubted she could have read the complete contents of Jeffcock’s letter from my memory, or pieced together much more than anything I was currently thinking about. But what I thought about was surely enough... a little girl in terrible danger. The worst imaginable, quite frankly, and I had gone through it too, once, long ago, in another life.
So, yeah, I held some of what I knew back. There was just... too much to share with everyone, and I wasn’t ready to share everything just yet... at least not all the personal details about my one-time father. And not with Annie still missing. Later, when the dust settled, I would catch them all up. Indeed, only Tammy, who had access to my mind 24/7, knew everything.
Kingsley, being an immortal, had no telepathic connection to my mind. Not all creatures are created equal, so to speak. Werewolves aren’t too big on the telepathic stuff for example. Lichtenstein monsters have none as far as I know, and merfolk? I’ve heard theirs is the most powerful, but it comes with a cost—it’s tied to sexual attraction. If someone isn’t attracted to them, their telepathic powers are far weaker than mine.
For now, the others knew a young witch had been kidnapped and that the man—or entity—was a bad mamajama, and it would take our combined might to locate her in time. Anthony had asked, “in time for what?” But Tammy just shook her head. She knew the contents of the letter I had read, and knew that the Red Rider didn’t just drink the blood of his victims, but feasted on them completely.
Troubled deeply and wishing like crazy we hadn’t delayed even the amount we had delayed, I willed Kingsley to floor it. But he didn’t. The man drove with surprising caution for an immortal. Then again, we did have my kids with us, neither of whom were immortal—I think.
I fidgeted, anxious, worried. A girl had been kidnapped by the very entity who had kidnapped me 500 years ago. My one-time father hadn’t been terribly clear how old I—rather Daisy—was when she died. Only that they had lived together for ‘many years’ after her mother passed away. Some part of me wants to say she’d been around eighteen. It had taken me all this time to get a whiff of my magic back... and just as it would’ve returned to me in this life, I had been rendered into a vampire.
Not about me, I thought. Not right now. Focus on little Annie.
I worried terribly about a scared little girl somewhere out there. Undoubtedly, I had been scared, too, having been stolen away from my father and held in a cave, where a creature had proceeded to devour me. And not just my physical body, but my magic too.
Christ.
“Mom...” whispered Tammy next to me. She shuddered.
I knew getting out of people’s heads was a problem for her. She heard all thoughts in an ever widening radius. And the closer the person, the more clearly she heard the thoughts. It was all she could do, she told me, to not go crazy. And even then, she still sometimes wondered if she’d already cracked. When she had said those words to me not too long ago, I had burst into tears. The words echoed my thoughts, and to think my precious little girl had uttered them too...
