Samantha Moon Phantasm, page 128
part #9 of Vampire for Hire Series
“Are you seriously trying to tell me the Red Rider was more important or powerful than the Devil?” I blinked in shock. “Seriously?”
“More important to me, yes. More powerful, well that depends on your definition of power. Only a handful of people knew of him, and none of them continue to believe he exists, so his destruction is permanent. Unlike the Devil who is feared, reviled, and even worshiped by vast numbers of people. The Rider murdered innocents. He murdered you in a prior life.”
I folded my arms. Despite every bit of me wanting to accuse her of lying, I couldn’t. For an instant, I considered lashing out at her, but hesitated. Something was wrong here. My body ached, and I felt as worn out as a spent battery. My arms and legs cooperated only under protest, like I’d way overexerted myself at the gym and needed a full day to lie in bed and do nothing. That, and I couldn’t shake the sense of wonder and doubt triggered by J.C.’s comment to me that I was about to change. Well, Elizabeth somehow leaving my body and growing a new one certainly counted as change. But, what did that mean for me? Had I become human again? If so, attacking this bitch would be a huge mistake.
She laughed. “It would be a huge mistake for you regardless, dear. And no. You’re not human again, quaint and romantic as that idea is.”
“So…” I rubbed my stomach, which still ached. “What exactly happened?”
“Thank you, Samantha, for being a good little part of my plan. Fret not, my dear. You have taken your revenge, and you have given me what I wanted the most.” Elizabeth patted me on the cheek. “The world.”
I opened my mouth, but before a word could form in my brain, she patted me again.
Her palm touched my face with a crash like a thunderclap, knocking my surroundings into a spinning blur. Again, I felt as though I plummeted straight down past the ground and kept right on going, though by no means as gracefully or gently as my descent from the Origin’s doorstep.
No, this time, I fell like a damn rock.
Chapter Twenty-Two
I’m not sure at what point the disorienting spin-fall stopped and I found myself gazing up at a blue sky dotted with fuzzy white clouds.
One moment, I’m hurtling downward, tumbling over and over, too weak and out of it to even scream… the next I’m flat on my back. Well, at least my landing didn’t hurt. Or maybe I’m in so much pain from everything else, a high-speed collision with the ground didn’t even register on the ouch-o-meter.
Grass fluttering in a calm breeze tickled my cheek. Somewhere, birds chirped. The sun hung high in the sky, noon or close to it. An instant of panic started deep in my soul at being caught outside on such a bright day, but then I remembered my rings. I heaved a sigh of relief and raised my hands to smile at them—and stared in confusion.
No, the rings remained. That’s not what caused my brain to seize up.
My fingernails no longer looked grotesquely pointed. I lay there in the grass for a long few minutes, simply staring at my hands, at nails that looked exactly as they had for my entire life prior to that fateful night in Hillcrest Park.
Ooo-kay. That’s bizarre.
I concentrated on trying to extend my claws, but nothing sprouted from my fingertips. Umm… All right. I know I hated my fangs. I’ve tried as much as I can not to even think about them ever since I scared the crap out of some little girl years ago. Except for that time I got stuck in 1862 and had no choice but to feed from live cows, I’d largely almost forgotten I even had fangs. But, yeah. Vampire. The universe creates what people believe in, and people believe vampires and fangs are like pizza and pepperoni.
“Okay. This is for scientific purposes only.”
I braced my jaw and tried to extend my fangs… and felt like an idiot doing some kind of yogic eardrum-popping exercise. When that didn’t accomplish anything, I reached into my mouth and felt around at my canines. Even retracted, they’d been sharp enough to punch holes in thin metal sheets… but they felt normal now.
“Oh, this is too damn weird. What happened to me?”
Elizabeth? Are you there? I mentally lifted the rock off the oubliette lid, then pulled the lid open, searching for her. Only, it felt like the mental prison pit I kept her in had been filled up with dirt. No Elizabeth.
Gone.
My brain belonged to me and me alone.
I curled up in a ball and wept. How long I’d wanted to be free of her… It seemed too good to be true. But, really… it wasn’t good. Not at all. I had contained her specifically to protect the world. I accepted that role, but the bitch had a point. I really did resent having to be the one stuck with that job. But what if she hadn’t lied to me? If it had been her plan all along for me to do everything I did, with the climax of destroying the Red Rider… then it had never really been my destiny to ‘contain’ her. She only made everyone believe that. She’d made me believe that.
Or maybe it had been my destiny and I screwed it up. I let her talk to me. I listened.
Am I still a vampire?
I stared at the sun protection ring. Okay, a few seconds won’t kill me. It’ll hurt like a bastard, but it won’t kill me. I had to know. Hell, my claws were gone.
I hadn’t shaken like that since I’d been a little kid dreading what Dad would do to me when he got home. Okay, so I almost accidentally burned down the house, but I didn’t mean to. And hey, Dad didn’t even hit me. He wasn’t a violent guy. Violence took energy. Dad weaponized guilt. Talked at me for like an hour about how sad everyone would be if we lost our house.
Hey, it worked… I never did try ‘chemistry experiments’ with matches again.
Trembling, I grabbed the sun ring and eased it off my finger, braced for horrible pain.
The ring slipped free… and I felt no different. The sun warmed my face and hands, no burn. No pain. Not even discomfort. I swear I giggled like a six-year-old girl getting a pony for her birthday. Overcome by happiness, I leapt to my feet and danced around in circles for a little while.
My claws were gone… and maybe I’d miss them. They did come in handy. Fangs are gone, good riddance. Those things always bugged me. Such an inhuman reminder of being a monster. Wait a second… what’s that noise?
Thump. Thump. Thump.
Heartbeat… coming from… me?
My head spun.
More testing. I spun in place, gazing out over miles of endless meadow. It didn’t appear oil painted, nor did it look hyper-real, so I felt certain I’d fallen back into the third dimension. Exactly where I was, I couldn’t say. This field could’ve been in like Oklahoma as easily as Germany. Still, no one was around to see me. Did I still have a link to Talos?
I stripped naked. For a few seconds, the distraction of basking in the sun occupied me. Years ago, I’d been a beach bum. I never did the nudist beach thing; however, I’m a little short on bikinis at the moment. Basking in the sun, not having any fear of it almost brought me to tears. On a lark, I picked up a potato-sized rock and hurled it as hard as I could throw. It zoomed off as if fired from a cannon. Right. I remained much stronger than a human should be, about the same as I’d been as a vampire. Time for another test: I called out to Talos. The single flame appeared in my mind, dancing against a field of blackness. I felt myself moving toward it... rapidly.
The transformation, as always, was instant. I unfurled Talos’s great wings, stretched his long neck to look back the scaled, heavily muscled body.
Well, I was definitely not a normal human again. Though, I dare say I might not be undead anymore. I seemed to have a heartbeat and my hands, at least, didn’t look as pale as they should be. Or were. Not should be. I shouldn’t have been pale, that had been a side effect of undeath. They looked like me again.
Son of a bitch.
It occurred to me that the image of me I’d once seen in Max’s book with wings, before I’d met the Angel of Death, had been rather lifelike. Not pale and ghoulish like I’d been. Holy crap. My great dragon like head spun.
Talos, what the heck happened to me?
Hmm… I sense a great deal of… magic inside you now. It was not there before. It is powerful, but raw, untrained. I believe you may have absorbed some of the power that blasted away from the Red Rider when it returned to the third dimension. Perhaps that which he stole from your prior incarnation is once again yours.
Hmm. Elizabeth admitted to prodding me to miss my magic like a stolen puppy. But why would she do that? Oh, shit… If I really did have some scrap of creator power, how much of reality had I shaped?
Your incarnation this time was due for a peak in power. Fate has strange ways of ensuring it comes to pass. I believe you may have gotten your wish.
Am I a vampire? Elizabeth is gone. She’s not in here anymore. She… somehow made a new body for herself.
I cannot say for sure, but you no longer appear to be undead. You are no mortal, Samantha. Your soul remains fully contained within your body, still apart from the cycle. When your time finally ends, you will return to the Origin.
J.C. said I’m a creator. But I can’t believe that.
His smile stretched across the back of my consciousness. You wanted to fly, and you reincarnated as a dragon in a prior life. You continued wanting to fly, and here I am, happy to lend you my body in your world. You felt jealous of Annie and her relationship to the fairies, wanting your magic back… and here it is. You resented having to contain Elizabeth, and she is now gone. You may be a form of creator, but you don’t make whole worlds in hours.
She said I have a slow effect on this world. And, Elizabeth made me want my magic. Did I really want it or was that her mind-controlling me?
Talos seemed to think that over, or maybe peered into my head. I believe you convinced yourself that you had lost all hope of being the witch you were born to be in this lifetime. A part of you did desire it again, as she says. Elizabeth may have only brought the desire to the surface... while removing your barrier of grief and acceptance of loss.
I can’t grieve what I never knew. I sighed out the great dragon’s nostrils.
Well, you did see a fairy when you were nine, Sam. One does not have to be an adult for the cynicism of the world to cloud young eyes.
I felt like Kingsley during a discussion of higher dimensions.
Say again?
Talos chuckled. In simpler terms, your impoverished childhood placed the burden of maturity on you at a younger age. Your mind closed to the magic around you far younger than most.
So what the hell am I if I’m not an undead vampire anymore?
No idea. I am merely a dragon, not an Oracle. Perhaps your alchemist friend may offer some insight.
The exertion of the past hour or so finally caught up with me, and a strong pang of hunger gripped my gut. It felt pretty much the same as the few times I screwed up and went too long without a blood meal, but ever so slightly different. The lightheadedness and fatigue were new. I started to think about finding some pig blood, but the mere idea of drinking that mess brought me to the edge of vomiting again, so sick that I lapsed out of Talos form and fell on all fours, naked as a fairy in the grass.
The last time I threw up, I resurrected a source of ultimate evil. Not in a hurry to do that again. I clamped both hands over my mouth and tried to stop thinking about blood with little nuggets of pig flesh floating in it.
Oh, this is way too weird.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Well, I’ve found myself in stranger circumstances than this before—though not by much.
At least Talos remained connected to me. Why I found that a relief, I couldn’t quite say. I’d have been lying if I said I didn’t often miss being a normal human, though I needed to qualify that.
I plopped down in the grass and put my clothes back on, happy the ‘Talos test’ worked. Yeah, sure, for the first couple of months after my attack in Hillcrest Park, I tried to disbelieve what happened, begged the universe for a do-over, that sort of thing. But, honestly, I wasn’t so much opposed to being a vampire as I was to losing my family and the life I’d worked so hard for. My job at HUD, my husband, my kids… I once feared I’d lose all of it. And, well, I did lose everything except my kids. And I did kind of lose them in a way after all; they’re far different than they would’ve been normally.
Of course, Anthony would’ve been dead at seven otherwise. Yeah, maybe I would still have Danny in my life if I never became a vampire, but I’d have lost my son. That’s a trade I couldn’t make. Now I have another loss to worry about. Tammy, powerful as she is, was on a collision course with insanity or worse, suicide. Fortunately, a distinct difference existed between those who wanted to end their lives due to mental illness, and those who reached that point due to things like chronic pain—or in Tammy’s case—unending voices in her head. In those cases, the person didn’t want to die as much as they needed to stop the source of their pain.
I also considered the possibility that with Elizabeth now gone, the source of Tammy’s telepathic prowess was also gone; meaning, perhaps Tammy’s abilities would wane. Perhaps. But I suspected that her gifts had stuck, so to speak. Although awakened by the proximity of Elizabeth and enhanced by the demoness within, Tammy’s latent abilities had come through.
Still, fingers crossed that I would return home to find a daughter who would report a diminishing of telepathic power.
That is, of course, if all was well with them. In truth, I didn’t know where I’d landed or if my kids—and Kingsley and Allison—were okay. First things first... find out where the hell I was.
I stood, finished getting dressed, and looked around again at the pastoral field. Being outside in broad daylight without wearing my ring tweaked a nerve of dread, but I couldn’t argue that I wasn’t on fire—or even uncomfortable. I’d spent so long defying the sun with the medallion and rings that it didn’t feel too weird. Lord knew, I wouldn’t miss those fangs. I tried to ignore them so much I may as well have never had them.
Which brought up another issue. I presently felt hungrier than I could ever remember being. Wait, no. I hit this point once before in the past—and wound up attacking a creep at a parking garage in the midst of a blind frenzy. If I remained a vampire, and I didn’t even have fangs, how the hell was I supposed to feed?
Again, the mere thought of consuming blood made me sick to my stomach. I stopped thinking about it before remembering the way those little nuggets of pig gristle or skin felt going down my throat.
Why did such a normal reaction of disgust to that feel so bizarre?
Ugh.
Time to go home.
I closed my eyes, thought of home, and called the dancing flame, but only a faint spark appeared along with a withering pang of hunger that nearly put me on my knees. Dammit! Seriously? I can’t teleport anymore? That’s like taking the car keys away from an eighteen-year-old after she just got her license. My panic ebbed in a few seconds along with the wracking pain clawing at my guts.
Wait, no. The flame tried to appear. I was just too damn weak to do it. It hadn’t been that long since I fed, but as best I could figure, trying to hold myself together in higher dimensions took a lot out of me. Or maybe Elizabeth drained me to make herself a new body. And I also had an entire dimension’s worth of magical energy explode through me when the Red Rider died.
So, yeah, that could explain why I felt like a wrung out dish towel.
Guess I’m walking.
Wait…
I thought about the wings the Angel of Death gave me—and they sprouted into existence, unfurling into their feathered magnificence with a barely audible whuff—and a twinge of mild pain that reminded me I ran on empty. Every little supernatural thing I did hurt. No slight on Talos, but I love the way these wings don’t require I strip. Somehow, they phased right through my clothes, which made them quite a bit stealthier. Much easier to recover from a quick landing when I don’t have to explain why I look like I made a wrong turn at the nudist colony. Sad thing is, the area I grew up in back in California… people probably wouldn’t even notice or care about the nakedness. Lot of hippies around there.
Anyway… I pulled out my phone hoping to get some good news from the GPS app. It didn’t disappoint. I’m still in Cali, near the Carrizo Plain National Monument. Nice. Not too far from home.
***
I flew at a medium altitude, low enough for my still-sharper-than-human eyes to see people on the ground, but too high for anyone to perceive me clearly. If anything, they’d probably mistake me for a California condor or something. You know, because most people wouldn’t expect a woman with wings to be cruising around LA.
Soon after I glided in over Fullerton, I spotted my crew hovering around the Momvan in the driveway of my house. Though I couldn’t hear them from this altitude and distance, their body language made me think they tried to figure out where to go to find me. I leaned into a dive, picking up speed, and headed straight for them.
Tammy sensed me coming first, and pointed up. Okay, so her power hadn’t faded. Shit.
I swung my feet down and landed a bit harder than expected, on one knee with my fists against the driveway. I blamed the ungainly crash landing on fatigue and hunger. The instant my sneakers hit the pavement, a rush of energy hit me, like I’d started feeding on blood. Powerful blood too, like human blood.
And ugh. The idea of drinking blood seriously disgusted me.
“Whoa,” said Kingsley.
“Mom…” moaned Anthony in a tone he only used when genuinely sick or trying to fake his way out of school for the day.
“Gah!” Tammy grabbed her head. “Mom! Stop it!”
I lifted my head to look at them.
Kingsley swooned on his feet as if drunk. Anthony—back to his human form—leaned against the Momvan with an expression like he’d just finished running a marathon. Tammy scowled at me, though her mood radiated far more confusion than anger. Allison’s eyes rolled back into her head and she stood there like a zombie.
