Samantha Moon: First Eight Novels, Plus One Novella (65 page)

“Well, your clients are scumbags,” I said.

“
Be that as it may, they deserve a fair trial.”

“
Whatever helps you sleep at night, big guy.”

“
Why are you here, Sam?”

I stared at him...no doubt icily. He calmly returned my gaze. We did this for about ten seconds before I finally lowered my eyes and looked away. “I’m sorry,” I said. “That wasn’t cool. I guess I’m desperate.”

“A desperate vampire is a sight to see.”

“
A desperate mother is worse.”

He nodded and eased off the corner of his desk. He sat next to me and adjusted the drape of his pants. Kingsley, as always, smelled of fine cologne and that special something else. Something wild. He waited. As he waited, I gathered my thoughts.

Finally, I said, “The medallion that’s in my possession...”

He looked at me sideways, turning his head just a fraction of an inch. “What about it?”

“Is it really true that it can reverse vampirism?”

Although I wasn’t looking at him, I knew he had narrowed his eyes. Kingsley was nearly impossible for me to read psychically. I wondered if it was like that for all other immortals, too.

He said, “That’s the legend about it.”

“
What else do you know about it?”

“
I know that a lot of people are looking for it.”

“
People? Or vampires?”

“
Vampires are people, too,” he said, grinning easily. And then he grew serious. “Why, Sam?”

The smell of blood wafting up from the desk was diminishing. The growling in my stomach subsided accordingly. I told Kingsley about my plan, minus any references to Fang. There was no need to make the big werewolf jealous. Fang might be a freaky dude, but he was no physical match for Kingsley. At least, not presently.

Make me into a vampire, Moon Dance.

Yeah, I still haven’t forgotten those words.

Anyway, I laid the plan out to Kingsley, and as I did so, he leaned a meaty elbow against the chair’s arm and took me in, watching me closely as I spoke. And as I spoke, I couldn’t help but notice that the slight amber in his eyes caught some of the office lighting and reflected it back to me twofold. Tenfold. He can look so wild sometimes.

When I was done talking, Kingsley’s reply was instant and heart breaking: “I don’t like it, Sam.”

“What’s not to like?” I said, jumping up. I paced behind him. “I save my son and later, I return him to being human. It’s perfect.”

He was shaking his head, and the amber glow was gone from his eyes, replaced with something close to alarm. And also something else. Concern. “Unless it doesn’t work, Sam.”

“But why wouldn’t it work?” I heard the desperation in my voice, which had risen an octave or two. I spun on Kingsley, standing before him.

“
Because it’s just a story, Sam. A legend.”

“
All legends have some basis of truth. Look at us. And quit looking at me that way.”

“
What way?”

“
Like I’ve lost my mind.”

He stood suddenly and towered over me. “I don’t think you’ve lost your mind, but I think you’re desperate, and dangerous, and if you would for one second listen to yourself you would see how scary you sound.”

I looked up at him as he looked down at me. He was breathing hard, and I could hear his heart thumping through his wide chest. “Who do I need to talk to?” I asked. “Who would know more about the medallion?”

He looked at me long and hard. “Sam, please.”

“I’m going to do whatever it takes to save my son, goddammit.”

“
Even if it means turning him into a monster, Sam? Even if it means draining the blood from his body? And what if you can’t turn him back? What then, Sam?”

I heard footsteps just outside Kingsley’s office door. His new secretary was there. How much she’d heard, I didn’t know, but I suspected his doors were quite thick. If anything, she was concerned for her boss’s welfare.

I said nothing. How could anyone answer that question? Hell, has that question ever been posed before? Ever? In the history of mankind?

Kingsley continued, “I’ll tell you what would happen if you
can’t
change him back, Sam. Your son will be undead, like you. He will feed on blood, like you. He will be a monster.”

“
Like me?”

“
For all eternity, Sam. Your boy. Your little boy. Don’t do this to him, Sam. You can’t take this chance.”

I held his gaze long and hard. “Who do I talk to, Kingsley?”

He took in a lot of air, crossed his arms, and looked away. “Let me ask around, Sam.”

I nodded and felt a combination of joy and dread, fear and hope. “Thank you,” I said.

But he didn’t answer me or look at me, and shortly after that I left his office.

Chapter Forty-three

I had just slipped into my car after practically sprinting across the baking asphalt when my phone rang. Gasping and in real pain, I looked at the faceplate:

Caller Unknown.

Heart thumping and still reeling from my singed skin, I clicked on the phone.

“Hello,” I said. My face and hands were on fire, despite the copious amounts of sunscreen—and a sunhat that was wide enough to shade a small Balkan country.

“
Hi,” said the tiny voice, a voice that was somehow even tinier than I remembered.

“
Maddie!”

“
You know my name.”

“
Of course I know your name, honey.” But as much as I wanted to comfort her and reassure her, I needed information. “Maddie, honey, how many people live with you?”

“
Two grownup men now.”

“
Are they black or white?”

“
Bofth. The white man is new. He’s really mean.”

Maddie had a slight lisp and it was the most precious sound I had ever heard. I absently started my car and turned my air conditioner full blast on me, while huddling as far away from any sunlight as I could. My van’s side windows were equipped with pull-down shades, which I rarely, if ever, pulled up. The windshield sunshade was still in place, blocking most of the sun, although laser-like beams still found their way through here and there.

So there was a black guy and a white guy. The white guy, I knew, could have been Hispanic or even Asian. Maddie was only five. I doubted she saw race and color like an older child would. Or as an adult would.

Sherbet had confirmed the worse, that some kind of child swapping was going on. Children for drugs. Children for money. Children for sex. A slave trade where lives meant little, and no doubt most kids disappeared or ended up dead. Along with the mothers.

“Maddie, honey, are you in a house?”

“
A house?”

“
Or is it an apartment?”

“
Peoples live here. We take the vader.”

The vader? My head was swimming. Jesus, I had had my questions rehearsed for when and if I heard from Maddie again, but now all my questions had gone out the window.

Think. Focus.

“
Honey, what can you see from the window? Can you see anything?”

There was a slight pause. I heard her pushing aside what sounded like blinds. “I see a big house.”

“Where?”

“
It’s high on top of the biggest mountain I’ve ever seen!”

My heart started hammering. I knew Simi Valley. The federal agency I had worked for, HUD, used a facility outside of the city to hold seminars and training. The facility was away from prying eyes, up against the base of a majestic, sweeping mountain range. Or, perhaps, a very big hill. Certainly big enough to call a mountain if you were a small girl from the streets of Buena Park.

And at the top of the hill, majestically overlooking the city was a museum. Not quite a mansion, but it looks like one from a distance.

The Ronald Reagan Museum.

The Moon Feather Indian casino, if I recalled correctly, wasn’t too far away from our training facility, either.

She’s in Simi Valley.
I knew it. I felt it in every fiber of my being.

I also sensed something else. Or, rather
someone
else. And from somewhere over the phone line, I heard what sounded like a door slam followed by a man’s yell. The yell sounded drunken and angry.

“
I have to go,” said Maddie, whispering into the mouthpiece. Her whisper sounded nearly as loud as her little voice.             

The line dropped before I could say goodbye.

Chapter Forty-four

I was back at the hospital, sitting in a chair at the foot of my son’s bed. He was sleeping quietly. Too quietly. I would have thought he was dead if not for the hospital equipment that chirped out a heart beat.

The dark halo around him was bigger than ever. My son, to my eyes, seemed lost in a cloud of black smoke.

Sitting on my lap was a clipboard with a mostly blank sheet of paper I had found in the backseat of my car. The paper had my daughter’s name on it and the beginning of an assignment. I wondered idly if she ever finished the assignment.

I held in my hand a Pilot Gel Ink Rolling Ball pen, which I preferred to use when I did my automatic writing sessions.

Automatic writing is still new to me. In fact, I’d only done it a couple of times, and both times I was certain I was going crazy.

In essence, as it was initially explained to me by Fang (and verified by a little online research) the process of automatic writing is a way to communicate with the spirit world. In particular, with highly evolved enlightened beings who know what the hell they’re talking about.

At least, that was the idea.

Who or what came through in these sessions was certainly open to debate. And, yes, there was a part of me that seriously suspected I was moving my own hand, and giving myself the answers I wanted to hear.

Just a part of me.

The other part of me, perhaps the part that was still human, believed that I was getting messages from beyond. By spirit guides, or spiritual beings.

Or, for all I knew, Jim Morrison, unless he was alive, too, and working as a bounty hunter in Hawaii.

I went through the various steps of centering myself, imagining silver cords attaching themselves to my ankles and lower spine and reaching down through the many hospital floors, the building’s foundation, through the very ground itself, down through Hell and a lost world of dinosaurs, and all the way to the center of the earth, where I mentally tied them tightly around three massive boulders.

Now firmly anchored, I closed my eyes and attempted to empty my mind by focusing on the physical act of breathing, drawing air in through my nose and out my mouth, even if it was air I didn’t need. Except I kept thinking about my son, lying there just a few feet away, fighting for his life.

Focus, Sam.

I closed my eyes and, as I breathed, I pictured the stale, medicinal hospital air flowing over my lips and down deep into my lungs. I breathed in, holding the air, and then exhaled it.

I did this over and over, breathing and picturing, and any time I thought of my son, I gently released the thought.

In and out, in and out.

Breathe, breathe.

My hand twitched.

I kept reminding myself to breathe, and as I breathed I imagined the air currents tinged with gold, and the golden air flowing into my mouth and filling me with golden light.

My hand twitched again, followed by a full-blown spasm.

The pen gripped in my fingers moved back and forth.

It’s coming,
I thought. Whatever it is.

Keep breathing. Breathing. In and out. Golden light.

Jesus, my hand is moving.

Don’t think about it. Good, good.

But now I couldn’t deny that something seemed to have settled in me. I actually felt another presence. A warm and loving presence.

And then my hand moved again, and again, and I realized it was writing. I looked down at my clipboard as two words appeared:

Hello, Samantha.

Chapter Forty-five

“
Hello,” I said quietly, feeling slightly silly, but also feeling like something very important, and very exciting, was happening. “Um, how are you?” I added lamely.

My hand twitched again and again, and it kept on twitching until it wrote out a reply. I could only watch in stunned silence. My hand, in these moments, did not feel like my own.