Suddenly Sam (The October Trilogy) (15 page)

He looked back down at the gathering.

The story had come to an end. Sam moved toward Logan, and she rose, coming to her feet.

Lightning
arced directly overhead. This time, its thunder rumbled low and menacing, scraping along a trembling ground and filling the surrounding forest with thoughts of primordial fear. Above the masquerade floor, the flickering flames began to go out, one after another.

At once,
Dominic realized that this was his chance.

Chapter Twenty-One

Not again.

Agony reached right through Die
trich’s lungs and pierced his soul. He was losing this fight. It wasn’t a fight for his life, but for his sanity.

Not one more time,
he thought.
I can’t do this even one more time.

If he did, he was certain he would lose his mind.

He’d already inhaled seventeen times. It was impossible not to count. There was nothing down here in this darkness but the sadistic passage of time and the pressure of the water – and the death.

Nothing….

Nothing… except clouds?

Dietrich
would have groaned if he’d had the breath for it. He would have whined and whimpered like a dying animal. He’d thought he’d had one more death in him before this would happen, but the vision materializing before his eyes proved otherwise.

Wisps of what looked like clouds were coalescing in the darkness of the water. They swayed for a moment, like th
e steam rising from a cup of coffee, and then drew together to form the image of a beautiful woman. Her long white hair waved around her like a mermaid’s mane. She reminded Dietrich of a bansidhe.

I’m hallucinating.

It was over now for sure. From now on, his mind would commit acts of ever worsening insanity, and interlacing that madness would be pain. Always the pain. For eons to come.

You must pay attention, wizard
, said the woman in the water.

Dietrich blinked. It did no good in the water, of course, but it was a natur
al reaction. The pressure outside his lungs longed to even out. He was sheer moments away from inhaling.

Withdraw from your self-
pity,
the woman told him. Her voice was beautiful, melodic and clear, but her words stung. He had the sudden impression that if she could pop him upside the head, she would have.

My hallucination is badgering me.

Remember!
The woman in the water insisted.
Remember who you are!

The image faltered, suddenly
disintegrated, and then re-coalesced, like a dust devil dissipating and then re-forming into its twisted shape. This time, it was not a beautiful woman Dietrich hallucinated.

It was a goblin.

Oh gods
, he thought, feeling his heart pound like mad.
I forgot
.

He kept forgetting
. What was it going to take for him to remember that he was no longer human? That he was a monster a full two feet taller than normal and twenty times as strong?

As soon as he remembered, the image was gone, dissipating once more and this time staying gone. The fragments of its wisps melted into the water, darkening until they were no longer visible.

Dietrich gritted his teeth so tight, he was sure they would crack, but this time he remembered they weren’t human teeth. They weren’t capped or crowned or just plain old middle-aged teacher’s teeth. They were goblin teeth, and they were even tusks.

He reached down to the rope tied around his waist. It had prevented him from swimming away, from trying desperately to reach the surface before he had to inhale once more. He’d given up on it because he couldn’t reach th
e knot behind him, much less undo its intricate loops and ties. It had never occurred to him that he would be able to simply tear the rope apart with his bare hands.

Now he grasped it tightly, feeling his mass
ive hands curl easily around it. Suddenly, it felt like tissue paper.

McCay and Briggs hadn’t considered that he wo
uld break free. They were rash and impulsive and never thought things through all the way.

They were boys. Boys always messed up eventually.

Right now, Dietrich couldn’t have been happier about that particular personality fault.

He pulled, using the muscles the poison
of the Hell Hound had given him. The rope made a ripping sound that carried easily under the water. It was loud and wonderful, and in sheer seconds, Dietrich was free from the rope’s hellish hold.

He shoved himself upward, aiming in the opposite direction
to the rope, having no other indication of which way was up and which way was down.

But a few seconds into his mad-dash swim, Dietrich realized his mistake.
His massively strong goblin body was taking him up faster than he should have gone. And he had no way of evening out the pressure.

A dull ache began in his shoulders, but this dull ache increased to a terrible sharp pain within sheer split moments. His skin began to itch – furiously. It felt as if insects
were crawling all over him. Then his skin began to sting as if those insects were biting him. The pain in his shoulders spread down his body to his hip joints, his knee joints, and his ankles, and before long he was engulfed in a throbbing disruption in every single joint in his body.

I’m getting the bends
, he thought, and it was so much worse than that too – because the pressure in his lungs hadn’t gone away. He couldn’t believe he’d managed to not inhale this long as it was, and now he was falling victim to decompression sickness. He wasn’t going to make it. He had to stop. And he had to breathe.

No. Not one more time!

He was going to die yet again in this hellhole of a water pit. And each time, it was so horrible, it killed a new piece of his soul. Dietrich honestly felt as if his mind had become a cracked vessel, delicate and strained. One more thunk and it would go – shattered into a thousand pieces.

He opened his mouth….

But a hair’s breadth of time before he would have inhaled that killing mouthful of liquid, a white light opened up before him. He froze, temporarily and mercifully distracted from that suicidal inhalation.

T
he light in front of him spread, becoming the ring of a magic portal. That ring shot toward him, engulfed him, and he was suddenly yanked through the portal and sent hurling through time and space.

In the portal, Dietrich
inhaled.

Chapter Twenty-Two

Lehrer came out spinning end-over-end as if he’d gone in doing somersaults, and water went spraying everywhere as the portal ejected him with exactly the amount of force Meagan and the others imagined it would. They’d prepared for it this time, though, gauging how far he would go and hurriedly throwing down their jackets and outer sweaters where they figured he’d land.

To their great fortune, they’d estimated right on.
Meagan watched, wide-eyed, as Lehrer shot through the air in a wet, spraying arc, and then slammed into the ground directly on top of their clothing. He rolled right off again, though, tumbling a few times across the unforgiving rock surface before coming to an absolute stop. He lay still and prone, and the worst kinds of thoughts cascaded through Meagan’s mind.

She, and the others
hurried to his unmoving form, kneeling beside him. She needed their help in turning him over; his goblin body was immensely dense and heavy. But they were rewarded for their efforts when her grove leader let out a low groan and began coughing. It was a wet, wheezing cough that sounded so miserable, Meagan couldn’t help but feel wretchedly guilty.

“Mr. Lehrer!” she exclaimed, breathing hard with fear. “Can you hear me?” She didn’t know why she was asking him that. Perhaps thoughts of water pressure and exploding
tympanic membranes. Everything seemed chaotic to her. She wanted to use her magic to heal him, but he was clearly alive, and if he was coughing, then he was expelling the water from his lungs.

He coughed some more, and Katelyn said, “Move him on his side.”

Together, they rolled him back onto his side. She was no doubt thinking he would vomit up lungs-full of water, but it turned out that whatever he’d had in his lungs, if anything, he’d already expelled.

“His lungs are strained,” said Draper. “It will take him a moment before he can speak. But he is going to be well.”

*****

Twenty minutes later,
Meagan stood over the unconscious forms of Nathan McCay and Shawn Briggs and shook her head. “They look almost human right now.”

Both boys seemed wrapped in a peace that belied the monst
ers they’d been half an hour ago. It reminded her of how little three-year-old hellions could suddenly look like angels once they were unconscious and tucked into their beds.

She’d done a lot of babysitting.

“In sleep, we revert to what we once were,” said Draper.

“And they were once human,” said Katelyn.
“But I seriously can’t believe they’re still out cold. That was one hell of a spell.” She looked over at Meagan, her eyebrows raised. “You think it’ll last much longer?”

“I don’t know. Probably not. We should do s
omething to protect ourselves,” Meagan replied.

Mr. Lehrer came up beside them.
“I have an idea.” His voice was scratchy and raw. He tried to clear his throat, failed, and swallowed hard instead.

Meagan
waited until he wasn’t looking at her, and then studied him over, concerned. He didn’t look good. Actually, he looked like a goblin freshly pulled from the water, but it was what she saw in the depths of his eyes that left her feeling disconcerted.

He seemed different somehow. Very, very tired at the least.

“Katelyn, give me your life pendant,” he instructed softly, holding his hand out. His eyes were on the sleeping vampires, so he didn’t see her expression of worry.

But Meagan nudged her and nodded. She had a feeling she knew where he was going with this.

Katelyn took a deep breath and unlatched the necklace, giving it to her history teacher. He looked up when it landed in his palm, then turned to Meagan. “We can duplicate this. It’s a spell I haven’t yet taught you, but you’re more than ready for it now. And if we do it together, it’ll work twice as fast.”

She nodded.
“But what about them?”

“I have a hunch…
.” Lehrer frowned as he looked over the vampires again.

“You have a hunch that if we place the life pendants on them, it’ll lock them in their human forms.” She’
d had the same passing gut feeling, but had been afraid to voice it.

Lehrer
met her gaze. Again, she was struck with the new depths to his eyes, and the worry inside her ratcheted up a notch.

He nodded and looked away. “
These pendants contain within them the essence of life, and a vampire’s essence is shrouded in death. One might cancel out the other.”

Yes, but which one?
Thought Meagan. It was another thought she chose not to voice. “Let’s give it a shot,” she said instead.

“Very well, but we’ll need to add a stipulation that will prevent the amulet from harming anyone who wears it, or it’ll end up burning a hole through them while they sleep. P
lace your hand over mine,” he instructed. She laid her hand over the life pendant, sealing it off between their palms.

“And repeat after me.”

It was much less of a drain on Meagan than she’d expected it to be, but then it had become quite clear that October Land amplified her magical abilities. They seemed to have done the same with Mr. Lehrer. The duplication spell took two people to cast, which was both fitting and ironic. Within minutes, the two had created  seven new pendants – one from Katelyn’s pendant, then two more from those two, then four more from those four.

“Plenty to go around and extra just in cas
e,” Meagan said as she took one of the pendants and secured it around Shawn’s neck. Lehrer did the same with Nathan.

“
Can they take them off again?” asked Katelyn as she lifted up Nathan’s hand to remind everyone about the black gloves they both wore.

“Probably,” said Meagan. “But why would they want to?” If she was given a choice between being herself and being a bastard, blood drinking monster –

“You know,” said Katelyn, “ the whole ‘sleep all day, party all night, never grow old, never die’ thing.” She was quoting The Lost Boys.

“You forgot the ‘but you must feed’ part,” countered Meagan.

Both girls found themselves considering that then, and the whole thought of drinking blood was so wretchedly disgusting to them, they simultaneously shivered at the thought, and the discussion came to an end.

“What now?” Katelyn asked as they moved away from the two sleeping vampires and back toward the forest line. It seemed the only way to go.

“Now we locate Logan,” said Lehrer.