own."
Manuel shed some wisdom, "Man is of the earth but cannot own the earth."
"Point taken," Hartwell replied as they walked up to a fire in the center of the camp.
Manuel was introduced to Carmen and her natural beauty literally took his breath away.
"She is the most beautiful woman I have ever seen," he said to Hartwell internally.
"Yes, she is breathtaking," Hartwell concurred.
"Why didn't you look at me this was when we first met?"
Carmen asked internally as Hartwell looked on. And then she smiled and Hartwell said, "How are you doing big guy?"
Hartwell immediately thought of Maggie, who was the love of his life, and she appeared in an outfit that was similar to Carmen's.
"He's spoken for!" she yelled and then popped out of the scene and was standing in the main room of Hartwell's house wearing the same outfit.
"Blake asked, "Where were you?"
"Not sure, but it was real dusty and some Native American woman was making a play for my man, but he thought only of me," Maggie proudly replied.
Blake laughed, "Could it be that you finally have him tamed?"
Hartwell had not been able to breach the parallel universe to that point.
"I love my wife!" as he kissed Maggie passionately right in front of Blake. He broke the kiss and said to Blake, "Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Agent Wallace! I gotta' go!"
And before either Maggie or Blake could ask the obvious question, "Where have you been?" Hartwell was standing next to Manuel and staring at a pack of angry and confused naysayers.
An elder grunted, "Diablo!"
"Maybe you shouldn't have disappeared and then appeared again? Now they think you're the devil," Manuel stated.
"Oh, that can't be good," Hartwell replied.
"I mean, they were thinking you were the devil purely by the color of your skin and then you left and came back, which basically confirmed their paranoid suspicions."
"So, what does that mean?" Hartwell asked as the two men started slowly walking backwards to stay ahead of the advancing mob.
"We either run, or you get us the hell out of here. And I've seen you run, so I would suggest Plan B, because we have some people that can run faster than the deer."
"Plan B it is!" Hartwell exclaimed amidst a cloud of dust.
NINETEEN
Hartwell and Manuel were back at their bench on the Beach Haven Boardwalk.
"That was a close one," Hartwell said. "What would they have done with me? Cooked me for dinner?"
Manuel replied with a straight face, "They would have cooked you, but fed you to the coyotes and buzzards."
Hartwell was ready to laugh until he realized that most of the joke was on him.
"What are you really doing here?" Hartwell asked in an attempt to avoid any more potentially death-threatening questions.
Manuel's first instinct was to continue to put Hartwell off until resolution, but the game had changed and he was in no mood to be under the microscope anymore.
"I was under the ground for the past 30 years and figured that some fresh air might do me some good."
"So, you were scared to come out because that woman we just saw was son angry with you?" Hartwell asked.
"How did you know?" Manuel asked.
"You didn't see that wild look in her eyes?" Hartwell asked.
"You must have really pissed her off!"
"I was out all night in the days and months leading up to our wedding, and I even invited a few of the women to the festivities," Manuel detailed.
Hartwell was flabbergasted, "Wait! Wait! Let me get this straight! You invited a date to your wedding?"
"It was actually a few dates," Manuel corrected.
"You invited dates to your wedding?" Hartwell exclaimed, and then the complete gravity of the situation finally caught up with him.
"She was the one who starting this whole thing!" he gasped.
She used black magic and turned you into a vampire!"
"Guilty as charged," Manuel replied.
"She must have either died, or lost interest," Hartwell surmised.
"No, that one would never have lost interest," Manuel explained in a way that he wasn't trying to seem self-serving.
"She was having way too much fun."
"Where am I on your family tree?" Hartwell asked.
"It was me then Alexander Lowery. That really wasn't my finest hour. I had a bit too much to drink and probably should have been cut off. Normally, I would have just drained him, but I passed out just before he was about to cross the threshold.
"So, you're saying that I should have died in my house in San Francisco?" Hartwell asked with a hint of sobering reality.
"Yes," Manuel replied. "But, frankly, I'm glad I passed out and you got to see your family again."
Hartwell smiled, "Yeah, me too." Then he asked the question that was at the forefront of his mind. "Where do we go from here?"
Manuel thought about the query and offered very little in terms of clarity.
"You know, for the first time since I came out of my coffin, I'm not really sure what comes next?"
Hartwell took the opening as an opportunity.
"Well, maybe we should start by going home."
Manuel nodded in agreement, "It's been a long time since I've been anywhere that remotely resembled home."
"Except maybe that coffin."
"Yeah, there is that," Manuel chuckled and agreed.
And then the pair was standing in front of Hartwell's house.
"You know we still have that pesky problem of Gabriel," Manuel stated before they walked into the house.
And then Hartwell understood what Manuel was trying to get at since they met.
"It's never going to end, is it?"
"No, not unless we do something about it," Manuel replied.
Hartwell nodded as they glided toward the front door.
"Then we'll do something about it," he stated. Although he wasn't sure what that 'something' was, he knew that it would require a supreme sacrifice on their part. But whatever he could to help his family and keep his loved one's out of harm's way, he was on board for. And it appeared that Manuel Ortiz had his back and would support any decision they jointly made.
TWENTY
While the ape formerly known as Gabriel Billingsley wasn't sure who he was calling via his distress growls and grunts, he knew that his emotional pleas would not fall on deaf ears. He had impatiently waited in the confining space of the ape exhibit at the Beach Haven Zoo, until he decided that he could bare the weight of frustration no more. So, he simply swung his way out of the zoo at night, using the trees adjacent to the exhibit to leave the area undetected by spying security cameras.
Since Gabriel was the leader of the pack, all of the other members followed him without hesitation back to the vacant house they had been previously living. The familiarity of the scents of this location eased the transition and opened the door for the other apes to regain their previous powers. And for that task, he called on his witch, Brenda Vinson.
"Gabriel is at it again," Brenda said to her daughter Linda as they sat and got the mani/pedi special at Beach Haven Nail Salon.
"You better go talk to Hartwell before things get out of hand again," she added.
Linda didn't dare question her mother's sixth sense about such things, because her entire body was tingling from the recent surge in paranormal activity.
"What's going on?" Linda's daughter and Brenda's granddaughter asked as she leaned forward and sensed something was wrong. She had also felt the surge but didn't want to stir up trouble. It had been a stressful couple of months for the newbie witch, and she was looking forward to a normal life with her family. Her mother had been on the run from Lowery since the day she was born, because she didn't want him finding out about his daughter.
The usual answer to one of Claire's open-ended questions would be to say nothing and quickly close to door to curiosity.
/> But the girl was now of age and her predecessors had to start treating her more like an equal, a woman, a witch.
"It's starting again," Linda Vinson said to her daughter.
Claire was about to panic and react emotionally, but her grandma'- who she had lived with her entire life- nipped that in the bud.
"Claire Rebecca Vinson! If you want to be one of us take your emotions and turn them into action!"
She lovingly put her hand on her granddaughter's face and added, "Together we can do anything."
Claire calmed down and regained control of her rampant emotions. She then turned to mother and grandma' and asked with all of the maturity of a woman.
"What do you need me to do?"
Brenda looked at Linda and it was Linda that made the somewhat surprising assignment.
"For starters, you can reconnect with Hartwell's son."
Brenda and Claire hadn't realized that Linda was privy to that connection.
"Daniel?" Claire asked.
"Yeah, he holds the key to anything we can accomplish."
Brenda was usually the one who came up with the master plans, so she was curious of the direction they would be taking.
"So Lin, what do we hope to accomplish?"
Linda Vinson replied without hesitation.
"A life together."
The other two nodded in agreement and then sat back, waiting for their nails to dry.
Back at Hartwell's house, people had been coming and going so fast that Agent Blake Wallace could barely keep up with it.
Strange things had always happened with anything and anyone associated with Hartwell, and Blake was the resident expert about all things to do with Hartwell- being that he spent his entire F.B.I. career tracking the whereabouts of the vampire, while also keeping an eye on his daughter Nicole.
There was an audible buzz throughout the house, and any remaining stragglers had been awoken and naturally moved to