“Thank you,” he said, meaning it from the bottom of his stolen, human heart.
Logan smiled a closed-mouth smile since she had yet to swallow the rest of her food. She took a big drink of the milk she’d poured after finishing her cider; cider wasn’t great with cookies. Then she set down the empty glass, wiped her mouth with her napkin, and said, “It’s the least I can do.”
“If you’d like, I’ll give you a tour of the rest of the estate,” Sam offered, feeling fortified and confident. He had all of Maldovan’s memories, so he knew this house as well as the guitarist did.
Logan nodded and pushed away from the bar, following him out of the dining room. As he took her from room to room, he concentrated on several things at once. He tried to appear unaffected by the wealth the house represented. He remained close to Logan – but not too close. And he thought furiously about how he was going to get her writing again.
Eventually, they came to his room, Dominic’s room, which was on the third floor of the mansion. It was a converted attic, complete with a few slanted ceiling spaces and floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out over the entire town beyond.
Sam entered and turned, watching Logan as she hesitated at his threshold. Her eyes were so big in her lovely face, so hesitant and uncertain. Her cheeks were flushed, her lips parted. Her gaze skirted over the interior of the room, taking it all in, and Sam had the sudden urge to reach out, grab her, and pull her in after him.
Why, he had no idea. It would accomplish nothing. It was just an urge.
“You do have posters of Dio on the wall,” she muttered, smiling to herself.
Sam tilted his head to one side. “So I do,” he said, his voice a little mystified. He smiled. “Why?” She seemed to be enjoying some inside joke. He wanted in on it.
But she shook her head. “Nothing.” And finally she entered the room.
“You like Tenacious D?” she asked, turning from a “D” poster to smile curiously at him.
Sam knew that Dominic appreciated the guitarist of the band; apparently he was quite talented. “Good guitarist,” he said by way of confirmation.
“Yeah,” Logan said, now grinning. “I agree Cage doesn’t exactly suck.” She moved on, eyeing his belongings like a kid in a toy store.
“Oh my God,” she suddenly said. She’d come to a stop in front of one of the many shelves that lined Maldovan’s walls. The shelves were polished oak and most likely meant for leather backed tomes, medical encyclopedias, and white washed skulls. But Maldovan had filled them with CD’s, trophies, ribbons, and photographs of abstract but admittedly beautiful things such as crumbling churches, raven silhouettes, and full moons. There were collectibles scattered here and there: a troll doll with black leather spiked cuffs and poufy black hair stood beside a bent black slinky. An Optimus Prime Transformer action figure stood tall behind a seated Jack Skellington figurine.
At one end of the shelf to Sam’s right, a very large Millennium Falcon was displayed. This is where Logan stood. She stared disbelievingly up at the vintage toy. Beside it, a LEGO castle had been carefully constructed and preserved with glue. On the floor beneath these stood a Star Wars AT-AT from the seventies. The items in this room were of a decidedly different taste than those in the rest of the house, but were nonetheless worth thousands of dollars.
“I don’t believe it,” Logan whispered. “Somehow I just knew you would have one of these.”
“My mother’s brother collected everything having to do with Star Wars. He had five of those Falcons,” Sam told her as he came to stand behind her. “He left that one in the box and gave it to me for my seventh birthday.”
Logan shook her head. She’d gone mute. He could sense a tension about her and recognized it at once. It was the same sort of tension that rode him non-stop when he was around her. She wanted to touch the toy. Oh, he knew the urge all too well.
“You want to see it?” he asked as he moved around her and took the Falcon off of its pegs on the shelf. Logan stepped back, immediately uneasy. She recognized the value of the item and no doubt had little desire to cause it any harm.
This time, when the urge came to seize her, Sam didn’t fight it. He held the large gray Star Wars space ship with his right hand, and with more speed than he should have displayed, he reached out for her with his left. His hand encircled her wrist, bringing her to a fast halt.
She froze, startled. He immediately let her go. “It’s okay,” he told her, shifting the antique toy from one hand to both. “Here, take it. It’s seriously fine.” He held the ship out for her and gave her a reassuring nod.
Logan hesitated a second more and then gingerly took the ship from him. She turned it around, ogling it as would a child.
“I take it you’re a Star Wars fan,” he teased gently.
She let out a breath. “You have no idea.” She shook her head. “When I was little, I decided that if there was a heaven, I wanted it to be Star Wars. I promised all of the forces in the world that I would be a good girl as long as they would give me a Millennium Falcon when I died.” She laughed. “I also had a thing for Vader.”
Now it was Sam’s turn to laugh. He should have guessed as much about her. The original Star Wars was of a different generation, but it was also timeless. A lot of people still loved it, and the franchise was certainly still alive. Darth Vader, or Anakin Skywalker, had only become more appealing of late. And if her writing was any indication, Logan Wright loved a good, charismatic bad guy… especially when he wasn’t really all bad.
After a few minutes, she handed the ship back to him and he placed it back on its pegs. Then she turned her attention to the LEGOs on the shelf.
“I also knew you would have these.” She turned to face him. “You know, I loved LEGOs as a kid but we could never afford them. So I would go over to a friend’s house and play with hers….” Her voice drifted off and an uncomfortable look crossed her beautiful features. She shoved her hands into the front pockets of her wonderfully form-fitting jeans. “Eventually she stopped letting me play with hers too.”
Sam’s gaze narrowed. “Why?”
Logan’s cheeks grew pink and her expression turned guilty. “Well…. I was sort of good at them, I guess.”
“It pissed her off, didn’t it?” Sam guessed. Envy had many faces. He was betting that a lot of people would be jealous of Logan as they had to try so very hard to have what they undoubtedly thought came naturally to her: beauty, intelligence, creativity. They had no idea that Logan Wright’s home life was riddled with more violence and sickness than any young girl should ever have to endure. That she wrote, in fact, to escape this pain. It was her only way out.
I will give you another, Dominic thought, as an idea occurred to him. And when I do, you’ll have all of the broken down hunk of junk space ships your precious heart desires.
Chapter Ten
Dietrich Lehrer shoved the tome he’d been scouring aside and pulled another one toward him across the chopping block table. He’d been at it for hours. The words were beginning to blur, despite his glasses.
“Anything yet?” Meagan Stone asked from where she sat at the other end of the long table going over her own pile of books. She looked as tired as he felt, and that was saying something, seeing as how she was a good twenty years younger.
“No,” he sighed. “Nothing.” He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “We might want to give up on this and work on the spell instead.”
“Should we go check on Logan and Dom?” Katelyn asked. She was across the library, seated in a window seat, one leg dangling over the ledge of the raised seat, the other bent, her boot no doubt leaving rubber scuff marks in the wood.
Dietrich took another deep breath and slipped his glasses back on. “Not yet.” He was worried about Logan and Dominic, Logan almost more so than Dominic. If what the police officer had told him was true, it was quite possible that Samhain, or rather Sam Hain, had left Alec’s body upon having it killed and had entered someone else’s.
/> Dietrich had made certain to check, and Dominic was wearing his medallion when they’d met him at the hospital. There had also been nothing outwardly similar between him and Sam. Hair, eyes, and facial features had all been decidedly Dominic’s. Hence, Dietrich was fairly certain that Sam had been unsuccessful in taking over Dominic’s body despite his intent.
Dietrich would need to talk to Dominic personally to find out what, if anything, Sam told him before the police arrived on the scene in that cornfield. It would help him figure out where Sam’s energy or essence had gone in the end. However, in the meantime, Dietrich was confident in the fact that Logan and Dominic were both themselves, they were both suffering, and they were in fact the perfect company for one another. He would only get in the way, and there was nothing either of them could do to help him or Meagan.
Plus, should something go wrong, he trusted them to call him. Between the two, chances were good at least one of them would keep his or her head long enough to dial his number.
Meanwhile, he’d retreated to the place he was most comfortable; the public library. The finished, restored basement and converted attic of the old four-story town library were regularly reserved for him whenever he wanted them. One room held the town’s archives, and the other all of its oldest, leather-bound tomes. A simple phone call to the librarian, and he had free and isolated access to both.
At the moment, he and the girls occupied the large, renovated fourth floor of the historic mansion. This was the attic. This very room of this very library was the main reason Dietrich had decided to settle down in this town. While he’d been earning his history degree, he’d done quite a bit of research as to where to find the best records for certain cultures in the United States. This city happened to have at one time been a hub for people from all secular and non-secular walks of life. It was a crossroads of happenstance, a place where families coincidentally came together from a plethora of very different backgrounds for the sole purpose of finding the one thing they could all understand and agree upon: Gold.
Their grimoires, Books of Shadows, diaries, journals, and family records were eventually collected and stored here, in the public library, and formed the secret jewel in the crown of Lehrer’s occult knowledge. It was the town’s best kept secret, and it was Dietrich’s as well.
Neither of the girls wanted to be alone after what had gone down with Dominic, so when he’d told them he was headed to the library, they’d offered to tag along and help him research.
They were searching for anything that would help them be rid of Samhain before the blue moon rose on Halloween night. At this point, they knew that the second full moon of the fated month would see the Lord of the Dead’s retreat back into his realm for good, but that was three weeks away. A lot could happen in three weeks, as tonight’s unfortunate events plainly illustrated. How much more damage could Sam do in that time frame? Far too much. Too many lives were at stake; they needed to send him back now.
If they failed to find anything of real value, he planned to fall back on a trusty protection spell for Logan. He and Meagan could conjure a fairly potent one together; defensive magic was more powerful than offensive. It was a karma thing, perhaps.
“Do you think Alec would come back to life if Sam were defeated again?” Katelyn suddenly asked as she stared out the window, swinging her leg back and forth. Dietrich straightened in his seat and blinked. The thought had honestly not occurred to him.
He met Meagan’s gaze across the table; she looked as taken aback by the question as he did.
Katelyn turned in the window and swung both legs off of the seat. “I mean, all of those other people did, right? So why would Alec be any different?”
“It’s an interesting idea,” Dietrich admitted. “And I honestly don’t know. But it’s all the better reason for us to forcibly send him back to his realm before the second moon. I’m not sure that allowing him to go back on his own would constitute a ‘defeat,’ and as such, that it would have the same effect on those he’d killed.”
“Well, I don’t know about anything that will help us defeat him, but I did find something here you might want to look at,” Meagan said. She gently but firmly grasped the edges of the book she’d been reading, a large leather-backed book with warped, brown-edged pages and weathered ink, and turned it toward Dietrich. He rose from his chair and moved down the table to get a better look.
“This part here about bards,” said Meagan. “I recognize the words.”
Dietrich had been teaching his witches how to read the older languages; it was good to see that some of the instruction had paid off.
“Yes, I see it.” He read carefully, having to go a little more slowly over the words that were hopelessly faded.
The passage talked about the power of the bard, stating more specifically that a bard’s magic did not necessarily arise only from the creation of stories, which could be passed from one generation to the next verbally, but also by the actual placement of ink upon parchment.
“If this says what I think it does,” he said, “it means Logan doesn’t necessarily have to write a story to give Sam the power he needs. She could just make any word, or even possibly a symbol, with a pen or pencil and she’d be doing essentially the same thing.”
“Does she know that?” Katelyn asked.
“After what happened at the dance, she seemed pretty adamant about not writing anything new at all,” said Meagan, “I doubt she’s going to put this to the test.”
“Still,” said Dietrich as he reached for his cell phone, “better safe than sorry.”
Chapter Eleven
“I got these when I was eleven or twelve and my guitar instructor wanted me to start writing my own music,” Sam told her as he rooted through Dominic’s closet. Up on the shelf over the hanging jackets and vintage t-shirts were several shoe boxes. He reached for the third of four and pulled it down, knowing exactly what he would find inside.
He left the walk-in closet, his prize in his hands, and shut the door behind him. Logan was standing on the opposite end of the room, her arms crossed over her chest as if she were uncomfortable. Nervous, maybe.
He could see that. She was standing in the private bedroom of her eight-year crush. There was bound to be some discomfort involved. But he would quell it soon enough.
He took the box to the bed and sat down on its edge, pulling the top off to reveal dozens, if not hundreds of identically shaped and sized LEGOs. Beneath the pile of toys were white stick-on labels that could be placed in a computer printer. Also in the box were two Sharpies, probably dried up at this point, a tube of super glue, also no doubt dried up, and a small plastic bag filled with countless magnetic strips.
“It was almost impossible to print out music notes at the time, so I used these to draw on the labels and then place the labels on the LEGOs,” he told her. This was too perfect. He knew she liked LEGOs – she’d told him as much – and this would trick her into writing without realizing she was doing so.
“What is all that?” Logan asked as she came closer to peer into the box.
“LEGO poetry,” he said, chuckling. “Or at least that’s the idea. You put words on the labels, then attach the labels to the LEGOs and then attach the LEGOs to the magnets.”
Logan frowned. “Why not just attach the label to the magnets and forego the LEGOs?”
He chuckled. “I guess it’s more fun to have something solid to grab onto,” he said. “Plus, the LEGOs are different colors. And, well, this is just the way it’s always been done.” He shrugged, grinning.
Logan returned the smile. “Got it. So, LEGO poetry. Interesting.”
“For some,” he said. “For me, it was LEGO music. I would put the notes on the LEGOs, stick the magnets on the other ends, and use them on the fridge to compose at random. Fooled my instructor every time.”
Logan looked from the box to him, a quizzical smile on her beautiful face. “But I’ve heard you play your own music. It’s really good. Don’t tell me you go
t it like this?”
Sam blinked. Dominic hadn’t known that she’d heard him play. The guitarist had gone still inside of Sam, a sensation of surprise and thrill thrumming through his musician’s soul.
“You’ve heard my songs?” Sam asked softly.
At once, Logan’s cheeks flushed pink, and she averted her gaze. Sam had the sudden impulse to reach out, grab her chin, and turn her eyes back to his. But that was him talking, the Lord of the Dead, the King of an entire realm, not Dominic. Dominic was patient – far too patient for Sam’s liking – but Sam had a part to play.
All in good time.
“No,” he admitted, saving her from having to answer. “I’ve written an honest song here and there. I just used this for the assignments I had to give away.” He smiled, throwing in a wink for good measure, and Logan’s shoulders visibly relaxed. “I was thinking that you could help me make some LEGO poetry,” he suggested now, being careful how he chose his words. He set the top down, shook out the box’s contents on the bed, and began to organize them while he looked up at her. “This can’t possibly be mistaken for real writing,” he said, keeping his grin firmly in place. “Just words, not put in any order.” He held up the magnets. “We’ll let the fridge do the story telling for you.”
She smiled, albeit nervously, but there was a twinkle in her eye that hadn’t been there a second ago. Like a true bard, Logan was just desperate to feel a writing utensil between her thumb and forefinger.
“It’ll take our mind off things,” he said, looking down at the bed now and allowing his voice to grow quiet for emphasis. “Maybe make us both feel better.”
As he’d suspected, she took the bait, almost instantly diving for anything that would take her crush’s mind off of the tragedy he’d witnessed that night. It didn’t hurt that it also involved writing and would help take her mind off of things too.