Through Logan’s curse of empathy, Sam saw a living person, breathing, heart beating, soul burning bright, and understood the boy’s need. And the pain the boy would endure if his older sister was taken from him.
But the scene changed, shifting from bedroom to hospital room, and Sam was suddenly witnessing a man, standing still and alone at the side of a bed. A woman, wasted away but once obviously beautiful, lay unmoving beneath the thin sheets. The smell of antiseptic permeated the air. The man leaned down, brushed a long black lock from the woman’s bony cheek, and sucked back a sob that threatened to overwhelm him.
Out in the hall, a young boy with black hair and green eyes listened. He listened for the sound he had been dreading. The sound of his father’s tears. Because then he would know she was gone.
The boy’s name was Dominic Maldovan. He, too, was a child. This time, in every sense of the word.
In another hospital room, in another time and place, Sam beheld a young mother, her heart ripping itself to shreds as she sat on the edge of a bed and leaned in to steal one last hug from her baby girl’s limp, still warm form. For a short, terrible instant, because of Logan’s spell of empathy, Sam was this mother – this mother losing her child to disease.
Sam cried out, the pain overwhelming. He never could have imagined it.
And Logan cried as well. Because she always would.
We live and lose, Sam. We surrender in the end – to you. You’re right. Everything comes your way in the end. But it’s everything before then that is important. This is what you have not known and therefore cannot understand.
Sam listened to her, to the magic of her spell, as she showed him what it really meant to be alive. He had no choice. The magic of what she was showing him was more powerful than he was. It was more powerful than death.
He moved on, witnessing births and deaths and sicknesses and recoveries. He saw children learning to ride their bicycles, couples wedding their best friends, gatherings and parties and funerals and wakes. He saw celebrations and birthdays – and his spirit held its breath as he beheld children in costumes. They were trick-or-treating, smiling and laughing and wishing that every day could be Halloween.
They were wishing that every day could be Samhain.
They trusted him. Of all creatures. Children looked up to him. The faithful worshiped him. And all this time, he had looked down on them, the mortals who were but drops in the ocean of time, whose spirits entered his realm in the masses and whom he had never cared to know or understand.
Logan showed him the graves of the people he stood among, the graves of those that made up the border between October Land and the Realm of the Dead. She thought of the illnesses that had taken them, both physical and mental. She thought of the tears shed on their behalf, of the pain suffered for them even after their deaths.
Life comes with a quid pro quo, Sam.
It was something she, herself, had only just come to realize. Just as it is for a child who is given permission to go out but must return at a certain time, there were rules. There were curfews.
It comes with conditions, she told him. Life is given, and it truly is a gift. It is given in exchange for responsibility… and hardship.
She thought of the grave of the four-year-old girl. Annie.
For some more than others.
She thought of her own brother, Taylor, and the way so many people assumed he was her cross to bear, her burden. His sickness made him violent, left him trembling, and haunted his every waking moment. He had unwittingly tortured his family with this illness for the duration of his life.
But how many people on the verge of death, if given the choice of further life in exchange for the care of a man such as Taylor would say no? How many?
Logan realized that Taylor was her curfew. He was her life condition. And probably only the first of many.
And something else she realized – just then, just in that very moment – was that Taylor’s life condition was so much worse than her own. His curfew had begun at birth. What he had to give in exchange for existence was literally unimaginable. It left him virtually destroyed.
Sacrifice.
All of the best magic required sacrifice.
And life was the most magical of all magic spells.
Chapter Thirty-One
When the visions faded and the spell ended, Logan opened her eyes.
She let her hand drop from Samhain’s black-clad chest and watched as he slowly lowered his head, his eyes closed. But upon his cheeks were the remnants of liquid proof. He had felt the empathy he had until now been incapable of feeling. It was the empathy of the living, felt by the Lord of the Dead.
In the aftermath of the spell, the world seemed winded. It was out of breath and dipped in silence. Logan could feel everyone watching – Alec, Dominic, Meagan, Lehrer, Draper, Katelyn, the Harvesters – everyone.
Sam opened his eyes.
Where there had been cold gray steel and the wicked glow of liquid lightning, there were storms now, deep and dark and troubled. There was a wretchedness to the knowledge in their depths, taking their mesmerizing pull deeper than ever before.
Samhain had always been beautiful. But now he was perfect.
And there was a part of Logan that loved him. Always had.
“Send them to their home, Sam.”
Sam gazed down at her for a long, long time. “No,” he said, and his voice was choked with the empathy of a billion-billion deaths. “Not their home. Your home.”
The portal on the hill in the not-too-far distance at last cracked open to its widest breadth, and a swirling light built up inside. Sam stepped back from Logan, his eyes remaining locked on hers, and as he did, he waved his hand.
The necklace around her neck unclasped and tumbled to the thorn covered ground.
That ground rumbled a second time, as if in echo of the promise she had made only moments ago. It rumbled now with a new promise, a new spell.
Sam stopped several feet away. There, he raised his hands at his sides, palm-up.
His gaze searched hers, his spirit touching her soul. He swallowed hard, and smiled a small, tender smile. “I will see you in seventy years,” he said softly. “Give or take.”
“No,” she corrected him. No, she thought. Please not that long. She needed him. She needed the magic and the mystery. She needed Samhain in order to stay sane as she paid life’s dues and kept her curfews and met its conditions. “I’ll see you every night in my dreams,” she told him. Our dreams, she thought.
And he heard her.
Because his smile spread, and she caught just a hint of wicked, promising fang – before he spoke the single, powerful command that caused his spell to erupt like a furnace blast over Fall Fields.
Everyone cried out as the wind hit them hard, knocking them backward. Somewhere along the way, as they tumbled through the air, things began to change.
*****
Dietrich Lehrer watched, suspended in the supernatural, as his hands shrunk and the hair that had sprouted over them like a thick fur rug began to recede and disappear.
He felt his tusks shorten, his head crackled, and clothing he’d left in his closet in his home somehow, miraculously, found its way onto his body.
Strength ebbed away, so vastly different from his own, that it was noticeable as it left, even though he floated in a white and blurry nothingness.
He was no longer a goblin. The Hell Hound’s poison had been removed from his system. He was a history teacher once more.
*****
Shawn Briggs became aware that he was floating. There was no up and no down, only light and blurriness. Memories flashed before his mind’s eye – things he’d said and done. He saw Meagan Stone’s face, her beautiful eyes. And then he felt his teeth, long and sharp and deadly, begin to diminish in his mouth. The ache, the need for blood that had been with him since his transformation began to recede. He felt weaker… but wiser. He felt human.
*****
Alec Sheffield
stopped in his tracks. His boots made a scuffing sound on the wet pavement. He looked around himself to find he was in an alley. Fall Fields was gone. The Harvesters were nowhere around. Sam was gone – Dom….
Alec lowered his arm, dropping the leather backpack he’d been carrying. He knelt, rummaged quickly through it, and withdrew the sterling silver lighter he’d been given one year for his birthday. He raised it to the light and peered into its shiny surface.
It was his own visage reflected back at him, his own face, his own eyes.
He opened his mouth – no fangs.
Slowly, wrapped in awe and wonder and a slew of warring emotions, Alec got back to his feet. Somehow, things had been set right. Logan had done something. She had somehow gotten through to Sam, and he had reversed every wrong he’d committed.
Alec closed his eyes.
Now it was his turn. He, too, had done some terrible things. There were people he had well and truly hurt. People who meant a lot to him.
Amends would have to be made.
*****
Dominic threw back his head and cried out in agony and unutterable relief as Alec’s spirit was ripped from his and he was once more free of possession. His mind was his own.
His body, coasting in some bizarre never-where of white and nothingness, came next, its transformation less immediate. It was more than Alec’s possession that had forced him to take vampire form. It was a truth that burned him like a brand. It was the very essence of who he was and what he wanted from Logan that had carved out the path he took as he went from man to monster.
He wanted to bite her again. Hell, he’d wanted to taste her for years.
When Alec had pierced Logan’s wrist with his teeth, Dominic had pressed the fangs deep. When Alec pulled her blood into his mouth, Dominic pulled harder.
Until he had finally realized what he was doing. It hit him like a sledgehammer, sudden human reason in the mind of a maniac, and then and there, as he swallowed her up and drank her in, he loathed himself as no man ever has.
He won out, forcing Alec to release her, and even managed to do so with some semblance of the tenderness, of the love he felt for her.
He knew – he knew deep down – that if it had been him and only him, he never would have hurt Logan. But he felt unsure now, of his own strength, of his own will. But he had learned a lot about desire. It had to be tempered. It had to be controlled.
This was the lesson learned that separated a boy from a man.
And Dominic Maldovan was a child no more.
*****
Logan watched the others slip through the magic of Sam’s spell and enter the portal that would take them back to the mortal realm.
But she remained.
Only for a moment.
There in the field of black roses overlooked by the castle of her one-day king, she stood toe-to-toe with the spirit of Halloween.
He must have known he had but this tiny fraction of time, because he cupped her cheek, his touch tender and true. And then he lowered his head, and his silky black hair brushed her cheek. She closed her eyes as his lips delicately brushed hers.
So soft, she thought.
She caught the scent of spice and wood smoke and caramel apples, and moaned softly against his lips. He pulled away for the briefest moment, long enough to look into her eyes. And then the scent of Halloween rushed her again, warm and comforting, familiar and wonderful. His lips crashed down upon hers a second time, opening her up and drinking her in. She could taste the cinnamon on his tongue, the fire of promise in the depth of his kiss. Perfect.
A hot blanket on a cold winter’s day, a sip of cocoa when you’re shaking, a favorite stuffed animal…. It was all there, in his tender, brutal kiss. He trapped her face in his hands and ensnared her with his passion, with his desperation.
With his love.
It literally took her breath away. But it lasted precious short seconds before he slowly, so slowly, pulled away.
He said not a word. Every word that needed to be said had already been spoken.
Logan blinked.
And found herself standing in her bedroom beside her bed. She glanced down.
Upon her pillow was a single black rose.
Chapter Thirty-Two
Logan closed her locker to find herself face first in a rainbow of colors – again.
She peeked around the flowers at the witch holding them. “He’s still sending them, huh?” she asked.
Meagan smiled. “Yeah, this is number seven.” She shrugged. “He’s been pretty relentless.”
Logan twisted the padlock’s combination to mess it up and hugged her books tighter to her chest. They weren’t schoolbooks. They were notebooks, each one filled with her words from cover to cover. It was time to take them home and switch them out for new ones. She’d filled them in less than a week.
“He feels pretty bad about the way he behaved when he was….” Meagan trailed off, looking over her shoulder at the students passing by. The halls were still fairly crowded. She lowered her voice and leaned in. “You know. Fangtastic.”
Logan did know. The last five days had been a period of major adjustment for the group of friends. Their venture into October Land had left some of them scarred, some of them changed, and all of them with more than enough to think about.
Even though Sam’s parting spell had set everything “right” that he’d put wrong, he hadn’t turned back time. It was still Halloween night when they made it back into the mortal realm through that Fall Fields portal. What his magic had managed to do, however, was smooth over the period of time in which they’d been missing. No one had known they were gone. Their grades hadn’t suffered. No one missed them at work. It was as if those days simply hadn’t existed.
Eight people – Logan, Megan, Katelyn, Dominic, Alec, Shawn, Nathan, and Mr. Lehrer, had basically aged what felt like twenty years in what was to the real world no time at all.
But what Sam’s magic had not been able to do was erase the experiences they’d all suffered through. They seemed to have been hardest on Lehrer himself.
He’d never told anyone exactly what happened to him while he’d been trapped in that pool in October Land – or what Nathan and Shawn had done to him prior. But Logan had a good imagination, and as far as she was concerned, you didn’t need one to imagine what had gone down.
Vampires were cruel. She knew that now firsthand. And water was not air.
He’d most likely drowned countless times. Logan didn’t want to think about what such a thing would do to a person psychologically, but she had no choice. She always thought about things like that. And Mr. Lehrer was a friend.
History was a difficult subject, one Logan liked to think of as “spiny.” It wasn’t that it was hard to comprehend or that it required “figuring out” like other subjects did. It was that history was both good and bad. It was good in that it had the potential to teach lessons. But it was bad in that those lessons were composed of pain, death, disease, war, famine, and torture. Worst of all was that the human race never learned its lessons anyway. So to her, it was a study in pointless suffering.
Horror movies were rated “R” to keep out those who might be negatively affected by the violence upon a screen. But there was of course no ban on teaching children history. Logan sometimes felt it was unfair that they were forced to sit through what amounted to “true crime” tails of murder and misery, especially when it would change nothing. And extra especially for someone like Logan, who had always possessed far too much sensitivity and empathy for her own good.
Then again, she was not so shortsighted that she would fail to recognize the value of learning these things – that faint prayer that future situations might be changed or turned, that fist gripping hope that a generation might be spared of intolerance and persecution.
But regardless, for someone like Logan history was painful. And now, she suspected that for Mr. Lehrer, it might feel the same. Because word had it he had put in his resignation and would
no longer teach history at Silver High as soon as he could find a suitable replacement.
Logan imagined it might be much more difficult to objectively teach a subject in which there was so much death when you had experienced it yourself firsthand – several times over.
“Are you meeting Mr. Lehrer tonight?” she asked Meagan.
Meagan placed the flowers in her locker and nodded. “Yes. There’s a grove meeting. I’m glad, too. I’m a little worried about him.”
“I understand. But I’m not so sure you need to be,” Logan said. She thought of her own trials and tribulations, of her mother in particular. “He’s not hiding from what happened. If he’d just continued on as if nothing bad had ever gone down – then maybe worrying would be justified. But… I think he just needs to deal with what happened in his own time, in his own way. He needs to take baby steps.”
“That could be said for all of us,” said Meagan.
Logan considered that. “This grove meeting,” she hedged, “is it to discuss this new ability of yours to cast magic without words?”
Meagan hesitated before she nodded. “It wasn’t just an October Land thing, apparently,” she said. “I’ve tried it several times since then, and I can still do it.”
“Hey guys,” said Katelyn as she pushed her way through the crowd to join them. Passing period was coming to an end, and the students were moving more quickly now to keep from receiving tardies.
“Katelyn, how’s Alec?” Logan asked.
Since they’d returned, Alec Sheffield had been slowly attempting to get closer to Katelyn, and in the process, he’d apologized to the girls – especially Logan – no fewer than a hundred times for his behavior in October Land. He and the others in his band had been the girls’ shadows, saving them the best seats in the cafeteria, appearing out of nowhere to reach the books on the highest shelves in the library, and offering them rides home so they wouldn’t have to take the bus.
They were trying to make amends. In the end, there had really been no choice but to forgive them. The boys would have it no other way.