It was now or never. Now was when he had to get Samhain out of his body – now, when the dark king was distracted with the portal and with what he’d just done to Logan.
Dom pulled his own soul closer. It was like reaching out with invisible arms and hugging mists together until they coalesced into something halfway solid. With this condensed spirit backing him up, and his fury fueling him, he roared into the confines of his bodily prison. Get out! he bellowed at last, his sheer force of will thrusting madly at the Lord of the Dead.
GET OUT!
He shoved outward, expanding into every space he could wrestle himself into, every shadow and crevice and corner that was originally his. He claimed it back. And finally, he felt Samhain’s intrusion back away, peeled off like a stubborn piece of tape, and sent hurtling into the winds of fortune and the twisted chaos of the shifting portal.
He knew the very instant that he was free of him, and it was a terrifying and liberating heartbeat of time. His own essence crashed back into himself, as bracing as a bucket of ice water, but as disorienting as waking up in the seventh hotel room during a trip and not knowing where the hell you were.
He cried out as the magic of the doorway pulled at him with more force, left to its own incredible volition when no longer having to fight against a being with equal amounts of power. He gritted his teeth and drowned in a new tidal wave of terror when he realized that without Samhain’s magic, the wound he’d sustained by Logan’s knife might not heal.
The world was now only dealing with a mere human – and it wanted to rip that human limb from limb.
He was suddenly disoriented and sick, his arms and legs both on fire and numb at the same time, his stomach churning maddeningly. He tried to look down, to be certain that at least Logan was still grasped firmly in his arms, but he couldn’t control his body, and couldn’t see through his eyes any longer anyway.
And then, just as suddenly as its power had come in at him, the portal’s influence was receding – and he was falling. Fast.
*****
There was damp under Logan’s cheek. It was gritty and cold, but it smelled like freshly fallen rain, which blunted the unpleasantness a bit. Her lids were heavy, and there was a bitter taste on her tongue like metal and lemon. Her head hurt, as did the side of her neck.
She felt bruised on the surface, and sore beneath, as if she’d worked out too hard at the school gym. Slowly, she levered her heavy eyes open, pulling on them like she was lifting a heavy red curtain at the beginning of a play. As she did, she fought the frightening urge to slip into sleep once more. There was something wrong with her body. It was too heavy, from her eyes to her toes.
But memories were fleeting and flitting, like fireflies on a humid night. She grasped at them clumsily, inefficiently.
Think, she told herself. Figure this out.
Her eyes opened on a reluctant, blurry world. As she blinked, attempting to re-focus, she strained to listen. The cool air against her skin and the fresh smell in her nostrils helped, clearing her throbbing head enough for her to at least concentrate.
The last thing she remembered, she’d been fighting with Samhain and the portal had been closing. Katelyn had been there… with the car. Everything was crazy. Everyone was struggling. She’d been… she had a knife in her hand, and she’d been brandishing it toward Sam, desperate to just be free of him and his threat of death.
She’d injured him. In fact, she closed her eyes and saw a flash of red, recalling that her blade had sliced deep.
“Dominic,” she whispered. Her voice came out scratchy, and her throat hurt worse. Instinctively, she raised her hand to her neck, feeling the slightly raised wounds his teeth had left in the side of her throat.
He’d bitten her.
She’d cut him.
And then he’d hit her.
Logan’s vision focused. All of her thoughts coalesced and clarified into crystal awareness. Anger spewed venom-like adrenaline into her veins. Bastard. Her fury was not only for what he’d done to her, but for what he’d forced her to do to Dominic.
He’ll survive, she told herself firmly. If Sam was still tucked away inside him, his magic would heal the wound. In the meantime, she had to figure out where she was.
She looked around.
She had to figure out where Sam was too, and why she was now sitting up completely alone in a small wooded clearing with not another soul in sight. How had they been separated?
The light from a late afternoon sun was shafting through treetops far overhead. The leaves on the trees were a rainbow of fall hues, from yellow-green to bright gold to ruby-red and deep purple. They danced in a very slight breeze. Logan inhaled slowly, noticing the faint scent of cinnamon and what smelled like pumpkin pie.
The air was cool. It wasn’t cold, but there was the promise of cold along its edges, crisp and fresh and new. There was something else there too.
Logan ran her hand over her face as the last of her headache receded and slipped away. She sat up a little straighter, taking stock of herself. She was still dressed in the same clothes, but they seemed newer somehow. They were cleaner, fresher, even softer against her skin. A small comfort, but unexpectedly nice.
Her hair fell over her shoulders in untangled, shining waves. Her hands were free from the blood that had caked them when she’d injured Sam. Her fingernails were clean. And now she recognized the scent on the gentle breeze. It was cinnamon – and spice. Hearth fire and Autumn. There was something in the air that felt like possibilities. New chances. It felt like magic.
This is October Land.
She realized her location just as she heard the crunching of a footstep somewhere in the line of trees past the clearing’s edge. She froze, at once uncertain.
It might be Dom, she thought hopefully.
And then she remembered that Dominic was Samhain.
Chapter Two
Dominic came awake with that dull, miserable sensation of being assaulted by pain but not yet knowing exactly where the pain was. He forced his eyes open to a blurry world filled with obscurely defined colors. There was a bit of a bite to the air, and dryness in his mouth. He could sense damp and cold against the side of his head.
He tried to turn it, but it wouldn’t move. That was when he inhaled the scent of wet earth and realized he was on the ground, on his side.
The pain was clear now, emanating from every joint in his body. It was like he’d been grabbed by the shirt collar and tossed around like a ragdoll by some angry giant. That was how he felt. Violently shaken.
The portal had dropped him. Without any magic to guide where it started and stopped, it had simply opened up and thrown him out like Tuesday’s trash. He’d gone sailing, nothing solid to grab on to, and it had felt like forever.
And then he’d hit the ground.
Now he made an involuntary low groaning sound and attempted to push up from the dirt. His muscles strained and his fingers brushed fallen leaves that scraped beneath his touch, shuffling into a small pile as he struggled to sit up. The pain in his body coalesced, pulling in from his joints to focus on an area across his chest.
Oh no, the knife, his thoughts flashed. Fear pumped his heart harder as he realized he may have been separated from Sam before the wound was healed. He glanced down, expecting to see a red streak and sliced shirt. But his shirt was whole and there was no blood anywhere. In fact, he looked as though he’d been thrown into a washing machine with a quart of Tide.
He lifted his shirt to look at his midsection. A thick, red and puffy scar ran new and fresh from his upper right ribs to just beneath his left ribs. There existed significant purple, red, and green bruising around the wound, and the area also looked slightly swollen.
Half way, he thought, and he experienced a flood of mind-numbing relief. It’s half way healed. Dom hated Samhain, but was admittedly immensely grateful Sam had been in his body long enough to keep him from dying.
He dropped his shirt, managed to get his back up against a near
by tree trunk, and closed his eyes again, gently touching his throbbing forehead. He felt disoriented and a little sick. His mind spun; he was cold and in pain. But he wasn’t the only one the portal had thrown about. Logan had been in his arms before he’d been sent hurtling through space, and now she was gone.
You have to think, he commanded. What could the portal have done with her? She was as human as he was, so it would have done the same thing to her that it had done to him. Right? It would have thrown her out.
She must be here somewhere. Somewhere nearby.
He forced his pain to a back burner and focused on her alone, slowly maneuvering himself up along the tree’s trunk until he was standing. His head instantly punished him for the effort. But he took a deep breath in through his nose and let it out through his mouth, and then did it again. Slowly, the pain receded and his vision cleared.
He swore internally as he breathed. I must have some kind of mild concussion. There was nothing he could do about it, though. And even if he were home, there wouldn’t be anything anyone could do about it. The medical field had not yet advanced enough to deal with bumps on the head.
Dominic dropped his hand, opened his eyes, and glanced around.
Where is she?
There was still a hint of blur around the edges of his sight, but for the most part, he could now see. He was standing beside a tree in a dense, beautiful forest. Leaves of multi-hued amber littered the ground. The sky through the tree-tops was a purple-blue color, vivid in a late-afternoon sun.
Dominic turned in a slow circle, ignoring the arc of pain that shot from the base of his skull to his right eye.
There was no sign of Logan.
And then, just as he was thinking this and feeling the stirrings of a cold, hard desperation, he heard the softest, most indistinct sound. It was muffled, but he could have sworn it was a groan. Maybe? And yes! There was what sounded like movement in the leaf carpet along the ground.
Dominic froze and listened for all he was worth. He waited, hoping the sound would come again. Blood rushed through his eardrums, threatening to drown out all other sound. He swallowed, and the noise was disturbingly audible. He held his breath.
He was rewarded for his efforts when the sound came again. It was definitely movement, displacing leaves that hiss-crackled as they were brushed aside. It was distant and barely audible, but unmistakable.
Dominic moved away from the tree and headed in the direction of the sound. Every two steps, he paused and waited to hear more, but all was frustratingly silent in the forest now. “Logan!” he called, hoping he wasn’t making a grave mistake in giving himself away.
There was no reply. He tried again. “Logan! It’s me! It’s Dominic!”
Nothing.
He moved faster. It was easy; the leaves of the trees were not at eye level and nothing needed to be knocked away to get through the underbrush. The branches were instead high overhead, as if someone had taken Redwoods and crossed them with the color-changing leaves of deciduous trees. The effect was stunning, though he imagined a bit of it was lost on him just then.
Just when he was beginning to believe he’d gone the wrong way, he saw a flash of bluish gray amidst the orange and yellow of the fallen leaves on the ground. He ran toward it, now more certain as he drew closer.
Logan!
She was laying on her side, unmoving and clearly unconscious. Her long golden hair spilled out in a thick cascade of shimmering honey across the blanket of leaves beneath her. The ground had been disturbed a bit in front of her; as Dominic skidded to a halt and knelt, he realized she must have awoken momentarily, just enough to stir a bit and then pass out once more.
“Logan?” he whispered softly, leaning forward just a little. He was sort of afraid to touch her. From where he was sitting, she seemed relatively unharmed.
He knew he’d bitten her. He remembered that all too well…. It had awakened a cruel dichotomy of emotions within him, for it was not only Samhain who enjoyed the feeling of Logan trapped in his arms, her flesh against his lips, her throat trapped in his teeth.
Dom closed his eyes and clenched his fists, schooling himself. When he opened them again, he could see the remnants of the bite marks on the side of her throat. But Sam’s wicked sharp teeth had stopped just short of piercing anything vital, and the wounds looked shallow, if a bit raw.
He’d hit her hard, though. His knuckles had actually throbbed after that terrible impact. And if he’d caused some kind of brain damage – he felt cold at the thought – those particular wounds would be invisible to the naked eye.
“Logan,” he said again, a little less softly now.
But she still didn’t respond, or even move. Her long eyelashes rested unmoving against the top of her cheek, which was rosy in the nippy air. He raised his hand, bringing his fingers to her forehead. A long lock of her hair had fallen over it. He was about to brush it aside when there was a sudden explosion of movement.
Logan rose, spinning on the ground as she did so. The last thing Dominic saw was a flash of flying gold hair and the bottom of her leather-soled boot as its heel made its formidable way to his chin.
Chapter Three
I’ve escaped you once more.
There is still time. A promise is a promise.
It was a promise I never made.
There was a pause as Sam digested this, not fully willing to admit that it was true.
When did you figure it out, Sam?
That she is you? He thought of the way he’d felt as Logan had been ripped from his arms in the portal. He’d realized, only then in that moment, that he’d felt that exact same despair once before.
Only now, he said.
He hesitated, alone in the mists between October Land and the Realm of the Dead – but not alone. She was there. At least, a part of her was.
I claimed you eons ago, he told her. You should have been mine then.
But I claimed another, she returned, her beautiful voice as light and yet as powerful as were the words she’d once written. And he and I claimed each other.
Sam knew who she was talking about. Some mortal she had fallen in love with, a man who had died beside her when the Romans attacked.
You can’t be with him either, Sam challenged. The spell Ciara had cast thousands of years ago to escape him had not only kept her from Sam, it had kept her out of his realm altogether. And that had prevented her from being with the man she professed she loved.
He’s only a boy, he told her, thinking that the boy and Dominic Maldovan had much in common.
Everyone is a child to you, Sam.
He paused again, closing eyes he didn’t have, and felt the torn emotions of a man who loved the sound of a woman’s voice, but hated what she was saying. Because it was true.
He was disembodied now, an incorporeal form once more in need of substance. Dominic had succeeded in taking back his body, leaving Samhain without arms and legs and the feel of human flesh. But he was still more than he’d been in his own realm. The magic Logan had given him with her words had not completely left him. He had power.
Do you think you will be happy with a queen who does not love you?
It was the question he had been desperately hoping she wouldn’t ask. But it was the one he knew she would.
Time changes everything, he told her.
It hasn’t changed this.
On the day that she’d been born, in his month of October, he’d paused on his throne and straightened. He’d felt something.
It had literally been forever since he’d felt anything at all. His world was a realm of memories. He had around him the after-images of each person’s life, like flashes of sepia over black and white. There was no future, no present, only the past.
And yet, this little bard had brought color to Samhain’s aging world. There was a bond between magic and Samhain. Magic was nothing but the mass of infinite possibilities – just like death, just like those breathless moments when an infant is still trapped in that nothin
gness of death before a mother screams and the baby draws its first breath and wails, and the world rejoices in a newborn life.
So when Ciara was born, Sam knew it. But this time, he more than knew it. It was like coming awake, like seeing the beginnings of a masterpiece.
Like being born.
And he had fallen in love.
That love was as strong in this moment, millennia later, as it had been then. But now, Ciara was just as incorporeal as he was, and even less so because she’d split her spirit into two with her last breathing spell.
Only a whole spirit could enter the Land of the Dead.
In Fall Fields, the portal would open and take whole spirits into Sam’s realm. There, they joined others they had loved and lost. It was a final resting place, together at last, an exhalation like the period at the end of a very long sentence.
Spirits with unfinished business, however, were kept at bay by the forces of the in-between and could not enter the portal. Almost always, these spirits were torn in twain, ripped apart by the dichotomy of forces placed upon their souls. They yet wanted to live. But the fates had brought them death.
They were torn between this world and the one they’d left behind. They were haunts, poltergeists, or spectres.
They were ghosts.
This is what Ciara had done to herself to escape Samhain and the throne he’d prepared for her. She’d used the last of her mortal existence and sacrificed another in order to complete her spell.
She’d turned herself into a ghost.
She was prevented from entering the Land of the Dead, no matter what he did. And the other half of her spirit? Sam was now realizing that this was where resided the true beauty of her spell. It was no poltergeist or remnant. Instead, it was Logan.
Now he knew why she possessed such an old soul.
Time did change a lot of things. But the essence of a person, it could not touch. So Ciara was right. It hadn’t changed this.
But Ciara was also wrong. Logan was undoubtedly more than Ciara had hoped for in a corporeal form. Logan Wright was a bard of immense untapped power, and that power had done for Samhain what Ciara’s companionship never could have. It had brought him to life.