Suddenly Sam (The October Trilogy) (22 page)

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 t
hat 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.
Fang
tastic.”

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.

B
ut 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 ha
rd 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 viole
nce 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.

T
hen 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 ha
d 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.

“He’s resilient,” said Katelyn, smiling. “You’d think the guy had never been killed.”

“I think he got out all his anger in Fall Fields when he was telling off Sam at the top of his lungs,” said Meagan, laughing. “That was actually pretty ballsy.”

Logan felt a pang of something deep inside at the mention of Sam. It happened a lot now. She was trying to get used to it.

Meagan turned to her, her violet eyes searching. “Logan… how are you holding up?” she asked softly. Her searching gaze dropped to the notebooks in Logan’s arms.

Logan knew she wondering whether writing had become an obsession with her now. And maybe it had. All Logan knew was that she had stories to tell, and telling them brought her comfort. If she was very, very lucky and very, very good, maybe one day reading them would do the same for someone else.

“I’m fine.” She smiled. “Honestly.”

They were all still quietly reeling from the fact that Logan had promised herself to Sam upon her death and that one day, she was going to wind up Queen of the Dead. But it was a little easier to deal with than some things. People didn’t often think about death. It always seemed so far away – and it was best that way.

“How is Dom?” Katelyn asked.

“He’s fine too.”

“Speaking of,” said Katelyn, looking over Logan’s shoulder. “Hunk at half past.”

Logan turned.

Dominic Maldovan had just rounded the corner. He was dressed, as usual, in jeans and a leather jacket. But since their return from October Land, he’d looked different to her. He looked rougher around the edges, more angled – sharper.

Older.

It looked good on him.
Really
good.

I’ve got seventy years,
she thought.
Give or take.

At once, Dom’s piercing green eyes were on her, and his long stride was headed her way. In his right hand, he carried his g
uitar case. His left was free, and when he reached her, he didn’t hesitate in using it to run his fingers through her hair, grasp it at the back of her head, and pull her in for a deep, deep kiss.

Logan’s senses all went flying.

In the distance, she heard Meagan and Katelyn moving away. “I guess she wasn’t kidding,” Meagan said.

“Fine indeed,” agreed Katel
yn. Their footsteps grew fainter as they made their ways down the hall.

Dominic held her
firmly – gently – but also not. His lips parted hers, his tongue tasted her freely, and Logan forgot how to breathe.

Dom
broke the kiss, leaving her gasping, and spoke his words across her lips. “Seventy years, right?”

A chill went through Logan, a thrilled sensation at the tone of Dom’s voice and the nearness of his body. It was getting hard to think, but she man
aged, “Give or take –”

Dom
gently touched his forehead to hers, effectively silencing her. “Life is short, Logan. I’m starting mine now.”

With that, he
dropped his guitar, cupped her face in his hands, and again claimed her lips with his.

Logan’s knees gave out, she dropped her notebooks to the tiled floor, and Dom pressed her up against the lockers behind her.
Somewhere far away, the one-minute bell for the passing period chimed.

Epilogue

Hugh Draper understood now.

He now knew the
real
reason he had been traveling through time for thousands of years. It had not been a spell cast by his grove. He did not even have a grove. It had not been because he was the one chosen for this time travel quest. There was no quest.

He was never sent to seek out a time and place where magic users were accepted.

He was not even a magic user himself.

Not really. Not
originally
.

He’d been a soldier
once, not a wizard.

And his name had been Leontius. Not Draper.

Once upon a time, in another world it seemed, a witch had needed a sacrifice. But she could not kill. Not her. Her spirit was too kind, her soul too pure. So even as she cast the spell that would take his life for her magic, it did not kill him.

The spell ripped a hole in the fabric of the physical universe. The laws by which it was bound were broken. The witch’s spell defied the fates, and yet appealed to them. They allowed it – and in the space of time it took for the witch to weave her magic, fate wove another spell along with it.

Leontius was sent spinning away through time. He would travel its eons, believing the lie of another name and another life, until such a day when the witch’s spell could be broken. And fate would come to fruition.

Now Hugh Draper stood on the rain-soaked street of a
Southwest neighborhood on Halloween night. All around him, children scurried, their faces hidden by masks or paint, their tiny bodies wrapped in plastic costumes of things he did not recognize.

The spell was broken. He remembered everything.
He remembered every tiny, personal detail of every time and place he had ever visited throughout the course of history.

And yet he was separate fr
om it all, a man out of place, and out of time.

*****

Dietrich Lehrer sighed at the knocking on his door. He really wasn’t looking for conversation just then. He’d had his fill of visitors five days ago on Halloween night.

Samhain’s spell had deposited him directly back in his living room
that night. Not thirty seconds later, the first trick-or-treater had banged loudly on his door. It was a family neighborhood, and trick-or-treating was always a big deal.