Secretly Sam

by Heather Killough-Walden

  What do I do? She thought. A bitterness welled up inside of her, familiar and nasty. Logan tried to suppress it. This was neither the time nor the place for her to feel sorry for herself. “I write.”

  Dom looked up. She felt the weight of his gaze on her, and she glanced over at him. Something strange flickered in the backs of his jade-colored eyes. “I’m sorry,” he said.

  Logan blinked. “Oh God,” she said as she realized some of the bitterness had slipped out anyway. “Don’t be,” she told him firmly. “I mean it. Dominic, what you’ve been through is… so much worse.” She shook her head. “I don’t even know what to say. And none of this is your fault.”

  The light turned green.

  “You shouldn’t be here,” she whispered as she moved the car forward. “None of this should have happened to you. It’s all my fault.” It was true. If she had never crushed on him, he wouldn’t be involved, and Sam wouldn’t have gone after him. Alec Sheffield would still be alive. “If I hadn’t….”

  The reality of Alec’s death washed over Logan, a rush of liquid verity that coated the inside of her chest like a slushy and actually hurt her heart. He’s really dead.

  “Don’t,” Dom suddenly said, cutting through the raging silence of her own inner turmoil with one sharp word. “You’re doing it again,” he said, “shutting me out. Please don’t, Logan.” He shook his head, and the street lights reflected in his eyes. There were shadows under them. He was haunted. “Not now,” he finished with a desperate whisper.

  Logan’s fingers clutched tighter on the steering wheel. Every muscle in her body bunched up, tensed and tight and strained. He was right. She had been shutting him out again. It was exactly what he’d asked her not to do a week ago, after the first time they thought they’d rid themselves of Sam Hain.

  She returned her attention to the road and licked her lips. “Can you… can you tell me what happened?” she ventured, relieved to have finally asked.

  Dominic was silent for a long moment. Logan divided her attention between him and the ribbon of black unwinding ahead. He swallowed hard; she could see the muscles working in his throat. He peered through the windshield as a few fat drops of rain began to beat the glass.

  Logan switched on the wipers. She wondered if he was going to answer her. I shouldn’t have asked. It’s too soon.

  “Sam attacked me at my own front door,” Sam finally said. “He was in Alec’s body… I didn’t know.”

  There was a space of silence, filled by a quickening rain.

  “When I woke up, we were in the cornfield outside of town. He had me tied to a post like a scarecrow.”

  A scarecrow? Logan thought of a similar scene that she’d painted in a story not too long ago. He read it, she realized. Sam was taking her ideas and turning them into grisly waking nightmares.

  “There was gasoline all over the ground and all over the hay and kindling he’d piled up around my feet.”

  Gasoline - that was why she’d caught the scent of fuel on him. He must have gotten some on his boots.

  “He had a torch, and he said he’d called the cops. He was going to pretend to threaten me with the fire so they would shoot him.”

  Why? Logan wondered, bewildered and dismayed. Why would Sam do such a thing? He was no longer a vampire. It wasn’t like he was killing for sustenance now. And Alec hadn’t been trying to stop him. He hadn’t been in his way, had he? What could he possibly hope to gain by having his host body, the only thing keeping him grounded here in the mortal world, murdered?

  Dominic turned in his seat, pinning her with his green eyes. Logan tried to pull her own gaze away enough to watch the road, but he was magnetic. He always had been. “He said that by having someone else kill Alec, he would be able to leave his body and enter someone else’s. He wanted to take over mine, and I swear I thought he was going to do just that.” Dom closed his eyes, finally releasing her from their dangerous pull. “But the medallion Mr. Lehrer gave me protected me.”

  Logan turned her attention back to the road. The rain was really coming down now; she couldn’t afford not to look ahead.

  “What did it do?” she asked softly. “How did it protect you?”

  Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Dominic shake his head. It was as if he was struggling with the mish-mash of images his memories were supplying. “He went down and I thought for sure the fire from his torch would light me up. But it just rolled away in the dirt instead. The ground was wet with rain, so it went out.”

  He paused, stopping between the subjects of a story like she would while writing. “A few seconds later, there was this confusion. Flashlight beams were everywhere, but under all of them, I could see this light come out of Alec. It was like…. It was purple and orange.” He let out a frustrated breath. His voice sounded tight, strained as he went on, like he was edging closer to something dangerous. “And then it came toward me. The pendant got hot; it sort of glowed. Somehow, I knew it was keeping him away. Sam’s light shot off toward the cornfield instead – and there were hands all over me, cutting me down and pulling the tape off me.”

  Logan felt cold, colder than she ever had, maybe. She switched the wipers into high gear and shivered, almost violently. She felt like someone had just walked over her grave.

  “It just disappeared in the corn?” She glanced at him. “In the darkness?”

  Dominic seemed to consider that a moment, and then he shook his head, frustrated. “I don’t know. There were cops all around us. It might have gone toward them, it might have just disappeared in the night. Jesus, Logan….” He sounded suddenly lost, and finally, he also sounded as if he were on the verge of tears.

  He’s human, Logan thought. It was a strange thing to think. It made her realize that she’d put Dominic Maldovan on some kind of pedestal for the last eight years. To her, he wasn’t a human being; he was a rock god.

  But now? Now Logan studied his beautiful profile, the scruff on his strong chin, his raven black hair, his broad shoulders and leather jacket. Now – he was still a rock god.

  He was just a human one.

  “Alec’s dead,” Dominic said, and the sound of those yet unshed tears came through loud and clear. “The son of a bitch actually killed my best friend.”

  Logan drove, mentally wading carefully around Dom’s figurative whirlpool of what must have been a terrible grief. But as she drove and the rain poured steadily down, a niggling thought began to peck at her brain.

  Dom wasn’t the only one to lose someone close to Sam Hain. One of the cheer leaders at their school had been dead too. Only a week ago, Sam had killed her. He’d also killed Logan’s crappy, jack-ass of a manager at the bakery and about a dozen other people. But when Logan and her friends managed to weaken Sam enough that they defeated him at the dance and he disappeared for a while, all of those “dead” people suddenly came back. It was as if they’d never died to begin with. No one remembered what had happened to them; no one thought twice about any of it.

  Maybe…. Maybe it was impossible for someone Sam killed to actually die? Perhaps it had something to do with Sam being the Lord of the Dead, stuck here in another realm? Maybe, just maybe, they could bring Alec back as they had the others?

  It was a thought so suddenly bright and hopeful, Logan’s knee-jerk instinct was to give it voice and share it with Dominic right away. But somehow she managed to keep her mouth shut and maintain a lid on it. It was certainly a hope. But that was the problem. This time, things might be different. It might just be a false hope.

  And that was the last thing she wanted to give Dominic just then.

  Chapter Eight

  Logan moved through Dominic’s living room like a ghost, not touching anything. It felt surreal for her to be there, for several reasons. It was strange enough to be in the living quarters of someone so wealthy. Logan knew that Dom’s family was well off, but Dominic himself never put on airs. He didn’t dress in Hilfiger or use two hundred dollar gel in his hair or hide a badminton racket in hi
s locker. He was a guitarist in vintage Black Sabbath t-shirts and blue jeans. To stand now in the middle of a room sporting tiny objects that probably cost more than her family’s entire house was… odd.

  She felt out of place, like a great pretender. She could imagine that Dominic’s father would walk in any second and his poor-scoping-x-ray vision would instantly peg her for the non-heiress she was and demand she be thrown out.

  But even more jarring was the fact that she was there in the first place. In Dominic Maldovan’s living room. For years, she’d dreamed of Dominic one day inviting her over to his house. When she was younger, she imagined that he probably had all of the coolest toys. Not the most expensive, necessarily – just the coolest. Toys she liked. LEGOs. A Star Wars lightsaber maybe, or one of those huge Millennium Falcons.

  As she got older, what she imagined his room consisted of changed. Lately, she’d been seeing him surrounded with a lot of black. Dark curtains, posters of Dio on the wall. Maybe a drum set in the corner, and definitely a few guitars and amps. That would quintessentially be Dom.

  Now she was turning a slow circle in the midst of gold gilded mirrors, plush leather couches, crystal decanter sets and Persian rugs. She stopped and peered across the room toward the kitchen and the large marble-topped bar that separated it from the dining room. Dom sat there right now, his elbows on the bar, his hands clutching his hair, his eyes shut tight.

  Looking at him amid all of this stone and silk, it was clear to her that there was much more of Dom’s father in this house than there was of him.

  It was also clear that she was being a horrible friend.

  The realization was a little jarring. Dom was hunched over, clutching at himself, clearly in horrible amounts of mental pain, and all she could do was ogle his family’s belongings and judge.

  She swore softly under her breath as she tore off her leather messenger bag, tossed it onto the couch, and pulled her jacket off next. She was rolling up her long sleeves on her way into the kitchen when Dom looked up at the sound of her shoes on the tiles.

  Logan placed a gentle hand on his upper arm – didn’t fail to notice the thick muscle – and forced herself to move on past him.

  Dominic had just suffered a life-altering traumatic event. It wasn’t something new to him, which was a tragedy in and of itself. But every new horror life revealed was different in intricate, terrible ways. It bore different colors, different tastes, and it demanded its own separate attention.

  As he had hopefully done when his mother died, Dominic would eventually need to grieve Alec’s death. He would need to talk about it, re-live it, purge it, and vomit the pain until there was nothing left of it but the dried-up husks of emotion that remained at the bottom of that nausea-of-the-soul abyss.

  But right now? It was too soon. Right now he just really needed to be distracted.

  Right now he needed cookies.

  And it just so happened that Logan was pretty much the best cookie chef in town.

  *****

  Inhabiting a person’s body was an experience that Sam would never get used to and one he whole-heartedly hoped he would never have to do again. There was a law of physics that claimed two objects could not occupy the same space at the same time, and now that Sam was outright breaking that law, he would almost agree that it was true. It was an impossibility that became possible but was so uncomfortable and so wrong, it was nearly impossible once more.

  When he’d become Alec Sheffield, he’d shoved the boy’s will or spirit or force, whatever one wanted to call it, to the side and infused his own essence into every nucleus, every strand of DNA until he was operating the same neurons that Sheffield had once operated. What the boy knew, Sam knew. What he’d experienced, Sam remembered. Every bit of knowledge Sheffield had ever acquired, every dream he’d ever had, and every fear he’d ever experienced became Sam’s.

  There was no literal voice in his head telling him to get out; that was impossible, after all. Alec’s brain waves had been Sam’s; his neural synapses were the same. The difference was not in the physical, it was in the ethereal.

  The only way Sam would be able to describe it was that as Alec Sheffield, he felt depressed, he felt drained, he felt as if he had to struggle with every decision he made, second guessing himself, and sometimes wanting to give up. That was Alec’s willpower, Alec’s own “soul” at work. It hadn’t left the body. It was still there, still crammed in alongside Sam’s, only it was no longer in control.

  The sensation was discombobulating, but one Sam had managed to handle.

  However, now that he was in Dominic Maldovan’s body, there was an entirely new sensation to contend with. Compared to Sheffield’s will, Maldovan’s was stronger in spades. It was like thick black oil versus clear water. It was hard to see in here, hard to feel anything but rage and desperation.

  With every passing second, he felt closer to losing control, to wanting to simply kill Maldovan’s body so he could get the hell out of it. It was too hard, too much work. Maldovan cared too much.

  He’d brought them to Dominic’s home, but once there, Sam succumbed to the fight going on inside. His hands fisted in his hair, his eyes shut tight to the turmoil raging inside of him, he hunched over the bar and tried to remember – his realm, his kingdom, his sovereignty – in the hopes that recalling just how powerful he truly was would give him the strength to see this out.

  He had no idea how he was going to get Logan writing again; he desperately needed the magic power that came when she created words, any words, new words, new imaginings. There was an inherent energy involved when a bard created. He desperately needed that. It was the spark that would ignite his fire once more and set him on the road to being at full strength.

  But he could barely function, much less conceive of how to get a pen in the bard’s hands.

  He was beginning to despair. Maldovan was winning.

  And then he heard Logan’s footsteps drawing nearer, and he raised his head just as she placed her hand on his arm.

  Her touch shot through him like electric warmth, a cleansing kind of fire that temporarily burned away the black and red and chaos of his personal battle. While the touch, so tender and warm, gave Maldovan inside something to fight harder for, it simultaneously gave Sam the strength with which to fight back.

  Logan turned a smile on him, gentle and compassionate. Her amber colored eyes looked like honey, freshly heated by the sun. For one blessed moment, Sam melted in those eyes, was sweetened by them, fortified by their liquid gold.

  “Where do you keep the flour?” she asked.

  And because he was in Dominic’s body and had all of his memories, Sam knew.

  Twenty minutes later, the house that Sam knew Dominic hated with a passion smelled like Autumn. It smelled like October, like cookies and cinnamon and apple cider, like a new year and a new hope and all of the right colors.

  Sam watched as Logan bent to pull a baking tray out of the oven. He felt something hard in him spike with need, and he clutched the side of the counter with a clenching fist as her tight jeans hugged her hips and the curve of her ass. A cloud of chocolate-scented steam wafted from the oven to curl around her as she lifted the tray out and placed it on the stove. Sam licked his lips, for the briefest moment not at all certain whether he was hungry just for Logan… or for the cookies she’d made as well. They honestly looked and smelled delicious.

  He realized something just then. He was in a human body. For now, anyway. And he had to admit that he’d put that human body through quite an ordeal. It had been some time since Maldovan had eaten, actually. Sam was feeling that human frailty now.

  “Get the cider, would you?” she asked, smiling over at him.

  Sam blinked, remembering who he was pretending to be and reminding himself of the part he had to play. He nodded and straightened, coming off of where he’d been leaning against the kitchen counter. “Right,” he said. “The cider.”

  Logan moved out of his way, taking the cookies to anoth
er counter and using a spatula to get them onto a cooling rack. Sam lifted the metal pot of cider off the stove and poured its steaming contents into two mugs that Logan had already prepared with cinnamon sticks.

  Autumn. October.

  Little by little, Logan was managing to make him feel more at home. This was what his kingdom was like all the time, in a way. His realm was muted. It was orange and red and purple mixed with shadows apple and cinnamon and clove, but caught as if from far off. Crisp wind, rain storms, warm fires, but not quite as cold and not quite as hot. His realm was Autumn, but cast into night. It was the darker side of Fall. It was an almost beautiful thing, as if all it needed was for someone to switch on a light, pull back a curtain, and take the apple pie out of the oven.

  Logan could do that for him. Watching her now, experiencing the way she seemed to bring October with her everywhere she went, Sam realized that there was more to his choice than he’d originally thought. Logan was not only a bard, not only beautiful, and not only possessing of an ancient soul. She was capable of turning his realm into everything its potential promised it could be. She didn’t even know she was doing it. This was just her – just Logan Wright and her pumpkin patch, full moon, fog magic soul.

  She was perfect. She was Halloween. And she was going to make the perfect queen.

  Chapter Nine

  Sam brushed his hands together and then did what Dominic would have done and wiped his palms down the front of his jeans. Logan watched him from across the bar and shook her head, smiling. She handed him the kitchen towel beside her as she finished chewing. He took it, made some effort to get the chocolate off, and then set it down on the counter.

  The cookies had been his first. He’d never tasted anything like them before. In his realm there was no need to eat. He wasn’t mortal there, and not bogged down by mortal weaknesses. But while the frailty of human necessities in this world could be irritating, he had to admit that there was reward involved as well. It felt good to satisfy your hunger. It tasted good. He’d learned that much as a vampire. It seemed the same held when you were just plain human – if not more so.