by J. R. Rain
No. Sleep started the instant the sun rose—as it was starting to do now—and it came over me rapidly, overwhelming my senses, my mind, my body, my entire being. A complete and total shutdown of all that I am. It was a form of micro-death. Yes, I could fight it if I wanted to, thanks to the day ring. I could even force myself to stay awake. But giving in was so much easier.
And so I gave in now, and felt myself die a little, all over again.
Chapter Twelve
I rarely dream when I sleep.
Mostly, I just lay there, comatose, not breathing, not thinking, not really sleeping. Perhaps I really do die a little. Perhaps I’m not anything. Perhaps there is no definition for what happens to me during the day. I don’t remember any of it. Usually, I feel myself slip away, and then, my alarms are going off. Two of them, in fact.
Yes, it was hell getting up during the day. It was much better to awaken naturally at sundown. I could count on one hand the number of times I had slept through the day. I envied those creatures of the night who didn’t have kids.
I set my alarm for 1:30. That gave me enough time to climb out of my sleep, to return to the land of the living—perhaps, literally—and then make some coffee, do some chores, and watch Judge Judy, all before picking up my kids.
That was generally my routine.
Except on the rare occasions when I dreamed. And because I didn’t really sleep, I didn’t really dream either. I knew this because these weren’t really dreams.
They were visions of the future. Prophetic visions.
And on this day, while others were working or in class or running errands or smoking weed, I was in my bedroom, dreaming of my daughter Tammy dying, over and over again.
The same dream, repeated over and over.
In it, I saw her being flung through a broken windshield, to lay broken and bleeding in the middle of the intersection... only to be run over by something, something big...
***
I shot up out of bed, fully awake, gasping and crying.
In my mind’s eye, I saw Tammy, clear as day, lying in the center of the street, bleeding and cut and choking on her own blood, when a car—no a truck—ran her over. I heard the thud, thud. I saw the tires bounce, the shocks compress. I saw her jackknife involuntarily as her chest collapsed and blood burst from her mouth and eyes. Mostly, I saw the life escaping instantly.
Now, I paced, alternately running my hands through my hair and shaking my hands before me, as if they were wet. My room was hotel-room dark. No light at all. I might as well be pacing in a cemetery in the dead of a moonless night. Even as I paced, I moved quickly, perhaps even supernaturally quickly. Pacing, turning, pacing. I didn’t stub my toes along my smallish desk pushed up against the window. I didn’t hit or touch anything. I was a spirit in my own bedroom. A wraith. A shade.
The dream or vision hadn’t been very long. The car had been packed with kids. Teenagers. Older teenagers. Much older than my daughter, who was now a freshman in high school. The dream was seared into my memory. The details, too. And, unlike real dreams, I remembered everything.
As I paced, I relived the dream again and again.
I see the joints. I see someone raising something—a can of beer. A forty, they call them. It’s a party in the car. I see all the faces. Hell, they are seared into my memory. And there is my daughter, riding shotgun, arms above her head and dancing in her seat, her seatbelt off. And then she screams, and I see why she screamed.
The bastard behind the wheel, the bastard drinking the 40, runs a red light.
Tammy screams, they all scream. Brakes squeal. The crunch of metal is terrible. No airbags. No seatbelts, and my daughter is launched out of her seat and through the windshield. I see this from seemingly many angles at once: her angle, the driver’s angle, the passengers’ angles. I am a wildly swinging point-of-view camera.
I shook my head and rubbed my eyes. I didn’t want to see her get run over again. But I did. Over and over again.
Chapter Thirteen
We were drinking coffee in her kitchen, something we didn’t do nearly enough.
The first thing I’d done once I’d gotten control of myself was call my sister and confirm that Tammy was okay. Once confirmed, I threw on some clothes, ditched the makeup, pulled my hair back through an Angels ball cap, and was out the door faster than, officially, any woman ever.
I had precisely two more panic attacks before I finally pulled up to my sister’s house. Once there, I rushed into the guest bedroom that Tammy shared with Mary Lou’s own young daughter, Ellie Mae. My sister always loved her own two-word first name, and blessed (or cursed) her own daughter with one of her own. Anyway, both girls were sitting up in bed, texting. Perhaps texting each other. Kids these days. Tammy shot me a look that suggested she disapproved of my very existence on this planet. But she was alive.
I’d done my damnedest to shield my thoughts from my powerfully telepathic daughter, to bury my concern and panic, and I think I might have succeeded. “Love you,” I had said, and she’d rolled her eyes.
In the kitchen, Mary Lou handed me an oversized mug that was, I was certain, exactly twice the size of my stomach. We sat at her cute little kitchen table that overlooked her cute little backyard, and three sips of perfect coffee later, I was bawling like a baby.
Mary Lou came over and took the cup from me. She set it aside and kneeled down and wrapped an arm around my shoulders. Our heads touched, our hair intermingled. Two sisters who had taken two very different paths.
She whispered some sympathetic words, instinctively aware that I wanted to keep this mini-meltdown from my daughter and my son, who was playing video games upstairs with his younger cousin, Billy Joe. Yes, Billy Joe. I think I might have cried a little harder with that last thought.
My face slid to her ample bosom, pulled down by the sheer gravitational force of her breasts. Had I been an air breather, I surely would have suffocated by now. I managed to pull away, just as a napkin materialized in my hand. Yes, Mary Lou was that good of a mother and sister and friend.
“She’s fine, Sam.”
I closed my eyes and looked away and made a small whimpering noise. The images of her dead in the street came flooding back and the whimper nearly turned into another bout of tears.
“Nothing’s happened to her, Sam.”
“Yet,” I said.
“Don’t talk that way—”
I raised a finger to my lips, especially since I knew my sister was about to launch into one of her Law of Attraction sermons.
“She can hear us?” asked Mary Lou.
My sister’s home was big, maybe even twice as big as my own. Then again, that wasn’t saying much. Danny had never really gotten his career going and the money had never really flowed in from his end. I’d made more than him as a federal agent which, I think, had gnawed at him. When I started working private, our money situation turned erratic at best. Maybe that was why the bastard had turned to his lurid side business. A side business that, as far as I knew, was still nothing more than smoking ruins.
To the world, Danny was still officially missing. And, since I doubted anyone would find his body buried deep within a cave, he would stay missing. I, of course, knew he was dead. So did my kids, and so did my sister. Most definitely my sister, as she had been a pawn in his plot to do away with me.
Anyway, few people asked about him, which spoke volumes of his futile life. My kids, it seemed, were the only ones who missed him. Little did they know he sometimes appeared in their bedrooms, or just outside their doors, or in the far corners of our house where he watched us silently, before disappearing into nothingness again. I never, ever mentioned his presence. His spirit haunting our place would do little to help them move on. I could see spirits, but I rarely interacted with them. It seemed that the interacting part was largely contingent on them. Few seemed to try. Most seemed content to appear, to watch, then disappear again.
Once again, I held the oversized mug in both hands, and looked a
t my sister through the steam that was still rising. Through her open sliding glass door, I could hear the birds singing and chirping and squawking. I knew she fed the birds each morning, and squirrels, too, I thought. She had not one but three birdbaths in her backyard, with small wooden bowls scattered around her garden for all the little critters. Her backyard was a veritable wildlife sanctuary. She had everything from raccoons to skunks to hawks showing up.
With all the chirping and chittering going on behind me, I said, “Truthfully? I’m not sure what Tammy’s range is, but I suspect it’s significant.”
“How significant?” Mary Lou was dressed in mom jeans—she loved her mom jeans—and an old-school, sleeved softball shirt that was now wet with tears.
“I’m wondering if there is no limit,” I said.
“What does that mean?”
I thought about that, as even this concept was new to me, too, but it felt right. “If she has established a prior connection with someone, I think—and this is just conjecture on my part—I think she has the potential to dip into their thoughts from anywhere on Earth.”
“And you know this how?”
“Just a guess, but I’ve seen some evidence of it. She seems to know where I’m at most times, for instance.”
“Every teen’s dream.”
“And every mom’s worst nightmare,” I added.
“We do tend to rely on stealth,” said Mary Lou.
“Stealth is out the window with her.”
“She can read other family members, but you can’t?”
“Exactly. At least, not immediate family members. Never really tried third or fourth cousins.”
“But she can?”
“Oh yes. And not just family members, but other immortals, too.”
“Kingsley?”
I nodded.
Mary Lou said, “Does he know that?”
I nodded again.
“Good. Should keep the bastard honest.”
Mary Lou hadn’t been as forgiving as I had been of Kingsley’s past transgressions. Mary Lou claimed it was her job to remind me of it as often as possible. Once a cheater and all of that.
“He’s not a bastard,” I said, then giggled. “And, yeah, he tends to stay away from her. I don’t think he wants her to know all his secrets.”
Kingsley, I knew, had lived an interesting life. Before he was a famous defense attorney, he had seen and done his fair share of questionable activities. And by questionable, I meant raiding local cemeteries and feasting on rotting corpses. You know, normal stuff.
“Is she listening to us now?”
“If she wanted to,” I said.
I wondered if she could control thoughts, too. That gave me pause for thought. Hell, was she controlling me now? I doubted it, but that was just the thing with mind control, one never really knew.
“So, it doesn’t really matter where we have this conversation then?” asked Mary Lou.
“Not really.”
“Or how low we keep our voices.”
“Well, the others could always overhear us,” I said. “You know, in the traditional way.”
“We have the strangest conversations, Sam.”
“We do.”
“I’m not sure I enjoy them.”
I waited, sipping, wondering again who those kids were in the car with my daughter. I hadn’t recognized any of them. Then again, I hadn’t gotten the clearest look at their faces. That was the thing with my prophetic dreams... they gained clarity over time. The closer to the event, the more details emerged.
“I mean, I enjoy talking to my kid sister—a kid sister who looks nearly a decade younger than me, mind you.” My sister was six years older, and I’d been part of the undead club for a decade. “But I’m not sure how much I enjoy talking about all of this... craziness, you know?”
I nodded. “I know. You would prefer to talk about the kids and school and movies and Game of Thrones.”
“Well, yes. Normal stuff.”
“Mary Lou, normal flew out that window years ago. Like a bat. A vampire bat. I wouldn’t know normal if it bit me on the ass.”
“You see, it’s these kinds of conversations. They are unsettling to me.”
“Are you saying you want me to not talk about what I am, and what my family is going through?”
“Maybe just a teensy bit less? Is that too much to ask?”
I thought about getting mad. I thought about overreacting. But I thought my sister had a point. This past decade, our conversations had been dominated by what I am, what was happening to me, and the general weirdness of all things Samantha Moon.
“Let me get this straight,” I said, my voice rising a little. I feigned righteous indignation. “Are you telling me that your life doesn’t revolve around me?”
“That’s what I’m telling you—”
I cut her off. “And that you have, in fact, a life outside of vampires and werewolves?”
She caught on. “A thriving life, in fact. A very fulfilling life.”
I lowered my voice and sat back. My little faux tirade over. “I’m sorry, M-Lou,” I said, using her high school rap name. Yes, she had a rap name, and, no, I never let her forget it. Ever.
“Thank you, Sam.”
“So, when’s the band getting together again?”
“The band?” she asked, blinking, then put it together. “I was in a rap band for precisely two weeks, Sam. Two weeks.”
“Two of the greatest weeks of my life,” I said.
“You’re terrible. Oh, no, you don’t, Samantha Moon!”
And now I was off of my stool and in the center of her kitchen floor, going through her rap routine, a routine I’d watched her practice dozens and dozens of times with her friends; over and over they’d practiced their moves and flashed wannabe gangster signs.
“My name’s M-Lou, and I’m coming for you,” I rapped, and did their hop, skip, slouch dance perhaps a little too well.
“Sad that you still know that—”
I ignored her. “I drop sick rhymes for these scary times...”
“Oh, God. Kill me now...”
I did their routine, sliding right, then left, waving one arm, then the next. Now, elbows up, hands swinging. The robot zombie, as she used to call it.
“Mommy,” I heard a small voice ask from the kitchen entrance, “what’s Aunt Sammie doing?”
“Never letting me forget, baby. Never letting me forget.”
“We like cute boys and we cannot lie...” I rapped, and accidentally slid into her stove. Ellie Mae giggled and ran over with me, picking up the dance moves quickly, or at least trying to.
Mary Lou shook her head. “My. Worst. Nightmare. Ever.”
“Oh, stop, M-Lou,” I said, sliding to the left, then to the right. Ellie Mae slid right along with me. “And join us.”
“No.”
“C’mon.”
“Fine.”
And she got up from her own stool a little too fast, I thought. In fact, it fell over. She ignored it and joined the two of us in the center of the kitchen. She fell into step smoothly and picked up where I’d left off, channeling her inner thug:
“We like cute boys and we cannot not lie—and who treat us like we’re fly...”
Chapter Fourteen
The dance party ended when Tammy appeared in the doorway, shook her head contemptuously, and pronounced that we were all lame.
I caught up to her in the living room. My niece followed us in, and I asked for some privacy. Mary Lou swept her up and hauled her deeper into the big house.
“Strong words for someone who used to call themselves Lady Tam Tam.”
Tammy took to studying my sister’s china hutch, which displayed anything but china... my sister, besides being a closet rapper, had been into all things medieval growing up. Dungeons & Dragons, fairies, sword and sorcery novels, Renaissance fairs. Yeah, go figure. I’d been told repeatedly that I’d been a witch in a handful of past lives. Maybe my sister had been Maid Marian
or, maybe, a princess with an aversion to peas.
“You’re funny,” said Tammy, without looking around. She was eying a Knights of the Round Table display that, admittedly, looked pretty dang cool.
I said nothing, not because I didn’t have plenty to say about my wannabe rapper, medieval-loving sister. But because the dream had come again, and I saw my daughter jackknifing in the center of the road as the truck’s tires thumped-thumped over her exposed stomach. Crushing the life from her and bursting blood from every orifice.
“Eeww, Mom.”
Yeah, I doubted that last vision—or memory—had stayed hidden. Too powerful, too painful, too fucking terrible.
“Such language, Mother.” She had moved on to examining a fairy sitting on a crystal ball. The fairy had blue wings. I wondered if fairies were real, too.
“Of course they’re real, Mom.”
“Oh? And how would you know?”
She giggled and moved on to a red-winged dragon perched on a pewter rock. The dragon was eying the fairy. I came over and stood next to Tammy. We were both eyeballing twin swords sheathed in a wooden mantel of some sort.
“You kind of sounded like you knew what you were talking about,” I said.
“I’m just joking, Mom. Of course they’re not real.”
But I wasn’t so sure. I knew when my daughter was lying. I sure as hell didn’t need to be a mind reader for that. She had backtracked, but not very convincingly. “Fine,” I said. “We’ll talk about it later.”
“You want to talk about the dream.” She moved on to a display of tiny pewter figurines that could have been lifted from a Lord of the Rings board game.
“It’s not a dream, young lady.”
Tammy shrugged and touched the glass with her fingertips. She was going to be small like me. I barely scratched five foot, three inches. She had barely tipped the tape at five feet. She was thinner than I’d been at that age. She could thank Danny for that. I’d always had a little, um, padding. Even in my vampirism, some of the padding had stayed, although I was leaner and harder than I’d ever been.
