Child, p.28
Child, page 28
part #6 of Sam and Sam Series
“I think you need to meet Justin.”
“Is that possible?”
“No, I mean… I want to go see him.”
She waited and after a moment Sam figured it out.
“Ah. Yeah. Can we go see my parents, too? It’s been a really long time.”
She nodded.
“Yeah. I think we should.”
<><><>
Ohio is a huge state.
Looking at it on a map, you’d never know. It hides so well in the cluster of mid-sized states in the midwest, but the drive across Ohio never ceased to amaze Sam for how long it was. It was why they always stopped with Darin and Cathy on the way through.
This time they didn’t.
Seeing Jason had been great. He had a hole in his sense of normal that he hadn’t felt quite so poignantly until Jason showed up and filled it, and Sam knew they had some really complicated decisions to make about the future, at some point, but this wasn’t that point, yet. For now, the decision to be on their own was still simple. Sam found a bed and breakfast on the lake outside of Cleveland, and they had an easy afternoon there, eating at a cafe the owner recommended to them, driving to a park and walking for a few hours, then going back to the hotel and walking out in the little backyard to watch the water as the sun set. Samantha was calm, but it was for his benefit.
Jason had said something to her. It hadn’t upset her anywhere near as much as the ribbing the night before, but it had stuck with her, more. He had an idea what it was, and he knew better than to ask.
He was at a loss. They never talked about any of it; it made her skin crawl to try to find words, and even their ability to communicate concepts without framing them in words didn’t give her a big enough head start to be able to talk to him. He would just find all light barricaded out of the room and she would come after him in an uncoordinated, frantic attack fueled as much on guilt and panic as real desire. He’d never showered in the dark so many times in his life. And he didn’t know what to do to make any of it any easier.
Of all people, Jason had warned him that this was going to happen. Samantha and Jason had always had a strange relationship. Jason could tease the oddest things out of her, because he had no shame. She could say things to him that she would have never said to anyone else because nothing she could say would shock, impress, or intimidate him. Sam knew the kinds of things Samantha had seen when she’d lived with Carter. Demonic sex was a brutal affair. He’d witnessed bits and pieces of it on accident as he’d spent time in the club that Nuri and Kjarr owned and ran. The two of them were like parents to Samantha in an odd way, but they ran a club that catered to the most twisted demonic interests, and Samantha often had to remind Sam that, all of their charm and interest aside, Nuri and Kjarr were demons themselves. Samantha had come of age in that culture. Sam only had the beginnings of an understanding of what that meant.
“She’s gonna freak out,” Jason had told him the night before the wedding, as they’d sat at a real night club with Carter and a number of the Rangers. The music was up, the alcohol was prolific, and the conversation was loud, and Jason had chosen his moment carefully to make sure it was private in the midst of the chaos.
“She’s gonna freak out, and there’s no telling how bad that’s gonna be.”
Sam had known; having Jason say it out loud had made it real, though.
“What do I do?” Sam asked. Jason shook his head.
“Wish I could tell you. Use your magic mind voodoo and do the best you can.” Jason paused as Kara, Krista, and some of the other women arrived.
“There are girl Rangers?” Carter commented. “How enlightened.”
“There are chick demons, aren’t there? Why wouldn’t there be chick Rangers to go after ‘em?” Jason asked with half a smile, then wrestled his way out of the booth to go dance with Kara.
The dark really wasn’t the problem. For some girls, that was a thing. It was that she had no idea what she wanted, and she was too frantic and too distracted to learn. He wanted to teach her, but there was no way to put that into words that didn’t sound condescending, or invoke the women he had slept with before.
In all, being married wasn’t that much different than they had been, before, but here he felt like a failure. Even knowing it was coming, he’d completely failed to make even the smallest improvement to make their physical relationship less stressful. Worse, she was still skittish around him, even just doing things they had done before. As soon as he tried to kiss her hard, or his hands found the skin on her waist, she would peel away, frustrated at both of them. A few times he had protested that he hadn’t meant anything, but it didn’t help and he knew it.
She sat now with her head leaning on his shoulder, the sun far to their left sinking lower and lower against the horizon, her thoughts a quiet turmoil. He felt her gathering her nerve and he tried not to watch it happen too pointedly.
“Jason makes it look so easy,” she said. He couldn’t help laughing at this.
“He does. For him, it is.”
“I…” she said, looking for words.
“You don’t need to explain,” Sam said. The unspoken exchange was quick, ambiguous. She wanted to say something, to give him an explanation and some kind of gratitude, but the relief at not having to put words to it was real. “You don’t owe me anything.”
“I do.”
They sat for another minute, and something that had bothered Sam a few times came up again.
“Do you ever regret it?” he asked.
“Hmm?”
“You lost a lot of power and a lot of… opportunity. I can tell.”
This bothered her.
“Really? I didn’t know… you knew.”
She had explained a few times how she had made money, before she’d left Carter, by selling strands of hair, eyelashes, tears, and such to magic users who needed things from virgins. He found it odd and a bit intrusive, but it had made enough sense at the time. Recently, though, he’d noticed a difference in how she’d used magic, where it was sourced and the heat and flow of it. It hadn’t taken him long to figure out what had changed.
“Yeah.”
She pushed her face against him.
“Being well loved has its own power,” she said.
“Is that euphemistic?” he asked.
“Hope so. Otherwise I’m doing it wrong.” She sighed. “No. That hasn’t got anything to do with it. You have to understand who you are and where your power comes from, if you’re going to use it effectively. It isn’t a problem, or something I’d regret. It’s just something I’m still adapting to.”
The sun lit the sky with a blanket of red for a few moments, then darker colors began to chase the red back across the sky and stars began to appear.
“You know what we should do?” Sam asked, finding a door.
“Hmm?”
“Let’s go dancing.”
It had been months since she’d been out dancing, and longer than that since it had been somewhere that wasn’t run and populated by demons. The little surge of optimism that she echoed back to him told him he’d hit on something important.
“Yeah,” she said. “Yeah, let’s do that.”
<><><>
It was a bit hipster for either of their tastes, and the air conditioning was apparently broken, but the dance floor was crowded and the music was good enough. Sam claimed a table and Samantha made her way out into the crowd, feeling for the part of her mind that would let go and just exist in the music.
It had been a long time.
Girls formed little rings, shaking arrhythmically with their drinks over their heads. Samantha didn’t understand why they persisted in thinking that a tube dress was great dance attire, and she kept getting spilled on. More than once, a guy with more fingers than brain cells tried to dance with her, but she wasn’t up for dealing with that tonight. She stepped on their feet and moved on.
Sam wasn’t sure where this new, feisty blend of confidence and lack of patience was coming from, but it amused him all the same. She tugged at him to come dance with her, and he put her off. He made a big show of getting a pair of drinks and camping back out at the table, because there were only four empty ones and there was no telling when they were going to all run out. Samantha rolled her eyes at him, sending a strong enough signal across the bond for him to know exactly what she thought of that - chicken! - then resumed her search for her musical center.
It was there.
Despite the strappy platform stilettos, the pink, sticky drinks, and the guys who thought that khakis and a button up made them a gift to women, she was working her way toward that point of balance that she knew was there.
The song changed, disrupting a number of the dancers with an awkward transition, and she was alone in the rhythm, in the sweep and the curve of the melody, an odd sample off of an old record that launched into hip hop that played for her. The floor emptied slightly as a critique to the DJ for playing something they didn’t all immediately know, and Samantha claimed space, feeling the articulation of the music, lyrics that were just another instrument, and she was away.
She didn’t know when Sam stopped being an idea in her head and started dancing with her physically. The realization nearly jarred her out of the music, but she pulled herself back under, drawing him against her, pulling the black closer, losing.
<><><>
That was their best night yet. Long after dark, with the coffeemaker unplugged and the curtains pulled against the windows three times, she forgot herself.
Sam woke up sore.
<><><>
They meandered the rest of the way across the country, to Connecticut. They stopped in at Samantha’s house there, just to be certain no one evil had taken up residence this time, but it was her home from another life. They moved on to a hotel, checked in, and found themselves sitting on the end of the bed, just looking at the door.
Samantha found she wasn’t ready.
She’d spent much of the trip telling Sam the few stories about Justin that she couldn’t remember having ever told him before. It had hurt him, to hear how much she had loved her fiancé, but she had needed him to hear it, as part of her tribute to Justin.
She couldn’t imagine how her life would have turned out.
Carter had told her once, in a fit of mischief and anger, that it was going to end like it did, no matter what. That by involving Justin in her life, she had written a death sentence on him, and it had only been a matter of time.
On bad days, she believed that.
On really bad days, she still believed it about Sam.
For his part, Sam waited quietly. There was a subtle knowledge between them that his day would come, when they sat on the end of a hotel bed and he wouldn’t be ready to go and sit at the graves of his parents.
“Yeah. Okay,” she said. “I’m ready. Let’s do this.”
He squeezed her hand and helped her up off the bed.
This day, without conversation, she let him drive her car. He managed the clutch for the first time well, likely because of the cues she gave him as she stared out the window, listening to the engine.
The sky was full of low-floating clouds, gray and cool like a fog were still lifting. Shivers ran down Samantha’s arms as she walked across the rainsoft ground, following a peculiar line that was still familiar to her, all these years later.
Sam followed, his hands in his pockets. She felt it hit him as they approached the family of gravestones. He had known, she was sure, but it was different, actually seeing them. Justin’s parents, Patrick and Mary, shared a headstone. They’d only been born three months apart. Justin was the oldest of three children; his sisters Lilly and Patricia were next to him. Lilly had been twenty-one. Patricia was nineteen.
She’d loved him. Loved him in a way she had never loved Sam. Honest and clean and without clouding of anxiety about what things meant and whether she was clouding her ability to do her job.
Carter had been trying to beat her out of her habit of being wholly honest every time she spoke, and he’d sent her out in public wearing a truth collar. She’d met Justin on the subway and between the collar and his gentle earnestness, there had never been any line of mistrust between them. He’d been easy and light and sweet and smart.
They’d talked about books. Computer games they’d both played in high school. Movies. He took her to see her first movie in four years. He wanted to hold her hand, but didn’t know how to do it. It wasn’t that he was shy. It was that he didn’t know how to ask. He knew if he did, it would come across bumbling and awkward.
So they talked some more. Got ice cream. Laughed.
Honest laughter. She had still been coming down off the otherworldly high of being in the front courts of heaven, and he had eased that for her in ways that she was still learning to understand.
He drew silly cartoons for her on napkins.
And then, only weeks after the first time she’d kissed him goodnight, he proposed.
And it was simple. Of course. She wanted this to be the rest of her life.
She met his family, two girls with big mouths full of wide teeth, a mother who smiled when her mind wandered, a father who pushed his glasses up his nose and didn’t know what to do with himself when he was alone with the three of them. Justin and his father had been close.
She knelt in front of his headstone, putting her fingers, spread, into the damp grass.
“Hi, Justin.”
She ran her tongue back and forth along the inside of her teeth, staring at the ground.
He wasn’t down there. Parts of her knew that. Other parts, the ones more fluent in symbolic magic, knew how important this ground was, anyway. Knew that dismissing it casually in platitudes and shallow theology wasn’t going to change how careful she was arranging her feet or how her mind perceived the details of the place with such specificity.
She took the stone out of her pocket and put it on the headstone, then dropped her head.
“I miss you.”
That day.
Thanksgiving dinner.
She’d been late, running around chasing Carter and trying to keep the worst of what he was doing out of public view. Justin had called her a few hours earlier, letting her know when dinner would be ready, and she’d enjoyed the drive out of town with the sun setting, earlier and earlier, and casting gorgeous colors across the sky. The trees were enjoying a late fall, and the air was crisp with the promise of frost. She was still happy, in those days, feeling like life had unlocked for her. Hers was simply to experience the joy of it.
Three cars in the driveway, everyone was home. She’d parked on the street. She still remembered the chill of the air against the back of her neck as she’d stuck her hands into her jacket pockets. Fall in the suburbs was different from fall in the city. New York smelled like people and their things. Connecticut smelled like open air.
She’d knocked on the door, and the fact that Patricia didn’t come running was her first clue that something was wrong. Justin’s family often grilled out on the back porch, but the family should have been clustered in the kitchen as Mary worked, today.
Scolding herself for bringing her paranoia with her, she’d walked around the house, but the back deck was empty, too.
From the back door, she’d been able to see.
The demon had ambushed them, just glitched into the house, slaughtering the girls and Patrick in a flurry of violence. Justin had tried to protect his mother, but none of them were equipped with the skills or the tools to put a dent in the creature.
Justin had died badly.
It had been a message for Carter. The demon had taken a contract on Justin and his family from a very well-connected syndicate who had promised him the moon in exchange for an attack that they thought would only be modestly avenged.
Carter’s hands were tied.
The attack had ultimately been on Samantha’s people, not his own, and she was on her own to deal with it.
They’d underestimated her.
Badly.
Very badly.
Her saliva, even now, ran sour at the memories. She put her palm flat on the ground, feeling the wet squish as the soil gave way under the slight force.
“I’m sorry.”
She blinked a pair of tears onto the earth, then she stood.
“Justin, this is Sam.”
Sam waited. He kept himself to himself, not responding at all to her grief, just letting her go through it.
“I married him,” she continued, finding her voice higher than she’d expected. She swallowed. “I love him.”
She nodded, then closed her eyes.
“I miss you.”
She went to stand next to Sam, and he put an arm around her shoulders.
“He made me happy,” she said simply. Sam nodded.
“Yeah.”
She hadn’t really felt special, after that. She’d felt hunted, like her lack of gratitude and hope was a black mark against her, and that she were now imperfect, unredeemable.
Carter had been giddy.
She’d toted him around for six months, after that, killing things in a state of mania that kept her from dealing with her new reality; she’d burned paradise and siphoned off her grief in short order, but without refuge, she had no way to chart a course forward. So she’d hunted and killed.
And then Carter had sent her away, and even the fury turned to ash.
And she’d wandered.
Alone.
Sleeping where she found opportunity, only very infrequently.
And then she’d found Sam.
She tipped her head against his chest.
“Life is different now.”
She looked at the stone, balanced, alone on Justin’s headstone.
Save Ashley.
They stood for a long time, then she knelt once more, putting her fingers on the earth and breathed an angeltongue blessing.
She stood and nodded at Sam, and they left quietly.
<><><>
They took a long time to get to North Carolina.
A very long time.
Samantha was in and out, taking the first couple of days to try to regain her balance. She told him stories he’d heard before, and a few he hadn’t, about the few months she’d been with Justin. She’d told Sam once that she was the nerd princess and that he - Sam - was the nice guy, and that they wouldn’t have ended up together without the intervention of fate. Justin was the nerd prince that she was supposed to have been with. Awkward and introverted, he’d won her in shared interests and temperament. As quietly as he could, Sam thought that her relationship with Justin was harder to accept than her relationship with Alexander had been. Sure, Alexander had been physical and intoxicating to her, but she had always known there was nothing else to it. If either of them had had to admit it out loud, they both knew that if Justin were alive, no circumstances conceivable would have had her end up with Sam.
