Chapter Eleven

The Problem with Bloodlines

So… the kids are asleep.

Me, not so much.

Hi, ceiling. Been a while. To say that lying in my old bed in my old room at my parents’ house is a surreal feeling is putting things mildly. I’m not sure if it’s because the whole vampire thing happened to me or if I’m just being weird... but it doesn’t seem like much time has passed at all. For a fleeting moment, it’s tempting to think everything from the day I left for college to coming back here to say farewell to by father has been a crazy ass dream that woke me up in the middle of the night… and in three hours, I’ll be trudging off to class at the high school.

Thinking about my childhood gets me thinking about Mom. I know ‘motherhood’ isn’t some hard-wired absolute thing in our brains and there are horrible mothers out there. Mom never actively did anything bad toward us kids. The more I think about it, the more I feel guilty because she’s obviously suffering from something.

In hindsight, I no longer believe she ignored us because she wasn’t interested in us or had better things to do. I’d say she might be legitimately crazy but… Anthony mentioned she has no soul. Dusk told us he thought he saw her doing magic when he was little. Magic runs in my bloodline, right? That doesn’t mean it’s only me. It’s my entire family. Could Mom have been practicing magic in secret? Did she screw something up that resulted in her present condition?

Within seconds of me wondering this, a strong sensation of vertigo washes over me. For an instant, it feels like the bed beneath me has stopped existing. I fall straight downward into darkness. Above me, the white rectangle of my bedroom ceiling rockets off, shrinking and spinning until it’s gone from view.

Eerie black-and-white trees appear around me out of nowhere. I find myself hovering in the air, twice my height above the ground, surrounded by forest. The freakiest part of this is how dark it looks. Yes, I’m serious. That’s freakier to me than falling down through my bed into a crazy woodland environment. I haven’t seen real darkness for fourteen years. Being a vampire is like having permanent night vision goggles bolted onto my skull. Except… I don’t experience the ‘everything is green’ thing. It’s all in color, just sort of muted. Hues are much more vibrant in the light. That’s about the only way I can tell if it’s dark or not, is how washed out or bright the colors look.

Anyway… it’s dark.

That’s weird.

I look up past the tops of towering trees at a starless expanse of infinite blackness. I am mostly sure this is not real. For one thing, if I actually did fall downward through the bed, Tammy would be freaking the hell out. For another thing, being able to pass through solid matter is not one of my special powers. No, this has to be some sort of vision.

If so, what am I seeing ?

I float around, having a little bit of control over myself here. Motion amounts to drifting lazily in any particular direction. Can’t seem to make myself go down or up, though. While I’m trying to figure out how to navigate, I catch sight of something moving in the distance. Okay, it seems important. I lean toward it and try to propel myself forward, waving my arms like I’m swimming in the air.

Something ghostly a hundred yards away glides among the trees.

I chase after the apparition, which gradually becomes clearer and clearer as a human form. Pursuing it soon feels easier. I’m moving faster, so this is clearly what my psychic senses want me to see. Going in the wrong direction is extremely difficult. Picking up speed, I chase the spirit for a few minutes before arriving in a narrow clearing with a creek running through it.

The spirit looks to be a woman somewhere between thirty and forty. Her clothing and hair scream Eighties. That was the decade where humanity collectively went through more hairspray than they did in the sixties, seventies, and nineties combined.

I was born in ’79, so I missed most of the Eighties. I don’t really remember much that happened before age six, which would’ve been ’85. Thankfully, my teenage years did not line up with the whole big hair and legwarmers craze.

This woman looks like she stepped out of 1984. I’m being kinda silly here. It’s impossible to tell what year just by her hairspray do.

All of a sudden, my whimsical opinion of her fashion sense gets crushed under the dread of an all-too-familiar presence: Elizabeth.

No, she isn’t anywhere in sight. I don’t hear her whispering in my head, nor do I see anything obvious that indicates she’s back from beyond. She is absolutely dead, destroyed, one with the Creation Engine or whatever you want to call it. This can’t be her. It’s my psychic feelers telling me Elizabeth had something to do with whatever I’m witnessing. Her stink is all over it. Even though it’s residual, the feeling of her makes my skin crawl.

The spirit pauses and looks back in my general direction, though she’s not looking at me. And… whoa! That’s Mom. Yeah, she looks late thirties, which would be younger than when I last saw her. But… this version of Mom is a lot closer to my memory than the seventy-year-old woman who sits in the greenhouse all day.

Ghost Mom seems lost, more annoyed than scared. Like she pulled over on the side of the road for an emergency pee break in the forest and can’t figure out how to get back to the car. She’s walking around like she expects to find the right path back to the road and her car at any minute.

Son of a…

Did Elizabeth do something to my mother?

Argh. Of course, it makes sense. Elizabeth did not simply come into being one day and decide to mess with Samantha Moon. She’s like 500 years old or something. That bitch has been chasing my family bloodline for centuries. I’d be stupid and a little arrogant to think that I’m the only one she’s ever attacked. It only makes logical sense that she’d have been trying again and again. Me, my sister, Mom, Grandma. Great Grandma, and on backward through generations. If anything, I’m the unlucky one where Elizabeth finally figured out the correct way to do what she wanted.

Or, I’m the unlucky one who didn’t know anything about magic, so I couldn’t defend myself.

As I float here staring at my mother’s ghost, it occurs to me that Mom couldn’t teach me anything about magic because she was a basket case.

The forest blurs and spins .

I’m in the woods again, but now it’s more familiar. Still the eerie woodland, the trees monochrome and somewhat transparent. I recognize this place. It’s behind the house, effectively our massive backyard. Mom’s crouching near the ground, not far from me. She’s not a ghost anymore. Looks normal; she’s the only item of color in an otherwise black and white vision. A bamboo basket in her left hand contains a collection of plant matter. She appears to be harvesting something growing near the base of a glowing tree with a door embedded in it. Fairy magic?

Mom snaps her head up like a deer sensing danger.

A man in a long black trench coat comes flying out of the forest at her, literally flying… as if he’d been shot out of a giant crossbow. I get only a brief look at him before he crashes into Mom and they both disappear. He had fangs, yellow eyes, and pale skin.

I close my eyes, trying to preserve that image for as long as possible. He’s pale but not gray like the one that exploded into dust. White guy, too. Short hair. Goatee. Two rings on his left hand, and some sort of black amulet hanging from his neck. I can’t make out what it is in the half second he’s visible.

When I look again, Mom’s ghost is still there, walking around like she’s trying to find her way back to the glowing tree with the open door.

I reach out toward her and try to call, “Mom?”

But no voice comes out of me.

The instant I try to speak, a harsh force yanks me backward. Helpless to stop myself, I careen head-first through the forest at such speed the trees blur together into a ghostly gray haze. A speck of white appears in the distance, growing rapidly into a rectangular shape... a wall of some type.

Just when I think I’m about to crash into the white wall, my motion abruptly stops.

I’m lying in bed, staring up at the ceiling again .

Oof. What a ride.

Though my physical body appears to have never moved from this spot, my heart is racing and my sense of balance is spinning. My brain can’t make sense of such an instantaneous stop, even if it didn’t really happen. It was only a dream/vision.

Dammit, Elizabeth.

The most frustrating part of this is that she’s quite dead and gone. I can’t kill her again. And I definitely want her to stay dead and gone. The world is better for it. She did this catatonic fugue thing to Mom, though. I’m sure of it. That bitch tried to do to Mom what she eventually did to me. But it didn’t work—it didn’t take.

But why not?

As I lay there stewing in those thoughts, I find myself becoming increasingly angry.

My mother has been a shell of a person for most of my life. That forced Mary Lou to sacrifice her childhood to become our stand-in mother. I can’t help but wonder how my life might’ve turned out if Mom hadn’t been attacked.

Just when I think Elizabeth couldn’t have ruined my life any worse than she already has, I find out that yes, in fact, she did.

How different would things be if Mom wasn’t… gone?

I close my eyes and let out a long sigh.

“No sense driving myself crazy,” I whisper to no one in particular.

“About what?” asks Tammy in a sleepy voice.

“What-ifs.”

“Yeah, they suck.” Tammy snuggles against my side.

When my daughter was little, she’d always want to sleep with us whenever she had a nightmare. Even though she’s technically an adult now, she still feels safer around me. I don’t blame her. I would feel safer around me, too!

“So, what what-if are you agonizing over?” she whispers .

“Just had a doozy of a vision.”

“Spill.”

I take a breath and explain what I just experienced. “… basically wondering what things would’ve been like if Mom won that fight and didn’t go full basket case.”

Tammy’s quiet for a bit, then asks, “So, does that mean Grandma’s ghost is lost out there somewhere?”

“I think so. Yeah.”

“Can we fix her?” asks Tammy.

“No clue. I don’t even know what happened to her.” I rub a hand down my face. “Those visions aren’t always literal. Though, I do kinda think this one might be.”

Tammy stretches. “If it’s as simple as bringing Grandma and her ghost to the same place, I think she would’ve found her way back on her own by now.”

“Yeah, true,” I say with a hint of sigh in my voice. “Something’s keeping them apart.”

A change in Tammy’s breathing tells me she’s drifted off. I close my eyes, but there’s little chance of me joining her. Sleep isn’t in the cards for me tonight. As if worrying about vampires potentially being in the area didn’t give me enough reason to stay up all night, now I’ve got the added puzzle of my mother to spin the gears of my brain.

What the heck happened to her—and is it even possible to fix?

Dammit. I’d kind of been hoping for a brief stay. Say what I need to say to Dad and go home. But now…

I can’t leave until I figure this out.