Suddenly Sam (The October Trilogy) Read Online Free Page A
Author: Heather Killough-Walden
had kept her out of his realm altogether. And that had prevented her from being with the man she professed she loved.
He’s only a boy , he told her, thinking that the boy and Dominic Maldovan had much in common.
Everyone is a child to you, Sam.
He paused again, closing eyes he didn’t have, and felt the torn emotions of a man who loved the sound of a woman’s voice, but hated what she was saying. Because it was true.
He was disembodied now, an incorporeal form once more in need of substance. Dominic had succeeded in taking back his body, leaving Samhain without arms and legs and the feel of human flesh. But he was still more than he’d been in his own realm. The magic Logan had given him with her words had not completely left him. He had power.
Do you think you will be happy with a queen who does not love you?
It was the question he had been desperately hoping she wouldn’t ask. But it was the one he knew she would.
Time changes everything , he told her.
It hasn’t changed this.
On the day that she’d been born, in his month of October, he’d paused on his throne and straightened. He’d felt something.
I t had literally been forever since he’d felt anything at all. His world was a realm of memories. He had around him the after-images of each person’s life, like flashes of sepia over black and white. There was no future, no present, only the past.
And yet, this little bard had brought color to Samhain’s aging world. There was a bond between magic and Samhain. Magic was nothing but the mass of infinite possibilities – just like death, just like those breathless moments when an infant is still trapped in that nothingness of death before a mother screams and the baby draws its first breath and wails, and the world rejoices in a newborn life.
So when Ciara was born, Sam knew it. But this time, he more than knew it. It was like coming awake, like seeing the beginnings of a masterpiece.
Like being born.
And he had fallen in love.
That love was as strong in this moment, millennia later, as it had been then. But now, Ciara was just as incorporeal as he was, and even less so because she’d split her spirit into two with her last breathing spell.
Only a whole spirit could enter the Land of the Dead.
In Fall Fields, the portal would open and take whole spirits into Sam’s realm. There, they joined others they had loved and lost. It was a final resting place, together at last, an exhalation like the period at the end of a very long sentence.
Spirits with unfinished business , however, were kept at bay by the forces of the in-between and could not enter the portal. Almost always, these spirits were torn in twain, ripped apart by the dichotomy of forces placed upon their souls. They yet wanted to live. But the fates had brought them death.
They were torn between this world and the one they’d left behind. They were haunts, poltergeists, or spectres.
They were ghosts .
This is what Ciara had done to herself to escape Samhain and the throne he’d prepared for her. She’d used the last of her mortal existence and sacrificed another in order to complete her spell.
She’d turned herself into a ghost.
She was prevented from entering the Land of the Dead, no matter what he did. And the other half of her spirit? Sam was now realizing that this was where resided the true beauty of her spell. It was no poltergeist or remnant. Instead, it was Logan.
Now he knew why she possessed such an old soul.
Time did change a lot of things. But the essence of a person, it could not touch. So Ciara was right. It hadn’t changed this.
But Ciara was also wrong. Logan was undoubtedly more than Ciara had hoped for in a corporeal form. Logan Wright was a bard of immense untapped power, and that power had done for Samhain what Ciara’s companionship never could have. It had brought him to life.
To life .
N ow he had a new and more thorough understanding of existence. Of what it meant to draw breath, to think with a
He’s only a boy , he told her, thinking that the boy and Dominic Maldovan had much in common.
Everyone is a child to you, Sam.
He paused again, closing eyes he didn’t have, and felt the torn emotions of a man who loved the sound of a woman’s voice, but hated what she was saying. Because it was true.
He was disembodied now, an incorporeal form once more in need of substance. Dominic had succeeded in taking back his body, leaving Samhain without arms and legs and the feel of human flesh. But he was still more than he’d been in his own realm. The magic Logan had given him with her words had not completely left him. He had power.
Do you think you will be happy with a queen who does not love you?
It was the question he had been desperately hoping she wouldn’t ask. But it was the one he knew she would.
Time changes everything , he told her.
It hasn’t changed this.
On the day that she’d been born, in his month of October, he’d paused on his throne and straightened. He’d felt something.
I t had literally been forever since he’d felt anything at all. His world was a realm of memories. He had around him the after-images of each person’s life, like flashes of sepia over black and white. There was no future, no present, only the past.
And yet, this little bard had brought color to Samhain’s aging world. There was a bond between magic and Samhain. Magic was nothing but the mass of infinite possibilities – just like death, just like those breathless moments when an infant is still trapped in that nothingness of death before a mother screams and the baby draws its first breath and wails, and the world rejoices in a newborn life.
So when Ciara was born, Sam knew it. But this time, he more than knew it. It was like coming awake, like seeing the beginnings of a masterpiece.
Like being born.
And he had fallen in love.
That love was as strong in this moment, millennia later, as it had been then. But now, Ciara was just as incorporeal as he was, and even less so because she’d split her spirit into two with her last breathing spell.
Only a whole spirit could enter the Land of the Dead.
In Fall Fields, the portal would open and take whole spirits into Sam’s realm. There, they joined others they had loved and lost. It was a final resting place, together at last, an exhalation like the period at the end of a very long sentence.
Spirits with unfinished business , however, were kept at bay by the forces of the in-between and could not enter the portal. Almost always, these spirits were torn in twain, ripped apart by the dichotomy of forces placed upon their souls. They yet wanted to live. But the fates had brought them death.
They were torn between this world and the one they’d left behind. They were haunts, poltergeists, or spectres.
They were ghosts .
This is what Ciara had done to herself to escape Samhain and the throne he’d prepared for her. She’d used the last of her mortal existence and sacrificed another in order to complete her spell.
She’d turned herself into a ghost.
She was prevented from entering the Land of the Dead, no matter what he did. And the other half of her spirit? Sam was now realizing that this was where resided the true beauty of her spell. It was no poltergeist or remnant. Instead, it was Logan.
Now he knew why she possessed such an old soul.
Time did change a lot of things. But the essence of a person, it could not touch. So Ciara was right. It hadn’t changed this.
But Ciara was also wrong. Logan was undoubtedly more than Ciara had hoped for in a corporeal form. Logan Wright was a bard of immense untapped power, and that power had done for Samhain what Ciara’s companionship never could have. It had brought him to life.
To life .
N ow he had a new and more thorough understanding of existence. Of what it meant to draw breath, to think with a
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