Suddenly Sam (The October Trilogy) Read Online Free Page B

human mind, to reason and dream and want and lose – even to bleed. With this new understanding, this impossible comprehension, came a renewed and revived sense of tenacity. He was not going to give up what he had been given.
    Ciara might not be corporeal. But Logan was.
    That would do nicely.
    It will , he told her at last. Time will change everything .
    With th at, and with a plan in mind, Samhain shot through the last of the parting mists of the barrier and entered his own realm. The King of the Dead had returned.

    Chapter Four
    Dietrich Lehrer glanced one last time at his student. Meagan Stone had her shoulders rolled back, her mass of dark hair pulled into a ponytail, and her backpack firmly strapped to her back. Her hands were free at her sides, prepared to gather magic and hurl it at whatever dangers they encountered. He’d taught her well. He realized, in that moment, that he could be secure in the knowledge that Meagan Stone was officially a witch. She had come full circle and crowned herself a queen. She’d earned her right to use the magic flowing through her veins.
    To the right of Meagan stood her good friend, Katelyn Shanks. Lehrer had always known there was much more to Katelyn than she allowed the world to believe. For the life of him, he would never understand why she hid her intelligence from her classmates and teachers. She had the makings of a polyglot, if she allowed herself to be one. She could be an A student if she cared, but she purposefully “forgot” her assignments and missed the easiest questions on tests. He wondered. Maybe she was a being of such substance, she felt the need to hide it from those around her. Perhaps she felt that her intelligence would push her further away from the rest of the world. And maybe she was right. The world was a rather shallow entity, after all. It never really cared to wade into the deep end of much of anything.
    Katelyn , too, stood at the ready. Her chin was up, her shoulders rolled back, and her eyes were steady on the swirling portal before them.
    Dietrich took a deep breath and looked to his left, where Hugh Draper stood. Draper was the stranger among them, the newcomer. He was a wizard from another time. Having disappeared from the Tower of London hundreds of years ago and reappeared in the here and now – and just in the nick of time to save Meagan and Dietrich, the wizard had decided to stick around and lend further aid wherever he could before once more jumping time. According to Draper, his own grove had cast the time travel spell long ago in the hopes that he would locate a moment in chronology when magic was accepted in the world and witches and wizards were no longer prosecuted. So far, he’d had no luck.
    Draper had been a good sport about “suiting up” for whatever adventures might lay ahead for the four of them in October Land. He’d learned quickly what was what, and taken his cues from the others. Whatever they packed, he packed, and if he didn’t know what something was, he simply asked. It was interesting to Lehrer how quickly the man seemed to adapt to a new time. It was as if he existed outside of each time, and time had no influence on him.
    That was so rare, it s eemed a near impossibility. People were a product of their time. The day and age dictated everything to most people. In fact, both Meagan and Katelyn had attempted to pack their iPhones before Dietrich reminded them there probably wouldn’t be great reception in October Land.
    Now the four of them stood together before the pulsing portal through which Logan and Dominic Maldovan, possessed by the spirit of Samhain, had disappeared.
    The portal had been opened by Logan, more or less. Before she’d been taken through, she’d written in her own blood the one word that would allow Dietrich, Draper, Meagan, and Katelyn to go through after her. With a raw fingernail, she’d carved “open” into the trunk of a tree. And because she was a bard, it was a powerful word.