Kingsley continued, "I'll tell you what would happen if you can't change him back, Sam. Your son will be undead, like you. He will feed on blood, like you. He will be a monster."
"Like me?"
"For all eternity, Sam. Your boy. Your little boy. Don't do this to him, Sam. You can't take this chance."
I held his gaze long and hard. "Who do I talk to, Kingsley?"
He took in a lot of air, crossed his arms, and looked away. "Let me ask around, Sam."
I nodded and felt a combination of joy and dread, fear and hope. "Thank you," I said.
But he didn't answer me or look at me, and shortly after that I left his office.
Chapter Forty-three
I had just slipped into my car after practically sprinting across the baking asphalt when my phone rang. Gasping and in real pain, I looked at the faceplate:
Caller Unknown.
Heart thumping and still reeling from my singed skin, I clicked on the phone.
"Hello," I said. My face and hands were on fire, despite the copious amounts of sunscreen - and a sunhat that was wide enough to shade a small Balkan country.
"Hi," said the tiny voice, a voice that was somehow even tinier than I remembered.
"Maddie!"
"You know my name."
"Of course I know your name, honey." But as much as I wanted to comfort her and reassure her, I needed information. "Maddie, honey, how many people live with you?"
"Two grownup men now."
"Are they black or white?"
"Bofth. The white man is new. He's really mean."
Maddie had a slight lisp and it was the most precious sound I had ever heard. I absently started my car and turned my air conditioner full blast on me, while huddling as far away from any sunlight as I could. My van's side windows were equipped with pull-down shades, which I rarely, if ever, pulled up. The windshield sunshade was still in place, blocking most of the sun, although laser-like beams still found their way through here and there.
So there was a black guy and a white guy. The white guy, I knew, could have been Hispanic or even Asian. Maddie was only five. I doubted she saw race and color like an older child would. Or as an adult would.
Sherbet had confirmed the worse, that some kind of children swapping was going on. Children for drugs. Children for money. Children for sex. A slave trade where lives meant little, and no doubt most kids disappeared or ended up dead. Along with the mothers.
"Maddie, honey, are you in a house?"
"A house?"
"Or is it an apartment?"
"Peoples live here. We take the vader."
The vader? My head was swimming. Jesus, I had had my questions rehearsed for when and if I heard from Maddie again, but now all my questions had gone out the window.
Think. Focus.
"Honey, what can you see from the window? Can you see anything?"
There was a slight pause. I heard her pushing aside what sounded like blinds. "I see a big house."
"Where?"
"It's high on top of the biggest mountain I've ever seen!"
My heart started hammering. I knew Simi Valley. The federal agency I had worked for, HUD, used a facility outside of the city to hold seminars and training. The facility was away from prying eyes, up against the base of a majestic, sweeping mountain range. Or, perhaps, a very big hill. Certainly big enough to call a mountain if you were a small girl from the streets of Buena Park.
And at the top of the hill, majestically overlooking the city was a museum. Not quite a mansion, but it looks like one from a distance.
The Ronald Reagan Museum.
The Moon Feather Indian casino, if I recalled correctly, wasn't too far away from our training facility, either.
She's in Simi Valley. I knew it. I felt it in every fiber of my being.
I also sensed something else. Or, rather someone else. And from somewhere over the phone line, I heard what sounded like a door slam followed by a man's yell. The yell sounded drunken and angry.
"I have to go," said Maddie, whispering into the mouthpiece. Her whisper sounded nearly as loud as her little voice.
The line dropped before I could say goodbye.
Chapter Forty-four
I was back at the hospital, sitting in a chair at the foot of my son's bed. He was sleeping quietly. Too quietly. I would have thought he was dead if not for the hospital equipment that chirped out a heart beat.
The dark halo around him was bigger than ever. My son, to my eyes, seemed lost in a cloud of black smoke.
Sitting on my lap was a clipboard with a mostly blank sheet of paper I had found in the backseat of my car. The paper had my daughter's name on it and the beginning of an assignment. I wondered idly if she ever finished the assignment.
I held in my hand a Pilot Gel Ink Rolling Ball pen, which I preferred to use when I did my automatic writing sessions.
Automatic writing is still new to me. In fact, I'd only done it a couple of times, and both times I was certain I was going crazy.
In essence, as it was initially explained to me by Fang (and verified by a little online research) the process of automatic writing is a way to communicate with the spirit world. In particular, with highly evolved enlightened beings who know what the hell they're talking about.
At least, that was the idea.
Who or what came through in these sessions was certainly open to debate. And, yes, there was a part of me that seriously suspected I was moving my own hand, and giving myself the answers I wanted to hear.
Just a part of me.
The other part of me, perhaps the part that was still human, believed that I was getting messages from beyond. By spirit guides, or spiritual beings.
Or, for all I knew, Jim Morrison, unless he was alive, too, and working as a bounty hunter in Hawaii.
I went through the various steps of centering myself, imagining silver cords attaching themselves to my ankles and lower spine and reaching down through the many hospital floors, the building's foundation, through the very ground itself, down through Hell and a lost world of dinosaurs, and all the way to the center of the earth, where I mentally tied them tightly around three massive boulders.
Now firmly anchored, I closed my eyes and attempted to empty my mind by focusing on the physical act of breathing, drawing air in through my nose and out my mouth, even if it was air I didn't need. Except I kept thinking about my son, lying there just a few feet away, fighting for his life.
Focus, Sam.
I closed my eyes and, as I breathed, I pictured the stale, medicinal hospital air flowing over my lips and down deep into my lungs. I breathed in, holding the air, and then exhaled it.
I did this over and over, breathing and picturing, and any time I thought of my son, I gently released the thought.