Read Page 18

It was Edwin, of course.

"Good evening, Samantha," he said.Advertisement

He came closer and I saw that his hands were covered in dirt. Dirt was also under his fingernails. And it wasn't just dirt, but something else. Clay?

"Pardon my appearance. I was on an emergency dig."

"Digging what?" I asked, and was all too aware that my inner alarm was ringing even louder.

He came closer, grinning macabrely.

He looked, quite frankly, insane. "Tell you what, Samantha. I will show you someday.

How does that sound?"

"Weird as hell," I said.

He laughed. "Yes, I suppose it does sound sort of odd."

His aura, like that of Tara and old Cal, rippled with a dark thread-like energy.

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Except in Edwin, the darkness was more evident. I had assumed the darkness was a result of grief...now, I wasn't sure what to think.

"Why do you keep smiling like that?" I asked.

"Oh, I'm just a happy-go-lucky kind of guy. Made even happier now that you're here."

My inner alarm blared loudly. "What the hell does that mean?"

"Oh, nothing. We just so rarely get visitors here on our little island."

"I'm beginning to see why," I said, and found myself inching away from him.

He laughed. "Yes, we are an odd lot.

Not exactly your typical family. And like most families, we have our hidden demons."

His words hit home. "You're one of them."

The young man continued grinning bizarrely. "One of whom, Samantha Moon?" He used my full name.

"You're a Dark Master," I said, using the term for the thing that lived in me, the thing that had mastered immortality, the thing that lived on through me using the darkest of magicks.

"Dark Master? I like that. I'm very flattered, Sam."

He flashed me another crazy smile, and now I saw something else within him.

Something human. It was in his eyes, and it made a brief appearance. I saw the young man. The real Edwin Thurman.

Hidden. Pushed aside. Suffocated. But as quickly as he appeared, he disappeared again, like flotsam rising briefly to the ocean surface, only to be sucked under the dark waters again.

Edwin - or whoever was before me - stepped around me, clasping his hands behind his back. I got a very powerful psychic hit, and one that I knew was true.

"You're not like the others," I said.

He glanced at me, arching an eyebrow.

"Oh? Do tell?"

"You are, if I'm correct, permanently present. You're not hidden in the background, not like the others, not like the thing within me."

"Not a thing, Sam." His annoyance surprised me. He paused, held my gaze, and added, "My sister."

I gasped and backed away some more.

"And I'm not saying that metaphorically, Samantha Moon. Residing within you is my sister, and someday soon - very, very soon - she and I will be together again." pqdm.com