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The next chapter of SOL is up on wordpress now, and you can read it here :)
In which the cousins try to convince their parents to let them move away with Q, and learn to fight the Council... to varying degrees of success.
(casual reminder that I love anyone that reads SOL but even more so if they read it over on WP ;) )
“Do you think they suspect anything?” Dustin murmured, hovering over the crib of their precious daughter. Shanna looked over her shoulder to see Isabelle smiling as she stroked her belly, the wonderful smells of Kian’s cooking drifting through the open windows. She chewed on her lip.
“About what Q has done? No way. We keep it like that.”
Dustin nodded, curling his finger around the tiny cheek of their – so far inappropriately named – Fury. “I trust him. But will it be hard?”
“Doesn’t matter,” she replied in a whisper. “Does it?”
“Not if it keeps our children safe,” Dustin agreed, somewhat grudgingly. Shanna’s eyes sparked.
“They’ll end the Council, Dustin. Anything is worth that.”
“Definitely not.” She fidgeted on the sofa. “Dova is cute, temper tantrums aside. It’ll be nice to have someone like that in my life…”
“All kids are different, but he’s a good one.”
“What’s he like?” Shanna asked, staring down at her stomach.
“Shan, if I got down a rabbit hole telling you what all the future kids of this branch of family are like, I’ll never stop.” Q rubbed a hand over his hair. With a pang, Shanna realised she would soon look older than him.
“Wait,” she said, as something suddenly occurred to her. “How does all the half-vampire stuff work with the kids? Like – are they like us? Or fully human? Or…” She trailed off at Q’s guilty look.
“You know how I said I knew how we defeat the council?”
Shanna nodded.
“I had to do something to the kids for it to work.”
It hadn’t been easy. He’d been working on a deadline of a few months with something that should have been years in the making, and until that day staring into the water, Q hadn’t even known things like this were possible. Fae and vampires and werewolves and warlocks – fine. He didn’t know how they’d come to be, but he knew that they were there, and that was enough. Somehow the presence of human myths had made them easier to swallow.
But this?
Q could only trust in the futures. He wasn’t endangering his family, he was protecting them.
It felt wrong even so.
Shanna nodded. “Okay,” she said, and Dustin looked at her sharply. She didn’t need to ask anymore, because Q’s tone had said it all. “And the council?”
“Two vampires down, but Menna walked away.” He spat the name.
“Can we Turn him?” Dustin crossed his arms against the chill. Q noticed and jutted his chin towards the car, and they shut the door behind them.
“The virus will kill him.” Shanna tried to sound dispassionate. All of her visions and none of them had shown this? Somehow it made her feel worse, that she could be so easily blindsided by death.
“The virus is already there. Activating it might help some of the healing process.” Q turned on the engine and blasted the heat, doing a neat U turn to get them back on the road. “It wouldn’t be enough.”
“You’ve looked ahead?”
“Of course.”
“And?”
Q stared dead ahead. “There’s no good outcome, Shanna.”
“Can’t your contacts do something? Your mate the Blood Warlock?”
“I burned that favour for Shanna.”
“Dustin, stop.”
“No, Shanna. Why are you accepting this so easily? Q might not have thought of the solution yet. What about Cissy? She started learning healing magic last time she was back in Wales.”
“She’s halfway across the world.”
“So then bring her back.”
It had. On her seventeenth birthday she’d been jokingly offered a kiss, and she’d taken it seriously, and then she’d asked for more. She’d explored the marks on his skin with her gentle fingertips and felt humbled at the level of trust he had gifted to her. By her eighteenth birthday she knew every inch of him, familiar in his companionship in a way she’d never felt before, had whispered promises of forevers and rings, and then on her nineteenth he’d seriously offered her one.
“Maybe I should have said yes,” she sighed, but what did something like marriage mean for love? It had been a nice gesture, but she’d suspected at the time it had been only for her, and she wasn’t interested in taking it. Too young, she’d thought. Not for her, she’d thought. She’d forgotten the wistful way Isabelle had looked at Kian, resplendent in her dress, and how Cara and Ayr had cried. She’d tried to be like Mia, derisive of the traditions, but in her heart she wanted.
It wasn’t until Q knocked on her door that she got the advice she had been looking for.
Why did he believe it? Well, there was only so far coincidence could go. He pulled the strings and mastered the pied piper’s flute, so of course he could get a sense for when his were being pulled, and he was being played. The only reason he thought it was something of a higher power was because the outcomes had never been bad: they had always held his hand and prompted him to a better outcome. He knew better than to believe anyone powerful in the real world would help him out without expecting some quid pro pro.
Frankly, this gave him some reassurance: a safety net. He never truly relied on it, because to do so was a risk, and Q did not take risks. A risk implied he didn’t know an outcome, didn’t know the consequences. He always did.
So after paving his road to hell with his latest act, he retreated from his brother’s family – physically, at least. He always looked in on them, searched ahead. Saw that Shanna’s inevitable conversation with Dustin went well, and that Isabelle finally fell pregnant and would carry to term. He saw the cousins growing up, their close bond iron-tight with their secret but strained with the toll.
He visited them all to make sure they knew what they were, but for the most part kept to himself. He had made some mistakes with his own child, and he’d make many more, but at least he was here for it. At least he could be here for it.
Hard to take off the white knight’s armour when there were so many suffering, but he’d give enough in the future. He had to try and be okay with that, even if he never really was.
But he set his watch when he left Shanna’s house. Nine years. In nine years time, he had to start preparations.
“Why are you here?” Shanna asked, eyes narrowing, subconsciously searching for dangers.
Q gave her a look. He wasn’t fooled, because he’d never been. “Oh ye of little faith,” he said, sweeping in. “Why do you think, other than to offer my congratulations?”
Shanna scowled and followed him to the sofa, but he was speaking before she could think of what she needed to say.
“It’s not about being as good as Echo and Lukas. It’s not about moving on with a replacement family. It’s about you, forging your life, your path. Not taking cues from the ghosts of the past or even the Mia’s of the present. You need to be true to yourself, and to do that, you need to know who you are. You can’t do that by being the thing that you think people want you to be.”
Shanna glared at him. “Psychologist now, are you?”
“I’m insulted that you think I wasn’t one before. You’re just scared. Trust me, anyone expecting a child is scared.”
“You’ve come back after three and a half years to give me that pearl?” she snapped. “Thanks. You can go now.”
