The drive to my family’s compound was shorter than I remembered, or maybe it was just my nerves and racing mind that made the trip seem short.
As we pulled up in front of the estate gates, my dad leaned out to type in the access code, and soon after we were driving up the long driveway leading to my childhood home. The castle-like structure up ahead was the main base for all hunters, it was also the place in which I grew up. The rolling hills and duck pond to the north, and the forest to the south, the property spanned over acres of green, lush land, with the castle smack in the middle of the property.
As my uncle pulls the van around a circular fountain, the main doors to the castle fly open, and my step-mother along with my grandmother come running down the steps towards us. My brother and father exit the van first and are wrapped up immediately in loving embraces, while I take a little longer to retrieve my bag and exit the vehicle. Once they release my dad and brother, they both look to me, my mother being the first to move and wrap me in her arms.
“Are you okay sweetheart?” my step-mother asks gently, squeezing me a little tighter before releasing me.
“Yeah,” I say simply, not really knowing how to answer.
My grandma then moves to embrace me too, when the van begins to buck and shake, startling us all out of our sappy reunion moment.
“You mind explaining what the hell that is,” she says sharply to my dad, as he and my uncle move to the back of the van.
“It’s a gift, just for you mum” he replies as we all follow him to view the spoils of the evening. As my uncle opens the back of the van, with a big grin on his face, the vampire roles out onto the ground, and snarls up at all of us.
“Well, how did you know son” placing her hands on her hips. “It’s what I’ve always wanted, my own pet vamp,” she says as she moves to avoid the vampire that is now rolling around the ground.
“We thought you’d like it” my uncle jokes, as he grabs the vamp and, throwing him over his shoulder, moves towards the house.
“Who is that?” my step-mother asks, as my dad pulls Tina gently from the bed of the van.
“Well, that is going to require some explaining” my brother chimes in, looking pointedly at me enough for mum and grandma to notice.
“Alright, everyone inside looks like we will be needing a hot cup of tea for this tale,” my grandma says as she follows my dad and brother into the house. Trust my grandma to fall on old habits, the cup of tea was a bonified tradition in my family. Pretty much anything could be settled over a cuppa my grandmother believed, and whether that was true or not, a hot beverage sounded perfect right about now.
I follow my grandma into the giant building I once called home and once we were through the entrance, I couldn’t remember why I had left in the first place. The main floor of the castle was a bustling hub of activity, with both human and Soulassassin’s sharing the communal space. To the right was a rumpus room filled with pool tables and a bar and a giant TV where some teens were currently watching some monster flick on the big screen. To the left was the dining and kitchen area, where all members of the household were responsible for cooking and cleaning, according to the rotating roster set out by my grandmother, and ahead were the living quarters for all members of the household. Beyond the living quarters, the house split to the left wing, housing the hospital, training facility and the dungeon, and the right wing, which was exclusively for my family.
As we moved through the main hall, many members of the household came to watch us walk past, some stopping me to welcome me home while my brother and grandma moved to follow my uncle, taking the path to the training area, while we moved quickly to the hospital my step-mother ran. Admittedly it wasn’t a hospital, more of a clinic, but with all the machinery my step-mother had acquired over the years, along with multiple medical qualifications she coupled with her innate healing abilities, the clinic could take care of just about any injury or ailment.
Once we were there, my dad moves Tina’s body to one of the beds, while my step-mother began taking her OB’s as she called them. My mother was the first to create a baseline health system for our kind, one used by other safe houses all over the world, when treating our people, as our physiology changed once we were turned into, essentially, living vampires. Our body temperatures were colder than humans, our hearts rates were lower, at a usual 30 beats per minute, and other aspects of our blood changed, when viewed under a microscope. Well, that’s what my step-mother said, to me, it didn’t really make a lot of sense if I could fight, that was good enough for me.
While my mother moves around Tina, I notice she hasn’t changed a bit since I left. Her red shoulder-length hair is pulled back in its usual ponytail, her freckled skin and green eyes observing every subtle movement that Tina makes. Though not my mother by birth, my own mother having died 3 years ago, Katherine Livingstone had never treated me as anything less than her daughter.
Not wanting to disrupt her and my dad as they worked to help Tina, I moved out of the curtained area to look around the clinic, noting some of the changes my Katherine had made in my absence, when a short brunette I recognize exits one of the lab areas located at the back of the clinic.
“Deanna?” I call out, surprised to see one of my oldest friends wearing a white lab coat and writing on a clipboard. Her head pops up at the sound of her name, and when she recognizes me, a brilliant smile lights up her face, as she drops the clipboard and runs straight for me.
“Alessandra!” she exclaims as we wrap each other in a big hug, laughing with joy, as it had been over a year since we had seen one another.
“What are you doing here”.
“What are you doing here”.
We both laugh as we speak at the same time, an old habit, but a comforting one after being separated for so long.
“You first,” I say, wanting to hear everything about her life.
“Well, your mum approached me about 6 months ago, saying that she could use an assistant in the labs” she moves to pick up her dropped clipboard, “so she asked me if I wanted to train to become a healer, and of course I said yes!” she exclaims loudly, both of us laughing at her excitement.
For as long as I could remember, Deanna had wanted to be a healer just like Katherine, but unfortunately lacked the natural ability born to some of our kind. That didn’t stop her from studying every health science and medical course she could get her hands on, having to move to multiple universities over the years throughout the country to complete the degrees when people would start to question her age. It was no surprise that Katherine was using Deanna’s vast knowledge to learn more about our kind.
“So, just out of curiosity, what are you and Katherine working on right now,” I ask, remembering a conversation from over a year ago, about my step-mother wanting to study supernaturals.
“This and that,” she says vaguely and straight away, I know she is hiding something important.
“Deanna,” I say seriously, and she rolls her eyes at me.
“Ask your mum, she can explain it better than I can,” she says as she places the clipboard on a desk in the corner of the room.
“So, what about you?” she asks, beings as subtle as a bull in a china shop when it comes to the subject change.
“This and that” I reply just as vaguely, to which she sighs dramatically, her brown eyes glaring at me.
“Alright, alright, well, I cut my hair” I begin, pointing to the dark brown undercut and long blonde hair on top.
“I noticed, loving the new look.”
“Thanks, ahh what else,” I say tapping a finger to my chin, “well I’ve been doing solo missions for a while, taking out the odd nest here and there, must have pissed off enough vampires for them to openly attack me tonight” I continue, much to Deanna’s astonishment.
“Then I kinda turned Tina into a Soulassassin”.
“WHAT?!” Deanna shouts, and my dad pokes his head out of the curtain to see what the fuss was about.
“Oh, hey Deanna, everything okay?” he asks, looking between Deanna and me.
“Ah, yeah sorry about that John, Alessandra just caught me off guard was all” she replies awkwardly, moving around me and toward my dad.
“Is Tina behind there?”
“Yep, poor thing, she’s a bit banged up, but should recover soon enough” he replies, pushing the curtain across.
Deanna gasps when she sees our friend, and moves around the side of the bed, avoiding the cables now attached in various places, to take a hold of her hand.
“I forgot to ask, but how do you both know her?” my dad says to Deanna and me, and I let her answer the question, so I can go to sit down in one of the blue plastic chairs against the wall, utterly exhausted.
“I went to university with her 2 years ago” she begins, looking down at Tina’s pale still form on the bed, “but on some of our nights off, we would all hang out together, with another friend from uni, Crystal”.
“I miss Crystal,” I say absentmindedly. I hadn’t seen her in over a year, but we had kept touch through calls and text. She had finished her law degree and had gotten married late last year, a wedding which Deanna and I were bridesmaids. It was a nice reprieve to feel like a human sometimes, but our lives were too dangerous to involve ourselves with humans outside the clan for long, lest we risk them getting caught up in the war.
“Well, she will probably be out for a while, but I’ll let you both know when she’s awake,” my mother says as she brushes a kiss on my forehead and leaves the room with my dad.
“I should probably get back to work,” Deanna says, as she moves past the bed to stand before me.
“You okay?” she asks me when I don’t reply.
“Yeah.” I rise from the chair, my muscles sore from all the fighting tonight, “I should go and track down my grandma, we caught an old vamp tonight, and we’re going to interrogate him” I hug Deanna goodbye.
“Well, if you're hanging around, we need to organize a proper catch-up,” she says, with a big smile spreading across her face.
“Agreed” I smile back, before moving past her and out of the clinic.
