by Amira Rain
“You’re just so pale all of a sudden.”
He was pale and a bit ashen-faced, to be precise. I was a bit afraid he might be having a heart attack. And I was more than a bit afraid that his response to me asking about Seth indicated that Seth and Matt were related. Meaning that Matt was related to me. I honestly felt like I was working up to a heart attack.
However, seeming to intuit that I was, Uncle Dan quickly put my mind at ease, picking up his tea. “Don’t worry. You and Matt aren’t related in any way.”
I exhaled in a rush, realizing that I’d been holding my breath. “Oh my God. Oh my God. Good. Thank you.”
Leaving me to listen to the sound of my decelerating heartbeat thudding in my ears, Uncle Dan began taking the first of several long drinks of his warm tea. And by the time he put the mug down and spoke again, a little rosy color had returned to his cheeks.
“You and Matt aren’t related in any way, but you and I are.”
“What?”
Uncle Dan gave me a small smile, with even a bit of twinkle returning to his bright blue eyes. “I truly am ‘Uncle Dan’ to you. I’m your great uncle.” Smiling again, he reached across the island, took my hand, and gave it a little squeeze. “I’m your great uncle…and it’s so nice to ‘re-meet’ you this way, Kylie, with you now as my great niece. I don’t have any other ‘blood’ family left, and this makes me happier than you know.”
I squeezed his hand back, realizing that a bit of moisture had risen in my eyes. “I’m really happy, too. You’re actually the first ‘blood’ family member that I’ve ever met.”
Making a bit more moisture well in my eyes, Uncle Dan gave my hand another little squeeze. “Well, welcome to our new little family, great niece.”
I was blinking back my tears and trying to smile. “Thank you,” I said, and he smiled in return before releasing my hand.
“I guess I shouldn’t have been as surprised as I was when you said that Seth is your biological father because when I first saw you, I thought your eyes looked familiar in some way, but I just couldn’t pin it down. Now I understand…your eyes resemble my nephew, Seth’s, a bit. Your eyes resemble your father’s.”
This knowledge finally sent my tears rolling down my cheeks, and I dabbed at them with a paper napkin before asking a question that I suddenly needed to know the answer to.
“Is he alive, Uncle Dan?”
Just then, preventing him from answering, the dogs, who’d both been snoozing beside the island, suddenly went nuts, jumping to their feet and barking loudly while making a beeline for the front door. I knew Matt was probably home, and within just a second or two, my thinking was confirmed when I heard the front door open, and then his voice while he spoke to the dogs, telling them to settle down.
With them both at his heels, still barking a bit, he soon emerged from the foyer into the kitchen, smiling when he saw me and Dan. However, probably seeing my eyes, which I guessed were pink, and my tear-stained cheeks, he came to a dead stop just short of the island with his smile turning to a frown, and he asked me if I was okay.
While I dabbed at my eyes again, trying to figure out how to explain anything, Uncle Dan went ahead and answered for me. “She’s just learned some very surprising news, and so have I. Although maybe you’d better have a seat, Matt, before hearing what--”
“No. No, please, just tell me what it is. What’s going on?”
Uncle Dan looked at me briefly, while I continued dabbing my eyes, before shifting his gaze back to Matt. “I’ve just learned that Kylie is my great niece. Seth was her biological father.”
I instantly shifted my gaze from Matt to Uncle Dan. “‘Was?’ As in…Seth is no longer alive?”
Dan’s expression answered my question even before he spoke. “I’m sorry. He….” Somewhat inexplicably, Dan shifted his gaze to Matt for just a split-second before continuing. “He was killed during the war.”
My slowly-dripping tears suddenly became a tsunami, and I wept into my hands with my shoulders shaking. My dream of having my own Mr. Decker was dead.
Within a few moments, I felt an arm around my shoulders, and I could tell by getting just a hint of Matt’s scent that the arm around me was his. Without taking my hands from my face, I leaned into him and soon felt him guide my face to his chest. It was there that I un-self-consciously cried for a little while, feeling like my heart was breaking.
For some reason, I was finding the knowledge that my bio dad was dead to be infinitely harder to take than finding out the same about my bio mom. Maybe it was just because I’d had a mom growing up, even though she’d been distant, to say the least, whereas I had very minimal memories of my adoptive dad. All I’d had were my memories of Mr. Decker, and hope.
After Matt smoothed my hair for a little while, speaking comforting things near my ear in a low, soothing voice, my tears finally slowed, and I lifted my face and tried to give him a smile before trying to give Dan the same.
“I’m so sorry, Uncle Dan. You probably never dreamed you’d come over with cake and end up getting so much drama. I can be a bit of a crier.”
He smiled with his eyes slightly shiny and pink right then. “That’s okay. I can be a bit of a crier myself sometimes. There’s nothing wrong with it.”
Dabbing my eyes with a fresh napkin, I gave him a smile in return, then turned my focus to Matt. “I’m sorry that I didn’t tell you all about how I was adopted and found out that my bio dad was a dragon shifter sooner. I guess we’ve just been dealing with other things.”
Looking extremely pale, Matt pulled up a bar stool next to mine and had a seat. Studying his face briefly, I now realized he was almost looking as pale as Uncle Dan had looked earlier, which was saying a lot. I wasn’t sure quite why Matt would be so pale; however, I figured that since it seemed like he’d known Seth, maybe finding out that he’d had a daughter, and that the daughter was me, had just come as a terrible shock. After all, Seth himself hadn’t even known that he’d had a daughter.
Finding out that my waterworks weren’t done just yet, I told Matt and Dan with misty eyes that I was sure they were curious about how I’d come to discover that Seth was my bio dad and all that, and I’d tell them, but first, I just wanted to know one thing.
“Was he a good man? Was he the kind of man that I would have been proud to call my father?” With tears once again streaming down my face, I paused, cringing, and wiped them away before speaking again. “I’m just really hoping you both say yes.”
After glancing at Matt, Uncle Dan spoke first. “My nephew was a…he was a….”
Matt suddenly interrupted. “He was a good man, Kylie. The very best. He fought the Bloodborns like a true hero. He fought valiantly. I think you would have been very proud of him.”
I nodded, cringing in pain, sending a fresh wave of tears falling down my cheeks. After wiping them away, I spoke with a clear tremor of emotion in my voice. “This helps. At least now I know that my dad was a war hero. At least now I have a good image of him to hold in my mind.” Sniffling, I shifted my gaze to Uncle Dan. “I’d love to see pictures of him sometime, if you have some.”
After giving me a little smile that curiously didn’t reach all the way up to his eyes, Dan said that he did have a few pictures, and that he’d be glad to not only show them to me some time, but give them to me. I thanked him, then wiped my eyes once again before moving on to tell him and Matt the brief version of how I’d been adopted, what had happened to my adoptive parents, and how I’d learned about my biological parents. Then, I asked Uncle Dan to please tell me a bit more about Seth.
“Were the two of you very close?”
As if not really wanting to answer the question, as if maybe just talking about Seth caused him great pain, Dan hesitated in responding, only looking up at me from his tea mug after a long moment or two. “I suppose we were close at different times…although we did often butt heads, starting when Seth was thirteen. That was when his parents, who were my brother and my sister-in-law, died suddenly in a plane
crash, and June and I took him in. It was nice to have a ‘son’ in the house for a while, especially since June and I were never blessed with children…but you know how some teenagers get with authority figures. Seth had a bit of a rebellious streak in him that June and I were never quite able to tame. June always said that he acted more like a wildcat sometimes than a dragon shifter.”
Breaking into a little smile, Uncle Dan paused. “Matt was our next-door neighbor, back in those days in Indiana, and he was just a tiny little guy at the time when Seth was an older teenager; Matt was probably only three or four. Didn’t matter that he was still so young, though, I always tried to steer him in the right direction in life whenever he wandered over to our farmyard to pick berries from our raspberry bushes. I’d say, ‘Mattie…see that big boy smoking a cigarette over there on the porch, right in full view of his uncle, even though his uncle has told him not to smoke? You don’t ever do that. When your parents tell you not to do something, and you still live in their home, you obey.’ And, Matt, even as tiny as he was, would say, ‘Yes, sir!’ Even back then, he had something of a military way about him. It’s like he was destined to become commander of Greenwood.”
With my tears having completely stopped by now, I looked over at Matt, smiling. “I bet you were really cute.”
Matt gave me a little smile, with a little color having returned to his face. “Not so sure about that. You’ll have to ask Uncle Dan sometime about how I once filled his and June’s mailbox with live frogs for a prank when I was about five. Seth wasn’t the only one who had a mischievous streak back in those days.”
I turned my gaze back to Uncle Dan and asked him if Seth had ever grown out of it.
Looking a bit uncomfortable for some reason, Dan glanced over at Matt for just a split-second before replying to me. “Well…he did settle down some as he got older, and he did eventually stop smoking cigarettes; I’ll give him that. They started giving him a bad cough in his early twenties. That was when he shook off the nickname of ‘Puff,’ too. That was a nickname given to him by his friends when he started smoking at around fourteen or fifteen, because he was always taking a puff.”
“Oh.” Thinking this over, I paused for a moment before speaking again. “I guess since Seth was a dragon shifter, I was vaguely thinking that maybe the nickname was some reference to ‘Puff the Magic Dragon’ or something.”
Uncle Dan chuckled. “Well, who could blame you for thinking that?”
Matt and I joined in the chuckling, and then we got to laughing again just a minute later when Uncle Dan explained to me the origin of the crescent-shaped scar above Seth’s eye.
“See, he got it when he was maybe fourteen or so. He and a few of his buddies decided that they were going to start some sort of a teenage dragon shifter gang called the ‘blood moon gang.’ This, despite the fact that they were all still a few years from even being able to shift into their dragon forms. But they were determined to start their little gang anyway, and they decided that the initiation into it would be receiving a brand in the shape of a crescent moon. So Seth and a few other boys in our small little town burned each other with hot pokers and ended up with crescent-shaped scars above their left eyes. Their triumph at being official gang members didn’t last long, though. Within a few days, one of the boys’ older brothers began calling them the ‘crescent roll gang,’ and before long, that’s what all the kids in town were calling them. After that, I don’t think Seth found his scar to be so cool anymore.”
Once I’d stopped laughing, I asked Uncle Don a few more questions about Seth’s childhood, then asked him if he knew how it had come about that Seth had been traveling through Michigan when I’d been conceived. Clearly, my theory that Seth had been from one of the small shifter communities in mid-Michigan had been way off.
Uncle Don answered my question by saying that it had probably been during Seth’s “new wing days” in his late teens, when he’d first gotten the ability to shift into his dragon form. “As a lot of young dragon shifters like to do when they first ‘get their wings,’ he liked to go on ‘flight trips’ sometimes, all around the Midwest. He wasn’t supposed to do this, nor was anyone else back in those days, because although the government knew about us shifters, ordinary citizens certainly didn’t and commercial pilots didn’t, either. The risk of being spotted by a pilot or another regular citizen was too high, so the government told us that they’d suspend our yearly ‘hush money’ payments if any shifters from our community were ever caught flying on a non-government-sanctioned mission. They never did, though, and kids like Seth continued to fly. I bet it was during one of these trips that he met your biological mother.”
Uncle Don told me a few more stories about Seth, and answered a few more questions, but then, around nine o’ clock, he said he probably should be getting home. “I have a dog of my own, a little cockapoo named Lucky, and he gets anxiety problems and likes to tear up furniture if I’m not home within a couple of hours.”
After I’d given Don a long hug, and Matt had given him a manly half-hug, and Charlie and Shadow had given him a few nuzzles and licks, he left, promising to come visit again soon.
Now alone with Matt, I leaned against the island, suddenly finding myself a little tearful again for no good reason. I supposed I was just feeling a little emotionally overwhelmed, I told Matt, blinking back my tears, and he agreed, taking my hands in his.
“You probably just need a little time to process everything.”
I nodded. “You’re right. I guess it’s just hard to go from having hope that my dad might still be alive, to finding out that he’s dead, all over a single slice of cake. I just feel like I have ‘emotional whiplash’ or something. At least I gained a wonderful great uncle tonight, though…and at least I also know that my dad was a war hero now…and that’s definitely something. I feel like now that I know this, I can just move forward in my life thinking of him as a strong, brave man that I’m proud of, and I can just try to live my life in a way that would make him proud of me.”
Matt nodded. “That’s right. You can honor his memory that way.”
Thinking, I didn’t answer right away. “Speaking of my dad’s memory…was his death in battle ever avenged? Do you know if the Bloodborn that killed him was ever killed himself?”
Suddenly looking distinctly uncomfortable, Matt shifted his gaze to the side for a moment and cleared his throat, basically answering my questions before even speaking. “We were never able to determine which Bloodborn, specifically, killed him. The battle was just too intense. It was just one of those things where he just suddenly fell from the sky, mortally wounded. I’m sorry I can’t give you any specifics other than that.”
I nodded, feeling a rising tide of anger at the Bloodborns. “I understand.”
Still holding my hands in his, Matt gave me a brief kiss and asked if I wanted to let the dogs out with him. “I’ll show you how quickly Charlie races up to the door for me now, just when I say the first syllable of pepperoni.”
Still feeling some sort of dark, growing anger beginning to churn deep inside my stomach, I said that I’d love to take the dogs out with him. “But first, I just want to tell you something. Since I’ll never be able to find out which Bloodborn, specifically, killed my dad, I guess I just want to say that when they attack Greenwood….” I paused briefly, suddenly becoming so angry that I was almost startled by the rush of incredibly intense emotion I was feeling.
“Matt, I just hope you and your men kill them all. I hope you absolutely slaughter them all, and that they all die painfully. And maybe in this way, whoever killed my dad will get a taste of his own medicine. I just want him to suffer and die.”
Matt had paled dramatically while I’d been speaking, and he now swallowed and then just remained silent, like maybe he had no idea what to say in response to the vitriol I’d just released. Now, thinking about my words, I realized that maybe they had been too much. Maybe it had even been a lapse in my own morality that I’d wished death and
suffering on a group of people, no matter that one member of that group had killed my dad.
With my anger now cooling and becoming replaced by a feeling of slight embarrassment, I told Matt I was sorry for saying what I had. “I really shouldn’t have said it. If the Bloodborns attack us first, then I do hope they get justice, even if that comes in the form of death, but that probably wasn’t right of me to outright wish suffering on anyone. It’s just that for a second, there, I just got so rage-out-level mad at whomever killed my dad. It was weird. It was like I could have literally strangled whoever killed him with my bare hands had he been in front of me.”
Once again, Matt cleared his throat, shifting his gaze to the side, and I got the feeling that I’d gone too far, and that maybe he was starting to think that I had some deep-seated violent tendencies or something.
Wanting to assure him that I didn’t, or that I at least didn’t think I did, I apologized once again. “That probably seemed like some kind of a red-flag about me that I just said I could literally strangle someone with my bare hands…but please believe me, Matt, I’m really not a violent person, and I’m really not normally so filled with such strong anger.”
With a look of clear pain in his eyes, like maybe he was feeling bad for me that learning about my dad being killed had made me experience such strong anger, Matt picked up my hands and pressed a tender kiss to each of them. “I think your angry response to learning that your dad was killed is a perfectly normal one. I don’t blame you at all for it. I’d feel the exact same way if I’d learned that someone had intentionally killed my dad.”
Satisfied that he didn’t think I was some sort of a violent maniac-in-the-making, I thanked him for understanding. “Now, let’s put all this negativity behind us and take the dogs out. We’re getting married in about a week, you know, and I want this to be the happiest week of our lives. I don’t want to let what some depraved, bloodthirsty Bloodborn did to my dad ruin everything.”
Still holding my hands, Matt gave them a little squeeze, his expression unreadable. “I don’t, either.”