“Not always violent, no,” she answered carefully. “But she was always very dedicated to whatever she set her mind to, and even more so if a task had been assigned to her, presumably by a higher-up that she didn’t want to disappoint. I don’t believe she ever had anything against mortals herself, but as far as she was concerned, they were irrelevant. She had a job she was supposed to do. Failing to do so would mean disappointing the one who gave it to her.”
“I thought the other angels you and Gabe talked to had decided that leaving ‘the mortals’ alone was the best course of action, for self-preservation’s sake?” Jack wondered, reclining loosely against the balustrade on his elbows. “Why the change of heart?”
Anael was silent, her expression vaguely bemused. It was Gabriel, perched on the balustrade, who suggested, “She may have viewed that as… a lapse, I suppose. A failure on her part to do her job. The Metatron taking control of her is both a reminder of what she thinks she should be doing, and a punishment for failing to do so.”
Siobhan wrinkled her nose. “Creepy,” she supplied succinctly.
“A bit,” Anael conceded, still running her fingers through Barton’s fur. He was splayed out on his belly, tail wagging lethargically and looking like he was entirely at peace with the world just then.
“Are the others like that?” Jack wondered. “I mean, Michael seemed pretty fucking dedicated.”
Anael’s expression screwed up just slightly in indecision. “Not… quite,” she replied slowly, before she trailed off as she thought.
“It was more that they hadn’t ever considered an alternative,” Gabriel added eventually, shrugging one shoulder. “Why would they have? They had never had a reason to. By the time there was an inkling that something was off, they were too content to keep thinking they were better and that they were right.”
“So what about you, then?” Siobhan asked, looking down at Anael curiously. “We didn’t kidnap you, but you never seemed keen on fighting us.” She cocked her head to one side, hair falling across her face. “So what was your reason?”
“Honestly, I’m just glad to hear you admit it was kidnapping,” Gabriel sighed as Anael stared down at the decking.
“Only kind of kidnapping,” Siobhan amended. “Only in the beginning. We grew on you.”
“As fungus is wont to do,” he deadpanned in return. He didn’t even bother to dodge the punch she aimed at his shoulder.
They fell silent as Anael began to speak. “It was no longer simply a matter of fighting outsiders at that point,” she settled on. “Michael was asking me to fight my family.” She glanced briefly at Gabriel. “Realizing that everyone else were still people came… secondary,” she admitted.
Siobhan snorted and waved it off. “Secondary, tertiary, eighteenth place, I don’t care, as long as you aren’t trying to kill us.”
Jack flashed a thumbs-up as if to silently say ‘right on,’ and Gabriel observed blandly, “That does seem like the ideal situation.”
Admittedly, nothing about anything was particularly ideal lately, but they were making things work as best as they could.
If Siobhan could just convince her head to stop hurting, then things would be even better, but she was going to take things one step at a time.
Otherwise, everything was just too damned complicated.
CHAPTER FIVE
Having a mental bond with Gabriel was… an experience. He wasn’t belligerent about it, and, if nothing else, the speed with which he figured out how to control his side of it made Siobhan believe that angels also had some sort of similar bond naturally. But an angel’s feelings felt a bit… strange when compared to what Siobhan had come to expect.
(Granted, she supposed she didn’t exactly have an amazing pool to draw experience from. She knew what Jack’s feelings felt like. That was about it. Presumably his feelings felt like any other human’s would, even if they had likely been colored by the fact that he was rather older than the standard model of human.)
There was something deep and dark and murky about Gabriel’s feelings, as if there was constantly a layer of ocean water obscuring them. Siobhan prodded at the bond occasionally, just to see if she could identify what he was feeling at any given moment. He humored her sometimes, but he was still a private man, and more often than not, he simply closed her out. She thought about being offended the first few times he did so, but when she remembered her own outrage at Jack when she found out about the bond, she got over it. Privacy was something she had chased like a rabid dog at first. She wasn’t going to begrudge him his.
Not that it stopped her from prodding at him occasionally, like tapping the glass of an aquarium to see what the fish would do. His feelings were old to the point of seeming eldritch. She couldn’t quite help herself. He didn’t seem to mind most of the time. It probably wasn’t so different from letting her quite literally climb all over him. It was no more or less of a blow to his dignity, at any rate.
She wondered how his bond with Anael felt. Presumably he could read it far better than Siobhan could read his, considering their shared lifespan and species.
Granted, that brought up another question that she hadn’t really thought of until then.
“What do a human’s feelings… feel like to you?” she wondered, splayed out on her back on the balcony. Beside her, Barton noisily cleaned a bowl of every last drop inside it.
Gabriel peered down at her from his perch on the balustrade, head cocked to one side. “What brought that on?” he wondered, quietly bemused.
Siobhan shrugged as best as she could while lying on her back. “I fell down a rabbit hole in my head.”
He snorted, but his expression turned thoughtful for a moment as he contemplated the question. “Colorful,” he settled on, though he sounded dissatisfied with his own answer. “You feel everything about everything. I’m not sure we were really made for that.”
Siobhan wasn’t sure she believed that, given everything she had seen of him up until that point, but she nodded and accepted the answer.
*
“What’s it like feeling another angel’s feelings, then?” Siobhan asked, apropos of nothing. It had been quiet until then.
Gabriel glanced at her sideways, quietly bemused. “Not appreciably different from feeling my own feelings,” he replied, sounding as if he thought the answer was obvious. In fairness, it sort of was, albeit not very helpfully so.
“But how’s it different from a human’s?” Siobhan wheedled, stretching a leg up to prod at him with her toes. She couldn’t be bothered to sit up and poke him properly.
“Angels’ are more muted, I suppose,” Gabriel replied, swatting her foot away with the tip of one wing. “Not like a sound, but like a color.”
“Like there’s a filter over it?” Siobhan suggested, linking her hands together behind her head and squirming her shoulders to get more comfortable.
“I suppose,” he agreed easily enough. “It can take a great deal of work to remove the filter and see what the color actually is.”
Siobhan hummed thoughtfully as she pondered that before she asked, “Do angels have bonds like that naturally?”
The look he shot her was bewildered. “No,” he replied easily, brow furrowed slightly. “Why?”
Siobhan shrugged, awkward as it was while lying on the decking. “I don’t know, you just seemed to get the hang of it really fast, is all,” she reasoned.
Gabriel huffed out a breath that wasn’t quite a laugh. “It wasn’t particularly different from trying to tune out the signal,” he replied. “It can’t control me, true, but I still don’t want to hear it. It’s not exactly an enjoyable sound. From there, learning how to tune out you and then later Anael was fairly intuitive.”
Siobhan hummed again, nodding slowly, her hair getting mussed against her hands. “Got it,” she mused, trailing off as she thought. Gabriel watched her quietly, his expression expectant, until Siobhan asked, “Does it bother you? Since my feelings are apparently super loud and color
ful, I mean.”
“Not especially,” he answered, shrugging. He stretched his wings absentmindedly before he folded them close once again. “‘Loud and colorful’ doesn’t mean… unattractive, I suppose,” he added. “And like I said, I’ve gotten rather adept at tuning it out, regardless. Unless you decide to go poking at the bond, I tend not to really notice your presence.”
Siobhan nodded, and they lapsed into silence again until Gabriel asked slowly, “And what about you? Do you find the bond troublesome?”
“Not troublesome, no,” she replied carefully. “I mean, it’s sort of… weird,” she added, her expression screwing up in distaste as she tried to find the words to describe it. “Not bad, but just… weird.” At Gabriel’s look of quiet confusion, Siobhan carried on, trying to figure out what she wanted to say. “Your feelings are really old,” she settled on. “Or at least, they feel really old. A lot of the time, I don’t even know what they are. Like, I’m aware you’re feeling something, since it’s hard to just feel nothing, but I can’t always pinpoint what it actually is.”
“Well, I suppose that’s good for maintaining my privacy,” he mused dryly.
Siobhan stuck her tongue out at him. “All part of some plot of yours,” she accused. “I knew it.”
*
Siobhan’s phone was ringing. She was aware of it. She could hear it. But she was trying to nap. She had the bed all to herself, aside from Barton taking over the foot of it, and she could spread out as much as she wanted, and no one was interrupting her. At least, no one had been interrupting her until her phone had begun to ring.
She was actually sort of offended at the cell phone’s audacity. Honestly, who did it think it was? What gave it the right to interrupt her nap? She was a good person, and she didn’t deserve such disrespect.
With the utmost reluctance, she rolled over and grabbed her phone from where it sat on the bedside table, glaring at it distastefully. Her glare fell away, though, once she saw the name on the caller ID, replaced instead with quiet surprise.
Her brother hadn’t called her in years. Oh, sure, they spoke, but Siobhan usually initiated things. But after the last time she’d called him, setting her affairs in order in case the showdown with the seraphim resulted in her turning into a greasy smear on Belleview’s pavement (not the case, thankfully), she supposed she shouldn’t be surprised that he was trying to get in touch.
She answered the call and brought the phone to her ear with a mumbled, “H’lo.”
“…Did I wake you up?”
“Yes, and you’re an asshole for it,” Siobhan informed him plainly.
“It’s the middle of the afternoon?”
“Naps are a thing, Sean,” she explained patiently, muffling a yawn behind her hand. “What’s up?”
He cleared his throat. “I was talking to Sinead, and we decided the three of us should get together sometime. Soon, preferably. Before you make any other ‘bad omen’ phone calls and scare us half to death again.”
Siobhan supposed she could’ve just said ‘no, I’m busy.’ But she did miss her brother and sister. And she had meant it when she called and said she wished they got to see each other more often.
“No Mom and no Dad?” she asked, just to be sure.
Sean snorted, though it sounded more like a burst of static over the phone. “Duh, of course not.”
“Can I bring my boyfriend?” she asked, right on the tail of his words. “Or is this a ‘family only’ thing?”
“Well, if you don’t bring him, I don’t think we’re ever going to meet him,” Sean reasoned dryly, “so go ahead.”
“Do you have a girlfriend?” Siobhan wheedled, finally sitting up properly, internally admitting that her nap had been well and truly interrupted.
“All your questions can be answered in person,” he replied, trying and failing to sound mystical and mysterious. She took that as a no.
Siobhan scoffed. “Yeah, alright,” she sighed. “Two days from now, there’s a great little diner. We’ll meet at eight at night. I’ll text you the address.”
“Bit late for dinner, don’t you think?” he asked, though he didn’t sound like he was complaining.
“It’ll make sense once we’re there,” she assured him, though, truth be told, she hadn’t actually decided if she was going to explain anything to them or not.
She supposed it would depend on how well dinner went.
“Yeah, alright. I’ll let Sinead know.” He paused for a moment, as if he was going to say something else, but all he offered was, “See you in a couple days.”
“See you soon.” Siobhan hung up.
She dropped her phone back down onto the side table, flopped onto her back, and kicked her feet petulantly for a moment. Everything was getting so damn complicated again.
*
Two days passed in a flash. It seemed like Siobhan had hardly finished telling Jack, “You’re meeting my siblings,” before they were in his truck and driving to the diner. They made sure they were well fed before they left, and made doubly sure for Barton.
It was in a small town not too far from the manor, and it was cute. The diner looked as if it had been ripped right out of the 50’s and dropped on the side of the road in the 21st century. The floor tiles were a little beat-up, but it was clean, and Siobhan was reasonably sure the food was supposed to be good. Also, the owner liked dogs, which meant he was willing to let Barton trot into the building on Siobhan’s heels.
They sat in silence at first until Siobhan asked, as casually as she could, “Do you think Regina would completely hate me if I told my siblings about being a vampire?”
Jack looked up at her sharply, looking, for a moment, as if someone had slapped him with a halibut when he’d least expected it. To his credit, he regained his bearings quickly and shook his head. “Not completely,” he answered carefully, and he shrugged one shoulder. “And, I mean… if you think they aren’t going to go blabbing it to everyone they know, then you could just… tell them, and not tell Regina you did so.”
Siobhan blinked at him slowly, tipping her head to one side.
“She’s not actually psychic,” Jack pointed out plainly. “Good intuition, sure, but she’s not psychic. If you never mention it to her, I doubt she’s going to figure it out.”
“But—”
“Keep in mind, you’re already uncomfortable around all of them,” he reminded her wryly. “If you’re slightly more uncomfortable than usual until lying by omission stops bothering you, none of them are going to notice.”
Siobhan scowled at him, though it more resembled a pout. Even so, she couldn’t actually argue with that point, and she sighed out a slow breath. “Right. Well. I guess that’s decided, then.”
Jack arched one eyebrow and wondered with long-suffering amusement, “Do I actually get a say in this? I mean, I’m right here with you, so presumably, if you spill the beans, you’ll also be spilling the beans about me.”
Siobhan leaned her elbows on the table and cupped her chin in her hands, making her eyes large and round and innocent as she pointed out, “Presumably, if you really objected, you would have done so just now.” Her eyebrows rose slightly. “Since that’s not the case, I’m going to assume you don’t actually object,” she reasoned pleasantly. “Speak now or forever hold your peace, then.”
Jack held his hands up in surrender. “No, no, I’m good,” he assured her. “Go ahead and tell them.”
Siobhan nodded once in agreement and leaned back in her seat again.
Granted, that still meant she had to decide which details were relevant and which ones she should really probably keep away from her siblings. She had a feeling they wouldn’t react well to the notion of ‘an angel tried to drop me to my death and the only reason I didn’t actually die was because Jack tripped over me like a speed bump.’ When she thought about it like that, it just seemed like there were some details that they didn’t really need to know.
She occupied herself with pondering what to act
ually tell them, other than just ‘by the way, I’m a vampire now.’ She did, after all, want to explain things in such a way that they might actually believe her. She supposed her idea to confess everything was actually slightly more complicated than just spitting the words out, but she figured she had to do it regardless.
At least it gave her something to occupy her thoughts while they waited.
Siobhan and Jack waved the waitress off no less than four times before, at last, the diner’s door opened once again and Sean strolled in with Sinead trotting in his wake.
Sean was a tall young man, only a few years older than Siobhan. He looked a bit stretched out, as if he had fallen into a taffy puller at some point in the past and gotten stuck for a few moments before scrambling out. He was all long limbs, with hardly any meat on him at all. His hair was a shock of wild curls cropped close to his head, and his eyes were pale green. He had a bit of a tan and he was liberally speckled with freckles. Facially, he was narrow and pointy with a nose that looked a bit too thin for the rest of his face, as if it might try to poke someone’s eye out if only they got close enough.
The Vampire's Bond Trilogy: The Complete Vampire Romance Series Page 40