“You also didn’t expect to get dragged into the middle of it like that,” Siobhan supplied wryly, slinging an arm around his middle and pressing up against his side. Jack conceded that point with a shrug.
“Can we see your fangs?” Sean interjected, coming up to stand behind Sinead.
Siobhan rolled her eyes in fond exasperation before she grinned, broad and toothy, her fangs on display. Both Sinead and Sean leaned closer to peer at them, and Sinead breathed quietly, “That is so cool.”
Siobhan waved them off, closing her mouth once again. “You didn’t come here to stare at my teeth,” she pointed out. “You’re not dentists. Now, let’s get hiking before someone starts to wonder why we’re just standing here like highwaymen.”
With that determination made, the group set off into the woods that surrounded the manor. They walked in silence at first, as Sinead and Sean quietly gawked at just how much land surrounded the manor and the fact that it was all attached to just one house. The manor’s lights had been lost between the tree leaves by the time Jack spoke.
“You guys seem really chill about the whole… vampire thing,” he commented, turning to walk backwards at Siobhan’s side so he could face Sinead and Sean as he walked. “Other than the initial disbelief, I mean. I kind of figured there would be some sort of… explosion, I guess. Or implosion, maybe.”
Sinead’s lower lip jutted out in a pout that seemed largely like a diversionary tactic. “What, we don’t seem like calm, rational people to you?” she challenged.
Jack’s eyebrows rose, his expression turning faintly unimpressed. “There is a difference between ‘calm and rational’ and ‘completely cool with the supernatural.’ One is a reasonable trait. One is slightly suspicious.” There was a beat. “Also, no,” he added, in answer to the actual question.
Sinead scowled at him and folded her arms, but it was Sean who interjected, “Trust me, there was a lot of freaking out after last time.” He dragged a hand through his hair. “Like, a lot.” He cleared his throat, as if he could not quite properly emphasize just how much freaking out had occurred after their last meeting.
“But,” Sinead interrupted sharply, butting her way back into the conversation, “we had plenty of time to think it over and freak out and discuss it and freak out some more, and mostly it just led us to the conclusion that she’s still our sister, freaky teeth and weird dietary habits aside, and that’s more important than anything else.” She paused as a thought occurred to her, before looking at Siobhan. “You didn’t, like, get sick after eating at the diner or anything, did you?”
With a snort of laughter, Siobhan shook her head. “No. I can still eat whatever I want. I mean, I don’t get anything out of it nutritionally if it’s just regular food, but that just means now everything is junk food.”
“Point being,” Sean added, dragging the conversation back to its original point, “family comes before freaking out. Or, at least, simultaneously to freaking out.”
Siobhan lifted her hands, cupping them together by her chest as she batted her eyelashes. “Aww, you guys,” she cooed, turning and slinging her arms around both of them at once. “That’s so cute.” And if she sounded as if she was, in fact, honestly touched by their decision, well, no one actually brought it up.
Sean began to squirm almost immediately, but he was no match for Siobhan’s vampiric hold and was forced to simply put up with it until she decided she’d had her fill of hugging. Sinead saw no such issues with it.
*
Sinead was climbing a tree. Not by herself, of course. She wanted to get a decent look around, which meant she would need to climb a tree far too tall for her to feasibly climb it on her own. Instead, Siobhan was basically piggybacking her up the tree, Sinead laughing in her ear. It wasn’t exactly a difficult task, and when they got to the top of the tree, Siobhan perched carefully in the crook of one branch where it met the trunk and let Sinead cling tightly to her hand as she stood on the branch to peer through the top of the canopy.
For a few moments, as Sinead took in the view, there was silence. Nearly mesmerized silence, in fact. Until, finally, Sinead breathed quietly, “I can’t believe you live here.”
“Quite a sight, isn’t it?” Siobhan asked, leaning more towards Sinead to stabilize her as she stood up on her toes. “I get to see this whenever I feel like it.”
“It’s huge,” Sinead added quietly, still sounding awestruck. “It’s like you live in a fairytale forest or something.”
“Well, from a certain perspective, I do,” Siobhan argued casually. “There are vampires all over the place, and there are angels wandering around. That sounds like some sort of story to me, even if it’s not a fairytale.”
“You know, I almost thought I hallucinated the angels,” Sinead returned, turning carefully on the branch, switching her hold on Siobhan from one hand to the other as she did.
“They aren’t that weird looking,” Siobhan protested dryly, though she knew what Sinead’s point was well enough. “Unless you see more than one of the same sex standing next to each other. Then it’s super weird.”
Sinead turned her head, blinking at Siobhan in bemusement. With a shrug, she clarified, “They look like they were put together with the same puzzle pieces and just painted different colors. Super eerie if you aren’t expecting it.”
“Oh,” Sinead returned faintly, sounding as if she hadn’t known what she was expecting to hear, but it hadn’t been that. “Good to know, I guess. How many are there?”
“I mean, they’re an entire species,” Siobhan pointed out. “There are a bunch of them, even if not all of them have four wings.”
“Right,” Sinead agreed, sounding faintly shell-shocked. “Makes perfect sense.”
No, it didn’t. Creating an entire species from the same two molds made basically no sense. Siobhan was aware of that. But she wasn’t going to point that out or argue the point. She was, however, going to get Sinead down from the tree before some new revelation made her pass out and fall to her probable death. That would be a very messy, unpleasant way to end an otherwise good night.
She gave Sinead’s arm a tug, and after some careful finagling and some very careful, precarious balancing on the branch that hadn’t seemed quite so narrow a moment ago, Siobhan was piggybacking her sister back down the tree to the ground below, where Jack and Sean waited.
They were arguing about cellphone games. Siobhan was going to assume that meant they were getting along.
*
There was a pond tucked away in the woods that surrounded the manor. It wasn’t particularly big, but it played host to a smattering of fish and a great deal of chirping frogs. It was a decent place to sit down on the grass and relax for a little while.
Siobhan had a hand raised, one finger extended to trace along a quintet of stars, when a quartet of shadows blocked out most of the sky for a very brief moment, just before four archangels landed beside the pond.
Sinead and Sean gaped, staring openly and not even caring about whether or not it was rude.
Gabriel and Anael, having already undergone the process of meeting Sean and Sinead, seemed personable, for the most part. Samael was hanging back slightly, leaning to one side to observe Siobhan’s siblings from around Anael’s shoulder but making no efforts to get any closer. Raphael seemed content to hide at the back of the group.
“There are more of them,” Sinead finally observed, very faintly. “I thought there were only two.”
“We keep acquiring more,” Siobhan returned cheerfully. “Pretty sure this is as many as we’re going to get, though.”
“How come?” Sinead wondered, though her voice was still very faint and she was still looking right at the angels, as if a magnet was pulling her attention towards them. Sean didn’t seem to be much better off.
“We only have so many siblings,” Gabriel answered dryly. “We’ve collected the last of them.” He waved a hand in Raphael’s general direction. Raphael retreated a step as if he was expecting a pac
k of wolves to be set loose on him.
“Samael,” Siobhan supplied, pointing to the archangel in question, “and Raphael.” Her pointing finger moved in his direction. She did, she thought, a rather admirable job of hiding just how wary Raphael made her. It wasn’t as if he was going to be able to do anything just then. Gabriel and Anael, at least, wouldn’t let it happen. And he didn’t look particularly intimidating, all things considered; he looked more like he wanted the ground to open and swallow him whole. (It was actually a feeling Siobhan had been familiar with in the past, though she was loathe to find reasons to actually bond with him.)
Jerking a thumb towards her siblings, she added, “Sinead and Sean. My siblings.” She slung an arm around Jack’s middle and leaned against him with enough force that he nearly toppled over. “How does it feel, being the only one without siblings?”
Bringing a hand to his chest, Jack assured her, “I consider it a blessing, to be sure.”
She punched his shoulder.
It was decent entertainment after that, listening to Sinead spout questions at the angels. A lot of them were conversations that Siobhan and Jack had already had with them, and that seemed to help, giving them a known angle to answer from.
The topics ranged all over the place, from what they thought of humans to what they thought of human entertainment to what angels did in their downtime to how many angels there were and why a handful of them were living in a vampire house.
…They carefully avoided that last topic. It seemed like it would be a bit much, maybe, to expect Sinead and Sean to perfectly accept the idea of angels being at war with the mortal world and being turned into vampires being the only way to get out of it.
Samael opened up quickly enough, though she seemed far keener on Sinead than on Sean. Siobhan could understand. Sinead’s boundless enthusiasm for basically anything she set her mind to was sort of infectious, and it had always been fairly compelling. It was basically the first thing Siobhan thought about whenever she thought of her sister: enthusiasm as bright as the sun. Sean’s own taciturn nature had to seem almost cold in comparison.
By the time the conversation was wrapping up, even Raphael had offered his own two cents a few times. Siobhan supposed it was probably good for him to simply talk to a few average, non-vampiric people and know that they existed. He had to get used to them, after all. He was going to be around for a very long time.
(Even if Siobhan wasn’t thrilled at the idea of her siblings being the guinea pigs used to acclimate him to humanity. She supposed beggars couldn’t be choosers.)
The archangels departed, eventually, bidding Jack, Siobhan, and her siblings farewell. Curiosity had drawn them out of the manor, rather than any sort of pressing need, so there was no need to linger. Besides, Siobhan was pretty sure they were getting uncomfortable; they weren’t particularly well-adjusted when it came to talking to more than two people at a time.
The rest of them lingered at the pond for a while longer, if only because Sinead was determined that she had to try to catch a frog. She denied all of Siobhan’s offers to help, since enhanced speed apparently counted as cheating.
Not that she actually did anything with the frog once she did catch it. She cooed over it for a moment because of how adorable it was (according to her, at least; Siobhan had always preferred fuzzier animals) before she let it go once more while Sean applauded the acquisition in the background.
Siobhan really had missed them. Assuming she survived everything with the Metatron, she really did need to make an effort to see them more often.
*
Returning to the manor—or at least the manor’s driveway—was a quiet affair. It was a comfortable sort of silence, though, even if Sinead and Sean still seemed (understandably, admittedly) rather unnerved by the entire matter of ‘inhuman creatures actually exist, some of them look almost perfectly human, and your sister is one of them.’ They would adjust, though. Siobhan had faith in that. And she was glad to have seen them, regardless of how it went. Soon would come the confrontation with the Metatron. She would be no help there, and she had no idea how it was going to go. She didn’t want to leave any loose ends, should the worst happen.
Not that she thought it was going to. She just wanted to be prepared.
Sinead threw her arms around Siobhan’s neck once again, seeming to enjoy the novelty of being able to just dangle there as if she weighed nothing. More restrained, Sean slung an arm around Siobhan’s shoulders and gave her a noogie. As she scowled and tried to fix her hair to no avail, both of her siblings shook Jack’s hand.
There was a moment where the four of them simply stood there, observing each other in silence. It was a brief moment, though, and it ended without commentary as Sean turned away to head back to the car and Sinead followed closely on his heels.
Jack headed back inside, leaving Siobhan to watch as Sean’s car began to drive back along the driveway.
She waved after the car until it disappeared over the nearest hill before she turned away at last, heading towards the manor once again. Her head pounded dully as she headed back inside.
*
Siobhan’s head hurt. That was nothing new by that point, but it was growing to new, creative levels. Her skull throbbed as if it was trying to crack into pieces in time with her pulse. Her ears rang, and even with the curtains drawn and the lights off, everything still seemed just on the edge of too bright. She squeezed her eyes shut and refused to open them even when she heard the door opening. She didn’t hear the click of claws on the floor and the door was opening too purposefully to be the dog nudging it open, so she knew it wasn’t Barton, which meant someone had gone looking for her.
She wasn’t sure how to feel about that. She didn’t want company. Company made noise and expected her to talk, and just then, she wasn’t really up to pretending she was okay. More importantly, it was rather apparent that she was not okay, which sort of voided all of her past efforts to prove the opposite.
She was curled up in the middle of the bed when Jack found her. She heard him start to ask a question, though he fell quiet with a click of teeth as he looked at her, before she got a chance to figure out what the question was going to be.
Slowly and quietly, he crawled onto the bed and pressed up behind her. He tucked his face against the back of her neck and began to stroke a hand through her hair, the motion steady and soothing. It would have been calming had she been in a position to be anything other than calm.
He didn’t ask her what was wrong, which was a relief. She supposed he didn’t need to. It was pretty apparent that she was in pain, and there had really only been one culprit with regards to her pain recently.
Mostly, she was just glad that he wasn’t trying to talk. Everything was too loud, and she felt like she was going to burst out of her head like a firework. She was pretty sure she wouldn’t be able to handle talking just then.
For a few moments, not much else happened, though Siobhan’s thoughts continued to churn sluggishly.
Jack’s hand running through her hair felt nice, but it wasn’t quite enough of a distraction. Siobhan wanted to feel better. Failing that, she wanted to at least not notice how shitty she felt. With that thought in mind, she disentangled herself from Jack and pushed him back on the bed. Leaning close to him, so that their noses brushed and there was hardly any space between their lips, she said, “Make me feel good, Jack.”
He paused for a moment, though he nodded slowly. He gave her a thoughtful look, and then shifted backwards, away from her, until he could swing his legs over the side of the bed and stand up. It was not particularly surprising to see him begin to strip his clothes off, and it wasn’t particularly surprising when he motioned at her expectantly and said, “Come on, clothes off. All of it.”
Siobhan sat up on her knees on the bed and began to strip, tossing first her shirt and then her bra over the edge of the bed. Her shorts and her panties followed. Completely bare, she sat cross-legged on the bed, looking at him expectantly.
Jack motioned for her to lie down, and then for her to roll over.
There were a rather limited number of things she was expecting to happen once they were both naked. Being told to lie down on her belly wasn’t quite one of them, but it could pretty easily factor into them. Jack straddling the backs of her thighs didn’t factor into them quite as well. And then his hands were kneading her shoulders, and it began to make more sense, and then he pressed his thumbs into a knot between her shoulders, and with a quiet moan, she decided she was done thinking about how any of it fit together, so long as he kept doing what he was doing.
His hands moved steadily down her back, working outward from her spine and then inward once again. At first, she praised him every so often, but by the time he made it down to her tailbone and began working his hands back up towards her shoulders once again, she was beyond words, reduced to just the occasional moan.
The Vampire's Bond Trilogy: The Complete Vampire Romance Series Page 47