Transfusion (Transfusion Saga #1)

Chapter 2

Family Connections

“Dad!?”

Wendy screeched making me wince.

I turned to her and said,

“Yeah, pretty much,”

before turning back to my dad, trying to ignore my friend when she hissed,

“What, was he like twelve when he did the deed?”

I chuckled when my dad replied,

“I can assure you, young lady, I am older than I look.”

I shook my head and stopped myself from commenting drily, ‘yeah, I’ll say’ with a scoffed sound to match it.

That’s when I noticed Wendy blushing, something I hadn’t seen achieved in the whole time I had known her.

Seriously, was there anyone with ovaries my dad didn’t affect, I thought in disgust, the way any daughter would when thinking of her parents having sex.

Or in this instance, obviously showcasing in every one of my friend’s sexual fantasies from now on for the next decade at least.

Now forget a jar of intestines, that thought right there was creepy enough, I admitted with a shiver and a grimace.

“Wow, he just called me young lady,”

she said, a breath away from swooning.

“Stood right here, Kirky…”

I muttered before I turned my attention back to my father.

“…So, like I said, what are you doing here, dad?”

I said in a curt tone as me and my father hadn’t exactly parted on the best of terms when he heard of my decision to move away seven years ago.

But of course, I had seen him since then.

As my mother would have hunted my ass down and dragged me back home every Christmas, no matter if I had been hiding somewhere in the Amazon and getting eaten alive by mosquitoes the size of gorgon leeches.

Oh, and she would have done it with my Aunty Sophia, my Aunty Pip and my Aunty Ari as her backing singers as they all broke out into Guns N Roses, ‘Welcome to the Jungle’.

I swear when you got them all together they were as thick as thieves and could take on a bloody army in Hell if they were let loose long enough.

In fact, most of the stories I had heard growing up, I didn’t know whether to believe them or class them as just elaborate fairy tales you tell a child.

Only in this instance just switching out the names to people you know to make it more fun.

But as an adult, then thinking back to most of them, now I wasn’t so sure as they were certainly capable of getting into that much trouble and surviving.

The fact I was certain on though was that when they got together I think it was the only thing my father did fear…that and my mother’s wrath.

But on the whole, as the only daughter of the King of the Supernatural world and a mother who was half Vampire, quarter Demon/Angel mix and quarter Human, I was brought up in a relatively normal and happy household.

If, of course, you could call an old castle style mansion on the edge of a cliffside normal that was… oh and one which just so happened to be the small town of Evergreen Falls’ gothic Nightclub of choice (as in there wasn’t any choice and we were the only ones to provide that brand of gothic crazy to the locals).

Then, yep it was normal.

Or at least my mother and father’s variety of normal.

Which, granted, wasn’t much to go on seeing as everything I had just mentioned in that list.

So, what the heck, it wasn’t the suburbia upbringing that most kids in my school had, but one thing was for sure, living in the town’s creepiest and coolest of places meant that I was the very last target for a bully, not when they believed that the ghost of my ancestors would rise up from the grave to haunt them.

The funny thing about that was that I didn’t have any ancestors to speak of, not considering my father and his siblings, my Aunty Sophia and my Uncle Vincent, were thousands of years old.

My father gave me a warm and amused grin before answering my question on why he was here,

“Can’t a father surprise his beautiful daughter with a visit?”

“Aww that’s so sweet…what, all I get from my dad is a grunt and half assed wave…oh and a head nod if it’s Christmas,”

Wendy said defensively when I shot her a silencing look.

“Yes, but he’s a recovering alcoholic that smokes fifty a day and half the time can’t see you through the cigarette fog,”

I reminded her, making her giggle instead of her taking any offensive, as let’s just say there wasn’t much love lost between them.

“Very true, damn you, but it looks like you won the parent lottery with that sexy piece of DNA right there,”

she muttered quietly, not knowing that of course my father could hear her just fine.

It was at this point that I lowered my head and slapped my forehead the second my dad sounded like he was coughing back his laugh.

“What…too much?”

Wendy asked me in response to my reaction.

“Yeah, just a tad.”

She laughed once, slapped me on the back and said,

“I am gonna take a wild stab in the dark here and guess that I should probably give you two some alone time.”

I grinned back at her and agreed,

“That’s probably best, yes.”

“Right, well it was nice meeting you, Mr…”

“Draven, my name is Draven, but you can call me Dominic.”

I swear if my dad carried on like this he would soon be catching her, she was that close to swooning.

“Wendy, this is usually the part when you say bye,”

I reminded her after she just started smiling at him like a loon or someone high on drugs, whichever suited.

“Oh yeah, right…okay well nice to meet you like I said and Smock, call me later,”

she said giving me wide eyes as if silently telling me she will be eagerly waiting with her phone in hand for me to call her and give her all my family gossip.

And well, considering I’d never said anything before about my ridiculously handsome parentage, then it probably meant it was going to be a long phone call.

After this she left and the second we heard the door close behind her my father asked,

“Smock?”

“They call me Emmie here…you know, short for Amelia and well Wendy thought it was funny to combine it with…”

“Spock,”

my father said smirking as he knew all about my obsession with Star Trek growing up, as he was the poor sap I had to drag with me to all the conventions.

In the end it turned out that Spock was his favorite as well.

Or at least he said it was after I also made my parents sit through the original series, along with all the spin offs they made.

Like I said, they were good parents, but even the best kind have their flaws and my dad’s were…well let’s just say that they were suffocating.

“My dear Amelia, give this old man a break and come here, sweetheart,”

my father said with such a tender tone I could never have refused him, no matter the distance that had grown between us since the day I left home to make it on my own.

“Oh dad!”

I said as I made the first steps towards him before I threw myself into my father’s arms.

I hugged onto him as he lifted me up as he always did when I was a kid.

He also did so with my mother, who was quite a bit shorter than him and also me by two inches.

“I missed you, little one,”

he told me as he lowered my feet back to the floor and ended the sweet statement with a kiss to my forehead.

“How’s mum, is she here?”

I asked hoping that she was but with a small shake of his head he told me that she wasn’t.

“Let me guess, she doesn’t know you’re here, does she?”

I asked.

He actually looked sheepish because if there was one single person in the world that could render my father speechless and squirming it was my wonderful mother, Keira.

She was his kryptonite and Achilles heel all wrapped into one.

As it was a clear and constant reminder living with them both that true love wasn’t only real, but it could also be fated and blessed by the very Gods themselves.

Love was a gift and one I had been hoping to find in a man who I had been dreaming about most of my life in one way or another…but, boy had I been wrong!

But my parents knew nothing of this or that he was the reason I had walked away and turned my back on the same life my parents had chosen.

Now, maybe it would have been different had I been like them, but the sobering truth for them and for me was that I wasn’t like them.

As in… Not. At. All.

Because I wasn’t supernatural…I was human.

“No, she doesn’t know but no doubt will by the time I get back,”

he admitted making me chuckle before nudging his arm with my shoulder and saying,

“Yeah, well good luck with that one, Pops.”

He smirked at my teasing knowing that it was only me and my mother that could ever get away with it and it was fun at that.

But my dad was a good sport and amazingly still managed to uphold that same level of authority he always did, even when in the past he had a toddler on his knee pulling his nose or making him blow raspberries in my face.

He simply sat at his council table most nights and obliged me and my silliness until it was time for my bed, more often than not leaving it to my mother to discipline me, as he found that he just couldn’t bring himself to tell me off.

However, the one thing that he would not do, under any circumstances, was go against my mother’s wishes as he always backed her up and declared that her say was final and decreed law.

Of course, when you’re five and told to go to bed sooner than you would like or being denied dessert after not eating all your dinner, these all seemed pretty end of the world things to a child.

But let’s just say that I learned early on who the softies of the household were and that was pretty much anyone who wasn’t my mother.

In fact, in the end, I felt so sorry for my poor mum that I would often choose to be good just to give her a break in having to explain to a table full of clueless Supernaturals the importance of a child’s routine, or the value of not being hyped up on sugar before bed.

Because, no matter how much my mum had to play the bad cop in my upbringing, the simple fact remained that I utterly adored her.

She may have been the one to tell me ‘No’, ‘Not yet’ and ‘Don’t touch’, but the rest of the time she was so much fun I would find my days filled with more laughter than I could possible count and tears that could be counted on one hand.

They were, without a shadow of a doubt, the best parents any child could have ever hoped for, but then something awful happened and that was what most parents have to face…

I became a teenager.

So, no matter how much my dad used to dote on me, the second I started to grow up and know my own mind was when he found the list of things he couldn’t give me was starting to mount and one of those was what I craved for the most…

Freedom.

You see, I was stuck smack bang in the middle of two worlds and in neither one of them did it feel like I truly belonged.

I was human in the supernatural world I was brought up in, but the longer I was in school surrounding myself with my own kind, the more I longed to belong in their world.

But, like I said before, this didn’t mean I didn’t adore my family and included in that were those who weren’t related by blood like my Aunty Pip and Uncle Adam.

But they all had their place within their world, whereas I wasn’t even allowed to go on a simple shopping trip to Evergreen Falls’ Mall without having a tank sized bodyguard named Ragnar watching my every move.

Even if he was another person I considered as an Uncle, it still didn’t stop the fact that he was a scary ass Viking the size of a house!

But it wasn’t just the unfair restrictions my parents laid down for me as I knew it was only done for my safety, it was also where they wanted my life to go.

The way my dad wanted me to play it nice and safe and work in Afterlife, in whatever area I could that would make me happy.

But what made me happy was living out my dreams in a museum somewhere.

Or even being out in the field discovering the world’s unknown hidden treasures of our history and being the first one to lay eyes on something that had not been seen for a millennium.

This was where my father and I started to disagree, and it quickly became the first time that my dad could no longer give me everything I wanted, being the one to say the word NO to me in place of my mother.

Hence our tense relationship ever since.

Not that we argued much or were vocal about it.

It was just that my overbearing father and his need to constantly protect me was starting to sound like a dictatorship of my life rather than friendly advice on where he thought my life should lead.

Which was why I decided to move to London to first study and then get a job straight after in the British Museum.

It also didn’t help that my family was insanely rich, which not to sound like an ungrateful bitch here, but it also meant that my dad wanted to pay for everything and ensure it was the best.

Whereas, I wanted to learn the value of hard work and the ways of the world with it like my mother had taught me.

That was where they clashed on my upbringing the most.

But I sided with my mum, which was why I lived in a small modest flat on the outskirts of London that I bought cheap.

And was why I caught the bus into the city every day for work.

Okay, so it was also why I didn’t go home much as I couldn’t afford my living expenses and flights back to Portland as they weren’t exactly cheap.

But I refused to ask my dad for money or for the use of one of their private jets, as that would have been against the point I was trying to make.

In truth, I simply wanted to make it on my own.

Which was why, like most people, I bought my clothes not from the many designer shops on Bond Street, like my Aunty Sophia would have liked.

But instead in Oxford Street and from the places most people did on the high street.

And I was honestly okay with that.

In fact, I enjoyed finding my sale bargains just as much as the next person, determined that my parents’ wealth would not influence my nature as a human being and instead make me a better person for learning to value what I have earned. And I did, especially when setting up my first home by myself and going to the British Heart Foundation for my second-hand furniture to fill my flat with.

I remember my mum’s face when she saw it for the first time and how proud she was, nudging my father’s side and prompting him to say the same.

I wanted to laugh now as I remembered the way he looked down at my shabby sofa as if any minute rats were going to break free from the springs and attack him.

In truth, my dad was a bit of a snob at times and I remembered laughing when my mum told me stories of when they had first started dating.

At how he acted when she took him into places like Burger King and Poundland.

At the time, I’d had tears in my eyes at just the thought of it.

But then again, my dad had never known anything other than his extreme power and wealth, spending thousands of years as a King, then really…who could blame him? All I could hope was that in time he would come to understand my decisions and come to respect them as my mother did.

But then again, with one look at my dad now, then I knew today was not that day.

He was here because of something else and if he was here without my mother knowing, then my guess… it wasn’t anything good.

“You’re looking well and more grown up every time I see you,”

my father said, running the back of his hand affectionately down my cheek and giving me a tender look.

I knew that my dad struggled watching me growing from his little girl into an independent woman, as no doubt most fathers did.

And even if I couldn’t have seen it clearly myself, my mother spoke about it often enough, no doubt trying to get me to understand his reasons for being the way he was.

In fact, every time we spoke for our weekly catch up phone calls and I would ask how he was, she would laugh in her light hearted and teasing way before telling me, ‘struggling as always’.

Half of me felt guilty for my decision to leave but then I would stretch out on my little sofa, look around at my own little slice of heaven that I had worked for and know that I had done the right thing.

And like I said, one day hopefully he would see it too.

Which was why knowing that he was a long way off that yet, I took a step back, folded my arms over my chest and asked him,

“Yeah, well that’s what happens when you’re twenty-seven, dad… now come on, spill…why are you here?”

I asked getting down to business and knowing taking a family trip down daddy and daughter good old times lane, wasn’t going to do me any favours in trying to get my dad to see me as an adult.

He gave me a knowing look but obviously thought better of whatever it was he wanted to say and instead replied with the actual reason he was here.

“I have something for you,”

he said after releasing a big sigh that showed only of his frustration.

So, deciding to opt for less tension, I gave him a big grin and hopped up onto the nearest table, thankfully the one without the four-thousand-year-old Egyptian artifacts upon it and said,

“Alright, let’s have a look.”

Then I rubbed my hands together like I always did out of habit when something exciting was possibly coming my way.

I knew with the warm look my dad gave me, that he was reminiscing back to every Christmas and Birthday when I would do the same thing before being handed a present to open.

What can I say, I loved receiving gifts and still acted like a kid when being surprised with one.

“This box was found hidden behind one of the walls in a building I recently acquired,”

my dad said picking up an aluminum case that I only just noticed was sat on the floor next to him.

It was like the ones you would have seen in any action movie where the hero is trying to stop a case full of nuclear uranium from getting into the hands of terrorists.

Of course, it always does get into the hands of terrorists, where a bomb gets made that threatens the city and the hero is essentially left at the end contemplating in the five seconds remaining which wire to cut.

And, of course, they cut the right one with mere seconds to spare.

Even after knowing nothing about nuclear bombs yet still managing to save the day anyway and along with it the love interest that they just happened to pick up half way through the story line.

But enough about the box and my runaway imagination along with it, as it was what was inside the box that interested me the most and I very much doubted that it was anything radioactive.

“Wow, now that’s certainly different,”

I said the second he ran a hand over the other-worldly locks, ones no human could ever hope to crack before flipping back the lid.

Inside sat an intricate wooden rectangle that was no bigger than a regular sized shoe box.

It had raised panels on each side which in turn held three framed squares and each were painted with different symbols at their centres.

“It’s shaped like some kind of miniature sarcophagus, although definitely not of the Egyptian kind, yet there are some hieroglyphs here…but wait, that’s strange as these are Demotic script…and look here, this looks like Ancient Greek…”

I looked back up at my dad as I had been spinning it around in my hands for he and I both to see, when I stopped, gifting him with a look of utter astonishment.

“But that’s…well that’s…”

“Surprising?”

my dad said finishing off my sentence with a word I wouldn’t have used… no astonishing, unbelievable, amazing…those words I would have used!

“Where did you say you found this again?”

I asked as I picked it up gently and turned it around again, this time looking at it in more detail and already trying to make out some of the markings I knew.

“New Haven, Connecticut,”

he said making me raise a brow at him.

“And what where you doing at Yale University, umm? Decided you needed yet another doctorate to add to the collection?”

I teased, knowing the university would have been his sole interest there.

He gave me one of those ‘you’re too clever for your own good’ type of looks that made me chuckle.

“Can you decipher it?”

he asked ignoring my question in place of one of his own.

My eyes went wide in surprise when I replied,

“You can’t?”

This shocked me because if there was an ancient language out there that my dad couldn’t read then it really must be an even bigger mystery than I first thought.

“No, hence why I rushed over here to the one person I knew that could…eventually,”

he said adding this last part as a tease.

I smirked, taking on the challenge as he knew I would and looked at the box again.

“One of the only other artifacts found with all three texts is the Rosetta Stone, which has been here in the museum since 1802…you know it’s how they ended up deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphs.”

I told my dad even though I didn’t know why I bothered considering there was very little my dad didn’t know about important world history and he confirmed this when he said,

“I remember seeing it the day it was first put on display for the world to see, although ever since its rediscovery, I believe the stone has been the focus of nationalist rivalries.

Which include the debate of its transfer from French to British possession during the Napoleonic Wars, thanks to a long-running dispute over the relative value of both Thomas Young, and Jean-Fran?ois Champollion’s contributions to its decipherment.”

I whistled and nudged him with my elbow,

“Impressive…you know mum is right…”

“Oh?”

he enquired as I knew he would considering I had mentioned his biggest weakness, my mum.

“It must be like living with the intelligent superhero…no wonder mum calls you ‘Google Man’.”

I said in a deep ‘man voice’ and making a stance like a superhero with my hands on my hips and my feet apart.

My dad rolled his eyes at me and my playful banter as he always did before muttering,

“Too much like your mother.”

“Well, they may have wanted it in France but since 2003 there have been demands for its return to Egypt,”

I told him, getting back to the reason he was here.

“Well, I don’t see that happening anytime soon, not when it’s one of the museum’s biggest attractions that has been sat on display behind its walls for over two hundred years,”

my father commented.

“So, what’s inside?”

I asked nodding back to the box after seeing for myself there was no way inside but knowing that from the weight of it then an educated guess would tell me it definitely had its secrets at its core.

“I don’t know.”

I frowned at this at the same time jerking my head back in shock.

“What do you mean you don’t know, surely you have just willed it to open before now?”

I said, knowing object manipulation was just one of my father’s many supernatural gifts.

“I have tried but to no avail.”

“You’re telling me that it’s protected against supernatural means?”

I asked in utter astonishment but was soon to learn that this wasn’t the most shocking part of all.

No, it was when my father told me,

“There might be one with enough power to open it, for his exertion over people’s will far exceeds my own.”

I had a bad feeling about this as I felt the shiver creeping down my spine, only knowing the deeper reason for it the second he said his name.

“Who?”

I still asked as if compelled to do so.

However, the second I stared at the box that wouldn’t open I knew just by asking, that the question was opening a far more dangerous one for me.

One not named Pandora’s box, but one named…

“Lucius.”