4. I’ve decided you’re getting a cool mug, Dad. #4
My father’s uncles exchanged glances, and after a while, Alheen sighed.
“Jeremy Breckenan likely believes there is a vampire who turned my father, and he wishes to lure that vampire out—or transform himself into one. Because he does not understand the role of religious belief in the origin of vampirism, he attempts to recreate a method best left gone. What he is succeeding at doing is creating a focus of great evil. Pain and suffering can be harvested, and that is precisely what he’s done.
I don’t believe he understands he does it, but much like you carry stakes and wear a jewel around your throat, he has tokens he always takes with him.
These tokens have absorbed the evils he’s wrought upon others.
There is a great deal of death imprinted on these objects, and once the objects reach full capacity, they will burst. This burst is what I feel he is unwittingly after.
Such a concentration of evil power could give those touched by it new powers.
” Alheen’s gaze landed on my father. “Or it could create someone like him.”
“By nature, the world is balanced,” my father explained.
“For every deep darkness there is a bright light. The sun versus the night, the dawn versus the dusk. Everything has an opposite. We have long speculated I exist because of how much darkness my grandfather brought into the world. Why me? I don’t know.
Perhaps I needed to be touched by the darkness I was intended to counter.
But that Pepper was born much like I was is a cause for concern.
This Breckenan had not been turned before her birth. ”
All my relatives, save for my brothers, nodded their agreement with my father’s assessment.
Emerick made a soft sound. “Ben, what do we have on Breckenan’s turning?”
Ben dug his phone out and referred to it. “Breckenan is Pepper’s age, born two months prior. Premature. Had he come to term, he would have been quite close to her in age, actually.”
I frowned. “People aren’t born evil or good, are they?”
“They are,” my father replied with a frown of his own.
“We had trouble with conception,” my mother pointed out, and she narrowed her eyes. “Is it possible she was conceived at the same time as this bastard?”
I raised a brow at my mother’s choice of language, something she’d taken great care to never use when anyone might hear her. “It seems unlikely that I would have been conceived as a counter for Jeremy Breckenan.”
“Actually, it’s not far-fetched,” Alisander said, raising his hand to prevent me from saying anything.
I tilted my head and waited for him to continue.
He got up from his place on the floor, went to Alheen, and then pointed at our father.
“Our father exists because of the evil done that night. If Breckenan’s potential for evil was that great, I could see how you might have been conceived.
You had a birth defect, a lethal one. Aren’t defects of that severity usually so bad the fetus is aborted naturally, Dad? ”
My father grimaced, but he nodded. “Had nature done as nature does, it’s probable you would have been an early miscarry; I am of the opinion only magic kept you alive with a beating heart until we were able to find a heart for you.”
My mother joined my father in grimacing. “We actually had an opportunity to see your faulty heart. There were pictures because of how abnormal your situation had been. It was incapable of sustaining life for any length of time.”
“I broke into the hospital, erased the images, and wiped the doctor’s memory of the severity of your defect,” my father confessed.
“I couldn’t afford news to spread of how you had survived the impossible.
I could not bear to bring false hope to parents of children like you.
It’s probable you exist for the same reason I do, to become a light in the darkness.
But for an infant to be a bearer of such evil is alarming, Alheen.
Why do you suspect his evil is that great? ”
“His father was a practicing necromancer, albeit a neutral one. He studied the nature of life and death without doing much to influence it, and when he did use his powers, it was to undo the work of other necromancers. My speculation is that in order to unravel the workings of other necromancers, he channeled the evil into himself. This somehow transferred to his son. Jeremy Breckenan had three other brothers, and they were also quite… wretched.”
My father scowled. “I see I must take better care to follow current events in the preternatural world.”
Alheen waved his hand. “You did not find out because we took care to make certain you did not find out. What those hands wrought would have bothered you far more than us. We took care of it so you would not have to. It seems we did not take care of the problem thoroughly enough. That is what we are here to change.”
“What happened to Breckenan’s father?” I asked.
“That is the beginning of the journey, but brace yourselves. It is an unpleasant tale,” Alheen warned.