Fade to Black-3

Chapter 3

The reports take me awhile. It’s why I guess that armies really do run on paper. I didn’t really want to do this stuff but I need to. Mom keeps refilling my coffee and Dad’s still kind of surly; I can really start to see why he hates this, why he never wanted to be part of the life. He actually shot me a sort of sympathetic sort of look and then left after looking at everyone.

Athena/Andrea is sitting with Dorian and are talking is a very foreign language save for the names of people and places that don’t fit the language I mean what ever they’re speaking stuff like “New York” doesn’t seem to translate to. I think he’s getting caught up on current events.

I wonder just how long it’s been and what he’s missed. Andrea seems like she’s seen and awful lot of stuff. She must have been through an awful lot and she looks tired while she’s talking to Dorian except for when she’s looking at Miranda then there’s this sweetness that get’s into her eyes.

Dom comes out of the shower and gets himself a coffee and he’s dressed darkly even for him. SWAT styled combat pants and boots a plain black t-shirt and a dark black hoody under his leather jacket. He sips at it black and doesn’t really say too much.

My fault really I can feel the hurt rolling off of him. And despite how dark he’s dressed he seems to be so calm. So all that hurt rolling off of him like heat is coming from the inside. I reach out to him. “Dom…”

“I’m fine Stevie, it’s and arrangement I forced on you or tried to remember this is on me, it’s my fault.”

He gets out and he leaves like dad did, is this going to be a habit that the men in my life get up and walk away?

I get up a bit pissed and hurt and go after him. I need to square things with him and he’s got a good lead on me already through the camp and heading to the tree line.

“Dom wait.” He ignores me.

“Dom please.” He still ignores me.

“God dammit Dom would you just fucking stop already!” I grab his arm and spin him around and he shoves me open handed a dozen feet hard slamming me into a tree.

“Stevie go away! Just leave me the hell alone!” he shouts at me with a bit of a snarl there.

I let a bit of my own wolf out and snarl back at him. “No! We need to have this out; we need to talk about this dammit!”

“About what Stevie the fact that you might love me but you’ll never be in love with me? That I’ll never be Katya?! Don’t you think that I don’t know that! The link runs both ways Stevie I know you’re never going to really love me!”

“Now! you’re doing this now! Jesus Dom of all fucking times for you to be doing this and you fucking pick now of all times to do this!”

“Yes now, Dammit I lost people too, friends too you fucking forget that I knew this pack long before you were bit into it your highness!”

I’m crying and yeah I did forget that, I forget a lot of things…like the promise that I had made him and god dammit even as hurting as he is he’s not throwing that in my face and he’s right…he’s not Katya and I feel like a really shitty person for feeling so much for her that he’s taking a backseat to a dead girl despite the way that he had opened up to me.

“I’m sorry, Dom, I’m really sorry I’m trying here but I don’t know what I’m doing or what I’m feeling half the time I’m just trying to keep us all alive and…and…”

“Stevie, just leave me alone…please, I just need some space.”

Oh god it hurts because I can feel him pulling away from out link like I’m this fire and he’s been burned so many times before. Oh…oh… god it’s this horrible feeling when you’re feeling someone who loves you pulling away from you. It’s bad enough when that happens in a relationship but to feel it, literally feel it on the inside, in your heart them moving away from you and that it’s you’re fault.

I can’t stop him. I just can’t stop him as he just walks away from me deeper into the woods.

I walk back after a few minutes…half an hour through the camp just kind of numb. I get a thump on my upper arm and Natasha one of my seconds and one of the few spell casters I’ve found since I started things looks at me and she’s got a flash in her hand. It’s still early and what the hell really and I take a swallow of three of the hard stuff inside and cough a bit. “What the hell was that?”

“Moonshine with a little vodka to smooth it down.” I watch her take a sip from the flash with no reaction on her face just like she was drinking water.

“Hmm, Vodka to smooth it down…right.” Tasha’s shinny but in a good way with messy sorta ash blonde shoulder length hair and these killer icy blue eyes. She was with me when we ran into Athena at the biker joint. She looks different this morning but in a good way.

Army green t-shirt and fatigues with hiking boots and a big over sized flak jacket on. The one thing that’s the same is the heavy sort of eye make up she has on. She really has this soldier girl meets Russian hooker thing going on.

“Stevie?”

“Yeah?”

“Just let him be, it wasn’t ever going to work out anyway.” She takes another drink and even lights a smoke. I don’t know how she can do that with enhanced senses. She takes a long drag then she walks away.

“What do you mean it wasn’t going to work?”

She keeps swaying as she walks for another fifty feet and turns just enough to look at me. There’s even this smile there with the hint of sharp teeth.

“Isn’t it obvious Stevie, You’re a lesbian.” She turns smoke in her lips and shoves her hands in the pockets of her flak jacket and she walks away.

I’m…

I’m stuck in mental and emotional neutral until I felt something skim the area? That felt strange and I head to grandpa. “Did you feel?”

“Yes something tried to get past the wards on the farmstead.”

“Yes I had strengthened the when Shadira and I were settling down once the children were settled in.” Dorian says as he walks up to us. “Whatever it was it was strong and it wasn’t mortal.”

“Oh…” I say and Grandpa is frowning at Dorian. Dorian ignores it as much as like Spock would someone being perturbed by the whole thought of someone being mad at him.

I look when I heard the ring of a cell phone way out here where cell phones shouldn’t get a signal and Andrea is answering her phone. She’s smiling and doing that trying not to laugh thing and is nodding a few times. She walks over to us as she’s doing so.

“That was the director, he needs a drive here apparently his transport spell had been turned and he’s somewhere south of here in a marsh? I have to go and pick him up.”

Dorian does the eyebrow thing and asks her. “You are an Olympian and he is an Asguardian and he commands you’re loyalty?”

She smiles at him. “Only sort of Mr. Gray, Tyr is also earthbound like myself by choice and he happens to be my mortal life superior in the same organization.”

“Indeed as you’ve said very strange times indeed lady.” He looks at me. “Your Majesty I’m afraid that my time here will be short lived for I’ve learned of a great force of good that requires someone to help her with enough experience to help her through the things ahead of her.”

“Sure that’s fine you’ve been a huge help to all of us.”

“So you’re leaving to get into the head of some poor talent huh elf and drag her into you twisted power games?” my grandfather snipes at Dorian.

“Hardly, young sir. I’m going there because the Ashe and the Morrigan are getting involved with her and there needs to be something done down there before it gets out of hand.”

“Likely…” Grandpa snorts.

“I’m sorry that you’re family got involved in those troubles Parker but the creator gives us all choices. Your brother chose his own path all those years ago. Good day everyone. Majesty the blessings of Leaf and Star, Fire and Fountain upon you and yours.”

I’m as confused by the exchange between him and Grandpa but I actually give him and Shadira both light hugs and kisses to their cheek and say with a bit of a joking way. “Go with god.”

She gives my literally this shiny literally heavenly smile and she gives me a Namaste bow which is like a yoga thing or Hindu or something?

I watch them leave and Andrea leave and I sigh. Then look at Grandpa. “So you going to enlighten me as to the stuff about the fae and my Great Uncle that I never knew that I had?”

He looks at me and I look at him and despite that he’s a tough hard old guy I’ve gotten a lot harder inside myself and for awhile there’s a staring contest and he breaks away first. He then digs through his pockets and takes out his pipe and takes his time stuffing it and lighting it.

“It was a long time ago but we were just starting to learn the ways of using power and we had both been pretty excited and pretty keen on using our power and testing our limits when Jeremy had found some old books in an estate auction that were from the early colonial days and the described an area that was off limits to the settlers that even the Indians steered clear of.
I took these to our teacher who told us that these were lands that had been claimed by the fae upon their exodus from Europe to here. He forbade us to even go there.
We didn’t listen.”

“So what happened?”

“We were caught by these….elves from something called the court of silver leaves and because we were mages our lives were forfeit to some treaty or something I’d never heard of and the fact that we didn’t know fell on deaf pointed ears.

They said just because we had been raised in ignorance that it wasn’t and excuse. They took us away separately and I never seen him again not alive at least.

I was held and tortured there for I don’t know how long and then they through me out of their realm and twenty years had passed.”

“And Great Uncle Jeremy?”

“The state police had found the remains of his body at the closest crossroads near that damned valley the day your father had been born. He’d been gnawed on…the cops had no idea of what had happened and couldn’t place the blame on me because of the timeline and my own disappearance and stuff without my aging so they just “forgot” that it happened. I’ll never forget, and I’ll never trust them Stevie, never they play by their own rules and ours never matter to them.”

I was going to say something but there’s a tingle and flooding zip of multiple mental contacts from my scouts.

“We need to talk about this later Grandpa, but we will talk about this I need to know more about this whole frigging world I got dumped into. C’mon the First nation’s contingent is here….they brought our dead from the stronghold.”

I move to where I can see them and my chosen elites or what’s left of them move through the crowd to join me…Huh…okay…they’re all women. Why didn’t I? I can’t be can I? I mean I’ve slept with Dom?

I slowly watch them pulling in with a small convoy of trucks and cars and a few RV’s and there’s a lot on guns and weapons with them too.

“They look more like guerilla fighters than Native Americans.”

Dad’s there beside me surprisingly. “The reserves here and back home have a lot more going on than either of our governments will admit to and considering the ooga-boogas running the stuff in the government they might just be not looking on purpose.”

“Yeah…I can feel our kind out in them too.”

“Let’s be careful, the euro-weres never took over here in North America for a reason.”

“Thanks Dad, you don’t have to be here.”

“Yeah, I do.”