Divine Blood (Vampire Love Story #6) (5 page)

“
What can I do for you,
sweetie?” I said after we carefully hugged, prudently though, as I
was a very married man and as befitted the leader of the
Mani.

“
Sweetie? Man, being a dad
has made you mellow.” Yari winked and gave me one of her beautiful
smiles.

My heart warmed. My old
friend and comrade in arms. She was still a charmer.

I charmed right back and
replied, “Oh, I can call you sweetie if I feel like it. After all
that we have been through...if I wanted to call you ‘blueberry
muffin,’ I’d be entitled to it.”

She laughed, and it was
genuine and from her gut. “That’s why I love you, Josiah. You’re
the one man who never let me get away with my bullshit.”

“
Well, I love you, too,
Yari. How can I be of service to you this evening?”

“
If I knew you were giving
out services at this time of night, I would have been by a long
time ago.”

My mouth flickered in an
almost-smile at her double entendre. She still flirted like a
champ. I said, “You used to come over a lot until you got your own
place,” I said. “Then you nested in and became a
hermit.”

“
I kind of did that,
didn’t I? I was tired, Josiah. We fought an amazing war and I stood
by your side through all of it. It was the greatest experience of
my life. And yet, it was the most heartbreaking. It both built me
up and it tore me apart.”

“
What are you saying,
Yari? You’re getting sentimental. People usually only get like this
when they are going away. What’s going on?”

Yari was quiet and I knew
what she was going to say before she said it.

“
I’m leaving.” Yari
smirked and looked deeply into my eyes and gave me her mischievous
up-to-no-good smile for the last time.

“
Why?” I wished it wasn’t
Yari. She was like my right hand in battle.

She folded her hands, as
if subtly pleading for my forgiveness. Apologetically, she said,
“I’m taking my journey back to the East Coast where I feel more
comfortable. This farming and small-town values structured society
you built here is nice. It’s just not for me.”

“
I’m surprised you lasted
this long,” I said, laughing. “I’m grateful you stayed as long as
you have.” I bowed my head to honor her, my friend, almost my
Lancelot, if the truth be known.

Then Yari got extremely
serious and looked me in the eyes, her eyes intent on my reaction.
“Josiah, there’s something I need to tell you.”

“
Okay...” I
said.

Yari sighed and stared
deeply into my blue eyes. “I hope that this stays in this room,”
she said. “I just want to get extremely real with you for one
moment.”

Yari was really passionate
about what she wanted to tell me. It wasn’t often that she had such
a hard time spitting out her thoughts. We were that close and
honest. She looked at me and said, “In my life, I had only one man
who could make me feel the way I always imagined being ‘in love’
would feel like.”

I looked at her, my head
tilted in puzzlement, yet forewarned. “Yes? Who’s the lucky
guy?”

She sighed. “That person
was you, Josiah. I’ve broken many, many hearts. But you were the
first to break mine.”

I felt wounded. “I’m
sorry. I have always respected and loved you deeply; I just needed
to place you in the appropriate place in my life.”

“
I know you did. It wasn’t
in the cards for us. I just wish it would have been. It would have
been nice to be your destiny. More than nice.”

“
We cannot undo what or
who we are,” I said terribly surprised that this conversation went
in this direction.

“
I know. I can’t get that
image of you out of my head.”

“
Which one?” I
said.

“
What I heard Krull did to
you, on that mechanical, metal crucifix. And how you survived it,
and thrived.”

“
Ah, it wasn’t so bad. I
think it got some kinks out.”

“
I heard it was a
nightmare.”

“
It was a long time
ago.”

“
I know.”

“
I don’t like to think
about that day,” I confessed.

“
That day always bothered
me,” she said.

“
Why?”

“
None of us were there for
you,” Yari said.

“
One person was,” I
said.

“
How is Atticai?” Yari
asked remembering it was Atticai who swept in and saved me on that
day. That was a long time ago. Atticai had different problems on
this day.

“
Donya is still very
sick,” I said, risking revealing sensitive information, but I
trusted Yari as a sister and knew Atticai did also.

“
Do we know yet what’s
wrong?” Yari asked, with a sincerity that was honest and
loving.

“
I think they know, but
they are just keeping it a secret.”

“
People do what they got
to do.”

“
I hear that.”

Then Yari changed the
subject. “How are Lena and the boys?”

I knew what she was really
asking, what she really wanted to know...if I was really happy. “I
have no regrets,” I said, nodding in a way that Yari would know
that Lena was still the love of my life.

She nodded back. Her eyes
pleaded with me for a scrap of my heart, the tiniest piece. I did
love Yari, but, out of necessity, I was careful to keep her in this
valiant and pure place in my head. She was still very beautiful.
And so was her heart. I was not completely immune. But Lena and the
boys were very grounding for me. They were the only semblance of
normalcy in an otherwise remarkable existence.

“
Don’t stop talking to me,
Yari,” I said carefully. “Just because you are leaving doesn’t mean
you have to end our friendship. We have history, much of it very
good.”

Yari gently kissed me on
the side of the cheek. “I’ll keep in touch.” Then she left my life
for a while. I caught up with her a couple of years later. We had
seen each other a few times over the years, but nothing was ever
like when we had all lived together in Victorville.

Over the years, my
faithful sidekicks Wyatt and Hector did the same as Yari. They,
too, had passed out of my life, and except for my family, at times,
I felt very alone. They didn’t declare their love for me on the way
out, not the way Yari had, but they were emotional goodbyes to say
the least.

Wyatt and Hector were my
comrades, my brothers in arms, not to mention that Hector was my
benefactor. Hector assured me that I would never have to worry
about money. I believed him because no one had been more diligent
about making sure his dear friends were taken care of. Hector was a
great man. Wyatt was just a great guy, too. He was there for my
family when I needed it most, back in the day. I would always owe
him a debt of gratitude.

Chapter Seven

Here I was, many years later,
preparing myself for just about anything to go down tomorrow. I
finally decided to get up. I very slowly got out of bed so as not
to wake up Lena. I left my wife in the room alone. I was certain of
my wife’s safety. No one would dare enter my castle. Not unless
they had a death wish.

My reputation, by this point, was that
most people would think it was in their best interest to leave me
alone. I headed down the hallway and went downstairs. I headed to
Joshua’s room to check on him. It was close to four in the morning
and both boys were sound asleep.

Like I said, we lived in a
sixteenth-century castle and we tried to set up the inside to look
like a normal home, even if the outside looked like there should be
a moat out front.

I looked in on Joshua. He was lying in
his queen-size bed. He was already over six feet tall with blond
hair and blue eyes like his dad. His hair was darker than mine,
thanks to his mother’s Goth jet-black hair gene.

It had been an amazing sixteen years,
both for my family and the Mani people. Yet, nothing had gone the
way I thought it would.

At first, there had been a wonderful
time of peace for a few years among the Mani people. Then, like
most things in my life, that changed. It changed in the hearts of
other Mani and even I got impatient and decided to take on all the
bad people of the world. That included anyone who fell in that
category.

Some Mani, the ones who chose to come
and to stay on the islands, had experienced a peace and a harmony
that was something we would have never been able to attain, unless
we went through what we went through.

Unfortunately, as with all good
things, a backlash broke out among different Mani mini-sects inside
our own society. One thing I didn’t take into account was that most
vampires weren’t going to want to settle for peace. It was not in
their DNA. It was just the old tired-out ones who just wanted to go
somewhere and retire. Like their vampire Florida retirement
communities where they could play shuffle board all day. Most new
Mani wanted to fight and get something going. Mix it up with bad
guys. It’s just the way it was.

I was as guilty as anyone. Once I had
the Deity’s approval, I had become a regular Lone Ranger. Sion was
my Tonto. We were a good team. Batman and Alfred could eat their
hearts out. This was my cause, but after a couple of years of
living the good life, I started to miss the not-so-good life. I
started to help people all over the world in any way I saw fit.
That’s what I did. I started helping those who couldn’t help
themselves. Luckily, I could, even though my time away doing
vampire superhero things weighed on Lena’s tolerance.

As a family, we had had our own ups
and downs. It was apparent that the two boys had night and day
personalities. All Joshua wanted to do was show off and be a man’s
man, and all Jason wanted to do was be left alone by everyone,
especially me, his dad. Jason was the most reliable kid I had ever
seen. If he had ever lied, it wasn’t to me. If he had stolen
anything, it wasn’t mine. I had never seen this kid act out, not
once. Did he make mistakes? Yes, once in a while. I corrected it
and he never made the same mistakes again.

This was the life I know I lived: I
was a superhero and a dad. I had no more complaints. There wasn’t
time to be selfish. I had given all I could to this cause and it
looked it would be the detriment at least one of my sons. I was
taken from my pretty screwed-up world in my own right, and then
shoved into a world that was unlike anything I had ever known to be
true. Detriment or not, I would die making sure my sons were safe.
Prophecy or not, this had become a new ball game. Now it was about
family.

I remembered the first
time when it became apparent to me that my family was all in this
together. We had two incidents within three months of each other,
incidents in which both boys showed amazing abilities. They were
different abilities, but equally impressive.

The boys were barely five
years old when they discovered the joy of climbing. They climbed
everything: houses, trees, hills, rocks, even bookcases. Climbing
was one of the few times I had seen the boys be competitive with
one another. Each boy always wanted to go higher than his brother.
Most often, Jason won. But Joshua had out-climbed him a few times.
But if you asked me, Jason had let him because that’s just the kind
of kid that he was.

Once, we were spending the
weekend at Uncle Tommy’s house in Anaheim Hills. I wanted the boys
to look at Tommy as a legitimate uncle, because he would have been
if he would have had the opportunity to marry my sister,
Maya.

Lena usually didn’t make
these trips because she viewed them as “guys’ weekends,” even
though we were taking care of two five year olds.

The boys loved Tommy. He
was funny and playful and knew how to take the role as fair and
funny uncle.

It was a typical Saturday
night at Tommy’s. We had ordered pizza and wings. We were all
having a good time just being guys, watching cartoons and any movie
or show that was rated G. Tommy was a good sport about the fact we
needed to accommodate the boys and they would want us to watch at
least one movie with them. After one movie, if Tommy and were
lucky, we went in his den to get some video games in as the boys
fell asleep to the second movie, but this wasn’t one of those
nights. This was going to be an active evening.

There was still a good
hour of sunlight left. “Can we climb Tommy’s eucalyptus tree, Dad?”
Joshua asked.

“
I’m impressed that you
can say the word ‘eucalyptus,’” I said.

“
I’m just impressed that
either of your kids can talk,” Tommy joked.

I gave Tommy a sharp look
to be nice, but that’s the way he was. It didn’t matter who you
were—a guy at the bar or my five year old son—Tommy would find a
way to get under your skin and tease you. It was his way, one of
the reasons why I loved him. Just keep my five year olds out of
it.

On to what
happened...

Tommy had an exceptionally
huge tree that I hadn’t yet allowed the boys to climb. But because
they were both getting pretty good at climbing, I decided to let
them give it a shot.