F A M I L Y
"What do you mean, '
she has a Black Dog'," Juneau asked, her typically direct manner somehow more biting than it usually was. Rhys had just informed her that Nissa had established a companion and that he was currently en route to them. "How? When?
How?" she fired, her rapid-fire questions made to be more aggressive as her entire posture changed and she began advancing on the siblings.
"Now, Juneau, you know I don't - " Rhys began, diplomatically, before Severin cut her off.
"We don't fucking know," he said bluntly. "Everything you want to know, I also want to know. Believe me, I'm not keen on having another
thing to be worried about right now any more than I've already got." He gestured sharply with his hand at her, effectively truncating all of the things she wanted to say for the moment.
Rhys sighed. "You two deserve eachother," she muttered, turning on a heel and leaving them to sit and stew together in confused anger.
Virgil hated flying, and so he'd elected to drive the way from Missouri to New York, where the family was.
His family, apparently. He'd always known that it could happen one day, but nothing that anyone had told him had really prepared him for being Called. Called, with a capital C, because it was an Event. As a boy, his father had always spoken against it. He made it sound like something straight out of those stupid books about sparkling vampires, where once you were Called, you'd lose your free will and become some mindless
thing. But that wasn't the case at all, at least not as far as he could tell. He flicked a cigarette out the window of his Dodge Ram, hoping it didn't land in the bed of his truck on his duffel bags. Nissa had told him to pack like he was moving; when she'd seen that he'd only had 2 bags in the back of his truck, she'd been confused. He'd tried to explain that the military had taught him to pack light, but the truth was, he'd grown up in a trailer a stone's throw from the Ozarks, and honestly, he wasn't in the habit of keeping a lot of shit around.
He'd lost track of the time he'd been driving, but he knew Nissa had already landed. "You should have flown with me," she texted him. "You'd be home by now."
Home. What even was that?
"Nah kid, a man and his truck are not parted so easily," he'd told her. Their relationship had yet to truly be established; they'd met, spent a few days together, and then she'd told him that her siblings were coming to New York, and she was meeting him there. Which meant, of course,
he was meeting them there. He was vaguely aware they already had a dog, but he'd never met another one who'd been Called, so he didn't know what to expect. She hadn't given him much in the way of an explanation either, but it wasn't wilful withholding - Nissa didn't
know.
This whole situation was a clusterfuck.
"He's driving, I don't know
when he's supposed to be here," Nissa said hotly, after having been asked by Sev for about the fiftieth time where the man was. She was seated at an oak table, as far from where he stood as possible. She had a journal open of a long-passed Van Helsing, one who had encountered the uniqueness of her situation, and she had been trying to glean information from it, but she couldn't if her brother kept pestering her.
"Call him and ask," Sev said, each word emphasized to show how much he cared about the fact she was annoyed at him. It was like having two of Rhys around, if one of them was younger, American, and entitled without an iota of knowledge to her own ability.
"Sev!" Nissa snapped. "He'll get here when he gets here, okay? Fuck," she muttered, looking up from her book finally and at her brother.
"Don't talk to your brother that way," Juneau interjected from her spot across the long table, raising her eyes but not her head and giving her a sinister appearance. She'd been pouring over books herself ever since this had come about, unsatisfied with the litany of "I don't know" responses she kept getting. She already didn't like Nissa, and in part, it was because she'd was unbound to her. It had given her a strange insecurity about her own purpose, if not to be bound to the Van Helsing family. Juneau's
bloodline had always been bound to them, for as long as she had been told, anyways. This situation was playing on childhood fears about being ousted from what was considered a high station and relegated back to a cabin in the great beyond of Alaska to live out her days with no family to call her own. She locked eyes with Nissa as the girl set her jaw, as if
daring Nissa to start that fight.
"He'll get here when he gets here, dude. He knows the way. He's fine," Nissa said after the tense silence had lingered. She thought maybe he'd say something to Juneau about her attitude, but no, of course he didn't. It was just one of the many ways she was shown that she didn't "fit" with whatever had been going on here. She didn't wish Sev had stayed dead, though; on the contrary, she wished he hadn't died at all so she could just have lived her life with dormant magic that would have never been activated.
When Sev opened his mouth, Juneau slammed her book shut, the sound thunderous in the quiet of the massive study. "Sev for fuck sake!" she yelled.
They were all interrupted as Rhys opened the door, unknowingly (or maybe not) stopping what was about to be a huge three-way fight between them. "Someone's pulling up the drive," she informed them.
"Well god
damn, I say god damn," Virgil said to himself as the house finally came into view. He knew it was going to be fancy judging from the mile long driveway (that was paved), but he had no idea it was a damn castle. Nissa hadn't told him that. "Virgil, you sure do know how to pick 'em." He parked the dusty black truck in the circular drive at the entrance of the house, wondering to himself if he'd won or lost the lottery on this one. Fancy was never his thing, and though he wasn't apprehensive that he wouldn't fit in, he was keenly aware what fancy saw when it looked at him. He'd been aware of that his whole life, thanks to his environment.
As he got out and walked around to the side of the truck to grab his bags, the massive doors opened. He had expected it to be Nissa, but it wasn't. He could hear her voice behind the door, but he watched as the woman forcefully shut it, deliberately putting time between she and the people on the other side. She had already descended the steps when the rest of them came out.
"Hey," she snapped. "Farm boy. This is
my family. Do you understand?" Boy, but she was mad - and unafraid. She was very quickly in his personal space, and despite the height difference, seemed to lose no dignity in looking up at him. It still felt like he was being looked down at.
"I'm not here to steal your family, Duchess," he told her, merely arching a brow before continuing to go about slinging his bag over his shoulder. He reached past her, picking up the second one, and pulled it over the side of the truck, comfortably gripping it in his hand. She didn't move a single inch, he noticed. If she was trying to frighten him, it wasn't working, but he was impressed by how fiercely she came at him all the same. He was an outsider. She was doing what she was supposed to do, without a single question as to the why.
"But," he warned, dropping his voice a little. "You ain't gonna keep me from mine - so I suggest you get used to me," he warned her. He looked past her to where Nissa was rushing down the stairs, pushing past Sev and Rhys feverishly to get him away from Juneau before she started a fight. "Because that little thing right there? That's mine. Not yours."
He stepped out of her personal space, walking towards Nissa with a smile. "Well hello darlin, you did not tell me you were a princess, too," he called.
Juneau stayed where she was at the truck, facing the opposite direction and seething with rage. "We'll see about that," she hissed.