“They do have a bit of baggage,” Siobhan agreed. As it was, she wasn’t entirely comfortable with Raphael’s presence either. He didn’t seem to actively want to do anything that would put anyone in danger, but that didn’t change the fact that she had very clear memories of Raphael very nearly killing Gabriel while he tried to protect Jack and Siobhan. He hadn’t even argued with Michael. Michael said ‘we need to kill one of our brothers,’ and Raphael said ‘okay.’
Alright, so it had probably been a bit more complicated than that, but that was how it looked from Siobhan’s perspective.
So if they wanted to… establish dominance or whatever it was they were up to, she wasn’t going to argue about it. Besides, it was sort of satisfying to watch. Even when both of them were vampires and technically on even footing, Gabriel was still the faster of the two.
“As long as they don’t plan on murdering each other or throwing each other through any of the walls,” she sighed, leaning into Jack’s side as she watched.
“I don’t think they would want to listen to Alistair’s complaining if they did that,” Jack assured her.
It was a good point. The manor was probably safe.
*
Siobhan was in the yard playing fetch with Barton—a rather extreme game of fetch, considering just how far she could throw things if she was really trying—when Raphael found her. She heard him land behind her, and when she turned to look at him, she bristled slightly. As Barton returned to her side, he dropped his toy, noted the current atmosphere, and sat down at Siobhan’s side. He tipped his head up to nose at her hand. Distractedly, she scratched the top of his head.
Raphael held his hands up in a pacifying motion. “I’m here to talk,” he assured her, his voice low. “That’s all.”
“I don’t think we have much to talk about,” Siobhan returned. “We can’t exactly throw each other through the air to work things out, so I’m pretty content with just keeping to myself instead.”
“I have no complaints with that,” Raphael assured her, his hands still raised, as if she was going to assume he was armed the instant he dropped them. “I wanted to say thank you. That’s all.”
“For what?” Siobhan asked slowly, her voice low with suspicion. Barton whined and butted his head against her hip.
Slowly, Raphael let his hands fall to his sides. “Gabriel explained the signal to me, and that you’re the one who disrupted it. So I just… wanted to say thank you,” he repeated. “That’s all, I promise.”
“Then… I guess you’re welcome,” Siobhan returned. She hadn’t done it for him. Not really. She had done it because it needed to be done, and if it could be done with less death, then that seemed like the ideal route to take. But it wasn’t as if she had been doing him a favor or anything like that.
With that said, Raphael began to back away. Before he could make it more than a few steps, Siobhan blurted out, “I have a question.”
“…Okay.” Raphael sounded wary as he agreed to it.
“Which side are you actually on?” she wondered, and despite the way it sounded, it was not a truly malicious question. “You didn’t care about killing any of us before, but now you’re willing to stand by while the Lords kill the Metatron. Why the change of heart?”
He wasn’t actually looking at her anymore, silver eyes directed off into the woods instead. “There’s a lot you’re willing to do to make things go back to normal, if you aren’t actually sure who’s in the right,” he offered.
“And are you sure now?” she asked sharply. Barton whuffed out a quiet breath and butted his head against her leg again.
“Not entirely,” Raphael answered simply. “But I’m sure the Metatron doesn’t actually care about any of us, so letting him use me as a puppet would be little more than extended self-sacrifice.”
Siobhan was fairly sure that was as good as she was going to get. She supposed she could accept it.
“Fine.”
With a brief nod, Raphael spread his wings and took off, returning to the manor.
CHAPTER NINE
Siobhan’s phone was ringing. It only ever seemed to happen when she was trying to sleep. She ignored it, and soon enough, it stopped ringing. With a sigh of relief, she tried to melt into her pillow again.
Her phone started ringing a second time.
With a loud, outraged groan, she snatched it off of the bedside table and answered it with a grumbling, “Whaaaaaaat?”
“If you slept at a set time, we could just avoid calling then,” Sinead informed her primly, “but seeing as that’s not the case, you’ll just have to get used to being woken up when we want to talk to you.”
“What do you waaaaaant?” Siobhan whined, her voice muffled as she tried to bury her face in her pillow once again, even with the phone still pressed to her ear.
“Sean and I just want to meet up with you again,” Sinead explained. “You can bring Jack.” There was a pause. “And we can apologize for calling him an enabling monster.”
“You mean you can apologize for calling him an enabling monster,” Siobhan mumbled pointedly.
Taking on a diplomatic tone, Sinead replied, “Let’s not start pointing fingers.”
Siobhan scoffed. “Yeah, alright. I’m not doing anything tonight. Not that I’m aware of, anyway. What do you want to do?”
“Hiking?” Sinead suggested. “You do generally prefer being outside, and dragging you into town and making you try to hide everything on a whim sounds unfair.”
Well, hiding everything didn’t actually entail that much, but Siobhan supposed it was the thought that counted. “You sure you’ll be alright? No allergies? No chance of getting sick?”
“I’m as healthy as a horse,” Sinead informed her matter-of-factly. There was a beat that was slightly expectant on Siobhan’s end, before Sinead sighed and added, “Alright, so it’s a horse that just got over colic, but it’s on the mend. Shut up.”
“I didn’t say anything,” Siobhan replied, beatific and placid. “But if you’re sure you’ll be alright, then hiking sounds fine. The grounds around the manor are certainly expansive enough. Gabe might tag along, though. I don’t know. He gets curious about people.”
“That’s fine,” Sinead hurried to assure her. “So it’s alright?”
“Yeah, it’s fine,” Siobhan sighed, words slightly garbled as she yawned.
“Great!” Sinead all but squealed in reply, and Siobhan jerked the phone away from her ear. “We’ll see you tonight!”
Siobhan hummed an agreement and ended the call, before she dropped the phone onto her pillow, bashed the pillow with a fist several times, and went back to sleep.
She woke up again five minutes later when Barton bounded into the room, hopped onto the bed, and dropped half a squirrel on her, demanding she praise him for the acquisition. After a reluctant pat on the head, she left him to finish his squirrel in peace and sulked all the way into the shower.
Jack could wash the sheets.
*
Siobhan got a brief phone call that night informing her that Sean and Sinead were about twenty minutes away. After that, she toted Jack and a very well-fed Barton out the door to wait outside for them. Because bringing them into the manor seemed like a needlessly complicated idea and she didn’t want to deal with that.
When Sean’s car pulled up, Sinead flung herself out of it and then launched herself at Siobhan, arms wrapping around her neck. Sinead dangled there as if she didn’t weigh anything at all. Siobhan pat her on the head and pried her arms free to put her back down.
From there, Sinead slunk over to Jack, her hands linked together in front of herself as she picked at a cuticle. “Sooo,” she began slowly, rocking back and forth on her heels. “I’m really sorry about calling you an enabler and everything else I said last time.”
“To be fair,” Jack reasoned dryly, “I didn’t actually expect you to believe anything Siobhan said.”
“You also didn’t expect to get dragged into the middle of it lik
e that,” Siobhan supplied wryly, slinging an arm around his middle and pressing up against his side. Jack conceded that point with a shrug.
“Can we see your fangs?” Sean interjected, coming up to stand behind Sinead.
Siobhan rolled her eyes in fond exasperation before she grinned, broad and toothy, her fangs on display. Both Sinead and Sean leaned closer to peer at them, and Sinead breathed quietly, “That is so cool.”
Siobhan waved them off, closing her mouth once again. “You didn’t come here to stare at my teeth,” she pointed out. “You’re not dentists. Now, let’s get hiking before someone starts to wonder why we’re just standing here like highwaymen.”
With that determination made, the group set off into the woods that surrounded the manor. They walked in silence at first, as Sinead and Sean quietly gawked at just how much land surrounded the manor and the fact that it was all attached to just one house. The manor’s lights had been lost between the tree leaves by the time Jack spoke.
“You guys seem really chill about the whole… vampire thing,” he commented, turning to walk backwards at Siobhan’s side so he could face Sinead and Sean as he walked. “Other than the initial disbelief, I mean. I kind of figured there would be some sort of… explosion, I guess. Or implosion, maybe.”
Sinead’s lower lip jutted out in a pout that seemed largely like a diversionary tactic. “What, we don’t seem like calm, rational people to you?” she challenged.
Jack’s eyebrows rose, his expression turning faintly unimpressed. “There is a difference between ‘calm and rational’ and ‘completely cool with the supernatural.’ One is a reasonable trait. One is slightly suspicious.” There was a beat. “Also, no,” he added, in answer to the actual question.
Sinead scowled at him and folded her arms, but it was Sean who interjected, “Trust me, there was a lot of freaking out after last time.” He dragged a hand through his hair. “Like, a lot.” He cleared his throat, as if he could not quite properly emphasize just how much freaking out had occurred after their last meeting.
“But,” Sinead interrupted sharply, butting her way back into the conversation, “we had plenty of time to think it over and freak out and discuss it and freak out some more, and mostly it just led us to the conclusion that she’s still our sister, freaky teeth and weird dietary habits aside, and that’s more important than anything else.” She paused as a thought occurred to her, before looking at Siobhan. “You didn’t, like, get sick after eating at the diner or anything, did you?”
With a snort of laughter, Siobhan shook her head. “No. I can still eat whatever I want. I mean, I don’t get anything out of it nutritionally if it’s just regular food, but that just means now everything is junk food.”
“Point being,” Sean added, dragging the conversation back to its original point, “family comes before freaking out. Or, at least, simultaneously to freaking out.”
Siobhan lifted her hands, cupping them together by her chest as she batted her eyelashes. “Aww, you guys,” she cooed, turning and slinging her arms around both of them at once. “That’s so cute.” And if she sounded as if she was, in fact, honestly touched by their decision, well, no one actually brought it up.
Sean began to squirm almost immediately, but he was no match for Siobhan’s vampiric hold and was forced to simply put up with it until she decided she’d had her fill of hugging. Sinead saw no such issues with it.
*
Sinead was climbing a tree. Not by herself, of course. She wanted to get a decent look around, which meant she would need to climb a tree far too tall for her to feasibly climb it on her own. Instead, Siobhan was basically piggybacking her up the tree, Sinead laughing in her ear. It wasn’t exactly a difficult task, and when they got to the top of the tree, Siobhan perched carefully in the crook of one branch where it met the trunk and let Sinead cling tightly to her hand as she stood on the branch to peer through the top of the canopy.
For a few moments, as Sinead took in the view, there was silence. Nearly mesmerized silence, in fact. Until, finally, Sinead breathed quietly, “I can’t believe you live here.”
“Quite a sight, isn’t it?” Siobhan asked, leaning more towards Sinead to stabilize her as she stood up on her toes. “I get to see this whenever I feel like it.”
“It’s huge,” Sinead added quietly, still sounding awestruck. “It’s like you live in a fairytale forest or something.”
“Well, from a certain perspective, I do,” Siobhan argued casually. “There are vampires all over the place, and there are angels wandering around. That sounds like some sort of story to me, even if it’s not a fairytale.”
“You know, I almost thought I hallucinated the angels,” Sinead returned, turning carefully on the branch, switching her hold on Siobhan from one hand to the other as she did.
“They aren’t that weird looking,” Siobhan protested dryly, though she knew what Sinead’s point was well enough. “Unless you see more than one of the same sex standing next to each other. Then it’s super weird.”
Sinead turned her head, blinking at Siobhan in bemusement. With a shrug, she clarified, “They look like they were put together with the same puzzle pieces and just painted different colors. Super eerie if you aren’t expecting it.”
“Oh,” Sinead returned faintly, sounding as if she hadn’t known what she was expecting to hear, but it hadn’t been that. “Good to know, I guess. How many are there?”
“I mean, they’re an entire species,” Siobhan pointed out. “There are a bunch of them, even if not all of them have four wings.”
“Right,” Sinead agreed, sounding faintly shell-shocked. “Makes perfect sense.”
No, it didn’t. Creating an entire species from the same two molds made basically no sense. Siobhan was aware of that. But she wasn’t going to point that out or argue the point. She was, however, going to get Sinead down from the tree before some new revelation made her pass out and fall to her probable death. That would be a very messy, unpleasant way to end an otherwise good night.
She gave Sinead’s arm a tug, and after some careful finagling and some very careful, precarious balancing on the branch that hadn’t seemed quite so narrow a moment ago, Siobhan was piggybacking her sister back down the tree to the ground below, where Jack and Sean waited.
They were arguing about cellphone games. Siobhan was going to assume that meant they were getting along.
*
There was a pond tucked away in the woods that surrounded the manor. It wasn’t particularly big, but it played host to a smattering of fish and a great deal of chirping frogs. It was a decent place to sit down on the grass and relax for a little while.
Siobhan had a hand raised, one finger extended to trace along a quintet of stars, when a quartet of shadows blocked out most of the sky for a very brief moment, just before four archangels landed beside the pond.
Sinead and Sean gaped, staring openly and not even caring about whether or not it was rude.
Gabriel and Anael, having already undergone the process of meeting Sean and Sinead, seemed personable, for the most part. Samael was hanging back slightly, leaning to one side to observe Siobhan’s siblings from around Anael’s shoulder but making no efforts to get any closer. Raphael seemed content to hide at the back of the group.
“There are more of them,” Sinead finally observed, very faintly. “I thought there were only two.”
“We keep acquiring more,” Siobhan returned cheerfully. “Pretty sure this is as many as we’re going to get, though.”
“How come?” Sinead wondered, though her voice was still very faint and she was still looking right at the angels, as if a magnet was pulling her attention towards them. Sean didn’t seem to be much better off.
“We only have so many siblings,” Gabriel answered dryly. “We’ve collected the last of them.” He waved a hand in Raphael’s general direction. Raphael retreated a step as if he was expecting a pack of wolves to be set loose on him.
“Samael,” Siobhan supplied, p
ointing to the archangel in question, “and Raphael.” Her pointing finger moved in his direction. She did, she thought, a rather admirable job of hiding just how wary Raphael made her. It wasn’t as if he was going to be able to do anything just then. Gabriel and Anael, at least, wouldn’t let it happen. And he didn’t look particularly intimidating, all things considered; he looked more like he wanted the ground to open and swallow him whole. (It was actually a feeling Siobhan had been familiar with in the past, though she was loathe to find reasons to actually bond with him.)
Jerking a thumb towards her siblings, she added, “Sinead and Sean. My siblings.” She slung an arm around Jack’s middle and leaned against him with enough force that he nearly toppled over. “How does it feel, being the only one without siblings?”
Bringing a hand to his chest, Jack assured her, “I consider it a blessing, to be sure.”
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