The coffee and toast were consumed quickly along with a little water. Davis refused the cough medicine. “Damned stuff’ll make me go back to sleep, Aaron. And I’ve got too much to tell you before I do.” He patted the edge of his bed but Aaron wasn’t sure if he should be that close. He hadn’t inhaled since he stepped inside the door and while he didn’t feel uncomfortable, he wondered if he smelled his uncle if his fangs would come out. Along with everything else, he didn’t want to scare his uncle to death. Or even worse, drink his blood. There was just too little he knew about this whole drakyl thing.
“I think I’d better stay over here,” he said, leaning against the door.
Davis watched him and if it was possible, his skin went grayer than it had been. “I see. Can you go over there—“ he pointed at the far wall “—and enter the following combination into the safe you find?” He rattled off a string of ten numbers as Aaron walked up to a painting that had been on this wall as long as he’d lived on the ranch. It was a simple oil painting of the land here, with a man on horseback facing away as if surveying the landscape. Tugging on one side, it popped open easily enough and even though he shouldn’t have, he was still surprised by the safe that sat in a large cutout of the wall.
After entering the codes his uncle gave him, he opened up the safe, only to find a tremendous amount of stuff. Files, folders, pictures, drawings…and from what he could see, it looked like research.
“Bring over the folder in the front. You can look at the rest later.”
Grabbing a large tan folder, he closed and sealed the safe before returning to his uncle’s side with it.
“Open it up.” There was a look of expectation in the old man’s eyes as Aaron pulled open the flap and removed a set of eight-by-eleven inch legal papers. “The top four sheets are my last will and testament,” he explained in a calm voice. “The next ten are the legal status of the ranch. It doesn’t belong to any one person, but to the entire Drakyl line as a trust. I’ve been its trustee for sixty-four years. Now, I turn that over to you.”
“Uncle, I—” Aaron still didn’t like the thought of his uncle dying. He had been a strong fixture in his life ever since he came here at two years old.
Davis waved his hand, stopping what Aaron had been about to say. “I have much to tell you and not much time to do it in. Some of it won’t be easy to hear. Though I think it will answer most of the questions you’ve had ever since the sun sickness came upon you. And the truth is,” he added with a wince, “I have waited far too long for this talk. I should have believed my own eyes thirteen years ago and shared with you the knowledge then. But I was a stupid old man. Hopefully what I do today makes up in some small way for that folly.”
For a moment, Aaron just stared at him, knowing Jaret had been right. Davis knew. Now the question was, was Aaron ready to hear it?
“If you don’t think you can sit here, grab a chair from the kitchen. It’s gonna be a long morning and you exhaust me by standing there.”
Nodding, Aaron left the room for a short time, coming back with one of the kitchen chairs. As soon as he shut the door, he sat the chair in front of it and sat down. Taking a cautious breath in, he almost gagged at the fermented scent of lemon and what he realized was the decaying stench of old age. He had the feeling these new advanced senses were going to be a blessing and a curse.
Chapter Fifteen
He stared at his uncle across the room, waiting for something he needed to hear but didn’t really want to.
“Our family is different,” his uncle began and he almost snorted. “You aren’t exactly a history buff, but I’m sure even you have heard of Vlad Dracula.”
“Uncle, if you say we’ve descended from Vlad the Impaler, I think I’m leaving.” God, wouldn’t Conner get a kick out of that.
A bark of a laugh came from the man opposite him, quickly turning into a coughing fit. Aaron instantly poured him more water, but while he sipped at it until the coughing stopped, he refused the cough medicine. “Not until I’m done,” he insisted, waving the spoon away. “Now, no, we are not descended from that monster. It’s just my way of trying to explain—”
“That we turn into creatures that have fangs and suck the blood out of living things?” Aaron asked, surprised by his wry tone.
For a moment, Davis looked at him, startled, and then he let out a slow chuckle. “Jaret told you.”
“More like he showed me what I am.” Reaching up, Aaron lightly rubbed over the fangs which were not out but he could swear they itched.
“Ah.” Frowning a bit, his uncle leaned back against his pillow. “So your change is complete?”
“Yes.”
Nodding slowly, Davis closed his eyes, his lips moving even though no sound escaped. It looked as though he was praying and Aaron had never seen or heard him do that. When he re-opened them, he had a fierce sort of worry on his face as he looked straight at Aaron. “You must understand that until you and Jaret, I had never actually met one who had, well, become what you are. I’d been warned and had read the accounts, but never having seen one in real life, I hoped that what you had was truly sun sickness. After all, it’s becoming more common.”
“And if you’d known?”
“I don’t know. Telling your nephew that he’s no longer completely human and that it’s his genes that caused this manipulation? It’s not fucking easy.”
“Well, it’s not fucking easy thinking for thirteen years that I was dying only to find out that the reason is I’m not human. And,” he went on, anger tingling over his nerves, “that an influx of blood and staying out of the sun was all I needed to feel better.” Truth be told, he wasn’t sure that was all, but right now he felt betrayed by the man who had the knowledge and hadn’t told him.
For a moment, his uncle stared as if looking at nothing and suddenly he turned and opened the top drawer of his side table, pulling out a pack of cigarettes.
“Uncle!” Aaron said in disgust, standing up. “What the fuck?”
Davis waved him away. “I’m dying, Aaron. These won’t change that fact. I haven’t smoked in years but I figure I’m dying so I might as well enjoy the fucking trip.” His fingers shook as he pulled one out and put it to his lips. When it became apparent he couldn’t get the lighter to work, Aaron took the couple steps needed and did it for him. Once his uncle took in his first drag, Aaron dropped the lighter back into the drawer and resumed his seat.
“If my cousins start smoking, I’m blaming you.”
Davis offered him a wry smile. “There’re worse things. Now, where was I?” he asked as he took another drag of his cigarette. Why the hell he didn’t start coughing confused Aaron. He should be hacking up a lung by now.
“We have records. Since you know what you are, I won’t go into that—”
“Wait. Please, uncle, tell me what you know. Jaret hasn’t had a lot of time to truly explain this. I’m sure he will tell me what he knows—” And with his centuries of knowledge, he should have a lot to tell. “—But for now I would really appreciate hearing what you know. For instance, why the hell is our name Drakyl?”
“Ahh, well, let me go back a bit. Humans have been around a few thousand years. As far as the records show, so have the vampyr.” Davis glanced at him through the fog of smoke, looking as though he waited for a reaction, but Aaron didn’t want to stop him now that he’d started, so he just waited. “The record of our lineage goes back dozens of centuries. From what I’ve surmised during the time I actually studied the material—though keep in mind that was fifty years ago and my mind isn’t what it used to be—nobody knows exactly when the first of the drakyl happened. Those who wrote our history surmised through the years and felt that the drakyl was a genetic link between both the human and vampyr races.
“Nobody is quite sure how it was possible, but it is assumed every once in a while a vampyr bred with a human. How the human lived through it was a mystery in itself. Let alone the fact the child was born fully human from all indications.
At least all the females are. Any male born to such a union possibly carries the gene that turns a human into a drakyl.”
“Wait. Only males carry the drakyl gene?”
“Yep. No female has ever turned into a drakyl as far as we know.” As Aaron thought on this little development, his uncle continued. “The problem was—and the language didn’t really change until after I’d studied the material and did some study on gene theory—just because the child was born with the gene did not mean he would become drakyl. In fact, from my study, nobody was quite sure what made a young man change.”
Davis took another puff as Aaron digested the information. “Sometimes the gene would not activate until several generations had passed. Our, err forebearers for want of a better term, went through three centuries where they did rather unethical studies involving humans, vampyrs, and strength of drakyl offspring depending on how many generations it took for the gene to activate.”
“I assume with each successive generation that the strength would be diminished,” Aaron offered, thinking of his science classes in high school.
“When, in fact, it was the exact opposite. Lines where the gene didn’t activate for a couple generations produced the strongest, hardiest drakyl. Those that came before us recognized the importance of that piece of information. But so did the vampyr. Vampyrs—”
As if unable to stop himself, Aaron cut in. “The plural of vampyr is vampyr, not vampyrs.”
“Err, right. Anyway, the vampyr race did not like these findings. Up until this time, it was assumed that the vampyrs—I mean vampyr—were the strongest predator out there. These studies, while unethical, showed that a drakyl whose genes had been dormant in multiple generations, once activated, was stronger than a vampyr.”
Looking up, Aaron cocked an eyebrow. “How many generations has it been?”
“As far as I can tell, the last drakyl in our direct line to transition was in the early eighteen hundreds. In your father’s line, even earlier.”
“Wait.” Aaron looked at him startled. “My father?” He had been told nobody knew who his father was. That his mother had died and his uncle had taken him in.
Wincing, Davis nodded even as he took another drag from the cigarette. “More lies, I’m afraid. We told them to keep you safe, but still. Lies.” He took another long drag, letting out the smoke slowly before he spoke again. “Your mother, my sister Wendy, died when you were eighteen months old. Your father Liam wanted to keep and take care of you, but he had pissed off a powerful vampyr and was afraid of what the bastard would do to you if you were found.”
Aaron could barely process. Not only was he a drakyl, some sort of hybrid human-vampyr blood drinker, but his father was alive and he’d never known. “Where is he now?”
“I don’t know. To keep you safe, we severed all contact. Just like your cousins’ parents did when they sent them to me.”
“Holy fuck, uncle!” he exclaimed, leaping to his feet. Not knowing what to do, he paced back and forth. “So, none of us are orphans.”
“None.”
“Then…where the hell do you come in? What are you, the fucking drakyl orphanage?” he snarled.
“Something like that,” Davis said with a sigh. “Look, Aaron, I know this is difficult to hear, but please. It’s important.”
“Right. Important.” Taking a deep breath, grimacing at the stench, he forced himself to stop pacing and to sit back in the chair. “Go on.”
“When I was twenty-three, it was correctly assumed that the gene had passed me by. Since I was gay, they considered me both an abomination and a gift. For, you see, someone needed to tend to the family, to keep an eye out for new genetic markers, to help the next drakyl if he came to be.”
“I don’t understand. Why you?”
“Because as a gay man, they assumed I would stay alone here on the ranch. Plus, the added bonus that if I found a partner, there would be no children. As nobody wanted to put any offspring in the path of a blood drinker.”
Coughing out something akin to a laugh, Aaron buried his head in his hands. “Bloody hell, uncle.”
“Yeah. I studied the information for a full decade after they asked me to take over as the trustee of this place. I thought I knew it all. And then…they began to show. The boys were dropped off at two to five years of age. I raised fourteen young men from the sixties through the mid-eighties. I thought you would be the last, to be honest. Nobody had changed and more and more parents chose to watch over the boys themselves. After all, the drakyl were less than myth now to most of our family. Most of them don’t even believe in vampyrs—err, vampyr—anymore.
“You were fifteen when I was notified Jeffrey and Conner were on their way. I was actually glad you were level-headed and wanted to help out. Especially when Stephan, Adam, and finally William arrived. I almost told the last three’s parents no.”
“Why?” Aaron was trying to assimilate all the information but felt weighed down. Whether it was due to the sun being up or all the junk he’d just been told, he didn’t know.
“You were showing signs of sun sickness. Even with everything I’d studied, I didn’t want to believe you were turning drakyl, so I was actually glad the doctors gave you a prognosis. Of course, then they became intrigued about your bloodwork and I got you out of the hospital as fast as I could.”
“And yet you were afraid enough, you almost turned down the last three.”
“I know it sounds crazy. But I didn’t want to see the truth. It had become myth in my own head. I didn’t want it to be true.”
“Yeah, I can understand that.” Rubbing his fingers over his temples, he thought about something. “Why is my last name Drakyl?”
“You’re my nephew.”
“Yeah, but through my mom’s side. Not my dad’s. Shouldn’t I carry his name?”
Wincing, Davis took a moment to suck what was left of the cigarette before speaking. “When I was named head of this trust, I was given the name Drakyl. It was decided that every male who came into my care would carry the same name.”
Needing a break from the strain, Aaron figured he would change the subject. Slightly. “So why was Vlad’s name Dracula?”
Reaching over to his side table again, Davis dropped the remaining stub of the cigarette into his water glass. The hiss from it sounded incredibly loud in the small room. “That’s just coincidence, actually. Dracula has nothing at all to do with drakyl. It’s Romanian for some sort of dragon thing. But when Bram Stoker’s Dracula came out, it actually took some of the strain off the drakyl as humans were fixated on vampyrs, vampyr…damn it, Aaron! I’m eighty-six years old and I’m gonna say vampyrs.”
Grinning, despite how odd he felt, Aaron nodded. “All right. That isn’t the important part, anyway. So, let me get this straight. I’m from a long line of drakyl, some sort of vampyr/human hybrid. This ranch was started as a place to put us so you could watch over us. And you have tons of information I’ll probably have to read at some point.”
“Yeah. There are ways to harm your kind,” his uncle said in a shaky voice. “One of the folders in there tells how to treat most injuries.”
“That’s how you knew how to treat the sun poisoning.”
“Yeah.” Davis sounded defeated. “I’m sure you hate me, but—”
Aaron shook his head. “No. I don’t hate you. I wish I’d known this, years ago. But I don’t hate you. Is there anything else you need to tell me?”
“No. Most of the information is in the safe. What you hold in your hands is what you’ll need to hand to the lawyers. Aaron,” he pleaded in a small voice. “Please promise me you’ll carry on. You know what you are and what’s going on. Please, teach the boys the way I didn’t teach you. Whatever you do, please keep the ranch running.”
Taking a deep breath, Aaron stretched his shoulders a bit. “I’ll have to talk to Jaret about his plans. We’re together now and I won’t make plans without him.”
“I understand.”
“If he doesn�
��t wish to stay, we will see Jeffrey through his change and—”
“Jeffrey’s changing?” His eyes went wide.
“Jaret says he is.”
“Fuck. I’m sorry, Aaron.”
Standing up, Aaron walked over to his uncle. There was fear in the eyes watching him, but he leaned over anyway and gently hugged the man who had raised him, the man he had looked on as a father-figure. “I won’t leave my cousins without the care they need. I promise.” Hands which had no strength gripped his arms as his uncle wept against his shoulder. When his sobs turned to coughs, he meekly took the cough medicine Aaron offered. He was asleep before Aaron left the room.
Chapter Sixteen
Jaret was at the top of the stairs waiting when Aaron stepped out of his uncle’s room. He looked exhausted, as though the weight of the world had just been dumped on him. Without a word, he opened his arms and Aaron practically fell into them, grasping his shoulders so roughly, if Jaret had been human, it would have left a bruise.
“Get a room,” Conner teased as he walked by. “The others have left. I’m checking out the south gate again. Will be back late.”
“Not after dark,” Aaron said, looking over his shoulder. “Nobody is to be outside after dark from now on.”
His cousin gaped at him for a moment before rolling his eyes. “Geez, you’re already turning into Davis. Fine, Dad, I’ll be back before dark.” He headed toward the mud room and even though he shut the door, Jaret heard his mutters. “Though you and Jaret will sure be out there. Guess it’s just us kids who can’t go out after the sun goes down.”
“Come on, let’s go rest,” Jaret suggested, guiding the other man toward the stairs.
Discovery Page 10
