frustration, sending out a signal to Blake that they were stopping, while simultaneously telling her father that she was a woman and a force to be reckoned with.
“For god’s sake, dad! Were you there last night when a two year-old gave birth and then you married her to another two year-old? I am 20, almost 21 years old. Why can’t you just treat me like a woman already?”
If Joe was above sea level, he would have shed a tear.
“But, you are my baby. My little girl.”
Blake backtracked and was touched by the conversation. It was a similar exchange that he had with his daughter Nicole when he found out that she had been with both Daniel and Andrew around the time of her 18th birthday. He had no contact with Nicole ever in her life, because his marriage to Sharon Phillips had broken up when she was only a few months pregnant with Nicole. It was definitely a difficult conversation to be having with a girl that had made the transition into a woman.
Dolphin Blake made his way back up to the surface to get some air, and was followed by shark Drew, who changed back into a hawk and did some gliding above the water for a few minutes. This left Blake Wallace alone with his heavy thoughts for a few moments.
The arduous task ahead of him was as emotionally exhausting as it was physically demanding. Blake had just become comfortable with his new family after so many years on his own as an FBI agent. While he tried not to think of the peril that awaited them, it was hard to look past the potential of the siege they would soon be under. He and his small team had also only unearthed 50 potential hunters and there were still many hundreds to uncover in such a short frame of less than two weeks. It was also unknown whether time and the strong pull of the ocean would do the rest of the work and free the hunters from their watery tombs, as there wasn’t time to completely free each person and bring them to land where the process to regain strength would wait until the next sunrise.
Human Drew came back down and thought for a moment about making a smart comment, since his relationship with Blake had started in those early days as quite contentious. Blake was carrying a few extra pounds in those days and Andrew took every opportunity to remind him of that. But Drew noticed the look of concern on Blake’s, now human face and sought to sooth instead of inflame on this occasion.
“Don’t worry, AB,” Drew said using Agent Blake’s initials to carve out a nickname.
Blake liked the nickname and replied, “We have a long road ahead of us.”
It appeared that some of Hartwell’s ancient wisdom had finally been rubbing off on Drew, because what he said next was completely out of character.
“Peace is every step, AB. Peace is every step.”
Blake was expecting a random rah-rah speech from the prince of adrenaline, but what he got was a fist-full of undeniable wisdom that hit him upside his head.
He nodded his head in approval and replied, “Then peace it shall be,” as he stuck out his right fist and was met by Drew’s left fist in a true sign of solidarity.
SEVENTEEN
The first week went by without further incident, meaning that Abraham Ellison stayed away from the hunters and didn’t get knocked out again. Cohesiveness was the word with the most staying power in the house of Hartwell. Especially tight were two forces that couldn’t have been moving in more opposite directions only weeks earlier.
“Are we serving the taco shells filled or unfilled?” Nicole asked Carla.
Carla pondered the question and once she downloaded the image of a soggy taco, she replied, “Unfilled. It will be fun to pass around ingredients in a cooperative manner.”
Nicole turned to Carla and they looked into each other’s eyes. They had been through so much together in their short, but connected, lives…
Nicole growing up with her early years spent in another town and then suddenly being jerked away, almost overnight – from her friends and familiarity – to live in the sleepy coastal town of Beach Haven, New York. While she showed up for her first day of school with a boat-load of apprehension, all of that melted away when she came face to face with a boy wearing way-too-many layers of clothing for an early September day on the East Coast.
Daniel was the center of her universe since they met outside of the school on that day, although she and Andrew Brewster also appeared to connect when they all entered Mrs. Williams’ classroom. Little did these gifted children know that their tight relationship was the function of a mystical triangle between vampire, protector and hunter. And this bond continued through their days in middle and high school as volleyball’s Three Slamigos, in which they used their burgeoning powers to dominate the county’s teams.
But it wasn’t until their first real semi-formal high school dance that the division between hunter, vampire and vampire protector became pronounced. Nicole really wanted to go with Daniel, to have Daniel step up and ask her out, but she didn’t want to hurt her friend Drew’s feelings. So, she decided to go with both boys to avoid the awkwardness of leaving one of them behind, especially hot-tempered Drew.
The three teenagers were having a great time at the dance, breakin’ and spinning they way on a long string of fast dance songs. But the light mood shifted once the deejay queued up a slow song, signaling that playtime was over and one of the boys would have to step up and become a man. Hartwell watched his son from the corner of the gym as it was Andrew who surprisingly stepped forward after his cousin failed to act on what was obviously in his heart.
Hartwell was usually a casual observer, preferring to exist in the corporeal world for Daniel instead of the real world. He could sense that Daniel was headed in a passive direction by the rapid acceleration of his heartbeat, and took the liberty of spiking Drew’s punch with a laxative that would surely send him running to the bathroom even if he got up the nerve up to ask Nicole to dance. Hartwell knew the association of a hunter and a protector was dangerous, especially if it superseded the beings that were at the top of the food chain, the vampires.
So Drew asked Nicole to dance, which made Daniel want to kick himself down the block for being so shy. They took a few steps toward the dance floor and then Drew felt nature, or the unnatural, taking its course. He excused himself and galloped off to the locker room, while Daniel stepped up and did something he should have done only seconds earlier. They walked out to the dance floor and then instincts took over, making their strong bond of love unbreakable.
The slow music was taken over by another wave of dance music, but the couple was still attached like Velcro and slowly shifting. Once they were alerting of the beat shift, being that they were the only people in the crowded gym still stuck on the slow groove, they adjourned to an outside landing where the magic happened. When they kissed everything made sense in the world. That was, until, Andrew finally emerged from the bathroom and the locker room and set out to reconnect with his friends. After scanning the innards of the gym for a few minutes, he stepped out on an adjacent concrete slab just outside of the gym. Drew inhaled some fresh spring air into his lungs and discovered a familiar scent nearby. He looked to his left and saw a couple kissing and then giggling. When they talked to each other, he picked up the voices and then was able to make a positive ID. A jolting discovery that sent him bounding off angrily as a pit bull, although he didn’t even realized that he had changed outer forms.
The kiss effectively split up the Three Slamigos and subsequently sent Drew into Carla’s arms when they met at wilderness camp the following summer. Drew found in Carla what he couldn’t elicit in Nicole: a partner that loved him as much as he loved her. And it remained that way until the day that Daniel turned 18 and began his transformation into becoming a vampire. When Hartwell told Daniel what he had become, Daniel thought that he had to keep Nicole as far away from his dangerous self as possible.
Daniel then abruptly broke up with Nicole, which drove her into a crying fit and reaching for someone familiar to comfort her. That ‘familiar’ body happened to be Drew, and he jumped at the o
pportunity to finally have a shot with Nicole. Drew comforted Nicole in a way that he knew how, and a few months later Nicole found out she was pregnant. But Daniel also had been with Nicole on the night of his 18th birthday – only a few weeks before Drew – so there was a real question of who was the baby’s father?
Drew then told Carla and she became enraged, although she decided to stick by her man because she had learned in the days after Nicole’s discovery that she, too, was pregnant. The possibility of Andrew being the father of two babies did wonders for his ego, but it would have had devastating impacts if he was the father of Nicole’s baby. Nicole wanted Daniel to be the father of her baby, not Drew, and Carla could not disagree with that sound logic - she did not want to have Drew’s attention split in two after a moment of weakness, an animalistic reflex, if you will.
It was a long road for Carla, who just happened to be Brandon Justice’s hunter when he was a vampire. She grew up in Oregon and was constantly beaten down mentally by Justice in advance of her 18th birthday and the day that she would become the hunter, not the hunted. It was Drew that gave her the confidence to stand up to her abusive foe, but it was Carla who eventually came to terms with Justice and forgave