was just a few yards from the gathering. Daniel’s wife Nicole appeared quickly at his side, and was followed by Hartwell’s protector Garrison, Nicole’s father and Belinda’s husband, Agent Blake Wallace, who stood next to Belinda and held her hand.
A cluster of Brewster’s appeared in the room as if they were transported together. Cal, his wife Sharon, father Thaddeus, his sister Emily and her husband Aaron, and nephew Andrew and his wife Carla. It was obviously their nature to always be tracking the vampires and their protectors.
It took Max and Kayla a few extra seconds to join the gathering, due to Kayla’s sluggish state. She had been sleeping like a hibernating bear for at least 20 hours of every 24-hour day, and was barely conscious when she went to the bathroom and ate sparingly.
Max held her upright as they zipped into the room.
“Nice breeze,” a peaceful, but half-asleep, Kayla said.
“You can put her back to sleep,” Daniel communicated to Max internally.
Max complied with his father’s wishes and set Kayla down gently in their bed and neatly folded the cover over her.
“Going back to sleep now,” Kay mumbled before rolling on her left side and slipping back into a deep slumber.
Max returned seconds later to the main room, but Daniel had one more suggestion.
“Can you cloak your room for privacy… what we have to say here, she doesn’t need to hear, at least not yet.”
Max’s processing speed and capabilities were far superior to that of his predecessors, but he was still getting a handle on some of his abilities.
Daniel started to talk, but the other vampires and protectors realized they had been placed in the ‘cone of silence,’ not Kayla.
“We can’t hear,” Hartwell said to Daniel as he noticed the other people tapping their ears and standing in silence.
Max put his left index finger up to indicate “one minute,” and then shifted his thoughts to what he concluded must be Kayla.
Daniel started talking again, but this time the hunters and the group’s Oregon friends were on the outside looking into the silent conversation. Max was catching on, as he retrieved Kayla from her bed and simply put his hands over her ears to satisfy the frustrated crowd. He put her back in bed and then completed his original task.
“Can everyone hear me now?” Daniel asked as the sound was greeted by scattered thumbs-ups and raucous applause, while Kayla truly slept in silence.
“Way to stick with it, Maxie,” Hartwell said as he patted his grandson on the back.
“I will turn the floor over to my dad…” Daniel said as he looked at Hartwell, and then turned to Cal, “at least one of my dads, once I share with you what I recently discovered.”
Cal nodded in appreciation of the recognition, as he and his son were moving in a positive direction after mending broken fences.
“I was out on the water with my two dads and we were talking to Mr. Lowery, who - by the way - is everything that this family should stand against.”
There was an audible murmur of agreement hear throughout the room.
“If we have to do battle, better that we band together in a common cause against someone who threatens the very fabric of our wonderful existence.”
“He’s been listening to those Martin Luther King, Jr. speeches again,” Garrison whispered to Hartwell.
“Who do you think put them in his head?” Hartwell replied.
The energy in the room grew more intense.
“When we were on our way back to the house…” Daniel started, but he was not as good as explaining as Hartwell, who could always command attention with few words.
“Let me just show you,” he stated.
Originally, he was going to flash back to let everyone view the ride back with Cal and what he had discovered. But, then he figured that a live demonstration would pack a greater punch.
He reached over and grabbed Cal by the back of his shirt and then projected his insides, like a 3-D x-ray, in the middle of the room. Of course, he could have accomplished the task without even touching his father, but Daniel was all about the visuals.
“As you can see, this man is in prime physical condition,” he said as Cal and everyone else smiled at his medical prognosis.
“Let’s get into the real meat of this,” Daniel said as he extracted Cal’s DNA sequence with his right hand. He could have simply maneuvered the data with his mind, but it looked a lot cooler to physically extract the genomic code.
The DNA strand would have looked only like the tracks of a roller-coaster, if Daniel hadn’t thought ahead. He started to analyze the sequence.
“This is his dominant gene, which makes him a hunter above all else,” as the 3-D image of the gene morphed from Cal as a man to his alter-hunter-egos as a pit bull, then a ram, then a ferocious grizzly bear, then flying away as an impressive hawk.
“So, nothing new here. But, when you look a little deeper into the recesses of the gene pool…” he explained as his image jumped into Cal’s gene pool and then emerged with a shiny strand.
“Thank you,” he said to his own image.
“You discover that hunters not only have the capacity to hunt, they also have the natural ability to…” he paused for the added affect.
“PROTECT!” he exclaimed dramatically, as the gene sequence transformed into a wolf, then a bottle-nose dolphin, then a hippopotamus, then an Orca killer whale.
A gasp could be heard throughout the room. Daniel then shuffled Cal back a few steps and grabbed Blake, who had made the transformation from FBI agent to protector.
“I suspect the reverse is true with protectors.”
He flipped his father-in-law’s gene sequence and highlighted the recessive gene, which displayed the pit bull, ram, bear, and hawk sequence.
“Cool!” Max yelled with all of his boyish energy. “Can I do that?”
Daniel looked over at his son, “In time, superstar!” as all of the people in the room were conversing back and forth.
Agent Bake was impressed, but that did little to curb his enthusiasm as a biologist.
“What about vampires?”
Daniel had a feeling that Blake would ask that very question, so he had a model of his own body at the ready. People stopped talking after they heard the question, which had shocking implications. Vampires were already the fiercest of warriors and would be almost impossible to kill with enhancements.
He reached inside of his own body and pulled out two DNA sequences, one in each hand. He turned over his palms and the evolutionary tract of the protectors was rotating in his right palm, while the hunter sequence morphed in his left palm.
Hartwell’s eyes widened from the rush of power.
Max said, “Whoa! I can do all that?”
Hartwell put his arm around his young charge.
“In time, my boy. In time.”
NINE
Hartwell gazed at his son with such a sense of pride. The second go-round with Daniel – who was Nathaniel in his previous life – had wildly exceeded his expectations. There was even question after Daniel found out about Hartwell, if they would have any relationship at all. Daniel was as furious as he was confused at the prospect of becoming a vampire.
Thomas Hartwell had waited over a century to reunite with his boy. Their relationship had been unexpectedly severed the first time around, when the father barely had a few days to say goodbye to the young son.
It was a different dynamic with Thomas and his wife Maggie. There strong love connection knew no boundaries, and the time apart did little but bolster an already-strong bond. Being either mortal or vampire had little impact on Maggie, who appeared to be the same person on both sides, other than her insatiable craving she now had for human blood.
Thomas and Maggie rarely made small talk, preferring to always get right to the heart of the matter.
“I always had faith in you, Thomas,” Maggie stated as they sat in their bedr
oom in a quiet moment after the big meeting.
“Even when I was going to rob your bank?” Hartwell asked.
“Maggie was unwavering in her conviction, “Even when you were going to rob my bank.”
She then probed further as the topic opened up.
“How did you plan on getting the money out of the safe?”
He was surprised, “It was in the safe?”
She couldn’t believe his naiveté, “No, we usually left most of the cash behind the counter, and then had some just lying around for people to take samples.”
He laughed, “That’s funny. I was watching you for a few weeks and you never put the money in the safe until after closing time.”
She looked at him in disbelief, “That’s why I put the money in the safe in the first place. You must have been the worst bank robber in the history of San Francisco, because I knew you were trouble the first time I laid eyes on you.”
Hartwell was confused, “Are you saying that you didn’t trust me?”
“No!” Maggie exclaimed. “I was hooked from the moment our eyes first met. Trust you? I was trying to save you from yourself and protect you.”
Hartwell’s enormous pride was hurt at first, even though he was reliving an event that took place more than 100 years ago.
He laughed, “I really had no chance of robbing that bank unless I walked in and you handed me a satchel of cash.”
Maggie chuckled, “You had this sad look in your eyes like someone had stolen your new bicycle, or something.”
“I didn’t know what to do, Mags,” he confided.
“That is why it’s so hard for me to think back to the before and then the