Chapter Thirty-Eight: Sins of the Father

Helaine

Frank’s brow furrowed as he openly stared at me, the shotgun clattering to the gravel below as it fell from his hand. No doubt, I was the last person he expected to see rolling up to his house tonight.

“Helaine . . . ” His voice was barely above a whisper as his head shook slowly, side to side, like he knew this wasn’t just a social call.

Like he knew all his lies would catch up to him eventually.

Evan followed, climbing out of the driver’s seat and eyeing my father dangerously over the el camino’s hood.

“Who’s he?” Dad asked, his eyes narrowed suspiciously as he gestured toward Evan.

“Never mind who I am,” Evan spat without an ounce of hesitation, his eyes never leaving my dad as though if he stared hard enough his gaze would pierce through him. “Your business is with her, not me.”

In some cases, I supposed that Evan’s gaze could do just that to a person’s mind, but he wasn’t using his ability now. He wouldn’t meddle like that when he knew how badly I needed this.

“I think you both should go.” Frank stooped to pick up his gun, slinging it over his shoulder as he leveled his eyes on me. “If you plan on coming back for Thanksgiving, Helaine, don’t bring him.”

“I know, Dad.”I stepped toward him, feeling my nose wrinkle as my face twisted in disgust and bitter desperation. “I know what I am, I have a pretty good idea of what you did, and if you don’t help me now I don’t know what I’ll do.”

We locked eyes, and the cold blue of his almost seemed to die a little before he shut them tight, turning away from me as he stalked off toward the front door. “You may as well come in—don’t need the neighbors hearing any of this.”

“Did they ever hear before?”

My words fell on him like knives, and he let out a small exhale of pain as he hobbled up the decaying porch steps.

“Mind that first step,” he grunted, pointedly ignoring my comment. “Termites got to it. Smoked ‘em out, but I haven’t got around to replacing the weak boards.”

My whole body seemed to tremble as I watched my dad walk inside. Those short porch steps might as well have been Mount Everest with as daunting as they seemed.

Evan rested a hand on my shoulder, eyeing me with concern, but keeping his lips sealed.

This was my battle. No matter how much I knew he wanted to, he couldn’t fight it for me.

The old porch groaned with each step we took, and more than ever before I realized what a sad, lonely existence my father lived. When I was a girl, if anything broke, dad was always the one to fix it.

Back then, I just thought he was handy—I thought my dad could do anything, but now I knew he just wasn’t willing to bring anyone over to the house to do any work because then they’d have interacted with me.

God forbid anyone saw the bruises.

Evan shut the door behind us when we followed my dad inside, pulling the door softly, like he was worried it might break off of the old rusty hinges if he closed it too hard.

The old man’s hands trembled as he stood in the kitchen pouring himself a shot of what looked like whiskey.

“You don’t drink.” My brow furrowed as I watched him knock back the liquor. 

He let out a small scoff, his lip tugging into a grin that didn’t permeate the lifeless look in his eyes. “And I thought you knew everything.”

A low growl built in Evan’s chest as he stood next to me, and I took his hand, lacing my fingers with his. He squeezed my hand back, making a concerted effort to relax before nodding at me.

It was his first instinct to jump to my defense, but I didn’t want him to intervene—not yet, at least.

“I don’t know everything, Dad.” I stepped toward him, letting Evan’s hand fall from mine. “You made damn sure of that.”

“Tried my best,” he grunted, reaching for the bottle again before seeming to decide against it. He nodded toward Evan. “That boy, he’s a vampire, ain’t he?”

I watched him sharply, resting my hands on the kitten counter between us. “This isn’t about him, Dad.”

“Oh, it isn’t?” Grabbing the liquor for real this time, he didn’t bother with the glass, making me wince as he took a long glug straight from the bottle, pissing on the image of the good pious man he pretended to be when I was growing up. “So he’s not the one who told you who your daddy really is?”

“Give me the truth, Dad—Frank—whatever you want me to call you.” I snatched the bottle from his hands, throwing it aside where it spilled its contents out onto the old carpet, still stained in spots from my blood and the messy paints I loved so much when I was growing up. “Who the fuck are you, and how did you end up with me?”

He took a deep breath, his eyes darting to Evan, who only shook his head. Frank sighed, dragging a chair from the kitchen table with a shrill screech before sitting down in it like all his years had caught up to him.

Maybe they had.

“You ever hear of the Knights of Testament?”

“The vampire slayers?” Evan piped up, raising a brow, only for my father to wave him off.

“Of course that’s all you’d know about the Knights,” he spat. “I wouldn’t expect a beast like you to care about anything else.”

“Don’t talk to him like that!” I slapped my hand down on the desk, startling my father, who looked down at his once timid little daughter like it was him I’d slapped. “Get to the point. I assume you were one of those knights, so skip to the part that involves me.”

“Yeah, I was one of them.” He sucked in a shaky breath, letting his eyes fall shut with a grimace of what looked like pain. “I was a young up-and-comer back then, almost ready to take it to the big leagues.”

He scoffed at the memory before he continued. “I was given a sacred duty, one of the utmost importance. I was sent to kill the anti-christ and stop judgment day from coming. But I guess it still came for me in the end, huh?”

“Why didn’t you?” I spat, my mind swimming with memories of all the times he beat me, of the wooden switch tearing into my back. “You had the chance.”

“You were just a baby,” he hissed through his teeth, his eyes glistening with unshed tears I didn’t think he was capable of producing. “I snuck into the coven, intent on carrying out my mission, but when I found your cradle you were just a tiny thing . . . ”

He held his hands up to estimate the size of me, and I sucked in a shuddering breath as a tear rolled down his cheek. “You stretched your little arms toward me, babbling like you were desperate for another human’s attention. I . . . I couldn’t do it.”

“So you brought me here just to keep me prisoner in this fucking house?” I spat, fury and nostalgic grief warring in my chest.

“I had to keep you hidden. If the order knew I was raising you as my own, they’d have hunted us down and killed us both.” His chest heaved as he continued, “Hate me for it all you want, but I did what I had to do.”

“Oh, you had to beat me?” My hands balled into fists at my sides, nails digging painful half-moons into my palms. “You had to make me feel like I didn’t belong anywhere in this world?”

“You don’t belong in this world!” He bellowed, standing up so fast that the rickety kitchen chair I used to sit in when I ate my meals clattered to the floor, cracking the finger-painted frame. “I had to keep the world’s sin from corrupting you, and keep you from corrupting this world. God’s angels aren’t meant to stray from heaven’s light.”

“W—what?” I stammered, recalling what Evan had told me about Lucifer being an angel, and what that made me.

At the time, I thought he was just trying to make me feel better—I didn’t yet understand just how real all of this was.

“Azazel, Samyaza . . . Lucifer.” Frank grimaced, wet faced as he stared me down. “The taint of humanity can only turn angels into monsters.”

“I don’t want to hurt anyone!” I screamed, my own hot tears rolling down my face now.

“Don’t lie to yourself!” He roared back, baring his teeth like a cornered animal fit to lash out. “Look at yourself! You’ve even got your own hellish champion!”

Evan marched forward, stabbing a finger in my father’s direction, and I tucked my head to my chest, shielding my eyes behind my arms as his words rattled around my skull like a bullet.

“Don’t you talk to her like that!” Evan snarled, closing the distance between himself and my father. “Neither of us knew what she was when we met—you were the one keeping secrets from her!”

“It doesn’t matter what you thought you knew,” Frank spat, stalking toward the old yellowed refrigerator. “All you beasts run on instinct at its worst.”

“Stop!” The shriek that came out of me was barely human, shattering all the glass in the house in one horrible cacophony of sound. “It’s too much!”

The darkness in my chest dug its claws into my heart, and my stomach twisted as though I was going to vomit. My hands shook as I pulled them away from my face and I gagged at the inky black liquid that I realized was pouring from my eyes.

“Dad,” I whimpered, like a helpless child as I tried to see through the black haze that had watered up in my eyes. “Dad!”

I felt hands on my shoulders, pulling me into a chest for comfort when I realized it was Evan, whispering words of assurance, even though they couldn’t reach me.

“Look at yourself!” My dad shouted, slicing though the disorientation as I heard a series of strange, wooden clicks. “Look at what you’ve become!”

Suddenly, Evan was shoving me, and the sound of tearing flesh ripped through my ears along with a shriek of pain as we fell to the floor.

When I rubbed the inky blackness from my eyes, Evan was hissing, snarling, clutching his shoulder where dark blood oozed from the wound.

I looked up to see my father, holding a crossbow still pointed at us.

“You shot him!” I screamed, crouching protectively over Evan as my heart tried to race right out of my chest.

“He got in the way,” Frank spat, his eyes cold and dead as he stared me down, and I soaked in the meaning of his words. “That bolt was fletched from the wood of Christ’s cross, specifically to eradicate dark things that should not be in our world.”

My jaw dropped, my head shaking ever so slightly as I openly stared at him. “You—you were trying to shoot me?”

“You should’ve killed me first,” Evan snarled, gritting his teeth from the pain as he rose to his feet. “Because now I’m going to enjoy tearing the spine from your body.”

“No.” I held my arm out, stopping Evan from going any further. “We’re leaving. He can’t stop us.”

It didn’t seem like he had any more of those fancy bolts, and Frank Fairgrieve was just a man at the end of the day.

Evan kept his eyes on my dad as we moved toward the door, but he didn’t move. He knew there wasn’t a damn thing he could do.

But when the house began to shake, we all held onto whatever we could as an ice cold laughter permeated our skulls.

“Really? He shoots your champion and that’s the worst you do?” A vicious feminine voice rang out from nowhere before flames erupted in the kitchen behind my father. “That won’t do at all.”

The woman who materialized from the flames was as striking as she was terrifying, an aura of utter pain radiating from her as she grabbed Frank by the neck only to whip him across the room like a rag doll.

“There you are, Hell Daughter.” Her shiny black eyes, barely visible through the dark curtain of her hair, landed on me as her face split open into a sharklike smile. “I’ve been looking for you.”