"You OK?" he asked me as he dragged another bar stool to where I sat.
"I'm fine," I told him as he sat down next to me.
"Are you?" he asked softly, watching my face intently.
"I will be," I said resolutely. "It's been a hectic few weeks and I'm still not sure how I feel about it all. Not you," I added as his eyebrows lifted enquiringly. "I know exactly how I feel about you. But this whole father thing is a bit of a shock. And Mark. Poor Mark. I should ask him what happened but I'm so afraid of the answer. I know it was awful. I can see it in his eyes."
"Mark is stronger than you think, my little love. He may be the strongest out of all of us. Don't worry too much about him. He'll be fine. He has a very level-headed approach to the world. And Hugo is a good man. But you'll find that out for yourself. You don't have to rush into anything with him. He'll wait for you."
Hugo. My father's name was Hugo. I nodded and smiled to myself. It was a start.
"How long are we going to be staying here?" I asked.
"A few weeks, maybe months. There is going to be some fallout from our recent activities back home, so we're going to lie low for a while. Hugo has a lot of information about Jack's operation, and we haven't decided what to do with it yet. There are several bases remaining, and around four hundred blood drinking vamps to destroy. Problem is that number is really too big for anything we do to remain under the radar. Too many bodies to bury. And blowing them up is no solution."
"But you blew the last lot up, Mark said."
"Yeah, we did, and that destroyed a lot of evidence, which is great, but the skeletons would still be there for the police to discover, and for the forensics experts to pore over. Marcus tells me that the skeletons of the bloodfeeders are similar to humans, but also different. The iron content makes them heavier, and harder too. Any anthropologist worth his salt would pick up on that difference."
"So the world is going to find out about vampires," I said, wondering what all of this meant for us.
"They'll know a group of individuals exist who have different tissue composition to that of normal humans. Whether they will make the connection to blood consumption is anyone's guess."
"If they find one of those blood drinkers alive, they couldn't really miss the connection if they tried," I said dryly.