Enid looked up at the moon as it shone in its full glory above the northern Atlantic, a rare clear night in the highlands. The stars sparkled above her in their infinite tapestry. She stood in the shadow of the castle ruins that stood where her village had once occupied. She looked down at the chain wrapped man that lay on the ground. He was face down and in a healing sleep. He looked so much smaller than she remembered. She had Bloodseeker in her hand. It would be easy to end him now. One swift thrust and everything he had been, drained, torn apart and would feed her vampiric strength. The thought of it made her feel sick to her undead stomach. She wanted no part of his essence in her. She sliced through the chains holding him. The silver was worn from two millennia of salt water. She picked up his sleeping form and threw him onto a patch of dirt and flung the silver chains back into the ocean below. She was in her Atlantean armor and showing her true face this night. Red hair blowing behind her on the wind-swept cliff she willed the gloves to sink into the armor and bit her palm putting it to her father’s lips. The hunger drove him to clutch onto it and gulp down her potent blood. The most potent left in the world now that she was Empress. She shoved him off of her hand with ease when she believed he had enough.

How the tables of turned you pathetic heap of a man.

She watched his pale skin become flush as her blood filled him his empty veins. Missing patches of flesh started to stitch itself together. The last to heal were his eyes, his green eyes the same ones that she had. He gasped for breath and looked around himself taking several moments to notice he was being watched by a lithe Celtic woman with flowing red hair and piercing green eyes. He scrambled away when he saw the blade on her back. Enid stayed there crouched watching him. She realized she felt no fear of him. He really was nothing to her now. He licked his lips the taste of potent blood on them. He looked to be sizing up the pale red-haired woman he could not recognize in the darkness. Enid quirked her head to the side. She watched his face go from hunger, to lust, then to fear as he realized he was a mouse being watched by a cat. She was the apex predator in this dynamic. She stood and he flinched. His instincts telling him she was the monster that stalked his nightmares. She stepped out of the shadow of the castle’s ruined wall her facial features becoming clear to him. How alien she must have looked with the Atlantean body suit and smart watch, and Glock on her hip. He hissed; She’d seen pugmentia do this when they first wakened many times. Like a cornered animal. Enid spoke the first words she had spoken to her biological father in over two thousand years. She used their native tongue.

“Do you recognize me?”

His fangs retracted as his human mind took control of his body. He took a hesitant step closer. His wild eyes focused on her. He blinked. His voice long disused and raspy he spoke.

“Enid.”

“Do you know why I freed you?”

He shook his head, eyes wide with real fear now.

“I was going to kill you while you slept, drain your soul, shred it and devour it. You are a monster.”

He stumbled backwards into the castle wall; He found no escape there as she approached Bloodseeker still in it’s sheath. She reached out and grabbed him by the neck lifting him easily. He tried to free himself but he had nowhere near the strength of his much more powerful and experienced daughter.

“Father, you are the weakest of us, my adoptive father ensured that should you survive, you would be a bottom feeding worm. I am going to do something you never did once in your mortal life.”

She dropped him and he fell on his ass. She stepped back.

“I am going to show you mercy. Not because I am weak, but because I am strong.”

She crouched down again to look him in the eyes.

“You see these walls? This was once a great castle, it was built on the land of your kingdom, eight hundred years after you were thrown in the ocean, it fell in a siege three hundred years later. And it has been here falling apart for nine hundred years. Two thousand years have passed since you were imprisoned. The world has changed. Men like you are considered the weak and despicable ones. Women are equal to men now. You have lived long enough to be the monster in everyone’s eyes and not only mine. If you had done what you did to me in this day in age, you would have been caught, and arrested, thrown in prison where you would have been violated repeatedly by other men to live out their sense of justice. Even murderers consider your kind evil.”

He looked up at her huddled on the ground. His throat was healed but he still touched it with his hand, looking up at Enid with wide eyes. She reached down and picked up a handful of earth.

“I am the Empress of our kind. My word is law, it is by my will that you live or die. I have an army of Seers who if they knew what you had done to me would line up to gut you over and over again. Knowing you will heal by the next dusk. There are worse things than death and they are quite capable of doing them all. I tell you this, not to threaten you, but to be clear, after I am sure you understand our laws and how to navigate this new world. I will never acknowledge our relationship. I will deny you. If you claim to know me, my Seers will hear, the young ones call them Reapers, angels of death. They will sniff out your sins against me and they will make the last two thousand years seem like a restful nap. And now that I have warned you, I will not lift a finger to aid you.”

She reached into her pack and pulled out a wireless electric razor. She grabbed him by the arm he stumbled beside her as she dragged him to the edge of the cliff and forced him down on his knees and leaned his head over the side. She could feel him trying to resist but he was powerless against her strength.

“Sit still and this will be over quickly.”

She flipped the power switch and started shaving off swaths of his hair. Then his beard. She could feel him shaking he almost fell once but she stopped him. When she was done, he had a clean-shaven head and face. He stood and rubbed his head looking at her hand as she put the razor back in her pack.

“You are a sorceress.”

“Yes, but that was not sorcery. Things have changed father.”

His voice was clearer as the blood she fed him continued to mend parts of his decayed body.

“I do not understand, Enid, you… why are you helping me? I can see in your eyes you want to kill me.”

“Because, if I can… forgive you then forgiving my prey, my enemy, my husband… will be easy. If I can be merciful to the man who scarred me so badly that I will never be rid of them, then I can be merciful to him.”

“The man, the man who bound me, he burned the suffering you felt into my mind all of it, every moment I... It was all I could feel until… until darkness took me. Let me fight this enemy for you, make amends.”

Enid closed her eyes and took an unnecessary deep breath. She motioned between them.

“You have learned your lesson too late father. This, this isn’t me trying to find a common ground with you. Trying to get an apology. We will never be family. You will never meet your granddaughter. We are done after I teach you English and ensure you can take care of yourself. Maybe you can help others to alleviate your guilt. The very fact you are standing here and not dangling from the point of my sword means I have succeeded in putting your… behavior behind me. But know this if you touch another child, disturb a hair on their head, my Seers will be told of you.”

“The… thought of that makes me feel ill. He did something to me.”

“Sextus always had a strong sense of justice.”

Enid pulled a towel, a set of clothes out of her pack and threw them at him.

“Get dried off, get changed we have a lot to do, and the night isn’t getting any younger.”

He looked at the towel feeling the strange material and started to rub himself off, the shreds of his clothing and rusted armor falling away. With the aid of Enid, he was able to get dressed and could at least pass for a man from the twenty-first century.

“You are going to see things tonight that you could not even have dreamed of the world is a different place. Humans have walked on the moon.”

She pointed to the full moon that still shone over the ocean below.

“By the time I am done with you, you will be able to speak their language, you will have an identity and money. You will have shelter and you will be able to live the rest of your immortality free of me and of your watery prison. If you break our laws the punishment is death, not because you are you, because that is how the laws are. Follow me.”

She walked towards the parking lot for the ruins. She saw the security guard she had bribed to let her park her car and to let her in. She pulled another hundred pounds out of her pack and put them in his palm. Her father followed her watching, then his eyes flicked to the lone black muscle car that inhabited the lot.

“Thank you, Frank.”

“No problem, ma’am.”

She motioned for her father to follow her, and she pulled her keys out of her pack pressing the button on her remote the lights of the car flashed, and her father jumped. She opened the door for him.

“Get in, father. It doesn’t bite. That’s what we do. She flashed her fangs and he jumped back a few steps. Get in.”

She pointed at the seat and her father got in tentatively. She closed the door once he was inside and walked around to her side. She turned the key and it rumbled to life. She wasn’t much for fancy sports cars or electric cars. This was her car for the British Isles. A 1968 charger, modernized with up-to-date technology, suspension and interior. The engine was a modern 450 horsepower monster, and the body was original. She looked at her father and backed out, then revved the engine and slammed her foot on the gas then popped the clutch causing the car to peel out and lurch forward shoving them back in their seats. The look of absolute terror on his face amused her slightly and she shifted gears up as she swerved onto the winding highlands highway.

“What manner of sorcery is this?”

“Your language doesn’t have the words to describe it. But it would take four hundred and fifty horses to go this fast.”

She shifted up another gear taking a curve way to fast, but the car’s suspension was more than capable of handling it.

Eyre rubbed off on me. Or maybe it was just the fighter planes.

They hit a straightaway and she shifted up another gear her speedometer was bottoming out on the two hundred mph she saw headlights ahead and started to slow down. Her father was holding on to the door handle with white knuckles. By the time the car passed she was going the posted speed limit. It was a police car which did a U-turn shortly after passing them and put the flashers on Enid sighed and pulled over. Sliding her glock and holster into her pack. She pressed the power window button and as the constables approached. She turned the engine off and looked up at the man. She put on her most innocent look.

“Is something the matter constable?”

“Good evening, ma’am we had a farmer call in about a car traveling at extreme speeds, was that you?”

“No constable. I did see a car whipping past us going the other way, such a dangerous road to drive like that.”

“Can I see your license please, ma’am.”

“Of course.”

Enid reached into her pack and pulled out the license that matched her current look. He flashed his light into the car to see her face better. Enid’s father shied away from it. The constable looked at the license then flashed the light at Enid.

“And why are you out here, Ms. McCloud?”

“My dad wanted to see the ruins at night. You know the ones down on the cliff? Just a few miles back?”

“Yes, that’s closed at this time of night.”

Enid forced cheeks to get red.

“I may have passed the night watchman a few quid to let us in.”

The constable gave a slight smile.

“Well, if you see that car coming back this way, call it in please.”

“Of course, constable, you have safe night, won’t you?”

He handed her license back.

“Just… before I go, what do you have under the hood.”

Enid heard his partner sigh.

“A four fifty horsepower hemi.”

Enid shrugged.

“I like to have a car I know can go fast enough to do something stupid in, but I don’t of course. Especially with my father in the car.”

He nodded.

“Did you do the work yourself?”

“No, actually, I bought it from a doctor who decided she was too old to drive it. She apparently did all the work herself, it’s a beautiful car isn’t it?”

“She sure is, if you ever consider selling it, here’s my card. Or, if you, need someone to talk car talk with?”

She heard his female partner make a groaning sound. Enid took his card with a smile.

“I’ll make sure to call you first if I’m going to sell it.”

“You have a good night, Ms. McCloud.”

“You to.”

He stepped back and Enid closed her window and pulled away slowly, so she didn’t spray gravel at the officers. Her father looked at her.

“I didn’t understand what they said.”

“Exactly why I need to teach you a thing or three before I release you into the world.”

“What did they want?”

“There are laws here, I broke several going as fast as I did, someone reported it, I told them it wasn’t me and they believed me. Which is good because I like this…and my…there are no words for it.”

“Where are you taking me?”

“Somewhere called Ullapool. I have a home there and once I have… well some stuff I need, I will be taking you to the New… Land. We need you to get your hair and beard back first though.”

“That… will take so long.”

“No, you’re a Night Sidhe now, it will grow back just like it was on the night you were turned. Only it will be clean.”

He blinked at her.

“I’m the Night Sidhe queen father. I told you this.”

He nodded.

“You drink blood now to survive, you are immortal.”

“If you hated me so much…why…”

“I didn’t change you, I had nothing to do with what happened to you. I thought you were dead until the truth came to light.”

“How long have you known?”

“Mmm, fiftish years.”

“Why… why now?”

“It’s part of my… learning.”

“I promise you will understand more one day. By dragging you out of that ocean I have taken responsibility for you in my father, my adoptive father’s stead. You are going to learn to hunt, survive and blend in, it is my duty.”

“Why would you take responsibility for me? After what I did to you?”

“It is what I would do for any night sidhe trapped under the ocean like you. Our past doesn’t matter, at least for that. We have traditions, laws, covenants, they apply to all equally. They say what was done to you was wrong. My adoptive father had a way of ignoring the rules since he made them. I try very hard not to. Until you violate the laws of our people, you are safe from me. Also like I said, I need to forgive you and show you mercy to come to terms with my past. That being said, if you violate our laws in any way, I will not hesitate to end you. Please don’t give me an excuse.”

“Someone taught you right from wrong.”

“It sure as hell wasn’t you.”

“I know.”

“I have had several father figures in my life. All of them were better than you. And when they died, I cried over each of their graves. I shed no tears for you.”

He looked at her and nodded silently. Her house in Ullapool was built on the outskirts but was built to blend in with the buildings of the town, save for the larger than normal garage to handle her two cars and her motorcycle. The original owner was Melanie Stuart. She pulled into her driveway and tapped the button on her app to open the garage door. She pulled inside and got out her father didn’t seem to understand yet how to open the door, so she sighed and walked around, pulled his handle and the door popped open.

“If you can’t figure out how to open a door, you’re fucked.”

She shook her head and he got out. He looked at the tarp covered shapes within in confusion.

“What is this place?”

“Stables. Come.”

Enid closed the car door and walked toward the door into the house. She pressed another button on her phone and the lock beeped and opened. She opened the door and motioned for her father to enter. The exterior was built in the same fashion as the ones in the town, but the inside was open concept, and was by this time a fully modernized smart home.

“This is my house. Unlike me you’ll turn into ash in the sun, so you’ll be staying in the basement during the day. Tomorrow night we’re going to start that process. For the rest of the night, you and I are going to start English lessons.”