72)

After his son calmed him down, my own efforts had just made him more upset, and the three of us headed into the sitting room.

I poured the three of us a tumbler of my mother’s favorite brand of rum, cut with soda water for Charles, and a double for Drew. After passing them around, I had a seat as my brother downed his.

My nephew waved me down as I started to get my brother a refill. “I got it.” Drew’s second round may have had a few drops of rum mixed in with the soda.

“I got bit a week ago by a panicking kid, she feels pretty guilty about it, but everyone who is like me around here seems like pretty good people. They hold down jobs, have families, even have normal human friends who know what they are.”

“I’m guessing the one you met was a little different.”

My brother huffed out a near laugh. “Yeah, you might say that...”

He sat there in silence for a few minutes. His son and I let him.

“We were out on a patrol, looking for… I don’t even remember exactly. Doesn't even matter anyways. They came out of nowhere. Solid black coats, streaking out of the shadows with the sun at their backs. We didn’t even see them until they were on us.”

“They went for the Lieutenant first, he managed to get his arm in the way and took the bite from the first one. But it still knocked him down, and another one got him in the neck once he was down.”

He looked up at me. “Lieutenant Jacob. I wish I could say he was a good man, but I can say he was competent. He had kept us all alive for almost half a year. At least up until then, up against anything normal.”

“Some of the guys panicked. Some by running, some by trying to shoot them while they were still mixed in with us. We probably lost more people from our own men than from them.”

He reached down to rub at his fake leg. “Two rounds messed my leg up so bad they had to amputate.”

Reaching out he picked up the drink his son had gotten for him and sipped at it. Then regarded it with a look of confusion followed by a glare at his son before putting it back down.

“One of them tried to snag my leg after I fell and it got a round of buckshot in the guts for its efforts, the rest of them didn’t like that. I could see them circling around me.”

“That’s when I pulled out the grenade, tossed it at the one I had shot as tp tried to get away, and rolled the other way.”

Drew slowly shook his head. “I guess that was too much for them, or maybe they just didn’t want a stand up fight as the guys who had run away came headed back our way. Because the ones that scattered away after the grenade went off didn’t come back.”

He looked up at me again. “They only killed two of our guys, but five more got bit. I didn’t think anything of it at first. Until I saw the naked Vietnamese woman lying on the ground about where the wolf I had killed had been.”

“I’m not sure what the Sargent reported happening, but no one came around to ask me what had happened. When I checked up on the guys who had gotten bit, they all made it past the night of the full moon without anything weird happening. So I stopped thinking about it. Let it go as just one more crazy moment in a crazy time I just wanted to forget.”

“Up until tonight.”

My brother finished his drink, then looked me in the eye. “So why did you really call me out here little brother?”

I leaned forward while maintaining eye contact. “In all honestly, mainly to help me prepare an entire dinner in under twenty-four hours. Then to meet my son's family, and stand by me while we try to convince their families to stand back and let them raise their own kid.”

Then I leaned back. “Who is an eleven year old witch, with an entire side of her relatives who are also witches, and the other side what might be described as a group of ninjas.”

Then someone who had managed to creep up to the top of the stairs, which was still much too far away for a normal person to have heard the conversation, yelled out. “We don’t use that word!”

I yelled back. “I said might be described as, not was! And how did you hear that!?”

She jogged down enough stairs to bend down enough to look at us through the sitting room doorway. “I’ve been training like you said!”

I blinked a few times. “That was yesterday! Stop being so good at this!”

Ami now joined it. “I helped! I did a magic! I made the stairs pull up sounds.”

She raced down to join her sister, each footfall sounding like a full grown horse pounding down the stairs. Looking a little pale, she mentioned that. “Oh, I don’t know how to turn it off?”

I pointed a finger at her. “You too, stop being a prodigy. And leave the spell alone, your grandmother can deal with it tomorrow if it’s still there.”

Shooing away them both, I stood up and walked toward the stairs, still waving my fingers at them. “Shoo, back upstairs. Men are talking.”

Ami giggled and raced back upstairs, with each footstep still thundering as she went up the staircase. Sara shot me a glare and then gave her granduncle a pleading look. “Let grandpa bite you Gruncle Drew, you can get your leg back.

Then she shot up the stairs, with nary a sound.

My brother got to his feet and stared at me. “What the hell is she talking about? Biting me? Explain before I beat on you with my fake leg.”