Page 16 of Seph

If you go to the supermarket, you can use your staff discount.

But you’ll be out at night longer. You’ll be vulnerable longer.

But I might run into fewer “creatures.”

Time vs. location.

Whenever Emily saw a monster, no matter the kind, it triggered a conflicted inner monologue.

You’re a Van Helsing. Kill them all. The only good monster is a dead monster.

How can you say that, when Mr. Minegold has kept you fed, and the police officer in town who took the accident report is a Pooka, and a gargoyle saved your life, and a minotaur gave you a discount on all iron and silver-bladed weapons?

How can you keep thinking Simeon is evil, when he took out humans who kill humans, and you take out vampires who kill humans? Doesn’t that kind of make you on the same team?

Your father would say you’re a turncoat. Betrayer. Failure.

You’ll have the dream again tonight, the one where he chases you with a stake. Or worse, the one where he pins you into a coffin. Maybe he won’t let you out this time.

Remember the time he left you in there for three hours because he wanted you to break out, only he didn’t tell you that?

I thought I was supposed to wait, to show I wasn’t scared.

He was so angry at me for almost dying, suffocating, after he’d spent so many years training me. He’d lectured me about my duty, forcefully reminding me there was no other Van Helsing to carry on the work.

Emily rubbed her shoulders, the phantom grip of her father’s fingers shaking her oxygen-deprived form suddenly as real and painful as it had been when she was thirteen.

Anyone else would have been diagnosed with PTSD. But no therapist on Earth would believe her stories of watching her father battle vampires and gore-covered shifters since she was a toddler. No one would believe that she had done the same thing since her teenage years.

With a neat switch, Emily shut her brain off and opened the door, then carefully locked it behind her. She could either shut the thoughts down or listen to them rage. There was very little middle ground. Probably because she had always lived in extremes of either waiting with nothing to do or a constant loop of kill-or-be-killed adrenaline.

Eat, so you can sleep. Maybe if you’re very tired, you won’t dream tonight.

“Emily! Oh, my goodness! Jesse, Sophie, Jesse Jakob, this is Miss Van Helsing.”

Emily juggled a handful of produce into a brown paper bag, small cloves of garlic and plum tomatoes toppling from her grasp.

Mr. Minegold caught them in his hand and helped scoop them back into her bag before giving her a brief hug. “You are up and walking so well! Not even a limp!”

“Uh. Yeah. Hi!” Emily swallowed the questions burning her throat.

How had he touched garlic? How had he hugged her without getting burned?

Simeon told me the truth. He has his soul.

The pale, beautiful woman holding a toddler by the hand gasped. “Van Helsing? Like... Abraham Van Helsing?”

“Descendent of.” Emily allowed herself to shake hands with the equally pale man next to her.

“This is my son and daughter-in-law, and my darling grandson! J.J. Upsies!” Mr. Minegold scooped up the little boy and kissed his round cheek.

“Your... children?”His children are vampires? The woman has a heartbeat! So does the little boy. What the...

Jesse tapped his teeth. “Adopted, but you could say we’re blood-related.”

The three pale people laughed, and Emily felt like screaming.

I’m in a weird nightmare where the vampires are out hitting the flea markets in a happy little family group, and I’m the monster because I want...

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