ANCIENT MEN

One hand thrust in the pocket of his jeans, the other holding the phone to his ear, Finn wandered away from the shop. His daughter’s shop. The first time he’d said the word aloud it had felt like it held the power to drive him to his knees. God, Bridget had kept that news close to her heart. Why, he still wasn’t sure but Delphone’s existence hadn’t been marked anywhere that he’d been able to find so far except for the baptismal record. A small kirk near Scotland, his wife’s name scrawled in her own hand on the long faded page of the book. Right below the record for Alec. Both stating father – Finn de la Salle, Soldier, Absent. As though he had just skipped a day of school instead of being hundreds of miles away, fighting for his life on a battlefield. While Bridget had clung to their twins, while she’d watched the father bathe both of their tiny heads in holy water, while the English had burned the cottage around them.

That thought, as it always did, tightened that fist around his throat. He sidestepped around someone, missing for a moment the voice that emerged from the other end. Finn cleared his throat, lifting his other hand to press a fingertip into his ear to block the sound out from around him. ”Sorry Father, it’s loud here, what was that?”

There was a hiss at the other end, a low murmur and then the static cleared. ”We have found a few of Father Benedictus’ papers in our search of the kirk’s records. Most relate strictly to the kirk’s business workings but there were ledgers, similar to what were provided to you by our lay brother. The son’s name was listed as Alec and your Alexis, aye?”

Finn felt hope send that fist from his throat into his chest. His fingers went icy around the phone. ”Yes father. Alec and Alexis de la Salle. Their mother was Bridget.” Delphine. The man who had found her had renamed her, had replaced him until just a few short months ago when that random meeting in the Grill had turned his life on its head.

”And the name of their father was…”

”Finn de la Salle, Father,” he managed through gritted teeth. ”I’m his name sake. My grandmother had hoped I would be able to find some trace of her distant relatives…” Another lie but how in the hell did you explain to a priest of all people that you had fathered twins almost three hundred years ago. One you hadn’t known about until she’d found you thousands of miles and two hundred and seventy five years ago, the other you were desperately trying to find now.

There was another low sound from the priest. ”I shall see what we can find Mr. de la Salle. If there are any mentions I’ll have our lay brother send them to you in the same way. Good day.”

Before he could stop the man or even murmur a goodbye the line was hanging up at the other end. Finn let out a long breath, thumbing the end call button before a meaty hand slapped down on his shoulder. Finn looked up, dark eyes narrowed as he stared at the man in front of him. All grown … what? Old man’s name. Gadifer. The name had been his, handed on to the son he’d plucked from the flames he himself had set. For a second Finn gawped and then he was shaking the guy’s hand. ”Far enough,” he managed, glancing around the two of them. If anybody else heard this…

Dayne. The minute the name and the title slipped out Finn was snorting. He clucked his tongue against the back of his teeth nodding. ”You think I’d forget the man who knocked me on my ass in the muck a dozen times trying to teach me how to swing my first sword,” he accused. ”You’ve hardly changed, but it looks like you’ve come pretty far too, Sir Dayne. What are you … here for?” Those dark eyes swept around the square, taking in at least half a dozen semi-familiar names. As though he needed to ask a question like that here … in the supernatural version of the Bermuda Triangle.

Tagged: MAGNUS DAYNE * Word Count: 715

There were places of power worldwide. The sort that left your skin prickling the moment you set foot in them. He’d never been sure if what he was had let him feel the power in those places so keenly. Crackling over his skin as he’d stepped into a stone circle in Scotland on the way to the croft that would be his home for a couple of the happiest years of his existence. In a Trench in World War II, on the borders of a small French town where it seemed to sizzle in the fog that had rolled in one night, giving them the cover to get behind the German lines finally. He had known that there was something special about Mystic Falls when rumour of the place had first reached him but it wasn’t until he’d been here that he’d known that those who had named this place hadn’t been kidding about the Mystic part.

It had stared him in the face a half dozen times. Luck, pain, that sense that there were others here controlling it all like puppeteers pulling on their strings, guiding them in directions they never could have imagined. Pushing them apart, pulling them together along the near invisible tethers still tying people together centuries after they had drifted apart.

Dark eyes took in the grizzled face, not dropping to the hand that settled weightily on his shoulder or the one gripping his other as the old knight threw his head back and laughed. Sighing, nostalgia heavy in the sound Finn raised a hand and clapped it against Magnus’ upper arm. The man didn’t look a day older than he had the last time he’d seen him, although he’d aged more than a decade past that Finn knew that there was enough of the boy he had been in him to have allowed Magnus to see past the centuries that had passed since then. The man had worked him in that yard every day, not giving him an easy time just because he was the son of one of the Duke’s favoured few.

Finn hunched his shoulders beneath his jacket as the separated, feeling the pull of muscles still more used to the heft of his sword than modern weapons. He slipped his hand into his pocket, folding his fingers around his phone as he studied the square around them. No one close enough to overhear what was going to be a tale most wouldn’t believe even if they did. Dark eyes crinkled at the corners as he looked back at Magnus, the corners of his mouth twitching faintly. ”You always were a dark horse. I guess you kept it as quiet as I did in the end.” By the time he had started to suspect that there was something different about him Sir Dayne had been gone, drifting away to another patron as allegiances had switched. The older man hadn’t been there to see Joan martyred or help pick up the shattered pieces afterwards.

His other hand rose, fingers scratching at the back of his neck as Dayne knuckled his shoulder. That lined face settled into a grin, the man’s voice soft, answering as if it was normal for the two of them both to have found their way here after more than six centuries. ”Same,” Finn drawled lightly as Magnus explained he’d been in town for a while. For a place so small it was a wonder their paths hadn’t crossed before. ”New to the whole thing?” He put the emphasis further on in the phrase than Magnus hadn’t. The word control had a thousand different connotations, especially in their world where so many things seemed to struggle after they first turned, were bitten, changed. It had never been like that for him, the revelation of what he was so slow and subtle that it seemed he was still learning aspects of it now.

Slipping the hand with his phone in it back out of his pocket, Finn glanced down at it for a moment, his brows drawing together. If it hadn’t been for what he was he never would lived long enough to meet Bridget or been able to father two children with her. Finn cleared his throat, glancing up from the dark screen to the older man who had never been anything but a friendly face to him. ”My children,” he admitted, his brow creasing faintly. ”They weren’t the reason I came here but Mystic Falls, it seems, is a town that gives more than it takes. I came for a job and found a truth I didn’t know about. You didn’t happen to be in Scotland for their last failed attempt at freedom?” He doubted it, although he had been there himself for just that reason, pushed by Bridget to support the bid for independence, forced to it by her father, who undoubtedly had seen an opportunity to rid himself of a son in law in battles that were more likely than not to get him killed.

Tagged: MAGNUS DAYNE * Word Count: 839

Finn supposed that supernatural underbelly to the world had always been there. Just as skilfully hidden from prying eyes s it was now, perhaps even more so without technology revealing every detail of people’s lives. The population had been spread out when he had been younger, isolated villages providing safe havens. Perhaps the one he had been born into had been that way before Gadifer and his men had rampaged through it. Magnus amongst them. It was long past the time he could have blamed the man for it. They had acted on the orders of the Duke of Burgundy, something he himself had done often enough when he had risen up from the ranks of page to take his place among the Duke’s cadre of knights.

Glancing down at his hand, Finn turned it over slowly, studying his palm and the road map of lines upon it. He had still been so new to what he was when he had held the Duke down on the battlefield and seared his flesh from his bones. For Joan’s sake he had let all that had been inside of him out. He made a low sound, some trace of understand in it, as he looked up. ”I’m glad to hear it. There are those in the town that would’ve taken issue if he hadn’t been able to. I’m sure you’ve heard what happens here?” A warning in a way. There was a smile on Magnus’ face, a pride, he would hate to see erased. Those who hunted here, men not entirely different to how he had imagined he would be when he had come here, wouldn’t blink twice at the thought of putting down a young vampire, especially if one was dropping bodies all over Mystic Falls.

He had kept a close eye on Delphine, hoping that the darkness in this town didn’t swell to swallow her up the same way it had his own life periodically. From being alone in this world to finding out that the daughter he hadn’t known he’d had still lived, a roller coaster ride that had left his head spinning. Finn knew that there was a chance his son had also survived, was alive out there somewhere, but at this point Alec’s existence was a needle in a haystack that he was diligently trying to pull apart.

Some part of him had hoped that the war for independence had drawn Magnus, that perhaps the world truly was that small. All it would’ve taken was one chance meeting, the same as he’d had with Delphine at the Grill. A huge world out there and yet they had all ended up in this corner of it. Finn shook his head slightly, a wan smile touching his lips. ”Perhaps if you had been on their side they would have triumphed. I always remembered you as a demon with your sword.” A literal one if he’d had any clue what the man had obviously been. Glancing around the two of them, Finn’s frown deepened slightly. When he looked back his dark eyes were troubled. ”I had believed mine were over too but … my wife believed in the cause.” Even if he had been able to talk Bridget out of his going to battle for the sake of their unborn child, there had been Geraint with the threat of his never seeing his child on his lips. He had almost been right.

Finn swallowed hard, slipping his hands into the pockets of his jacket and feeling the faint crinkle of paper against his right again. He hadn’t been there to fight, had wanted to find the peace that had been denied to him for so long. ”Unfortunately,” he managed hoarsely. ”I arrived over a year before the war truly started, just in time to be swept up in it all. In a way I suppose I haven’t put it down since.” This had been his first foray into being a civilian again since Bridget, since war had again left him alone. Brows furrowing, Finn glanced around again, seized on the bulk of Campbell’s squatting on the corner. ”The family I was talking about,” he admitted briefly. A chuckle finally rolled free like a distant peel of thunder. ”You know what they say, only three things are eternal – death, taxes and cockroaches. Are you free for a drink? Perhaps for me to offer something more than taxes to entertain you for the afternoon?” It felt wrong to pick the man’s brain minutes after their reunion but men like him, like Magnus Dayne, were travellers it seemed, they saw and just perhaps … perhaps Magnus had seen his boy somewhere or at least had resources he had not dreamed of to find him.

Tagged: MAGNUS DAYNE * Word Count: 791