Day of the Druids

One interested party was better than none. It would be a step up on the classes he’d taught where each and everyone of the students had slowly broken their focus away from him, leaving him feeling as though he was shouting into the wind. Noah imagined every teacher had felt that pain a time or two, especially at college level. You needed that one set of eyes on you to feel like you were being heard. Hers were on him the minute she’d walked into the room. A promising start that would build on those busier sessions from earlier in the day.

The intention had never been to stay at Whitmore long enough to make things like this a possibility. Every other trip over the last couple of years had taken a handful of months at most. A problem presented, a solution offered up and once it had been settled he’d head on the road again or would make that trip back at home to pass on those stories to his dad like they’d once been passed onto him. Storytellers centuries after the first in their line had taken on the mantle of skald. Jacob himself, the druid from which all of this had sprung, including what he’d set up on the board.

Noah supposed his passing that along was his own version of seeing his ancestors, acknowledging everything that had come before to give him the power that ran in his veins. I see you Jacob. He’d let her see too, once he had her in the front row hooked on every word out of his mouth.

He was willing to put money on her being that way by the time he was done. That bright chirp to her voice and the shake of her hand had his grin brightening. The seventeen year old might’ve had no interest, but this was a different animal. Dipping his head towards her slightly, Noah mock winced. ”I’m glad to hear it,” he told her, mock conspiratorially. ”I honestly thought I’d lost the last of the attendees to the professor down the hallway who was luring people in with pizza.” Only half a joke to that, he’d half expected the trickle of visitors to his classroom to dry up entirely.

On her own she’d get his full attention, and look, he had hers. Noah watched her as she studied the chalkboard. Something shifting in her perhaps? The series of little clicks he’d felt in his chest a thousand times over the years, like the tumblers in a lock suddenly snicking into perfect alignment. His own did the same, his hand flattening on his chest as he returned her chuckle with a grin that quick froze as she tossed the word out with the carelessness of someone who had no clue their toy was a live hand-grenade.

Blue eyes cut to the door and then back to her, a hand reaching out to touch her elbow lightly to encourage her deeper into the room. Away from the open doorway and anybody who might’ve lingered and could hear. ”What about you, Destiny? A druid?” he asked tightly. ”Or a darach?” He hadn’t written that word on the board. Once you started talking about the dark side of things at something like this it was all people could hear. They fixed on it with a hunger that went beyond just seeing.

Noah’s hands slipped into his pockets, his shoulders stiffening slightly. It was foolish to believe that everyone of their kind who had turned dark would exude it like some noxious perfume or that anybody who called themselves a druid instead of a darach was inherently good, but there was a light about her that seemed to radiate with that little bounce and the joke that followed. ”Looks like you might be the only one. I guess that just means extra attention, right?”

Taking slow steps back, Noah sank down on the edge of his desk and tipped his head back towards the board. ”Do you have some idea about all of this?” Prying without obviously digging took some experience – he didn’t want to carve her open like he’d taken a can opener to her but Noah wanted rid of the tension that had started to ratchet his nerves tighter like someone was turning some crank inside of him. It wasn’t like movies would have everyone believe, there was no psychic link that came with druidism but there was a sensitivity there, especially amongst their own kind, a feel when that power seemed to radiate out of someone and Noah had learned to pay attention to it long before his wife had almost been killed as a teenager.

Tagged: DESTINY BACCARI * Word Count: 782

Noah dipped his head, chuckling ruefully. The pizza had probably made all the difference in which session was more crowded now but when you had to resort to food to lure people in … there was probably something wrong with what else you were doing. He probably should’ve believed in the power of rewards a little more but years of experience had shown him just how weak that made a bargain. If you had to bribe someone into it then a bigger bribe would just drag them off elsewhere … unless there was a real lure to what you were doing. People had to want it and his skill had always been in getting them to see it.

His lips curved faintly with the temptation to sweep a hand through the air Jedi style to quip that it ‘wasn’t the pizza she was looking for’, but he resisted. He tilted his head back instead, humming lightly. ”Best I can do is probably a protein bar … I’m guessing there won’t be much competition.” A light quip, one that felt entirely inadequate just moments later.

Darach.

In a town like Mystic Falls it should have been no surprise. There were stirrings here, a feel to the air that had left him shivering a time or two, and not just from the bite of the winter cold in the air. Power crackled here and from what he’d managed to dig up about the town’s history, it had done from the start. Noah had learned from a young age not to judge, the labels on that power weren’t always given by the impartial, but he’d seen enough damage done by the dark oaks to feel that stir of discomfort around someone who tossed the term around so lightly.

A low sound slipped out of Noah, pale eyes watching her as she moved with him. Studying now, not just giving that cursory glance that his last group had. He hadn’t answered the question she’d thrown at him, evading it with one of his own. Shoulders stiff beneath the cover of his shirt, Noah hovered by her shoulder. ”From a line of darachs, then. I guess we all pass things down.” Everything he knew had come from his father, a man who had determined to keep straddling the lines his ancestor had drawn out on those docks a couple of centuries before.

If she was as dark as most in the know believed her kind to be then she was doing a stellar job of hiding it. A flush was crawling up her cheeks, that smile lingering on her lips. She didn’t need the pizza to lure her in to his talk. Settling on the edge of his desk Noah tried not to make an obvious study of her but he still watched as she slipped her jacket off. ”Well,” Noah said lightly, ”you’ve come to the right place. There’s never enough time in these things to go into everything but…” He gestured up at the board before the touch of her hand against her stomach had him stilling. Like so many other things there was a universal sign of pregnancy – minus the beach ball sized bump of course. The unconscious press of a protective hand against a stomach, checking on that life within, shielding it from everything horror out there in the world, big or small.

Noah was on his feet almost instantly, pulling the chair out from behind his desk for her. He flipped it around, set it next to his desk before he sank back down again. ”Since it’s just the two of us, how about we just make this an up close kinda session. Can you see OK from up here?” He nodded towards the board, like he hadn’t made sure a half dozen times that it could be read right from the last row.

The little huff that emerged was laced with humour as she joked. Heat rose faintly into Noah’s own cheeks. He raked his teeth over his lower lip for a minute, wondering how much it was wise to let out. ”I did,” he admitted finally, glancing over at her. ”My family are druids … and as you can guess, not in that new age, communing with the trees kind of way most take it as. They passed down what they knew and my father’s still working as an emissary.” A little information drip fed to see how much it was taken in. ”I try and work a little of that into my teaching, although most of it is either more ancient – who doesn’t love a viking saga after all – or more modern. Are your family from Virginia?” Like a fisherman he cast the fly out, waiting to see if she would bask in the shadows of those murky waters that surrounded their kind, or happily bite, trusting that she wouldn’t get yanked out of the water.

Tagged: DESTINY BACCARI * Word Count: 819

Kids hadn’t been on the card in his marriage yet. It wasn’t a case of fertility issues or a lack of want. Eventually Noah figured they’d end up with a house full of kids in Boston. Their grandparents fussing over them, his sister – the supposedly cool aunt – drifting in and out of the place if she hadn’t squashed herself in with them still. It’d been the way of the Jacobsens since the first had settled down not a mile from the harbour. The house where he’d raised his kids wasn’t there anymore but Noah liked to believe he could still feel some trace of it when he passed the spot. It was that cord that tied you together through blood and didn’t snap when Death came a calling.

His eyes squinted up at the board as Destiny settled herself it, pronouncing the distance good for reading what he’d painstakingly printed up there. In ancient times they’d been in tune with that cord, still talking with the ancestors, offering up gifts to them to keep them happy as though there were a way they were guiding things for those future generations from beyond the grave. Given all that was out there in the world it was possible. Those ties mattered, they wound around you, not always visibly, and tugged you along certain paths.

Noah glanced sideways at Destiny, studying her profile for a moment before he had her laughing. Not over what his family had done, apparently, but with rue over her own attempts to follow the same trail. Making a small sound, Noah smiled at her reaction before he propped an elbow on his knee. ”We all need to learn somewhere,” he said lightly. ”Without training it can be like being thrown in at the deep end of a swimming pool. Maybe you manage to tread water, maybe you end up drowning in it all.” Sinking down into that darkness, the wise oak becoming the dark. It could be that easy, he’d seen it before. Given the read he’d gotten on Destiny already he didn’t think that was the way it had gone for her. That bitterness that came with a turning didn’t seem to radiate from her. Still though, she’d called herself a darach.

Going by her light alone, she never should’ve been. The hereditary had damned her with those cords, Noah supposed as he quipped about the Vikings. It was the furthest some of his students would ever see into his reality. ”I was gonna ask,” he admitted, his sandy brows hitching for a moment. ”Was that where your pack was?” He wasn’t about to admit to there being some in town. She’d probably have been aware if she’d been here a couple of years but he wasn’t about to reveal his own tenuous connections to them at all. ”For my dad, it was usually Boston,” Noah said with a bob of his head before he glanced at her. ”He’d travel at times though. With his pack, with just us kids to reach out to other emissaries. He still believes that those connections are what helps keep the peace.” That was something that he believed in totally. If anywhere had needed peace, it was this town.

Tipping his head, Noah half indicated the classroom, meaning somewhere far wider though. With his dad emissary to the local pack in Boston he’d headed out on the road in his stead. His version of bringing peace was wading into this dangerous situations with his wife and sister. He paused as Destiny brought up her older sister, the name ringing bells in the back of his head. Noah squinted at her, his expression suddenly serious. ”Your dad was an emissary?” he asked. Thinking back to the journals his dad had sent him when he’d arrived here, the ones that had led him to a hunter’s door for information, Noah made a small sound. ”I can’t say I know your sister, not past a line or two in something my dad wrote, but I think I met your dad once. My dad had a black book I guess you could call it, people he’d come across in our world. You had another sister, right? There were three of you?” He tried to filter back through the details in the book, matching them up with his own memories, men and women in dozens of towns and cities, little flickers of their lives passing through his own.

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Most normal people in the neighbourhood had no idea what was going on under their noses. The Jacobsens were just normal. They were well known – which you had to expect given how many decades, centuries really, they’d been there – and were always known for being pretty community minded. If someone needed a little help around the house or were struggling a little financially the Jacobsens were the first to start circling the wagons. They threw open their doors and welcomed people in, the ignorant right there cheek and jowl with the initiated. Noah had always guessed that was a part of who they were. You couldn’t work to keep the peace in your neighbourhood if you were alienating part of it.

He guessed he’d been glad of that. Growing up he might’ve heard stories about vampires and witches and werewolves on almost a nightly basis but he was also the kid to go tripping out of Andy Redmond’s tree house when they’d all stayed over in the sixth grade – a ten feet fall meant a trip to the ER for stitches with Andy’s mom freaking out the whole time – and just about the worst in their driver’s ed class. Things were normal even if they weren’t and not all of their kind managed to have that.

Noah wasn’t about to go judging anybody else for that. People got by any way they could, some would end up with tragedy wrapped anaconda like around their lives no matter what they tried but some got through it and ended up finding a hand extended to them somewhere that would help pull them out of that mire. It hadn’t exactly been his intention for today – that had been to get some young minds engaged - but somehow this felt more important. A real education.

Head bobbing, Noah nodded understandingly at Destiny’s explanation. A travelling darach, like some faint mirror image of his own life right now. His brows remained hitched, his fingers peeling off his upper arm to gesture faintly at her. ”So you ended up kinda drifting without really drifting to anywhere.” It seemed like she’d found her place here. Destiny might now have known too much about what she was but she was already a step above him in the getting settled stakes. Maybe – God forbid – if his dad wasn’t still in his prime he would’ve been, right back home with the pack. Noah automatically uncrossed his arms, tapping knuckles lightly against his desk on the side away from where Destiny was sitting. He glanced at her, catching that faint frown before he shook his head. ”Kinda, I guess. There are two main groups in our part of Boston – either side of us, I mean – vampires and werewolves. They were both there when my ancestor arrived from the old country. He stepped in to stop a fight between them on the docks and changed the path of his family forever.” It sounded like some sort of Hollywood romanticism but it was the total truth.

For years his dad had tried to follow the path laid out for them all the way back then. He forged connections, tried to help others do the same. Most of the time that had been done from their base in Boston but his dad had travelled, had networked in a way that meant he could do the same years later and follow his dad’s footsteps. California hadn’t been somewhere he’d circled back to but he remembered that first trip out there, the faces and names of the people he’d been introduced to soft around the edges by now. There’d been a guy they’d spent some time with, a couple of hours of him drifting around the parking lot out in the woods where they’d met just about as boring as it got in those days.

Noah’s brows furrowed as he tried to sharpen up those edges. Maybe this was another time he got back in contact with his dad, like he had done when he’d ended up looking up a hunter here in town on his dad’s recommendation. The black book – well, his now he guessed since it had been passed to him – had notes. Wife’s name is May, third generation druid on his father’s side. Mother of two, turned darach after the death of her husband. Former emissary of the local pack killed under strange circumstances, reach out to the replacement if there is one. Little notations that gave you a taste of someone’s life.

He pressed his tongue against the point of one canine, staring at the board in front of him but not really seeing it. The guy had … three daughters, a wife. From an area that was pretty active when it came to the supernatural. Anything more than that he’d have to look up again. ”That might’ve been how they connected,” he drawled lightly as he looked back and saw that excitement filling Destiny’s face like he’d located a slice of that pizza after all. There were tears though, visible enough in her eyes that he twisted to grab the box of Kleenex on the desk and offered them up to her. ”I thought I remembered right. I’m pretty sure he showed my dad a photo of the three of you. Were two of you twins?” Another little crumb dropping from his mental image of the pages.

There’d been no intention of getting her hopes too far up about what he knew but Noah didn’t wanna hold the cards too close to his chest out of suspicion – being a darach didn’t necessarily mean evil. He tilted his head, the smile tugging at the corners of his lips for a moment. ”I did. I don’t know exactly what kinda connection they had but we made a stop when we went on a trip out to Cali. I remember woods, my dad telling me to be patient – I was maybe 10, so you can imagine how that went – yours was pretty chill about me being there. He told me he had kids too – all girls. I can see if my dad knows anything more?” The offer might not pan out but he’d be a mega asshole if he offered something that put that much hope in a pregnant woman’s face and then yanked his hand back and pretty much belted out a psych!.

Tagged: DESTINY BACCARI * Word Count: 1060