Father (Blood Brotherhood 1)

Bryn

"The fog is coming in. Where’s Nina? I don’t want her exposed to it again. It could cause another incident.”

When I am with Nina, I am a filthy demon desiring her with no ability to control my craving. When I am apart from her, I worry about her incessantly. I know the sex we had will do nothing to earn her forgiveness. I think, in some twisted way, I tried to ensure it would not.

“She was in the garden with Steve?” Thor suggests.

“I wasn't in the garden,” Steven says. “Too cold these days for my old bones.”

“I saw you walking in the garden with her like thirty minutes ago,” Cosmos says.

“I think I would know if I was in the garden a half-hour ago.”

“Maybe not, if you’re sundowning, old man.”

Steve narrows his eyes a fraction and makes some mumbling reference to crucifixion. I do not have time for the petty squabbles of these men. Someone is supposed to know where Nina is at all times.

“Who was she with?”

When I do not get a response, I ask the question again, much more loudly this time.

“WHO WAS SHE WITH!?”

“I don't know. I thought it was one of us. We could ask the others, but I think Thor is in the village trying to find that fermented fish he likes.”

The time it would take to ask everybody is inefficient. I decide instead to use the cameras. I have camera feeds covering every corner of the exterior of the property. You can quite literally never be too careful.

Surveillance reveals a man emerging from the woods. It is a facet of life in England that ramblers have rights. This means they can go gleefully trampling over most of the landscape no matter who owns it. I cannot block access to the woods to the public, and so on this occasion, someone in a hood has wandered into my property and stolen my damsel in distress. Keeping hold of Nina has become the greatest challenge in my life, in spite of the fact that there are more than a dozen of us here keeping an eye on her.

Cosmos comes with me because he is curious to a fault. Steven comes with us because he's mistaken the venture for a journey for more of Mrs Crocombe’s butter biscuits.

“Alright, I think the camera on the west wing will…”

The figure looks up, directly at my camera, and winks.

“Craig.” Steven says his name. I wish he wouldn’t. Naming the man feels like embodying the evil. Craig. Has there ever been a more infernal moniker?

“How did he know she was here?”

Nobody answers me, but it is obvious. Someone in this house let it slip. Someone gave the game away. I should never have told anybody about Nina and whatshisname. I should have kept them locked up here away from the eyes of the world and I should have protected her the way a jailer protects a prisoner.

Nina

I am being dragged into the woods by a man who I am now certain I have never seen before. He’s not one of Bryn's Brotherhood, even though he feels like them. It’s some new and probably not terribly improved psychopath who is probably going to chop me up into little pieces. I wish I cared more about that. I try to give a fuck, if only to keep up appearances.

When I start crying out, I think it's pretty obvious that my heart isn't really in it.

“What are you doing! Let me go! Let me…”

He lets me go.

Fog is starting to trickle through the undergrowth. I don’t want to be here when it thickens and rises. That’s when I go batshit crazy and see all sorts of crap they tell me isn’t real, but I’m still fairly convinced it is real, or at least, highly allegorical. I turn to leave, because this guy is pretty poor company, all things considered.

“Before you run back to that bastard Bryn, you should listen to me.”

There’s something in his tone that makes me turn around. The impulse to run has been tempered with curiosity. Now that he’s let me go, I can disappear into the mist whenever I want to. He doesn't know that. He doesn’t know me.

“I’m your father.”

Maybe he does know me? Nina, I am your father is one hell of an opening gambit. It also fails immediately.

“My father died in a car crash.”

“I’m your actual father. The one who impregnated your mother. Not the one who took you two cuckoos into his nest.”

That's a heavy statement. We’ve always known that we weren’t my dad’s bio kids. When I was a teenager, I used to think about what my real dad was like. I assumed he had red hair like me and wasn’t a big creepy weirdo who dragged girls into the woods, but I think parents are always disappointing one way or another. Except my mother. She was perfection.