Essence of Quinn Parts 3 & 4 (MxM)

New Beginnings

*** Time jump!! 5 years have passed since the end of the last chapter ***

The ghouls all glanced at each other nervously. They were in the conference room along with Secondo, Terzo and Primo. All of their ghouls were present.

Terzo was pacing and chewing on his nails, a nervous habit that Quinn had noticed he’d picked up recently.

“If we ignore them, they’ll go away, si?” Secondo said, looking pointedly at Terzo.

Terzo sighed and shook his head

“We need to get rid of them before it gets any worse, fratello. They are already drawing unwanted attention to us,” he said. Alpha was standing by the wall, hands in the pockets of his uniform, head down and trying to be inconspicuous. Terzo huffed and stopped pacing. “I will go out and speak to them. They will see reason. I can take ghouls for protection.”

Secondo shook his head. Quinn could feel his annoyance at his younger brother and his patience was wearing very thin with him.

“Terzo, just wait it out. You do not want to make this any worse. What if it turns nasty and the ghouls have to rescue you? What if they have cameras and one of their glamour slips?”

Earth, who was watching the security camera feeds from a laptop spoke up then.

“I can confirm that there are cameras. A news van just showed up.”

Secondo and Terzo both cursed in perfectly synchronised Italian.

“That's it. I’m going out there. I will take Omega and Earth. Neither of them will lose their cool under pressure. It will be fine, si?”

A local group of religious bigots had taken up residence outside the main doors of the Abbey. Pastor Chad Logan and his congregation had brought the good fight to the doorstep of their home.

Somehow they’d gotten hold of a picture appearing to show a demon wandering the Abbey’s grounds. They’d worked themselves up into a religious crusading frenzy and had launched a protest outside. It had been going on for the best part of a week now. They had gone old school with hand painted signs and the leader addressed his followers with a megaphone. He spouted religious nonsense and quoted irrelevant passages from the Bible, making the Abbey's residents laugh every time he misquoted something or took it out of context.

At first it had been amusing and they’d all joked about sending the ghouls out to eat the humans, but now the curious crowd was growing. The picture had started showing up on paranormal sites all over the internet and was gaining attention from the media.

It wasn’t a demon, though. The low resolution, blurry, night vision image was of Alpha in the woods in his full ghoul form, fiery orange eyes and all.

“How fucking stupid can you be, Alpha?” Fire growled at him.

Alpha looked up and snarled at him.

“Fuck you, Fire. How was I supposed to know there was a fucking pervert with a camera taking pictures over our wall?”

He was right, Quinn thought. They were on their own land and someone had managed to scale the wall somehow and take a picture. Alpha just happened to be the unfortunate ghoul who was caught in it.

“It’s always you, Alpha. Always.”

“Enough!” Secondo snapped. “It is nobody’s fault. It is just unfortunate and we now have to deal with it.”

Everyone nodded and voiced their agreement.

“I am going to speak to them,” Terzo said, holding his hand up to quiet Secondo when he made noises of protest. “I am Papa and I will deal with this as I see fit.”