Bad Choices (Hypernaturals 8)

He is your FATHER!

Marvin and Skye, Morgan's parents, live about three miles to the north of the family compound. Complex. Whatever you call the assemblage of houses, observatories, former garages, new garage, and medical clinic we live in. Marvin and Skye used to live upstairs in the 'main' house, where Nakoma and Angel are but moved to their own place.

A while back, Jessica and Helen bought up every house for miles around. That means we own a lot of houses near us that are empty. The one Skye and Marvin are in is the closest to the North, and we bought an ATV that lets us run through the woods back and forth easily. Mostly that is for Marvin. Skye being a full-on female Vampire can run at forty miles per hour without breaking a sweat. Morgan and I, not quite that easy, but still, pretty easy. It is only three miles.

Morgan's dad is in his sixties, and he is ill with some sort of blood disease. Morgan detected it when she was visiting him in Houston. Her hyper-sensitive nose tagged it as 'wrong', but I agree. He is sick.

Dogs are well known for being able to not only tell when someone has cancer and a variety of other illnesses. Morgan and I are as able as the finest tracking canine to do the same, capable of detecting some odors in parts per trillion. We have Vampire brains to help us further tell the difference between something like cancer and Diabetes. Bacterial infections are easy: The first thing I ever smelled wrong with a human was gangrene.

Morgan's diagnosis led to us telling Marvin about Vampires. We could not convince him he was sick when the doctor said he was not sick unless we explained how WE knew. That led to Marvin leaving Houston and living with us for a while.

Skye, his wife, was turned shortly after Morgan's birth. As a good Vampire worried about 'The Secret', Skye disappeared from Morgan and Marvin's lives. Just vanished, and the authorities found nothing. No evidence of foul play. Nothing. She is still a 'missing person' in Houston as far as the authorities are concerned.

Marvin, thinking Skye dead, raised Morgan as a single parent. He also ran his ASIC business extremely successfully and sold off his first business to start a second one. He did that mostly to give Morgan a trust so that she would never want for anything in her life: One of Marvin's ways of making sure Morgan never suffered from the loss of her mother.

Morgan being Morgan wanted to make her own way in the world and largely left her trust untouched, choosing to be a Homicide Detective. As Cops make crap for money, she did use a tiny fraction of the trust to buy her house in Houston. I have never seen it, but it was well away from the city. Morgan used to be a cop who valued her privacy. When she moved to Austin, she sold the house at a profit, and put all the money back into the trust and then some.

Skye never really left her family. She used her Vampire capabilities to keep returning, but then hypno'ing Marvin into forgetting her visits. Marvin never re-married after Skye 'left', because Skye was really still there, and she would not let him even consider it. She is his wife, till death do they part. As she is Vampire and he is human, that was going to be soon for her no matter how long Marvin lived. Vampire life spans are one thousand times that of a human, we think. The new checks in our DNA written by what turned us keep us from aging. Make us physically twenty-five for eons.

Again: We think. Keeping 'The Secret' means we have never studied our DNA and how we are different.

Morgan and I described, as best we could, what we scented about Marvin to Jessica. She diagnosed, based on our descriptions, a cancer, and Jessica assumed it is a blood cancer because no abnormal growth appeared on any human-taken scans.

The disease is now progressing. At this point, it might even show up on human diagnostics. He could go to a cancer center and get it figured out. Or perhaps he could turn Vampire. Align his lifespan with his wife and daughters.