A Trail of Echoes (A Shade of Vampire #18)(17)

I stared at the teens in confusion. When Liana and Cameron had left The Shade, they’d said that they wanted to trace their descendants. They’d lived centuries regretting having to leave their young children when they were first turned into vampires. Then when finally we’d discovered a cure, they’d wanted to leave The Shade to live a normal life and watch over some of their distant relatives. I wondered if perhaps these teens were such distant relatives.

“And who are Cedric and Pippa exactly?” I asked.

Cameron and Liana exchanged glances. “Our son and daughter.”

I was speechless. I certainly hadn’t expected them to have more children. But now that I thought about it, it made total sense. Hundreds of years had passed since they’d last lived as humans. The relatives who would still be living would be very distant indeed. They had still been young when they left, in their late twenties. I should’ve expected that they would start a new family.

“Wow,” I said. Derek shared the same shocked expression as me.

I looked back at their two children. “What a pleasure to meet you. How old are you?”

“Fifteen,” Pippa replied.

“I’m sixteen,” Cedric said.

Apparently recovering from the shock, Derek proceeded to step behind the controls. “We should get inside.”

He moved the vessel the few feet that it took to pass through the boundary, and then stopped. He turned to me. “We still have our submarine floating nearby. We have to take that back to the shore, so Sofia, you stay with Cam and Liana, and I will navigate the other submarine back. We’ll meet at the Port.”

Derek didn’t look like he wanted to leave his two friends for even a minute after just reuniting with them, but we couldn’t leave our submarine stranded.

And so he left, leaving me still reeling as I looked from Cameron, to Liana, to their two children.

“So how are you a vampire?” Liana pressed, clutching my knee as Cameron took a seat behind the controls and navigated the submarine toward the shore.

I breathed out, and traced my memory back to when they had first left The Shade. Rose and Ben had still been newborns, and Derek and I had also left The Shade to move into our dream home in California.

I didn’t get far into our story before we arrived at the Port and Derek rejoined us.

We stepped out onto the jetty, and warmth filled Liana and Cameron’s expressions as they eyed their old home.

“I’ve got to say,” Cameron said hoarsely, “I’ve bloody missed this place.”

I saw tears in the corners of Liana’s eyes. She seemed quite choked up as she helped Pippa and Cedric onto the jetty next to them.

“You have no idea how excited everyone is going to be to see you again,” I said, my heart pounding at the thought of Vivienne’s eyes lighting up on seeing them again. Liana was her best and oldest friend. “We wondered what happened to you.”

It was late now and most people were in bed, so as we led the four of them through the woods, the only person we bumped into was Eli taking Shadow for a nighttime walk. He looked like he had just seen a ghost as he eyed Liana and Cameron. Then a huge grin split his face and he hurried forward to embrace them.

Eli ended up joining us back in our penthouse after he had taken Shadow back to his apartment, and we spent the rest of the night trying to recount everything that had happened since they left.

I sat them down in the living room and since they all admitted that they were hungry, I prepared a meal for them of hot tomato soup with fresh bread, paella with feta cheese salad, and apple pie with ice cream, while we talked.

I kept looking at Cedric and Pippa. I wasn’t sure how much their parents had told them of the supernatural world, and they looked in a daze listening to what we said. Heck, even Cameron and Liana looked in a daze—especially when we told them about our new fire-breathing residents.

Of course, there was no way to tell them everything that had happened in a matter of hours, but we did our best to provide a good recap.

And then it was our turn to ask questions.

“How come you never came to visit us all these years?” Derek asked. “And why are you here now?”

“Good questions,” Cameron said, leaning back in his chair and taking a sip from his cup of tea. He glanced warmly at Liana. “My love and I… you know how we yearned for a normal life, Derek. Just as you and Sofia did. We wanted to experience what it was like to be human again. To live oblivious to the supernatural world. When we decided to have children, we knew we wanted to give them a normal, carefree upbringing. I guess if we hadn’t had them, we probably would’ve come back to visit much sooner, but we wanted to shelter them. So once they were born, that just cemented our distance from The Shade. Actually, we only told them about… all this… about ten days ago.”

My eyes widened. “Ten days ago?” No wonder the poor kids look bewildered.

Cameron paused, wetting his lower lip. “Something rather… disturbing happened. Something that left us no choice but to tell them the truth about our past, and return to The Shade.”

Derek leaned forward in his seat. “What happened?”

“Two strange men showed up at our home in Scotland,” Liana answered. “We were away on vacation at the time, in France. It was our house sitter who opened the door. They arrived late at night, around 9pm, and they asked to speak to Cameron and me. Our house sitter was under the impression that they were the police, so she gave them our mobile number. We received a call while we were on the beach one morning. It was an American man. It was Cameron who picked up the phone.” She looked at her husband, who nodded.