Page 52 of Blade

So I filled him in on my ability and how I’d never heard anyone else talk into my head. Before he could respond, another whirlwind of shadows appeared and out of it, stepped a blond man. All I could do was blink.

Because he looked uncannily like me.

“Hayden,” Séamus calmly began. “Would you like to tell me why you hid your son from me all this time? And then, pray tell… why does he also taste like… a witch?”

The guy he called Hayden had the look of a man who’d been caught doing something he shouldn’t have.

“I can explain,” Hayden began. I stumbled backward and fell into the wall where I used it to keep me on my feet.

I was thankful for that because I was metaphorically and almost literally, knocked on my ass by this turn of events.

“Can we go somewhere private?” he asked Facet’s father who looked at Gator in question.

“You can use the conference room—the chapel,” Gator told them.

They both shuddered, then motioned for me to follow. We entered the chapel where Séamus cured his lip momentarily. “Couldn’t you have called it something different?”

“I didn’t fucking name it,” I grumbled. At the moment, I was very confused.

When he explained everything, I was speechless. And angry.

“So you’re telling me that my mother lied to me my whole life?” I demanded.

“No,” Hayden simply replied. “She absolutely believed you were her child, I made sure of it. She’d been a kind woman to me and she was desperate for a child. She got what she wanted and you were protected because no one knew who you were.”

“So what? You brainwashed her?”

“In a matter of speaking.”

“Fuck,” I muttered. “And you just let us struggle? Like you couldn’t have helped her out so she wasn’t working her fingers to the bone?”

Hayden looked truly regretful. “If I had given her money or fancy things, they would’ve known. You had to live as if you didn’t exist to me. It was the only way to keep you alive.” He paused as he seemed to search my face. “Did she love you?”

My throat burned. “Yes. Very much.”

“Good,” Hayden said softly as he took deep breath and let it out.

“This is so fucked up. I hope you know, I’m not calling you Dad. Ever. You look like you could be my brother,” I grumbled, then dragged a hand down my face.

“Do you know what could happen if it gets out that his mother was a witch? An actual witch?” Séamus restlessly paced.

Hayden crossed his arms and cocked a brow in judgement. “Oh? You mean like Maribelle?”

Séamus stopped in his tracks. “How did you know that?”

Hayden scoffed. “Why do you think I hid Finley? Maribelle knew. She warned me and Finley’s mother that we couldn’t keep him. That if we loved him, we would give him up. It wasn’t a choice we made lightly. We chose to never know our child, than for him to be sacrificed.”

I had to sit down.

“I didn’t know about Facet until you told me,” he told Séamus. “I swear.”

Séamus nodded curtly.

“When did you start having the ability to speak into other people’s minds?” Hayden asked.

I swallowed with difficulty. “After my first kill.”

Hayden closed his eyes and Séamus threw up his hands. The usually cool, calm, and collected demon was unusually flustered. “And today… you said you almost lost your woman. Voodoo said something strange happened when you thought she died.”