Chapter Text
Kristen is weary. Her bones are heavy and her soul screams for the comfort of the nest. Of the coven. She wants to see her boys. Desperately.
Kristen is old.
Very old.
She is the First Knight. She has to be old.
For the past few centuries she has been fighting a bleak war against the ilharts. Lady Universe needed her First Knight, her strongest Knight. Who is Kristen to deny her Lady?
It hurt leaving Phil alone with the twins just barely out of their fledgling years. Her soul felt torn when she took those first steps away from her properly manifested sons. The ones that brought her to the stars nearly ripped her heart to pieces.
She answered her Lady’s call though. Her boys are doing fine. The bond would be empty if one of them perished. They even added to the bond! She can’t wait to meet Niki and Jack. The bond practically croons with how happy the frostwalker and human make her boys.
Her point is, she’s tired. She wants to sink into her nest with her boys curled around her and sleep for the next century. They can’t stop her.
Phil will probably try to get her to sleep longer, the bleedheart that he is.
The woods around the manor are different. There’s fresh smells, new and familiar. Her ears twitch as a fox dances out of her eyesight. She lifts her head and breathes in deeply.
The coven has grown. The territory has grown. She can smell Phil’s scent marks all over the place. She can smell his scent marks intermingled with a very fresh scent.
She takes another deep breath. Her ears perk straight up when the smell of human shines through Phil’s scent mark. So her Phil found a human to keep? Hm, she’ll have to investigate that.
The last time Phil found a human to keep, Kristen was granting immortality from lightyears away.
Kristen turns her eyes to the moon overhead and grins. Time to go surprise her boys.
It takes her a very short amount of time to appear on the back steps to the kitchen of the manor. She can hear some kind of commotion inside but it doesn’t sound like a fight so she settles for being polite. By kicking the door in.
“Boys! I’m home!” she shouts, setting the door against a nearby table before it can fall to the ground.
She hears a heartbeat that’s unfamiliar and snaps towards the source. Her pupils are lines, focused entirely on the entirely too human smell in her kitchen, near her boys. A human smell that is far too similar to the stench a hunter wears with pride.
There, in her youngest’s arms, is a little frail blond human. A boy, young, barely a man if he even is one. His eyes are sharp, something in them that makes her posture go from mildly surprised to hunting. She doesn’t notice the expressions on her boys’ faces, eyes only on the human hunter that dared to slink his way into her home.
Then, as if his being in the center of her place of power isn’t enough, he growls at her.
Her claws sharpen and she doesn’t bother hiding the fury on her face. Distantly, the bond erupts into pleading for her to calm down. To leave the boy alone. To not hurt him. She ignores it.
She will not allow her territory to devolve into a battlefield. She only just escaped a war she won, she does not want to start another she will win.
The human steps in front of her boys as if to protect them. From her.
The snarl that ripples out of her throat freezes her sons from where they’re desperately reaching for the human. She can see the way Phil tries to fight his instincts to freeze, she ignores it. This pest will be gone by the dawn.
The human answers her snarl with one of his own and Kristen goes from bloodthirsty to enraged. Her face twists into something dreadful and the room is flooded with the red shine spilling from her eyes. The human doesn’t quake under her glare, she will commend the boy for that. Much stronger beings than a silly little mortal have broken into sobs at her anger.
She notices he’s going to lunge immediately. Humans are laughably slow. She goes to meet his lunge with outstretched claws and the desire to see his stagnant blood coating her floor for the mice.
It’s silent as she stops halfway into her lunge, only her reflexes keeping her claws from tearing through Phil’s skull. He stands between her and the human. She growls at him quietly, a reprimand and a demand to move in one. He hisses at her and she goes deadly still.
She can see the way he shakes from the urge to listen to her. She knows he’s shaking to hold back from fighting her to protect the human as well.
“Kristen, stop.” Phil’s voice is quiet, strained. She watches a few tears slip down his cheeks.
“Phil, move. I’ll rip her fangs out for you, just get out of my way,” the human growls. Kristen’s ears flatten against her skull and she leans around Phil a little to rattle her teeth at him. He holds his ground. Impressive. It won’t save him.
“Tommy,” Phil hisses quietly, pushing the human further away from her. She takes a step forward, only to stop halfway through the next when Phil has his talons resting against her jugular.
The room drops several degrees.
“Kristen, love, please just listen for a second. Okay? Just listen. I know you’re upset, we brought an unfamiliar human into the house-” she hisses a little, it’s not that he’s human, it’s that he’s a hunter. “I know! I swear to you, I swear on everything I’ve ever given to you and everything I will ever give to you, Tommy is harmless.”
She snorts and rolls her eyes. The human flinches behind Phil, trying to stand between her and her sons. She reaches a hand up and grabs onto Phil’s wrist and lightly tugs it away from her neck.
“You won’t hurt me,” she whispers in his ear. He’s nervous, of her. That won’t do.
“I won’t. But I won’t let you harm my fledgling,” Phil hisses just as quietly. She tilts her head to the side, scrutinizing him.
His resolve doesn’t crack. He shivers and she can feel the way he’s crying out over the bond for her to stop and listen. Curious.
“You care this much for a hunter?” she whispers into his ear, eyes trained on the boy behind Phil. There’s something defiant in the human’s face. Something that calls to her. She wants to crush it out of existence.
Phil gasps, surprise clear as day.
“My fledgling could never be a hunter,” he growls, eyes steely. She pulls away from him a bit and makes eye contact.
“Fuck you bitch! I’m not a fucking scumbag hunter!” the human yells and it takes Phil’s frantic clawing at her arms to keep her from ripping the boy’s innards out.
Nolan and Wilbur shove the human behind them in sync, their instinctual response to her anger forgotten at the shout from the boy. They stand in front of the human protectively, fangs bared.
It’s then that she takes a step back and thinks for a few seconds.
She just left a warfront that raged for three centuries. She comes home to Phil with a new human. The human smells like a hunter. Phil is willing to step between her and her prey. The twins broke out of their instinctual fledgling response to an angry siremate to protect the human. That shouldn’t be possible unless there was a genuine connection between them and the boy.
She finally registers the pounding in her skull and the ache in her fangs.
Oh.
“Phil?”
Phil looks hopeful yet guarded. He’s wary of her. This is unacceptable.
“I… I may be a tad bit bloodstarved and sleep deprived.”
Phil sputters and immediately has a squishy clear bag of blood in his hands, holding it out for her. She doesn’t hesitate to sink her aching fangs into it and oh, it’s been so long.
Blood always tastes the best after fasting.
It’s cool against her tongue. Sweet. Refreshing. It’s been too long. She may not need blood as often as the regular vampire but two centuries with only ilhart blood is not enough to keep her sustained. It’s lacking vital nutrients she needs and since no humans were anywhere nearby it was her only source of food while she fought her Lady’s war.
Kristen quickly drains the blood bag and breathes for a few moments. Her head still pounds but she plans on sleeping through the next week at least anyways. Her fangs don’t ache and her instincts are smoothed down, not as near to the surface as they were a few moments prior.
Her ear twitches when the human shuffles a little and she snaps to stare at him. Everyone freezes in the room as they pair stare each other down. The human is afraid, her boys are afraid. She flicks an ear and takes a step away from the human, towards the door she kicked in. Her head dips down and she holds her hands in front of her, claws neatly folded into her palms.
“I… apologize for my behavior. I should not have assumed you were a threat,” she whispers, meeting the boy’s eyes for only a second.
“It’s… I’m not gonna say it’s fine since you did try to kill me but it’s okay. I was trying to kill you too. I didn’t react in the right way to an unfamiliar vampire. I’m sorry.”
The tension in the room dissolves and she laughs a little bit. Phil comes up to her side and helps hold her up when her knee starts to buckle. She leans into him and hums.
“I guess we should start over our first meeting,” she mumbles.
“Sure.”
“Hello, I’m Kristen, the First Knight. It’s nice to meet you.”
“Nice to meet you Kristen, I’m Tommy, Phil’s kid.”
Kristen chuckles a little and closes her eyes for a bit too long and ends up slumping into Phil’s side, asleep within seconds.