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went downstairs. I headed to
Joshua’s room to check on him. It was close to four in the morning
and both boys were sound asleep.
    Like I said, we lived in a
sixteenth-century castle and we tried to set up the inside to look
like a normal home, even if the outside looked like there should be
a moat out front.
    I looked in on Joshua. He was lying in
his queen-size bed. He was already over six feet tall with blond
hair and blue eyes like his dad. His hair was darker than mine,
thanks to his mother’s Goth jet-black hair gene.
    It had been an amazing sixteen years,
both for my family and the Mani people. Yet, nothing had gone the
way I thought it would.
    At first, there had been a wonderful
time of peace for a few years among the Mani people. Then, like
most things in my life, that changed. It changed in the hearts of
other Mani and even I got impatient and decided to take on all the
bad people of the world. That included anyone who fell in that
category.
    Some Mani, the ones who chose to come
and to stay on the islands, had experienced a peace and a harmony
that was something we would have never been able to attain, unless
we went through what we went through.
    Unfortunately, as with all good
things, a backlash broke out among different Mani mini-sects inside
our own society. One thing I didn’t take into account was that most
vampires weren’t going to want to settle for peace. It was not in
their DNA. It was just the old tired-out ones who just wanted to go
somewhere and retire. Like their vampire Florida retirement
communities where they could play shuffle board all day. Most new
Mani wanted to fight and get something going. Mix it up with bad
guys. It’s just the way it was.
    I was as guilty as anyone. Once I had
the Deity’s approval, I had become a regular Lone Ranger. Sion was
my Tonto. We were a good team. Batman and Alfred could eat their
hearts out. This was my cause, but after a couple of years of
living the good life, I started to miss the not-so-good life. I
started to help people all over the world in any way I saw fit.
That’s what I did. I started helping those who couldn’t help
themselves. Luckily, I could, even though my time away doing
vampire superhero things weighed on Lena’s tolerance.
    As a family, we had had our own ups
and downs. It was apparent that the two boys had night and day
personalities. All Joshua wanted to do was show off and be a man’s
man, and all Jason wanted to do was be left alone by everyone,
especially me, his dad. Jason was the most reliable kid I had ever
seen. If he had ever lied, it wasn’t to me. If he had stolen
anything, it wasn’t mine. I had never seen this kid act out, not
once. Did he make mistakes? Yes, once in a while. I corrected it
and he never made the same mistakes again.
    This was the life I know I lived: I
was a superhero and a dad. I had no more complaints. There wasn’t
time to be selfish. I had given all I could to this cause and it
looked it would be the detriment at least one of my sons. I was
taken from my pretty screwed-up world in my own right, and then
shoved into a world that was unlike anything I had ever known to be
true. Detriment or not, I would die making sure my sons were safe.
Prophecy or not, this had become a new ball game. Now it was about
family.
    I remembered the first
time when it became apparent to me that my family was all in this
together. We had two incidents within three months of each other,
incidents in which both boys showed amazing abilities. They were
different abilities, but equally impressive.
    The boys were barely five
years old when they discovered the joy of climbing. They climbed
everything: houses, trees, hills, rocks, even bookcases. Climbing
was one of the few times I had seen the boys be competitive with
one another. Each boy always wanted to go higher than his brother.
Most often, Jason won. But Joshua had out-climbed him a few times.
But if you asked me, Jason had let him because that’s just the kind
of kid