Maya

"So, Maya, how did your date with Daniel go?" her father asked, his voice nonchalant. Maya knew the truth though.

"Yeah Maya," her brother said slyly and lowered his voice so that their parents couldn't hear across the table, "What did you and the benandanti do for half the day in the forest?"

"Shut up Ash. You know what we were doing," Maya fake glared at her brother and then turned to her parents, "Thanks again for your help with that porcupine, Mom; I think Daniel is glad be won't be a human pincushion anymore."

Every day for the last three weeks Daniel had been pricked by the little porcupine Maya had found nearly dead by the lake. She tried to take over but he insisted on going to that little guy while she tended to the snowy ermine that had been caught in some traps a week before they found the porcupine.

"It was no trouble for me honey, but I must admit… you two were gone quite a while to have only released him," a knowing smile played on her mother's lips.

Why do I have to be caught between all of this! Maya felt her anger flaring up. I've been spending time like that with Daniel for years and now they are playing it up all of the time! Clenching her hands, she tried to calm down. Between the medication the Nasts were giving her and the support from her family- especially Daniel- these flare-ups were few and far between. I wonder what it would have been like for Annie if she had gotten this help at the same stage I had. She was still having troubles with the regression. Although now her lucid times lasted for about an hour, she still had to have a break between doses of medication, which meant that everyone, including Rafe, was kicked out of their house until she could take it again.

It had been a year since the Phoenix kids – that's what the work crews had called them and it slowly replaced their old group name, the Salmon Creek kids- had found out what they were and eventually been brought to this village in Ontario. They had put up quite a fight though and were able to negotiate with the Cabal, at least after they had met the Genesis kids and the adults helping them. Now their entire community revolved around honesty (when it came to their powers at least) and grooming them to become employees for the Nasts… though they still hadn't been told what those jobs would be, Maya and her friends had some pretty good guesses. Every day they went through different, hour and a half classes starting at 8am and ending around 5pm and rotating days so they didn't have the same thing every day. Like every other teenager, they had to take math, science, geography and English; plus they had martial arts (tae kwon do, jujitsu, karate, etc.), survival (Ash had made quite a fuss about this one, saying he "took care of himself for three years on the streets in America, he already knew how to 'survive'"), as well as a few others specialized for each individual supernatural.

Several seconds had passed by the time Maya was calm again. So of course this didn't go unnoticed by her family. When she looked at her mother across the table, concern was written plainly across her face, it even slipped into her voice, "Maya, honey, are you ok?"

"Ya," Ash, who was the best in the family at reading Maya now, said, with a hint of scorn in his voice, "didn't know you would flip 'cause we were asking about your day. We're just a little worried about you is all." Now he dropped to a stage whisper, "You've been using protection, right?"

"Of course," instead of getting angry this time, Maya just played along, it was actually kind of funny seeing the mock-horrified look on her parents faces as they joined in the joke, "I changed before we stated and gave him cougar kisses."There wasn't even a second of silence as the joke sunk in, the whole Delaney family just burst out in shared, uncontrollable laughter.

This was a typical dinner in the Delaney house. It had taken a little while, Ash hadn't been with them before Beaver Lake even though he was Maya's twin, but after a few months he had come to understand her parents and their laid-back yet strict ways. Now everything was easy and comfortable in their lives… well, except of course the fact that they were experiments that were being groomed for a life of hit-men/ninja assassins…and their biological father, who worked for the evil Cabal, lived only a few houses away, near the edge of the woods that surrounded the Delaney house and the rest of Beaver Lake.