"Mommy!" I almost dropped everything that I was holding when I heard Lucan's voice echoing throughout the armoury, the patter of his feet hurrying towards me as I turned around quickly to see him racing towards me.
"Lucan!" A thrill of joy soared through me as I quickly put the journal I had been reading aside and lunged for him as he jumped, beaming as Lucan flung himself at me with my mom casually following behind. "Oh my baby I've missed you! What are you doing here? Did nana bring you all the way here just to see me?"
"I wanted to see you mommy. I thought you might forget about me." Cuddling him close I promised that this would never be the case as I kissed his chubby cheeks and propped him up neatly on my hip where he naturally curved to my body, perfectly aligning with my shape like he truly was made to fit just to me.
"Mom, you should have called ahead, I would have come to meet you in town…" Mom merely chuckled and said that Lucan had been upset that I was taking so long with my work and so she decided to just bring him to me. I was glad that she had, holding Lucan close to me as he curiously looked around at the people who were starting to gather at the sound of his voice.
"Oh my god is this him? Hi! Hi Lucan, I'm Caroline." Caroline and Bonnie, who had only just returned from her trip to Paris with Enzo, immediately fell in love with Lucan, who quickly put on the shy act which he knew full well made him totally irresistible as the both cooed over him, giggling at his timid grin as I introduced him to everyone. Alaric brought over the twins in order for the three of them to meet since they were all the same age, and I was shocked at how quickly they got along with one another, quickly settling down to play and draw to their hearts content. Soon enough it was like I didn't even exist to Lucan, which only made me laugh and roll my eyes before turning to my mom so I could hug her and kiss her cheek.
"Thank you mom, I owe you one." She waved it off, saying that it was nothing and decided that she was going to go into Mystic Falls to visit some old friends of hers, including Carol Lockwood, who she hadn't seen in years but had kept in touch with. I offered to go with her but she said that she could see that I was still busy and since Lucan had plenty of people to look out for him, she could have a day to herself to catch up with old friends. Having Lucan back with me was like a breath of fresh air as he came back and forth between me and the twins, sometimes coming to sit on my lap and ask questions about the objects in the armoury where I would then tell them what they were and if they were magic or not.
He loved it there, quickly becoming interested and even started to follow Dorian and Alaric around curiously, though he shied away from Stefan and Damon. "I don't think your son likes me." Stefan noted as Lucan had spotted him and quickly ran in the opposite direction, making it rather obvious how he felt.
"He's just a sensitive kid. He knows that you're not human and it makes him nervous. I think he may have some of my ancestors' powers in him, though it's too early to tell. He's already showing signs of having special gifts which I found rather surprising." I admitted as Damon came to join us with coffee for us all, having just returned from a coffee trip.
"So what, you're saying he's like you? A druid?"
"Possibly."
"I thought you were the last of your kind." Humming as I sipped at my coffee, I scowled at Damon who had once again brought me the wrong thing despite the fact that I had not only told him my preferred drink a hundred times, but had even written it down for him. Asshole.
"That's true, I'm the last druid alive today, however that's only because the druid ancestry in me was awakened when I turned eighteen. The spirits of my ancestors chose to reawaken it, so in some ways I guess you could say I'm the beginning of a new chapter. A trial run, as it were. If I make a good impact on the world by existing, then maybe more druid bloodlines will start to crop up, and Lucan may be one of them. He can talk to animals, you know. They love him, which is a druid trait, one that even I don't have. I have to use magic to be able to understand them, and even then it's just a general conveying of emotions and impressions. He literally talks to them, and they talk back." I told the Salvatore brothers who listened with keen interest at the revelation. "If you thought I was strong, then Lucan is going to be something else altogether if he's already awakening his powers."
"That's…terrifying." Damon decided with a wince, naturally going to rub his arm where I usually set him on fire. "Just don't teach him any dirty tricks like setting me on fire."
"Oh you can count that's the first thing I'm going to teach him once he's old enough." I grinned rather wickedly, taking another sip at the rather weak and gross coffee as I sent Damon a look. "Maybe you should start getting my drink right from now on." We left it at that, and after our coffee break, we returned to our work. Dorian was focusing on the journal that had been written by the man in the tunnel who had starved to death in there, and made a lot of headway with the tuning fork which he eagerly shared with us after calling us together. "It's called the Staff of Arcadius. Cade's enemies forged it in the fire that killed him."
"And how do you know that?" Damon asked sceptically as we all listened. Dorian was unperturbed by Damon's naturally intimidating persona and simply rustled through the pages of the journal in order to find the right one, cross referencing it with the rest of our research to give us the written evidence.
"It was Harvey who said so. In his journal. Seems our dead guy, Harvey, was friends with the sirens, back in seventeen-ninety. They lured him into the Armoury tunnels, and he starved to death down there." Dorian expressed eagerly, impressed that we had finally made a breakthrough with something. "You know, the pile of bones we found a couple months ago? DNA results got back yesterday."
"Good work, what else does it say?" Alaric questioned so Dorian continued, pulling out the photocopies of the pages in order to show them to us all.
"Yeah. Turns out, he was related to a family from Mystic Falls. And through the magic that is the Internet, I've tracked down a living descendant. He's from a family called the Maxwells, who were one of the original families that lived in Mystic Falls." This caught my attention, standing up straight and looking at Ric quickly as we both came to the same conclusion.
"Matt." We said together as Damon clicked his tongue, all of us coming to the same conclusion. The skeleton in the tunnels was an ancestor of Peter Maxwell, and therefore Matt Donovan. Now we just have to figure out why the hell he was in there, what the iron ball heirloom was, and how it all fit together, though now we were starting to get somewhere on that too. The sirens were absolutely no help whatsoever at this point, basically nothing more than prisoners left to rot, so our own research had to fill in the gaps, though once again Dorian pulled through as he explained a little more about the Maxwell skeleton and what he'd written in his journal and we'd even called Peter and Matt in to keep them in the loop.
"Here's another artefact that could help." Rifling through the endless pages, Dorian then handed Peter a page that had a design sketch that the Maxwell ancestor had drawn. "Mr Skeleton Maxwell was a metal smith, circa seventeen-ninety. In his journal, he made sketches of something that he smithyed-up before he died. Now, according to Dalton St. John, the surviving Maxwells made a family heirloom out of it. That look familiar?"
"No, not really. But it could be inside the family storage box that hasn't been opened in…however long forever is." To this, Damon made the sarcastic comment that forever was a very long time indeed, considering he had a unique perspective on the subject to which Peter looked up a little nervously, having been clued in on the fact that he was in fact in a town frequented by vampires and three of them just so happened to hang around us quite often. Fair play to the guy taking it on the chin like this. I was just glad he was making an effort to reconnect with Matt and apologise for walking out on him all those years ago.
"Yeah. Meanwhile, the rest of Dalton's writings from eighteen-eighty-three were about Seline. 'What Seline wants'. He lists precise measurements from neck, shoulder, lip, tongue…"
"Yeah, I'd say he was obsessed with her. He even measured her for a crown." Matt agreed as Dorian had started to list off all the measurements, however the words seemed to strike recognition in Peter as he then asked to see the list again in order to give it a second glance over.
"Wait, hang on. Let me see that list. These are all parts of a bell. Neck, shoulder, lip, crown…they're metalworking terms. The measurements make sense." All of us crowded in closer to take a look, a vague hope of progress tickling at our minds. "Yeah. The Maxwells used to be in the business of making church bells. That's how our family metalworks started, back in the day."
"This is all well and good but does it mean anything? What's so special about some bell made by a family who could barely keep their lives together?" Putting it rather bluntly, I punched Damon in the arm to scold him silently and pointed out that anything we could dig up could be a potential clue and Alaric agreed, instructing Dorian to keep on digging whilst I made preparations to take Lucan out into town with Josie and Lizzie, with Bonnie and Caroline all in tow. We decided that we all just needed to take a day to just be ourselves, and since part of my identity was Lucan's mom, I was more than happy to fall back into that role and showed him the place where I grew up, walking with his hand in mine.
He was such a sweet and gentle boy with not a bad bone in his body, so even when Lizzie got a little rambunctious and ended up pushing him in order to get to the swings at the park first, he just picked himself up and dusted himself off, though Caroline reprimanded Lizzie and made her apologise. "It's okay, you can swing first if you want to Lizzie." Lucan told her and even helped hold the swing steady for her so that she could climb up as Bonnie cooed adoringly.
"I never thought such an angelic child could ever come from you, Lia. No offense, but he is way cuter than you ever were." She said to me as we sat on the park bench together just watching the kids as Caroline hovered a little more closely.
"Oh I totally agree. I was all course and grumpy as a kid. Lucan is very much his father's son. Owen was the best kind of man that could ever walk this green earth. He lived to serve others, and couldn't be more devoted to his family." Thinking of him brought up the sweet memories of our past and the reminder of the gaping hole I felt within me, grief and pain resurfacing until I could take a deep breath to maintain control over them as Bonnie took my hand to give it a comforting squeeze.
"I wish I could have met him." Grateful for her encouragement and comfort, I nodded my head in agreement and returned to admiring my perfect little boy, and I didn't think that way just because I'm biased. Lucan was everything to me, and I could tell from a glance that he had a good heart, one that would remain incorruptible for all time to come. We spent the day together whereby he became close friends with the twins and even told him about his older sister Hope, to which I had to explain that Hope was someone he had grown up with and not actually my daughter. It was a perfect day, and after he had tired himself out running around making memories, I carried him in my arms and tucked him up in my bed where I could hold him throughout the night just to prove to myself that he really was there with me.