Warnings: Language, gun violence, death (sort of)

Sentient

Chapter 03:

"Equal Opportunity Employer"

The man who wore Vergil's face looked me up and down—that long, sustained staring-thing guys do when they see an attractive woman on the street. Vergil would never do that. Seeing a carbon copy of Vergil's face performing that particular action made my skin crawl. Much as Vergil could be a controlling bastard, he had never, ever disrespected me like that, or made me feel like a sex object.

This guy…I didn't like him. And I didn't like it when he winked at me. I didn't like it at all.

"So you're what Vergil's been up to, huh?" he said. "Can't say I share his taste, but you're cute enough…provided you're into 'cute.' Me, I like 'sexy,' but I guess it's all relative. Whatever. No skin off my nose." He looked back up at the cabin's tall windows. "Though I gotta say I love the new digs. Very modern. Very 'Vergil.'" His eyes slid my way once more. "So where is he?"

"You…who are you?"

The words just slipped out. The man's eyes popped wide, showing off their gas-flame-blue color—the same color as Vergil's. My teeth ground at the realization. This man, he was identical to my Vergil.

How dare he!

"Are you telling me he's never mentioned me?" the man who-was-not-Vergil said. His eyes narrowed, angry and hurt and not surprised. "That bastard. Of course he wouldn't."

"Who the fuck are you?" I said. That time, I meant to say every word. "Why in the goddamn fucking hell do you look like Vergil? And what the hell do you mean, he's never fucking mentioned you? Why should he have mentioned you? Why the hell do you look like him? And who the fucking hell are you?"

My voice rose and rose and rose as I talked, and yeah, I wound up repeating myself a little, but by the time I was done, the confusion inside me had been replaced by anger—anger that covered a healthy dose of what felt suspiciously like fear, but anger nonetheless. No one had the right to wear Vergil's face like this. No one. I knew demons could take on a human disguise, but for one of them to take Vergil's face—

Wait. Was this guy a demon? I hadn't checked yet. Oops.

The expression he wore certainly looked human. He stared with amusement and a sort of wry, fascinated horror as I spoke. When I fell quiet, his lips curled into a grin.

"Dude. You've got a mouth on you," he said. "You're tiny and cute—but wow. Wow. It's like watching an American Girl Doll impersonate Samuel L. Jackson."

My jaw dropped. "An American Girl Doll?!"

"Yeah. You know. Small and big-eyed and adorable." The rat-bastard looked me up and down. "And short. Also short." He shifted on his motorcycle, a little bounce of excitement. "Hey, say that line from Snakes on a Plane!"

"Dude." Words failed me, so I fell back on a tried and true, "Fuck you!"

The man gave me another long, slow look, up and down and up again. His teeth gleamed when he favored me with a lascivious grin.

"That can be arranged," he said, "but something tells me my brother wouldn't approve."

"My aunt and uncle gave up."

Vergil sighed. "I told you to stop looking."

"I know," I said. I sat next to Vergil on the couch and leaned my head against the backrest, face toward the ceiling. He put aside the book he'd been reading and angled his body in my direction, knee just brushing my thigh. "I wish I hadn't. But I wanted to see what Ami and Karen were up to."

"You miss them."

"You know I do."

I'd been gone about two years, all told. It felt simultaneously like a lifetime and a mere hour. Life had gone on without me without a hiccup. Sure, my friends missed me, and they were still raising a fuss about my supposed disappearance, trying to get the authorities to look into it, but…it was like I hadn't mattered. Nothing really changed after I left, so far as I could see.

Except for my aunt and uncle. Life changed for them in one big way.

"They're selling the house," I said. "You know. My aunt and uncle's summer home, where I lived. They're selling it. I think they only kept it because I was living in it." I sighed, closing my eyes and sinking deeper into the couch cushions. "Good for them, I guess."

"Does it bother you, that they're selling the house?" Vergil asked.

"No. Yes. A little." I sighed again, grimacing. "Just makes me feel like they've really given up. Moved on without me."

"And that upsets you?"

"Of course it does." It irked me I should even have to say so aloud. "You'd think my only living family would want to know what happened to me. That's what families do."

Vergil didn't say anything. After about a minute I cracked an eye, but he wasn't looking at me. He'd turned his head toward the windows. Pale light made his hair gleam like spun silver. He was a statue carved from alabaster, eyes a burning blue flame that saw not the mountains and the forest outside the house, but rather…something else. Something far away, distant, and untouchable.

Something I didn't understand. Not at the time, anyway.

"Hey," I said. I grabbed his hand, squeezing his large, warm fingers with my smaller ones. His face turned smoothly in my direction, but his eyes were still gone. "You OK?"

"I'm fine," he said. His eyes returned to me, then, as present and intense as I'd come to expect. A frown tightened his lips. "I don't like seeing you upset."

"Then cheer me up, Aeneid."

I scooted next to him. He lifted his arm, curling it around me as I rested my cheek on his shoulder, forehead pressed to the side of his neck. He pillowed his chin on my hair as I draped my legs across his lap. He cupped my knee in his other hand, thumb tracing slow circles on the side of my thigh. I wound one hand into his shirt and cuddled as close as I could. He smelled great—leather, books, cologne, Vergil.

"Family is what you make of it, Jira," Vergil said. The words rumbled in his chest, the idling of a powerful engine. His breath stirred my hair while he spoke. "Your friends were more family to you than your aunt and uncle ever were. Your true family is still looking for you. You have no reason for sadness."

It felt warm, here in his arms. Warm, safe, and secure. Like I'd found a place I belonged.

Like if I went missing, someone in this place would come looking, and try to bring me home.

"The circumstances of our birth mean nothing," Vergil told me. His lips brushed my hair. "We choose our family."

I snorted. "If you're about to make some sappy proclamation about choosing me as your family, I'll remind you that the Blood Tie chose me for you."

"It found you. But I chose you, in the end."

I pulled my head off his chest so I could look at him. He looked sincere enough—as resolute as a brick wall, in fact.

"If the Tie chose anyone but you," he murmured, "I would not have gone to such lengths to ensure their safety. To make them happy. To bring them into my life, as I have done with you." His lips quirked. "And need I remind you that you had to choose me, too, in the end."

I rolled my eyes. "Yeah. And I almost didn't. The way to a girl's heart is not through constant detentions, despite what certain people may have heard to the contrary."

He looked utterly, infuriatingly, adorably unapologetic. "I had to get to know you somehow, didn't I?"

"Sure. But you're still never allowed to give dating advice, to anyone, ever."

Vergil laughed. The sound warmed me to my toes, and I caught fire when he kissed me.

But despite our talk of family that day, Vergil did not tell me about his brother.

Before I could process the strange man's words—before "brother" could sink in and wreak havoc with my perception of the man I thought I knew everything about—the door to the deck patio rattled open. Andre ran out of the house at full tilt, skidding to a stop near the stairs leading from the deck to the driveway. When he saw the-man-who-was-not-Vergil, he held up his hands and slipped into a low crouch, a fighting stance if I've ever seen one. His eyes gleamed bright and wild, teeth on full display, glaring at Not-Vergil so ferociously that my internal magic sparked to life on reflex. A skittering black aura surrounded Andre in a rippling cloud of tension—and fear.

Andre was afraid of this man. Afraid, but willing to fight.

Not-Vergil reacted before I did. One minute he straddled his bike, the next he'd leapt off it in a swirl of leather coat and barreled headlong in my direction. I shrieked, hands up to ward him off, but he threw an arm around my waist and spun—spun and set me down, gently, on the driveway. Um. That, I had not been expecting. Then he turned to face Andre, blocking the way between Andre and I with his body.

He'd also drawn guns. Two huge guns, one black and one white. Gun I somehow hadn't noticed amid the rest of his complicated leather ensemble.

To my horror, he aimed these guns at Andre.

"Get back!" the man snarled in Vergil's voice. "That thing will kill you as soon as look at you."

I started to tell him he was an idiot, that Andre was my friend—but my magic and my adrenaline were both still pumping strong. The man's aura swirled around his body in a cloud of brilliant red, drawn tight against his skin like a ruby shield.

The aura, while I'd certainly never seen it before, was somehow familiar. Not its color, per se, but its shine, depth, strength, luminosity…it reminded me of Vergil.

I'd come to learn Vergil's aura possessed a mixture of both demonic and human traits.

So too did this man's.

Andre, oblivious to my internal turmoil, took a step closer to the top of the stairs. The man raised his guns higher in response.

"Leave, before I kick your goddamn ass," he said. "I don't know what you think you're doing, but I won't let you hurt her."

Took a minute to realize "her" meant me. Dude, did this guy have white-knight syndrome out the wazoo or what? Snorting, I stepped past the man and grabbed his wrist. He looked like I'd just revealed to him I was really three opossums in a trench coat and not the damsel in distress he assumed I was when I said, "Cool it, asshole, or I'll kick your ass."

Took him a minute to reply. When he did, he shot me a skeptical glance and chuckled. "Um—look, babe, I know that guy up there looks human, but trust me, he's not." He shook me off and repositioned us so he once again stood between Andre and myself. "Now go hide behind the garage and let me—"

Andre chose that moment to scream.

I'd only seen Andre scream once before. He'd shown me because I was curious about why he never spoke, not because we were in danger, and he had only screamed with a fraction of his power.

Judging by the damage this scream wrought, he was using a whole fucking lot more than that other time.

Andre opened his mouth wide—so wide it look like his skull was splitting, cheeks stretched to their breaking point—and let loose a peal of sound so loud and so high-pitched, the windows on the deck burst in a shrieking shower of broken glass. His eyes burned scarlet, hot coals set in a grotesquely distended face. I clapped my hands over my ears, but luckily Not-Vergil had the wherewithal to grab me around the waist again and leap to one side, toward the garage. He was just in time, too. The air in front of Andre's face distorted, a mirage on a hot day, and then the concrete where Not-Vergil had been standing exploded in a shower of gravel and dirt.

When the dust settled, there was a crater the size of a bathtub on the driveway.

Not-Vergil stared at the crater for second. Then he looked down, at the tails of his long coat.

The edges looked like they'd been through a blender.

"Dude. Not cool. I just got this thing tailored!" said Not-Vergil—and he aimed the gun in the hand not holding me before firing off a shot.

The bullet hit Andre squarely between the eyes.

In a shower of blood, he fell.

My vision tunneled.

Everything around me went deathly, darkly quiet.

My hands clenched around Not-Vergil's arm.

"Fuck that guy. I love this coat. Though I gotta tell ya," he was saying, "I expected more of a fight out of that one. The last time I fought a Siren, I—the fuck are you doing?"

I had summoned my magic and coated him with it, head to toe, top to bottom, doing with my magic to him what he'd done to me with his eyes. He began to float about an inch off the ground, ruined coattails tumbling about his heels. Then I grabbed him and, screaming wordlessly, slammed him with all my mental might toward the garage. I saw a brief flash of shocked blue before he went sailing, smashing against the garage with a thud. He fell to the ground on his face and lay there, stunned.

"That," I said, panting, "was my groundskeeper, you useless, motherfucking dipshit!"

The man stirred. His hands pressed against the ground as he pushed himself onto his knees. Sadly, he wasn't bleeding. Hell, he didn't even look winded. He just shot me a look of pure astonishment, tossed his platinum hair out of his eyes, and said: "Wait. You mean to tell me your groundskeeper is a demon?" He frowned. "And that move you just used. You ain't a demon, so what the hell are you?"

Deadpan, I told him: "I'm an equal opportunity employer, motherfucker."

The-man-who-was-not-Vergil looked appalled.

So I grabbed him with my magic and slammed him against the pavement a few more times.

Lemme tell ya, it felt fantastic.

NOTES:

Dante is now Jira's yo-yo. At least until he starts fighting back.

I've started posting the "By Blood Connected" rewrite (AKA "By Blood Connected: Restoration"). Would love some comments on that, if I haven't heard from you.

Also thinking of giving this story a different title since I think the current one doesn't make sense anymore. Thoughts?

MANY THANKS to those who reviewed the previous chapter. This is for you: Ariel Wild, Ikara-o-Kage, noiroux, Divine Demonic Assassin, and Innocence and Instinct.