Shaeido had explicitly told him to enjoy himself at Damien's party, and he was admittedly happy to do so. Thorn had organized an excellent party for Damien, and Adrian was impressed in spite of himself. The only thing he could not understand in Thorn's choice of entertainment was the clown he had hired. What in my father's name was he thinking? Adrian thought to himself, catching himself staring at the freakish-looking clown distributing balloon animals, while he practiced backflips on the inflatable bouncer. That is decidedly not funny, that is creepy. The guy looks like a child molester, for crying out loud! But his misgivings about Thorn's decisions on who to hire to entertain a yard full of kids were forgotten soon enough. He was happy enough seeing Damien grinning and laughing and having fun on his birthday.

He wondered, as Damien grabbed him by the wrist and pulled him off the bouncer toward the slide, insisting Adrian join him in doing everything at the party, if this was what a parent felt, the emotions he felt for his brother. He sometimes wondered what Thorn and Katharine felt about Damien. Katharine's emotions, he guessed, were likely the closest to what a real parent would feel for her blood related sons; as she knew nothing about their adoptions or what had happened to her real children.

He could not decipher Thorn's feelings toward them, with Thorn's knowing that they were adopted and his real children were dead. This lack of knowledge worried Adrian. He had made it a point to spend patient hours figuring out exactly what each person that affected his life knew about them and thought about them. He knew that knowledge was a major form of power, and holding this power over those that would oppose him and Damien was of great importance to him.

One day, Adrian had known for a while, his "parents" would discover the truth about their adopted children, at which point they would become his enemies and he would have to fight them, for Damien's life and his own. He had given careful thought over the years as to how he would fight this battle when it came, but his plans were constantly shifting, as new knowledge, ideas, and variables were thrown into the mix of swirling thought.

The truth was Adrian was not at all sure he was prepared.

This thought only reinforced his feeling that perhaps he needed the knowledge a new protector would have to pass on to him. As he pondered this, a bright flash he noticed out of the corner of his eye distracted him, and he turned to look and find out what had caused it. A photographer, of course. The flash had come from a camera, from the photographer taking a picture of a smiling Holly. Adrian briefly wondered why. Holly was pretty enough, but likely the photographer wanted pictures for a newspaper. Why would he need to take pictures of Holly? And why would a newspaper cover a politician's five-year-old child's birthday party, anyway? Wasn't there anything better to cover? Adrian dismissed these thoughts from his mind, and was about to follow Damien to the carousel, when something else caught his eye.

It was a dog; a burly-looking Rottweiler, hidden by the shade of a large tree, a distance behind Holly. He would have wondered how a dog had gotten onto the property without Thorn's consent if he hadn't felt a strange presence about this dog, a sort of familiarity. A feeling of friendliness and comradeship directed at him. It was similar to the feeling of kinship he and Shaeido shared.

He stared at the dog and it stared back, smiling its dog-smile with the pink tongue lolling out of its mouth; the kind that seemed to be saying, "Hello." The way the dog looked at him made him feel like it knew him. Like they were friends that had met years ago and not seen one another until now.

"Adrian?" said a puzzled voice behind him. "Adrian? Don't you want to come?" Damien had turned back to see why he was not coming to ride the carousel with him.

Adrian did want to, but he also wanted to stay and find out if his perceptions were true, if this dog was one of the new protectors Shaeido had said were coming. "You go ahead; I'll be there in a minute. I'll come as soon as I can."

Damien deemed this acceptable and ran off. Adrian turned back to study the dog, and realized that he wasn't the only one who had caught sight of it. Holly was looking at it too, he saw. But it didn't look to Adrian as though she felt the same connection to the dog as him. It had caught and held her gaze, as it had done to him, but it was different. They stared at each other, amber canine eyes into coffee brown human eyes, but the effects were not the same. Holly did not sense what he had sensed in the dog's eyes, which burned with unusual intelligence. She did not feel what he felt.

In fact, it didn't look like she felt much of anything at all. A sort of dullness had come over Holly's eyes and body, and she looked like her spirit had been washed away, had faded out of her. Her movements looked numb and unconscious of her will as Adrian, puzzled as to her sudden change in behavior, watched her walk away as if in a daze towards the house, or more accurately, to the tool shed. It looked to Adrian almost like she was in a trance of some kind. That's it, he realized. She's hypnotized. Or something like that. The dog hypnotized her – no normal dog could do that! It's got to be one of the new protectors.

He whipped back around to face the dog again, fearing for the fleeting moment it took for Adrian to turn back around that it would not be there. He worried that it had disappeared, its purpose completed. But he found it had remained there, and that it had not moved from its position at all. He gazed at the dog again, now knowing for sure what it was. It may have been his imagination, but its canine smile seemed to widen a little. Then it closed its mouth and assumed a more formal expression.

Adrian wordlessly raised his right hand to it in a half-wave. The dog in turn bowed its large head, never breaking eye contact with Adrian. Then it turned and loped away into the trees. Adrian, after watching the dog retreat into the shadows until it vanished from his sight, turned and walked off, remembering what Shaeido had said about leaving everything to the protectors, to rejoin Damien. He had to admit, that carousel looked fun to him, and he was eager to try it out.

All I have to do now, he thought, is sit back and wait to see how Shaeido plans to finish off Holly.

~0~