Free The Lie (The Skyy Huntington Series) by Holly Hudspeth Page A

other vampires in the area. I don’t know if I would consider any of them friends. As for family, no. It’s a long story…but my mother is back in Scotland still. She comes to visit a few times a year. I do have some other close vampire friends in different parts of the world as well.”
    Wow, I wasn’t expecting that. His mother was still alive? “Your mother? As in your real mother?” I asked, surprised.
    He chuckled, “Yes, my real, real mother, the one who gave birth to me in 1437.”
    “You two are close then? If she comes to visit often?” I asked.
    “Yes, we are very close.” He hesitated to say more but I could tell that there was more behind it than what he was letting on. I knew I shouldn’t push the subject, but I did anyway.
    “Is she…also a…vampire? Or is she something else?” A few weeks ago I had no idea that the supernatural really did exist so who knows, maybe Mommy was a werewolf or a zombie?
    I heard him take in a breath and hold it for a moment. I was regretting asking the question at this point. “Yes, she is also a vampire. If you want to know the whole story I can tell you,” he offered politely.
    “I’ve got all night,” I replied, anxious to hear more about the vampire world.
    “Very well. My mother had nine children, I was her last child, the baby of the family. My father was a farmer, and having to keep eleven people fed was a full time job for him. He wasn’t around much, and my mother only had two boys out of the nine children, so as you can guess once I was old enough to learn how to hold a plow I was put to work in the fields.
    My mother and father didn’t really have a good relationship, it was an arranged marriage and there was little to no love between them. He would work long days and spend most of his nights drinking either at home or at the tavern. He was never mean to us kids, but I heard he and my mother fight a lot and I had seen him hit her on more than one occasion.
    My older brother ran away from home when he was fourteen, which devastated my mother. He would write to her once every few years, but we never saw him again. My father died when I was twelve, and being the only male left in the family all the responsibilities fell on my shoulders. There was no time to be a kid and to enjoy life for me, I was in the fields from sunup to sundown. My sisters started getting married, one by one, and moving out until it was just me, my mother and my sister Aileas left.
    Deciding that we didn’t need a huge farm and a huge house anymore, I put the land up for sale, and moved my mother and sister to a nice cottage on a lake. By this time I was in my mid-twenties. My mother was hounding me to find a wife and settle down, but I had no interest in any of the rough country ladies in the area.
    By the time I was nearing thirty my mother’s health started to deteriorate. We lived in a very small village, and our ‘doctor’ was no more educated in medicine than I was. I left for Edinburgh when I was thirty-one to try to find some medicine and possibly hire a physician who would travel back with me to tend to my mother.
    I met a man in the city, who claimed to be a physician. He was foreign and his accent was very thick. He was quite odd, but well dressed and seemed to be knowledgeable on my mother’s condition…which in today's modern world of medicine we would diagnose as cancer. Looking back on it, I should have known something was off with this man. He was very eager to leave the city, and as fast as possible for no money. He only required passage to my village, which he asked many, many questions about on the journey back. He told us his name was Lucius and never gave a last name, and never offered up anything more than that as personal information.
    Once we arrived I found that my mother was very close to dying. Lucius administered many different tonics to her over the next few weeks, none of which seemed to help. He would spend the nights out until almost sunrise,