Free The Vampire Legacy III; Familiar Souls by Dawn Gray

seven-year-old sat in the middle of her bed, as the flames
erupted around her, and looked at him. A blazing blue light
surrounded her body and nothing seemed to be touching
her.
    “ Sage, we have to leave
now.” Michael yelled at her. Sage looked at her room, and as if
just coming out of a trance, she started to scream. The blue light
faded and Michael grabbed her off the bed. He ran down the stairs
and out passed the dining room. There, as he quickly glanced at the
table, sat two charred corpses. He looked at them, the odd way they
just slumped there and then he felt the child that wiggled in his
arms. This broke him out of the trance and he headed for the door,
clearing the threshold and most of the lawn before the house
exploded into a giant ball of flames.
    He picked his head up, after being
flung to the ground by the blast, and was sitting on a chair at the
burial of his two closest mortal friends. Their small, but powerful
child, holding his hand tightly as she sat to his left. She looked
over the two mahogany coffins with a straight face, and then she
looked up at Michael.
    “ Are you going to be my
daddy, now?” She whispered to him. Michael looked at her and hugged
her close to him as they watched the caskets being lowered, he
wished he could, but from what the police had told him, Sage’s
parents were dead before the fire started and that meant that Sage
would be in trouble. Sage’s aunt and uncle agreed to take her, care
for her as long as they could. Michael agreed to help them with the
expenses and sent them money for her clothing and school, and paid
them some for living expenses.
    He visited her often, but mostly at
night and away from her family. She knew who he was and what he
meant to her, and her to him, but it had been six years ago that he
stopped talking to her, verbally, because there was a threat to her
existence if he didn’t leave her be. Now, he needed her there so
that he could protect her, and he prayed that she returned to him,
safely.
    Michael rolled over on the grass and
looked at bare toes, dirty bare toes. He looked up and smiled at
Jack, who smiled down at him. The two year old seemed full of
mischief and touched Michael on the head, then ran off to chase the
small birds that lived off the land there. Michael sat up and
looked at Ashley as she walked towards him. She smiled and sat down
on the grass beside him, then looked over the water.
    “ Thinking about her?” She
asked. Michael nodded.
    “ She’s all I have left of
Douglas and Yvette.” Michael sighed. He looked up at the sky and
sighed.
    “ So, why would they be
after her if she’s just a normal girl?” Ashley
questioned.
    “ She’s not normal.”
Michael smiled and thought of how she used to overpower him, just
by a look. “She’s part of me.”
    “ In what way?” Ashley
asked. Michael looked at her and shook his head. “What did you
do?”
    “ The doctor called it a
blood interlace.” Michael sighed. “And, it was the only way to save
her life.”
    “ How?”
    “ When Yvette, her mother,
was 33 weeks pregnant, they were in a massive car crash, involving
a tracker trailer and a bus. Yvette was in a coma, Douglas, her
husband, was almost in a complete body cast. They weren’t sure if
either of them was going to live, but Sage’s heart was beating
normally, so they kept Yvette alive for the baby’s sake. I had
legal custody of Sage if either of them should die, so she wasn’t
without a family. When Yvette woke up, two weeks later, Sage’s
heart rate dropped, and the doctor knew that there was internal
bleeding in the womb.”
    “ Why didn’t they just take
her out?”
    “ It wasn’t that easy,
because Sage was the one that was bleeding. Michael closed his eyes
and breathed in deeply. “The doctor wasn’t easy to convince when I
told him that I could save her. He thought I was nuts, but I showed
him just what I was. He was very professional about it. He’d never
done it before, any kind of procedure