Covet (Clann)

and bloody body that even magic couldn’t save after the rogue vamp councilman Gowin had ripped a hole through Tristan’s chest, I had known I couldn’t let Tristan die no matter what the consequences. Right or wrong, turning Tristan had been the only decision I could possibly make at the time.
    Now the question was whether we could survive that decision.
    Tristan and I had been through so much to get to this point. And yet none of it had prepared me for the battle to come. Dad said the most danger for fledglings was in the first few days after turning, when the human mind struggled to assimilate the vamp DNA. During this phase, the brain tended to react as if to a concussion, shutting off the memory center and operating solely on the baser levels of senses and instincts. The memory would return in time, but it could take days.
    In the meantime, Dad warned that Tristan might be highly emotional and irrational sometimes, and have difficulty concentrating for long periods. In addition, Tristan would have the vamp impulse to feed with no understanding of why he felt such cravings, and he’d have the speed, strength and reflexes of a full vamp.
    As Tristan’s sire, or maker, it was my responsibility to fix him, to bring him back to some semblance of who he once was. If I failed, if Tristan revealed to human society that vampires really existed before I could help him recover his memories and self control, the council would kill him.
    The cabin door creaked out in warning, and my shoulders tensed.
    Just me, Dad thought as he slowly walked over to join me.
    I couldn’t stop a sigh of relief. Thank God I had Dad to turn to for advice on how to train a fledgling, because I was completely clueless here.
    “Come to get some fresh mountain air?” Dad murmured.
    “No, just needing some space to worry about Tristan. He can hear my every thought, whether I want him to or not, and I can hear his. He’s so lost and confused right now. How are we going to tell him about everything?”
    “We cannot,” Dad said. “We must be patient and allow his memories to return to him on their own. He will never truly believe what he does not remember himself, and right now he is in much too volatile a state to handle all the ramifications of our current situation. You will have to protect him from your thoughts.”
    “He trusts me completely. What if he never remembers it all? What if I’m not strong enough, or smart enough, or we don’t train him right or fast enough…?”
    Dad rested a hand on my shoulder. “Now you know all that I have gone through with you. Becoming responsible for another’s continued existence is the heaviest responsibility there is. But it does grow easier with time.”
    Time. How much did we even have? “Will the council try to find us out here?”
    He shook his head. “They will simply watch the news reports for now. The Clann, however…”
    “Tristan’s mom is leading them now. Why would they be a problem?”
    “We both know how she feels about our kind.”
    And how Mrs. Coleman blamed me for turning her only son into the very thing she feared the most in life.
    “She might hate my guts,” I agreed. “But she’d never send someone to hunt down her own son. She adores Tristan. And she knows he needs us to help him get better.”
    “True. But as the new leader, it might be a while before she regains full control of the Clann. When we left the Circle, the Clann clearly was not appeased by Gowin’s death. Many descendants were voicing their belief that the council secretly sanctioned his actions, and it may take Nancy quite some time to convince them otherwise. In the meantime, it is reasonable for us to be cautious in case there are descendants who would wish to find us and seek retribution for turning their former leader.”
    After his father’s death, Tristan had been voted Clann leader only minutes before Gowin, his rogue army, and the misinformed vamp council had attacked the Clann in the Circle. But even before the attack, the hatred and fear between the vamps and the Clann ran centuries deep, sparked by the danger each species presented the other and fed by the scars of loved ones lost in countless wars. Those wars had only ended after Tristan’s father and grandfather worked for years to create a peace treaty with the vamp council. A treaty that now seemed on the brink of total failure in the wake of last night’s battle.
    I sighed and stared at the seemingly endless miles of