"I'll go," I told them as we once again sat around that dining table. I saw a slow smile spread across Angus' features, and Oliver nodded in satisfaction. Hugo seemed astonished at first, but then he looked across at me and winked in approval. Rebecca had decided she was going to call him Dad, but it seemed wrong to me. He looked almost as young as I was, so I stuck with Hugo, and it suited us both just fine. I'd spent time with him in the last few days too, and I'd enjoyed his old fashioned edginess. He was an interesting man, but almost as reserved as Rebecca and I were, so progress was slow. But it was steady too.
"I'm going too," said Rebecca.
"You probably shouldn't," suggested Julia carefully.
"I'm going," said Rebecca again, a stubborn frown creasing her forehead. I knew that look - I'd seen in plenty of times before - and I knew that chances were she would be coming with us.
"We should all go," said Angus, surprising us all. "We have about four hundred blood drinking vampires to take down, and a few dozen female vamps to either liberate or euthanize," he said, flinching at the last distasteful word. We had unanimously decided that any female iron metaboliser whose thoughts were more aligned with Anne's than ours would be destroyed. We had all voted in favour of that action, but the execution would give any of us pause. It stuck in our throats.
"We owe it to ourselves and to a lesser extent, the blood drinkers," continued Angus. "If we can put them all down relatively quietly, the world might never realise what they are, or that there are so many of them. If one or two are discovered by the authorities, they might be seen as an aberration. More than that and they'd be labelled a plague, and that would spell trouble for us, and those that are like us out there. Plagues trigger reactions. Sometimes these reactions are disproportionate to the threat the plague poses. An unknown and probably large number of superhuman creatures who live on blood will instigate an almost catastrophic reaction. And when they realise that some of them look normal..." his voice trailed off, leaving us to draw our own conclusions.
"We're screwed," said Oliver succinctly, finishing the thought.
We all nodded solemnly. Really, when he put it like that, there wasn't much of a choice.
"And to be perfectly honest," Angus continued unhurriedly, "I don't think we would have been able to do it without Mark. As a group we could only have taken on a couple of dozen at a time without causing too much of a disturbance."