Home Sweet Home

"I don't care what vamp you have an lead on, Darc," Cinaed grumbled into his cell phone as he got off of the bus in Portlaoise. "I just spent a whole day just flying out of Sydney and had to wait ten hours for a bus because I had just missed the last one when I got in, which was another hour trip. Haven't slept because I've either had to cram myself into what feels like fucking matchboxes or where I didn't feel safe sleeping. So, no, I'm not going to cut my trip to Ireland short to come help you on a hunt in Africa." Darcy, his older half-brother, laughed loudly on the other end of the phone call and said, "Alright, little brother, alright. You've more than earned the time away, but I do want you with me on a hunt soon now that you fully earned your blade. Maybe on the next one." "Next time,"Cinaed agreed, hauling his backpack up onto his shoulder. "Now, if you don't mind, I'm going to to go hike my way across town to my gran's house and sleep for at least a day." "Sleep well, Cin." Hitting the button to end the call, Cinaed tucked the phone into the inside breast pocket of his long coat as he moved towards the back of the bus where the other bags that had been stored underneath were being laid out. As soon as he spied his larger duffle bag, he took a long step forward and leaned past an older man to grab his bag. Hoisting it up onto his other shoulder, he headed for the outside of the bus station and stood on the sidewalk for a long moment as he worked to orient himself. It had been...Christ, it had been eight years since he had last set foot in Ireland. So much looked different to his twenty-one year-old self than if had to his thirteen year-old self who had left there. There had been lots of Skype chats over the years to his mum and Gran - then later Zoom when one of the clan tech wizards had encouraged them all to make the change. So he had seen plenty of Ireland over the years, enough to keep him missing it. Yet it felt weird to be back standing on the soil of the country that had birthed him. Especialy since he also knew that Niamh was off somewhere in the wind now, having left Australia on her own flight heading to the States at that same time he had. Cinaed had seen his dearest Auntie off near her gate - as his flight was leaving later - with a warm hug and a promise to keep in touch. "Text me when you're somewhere that's not Ireland," she had said firmly, her dark blue gaze serious. "I know that what your grandmother asked me to do isn't really relevant at this point and you're a man grown now. But I still worry and I'd rather know that you're safe." "Of course, Auntie," he had replied with a smile, pressing a kiss to the top of her head. "I'll keep you up to date of what's happening, don't you worry." When he stood there on the corner for too long, Cinaed dug into his coat again to fish out his phone and opened up the Google Maps app. After letting the GPS automatically set his current location to the spot he was standing in, he tapped out his grandmother's address that he still had perfectly memorized. With another few taps of his fingers, he had the directions pulled up and headed out, trudging tiredly along the sidewalks. Maeve Hancock lived in the very home that their ancestor Cahir Hancóc had built to safely house his wife and sons so very many centuries before. It had been passed down to Arte Hancóc after the death of his parents and then on to countless generations after who took care of the now ancient home. The old stonework of the house itself had been shored up several times with new stones and mortar and these days most of it was hidden by hardier woods that his gran's father had added to the outside of the house, except for where stones jutted out away from the house on things like the windows and doorframes. There also was no longer the old thatched roof, one of their ancestors having replaced it with a wooden roof sometime during the '30s or '40s. Niamh had, of course, known that his grandmother still lived in her adopted brother's old house and shared more than a few tales over the years about the place. As he approached the house, Cinaed felt a tired smile slowly stretch itself across his face. The place looked exactly as it had the last time that he had seen it - flowers in the old window boxes on the front, Gran's old gardening boots outside on the edge of the front step, and a stream of smoke spiraling up out of the chimney. He could smell baking bread and it sent him back a good nine years to his last breakfast at her kitchen table, eating thick brown bread smeared with butter and eggs cooked over easy. Rapping his knuckles on the door, he grimaced a little at the fact that he was taller than the damn entranceway but that wasn't his fault. It was the fault of whatever practical giant had thrown their genetics into his mother's bloodline because it certainly hadn't been from an actual Hancock, but whoever they had married. Even Niamh had commented that he was a tall bean sprout of a boy when he started hitting his full growth spurt at seventeen. And she had noted that while her adoptive father, brother, and nephew were tall, they were around his Mum and Gran's height and not his 6'7". Then the door opened and his gran looked up at him and suddenly he was home. "Hey, Gran," Cinaed said softly, grinning sheepishly as she looked up at him with shock. "Surprise." Right. Maybe he should have told them that he was coming back home...but he had wanted it to be a surprise. Gran slapped her hands over her face in shock, her grey eyes wide, and then she reached slowly out with them to press her fingertips against his chest. "You've gotten so tall," she breathed, because talking on computer screens didn't exactly lend itself to giving away anything about his height since they had always been sitting down when on it. Then Gran shook herself and added, "Well, come on in here, I was just finishing up making a late breakfast. You can have a bite to eat and then put yourself down in the guest room for a rest." Then, as he expected from her, she snorted and stated flatly, "You look like shit, boy." Cinaed burst out into a laugh at that and said, "This is what near to forty-eight hours awake makes me look like, Gran. Didn't help that neither planes nor buses are built for this ridiculousness." As he said the last, he gestured vaguely at his height and she smiled, tutting softly. "That's your great-great-grandfather's fault," Gran commented. "Beast of a man." She then turned away back into the house and walked away, calling back over her shoulder, "Come in and sit your bags down by the door. You remember my rules?" Chuckling as he ducked under the top of the door to enter the house, he called out, "Boots off at the door, coat on the rack, weapons in the chest?" "Very good!" came the call back. "Now put those away and come have breakfast." He was dead tired and really wanted to just go lay down, but Cinaed dug deep into his reserves of energy so he could spend at least an hour without falling asleep in his plate. First, he sat down on the old steamer chest by the door and took off his beaten up combat boots, setting them neatly by Gran's sneakers. Then he stood up and opened the chest he had just been sitting on, hooking his fingers into the tray that that had been built for the top to hide what was underneath. Moving the tray aside with its contents - a folded blanket tucked in next to various things for the outdoors like collapsed umbrellas, sunscreen, and a folded up rain poncho - he shook his head as he saw that what was hidden below hadn't changed much. There was a pair of knives there that he knew had been his mum's (and a gift from his father), the head of an old first World War trench shovel that was still sharp as all hell that he knew belonged to his great-great-grandfather, and a small gun safe that he knew held an old Smith and Wesson revolver that had been his grandfather's. Thankfully there was enough room for all of the shit that Darcy had insisted he needed as a hunter and Cinaed carefully set it inside. There was the gifted long knife, his sword, at least six smaller knives that Aisha had given him on his last birthday...and the gun that his father had given him when he had come back from his first solo hunt. It was an old Colt M1911 that he had been told his great-grandfather had brought back from the second World War and had later enchanted to use on vampires. Darcy had apparently gotten the Webley Mk.VI that their great-grandfather had actually been issued as his personal sidearm during his stint in the Australian Army. The Colt had been a trade with an American soldier for some cigarettes that had gotten them both in trouble with their superiors but hadn't ended up with the gun returned to its proper owner. As he tucked the gun into the safe and put everything back, Cinaed shook his head as he marveled at how much at changed. Eight years ago he had maybe carried a pocket knife. Now he had a vertiable arsenal at his disposal and the magic to get it anywhere if he wanted to, as spellwork on all of the weapons kept them invisible to anyone that wasn't magically inclined. He'd carved the runes for that work into them himself and done the ritual work for the casting, nearly driving Darcy crazy more than a few times with how focused he was on it. Rising from where he had taken a knee by the chest, Cinaed shrugged out of his coat and hung it on the coat rack behind the front door, slipping his cell phone out of the breast pocket and into his left back pocket. He then pulled another cell phone - this one just a small, shitty flip phone that he had picked up years ago and paid for himself - and texted Niamh's number. After a close call with one of the clan techs asking about who's number was in his phone when doing a data transfer, he had stopped using the fancy new one that they had given him for calling her. As much as she was responsible for protecting him, he was responsible for protecting her and he took that duty as seriously as he was certain his ancestors had when they had adopted her. Here safe at Gran's, he tapped out as he slowly made his way towards the kitchen. Breakfast and then bed for me. How's New York? Cinaed didn't expect the phone to immediately vibrate back in response and get a very grainy quality photo of Niamh holding up a glass of something in front of her grinning face in a dark club. It was accompanied a moment later by the text, Thanking the fact that there's a vampire who invested in making fake IDs for years because not being able to drink this would be a crime. Sleep well! He stopped just outside of the kitchen doorway to do the math of the time difference - it was four in the morning there - and then shoved the phone into the front pocket of his jeans. Niamh was over three hundred years old, if she wanted to stay out until four in the morning drinking she was more than responsible enough to do it. Ducking the doorway into the kitchen, Cinaed's stomach growled as the smell of not just fresh bread hit him but also a heaping pile of scrambled eggs and rashers on a plate. "Sit!" Gran commanded where she was still standing at the old iron stove set into a corner of the kitchen, still busy at cooking something. "You need a lot to fuel those long legs of yours and I doubt that you got anything worthwhile running around between here and Australia. I'll join you once I get these eggs done." Not one to be told twice - especially not by his grandmother - Cinaed settled himself at the old, heavy oak table that was her kitchen table and dug into the plate with gusto. He noticed when she finally did settle across from him and began eating delicately in comparison to his basically shoveling of eggs and meat into his mouth. It certainly was different to how he remembered mornings going previously but eight years ago he wasn't running on nearly forty-eight hours without sleep with only energy drinks, soda, airplane food, and some snacks from a vending machine in the bus station to run on. He also hadn't been 6'7" and two hundred something pounds of hunter trained muscle back then either. Gran didn't seem to mind his single-minded focus on his food, though. She just sat there and smiled, picking at her own between watching him with her hands folded beneath her chin. When he finally did push his plate away, she reached across the table with a weathered hand to snatch up one of his and squeezed it tightly. Cinaed blinked sleep out of his eyes and then got caught sideways by a jaw-cracking yawn that had the same force of a brutal punch. "Sorry," he apologized when it was over, smiling sheepishly at her. "None of that now, boy," his grandmother said kindly in turn. "You should go rest before you collapse, because I won't be able to get those long limbs of yours into bed on my own." "But..." Her hand squeezed his again and then she laced her fingers between his, Cinaed noting that they looked so small and fragile next to his that had all of his training scars on them now. Despite having once been 6'2" herself, she was now only 5'9" and though there was still strength in her, her age wrinkled hands felt so tiny within his own. He had noted the same thing with Niamh, though she was even shorter at 5'2" and had been a slightly built young woman when her infected blood had activated. It probably didn't help that he knew his grandmother was only going to get older and more fragile, while his adopted aunt was frozen in time. Shaking his head to not get distracted in his thoughts, he said, "I feel bad for eating your food and then just passing out." Gran fixed him with an unimpressed stare and Cinaed suddenly felt eight years old again when he had burnt himself trying to make breakfast. "Shall I make it an order?" she questioned, tilting her head slightly at him. "Working with your father's clan, I imagine you're very used to taking orders now." Something made him flinch at that comment and he shook his head. "No, Gran," Cinaed replied quickly, "you don't have to make it an order." "Good. I'd rather treat you like my only grandson, who I love and have missed having around, and not like some subordinate hunter who's too stubborn to take care of himself when he damn well knows better." She then pulled her hand from his and gently patted the back of his hand, continuing in a kinder tone, "Now, go get some rest and try to sleep until the morning. Then, we can have breakfast again and you can tell me all about your time in Australia that you never wanted to tell me over that fancy computer program. And why you didn't bother to tell me or your mother that you were coming home." Nodding, Cinaed said, "Alright, alright, fine. I'll go." As he pushed himself up from the table, he stopped and furrowed his brow, asking, "Do you want to know what weapons I brought into the house?" His grandmother just stared back at him flatly before saying, "I've worked with several Smith hunters, Cinaed, I know the sort of arsenals they carry with them. Is it all put away properly in the chest?" "Of course." "Then I shan't have to whip your shins for not taking care with them. Now off with you." Cinaed knew a dismissal when he heard one, so he just nodded his head and made his way back out into the main room of the house. Grabbing his backpack and duffle bag, he headed towards the only guest room in the house. There were only four rooms in the old house total - kitchen, main room, and the two bedrooms - and since his mother had moved out her old room had been a guest room. He unceremoniously dropped his bags at the end of the bed and then fall facedown onto it, laughing a little to himself as his feet ended up dangling off the end of the queen sized bed. The pure punch of exhaustion hit him as soon as he was horizontal and he had enough left in him to haul the quilt laying across the end of the bed out from under his legs. Cinaed managed to get it spread out on top of most of his body before his body, now in a place that he trusted, finally deciding that enough was enough. And he slept.

Timeframe: 2019 Location: Port Laoise, Ireland Event: A year or so after earning his place as a full hunter in his father's clan, Cinaed Hancock returns home to Ireland to visit his grandmother and mother, as well as to find out more about whatever is between their clan and the three turned O'Connell children of Marie Smith. Though he probably should have remembered how long of a trip it is between Australia and Ireland first. Consquences: Despite meaning to talk to his grandmother as soon as he gets back in Ireland, nearly forty-eight hours without sleep and the stress of travelling isn't a battle that Cinaed can fight and he ends up passing out before he can have the conversation he meant to with his grandmother.

Cinaed Hancock

The product of a brief fling during a hunt between Daniel Wolfe III, a hunter, and Bridget Hancock, Cinaed grew up between both of the worlds he came from. Living first in Ireland with his mother and then Australia with his father, he has trained as both witch and hunter. Though he also, of course, has secrets that he keeps - mainly the existence of one half-cursed by the name of Niamh O'Connell, who was adopted into the Hancock family by his own ancestor centuries ago.