Sons Of Destiny

'I asked Desmond to free your spirit. Guilt drove you to the Lake of Souls, and would have kept you there eternally – there is no natural escape from that Lake of the damned. But rescue is possible. Souls can be fished out. Knowing that you were my half-brother, I felt honour-bound to free you.'

'What about Steve?' I asked. 'He was your half-brother too.'

'Steve deserves his imprisonment.' Her eyes were hard. 'I feel pity for him, since he was to some extent a victim of our father's meddling. But Steve's evil was primarily of his own making. He chose his path and now must suffer the consequences. But you tried to do good. It wasn't fair that you should rot in the Lake of Souls, so I pleaded with our father to help.' She chuckled. 'Needless to say, he refused.

'He came to me a few months ago,' she continued. 'He realized his plans were unravelling and he saw me as his only solution. He'd spent most of the time since your death trying to convince me to have children, with no more success than I'd had trying to get him to free you. But this time he took a fresh approach. He said we could help each other. If I had a child, he'd free your soul.'

'You agreed to that?' I roared. 'You sold out the world just to help me?'

'Of course not,' she grunted.

'But you said you were pregnant.'

'I am.' She looked back at me and smiled shyly. 'My first thought was to reject our father's offer. But then I saw a way to use it to our advantage. There is still no guarantee of a peaceful settlement between the vampires and vampaneze. It looks promising but is by no means certain. If talks break down, the war could continue, and that would play into our father's hands. He would have time to go back to the past and create a new leader, one who could pick up where Steve left off.

'I was thinking of this when Desmond put his suggestion to me. I recalled the way you tricked him, and wondered what you would do in my situation. Then, in a flash, I saw it.

'I accepted his proposal but told him I wasn't sure whether I wanted a vampire's child or a vampaneze's. He said it didn't matter. I asked if I could choose. He said yes. So I spent some time with Gannen Harst, then with Vancha March. When I returned to our father, I told him I had chosen and was pregnant. He was so delighted, he didn't even complain when I refused to reveal who the father was – he just quickly arranged to send me here to free you, so that we could move forward without any further distractions.'

She stopped talking and rubbed her stomach with her hands. She was still smiling that strange shy smile.

'So whose is it?' I asked. I didn't see what difference it made but I was curious to know the answer.

'Both,' she said. 'I am having twins – one by Vancha, one by Gannen.'

'A vampire child and a vampaneze child!' I cried, excited.

'More than that,' Evanna said. 'I have allowed the three blood lines to mix. Each child is one third vampire, one third vampaneze, and one third me. That's how I've tricked him. He thought any baby of mine would divide the clans, but instead they will pull them closer together. My children, when they are ready, will breed with other vampires and vampaneze, to give birth to a new, multi-race clan. All divisions will be erased and finally forgotten.

'We're going to create peace, Darren, in spite of our father. That's what you taught me – we don't have to accept destiny, or Des Tiny. We can create our own future, all of us. We have the power to rule our lives – we just have to make the choice to use it. You chose when you sacrificed your life. Now I've chosen too – by giving life. Only time will tell what our choices lead to, but I'm sure that whatever future we help usher in, it has to be better than the one our father planned.'

'Amen to that!' I muttered, then followed her silently down the tunnel, thinking of the future and all the surprises and twists it might hold. My head was buzzing with thoughts and ideas. I was having to take on board so much, so quickly, that I felt overwhelmed by it all, not sure what to make of everything. But there was one thing I was absolutely sure of – when Mr Tiny found out about Evanna's babies, he'd all but explode with anger!

Thinking of that, and the nasty little meddler's face when he heard the news, I burst out laughing. Evanna laughed too, and the laughter stayed with us for ages, following us down the tunnel like a flock of chuckling birds, acting almost like a protective spell against the banks of walled-in, ever-moving, ever-reaching monsters.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

About an hour later the tunnel ended and we entered the home of Desmond Tiny. I'd never really thought of him having a home. I just assumed he wandered the world, always on the move, in search of bloodshed and chaos. But, now that I considered it, I realized every monster needs a den to call its own, and Mr Tiny's had to be the strangest of them all.

It was a huge – and I mean HUGE – cave, maybe a couple of miles or so wide, and stretching as far ahead as I could make out. Much of the cave was natural, stalagmites and stalactites, waterfalls, beautifully weird rock colours and formations. But much more of it was incredibly unnatural.

There were grand old cars from what I guessed must be the 1920s or 1930s floating in the air overhead. At first I thought they were attached to the ceiling by wires, but they were in constant motion, circling, crossing paths, even looping around like planes, and not a wire in sight.

There were mannequins all over the place, dressed in costumes from every century and continent, from a primitive loincloth to the most outrageous modern fashion accessories. Their blank eyes unsettled me – I got the feeling that they were watching me, ready to spring to life at Mr Tiny's command and leap upon me.

There were works of art and sculpture, some so famous that even an art cretin like me recognized them – the Mona Lisa, The Thinker, The Last Supper. Mixed in with them, displayed like art exhibits, were dozens of brains preserved in glass cases. I read a few of the labels – Beethoven, Mozart, Wagner, Mahler. (That one gave me a jump – I'd gone to a school named after Mahler!)

'Our father loves music,' Evanna whispered. 'Where humans collect sheet music or gramophone records-' She obviously hadn't heard about CDs yet! ' -he collects brains of composers. By touching them, he can listen to all the tunes they ever composed, along with many they never completed or shared with the world.'

'But where does he get them from?' I asked.

'He travels to the past when they have just died and robs their graves,' she said, as though it was the most casual thing in the world. I thought about questioning the right and wrong of something like that, but there were weightier issues to deal with, so I let it slide.

'He likes art too, I take it,' I said, nodding at a flowery Van Gogh.

'Immensely,' Evanna said. 'These are all originals of course – he doesn't bother with copies.'

'Nonsense!' I snorted. 'These can't be real. I've seen some of the real paintings. Mum and Dad-' I still thought of my human Dad as my real father, and always would. ' -took me to see the Mona Lisa in the Loo once.'

'The Louvre,' Evanna corrected me. 'That is a copy. Some of our father's Little People are created from the souls of artists. They make perfect copies of pieces he especially admires. Then he slips back to the past and swaps the copy for the original. In most cases even the actual artist cannot tell the difference.'

'You're telling me the Mona Lisa in Paris is a fake?' I asked sceptically.

'Yes.' Evanna laughed at my expression. 'Our father is a selfish man. He always keeps the best for himself. What he wants, he takes – and he normally wants the best of everything. Except books.' Her voice became pointed, as it had earlier when she'd been talking about his attitude towards books. 'Desmond never reads works of fiction. He doesn't collect books or pay any attention to authors. Homer, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Dickens, Tolstoy, Twain – all have passed him by unmarked. He doesn't care what they have to say. He has nothing to do with the world of literature. It's as if it exists in a separate universe from his.'

Once again I didn't see her point in telling me this, so I let my interest wander. I'd never been a big art fan, but even I was impressed by this display. It was the ultimate collection, capturing a slice of pretty much all the artistic wonder and imagination mankind had ever conjured into being.

There was far too much for any one person to take in. Weapons, jewellery, toys, tools, albums of stamps, bottles of vintage wine, Faberge eggs, grandfather clocks, suites of furniture, thrones of kings and queens. A lot of it was precious, but there were plenty of worthless items too, stuff which had simply caught Mr Tiny's fancy, such as bottle tops, oddly shaped balloons, digital watches, a collection of empty ice-cream tubs, thousands of whistles,