Arran hardly noticed the drive back to Rose House, if he had been paying attention he would have gone straight to his room but as it was he found himself standing in the main entrance way across from his mother and uncle at the bar.

There was the kind of silence that suggested they had finished talking abruptly and they both had their eyes on him, but Arran had nothing to say. He made his way toward his bedroom quickly and was nearly at the door before his mother stopped him.

"Come here, Arran," she called, her voice soft but loud.

He didn't want to look at his mother directly and so he found himself staring at her feet as he turned back. She was still wearing the unexpected motorcycle boots but the helmet was nowhere to be seen. She had a drink in her hand and as he finally met her gaze she looked completely calm.

The woman he had seen kill another person just a few hours earlier looked no more perturbed than if she'd had a long day.

"What do you want?" Arran asked tersely.

"Is your friend okay?"

"She's fine. Is that everything? I'd like to go to bed."

"Arran sit down, we should talk about what happened tonight."

He kept expecting some kind of explosion, some sort of energy that suggested the events of tonight had been real. But all there was were the faces of his mother and uncle, calm, impassive. His own racing heart the only counterpoint.

"I don't think this is the kind of thing that you can talk through," said Arran.

"Your friend nearly died-"

"And someone else did, at your hand, just in case you'd forgotten."

Celyn and Lex shared a look that Arran couldn't read, she took a long sip of her drink.

"They were nothing more than vagrants," started Lex, "when we got to Manchester it became clear that they were only even in Britain because they had been chased out of America."

"Oh excellent, that totally excuses murder-"

"They were going to kill your friend," interjected Celyn. "What exactly did you expect would happen?"

If he were being honest with himself, he had no idea. He had expected more of a fight and if Celyn had killed the man in the middle of such a fight it would have been much more excusable in his eyes. But there hadn't really been much of a threat and so he expected his mother to take charge and somehow know what to do.

"I thought you'd take all of them to the council, that way if they had been executed it would have been legitimate." Arran wasn't even sure that they'd even have been punished much beyond a fine.

"Legitimate? This is my county, anything that I want to do on my own turf is legitimate."

"So that makes you the benign dictator? The arbitrator of who lives and who dies. Zooming in on a motorbike and shooting people like you're in a shitty action film?"

"It's registered under a different address so that if I'm caught on camera going somewhere that I really shouldn't, it doesn't go straight back to me. Besides, it's convenient."

"Yeah super convenient for superseding the council whenever you feel like it."

"You're putting an awful lot of faith in the council all of a sudden, boy," remarked a bored looking Lex.

"If there's one thing I can trust the council to do, it's to punish vampires!"

Once again Lex and Celyn shared a look and Arran felt his chest tighten. Their knowing looks and their shared calmness against his own aggravation made him feel like a child who's tantrum was just barely being entertained.

"In the last year or so," began Lex, slowly, "we think that vampire activity in the UK has nearly doubled, but there has been no rise in convictions from the council. You must have noticed more travelers coming through, especially in the cities."

"Yes but haven't been doing anything, I'm not stupid, I check the news." Arran had been aware for his whole life that vampires got a hard wrap and while he would gladly argue that it was undeserved, he couldn't deny that sometimes the system was necessary.

"You've only been watching our news," said Celyn. "Which isn't really our news anyway, it may as well have a council seal on the logo. It's all owned by the same people."

Arran couldn't think of a single reason why the witches wouldn't report on vampire attacks, it was their main source of content most days.

"What are you talking about?" He asked, he could feel his anger washing away, leaving him feeling drained.

"Things in this country are getting worse and I won't let it get to a point where the council has enough grounds to..." she took an uncertain breath, "to do something drastic. Especially if their fault for letting things slide."

Arran didn't know what to make of any of it. On the one hand, as much as he hated the control that witches had over so much of his life he had always seen the council as the people who kept things in order. There were plenty of vampires filled with superiority over humans and they needed to be kept in check, if his mother started to deal out vigilante justice wherever she saw fit it could start to unravel that order.

But if things really were as unstable as she made them out to be, perhaps it was the only way to maintain peace.

"I don't want to have this conversation right now," was all he could say.

"What do you want, Arran?" Asked Celyn, softly.

All Arran wanted was ignorance. He wanted to live a human life, to date Naomi, get a degree, end up with someone and grow old and die with them. He didn't want to live an endless life in a fragile, secret world.

"I want to go to bed."

He left without another word but didn't make it up to his bed, he undressed himself and got into the shower, trying to distract himself. The water was warm and soothing but he couldn't stop his head from spinning with images of the dying vampire, leftover imaginings of Cynthia dying, the reality that his world was at risk and knowledge that somehow he was going to have to think of something to say to Naomi in the morning.

After a minute his legs shook and gave way and Arran Redfern sat curled up on the floor of his shower and cried.

Wow, hello again. Thank you for still being here, I know it's been months but I was really unwell and now I'm a bit better! So I promise updates at least once a week, as well as some much needed tweaking. So I'm sorry, thank you, I love you. Chapter Seven will start next week without fail!