Disclaimer: See chapter one

At first, my eyes remained tightly shut, and I swatted at the annoying tapping on my shoulder. I didn't want to wake up; not yet, not after last night. I felt like I deserved a good week of uninterrupted sleep.

"Darren?" a scared, familiar little voice said softly.

I was up.

Bear stopped tapping on my shoulder as soon as he saw my eyes open. I was used to being greeted by a chipper Bear when I awoke, with an ear-to-ear grin plastered across his face, so full of energy that his little ears almost wiggled. But now, Bear wasn't smiling.

"Where are we?" he asked me, his eyes wide and troubled as he looked around at the trees.

I sighed and sat up, glancing around at my still-sleeping companions. Arra's cape was spread out on the ground beside Mr. Crepsley, and it was flattened as though it had recently been slept on, but Arra was nowhere to be seen.

"Where's Arra?" I asked Bear, unintentionally ignoring his question while I stood to get a better view of the woods with hopes of finding Arra.

"I dunno," he said, getting up and clutching the hem of my shirt unconsciously in his little hand. Then he repeated, "Where are we?"

"In the woods," I answered him distractedly; I had no intentions of being the one to explain the whole crazy day before to the little boy.

Still clutching onto my shirt as I carefully stepped around the sleeping Vancha, Bear asked, "Where's Daddy?"

Not explaining things was going to be harder than I thought. Images of Frank with the knife, Arra snapping Frank's neck, and Frank's dead body collapsing to the ground sped through my mind, and I hurriedly looked away from Bear, as though fearful he could see my thoughts. "He's not here right now," I answered hesitantly. "Let's go find Arra, okay, Bear?"

"Mmkay," he agreed.

I heard a crack of a twig somewhere behind us and spun around, almost knocking Bear, who was still holding onto my shirt, to the ground. My eyes darted over the spaces between the trees and the cracks in the branches of dense, low-lying brush. Finally, I scanned the ground and saw a squirrel standing on a rock nearby, up on its hind legs, cleaning its face with its front feet. I gave a breath of relief - for a split second, I'd thought of vampaneze and wondered if any were on our tail on Frank's tip, as Arra suspected.

"Hey, Bear?" I said. "Why don't you wait here, and I'll go find Arra."

Before Bear could answer, my request became unnecessary as Arra's voice called from behind me, "I'm right here."

I turned and gave her a brief smile of acknowledgement as she pushed aside a few branches to join us in our makeshift camp.

"I was still feeling queasy, so I went for a walk," she explained to my questioning expression.

"Arra," Bear said, finally releasing my shirt and hurrying towards her, "where's Daddy?"

Arra didn't show much of a reaction to his question; she obviously had been expecting it. Instead, she sat on her cape and motioned for Bear to sit next to her. Vancha, Harkat, and Mr. Crepsley had begun to stir by now, and their eyes were on Bear and Arra. They, like I, wanted in spite of themselves to hear the conversation about to take place.

"Bear," she started with a heavy sigh, "do you remember yesterday, when we told you you were going to stay with your mom? When we said you weren't coming with us anymore?"

Bear nodded, his face still downtrodden and somber. Mr. Crepsley got to his feet and began to wander away from Bear and Arra. He sat on a fallen log to began starting a fire. When he caught me watching him, he gave me serious look and shook his head slightly; he didn't seem optimistic about the way Arra's explanation would be received.

Arra continued, her voice strained. "You wanted to come with us, remember?" she said. "And you were upset that you had to stay?"

Bear nodded again and said, "I don't want to stay now, either. I want to come with you, and..."

"You are coming with us," Arra said, a rare smile spreading on her face. "We decided to take you with us, Bear. That's why we're here. After you fell asleep we decided to keep going. We ended up here when we decided to take a break."

Bear was smiling now, his eyes lit up, and he exuded his usual excitement and happiness. He threw his arms around Arra's shoulders and let out a couple gleeful giggles. This almost seemed too good to be true.

Of course, it was. Explaining that he got to come with us was the easy part.

"Where's Daddy?" Bear asked as he pulled away from Arra. "Didn't he come, too?"

Arra paused, her face falling. We couldn't have expected Bear to be oblivious to the disappearance of his father, but the prospect of having to explain Frank's absence was unnerving. "He didn't come with us, no," she answered slowly.

"Why?" Bear asked, and his face had fallen again.

Arra nervously scraped her fingernails together. "He didn't want to. I don't think he liked us very much," she said weakly, her gaze averted from the little boy. "He wanted us to go without him, I think."

"But why didn't he want to come with me?" Bear asked. "Why didn't he say goodbye?"

Arra shifted in her seat. "Maybe you'll understand better when you're older," she said softly.

"Why?" Bear said, his chin beginning to to quiver. And before Arra could come up with anything else, he began to cry again, bawling his eyes out for the second time in the past few hours.

I turned away, not wanting to be dragged into the conversation or forced to explain anything to Bear. Arra put her arms around him and pulled him into a hug, whispering for him to stop crying, telling him it would be all right. It didn't seem right. I felt like he deserved the truth; we all wanted him to know the truth, but he couldn't. And that left us with...what? We couldn't ignore the question forever. Eventually, we would have to tell him a lie. He was too young to understand. Even if he was older, even if he spent years with us, even if he understood us and accepted us for being vampires, he would never fully understand why Arra had killed his father.

I sat beside Mr. Crepsley. "What are we going to do with him?" I asked quietly, my voice low enough that even Arra could not hear. "He can't stay with us forever."

"You are repeating what we have all been wondering since you and Arra returned with him," he sighed, not impatiently.

"I know," I told him, "But if it was up to you, what would you do?"

He stroked the scar along his cheek. "I would have left him with one of his parents, where he belongs. But then, it is never easy to leave a child when you have his or her best interests in heart." He stared so thoughtfully out into the trees that I almost asked why. "Though," he continued before I said anything, "to remove Bear from the human world, from his family...it seems unnatural. Against destiny, you could say."

"But we were following our hearts," I offered.

"Aye," he nodded. "And for that, I cannot fault you. Though, several years down the line, as we continue to pursue the Lord of the Vampaneze with Bear still in tow, we will see what our hearts are telling us."

Vancha, who had come to stand beside us, cleared his throat. "How far are we from the Cirque du Freak?" he asked, deftly ignoring Bear as he so often tried to do.

"Less then one hundred miles now," Mr. Crepsley said. "We will be there in a few days, provided they do not move anywhere substantially farther away in the meantime. I predict they will stay put for at least another week, so it is a matter of short time before we reach the Cirque. Then, perhaps, Hibernius can help us make sense of this all."

"Sense?" Vancha snorted. "Who needs to make sense of anything? Hardly anything we've done so far has gone as planned. I say we keep doing what we're doing, go here and there, see what we come across. Not much else we can do. I say we use our visit to the Cirque as time to relax, enjoy ourselves a little, if you know what I mean, because, why the hell not?" A grin spread across Vancha's face and he rubbed his palms together. Mr. Crepsley snorted at him.

"What?" I asked, looking from one to the other.

"Vancha has an old friend at the Cirque," Mr. Crepsley explained, and despite my following questions refused to say any more on the matter.

After a few minutes, it seemed that Bear had stopped crying. He sat cross-legged on Arra's cape, listening and slowly nodding his head as she spoke softly to him. Harkat had joined the two of them, and as I watched, he reached into one of the pockets in his robes and pulled out, who else, Milo. Bear's tear-stained face looked at the little mouse for a second before lighting up into his usual smile. He reached his hands out and Harkat placed Milo in his hands. Apparently feeling like Bear was finally calmed down, Arra stood and came towards us.

"What did you tell him?" Mr. Crepsley asked as she sat beside him.

"Not the truth," she sighed. "But I tried not to lie. He's too young to understand, but that doesn't mean he deserves lies. I told him Frank couldn't come with us, that he didn't want to. I tried to explain that it had nothing to do with him."

"Eventually, he's going to get older and demand the truth; avoiding the question isn't going to be good enough forever, or even for long," Vancha said critically.

"And we can deal with that if we get to it," Arra said stubbornly.

"'If'?" Vancha said. "It's not 'if'. It's 'when' since you two decided to keep him like he's kept that little rodent."

"We didn't decide to take him with us just because we wanted to," I said calmly before Arra could snap back at Vancha. "We had to; we couldn't leave him. We really couldn't."

Vancha put his hands out and shrugged. "I shouldn't give a damn," he said. "It doesn't make much of a difference to me as long as he's your problem and not mine. I'm not saying I don't care about the kid, but I don't think you should have taken him."

"You've made that clear enough," Arra said coldly.

"Yes, we have all been over this plenty," Mr. Crepsley said with a tone that tried to diffuse the building tension. He ran a hand over his crop of orange hair distressedly. "The point is, Bear is here, and we are moving on. There is no going back, so we might as well put the debate to rest."

"Fine by me," Vancha said, leaning back and stretching. "I personally am looking forward to getting to the Cirque du Freak, if you know what I mean, and until we get there, everything else can go to hell as far as I'm concerned."

"Oh yes," Arra said, and I could tell she almost smiled. "I forgot how much you'd be looking forward to getting to the Cirque."

I breathed a sigh of relief as Vancha grinned at her and all three vampires chuckled. Feeling excluded but entirely better knowing that Vancha and Arra were not going to hold grudges against one another for the umpteenth time on our journey, I strode over to sit beside Harkat and Bear.

"...and if you hold him by his tail and drop him, he does a flip!" Bear was explaining to Harkat, as Milo fell head over heels through the air into Harkat's waiting grey hand.

"Okay, Bear," I said, interrupting before he could demonstrate Milo's next trick. "We're leaving soon. Why don't you give Milo a rest and put him back into your pocket, okay?"

"Okay," he said, taking the mouse back and sticking him in his pocket. Bear looked up at me and tilted his head. "Where are we going?" he asked. The kid had to hold a world record for asking questions, but this one, I could answer.

I smiled as I stood and gave him a tug back to his feet. "We're going to the circus."

A/N: Um. Hi. Remember me?

I can honestly say there is no excuse for the standstill on this, and I apologize to everyone who's waited for this update. Really, thank you so much if you're reading now, after all this time. I'm not even going to try bargaining for reviews, because that just seems wrong.

I know I've said this before, but I really am going to try to get this going again. This was a tough chapter for me to write, but I think now that this hurdle has been crossed, everything might be easier for me. It was a pretty rough chapter, definitely not my best, and I really struggled with it, but now that I'm back in the swing of writing, the next chapters should be better. With school in session now, hopefully writing will become my homework escape again :) Here's hoping I'll be writing more for all of you soon! Thanks for reading :)

P.S. Who's excited for 'Palace of the Damned'?