Sharon looked at Thad amidst a face-full of tears and regrettably stated, “It doesn’t really matter what I want. Does it?”
She then looked over at Gary and he nodded that it was time. They let go of Thaddeus, who instantly changed into a hawk and flew toward the ocean to try to save his boy. Sharon and Gary made their way to the nearby inlet and knifed through the water as dolphins on their way to the ocean.
Thad flew as fast as he could until he saw me flying with Cal a few miles ahead. He figured that the only way he could catch me would be to wake his son and cause a disturbance. Being only a mile from the shore, I was feeling pretty good about my plan. That was, until I heard Thaddeus shriek in the distance at a frequency that would arrest Cal’s senses, because Cal started coming out of his slumber.
My pace slowed as he struggled to keep control of a now fully- awake Cal. Thaddeus was making up the gap and was now only 400 yards from me, as I was only about 500 feet from the shore.
Just as I was about to lose my grip on Cal, I utilized his strongest feature to lock him down.
“Not so fast, Brewster,” I said as I thrust his razor-sharp teeth into Cal’s shoulder, effectively taking any fight away that he had left. I zoomed toward the water with Thaddeus on my tail in hot pursuit. Thad had one more trick up his wing – the no-flap, bullet thrust – and was just about to grab Cal when Gary the Orca whale jumped out of the water and swallowed him whole, as I plunged to the depths of the ocean with Cal.
Gary and Sharon swam to the bottom and started to push large rocks that would be considered boulders in some parts. I pinned a groggy Cal against the hull of a sunken 18th century pirate ship with a pile of smaller rocks.
Cal offered little resistance as his blood levels became depleted and then his breathing became shallow due to a lack of oxygen. His limit under the water was three or four minutes, which was fairly decent for a mammal, but not good enough for a mammal trapped in the ocean depths.
I lifted the more massive rocks one after the other and placed them strategically to trap Cal for as long as the rocks stayed in place. And, in this case, that would be 15 years – the first two of which Sharon checked on her flame regularly, although the visits became more sporadic over time.
There were many occasions, especially in the very beginning, when Sharon felt the urge to bash all of those rocks away and free Cal so they could be together. But her urge to be with Cal was overridden by her eternal oath to protect me at all costs.
Our lives were definitely enriched via Cal’s absence, but Sharon, Thad, and Emily had a much different experience. Belinda grieved at the loss of her husband, even though their relationship had thinned over the years. Daniel always wondered what his dad was like, but never really missed someone he barely knew. After all, I had been his father figure in the previous life and this life's formative years.
HAVEN
Somewhere in between Cal's underwater burial and the kid's 18th birthday, was a period of exploration and confusion. It started off rather innocently with me taking my new charges to school on a regular basis. Cal and Emily were so eager to learn that a five-year losing streak did little to damper their enthusiasm. It was during the middle of that period that Sharon became enamored with me and we had a little dalliance, a brief affair, which actually - when I think about it - made Cal notice her even more and drove him to heightened obsession with overcome me as an adversary, both physically and mentally.
There were a bunch of years when we were losing on a regular basis that I decided to take off and clear my head. Well, that would have been an oversimplification of what was actually happening. I could tell there was cosmic energy in the air that would lead to better days for me. And, as we all knew, this is all about me anyway...
We had taken an initial break to let Thad and Gary start families, and this secondary break was to further build the family through Sharon, Cal and Emily. Sharon pared up with her lifeguard partner, Agent Blake Wallace, which produced Nicole who turned out to be my son's protector and future wife. Blake and Sharon never got married because she didn't tell him she was pregnant. He found out years later when he was a government official who became obsessed with us and then eventually joined the fold.
Emily married a nobody named Randy Prince, who she dispatched just after Andrew was born. But, it was Calvin Brewster's relationship with Belinda Thompson that really was the shocker. Apparently, there had to be a conduit in this world that had the concentration of energy to match mine, in order to provide a window for my son. I have to admit that it was a case of extreme mixed emotions when I realized that my Nathaniel, now Daniel, was my fiercest rivals' son. There was no way there was room for the two of us in his life! At least, that's what I thought at the time.
My plan to bury Calvin Brewster at the bottom of the ocean had everything to do with the battle of the dads, and much less with the fact that he was cheating on his loyal wife Belinda with Sharon. And, there was also the issue of him becoming almost impossible to kill with his sister in tandem. I'm not going to say that I pushed Sharon toward Cal to distract him, and I'm also not going to say that I didn't. It was a case of using every tool that I had in my toolbox to disrupt the flow of energy that was surely going to lead to my 100th death before I had a chance to bond with my son.
Once Cal disappeared, it destroyed both Emily and Belinda, who moved away after it became apparent that he wasn't coming back. It was a few years later, when Daniel was going into first grade that Belinda moved to Beach Haven, New York for reasons that she couldn't fully explain. The truth was that I really liked the sleepy East Coast town and thought it would be a suitable place for the kids to grow up. Really, a suitable place for me to reunite with my son and then wait for my wife, his mother, to come to us.
Cal remained buried on the bottom of the ocean for 15 years while I became reacquainted with my son. He didn't know at the time that I had such a big stake in the game, but he managed to maintain a genuine hatred of me when finally set free from captivity.
Hours after Drew continually blasted the rock formation with his concrete head, Cal finally became dislodged and began the slow float from the depths to the ocean's surface.