Part Three of 'Father of Mine', nearly immediate sequel to 'A Reasonable Explanation, Please?'

Summary: Daniel and Jack look for answers. Daniel gets a cold.

'Kinda dusty' did not describe the thick coatings of dust that could be found in my attic. To say that I went up there often would be grossly inaccurate, too. Still, I was reasonably sure I remembered where I put those things of my mother's that I'd kept all these years.

I wasn't sure what I expected to find. A stake, perhaps? Love potion number nine? A lamp with a genie inside? I didn't know, but I'd find out soon enough.

I turned the overhead light on before proceeding inside. My shoes kicked up clouds of dust. Behind me, I heard a sneeze. Daniel's allergies were getting the best of him.

He sniffled. "So, what are we looking for?"

"A hope chest." It was a family heirloom, so to speak. If I had a sister, it would have been passed on to her.

I walked across the room and moved a few boxes out of the way. Behind them and leaning against the wall was the chest, just as I remembered it, if a little dustier. It was a simple, one-compartment chest, and it was stained a dark brown.

I removed a few boxes placed on top of it and carefully lifted the lid. Inside were a few more family heirlooms. There were two tablecloths and a set of matching, embroidered napkins that my grandmother had made. They were spread out on top. I swallowed. They'd all been Sara's favorites. I took them out and handed them to Daniel. "Hold these for a moment, would you?"

"Yeah, sure, whatever," he muttered.

I turned back to the chest. On the right side was a stack of photo albums, cards, and various other memorabilia such as a few letters written between my parents and a copy of an invitation to their wedding in 1952…wait. 1952? I checked the invitation again, but the date hadn't changed. "Huh."

"What?" Danny asked.

"My parents were married in 1952."

"So?"

"The date is for six months before I was born." I swallowed. I'd thought they were married in 1950, over two years before my birthday. It looked like Mitchell O'Neill may not be my biological father after all. That didn't mean Xander was. No way in hell could a twenty-four year old be my father.

"It doesn't have to mean anything," Daniel said, trying to be reassuring. "It could just mean that your parents didn't wait until after they were married before…"

"Maybe." I opened one of the albums and leafed through it. Daniel grabbed the other one and did likewise. The photos showed various members of my family and our friends doing ordinary things. Not a single one showed Harris.

"Hello…" said Daniel. I glanced at him in time to see him stoop and pick up a photo that had fallen out of his album. He sneezed on his way back up. "Jack, look at this."

I took the photo from him and stared. "No way…" I murmured. It was a picture of Xander Harris, eye patch and all. He had posed for the camera and was smiling broadly. The picture had faded with time, but it was still bright compared to the black and white and colored photos in the albums. The edges were bent out of shape from being fingered often.

"So they did know each other," Daniel said, softly. He looked and sounded as incredulous as I felt.

"Maybe," I said, glaring at him. I didn’t want to admit that I was starting to believe it, too. Someone could have come up here and placed the photo in the album, though the dust layers would suggest otherwise. This whole situation was just too bizarre to take at face value.

I pocketed the photo and returned to my search. The left side of the chest held several boxes. One box contained a few expensive pieces of jewelry. Among them, I counted three crosses; one was made of silver, another iron, and a third was intricately carved gold. I could vaguely remember my mother wearing the silver one, but the other two were unfamiliar. A second box contained a small collection of odd coins I'd put together back when I was a kid, and within a third box were more cards, letters and other documents.

At the bottom of the chest was a forth box. Unlike the other boxes, which were cardboard, this one was made of tin, and it was one the largest of the whole bunch. I pulled it out carefully, pried open the tight lid and set it aside. There were several things inside the box. They all seemed to be vampire-fighting implements.

Okay, this was freaky. There were, surprise, two wooden stakes with very sharp tips. There was also a bottle of holy water. Beneath the stakes was a knife made of what appeared to be silver.

"What the-?" How the hell had I missed these things when I'd packed this thing all those years ago? I frowned, concentrating, and within a few moments the memory returned to me. My mother had always kept this tin in the kitchen while I was growing up. I knew because I'd found it one day while looking for cookies, and she'd told me that the box must stay in the cupboard and never be opened. I'd made plans to sneak back and look at it later, but I'd ended up getting sidetracked in kid stuff and forgotten about it. Years later, when I packed the hope chest, I'd placed it in here without looking in it. All I'd cared about at the time was that it was one of my mother's things.

"They're stakes," Daniel said.

"Uh-huh."

"Wooden stakes."

"Yep."

"For killing vampires?"

I shrugged. "I have no idea." Though it certainly looked that way, didn't it? The photo, the slaying kit - one would almost suspect that one was being set up, but I was beginning to believe that wasn't the case. Shit.

Something glinted in the light from the overhead. I pushed the knife, stakes, and holy water aside and spotted something small and shiny hidden in a corner of the tin. I pulled it out. It was a small silver five-pointed star. A hole had been drilled through the uppermost point wide enough to pass a chain through it.

Daniel leaned over for a closer look, and some dust that had mingled in his hair fell on my shoulder. I brushed it off distractedly. "What's that?" he asked.

"No idea," I responded. Like the other things in the box, I'd never seen it before. The sides of the uppermost point flashed. "Woah!" The right side of the point turned yellow and the left side turned blue. The point returned to its original silver, and then the sides of an adjacent point flashed blue and yellow. The lights moved from point to point in a counter-clockwise rotation. After the lights reached the fifth point, the lights disappeared completely. The star pendant was once again completely silver.

"What was that?" Daniel demanded.

"That is a very good question." I stood up and dropped the pendant in the pocket with the photo. I replaced everything else back in the chest, lifted the tin box and motioned to the door. "Come on. Let's see if Carter can make some sense out of it."

Daniel sneezed again. "Sounds good to me."

We headed for the door with me in the lead. I opened the door and stepped out…

…onto a marble floor?

"What the crap?!"

"Uh, Jack? Did the decorators come and remodel your stairwell while we were in the attic?"

"That would be a big fat no, Danny."

Instead of the stairs that would take us down from the attic, we stood at one end of a three-story high hall crafted of creamy marble. To the left and the right were two large rooms containing rows upon rows of bookcases. Support columns, which held aloft the hall's vaulted ceiling, periodically broke up our view of the rooms. Out-of-sight windows beneath the hall’s roof provided the only light; there were lanterns nailed to the columns, but they were unlit.

We stood at one end of the long hall. I whirled around. Behind us was a blank marble wall. The door had disappeared.

"Great," I muttered. "Just great." It was just another addition to all the weird crap that had happened already. What next? A Godzilla vs. King Kong fight worthy of a truly awful B-rated movie?

A breeze blew through the long corridor. I turned away from the wall when I heard a growl.

Daniel’s eyes were wide and staring down the hall. "Oh, that can't be good."