Author's Note:
Well, hello, people! As I already announced you, I decided to write the story from scratch! Of course, I'll use again lots of pieces from the old text and I'm hoping that I'll manage to fill in blanks and correct inaccuracies throughout the story! Some of you might know that this was my very first fan fiction (except another one, which was really short-lived and luckily for the fan fiction world never posted online) so I experimented. Oh, trust me, I experimented a lot. Red Moon and its sequel Northern Lights (which will also be rewritten when the time comes) were my little beloved guinea pigs, as some of you may have noticed. The rest... You're lucky if you didn't read enough of them to figure it out, guys, take my word for that!
And I'm getting sidetracked and discrediting my own story... Way to go, Nessie! Yay!Anyhoo! I'll do my best to improve the story! I owe it to both you and my characters!Once again, I have to thank my wonderful beta, Wendy D, who agreed to edit Red Moon once again and put up with me as I start Eshe's story all over again!
Also, just to be on the safe side, if you're new to the fan fiction world:
a) I am writing in italics everything that is thought and
b) any mental dialogues will appear in italics and in this form: 'Quote '
c) I'll be attaching PDF files under each chapter now that I realized there was an awfully simple way to do it. Same thing with pictures, etc, they'll be at the end of each chapter.
d) Every now and then, you might encounter dialogues in languages other than English. I'll be putting in parentheses the English translation right next to the original, since my beta pointed out things get complicated when a reader has to scroll down to read the translation, then scroll back up to read the rest of the chapter... Anyway.
Oh and a last thing, since I always forget to write disclaimers for my fan fics. Twilight and all the characters from the saga belong to Stephenie Meyer, I have no profit by this fan fiction, the original characters belong to me and may not be used without my permission, yada, yada, yada!
I think I covered everything now! I hope that you'll enjoy the story and leave me your thoughts! They always matter, even if they're the tiniest of comments! (Although we all know how authors love long comments! *grins*) Constructive critisism is highly appreciated as long as it stays constructive. No flaming please!
Hugs!
Nessie
You might recognize this as the old first chapter. I decided to turn it into a prologue, since it's mostly introductory and I saw no way in making it longer. I made additions here and there, and I hope it looks by far better than the old chapter!
I was leaning against the door of our family car, and was staring at the front door of our home… Home-for-a-while… Whatever. I was saying goodbye to the place I lived once again. We always did that. We changed house, town, country every few months, even weeks sometimes. If we drew too much attention to ourselves, we left immediately. My childhood was really strange. I grew up between two worlds. My parents were vampires… and I was not.
The two of them had known each other since they were children. My dad lived in Texas until the age of four, and then his parents decided to move to Alaska after his father was offered a job there. That’s how he met my mother. She lived two streets down; they used to hang out in the neighborhood’s playground. They became inseparable, literally joined at the hip. Nobody was surprised when they started dating in high school. Alem and Emma. Everyone was thinking it. They were just waiting for it to happen.
The perfect high school love story never lasted though. It took just a night for everything to change. A few drinks, a little snow and a hungry vampire. That’s when my dad disappeared. Vanished, just like that. He didn’t remember much about the time after that, but he knew the vampire didn’t change him right away. He took him away from everything, and everyone he knew. My grandparents filed a missing person report. Everyone searched, and Emma tried to move on. His parents too. After a while, they gave up and returned to Texas, hoping it would help them heal. Maybe forget their son, like that were even possible. I never really knew.
But one day, he came back.
He looked older, different. His face was sharper, the childish characteristics were gone. And there was this other minor detail. His skin tone. Alem used to have such a dark complexion. I’ve seen photos when he was a kid, most of them with mom. My dad always had this deep, chocolate brown color, but after the transformation it turned into a pale, washed out shade of what it used to be. His eyes had changed too. The beautiful grey-blue eyes became a haunting, yet breathtaking, amber.
Mom found out the truth quickly. He couldn’t keep himself from coming back. How could he ever keep such a secret from her? Mom stopped caring about college, her future and everything else that used to be her life, the same moment he showed up. She didn’t care about his monstrous nature. All she wanted to do was to drop out of college and be with him. Dad convinced her to continue college. In the meantime, he stayed in the shadows; he knew he couldn’t simply step back into his old life. There would be so much he could not explain, too many questions he just couldn’t answer.
Being in love with a vampire, they soon discovered, was far from easy. They may have managed to keep their relationship secret, but there was no way on earth they could hide what came next. Who would have guessed, mom could get pregnant with a vampire’s child? Yeah, that’s where I come in. Almost. There’s some more.
My father tried to take care of her, even tried getting a doctor’s consult, but…
What do human doctors know about that kind of thing after all? Let alone, he had to explain how in half a month of pregnancy, there was a five month old baby growing inside my mother. They put as much distance as they could from mom’s hometown right away. He realized that the innocent little thing inside her was sucking away her life. I could have lived without knowing that bit about my mom’s pregnancy to be honest…
Day by day, she became weaker. There was no way it could be avoided. She loved me with all her heart, and could never have an abortion. The womb was too hard for a human doctor to cut, almost like vampire skin. The pink color she always had was gone and a sickening white was taking its place. Her swollen belly was like a sea of purple bruises. Her reddish-blond hair was losing its shine and until the end she tried to hide how much I was hurting her from my father.
When I was born, my father barely had enough time to turn my mother into a vampire. All the while, he was also trying to keep me far enough from her, so that I wouldn’t be dangerous to her; or her to me. The only memories of my mother as human that I have are the three painful days of her transformation. Her constant screams night and day during her change, would have gathered a big crowd if we weren’t hidden in a little house, which used to be where my mom went on vacation with her cousins every spring, deep in a forest in the Alaskan mountains. Fortunately, it was the middle of winter and there was always the danger of blizzards at any time, therefore, it kept humans away.
Her newborn year wasn’t as hard as my father’s. It seemed that her motherly instincts won out over her vampire ones. I was never in danger when I was around her. This also helped her develop her self-control early. After four solitary months that the three of us spent hidden away, mom had learned the ropes. We were able to make an appearance in the human world once again.
We tried to follow a more gentle diet. My father had a passion for human life; he saw people as… well, people, not food, unlike many others of our kind. Although he couldn’t even remember the vampire that changed him, he had learned a few things about the sort of creature he was going to become and had a plan, a way to control his vampire nature.
Seven months after his transformation, he had the discipline to test his theory. He had thought of a better, at least for the humans, way to feed himself; drinking the blood of animals. It worked, so he followed this diet from that moment on, never looking back. The animal blood made his eyes change from a blood red to a warm, honey-gold shade, which made it easier to blend in the human world without drawing curious looks to himself.
When he went back to find my mom, he was still experimenting, so his eyes had barely changed to amber at that point. Mom’s eyes turned gold faster than my dad’s, around her eighth month as a vampire, since she adapted to this odd diet so well from the very start. I’m proud to say that I’ve never tasted human blood in my life. Sometimes, it was hard to resist the temptation, walking around unsuspecting humans. They would never know what hit them if I decided to make a move... I wasn’t that kind of person though… I didn’t want to be that kind of person…
Throughout my childhood, I was surrounded by people who loved me. My parents of course, but also most of the vampires we met as we traveled around. I found out I could win their affection very easily… They used to think my little gift and I were adorable. But I also lived with the worry for my future, and the painful fact that I didn’t fit in anywhere. I didn’t belong to the vampire world or the human one.
I was growing too fast to bond with humans. They would notice I was not normal. And obviously, the fact that I grew at all, automatically ruled me out of the vampire world as well. There were many things that made me different. I always had a temperature that was much warmer than normal humans were, but I was pale like a vampire. My eyes didn’t change with my eating habits or my thirst. Their natural color was a bright, sky-blue, and my hair red with black streaks. Not that it mattered much; I happened to have a power or gift, however you looked at it. I could change my appearance at will.
The fact that I grew up too fast was also worrisome with nothing to base it on being I was the only “hybrid” we knew. On my first birthday, I already looked like a five-year-old. My growth has slowed considerably now, which is what allowed us to settle down for a longer time, and stay in the same place for the past year. Even though I was a bit short – blame mom for passing on the faulty height gene – I looked undeniably like a girl in her teens by my fifth calendar year.
Thankfully, my behavior wasn’t giving away my true age either. Along with my rapid physical growth spurt came an equal amount of maturity. The phrase ‘wise beyond her years’ was more than true in my case. None of the many vampires we met knew what could possibly be wrong with me, or how it would progress as more years passed. I had something in mind, but preferred not to think about it. It was more than once that I wished I hadn’t grown this fast. I always wondered what childhood was like for humans. If there were one thing I knew for sure, it would be that it was supposed to last longer. Maybe longer than I’d ever get to live.
“Eshe, honey, are you ready?” Mom nudged me, bringing me back to reality. I looked at her confused for a second. Oh. Right. The car. We’re leaving again, I realized.
I inhaled deeply and glanced for a last time at the little house, in the pretty and neat neighborhood where we’d hardly spent five months. Goodbye. Maybe the next owners will stick around longer than we did. “Yeah. Alright. Let’s go,” I said eventually.
I opened the door I was leaning against and grudgingly got in the car. The whole thing shook as I slammed the door shut. I never could fully control my strength. I didn’t get the chance to really practice after all since we always lived in neat, little towns like this one with perfect neighbors. The sort of neighbors that’d wash their car and cut the lawn every Sunday. Just imagine the new girl they were so curious about acting odd. Exactly my point. It wasn’t much of an option.
“Eshe, please, be careful.” Dad grinned. “We’ve only owned the car a month,” he teased.
I stuck my tongue at him as the engine roared to life. A brand new beginning. Once again. Not even fugitives get so many of these. I chuckled to myself. Oh well. C’est la vie…
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