AN: Hey! Just making sure that if your reading this it has nothing to do with my True Blood story. This is definitely a story based on CWs TV show The Vampire Diaries. The organization isn't even the same. Okay, enjoy.

Nobody believes in monsters, at least, not the "monsters" we grow up hearing stories about. The things that go bump in the night, the creature under the bed or in the closet, whatever the fuck happens at the "witching hour;" no one really thinks that kind of stuff is real. Sometimes it's just easier to imagine the impossible than to face reality. Usually, the things that people think are the most unimaginable are actually not that unimaginable after all.

"I just can't believe it," My mom cried over the phone to some relative in Italy. She was standing outside my room, but the door was cracked open so I could hear each one of her excruciating sobs. Just hearing her sound so devastated was hurting me more than anything else that happened tonight. "How could this happen to my baby? Maria?"

I wished the door were closed. I didn't want to hear this, and I didn't have the emotional strength to comfort a distraught mother right now. But really, that wasn't my job. She should be comforting me.

A nurse wandered into the room to check on me. There wasn't much to check on, except for the fact that I was still alive. I wasn't hooked up to any machines or IVs. She simply asked how I was feeling and if I needed anything with a sympathetic look on her face. I didn't believe her. With all the death and trauma and horror that hospital nurses see every day, I found it hard to believe she could muster up any real sympathy for me. She left after being in the room for less than thirty seconds.

I would have been out of the hospital by now if I hadn't been so stupid. It was just that, after everything that happened, I didn't know if I could handle it all. The world seemed so cruel and I was so weak. I kept thinking about how little I was, how weak I was. How stupid. How pathetic. How disgusting. I rummaged through the hospital room and found a pair of scissors. Why didn't I wait until I was home? They were going to release me that day, but I wasn't thinking. My state of mind was a mess at that moment. Those scissors were looking really friendly, but I wasn't going to do anything. I had made up my mind before the nurse found me in the bathroom, but of course she didn't believe me. "I wasn't going to do it!" I told her. As if she hadn't heard that one before. I should have said I was cutting off an itchy tag or something. But, like I said before, my state of mind was a mess. It had improved dramatically after that, because I had finally made my own choice—to live. At the very least, I could make that choice for myself.

I was released after the mandatory 48 hours of suicide watch, when the doctors determined I wasn't a threat to myself or anyone else anymore. At the time, that was an accurate conclusion. I had made up my mind to not take my own life, and I had never thought myself capable of harming anyone else. But its funny how people can change.

It was Thursday and I had no intention of going back to school. I had missed most of the week and was going to be ridiculously behind in all my classes. I didn't have the mental endurance to power through one long, tedious, boring class after another. And just imagining all the curious, sympathetic, and judgmental stares I was going to receive made me want to vomit. So when my mom told me to go to school I promptly went to next door to Mrs. Crowder's instead.

My neighbor was one of the few people I knew who was honestly a great person, but you would never have guessed it if you didn't know her personally. A stranger would see her and think she was some crazy, bitter, old widow. She tended to just peer out her window all day, scowling at the world. Now I knew that's just because her face tends to contort into a scowl, not necessarily because she's mad, just because she was upset for so long after her husband's death that it just stayed that way.

For most of my life my only contact with Mrs. Crowder was watching her fumble with her mailbox at the front of her yard. She always seemed to have trouble opening it without leaving the confines of her property. She had her food delivered to her house from the grocery store, and she didn't own a car. Granted, we did live in New York City, so a car was not exactly necessary, but still. Neither my mom nor I had ever seen her leave her property, and we eventually heard a rumor that we accepted as truth: Mrs. Crowder hadn't left her property since her husbands death almost eight years prior, just before my family moved to New York from Italy. Mrs. Crowder was agoraphobic.

When I was 12, I started to help her out a little. At first, I would just grab her mail for her after school and bring it to her door. Then I started grabbing her one of the free newspapers from school too. When we started talking, I realized she was actually pretty interesting (for a crazy, old widow) and we had the same sort of sarcastic humor. I offered to buy her groceries for her, and she started feeding me dinner. And that worked out fine for me, because my mom worked the nightshift as a custodian at the local hospital, so my options before Mrs. Crowder were limited to whatever I could microwave.

My home life wasn't all that spectacular. Between school and my mom's work, I almost never saw my mom. My biological father was dead. They both emigrated from Italy when I was four, but my father died in a car accident shortly after they arrived. Recently, and for reasons unknown to me, my mom managed to find the most obnoxious boyfriend: Butch. In my head, I call him Butch the Bitch.

Mrs. Crowder lived next door to me, and I supposed she could hear the fighting that goes on between all members of the house. Shortly after I started talking to her, she asked if I wanted to stay at her place after school. It was a nice gesture, and I took her up on it. I would do my homework, read, and eat dinner with her, and then sneak back to my house to sleep. This sort of thing became normal, and I almost thought of Mrs. Crowder as my own grandmother.

"You're mama told me what happened to you, Maria," Mrs. Crowder said with a sigh. "It's unbelievable. I just can't imagine what you're going through." Apparently no one could believe that what had happened to me was possible. I knew better.

"I shouldn't have been walking by myself that late," I told her, making excuses for what had happened to me. As if it would somehow make the pain less extreme if I could pinpoint a reason why life had handed me such a cruel hand of cards.

"No, Maria, this is not your fault. Don't you even think that for a moment." She was clutching my hands in hers, trying to squeeze her knowledge into me.

"It's easier to think that there's something I could have done better than to just think that it was always going to be this way," I admitted, and it was the truth. How could life just be so terrible without there being some reasoning behind it? Could life really be just that random? And if it was, why was I so damn unlucky?

"Maria, you can't think like that, because then all you'll have is regret."

I didn't want to tell her that I knew that's all I had. If I could write an encyclopedia on the regrets I had, it would need more volumes than alphabetical letters could provide. I shouldn't have gone home that night. I shouldn't have stayed up so late. I shouldn't have fallen asleep in school. I shouldn't have gotten detention. I shouldn't have walked home by myself after dark. I shouldn't have taken that shortcut. I shouldn't have made myself such an easy target…

I could think of a hundred more regrets, but my brain couldn't comprehend that kind of self-loathing. Instead, I just started to sob.

Mrs. Crowder leaned out of her motorized wheelchair and hugged me with her short coffee colored arms, letting me cry into her shoulder. When I was finished, what felt like a year later, she grabbed my hands, kissed them, and held them to her chest. "Maria, I never want you to feel that vulnerable again. I'm going to help you."

"You can't," I choked out.

"Stay still. I'll be right back." Mrs. Crowder was gone for a minute before she returned with a big, old, dark book and some candles.

"What are you doing?"

"Be quiet, darling, I'm going to help you."

She flipped through the book until she found the page she was looking for. "Close your eyes." I shut them for a moment, and when I opened them all the candles were lit. "I said shut them, Maria. Keep them closed tight."

I shut my eyes again, a little perplexed about the candle thing, but I was prepared to follow her directions. She grabbed my hands and began to rub them in her own while she started to mumble something I couldn't understand. I tried to listen for words I knew, but quickly realized there were none. I didn't know what language she was speaking, but it wasn't English. I felt the room get hotter and Mrs. Crowder squeezed my hands. Then I realized the heat wasn't coming from the room, but from within me. It started in my hands, and traveled up my arms to my heart and then my head and down to my feet. I felt awake—no, alive. There was some spirit inside of me that she was bringing to life. When it was completely awake and the heat inside me had reached a peak, Mrs. Crowder stopped her mumbling and let go of my hands.

"What happened, Mrs. Crowder?" I asked when she failed to say anything. "I feel different now." That was an understatement. I felt 100% changed.

Mrs. Crowder was wheezy, and she turned her wheelchair over to the sink to get a glass of water. "You can protect yourself now, from anything."

"What?"

"Maria, you're safe. I promise." She was still breathing with difficulty, so I stood up to help her. She waved me away. "I'm fine. You should go."

That made me uncomfortable. Mrs. Crowder never told me to leave; I was always welcomed at her house. But whatever she had awakened within me seemed connected to her, and it was telling me to leave as well. "Are you sure Mrs. Crowder?" I asked uneasily. I didn't want to leave her alone if she wasn't feeling well.

"Yes, Maria. I am. I love you."

It was the first time she had told me that, but I wasn't surprised. I felt the same way about her. "I love you too."

I would have said more if I had realized then what she had done for me. (Add that to my list of regrets). Unfortunately, I never got the chance to thank her. I found out she died that night two weeks later. I didn't make it to her funeral.

It was still the middle of the school day so I couldn't go home for another few hours. I usually got home around 4, and that's when my mom left for her nightshift at the hospital. It was the middle of the day, so it was pretty safe to walk around by myself now. I was surprised that I wasn't more anxious about being alone considering everything that had happened to me, but I was actually really confident. I felt safe in my own skin, which was something that had been utterly destroyed just four days ago.

I wandered around the Bronx for hours, just detoxing. I hadn't been alone since my near suicide, and it felt good to just be myself. No, it felt better than good. Something was different about me, I just couldn't figure it out yet.

Four o'clock rolled around and I returned home. I opened the door and saw Butch was sitting on the couch watching TV. I cringed inwardly. There was nothing that could ruin any semblance of a good mood like having any contact with my mother's scumbag boyfriend.

I didn't say hello to him, and instead tried to sneak to my room without distracting him as to avoid any confrontation at all. Surprisingly, it worked. He didn't say anything to me.

I flicked on the radio and lay down on my bed. Suddenly, I heard Butch grumble and the couch creaked. Damn, and just when I thought I had avoided him.

He pushed open my unlocked door and gaped at me. "When the fuck did you get home?" he snapped at me. His tone was harsh but his eyes were just perplexed.

"Just now," I told him honesty.

"What? Did you sneak through the goddamned window or something?" My green eyes flickered over to the window. There were thick steel security bars that ran the length of the small window, serving both as a means of keeping the evil out and me in. I was pretty sure a contortionist couldn't even squeeze into this prison.

"No, I came in through the front door and then came here," I answered, trying not to sound condescending after listening to his moronic question. "You probably just didn't see me because you were watching TV," I assumed. That made him mad.

"I'm more than capable of watching TV and seeing you walk to your room," he barked at me. "Next time, tell me when you get back," he demanded, and slammed my door shut.

It had been a pretty mild encounter, but, as always, it was still undesirable. It was strange that he hadn't seen me come in though. I essentially had to walk right behind the TV to get to my room. Butch must have really been out of it to not notice me.

I decided to get a snack, and left the room to get whatever junk food we had in the cabinets. I found an almost empty bag of Doritos, and started to head back to the room. I was standing behind the TV, about to go into my room, and Butch just kept looking at the screen. He didn't even seem to see me, not that I really wanted his attention. I was staring right at him, but he didn't acknowledge me at all. Something about this struck me as very curious. I decided to test this.

I walked over to the TV so that I was directly behind it and waved at Butch. His brown eyes just appeared glazed over at whatever crappy reality TV show he was watching. I clapped my hands, and his slight jump showed me he clearly heard the sound. But by the way his eyes darted around the room, it was evident he didn't know where the source was.

This was all so strange. Why couldn't he see me?

And that's when I turned and saw the mirror across the room.

I should have been reflected in that mirror.

Instead, there was no one.

I screamed and jumped out of the mirrors sight. My feet tangled with each other, and I tumbled to the floor, breathing heavily. What was wrong with me?

"What the fuck!" Butch yelled, leaping to his feet. He stomped over to me and continued to shout. "Where the fuck did you come from? Why are you screaming?"

Butch's big hand reached down to grab my upper arm, but the last thing I wanted was for him to touch me. His hand wrapped around my arm, but suddenly fell away… or through? I quickly scooted away from him, and got to my feet.

I caught a glimpse of my reflection in the mirror. This time, my shocked face was reflected back at me. I wanted to stare at this mirror for another hour out of curiosity at this invisible-visible phenomena, but Butch began to interrupt.

"W-what…?" Butch stuttered in shock. He wasn't used to not being able to catch me when he wanted to deal out some punishment. "Get back here!" He reached for me again, but this time he was just too slow. I darted away from him and to my room.

I was fast enough to lock him out of my room, but I knew by the pounding of his fist that the lock would give-way any moment. The lock only had strength enough for four Butch pounds, (I had measured this many times), so I had limited time to think.

The window.

Suddenly I was next to the window, sliding the glass up with my fumbling hands. The window was probably too small for my body, but somehow I had a feeling this would work. I pressed my hand into the metal bars that locked me into my room and wished— I wished so hard it was will— that I could leave this room.

And then my hand phased through the bars.

I kept pressing into the bars until my entire arm was out of the house, the bars appearing to slice through my shoulder blade, but I felt no pain. There was a tingling sensation where the bar was, but it felt no different than when my foot falls asleep in class. I pushed some more, and my head was out of the window. Then my torso.

I started to lose my balance and then the rest of me just sort of fell through the wall.

I landed hard on the cold cement, but quickly got to my feet. Butch's swears echoed out from the open window—he must have made his way into my room. I willed him to not see me just before I saw his face pressed against the security bars.

He was undoubtedly looking for me, but his menacing brown glare just grazed over me. I looked down. I could see myself, but it was evident that he couldn't.

What was this power that I had now? I could be unseen and untouchable; Invisible and intangible. If I willed it, Butch couldn't touch me. If I willed it, he couldn't even see me. If I willed it, he couldn't hurt me anymore.

And boy, did I will it.

The power inside of me was strong, and it made me strong as well. But I won't blame it for what happened next. It may have given me the ability to do what I wanted, but the desire came from within me. And that desire was murder.

I wanted to kill, and I knew exactly whom my blood lust called for. Surprisingly, on the top of my list wasn't Butch.

It was four boys. Four boys who had ruined my life.

AN: So this is just the first chapter and you'll get to meet the first Vampire Diaries character that I'm putting in this story in the second chapter. I hope to update every week. Thank you for reading! Review/ favorite/ alert/ message, exc., I love the support!