Prologue
Forks, Washington
Present Day
Memories clouded my consciousness. They pulsed like a throbbing heart beat conglomerated in my head.
All of my past – the good, the bad – and my choices had led me to the small town of Forks, Washington.
My mother sat at my left, cushioned down in the seat of our old Volkswagen, her brow furrowed, but her face a perfect façade of calm. No matter how casually she acted, I could tell the toll it took on her to return to her childhood home. So many bitter reminders, she told me once. If you had seen what I had seen, lived what I lived, you wouldn't want to go back either.
I laid my cheek against the cold pane of the window glass, and stared out at my new home.
Everything was a burning gray visage. Here lay a dull gray sky and gray clouds; gray rain falling down to the earth like sharp gray glass needles, exploding as it connected with the gray concrete and earth. Gray tree trunks hung limp in the dank atmosphere; green plant growth crawling up the sides. If you looked at it from the corner of your eye, it seemed to shake and slither, with a life of its own.
Our car flew by more unimpressionable and unremarkable landmarks. Old buildings made of red-brown bricks were the constant landscape here.
Then a beach appeared as we passed into the Quileute reservation; a rough mixture of black rock (or was it soil?) and tan black streaked sand. The water lapped lazily to the shore.
"We're almost there," my mother muttered under her breath.
My mom had told me little of her side of the family.
I guess it brought back all the old memories. Everything I knew about them was strictly on a need to know basis. My uncles' name was Billy Black, and I had a seventeen year old cousin named Jacob Black. He had two older sisters: Rachel, who was engaged, and Rebecca who lived in Hawaii with her husband.
My mother, Amelia Black, was Billy's younger sister.
So, you could say I bareley knew anything about the normal side of my family. My past is what forced us to begin this journey to pretend to live a human life. It was the past that was hunting us. And it wouldn't stop until we were dead.
The blurring gray background suddenly morphed into a red wooden house. The car lurched to a sudden stop.