Strong Love
Chapter One
"Bridget, come on!" I looked up from behind the book I'd been reading during lunch hour. "The bell just rang!" I saw my friend Kally shoving her stuff into her bag and heading for the lunchroom doors to go back to class. I swear, high school must be an invention straight from hell.
"Coming." I shut my book, and stood up. I hate high school. I've been through it twice already. The downside of being half-vampire and immortal I guess is that you have to repeat high school periodically, and not because you didn't pass the first time around.
I went through the rest of the day ignoring everything around me. Apparently, regardless of where you go in the United States, all high schools use the same boring curriculum, they just update it every year. Change a word here, a comma there kind of thing.
All of a sudden, in the last class of the day (World Literature, the only class I looked forward to), Kally poked me in the back of my shoulder. "The new girl must have the same gene pool as you." She joked in a whisper, "She's got the same flawless skin!"
"What new girl?" I hissed.
"That one." She pointed to the girl in the chair two rows over and one chair up from me. "Renesmee Cullen. Her family just moved here from New Hampshire. Twisted family. They're all like, twenty-something and they claim they're adopted but they all have the same looks and they're all married to each other, or something like that. It's messed up."
"How do you know all this?" I asked, I swear, she talks worse than a magpie.
"Common knowledge." She shrugged.
"Common gossip." I was so irritated, this may be a small town, but seriously? "Leave the poor kid alone. She probably won't be here that long anyway. New families never stay long."
I tried to go back to paying attention to class, but my gaze kept straying over to the new girl, Renesmee. She did have the same flawless skin I did, it looked like porcelain. When class was dismissed, I stayed seated so that I could watch her move. She rose from her desk so gracefully most people would've assumed she was a dancer, but I had a different hunch. I rose out of my chair and followed her. I never used my locker, so Kally thought nothing of the fact that I was headed in the opposite direction, she just waved goodbye and we went our separate ways.
I kept my distance, but watched as Renesmee pulled some stuff out of her locker, shut it, and then left the school. I followed her this whole time (I know, stalk much?), waiting for my suspicion to be correct. Something smelled different about her than most humans, she moved with a gracefulness that even a prima ballerina would envy, and her skin, it was just too flawless.
Instead of heading towards the parking lot, Renesmee headed for the woods bordering the school property. Once she was out of sight of the school she took off with a level of speed that could only mean one thing. She too was half-vampire. Unless full vampires had suddenly developed heartbeats. I stood, marveling at this discovery and was about to take off after her and demand to know the details of her existence, I'd never come across another like myself, outside of my sisters (whom I have little contact with) and was eager to learn more of my kind, when a voice spoke from behind me.
"Is she like you?" The male voice was one I knew better than my own. Ryan.
"So…what does it mean if there are more of you?" Ryan was busy pacing the living room floor of our apartment.
"I'm not sure. I was about to follow her when you found me." He sat down on the couch next to me, and grabbed my hand. Those brown eyes of his were so full of emotion I couldn't even begin to pinpoint one. "Are you sure it's a wise idea to contact her? What if she's on friendly terms with…them." He shuddered remembering our close call with the Volturi a few years back.
I shruggd. "It's a risk I'm going to take. She's the first one I've ever seen other than my sister's." My nose wrinkled, "And I'm not going to let this opportunity pass me by." Emotions in Ryan's face were clearer now, and I felt them as strongly as my own. The innate desire to protect me from anything that could harm me and the equally strong desire to give me whatever I wanted to make me happy. Stupid imprinting.
"I'm going to talk to her at school tomorrow." I said, "I'm going to see if she'll agree to meet with me in the clearing, you know which one, after school. If it makes you feel better you can be there waiting for us." I hoped this would ease things for him. "That sounds good." He agreed, and we started getting dinner ready.
Ryan has been with me for what seems like my whole existence, even though it hasn't quite been that long. I ran away from my father and sister's less than a year after my birth and had the appearance of a young teenager. I was off to see the world, and to learn what I could about my mother. The only thing my father would ever tell me was that she was none of my concern, and my sister's (half-sisters) would say nothing at all. When I had traced what little information I had to go on (after raiding my father's office) to every possible end, I ended up in some small town in Washington state, alone and with nowhere to go an no further leads to go on. It was as if my mother had suddenly vanished. I was contemplating the strangeness of everything concerning my mother when Ryan and his mother had happened upon me sitting on the beach, and they invited me to their home. Ryan and his mother were Quileute Indians but didn't live with or even near the rest of their tribe, somewhere far back in his father's history someone had done something to shame the tribe and apparently there was still tension over it today. I stayed with Ryan and his mother for quite some time before discovering that Ryan was a werewolf, or that he had imprinted on me, but I didn't really care about either fact, even though I should. I was just happy to have someone accept me as I was. I had never gotten along with my father and sister's for one simple reason. I hated the smell of human blood. I couldn't stand it, so I fed on animals instead, often eating the whole creature not just drinking the blood. They had often tried to sway me to their lifestyle in the almost year that I lived with them, just as I tried to change their minds, it was easier I finally decided to just head out on my own.
And when I finally had the appearance of a young adult woman (about a year and a half after I started living with them), Ryan and I left his mother and headed out on our own to see if we could find and more information about my mother, or other half-vampires. That was five years ago and until this day we had had no success with either venture.
That night as I lay in bed trying to drift off to sleep, even the sound of Ryan's snoring across the hall couldn't help me relax, I was far too excited about the prospect of meeting another half vampire and could only hope Renesmee Cullen would share my enthusiasm.