Prologue
"Aunt Jenna? Do you have a minute?"
Jenna Sommers glanced up from her laptop. The blank document had been open on her screen for the past twenty minutes. Taunting her. She was supposed to be writing her thesis - but she'd been delaying it, procrastinating, and now she knew exactly why her mother had always told her not to do that. The cursor blinked on as she smiled at her fifteen-year-old nephew.
Jeremy Gilbert had been having a few issues in the past year. His parents - Jenna's sister and her brother-in-law - had died in a car accident; Elena, Jeremy's older sister, had been the only one to survive the accident, somehow managing to get out of the car after it went off the old Wickery Bridge. Jeremy had messed around with drugs and alcohol for the summer, but Jenna and Elena had come down hard on him when school started again... or tried to. It hadn't exactly worked.
Just as things had started to look a little better for him, Jeremy's girlfriend, Vicki, had disappeared. Then he'd discovered that Elena was adopted, and not too long after that, Vicki showed up - dead. Jenna wasn't sure if he knew the rest of the story about Elena - that Jeremy's uncle, John, was actually Elena's birth father. You would think that would be where things started to get more normal, but that wasn't the case. Some psycho killer had gotten into the house and attacked John on Founder's Day. But now things were finally starting to lighten up: Jeremy had stopped doing drugs, stopped drinking, started doing somewhat well again in school. And now, Jenna was fairly certain that he was happy. Which could only be a good thing.
"Aren't you going out with Anna tonight?" she asked. She had to admit that she liked the new girl in Jeremy's life - she was a hell of a lot better for him than Vicki Donovan was, that was for sure.
"Um, yeah. But I... I have to talk to you." He looked nervous, she noticed. Oh, crap. Was he going to ask her some overly personal question or something? She panicked, her heart beat maybe even speeding up a little. Had Miranda and Grayson given their son the sex talk before their car went off the bridge? Was that up to her? She didn't think she could handle that. Maybe she'd have to bring Ric in for the Talk... Jenna wondered what Jeremy would think of that. His history teacher telling him to use a condom...
"Sure," she said easily, pretending she wasn't scared out of her mind at that particular moment. What kind of thing could he want to talk about? Closing the laptop, she patted the seat next to her at the kitchen table. As casually as possible, she asked, "What's up?"
Jeremy let out a long breath as he sat down. He didn't look at her; instead, his gaze rested on his fingers as they drummed on the tabletop restlessly. Jenna smiled softly as her eyes caught sight of the ring on his finger. Just before leaving town, John had given the ring, a Gilbert family heirloom, to Jeremy.
Taking a deep breath, Jeremy finally looked up and met her eyes. Jenna braced herself for anything she could think of. Anna's pregnant. Jeremy killed someone. Elena was in a car crash... No, Elena was upstairs, getting ready to go over to Caroline's house for a girls' night with her friends. And what came out of Jeremy's mouth next was nothing like anything she could have come up with on her own.
"Do you believe in vampires?"
Author's Note: Okay, yeah, so I've been a twit and haven't updated any of my stories in the longest time... But I got a little plot child for a Vampire Diaries fanfic, sort of, so I figured why not? :P
