A/n: Hey guys, this is the re-write of my ongoing story, About Eden. Some of you may already know what's going to happen, but a lot of things will be different! Please enjoy! Love, Breenagh.

Chapter One

Dawn had just broken and the world was still dark when I was shaken out of my sleep. I lifted my head in the dim room and let my eyes adjust to the shape of my mother, standing over the mattress on the floor that I was curled up on.

"Eden. Wake up," Mom said. "We're leaving."

"Now?" I checked the time. It was five in the morning. Mom didn't say a word. She dumped an armload of my things into a worn cardboard box and slid it towards me with her foot.

"All your stuff is packed. CD's, books, clothes. Get dressed, or don't, you can wear your pajamas. Grab the blankets and let's go," Mom said. This was a new record for her - two days. We hadn't even moved in yet and she was ready to leave. As usual, I didn't argue, I didn't say anything at all. I just rose and did as I was told. She scanned the trees when we left the little house we'd appropriated. I whispered goodbye to it. Stupid to get attached, I knew, but the house had this cottage-in-the-woods vibe that I really liked. It had been left behind, forgotten, and I wanted to make it home at least for a little while.

Mom loaded the car with everything we owned - always bare essentials - and we drove off without a second look. The benefit of having a vampire for a mother was that she didn't need to stop and sleep. In the growing light, I looked at the hard edges of her face. I could imagine her once as a human, kind and soft and sunny, but I'd only ever seen that human face once, streaked with tears and blood but with shining blue eyes and smile lines before she turned. Something in her, the humanity and the kindness, died when she changed. She was cold.

You know, cold for a vampire.

We drove for hours, for days. I slept on and off. She didn't. Sometimes she parked the car hidden somewhere and left for a while. She'd come back with her eyes bright vivid red and not say a word to me. The knowledge of what she had done would sit heavy in my stomach for a couple of hours afterwards.

On the last day we drove, I dozed off against the window, careening down the freeway always felt like flying to me. Rain streaked across the windows, landing with soothing dull thuds on the roof. My eyes closed, and I saw more than I ever saw when I was awake.

My dreams were colorful and bright, sometimes just shapes and moving colors, or shadows of people I didn't know. This dream, I was in a place with a low ceiling, surrounded by metal and colorless blobs. The blobs whispered or shouted and moved around me like I didn't matter at all until several - I counted four - shadows moved towards me in blinding colors. Scarlet, blue, purple, yellow. I moved to them, excited.

But then Mom turned a corner and the movement was enough to wake me, smush my face against the window. I rubbed my cheek.

"Where are we?" I asked. She looked pointedly at a sign that said Astoria, Oregon.

"Why?" I continued. Was she going to feed? Leave some local family with an unsolved murder, never knowing who or how or why?

"Your growth has slowed," Mom said, still not looking at me. She didn't look at me a lot. I was a reminder of something she hated. My face, my body - it wasn't hard to figure out that I looked like her but human. Well, half human. I was a reminder of the person she lost. We had the same kind, open faces, wide doe-like eyes, long and wavy dirty blonde hair. Except my eyes were dark brown and my lips were more full. That part of me, I assumed, looked like my father.

"It has," I confirmed, unsure why it was relevant.

"So, we'll stay here a while. You don't have any friends," she pointed out harshly. "It's time you made some. I got a house here. You'll be going to school. He won't look for us here."

I could barely believe my ears. I was three years old, about sixteen in physical appearance, and my growth had slowed enough that it wasn't a daily thing anymore. I tried not to get too excited, though. Maybe she claimed it would be different this time, but it was only so long until she saw some shadow in the night and got paranoid again. We'd been on the run since my birth. All Mom would say about my father, the vampire who changed her as I was being born, was that he was crazy and wanted to hurt us. She would never say more, never give me details.

We drove through the cheerful, colorful town. It was foggy and overcast, and the trees felt like tall green walls, but the store fronts and houses were painted brightly to compensate. Some humans moved around, shopping, drinking coffee, being human. I grinned. Humans were endlessly fascinating.

There was a curving harbor that cut into the land, filled with inky-looking sapphire water. Some ships passed in the distance or floated like ducks attached to the marina. The far side of the harbor was hilly, several big tall hills covered with a blanket of trees and some houses. We wound up driving up one of those hills to a sweet yellow and white house. Mom looked at it wistfully.

"There's furniture inside," Mom said as we walked up the chipped white porch steps. A few mismatched chairs sat on the porch, looking out over the hill and the harbor. We went inside, and to my left I peeked into a small blue-and-grey tiled kitchen. The front hall divided into a hallway and a staircase - the hall led down to a bedroom, the back door and a laundry room. The staircase went up to a bedroom and a bathroom. To the right of the front door, a living room and another bathroom.

"I like it," I said, despite the washed-out colors and sparse furnishings.

"Put your things upstairs," she said.

My room only had a dresser, a bed and a desk with a mirror. I put my worn-out green quilt on the bed, stacked up my CD's and books on the vanity, stuck my only photographs to the mirror and left my few outfits in the dresser. The carpet was a dusky grey-blue and the walls were faded yellow, but I liked it just the same. It was mine.

I ate microwaved noodles for dinner - Mom swore she'd never have me drink blood as long as I lived. A late summer rain drenched the town, warm and thick. Mom left the door open with the screen door shut to let in the smell of soaked pavement and wood. I curled up in the bed, under my trusty green quilt, and let the rain soothe me to sleep.

The girl in my dreams had red-brown hair, dazzling in the sunlight, but I couldn't see her face. It was just tilted far enough that I could only make out a line of pale white jaw.

"We're coming for you," she said in a voice like bells.

"Who?"

"We'll find you," the girl promised. "We'll never let go. Never let go."

A soft thud woke me.

"Didn't mean to wake you," Mom said plainly. "Those are for you."

I shook the dream away and looked at the bag - the source of the thud. It sat on the floor near my dresser, and I saw fabric peeking out.

"Clothes?"

"For school. And a cellphone," Mom told me, not looking at me as usual, hanging up curtains on my window.

"Okay," I said. She warned me to get dressed for school and left. The fabrics were mostly gray and green, the only colors I seemed to like. I put on shorts under a little black skirt, a grey tank top and a green zip-up sweater. The idea of being alone, without Mom, at a school full of humans made me so anxious I nearly threw up. I sank to the floor instead of vomiting and stuck my head between my bare knees. Seven deep breaths later I worked up the courage to go downstairs.

"Hungry?" Mom said, sitting at the round kitchen table, reading the newspaper. I shook my head no and sat, stretching my legs to rest my feet on the other empty chair. It struck me like a scene from the books I read. Now we just needed a dad, all decked out in suit and tie, to kiss us both on the head and hand me lunch money before leaving to go to work in a shiny blue car. I tried to imagine what he'd look like.

"Did you dream?" she asked. The only time she wanted to know what I thought was when I dreamed.

"I saw a girl," I reported dutifully. "Pale, with red-brown hair."

Mom's head snapped up. "And?"

Something made me want to keep her words, the honey-drenched voice, to myself. "She didn't talk."

"What was she doing? What did her face look like? Her eyes?"

"Nothing," I said. "I didn't see her face. I woke up before she did anything."

Mom glared out the window, sighing like I disappointed her, forgetting who's fault it was that I woke up anyways. I got up and grabbed my brand-new backpack, already stocked with notebooks and pens and my first cellphone ever.

"I should leave now," I said.

"I can drive you," Mom told me.

"If we're going to live here, I need to know how to get around on foot," I told her firmly. Really, I was just excited to get away from her and be on my own. Mom stood up.

"I'll drive you," she said. I knew better than to argue.