Chapter One

It was very difficult to breathe. I stared at the scene of what was my home, destroyed, and my breath constricted. It wasn't the fact that the door was off the hinges, or that everything had been thrown about and broken or shredded; those shocked me, yes, but it wasn't the worst of it. It wasn't even that the others in the building were not even glancing in.

I could smell blood.

After my moment of shock, having returned home from a particularly late night run to my home destroyed, I ran in. The lights were off, but I still could see easily enough to avoid all the things out of place, closing in on the blood. I easily jumped a chair and ducked over a fallen tower lamp.

I found my mother on the kitchen floor. A small pool of blood surrounded her head, but I could tell by the odd angles of her limbs that she had been thrown about a few times. There was also a small tear in her neck, and a bit of blood in her mouth as if she had bitten her tongue.

I fell to my knees and crawled to her body. "Mom," I croaked, but it was no use. She was dead.

I'm not sure the length of time that I sobbed next to her, but life became blur for several days after that. Someone else finally came in, I'm not sure who, and called the police. Her body was gone before daylight. There was a funeral service, which consisted of myself and a few of my mother's co-workers, and a memorial set up at her office. A few days later I was packing up my things, what hadn't been broken or destroyed at least. At age fifteen and with no known family, they were putting me into foster care. A family not too far had offered to take me in for the time being. I'd be going to the same school, which I couldn't decide if it was a good or bad thing. I knew that everyone would be whispering and pointing, but I'd have friends there. Aside from being so withdrawn, I guess I was what foster families wanted. A bright girl with all honors classes, active in sports and clubs at school, a hard worker, and never would I become involved in drugs or drinking. The worst they would have to deal with would probably be crying fits.

I could still smell the blood, even though it had been cleaned and bleached, after an extensive examination of the kitchen by the police that is. After all, the building management wanted to be able to get it all fixed up so they could rent it out again once I was out. However, as I was packing, I heard someone step into the apartment that I had lived in with my mother.

I grabbed onto an old field hockey stick that I never really used as it was one of the sports I hadn't excelled at, and held it ready as I crept out of the room. They say criminals always return to the scene of the crime, and I wasn't about to let there be a repeat performance.

What I found were two men, though I could hear a third person in the living room. They, however, didn't seem to be there to hurt me. The man in front was tall and thin, pale, with pale blonde hair like my own, and the same blue eyes. It hit me that this man could be related to me… possibly the father I had never met, though my skin was more tanned, and not just from my time in the sun playing sports. His skin was the kind of pale that one received steering clear of the sun completely. He wore a crisp black suit, blue undershirt that brought out his eyes, the jacket opened, and a hand in his pocket.

The guy behind him was just short of my possible father's height, but was twice as wide at the shoulders, probably of muscles. He wore black slacks and a black leather jacket over a white shirt. Dark hair, and his eyes were all over the place.

"It's Genevieve, right?" the blue-eyed man said.

I had begun to lower the field hockey stick when I first saw him, but I held it at the ready when he took a few steps toward me. In a flash, Mr. Muscle was in front of me and ripped the stick from my hands as if I hadn't been holding it at all, despite how tight my grip was.

"Harry, stop," Blue Eyes said, a commandment, but not stern. "She's just scared." He approached me again, but Harry kept his eyes carefully trained on me and threw the hockey stick behind him. "Genevieve. My name is Charles Lazar."

"And?" I asked. I stepped back, into my room so that I could slam the door closed if I felt threatened. Charles didn't feel like a threat; despite my small size, Charles looked frail and I figured a quick kick could incapacitate him. Harry, the muscles, not so much.

Charles sighed. "I think that, maybe, I might be your father."

"There's definitely a resemblance," I heard the voice of a woman in the other room. She must have been looking at a picture of me on the mantel. She stepped into the hallway. Like Harry, she was in black and white. Her light brown hair was in a bun. She smiled when she saw me. "Oh, back up you two. I knew I should have handled this alone." She approached, yanked Harry back a few steps, and put a hand on Charles's shoulder. Once he too had stepped back, she offered a hand. "The name is Betty, but I'm usually called Guardian Clare."

I looked at the hand for a moment, and then offered her my hand. "Gen," I replied.

Her looked went from cheerful to serious. "I'm so sorry about what happened, and how it was you that found her. No one should have to see that." She nodded her head toward Charles. "Mr. Lazar recognized your mother's picture in the news. He once had a romance with your mother. And, well, the timing does fit." She tilted her head. "You do have his eyes, rare indeed."

"So, you want me to move in with you now?" I asked, crossing my arms over my chest.

Betty bit her lip and turned to Charles. Interestingly, she had several tattoos on the back of her neck, but I only spotted them for a second before she was looking at me again. "We have some things to tell you that may come as a shock. But we will allow the decision up to you. And if you're dissatisfied with the decision you make, you can change your mind at any time."

It's probably a stupid idea to trust three random people that come to your home, but I allowed them to take me to a restaurant, a small diner that was lightly populated, but easy enough to run from if they tried to kidnap me. Running was what I was best at.

Charles started out with the basics… how he met my mother, how they had an affair, even though he was married and his wife pregnant, how his wife found out and rather than getting a divorce, forced the family to move away. He said it must have been shortly after my mother had gotten pregnant that he left because he would have insisted to know and help financially if he had known about me earlier.

"How did you learn about me, then?" I asked, slowly eating the ice cream I had decided on over actual food. Betty was sitting with us, as I felt comfortable with her around, but Harry was standing off, watching us from a distance. When I had asked about that, they said it would come up in time.

"Well, when I saw your mother's picture in the news, I recognized her," he said. "The story said she had left behind a daughter, so I had Harry come here and investigate to see if I could be the father."

"And your wife and kids are okay that you want to take your love child in?" I asked.

He completely avoided this question, and instead went in a totally different, and very unexpected, direction.

"What do you know about vampires?"

I stared at him. He was being serious. "Edward Cullen is awkwardly hot, Buffy slays them, and Dracula is pretty badass." I cocked my head. "Why? Don't tell me you are one."

He cleared his throat. "I'm what is known as a Moroi. One of two forms of vampires."

I stared at him like he had to be crazy. Because he had to be, right?

"That would make you half-vampire," Betty put in. "Better known as a dhampir." She smiled. "Harry and I are dhampirs too."

"Dhampirs, in our world, are sort of a Moroi body-guard," Charles continued.

"Okay," I said slowly. "I'm not saying that any of this is true, but what do vampires need to be guarded from? You know, aside from the sun?"

"Strigoi," Charles said. "The other kind of vampire. The one that comes more from legends that run in the human world." He took a bite of his chicken.

"Well, if you're a vampire, why are you eating that?" I questioned. I smiled, clearly breaking through his lie.

"Moroi survive off both blood and food," he said. "But we do not kill when we drink." He smiled and suddenly I saw that he had two long fangs. I jumped back in my seat. "Unlike Strigoi, who do kill their victims."

"Why are you telling me this?" I questioned, taking a breath to calm myself.

"For two reasons," Charles said. "First is that we suspect that it may have been a Strigoi that killed your mother."

"Why would one want to kill my mother?" I asked.

"To get to him," Betty said. "You're a Dhampir, but you definitely carry a few of Charles's looks. The hair, the eyes, the chin. They may have thought that your mother would have information as to where Charles was."

"So, they're after you?" I asked him.

"They're after all Moroi," Charles said. "The blood of Moroi makes Strigoi stronger. That is because our blood contains magic."

I sat for a moment, a little shocked.

"I know this must be a lot to take in," Betty said slowly.

"And the second reason?" I asked. "You said you were telling me for two reasons."

Charles cleared his throat. "Well, as we mentioned, dhampirs, like Betty, are often the bodyguards of the Moroi…"

I stared at him. He had to be kidding. "You want me to become a body guard for some Moroi?"

"Specifically, my son," Charles said.

"You just want to enlist me as a body guard?" I asked. I gestured to myself. "Do I look like I could be a body guard? I'm barely a hundred pounds."

"You'd be trained, of course," Betty said. "At St. Vladimirs. Well trained. I attended it myself."

I stood up. "You guys are crazy," I said. With that, I turned around and walked out. They didn't try to stop me, they just watched me go. By the time I returned to my home, which no longer felt like a home at all, I was quite tired and still not packed. What I did find, however, was an envelope on my bed. It had Charles's business card with his personal phone number written on the back, along with a few twenty dollar bills and a note that said, in case I needed something.

I had had all my assignment brought to me by a girl that lived in my building, and it had been the one thing I could do that was productive that allowed me to not dwell on what had happened. I was still packing, though a few men had come by earlier and taken most of the furniture to a storage unit (which I found out was being paid for by Charles). The only furniture left was in my room, and every day, more boxes were stacking up in the living room, ready to be taken to storage as well.

When I returned to school, a week after my mother had been killed, everyone stared. I tried to act as normally as possible, but no one seemed to know how to talk to me anymore. As always, my friend picked me up, as her sister drove and had to be in the area anyway. I still had the locker next to a senior who hadn't known I existed before, but now seemed to know who I was, as he told me, like everyone else was, that he was so sorry for what had happened.

"No one has an excuse to have not finished this assignment," Mrs. Crock said during my English class. "So, hand it in, whether it is finished or not." Everyone began grumbling, opening their folders to pull out a questionnaire about Jane Eyre.

However, when I reached down to my bag, she placed a hand on my shoulder. "It's okay if you haven't finished it, Gen. I can't imagine what you've been going through."

"It's okay," I said, pulling it out. "I actually have it done." We had been given the packet of questions two weeks ago, and I was one of those that loved English. I had finished the packet two days into the reading, after I had read ahead.

I could tell that Mrs. Crock wanted to use that as a slap in the face to everyone else, but she also could tell that by snapping that a girl whose mother was just brutally murdered finished the homework, there was absolutely no excuse for everyone else would probably be more of a slap in the face to me.

Half way through math class, I was called to the front offices, where I sat down with a school counselor. When I said I didn't want to talk about it, she said that we'd meed every week, on Wednesdays instead of me going to PE. I planned never to show up.

My table was nearly silent for at least ten minutes, until I demanded that they all talk. My friends immediately decided to catch me up on all the school gossip. I really didn't care at the moment.

I think the line was drawn when a junior came up to me and asked if they could interview me about the whole thing. I decided not to go to my volleyball practice and instead pulled my phone out, dialing Charles's number.