Prologue
Alice's POV.
The vision of the little blond vampire's birth plagued me.
I knew straight away that she was one of us, (or I suppose half a one of us.) by the way she was born. I watched over and over, helpless, as the poor woman was ripped from the inside out.
I tried desperately to work out where they were. If not to save the woman, then to make her pain worth while and save the poor little girl that would lie next to the mother until something killed her in almost every vision of her that I'd had.
They always started the same. The mother would stumble into the woods calling out to someone named Clive, pain evident in her voice. No one ever came and she'd end up crumpled on the floor unable to do any thing but scream. Then the bulge of her stomach would start to jerk around and I'd hear the sickening sound of her skin tearing and her bones braking. Once the bloodied hole in the middle of the woman was big enough the little baby pulled herself weekly from the mothers body and curled up against her mum.
Here was where the visions varied. Sometimes the two were attacked and eaten by wild animals, bears or wolves or mountain lions. And in some, a man that looked like a hitch hiker with no gear and red eyes, would emerge from the shadows and take the baby girl, leaving the mother as a feast for any carnivorous creature that happened to pass.
But this wasn't what scared me most.
The vision of what the girl would become, if she was left to go with the vampire hiker was a million times worse...
...because she'd be the death of us all.