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First of all, thank you all so much for choosing to read my story! I hope that you enjoy it. As an initial disclaimer: these characters really belong to Richelle Mead; I am simply borrowing them and changing a few things about them to suit my needs.

Secondly, this is a human story. No Moroi/Strigoi/dhampir. Also, warning: some of the characters may seem slightly OOC. I took artistic license and changed up a few things here and there to fit the storyline better. I hope you can forgive me!

You'll notice that throughout the chapters, there will be songs bolded and in parentheses. These are just songs that I thought fit well in that part of the story; kind of like songs playing in the background of a TV show. Feel free to listen to them as you read, but if nothing else, maybe you'll find a cool new song to enjoy. And if you have any good song suggestions, I'd love to hear them!

Lastly, please leave a review, even if it's just one word. I would REALLY appreciate it!

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Prologue

(Be Still by The Fray)

Airplanes… a necessary evil.

Logically, I knew that air travel was actually even safer than driving a car. Then again, that was based on statistics and everyone knew that far more people drove cars every day than flew in an airplane. So, when you really compared the numbers…

This isn't going to help. Think about something else.

I glanced at my watch and inwardly groaned. Or maybe it was outward as well. Either way, we still had four hours left. And then as soon as we landed, I would have to board another flight. But at least that one wouldn't be over the ocean.

"Nervous flyer?"

I looked over at the man sitting next to me. He'd boarded late and this was the first good look I was actually getting of him. I thought that he was tall, but it was hard to truly judge when he was sitting down. He was definitely well off, and I didn't just think that because he was sitting in first class; the gray suit that he wore was tailored exceptionally well. Custom-made, most likely. His blonde hair was styled well – with less on bottom and more on top, combed over and stuck into place with gel.

And he was most definitely flirting with me.

Cautiously, I answered him. "I don't fly much."

He made a face of faux jealousy. "Lucky you. I fly pretty frequently for my job. I'm a corporate lawyer."

The expectant look that he gave me meant that he was waiting to hear about what I did. In the interest of being polite, I told him. "I just finished up my master's degree at Oxford."

His hazel eyes widened in surprise. Whether it was that he hadn't expected me to be a student or that he hadn't expected me to have studied at one of the most prestigious colleges in the world, I didn't know. "Wow. What did you study?"

If he had been surprised that I had studied at Oxford at all, he was going to be even more surprised by my field. "Chemistry."

But, of course, he would use that to his flirting advantage. Flashing me what had to be his most flirtatious smile, he asked, "And what can you tell me about chemistry?"

How was I even supposed to respond to that without seeming like I was flirting back? Because I definitely didn't want to flirt back.

Just don't.

Stupid me grasped at the first thing that I could find. "You're reading a magazine."

He looked down in surprise at his issue of Men's Health, as if he'd forgotten that he'd been reading it. "Um… yeah."

How did I ever get accepted into Oxford? "I read magazines sometimes."

The look that he was giving me indicated that he regretted trying to flirt with me. Obviously, he thought that I had some kind of mental disorder. Hell, maybe I really did. I hardly knew myself anymore.

"Cool," he finally said and forced a smile before looking down at his magazine and picking up wherever he'd left off.

I looked out the window to hide my flaming face from him. When, exactly, had I lost all of my social skills? I had a feeling that I actually knew the answer to my own question, but I wasn't ready to go there. Perhaps I never would be. I just had to take it one day at a time and let things happen.

Somehow, I managed to fall asleep and only awoke when the plane slammed against the ground. At least, that's what it felt like. In reality, we touched the ground normally and made our way towards the actual airport. All around me, other passengers were waking up and preparing to get off of the plane. A lady across the aisle from me was touching up her lipstick. The guy next to me was putting away his laptop and magazine. I decided not to say anything to him.

Once the plane had stopped and we all had permission to begin gathering our things and exiting, I eagerly stood and shouldered my backpack. It felt so good to be back on solid ground and I thought that the airport was quite the sight for sore eyes.

The feeling didn't last long, however, because I realized that I was back in New York City and that sent my stomach to churning. I did my best to push the emotion aside and while that worked as I figured out where I needed to go to board my connecting flight, it didn't work so well once I had taken a seat to wait on boarding to begin.

I tried so many things to try to take my mind off of the feelings – scrolling through all of my social media accounts, watching movie trailers, and reading a bit of the book that I'd been trying to read – but nothing worked. I cursed myself for not thinking about how it would feel to be back in NYC. Really, it had been quite careless of me.

I was so relieved when boarding finally began that I was the first one in line to board. I eagerly took my seat on the plane and focused on anything and everything to take my mind off of my crazy emotions. Eventually, I resorted to watching each person as they boarded and making up a story about them in my head.

That lady in the dark sunglasses was a TV actress and was on her way home from an audition in the big city.

That little girl was going to stay with her grandparents in Montana for the summer.

That guy in the horrid patterned shirt had come to the big city as a tourist. Regularly, he worked as an accountant in a small town in Kentucky.

Finally, everyone was on board and had taken their seats. Not long after that, the plane was pulling up into the sky, leaving me clutching the arm rests of my seat. Even when the plane finally leveled out and the seatbelt sign was off, my discomfort did not ease. I wouldn't feel at ease until I was done with flights for a while.

Fortunately, that happened two and a half hours later.

As the captain welcomed everyone to St Louis, I eagerly unbuckled my seatbelt and prepared to get off of the plane. Hopefully that would be the last plane I would have to be on for quite a while.

The airport in St Louis wasn't nearly as crowded as the one in New York had been, and it didn't take me long to find the baggage claim. There, I waited for half an hour until I finally spotted my two suitcases rolling towards me. Once I had grabbed them off of the belt, I made my way towards the car rental area, following the signs the whole way.

The car rental agent was a kind, elderly woman of about seventy or so. She made small talk as she took my ID and let me read over the rental agreement. After she'd taken my credit card as payment, she called for a young man to take me to my car, which was a black Honda Civic. The guy helped me load my suitcases and then handed me the keys with a kind, boyish smile.

It had been a while since I'd been behind the wheel of a car, but I fell into it easily enough. Then, it was only a matter of navigating myself through St Louis. Luckily, I remembered the city that I had grown up in very well and I didn't even need the GPS. Things had certainly changed – there were more buildings than I remembered and a few places had changed ownership – but the most important things had remained the same.

(Welcome Home by Radical Face)

That included my parents' house.

They lived in a modest, two-story house made of red brick. The lawn was perfectly manicured, the flower bed bright and colorful. My mother certainly had a green thumb that I hadn't inherited. There were three cars in the driveway and I sighed as I parked along the curb so as not to block their way. I had told my parents not to make my homecoming a big deal, but they had obviously invited my three brothers and their spouses to help celebrate my return. So much for going straight to bed to recover from the flights.

As I got out of the rental car, the front door of the house opened and out poured my entire family. A small smile tugged at my lips; they hadn't even been able to wait for me to walk into the house.

The first one to reach me was my brother, Liam. We'd always been the closest of the Sage siblings and I found myself fighting back tears as I hugged him tightly. I hadn't realized quite how much I'd missed him until he was right there, telling me how much he'd missed me.

The next few minutes were a flurry of greetings and meetings and hugs. My mother began crying at some point and it was all that I could do not to join her. Thankfully, my father gently pulled her towards the door and asked my brothers to bring my luggage inside and up to my old room.

A few decorations had been updated but, all in all, the inside of the house had remained as much unchanged as the outside. Something about that familiarity was so comforting to me. It was a wonder that I didn't break down right then and there.

My mother had fixed her famous lasagna for dinner and I took my place at the table between two of my new sisters, Carly and Zoe. They were eager to talk to me and learn about me, and I was just as excited to meet them and get to know them. Unfortunately, I hadn't been able to make it to any of my brothers' weddings. Their spouses seemed perfect for them, though, and I made sure to tell them all how very happy I was for them.

The conversation occasionally turned to me and what I had been up to in the years that I'd been away, but I always artfully turned the conversation back to them, claiming that nothing interesting had happened in my life. I could tell that some of them – particularly Liam – didn't completely buy it, but they played along for the moment.

After the lasagna, my mother served my favorite strawberry cake and gave me the first piece. I felt like I was being treated better than I deserved, but my mother wouldn't hear of it and insisted that I deserved it.

If only she knew…

After all of the dishes had been cleared away, I said that I was tired and wanted to go to bed. "It was a long flight. And the time zone change is really messing with me."

"Of course." My mother was immediately full of sympathy and ushered me to the foot of the stairs. "You sleep as long as you need to. We'll see you in the morning. How do pancakes sound?"

I smiled and let her hug me. "Sounds wonderful. Can't wait."

I hugged everyone else and then found my old room looking exactly the same as the day that I had left it. Even my books were still in order on the shelf. It was like nothing had even been touched, though I was certain that my mother had still washed the sheets and cleaned occasionally.

My bags were waiting at the foot of the bed and I immediately grabbed what I needed for a shower. I had hoped that the warm water would wash away the stress and tension in my body, but it didn't help much. I was still worked up from my brief time in New York City.

Even after I'd changed into comfy pajama pants and a T-shirt, pulled my damp hair into a messy bun, and used a face mask, I still couldn't relax. I was wound up far too tightly to go to sleep, so I decided to go out and sit on the front porch for a while. Maybe being outside would relax me enough to be able to go to sleep.

I wasn't that surprised to find Liam already there, rocking in one of the wooden rocking chairs that our grandfather had made by hand years before. We'd used to hang out together on the porch all of the time in high school.

He didn't seem surprised to see me, either. "Hey."

"Hey." I sat down in the other rocking chair. "You didn't go home like everyone else?"

"My wife and I live in Atlanta now." That news surprised me and he laughed at the look on my face. "You've been gone for a long time, Syd. Things have changed."

"She's the lawyer, right? Sorry, I'm just meeting all of them at once…"

He nodded and ran a hand through his light brown hair. "She's a lawyer. A criminal lawyer, at that. I think she wants to be a judge someday, but who knows. What about you? What have you been up to?"

"Finishing up my masters at Oxford."

The grin that he gave me was one full of teasing and pride. "I always knew you'd be the most successful of all of us. Lee's a detective, Lance is an FBI agent, and I'm just an accountant."

"Which always shocked me, by the way. You used to be terrible at math."

He shrugged and let out a sigh. "I really never knew what I wanted to do with my life. I don't even remember how I picked accounting. I think I may have closed my eyes and randomly pointed at a list of the majors."

I laughed at the image and honestly wouldn't have been too surprised by that. "Well, you've done quite well for yourself."

"Not as well as others." He gave me a pointed look. "Valedictorian of your senior class. Full ride scholarship to several Ivy League colleges. Bachelor's degree from Columbia University. Graduated with all kinds of honors. Rhodes Scholar. Degree from Oxford. Are you done there or are you going to cure cancer, too?"

The praise made me uncomfortable and I picked at my cuticles. "Probably not. I still have the Rhodes Scholarship for one more year, so I think I'm going to do another degree at Oxford."

"Of course you are." His voice was full of sarcasm, but I could tell that he was proud of me. "Two degrees from two of the most prestigious colleges out there isn't nearly enough. You're some kind of genius, you know."

"I'm not a genius." A genius would have made better life choices. A genius wouldn't be where I was at emotionally. A genius would have known better.

"That's not what your IQ says."

I made a noncommittal noise in my throat and looked out at the street. It was dark and the streetlights cast oddly-shaped circles on the blacktop. A white cat ran into the bushes at the house across the street. Somewhere, a car horn blared.

After several minutes of silence, Liam said, "So, tell me what's really going on."

I looked over at him, our green eyes meeting. "I don't know what you mean by that."

He didn't believe me. Rightly so. "You leave to go to Columbia and basically excommunicate yourself from our family. And now, suddenly, here you are. Staying a whole summer with Mom and Dad. Not that they're not awesome, but it's all so sudden. I have a hard time believing that something else isn't going on."

I tried to buy myself some time to think of something to say to that. "Really?"

"Really." He nodded. "And you seem… different. Sad, somehow."

"Maybe you should have been the detective instead of Lee," I told him drily.

"I'm sure Lee noticed it, too. He's just not likely to say anything. I'm the one that's always been super close to you. So… Tell me all about it."

Liam may have only been twenty-four, but sometimes I thought that he had the wisdom of a middle-aged man. He'd always been very good at reading me, and I was partly glad and partly annoyed that he still was. "What am I supposed to tell you?"

"Everything," was his request. "But hold that thought for a minute, okay?" He stood and made his way inside.

In his absence, I contemplated what, if anything, to tell him. The truth was hard. Not because I thought that he would judge me harshly and never want to see me again, but because it would be hard to talk about.

Maybe it would help to talk to him. You used to talk to him about everything, after all. You've always trusted him more than anyone else in your family. And it can't be healthy to keep this all to yourself. You need to talk to someone eventually or you'll go crazy. So, you might as well talk to your brother. You know he won't make it too difficult on you.

I'd just made the decision when Liam came back out onto the porch carrying two cans of Coke and several bags of snacks. White cheddar popcorn, Lays BBQ chips, animal crackers, and some snack I had never even heard of.

"We can't have a good talk without snacks," he said by way of explanation as he set the bags down on the table in the middle and slightly behind the rocking chairs. "I have a feeling that this is going to take a while. I mean, you've been gone for four years. A lot can happen in four whole years."

"It's a long story," I warned him and popped the tab on my Coke. "And I mean long. We may be here until the sun comes up."

"It's been a while since I've pulled an all-nighter," he said in approval, opening his own can of Coke. "It'll keep me young."

The bubbles burned against my tongue. "I don't even know where to begin." There was so much to the story.

Gently, he reached out and touched my hand. His smile was soothing. "Start at the very beginning. Tell me everything."

Something about the look that he was giving me gave me the courage that I needed. After a deep breath, I nodded. "Okay. I guess it all started when I went off to start school at Columbia…"

He nodded to show that he was listening and settled in for the long story.