"Have you ever wondered what love is?

Wondered what makes people fall in love with one another. How they can see something so beautifully pure in someone you can't see anything other than annoyance in?

Then have you ever wondered when at the precise moment you do fall in love, if it's worth it? Maybe your love is fought with hardships, people who don't want you to be together, things that can keep tearing you apart making sure you don't even want to try anymore. Possibly you cause your loved one pain, or just your presence can undermine everything they're strived for.

Even when you're in love, you can't tell if the sort of love that'll last forever or the kind that'll fade. How are you to tell you're ready to spend your life with one person! What if you love but they have really smelly feet? Or chew with their mouth open. If someone you love annoys will put something like his or her family before you, how are you meant to know if it'll last?

And then you can never be 100% sure your partner isn't cheating. Can you? Isn't there always some doubt that you'll suddenly find out whilst they were away there was someone else? That they were just that little bit too lonely.........

How can you be sure someone actually loves you? Don't people in old films spend their days convinced the one they love doesn't know they exist and their night wishing they did? Only to find the one they love, is manically obsessed with them as well! Or you know they love you and they really actually quite like your best friend.........

I mean isn't it just setting your self up for disaster? Falling in love. It's like going into bad part of town wearing a police uniform. Or prepulse jewellery. You're asking to be robbed. Of your heart usually.

So why bother to even try love?

Apart from the examples you're set. The people who somehow have the courage to risk everything, lives, dreams, etc, just to be with the person they love. The one's who defy everything just to get back to the person they want to be with. The people who don't care they're partner will drop everything to save a stranger, or run off into Lord knows where for family. Or are with the one man everyone knew would NEVER settle because he enjoyed being a player too much.

The people who don't care that the fates hate them. The ones who when life rains on them just go dancing in the rain. Or when they have to fight for love do so with everything they've got because it IS worth it to them. They're the people that give you faith. They're the ones whom you look at and think 'love must be worth it.' They make you willing to wait for love."

"My name is Kathryn Natalie Cale. Call me Katie if you want too most people tend to. The people that I use for an example when they ask 'What's Love Anyway?' are my parents. Alec (random lack of last name) and Ella Cale. Or I look at my aunt and uncle, Logan and Max. They aren't usual couples they've gone through so much more than anymore else would think. And I know I'll probably have to when it happens to me. Just like cousin Matthew is going through trying to explain to his girlfriend why he can hear her from a block away.........

I guess it comes with the territory, my parents told me about a place called Manticore. They've told me very much because I can guess it isn't high on their lists of favourite conversations but they've told me enough. I know I'll never be normal and that doesn't matter to me anymore.

Since I turned five nothing about Manticore has effect our lives. It's over with as my uncle says. They're always times when either one or more of my parent or Max and Logan are gone for awhile. Usually Max and Alec, my dad, they come back with people who don't look like normal people or people who are like us- different. I'm not really meant to know about this but I know my uncle is Eyes Only. And that's still happening, Manticore is exposed, forgotten and all other bad guys are going down! Stuff like that still happens but my family doesn't seem to care. I guess they've seen worse.

It's funny to think of my family like other people do. Characters in a story do that sorta stuff, Cindy always says. I don't see them like that. We're not normal but we're still mainly human. blah blah woof woof"

So maybe my entire family isn't normal. And maybe that makes love different for us, my sister, cousin, and I. But I don't think it really matters. My parents have been married 19 years now. My aunt and uncle only a little less than that, I'm nineteen and my cousin Matthew is turning twenty-one soon. We're both old enough to know that our parents are happy. That despite Manticore and everything else that they had to go through when were small, before my sister Bethany-Rachel was born, just made the love between respective couples so much stronger.

"What's love anyway?"

"I don't know. But I know I want to find out."