Chapter One
Staring
I was washing dishes when I looked up and saw the pale face in the woods for the first time.
It had been an extraordinarily boring day.
College, for an underage, formerly homeschooled, introvert was vastly overwhelming and underwhelming - simultaneously.
The student body of the University of Washington wasn't at all what I thought it would be, for one thing. There were no wild drunken parties in the frat houses, no campus wide competitions of the multiple elites versus the one underdog group, and no cliches. Well, if I'd look hard enough for the continuation of high school groupings, I'm sure I'd be able to find some.
For the most part?
Students went to class, spent time with the people they had the most classes with, and had normal, boring schedules.
If I'd known that college wouldn't be the wild events and drama that movies promised it was, I never would have insisted on attending.
For the first fourteen years of my life, I had been rigorously homeschooled by my father, Harrison Durt. He was a high school teacher at Forks High School, the public high school of Forks, Washington. During the school day, he taught history. Every other spare moment, he taught me - Gabriella Durt - everything else.
It hadn't been a bad education, per say.
He was a great teacher and anything he didn't know, the online education programs - yes, multiple - supplemented. I'd "graduated" the regular online high school shortly after the October of my twelfth birthday. The others, all advanced curriculums, I had passed by my fourteenth. I then graduated the normal four years of college, all from the safety of my bedroom.
The printed out bachelor's degree in history sat in a desk drawer back home, stuffed there the night of my sixteenth birthday.
It had taken me six months to get where I was now, six months of pleading and cajoling and debating. I'd still studied for those months, but it hadn't meant I was any less persistent.
"Intelligence is invaluable but it means nothing without social intelligence."
That was the line that had finally battered down his resolve.
He'd allowed me to enroll, to move away, to live without his supervision.
I was eighteen and now had a doctorate.
Dr. Gabriella Durt.
I stared at the fancy degree, laid out on my now empty desk, embossed and hand signed. I couldn't summon up any feeling for it. How many hours had I spent researching and writing an untold number essays and theses? How many nights had I studied for the exams? How many breaths had I used to rehearse and then perform my oral finals?
All for this?
This scrap of paper?
What did it all mean?
I'd looked around my dorm room - a special, single bed room that had been set up for my attendance as a minor. Seventeen and already studying for a doctorate? While eager to take me in, the university hadn't known what to think of me. So, they'd stuffed me into a renovated office at the epicenter of campus, within sight of all my classrooms and far out of reach of all the other students.
I'd gone to class, done my work, and graduated again.
Yesterday, I'd skipped the ceremony though… for reasons I wasn't wanting to think about.
Apathy had struck when I'd received the news that I'd checked the last box.
I had finished the first four years of college online, in half the time.
The next five years, I'd fit into two.
All without an iota of social intelligence.
Sure, I'd had group projects - but the professors were ordered to ensure I was never paired with anyone that could threaten my "bright" future. That had led to all but mute partners who never looked up from their books.
The tan walls and grey carpet, the boxy desk and matching bed… there was nothing in common with my bedroom at home about them, but yet I felt like I'd never left. I might as well have still been in Forks.
I'd already packed my suitcase, ready for the morning's departure, but I still had the box of other things to fill. Like my dishes - or rather, the morning's bowl, the small plate from lunch, and dinner's recently cleared larger plate. All different colors because I'd bought them from a thrift store. I only had those and then a mismatched fork, spoon, and butter knife. The sink, a small single basin installed into an office counter under a window, was ill lit. Most sinks had a pendant hanging down or a globe to illuminate the cleaning area - but this had never been intended for a cleaning area.
I'd sighed, mechanically washing those three dishes like I had every single night for the last two and a half years.
It was only the apathetic emptiness that had me looking up, perhaps looking for another goal.
I met the very surprised, brown eyed gaze of the girl outside my window, without expression.
She was very pretty, almost cherubic. Waist length curls blew around her in the breeze, her open denim jacket gently flapping. She was backlit by the campus center flag pole spotlights and they created any almost angelic glow.
I tilted my head, answering her smile with an unwitting one of my own.
Then, logic seeped in.
My room was on the fourth floor, the highest corner of the campus office building right off the center square. There was a small forest in the square, displaying the beauty of natural Washington. Specifically, there was a giant tree at least five hundred years old there.
She stood on a tree limb like it was solid ground, hair tugged back and forth by the breeze, staring at me with a kind smile. Like she wasn't forty feet off the ground.
My jaw dropped as well as the dish I was holding.
Due to its second hand nature, it cracked into pieces on contact.
That crack drew my eyes down for a heartbeat.
When I looked back up, she was gone.
I was chilled to the bone.
My old quilt, normally almost stuffy, wasn't enough. I shivered and shook, eyes sealed to the glass panes over the tiny sink.
I didn't know what to think.
Was I scared? No. That smile had been the most non threatening smile I'd ever seen - in fact, it was the kind of smile she'd seen on tv, shared between friends.
So why was I shaking?
Sunlight brightened the room and finally, I calmed.
I packed the box, picked up my suitcase, and left without a backward glance.
The bus to Forks was nearly empty and I was grateful. I was sure my face was ashen, that my eyes were too wide. I sat with my suitcase at my feet and my box on my knees, watching my two plates slide with the twists and turns. When we finally reached the drop off point, I dashed off the bus.
The town of Forks was… quaint.
The grocery store wasn't a corporation but a family owned business, the gas station was almost an antique, and everywhere there were signs that time didn't pass here. Just down the highway - which was the road that connected everything, there was a high school. A collection of buildings that didn't look anything like the multi-story structures in the movies. I had stared at that school for sixteen and a half years, through a small window, but I'd never attended it.
I walked down the side of the highway, the early morning too bright. Today, there were no clouds which was supremely abnormal for Washington. My shoes, sensible black converse hightops that I'd had since my seventh birthday, squelched in the mossy gravel along the road.
I concentrated very hard on just putting one foot in front of the other.
The highschool was filling gradually, though it was still too early for the bells to ring them all inside. Excited voices, students enjoying the sunshine, the mood of the summer soon to come heightening everything. As an eighteen year old, I should have been among them, looking forward to graduating high school and entering the world for the first time. Instead, I was returning from the world.
What waited for me at home?
My dad… he'd raised me all on his own.
I didn't have much in common with him, not physically anyway. He had slightly wavy brown hair always cropped shorter than two inches and pushed away from his face, a face with Washington pale skin covered in freckles, light brown eyes, and a cleft chin that he could never quite shave completely. He was average height, about five foot five, and average build. Not muscled but not overweight, aside from the stomach pooch of a middle aged man who liked pie. He wore sweaters with patches on the elbows, ironed jeans, and converse hightops like me - though like me, not because of style. A pencil was always stuck behind his ear, another smaller one in his pocket.
He was mild mannered and soft spoken. Harrison had never disciplined me as a child - though that was probably due to me being so well behaved.
I crossed the road after waiting only a moment for the school traffic to pause.
The two story house that I'd spent my entire life in rose up in front of me, unchanged. The white painted siding, the worn green front door with small rectangular windows, the shutters painted a slightly different shade of green - like the first can had been used on the door and the second can hadn't quite matched. The brittle looking chain link fence encircled the small front yard and went around to the back, a long saggy gate pulled across the driveway. There was an unused garage in the back, full of boxes she'd never looked inside, and a back porch that could barely hold one person under the rain shield.
It was the sort of house that travelers' eyes slid over as they drove past, a well lived-in home of a small town resident whose life wasn't very interesting.
The door wasn't locked, which was strange.
She entered, inhaling the scent of home, but freezing when she felt the… staleness of the air.
Harrison kept a clean house, scented by the pie of the week and the pages of thousands of books. Every wall was fortified by shelves, wood plants bolted right to the studs. There were stickers on the shelves, depicting the sections and author names - rather like a library had been stuffed into a home.
The house was a square - the front door entered into a hallway that T'ed off to either side of the house, a wooden kitchen counter visible through an arched opening in the wall. On the left was a study - it was supposed to be a dining room but I had never seen anything but a mug of coffee on the corner of the massive, antique desk. Food wasn't allowed around the older books kept in there. The room to the right was a mirror of the "dining room", only it had a couch, a recliner, a small tv, and a dozen more bookshelves. On the right side of the house, there was a curling iron staircase up to the small hallway upstairs, connecting the two small bedrooms and single bathroom. Between the stairs and the alley kitchen stretching along the whole of the back of the house, was a tiny stacked laundry unit with a dryer that didn't work.
It was always a little dusty, but when my eyes looked over the counter, I was shocked to see a layer of white obscuring the aged wood.
A pie with two slices missing sat in an antique pie saver right in the middle of the archway, a glass pedestal with a simple dome and a rose shaped knob on top for easy lifting. It had sat in that spot for my entire life. That pie saver had contained a hundred different pie flavors over the years - none of which I'd liked, but that my father had savored.
He hadn't gone a day without a slice of pie, ever.
So, when I registered the layer of undisturbed dust clouding the glass, my heart stuttered.
Something bad has happened.
My feet carried me forward and my brain refused to try and bring up any theories because even the best scenario sent ice down my spine.
Turning the corner, looking away from the kitchen counter, I entered the living room and froze again.
A small space heater that looked like a fireplace was against the front of the house, old and whiny but faithfully warm in the damp cold of winter. It was safer than having an actual fireplace, especially with a house like this, stuffed so full of very flammable books. Over the fireplace was the only wall that didn't have a bookshelf because that wall held a framed portrait of my mother.
I didn't have anything in common with my father, physically, but… my mother could have been my twin.
Same straight blonde hair, summer sky blue eyes, cream skin, and nose - a nose with a slight upturn at the end, a detail Harrison had always called "pixie-like". I'd matured to look nearly identical. The difference between us was that, in her blue eyes, there was joy. In mine, there was apathy.
I knew nothing about her but her name, Hannah.
Her portrait had hung in that spot since before I could remember and it was the only picture I had of my mother, who'd died giving birth to me. My father had never been able to talk about her without choking up and I'd never been cruel enough to push him. In the end, what did it matter? She was long gone.
Just through the doorway, I gazed at the figure looking up at the portrait, frozen.
He was… very still.
He had pale skin and dark hair that fell to his shoulders, a grey coat… no, cloak.
Who wore cloaks anymore?
I didn't feel a shred of humor though.
I stared for an eternity that only took a few heartbeats and then he was turning to look at me.
Red eyes.
My ears muffled, ice dousing me as his scarlet red eyes latched onto me. Fear. This was fear then. I had never had a reason to be afraid, not even when I'd imagined the girl in the tree last night.
"Ah, this is fortunate timing."
His voice was smooth, accented slightly. It filled the room even though he'd spoken very calmly.
I suddenly inhaled, loud in the tomb-like quiet.
"Who are you?"
Sensible question, but that wasn't what I wanted to know. What was he? Because to the core of my being, I knew… there was something horrifically off about him. The stillness, the voice, the eyes.
Wrong, wrong, wrong.
I had never felt like this before, had never felt blood rushing to my head, my palms slickening with sweat, my stomach bottoming out with dread. But why?
"I am Felix, not that it makes a difference."
He tilted his head, studying me and I got the feeling that I was a bug, buzzing around a zapper.
"Wh-what are you doing in my house?"
"Taking care of business."
As though he'd been waiting for that moment, he picked up the edge of his cloak and flicked it to the side.
Slouched against the front of the faux fireplace, his skin white as snow and his eyes empty and staring, was my father.
It occured to me that, faced with a dead body, I ought to scream. It was a normal reaction. But, I didn't. I stared, my world narrowing to that single, lifeless face.
He spoke conversationally, but there was a note of disappointment, perhaps because I hadn't reacted the way he wanted. "I had to work very hard to find you, you know. From the sound of it, he didn't have a clue of the greater world - which doesn't absolve him, not of breaking the law." He tilted his head to the other side, eyes locked on me even as I stared sightlessly at the corpse. "I wonder, do you know?"
I didn't answer.
He shrugged after a moment, then leaned forward, "Back to business-"
Several things happened in quick succession and I didn't have any time to react to them.
The back door, which had never been opened to my knowledge because it was hidden behind bookshelves, slammed open. Books went ricocheting across the room, one hitting the back of her locked knees. I had no choice but to crumple, landing on my back. There was a pair of blurred bodies, flying over her head and tackling the dark one, and then a terrific shrieking sound, like an avalanche. The head of the red eyed man named Felix dropped to the floor in front of me.
That's when I screamed.