Hello! I'm sorry I didn't update sooner before… The official first chapter took a long time to produce. I had a lot of testing in school, I technically only have about a month and a half left of sophomore year :D Yay! So here's chapter 2… Read & review! Enjoy! (Also, WARNING: Usage of ONE F-word in the beginning of this chapter… AND I have good news: The chapters will most definitely be getting longer!) * I also just want to make a point that the first five words of each chapter will always be in all caps, so if you feel like the character is YELLING, they're not! ;)
I also want to address that yes, Nessie has parted ways with the rest of the Cullens a few times. She did hunt humans during her time away. She sees nothing wrong with drinking human blood and prefers it to anything else.
Disclaimer: I don't own shittttt.
Chapter 2: UNCONTROLLABLE FORCES
"EXCUSE ME. ARE YOU FUCKING joking?"
My father sucked in a breath and exhaled slowly. "No, Nessie. I'm regular joking." (A/N – Ten points to anyone who knows what that exchange is from! If you do, you're probably a Harry Potter/musical theatre fan!)
I slammed my cup of yogurt onto the table, and thankfully, it didn't explode all over me. That would've been unfortunate, but definitely the least of my worries. "Dad," I said calmly. "I don't know where the hell that came from, but I can tell you right here, right now, that I am not, under any circumstances, going to Forks High School."
"I'm afraid you don't have much of a choice," my dad explained. "You can either go to college, high school, or get a job. Those are your three options. Carlisle started at the hospital today and everyone already knows about his large family of adopted teenagers."
"Motherfu–" I stopped myself from letting the rest of that word come out, remembering how much my father despised my tendency to swear uncontrollably when under pressure or overwrought with emotions. "Why do I have to, though? I'd also like to add that I'm incredibly unprepared."
"Alice and Rosalie will be taking you shopping this afternoon. This won't be as awful as you want to make it out to be, Ness. It's all in your head. Believe me, I've been through high school too many times to count. You haven't been to high school in what, forty years? It's so much easier now. You're also a super-genius."
"As I should be, being your daughter," I added. "Listen, I'm all for getting down with the modern teenagers in Forks, but I don't know if I'm ready for that big of a commitment. Two years of nothing but high school is extremely tedious and it's such a long time to do the same thing every single day."
"Alright," he agreed, or so I thought. "So, two years of high school is too big of a commitment, but thirty years of slaughtering humans isn't?"
"Did you seriously just go there?" I snapped, jumping up from my seat.
"Nessie, don't take that the wrong way," Rosalie begged.
"No, Rosalie, I will take that the way it was intended to come across," I countered. I turned my yelling back to my father. "Damn it, Dad, how can you still judge me so much? I've only done that three times! How dare you still judge me? Jasper hadn't tasted anything but human blood for twenty years when we found him!"
"Jasper isn't my child," he stated. "I never wanted that for you, I never wanted you to be weak. I never wanted you to have to revert to that."
"So now I'm weak?" I screamed. "Thanks, it's great to know I have your confidence. You are just so insensitive! Do you know why I like to drink human blood?"
"Why?" my father wondered.
"Because it makes me feel strong," I elucidated. "It makes me feel like I fit in somewhere. My entire life, I've neither been a vampire nor a human. It's exceedingly frustrating. It blows my mind how much I feel like the perpetual odd man out! Me drinking human blood is the equivalent of you drinking animal blood. I feel so powerful and whole when I drink it. I don't kill to kill. That'd be like a hunter shooting a deer just to kill it. I leave no trail or evidence behind, either."
"You're scaring me, Nessie," announced my dad, his eyes widened with shock. "And you're scaring your mother."
"Yeah? Well, you'd better get used to it. I'm half of you, which means half of me is vampire and it's in my nature to want what makes me strongest. It's also in my nature to kill. I hate to admit that last part, but it's true in its entirety."
My father changed the subject after several uncomfortable moments. He closed his eyes and put his head down. "Go get ready. You're leaving at one o'clock."
I went upstairs and finally unpacked. I decided that if I was going to go through my bags and suitcases, I might as well unpack them before I left and put everything away when I got back. Picking out an outfit was challenging – I was afraid to wear anything that would mark me as a newbie or an outsider. All of my clothes were fashionable and from New York. This made Alice very proud, (if she could've taken me to New York to go back-to-school shopping, she would have) but it made me uncomfortable. I was still not used to the attention I got from men, but I'd been getting a lot more attention from women in the past few decades. Women had become jealous, envious creatures and I tended to resent them.
The closest mall was in Portland, and it was refreshing to see a town that was closer to a city than a village. The mall wasn't much. Actually, compared to most malls I'd been in, it was probably the worst. There weren't many stores to shop in, there were barely any people there… But hell, anything was better than Forks. The few hours out were exactly what I needed after six days in a car and a night in the woods.
At the end of our shopping trip, I had all my school supplies, ten new outfits, and three new pairs of shoes. Then, after a trip to the makeup store, I was all set. My conversation previously with my father still played over and over in my head the whole time I was gone. I didn't really care if my father was scared or worried for me. I was an adult and had been for most of my life. His lack of confidence in my control and strength made me want to prove him wrong. I had excellent control. I could stop feeding in with one thought about it. If I drank the blood, I would be stronger. Physically. I already knew what an emotionally and mentally strong person I was. I wanted physical strength like I wanted to breathe, though. To be on the same level as my family and some other vampires was more than I could ask for.
When we got home, I went hunting. Hunting was slightly more difficult in the dark than in the light, but my favorite animals came out at night. It had been shockingly very easy to revert back to a 'vegetarian' diet. I'd definitely surprised myself, getting back to drinking the blood of animals in the course of just a few days. Animal blood differed from human blood in the amount of strength it gave, but it also differed in taste. Not much, but having drunk both for long periods of time, I could tell the difference.
As I drained a fox of its last drops of blood, I saw something out of the corner of my eye that made me take a second glance. What I'd seen should have been impossible. I'd studied animals for a little while when I attended Harvard, so I knew quite a bit more than the average person, and I knew the animal I'd gotten a quick look at was not normal.
My eyes scanned the forest until they met those of the giant wolf. It looked to me like any regular wolf you'd see in Canada or a scarce wild wolf in North America. But it was just so big. If I had half a brain in my head, I would've done one of two things: Freeze or run like hell. I did neither. I took a few slow steps closer to the creature, trying to examine it further. I got a pretty good look at it before its head turned away from mine and it took off even deeper into the woods. As soon as it made its exit and I heard the footsteps get quieter and quieter, I ran back to the house as fast as I could, locking the back door behind me. I doubted it would hold off a wolf the size of a small bear, but it was better than nothing.
My eyes were wide from surprise and my heartbeat accelerated from curiosity and fear. Carlisle entered the room after a day of work, eyes sweeping over me when he sensed that something weird had happened. At first, I was going to dismiss it, but as soon as he asked me what had happened, the words fell out of my open mouth.
"I was hunting – and this wolf – it was huge!" I was speaking in broken, quick statements, but my grandfather understood me with perfect clarity. "I've never seen a wolf that big before in all my five-hundred years on this planet! I didn't think a wolf could be that big! The biggest wolf to ever live!"
He listened to me ramble for almost another hour without interrupting. Being the history nerd and prehistoric animal nerd (while I loved animals in general, my favorites were prehistoric ones, specifically dinosaurs) I was, I went on for what seemed like forever about how illogical it was for a wolf that big to exist. The biggest wolf to ever live was the dire wolf, which went extinct approximately ten thousand years ago. Almost everything about that enormous wolf matched up with that of the dire wolf, and I couldn't shake the comparison.
"Do understand what I'm saying, Carlisle?" I asked. "I know you aren't into prehistory like I am, but I know my shit. This doesn't just happen. There are only a few possibilities here." I then listed them. "This is some kind of cloned dire wolf – unlikely, because they've been dead for thousands of years. This is some kind of genetically enhanced wolf by humans – unlikely, because humans never could have artificially enhanced an animal that efficiently. This is some kind of unnatural occurrence – unlikely, but not impossible."
"You aren't going to let this go, are you?" Carlisle guessed, amused.
"Of course not," I replied.
"I suppose your life here won't be as dreadful as you anticipated it."
With his last comment of our conversation, I realized that I had a new project. And that it was best to get started on it as soon as I could.