Finally frozen, no more emotion
Started escaping, now everything's numb
Dove in the deep end, stuck and I can't swim
So out of breath, I know I don't have long
Not all nomads were as nice as Clint's coven. Only a few months after my encounter with them, I met two others. While their wild look was slightly off-putting, I still sprinted the distance between us, eager to meet more of my kind. I quickly learned my mistake as the male immediately launched himself at me, burying his teeth in my left bicep while the female he was with skittered away several yards. We brawled for several minutes, and I was thankful that I had taken to allowing the grizzlies I ate to fight back. It gave me some idea of how to fight back, and more importantly, how to agilely avoid the gnashing teeth and slashing claws intent on destroying me.
I was quite lucky to not have died, only walking away with a few crescent-shaped scars along my upper arms. I didn't know what made them suddenly turn and disappear toward the sound, but I was too grateful to be alive to care. I learned from that point on to have caution above all else when dealing with my kind. Each new vampire I strayed across, I was wary until I was absolutely certain of their intentions.
I never learned the names of the two I sparred with, although I did see them again. They steered far clear of me, and I from them. They were also not the last to fight with me, and I gradually learned how to hold my own against these assaults, although I had an inkling that I was still mediocre at best.
Of the others I met who did not spar with me, I was cordial with Peter and Charlotte, a couple who seemed more humane than most, but I wasn't as friendly as I was with Clint's clan. Peter had more than a few scars and that unnerved me in a way I couldn't put my finger on. Garrett was nice enough, but his sense of adventure was slightly too trying for my world-weary existence. Mary and Randall, who I met separately, were civil, but they did not stick around for days as the others had, so I never got to know how well we'd have gotten along. Every vampire that I met feasted on human blood, though - no other 'vegetarians' as I disparagingly called myself. It depressed me that I was the same and yet separate from my own kind, and that thought very nearly drove me to New England to find the ones Clint had mentioned. I told myself I never went because I simply didn't know where to look, but it was years before I could admit to myself that I was scared shitless of leaving the familiar geography.
SUMMER, 2011
I lived five more years in the wilderness before I saw Clint and his family again. I was pleased beyond words to see them, and we embraced in joyful silence until they remarked on my condition, still living like a savage in the mountains. I was scared to admit to them that in the intervening years I did hardly anything more than hunt and curl up into a ball as I let the nameless heartbreak simply have me, and that anything else seemed like far too much effort to even begin to think about. They, however, felt they I was owed more than a simple existence as a mindless, feral beast. Against my wishes, I was to be disseminated back into human society.
Georgette had been a Southern debutante whose family owned a plantation, and was the sole recipient of that inheritance when they all perished during the Civil War and her mother passed from Typhoid fever. What started as what she called a 'modest sum' (although I felt that in no world was 200,000 anywhere remotely near modest) was now millions in various offshore accounts under various aliases, and she became the benefactor to my college education. They also ensured I was able to have a formal identity through forged documentation, although I did not care to ask where or how they acquired such items. I barely knew my own name, so having another was difficult to stomach.
I saw them more as I studied at Washington State University since they took it upon themselves to remain somewhat close in the event I needed them, but it was still only once or twice a year. Truthfully, even though I did miss them when they were gone, it was still a relief when they finally moved on again after I got my degree. The more they were around, the harder it was to hide precisely how depressed I was, although simply calling it depression was a vast understatement of the utter despair that threatened constantly to pull me under at any moment.
I began teaching at my Alma mater after graduation, propelled along by my desire to owe nothing else to Clint and Georgette. They had given me everything - companionship, money, even a semblance of humanity. It was bad enough I would never be able to pay them back for everything they had done for me. I couldn't in good conscience continue to live like a wild animal when they had invested so much in me to make sure I had something that resembled a life, especially since I refused to move on from the only place I had ever known. That did not change, however, quite how often I spent in a paralytic-like stupor in the woods whenever I was not teaching or learning medicine, music, languages and history - just not my own.
While I did move around for the next 90-some years, I never went too far from the safety of the Olympic Peninsula. A force unnamed kept me here, but I was still not overly eager to wander even if I had felt free to do so. I knew this area, enjoyed the freedoms it afforded me such as being able to be outside during the day and hunt various game as required. I worked various jobs as well. My medical degree under the name Elle Butler (Georgette graciously let me use her last name) allowed me to be an oncologist in Portland for a while, but I always came back to Elle Masen. While I did enjoy practicing medicine or performing as a local concertist under varying identities, I preferred the comfort of the name that inextricably linked me to my past life.
SPRING, 2030
I was in one of my slumps, around 75 years prior to my experiment called high school. As I was wont to do, I was drifting listlessly somewhere outside the Olympic National Forest, failing to think of nothing and succeeding in thinking of the only thing that caused me the most considerable amount of pain. It had been several years since I had been someone to society and was contemplating the colossal task of finding a house and job that could afford me a year or two of muting the suffocating blackness that seemed ever-present since I became a vampire. I had expected it to recede in some degree the longer I lived and was both dismayed and pleased to find that, rather than shrink, the yawning expanse in my chest only seemed to grow in both size and intensity. On the plus side, it meant the love I knew had existed at some point was bigger than I could even fathom, but conversely made it even more difficult to continue to function in what would be considered a normal capacity.
Abruptly, large gaping jaws were snapping shut where my head had been just seconds prior. Some instinct to defend had triggered in my subconscious, allowing me to leap up into a tree before I was decapitated. I looked down, trying to see past the haze of my torment to find out what had attacked me so suddenly. An overly large grey wolf was glaring at me with such hate in its eyes I was briefly taken aback, the excruciating tide temporarily receding. I didn't know this thing, so what was with the attitude? Had I offended it somehow? "Umm, can I help you..?" I called down to it, not really expecting an answer. It leapt up in response, saliva and teeth barely missing my bare feet. "What the hell!" I shouted, indignant. While the bears I fed on did fight back they never looked at me with an emotion so acutely sentient. Suddenly, the bushes behind it shuddered and two more wolves burst through the undergrowth. One was far bigger than the grey one, completely black and somehow exuding masculinity. The other was brown, the shade similar to the trunk of the pine I was clutching, smaller than the black but still larger than the grey.
I decided I was outnumbered, and rather attached to my head, so I took off to the north at a dead sprint. They followed me until I launched myself into the Juan de Fuca Strait, but I could still see them, hulking sentinels, as I bobbed just over the Canadian border. I swam farther south toward Sooke, and waited on Church Island for several hours. I had no home to return to, no family missing me, so the wait didn't bother me all that much. I took the time to contemplate the wolves I had seen, particularly their abnormal size and apparent sentience. It was as if they knew what I was and would not be content until I was eliminated. I waited for them to materialize on the far shore but they never did reappear. When I was as confident as was possible, I swam back to Washington and promptly lost myself in the craggy peaks of Mt. Rainier, awash again in senseless turmoil.
SUMMER, 2040
Ten years later, I was hurling through the forests outside of Forks. I bleakly registered that this was where I had been changed, and had likely subconsciously avoided it since. I didn't plan to stick around. I was just passing the newly-expanded high school campus when a spasm of pain shot through me, so tortuous I actually forgot to keep running. I careened into a wide spruce, which sent it shuddering into the neighboring cedar, felling them both. I noted this all as a sideline, for much of my attention was focused on the horrendous sensation radiating from where my heart rested in pieces. I gasped, ragged and uneven, and pressed my palms to my ears as if this would somehow mute the excruciating feeling.
I sat there, both fetal and feral in my agony, not even remotely close enough to sanity to count the seconds. The only thing that I was aware of was shoving my fist into my mouth so that I would utter no sound, no matter how badly I wanted to wail and scream and curse. I don't know how long I stayed there, curled up like a wounded animal - seconds, minutes, days, weeks, years. It could have been eons for all I knew was the rending pain wracking my body incessantly.
When I was finally able to regain the tiniest sliver of control, I wasted no time. I stood and immediately took off to the east. I did not return to Forks for another sixty-five years.