Prologue
Bella's POV-
I had known about them.
Of course.
They were a part of our mandatory reading in school. Year after year, we learnt about them. Their history. Their achievements. Their sacrifices, if you could even consider them not starting a massacre as a sacrifice.
Their leaders keenly studied the books published on them, as we were told. Not a word could be written mildly not in their favour.
The consequences of that would not be good.
They were a specie higher than us, the lion of our jungle. We were the deer, or the lamb, whichever you considered yourself to be. It was a matter of great luck to be alive.
Sure, they had rules. They did not feed on the healthy. A committee of our kind was designed- the richer than filthy rich taking control of that. The terminally ill and dying were chosen to be food. It was a sacrifice that had to be made to keep our kind alive. Once a month each one of them fed. Two of us. A hundred and ten of them. I sometimes wondered what would happen when our hospitals ran out of their takeaways.
It wouldn't be a merry sight, in the least.
Charlie hated it when I spoke about them in front of him. He could not publicly speak against them, of course. My entire family would be chomped on, if he did. He had his reasons to hate their kind though. He had lost his wife to them.
His wife. My mother. Renee.
She was mated to one of theirs.
The last I had heard about her; she had chosen to become one of them. I could still recall that last phone call verbatim. She had been delighted with her choice. The only slightly upsetting detail in her elation being that she could never contact us again. No lion chose to be friends with a deer. We were a part of her past. She had to forget that she had three children. Or that she had been once married for twenty years of her human life.
Charlie and Renee. The perfect couple. High school sweethearts. Never fought. Never argued. The perfect ageless couple.
I had believed that growing up. We were the typical American family. Madly in love parents. Three children. A dog. A white-picket fence and a minivan. It was a package deal.
But like all dreams shatter when the morning comes, this one had too.
One of theirs had claimed her. He had seen her while out on a hike, ironically, picking up groceries from the local supermarket. She never even had a choice. She was his mate. That was all we were told.
It did not matter that she had a family.
It did not matter that she did not want to divorce the love of her life.
It never did matter.
One minute we were a happy family, and the next, we were threatened to have our necks slit if we stood in their way.
I had wanted to fight.
They could not take my mother away from me.
I was hardly thirteen. I needed her.
Seth. Poor Seth. He was only five. He could not even understand what was happening. Or why his parents were crying.
Leah though, was strong.
Stronger than me. Stronger than Charlie. The sane head in our madness.
She had held me back. She had held Charlie back from committing a crime with severe repercussions.
We had to let Renee go. We had to accept their decision.
It was just the way our society worked. Like it or not.
She was eighteen back then. A young age, yet so mature.
It was her who had glued our family back.
We weren't complete, we knew that. But we had to somehow survive. With Renee gone, we had to accept our new roles.
Charlie had to play a dual role. I was too young to manage the household chores, and Leah could burn toast. She was that very useless in the kitchen. Charlie also had to earn. With three young kids, the expenses were endless. While his job at the police station did give him a steady income, it was the overtime that made the difference when it came to buying that beautiful dress for Jessica Stanley's fourteenth birthday party, or when Leah wanted to buy her first car but needed a little monetary help. She needed a car. She had to drive to Port Angeles for community college. Charlie refused to let her dropout. She would help us out at home where she could, but taking care of Seth had come on my shoulders. I was his mother. The one who fed him the food Charlie had prepared before leaving early for work. The one who bathe him because there was no one else to do it. The one who ironed his clothes and ensured he had breakfast before leaving for school. It was tough. There were many a night I had cried for my mother.
I was hardly a child myself.
I could not raise another child.
Unfortunately, their kind had never offered me the choice.
I wanted to blame them. And I did. In the deepest of my mind. Like many others of my age, I was afraid.
I was aware that many of them could read minds. And that even thinking bad about them would be considered treason.
It had all begun with one Angela Webber. In this same small town of Forks.
The one who leaked out their secret. It was in the early 2000's, I believe, fifty odd years ago.
The world as I knew it, was very different back then. Their existence was a secret. They kept to the shadows and were more scattered around across the world.
A coven of theirs had lived here, repeating high school, as they passed their boredom. It was back then when one of theirs had found their mate in the local preacher's daughter, Angela Webber. He had tried to claim her. She had refused to be chained to their kind. He had threatened to murder her entire family. She had exposed his secret to everyone who would hear. They had brutally murdered her. And her entire family, starting a war that had gone on for close to a year. Them against us. Of course, we were bound to lose. They were stronger with hidden superpowers. It was futile to even believe that we could win. We would be murdered before we even grasped the situation in front of us. Finally, with our numbers dwindled, humankind had accepted defeated and pleaded for mercy. And mercy, they had shown. They were our masters. We were their slaves. We could go on with our lives but had to accept their superiority. Their existence was no longer a secret.
We knew about them.
We studied about them.
It was engraved in us to never go against our masters.
They had settled in a small town in Italy. We weren't permitted to ever travel there. Not to the town and not to Italy. Their entire kind lived there. A hundred and ten of them. They fed on the terminally ill and controlled our world back from their castle.
I should have been thankful to be alive. And I was. There were a many I had known who weren't as lucky.
At the age of twenty-one, eight years after I had lost my mother to them, I had been living a sort of happy life. Charlie while still grumbled about having had to let go, had finally been on a few dates here and there. Leah was happily married with a baby on the way. Seth was Mr. Popular in school and was perpetually happy with the way his life was going.
I had a job I loved. I was the youngest and newest teacher to join Forks elementary. I had a boyfriend I was getting pretty serious about. In fact, we had even discussed marriage. I had a future to look forward to.
I really did not wish to ever come across one of their kind, being mated to one definitely not on my list.
And it definitely was a shit list.
I hated it. And him.
A fact that made him guffaw.
The bastard had a sick sense of humour.