1 Chapter One: The Drop of a Pen

I open the soft, new purple journal I bought specifically for this occasion. The trip to the local dollar store earlier today was filled with turmoil. The cool leather holds an emotion I refuse to acknowledge. My heart wells up in my chest and my eyes sting from my efforts not to cry. The small flashlight lit my written words from the pages I will leave here. The ink is glistening and seeming to jump off the page. The words are blurring, but still I write.

I glance back at my sleeping husband, his body shaped only by a new shade of darkness, as if he were a darker shadow in the depth of our little room. Pain courses through me, he never knew the truth. I have been feeling this grief since my Blooms birth. I have cried every night after Bill fell asleep, I've woken with panic in my heart. I would throw up out of fear every morning.

Selfishly, I'm sad knowing I will never see his face again. Bills glowing brown eyes as he holds our daughter. His beard growing in, simply because I didn't remind him to shave it. His horrible cooking and happy heart. Bill's active and full of energy. He's spontaneous and works like a madman. It was beautiful how excited he'd get for the most adventurous of things. He's a sucker for adrenaline. Before we got married and had Bloom we'd spend so much time traveling and trying new things. He's truly one of a kind.

Bill was quite the mess when I met him. He drank the day away and couldn't hold a conversation. He had a peculiar family. A neglective set of parents who ran off to Vegas when Bill and his brother were old enough to feed themselves. Jared, his brother, is the opposite of Bill. He's moralistic, religious, responsible, uptight and a workaholic. Bill's brother is a touchy subject with him. I know a secret about his brother, the same secret that drives a wedge between them. It kept them distanced even when they needed each other most. It keeps all of us from being the tight-knit family that Bill once craved. Even then, I couldn't bring myself to tell him about his brother. I couldn't bare to ever tell Bill the truth about me. My Bloom, my Bill, my reason to live...will be gone the moment I drop this pen.

Bill could never know what I am, he never did. He should never know about my world- now more than ever. I've kept it from him all these years because I was always afraid of him leaving me - but now I'm the one who's leaving. I feel my heart break and sink into my stomach. I'm the one abandoning his dream, the dream I've come to crave as well. The warm darkness of our small cozy room curses me because I know I will miss it. The pain I have to cause Bill...I can't allow myself to imagine, because it would only make this harder, If I stay they'll die.

I let a tear fall onto the pages for my daughter to someday read, maybe my tear stains will portray my pain now. Why have I waited so long? I think to myself but my heart knows the answer, I had always wished Bloom would have had absorbed my abilities from me, but she didn't.

My Bloom is a normal, healthy human girl and I will never get to see her grow. I would've been so happy, been willing to die for her to live. It would of been the ending I dreamed about. The death I was meant to have. I think of my precious baby in her crib a few feet away, I painted her face in my mind. I always thought babies were ugly but my baby isn't, she's the most beautiful thing to have ever existed. Grief filled me with dread; I have to find Bill's brother, Jared. Oh, why did I have to love Bill? Why can't I find anyone else that could do this? Why Jared? Why did I have to fall in love with Bill? Why did Bill have to be human? Why did I put myself in such a mess? Why do I have to hurt him so much? Why is this happening?

I sigh because I know the pain I will bring both my baby girl and my husband. I wish I could stay here and love them both until the days they died of old age; by then, I would have been forced to leave anyway, provided the illness took its time and allowed me time with my daughter. I haven't physically aged a day since I turned twenty-four years old over two-hundred years ago. I've woken myself up early everyday to paint my face in makeup, trying to seem as if I have aging lines and wrinkles. To look in the mirror now and know I don't get to lie to myself anymore makes me cringe away from the sight of youth.

My options seem limited: stay here and surely kill my family, leave and do nothing until I am hunted down or leave and transfer my abilities to a child of whom will have reason to survive.

I pick up the cool pen, distress playing to gravities favor. I have to save them right now, if I don't go now, I will lose the strength to leave. When I die and they meet me, wherever we go, I'll apologize to them. I'll hug them and my baby will be a beautiful women and Bill will smile as if he knew all along where my heart is now.

April 7th, 2002

Dear my sweet, beautiful baby girl

I love you. I'm so sorry we have to part this way but I have to leave you and your father. I love you both with all my heart, I wish I could stay but I know I can't. You're beautiful and perfect and I wish I could be there to see you grow and live. I love you with all my heart and everything I am. Bloom, you will never understand but you deserve a true explanation and I will try to explain best I can, I'm not like you or your father or Mr. Morris from next door; there are things in this world that will never make itself clear to you, I am a moon spirit. Moon spirits are not human like your father and you. I can never express how grateful I am for that. I have been alive for hundreds of years and never have felt more alive than with you and your father. I would not wish immortality upon anyone and wish there was another way that would postpone my abandonment. However, It is my responsibility to pass on the abilities of a moon spirit to a child, I would rather no one face the rootless existence as a moon spirit and as grateful as I am to have your human DNA spare you my fate, I have no choice but to doom another. Please understand that I love you for who and what you are but my kind never die the same as you or you father. When I speak of my immortality, I refer to my unmeasurable time on this earth, when I speak of fate, I refer to the root of my birth and of my death. Until Moon spirits are (and this is very difficult) murdered, have children that absorb their essence, or their energy source runs out, they will live indefinitely. My birth killed my mother and now this birth will kill me. I know that may seem like a terrible thing but it's not, when you think of the greater good, it's how my kind finds death and helps the world with a new generation of moon spirits. I'm still trying to accept this fate myself but someone is hunting our race and executing my kind. We don't know how exactly. There is a resistance forming, I will not be joining, my two best friends will be training those who chose to learn to fight these mysterious hunters. I will send your half sister/ brother there to learn to survive once, it's my time to die. I'm trying to explain this in a way that I can express how dire it is that I leave. It's too late for me to learn to survive and even if I were to learn and additionally survive, by the time the war is over, gravestones will be all that remains of Bill and you. My kind will hold a better chance with me giving birth to a child that can have something to truly live and fight for in their own life. All I want for you and your father is hope. If I stay now, your hope will die because of this war. If I go and fight, my hope dies because I will no longer be with you. When this child is born he or she will find something that she or he can fight for.

I love you with all my heart and I will have dreams about all I will miss seeing you accomplish. I leave the rest of this journal to you to fill with all your thoughts and experiences with the reminder that I will always be here for you, In your heart as you will always be in mine. I love you with every ounce of my being,

Your mother,

Melissa Grey

I reread the pages with such sorrow I wished I could have died to escape it. It wasn't well written, but nothing I could do would adequately explain. I close the journal and place my warm hand on the leather, knowing if I was to take it off then this last moment of peace would be gone forever, I knew it has to be done. Even if this is my last moment of peace I can look back and know I lived the life I wanted.

I put the journal softly down on the wooden desk and turned off the flashlight and sat there in the darkness, dreading the man I would go see. Jared is a good man but he will never be Bill. He will however give me the strong offspring I need to continue my species. I stand slowly as to not wake Bill I have never been so scared of a confrontation before in my life because I don't want to lie to him, to walk out on him, or my daughter but if he wakes that will be the outcome. Me walking out has always been the outcome. I look once more at my sleeping husband, Bill wasn't the most attractive man but I had lived almost a two hundred years and I have never met a man who touched my heart like he has. I still fear what will come of him when he realizes I've left. I have no doubt that he will do whatever needs to be done to keep our Bloom safe but he will never be able to know that me leaving her is also me protecting her; Bloom will also never understand. I won't ever see them again and my baby will think me crazy surely. Once I give birth to a child with Jared, I will grow ill and eventually die. It's how moon spirits move on, we give our life to another to create the next generation, whenever we wish to end our lives. Many species don't have that knowledge though. In fact, we are the most powerful creatures by nature but also the most docile. We aren't much of a threat most of the time, so no one cares to know. Jared, however, knows very little about my species.He pretends too but is far too 'strong' and 'manly' to really hold any interest and for that reason, along with his uniquely strong species and excessive fondness of me, I will use him to give birth to a child. I don't have much time however, it pains me that it's likely both my children will grow without a mother, it could be weeks after the birth or years, there is no average. No one knows.

It pains me to the point that I wish I could no longer feel. To think that my daughter will hate me based on the notion that I wouldn't want her, She's better off without me. That's my only hope for her and my only job is to give my daughter the best shot at her dreams. Bloom could never have that living on the run with me. She could never be free to openly be herself if I were to stay with her. Though staying would be to conform to my deepest, most selfish desires. If I were to stay here, there would be no hope for happiness, only room for fear because when there is a need for hope there is certainly going to be despair to match.

Jared's POV

"Melissa, you look stunning."

As I said it I was afraid of it sounding as I thought it, she is my brother's wife but damn, was she attractive. I looked at her black hair and deep blue eyes, she was gorgeous. As I'm taking in her beauty I'm suddenly not sure if it's my hopeful imagination or if she really has just wrapped her arms around me in such a way that I can feel the dip of her belly button through her clothes.

I've loved Melissa since high school. We were good friends and I had developed a crush on her senior year. I've always wanted her, but she had fallen in love with my brother. After she married him, I couldn't help but hate his human guts. I'm a freak of nature and he gets to live, not only as a human but also with the girl of my dreams. We're twins, him and I. My mother was a werewolf and my father a vampire, not only is the coupling odd to begin with, it was also very toxic for their children. We were twins...it made sense that he would of assumed the werewolf gene or the vampire venom, instead I got stuck with both. I was born only seconds after Bill and grew up resenting him, I was forced to rely on him until our folks up and vanished. When I needed him most, he got into drugs and miraculously, I met Mal at the first and only high school I ever attended, my first day without my brother. She was a college intern and given that neither of us were human, we had a connection, a secret to keep together. I invited her over, my brother and I had barely afforded our home, I hadn't expected that bastard to be home. He was, I introduced him to my Mal as my friend from school, suddenly I was the third wheel. I hated myself more than I hated Bill but I could never bring myself to hate her. Even the way, back then, she would toss her head back at me and invite me into the conversation made me love her. I wonder if maybe I took those invites, instead of hid away in my self pity, if Bill would still have been the one to marry Mal.

I still love her and want to see her happy - not this, not at my door crying in the middle of the night. What the fuck happened? Why isn't he the one comforting her, what did he do? That jackass never knew how to talk to a woman, even his wife. I've been more bitter towards him since the marriage but I see Mal often because even if I couldn't have her, I wanted her in my life.

"Mal, what's wrong? What happened?"

I called her by her nickname and cursed myself for sounding so hurried, Melissa needs soothing words, not demands. Her black hair, soaked with rain, was thinly matted to her pale face, framing the cute form in a way that was sheepishly attractive to me. Her blue eyes were glossy with tears and her face showed open vulnerability, her plush pink lips seemed full and her bottom lip had one drop of rain threatening to fall; I fight the unwarranted need I felt towards her because this was not my wife, she was Bill's. He had won her heart, not me, she doesn't want me but the way she's looking at me now makes my head fog a little.

My head is swirling with the desire to take advantage of her vulnerability but I also know my morals and basic courtesy to respect a woman, especially one like Melissa. I wasn't a teenager anymore, I don't normally feel so overtaken but Mal always looked beautiful to me. Physically it's as if she hasn't changed, just bits and pieces like the zit she used to have- it's gone now but she always had a pretty young face even though she's physically twenty four. She looks like she could pass for a teenager. Whenever I see her, I feel younger than I am. We aren't old, we're almost the same age physically. My aging process slowed late at twenty five, If you ask me, I'd tell you that It's fate. She stops time for me it would seem.

My attraction to her only grew with the realization of not being allowed to have her but I never will give up. Humans are weak. Someday, Bill will die as all humans do. Mal will have a long time left after him and I'm not dumb enough to give up on my eternity with her.

Her breasts are perky from the cold and the realization came because they are rubbing on my chest through her sexy light colored blouse. It only made it harder to keep my morals intact. My mind struggles to remember how or when she started hugging me like this but it was nothing less than sexual. I feel my body tense up with resentful need as I slowly unwrap her soft tan arms from around my neck and show her to my small living room couch which I'm honestly a tad embarrassed of a women as classy as her to see.

"Please, uh, take a seat Melissa I'll go shut the door, would you like something to drink or eat - or anything at all? please just tell me and I'll be happy to get it for you and sorry 'bout the mess, I've been a bit busy with work."

I was quickly picking up clothes that had bundled on the floor around the room and as I inched towards the hallway to shut the door I shot her another glance. I stared, her distress cut me deep, I loved her since I first met her when she was set to marry Bill. I hate him but I know I don't have the right too. She loved him and even if she would have never met him she still never would have loved me.

"No, no I'm alright but I – well, go shut the door and I'll explain."

Her telling me that she wanted me to shut the door and be alone with me was hard for me to keep innocent in my mind. I'm not a novice in the art of seduction, I've bedded many women but never had the confidence to put the moves on Mal and she has never tried any tricks before. Even so, I can't help but think she had a seductive edge to her voice. Against my better judgement, my mind's dedication to making everything she says sound like ' take me, I'm yours' is working to well for comfort. Damn did it sound real this time., better than any of my fantasies. A part of me feels like it's all some big joke and she's gonna jump up and laugh at me.

I try to keep in mind what power the body has in deceiving the mind but even so, I shake my head a little and turn to shut the wooden door a few paces away from the very couch she sits on, took a deep breath to, ideally, calm myself. I turn to find myself being pushed against the cool door as my brother's wife's small figure pinning me there. Of course I could forcefully move her but the sick thing is- I don't want too. This is wrong, this is so wrong. Her long black skirt was ripped up the side and I could feel her bare legs trapping me to the door frame. God damn it. I was shocked to find my voice so low and rough, sounding more sensual than required because it was meant to sound reasonable and soft. My body and voice betrayed what I knew I was supposed to do.

"Melissa not that I'm not enjoying all this… but I think you need to take a few steps back and give me a minute to get my head on straight. Think about this." In the most seductive way possible she said a couple sentences that I could never refuse, even if it's sick or wrong or if it would send me to hell, I could never refuse her.

"I need you. Your brother will never be able to give me what I need, you are supernatural, I'm supernatural. You can understand that part of me. Let's leave this place and you can build me a cottage in the woods and we can disappear together and we can have our own family. Will you do that for me?" Confusion pricked at me, even suspicion bubbled up, a feeling that this must be a trick that I couldn't help but fall for it. I can't help but think that if my brother comes out of nowhere I'll kill him for fucking me over like this. "Of course. But what about your kid or my brother?"

"Forget them, I will never see them again, I need you, only you." As she spoke those words tears break free from her eyes, unsure of what caused them I said the only thing I ever knew to be true.

"I will always love you, I have always loved you."