Run.

Fighting.

"Melanie, open your door." I sighed. She probably couldn't hear me and for all I knew she was probably crying into a pillow, but her walls made it impossible to hear.

I found my only option would be to break the lock. I turned the jammed door knob to no avail and then grew frustrated and forced it. The lock snapped and the door opened and there sat Melanie with her back against the headboard, her legs crossed and her eyes staring at nothing. Tears flowed but she made no move to wipe them and still I hated the girl.

I had no rational reason to hate her, she had done me no harm and I personally didn't wish her any. But I hated her. She had what was mine first and I hated that thought. I knew Alexis was no walk in the park from the moment I laid eyes on her, but to have not one but two of her past conquests living under the same roof as myself was causing a huge discomfort to my heart.

"She said I should talk to you." I didn't want to move closer to the witch, truthfully, I didn't want to be in the same room as her, but Alexis asked and I couldn't say no. She thought I had her wrapped around my finger, she simply had no idea how tightly wound I was around hers.

"I don't want to talk and you don't want to listen. Tell her that." Melanie spoke but didn't move her eyes towards me.

"You killed sixteen people. Sixteen humans."

"It was them or you. I chose loyalty." Then she looked at me and her face broke and I found parts of my hatred towards her shattering. Her mortality was shining through her eyes and I realised just how different we were as creatures. I had killed and felt immense guilt, but never had my kills destroyed me like they are her. "They could've had families."

"Most of them probably did." I said more to myself than to her. I spotted a computer chair at the desk opposite her bed and perched myself there, looking directly at the witch. "You probably killed a mother, father, sister or brother."

"Alexis has killed thousands more."

"Alexis doesn't have a soft heart anymore." I shook my head. "The longer you live the more you have to seal your heart, it's the curse of immortality." The witch didn't want to hear this, she wanted comfort not truth. "It still hurts me too... killing people I mean. They haunt me, I see them in my head most nights. Alexis makes the dreams go away...but she doesn't take the guilt away."

"I'm a murderer."

"And I'm a hybrid and Alexis is worse and Darcy is a vampire and Chuck is a mix of something worse as well. You're living in a house full of the worst creatures to ever grace the planet and you still love at least one of them, if not two."

"I don't know how to get past it." She whispered. "The trees are still weeping for their screams. I burnt them alive."

"They weren't trying to kill the trees, Melanie, they were after us. If they had found you they wouldn't have hesitated to put a bullet right through your head. I could maybe survive that, you definitely couldn't."

"Tell me about immortality." Her eyes desperately met mine. "Alexis never would, she never wanted me to crave it, so you need to tell me."

She moved closer to me. She sat with her legs tucked beneath her and only a ruler's length away from me. I could smell her from where I sat, she smelt...like candles. Scented candles, a mass of them. She smelt mystical.

"It's a complication." I wondered how I had come to hate Melanie, truly hate her. Here she sat desperately clinging to my every word and I hated her because I could see her hands touching Alexis, her mouth where mine belonged, all of it. "Immortality deprives more than it gives. It's luck for me that Alexis is an immortal, some creature don't have that luxury. Werewolves choose whether to age or not, when they meet their mates they choose ageing because most of the time their mates are human. The same goes for vampires. But vampires can't stop their ageing, so they either deprive their mate of a long life by turning them or they allow the long life and watch their mate die." I looked at Melanie as I spoke. "Don't you think that's sad? To look for love for an eternity, find it and in a blink of an eye, lose it?