Found

Prologue

The weather had been cold that day, nipping at my cheeks as if to say they could use more color. They were red enough as it is, and just an hour more out in the stiff air would have frozen them to diamonds. I could feel the wind blowing through my hair, or at least what was left of it. My mother had just cut it earlier that morning and I couldn't help but run my fingers through it. It had gotten too long as it began to remind her of my father, a man who I knew little of.

He died when I was younger,  just a tyke who couldn't distinguish circles from squares. She said it was a car accident but I'm starting to doubt that more and more with each passing day. I'll hear his voice, whispering in my ears the songs he used to sing to me when it was time for bed. I was a wild thing, never wanting to slow down because that's when you get caught.

Caught. Such a funny word. I used to think it meant to be trapped by someone, or something, else. Now I know it as a different word: Death.

Dead to the world, dead to the sky and the mountains and trees, just dead. Getting caught by the O'felloe would assure your destruction, as it did my mother's on that godforsaken day.

She was a kind woman, the kind to degrade you one day and then feed you soup in bed the next. It wasn't her fault though, her mind couldn't possibly be the same after my father's passing. How could it be, they were mates after all.

I think that's why she was never able to talk about him, especially to me because I embodied every trait in him that she once loved. His eyes, nose, and mouth. His hands, jaw, and hair. His strength, humor, and skill. I was everything that she could no longer have, a memory of that which she lost.

Her mate, the man who was inextricably bound to her soul for all of eternity. One day he was showering her with kisses and the next she was kissing his grave. It's hard to believe a man blessed by the moon could perish so easily, but I guess that's what drunk drivers are for.

I remember staring at her reflection in the bathroom mirror when she was cutting my hair. Looking at a woman who had raised me for 19 years, yet could only remember half of them. I remember wondering if that would happen to me, would I one day be cutting my own daughter's hair because its resemblance to my dead mates' made me physically ill? I hoped not.

After she had finished, I could feel the tips of my hair slightly brush against my shoulders as if it were a constant reminder of what I had lost. I did not care though, because if it made her happy, I was happy. How could I not be? The fire in her eyes that I so longed to see had rekindled, as she finally began to recognize me as the daughter which she so desperately loved. I think that's what made that day so much harder.

Most of it was a blur—a common routine of eating breakfast, sitting through online lectures, crushing antipsychotics into my mother's lunch. It was only towards her daily walk in which I noticed a shift in the air, a chill that ran from the top of my spine to the tips of my toes.

I had led her into the garden because she loved looking at the flowers. You'd think that she's get swept up in the roses or daffodils, but no. She loved sitting in the grass and picking at dandelions, the weeds that had disguised themselves with beauty. I can't be sure, but I'd like to believe that was one of the things she used to do with my father; I imagine them sitting in the grass and picking flowers, twisting them between their fingers, and placing them into each other's hair. At least, she loved doing that with me.

I had sat beside her, resting my head upon her shoulder which was somehow still warm despite the cold breeze. She smelled like warm vanilla, like the cookies we used to bake before settling into the couch to watch a movie. I miss that smell, the smell of my childhood and the home which I had now lost.

I didn't hear it at first, but then again, neither did she. The sound of crackling sticks from within the forest made from light footsteps slowly ascended upon our home hidden within the valley. The footsteps which still haunt me within my dreams, or lack thereof.

By the time they had reached my ears, it was too late. The O'felloe were here, and that could mean one thing—our deaths were imminent. A man dressed in a black coat approached first, his hands spread wide. I could see the red embellishments upon his shoulders. Vampire.

With a violent crack, he brought his hands together as though he were performing an interpretive dance. It seemed as though his hands were moving on their own, swiping through the air at a speed too fast for his brain to grasp. It was at this moment I knew they were sent to kill us; he had a witch by his side, controlling or helping I did not know.

I didn't have time to find out.