To Love and To Be Loved (A Jasper Hale/ Whitlock Love Story)

Prologue

I was five when my father went missing. He had led a search party out to destroy a coven of vampires living in the sewers, and he just... never came back. Mum was distraught. She died three years later from heartbreak, at naught but twenty-five, and I got landed with the church.

I was only eight years old, and I was being raised to become a nun. To continue my family's work within the church.

I hated the way the church was set up and executed. I held the Christian faith, but I hated their hypocrisy, and their malice. It seemed they held more hate and greed in their hearts than love and generosity, though it is the latter they constantly promoted as though they were the saints. All the golden statues that took money from the poor, the cold, stone walls that felt more like a cage than a warm and welcoming house of God, the hunting of other creatures and misunderstood people instead of their attempts to help them... It just didn't add up to the things God explicitly told us to do - to love each other. To help the weak and the weary, and to reserve all judgement. To forgive.

No matter what I did to show mercy to anyone and everyone who did wrong, I was beaten for it. I had much peace for a time, the peace of God, and the others' lack of ability to upset me led them to lie, and I often took the punishment for others' wrongdoing.

After being starved and beaten for three days, I finally lost my peace. I snapped. I had a moment of fear and confusion fill me. I wanted to find the truth, and I couldn't help but feel as though I couldn't find it there.

Hence why I snuck out. At seventeen, the night before I was to recite my vows and become a nun, I left the church. I had completely intended to come back, believe me... But it just didn't happen that way.

I had planned my escape for months, and I knew, as the one girl who was ardently devoted in spite of my apparent misdemeanors, that no one would expect it.

I wanted to find those vampires who took my father.

I wanted to tell them that I forgave them. And that I could help them find another means of survival, something else to live off. I was so stupid. So naïve.

They found me first. In the darkness of the night, in the alleyways of the town, they found me.

I was bitten, and my screams awoke the town, distracting the being who had been slowly draining me of my life source. The riot spread far and wide, people all around me, but the pain was unimaginable. I didn't know where to go, or who to turn to.

So I hid.

And when my transformation was over, I fell into a deep depression. Everyone I knew, everyone I had grown to love, would hate me now. They would never speak to me again.

I was alone.

But most of all, I was thirsty.

I wiped out entire families before I came to my senses.

That was when I felt disgust beyond measure, and I left London, doing anything and everything I could to just... die. But I couldn't. But still, I kept trying. For just over two centuries, I tried. And I failed.

That was when I found the Volturi, and Aro took a particular interest in me. Especially when Eleazar announced something that shocked us all.

"You can manipulate energy," he noted with a nod to me, his red eyes boring into mine, and my brows pulled together in confusion, my hand leaving Aro's. Even he grew confused.

"I beg your pardon?" I asked.

"How do you do it?"

"I... don't," I denied, and Aro looked like he realized something, a small smile growing on his face.