Melina Caruso carried a secret in her veins - a blood that was both a blessing and a curse. When her unique gift attracted the attention of the hidden world of the Immortals, a game of power and passion began that would change Melina's life forever...
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We are all afraid. The difference lies in the question of what.
Frank Thiess (1890-1977)
The word seemed to echo several times in the middle of my head, resembling a reflective reverberation of sound waves that continuously reverberated off the walls of my skull and penetrated the centre of my brain a hundredfold.
Vampires.
At the exact moment, as this panicked certainty, similar to a sharp knife attack, overcame my thoughts and feelings once again, one of the pale beauties suddenly broke free from his seated paralysis.
His boyish-looking face jerked up so that his messy hair glistened bronze under the artificial light of the canteen. With bated breath and shaky, wet hands, I watched as the angular shape of his flawless face turned towards our table, and his eyes instantly caught mine. A protracted gasp escaped my chapped lips as soon as the restless darkness of his eyes reached the grey-blue colour and threatened to engulf me after a few lingering seconds.
"This is Edward Cullen..." said a loud voice beside me, instantly breaking our intense eye contact. The muffled conversations and jokey silliness of my classmates, caused by concentration and adrenaline, suddenly reached my ears again, causing me to blink in overload.
My head spun as my muscles tensed slightly with adrenaline, and the attention I had previously paid to the pale, silhouetted figures immediately focused on my desk.
"Is everything all right, Melina? You suddenly seem so pale," Angela asked me anxiously, leaning closer to me. I nodded apathetically, and a forced smile immediately appeared on my lips, a bleak attempt to reassure her and everyone at the table.
"Probably...just some residual excitement due to my first day." I lied skillfully, gradually releasing my cramped fingers from the embrace of my water bottle. Their hefty imprints were clearly visible in the crumpled and bruised indentations of the bottle. My wet fingers and handprints were all too visible.
Despite my behaviour, my lying statement was received with a wave of understanding and satisfied nodding from most of the listening parties, who then returned to their respective businesses and conversations.
"Anyway..." Jessica began again, and her blue eyes turned unceremoniously to the Cullens' table.
"... he's insanely handsome, obviously...but apparently, no one here is good enough for him," she said descriptively of Edward Cullen, turning back to her food with a wrinkled nose and feigned disinterest.
"And the rest of his siblings?" I asked with a tiny spark of cautious curiosity beneath the seething mass of fear, disbelief and suppressed dread. My head tilted, and my eyes risked a glance out of the corners, freezing once more amidst my movements.
I felt the loud pounding of my heart and heard the unstoppable roar of the beating in my ears.
With fluttering eyelids, I looked at Edward Cullen's face and turned away from me. His shadowy dark circles stood out like bruises in the face of his deceptively abrupt increase in pallor, disrupting his otherwise perfect outward appearance. His attention was focused on his adoptive siblings, his barely open lips moving with a frantic lightness and a recognizable heaviness as if he were trying to speak softly to them.
The rest of the table, meanwhile, looked in part like an image of objects moving haltingly, wound up by keys and driven by spring power, which could have been compared to mechanical figures from tower clocks or toys and yet carried with them a certain elegance and suppleness that the constructions made of wood and metal were unfortunately denied.
An uneasy feeling crept over me as soon as his siblings' previously neutral and indifferent facial features turned into an unfamiliar image of suppressed stiffness and tension, not unlike their adoptive brother's current behaviour.
"The blonde... that's Rosalie, and the tall, dark-haired one is Emmett," Jessica explained quietly, her blue eyes twitching in the direction of the Cullens in question. Her initially Edward Cullen-accented melancholy voice regained its original joyful gossip-spanning tone.
Although I was aware of the indescribable beauty of the nocturnal creatures through the sight of my gift, Rosalie Cullen's looks and charisma dominated in every way. Her modern and elegant clothes emphasized her tall, striking figure, while her long, wavy blonde hair reached the middle of her back in thick strands.
Offsetting the feminine elegance was the tall and stocky man at her side.
Despite his chair limitations, Emmett Cullen seemed to tower far over his other siblings with his height. Thick muscles stretched across his upper arms and looked intimidating to outsiders and could certainly be seen as threatening.
"They're a couple. Is that even allowed?" I heard Jessica say across the table as the brown-haired man's broad, chunky hand slid over the blonde beauty's slender thigh, almost tenderly reassuring. Nevertheless, Rosalie let out a few unsightly facial twitches, hinting briefly at her dangerous heritage.
"Jess... they're not related," Angela replied demonstratively, her fingers feeling the intricacies of her camera.
"Yes, but they live together. It's strange..." Jessica said firmly and turned her head towards the table.
"The little dark-haired girl is Alice. She's pretty weird."
With her finger, the brown-haired girl pointed inconspicuously at a petite black-haired girl whose hair was cut short and stuck out spikily on all sides of her head. Her black eyes focused far away and exposed to her adopted siblings' worried and waiting expressions.
"And...she belongs to Jasper, the blond one with the suffering look on his face.".
I nodded understandingly and looked intently at the muscular but slender figure of the honey-blonde man. His elongated fingers clasped the delicate little hands of his partner, whose eyes began to flutter with effort the next moment and seemed to find their focus in reality again.
The feeling of apprehension and nervousness intensified within me as I registered the rapid opening and closing of Alice Cullen's thin lips. The release of these lips brought a new level of stiffness and tension to the bodies of her surrounding companions, making her once-indifferent-looking black eyes sparkle alarmingly.
I turned my head away and stared at the drab colour of my food tray, lost in thought. Despite my lowered eyes, I felt the all-too-familiar sensation of the secret shadowing on my person.
"Great..." I mumbled in a stunned voice and closed my eyes, accepting the challenge of escaping the baleful dark eyes eating through my skin and controlling the uncomfortably pent-up collection of tumbling disparate emotions amidst my organs.
