Destined Part I

To Fly

The light the next morning was magnificent. The sky above the mountains was like streaks of violet and fuchsia paint splattered behind the clouds. The light wasn’t too intense, but instead it cast a calm glow throughout Juneau.

In the Browning’s jet black BMW M5, we drove through the curvy roads headed into the forest for our hunt. My nerves were practically tingling out of my skin and I couldn’t control the shaking that was taking over my knees.

Giada drove the car, Angelina rode up front, and Grace sat next to me in the backseat. She reached over to stop my leg from shaking and quietly chuckled to herself.

I was curious, despite my anxiety, as to what exactly we were going to be hunting. I was growing hungrier, but it wasn’t out of my control just yet. Obviously, we wouldn’t be chasing deer…since that idea seemed to be a joke amongst the veterans. It was fine anyway. Slaying a deer was not on my list of things I wanted to do again. I still felt a twinge of guilt when I thought of how defenseless the animal had been.

I knew that my new family did not take life from humans, which pleased me a great deal.

Whatever it was we were hunting for, no one in the car seemed to be the least bit concerned over sacrificing it for food.

Giada pulled into a clearing in the forest and parked at the edge of a stream, which was only a few feet from the road that led back out. When the car stopped, everyone climbed out, so I followed, my rubber boots that Grace had loaned me squished into the ground where I stepped.

They had already made it across the stream by the time I got my foot unstuck, so I had to quicken my pace to catch back up with them.

We hiked through the clearing and into the forest, four women happily chattering about shoes and lingerie. It was comforting to have women there again. Since my mother, there wasn’t really a female around that I could relate to. There was Mrs. Watson, but I didn’t really relate to her all that well. The Browning women were caring and funny, and I enjoyed that I got to spend time with them. They were quickly beginning to feel like the sisters that I never had.

Giada was definitely the mother of the group. She was the oldest-she had lived to be thirty before she was changed. She told me that she had been changed by Kristopher, whom she had fallen in love with when she was still a human. She begged him to make her a vampire so that she would never have to grow old without him, and after years of pleading, he finally conceded.

Now, Angelina was just stunning, inside and out. She had a glow of golden hair that reached down to the middle of her back and pitch black eyes that reminded me of volcanic obsidian. She was so incredibly warm and inviting, and made up for any amount of excitement that the rest of us were lacking. She had been transformed into a vampire by Giada. The story was that Giada had come upon a car that had crashed into a tree. Angelina was inside, teetering on the edge of death, and had cried for Giada to save her. Having such a compassionate heart, Giada couldn’t leave her side so she quietly made her into a vampire, right there in her car and stayed with her until the transformation was complete. 

The last female to be changed, besides myself, was Grace. She was very young, I believe only nineteen at the time, and a spitting image of Audrey Hepburn. She had short cropped brown hair and huge chocolate eyes that were outlined with thick black lashes. Her maker had been someone that apparently the Brownings hated passionately, and they had saved her from their sin by bringing her to their home. When Kristopher told me the story the night of the welcoming party, his green eyes had turned cold and haunting. He didn’t divulge any more details, but something in those eyes had warned me not to press him further.

As the girls and I hiked deeper into the forest, we began climbing up steep rocks and sifting through the dense brush while the rain started sprinkling down lightly. The girls were silent now, concentrating on their footsteps, which were almost impossible to hear anymore. They stepped so lightly absolutely nothing could have anticipated their approach.