Catch Me If You Can ~The Vampire Diaries

Prologue

My life is practically one big jigsaw puzzle.  A jigsaw puzzle that was opened and emptied of half of the pieces.  I don’t remember anything before January 15th 1982. That day I was walking through the crowded streets of New York. I remember stopping at a news stand and picked up a newspaper. On the front cover was a picture of a girl with long dark brown, almost black, hair and bluey-grey eyes. I remember reading the headline “17 Year Old, Bethany Phillips Killed in Tragic Car Accident”. I remember feeling an empty feeling in my gut, as if I should be upset by this. I remember looking up into the window of the shop directly in front of me and seeing the reflection of the girl in the article, and that was when it clicked into place. The girl in the article was me.

Memories started to come back in pieces. Wind whipping through my hair, the roar of my car engine, The voice of a radio host. And then came the loud honk of a truck, two blinding white lights coming at me from the side… And then nothing.

For some reason I knew immediately that I was a vampire. I didn’t have to be told, and I didn’t need to prove it to myself. It was something I just knew. That was the only thing I knew. Looking back on it, I had probably been compelled by whoever turned me to forget everything about myself minus that one detail. There was however one thought that rang clear and strong in my mind. A memory of a man’s voice whispering in my ear; “Run. Run and don’t stop running. Never let Klaus catch you.” I have no idea who this Klaus guy is, but if that is the only thing I remember, then it must be important.

I spent about three months alone in New York after I died, getting used to being a vampire. I didn’t kill anyone unless it was absolutely necessary. Over three months I came to a final kill-count of two people. I was getting ready to move away from New York when I met the one person that I now count as a friend.

All I remember is walking down a crowded street in the middle of winter. People were wearing raincoats and carrying umbrellas which made it all the more difficult to make my way through the crowd. I remember shoving past a man wearing a black trench coat and carrying a briefcase. I remember passing a dark alleyway when a hand reached out from the darkness and closed around my forearm, pulling me into the darkness of the alleyway. The person that grabbed me slammed me up against the wall, my head smacking on the bricks in the process. I remember looking up into the snarling face of the man that was stood in front of me, veins rippling under his eyes and fangs protruding from his upper jaw. Damon Salvatore.

I remember throwing him off me and him flying into the opposite wall. He stumbled to, trying to get up as I dusted myself off and picked up my bag that had fallen to the floor. I remember him looking up at me in shock and saying “You’re a vampire?”, as if he didn’t already know.

After that Damon and I stayed in New York for five years. He quickly became my best friend, which wasn’t hard, seeing as though I didn’t have any friends. In 1987 we both left New York and went our separate ways. I went travelling through Europe and he stalked his brother through America. We kept in touch over the phone and we met up at least once a year, usually on my birthday.

In the thirty years that I have been a vampire, I have spent all my waking hours running from someone I have never met, someone I probably will never meet. Until now.