Margaret Allie Brandon (Jasper's Mate Story)

Prologue

Prologue

I woke with a scream from the nightmare of Mrs. Penny, our older next door neighbor's demise. I heard his yell from the living room followed by a thud as I cried in my room. A few seconds later and I heard her soft footsteps in the hall before she slipped quietly into my room. I was hiding as best as I could in the corner, in case it had been him to come instead, but she found me immediately.

I felt her arms wrap around me in a hug but all I could remember was the dream and I cried harder as she started to hum our song. I had always had dreams of people dying and Randy had always hated me because I told him they were real. He never listened but Mom and Granny Cynthia always had. He would just yell and scream at me that they weren't real and sometimes I would be slapped if mom wasn't around to stop him.

"Honey it's ok, what was it this time?" (Samantha)

"Mrs. Penny, she....she dies in a hospital but it hurt and she was alone." (Maggie)

"Shhh baby, it's ok. Everything's going to be fine." (Sam)


Narrator's POV:

The mother held her seven-year-old daughter closer to her chest at her words, the fresh cut under her newly blackened eye stinging with her own tears as both she and her daughter cried with one another. She had known for a while that her daughter had inherited the family gift or curse in one of the worst ways possible. Her daughter's dreams were true when they foretold of someone's death, and she was only thankful that her daughter hadn't dreamed of her death by Randy's hand as she feared that would be how she met her end.

Her own mother, Cynthia, would often "day-dream" of the everyday things that would happen in the future. While she herself would see people finding their soulmates, of being with someone that loved them completely. They all knew and accepted the term seer, though they kept it secret from anyone except themselves. Theirs was a gift that the grandmother thought her own older sister had before she died, but it was unknown as she had been too young to remember her sister very much and her family refused to ever talk about her after her death.

So Granny Cynthia's suspicions of the gift of foresight belonging to her sister as well as herself were just that, suspicions, as no one ever talked about her sister Alice. However, Margaret's gift differed from her grandmother's and her mother's, as she only ever dreamed of death. Not only would she dream of a person's death but she would feel it just as they would when the time came, and not everyone passed in a gentle and painless way. The grandmother's gift was tame almost boring in comparison, while Margaret's mother's gift was beautiful in the sense that she dreamed of other's happiest and purest moments. Margaret's gift though seemed more like a curse even at the best of times.

It all started shortly after her fifth birthday, the little girl had begun having dreams about people she was closest to. She once told her grandmother and her mother with tears in her eyes that she saw her grandmother going to sleep and never waking up. The grandmother knew that it meant she had inherited the family's gift of foresight, but the mother had hoped she was wrong already knowing what a burden it was to have such a gift.

After her mother passed away within the next year, just as her daughter had predicted, the mother knew that her daughter's visions of death were true. She had seen her own dream vision of her daughter in what seemed to be years into the future when her little girl wasn't so little anymore. She had seen her precious daughter grown up and in love with a man that would treat her as the angel that she was. But she also knew that if she stayed with Randy she wouldn't be able to protect her daughter long enough for her to grow up.

It was in that briefest of moments that night, when she was punched to the floor, only seconds after her daughter's cries had woken an angry and drunk Randy, that she had made the decision that would forever change her daughter's life. She finally got her daughter to stop crying before she packed a small bag for her daughter and then for herself, and snuck them both in to the back of her old Camry.

That next morning, she woke her daughter and told her they were going for a doctor's checkup, just as Randy had demanded in an attempt to 'medicate that freak of a daughter.' She left the man passed out drunk on the couch as she pulled out of the driveway and headed for the closest highway she could reach, not caring where they went just as long as they got away.

It wasn't long before her daughter was talking quietly about things in the backseat with a slight smile on her face. The woman was so anxious though to escape Randy once and for all that she didn't notice her speed slowly climbing to 80 miles an hour, then 90, then 100, and finally past 100. She knew that he would come after them just as he always swore he would do, and she wanted to get as far away from him as possible.

"Momma why are you going so fast?" (M)

"Margaret honey, I lied. We aren't going to a doctor we're leaving Randy." (S)

"But momma, you're going too fast!" (M)

"Honey, it'll be fine everything is under control. I love you." (S)

"Momma!" (M)

The woman looked away from her daughter's panicked face in the mirror as she saw the eighteen-wheeler merging onto the highway into their lane. She swerved as best as she could, sending up a prayer when she heard the windows on the right side of the car burst, along with the crunching sound of metal and her daughter's scream of pain and fear. She saw the other car before she clipped it, the car spinning a few times on the highway before it began flipping.

She heard her daughters screams before she went silent, and yet the woman didn't scream once as the car continued to flip. A few moments later, or perhaps it was an eternity, the car came to a stop right side up and she felt blood drip down her head as she tried to twist in her seat and look at her daughter not even noticing the shards of glass and metal that had pierced her own body. She heard footsteps and yelling before she felt a cold hand on her forehead and she forced herself to look away from her daughter for a moment as she looked into the face of what she thought had to be an angel.

"Don't worry I'm a doctor, we're getting help now, you're going to be fine." (Carlisle)

"N-no......dau-daughter first." (S)

She struggled with the words as blood started to fill her lungs but watched as the doctor with the pale skin and golden eyes looked at her before his gaze slid over to the backseat and her young daughter laying motionless in her seat. He disappeared from her side and was suddenly in the backseat with her daughter so quickly that the mother was now certain he was an angel of some kind. She watched as he began feeling her wrist and then her neck before doing what looked like a general physical exam as gently as he could.

"I think she has some broken ribs and numerous cuts all along her body, but otherwise nothing extremely serious at the moment." (Carlisle)

The woman gave one sigh of relief before she thanked the doctor in a struggling voice as she felt her lungs fill with what she knew now without a doubt was blood rather than air. She heard the doctor turning back to face her but she knew that her daughter would dream of her death and she had a message for her, one last message that she needed to hear.

"Don't let him break you Maggie, never let him break you. I love you my precious little girl." (S)

The doctor tried his best to bring the woman back but he knew that beyond any means that even he could provide, she was already gone. He sat in the car with the young girl, hearing her strong heartbeat continue even as her mother's had completely disappeared. It was a miracle that she survived if he was being honest, with the car resembling scrap metal more than a car and the blood that continued to leak through the hastily placed bandages on the little girls face. He heard the ambulance arrive and decided to ride with the young girl, thankful for the clouds as Alice had predicted.

He arrived at the hospital with the ambulance and told the attending doctor on the case everything that had happened and told him to call him with an update if he could. He then looked at the young human girl one last time, knowing how much her life just changed in an instant, before he left to meet up with his family in Tennessee before heading to Canada. In the years to come, he thought about the young girl several times but he could only hope that her sorrow did not last long.