We moved to Boston about a year ago. Things have been great. That is until my baby brother and I started at Harvard.

Jason was his typical annoying, jerk self. I couldn’t get away from him. Don’t get me wrong, Jason is a good guy most of the time. But he is obsessed with me and just mostly annoys the hell out of me.

Ben, my brother, is super smart. He is also my best friend. I may have some anger issues and impulse control issues, fortunately, Ben looks out for me; it’s a little annoying sometimes. This is his first time going to college. I have been to a few - around the world.

Sorry, getting ahead of myself. My name is Strix Barnette. And of all the supernatural creatures I could have been born as, I was born a vampire. Well, half-vampire anyways. My father, William “Billy” Barnette has been a vampire since the Spanish-Mexican War. He met my mother, Lily Rose St. James in the summer of 1909. She was human. They had me three months later in October and that’s when my mother became a vampire. It was preeclampsia, my mother would have died if Billy hadn’t turned her right then. While my parents didn’t age, I did, until my eighteenth birthday. I also don’t need blood as often as they do. Unlike my parents, I can eat human food. Life was great for a while.

We eventually went to live with Uncle Donnie, his brother. They weren’t biological brothers, but they had the same creator, Jeremiah Frost. He taught them to protect the innocent and how to abstain from human blood.

After decades of searching, Jeremiah had found a mate. Her name is Hailey. They had their son Zach in the spring of 1908. That was when Donnie and Billy set off to start families of their own.

In 1909, Donnie went east to New England with no luck. But since he really liked it there, he stayed hoping that one day the right woman would find him.

Billy went to Texas. It had been where he was headed before he was fatally wounded in the Spanish-Mexican war that ended with him becoming a vampire. That’s when he met Lily and Karmen. Karmen had been nearly beaten to death, by Lily’s abusive fiancé, when Billy stumbled across them. He chased down Lily’s fiancé first and then helped the two of them. He told Lily that he could help Karmen and keep them both safe.

Over the next couple of days and nights, as Karmen transitioned, Billy and Lily fell in love. He told her about his family and what they were. Lily was not afraid. She loved him so much that it didn’t matter to her. Soon they were married. And in October I was here.

Growing up, I knew my family was different—I could read their minds and project my thoughts into theirs. But it wasn’t until eighth grade when Billy moved us to Northern California to live with Jeremiah that I found out about the others. Everyone avoided that topic in their thoughts. I met Zach. He is just like me but he is an empath and can see the future. And even though he is technically my uncle, we became close friends, virtually inseparable.

I went to Finishing School in California. And my mother started going crazy. She had developed a hatred for humans and I could no longer bring friends home.

One day while Zach and I were out, he felt a lot of fear and pain and saw my mother attacking people, though he couldn’t tell where. I scanned through the thoughts in the area and found Lily attacking a family in an alley just a few blocks away. I sent him home to get my father while I went to try to stop her.

I wasn’t strong enough to stop her on my own, so I was glad when Billy arrived. My mother had already killed a man and two of his children. She was about to kill the third child.

We will have to kill her. Billy thought apologetically. Or she won’t stop.

I didn’t relish the idea of killing my mother, but I knew he was right.

You’ll have to restrain her. I’m not strong enough. I thought back.

Lily’s last thoughts will stay with me forever. She just wanted to be free. Free from all that she was because she could no longer control her thirst. She thanked me and apologized for the children.

School ended two days later and we moved to Oregon to live with Uncle Josh. I didn’t want to go. I would miss Zach terribly. And for this I truly hated my mother. I had spent four years with Zach and he was like my big brother.

Oregon presented new challenges, but I accepted them as I knew how our family had to live, to keep who we were from the rest of the world. I went to school to become a nurse as there weren’t many jobs for women. Women either became teachers or nurses. Since Billy was a doctor, I chose nursing. We lived in Salem for ten years before we moved on.

We moved in with Uncle Donnie. He lived in Augusta, Maine at the time. Donnie and Karmen were in love almost right away and got married. They were a perfect match. Soon Donnie and Karmen had created children for themselves. First was Rose, she was only twenty-five. She had been left to die by her human family in the woods outside of Augusta. I found her and it took a lot of convincing to get her to realize that she didn’t have to die. That what her family had done was wrong. Apparently her parents were members of a cult. I couldn’t turn her myself, as I was afraid I might kill her in the process. When Donnie turned Rose, we found that she, too, could read minds. She and I became close friends, almost sisters. Next was Scarlett. Karmen found her while hunting when we were in Germany, World War Two had broken out and we were there mostly tending to the injured troops. Her family had been slain by the Nazis and she was barely alive when Karmen found her. Scarlett was twenty-two and Karmen had sympathy for her. She turned the girl that night without giving it a second thought. Scarlett’s turning was unbearable for all of us. She was in so much pain and we had trouble keeping her quiet. Through her screams I heard her thoughts. She was scared, confused and most of all she wished we would kill her so the torture would end. On the third day when she finally came to, she was still confused but she was a sweet girl. She had so many questions so Karmen took her aside to explain. She remembered what happened to her family but never brought it up, she just wanted to forget.

During that same time, Donnie and Billy were doctors in the RAF. One night on the front line, a boy was brought to them. He had been found strung up on barbed wire. Jason was his name, he was twenty-one. Billy told his brother the boy would die and that they should make him as comfortable as possible. Donnie decided that since he had two daughters, he wanted a son. So he turned the boy, adding a son to his family. Jason didn’t notice much as he changed, he was on so many medications and painkillers. I don’t know how he was as a human but I found him to be incredibly annoying as a vampire. After he learned what he’d become, he thought himself a god.

We went back to the States in 1947.