“Good luck honey!” My biological mother, Renee Swan, hugged me tight, her golden eyes bright with happiness. “Your first day of high school! I’m so proud!”

I’d already been to college once, and she’d been proud then, which I could understand, but proud of me now, for deciding to attend public high school?

My father, Charlie, had already gone off to his new job as Police Chief here in Forks, so that was one less embarrassment to endure. He’d wanted to see me off, but I’d persuaded him otherwise.

I felt a little guilty about doing it though, because after Renee had released me she said, “Your father wishes you well too.”

“I’ll be fine Mom,” I reassured her, and I was glad she couldn’t cry, or else the tears would have been flowing full force now. “I’m not thirsty at all! I’ll behave, don’t worry.”

“One thing Bella,” She said this quietly, and even though I was at the end of the driveway by then, I heard her. “Don’t overuse your power. Just because you have it, doesn’t mean you always have to use it.”

I scowled in response, but I laughed as I swung myself into the front seat of my red Volvo. She laughed as well. No doubt she was remembering my college days, as I was. I’d loved to use my talent in college.

According to Renee, who had done a lot of research on the matter in her two hundred plus years, vampires very rarely had special talents, and the largest group of them with specific, unique powers lived in Italy. They had intrigued me, and I’d always wanted to meet them. The coven we’d met in Alaska had said there was a mind reader, an empath, a psychic and a pain bringer.

No one had heard of my talent though. Then again, no coven had ever lived like ours before either. In my earlier years, I tried to convince other vampires we’d met to change their lifestyle as well, but my power hadn’t been strong enough. Eventually I’d stopped trying, and we kept to ourselves. We were happy feeding off of animals, and that was good enough. No one had tried to kill us yet because of it.

We were doing so well with the new life that I decided to go to college. An institution crowded with thousands of humans. I resisted them all, but not without great struggle. My parents were ecstatic, so we decided to begin living in areas permanently for allotted amounts of time. Seventy years was our longest. That had been in Alaska, but we’d hardly seen any people, and as we encroached closer to the human population there, we discovered it was too sunny to be within seeing distance of them. So my mother did some research, and here we were: Forks, Washington. The rainiest city in all of the United States of America.