A Beloved Daydream

So this is my novel in it's outline stage. I don't even really know if I'll try to get it published or not but I think I might. I love some constructive criticism and just so you know, this is in a very early stage and I've just been going with the flow. It isn't even closed to finished but i have an idea of where it's going. so, please...COMMENT!!!!! Thanks. Morgan.

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“It was on the moral side, and in my own person, that I learned to recognise the thorough and primitive duality of man; I saw that, of the two natures that contended in the field of my consciousness, even if I could rightly be said to be either, it was only because I was radically both; and from an early date ... I had learned to dwell with pleasure, as a beloved daydream, on the thought of the separation of these elements.”

From “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde”

When Sophie Murray is sent by her family to live with her Aunt Andrea, her mother Dana’s younger sister, in Dunsmuir, California after a string of murders hit her school in San Francisco, she isn’t very happy. Not only does she hate her mother with a passion for sending her away from what is, in her opinion, a stupid reason but she hates having to leave all of her friends and all that she knows of the city A) when she should be mourning the death of her friend Monica who was one of the murder victims and B) to go to some Podunk town in the Shasta Cascade Range to live with her quirky, neo-hippy Aunt Andrea in some ancient, old Queen Anne style house until crime in San Francisco subsides. It’s pointless for her and she hates most of all having to start over for the ending half of her high school career. She is a junior in high school who has to end the second half of the year in a new place. Sophie absolutely hates it.

So at the end of her second semester, right after Christmas break, Sophie moves in with her Aunt Andrea in Dunsmuir, taking the Amtrak train line from Oakland on a cool morning. The entire ride is a bore and she detests having to leave her friends, who had waved her off with false good wishes and truthfully sad goodbyes. Her family only wants her to be safe but she feels she would be just fine if she were back at home in San Francisco. When she gets off the train, Andrea is there waiting, wearing her usual, trendy clothes that most of Sophie’s friends wear. Not their thirty-six year old, painter aunts. Andrea greets her and they move her belongings into the car. They drive back to the house, a half an hour drive from the train station and chat lightly until Andrea sees that Sophie is not the least bit please with the situation. She tries to explain things to her but Sophie just grumbles in a response.

They get to the house and unpack her things. While Andrea makes dinner (some disgusting vegetarian dish made of tofu), Sophie goes up to her room and goes on her computer to talk with her friend Ivy on AIM. Sophie complains about how stupid her situation is and how much she misses Ivy. Ivy talks about all of the rumors going around the school involving the murders at William P. Croft High School, Sophie’s former school. Kids have suddenly stopped disappearing and turning up dead. It’s like as soon as Sophie left, so did the killer. Ivy thinks it’s really weird how things have happened. Three people have turned up dead and now it has all stopped, leaving Sophie with the assumption that something happened when she left. Maybe it is just her nervous, speculative nature that leads her to believe that she is the connection but whatever it is, it leads to a tense dinner atmosphere as Andrea eats with her feet on the table, like usual. That night, Sophie doesn’t sleep much.

The next day, Sophie takes her Aunt’s car to the store to buy some groceries for the house, which is barren when it comes to food. At Alpine Foods, Sophie picks out her food purchases and then browses over some shampoo in the toiletry aisle. While looking around and comparing prices of conditioner, four boys make their way to her, skateboards in their arms and outfitted with ripped jean and tight black shirts. She pretends not to notice them until one of them makes a grab for her ass and this pisses her off. She turns around and slaps the one who grabbed her behind, hitting him so hard that he rubs his jaw, though he continues to smile. He remarks about how feisty she is and she slaps him again without a second thought. This time, he’s a little pissed about all of the slapping. He grabs her hand and twists her wrist until it is almost about to break. Sophie tells him to let go before he regrets it. He laughs with his friend and tightens his grip. She smiles and says he shouldn’t have done that. Kicking him swiftly in the groin, she feels him relinquish his hold on her arm and he and his friends leave the store, him howling in pain and his friends laughing their asses off.

After catching her breath and recovering from the encounter, Sophie hears clapping behind her. It is a strikingly handsome boy with wild brown hair and incredible, tawny eyes. His eyes are like the tiger’s eye necklace she wears, the one her great-grandmother gave her for her sixteenth birthday before she died. The necklace is a silver crescent moon with a silver, eight-pointed sun, its middle made of tiger’s eye, in the center of it. She unconsciously allows her fingers to search for the pendant at her neck, though it isn’t there seeing as she only wears it on special occasions, as she rolls her eyes over the boy’s brawny physique, briefly of course. Then she glares at the boy and demands to know why he didn’t do anything to prevent her encounter with the asshole quartet. He says they are actually Nick Foster and his friends Chris Long, Shaun Campbell, and Robbie Hayes and that it looked like she had it under control anyways. She can’t help but blush and be angry at the same time. To have such a handsome boy pay any attention to her is miraculous in her opinion. She tells him it still would have been the decent thing to help her out but all he does was laugh musically. It frightens her how beautiful he is and how dazzled she is by him. But she is too angry that she received no help to do anything.

Suddenly, the boy is right beside her and is holding out his hand for her to shake. Not fazed by his charms, Sophie refuses to shake his hand, crossing her arms instead, and he introduces himself as Henry Merritt. She doesn’t speak for about a minutes and a half, waiting for him to say something because she will be damned if she says anything first. After waiting in an awkward silence, Sophie decides she is going to go check out and tells him sarcastically how nice it was to meet him and that it had been a pleasure to be his acquaintance but that she must leave. As he follows her out, trying to get her to tell him her name, she laughs and says not in this lifetime or any others she may be reincarnated into. I seems that this strikes him harder than anything else she had said. He grabs her arm as she turns to leave; looking into her eyes as if gazing into her blue eyes would change anything and asks her one more time if she would give him her name, at least her name, with desperation in his eyes. She tells him to let go of her arm before she screams for help. And with that, Henry let’s go and watches as Sophie puts the groceries into the backseat of her aunt’s vintage Mustang and drives away.

On the drive home, all Sophie can think of is him. Henry. And of the look he gave her, as if letting go of her arm would kill him with grief. As if he already knew her and as if the way she spoke of reincarnation was going to make him wince with pain. It was odd the way he had looked at her. Like he had always known who she was and as if they had met before. And something that she would never admit to anyone was this: she had felt like she knew him as well. Like they had been close at sometime in the past only she had no recollection of it. But as she ponders these déjà vu-like feelings she nearly crosses over the divider into the oncoming traffic of the main road. After recovering, she shook the idea from her head and pushed it to the back of her mind, thinking it silly, thinking that it was best for her health that she pay attention to the road rather than think about some stupid gut feeling she had.

Finally making her way back to Andrea’s house, she puts away the groceries and her aunt begins to make dinner. On the kitchen table is a copy of the Los Angeles Times, the headline being the sudden reappearance of murders of the same style as the ones at Sophie’s school only they are further north, as if the killer has worked his way up the coast. North. That’s the only word she can see. It only makes the idea that the killer is after her more realistic. She makes dinner quickly and leaves her aunt to eat alone. When her aunt climbs the stairs to Sophie’s bedroom to see if she is okay, Sophie refuses to admit anything is wrong. She takes a shower and prepares for her first day at school, which happens to be two days from then. She goes to bed thinking of the last thing she wants to…Henry. And that night, she has a dream that she is going to die at the hands of a monster in a forest clearing.

The next day, she wakes up with that feeling of dread that a kid gets when they know school is right around the corner and is heightened by the foreboding sense that she has due to the dream she had the previous night. So she decides to go walk around town to pass the time, driving down to a small café in the center of town. She buys a cup of coffee and begins to walk around the town. She ventures to the park and has another dreadful encounter with Henry then, having already heard about it, hikes to Mossbrae Falls. She walks along the trail, stepping into the train tracks once in a while just for fun. Once there, she pulls out a sketchbook and begins to sketch the waterfalls, peacefully perched on a large boulder near the falls’ southeastern side. Suddenly, as she notices it is nearing dusk, she begins to walk back.

On the walk back, she steps along the railroad tracks since she can’t see the trail. But then she gets her foot caught in one of the tracks. And as if things couldn’t get any worse, Sophie sees a train coming at full speed towards her. She starts to panic and only gets her foot further caught under the track. She tries to pull her foot out of the boot but can’t do it. She starts to scream for help but no one comes…until she feels a body pull her out of the way of the train just moments before she would have gotten hit. She lands on the embankment on the side of the tracks and hits her head on a rock protruding from the ground. Just before she loses consciousness, she looks up into the face of her savior, only to see that she cannot make out whom the person is. She only feels hands lifting her entire body as if it were a feather and carries her into the night. All she remembers is the swirl of trees around her as if she were moving at great speeds while in the arms of her rescuer.

She wakes up in the porch swing, her forehead covered lightly with dried blood. When she touches the wound he finds that it isn’t deep, merely a shallow gash and she concludes that she fell unconscious due to a mixture of fear and exhaustion, not because of the laceration. It takes her a few minutes to remember what had happened and once she does, she instinctively sits up and looks around her to see if the man who carried her away was there. She remembers how the person must have been going at amazing speeds because all she remembers of them running was a smudged blur of darkness and the moonlight. As if they were moving faster than normal legs could go. But she dispels the idea and doesn’t bother to continue looking when she realizes that no one is there. She finally gets up, slowly however, and walks into the house. Abby immediately begins to play the worried maternal figure, asking her where she has been and only stopping her interrogation when she notices Sophie’s cut on her head. Sophie says she tripped on a rock at the waterfalls and hit her head, not wanting to freak her aunt out by telling her she almost got hit by a train. After her aunt has believed her explanation, she asks if she can go up and go to bed now, an idea to which her aunt approves. She goes upstairs, cleans her wound and showers, falling asleep almost as soon as she gets into bed, having the same dream as the night before.

Her first day at Dunsmuir High School is something that tested and pushed her sanity to its limits. She wakes up early and goes through her regular routine of getting dressed and making herself look at the very least, presentable. She goes down stairs to the kitchen where Andrea is making breakfast. She sounds excited for Sophie that she is going to begin school in Dunsmuir, though Sophie doesn’t say a word. The dream from the previous night is still on her mind and she had a feeling that there was something prophetic about it. But she doesn’t believe in the unknown; to her seeing is believing and she has no proof that her dreams were anything more than just a dream. Grabbing a piece of toast made up with grape jelly and peanut butter, just the way she likes it, she says a quick goodbye to her aunt and runs out of the door after Andrea begins to talk about how many boyfriends she is going to have. Awkward…

On the drive to school, Sophie feels much better about things, having forgotten about her dream. It isn’t until she reaches the school and makes it to her locker that she realizes things are not going it go the way she had hoped. As she is shutting her locker, she begins telling herself that she will get through this and then she is scared to the point that she drops her books when she sees that Henry is standing there behind the door. He asks her if he can have her name yet and she says simply, no. She begins to pick up her books and he bends to help her, acting like some perfect gentleman but she has the books in her hands before he can even start to help her. She stands up and says she has to go to class but he follows her and is finally angry.

He asks her why she dislikes him so much. Why she rejects him every time they’ve seen each other. She looks at him and tells him she doesn’t know why when of course she already knows that the reason is that he makes her feel vulnerable. That he makes her feel at all makes her scared. He tells her that that isn’t an acceptable answer; that he wants a real explanation. She says she doesn’t care what is acceptable by him or not. He says that he hasn’t been anything but nice to her and she has treated him like shit. His eyes are pleading now. She gets defensive and says that if she doesn’t like someone, she has every right not to and that he just happens to be one of those people. Then he says fine and that if she wants to be one of those people, then fine. She gets really defensive and asks what he means by “those people”. He says he means one of those people who hate anyone who makes them feel at all. It was as if he’d read her mind. She says fine, that she will be that way. He says fine. She says fine. He says fine and she says fine. She stalks off and goes to class.

It’s safe to say that they highly dislike each other now. But for some reason, Sophie can’t get him out of her mind. His face was on every face she saw in school. And her attention was not grabbed until she met Alicia Prideaux, the girl who “saved” her from a group of freshmen who were hounding her with questions about the great metropolis of San Francisco. They had been asking her questions and following her around the hallway while she made her way to lunch and Alicia had seen this and pulled her out of the way by pretending to know who she is and telling her she had been “looking for her everywhere.” Sophie thanks her and introduces her self. Alicia also introduces herself and they chat for a few minutes on the way to lunch. When they approach the doors, Sophie stops, realizing she has no one to sit with but Alicia tells her to come on and they sit at a table in the northwestern corner of the room with four other people. Alicia introduces them as Alex, Jack, Lucas and Olivia also introduces Sophie.

While they chat innocently about the Valentine’s Day dance and other silly topics, Sophie notices that she can’t see Henry anywhere in the room, even though it the junior’s lunch period. The thought of him leads her to start asking questions about him. And that is when she gets the whole story. Henry moved to Dunsmuir about a year and a half ago with his older sister, Genevieve, and the story went that they were orphans. Genevieve, who was about twenty, was apparently left a small fortune from their parents’ life insurance. They live in a restored, Victorian mansion on the edge of town and rarely socialize with anyone. When Sophie tells them about her encounters with Henry, they are fairly surprised. Olivia snickers that he must like her. The others say that that never happens. That Henry never talks to anyone, especially girls. Most of the girls are in love with him but he has never approached one of them.

This information leaves Sophie thinking about him even more. Why is she any different than the girls who have been pursuing him? Why would he like her more than girls who actually like him? Well that wouldn’t be a problem since he now hates her, though the feeling is pretty much mutual. She leaves lunch and goes on to Biology class, where, much to her dismay, she is partnered up with Henry himself, not that he isn’t irritated about the match as well. She begins to bicker with him about how much she hates it and Mr. Porter, their teacher, scolds them. They have afternoon detention when they continue to bicker after being scolded the first time and then, finally, they both shut up. On the way out of class, Sophie says thanks for getting her detention and Henry says don’t mention it, both of their comments dripping with malice, and they part ways until English, where they sit as far from each other as possible as the lesson on the book Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. And even though she is really quite angry with him for getting her detention on her first day at school, Sophie can’t help but glance at him every once in a while.

After school, she goes to the library, where detention is held. She puts down her belongings and sits down, watching to see Henry walk in and do the same…only he sits back with a pissed off look on his face, a look that they share. The librarian, Mrs. Carr, presides over Sophie, Henry, and one other boy who appeared to be sleeping at the table. Sophie mumbles how she can’t believe that this is happening and Henry seconds that. She scowls at him and he smiles arrogantly back at her as if to say fuck you. She turns her head and they get through the detention without speaking. Once the detention is over, Sophie goes to her car, seeing for the first time Genevieve Merritt, who has come to pick him up in a black Saab convertible. She notices how lithe and graceful Genevieve is and how much they look alike, both with beautiful golden eyes that seem to bore holes into anyone whose gaze they rest upon. And Henry’s happen to rest upon her as they pull out of the parking lot, but not in a bad way; it is more of a good, longing way than a glaring way.

Sophie drives home, eats dinner early, explaining to her Aunt that she has a lot of work to do for school and that she is just going to go to her room and get working on that. Andrea complies and gives her a plate of tofurki, tofu turkey, and some mashed potatoes and she leaves. After reaching her room, Sophie begins to work on her Calculus but ends up falling asleep on her bed, her copy of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in her hands. In her sleep, she dreams the same dream she had dreamt the previous two nights only this time, it feels more real. She wakes up screaming and finds that, in her fitful sleep, has dug her nails so far into her own skin that she is bleeding. She goes to the bathroom, cleans her skin and bandages it before going back to her bed, where she stays; awake, until she has to get ready for school.

The next few days, Sophie spends most of her time with Alicia and her new friends that she introduced her to and trying to avoid Henry. It isn’t as easy as it looks. They continue to bicker during Biology and are given two more detentions until finally, they are sent to the principles office. Mrs. Lescher asks them what is going on and why they are disrupting the class so much. The two students look at her and say, in unison, that they just don’t like each other. Mrs. Lescher sighs and looks at them as if observing their behavior for a moment. Then she tells them that, to stop this once and for all, they will have to learn to co-exist. When they refuse to look at her or each other, she tells them that if they continue to disrupt Mr. Porter’s class that they will be suspended and given community service under the school’s zero tolerance plan. When they don’t respond, she asks them if she is clear and Sophie replies by saying crystal. Henry nods in agreement and the pair leaves without saying a word.

The rest of the day goes on without a hitch. The two don’t talk to each other and it goes the same way for the next two weeks…that is until Mr. Porter gives out an assignment for all pairs to take the name of an organism out of a hat and do a 10 page research project on it. As they pass the hat around, Henry and Sophie don’t even look at each other. But when the hat comes to them, they both put their hands in and for one second, their fingers touch. Suddenly a vision flashes before her eyes; of a young woman before the turn of the century who looks just like her smiling with a young man who looks just like Henry, standing in a garden in each other’s arms, the man whispering sweet nothings into the girl’s ears. Then, just as fast as the image came, Sophie wakes up in the nurse’s office. She is told that she fainted in class and hit her head on the table, which would explain the pain on her forehead. She looks around her to see Alicia and Jack and, much to her odd relief, Henry, standing around her. Jack asks if she is alright and Sophie says she is fine, blushing slightly. She is still slightly confused by the vision she had and isn’t sure whether t believe it or not. But anyways she can’t help but see Henry in a new light no matter what ways he looks at her vision.

Sophie is sent home early and ends up watching TV for the next few hours. Around six ‘clock that evening, she accidentally sees the evening news and notices a story on the murders running up the coast, the most recent body being found in Sacramento, only a few hundred miles away. Even more disturbing is the similarities between the victims; all of them are girls between the ages of fifteen and eighteen with dark brown hair and blue eyes…just like what Sophie looks like. She turns ff the television and throws the remote across the room, letting it clatter to the floor. She ends up locking all of the doors and windows of the house out of fear, only coming out of her panic-induced trance when Andrea comes home from the art store where she works part-time, banging on the locked door since she forgot her keys. Andrea asks why the door was locked, to which Sophie replies that she thought she heard coyote’s outside and got scared. Andrea says that there is no need to be frightened and that it was probably nothing. She adds that she has decided to order out for the two of them and they send for a cheese pizza from Mariana’s Pizza in downtown. As they eat, they watch the movie Andrea brought home, some crappy horror flick, and Sophie finds herself more at ease and sensible than before, deciding that the murders have nothing to do with her at all.

Only as they come to the climax of the movie, the phone rings scaring them both. Sophie crawls over the couch to grab it, only to hear Henry’s melodious voice on the other end of the line. He tells her he was calling to make sure she was okay and to let her know that before her accident, they had chosen the grey wolf as their organism. She says thanks and that she is fine. There is a period of awkward silence before Henry asks if there is anything she wants to tell him about that afternoon and Sophie pauses before saying no as the thought that he might know about her hallucination crosses her mind. He says okay and they say goodbye, but right before they hang up, Sophie says thank you and he asks what for. She says she means thank you for being there when she woke up. They hang up and she goes into the kitchen for another soda before going back to the movie.

After going back to the movie, she can’t stay focused on it. Andrea asks who it was and Sophie embarrassingly admits it was a boy. Fascinated, she inquires as to which boy it was and when her niece replies that it was Henry Merritt, her smile fades quickly and Sophie is ordered to never speak to him again. But Sophie, slightly confused about her aunt’s reaction, explains about the project and her aunt says that she will speak to the principle about it all. As Andrea gets up and goes into the adjoining kitchen, her niece asks her why she is s upset over Henry, a question to which she doesn’t answer. When she continues to push, Andrea snaps that there are things in the world that she wouldn’t understand; that there is evil in the world all around them…even in Dunsmuir. Her niece asks what that has to do with Henry or her to which Andrea replies in one f her short bursts of anger that she is too naïve and ignorant to find out just yet but that if she continues to be around Henry, she will regret it. Sophie tells her aunt that she is going to bed as she is quite angry at her and when Andrea tells her to wait and tries to apologize, she doesn’t respond, only running up the stairs and slamming her door, leaving the pizza boxes and the movie behind her downstairs.

She falls fast asleep, dreaming a different dream this time. She dreams of the young woman who looks like her and the young man resembling Henry. She sees them dancing, the woman in a beautiful blue satin gown and matching shoes while the man wears a traditional black coat and jacket that is slimming on him. They glide across the floor like ghosts of beauty, and their gaze doesn’t lift from each other’s eyes as they dance the quadrille with three other couples, thought they are easily the most skilled and stunning of the four. Sophie feels like an observer of it all though she knows she can’t be seen. Secure in this notion, she finds herself walking around the ballroom, weaving her way through groups of people and only when she gazes at a dedication plaque on the table does she realize that she is in San Francisco in 1885 at the dedication ball for the Bingham-Carleton Hall, a grand hall that was used as a ballroom in the past and now is a venue for some of the greatest performers of the twenty-first century.

When she turns around, she finds herself pulled into a servant’s passageway by a handsome, blonde haired man with steely grey eyes. He shoves her against a wall and presses a knife to her throat. She peers into a mirror on the wall beside her and sees she is the girl in blue who looks like her because she is now wearing the gown and is made up the same way. She looks into his gleaming eyes and feels the blade at her throat, the heat of his body against hers. He tells her to stick to the plan, to use her skills to shield her mind from him and to lure him to the lobby. She asks him what he means and who he is. He only pressed the blade harder, drawing a bit of blood, before telling her not to play coy with him. He calls her Stella, drops the blade and pulls her face into his hands, murmuring how much he loves her and how it will all be over within the hour. Sophie decides to play along and says that she loves him too and that everything is falling into place. He kisses her passionately and within seconds he is gone, back to the ball. Sophie takes one last look at herself in the mirror before she is pulled from her dream state.

A shrill beeping sound echoes in her head for quite a while after waking up. As Sophie gets ready for school, she looks into her bathroom mirror and sees a small, line of a welt crusted over with blood at her throat...just like in her dream. This time she has no rational explanation for it other than that she might have scratched herself in her sleep. She tends to the wound and goes downstairs to find Andrea slamming the phone receiver down into the cradle. She says she just spoke to “that conservative, bitchy pig of a principle”, Mrs. Lescher, and says that she refused to let Sophie change lab partners so that she didn’t have eat be with Henry. Sophie just says huh, grabs an apple from the fruit basket and goes to school, leaving her dissatisfied, overprotective aunt behind her, still angry in the kitchen. She gets through the beginning of the day without any confrontations or weird visions, eating lunch and chatting with Alicia and the others, mostly about the day before when Sophie had fainted before moving on to more cheerful topics such as the Fall Formal in a few weeks and what the girls will wear while the boys talk about the continuing football season.

She gets through the rest of the day just fine until she finds Henry waiting by her locker at the end of the day. She goes to it and, for the first time ever, smiles at him. He says he came to her locker to ask when they should start working on the project seeing as they only have two weeks to do it. She says that any time is fine and then smiles, remembering her awkward defeat of her aunt only that morning. Seeing the smile, he asks what she thought was funny and she says nothing, accidentally touching her throat and drawing his attention to the wound there. Concerned, he asks how she got that and she stares blankly into her locker before saying she doesn’t know, that she just woke up with it. He says he is sorry for how the past few weeks have gone and that he just didn’t know how else to react to her rejection of him. She says it is okay and that she feels the same way about the past few weeks. He asks her if 8:00pm at his house would be okay to begin working on their project. She says she’ll be there and with a nod f her head and an awkward good-bye, Sophie and Henry part until that night.

For her, the rest of the day was like driving on the highway; the rest of the world passed her by as if everything else was faster than her, like she was in slow motion and the rest of the world had fast forward. She couldn’t get the dream out of her mind. Her usually skeptical self was becoming more and more concerned with her dreams. She went home, showered and dressed, got the materials and told her aunt she was going out with friends before Andrea could respond with an approval or not. She took the car and drove to the Merritt house, a beautiful old house outside town, using the directions she’d printed off of the internet. By the time she got there, it was dark but she was still a half-hour early. She walks up to the door and rings the doorbell. When no one answers, she rings it again. Still no answer.

Then, out of the blue, Henry appears from behind the house and demands to know why she is so early. She says she just had been ready earlier than expected and decided to just come over early. His hair is disheveled and windblown as if he has been running around. She asks what he had been dong and he says he was jogging around the woods. Henry invites her in and they get to work, despite his fowl mood apparently brought on by her earliness.

The interior of the house is stunning and awe-inspiring. With vaulted ceilings and French doors paired with a fireplace in the living room and a huge wall made of glass looking out over the magnificent view of the eddies and the hilly forests, the Merritt siblings home was amazingly beautiful. Henry led her through the entryway and into a spacious living room where there was a chestnut coffee table with a laptop computer sitting on it. He motions for her to sit down on the sofa adjacent to the table and she does, folding her legs beneath her. He takes a seat beside her, silent as always, and asks her how she wants to begin. She says she brought some books on wolves and that she can look through them and highlight key points while he searches the internet for information. He says okay and they get to work. There is an awkward silence for a while before Henry asks why she is spending her time in Dunsmuir with her aunt. Leaning back casually, book still in hand, she explains about her parents being concerned about all of the mysterious murders in her neighborhood in San Francisco and how her mother decided it would be best if she stay with her aunt until the killer was found.

Henry just listens, though there is a glimmer of fear in his eyes, and after Sophie pauses to decide whether or not to tell about her paranoia over the murders moving up the coast, though she does tell him anyways. When he hears of this, his eyes go blank with concern but he regains composure in an instant so as not to let her notice, though she does. He says that he understands Sophie’s parents’ point of view; that he would want her out of danger by any means necessary. Then he adds the question of if she had ever thought that maybe the murders moving up the coast has something to do with her moving up the coast…that maybe there is a connection between her and the murderer. She says she has thought of that but there is no reason for anyone to want to kill her. She never had any enemies or at least none that she knew of. Henry says that there are always enemies, even if they aren’t obvious.

They are silent for a little while until Sophie asks about what happened to his parents. Henry is hesitant and tells her he doesn’t like to talk about that. She says its fine and asks him about how long he has lived there. He says he’s been there for two years and that he has moved around a lot with his sister. They had lived all over the West Coast, California mostly though the lived in Oregon for a few months. He explains that they liked to keep on the move seeing as it was easier for them to not get attached to a place that way and they never wanted to get attached for fear of losing their distraction from their past. He says that them moving helps them not remember their parents or their past. They hate remembering. Sophie understands, though she has never been in the same situation as him. They go back to being silent again for a while before Sophie makes a confession that she has been having weird dreams. She describes them in detail, especially her most recent one about the 1885 dedication ball in San Francisco.

As she speaks, the expression on Henry’s face doesn’t change at all. He is listening intently and she finds herself shaking from retelling the worrisome dreams she has been having. Much to her surprise, he grabs her quivering hands and holds them close, saying he would never let anything happen to her. She is near tears by the time they lock eyes and he leans in to kiss her, their lips brushing each other’s before actually uniting. They kiss for a good ten seconds before Henry pulls away, murmuring how much he has wanted to do that since he first met her. She smiles and asks why he acted like such a jerk if he liked her so much. He says that he just didn’t want to spoil all of the rumors at school about him being gay since he had never had a girlfriend in Dunsmuir before and, of course, he wouldn’t want to disappoint all of the girls that have crushes on him by turning up taken. They both laugh and Sophie gets up to stare out the large window wall at the scenery of the surrounding woods, Henry staying on the couch. She asks what will happen now that everything has changed. He says he doesn’t know what will happen but he does know that he has loved her since he first laid eyes upon her at Alpine Foods when she had her encounter with Nick and his boys.

She smiles as she thinks about the memory, not feeling any more resentment towards him for not helping her, and at the comment as well. She says she has felt the same way but there was something about him that irritated her, though she admits it might be that he sees through her façade and into who she really is, painful as it is. That he makes her honest in ways she doesn’t want to be. He gets up and walks over to her, taking her fingers in his hands and kissing each tip one by one. Then he kisses her again and says that they both wear them but that they each see through each other’s masks. They kiss again and she smiles. Then, seeing her cell phone vibrating on the table, Sophie runs to grab it and says hello to her aunt. She asks if she knows what time it is but doesn’t wait for an answer. She says that seeing as it is almost 11pm on a school night, she had better be back in ten minutes or else there will be serious consequences. Then she adds that Alicia called and she knows she isn’t out with friends and that if she is where she thinks she is, then she is going to have a long talk with Sophie when she returns home. Sophie hangs up and says she has to go. Henry nods his head solemnly; they kiss goodnight and say good-bye.

When she arrives home, Andrea is waiting for her in the kitchen. Sophie doesn’t even bother trying to sneak past her to go up to her room and instead confronts her right then and there. Andrea asks her niece where she has been and Sophie responds by saying that she obviously already knows. Andrea, though cool most of the, can be just as maternal as any adult can be over their younger relative. She tells her not to get smart with her and to answer the question. Sophie instead asks what her problem with Henry is but her aunt says she didn’t answer her question first, to which her niece replies that she doesn’t care and to just answer the question. Andrea finally says, after a moment of thought, says she will tell her everything so that she knows what she is getting into when she engages in a relationship with Henry. She warns her niece that she won’t believe her at first but that that will change over time. She goes to the sink and gets a glass of water for herself and Sophie and tells her to sit down. She pulls a folder from a drawer in the desk in her adjoining office and puts it on the table. Sitting back down with a bewildered Sophie, Andrea begins to speak.

She asks if she believes in vampires and Sophie laughs saying not since she was five and her cousin Elliot dressed up as one for Halloween just to scare her. She asks what vampires have to do with Henry and Andrea says everything. She explains that the Murray’s have an old connection to the Merritt’s in more ways than one. She says that the tiger’s eye pendant Sophie was given by her great grandmother was a protection amulet against vampires and that the Murray women have always been what many consider to be vampire hunters. Sophie laughs louder than ever and says, “Now you’re probably going to tell me that Henry is a vampire, right?” Andrea just nods her head and pushes the folder towards Sophie. She opens the folder and sees, first, a birth certificate for a Henry James Merritt, born on October 12th, 1868 in San Francisco, California to Rebecca and Phillip Merritt. The second thing she sees is a death certificate of Henry James Merritt on April 19th, 1885. The cause of death was loss of blood. And the age at death was seventeen…the same age her Henry is now.

Sophie says that this doesn’t prove anything and that the Henry n these documents could just be one of Henry’s ancestors. All Andrea says to this is to keep looking. Sophie fingers through the various documents such as several high school transcript reports from various years, some over a decade before and other even longer. But the tip of the iceberg is a photograph that has to be over a hundred years old with the unmistakable Henry standing with the young woman from her dream, Stella. She puts a hand to her mouth in disbelief and steps back from the table until she hits the wall. She repeats no over and over again, hoping that she will figure out a way to be skeptical. She says that’s him and me and those are the only words that come out of her mouth for now. Andrea explains that that is Henry’s first love, Stella Murray; one of the first vampire hunters in the family and that Sophie is the reincarnation of her. She begins to tell the story of Stella Murray and Henry Merritt as she drinks from her glass of water.

Stella Murray was seventeen when she was given her first vampire to track down and kill: Henry Merritt. He was a new vampire, one that should have been easy for her and her fiancé, William Larson, who belonged to anther family of vampire hunters from Massachusetts. There were four families for each four regions of the United States: The Murray's for the northwest, the Larson’s for the Northeast, the Ramsey’s for the Southeast and the Sheffield’s for the Southwest. The Murray’s had always married into one of the other families so as to keep the tradition of vampire hunting as strong as possible. But, the plan got more complicated as they found his sister, Genevieve, had also been turned and the pair of siblings were under the protection of their sire, a powerful and mysterious vampire who had no identity except for the initials “A.D.” All they knew of A.D. was that he had been around for ages, centuries, and was stronger than any other vampire the families had encountered in the Continental U.S. So the plan had to become more elaborate to go along with the complications.

Anyways, the plan was formed to go like this: Stella would win the heart of the naïve and amateur Henry over time and gain his trust using both her skills to cloak her thoughts, her beauty, and her charm. She would meet him through a series of happy “accidents” around San Francisco and this worked, for he soon fell in love with Stella. It nearly killed William to see his beloved in such a dangerous situation and pretending to be in love with a vampire but the job was the job. And the job was going very well considering that the final step of the plan was to kill him at the dedication ball for the Bingham-Carlton Hall, where everyone would be too busy to miss one person. But there was one exception to the plans progress: Stella had grown feelings for Henry and would, in the end, give her life to protect him and betray her own family.

By the time Andrea was done telling the tragedy of Stella and Henry, Sophie is shaking her head in disbelief. She is still trying to get her head wrapped around the idea of the possibility of the existence of vampires and vampire hunters and the fact that reincarnation is real. It’s too much to handle all at once. In order to get what she has heard straight, she comes from a family of vampire hunters...