CHAPTER ONE:
THE HAUNTING
(trigger warning: blood and death)

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HERE'S THE THING ABOUT Jia Littlesea; try as she might (not that she tried all that much) she was pessimistic to the bone. Maybe it was just her. Some people were hopeful, some hopeless. Then there was that shade of grey in between.

Growing up, she never had much. For the first several years of her life, Jia really only had her mum, Himari, a Japanese immigrant who quickly fell in love with the American Dream when visiting on a holiday with her sister. It was here in La Push she met Jia's dad, a Native American man several years Himari's senior.

(Jia didn't know his name and never cared to ask. She never met him, and the last she saw of his parents, she was too young to remember the weight of their sadness, that their only son had abandoned his own blood for fear of commitment to life in one place. He was a singer. His blood, as far as he was concerned, poured like a river into his music and his music only.)

Back to Himari. To understand Jia, you must first understand her mum. The root of Jia's biggest fears; failure, disappointment, loss. She loved her mum, in a way that was both innocent yet fruitless. Himari learned real quick that the American Dream was nothing but a tale. The highlight of a song sang in her traitorous lover's baritone croon. She settled down and made do with the gritty morsels that remained. Food-stamps, a modest (cramped) apartment, her own hard labour the only thing keeping her head above water. Jia was born out of hardship, and it burrowed in deep as she grew older and realised the world wasn't pretty. Not to anyone, but especially not to the victims of Childhood. That blasted thing.

So maybe Jia was a realist. She didn't hate her life. She had a lot to be grateful for. That Himari worked, bled, screamed and cried until she was sent over the edge, free-falling into oblivion. That John Littlesea came along and released the weight of the world from her shoulders. They married quick, seeking complacency, and soon came a bouncing baby boy and a white picket fence to match.

Don't get her wrong, Jia benefited from it. She had a family, but at what cost? Her mother's vacant eyes when Jia came home one day and declared an interest in music? That for every school recital, Himari had to watch her daughter become the love that deemed her unworthy of commitment? Jia was not her father, but she looked like him and now had the voice to match. She knew even then Himari resented her.

Hence Himari. There was Mum, the one who shielded her from the shadows as a babe, poured her heart into keeping her alive; Mother, the woman of tolerance; and Himari, who was Mum and Mother combined beneath a stranger's skin. Himari was her own person and she did not like her daughter one bit.

But Jia had long since accepted this. Mum, Mother and Himari were the angel and devil on her shoulder. They warred for much of her life, and they followed her to California at sixteen where John's younger sister, Elis, was kind enough to let her stay in the cramped spare bedroom of her apartment.

Flighty, aiming much too high, a nameless man's daughter, Icarus falling from the sun.

The realist/pessimist/whatever you called Jia knew she was up shit's creek when she woke up in a shonky alleyway on the outskirts of Seattle. There was no sugar-coating the eerie silence that lingered, the impending sense of fear; this was permanent, she could not come back from this. If she was already too far gone before, she was way beyond reach now.

Maimed. Alive but absent inside. Fighting to feel something, anything.

(Was she back to pessimist? Or maybe masochist, just for the thrill of it?)

When she woke up, something was... off. She didn't feel right. Everything was loud, but the silence leaked around her like an unshakable shadow, numbing parts of the noise until her head started feeling like a patchy radio. There was no one around she could see beyond the familiar body curled up in the corner, and yet low voices seemed to scream in her ears as if they were in the same room. Every molecule of air (if that was the right word, Jia was hardly a Science genius) seemed to tremble; the sound-waves, the light of the moon, even the fog of her own breath seemed to gather and catch in her eyes.

Not to mention her body. She was empty, a hollowed out vessel made of thick marble skin and decay. Her chest moved from muscle memory only. She breathed because her mind reminded her, her lungs didn't burn in the slightest. But her chest. Her heart. She could feel nothing inside. Just this never-ending chasm of darkness. The blood had stomped pumping in the time she spent knocked out. The memories were coming back in flashes, faster than she could keep up with. Jia Littlesea was alive but dead, realist but pessimist, human but not.

Above all, she was terror. The root of her own paranoia.

What was wrong with her?

She turned to Finley again. Eyes clenched shut, veins popping in taut arms, he was rigid and cold but he moved like a live wire had burnt him up from the inside out. He was alive but for how long? Did this eerie state of in-between wait for him too? And the smell... something sickly sweet and teeth-rotting seemed to cling to his skin. Like a siren luring in pray. Jia was by his side in a flash. Her feet moved at lightning speed, and her heart would've been trapped in her throat if it could. Moving like that shouldn't be possible, and yet...

(Jia has so many what ifs circling her brain. She was tired already.)

"Fin," she murmured, breath hitching when the whispers from before suddenly stopped. "Fin, please wake up." He didn't move. Huffing, Jia smacked him around the face. He flinched, then froze like he was possessed straight out of a ghost documentary. "Don't make me kiss you, Sleeping Beauty. You know I'll do it."

As if by a miracle, Finley's eyes shot open. Jia laughed, did a double-take and screamed bloody murder.

"What?" Finley sat up, suddenly alert, only for his face to drop and mirror her own. He leaned closer, finger poking the unblemished skin of her face. "Now what the fuck?"

"Your eyes," she murmured, panicking as she smacked his hand away. "They're... red. Have you looked in the mirror yet?"

"Sorry, I've been too busy dying to check myself out," his voice took on a tinge of hysteria.

At the reminder, Jia's face dropped. Right. So they were dead now. Look, it might've been logical, but Jia wasn't as far gone as to jump to Death, the worst possible conclusion straight off the bat. She was here, wasn't she? That, she couldn't get past. This was no dream.

Until it was.

The burn climbed up her throat with a surprising amount of intensity. It was sudden and ruthless, and both Jia and Finley clutched their necks, blood red eyes now like pits of obisidian. Jia pushed out of the alleyway first, as fast as the wind and then some. The alleyway lead to some kind of run-down lot, abandoned except for several other red-eyed... things that prowled around the space. They paid Jia and Finley no attention, too focused on the root of their pain, the dreaded release of sacrificing one part of yourself for another.

At their feet were people. As real as Jia herself, made of soft-flesh now stained red.

The red was tantalising. In a blink, every single thought revolved around it. The burn took over her whole body. She'd do anything to satiate it.

Finley pushed past her then, his face absent of emotion. He didn't hesitate, and Jia would forever remember the way he seemed to lose the part of himself that made her want to be his friend. The innocence, the sometimes infuriating moral superiority. The bright-eyed, soft-hearted nature of a boy who cherished his life and sense of self. Gone just like that. Traded in for the irresistable.

And bit-by-bit, Jia could feel herself slipping too.

The red was everywhere, running rivers along the pavement, just one taste wouldn't hurt. If anything, it would take the pain away. She could be gone too, but free of agony. Isn't that what she wanted?

When Jia came to, she was crouched back in the alleyway drenched in blood. The burn was gone. Like waking up from a nightmare, she struggled to pick apart the fogginess in her head.

Now Jia's heart hurt, or whatever was left of it. She had killed someone. She knew in her bones she did. Maybe she had blocked it out or the act of killing as a Cold One, when the burn got to be too much, was simply unavoidable. It came and it went like the tide. Soon, the faces of her victims would be meaningless. Forgotten, pushed to the back of her mind.

Jia knew what she was now, without a doubt.

Cold One.

The red eyes, the lust for blood, the lack of a heartbeat in her chest. Alive but dead. Human but not. She was the monster her hometown had warned her about. The Quileutes told stories about her kind. Her kind. They were just metres away, in the abandoned lot, playing right into the expectations for a monster. And she had just been with them. Bleeding someone dry.

Jia wanted to cry. No tears came. She wanted to be sick, even if it meant the burn came back. She would live (ha) with it. She would...

As if summoned by memory alone, the burn crept up and Jia didn't think, couldn't, as she followed the sounds of new screams. She was both Jia and Monster, like Himari was Mum and Mother. Together in one body, warring against each other pointlessly.

This time when Jia attacked, she did it was precision. She remembered it, too, stored away alongside the thought of Finley doing the same thing. The way she crouched and paused, eyeing up each person before choosing a girl around her age. She deliberately committed every feature of her face to memory, for Jia knew it would haunt her later.

And when she struck, nothing seemed different. She bit down and the burn faded. But from the outside looking in, Jia and the girl were like echoes of themselves. Where the other Cold Ones fought over bodies like toddlers squabbling over their toys, Jia and her victim seemed cloaked by the shadows. If you looked close enough, with the vision of a Cold One, you could just make out the transparent shape of them blended into the background. Of Jia letting the body hit the floor before she returned to herself and fled again.

(It was a game she would keep playing and losing. Controlling her urges.)

"Interesting," the woman looking down on them commented.

She was too far away for the newborns to hear her but close enough that there was no denying the odd one out. The woman didn't care for her name before, but now. There was a girl that could disappear, invisible to the human eye and barely an outline to a vampire. She could be used. For once, Riley had made a smart choice. When he first returned with two newborns he changed himself, she was furious and refused to hear his reasoning. They had a routine. He would lure them in and she would change them. Riley always listened. That was what she liked.

"What's her name?" she asked him. "Where did you find her?"

"Who, my love?" Riley questioned cluelessly. He was too busy marvelling at a strand of her red hair curled around his finger to watch the massacre occuring below. Victoria rolled her eyes. Patience truly was a virtue.

"The invisible girl in the alley," she snapped, feeling nothing as Riley's face flooded with hurt. She had to force herself to sigh, to kiss an apology into his mouth. Like a fool, he smiled when she murmured into the column of his throat, "Where is she from?"

"Forks," he answered. Victoria's eyes gleamed. "They smelled like the Cullens. I thought that might be useful."

"Well, you were right."

The Cullens. The root of Victoria's plan. Had they known about this girl? Planned to use her against Victoria?

Oh, how it all came full circle.

In the grey area between realism and pessimism, hopeful and hopeless, Jia drowned in self-hate. She did not know that the real monster was watching her. That this was only a taste of what was to come.

She wanted out.

She wanted to turn back time and let the man who was not a man kill her.

(There were those what-ifs again. Maybe Jia Littlesea was just fucking unlucky.) 

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A/N: Not gonna lie, I hate how I ended this chapter but I needed to show a bit of Victoria and Riley for what's to come. Riley picked Jia and Finley because they came from the Cullens party. Legit, they would've lived had one thing been different lol. Now neither of them know Finley is Bella's cousin or that Jia is connected to the pack not the Cullens, and it never really is a priority beyond Victoria getting Riley to train the newborns. My idea is she thought they would be enough in numbers and in their wild nature to overpower the Cullens, but realising one had a gift made her think others (👀) could too. So, yeah. Hope this clears some things up and that you guys at least enjoyed this little introduction to Jia and her life before everything. Only a few chapters now before we see Jia and Quil!! Who's excited?