Shards of My Past (Original Version)

*Nine*

Wallace sat at her desk, leaning back in her chair. Looking at me because I had yet to tell her what I was doing in her office

Finally, I blurted, "Why am I being hunted?" before I could question myself.

"It's a long story," she said calmly.

"You seem to have forgotten we're vampires. We have all the time in the world."

"I see. You don't remember much from your past do you?"

"How far into the past? Sixteen years? Twenty? Or just three?" I tacked on, unable to stop myself.

"More than twenty. No, more like eighty to one hundred."

"I remember a lot of running. And torture. But it's fuzzy. It's hard to understand it all now."

"When you were first placed in this program, you had been living with your family. They were humans and you were not. But they didn't know how dangerous you would be. Anyhow, this was in a small country where disease was the main killer. It took the entire village you lived in. But there was one survivor and a doctor couldn't fathom how you had survived something that had no cure.

"He chased you, you ran, until he caught you. He tried to find out what made you immune. Tried to see what else you were immune to, which, as you know is everything. He couldn't figure out what you were. That is, until you freed yourself from your restraints and attacked him. You killed him and his men devoted their lives to finding you and making cures from your blood.

"And just to be clear, these men are mere humans, so they had sons and daughters and they devoted their lives to hunting you as well."

"Why didn't you tell me?" I asked when she paused.

"You knew everything. But, somehow, you stopped remembering. It was like you were given a potion to make you forget. But then, we started to understand. When you were with the Kingsleys, you refused to talk about it and you were afraid you would scare Penelope."

"What do you mean?" I was confused.

"You suppressed the memories to make your life seem more normal. I honestly don't know how you did it. But, since you're finally asking, perhaps it's time to remember, Taelynn."

"What—How do I do that?" I asked.

"It's hard to say what will work best, but what I can tell you is to make your mind open to remembering. There's a reason you wanted to forget. What you went through was awful, so if you really want to remember, you will."

***

When I returned home, I went straight to my room. I closed the door and sat at my desk to look through sixteen years of writing and drawings from my time with April, Marcus, and Nell.

I started at the beginning, a year before Nell was even born. It was crazy to think when she was born I looked seventeen and when I'd left, she was fifteen and I still looked seventeen.

I couldn't find anything about my running away from anybody or being tortured and tested. Nothing. I only wrote about my host parents, the baby that grew up while I was there, and short stories I made up.

I read a word that caught my eye: disease.

It was in a short story that I'd written when Nell was four. Upon a few page flips, I discovered it hadn't even been finished.

I found all of the stories I'd written and found none of them had been finished.

And then I realized something else: they were about my life.

I had started to write about the things that had happened to me, but stopped because I was trying to forget. I made myself forget and eventually I stopped trying to write my stories.

But everything Wallace told me was there. The village being killed by a disease that couldn't touch me; me being caught by the doctor that I'd killed; the generations of families chasing me; I'd even started a few sentences about forgetting so I could be normal.

And, then, the dam I'd built in my memories cracked and I began to remember.