[Rewritten] The Family Secret - Voices of Beasts (Book 1)

Chapter 2

It can take less than a minute for your whole life to change.

A job offer

A marriage proposal

A pregnancy

The loss of a loved one

All of them are sudden and surprising, but only one is completely devastating.

When I was four, my Mom and my Dad were married, he had just gotten the job offer of a lifetime, and he and my grandpa, Mom’s dad, were getting ready to invest in a workshop so they could build cars together on the weekends. It was grandpa's retirement dream, and everything was so close to becoming perfect.

Until that semi hit my grandpa’s truck with him and my Dad inside.

My mom and grandma were both devastated. They’ve both told me that if they hadn’t had me they wouldn’t have been able to handle the grief.

After two years, Mom finally got out of her own head and tried to start writing again to relieve the pain. When her typewriter ended up clicking it’s last clicks on her second page, she went to go get it fixed, and she found out that she would have to get a computer.

Grandma was so overly against it after all that she had heard about predators online, but when she found out Mom could more easily get her stories published, she relaxed a little. But when Mom started talking to a guy online, Grandma’s suspicion went into overdrive.

That is until she met the guy.

His name was Horatio,and when she saw his eyes light up when he talked about Mom,grandma started being more open about babysitting me while they dated.

It wasn’t too much longer before he started living with Mom and I, and as time went on, I ended up with three younger siblings.

I didn’t think anything of my mom’s extended hospital stays with each kid, I didn’t know any better.

After a long time of me being treated like his own, I started calling him Pop. We were a mostly happy family, and I never knew anything was different about the people I called family. That is until the day I came out of the closet as a trans man…

“Mom, Pop, I gotta tell you something.” The two of them turned to look at me with all the love and concern two parents could give when their 22 year old daughter comes to them in baggy jeans, a too big tee shirt, and a baseball cap.

“What’s going on,  sweetheart?” Mom asked, her long brunette hair tied up behind  her and her glasses framing her blue eyes. A set that were identical to mine in both shape and color, I looked like a ginger, taller version of her, and with that in the back of my mind, I blurted it all out.

“I’m not happy as i am in my body, I think I'm a boy!” I exclaimed, my whole face flushing. They looked at me in silence for a long minute, side glanced at one another, and smiled.

“Well, I think before we start navigating how to best get you on the right path after holding that in for so long, I think it’s time your mother and I tell you about our family's little secret.”

That day I found out that Pop was a vampire, he had turned Mom after she had all three kids; Dianne, Francis, and Izaak, and that they weren’t the only ones.

Pop’s best friends, my Uncles Maxus and Ivan, Ivan’s wife, Quinn, and Maxus’ daughter, my best friend Elise’s fiance Jensen, were all vampires, and Elise herself was in training to  become one on her honeymoon. I had been completely surrounded for years and had no idea. I was sitting on the roof of the porch, smoking a stogie when I heard my window open and Elise came out to sit with me.

Elise and I were raised like cousins do, seeing one another every weekend, having sleepovers, the whole nine yards. She had known I was questioning who I am since we were 20, and she had assured me time and time again that my parents were still going to love me no matter what happened. She, of course, was right, and even as her small mousy form crawled over to sit beside me, she didn’t exude an ‘i told you so’ aura, she put her hand on mine and just looked out at our mountain view. She had her ginger hair tied up in two braids and her glasses sat covering her light grey eyes. We sat in silence until I smoked through my first, sat for a few minutes, and lit another one.

“So, they finally told you the truth?”

“Yeah. I don’t think they were planning to until it got to the point that either I was older and started getting suspicious or they were all going to fake their own deaths and dip.” I sighed.

“I think they were waiting for you to have some kind of big news before they dropped that big a bombshell on you, honestly.” She replied, looking over at me. I took another drag and sighed.

“Maybe you’re right, they were trying to keep it from me until it felt right, and a big announcement felt right.”

“That, and now they've told you Dad will have to go to the head of it all and inform them you know for their records.”

“The head of it all? Oh, shit its not some asshole brigade like the Volturi in Twilight is it?”

“Oh, no no no...” She began, pausing for a second and chewing her lip, “Dad’s technically the big boss for the whole 13 colonies and then some. These three are...how do I put this...much higher? The guy Dad has to report to is a suuuuper powerful demon. He wants to meet me after Jensen and I get married.”

“So After he’s already changed you? What, can humans not be in his presence?” I asked sarcastically. She sighed, and then told me the rest of the story of how vampires came to be.

“it’s a lot more complicated than the movies make it out to be so it seems like some whimsical fairy tale. It’s actually super difficult, and the process is more heavily monitored than the internet itself.” She giggled, adjusting her jacket to button it up. It was long, and looked like a trench coat on her, in a hunter green. Had to be something of Jensen's, considering the rest of her outfit consisted of black jeans, a band tee shirt, and black combat boots. Normally I wore similar, but now that I was out and proud, I’d eventually change my wardrobe, and I knew Elise would help me every step of the way.

We sat in silence that night for a while longer until my Mom called us in for dinner, and after that my life started fast changing…