The Rise of Lydia Rowe ↠ Jasper Hale (ON HOLD)

[2.13] the story of juliette de ricart

LYDIA CONTINUED TRYING TO GAIN CONTROL of her powers, and she continued to fail. She could control fire without a problem—she'd even learned to pull it toward her and move it throughout the air. But no matter how long and hard Lydia trained with her uncle, she couldn't make a flame come to life on her own. 

Adam had resorted to scouring the journals he'd gotten from Juliette, their ancestor. Lydia found him at the kitchen table when she came home from school one afternoon, glaring at the handwriting on the page in front of him. 

Lydia came up behind him, setting her backpack down and looking curiously at the journals. "Is that French?" Lydia asked. 

Adam nodded, not looking up from the journals. "Juliette was born in France, so most of her early journals are in French," he explained. "When a large portion of her descendants moved to North America in the late eighteenth century, she switched to English. She didn't bother to translate her earlier journals, though, so I had to learn the language." 

Lydia remembered thinking it was strange that she, Adam, and Meili Zhu belonged to the same bloodline as Juliette and Vincent Myers, who both had European roots, but when Adam explained that even the most distant relatives in their bloodline could have the phoenix gene, she understood a little better. They weren't direct descendants of Juliette, seeing as phoenixes themselves couldn't reproduce, so she supposed it made sense that their bloodline could be spread all around the world. Adam presumed that a distant relative of Juliette's had immigrated to China centuries ago and integrated into the Zhu lineage, which led to Adam, Meili, and Lydia. It was complicated, so Lydia tried not to think about it often, lest she get a headache.

"Guess it's a good thing I took AP French last year," Lydia muttered, taking one of the journals in a stack next to Adam. She opened it to the first page, seeing the name Juliette de Ricart written in elegant handwriting. Underneath it she'd written 1680-1695. "What all did she write about?" 

"She wrote down anything she found out about our kind," Adam told her. "Our abilities, our weaknesses, our history. She documented the war between our kind and the Volturi coven in one of her journals—I can't remember which one, but I remember the war began in 1628." 

Lydia set the journal down, reaching for another one. "The Volturi?" Lydia asked as she looked at the dates on the journal she'd just picked up. 1709-1721. She recognized the name vaguely—Carlisle had mentioned something about them, though she couldn't remember what he'd actually said.

"They're pretty much the leaders of the vampire world. They make the laws vampires have to abide by and ensure they're followed," Adam said. "Juliette despises them." 

"Because of the war?" Lydia guessed.

"Not just the war," he said quietly, closing the journal in front of him and setting it aside. "They took away the most precious thing she had—her mate." 

Lydia sat down. "She had a mate?" 

Adam nodded. "Phoenixes are like vampires when it comes to love. Both species typically fall in love once and stay in love. Juliette said when our kind meet the person we're destined to love forever, a part of us just... knows. And she met hers in 1694. Bridget Shaw." 

"Her soulmate was a woman?" Lydia asked. "That couldn't have been easy."

"They had to be careful, but they made it work," Adam said. "Fate was kind to Juliette, at least in the beginning. See, Bridget was a vampire—had been for a few decades, which meant—" 

"Juliette wouldn't have to lose her," Lydia realized. 

A look of sadness came over Adam's face. "So they thought," he murmured. "They visited Italy in 1719, and they caught the attention of the Volturi coven. The war between phoenixes had been over for nearly a century at that point, and the coven believed they'd exterminated all of the phoenixes and carriers in existence, so they had no reason to believe Juliette was anything other than human. And that was a problem."