Irene had always known she was different. Ever since she was little she had been treated differently. It hadn’t been a bad differently, just an odd differently. She wasn’t allowed to go outside when the sun was out, she wasn’t allowed to eat the food that her father ate, etc.. She’d never thought of it too much, though. Irene had always been a simple-minded soul. She would drink blood from these cute little packets when she got hungry, pick up her father’s fifty-pound weights with one hand as if it were a pencil when she got bored. The usual. However, when she saw these entities that looked a lot like her run past her house, Irene had run to her father.

“What are they? They look just like me!”

Irene’s father had knelt down, tucking a blonde strand of hair behind her ear and said, “You’ll know someday, Irene. Just not today, okay?”

Irene had simply accepted it. She trusted her father who took care of her most of the time as her mother was constantly out, only returning when the sun began to set and sometimes not even then. Her father shared similar, yet at the same time, different features from her. Irene’s father was a handsome man. Her eyes were her father’s, large and open, but instead of a warm chestnut brown, her’s were an electrifying blue. Her nose was her father’s, in its sharpness and the definition of it, but instead of the tanned skin that covered the man’s, Irene’s was a colorless pale white.

Irene’s hair was her mother’s as was along with almost everything else - light blonde locks and finely shaped ruby lips that brought out the porcelain white of her skin. She’d also received her mother’s slim stature. Her parents’ friends always spoke of how pretty Irene was. They’d talk about how she would become a beautiful young woman some day.

It wasn’t until she turned ten that she realized what she really was. Irene had been enrolled in preschool by then. She had been specifically told not to drink in front of the other children or pick up things that looked heavy like her father’s weights.

Irene had immediately become a source of the other children's attentions. They’d ogled at her as if she were some sort of alien, and some had approached her with cautious awe and asked if she were a fairy princess.

Even her teachers stared at her from time to time when they thought she wasn’t looking. Irene had grown up like that.

It was in middle school that one of the girls who harbored jealousy of her found one of her blood packets in her backpack and had thrown it on the ground. As expected, there had been mayhem.

After that, Irene had stopped drinking blood without her parents’ knowledge. She’d starved herself, and she knew she would die. It came to a week when instead of dying, she’d suddenly felt a searing pain in her body and dropped to the ground during the middle of the night. She’d convulsed, and then the burning feeling had faded away. Irene had walked to the mirror in her room to find someone that was her, but wasn’t her looking straight back at her.

Her hair had turned a light brown like her father’s, and her eyes had shifted from the electric blue she was so accustomed to seeing to the exact shade of russet of her father’s. It was her, but at the same time, it wasn’t.

When her parents had found out, there had been another uproar. Her mother, who so rarely showed emotion, had stared at Irene in disbelief, and her father had reached out to her and had taken her now warm hand in his own.

She was the first ever vampire hybrid.

“I think I just found my first love - ow!”

Irene rubs the back of her head, pouting at her best friend.

“You say that every time,” Wendy says, shaking her head and taking a book off one of the shelves and flipping through it.

“But look at her! She’s so pretty! She’s my ideal type, Wen!”

Irene cups her chin in her hand and sighs, watching the girl walking through the bookstore, browsing through the numerous novels on the shelves. Irene moves to stand up, but Wendy’s hand shoots out and grabs Irene by the wrist, yanking her back down.

“But I can get her!”

Wendy stares at her fixedly and says, “Yeah. I know. That’s exactly why you should stay right here and not move.”

“Wendy,” Irene whines, eyes flicking back and forth from the pretty girl to her best friend.

“Irene. No.”

Irene huffs in indignation and slumps down in her seat, crossing her arms and pouting like a little kid.

Wendy rolls her eyes at her and laughs. She can’t help but wonder how someone as pretty as Irene could possibly be so immature. Irene is pretty. Unbelievably so. But i