My Mysterious Father

I am different. I always knew that. I always knew my father was out there being mysterious too, some guy in a town with rain.

My name is Nicholas Finn Leo Jackson, named for lost brothers and an uncle she loved the loud way, because that is how my family does things. My mother was Judith Ray Jackson, and if you have never heard of her, you have not been paying attention. She was an original hybrid, one of the first vampires ever made, with a British accent, a gummy bear habit, a temper like weather, and a family so violent that history keeps mistaking them for plagues.

Her brothers dagger each other the way other families argue about dinner. Her mother came back from the dead with an agenda. The enemies who chased her across centuries could fill a cemetery apiece. And through all of it, she dragged one vow behind her like a blade: always and forever.

Then she rolled into a rainy little town called Forks and met the politest monsters in America, a coven of golden-eyed vampires who drink animal blood. She called it disgusting. She stayed anyway. She fell for the empath with the soldier's posture and the tiny seer who hugs first and asks questions never, and for the first time in centuries, my mother stopped running.

She also had us. Twins, born in a storm we raised ourselves, with powers nobody could explain and a last name that draws hunters like a porch light draws moths. She named us for the brothers she lost, kissed our heads, and made her favorite brother promise that if anything ever happened to her, everything we are would be his to protect.

And through all of it, one subject was forbidden. Our father. Ask about him and she would hand you a story instead of an answer. He was a soldier. He was a witch. He was nobody. Stop asking.

Now she is gone, keeping the one promise she was never any good at, the one where she comes home. My twin, my cousins, and I grew up on legends, surrounded by uncles who would burn the world down for us and still could not fill the hole where our father goes.

But she left a trail for anyone stubborn enough to follow it. A journal in her handwriting. A cottage with a key shaped like a little sun. A meadow that blooms in the rain because she asked it to. And letters. Years of letters, kept by a man we were never allowed to wonder about.

I went looking anyway.

This is the story of how my family stopped being hunted, how my cousin and I survived the thing that hollows children out and wears them, and how I learned that my mysterious father was never a mystery at all. My mother did not hide a nothing. She hid the one sure thing she ever found. A man with quiet hands who kept every word she ever sent him, and left the light on for kids he had never met.

Always and forever. Come meet my family.