Free First Bitten by Samantha Towle

on me.
    I’m pretty sure a tumbleweed blows through the room.
    I look at Nathan agog, but he doesn’t meet my stare. I flick my widened eyes to Sol. He meets them and smiles in that awkward way people do when they really don’t know what else to do.
    Okay, so I don’t really know what I was expecting, but it wasn’t that.
    “ Shape … shifters, as in ... shape-shifters,” I finally say.
    “ Is there any other type?” Nathan bites.
    I turn, surprised, and see Jack give him a look. Nathan gets out of his seat, taking his glass with him and puts it with a clatter into the sink.
    “ So, erm ... what do you ... shift into?” I ask Sol in a quiet voice.
    “ We can change into anything we want,” Sol answers, “but only animals. We can’t change into other human beings.”
    “ Oh,” I say.
    Silence reigns for a moment. Nathan sits back down at the table beside me. He doesn’t look happy.
    I decide to turn the subject away from them and onto myself, even though I am curious. I shift in my seat, turning to look at Nathan. “Nathan, you said earlier that when I was been bitten by the Vârcolac it should have killed me, not changed me. So how did I survive?”
    I’m met with shrug. Nathan turns his head to look in my direction. His hair falls in front of his eyes. He brushes it away. “Maybe there’s something different about you. Maybe you’re special,” he says. He doesn’t sound like he thinks I’m special. “Or maybe over the years, as women have evolved and your bodies have somehow become stronger, you’ve become able to cope with the change. They’ve probably just never discovered this fact because Vârcolacs are so accustomed to you dying, they stopped trying to turn you. To them you were just dinner and obviously no one’s been stupid enough to try and save a woman from them, well apart from me, that is, and when I did, well then obviously I changed everything.” I see the regret in his eyes.
    I’m fast coming to the conclusion that Nathan doesn’t really like me and that saving me is probably what he would class as one of his bigger mistakes in life.
    It’s fine. Really.
    I rub my hand over my face. “From what you said earlier, I’m to take it that it’s not a good thing I survived and became one of them?”
    Nathan taps his long fingers against the table top. “No. If the Originals find out you exist–”
    “ Originals?”
    “ The first Vârcolacs,” Jacks inputs. “There’s two of them, Matthias and Isaiah. They’re twins.”
    “ So where did they come from?” I’m starting to get so anxious that I’m fidgeting with thin air. “What I mean is, if they’re the first, then how did they become that way?”
    Jack stubs his half-smoked cigar out and lays the remainder on the edge of the ashtray. He leans forward, resting his elbows on the table. “There’s a lot of myth surrounding them but the legend as we know is that in the early part of the 1600s there was a cross-breed between Demetrius, the son from the original head vampire family, and a werewolf, Grace. She was the daughter of an important pack leader. That’s how Matthias and Isaiah were created. Demetrius and Grace were in love and she got pregnant. It was a pretty damn stupid and dangerous thing for them to do. Vampires and werewolves don’t mix at all. They don’t get along.”
    “ That’s putting it mildly,” Sol chuckles. “They hate one another,” he adds, looking at me.
    “ Cross-breeding for them is deemed sacrilegious,” Jack says.
    “ But I thought vampires are supposed to be dead? How could she get pregnant if he was ... dead?” My voice suddenly sounds really small and tinny.
    “ The first family can procreate,” Nathan tells me, “but not ‘made’ vampires. They are ‘dead’. What happened with Demetrius and Grace should never have happened, but it did. They hid their relationship and her pregnancy from their families. Only Grace’s sister, Genevieve, knew. Grace had the twins in