Author Archive: Ryana Hunter

#4 Aiden

Aiden, wife, mother of three…vampire.

She struggles to maintain the life and people she has lost due to her dramatic change. She wants to protect her family but also puts them in danger because of her unwillingness to let go of them.

In the beginning of the story Aiden is lost, trying to remember what happened the night of her transformation as well as trying to figure out a way to be near her family without them knowing. Every time she tries to remember that night, terrible pain shoots through her mind almost causing her to black out. Later she discovers the werewolf Zev, whom she hit her car with that night knows some of the details of what happened but because she is a vampire he is unwilling to tell her anything. Realizing she cannot pursue this until she can get past the pain, she instead focuses on watching her family.

Initially she is very careful and does not get close to the house but as time goes on and the dogs and other creatures start to accept her presence she moves closer and closer until ultimately she enters the house as often as she can. Here she finds peace and torment all at once, it rips at her soul but also mends it – it is like a drug she cannot quit.

Aiden met her husband when they were children; eventually leading them to love until Marcus moved away in high school, leaving Aiden heartbroken. Several years later Marcus returned much wiser than he should have been for his years. Despite all that had taken place in their time apart their feelings had never changed and they were quickly married.

Aiden watches painfully as her family suffers without her feeling powerless against what is unfolding in front of her eyes. Torn with keeping them ignorant and safe and stepping in to save them from themselves Aiden plans how she might help them without becoming any wiser.

#3 Marcus

Aiden’s husband and father to Morgan, Love and Ryan. He is attempting to hold his family together after the loss of his wife. Marcus desperately wants his wife back and struggles to let her go knowing it is what he must do for the children so that they can have closure but Aiden’s death has been more than Marcus is really able to handle. He in general is a strong man both physically and mentally but the emotional aspect of her death has devastated him almost to the point of not being able to function. If it were not for his children he would have all but given up by now. In the back of his mind he knows his ability to cope with this is very weak and the way he has chosen to cope (drinking) is Not good but he feels he has no choice.

Marcus has lived most of his adult life in complete denial of his heritage and background. He is not ashamed of what he is and certainly not who he is now, but he does not want that part of himself anywhere near his children. Aiden could always accept and understand his strange behavior and did not probe too much to find out the secret she knew that he hid from her. She accepted him as he was and always looked to their future, not his past. He could never put into words how much this meant to him, to think of those memories brought so much pain he could hardly bear to remember that time in his life without her.

Marcus knows that Morgan is very sensitive and can “see” things others do not, this causes him concern to his core knowing where her abilities come from and it scares him what might happen to her in the future. When she was very young with Aiden’s help they guided her to close doors in her mind to help protect her from things that may want to harm her – simply by closing part of herself off. He and Aiden had both agreed this was best to protect their daughter since they were not completely educated in what might try to harm her. Marcus quietly did his own research even though it stirred up the painful memories of his past just to be safe in case things did not go as they had hoped. Aiden being Aiden had an entire locked file cabinet full of information she had found on various things that might try to harm their special daughter.

Marcus was relieved as the years passed and Love seemed to be a perfectly normal little girl hoping his curse would indeed skip a generation and she would lead a normal life. At the moment he is missing the signs that things are amiss due to his grief, his drinking and her acting out in morbid ways. Often he rocks Ryan to sleep thinking of Aiden. Sometimes he can even still smell her in Ryan’s room and feels she is near.

He continues to struggle with his duality hearing the voice inside, angry with his recent choices and urging, forever urging him to look for his dead wife.

#2 Love

Morgan’s little sister – an adorable lively bundle of energy with extreme anger and violence just below the surface. To anyone not paying attention she seems to be a fairly normal 10 ½ year old girl with her love of unicorns and rainbows. However if someone spent some time with her they would realize how mature she can be at times and recognize her unusual grasp of complicated matters with surprise.

Love has a lot of difficulty, especially after her mother’s death, controlling her rage. Her father assumes this is directly linked to her mother’s death but that is only half of the issue. Love herself has no idea what secretly hides in her genetics making her far more dangerous and powerful than any of her peers. She only knows that when she gets angry she is very fast and strong and fights against the urge to tear a chunk of flesh from her enemy at the time. Often she feels the urge to be outside running and playing in the nearby forest, feeling most at home there and now that her mother is gone she has to remind herself to go home to her family.

Love feels extremely sad that her mother is gone and misses her everyday and often falls asleep crying wishing she would come back to life and be with her again. She loves her father but was especially close to her mother and feels lost without her, almost like a twin would feel if separated from the other. Love truly believes that no one except her mother understood and accepted her completely, even knowing her dark tendencies.

Love adores her sister and wants so much to be more like her even though a part of her understands this could never happen. Morgan is a healer and caretaker – Love is a fighter. The strength of her own will sometimes scares even her and without her mother to help guide her she is not sure what will happen to her now. Love finds that she thinks about things like that at night after her father has tucked her in and left the room, she sometimes wonders if he stayed longer maybe she would not think about things like that. She knows it is hard for her father to look at her now because she and her mother looked so much alike and her face reminds him. Because of this she tries to distance herself from her father not waiting to cause him more pain but this only makes her feel more alone.

Sometimes she gets mad at her little brother Ryan because she blames him for her mother’s death, even though the two are not related. In her mind her mother would not have been working late that night if it wasn’t for him and her mother not wanting him in daycare. The only reason Love has not acted out against him is because she fears what trouble she would get into and because she does not want to upset her dad or Morgan.

In an effort to keep Love out of trouble, her father placed her in anger management with the guidance counselor. Love learned very quickly what she should or should not say and is teaching herself how to internalize her feelings so that they will not cause more problems, not understanding what that will eventually do to her. Recently she has begun to act out more in macabre ways then anger, drawing more concern from Morgan and her father, though not realizing it yet.

#1 Morgan

A young gifted teen trying to muddle through her new life without her mother and deal with the many spirits that demand her attention. A gifted artist she tries to work through her problems and pain with her many mediums of art.

In the beginning of the story she is simply trying to deal with the loss of her mother and watching her family slowly fall apart in front of her. Because of her age, 15, she has a better understanding of what is happening around her and with less apprehension than an adult she quietly solves the mystery of what her mother has become before she tells her.

Watching her father fall into despair is especially difficult for Morgan because she always looked up to him and wanted in so many ways to be like him. After her mother died Morgan realized her father could not raise her baby brother and younger sister alone so on top of her other responsibilities she began caring for her younger sister and brother more like a mother. She feels close to her mother every time she holds her brother remembering the way her mother smiled at her while holding Ryan shortly before she died.

Over the years Morgan has learned how to shut out the spirits when she does not want to deal with them but it is difficult for her gentle soul to refuse them, feeling their pain when they communicate with her. However over the years she has also dealt with angry, hateful spirits who only seem to want to hurt anything around them that notices them. Due to this it has strengthened her tender spirit – putting a steel rod inside of her that can bend and bend but not be broken. The fear can still effect her but not over take her and cause her to freeze unable to defend herself. Since defense is the best offense in her mind most of her abilities lie there. At this point Morgan is not aware what she is capable of or how she came to have her abilities at all, only that when she wants the spirits away from her she can force it if she has to. Other than her family the only friend that knows about her secret is her best friend Brielle that she has known since fist grade.

Like many teens she wishes for a true love that she reads about in novels or sees in moves but is grounded enough to know that kind of love is rare and never anticipates that it would happen to her. She enjoys having boys as friends and easily feels a connection with them but rarely find herself interested in one as more than a friend. Morgan sometimes feels like she already has a boyfriend because of her close friend Melissa’s constant boy trouble that somehow she inevitably ends up involved in.

Morgan struggles to maintain the balance between delving into the mysteries of the supernatural, hanging out with friends, working on her art, and keeping up her grades during her 10th grade year.