EMMA

ONCE UPON A TIME . . .

That is the way my story must begin, because mine is a strange and magical story. Once upon a time, I fell in love. Yes, it begins there, with love, but not a simple, ordinary love, because once upon a time, my beloved revealed a secret to me. He revealed he was a vampire.

And that only made me love him more. I loved him for the compassion and knowledge his hundreds of years of walking the earth had given him. And he loved me for exactly who I was, although he had seen many women more beautiful, more gifted, more everything in all those years.

Soon I had a secret to tell him—I was carrying his child. Again, a secret made our love grow deeper. We decided we would begin our happily ever after. We would marry, and our child would bring our two worlds together. Our child wouldn’t be human. Our child wouldn’t be vampire. She—for some reason, we both felt our baby was a girl—would be something new, something special. Throughout history, once in a great while, such children had been born, but none had survived. We were sure ours would be different, because our love was so strong.

We had many dreams for our little girl, my beloved Sam and I. We decided we would call her Shay, because the name means “a gift” and that’s what she would be to us. We hoped she would be a gift to all humans and all vampires as well, a gift that would unite them, that would take them the first step toward living in peace.

Sam gave me a beautiful necklace engraved with two birds flying through a sky that held a sun and a moon both. He said it had belonged to the woman who was his mother in everything but birth. He said that one day we would give the necklace as a gift to our gift, our Shay, and that it would symbolize the two worlds that had been brought together in her. Day and night. Human and vampire.

In that moment, I thought nothing could be more perfect than our love.

And then he abandoned me. I never saw Sam again.

When we think about fairy tales, we think about happily ever afters, forgetting the darkness that stories beginning with “once upon a time” so often contain.

I tried to protect Shay from that darkness. But there was no way to shield her from the truth: Life is not a fairy tale.