Lacey's Story

                   It’s really quite odd.  No one truly knows the real me.  To the eye, I’m a 5’7” young woman with curly, sandy blond hair and vibrant green eyes that some have said they could get lost in.  I’m skinny and lithe, just like the teenagers of this society have always aspired to be.  To the ear, I’m intelligent and understanding, willing to help whenever I can.  However, what no one but my family and closest friends know, I belong to a race only the open-minded have ever heard of.
         I’m a werecat, and a half-blooded one at that.  This means that I can shift when I wish into any type of feline, including the extinct sabertooth, my felinethrope and my ‘half-shifted’ form, which involves just my sandy tail and ears, my claws and my fanged teeth.  I also have other abilities: I can speak, control others, read memories and examine people with my mind.  The blood that runs through my veins is literally blue, used for healing, poisoning and, through certain processes, for other things.  It also gets vampires drunk.
         Through the years, I’ve gained other abilities.  I was, for a short time, a werepyre, the end result when a werecat is turned into a vampire as well.  That didn’t work out too well.  My husband, Wayne Lawson (the one who turned me in the first place when I nearly died of a poison specifically attuned to my system by his father) found the cure and returned me to who I’d been before.  My other addition is still a part of me though, through an accident, Wayne bit me, thus turning me into a werewolf.  That, I can assure you, was one painful week.
         Here’s twice I’ve mentioned him, but you still don’t know just who my husband is.  His full name is Raymond Wayne Lawson, though he prefers to be called by his middle name.  I’ve known him since he was a baby, which is kind of odd considering that I was 600 years old when he was born.  That’s right, I’m immortal.  What’s sweet is, when he was two, he promised that he’d marry me.  He was too young to remember, but I do, and smile.  His life was not by far the best; his father was rather abusive, beating him, his mother and his older twin, Robert.  I knew both of the boys when they were in high school; I was 617 at the time though to them I was 17-year-old Rebekah Alice Teal.  I even dated Robert for four years before I had to disappear, ‘dying‘ in a plane crash in which I never even boarded the plane.  By the time I made it back to their hometown of Rayburn, Texas, Robert was dead from their father’s hands and Wayne, my secret crush, had vanished.
         To my surprise, I met him again when he returned with my vampiress best friend on his arm.  She’d turned him for companionship and also under my father, Brujah clan leader Jeanor Alexander Teal’s, orders.  And she has to listen to her sire (making her my ‘adopted’ sister too).  He’s infatuated with her, so who am I to break that up?  Not to mention that we discovered at Christmas that the impossible has just gone to prove common knowledge wrong.  She (a vampiress I must mention again) is pregnant with twins, HIS kids.  And, they’re engaged to be married.  *sigh* Sure I got to be the Matron-Of-Honor, but luck just doesn’t swing my way.  The only guy I’ve EVER liked in my 626 years of life and he’s marrying my best friend.  But, their marriage was no picnic.  First, their kids are kidnapped, then they get in a big fight and Maia leaves him, not to forget the fact that the girl Wayne accidentally got pregnant in high school didn’t kill herself and his son, Sean, is a hunter.  Then, Wayne is blamed with a massacre in a nearby Kindred club and exiled by my father.  I had to rescue him from death when the hunters who’d captured him beat him to the point that his system couldn’t heal.  I nearly died in the process, but it was my sacrifice for him.
         Further down the road, Sean is dead and Wayne has already taken a turn at being a movie star with my guidance.  He and Maia decide to try out college life at the University in California I was attending.  There, he and I wound up in an odd situation.  I wasn’t a virgin anymore after that and Wayne cheated on his wife.  Oops.  He and I try to put it behind us, but well, too late for me.  He becomes the father of another little girl, Grace Beth, to go with his twins: Mae LeeAnne and Raymond Wayne Jr.  When Grace is two, hunters strike again, burning their home and killing Maia.  Wayne was completely torn up after this, he’d already lost his wife so many times before and now she could never return.  I sought to lend him comfort and wound up in his arms.  It wasn’t some grand scheme of mine; I missed Maia as well, it just... happened.  For five years, I was content like I had never been before in my life.
         And then, wouldn’t you know it, Maia didn’t die.  She’s been alive and searching for us while we’ve been hiding in Wisconsin.  With her return, I tell Wayne that it’d be best to let her know what happened, so we figure out what story to best tell her.  We decide that it happened once, a week after her ‘funeral’ and no more after that.  However, it’s too late for us.  We’ve already grown attached to each other and can’t let it go.  It continues.  It does so until Grace is 17, 10 years of our SECRET, Wayne has been growing more and more distant from Maia and closer and closer to me.  Also, in that time, I told my parents the same story that Maia heard, only they weren’t so forgiving.  They disowned me, I cried, BIG TIME.  And Wayne told me he loved me for the first time.  Secretly, I felt the same, though I didn’t tell him so.  My beautiful Challenger, which has been through so much, got wrecked when a yellow Hummer ran me over because he wasn’t looking where he was going.  I broke my arm. 
         Anyway, I’m getting off topic.  Wayne and Maia get a divorce when Grace is 17.  He sticks around long enough to take his baby girl to her Junior Prom before skipping out of town one night and leaving me a note telling me that he’ll be back.
         6 years pass, Grace is in college, Mae, her hubby Travis Logan Whitlan (Logan) , their daughter, Colleen Elizabeth (Callie/ Caddie) and Ray (Raymond Jr.) have moved back to Texas and I have moved to California to be near Grace.  Maia also left years ago, going to New York and designing her own clothing line.  One day, in a grocery store, I meet, of all people, my wayward Wayne.  :D  He has become a trucker.  I invite him back to my house for a home-cooked meal and things progress back to where we’re both as happy as we haven’t been for years.  For a time, he’s still a trucker, coming to visit and stay with me when he can until his ancient rig finally breaks down.  Then he moves in permanently and takes up a job as a tattoo artist.
         I gotta admit, I loved those years, especially when he proposed shortly after.  I said yes.  My dream has finally come true.  We married with his kids’ blessings and settled into a blissful lifestyle after I reconcile with my parents, my new sister Tabitha Katherine and Maia.  I was completely happy.  Then, trouble strikes once again.  Wayne’s father, who we believed to be dead, has returned to get back at Wayne.  First he tries a mental attack (he’s a full-blooded werecat though younger than me) that I block, then he traps us in a small room (I’m a bit claustrophobic, like my feline cousins who HATE being put in carriers) pumping it full of an invisible toxin that nearly kills me.  My dear husband saves me by turning me into a vampire.  Finally, Eric removes my soul, trying to control me that way, but he doesn’t know that I am a werecat and therefore have two souls.  Well, Wayne ends up killing daddy dearest, no remorse there.  Order returns to my crazy life once again, with me becoming, in succession, a werewolf, a mother to Robert Eric Jr. (named after Wayne’s deceased brother and my only ex.) and later, Faithe Susanna.  True to theory, I’m thrilled!  Ageless ole me finally has youngins of my own.  And I’m catching up with Maia.
         The monotony is swiftly disrupted as the war between hunters and the Kindred moves out into the open.  Wayne stepped into place as the leader of the Brujah clan when my father abdicates to concentrate on affairs back in England.  I was so proud of him, though severe limits have been put on our living style.  We moved from our lovely home near the shore to a dreary compound where we’re safe.  From there, things got even worse.  I was captured on a reconnaissance mission and knocked out with a tranquilizer AFTER I had a listening device removed from my neck a week before.  When my ever-reliable Wayne came to rescue me...
         That’s it, I can no longer add anymore, my reason for living, my heaven, my love, and my Wayne is gone.  Forever.