NaNoWriMo Character Exercise: Paul Baxter

I feel in love with Sarah the moment I saw her.

For a fourteen year-old kid from a shitty home who was falling fast into the Dark she was like an angel coming to save me. She treated me like a second little brother from the start and I loved it. I wanted to be a part of their family so badly...but shit happens.

What I know now is a hell of a lot different than what I knew then. Now I know Dev and Sarah are my family. Back then...I still wasn't ready to turn my back on my parents even if my mother was a falling-down drunk and my father was angry at everything for no reason. So when he told me to stop hanging around that do-good bitch (meaning Sarah and Dev's mom), I did it. I cut ties with Sarah too, completely ignoring her because I didn't want him to notice her. Devin he didn't care about so I kept right on being friends with him and he never asked what was going on even though I know it had to bother him.

Sarah...it was agony ignoring her. That's part of the reason why I kept getting further and further lost in the Dark; because I no longer had her to help me out of it. And for some reason she just let it slide, like she knew exactly why I was doing what I did.

After I tried to kill Dev and left my so-called "friends" it was like nothing had happened in the time between when I started ignoring Sarah. That first morning after I slept on their couch, she woke me with the same smile that had been haunting me for almost five years and got me up for breakfast. It was eerily reminiscent of the first (and only) time before that I'd spent the night at their house. And it was peaceful. I spent that entire time just sitting at the kitchen table watching her cook, not even noticing that Dev or their parents had come in. My eyes never strayed from her and all I wanted to do was to just stay near her and bask in her calming presence.

So, yeah, trying to kill my best friend opened my eyes. And they all made me feel really welcome and at home somewhere for the first time in my life.

It was Sarah that made me realize what a monster I'd really become, though.

I'd be nothing without her.

NaNoWriMo Character Exercise: Devin Ridgefield

I think the sense of a kind of kindred spirit is what first drew me to Paul. Or more him to me as he jumped in to defend me against a pair of bullies at the start of seventh grade. With Sarah moved on to the high school, I'd been the prime target for the bullies she'd once driven off and who I refused to touch. Back then I was still too scared of the need to hunt that would sometimes well up within me, to chase down something smaller and weaker than me...and I knew all too well that I could turn the tables on the bullies who only pretended to be strong.

Paul rose to my defense though. He was thirteen, just barely under the mark that would have put him a grade ahead of me, and he wasn't afraid of the bullies. And where Sarah was my safe place to run to when things got too much, he helped me stand tall and try to face what was coming. Sure, I didn't always succeed (shit, I failed more than I like to recall) but he kept me getting up. He's the one that taught me how to brawl too and got me my first drink two years later (don't tell Sarah about that one, she'd kill us both for being such fools). I owe him...I owe him a lot more than I can ever pay back, though he'd tell you he owes me the same.

Really I'm not sure when Paul found his magic but by the time we met he was descending. He wasn't going down fast (more of a casual saunter downwards) but he was going down. There wasn't anything I could do to stop it either except just sit back, be the best friend I could, and hope (not pray, I'll leave that to Sah) he came back. And he did, holy shit, he clawed his way back out of that darkness like a man who'd been drowning but it took a real kick in the pants.

I mean, he did try to kill me.

Paul, my best friend, tried to kill me at eighteen for spell components. It took me punching him in the face and giving him a black eye I'm still proud of to get his head right but he saw what he'd been doing. And what he'd done inadvertently to his then girlfriend Melinda who'd been through things I didn't even want to imagine and come out scared, angry, and power-hungry. Whatever he'd descended into, he dragged her right down with him and when he came up for air, she stayed at the bottom of the ocean. So he left, just like that, picked up from the condemned building where they and a few others of their group lived and started camping out in our living room on the couch. Maybe it was wrong to run...but I can't say I blame him.

Mom didn't take long to practically adopt him as a second son and I think that helped him. Paul never talks much about what his home life was before he dropped out of school and ran away but I've seen enough to know his parents couldn't touch the boots of the lowest-of-the-low if they were standing on their tip-toes (and that's on a good day). Living with us reintroduced him to Sarah, too, and to finally admit he'd been in love with her since he was fourteen - which was just one of the things he'd been running from at the time. And when Mom and Dad died, he was there to help both of us through it just like we were there for him.

I feel...bad though. The one thing I'm most grateful for about Paul?

He's walked the same dark paths as me.

NaNoWriMo Character Exercise: Sarah Ridgefield

I remember clearly the night Mom brought Devin home. He was this tiny scruffy little thing that just clung to her neck like she was the last safe place on Earth, eyes wide in a mix of awe, fear, and caution. That impression of him, all of five years old, is one of the clearest memories from my childhood.

Only eight and I can remember every second of that night like it was yesterday.

It never surprised Dad what she did; Mom did things like that. She gave a homeless man fifty dollars on one hand and brought a teenage girl surviving only by prostitution into the house for a simple bowl of soup. Mom was...amazing is the only word I can find to accurately describe her. She had a heart bigger than the rest of her and when she found Devin abandoned on the street she couldn't help but bring him home. Of course, neither of us found out until later that he wasn't officially a member of the family until he was nine but we had the papers to prove it so the how didn't matter.

Mom fought tooth and nail for her family. The only problem was she saw everyone as extended family. That's what got her and Dad killed in the end; she insisted they pick up this hitchhiker and, well...you can only get so lucky with hitchhikers before you find one that's not looking for just a ride and maybe a meal.

That was later though. Growing up...things were good. Happy. We became a family fast and I took to the role of big sister like a duck to water. And, thinking back on it, we both knew there was something off about him even back then. Devin was an unnaturally quiet little boy (and he's still a very quiet man in general) and he always was watching when we were in public, his eyes darting everywhere as if he needed to see everything. Even when he was five and refused to go anywhere without his hand in mine, he was watching, keeping an eye out for me same as I was keeping an eye out for him.

I remember the first time I knew something was really really wrong was three years later when he was eight and I was eleven. He came creeping into my room that night and climbed in with me, not answering me with anything but a whimper and burrowing into my arms. In the end all I could do was curl myself around him and go to sleep wondering what was wrong with my baby brother and how I could make it better. I didn't know until much later that that was the first night he'd really felt the Wild, felt the need to hunt, to kill, and he'd sought comfort and solid ground in the only way he knew. And then the whole thing blew up in our faces with one horny teenager.

Oh, I beat the ever-loving shit out of Aiden Cormac a month after what he tried to do. Not because he tried to rape me, no, I had gotten around that lightning fast. No, I beat him senseless with a baseball bat because of what he did to Devin. He hurt my baby brother and I showed that little snot that I am damn well my mother's daughter.

I never told Devin I was afraid of him that first time he changed. Oh, I'm sure he smelt it with that nose of his but I never let it show on my face that I was terrified. I couldn't, not when I was his big sister or when I saw just how terrified he was, scared of me and our parents rejecting him. We never told Mom and Dad...but I hold out to this day that they'd have understood even if Devin never agreed. It took a lot of practice to figure out how to best hide it from them as well as how to control his hunting urges and both ended up being our start in hunting. At nineteen and sixteen we were the monster hunters of our block, spreading fear amongst the denizens of the dark and letting ignorant housewives sleep safely.

We were such innocent fools then.