The Everetts.

She sits at the old desk in the library; paper awaiting the words the ink in her pen will scribble across them.

Her shoulder blade length dark brown hair is pulled back into a loose ponytail, revealing a pale face with doll-like features and large blue eyes.
She bites her lip in thought before she begins to write.

’My story can never be told.
So I write them on these pages; afterwards I will rip them to pieces and burn them until they are ash. When that is done, I will throw those ashes to the wind and river.

Truly, it is not only my story; it is my family’s story.
My father’s, my grandparents’, Elijah’s, Delilah’s, Alek’s, all of us, going back as far as any of us can remember.
I could not tell you how it started as I do not know the while story. From the little I remember of what my father told me, it started with the first of our family to come and live in the shadow of the mountain. All I know is because of certain events or circumstances (that will probably always be unknown to me), it was made sure that our family would never be like any other; that we are forever tied to this place.

Families tend to have traits that pass down through the ages: sometimes it’s a certain eye colour, a birthmark or a weird toe. Our trait, besides unwavering loyalty to each other-’

She stops for a moment and puts her pen down, brushing back a strand of brown hair with a hand tipped with nails bitten to the quick. She turns her blue eyes to one of the various pictures on the wall of Everetts past. Her eyes linger on the photograph of her parents and how happy they look. Her mother had been special from what she had been told, her mother had accepted the family for what it was: darkness and all. Elijah and Delilah always speak fondly of her and call her ‘Mother’, though she did not birth them.

The girl’s eyes move to the other photographs and occasional painting, stopping at the old daguerreotype portrait of her great grandfather and his sister. He looks around twelve, right around the time the Need would have come upon him, just like it had her, her siblings and her father before them.
While her face is smiling, his is neutral, but even she can see the deadness in his eyes. It's the same that she sees in her own when she looks in the mirror. Soon after the portrait was taken, the innocence in her great-aunt’s eyes would be gone as well; the light in her eyes dead.

Sighing, she picks up her pen and continues.

’Our trait, besides unwavering loyalty to each other is a certain duty that we must fulfil until our last breaths. We cannot run from it, no matter how hard we try. To do so is to put so many lives at risk… and put our own at risk as well.
So to keep them safe, we must do what is necessary. In the end, the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few and sacrifices must be made.

Alek once told me that sometimes, one must do monstrous things for the greater good.

And that is what I have come to live by. We must do our duty, no matter what the price.
We must satisfy the Need.’

She folds the papers in half, feeling their slight weight in her hand. While not heavy whatsoever, what is written on the pages weights more then a ten-ton boulder yet that weight has been lifted off her shoulders.

She'll get burn it in the fireplace at the cabin later that night while she waits for Alek and his “guest”.
After all, he does need someone to help him clean up.