Forget Me Not | ✓

BONUS CHAPTER: The One They Call Mason

IT WAS COMING. 

Whispers of impending catastrophes traveled on the gusting winds of the approaching storm, inspiring a sense of unfounded dread among the citizens of Forks, Washington. A massive storm was set to approach the quaint town and while the residents were all too prepared in storm-watching, seeing as they saw rain and storms most of the year, they were not prepared for this one. It was a storm brewing with perpetual doom, with bloody demise, with the cursed utterances of ghosts whistling in the wind. It was a storm that was not of the human world. It would tear down everything in its path. It would bring a long-awaited reckoning -- a reckoning which Adele Cullen began ten years ago when she uttered the most dangerous word to ever escape her lips to Aro Volturi across the would-be battlefield. It was a single which meant everything in the world to her and yet inspired fear within her like no other could; it was, after all, the name she bestowed upon her biggest, darkest secret.

Mason.

It was coming.

On that fateful day, the skies screamed and the clouds cried. They wreaked flooding havoc on the small town of Forks, Washington, and its woodsy outskirts where the immortal Cullen coven still resided. Adele Cullen could feel that it was a warning deep within her bones; every crash of thunder and flash of lightning from the catastrophic storm sent a chill throughout her entire body.

He was coming.

The story of Adele Cullen is a long and tumultuous one. The darker parts were woven with dark secrets, crippling loss, violent bloodshed, and lingering fear of the ever eternal future. She had lost her mother at an extremely young age which paved the road for hundreds of years of heartbreak and loss. She lost the very first love of her life, Jace Rosewood, to a violent end and that within itself threatened to break her, but still, she did not. She endured because, as it so happened, she still had something to live for -- something which started the chain of events that led to Jace's slaughter in the first place.

They were coming.

Adele stopped dreaming years ago. A couple of months after she realized her dreams -- which almost always took the form of memories from her past lives -- had stopped recurring, she ceased to sleep altogether. She became completely, irrevocably immortal and the buried emotions which had always bled into her dreams begun to bleed into her daily life. It was enough to cripple anyone, but she held herself together. She had to. For them. No matter how heavy the weight of the world became on her shoulders, she held it still. She could have continued on for a lifetime more had that wretched storm not struck.

They were coming, and they were going to tear down everything in their path.

There are many chapters to the life story of Adele Cullen, but this is the darkest, most dangerous yet. It is the first and last chapter. This is the story of Mason, and how he was and was not.

It seemed that every new chapter of Adele Cullen's life began with rain. As she paced the floor of the Cullen house, running a hand through her short, curly platinum hair, she couldn't help but find the irony in it. She stared out of the floor-to-ceiling windows at the swaying trees: they appeared as though they would be ripped from the ground at any split second and even with her enhanced immortal sight, she could not see farther than a couple of dozen yards into the woods. Rain had the power to give life just as easily as it could take it away; it could create just as easily as it could destroy. Today, she feared which fate she would face within it.

"Adele, I'm sure they'll be here soon." Paul Lahote, her husband of nine years, leaned against the back of one of the white sofas and watched her. "Edward's a decent driver -- for a bloodsucker."

She spared him a biting glance for his use of the term.