THE MOMENT
"But, you're a werewolf?" Debbie asked. Suddenly, everything made sense. She hadn't been dating Eddie for very long, but she was finally meeting his family for the first time. And, it came with some unexpected revelations. He brought her home and introduced the entire family as vampires, which was a surprise. She'd already known Eddie was a werewolf, and half-expected the rest of the family to be werewolves as well. But seeing them all together in human form made a few things apparent.
"Oh, so you're adopted...?" she asked. Two distinct shades of laughter erupted. Eddie laughed jovially with a broad smile, as if he'd heard his favorite joke, and his vampire family somehow became notably more pale, and they shook their heads with nervous chuckles.
"People keep thinking that!" Eddie laughed hard, making his bright red curls bounce with the movement, and his brilliant green eyes sparkled. It felt like an odd statement at that point, and it wasn't helped by Debbie's vague confusion. She had the sense that she was confused about something, but couldn't put her finger on what.
"They do? Like... how often does it come up?"
"Oh, All the time!" Eddie nodded. "Feels like it's happened a lot, even when I was a kid. Anytime they saw us together, people would just assume I was adopted. A werewolf in a vampire family tends to draw questions."
"But.. you became a werewolf when you were 14..?" Vampires and werewolves were known, and tentatively accepted throughout the world, but she couldn't imagine a werewolf walking around with vampires open enough to draw questions. Certainly not on any level that could be described as 'all the time' casually. It felt like they were having different conversations about the same topic. Debbie was trying to make sense of it, and Eddie's mom, Mrs. Carter, interrupted.
"Debbie, would you help me in the kitchen, please?" She was the most pale family member with long dark hair and dark brown eyes, the same as her husband and daughter. The matron asked as she moved toward the swinging door that separated the dining room from the rest of the house.
"Sure," Debbie guessed she was about to be informed about something, and followed the distinguished vampire into the kitchen.
"I'm sorry to ask this of you, but Eddie had a rough childhood, and it wasn't helped when we were all attacked by vampires...," she met Debbie's eyes to plead her case. "We loved that boy so much, we sacrificed everything we could to ensure his escape, although we were unaware of the werewolves helping the vampires," she sighed as the memories brought tears to her eyes.
"By some miracle, every one of us survived, and it drew us closer as a family. We had all changed, and it was like we became a whole new, better family," she said, with a nod. "Anything that happened before that point no longer mattered; we were, and always will be family." Debbie was smart enough to catch the point. But, she needed to be sure.
"He doesn't know?" she asked.
"The werewolf attack was rather traumatizing...," Mrs. Carter sighed. "He remembered we were family, and that was the only thing that was important, regardless of how he came to join our family."
"So... he was adopted...," Debbie needed to put it together to be sure she had the right idea. "... but that was when he was a child, I guess? And he grew up as a normal part of the family before the big attack that changed all your lives?"
"We had planned to tell him when he was old enough, but the disaster made that feel unnecessary; we became a better family with no reason to disturb it. You'll keep it a secret, won't you?"