Rise of the Moon (Moonlit Series Book 1) by Rachel Hera

his hair the day before school started; now, three weeks later, there was a thin layer of dark brown hair covering his head.
    I was in the basement, looking through boxes of personal possessions my mother had sent me from our house in Europe. She said she had sent everything over, but I was missing one particular photo album.
    “Nothing,” I replied. The old-fashioned part of me hated that answer, but I had recently begun to understand why it was used so often; it was a clear sentiment of one wanting to keep to oneself.
    “Liar,” he called me out on it immediately. Evidently, the other party refused to accept that dismissal.
    “I’m looking for an album,” I set down one of the boxes, giving up for now. If it was not there, then there was not a thing I could do about it. I would have to call my mother and ask about it later.
    “What year?” he took a curious step down the stairs, but retreated as I started to ascend.
    “Eighteen forty-four,” I passed him by, heading for the kitchen.
    “It’s so easy to forget you’re a hundred and seventy some odd years older than I am,” James muttered, following me at my heel.
    My brother was still very much alive in comparison to me. He would not properly turn until he drank fresh blood, when the cells in his body would react. My father called it a perfection virus. It reconstructed the cells in a short period of time, hardening them, making sure their functionality was at its best. It had the potential to change the exterior of the infected, and it, in fact, was rare that it didn’t. I personally hadn’t changed, but I’m fairly certain it’s because I was born, not made a vampire. I was equally certain my brother would be the same.
    But virus or not, to me, it was a curse. 
    “But that’s the year Evangeline died, right?”
    Mr. Smith was in the kitchen, preparing dinner for James and I. While my diet was a bit unlike most, eating was not a problem. Mr. Smith was an older gentleman, his family having spent generations serving my family. His son would do the same, after he turned twenty-one. Right now he was sixteen, like James, and living with his mother and sister in the London estate that we had given them for two hundred years of service. It was well deserved. Mr. Smith always seemed to know what we wanted before we could say a word.
    That being said, when I entered the room, he paused in his preparations and fetched me a bottle of blood from the fridge. He even went as far as to uncap it for me before he passed it my way. 
    “The newest sample,” he explained.
    “Are you forgetting what she looks like?” James persisted. “I hope you find the album. I want to see her.”
    “Enough about the past. You were telling me about a girl in school,” I took a sip of the blood, hating the chalky feeling it left in my mouth afterwards. Artificial crap was what it was. “Mr. Smith, we’ll have to tell Selena that this batch is no good either. It needs to be smoother. Remind me to contact her later.”
    “I will,” he took the bottle away and fetched me a warmed blood pouch instead.
    Selena and I, along with a few other vampire activists, were working to create an artificial drink for vampires, hoping to overthrow the entire system of taking blood from humans. My father was against it –which was, perhaps, the entire reason I pursued that course of action in the first place. He did not believe we would succeed very well. Vampires, after all, were creatures of tradition and habit. Unfortunately, that habit left more than a few humans dead year after year. It’s why I chose the blood pouch, and why as soon as it was perfected, I’d be choosing the artificial blood.
    “So, James? Tell me about her.”
    “She’s just caught my eye, that’s all,” his ears turned red with embarrassment.
    “She’s in a grade younger than you?” I asked. He had mentioned her earlier, but had been just as vague.
    “Just a year,” he spoke slowly, deliberately. Something my