My Name Is Sunshine (Sunny) McDonald…
…and if you’d have asked me a year ago, I would have described myself as a normal, everyday high school sophomore, living a normal, everyday life in normal, everyday suburban Massachusetts. Like many girls my age, I loved English, abhorred math, played varsity field hockey, and auditioned to take part in the school production of Bye Bye Birdie. (Mainly to get up close and personal with senior hotness and leading man Jake Wilder, my ultimate normal, everyday crush.)
Back then, just one year ago, I accepted the world exactly how it had been presented to me since birth: normal, logical, and not the least bit supernatural. In fact, if you had asked me to swear on my life that vampires, fairies, werewolves, leprechauns, and other creatures of the night didn’t exist (at least outside Stephenie Meyer novels and HBO shows), I’d have happily sworn.
Until that fateful night, that is. The night my dear twin sister, Rayne, dragged me to the oh-so-tacky, Goth haven they call Club Fang—and my sense of normalcy was irreparably shattered forever.
Yes, yes, Sunshine and Rayne. I don’t like it any more than you do, so save the jokes. At least the names fit. You see, unlike normal, everyday me, my sister has always embraced the darker side of life. She’s basically your typical Goth girl, though she hates being labeled as such. Or labeled at all, I guess. Still, I say, if the Doc Martens fit…In any case, she’s always been all about dressing in black, listening to morbid music, hanging out in graveyards, wishing she were dead…
Or undead, as the case may be. Little did I know, while I was busy flirting with Jake and scoring goals, Rayne was occupied getting her vampire certification by taking night school classes at the local coven. She’d been on a waiting list, gotten blood-tested, passed her final exam—she was good to go. And that fateful night at Club Fang I mentioned? That was supposed to be her undead birthday—the day she was meant to be bitten by her vampiric blood mate and become a creature of the night forever.
Ah, romance.
To her, it was a dream come true. Immortality, riches beyond belief, a hot vampire boyfriend, and best of all, no homework. But if you asked me? I’d rather be bogged down with biology any night of the week than sacrifice my tan for all eternity.
Unfortunately, as you may have guessed by now, I didn’t get that choice. Due to a bloody bad case of mistaken identity, the vampire in question, Magnus, who was supposed to be Rayne’s blood mate, accidentally bit me instead.
Looking back on it now, I can accept the fact that it was an honest mistake. I mean, Rayne and I are so identical even our mother can’t tell us apart. So what prayer did Magnus have of discerning our subtle differences? Especially since Rayne made me don that ridiculous Bite Me tank top before heading to the club so I’d better fit in. Which, I guess, worked, if not a little too well.
But though I can accept it now, at the time I was plenty pissed off. Just imagine being told you’re on your way to being morphed into a vampire—a species that, up until now, you thought was simply a by-product of a dead Victorian author’s perverted imagination—one week before prom! So not part of my five-year normal, everyday plan, let me tell you!
But luckily for me it didn’t stick. The vampire Magnus was able to make good—figuring out a way to reverse the transformation—and just in time, too. And through our journey together, I ended up realizing he wasn’t so bad, under all those fangs. In fact, he was pretty special. And way better than that boring old normal, everyday Jake Wilder of drama club fame.
You gotta understand—while I’m still no fan of bloodsuckers in general, I am a fan of sweet, loyal, protective guys who happen to be former knights in shining armor and now resemble a cross between Ben Barnes and Orlando Bloom. The harder I tried to resist his charms, the more he melted my heart. Today I can’t imagine life without him by my side.
In any case, you’d think at this point it’d all slide into some sickeningly sweet happily-ever-after, the end, right? But for us, not so much. You see, Rayne, who still wanted to become a vampire more than anything in the world, suddenly found out from our drama teacher, Mr. Teifert (who, in addition to instructing young thespians, also serves as vice president of an organization called Slayer Inc.), that she was destined to become a vampire slayer. Yes, the girl voted most likely to become a vampire was now officially commissioned to kill them for a living. And she couldn’t turn down her destiny either, thanks to a dormant nanovirus the powers-that-be had injected into her bloodstream at birth. Pick another path and BOOM! Bye-bye, Rayne.
But don’t worry. Slayer Inc. isn’t as evil as their name makes them out to be. If anything, they’re more like a police force for vampires, voted in more than a hundred years ago to uphold the laws and protect those who followed them, only taking out vamps who broke the rules and became a danger to others. Like Maverick, the first evil vampire Rayne was assigned to slay. He’d planned to take over the coven by creating a deadly virus. My sister, with the help of Blood Coven general Jareth, was able to take him down and save the day. And afterward? She finally got her wish. She became not only a vampire, but Jareth’s blood mate for all eternity. (And still a slayer, too! The girl wears many hats, let me tell you.)
We’ve had a ton of adventures since then. Like when Rayne had to figure out a way to stop a pack of rampaging werewolf cheerleaders from destroying our hometown. Or when I had to save Magnus from a super sneaky redheaded spy who pretended to be in love with him while spilling coven secrets to her real vampire boyfriend back home. But our biggest adventure of all? Well, it had nothing to do with vampires whatsoever, but rather our parents, who one day broke the news that we weren’t normal, everyday humans at all, but rather fairy princesses. Crazy, huh? And let me tell you, Rayne was so not psyched about the glittery pink uniform.