Childhood toys.

Reyes and Elysa’s favorite toys are a stuffed cow and an oversized stuffed shrimp. It takes knowing the twins pretty well to notice that the cow is Reyes’ favorite and the shrimp is Elysa’s- it’s just that their second favorite toys are The One That Smells Most Like My Sibling.

Also, neither of them likes it when their sibling is unhappy about being deprived of their favorite toy. Elysa fussing over the cow or Reyes fussing over the shrimp boils down to “Sibling unhappy, grown-up make it better!”

Their third favorite is an orangutan.

Evelyn does not remember having a cow, nor does Reynaldo remember having a shrimp (they did, but neither toy was The One That Smells Most Like My Sibling and therefore became quickly irrelevant), but they both remember the orangutan.

One time they bonded was when they both automatically and simultaneously corrected someone on their misuse of the word monkey.

Ooh, ooh, I got a crush on you.

For years, Reynaldo has had a crush on someone he saw once and will never see again. This crush has persisted through several dates and flings, a few relationships, and even Isaac.

Isaac knows about it. He thinks it’s hilarious.

Mommy and Daddy. And Mommy and Daddy. And Daddy.

Day 03 - Your Parents

I have five (And you thought three was more than normal, Rory?). Dream Ryan and Dream Emma (as the Victorian alternates called them), Victorian Ryan and Victorian Emma (as the dream alternates called them), and the vampire Ryan. Seven if you count this world’s alternates of my parents, which I don’t.

Dream Ryan and Emma raised me, and they’re usually who I mean when I say “my parents.” They were very much like the Ryan and Emma from this universe, and since they like to be secretive, I won’t go into detail.

They were good to me, but abusive to each other. We had our share of issues, but we were a close family. In some ways, they were very much like normal parents: worried about my education, my career, and when I’d settle down and give them grandchildren.

Their marriage was interracial, interfaith and interspecies, and they fought hard to make it work. Sometimes that was because they were obsessive, sometimes it seemed like it was sheer stubbornness, but it was obvious that they deeply loved each other.

My dad was killed when I was nineteen. My mom was killed when I was twenty-six.

Victorian Ryan and Emma weren’t married or in love, and they were only barely a couple. I never knew them.

Ryan was obsessed with finding the person who murdered his wife. He hated everyone and everything, especially himself. My dad didn’t like to talk about him, except to use him as an example of how destructive revenge is.

When I went to that reality to look for my second set of parents, I found him. By then, he suffered from a delusion that’s fairly common there: that he’d drowned and was dead. I tried to talk to him, but he wasn’t coherent. All I could do was study his tattoos.

Emma was obsessed with manipulation. She got herself involved with the politics of court and the politics of Hell, and she was involved with several of Hell’s representatives.

When I looked for her, all I could find were her journals. They were more about other people than herself, and a lot of it’s in code that I’m still trying to understand, but they’re all I have of her.

When my dad died, he became a vampire. I know he’s not the same person that my father was, but I’m not the same person as that father’s son, and we were still left with enough memories and emotions and attachments that I’d rather call him “Dad” than “Ryan.”

For a while, he pretended that he wasn’t killing because he knew my family would kill him if he did. Then, he pretended that he wasn’t killing because we had a common enemy and he wanted our help killing her.

That common enemy was the vampire my aunt became. He was always on her side, and lying about it. Together, they destroyed everything I cared about.

How To Get A Lifemate In Three Painful Steps.

Day 02 - Your First Love

Which me? And how am I supposed to figure out which person was the first I definitely loved instead of just having a crush on?

The first time I thought I was in love, I was thirteen and fell for my best friend, Donnie Weaver. We met when I noticed he had my favorite game on his tablet, and we ended up talking about the best ways to catch leras.

It took me a while to realize that I had a crush on him, though I’ve been told it was obvious to everyone else. Once I admitted it to myself, I spent most of my time acting embarrassingly like a lovestruck teenager. I wrote bad poetry, kept a picture of him under my pillow, and rambled to Sonya for hours about how he’d touched my hand or smiled at me, or something else that was the best thing in the world because it meant he might like me.

I never told him. I worried about lying to him about my species, I worried about my family having to pass for human around him, and I worried that he was straight.

Then he broke my heart by going out with Alan Floyd.

It’s funny now, but back then I thought the world had ended.

That was the old me. The first person that this me loved was Camilla Sarden. I’d been dating her for about two years when I found out I’d lost my soul. It’s possible that we started dating when I still had a soul, it’s possible that I’d already lost it, but I know that I still loved her after it was gone.

Camilla was a healer in the demon clinic I started. I knew I loved her when we were trying to save a patient who’d been attacked with a particularly unpleasant poison. He, quite literally, exploded all over us.

You know that moment when someone should look disgusting, but they’re still beautiful? That was it.

She was confident, calm under pressure, and she had an inner strength that I always admired. There was a time when I thought that she could handle anything. She couldn’t handle her boyfriend dying and becoming someone else.

I don’t blame her for that, but it still hurt.

The first person I fell in love with after I knew my soul was gone was Isaac Sowka. We’d known each other since we were children, I even had a crush on him when I was a teenager, but he accepted that his old friend had died and that I was someone new.

He’s half were-owl. We knew that if he fell in love with me, there’d be no going back. And we fell in love, he mated to me, and it’s the best thing that has ever happened to me.

Then my father and aunt killed him. Specifically to drive me further into despair and make me an emotional burden to Sonya, thereby weakening their two most dangerous enemies.

I know this because when he died, he held onto the world to warn me that my father was working with my aunt. And when I realized that he’d become a ghost, I held onto him. I bound his spirit to me, so he could use my body as an anchor to stay in the world.

He’s possessing me now. That can’t last forever- there are almost always consequences for both entities- so I’m working to recreate his body and, essentially, bring him back to life.