As a young boy, Amadeo Jewel would play all day with his twin sister and their cousin, Matt.  Matt had never been able to hear, and Amadeo grew up thinking it a very usual thing that he moved his hands in signs as he spoke.  Matt's mother spoke Spanish to her son as she signed and just by watching the signs she made Amadeo could understand her.  It was not till he found himself listening to her speaking Spanish while he was looking at something else entirely that he realized he could understand it perfectly.

The three of them did their studying together, when they were young.  The school system provided standard terminals to the household, and the children sat in front of them inundated with sound and light.  If nothing else they learned subliminally.  Children like to stare at screens.

Amadeo's father could read minds.  His mother could do that, and she could move things by force of her will.  They realized early on that their twins had inherited the powers that so many members of the Jewel family carried.  It was said, by many Jewels, that because Amanda and Steven were both Jewels and third cousins that their children might be particularly powerful psychics; witches if you listened to Great-Aunt Vanessa.  Amber was infamous for knocking glasses off the table and shelves.

When Amadeo found out that he and Matt would not see each other because they had to go to different High Schools, he threw a tantrum.  Lightbulbs popped and vases cracked in the living room.  He ran up the back stairs, screaming at his parents, and into his room.  He slammed the door and everyone who remembered it afterward said, it was as if the whole place was shaking, though people living below didn't notice anything.  Amadeo had come right back out of the room and run crying into his mother's arms, because he did not understand what he had done.

It was around the age of 14 that Matt started having trouble with school.  He was smart, but he just didn't seem to be doing well.  He never spoke.  His parents made the decision to send him to the public day school, which by law had to do their best to educate anyone who for some reason had a problem with learning from the standard terminal.  At the same time, Amadeo's parents saw how well he was doing and decided to send him to a private boarding school where they should really challenge him.  And Amber they decided should go also.

So just around their 15th birthday Amadeo and Amber were left with more pieces of luggage than they could carry at a boarding school.  Before they had left, their father had shown them pictures of some people in an album.  He told them that they were Vampyres.  Amadeo and his sister had heard family members talk about Vampyres quite often.  They knew a story about their great grandparents being an immortal man and a witch.  It sounded like a faerietale.  But when their father showed them the album they believed him.  There were old pictures of his great grandparents taken at different times. Helen grew old but Steven who was often pictured with her never aged.

And there was another person they had many pictures of. She was in many pictures with Helen and Steven and never looked any different.  She was in pictures with Amadeo's Grandmother Nancy Jewel and his grandfather Cameron Johnson. Amadeo had told his father he recognized the girl.  She was the pretty girl in the painting on the wall of his room.  His Father told them that the family owned many paintings given to them by the Vampyres. In all the pictures she was very pale.  She looked very happy with the family, posed among them as if she were a member.

They each got a picture to take with them.  Amber got one of her great grandparents.  Amadeo took one of the girlish Vampyre.  Their father told them that he was bringing it up now, because they were getting older and they were leaving home.  To other people their simple psychic abilities might seem a bad thing.  And it was certain there were many strange things to be found out there.  If they ever met one they might tell them that they were a Jewel.  There was always a chance it was one of those who knew the name and who the Jewels were.  He told them to remember the name Louis Shade. And there were other names he rambled off.  Mazaret was one.

Amadeo had never had to be around so many children before, as he did at school.  He had gone out to the park often enough, and to movies, and shows.  He had taken dance lessons in a small class of children.  But, never, had he had to associate with so many children.  It was probably good that he went there, but at the beginning, he was overwhelmed.

While Matt was showing tremendous improvement, Amadeo was having trouble.  In the classroom, work was done on terminals as usual but teachers did presentations.  And they valued participation and discussion.  Matt's teachers told his parents that the terminal system relied a lot on audio presentations as the students progressed and Matt had been able to make up for it for a long time.  He did have the audio signals translated, but it was too much to read quickly. And he was doing well with a speech therapist.  Amadeo's teachers questioned why he was doing so poorly in class, while his test scores were so excellent.  Amber was doing fine.

Then puberty hit.  Not everyone at once of course but around the same age.  Amadeo and Amber who had always confided in each other were asking each other about their friends.  They compared themselves to the models in ads on television.  Amber, through High School, hated her tightly curled red hair.  Amadeo tried to tell her she was pretty, but teenage girls rarely listen to beauty advice from their brothers.  She always asked why he got the straight hair.  Or else she asked why she couldn't have inherited her father's black hair.

Amadeo was forced to learn to speak in public.  The hardest thing was that, at the same time he was making an effort to participate in class, his voice was changing.  When it did even out, things became a lot better for him.  When he spoke his voice carried and he could get others to listen with out much effort.

But one more change took place in Amadeo.  He found it easier to tell when people were lying.  He could take the information he wanted from their thoughts.  Most times, he just got impressions of what someone felt toward him.  Then the visions started.  There was a sharp pain and then he saw things.  He saw strange people, who turned up later to be new students.  He saw a friend of his fall, before he fell.  And he saw ghosts when no one else could.  He told Amber and his parents about it.  They said he was a seer.  His great grandmother Helen had been a seer; and they sent his Great-Aunt Vanessa to visit him because she was a seer, too.  Vanessa told him how to make the visions come when he wanted them, and she advised him on how to deal with seeing.  All the Jewels talked about Amadeo, they all knew of the psychic abilities that ran in the family, many of them had the talent, but real seers were rare.

His teachers then said wonderful things about him.  He wrote brilliantly with perfect grammar.  He was learning to speak French as well as English or Spanish.  He had a fair eye for art composition, perspective, and lighting. His music teacher gave him assignments separate from the rest of the class, because he was so far ahead of them.  His history teacher didn't always agree with him, but he said he had a respect for Amadeo, because he argued so well.  He could always find some obscure fact to back him up.  Amadeo's teacher didn't know how easy it was for Amadeo to anticipate his next argument.

Girls at school liked him.  He knew he was good looking.  At 17, despite the fact that he was bookish and not particularly athletic, he found girls interested in him.  He was already 6'2" and always asked to play basketball with his friends.  He was good at free throws, but he was never very interested in playing.  He played tennis.  And he could dance anything from the waltz to pump and grind.

Amber was over-shadowed by him and he knew it.  When he first came to school, everyone asked why he couldn't be like her. After the first two years it was, "why isn't Amad's sister more like him."  He was awfully popular.  He couldn't help it at all.  It was as if everyone was seeing him for the first time.

The amount of girls falling for him might have been annoying if he didn't like them all so much.  If you're a seventeen-year-old boy there's a good chance that you do like girls, very much.  He was very good at finding remote place in which to kiss them, which they were not really supposed to do at school.  Overwhelmed by teen lust for the boy that looked and sounded so much older to them they might have let him do anything.  It was Mary, one of the quietist girls in school, whom he took into his room in the dormitory, when everyone else was asleep, and lost his virginity with.  It was better than Amadeo's second time, but everything afterward just seemed to get better.  It was Mary who told Amadeo to wear a condom, which she gave him; she had a mother who had drilled the importance of such precautions into her at a relatively young age.  Brief and awkward as it had begun Amadeo and Mary let everyone consider them a couple after that.

In his senior year, Amadeo worried that it would be left to him to run the family's company after his father.  He didn't want to, but unless Amber really wanted to, and he knew his sister wanted to better the world, it would go to him. And he was feeling pressure to choose a college to go to.  He should have been able to get into which ever one he chose.