WE WALKED BACK ALONG THE HALL TO CARLISLE’S OFFICE. I PAUSED AT the door, waiting for his invitation.
“Come in,” Carlisle said.
I led her inside and watched her animatedly examine this new room. It was darker than the rest of the house; the deep mahogany wood reminded him of his earliest home. Her eyes ran across the rows and rows of books. I knew her well enough to see that the sight of so many books in one room was something of a dream to her.
Carlisle marked the page in the one he was reading and then stood to welcome us.
“What can I do for you?” he asked.
Of course, he’d heard all our conversation in the hall, and he knew we were here for the next installment. He wasn’t bothered by my sharing his story; he didn’t seem surprised that I would tell her everything.
“I wanted to show Bella some of our history. Well, your history, actually.”
“We didn’t mean to disturb you,” Bella said quietly.
“Not at all,” Carlisle assured her. “Where are you going to start?”
“The Waggoner,” I said.
I put one hand on her shoulder and turned her gently to face the wall behind us. I heard her heartbeat react to my touch, and then Carlisle’s almost silent laugh at her reaction.
Interesting, he thought.
I watched Bella’s eyes widen as she took in the gallery wall of Carlisle’s office. I could imagine the way it might disorient a person seeing it for the first time. There were seventy-three works, in all sizes, mediums, and colors, crammed together like a wall-sized puzzle with only rectangular pieces. Her gaze couldn’t find anywhere to settle.
I took her hand and led her to the beginning. Carlisle followed. As on the page of a book, the story began at the far left. It was not a showy piece, monochromatic and maplike. In fact, it was part of a map, hand-painted by an amateur cartographer, one of the very few originals that had survived the centuries.
Her brows furrowed.
“London in the sixteen fifties,” I explained.
“The London of my youth,” Carlisle added from a few feet behind us. Bella flinched, surprised by his closeness. Of course she wouldn’t have heard his movements. I squeezed her hand, trying to reassure her. This house was a strange place for her to be, but nothing here would hurt her.
“Will you tell the story?” I asked him, and Bella turned to see what he would say.
I’m sorry, I wish I could.
He smiled at Bella and spoke aloud to her. “I would, but I’m actually running a bit late. The hospital called this morning—Dr. Snow is taking a sick day. Besides”—he looked to me—“you know the stories as well as I do.”
Carlisle smiled warmly at Bella as he exited. Once he had gone, she turned back to examine the small painting again.
“What happened then?” she asked after a moment. “When he realized what had happened to him?”
Automatically, I looked to a larger painting, one column over and one row down. It wasn’t a cheerful image: a gloomy, deserted landscape, a sky thick with oppressive clouds, colors that seemed to suggest the sun would never return. Carlisle had seen this piece through the window of a minor castle in Scotland. It so perfectly reminded him of his life at its darkest point that he’d wanted to keep it, though the old memory was painful. To him, the existence of this devastated landscape meant that someone else had once understood.
“When he knew what he had become, he rebelled against it. He tried to destroy himself. But that’s not easily done.”
“How?” she gasped.
I kept my eyes on the evocative emptiness of the painting as I described Carlisle’s suicide attempts.
“He jumped from great heights. He tried to drown himself in the ocean… but he was young to the new life, and very strong. It is amazing that he was able to resist… feeding”—I glanced quickly at her but she was staring at the painting—“while he was still so new. The instinct is more powerful then, it takes over everything. But he was so repelled by himself that he had the strength to try to kill himself with starvation.”
“Is that possible?” she whispered.
“No, there are very few ways we can be killed.”
She opened her mouth to ask the most obvious follow-up, but I spoke quickly to distract her.
“So he grew very hungry, and eventually weak. He strayed as far as he could from the human populace, recognizing that his willpower was weakening, too. For months he wandered by night, seeking the loneliest places, loathing himself.…”
I described the night he found another way to live, the compromise of animal blood, and his recovery to a rational creature. Then leaving for the continent—
“He swam to France?” she interrupted, disbelieving.
“People swim the Channel all the time, Bella,” I pointed out.
“That’s true, I guess. It just sounded funny in that context. Go on.”
“Swimming is easy for us—”
“Everything is easy for you,” she complained.
I smiled at her, waiting to be sure she was done.
She frowned. “I won’t interrupt again, I promise.”
My smile widened, knowing what her reaction would be to the next bit.
“Because, technically, we don’t need to breathe.”
“You—”
I laughed and put one finger against her lips. “No, no, you promised. Do you want to hear the story or not?”
Her lips moved against my touch. “You can’t spring something like that on me, and then expect me not to say anything.”
I let my hand fall to rest against the side of her neck.
“You don’t have to breathe?”
I shrugged. “No, it’s not necessary. Just a habit.”
“How long can you go… without breathing?”
“Indefinitely, I suppose; I don’t know.” The longest I’d ever gone was a few days, all of it underwater. “It gets a bit uncomfortable—being without a sense of smell.”
“A bit uncomfortable,” she repeated in a fragile voice, barely over a whisper.
Her eyebrows were drawn together, her eyes narrowed, her shoulders rigid. The exchange, which had been funny to me a moment before, was abruptly humorless.
We were so different. Though we’d once belonged to the same species, we shared only a few superficial traits now. She must finally feel the weight of the distortion, the distance between us. I lifted my hand from her skin and dropped it to my side. My alien touch would only make that gap more obvious.
I stared at her troubled expression, waiting to see if this would be one truth too many. After a few long seconds, the stress in her features eased. Her eyes focused on my face, and a different kind of unease marked hers.
She reached up with no hesitation to press her fingers against my cheek. “What is it?”
Concern for me again. So apparently this wasn’t the too much I’d been fearing.
“I keep waiting for it to happen.”
She was confused. “For what to happen?”
I took a deep breath. “I know that at some point, something I tell you or something you see is going to be too much. And then you’ll run away from me, screaming as you go.” I tried to smile at her, but I didn’t do a very good job. “I won’t stop you. I want this to happen, because I want you to be safe. And yet, I want to be with you. The two desires are impossible to reconcile.…”
She squared her shoulders, her chin jutted out. “I’m not running anywhere,” she promised.
I had to smile at her brave façade. “We’ll see.”
“So, go on,” she insisted, scowling a little at my doubtful response. “Carlisle was swimming to France.”
I measured her mood for one more second, then turned back to the gallery. This time I pointed her toward the most ostentatious of all the paintings, the brightest, the most garish. It was meant to be a portrayal of the final judgment, but half the thrashing figures seemed to be involved in some kind of orgy, the other half in a violent, bloody combat. Only the judges, suspended above the pandemonium on marble balustrades, were serene.
This one had been a gift. It wasn’t something Carlisle would have ever picked out for himself. But when the Volturi had pressed upon him the souvenir of their time together, it wasn’t as if he could have said no.
He had some affection for the gaudy piece—and for the distant vampire overlords depicted in it—so he kept it with his other favorites. They had been very kind to him in many ways, after all. And Esme liked the small portrait of Carlisle hidden in the midst of the mayhem.
While I explained Carlisle’s first few years in Europe, Bella stared at the painting, trying to make sense of all the figures and swirling colors. I found my voice becoming less casual. It was hard to think of Carlisle’s quest to subdue his nature, to become a blessing to mankind rather than a parasite, without feeling again all the awe his journey deserved.
I’d always envied Carlisle’s perfect control but, at the same time, believed it was impossible for me to duplicate. I realized now that I’d chosen the lazy way, the path of least resistance, admiring him greatly, but never putting in the effort to become more like him. This crash course in restraint that Bella was teaching me might have been less fraught if I’d worked harder to improve in the last seven decades.
Bella was staring at me now. I tapped the relevant scene in front of us to refocus her attention on the story.
“He was studying in Italy when he discovered the others there. They were much more civilized and educated than the wraiths of the London sewers.”
She concentrated on the tableau I indicated, and then laughed suddenly, a little shocked. She’d recognized Carlisle despite the robe-like costume he was painted in.
“Solimena was greatly inspired by Carlisle’s friends. He often painted them as gods. Aro, Marcus, Caius.” I gestured to each as I said their names. “Nighttime patrons of the arts.”
Her finger hesitated just above the canvas. “What happened to them?”
“They’re still there. As they have been for who knows how many millennia. Carlisle stayed with them only for a short time, just a few decades. He greatly admired their civility, their refinement, but they persisted in trying to cure his aversion to ‘his natural food source,’ as they called it. They tried to persuade him, and he tried to persuade them, to no avail. At that point, Carlisle decided to try the New World. He dreamed of finding others like himself. He was very lonely, you see.”
I touched only lightly on the following decades, as Carlisle struggled with his isolation and finally began to consider a course of action. The story turned more personal, and also more repetitive. She’d heard some of this before: Carlisle finding me on my deathbed and making the decision that had changed my destiny. And now, that decision was affecting Bella’s destiny, too.
“And so we’ve come full circle,” I concluded.
“Have you always stayed with Carlisle, then?” she asked.
With unerring instinct, she’d found the one question I least wanted to answer.
“Almost always,” I answered.
I placed my hand on her waist to guide her out of Carlisle’s office, wishing I could also guide her away from this train of thought. But I knew she was not going to let that stand. Sure enough…
“Almost?”
I sighed, unwilling. But honesty must take precedence over shame. “Well,” I confessed, “I had a typical bout of rebellious adolescence—about ten years after I was born, created, whatever you want to call it. I wasn’t sold on his life of abstinence, and I resented him for curbing my appetite. So I went off on my own for a time.”
“Really?” Her intonation was not what I expected. Rather than being disgusted, she sounded eager to hear more. This didn’t match her reaction in the meadow, when she’d seemed so surprised that I was guilty of murder, as though that truth had never occurred to her. Perhaps she’d grown used to the idea.
We started up the stairs. Now she seemed indifferent to her surroundings; she only watched me.
“That doesn’t repulse you?” I asked.
She considered that for half a second. “No.”
I found her answer upsetting. “Why not?” I nearly demanded.
“I guess… it sounds reasonable?” Her explanation ended on a higher pitch, like a question.
Reasonable. I laughed, the sound too harsh.
But instead of telling her all the ways it was neither reasonable nor forgivable, I found myself giving a defense.
“From the time of my new birth, I had the advantage of knowing what everyone around me was thinking, both human and nonhuman alike. That’s why it took me ten years to defy Carlisle. I could read his perfect sincerity, understand exactly why he lived the way he did.”
I wondered if I would ever have gone astray if I had not met Siobhan and others like her. If I hadn’t been aware that every other creature like myself—we’d not yet stumbled across Tanya and her sisters—thought the way Carlisle lived was ludicrous. If I had only known Carlisle, and never discovered another code of conduct, I think I would have stayed. It made me ashamed that I’d let myself be influenced by others who were never Carlisle’s equals. But I’d envied their freedom. And I’d thought I would be able to live above the moral abyss they all sank to. Because I was special. I shook my head at the arrogance.
“It took me only a few years to return to Carlisle and recommit to his vision. I thought I would be exempt from the depression that accompanies a conscience. Because I knew the thoughts of my prey, I could pass over the innocent and pursue only the evil. If I followed a murderer down a dark alley where he stalked a young girl—if I saved her, then surely I wasn’t so terrible.”
There were a great many humans I’d saved this way, and yet, it never seemed to balance out the tally. So many faces flashed through my memories, the guilty I’d executed and the innocents I’d saved.
One face lingered, both guilty and innocent.
September 1930. It had been a very bad year. Everywhere, the humans struggled to survive bank failures, droughts, and dust storms. Displaced farmers and their families flooded cities that had no room for them. At the time, I wondered whether the pervasive despair and dread in the minds around me were a contributing factor to the melancholy that was beginning to plague me, but I think even then I knew that my personal depression was wholly due to my own choices.
I was passing through Milwaukee, as I’d passed through Chicago, Philadelphia, Detroit, Columbus, Indianapolis, Minneapolis, Montreal, Toronto, city after city, and then returned, over and over again, truly nomadic for the first time in my life. I never strayed farther south—I knew better than to hunt near that hotbed of newborn nightmare armies—nor farther east, as I was also avoiding Carlisle, less for self-preservation and more out of shame in that case. I never stayed more than a few days in any one place, never interacted with the humans I wasn’t hunting. After more than four years, it had become a simple thing to locate the minds I sought. I knew where I was likely to find them, and when they were usually active. It was disturbing how easy it was to pinpoint my ideal victims; there were so many of them.
Perhaps that was part of the melancholy, too.