I wasn’t exactly sure what she was searching so minutely for, but I followed her unhesitatingly. She ignored a few more flocks of deer, leading me deeper into the forest, angling south. I saw her searching ahead, seeing us in different corners of the park—all of them familiar. She drifted east, starting to curve north again. What was she looking for?
And then her thoughts settled on a slinking movement in the brush, glimpses of a tawny hide.
“Thanks, Alice, but—”
Shh! I’m hunting.
I rolled my eyes, but continued following her. She was trying to do something nice for me. There was no way for her to know how little it all mattered. I’d been force-feeding myself so much lately I doubted I would notice the difference between a lion and a rabbit.
It didn’t take us long to find her vision, now that she was focused on it. Once the movements of the animal were audible, Alice slowed to let me take the lead.
“I really shouldn’t, the park’s lion population—”
Alice’s mental tone was exasperated. Live a little.
There never was much point in fighting with Alice. I shrugged and passed her. I’d caught the scent now. It was easy to shift into another mode—just let the blood pull me forward as I stalked my prey.
It was relaxing to stop thinking for a few minutes. Just to be another predator—the apex predator. I heard Alice head east, searching for her own meal.
The lion hadn’t noticed me yet. He, too, was heading east on his own search, looking for something to hunt. Some other animal’s day would end better, thanks to me.
I was on him in a second. Unlike Emmett, I saw no point in giving the beast a chance to fight back. It would make no difference, and wasn’t it more humane to do it quickly? I snapped the lion’s neck and then quickly drained the warm body. I wasn’t that thirsty to begin with, so there wasn’t any real relief tied to the action. Force-feeding again.
When I was done, I followed Alice’s scent north. She’d found a sleeping doe, bedded down in a nest of brambles. Alice’s hunting style was more like mine than Emmett’s. It didn’t look like the creature had even woken up.
“Thank you,” I told her, to be courteous.
You’re welcome. There’s a bigger herd back to the west.
She got to her feet and led the way again. I bit back my sigh.
We were both done after one more. I was too full again, my insides feeling uncomfortably liquefied. I was surprised that she was ready to quit, though.
“I don’t mind continuing,” I told her, wondering if she’d seen that I would sit the next round out and was being polite.
“I’m going out tomorrow with Jasper,” she told me.
“Didn’t he just—”
“I’ve recently decided that more preparations are necessary,” she said, smiling. A new possibility.
In her mind, I saw our home. Carlisle and Esme waiting expectantly in the front room. The door opening, myself walking through, and next to me, holding my hand…
Alice laughed, and I tried to bring my face back under my control.
“How?” I asked. “When?”
“Soon.” Possibly Sunday…
“This Sunday?”
Yes, the one that comes after tomorrow.
Bella was perfect in the vision—human and healthy, smiling at my parents. She wore the blue blouse that made her skin glow.
As for how, I’m not entirely sure. This is just an outlying chance, but I wanted Jasper prepared.
Jasper at the foot of the stairs now, nodding politely to Bella, his eyes light gold.
One of the threads.
It spun out again in her mind, the long ropes of possibilities. So many converging on tomorrow… not enough emerging on the other side.
“Where am I at?”
She pursed her lips. Seventy-five-twenty-five? She thought it like a question, and I could see she was being generous.
C’mon, she thought as she saw me hunch in on myself. You’d take that bet. I did.
Automatically, my lips pulled back over my teeth.
“Please!” she said. “Like I was going to pass up such an opportunity. This isn’t just about Bella. I’m relatively confident that she’ll be fine. This is about teaching Rosalie and Jasper some respect.”
“You’re not omniscient.”
“I’m close enough.”
I could not match her joking mood. “If you were omniscient, you’d be able to tell me what to do.”
You’ll figure it out, Edward. I know you will.
If only I could know that, too.
No one but my mother and father were home when we returned. Emmett had no doubt warned the others to make themselves scarce. It didn’t matter to me one way or another. I didn’t have the energy to care about their stupid game. Alice, too, ran off in search of Jasper. I was grateful for the thinning of the mental conversations. It helped me a little as I tried to concentrate.
Carlisle was waiting by the foot of the stairs, and his thoughts were hard to block, filled with all the same questions to which I’d just begged Alice for answers. I didn’t want to admit to him all the weaknesses that kept me from running away before any more damage was done. I didn’t want Carlisle to know the horror that would have come to pass if I hadn’t come back to Forks when I did, the depths to which my monster would have sunk.
I gave him one tight nod in acknowledgment as I passed him. He knew what it meant—that I was aware of all his fears, and that I had no good answer. With a sigh, he nodded back. He followed up the stairs more slowly, and I heard him join Esme in her study. They didn’t speak. I tried to ignore what she thought as she analyzed his expression: her alarm, her pain.
Carlisle, of all the others, even Alice, understood best how it was for me, the never-ending chatter and babble and commotion that was the inside of my head; he’d lived with me longest. So, without a word, he now led Esme to the large window we often used as an exit. Within seconds, they were far enough away that I could hear nothing. Silence at last. The only commotion in my head now was of my own making.
At first I moved slowly, at barely more than human speed, as I showered, cleaning the residue of the forest from my skin and hair. As before, in the car, I felt damaged, impaired, as if my strength had been drained away. All in my head, of course. It would be nothing but a miracle, a gift, if I could somehow truly lose my strength. If I could be weak, harmless, a danger to no one.
I’d almost forgotten my earlier fear—such a conceited fear—that Bella would find me repulsive when I revealed my true self in the sunlight. I was disgusted at myself for wasting even a moment over that selfish concern. But as I looked for fresh clothes, I had to think of it again. Not because it mattered whether she was sickened by me, but because I had a promise to keep.
I rarely gave what I wore a first thought, let alone a second. Alice stocked my closet with a wide variety of items that all seemed to go together. The main point of clothing was to help us blend in—to embrace the current time period’s fashion, to downplay our pallor, and to cover as much of our skin as possible without looking shockingly out of season. Alice pushed the limits within those constraints, offended by the idea of trying to make us look unnoticeable. She chose her own clothing and dressed the rest of us as a form of artistic expression. Our skin was covered, its pallid hue was never put in contrast with deeper tones, and we certainly were up to the minute with current style. But blend we did not. It seemed a harmless indulgence, like the cars we drove.
Alice’s forward-thinking taste aside, all my clothes were, if nothing else, designed for maximum coverage. If I were going to fulfill the spirit of my promise to Bella, I would need more than my hands exposed. The smaller my exposure, the easier it would be for her to compartmentalize my disease. She needed to see me for what I was.
At that moment I remembered a shirt, stuck in the back recesses of my closet, that I’d never worn.
The shirt was an anomaly. Usually, Alice wouldn’t get us anything that she couldn’t see us wearing. Typically, she was quite strict in following the letter of the law. I recalled the afternoon, two years ago, when I’d first seen the shirt hanging with a new lot of Alice’s acquisitions, tacked on at the very back, as if she knew it was all wrong.
“What’s this for?” I asked her.
She’d shrugged. I don’t know. It looked nice on the model.
There hadn’t been anything hidden in her thoughts. She seemed as confused as I was by the impulsive purchase. And yet, she hadn’t let me throw the shirt away, either.
You never know, she’d insisted. You might want it someday.
I pulled the shirt out now, and felt a strange wave of awe. A chill, almost, if I were capable of feeling such a thing. Her uncanny premonitions reached so far, stretched their tentacles so deep into the future, that even she didn’t understand all the actions she took. Somehow she’d sensed, years before Bella had chosen to come to Forks, that at some point I would be facing this most bizarre trial.
Perhaps she was omniscient after all.
I slipped into the white cotton shirt, unnerved by the look of my bare arms in the mirror inside the door. I buttoned it, sighed, then unbuttoned it again. Exposing my skin was the whole point. But I didn’t have to be so conspicuous right from the start. I grabbed a pale beige sweater and pulled it over the top. I was much more comfortable that way, just the collar of the white shirt showing above the crew neckline, covered up as was normal. Maybe I would leave the sweater on. Maybe full disclosure was the wrong path.
I wasn’t moving as slowly anymore. It was almost comical, with all the dire fears and resolutions in my head, that the more familiar fear, the one that had recently dictated almost all my movements, should still be able to control me so easily.
I hadn’t seen Bella for hours. Was she safe now?
Strange that I should even be able to worry about the millions of dangers that weren’t me. None of them were close to as deadly. And yet, and yet, and yet… what if?
Though I’d always planned to spend the night with Bella’s scent, more important tonight than any night before, now I was in a hurry to be there.
I was early and, of course, everything was fine. Bella was still doing laundry—I could hear the thumping and sloshing of the unbalanced washing machine and smell the scent of softener sheets blowing hot from the dryer’s exhaust. Part of me wanted to smile as I thought of her teasing at lunch, but the superficial humor was too weak to overcome my ongoing panic. I could hear Charlie watching a sports recap in the front room. His quiet thoughts seemed mellow, sleepy. I was sure that Bella hadn’t changed her mind and told him of her real plans for tomorrow.
Despite everything, the easy, simple flow of the Swans’ uneventful evening was calming. I perched in my usual tree and let it lull me.
I found myself feeling jealous of Bella’s father. His was a simple life. Nothing serious weighed on his conscience. Tomorrow was just a normal day, with familiar, pleasant hobbies to look forward to.
But the next day…
It wasn’t in his power to guarantee what that next day would be for him. Was it in mine?
I was surprised to hear the sound of a hair dryer from the shared bathroom. Bella didn’t usually bother. Her hair was, as far as I had seen in my nights of protective—if inexcusable—surveillance, wet as she slept, drying over the course of the night. I wondered why the change. The only explanation I could think of was that she wanted her hair to look nice. And as the person she planned to see tomorrow was me, that meant she must have wanted it to look nice for me.
Maybe I was wrong. But if I was right… how exasperating! How endearing! Her life had never been in deeper peril, but she still cared that I, the very menace threatening her life, liked her appearance.
It took longer than usual, even after the extra time with the dryer, for the lights to go out in her room, and I could hear some quiet commotion inside before that happened. Curious, always too curious, it felt like hours before I could be sure I’d waited long enough for her to be sleeping.
Once inside, I could see I hadn’t needed to wait quite so long. She slept more serenely than usual tonight, her hair fanned smoothly across the pillow over her head, her arms relaxed at her sides. Deeply under, she did not so much as murmur.
Her room immediately revealed the source of the tumult I’d heard. Piles of clothes were thrown over every surface, even a few across the foot of her bed, under her bare feet. I acknowledged again the pleasure and the pain of knowing that she wanted to be attractive for me.
I compared the feelings, the ache and the soaring, to my life before Bella. I’d been so jaded, so world-weary, as if I’d experienced every emotion there was to be felt. What a fool. I’d barely sipped at the cup life had to offer. Only now was I aware of all I’d missed, and how much more I had to learn. So much suffering ahead, more than the joy, certainly. But the joy was so sweet and so strong that I would never forgive myself for missing a second of it.
I thought of the emptiness of a life without Bella, and it brought to mind one night I’d not thought of for a very long time.
It was December 1919. More than a year had passed since Carlisle had transformed me. My eyes had cooled from brilliant red to a mellow amber, though the stress of keeping them so was constant.
Carlisle had kept me as isolated as possible while I worked through those unruly first months. After almost a year, I felt quite sure that the madness had passed, and Carlisle accepted my self-evaluation without question. He prepared to introduce me into human society.
At first it was only an evening here or there: As well-fed as possible, we would walk along a small town’s main street after the sun was safely below the horizon. It surprised me then, how we could blend in at all. The human faces were so completely different from ours—their dull, pitted skin, their poorly molded features, so rounded and lumpy, the mottled colors of their imperfect flesh. The clouded, rheumy eyes must be nearly blind, I thought, if they could really believe we belonged to their world. It was several years before I grew accustomed to human faces.
I was so focused on controlling my instinct to kill during these excursions that I barely registered as language the cacophony of thought that assaulted me; it was just noise. As my ability to ignore my thirst grew stronger, so the thoughts in the crowd became clearer, harder to dismiss, the danger of the first challenge supplanted by the irritation of the second.
I passed these early tests, if not with ease, then at least with perfect results. The next challenge was to live among them for a week. Carlisle chose the busy harbor in Saint John, New Brunswick, booking us rooms in a small clapboard inn near the West Side docks. Besides our ancient landlord, all the neighbors we encountered were sailors and dockhands.
This was an arduous challenge. I was entirely surrounded. The scent of human blood was ever present. I could smell the touch of human hands on the fabrics in our room, catch the scent of human sweat wafting through our windows. It tainted every breath I took.