INSISTING UPON DRIVING HAD BEEN A VERY GOOD IDEA.
There were all those things, of course, that would be out of the question if she needed to concentrate her human senses on the road—hand-holding, eye-gazing, general joy-radiating. But more than this, the feeling of being filled to the point of bursting with pure light hadn’t dimmed at all. I knew how overwhelming it was for me; I wasn’t sure how much it would compromise a human system. Much safer to let my inhuman system tend to the road.
The clouds were shifting as the sun set. Every now and then a lance of fading red sunlight would strike my face. I could imagine the terror I would have felt only yesterday to have been exposed in this way. Now it made me want to laugh. I felt filled with laughter, as if the light within me needed that escape.
Curious, I switched on her radio. I was surprised that it was tuned to nothing but static. Then, considering the volume of the engine, I deduced that she didn’t bother much with driving music. I twisted the knob until I found a semi-audible station. It was playing Johnny Ace, and I smiled. “Pledging My Love.” How apt.
I began to sing along, feeling a little cheesy, but also enjoying the chance to say these words to her. Always and forever, I’ll love only you.
She never took her eyes off my face, smiling in what I could now accurately construe as wonder.
“You like fifties music?” she asked when the song ended.
“Music in the fifties was good. Much better than the sixties, or the seventies, ugh!” Though there were certainly excellent outliers, the artists that were played most often on the limited radio options then were not my favorites. I’d never warmed up to disco. “The eighties were bearable.”
She pressed her lips together for a moment, her eyes tensing as if something worried her. Quietly, she asked, “Are you ever going to tell me how old you are?”
Ah, she was afraid to distress me. I smiled at her easily. “Does it matter much?”
She seemed relieved by my light response. “No, but I still wonder.… There’s nothing like an unsolved mystery to keep you up at night.”
And then it was my turn to worry. “I wonder if it will upset you.”
She hadn’t been disgusted by my inhumanity, but would she have a different reaction to the years between us? In many very real ways, I was still seventeen. Would she see it that way?
What had she imagined already? Millennia behind me, gothic castles and Transylvanian accents? Well, none of that was impossible. Carlisle knew those types.
“Try me,” she challenged.
I looked into her eyes, searching their depths for the answers. I sighed. Shouldn’t I have developed some courage after the events behind us? But here I was again, terrified to frighten her. Of course, there was no way forward but total honesty.
“I was born in Chicago in 1901,” I admitted. I turned my face toward the road ahead so she wouldn’t feel scrutinized as she did the mental math, but I couldn’t help stealing a look from the corner of my eye. She was artificially composed, and I realized that she was carefully modulating her reactions. She didn’t want to appear frightened any more than I wanted to scare her. The more we came to know each other, the more we seemed to mirror each other’s feelings. Harmonizing.
“Carlisle found me in a hospital in the summer of 1918,” I continued. “I was seventeen, and dying of the Spanish influenza.”
At this her control slipped, and she gasped in shock, her eyes huge.
“I don’t remember it well,” I assured her. “It was a very long time ago, and human memories fade.”
She did not look entirely comforted, but she nodded. She said nothing, waiting for more.
I had just mentally committed to total honesty, but I realized now that there would have to be limits. There were things she should know… but also details that would not be wise to share. Maybe Alice was right. Maybe, if Bella was feeling anything close to the way I was feeling now, she would think it imperative to prolong this feeling. To stay with me, as she’d said in the meadow. I knew it would be no simple thing for me to deny Bella anything she wanted. I chose my words with care.
“I do remember how it felt, when Carlisle… saved me. It’s not an easy thing, not something you could forget.”
“Your parents?” she asked in a timid voice, and I relaxed, glad she’d chosen not to fixate on that last part.
“They had already died from the disease. I was alone.” These weren’t hard words to say. This part of my history almost felt more like a story I’d been told than actual memories. “That was why he chose me. In all the chaos of the epidemic, no one would ever realize I was gone.”
“How did he… save you?”
So much for avoiding the difficult questions. I thought about what was most important to keep from her.
My words danced around the edges of her question. “It was difficult. Not many of us have the restraint necessary to accomplish it. But Carlisle has always been the most humane, the most compassionate of us.… I don’t think you could find his equal throughout all of history.” I considered my father for a moment, and wondered if my words were adequate praise. Then I continued with the rest of what I thought it safe for her to know. “For me, it was merely very, very painful.”
While the other memories that might have brought pain—the loss of my mother in particular—were confused and faded, the memory of this pain was exceptionally clear. I flinched slightly. If there ever came a time that Bella did ask again, with full knowledge of what it meant to stay with me, this memory would be all the aid I needed to say no. I recoiled from the idea of her facing such pain.
She absorbed my answer, lips pursed and eyes narrowed in thought. I wanted to know her reaction, but I knew that if I asked, I would face more pointed questions. I continued my history, hoping to distract her.
“He acted from loneliness. That’s usually the reason behind the choice. I was the first in Carlisle’s family, though he found Esme soon after. She fell from a cliff. They brought her straight to the hospital morgue, though somehow, her heart was still beating.”
“So you must be dying, then, to become…”
Not distracted enough. Still trying to discern the mechanism. I hurried to redirect.
“No, that’s just Carlisle. He would never do that to someone who had another choice. It is easier he says, though, if the blood is weak.”
I shifted my gaze to the road again. I shouldn’t have added that. I wondered if I was dancing closer to the answers she sought because part of me wanted her to know, wanted her to find a way to stay with me. I had to be better at controlling my tongue. To keep the selfish part of myself bridled.
“And Emmett and Rosalie?”
I smiled at her. She probably realized I was being evasive, and yet she was willing to let it go to make me comfortable.
“Carlisle brought Rosalie to our family next. I didn’t realize till much later that he was hoping she would be to me what Esme was to him—he was careful with his thoughts around me.”
I remembered my disgust when he’d finally slipped. Rosalie had not been a welcome addition in the beginning—in truth, life had been more complicated for all of us ever since her inclusion—and learning that Carlisle had envisioned an even closer relationship for her and me was horrifying. The extent of my aversion would be impolite to share. Ungentlemanly.
“But she was never more than a sister.” That was probably the kindest way to sum up that chapter. “It was only two years later that she found Emmett. She was hunting—we were in Appalachia at the time—and found a bear about to finish him off. She carried him back to Carlisle, more than a hundred miles, afraid she wouldn’t be able to… do it herself.”
We’d been outside Knoxville then—not an ideal place for us, weather-wise. We had to stay inside most days. It wasn’t a long-term situation, though—Carlisle was researching some pathology studies at the University of Tennessee’s medical school. A few weeks, a few months… it wasn’t really a difficult ask. We had access to several libraries, and the nightlife in New Orleans wasn’t inconveniently far, not for creatures as swift as we. However, Rosalie, out of her newborn stage but not yet comfortable with very close proximity to humans, refused to entertain herself. Instead, she moped and whined, finding fault with every suggestion for amusement or self-improvement. To be fair, perhaps she did not whine so much out loud. Esme was not as irritated as I was.
Rosalie preferred to hunt by herself, and though I really should have watched after her, it was a relief to us both that I didn’t object very strenuously. She knew how to be careful. We all were practiced at restraining our senses until we were in unpopulated areas. And though I was reluctant to attribute any virtue to this unwelcome interloper, even I had to admit that she was incredibly gifted at self-control. Mostly due to stubbornness and, in my opinion, a desire to best me.
So when the sound of Rosalie’s footsteps, thudding faster and heavier than usual, broke the predawn calm of that Knoxville summer, her familiar scent preceded by the strong aroma of human blood and her thoughts wild and incoherent, my initial expectation was not that she had made a mistake.
In the first year of Rosalie’s second life, before she had disappeared on her several missions of revenge, her thoughts had given her away clearly and thoroughly. I knew what she was planning, and I’d informed Carlisle. The first time, he counseled her gently, urging her to let go of her past life, certain that if she did she would forget, and then her pain could lessen. Revenge could not bring back anything she had lost. But when his guidance met only the implacability of her fury, he gave her advice on how best to be discreet about her forays. Neither of us could argue that she didn’t deserve vengeance. And we both couldn’t help but believe that the world would be a better place without the rapists and murderers who had ended her life.
I’d believed she’d gotten them all. Her thoughts had long since calmed, no longer obsessed with the desire to break and tear, maim and mutilate.
But as the smell of blood flooded the house like a tsunami, I immediately assumed that she’d discovered another accomplice to her death. Though I did not think very highly of her in general, my faith in her ability to do no harm was strong.
All my expectations were turned upside down as she cried out in panic, calling for Carlisle’s help. And then, beneath the shrill sound of her distress, I caught the sound of one very feeble heartbeat.
I raced from my room, finding her in the front parlor before she’d even finished her cry. Carlisle was already there. Rosalie, hair unusually disordered, her favorite dress stained with blood so heavily that the skirt’s hem was dyed deep crimson, carried in her arms a giant of a human man. He was barely conscious, eyes wandering the room out of sync with each other. His skin had been torn again and again by evenly spaced slashes, some of his bones clearly broken beneath.
“Save him!” Rosalie almost screamed at Carlisle. “Please!”
Please please please, her thoughts begged.
I saw what the words cost her. When she inhaled to replace the air she’d used, she flinched against the power of the fresh blood so close to her mouth. She held the man farther from herself, turning her face away.
Carlisle understood her anguish. He swiftly removed the man from her arms and laid him on the parlor rug with gentle hands. The man was too far gone even to groan.
I watched, shocked by the strange tableau, automatically holding my breath. I should have already left the house. I could hear Esme’s thoughts, quickly retreating. Once she’d caught the scent of blood, she’d known to flee, though she was just as confused as I.
It’s too late, Carlisle realized, examining the man. He was loath to disappoint Rosalie; though she was clearly unhappy in this second life he’d given her, she rarely asked for anything from him. Certainly never with this level of agony. He must be family, Carlisle thought. How can I bear to hurt her again?
The big man—not that much older than I was, now that I really looked at his face—closed his eyes. His shallow breathing stuttered.
“What are you waiting for?” Rosalie shrieked. He’s dying! He’s dying!
“Rosalie, I…” Carlisle held out his bloodied hands helplessly.
Then an image surfaced in her mind, and I understood exactly what she was asking for.
“She doesn’t mean for you to heal him,” I translated quickly. “She means for you to save him.”
Rosalie’s eyes flashed to me, a look of intense gratitude altering her features in a way I’d never seen before. For one instant, I remembered how very beautiful she was.
We didn’t have long to wait for Carlisle’s decision.
Oh! Carlisle thought. And then I saw exactly how much he would do for Rosalie, how much he felt he owed her. There was barely any deliberation.
He was already kneeling beside the broken figure as he shooed us away. “It’s not safe for you to stay,” he said, his face inclining toward the man’s throat.
I grabbed Rosalie’s bloodied arm as I rushed to the door. She didn’t resist. We both escaped the house, not pausing till we’d reached the nearby Tennessee River and immersed ourselves.
There, lying in the cool mud at the river’s edge, Rosalie letting the blood sluice from her dress and her skin, we had our first real conversation.
She didn’t speak often, just showed me in her mind how she’d found the man, a total stranger, about to die, and how something in his face had made that future intolerable to her. She didn’t have words for why. She didn’t have words for how—how she’d managed to complete her harrowing journey without killing him herself. I saw her run for miles, faster than she’d ever moved before, aching to satisfy her thirst the entire way. While she relived it all, her mind was unguarded and vulnerable. She was trying to understand, too, almost as confused as I was.
I wasn’t looking for yet another addition to my family. I’d never been particularly concerned about what Rosalie wanted or needed. But suddenly, seeing this all through her eyes, I could only root for her happiness. For the first time, we were on the same side.
We couldn’t return for a while, though Rosalie was anxious in the extreme to know what was happening. I assured her that Carlisle would have come for us if he’d been unsuccessful. So for now we would just have to wait till it was safe.
Those hours changed us both. When Carlisle finally came to call us home, we returned as brother and sister.
The pause as I remembered how I’d come to love my sister was not very long. Bella was still waiting for the rest of the story. I thought of where I’d left off: Rosalie, dripping with blood, holding her face as far away from Emmett as she could. Her posture in the image reminded me of a more recent memory: me struggling to carry a lightheaded Bella to the nurse’s office. It was an interesting juxtaposition.
“I’m only beginning to guess how difficult that journey was for her,” I concluded. Our fingers were knotted together. I lifted our hands and, with the back of mine, stroked her cheek.
The last bit of red light in the sky faded to deep purple.
“But she made it,” Bella said after a short silence, eager for me to continue.
“Yes. She saw something in his face that made her strong enough.” Amazing that she’d been right. Astonishing that they’d matched up perfectly, like two halves of a whole. Fate or astronomical good luck? I’d never been able to decide. “And they’ve been together ever since. Sometimes they live separately from us, as a married couple.” And oh, how I appreciated those times. I loved Emmett and Rosalie separately, but Emmett and Rosalie alone together, heard only by my inescapable mental reach, were a grueling ordeal. “But the younger we pretend to be, the longer we can stay in any given place. Forks seemed perfect, so we all enrolled in high school.” I laughed. “I suppose we’ll have to go to their wedding in a few years, again.”
Rosalie loved to get married. The chance to do it over and over was probably her favorite thing about immortality.
“Alice and Jasper?” Bella asked.
“Alice and Jasper are two very rare creatures. They both developed a conscience, as we refer to it, with no outside guidance. Jasper belonged to another… family.” I avoided the correct word, controlling a shiver as I thought of his beginnings. “A very different kind of family. He became depressed, and he wandered on his own. Alice found him. Like me, she has certain gifts above and beyond the norm for our kind.”
This surprised Bella enough to break through her calm façade. “Really? But you said you were the only one who could hear people’s thoughts.”
“That’s true. She knows other things. She sees things—things that might happen, things that are coming.” Things that now would never happen. I was past the worst of it. Though still… it bothered me how hazy the new vision had been, the one I could live with. The other—Alice and Bella both white and cold—had been so much clearer. That didn’t matter. It couldn’t. I’d subdued one impossible future and I would triumph over this one, too. “But it’s very subjective,” I continued, hearing the harder edge in my voice. “The future isn’t set in stone. Things change.”
I glanced at her cream and apricot skin, almost to reassure myself that she was as she should be, and then looked away when she caught my gaze. I could never be certain how much she was reading in my eyes.
“What kinds of things does she see?” Bella wanted to know.
I gave her the safe answers, the proven prophecies.
“She saw Jasper and knew that he was looking for her before he knew it himself.” Their union had been a magical thing. Whenever Jasper thought of it, the entire household relaxed into dreamy contentment, so powerful were his communal emotions. “She saw Carlisle and our family, and they came together to find us.”
I’d missed that first introduction, when Alice and Jasper had presented themselves to an extremely wary Carlisle, a frightened Esme, and a hostile Rosalie. It was Jasper’s warlike appearance that had them all so apprehensive, but Alice knew exactly what to say to ease their anxiety. Of course she knew exactly what to say. She’d envisioned every possible version of that momentous meeting, and then chosen the best. It was no accident that Emmett and I had been away. She’d preferred the smoother scene without the family’s primary defenders in residence.
It was hard to believe how firmly entrenched they were by the time Emmett and I arrived, just a few days later. We were both shocked, and Emmett was ready for battle the second he laid eyes on Jasper. But Alice ran forward to throw her arms around me before a word could be spoken.
I wasn’t frightened by what might have been construed as an attack. Her thoughts were so sure of me, so full of love for me, I thought I’d had the first memory loss of my second life. Because this tiny immortal knew me perfectly, better than anyone else in my current or former family. Who was she?
Oh, Edward! At last! My brother! We’re finally together!
And then, with her arms tight around my waist—and my own arms hesitantly coming to rest around her shoulders—she thought swiftly through her life from her first memory to that very moment, and then forward in time through the highlights of our next few years together. It felt very strange to realize in that instant that now I knew her, too.
“This is Alice, Emmett,” I told him, still embracing my new sister. Emmett’s aggressive pose changed to one of confusion. “She’s part of our family. And that’s Jasper. You’re going to love him.”
There were so many stories about Alice, so many miracles and phenomena, paradoxes and enigmas, I could have spent the rest of the week just telling Bella the bullet-point version. Instead, I gave her a few of the simpler, more mechanical details.
“She’s most sensitive to nonhumans. She always sees, for example, when another group of our kind is coming near. And any threat they may pose.” Alice had become one of the family’s defenders, too.
“Are there a lot of… your kind?” Bella asked, sounding a little shaken by the idea.
“No, not many,” I assured her. “But most won’t settle in any one place. Only those like us, who’ve given up hunting you people”—I raised an eyebrow at her and squeezed her hand—“can live together with humans for any length of time. We’ve only found one other family like ours, in a small village in Alaska. We lived together for a time, but there were so many of us that we became too noticeable.” Also Tanya, the matriarch of that clan, was persistent to the point of harassment. “Those of us who live… differently tend to band together.”
“And the others?”
We’d reached her home. It was empty, no lights in any windows. I parked in her usual spot and turned the engine off. The sudden quiet felt very intimate, there in the dark.
“Nomads, for the most part,” I answered. “We’ve all lived that way at times. It gets tedious, like anything else. But we run across the others now and then, because most of us prefer the North.”
“Why is that?”
I grinned and nudged her gently with my elbow. “Did you have your eyes open this afternoon? Do you think I could walk down the street in the sunlight without causing traffic accidents? There’s a reason why we chose the Olympic Peninsula, one of the most sunless places in the world. It’s nice to be able to go outside in the day. You wouldn’t believe how tired you can get of nighttime in eighty-odd years.”
“So that’s where the legends came from,” she said, nodding to herself.
“Probably.”
There was actually a precise source behind the legends, but that wasn’t something I wanted to get into. The Volturi were very far away and very much absorbed in their mission to police the vampire world. They would never affect Bella’s life beyond the lore they’d concocted to protect immortals’ privacy.
“And Alice came from another family, like Jasper?” she asked.
“No, and that is a mystery. Alice doesn’t remember her human life at all.”
I’d seen that first memory. Bright morning sunlight, a light mist hanging in the air. Tangled grass surrounding her, broad oak trees shading the hollow where she woke. Besides that, a blankness, no sense of identity or purpose. She’d looked at her pale skin, shimmering in the sun, and not known who or what she was. And then the first vision had taken her.
A man’s face, fierce but also broken, scarred but beautiful. Deep red eyes and a mane of golden hair. With this face came a profound conviction of belonging. And then she saw him speaking a name.
Alice.
Her name, she realized.
The visions told her who she was, or shaped her into who she would become. These were the only help she would get.
“And she doesn’t know who created her,” I told Bella. “She awoke alone. Whoever made her walked away, and none of us understand why, or how, he could. If she hadn’t had that other sense, if she hadn’t seen Jasper and Carlisle and known that she would someday become one of us, she probably would have turned into a total savage.”
Bella pondered this in silence. I was sure it was difficult for her to comprehend. It had taken my family a while to adjust, as well. I wondered what her next question would be.
And then her stomach gurgled, and I realized that we’d been together all day and she’d eaten nothing in that time. Ah, I needed to keep better focused on her human needs!