Chapter Seven
I’m home alone when the doorbell rings.
The panic is immediate. There are too many exits. Too many entrances. Too many people who might be too curious, too drunk, or too angry, and they could come knocking with the taste of too much vengeance on their tongues. The backwoods raving lunatics determined to right a wrong, home-brewed moonshine in their bellies and the rage of a thousand scared townsfolk singing through their veins. The suburban helmet heads in their minivans and their herringbone, their baby monitors in their back pockets, and the numbers to their security systems programmed into their cell phones.
The teachers who should have seen me coming.
The classmates who knew it all along.
It could be anyone.
I tiptoe through the house and slink up to the peephole, but it’s not a backwoods anarchist, or a suburban housewife, or even a concerned citizen. It’s not Mr. Welburn with his fuzzy grey hair and that wrinkle between his eyes, on the hunt for blood. It’s not Stephanie Walsh with her nose in the air and her cheerleading skirt rolled up two extra inches, searching for rumors. It’s not old Mrs. Franklin with her ugly toy poodle and her gout, looking for gossip.
It’s a guy in a suit who looks likes he’s prepared to sell me a vacuum. Or god.
“I’m not home!” I yell through the door and watch him startle through my fisheye view. He looks hard right at the peep hole, and I swear he can see me through it.
“Yes. Yes, you are,” he says simply.
He looks sick. Like terminal sick. Like his blood cells stopped working, and he’s been surviving on air and not much else. Like he caught some weird disease that snatches away the color in his eyes and leaves him hunched over, pale as snow. His hands are shaky, and his cheeks are hollow, and his eyes are empty and dark. He’s dressed in a suit that looks limp and heavy, hanging off his shoulders. Tie loose. Buttons undone. Shirt wrinkled.
Young and half-dead and beautiful.
“Let me in, Bella Swan.”
When he says it, my name, my heart grinds to a stuttering halt. My blood freezes. My skin goes creepy-crawly cold. I don’t even have time to wonder how he knows it before I’m flinging the door open, trying to look bigger than I am. I straighten my spine and throw my chin up and stick my chest out like I don’t actually weigh just a hundred odd pounds. Like I’m a thousand pounds of gravity. A million pounds of concrete. A zillion tons of earth. The unbearable weight of the universe, not some girl with bird bones or paper skin or a heart like a helium balloon.
His nostrils flare.
“What do you want?”
“Let me in,” he says, his voice as rough and worn and as tired as his face.
“I don’t even know your name. I’m not stupid,” I hiss.
“Edward.”
I wait for it, but he doesn’t offer up anything more.
“That’s it? Just, Edward?”
He nods, only once, and he still hasn’t blinked.
“Well, just Edward, I don’t need a vacuum. Thanks, anyway.” I step back and start to shut the door, but then his hand is splayed across the wood next to my face, and the door is stationary, and all I can think is that his skin smells like the very middle of the forest where the oldest trees grow.
“I’m not selling anything.”
“I don’t need Jesus either,” I say.
“Come with me.”
Before I can turn to run, flee, scramble away, he has a hand around my wrist and has dragged me clear out of the house. I’m off the porch, into the grass, my bare feet fumbling along behind him in an effort to keep up. He is fast, despite looking so sick, but his hand is freezing cold, and he’s breathing hard with a wheezing sound in his throat that cannot be healthy. He marches up to the edge of the forest where the elderberry and the sumac stand shoulder to shoulder, like the front line of an army defending something that you think is big and grand but is really only small and meek, and maybe not even worth defending. It’s not raining, but the fog is so thick you could slice through it. Even from a few feet away, standing staring off into the trees, he looks like a shadow.
“I’m not going in there with you.” I halt, wrenching myself out of his grip, my hands shaking. I’m sure, really sure, that he’s going to take me into that dark forest and pull some self-righteous revenge-killing on me. He doesn’t look like a housewife, or a backwoods hillbilly. In that suit, he looks like a goddamn assassin.
“Is that so?” He’d probably deny it, but I swear to god he’s laughing at me.
“No fucking way. You’re gonna take me in there and beat me to death and then bury me under a tree. They’ll never even find me.”
“I have no intention of doing that.” He licks his lips, the inside of his mouth red against his sickly skin, eyes all over my face. He takes a step closer, a hand floating shaky out toward me. “You’re giving up too easily,” he says.
“What?” I stammer. He’s too close, too stern, and too strong. It’s making my head spin funny. All I see is the flash of his hand near my face, and then he’s pulling me through the forest faster than my feet can keep up with. A blind stumble through the trees with my hand held tight in his, and there is no warmth coming up through his bones. There is no give to his skin, no take from his muscles. No flush or thump or breath. He skids to a halt, dropping me into the leaves beneath a gnarled tree before I even have time to wonder what all that means.
Edward looks up at the sky for a moment, breathing steady and slow, until he’s no longer wheezing. Even still, his chest doesn’t move, and his eyes don’t blink, and he’s not even flushed from running through the woods like that. I turn red just walking up my stairs.
“Dig.” He turns to point at the ground between my knees, tone oddly bland like he didn’t just run me out into the middle of the woods to kill me.
“Are you serious?” My mouth drops open.
“Deadly.” He isn’t even looking at me, and I’m not even remotely gonna do that.
“No.”
Edward scowls at me. “It’s about Alice.”
I gulp and shove my hands into the loam. My fingers push through the wet and damp and cold, and I try to ignore the rotten egg smell that drifts up from between my knees with each handful I push aside. Try to ignore the skittering feet of insects and the wet slime of worms. Blindly digging and digging and digging until he tells me to stop by pushing me aside. I scramble to my feet, my legs covered in dirt and my hands caked in mud, to watch him finish the job. Edward pulls something from the hole and brushes off the mud, the dull glint of metal in the moonlight.
“What is it?” I ask, peering around his shoulder. He holds it up, a sharp blade with a wooden handle that looks oddly familiar. I feel the sink in my stomach before he even tells me what it is.
“This is the knife you stabbed me with. I buried it here.”
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