Grim and Darling

Chapter Twenty Three

Edward won’t stop smiling at me. It’s weird. Usually he looks tired and sick and as worn through as my oldest shirt, the one with the holes in the elbows and the hem all frayed. But tonight, he’s smiling.

“What’s up with your face?”

“My face?” He brings a hand to his cheek, like he’s checking for stray blood the same way someone thinks they might have traces of their dinner left on their chin.

“You’re all smiles tonight. It’s weird.”

“Weird?”

“Yeah. Really weird.”

“You stood up for me today.” The smile just gets bigger, and if I didn’t know he was a hundred- year-old vampire, I’d think he was just another teen boy with a crush. On me. I blush hard enough to break out in a heat rash.

“You were spying on me?”

“I was keeping an eye on you.” His smile falters a bit. “Newton is bad news; you shouldn’t have gotten in that car.”

“Was it Alice? The woman in the grass? Was it Alice who did it?” I glance off toward the highway, my mind zooming down the asphalt until I was standing back in front of that cute little house with the flowers and the porch and the dead woman in the lawn. I knew they’d taken her away, carted her off to the morgue, but in my mind, she will always be there, sprawled in the grass like a broken doll.

Edward’s smile slips completely, and he glances away with a heavy sigh. “Yes.”

“I thought she was getting better.”

“I never said that.”

“She got away,” I ask without actually asking.

“She’s tricky like that. It’s easy to lose her.”

“Yeah, no shit. I know the feeling.”

“It’s your fault, in a way. The fact that she got away.”

“Mine?” I glare at him because keeping an eye on Alice has nothing to do with me these days. Even if I could be the one to watch over her, there’s no way I could stop her if she decided to off someone. Or me.

“Yes. You’ve been such a distraction lately. I had to get away. Clear my head. You smell so strong that I had to run clear to Calgary to do that. She took advantage of my absence.”

“You ran to Calgary?” That was a decent seven hundred miles away. “I stink that bad?”

“I never said you stink,” he chuckles. “In fact, you smell so good, there are times I have to keep myself from leaping on you.”

“Leaping on me, and then what?” I’m basically suspicious of everything now, and when a vampire tells you you smell good and he wants to leap on you, there’s a high probability you wouldn’t come out of that situation alive.

Edward leans in, too fast and too slow, not in human time at all. Just a blur and then a halt that happens before I can blink, and he’s holding me just half an inch off his lips. Just holding me, not breathing and not blinking and not moving any further, and god, he frustrates the hell out of me.

“Kiss you,” he exhales. “Leap on you and kiss the shit out of you.”

Holy.

Fuck.

“Do it then,” I whisper. “I bet I taste delicious.”

“I’m certain of it.” His voice is a waiver. An exhale. A falter. Then he gives in.

This time, it’s not my forehead.

He tastes like the best kind of wrong. Like a fatal sting of poison. Like the final sinful act that gets you permanently kicked out of church, or school, or heaven. He tastes like butterscotch and burnt sugar and the wrong end of a lit match.

The flame end.

We could kiss forever. For days. For hours. I never want to stop, never want him to stop, but he does. It’s not because of me. It’s not him or that maybe it’s wrong, or that maybe it’s so right it hurts. He pulls away because there’s a scream that rips through the still, heavy air around us like a hot knife through cold butter.

Alice.

Her little stone fingers wrap around my wrist and clamp down so hard that I feel the bones grate together before they crumble under the pressure, and I’m just about to cry out in splintered pain when her teeth find purchase. Deep in my shoulder, clear down through the muscle and the cartilage to the joint and everything goes numb and warm and lovely. She bites again, higher this time, and the numb just gets number, and the warm just gets warmer, and then she bites me again. So close to my neck. Again. So close to the end. She’s moaning like I taste even better than she imagined, better than any bunny ever could, and the numb is just pure bliss for two solid seconds before she’s being ripped away.

Her teeth leave ragged gashes across my shoulder blade, and her fingernails scrape five long     trenches down the length of my arm.

Edward is right next to me, panting, his hands in fists and shoulders hunched as Alice lands in the grass an entire football field away from us. She’s on her feet immediately and racing back like a speeding bullet as the blood starts to well up and drip down my arm, splattering my shoes. Edward’s hand slams into Alice, square in her chest, stopping her cold not two feet away from me. Her eyes are clouded, and her mouth is in a snarl, and her hands are reaching for me, but she looks up with Edward with something like clarity in her eyes.

“Go,” he growls, his hand still planted firm on her chest.

Alice blinks, the blood lust ebbing as her eyes clear, and her mouth slackens.

“W-what?” she stutters, eyes gone wide, hands dropping to her sides.

“Go.” His voice is grit and grime. Anger and impatience and exhaustion. He sounds resigned, like the project he’s been working on for years is now a failure, and he’s finally throwing in the towel. Giving up. Calling it quits. Except the towel is my sister, and the project is her endless undead livelihood, and I think I look just as shocked as she does.

“You don’t mean that,” she whispers.

“I do. I can’t help you anymore. I’ve tried, Alice. You have to go.”

With one last look at me, Alice snarls, her eyes narrowed and her mouth full of poison, literal and figurative. “I hate you,” she hisses, and then she’s gone, the trees quivering and the fog boiling in her wake. Edward watches her go, eyes on the spot she disappeared into for a long, long time before he turns toward me. His gaze finds my face, my shoulder, my elbow, my fingers, and then the puddle of blood at my feet.

“Does it hurt?” he asks, gazing at the blood splashing my sneakers, his hands reaching out toward me. That numb feeling starts to ebb away, replaced by a pain that I can’t even begin to describe. A burn of ten thousand supernovas, of ten thousand acres of forest fire, of ten thousand eyes of god. All of it in my shoulder.

I wrench away, moaning as I shuffle backward.

“Not as much as when you fucking lied to me,” I hiss, tears stinging my eyes for the first time in three years. I can’t cry over Alice, but I can cry over Edward.

If that doesn’t say something really fucked up about me, I don’t know what does.

“I didn’t want to, Bella, but what choice did I have?”

“Three years. Three years, Edward! That’s over a thousand days. I know that probably means nothing to you by now, but that’s a thousand days, and I suffered for every single one of those.” My voice cracks at the end because even as I say it, I can barely believe it. I can barely believe how long Alice has been gone, how long I’ve been living in this suspended hell, how long I’ve been treading water while the answer was sitting in some abandoned house not three miles away.

“You think I haven’t suffered?” Edward’s face is tight in the middle, eyebrows pulled in and his mouth in a thin, hard line. He’s looking at me like I have no idea what suffering is. Like my weak human mind couldn’t possibly comprehend his kind of pain. Maybe I can’t, but he’s partially responsible for my version of this suffering thing, and I hate him for it. I hate him for making me want him. I hate him for making me think about him, and for making me think he was helping me. I hate him for keeping Alice away but also for knowing that it was the best thing to do.

I hate him, and I don’t hate him, and that makes me hate him even more.

“You made me suffer,” I gasp, the fire in my shoulder starting to spread. “You kept me from the truth, you kept her, and now look at me. Look at her.” I whip my good arm toward the silent forest where Alice disappeared. “What am I supposed to do with my life now? Just go on like this didn’t happen? Like she’s not out there somewhere eating animals, or god forbid, people? Am I just supposed to forget about her, about you? Go back to school like I’m not completely different from the person I was last month?”

He doesn’t answer. Instead, his gaze slides slow and steady down my arm, down my fingers, down to my feet where the grass is drowning in a thick coating of my bright red blood. I watch his eyes go from gold to black in a split second. His skin shifts paler than ever, and he takes a mindless step toward me.

“Edward,” I say, but he doesn’t respond. He just takes another step.

“Edward, stop.”

Another step.

A tongue across his lips.

A twitch in his fingers.

“Stop,” I say, just a whisper.

“Bella, I‒” He licks his lips again and takes another step. Just one more and he’ll be right up on me with his chest to mine and his hips to mine and his mouth probably on my neck, and what the fuck is happening right now?

“Stop!” I scream, right in his face, and even that doesn’t snap him out of it. “Edward!”

My voice cracks and splits in my throat, and it’s painful, but it’s nothing compared to the venom in my arm or the break in my heart or Edward’s teeth buried in my neck.

Next

AN:

EEPEEP!

*runs to Hadley's arms*

Grim and Darling

CHAPTER TWENTY two

“So, you like that Edward guy, huh?”

I choke on my spaghetti. You’d think it was the only thing either of us knew how to cook, or that we really, really loved marinara, but we don’t, and there’s lots of other meals both of us are pretty good at cooking. This one, though, this one is just easy and simple, and there’s a comfort about it that neither of us could explain. So we just stick with it.

“I, uh -” I sputter.

“Don’t even try lying to me.” Dad grins. “You know shit-all about cars. Tell him that, next time, he’s gonna need a better excuse to get you away from the house.”

“We really did go look at a car.” At least that part is the truth.

“You know, I checked up on the old Cullen house.” Dad eyes the meatball on the end of his fork. “That place is a downright shit hole.”

I nod. It is.

“He’s out there by himself, huh? All alone?” Dad is fishing again, cop fishing, which isn’t much different from regular fishing, but I can’t tell him about Alice. I just can’t. He deserves to know, but I can’t ruin him like that. For one, he’d never believe me. Two, if he found out it was his sweet little baby girl who killed all those people, Alice, the culprit behind all of his unsolved murders, it would wreck him. Devastate him, maybe even more than her disappearance. Plus, I’m still not entirely convinced her current situation is better than her just being gone with no explanation. Was an eternity as a creature of the night better than being dead?

Maybe.

But maybe not.

“He registered for school yet?” Dad shoves some more spaghetti down, and I try not to let mine come back up. Of course he thought Edward was in high school. That smooth skin and the hair and the jaw, he was a hundred-year-old vampire who didn’t look a day over prom, pep rallies, and locker combinations.

“He has a GED,” I hedge, nervous and mutilating my meal with my fork.

“Smart kid. Why don’t you do that?”

I glare across the table at him. “I’ve asked you. You said no.”

“Really?” Dad’s eyebrows furrow, and he squints at me like he’s trying to remember that conversation. “When?”

“Two years ago. When I was desperate not to go back to school because this whole town treats me like a leper. Remember?”

I can’t help it that my words come out harsh and mean and full of venom, but fuck. I cried at this same stupid table for days telling him how bad it was. I didn’t talk to him for two whole weeks after he refused to let me homeschool, and it was the longest two weeks of my life. I hated not speaking to him, but he just didn’t get it. He didn’t hear the whispers or see the ugly shit scrawled on my locker in permanent marker. Didn’t understand that the teachers all looked at me with an equal mixture of pity and disgust, or that the students all avoided me like I carried some highly contagious disease. He didn’t know that I spent lunch time in one restroom stall or another, or that I was failing PE because I stopped going. The locker room was worse than prison, and twice, I’d been pretty sure the cheerleaders were going to drown me in a toilet before they let me up for air.

“Well, maybe this year you pull out.” He shrugs like this is no big deal. “Bust through the coursework. Thought about college yet?”

I just stare at him. Here he is making conversation about post-high school education like everything is normal, like everything is the same, like I have all the time in the world to daydream about college. All I can think about is little vampire Alice three miles away from us, probably munching on bunnies and planning her wedding to Edward.

“No,” I grumble.

---

I’m hoofing it to Edward’s place when the yelp of a police siren has me flattened up against a tree trunk, my heart up in my throat. Newton slows to a crawl beside me, the white cruiser dingy from the wet asphalt roads, his window scrolling down between us. He doesn’t take off his sunglasses, and he doesn’t stop chewing a big fat wad of gum, and my stomach doesn’t give up the disgusted roll it always does whenever I see him.

“Got a call about a suspicious death out on Lexington.” He smacks his gum between his teeth. “Want to come?”

“Why?” I scrunch my nose up and stay put.

“Well, I don’t know, kid,” he huffs. “You’re always snooping around; I thought you’d want to tag along.” Newton throws the car in gear and looks dead ahead like I’m not even there. “Either way, you’ve got three seconds to decide.”

I’m planted ass to leather in the front seat of his cruiser before the tires even start to roll.

The whole car smells like cigarettes - a hot, stale, rotten smell like a chemical truck upended on a highway somewhere, and the hot sun on the hot asphalt cooked the shit out of the whole mess of toxic waste. And then Newton rolled around in it.

I lower my window four inches.

“Your dad ok, kid?”

“Quit calling me that,” I snap, arms across my chest before I even have time to think about it. I lean into the wind rushing into the cab, forehead to the glass. “I’m not a kid.”

“Yeah, you are.” Newton nods like he’s the end-all and be-all on these kinds of things. “Your dad though, he ok?” he repeats.

“I guess,” I grumble, looking out the window at the green blur of the world flying by. “Depends on what you think ‘ok’ means.”

“He’s been weird lately. Seems lost, kinda.”

“You do remember, right?” My voice sounds like the bad end of an atomic explosion, acerbic and burning. “What happened to us?”

“Of course, Bella. Who could forget?” He turns a little too hard off the highway, and the rest of my body smashes up against the door. “But he’s been different lately. Quiet, grouchy. I’m just wondering if everything is ok at home?”

“Why are you so interested?”

“I don’t know. I care about the guy, you know? He’s been better to me than my old man ever was. He’s like a father-”

“Don’t!” I cut him off. “He’s my father, not yours.”

We grind to a stop at the side of the road, and I realize that we made it clear out to east side of town in the time it took to have that awkward mess of a conversation. I glance over Newton’s shoulder at the little blue house tucked between two towering trees, a mess of wildflowers spilling around the front steps, and an even bigger mess of uniformed personnel crawling all over the yard.

There’s a woman sprawled in the grass.

She’s in a yellow dress, face down. Her legs are akimbo, and one arm is at such an unnatural angle that it can only have come out of the socket. Her neck is torn open. Her skin is blotchy, blue and purple. Her dark hair is matted in the back. Her feet are bare. I wonder if she suffered or struggled or screamed. I wonder if she was drug outside or ran out here on her own. I wonder if, when they pick her up, she’ll leave a body-shaped hollow in the grass.

I wonder if the ground beneath her face smells like her last breath.

I wonder if this was Alice, too.

Newton swaggers over to a short, mustached guy who I think is either called Sanchez or Hernandez, but I can’t remember which. He joined the force three years ago, and I followed him for four days before I decided he probably didn’t murder Alice. He had a penchant for My Little Ponies and life-sized furry fetish costumes, and if that’s the worst he could be, then he probably wasn’t all that into murdering little girls.

I stand at the edge of the grass, six feet away from the dead woman, which is too far to see the bit of her face that’s peeking out from underneath her hair, but not far enough that I can’t smell the faint traces of blood and guts and rot. She has to be at least twelve hours old, a fact which I fist pump myself for knowing when I hear Hernandez/Sanchez confirm it to Newton.

“Ten hours, give or take,” he says in that no-nonsense cop talk I hate more than just about anything else. No feeling. No emotion. Like they were talking about a car engine. “Found by the neighbors thirty minutes ago. Throat gouged up real bad. The living room is a mess, most of the struggle happened in there, but there’s no sign of forced entry. Door was unlocked, nothing broken in.”

“Forensics?” Newton asks.

“On their way, but you know Webber. He couldn’t be on time even if he tried.”

Both men scoff and continue to stare at the woman laid out before them. There’s a rookie poking around her feet with a pair of tweezers, and a mid-level brushing the door handle for prints.The two lone female officers are deep in conversation on the far side of the yard, both looking shaken, and a whole mess of uniforms are combing the perimeter of the yard, peering under bushes and kicking aside piles of leaves.

“Just seems odd, you know,” Newton mumbles, eyes glued. “It’s like that old man out on the Rez a few weeks back.”

“This? Nah.” Hernandez/Sanchez shakes his head and folds his arms the other way, shifting his weight.

“Then why’s her neck all torn up like that, huh? That’s no swift cut; that’s a damn hack job.”

“Old man died less brutal than this. Just some blood and some bloat.”

“Ain’t much of a struggle to take out an old man in a chair. Healthy lady, though? She put up a fight.” Newton is staring at the mangled neck of the dead woman. “There’s that new guy, came to town a couple of years back. Young kid. Lives out at the old Cullen place.”

He’s getting way too close for comfort.  

“This wasn’t Edward.”

The words are out of my mouth before I can even stop them. Both Newton and Hernandez/Sanchez turn to look at me, Newton with his jerked-up eyebrow and Hernandez/Sanchez with his scowl, and oh shit.

I should not have said that.

“Edward who?” Hernandez/Sanchez asks. He doesn’t even seem fazed that his boss’s kid is standing there, a teenager at a crime scene. In fact, I think it’s the first time he’s noticed me, ever.

“Edward Cullen.” I look down at my sneakers and kick at the dirt and mumble between my teeth. “He didn’t do this.”

“And how, exactly, do you know that?” Newton’s raised eyebrows are now slouched down low over his nose, his jaw tight, and he’s scowling at me. I’m probably going to have to find my own ride home. I straighten up, stick out my chin, and meet him right in the eyes.

“Because I was with him last night.”

Next

AN:

The next chapter is my favorite one. I literally squealed when I was writing it. 

All my love and thanks and adoration to HH. She puts up with a lot from me, my needy phone calls and my questionable comma usage, but still seems to want to keep me around. 

Thanks for reading!

<3

Grim and Darling

Chapter Twenty One

I wake up on Newton’s front porch.

It’s the kind of dark that only happens at the very middle of the night, so black that everything is blue. The kind of dark that only happens at the very middle of the ocean, so blue that everything is black. All the windows are dark. I listen, but I can’t hear anything. I know he’s in there, Newton. Passed out on his couch, the carpet littered in spent 40s and half-smoked cigarettes. Asleep at the kitchen table with his hand down his pants and the remnants of a pint of whiskey spilled in front of him.

What a place for my head to take me.

What a place to wake up.

Everything is dark, but I can see him. Edward is standing in the grass just a few feet off the porch, his suit blending into the black and his skin glowing pale in the moonlight. The hollows of his eyes are midnight, and his mouth is a dark gash, and he’s staring at me just the same way he always does, his face gone slack and his tongue edging his lips.

“You’re always staring at me.” I pull myself upright and take inventory. At least I’m wearing shoes. For that matter, at least I’m wearing clothing. At least I’m not naked, or half-naked. At least I’m on the porch and not inside the house.

“I can’t help it,” he says and shrugs like he doesn’t think it bad or creepy, or like he’s at the top of the food chain, and I’m at the bottom.

“It makes me nervous.”

“Why?”

“Because sometimes it feels like you’re planning on how to eat me.”

“I suppose that hunger and adoration can look alike.” He swallows hard, his throat flexing, and he’s shrugging again. “Both are painful if left ignored for too long. Both make your insides twist up. Both leave you lightheaded and weak-kneed.” His eyes meet mine. “It’s been a long time, decades even, but I think I know what this is.”

“What what is?”

“I’m feeling very enamoured of you,” he says. His hand drifts to his chest, and I wonder if he misses the feeling of his heartbeat, the thump under his ribs, or if it’s been gone so long he can’t even remember it.

“Can you speak in modern talk, please? This isn’t 1915,” I grumble.

“I like you, Bella. I like you a lot.”

“You can’t.”

“Can’t I?” His brows furrow, and he looks confused.

“No. You can’t. Because you promised my sister you’d marry her.” My mouth is so full of sarcasm, it almost chokes me.

“Bella,” he sighs. “Be reasonable. She’s eight.”

“No shit,” I snap. “That’s why you don’t promise to marry her.”

Edward breathes deeply and looks up at the sky for a moment, shaking his head like he’s waging some internal debate. “I’m going to tell you what it’s like, what it was like for her. It won’t be easy to hear, but I think you need to know.” He looks right at me like I’m supposed to say something, supposed to tell him to go on, but I stay silent and scowling like we’re in some gun-drawn duel. Like this is the Old West and we’re ten paces apart in the dust rather than staring each other down from the yard of an asshole who, up until just a few days ago, I was convinced had murdered my sister.

“I’d just come back, that night. I do that, occasionally. Show up to check on things, make sure the house is still standing.” He glances off into the tree in the general direction of his haunted-by-my-sister house. “Unfortunately, it still is.”

“What does this have to do with Alice?” I’m tired and cold and beyond the point of wanting to think about that night anymore, or ever again. Nothing turned out like I thought it would, nothing was right side up or rational or made even the smallest amount of sense anymore. I’d give anything for a really bad case of amnesia right now, just so I could move on with my life.

“I ran into him, the man who broke into your house.” Edward looks back at me. “It was dark. I was tired. And hungry. Very hungry. I hadn’t eaten in months, and suddenly there was blood, blood that smelled pure and clean and delicious, and I... ” He hesitates, swallowing hard before he continues. “I can’t tell you how it takes over. How everything just stops. How nothing will satiate that kind of burn.”

“You killed him,” I say, my voice sounding as flat and dead as I feel.

“I drained him,” Edward corrects me. “In less than a minute. I drained him dry, and it felt so good. There’s nothing like it, Bella. Human blood. It’s like a shot of lightning. Like swallowing a meteor or the sun. It makes me feel like I could move a mountain. Like I could fly if I wanted to. I couldn’t stop. I needed more.”

“More,” I repeat.

“He had her with him. She was bleeding. The frenzy, it just - when I realized it was a girl I was drinking from, by the time I was full enough to stop, I had very nearly killed her.” His voice is so low, I have to strain to hear him, and even then, I can barely believe it. “There wasn’t even enough blood left for her heart to pump; she didn’t have a pulse. She was grey and limp and so very near to gone that I bit her, as a last resort.”

“Last resort to what?” I wheeze, my lungs empty, and my heart at a standstill. This is the moment. I know it. He is the harbinger of doom, the bearer of bad news, the straw that breaks the camel’s back.

And I am the camel.

“Death,” he says “It was either this, or death.”

“I think I’d rather she be dead.”

“Is that really true, though?” He peers at me through the dark, eyes wary and brow furrowed. “Because I’ve watched you look for her for three years, and you never gave up. Even when you should have, you never gave up on her. You kept looking. I think you believed she was alive.”

“But she’s not,” I spit.

“Not in the way you’re used to. But she’s still here.”

I glare at him. Narrow my eyes and harden my mouth and stick out my chin and glare. He huffs, something hard and harsh in his chest, and he just keeps talking rather than acknowledge me.

“When we change, it takes a few days. Nothing is immediate. Everything has to burn up for it to be replaced. It’s wretched, painful in a way humans can’t comprehend. And it’s worse for children. Their tolerance is low.” Edward looks off toward the woods as though he can see his house through the miles of trees. “She screamed for days,” he says. “It was terrible.”

“And ever since then?”

“I’ve been trying to teach her to control it, to curb her taste for humans, but it took twenty years of fasting for me to learn it myself. It’s been difficult. I’ve been keeping her here, away from town, because she isn’t ready yet. Sometimes she get so bad that I just have to tell her what she wants to hear. Of course I’m not going to marry her. ”

“You’ve been up there for three years?” I screech. I can’t even believe it. They were so close. This whole time they were so close, I could have found her if I’d only looked a little harder. I can’t help but think about the first time I showed up at the creaky old house, and Edward told me the place was haunted. That I best not come inside.

Haunted, my ass.

Edward nods, looking glum. “She killed a hiker her first year, someone who wandered too close. A few months after that, she got a trucker who stopped on the highway to sleep. Then there were more hikers, a whole group, and she got all six of them. After that, we had a couple of quiet years, and she stayed inside mostly, but then last month she escaped to the reservation and attacked an old man in a wheelchair.”

Oh god. It was Alice. All that time, it was her. The hikers, first the one, that guy from Montana they found high above the tree line, then the whole group from Utah. Everyone was so sure it had been a pack of wolves, possibly rabid, because there was so little of them left, and what was left were just bloody piles of body parts. And then that trucker, the one from San Francisco, the door to his semi ripped clean off, and maybe that one had been a bear. The bite marks in the metal, the cab torn to shreds like a bomb had gone off inside, it had to be a bear. And then Billy Black, poor old guy who couldn’t even run away, left wide-eyed in a very, very small puddle of his blood.

But it wasn’t a wolf with rabies. It wasn’t a bear with some weird brain virus. It wasn’t a guy with a grudge or a woman with a god complex or a traveling serial killer.

It was my eight-year-old sister.

---

Ten things about the night Alice disappeared.

One.

The guy from Seattle had been watching your house for days. He parked his car deep in the woods and hiked back and forth every morning to watch your dad leave for work, and then your mom, and then two little girls walk down the driveway to catch the bus for school. Sometimes, he thought about tying all four of you up and burning the house down. Sometimes he wanted to convince you that he was a long-lost family member and get integrated into your happy little circle. Sometimes, after you’d left, he slept in your beds. He ate your food. He used your shampoo and spent the week smelling like strawberries.  

Two.

He knew your dad from a past life. Once upon a time, when Dad was a rookie, he pulled over a guy for speeding. That simple ticket lead to a search of the car, which lead to a search of a house, which lead to a fifteen year conviction for drug distribution and child pornography. Meth in the bathtub and naked boys on the computer. He appealed his conviction four times and lost all of them. Hoped to get out early on good behavior, but he wasn’t that well-behaved.  

Fifteen years is a long time to nurse a grudge.     

Three.

He knew about your sleepwalking.

How could he not?

Four.

He found the screwdriver in the trunk of the car he’d hot-wired and stolen from a parking lot in Seattle, tires burning all the way out of town. He jammed it into our lock and busted it clean off the door.

Five.

He killed Rose because she woke up when he broke the lock on the front door, and she started to scream. It took less than a minute to choke the life out of her, mostly because he nearly broke her neck.

Six.

He took Alice because she looked like his sister. Dark hair. Blue eyes. The upturn at the end of her nose. What he had planned for her, however, was decidedly unsister-like.

Seven.

He had no idea you were asleep in the kitchen. If he had, you’d probably be dead too.

Eight.

Halfway back to his car, Alice woke up. Slung upside down over the shoulder of a stranger and bouncing through the dark, she started to struggle. Started to kick and punch and flail. She started to scream.

Nine.

Out of desperation, the guy dropped a screaming Alice to the ground, fumbled through the dirt, and wrapped his fingers around a rock.

Ten.

The blood that Edward smelled when he stumbled across the scene in the clearing was from Alice’s head wound. The pure, clean blood that sparked his frenzied lust was hers. The blood that broke his fast was the man’s, but the blood that quenched his thirst was hers.

Sweet little Alice, with her soft pure insides like rain and sunshine, brought out the monster in Edward Cullen.

Next

AN:

Fresh off the AOE contest, I am still SOARING the stratosphere. 

Off to plan the Hemingway-Honeybee wedding.