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.
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