There was no sound. No breathing. Not even mine.
For a second, all I could process was the absence of pain. The dull, dry afterburn in my throat was easy to ignore, because every other part of me felt amazing. The release was an incredible high.
I stared up at Edythe in wonder. I felt like I’d taken off a blindfold I’d been wearing all my life. What a view.
“Beau?” she asked. Now that I could really concentrate on it, the beauty of her voice was unreal.
“It’s disorienting, I know. You get used to it.”
Could you get used to hearing a voice like this? Seeing a face like that?
“Edythe,” I said, and the sound of my own voice jolted me. Was that me? It didn’t sound like me. It didn’t sound… human.
Unnerved, I reached out to touch her cheek. In the same instant that the desire to touch her entered my mind, my hand was cradling the side of her face. There was no in-between—no process of lifting my hand, watching it move to its destination. It was just there.
“Huh.”
She leaned into my touch, put her hand over mine, and held it against her face. It was strange because it was familiar—I’d always loved it when she’d done that, to see that she so obviously liked it when I touched her that way, that it meant something to her. But it was also nothing the same. Her face wasn’t cold anymore. Her hand felt right against mine. There was no difference between us now.
I stared into her eyes, then looked closer at the picture reflected in them.
“Ahh…” A little gasp escaped my throat by accident, and I felt my body lock down in surprise. It was weird—it felt like the natural thing to do, to be a statue because I was shocked.
“What is it, Beau?” She leaned closer, concerned, but that just brought the reflection closer.
“The eyes?” I breathed.
She sighed, and wrinkled her nose. “It goes away,” she promised. “I terrified myself every time I looked in a mirror for six months.”
“Six months,” I murmured. “And then they’ll be gold like yours?”
She looked away, over the back of the couch, to someone standing there behind us where I couldn’t see. I wanted to sit up and look around, but I was a little afraid to move. My body felt so strange.
“That depends on your diet, Beau,” Carine said calmly. “If you hunt like we do, your eyes will eventually turn this color. If not, your eyes will look like Lauren’s did.”
I decided to try sitting up.
And like before, thinking was doing. Without any movement, I was upright. Edythe kept my hand in hers as it left her face.
Behind the sofa, they were all there, watching. I’d been one hundred percent with my guesses—Carine closest, then Eleanor, Archie, and Earnest. Jessamine in the doorway to another room with Royal watching over her shoulder.
I looked at their faces, shocked again. If my brain hadn’t been so much… roomier than before, I would have forgotten what I was about to say. As it was, I recovered pretty fast.
“No, I want to do it your way,” I said to Carine. “That’s the right thing to do.”
Carine smiled. It would have knocked the breath out of me if I’d had to breathe.
“If only it were so easy. But that’s a noble choice. We’ll help you all we can.”
Edythe touched my arm. “We should hunt now, Beau. It will make your throat hurt less.”
When she mentioned my throat, the dry burn there was suddenly at the forefront of my mind. I swallowed. But…
“Hunt?” my new voice asked. “I, uh, well, I’ve never been hunting before. Not even like normal hunting with rifles, so I don’t really think I could… I mean, I have no idea how.…”
Eleanor chuckled under her breath.
Edythe smiled. “I’ll show you. It’s very easy, very natural. Didn’t you want to see me hunt?”
“Just us?” I checked.
She looked confused for a fraction of a second, and then her face was smooth. “Of course. Whatever you want. Come with me, Beau.”
And she was on her feet, still holding my hand. Then I was on my feet, too, and it was so simple to move, I wondered why I’d been afraid to try. Anything I wanted this body to do, it did.
She darted to the back wall of the big room—the glass wall that was a mirror now because it was night outside. I saw the two pale figures flashing by and I stopped. The strange thing was that when I stopped, it was so sudden that Edythe kept going, still holding my hand, and though she was still pulling, I didn’t move. My grip on her hand pulled her back. Like it was nothing.
But I was only noticing that with part of my brain. Mostly I was looking at my reflection.
I’d seen my face warped around the convex shape of her eyes, just the center, lacking the edges. I’d only really seen my eyes—brilliant, almost glowing red—and that had been enough to pull my focus. Now I saw my whole face—my neck, my arms.
If someone had cut an outline of my human self, this version would still fit into that space. But though I took up the same volume, all the angles were different. Harder, more pronounced. Like someone had made an ice sculpture of me and left the edges sharp.
My eyes—it was hard to look around the color, but the shape of them, too, seemed different. So vaguely, like I was remembering something I’d seen only through muddy water—I remembered how my eyes used to look. Undecided. Like I was never sure who I was. Then, after Edythe—still so hard to see in my memory, uncomfortable to try—they were suddenly more resolved.
These eyes had gone one step further than resolved—they were savage. If I walked into this self in a dark alley, I would be terrified of me.
Which was the point, I guess. People were supposed to be afraid of me now.
I still wore my bloodstained jeans, but I had an unfamiliar, pale blue shirt on. I didn’t remember that happening, but I could understand; vampire or human, no one wanted to hang around with someone drenched in vomit.
“Whoa,” I said. I locked eyes with Edythe in the reflection.
This was strange, too. Because the Beau in the mirror looked… right next to Edythe. Like he belonged. Not like before, when people could only imagine that she was taking pity on me.
“It’s a lot,” she said.
I took a deep breath and nodded. “Okay.”
She pulled on my hand again, and I followed. Before a fourth of a second had passed, we were through the glass doors behind the stairs and on the back lawn.
There were no moon and no stars—the clouds were too thick. It should have been pitch-black outside the rectangle of light shining through the glass wall, but it wasn’t. I could see everything.
“Whoa,” I said again. “That is so cool.”
Edythe looked at me like she was surprised by my reaction. Had she forgotten what it was like the first time she saw the world through vampire eyes? I thought she’d said I wouldn’t forget things anymore.
“We’re going to have to go a ways out into the woods,” she told me. “Just in case.”
I remembered the gist of what she’d told me about hunting. “Right. So there aren’t any people around. Got it.”
Again—that same surprised look flashed across her face and then was gone.
“Follow me,” she said.
She whipped down the lawn so fast that I knew she would have been invisible to my old eyes. Then, at the edge of the river, she launched herself into a high arc that spun her over the river and into the trees beyond.
“Really?” I called after her.
I heard her laugh. “I promise, it’s easy.”
Great.
I sighed, then started running.
Running had never been my forte. I was all right on a flat track, if I was paying enough attention and I kept my eyes on my feet. Okay, honestly, even then I was still able to tangle my feet up and go down.
This was so different. I was flying—flying down the lawn, faster than I’d ever moved, but it was only too simple to put my feet exactly wher
e they were supposed to go. I could feel all of my muscles, almost see the connections as they worked together, will them to do exactly what I needed. When I got to the edge of the river I didn’t even pause. I pushed off the same rock she’d used, and then I was really flying. The river slipped away behind me as I rocketed through the air. I passed where she’d landed and then fell down into the wood.
I felt an instant of panic when I realized I hadn’t even considered the landing, but then my hand already seemed to know how to catch a thick branch and angle my body so that my feet hit the ground with barely a sound.
“Holy crow,” I breathed in total disbelief.
I heard Edythe running through the trees, and already her gait was as familiar to me as the sound of my own breathing. I was sure I could tell the difference between the sound of her footfalls and anyone else’s.
“We have to do that again!” I said as soon as I saw her.
She paused a few feet away from me, and a frustrated expression that I knew well crossed her face.
I laughed. “What do you want to know? I’ll tell you what I’m thinking.”
She frowned. “I don’t understand. You’re… in a very good mood.”
“Oh. Is that wrong?”
“Aren’t you incredibly thirsty?”
I swallowed against the burn. It was bad, but not as bad as the rest of the fire I’d just left behind. The thirst-burn was always there, and it got worse when I focused on it, but there were so many other things to focus on. “Yes, when I think about it.”
Edythe squared her shoulders. “If you want to do this first, that’s fine, too.”
I looked at her. I was obviously missing something. “Do this? Do what?”
She stared at me for a second, her eyes doubtful. Suddenly she threw her hands up. “You know, I really thought that when your mind was more similar to mine, I’d be able to hear it. I guess that’s never going to happen.”
“Sorry.”
She laughed, but there was an unhappy note in the sound. “Honestly, Beau.”
“Can you please give me a clue as to what we’re talking about?”
“You wanted us to be alone,” she said, like this was an explanation.
“Uh, yeah.”
“Because you had some things you wanted to say to me?” She braced her shoulders again, tensing like she was expecting something bad.
“Oh. Well, I guess there are things to say. I mean, there’s one important thing, but I wasn’t thinking about that.” Seeing how frustrated she was by whatever misunderstanding was happening, I was totally honest. “I wanted to be alone with you because… well, I didn’t want to be rude, but I also didn’t want to do this hunting thing in front of Eleanor,” I confessed. “I figured there was a good chance I would screw something up, and I don’t know Eleanor all that well yet, but I have a feeling she would find that pretty funny.”
Her eyes got wide. “You were afraid Eleanor would laugh at you? Really, that’s all?”
“Really. Your turn, Edythe. What did you think was happening?”
She hesitated. “I thought you were being a gentleman. I thought you preferred to yell at me alone rather than in front of my family.”
I froze up again. I wondered if that was going to happen every time I was surprised. It took me a second to thaw out.
“Yell at you?” I repeated. “Edythe—oh! You’re talking about all that stuff you were saying in the car, right? Sorry about that, I—”
“Sorry? What on earth are you apologizing for now, Beau Swan?”
She looked angry. Angry and so beautiful. I couldn’t guess why she was worked up. I shrugged. “I wanted to tell you then, but I couldn’t. I mean, I couldn’t even really concentrate—”
“Of course you couldn’t concentrate—”
“Edythe!” I crossed the space between us in one invisibly fast stride and put my hands on her shoulders. “You’ll never know what I’m thinking if you keep interrupting me.”
The anger on her face faded as she deliberately calmed herself. Then she nodded.
“Okay,” I said. “In the car—I wanted to tell you then that you didn’t need to apologize, I felt horrible that you were so sad. This isn’t your fault—”
She started to say something, so I put my finger over her lips.
“And it isn’t all bad,” I continued. “I’m… well, my head is still spinning and I know there are a million things to think about and I’m sad, of course, but I’m also good, Edythe. I’m always good when I’m with you.”
She stared at me for a long minute. Slowly, she raised her hand to pull my finger away from her mouth. I didn’t stop her.
“You aren’t angry at me for what I’ve done to you?” she asked quietly.
“Edythe, you saved my life! Again. Why would I be angry? Because of the way you saved it? What else could you have done?”
She exhaled, almost like she was mad again. “How can you…? Beau, you have to see that this is all my fault. I haven’t saved your life, I’ve taken it from you. Charlie—Renée—”
I put my finger over her mouth again, and then took a deep breath. “Yes. It’s hard, and it’s going to be hard for a long time. Maybe forever, right? But why would I put that on you? Joss is the one who… well, who killed me. You brought me back to life.”
She pushed my hand down. “If I hadn’t involved you in my world—”
I laughed, and she looked up at me like I’d lost my mind. “Edythe—if you hadn’t involved me in your world, Charlie and Renée would have lost me three months earlier.”
She stared, frowning. It was obvious she wasn’t accepting any of this.
“Do you remember what I said when you saved my life in Port Angeles? The second time, or third.” I barely did. The words were easier to bring back than the images. I knew it went something like this. “That you were messing with fate because my number was up? Well… if I had to die, Edythe… isn’t this the most amazing way to do it?”
A long minute passed while she stared at me, and then she shook her head. “Beau, you are amazing.”
“I guess I am now.”
“You always have been.”
I didn’t say anything, and my face gave me away. Or she was just that good. She knew my face so well, she spent so much time trying so hard to understand me, that she knew immediately when there was something I wasn’t saying.
“What is it, Beau?”
“Just… something Joss said.” I winced. Though it was hard to see things in my old memory, the dance studio was the most recent, the most vivid.
Edythe’s jaw got hard. “She said a lot of things,” she hissed.
“Oh.” Suddenly I wanted to punch something. But I also didn’t want to let go of Edythe to do that. “You saw the tape.”
Her face was totally white. Furious and agonized at the same time. “Yes, I saw the tape.”
“When? I didn’t hear—”
“Headphones.”
“I wish you hadn’t—”
She shook her head. “I had to. But forget that now. Which lie were you thinking of?” She spit the words through her teeth.
It took me a minute. “You didn’t want me to be a vampire.”
“No, I absolutely did not.”
“So that part wasn’t a lie. And you’ve been so upset.… I know you feel bad about Charlie and my mom, but I guess I’m worried that part of it is because, well, you didn’t expect to have me around very long, you weren’t planning for that—” Her mouth flew open so fast that I put my whole hand over it. “Because if that’s what it is, don’t worry. If you want me to go away after a while, I can. You can show me what to do so I won’t get either of us in trouble. I don’t expect you to put up with me forever. You didn’t choose this any more than I did. I want you to know that I’m aware of that.”
She waited for me to move my hand. I did it slowly. I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear what was next.
She growled softly and flashed her teeth at me
—not in a smile.
“You’re lucky I didn’t bite you,” she said. “The next time you put your hand on my mouth to say something so completely idiotic—and insulting—I will.”
“Sorry.”
She closed her eyes. Her arms wrapped around my waist and she leaned her head against my chest. My arms wound around her automatically. She tilted her face up so that she could look at me.
“I want you to listen to me very carefully, Beau. This—having you with me, getting to keep you here—it’s like I’ve been granted every selfish wish I’ve ever had. But the price for everything I want was to take the exact same thing away from you. All of your life. I’m angry with myself, I’m disappointed in myself. And I wish so much that I could bring that tracker back to life so that I could kill her myself, over and over and over again.…
“The reason I didn’t want you to be a vampire wasn’t because you weren’t special enough—it was because you are too special and you deserve more. I wanted you to have what we all miss—a human life. But you have to know, if it were only about me, if there were no price for you to pay, then tonight would be the best night of my life. I’ve been staring forever in the face for a century, and tonight is the very first time it’s looked beautiful to me. Because of you.
“Don’t you ever again think that I don’t want you. I will always want you. I don’t deserve you, but I will always love you. Are we clear?”
It was obvious that she was being totally sincere. Truth echoed in every word.
A huge grin spread across my new face. “So that’s okay, then.”
She smiled back. “I’d say so.”
“That was the one important thing I wanted to say—just, I love you. I always will. I knew that from pretty early in. So, with that being how things are, I think we can work the rest out.”
I held her face in my hands and bent down to kiss her. Like everything else, this was so easy now. Nothing to worry about, no hesitation.
It felt strange, though, that my heart wasn’t beating out a crazy drum solo, that the blood wasn’t stampeding through my veins. But something was zinging through me like electricity, every nerve in my body alive. More than alive—like all of my cells were rejoicing. I only wanted to hold her like this and I would need nothing else for the next hundred years.
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