Summary: Since Bella was changed by Carlisle in 1901, she had given up on humanity, thinking that love was something that only happened in romance novels. That is until she meets Edward Masen, a young charming boy who won't seem to leave her alone. Bella finds herself challenging her beliefs at every turn. What happens when an old enemy comes out of the shadows, threatening to destroy it all?
The Darkest Sunrise
By:
Pinkster Lily
Chapter One:
The True Meaning of Irony
The market place in Chicago was a somewhat crowded place on this rare, cloudy day in the middle of June. Vendors shouted their wares to the potential buyers and the surrounding crowds responded as expected—either ignoring the sellers all together or bustling from stand to stand, looking at items even if they weren't what the buyer had come for in the first place.
Men, women, boys, girls—they all joined the market bustle, most bumping into one another here or there, never slowing, never stopping to see who they had knocked over, continuing along in their busy and uneventful lives like little worker bees, all part of the bigger picture.
I myself felt like an intruder in the hive, a poser, as I shopped for the props that Carlisle had sent me out to get so as to keep the human worker bees from getting to suspicious of our intrusion into their daily lives. I nervously glanced around now and then, watching the sky carefully to make sure the sun wouldn't come out anytime soon.
Every so often, I'd stop and buy something from one of the shouting vendors, like piranhas in their attempts to ambush me and eat me alive. It was still early in the day, so the market wasn't as crowded as it could have been, the cloud cover encouraging people to stay indoors, case it rain. I knew it wouldn't rain, the air was too dry for rain to come down anytime soon, but I couldn't tell the humans that. To them, I was but an insignificant girl, the adopted daughter of a small-time doctor's dead brother, to those who might have seen me around and took notice. Nothing too incredibly special.
Oh, but I was. We were special. Even among our own world, we were special. Beautiful, pale, powerful, unstoppable. I could imitate others. Copy their voices, their behavior, and their appearance, to the point where I could copy their powers, if they had any. I just had to know what I was looking for.
And the apparently "small-time doctor" that had adopted me was the other that was special. He had made me into what I was now, and he, though he had no apparent power, was very powerful. He had an unusually high level of resistance for our kind—which I had been able to copy—along with a large amount of compassion that I had shared without taking it from him. He was strong, stronger than I in some ways, because he was able to be around our natural prey and not snap—something I might not have been able to do unless I had copied it from him.
"His" name was Carlisle Cullen, a vampire and doctor. He had found me out in the middle of the wilderness while hunting when I was human, and still fragile and weak. I didn't remember how I had gotten there or anything at all, for that matter. Carlisle had later told me that I had smelled strongly of vampire when he found me and then changed me out of sympathy. Apparently I had been there for several days prior to him finding me.
When we had discovered my power, a very interesting event in which I had started to copy Carlisle's voice as he spoke to me, I discovered the true meaning of irony. I didn't know who I was, so instead I took what I learned from others and applied it to myself, therefore effectively copying it.
Carlisle is the best person I have ever had the honor to meet in my remembered lifetime. He took me in and taught me how to hunt animals. If he hadn't been the vampire to find me I probably would have ended up hunting humans, because Carlisle's was the first behavior I copied. Without him, I'd either be dead or wishing I was.
Because of our plight to be "good" vampires (though, honestly, we were very, very bad at being vampires, an irony I had pointed out to Carlisle before) we had beautiful golden eyes instead of the horrific red orbs most vampires had. Our skin, like all vampires, sparkled in the sunlight and did not burst into flames like how Bram Stoker says in his novel. Apparently, he fell in love with a vampire who didn't love him back, so he decided to write a book about vampires being despicable creatures. Annoying twit.
Carlisle had changed me in 1901, and since then we had traveled together. It was nice, Carlisle was like a father too me, and we either pretended to be siblings or related in some other fashion. It varied depending on how long we were planning on staying and how young we were willing to pretend to be.
I guess you're wondering what my name is. Since neither Carlisle nor I knew, we just guessed at names until I found one that sounded mostly right. Marie Isabella, or Bella for short, was as close as I got. Marie didn't sound quite right when Carlisle called me it, so we assumed that I was called by my middle name as a human, and I liked Bella better, anyway.
We had lived in Chicago for only a few months now, only emerging at night or on cloudy days such as this. The tale we fed humans was that I was homeschooled during the day and Carlisle worked the nightshift at the local hospital because it was the only available job at the time we moved, which was very much true. Our small but beautiful home was relatively isolated on the street we lived on, large trees surrounding it so that none of our human neighbors would see the lights on at night or the sparkling, diamond-like glitter of our skin during the day.
Today had been the first cloudy day in about a month, so Carlisle had sent me out to get our props because I had started getting restless with watching the street from the inside of our house during the day. Carlisle mostly read, but there was only so much reading that I could do without getting distracted. Especially when I had run out of paint.
That was another thing. I loved to draw my surroundings. We had literally hundreds of paintings hung around our house that I had either drawn or painted from the various places we had lived. It was just a part of me to copy the things I saw onto either canvas or paper, though lately because of the paint issue, I had been stuck with paper.
I glanced down at my basket after checking the unsuspecting humans again. I had everything Carlisle said we needed, so I turned down a side street to the place where the shop that sold paint supplies was.
The bell on the door chimed as I entered, alerting the old clerk at the front desk in the far back that a customer had come in. He smiled warmly at me and I mimicked him with ease. It was fortunate that most humans were very unobservant to these little differences between vampires like Carlisle and I, and them. Otherwise, the clerk would have been very disturbed by the fact that my smile was exactly the same as his, with the same amount of friendliness and slight predatory instinct as his eyes alighted upon a potential target to sell to. Even down to the amount of teeth that I showed when I copied his smile.
That was another reason Carlisle had sent me out. I was the best at behaving human.
I immediately glided over to the paints, selecting which ones I wanted with quick precision along with a few new brushes and a mixing pallet. At the front desk, I also grabbed a new drawing pad and charcoal so that if I ran out of paint before I could get down to the market again, I wouldn't go insane trying to find spare scraps of paper and a pencil.
The shopkeeper rang up my total and I pulled the money needed out of the small concealed pocket in my dress. I counted it out for him and he thanked me, giving me a receipt and helping me load the supplies into my nearly full basket.
I walked out of the store whistling quietly to myself, swinging my basket back and forth as I walked down the street, away from the market. There was no need to walk back in the direction I came from, when I could stop in the park and maybe draw a couple or two strolling about on a walk down the path there. As long as I got back before the sun peaked out from behind the clouds, I could go anywhere I wanted.
So deep into my thoughts, I didn't notice as a group of thugs, about my age in appearance, come up from a small side street and surrounded me until it was too late.
I mentally swore in my head as the leader, the biggest of course, approached me. "Hey there, sweetie. You're not lost now, are you?" The others laughed along with him, and I rolled my eyes. Idiots. Most humans tended to stay away from Carlisle and I, their subconscious telling them that we were dangerous. Of course, every now and then, there was the human that was so oblivious to their subconscious needs that it was a shock that they hadn't been eaten yet. "No thanks," I called, "I know where I'm going." I tried to sidestep him, but he wasn't having that.
"Oh, looky here," he crowed, snatching the drawing book from my basket before I could stop him. "A drawin' book. What were ya plannin' to do with this?"
I glance around discreetly. I was still too close to the market to retaliate like I wanted to without someone noticing, and even if I wasn't, then we'd still have to move yet again if I revealed myself, even if to a bunch of half-wit thugs. "What do you think?" I retorted.
"Oh, a smart one, Alec," said one who was obviously the second-in-command. "Show her what we do to th' smart ones."
Alec the Idiot laughed and looked over at his second. "Ah, bu' Julian, she's but a wee little lady. We might as well—hey!"
While he had been blabbing to his second, Julian, I had darted in and snatched the drawing book out of his hand, stuffing it back into my basket and backing away so I was in the middle of the large ring of idiots. There were about five of them, I could take them easily if it came to it, but hopefully not. The odds were that they wouldn't go off screeching about how some inhuman girl had beaten them, simply because I was a girl, but I didn't want to take the chance.
"Get out of my way," I snarled at him, furious.
"Oh and why should we do tha'? These are our streets, here, and you're trespassin'." He said with a feral look. I personally hoped no one changed him into a vampire; else we'd have an out-of-control vampire rapist among us, which would definitely not bode well for any females, human and vampire alike.
"I don't think so. Now get out of my way."
Suddenly one of the boys behind me yelled in a gruff voice, "Hey, I know her! She's tha' Cullen gal!"
We all turned to him. I was in shock, the only ones who knew my name were the people on our upper-class street, and this boy was definitely not a member of our neighborhood, what with his tattered clothes and obvious lower-class accent.
"What you talkin' about, Reeves?" asked another boy.
Reeves seemed uneasy under all the stares, and he shifted from foot to foot. "I saw her askin' for Doc' Cullen at the hospital las' week. She said she was his niece or somethin' like tha'."
"Who cares," said Alec, turning all attention back to him. My dress whished against the cobble stones as I turned to face him again. "She's on our territory now." He advanced on me, and I prepared to fight him without breaking anything when a new voice entered the scene.
"Leave her alone," said a smooth, male voice. We all whirled around to see a beautiful boy standing only about ten feet from our gathering.
