A/N: Am I starting another story? Well, yes, and I'll be damned if I don't finish I, haha. In my mind for this story, Esme reigns supreme badass and I would like to explore and write her this way. Regular disclaimer applies, I own nothing of Twilight. Copyright in profile applies as well. Please enjoy and review!
South End of Madison Square, Manhattan, March 1956
The black cab with shining metal grill had been sidling by the curb, the man in black waving a few bills to the front, drunkenly protesting the fare. A hustler being hustled at the tail end of a short night.
It had almost been too late when she appeared: A rapidly approaching glimmer of color, dangled before him by the shadows of the New York night.
She had shy, fixated eyes: Fixated on him with a shield of dusky lashes and masked innocence. .
"Mr. Marshall, I…was hoping to catch you." she admitted, the glimpses growing bolder and the cold rising from the stretch of paved, unrelenting street surrounding them.
"Oh?" The bills had dropped unceremoniously through his window to the seat in his pleasant shock, and the cabbie sped off before the gentleman had a chance to settle his case. Or retrieve back his money.
"I was given your name…for the open position."
She knew he was a heavy hitter amongst the elite. He was spoken for by his well furnished abode, a penthouse suite atop a building that reached for the sky. He capitalized on trade, his days inconstant with the ebb and flow of the markets on Wall St, and his nights debauched away with empty promise and booze.
"So an actress, Ms…?" His conjecture tapered off as he recognized she was a virtual stranger sitting on his brocade settee, contradicting the ill gain of his home with demure patience. A rose left unsullied by the soil she sprang from.
Maybe her beauty hid her prickly thorns. The thought excited him.
"Platt…Esme, if you'd prefer." With a bat of her lashes, and a swipe of her hand across the skirt of her flared red dress, she captivated him with her insistence of familiarity. His neatly wetted and combed mustache quivered obscenely. "I was hoping to go into big pictures, but for a Columbus gal like me…well the only things I've been able to keep my hands on are my big dreams." She played her part beautifully and her shy, halted speech unwound him.
"Columbus?"
"Ohio, Mr. Marshall. It's been a dreadfully long wait. I was told you would …that I could…that I would be taken care of." She toyed and sulked lightly for his benefit. But through her simpering and swaying, he made plans she already knew didn't include her, past the gray break of dawn.
His concentration grew fogged and fragmented with her presence but his unabashed gaze did not do her justice. Instead, stale silence riddled with the biting odor of aged liquor and harsh, uneven breaths separated them.
It broke with a note of realization that rang earnestly in the face of a lie. Hers, of course.
"You must be one of Lawrence's girls." He hadn't expected another 'opportunity' to be sent his way until the storm over his white-collared reputation had receded. He didn't suspect; he simply wanted her, someone a man in his position had no business chasing.
Then again, she had come to him.
His suspicion had ultimately failed to be aroused by the way she couldn't possibly fit into his reality: Deathly pale, frigidly beautiful, and wandering alone in a city meant to swallow her whole. But his eyes had already been clouded with the onslaught of a wanton lust.
The ironic quirk of her colorless lips lay ignored by him, but he would've benefited from noticing something too apparent to have been missed.
She was no one's girl.
His meticulously engraved cigar humidor lay open and willing, bequeathing its contents as he struck a match. The acrid odor of sulfur pervaded the room, even after he lit his cigar and shook the match loose of its flame. Filler leaf tobacco and decayed wood mingled in the foul smelling space and she found herself involuntarily constricting her shallow breaths to her mouth.
He stumbled over to his paned window that afforded him a beautiful view of the Grecian detail on the Flatiron Building. The lights twinkled like fallen stars in the inky blue canvas of the city night. It oftentimes served him a rueful reminder: The things he bought did not always look upon things he could attain. But his mind was elsewhere in this moment
She felt him gathering courage. Falsely secure in his silent declaration of infallibility. He gazed from above into the dark abyss below and it was difficult for him not to feel the intoxicating power of his decisions.
She knew him at that moment, because her thoughts had once occupied the black depths of that place. They were dangerously persuasive.
He appreciated the thickly curled ginger locks that framed the carved stillness of her face, and the firm, appraisable curves under her dappled wool coat.
"Yes, if you'd accompany me upstairs, maybe we could work towards…an arrangement." He ended his invitation with an unmasked leer and she knew a less equipped woman would have accepted his bold insinuation with a dose of fear and resignation.
But only determination marked her countenance, and she was as steadfast in her purpose as he was. After all, she couldn't deny him the satisfaction she would soon savor.
The concierge welcomed them through the gilded doors and she followed his lead to the elevator cage, where she was waved in with fiendish glee.
He thought he had her trapped.
She knew better.
"Your family, Ms. Platt?"
She feigned slight unease and tittered girlishly in her seat on the sofa cushion. Her suede pump circled the rich fringe of the rug beneath her, and she was careful to control the pressure of the heel as to not drive a hole through the wood. Her mind crackled with the memory of dirt and blood stained cotton and dark, desperate pleas of reconciliation.
She spoke the truth embedded in her fabrication.
"I'm afraid they haven't got the faintest clue as to where I've run off."
The hormone heavy scent of endorphins rose in a cloud, surrounding and drugging him into an unexpected high. He had already strung along her trust and her relative obscurity in this town gave him the luxury of something he came to value in these situations: time.
He turned, taking calculated steps to the humidor once again, barely avoiding an alcohol induced collision with the end table to her right. His meaty fingers reached and grasped, and a slender, cocktail length cigarette holder lay pinched between his forefinger and thumb. He set it beside the polished wooden surface of the humidor, flicking an almost indiscernibly malicious glare to the piece. The delicate and sleek run of the instrument insinuated its design was for a woman's hand.
There it was. She found her mark.
Ostensibly, the relief was palpable in her charming smile. There was little consideration for time, given her nature, and now the night was sure to end quickly enough
Internally, an unfathomable roar sounded.
She hummed deeply in the cavity that lay unbeating beneath her chest, as the fraying ends of her carefully maintained control twisted and snapped; unraveling rope that gave way to the dangerous thing that lurked inside and fed off her deeds.
She was ready, and the surety she had of her position flared in a protective visage.
But he misjudged once again and took her easy and relaxed expression for another invitation entirely. Her confidence may have taken him by surprise, but he was not one to question her readiness at becoming his next victim. As he stepped closer, the smoke curling from the thick brown wad that was clenched in his stained teeth, it was obvious he was gearing to pounce. His words only affirmed it.
"Let us skip certain formalities, it's very clear we each have something the other wants." He sat close, too close for any semblance of propriety. "The mayor himself would be astounded at the connections I've made, Esme." He sneered her name in a low whisper, the last syllable tossed carelessly from his tongue. "A soap advertisement is hardly the best I could get for you. Appealing to homemakers, the working man, it's all worthless, a waste of talent. Now you." He puffed a plume of smoke against her cheekbone. "I could make you a star, a piece of art to be admired by the masses. Your name in bright lights." He paused, allowing the feeble piece of assurance to drift and root itself in her hopes. She feigned a gasp of intrigue, and he grew bolder with the false encouragement.
"But, I'm sure, you're familiar with the concept of a trade." His greedy hand left its resting post on the arm of the sofa, and skimmed over her arm, locking his fingers over her thin wrist. She knew the hardness, the solidity of her skin would only be an afterthought for a man like him. "You give a little and then I return it with everything you ever dreamed of and more." His nose firmly planted itself in the cloying sweetness of her hair, his life sucking in death. She didn't flinch, biding her time for the right moment.
"Let's just call it a little insurance in my investments." With that he tugged and extended her arm, fully anticipating a bit of struggle from her innocent form. It's what he treasured in each of his encounters.
What he didn't expect was her deft maneuvering as she stood up and dodged his blatant advances. He floundered headfirst into her seat cushion, his mouth agape in fury and astonishment.
Without hesitation, the cigarette holder now lay between her fingers, and she lazily twirled the stem as if she were entertaining the idea of its use.
As if should would ever.
"Now, let's behave, shall we?" she admonished him with the mirthless humor of a disciplinarian schoolteacher. She was highly aware of the enjoyment she was getting out of playing with him in this mindless game; it was easy, laughably easy, and she was almost nostalgic for the days in which she felt a bite of remorse from her conscience to keep her sanity from spiraling.
But she was not culpable for her actions, neither were the women he had harmed. Now he would see what it was to be hunted.
He glared in anger at being told how to comport himself in his place of living by this…this…presumably defenseless girl that he hadn't even needed to manipulate into his clutches. Unaware of his fate, he stood; anger and weakness and humiliation warping his emotions and urging him to commit a secondary lunge.
But then she spoke.
He froze at her words, no longer the breathy whispers of youth, but brassy, chiming bells that didn't ring. No, they strummed unnaturally like delicate harp strings under a practiced hand.
"This was your wife's?" she languidly inquired of the holder, stepping behind of the sofa and running her fingers along the intricately upholstered back.
He didn't answer, not initially. Instead his eyes did a peculiar dance, the dilated pupils shifting like a pendulum from her unmoved face to the crinkled face of a newspaper that had been set haphazardly on the low coffee table. From her position, the date printed in black screamed its accusation to him, so alarmingly, that she idly wondered why he had allowed it to enter his home.
That was a sign as good as any and she would gladly take her cue. She hadn't even begun to break down his walls of self-rationalization, and he was already weakening with every tumble.
"My wife?" he sputtered. He hadn't expected her knowledge, or the precision of her acute gaze as it pierced through him.
He was a man of simple tastes. Lawrence had to have known by now his usual preferences; young, pretty, uneducated in the ways of the world. An innocent that only warranted a quick cleanup. It was all he ever wanted, all he ever truly needed…all he ever got away with.
Why had she been sent? She couldn't possibly know anything. Yet, her words left him with the distinct impression that they shared a common purpose in being together this night.
He was beginning to woefully dismiss his earlier impression of the woman he had very much mistaken for another kind.
His utter humiliation at her dismissal was rapidly wiped from his memory, as he composed himself and adopted a defensive posture. He simultaneously ran her face through a mental catalogue of witnesses, jurors, girls from previous rendezvous. "Yes, it was hers." he carefully replied, smoothing internal wrinkles of anxiety and suspicion. "I miss her very much." He added a flimsily constructed façade of grief as an obligatory disclaimer, the disconsolate admission contradictorily flat and emotionless. In that moment, he substantiated her motivation.
She quickly skirted the other end of couch, her movement leaving an almost indiscernible blur. Had she really moved where she stood? It was impossible for him to tell.
The flagged cover page of the paper rustled in her grasp and as she smoothed her hand over the leading headline:
Dow Jones Industrial Average Closes Up Over 500 Points, Wall Street Pockets a Win.
Just below it, on the less conspicuous bottom-right quarter of the page, a significantly more telling headline rang out in stark black lettering.
Wealthy Trader Acquitted of Wife's Murder, Absolved of Ties to Organized Crime
-Charge of 'Not Guilty' Garnered in J. J. Marshall Case Reinstates Reputation
She idly contemplated how empty his safe was with the 'dealings' he perpetrated upon the jury to ensure such a sentence.
She tapped a now impatient fingernail on the page as he dissected her reaction to him. He didn't move to answer her silent question. There was nothing but weak denial that crowded his features.
She rattled it purposefully, surveying it merely for effect, putting on a show for the increasingly fearful man in the corner. Glancing up again, she fanned the pages out expertly, and tossed them flippantly behind her, in a flurry of black and white print towards the depthless windows. His mistaken assignation of innocence did nothing to deter her.
"You've done a very bad thing…," she intoned melodiously, the lilt of her voice compounding upon her ominous presence. A cat gleefully toying with the arrogantly, ignorant mouse. His rapid shallow breaths punctuated stuttered denials: the flying spittle and incoherent disbelief did little else but seal his guilt.
The faux sternness of her brow persuaded his fumbling backwards movement as she stalked closer, a side-winding snake coiling in circles of ecstasy. "Well, from the unbecoming expression that seems to have frozen on your face, Mr. Marshall, I see the evening has taken quite a turn for you." Thump. "I, however, expected as much." The humidor met the outreached back of her hand, her knuckles barely feathering against the wood as it shattered and splintered before it even met the floor. The pricey contents rolled and radiated outwards in the closing space between them. It was a tangible trail of ruin, a parallel to the untraceable ones of her doing that wound in her wake like a macabre trail of homebound breadcrumbs. She never made it her objective to steer herself backwards into places of the past, however. Home was wherever the land lay untouched by her immortal feet which were never ceasing and always seeking.
"What…what are you doing?" The man's heightened anxiety only beckoned her further, the frenzy of fear and confusion only feeding into her own. She snapped the back of a scrollwork chair, crushing the rung of polished mahogany into grain, as she employed every last bit of resistance. He would confess before she took from him.
My things, he realized. She was violating his things, his identity. Erasing him from the confines of his own home. How had he categorized her so clearly before, only to now realize he had not seen her at all.
His eyes lolled in disbelief at the scene before him, rolling almost comically as he struggled to fathom the strength of her grip, or the undeniably hungry sneer that now graced her lips at intervals. A woman, how can… he frantically searched his disbelieving mind for an ounce of sense, of reasoned comprehension. No, a ghost…a demon? Images of an exaggeratedly demonic Jezebel entered his thoughts, quickly transitioning to a romanticized pictorial of ancient Green sirens. Could she be? He agonized over the possibilities.
Even as he contemplated the preternatural embodiment of the woman that hovered near, the enormity of his sins unveiled itself before his eyes. A dawning sense of dread emerged and solidified his frightened resolve that his past transgressions would be amongst the final reels playing before his sight. Sweat beaded and flowed as tears of guilt in streams from his forehead, the salt stinging his eyeballs as they ran aimlessly over them. Snippets of the Lord's Prayer fell from his lips: Learned and memorized, she undoubtedly assumed from some half sincere upbringing in Christianity, or an adolescent rite as an alter boy in church.
"Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those…deliver us from evil." His uneven recital stuttered and looped, and she smirked at his last resort attempt at prayer. As if any god would protect what lay before her now.
"Well, to ensure that this scene progresses as naturally as it can under these circumstances," she drawled, with a belittling wave of her hand. Silver cast candlestick holders clamored to the wood, the cacophony of destruction a discordant accompaniment to her ritual. "I'll leave you with the dignity of the impression that you held your own in this little scuffle." Her words held an almost lethargic confidence, as if they were regularly drummed up for repetition in the presence of men like him: Easy words in exchange for a painful death. "But we'll know better, won't we?" They were undeniably calculated to dredge up a looming horror within the man, and he doubted he was the first to be on the receiving end of what he could only now acknowledge as her brand of justice.
He cursed the things he had done, when it had been so clear all along he would come to regret doing them.
Her neck rolled disconcertingly to the side, blue veins popping and straining under translucent, white skin, as she stopped to appraise the havoc she had wrought on him insofar. She smelled and observed the blood draining from the surface of his skin as he fought to keep white knuckles grasped to a last means of defense, an iron poker blunt and sooty from years of disuse. It scraped a line through the floor as he dragged it before him, demarcating an area of which he deluded himself into thinking she wouldn't dare enter. His safe haven lay behind a piece of crusty metal and wood grain and now he wouldn't hesitate in reserving this last shred of hope with a swing of his hand.
Abandon all hope ye who enter.
She smirked at the challenge, and hedged her slight figure onto the back of the couch, the chiffon of her skirt billowing prettily around her. She trailed one nail through the woven fabric as it linearly split, cotton batting exploding from the broken seam on the sofa.
"Now it seems we've reached an understanding of sorts." She examined her work, and flicked her hair to one shoulder. She gazed and batted with the confidence of a woman empowered not by beauty, but by malicious strength. "You know why I'm here, and it seems I have no choice but to stay until you confess." He blinked rapidly, uncertain how much she would force him to disclose. "So," she clapped her hands loudly together once, allowing the diamond hardness of her hands to resonate throughout the room. "Let's have a story? I will tell you what I think happened, and you'll fill in the breaks of which I may or may not already know. Your wife…?"
"Abbey." He stood stock still, the answer rolling involuntarily off his dazed tongue. She knows. She'd always known, he internally bemoaned.
"Mmm, Abbey. Sweet woman. Had the decency to put up with you. Knew very little about your predilections, until very recently I assume?"
He swallowed and the quiver in his palms traveled up his arms to the back of his neck.
"But one day, she grew wary of your lies? Came to recognize the extent of your overall ugliness and cowardice?" She stood and gestured rhetorically to the ceiling. He knew the inquiry was intended for him.
"Maybe she told you of her fears, gave you a choice? Stop or I'll tell." She raised her hands in mocking fear and then folded them again after a moment of consideration."No, that can't be right."
She nodded speculatively, and then raised an eyebrow. "Do you mind enlightening me?"
His tongue unstuck from the roof of his mouth, cotton dry and swollen. His lies had very little left to offer and there could be no deceiving her. She knew.
"She was going to leave. She had a bag…and the police…I had no choice." he whispered, tears thickening his words.
His hand jerked and the poker shakily raised itself to her eye level.
She tucked her tongue behind her teeth, smiling widely. Her white teeth glinted and the tension in his throat urged him to swallow once again. "But then you never had the consideration to offer her an ultimatum in return. You had some 'friends' deliver it instead."
Ba-boom. Ba-boom. Ba-boom.
The blood rushing through the chambers of his heart amplified the beat, and the constant cycling made the pulse on his neck more prominent than ever.
"If she had just…I didn't want to," he moaned, the strangled words echoing strangely in his throat like a ventriloquist's voice thrown into an inanimate object. He gasped again for air, heaving forward as if battling away the offensive truths that had been revealed all too unexpectedly. But she didn't flinch.
"And for her goodness, she received a bullet to the back of her head. Already forgotten with the continuance of your pursuits." She may have kept her lips stretched and teeth bared, but there was no longer a fanciful smile that played upon them. It was wide and dangerous and hid nothing but the woman she had pretended to be.
He gurgled unintelligibly and his grip tightened.
"I would be a little more courteous if I were you." She held her palms towards him, examining them with a frown of annoyance. "I'm afraid I'm unarmed."
A split second motion of her hands rendered the the iron rod a mass of metal splinters, crushed and twisted beyond recognition.
Her sickly sweet breath landed on his neck as she swooped to whisper in his ear.
"But I always knew this wasn't a fair match."
Pop. Pop. Pop.
His face was purple as she had already gripped his neck. She dislocated both his shoulders and sank her heel into his knee, blood spilling in a fountain of gore onto the oiled wood and bone following in a flinty heap.
He cried out, more in surprise than pain, but he would quickly know what the latter really was.
Any form of struggle was futile and he quickly learned to stay still. His eyes, listless and glazed, slid to the back of his head as the demonic woman buried her face in his neck, curving his back into her arms. It could have been an embrace for all an outsider, far below in the inky city night, could see. Lovers, perhaps, settling in on the coldest night so far this winter.
They couldn't see the blood slowly blooming on his snowy white collar fastened to his shirt, or the ruthless snap of her teeth as they tore through corded tissue and gnawed at blood vessels until they protruded limply from his neck. Her face was thick with red, the heady aroma almost rendering her blissful and unaware of the danger of lingering too long with a target.
But then there was nothing. No noise. No commotion or evidence alerting the sleep comforted neighbors or the hotel staff of a vicious murder that they would wake to the next morning. The society couple in the suite next door, the Chesters, would eventually recoil in horror at the crimson verdict of "GUILTY" jaggedly painted across J.J Marshall's crown molded doorway, and the macabre tableau that awaited the police beyond the threshold. No witnesses or suspects, even after what would be a three year investigation: Just death, destruction, and an eerie sense that justice had been borne and served in spades in the confines of those four walls.
Until then, the woman would work to fastidiously remove herself from the situation. She dropped the corpse like a revolting piece of carrion and slowly ran her wrist across her mouth, smearing her own sins over her lips and chin. As if forgetting they were extensions of herself, she then peered inquisitively at her hands, chiding herself for getting carried away but noting with satisfaction that her clothing remained immaculate.
Years and years of practice, after all.
After a quick swipe of her fingers in the pooling blood and an unforgettable message sprawled on the front door for everyone to see, she gave herself a quick rinse at the faucet beside the vanity cabinet and shut the door behind her, as she was wont to do.
And then Esme escaped through a forgotten stairwell and disappeared like a ghost in the night, all the while thinking that San Francisco would be lovely this time of year.
Bainbridge Island, Washington State, August 2011
It was all done. Finished. And she hardly had anything left to do except have her proxy sign the papers.
On an isolated inlet of craggy rock, shielded by a mixture of towering firs and the sturdiest variety of deciduous trees that could one could imagine, Esme laid her sopping wet back against a carpet of emerald moss and breathed in the soul reviving scent of damp earth around her. She lightly coughed, expelling the last remnants of sea water from her stone lungs, and was then silent.
The wind carried salty drops of the Puget Sound to the stony coast and they mingled with the light rain falling from night darkened clouds onto the Japanese Maple leaves above. When they shook, she was showered with sea and sky and she observed the ocean crash before her in a delicious fury. She had emerged dripping from those angry waves, just moments ago, seen by no one as it was her way to remain unnoticed. She had specifically instructed that Jasper acquire a house on an appendage of the island that extended beyond the eyes of curious, privileged island dwellers who made their permanent homes at the edge of town. If they saw her now, it just wouldn't do, the most pressing concern being that she had apparently swum her way from Seattle to the lip of the island: That too wearing a yellow vintage sundress and no wetsuit, to make matters completely inexplicable.
Well, Jasper had succeeded beyond her wildest hopes. Climbing over the slippery rocks, her excitement grew at the obvious isolation and the looming shadow of a structure built of wood and glass. It was comfortably settled amongst the trees and boulders, not straining to make itself known as anything but a natural protrusion from the land. She knew the house would need work, plenty of it, as it remained in disrepair for the better part of twenty years. The occasional teenager and/or animal – there was no difference in Esme's mind – would undoubtedly have crashed their way through a few rooms, either on a poorly thought out dare or on the hunt for food and warmth. Her presence would put an end to all that, she was confident.
And Jasper would help, despite his various outings and ventures in Seattle. That, he had already promised.
The packages would begin arriving tomorrow, and she would need to introduce herself to a few people in the community after a week or so, just to avoid natural suspicion and foster neighborly trust. But for now Esme stretched her arms and allowed her hands to sweep against the springy moss, almost flying as she listened to the water roar and the leaves weep. Snapped branches and spindly tree limbs surrounded her, creating a cosy nest, and she closed her eyes. If her heart was capable, it would have softly drummed in contentment at that moment.
Yes, this could be home.