The first time I saw Jasper Hale, I had just killed a man for the very first time. It seemed to be a sequence of firsts – first thirst, first kill, first feed, first vision and the first sight of the man I would love.
It wasn't anything fancy. I didn't suddenly feel the need to race off the find him. Somehow I knew that it wasn't quite time, that neither one of us was ready to actually meet the other in person. I wasn't calm when I saw him – far from it. I was still basking in the glory of my first taste of blood. The smartly dressed businessman who's life I had just drank away still lay at my feet, his body now cold and lifeless.
The image of his corpse lying there would still be clear in my mind nearly a century later, and not only because he was first kill.
I didn't understand what had happened to me. I had awoken alone. I didn't possess any memories, or anything to trigger those memories. I could remember nothing – except the name "Alice". I assumed it was mine, though I wasn't sure. Other than the fact that I was alone, the only thing that I knew for sure when I awoke was that my throat hurt.
The businessman that had lain at my feet had been the unlucky human that I had chosen to sate it. I had quite literally just dropped him to the ground after draining him when my eyes had suddenly seen something other than the red brick wall that I had been staring at.
Instead I saw a man sitting on a patch of grass doing nothing. He didn't strike me as important, until I saw that his eyes were crimson red – the same color as mine. His skin was pale, yet another thing that seemed to indicate that he was similar to me.
That was it. I had seen nothing else, merely him sitting on a patch of grass somewhere in the world. In my newly turned stage, my vision had angered me. I hadn't understood them. No one had been there to inform me that some vampires could possess "gifts", while others did not. They terrified me, and so therefore I felt angry that I was having them. Eventually, I had grown used to them, but I didn't have another vision of the blonde haired vampire that had been the focus of my first for over a year.
Instead I had random visions of the people in the towns that I passed through, of who my next kill would be and of a coven of vampires who didn't feed as I did.
After little more than a year, the visions of the coven had finally made me curious. There was a leader – Carlisle as I had heard the others call him, and he had a mate who they called Esme. Both seemed to enjoy acting as though they were parents to the other two members of the coven, Edward and Rosalie. From the arguments between the two, I learned that Edward was a mind reader, and that Rosalie had something she didn't like him hearing.
Soon, I had found myself looking for them deliberately, trying to determine why they were in so many of my visions.
The day that I found out why was the day I had another vision of my blonde haired vampire. I had sought shelter in a small diner in a small town in the middle of nowhere. The waitress had just served me the glass of water that I had asked for, while she had tried to avoid staring at me. I didn't blend in very well, with crimson eyes, as well as dirty clothes and hair. I would need to find somewhere to clean up soon – humans were becoming more concerned with cleanliness now, finally learning their lesson.
My gift had shown me the Cullens again, though another man had joined them now. He had been in my visions for several months, after Rosalie had begged Carlisle to turn him. That particular vision had been informative, as I had been unaware of how a human could be turned into one of our kind. The pain I had seen the changing human go through had made me glad that I could not remember my human life.
The newest member of the Cullen coven had been laughing, and the other members of his coven had been laughing too. It was then that I realized that they weren't a coven, but a family. I had been confused as to why they were laughing, until I had seen my blonde haired vampire there. He was seated on an armchair, slightly away from the rest of them.
And I was in his arms.