Edward jerked out of sleep so violently that he rolled right off his bed into the floor, a tangle of gangly limbs and sweaty sheets.

He sat up, disorientated and terrified. His heart was pounding in his throat. He forced himself to take a calming breath and quiet his mind.

Behind his eyelids all he could see was a dark figure crouched over his parent's bed, draining his mother's life force through her neck. His father was glassy eyed and motionless beside them, his pajama shirt drenched in glistening blood. His neck was crooked at an odd angle.

Once he was able to focus, he realized the terror he was experiencing wasn't his own, it was his sister's. Through her mind, he saw the creature fling aside his mother's lifeless body and lumber out of the room towards the stairs.

He was on his feet and running to her room as fast as his legs could carry him.

He flung open the door seized Alice by the shoulders, shaking her hard, as the monster in her dream stopped outside her bedroom door.

"Wake up! Alice, wake up!"

As she regained consciousness her thoughts were a quivering mess of fear, and flashes of blood red eyes.

She burst into tears and Edward allowed her to throw her arms around his waist and sob into his shoulder even though the noise it made in his head was deafening. People's thoughts were always magnified by touch.

Edward tried to scrape together a mental shield little success. It was flimsy at best.

"Edward, I-I don't think it w-was a dream," Alice whispered.

"Shh, of course it wa-" Edward cut off mid-sentence as his father's mental voice screamed in his head effortlessly breaking through his frail mental shield.

GET YOUR SISTER EDWARD, GET OUT OF THE HOUSE. THERE'S SOMETHING HERE.

He'd never heard his father panic. His father had also never outwardly acknowledged his mental quirk, and they'd never communicated like this. Edward opened his mind fully and let his ability flood the house.

His parent's minds were in their room where they usually were. His mother's mind was asleep, her thoughts a cacophony of bright colors and movement, but his father's was in a state he'd never felt before. The edge of his father's usually solid presence was shuddering and undulating, like someone was tickling it, or molding it like clay. He could tell by the mental flavor that it was his father, but there were no thoughts.

Then Edward felt ice slip down his spine as he registered a third presence just outside the room, hovering by the window. He heard his father's voice murmur something indistinguishable, and at the same time the words appeared in his father's head almost like someone else was writing across the inside of his skull.

Please come in.

Edward strained his ears and heard the latched window in his parents room scrape open.

Alice suddenly grabbed his arm and in her thoughts he saw himself hurtling back to his room, grabbing his baseball bat, charging into his parent's room. The creature would look up as he entered; it's eyes deranged and mouth smeared with blood. He would charge, bat raised over his head, an anguished scream torn from his lips.

The bat would splinter to pieces over the creature's body, and as it rose off the bed, he would notice with horror that he was too late, his mother's cream silk pajamas were stained red and she lay in the corner of the room unmoving, glassy eyes staring at nothing.

His father was still on the bed, neck twisted unnaturally.

The monster would consume him, and then it would hunt for Alice, and the four of them would be dead.

Alice took her arm off of his and they stared into each other's eyes solemnly.

"Alice, run now to the pool house and barricade yourself inside. Call the police," whispered Edward furiously.

He pulled her to her feet, out of her room, and pushed her towards the front door.

But Edward! You saw what will happen! You can't! screamed Alice's voice in his head.

He didn't care. He couldn't live with himself if he didn't at least try to save them.

Just like in the vision, he sprinted back to his room and grabbed his baseball bat, before sprinting up the stairs to his parent's room and wrenching open their door.

He was too late; his parents were just as they were in Alice's vision. The creature was even more terrifying in the flesh. Its pale skin glittered in the moonlight. Edward couldn't read its thoughts, but he could tell where its mind was. It felt like a writhing pit of venomous snakes, convoluted, twisted and evil.

Then he was screaming and charging, swinging wildly. The bat splintered to pieces across the creature's back.

In a movement that was quicker than a heartbeat the creature had him by the throat, pinned to the wall with single freezing cold hand.

Its blood red eyes seemed to stare into his very soul, and then he felt a nudge at the edge of his own mind.

Relax, this won't hurt… something whispered in his mind in a voice as smooth silk. Involuntarily he felt his muscles unclench, the handle of the splintered baseball bat fell from his nerveless fingers. He felt his head tilt up, exposing the column of his neck to that red gaze…

As he grappled mentally in vain for the will to struggle, Alice's thoughts permeated the thick fog clouding the edges of his consciousness.

She had crept into the room.

"I r-rescind your invitation," she intoned shakily. The effect was dramatic; the creature was pulled off Edward and flung violently across the room and out of the window by some invisible force.

Edward regained control of his limbs and gasped for breath. Without missing a beat Alice grabbed his arm and with strength that belied her slight frame, hauled him to his feet and pulled him out of the room.

The cellar she thought at him. He caught a vision of the two of them barricading themselves in.

They stumbled down the stairs as quickly as possible. There came a crash from somewhere outside the house.

Alice gasped and stopped moving abruptly as another vision flooded her.

The creature was going set their house on fire.

"Alice! That's enough!" Edward shook her desperately in an effort to snap her out of the vision of the two of them writhing in fiery agony in their barricaded cellar as the creature outside looked on indifferently.

She snapped back to herself and slumped into Edward's arms, sobbing uncontrollably.

"W-we're g-going to burn," she choked.

"No we aren't," growled Edward, casting around wildly in his head for something they could he realized it was obvious.

"I've got a plan. Go to the downstairs bathroom and fill the tub with water," he said authoritatively with a lot more confidence than he actually felt.

Alice stilled for a second and fleetingly caught a glimpse of the two of them gasping for breath outside of their house underneath a broken window. There were sirens in the background and the house was engulfed in flames.

She took a deep breath and straightened her back.

"Alright," she intoned.

Edward headed in the opposite direction to the telephone while crashing and thumping sounds continued come from outside.

He dialed and waited impatiently for an operator to pick up.

"Nine-one-one what is your emergency?"

"There's someone outside my house trying to set it on fire!"

"What is the location of your emergency?"

Edward was momentarily distracted by sudden the absence of sound from outside, had the creature given up and left?

"We're at-" suddenly he heard an almighty crash and the line went dead. Edward uttered a low oath, his mind working furiously to figure out what to do next, and then he remember his father's work cell phone. But where was it?

He sprinted to the kitchen to see if it was sitting on charge. It wasn't.

He quickly rerouted and found his father's briefcase on the side table by their front door. He emptied the whole thing out but there were only paper documents.

That meant that it must be in their room on the bedside table.

Edward forced himself back up the stairs and with shaking hands and found himself paused on the threshold, struck anew by the horror of the scene. Swallowing back the bile rising in his throat, Edward crossed the room quickly the snatched up the phone from where it lay.

He couldn't help by look at his mother as he left; her cream silk pajamas where luminescent in the moonlight.

His eyes filled with tears, blurring his vision and against his better judgement he found himself walking to her and kneeling beside her prone figure.

"I'll look after Alice mom," he whispered. He laid his shaking fingertips against her eyelids and gently closed them.

He stood and tried to look at his father to say a last good bye, but the unnatural angle of his neck was too much, there was a bone protruding, and Edward found himself on his knees retching. He knew he had to get moving, had to call again, had to get down to Alice, but even as the quiet crackling sound of flames replaced the crashing and thumping outside, he found himself unable to stop dry-heaving.

"Edward…" it was Alice. She crouched beside him and laid a hand on his back. He managed to calm himself enough so that he was just sobbing uncontrollably. He couldn't remember the last time he'd cried.

She took his hand and he blindly followed her out of the room and down the stairs.

They got to the bathroom and got into the tub and sat in cold water side by side.

Edward registered that Alice had the cell phone and was talking to someone. He heard through her thoughts that the operator had taken the liberty of searching their address with their phone number, and that a fire engine and police officers were already on their way.

The operator told Alice to get out of the house. She replied that they were in the downstairs bathroom unable to leave.

They huddled together as the sound of fire got louder and nearer and smoke started to seep in under the door.

Very soon Edwards could feel the heat and see bright light dancing through the gap between the door and the floor.

He numbly registered the sound of sirens in the distance. He felt the twisted mind of the creature outside become colder and somehow more negative, and then it was moving away. A short while later Edward could no longer register it's presence.

The room was really filled with smoke now, and both Edward and Alice found themselves in a frenzy of coughing.

It was time to leave.

Edward's eyes were watering from the smoke and he could hardly breathe when he stood up straight so he couched low and felt his way up the wall to where the window was.

He reached around blindly for something to break the window with, and found his hand closed around their metal waste bin.

It took two good shoves before the glass gave way.

He grabbed Alice's hand and helped her climb out the window before pulling himself up and allowing gravity to do its job as he tumbled out bonelessly. Alice was lucky he didn't land on top of her, and they were both lucky it wasn't a very far drop.

They both breathed in fresh air like people in a desert drinking water after days without, before staggering away from burning heat of their home and collapsing side by side on the lawn.

They saw a fire truck make its way up the driveway followed closely by several police cars.

What are we going to tell them? Alice thought. Her question was accompanied by the salient points of what would happen if they told the truth.

They'd both be declared mentally unsound and Edward would be tried as an adult for the murder of his parents and arson. He would either spend the rest of his life in prison, or in a mental facility for very dangerous people depending on if he wanted to plead insanity or not.

"How about the truth… minus the unbelievable bits?" suggested Edward between labored breaths. Alice concentrated for a moment and their futures cleared up somewhat. Neither of them would be sent to prison or institutions. She caught a glimpse of their kind uncle Carlisle on a plane, his usually serene visage marred by worry and fatigue.

Edward grabbed Alice's hand and she squeezed his back.

"We'll be okay," he murmured.

Tears ran silently down their faces as they watched their home burn.

I've never written a twilight fanfic before. What did you think? :)