She was twenty-one, but she looked at most sixteen. Her face was delicate, framed by a sleek pixie cut of dark hair. He found her on her way home from a bar, obviously drunk, and surprisingly vulnerable looking — though granted, you didn't get much more vulnerable than a young woman alone, at night, and intoxicated.
It didn't take long for him to convince her to walk with him to the cheap motel, where the secretary didn't even bother to give the obviously drunk girl and her dangerously handsome companion a second glance. The key to the room felt sharp and cold in his hand.
She had a sloppy arm around his shoulders, and her face fit perfectly into the curve of his shoulder. Her lips were warmly moist against his skin.
He wondered dimly who was seducing whom when she pressed him against the door and pushed her mouth to his. His teeth scraped against her lips, making her moan — he didn't know if it was pain or pleasure, and he didn't know how far apart the two were. She whispered slurred nonsense, fragments of phrases and words, and he pulled her farther into the room. The fumbled with each others clothing, flashes of bare skin, fevered breaths.
Passion.
She was clumsy, her eyes wide and slightly damp, sparkling in the dim glow of the open door. Her kisses weren't precise, landing on his forearm, his chest, his eye-brow. Still, she was beautiful.
Hand moved against bare skin in rhythm with moans of barely breeched desire.
"You've changed," she said, her voice suddenly clear, "used to be you were the clumsy one and I was the one that knew what I wanted. Funny, it was just last month. You didn't know me at all, did you?"
He fell still, a thousand questions swirling until they pinpointed to one answer.
She laughed, a simple sound violated by the hint of cruelty. (Her laugh used to be innocent, but he sees now that he couldn't have expected her to stay that way — not after what he had done.)
Was it cruel fate that brought him to the woman he had loved? How did she change so drastically in such a short time? When were her eyes so sad, when did she dye her hair black, when did she get her lip pierced?
He couldn't answer. (He didn't want to answer when she pulled him down to her lips, kissing him hungrily)
He felt sick, and abruptly wanted to end this. His hand tugged the nape of her neck away from his lips, and he pulled her ear to his mouth.
"I have changed," he whispered. She didn't scream when he closed his mouth on the tender skin of her neck, drawing blood.
It wasn't the casual slaughter necessary to create the Army. This wasn't just a number on the night's quota.
(When it's personal, casualty no longer seems the right word for death.)
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang, but with a whimper.
— T. S. Eliot The Hollow Men
How Bree, the newborn killed by the Volturi at the end of Eclipse, was changed.