I remember the last girl I killed
For some of the others, it's difficult to remember—the last time they scrolled the Vampirics Anonymous calander back to zero. Most of their last kills were more than a decade ago, unpleasant memories but vague ones. Mine was a year and a half ago.
I was hunting alone—never a good idea for me. I'd had a rare fight with Alice, so I was already in the red. I went out for cougars and deer and found humans instead. Two hikers, a young woman and an older—the young woman was a ways ahead, on her knees beside a stream, splashing water into her face and onto the back of her neck. Her hair was bright albino-blonde, pulled into a loose ponytail. This was the only thing that I noticed about her in the split second before I killed her.
It wasn't really like I'd meant to. You have to understand that this is quite simply the way we are put together. Our instincts have no understanding of morality. See a human, eat a human, as natural and casual as plucking an apple from a tree.
No one was there to stop me that time, and I drank her dry. Again, instinct—I wouldn't be able to stop myself now that I had blood on my tongue, would be a vampire and not Jasper until I was done. Like waking up the morning after a party and suddenly realizing you were in someone else's bed, staring at an unfamiliar ceiling.
No Edward to stop me then, but a similar catalyst to bring me back to my senses—the scream of someone discovering what I had done. I was standing in the shallows of the stream with blood floating on top of the water behind me when the mother came through the last trees and saw me there. And screamed.
A normal vampire would have known exactly what to do—kill the mother, keep feeding, no big deal. But her screamed snapped me back to being Jasper, and exactly what it meant to be holding this girl with her blond hair trailing down into the water behind her. I looked at her mother with the same white-blond hair, and eyes that looked like someone had just stabbed her and she was halfway to dying. Guilt came at me like a sandstorm and covered me, burying me hot and coarse. I suffocated with it.
I had thought that was rock bottom, right there—looking at that mother's eyes and realizing what I had done, whose blood was on my hands after all these years of honing my self-control. But I knew now that those eyes were nothing, not compared to looking at Edward's eyes with his Bella lying dead just yards away. I have never been suicidal but I wanted to die. I wanted to blank out completely and forever and not exist as the person who'd just done what I'd done.
Edward seemed perfectly happy to oblige. "I'll kill you!" he was yelling from where Carlisle held him. "I'll kill you, Jasper, you're dead!"
And all this from Edward, our quiet, straight-faced monk of a brother. Emmett and I used to try to mess with him, when we were younger, try to get him mad. It had never worked. He'd only found that range of emotions, fear to anger and back, since he'd found Bella. There had been nothing for him to care about before—hard to get angry when you've got nothing to lose that you couldn't stand losing. Still, he'd never lost it completely, never lost control the way the rest of us did occasionally, inevitably. Ah, noted the younger Jasper, still curious about where his limits were. So this is what it takes.
The rest of my mind was nowhere near as calm. Self-hatred telling me to jump off a cliff. Guilt and pity telling me to bare my throat to him, to tell him to go ahead, an eye for an eye. Indelible soldier habit telling me to fight and self-preservation telling me to run. No chance of that, at least. I was going so many directions that I could hardly move for the knots.
Edward broke an arm free from Carlisle and threw it out towards me, fingers stretching and scrabbling for me uselessly, still thirty feet away. Suddenly I felt Alice's hand in mind, the familiar smallness of it, and she was standing slightly in front of me, her body angled between Edward and me. My mind registered as always the absurdity of it, her protecting me and a full foot shorter than me, skinny as a birch, but as always I had to push the absurdity aside and remember exactly who Alice was. A low growl rippled from her chest and through her teeth, and she glared Edward down.
It was the first time I'd thought to be aware of the rest of the family—a quick startled look showed me Esme behind Carlisle, Rosalie standing back calmly with her arms folded across her chest. Emmett crossing the yard to pick Bella up from the grass, her limbs all going the wrong way as he lifted her, a broken-doll horror-movie image. Shaking his head as he started to know what I knew, that she was dead, absolutely heart-stopped no-coming-back-from-this dead. If she'd been even the slightest bit alive, vampire venom would have fixed everything, but I'd really done a number on her. Guilt pumped in my chest like my heart was alive again, jump-started to life by shame and self-loathing.
"Let me go," Edward said quietly as Emmett carried her to the house. He'd gone suddenly still, quiveringly in control again, straight-faced Edward. He was looking at her. "Let me go, Carlisle. Bella—"
Carlisle understood—or at least thought he did. He released Edward carefully, hovering close in case he needed restraining again. He did need restraining, but Carlisle wasn't nearly close enough. Because his unfinished sentence wasn't Bella is dead, let me go to her, it was Bella is dead, and someone else is going to die for it. His body snapped away from Bella in the instant Carlisle let go, and he jumped at me.
I discovered something very suddenly in that split second, in the way that my feet slid back into a stance and my lips pulled back from my teeth—that I did not want to die after all. Yes, there was guilt, a hundred thousand pounds of it, worse guilt than I'd ever felt and the fear that I was a terrible, irredeemable pitch-black soul. But I'd lived with guilt. Guilt had been a step behind me my whole life, right over my shoulder—we were almost friends, by now, or at least weary acquaintances. I was the black sheep Cullen, the one who couldn't keep his mouth closed to stop eating people. And so now, looking guilt in the eyes, it was something like oh, hello. It's you again. Come on in, I've been expecting you.
No matter how much I might deserve to die for my latest crime, my body wouldn't let me do it. I didn't want to die. So when Edward came for me, I dragged Alice backward by the hand and got in front of her and got ready to fight him. Just as he was about to hit, though, something caught him midair, Emmett this time, snatching him out of the air by the collar of his shirt and yanking him away from me, pinning him.
"Stop it, Edward!" he barked in his rumbling, authoritative bass. "Calm down, man, don't do something you're going to regret!"
"I am not going to regret this," Edward bit back. "He killed Bella, I'm going to kill him!"
"Maybe he should," I found myself saying, my martyr side resurfacing now that he wasn't attacking me.
"Hush, Jasper," Alice said sharply, bristlingly mother-bear defensive. "Nobody's going to be killing anyone! It was an accident, everyone saw that!"
"Alice, don't be stupid," Emmett said, slightly breathless from restraining Edward's thrashing. "There will be consequences for this, either way. All I'm saying is we shouldn't do anything rash."
"What do you mean, consequences?" Rosalie said suddenly from beside the wall. "She was only a human."
This brought a fresh burst of struggling from Edward, his eyes halfway to crimson with bloodlust even though he'd fed two days ago, very specific and targeted bloodlust. "Only a—" he snarled, unable to even finish. "Only a—?"
"She was his bonded partner, Rose!" Emmett yelled, equally appalled. "How can you even—"
"Emmett, Rosalie!" cut in Esme with an edge we'd rarely heard in her voice. "Behave!"
"I don't care if she was the Queen of England!" Alice's furious soprano climbed to the top of all the noise as she stalked forward, two steps in front of me now and practically mantling, a hawk with her wings spread around me. "Nothing is going to happen to Jasper, understand? It was a mistake!"
Vampire voices are very beautiful. The adjective I've heard most often is musical, described as bell choirs and clear clarion notes. But not all notes harmonize with other notes, and not all bells are pleasant to listen to. The sound of six voices rising in cacophony, smashing against each other in dissonant anger, was, yes, technically musical. But not pleasant. The notes of their voices sounding like they were trying to tear each other apart.
As soon as Alice took one more step forward, arguing furiously, I took a step back. No one seemed to notice, not even Alice, not even Edward—I was sure their minds were caught up with other things right now, debating whether I should live or die. I took a last careful look to see if anyone was watching me, and then I slid silently into the woods behind us and I started to run.
I wasn't sure whether it was cowardice, self-preservation, panic—I wasn't sure what it was powering me as I moved quickly between the trees, where exactly I intended to go. The flat-line horrified impulse to run seemed to be only saying away, far enough that I couldn't hear their voices twisting together in six-part disharmony behind me. Away from Bella with her arm bending the wrong direction. Away from Edward with his eyes like a whole city burning. Just away.
I ran without thinking, and instinct took over. I ran south.
