WARNING: AT THE BOTTOM OF THE PAGE.


AN~Okay kids, here's the deal. I haven't been posting because I haven't had time to edit these remaining chapters the way I feel they need to be. I've been working full-time on an original novel and just the research eats up hours of my day.

Also, I am actually insane and the mania that assisted me in writing, editing, and posting Sunlight in six weeks has abated and I'm trying to work at normal human speed again which is painful and tiring for me. Anyway, basically what's going to happen here is that I'm going to post the remaining chapters with far less editing than usual and the quality will drop off from here as a result. It won't be joke-chapter-five bad, but it won't be near what I consider polished and there will undoubtedly be errors of every kind from grammatical to canon-contradictory.

But I figured you would prefer an ending (even a rough draft one) to nothing at all.


7

It took us nine months to get to the opposite coast. We stopped along the way for only days in some places and weeks in others. Our longest stay was in Baltimore, Maryland. It wasn't a specific choice, it just happened. We'd been there for nearly three months already, living in a tiny apartment above a bakery. Someone had even tried to break into the shop below one night. Unfortunately for him he was also a remorseless drunk driver and didn't stop even after killing a nine-year-old on a skateboard one afternoon and driving away. He was never caught. Until the night he tried to rob an old lady who made pies for a living. That was the safest business in town for those months while two literally bloodthirsty killers who never slept lived upstairs. There was a commercial for the Mothers Against Drunk Driving campaign on TV that same night and Aro sighed and said, "He was appropriately warned it seems," with absolutely no trace of humor. I laughed for so long I was grateful I wasn't human because I was sure I would have peed my pants. He just watched me with a quizzical expression. He often said completely hysterical things he didn't know were funny and had learned to exercise an impressive level of patience with my equally hysterical laughing fits every time.

I knew we would have to move on soon because even in a city this size, the number of people who'd gone missing since we got to town would begin to draw attention. But still I felt unusually lighthearted when we went out that night. It was a particularly frigid one and we there weren't very many people on the streets. On nights like this we had to search out people in abandoned buildings and often went home without eating at all. We were scouring a new part of town. If we killed too many times in the same area, people became suspicious and started to avoid sleeping there at night. We kept to the roofs when we could, listening for heartbeats in the buildings below us. After about twenty minutes, I heard it: two heartbeats right below my feet in the warehouse I had landed on. I looked around and didn't see Aro anywhere. I gave a soft low whistle we'd invented to communicate in situations like this. To anyone else—if they heard it at all—it probably sounded like the wind, a distant car horn, anything but the call of a terrible creature who could bring death to them swifter than almost any force on earth.

He appeared, grinning, in front of me a few moments later. He listened to the quiet thumping beneath our feet and swallowed in an anticipatory way. He slipped his arm around my waist and kissed me as lovingly as he would have if we'd been standing in front of an alter getting married. He loved when I found victims first and signaled him. It was like a really perverse version of having dinner ready for him when he got home from work.

We swept to the side of the building and jumped together, landing gracefully on the pavement below. Inside we found a woman laying nearly flat on the floor. The second heart beat was a child. At first I thought it was a baby until we got close and found it was actually a very small toddler. He was huddled against the wall in a dirty t-shirt too large for him and wore no coat. I had to assume the woman on the ground was his mother. It smelled like pee around them but not like human pee. It was like cat pee mixed with ground up drywall. The smell of a meth lab. Probably not here but the ghost of it was on their clothing.

I wasn't very interested in getting too close to them at all but I thought we'd found a person to help so I didn't tell Aro we should leave. There was something strange about the child. His heartbeat was irregular and his eyes glassy. We had seen a lot of hungry people and while this boy was obviously malnourished, that wasn't what was causing his current condition. He didn't even look at us until Aro had crouched in front of him.

"Hello," Aro said. He was trying to sound kind but it was obvious, even through his haze that the boy was afraid. Aro reached out and touched his hand. The boy didn't even flinch from the touch. It was so cold out here already, he might not have even felt it, his little hand was purple and mottled.

Aro hissed through his teeth a moment later and then taking the boy's wrist he turned it so I could see that there were infected-looking holes dotting the soft underside of his arm. Bright red lines were snaking away from these following his tiny veins along the quickest route to his heart. Track marks and the deadly fingers of blood poisoning birthed by dirty needles. If Aro hadn't been quicker than me, I would have literally ripped the woman, who was still unconscious, into pieces right there.

"Take the boy to the nearest hospital, I'll be here when you get back . . . " he said in my ear, holding onto to me until I relaxed. Then he crouched again and bent his head to look at the boy's face.

"This is my pretty friend, Isabella, she's going to take you somewhere warm," Aro said soothingly. He was much better at making his voice sweet than I was, his words made even me sag with relief a little bit. It would be all right. Aro knew. He always knew.

The boy looked up at me for the first time and then stared, transfixed. I didn't even know if he could understand us. He looked so young. The hand Aro hadn't held was resting on top of one of his dirty feet, the index finger was moving, scratching but so slightly you almost couldn't see it. I coaxed his hand up away from his foot revealing a flat, sticky wound where he had simply worried the skin away with his fingernail.

I lifted him carefully. Even if I were still human, this boy would weigh nothing. For the first time I was grateful for my vampire inability to cry and concentrated on not crushing the tiny body in my arms, far colder than it should have been for a living thing and gaining no warm from me. I had none left to give in any form. I didn't worry about acting like a human too much. He was near death, anything he said would be taken as delirium and I needed to get him help as quickly as possible. I leapt across roofs to travel faster until I saw a glowing red cross in front of us in the dark.

I knew the layout of this town was well as if it were Forks which you could travel from one end to the other in five minutes in any direction. I knew which of the city's thirteen hospitals was closest to that dreary warehouse.

I approached the north side of the largest building where a brightly lit lobby glowed like an empty fish tank behind the glass and after checking that no one was looking, I placed the boy on the cold ground where the ambulances stopped under the lit up emergency sign. I jumped silently back to the roof to wait. There were a lot of small rocks in the gutter by my feet, I took one and threw it through the window of a nearby SUV. An awful siren filled the night. People came outside and the boy was spotted immediately. I watched them take him inside. A swearing man turned off the car alarm, looking around for the culprit. He didn't look up at me and probably wouldn't have seen me anyway, crouched on the roof in the shadows, a porcelain-skinned gargoyle with the face of a dancer in a Botticelli painting.

I listened to the voices inside until I found the ones I was looking for, it was like changing TV channels.

They were describing his condition out loud.

"Yeah, those are track marks. What the fuck? And who would just leave him there . . . "

"Who brought you here, sweetheart?" A woman asked.

"Angels," this voice was so quiet I could only just hear it. "Red eyes . . . "

"Angels with red eyes?" A third person.

"Look at his eyes, Jackie," the first voice said. "Well, I guess they were angels or he would have died tonight. Still may . . . "

That was enough for me. I sped back to Aro. But there were four people there now, three humans. The woman on the ground was still unconscious and there was another woman, wearing the skimpiest of clothing under a leather jacket lined with dirty fur. The kind of outfit that was as inappropriate for the daylight as it was for the nearly arctic weather. She was sitting on the ground, watching Aro carefully but not moving. Aro was casually holding the third person, a man, against the wall with one hand. Every few seconds, the man struggled like maybe he could catch Aro off guard. He was short and very dark skinned but not black. I couldn't tell his ethnicity.

"Shockingly, she has a pimp," Aro explained. "Lucky for us though because she isn't 'fit to eat' as they say." He gestured to the first woman in a casual way. "Her blood is swimming with infection. You'd be vomiting for a day."

"We vomit?"

"Sometimes. It's awful to clean up as you can imagine," he said with a grimace. "Sticky. Anyway, we can just leave her, she's going to die anyway."

I was surprised to find that I wanted to kill her anyway. That boy, her son. It was horrific what she had done. I thought of my own daughter as I often did when our journeys brought us into contact with unfortunate children and my need for vengeance rose alarmingly.

"Freezing to death will be awful enough," Aro said observing the black anger on my face, "But if you want to, go ahead. I'm afraid I cannot."

Aro couldn't kill someone? What had happened to her? "Are you sure she'll die?" I asked, the desire to enact justice and the pull of being merciful were making me a little dizzy. When Aro killed that girl back in Seattle, it had been merciful. But if I got my hands on this woman, it wouldn't be a nice death. In this case, freezing to death was the kinder option.

"I guess there's a chance she'll be found before that, but she wouldn't remember us if she was," he said soothingly.

The man and other woman were watching us, fright making them statues now listening to this bizarre exchange. I guessed Aro had seen that they were bad enough to die or we wouldn't be talking so freely in front of them.

"You should take him," Aro said. The man's head turned to me, sizing me up, obviously to see if he could take me. He looked a little hopeful. I wasn't large after all and my thin arms belied my strength. As soon as Aro let him go, the man darted between us and ran. I caught up with him easily but he now had a gun in his hand. He fired at me and it bounced off my side like I was Superman, flying up into the brick wall next to us, a little puff of dust erupting where it hit. The man swore loudly in another language and turned to run. I grabbed him around the neck and slammed him into the wall.

"This was a new shirt, you asshole!"

Alice would have been so proud of my anger at that moment. I yanked him forward more roughly than usual and sank my teeth into him. He twitched but stopped fighting as my venom rushed into his veins, paralyzing him.

Aro was laughing giddily, it echoed in the vast, empty space. The woman at his feet was trembling as I came back to him, dragging the pimp's corpse behind me.

I looked down at her. Aro hadn't killed her yet. Usually he would have.

"She's a petty thief, that's all."

Oh. Why hadn't he just let her go?

"She'd already seen me," he said.

"But I won't say anything! I swear! I never ratted out anybody! I don't care about Jackson, he was an asshole. Good thing he's dead now." It seemed odd that she would be trying to side with us over the pimp's death and didn't seem to be particularly disturbed by the freaky manner of his demise.

"We can't save everyone," he said. "Sometimes, this is going to happen."

I looked down at her. She had frizzy, dyed brown hair and thick blue eyeshadow that looked like it had been layered on over days, the color clung to the natural lines around her eyes, enhancing them and making her look like she was growing iridescent scales on her face. Her cheeks were hollow. She also had track marks. I couldn't see her arms but there were some on her ankles. We were grim experts on drug addiction at this point.

I didn't want to kill her. I looked at Aro, my plea silent but intense and I knew much more persuasive than hers would be.

He shook his head and I turned away.

Behind me, I heard her scream and then nothing.

He reached for my hand at one point while we were walking home from dumping the bodies and I snatched it away before his fingers could touch mine. I knew I would forgive him too easily if we were touching.

"She had an awful life," he said quietly. "She was going to keep—"

"I don't care."

I was angry at him even though really, this was my fault. A result of my idea. I was surprised it hadn't happened before. Had it? I assumed he would have told me but maybe he didn't because he knew how I would react. He didn't always tell me what they did.

I ran ahead and jumped up the side of our house instead of going in the back door like a human. I didn't feel like being civilized. I caught the window ledge and flipped smoothly inside with a slick precision that would have made me an Olympian in another life. He was beside me in the dark a moment later. He took my arms and forced me to face him.

"You know who I am, Isabella. I've killed thousands of people you would consider innocent. The truth is everyone is innocent. And no one is. The differences are only black and white to someone who can't experience the life of another person entirely."

I was facing him but I wasn't looking at him. He pulled me a little closer.

"You have the glorious cushion of partial ignorance to fall onto after each kill. And you seek only to punish the wicked, to obliterate evil. But everyone I kill is innocent, you see, because there is no doubt about their true nature. I know why they are the way they are. Righteous satisfaction in judgement can only be had if there is room for doubt in which you can paint your own truth. That's what makes me a monster. I know every death I inflict is unjust and yet I feel no remorse. But you are a saint. And so you will always feel sad when the subjectively innocent die. But if you attempt to carry the guilt I don't feel on top of your own, you will drown in it, my dear."

"Then why didn't you want to kill that boy's mother . . ."

"I had already seen her life, I had no wish to see it again."

I hugged him even though I knew he would think I was being ridiculous and insist he was in no way traumatized by the event.

"We should leave town soon. Tomorrow," I said. I was anxious to get away from here and bury this memory on top of all the other awful ones in the mass grave in my head.

"We have two weeks left on our lease . . ."

He picked me up and set me on the table, pulling my legs around him. He smiled at me in a soft, persuasive way I had been trying not very successfully to learn to resist.

We had both become fond of our little temporary home, with its secondhand furniture and lemon yellow walls, the adorably tiny kitchen that we didn't need, the living room that looked out on the street over the bakery. The bathroom had a claw-footed tub that became a shower when you pulled the curtain around it. It wasn't really big enough for us both to sit down in it comfortably but we did it anyway with some inventive maneuvering. It was where we often talked. With the curtain pulled around us and the air heavy with steam, it was a secret, private world and it belonged only to us.

Every morning we could smell the baked goods that would later fill the glass cases downstairs as they were made, the scents and science of their creation: caramelizing sugar, mellow yeast dissolving into warm water, bitter chocolate flaking from a sharp knife onto the top of a cake in flat brown curls.

"We wouldn't even have to hunt for a while. You're old enough now that we can go a few days. It's not comfortable but it's entirely possible. I'm sure we can find other ways to amuse ourselves," he said, kissing my neck sweetly.

I held onto him, my chin resting on his shoulder. Our curious attraction hadn't waned much and I continually watched my heart for signs that the ice I had placed around it was cracking or beginning to melt, swearing I would pull back and leave if it ever did. The result of this was that it ached and burned constantly the way your hands do when you run them under very cold water.

"Two weeks," I agreed.

He lifted me again the way you would carry a bride over a threshold and took me to a chair near the window where he set me down again carefully. This chair was low and we had found that with me seated on the edge and him kneeling, it was just the right height for us to make love. He knelt in front of me, bringing our faces to the same altitude.

We kissed slowly. I moved to the front of the seat, caging him with my legs, pulling him tightly against me. We undressed each other without speaking. We hadn't turned on any lights when we came home and the only illumination was from the street lamps outside. Our pale, slightly shimmering skin was beautiful in the semi-darkness.

He put his hand on my sternum and pressed me back. I complied willingly even though it put my neck in an awkward position. I knew what was coming. This was something I had never done with Edward and Aro had had to spend some time talking me into letting him try it which he never had to do again after the first time because I was as close to being addicted to it as I had ever been to anything. I wasn't sure if he was particularly skilled at it or if it was just because it was him and he was so formal and eloquent all of the time that having him do something so base and sexual with his mouth was indescribably exciting.

I moaned something unintelligible when his mouth made contact with me and the mania of my need for him swirled upwards and, bypassing my frozen heart, wrapped itself around my brain, driving away all the pain and increasingly indistinct guilt about us.

Usually he carried on much longer than he did this time and when he stopped abruptly and yanked me up to meet his lips in a kiss that was full of unexpected electricity, I actually looked to see if we were glowing when he let go of me because my nerves lit up all over my skin like a lake hit by moonlight as a cloud moves away. All at once illuminated.

He was behaving with uncharacteristic desperation and I hadn't even caught my breath from the kiss before he had thrust into me suddenly. I gasped, this weird frenzy of his infecting me too. I placed my hands on his lower back, silently urging him to continue his somewhat frantic movements.

I had excellent control of my shield now and very rarely, I used it to silently communicate things to Aro in public by touching his hand and throwing my shield around us both like a cloak. I didn't usually project it by accident but sometimes it happened during sex when I was particularly distracted or aroused it left me, floating outward, surrounding us in a diaphanous cloud and I let out images I didn't mean to. Usually they were innocuous enough and even just memories of us together at other times. Brief flashes of him as we undressed or a second of his jaw from my perspective as he kissed my throat. A few times, it had been things I didn't want him to see. Times with Jacob or Renesmee. Once even being in high school in Phoenix.

Tonight I felt my shield go and I didn't try to stop it. I was feeling open and drowsy and everything was so nice I wasn't very concerned about losing control. But I knew it had been a mistake as I got close and I tried to pull my shield back but it was was too late, there was few seconds of us having sex in a hotel in some city months ago and a clear impression of my thoughts as we were together. I was thinking about how much I needed him to touch me so I didn't have to feel anything or remember anything.

And I saw a rare flash of vulnerability on his face and an expression I hadn't ever seen before contained inside it. It was naked and pained. His eyes were open, fixed on me, his mouth set in a flat line. the undisguised emotion on his face, real naked emotion, not his mask of humor and cheer, sent me to my end almost immediately making me feel perverse that his apparent sorrow had pleased me. I didn't want him to hurt, but I had never seen him really feel either and it wrenched something inside of me painfully. Wonderfully. He felt something for me.

He hadn't stopped but his face had changed, closed subtly. The sadness just in his eyes now. I expected he would finish but he was still holding me, moving in me.

"Again," he said, his voice utterly flat.

"What?"

"Come for me, I want to see it again."

I had had multiple orgasms with him before but he'd never demanded it like this.

He swallowed. "Please."

I didn't speak, I just moved against him as he thrust into me. I kept eye contact with him, I didn't want to look away from that visible feeling in him while it remained. It only took a minute this time and I grabbed at him thoughtlessly when I came, my hands made fists in his hair, my fingernails scraped his scalp and a long, harsh cry burned up out of my throat.

He let me recover for a minute before he said, "Again." This time is was a little more stressed.

I didn't question it this time. It took a little longer but it was so violent I thought that my spine would break when it finally hit me. The combination of his expression and the way he was ordering me to do it was making me both sick and excited. It was the first time since we have fucked on the ground in the middle of the woods that he had openly shown an unmasked dominance towards me. That time it had just been him needing to have control over something which he never had control of. I didn't know what was happening this time. He was still watching me with that same expression and he still hadn't finished.

"Again."

His voice was dead and dry.

I sat up straighter, shocked and uncomfortable.

"Aro, I can't." I really didn't know if I could.

"You can if you want to. And I want to see you come while I fuck you. That's what I'm here for, isn't it? So what's the problem, Isabella?"

"You're scaring me."

He released me and stood. The sudden loss of him felt inordinately devastating and I just sat in the chair feeling woozy as I watched him dress quickly. I covered myself inadequately with my arms suddenly feeling as exposed as I would have if I had been standing on a street corner naked in the middle of the day not sitting in my own apartment in the dark.

He came over and kissed my forehead but it felt distant and perfunctory. He went to the still open window and looked back at me. I saw that look again, there and then gone so fast. Pain and also fear and something I didn't see the first time or maybe wasn't there the first time: hatred. My cold heart shrank in its glittering prison.

"I'm not leaving," he said, his voice was strained. And then he was gone.

It was a long time before I could collect myself. I rose from the chair and went to our bedroom. I put on the pajamas Aro always laughed at me for owning, saying I wasn't going to sleep and if I was in bed, he'd prefer I be naked. I couldn't smile at this memory right now. I had a few nice memories now. To replace basically the entirety of my life before. We had made some valuable ones in the past few months. Ones I cherished. Ones in this apartment. Our first home since we ran away. They all looked drenched in red in my mind now, I saw them through a waterfall of blood. I saw us sitting in our tub, turned sideways, side by side, laughing as we often did but our laughter sounded grotesque and villainous not carefree the way I had always remembered it until now. Now I was seeing us for what we were, disgusting killers, horrible, greedy creatures of death. The tub was full of blood instead of water. Our arms and legs, above the bloodline were streaked with it. It was matted in our hair and smeared on our cheeks and foreheads. I watched us kiss obscenely with bloody mouths and then I shut my eyes and bit my knuckles hard, the way I had back in Seattle, when he had pulled me from the tub there. I don't know why I hadn't seen it this way before. Everything we did was colored by our nightly murdering. We didn't deserve joy and we had escaped justice for long enough. This is how I was finally going to pay for my immediate betrayal of everyone I loved not an hour after they all died because of my daughter while she and I lived on.

I went to the bathroom and stopped in the doorway. I wasn't sure what I was going to do in there. I stared at the empty bathtub. I was about to step forward and touch the cool porcelain when I remembered there was a mirror in there. My face was the last thing I wanted to see. I snatched my foot back and turned around. I just about jumped literally through the roof.

He was standing in the doorway. He looked almost normal again. Normal for him. Weird and intense for anyone else. I didn't move and neither did he. We just stared at each other across the room. Then his eyes went from my face to my outfit.

"Pajamas," he said, and smiled just a little bit, shaking his head. He came to me in a blink and kissed my forehead again. It wasn't detached this time though.

"You should lay down," he said softly.

I nodded and he led me to the bed. I sat down and looked up at him. He was holding my hand and I tugged on it, trying to coax him into laying down with me. His face was totally blank but after a minute he nudged me gently and I moved over giving him room.
We lay on our backs, only our hands touching, our heads turned to look at each other.

"We should leave tomorrow," he said.

It was like being stabbed. He wanted to leave here as fast as possible. Get away from our life here. I didn't want to leave now.

"Okay," I said quietly. I let go of his hand and turned my back on him.

He didn't move and we lay in the darkness like that until the sun rose, filling the room with moldy grey light.

I turned back to look at him finally. He was staring at the ceiling, completely still. It was the first time I had ever seen one of our kind look like an actual corpse. But then he looked at me and all of the confusing emotions from last night were just gone. He was Aro again completely.

"You look very pretty in the daylight, did you know?" he said brightly.

This cheery mood was so ridiculous compared to last night that I laughed out of sheer disbelief.

"You're . . . insane, Aro. Did you know?"

"I did, actually. I believe I was the one who told you that, in fact," he said, smiling.

At least this would be the same. If we couldn't have emotion, laughter was okay. I thought this was all there was yesterday after all. I smiled back, hoping I could forget about what it had felt like to see him be a real person. And I really didn't want to remember that hate I saw in his eyes for a second. I didn't know what it meant and at least this way I could always believe it had nothing to do with me.

"I think, you're on my side of he bed," he said silkily, kneeling over me. I was laying on the side he usually did. It had smelled like him and not feeling like I could just roll over and be near him I lay there, smelling him on the sheets all night. It was like licking crumbs from a cake plate. Just a trace and more torturous than satisfying.

"What should I do about that, hmm? A spanking?"

"Only if you want a broken hand."

"Oh, but I'm so much faster than you, my sweet."

I dived out from under him, laughing, and dashed for the door. He was much faster than me and had me before I even got to the end of the carpet. I was tossed, rather carelessly I thought, back onto the bed.

He stepped up onto the mattress and stood over me with a smirk on his face.

"Pajamas," he said again, completely confounded.

"I like them."

"Well, I like you without them."

"Take them off then," I said putting my arms over my head and stretching so my t-shirt rode up showing my stomach and my back arched, enhancing every curve.

"Maybe I should just destroy them so you can't wear them anymore," he said. He was straddling me and had the tie from my pants in one hand, laced between his pretty fingers.

"Don't you dare! I love these."

They had cupcakes on them. They reminded me of our place here above the bakery.

He smiled. "And if I do?"

"Maybe you'll get a spanking."

"Oh, but I would like it," he said with a small laugh.

"Perv." I tried to roll away but he placed his hands on either side of my shoulders trapping me.

"I will leave your precious pajamas intact. Since they make you so happy," he said and he leaned in to kiss me.

It was a lovely kiss. It made me feel warm and almost like nothing had happened at all. Except that it had. The evidence was pooled in the bottom of my stomach. A tiny puddle of water from a thin sphere of ice that had been melting all night in slow drips, revealing underneath the hard, grey heart of a vampire, covered in the scar tissue of my misfortune, unbeating still but no longer protected from the most dangerous thing in the world. I felt that thing flood in, encasing my heart with a new, lighter layer that warmed it from its frozen condition to something that almost seemed human it was so soft and fragile and alive.


END NOTES: Yeah. Damn this thing is rough. Hopefully still readable enough. Once I get past the next chapter which I know requires a few minor changes at the beginning, these should post pretty quickly from there. Sunlight readers will see the two parallels in this chapter. The bathtub was actually in this story first and when I saw the opportunity to reference it in Sunlight in such an appropriate way, I was overjoyed.

Thank you for the lovely reviews and PMs, as always. You guys are just a delight, you make writing for web publication worth all of the effort involved.


CONTENT GUIDE: Reference to child abuse involving drug use.