EDWARD- The Black Light
I threw aside the jaguar and it fell to the ground like a rag doll. I wiped a trickle of blood from the corner of my mouth, not feeling nearly sated enough. Nothing was ever enough.
I leapt from the tree and landed squarely on my feet. Had I been human, the landing would have shattered my legs. As I was, it was disappointing that such a great jump caused me no pain; it might have helped me snap out of my wallowing. Instead all I felt was tension in my legs, a desire to move. So I ran. I emerged from the thick rainforest onto a huge rock overhand looking out onto the ocean and watched as the sky burned crimson.
The sunsets in Forks had been a somewhat rare thing, what with the sun being hidden by clouds and succumbing to darkness without much show, and I was surprised to realize how much I had missed it. After Forks, I followed a trail into South America. When I realized it was false, I had fled with anger as far south as I could to a tiny island in Tierra del Fuego called Isla Noir. There, food had been scarce and people scarcer. It had been perfect. But after feeding off of penguins and sea lions I had been slowly drifting north in search of bigger game. Now I was somewhere in the Amazon and while I spent most of my days in the thick forests, it felt good to find open space and see the sky and smell the ocean.
As I sat on the rocks and watched the waves crashing a hundred feet below, my mind wandered back to Denali and the look on Alice's face whenever I had been able to catch her eye. As if her reciting the Pledge of Allegiance in German, Korean, and Swahili at the top of her thoughts whenever she saw me wasn't enough, I could tell by her avoidance of me that something was wrong. Alice had never kept a secret from me before—in fact, she often had told me more than I had wanted to know. But we had a different relationship than with the others because we would always know what the other was going to do…that's why it was impossible for the two of us to play chess. So it felt strange to know that Alice was keeping something from me.
I knew there was only one thing it could be about.
At this thought, I instinctively flipped a switch in my mind to halt my thoughts. I wasn't going to go down that road now. I had already wasted too much time lost in my reveries. In the back of my mind, I could figure out what Alice's secret had to do with, but I wasn't ready yet to form those words. I wasn't ready yet to think about what I had left behind.
So instead, I turned on my heel and ran back into the rain forest, letting myself be consumed by the shadows, the humid air, the descending night, until the last shreds of humanity fell away and I was pure spirit, moving through the jungle like a ghost. It was the closest I could get to freedom.