"Isn't it lovely, all alone? Heart made of glass, my mind of stone. Tear me to pieces, skin to bone. Hello, welcome home"
-Lovely, Billie Eilish, Khalid

Chapter Sixteen:
EPOV

"Isabella," I breathed against her neck before inhaling sharply.

I had no need for air and yet since the moment I dragged her almost instinctually towards me by the knots of her oversized sweater, I had been panting like a dog.

I should be mortified that this little creature had such a hold over me.

I should have been furious that I had such little self-control over my own body.

I should have felt some shred of remorse as I practically dangled this girl off the ground, pushing and pulling her around like my own rag doll.

But there was nothing.

Nothing, except the all-consuming desire, passion, raging need to bring her closer to me. I wanted to devour her hidden thoughts that lay underneath that thick dark and damp hair. I wanted to rid her of the shapeless sweater that hung off her lithe frame and see more of the pale skin that must have existed underneath. I wanted to press her flesh against mine and hear more of the little noises that spilled from her mouth.

So I did.

She fell into my arms; light as a feather and yet feeling so substantial and solid I could practically hear the imaginary cord, one that connected us in a cloud of heady emotion, snapping taut between our bodies.

More quickly than my mind could register, I had her pinned against me, one arm wrapped much too tightly around her waist while the other found a home in the wet tresses of her crazy hair. My nose found her neck again, running up and down the smooth white skin.

I just needed a taste.

My lips took the place of the tip of my nose and the demon inside me purred in delight.

'Bite'

He rumbled deviously.

She was like a pile of warm flesh and bones in my arms, almost human and yet just durable enough to bend her underneath my fingertips without snapping.

I couldn't begin to comprehend how only a few moments before, I was rifling through her large collection of vinyl discs, staring at the suffragette sash that was displayed proudly over her neatly made bed, pressing a cigarette to my lips wondering how all of what lay before me could give me any answer to who this little creature was.

I was reeling from our encounter in the post office. My body was still ringing with an intensity that mirrored that of coming off a blood high; the feeling of being pleasantly warm and sloshy and completely sated for just a moment post-hunt. Although the contentment quickly faded when I found my way back to the house and the scent of her, which lingered in on every surface and permeated the air, had that strange space in my chest pulsing with painful stabs.

It was that pulling sting that led me to her room. If I thought it would help me to crack the code of Isabella Cullen, it was merely hubris thinking on my behalf.

Walking into this room was like stepping back in time 100 years. Everything from the typewriter on the desk to the curtains that hung on the windows seems to have been plucked from a bygone era. The passing of time and societal changes weren't something I was necessarily observant of, but one look at Isabella and this room, and even I could tell she was a frozen being, floating somewhere between the turn of the century and this new modern age.

However, it was a far different experience when compared to being confined within the ancient walls of Aro's Italian castle.

There was a very human aspect to the atmosphere of the open space she created for herself. One might call it 'homey'.

I scoffed at her pristine sash as soon as I saw it; knowing exactly where her pushy dominant behavior from the post office came from.

"A little suffragette," I had mumbled to myself staring at the installation on her wall, an item from another life that she was obviously proud to own it by the looks of the thick expensive glass box it hung in, forcing it to remain pristine in this new century. Much like Isabella herself.

I'd never cared much for wondering about the inequalities of race, gender, social class or any of the other titles that seemed to rule human society, although, I had read enough about them to understand the fundamentals.

The sash was just about the only thing in the room that did make sense to me. What lay beyond it were jagged pieces of a complex puzzle whose final picture would remain hidden in its intricacies.

Stacks of dusty albums from every decade, genera and nationality cluttered the corner of her room, intriguing my eye almost immediately after I had abandoned my inspection of her suffragette paraphernalia.

Music was sparse inside the walls of the castle, although I did find myself often seated behind the ancient grand piano tucked deep into the basements of my stone prison.

But this, like so many other things in her room, was peculiar.

My fingers found themselves plucking a think disc from its sheath and setting it upon the tray of the ancient gramophone, letting the needle fall as delicately as possible into the grooves of the vinyl.

The melody was dark and scratchy, music from a different era, a more modern time. It was animalistic and rough and picked at the fresh yearning that was still cascading over me as I encased myself in her space.

My eyes lingered on the dozens upon dozens of art canvases, featuring smudged depictions of four figures huddled around one another. While they were all unique in their own way, it was clear this little creature had an obsession with the small group of people, drawing them over and over again almost obsessively by the looks of it.

Black charcoal marks stained the floors beneath the wooden canvas that sat by the window. And I could see small fingerprints left everywhere around the room.

However, it was the familiar-looking package that I spotted sitting next to her typewriter that intrigued and confused me the most.

My little suffragette liked to draw haunting faces while listening to guttural modern music on a turn of the century device and…does it all while nursing a cigarette between her soft full lips.

Now that was a picture that didn't quite add up.

I plucked the pack of tobacco stuffed sticks from her worn writing desk, where it laid next to a tray already filled with half-burned comrades lingering in piles of cold ashes.

There was nothing that I needed from a cigarette. It was like tangible food or alcohol. However, I had stumbled upon some amidst a war I was trekking through several decades ago and thought maybe, just maybe they would offer a small piece of human life to me.

It had been more years than I could recall since I had placed one of these between my lips, and the while the smell was never something I cared for, it was the warmth that filled my dead lungs that made it almost worth the effort to inhale.

She found me in a cloud of tobacco, feeling more at 'home' than I can remember in this life, watching the record on her gramophone spin around and around on its plate, emitting a dark and alluring melody from its metal horn.

I sucked in her heady scent now like I sucked on that cigarette before she aggressively snatched it out from between my fingers.

I never felt more out of control. And I wasn't looking to stop myself until the buzzing inside of me shattered into a full-blown lightning storm.

And that's how it would have gone…had not a small voice popped inside my head.

"Edward." It came out breathy and quiet in a way that would have been entirely alluring had the small creature in my arms whimpered it.

But it wasn't Isabella's voice.

It was Esme's.

The warmth that once encased me in a cocoon suddenly froze over in a thick chilling layer of uncertainty. My eyes slid shut and my hands stilled to a halt on the skin of the girl bent underneath my hands.

"Edward," she called me again, this time a little louder but still sounding flush and out of breath.

She didn't have to call me a third time. My hands, without even thinking, released the girl in my arms while my legs carried me out the back of the house headed towards where Esme's voice called to me.

I felt disoriented as I ran into the thick, wet wooded terrain that surrounded the house. Her voice didn't return to my thoughts, but rather echoed deeply through the cavernous spaces between my skull and my brain.

I tried desperately to feel the invisible pull that had clung between us since the day I made her.

I skidded to a halt, allowing my eyes to slide shut, for my hands to rest at my sides. I pushed the very boundaries for my mind to reach out into the spaces beyond where I stood.

But there was nothing.

No voice, no thoughts…and no familiar tug between my heart and my ribs.

I opened my eyes and screamed.

"Esme!"

Edward, just a little further…please.

I moved without thinking, allowing the vibrations of her thoughts to drag me through the woods.

I didn't have to go very far before I was stopped by a wall of permeating stench that if it had been but a passing wisp through the air may have brought any beast to its knees. However, in its current density and saturation, made me feel ill.

I doubled over, one hand clutching at the contracting muscles of my stomach, the deep spasms a sign of desperation to rid myself of the leftover liquid that soaked inside the organ within me. My other hand pressed firmly over my mouth and my nose. My lungs ceased their normal human functionality for the sake of some small relief from the smell that overwhelmed me.

"Edward!"

I could barely move from my crouch to look up and see her moving cautiously towards me from the forest beyond.

I almost wish I had collapsed on the ground and never looked up to see her. I'm not sure I will ever get the image of her in such a state out of my immortal mind.

Esme had always been an elegant woman, her hair pinned back in curls that sat near the nape of her neck, only a small spiraled curl allowed to slip down the side of her left cheek. Her dresses were always pressed, her feet always bare and a swipe of mauve lipstick was run across her lips each morning, a habit formed in her past life.

She stood before me now, a mess of a woman. Looking more like her inner feral beast than the upstanding all-American woman I'd know for decades.

Her hair had been pulled from its crisp and delicate styling; her pearl pins that once held it in place were nowhere to be seen. Her hair fell around her shoulders, straightened and wet from the rain that had just let up in the last half hour. It appeared that sticks and small pieces of forest floor clung to her neck and cheeks and trailed upward into her thick hair.

The dress she had been wearing was like a second skin, tight against her shapely curves and heaving chest that moved up in down as she practically panted, pulling in shallow and desperate breaths. It looked as if the hem of the skirt had been ripped, leaving her right knee bare, just one of her shoulders, which had also suffered a wardrobe calamity. The only thing left to see was the thin black strap of the slip she wore underneath and it too had fallen to her slender bicep.

She was covered in mud from the tips of her bare toes to just under her chin. Smudges and streaks rained down her body.

Her physical appearance was shocking, but it was the look she pinned upon me that shook my core.

Her eyes were wide, looking like a doe caught staring at her prey. But it wasn't the intensity of her stare that jarred me, but rather the look of her eyes.

No longer did the dark golden rings of her irises look back at me…no there was nothing but black. A black so deep and endless that it even reached out into the bright whites of her eyes, eclipsing the very windows that led deep down inside of her.

"Edward," she whispered this time, taking another step towards him.

She didn't even put her foot on the ground before he made his appearance.

If Esme was a bewildering and haunting sight, it was Dr. Carlisle Cullen, a man so set in his gentle disposition and human demeanor, who appeared the wilder of the two creatures looming before me.

Much like Esme, he was disrobed and caked in the rainwater and mud. His own shoes were missing, a detail that would have been the most alarming thing about his appearance if I hadn't finally gained my senses and heard the deep and inhuman growls that ripped through the air, coming directly from the clenched teeth of the once gentlemanly doctor.

I watched in rapture as Carlisle's hands quickly wrapped around Esme, pulling her flush against his marble chest, which was practically bare aside from the shreds of fabric that still clung to him. I could see her blunt fingernails dig sharply into his arms, not in defense, but rather one of need to remain connected to him.

"Es-Esme", I desperately tried to move my body toward them. If I could only reach her, somehow I could save her from the devastating bond that I could only hope had yet to fall upon her.

If I was thinking rationally, not paralyzed in a cloud of thick, hot pheromones that blew off their bodies like chemical waste, striking everything down in the path of its radiation, I would have seen that it was well beyond the point of no return for Esme and the good Doctor.

Their black eyes were already in another world…one where nothing but the two of them existed.

But I had to try.

"MINE", Carlisle suddenly roared, slicing through the trees and heavy fog that descended around the clearing we stood in.

I blinked and they were gone. Lost to the poison that I had feared would overcome them both the moment I saw their minds linger upon the other.

By the time the petrifying smog cleared around me, I had already been collapsed on the ground for some time.

I stared up at the sky that peaked out from the spots were a canopy of trees hadn't managed to cover all of the quickly darkening clouds. A rumble of thunder sounded in the distance and my eyes slid shut.

'How could you let this happen?'

It was the only thought that I could muster.

"He thinks he can just…just leave after…after. Ugh! How can one man be so incredibly infuriating?!"

Even after allowing my heavy body to sink into the ground around me for some time, I rose in an instant the moment the pitch of her first grumbled word reached my ears. And yet I couldn't move forward, not until I saw her break through the line of trees and come fully into the clearing.

Her eyes were full of fire and disdain upon seeing me.

"There you are!" She pushed forward approaching me quickly.

She was still in her thick sweater, clad in the same dress thrown on underneath, while a pair of old brown boots now adorned her feet. Her hair had dried and was arranged back up in its short up-do, with a silk ribbon weaved through a braid she had knotted into a crown around her head.

"You can't just leave after-". She stopped her sentence short just as she was a foot away from me. Her scent wrapped around me like a fresh warm blanket.

I breathed in deeply, letting her aroma help to clear the sticky stench of our Esme and the Doctor out of my scarred lungs.

However, it became quickly clear that it was that very sickly scent that had her trailing off from her immanent scolding of me.

I watched as she tested the air, her mouth opening slightly to let it land on her little pink tongue.

"Isabella?"

I watched in near horror as the small lingering cloud of Carlisle and Esme reached her senses. Her irises shifting to a coal-black between a few flutters of her eyelashes.

As I said, in a small dose such pheromones were far more than desirable to our baser natures. It was…intoxicating.

"Edward," she whispered deeply, taking a step towards me, her small hand outstretched, ready to press against my chest.

I quickly grasped her wrist and dragged her out of the clearing, moving swiftly back towards the house where we both should have stayed wrapped in our cocoon of ignorance.

It only took a half-mile or so before her senses cleared and she began to roughly claw at my cold and rough grip around her seemingly delicate skin.

"Let go of me, you idiot! I'm not some piece of meat you can drag around." She persisted and yet I refused to let her go.

"What are you doing? Where are we going?"

I gritted my teeth and kept moving forward, barely tolerating her incessant nagging as we went.

By the time we reached the open space that made up the large backyard of the Cullen house, I was fuming. The reality of our situation finally set in and sunk deep inside of me, festering more painfully with each wailing complaint that came from her mouth.

How had I ever pressed up against her like a dog in heat?

"Enough!" I finally shouted, throwing her arm away from me like a diseased limb.

"He speaks!"

I abruptly pushed our faces together, our noses nearly touching. My hand took hold of her chin in a grip that I knew was far too harsh and yet little care came to mind. If it was in any way painful on her behalf she didn't give a sign of any discomfort. Her burning black eyes simply challenged my own.

"Do you know what has happened? Do you have any idea of the situation we are in?" I growled.

Her mouth pursed into an unpleasant line as she stared harshly back up at me, my grip on her chin straining her neck upward to make up for the near foot height difference between us.

I hope she felt inferior as I loomed over her.

"Enlighten me." She challenged.

"Ha!" I pushed away from her not in the least bit humored by our situation. In fact, the range of emotions that had rushed through me was overwhelming and a complete antithesis to the cold stoic beast I had resigned myself to be.

I paced back and forth in front of the small girl who stood with her arms crossed, looking at me with an intensity of loathing that I could practically feel stinging my impenetrable skin. I tried to ignore the feeling, pulling my hands roughly through my hair and clawing my nails down the back of my neck, if only to feel something other than her stares or the hurricane of feels brewing inside me.

I was also painfully aware that the usual storm that ran through my mind was now infuriatingly quiet.

"Fuck!" I yelled, pushing the heels of my palms into my eye sockets.

"What in God's sake is going on?" She cried out just as a flash of lightning brightened the overcast twilight sky.

I pulled my hands away from my eyes so I could stare at her. We stood only a few feet apart.

"What do you recall of that scent that captured you in the clearing just a minute ago?"

"I-I…" while she couldn't find words for the deeply rooted sensations that had racked over her body I could see the recollection in her eyes as they further darkened to a shade of obsidian.

"Have you ever smelled anything like it before? Anything so intoxicating that every ounce of humanity you've managed to wrap up into a pretty this pretty casing hiding the beast inside of you was ripped away in an instant?"

Her mouth opened and closed two or three times. The silence hung thick between us.

"A craving more insatiable than your newborn blood lust?" I continued, the air around us charged with an electric crackle, as if we were in the center of the storm itself.

"Before you arrived, that same smell was one hundred times more potent and had me lying flat on my back."

"Why?" She nearly whispered.

I took a step towards her.

"I know you live a sheltered kind of existence here amongst your humans," I hissed, "but you must know that we are nothing more than animals. We have our own triggered defenses. It's in our make up, just like the hunger fueled cravings that fills our mouths with venom and begs our limbs to jump through the air to capture our prey."

Even with my slanderous words directed at her, she remained quiet, waiting for me to continue, hanging onto every sentence, her dark eyes never blinking.

"This particular scent, when captured at the tail end of its potency, is a powerful aphrodisiac, bound to drive even the sanest of us mad with the most primal needs."

She stared blankly at me, following my lips as they moved around my words, capturing each syllable.

I moved back into her personal space, our faces just a breath away.

"The kind of needs that a man craves from a woman."

Her eyes shot back up to stare into my own. I held her gaze for only a moment before turning back around and taking two steps away from the tempting creature behind me.

There were already too many pheromones clinching to us to make such closeness safe.

"The smell comes from the pheromones that are produced at only one point in a vampire's existence."

I looked up at the night sky that rolled in and doused us in darkness.

"When?" She pressed.

"When you mate for the first time."

The silence that stretches out between us seemed to vibrate in the charged air.

"What?"

I turned around to face her once again.

"My Esme and your Doctor seem to have fallen ruin to one another." I had to spit out my words between gritted teeth as the overwhelming urge to scream built up in my chest.

Her mouth hung open slightly, her brows furrowing into a look of confusion.

"I'm sorry, what are you trying to tell me?"

"Jesus Christ!" I growled, losing the battle with my temper. "Do you know anything about your own kind?"

In an instant she slammed her small body against mine, taking me off guard and throwing me back a few feet, digging up the moist ground of the earth as I fell.

I stared up at her taken back and slightly stunned.

"Will you stop patronizing me and tell me what the hell is going on with Carlisle and Esme? Where are they? And why do you have to be so goddamn cryptic all the time?" She roared back at me, her hands balled into fists at her side, the thunder and lighting a dramatic background for her own rage.

I saw red.

Who did this little pixie think she was?

A moment later we were back nose-to-nose, my hands gripping into her twig-like biceps, lifting her off the ground so our eyes met at the same level.

"Your sire and Esme went into the woods thinking they were going on some peaceful hunt and the powers that be, whatever the fuck that is, decided that they should tear each other to pieces and bind themselves to each other for the rest of eternity. When I ran into them they were drenched in the putrid scent of that bond and are now probably knee-deep in a fucked up mating ritual.

She's not mine anymore and he's not yours. It's over. They have each other and it might as well mean that neither of us exists."

I was seething. I wasn't sure if my words made any sense around the rumbling growls that they battled with as they flew out of my mouth. I had my fingers dug so deeply into her skin that it must have hurt, but the look that she only stared at me with was blank. The previous rage drained from her pale skin and dark eyes.

"Was that direct enough for you?" I whispered, all the fight seeming to leave me as well upon looking at her defeated face.

"Perfectly." Her tone was now flat and quiet and I put her back on her feet, removing my hands from her body.

She didn't say another word and walked slowly back into the dark house, the sky opening up as soon as the backdoor shut behind her.

A/N:

Today's chapter brought to you by the fact that I got a new computer and LOVE the way the keyboard times. I hope you enjoyed and I hope to get more out soon with this winter weather keeping me in!

XO