"And I don't know the loneliness you've known, I don't hear the frosty words echo inside. When you're gone again I can't read your mind though I'm trying all the time. There's something I don't know, I can see it in your eyes."
Woman, Mumford & Sons

Chapter Eighteen
EPOV

Ding.

Ding.

Ding.

Dong.

The large clock at the top of the tallest building in the city cried out its nightly wail as the bewitching hour fell over the sleeping patrons that resided within the stonewalls of Volterra.

At three o'clock in the morning, the world around me was as silent as it could ever be to one whose mind was like a radio that couldn't turn off, forever picking up the frequencies around me. But it seemed that I could almost relax when I stood still at this time of night, in this very spot. The comatose human thoughts nothing more than low rumbles between my ears.

It didn't take me more than a decade to finally figure out how to escape the underground labyrinth that Aro called a castle, and find this small nook tucked away between the meeting of two buildings. It was a small hole in the wall where I could wedge my body into the stone and practically disappear amongst the rock that made up this sleepy city.

I wouldn't talk or think or even breathe but rather allowed my eyes to slid close for the first time in the last 24 hours and pretend that I was just like any other, nestled in their bed.

But I wasn't, and the moment his voice popped into my head, the daydream was shattered.

'Caro Dio, per favore, proteggimi in quest'ora più buia.'

My eyes snapped back open as if they were on a tightly wound spring. It took me less than a second to find whom the frantic voice belonged to.

Rushing across the square was a cloaked man, whose white clerical collar flashed in the moonlight.

'Padre nostro, che sei nei cieli, sia santificato il tuo nome.'

His frantic prayers not only rushed through his head now but also were being mumbled nervously under his breath as he continued across the piazza, his head pivoting back over his shoulder every few seconds as if expecting to see someone following him.

"Edward."

I shouldn't have been surprised that he found me. Demetri and his gift for tracking made it nearly impossible for any creature, living or dead, to fly under his radar.

He leaned against the wall next to my hiding place, his own eyes following the erratic priest, watching as he tripped on the cobblestone and tumbled to the ground next to the obelisk at the center of the square.

"I was starting to think you were getting lazy. It took you nearly a century to finally find me." I mused.

He snorted, "Don't flatter yourself, Mason. I've known you've been sinking yourself into that hole since the first night you slipped up here. I just don't care."

I figured as much.

"And why do I deserve the honor of your presence now?" I slowly eradicated myself from the space between the stones, resolving to lean against the wall opposite of Demetri, crossing my arms and continuing to watch the now crying religious man scramble to his feet.

"That," He nodded towards the man, "is Father Ricci."

"And?"

"And he may or may not have stumbled upon me having a midnight snack outside of the walls."

I rolled my eyes, not surprised in the least by my coven brother's reckless behavior.

Although, at the mention of a 'snack' my nose suddenly picked up on the delectable scent of fresh blood wafting off his mouth, permeating the air around us. The sting of pooling venom tormented the back of my throat.

"Now what?" I asked, already knowing the answer.

Demetri turned to look at me, a small smirk playing dangerously on his lips.

"You look hungry," he chuckled. "Feel like sharing some Italian Padre?"

I'd like to say I needed more than a second to make up my mind, but by then I was already drowning in a mouthful of fragrant warm blood, ripping the shiny gold relic of a dead man from his open neck, not even caring that my night had been interrupted.

-IISEID-

The only conscious memory that I had about religion in any form was the night Demetri and I dug into the town priest some two hundred years ago.

It wasn't a vivid memory. But it was the only one that came to mind as I stared at the large wooden cross nailed to the wall at the end of the hallway outside of the library.

I had lingered in front of the window watching the murky late summer sunrise, sending a burning glow over the wet tops of the evergreens surrounding this miserable house. I wished the glow really was a burning fire racing to swallow the timber and brick holding up the walls around me.

I had a strong feeling the strange girl upstairs wouldn't mind if we both left this world without much fuss. There was something just as dark and dreary about her as the dark pit that filled the space under my ribs.

I could only stand and look out at the vast forest thinking about our respective beloved creatures tearing each other apart for so long before I forced my chaotic body to move out of the now chilled and dark library, the fire had died down before dawn.

Instead of turning towards the staircase and scaling the stairs to see that infuriating little nymph's face again, I forced myself to turn towards the end of the hall that I had yet to explore.

It was there I found the half-rotted piece of wood hanging on the wall.

For damned creatures, both Isabella and her Sire talked frequently about some divine creature and his 'plan' for them.

Just like feminism, religion and deities weren't a topic I was unfamiliar with but rather uninterested. While the only noteworthy memory of the church was one involving ripping the jugular out of a man's throat, it wasn't my only occurrence in these centuries with evangelists and devote followers of a faith.

Volterra was an Italian city built around the Catholic Church. Priests and habited nuns walked the cobblestone streets day and night, delivering their word of God and tithing the citizens' copious amounts of coin to be used on building ordinate statues and altars and filling corrupt men's pockets with which they bought whores, filled their bellies with meats and drank themselves into a stupor. They might have found themselves above reproach, but they were the same as the rest of the blood bags that I had encountered.

In my world, there was no God. There was nothing divine or beautiful about the world around me. The closest religion came to touching my existence was hearing the Lord's pray spoken in a dozen different languages by the tourists who wandered into our castle walls and left as lifeless carcasses.

This small coven only got more peculiar and much more maddening.

I was reprieved from my inner musings by the padding sound of Isabella's feet hitting the hardwood as she bounded down the staircase languidly. I couldn't help but appear before her as she finally reached the last step, bringing us almost nose to nose with the extra inches the elevation allowed her.

"What?" She flinched back from me, surprised at my sudden appearance.

Even her small reactionary movements spoke volumes of her connection to humanity. She wasn't used to cruelty, cold movements and stoic faces that killed the small linger thread of a beating heart we all once had.

"Going somewhere?" I questioned, taking in her latest outfit change.

A new dress clung to her lithe figure, a cream-colored flower printed tea length piece that was made to appear as if she had spent her days fading the fabric in the late afternoon sun. The sheer fabric of the dress covered her modestly, the hem falling down to the middle of her stocking covered calves. She wore a beige silk slip underneath the flowing fabric, everything cinched together with a tie around her small waist. How a simple piece of clothing could be both utterly chaste and innocent as well as sinfully alluring I would never imagine wrapping my head around.

She glared at me, her ire trying it's best to seep underneath my skin, but I was too busy examining the new braided twist that wrapped around her head. How could one silk ribbon hold all those thick tresses together?

"Edward?"

"Yes, Isabella?"

"Are you my Sire?" I almost laughed at the absurd way one of her eyebrows arched upward sharply, although I'm sure such body language was supposed to convey annoyance rather than humor.

"I believe I would have remembered sinking my teeth into a neck as enticing as yours." There was some sick satisfaction that swirled inside me when I poked and propped at her as if teasing her for the rest of my existence would be enough to live even without the blood.

"My jailor perhaps then? Or," she crossed her arms underneath her chest in defiance, "perhaps in your own misogynistic way you see yourself as a bodyguard to a poor meek little girl?"

"I wouldn't consider myself any of those things," I answered honestly, dragging my eyes to hers, staring deeply into her darkening irises. They were almost completely black now.

"Then why is it that you feel entitled to inquire why I choose to enter and exit my own home?"

I could tell her the truth, that the aching hole that had been pounding against my ribs for months now seemed to snap and crackle like a stinging slave healing a deep wound when I stood this close to her. Although the implications of what that might mean were impossible and I would never give them any power by muttering such nonsense to this broken little mouse.

She was simply an intriguing creature, something that I hadn't seen much of in my three hundred years. Her awakened mind was refreshing and the quiet that surrounded her was almost euphoric after the numbness of millions of strings of thoughts banging and barging their way through my stream of consciousness.

"Call it curiosity. Watching you move about this life is like viewing an animal in its natural habitat."

"Ha!" She barked in my face, leaving a gust of her tantalizing sweet air hanging in my lungs. "I think that we've established that if there is an animal between the two of us, it's certainly not me."

She loved leaving our conversations with punchy rhetoric. I wondered if this was another element of her human nature that had snuck its way into the cracks of her being after so many years in humanity.

She brushed around my unmoving body, stopping only at the entrance of this horrid home to slip into the flat oxford shoes she had held in her hands.

"Don't follow me." She called over her shoulder as she swept out the front door looking like a 1940s war bride ready to wave her soldier off to the battlefront one last time.

I tried with the smallest amount of restraint that I still possessed, to try and keep my distance from her, but I was never one to deny myself just to please someone else. On the contrary, I often did exactly the opposite, committing acts just to spite another.

When I finally set off after her scent only 20 minutes after her departure, I could feel the beast inside me growl and rattle at his cage door. The thrill of the hunt was mouthwatering.

It wasn't nearly as fun as I had thought to find her. Maybe it was because the effort I actually had to exert to follow her smell was nearly nonexistent. She was like a warm spiced pie sitting out on a windowsill on a crisp autumn day. I could track her across an ocean and never lose that smell.

I lost the thrill the moment I realized where she had escaped off to on this humid summer morning.

The small brick building sat on a busy road, several other equally as unimpressive establishments lining a minuscule business district of sorts; an old diner, a grocer advertising fresh produce, and a local library.

I stood, blending into the trees on the opposite side of the road, the forest reaching the final line here before once again engulfing the town about a mile down the way. This created just enough space for a pitiful civilization to pop up, a place where a couple of thousand humans could live and die without much consequence.

If only they knew how quickly the unnatural beauties that lived in the forest could end all of that in an hour if they weren't so pacified.

She could have wandered into any of the rundown, mediocre places in this town, but it was the one with the steeple and the bright white cross that drew her in.

A church. How comical.

I could easily hear the singing voices; the loud yet gentle voice of the man of 'god' preaching his homily, offering these sad pumping hearts a way to feel better about their lusty thoughts, their greedy activities, and all the slothfulness they exhibited.

The stained glass and congregational voices and thoughts kept her deeply hidden behind those walls. If it weren't for the strong pooling smell of her skin and hair clouding there, I wouldn't even believe she was swaying alongside the local sinners.

I had to stop myself more than once from ripping through the walls, breaking necks and dragging her back to the house with me. Not only did I crave to see her and hear her voice again, but also the idea of bringing some true evil to a seemingly tranquil sanctuary would have been delightful.

It was only an hour, but it might as well have ticked by like decades. I nearly ran out of the trees when I finally saw her emerge with a crowd of humans, looking almost like a warm body herself as she smiled and chatted with several individuals around her.

The way she brushed up against the creatures that should have been her next meal was unfathomable to me. I had only broken into a neck a few days ago and I was already feeling dry, the vulnerable craving of a gushing vein sending the slick stinging venom down the back of my throat. Her own eyes had been nearly as dark as coals this morning as she pushed passed me.

If there was one thing about this girl that wasn't small and weak, it was her restraint.

The longer I stayed and watched her a deep-seated feeling seeped into my gut where that phantom ache panged. The swells of emotions that seemed to ebb and flow around this little mouth were truly perturbing and overwhelming to a prince of stonewalls and dead eyes.

The need to stay and continue to follow her with my eyes or even greater, to run and press my skin against her was almost unbearable. But the pulsing of…shame cut me to the core. As if my body knew before my mind that interrupting this vehemently human moment for her would only bring creeping darkness to her eyes. The same one that I had watched in an almost panic, cloud her vision last night as she stared out the library window.

As with most of the day, I allowed my body to move me, pulling me away from the scene of humanity and back to the quiet and empty house in the woods. Her scent followed me the whole way back.

I avoided the confining walls of glass & brick when I broke out of the forest and into the clearing where the oddly perfect Cullen residence sat. Instead, I followed the curved stone path that led from the front porch to the open backyard where warm grass blew in the wind of the humid overcast day.

There were a few stray trees that managed to pop up ahead of the tree line of the forest, casting several spots of the yard in more shade than the rest of the space. I gravitated towards the one farthest from the house, throwing myself to the ground. Leaning against the thick trunk of an oak tree, I allowed my eyes to slide shut, letting the silence of the empty space to settle into my bones.

I tried to relax, to clear my head of my own thoughts, as I never had a moment like this to push away all the blaring noises of the incessant minds around me. But I couldn't. I kept coming back to the same face, the same name, and the same smell.

Her pale delicate fingers, the fire in her brazen eyes, the sadness in her smile, the way her old fashion clothes moved against her skin, and the smell.

That fucking scent.

The beast hissed inside me, breathing in deeply to catch any remnants of her lingering in the air.

"Edward?"

My eyes flew open to see the visage of the very demon plaguing my mind standing before me looking more like an angel. Her disguise was deceiving, the devil's greatest creation.

It was disturbing how she was able to sneak around so undetected by my scenes. Everything about our make up should have allowed me to simply feel her presence miles before she found herself in view of me.

"May I sit?" She gestured to the grass next to me.

I could only nod wordlessly up at her.

She folded herself onto the ground delicately, the way a flower would unfold itself in the sun, with grace and patience. Instead of leaning up again the tree like me, she laid her whole body out flat, pressing the lush green summer grass into the ground around her. Her head was only a foot away from my thigh. My eyes slithered down the length of her thin pale body covered in sheer floral fabric, following the white plains of her slender legs that stretched out into the grass, ending with her bare feet digging into the soft ground, still a little damp from previous night's storm. It didn't go unnoticed by me that the cream-colored stockings she wore earlier no longer encased her skin, nothing but naked flesh met my burning gaze. Her hands came to lie on her stomach and here wide dark eyes closed.

"You picked my favorite tree." She nearly whispered. She exhaled slowly, emptying her lungs of every trace of life, pushing it into the air only to be swept up and caressed across my face by the afternoon breeze.

I didn't know what to say to her, so I reminded silent, sucking in as much of our shared air as possible without rousing her from her corpse pose. Our mixed scents tingled on my tongue and lips.

"What do you remember about being human?" She suddenly asked.

"What?"

Her eyelids fluttered open and she stared up at me in a way that caused the hole to feel pleasantly full behind my ribcage.

"I told you I don't remember what being human feels like, what it was like to live…only die." She sat quietly for just a second too long. "But, I always like to ask others what they remember. And of course, I've already heard everything that Rose & Carlisle have stored away." She let loose a breathy laugh, "So please indulge me."

I had a feeling I would do anything to indulge any request she might ask of me…and that was infuriating.

"I can't imagine much of us remember everything." I sighed, not having tried to resurface these kinds of memories in the last 300 years. "If you don't recall them in your first year as a newborn it's likely that they become dusty portraits of a time that no longer exists. Not very necessary for raping and pillaging." I grinned down her at.

"Please," her voice gave the slightest tremble and her eyes looked as if she would cry if she could, "anything you remember."

I looked away, staring out into the field ahead of us, trying to clear my mind and think back to any of those black and white images from another life.

The smooth sound of my mother's French accent discussing dinner with the housekeeper, the sharp lick of a jab to my side by a young yet burly stable hand, the thick smell of freshly sliced lemons in the summer and spicy ground clover in the winter all swept up into the dust in the deepest recesses of my mind.

"I was a young man who had too much money and not enough discipline. I wanted to run into revolutions and see what the world had to offer me."

"That's very vague." She muttered, her eyes once again closed.

"Well, 300 years is a long time to hold onto pieces of a life that I no longer lead." Or cared to remember.

"Isn't there anything about your humanity that you miss?"

"Such as?" I rolled my eyes down to look at her. She was staring at me again, deeply and thoughtfully.

"You're telling me there isn't anything in that empty chest that longs for some sort of human experience again?" She said it as if I had just denied the existence of oxygen.

I leaned just the smallest bit forward, bending my head so if someone was looking at us from afar they would think I might have been leaning down to press my lips against hers.

"That's the difference between you and me, Isabella. You still think there's a chance that what's inside us isn't empty. That we're more than dead tissue and venom."

"You're wrong."

I quirked an eyebrow at her.

"I'm very aware of the fact that I am nothing more than a pretty corpse that the earth won't accept back into the ground."

A/N: Hope you're all staying safe during these crazy times and got to escape the world for a while with my words.