The response to the last chapter was overwhelming. Thank you to each and everyone of you that reviewed. It means so much to me in ordinary circumstances, but this story is unique in that I still have a sequel to write. Knowing you're enjoying what you're reading and will want more when it's finished drives me to write. The sequel is always in my mind now, and I am looking forward to being in a position to sit down and write it.

Chapter Twenty-Three

Bella

I had fixed myself dinner, but I only moved it around my plate and took a few bites. I didn't feel hungry. In truth, I didn't know what I felt.

What had happened with Edward had taken me completely off guard, and I didn't feel as sanguine as I had pretended to be for Carlisle and Alice. I had died, again, and this time it was at the hands of Carlisle's own son.

The basic fact they were vampires wasn't a problem. It was actually nice to have an answer to the question I'd been refusing to ask, and it did feel good to have someone else know my secret, someone I cared about in a different way to how I felt about the generations of the tribe. I'd had only a week in La Push with Quil when he was a child, and I'd not spent much time with him as I had spent more time with the elders of the time. I cared about him in a peripheral way, more because of the memory of his ancestors and our history than because of who he was as a man.

But Carlisle… Carlisle, I cared about for himself wholly. And now, through him, I had a possibility of something I'd never had before.

I would never lose him unless either of us chose to say goodbye.

I took the assignments that needed to be graded from my bag and set myself up at the kitchen table to work. I was halfway through an essay on the March On Washington, written by Mike Newton, a poor effort compared to what I believed he would be capable of if he studied more and socialized less. I was making an effort to not be too harsh because of my disappointment in him when there was a soft knock on the door.

Glad of the excuse to stop and relatively sure I knew who would be visiting, I hurried to the door in my slippered feet and opened it.

Carlisle stood on the threshold, a slightly sad smile on his face, "I hope you don't mind me coming, but there were things I thought I should tell you before you learned from someone else."

With a furrowed brow, I stepped back and gestured him in. "Go on through to the living room."

He stepped past me, seeming to give me more space than he usually did, and I closed the door and followed him into the living room. He had seated himself on the couch, and his hands were folded in his lap, but he didn't look as relaxed as he usually did when we were together.

I sat down beside him and turned slightly, so I was facing him with our knees pressed together.

"What's wrong?" I asked.

"Nothing is wrong," he said. "It's good news, in a way. My family are leaving Forks and going to Vermont."

My breath caught. "You're leaving?"

I felt a swell of sadness at the thought of losing him, though I understood why he would go. Edward had been through something when he'd bitten me, and he surely needed his father's love and presence to deal with it. But when told Carlisle remembered me, gifted me with the knowledge of my first life, I thought there was a connection there. He said he loved me. I had wanted to be with him, to see if I could have a forever love at last, and I couldn't have that if he left Forks.

"No," he said quickly, reaching for me and then dropping his hand to his lap. I took his hand and stroked his cool, hard palm. He smiled slightly. "They are leaving without me," he went on. "It will be better for you without him. You won't have to live in fear."

I frowned. "How will it be better for me? I'm not going to pretend what happened wasn't awful, and, yes, I am still scared of him. They don't need to leave for me, though; Edward doesn't. We will just be more careful. I won't be alone with him again."

Carlisle shook his head. "You don't need to suffer for us."

"I won't be suffering. He can't kill me, not in a way that lasts. Obviously, I'd rather not be bitten again, but I am essentially safe."

Carlisle stared at me, a strange kind of awe in his eyes, and then he said, "You are the most amazing woman, Bella. I appreciate what you're saying, but Edward cannot stay here after what happened. Not only would you be in danger, and you know you would, but he would be haunted by the reminder of what happened, how it could have ended, whenever he saw you. The rest of my family all agreed that it was right to go with him." He squeezed my hand gently. "They will be together, and it will be better for him."

"You'll miss them, though," I said.

"I will," he agreed. "But it is not too great a price to pay for you. Bella, you are everything to me. I know you don't feel the same, and you don't remember me. I understand it's not the same for you as it is for me, but if not being with my family is the price of me being close to you, it is something I will gladly pay." He touched my cheek with such gentleness it was like the stroke of a feather.

"That doesn't seem fair," I said, though internally I was absorbing his words and treasuring them.

He loved me. I was loved. I wished I could say the same to him with absolute honesty, but there was still a barrier between us of my long years of refusing love. Perhaps it would be different if I remembered him the same way he remembered me, but I didn't, so it wasn't.

"It is the fairest way for all of us. Besides, I'll be able to see them still. When we have good weather days in a row, we can arrange to meet. I can travel to Vermont, or we can meet halfway to hunt."

"Hunt?"

He gave me an appraising look. "We have to hunt for our food, Bella."

I laughed softly. "Yeah, I guess you would. What's the sunny days part, though?"

"We cannot be seen by humans in the sun without exposing ourselves as different. I will show you one day, if you would like to see."

"I would," I said and then went on with one of the many questions I had for him. "You said I should have changed when he bit me, but I didn't, so how does it work? How do you become a vampire?"

"It is our venom," he said. "Our teeth are razor sharp and coated in venom. It incapacitates our prey with pain so they can't escape, though they would have no chance of that anyway as we're too strong and too fast. When the venom touches the bloodstream, it moves through the human's body, changing each cell as it passes."

"But the venom had to have entered my bloodstream. He bit me.

"Yes, but he drained too much of your blood for you to live. And Alice told me that when they were trying to save you with CPR, the venom was not able to restart your heart. It passed through your system without saving you—which would be a longshot in any case, even without the amount of trauma your body sustained with the shock and blood loss."

"And I've definitely not been changed?" I asked. "It's not happening differently because of the curse?"

"Definitely not. The spread is fast of venom, but the process of changing is slow. Each cell must be reconstructed. And the pain is unimaginable. The closest comparison I have is being burned alive. It lasts for days, two to three is average depending on how much venom enters the blood and how close to the heart. When I changed Edward, for example, he burned for three days as I did now know what I was doing; I just recreated my own wounds. We would both know if you were changing, especially by now. Your body would show clear differences to us both."

I breathed a soft sigh of relief and asked. "How did no one know you were changing if you were in that kind of pain? You must have been screaming. Did the vampires take you out of London?"

"No," he said, a dark look coming into his eyes. "I had to hide as I knew my father would see that I was destroyed if he knew what I had become, so I hid in the Franklin warehouse cellar, and I stayed silent."

"You were silent when you were being burned alive?" I breathed. "How?"

"I was silent for you," he said, touching my cheek. "All I could think of, all I wanted, was to be with you again. Even though I believed it would be impossible as I didn't know there was any way to live other than killing humans, I clung to the smallest hope that I would find a way to be with you. If I'd been found, I would have been killed, so I hid myself and stayed silent, thinking of you as well as the pain."

"I hate to think of you suffering like that," I said sadly.

He smiled. "It was unimaginable, but it didn't stop me doing it to other people. Edward was the first of my family. I was working in Chicago in 1918, treating victims of the Spanish Influenza outbreak. He and his mother were my patients, and…" His eyes became distant. "I had been thinking of creating a companion for myself for a long time, but I never wanted to take a life. Edward's mother was the one that persuaded me. She somehow knew there was a way for me to do what medicine couldn't. She pleaded with me to save him in any way possible. She said, 'You must do everything in your power. What others cannot do, that is what you must do for my Edward.' I looked at him and saw the goodness that shone out of him, sick as he was, and the purity of his face, and I thought that was the face I would wish for in my son had I had one." He stared into my eyes. "In our son."

I smiled slightly. The idea that I once might have had a child, a son, was a strange one to me. It was impossible for me now; my body didn't have the cycle of a human woman. I had never minded as my life was never suitable to share, and if my curse had not been passed on, I would have had a child to love only to watch it age and die while I stayed forever young and healthy. Or worse, it could have passed on to a child, and they would suffer death and what followed after the way I did.

Pain was nothing compared to that.

"What about the others?" I asked. "Esme, Rosalie, Emmett, Alice, and Jasper? What made you change them?"

"Esme was an easy choice," he said. "I had met her when she was just a child. I'd been called to treat her in 1911 when she'd fallen out of a tree and broken her leg. There was something engaging about her and the way she lived, not conforming to the female ideals of the time, and I didn't forget her when I moved on again. Three years after I changed Edward, I came across her in a hospital in Wisconsin. She was so gravely injured that they'd taken her straight to the morgue, but she hovered on the edges of life. I saw the face of the girl I'd met in the woman, and I couldn't bear to let her story end there, with that kind of pain, so I stole her away and bit her."

I felt as if I was under a spell as I heard his story. It was incredible to me that he had done this and created this family of people who would have died without him.

"What about the others?" I asked.

"Rosalie came next, in 1933. She'd been… injured, too, and I couldn't bear to see her end like that; it was too much waste. She found Emmett two years later when she was hunting. He'd been mauled by a bear. She brought him back to me and begged me to change him. I'd already decided I wouldn't change anyone after Rosalie as she was not happy with her change, but I couldn't refuse her. He was in love with Rosalie before be even woke up." A small smile quirked his lips. "It's an interesting story. Perhaps Emmett will tell you himself one day."

I did want to see them all again. If Carlisle and I really did have forever, I wouldn't want that to be completely without them. Somehow, someway, we had to find a way for me to be around them without Edward suffering or slipping.

"Alice and Jasper were already vampires when they found us," he went on. "Our family was completed with them. Well, I thought it was. But that was before I found you."

I shifted so I was sitting beside him and leaned my head on his shoulder. "You have made your family," I said. "And they're all wonderful. It makes me wonder what my life would have been if I'd found you sooner, how many times we might have come close together just to drift away again over the centuries."

"A friend of mine had a theory about that," he said. "I went to visit our extended family recently, after the crash in La Push. They're vampires, too, and keep the same diet as us. I asked them if they had any knowledge of doppelgangers, as that was the only theory I had for you at the time. No one knew of them, but one, Carmen, had theories. She told me about these legends. She thought you could be one of what are called haltijas, a guardian spirit of a person. She thought you were of a type called an etiäinen, which is one that comes before. Obviously, you aren't, you are the same person I love, you just had a different life, but one of her beliefs was that it was fate for you and I to meet now. She believed you'd come back in whichever form, into my life, because now is the time for us to be together."

"Fate," I said thoughtfully. "Yeah, I like that. It does feel like fate. Of all the places for me to choose to live after I left Phoenix, I came to Forks, and so did you. We would have crossed paths sooner or later, we had to a town this small, but that day in the hospital was the right time and place." I lifted myself to look at him as I said, "Fate brought us together, and know we both know the truth, there's no reason to be pulled apart again."

That was my hope. I wasn't Alice, I didn't see the future, but when I thought of what I wanted in my life, Carlisle was the first thing that came to mind. There was no reason for us not to now. We both had forever, and he already loved me. If I could give him my heart, release the hold I had kept on it for over three hundred years to protect it, we would be together.

I would finally know what love really felt like.

So… Some fluffy stuff for you to enjoy—did you? I enjoyed writing it.

Until next time…

Simaril xxx