For a while I was haunted. Every dream was a nightmare, and every waking hour filled me with an unspeakable dread. Jane would come. I was sure of it. She would come and tear me limb from limb with her tiny hands; she would taste my blood on her pretty pink tongue. She would end me. Each morning I woke in a silent scream. The days were long, spent trembling and quaking, and praying for the end. But each end only came when I shook myself apart, the pieces of me too tired to continue quivering.

And then, one night, I dreamt of Luc.

It was easy to lose myself, to float away with him in to the night. Easy to hang myself from his smile and let the fear wash away. I hoped to awaken unburdened. New and clean. I wanted to tear my chest open and flood it with light, paint my bones a warmer shade. But things are never so easy. It is three whole months of shaking and shivering. Three whole months of wreckage and ruin.

Then came Tuesday.

Tuesday is pancakes, and short-shorts, and learning to breath again. Tuesday is classes, and friends, and thinking of him. Jasper's a fire-coloured sky when I imagine him. Stars and smoke signals. He's a thumb across my cheekbone, a mouth pressed to my own. For the first time in so, so long I ache to have him near me, but I have kept the promise I most wanted to break: I let him go. I did not follow him. I did not stop him. No matter how fervently Bella had insisted I go to him, I had left Jasper to carry out his foolish errand alone. So I make a wish. Nothing happens, of course, because wishes are little more than futile hopes. They are things we say aloud because they hurt too much to hold inside. But the thought is small and soothing so I keep on thinking it. Five words, five tiny words. I wish you were here.

Also on Tuesday, I fix things. Fix my hair, fix my nails, fix the unsightly hole in my bedroom wall. It was a childish attempt to regain control. My fist through the plaster, my fist through the grief, my fist through the unspeakable terror of being alone. But I can fix all of it. I will paint my life with a shiny new coat of Hot Pop Yellow, of Riverland Blue. I will start my life again. This story will be my own.

Tuesday is a phoenix born of Mondays ashes. It is a light in my chest. My ribs, my heart, my tender flesh and umber skin all warm and glowing. Even as the sunlight dims, I feel the heat of it. By dusk I am done. Golden and glorious. No longer half of a person, half of a pair.

On Tuesday, I am whole.

Night comes late, the tender dark drawn slowly like a veil. It feels like an omen. My phone rings in familiar staccato beeps, and I hold it up, breath thick and slow against the screen.

"Could I get a lift?"

His voice is strange after so long, softer than I remembered. Sweeter. We have three months of silence growing between us. It has bloomed and blistered in to something twisted and prideful, something almost impossible to make peace with. With silence we wounded each other. Perhaps it should have been me who spoke first, who pierced this solemn thing, but I would forgive myself my petty grudges. I have forgiven so much worse.

"Just... tell me where you are."

He does. I snatch up the keys to my ugly orange van and tear out of the apartment. The stairs are narrow. Where once the concrete walls felt like a vice—crushing, closing, clamping—there is now comfort in their closeness. My sneakers hit the tiles with a screech. The foyer is blue and grey, no more than smoke as I tear my way through it.

Then, I am driving.

Traffic's sparse until I hit the marketplace. I watch my own hands drum restlessly against the wheel, fingers stained pink by the row of stop lights. It is purgatory. Trapped in a moment, a liminal space, held motionless by the rush around me. These nerves are strange. Misplaced. The dampening neck and quickening heart are relics of a forest, a riverbed, a cabin in the snow. I draw air into my nose, into my lungs. It's sharp, and hot, and stinks of gasoline. Warm and foul. A horn blares behind me and my stomach flies in to my throat, coating my neck in a new, slick sheen of panic. I have no plan, no schedule, no idea what unseen force pulls me forward. But it's there. A thrilling compulsion to advance - no matter what. And so I do.

There are ten more minutes of queer and curious agony, of stopping and starting, of fingers tapping, before I see it. It is a strange and dusky outline. A cap drawn low, a dusty duffle slung across narrow shoulders. My heart hammers in my chest. It shakes all of my bones in turn as I steer the van off the road, as I fling open the door, as I run headlong in to the arms of the boy made of stone.

"I still hate you," I say.

"I know," he replies.

But I don't. Not any more. I spent three months learning how to forgive Jasper, learning that I cannot despise him for the man he was, a man he cannot even remember. Though fairness seldom seems to pair with judgement, I resolve to only measure the man he is today, the life he lives right now. When I tell him that, he smiles small and slow. It isn't hard to imagine that the expression is crooked from disuse, but I cannot find the courage to ask where he has been, what journey could have ruined even the smile on his lips.

He slouches low in the passenger seat of the van, lazily pulls the cap from his head. We waste a few minutes on awkward small-talk, my eyes darting between the road and him, still captivated by the sight. Greasy hair frames his face - tilted toward the windows, his eyes superfluously pulled closed. He looks human. Not just scripted, not just a series of perfectly composed affectations. Messy. Tired. Human. It would be foolish to let myself believe it, to fall prey to one of their greatest snares, but I can pretend. Just for a while. Just while his cheeks are stained red by the stop lights, just while my hands are still restless against the wheel.

When we get home he showers and changes clothes. Jasper's inhuman charms have never seemed more conspicuous than sitting at the tiny pine table in my dinky old flat. I wonder again how it is they pass for human. Their bodies too strong, their minds too quick, their pretty skins too poorly stretched to hide what lurks within. Just trying to imagine him in an ordinary classroom sets the blood roaring in my ears. People must be blind.

"Bella said you were in Volterra." He only nods in response, my disbelief is full and staggering. "Why? Why would you go there?"

"I went to fight a war."

It takes all my strength to look at him, to force my eyes on to his. When I draw air in to my lungs it feels wet and warm but comes out cold. Frigid and salty like an ocean spray. Another war. I wonder if he could ever live without battle, without bloodshed.

"It was passed time someone ended Jane's grudge against Bella." He seems troubled by his own thoughts, by even the force of gravity on his anchored form. "And that meant getting rid of Aro, the one who pulled her strings."

Regicide. Air bursts in to my chest in sickly hiccups, my fingers twist and flex. Jasper has killed a king. The story he tells is dark and treasonous, rich with blood and woe. Aro, it seemed, played the part of Mad King. He seethed and raged in secret, plotting to destroy Bella for embarrassing him, for birthing an impossible child. I think of Ren, soft and small and strange. She should not exist. None of them should. It ends with the deaths of Alec and Jane, of Aro and Caius.

"Marcus keeps his throne for now," he says, "at least until he gives the new queens of Volterra a reason to end him."

It is a terrifying thought. Four powerful, immortal creatures torn down and ripped apart; a secret society and ancient government both forced in to reformation. And at the heart of it: Bella. Beautiful Bella. I wonder if she knows how many lives she has destroyed, how close she came to destroying mine. Wet, cold, and blue all-over. I nearly died to please the Mad King, and Beautiful Bella had never even told me why. The betrayal of that stings me. It pierces my chest, and fills my lungs with a fractured fury, the heat of it burning in waves, rubato, like the beating of my injured heart.

In time I will forgive her. That sting is greater still.


My predator's gaze is heavy, heated. It scorches my skin and warms the flesh beneath until the origin of my aching is muddied with desire. I run. I keep running. Four more laps, then five. Soon, I am laid out at his feet, panting and breathless, my pulse a throbbing distraction. He follows me here every morning. He risks being caught by the first slip of day just to watch me run. I am fast, he tells me, as though I don't already know. As though this track is not the only place my winter bones feel truly warm.

"I could make you faster."

His offer holds little temptation. For now, I am content. They can keep their ritual, their alchemy, their eerie perfection; I will choose to ache, and to age because the pain of living has never felt so good. His offer will come again. It has come before. For weeks now, Jasper has offered strength when my limbs grew weary, tirelessness when I slept through my studies. Most tempting though, are his offers of eternity. Forever, when he kisses me. Forever, when our fingers lace. Forever, as he presses his body into mine. For too long my strength was a lie, my bravery an illusion. My humanity was all I knew to be true, knew to be mine. And forever means surrendering that to him. I am not ready for forever.

He is gone before the sun's made real. Burning lips and nervous hands waiting for the dark. But my days are full. I have classes, and friends, and the rapturous feeling of a life becoming whole, becoming real. The nights are better still. Tangled limbs and fevered kisses, cupping and clenching, our skin turned blue by the light of the television. My palms over his ribs are like an epiphany. As though my hands had no purpose before they wrapped around him, as though my fingers were meaningless before they knotted in his hair. We spend weeks like this. Breath in concert. Flesh to stone. Every part of us becoming something stronger, something better, while we pretend I'm not a ticking clock. Forever is never more tantalising than when the room turns silent, and the clock is all I can hear.

We are carving our time in to seconds, making notes on how best not to waste it. But we are wrong - the chronology of us. Somehow, even entwined, we use a line to divide ourselves, keep my insides from his outsides, and it leaves us out of sync. I wonder if we can transcend this. I wonder if I will ever let him convince me of the fallacy of my death. For his kind the end is a beginning, a painful pause to mark the birth of something new. For me, it is just the end. When the night drains from the sky they flee for the shadows, but I cannot imagine a life without the sun on my skin, without the exhilarating hammer of my heart within my chest. The metronome stutters.

Forever.


There's a feeling growing inside me, something unformed and unknown, that threatens to make me useless when he looks at me. It beats inside my chest. It warms me slowly. It's a taste, not a word, somehow, but contorts around my tongue and squeezes between my teeth with all the weight of wanting. But what more could I possibly want?

Apparently we'll hike today. Plot a course, do a climb, make a mountain ours. For a creature whose survival depends so heavily on the masquerade of humanity, Jasper seems dangerously at ease with our planned excursion. I am far less certain. Where once I may have thought this brave or defiant, I now wonder if he's simply stubborn or foolish. But it doesn't matter. I am helpless to deny him. Wanting, wanting.

Our trail is covered in stone and sand. And though the sun burns above us, bright and dazzling, he is unafraid here. No thought of discovery, of danger can keep the smile from Jasper's face. Pleased and pleasing. His skin glows dully, as though a fire burns just beneath. It sparks and spreads and rolls in waves. When his hand grips mine it is warm and strange, never more like real flesh. These hands, this flesh, this love will ruin me. Love. It is far too soon for the feeling. I feel it just the same. I swallow the word down deep before it can crawl right out of my mouth.

We hike for hours, steady and slow. When we reach the rock-face, he takes my hand again, gives it a gentle squeeze. He climbs with ease. Nimble hands dig pits and pockets, sure holds for my nervous feet and fingers to follow in. The climb is hard. The rock is sheer. Straining muscle and grasping hands drive me to the top. There, I collapse exhausted, exhilarated. A sweating, ruddy tangle. I have never felt more powerful, more incredible, more human. He lays down beside me. Stony fingers drag through the dirt, through the sand, then paint a dusty trail upon my face. There's an ache in my chest. I wonder if he feels it.

"Tell me what can I give you." There's a dull pain in his voice, some sort of ancient misery that makes his meaning incomprehensible to me. "I know you're tired of forever—of eternity—but I have nothing else to offer." His lips are a tight line. An effort to make the words stop. "So please, Lena, tell me what I can give you."

I throw myself against him, press my lips to his, and hope that time just ends. He turns. He covers my body with his own. His mouth draws a line up my neck, whispers into my ear. There is no story I could write for myself better than this one. I am fully and truly satisfied. What can he give me, then? This desert. These rocks. Each part of him that presses flush against me. He can give me these. I need nothing more.

"Give me this," I say, my palm against his chest. "Give me you. For just as long as you want to."

He traps my hand with his, creates a cage around his heart. "Forever, then?"

Behind him, all I see is the sky, the sun in his hair like a fiery crown. Forever. Finally, it doesn't sound like a curse. "Forever, then."

We stand, not quite sure of what comes next, of where forever starts. But we have this. This desert. These rocks. His hands across my skin like a river, like a promise. Our descent is clean and quick, the mountain somehow softer from my longing, but we ramble the return path slowly. The minutes smear together. Everything casts a shadow. I wonder aloud if there was even any escape from them, the alluring monsters who captured my heart.

" 'The more I saw of them,' " he quoted, " 'the greater became my desire to claim their protection and kindness.' "

I laugh, the sound a distant echo off each surrounding stone. " 'My heart yearned to be known and loved by these amiable creatures.' "

Jasper turns to me, his brow quirked in practised interest. "But doesn't that make you The Monster?" He laughs softly, quietly, and then simply walks away.

Perhaps he's right. Perhaps I am The Monster. I suppose I'll have forever to find out.