June 23
The call went straight to voicemail, just as it had the last twenty times. Diana wasn't expecting that to change. She pressed the phone to her ear anyway.
"This is Mac, leave a message! Or, y'know, text me. Like a normal person."
A tinny beep to signal that the voicemail was recording. Diana hung up and hovered her finger over the call button again, wishing Mac had recorded a longer message.
She desperately wanted to hear her sister's voice. What she really wanted was to talk to her, but that wasn't going to happen—could never happen again.
She wasn't supposed to be dead.
She was only thirteen. She was supposed to be alive. She was supposed to be texting silly memes Diana only half-understood and complaining about her braces and explaining the ridiculous plot of the latest manga she'd read. She was supposed to come visit later in the summer, and they would road trip up the east coast and laugh at all the names of the towns they couldn't pronounce until they hit Bar Harbor, where Diana would buy them lobster and take Mac to see the whales.
None of that would happen now. Diana pressed the call button and listened to the message play through one more time. When it was done she tossed the phone aside and curled into a ball in the tangle of sheets, fisting her hands in her hair.
"What do I do, Mac?"
"You already know what to do. You just don't wanna admit it."
Diana stiffened, squeezing her eyes shut. She was hallucinating. Between the grief and three full days of binge drinking, it wasn't that surprising.
Or maybe she was being visited by her sister's ghost. Why not? Vampires were apparently real. Why not ghosts and werewolves and the Loch Ness monster, too? Diana didn't care either way. It was good to hear Mac's voice, even if she was a figment of her imagination.
"They ate you."
"Yeah. I know," said Mac's voice, her tone snarky. "But you exposing them isn't going to make them un-eat me, is it?" She paused, and when Diana didn't say anything she pressed, "Is it?"
"No," Diana muttered grudgingly.
"No!" Mac repeated. "Seriously, Di. I can't believe you're even thinking about this."
"Mac, they ate you."
"So?" Mac said expectantly. "Lions eat gazelles. Wolves eat deer. Humans eat… basically everything. Including each other, sometimes! Predators eat prey, Di. It's the—"
"Don't say circle of life."
"You said it," Mac said smugly. Then her voice softened. "Look, I'm not saying I'm happy about it, but it's not like this was personal."
Diana shook her head and heaved a shuddering breath. "I don't know if I can do it, Mac. I don't know if I can stand to help the—" She stopped herself before she said the word people, because they weren't, were they? "The things that killed you."
"Then don't do it for them," Mac said simply. "Do it for me. Do it because I wouldn't want you to vampire apocalypse the whole friggin' world just because I couldn't say no to Mom."
"Don't say that." Diana blindly clenched her fists in the sheets. "You're thirteen. None of this was your fault."
"I know." A pause. Then, softly, "Hey, Di?"
"Yeah?"
"Don't let the vampires kill you before you get to see some whales."
Diana smiled even as a tear worked its way down her cheek. "I won't."
June 26
The vampire who came to collect her after sundown on the seventh day was petite, with light brown hair that fell in loose curls, and just as unsettlingly beautiful as all the others she'd seen so far. She neither introduced herself nor made conversation, leading Diana silently back through the dark, winding streets of Volterra, through a side door, and ultimately back to the large stone room. There were no bodies this time—only Aro, Caius, and Marcus, all three of them seated on wooden thrones which Diana had failed to notice the first time she'd visited.
Aro smiled when they entered, looking genuinely pleased. "Thank you, Chelsea."
A casual gesture of Aro's fingers had the vampire who'd escorted her tipping her head in a gesture more like a shallow bow than a nod. She left them, shutting the door behind her.
"Now, Diana." Aro leaned forward, expectant, almost eager. "I trust you've come to a decision?"
Diana straightened her spine. The last time she was in this room, she was on her knees. Not this time.
"I've come with a counter-offer."
Caius's face darkened with rage immediately. Aro held up a hand to forestall his outburst, looking intrigued. "Let us hear her out, brother." To Diana he said encouragingly, "Go on."
Diana affected the coolly professional tone she used in legal negotiations. "I am willing to cooperate with covering up your murder of my sister on the condition that I may live freely through the end of the year."
"Six months?" Caius laughed coldly. "You would be lucky to be allowed six weeks."
Diana narrowed her eyes, refusing to back down. "I don't have to help you at all."
"Explain what you mean by 'live freely'," Aro said, still sounding intrigued. Caius glared at him, but said nothing.
"There are a lot of things I want to do and see before I die," Diana said frankly. "I want to be able to travel."
"And in return you offer your cooperation."
"Yes."
Aro sat back in his chair, looking thoughtful. Caius hissed, "You cannot seriously be considering this, Aro."
Aro seemed to ignore him. He held out a hand in Diana's direction and smiled invitingly. "If I may?"
He wanted to read her mind.
She should have anticipated that, but she hadn't. She hesitated a moment as she realized that Aro would see every moment of the last week—every drunken, rambling, raging, hallucinating moment. But she doubted this was truly optional, and so she strode forward, consoling herself that there couldn't possibly be anything in her mind that Aro hadn't seen before.
She placed her hand in Aro's outstretched one. Immediately his other hand came to rest over hers, and he bowed his head briefly as his eyes went distant. Diana wondered absently what it must feel like to read someone's mind. She herself felt nothing but the marble touch of Aro's icy cold hands.
"I can see the benefit in this course," Aro said reasonably, releasing her hand. Diana stepped back as he continued, "Diana's death so soon after that of her sister would be viewed with suspicion. An extended soul-searching trip, however, which ends in a tragic accident or in young Diana taking her own life… that is much more easily believed."
"It is not so different from what we allowed the Cullen girl," Marcus said dully, the picture of disinterest. His words only agitated Caius further.
"And we would have been wiser to kill her, too, when we had the chance," he snapped.
Aro stood smoothly. "Let us counsel."
With a venomous glare and quiet resignation respectively, Caius and Marcus rose from their own seats and crowded together with Aro, each of them offering a hand. Diana watched and listened, but if they spoke it was too low for her to hear. Whatever deliberation took place lasted less than a minute. Diana felt a rush of satisfaction even before Aro spoke—the outcome was clear to read from the sour expression on Caius's face.
"Six months in return for your cooperation," Aro announced. "You may travel freely in that time on the condition that you return here every two weeks so that I may see that you have not changed your mind."
Diana frowned, performing some quick calculations in her head. She made good money at her law office, but between New York rent, student loans, and years of helping with the mortgage on her mother's house, she wasn't exactly wealthy.
"I won't have enough money for that."
Aro waved carelessly, unconcerned. "We can see to your travel. Do we have an agreement?"
"Agreed."
July 10
"Ah, Diana," Aro greeted warmly when Chelsea ushered her into his study. "Two weeks already."
Diana did not return his smile. "If it's all the same to you, I'd like to get this over with so I can sleep."
Aro's smile dimmed a bit. "Of course." He swept forward and took her offered hand.
She was viciously glad now that he would see everything, hear every thought. She wanted him to witness it. Wanted him to feel it.
The corpse she buried was not her sister.
The pretty secretary, Angelica, had delicately explained that the Volturi had a very efficient means of disposing of bodies. Mac's body was irretrievable. So was her mother's, but Diana couldn't bring herself to grieve that loss. Her feelings for her mother had been complicated well before her stubborn stupidity had gotten herself and Mac killed.
Diana had been provided with two water-logged corpses and a wealth of falsified documentation for a boating accident off the coast of Greece. The resemblance wasn't particularly strong, but water damage could render bodies unrecognizable in a fairly short amount of time. In the end, it didn't matter much. It was a closed casket funeral.
She laid two strangers to rest next to her father.
Diana had wondered about them. She didn't know if these bodies were more victims of the Volturi, or if they had been killed for the express purpose of providing bodies to be flown back to the United States and laid to rest in Virginia. She hoped it was the former, because the thought that no one died unnecessarily for the grisly ruse was marginally better than the alternative. But she didn't wonder enough to ask, and Angelica did not volunteer the information.
Those two weeks were some of the worst in her life. Not the worst—that honor went to the previous week, where she learned her sister was dead and slowly resigned herself to the fact that she would be making a deal with the monsters who ate her. But the time spent communicating with authorities to have the bodies of two strangers transported home from Italy, the days spent typing out emails to friends and family and colleagues explaining in sparse detail the boating accident that had allegedly taken both their lives, the hours of phone calls and funeral arrangements and obituaries culminating in a double closed-casket funeral… it came close.
The only time in Diana's life that compared was when her father died. She had been fifteen. Mac was still a baby, and her mother completely fell apart. Diana had been a kid. She should not have been the one who handled the bulk of the funeral arrangements, who took care of her infant sister and accepted all the well-meaning casseroles from sympathetic neighbors and relatives. But her mother had been very nearly catatonic with grief, and so Diana had stepped up and taken care of what she could.
She had thought at first that her mother simply needed time to recover, but it became clear a few months after her father's death that the recovery Diana hoped for was never going to happen. Her parents had been high school sweethearts. Her father had been the bread-winner. He'd been the one who paid the mortgage and the utility bills, mowed the lawn, paid the car insurance and taken care of just about every day-to-day task that adults did to keep life running smoothly. Diana's mother had never done any of that, and she didn't seem inclined to learn now that she was the only adult left in the household.
And so, Diana had become the adult. She made sure the bills got paid. She did the grocery shopping. She took care of Mac, and became more of a mother to her baby sister than her own mother ever was.
She didn't leave home for college. She could have—she got a number of very generous scholarship offers, but there was no way she could leave Mac alone with her mother unsupervised for so much as a semester. So instead she attended the local community college for two years, and then transferred to the University of Virginia, commuting more than an hour in each direction, working a job in the campus library to earn what money she could to help out at home. Two years to finish her undergraduate degree, then three more years of law school.
Mac was ten when she graduated, and already smarter and more independent than their mother ever would be. She'd been the one to encourage Diana to finally leave home. She could take care of herself, she promised Diana, and she was getting tired of the screaming matches.
So Diana left. She got a job in New York as a corporate lawyer and moved into a tiny studio apartment that she didn't spend much time in. She wore tailored suits and drafted legal documents and settled negotiations worth more money than she'd make in her lifetime, and she enjoyed every second of it. She was good at it. And when she wasn't doing that she was exploring New York, visiting museums and going to musicals and eating greasy pizza, and the only thing that could have possibly made it better was if Mac was there with her.
She'd floated the idea more than once, let Mac know that she was wanted and welcome. Told her about all the brilliant arts high schools in New York and encouraged her to put together a portfolio and apply. Mac had always resisted. Diana could never tell if it was out of a sense of duty to their mother or an unwillingness to be a burden on her sister.
Now, she'd never know.
She hired an estate sale service to handle the house, unable to stomach sifting through the contents of it. The only things she held onto were some sentimental items of furniture that had been passed down from her father and a few boxes filled with all of Mac's artwork and school notes. She planned to take some of Mac's things with her while she traveled. The furniture was put in storage. It would be sold when Diana eventually died herself, but she thought it might look suspicious to get rid of the house and everything in it all at once.
Diana passed the "For Sale" sign on her way out of the house for the last time. She returned to her place in New York only long enough to drop off her sister's things and pack a bag for the trip back to Italy.
In Volterra, Aro held her hand for only seconds. When he released it, his eyes found Diana's challenging, accusatory stare. He did not blink. His small, sympathetic smile did not waver.
"Thank you, my dear. You may go. I will let you sleep."
July 24
"Ah, Diana." Aro rose from his chair with a smile when she entered his study again in mid-July.
She suspected that most of these genial smiles and kind expressions were a performance, and couldn't help but wonder why he bothered. There was no way he could possibly be this pleased to see her, and he knew very well that Diana wasn't at all pleased to see him.
Still, he remarked politely, "You are looking more refreshed than when last I saw you."
Diana said nothing, mutely offering her hand. If Aro was put out by the snub, he gave no indication, instead taking her hand eagerly.
What he got to see this time would be much less morbid than the last time he'd touched her, though the memories were still tinged with grief. She had quit her job first thing upon her return, citing a need to be away for a while to deal with the death of her family. She said she didn't know how long she would be traveling, or if she would ever want to come back to her job in New York. Her colleagues had been understanding and sympathetic. She'd promised to keep in touch with more than one of them who expressed worry about her, and who promised to be there for her when she needed.
No one doubted the story. This was not a surprise to her. Diana could be extremely convincing, when she wanted to be.
She went to Maine. The coast up there was breath-taking, forest and mountains meeting the sea, the smell of pine and salt water mingling in the summer air. Diana spent days hiking up mountains and down to beaches in Acadia National Park. In the evenings she wandered the streets of the tourist town of Bar Harbor, eating fresh lobster and blueberry pies. One day she took a boat tour, and in between bouts of sea sickness she managed to spot whales and puffins.
Mac's absence ate at her every minute of it.
They were supposed to take the trip together. Mac was supposed to have huffed and complained about hiking up the mountain, and pulled her into kitschy art galleries, and insisted on lounging on the beach for a while longer so she could draw the shoreline and sea gulls overhead.
Instead, Diana had spent the trip alone, and by the end of it she wondered whether Caius's suggested six weeks might not have been a better timeline for the remainder of her own life after all. She didn't know if she could live with this grief and loneliness for another five months.
She'd already kept her promise to Mac, hadn't she? She'd gone to see the whales.
But Mac wouldn't want her to give up before the end. The five months remaining before the end of the year were five months Mac would never have, and Diana couldn't bring herself to waste them. So she returned to Volterra with her bags packed with everything she would need when she flew to Mexico the next day.
"So much living to do in such a short amount of time," Aro mused when he released her hand this time.
That sounded like a lead-in to another conversation about the possibility of turning her, and Diana wasn't keen to stick around for it. Voice terse, she said, "May I go?"
Aro's amused smile was unaffected by her tone. "Certainly."
August 7
"Do come in, Diana."
She had not been escorted by a vampire this time. She knew the hallways from the reception area to Aro's study well enough by now, and the vampires in residence were apparently aware that she wasn't a meal—yet.
Her flight had landed ahead of schedule, allowing her to catch an earlier bus and arrive in Volterra a few hours before she'd been expected. Because she was curious, and because her stubborn silences in her previous visits hadn't seemed to faze Aro at all, she asked as she let herself in, "How did you know it was me and not the secretary?"
Aro looked pleased at the question, rising from his seat and drifting forward with his fluid and unnatural grace. "You're not wearing heels," he said simply. Extending one hand in invitation, he added, "And there is no mistaking your smell."
"My smell." As she placed her hand in his, Diana wondered just how keen his senses must be for him to distinguish her smell from another human through the closed door of his study.
"Very," Aro said softly, glancing up from their joined hands to look at her. It took Diana a moment to process that this was a response to her unspoken curiosity. Very keen.
Diana raised an eyebrow and wondered silently what she must smell like in comparison to the secretary. Sweat, exhaust, and travel, she guessed, considering she always came straight from a bus.
"Those are inconsequential," Aro said lightly, and explained further, "Most prominent is the scent of your blood. Each human has their own unique bouquet. Dear Angelica's is rather floral."
Morbidly curious, Diana asked softly, "And mine?"
"Rather like mulled wine. Warm, sharp, complex…" He paused, and Diana could see his throat work as he swallowed. "Juicy."
Diana swallowed hard herself. "Sounds like I should leave before you decide to eat me after all."
Aro laughed and dropped her hand, stepping away from her abruptly. "I am in perfect control, I assure you." He briskly changed the subject, ignoring Diana's implied request to leave as he confessed, "It is an unanticipated pleasure for me to view these places through your eyes. I have not had cause to visit Mexico for over two hundred years."
Diana blinked. That was another point of curiosity. Aro had mentioned before that his own name had been out of fashion for well over a thousand years, but she had a hard time believing that he was really that old.
"Just how old are you, exactly?"
Aro's eyes danced with delight at the question. "Stay for an hour and I'll tell you," he bargained. Diana hesitated, and he reasoned, "Come, now. Your hotel won't let you check in until two o'clock, anyway. And I just so happen to have another bottle of that wine you so enjoyed."
Maybe her sense of self preservation had fallen to the wayside now that her death was already scheduled. Maybe she was lonely enough after her travels that she was willing to spend time with literally anyone, even if said someone was a vampire. Maybe Aro's unfalteringly cheerful demeanor had worn her down, or maybe it was simply a relief to talk frankly with one of the only creatures on this earth who knew the truth about what had happened to her sister and what was going to happen to her.
She told herself she stayed for the wine, and because she really couldn't check into her hotel for a few hours yet. She sat.
"Marvelous." Aro smiled and poured the wine.
It tasted better than the last time, somehow. Probably something to do with the fact that she hadn't seen a pile of dead bodies today. "So?"
"Right to the point, as always," Aro said, though as ever he looked nothing but pleased by the question. "I have been alive for over three thousand and five hundred years."
Diana swallowed her sip of wine with difficulty. "Three thousand?"
"I was Mycenaean," he said helpfully, looking amused by her disbelief. "By today's calendar you would say that my immortal life began around 1300 BC."
She tried to picture it, but couldn't. She could easily picture Aro in the Renaissance or even the middle ages. He seemed like he would be utterly at home bedecked in finery at opulent balls and parties. But she couldn't fathom the idea that she was having a conversation from someone who'd been around in ancient Greece. Such an expanse of time was just too great for her to comprehend.
She didn't know how to put her disbelief into words, so instead she leaned forward, impulsively pressing her hand to his in an attempt to communicate the jumble that was her thoughts. Aro's eyebrows arched in surprise for a moment, but then his fingers grasped hers and he tilted his head as if listening. A second later he smiled, the expression simultaneously pleased and anticipating.
"Come along."
He rose, keeping hold of her hand. Diana let him guide her out of the room, down hallways she had never traversed and through a set of large, ornate doors. On the other side of the doors lay what appeared to be a gallery. Aro guided them through too quickly for her eyes to linger too long on any one painting or sculpture, but even a passing glance was enough to tell her that the value of the art in the first room alone was easily in the millions of dollars.
Aro walked briskly past the modern art and into the next room, and then the next. Every so often they would take a set of stairs to a lower level, descending further and further underground, and with each room and each descent they ventured further into the past. From modern art to pieces from the twentieth century, then the nineteenth. Diana allowed herself to be pulled along without a fuss until, with a start, she halted to look at a painting whose subjects she undeniably recognized.
Aro paused at her side, following her gaze to the painting with a pleased smile. "We have ever been patrons of the arts," he said. "And, more rarely, the subjects."
Aro was the most prominent figure in the painting, front and center on a balcony overlooking a crowded ballroom. Caius and Marcus stood at either side of him, all three of them dressed in fine golden clothing and looking much more like gods than mortal men. A fourth vampire was also in the painting, further in the background, but Diana did not recognize him. His eyes, she couldn't help but notice, were portrayed as gold, not red.
"That is my dear friend Carlisle," Aro said fondly. "He left us shortly after this was painted to start his own coven. I gifted him a copy when he departed."
He offered no explanation of the unique color of his friend's eyes. Diana was curious about that, but her more pressing question was, "When was this painted?"
"1709," Aro said easily. "By Francisco Solimena."
He spoke the name with great respect. Diana admitted, "I have no idea who that is."
Aro tapped one cold finger against her hand, still clasped in his own. "I'm aware. But come. This is not the part of the collection I wished to show you."
They walked on, descending deeper and deeper underground and passing older and older art. Painting, statues, and tapestries eventually gave way to mosaics, wood carvings, pottery and metalwork. Christian imagery gave way to depictions of Roman and Greek gods and goddesses. Eventually they reached a small room from which there were no other doors. Inside this room stood only a single glass case. Within it, on the left-hand side, was a gold chalice with a long stem and two small arms on either side, more plain but not terribly unlike some of the other examples of such metalwork from prior rooms. On the right-hand side sat a delicate necklace comprised of tiny flowers, though whether they were carved from stone or sculpted from clay Diana could not tell.
"These are the only items I have retained from the time of my mortal life."
Diana blinked, looking between Aro and the items in the case, and then thinking back to all the art they had passed, all the rooms it had taken the better part of an hour to walk through, even without stopping to look more closely at any of it. She could believe, now, that Aro was truly this old, that he had lived and collected all this time. But it was still hard to wrap her head around living so long, seeing the world change so dramatically.
"I can't imagine…"
"Caius is even older than I am," Aro said with some amusement. "Though not by much."
Diana shook her head in amazement, then frowned as an even more astonishing idea occurred to her. "But you were both created. That's how it works, isn't it? Which means there must be vampires even older than you."
Aro nodded, but said, "Very few."
"Where does it come from?" Surely, if he was this old, he must know. "Who was the first?"
"Ah." Aro's smile was a little wistful now. "No one knows. Even the oldest of us are too young to remember, too far removed from the source."
Diana's frown deepened. "But surely there are theories. Myths. Something." Nearly every culture on earth had some sort of creation myth. Surely vampires weren't so far removed from humanity that they had nothing similar.
"Most of mankind's myths about gods can be traced back to us," Aro replied to her train of thought. "We have none of our own."
He sounded very certain. Diana couldn't help her feeling of disappointment. "You're not the least bit curious?"
Aro looked, for the first time, a little bit offended at this question.
"I am deeply curious," he assured her. "I have been asking these same questions for millennia. But it is as I said. There are very few vampires older than I, and they have no memory of our beginnings—nor any memory of anyone who ever knew."
It wasn't a satisfying answer, and Diana knew the mystery of it would linger in the back of her mind for weeks. She turned back to the glass case, and then glanced to the door which led back to the rest of the gallery, thinking.
"So this is how you spend your time, then. Enforcing the law. Eating people. And in your spare time…" At last she tugged her hand away from his to gesture all around them. "This."
"This being art and science and all the fruits of human civilization," said Aro. "Fruits which, I remind you, are only possible because of our intervention."
Diana's eyes found the glass case again, her eyes lingering on the necklace. It was delicately beautiful, for all its crude construction. Not something a man would wear. She wondered briefly who its original owner had been.
"It's terrifying," she said quietly. Aro shifted and she clarified, "The thought of living so long, I mean. The civilization you were born into doesn't even exist anymore. Your first language must either be dead or so dramatically changed that it's unrecognizable." She turned to look at him again, amazed. "How can you stand it?"
"Stand it?" Aro repeated, lightly incredulous. "To bear witness to the growth and evolution of this world beyond anything I could have dreamed at the start of my immortal life is my greatest pleasure," he said plainly, as if this should be obvious. "How can you stand your own mortality in the face of all there is to know and be discovered?"
Wryly, she said, "Until very recently there was no other alternative."
"And now?" Aro looked genuinely curious, expectant. It occurred to Diana that both of them viewed the other's condition as inherently tragic, and she couldn't help the quiet laugh that escaped her. Aro's expression turned puzzled. "Something amuses you."
Diana shook her head, still smiling. "Irreconcilable differences," she said simply. With one last glance at the necklace and a sigh, she asked, "Would you lead me back now, please?" She was fairly certain she would be able to check into her hotel by now.
"Certainly." As they made their way back up the stairs, he said lightly, "You are aware that I'll see whatever you were laughing at the next time you visit. There's little point in delaying the inevitable."
"Delaying the inevitable is kind of my thing these days," she said dryly. "Besides. You're clearly used to getting what you want, when you want it. Having to wait a few weeks to satisfy your curiosity will be good for you."
Aro did not deny the accusation. After a pause he said, "I can be patient. When it suits me." He left her at the door to the reception area then with a parting smile. The expression seemed to reach his eyes, and Diana wondered when that had started to happen. "Until next time, my dear Diana."
