Shahrazád's Ghosts


Chapter 2: Rosalie


2416 AD


It was a dark and dreary night. The angry wind whipped across the Scottish moor like a herd of galloping horses, clambering against the window pains and pounding the stone walls of the castle the Cullens now called home. Rain fell sideways like the world had turned upside down and the clouds hung over the eastern garden instead of in the black sky above and little drops crept in from the corner roof which was still waiting for a new patch. None of the residents of the old medieval fortress minded how easy the cold crept in through the worn stones or whipped through the vaulted halls. The cold did not bother them and the fires in the hearths were kindled for cheer, not warmth.

Rosalie wrapped a woolen blanket around herself as she watched the shadows of the flames dance around the walls of the drawing room. It was not because she needed the blanket, but because she felt she ought to need the blanket that she wore it. She did not have so many of those pre-vampiric human instincts left and so when one gnawed at her like this, she felt it best to concede and allow whatever small inklings of her pre-human self remained to have its way, even if only in the form of a blanket on a chilly night.

Esme sat at her desk sketching her plans for remodeling the nearly crumbling west tower. The main keep, courtyards, and great hall of the castle had already benefited from her hand, but the towers and the carriage house were badly in need of repair. Restoration of the 14th century structure had been Esme's dream-come-true opportunity and none of the Cullens dared complain about its isolated location or its state of disrepair when they saw how happy Esme was fixing it up. She kept herself busy day and night, happily dreaming how to breathe life into the old bones of the fortress and make it ready to withstand another millennium of highland winds and rains.

Emmett and Jasper spoke in low whispers to each other, the light of their laptops casting a pale glow onto their pensive faces. Their fingers flew across their keyboards as they worked on coding for a new security system for the family. Carlisle was roused from his medical journals, every now-and-then, to add in his opinion on their work.

It was getting harder and harder. With the rapid development of facial recognition software and more vigorous government surveillance, the Cullens had to be ever more vigilant over their movements. Despite Emmett and Jasper's constant efforts at blotting their faces from databases, inventing devices to temporarily confuse surveillance cameras when they walked past, and covering their tracks with increasingly sophisticated layers of codes, they were not always successful. Their list of countries deemed "unsafe to return to for a hundred years" was up to five now and they were forced to take longer breaks, and seek more isolated locales between their charades at "playing human."

Isabella lay asleep on a couch in the shadowed corner of the room. The rise and fall of her gentle breaths continued to be one of Rosalie's favorite sounds, even after so many years. Soon, they would be celebrating their little girl's 240th birthday and the slight "v" in her forehead and the scattering of silver strands in her auburn hair were a reminder that she was neither unchanging nor immortal. They never spoke of the uncomfortable fact that one day, she would be gone. It didn't matter if it was a thousand years or a hundred, the thought that there would someday be an empty couch and no quiet sounds of sleep in their family already was more than Rosalie could bear. Edward's final last parting gift to their family, whatever the circumstances of her conception happened to be, had been the most precious gift he could have given them.

From the day that little baby was first placed into her arms, Rosalie had loved her with all her heart. It would never be enough, though maybe that was both the gift and the curse of truly loving someone. No amount of time would ever be enough. That made every day just a little more precious.

Especially now. Isabella lived with her own family most of the time, and it was only on rare occasions that she could slip away to spend time with the family who raised her and called her their own. It had been that way for awhile. A drawback of such a condensed childhood was she was physically an adult before she turned the age of eight, though it took awhile for the rest of her to catch up. It took even longer for the Cullens to realize her advanced aging as a child did not necessitate a premature death and they stopped holding their breaths thinking she would be an old woman before she was thirty.

Alice never had explained who her human mother had been or what events led to Edward's death. Rosalie gave up asking and guessing and just accepted she wouldn't ever know. But she hated the feeling there there were truths hiding under rugs and jammed into closets so tight the doors only barely shut. She knew truths like that had a tendency to trip up one's foot at night or burst out of the top shelf and fall upon one's head when opening the closet door. She preferred to get it all out there at once and be done with that, but, then again, Rosalie didn't have to deal with an infinite number of ever-shifting futures and possibilities of everyone around her. It was for the best, really. She'd never put up with stupid decisions or all the lousy nonsense people were prone to bury themselves with. If she knew different, she'd tell them straight and knock them over the head until they listened.

But that's how Rosalie would do it. Alice was Alice. She'd rather fret and plot and scheme with all the stealth of a spider building a web. Even Alice's visions weren't perfect, and she'd be the first to admit it, but when Edward fell off the deep end, it had really shaken the little pixie. Between that and Isabella's gifted ability to completely confound her, Alice's confidence in her own abilities had been shaken to the core worse than an apple tree in a windstorm.

Now Alice paced the room, uncharacteristically nervous and high-strung. Her hands rubbed at her temples, despite the waves of calm everyone could feel Jasper projecting in buckets in her direction. She had been fine until four days earlier. She'd appointed herself chief window draper and furiously washed all the windowsills for days before fixing each with a fresh set of thick velvet or brocade hangings. Then she stopped and dropped a pint of paint all over her pants without even noticing and then everyone knew something was up. Again.

"Something has happened. I can't see," she said, her eyes as lost as her ruined pants. "Four days from now, Emmett will win a bet against Jasper over who can catapult stones the farthest. Then, in the evening, it will rain and storm something awful. Then, nothing. It's all gone."

"Oh, you better not be blaming me again," Isabella had complained.

"No, no, it's not you," Alice said. "I know how to look around you. It's something else and I don't like it. It doesn't only blot out one evening, either. Something is going to happen that night that is going to change the course of all our lives and I have absolutely no idea what it is."

"Could you sound any less ominous and dramatic?" Rosalie said as she flipped through her magazine.

"Do we need to prepare for some kind of danger?" Carlisle had sensibly asked.

"I don't know. Maybe?" Alice said, tugging on the ends of her hair as if the action would help the visions materialize again in her mind.

"Is it some kind of gifted vampire?" he asked.

Alice blew out a long breath. "I don't know, Carlisle! That's the problem! I can't tell anything about it except that I can't see!"

She was on edge for days, no matter how much Jasper tried to calm her down and she was even more snappy with Rosalie than usual. Now she was downright frantic. The little vampire paced restlessly, pausing only to look at the grandfather clock as regularly as the clock ticked and tocked and chimed. Everyone pretended not to be ruffled by her unease; or, maybe, Jasper's waves of calm were the cause of their platitude. Each continued their various pursuits as best they could as they waited for whatever "it" was. Rosalie pretended not to be bothered, but she knew she was as transparent as tracing paper and she was just as nervous as everyone else. Isabella was the only one who remained unperturbed by Alice's visions. Maybe it was because she was sort of immune to them or she worked in a world outside of them. Whatever it was, she paid less heed to the visions than the rest of them. However, even she couldn't maintain her nonchalance when, sometime later, Alice stopped in her tracks facing the door, her eyes grew glazed, and she whispered, "it's time."

Immediately, they heard the front portcullis pushed open. Next, the wooden door of the courtyard opened with a bang, followed by multiple pairs of rushed and unfamiliar foot steps. The massive door into the hall outside of the drawing room creaked on its hinges and the footsteps came ever closer, with ever more urgent intensity in their gaits. Wet boots sloshed down the hall outside the drawing room, joined by the sounds of heavy breathing and heartbeats. Multiple heartbeats.

But the scents they could gather were not all human.

Esme placed her drawing pencil down upon her desk and gave Carlisle a questioning glance. He shook his head. Alice's posture remained as charged as a waterfall in a snowstorm and not even Jasper's reassuring hand on her shoulder could make her relax. Emmett rose to stand guard over where their little Izzy blinked the sleep out of her eyes and yawned. Once sure Isabella was protected, Rosalie could turn her attention to the door.

It opened.

Two figures emerged first. They were tall men with grey turbans on their heads, brown beards covering their faces, and black trench coats soaked with rain. They stood uneasily on either side of the doorway, as restlessly as caged lions, and only then did Rosalie notice that they were completely identical. The next thing she noticed was their scents and heartbeats. Even from across the room, Rosalie could tell they were the same as Isabella's.

Before Rosalie could register her shock at this, Isabella threw off her blanket and ran across the room in her socked feet, her brown eyes glowing in radiant delight.

"Khalid, Kassim! You've finally come!" Isabella cried, throwing herself into the arms of the silent sentries. Each twin broke into a wide smile and embraced the petite woman with a fervor that equaled her own. "Oh, you should have told me you were coming! I'm so happy to see you again!"

"It has been long, dear sister," one answered in deeply accented English. "Unfortunately, we have come to ask for your assistance, and the assistance of our family among the jinn."

"Of course!" she said. "What do you need?"

The pair drew aside from the threshold and a third set of footsteps entered between them. This new guest was entirely shrouded in a grey cloak...a grey cloak exactly like those worn by Volturi guards. All that could be seen beneath his hood was the crook of his nose and a fine beard on his chin. He was slightly taller than the twins and in his arms, he carried a bundle of something close to his chest. The bundle whimpered slightly in his arms and he grimaced. He readjusted his hold, wrapped his burden all the more tightly in his cloak, and moved as though his arms held either the most fragile or the most precious of cargo in all Scotland.

It was then that Rosalie noticed the quiet thrum of a human heartbeat.

The newcomer paused to assess the room for a moment before he walked with long strides to the couch Isabella had vacated. Carefully, tenderly, he placed his burden down onto the cushions. A woman, petite and frail and wrapped tightly in a blanket, peered out cautiously from behind the grey-cloaked figure holding sentry over her. He placed his own body between the room and the woman, his posture daring any in the room to approach her, and his nostrils flared as he appraised each of the inhabitants of the room through his hood.

She was a young woman, not more than 25, if that. Her short hair was an untamed riot. Outgrown roots showed her natural hair color to be dark, but three inches of poorly bleached blonde tips made it hard to discern if it would grow in black or brown. Her face was wan and pale and much too thin to be healthy. A healed scar ran from one side of her forehead to the other. With her chocolate brown eyes, she quietly searched the room's inhabitants, both weariness and exhaustion evident in the way she collapsed her head against the welcoming cushions beneath her.

With a swift motion, the grey-cloak was removed by her guardian and placed on top of the woman's blanket. Then he faced the room with all the fierce intensity of a cornered wolf with an injured paw. All eyes in the room were fixed on the face no longer hidden by the cloak. He was no older than the woman and his hair was in no better order. A tumult of wild reddish-brown locks, a shade lighter than his beard, framed his pale face and fell around his ears in uneven, unkempt waves. Yet even his hair paled in comparison with his eyes.

They were red. Furiously red. Fiercely and unashamedly red. Not the dull burgundy of what Edward's eyes had been from that time he returned from his rebel days. No, these were a freshly-and-boastingly-fed kind of red.

The entire room fell into a collective shock as they lost the breath they did not need. It was Carlisle who said it first. He rose cautiously and approached the vampire as carefully as if he were seeing a ghost...which is, in fact, what they were all convinced they were seeing.

"Edward?" he asked. "My son? Is that you?"

"It can't be. He's dead," Alice said, uncharacteristically dumbstruck.

"Well, technically so are you," Emmett chimed in. "And he looks about as alive and kicking as you are."

Rosalie gave the vampire a more thorough look-over and she knew the answer before the vampire spoke it. This was not Edward. It's true, he could have been Edward's twin...or, more likely, his older brother. Judging by the breadth of his shoulders, the additional musculature in his arms and chest, and the beginnings of a beard the man sported on his face, he was only ahead of Edward by two or three years at the most. Other than that, the two would have been identical, at least on the outside.

But it was his eyes that told Rosalie that this was not Edward, at least, not the Edward they all had once known.

Rosalie remembered the last time she saw Edward with red eyes. Storm clouds darkened his brow and his shoulders sank with the weight of his self-reproach. She had caught him again and again gawking at himself in the hall mirror, hatred evident on his face as he turned his inner judge, jury, and executioner onto himself.

No shame burned through this man's irises. While red eyes may have been worn as the old Edward's Scarlett Letter, this new manifestation of him wore them as a ruby broach and not a confession of transgression. No self-loathing sank his shoulders. No arrogance trickled into his footsteps. He was as decidedly less-human as he was more-vampire, yet he crouched next to the delicate human with all the tenderness of human affection and Rosalie gawked to watch the dissimilarities between this man and her long lost, black sheep of a brother.

The vampire shook his head in confusion. "No. Not Edward. I am called Michael," he said. "And this is my Bell."

He smiled fondly at the woman he introduced and she forced her own smile in return. She wished to sit up, but was to weak to manage it on her own. She clung to her guardian's shoulder with shaking knuckles as he helped her. At first, none could understand the cumbersome way she moved until her coverings were dislodged, revealing that her free hand rested on what was, undoubtedly, a womb in the late stages of pregnancy. The silence in the room grew so thick that every supernaturally-attuned ear in the room could hear what they could not hear before: another heartbeat. A lighter, higher, faster heartbeat; it so slight it could not have been heard without the sudden silence.

Carlisle was about to speak again when he was interrupted by a little screech and a pair of woolen socks bounding across the tiled floor. Isabella flung herself on the vampire with all the fury of an angered mother hen attacking a hawk, her fists swinging wildly in an attempt to make purchase on his exposed head.

"I will kill you myself, you Son of a Bitch!" she screamed at him. "We won't let you do this again. So help me, you will not see another day if I have anything to say about it! Rose, Alice, get his legs!"

Rather than attack her or fight back, the vampire accepted her onslaught while strategically pushing forward to keep Isabella as far from the human woman as possible. The human gave a cry of dismay and cowered back on the couch in a fetal position with her hands covering her face. Rosalie was unsure whether to help Isabella or rescue their guest or stand guard over the hapless woman to ensure she didn't come to any harm or burst out in laughter at the sight of it all. The twins intervened first, their quick movements saving Rosalie the trouble of coming to a decision at all. Two pairs of arms drew the struggling woman off the vampire and held onto her as she kicked and flailed. The moment he was freed, Michael quickly resumed his post next to his woman, but even closer and more guarded than before. His eyes scanned the room over and over again, waiting to see from which direction he could expect the another attack to come.

"It's not what you think," one of the twins whispered to his struggling charge.

"Khalid, how is it not what I think?" she said.

"This is not our father."

"He sure as hell looks like him and by the looks of her, he acts like him, too."

"Isa, Isa, calm yourself. Allow me to explain before you decapitate him," her captor said, pulling her closer into his chest as her movements still and she gave up struggling to get free. He wrapped his arms around her and held her while her tears streamed down her red, swollen face and her hands shook against his shoulders from her rage. "Bell is his mate. Michael is not responsible for her creation nor his own. He fled Barzakh to preserve both her life and the life of their child. It is to save them both we have brought them to you."

"But he is responsible for the child," she bit back, her accusation clear in her voice.

"Oh, undoubtedly," Khalid responded with a chuckle. "However, both were willing participants."

"You are sure?"

He gave her an expression which immediately caused her to fall silent and hang her head in her hands.

"I'm sorry. It's just, you show up here with exact replicas of Edward and our mother and expect me to be ok with that? I'm not, ok? I'm not ok with that."

"I know, Isa," he said. "I did not bring them here to force you to make peace with the memory of our father. I brought them because they are more unwilling victims of our father's hands who do not deserve to be punished for his transgressions."

"I don't understand. Why do they exist at all? I thought Barzakh was destroyed," she said. "It was nothing but mummified corpses and old graves the last time we were there."

"We thought the same."

"Then what happened?"

It was Alice who interjected then, her eyes glazed slightly, surprising them both with her voice. "It was destroyed. That terrible place was meant for nothing but the desert. But we misjudged. We didn't know about her."

"Her?" Isabella asked.

The vampire's eyes flew to Alice, fixed on her in first confusion and then awe. When Alice failed to elaborate, her eyes still worlds away from where the rest of them remained in the present, the vampire spoke for her.

"The Mistress of Barzakh," he said, nodding his head. "Our creator."

The room fell silent again, but Emmett had listened long enough and said what Rosalie had been thinking all along.

"I, uh, think I am a little lost here. I might be the only one, but could we, uh, break it down a little? Who the hell are these two and how does our little Izzy know them? And why is Edward suddenly resurrected and who is the human he's knocked up? And who is this Isaac and why does he have a mistress?"

"I second that," Rosalie added in, placing her hand on her husband's arm in a show of support for his brilliance.

Isabella gave a wry smile. "Aunty Rose, Uncle Emmie, meet Khalid and Kaseem. These are my blood brothers and full siblings. And this pair who calls themselves Michael and Bell are cloned replicas of our parents."

Emmett chuckled and shrugged. "You know, that's really not that helpful. Maybe you had better start at the beginning."

Isabella shook her head. "The beginning starts way before me. Maybe it would be best if Alice tells it. I think it's time we all heard the truth."

And just like that, Rosalie knew that old closet had burst open again, spilling it's secrets and revealing old skeletons, just as she'd always known it was going to do and she was ready. She'd rather have it cleaned out and, once and for all, stop hiding secrets.

Not even the ugly ones.

Cause one thing Rosalie knew for certain. This was not going to be a pretty story with a "happily ever after" ending, but it would be the truth. And sometimes that was the best kind of story of all and that was the story she wanted now.

oooo


Author's Note: I wasn't going to update so quick, but this chapter got stuck in my head today and wanted to come out...and I wanted to listen to the end result before I called it a night, so here it is. :)

I've absolutely loved hearing all your suggestions and ideas and, most of all, your enthusiasm for a sequel for this story. I couldn't believe you would want more after all we went through with that first story, but I'm glad you are up for more!