33
From the pained look on her face, I just know I'm not going to like what she's about to tell me.
When she opens her eyes, they focus on her hands.
"I grew up in a different time than you did, Edward. I was twenty-nine and unwed, and society thought I would die an old shrew. My family wasn't what you could call wealthy by any standards, and I fell in love with a man of great pedigree." She sighs heavily. "We weren't meant to be, and he eventually married a woman of his equal. I was heartbroken."
I swallow thickly.
"The day of the wedding, my parents took me for a hike in the Rainier Forest so I could drown my sorrows …" She looks up, and her eyes are utterly devastated. "I'm sure you know the rest."
I actually know what happened. Well, at least the cliff notes they taught us in school, but I'm sure there's more to her story.
"I want to hear it from you," I croak, and she gives another heavy sigh.
"We were setting up camp in our favorite spot and didn't even notice when they arrived. Three nomads swooped into our site while we prepared to call it a night. My father was the first one to notice that something wasn't right. There was something inhuman about them." Bella swallows and rubs the almost indiscernible scar on her left wrist. "He was their first victim, and then my mother."
"Fuck," I whisper, but she continues, almost robotically.
"They made a game of it, playing with us, and they made me watch them torture my parents until all three of us were begging for death." Bella scrunches her nose. "As the years pass and your human blood dies off, you lose your human memories, but I can still remember the sound of my parents screaming when the monsters turned their attention to me. I couldn't count the number of bones in my body they broke, but I remember when my own screams drowned out everything until they gave in to their bloodlust."
"Fuck," I repeat because I honestly don't know what else I can say.
"The nomads didn't stick around after that. My family suffered the three-day burn alone in the middle of the forest, and we woke up scared and confused with an unquestionable thirst."
"How did you not succumb to the bloodlust?"
Bella walks over to the fridge, gets a bag of blood out, and pours it into the coffee mug I bought her. "My father has always been a proud man. He left us in the woods and went home to find a doctor. He thought we had contracted a disease of some sort, something curable. Instead, he drained our neighbors."