Esme

Esme POV

Ashland, Wisconsin

I walked aimlessly, staggering toward the cliff face. The doctor's words were ringing in my head.

"I'm sorry, Mrs Evenson... your son passed away."

It was like a record on repeat. Eating me alive. I felt nauseous, my head was spinning. I couldn't think straight. Not that I wanted to; it hurt to think. God, it hurt to breathe. I merely closed my eyes, taking care not to look down from the edge of the cliff where I was poised. I could not afford to lose my nerve. Taking in a deep breath, sucking in the cool wind that was raising goose bumps on my skin, I stepped over the edge...

And plunged into nothingness.

Carlisle POV

"Just a second there, Jimmy." I held my cold hand against the squirming boy's leg to stop him from twisting. His cast wouldn't set right if he moved. It was only a small fracture, nothing too serious. He was twelve, and a healthy boy; it would be brand new in a few weeks.

"It's a little sore, Dr. Cullen," Jimmy winced and pressed his head into the pillow.

"I'd imagine that it does. You've been through the wars here." I smiled indulgently at the boy, his keen blue eyes showing the extent of the pain he didn't want me to see he was in. From the hour or so I had just spent with him, he seemed to be a soldier.

"So my mom says, sir. I'm always getting into some kind of scrape." Jimmy smiled apologetically at me. His brown curls were flattened at the back now from the force he was exerting against the pillow to manage his pain. I was instantly reminded of my own son. Edward was new to this life, but he was forever trying to display an iron-clad will that, by all accounts, he should not have had yet. Every time a human walked past, I could almost hear him grimace in discomfort, but he never complained. Personally, I was beginning to wonder if he was just a glutton for punishment.

"How did you do this anyway?" I asked animatedly, and the boy's eyes lit up, probably from the prospect of recounting his tale of gruesome injury.

"Climbed a tree. I had a bet with one of the boys from the village. I bet that I could walk across this big branch without it snapping. He bet I couldn't. He won." Jimmy shrugged nonchalantly.

I bit back a laugh. "Evidently."

"That's what you get," Ellen, Jimmy's mother, had obviously returned from the mess downstairs. She was a cheerful woman, with the same curls and eyes and rosy cheeks as her son.

"Leave me alone, Mom. I just fell out of a tree. How about some sympathy?" He caught my eye and then rolled his own, as if to say mothers.

I felt a memory spring to the forefront of my mind, and I watched in surprise as the scene materialised in front of me, a hospital room from a decade in the past...

"So how did you manage this then, Miss Platt?" I sighed, probing my cold fingertips gently down the girl's leg. She grimaced and gritted her teeth in agony, her pretty face pinched and her hands balled into fists at her sides.

"I... I fell out of a tree Dr. Cullen." Her cheeks flushed with blood as she said this, and she returned her gaze to her lap, her caramel hair tumbling forwards to obscure her features.

"Silly, irresponsible thing to do, wasn't it Esme?" Esme Platt's dour, misery of a mother had snapped at her shrilly. "Sixteen years old and still climbing trees, what can you do?" She turned her attention to me with a coy smile.

"I suppose so, Mother." Esme sighed wistfully. "I am a little old to be climbing trees."

"Nonsense," I murmured, loud enough so that she could hear. "I've been known to do it myself, on occasion." I winked conspiratorially at her, and her wide, coral blue eyes got larger in shock.

"Really?" she asked incredulously. I laughed gently.

"Of course. It's always fun, being a child now and again." I smiled encouragingly at her. Part of me just wanted to rescue her from the clutches of her unpleasant guardian.

"What's the hurry to grow up?" She agreed, grinning widely. "Thank you, Dr. Cullen."

"Please, call me Carlisle, Miss Platt," I offered cordially.

She bit her lip, considering me carefully. "Okay..." she enunciated slowly, "Then you have to call me Esme. Deal?" She raised her eyebrows.

"Deal," I agreed with a chuckle.

"That's hardly appropriate, Esme," Mrs Platt scolded her daughter.

Esme rolled her eyes at me behind her mother's back.

Jimmy was so like her, but with a much more amicable mother. I had grown very fond of Esme over the two week span when I had treated her, the fondest I'd ever grown of a patient. She was so bright and upbeat and enthusiastic, plus she had an endearing way of acting like I was the unspoken authority on everything. I could have told her the moon was made of cheese and she'd have believed me beyond a shadow of a doubt.

I didn't have the patience for her family. They didn't seem to see what a gem their daughter was, her parents merely looked at her as a burden, rather than a witty, precocious treasure. They had left her at the hospital and were not heard from until they came to pick her up two weeks later. Hardly the most caring, nurturing environment for the poor girl to be raised in.

I learned the reason behind this. Her mother could find no husband for Esme, despite her evident beauty. I thought it was simply that Esme vehemently told her that she did not want to get married right now, but her mother put it down to Esme's intelligence and opinions. Human men apparently wanted meek little girl to look pretty and say nothing. How tiresome.

"Dr. Cullen?" Ellen called my name quietly, and I snapped out of my reverie.

"I'm terribly sorry," I apologised, my English accent leaking through.

"No, it's no bother, you just seemed like you were miles away." Ellen smiled.

"Away with the fairies," Jimmy chipped in, grinning at the mental image.

"Indeed I was. Good friends of mine, those fairies," I winked at him.

"Carlisle?" My colleague, Dr. Prince, an intern who had started three days previously, called my name from across the ward. I glanced up.

"I'll be right there, Nicholas." I added the finishing touch to Jimmy's plaster cast, and left his bedside to see what Nicholas wanted. His face was grim.

"Can I help you with something?" I asked in a low voice that doctors reserved for keeping the surrounding patients calm and ignorant to the horror injuries around them.

"A woman was just brought into the morgue. She's real messed up. We need you to pronounce her." I was the only attending physician on this shift, so of course, it would be my job.

"She was dead on arrival?" I enquired. I detested cases like these.

"Poor thing threw herself off a cliff by the looks of it. There wasn't anything we could do." Dr. Prince sighed mournfully, shaking his head from side to side in slow motion.

"I see," I nodded glumly. "I'll do it right now then, and I'm going home after that. All my patients are seen to, though you can check up on Jimmy Mallow in thirty minutes."

I strode out of the ward and down the corridor, moving too quickly down a flight of stairs whilst nobody was watching. The smell of blood was potent in the hallway, but I couldn't tell from which direction. I was desperate to get this over with... I hated death.

The door of the morgue creaked open when I pushed it, and it was like something out of a gothic horror novel when I entered. The poor woman's broken, bleeding corpse had been lain out on a gurney with little care, the paramedics not even bothering to cover her in a sheet. She was gone already.

I moved closer to her, brushing her blood-matted curls away from her face. She was still slightly warm, and ravishingly beautiful, but there was something else, something more...

A sickening sense of déjà vu hit me, and I felt a little dizzy. I recognized the young woman before me, though it had been a decade since I had seen her last.

"Esme," I murmured. "What have you done?"

Esme Anne Platt. The girl I had just been thinking about not five minutes previously. My favourite patient. Ten years had passed, and those years had been extremely kind to her, letting her lose her childish awkwardness and blossom into such a beauty that it shocked me, even now in her mangled state, the fresh blood trickling down her cheek like a tear.

Why would she do this to herself?

I stroked her hair, ignoring the sweet smell of her blood, lamenting in the loss of a girl I had had no right to care for as much as I surely did. No other death had affected me so.

"Time of death... 19:35," I declared to the cold room.

And then I heard it. That soft sound, lighter than air. Faint, but audible.

A heartbeat.

My vision of everything before me shifted, and before I knew what I was doing I had seized Esme, gathering her in my arms, and fled to the fire exit, kicking the door open.

I ran, speeding, tearing away into the night. I didn't know what had possessed me to do it, but now my course was set, and hell mend me, I would not alter it.

Esme needed to live. I needed her to live. This wasn't a deliberate decision like Edward. My heart had completely eclipsed my head and I had no capacity to resist. I was going to change her, because I needed her. This inexplicable revelation was suddenly as key to my survival as breathing is to a human.

It was selfish, irresponsible... Even as I lay her head against my sofa cushions I could tell that. Even as my teeth sank into her skin; her neck, her wrists, the better, moral part of me was screaming at me to stop, not to do this, to just let her go.

But I couldn't.

Esme's body gave a shudder, and her heart began to thump insistently.

There was no going back now.

Esme POV

I was on fire. The flames of purgatory, grilling me alive for failing. I was paying the price for letting my son die, for being weak and meagre and irreprehensible. The torture was a welcome punishment to me... I deserved it.

I felt some pressure on my forehead – at least, I thought so, but I couldn't be sure it was my forehead. I couldn't tell which way up I was facing, let alone where each piece of my body was.

I deserved the burning. I must endure it.

But it was so much... so harsh, so excruciating.

I whimpered in agony.

"I'm sorry, Esme. So very sorry. Forgive me, please." That voice... I knew that voice! I had dreamt about that voice since the first night I heard it. I had spent years imagining the person, the god-like creature who possessed that voice, showing up at my home and whisking me away from the clutches of my evil husband. Of course, the fact that I was too cowardly to escape him on my own was the reason I was burning. So... what would Dr. Carlisle Cullen be doing here, bearing witness to my torment?

"Esme? You mean – you know her name?" Another voice, a man, smooth like velvet, beautiful and melodic.

"Yes, Edward. She was a patient of mine from a long time ago." Carlisle, the angel of whom I dreamt, sighed deeply as he spoke. So his velvet-voiced companion was named Edward...

"Carlisle, honestly, what possessed you?" Edward's tone was sharp, almost a reprove. I opened my mouth to reprimand him for speaking to an angel that way, but I couldn't find my voice box to frame the words.

"I can't explain it, Edward. I just... I saw her, and I remembered how beautiful she once was, how lively, and I..." Dr. Cullen could not complete his sentence.

"So you wish to condemn her to our family for her virtues?" Edward demanded.

"Don't be that way, Edward, I beg you." The broken tone of Carlisle nearly distracted me from the raging inferno inside me.

"I'm sorry, Carlisle. I didn't mean that. I am grateful that you kept me alive. You're the best father anyone could ask for, and it was inexcusable of me to insinuate otherwise." Edward was Dr. Cullen's son? Did that mean he was married?

I felt like my heart would implode with devastation if it could.

"It's okay, Edward. I understand if you truly do... feel that way."

"It was a cruel and bitter comment Carlisle. Don't take it to heart." The boy named Edward sounded remarkably ashamed of himself now. As well you should, I thought privately.

A soft, entrancing chuckle came from somewhere above me.

"What?" Carlisle's heavenly voice queried.

"Esme is telling me off," Edward laughed. "She thinks I should be royally ashamed of myself, speaking to you that way."

I heard Carlisle gasp. I was surprised I could differentiate between the two breathing patterns, but I could. "She can hear us now?" he asked, his voice hopeful.

"Yes, every word as clear as a bell. It shouldn't be long now." I didn't know what that meant, and nor did I care; an unsettling thought had just occurred to me.

Could Edward read my mind?

Another soft chuckle. "Yes."

I was certain that he was answering my question, and I was a little outraged. I couldn't forget the fire, but my emotions were coming back a little.

It's rude to snoop, I thought in the general direction I supposed Edward was in.

"I'm sorry," he replied, not sounding sorry in the slightest. "I can't help it."

Just then, the fire burning through my veins picked up tempo, and I forgot anything else.

"It's time," Carlisle said quietly.

My heart was galloping, racing ahead faster than my body could stand. I felt sure it would give up trying soon enough, and I was ready. Much as I found it wonderful, hearing Dr. Cullen's voice again, I wanted to die. Dr. Cullen was a childish dream of the past that would never come true.

Three loud beats and my heart gave out.

I lay in comfort for a second, relishing in the delight that my agony had ceased. A thought struck me... was I really dead? I was still breathing, but... it tasted funny. It felt wrong.

Dragging in one of my new, strange breaths, my eyelids fluttered open.

My eyes met two anxious, butterscotch ones, and my dead heart flooded with joy. There, more perfect, more out of this world than I had ever remembered, even though I was sure I could never forget, was Carlisle Cullen.

"Oh!" I gasped, shock flooding through my now dry veins.

"Hello, Esme." He smiled warmly at me, and offered his hand.

Without meaning to, I tensed and recoiled, a low hissing sound escaping my throat. He withdrew his proffered arm slowly, bowing his head a little.

Once I recovered myself, I stood up, tilting my eyes to the floor in shame.

"I'm very sorry," I said solemnly, only it wasn't my voice. It was a shimmering, angelic chorus, surely. My gaze shot to Carlisle, perturbed. He smiled reassuringly.

"It can be a little daunting, I'm sure. But it's perfectly normal."

I nodded jerkily, surprised at how fast the movement was. My eyes darted to my left, and there stood a young man, boyish yet full-grown, with curious, bronze colored hair and the same topaz eyes as... his father, I assumed, as this must've been Edward. He smiled crookedly at me, his dashing face set off by this charming expression. I smiled eagerly back at him. If my son hadn't have left me, I would have wanted him to end up like this beautiful, telepathic ward of Dr. Cullen's.

"What happened?" I murmured, still not sure of my voice.

"You changed, Esme." Carlisle commanded my flighty attention again, and I was struck once more by his magnificence. "I changed you." He looked guilty, ashamed even. It made me anxious to see him like that.

"You're one of us now," Edward grinned cheerfully.

"And what would one of us be exactly?" I felt odd including myself in the plural.

Edward raised one eyebrow for dramatic effect, and delivered his line in the perfect suspenseful tone. "That would be a vampire."