Author's Note: Hey! Thanks to everyone who reviewed the last chapter! This story has been added to a commmunty (a C2)! Isn't that awesome!? I thought so! One more chapter after this, but I've been playing with some ideas for other Twilight fics, so keep on a look out! (Although, those will probably be more upbeat and happy... unless I do something like this for Jasper...)
Also, I did the math as to the years when this would be happening (by what I read in the books) and I concluded that it'd be happening around the late 1930s, early 1940s. I remembered that at some point in the thirties, prohibition was going on, and that's why I wrote that bars were illegal...
Disclaimer: I am not Stephenie Meyer and don't own the whole Twilight franchise, which also means that I don't own the quote that is in the first paragraph of this chapter. (Reference: Twilight, Chapter Sixteen: Carlisle, page 343). I do, however, own the characters you don't recognize in this story and a fish named Koah Abob! Oh, and I own a Bible, but I don't take any claim to the Bible verse in this chapter... just to clear that up! Enjoy!
Five People Edward Cullen Has Killed: Chapter Four: Glenn Haddix
It was exactly as I had told Bella the day I properly introduced her to my family. The day I let her in on Carlisle's past as well as a portion of my own. "Because I knew the thoughts of my prey, I could pass over the innocent and pursue only the evil. If I followed a murderer down a dark alley where he stalked a young girl--if I saved her, then surely I wasn't so terrible." I had explained to her. And that was exactly what I had thought. It's exactly how I justified the killing of Glenn Haddix.
I had been walking in a darkened alleyway in the city, behind one of the many outlawed bars at the time. I was listening to the drunk men's thoughts absentmindedly, not really thinking, just doing, when I heard his thoughts. They started off bitter, thinking of how much he hated his boss, a rich banker, for firing him. Soon, with alcohol as a severe catalyst, his thoughts got much more violent. He started imagining himself kicking dogs, randomly enough, and then of going home to his wife. He started yelling at his wife, blaming her unjustly for things, such as him getting fired, saying she wasn't supportive enough. I could see, through the other men's thoughts, him pounding his fists on the tables, smashing glasses. He was getting too out of hand too fast.
He smiled in anticipation and growing excitement of returning home and lashing out on his wife, making his two children, a young boy and girl, watch to teach them a lesson.
"Mary," he imagined himself yelling pointedly, in his mind's sick dream, at that little, innocent girl. "This is what happens to a wife when she's not supportive to her husband." He slapped his wife whom he was holding up by the hair as she knelt on the ground. Her face was bruised and beaten, red all over from being assaulted. "You be a good girl, won't ya Mary?" His voice boomed. Mary was scared silent. Her lips were quivering in fear, verging on tears. "Mary!" He shouted again. "You answer me, you hear?"
Tears raced down the innocent girl's face as she looked from her mother to her father. "Yes," she whispered, afraid to get beat herself.
The little boy, clearly younger than Mary, slowly shifted himself so he was behind his sister. Her arm flew back to catch him, to hold him close to her back to let him know he was safe. Through her legs you could see the poor boy's knees wobbling, close to letting out beneath him.
"And you!" The father roared again. "You, son, need to be strong! You never let a woman treat you so horribly. Do you understand!?" He yelled the last part much louder than before.
The boy winced into the little girl's back, his face unseen. The father smiled, exuberant that he scared his son and daughter. The girl turned her face away as her father raised his hand up and quickly threw it back down in a punch to the two children's mother.
His thoughts were enough; there was no way I was going to allow that to happen. To think such things! Such horrible, wretched things with no feelings other than elation! And for his mind to be so specific in the doings, and the clarity of his imagination.
I was ready to burst into the bar right that very moment to take him out, but something stopped me.
No, I said to myself. Too many others, innocent. So I waited and watched in the light snow for him to come out into the cold.
It didn't take long for him to exit the bar door. The man could have been noticed from a few blocks away as violent and drunk as he staggered down the steps, almost slipping. I let him take exactly seven steps before I attacked. I grabbed him by the waist and dragged him further into the darkness of the roughly-paved alley. I heard, with pleasure, a few of his ribs crunch under my grasp and the sound of my fingers pressing into his organs. I felt him wither in pain in the grip of my one hand. I wanted him to imagine what I could do with both hands.
With the same razor that I used to kill the Jensen imbecile, I cut open his chest. He screamed in agony as the razor slowly made its down from his collar bone to his respiratory cavity.
As I fed on his blood, I payed no attention to his incoherent thoughts. My hands pressing him down, I felt his body shake in shock and pain as he deflated, the blood in his body gone.
I stood and looked down at him, grinning at the sight and thought of the pain I must have caused him. In that moment, one word screamed in my head. MONSTER!
Not him, but me. What type of good-doing guy does that? What God would send a man such as myself to kill and destroy?
"The thief comes not, but for to steal, and to kill, and to destroy: I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly." John 10:10, as said by Jesus himself. The biblical verse flew though my thoughts.
What had become of me! I had turned into the exact thing I was trying not to be, what I was trying to rid the world and humanity of. Had I really thought that I was Jesus, sent by God? Clearly, I was the thief he was referring to. I selfishly made myself into a man who lurked in the shadows, waiting for that kill, to destroy a person. I wasn't Jesus, setting the criminals straight, forgiving them for their sins, but I was the thief who needed such forgiveness, the abundant life. No, Carlisle was the Jesus figure in this ordeal, not me.
It was then, when I was walking at a human pace away from the fire I had started to burn the remnants of Haddix's body, that I decided it was time to return to Carlisle's way so I would no longer be a monster, taking human life, being selfish in that way.