Chapter Two
When Mr. Booker got home, he looked down at Mary. He wasn't going to keep her, that's for certain. What if an accident happened and she was in the way when he was thirsty? He was controlling himself now because he had a policy against eating children, particularly babies. He sighed to himself. He didn't have time to deal with this now. The father of this child was foolish, he decided, for leaving his baby on the doorstep of a man he had never spoken to nor seen before. He'd drop the child at an orphanage in the next town he went to.
When he opened the door with nothing more than a backpack, he was shocked to see the police on his doorstep. He'd never been caught before. Who had seen him? He was a nomad for a reason. If Aro ever heard about this…
"Edmund Booker, you were spotted leaving the crime scene of a murder," said one of the officers. Officer Boyd, according to his nametag. Officer Boyd was an obese man, and at the moment all he could think about was getting home for dinner. A murder was the last thing he needed on his plate.
"Officer, I'm sure this was all a mistake. See, I was just about to go for a walk with my daughter," said Edmund, using the baby as a resource at the last minute. Just then, he started to feel a little bit guilty for leaving the child alone for an hour. She may have her uses.
"I know, but let's just go down to the station where we can get this all cleared up. In fact, we have child care so that your daughter will be watched over very carefully. You don't have to worry about anything." At this point Edmund was very torn. He was still thirsty, because the woman was very small. So if he went with the police officer he'd definitely end up eating someone, no doubt about it. Then Aro and the rest of the Volturi would show up, make everything worse, kill him, then murder Mary. If he runs, then he'll be on every wanted poster in the state. Medora, North Dakota is a very small town, and something like this will start a wildfire of gossip. At this point, running is the better option.
So he held tight to Mary, shielding her face from the wind as he flew over the grass in his yard and back into the woods. The ground blurred beneath his feet, wildflowers turning into a rainbow as he raced past them beneath the wide blue expanse of the sky.
Edmund smiled widely, knowing in his heart that if he slowed enough for anyone to see him that they'd be terrified by the manic expression on his face. Edmund hadn't run in a while, for blending in was the number one priority. Arriving in a train station was much less suspicious than running into town with nothing more than a suitcase and a strange little baby girl.
It was then that Edmund realized the baby must not be faring well, and he began to gradually slow his pace till he came to a stop. He opened his jacket to look at Mary and, to his surprise, the girl was not crying. He had a brief moment of horror when he thought the girl had passed out, for he didn't know a way to push air to her lungs without awakening his thirst. When little Mary breathed in deeply and made a little gurgling sound in her throat, Edmund was quite relieved. He didn't want the death of an infant on his hands.
"You're a strange one," Edmund mumbled, more to himself than to Mary. Then he began to chuckle when he realized that Mary had fallen asleep in his cold granite arms while traveling at his top speed, five-hundred miles-per-hour. He took off again, running as fast as his immortal legs would carry him. Above the sound of the wind, he heard a little giggle.
He looked down at Mary through a little gap in the bundle, and was even more shocked than he was when he had found her asleep. Now Mary was wide awake, her eyes shining with joy, a little toothless laugh escaping her mouth. She was running with him, and she was loving it.
At that moment, he couldn't bear the thought of giving this child up to be raised in an orphanage. He would go up to Denali and live with Carlisle and Esme and Tanya. He had a feeling that the girl belonged with him, and one day, when she got old enough, he'd turn her into one of his kind.
Edmund was grinning a toothy grin now, just when he'd thought that he couldn't get any happier. That manic expression was back because he'd always wanted a daughter, but that all changed when he was twenty-five and was bitten by an unstable newborn. He'd been lucky at the time that the woman who'd bitten him wasn't very thirsty. It was dumb luck that had saved him that time. Now he didn't need saving.
That had been back in seventeen sixty-three, and who knows? It's the new year, a new start in nineteen-o-two. Maybe the nineteen-hundreds would be a better century than the last ones.
Maybe in a decade or two Mary would be able to run alongside him.