4. Youth

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The first time Bella and I had gone to the meadow I had teased her about her ancient truck's slowness, but today I was grateful for the extra minutes its sluggish pace would allow me to spend with her. As through to make up for it, however, when we reached the trailhead she decided we should run instead of walk. I savored the feeling of her warmth wrapped around me and her breath on my neck, and wished I could have her with me always. I ran at a pace that was slow for me, but even so, after only a few minutes I could see the meadow ahead.

She lay down on her back in the center of the field, gazing up at the formless blanket of clouds. "It's a shame it's not sunny," she said wistfully.

I lay next to her and made a noncommittal noise. Personally, I was thankful for the cloud cover, that the sun wasn't adding to my misery by refracting off me like I was some sort of hideous, undead disco ball.

We stared at the featureless blanket of clouds for a long moment before she prompted me in quiet voice, "Well?"

"I… I don't even know where to start. I promise, I'll tell you whatever you want to know, I just…"

"Start at the beginning," she suggested gently.

I didn't know if she meant my human or vampire life, but I decided to talk about the former. "I was an only child. We were well-off—not rich, but comfortable. Our house was large, and there was a big garden in the back. I remember my mother cutting flowers… roses, maybe? I think roses. They were pink. My father worked in an office… he was a businessman? Or a lawyer? I don't remember, but I think I was closer to my mother. I have more memories of her."

"Like what?"

I frowned, sifting through the faded shreds for something tangible. "Of sitting with her in the garden, drinking lemonade. Talking in the parlor. She was very interested in me, and gave good advice. I don't remember any in particular, just the feeling that I trusted her and her opinion. She loved me." Did she look down from heaven and weep at the sight of me? I hoped God was merciful to her, and she didn't know what a monster I was. Maybe He'd allowed her to forget that she ever had a son.

"Of course she did," Bella murmured. I was startled for a second, until I realized she was talking about my mother loving me. "What did you like to do? I suppose you went to school; what were your favorite subjects? What hobbies did you have?"

"I… I don't remember favorite subjects, as such, but I remember liking school. Liking the challenge of it. I played the piano, and I loved baseball. I played it at school, and with friends, and…" My voice changed with the surprise of my discovery, "I think I went to some games with my father. The White Sox. I had forgotten that."

I felt Bella's eyes on my face, and realized it was contorted with the effort to remember.

"Should it be so difficult for you to remember your human life?"

"Human memories are fuzzy, especially if we don't try to remember them when we're first changed. The more we think about them, the clearer they become."

"So did you didn't try to remember?" she asked, surprised.

"No," I admitted. "Quite the opposite, actually. I tried not to remember."

She didn't ask why, but out of the corner of my eye I could see her frowning, so I continued, so quietly it was almost a whisper, "My life had been good—I had been... It was difficult to think about what I had been, in light of what I had become."

The back of her hand brushed against mine where it was clenched at my side, and I instantly felt myself relax. Her warmth was amazing.

"Do you remember anything else?"

I struggled to make sense of the shadowy half-images in my mind. "The windows in the front of the house had stained glass in them, and the sun would cast colors everywhere. I liked it. I remember watching it, at all different ages. When I was small I remember… I would play in the colored light." The memory became clearer as I spoke. "I had toy soldiers, and I would use the different colors for different parts of the battlefield. Sometimes I would drag the cat around through the light; she was white and I liked to watch her change color. She didn't seem to mind, but Mother would scold me."

"You had a cat?"

I huffed a surprised laugh. "Yes, apparently. I had forgotten."

The back of her hand was flush against mine now and she was slowly stroking my fingers with the back of one of hers. It was glorious, but surely she didn't realize what she was doing. I devoted part of my brain to keeping my hand perfectly still, afraid to so much as twitch and scare her off.

"Your childhood sounds idyllic," she commented.

Disconnected images flashed before my eyes: my mother knitting, amusement on her face as a small, grubby me told her a long, convoluted tale; sitting in church beside my father at eleven or twelve years old, squaring my shoulders and trying to look as gentlemanly as he did; running around outside with a bunch of other children as our mothers sat talking in the shade of a large tree; a woman in a kitchen with a huge apron wrapped around herself—our cook?—handing me a few cookies and tousling my hair, saying, "Go on now, Mr. Edward, outside with you!"

"Yes," I agreed quietly, a dull ache in my chest. "I think it was."

She silently stroked my fingers. After the twelfth stroke she sighed and asked, "So then what happened?"

"I volunteered at the hospital the summer of 1918; so many doctors and nurses were serving overseas that the hospital was grossly understaffed. I remember helping on the wards with injured soldiers. I think my mother hoped seeing the aftermath of war would make me reconsider signing up when I turned eighteen, but I was determined to go." I scoffed. "Not that it mattered. Even if I hadn't become… what I am, the war was over long before my eighteenth birthday."

I took an unnecessary breath, trying to steady myself. My last human days were, unfortunately, the most detailed human memories I had retained. "That fall the influenza began. I woke one night to this horrible coughing. My father had taken ill. Mother tried to nurse him at home, but he was so sick, and he rapidly got worse. His fever was high, his face was blue and purple... He was delirious, hallucinating perhaps. He didn't know us. Someone called for an ambulance, but he died shortly after we arrived at the hospital. By then, my mother and I were sick as well.

"The hospital was a nightmare. There weren't enough beds in the wards, there weren't enough sheets or blankets. There were people on pallets lining the hallways, and all you could hear, from every direction, was coughing, and these horrible wheezing gasps. It was terrifying, like nothing I'd heard before.

"I don't remember anything clearly after that. I was so sick— everything hurt. It hurt to breathe, it hurt to be touched. Just the weight of the sheet on my skin was excruciating. Mother repeatedly left her bed, trying to care for me. She kept running a wet cloth over my face and neck, repeating 'Not you, too. Not you, too. Not you, too.' There was blood smeared on her mouth from her coughing, and spattered on her face and clothes from mine. Her hair was falling out of its braid and her face was bruised-looking and bluish. That's the last memory I have of her."

Bella was holding my hand now. I laced my fingers with hers, taking care not to squeeze her hand too tightly.

"I remember knowing I was dying. It was so hard to breathe and I was so tired. Everything was a blur of pain and cold and too much light. Then there was nothing, until I felt the fire."

"The fire?" she cried, startled.

"Changing from human to vampire is horribly painful," I explained. "It feels like being burned alive. I thought, at first, that I'd gone to hell, and I didn't understand. But there was a voice talking to me, telling me what was happening, apologizing over and over and saying everything would be all right. He sounded familiar, and I knew I trusted him, but I couldn't place who he was. The pain was distracting, to say the least. Between that and how sick I had been, it was difficult to concentrate on anything. But then there was a different voice, or at least the voice seemed to have changed, and when I woke up I was with a stranger. I don't know if the first voice was even real."

I lay with her in silence for a while, the warmth of her hand soothing me, then admitted, "I really don't want to tell you the next part."

"You promised, Edward," Bella reminded me.

I rolled my head to look at her face, saying earnestly, "It's not that I want to hide something about myself from you. It's just, he was so evil. So… vicious. I shouldn't burden you with this."

She bit her lip for a moment, her eyes searching my face, then said resolutely, "Tell me."

I sighed and turned my head away, looking back up at the featureless clouds. "His name was Tredan. I discovered later that it meant 'tramples,' which was certainly appropriate for him. He was sadistic. Brutal. He enjoyed taunting his prey, torturing them, making their ends a complete misery. He tried to mold me in his image, and was very angry when I resisted. I would like to say that he was insane, but as I don't believe that's possible for our kind he did not have even that excuse. He was simply evil."

Bella's breath was coming faster. I began running my thumb over the back of her hand, back and forth, hoping it would soothe her.

"He was a braggart, telling me lots of tales about how old he was, all the places he'd lived and the vampires he'd defeated. Intentionally or not, he gave me quite a bit of useful information, including the rules of our world and exactly how to destroy a vampire. Quite a lot of nonsense as well, about how it wasn't permitted for vampires to leave their makers and how he'd always be able to find me if I left him. By dint of talking to him as little as possible, I managed to hide my mind-reading ability. It was difficult, because I didn't have good control over it at first and the mental noise was sometimes overwhelming, but I was afraid of what he would want to do with me if he knew."

Bella made a small noise and I turned my head to look at her. "You doing okay?"

She nodded.

"You sure? Because it's not going to get any prettier."

"I'm sure. Just tell me."

I could feel the love for her in my smile. "You're so stubborn."

She rolled her eyes and said firmly, "Just tell me, Edward. Get it over with."

"Very well." I looked back up at the clouds and resumed stroking her hand with my thumb. I didn't know if it was helping her, but it certainly was helping me. "So time went by. Eventually he gave up on turning me into a sadistic brute like himself. He pretended that he was still trying to teach me the so-called 'correct way' for a vampire to behave, but I heard in his thoughts how angry and disappointed he was, and that he'd decided to punish me instead, for being such a puling weakling. He had an odd, fleeting thought, that he should have left me where he found me, but he never thought about it further and I don't know what he meant. I didn't have the opportunity to think about it at the time, since I was too busy trying to pick his brain for how he planned to punish me. Forewarned is forearmed, right?"

Bella scoffed.

"Yes," I agreed quietly. "I'd been with him for almost six months at that point and for a long time I had been watching for an opportunity to leave. I wasn't sure if I could best him in a fight, so I was hoping that he would stop watching me so closely, giving me a chance to get away. We were on the outskirts of Chicago, and I knew if I could make it to Lake Michigan he wouldn't be able to follow my scent in the water. Perhaps he had some kind of special ability, for somehow he always knew when I was going to try to get away from him."

I fell silent, and after a minute Bella squeezed my hand and whispered, "How did he punish you?"

I chuckled humorlessly. "He knew me fairly well by then, so he did everything he knew I hated. We hunted a little more frequently, and his choice of prey was younger or more elderly than usual. He was even more sadistic, if that's possible, and taunted me with what he was doing to them. We began hunting in the nicer areas of the city, which we usually didn't do since missing persons were more noticeable there, but he was hoping to find the neighborhood I came from. He knew from my clothing and speech that I had been reasonably well-off, and he hoped quite gleefully, inside his head of course, that he would eventually hunt someone I knew." I took a deep, unnecessary breath. "And then one day, he did."

A/N: So there's the beginning of Edward's story- tomorrow we'll find out who Tredan took and what Edward does about it. :) I posted some pictures to my Tumblr (whilewewereyetsinners DOT tumblr DOT com) of Elizabeth Masen and little Edward, some examples of Edwardian glass, and a poster that was distributed throughout Chicago during the epidemic. I've learned so many horrific things about the Spanish Flu while researching for this and another story that I don't understand why I didn't know more about it before. Tens of millions died globally, yet, here in the US at least, it seems to have become no more than a footnote to history. Anyway, check out the pictures, if you like, and thanks for the reviews!