A/N: Just a reminder. If you've heard of it, I don't own it.
Chapter Seven
I woke suddenly in the darkness the night before the eighteenth birthday I should have shared with Edward. A strangled scream slipped through my lips, but my throat was so dry that it came out as a broken sob. The nightmare I'd just been living had brought tears to my eyes as I slept, tears that still coursed down my cheeks. I buried my face in my hands and tried to forget that awful, horrifying nightmare, but it was still seared into my mind by a blinding fire.
I was sitting at the piano in Aunt Sophia's sitting room, not playing, just sitting and remembering better times. But then there was a soft sound behind me, a sound that made me look over my shoulder. Edward—exactly as I remembered him—stood in the door, watching me, his face lit with the crooked grin he had inherited from our father. I gasped his name and bolted across the room into his arms.
But I shrank back from him when I realized that he had grown cold, like Dr. Cullen. He could have been a marble statue left outside in the winter. Touching his frozen cheek cautiously, I murmured through my tears, "Edward, what happened to you?"
His cold fingers found my chin and lifted it until our eyes met. That was when I screamed, jerking myself out of the horror. I knew that I would carry that terrifying image with me until the end of my days because it had taken the face I'd loved most and twisted it into that of a monster.
Edward's eyes, which everyone claimed was the most beautiful shade of emerald they'd seen, had been a vivid, blood red.
The hole in my chest had never hurt as badly as it did now. I could not, would not believe that my beautiful, loving, gentle Edward could ever become a monster. He had been so sweet and so gentle in life that he would never harm another living thing, that no one would have reason to fear or hate him. Nothing in this world would have made me suppose he could ever be anything different.
But maybe something did, and that was the source of this pain. Its heat spread through me until I was gasping for breath in the dark, close, humid air of my room; I threw back the bedcovers, crossed the room, and forced open the window in search of some unlikely nighttime breeze.
I sat at the window for a long time that night, staring sadly at the streetlamp just down the street. In another section of the house, Aunt Sophia and Silas were very much awake, although they probably had no worries about waking me. But by keeping my eyes fixed on the streetlamp's yellow globe of light, I'd managed to block them from my mind as my thoughts drifted back to better times.
This was not the first sleepless night I had known in almost eighteen years, but it was the first sleepless night I had known alone. When we were ten, Edward and I had both fallen ill at the same time. We had gotten so ill that Father, who had been just as dedicated to his work at the law firm as he was to us, had refused to leave us. One night when we were at our worst, neither one of us had been able to sleep, so Mother and Father sat up with us through the night, distracting us with soft stories.
That night, as I lay curled in Father's lap, he looked out the window and commented to my mother that the dawn must be coming. I innocently asked him how he would know that without looking at his watch; he smiled down at me with that familiar crooked smile and murmured, "The night is always the darkest just before the dawn, sweetheart."
I sighed sadly, for the night I gazed upon now had grown the darkest it had been. The street on which Aunt Sophia lived was lit only by the streetlamp; its yellow light was not enough to reach the corner.
Maybe that was why I hadn't noticed the young man walking down the street until he stepped cautiously into the streetlamp's circle of light. He was dressed in modest dark gray trousers with a matching waistcoat and coat; the collar of his white shirt was worn loose without a tie. He carried with him a small teddy bear wearing a red ribbon tied around its neck. He might have been a young father, carrying a surprise home for his son or daughter.
But just as the thought went through my head, he looked up and met my eyes. We regarded each other for an instant, and then I slipped from the threshold of consciousness.