Light Up My Lover's Way

by NovemberMurray

Every time he leaves her because he knows her life will be better off without him. Every time she falls further into the tragic spiral of her human life. Every time she finds her way back to him to remind him of how strong and kind humanity can be. Every time she saves him and he save her. Carlisle and Esme's love story (slightly AU mostly cannon)

2. Chapter 2

Chapter 2: New Lives

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Carlisle

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I had to leave. It was my only option. In a daze I finished my day and wrote out with a steady hand my resignation and apology. I cited some reason, it hardly mattered what. I could never return to Columbus so long as Charles Evenson lived here. I hardly trusted myself to take the time to pack as I left the city for fear I would change my mind, that I would decide I could not abide the shadows of old bruises on her creamy skin, that I would decide a hand taken to her in anger was a capital offense, that I would decide to kill Charles Evenson as would be so easy. I could do it painlessly, snap his neck with a flick of my fingers. I could make it look like an accident, push him in front of an oncoming car. I could catch him in his sleep, choke him into a slow death… with Esme Evenson—beautiful, bashful, bright eyed, soft spoken Esme Anne Evenson—beside him… No. That was why I had to leave.

All of my murderous instincts I could forgive but this was not an instinct; it was a desire. For the first time it was not the beast inside me that I was fighting but myself who wanted nothing more than to release the very monster I had spent two hundred years restraining. I packed my few precious belongings distractedly, trying to empty my too spacious head as I did: some clothing, some books, older mementos, a few paintings quickly wrapped, my father's cross, letters from the Russian sisters in Denali and my few other friends, and any money I had. I gathered all my paperwork, anything that might identify me later and burned everything in the trashcan. Lastly I threw in the white coat that I had worn out of the office. Moments before letting it fall in the flames I dug through the pocket. Esme's white glove was still there, a trace of her scent still clinging to it. The little blue button winked in the light of the flames lapping up what was left of my life in Columbus. Not for the first time I wished I could still cry. But not even tears for the vibrant little girl I had met all those years ago would change what I had to do.

I drove away from Columbus with everything important to me. Most notably I drove away without blood on my hands and tried to tell myself it was a victory. But I had never felt so defeated.

I drove for 8 hours until the steel structures of Chicago rose up around me. It was a new town far from The Arch City, far from Esme Evenson, and far from her abusive sorry excuse for a husband. I sighed and resolved not to think of her. I had taken myself from their lives for the better. They would be long dead before I saw Columbus, Ohio again. For some reason that thought made me sad and threw my lonely existence—so easily abandoned and relocated—into sharp view. Without feeling fatigue I felt tired.

.

Life in Chicago started slowly for me as I looked for a new job. For a while I contented myself with returning to schooling, learning as much as I could about the most recent medical advances the industrial revolution had brought me. It was in those early months of 1918 that I got word of the pandemic for the first time. The Spanish Flu was what they called it. I shivered at every headline remembering my short time in Moscow in the late 1770s. I was horrified to think what a global pandemic might do. Rumors of the casualties on the front in Europe were circulating and I was inclined to believe them. Travel was so much more common now then it ever was. If this became an epidemic there would be no way to quarantine as they used to.

Knowing all this, my first night in the influenza ward was a nightmare. I was used to watching the old withering away after so many centuries and seeing children stolen from life before their time by an adult's illness but this… The dying were all healthy, young, vibrant people with lives and futures and hopes. All I could do was make them comfortable and watch. I couldn't even participate in the risk that my co-workers were taking. I could never get sick. This would pass me by like everything else and I would watch as they died. Sitting by their bedsides I wondered if a crisis could ever be so destructive on a global scale that it would threaten humanity itself. What would our kind do?

It was in that ward where I watched the future of the country I had come to see as my own in many ways dying under fever and delirium that I met Elizabeth Masen. She was like the others, initially beautiful and bright with the flush of heath and hope in her cheeks. Then she was joined by her husband and teenage son and the hope and health fled her. I watched her gray and shrink in the bed beside her family in the long ward. Somewhere in her fevered delirium she realized what I was. She saw the reason for my cold, hard skin, strange eyes, silent heart and unnatural stillness. That or she just saw what I lacked: the mortal fear of death.

Something about her knowledge drew me to her. It had been so long since anyone knew who or what I was. Elizabeth Masen was as close as anyone had been in nearly eighty years. Watching so many patients come in warm and living only to leave within weeks or days made me so acutely aware of my solitude during the day. When the other doctors and nurses around me started to fall ill and were replaced my loneliness became what I can only describe as a lifeless depression. I lived only to return to work and sat for hours just staring out my window in those days as winter descended on the city and the death toll mounted. Then Elizabeth Masen looked at me as I whipped her salty forehead and whispered softly, "I know what you are." My loneliness lifted a fraction.

In the dead of night as the ward slept fitfully Elizabeth Masen lay awake, waiting for me, on one of her last night. In the bed beside her the auburn haired boy who had her same bright green eyes moaned in his nightmares as the fever burned him. She took my hand when I stopped at her bed to check on her. Her eyes wide, wild and clouded. They flickered between my face and her husband's empty bed.

"Please," she whispered in a voice dry as paper.

"Let me get you some water," I offered but her hand gripped mine with all of the bony strength it could manage.

"Please…" she begged me, holding my gaze with her own, "You must do everything in your power. What others cannot do, that is what you must do for my Edward. You must do..." Her whispery voice drifted off into a hacking cough and I hurried for the water. There was little I could do for her anymore. It was the pneumonia that would take her before the fever burned out her consciousness. Standing over her as her spasms finally subsided and she drifted exhausted in to fitful sleep I looked across at the boy, Edward Masen, her son. I remembered him singing to her in the first days of his illness when he had strength still, his soft voice weaving a calming melody filled with love.

How wretched did I have to be to steal this boy's humanity? How heartless did I have to be to let him die? What is the price I would pay to no longer be lonely? His hatred? His anger? Would the memory of Elizabeth Masen haunt me if I let him die? If I didn't change him? Would she still consider her son living if he would gladly kill her for the blood that would curb his terrible thirst? I pondered all this through the long night and all through the next day.

When I returned to the ward she was gone and Edward thrashed in his fever. As I sat with him between my rounds that night I resolved myself. His thrashing stilled and then he succumbed to the exhaustion of the illness that was quickly taking his life. A simple sedative calmed him enough that no one would ask questions as I wheeled his bed from the ward. I stole him away, barely able to contain my hope. Could this be the end of my solitude?

In the prop bed I had never touched I laid him down and whispered one final apology. The sedative was wearing off and the boy fighting the fever opened his clouded eyes to look at me. For a moment I thought of Esme Evenson before she took that name, when she was just a child smiling through the fog of drugs and pain of her broken leg. I entertained for a moment the thought of what her life would have been like if I had changed her then. I shook it off.

I filled my mind with the thought of her blood that made all else seem weak and bitter by comparison. I bent over Edward Masen's neck and carefully, deliberately, sank my teeth into his delicate, feverish skin. In that moment we were both set on a course that would change us in unimaginable way. Only one thing was certain and it made me happier than even the sweet taste of human blood running down my throat for the first time: I was no longer alone.

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Esme

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Two things happened on August the 18th of 1919. The first threatened to destroy me. The second saved my life.

I woke up the morning of the 18th long before the sun came up and lay in bed with the feeling of dread churning like bricks of lead in my stomach. When the sun reached my face I got up, thinking only of my shower. When my hair was impeccably clean and my face scrubbed I focused on clothes. I wore the white eyelet lace dress and sensible shoes. I put my hair up under a hat and wore simple jewelry, nothing flashy to attract attention. Then I went about cleaning, keeping house like I always did. I double checked the dusting, straightened perfectly straight carpets, and washed mirror shinny pans. I checked the poorly stocked pantry, making sure that there were at least all the fixings for a real home-cooked meal. Then I walked down to the Oakton bus station to wait.

Until I saw him I had not quite given up hope that there would be no return. I had held out in the quite corners of my mind that the telegram had been rerouted, the letter lost, the news delayed, the ship sunk, plane downed, bus crashed… but no. He walked off the bus with a new slight limp and a grim expression. His eyes picked me out from the crowed of smiling families awaiting with streamers and banners, his frown deepening new hard lines on his face. All my resolve to be strong, all of my excuses and justifications, all of my 'it wasn't so bad's and 'it will be better's became vain platitudes.

I hoped only that nothing had changed but that night as he took from me what he wanted with rough calloused hands now even more accustomed to violence I knew they had for the worst. I lay in bed that night beside him as he snored, his sour breath smelling of alcohol and cigarettes, my only solace was my father's laconic letter hidden in the mattress of the guest bedroom.

It came in a plain white envelope. Scrawled on the back was: "all that won't be missed" in my father's unpracticed handwriting. Inside were a handful of bills and coins.

Over the days that followed the wordless letters of support from my father were all that kept me going. He sent them sporadically: twice in one week, then nothing for a week, then three, then two consistently for a month, then nothing. So it went and I clung to the hope every day that another would arrive. My mother's regular Sunday calls were like weekly recitals where I practiced lying and assuring her. It helped that she talked more than she listened.

Charles worsened. Where before a single drink at night would mellow him into verbal abuses before a quick forceful fuck and then a muttered good night now a bottle and a half made him angry and incited him to physical rage in which he was blind to even his own injuries, much less mine and they did not stop in the living room but carried almost seamlessly into the bedroom, leaving me lying in the wet bed beside him, crying as silently as I could. Finally he declared me too messy and banished me to the guest room where he came to me if wanted me. I was thankful for this because some nights he was too drunk to bother and I was mercifully alone in the room down the hall, comforted by the small reserve of money growing slowly under my feet.

So a year passed. A year I marked in scars and broken furniture. A year Charles marked in so many dozens of bottles and lost jobs. A year passed marked in wordless white envelopes of petty change.

It was early September when I noticed and I tried to deny it. When my mornings were consistently filled with queasy unease and quick dashes out the kitchen door into the garden to hurl I couldn't deny what I knew what happening. Still I was reluctant to admit. A short doctor's visit while Charles was at his newest job confirmed my fears. I walked home unsteadily, a hand over my abdomen wondering. How could this happen? How could God let this happen? How could I let this happen?

You don't deserve it. Dr. Cullen's words came back to me and I had to stop, teetering in my high-heals on the sidewalk. I could picture his face so clearly, the only way I had been able to remember him, a way that was hard to think of: tortured. Any justification he gives for this… is just a lie to disguise the truth. There is nothing you could do to deserve physical violence. Charles didn't bother with justifications anymore. There was no need. We both knew how the days and nights would go, our twisted marital routine of pain and silence. If he had no reason for harming me, would he need a reason to harm our child?

I felt sick for the second time that day. Quickly I hurried home to phone my mother. She would have to see it differently now, she would have to understand what I needed, what my child needed, what her grandchild needed…

"Yes," her voice was shaky when she answered.

"Mother, it's Esme Anne."

"Oh, darling. You must have heard. I did mean to call you but things have been so crazy so… oh I can hardly bear it."

"Mother, what's happened?" I asked worriedly.

"It's your father, darling."

My blood ran cold.

"He's gone. Carriage on main street just clipped him as he was goin' into the post office and Dr. Brooks said he went quietly with the head injury."

I was frozen ice, a statue with the phone in my hand. I was alone. Who would help me now?

"I can't possibly keep the farm now," my mother was saying but I was hardly listening, "You and Charles have a spare room of course and I know you could use the company." That last word seemed to break me out.

Company, that's what my mother thought I needed. Company. I felt the phone slip out of my hand and dangle by its cord from the table. I had no one and nothing…nothing but my child. My hand drifted up to my abdomen where a new life was forming inside me. A life that was pure and innocent and untouched by Charles even if he could claim the child.

I was suddenly decided and there was nothing to do but act. I ran upstairs and grabbed the suitcase I had brought from home after my wedding. Into it went my least ragged clothes, hairbrush, a family picture from my childhood, my grandmother's bible, the contents of my depleted jewelry box—much of it I had sold off in the war to pay for food—and the bag of change from the guest bedroom. I left the expensive fashionable coat the Charles had bought me and took instead his army coat, wrapping over it the warmest blanket in the house. I tied a stained dark colored handkerchief around my head and left out the front door as night was falling, the blanket wrapped tight around my shoulders and suitcase in hand.

I didn't know exactly where I was going when I left Charles Evenson's house for the last time but I had a long walk to the train station to figure it out. I knew my mother had a sister who had died in childbirth a few years before I was born. Her husband had visited once a long time ago and I had met my cousins: two older boys who could very well have been drafted and a girl, Mary. I knew Mary if only from the letters from my grandmother while she was still alive living in Milwaukee and helping to raise my cousins. My mother loved nothing better than to compare me to my Grandmother's glowing descriptions of Mary. From what I remembered Mary and her husband had taken over her father's house after he died and if she hadn't moved I knew the address from the letters I had sent to my grandmother as a young girl. When I reached the station I was decided. The ticket alone cost more than half of my father's money but it was my last chance.

I sat down in my hard seat against the cold window, squished by the family of five that shared the bench with me. I kept my suitcase between my feet and the blanket up around my shoulders, trying to hide my shaking.

"Traveling alone?" The middle-aged mother of the family asked me.

"Yes," I replied.

"Your husband's still in the army?" She said looking at the army coat under my blanket.

"No… he died." I said, unable to meet her eyes. I wished he had died. I realized suddenly that was no longer true. Even though life with Charles was hell, I would endure it for the little life I felt warming me. You give me life too, I told him in my mind.

"I'm sorry for your loss," the mother beside me said, buying my story.

"I have part of him still," I said. All that is good of him I have with me, I added in my head. I turned to the window feeling more hopeful then I had in years. I prayed silently to my angel, his smiling gentle face finally clear to me. I prayed to my father where ever he was that he had found peace in death that we had not known in life and that I would go on to find a greater peace somewhere. The train pulled away from the station and I left Charles Evenson's battered wife and Esme Anne, Martha May Platt's daughter behind me. I was speeding down the snow dusted tracks north toward a new life.

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Carlisle

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It was a scent I thought I would never cross again but it was unmistakable as it wafted down the hall of the maternity ward through the swinging doors. I argued with myself as I filled out the paperwork at the main desk. Was I strong enough to see her again? I found that it didn't matter whether I was or not, because I wasn't strong enough not to see her. I handed over the paperwork to the nurse behind the desk.

"Is that everything Nurse Green?"

"Mandy, please," She said coyly, "and yes, it looks like you're done for the day. Enjoy your evening."

"Thank you," I said with a nod. "I think I'll be around for a while, take a walk. Call me if something comes up."

"Of course, Dr. Cullen." She said. I heard her sigh dreamily when I was out of human hearing range. As much as I appreciated rising gender equality I was not quite used to the overt interest of the female staff yet.

I followed her smell down the long hall of the maternity ward. Many of the nurses there smiled at me and let me go unhindered. I was an infrequent guest in their wing. After a particularly hard shift I was known to wander down that way. The miracle of human birth, so much more so than the creation of an immortal, was fascinating and beautiful to me; it was poignant antithesis to my work in the ER. I followed her scent to one of the south rooms and I glanced at the name on the door before I entered: Esme Richardson. I smiled and went in.

Two heartbeats filled the small hospital room, one smaller and faster. Esme's smell saturated the air but I trusted my control and promised myself I would keep my distance. She sat up in bed looking tired but triumphant. Her hair was still sweaty, adding to the already tantalizing scent, and circles ringed her eyes but there was color in her cheeks and the easy joy I had missed in our last meeting smoothed her features. Her arms, cradling the bundle of blankets from which the second heartbeat emanated, were too thin for my liking. I wondered with a curiosity that threatened to overpower my thirst what had happened to her since our last parting: her trials and triumphs, her failures and shames and prides.

She looked up at my entering footsteps, her joyful expression transforming into shock and then a nervous, uncontrollable laugh. She quickly covered her mouth but her shoulder still shook and her eyes glassed over with unshed tears. I couldn't help but smile back, feeling a simultaneous clenching in my chest I didn't know how to describe.

"I can hardly believe that it's you," she said. "It's good to see you, Dr. Cullen."

"Carlisle, please," I said, betraying myself by walking closer and taking the seat beside her bed. Her smell engulfed me and I reveled in the pain ripping down my throat.

"Carlisle," she said with a nod, "then you will have to call me Esme."

"Not Mrs. Richardson?" I questioned.

"Oh, no," she looked down and suddenly ashamed. "I—I feel bad for lying… everyone has been so nice to me here. Richard is my father so… it's really only half a lie."

"I assume then, you're here alone."

"Yes. I left him." She didn't look at me, instead stared down at her child. Neither of us needed to say who he was or why. "I knew you were right all those years ago but… I was too scared then. He changed everything, my little boy." She smiled down at her child with so much love in her eyes. I realized that time had changed the carefree gentle child I had tended to in the Ohio countryside into a beautiful woman with a purer heart than I had ever known.

"You will be a wonderful mother," the words slipped out of my mouth. It was surprisingly easy for that to happen without the human delay of time from a decision to my body's compliance. She looked up quite surprised at my words.

"From you, that means so much I… I don't know what to say." Another little laugh bubbled up from her and I struggled to keep from grinning too wide—I didn't want to scare her.

"It takes courage to do what you did."

"No," she said shaking her head, "it takes faith—faith in myself. I didn't have much of that left when I last saw you."

"You underestimate yourself."

"I think I did." She laughed again and the sound sent shivers down my spine like the Edward's most achingly beautiful melodies.

"And your life now?" I asked, trying to restrain the curiosity from my voice.

"I have a job now—as a school teacher. I never had a job before. I work and get paid. I've started drawing again, little things but the children like them. They make up stories for my drawings, stories I never could have dreamed of. Every day they amaze me and I feel blessed just to be in their lives. I live on my own but I got used to that after… after my husband was drafted. Soon it will the two of us, my child and me, and I won't be lonely again."

"You sound happy," I said with a contented sigh.

"And you?" Her question caught me off guard.

"Me?"

"You seem… different." She said, large warm brown eyes focused on my face, searching for something there and satisfied not to find it. Was the change in me so clear?

"I'm…" no longer alone, I wanted to say. "I'm actually a newly made parent as well." I don't know why I admitted it. Our cover story was that Edward was my half brother, which explained our similar colorings yet widely varying features. "It was not planned, but I… I'm better for having Edward in my life."

Esme was smiling at me and just nodded her understanding. In her arms the small baby boy wriggled in his wrapping and his mouth gapped in a wide toothless yawn. Esme rocked him and softly shhhed him back to resting quietly.

"Will you introduce me?" I asked.

"Oh! Yes, well." I watched transfixed as her cheeks blossomed with warm blood. "I named him Carlisle. I hope you don't mind." I just sat stunned into speechlessness, an unfamiliar feeling. "N-not that I think anyone will call him that," she went on, heart thrumming like a birds wings nervously. "I think I'll call him Lyle for short."

"I—I don't know what to say?" I admitted, knowing even as I spoke the words—any words—would be pathetically inadequate to express the strange warm feeling in my chest and the tightness that caught my breath and had nothing to do with her scent. She looked right into my eyes as she explained.

"You saved us both Carlisle. I want him to know you. To know that there are people who chose to be kind and caring in the world, so he'll always know that is a choice for him."

"Thank you," was all I managed to say.

"I'm just glad you don't mind….I didn't know how to contact you. I called the clinic in Columbus but they said you had moved on suddenly."

"Yes," I opened my mouth for an excuse but nothing came.

"I assume Edward was part of the reason."

"Yes," I agreed again, glad for that little bit of half-truth she offered me.

A soft rap on the door interrupted us. Nurse Frasier stood in the doorway with a patient expression on his face that turned to surprise as he laid eyes on me. I realized suddenly I was leaning in toward Esme unconsciously, sitting on the edge of the seat. I sat up quickly.

"Mrs. Richardson," he said, tearing his eyes from me, "it's time."

Esme deflated a little.

"Yes, of course," she agreed and kissed Lyle's forehead in goodbye. Surrendering the baby to the nurse she bit her lip, watching him go with longing.

"It was good to see you again," I said and allowed myself one last indulgence, I reached out to cover her hand on the blankets with mine as I stood. "Esme," her name felt good on my lips.

"You as well, Carlisle," she replied and to my surprise flipped her hand under mine, giving it a blazingly warm short squeeze that made my breath catch in my lungs. But the monster inside was still chained and gagged. If she noticed my hand was hard and cold she did not show it on her face, just smiled at me with that same accepting and compassionate warmth.

I forced myself to leave her then because if I didn't at that second I didn't know if I would ever be able to. As I all but fled the maternity ward one thought broke through my forced blankness. Could someone so loving and accepting as her love even a monster of the basest kind? I refused to let my mind linger on that thought even as it refused to leave me. If I let it stay and fester I would seek her out again and I wanted to remember her the way I had seen her today: happy and strong and free. I would never fit into her life, tying to would only bring us both pain. Better that only one of us suffer, I thought as I drove home. Then I had to admit that I was suffering. I had entered her room one person but leaving it I think I was wholly a different one, one pained by any separation between myself and Esme. The change that had come over me I felt in every part of my body but I would not name it; as if leaving it nameless would dull the longing I felt.

.

Somehow I hid my torment from Edward. I think it was because I was trying so hard to hide it from myself that I succeeded. Still he knew something had changed in me and watched me warily in the days that followed, waiting me out. His silence was both appreciated and infuriating at the same time. He knew how I felt but continued to keep his silence. I suppose he had nothing to add. I wonder if he simply understood my emotions as little I did.

So the days passed and I consoled myself with knowing she—for I could hardly think her name without feeling like a gash had opened in my chest—was happy and that my pain would fade in time—though that was a human notion. Could 'time heals all wounds' apply to a being who no longer felt time's passage. I wondered at that in my private moments at the hospital when I was resisting my urge to walk again down the maternity ward and look for her. Such thoughts came and went with my few memories of her. They replayed in perfect clarity thanks to my unfading memory. They taunted me but I refused the nearly overwhelming urge to look for her over and over… Later I wished I hadn't.

I came into the ER the night one week after meeting Esme again in Ashland to a familiar smell that gutted me in the doorway. It was nothing like the smell of her skin or hair—no it was too potent—this was the smell of her spilt blood. I looked around, forcing myself to move at human speed, in every curtained room of the ER but didn't catch a glimpse of her. I hurried to the nurse's desk.

"Mandy," I asked and got her attention immediately, "was a women brought in recently, badly injured?" From the amount of blood I could smell she would have to be. Where was her son? I wondered.

"Ummm, yes. One woman, white, mid twenties, brown hair, brown eyes, brought in less than five minutes ago, suicide—she was a jumper—declared DOA." Nurse Green listed off the chart without feeling, too focused on me.

My world broke. It fell apart, all color draining from my sight and all warmth gone in an instant. I walked away from the desk without thanking the nurse, my feet carrying where my senses led me. Her smell pulled me and I followed. DOA, it echoed in my head. Dead on arrival. Nothing I could do. Nothing I could have done. Nothing left to do. But I moved still down the inclined hallway to the lower level and through the double doors that barely held back the stench of death and rot. I screamed in my mind against it. She did not belong her. Someone so bright and full of love did not belong here in the dark rotting silence of the morgue. The words of a poem from so long ago came back to me hauntingly.

A slumber did my sprit steal;
I had no human fears;
She seemed a thing that could not feel;
The touch of earthly years.

No motion has she now, no force;
She neither hears nor sees;
Rolled round in earths diurnal course,
With sticks, and stones, and trees.

I found myself before her gurney staring at the sheet that covered her broken body, from which the smell of her blood, suddenly sour in my throat, rolled thickly. Not her! No, please, God, please not her. I prayed in vain. Why let me leave her alive again and again only to kill her like this? My hand hovered over the sheet as I hesitated to pull it back, to see what had happened to the beautiful woman I had so fleetingly known yet…

Thump.

I thought I had imagined it. I must have. In all my longing I must have dreamed the sound of a heartbeat so soft and weak yet…

Thump.

I held my breath.

Thump.

I ripped back the sheet and paused only a fraction of a second at the bloody scene beneath. I wondered how she could even still be alive with the bloody mess, her battered limbs at odd angles, protruding bones in her arms and thigh where blood ran in slow sluggish rivers. I could hear liquid bubbling in her lungs and hissing in her windpipe and the gentle, feeble beating of her heart. Was it enough? I wondered but I did not wait to debate it. I bent my lips to the cooling skin of her neck and I bit, waiting only long enough to feel the venom in her before pulling back, licking the wound quickly to seal it. But would that be enough?

Her blood was sweet and invigorating on my tongue and it slid down my throat sending a rush into my brain that drove out all other thoughts but the pleasure of it. I licked my lips and gripped the metal bed on which she lay, bending it effortlessly into a mold of my hands. I fought the monster inside of me for control, holding the image of her alive, smiling at me, and the sound of her laughter. Then a sweeter sound interrupted me. The venom of my bite must have reached her heat because it's next beat was louder and the next sooner. That simple sound was a greater rush than even the sweet blood in my mouth.

I bent over her again and again, her neck, her wrists, her arms, her thighs, her ankles. Again and again her skin broke under my teeth and healed over under my tongue.

"Please, Esme," I whispered as I whipped my mouth and looked at her battered face. Her heartbeat was picking up pace, louder and stronger with every passing minute.

I became aware again slowly of the outside world, our surroundings, and the danger we were in. I had to get her out of the hospital as quickly as I could. She would not stay quiet for long. Gathering her quickly in her shroud I noticed the indents of my hands on the gurney and I cussed. Quickly I smoothed them out as best I could. That's when I saw the box. It was as battered as she was but somehow still whole. A small placard on the top read in stamped, clinical letters:

Carlisle Ethan Richardson
Born 04-23-1921 Died 04-25-1921

My heart sank. I gathered Esme and the box that was all that remained of her human life and quickly fled the hospital. I was glad for the night shift because the darkness covered our escape and there were few people out to see me. We would need to move on anyway; Ashland was not a place that a body could go missing without questions. As I drove I focused on the sound of Esme's heart in the back seat, stronger and faster every moment, overtaking normal speed and rising rapidly. The change was accelerating. If she was conscious now then the pain was already building.

"I'm so sorry," I whispered, "so sorry." Over and over I repeated those two words. I could think of nothing else to say. Elation, hope, and regret warred within me as I spirited this woman I desperately loved away in the dead of night to a new life.

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Author's Note: Wordsworth, William "A Slumber Did My Spirit Steal" 1770-1850