Chapter 3: Changes

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Edward

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I was unusually pleased with myself as I walked home, choosing to take a human pace and follow the road as it wound into the forest toward our little house. Under my arms were new books and the receipt the smiling cashier had given me. I knew I was being prideful, taking so much pleasure in my little jaunt into the town but my eyes were finally muddy enough that they would attract attention. "Slipping" as Carlisle thought of it, was really most annoying because it kept me isolated for the weeks after. So, it was my successful trip and returned leisure that lightened my mood as I briskly made my way home.

Then the smell hit me. It drifted in the chilly evening breeze down the drive from the open door of Carlisle's car. He shouldn't have even been home, I realized, as I came up beside the vehicle. Inside the back seat was shinny and slick with sweet smelling blood. Whose? I wondered and looked toward the darkened house, listening for Carlisle's mind.

What have I done? Why did I do it? Couldn't have done anything else! Why her? Why now? Oh, Esme. What have I done? His mind was chaotic and incoherent flipping between self-loathing, tenuous hope and abject despair. But there was another mind, growing louder as consciousness returned to her and that one was nothing but wordless agony like the high pitched grinding of steal against steal in my head. I shivered, remembering my own experiences of that pain, worse than any other I had ever known. Carlisle had changed someone else.

My feet flew over the porch and I nearly ripped the door off it's hinges as I stormed past it, upsetting a table in the hallway and dropping my books without thought to them.

Carlisle was in the small unused bedroom at the front of the house, sitting on a rickety chair with his head in his hands. He looked up at my sudden entrance. The tortured expression of his face only deepened at my furious expression.

"What have you done?" I hissed the words through my teeth. Carlisle didn't even bother with words anymore; he just thought the answers. In his mind I saw a child with sweat on her brow, warm brown eyes, a blazingly hot hand gripping one stone cold and hard, a man's face, the shadows of bruises on a woman's neck, a small room filled with a smell that made my throat constrict in sudden insatiable thirst, a box of ashes, a child's yawning face. Each image was only a flicker for a fraction of a second, a dizzying storm of emotions and ideas.

"Enough! Slow down! Who is she?" I asked and looked at the woman on the bed. She was slender, a little older than I was and covered in blood. Already I could smell the sweetness souring into the scent of an immortal as her body changed. Her head lolled to one side on the pillow, eyes open but unseeing, a clouded brown color very different from when I had seen them in Carlisle's mind. Her dark hair was matted with drying blood, her right leg and left arm showed long gashes where something—her own bones I realized—had broken through her skin. She was laid out on a sheet that smelled of disinfectant, the same smell that clung to Carlisle when he returned home from work at the hospital. So she was a patient, I realized. On the bedside table beside her was the box from Carlisle's mind, printed with a name and dates of birth and death on top.

"Her name is Esme," Carlisle said in a horse voice. He showed me the image of her I had seen first, as a child he had treated ten years prior. The child morphed into the woman with her sprained wrist he met again in 1917. I caught a flash of Carlisle's imagination where a man's hand held that delicate wrist and twisted it harshly. That man was in the next memory my adopted father showed me. Charles, that was his name, was glaring at his wife, Esme, sitting in the little examination room. I felt such a rush of bloodlust from Carlisle unlike anything I had ever heard from him that it made me gasp.

It was the hardest thing I have ever done, harder even then resisting your blood once I had bitten you, to leave and let him live, Carlisle thought to me. I just nodded. I knew in his place I would not have had so much strength.

Finally he showed me the last memory he had of Esme. His strange behavior and carefully controlled thoughts of the past week made sense to me finally. I looked over with renewed appreciation for the significance of the box of ashes on the table and Carlisle's name on it.

His imagination continued from where his memories left off. He saw the child with his name, blue lipped and still in Esme's arms. Transposing in his mind my mother's face as she grieved for me dying beside her onto Esme's, Carlisle pictured her anguish. Then she was standing on a high building, a cliff, clinging to the side of a tall tower—at the top of an apple tree (in this as a child with a notepad and pencil sketching in the golden evening light)—and she stepped off into the air.

The next image would have made me sick if I could still retch. I tried immediately to forget what I had seen in Carlisle's mind, the woman's broken body and twisted limbs. More than that I wanted to erase the echoing scream of Carlisle's mind, Not her!

I watched my father burry his face in his hands again and the nearly incoherent cycle of self loathing, hate, and depression returned.

"Ah," I said inadequately.

"I couldn't let her die," he said softly.

"Yes, I see that."

Is she in pain? I heard him wonder privately, dreading and yet also hoping.

"Yes, it's started." I replied. It was taking a lot of my concentration to block out the mindless noise of her brain as she burned inside. Carlisle groaned, his own pain echoing hers dully. I wanted to think of something else to say to him, some words of comfort, but he had already said it all to himself with no avail, his guilt consumed him. It was worse than the guilt he felt at changing me. Armed with the pleas of my mother, desperate with loneliness and assured that there was nothing he could have done to save me from the disease he had quickly forgotten his guilt in the frustrations of raising a newborn vampire. Esme was different for him. She was not the first jumper he'd treated and who was he to deny her suicide, escape from the pain, the loneliness he knew so well? There was no excuse for it either. He was not discontent with me as a companion so what right did he have to covet another? And worst I think of all the things that plagued my father as we watched Esme's change, he couldn't help thinking there was something he could have done to save her.

"All we can do now is wait," I told him.

And then what? Carlisle thought. What will she think of me? What will she think of herself? Will she even want this life? Shortly after that thought was his wordless horror at the idea of killing her and at the prospect of me killing her. He knew he had robed her of suicide just as he had been denied that escape from his new immortal life. But the idea of her living in agony, hating even her own existence made him sick with paralyzing guilt.

"All we can do is wait," I repeated.

We both heard the grinding sound of cartilage from the bed seconds later and watched as Esme's body shifted straighter and her neck twisted into a more natural angle. A little light crept back into her eyes behind the cloudy film. I flinched at the physical of effect of being so close to her mind as the terrible pain triple not once or twice but over and over as her nerves reconnected. I covered my ears in a useless attempt to block out the sound in my brain. I set my jaw and did not scream, but only barely.

"Go, Edward," Carlisle said softly, "there's no need for you to say and listen to this."

I gave him a thankful look and bolted from the house. Running through the forest. As Esme's mind grew dimmer with distance I wondered at my creator's expression. It was something worse than guilt in that last moment before I left. He looked to be in as much pain as I was in that room, nearly as much pain as the dying woman.

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I waited a whole day before I returned. More than once over that time I nearly went back sooner but the idea of listening to her pain again, each time, kept me away. So I hunted and swam in the great lake even though it was still April and most humans would have frozen to death in the water. Finally I resolved to return. For one, my last hunting trip had destroyed my clothing in a moment of thoughtlessness; it was easy to forget that my clothes were not as impervious to predators as I was. For another I was anxious to see Carlisle again and how he was fairing. I thought I should at least try to tear him away from wallowing in his own self-loathing for a little while (even if I thought it would be a vain attempt). So I turned my steps toward home.

I felt her mind as soon as I got within a mile of the house. The agony had not ebbed even in the slightest but she was quieter in her torment now, resigned to it almost. I wanted to know what her thoughts were in those terrible moments but I did not want to listen too carefully. So instead I focused on my own steps and physical movements as I entered the house, trying not to listen to anything in the front room.

I changed into clean clothes before venturing there.

Carlisle had moved his chair closer to the bedside. A pan of red tinged water and a few stained cloths were on the table beside him and one was held in his hand as he gently wiped the evidence of the near scrape with death from Esme's skin. Where he washed away the blood, he left pale unnaturally smooth skin behind. The change was well underway now.

I tried to block out the sounds of her pain but seeing my own face in Carlisle's mind I know I failed.

You didn't have to come back, Carlisle thought to me. I rolled my eyes. I knew that.

"How is she?" I asked instead of voicing my exasperation.

Quiet now, he thought and showed me a quick snatches of the violent convulsions and screams that I had missed though the lenses of his guilty eyes.

"I see," I replied and shifted nervously. "How are you?"

"I'm…" Carlisle debated his words: terrified, hopeful, repentant, anxious, grieving. "…fine," he said at length knowing I had heard everything. "I don't know my own mind anymore," he admitted before returning to his work, cleaning the blood from Esme's fingernails. I noticed a shift in Esme's mind even as I was blocking it. I risked looking closer.

"She likes the sound of your voice," I said with a small smile through my grimace of pain.

"What? She can hear us?" Carlisle asked.

"She can hear but I don't think she can understand much through the pain yet. I remember when I was changing I felt alone in my pain. I think she just likes the company."

"I see," Carlisle said softly. Would she enjoy music? I don't even know what kind of music she likes? What books she reads? What she draws? I listed to Carlisle's mind drift into his curiosity, sensing a tenor of excitement in his voice that surpassed anything he had felt for me. Somehow that didn't bother me. Together we had been through rough times as I adapted to my new life and Carlisle adapted to company after centuries of solitude. I knew that was a bond this woman would not break or weaken. In fact it was that bond we shared that gave me joy. She, Esme, gave him a kind of happiness he had never known and as his friend—no as his son—I was happy for him.

I turned from him and went to the grand piano in the main room (it had been purchased with the house being in fact the dilapidated building's finest selling point). It was easier to block out Esme's pain with music so I tried focus on the notes and expressions completely.

I played for hours until my repertoire was exhausted. All through it I felt Esme's mind on the edges of her pain clouded consciousness bent toward the sounds. The sun came up over the canopy of the forest and ended my concert. From where I sat my refractive skin would be a beacon visible from the road for the next few hours. Reluctantly I left the golden squares of light creeping across the floor.

In the front room Carlisle drew the tattered and faded curtains and ran a hand gently over Esme's tangled hair. He sighed and sat down in his chair again, returning to his vigil.

Thank you, he thought to me.

"It's been nearly 40 hours. Considering how much…" I stopped. Esme's mind paused, hanging on my words. Carlisle looked up at me confused at my sudden silence.

She can understand us? He thought. I nodded.

If it's alright with you I think the shock of all this—this being the hidden supernatural world she would awake in—will me more than enough without adding your unique perceptiveness as well.

I chuckled at his choice of words and nodded.

I'll be ok, if you want to leave. I'm sure the end won't be so easy to listen too. We both remembered that pain all too well. I just nodded again and turned to go. He started speaking again softly as I left, aloud now. He was reciting from memory:

"My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
my sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:
'Tis not thought envy of they happy lot,
But being too happy in thine happiness—
That thou, light-winged Dyrad of the trees,
In some melodious plot
Of beechen green, and shadows numberless
Singest of summer in full-throated ease."

Esme's mind was focused then on only the sound of his voice. It lulled her better than any of my tunes. Perhaps she didn't love the piano as I did but I think it was more the speaker that she had preference for.

.

I didn't return to the house until darkness fell again.

Carlisle was still in his seat, his untiring voice filling the house with soft yet fervent verses. An anthology was splayed open in his lap but he read from it only occasionally, choosing instead to pull stories and poems from his long memory at will. Esme's eyes were closed but her body was laid out more naturally than before. The pain that came from her mind had not dulled but she as calmer. I could catch coherent thoughts from her as I stood in the doorway.

So this is hell, was the first thought I managed to grasp. It was a surprisingly placid thought. I suppose she had expected hell when she took her own life. But then why is my angel here? Is he in pain like me? I wish I could tell him to leave and go on but if I open my mouth I'll only scream. Her consciousness drifted back to Carlisle's words as he recited Milton. I frowned, it seemed Esme and I had similar opinions of Milton. I gave Carlisle a pleading look.

Alright, he thought to me, I know what you're going to say. He broke off and instead picked something at random from the book on his knee.

He was halfway through a short story when Esme noticed the change; the pain was fading from her fingertips. I looked at Carlisle and mouthed silently, "it's started." He just nodded without a break in his even voice but I could hear the nervous anticipation in him mind.

Hours passed. The moon rose. Carlisle kept reading. After a while there was no need to mouth silent updates because we could both hear the pounding of her heart in it's final moments. Still Carlisle read on.

"As from the pow'r of sacred lays
The spheres began to move,
And sung the great Creator's praise
To all the bless'd above;
So when the last and dreadful hour
This crumbling pageant shall devour,
The trumpet shall be heard on high,…" His voice trailed off as Esme finally moved.

Her heart picked up speed like train engine rising to the pitch of a hummingbirds wings, loud and fast and strong. She tensed up on the bed, drawing in to herself, clutching at her chest, breath coming in ragged gasps now. She convulsed once then balled up lifting herself up as she tried to smother the fire within her. As her heart reached a painful climax of hammering like a tuning fork's warbles, each beat blending into the next, she let out one scream that made my cold dead heart drop into my stomach. I heard Carlisle's hands straining in tight fists. Then as suddenly as a candle blown out, Esme fell silent and collapsed on the bed.

Her heart gave one last short, weak beat, then was still.

"The dead shall live, the living die, And music shall untune the sky." Carlisle whispered the end of the poem into the utter silent stillness.

We waited what seemed to me many long moments before Esme opened her eyes on her new world. She sat up and turned to us in one blinding movement, startling herself. Her wild red eyes flittered all around the room in a matter of seconds.

Stay still, Edward, let her do this at her own pace, Carlisle thought to me. I didn't even dare nod. I knew at that moment Esme was as much a danger to us as she was to any human she came in contact with.

Her mind was hectic with a million questions. Each demanding an answer only to be forgotten milliseconds later, displaced by yet more questions. Then her eyes fell on my father and she paused, all her thoughts converging on his presence.

"Carlisle," she whispered.

"Hello, Esme," he replied evenly. Her panicked mind was set instantly at ease by the familiarity of his voice and the normalcy of his response. I relaxed a little.

"Where am I?" She asked.

"This is my home."

Her eyes shifted suddenly to me, taking in my unfamiliar face yet similar color to the man she knew. Edward, her mind supplied my name to her.

"This is Edward," Carlisle introduced me seconds later.

"Yes, of course," she whispered. "It's very nice to meet you." Her mind was reeling as all the thousands of questions came back to her. She looked back to Carlisle who hadn't moved. "I don't understand. How did I get here?" Her mind was trying to follow her last memories to where she was now. I saw in her mind the little box of ashes being placed in her shaking hands. Then the cold, one room apartment where she sat for many long hours until hunger forced her to move. She flickered through days of that kind of monotony in half a second, each bleeding into the next.

"You were brought in to the hospital," Carlisle began to explain.

Why? Esme wondered then remembered the moment after her feet left the solid rocks of the cliff side. It was only a second of memory but it remained more vivid than any human memory Carlisle or I had maintained. It was like a sudden moment of clarity in which she realized that she was alone, but all the world had finally opened up to her. Her son was dead and nothing, not even jumping from that cliff, would change that. She was done with her family but that meant everything they had ever denied her was now a possibility. And there was Carlisle… she regretted more than anything in that moment when her feet left the earth that she had not sought him out one last time. Perhaps things could have been different. All the terrible things in her life shrunk in that second before gravity claimed her, everything but the terrible choice she had just made and could never take back. I stifled a gasp at the single second of memory that staggered me.

"I remember." She whispered. "I—I died didn't I."

"Very nearly," Carlisle replied. Knowing him as well as I did, I could hear a strange tightness in his throat as he talked.

Esme was quiet for a long moment before very slowly lifting her hand to her chest, pressing it to her bloodstained dress.

"My heart's not beating." She noted numbly.

"Yes." Carlisle replied.

"My heart's not beating but I'm still alive. How is that?" A note of hysteria touched her voice.

Carlisle's mouth gaped once then twice as he foundered for words to confess what he had done. An apology was half way to his lips when I spoke.

"I can explain."

"No, Edward, it's alright. Esme, I—I did something drastic and unforgivable to save your life. Something irreversible and terrible, that I don't expect you to thank me for. I had no right, and knowing that, I did it anyway. I can not even ask you to forgive me." He bent his head, burying his face in his palms at the admission.

"Why? Why me?" Esme asked, looking from Carlisle's blond head to my face. He's saved my life again. How can I not thank him, my guardian angel? What could be so terrible? What could be worse than – and her mind played over that terrible last moment of vivid human memory—that?

Of course you! I heard my father think incredulously. It's always you, Esme. Every time I force myself to let you go, you come back to me and remind me how truly kind humanity can be. How could I live if I let you die even if you had to become this to survive?

"W-why?" Esme asked the silence again but even as she spoke a greater desire than her curiosity made itself known. She reached up to cup her burning throat. "W-water please?" She asked and I could only look at her pityingly.

"It's not water that you're craving," I told her.

"W-what?" She was shaking now.

"I'm so sorry, Esme," Carlisle repeated, raising his head to look at her with guilt twisting his face. Her crimson eyes raked over his face then caught on the spattering of red across his shirt collar. She breathed in deeply through her nose, assessing the smells that flowed through her new senses.

"That's my blood on your shirt. I can smell it. But…" she looked down at her own arms, twisting them in front of her face, feeling her body and brushing along the rips and tears in her dress.

"I'm not injured," she said in shock.

"No. You healed."

"How long have I been here?"

"Two days."

"Two?" She blinked. "That's not… that's…" I took this chance to clear some things up.

"Your world is a lot more complicated than you think," I told her. "There are secrets even science hasn't found yet, hidden for hundreds of years behind fairytales and myths." I heard her mind questioning how possible that could be. "Our kind have been keeping their existence a secret for thousands of years. It makes it easier to hide if no one thinks such things even exist." She was recalling her first memory of Carlisle and comparing it to him now, not a day older. Nothing from his beauty to his cold, hard skin was normal and this was not a new revelation to Esme. I wanted to smile. Despite my initial anger at Carlisle I was being quickly won over to his side. I liked Esme. I liked her pure and compassionate mind.

"I think she's not as oblivious as you believed, Carlisle," I said with a smirk.

"Edward," he warned, we agreed to take this slowly.

"What are you… what am I?" She corrected herself. Am I still myself? She wondered silently.

"We're exactly who we were in our human lives," I said, answering her unspoken thought as naturally as I could, "just stronger, faster, and… changed." I trailed off.

"You'll find your senses are more acute, smell especially. Your reflexes are faster and your mind is more agile." Carlisle adopted his clinical doctor's voice, the one he used to explain complicated illnesses to his patients. "Your skin is harder, you'll find very little will harm your or even bruise you. Your teeth are sharper, they just about the only thing that will break your skin and scar you. What you taste in your mouth is venom; we all have it. Your body has been changed on a cellular level; that was the pain you've been experiencing. Our venom will start the change in a human and as it progresses will heal almost any wound so long as the heart continues to beat and blood flows through it. Your new body is many times stronger than your human one. It will never tire or age or change. It does not need sleep or exercise. It will never cry or sweat. It does not need warmth or air or food or water." Esme took all of this in with wide eyes. For a long moment she was completely silent staring at Carlisle's apologetic face going over and over everything he had said and marveling at her own perfect recall. Finally she settled on her last burning question.

"If I do not need food or water then what is it I need?"

"Blood." I answered for Carlisle because I knew he couldn't. Her mind supplied the name we had both been hesitant to give her.

I'm a vampire, she thought with the same placid reaction she had to believing herself in hell only hours ago. Carlisle is a vampire? No. That can't be! He's so kind and genuinely good he could not be a monster at heart. Then if he is a vampire and a good person despite that, a vampire is not necessarily a monster. She was so assured of that thought that for a moment I was almost convinced. What Carlisle's constant arguments had never been able to do she did with sheer conviction and assured faith.

"Oh," she said, a completely anti-climactic response to the revelation I had heard in her mind.

Carlisle's anxiety petered out into shocked static and I swear I could hear with my ears his jaw drop.

I could no longer help it, laughter burst from my lips.

"Edward?" Carlisle cried, more in shock than anger. What did you hear? He demanded to know. I just laughed on.

Am I funny? Esme wondered. Did I do something wrong?

"No, no," I said gasping. "You didn't do anything wrong. I just expected something more than, 'oh'." Esme looked at me even more confused and Carlisle was glaring.

He's going to start scaring her soon, my father worried, glancing nervously at Esme.

"I'm not going to scare her, really she's fine. More than fine actually," said recalling her last vivid human memory.

What is he talking about? Esme wondered. Why does he think he would scare me?

"Carlisle thinks I'm going to scare you," I told her regaining control of myself. "It's partially my fault. I was a rather… jumpy newborn. My ability lets me hear so much but I found it very hard to manage while we were still in Chicago, too many people."

"Your… ability?" She asked. It's like he was answering my thoughts, she noted and bit her lip, feeling the sharpness that Carlisle had warned her about.

"I was answering your thoughts."

Edward, Carlisle groaned internally.

"Don't worry, Carlisle. She can handle this. She's handling everything else so well."

"Yes," he agreed, "let's not push it."

He hears my thoughts, Esme realized. So he has heard everything? I felt the mental equivalent of blush that wouldn't show on her pale bloodless cheeks. Oh no! What has he heard? I didn't need to hear the alarm in her voice, it was clear on her face.

"Edward's gift is hard to get used to but he is very discreet. He will respect your privacy as he does mine," Carlisle assured her, reading her reaction correctly. Won't you, Edward, he thought to me and I nodded with a grin.

Can Carlisle hear me too? Esme wondered with a note of panic.

"No, it's only me," I assured her quickly. "Even among the supernatural there are freaks."

She relaxed a little at my joke and as the panic faded her thirst returned to dominate her thoughts.

"I think it's time to hunt," I told Carlisle.

"Yes of course," He agreed. He stood and offered a hand to Esme.

"Hunt? But I don't know how," she worried. I stifled my laugh.

"You'll be a natural, I promise," Carlisle assured her. Hesitantly she reached out and took his offered hand. I heard her note the lack of a difference in temperature yet the tingling sensation the physical contact gave her.

"What are we hunting?" She asked.

I lifted my face into the wind as we stepped outside. "Mountain Lions."

Don't try to fight her for it, you'll lose, Carlisle warned me. I just chuckled. If nothing else, having Esme around was going to be interesting.

Author's Note: 1. Keats "Ode to a Nightingale" 1795-1821, Dryden; 2. John "A Song for St. Cecilia's Day" (Chorus) 1631-1700