Author's Notes (September 21, 2010): While this is a short chapter, for me at least, it's pretty important, as far as the plot goes. It will answer some questions, while raising others, so I'm a little nervous. I hope everyone enjoys it.

Thanks, as always, to duskwatcher2153 and Aleeab4u. They saved me from publishing several rather awkward lines this time, believe me.

Chapter pic: bit(dot)ly/sotpm10-pic

Chapter music: bit(dot)ly/sotpm10-music

"SINS OF THE PIANO MAN"
CHAPTER 10: REVELATIONS AT MIDNIGHT

And all the suffering that you've witnessed
And the handprints on the wall
They remind you how it's endless
How endlessly you fall…

"Breathe" by Alexi Murdoch

EDWARD MASEN
Though I was loath to leave Bella at night when nightmares might disturb her, I decided I had to visit the Cullen property. Alice seemed oddly harmless, quaintly humanlike, but I wouldn't feel relaxed about her coven's involvement with the Swans as long as they knew more about me than I did them. After making sure Bella was in a deep sleep, I returned to Forks.

The Cullens lived on a stretch of land north of the Calawah River, in the fog-filled belly of a verdant forest. An unpaved road snaked its way toward their home, but I kept beneath thick tree canopies that slowly drip-dropped rainwater from above. I weaved my own pattern between broad trunks and low-hanging branches that were perhaps even older than I was. Scents from three distinct vampires swirled around me, and I saw evidence of buried animal carcasses, further proving our shared dietary choice. I tended to leave my bloodless kills for scavengers, but a coven of three or more probably couldn't risk exposure by constantly leaving a trail of animal bodies in their wake. Local rangers and hikers would eventually notice.

Perhaps there were more vampires who chose to live this way that weren't good at hiding their kills. I idly wondered if that was how the Latin American legend of the chupacabra began. It wouldn't be the first time vampires had interwoven our existence with some other legend.

I stopped at the edge of what I knew to be the winding Sol Duc River; the Cullen house came into view. I sat on a curling, gnarled tree root and stared ahead—watching, waiting. Several massive cedar trees guarded the front of the house, obscuring it from weaker, human eyes and, I imagined, shading its large, wrap-around porch on the rare sunny day that this region of the United States managed to entertain.

Theirs was an extravagant, three-story mansion that was painted a creamy white and was luminescent under the thin, waning crescent moon. The house was older, with a few blatantly modern touches; clearly restored from a previous state and time, in which it might have been some wealthy man's show of money or perhaps even a rural lodge of some sort, given its large, rectangular shape. As I'd seen in Alice's thoughts, the whole south side of the house was covered in windows in a fashion that was similar to one of the walls of my new home in Port Angeles. I supposed Esme Cullen favored the light, even if she was a creature of darkness.

The house and its surrounding yard were shadowed and quiet. No thoughts stirred inside, and though I cast the net of my ability wide, I found myself alone beyond the audible sound of scurrying animals, whose thoughts were often just a quivering blur of color and form. I edged nearer to the house, my senses alert, always prepared for a last minute ambush.

Alice had blatantly invited me, of course, but I was wary of my own kind. We were an instinctual lot, sometimes given to near-primitive territoriality that spurred on a whole host of problems. Since giving up human blood, I had also noticed that the bloodlust for our natural source of food had a way of making us… Unstable was the most fitting word. Territoriality and instability did not make for a good mix.

But the Cullens appeared to feed from animals, and so I tentatively crept closer, my curiosity ignited. I stepped forward, ducking behind one of the large cedar tree trunks before edging forward once again. I went from cover to cover, until finally I reached the bottom porch steps, where I hesitated. The Cullens weren't home. What was I planning to do here?

Wind whistled past me, stirring a set of chimes that chinked lightly as they danced on the breeze. I heard a quiet, unexpected rustling at the doorway and stiffened in alarm.

Looking toward the door, I noticed then that there was a folded piece of paper taped to the doorknob. I stared at it for a moment before slowly stepping up onto the porch and pulling it free. I unfolded the lavender stationery.

The door's unlocked, and we'll be in Canada until Tuesday. Consider yourself officially invited in! This way you don't have to feel guilty about breaking and entering—and don't give me that look. –Alice

I pinched the bridge of my nose as I stared at the note with the heart-dotted I's. Alice knew I would be here this night, it seemed. She knew I wanted information but was threatened by the unknown elements her coven presented. I still didn't know how to feel about her ability, even if I could imagine it was very useful. I snorted. Yes. Useful to her coven, but not necessarily to me. It just had a way of making me feel uncomfortable.

I looked around and spoke into the silent night. "Can you see me asking this question? Are you watching me all the time now?" More importantly, how long had she been watching me?

A dragonfly's wings thrummed to life near the river's edge. No one replied. I was alone, and without further delay, I turned the unlocked doorknob of the Cullen house and stepped into the shadows.

When I'd bought the house in Damascus, I'd laughed at how odd it was for a vampire to purchase real estate. Nearly indestructible, vampires had no real need for shelter, and if we did, surely we would just take a house from a victim or rent a hotel room for a night. But I'd bought my house, just like a regular person would; I'd furnished it with a few human materials, had fed my dog in the laundry room, had washed my car—at human speed, no less—in the driveway. I'd thought I was so very human.

The Cullens, though, they put a whole new spin on pretending to be human.

The floral-scented entryway to their home was spacious, flowing freely into a living room that held more human possessions than I'd ever had in my Damascus home. There were couches and recliners, an absurdly large flat screen television, gaming consoles and more besides. Two computers—one a Mac, the other a PC—sat against a wall, a short distance away from the couches and television. Board games and magazines were stuffed beneath the glass coffee table. Several of the games were encased in vintage boxes, and I couldn't help but wonder when the Cullens had actually purchased them. I was over one hundred years old. How old might they be?

No matter their age, it was hard for me to imagine vampires playing Scrabble and Parcheesi. Surely they were just props.

I shut the front door behind me and flipped the nearest light switch. I didn't need the light, but it felt more comfortable to exercise these little pieces of my humanity. Lamps lit up the rooms, and I used the dimmer switch to calm the light to a comfortable, low setting. It was only with the lighting that I truly took notice of what sat just beyond the seating area.

Resting on a slightly raised platform, and beneath a perfectly-orchestrated glow of warm, recessed lighting, a beautiful, black Steinway piano was on display; it was the exact same model I owned, the one I loved. I felt the pull toward it and suddenly couldn't wait for my own piano to be delivered to Port Angeles tomorrow. It had been two weeks since I'd played in Seattle, and I was beginning to feel slightly guilty that I'd not worked on any new compositions.

Quietly, I inched closer until I was by the instrument, and then seated on the bench. I raised the fall carefully and set my fingers along the black and white keys. There was always the fleeting echo of my humanity, the moment where I could almost feel my mother's presence as she directed my fingers into position along the keys. I played scales before gently edging into Bella's lullaby. I smiled as the piece meandered and evolved of its own accord.

Her lullaby had never been stagnant, never exactly complete. The core melody always remained the same, but some notes were flexible, changeable depending on my mood—and now, depending on my thoughts of Bella, in particular. They were warm tonight, slow and worshipful as I remembered this afternoon and the gentle kiss I'd placed on her forehead when I'd left her at her front door. As I'd cradled her cheeks in my hands, her warm skin had glowed a dusty rose. Her eyes had been closed, and she'd breathed a soft sigh.

I stopped playing when her lullaby came to its natural end. The house was silent once more.

In some ways, I desperately wanted to dig into all of the Cullens' file cabinets, just to see what I could find, but having been expressly invited to investigate their home—while they weren't even in it—I'd suddenly developed an annoyingly higher standard for myself. "Bet you knew that'd happen, Little Freak," I muttered as I rose from the piano bench.

I ascended a curving staircase. On the second floor, there two bedrooms and an office that had a connecting drawing room and a similarly connecting library. Ignoring the personal rooms because of my silly conscience, I entered the studies, drawn to the musty ink and mahogany scents that lay within.

Since giving up human blood, I'd read a great deal, and so I knew upon entering the dark-paneled office and connecting room of filled bookshelves that the Cullens had enough books in their house to rival most small town public libraries. Volumes upon volumes were closely wedged in together, and there were many languages adorning leather spines, some of which I'd never seen before. The scent of a male vampire was in the room, leading me to believe the coven leader, Carlisle, frequented this room. How old was he to have possessions such as these?

Going deeper into the office, I went to the large mahogany desk and leather chair that sat near the west-facing windows. I stood in front of the chair and looked down onto the desk. Another note was left for me there; cursive penmanship flowed in loops across heavy cotton paper.

Dear Edward,

I will be here when you're ready to speak, and I will do my best to answer any questions you might have. Please know that Alice has only recently told me about you.

Kind regards,
Carlisle Cullen

My brow furrowed as I touched the ink-covered stationery. What was this?

And then I saw it.

I snatched the golden picture frame up from the desk and looked at the vampire couple framed within. The female must surely be Esme, and the male… The male was Carlisle Cullen.

I remembered him instantly. Suddenly, I knew why the name was familiar, why it niggled in the back of my mind. This vampire had known me when I was human. He had been my doctor, my parents' doctor. A knot formed in my stomach as I stared at his face, as I was suddenly inundated with memories I'd tried so hard to bury.

"No!" I shouted and threw the picture across the room as if it were on fire. It was a hard throw that shattered not only the glass but the frame as well. Books toppled from shelves, where it had hit, landing with clunky thuds on a dark, Oriental rug.

How could this be? How had Alice kept this from me? Did she even know of the secrets she was keeping? How much did she know?

The human memory of Carlisle's face was weak, buried deep, deep in a part of my brain that I had little access to, but I remembered him now. Finally, I managed to put a face on the strange "man" that I'd been unable to identify for all these decades. I fell back into the leather chair and breathed heavily as my most wretched, vivid memories from my human life consumed me.

I lay in sweat-soaked bedclothes, feeling as though my body was eating me alive, hotly chewing on my organs before moving out to my clammy skin. To my right, my mother's bed was merely a few feet away from mine, and my father's was on the right of hers. The main room of the hospital had filled by the time we came in, and we'd been placed on cots in what had once been a doctor's office. The flu had taken us all, was dragging us to our graves, as it had done to so many already. Words like "death" and "epidemic" and "prayer" were muttered around me. The sickness was a slow waiting game, filled with fear and delirium.

I thought I might be seeing angels and devils at the foot of my bed—perhaps even Satan himself. He was no red-horned beast, as I'd always envisioned him to be when my parents took me to the Second Presbyterian Church each Sunday. He was magnificent, a golden-haired fallen angel. He watched me closely as he paced between my mother's bed and mine, his chin held between forefinger and thumb. What was he waiting for? What was he thinking? Sometimes I thought I heard him talk about taking me away with him, but his lips never moved.

My father died first—quickly, quietly in the night. I was awake when he spent his last breath on his most treasured word, my mother's name. "Elizabeth..." A gasp, then nothing.

Roaring silence ate at me, and I wailed into the night like a pitiful little boy, unable to stomach lying in a room with my dead father. I quietly heaved the broth I'd managed to eat earlier in the night. The sound was just one of many sounds of sickness in the overcrowded hospital.

Satan became Jesus as the golden-haired man strode into the room and quickly removed my father's body, so silently that my mother did not wake. She would not know the horror until morning. The angelic devil seemed fearless, because he was Death himself. He paid no mind for his own health as he brazenly held me in the darkness to his chest, rocking me soothingly as I wept like a weak, small child. He felt so cold against my skin, and that was when I began to think the fever might take me, too, that Death had come to Chicago for me.

Mother was unable to weep for my father the next day. Each time she tried, the congestion lodged itself in the back of her throat, constricted her breathing until she was gasping for air and drowning in unforgiving phlegm. It was unfair. How was one to grieve if crying was not an option? I watched in fear as she writhed in damp sheets with each passing night. I hated watching her pain, because I knew I was part of the reason she was here and in such bad shape. She had taken care of me far longer than she should have, ignoring her own health to try to keep me out of the hospital. Instead, we'd all ended up here.

I waited and wondered.

Must I watch my parents die? Must I lie in the same room with them as they moan in pain? Must I lie with their bodies as they let go of life, smell the putrid scent of evacuated bowels and cooling sweat and bitter, useless cough syrups?

I woke with a start a few nights after my father passed. My mother was gasping for air in her bed, and the blonde-haired creature stealthily crept nearer, touching her face and whispering soothing words. Satan or Jesus or something in-between, he had compassion. I watched her sweaty hand grip his wrist and slide ineffectually down to his fingertips. "Carlisle Cullen," she whispered through a cough, "you must do everything in your power." Her frantic green eyes glanced over at me. "What others cannot do, that is what you must do for my Edward."

He held her hand as she died, and then held me once more as I wept and drooled onto his cotton shirt.

Carlisle Cullen…

He'd hardly left my bedside as he'd nursed me back to health.

I got up and went over to the mess I'd made, stared at the shattered frame on the floor. The remembered pain of losing my parents accounted for some of the very few human memories I had retained through my transformation, but I had lost Carlisle's name and face until now, until seeing him again in the photograph. I'd always assumed the angelic demon in my memory was just a hallucination, a fevered boy's dream, but he was real.

He wasn't an angel or a demon, but he was something in-between, perhaps. Carlisle Cullen was a vampire.

Had my mother known somehow? Perhaps she had sensed he was supernatural, just as I apparently had.

Dropping to my knees, I picked up the broken frame, along with the creased and bent picture. Shards of glass ineffectively poked at my skin. I didn't know whether to love or hate the smiling vampire in the photograph. He had followed my mother's dying wish. Against all odds, he had nursed me back to health. I even had a vague memory of how he had offered to help me get back into a "normal life," as I was sick for so long, but I had refused him.

He had given me my life, but by then, it was a life I hadn't wanted.

I only remembered bits and pieces of what happened after the Spanish Influenza, after my parents' deaths. I could still remember my shock and confusion, however. At seventeen, I'd been a foolish, war-hungry boy and had been convinced that I would run off and join the war efforts. I'd put all my eggs into the one basket. But with my mother dead… It had seemed too disrespectful to do that to her memory. She had never wanted me in the war, and so I didn't enlist, so as to honor her. Not that what I'd ended up becoming was any better way to honor her.

My father had been a successful lawyer in Chicago, and his business partners watched me eagerly and nervously. Would I follow in Edward Sr.'s footsteps? Would I lead? Would I bend to someone else? A few of them cared, but most were just lawyers with greedy vulture hearts.

I chose not to get involved, period, and I had no memories of what became of the firm, if it survived or not. Perhaps some watered down version of it even existed to this day. I wasn't sure, since I'd left Chicago in 1923 and hadn't looked back.

In my last years as a human, I'd become a drunkard and a bum, even though I'd had money to do and be otherwise. I wasted my life in aimless misery. Death had changed me. Sitting in the same room with it, fighting it, had simultaneously hardened and destroyed me. Before the flu, I'd thought I was a man—an invincible one, at that—but Death taught me that we were all children to be swallowed up by shadowy monsters. No one beats death, I'd thought, so does any of this even matter?

I was haunted in my sleep. I couldn't remember the dreams or the particulars of my fears, but I remembered jolting awake at night, looking over my shoulder, obsessing over my health, even as I all but lived in whiskey bottles. Drinking, drinking, drinking—living up to those Irish genes.

The fact that I'd become an alcoholic as a human was rather ironic, considering how I'd gone on to spend the next eight decades as an addict of a whole other kind. I'd been a horrible human, and I'd become a horrible monster.

I sobbed dryly at the picture of Carlisle and Esme, the petite, chestnut-haired female who appeared to be his mate. They were embracing, smiling, and I was suddenly, childishly jealous of them and of the happiness that Alice had exuded at the lunch with Charlie. On some level, as I looked at their smiles, I wondered why Carlisle hadn't changed me. Why had I had to suffer after my parents were gone? He obviously didn't have a problem siring others, so why hadn't he saved me?

So many years had been spent in a bloodthirsty haze. I'd woken to this existence alone, with a thousand voices in my head and a burn in my throat. I'd killed the first person who crossed my path, and then I'd run, far, far away until I reached someplace that was quiet. For two years I'd played that game, living between the woods and the city, learning how to adapt to my gift and hunt accordingly. Using my ability was the only way I'd survived; I killed the dregs of society and avoided getting caught. I was lucky that a number of my murders were blamed on Al Capone and crime of the Prohibition Era.

All those lives I'd taken… Could that have been prevented? Carlisle Cullen had given me my human life back, had restored it so some other nomadic vampire could come through and obliterate it only a few years later. If Carlisle had changed me, would my existence have been different, would I have fed from animals, instead of humans?

Numbness settled over me eventually as I closed down old feelings and locked away unpleasant memories. I cleaned the glass from the floor, put the fallen books back on their shelves and straightened the photo as best I could before gently laying it on Carlisle's desk.

I thought of writing something on Carlisle's note to me, but I didn't know what to say. Should I thank this vampire for saving my human life, for opening his home to me in a very strange and openly trusting manner? Should I curse him for putting me on this path I'd ended up traveling? Should I blame him in part for the many lives I'd taken, simply because some other vampire had changed me and left me to an existence of thirst and sadism?

For the second time this weekend, I felt as though I'd been dealt a hefty blow to the gut, but as I focused on that pain and uncertainty, I felt something else, too. It was that pull—that line of steel cable that always seemed to tug me back to Bella. Peace washed over me as I thought of being by her side again.

I left the Cullen house at top running speed, barreling into the forest, jumping over the Sol Duc River, and threading my way into the night. There was only one truth for me as I pumped my legs and calves harder, until it felt as though my feet weren't even touching ground. I needed Bella.

Slipping inside the attic room, I silently ghosted to Bella's bedside. She was sleeping on her stomach, like she often did, her heart-shaped face turned toward the window, as if she'd been waiting for my return. She was breathtaking in the shadows, a pale portrait of beauty. I crouched beside her bed and pressed my hand against the small of her back. She stirred slightly, and I watched her brow relax as her lips turned up into a mysterious little smile.

What was she dreaming?

Being near Bella again did wonders for my mood. It didn't seem to matter as much that the Cullens were more complicated than I'd first thought or that I had an unexpected, pre-existing history with the coven leader. Here, in the darkness, it was just Bella, just me. I even liked to think that I'd become her protector now; I protected her from her dreams, if nothing else.

"Edward…" Bella puffed out a sigh and snuggled her face into her pillow. Her hair further tangled with the motion, curling and twisting into nested, brown little knots around her head. So beautiful.

She stirred again, this time shuffling nearer to the edge of the bed. I shook my head and held back a laugh. One more shuffle, and I'd be keeping her from falling to the floor. I smiled as I rubbed her back in gentle, slow circles. Bella's legs straightened out, in turn, her sloping calf muscles twitching and stretching.

Her tongue slipped past her teeth and licked at her parted lips, leaving behind a sheen of wetness. Before I even aware of my actions, my face was close to hers; I was staring, mere inches away from her nose, breathing in each of her breaths, playing with fire. I needed to hunt again, so the burn was more potent, but it wasn't her blood I craved. I licked my lips, just as she had, and wished I could somehow be even closer, that I could crawl into bed, beneath the sheets, and twine my limbs with hers.

I imagined taking her in my arms, pulling her body flush to mine. Our contact would keep her nightmares at bay and free me from my haunted past. She would touch me gently, shyly, but then I imagined her leaning in with a wicked smile before going for a heat-filled kiss. I maybe couldn't give her heat in the most literal sense, but I could make the kiss good, so long as I was careful, so long as I could overcome other, baser desires. It would be a challenge, I was sure. I'd only kissed a few humans in my time, and none as delectable as Bella. Their fragility had always unnerved me.

But then, fearful as I was of Bella's frailty and wondrous scent, I was finding that I selfishly wanted her mouth even more sometimes. I'd thought about kissing her many times since we'd met. I wanted to press her lips to mine, curl my tongue against hers and make her moan. I didn't want it to stop there, either.

I wanted to see her naked, not just imagine it as she showered in the downstairs bathroom. I wanted to touch and kiss her breasts, rest my face against the pounding heart that had come to make all my decisions for me. I wanted to slide down her warm body and open her legs—not for the femoral artery, as I'd cruelly done to so many other women, but for Bella's pleasure, for mine. I'd make her—us—forget everything else, even if only for a little while.

Then I could move back up her body and hold back her knees as I slid inside the warm, wet channel of her body. There'd be no frenzy between us, at least not at first; it wouldn't be blind and raw and snarling, as my experiences with vampires had been. It would be slow and intensely sweet, an uphill climb and a freeing fall toward the same destination.

I'd lean over her, kiss her as we melded into one form of warm and cool, cream-rose and pale-gray. Always mindful of my strength, I'd use feather-light pressure while running my hands up her thighs, along her hips and sides, over her breasts, and up to cradle her neck and face. I imagined her liquid brown eyes staring up at me, trusting and passionate. Would Bella moan loudly or softly? It didn't matter. I'd love sounds or silence from her. She would be mine, and that would be all that mattered.

"I love you," I would say.

I snapped out of the fantasy and ripped my hand away from Bella's back. I moved away from the bed, my hands fisted at my sides.

Love?

Staring at Bella's relaxed, sleeping features, I placed a hand over my still heart. I could swear that it was beating… No, not just beating—thundering, rushing, racing. It reminded me of the last moments of the transformation, when my heart galloped to the finish line, pumping venom through its valves. Perhaps this time I was coming alive, rather than dying.

Love?

I couldn't possibly love her, and she would never see me as someone worthy of love. The pain that realization brought with it was almost too much to bear.

Creatures weren't really capable of this human emotion, were they? Humans weren't capable of loving creatures like me. But as I looked at the curled up woman before me, I knew. I could at least speak for myself, as it seemed so obvious now. I loved her. I loved how she was too observant for her own good, how she was forgiving and faithful, sweet and selfless. I loved how she never seemed to fear me, even though she should. I perhaps, just very slightly, even loved that she challenged me.

Carlisle was forgotten for the night. Everything was forgotten, but one fact. I was in love with Bella. Nothing else mattered more than that. Suddenly, everything aligned and made sense, warmed me to my very being. I could never leave her now. I would stay and guard her life as if it were my own. I returned to her bedside and marveled at the feelings coursing through me, at how I once again felt my world changing, all because of Bella.

It was simple. She was my life now.