Parsifal
We can never wholly forget what we are. But we have become very adept at pretending to be what we are not.
We pretend to be children. But we are not.
We pretend to be human. But we are not.
We pretend to live normal lives, but we do not. Not even among our own kind are the lives that we lead called normal.
"It's going to be alright, Edward. I'm pretty sure." Alice's hand is under my elbow. Jasper looks on, doing his part to project the reassurance that Alice has spoken. Because she has asked him to.
Why did I come back? I have always disliked the places where there are many people – schools, office buildings, hospitals – the places where I have spent so much of my time over the decades. Now Fate has given me the perfect excuse to disappear for a few years into the relative solitude of the North. Tanya and her sisters are kindred spirits with my own family. I could live with them as long as I pleased. Esme was heartsick to see me leave, of course, but even she understood. And if Tanya's unrequitable thoughts toward me should become unbearable, I have the entire Arctic to range where I will. To dwell like a hermit among the beasts of the tundra and the sea, until this dreaded cup might finally pass from me. This unholy Grail. This girl. This Isabella.
We leave our vehicles behind, and slouch across the parking lot towards school.
It starts. Even here, in the drizzling open air. The heady smorgasbord of scent. Blood. Human blood. In every shade and tenor of possibility. Even amid the exhaust fumes, the oil drips, and the peanut butter and jelly sandwich lying crushed under books in one boy's knapsack – the blood overrides everything. They douse themselves with other odors – soaps and shampoos and creams, deodorants, colognes and perfumes – anything to mask the alchemy of sweat and pheromones and bacteria. It works for them. But not for us. Their bodies are open books to us. And under it all, through it all, clarion and compelling, is their blood. No flesh can mask it, no skin can seal it in, no clothing, not even concrete walls, can completely hide the scent of human blood from a vampire.
My mouth waters, with a venom more baneful than any witch's curse. I hear my brothers and sisters swallowing. Another day at school begins.
"No point gettin' all distempered 'bout it, Ed-boy," Emmett says. "If I was you, I'd just have her 'n be done." That's what he did do, actually. His mind harks back, with the total recall of our kind, and I succumb to my gift, which shows me his memory as he lives it again, jumping out at me against the cacophony of thoughts from the school population at large. It is as vivid and complete as if it were my own ...
The perfect, soft evening in May. Blue sky, with puffy clouds just starting to take on hue. New green on the treetops, shot gold by a sinking sun. The scent of an apple orchard in bloom.
The kind of evening that makes anyone with a heart in his chest ache for its beauty.
Shadowed dirt road underfoot, and a tender, shifting breeze, that carries the snap of clean laundry on a line … and the ambrosia of blood.
Not just any blood. But The Blood. The one you wait a lifetime for. The one that haunts your eternity. The one that, once you've smelled it, you will not rest until you find it and capture it and have it all. The one that you wish will never end. But of course it does, because the human body does not hold but twelve pints at the very most.
She never saw him. He hit her like a freight train. The taste, the smell, the glory. Hot. Sweet. Gushing at first. Indescribably delicious.
"Stop it Emmett!" Alice hisses. "You're not helping!" She cannot see his memory, as I do, but staggers, instead, under a bloody kaleidoscope of futures; rushing toward us as the song of Emmett's kill calls forth an answering chorus from the darkest pits of my own mind. For I can smell the Swan girl. I have been smelling her since we arrived at the school parking lot. From somewhere inside the building her blood calls to me, like a brightly pulsing beacon through the fog of all the others. Absence has done nothing but sensitize me to her all the more keenly. The red truck is hers. How appropriate.
Cursed to feel the feelings of those around him, Jasper is pole-axed by my and Emmett's combined lust. Valiantly he tries to stem the dreadful tide with anything he can find – remorse, renunciation, resolve.
He never even registered her face – what was left of it – until after he had emptied her. Just an ordinary woman in her middle years. Perhaps already a grandmother, given her circumstances, and the times in which she lived. Gone to gather her family's linens before the dark should wet them down with dew.
Emmett buried her, of course. A hundred miles away, of course. We do our best not to leave traces.
Calico apron that she had probably made herself, disappearing as he wound her in the one sheet that had caught a bit of red spatter on its edge. Double handfuls of dank brown dirt, thrown down on the white-wrapped form.
My mind transposes a young girl's frame into the impromptu grave.
The entire vision, from start to finish, has taken no more time than the span of us walking, at human speed, three steps across the asphalt ground.
Jasper's influence has made Emmett uncharacteristically pensive. "I don't regret it, y'know? She'd be dead by now, just the same, even if I hadn'a taken her then. And if I'da left her be, I'd be kickin' myself from here to kingdom come and back for passin' her over, what with her gone forever now, and no chance ever again, and not even the memory of her taste to keep me. I don't regret it, Eddy. Their lives is short, anyhow."
I think of myself a hundred years from now, two hundred years, when this girl and her blood and bones are nothing but dust. Lost to me forever, and eternity still yawning before. Is this why I have come back? To claim at least the moment's rapture, and then the memory, ever more?
Their lives is short, anyhow.
Rosalie has no patience for any of this. She is thinking, quite pointedly, Get over yourself Edward. Do or do not. There is no try.
We have almost reached the doors to the main building. "Stop it, both of you!" Alice is seeing the future shift under the influence of Emmett's words and Rosalie's thoughts. She tries to hide her visions from me. There is no hiding. The gruesome futures she sees originate in my own, terribly fertile imagination.
Emmett thinks he knows better than Alice. He continues silently.
Carlisle'll forgive you. Ain't like you'd be goin' on a rampage or somethin'.
No, I've done that already. After a fashion. Back in the oh-so-well-named "Roaring Twenties" … It wasn't what I had thought it would be. And still Carlisle and Esme forgave me. And still I don't know why.
She's only one girl.
Only one. But an innocent, I imagine … or as innocent as girls these days can be. Not what they once were, when they used to be … but certainly not a predator, like ….
Like me.
She'd follow you.
Oh, indeed she would. Any and every girl in the entire school would trip after me in panting bliss. I can hardly imagine, let alone expect, this one to be any different. Ninety years mingling among humans, and the combined memories of all my family members, have taught me just how invincible are the charms of our kind.
You could take her someplace far away, Alberta or some-like. Bury her out on the prairie somewheres when you're done. Fast as you run, you could be back in time for school right next day. And nobody findin' her for months. If ever. We wouldn't even have to move.
Silently, secretly, Jasper's tactician mind is running in parallel with Emmett's. The best defense is a decisive offense. Take control of the terms of engagement.
Cut your losses before they can become catastrophic.
I catch the tail of Alice's thoughts, private, plaintive. She was going to like me. We were going to be friends.
This is intolerable. I want to run again. But I know it's no use. Isabella Swan exists in the world. And I have found her.
Like a bit of sea foam, frothing on the waves of her classmates' thoughts, her image was first cast ashore onto my mind, even before I had laid eyes on her myself.
The new kid. The shiny new toy, thrown among a pack of six-year-olds. In fact, utterly ordinary. Just another slip of a brown-haired girl. Walking about with the hunched, tentative posture of a creature far from its home.
Did she even guess how little these busybodies knew, or cared, about her? How she was barely more than an object to their curiosity? Or, for the boys, intimations of lust? I had no idea. Her own thoughts were lost to me amid the general babble. Not that I'd cared to sift through it all. The intrigues of these human children were of no consequence to me. Isabella – "just Bella" she had said, all morning long, to each new acquaintance in turn – was of no consequence to me.
Until she'd stood in front of that devil's own fan. And smashed my precious indifference to pieces. Now the entire planet is nothing more than a vast labyrinth, whose every twisting path begins and ends with her crimson scent.
We have sauntered indoors, into the bright, warm hallways. The other students unconsciously give us space, avoid our eyes. Shards of thought assault me from every direction. How I hate the crowded spaces. I shut out the voices, as I have learned to do. Just as we all have learned to shut out the enticement of so much blood, so many beating hearts, under our very noses. To pass among the hot, throbbing herd, untouched and untouchable. Most of the time.
"So, Alice," I say, and I don't mean to mock, but I do, "How sure is 'pretty sure'?"