Chapter 6 – What I Am Now

Time. I think a lot about time, in the days that follow. Because vampire time seems to run nothing like human time, and the lack of all the human rituals that marked the progression of days and nights leaves me feeling completely unmoored in this strange new world. The sun still rises and sets on the day, but the natural rhythm of it all is lost on my new vampire self. When you don't get tired and you don't sleep and you can see just as well in the dark as in the daylight, what difference does any of it make?

There are no regular meal times to break up the hours of the day. There is no tiredness, and no sleeping in the darkness and waking refreshed with the dawn. There are no ordinary routines of milking cows and making beds and doing dishes and weeding vegetable gardens and chopping and carting wood to give shape to the day. I find myself listening in to the daily radio show that Esme likes just because it's an external, fixed point in time.

Carlisle goes to work, but working a rotating shift schedule in the emergency room means even this is changeable. Edward and Rosalie are apparently enrolled in high school, with Edward doing an advanced placement course at college too, although when they haven't attended in all the days I've been there I ask Edward about it.

"Carlisle told them we'd come into contact with chicken pox and are in quarantine," Edward answers with a grin. "Esme too. We thought it might be better – safer – if you weren't left alone too much to begin with. We thought that chicken pox quarantine followed up with a dreadful case of scarlet fever will cover absences for quite some time."

"You don't have to do that," I protest. "I promise I'll just stay right here at home while you're gone. No running around outside and risking anything going wrong."

Edward waves me away. "It's not that important; school will always be there later. I've already graduated high school and college anyway, and Rosalie won't lose anything by staying at home doing independent study. She's been frustrated by the pace of the high school curriculum – she's very intelligent and she'll probably be happier filling in the gaps of her human education at a much more accelerated rate and getting to college all the quicker."

Once again, another difference between the Cullens and I that leaves me feeling a little uncomfortable. Edward has already graduated high school AND college? And Rosalie is studying under her own steam so she can head for college too? I don't think I've read an actual book that wasn't the Bible or a picture story book for my nieces and nephews in years. I'm not exactly illiterate, I went to the local school until I was fourteen and had all the basics of reading, writing and arithmetic drilled into me (with the frequent aid of the strap) but it's clearly not the same thing.

"It's the basis of it though," Edward says, answering thoughts out of my head as he so often does. "I mean, what you learned in school. You can read and you have an understanding of the fundamental mathematical principles, so now you can build on it."

"I wasn't any good at it though," I say. "Facts and figures never stayed in my head, and I was always in trouble. I couldn't stop talking, was distracted by anything and everything, and I couldn't sit still for the life of me. I'm pretty sure I hold the record for getting whipped the most times out of any girl in the whole history of the school."

Esme, coming in from outside with an armful of fall flowers, laughs as she overhears the end of the conversation. "The more I learn about you Eleanor, the more I think we were destined to be friends," she says. "I was fortunate to have a teacher who didn't believe in corporal punishment for children, because I was a terrible daydreamer and something of a tomboy when I was a child. I was always being kept in at recess to finish work I hadn't done, and then being scolded when I finally went outside because I kept climbing trees and playing in the brook."

"I would have been right there with you for sure. Climbing trees and playing football and building forts in the plantation next to the school." I grin back at her. Esme is so effortlessly elegant and poised it's kind of hard to imagine her as a grubby little girl splashing in a muddy stream, but I love her a little bit more for once again doing what she can to make me feel comfortable here.

"It was a little country school, and I attended through the eighth grade, just as you did," Esme adds. "As a vampire though, it's never really limited me. I haven't gone to high school, but I've done a number of college classes across a range of subject areas and with a little catch up work I've managed quite easily. I think you'll find that you'll be able to do the same, if you want to."

I have my doubts. But later that day Edward comes to find me where I'm sprawled out in the hayloft, absorbed in watching a spider spin a web, and hands me a book. Treasure Island.

"I know you think you don't like reading, but you should try this," he says. "It's a classic adventure story, about pirates – you're going to love it."

I roll my eyes at him, but once he leaves the barn I lie on my belly and prop myself up on my elbows. I'm kind of bored, and since Edward's gone to all the effort of finding it for me the least I can do is give it a try. But, as the title page gives way to the first chapter and the pages turn faster and faster under my hand, I become utterly absorbed. This is nothing like the laborious effort of tracking text and sounding out words and deciphering meaning that was what reading was like in my human life. Now the words flow effortlessly and I am entirely captivated by the story playing out in my imagination until the very last page is read. I close the covers and blink at the dust motes dancing in the shafts of sunlight, half surprised to realise that I'm in the hayloft of a barn in South Carolina, and not sailing the seas. I look down at the book in my hand and can't stop the smile that spreads across my face. Edward gave me a simple book, but in doing so he's given me a whole new world.

I jump down from the hayloft in a single bound and cross the yard, heading for the house. Rosalie is the first person I see, and seeing the book in my hand she gives me a quizzical look.

"It was amazing!" I say before she can speak. "Brilliant! I had no idea reading could be like that – so easy and the story was so good! It took my mind off everything. Are there others like this?"

Rosalie reaches for the book, and I give it to her with a sudden flicker of embarrassment as I recall Edward's casual references to her brains and her college ambitions.

"I mean, I know it's probably mostly for kids," I say quickly. "You might think it's silly, I don't know what you like to read, but…"

"I read it to my brother," Rosalie says, and I don't miss the softening in her face. "It was his favourite book."

"What was he like? Your brother?"

"Julian was five years younger than me, and Sebastian four years younger than him. I adored taking care of them as babies, and they always looked up to me. I used to read to them at bedtime every night, all different things, but Julian loved this one."

"My brother Patrick would love it too," I say. "I wish I could tell him about it. He's not a reader, but I'm not either and look at me all excited about this book! But we used to play we were pirates and soldiers and explorers and all kinds of stuff." I shrug a little self-deprecatingly. "Maybe if we'd had this book we both might have worked a bit harder at the reading? I'm going to ask Edward for another one."

Rosalie raises an eyebrow. "If Edward can find you a book that makes you want to read, I'm sure I can. Explorers, you say?" Beckoning me to follow her she goes to the library and reaches for a book without hesitation. "This one – Around the World in Eighty Days. It's old, but it's the ultimate in exploring really. Let me know what you think."

I run my fingertip over the embossed title on the cover. The scent of Rosalie, Carlisle, Edward and Esme permeates the pages – they all must have read this one. "I'm sure I'll love it if you think it's good."

"I think you'll like it." Rosalie's eyes scan the shelves. "He wrote others too. And of course, you'll have to read…"

But she doesn't finish telling me what else I'll have to read. Because the car coming up the drive that I'd heard and assumed was Carlisle and Esme returning from the store, isn't them at all. It's a stranger – a human – and as the car door slams and his footsteps approach the front door the scent of him floods my senses and I freeze.

"Eleanor." Rosalie reaches for me, her face tight with sudden apprehension. "Don't…I'll get rid of him. Just don't move, don't do anything, you can resist…"

Except I can't.

Not when he pauses at the base of the porch steps to admire some of Esme's fall bloom of roses, and a prickle pierces the skin at the base of his thumb. A prick of a thorn, a bead of blood…it's the last thing he knows.

Rosalie makes a futile grab for me, but I twist out of her reach and I am on him before he is even aware of my presence. Effortlessly my teeth cut through the delicate skin of his throat and into the lifeblood that flows beneath. And it is bliss. Nothing like the animal blood I've been sustaining myself on, this is an explosion of flavour and a satiation that is nothing short of sublime. There is nothing in the world that touches me beyond my own fierce pleasure as I feed on him.

It doesn't last long. The blood that feels like it's giving me life is draining his with every swallow, and then all too soon his heart stutters and falters and stops and I let the body fall as I realise what it is I've done.

I've killed a man.

The horror of it, crashing so abruptly into the transcendental satisfaction of the feeding, sends me reeling. I stagger backwards, hands over my mouth, straight into Rosalie who has come out behind me.

"Eleanor," she says urgently. "Eleanor, listen to me. You couldn't help it. I should have been paying attention. I'm sorry. It's not your fault."

I jerk free of her grasp. "But I…oh my god, that was so…how did you NOT? How do any of you go about in the world without…sweet mother of mercy, I'm never going to be able to…how do I live with this? How do I live LIKE this?"

Rosalie looks stricken. We both know there isn't any answer.

"I'm sorry!" Edward arrives in a blur of speed, his face anguished. "I heard the thoughts, I tried to get back but I wasn't fast enough."

"You heard the thoughts? While he was…" Dying. I choke on the word.

"Not his," Edward clarifies. "Yours. He didn't really think anything, it all happened so quickly. Really Eleanor, you can't torment yourself with that – he didn't suffer. He didn't know anything at all."

Well, it's something at least. I sit down abruptly on the porch steps, and a moment later Rosalie sits beside me. I breathe her in, summer roses and sugar cookies and angel wings and (mine) and feel myself steady.

"What now?" I wipe my face furiously on the sleeve of my shirt. "I mean, what do we do with…him?"

He's so ordinary, lying there on the path. Not old and not young, not expensively dressed but not too shabby, a clean shaven face and nondescript brown hair combed neatly…utterly unremarkable. The kind of man who looks as though he would balance his check book and brush his teeth every night and go to church on Sunday. The kind of man who would never have even considered that his life would end so brutally at the hands of a supernatural monster.

Edward kneels by the body. "Find out who he is and what he's doing here." Extracting a wallet from a suit pocket he riffles through the contents. "South Carolina driver's license – I've got a name."

Rosalie reaches for the cardboard suitcase held loosely in the man's lifeless hands. "It looks like he was a salesman," she says, popping the catches. "Magazine subscriptions, it seems. Oh…here comes Carlisle and Esme." She frowns at the Cadillac coming down the drive and mutters, "I could wring my own neck for not paying more attention! The cars sound completely different, I should have been on it from the moment he turned into the drive!"

I'm dreading facing Carlisle and Esme, but their faces show nothing but concern as they emerge from the car. Carlisle immediately goes to his knees beside Edward, and Esme swoops down on me with a fierce hug.

"Oh Ellie darling, it will be all right! The poor man – but we love you. It will be all right."

It won't be all right for the salesman. It can't be. But all right for the rest of us? It finally dawns on me that it's not just the gut-wrenching guilt that I've got to deal with now, but I've murdered a man and the evidence is currently all over the crazy paving of the front path. What do we do?

"We stage a death scene if we can get away with it, or we hide the body where it will never be found if we can't." Edward answers my unspoken thoughts.

"I think a car accident might work," Rosalie says thoughtfully. "If we set it up at that old wooden bridge near Hansonville, where the road curves at the bottom of the hill – you know the spot Edward, it's an absolute menace and I've seen cars nearly off the road there before. If he came down the hill too fast and missed the turn just a little, the car would crash through the bridge and down into the gully. It would smash itself up on the rocks, and come to rest in the water."

"That kind of accident would account for the broken neck," Carlisle says, examining the corpse intently. "We can eliminate any trace of teeth imprints on this wound, and between broken glass and sharp rocks and bent metal it won't be a suspicious finding. Being submerged in water will explain the lack of blood too. Excellent plan, Rosalie, I believe you've thought of everything."

I'll say she has. I don't know whether to be impressed or terrified by her coolly calculating assessment.

"We always think it's better if we can orchestrate an accident and have the body found and claimed," Edward says to me. "There are risks to us in that – we're going to have to drive this car and throw it off a bridge without being seen, for one – but it seems kinder to the families that they get some answers and can hold a funeral."

"You've done this a lot?"

Ever since I woke up and found out what I am now they've been warning me about how hard it is. They've told me, again and again, about how tenuous the control required to abstain from the lure of human blood can be. And yet somehow it's only now, with the body of a man dead in front of me, that I follow these cautions through to the full conclusion – the Cullens have killed. They have done this, used their vampire strength to take a defenceless human and tear out their throat to drink their blood. I put my head in my hands.

"They've done it for me." Esme's voice is soft. "Several times."

I look up at her, shocked. Esme, a murderer? Esme, who embroidered a set of towels with my name and hand pieced me a quilt and told me to consider the spare bedroom my own, has killed people? Esme, who likes to arrange flowers and refinish furniture and knits a sweater a day for her charity work has been the out of control monster that I felt like today?

She gives me a sad smile. "The others have never slipped up, not like this. But I've always found control to be more of a challenge, and there were times when I failed. I know how you might be feeling…but I also know that it's possible to live with it. Sadness and regret are unavoidable, but you can learn to extend yourself grace. What we're trying to do here is unimaginably difficult, and I hope that even when the outcome isn't good the effort must count for something."

"I'm trying," I say in a low voice. "I don't want to do this – I'm so sorry."

"Let's just take care of it." Rosalie doesn't look at me as she rises to her feet. "If we leave now it will be dark by the time we're at the bridge. With luck we can send the car off the road and it may not even be discovered until morning."

"I'll drive the car," Edward says. "It's not distinctive, and If I'm wearing a jacket and hat I'll look fairly inconspicuous. My telepathy may come in handy too, if there's anyone about or if anything happens."

"I think we ought to carry the body separately," Carlisle says. "The chance of anything going wrong is remote, but we wouldn't want Edward to be caught out driving a stolen car with a body in it."

Rosalie agrees. "I'll take it through the forest."

"I'll do it." I reach for the man before Rosalie can touch him. "It's my fault; he's my responsibility."

He weighs almost nothing to my vampire strength as I lift him into my arms. Nothing at all compared to the weight of guilt on my heart.

Edward drives away in the Ford and with Rosalie guiding the way, the rest of us run through the forest. I'm not familiar with the site Rosalie has suggested, but as soon as I see the way the steep incline and the sharp turn in the road at the bottom of it, just ahead of the elderly wooden bridge, it's clear that she's made a good choice.

We're mostly silent as we wait for Edward in the falling dusk. I jump every time we hear a car, but it's a quiet road and vehicles are very infrequent. Esme makes a few attempts at conversation, but for once I don't have anything to say. At one point Carlisle bends over the body and does something to the man's neck to make the wound look less like the bite mark that it is. I don't watch.

I wish I knew what Rosalie was thinking.

Rosalie recognises the sound of the man's car first as Edward finally reaches us. It's full dark by then, but we still wait until the car stops and Edward calls us to come out.

"It's all right. There's no one within miles – we'll not get a better chance to arrange this."

It's surprisingly easy, in the end, to make it look natural. I place him carefully in the driver's seat, his suitcase of magazines and journals on the seat beside him. With the engine running Rosalie and Edward push the car into a natural looking skid, sliding it sideways through the bend, and then giving it a final shove to send it through the wooden barrier of the bridge and down the steep and rocky embankment. There's a screeching of twisting metal, the tinkling of shattering glass, and a booming splash as the car breaches the water. And then the engine cuts out and we listen to the swirl of the water and the rush of bubbles as the river swallows up most of the car, and I lose another part of what used to make me human.

"It looks unremarkable from here," Rosalie says into the silence. "Tyre marks on the road, the path of the car down the rocks…you should probably check the body Carlisle, just to make sure there's nothing glaringly out of place, but I don't think anyone will raise suspicions from this vantage point."

Carlisle disappears down towards the crash site, reappearing a few moments later with his shoes and trousers soaked. "It looks like a credible accident, and there's nothing else we can do here. I suggest we all return home." He looks over at me and adds gently, "He'll be found by the morning I would think. It won't take long for him to be identified and his family notified – I know you feel badly, Eleanor, but he'll be taken care of. It's the best we can do in the circumstances."

I wish we'd been able to give my family that.

When we reach home I go straight to the bathroom and take a shower, scrubbing fiercely to get rid of the scent of the man that clings to my skin. I watch the tiny traces of blood beneath my fingernails mix with the soapsuds and slide away down the drain, and I think that I have to let the whole memory of this and the guilt of it go too.

This is what I am now. Powerful, extraordinary, gifted beyond measure - and utterly lethal. I'll fight my own nature as long as the sun rises and sets, but sometimes giving my all might not be enough. I just have to believe that trying counts, and have faith that it's possible to win.

I smell the acrid smoke of a gasoline fire as I leave the bathroom. Going to the front porch I see the flames in the middle of Esme's garden, the smoke billowing out as Rosalie yanks the last of the rosebushes out of the garden beds and hurls them onto the pyre.

"There," she says to me, her face shadowed by the fire behind her. "Now it won't ever happen again."