My cousin (you know, the one I started writing this monstrosity for that I mention in every disclaimer and who is very generous with her thoughts on every chapter) and I have been talking about this chapter since I started writing this thing. Three years of waiting for this moment. Mander, I hope it's everything you wanted and more.

The song for this chapter is The Parting Glass by Peter Hollens and also the cover by Pinar Toprak for the second half. Remember that you can play along with the story on Amazon Music using the special web address below!

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Disclaimer: I'm only doing this for a friend. I don't get anything from it but her undying appreciation. I certainly don't get to have fun with Emmett and the boys in my head.

TRIGGER WARNING: THIS CHAPTER CONTAINS BRIEF FLASHES OF DOMESTIC VIOLENCE, ESPECIALLY PHYSICAL ABUSE. YOU KNOW YOUR TOLERANCES. SKIP PAST THE ITALICIZED TEXT IF THIS VIOLATES A BOUNDARY.

Chapter Forty-Four: The Parting Glass
Day Three
EdPOV

I would kill for a moment of silence.

I would kill for a lot of things these days.

Human blood.

To protect the man who had become a father, brother and best friend; who had given me a second chance at life when mine had been cut brutally short.

To talk to my mother one more time.

To feel her wrap her arms around me and hold me to her even when I protested that I was too old for such affection.

To punch my father in the face for being the giant, grade-A asshole that I now recognized he was.

To spend one more night lost to the oblivion of sleep and dreaming.

But above all that, I would literally kill to have silence inside my head.

Thoughts filled the space, slamming into each other until it was impossible for me to recognize where any one of them were coming from.

This was one of the worst drawbacks to the eternal life Carlisle had gifted me.

Hearing every passing thought that anyone had in a mile radius would drive me into madness, I was sure.

I made my way through the center of town towards the outskirts where Carlisle and I had a modest house set away from the population –but that was still within driving distance for him to the hospital. People were strolling down the sidewalk, enjoying their Friday night. I would need to thank Carlisle for talking me into taking a hunting trip. While the fragrance of blood wafted in and out of the breeze, I was satisfied enough that it didn't feel like a raging inferno in my throat so much as the warmth after drinking a hot mug of coffee. I felt bad that I'd gone and left him here to work but with only three years of this new life under my belt, it was of the utmost importance that I not let myself get too thirsty. I picked up my pace, still maintaining a human speed, eager to be home and in the privacy of my own room. When the house finally came into view, I jogged the last few blocks in the off chance anyone could see and breezed through the front door.

"Carlisle, I'm home," I called out cheekily, shutting the door behind me. I turned to head deeper into the house but stopped short.

There was a woman on our sofa.

A vampire.

Her heart shaped face was framed by lustrous, chestnut and caramel colored locks, curling gently around her shoulders. She was petite, almost a foot shorter than me, and delicate but I could see the hint of curves beneath what appeared to be a set of Carlisle's pajamas.

That irritated me for some reason.

As soon as our eyes met, she flew up and crouched behind the sofa, her vibrantly red eyes watching me with a mixture of wary fear and curiosity.

"Hi," I said, voice strangled. I cleared my throat from the curious tightness that had taken hold. "I'm Edward." I held out a hand, feeling like an idiot as she stared at me, unmoving.

Carlisle told you about him, she thought and the sound of her voice, even in her own head, was like a wrapping a blanket that had been warming by the fire around your shoulders after coming in from the snow. He promised he wouldn't hurt you.

"Is Carlisle home," I asked, wondering what was so important that Carlisle felt compelled to leave what was either a newborn vampire or a deeply mistrusting one in our parlor alone.

"H-he went to find some clothes for me," she said softly. Each word was like a caress down my spine, leaving a trail of tingles in their wake.

"He left you here alone?" I wasn't sure why exactly this bothered me so much but I had half a mind to lay into him when he came home. I hadn't realized that I'd let my anger slip into my tone but she ducked further behind the couch and I was assaulted by flashes of memories. They were a bit dulled, the way memories appeared to me when our kind remembered their human life.

A man stood over her, face contorted in anger as he raised a fist and brought it down against her face. Blinding pain turned her vision white as he shouted at her. Another memory showed him smiling charmingly beside her before he slammed her head into the table in front of them. The bone in her nose broke and blood rushed down her face while he screamed in her ear about not talking back to him. Another took its place as he threw her down the stairs and her head slammed into the cinderblock of the cellar before he closed the door above her, casting her into complete darkness as the lock engaged.

There were dozens more, some flickering so fast that I didn't see them. My hands were balled into fists and I looked down at them, surprised to see that I was shaking with barely contained rage. My eyes flew back up to the woman in front of me and she whimpered at what she saw. I took a step forward and she scrambled back into the corner where she was partially obstructed from view by a velvet armchair. I froze as soon as I realized that she was making a mental comparison of this… animal… to me. I closed my eyes and carefully willed myself to calm down.

What would Carlisle do in this situation?

I stepped back to the other side of the room and slid down the wall, still keeping her in view but making myself as small as I could. I took deep breaths, willfully ignoring the violent memories that assaulted her.

No, not ignoring. Setting aside, saving for later, when I could leave and hunt down the worthless piece of trash and give him a taste of his own medicine before ending his miserable life.

I forced my hands to relax, resting them loosely on my knees. I watched as she uncurled slightly from the ball she'd pressed herself into while she watched me.

"I'm not going to hurt you," I said calmly, mimicking Carlisle's cadence when I'd first woken and been so overwhelmed by my senses. "I'm sorry for frightening you." She stared at me, unsure. Her thoughts were a whirlwind of wariness warring with the compulsion to trust me. "What's your name," I asked after a moment, when she'd stretched her legs out in front of her.

"Esme," she whispered but she might as well have shouted it. It echoed around my head and settled on my heart, like a brand.

"Esme," I murmured and she shivered. "It's a pleasure to meet you, Esme," I said, remembering my mother's lessons on gentlemanly behavior. Before I could say anything else, Carlisle came into the house. He stopped, taking in our positions and hypothesizing in his head the circumstances that had led to this. In his hand, he clutched a paper shopping bag from a department store I'd passed on my way in.

"Ah, Edward, I see you've met Esme," he said and I caught the briefest sense of something from his thoughts before he started reciting Russian poetry in his head. My eyes flickered to his but he wasn't looking at me.

Intentionally.

"Esme was a patient I treated some ten years ago for a broken bone," he continued as if nothing strange was going on at all, moving further into the room and setting his bag on the sofa. "She came into the hospital after a fall and they thought she was done for but I could tell she was still alive and felt compelled to save her, much like you." Esme's thoughts mixed with Carlisle's as he recalled his surprise at seeing her again and his sorrow for the loss of someone he remembered so fondly.

But her thoughts…

Pain. She was in inescapable pain.

Not the kind that she had experienced with that asshole from earlier.

This was deeper, penetrating. Like her heart had been ripped out of her body.

I expected to see the hazy, pain fueled memories of transformation but she was sitting in a small room, holding a bundle in her arms as her world imploded around her. She tearfully stared down at the bundle and tiny face was swaddled in the blankets. His eyes were closed, the dark lashes a smudge against his unnaturally pale skin.

His lips were blue.

She was sobbing as a doctor explained about the devastating symptoms of lung fever. She was sobbing helplessly as she clutched the baby to her, unable to breathe life back into him.

I looked over at Carlisle in horror. He was staring at me, brow furrowed.

"What have you done," I gasped out. Esme was huddled against the wall again, rocking herself while she sobbed tearlessly.

"I couldn't let her die," he said, raising his hands helplessly. "There was no other way to save her." But as he said it I finally caught what he'd been trying to hide before.

Maybe since she knew me before, she could learn to love me.

I reeled back, floored as that thought slipped through the Russian poetry before he filled his head with anything else to block out his stream of consciousness.

"Carlisle," I breathed as a righteous possessiveness filled me. "She's in pain," I said angrily. She whimpered and hunched closer to the wall and I immediately pulled back, the anger leaving me completely.

I couldn't –wouldn't –hurt her, even with memories.

"Why don't you and I go for a walk and let Esme change into something more comfortable," I suggested lightly to him, watching the way she relaxed slightly at the suggestion. Carlisle looked between us and then nodded, standing and following me to the door.

Don't leave me, she thought, panicked before scolding herself.

"We're just going to step out to the treeline," I reassured her. "I'll be able to hear if you need anything." Her eyes were locked with mine before she gave a little nod and I forced myself to step out the door when all I wanted to do was scoop her into my arms and hide her away from the horrors of the world.

Carlisle and I walked to the treeline, just out of earshot from the house but still close enough that I could faintly hear the stream of thoughts she had as she rifled through the bag Carlisle had left for her.

"What is going on," Carlisle finally asked. I rounded on him.

"You changed her?!" He watched me.

"I realize that ideally it's the kind of thing we should have discussed beforehand but unlike with you, I didn't have the time for deliberation. I had to make a decision at that moment."

"Why," I asked, trying to force myself to be calm in case she looked out the window at us.

"I remembered what she was like when she was sixteen. She was bright and bubbly. Incredibly intelligent if a little shy. I couldn't marry the memory of her then with the broken woman I was seeing. I didn't want it to end like that for her."

"And you've been lonely," I said blankly. He turned his head away from me, guilt filling his thoughts.

"It's not that I don't love you, Edward, you know I do. But I have been… lonely, of sorts. I had hoped that perhaps, since she knew me before, it would be easier for her and I to…" He trailed off but I read his every intention in his thoughts.

Fall in love.

Get married.

I snarled, shoving him hard. He flew back against a tree. It groaned but remained upright and I immediately tuned into Esme's thoughts to see if she had seen that but she was currently in my room, curled in my bed with a pillow to her chest, longing for sleep.

"What in the hell is wrong with you," Carlisle asked and I knew he could tell how out of sorts I was by the profanity alone.

"Show me the memory of how she was when you found her," I demanded and he immediately recalled seeing her for the first time again. She was broken, bloodied and bruised. Her skull was pulverized, almost every bone in her body broken in some way, organs eviscerated. But still so beautiful.

"They found her at the bottom of a cliff," he murmured and I raised a hand to my face, scrubbing at it. "She must have fallen or a gust of wind blew her over the edge."

"She jumped," I breathed but of course, he heard.

"No. Why would she…" He trailed off.

"Because not but five days ago, her two day old son died from what I suspect was pneumonia." He stared at me in horror then up to the house.

"Oh God," he breathed. "I didn't know."

"So now, on top of the memories of her abusive husband, which have very clearly left her traumatized, she has to live with this loss that was so debilitating that she chose to end her life over it," I hissed at him. "I can't believe you did this, Carlisle. She's in so much pain and there's nothing I can do to fix it!" He stared at me, confusion starting to invade past the self-loathing and regret he'd been stewing in only moments before.

"Why would you… oh. Oh, Edward." I glanced at him sharply.

"What?"

They're mates.

"What in the devil are you talking about? Mates? She and I aren't mates. I scared her out of her wits in there!" But even as I denied it, every cell in my body hummed at the word.

Mates.

She was mine.

I realized I'd growled out the last thought and stepped back shakily.

She belongs with him, Carlisle thought and I immediately felt guilty for the wave of disappointment and hollow loneliness that filled his thoughts.

"I'm… Carlisle, I'm so sorry. You know I want you to be happy," I whispered. He shook his head, shoving his thoughts down and covering them with others. He grabbed me in a hug and held me to him.

"You have absolutely nothing to apologize for, son. It is a beautiful thing to find the other half of one's soul. Esme is a lovely woman, even if she has endured unimaginable hardship. I would expect nothing less for someone as special as you, Edward. This is an amazing thing!" He grinned at me, so easily setting aside his own feelings and hopes for mine.

"I don't… I don't know how to help her," I admitted helplessly, staring at the house.

"I imagine something like this will heal the way it always does," he mused. I looked back at him. "With time."

"We certainly have plenty of that," I said with a huff of a laugh. He clapped me on the shoulder and led me back to the house.

"And now you have her to share it with."

I was pulled from my thoughts by the sound of Jasper's cell phone ringing. I blinked at the sunlight streaming through the windows before me, still in that little house in Wisconsin.

Esme had been a hard earned prize. Even with the ability to read her thoughts, it had felt like walking a minefield in the early days of getting to know each other, never knowing until it was too late that something would trigger her PTSD and send her into a panic attack. It had taken months of talking and sharing vulnerabilities with each other before she was willing to admit her attraction to me and act on it.

It didn't matter to me. I would have waited centuries if that's what she needed.

She'd initially disagreed with me when I rebelled against Carlisle's way of life. But even her resolve wasn't infallible and she'd agreed to trying it with me.

I hadn't told her about my plan to go after Charles.

I didn't tell her until after. I told her I wanted to hunt alone the first time in case I couldn't handle it. But then I'd gone after him. I'd done my research beforehand and found him living in the same house, suspected by the police for his new wife going missing. It had been all too easy to torture him before emptying him of his own life force, then leaving a trail for the police to make it seem like he'd run, leaving behind a note admitting his own guilt and letting them know where they could find his wife's body.

Esme hadn't spoken to me for a whole month after I did that. We didn't talk about it now, really. She'd been content to just forget about him until time did what it always did and wiped him from existence. But I hadn't been content knowing that the man who had abused my wife in every way possible was still drawing breath.

Of all the murders I committed during my rebellion, Charles was the only one that I didn't have any retroactive remorse for. While I'd justified the others to myself by choosing to prey on the lowest of criminals, after returning to Carlisle, I'd suffered the inevitable attack of conscience and found myself proudly unrepentant for making society safer for women and children but sorry that I ended their lives for my own sustenance. Had I murdered them without ever drinking a drop of blood, it might have been truly noble and not just the lie I told myself to excuse my lapse in judgment.

But not the first.

"Okay, I don't know what you're thinking about but if you keep doing that, I'm going to have to call Alice and make her come get you." I looked up at Jasper as he came into the room, sunlight reflecting off his skin and making it shine as he walked toward me. He sat in the chair across from me.

"Sorry. I think Bella changing has made us all a bit introspective about our own early days."

"It probably wouldn't if she were acting like a normal human undergoing the change. But this death-like stillness has us all freaked out." He shuddered and I shrugged.

"Maybe it's us. Maybe it's been so long since we've seen someone change that this is actually not that unusual and we just happen to be very violent transformations." He knew as well as I that there was nothing normal about Bella's change in the least.

"Or, hear me out, maybe being that close to death and that pumped up with drugs is turning her into something else," Emmett said as he came down the stairs.

"What could that possibly be," I asked indulgently.

"I don't know for sure but what if she has some weird, violent cravings."

"Doesn't every vampire wake up with violent cravings," Jasper drawled and I chuckled.

"What if it isn't for blood though," Emmett persisted. "What if it's cravings for something else?"

"Like what," I asked skeptically.

"Like… vampire flesh?" Jasper and I scoffed but Emmett held up his hands. "Hear me out. She's got anesthesia and morphine pumping through her system and on top of that, vampire venom. What if the venom is reacting to the drugs and changing her but also changing what she is so that when she wakes up, she's like a vampire killing machine?" We stared at him in absolute silence for a moment before Jasper shook his head in disbelief.

"And what, pray tell, could we possibly do to protect ourselves from such a monster," I asked Emmett blithely. He considered.

"If we buried her in the backyard and then put a cage on top of it, it might slow her down."

"Given this a lot of thought, have you," Jasper teased.

"It certainly can't hurt."

"Well, I've got nothing better to do," I said, standing and heading for the backyard and the tool shed.

"Are we really going to bury Bella alive so the first thing she wakes up to is dirt," Jasper asked me as he and Emmett followed.

"Maybe we'll just do up to her chin so we can still have a conversation with her. Maybe she can be reasoned with after she wakes up as the terrifying monster of Emmett's nightmares."

"Hey! I just think we should be open to new ideas. If vampires and werewolves and shapeshifters can exist, who's to say that other things aren't possible either?" I stepped into the tool shed and grabbed three shovels from their hooks on the wall. I came back out, handing one to Emmett and the other to Jasper.

"I think I'm going to work on this cage Emmett's suggested," Jasper said, eyeing the shovel.

"There's some rebar in there," I said blandly.

"Why do we have rebar in the shed," Jasper asked as he walked into the dimly lit structure.

"Don't ask questions you don't want the answers to," Emmett said archly and I was assaulted with images of he and Rosie using said rebar in very creative –but mostly disturbing –ways.

"Thanks a lot, Emmett. Now I need to bleach my brain in an attempt to never see that again." I shoved him as he laughed heartily. I moved to the center of the yard and began digging, driving the shovel into the grass and dirt and then flinging it aside. Emmett joined me a few feet away while Jasper carried an armful of rebar near where we were working.

"What if this isn't enough," Jasper asked after constructing half of a cage.

"Emmett should be strong enough to tackle her," I quipped and he flipped me off.

"Yeah, put me close enough to her that she can take a bite out of me and potentially infect me with some kind of mutation or virus."

"I don't think we should be letting you have unfettered access to the television anymore, Em," Jasper laughed.

"Look, if the whole world has one big food chain, it's not unreasonable to believe that something might adapt or mutate to top us."

"You think Bella is the first of a species designed to eat us," Jasper asked acerbically while I continued to dig.

Emmett was feeling what the rest of us were feeling: concerned, terrified, nervous and impatient. If this little exercise helped take his mind off the fact that Bella should be waking up in just a few hours to discover that not only had her father been brutally murdered but the only reason she hadn't joined him was because we'd changed her into a vampire without asking her first, then I would help him dig all the way to China. The exercise did a better job at keeping me calm and out of my head than sitting around had. I focused back on the argument Jasper and Emmett were currently engaged in.

"It's not big enough," Emmett criticized.

"She's just over five foot and a hundred pounds soaking wet, Emmett. It doesn't need to be your size to be effective," Jasper retorted.

"What are you doing?" We spun around to see Rosalie standing by the back of the house, arms crossed and brow raised.

"Um… we were just… digging a hole," Emmett said quietly.

"What is Jasper doing," she asked.

"He's… building a… cage."

"Why, may I be so bold as to ask, are you doing these ridiculous things?"

"We were going to… bury Bella's body up to her chin," he muttered.

"And why would you do a silly thing like that?"

"In case she wakes up as a zombie with a taste for vampire flesh." She stared at us in silence for several minutes.

"Well congratulations to you three! You've achieved ultimate immortality!"

"How'd we do that," Jasper asked cautiously.

"Because stupidity is eternal and this is the stupidest thing I've ever seen you do," she said before she started laughing. Emmett grinned and threw his shovel down, racing over to sweep his wife into his arms and kiss her soundly.

"Get a room," I shouted teasingly. Their own display was making me miss my wife even more, if that was possible.

"Alice said Bella's going to wake up in a couple of hours," Rose said once she'd pulled away from Emmett. "She asked me to be here for it so the poor thing wouldn't wake up to you three nimrods crowding her."

"So you aren't staying," Jasper asked, walking toward the house.

"I can't. I'm helping Esme with the funeral arrangements and I definitely have to be there for the funeral. I'll probably drag at least one of you with me when I go to help keep up appearances." I threw my own shovel aside and shoved my hands in my pockets. I sorted through Rosie's thoughts to see what plans had already been made while she, Emmett and Jasper preceded me into the house. I walked to my bedroom to change into clean clothes and wash the dirt off my hands. As I passed the room we'd moved Bella into, I stopped at the door, listening to the struggling beat of her heart break the silence.

Alice was right.

Just a couple hours now.

Just a couple hours and I'd have to give Bella the worst news of her life and hope she didn't hate me for it.