I find I don’t have much to say about this chapter except to thank my beta, because that is where my mind is right now. One of the great things about fan fiction is that the interaction between readers and writers opens the door for you to meet people you end up truly loving as your closest friends.
It’s not my place to say any more, but I feel the only thing appropriate to do in conjunction with this chapter is to express my extreme gratitude for her help, her guidance, and her friendship.
The Bastille was in flames, and Carlisle was exhausted.
An impossibility, he knew; his kind required no sleep and could stay in motion for weeks without feeling a single twinge of fatigue. Yet he felt as though he ought to curl up into a ball and wait for rest to bring him back to life.
But instead of rest, he got Garrett.
“We did it, English,” he said, a wide grin spreading across his face as he approached. “We forced De Launay out of power. We’ve stolen the munitions. The people will have their way. Government by the people, for the people.”
“By the people?”
“An American saying. The principle upon which we were founded. And now France shall have her democracy, too.”
It would be a long time before that happened, Carlisle thought. He peered across the yard, which was strewn with debris and carnage. Every now and then, a wailing cry would go up as some family member or friend discovered the body of a loved one lying in the grass.
Carlisle had saved the lives of dozens, it seemed. But it was nothing against the tide of the attack., and dozens more were dead despite his efforts.
He stared in silence.
“What think you, English?”
He looked up. Garrett seemed to be ready to run off any moment. His posture was erect; his eyes bright.
And the dark burgundy of one who had recently fed.
“I think there were a great many sacrifices here today,” Carlisle answered evenly.
Garrett, clearly understanding this comment, hung his head.
“It was impossible to resist,” he muttered.
“Not impossible,” Carlisle answered. “But, I accede, it is perhaps a great deal to ask of you.” He got to his feet and began to walk away from the prison. When Garrett didn’t follow at once, he beckoned to the other man.
“I do understand,” he offered kindly.
Men sat drinking outside their taverns and at the foot of barricades. Many more shops had been looted, their broken windows glinting in the fading daylight, and several buildings still smoldered.
Had Garrett’s country looked like this, Carlisle wondered? Was this revolution—dead bodies, burning buildings, wailing loved ones?
It would be a long time before France was at peace.
Carlisle continued to wander. Garrett followed him a few paces behind.
“You walk toward Italy,” the other commented after a while.
Did he? It hadn’t been his intention to particularly walk in any direction other than away. But Garrett was right; his feet had pointed him automatically toward the place from where he’d come.
He stopped short.
“Are you planning to return to Volterra, English?”
They were not yet so far from the prison that they could not still hear the shouts—some of joy, others of mourning. He allowed himself to conjure the images he’d already tried to block from his mind: the bleeding humans, the limp bodies lying in the courtyard outside the drawbridge to the prison. The bloodstained earth beneath the injured and the dying.
But humans die, he told himself at once. And they choose to do foolish things, such as attack for munitions.
Garrett cocked his head as he looked at Carlisle.
“A penny for your thoughts?”
Carlisle pursed his lips. “I am thinking of all those who died today. My knowledge was not enough to save them.”
“No one’s knowledge would have been enough to save them. And that you did save so many, when they rushed headlong into danger—and when your very instinct is the same as my own—” He shook his head, and placed a hand on Carlisle’s shoulder. “I don’t know how you did it, English. When I found you, you were literally up to your chest in human blood.”
Carlisle shrugged, but began to walk again.
“I confess I don’t know either,” he said quietly. “It was the moment, I suppose. Were I thrust into a group of bleeding humans, I would’ve had difficulty, even after all my practice in Volterra. But there was purpose to my actions. I could no more stand there idly than I could carve myself to pieces. And each time I saved someone—it made me drive harder.”
Garrett turned so that one shoulder faced the Bastille. A violent snapping sound issued from the site, and the sky glowed a pulsing orange from the flames.
“Perhaps this is what you were meant for, English,” Garrett answered, gesturing toward the site. ” Heavens knows that there are none like you, who can so freely ignore that which fuels us. Perhaps that constitution was given to you so that you could atone for the rest of us.”
Carlisle frowned, and studied the stones beneath his feet as he walked at a pace that would have been slow even for a human. This life gave him great gifts, he knew. When he thought he could get away with it, he had darted from Frenchmen to Frenchmen at his full speed; appearing before one in the same instant he left another. His eyesight allowed him to see others in distress; his ears allowed him to hear a cry for help from across a thunderous battlefield.
“I haven’t the knowledge to truly be a physician,” he muttered, but this only caused Garrett to laugh.
“Lack you the time to acquire it, my friend?” He clapped Carlisle on the shoulder. “There are medical colleges now, you know. You could study.”
How freeing that would be, Carlisle thought. Not to take his information piecemeal, as he was able to find it, nor to experiment on some humans willing to make him trades, but to sit and learn the way human physicians did. So much of what he had done had just been instinct; based only in the loosest way on his knowledge.
What if he had known more? Would more have been saved?
A grin spread across Garrett’s face as he saw Carlisle considering the idea.
“I suppose there is even medical study to be done in Italy,” he prodded. “That is, if you still wish to go there.”
Carlisle frowned. “I’m not certain I’d wish to stay in France.”
Garrett laughed. “It is not my intention to stay, either—an American diplomatic tour is unlikely to decide to try to survive another country’s unrest. And trading ships move often between the continent and the Americas.”
“Are you suggesting I return with you?”
“I cannot imagine that those who seem to consider themselves our…royalty”—he blanched at this word—”would exactly welcome you home with open arms after you declined the honor of their invitation.”
Garrett had a point, and Carlisle’s insides twisted. He’d been trying to pretend differently, but the facts were that he’d run. To the best of his knowledge had not been followed, but there was no reason to believe that he would be welcome to return as he once had been, the quiet student, sitting with Marcus and learning Greek.
Aro was no fool.
But as soon as this thought came to him, it was followed by a swirling memory of just a few short weeks before. Of Martina teasing him, calling him human, of all things, utterly unaware that she was bestowing a quality upon him which he did not possess. Of her sister, standing with her hands folded over her growing belly.
Of the tiny, strange flutter against his palm as she held his hand over where the child grew.
“You disappear often, English.”
“I’m sorry.” Carlisle took a few more steps. “I was thinking of my—” he trailed off. Did he dare call them his patients? “Of a woman I trade herbs with. She gives me new things to work with, I distill them into medicines. Or at least, I try. The art is somewhat subtler than I wish it were.”
Garrett only shook his head. “And you say you haven’t knowledge.”
“Not enough.”
“So these women—you wish to return to Volterra for them?” Garrett winked.
“I do not wish to be with either of them, if that is what you insinuate.”
Garrett guffawed. “Certainly, English.” ”
“The one—the sister—is with child. I’ve made preparations for her to handle the pains of carrying the baby, but I still worry for the birth.”
“I wouldn’t have taken you for a midwife.”
“I don’t mean to be one. But perhaps childbirth isn’t so much the work for women.”
“You would risk your life for her? Because that is what you’d do. ”
A memory flashed vividly in his mind. His day in London, only some twenty years before, standing before the tombstone which marked his parents’ graves. His finger, tracing the tip of the letter “A” on the dilapidated sandstone.
A half an “A.” All he had left of the woman who’d borne him. Her first initial? Perhaps she’d been an Anne, or an Alice? Or perhaps it was somewhere in between, in which case her name could have been anything…
What would it have been, he wondered idly, if someone more schooled had attended his birth?
I wouldn’t be standing here.
The thought felt like a physical blow.
Had his mother not died, he might have lived a different life. With siblings. With a father who was not so hardened. He would have died, what, eighty, a hundred years ago?
Died as a human.
“English?”
Garrett stared at him curiously, and Carlisle realized he’d gone silent.
“My mother died in childbirth,” was all he said.
~||x||~
Volterra July 15, 1789
Garrett’s Tuscan was awful, but Carlisle’s was impeccable, and the human guards at the city gate let them in almost without question. They claimed to be cousins, come to visit Carlisle’s sister, who was with child. The guard examined their similar build and hair colors and, after a moment, swung the gates open to allow them through.
They had stopped in several towns along their way, and discovered a ship was to sail from Naples toward Portugal in three days. From Portugal, they would bill themselves as colonists; Garrett was convinced he could pass his way onto a ship with his English. He would sail straight for Virginia, leaving Europe behind.
But first, they would stop in Volterra.
“This place reeks, Carlisle ” Garrett muttered as they skulked through the streets. Humans could not perceive it, but the city was drenched with the scent of their kind. “How many are there?”
“Three,” he answered absently. “Aro, Marcus, and Caius.”
“Not the brothers. The guard.”
He didn’t know, to be honest. The outer guard were prone to fighting amongst themselves, and their number changed regularly. Shrugging, he answered, “Dozens.”
“Dozens,” Garrett repeated, and then, more quietly, added, “Wonderful.”
The streets of Volterra were less streets than alleyways that snaked between buildings, self-directed tributaries of a stream that all flowed into the city center. It was no wonder the brothers had landed here so many millennia ago; the city itself kept its own secrets tucked away in the nooks and crannies of its twisting roads.
He didn’t know where Martina lived, much less her sister.
How many market days had he missed? He’d been in the Kingdom of France the better part of a month; he’d left before the solstice, and it was a good ways after it, now. Martina was used to him not appearing for many days in a row; his need to wait for overcast days often kept him inside. But he imagined she wondered now if he had utterly disappeared.
He was so lost in his own thoughts that he almost missed picking up the scent—lavender, willow, thyme.
An infusion.
His infusion.
“Do you find something?”
The scent was still a long ways off, but at least he could follow it—it wafted down the twisting road from some home. He started to run. It was a ways after midnight, and only in a handful of houses was there any light at all; a single candle burning its way out, or embers glowing merrily as the last remains of a dinner fire reduced the logs to ash.
Garrett moved alongside him.
“If she is in childbirth,” Carlisle said, “there will be bleeding. A great deal of it.”
“A great deal of bleeding,” the other repeated.
“You’ll need to leave.”
His companion’s s eyes had grown steadily darker as they traveled. Carlisle suspected that Garrett felt sheepish about hunting his normal prey in Carlisle’s presence—which, as far as Carlisle was concerned, was not a bad thing.
Garrett frowned. “Yet you are willing to take the risk?”
“I’ve proved myself.”
“You’ve proved yourself in the heat of battle. But in a moment where you have time to think on how the blood calls to you…”
“Shhh!”
The scent was strong. And it grew weaker by the tiniest amount, it seemed, when Carlisle stepped away from the spot where he stood. The home was modest, two stories tall, and narrow—a single window revealed a candle burned almost to its stub.
Then from the second floor came a shriek.
He pressed on the door and found it unlocked.
“Martina?” he called out softly, as Garrett slipped away.
There was an odd flurry of sound, and then a woman came shooting down the stairs. Her whole face was pulled taut, but as she laid eyes upon Carlisle, her mouth and brow relaxed.
“Dottore,” she breathed. “How did you know?”
“Know?”
“We thought for certain you had left Volterra.” She has labored for this whole day.”
“I did,” Carlisle answered, turning himself toward the stairs. Now he could hear it, a tiny, quiet whimper below what Martina could hear. A heartbeat, fluttering quickly, as though it belonged to a sprinter. And a second heartbeat, almost unhearable even to him, as fast as a candle flicker.
Another shriek.
“Is there no midwife?”
Martina stared.
“I am the midwife, She came here when her pains began. I prepared more of what you made for her, but it is nothing against the birth of a child…”
Carlisle nodded, filing that fact away in his memory. He gestured toward the stairs. “May I?”
“I imagine she would welcome you.”
They made their way up the stairs together. In a room just at the top, Annetta sat on the bed, her legs folded in front of her so that her knees made a diamond. Her face shone with sweat in the candlelight.
“Dottore,” she whispered, but it came out as a fatigued squeak.
“Carlisle,” he corrected. “Please, call me Carlisle.” He leaned in, reaching a hand to her belly. “May I?”
She nodded.
As soon as his hand made contact with her shirt, there came the discernible flutter, still strong against his palm. Instinctively, he closed his fist, as though to capture the feeling of the baby’s kick.
Both sisters looked up at him anxiously.
“He still moves,” Carlisle said quietly. “But you know that.”
Annetta nodded, and then clutched her middle and let out another wailing groan.
At once, he began to rack his mind. Childbirth was the purview of women, and so the male scholars did not often bother to write about it. But he had read a few treatments by the midwives themselves, that women could walk to coax the baby down, that they could kneel beside the bed.
“Have you walked?” he asked.
“She has walked all she is able,” Martina said. “But her waters broke hours ago…”
The waters. He didn’t know much about birthing children, but he knew that much. When the waters broke, the child appeared shortly thereafter.
Unless there was a problem.
Annetta suddenly shrieked and grabbed for her sister’s hand. Even in the dim light, Carlisle could see the ripple of the muscle under her shirt.
How foolish was he, thinking that simply dragging bodies away from the Bastille, running around making sure that the near-dead did not complete the process, qualified him to handle this?
The bed shook, and Annetta screamed.
Martina was quick. She nearly shoved her sister into a supine position on the bed, rucking up the bedclothes beneath her and yanking her shaking legs so that her feet were flat against the straw mattress. Her legs fell open as she gasped in pain.
Carlisle looked away.
Garrett had been right, He was out of his depth.
Martina fixated to where her sister would give birth, and Carlisle moved to the head of the bed and offered his hand. That much, he thought, he could do. She could squeeze his hand for hours and he would feel nothing.
Another rippling in her belly; another yell. This one was shriller. Pain, certainly, but more than that.
Fear.
Annetta’s eyes were wide as she panted.
“Can you—see—anything?”
“I do not see the baby’s head,” Martina answered evenly, frowning. “We should see him now.” She put a palm against Annetta’s belly and pushed back; her sister groaned, but nothing changed.
Annetta’s heart raced now, and the tiny flutter Carlisle had heard before seemed to slow.
“He has—to be—born!”
Another scream. This one nearly rattled the walls.
The flutter slowed even more.
An odd knot formed in Carlisle’s throat. He didn’t have the knowledge to intervene here. He would put himself at risk, have his “death wish” as Garrett put it, and mother and child would lose their lives anyway.
“Do—something,” Annetta panted.
I want to, Carlisle nearly said aloud. But he didn’t know what that could be.
“Dottore.” Martina beckoned. “Can you see?”
He actually took a step backward. Even as a vampire, among others who utterly did not share his standards of modesty, he’d never had occasion to glimpse…well, this. But if he could help…
He stepped in closer.
It didn’t resemble anything he’d read about, nor any of the vulgar drawings he’d come across in his century of life. He’d seen newborn babies, marveled at how impossibly large they seemed in comparison with a woman’s passage; but in this moment he understood. The human body was meant for this.
At once, the scientist replaced the modest Englishman. Carlisle stood, fascinated, before a shrill cry rent the air yet again.
“I should be able to see his head,” Martina said, her voice shaking.
There was flesh there, Carlisle realized. But not hair—were babies even born with hair? He thought he had seen some. The bulge was oddly small, disproportionate for what should have been the largest part of the child.
It took him a few precious seconds to realize he was seeing the child’s shoulder.
Carlisle didn’t have much knowledge of the birthing process but he knew enough. Babies were born with their heads first, to make it easy for them to fit through. Sometimes a foot would come out first, and those mothers often died.
Headfirst, mostly, feet first, sometimes…but babies could not be born sideways.
But a shoulder meant a neck, and a neck meant a head wasn’t far…
“Dottore?”
He realized he’d gone silent.
“Annetta,” he said gently, “I need to move the baby.”
Her eyes flew even wider as another of the pains ripped through her body.
“Move?”
“Yes.” And he would have to do it quickly, for with every one of her pains, the heartbeat inside her grew slower.
Another pain. Another shriek. Her hands scrabbled at the sheet, bunching it between her fingers. Tears of pain rolled down her cheeks.
He would have to use his hand…
“May I?” he asked, but she just yelled.
“Anything,” Martina said quickly, clutching her sister’s hand. “Anything! If you know what to do.”
His fingers found the shoulder—so impossibly tiny!—and he gently pressed it backward.
The fluttering heartbeat slowed.
He kept his fingers moving. He could feel bone beneath his fingertips, and then a large, round mass. And then his hand was somehow beneath the shoulder, and then the round part was in his palm…
Annetta screamed continuously now, the sheets bunched beneath her hands. But the mass in Carlisle’s palm followed his hand as he drew his arm back toward himself—a head, and shoulders, arms, a short body, and stumpy, kicking legs. He put out his other hand to catch it.
The next cry that cut the air was not Annetta’s, but came from the slime-covered creature in Carlisle’s hands.
A bark of laughter bubbled up from within him, and a wide grin spread across his face.
“Annetta,” he whispered, handing over the writhing body, “you have a baby girl.”
Annetta reached out, looking down at the baby with awe.
An odd warmth flooded through Carlisle as he sat back on his heels. This was not the rush of the Bastille; the shouting of injured people crying out for his help. This was a mother, laughing, an aunt, beaming, a new baby, crying.
“And I thought she would be a boy,” Annetta said quietly. “So strong!”
“Perhaps she will be every bit as strong as a boy,” Martina said, smiling.
When Annetta quickly took out her breast to nurse, Carlisle averted his eyes and stood.
“I should be on my way,” he muttered, but Annetta shook her head, jiggling the baby a little bit so that she quieted.
“How do I ever thank you, Dottore?”
He shook his head. “Take care of the child,” he answered. “That will be more than thanks enough.”
Annetta smiled.
Did he tell them he was leaving for good, he wondered? He hadn’t mentioned to anyone when he’d departed for France. But Martina and Annetta would miss him; would need an explanation for why he wouldn’t be here to see the girl grow. He had no sooner opened his mouth than a loud bang issued from downstairs.
At once, the smell of lavender and willow and embers on the fire disappeared, replaced with the sickly sweet perfume of his kind.
“What—” Martina barely managed, and then a tall figure appeared in the doorway.
It was Rafael.
And Carlisle was still covered in birthing fluid and blood.
He didn’t even think about springing. His mind registered the presence of the other vampire, and the next thing Carlisle knew, the floorboards were splintering beneath Rafael’s shoulders and then Carlisle was tumbling head over feet down the stairs.
Rafael’s breath came hot and wet against Carlisle’s neck as he snarled.
“Unhand him!” another voice cried.
Garrett’s voice had possibly never been so welcome a sound.
Of course, Carlisle thought. It was nighttime; the guard were out prowling, or at least some would be…had his friend given up his position, or had they insisted Garrett bring them here?
“Dottore!”
Another voice, this time, Martina’s.
The humans. The humans who were upstairs.
And the baby was there, too, still covered in its mother’s blood…
Rafael’s head jerked upward
The other vampire was stronger, there was no doubt about that. He’d been a slightly older man as a human, and was taller and better proportioned than Carlisle. But he was still new to the life. For all his strength, he did not know how to fight.
Pulling his legs up sharply beneath him, Carlisle kneed the other in the groin with enough force that he saw Rafael’s eyes roll. The momentary lapse gave him just enough time to spring to his feet.
He had never attacked another of his own kind. But he’d seen it enough; the ways the others used momentum to their advantage. Force, leverage; all these things the great physicists talked about. Book knowledge, for Carlisle, until this moment.
His hands were on Rafael’s head in an instant, one palm at the forehead, another at the chin. And then he thrust outward with both elbows at once, torqueing the neck in opposite directions. A sickening crack, then the head went skittering and bouncing across the floor.
Martina screamed.
Garrett descended on the body before Carlisle had even changed his posture, and in a fraction of a second, had twisted off one of the arms. In the blink of an eye, the two reduced the body to only a torso.
It was only when the other was in pieces that Carlisle stood. He faced the woman on the stairs. In the firelight, he could see Garrett’s eyes flickering, the dark ruby every bit as shocking to Carlisle as he was sure it did to Martina.
“Martina,” he mumbled.
But she was already sobbing.
Garrett nudged him, cocking his head from the body to the fireplace.
The fireplace. Of course.
The head went first, followed by the arms; the venom which ran through the others body igniting like lamp oil and sending an odd, purple smoke into the chimney. He watched it, mesmerized, as Garrett made quick work of the rest of the body; ripping it into pieces small enough to fit.
It wasn’t until the last body part crackled on the fire that Carlisle turned again to Martina.
“Martina,” he said quietly. “I’m sorry…”
But she simply stared, wide-eyed.
Carlisle’s heart seemed to leap into his throat as he realized the severity of what he’d done. Destroyed a guard. Killed another of his kind. And exposed himself.
He began to back away from her. “Please,” he said quietly. “Please do not tell anyone what happened here. You are safe, but I must go. I won’t be back.”
She shook her head furiously, and he winced, waiting for the damning words. For her to take up a cross and chase him from the house as the demon he was.
But when her trembling lips parted, she mumbled, “Benefico.”
Benefico? He blinked. He had just murdered a being in front of her, not merely murdered, but dismembered and torched him, and she called him good?
Carlisle gaped, but Martina was nodding. “Stregone benefico,” she repeated.
The knot in his throat dissolved. A demon, yes. She saw him for who he was. But she also saw him for what he’d done…and why.
He nodded. “Take care of the baby,” he said. “Take care of your sister. And if anyone asks—”
“I attended my sister alone,” she whispered.
Garrett shifted nervously from foot to foot near the door, in a posture as though ready to run at any moment.
Carlisle looked out the window. The street was still dark, but that didn’t mean that more of Rafael’s comrades weren’t on their way to find them. “We have to leave. Please, Martina—”
She lifted a finger to her lips. “No words.”
Carlisle nodded, backing toward Garrett. The two of them had already turned toward the door when she spoke again.
“Dottore?”
He turned.
“May God go with you.”
It was not at all what he expected. He, who had just sullied himself, even if in service to another, and who was now needing to run to the other side of the earth—and she was wishing God to be in his midst?
“Thank you,” he choked. “Goodbye.”
Then he and Garrett rushed into the night.
~||x||~
Naples July 18, 1789
Naples reminded Carlisle of what little he could remember of the East End of London. , Sailors’ rowdy behavior as they flowed into the city’s taverns. The clanging of ship bells, the rhythmic slap of sea at high tide against the sides of the ships.
“Are you ready, English?” Garrett asked, cocking his head toward the docks. The two had sat in shade the better part of the afternoon, waiting for the sun to disappear on the horizon. Now its rays were gone, leaving only its ephemeral glow in the sky.
It was time.
He and Garrett had fled Volterra in a single sprint that took them all the way to the south of the country. They ran as much of their path as they could in rivers and streams, in hopes that the water would wash away their scent, and when they reached the coast, they even dove into the sea and swam for several hours. .
It had worked. They’d waited here two days for their ship, their fares negotiated under a ruse: Garrett, the wealthy American landowner, would bring the Englishman back as his indentured servant. In the time they’d been here, they’d seen not another of their kind.
Whatever had been sent after them in Volterra, it had not followed them here.
Together they made their way across the busy street to the dock below.
When Garrett gave their names to the shipmaster, however, the man looked surprised.
“Cullen?” he said, eyeing Carlisle suspiciously.
Carlisle gulped, but managed to squeak, “I am he. Is something the matter?
The shipmaster shook his head. “Simply that you have a trunk there. Sent for you.”
A trunk? Carlisle looked where he gestured. Sure enough, a hulking trunk sat next to a pile of freshly-caught fish; on its side was hastily painted the name “Cullen.”
He frowned.
“It’s been here a day,” the shipmaster answered his unasked question.
It had been a long time since Carlisle had been on the water, and the way the floor rolled beneath his feet, even with the ship safely in port, made him uneasy. But he and Garrett made his way over to the trunk. He swung open the lid, and together, they peered inside.
There were only a few items inside. Several sets of shirts and pants and a pair of sturdy shoes. A hulking wooden cross, the edges an intricate twisted pattern, burnished smooth from the century-plus that it had hung in the parsonage in London’s East End. A mortar and pestle, tucked into the bottom corner where they would not jostle around the rest of the trunk. Tiny pouches of herbs, gathered into a large sack which had come open at the top so that some spilled over the lip.
And a large, rectangular item, wrapped in cloth. Carlisle reached for this, unfolding one corner so as to expose the contents of the package. A single slip of paper fell out.
Garrett peered over Carlisle’s shoulder, craning to find the identity of the sender. But Carlisle had no need to read the signature, or even truly the note. He held it up anyway.
A few things for your continued journey, Young One
He handed the note to Garrett as he unfolded the larger package. Beneath the cloth sat the painting; the Italian painter’s vision of him as god, gazing without compassion on those below. Carlisle’s eyes, half-closed as though he derived some sort of pleasure from the chaos of humanity beneath him.
An expression, he thought, he would never take on.
Garrett folded the paper carefully, and thrust it back. Carlisle didn’t take it, however, and Garrett slid the paper into his own pocket, instead.
“He is wishing you well?” he asked.
Carlisle shook his head.
“He is reminding me that he can find me at will,” he answered.
And yet, Carlisle thought, he was also saying something. He could have sent an ambush. One of the guard who supported Rafael; who would want to see Carlisle destroyed for what he’d done. And he had not done that. He had sent along Carlisle’s things, and a gift.
“It makes you fascinating,” Aro had said of Carlisle’s work. “And I enjoy fascination.”
He was valuable. Perhaps only in that he was willing to defy them, but Aro was strange that way. Sycophantic adoration was not what he most desired from his followers. Carlisle had presented him a challenge, and this trunk seemed to be Aro’s way of saying, “I accept.”
When would they meet again, Carlisle wondered? Decades from now? Centuries? And who would he be, then?
The sky was beginning to darken, inky black overtaking the greyish tint of twilight. A handful of stars had begun to appear.
“I won’t return to Volterra,” Carlisle muttered.
“As you shouldn’t,” Garrett answered, nodding. “My country awaits, English.”
“I’ll be an American.” Carlisle said, finally.
Garrett laughed. “You’ll be Carlisle, Friend. And I think that’s definition enough.”
He smiled.
They stood on deck until the sky went dark. Then, under the moonlight, they hauled the trunk to their berths and prepared to set sail.
The influenza, the utter devastation, the quiet Chicago streets, losing Dorothy—it had all caused him to take temporary leave of his faculties. Yes, he’d considered this before, creating the companion he wanted. But he’d imagined perhaps a mate, if he were ever capable of falling for one, or at the least a man his age.
Not a seventeen-year-old boy.
This was crazy.
No one had seen him racing through the cold night; for once, the influenza and its utter evacuation of Chicago’s streets had played in his favor. And he’d traveled the rooftops, at his full strength and speed, the wind whipping his hair as he clutched the feverish body to his chest. When he reached home, slowing to climb the stairs like a human was agonizing.
He laid the boy on his bed gently, as though the body with its spindly limbs might break if it landed too hard. At once, the boy coughed, blood spattering the quilt and dripping down his chin. Carlisle immediately began searching for a rag. There were none, of course. He didn’t have use for such things.
He was so utterly unprepared.
Stripping off his shirt, Carlisle used it to wipe the boy’s face, earning another incoherent moan. His shirt became a gooey red mess, so much like the rags at the hospital. The ones Carlisle had learned to ignore with such ease.
But the boy wouldn’t, not right away.
All the bloodstained clothing. The blankets. The mattress. He would need to burn it all, before the boy awoke.
And if that wasn’t enough?
Carlisle’s stomach wrenched. What if he didn’t want to stay? What if he ran? Newborn vampires were impossible to control at times. And always, always stronger than their sires. If Edward ran, Carlisle would be helpless to stop him.
He had to take the boy back to the hospital.
Carlisle’s was already reaching for the slim body when Edward uttered a long, gurgling wheeze.
He didn’t have the lung volume to cough any longer.
Which meant he would die before Carlisle could return him anywhere.
“Oh, God,” he moaned.
If he waited, the boy would die in his apartment. If he tried to take him back to the hospital, could he ensure he was able to steal his way in as easily as he’d gotten out? If he turned him, how could he ensure he would create a man and not a monster?
He’d gone insane.
Carlisle had been to the asylums not so long ago. Rooms not too much unlike his own, in fact, if one removed his chair and his artwork and the cheery quilt. A single, creaking bed, perhaps a sink, the same mice and cockroaches fighting to make their way inside. The same bare bulb hanging from the same cracked ceiling.
And the same, single occupant. Solitary confinement. In the asylums, they used it for the most severe punishment. To drive the worst of the worst to their very brink. The patients went mad in as little as a few days.
Of course, he wasn’t human, he corrected at once. But the differences between humans and him were not absolute. They were always an order of magnitude. He was stronger, faster. It simply took more force to kill him; but he could be killed.
Perhaps it was simply that for him, madness had taken centuries instead of days.
He backed away from the bed and its shivering occupant.
He didn’t even know how this was done. His own attack had been so furious and fast—he remembered falling onto his back, remembered the pain ripping into his shoulder and racing down his arm. And of course, he had the wounds: two ragged crescents where his neck met his collarbone.
It had hurt. A lot.
It would be reckless to inflict that pain on Edward.
Shaking his head, he moved again to the bed. He would take the boy back. That would be best. Edward would no doubt die in his arms, but he would simply carry the boy into the hospital as though he’d come from another staircase, take him down to the morgue, and lay him next to his mother.
His arms were reaching for the boy when the green eyes snapped open. They were still hazy with fever, unable to focus. But his grip on Carlisle’s arm was surprisingly strong.
“Please,” he croaked. “Please.”
Please.
His mother’s final word.
Please save him. Do everything in Carlisle’s power. Save the boy, don’t let him die. Don’t let Edward Masen die.
Edward Cullen.
The name flashed in his mind, unbidden, and startled him.
Edward Cullen.
It was a name of arrival. A name that implied a companionship, a name that made a family where now there was only a boy on a bed and a terrified vampire.
It was a name of hope.
Edward’s plea threw his body into convulsions. He shook on the bed with such force the legs rattled against the floor. His breathing came in tiny, choking gasps, like a doomed swimmer barely keeping his head above water.
He was drowning in his own lungs
Kneeling beside the bed, Carlisle ran his palm down Edward’s face. As always, he turned into the coolness, and at once, Carlisle took both sides of Edward’s face in his hands. He leaned over, putting his face so close to Edward’s that he could feel the wet heat of the boy’s breath.
The green eyes opened again.
“Edward?” Carlisle asked.
A blink.
“Edward, do you want me to save you?”
And there it was. Almost imperceptible, but still there. A nod.
And then unexpectedly, the parched body did what it wasn’t supposed to do. Every fraction of an ounce of water should have been conserved, every fluid retained.
But instead the green eyes went glassy, and out of the corner of Edward’s eye a single tear formed. Carlisle watched as it rolled slowly across the pale cheek, down to the bedsheet beneath, where it disappeared into a tiny dark splotch.
Laying a hand on Edward’s cheek, Carlisle wiped where the tear had fallen with his thumb.
“You’re certain?”
Another nod.
This time, Carlisle nodded back. Gripping Edward’s chin in one hand to expose his neck, he leaned forward once more.
Edward Cullen.
The name of his brother?
The name of his son?
“I am sorry,” Carlisle whispered. “Please, please forgive me, Edward. I am so alone.”
And then, for the first time in his entire existence, Carlisle’s teeth pierced human flesh.
~||x||~
It was the screaming which made him stop. Not the hands clawing at his face, for he couldn’t feel those, and not the body twisting its way out of his grip. And even with the screaming, it took several moments for him to even truly hear it, to register it as a sound of distress, and to recognize that he was the cause…
Carlisle flung himself against the wall with such force the plaster chipped around his body and little white flecks rained to the floor.
He was drinking from a human. He was killing a human.
But Edward isn’t dead, his mind told him just as quickly. He’s still screaming.
And there was still the soft whisper of blood through the valves of the heart.
Swish-thump. Swish-thump.
Edward kept right on screaming.
Lifting a trembling hand to his face, Carlisle wiped his lips. His hand came away sticky and red, making his stomach roil.
I could have killed him, he thought.
He very nearly had.
Aro had been right. To smell human blood was one thing; to taste it, however, was beyond incredible. Sweet, filling, rich. Unconsciously, a hand drifted to his throat. It burned, but not simply with the usual discomfort of having gone too long without feeding. It burned as it had when he’d first been created. Please, it seemed to call him. Please finish him off.
And he wanted to.
It wouldn’t be the end of the world. His kind had killed humans for millennia. He had abstained for almost three hundred years.
One wouldn’t matter, would it?
It was only when the iron sink broke from the wall and crashed to the floor that he realized he’d even grabbed it. Water spurted from the wall, and at once, he began scrabbling for the pipe valve. Even though he found it in inhuman time, his pants still became soaked.
The water, however, cleared his head just enough. At once, he moved to the lone window, flinging open the sash so that the frigid night air rushed in. The scent of the blood lessened at once. Not to the point that it dulled his thirst, but at least enough so that he could think…
Edward let out a guttural yell, making Carlisle wince. He remembered this; the way the venom worked its way through the body, taking it over section by section. That every now and then it would make a jump that seemed monumental, that intensified the pain seemingly a hundredfold. Two hundred fifty years ago, he hadn’t known why, but now he could imagine—the venom flowing through the bloodstream, through the capillaries to the veins and then—whoosh—into an artery, where it would behave like a car sent out onto a speedway.
It was this thought which brought him back. Simply cataloging the direction that the venom would travel, from the neck to the heart to the torso, to the legs…
He again became the doctor. At once, he glanced at the clock. How long had it been? How much blood had the boy lost?
How much blood did you drink from him was what you meant to ask. His stomach twisted with guilt.
The bed creaked as Edward writhed, and slowly, Carlisle crept back across the room. One step at a time, taking a deep breath with each step, stopping, making himself accustomed, just as he once had in France and Italy.
It took him nearly five minutes to cross the room.
It took him another five to take Edward’s hand.
He remembered a small bit of this; that he’d been able to discern place, smells, the utter lack of people. The way, even in his pain he’d found the pile of rotten turnips, with their nauseatingly sweet smell, and crawled between them to hide. That even while he contemplated his own demise, he’d been able to think—to question if he were in Hell, or if anyone would come to find him, or what his father might do were he found. He remembered the darkness that slowly became light. Not because the larder in which he lay became lit, but because his eyes became able to see.
And he had heard everything.
“Edward,” he whispered. “Edward, it’s all right. I know it’s painful.”
Edward only gasped in answer. The grip on Carlisle’s hand became stronger.
Was it his imagination that the boy’s strength was already beginning to match his own?
Already Edward’s blood was changing; Carlisle could smell it. The change was ever so subtle, but it was there—the edge of his thirst taken off. Dulled, not as painful as before.
Gently he released Edward’s hand. At once, the boy’s hand groped, the fingers opening and closing ineffectually in the air.
He was reaching for Carlisle.
Carlisle grabbed his hand again and squeezed it. “I’ll stay with you,” he said. “I promise.”
Letting go of the boy’s hand, Carlisle crossed the room. The sink sat on the floor, the pipe broken in half. Above it was the mirror, and even through the dust, Carlisle could see an image which made him sick—his eyes, sunken and haggard-looking as always, but now an odd reddish-gold. Not the color of his compatriots’ in Volterra, but not his own, either.
He looked like a monster.
Would it go away by the time Edward awoke? How much human blood did one need to ingest in order for the red color to stay? And how much, exactly, had he ingested, anyway?
The sink basin screeched in protest as Carlisle pushed it across the floor. Edward grunted and cried out. At once, Carlisle flew back to his side, grasping the pale hand once again.
The boy’s next groan came through clenched teeth, which amazed Carlisle. Even in the midst of this, the boy was trying to remain strong. But then, he, too, had clenched his jaw, kept himself from crying out, for fear of being found.
It seemed Edward had more in common with him than he thought.
Carlisle ran a hand through the sweaty hair, and Edward curled toward him slightly. As though he recognized him, as though he wanted to be near him.
But why would he want that?
“I—I’m an awful man, Edward,” he whispered. “You didn’t deserve this, and I’m sorry.”
Because truly, how could he explain this?
He could tell the boy what he’d been through, he thought. It would be a series of pitiful excuses, no doubt, for at what point did one justify murder?
And even if he could justify this, where did one even begin? When had it been, exactly, that his life had drifted so far as to lead him here, in an apartment with a boy he’d just bitten.
Carlisle leaned against the bed, the cold metal digging into his bare back.
Swish-thump. Swish-thump.
The blood still flowed. Faintly, quietly, the heart still beat.
He leaned his head next to the body on the bed, so that his hair touched Edward’s skin. “I’m sorry,” he said again, because that seemed as good a start as any. And then he decided to begin at the only place that made sense.
“Edward, I was born in England,” he began, and his voice cracked. “Centuries ago—I know that’s hard to believe. It was during Cromwell’s rule. And my mother died giving birth to me…”
And as Carlisle sat listening to the boy’s beating heart, he began to talk.
~||x||~
On the second day, just before sunrise, Carlisle stopped talking. He stood, threw the bedclothes and his shirt in the sink basin and carefully set them on fire.
His eyes looked less red, he thought, but perhaps that was just a trick of the firelight.
When the blood was nothing more than a pile of ash in the broken sink, he returned to the bed. There was enough room for him, he thought, between Edward’s body and the wall. So he lay down on the bed, too, and started talking again.
In the evening, he stopped talking long enough to examine Edward’s body. The bite had already closed itself, becoming two thin crescent-shaped scars. The pale skin was becoming less pliant, the once-weakened muscles more defined.
He laid two fingers just below Edward’s jaw and felt the gentle throb of the pulse.
The morning of the third day, Carlisle stopped abruptly in the middle of the explanation about Jean-Jaques, and how he’d wound up in Volterra.
Edward had been in the hospital for the better part of a week, and in the infirmary several days before that. His body was yet immature enough that the resultant beard was patchy and almost nonexistent, but it was there. And it would be more easily removed while Edward was still at least partially human.
Carlisle opened his center desk drawer. He’d bought one of the new Gillette razors from the druggist some years ago. He did this, sometimes—bought an item simply out of intrigue for the invention.
He’d never thought he would have occasion to use it.
He had no water or shave cream, but it wouldn’t matter in the long run. Edward thrashed as Carlisle shaved him. Carlisle cut his face several times
The skin healed at once.
In the evening, Carlisle lifted Edward with one arm, and put fresh sheets on the bare mattress.
He burned the old ones.
When he returned to the freshly-made bed, he put his arms around the thin body and continued to talk.
It was the fourth day that Carlisle reached Cook County Hospital in his story, with the woman with the green eyes.
“She intrigued me,” he said to the boy in his arms. “And I don’t know why. You’ll think I’m crazy.”
Was it his imagination that the heart beat faster?
“She reminded me…”
He stopped. Because that was it. He couldn’t say what Elizabeth reminded him of; or whom, just that something about her felt familiar. Just that something had drawn him to her, caused him to change his very nature—to do the unthinkable…
No, he wasn’t imagining it. The boy—Edward, Carlisle had to start using his name—lay gasping in slow, rattling breaths, his heart speeding.
Was that right? Was there something wrong?
“Edward?”
The heart thrummed faster, and Edward began to tremble.
“Edward?”
There came an odd choking noise, and Edward drew one breath—a long high-pitched gasp that hung on the air. Then came the low, long whoosh of the diaphragm going slack, of the lungs emptying completely.
Swish.
Thump.
And then the heart was still.
Carlisle froze. It was their nature, this stillness. Over the years, he’d taught himself to fidget; to shake his leg, to shift his weight from foot to foot. But the reality was, his kind had no need to move, unless they intended to.
So they both were still.
The clock on the bookshelf ticked off several seconds.
It wasn’t until now, with the boy as silent as his own, that Carlisle even realized how full of sound Edward’s body had been; the pumping heart, the breathing, the rasping of mucous in the back of his throat. He’d vomited about twelve hours after Carlisle brought him home, and that, too, had been noisy.
But now there was nothing.
The human boy was gone.
Carlisle didn’t even realize Edward had opened his eyes until he pulled away and sat up. His hair was tousled, standing straight up in the back. He blinked.
At once, Carlisle pulled his arms back to himself, but an imprint remained; the ghost of the body that had been in his arms still exerting a strange pressure on his muscles even as the boy himself made as though to stand.
Then Edward turned, and Carlisle gasped.
He’d forgotten about the eyes. Even as he’d worried about his own countenance, he’d forgotten to consider Edward’s. The last time he’d seen someone new to the life had been at least a century before, and it had been decades since he’d seen another besides himself.
As foolish as it was, a part of him had expected the boy to turn to him with the same bottle-green eyes that had so captured his attention a month before.
Instead, they burned red, the crimson of the new to this life, the remains of the human blood still very much in this no-longer functioning body.
Edward blinked. For a moment, his lips moved, but no sound came out. A moment later, however, he found his voice, and spoke.
“You are so sad,” he said, frowning. “Why are you so sad?”
“Sad?” If anything, Carlisle was panicking. Was Edward all right? What made him think he was sad?
“Because you said so. I felt it—how did you do that?”
How had he done what, exactly?
Carlisle’s mind began to race. No, he wasn’t sad, certainly. He was terrified. He reached out and took Edward’s arm. It was muscled, strong—no longer the weak arm of the dying boy he’d known. Edward would be stronger than him for the better part of a year. What if he wasn’t able to control him? What if Edward ran away? What if the Brothers stepped in to destroy him?
But the boy was scared.
Carlisle pulled himself upright, and planned to affect his most soothing bedside manner possible.
“I didn’t do anything, Edward. What is it, exactly, that you are hearing?”
Edward pulled himself away slightly, his knees curling toward his chest.
“I don’t want to run away,” he said quietly.
He didn’t want to run away?
Had Carlisle said that aloud?
Aro’s face swam in his mind. The smug look of their leader in Volterra, as he read the thoughts of another unsuspecting vampire.
Carlisle dropped Edward’s arm as though it was on fire.
How appropriate, he thought. In such an unbelievably eerie way. Of course, he, who had begged for a companion, who longed to be known, would be sent a young man from whom he could hide nothing. He, who had fled from the constant assault on his privacy that Aro’s gift presented, now found himself a continent and nearly a century and a half away, only to find someone with the exact same gift.
His mind went a million directions at once. It meant he would need to be careful with what he said in his mind, censor his thoughts so as not to overwhelm Edward.
He let his voice take on the most soothing tone he could muster. “I’m glad you don’t want to run away,” he said quietly. “You will be safer here, with me.”
The young man curled himself away from Carlisle again, staring up at him warily. “Who did you leave? And what gift? Where am I?”
Carlisle frowned. Edward was now entirely curled up on himself, his knees locked to his chest, his bony elbows sticking out as he clasped his arms around his legs.
He looked terrified.
Did he notice how fast his body moved? Carlisle wondered. Did he feel that somehow this posture in which he sat was easier to achieve than it had been before?
Did he notice that he was still hearing?
“You’re still talking; of course I’m still hearing you,” Edward snapped. “Dr. Cullen, what happened to me?”
For over two hundred years, Carlisle had been alone, trapped with his own thoughts. But there would be no way to hide himself from Edward. He’d prayed for a companion, and had instead been sent a telepath…
“Sent a what?” Edward said, his eyes wide.
Carlisle took a step back. How jumbled it must sound, the way his mind reeled out of control. All his fears and his hopes, and his desire to take care of this boy, all crashing like a weight—
His loneliness.
His stomach wrenched.
He had for four days been telling Edward his story; pitiful excuse as it was for what he had done to the boy. And through that ran the undercurrent of his very existence; his inability to find another who could share his way of life, the way he’d meandered from country to country, seeking out others like himself, only to be thwarted at every turn.
It was crushing to live with, and now he’d begun his companion’s existence by thrusting all that pain onto him.
I felt it, Edward’s voice said in his mind. Why are you so sad?
Carlisle’s hand found Edward’s shoulder. He could see there the pale crescent of his own teeth on the boy’s neck above his thumb. He stroked this area gently, closing his eyes as he remembered, letting his mind flood with the concern he already felt. He knew, now, that Edward would see it with him, and so he allowed his mind to wander, from the bite, to Carlisle’s recoiling from Edward’s writhing body, to the four days spent caring for him while he underwent his transformation.
To the room at Cook County Hospital; to his discovery of how Edward’s mother cared for him even to the point that she’d fallen against his bed. Edward winced, but at once Carlisle showed him the memory of the night he came to find Elizabeth singing to him.
Edward’s eyes widened, and then squeezed closed, as though he was trying to stem the tide of tears. Tears which, Carlisle knew, would never come.
Carlisle took him back even further, from the hospital to the armory. He felt again the sinking feeling, the terror that he would not be able to help the unconscious boy. And so Edward felt it, too.
And then the concern which had ripped through Carlisle the moment he took the lanky body into his own arms; as he had clutched the boy to his chest, and felt himself flood with feelings he barely had names for.
Tracing the scar on Edward’s neck, he repeated these feelings, allowing himself to attempt to understand it, even as he allowed Edward to peer in at the mess of thoughts. Joy at having found a companion? Fear for what the future held for them both? The sadness and shame, crashing over him, for what he had done? The deep, guttural happiness that Edward had said he didn’t want to leave?
Edward’s posture relaxed ever so slightly, and his eyes fluttered closed again.
Dr. Cullen. Edward had called him Dr. Cullen. Which meant, that for whatever else might be falling to pieces in his mind, he remembered being treated. Perhaps he remembered that Carlisle had been a benevolent force, someone who cared about him and cared for him.
Did he dare hope for that?
Carlisle let his mind continue on. From the armory to the morgue, four nights ago, as he wrapped Elizabeth. As he made his promise to her.
“I will take care of him. I will never leave him.”
Edward shivered, and Carlisle squeezed his shoulder.
He couldn’t take the place of Elizabeth. There was no way for him to do that. But he could be whatever it was that Edward found he needed. He could be a friend.
And a friend was what he’d waited almost three hundred years to have.
He moved closer. “Edward,” he said, “there’s much I need to tell you. But to begin, you should probably start calling me Carlisle…”
Then, both aloud and through his mind, Carlisle opened up to his friend.
(I posted this to my tumblr last night, but I think it bears repeating as the notes to this chapter.)
I always find myself amused by what I feel the urge to listen to while I’m editing or writing a particular chapter or scene. I don’t have a set “soundtrack” to anything, and one gift I always ask for are iTunes gift cards so that I always have a balance ready to purchase exactly the song I want for any particular moment of writing.
When I sat down to edit chapter 26, I knew I needed to listen to Andrew Lloyd Webber’s setting of “Pie Jesu.” sung by a boy soprano. It’s a beautiful piece, and something told me this was the piece for this chapter. So I dug around on iTunes until I found a setting I liked, and then put it on one-song repeat.
I had never in my life looked up the meaning of the Latin in this piece, until the moment when I knew *this* was the song I needed to hear as I worked on this chapter. I just knew that I liked it, and that I needed it to do these edits.
This is the translation:
Lord Jesus Who takes on the sins of the world Give them rest
Lamb of God Who takes on the sins of the world Give them rest Everlasting rest
Call me a crazy author, but I think the urge to listen to that was Carlisle. Telling me exactly what he wanted to say to Edward in his turning.
(It was also eerily appropriate given the tragedy in Connecticut yesterday, and these words certainly apply there, as well.)
I posted this one without sending it to my beta to stay on track with getting SB up in December, but she is never undeserving of my thanks. Openhome sits on my shoulder even when I’m self-editing, going, “You’ve already said that three times, move along.”
There were two hundred seventy-eight cracks on the bedroom wall.
Lately, Carlisle had ample time to count.
The weight of Elizabeth’s body lingered on his forearms, as though she lay there as a phantom, even in death. Witches were to be purified after they hanged, but Carlisle was stronger and faster than his father and amid the chaos at Tyburn, he’d cut down his beloved and, weeping, delivered her body into her brother’s arms instead.
Her mother, who stood there screaming, slapped him.
Carlisle stumbled home in a daze, went immediately to the second floor, stripped to his shirt, yanked out the trundle, and crawled under the quilt.
That had been days ago.
He had nightmares. Nightmares which began as wonderful dreams; he was married, he had a child, and then the world would literally fall apart, chasms opening in the earth and ripping his family away from him. He dreamed he failed at Tyburn, and watched the surgeons take Elizabeth’s body, screaming as they cut into her. He would cry out in his slumber and awaken himself, only realize that the nightmares were true.
So he tried not to sleep.
His father acted oddly. At times he came into the room and hollered, demanding that Carlisle pull himself out of the spells “that woman” had cast upon him. Other times, when he seemed to think Carlisle was asleep, he prayed over him, stroking his hair and neck with a tenderness Carlisle had never before experienced.
But Carlisle didn’t move.
One afternoon the door opened, and it wasn’t William.
“Eight days, Friend,” Thomas said, as he crept into the room.”Eight days you’ve been here.”
Carlisle opened his eyes. Eight days? He supposed that was possible. He blinked.
Thomas bent over and made eye contact. “So you are awake. Your father said he was uncertain.”
Carlisle didn’t answer.
Thomas sat down on the floor, folding his legs beneath him. He spoke to Carlisle as though he were having a conversation, despite receiving no answer from the still being on the trundle bed.
“You once knew this, but I do not know if you are even aware the date any longer,” he said. “Anne and I will wed the day after tomorrow. We both would wish to see you there.”
The wedding. Of course. Carlisle’s stomach knotted.
“I realize it is a great deal to ask,” Thomas went on, “and that you must take time to grieve your own loss. But we would like it if you were there. Life will move on from this day, my friend. No matter how improbable that feels at this time, it will. You will move on.”
Carlisle swallowed. He didn’t want to move on. He wanted to die. And he was getting there, partially, he thought. Not eating made him weak, weakness made him ill.
How long would it take for hunger to kill him, he wondered. A fortnight? A month?
As though Thomas had read his mind, he said, “You cannot expect to starve yourself to death, Carlisle. For one thing, it is unlikely to work, and for another, what kind of revenge does that take on your father? If you die, he gets his way.”
Except that William Cullen would die before long also. And then what? The world would be left up to its own devices.
That would be fine.
His friend met his eyes, brown upon blue, and Thomas reached out and squeezed his shoulder.
“Carlisle, please do not be foolish. I will see you at my wedding.”
Then he stood, and was gone.
Thomas’s words swam in and out of Carlisle’s consciousness.
“It is a great deal to ask…you will move on…do not be foolish…what kind of revenge does that take?”
He hung on that word. Revenge.
Carlisle wasn’t a vengeful person. In fact, if anything, his easygoing temper had always been his undoing; something which his father struggled to beat out of him. He wasn’t prone to angry outbursts; he wasn’t prone to deciding who was with God and who was not.
And so death had occurred to him before revenge.
He still did not move, simply lying there and staring at the wall while he thought. It was nearly nightfall before he understood how to undermine the force that was the Reverend William Cullen.
As he climbed out of bed for the first time in over a week, the first thing Carlisle reached for was his chisel.
~||x||~
The congregation was large and joyous, and Thomas Milner and his betrothed both looked radiant. William couldn’t help but to beam as he began to pray over them.
The prayer came easily; he’d said these words so many times before. But as he looked up into the congregation, his voice cracked ever so slightly. Thomas Milner had come to their home two days before, and had spoken to Young William, asking him to come join in the wedding festivities. And so the boy was here, shaven and in clean clothes, but there was no joy in the lines of his face. Instead, the blue eyes stared blankly, as dull as his mother’s had been the day that she’d died.
One of his hands clenched involuntarily as he stared out into the congregation. The witch on Ratcliffe Road confessed, and she implicated her coven: the Bradshawe girl and two others. It was of no consequence that his child had fallen for one of them. If anything, he’d saved his son.
Someday, he thought, Young William would see this.
He just hoped he would be around to appreciate it when it happened.
“…we proclaim you married, in this day, the twenty-seventh of June, Anno Domini sixteen hundred and sixty-seven,” he heard himself say, and this startled him. Somehow, he had reached the end of the service, without thinking a whit about either what he was doing or the bride and bridegroom.
The couple embraced each other, and the congregation cheered, and the next thing William was aware, people were standing and flocking to congratulate the two and rib them both about their wedding night. William smiled broadly but insincerely, as he found himself searching the congregation for his own child.
A sharp pang shot through him when he finally saw the boy. He had not moved an inch, simply allowed the men around him to clamber over him into the aisle.
And instead of standing and cheering, he sat completely still, his arms crossed over himself, tears rolling down his cheeks.
William looked away.
It was late afternoon by the time William returned to the parsonage. Young William had not appeared at the tavern for lunch. Probably for the better, as the laughter and singing and general merriment would’ve been spoiled by such a sullen presence. A few times during the celebration, William caught Thomas Milner’s eye. The groom scouted William’s vicinity as though expecting to see the younger Cullen at any point.
William had only shrugged.
When he entered the house, the scent of stewing pottage met him at the door. He looked to the table to find his place set with a bowl and flagon of beer.
William’s pace slowed as he entered the room. It had been, what, a week or more since his son had spoken to him? And the last words they’d exchanged had been screaming… He winced as he recalled the kitchen items flying at him, and at once he began to tally the things which were available for his son to throw—the pot, the ladle, the bowl, the cross…
The cross?
He stared. No, not the same cross. This one was subtly different, and more impressive. Three different colors of wood ran through the upright; the edges were finished with a twisting design. The Geneva doctrines required simplicity, a rejection of the extravagance of both the Catholic church and now even of the Church of England. This new cross flirted carefully with that line; just ornate enough to be interesting, and yet simple enough to warrant a place in their home.
He had always thought his son’s insistence on carpentry to be merely a diversion, a childish, recalcitrant way to delay the inevitable decision to attend seminary and follow in his father’s footsteps.
This cross, however, was the work of an artist.
“Thou hast made a new cross,” he said, approaching it cautiously. His son shrank back defensively, but then nodded.
William examined it more closely. The design on the edges appeared as though it were a wooden rope, drawing to mind the crucifixion without making it overt. Subtle beauty, and superior craft.
“It is beautiful,” he said, reaching out to touch the wood. “Mr. Tyne has taught you well.”
He studied his son’s face for a reaction, but the boy’s expression remained stony. The blue eyes were blank.
Was this to be taken as a peace offering?
The table, he realized, was not set for two.
“Thank you, William,” he said quietly. “This quite makes up for the other.”
A snort.
William gestured to the table. “Will you have supper with me?”
The boy shook his head.
He wasn’t sure what to do. He settled for bringing his bowl to the pot of stew, and ladling out a portion for himself. It wasn’t until he returned to the table and sat down that his son finally spoke.
“I wish to take over the raids, Father,” he said.
Take over the raids?
“I beg thy pardon?”
His son shook his head. “You heard me. Your health is compromised.”
William’s spoon fell into his bowl with a loud clank. For a moment, he only stared.
“And thy opposition to punishing evil?”
“There is no evil.”
He should’ve expected as much. “William—”
His son’s fist dropped to the table with such force the bowl clattered. “There is no evil!”
Then he gulped, and took a step back.
“But you are right about one thing,” he said. “I must prove you so. And I will. I shall take over the raids.”
“This is about the woman.”
“Her name was Elizabeth.”
William winced.
“Fear you hearing the names of the innocents you’ve killed? I cannot imagine why.”
His son circled him now, coming around to the other side of the table. Instinctively, William pulled his bowl toward himself.
“I do not plan to throw things, Father,” he said. “Not today. But you are a man of faith. Surely, if God intends for you to find evil, I will find it also. If you are right that you follow His path, then He will make sure that I follow it also.”
The stool squeaked against the floor as the boy sat.
“I will take over the raids,” he said. “And if you are right, you will be proved so. And I will go to seminary to serve our congregation as you have asked.”
William’s heart leapt. “And if you prove me wrong?”
“I become a carpenter. And I leave London.”
The Milner boy hadn’t spoken to William when he came to plead for Carlisle’s presence at his wedding. But on his way out, he’d given William a piteous glance. “You made a mistake, Reverend Cullen,” he’d said. “And I hope that mistake does not cost you your son.”
But he’d made no mistake in his handling of the woman. If anything, he had saved his child from certain corruption. And his son would discover the truth. He would understand the reality of evil.
William found himself nodding.
“Then we have an agreement?”
“We are agreed.” He looked at the cross. “When will you begin?”
His son followed his gaze, turning his body so that he appeared in silhouette. In the rapidly darkening room, the light from the fire flickered against his skin, casting ominous, fast-moving shadows across the sharp planes of his face.
“Tonight,” he answered.
~||x||~
Early August, 1667
Growing up, Carlisle had always been known for his ability to concentrate. The way he could sit for hours reading, or spend a whole day sweeping the sanctuary—people praised him for this. They called him disciplined and dogged, and they thought him virtuous for it.
But if there was any part of him which was evil, it was surely this part, the part which could focus so singularly on facilitating the downfall of his only surviving relative.
The nightly raiding parties were small. Some of those who came suspected that his father grew weak; for them, this was only one more reason why it made sense that Carlisle take his father’s place. A few of them even mentioned it, that they looked forward to the day that Carlisle would stand at the pulpit.
That day would not come, he thought. Not if he had anything to do with it.
Summer stretched on; weeks passed and the days slowly grew shorter again. Carlisle went out every night, sometimes with others in the congregation, often alone. Thomas spent nearly all his time with his new bride, which suited Carlisle perfectly. He was as through with his raking days as was his married friend.
He stopped those he thought his father would stop, but instead of leveling blind accusations, he asked for explanations and looked for proof. A neighbor insisted a witch made his cow sick; Carlisle discovered a child had mixed nails in with its feed. A man claimed a demon possessed his home; a further search found a roost of bats in his attic.
But instead of validation in these small triumphs, he found restlessness. And so he roamed the streets, increasingly alone. Carlisle had never been an angry person before. Now the anger licked at him, flames of a fire deep in the pit of his belly, slowly reducing him to ash from the inside out.
So it was he was wandering the city, lost in angry thoughts, when he heard, “Ho, there, Mister Cullen!”
Carlisle looked up to see Judge Porter, the man who had presided over the executions at Tyburn that awful day. He was a young man, not more than ten years older than Carlisle, and he walked even in the darkness with a casual assuredness.
“Mister Porter.” Carlisle nodded his hello, but didn’t slow his pace, walking so quickly that the judge needed to jog to keep up with him. The other man said nothing, however, and simply walked alongside.
They were nearing St. Paul’s; entering the section of the city hardest hit by the fire ten months before. Already people were rebuilding; clearing old lots of charred rubble. But in this section of the city, the air still reeked of char and ash, a smell so powerful that in places it managed to overtake the stench of waste and debris of the open trench sewers which ran the streets. It was darker here, too—flattened lots and no remaining windows to shine lamplight into the street.
Before long, he found himself in a wide expanse, the grounds of the cathedral itself. He stopped, staring up at the ruins of the great cathedral. The hulking building had fallen in on three sides, its remaining blackened walls sagging freakishly toward each other.
“It is frightening, is it not?” the judge said quietly. “Our great St. Paul’s, destroyed thus.”
Carlisle nodded, staring upward. The great spire in the center of the building was completely gone, opening a hole in the roof wide to the heavens. Paul’s Walk was all but destroyed, with only a handful of soot-covered columns still standing, defeated sentries oblivious to the fact that there was nothing left to guard. He held out his lamp, which illuminated the walk oddly, casting menacing shadows on the burned walls.
“I was educated here,” Carlisle muttered, gesturing toward the ruined cloister.
A smile spread across the Judge’s face. “It does not surprise me, Mister Cullen. Educated with the common man and the gentleman. Such an education gives one a broad worldview. Dare I say—a thoughtful worldview?”
Carlisle didn’t answer.
“I wanted to be a barrister,” he said at last
Even in the dark, Carlisle could see the surprised expression on the Judge’s face.
“Of course that would not be possible,” he went on at once. “I was settled to become a solicitor, but I had not my father’s blessing to attend law school.”
There was a long moment before the judge answered.
“Your father said you had agreed to join the ministry.”
He nodded. “A condition of my marriage.” His voice cracked on this last word. For weeks he had not spoken of this. He would not give his father the pleasure of seeing him broken. But now the mere thought of Elizabeth sliced through him with such ferocity that he nearly doubled over.
The judge again was silent, and together the two men stared up at the blackened stone.
“I asked for her pardon,” came the voice a few moments later.
“Excuse me?”
“I asked for her pardon,” repeated the judge. “Of your father. That day at Tyburn. Your father insisted that she had bewitched you. But I believe you to be no more bewitched than he. Besotted, perhaps. But not bewitched. And I am sorry that I did not press him more.”
The judge clasped his hands behind his back and began to wander in the direction of the ruined cathedral. His feet seemed to pick out sure footing among the rubble, and so Carlisle followed.
After twenty yards or so, the judge stopped.
“You are fairer than your father,” he said, “and I speak not of your countenance. If I might be of assistance to you ever, Mister Cullen, I beg you to ask.” He took a deep breath and added, “To minister means to care for. Or to give aid. And it is not always the case that it is those we appoint who truly do the ministering.”
Carlisle snorted. “My father believes my skepticism will send me to Hell.”
Much to Carlisle’s surprise, the judge laughed.
“Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness,” he said, smiling, “for they shall be filled.” Placing a hand on Carlisle’s shoulder, he turned him away from the rubble.
“We should go from this desolate place,” he said. “And you, it seems, ought to rest.”
Did he look that haggard? Carlisle wondered, but he nodded and began to turn.
His lamp wasn’t large; just enough to light his path in these areas where there were no longer taverns and homes to keep the streets lit after darkness. So as he swung it to turn, its beam did not go far.
But it went just far enough.
The man, if he was that, looked gaunt. Even weak. His hair hung in stringy ringlets, too long even for one who was not a dissenter. The moon had risen, and its light caused the other’s skin to glow a pale silver.
And then there were the eyes. At first, disbelieving his own sight—he was nearsighted after all—Carlisle assumed them to be brown. But then the lamplight caught them just so he saw them for what they truly were: a deep ruby, the color of fresh blood.
Carlisle yelped. Maybe the demon did, too, he couldn’t be certain. The lamp fell from his fingers and smashed on the stone.
“Run!” yelled Judge Porter.
Heart hammering, Carlisle’s legs churned beneath him, propelling him away from the ruins of the cathedral and down the darkened street. He didn’t dare look behind him, and instead simply dropped his head and ran. It was only when he stood a few streets from his home, back amongst houses from which issued the warm glow of oil lamps, when he finally slowed and allowed himself to discern if the other had given chase.
The judge was a ways behind him, but still unencumbered. And there was no one behind him. They were alone.
“What was it?” Judge Porter’s voice wheezed a little as he spoke.
“I know not.” Carlisle’s chest heaved as he leaned against the wall of the nearest home. Sweat poured off his face, blurring his vision and stinging his eyes. He wiped at them with the back of his wrist as he frantically tried to catch his breath.
It was only then he realized it wasn’t merely sweat causing his eyes to sting. At once, his hands began scrabbling at his cheeks, furiously wiping with such force that his fingernails scratched his own skin. He didn’t want to cry. Not like this. These were tears of frustration. Of anger. Of humiliation.
In the ruins of Saint Paul’s lived a demon. A real one.
And that meant that his father was right.
~||x||~
It took Carlisle three days to muster the courage to go out again. He used the church chores as an excuse, sweeping, dusting, and polishing until his knuckles ached. But he’d been on the fourth go-round sweeping the sanctuary for the day when he burst into a fit of anger and snapped the broomstick over his knee.
Then he’d gone to find Judge Porter.
The judge was swift to agree, as was Thomas. Carlisle spread the word no further, and so it was just the three of them this night, their lamps swinging from their arms as they stood in the rubble of the once-glorious cathedral.
They would destroy the demon.
And then Carlisle would pretend nothing had ever happened.
“Over there,” Carlisle called, pointing to the center of what had once been the nave. Ironic, he thought, that the creature had chosen the very center of the church in which to live.
The other men paused, looking at one another nervously.
He sighed. “I will go.”
“Carlisle, wait—” Thomas began, but one look from his friend was enough to silence him.
“It is my problem,” he snapped. “It is not your livelihood on the line.”
Thomas looked as though he might make a second overture, but then, at the judge’s urging, he hung back.
Inside the cathedral, the smell of smoke and char was still so heavy that it seemed to suffocate him, as though from somewhere deep within the church, the fire still burned. His footsteps echoed on the tiled floor. Moonlight shaded through the wrecked roof, casting shadows across the debris—ruined pews, windows exploded, their frames mangled from the heat.
Like these walls, it had taken mere days to reduce Carlisle to little more than rubble and ash. All that had remained of Carlisle was this fragile hope, charred and in danger of falling, the hope that at least, he could prove his father wrong.
Now the demon had stolen that, too.
And for that, it would die.
His poor eyesight meant that even with the aid of his lamp, he didn’t see the forms until they moved, their clothing having obscured their brilliant skin from the moonlight. There were two of them, near where the altar had once stood: the same ruby-eyed one he’d seen three days ago, but also a second, gaunt-looking, his hair bedraggled and his eyes as black as the night around them.
“Run,” the red-eyed one said, and it startled Carlisle to hear a strange Latin, not like the one he’d learned in school.
“Run,” it repeated. “Run, human, or die.”
Reaching down, Carlisle yanked his dagger from his boot. “You mistakenly assume that I desire to live,” he said.
The pain was devastating and utterly complete. One moment, Carlisle stood upright, the next, his face was on the ground as fire ripped through his neck and shoulder and arm.
He screamed. Maybe. He wasn’t entirely certain. He attempted to push himself to his feet with the arm that wasn’t burning—was his arm burning? There was no flame that he could see. Just searing, unbearable pain. He collapsed back onto the floor, his right arm clutched in his left.
Three lamps exploded as they hit the ground, and went out, plunging them into darkness. A scream—Thomas? But Thomas was a fast runner, and whatever these demons were, they’d attacked Carlisle first…
Squinting, Carlisle just managed to see the screamer. It was the judge, flailing as he was dragged by his feet…Carlisle realized at once that Judge Porter had run to his defense, coming from behind him. He tried to yell and found he couldn’t. The demons and the judge vanished into the dark.
As suddenly as the clamor had arisen, everything went silent. All that was left was a gasping, raspy noise accompanied by ragged cries of pain—coming from him, he realized.
He struggled to push himself up enough to see. There was no sign of Thomas. His friend seemed to have managed to run.
Thank God.
Still gasping, Carlisle collapsed onto his back.
The invisible fire spread, and soon his whole side was engulfed.
He had been cursed. Or maybe he was dying, he wasn’t sure. How could he be on fire if there were no flames? Perhaps he’d already died, and this was Hell?
But his heart hammered in his chest. His eyes still welled with tears of pain and shame and anger. His breath came in ragged gasps that hurt.
He wasn’t dead.
Yet.
When he squeezed his eyes closed against the pain, he saw the flames lapping the skin of his father’s victims, the women accused of witchcraft. “To cleanse them,” his father had said, his firm hands holding Carlisle before the fire, even as he’d wanted to run. “To purify them.”
His father would purify him, too.
The fire was spreading faster now, and he couldn’t manage to stand. Carlisle’s stomach heaved as he pulled himself to his hands and knees, but somehow he refrained from becoming sick.
Dizzied, he stared up at the ruined walls of the Cathedral. Even burned and crumbled, they still stood true, a straight line to the sprinkling of stars overhead, as though even in ruins, they still pointed the way to Heaven itself.
His voice was scratchy and weak; whatever this fire was, it would overtake him before long. But Carlisle fixed his eyes on the walls and gazed up.
“Please, Lord,” he whispered. “Please have mercy on my soul.”
Then, carefully, with his knees and one good arm, he pulled himself away.
~||x||~
At midnight, Young William had not returned. One o’clock came and went. As did two o’clock.
William was pacing when the Milner boy arrived to the parsonage just after dawn. He appeared bedraggled and frantic, his face dirtied with streaks of dried tears.
The other man had barely managed to choke the words, “St. Paul’s” when William took off as fast as he could manage. To prove him wrong. The words rang in William’s ears as he half-walked, half-ran. His son had wanted to prove him wrong. And so it had been he who was out in the darkness, skulking the streets of London…
He bit his lip so hard it bled.
By the time he made it to the Cathedral, it was nearly noon, the sun beating down on the open expanse where the ruined building now stood. A small knot of people had gathered, having heard the news. At least two dead in a gruesome attack. A pile of mangled, rotting bodies found among the rubble of the cathedral. The crowd ambled about, morbidly picking through the ruins for valuable possessions.
William turned to the nearest person. His hands shook from exhaustion, and his voice was hoarse.
“Where are the bodies?” he demanded.
“Oh long gone, Sir,” the man answered. “Taken by horse cart. Mangled. As though an animal attacked them.”
Mangled.
It wasn’t until the other man caught him that William even realized he’d begun to fall.
“Are you all right, sir?” he asked, helping William back to his feet
“Did anyone see them?”
“The bodies?”
He nodded.
The man shook his head. “Seek you someone?”
William found it nearly impossible to say the words.
“My son,” he managed weakly.
Sadness crossed the other man’s face. “I am sorry, sir,” he said. “Perhaps he was not among them?”
But William was already moving toward the rubble. A single boot, ripped free of its owner, was somehow still here, not stolen yet—because it was mateless?
Next to it lay a dagger.
William’s hand trembled as he went to close his fingers around it. He recognized the hilt at once. Originally only a simple wood, later carved by an apprentice carpenter with an intricate, knotted design, and oil worked into the wood nightly until it shone.
He turned the dagger over in his hand. The blade was completely clean.
Had his child not defended himself?
Had his attacker been too quick?
Tears bit at the corners of William’s eyes. He gripped the hilt of the dagger so tightly his knuckles turned white, and pulled it to himself. He ducked deeper into the shadows of the cloister walk, behind a wall where he could not see the blood, and where he would not be seen. Here where the walls met, it was dark—the tall stone walls blotted out the sun so that William huddled in complete shadow. Like the wraiths his son had hunted when he met his end.
He wouldn’t have been out here if it weren’t for you, came the sickening thought.
He ran his hand over the hilt of the dagger. It was carved every bit as intricately as the cross that now hung in their kitchen. Despite William’s misgivings, his child had become an expert craftsman.
Carved into the pommel of the dagger were three letters: W.C.C. William had seen this on the back of the cross, also—W. Cullen was carefully scorched into the back of the wood. For even with all his denial, his son had still used the name he was given. He had not once relinquished the tie to his father, even as he fought against it.
And what had William done in return?
“I prayed to protect him,” he said to himself. And then, louder, “I prayed for you to protect him!”
The walls didn’t answer.
The Lord hadn’t protected him, William thought, because William hadn’t protected him. His son. Sarah’s son. The only thing he had left of the woman he loved.
He closed his eyes, hugged the small knife to his chest, and sank against the cold wall.
“Carlisle…Carlisle, I’m sorry! I’m so sorry,” he screamed.
Then, huddled in the shadows, William began to weep.