Writings

One of the things about good canon, in my opinion, has always been that there should be more going on than just a retelling of what might have happened to the characters in any given time period. It’s one of the reasons I don’t fault people who say they find canon fic boring; the truth is, much of it can be. The strongest canon fics have purpose unto themselves; the characters have a story arc and conflict and growth just as they would if they weren’t part of a larger story.

When I set out to write Stregoni, my challenge was to find what the arc was for it. Where is the story in Carlisle’s background? And, with the help of M, my friend of ten years who gives me much inspiration for my stories, I realized that the story of Stregoni is the story of turning Edward; that in some way, each and every bit of every chapter leads us closer and closer to that evening at a hospital in Chicago in 1918, when Carlisle makes the decision that will change his life forever.  It’s not enough just to write Carlisle’s history—it’s too long and too circuitous for that. Plus, he is far too purposeful a man to tell his story without purpose.

Making that happen, however, continues to be a right sight more difficult than I thought. Despite that this novel has an outline more detailed than any I’ve ever written (if you’re familiar with Moleskine’s Cahier line, this story has a cahier all to itself), segments of it keep throwing me far off kilter. Chapters 10 and 11, the current one posting and the one just finished being penned, turn both the 1667 and 1918 plots to deeper conflict—Carlisle’s struggle with his father becomes more defined, and he now knows he has to make some decisions if he’s going to keep Elizabeth the way he’d like to.  My beta was kind enough to throw this one “back over the wall” as I like to term it, i.e., she asked for some revisions to change the shape of the argument between William and Carlisle. All in all, I don’t know how much I tweaked it (I’m sure Openhome will tell me), but getting the movement between these two to feel right is complicated, to say the least.

A second reason for the delay, which I’ll put here as my site is a bit less public, is that I’ve spent much of the summer preparing a profic work to go out. Although SB is my seventh serious novel I’ve written (I put as much work into my fanwork as I do any of my other work, and therefore I number them among my novels written), I’ve never taken a novel through the process of final revision to get it ready to show to publishers and agents. It’s been an interesting journey, to say the least. I have zero intention of pulling back from fandom, as frankly, it’s too fun (and at this time, I’m choosing to largely keep my profic identity and fanfic identities separate so as to protect my fic postings from anyone who might ask me to take it down), but I’m still learning how to balance the two. I felt I owe you that explanation at least, and I  thank you immensely for your patience while I figure out how to keep all these balls in the air.

At any rate. Enough of me rambling on about it. Go read it, if you haven’t already. I’ll be curious to hear what people think.

Also, many, many thanks to those anonymous souls who keep assuring that SB pops up on fanfic award nominations all over fandom. I am floored and continually humbled. Although SB didn’t win in its category for the Hopeless Romantic Awards, “Form 1040” took home “Best Renesmee” (which I find surprising, as I personally hated her before writing that fic), and it absolutely made my day.

Thank you, as always, for reading.

Volterra, Italy
Early June, 1789

A burst of high-pitched Greek erupted from across the room, followed by a rich laughter, and Aro glanced over to see Marcus smile. At his feet, Carlisle sat, a wide grin on his face—he had been the one who’d burst out chattering.

It was one of the newer developments. Carlisle had grown tired of simply reading the histories and started seeking his tutelage directly. Caius, who was eldest, had been the first one he’d approached, but the older vampire had little patience for Carlisle’s insatiable curiosity. Aro had tutored Carlisle a few times, but inevitably their conversations wound toward the younger man’s bizarre feeding choices and devolved into heated arguments.

So Carlisle had lately settled on Marcus, and this seemed to be a good fit. He sat at the other man’s feet like a true young scholar, listening carefully and peppering Marcus’s explanations with questions. How much of the account provided by Thucydides was accurate? What of Homer and his writings of Hector and Achilleus? Marcus, for his part, carefully unraveled the things that Carlisle had learned as a boy, or at least, as much of his teachings as Carlisle remembered, which was surprisingly a lot.

Alrigo snorted. He glanced in the direction of Carlisle and Marcus as well, shaking his head in annoyance as he pressed his hand to Aro’s.

At Caius’s suggestion, Alrigo had been set on detail duty with young blond. Each day he reported in the same way they all did, and Carlisle’s movements were transmitted to Aro in an instant. The Young One had spent the better part of the day in the library reading an ancient book that had been a gift to the brothers from one of their kind in the Orient. The image was now burned into Aro’s mind of the blond hair falling forward as Carlisle pored over the thick book, referring to multiple tomes and folios next to it to aid in his translation of the pictograms.

He was studying a new language again, which likely meant he would travel. It always happened that Carlisle would rummage in the Volturi library for a day or so, returning with some impossible text in a new tongue, and then proceed to bury himself in the library for weeks on end while he mastered it. Then he would make the trek on foot to wherever it was he’d just studied, where he would mingle with the locals as much as he was able to solidify his grasp on the language.

Importantly for the moment, however, these studies kept Carlisle safely inside the compound, save for his occasional runs to the market to buy and sell his herbs. Alrigo’s silent reports indicated that the intruder, whoever he might have been, had backed away. Caius, the most bellicose of them all, insisted on a headhunt when, after two weeks of careful searching, it seemed that the intruder had retreated. Aro talked him out of this, suggesting that if they destroyed the intruder, he might never get the test of loyalty he wished.

But it had been two weeks more, and there was no testing of Carlisle; at least, not beyond his knowledge of Homer.

Laughter erupted again, and Aro turned toward his brother. Marcus was explaining the origins of several of the god myths, many of which were based on human encounters with others of their kind. Humans always seemed to take beauty and strength as a sign of godliness instead of the mark of a superior predator. The legends of Ares in particular were based on an ancient Chosen One who had suffered a particularly painful transition to the new life; his desire for destruction and vengeance had been unparalleled. It was Carlisle who was laughing, his face bright as he listened to Marcus going on about some of the myth which humans were happy to believe.

“Is this wise, do you think?”

The voice tore Aro from his observation. Alrigo was staring absently at Marcus and Carlisle, who were now speaking rapidly about the appropriation of the Greek god myths by the Romans. Carlisle teased that perhaps Marcus might have been memorialized a god instead of a saint for his actions in “ridding” their city of vampires, if only the coven had settled a bit further south.

“The schooling? I see little harm in it.”

Alrigo shook his head. “Not the schooling, Master. Everything.” His gaze shifted again to the pair talking. “He spends nearly all his time with humans. And you’ve given up on changing him from his diet, it seems.”

Given up? Aro’s brow knitted as he thought back to what Alrigo had shown him, a scene which had taken place during their last group feeding. Carlisle, standing in the doorway, a look that was equal parts resolve and disgust across his face. But he’d stood there, for the better part of an hour. He’d stood there, breathing air that would have tempted any of their kind, his arms crossed defiantly over his chest.

Aro had stopped testing Carlisle. And now Carlisle was testing himself.

“I’ve given up on nothing,” he snapped.

“I didn’t mean to imply—” Alrigo stammered, but Aro held up a hand and waved him off.

“Thank you, Alrigo.”

The guard ducked his head and resumed his position beside the others. His only duty of late was to track the blond, and Carlisle seemed to be either blissfully unaware that he was being tailed or was accepting of it. Either of these suited Aro.

Perhaps Alrigo was right, however. It had been a good deal of time since Aro had last “encouraged” Carlisle, as he called it. When the young one had first arrived, the tests had been more regular—first out of conviction that Carlisle would fail, and then out of fascination that he never seemed to. They had been simple tests; a blood-spattered robe, a single injured human. He had instructed Carlisle to prove he could resist, and although the other could have run from the temptation at any time, he never had. The first time Carlisle had pulverized the chair in his chambers as he held back his desire. The entire thing had been reduced to sawdust as the human bled to its death. Later, however, he learned to immerse himself in other pursuits, and on Aro’s last attempt, over twenty years ago, he had returned to find the human lying face down in a river of cooled blood, and Carlisle sanguinely paging through a volume in Occitan.

Yet resisting a single human, especially when one was sated, was not difficult for one who was more than a few years old. Perhaps it had been the wrong task, Aro thought. It would be smarter to bring Carlisle into the midst of the feeding.

Although, it seemed he was already intent on being there, too.

Aro snapped his fingers, which caused every head in the room to swivel his way. The young vampire and his tutor cut their chatter at once, and two sets of dark eyes landed on Aro.

“Carlisle.”

“Aro?”

There came a soft hiss that was the collected intake of breath from several of the other guards. They did not dare address Aro as anything other than “Master,” nor would any of them answer him with their bottoms still firmly on the floor. Aro heard the word “impudent” muttered from somewhere near his shoulder.

Ignoring this, he tapped the arm of his chair. “Please.”

As the young one moved swiftly across the room, his hair it caught the light and shimmered in stark contrast to Carlisle’s dark gray robe. He stood before Aro, his arms open, and a gentle, inquisitive expression on his face. Around them, the other guards and Aro’s brothers came to complete stillness. Carlisle made no move to speak.

Aro cleared his throat. “Alrigo tells me that you wish to observe our feedings?”

The other man’s jaw flexed, and he looked away. “I observe them, yes. Do I wish to? That is quite a different question.”

“You are testing yourself.”

“I’m familiarizing myself.”

There were murmurs from around the room. Aro simply raised his eyebrows.

“Humans bleed,” the blond explained. When Aro did not speak in answer, he went on. “I will be a rather poor excuse for a physician if I am unable to tolerate a natural process which my patients undergo.”
For the second time in ten minutes the gasps in the room were audible. Aro lifted a hand.

“It is your intention, then, to treat humans directly?”

“That is my ultimate ambition.”

There were a few titters from around the chamber. The remainder of the guard knew at least a little of what Carlisle was up to; his constant disappearances out of the castle to the piazza market so that he could trade herbs could hardly go unnoticed, to say nothing of the stench which lingered in his chambers. But this was the first anyone beside Aro had truly heard of the young man’s true goals. And Aro had largely written them off—he saw many aspirations when he read a mind, and very few of these ever came to light. They were often far-fetched, with no plan of action to achieve them, and Aro ignored them as a matter of course.

He realized at once that when it came to Carlisle, he should have known better.

“So it is your intent to violate our laws of secrecy,” came the familiar, indignant voice. This time every pair of eyes swept to Caius, who leaned forward in his chair as though he were about to spring. The man’s upper lip twitched as he stared at the young vampire whom he’d never cared for.

“I see no reason why my practicing medicine ought to violate the laws.”

“Surely you do not expect humans to believe you are one of them,” Caius growled. “They will suspect you. We will be compromised.”

Carlisle’s smiled at Caius, the sort of smile an adult gives to a child. Aro suppressed a laugh. He was certain Caius had never been on the receiving end of such an expression, and judging from Caius’s scowl, he did not find this position pleasurable.

“Look at what already happens when I walk in the piazza,” he said, gesturing toward the windows. “Whether it is to our dismay or our advantage, I am not certain, but they do not fear us as they once did. We are neither beasts nor gods”—he nodded toward Marcus—”and they have long since decided any threat we pose is only fiction.”

Carlisle moved toward the window, where sunlight streamed down in a narrow band on the floor. Stepping into the beam, he held his arms out before him turned them, a fascinated grin spreading across his face as his skin refracted the light into vivid rainbows across the walls. “Humans believe now in only what they can prove,” he said more quietly. “The sun is the center of the heavens; all the heavenly bodies are held together by the same force that keeps our feet on the ground. We can sail around the Earth without fear because of this, and we will return to where we began because our Earth is round. Blood runs in one system, not two. And it needn’t be removed to heal anyone. We can introduce foods into the body to cure illness and relieve pain.”

Still smiling, he stepped sideways out of the sun and faced the brothers once more.

“Once, we might have been hunted because humans believed their fears. But today?” He chuckled. “If I told a human that I was a vampire, he would declare me a drunkard.”

Shrugging, Carlisle went back to Marcus, who was still rather obviously stifling a smile.

There was an utter stillness in the room. Sometimes, even the air grew stagnant in the tower, and this was one of those times. Vampires were able to hold preternaturally still. Except, that was, for Carlisle, who occasionally shifted his weight from one hip to the other as he sat on the stone floor.

He looked…human.

Aro could see several whose gazes moved uncomfortably from Carlisle to Aro and back again. They were waiting for him, he knew. Such dramatic orations did not commonly happen in this hall, at least not from anyone other than himself. He thought back to Alrigo’s comment a moment before. Was it wise, to let Carlisle continue as he did? He wasn’t beholden to them the way the guard were, yet he was not an equal to the brothers, either. At the moment, he was looking away, intent on one of the tapestries on the wall. Carlisle wasn’t defiant, Aro was certain. The Englishman did not desire power; in fact, this was probably what made him such a liability. The others came to them seeking power; to be in the guard of the Volturi was to stand next to the most powerful of their kind. It made them easy to keep near, easy to threaten—none in the guard wished to be ejected from the good graces of the three brothers, and so they would do as asked. Threatening Carlisle would not be possible. He was too assured, too steadfast in his own ways.

But then, perhaps these were the precise qualities which could be used against him.

“If you wish to practice,” Aro said thoughtfully, “then we ought to assist you.”

The blond head snapped around, and Aro found Carlisle’s eyes fixed on his own.

“Your pardon?”

“If you wish to practice, then you ought to be given the most practice we can afford,” he answered, with a wave of his hand as though this was such a natural solution, Carlisle should have figured it out himself. “You will join us for feedings from now on.”

The other’s face dropped. “I have no plans to alter—”

“I expect you to alter nothing,” Aro answered. “Nothing, my young friend. You may continue with your…diet…exactly as you please. But this way you will be able to practice your control even more, don’t you see?”

Carlisle’s jaw remained taut. “You mean this way you will be able to test me directly.”

“I mean nothing of the sort,” Aro answered. “If to be a physician will require your utmost strength and control, and I am to nurture that, then it only makes sense I provide opportunities for you to practice. In much the same way my brother helps you to practice your Greek.” He gestured toward the other vampire, whose face was now wiped of anything resembling good humor.

Carlisle’s eyes locked his own, and Aro could see from the corners of his own vision that half the room was fixed on the blond, waiting for him to make another move in defiance. But finally, his face softened a little.

“As you wish,” he answered, and then under his breath, added, “Master.”

Pulling his cloak more closely around himself, Carlisle turned his back, and moved away from the brothers. He thanked Marcus for his time, and then in a flurry of gray wool and golden hair, disappeared toward his chambers. Alrigo made a motion to follow, but Aro shook his head.

Caius gave Aro an approving look; Marcus scowled. Aro nodded to them both. It was perfectly evident that he had won this round.

The question was, at what cost?

~||x||~

The wind whipped through Carlisle’s hair as he raced into the purple dark. He preferred to hunt barefoot, and the dirt sprayed up between his toes, briefly turning his ankles black before sliding away from his impenetrable skin.

Feeding strengthened them all, and it was not uncommon for one to feel the need to run off additional energy after having had a good meal. He had not fed in over two weeks, longer than he usually allowed himself, and the surge of power was nearly overwhelming.

He swept his tongue across his lips as he ran, remembering the slick wetness of the blood which had just passed there. A mountain wolf, a hulking animal whose blood would sate him for at least a week. The animal had struggled pitifully beneath his hands as he pressed its shoulders into the earth; its legs kicking more and more jerkily as he slowly drained the life away.

Was he mistaken in thinking Aro was becoming more aggressive toward him? he wondered as he ran. Today’s interaction had been…odd, to say the least. It was rare that Aro would confront him as he had. When they spoke about Carlisle’s habits, it was usually in private.

And surely Aro had known of Carlisle’s goal? He had gone to no effort to try to hide it. Hiding things from Aro was impossible anyway. Aro would have seen him imagining sitting by a patient’s bedside, using his knowledge of the apothecary sciences and his superior senses to understand their illnesses, and at last, successfully healing them.

These had been the ends which had driven him closer and closer to the feedings; first from his own quarters, with the door closed, then with the door open, and now finally to where he could stand in the doorway to the main hall. The first time he had closed his eyes; not wishing to see the humans slaughtered, but the sounds and scents had been more than enough to leave a vivid image burned in his mind anyway. So he’d begun to stand with his eyes open.

He suspected this was what Alrigo had shown Aro. The other vampire had been following him disturbingly closely for several weeks. Stopping his pace a moment, Carlisle inhaled deeply, tasting the air. He smelled nothing. No one tailing him.

Well, that was good, at least.

He had called Aro “Master,” something he rarely did. He wasn’t stupid; he knew Aro would recognize his use of the term as effrontery. But he didn’t care. If Aro wanted Carlisle at his side while he fed, then he would make that happen. Let them all come to grips with exactly how well-controlled Carlisle was.

Aro wanted to see this all backfire. He wanted to be right.

Carlisle had no intention of allowing either.

Letting out a frustrated growl, Carlisle suddenly launched himself into the woods, barreling forward at top speed. His legs pumped beneath him, and he barely registered the foliage as it rushed past. The earth pounded itself into submission beneath his feet. Purple dusk gave way to inky night, and he pressed himself onward, until the air chilled and thinned.

It wasn’t until the terrain beneath him became rocky instead of lush and earth shifted to snow that he realized just how far from Volterra he’d run. The Alpi were two days’ long drive by ox-cart for a human, and although he had been here before looking for ingredients for his medicines, he had never managed to run this far without intending to.

Was he running away?

He had thought about it lately. He’d begun studying one of the languages of the Orient, and he was finding steadfast wisdom in the teachings of its ancient scholars. To travel there to practice it, even as a vampire, would require a lengthy journey that would take him away from Volterra for years.

Carlisle continued to run as the trees seemed to shrink into scrub-sized versions of themselves. The air grew thinner, and he knew that this was the level where humans began to find it difficult to breathe. He found it easier-the air was like a watery soup, going down quickly instead of the thickened stew of a hot Tuscan afternoon.

It was easier for him to breathe here.

Easier, precisely because he was not human.

There was a thunderous crack like the beginning of a snow slide, and Carlisle whirled. It took only an instant for him to realize that it was not a snow slide at all—his right hand was covered in bark and sticky tree sap, and some hundred yards away lay the only decently-sized tree in the vicinity, which had been nearly three times his own height when he’d uprooted it and sent it spiraling into the dense forest below. Sickened by his own lack of control, he collapsed into a sitting position so quickly that he broke the stone beneath him before letting out a pained cry that echoed off the cliffs and snow. Somewhere in the distance, a wolf howled in answer.

He stared into the darkness, but saw no movement. You should run, he thought at the wolf. I am a danger to you.

Scuffing his feet against the ground, Carlisle thought back to the other vampire, the one who had sent him here in the first place. Jean-Jacques was a Frenchman, almost three hundred years old. He’d come across Carlisle in the abandoned, burned-out house in Paris where Carlisle had been living, sneaking to the Collège de Sorbonne from time to time to attend courses.

It had been the first time Carlisle had encountered another besides the small coven in London; and that coven had avoided him. He now knew why-they did not wish to be destroyed should the Volturi come to them and question them about Carlisle’s existence-but at the time, it had meant that he had moved in utter solitude, and he, a mere child of twenty-three, had understood it only as rejection.

He had recognized Jean-Jacques’ scent as an absence more than a presence. Unfamiliar with the scent of another of his kind, he did not recognize it. But he knew there was another being, and that for once, his throat did not burn for it. The other vampire broke in the door, expecting to find a beast ready to fight for territory. Paris was Jean-Jacques’ hunting ground, and he was not interested in yielding it. His hands clenched into fists at his sides, and he entered snarling in French, demanding to know who Carlisle was.

“Étudiant,” Carlisle cried, throwing his books down and backing against the wall, his hands upturned. “Je suis un étudiant.”

The other stared at him, puzzled, and Carlisle could see his mind working as he struggled to mesh the word “student” with the vampire who stood before him. The burned house was full of debris, but before Carlisle sat a volume of Aeschylus which he had smuggled from the library, and beside it, the papers upon which he was translating the Greek into French. When it seemed evident that the other would not harm him immediately, Carlisle had added that he did not hunt humans at all.

They had fallen into a long conversation after that. Jean-Jacques had been amazed at Carlisle’s temperance; especially that he had chosen his lifestyle as a newborn. He was even more impressed by Carlisle’s desire to use his immortal life to better himself beyond any human measure. It had been then that he had mentioned that Carlisle reminded him of the Volturi.

Carlisle hadn’t yet heard of them then. He wondered how differently his life would be if he never had? Or if perhaps he had been introduced to them the way it seemed most of his kind were: as the enforcers of the law, to be feared and revered, but generally avoided. Instead, his curiosity piqued, he had headed south.

He’d been happy at first, to discover the cultivation and sophistication of this coven. The brothers kept an expansive library, and Aro had brought scholars to Volterra from the same universities Carlisle attended. (The scholars never made it home, but Aro still prided himself on the knowledge he’d taken from their minds.) They appreciated art and funded Italy’s masters; they invested in music and listened to it regularly. The compound was full of things that sparked Carlisle’s imagination and intellect, and finally he felt he had some form of kinship. He spent years learning, observing, asking questions about the history of humans and the history of their kind, the Chosen, as Aro called them. He learned languages, mastered the pianoforte and the violin, taught himself to paint. Time and his mind were endless, and he planned to take advantage of both. Volterra had become home.

But all that was dropping away. The more Carlisle learned from the brothers, the more knew he would always be different. And that difference would leave him alone.

He lay down on his back and gazed up at the sky. Even though it was summer, the air here was chilly, and the cold cleared away the clouds that covered the sky down in Tuscany. The sky was a rich black, salted with stars. Carlisle could see them as a strange blue-white-red-purple, the way he imagined humans saw them through their telescopes. He had read Kant’s treatise not so long ago, the bit which expanded on Galileo. According to Kant, these stars were spinning, a giant whirling disc spanning a distance so far man couldn’t fathom it. The stars were uncountable, unknowable. And this planet was but a speck of dust in that larger picture.

And he was no more than a tiny bit of that.

He was just focusing in on a particularly bright star when he heard the whoosh of air that indicated a body moving somewhere behind him. At once, solid ground came beneath his feet and he stood, crouched, and ready to spring. Perhaps it was a wolf, or a mountain goat, in which case he might feed more if it attacked, or he might throw the animal on its way down the mountain.

Nostrils flaring, Carlisle sucked air into useless lungs, seeking the scent of blood. But it was not there. Instead he found the sickly sweet cloy of another of his kind. His mind flashed on Alrigo’s face, with its gaunt lines and tangled hair, and then flashed away as quickly.

This was not a scent he knew.

Straightening up, he called to the darkness. “I mean you no harm.” Remembering his encounter with Jean-Jacques, he added, “There are no humans to hunt here. I encroach not on your territory.”

The trees gave no answer, and the wind continued whipping across the face of the mountain. But then behind him, a single twig snapped.

In the moonlight, the others’ skin shone as his did, a blue-white like the Grecian statues Aro was so fond of collecting. He was the same height as Carlisle and of a similar build. Their hair differed by half a shade, although the other’s was far longer, tied between his shoulder blades with a bit of leather. For a fleeting moment, Carlisle imagined that someone else could mistake the two of them for brothers.

“I likewise mean you no harm,” the other said finally, his head cocked as he observed Carlisle. “I found your…kill.”

When Carlisle’s eyes stayed fixed on him, the man smiled and went on. “It was your kill, then. No wonder you claim not to encroach on territory. There are plenty of humans at the foot of these mountains. I conclude that the animal was slain instead of a human by your choice?”

Carlisle nodded slowly, and a smile spread across the other’s face.

“You are English?” he asked.

Carlisle nodded again. “You also?”

The other laughed, a booming sound that echoed off the cliffs. “I am no English. I was born to both my lives in the New World. A Virginian.”

“A colonist?”

The booming laugh came again. “Colonist no longer, my friend.”

Of course. Being immersed in Tuscan culture, Carlisle had barely followed the war, but he knew that the English colonies had separated some scant handful of years ago. It was little wonder this other man took this as a point of pride.

“My apologies. Of course you are an American.” He extended a hand. “My name is Carlisle.”

For a moment, the other did not move, but then he bounded forward and took the offered hand in a confident grip.

“They call me Garrett.”

Forward

Back

Outtake

Chapter 9 “came in heavy” as I like to say, and so I axed this little ditty because it didn’t add enough to the chapter to warrant staying in. But it’s still a neat flashback, if I do say so myself, so I thought I’d post it here. This takes place when Carlisle is lying on the glacier in the Alps, looking up into the night sky.

~||x||~

As he lay staring to the heavens, a memory came to him. The human memories were almost unknowable, what he imagined dreams must have felt like, when last he had been able to sleep—wisps of thought that raced away as quickly as they came. He had been a boy, standing in the churchyard on an unusually clear night like this one. He had asked his father about the stars, and had been met with the same answer as to everything; they had been made by the Lord.

When he had pressed, however, for once his father had not angered—he remembered now that this was the more common response—but instead had told the story of the promise to Abraham. How Abraham had nearly given in to siring an heir by another, but the Lord had insisted that he would sire his own heir, with his wife. Then how Abraham had been instructed to look to the heavens, and had been told, “Look now towards heaven, and tell the stars, if thou be able to number them…So shall thy seed be.”

Carlisle’s father had placed a hand on his shoulder as they both looked upward. “A reminder, child,” his father had said. “A reminder that thou art among that seed, that thou art a child of Abraham.”

The memory whirled away.

“That thou art a child of Abraham,” he muttered.

He wondered if this was still the case.

Carlisle doesn’t hunt humans, and he’s gentle, kind, and humane——pretty much the polar opposite of the brothers in Volterra. So why did it take so long for his time with the brothers to fall apart? Obviously, there had to have been something which drew him.

One of the most interesting challenges for me as I write this piece is striking the right balance between grappling with Carlisle’s decision to leave Volterra, and yet the oddly benevolent feelings he has toward the brothers, at least until the end of Breaking Dawn. Although there’s certainly love lost between them, the Volturi remain men whom Carlisle respects even two centuries later. In Twilight, Edward says that Carlisle found the brothers to be “civilized” and enjoyed that they were committed to the pursuit of the life of the mind. So in this chapter, I had fun imagining what it was that kept Carlisle in Italy for so long, and engendered goodwill toward Aro, Marcus and Caius.

And finally, we meet the intruder. I’ll be curious to hear folks’ reactions, as so far, no one has guessed correctly as to who it is.

This chapter also had an interesting little scene that I liked, but which ultimately didn’t add enough to the chapter to warrant staying in, given that the chapter came in several hundred words over where I wanted it. You’ll find that in the next post.

Happy reading,

g

Chicago, Illinois
October, 1918

They refused to let her see him.

The doctors had ordered her home. Families of patients were instructed to return to their houses and wait for the bad news to come by telegram. She couldn’t count any more the number of times a well-meaning nurse had walked her down the corridor, only to leave her when a patient cried out from one of the wards. Freed of direction, Elizabeth could duck up a back stairwell, returning again to the place where her husband lay.

Two days had passed, and she could not help noticing that in that time, approximately half the patients in the ward had disappeared-a quarter each night, it seemed. The newspaper reported over one hundred deaths per hospital per day. New admissions would now only be made with approval-the intake room had emptied, and police guarded its doors, urging the ill to one of the makeshift infirmaries which were springing up like a pox across the city. Still, those who did have approval to enter the hospital came in droves; filling beds that seemed to empty by the minute.

Her Edward couldn’t see them, thankfully. He lay hidden behind the sanitary curtain around his bed, shielded from the stretchers of bodies that Elizabeth saw marching their way out of the hospital. They called it a bronchopneumonia, though it spread like an influenza. Some of the patients had chills, some had aches. Even in the area outside the men’s ward Elizabeth could hear the groaning and screaming—some men seemed to merely have feverish aches, while others hollered as though parts of their bodies were being cut off.

The blood was the worst part. Not just her husband’s, although his was terrifying, but that it was everywhere-patients with eyes crimson red, noses bleeding so furiously that they spattered the floor before rags could be found. It seemed to her as though the disease was little more than the body tearing itself apart. At least twice in the two days she’d been here she’d seen a body and presumed it first to be a Negro, only realizing a moment later that the color was a splotchy blue-black instead of consistent brown.

Her husband’s skin had begun to turn this morning. A small spot on his arm, larger ones in the beds of his fingernails. His lips turned the color Junior’s had been one day when the boy been about seven and had insisted on staying out sledding with some of the older boys on their street.

“No, Mama!” Elizabeth remembered her son’s childish, high voice calling when she’d tried to force him to come back in that day. The snow was too fresh; his Flexible Flyer was brand new. It was a way of proving himself to the bigger boys, and she wasn’t to stand in his way.

He’d returned hours later, soaked to the bone from repeated crash-landings in snowdrifts, with his teeth clattering and his lips a bright blue. He insisted he didn’t need her, reminded her the big boys didn’t have their mothers looking after them, and then left a little sopping trail of first snowsuit, then trousers, then underpants on his way up the stairs.

She’d made him a cocoa and drawn a hot bath anyway. He’d grudgingly accepted.

Elizabeth shook her head. Junior was at home, practicing his piano, staying safely away from the influenza. It was such a funny thing, she thought, that sitting here in the metal chair outside the ward, listening to men screaming and crying in pain that her mind would go to such a pedestrian moment with her son. Just one small afternoon among thousands.

And so it was that she was thinking about Junior, with his blue lips and bare bottom when the voice interrupted her thoughts.

“Mrs. Masen?”

Her head jerked up. It was the light-eyed doctor, the one who had met them on Edward’s admission. He was so young, she thought. If she hadn’t encountered him in the hospital, she never would have thought him old enough to even be a physician. But there was an odd wisdom in him. Unlike the other doctors, he never appeared hurried or frazzled. He seemed to simply take whatever time he needed and then moved to the next person who needed his care. And maybe she was imagining, but it seemed as though he had taken a special interest in her and in her husband.

“Mrs. Masen?” he repeated.

“I am surprised you remember my name,” she answered. “I barely remember yours.”

“Cullen,” he said quietly. “I’m Dr. Cullen.” He dropped himself into the chair next to hers. “And I have an excellent memory. In addition, you remind me of someone…from my past.” At this, his eyes glazed a moment, and she could see him working as though trying to grasp at something. It struck her as odd; that he would have such a good memory as to remember her name but not, it seemed, enough for whoever it was she reminded him of.

He came back to himself in a few seconds. “Your husband—” he said quietly.

And that was enough, really. Hadn’t she just come to this conclusion herself; thinking about Junior and his blue lips after a day of sledding. Her husband’s skin was already turning that same dark bluish-black, “cyanosis,” she’d heard one of the nurses call it. And that was the moment at which they stopped. She had seen the way the doctors stopped visiting a bed, the way all the nurses would do was wipe a bleeding nose or spittle away from a face. The way the stretcher men came not long after.

So she nodded. “I understand.”

The young doctor stared at her. “No,” he said quietly, “you haven’t been in there in a short while, if I’m not mistaken.”

There was an assuredness to his voice that caused a chill to shoot down her spine. He was not mistaken. And somehow, without having never seen her there, he was certain.

She nodded.

“Mrs. Masen I—” he looked down, and drew a deep breath. “Mrs. Masen, I just arrived to my shift. I only work in the night, you see. And I went to check on your husband at once.”

She waved a hand, looking back at the floor. “I understand the outlook isn’t good.”

“He’s passed.”

For a split second, she thought she hadn’t heard him. Her next thought was perhaps in this context, those words had some other meaning, some sort of medical way of explaining something, like the way they referred to a whooping cough as pertussis. But then she met the strange yellow eyes—like a thin honey, she thought, not the kind you got at the orchard but the kind they sold at the market, the one that had been processed so that it would stay on the shelf. Those eyes went out of focus, the yellow becoming this strange blur.

It was a moment before she realized it was her eyes that had filled with tears.

There was still screaming and moaning coming from the ward, the sound of feet scuffling up and down the rows of beds. The doors opened and two nurses hurried out, giving Dr. Cullen a nod before disappearing off to some other part of the hospital.

The world needed to stop, she thought. Hadn’t Dr. Cullen just said that Edward had died?

But it couldn’t, she realized at once. Nothing was stopping for her; nothing could stop. Even Dr. Cullen had other places he needed to be.

Then she wouldn’t stop either. Elizabeth sniffled and wiped her eyes with the back of one hand. She drew herself upright. Standing several feet above Dr. Cullen, she was struck even more by how young he appeared-hardly older than her son. He was staring at the linoleum floor, his hands moving rapidly over each other.

“May I collect him?” she asked.

The doctor’s head jerked upward, and the honey eyes fixed on her, coldly confused.

“Have you access to an undertaker?”

An undertaker? There was a cemetery at their church, of course. She would call on the caretaker there and get his recommendation for the persons to use for the burial.

“Our church has a cemetery.”

His head shook in reply. “If they are willing to take him, they may come for him. But almost no undertakers are willing to work, ma’am. They don’t want to become ill themselves. The mayor has given instruction for the dead to be taken to mass burial.”

She blinked. Mass burial. For her husband?

A particularly loud cry erupted from the men’s ward, and both of them started.

“I am so terribly sorry,” the doctor repeated. “You don’t know—” There was a brief pause as he shot to his feet. “Please, wait a moment.” And like that, he seemed to vanish, the hinge on the men’s ward door creaking in protest behind him.

Elizabeth dropped back into the chair, her head in her hands. Just a few hours ago, Edward had been laughing, joking off his embarrassment at his wife seeing him so incapacitated.

“They feed me terrible things, Lizzie,” he had told her, his blue lips turning up at the edges. “Make sure Edward Junior doesn’t end up in here. He’ll become even scrawnier than he is already.”

It had been, what, five hours?

The linoleum floor was green, a funny, ugly hue. Black and white spots, some little, some larger. She wondered why the spots were there, if perhaps the ugly color was too overwhelming on its own and thus required the dots to break it up.

A little cloth package was shoved into her hands.

“Your husband’s effects,” came the quiet voice. “We don’t usually—”

He coughed, and began again. “I simply thought your son might want to carry his father’s things.”

Elizabeth ran her hands over the package, unwrapping it a bit. There were her husband’s eyeglasses, half-lens spectacles that he needed for reading but carried in his jacket pocket so they would never be seen. His pocket watch, the heavy brass thing that he carried every day so that his trousers always looked lopsided. His lighter, engraved with his initials.

E. A. M. Edward Anthony Masen. The same name they had given their only child.

It had been here, many corridors and floors away, she supposed. Her mother had insisted she come to a hospital; that was how the women were doing things these days and it was far safer. The pain had been terrible, yet somehow she had been astonished when she felt something give way, and she’d watched the doctor lift a squalling, smashed-face creature from between her legs.

Her arms had reached for him at once, and she had said the only word which came to her, the same word that would be the first word from his father’s lips a few minutes later when he was told he’d been given a son:

“Edward.”

Turning the lighter over in her hands, she rubbed her thumb carefully over the initials, burnishing them a little so that some of the grime of her husband’s pockets disappeared. The world had seemed theirs that day as they held the little bundle. They had watched him for hours, mesmerized by every yawn and cough, making silent promises to themselves. They would raise their little boy, send him to a good school, cheer him on in sports. Elizabeth would teach him how to play the piano. One day they would sit in the front row of a church when he married a pretty woman. Not long after they might come to a hospital again and this time, it would be his baby boy they would hold.

There was supposed to have been time for all of these things. Their son was supposed to have a father.

Her Edward was not supposed to die.

It was hardly cool in the hospital; the crush of bodies seemed to keep all the air a thick, stifling warmth. So the coolness of the finger that brushed her collar made her jump as the doctor’s hand came to rest on her shoulder.

“I am so very sorry,” came the whisper.

On the floor, white dots merged with the black dots and finally with the ugly green before it all became one blurry mess. This time, Elizabeth did nothing to stop her tears.

~||x||~

The rates from Cook County hospital were reported in the Sun-Times.

They were losing forty percent.

It demoralized the physicians. It was true that more patients were walking out of Cook than were dying, but only by the tiniest amount, and on any given day, that number could seem imperceptible. The ones who were well enough to leave almost never saw a doctor at all; they were rerouted by friendly nurses or sent on their way by intake staff, redirected to one of the armories or churches which had been pressed into service as infirmaries as the epidemic wore on.

This meant, of course, that those Carlisle saw were the ones who would die-it seemed at times as though he saw the forty percent and only them.

The influenza struck hard and without mercy, and it seemed like every time Carlisle turned around there was another man or woman fallen. The fastest report was four hours-a patient who experienced his first symptoms at six in the morning and was pronounced dead by ten.

And in the midst of this, he was still trying to keep focus.

His steps were loud as he walked toward his office.

Carlisle always bought sturdy shoes, shoes which withstood years of wear, particularly with the aid of a cobbler. There was some part of him that felt he should wear good shoes, and he tended to listen to those parts. Those parts were the parts of him that came from before. The parts that kept him human.

He flexed his right hand. He had touched her, Elizabeth, the woman who had captured him with her striking green eyes only three days before. He never did that. He was too afraid that a human would notice the unnatural coolness, the way his skin was unyielding instead of soft. And he did not allow himself to become close to patients. If that was even what this was.

True, he had raced to the hospital both days since Mr. Masen’s admission. True, the man’s status had been his first checked at the beginning every shift, the last looked in on at the end. True, he had accepted the man’s affects, hiding them in the bedstand in case an unscrupulous gurney man or gravedigger tried to take them from him.

He shook his head in dismay. All of this had been a mistake. Humans were mortal. Even something as small as worrying about them ended in this dull ache in his being that he couldn’t shake. This, he suspected, was why the brothers in Italy looked down with such disdain on the mortals. It was simply easier.

Even if you grew close to them, they would still die.

He wouldn’t do it again.

The groan of frustration ripped from him before he had the forethought to suppress it.

“Are you all right, Doctor?”

Startled, he whirled. Too quickly. Dorothy gave him an odd look.

“You’re not becoming ill, are you?”

If only she knew how ridiculous a proposition that was. “I’ve just lost a patient.” His voice was gravelly, almost growled, and he wondered briefly if she noticed the animalistic sounds he tried so hard to keep from his voice.

Dorothy, however, looked mollified by his admission. She clucked her tongue softly and moved closer to him, laying a hand on his upper arm. He jerked away out of instinct, and she frowned, but spoke anyway.

“There isn’t a one of us seen anything like this, Doctor Cullen. But it won’t do any of us good to dwell on what we don’t have right now.” She locked his gaze. “You’re needed in the women’s ward. You do what you need to”—a quick glance toward his office door—”and then come see to the patients. Just because you missed one don’t mean you can’t save more today.”

Then she turned.

Carlisle stared down the hall toward his office. Then, shaking his head, he turned and followed Dorothy.

The women’s ward was filled to overflowing. Any medical facility, or anything which could be pressed into service as a medical facility-churches, armories, libraries-they were all bursting at the seams.

A patient near the door was nearing death; even if his stethoscope might not catch the growing rattle in her lungs as she slowly drowned, his ears knew the sound. He stopped to look briefly at the chart at the foot of her bed. Her name was Alma, she was twenty-three years old.

My age, Carlisle thought, and it startled him. He didn’t often think of himself as being anything other than over two centuries old. Her fever was high, and from the sounds of it, the pneumocystis had set in. There wouldn’t be much time for her.

He leaned over her bed and took her hand. “Alma?” he asked gently.

Her eyes snapped open, revealing a vivid blue-gray gone only slightly clouded from the influenza. Like most humans did when they first looked into his eyes, she frowned, and he fought not to look away. An ocular condition, he explained to patients and coworkers who looked too closely. A rare disease which had nearly blinded him as a child and left his eyes this feline-like color. Others tried not to stare, and he appreciated that, but it also meant that he very rarely had the pleasure of having another look him in the eye. That this patient did so was startling and refreshing.

“How do you feel?”

She coughed, shaking her head, a bit of blood bubbling on her lips and dripped down her chin. There was a rag hanging from the head of her bed, and Carlisle took it, wiping her chin gently. When she had settled, she looked up at him again with half-closed eyes.

“Am I going to die, doctor?”

He sighed, and wondered if he should have even bothered to look at the chart. It was harder to answer, “Yes,” to a patient when he knew her name, when he had made that inevitable comparison to the end of his own human life.

But that was his job. And had that not been what he had thought when he had entered the ward? His ears had identified the woman as near death at once. Did it do her any good now, when she had asked, to lie? What would it accomplish?

His hesitation solved the problem for him, however. She was already shaking her head when Carlisle met her eyes again. “No need,” she rasped. “No need, doctor. I understand.”

And he was grateful. He ducked his head.

“I need to attend to the others,” he told her quietly. “Is there anything I can have the nurses do for you?”

She shook her head, and her full hair flopped across her face. But as he was turning away, her voice came again.

“Doctor? Are you a Christian?”

He froze. What kind of a question was that? Was he a Christian? He was a vampire. Did not the one preclude the other? He looked hastily around the ward to see if anyone else had heard this question, or had seen the way he had jerked in response. The patients to either side of Alma were already lost in febrile hallucinations, rolling and moaning and coughing so hard they probably had no way of hearing a single request of a patient, even one immediately adjacent to them. The nurses, for their parts, bustled from bed to bed, wiping brows, taking temperatures, attending to soiled bed linens.

No one had noticed.

He turned back to Alma and fixed her grey eyes in his own. “I was raised in the English church,” he answered quietly, “but I don’t attend now.” It had been decades, in fact-shortly after the North and South war. He had gone to a church in Pennsylvania, Methodist, where the congregation was mourning its sons who had died in the war. He had run himself ragged-or as near to ragged as he might have been able to-attending to soldiers on the battlefields, and he had needed then to say something, to somehow give thanks for the fact that his new country had not torn itself in two. But since then, there had been nothing—over fifty years.

She didn’t seem fazed by this answer, however. “I haven’t been in a long time, either,” she said. “They’ve closed them all, the churches.”

He had forgotten this, but of course it was true. The city had declared that there was to be no public congregating in this time-bringing people together was simply a way to spread the disease more quickly. Gymnasiums had shuttered their doors, along with theatres and concert halls, schools, and of course, the churches. At times, the tollers still rang the bells, but even as he thought about it he could not recall a time in the last three weeks in which the bells of the churches near his flat had rung. The city was silent.

“Doctor, would you say an Our Father with me?”

He gulped, and again his eyes darted around the room. There was still no one looking at him. So he turned and went back to the bedside. Taking Alma’s hand again, he knelt at her bedside. The mask he wore was of course unnecessary, just a part of his charade. He pulled it down so that she might hear him clearly, and bowed his head.

She closed her eyes.

“Our Father who art in heaven,” she began, and for a moment, he did not finish. But then she coughed, and he looked to her again, to the way a bit of blood dripped from her lips, and thought about the prognosis he had just given, or rather, had allowed her to figure out for herself. He thought about Edward Masen, his strong son, and his widow. He thought about the way the boy had tried so valiantly not to cry, and how much he longed to console them. How terrible he had felt standing before them and admitting that he was powerless.

His voice rose, shaking.

“Hallowed be thy name,” he whispered, and the gray eyes fluttered closed in satisfaction.

“Thy kingdom come—”

“Thy will be done—”

“On Earth as it is in Heaven.”

So among the clattering of beds against wooden floor, among moans of pain, coughing, the dark rattling of breath-those dying and those merely suffering; it was impossible to tell the difference now-they prayed together, in whispers, one line at a time, in whispers. It was a prayer for her, certainly, but it was as much a prayer for the family he had left in the men’s ward; a prayer for their safety; a prayer of penitence for his own inability to fulfill what he had promised them.

“Amen” came from both of them at once, and for a split second, it was as though there was silence in the ward. Gray eyes met yellow, locking them hard. They said nothing a moment, and then he leaned forward as though to feel her temperature with his palm. It was an odd thing, this fever; so many patients had fevers above one hundred degrees that he could finally get away with contact-they noticed his hands were cold, certainly, but a patient merely chalked this abnormality up to his or her own illness, and thought nothing of whether it was Carlisle who was abnormal.

When his hand touched her brow, the gray eyes closed.

Usually he didn’t say anything. The best he offered his patients was his thanks to them for allowing him to treat them. His closure, and the only way he allowed himself to display any emotion for a patient at all. He didn’t speak with them; he didn’t sit with them, and he certainly did not pray with them, for them, or over them. Perhaps it was that the woman was twenty-three, or perhaps it was the way she had stopped him and asked, or perhaps it was going back on his word to take care of Edward Masen, but the words were already on his lips. The twenty-third psalm; not the beginning that everyone knew, but the end, the committal. The part which he suddenly felt he owed to a woman whom he had not managed to tell outright of her own death.

“Surely goodness and mercy shall follow thee all the days of thy life. And thou shalt dwell in the house of the Lord forever.”

He was saying it to her, yes. But as he said it, he imagined not the woman before him, but the other woman, the one with the red hair and the striking green eyes. With his words, he commended her husband, apologizing for his own shortfall to the mother and to her young son. If God would hear the prayers of a vampire—and he doubted this—then perhaps he might be forgiven for this failure.

Where was Elizabeth now? he wondered. Trying to press her way into the men’s ward again? On her way home to take care of the gangly boy?

Carlisle squeezed Alma’s hand one last time, stood, and stepped away quickly, before she could say anything. In his hurry, he nearly ran headlong into Dorothy where she stood a bed away. Her brow furrowed as she looked on him with a soft expression.

“Doctor, you are quite the extraordinary man,” she said quietly. “To find God in this place.”

He blinked. Turning, he glanced back.

The young woman before was staring, dazed by his addition. Then, when she saw him looking, she smiled, and he saw her lips had turned a dark, purplish-blue.

The panic and frustration that had seized him so powerfully a short time ago clawed back. He pulled his hand closed, remembering where it had touched the neck of the woman, Elizabeth. He had failed her. He had failed her son. And now he would fail this woman as well.

Locking eyes with Dorothy, he shook his head, slowly. When he spoke, his voice was ice.

“God has forsaken this place,” was all he said.

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Chapter Notes