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I put my cheek against the cool black tabletop and tried to hold on to my consciousness.
Just let me get out of here, I thought. I’ll crawl.
Suddenly the sidewalk disappeared from beneath me. My eyes flew open in shock. Edward had scooped me up in his arms, as easily as if I weighed ten pounds instead of a hundred and ten.
“People can’t smell blood,” he contradicted. “Well, I can—that’s what makes me sick. It smells like rust… and salt.”
His voice was like melting honey.
he didn’t belong in the same world.
La Push, to First Beach.”
He stared out through the rain, lost in thought.
“I’m seventeen,” I responded, a little confused. “You don’t seem seventeen.”
“You don’t seem much like a junior in high school yourself,” I noted. He made a face and changed the subject.
“Would she extend the same courtesy to you, do you think? No matter who your choice was?” He was suddenly intent, his eyes searching mine.
There are no secrets in Forks.”
“We’re going to be hiking in the Goat Rocks Wilderness, just south of Rainier.”
you seem to be one of those people who just attract accidents like a magnet.
And I couldn’t stop the gloom that engulfed me as I realized I didn’t know how long I would have to wait before I saw him again.
“It’s not a very good place for camping.” He sounded surprised. “Too many bears. Most people go there during the hunting season.”
It was only fifteen miles to La Push from Forks, with gorgeous, dense green forests edging the road most of the way and the wide Quillayute River snaking beneath it twice.
teenagers from the reservation come to socialize.
I noticed a younger boy sitting on the stones near the fire glance up at me in interest.
and the boy who noticed me was named Jacob.
It was relaxing to sit with Angela; she was a restful kind of person to be around—she didn’t feel the need to fill every silence with chatter.
He looked fourteen, maybe fifteen, and had long, glossy black hair pulled back with a rubber band at the nape of his neck.
“I’m Jacob Black.”
“The Cullens don’t come here,”
He’d said that the Cullens didn’t come here, but his tone had implied something more—that they weren’t allowed; they were prohibited.
“That’s Sam—he’s nineteen,”
“The Cullens? Oh, they’re not supposed to come onto the reservation.”
“Do you like scary stories?” he
“Another legend claims that we descended from wolves—and that the wolves are our brothers still.
“Then there are the stories about the cold ones.”
There are stories of the cold ones as old as the wolf legends, and some much more recent. According to legend, my own great-grandfather knew some of them. He was the one who made the treaty that kept them off our land.”
You see, the cold ones are the natural enemies of the wolf—well, not the wolf, really, but the wolves that turn into men, like our ancestors. You would call them werewolves.”
They didn’t hunt the way others of their kind did—they weren’t supposed to be dangerous to the tribe. So my great-grandfather made a truce with them. If they would promise to stay off our lands, we wouldn’t expose them to the pale-faces.”
“There’s always a risk for humans to be around the cold ones, even if they’re civilized like this clan was. You never know when they might get too hungry to resist.”
“They claimed that they didn’t hunt humans. They supposedly were somehow able to prey on animals instead.”
“So how does it fit in with the Cullens? Are they like the cold ones your great-grandfather met?” “No.” He paused dramatically. “They are the same ones.”
“There are more of them now, a new female and a new male, but the rest are the same. In my great-grandfather’s time they already knew of the leader, Carlisle. He’d been here and gone before your people had even arrived.”
“Blood drinkers,”
“Your people call them vampires.”
He was pretty mad at my dad when he heard that some of us weren’t going to the hospital since Dr. Cullen started working there.”
But I really did like Jacob. He was someone I could easily be friends with.
“Jacob!” I screamed. But he was gone. In his place was a large red-brown wolf with black eyes.
And then Edward stepped out from the trees, his skin faintly glowing, his eyes black and dangerous.
My subconscious had dredged up exactly the images I’d been trying so desperately to avoid.
Danag, was a Filipino vampire supposedly responsible for planting taro on the islands long ago. The myth continued that the Danag worked with humans for many years, but the partnership ended one day when a woman cut her finger and a Danag sucked her wound, enjoying the taste so much that it drained her body completely of blood.
It seemed that most vampire myths centered around beautiful women as demons and children as victims; they also seemed like constructs created to explain away the high mortality rates for young children, and to give men an excuse for infidelity.
the Romanian Varacolaci, a powerful undead being who could appear as a beautiful, pale-skinned human, the Slovak Nelapsi, a creature so strong and fast it could massacre an entire village in the single hour after midnight, and one other, the Stregoni benefici.
An Italian vampire, said to be on the side of goodness, and a mortal enemy of all evil vampires.
Speed, strength, beauty, pale skin, eyes that shift color; and then Jacob’s criteria: blood drinkers, enemies of the werewolf, cold-skinned, and immortal.
My sense of direction was hopeless; I could get lost in much less helpful surroundings.
