Twilight (Twilight, #1)

by Stephenie Meyer

You don’t realize how incredibly breakable you are.

I know love and lust don’t always keep the same company.”

“I love you,” I whispered. “You are my life now,” he answered simply.

“What would you say to meeting my family?”

“Oh, they already know everything.

At any rate, we don’t have secrets in the family. It’s not really feasible, what with my mind reading and Alice seeing the future and all that.”

She spoke with feeling, and I realized that she thought I was brave.

“Rosalie struggles the most with… with what we are. It’s hard for her to have someone on the outside know the truth. And she’s a little jealous.”

“You’re human.” He shrugged. “She wishes that she were, too.”

Alice just sees some visitors coming soon. They know we’re here, and they’re curious.”

“He just celebrated his three hundred and sixty-second birthday,”

“Carlisle was born in London, in the sixteen-forties, he believes. Time wasn’t marked as accurately then, for the common people anyway. It was just before Cromwell’s rule, though.”

“He was the only son of an Anglican pastor. His mother died giving birth to him. His father was an intolerant man. As the Protestants came into power, he was enthusiastic in his persecution of Roman Catholics and other religions. He also believed very strongly in the reality of evil. He led hunts for witches, werewolves… and vampires.”

“They burned a lot of innocent people—of course the real creatures that he sought were not so easy to catch.

“When the pastor grew old, he placed his obedient son in charge of the raids. At first Carlisle was a disappointment; he was not quick to accuse, to see demons where they did not exist. But he was persistent, and more clever than his father. He actually discovered a coven of true vampires that lived hidden in the sewers of the city, only coming out by night to hunt. In those days, when monsters were not just myths and legends, that was the way many lived.

“He must have been ancient, and weak with hunger. Carlisle heard him call out in Latin to the others when he caught the scent of the mob. He ran through the streets, and Carlisle—he was twenty-three and very fast—was in the lead of the pursuit. The creature could have easily outrun them, but Carlisle thinks he was too hungry, so he turned and attacked. He fell on Carlisle first, but the others were close behind, and he turned to defend himself. He killed two men, and made off with a third, leaving Carlisle bleeding in the street.”

“Carlisle knew what his father would do. The bodies would be burned—anything infected by the monster must be destroyed. Carlisle acted instinctively to save his own life. He crawled away from the alley while the mob followed the fiend and his victim. He hid in a cellar, buried himself in rotting potatoes for three days. It’s a miracle he was able to keep silent, to stay undiscovered.

“It was over then, and he realized what he had become.”

He was just placing a bookmark in the pages of the thick volume he held.

“The Waggoner,”

“When he knew what he had become,” Edward said quietly, “he rebelled against it. He tried to destroy himself. But that’s not easily done.”

It is amazing that he was able to resist… feeding… while he was still so new. The instinct is more powerful then, it takes over everything. But he was so repelled by himself that he had the strength to try to kill himself with starvation.”

“So he grew very hungry, and eventually weak. He strayed as far as he could from the human populace, recognizing that his willpower was weakening, too. For months he wandered by night, seeking the loneliest places, loathing himself. “One night, a herd of deer passed his hiding place. He was so wild with thirst that he attacked without a thought. His strength returned and he realized there was an alternative to being the vile monster he feared. Had he not eaten venison in his former life? Over the next months his new philosophy was born. He could exist without being a demon. He found himself again.

“I can’t adequately describe the struggle; it took Carlisle two centuries of torturous effort to perfect his self-control.

“He was studying in Italy when he discovered the others there. They were much more civilized and educated than the wraiths of the London sewers.”

“Aro, Marcus, Caius,”

Carlisle stayed with them only for a short time, just a few decades. He greatly admired their civility, their refinement, but they persisted in trying to cure his aversion to ‘his natural food source,’ as they called it. They tried to persuade him, and he tried to persuade them, to no avail. At that point, Carlisle decided to try the New World. He dreamed of finding others like himself. He was very lonely, you see.

There was no hope for me; I was left in a ward with the dying. He had nursed my parents, and knew I was alone. He decided to try…”

“Well, I had a typical bout of rebellious adolescence—about ten years after I was… born… created, whatever you want to call it. I wasn’t sold on his life of abstinence, and I resented him for curbing my appetite. So I went off on my own for a time.”

“It took me only a few years to return to Carlisle and recommit to his vision. I thought I would be exempt from the… depression… that accompanies a conscience. Because I knew the thoughts of my prey, I could pass over the innocent and pursue only the evil. If I followed a murderer down a dark alley where he stalked a young girl—if I saved her, then surely I wasn’t so terrible.”

His view looked down on the winding Sol Duc River, across the untouched forest to the Olympic Mountain range.

There was no bed, only a wide and inviting black leather sofa.

“Alice says there’s going to be a real storm tonight, and Emmett wants to play ball. Are you game?”

“We have to wait for thunder to play ball—you’ll see why,” he promised.

“Vampires like baseball?” “It’s the American pastime,”

He led me a few feet through the tall, wet ferns and draping moss, around a massive hemlock tree, and we were there, on the edge of an enormous open field in the lap of the Olympic peaks.

“Well, I do think of them as my children in most ways. I never could get over my mothering instincts—did Edward tell you I had lost a child?”

“Yes, my first and only baby. He died just a few days after he was born, the poor tiny thing,” she sighed. “It broke my heart—that’s why I jumped off the cliff, you know,” she added matter-of-factly.

The crack of impact was shattering, thunderous; it echoed off the mountains—I immediately understood the necessity of the thunderstorm.

“Emmett hits the hardest,” Esme explained, “but Edward runs the fastest.”

Carlisle was up to bat, Edward catching, when Alice suddenly gasped. My eyes were on Edward, as usual, and I saw his head snap up to look at her. Their eyes met and something flowed between them in an instant. He was at my side before the others could ask Alice what was wrong.

“They were traveling much quicker than I thought. I can see I had the perspective wrong before,”

“They heard us playing, and it changed their path,”

“Less than five minutes. They’re running—they want to play.”

“Three,”

THEY EMERGED ONE BY ONE FROM THE FOREST EDGE, RANGING A dozen meters apart.

The third was a woman; from this distance, all I could see of her was that her hair was a startling shade of red.

Their walk was catlike, a gait that seemed constantly on the edge of shifting into a crouch.

Both men had cropped hair, but the woman’s brilliant orange hair was filled with leaves and debris from the woods.

Their eyes were different, too. Not the gold or black I had come to expect, but a deep burgundy color that was disturbing and sinister.