Page 113 of Life and Death

“They had already died from the disease. I was alone. That’s why she chose me. In all the chaos of the epidemic, no one would ever realize I was gone.”

“How did she . . . save you?”

A few seconds passed, and when she spoke again she seemed to be choosing her words very carefully.

“It was difficult. Not many of us have the restraint necessary to accomplish it. But Carine has always been the most humane, the most compassionate of all of us. . . . I don’t think you could find her equal anywhere in history.” She paused. “For me, it was merely very, very painful.”

She set her jaw, and I could tell she wasn’t going to say anything more about it. I filed it away for later. My curiosity on the subject was hardly idle. There were lots of angles I needed to think through on this particular issue, angles that were only beginning to occur to me.

Her soft voice interrupted my thoughts. “She acted from loneliness. That’s usually the reason behind the choice. I was the first in Carine’s family, though she found Earnest soon after. He fell from a cliff. They took him straight to the hospital morgue, though, somehow, his heart was still beating.”

“So you have to be dying, then. . . .”

“No, that’s just Carine. She would never do that to someone who had another choice, any other choice.” The respect in her voice was profound whenever she spoke of her adoptive mother. “It is easier, she says, though, if the heart is weak.” She stared at the now-dark road, and I could feel the subject closing again.

“And Eleanor and Royal?”

“Carine brought Royal into our family next. I didn’t realize till much later that she was hoping he would be to me what Earnest was to her—she was careful with her thoughts around me.” She rolled her eyes. “But he was never more than a brother. It was only two years later that he found Eleanor. He was hunting—we were in Appalachia at the time—and found a bear about to finish her off. He carried her back to Carine, more than a hundred miles, afraid he wouldn’t be able to do it himself. I’m only beginning to guess how difficult that journey was for him.” She threw a pointed glance in my direction and raised our hands, still folded together, to brush her cheek against my hand.

“But he made it.”

“Yes. He saw something in her face that made him strong enough. And they’ve been together ever since. Sometimes they live separately from us, as a married couple. But the younger we pretend to be, the longer we can stay in any given place. Forks is perfect in many ways, so we all enrolled in high school.” She laughed. “I suppose we’ll have to go to the wedding in a few years. Again.”

“Archie and Jessamine?”

“Archie and Jessamine are two very rare creatures. They both developed aconscience, as we refer to it, with no outside guidance. Jessamine belonged to another . . . family, a very different kind of family. She became depressed, and she wandered on her own. Archie found her. Like me, he has certain gifts.”

“Really?” I interrupted, fascinated. “But you said you were the only one who could hear people’s thoughts.”

“That’s true. He knows other things. Heseesthings—things that might happen, things that are coming. But it’s very subjective. The future isn’t set in stone. Things change.”

Her jaw set when she said that, and her eyes darted to my face and away so quickly that I wasn’t sure if I’d only imagined it.

“What kinds of things does he see?”

“He saw Jessamine and knew that she was looking for him before she knew it herself. He saw Carine, and our family, and they came together to find us. He’s most sensitive to non-humans. He always knows, for example, when another group of our kind is coming near. And any threat they may pose.”

“Are there a lot of . . . your kind?” I was surprised. How many of them could walk around with us all totally oblivious?

My mind got caught on one word she’d said.Threat. It was the first time she’dever said anything to hint that her world wasn’t just dangerous for humans. It made me anxious, and I was about to ask a new question, but she was already answering my first.

“No, not many. But most won’t settle in any one place. Only those like us, who’ve given up hunting you people”—a sly glance in my direction—“can live together with humans for any length of time. We’ve only found one other family like ours, in a small village in Alaska. We lived together for a time, but there were so many of us that we became too noticeable. Those of us who live . . . differently, tend to band together.”

“And the others?”

“Nomads, for the most part. We’ve all lived that way at times. It gets tedious, like anything else. But we run across the others now and then, because most of us prefer the North.”

“Why is that?”

We were parked in front of my house now, and she turned off the truck. The silence that followed its roar felt intense. It was very dark; there was no moon. The porch light was off, so I knew my dad wasn’t home yet.

“Did you have your eyes open this afternoon?” she teased. “Do you think I could walk down the street in the sunlight without causing traffic accidents?”

I thought to myself that she could stop traffic even without all the pyrotechnics.

“There’s a reason why we chose the Olympic Peninsula, one of the most sunless places in the world. It’s nice to be able to go outside in the day. You wouldn’t believe how tired you can get of nighttime in eighty-odd years.”

“So that’s where the legends came from?”