Page 53 of Life and Death: Twilight Reimagined (The Twilight Saga)

S HE LED ME BACK TO THE ROOM THAT SHE’D POINTED OUT AS Carine’s office. She paused outside the door for a second.

“Come in,” Carine called from inside.

Edythe opened the door to a tall room with long windows that stretched the entire height of the walls. The room was lined by bookshelves reaching to the ceiling and holding more books than I’d ever seen outside a library.

Carine sat behind a huge desk; she was just placing a bookmark in the pages of the book she held. The room was how I’d always imagined a college dean’s would look—only Carine looked too young to fit the part.

Knowing what she’d been through—having just watched it all in my imagination while knowing that my imagination wasn’t up to the job and it was probably much worse than I’d pictured it—made me look at her differently.

“What can I do for you?” she asked with a smile, rising from her seat.

“I wanted to show Beau some of our history,” Edythe said. “Well, your history, actually.”

“We didn’t mean to disturb you,” I apologized.

“Not at all,” she said to me, and then to Edythe, “Where are you going to start?”

“The Waggoner,” Edythe said. She pulled me around in a circle, so that we were facing the door we’d just walked through.

This wall was different from the others.

Instead of bookshelves, it was covered by dozens and dozens of framed paintings.

They were all different sizes and styles, some dull, some blazing with color.

I scanned quickly, looking for some kind of logic, something they all had in common, but I couldn’t find any link.

Edythe pulled me to the far left side, then put both her hands on my arms and positioned me directly in front of one of the paintings. My heart reacted the way it always did when she touched me—even in the most casual way. It was more embarrassing knowing Carine would hear it, too.

The painting she wanted me to look at was a small square canvas in a plain wooden frame; it did not stand out among the bigger and brighter pieces.

Painted in different shades of brown, it showed a miniature city full of steeply slanted roofs.

A river filled the foreground, crossed by a bridge covered with structures that looked like tiny cathedrals.

“London in the sixteen-fifties,” Edythe said.

“The London of my youth,” Carine added from a few feet behind us. I jumped a little—I hadn’t heard her approach. Edythe took my hand and squeezed it lightly.

“Will you tell the story?” Edythe asked. I turned to see Carine’s reaction.

She met my glance and smiled. “I would, but I’m actually running a bit late. The hospital called this morning—Dr. Snow is taking a sick day. But Beau won’t miss anything.” She smiled at Edythe now. “You know the stories as well as I do.”

It was a strange combination to absorb—the everyday life of a small-town doctor mixed up with a discussion of her early days in seventeenth-century London.

It was also kind of unsettling to realize that she probably was only speaking out loud for my benefit.

With another warm smile, Carine left the room.

I stared at the picture of her hometown for a long minute.

“What came next?” I asked again. “When she knew what had happened to her?”

She nudged me over a half-step, her eyes on a bigger landscape. It was done in dull fall colors and showed an empty meadow in a gloomy forest, a black mountain peak in the distance.

“When she knew what she had become,” Edythe said quietly, “she despaired . . . and then rebelled. She tried to destroy herself. But that’s not easily done.”

“How?” I didn’t mean to say that out loud, but I was so shocked, it slipped out.

Edythe shrugged. “She jumped from great heights. She tried to drown herself in the ocean. But she was young to the new life, and very strong. It is amazing that she was able to resist . . . feeding . . . while she was still so new. The instinct is more powerful then, it takes over everything. But she was so repelled by herself that she had the strength to try to kill herself with starvation.”

“Is that possible?” I asked quietly.

“No, there are very few ways we can be killed.”

I opened my mouth to ask, but she spoke before I could.

“So she grew very hungry, and eventually weak. She strayed as far as she could from the human populace, recognizing that her willpower was weakening, too. For months she wandered by night, seeking the loneliest places, loathing herself.

“One night, a herd of deer passed beneath her hiding place.

She was so wild with thirst that she attacked without a thought.

Her strength returned and she realized there was an alternative to being the vile monster she feared.

Had she not eaten venison in her former life?

Over the next months, her new philosophy was born.

She could exist without being a demon. She found herself again.

“She began to make better use of her time. She’d always been intelligent, eager to learn. Now she had unlimited time before her. She studied by night, planned by day. She swam to France and—”

“She swam to France?”

“People swim the Channel all the time, Beau,” she reminded me patiently.

“That’s true, I guess. It just sounded funny in that context. Go on.”

“Swimming is easy for us—”

“Everything is easy for you ,” I muttered.

She waited with her eyebrows raised.

“Sorry. I won’t interrupt again, I promise.”

She smiled darkly and finished her sentence. “Because, technically, we don’t need to breathe.”

“You—”

“No, no, you promised,” she laughed, placing her cold finger against my lips. “Do you want to hear the story or not?”

“You can’t spring something like that on me, and then expect me not to say anything,” I mumbled against her finger.

She lifted her hand, moving it to rest against my chest. The speed of my heart reacted to that, but I ignored it.

“You don’t have to breathe ?” I demanded.

“No, it’s not necessary. Just a habit.” She shrugged.

“How long can you go . . . without breathing ?”

“Indefinitely, I suppose; I don’t know. It gets a bit uncomfortable—being without a sense of smell.”

“A bit uncomfortable,” I echoed.

I wasn’t paying attention to my own expression, but something in it made her suddenly serious. Her hand fell to her side and she stood very still, watching my face. The silence stretched out. Her features turned to stone.

“What is it?” I whispered, carefully touching her frozen face.

Her face came back to life, and she smiled a tiny, wan smile.

“I know that at some point, something I tell you or something you see is going to be too much. And then you’ll run away from me, screaming as you go.

” Her smile faded. “I won’t stop you when that happens.

I want it to happen, because I want you to be safe.

And yet, I want to be with you. The two desires are impossible to reconcile.

. . .” She trailed off, staring at my face.

“I’m not running anywhere,” I promised.

“We’ll see,” she said, smiling again.

I frowned at her. “Back to the story—Carine was swimming to France.”

She paused, settling into the story again.

Reflexively, her eyes flickered to another picture—the most colorful of them all, the most ornately framed, and the largest; it was twice as wide as the door it hung next to.

The canvas overflowed with bright figures in swirling robes, writhing around long pillars and off marbled balconies.

I couldn’t tell if it represented Greek mythology, or if the characters floating in the clouds above were meant to be biblical.

“Carine swam to France, and continued on through Europe, to the universities there. By night she studied music, science, medicine—and found her calling, her penance, in that, in saving human lives.” Her expression became reverent.

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

Now she is all but immune to the scent of human blood, and she is able to do the work she loves without agony.

She finds a great deal of peace there, at the hospital.

. . .” Edythe stared off into space for a long moment.

Suddenly she seemed to remember the story.

She tapped her finger against the huge painting in front of us.

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

She pointed up to a comparatively dignified group of figures painted on the highest balcony, looking down calmly on the mayhem below them. I looked carefully at the little assembly and realized, with a startled laugh, that I recognized the golden-haired woman standing off to one side.

“Solimena was greatly inspired by Carine’s friends. He often painted them as gods.” Edythe laughed. “Sulpicia, Marcus, and Athenodora,” she said, indicating the other three. “Nighttime patrons of the arts.”

The first woman and man were black-haired, the second woman was pale blond. All wore richly colored gowns, while Carine was painted in white.

“What about that one?” I asked, pointing to a small, nondescript girl with light brown hair and clothes. She was on her knees clinging to the other woman’s skirts—the woman with the elaborate black curls.

“Mele,” she said. “A . . . servant, I suppose you could call her. Sulpicia’s little thief.”

“What happened to them?” I wondered aloud, my fingertip hovering a centimeter from the figures on the canvas.