Life and Death: Twilight Reimagined (Twilight #5)(138)

I would be able to see more clearly, hear even the smallest sound.

My heart would finish beating tomorrow or the next day, and it would never beat again.

I would be a vampire.

One good thing about the burning—it let me hear all this with some distance. It let me process what she was telling me without emotion. I knew the emotion would come later.

When it was starting to get dark again, our journey was over. Edythe carried me into the house like I was a child, and sat with me in the big room. The background behind her face went from black to white. I could see her much more clearly now, and I didn’t think it was just the light.

In her eyes, my face reflected back, and I was surprised to see that it looked like a face and not a charcoal briquette—though a face in anguish. Still, maybe I wasn’t the pile of ash I felt like.

She told me stories to fill the time, and the others took turns helping her. Carine sat on the ground next to me and told me the most amazing story about Jules’s family—that her great-grandmother had actually been a werewolf. All the things Jules had scoffed about were straight history. Carine told me she’d promised them she would never bite another human. It was part of the treaty between them, the treaty that meant the Cullens could never go due west to the ocean.

Jessamine told me her story after all. I guess she’d decided I was ready now. I was glad, when she did, that my emotions were mostly buried under the fire. She’d lost family, too, when the man who created her stole her without warning. She told me about the army she’d belonged to, a life of carnage and death, and then breaking free. She told me about the day Archie had let her find him.

Earnest told me how his life had ended before he’d killed himself, about his unstable, alcoholic wife and the daughter he’d loved more than his own soul. He told me about the night when his wife, in a drunken rampage, had jumped off a cliff with his little daughter in her arms, and how he hadn’t been able to do anything but follow after them. Then he told me how, after the pain, there had been the most beautiful woman in a nurse’s uniform—a nurse he recognized from a happier time in another place when he was just a young man. A nurse who hadn’t aged at all.

Eleanor told me about being attacked by a bear, and then seeing an angel who took her to Carine instead of to heaven. She told me how she’d thought at first she’d been sent to hell—justly, she admitted—and then how she got into heaven after all.

She was the one who told me that the redhead had gotten away. He’d never come near Charlie after the one time that he’d searched Charlie’s house. When we’d all gotten back to Forks, she, Royal, and Jessamine had followed the man’s trail as far as they could; it disappeared into the Salish Sea and they hadn’t been able to find the place where he came back out. For all they knew, he’d swum straight out to the Pacific and on to another continent. He must have assumed that Joss had lost the fight and realized it was smarter to disappear.

Even Royal took a turn. He told me about a life consumed with vanity, with material things, with ambition. He told me about the only daughter of a powerful man—exactly what kind of power this man wielded, Royal hadn’t entirely understood—and how Royal had planned to marry her and become heir to the dynasty. How the beautiful daughter pretended to love him to please her father, and then how she had watched when her lover from a rival criminal syndicate had Royal beaten to death, how she’d laughed aloud the whole time. He told me about the revenge he’d gotten. Royal was the least careful with his words. He told me about losing his family, and how none of this was worth what he’d lost.

Edythe had whispered Eleanor’s name; he’d growled once and left.

I think it must have been while Royal or Eleanor was talking that Archie watched Joss’s video from the dance studio. When Royal was gone, Archie took his spot. At first I wasn’t sure what they were talking about, because only Edythe was speaking out loud, but eventually I caught up. Archie was searching right there on his laptop, trying to narrow down the options of where he’d been kept in his human life. I was glad he didn’t seem to mention anything else about the tape—the focus was all on his past. I was trying to remember how to use my voice so that I could stop him if he tried to say anything about the rest of it. I hoped Archie was smart enough to have destroyed the tape before Edythe could watch.

The stories helped me think of other things, prepare myself, while the fire burned, but I was only able to pay partial attention. My mind was cataloguing the fire, experiencing it in new ways. It was amazing how each inch of my skin, each millimeter, was so distinct. It was like I could feel all my cells burning individually. I could feel the difference between the pain in the walls of my lungs, and the way the fire felt in the soles of my feet, inside my eyeballs, and down my spine. All the different agonies clearly separated.

I could hear my heart thudding—it seemed so loud. Like it had been hooked to an amp. I could hear other things, too. Mostly Edythe’s voice, sometimes the others talking—though I couldn’t see them. I heard music once, but I didn’t know where it was coming from.

It seemed like I was on the couch, my head in Edythe’s lap, for several years. The lights stayed bright, so I didn’t know if it was night or day. But Edythe’s eyes were always gold, so I guessed that the fire was lying about the time again.

I was so aware of every nerve ending in my body that I knew it immediately when something changed.