Life and Death: Twilight Reimagined (Twilight #5)(81)

“So Jessamine wasn’t sure if she’d ever come across someone who was as”—she hesitated, looking for the right word—“appealing as you are to me. Which makes me think not.” Her eyes flickered to me. “She would remember this.”

She looked away again. “El has been on the wagon longer, so to speak, and she understood what I meant. She says twice, for her, once stronger than the other.”

“And for you?”

“Never before this.”

We stared at each other again. This time I broke the silence.

“What did Eleanor do?”

It was the wrong question to ask. She cringed, and her face was suddenly tortured. I waited, but she didn’t add anything.

“Okay, so I guess that was a dumb question.”

She stared at me with eyes that pleaded for understanding. “Even the strongest of us fall off the wagon, don’t we?”

“Are you… asking for my permission?” I whispered. A shiver rolled down my spine that had nothing to do with my freezing hands.

Her eyes flew wide in shock. “No!”

“But you’re saying there’s no hope, right?”

I knew it wasn’t normal, facing death like this without any real sense of fear. It wasn’t that I was super brave, I knew that. It was just that I wouldn’t have chosen differently, even knowing it would end this way.

She looked angry again, but I didn’t think she was angry with me. “Of course there’s hope. Of course I won’t…” She left the sentence hanging. Her eyes felt like they were physically burning mine. “It’s different for us. El… these were strangers she happened across. It was a long time ago. She wasn’t as practiced, as careful as she is now. And she’s never been as good at this as I am.”

She fell silent, watching me intently as I thought it through.

“So if we’d met… oh, in a dark alley or something…”

“It took everything I had—every single year of practice and sacrifice and effort—not to jump up in the middle of that class full of children and—” She broke off, her eyes darting away from me. “When you walked past me, I could have ruined everything Carine has built for us, right then and there. If I hadn’t been denying my thirst for the last… too many years, I wouldn’t have been able to stop myself.”

She stared at me grimly, both of us remembering.

“You must have thought I was possessed.”

“I couldn’t understand why. How you could hate me, just like that…”

“To me, it was like you were some kind of demon, summoned straight from my own personal hell to ruin me. The fragrance coming off your skin… I thought it would make me deranged that first day. In that one hour, I thought of a hundred different ways to lure you from the room with me, to get you alone. And I fought them each back, thinking of my family, what I could do to them. I had to run out, to get away before I could speak the words that would make you follow.…”

She looked up then, her golden eyes scorching from under her lashes, hypnotic and deadly.

“You would have come,” she promised.

I tried to speak calmly. “No doubt about it.”

She frowned at our hands. “And then, as I tried to rearrange my schedule in a pointless attempt to avoid you, there you were—in that close, warm little room, the scent was maddening. I so very nearly took you then. There was only one other frail human there—so easily dealt with.”

It was so strange, seeing my memories again, but this time with subtitles. Understanding for the first time what it had all meant, understanding the danger. Poor Mr. Cope. I flinched at the thought of how close I’d come to being inadvertently responsible for his death.

“But I resisted. I don’t know how. I forced myself not to wait for you, not to follow you from the school. It was easier outside, when I couldn’t smell you anymore, to think clearly, to make the right decision. I left the others near home—I was too ashamed to tell them how weak I was, they only knew something was very wrong—and then I went straight to Carine, at the hospital, to tell her I was leaving.”

I stared in surprise.

“I traded cars with her—she had a full tank of gas and I was afraid to stop. I didn’t dare to go home, to face Earnest. He wouldn’t have let me go without a fight. He would have tried to convince me that it wasn’t necessary.…

“By the next morning I was in Alaska.” She sounded ashamed, as if she was admitting some huge display of cowardice. “I spent two days there, with some old acquaintances… but I was homesick. I hated knowing I’d upset Earnest, and the rest of them, my adopted family. In the pure air of the mountains it was hard to believe you were so irresistible. I convinced myself it was weak to run away. I’d dealt with temptation before, not of this magnitude, not even close, but I was strong. Who were you, an insignificant human boy”—she grinned suddenly—“to chase me from the place I wanted to be? Ah, the deadly sin of pride.” She shook her head. “So I came back.…”

I couldn’t speak.

“I took precautions, hunting, feeding more than usual before seeing you again. I was sure that I was strong enough to treat you like any other human. I was arrogant about it.