Midnight Sun (The Twilight Saga #5) - Stephenie Meyer Page 0,150

eyes. Strange, but not the same strange as Carlisle’s. Amber rather than gold. He’s quite pretty. I wonder where Carlisle found him.

Siobhan took a step back. “I’m being rude. I’ve never met your companion.”

“Allow me to introduce you. Siobhan, this is Edward, my son. Edward, this is, as I’m sure you’ve inferred, my friend of many years, Siobhan. And this is her Maggie.”

The little girl cocked her head to the side, but not in acknowledgment. The thin lines of her eyebrows pushed together as if she was concentrating very hard on some puzzle.

Son? Siobhan thought, at first thrown by the word. Ah, so he’s chosen to create his companion after all this time. Interesting. I wonder why now? There must be something special about the boy.

What he says is true, Maggie thought simultaneously. But there’s something missing. Something Carlisle isn’t speaking. She nodded once, as if to herself, and then glanced at Siobhan, who was still examining me.

“Edward, how delightful to meet you,” Siobhan said. She offered me her hand, her gaze lingering on my irises, as if trying to quantify their exact shade.

I knew only the human response for this kind of meeting. I took her hand and brushed my lips against the back of it, noting the glassy smoothness of her skin against mine.

“A pleasure,” I responded.

How charming. She let her hand drop, smiling widely at me. So pretty. I wonder what his gift might be, and why it appealed to Carlisle?

I was taken aback by her thought—only comprehending, when she used the word gift, exactly what she’d meant before, when she’d presumed there must be something special about me—but I’d had enough practice by now to hide my reaction from her interested eyes.

Of course she was right. I did have a gift. But… Carlisle had been honestly surprised when he’d understood what I could do. I knew, thanks to my gift, that he was not pretending. There was no lie, no evasion in his thoughts when he’d answered my own whys. He was very lonely. My mother had pleaded for my life. My face had unconsciously promised some virtue that I wasn’t entirely sure I embodied.

I was still mulling over both the rightness and the wrongness of her assumptions as she turned back to Carlisle. One final thought about me lingered as she moved.

Poor boy. I suppose Carlisle has imposed his odd habits on the lad. That’s why his eyes are so strange. How tragic—to be deprived of the greatest joy of this life.

At the time, this conclusion did not trouble me as much as her other speculation. Later—their conversation lasted through the night and trapped us away from our rented rooms until the sun had set—when we were alone again, I spoke to him about it. Carlisle told me Siobhan’s history, her fascination with the Volturi, her curiosity about the world of mystic vampire talents, and finally her discovery of a strange child who seemed to know more than was humanly possible. Siobhan had changed Maggie not because of any need for companionship or personal concern for the girl, who might, under other circumstances, have been dinner, but because she was eager to collect a talent for her own coven. It was a different way of viewing the world, a less human way than Carlisle had managed to preserve. He’d withheld the information about my own talent from Siobhan (this explained Maggie’s strange response to my introduction; she knew Carlisle was holding something back by virtue of her own gift), not certain how Siobhan would have reacted to his having acquired access to such a rare and powerful gift without even a search. Because it was no more than a strange coincidence that I should have turned out to be talented. My gift to read minds was part of me, so Carlisle did not wish it away any more than he would have wanted to change the color of my hair or the timbre of my voice. However, he never saw that gift as a commodity for his use or advantage.

I thought about these revelations every so often, less and less as time went on. I grew more comfortable in the human world, and Carlisle returned to his previous work as a surgeon. I studied medicine, among many other subjects, while he was away, but always from books, never in the hospital. Only a few years later, Carlisle found Esme and we returned to a more reclusive life while she acclimated. It was a busy time,