Midnight Sun (The Twilight Saga #5) - Stephenie Meyer Page 0,214

his distance from her in the daytime. It was at night that he paused outside the window, hiding in the shadows while a single candle burned in her family’s room. He marked at what time the candle was blown out. He noted the location of the child’s bed—just a newspaper-stuffed cushion under the open window. It was getting cool at night, but the smells in the overcrowded house were unpleasant. Everyone kept their windows open.

I can’t do this. I can’t. I can’t. His mantra continued, but he began to prepare. A piece of rope he found in a gutter. Some rags he plucked off a clothesline during his nighttime surveillance that would work as a gag. Ironically, he chose the same dilapidated house where I hid to store his collection. There was a cave-like space under the collapsed stairs. This was where he would bring the child.

Still I waited, unwilling to punish before I was positive of the crime.

The hardest part, the part he struggled with, was that he knew he would have to kill her afterward. This was distasteful, and he didn’t like to consider the how of it. But this qualm, too, was overcome. It took another week.

By this time, I was quite thirsty, and bored with the repetition in his mind. However, I knew I could not justify my own murders unless I was acting within the rules I’d created for myself. Punish only the guilty, only those who would grievously harm others if they were spared.

I was oddly disappointed the night he came for his ropes and gags. Against reason, I’d hoped he would stay guiltless.

I followed him to the open window where the child slept. He didn’t hear me behind him, would not have seen me in the shadows if he had turned. The chanting in his head was over. He could, he had realized. He could do this.

I waited until he reached through the window, until his fingers brushed her arm, looking for a good hold.…

I grabbed him by the neck and leaped to the roof three stories up, where we landed with a low thud.

Of course he was terrified by the ice-cold fingers wrapped around his throat, bewildered by the sudden flight through the air, confused as to what was happening. But when I spun him to face me, somehow he understood. He didn’t see a man when he looked at me. He saw my empty black eyes, my death-pale skin, and he saw judgment. Though he didn’t come close to guessing what I actually was, he was absolutely correct about what was happening.

He realized that I had saved the child from him, and he was relieved. Not hardened like the others, not cold and sure.

I didn’t, he thought as I lunged. The words were not a defense. He was glad he had been stopped.

He had been my only technically innocent victim, the one who had not lived to become the monster. Ending his progression toward evil had been the right thing, the only thing to do.

As I considered them all, every one of those I’d executed, I didn’t regret any of their deaths individually. The world was a better place for each one of their absences. But somehow this didn’t matter.

And in the end, blood was just blood. It quenched my thirst for a few days or weeks, and that was all. Though there was physical pleasure, it was too marred by the pain of my mind. Stubborn as I was, I could not avoid the truth. I was happier without human blood.

The total sum of death became too much for me. It was only a few months later that I gave up on my selfish crusade, gave up trying to find something meaningful in the slaughter.

“But as time went on,” I continued, wondering how much she’d intuited that I hadn’t said, “I began to see the monster in my eyes. I couldn’t escape the debt of so much human life taken, no matter how justified. And I went back to Carlisle and Esme. They welcomed me back like the prodigal. It was more than I deserved.” I remembered their arms around me, remembered the joy in their minds when I returned.

The way she looked at me now was also more than I deserved. I supposed my defense had worked, no matter how weak it sounded to me. But Bella must have been used to making excuses for me by now. I couldn’t imagine how else she could bear to be around