Chapter Text
Aesa had been in Montana for eleven days when Carlisle Cullen suggested that she come to Washington.
Eleven days was not particularly long by her standards. There had been stretches of her life when she had remained in one place for years, even decades, but those had grown increasingly uncommon as the centuries passed. More often she arrived somewhere because something had drawn her there - an area she had not seen in a long while, a city she remembered as something entirely different - and stayed until the quiet restlessness beneath her skin began to stir again. Then she would pack what little she bothered to carry and leave, moving on to the next place, the next city. She had become very good at leaving. There was a particular skill to it, one humans rarely had the opportunity to perfect. Learning exactly how much of yourself to put into a place when you knew with absolute certainty that eventually you would walk away from it.
The cabin she had borrowed for the month stood several miles from the nearest paved road, surrounded by pine trees and enough open wilderness that she could hunt without worrying about hikers stumbling across her. It belonged to a man in Bozeman who believed he had rented it to an eccentric woman traveling alone through the United States. He had not questioned her lack of luggage, or why she had paid for the entire month in advance, or why she had smiled at him when he warned her about bears. She liked humans like that. They didn’t complicate things.
Rain had come through the previous night, leaving the forest smelling of wet bark, cold stone, and dirt. Aesa sat on the narrow wooden porch with one bare foot tucked beneath her and the other resting against the railing, watching mist drift between the trees. Her hair was loose, as it usually was, the long ash-blonde waves falling over one shoulder and halfway down her back. She had been reading until perhaps ten minutes ago, though the book now rested facedown beside her. Some modern history book written by a man who had managed to be impressively confident about several things he was entirely wrong about.
She had considered writing in the margins.
Then she remembered that it was a library book and decided against it.
Her phone vibrated against the wooden boards of the table beside her.
Aesa glanced down at it without moving immediately. The number of people who possessed that particular number could comfortably fit inside a small room, and fewer still used it outside of official reasons. For several seconds she merely listened to the forest. Water fell intermittently from the trees. Somewhere several miles away, a deer picked its way through sodden undergrowth. A truck moved along the distant highway, the sound of its engine fading until her hearing could no longer distinguish it.
The phone vibrated again.
She picked it up.
Carlisle.
Aesa smiled before she opened the message.
We’ve been settled in Forks for almost a year now. I suspect you would approve of the weather.
Then:
You should come visit when you’re next in this part of the world.
There was an address after that. His home. At least for now.
She read the messages twice.
Not because there was anything particularly complicated about the words. Carlisle wrote much the way he spoke - precisely, kindly, and with an irritating tendency to phrase invitations that were both subtle and blatant at the same time. She could almost hear his voice as she read the text.
She leaned her head against the post beside her and looked back toward the trees.
Forks.
Washington.
She knew roughly where it was. A small town on the Olympic Peninsula, west of Seattle, nearly buried beneath temperate forest and rain clouds. Carlisle had mentioned years ago that his family had lived somewhere in that region before. He moved frequently enough that she had long since stopped attempting to rem
Aesa typed back:
I have seen rain before.
The reply arrived less than a minute later.
Not like this.
Her mouth curved.
There had been a time when messages between them required couriers and months of patience. Later, there had been letters sent across oceans, postcards sent from whatever country one happened to be passing through, telephone calls kept short because international rates were absurd even when money itself was not particularly difficult to acquire. Aesa had initially considered cellular phones unnecessary. Carlisle had eventually pointed out that someone who habitually disappeared into remote parts of the world for years at a time might benefit from being reachable.
He had been correct, as he often was.
She turned the phone slowly between her fingers, thinking. She sent another text.
How is your family?
This answer took longer.
Well, Esme sends her love despite never having met you.
Aesa smiled at that. Admonishment without cruelty. She had never met his family. Had always kept her distance.
She read on: The children are preparing to start school again and objecting with varying levels of enthusiasm. We’re happy here.
Aesa lingered over the final sentence.
We’re happy here.
They were simple words.
They should not have caused her heart to ache.
For most of her existence, solitude had been something Aesa chose rather than endured. She liked her own company. She liked being able to travel because she had suddenly remembered a coastline in Greece and wanted to know how it looked now. She liked sleeping nowhere, belonging nowhere, deciding that she wished to be three hundred miles away by sunset.
There had been covens over the years. Temporary arrangements. War made strange companions of people, and necessity made stranger ones. She had hunted beside vampires she later fought and killed, fought beside vampires she eventually mourned, and lived for years beside people whose names had slowly become ash in her memories after their deaths. There had been friendships, alliances, acquaintances stretched across centuries. Yri had once teased her that she collected people much the way magpies collected bright things - delighted by them for a time, careful with the ones she particularly liked, but apparently incapable of remaining in the same nest.
Yri had been dead for centuries.
The thought didn’t hurt as sharply anymore - almost nothing did after enough time. Grief did not disappear, exactly, but it changed shape. The memories stopped having teeth.
Aesa looked through the trees and realized that she could not remember the last time anyone had been waiting for her to come home.
The realization struck something in her.
She had spent eleven days in this cabin. Before Montana there had been Alberta. Before Alberta, three months in Alaska. Before that, Japan, briefly, because she had not visited in nearly thirty years and had grown curious about how much Tokyo had changed. Argentina before that. Portugal. France. Norway for a winter she had enjoyed considerably more than she thought she would.
She could recount the route almost indefinitely.
Places.
Never people.
Aesa stared at Carlisle’s message.
There were vampires who considered nomadism an unfortunate stage before one found a coven. She had never understood them. Permanence had always seemed dangerously close to stagnation, and stagnation had always felt like another word for waiting to die in a body that could not.
But Carlisle had built something different.
She knew that much.
He had written of them over the years, never with the clinical detachment most vampires might use when describing their companions. My family, he called them. Esme. Edward. Rosalie. Emmett. Alice. Jasper. Names that surfaced in letters and texts and calls, sometimes accompanied by stories Carlisle clearly found amusing despite pretending otherwise. Aesa knew the broad strokes and little more because Carlisle wasn’t one to offer other people’s histories simply because she was curious.
She knew Esme was his wife.
She knew the others lived as their children.
She knew they all drank animal blood.
She knew Carlisle loved them.
And perhaps more importantly, they seemed to love him in return.
That alone told her a great deal.
The phone was still in her hand. She typed:
Perhaps I will.
She watched the message send, then set the phone facedown beside the abandoned book.
The forest continued exactly as it had before Carlisle had messaged her. The curling mist, the smell of wet earth. A deer a few miles off. Birds chirping.
She sat there, listening, thinking.
She was tired.
Not tired in any sense her body could understand. Her body had not known fatigue since she had been turned. It could run until mountains turned to plains, and plains became coastlines without slowing. It could cross oceans without drawing breath. It could fight for hours if necessary, heal from injuries that would have ended any human life, remain perfectly alert through years without sleep.
This was… something else.
Aesa was tired.
Tired of temporary rooms and temporary houses. Tired of disappearing before humans noticed she did not age. Tired of friendships conducted through occasional messages scattered across continents. Tired, perhaps, of having so few people left who remembered something more than the latest version of her.
Carlisle remembered their meeting in London.
He remembered when the world had looked profoundly different.
He knew her. Her history, her likes and dislikes. He was a good friend.
That was rare in her experience.
Aesa reached down again and picked up her phone.
She considered telling him where she was.
Considered telling him she might come next month.
Or maybe in a few weeks.
Instead, she locked the screen, slipped the phone into her pocket, stood, collected her book, and headed inside.
If she went, she went.
Carlisle had invited her. That seemed sufficient.
The decision, once made, settled surprisingly easily.
The cabin she had been staying in suddenly looked exactly like what it was - somewhere to stay while she passed through.
She owned more things than she carried, although most were scattered through several properties, storage facilities, and safe-deposit boxes acquired under names she had outlived and willed to nonexistent family members. What traveled with her fit comfortably into a large leather bag and a smaller case. Clothing. Documents. Money. A few pieces of jewelry. Her phone and various electronic devices, including another phone she used for “human business”.
Packing required less than ten minutes.
She paused before the small bathroom mirror.
Amber eyes regarded her from a face that had remained eighteen for longer than most civilizations had lasted.
There were days when she still found her age… strange.
Not disturbing. Not anymore. But strange, in an abstract way.
The girl born beneath another sky had expected wrinkles someday. Children, perhaps, if her body had allowed them. Gray in her hair. She had expected to become an old woman surrounded by people who loved her and had grown old with her.
Instead, her skin remained clear and pale, her features fixed as they had been in her last moments alive, her ash-blonde hair thick and untouched by age. Any scars from her human life had been wiped away. She didn’t even remember if she’d had any.
She’d collected new scars anyway. Pale crescents and uneven marks left by vampire teeth across her shoulders, ribs, arms and back, her neck, her legs. Some had been acquired during her first months, her first years as a vampire. Her sire had not been kind and had left many such marks on her. Others came later. Various fights between nomads, some from actual battles.
Most humans never saw her scars.
Vampires always did.
Aesa pulled her hair forward over one shoulder and regarded herself for another moment.
Then smiled faintly at the woman in the glass.
“Well,” she murmured. Was she really going?
Her reflection offered no advice.
She left the cabin that evening.
She did not travel directly.
Aesa had never possessed the modern obsession with efficiency when there was no reason for it. She could have driven the eight-hundred-odd miles in a day if she cared to respect human speed limits, considerably less time if she did not. She could have run it faster still. Instead, she took her time through western Montana and northern Idaho. The scent of elk drew her off the road once in the mountains, and she spent several hours afterward standing on a ridge while the last of the daylight burned itself out against the horizon.
Animal blood had been part of her life long enough that she no longer thought of it as Carlisle’s diet.
She remembered the first time she heard him speak of it.
She had mocked him.
Politely, of course, because Carlisle had always been difficult to mock cruelly.
Then her curiosity had won.
Aesa had discovered that animals - predators most of all - tasted considerably better than anticipated and that Carlisle’s absurd way of life allowed her to move among humans without reducing every interaction to an exercise in deciding whether someone smelled appealing enough to kill.
She no longer considered it absurd.
The red had eventually faded from her eyes.
She had watched the change with fascination.
Amber suited her better.
Carlisle had been insufferably pleased when she had admitted it.
She took the scenic route, but before she knew it she was in Washington. By the time she reached the Olympic Peninsula, the world had become increasingly green. Moss consumed fallen trunks. Ferns crowded the forest floor. The trees grew enormous and close, their branches knitting above roads still shining from an earlier rainfall. The air smelled rich with water and earth and living things.
She stopped in Port Angeles long enough to refuel the car, then followed the road toward Forks.
She had not contacted him.
Several times she considered it.
Each time she decided against it.
The invitation remained on her phone.
You should come visit.
So she was. She ignored that little voice in her head telling her that she should maybe let him know.
The closer she came to the town, the more obvious the local vampire presence became. Six - no, seven, including Carlisle - individual scents threaded faintly through the broader landscape, overlapping enough to indicate a settled coven - no, a family. Aesa slowed slightly as she drove, drinking in the landscape and mulling over the word.
A family.
She still wasn’t certain what she thought of it.
The house appeared gradually through the forest, dark and modern and improbably open to the surrounding woods. Far too many windows for Aesa’s personal taste, though she supposed privacy mattered less when one’s nearest neighbors were sufficiently distant.
She parked some distance from the house.
For a moment she remained seated.
There was still time to leave.
The thought didn’t come from fear. Aesa had long since stopped being particularly frightened of other vampires, although she respected the dangers they posed. It was simply an awareness that stepping out of the car meant something. Not commitment. Certainly not permanence.
But something.
She would see Carlisle. Meet his family. See the life he had made.
And she knew that continuing as she had before would become considerably more difficult.
Aesa opened the door.
Cool air slipped into the car.
She stepped onto the wet ground and retrieved her bag.
Inside the house, seven vampires went silent.
One moment there had been movement - several voices, the faint turn of a page, footsteps overhead, something shifting against furniture - and the next there was nothing.
She stopped beside the car, her head tilting slightly.
She had approached the private home of an established coven family without warning anyone. Perhaps that hadn’t been too wise of her.
Inside, movement resumed, but differently now. Faster. Controlled. Several bodies repositioning. Someone crossed the upper floor and descended without bothering to disguise their speed. Another moved toward the rear of the house.
Her mouth twitched.
Carlisle, at least, would recognize her scent when she came close enough.
Probably.
It had been several decades.
She started toward the house, her steps measured.
Aesa could not hear words, which meant they were communicating silently or too softly even for the distance between them. She respected that. Whoever Carlisle called family, they were not fools.
Then she came within fifty yards.
Something changed. She heard quiet movement near the front of the house, followed by Carlisle’s voice.
“Aesa?”
She smiled.
The tension inside did not vanish, but it shifted immediately. Whoever had been at the back of the house now came toward the front. Confusion entered where alarm had been.
Aesa climbed the steps to the porch and set her bag beside her boots.
She knocked.
There was no need, but it was polite.
Carlisle opened the door almost immediately.
For a fraction of a second neither of them spoke.
He looked much as he always had. Golden-haired, composed, absurdly young for a man whose eyes carried centuries. Time had altered his clothing, his speech, the details of how he presented himself to whatever era surrounded him, but Carlisle himself remained unmistakable.
His expression softened into surprised warmth.
“Aesa.”
She smiled fully at him.
“Hello, Carlisle.”