Disclaimer: I do not own nor receive monetary value from anything Twilight and created by Stephenie Meyer. I appreciate her generosity in allowing others to play with her creations and share the love. I claim my own characters and plots outside of her creations. At no time is any copyright infringement intended.

May, 1998

JPOV

The tinkling ring of a child's laughter bounced off the trunks of the trees around me as I crouched on my heels in a tall and thick grouping of ferns. The small rest stop was more secluded than usual for its kind along a fairly nameless and more scenic two-way highway. I wasn't really certain which highway it was, or even whether I was still in the US or had crossed into Canada. These distinctions rarely had meaning for me.

A part of my mind, the part perpetually concerned with survival, nudged at me to leave. Though there was only two humans, a mother and her child, and thus no true danger, instincts honed through nearly a full century of perpetual war twanged uneasily. And yet, the amused patience of the mother and the pure delight and excitement of the child held me. I closed my eyes briefly, savoring the clean emotions flowing through me. The sensations were like a balm to the tattered edges of my soul. Another part of my vampire's mind mused that there could not be a greater curse to one of my kind than to be an empath.

The child continued to skip and trot through wildflower dotted grass. She was enchanting, her brown hair slightly tangled, flowing behind her with her movements and making the golden highlights shimmer. I'd already noted the blue-hazel of her large doe eyes, the color now hidden with the crinkling arc of her laughter. A white moth, the current target of her entertainment, bumbled into the air. Another shriek of delight bounced around the artificial clearing as the child changed course to pursue.

A woman's voice, calling over the continued bubbling giggles, diverted my attention from the low-grade burning surging along my throat. Reflexively, I swallowed.

"Virginia! Come back where I can see you!"

Obediently, the child altered her footsteps, her delight in her impromptu game unfazed. An errant breeze ruffled the grass around her before flowing toward me. Instinctively, I inhaled deeply and the burning along my throat increased to a brisk blaze. I remained rooted among the thick ferns and I felt a grin spread across my face. It was manageable. Pleased with my small personal milestone of control against the siren lure of human blood, I continued to watch the girl play.

Beneath my central focus of attention, another thread of thought wound its way through my brain. It had been six months since I'd actually tasted human blood. Ever since I'd learned there was an alternative for our kind, that it was actually possible to exist on animal blood and not our natural prey, I'd endeavored to refrain. Thus far, I'd met with mixed results. This latest, staying near a human woman and child, was another step in my exercises to widen and test my tolerances.

Most of my kind would not have bothered. Were I honest with myself, had I not been an empath, neither would I. Human blood was exquisite and capable of eradicating the thirst that was the ever burning torture of my kind. Animal blood, far less appetizing and incapable of fully relieving the burn, was a poor substitute. Yet, the emotions of my natural prey, the fear, horror, grief, despair and yes, even pain with their death, was another torture that I was nearly desperate to escape.

It had been 50 years since I'd first encountered Carlisle Cullen and his coven, his family as he preferred to call it. With my crystal clear and indelible memory, I still remember my amazement and disbelief. I remember my distaste when I'd learned of their alternate food source. I remember my instinctive unease at their golden eyes and easy, refined manner. I had spent nearly a century among wildly feral vampiric newborns and their only slightly less feral creators. The lack of malicious ambition, aggression, and rampant hatred within the Cullen cov-family had left me dazed and curious. And, honestly, wary. Even yet, after all these years, I continually found myself waiting for the other shoe to drop. Waiting for their "true natures" to show, even when my unique ability showed me their compassion, commitment, and honesty was unfeigned.

My fascination with the Cullens kept me traveling the Pacific Northwest. I kept tabs on them during my nomadic journeying. I was a fairly frequent visitor to their homes. I rarely stayed long, however. My sporadic control and respect for the monumental effort they maintained in order to blend in with human society compelled me to keep my visits short. Even though I yearned to stay as I was never happier than when I was among them. They were so different from anything I'd ever encountered in this existence.

"Virginia, time to eat, sweetie. Come eat your sandwich." As her mother called her, my sharp hearing heard the child's stomach growl. I smiled again, amused at how such a sound could sound so... innocent. Simultaneous with a renewed breeze blowing toward me, Virginia's inexpert feet snagged on a semi-buried tree root. The impact and slide on the ground released the mouth-watering burst of fresh blood from the scrapes. Instantly holding my breath, I bolted from my hide, frantically seeking distance as venom exploded in my mouth. I WILL NOT give in.

A mile from the rest stop, I halted my dash, unneeded air gasping through my teeth as I griped the trunk of a friendly tree. Sweet god that was close! Closing my eyes, I monitored the burn in my throat, waiting for the inferno to subside. Around me, the breeze was the only sound, whispering through the leaves overhead. As my gasping eased, the sounds of the small animals around me filtered into my attention... the rapid flutter of panicked heartbeats, the whir of anxious wings. One finger at a time, I eased my grip on my tree, automatically furring the indentations my grip had left in the bark with my fingertips. I was lost to time, absorbed in the natural stillness of my kind, striving to regain the semblance of serenity I'd so recently lost.

Dual screams, faint with distance, pierced my ears and I was off, running faster over my own trail. The instinctive chivalry of my human upbringing impelled my flight even as the part of my mind assigned to self-preservation shrieked at me to stop. My multifaceted vampiric mind took the time to marvel at myself. If asked, I'd have scoffed at the notion that any of my humanity had survived the brutal years of my life as an undead monster. Apparently, I was wrong again as I raced to discover the cause of the screams, anxious to protect the two females I'd usually see as merely prey.

Bursting through the bordering ferns of the rest stop, and sliding to a sudden halt, I instantly absorbed the scene before me. The bubbling laughter and laughing eyes that had so entranced me now lay silent and blank as death lay in testament of a broken neck. Snarls ripped from my gut as a blast of maniacal rage hit me from the piece of filth taking its pleasure from the broken creature that had been the child's mother even as he plunged his knife into the side of her chest again. How had I missed this? How had he approached so close without me sensing?

Moving so fast that even my vampire's mind didn't fully and consciously register the speed, I gripped the greasy hair of the human and pulling him off of her and into my arms. Unlike most times, I barely registered his emotions as I began to drain him; my entire attention wrapped around the broken grief of Virginia's mother as she stared at the unmoving form of her lovely child. Her anguish crested over me in a wave, the combination of her flowing blood and disbelieving grief overwhelmed my defenses and drove me into an unthinking frenzy of pure instinct. I came back to myself as the last of the blood filled my mouth. Opening my eyes, I gasped. My anguished cry splintered the air as I fell to my knees still cradling Virginia's mother's bloodless body. A body I'd just finished draining. In the end, I'd been no less of a monster than the one that had wiped Virginia's smile off the earth.