In The Dark, Dark House...

by Dead Heavenly

author notes:

thanks Leopardsky, ashmarquez77, peaches, Anabely, CourtneyPaige, Kohanita, MissPepperPot, Jordan Lyn 7, Nanita44445 and xEricax (hey, we live in the same time zone!) for your support for chapter five. I hope you like this one just as much. - D.H.

chapter six

"What's a Volturi?"

"Death."

"I thought that was you." I made jokes when I was nervous. Yes, that was supposed to be a joke.

His eyebrow lifted. It was an expression of interest. "Is that your guess? Death? It's not on your little list." He opened the notebook, my notebook, and thumbed the pages until he found the one he wanted. "Ghost." He made a face. "Hardly. It looks like you figured that out though, it's marked out. Let's see...Angel. That's pretty fuckin funny actually. Demon. Now that, that's a lot closer. Then there's Werewolf. I should slit your throat for even thinking that, Sara. You've got Alien here next. I have been told I act like one. Zombie. Mutant Superbeing. Mad Scientist. Mad Scientist's Creature. Vampire. I don't see 'Death' here anywhere."

Well I'd add Volturi. As soon as he gave me back my notes. "Are you keeping that? Like my necklace? Or the mug from under my bed?" I challenged him.

"No idea what you're talking about." He continued flipping through the book, chuckling occasionally.

"You've been taking my stuff, when you come in to my room. I know what to call that, stalker."

He turned to me and quicker than I could even imagine it and holding me by my hair. He gave me a violent shake before releasing me, and was sitting in the chair again before I could so much as wince. "What...the...hell?" I asked a little helplessly.

"Just reminding you who is in charge here. So let's talk more about this." He indicated my notebook. I guessed I wasn't going to get that back. "Who have you been talking to about me?"

I shrugged, trying to not show him that he was scaring me.

"The Volturi are the ones that will come to kill you if I do not." He said, answering my earlier question with a slightly better (if you could call that 'better') answer. "They don't like it when humans know our secret, and they don't really like me. I doubt they'd be merciful on either of us."

"But I thought you said Alice was with them. Wouldn't she be on your side?"

He snorted. It was a very unattractive habit. But it was better than trying to scalp me. I felt his contempt. Not sensed it. I felt it too. Jesus, I had a headache from it. Jasper was clearly doing something to influence the way I felt. I couldn't even trust my own emotions around him.

What sort of thing could do that?

We were both quiet for a few minutes, me wondering what sort of ability he had to manipulate feelings, him thinking about Alice probably. He finally said, "Alice and I have a complicated marriage."

"Oh." I lapsed back in to silence, hoping he would continue, but he didn't. It gave me time to think, and I came up with what I hoped was something good.

"Jasper?" I asked finally.

"Sara?" he countered back.

"I have an idea. Hear me out. It seems like you are isolated here, from your kind or your people, except for Maria, and you guys didn't really seem like friends. I have this thing where I can't mind my own business or keep my nose out of things and I'm sure I already know a lot of shit that could get me killed by these Volturies. I'd rather know what is going on around me than bury my head back in to the sand. I don't like being ignorant. You said I'm good practice for not killing people, because you promised Alice you wouldn't and that is clearly something very important to you." I was trying to sound as sincere as possible. He hadn't left yet, so at least I had his attention. "So why don't we try being...friends maybe? Not like we do each others hair or go to the mall, but instead of you sneaking in to my room and taking my crap back to your lair, you could just talk to me, and instead of me doing weird Google searches and looking at old years books, you could just tell me what I want to know."

He seemed to be thinking it over. His hands were under his chin and he was moving his head back and forth. His lips were puffed out a little bit and he was staring not at me or the room, but off in to space. He didn't look at me when he answered either. "You do remember what I told you a minute ago about the Volturi killing us both if I gave you the information you want, yes?"

"Yes, but, I'm not going to tell anybody, seriously. And pardon me for being the stupid human just guessing on the fog here, but since when do you give a shit about rules? Not caring is something you do, right?" I fired the questions back at him.

He got up, too quickly for me to see, and I shrank back because I thought he would grab me again, but instead he just stormed around for a minute. His thinking must be too intense to be chair contained at the moment. I watched him pace until it made me dizzy and when he spun back to finally stand still and face me, I was ready to throw up. The sudden sensation of him back in my face was too much.

"Alright Sara, one condition." His voice was between the growl I had heard before and a pleading purr in my ear. "If they find out and if they come for us, I get to kill you before they get here. You will not try to run. You will not beg for your life. You will not do something foolish like suicide. That is my price. I want to know the taste again before I'm a pile of ash. Agreed?"

I nodded. Gulped. "Agreed."

Then he was sitting again. I was definitely dizzy. Room spinning dizzy. The first thing I jumped on was, "Can you feel what I'm feeling? Do you sense emotions or something?"

"One of my talents." A smile. I guess he would enjoy talking about himself.

"So you can control emotions. You are strong. You're fast. You're violent and have a few personality issues... no offense. You have no body heat whatsoever, and you seem to have a fetish about blood."

"Vampire." he shrugged this time.

"Really?" My eyebrows crinkled. "But, I saw you during the daytime."

"I don't burst in to flames or anything. I also don't turn in to a bat. I can't fly. I don't have fangs, and I don't sleep in a coffin."

I thought about all of that. Vampire. Vampires were real and there was one in my bedroom. Was he immortal? How old was he? How many others were there?

What else was there?

And how would I know, if they didn't have fangs?

Or...if they could walk around in the day time? "Are you sure you're a vampire?" I asked.

"Want me to show you?" He asked, humorless.

"Um...no. Thank you though. Is that what the Cullens are, a family of vampires?"

He thought about it. "Vampires yes, a family no. We were a coven a long time ago. We lived here among humans and drank only animal blood. We tried to 'pass' as regular people. "

"Doesn't sound very fun." Spending every day pretending to be something you weren't.

"It was an existence. It made Alice happy and I would have forgiven a million miseries for her contentment."

"So what happened?" I asked, relaxing back a little.

"Long, sad, dull story."

"I want to hear it anyway."

He sighed. Did he need to breathe, or was the sighing purely for dramatic purposes? I didn't get to ask him that because then he started talking, and caught my rapt attention with his version of life with the Cullen family.

"To the people of this town, we were a normal family. Our leader pretended to be the father, his mate was the mother, and then the rest of us were adopted children. A very apt metaphor, actually, but woefully inaccurate. The younger we all pretended to be, the longer we could stay in one town, so apart from the leader and his woman, we were regulated to the role of perpetual teenagers. Imagine having a sophomore year every decade or so. New town, new assholes, new bullies, new gossip, but the numbing sameness following you like a cloud. Now throw in a constant hunger and the fact that you're basically living inside a kitchen full of all your favorite foods, but they are forbidden to you. The illusion was always what was important. So no showing off, no retribution. Some 16 year old dick with acne could tease you about having fucking clown hair every day for a year and even though you could snap his neck with your pinky, you had to just take it. And do you realize the way you human young dress? It is ridiculous and Alice always wanted us to look so 'posh', whatever the hell that means, so I didn't own a pair of comfortable pants for about fifty years. It was every sort of hell you could imagine, and a few you couldn't.

I wanted to slaughter each and every human I saw every single day. If it weren't for Alice, I know I would have regressed to what I was before, a hopeless, mindless, disposable killing monster. We were an insular group. No one tried to talk to us, no one attempted to be our friends. It was just us and my fake siblings. This was how it was for years, the same, over and over. One of the Cullens was Edward. He was our leader's first creation, a petulant favorite son. He took a shine to a girl we went to school with, by which I mean he felt a barely controllable urge to rip her head off and drink from the geyser that erupted. Bella goddamned Swan. Some of us wanted to leave town before anything messy happened, others thought it would be better to just kill the girl so she wouldn't be a problem. Edward took none of those options. Instead, he claimed that he had fallen in love with her deeply. That's fabulous, we all said, so let's change her into a vampire. Then he started ranting about her soul and her delicacy and not wanting to damn her to our life. Real over dramatic horse shit, pretty much. He only agreed to it when the Volturi threatened to hand us our asses if it wasn't done, and then only after he had married her. The fact that she let him lay all these rules on things disgusted me, and now I would be expected to accept her as a sister. Gets worse though. Before he turned her, he gave her a baby. A hybrid baby. Almost unheard of. Mythological creatures. That's when the Volturi got really pissed at us.

Our coven refused to drink human blood. We lived close to our prey, mirroring their lives. We preached diplomacy and acceptance, even to our sworn enemies. Carlisle, the leader, had set himself up as an example of everything the Volturi wasn't. So when we were accused of creating a vampire child, they came like bats out of hell to end us. In full force. Sixteen trombones and a bloody parade in their wake. When it turned out we were innocent and the child was in fact a natural born creature, that just raked their nuts. They let us go, but we were on borrowed time. Every move was watched. Every word was whispered back to them. When Bella's daughter married a werewolf, that gave them the excuse they needed to come after us again. They said that they just wanted the girl, but really, they wanted to wipe us all out once and for all. It was a fight that, unfortunately, we would not win this time, no matter what we did. Because we needed remindin of this, they killed one of our coven. Sent us a box of ash with their apologies and a note about the laws on werewolves. I was ready to march straight in to their lands and kill them. I wanted the fight, even if it would have been the end of me. I was tired of looking over my shoulder.

But Alice, she knew...she knows things, I can't explain to you how, but she had visions of the future and she knew that if it came down to a fight none of us would live through it. So she offered herself to them. They had been after Alice and Edward to join them as soon as they found out about their 'gifts', you see. Alice said she would return with them and join their clan, so long as they left the rest of us alone.

The others knew what she had planned. She said her goodbyes to them and gave each of them little warnings or hints to keep them safe. She didn't tell me. She knew that I would never let her leave me, even if it meant my death. You have to see... .before Alice I was nothing. I was a formless rage. I was only ever anything because of her and I didn't know what would happen to me. She was my light. She left us while I was hunting and when I returned to our home I found a long letter and two big vampires to hold me the hell down when I tried to chase her."

He stopped talking to touch his face, his eyes. I don't know what he was expecting but he pulled his hand back and looked surprised. He made these movements with his left hand because I was holding his right one. I didn't remember when I had reached across the distance between us to take it, but I didn't let go and he didn't ask me to. I almost told him to stop, that I didn't need to hear it, but maybe he needed to say it, so I let him go on.

"Everything I feared came true. Alice had written in her note that she would come back to me as soon as she secured our safety by working within the Volturi to gain us more allies. I just had to wait. But I couldn't. I began drinking humans again. I didn't care that I knew how scared they were, or that they begged, because what they felt was nothing compared to the hole in me. I stopped thinking. I stopped speaking to my coven. I just killed and feasted. I left the bodies in Bella's room. The way I see it, it was her fault they were dead. Alice had to leave because of her daughter. The Volturi were so fascinated with us because she had to come stumbling in to our lives when no one asked her to. Edward had sheltered her far too long from the way things really were, and I wanted each stinking corpse to be a lesson to her. They eventually asked me to leave. I just stayed behind the next time they moved. I had quite a body count by the time I felt the need to travel. Maybe France would cheer me up, I thought. Maybe Japan. I'd never been. But it was the same everywhere. Everything had changed in my life and everything was still the goddamned same. I killed wherever I went. Soon that wasn't enough. I didn't just want to feed, I wanted to hurt them. I won't tell you all of what I did. I'll spare you the nightmares. Within a decade, none of the Cullens would have recognized me. Twenty years, I didn't even recognize myself. The longer Alice was gone, the worse I became.

The worse I became though, the better I got too. I learned to control my thirst so I could savor the feed and make the slaughter more elaborate. Once, I nearly killed human Bella because she was stupid enough to get a paper cut in a house full of vampires. Now, you've seen what I can do, how I can take little tastes without the hunger overwhelming me. I trained myself to do that by abducting women and bleeding them little by little. There was one named Circe, or she called herself Circe, I think her true name was Ashley or Mackenzie or something equally suburban. I picked her up in a goth club in Boston where we were surrounded by black lights and red velvet. I took her to a hotel room where she was drugged and trussed. When she awoke the next day, she was in a holding cell I had constructed in a house that was appropriately secluded. I kept her fed and drugged for almost a year. During the first month, I cut her twice and just let her bleed until I could endure the smell. I built it my endurance until I could take the blood that dripped from her without biting or sucking, then until I could put my mouth on the wounds. We are a venomous species, vampires, and when we are about to feed we secrete venom. Too much venom in a human changes them or kills them. I had to learn to swallow it or hold it in the back of my mouth. Sort of you probably learned to give a blow job, but undoubtedly a lot less fun. I learned to not drain a body completely at the scent of blood. In the end, I was able to kill Circe and leave her body sitting there, I didn't drain her even after she was dead. I was very proud. Now I could drink a little, stop, and save a snack for later if I wanted. I didn't need to bite. It wasn't easy, and I usually didn't both, but it was knowing that I could. It made me feel powerful. I was evolving.

My killings became more brutal after that. Now that I could let them bleed without needing their deaths right away, I became found of torture. Each cry of pain was Bella, regretting ruining everything I held dear. Each beg for mercy was Alice, apologizing for being gone so long. The painful deaths of these women was enough to keep my monsters at bay, for awhile at least. I no longer cared about being careful, I knew I was not covering my tracks as well as I should have. I didn't realize how bad I had become until the Volturi dispatched someone to speak to me.

Or, maybe, she knew I wouldn't listen to anyone but her.

I was in Barstow when she found me. I had a nice little shack and a steady diet of tourists straight from the airport. I remember that I had on my good blue vest and my cowboy boots with the silver snakes on em. I was covered in blood. Gore. I had been planning to burn the clothes, actually. I'd save the boots if I could but the rest was beyond salvage. I was standing in the bathroom trying to fish something out of the sink when I heard a knock at the door. No one knocked at my door. Curiosity sent me to answer it and when I did, there was Alice.

In an instant, all of the shame I should have felt for my actions over the years hit me like an anvil. If my heart had been able to beat it would have broken. I wish I did not recall what happened next, but it is burned in to my mind that way I fell at her feet and wrapped my arms around her waist, burying my head against her stomach and breathing in the sweet scent of home. I couldn't even speak. I could barely move. I held her there and let her hug me back, whispering to me my name and how much she had missed me, how much she loved me and how worried she was about me.

We made love and it was glorious. It wasn't even love making. We fucked each others brains out for hours. She didn't say anything about the blood or the smell, she just took care of her man. I was enough of an asshole to think she had finally come back to me, and nothing could have taken the world from me on that night. It was only after that she told me she could only stay for the night. She said I had drawn the attention of the Volturi, as well as a few others. I was no longer being discreet. She asked me to stop feeding from humans. She told me if I didn't, she wouldn't come back to me. Actually, she said that she didn't think there would be anyone to come back to. She asked me not to put her through the pain of my death, told me how she didn't want to walk to earth without me. All pretty words and I fell for all of them. I told her I would go back on the wagon and she left me again. I haven't seen her since."

Once he stopped talking, I waited for a few minutes before speaking again. Werewolves. Vampires. There was so much rattling around in my brain but what I cared most about right now was the very frightening person who was trying to be my friend, at least before he killed me. He claimed he was serial killer. I didn't disbelieve it. I would scream in fear later. Everything could be processed later. Right then, I just couldn't imagine being with someone for a vampire lifespan and having your heart broken like that. The fact that she was still out there had to make it so much worse for him. Why didn't she come back to him? How could she do that to someone, even if he was sort of crazy?

"How long has it been?" My voice was quiet.

"Six years since then."

"I'm sorry." That was so awful.

"Maria was taunting me about Alice before we knew you were in the house. She doesn't think she is ever coming back. There are whispers about her and a vampire named Yanov in the Volturi guard."

"That's...stupid." I assured him. Yes, vampire, but boosting someone's ego in face of heartbreak was a universal thing, and I had done it many times. "Alice did all of this to keep you safe. Why would she cheat on you? Yanov schmanov."

"It's been forty one years since she joined the Volturi." he told me, sounding dead. "Maria is right. I am a fool."

"What's a few decades when you have eternity together?" I squeezed his hand and smiled. Should I offer him ice cream? That was the next step in the ego boost process.

He pulled his hand back from me, seeming to realize that I was still holding it. "I have to go, Sara. I need to kill something as soon as possible."

"Um...mind your diet?"

"Don't worry. I'll make sure my victim doesn't use tools or have adverbs in it's language skills." He was moving to the window, but at least slow enough that I could watch him walk. Was he doing it for my benefit, or had the story taking that much out of him?

I joined him at the window, showing him to it like I was showing him to the door. "Will I see you soon?"

"When I get bored, I guess." he told me honestly.

"Goodnight Jasper." I felt so horrible for him. I would forgive him for every single bruise and most of the cussing if he asked me to right now. His superfluous heart had been stomped on so much. It was stupid and insane and probably fatal, but I just wanted for him to be alright. I was sure I would cry once he left.

Although he was lost in his own world, in his own pain no doubt, he looked at me before he left, then glanced behind me at my old movie posters. Labyrinth. The Princess Bride. He had probably traced them during his stalkerish nighttime visits. A small smile showed itself at just the corner of his mouth when he looked back at me. "Good night Sara. Sleep Well. I'll most likely kill you in the morning."

I smiled back just a little bit, and then he was gone.

After he left and I had tucked myself back in, I remembered that Jasper could sort of sense emotions, and wondered if he hadn't said that because he knew how sad I felt. But honestly, he probably felt a million times worse, so I hoped not.

Maybe that was just his way of saying thank you for letting him talk?

Maybe he just really liked The Princess Bride. I mean, who didn't, living and undead alike?

Maybe I was just over thinking it.

Before I went to sleep, I took my little notebook, found the first blank page and scribbled out WEREWOLVES ARE REAL! Then I turned off the light and closed my eyes.