Detailed Background: This is neither AU/AH nor vamp!AU; Edward lived a human life until the age of seventeen – current to the start of the story – when, upon his sudden death, he became an incubus. In the lore of this story, incubi are ghostly creatures who feed via performing sexual acts on their sleeping victims, slowly leeching them of their life essence (to the point of death, if repeated feedings occur from the same individual with no regard to their failing health). He has no memories of his human life at the onset of his "life" as an incubus.

Author's Note: Updates may be sporadic, but given the topic and form of this story, I'm sure you all can forgive the time it takes for me to write concisely and in the proper tone to give you something that I am proud of and feel is worth your valued readership. Please, let me know your thoughts and reactions in a review or PM.

For Stella Luna Sky, Le Moulin, doitforyou, and windtrails. Because… we can't stop eating.

Disclaimer: I claim no ownership to any publicly recognizable entities, including Stephenie Meyer's Twilight series and its characters.

Ars Moriendi

You're cold, and sense that you should be able to see your breath in the chill dew air of the early morning, sun not yet rising pink in a haze of chromium over the lush wet trees of the Hum, but it seems that you're not breathing.

You don't mind.

Breath would be detrimental; alert the girl in the bed to your task, to your want, to the heady dark need between your legs that you don't care might hurt her.

You're hovering outside her window, weightless and flightless, incorporeal, a spectre of shame and shadow and wet mouth and stiff skin and you're not skin at all, you're a cloud like glass after a bullet pierces and shatters it into the night. You're staring at her. You're hungry.

Her sleep is not peaceful, and neither are you; your need is all-consuming, hard and lascivious and painful and you want the warmth at the apex of her thighs to give you the life, the sustenance, the salvation you crave, and the want is a need.

She's moving. Her curly cinnamon-brown hair splays against the pink pillows.

Her legs work like an eggbeater beneath the sheets, and the dully aching hunger you've known since birth – the only life you remember, though you're not newborn, not really; you're not a child, with these urges – blossoms into a fiery need.

You can feel the dark venom pulsing through you; collecting on your fingertips, coating your tongue, ready to burst from your private places… everywhere that will touch the girl with a birthmark behind one tan knee.

You want to trace its Rorschach inkblot shape with your tongue and show her its true meaning.

- - - - -

I sank, comatose but unable to sleep, into my mattress. It felt cold without his welcome heat beside me. He had been here only last night.

He had been alive only last night.

He had been warm and young and beautiful when he held me, smelling saline and earthy from his clandestine climb up to my window for our nightly secret rendezvous. His affections were a movie playing across the ocean of his eyes: the seventeen-year-cicada's song, the bugs themselves older than he and their song ancient as love itself, was the soundtrack. In his green eyes it was clear that the scene was grand, swelling strings and fireworks and his leading lady done up in burgundy velvet and filmy petticoats.

I rolled half-heartedly onto my side and clutched close the pillow on which his head had last lain. His smell, like honey and sunlight and beautiful manliness, filled my nose.

Edward was gone.

- - - - -

You melt through the frost-tipped glass of her window –

Surprise: a new emotion. You were not able to do that before, you don't think; but of course not, you didn't exist before tonight…

window.

Your hunger inflames, rising and roiling in a dark thrush of what should have been blood, should have made you blush, but you have no shame and no fear and no affection for this morsel of warmth in the nondescript pink bed, set in a sea of nondescript pink carpeting.

She is sound asleep but stirring, rocking herself to the dream your presence puts into her head, her hands with small stub fingers like snouts rubbing circles into her flat breasts, churning legs open and the pink fabric between dark and wet through.

Your cold lips turn up into a smile as you glide towards the dreary pink bed and satisfactory warm flesh, feet never touching the floor.

- - - - -

Edward was lithe as a mountain lion when he pounced from the wide-open windowsill to the floor. He landed softly on the balls of his feet, as he did every night; he kicked off his shoes and tumbled into Bella's bed.

"You're early!" She laughed delightedly. His legs tangled with hers beneath the sheets as he pulled her closer to press every line of their bodies together.

"Mmm," he groaned softly into the crook of her neck. "I wanted to have more time with you tonight."

Bella rolled over, slid her arms around his lean waist and felt his heartbeat thrumming life through him. She had no idea that life would only spark inside him for another few hours. Had she known, she would have been paralyzed with heartbreak.

"I'm glad," she whispered.

Edward touched his forehead to Bella's gently. "Someday, we'll be together all through the night." His voice was velvet in her ears. "We'll fall asleep together in a big white bed and I'll wake up with you in my arms."

And he kissed her, slow and sweet, like honey pouring from a spoon. When Edward kissed Bella, he wasn't doing anything else. She was his whole universe, and the moment was eternal because he didn't have any plans. Neither of them thought he was going anywhere. Just kissing Edward… it was overwhelming.

He left her when the sky outside was pink.

- - - - -

I glanced out my open window – a habit that I never wanted to break, because it felt like all I had left of Edward – at the purple-gray dawn sky, the color of twilight, like I was living in eternal night. He was my moonlight, pulling at my tides and directing my gravity, the point around which I faithfully circled, and had been for as long as I had been alive.

alive.

It was an aneurism, Esme said, her voice so flat I knew it had to be true, on the phone this morning when Edward's silver Volvo didn't roll into its spot in my driveway. The medical examiner surmised it had been dormant for years, silently threatening the beautiful boy like the point of a knife, provoked to striking by some innocuous startling – a sneeze, a hacking cough, a knock on the head.

His pretty twin sister found him broken beneath his half-open window, a bruise on his brow like he'd hit it sneaking back inside.

- - - - -

"Mmm," Bella moaned softly, writhing beneath him, his air-chilled hands beneath the t-shirt she wore as a nightgown, teasing at her small, pointed breasts. "Edward… please…"

He shuddered and kissed the hollow beneath her ear, all breath and life and pulse meeting pulse. "Not here," he whispered, one hand trailing down to ghost over her white panties. "Not with your dad sleeping in the next room. And not when I have to leave you after."

"But I'm ok with that!" Bella insisted, her hand mirroring his trail, slipping under the waistband of his crinkly new jeans, resting over burgundy briefs hiding the skin she'd only recently first seen. "Edward, you know that I understand that your leaving doesn't mean you don't love me. I need you. I want you. Right now."

Edward exhaled through his nose sharply when her small hand squeezed, and Bella heard him swallow: a hopeful sound. His fingers tapped softly over the sensitive curve only he had ever seen – that they were both certain only he would ever see – like she was the cream ivory keys of his piano, and he could draw the lullaby from her with the smallest effort.

"No," he whispered softly, finally, honestly. "I do love you. And I do need you. And I do so, so want you." He kissed her face then – softly – finally – honestly. "I will only treat you the way you deserve. I can't take this experience from you and disappear into the night. I could never live with myself."

- - - - -

You groan richly in half-sated, half-wet, all-carnal, half-satanic satisfaction at the first stiff sinking into the curly-haired girl's bare red center. She is flora like rosehips and sour like grapefruit and fauna like all prey: game and lurch and flight.

You drink deeply, aware that your mouth is not doing the sucking and it instinctively unnerves you, though you're unsure whose instincts would go against your own in your mind, but you busy your mouth against her breast – too hard, too big, too burnt from a UV lamp – but find it almost as satisfying as the nectar you're stealing below; when you suckle here, you can taste the metallic tang of blood, but you don't mind it.

You raise your head to lick your lips clean, catch sight of yourself in the mirror of her frosted window: bronze hair, white skin – not skin, you remind yourself, seeing through your own reflection – empty eyes glowing green like cursed jade.

You frown, and you're not sure why.

The body beneath you tightens and arches, taking pleasure from your tangible darkness, not knowing what you're taking from her – life and energy and soul; if you feed from her again, she'll grow weaker still, but the sour pungent odor of her tainted identity is overwhelming the aroma that called only because you were starving and frail, and you know you won't want from her again –

But she's good enough this once, and your hips roll harder, taking in her essence and enjoying the ride, and just before you come in a great implosion of frenzied drink taking in a great gulp from between her tan legs, you glance in the window's reflection again and see through your eyes to the sign on the door behind you:

jessica's room.