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CHAPTER SEVEN ɴɪɢʜᴛᴍᴀʀᴇ ғʀᴏᴍ ᴛʜᴇ ᴘᴀsᴛ
I once said I didn't know how I ended up in Forks. But I do know. Every moment before then was leading up to my place here. From the moment I was changed to the second I drove past the welcome sign, it was all predestined, already decided by the will of something bigger.
I was running. Forks itself didn't matter- it never did. It was the people who mattered. That's what made everything so much worse. I should have left the minute I felt an attachment, I should have run as fast as my legs could take me, just as Edward did, except I wouldn't have come home. I made everything worse. I shouldn't have been surprised when my troubles came back to bite me.
The forest was painted an amber light, mixing the colours of greens and browns like a sepia film. In twilight, the drowning lullaby of the sun would always stretch further than the silence, suffocating the quietness until its golden song was all that could be heard. Down by the stream, the sweet sound was louder, as if the last of the trickling rays had followed me there, illuminating the flow of water as it trailed over the rocks.
I sat by the edge of the mossy boulders, letting my feet dip into the brook.
I hadn't truly noticed the newly come darkness until I felt the air around me shift. It was subtle, but noticeable to my senses, appealing to the keenness of my ears and nose and fingers. The noise had stopped, freezing still into a deafening kind of silence that even the water couldn't break. Then came the coolness to the air. And then the smell.
I could recognise that stench anywhere. It was molten iron, metallic, and what I imagined the colour grey to smell like. It clung to you like smoke to fabric, needing to be scrubbed away by time and effort before it could truly disappear. It burned the air, cutting my nose like a poisonous gas.
And all at once, it was consuming me, eating me whole.
I jumped to the side before the figure could tackle me, sliding against the forest floor on the side of my knees. Spinning to stand, I stood straight, eyes easily finding him across the stream.
His name hissed from my lips before I could stop them. "William."
He was everything that I remembered: ice blonde hair, tricky red eyes, a long, lithe figure that towered over me like a tree. In his human youth, he'd never been called attractive or handsome, but after his change, an intricate sense of beauty had remained with him. It was not a beauty in terms of Rosalie's or Alice's allure. His immortal appeal came in terms of his motions, so smooth and eerie, and his air of mysteriousness, strong and unwavering.
I was biased, but William's face looked withered and worn from the long age he'd been on the hunt, his skin frayed and beaten like a rock on a beach, grated into slippery sand. The dark expression on his face didn't help in making him look deranged.
