In Dire Need of Cessation

Twenty-Two

Presumably bringing the book with him, Eleazar stayed wordless until he had reached the correct page. He hummed the words out as he skimmed them, trying to find any information that may be beneficial to us. "Holy water is their only weakness," he said, slapping his tongue against the bottom of his mouth as he continued to read and translate. "Maddalena confided in me," he read, "how presences can not be in their physical form in daylight unless invited into the residence." How ironic how the dead could not be in daylight while us, vampires, only displayed our frozen skin. It affected them more than us! "This may be," Eleazar predicted, "due to the residence being a shelter for the spirits. Could that be a possibility?" 

"I could be. Yet, on more pressing matters, this would suggest we will be free when the sun breaks the horizon," Carlisle said softly, glancing out the window before subconsciously checking Esme was in his sight.

"It also explains the transition between soul and body," Eleazar announced, unhinging the trapdoor within me and letting the lethal butterflies of nervousness out to play in my stomach. "Apparently, Lorenzo couldn't preform the transition from soul to the body on his wife as it would only place her into a body that was infected with the Black Death...meaning the cycle of her dying would only continue. It queries if he should find another body to place his wife into, one that didn't have the aftermath of the plague. In addition, Maddalena told Lorenzo that her soul would physically age the body. For instance, it says, if a soul was thirty-four, and the body stopped developing at eighteen, when the soul and body merged, it would cause the body to age by sixteen years in order to be in sync with the soul. Before his very eyes, he would have seen a body mar with wrinkles and skin become coarser."

Bella, with her eyes on me and mine on her, closed her lids and exhaled in shocked despondency, knowing, with a heavy rejected heart, that there was no hope due to her soul being over three-hundred years old and her body decomposed at the age of seventeen. It wouldn't work. Did she want it to, though? (It didn't matter, Edward, there was no cure for this predicament...stop making it more complicated).

The first sign of her heartbreak as she saw the doors to her future slam shut was the quivering of her bottom lip, which she attempted to prevent by catching it between her teeth, biting a little too hard as a distraction to this nightmare. Something to focus on. The windows were closed to her eyes, still, as she squeezed them shut, not allowing anyone to see the pain of false hope.

I, as her protector, needed to wrap a supporting arm around her, consuming her with my adoration as I tried to comfort (us) her in this horrific change of events. This news had placed me in a swamp, black with floating debris and fish, lifeless with the only movement being their bobbing corpses as the wind gave the waters a slight shove, I stayed afloat for her. I wanted to hide away in my solitude, drown in my grief, deal with this disaster on my own (the way I would always do), yet, knowing Bella was next to me, her hopes and plans (I imagined, as she couldn't be so disheartened by this news if she didn't want to stay here) had crumbled like a failed pastry that a cook had worked so hard for.

I required no more news from Eleazar, we knew the ghosts outside would disappear by sunlight, giving us a chance of freedom- for us to hunt and stay content until the inevitable happened (don't think about it, don't think about it) (and we all fall down). Therefore, when I looked at Carlisle, silently telling him I needed to leave this room with Bella for her to have her privacy when coping with this news, he nodded solemnly.

There must be a way, all we have to do is stop her aging at the correct moment before her body reaches her soul's age, Carlisle said in the back of his mind as he answered Eleazar, thanking and informing him that he, Carlisle, and Esme would be collecting the book today, as soon as the sun rose and the ghosts perished.