After Dark

6.

A few more days have passed.
I found a best friend in Rosalie. Now I get on well with everyone except Renesmee. Since a while, she just hang around with this guy who smells really disgusting.

Bella explained me that this guy is a shapeshifter. I just laughed about it because I thought it was nonsense. But at first I didn't believe that there are vampires. So you can be wrong.

Jasper has agreed to help me control my gift. We train every day. But today it's the fight training. It isn't really hard for me though.

I took part in the French Revolution about two hundred years ago. At that time I was very bitter and irritable.
That time, I belonged to a small group of vampires.
Before that I was alone for a living no time.
We lived in an old 'abandoned' house on the outskirts of Paris. It has always been said that this house is owned by demonic beings who come out at night and kill anyone who's still outside.
That was good for us.
We didn't have to bother with hunting, because there were always daredevils who didn't want to believe the story.
But we weren't that cruel either.
If someone begged for mercy and he seemed useful to us, we turned him into a vampire. That's how a kind of clan emerged right in the capital of France.

We've been planning a revolution for a long time. If we hadn't been involved, then it would have been all be unsuccessful. The storming of the Bastille was a walkover for us. Some of us took part in the execution of the king from a safe distance. But I stayed in the house.

After that, I decided to move on alone again. No matter which country I came to, after a while I came back to the USA. I kept going back to my home village to see how my family was doing.
Twenty years after my transformation, I returned for the third time. I wanted to try to keep living my old life. But everything was different.

The night I disappeared, a homeless girl was murdered.
People thought it was me because she was wearing my dress.

When I escaped, I had taken a simple dress from a clothesline and thrown the new one into an alley. She seemed to have found it before her life ended.

She were buried with my name. It also went bad for my family.
They lost all their wealth, my mother got a fever and died a little later. My father was almost ruined by that what happened. 'Cause I was an only child, he had no one to take care of him. Me and my mother were, next to his work, his one and only.

I always watched him through the window. Once, when I wasn't careful enough, he saw me. He was declared crazy and sent to a psychiatric hospital. Only a week later he committed suicide.

I heard that my fiance had married my best friend. Not even a year after my death. They got many daughters and sons.
They had their happy ending.
They grew old and died happily while I didn't change.

A human would be glad to live that long. But I was and am tired of being seventeen years old forever. Never having a family because you can't have children.
But no matter. I can't change that at all. At least I'm not alone anymore.

Now back to the present time. I run through the forest. I feel the hem of my dress, it's green and made out of silky fabric.
To hunt or to walk in the forest, I always wear a dress. There is no real reason for that. I just like it.
I jump over a river, followed by Bella. But she is much slower than me. We are probably many miles away from the house. No one is in the forest except the animals. No human.

"Where are you staying?", I ask Bella, who stops a few feet behind me.
"Unfortunately, I'm not as fast as you", she says with a smile. I just smile to myself. But then turn around quickly.
"Do you hear anything?", she asks, I'm closing my eyes.
"Yes, a bunch of deer, two kilometers north of here", I say and start running again. But this time slower, so that Bella can keep up.
"The two weaker ones", she says. We nod to each other and get to business. When the thirst is satisfied, we go back.
"What is actually between Renesmee and this Jacob guy?", I ask after a while.
"He is imprinted on her", she says, looking down at the floor.
"And what does that mean?", I ask a bit confused.
"It means that he is her protector, best friend, etc., but she isn't bound to him, she can fall in love with someone else, but he's still her protector", she explains. I start laughing,
"Lucky that it doesn't happen to vampires", I say a little more calmly. The rest of the way home we talk permanently.

I like Bella very much. She's like a sister to me. But my best friend is still Rosalie, she understands how I feel about the vampire existence.

Only one more week until school starts. I haven't seen a school from the inside for a long time. At that time there was a class of more than thirty students.
Thanks to the high infant mortality, there were not that many students in my class. At the beginning we were twenty-five students, towards the end only fifteen. I don't know how many of those survived the teenage years. Maybe two or three.

I enter my room, grab a book and throw myself on the bed, which gives a little bit in with a soft creak. I spend all night reading all the books.