Wolverine

Chapter-7

Edward's POV

I spotted Bella before she saw me, and I knew that something was different. She saw me and walked towards me, a pensive look on her face. She brushed by my left shoulder and headed into the woods near the school. She wanted to talk in private. I followed her.

We walked for almost twenty minutes before she stopped. "You're impossibly fast, and strong. Your skin is pale white and ice cold. Your eyes change colour, and sometimes you speak…like you're from a different time. You never eat or drink anything. You don't go out in the sunlight." I approached her slowly, trying not to frighten her. "How old are you?"

She knew.

"Seventeen," I answered, defeated.

"How long have you been seventeen?"

I couldn't say it. "A while," I answered.

She began to pant. I heard her heartbeat race. I wanted to comfort her, but I doubted she could find any peace with me. "I know what you are."

I needed to hear her. I needed her to tell me what she knew. "Say it…out loud. Say it," I ordered.

She took a deep breath. "Vampire." The word made her voice shake.

"Are you afraid?" Please be afraid. Please leave. Go home before I hurt you.

"No," she answered.

She turned around, stared at me, and I knew she was lying. "Then ask me the most basic question; what do we eat?"

She touched my face. I felt the electricity from before shoot through me. "You won't hurt me." I grabbed her arm and pulled her along. "Where are we going?" I detected a note of panic in her voice.

"Up the mountain," I told her. "Out of the cloud bank. You need to see what I look like in the sunlight." I went to pull her up onto my back, but she shook my hand off and began to run ahead of me. She was very fast. I followed her. We reached a meadow I'd located several months earlier, and she stopped.

I walked ahead. I began to undo the buttons on my shirt. "This is why we don't show ourselves in sunlight. People would know that we're different." I felt the heat of the sun's ray on my face and I slowly turned around to face her.

I couldn't fathom what she thought when she saw me. Her face was a mixture of awe and curiosity. The fear from earlier was gone.

She stepped closer to me. "It's like diamonds," she said, looking at my bare chest and up to my face. "You're beautiful."

"Beautiful?" I scoffed. Agony masked my face as I waited for the fear to come back. "This is the skin of a killer, Bella." I turned away, doing up my shirt in the process. I stepped out of the damnable sunlight and back into the darkness where I belong. I heard her follow me. "I'm designed to kill, Bella."

"I don't care." She smiled at me. What was she thinking?

"I've killed people before."

"So have I. I killed my father and not just him either." She took a deep breath. "I'm older than I look, Edward. I was born over a hundred years ago."

What?

"I enlisted in the army near the end of World War I. I cut my hair and pretended to be a boy. On September 21, 1918, a German soldier shot me in the heart and I died. I healed myself after a few minutes. Ever since then, I've been stuck like this." She indicated to her teenaged body. "I've been alone for a really long time, Edward." She reached up and played with the Dog Tags around her neck.