Beau Swan Touches Grass
I'd have liked nothing more than to drop everything I was doing and gun it to Port Angeles. Unfortunately, I got out of school at 3:00. It was an hour to Port Angeles. I was 1,000,000% going to lose track of time while shopping there and spend about two or three hours browsing. And then I'd have to drive another hour back to Forks. Given that it's January, the sun would go down at 5:00. So do that math.
No shot I was gonna drive through the woods in total darkness, in my Little Truck That Could, on rainy roads, while trying to triangulate my location with a paper map, in an area that had literal vampires roaming around, even if they were kinda benign. No pilgrimage to Port Angeles during the weekdays.
While it would suck, I would have to spend the rest of the week raw-dogging reality with nothing but my wits and dial-up internet.
God, I didn't remember 2005 being this ass. Had it always been this ass?
The answer was yes. It had always been this ass. I just hadn't noticed back then because I had been a dumb little moron-child whose only responsibilities were occasionally doing my homework and making sure my Neopets didn't die. Now, though, I was some sort of weird soul-amalgam person with no phone, no maps, no ride-or-die bros, and no serotonin. Just rain, denim, and ennui. So yeah. Day three in Forks. I was holding on, but just barely.
"Port Angeles, huh?" McKayla asked, eyes lighting up. I'd run into her at the parking lot—or, more accurately, she'd run into me—and she'd immediately pounced on the opportunity to chat, which I didn't mind—her enthusiasm was contagious. "That's so fun! Do you have anything in mind? A movie? Shopping?"
"Yeah, kinda," I said, pulling my backpack out from the passenger seat. "Figured I should get some clothes more suited to the weather here, as opposed to Phoenix. And maybe even get myself a cellphone, too."
"Ooh, cool!" she said, bouncing a little on the balls of her feet. "There's a mall there, you know. It's not huge, but it's got some decent stores. There's also this vintage shop with a ton of weird stuff—like, one time I found a cassette of whale sounds next to a bin of scary movies in VHS."
"Okay, you're selling me on this vintage store hard right now."
She grinned. "It's the best. I try to go whenever I can." Then she paused, her smile faltering just a bit. "I wish I could go with you, but I promised my dad I'd help out at the store this weekend. Inventory. It's… not glamorous."
"Oh." I hadn't been planning to invite anyone, not really. But now that the idea had planted itself in my brain, the fact that it wouldn't happen kind of sucked. I tried to play it cool. "That's alright. Gotta keep the baseball bats in check, I guess."
She laughed. "Yeah. Rogue baseball bats, my arch nemesis. Next time, though," she added quickly, brushing her hair behind her ear. "We'll totally have to go together next time."
"Sure, yeah. That'd be fun," I said.
We walked the rest of the way to first period together, chatting about nothing in particular. The weather, the latest episode of a TV show I hadn't watched, a rumor that the local ice cream shop might be closing down for good this summer. Just small, normal, everyday stuff.
Then, we walked into English, and my good mood was ever-so-slightly dented when I found out we were reading Wuthering Heights. Nothing says "thriving emotionally" like a hundred pages of horny ghosts and passive-aggressive Victorians.
I cracked open the copy Mrs. Mason handed me and was immediately hit with a brick wall of old-timey misery and people named things like Hindley and Hareton.
Again, I had memories of reading this in the past, and truly, deeply loving it. But I was now both older and younger than the last time I'd read it, and my current self was much less interested in reading about pretentious people in the 1800s who spent a million pages waxing poetic about their own sadness and their weirdly codependent relationships.
"Goddamn, dude," I said under my breath, flipping through a few pages and taking in the sheer density of the text. "It's like the lovechild of the King James Bible and a tax ledger."
A quiet laugh came from my left.
I looked up. Erica had her hand over her mouth, stifling a giggle. She'd turned halfway in her seat, and gave me a sheepish little smile. "Careful," she whispered. "That's classic literature you're slandering, Beau."
I blinked. She seemed surprised at herself for speaking, like she'd meant to just silently agree and her vocal cords had betrayed her.
"I'm not slandering it," I whispered back. "I'm just saying it reads like it was written by someone who desperately needed to have their thesaurus taken away and been given a hug."
Erica snorted, biting her lip to hide her smile. She turned back around, but not before giving me one last sideways glance.
The rest of class passed in a blur of archaic prose, dramatic sighs, and literary analysis. By the time the bell rang, my brain felt like it had been put through a blender. Not the most productive lesson, admittedly. I'd have to catch up on the reading at home, which meant more time spent with Heathcliff's melodramatic ass.
I was gathering my stuff when Erica hesitated by my desk. "Um… you really didn't like it?" she asked.
I shrugged, trying not to sound too dismissive. "I've read it before, and I used to be way into it, but that's more of a past-life experience now," I said, grinning enough to make her think it was a joke. "...I don't know. I guess I just fell out of love with it. Now it just kinda feels like everyone in this book needs therapy. And maybe a timeout."
Erica laughed—this time openly, though she still glanced around like she wasn't supposed to. "Yeah. It's a little exhausting."
"You say that like you actually enjoy it."
"I… kind of do," she admitted, hugging her books to her chest. "But I grew up reading a lot of stuff like this. I used to sneak my mom's old Brontë and Austen paperbacks into bed at night. I guess I got used to the drama."
"Well, you're clearly braver than me," I said. "I'll take dragons over love triangles any day."
Erica perked up a bit. "You like fantasy?"
"Big time. Sci-fi, too. Stuff like Dune, Malazan, A Song of Ice and Fire. Uh... also The Expanse."
Her head tilted slightly. "The Expanse?"
Right. 2005. That doesn't exist yet. I barely stopped myself from wincing as I added, "It's... kinda obscure. Indie series. Real niche, hard to find." I gave her my best 'please don't ask follow-ups' smile.
She nodded like she was trying to file the name away for later.
There was a lull in the conversation.
Then I added, "Anyway, uh... Yeah. As far as appreciating 'The Classics' goes... I liked that Romeo and Juliet movie where everyone's a mafia dude in Hawaiian shirts."
She giggled. "Baz Luhrmann?"
"I didn't know his name. But now I do. Thank you. I am now powerful."
"I like… uh, Lord of the Rings," she said, voice a bit quieter. "And Star Wars. And I'm saving up for Comic-Con next year. The one in San Diego."
Okay, that caught me off guard. Not because she said it, but because of how she said it—soft, like it was a secret. Like she expected to be made fun of for it.
"That's awesome," I said, and meant it. "You gonna cosplay?"
"Maybe," she said. "I'm not a great seamstress, but I have a friend who is, so maybe if I help her out she'll return the favor." She adjusted the strap of her backpack. Then she said, "Um… if you want, I mean—if Wuthering Heights gets too annoying, I wouldn't mind helping. I know it kind of sucks at first. But it gets easier."
"That's actually really nice of you," I said, taken a bit off guard. "Yeah. Sure. I might take you up on that."
She gave a nod, smiling a bit wider. Then, she added, "Great. You might really need the help!"
"Wow. Okay. Thanks for the vote of confidence."
"Don't be dramatic. That's Cathy's job."
The rest of the day wasn't really anything to write home about. Spanish was a bore. Trig was... Let's not talk about it. I spent lunch talking to Jeremy and the boys about what we were going to do this weekend, and someone tried to hash out more details about McKayla's planned trip to the beach at La Push. I was only half paying attention, though—my mind was set on something else. Something that would get me a much-needed win, and make me feel like I wasn't completely spiraling into the hellscape between the analog and digital eras.
Which is how I ended up wandering toward the school gym.
Now, to be clear—I didn't really expect Forks High to have a proper weight room. In fact, I would've bet decent money it was just a dusty closet with a pull-up bar and a yoga ball someone got from Goodwill. But lo and behold, tucked beside the gymnasium, past a door marked "WEIGHTS" in faded stenciling, I found it.
A real, honest-to-God weight room.
Sort of.
It smelled like metal and mildew. The air was a potent cocktail of rust, rubber mats, and the ghost of Axe Body Spray past. There was a squat rack in the corner, a couple benches, a mismatched set of free weights, and a few machines that looked like they'd been built during the Reagan administration. Most of the dumbbells had their poundages partially rubbed off, so half the time you had to guess if you were picking up 25 pounds or 45.
I loved it immediately.
This was home. This was familiar. Unlike 2005's cursed internet or the 1800s' emo love poems, this was a place where I could finally feel comfortable.
I dropped my backpack by the door, walked over to the squat rack, and settled in to make Mark Rippetoe proud.
I went light on the first few sets. Squats, bench press, and deadlifts. Despite the fact that I was wearing jeans like a heathen, it still felt better than doing nothing at all. I was getting my reps in, feeling the pump, grunting and sweating like a champ. I was even making a conscious effort to not say, 'Yeah, buddy' like Ronnie Coleman. This was going to be the most normal, sane thing I'd done all week, and it was feeling fantastic.
I focused on the rhythm. On the motion. The burn in my shoulders. The tightness in my back. My body was different than it used to be—stronger in weird ways, weaker in others—but the muscle memory was still there. The control. The part of me that knew how to move, how to breathe, how to brace.
Ten minutes in, I was locked in. Hoodie off. T-shirt clinging to me in sweat-dark patches, hair damp, eyes focused. That real /fit/izen in the zone shit.
And then, the door opened.
"Whoa," someone said behind me. "Swan? That you?"
I turned, mid-rep, and saw a guy I vaguely recognized from Spanish—Connor, maybe? Something like that. He was tall, built like a football player, with the kind of neck thickness that suggested shrugs, deadlifts, and farmer walks had been involved at some point in his life. He was flanked by another dude, shorter, wiry, with a ponytail and a pair of obnoxious blue Oakleys. Indoors.
"Didn't think you were the gym type," Connor said, eyeing the barbell in my hands.
I shrugged. "What can I say? Gotta stay sexy." Cringe.
That got a chuckle. Ponytail nodded approvingly. "Not bad form," he said. "Where'd you lift before?"
I bit back the urge to say 'uh, the gym?' because I was pretty sure that wasn't what he meant. Instead, I said, "Phoenix," and hoped that would suffice. Thankfully, it seemed to. Ponytail gave a nod. Then Connor said, "Right on. Guess we're not the only ones here for the pump."
He and Ponytail breezed past me, dropping their backpacks in a corner, before making a beeline for the bench press.
They started doing their own warm-up sets. I tried to go back to mine, but now I was doing that thing where I became hyper-aware of their presence. It's hard to stay in the zone when two gym bros are grunting like walruses two benches over and sneaking glances every few minutes like I'm a foreign exchange student from Planet Swole.
Eventually, one of them—Ponytail—wandered over.
"You ever deadlift?"
I nodded. "Not my strongest lift, but yeah."
"You wanna spot me real quick?"
I paused. Spot him... for a deadlift? What?
That's not... that's not a thing. That's not a lift that gets spotted. That's not even how spotting works. Spotting a deadlift is like lifeguarding a bathtub. Like, thanks, bro, but if I mess this up, no amount of friendly encouragement is gonna keep me from a one-way, all-expenses-paid trip to Snap City.
But, like... what was I gonna say? 'Nah, big dog, I think you've got it'? I didn't want to be That Guy, who couldn't even be a good gym bro when called upon. So instead, I just said, "Sure thing."
I set down my weights.
He lined up for his lift—way too much weight on the bar, by the way—hyped himself up with a few chest slaps, and then heaved it off the floor like it owed him money. His form was horrendous. Like, OSHA-violation bad. I did my best to hover nearby in a way that said "I support you" without actually getting in his blast radius.
He dropped it with a clang that rattled the entire building.
"Yeah!" he barked. "Felt good!"
"Sure," I said. "Looked like it felt like something."
Connor howled with laughter. "Dude. You got him."
Ponytail grinned like I'd just knighted him. "You're alright, Swan."
And just like that, I was in.
Afterward, I cooled down with some light curls and stretches. The bros packed up and left with a series of fist bumps and "see you around, man"s. And I was alone again.
I sat on the edge of the bench, breathing slow. My shirt stuck to me, my arms buzzed with leftover adrenaline, and my legs felt like warm concrete.
And weirdly, I felt good. Like really good.
The fact was that for one hour, in this dimly lit box of iron and mildew, I'd felt competent. Capable. Like I was in control of something, for once. I gathered my things. Toweled off. Took a long, quiet look around the room. And then I left.
It was still raining when I left school.
Not the dramatic, cinematic kind of rain—no thunder, no lightning, no sobbing violins in the sky. Just that soft, endless drizzle that Forks seemed to specialize in. The kind that soaks you down to your socks without ever raising its voice. The kind that made the world feel heavy, like it had a wool blanket draped over it.
My legs hurt, but it was a good kind of ache. The post-workout soreness that whispered, Hey, you're still alive in there. My arms were a little shaky, and I had the vague sense that tomorrow I'd regret ever looking at a barbell, but for now, I felt decent. Like maybe this whole "reinvent yourself" thing was actually doable.
I zipped my hoodie up to the neck, slung my backpack over one shoulder, and drove home.
Dad wasn't there yet.
The house was quiet. The soup pot still sat on the stovetop, rinsed and drying on a towel. My room upstairs waited patiently—desktop humming in the corner, dial-up connection already poised to lead me into another night of unholy browsing on ancient forums and niche message boards.
And hey, I wasn't mad about that. I had plans, okay? I was gonna heat up dinner, hop onto 4chan, maybe post something like "ITT: dumb things you believed as a kid" or arguing with Anons on /v/ about why Halo 2's online matchmaking was secretly ass, and settle in for a few hours of low-effort chaos. Maybe hit up an old fansub site and rewatch the first couple episodes of Berserk in 240p. A good time.
But as I stood there in the living room, backpack slumped over one shoulder and soreness in my thighs from my extremely heroic squat sets, I suddenly realized I didn't want to go upstairs just yet.
I wanted to... I dunno. Touch grass? Metaphorically?
Like, sure, Forks was a damp gray prison of pine trees and eternal drizzle, but it had a certain charm if you tilted your head and squinted real hard. It was peaceful. Slow. Real. And something in me—it might've been the endorphins or the fact that my muscles were too hot to sit still—wanted to lean into that.
So I did the only logical thing—I went to the library.
The Forks Public Library sat on a corner lot like a sleepy, moss-covered guardian of forgotten knowledge. The building looked like it had once been a post office or maybe a church—something sacred, now repurposed. The sign outside was sun-faded and slightly crooked. The front steps creaked. A crow on the roof made direct eye contact with me as I walked in, which felt extremely on-brand for this town.
Inside, the library smelled like dust, paper, and very old carpet. The kind of smell that lingers in your clothes for hours after you leave. A smell that, if bottled, would be called "Melancholy for Men."
It was also... empty.
Not "no one here" empty, but "someone's reading The Silmarillion in a corner with suspicious intensity" empty.
There were maybe four other people inside. An old man asleep in a reading chair. A woman with a toddler flipping through board books in the kids' section. A high schooler quietly highlighting a textbook. And the librarian, a woman in her fifties with an oversized cardigan and glasses on a chain, who glanced up at me with vague curiosity, like I was a rare bird that had flown in through the window.
I gave her a polite nod and wandered in.
The library had three short aisles. One for fiction, one for nonfiction, and one for "assorted stuff"—which turned out to be cookbooks, mystery paperbacks, and battered old VHS tapes of nature documentaries and public domain cartoons. There was a little magazine rack, a single table with four chairs, and a tiny computer station in the back.
The library had one (1) computer.
It was beige. It was humming ominously. And it was currently being used by a seven-year-old girl playing Neopets.
I stared at her for a minute. She stared back. Her Neopet was dying. I could feel the judgment radiating off her tiny, juice-stained hands.
So I gave up on that idea.
I drifted toward the fiction aisle, scanning the shelves for anything familiar. Painfully, I reminded myself that there was no dedicated Sanderson section. No Mistborn, no Stormlight, no Warbreaker. None of those had been written yet. In this world, Sanderson had... Elantris? That came out in 2004, I think? Sadly, I didn't find that. Even Rothfuss' The Name of the Wind, as over-hyped as it was, hadn't dropped yet.
Jesus. The world was in for a treat when those bangers hit shelves.
Instead, it was a sea of Tom Clancy, Sue Grafton, Anne Rice, and Lurlene McDaniel. Some scattered Star Wars expanded universe books, which gave me a tight, nostalgic feeling in my chest. A Goosebumps holdout. There were no Twilight books, thank Christ. That would've been too meta. Too recursive. The universe would've folded in on itself and I'd have been yeeted back to the void.
Eventually, though, something caught my eye as I rounded a corner.
Storm Front By Jim Butcher.
My first instinct was a bad one. A really bad one.
Because I saw that name, saw that title, and immediately wondered, "Hey, whoa, why does the library have a book that shares a name with the neo-Nazi site?" Which, y'know, is not the association you want to make in the middle of a public library.
So, once I shook that thought from my head and actually read the blurb and realized that no, this was not a copy of some white supremacist manifesto, and instead just happened to be the first Dresden Files novel, I was pretty relieved.
The cover was pure 2000s schlock—a dude with a black trench coat, hat, staff, mysterious shadows—but the name hit something deep in my brain. A memory stirred.
…Dresden Files. Yeah, I've heard of that. Wizard detective. Noir with fireballs. Kind of pulpy. Guy's a dork, gets beat up a lot, possibly unkillable, wrote twelve books before anyone noticed him.
I flipped it over and skimmed the blurb.
Wizard. Private investigator. Chicago. Sold.
I grabbed it and checked for sequels. There were three, so I took all of them.
And then, in a moment of weakness, I also grabbed a slightly torn copy of The Hobbit, because it felt wrong to be in a library and not check out Tolkien. That's like going to mass and not pretending to sing along.
I took my haul to the desk. The librarian glanced at the books, then at me, then back at the books.
"First time here?" she asked, voice dry like she smoked a pack a week and only drank hot tea out of spite.
"Yeah," I said. "Just moved into town."
She slid a clipboard toward me. "Sign-up form. Library card's free."
"Bless."
I filled it out, she stamped something, and a minute later I had a laminated card with my name on it. It felt good. Tangible. Real. A totem of literacy.
"Are you a big reader?" she asked as she scanned the barcodes.
I smiled at her. "You could say so, yeah."
The librarian made a small, noncommittal sound. "Haven't seen you around town."
"Yeah, I just moved in with my dad."
"Ah." She nodded. "The chief. Thought you looked familiar. You're Renee's boy, aren't you? The one that used to come visit in the summers?"
I blinked, caught off guard by that. Not "Charlie's boy". "Renee's". I... Didn't think anyone really remembered my mother much around here. "...Uh, yeah," I managed to say. "That's me."
The librarian—whose nametag read "Mrs. Field"—nodded again, as if this explained everything. "Well, good to have you back, Beau." She handed the books over, along with the card. "Enjoy. Due in two weeks."
"Yes, ma'am. Thanks a lot."
Mrs. Field just shrugged. "You need anything, give a holler."
I nodded, tucked the books under my arm, and left.
The rain had stopped when I walked out, leaving the air crisp and cool. The sun was beginning its slow descent into twilight. Everything smelled like pine and damp earth.
I hopped back into the truck. Books in the passenger seat. Sweat on my back—eww, I really gotta shower—the ache in my arms, the sting in my legs. It was enough. It was something.
Tonight, I'd shower. Make dinner. Maybe read a chapter or two of Storm Front. And yeah, sure—I'd probably still end up shitposting in the twilight hours with the screech of dial-up screaming into the void, but it'd be different this time. I'd have context, and I'd have a wizard PI in my corner.
Things were looking up. In a quiet, soggy, tragically phoneless kind of way.Last edited: Yesterday at 6:01 AMLike Award Reply346
Edythe Cullen Stalks A Seventeen Year-Old
Beau Swan is silent once again.
Not just quiet. Not merely soft-spoken, or contemplative, or slow to rise on cold mornings like this one. He is silent—utterly so—in a way that is deeply unnatural to me. A way that tastes of wrongness, like the absence of light in a place where there should be warmth.
I crouch in the shadow of an alder tree, unseen, unfelt, unwelcome. The mist curls around my ankles, thick as breath, but I do not stir the fog. The wind cuts cold across the hill, threading through my hair, brushing the pine needles underfoot. I do not shiver. I do not blink. I do not breathe. I cannot allow myself to breathe in the scent of his blood. Not now. Not here.
His bedroom window glows faintly in the pre-dawn dark. I can see him moving inside, blurry through the pane. Getting dressed. Backpack slung over one shoulder. The light turns off, a door creaks open, and then he emerges.
It's strange to me, the way he moves through the world, the way he exists. He walks with a kind of careless heaviness, like gravity clings to him harder than it does to others. Not in a burdensome way, but in a way that marks him as present. He does not float through the world as I do—he trudges through it. Leaves footprints. Closes doors. Makes noise. Except, not in the way that I am used to hearing.
Because again, today, as with almost every day—his mind is blank to me.
Not shielded. Not muddled. Just… absent, most of the time. Occasionally, there's a flicker—an echo of emotion, or a half-formed word—but never when I need it.
The day of my return, I was bracing for it. For the deafening roar of his thoughts. The panicked scramble of conclusions and theories, the cacophony of a human mind trying desperately to unsee what it had already understood. But when I saw him again—nothing.
No words. No pictures. No emotional cues. Just a hole. A dead zone.
At first, I thought it was an error, a momentary lapse. Some strange quirk of distance or focus. But it happened again. And again. And again. Now it is becoming pattern, if not certainty.
Most days, Beau Swan is silent.
Not even the sleeping mind of a human is this quiet. They mutter to themselves subconsciously, even in rest. Anxiety hums like a refrigerator. Memories flit across neurons. They think in dreams. They think in fragments. They think in noise.
But not Beau. Not anymore. His father is another outlier—his mind is closed off as well—but the Chief is different.
With the Chief, I can at least sense his emotions and the weight of his thoughts, even if I cannot truly decipher them. With Beau, there's rarely anything to decipher. Once or twice, I've caught a sharp flash of feeling—confusion, annoyance, something like amusement—but never context. Never continuity. It's worse, in a way—like knowing the lights might come on, but not knowing when or why
It terrifies me. And it also infuriates me.
I watch as he crosses the front lawn, keys dangling from his fingers, jacket half-zipped, hair a mess. He yawns, wide shoulders slumping, his neck stretching, the skin there pale and bare. My throat aches.
He looks like he would break easily, like a thing designed to fail under pressure.
He doesn't know I'm here. I believe I would hear it in his thoughts—Oh no, the stalker vampire girl from class is perched in a tree like a bloodthirsty squirrel. But no. Nothing. Just the sound of gravel under his boots as he stumbles down the driveway to his truck. He doesn't look back, and he doesn't even pause. He simply opens the door, climbs in, and slams it shut behind him.
It is worse, somehow, that he doesn't even know how much danger he is in. If he did, if he had any sense of self preservation, he would have run. He would have left.
I could let it go. I should. But the problem is that he still knows. And that makes him a threat.
That first day in Biology, his mind had been so loud it nearly shattered me. Screaming. Thrashing. Full of curses and theories and horrible, bright panic. He had stared at me and shouted truth at the inside of his skull, as if thinking harder would make it go away.
Vampire. That girl is a goddamn vampire.
It was the clearest projection of realization I've ever heard from a human mind. No doubt. No process. Just immediate, inescapable understanding.
He turns the ignition. The ancient engine snarls to life like a dying bear, and I flinch at the loudness. I don't know how anyone can stand hearing such a noise day after day. It's like a death rattle, a mechanical cough. The racket should be enough to wake the neighborhood, but no lights flicker on. No one stirs.
It's just him, and me, and the mist.
It strikes me, then, just how easy it would be to end this. He is so soft, so alone, I could take him. Take him into the forest, far from prying eyes, and drink his sweet blood. I could make it quick, painless. One bite, and then nothing.
No struggle. No fight. Just a swift, efficient kill. A mercy killing, really. The kindest option, given the circumstance.
I spit out the venom pooling in my mouth. It drips from the corners of my lips and splatters against the dirt. And, despite myself, I chuckle bitterly as I realize that had been one of the many deaths Archie had foreseen for Beau Swan.
I could choose it, if I wanted.
But I don't want it.
I let him pull out of the driveway before I move. Just a shadow between trees, a flicker of motion lost in the fog. I pace him easily. His truck is slow—glacial, even.
I can count his heartbeats—twelve, in the time it takes for him to back out onto the street. Twelve steady inhales. No spike in heart rate. No panic. No fear.
Nothing to suggest he knows that the person who nearly murdered him in a high school biology class is watching from less than fifty yards away, hidden just beyond the treeline.
He should be afraid. He should be looking over his shoulder. He should be wondering if I'll come back to finish what I didn't start.
But instead, he just yawns. He scratches the back of his neck. He mutters something about forgetting breakfast. He turns on the radio. Queen's "Fat Bottomed Girls" plays, loud and catchy and entirely inappropriate for the moment. I try not to hate it, but it is difficult. He taps his fingers against the steering wheel in time with the music, and his head sways slightly to the beat.
He seems so obliviously alive. Clumsy with life. Loud with it. It makes me want to scream
I don't follow the truck directly. That would be dangerous, even for me. He could check a mirror. Glance sideways. Catch a glimpse of something too fast to be explainable. So I take to the trees, bounding over ditches and weaving through old growth, my footfalls light and deliberate. I stay low, and I remind myself not to breathe.
This is ridiculous.
The shame of it burns, low and slow, just under the surface of my skin. I tell myself it's for the safety of my family. I tell myself that I have to do this, that I must watch him, measure him, weigh every step he takes and every word he says, in case this knowledge inside him ever turns outward.
But that isn't the whole truth.
Because if I was only watching to see if he'd tell someone, I would have stopped already.
He's had days.
Days in which to panic. To speak, to scream, to warn, to write. Days to tell his father. Days to do anything except carry on like nothing is wrong.
He goes to class. He eats his lunch. He does his homework, then reads on the couch. He makes dinner. He watches television, then goes to bed.
It's all so utterly mundane, so painfully ordinary. He's done nothing, said nothing. He's had so many chances, but he hasn't taken them.
And so now I follow not because I'm afraid he'll expose us, but because I don't understand how he knows, and why he hasn't.
All my instincts are based on what humans do when they're afraid. When they're confronted with something unthinkable. They retreat, lash out, scream, seek help, deny. But Beau Swan has watched a predator walk among him in daylight, and instead of running from the room, he sat beside her. He's stayed. He's kept his silence. And I can't hear him, and I can't see his logic, and I can't imagine his reasoning, and I can't understand—
Why?
I catch sight of his truck as it turns into the lot, sputtering and growling like it might give out before the second row of spaces. He parks under the tall fir near the east entrance, the same spot every day. Habit, or coincidence? I couldn't say, as his mind is closed to me.
He slams the door a little harder than necessary. Maybe the cold got to him.
I pause, high above on the wooded ridge that backs the east parking lot, crouched behind a thick stand of bracken. I can see his breath fog in the air as he shoves his hands into his pockets and starts toward the school.
No hesitation. No scan for threats. No lingering glance toward the trees. He doesn't know I'm here.
And I think—I hope—that if he did, even he might flinch.
He walks toward the main building, slouching under the weight of the gray sky, eyes focused on some point in the middle distance. If he's worried about vampires, he hides it well.
Almost at once, McKayla Newton jogs up to him, her mind buzzing with a juvenile infatuation that borders on giddy.
"Hi, Beau!" she says brightly, and falls into step beside him, thoughts already drifting toward weekend plans and invented conversations that haven't happened yet. He looks at her with mild surprise, as if he didn't hear her coming, or at the very least hadn't expected her to notice him. His eyes light up, and a small smile plays over his lips. He looks pleased, but I can't say for certain whether it is genuine, or if he is merely putting on a mask.
I can't read his thoughts, but I can read hers, and I can hear the way her heart picks up when he smiles at her. The way her mind slides into daydreams about prom dresses and first kisses and what it would be like to run her hands through his hair. She's an open book, all shallow crushes and predictable rhythms. The kind of mind I used to find irritating a few days ago. Now it just serves as contrast—one I didn't ask for.
He is a cipher. A puzzle. A locked box. He is a gap. A void.
I watch from a distance as the two of them reach the doors and disappear inside the school. It's just as well that I've decided to ditch today—For at least a handful of hours, he will be safe from me, and I will be safe from him.
The rain returns by mid-afternoon, soft and lashing, like silk drawn against glass. I don't mind it. It's quiet, in its own way. The woods turn hazy around the edges, and the sound of the road dies into a muted drone.
Archie is the first one to leave school, and he finds me in the car, waiting. He doesn't ask where I went today, or why I didn't come to class—he already knows why. He simply slides into the front seat, boots dripping on the mat, backpack slung into the rear.
Then, he turns to me and smiles. "You didn't hurt him," he says. It's not a question. Just a truth, softly spoken.
I glare at the windshield. "No," I reply.
"That's good."
"Is it?"
He hums, low and thoughtful. He's watching the rivulets of rain chase each other across the glass. The silence stretches, but with Archie it's never tense, only deliberate.
After a moment, I exhale and press my palms to the wheel. "I came close this morning. Very close."
"I know."
"I could still do it."
"I know that too."
His tone isn't patronizing. It's not approval, either. Just calm acknowledgment. Archie has always had a gift for not panicking, even when he should. It makes him difficult to rattle—and difficult to talk to, sometimes. But right now, that steadiness is exactly what I need. I'm trying not to crack. I think he knows that too.
"I watched him all morning," Archie says.
"Did he do anything suspicious? Say anything strange?"
He shakes his head. "Nothing that would make you worry."
The wipers hiss as they drag across the windshield. Rain beats a steady rhythm on the roof. I think of Beau's breath fogging in the morning air. His head tilted back against the seat. That insufferably catchy Queen song.
In a way, one could say that Archie has saved Beau's life a million times over.
He'd been the one waiting for me when I came back from Canada. I'd parked in the middle of nowhere on the outskirts of Forks, and Archie had been there. Leaning against the hood of his car, hood up against the wind, arms crossed like it was just another day.
He'd seen me coming, down to the second.
I remember sitting across from him on a boulder while the rain sheeted down around us, his eyes far away. I'd told him everything—how Beau had known. Not guessed, not feared, but known. The scent. The blood. The moment in biology class that I still couldn't think about without my stomach knotting into wire.
And Archie, in his irritating calm, had nodded, closed his eyes, and just… looked.
Not at me. Not around us. But forward. Into the maybes. The thens. The possibles. And I saw them, too.
There isn't a single future in which Beau Swan exposes us.
No futures with him telling his father, or writing a letter, or making a phone call. He just keeps his silence, always.
That, more than anything, is what makes it difficult to sit with Archie and see the futures in which I came for him. Not secondhand, not as theories or implications, but through Archie's eyes—visions shared like a dream passed from mind to mind. The snap of vertebrae, the hiss of torn skin, Beau's body, cold and still in my hands.
In those visions, he always seems completely astonished. As if, up until the very end, he truly believes that I was not a threat.
It was a baffling conclusion to draw. And even now, even after so many hours of waiting and watching and wondering, I can't fathom why he would ever think such a thing. I am the thing behind the curtain, the monster under the bed. If he knows what I am—and I am certain he does—then why doesn't he behave like prey?
Archie manages a smile, and leans his head against the window. "It's not quite as bad as it seems," he says. "Earlier today, there were a lot more futures where you ended up killing him than there are now. Because you didn't act on it."
I roll my eyes. "I'm so glad my restraint is finally starting to pay off."
He doesn't take the bait. Just keeps watching the rain. I still don't want to tell the others, he thinks. It'll just make things more complicated.
It's my turn to sigh. I still haven't complied with my duty. If I had, we would all already be in Denali, planning where to next make our home. We could be gone tomorrow, and all this mess could be behind us.
But I've chosen to betray that responsibility. At the very least, until I've found out the how of Beau Swan.
"Doesn't it seem like we're playing a dangerous game by keeping this from Carine?" I ask, knowing the answer already.
Archie shrugs. It's your call. But if you want my opinion...
"Go ahead," I mutter.
"...I think you've made the right decision," he says quietly.
My jaw tightens. It doesn't feel like the right decision. It feels like cowardice. Like selfishness. Like a child who refuses to admit she's made a mistake. But I don't say that. Instead, I nod and say, "Thank you," because he's trying to help, and that means something. Even if I don't agree.
I turn the key, and the engine rumbles to life.
I drop him off at the house before leaving for my hunt.
It's not strictly necessary—I've fed recently enough. But somehow, I keep hoping that if I glut myself enough on animal blood, the hunger might abate. The burn might lessen. The temptation might fade. It's a foolish hope, perhaps, but it is all that I have. So I go into the woods, and I let the rain wash over me, and I hunt.
I tear into the body of a mountain lion, claws raking uselessly against my skin. I close my eyes and sink my teeth into its throat, but for the briefest moment, it is not an animal I see. Not fur I taste. Not predator I subdue.
I move on to a young grizzly bear, and then a moose.
And still, late into the night, I find myself on a tree outside of Beau Swan's window, listening to his breaths, and I wonder at how fragile they are, and how easily I could stop them. Each breath Beau takes is a question mark. Each blink of his eyes, a coin toss. He doesn't know it, but every second he lives is a mercy extended by someone who has already seen him die a hundred different ways.
His father, as always, is asleep downstairs—half-lost to dreams and the flickering blue light of an old program looping quietly on the television. Beau is awake, though, sitting at his desk, a dim lamp casting a pool of orange light across his shoulders. His head is bent over a book, and his fingers are drumming absently on his knee.
I barely feel the stirrings of amusement from him, or the vague sense of curiosity. He is not reading for school, though he knows he should be. He is reading something else, some novel or other. And I don't know what it is, or what it's about, but I can feel that he likes it.
And then, that impression disappears, and Beau Swan ceases to exist once again.
I press my palm against the trunk of the tree, steadying myself. I don't think I'll ever get used to that abrupt shift of nothingness, to emotion, then back to nothingness, as if he's not really there at all.
I exhale slowly. I tell myself to focus, to stay calm and think clearly. That he is a threat, and must be treated as one. That if he has knowledge of our kind, then I must discover how he got it, and who he got it from. That if he is a risk, then I must mitigate that risk.
I am on a mission. I have a duty.
He chuckles again, turning the page of his book, and I feel my eyes narrow. I can't help but wonder what he knows, and what he is thinking of right this moment.Last edited: Yesterday at 1:48 PMLike Award Reply313