“No,” Bella corrected me, “We’ve got forever.”

“Would you truly sit here forever just to listen to my life story?” She was joking, I knew, but I kept my incredulity in my voice just the same.

“Obviously not,” she elbowed me in the arm and prodded, “Now get going, I want to hear this!”

I sighed and began, deciding to skim past my childhood – it was irrelevant. “My human life began in 1335, in a small village near modern day London. As I grew to the age I look now – 17 – I watched whole families perish around me from the Black Plague. My own parents, the knight and lady of the village, became infected before we could flee to the country, and I did as well. Most our servants fell ill also, but Carlisle, the village doctor, was strangely immune. After I learned what he was, it made complete sense, but why he would take up such a position was beyond me.

“He couldn’t save my parents, since they were too far along in the disease. But I, I could be saved, and Carlisle has told me that my mother’s dying breath was spent wishing for me to live. He changed me that night, and the pain for three days was literally…”

“Hell on Earth?” she giggled, then shuddered, and I knew she understood. Of course she would.

“Yes, very much so,” I continued, “But once it was over, I felt stronger and more powerful than I’d ever been in my sickly human life. I fast learned of my talent, and the first thing I ever saw or heard with it was an image of Esme, now my mother. I asked Carlisle if she was his wife, since he was picturing rather…lovingly of her, shall we say. He’d looked momentarily taken aback and stunned, so I’d decided to elaborate.

“‘I… I can read minds,’ I had smiled, and then laughed, ‘yours, at least. When I was human I had a knack for reading people. . . . So I assume traits like that translate this translate into this life then?’

“‘They can,’ he had answered simply, and shrugged. Ever since then he has blocked his mind from me, unless there’s something he wants me to hear from him. I have no idea why, though I suppose he has a few secrets of his own…