The cold mountain air rushed past as I carried Alice across the dark sky above the Olympic wilderness. Beneath us, the peaks rolled in long, dark waves, an endless ocean of pine trees broken only by rivers reflecting the fading moonlight.
Alice rested in my arms, unbothered by the speed at which we moved through the air. One arm was looped around my neck while the other rested against my chest, her fingers idly toying with the fabric of my shirt. I smiled slightly at that as my gaze wandered across the forests below us.
Then, I saw a small clearing nestled in the forest between two hills, its field of early spring flowers pale in the pre-dawn light.
Knowing how much Alice liked flowers, I began descending without saying anything.
When the clearing came into her view, she tilted her head and looked up at me. "You can see that far?"
"Yeah. I can clearly spot a rabbit from nearly sixty thousand feet," I said.
Her eyes widened. She looked back down at the clearing, then up at me again, saying nothing more.
By then, we were already nearing it. I slowed our descent with several powerful beats of my wings before landing gently near the edge of the flower field. I folded my wings and set her gently on the ground. She was still staring at me with visible disbelief.
"What?" I asked.
She exhaled softly, and a light laugh escaped her. "I think I just need some time," she said, "to get used to how amazing you are."
That made me chuckle. I stepped closer. "I'm no less than you are, my dear." Then I kissed her forehead.
She opened her mouth to reply, I lightly cut her off. "And I won't hear anyone argue otherwise. Not even you."
She paused, a smile playing on her lips, and then kissed me instead.
We settled on a small rise at the edge of the clearing, overlooking the field where pale flowers were faintly visible in the early grey light. The sky had shifted from black to a deep, quiet blue, the darkness receding, though daylight had not yet fully broken. Alice leaned her head against my shoulder, her arms wrapped around mine, and I gently curved my left wing around her.
Our conversation flowed naturally, one question leading to the next, until it drifted into uncharted territory. It struck me as odd, considering we had spent these days together, yet neither of us had delved deeply into the other's past.
While I had shared some of my history, that was partly because my story felt simpler, shorter. Besides, I never truly considered the memories of my body to be my own. They were more of a useful background.
Perhaps we hadn't spoken of her past because we'd prioritised more urgent questions, preferring to spend our time simply present with each other.
But now we were here.
"Unlike the rest of my family," Alice said, her voice quieter than usual, "I don't remember anything from before I was a vampire."
I vaguely remembered reading about her past back in my old world, fragments from internet discussions and random posts. Yet I recalled very little clearly: only that Alice had suffered memory problems, didn't remember her human life, and that James had hunted her before her transformation.
Now, hearing her speak about it, I clearly felt that what she was saying mattered deeply to her. Without consciously thinking about it, I tightened my wing slightly around her, instinctively trying to reassure her that she wasn't alone.
She glanced up at me briefly, and something in her expression softened. Her grip on my arm tightened a fraction, and when she continued, her voice carried a little more steadiness.
"I woke up in the cellar of an old wooden house," she said. "Deep in a dense pine forest. I don't know how long I had been there. I'm not even completely certain whether it was immediately after my transformation."
She paused.
"Carlisle believes the memory loss was either a particularly severe reaction to the venom or due to my body already being in very poor condition when I received it."
She leaned more fully against my shoulder before continuing.
"I didn't know who I was. I didn't know what I was supposed to do. I didn't even understand what had happened to me."
I listened without moving. I struggled to fully picture it: her waking in a dark cellar, with no memories, no thread connecting her to anything that had come before.
Just darkness and hunger.
The thought tightened something painfully in my chest.
Her face was calm as she spoke, showing only a mild sadness. Looking at her, I found myself forming a reasonable conclusion: perhaps she no longer felt it too deeply as I initially thought. After all, she had no memory of what she had lost. And it had been so long. Maybe, I thought, that was simply enough distance for the pain to have softened.
"But then," she said, and her expression brightened, "I had a vision. Of me, in a family. A loving family. All of us living together, peacefully. It was the first thing I saw."
A small smile appeared on her lips.
"It helped me survive those first years. Knowing that someday… I wouldn't be alone forever."
She looked up at me when she said it, smiling.
Yet I found myself not being able to return it.
As though searching for what she truly felt, my attention drifted to her eyes, and what I saw there shattered my earlier conclusion.
Though her face remained composed, her eyes, as she recounted her story, bore the full weight of her past emotions. The crushing loneliness. The stark fear. The profound sadness of one who had woken to nothing, forced to find a reason to keep going entirely on her own.
I understood immediately that I had been wrong. Time's distance had softened nothing. Vampires don't forget—not a single detail, not even after a century. She remembered every moment with the same raw sharpness as the day it happened.
I slowly lifted her from beside me, settling her sideways across my lap. She looked briefly dissatisfied as I withdrew my arm, but the expression vanished instantly, once she registered what I was doing. She leaned into me without hesitation, tucking her head against my chest, drawing her knees up, and curling her fingers into the fabric of my shirt.
I brought both arms around her and let my wings close around us, folding inward until we were enclosed in something close to a cocoon.
"I'm here," I said. "For you, and you alone." I paused. "Tell me everything, if you can."
She looked up at me. Her eyes said more than her face ever did. Within their depths lay a deep, old sadness, yet also so much love that it was almost overwhelming. She reached up and kissed me, then settled back and continued.
…
The decades she described after waking were not easy ones. She had struggled with her new nature the way any lone, newborn vampire would - the bloodlust most of all. I didn't judge her in the slightest for the deaths of those few souls in the first weeks. No lone vampire, thrust into existence with no guidance and no memory, could have done better. Most would have done far worse.
That first vision had given her one crucial detail about the family she was meant to find: they fed on animals, and because she wanted to belong with them someday, she forced herself to adapt. It hadn't been easy. It had taken time and discipline she had found entirely within herself.
She moved often in those years. City to city, never staying long, moving constantly, hoping new places would trigger new visions.
And little by little, they did.
The visions came more clearly over time, narrowing, sharpening, until eventually she knew where she would meet them.
Anchorage, Alaska.
She moved there and waited for two years. Until finally, in 1940, she met the Cullens.
"It didn't feel like meeting strangers," she said. " I had known them through my visions for so long that it felt more like finding my way back home."
She spoke warmly about Carlisle and Esme, about how Edward had helped confirm her story to the others using his gift. Even Rosalie's resistance, while present, hadn't amounted to much. Alice had already been a vegetarian. She already knew all of them. There had been very little friction to speak of.
The closest bond she formed early on was with Edythe, largely because of how direct and practical Edythe was, and how open Alice had always been. That friendship had deepened further when Alice helped her find Jasper, roughly seven years after joining the family. Edythe had never quite stopped being grateful for that.
She went quiet for a moment after that, and when she spoke again, her voice was slower.
"The years passed," she murmured, placing a hand lightly over the centre of her chest, "and even surrounded by my family… something still felt missing."
Her golden eyes lifted toward mine.
"It felt like part of me simply wasn't there yet."
Then she smiled softly.
"That changed when I first saw a vision of you."
I didn't look away from her.
"Even before we met," she whispered, "I could feel your presence."
Slowly, she shifted until she was straddling my lap, her knees resting on either side of me. She leaned closer until our foreheads touched.
"But when we finally met… I realised how deeply I had been missing you."
Her eyes opened again.
There was so much emotion inside them that for a second, I genuinely forgot how to breathe.
"I could never be apart from you, Samy," she whispered. "Never."
Her voice trembled slightly now.
"I love you. So much and so deeply that sometimes it feels like you're the very reason I exist."
Then, more quietly, almost uncertainly, she added:
"It probably sounds irrational to you-"
"It doesn't."
She stopped and looked back at me instantly.
I lifted a hand and brushed my knuckles gently along her cheek before smiling softly.
"From the very first moment I saw you," I said quietly, "I knew one thing for certain, my little fairy."
I held her gaze without wavering.
"I love you, Alice. More deeply than I've ev-"
She didn't let me finish.
Alice crashed into me like a force of nature and sealed our lips together.
The kiss was overwhelming, almost frantic in its intensity. I barely had time to react before she began kissing me repeatedly between breathless whispers of:
"I love you… I love you… I love you so much…"
Her hands tangled in my hair while kisses rained across my face, my cheeks, my jaw, my lips, everywhere she could reach, as though she were trying to lay claim to all of it at once.
Eventually, after some time, she calmed enough to settle back against my chest, still clinging tightly, her fingers wound into my shirt. I rested my chin lightly on top of her head and simply held her, my wings drawing close around us again, and said nothing. There was nothing that needed saying.
…
The first light arrived slowly. Rays began to filter through the treetops.
I opened my wings, shedding the cocoon until the light could reach us. Alice had already turned to watch me, knowing what was coming.
The rays found her face, and her skin caught the light, scattering it into dozens of small, brilliant points. Like light through cut glass, they shifted as she moved.
Then I understood what Bella had meant.
It was genuinely beautiful.
Alice watched me carefully, waiting.
I smiled and said, "You have absolutely nothing to worry about. You are mesmerising, love."
She smiled warmly, leaned forward and kissed me.
We stayed in the clearing for the rest of the time I had, tucked between the treeline and the flowers, the light growing slowly around us.
[Hi everyone! Hope you liked this chapter.]
[I have a quick question: did you get a notification for this chapter or the previous one when they were posted?]