Disclaimer: A final thanks to Sephanie Meyers whose books and characters have inspired so many in so many ways. She dared to create a world in which love is eternal, good triumphs over evil and the supernatural slips inside your bedroom window and watches you while you're dreaming. No copyright infringement intended as always.
Author Notes:
I thought I'd leave a little epilogue before I go...just to give a hint of what the future might hold for the characters in this little fanfic. By the way...I've started writing an original novel on The Writer's Coffee Shop if you are interested in checking it out. It's called Entanglement...a romance inspired by my passionate interest in quantum physics...specifically quantum entanglement and its implications about the possibility of the existence of telepathy...sounds boring, but believe me...quantum entanglement is so strange, it may very well be supernatural.
I'm writing under a new pen name on TWCS: electra1...so, if you get bored some time, come over and check it out. The plot is built around two sets of identical twins who were separated at birth and struggle to find each other and, at the same time, save the world from an impending terrorist attack. A double romance provides twice the lemony fun as my characters fight their way through a fairly tight plot, if I say so myself, with adventure, mystery, and humor as well. If you ever had an imaginary playmate as a child, you will probably relate...if you've ever heard a loved one say what you were already thinking about... or somehow knew that someone you loved was hurt or in trouble...if you are a twin or know twins...or...evil grin...if you wonder what making love would be like with someone who could read your mind...well...come on over and give my new book a try. Once again, thanks to all of you who have followed The Blood Wars...here's one last look at ...
The Blood Wars
Epilogue
What do you think has become of the young and old men? They are alive and well somewhere, All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,
And what do you think has become of the women and children?
The smallest sprout shows there is really no death,
And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the
end to arrest it,
And ceas'd the moment life appear'd.
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier .
Walt Whitman from Song of Myself
And what, my readers, do you think became of the Cullen family and their cousins...their children and grandchildren...their friends and survivors of the the Final Plague and the Blood Wars?
Well, they lived happily ever after, of course...well not completely happily...what's life without a little crisis and conflict every now and then... and maybe not ever after...I mean who's ever been to the furthest end of ever after to see who makes it to the finish line...actually there is no finish line to ever after or it wouldn't be ever after. after all, would it ? Point being that shit does happen, but most of the citizens of New Eden...that's what Seth decided they should call their little settlement...went on to find their fates in the choices they made and the accidents that befell them.
Edward and Bella did their part in repopulating the earth. They had a child almost three or four years and all of them were hybrids...but their children were not sterile as most hybrids are. They thrived on a fairly human diet and drank a glass or two of animal blood every now and then which was all they really needed. It seems their half human nature made their craving for blood only half as strong. They mated with and had families with the children of the human survivors who had been injected with small doses of vampire venom, Carlisle's newly discovered fountain of youth, and once they had gone through the change as Bella did, there was no going back. They didn't even have to keep taking the injections...Who knew? Right?
Their children were also immortal. It seems the change was hereditary. Nobody aged in the entire settlement, or got sick...and there were days when Carlisle felt a little useless especially when he wasn't needed to deliver babies. Every now and then he mourned the loss of true humans, purebred, mortal humans who grew old, sick, got wringles and died, but he knew it was an unworthy sentiment and never mentioned it to anyone. He would be the last to want the human race to go back to that
"sorry scheme of things" as Omar Khayyam put it. ….that scheme of things in which old age, sickness and death wait at the end of a every short life.
Yes, the residents of New Eden were immortal for all practical purposes. Perhaps that's what made them all a little lazy at times...there was always tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, but that kept their descendants from the ambitions that had previously industrialized and polluted the world with garbage, industrial waste, smog, radiation and biochemical weapons like the virus that almost annihilated the human species from the face of the earth. So, was a lack of ambition a bad thing? Not so much. They spent a lot of time with their families, learning to live off the land without destroying it...making and raising babies... getting involved in creative endeavors such as art, music...and love...
Not that they were entirely without occasional turmoil. Jacob's tall, dark good looking twin sons Charlie and Billy who were just like their father, except for their blue eyes, grew up to be the pack's best hunters. They were very close as twins often are, but competitive in a good natured sort of way. So it was a shock to everyone when at the age of seventeen, they had the bad luck...or the good fortune... to imprint...yes both of them...to imprint on Renesme, Edward and Bella's beautiful daughter. This gave rise to an intense rivalry between the twins, and they fought over her almost to the point of killing each other several times that year. \
To make it worse, the charismatic twins pulled other members of New Eden into the conflict, as various cousins and friends took sides... which was ridiculous really because there were only three people who could consistently tell the identical twins apart, and that was Jake, Rachel and Renesme.
Nessie loved them both...always had...and the three of them were inseparable almost from birth. As kids, if darkness found them at Jacob and Rachel's cabin, they slept there...if darkness found them at Edward and Bella's beautiful home in the meadow, they slept there. Having both of them imprint on her didn't seem to bother Nessie at all... but it made Edward homicidal. Jacob and Rachel were horrified as well. But for some reason Bella was a little less surprised about it.
The two brothers fought over Edward's beautiful auburn haired, brown-eyed daughter so often that it threatened to cause a rift in the whole family. Renesme remained unperturbed by the whole conflict until it came to the fist fights between them which she absolutely would not tolerate. She refused to speak to both of them for two weeks which stopped the fighting ….and that was that. But they still argued incessantly over her.
She loved both of them... but when even her own father told her she would have to choose...she nodded solemnly and said she would think it over...then she went to her mother and asked her to shield her so her father wouldn't be prying every minute of the day to see what she was going to do. Bella complied... which drove Edward to even greater heights of homicidal intent.
But the arguing stopped mysteriously one day in June after the imprinting. No one understood why the brothers decided to call a truce, but they suddenly seemed to get along better than they ever had. Then one morning in July, Nessie's mother and father came home early from a hunting trip and found their seventeen year old daughter in bed with both brothers...sleeping soundly...naked and cuddled up between the two equally naked men.
Jacob and the rest of the pack heard it all through wolf telepathy of course, and Alice told the Cullens, so they all converged on the house in the meadow trying to prevent murder. When they got there, Nessie was clinging to the twins, so her father couldn't kill them outright. It took Emmett, Jasper, Carlisle and the whole pack to hold Edward back, and it was hours before they could get him calmed down enough for a rational discussion of the situation. Even then at one point, Edward and Jacob went at each others throats and Garrett had to freeze them until Carlisle could separate the two and start all over with the rational discussion thing.
Nessie told her father that she loved both of them...always had... and that if he couldn't accept the situation, they would leave and find their own way in the world. Rachel and Bella put their heads together, but even they couldn't come up with a solution. It was a tense two weeks to be sure.
Then during the last week in July, the wolves on patrol caught the scent of nomads in the area, but while one of the nomads led the wolves away from the settlement, four others found Edward and Bella's house in the meadow.
They found Nessie.
Unfortunately for them, Billie and Charlie had just gotten there for an afternoon tryst since Edward and Bella had taken the other kids to the Cullen house for a visit. When the pack finally chased down and killed the nomad that had led them on a wild goose chase, they backtracked and found Renesme sitting in the open meadow crying and sobbing over Charlie and Billie Black, both young men covered in blood and so near death that no one believed they would survive. Nearby were the decapitated and mangled bodies of four nomads. The two young wolves had only been phasing for a year, but they put their lives on the line for the woman they loved and managed to do the impossible...they killed all four vampires although it cost them severely. By the time Carlisle got there, they were more dead than alive.
Nessie was inconsolable...she wouldn't leave them for the entire week it took them to heal. It was a testimony to Carlisle's expertise as a doctor and the recuperative powers of werewolves in general that they didn't die.
When Edward saw how close he had come to losing his daughter and how the two werewolves had fought literally to the death to save her, he relented. Despite his old-fashioned values, he realized that the world had changed. Nomads were now traveling together in larger groups for some reason, and he realized that his daughter could do a lot worse than sleeping between two men who were obviously willing to give up their lives to protect her. He put his Victorian morality aside and gave them his blessing.
The wedding was in August. Two grooms...one very happy bride. Throughout the community the relief that the conflict was finally over was almost palpable. It was evidently a brave new world, and Edward was made even more aware of that fact when Riley confided in him during the reception that the same sort of thing had been going on right under his nose since they had rescued the humans held captive by Aro. The women survivors outnumbered the men even when the unattached members of the pack were figured in. They had kept it quiet, but two of the men...he wouldn't say who... had been having a relationship with not one but two women at the same time. How Edward hadn't noticed this with his telepathic skills was a mystery, but then he had really been focused on his family lately. Even Quil was known to be sleeping with two of the female survivors. It was shocking news, but Edward felt a little better knowing it.
After a few years, Nessie's marriage to Billy and Charlie seemed almost common place as others came out of the closet and confessed to having two wives. Edward had to admit the twins treated Nessie like a queen, and she seemed extraordinarily happy with the situation. The twins never went on patrol together; one of them always stayed to protect Nessie in the little cabin they built for her next to Bella's and Edward's house in the meadow. Over the years, Nessie had several children, but no one seemed to care if they were Charlie's or Billy's...both twins claimed them...and since the men were genetically identical, they figured what the hell...not even a DNA test could say otherwise.
The only one who seemed a bit out of sorts with the whole thing was Garrett. He had been there that day when Edward found his daughter with the two wolves, and in the chaos he was probably the only one who noticed the bite marks on the twins' necks as they quickly pulled their shirts on. He kept his secret, but realized that Nessie was feeding on her two husbands. Their first child let it slip to Great Grandma Cullen when she was just three years old and learning to talk. When Esme confided in Edward and Bella that she was concerned that Nessie wasn't adhering to a strictly vegetarian diet, they both just smiled and told her not to worry. Half vampires didn't seem to need that much blood to survive anyway. They knew the other hybrids also drank from their spouses but mostly during moments of intimacy...even Edward was wont to take a sip or two of Bella's blood on certain occasions if the mood was right and she begged him hard enough. But he knew better than to mention that to his mother.
Sam and Leah never had any children except for the two they saved, Joey and Missy, but they seemed content with the many grandchildren those two gave them. As time went by, Sam seemed to smile and laugh more often and though he never forgot Emily, he grew to love Leah more and more. One day, not long after she had recovered from her near death at the hands of Caius, they went together to Emily's grave with flowers... something they did at least once a month. As they were cleaning debris away from the grave, Sam watched Leah on her knees pulling weeds and arranging the flowers on the grave of his first love. He knelt beside her...taking her hands, he placed them on his chest over his heart and covered them both with his large right hand then set his left hand over her heart as they faced each other over the grave.
His dark eyes looked into the eyes of the woman who had loved him despite the fact that he had pushed her away, forsaken her for another, betrayed her, broken her heart and hurt her in a hundred different ways. His Emily had been a fine person, but she could never have loved him through all that...she had never been that strong...but Leah was. She had followed him, badgered him, kept him alive when he wanted to die. Despite her own pain, she had save him from himself. She was the warrior who offered her life for a bunch of humans she had never even met, and she was the warrior who had battled for and finally won his heart.
Emotion made him hoarse, but he cleared his throat and spoke what needed to be said.
"I love you, Leah...I want you to know that...I love you more than I ever loved Emily. I had no choice about the imprinting...it controlled me...compelled me...but my love for you is freely given...not a biological or instinctive urge...I'll always love Emily, but my love for you is different from anything I felt for her...I choose to love you, and I will always love you . Will you marry me?
"Yes." was all she said.
Their wedding was a wolf pack free for all. The Quileutes never drank, but Emmett spiked the punch and before it was over, there were drunken wolves phasing into naked men and naked men phasing into drunken wolves all staggering around the front lawn. Seth and Leah sipped their champagne and watched the tomfoolery with great amusement. Esme took the children inside to watch a movie.
And life turned out equally well for their children too...Little Wolf, Rose's son, married Missy although she was a couple of years older than he was at the time of their wedding. Since no one aged past seventeen, it really was a moot point anyway. It wasn't too many years before Rose got to sit with Emmett in their rocking chairs on the porch and watch their grandchildren playing in the yard as she had always dreamed.
Joey married Garrett's adopted daughter Bree although he was a little younger than she...actually a lot younger...but nobody seemed to care...after all, Edward was close to a hundred years older than Bella.
Seth married Tanya which boggled the brains of vampire and werewolf alike...natural enemies in love!
Garrett married Kate but he continued to sneak blood from unwary hybrids every now and then even though he drank animal blood when everyone was looking.
Paul and Embry never married. They ran patrols together and spent most of their free time together even bunked together in one of the Cullen bedrooms. Nothing was said, but the pack knew. In public, they hardly spoke to each other...didn't look at each other for more than a second. After a few years of don't ask, don't tell, the men in the settlement started building a cabin in New Eden just back in the trees at the edge of the settlement. Paul and Embry didn't ask who is was for, they just piled in and helped cut down the trees and fit the logs together. With vampires, it didn't take very long to build it and by the end of the first day the walls and roof were up and the infrastructure well underway.
When Esme and the women brought food for the hard working men, Paul and Embry sat down at opposite ends of the same log to eat their dinner along with everyone else. Embry's curiosity finally got the better of him. He hadn't heard of anyone getting married anytime soon in the settlement. Trying to tap in to wolf telepathy twice to see who was getting a new cabin, he found his pack mates busily doing multiplication tables while they worked.
"Hey, Jake," he asked with a mouthful of potato salad. "Who's this cabin for? I didn't know anybody was getting married."
Jake gave a signal, and the wolves stopped doing their math.
The look on Paul's and Embry's faces went from embarrassment to gratitude to excitement in a matter of seconds. After keeping their relationship on the DL for so long, it was a relief to have it out in the open. Paul stood and went to Embry. He pulled him up and hugged him hard in front of everybody. They went inside the cabin to look at it with new eyes now that they knew it would be theirs. They talked about how they wanted the interior to look and watched as Rose finished laying the hearth. When they came outside again, the pack was gathered round the door along with the other men.
"Don't think this means you don't have to help us finish it, you slackers," Jake told them, and everybody laughed. They moved in by the end of the week still amazed and pleased that their macho brothers and friends could accept them as a couple so easily...They should have realized that each member of the pack knew by now just how little control a wolf had over imprinting. That Paul and Embry had imprinted on each other was not a matter for ridicule or derision as far as the pack was concerned. It just happened, and the pack accepted it the same way they accepted Quil's two wives. It was what it was... and if they made each other happy, that was all that mattered in New Eden.
And so the number of cabins and houses as well as the population grew steadily under the protection of the pack of werewolves and the coven of vampires.
With all the baby making and birthing going on, the only blight upon the day was the fact that the already mated vampires couldn't have children of their own...the problem lay in the unchanging nature of the females...no ovulation hence no fertilization. One day, as everyone was watching the kids play a game of T-ball, Victoria, Riley's wife, kept watching the Cullens as they cheered the young players along. She saw Alice exchange an almost wistful look with Jasper, a look Victoria couldn't quite interpret. She had often watched Esme with the same expression on her face when she played with the children. By the end of the game, Victoria had it figured out.
That evening she talked to some of her friends for a while and then went to Carlisle's office to make him an offer. If any of the full vampire members of New Eden wanted to have a child, she and her friends stood ready with the full approval of their husbands to serve as surrogate mothers for artificial insemination. After all, she told him...they all owed the Cullens so much...for their rescue, their lives, their immortality, but also for their constant care and and protection from a dangerous world of bloodthirsty nomads. It was more than a debt; the Cullens were their friends, and they loved them. Their offer was a gift of love from friends who wanted to see their protectors as happy as they were themselves.
Carlisle was completely overwhelmed by the generosity of her proposal. Later that day he met with the others to present her offer to them. He knew such a thing was possible...look at Edward and Bella, but none of them would have ever broached the subject to the humans...never in a million years.
The men were a little hesitant, but Esme, Alice, Tanya, Kate, Carmen and definitely Rose were more than eager. The men made their donations and women who most closely resembled the female vampires were selected from among the volunteers. When the word got around, every single woman who had been rescued by the Cullens showed up more than willing to be a surrogate. By June of following spring, each vampire couple had their own child... a baby that had, at least, the DNA of the fathering vampire. Little Wolfe was a teenager by then, but he was as happy to have a baby brother as Rose and Emmett were to have another chance at parenthood. The surrogate mothers were proud to be able to give their protectors something they had always wanted so badly.
It seemed that everybody was beginning to get their heads wrapped around the immortality thing and really...what was nine months out of an unlimited life span if it meant making the people who had given you so much, so very, very happy.
Nessie's second son. Carl Edward. was extraordinarily gifted. Many of the other children had gifts, but Carl was a psychic tracker. He could find the location of any person whether he had met them or not by simply looking at a map. At the age of six he was playing with a globe of the world in Carlisle's library when he pointed to a spot in Arizona and said, "A man lives here in a cave with his wife. They have two puppies." Edward's face went all vampirish, as Bella often called it, and he picked his grandson up and turned to Carlisle.
"I think there are human survivors here." Edward said pointing to the map. I can see them in Carl Edward's mind. The image is too specific to be just his imagination.
"Impossible!" Carlisle told him. "After all this time? Twenty years? There's no way they could have escaped the nomads for so long."
Nevertheless, Emmett, Jasper and Edward loaded up and set out to the little town where the child had pointed, and they found the small family living in a cave outside of town. Both the man and the woman were half starved and terrified when the three vampires showed up at the mouth of the carefully concealed opening to their underground home. The man shot Emmett and Edward several times to no avail, of course which frightened the humans even more. It took a while to calm them down enough to persuade them to climb in the truck and go back home with them. As time went by, Carl Edward predicted the location of several more survivors located around the United States and one in Canada. How they had managed to survive the nomads, no one knew, but they had. They were made welcome in New Eden, but it took a while for them to adjust...having lived like hunted animals for so long. Carlisle confided to Edward that they might never fully recover.
Every few years a nomad or group of nomads would pass through their territory, but the wolves were quick to scent them, and the pack was getting better and better at fighting them ….with the help of the Cullens, of course. After thirty years, the nomads stopped coming. Carlisle speculated that they had simply gotten too weak to move without human blood...or had adapted to drinking animal blood...but the pack kept doing patrols and guarding the settlement nonetheless.
Occasionally, there were disputes, or fights broke out for various reasons. These conflicts were always brought to Carlisle and Edward for arbitration. Carlisle's mature judgment was universally respected, and Edward always read the truth with his gift and reported what he heard to Carlisle, so they made a formidable team to settle the occasional dispute fairly...but for the most part peace reigned supreme in New Eden.
One day about thirty five years after the virus, Edward and Bella were sitting on their front porch watching the kids and grand kids playing baseball in the meadow. Bella was sitting on Edward's lap as he rocked lazily back and forth. She was admiring how the summer sun shot diamond reflections from his face all around the porch and onto her skin. He looked like an angel to her adoring eyes with an aura of bright light sparkling all around him. The grandchildren whose skin only shimmered in the sunlight were always so enthralled with their grandpa's sparkly skin, but they were busy right now and Bella didn't have to share his lap with two or three grandchildren. She loved her kids and grand kids, but she often lamented about how little time she and Edward had to themselves these days. The house was always full, and she missed those times in the past when she had her husband all to herself. Bella still looked as young as she had the day they were married, and Edward still had the power to send her heart racing with a mere touch or a devilish grin. Her shield slipped, and he caught her at her erotic musings...the only indication of his arousal was a sudden hardness under her thighs and a slight tightening of his arms around her waist.
Suddenly, he stood with her still in his arms, letting her slide slowly down the front of his taut body until she stood before him looking up with brown eyes wide and brimming with love. Bending her over his arm, he lowered his head, still looking into her eyes and slowly pressed his mouth to hers in a long, long kiss. The crowd on the lawn stopped playing and watched their grandparents for a moment
Several of them rolled their eyes and made rude noises at the flagrant display of passion.
Edward ignored their loudly voiced protests of disgust at the spectacle of Grandpa Edward and Granny Bella smooching on the porch. He ignored them utterly. His lips slid to the warm skin under Bella's ear where he could feel the pulse of his universe beat against his open mouth, and he smiled broadly.
He flung her on his back, and they were gone. Amid protests and cat calls and teasing whistles, he carried her through the yard and into the forest, her red face hidden in his neck. When the world slowed enough for her to see where they were, she was standing at the front door of Charlie's old house in Forks. They had kept it pristine over the years, but they didn't visit it often. She took the key from above the door and unlocked it. Picking her up, he carried her inside, up the stairs and into her old room. Gently, he laid her on bed where he had watched her sleep so many nights... trying not to kill her...trying to desensitize himself to the irresistible smell of his singer's blood.
Her blood sang to him still...after all this time...after all these years, it called to him like a siren's song to love.
"I'm not allowed to have boys in my room," she said to him with a lascivious smirk.
"Good thing I'm not a boy." He gave her that crooked grin she loved so much as he leered down at her, stripping his black shirt over his head and pulling down the zipper on his jeans.
"Hurry," she moaned reaching up to him with both arms. Just the sound of that zipper made her tremble with desire.
"Little girl," he whispered, "You need to learn some patience."
"An overrated virtue."
"On the contrary," he smiled and opened his jeans.
"Mine!" she breathed starring in wide-eyed wonder at the beautiful proof of his desire for her.
He removed his pants and toed off his shoes... slowly ….never taking his black eyes from her the whole time.
Straddling her hips, he began to unbutton her blouse and unfasten her jeans. Slowly, he undressed her... savoring each removal as if it was an act of love in itself. When she was as naked, he turned her on her side and lay behind her.
"No, I want you on top," she protested.
" Impatient little girls don't always get what they want," he whispered in her ear and then smoothing her long hair to the side, he bit down on the tender skin of her neck.
Her heart unraveled into sighs as he nibbled and nipped the skin where he had first bitten her so long ago.
Pulling her hips back into the cradle of his pelvis, he entered her from behind in a long slow slide that made her moan and press her hips back into his long delicious thrust. She couldn't touch him from this position, and it was maddening.
He fucked her at his leisure with his hands cupping both of her breasts. His long fingers squeezed and rolled and pulled at her sensitive nipples making her groan and push backwards impaled on his steely length as she grew more and more frustrated with his maddeningly slow pace. For long moments, he didn't move at all seeming content with just being joined to her in this way.
Her hand moved down to the place where they were joined, but he pulled her it away unwilling to let her impatience rule. She knew what he was waiting for, but dropping her shield during sex had always been a little frightening to her...it was so intense...each time more than the last, and each time, she wondered if she would survive the cataclysm.
"You know what I want." His voice was hoarse as he commanded her.
"It scares me..." she moaned.
"I'll be with you," he promised and thrust again inside her slippery warmth.
And with that she let him in...
And Oh! The rapture that beat through them in the place where they were truly one. Time stopped as the pleasure multiplied back and forth between them for an eternity it seemed...in that bed where she had dreamed of him so long ago, where he had gazed with hunger on the dreaming girl who held his soul.
All movement stopped as their consciousness merged, transforming them into a single creature of infinite bliss. His mouth went to the side of her throat, and he drank her blood while his semen pulsed against the opening of her hungry womb. With each pulse she gripped him tightly drawing in his powerful essence and convulsing around him... unwilling to relinquish him even when it was finally over and they lay spent in each others arms.
"I took too much," he sighed when the power of speech had finally returned.
"Plenty more where that came from," she sighed and slept.
He held her in the long hours of the afternoon and watched over her... dreaming in his own way...remembering in his perfect memory the times and times that they had loved each other in the past. It just got better and better. Each day he lived, he wanted her more. He recalled when she fed him her blood from her own lips...the long afternoon in the meadow with the flowers...when she ran from him and he was sure he would kill her...every single place and time he had made love to her...relived in his memory as she drowsed beside him.
As the sun began to set, its red light streaming across her pale skin in the darkening room, he turned her over, and woke her up with kisses.
"Mine!" was all he said and then took her again fiercely...holding her tightly when it was over... watching the small bruises on her shoulders and thighs fade and disappear...never wanting to leave her bed, but knowing the children would be wondering where they were.
"I wish Charlie could have met you," Bella murmured as they closed the front door behind them and put the key back in its place. They stood in the purple twilight for a moment looking at each other tenderly.
"I don't think he would have liked me," Edward said softly looking away. "I know he wouldn't have wanted his only daughter marrying into a family of monsters."
"Monsters?" she laughed. "Monsters?"
"Cruel to laugh, Bella..."
"You Cullens may be a lot of things, but monsters? I don't think so. Let's see, you saved me, saved the human race, made us immortal...you protect us from nomads and provide for us in so many ways. Are my children monsters? If their father is a monster, does that make them monsters? Am I half monster? Would monsters have fought the Volturi or the nomads...tracked down survivors all over the country and brought them here to live? You had better be careful who hears you call the Cullens monsters. There are about fifty or sixty people back at New Eden who might get a little upset about it. They worship the ground you guys walk on."
"Well, if we're not monsters, what are we?"
"The fine citizens of New Eden think of you as angels, sort of…protectors...guardians."
He smiled and shook his head. "For monsters, I guess we have done a few things right. You know I used to resent that fact that Carlisle changed me...turned me into a...vampire. But now I thank God every day that he did it. Had I been an ordinary man, I never would have been able to protect you or anyone else for that matter...maybe it's time I quit thinking of myself as a monster and started thinking of myself as just another one of God's creatures...different, but able to choose how I want to live my life."
"So, no more talk of monsters?"
"No more monsters. Hey, who knows? Maybe I am an angel," he smirked.
"Oh Edward," she purred. "You're no angel..."
He pull her to him and murmured softly, "Neither are you, my dear, but I love you anyway."
"As I do you," she whispered against his lips.
And they went home.