WARNINGS: Blood, gore, disturbing descriptions.

Disclaimer: I own nothing but the OC.

Prologue

If they didn't have near-infallible senses, they would've thought they had made a mistake.

In fact, they still sort of believed they'd made a mistake.

"Carlisle, this seems wrong," Esme worried, her well-manicured fingers curling over the edge of his jacket sleeve.

They stopped at the entrance to the graveyard, nearly just as still as the statues and tombstones that stood within the grounds. They'd been traveling for two days, and this was where their trail had finally lead them to. A large plot of graves and family crypts that stretched several acres long, right in the heart of Oregon.

The caretaker of the cemetery hadn't really kept an upkeep on their job. Cracked marble and chipped stones littered the pathways, and there wasn't a single grave marker that looked taken care of. It was like all friends and family of the beloved dead had forgotten them and left them behind.

Carlisle's eyes flitted across the expanse of land, glancing over the trees and engraved stones. He was frowning, but he didn't turn to leave.

"Surely, they must have been mistaken," Esme continued. "Why would she be here?"

"I'm not entirely sure myself," Carlisle commented.

Both vampires froze as their enhanced hearing picked up on a noise, deeper into the cemetery. It'd distinctly sounded of someone hitting wood, but very muffled and quieted.

The two shared a look of disbelief, before venturing in further to find the spot where the noise had come from. A few fast-paced steps into the sea of tombstones and mausoleums lead them deeper into the woods, and standing before a singled out grave that read 'Jane Doe'.

There was no more noise coming from the grave. In fact, there was hardly any noise at all. It seemed as though the forest around them had fallen completely silent. No more birds sang, and all animals in the area had suddenly scurried off and left silence in their wake. It was completely quiet. Eerily quiet.

Carlisle seemed to hesitate for a moment, golden eyes glancing from his mate's slightly perturbed face and then back down to the grave before them.

"...Lilith?" He called hesitantly, feeling a little foolish as he did so.

To both their surprise, he received a reply.

There was distinct noise of shuffling down below, muffled by several feet of wet dirt and what was likely a solid wood coffin door. Then, a voice spoke.

"Carlisle?"

Esme stared at her mate with wide eyes, her pink lips popped open in a look of pure shock. There was someone down in the grave, alive!

Carlisle's face, however, washed over with relief, and he fell down to one knee over the grave. He wasn't even phased as the wet grass bled onto the knee of his jeans. "What on earth are you doing down there? In a coffin, of all places?"

They were met with a long stretch of silence, before they both heard a long sigh of defeat. "Can you.. please, just dig me out? I've died three times in this grave, and I'm not looking forward to doing it again."

Esme looked at Carlisle, confused. He simply gave her a small smile and a shrug. "Of course, just give us a moment. We'll start digging."

Of course, they hadn't brought anything to dig with, so they started with their hands. Even Esme, with pristine clothes and painted nails, eagerly began helping her mate scoop out handful after handful of dirt, eager to get the poor dear down below out of her grave. Esme knew that Carlisle wouldn't put her in any kind of danger, so instead of fearing what was below she was more worried.

They worked at vampire speed, keeping their ears open just in case someone happened to wander close, though they doubted it. The closest human home was the caretaker of the cemetery, and that was several miles out.

Both were covered in dirt by the time they saw the plain surface of the coffin, with soil beneath their nails and relief on their faces.

"You know, I honestly don't know how I get myself into these situations, I swear."

Carlisle chuckled, scooping some dirt away from the coffin's latch. "That sounds vaguely familiar."

"Hey!" the voice protested weakly. "I take mild offense to that."

Finally, they had enough of the soil cleared away that the coffin could be opened. It took breaking the latch to do so, as the thing had become stuck after having all the weight of six feet of dirt placed upon it. Carlisle curled his hand around the coffin lid, and gave it a sharp yank. The wood cracked and groaned, but he had successfully pried the whole lid off of its hinges and freed the person within.

Esme could hardly contain the gasp that escaped her, eyes clouding with tears as she took in the sight before her. Horror was the only way to describe how she felt, and she felt her heart strings tugging painfully in her chest.

The young girl within was obviously once beautiful. But, now, after who knew how long beneath the earth, she was a shadow of a person. Her porcelain skin had shriveled taught against her bones, almost like her insides had been vacuum sealed. She was as thin as her bones, with no substance to her at all.

Brittle white hair rested around her like a halo of light, falling down to her waist in brittle waves. It'd lost all volume and shine, and looked just as dead as the rest of her. It was easy to see that a lot of it was falling out, revealing splotches of bald skin on her head.

In the sunken in depths of her eye sockets were eerily silver eyes, looking up at them curiously. The life in them was such a contradiction to the rest of her body, that it left the hair on their necks raising and tingling.

What was once a beautiful dress hung loosely off of her emaciated frame. It was white satin, tailor as a beautiful evening gown. Across the chest, however, was a horrible splatter of dried blood and a large slash across the top of the dress. The blood had soaked the entire top of the dress, starting from where her heart would've lay when it'd actually fit and spreading out from there.

In all definitions of the word, she should've been long dead.

"I know, I'm the sight of pure beauty, right?" the girl muttered sarcastically, and Esme shivered as she saw the girl's jawbone visibly moving beneath the skin. "I'm afraid I have no muscle mass at the moment, I can barely move my jaw. Either one of you has to carry me, or we can wait a couple hours until I die again."

"Of course I'll carry you, Lilith," Carlisle murmured, the golden hue in his eyes watered with sadness. "I'm afraid to break your bones, though. How should we go about this?"

A dry cough escaped her thin lips. "I'm afraid that's unavoidable at this point. Please, just get me out of this awful hole. And then introduce me to your lovely mate, because I don't believe we've had the pleasure of meeting before."

Carlisle reached down into the coffin, trying to be as gentle as he could. The texture of her skin was like paper that'd been crumbled repeatedly until it was an odd mixture of softness with roughness. He'd handled bones plenty of times in his line of work and because of what he was, but he knew that she was likely so brittle it didn't matter how gentle he was.

She was lighter then paper, and the cracking noises that followed made both vampires flinch.

"God, Lilith," Carlisle muttered sorrowfully, voice thick as he gently cradled the small girl to his chest so that none of her bones could no longer break in on themselves. "How did this happen to you?"

"My brother found me," she said simply, allowing her skull to sag against his neck. "I need to eat, or I'll die again, Carlisle. I should still have a bank account open-"

"Nonsense," he shushed. "We will buy whatever you need."

Esme nodded enthusiastically. "Of course, please. Dear, let us help you."

Those silvery eyes drifted to Esme, and the girls taut lips pulled into a mockery of what would've once been a beautiful smile. "Oh, you're lovely. I always knew Carlisle would've ended up with an extremely beautiful mate."