I'm putting my author's note up here because I'd like the end to just be the end. So: thanks for reading this creepy little story! If you like it, take a second to hit the review button, and if you really like it, pass it on. Thanks to hwimsey and the Twigasm ladies for the inspiration, however inadvertent it might have been, and big thanks to my wonderful sister and sounding board, mllebojangles, the coolest chick I know.

SMeyer owns everything, but my words are my own.

***

Winged children, all

Will fly over the mountain wall

To the lid of the sky

And slice its belly full wide

With their warm knives

Not the pin-pricks of starlight

But to bathe in the bright blood

Of the world above.

- Shearwater, "Lost Boys"

The daylight waxed and waned while I lay still. I opened my eyes to white refracted noon; I opened them again to the gold glow of late afternoon. I opened them at last to blue dusk. The boys were moving in the cave's mouth.

I pushed myself up to sit against the cave wall, all alone. This is the end, I thought. This is the final night. First Alyse, then Rose, then me. I struggled to find some fear inside me – some anger, some urge to fight or fly – but found only a deep still sadness. I had been made for more than this. This should not be all there was to be.

The leader – Edward, a voice inside me insisted – came once more to stand over me. Just as he had done the day before, a heartbeat ago, a lifetime ago, he took the water jug and disappeared.

He was gone a long time, much longer than he had been before, and the world narrowed and dimmed until the cave was as dark as the inside of my eyelids. I did not like being alone with the two boys where I could neither see nor hear them, but I waited and thought of stillness, of the tree in the forest, of the rock in the field. I would be like these.

At last I heard him returning, his light step loud to my ears full of silence. He went first to the fire, and when the spark caught and grew, he turned to me with what he had brought.

A rough burlap sack, stolen perhaps from field or barn, but heavy in his arms. He turned it over and shook out the contents at my feet. I watched, astonished: potatoes, apples, carrots and beets and radishes, whatever had been left in the late-harvest fields; mushrooms scrabbled from the forest floor, handfuls of what looked like late blackberries, crushed into indigo pulp. Two loaves of bread, surely stolen. A skin of what must be wine and half of a small wheel of cheese. A bottle of milk, half-spilt. Strings of sausages, snatched down from someone's rafters. This was an embarrassment of riches, more food than a family could eat in days. I looked up at him, bewildered.

"For you," he said simply. "My bella."

"Isobel," I mumbled. He merely looked down at me with uncertainty and eagerness in his eyes. I thought suddenly of feasts by candlelight, tables laden with extravagant delicacies. A sorry court this is, I thought, looking at my filthy hands, my bedraggled dress. He was doing for me what he could. It seemed there was room enough in my heart to ache for him as well.

"Thank you," I managed. He took his customary seat by the fire, not far from me. The other boys sat in the shadows, watching and listening. My stomach suddenly heaved with hunger and I lunged toward the bread, tearing it roughly with hands and teeth. I drained half of the remaining milk with one gulp, and it felt like sunlight in my belly. I gouged at the cheese with my fingernails until a piece broke off, and it was sharp and tangy and true in my mouth. My stomach cramped with the suddenness of it, but I didn't want to stop. The sausages were soft and half-cured, so I didn't dare bite into one, and I didn't trust him to know which mushrooms were safe and which were poison, nor could I trust my eyes in the flickering light, so I let them lie. But I ate nearly half a loaf of bread and made quick work of an apple, then finished the milk.

He was watching me closely as I wiped my mouth and put down the empty bottle. The exhilaration of food faded, and the tight knot of fear clenched again in the pit of my belly.

"Speak to me," he said suddenly. The other boys inched closer. "I want to hear your voice."

I swallowed hard, my mouth suddenly dry despite the milk. "My sister is gone. Both my sisters are gone."

He didn't respond, no matter how hard I looked for some sign of emotion in his eyes – there was no pity, no remorse, no triumph.

"Won't you please let me go?" My words came out as a sob.

"You're mine," he said simply.

"Please let me go," I whispered. "My father will be so frightened. Let me go back to him."

His dusk-colored gaze followed my mouth. "Your father," he said.

I nodded, closing my eyes. "He's a farmer," I said softly. "His hands are always dirty, and his hair is dark like mine. He has been very sad for a long time." I could see him behind my eyes, his bent form in the chair by the fire in our little farmhouse, his distant eyes, slow to smile. "He loved my mother very much, and she died when I was only seven. He drinks too much ale sometimes." It was suddenly hard to speak around the tightness in my throat. "But he is never cruel to us. He plays the fiddle and he loves to hear us sing. When Alyse was sick with the ague, he sent me and Rose away and nursed her all alone so we wouldn't take ill ourselves. He tells the best stories you've ever heard."

My voice stopped, as if cut off at the very source. I would never see him again. I wrapped my arms around myself.

"I had a father," said Edward, his voice soft with memory. I opened my eyes. He was still watching me. "And a mother, and two little sisters. All together in a little round hut of mud and straw. He came and found me and took me away."

"Your father?" I asked, confused.

His eyes softened, gazing through me. "Carlisle," he said.

I shivered, remembering the golden hair and the cruel smile.

"Did you all have families once?" I asked.

"I did," came the dark one's gravel voice. "They beat me and I ran away. Carlisle found me."

"And you?" I asked the fair one. He just grinned his wide mad grin.

"His mind is all shadows; he won't remember," said Edward. There was a pause. "I went back to look for my family, after... after." After Carlisle? I wondered. "They were gone. The little round hut was gone, the fields all changed."

I could hear the desolation in his voice, and suddenly it was as if puzzle pieces fell into their right places. Bits of stories and half-remembered legends. Their strange behavior, their strength, the way I knew without knowing how that they were not quite human. The echoes of hundreds and hundreds of years in the eyes of a boy not older than me. It explained everything.

"I know what you are," I whispered. His eyes didn't change. "You don't sleep. You don't eat. You were human boys once – you had families and parents – but no longer. I know what you are."

He said nothing. "Carlisle made you what you are," I said.

"Yes," he said at last. "We were with him for years and years and years. He was all we needed."

I finally understood, and the sickness of the knowledge settled heavy in my stomach.

"He showed us the whole world," said Edward softly. "He took us everywhere by night, and everywhere he ruled whatever he saw. We fed from kings and knights, maidens and courtesans, and they all fell beneath us. And we never tired, and we never grew old, never again."

"So what happened?" I asked. "Why are you here? Why are you alone?"

Pain twisted in Edward's face.

"Lost, lost, lost," crooned the fair one.

"He left us," said Edward. "He went away."

"Did he die?" I asked, perplexed. "Where did he go?"

"He didn't want us anymore," growled the dark one, the rage gathering on his brow.

"But where did he go?" I asked. "Why couldn't you follow him?"

"We couldn't find him," said Edward, his voice splintering like that of a child trying not to cry.

It is not me they want, I thought. "Please let me go," I pleaded. "It won't bring him back. It won't change anything."

"Nothing will change anything," said Edward. "Nothing ever changes, not anymore."

I sat back, closing my eyes. Please make them let me go, I begged desperately in my mind. Let me out of this hell they are trapped in, where they never grow old, where their minds are fixed in one place forever. This Carlisle, whoever he was, whatever he was, had damned them to an eternity of enslavement. These were his children, his favorites, cast away like worn-out toys: angry and terrified and broken, never growing up, never finding their way home.

There was too much sorrow here – for these three beautiful boys, for my beloved sisters, for myself. I felt numb. An image rose unbidden in my mind, of Rose and Alyse, silvery-skinned and undying.

"Tell me where my sisters are," I said suddenly, opening my eyes and seeking his. "Tell me what you did to them. Did you –" I hesitated, swallowing hard. "Did you – feed – from them? Or did you make them as you are?"

Edward turned his head and looked into the fire. "What does it matter?"

It was hard for me to breathe. "I want to know whether to pray for their souls."

The dark one snarled, an ugly animal sound.

Edward said, "There are no souls, and there is no one to pray to."

"We can always pray," I said, my words sounding false and hollow to my ears. "We all have a creator in heaven."

"We had a creator," the dark one spat.

"And he left us!" howled Edward in anguish. Hundreds of years of grief, of loss; the lover cast off, the child abandoned. The sundering of his very heart.

"Lost, lost, lost," keened the fair one.

"You poor lost boys," I whispered. My heart was breaking too, in useless shards; I felt the edges slipping from my fingers.

Edward was close to me now, though I had not seen him move, and my pulse raced with his nearness. "Bella, my bellissima," he murmured brokenly, and his voice went straight to the depths of my inmost self and laid me bare.

"Isobel," I mumbled numbly. I was shivering now, uncontrollably.

His hand had encircled my wrist. "The time has come," he whispered, his lips at my ear, at my throat.

His arm went around my waist, pulling me implacably in. I looked around me in a panic and saw the dark one and the fair one, firelight gleaming reflected in their eyes as they gathered closer, watching hungrily. It is ending, I thought wildly. He pulled me into his lap, his angel's face close above mine.

The tears slid down my cheeks, even as my body responded to him, melting against him, opening like a lover to her beloved.

"Are you killing me?" I cried. "Are you changing me?"

"My bella," he whispered, his cold fingers tracing my tears, stroking my face, my hair, my neck. "It will not hurt." His fingers twisted in my hair, tipped back my chin.

And he spoke truly, for when he brought his lips to my throat, his teeth were sharper than the keenest knife-edges, and I felt hardly a thing.

-the end-