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unfathomable eyes. "If you believed as he did. Could you take away his soul?"
The way he phrased the question thwarted my answer.
If he'd asked me whether I would risk my soul for Edward, the reply would be obvious. But would I risk Edward's soul? I pursed my lips unhappily. That wasn't a fair exchange.
    "You see the problem."
I shook my head, aware of the stubborn set of my chin.
Carlisle sighed.
"It's my choice," I insisted.
    "It's his, too." He held up his hand when he could see that I was about to argue. "Whether he is responsible for doing that to you."
    "He's not the only one able to do it." I eyed Carlisle speculatively.
He laughed, abruptly lightening the mood. "Oh, no! You're going to have to work this out with him ." But then he sighed. "That's the one part I can never be sure of. I think , in most other ways, that I've done the best I could with what I had to work with. But was it right to doom the others to this life? I can't decide."
    I didn't answer. I imagined what my life would be like if Carlisle had resisted the temptation to change his lonely existence… and shuddered.
"It was Edward's mother who made up my mind." Carlisle's voice was almost a whisper. He stared unseeingly out the black windows.
    "His mother?" Whenever I'd asked Edward about his parents, he would merely say that they had died long ago, and his memories were vague. I realized Carlisle's memory of them, despite the brevity of their contact, would be perfectly clear.
    "Yes. Her name was Elizabeth. Elizabeth Masen. His father, Edward Senior, never regained consciousness in the hospital. He died in the first wave of the influenza. But Elizabeth was alert until almost the very end. Edward looks a great deal like her–she had that same strange bronze shade to her hair, and her eyes were exactly the same color green."
    "His eyes were green?" I murmured, trying to picture it.
    "Yes…" Carlisle's ocher eyes were a hundred years away now. "Elizabeth worried obsessively over her son. She hurt her own chances of survival trying to nurse him from her sickbed. I expected that he would go first, he was so much worse off than she was. When the end came for her, it was very quick. It was just after sunset, and I'd arrived to relieve the doctors who'd been working all day. That was a hard time to pretend–there was so much work to be done, and I had no need of rest. How I hated to go back to my house, to hide in the dark and pretend to sleep while so many were dying.
    "I went to check Elizabeth and her son first. I'd grown attached–always a dangerous thing to do considering the fragile nature of humans. I could see at once that she'd taken a bad turn. The fever was raging out of control, and her body was too weak to fight anymore.
    "She didn't look weak, though, when she glared up at me from her cot.
"Save him!' she commanded me in the hoarse voice that was all her throat could manage.
    "I'll do everything in my power,' I promised her, taking her hand. The fever was so high, she probably couldn't even tell how unnaturally cold mine felt. Everything felt cold to her skin.
    "You must," she insisted, clutching at my hand with enough strength that I wondered if she wouldn't pull through the crisis after all. Her eyes were hard, like stones, like emeralds. 'You must do everything in your power. What others cannot do, that is what you must do for my Edward."
"It frightened me. She looked it me with those piercing eyes, and, for one instant, I felt certain that she knew my secret. Then the fever overwhelmed her, and she never regained consciousness. She died within an hour of making her demand.
    "I'd spent decades considering the idea of creating a companion for myself. Just one other creature who could really know me, rather than what I pretended to be. But I could never justify it to myself–doing what had been done to me.
    "There Edward lay, dying. It was clear that he had only hours left. Beside him, his mother, her face somehow not yet peaceful, not even