I threw one leg over the branch, sitting sideways on it now, and scooted closer to Jasper, leaning into his chest. He wrapped and arm around me and tugged his pack of cigarettes out of his shirt pocket.
“You want one?” he asked, offering it to me.
Why not? Lung cancer wasn’t an issue anymore, after all. I plucked a cigarette from the pack, and he held out the one he was smoking, using the burning end to help me light my cigarette. He retrieved another one for himself and lit up, and for a moment the two of us just smoked in silence.
“In my defense,” I finally said, “the things you make us work through are a lot worse than anything I ever felt with Phil.”
I meant it as a light-hearted little joke, but a haunted look crept into Jasper’s eyes and he nodded. “I know.”
I pulled back a little to look at him. His scarred, damaged face was stoic, but his eyes held heavy secrets. I rubbed the back of the hand that he had draped casually around my waist. “What are you thinking about?”
He took a drag from his cigarette and let his head fall back against the trunk of the tree as he blew the smoke out in a long stream. “Some things, Bella, you just don’t want to know.”
I wasn’t sure whether to press him or to let it go. I didn’t want to make him re-live whatever it was that was making him so miserable, but then again, it always seemed to help me when he made me talk about things. Of course, he was a professional. He knew how to properly guide a discussion like that.
Still, I owed him a listening ear, so I gave him an opportunity. “That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t tell me.”
He shook his head. “Kid, next to me, that step-father of yours looks like Mother Theresa.”
“Mother Theresa was a fraud,” I said lightly. “And I hear she wasn’t really all that nice.”
“Mother Theresa wasn’t all that nice,” he muttered, shaking his head. “You hang out with vampires and you question the character of honest-to-god saints. Bella, why is it that you trust all the wrong people?”
“I don’t really trust all that many people.”
“But you trust me.”
It wasn’t a question, but I nodded anyway.
“That’s a stupid thing to do,” he snapped.
I leaned into his chest and rested my head on his shoulder. “Why? What’s bugging you, Jasper?”
He raised his cigarette to his lips, and I pretended not to notice the tremor in his hand. That didn’t bode well. If the unflappable Jasper was trembling at the horror of his memory, it had to be seriously ugly. “I’ll tell you, if you really want to know,” he said darkly. “But I’m warning you . . . you’re going to wish you hadn’t asked.”
“Maybe. But I’m still asking.”
He drew in a deep breath and let it out in a heavy sigh. “I can’t just create emotions. I can intensify them, but at the root of it all, I have to have experienced whatever emotions I’m trying to create in a person, either myself or vicariously.” His thumb stroked absent circles against my hip. “I’ve felt a lot of awful things from people, but that . . . what I'm making you feel . . . that was something I developed. I put a lot of time and effort into making someone feel that way.”
“Who was it?”
“Just a girl. Her name was Antonia . . . she was maybe a little bit younger than you.” His eyes were far away as he remembered her. “She was sweet and pretty. People loved her. I almost passed her up because of that. When you’re trying to hunt discreetly, you don’t take the ones who will be missed. But there was just something about her that drew me in. It seemed like everything she felt was deeper and more intense than the people around her.”
He drew in a deep breath and shifted me into a more comfortable position, so I was leaning my back against his chest instead of my shoulder. “I was only a couple of years into this life. Maria loved that I could calm down a newborn army, to a certain extent, but I was starting to experiment with what else I could do. I was learning that newborns weren’t much good without older ones to lead them, and that the older ones were far more susceptible to emotional attack. So I started exploring that, searching for the darkest, most debilitating emotions I could find. Instead of feeding on Antonia, I experimented on her, trying to make her as miserable as I could so I could turn those feelings into a weapon.
“I took her to a cabin in the woods and tortured her,” he went on softly. “I raped her, made sure to bring her to orgasm and then taunted her. I told her she would be damned for enjoying sex with a demon. I beat her, cut her . . . though that was more for Maria than for me. I wanted to show her I was strong enough to resist the blood.”
“Maria knew about it?”
He nodded, his gaze far away. “I didn’t do anything without Maria’s approval. And she was very supportive of the project.”
Of course. She would have been all too pleased to see Jasper trying to become a stronger weapon.
“Antonia was very responsive at first,” he continued, his voice low. “But after a while she started to go numb. I could hurt her physically, but emotionally, she was shutting down. So I started taunting her with something new. I kept her in chains, and I left the key on a table just out of her reach. Each time I visited her I released her, and when I locked her up again I left the key just a bit closer. The desperation in her was almost overwhelming, but it wasn’t what I wanted. It was hopeful, invigorating, and I wanted something that would break her spirit. So one day I let her escape.”
I frowned. “I’m confused.”
He smiled tightly, staring at the forest floor below us. “I gave her hope so I could take it from her, Bella. I let her escape so that it would crush her that much more when I took her again.”
“Oh.” My word only cam out as a whisper.
“She made it back home to her parents. They were so happy to be reunited, and it gave me ideas for new tortures. But first, I terrorized her. I started leaving gifts on her pillow—a link from her chains, the knife I had used on her so many times. Little reminders. The fear she felt was nearly crippling, and I absorbed it all.
“When I took her again, I brought her parents with us. I tortured them all, made them all watch the pain I put each of them through. My plan worked. The pain went deeper. I made her parents watch while I raped her, and the horror was colored with humiliation. Then I killed her parents and made her drink their blood. And I told her she was responsible for it all. If she hadn’t run, her parents never would have been involved.
“But once again she started to go numb. I tried to offer her escape again, but she was too
afraid to take it, so I told her I was tired of her. I released her from her chains and threw her out.”
“Giving her hope again?” I asked timidly.
He nodded slowly, his eyes never meeting mine. “Yes. It took a long time. She made her way to a new town, tried to find a fresh start. It was months before she stopped looking over her shoulder. But eventually she got comfortable and stopped waiting for me to come for her. She even found herself a suitor. The night he proposed to her, I took her again. I brought them both back to the cabin and continued with the torture. It was horrible for her, watching me hurt the man she loved. It was even worse for her when I forced him to hurt her. It was so much more painful for her to have him wielding the knife that cut her.”
He swallowed hard, rubbing his eyes with a trembling hand. “I forced him to rape her, and as soon as he finished with her I killed him. I drained his blood and left his body lying on top of her for two weeks while it bloated and decomposed.”
A shudder ripped through me, and I ducked my head against his shoulder.
“She started to go numb again,” he said, his voice cold and empty. “So I taunted her again, this time with the only kind of escape that was permanent enough for her to trust it.”
I knew exactly what he was talking about, and I could see how she would have been tempted by it.
“I left a revolver just out of her reach. But once again, after a few days, I let her get to it. She put the gun to her head, but before she could pull the trigger I stopped her. I told her I would never let her go, that she would be mine forever.”
He leaned his head back against the tree, looking drained. “That was the low point. I kept her for months after that, did all kinds of horrible things to her, but I never felt agony or hopelessness like I did then. She just lost the fire in her, her emotions dulling more and more, until finally there was just nothing left of her. She was empty . . . and that’s when I killed her.
It was almost a relief for him to tell me that she was dead. My stomach wrenched at the thought of the misery that the girl had gone through.
“That’s what I’m hitting you with,” Jasper said, still sounding detached. “The worst things that I made Antonia feel. The worst of the hopelessness, the fear, the humiliation, the guilt, the horror. I combine them all, intensify them, and push them out on anyone I want to put out of commission.”
“That’s awful,” I whispered.
I felt Jasper stiffen, and I pulled back, looking up into his face.
“I’m sorry,” I said quickly. “I don’t mean to offend you, I just. . . .”
Jasper snorted in disgust. “You don’t mean to offend me, Bella? You know I’m a killer. Vampire or human, the body count is staggering, and you don’t mean to offend me?”
“Jasper, don’t.” I dropped my eyes, twisting my fingers together. “It’s in the past, don’t dredge up the old guilt.”
He shook his head. “It’s not in the past. I’m still just as capable of doing those things now as I was then.” He looked at me with sad eyes. “I’m not a good guy, Bella.”
“Of course you’re not.”
He seemed chagrined over my response, though not really surprised.
“Jasper, you said it yourself. There are no good guys and bad guys, there are just guys. We’re all capable of doing that kind of thing.”
Jasper frowned testily. “You don’t see things clearly.”
“Are you kidding me? I don’t see things clearly? Jasper, pay attention! Look at Charlie. Look at Renee. Look at Edward and his vigilante phase, or Rosalie and her little revenge mission. Look at Aro, all smooth and sophisticated, and so manipulative. God, Jasper, even Carlisle has a dark side, if Phil’s injuries last December are any indication.”
“One man,” Jasper growled. “Carlisle has occasionally hurt one man here and there throughout his life, and always for the noblest of reasons. He’s the kind of man you should trust. He’s the hero of the story.” He shook his head. “I don’t even understand why you’re still sitting here with me after hearing what I did.”
I tried to find an argument, and I couldn’t. Logically, yes, I should put myself far away from him. I felt the instinct to do just that the moment I saw the scars on his face. Except there were redeeming qualities too, and he was ignoring those.
“I don’t know why either,” I told him honestly. “I love you, Jasper, and if I tried to figure out how or why I feel the way I do, I’d probably fail. But that doesn’t make it any less real.”
He clenched his teeth, looking away from me. “Making decisions based on emotions will get you killed.”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. That’s basically how Carlisle lives, isn’t it? He follows his heart, and he’s been around an awfully long time.”
“Look at Aro,” Jasper countered. “You think that man lets his emotions cloud his judgment? And he’s lived ten times longer than Carlisle.”
“Yeah, but there’s a difference.”
He raised an eyebrow, inviting me to explain.
I smiled. “Aro’s about to die.”
