Twilight 2 - New Moon Read Online Free PDF Page B

"Like everything in life, I just had to decide what to do with what I was given."
"That makes it sound too easy."
    He examined my arm again. "There," he said, snipping a thread. "All done." He wiped an oversized Q-tip, dripping with some syrup-colored liquid, thoroughly across the operation site. The smell was strange; it made my head spin. The syrup stained my skin.
    "In the beginning, though," I pressed while he taped another long piece of gauze securely in place, sealing it to my skin. "Why did you even think to try a different way than the obvious one?"
    His lips turned up in a private smile. "Hasn't Edward told you this story?" "Yes. But I'm trying to understand what you were thinking…"
    His face was suddenly serious again, and I wondered if his thoughts had gone to the same place that mine had. Wondering what I would be thinking when–I refused to think if –it was me.
    "You know my father was a clergyman," he mused as he cleaned the table carefully, rubbing everything down with wet gauze, and then doing it again. The smell of alcohol burned in my nose. "He had a rather harsh view of the world, which I was already beginning to question before the time that I changed." Carlisle put all the dirty gauze and the glass slivers into an empty crystal bowl. I didn't understand what he was doing, even when he lit the match. Then he threw it onto the alcohol-soaked fibers, and the sudden blaze made me jump.
    "Sorry," he apologized. "That ought to do it… So I didn't agree with my father's particular brand of faith. But never, in the nearly four hundred years now since I was born, have I ever seen anything to make me doubt whether God exists in some form or the other. Not even the reflection in the mirror."
    I pretended to examine the dressing on my arm to hide my surprise at the direction our conversation had taken. Religion was the last thing I expected, all things considered. My own life was fairly devoid of belief. Charlie considered himself a Lutheran, because that's what his parents had been, but Sundays he worshipped by the river with a fishing pole in his hand. Renee tried out a church now and then, but, much like her brief affairs with tennis, pottery, yoga, and French classes, she moved on by the time I was aware of her newest fad.
    "I'm sure all this sounds a little bizarre, coming from a vampire." He grinned, knowing how their casual use of that word never failed to shock me. "But I'm hoping that there is still a point to this life, even for us. It's a long shot, I'll admit," he continued in an offhand voice. "By all accounts, we're damned regardless. But I hope, maybe foolishly, that we'll get some measure of credit for trying."
    "I don't think that's foolish," I mumbled. I couldn't imagine anyone, deity included, who wouldn't be impressed by Carlisle. Besides, the only kind of heaven I could appreciate would have to include Edward. "And I don't think anyone else would, either."
    "Actually, you're the very first one to agree with me." "The rest of them don't feel the same?" I asked, surprised, thinking of only one person in particular.
    Carlisle guessed the direction of my thoughts again. "Edward's with me up to a point. God and heaven exist… and so does hell. But he doesn't believe there is an afterlife for our kind." Carlisle's voice was very soft; he stared out the big window over the sink, into the darkness. "You see, he thinks we've lost our souls."
    I immediately thought of Edward's words this afternoon: unless you want to die – or whatever it is that we do . The lightbulb flicked on over my head.
"That's the real problem, isn't it?" I guessed. "That's why he's being so difficult about me."
    Carlisle spoke slowly. "I look at my… son . His strength, his goodness, the brightness that shines out of him–and it only fuels that hope, that faith, more than ever. How could there not be more for one such as Edward?"
    I nodded in fervent agreement.
"But if I believed as he does…" He looked down at me with