I thought I had disguised my expression, but this boy, for the brief time I’d known him, could read me better than anyone I’d ever met. In centuries.

“Doctor Cullen,” he said, struggling to sit up. Strands of his hair clung to his forehead, which glistened with fever. His pajamas were already more loose on him then they had been when he’d come in; they opened at the neck as he pushed himself up. “Has my mother’s condition . . . worsened?” he asked, looking right at me with alarm in his eyes. His heartbeat had quickened, as though he knew what I was about to say.

I sat at the foot of his bed. I could feel the warmth his body had imparted to the bed through the blankets. “I’m sorry, Edward,” I said. “Your mother died a few minutes ago.” There was nothing else I could say.

For a moment, he just looked at me, almost imploringly, as though by taking back the words I could change the facts. At the same time, tears began to slip down his cheeks. His innocence was so complete, his tears such a natural and sincere response, that I could hardly bear to look at him.

He bowed forward and, pulling up his knees, buried his face in them. “It’s my fault,” he said into the cotton blanket. “It’s my fault.” His shoulders shook.

Only I could have heard the muffled sounds from him among the moans coming from the rest of the ward in the hot darkness.

“Edward, it’s not your fault,” I said, wanting more than anything to take his hand, touch his shoulder, comfort him. It was an impulse I had long had to stifle.

“She tired herself caring for me,” said Edward. I didn’t know whether he was even talking to me at this point or not; the illness was so far progressed, his fever so high, he might even have forgotten I was there.

“Edward, you should lie back down,” I said softly. Not that that could possibly help. I could hear that his heart was failing. I could almost smell the death already on him.

Slowly, because he was so weak, Edward lowered his head back onto the pillows, more tears now silently making tracks over his temples and into his hairline. It was as though he didn’t have anything left in him to argue with me. He stared up at the ceiling, and I could feel, I could feel him losing his hold on life. No, not losing; letting go.

“Edward, your mother wanted you to live,” I said, and then I allowed myself to brush his tangled hair back from his eyes. With a fever like his, any hand would feel icy.

He nodded—barely—but I could tell that he didn’t really hear me.

“Your mother asked me to save your life,” I said even more quietly, bowing my head over him so that nobody else would hear.

And, again, he seemed to sense some intimation of my meaning before I had said anything. Anyone else would have thought I was referring to nothing more than my skills as a doctor, but he turned to look at me then, confusion in his green eyes.

“I can prevent you from dying,” I said, “but you won’t be human any more.” I wouldn’t let myself sound anything but completely confident, but in fact I wasn’t certain I could turn this boy into something like me. I knew only how it had been done to me; the other vampires I had met during my long life I had known only for brief instants, confrontations. None of them had been companions. I had never spoken to any of them about their experiences or mine.

Not ever; but now I was on the brink of making another one like me.

And I felt, I was afraid that it was wrong, that this would be the most wrong thing I had ever done, but then I hoped this Edward would be like me, would not want to murder as all the others I’d met did. I wouldn’t have considered it, despite his mother’s request, if I hadn’t felt that there was something in him it could not possibly be evil to save. He had uncommon sensitivity and intelligence. I had heard that his musical talent could have made him famous. The disease, of course, had taken away that future.

But he had so much promise in him. This boy, this man, just stepping over the boundary between the two, his body newly transformed with the strength and beauty of adulthood: he was the freshness and power of youth and hope and the loveliness of a new generation in the midst of all the misery of sickness and war. It was too bitter to see all this potential destroyed.

And after taking care of both his parents as they died, and hearing what they had to say about him, I wanted to protect him—as though they had passed the burden of parenthood on to me. Perhaps, after centuries of caring for humans from a necessary distance, that was what I wanted. Yes, it was selfish of me, too.

He still hadn’t responded. I wondered whether he was about to lose consciousness. “Edward?”

“Did my mother ask you to do this?” he whispered.

“Yes,” I said. And I truly believed she had; like her son, she seemed to have some sort of intuition that saw past all my pretenses. That was better, though; he would be more aware of what I was really offering.

“Is this a dream?” Edward whispered then, even more faintly. His heart was fighting now, but it was too late.

“It’s not a dream,” I said, holding his hand. He should feel it for as cold and hard as it was. “Edward, you’re dying. You have to choose. I won’t do this to you without your permission.”

He swallowed once, still looking up at me from his pillow in the dimness of the ward. I wished I knew what he saw, if he really understood, or whether his fever was too high for him to be capable of understanding. His cheeks were too flushed; his body at the limit of its endurance.

“Then yes,” Edward said, and closed his eyes in pain.

I would have wept if I could have; either way, this boy was going to die tonight. And even though this was the outcome I wanted, it was still death, in the end. For him, I grieved.

But for me, I felt a fluttering of hope amid the anxiety and fear and guilt.

I reached up and turned down the light by his bed so that we were now both in darkness—although I could still see. I glanced around quickly; the patients around us were dying themselves, unaware of anything except their own hurt, and I heard no doctors or nurses approaching.

“Try to be as quiet as you can,” I told him softly. “It will be very painful.”

He nodded, not saying anything.

I bent over him and gently touched his jaw to turn his head to the side. I remembered the attack on me, my own agony, and could hardly bring myself to do it, to replicate my own injuries. But then I caught his heart faltering, and I smoothed his forehead with one hand and clasped his hand with my other and leaned down and sunk my teeth into his jugular, a human jugular, for the first time ever.

And this blood was more delicious, more satisfying, than I could possibly have imagined in all my yearning for it, but at the same time I held the image of Edward in my mind and the thought of him, dead, made the blood less sweet until I knew he would truly die if I drank any more and that knowledge suddenly made the blood repellent and I pulled back. Edward was gasping, although I could see he was trying as hard as he could not to make a sound.

And my venom had already closed the wound on his neck, locking in the poison.

I forced myself to bend over again and reproduce my other wounds, not knowing which of them it had been, or if it had been all of them, that had turned me into what I was. It was quick, only taking moments in reality, but to me it was the most difficult experience of my life, and I could feel each tiny aspect of it printing itself on my memory: the sounds of Edward’s heart encountering the venom; the taste of his blood, so slightly different at the different points in his body where it was more or less oxygenated; the sensation of Edward shuddering under me.

I sat up and pressed my hand to his cheek to cool it; I knew the fire he would be feeling. I searched his face for signs of regret or fear, but all I could see was pain and innocent surprise, like children I treated who didn’t understand what they were feeling or how they could be hurting so much.

I was still holding his hand, and now he gripped it more and more tightly. I caught a glimpse of worry on his face. “You can’t hurt me,” I assured him. He must have heard, because then he allowed himself to dig his nails into my hand, to hold it so tightly that it would have been crushed if I were human. He was still being brave: not making a sound.

And the strange thing was, I felt proud of him. It wasn’t strange at all, of course, but it was strange to me at the time, because I had never had anyone to feel that way about before. Now there was a connection between this boy and me; I had chosen him. My venom ran in his veins. So I was proud of his courage, and I knew then that I had chosen rightly and I was glad. I loved him. I began to love him at that moment, when he relied on me, allowed me to help him by holding his hand.

Of course, even the most brave man couldn’t keep silent throughout the transformation, and Edward shouldn’t have to. I had already prepared documentation of his death in case he agreed to let me change him. I whispered to him not to move, and then I covered him with a sheet and took him down to the morgue, using my hearing to avoid as many passersby as I could. As one nurse passed me, preoccupied, I gave her a letter for the head of department. It said that I believed I had become infected with the disease and intended to sequester myself in my home until further notice. It was a blow to the hospital to lose a doctor, but I was by no means the first, and the letter meant that nobody would interrupt us while Edward changed. I had considered the sacrifice, the lives I might have saved by being at the hospital in exchange for Edward’s, but in the end . . . I could not have made a different choice once Edward made his.

Edward seemed too distracted by pain and the effort to keep silent to notice that we were in the morgue, and I thanked God for that. The place was a shrine to death; the pace of the disease far outstripped our ability to cope with it. Civilization was crumbling under the strain of the epidemic. I had seen plagues before, of course, but this, together with the war that spread its blight from Europe across the globe, leaving us with injuries more horrible than any I’d seen before and corps of ghosts returning . . . it was easy to believe this was the darkest time in history I’d ever seen, that this was the end of humanity. Trench warfare, gas, machines for mass murder, and now the influenza that was more than decimating the city.

But then there were the youth, people like Edward. His mother said he’d wanted to go and fight for his country; thank God he would never have to. He still clutched my hand with heartbreaking trust; I could hardly bear to leave him even for a moment to make the few extra false notations that would complete the deception of his death. Nobody would notice the absence of one body.

With quickness far beyond human speed, I swept Edward, still wrapped in the sheet, into my arms and carried him out to my car, placing him on the back seat. The mortician had not even seen me move. I drove as fast as I could without attracting attention, reaching one hand behind me to hold Edward’s. At my house, at last, I carried him (again, more quickly than any human could see, especially in the dark) into my bedroom and finally laid him on my bed. His head sank into the pillow, and I sat down on the chair by the bed and bent over in relief. I was grateful, again, that I had bought the bed as part of keeping up the appearance when I first arrived here; I would not have thought I’d need it for this purpose.

“It burns,” Edward whispered, seemingly involuntarily.

At once, I flattened my one cool hand over his forehead, the other still held by his. “Edward, you can make sound now, if you want to,” I said. Perhaps screaming would help the pain. Anything that helped.

He gasped once, briefly, and his other hand reached out for something to hold and found the front of my shirt. “Edward, scream if you need to,” I said. “Please, do whatever you need to.” I couldn’t bear to see him in so much pain.

“I’m burning,” he said. “I’m burning.”

I had nothing left to cool him with, and I couldn’t leave to get anything.

I pulled off my coat and jacket and pushed up my sleeves, and then I lay down on the bed beside him and wrapped my arms around him so that our hands were joined, our arms crossed over his chest. He pressed his face against the coolness of my skin. I would have wept if I could have, I would have taken his pain into myself if I could have, and yet, in all of it, I felt . . . as though something I had been missing for centuries had finally been returned to me. I had hardly ever allowed my skin even to be touched since I had become a vampire, and never like this.

Most hopeful of all, he didn’t appear to be dying—or, rather, he did, but I could sense that he was changing. His scent had already altered slightly, become less human and more like mine. I had not ended his life; he would be like me.