MINE (Caius Volturi)

CHAPTER 24

Unedited version

Emmaliese POV

Life is colourful, but not all the time. Sometimes you are stuck in what I call a 'grey sphere'. Everything feels and looks monotonous, like seeing the world through a grey frame where every other thing is just a shade lighter or darker than grey. There is no black or white. There is no other colour.

Life in the Volturi Palace was just like that. A constant blur of grey. A set routine that I was following from days, same old unspoken, unofficial timetable, was getting boring with each passing minutes. Same faces of the only few vampires that were allowed to be in the same vicinity as me.
Surprisingly, those few vampires included, Gina and her rather cocky brother, Evander.

I had my own notions about the both of them.

With hair more caramel than blonde, going hand in hand with her warm aura, Gina was sweet while blonde hair and ruby eyed Evander was just plain arrogant. With an ego bigger than Mount Everest, he fitted better as Caius' long lost brother than a sibling who grew up in a calming embrace of Gina.

Perhaps his gift was what boosted his ego. Evander had the power of Energy Manipulation. He could easily suck energy out of anyone or could create high energy field and vice versa. And he was pretty proud of it, until, I defied his powers.

The Kings were not creatures who could believe in others blindingly or on the basis of sheer power. Earning their trust required constant effort of not just years but decades and centuries. Gina and Evander were no exception, though their association with Anas sure earned them some brownie points.

Anas, a rather peculiar vampire and the most talked upon topic in the palace, came few nights later with his mate, Gaia, who had the ability to see past, of anyone or anything; 'retro cognition' was her gift. It was much different than what Aro could do. She could see a particular event that happened in the past, by mere touch of anything, living or non living, except me and probably my sister, Bella.

Bella; my stubborn yet sweet sister, called one day and surprisingly, the Kings let me talk to her over the official phone in Aro's office. And in a thirty minutes call, I had to ensure her thirty thousand times, that I was still very much a human and definitely not dead at all.

Fortunately, I later got to talk to Charlie too who effectively bought my made up story of visiting Italy with friends and not so indirectly, expressed his displeasure of such a long vacation. Charlie and Bella were the only pure happiness I got to experience in the past few days.

Now back to the guests, Anas also had the ability to sense gifts. He could find out how many gifts someone had, hidden or not and how the gift works. Though he couldn't figure out my reflective shield thing on his own, he did sense presence of more than one gift on me. But it was nothing new now. Everyone in the Volturi Castle knew that a mere human could nullify and repel any vampire's gift.

All in all I was continuously spending life, living in a grey bubble inside the Volturi Palace.

But today was different. Today I had to meet with Queen Sulpicia at her kind request and thankfully, the meeting place was far away from the Queen's Tower.

We were meeting at the Royal Gardens.

As always Jane escorted me to the gardens. The sun was peeking from behind the fluffy white clouds, its shimmering rays giving my pale skin a gold tint while my rose gold hairs were competing with the shine. This was the only time I genuinely loved my partial albinism. I felt really beautiful and the flowing, off shoulder, yellow sundress was adding an oomph factor to my appearence.