Writings

Vampires are fast in the snow. Even in feet of snow, like there was that night. We can race so quickly that we almost skim on top of it, our feet leaving little shimmering drags of tracks rather than giant footprints.

We were almost a mile away when we both caught the scent and stopped so abruptly that snow went spraying everywhere.

Blood.

A lot of it.

Edward gave me a pointed look.

I wondered if he could handle it.

He nodded quickly. “Can you?”

“We can hold our breath.”

And instinctively, I reached for his hand. He took mine, squeezed it, and together, we ran.

The accident scene was an eerie nightmare. Blood spattered across the road. The odd yellow lights of the tow trucks; the snow pulsing odd shades of blue and red from the police cruisers. People screamed.

Near the edge of the scene, a woman stood, sobbing.

“He was right here,” she screamed. “He was right here!”

Edward and I exchanged glances.

Vampires move too quickly for anyone except other vampires to see. But the scent near the woman was undeniable.

It was the scent I loved to bathe in at night.

“Oh, Jas,” I heard myself say and found my hand was squeezed tightly.

Edward still hadn’t let go of it.

“We can still find him,” he said.

We had to run at human speed through the wreckage, jogging at a pace that felt glacial. As we did, we ran into Carlisle coming the other way. I’d never seen him looking so disheveled—his shirt and pants were covered in blood, one of his sleeves was torn halfway off, his hair was drenched with snow and matted with some other substance. His skin pulsed an odd shade of purple in the glow from the emergency vehicles.

For someone with perpetually maintained energy, he looked exhausted.

“What—” he started to ask.

“Jasper,” Edward answered at once. “And Maria. They were out having a conversation. They weren’t far from here.”

Carlisle closed his eyes, tilted his head upward, and muttered a word I’d never heard him say before.

When he opened them again, he laid a hand on Edward’s shoulder. “Can you find them, son?”

Edward nodded.

“Then do. Please. Make that your priority. I’ll handle whatever needs to be handled here. Just—keep them contained.”

Then he turned to me. “Alice, do you see anything?”

I shook my head. “I saw the accident. And Jasper. But I think there’s nothing new coming.”

“Good. That’s…that’s good.” He squeezed Edward’s shoulder. “Go, son. You and Alice need to find them. And fast.”

Edward nodded and sprinted off in the direction of Jasper’s scent.

I was still holding his hand.

Forward

A hospital in Calgary lost its ER surgeon, and Carlisle applied for the job.

The night before we were to move, Edward played Chopin for four hours, and I sat there the whole time. Vampires don’t get tired, and we don’t need to change positions. So I could just sit, and listen.

I tried not to think about Edward’s mother, or the photo, or any of the things that the nocturnes usually made me think of.

At the end of one piece, Edward leaned back on the piano bench and pressed his hands backward against the wood so that it made his body rock back and forth a little.

I wondered what he was thinking.

He didn’t answer right away.

After a few minutes, I thought maybe what he wanted was privacy, maybe some space to play some more. I swung my legs around to the other side of the piano bench and was halfway to standing when Edward whispered, “I was supposed to have a sister.”

I stopped.

“I’m sorry?”

He shook his head, but in the “clearing out cobwebs” kind of way, not in the “don’t talk to me” kind of way. Then he went on speaking.

“I think,” he added. “I feel as though I remember my mother telling me that. But I don’t remember much…” His head tilted to one side and he thought for a moment.

“Her name was…Margaret? I think,” he said at last. “My mother was pregnant with her when I was very small.”

This was fascinating. Both what he remembered, and that he remembered it at all.

“What happened to her?”

He went silent again. His jaw locked, and his face went blank, and he stared at the keys, like black and white were going to swirl into some new medium and give him some information that he didn’t already have. He didn’t look up at me.

“She died,” he said at last.

In my vision, I could see exactly where Jasper was, except that I couldn’t see exactly where he was. I saw landmarks: a fir tree with an odd shape in the trunk, a little stand of trees where the branches were so thick that the snow cover was little more than a dusting and you could see the pine needles littering the forest floor.

“All you’ve got are pine trees?”

But just as he said it, the scent of human blood hit us like a wall, fragrant, and lovely and almost irresistible…except we would resist.

“I guess we don’t need the pine trees,” I muttered.

“Shut up,” Edward said. Then, as though realizing he’d been abrupt, he added, “You should hold your breath.”

I nodded, and we rushed toward the scent.

The scene was a lot worse than I’d imagined. At least ten corpses lay scattered in the clearing, some of them with grotesque injuries—bones sticking out of skin, severed limbs. I had already started to weep for the savagery my husband had committed when Edward muttered, “Those are accident injuries. All that blood from the wound was what drew them in the first place.”

We picked our way through the bodies, trying to hold our breath enough to tamp the desire to run back to the accident site ourselves. But we both needed to breathe just enough to keep Maria and Jasper in our sights.

Feeding causes a frenzy in our kind; it’s one of the few ways we aren’t like humans. We don’t get lethargic after we eat. Exactly the opposite, in fact. I’ve seen it with all of them, the way Rosalie and Emmett come back from a hunting trip together and even though Emmett is bragging about the bear and has blood running down his shirt, Rosalie is giggling and leaning into him. Carlisle and Esme disappear for a few hours and come back just serenely holding hands, but when you look more closely, you see that Esme has a stray leaf stuck somewhere in her hair and Carlisle has missed a belt loop or two.

It happens to me and Jasper, too.

Which was why I wasn’t that surprised when we found the two of them, even though pain sliced through me with such force I fell to my knees and couldn’t move. It had always been there, one of the possible outcomes of Maria’s arrival. But you aren’t tied to your destiny. The future doesn’t work like that.

My husband had the ability to make choices.

Now, Emmett always says Edward hits like a girl; that he never learned properly as a human and that he couldn’t hurt someone if his life depended on it. He always nudges Jasper to back him up, to tease Edward about how weak he is, and Jasper never does.

Because there, in the snow, with his pants unfastened and Maria with her head someplace it really should not have been, Jasper wound up on the service end of Edward’s fist.

As it turns out, Edward hits like a vampire.

Jasper tried to stand up, but he stumbled; tripping over his own pants and falling, face first, into the thin cover of snow. Pine needles stuck in his hair, poking out this way and that and making him look ridiculous.

I wanted to move toward him, but I found I couldn’t.

Edward socked him again.

Jasper is taller than Edward, but only by an inch; and an inch doesn’t matter when the shorter person is pissed off. Edward grabbed Jasper by the collar and slammed him against a tree with such force the top of the tree broke off with a sickening crack and fell to the ground, spraying all of us with freshly-fallen snow.

Maria started screaming.

“Go,” Jasper yelled. “Go, Maria, and don’t come back.”

She took two steps and paused.

“And don’t run toward the accident, either.”

A pained look crossed her face. “Querido,” she said softly, which is the Spanish word for lover. It’s one of the better words in any language for describing that—it literally translates as “my wanted one.”

Jasper spat in her direction, a slick, pinkish concoction of blood and venom.

“Get out of here,” he snarled. It was slightly choked off, because Edward’s hand was still around Jasper’s throat, pinning him to the tree. Edward turned to Maria, too.

“Don’t you dare come back,” he said. “Ever. Don’t you ever find my family again. Don’t you ever humiliate my sister like this again.”

Even with the wind howling, and the sirens wailing in the distance, I heard Maria gulp.

Then she nodded, and disappeared.

Forward

Three months after we got married, Jasper and I sat beneath the willow tree and talked. We were barefoot, and Jasper kept walking his toes up my calves, which tickles and makes me giggle.

“Stop,” I said, but he just laughed.

“I like to hear you giggle,” he said. But he stopped, and instead we just sat there, listening to the wind whistle its way through the willow branches and made them sway in front of us like little strings.

The next time Jasper’s feet worked their way up my legs, it wasn’t to tickle. He flipped me onto my back, and our lips met. Jasper’s a good kisser—a perfect kisser, and I know that without having to try anyone else. But he’s also an empath, and that works against me sometimes.

He laid his head next to mine and stroked my hair. “Your head isn’t here,” he said.

“My head is right here.”

I gestured to it.

Kissing my forehead, he laughed. “Yes, I understand. And I like this head.” He propped himself up on one elbow and ran his fingers through my hair.

He kissed me again.

“Nope,” he said. “Not here. Where is your head?”

I was thinking about our wedding, in fact. Standing there, under the willow, with the breeze rustling through Jasper’s hair, causing it to wisp around his face. Kissing him after I said I wanted to be his wife forever.

And Edward, standing off to the side, with his arms wrapped around himself as though the breeze was a bitter winter wind—like we were affected by a bitter winter wind.

His hair, blowing behind him as he stalked off into the house.

Buddy Holly, blasting from his bedroom.

“Alice?”

I sighed, and rolled over onto my side, propping my head up on one hand and staring at Jasper. He looks better with golden eyes, though I don’t actually mind the red. The red bothers Carlisle and the others; the times that he’s slipped. I think it reminds them that we’re not all perfect. That’s the real problem with Jasper slipping—it reminds them all that all of us could slip; it reminds them all that we’re all that way. But me, I never mind the red, even though I think the gold is better.

The gold eyes bore down on me, looking confused and concerned and delighted all at once. Edward hears thoughts, which is obnoxious, but Jasper feels feelings. So I knew he knew that I was feeling sad, and happy, and lustful, and all the things that could get tangled up at once with lying in the grass under the willow tree where we were married, thinking about the boy who had become my brother.

Hmm.

It was the first time I’d thought that.

“Alice?”

“Do you think Edward thinks of himself as my brother?”

Jasper snorted. “I think Edward thinks too highly of himself to think of himself as anyone’s anything.”

I punched him in the shoulder, and he faked a flinch. Then he rolled back over onto his back and stared up into the tree branches.

He didn’t say anything for a long while.

“Do you think of him as your brother?” he asked at last.

I shrugged. “Maybe. He was sad at our wedding.”

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Jasper nodding. Of course, he would’ve felt that, too. Known Edward was feeling sad.

Jasper closed his eyes, and I knew he was seeing what I was, the way Edward had stood there, with his arms wrapped around himself like he needed some kind of coat.

“He’s lonely,” Jasper said after a long pause.

“Lonely? There are seven of us.” Seven people who were totally different, crammed into one house so firmly it felt entirely claustrophobic most of the time. Seven people vying for time alone in a bedroom. Seven people competing for a quiet corner to read.

“Seven of us and six of us are mated.”

And six of us are mated.

I hadn’t thought about that.

Edward listened to love songs, most of the time. The upbeat ones. The ones where you sang about how the girl was your girl; how you had fun with your girl.

It was like I’d never heard them before.

That was when I decided to start paying more attention.

Forward

Back to Part I

Edward’s summer was blissful. Jasper could hardly leave him alone.

I probably should’ve guessed that it couldn’t last.

That Bella Swan could get attacked by someone in our family was a possible outcome every time she came to our door. Even Carlisle showed up in one vision, although that was only once, and it disappeared pretty quick.

You learn to expect it not to happen, even though you’re expecting it to happen, if that makes any sense.

Anyway, that’s why I didn’t have time to warn Edward before my husband lunged.

Emmett is strong, Edward is fast, and Carlisle is superhuman, and that’s the only explanation I have for how that birthday party turned out okay.

But Edward is a runner.

So the next day we all ran.

Forward