Okay, I think I'm back for real now. I got a good start on that original I was working on, but that's all it amounts to for right now: A good start. I have too many fanfic ideas to ignore!

I do not own Twilight or any of its characters.

Chapter One - Vision

Alice sat bolt upright with a gasp.

This could only mean one thing. She must have gotten a vision, and a particularly disturbing one at that. The rest of us would have to sit and wait patiently for a few minutes before we found out what it was all about. At my side, Rosalie was already starting to huff in annoyance. I stroked her hair in silence. It always seemed to calm her down.

"That's impossible," Edward murmured. There was a pause. "He must be there somewhere." Another pause. "Of course I'm not accusing you of anything," he told Alice in a soothing tone. "I didn't mean to imply anything of the sort. I'm simply stating that there must be another explanation." Several long minutes went by while both Alice and Edward closed their eyes, deep in the conversation that always appeared one-sided to the rest of us.

"It's irritating enough to have you two drifting around all the time, spying on us and being spooky. Can't you just, for once, tell us what you're muttering about?" Rosalie hissed.

"Rose..." I began, pleading with her to settle down. For the last few years, she'd been calm, almost happy, but she was starting to resemble her old self more and more. It didn't take a genius to figure out why she'd been on edge so much, but there was no point in worrying about it. All I could do was try my damnedest to be the best husband I could be.

Edward succeeded in silencing Rosalie where I had failed, fixing his steely glare on her. I shot him a couple of choice threatening words in my thoughts, and his gaze softened a little. No need to stress her anymore than she already was. Time to lighten the mood.

"All right, we give up," I said, throwing on my patented fix-Rosalie's-bad-mood grin. "Is it bigger than a breadbox?"

Edward sent me a dirty look, but that was fine. I could take it. I could dish it out too. I cracked my knuckles to prove it, and Edward rolled his eyes before finally answering the question on thee tip of everyone's tongue.

"Aro just disappeared from the future," he announced matter-of-factly.

Now it was everyone else's turn to gasp, and a few seconds later, the room was abuzz with high speed, high-pitched chatter.

"Does that mean he's dead?" Bella asked hopefully. She made no effort to conceal her glee at the notion that the man who had loomed over her humanity during her last year might be gone.

Jasper, who had been serenely playing a game of solitaire in the corner, shook his head. "I sincerely doubt it. I think Alice would've noticed if somebody had killed him. It's more likely that he found a new recruit with the ability to conceal him from her visions."

A beat of dead silence followed Jasper's assessment. "Alice would have noticed that too," Esme said firmly. God bless that woman, ever believing in the infallibility of a gift that had already been proven to be full of gaping holes that you could run a whole pack of werewolves through. I saw the corners of Edward's mouth flicker upward. Of course he'd heard that. He heard everything.

"Not necessarily," Carlisle asserted, walking into the room from his study. "If the person he'd found truly has the inherent ability to block others from Alice's visions, he or she might have also blocked Alice from seeing any interactions with Aro just before joining the guard."

"Like Bella's ability," Rosalie whispered, taking in the seriousness of the matter. "At first, it only affected her, but once she learned to use it, she could use it on others."

Another beat of silence. Even I was having a hard time making light of this situation.

"Alice," Bella began tentatively. "Can you still see the others? Caius, Marcus, Jane, Alec...?"

Alice shut her eyes and tilted her head back, deep in concentration. "Yes," she declared after a moment. "They're all there. All of them. Only Aro is missing. I don't see anyone new either."

"Then they're still as much of a threat as they ever were in a fight," I said. Aro was formidable, but from a strategical standpoint, it had never been him that worried me. It was always the twins. But we had Bella, and the twins were useless so long as she could shield us. We were the only coven who had a legitimate chance of taking out the Volturi if it came to blows. They'd left us alone for a long time, but whether it was because they'd given up or wanted to build up their forces and find someone that Bella couldn't shield us from was anyone's guess. That was why Alice continued to watch them. We needed to know anytime Aro added someone new to the guard so that we could figure out how to best fight them when the day arrived that they'd come for her. We weren't giving her up. Not to those beasts.

Rosalie snaked her arm around my waist in what I assumed was a subconscious gesture of fear. I draped my arm over her shoulder, hoping that she understood that no matter what happened, I'd always be there for her, always be at her side. Where she went, I went. Alice was my sister, but Rose was my soulmate.

"There's no reason to assume that it will come to that now," Carlisle said reasonably. "If in fact Aro has somehow died, I doubt that the Volturi will move against us right away. Perhaps not at all. It was always Aro who was determined to surround himself with talented vampires. It's possible they may no longer want Alice at all."

Did we dare hope for that much?

"Alice?" Rosalie spoke up timidly. "What about Sulpicia?"

Alice nodded her head emphatically. "Aro's wife is still there. She seems... Happy."

Now that made even less sense than Aro disappearing from the future unannounced. It wasn't as if Chelsea could have broken their connection before Aro was overthrown. Even if the Volturi had somehow managed to conspire against him and kill him swiftly enough that Alice hadn't noticed the decision being made, they would have killed his wife too. They would have been doing her a favor, if the way we'd seen other vampires behave after being separated from their mates was any indication. I pulled Rosalie closer, inhaling the scent of her hair and refusing to even imagine a life without her. No point in worrying about something that was absolutely, positively, never going to happen.

"So what do we do?" Esme's concern was apparent in her tone.

"No reason to do anything until we know what's going on," Jasper answered. I felt suddenly calm and at peace and glanced curiously back at my brother, who winked at me by way of confirmation. Thank you, I mouthed at him. Rosalie's tension was starting to fade under his influence.

"I agree," Carlisle's voice was no different under Jasper's soothing than it had been under his own personal unshakable inner peace. Amazingly, I had never once seen Carlisle behave in an emotionally-charged fervor, and I'd seen him in plenty of awful situations.

"So we just sit here?" Rosalie screeched. Damn. I'd really thought Jasper was helping her.

"What else is there to do, babe?" I cringed as she pulled away from me in annoyance and stormed upstairs without another word.

"Welp, see you in the morning, Emmett," Jasper called.

"Shush, she just needs a few minutes to herself. Let's go find a bear. I could eat." And then I'd spend all night and half of the next day trying to get back in her good graces. Such was my life, but I wouldn't trade a minute of it. I started to get up from the couch, but Carlisle motioned me back down.

"Just a minute, Emmett. I do think we should try to make a few discreet contacts to a few of our closer friends to see if they've heard anything. I'll give Tanya's family a call, and Jasper, I'd appreciate it if you could try to get in touch with Peter and Charlotte."

"Of course," Jasper agreed readily. "I don't think we can trust many of our other friends."

"I agree," Carlisle said once again. "We need to be careful to what we say to anyone from here on out, whether they are vampire, human, or werewolf."

At that last word, we heard the familiar sound of the Rabbit pulling up the driveway, which meant that Jacob was bringing Nessie back home after a long day of shopping in Port Angeles. It was yet another reason Rosalie had been in a foul mood today; she'd wanted to go shopping with Nessie, but of course Nessie had preferred to drag Jacob along and he was all too willing to go. Rose's dislike for Jacob was diminishing, but she still couldn't tolerate the stench, and it was hard to blame her. The dude reeked.

Footsteps came up the walkway and hesitated near the front door, lingering for a long time. Edward kept shifting uncomfortably, and after a few seconds he winced and got up in a flash, starting toward the door. Bella was blocking his way before he had a chance to get through.

"You can't hear what they're thinking out there! I can!"

"Would you prefer if I shielded them?" Bella answered innocently. "Jake's a good guy. I trust him."

"I don't," Edward grumbled, but returned reluctantly to his seat.

"And that's my cue to leave," I heard Jacob chuckling outside. "See you tomorrow, Ness."

Nessie bounded in the front door, looking every bit of eighteen years old and carrying a variety of bags that would have put one of Alice's shopping sprees to shame. "Hi everybody, sorry I'm late, we decided to go to Seattle because we were making such good time."

"Somebody was making time anyway," I said under my breath, not daring to look in Edward's direction.

Nessie, for her part, rolled her eyes. "Gross, Uncle Em. Way to spoil the mood, Edward!" She had taken to calling Edward and Bella by their first names last year. It made the most sense, because she wouldn't exactly be able to go around calling them "Mom and Dad" when they looked the same age as she was. Besides, she'd reasoned, Edward called his parents by their first names, and Bella always talked about her parents the same way. Neither of them had liked the idea much, but they hadn't ever been very good at denying her anything. Especially when it made sense.

"There doesn't need to be a mood. You are seven years old. He is twenty-three." Edward growled.

"And when you met Bella, she was seventeen and you were a hundred and—" she started to argue.

"Enough, both of you, enough!" Bella was used to playing referee when Edward and Nessie clashed heads. It was fun to watch, since I'd always thought Bella didn't have much of a backbone.

"Doesn't anybody want to hear about my day?" Nessie asked, batting her chocolate brown eyes in that way that was usually impossible for anyone to resist.

Carlisle cleared his throat. "I'm sorry, Renesmee, I'm afraid you've caught us all at a bad time." There was a brief uncomfortable silence. What should we tell Nessie? We'd just gotten done talking about the fact that we had to be careful what we said, and telling her anything constituted a pretty serious breach of security. Whatever she knew, Jacob would know within twenty-four hours. Whatever Jacob knew, his entire pack would know by the end of the day. Whatever his pack knew, the other pack would learn soon enough. So much for not telling the wolves.

Nessie set her bags down at the end of the couch and plopped clumsily down on the couch beside me in the empty spot Rose had left. Half-vampires were nowhere near as graceful as the rest of us, and she did have her mother's genes. I couldn't help smiling to myself whenever I saw her tripping or dropping things. She was less funny than Bella used to be, but it was better than nothing. She looked expectantly up at Carlisle, waiting for him to continue with the big news. "Well?" she prompted verbally when staring didn't do the trick. When that, too, did nothing, she glanced around the room at all of us, waiting to be clued in. So far, all anyone had done was glance nervously at one another while Nessie tried to get the truth out of someone, anyone.

"Come on guys, I know I'm chronologically only seven, but I can handle it, whatever it is." Her impatience was evident. Physically, she was eighteen, mentally, probably closer to thirty, but emotionally, she wasn't much older than twelve. She was used to getting her way all the time, and she couldn't stand when it didn't happen. Now who did that remind me of?

That thought earned me a smack to the back of the head from Edward, but it was worth it.

"Think of the devil," Edward murmured low enough that only I heard him. Sure enough, Rose was coming back down the stairs, looking every inch as beautiful as she had the first moment I saw her, except that I hadn't just been mauled by a bear.

"This affects her too, as much as any of the rest of us, maybe even more than the rest of us," Rosalie announced. "We should tell her."

"Rose..." Edward warned. It was one of the few subjects the two of them were still willing to dogfight over: How Nessie should be raised. Sure, she was Edward's daughter, but Rose was the one who had wanted children before one magically showed up without anyone knowing it was even possible. She'd read all kinds of books about child-rearing and had studied child psychology for years. All Edward had done was fail to wear a condom.

Plus, there was the matter of the fact that Rosalie had fought for Nessie to be born in the first place, while Edward had wanted to terminate. Rose hung that over his head shamelessly, threatening to tell Nessie one of the few truths that Edward demanded she remain in the dark about.

"We're going to need to protect her at all times until we find out what's going on," Rosalie argued. "She deserves to know why she's on 24-hour protection detail."

It's hard to disagree with her when she's actually being reasonable, I told Edward.

Edward made a scoffing noise, and Bella re-entered the conversation, for once actually acting like Nessie's mother. "Renesmee, can you keep a secret from Jacob?"

Nessie looked horrified at the suggestion.

"Only for a little while," Bella backpedaled, causing Rose and I to roll our eyes in unison. "Just until we have a better idea of what we're up against. It might be nothing. We really don't know much yet—"

"Fine, fine, I won't tell him," Nessie grunted. "What's going on?"

"Aro's future disappeared today," Alice piped up. "No one else has disappeared, only him. We don't think he's dead, but we don't think anyone's shielding him. We have no idea what it means yet, and we don't want to raise any alarm bells until we do. If something has happened to the Volturi, it would be irresponsible for us to tell everyone about it. Covens would start carrying out atrocities that previously weren't allowed because there will be no one to stop them. We have to proceed with caution until we know more."

"And I can't tell Jacob about this... Why?" Nessie folded her arms across her chest in defiance. "It isn't as if he goes around sending mass texts to every vampire on the planet."

"We'd rather keep this quiet for now," Carlisle told Nessie, and her posture relaxed. As difficult as it was for anyone to deny her anything, she found it equally difficult to disobey her grandparents.

"All right, but I won't be able to keep it from him for long. He's my best friend. So you guys better figure this out pretty fast."

"That had better be all he is," Edward muttered, too quietly for the half-vampire to hear, but loudly enough for the rest of us.

"Well if no one wants to hear about my day," Nessie pouted, "I think I'll go ahead and get some sleep. Jake's taking me to the beach tomorrow morning. Should I sleep here tonight?"

"Sure, sweetie, you can use our bed," Rose answered, her voice softening as it usually did when she spoke to her niece. "It's not as if we'll be using it," she added for my ears only, much to my annoyance.

Nessie said her goodnights and headed upstairs, leaving her bags behind to be dealt with in the morning while we continued to try to sort out the mystery.