A/N:

For Paige.

A car almost T-boned them as they sped along the small, lonely highway.

And it was enough for Rosalie. Her mood told her to grab the steering wheel screaming in Alice's grip and yank it to the side, but she convinced herself to slam her hand onto Alice's thigh instead. "Is somebody dying?"

No response.

Alice slowed enough for them to not flip during a curve in their route.

The blurring trees became a focus for Rosalie as her jaw clenched and she kept from squeezing or shaking her sister or otherwise being unproductive. "You cut off the first shopping trip I wanted in years over a five second vision and I didn't ask. I didn't complain. I just went along. I trust you. But I've never seen you be this way. Not in the decades we've known each other, Alice! You have to tell me something."

Life breathed into Alice just enough for her to whisper, "I don't know what to tell you."

A growl rumbled in Rosalie's chest, but it wasn't necessarily directed at Alice. It was about possibility. Possibility, as she settled back into the seat and the world zipped by, was something she held dear, except when it was something she couldn't account for. Except when it could lead to pain and regret. Amber eyes glanced over again and yes, judging from Alice's unnatural anxiety, this could lead to pain and regret.

So Rosalie didn't bother her anymore. She just mentally prepared herself to take care of her family and decided to discard possibility because as much as she adored it, possibility could drown you.

Even still, even with about an hour to do it, Rosalie Hale was not prepared.

The car hadn't stopped moving before Alice shot out of it without a concern for Rosalie's yell. By the time she hoped the seat and hit the brake and put the car in park halfway up their driveway, she'd entirely lost sight of her charge and cursed.

Another curse slipped from her lips as the door handle came with her.

The distinct rush of Esme came out the house with Edward trailing. "What is it?"

But Rosalie was gone, after her sister and whatever was making the most upbeat person she knew wildly distressed. It was so bad she didn't even have to follow Alice's scent.

Alice was tearing a literal path through the forest. Broken branches, fleeing animals, underbrush all but cleared, and shreds of clothes.

It made Rosalie run faster.

Farther and farther away from civilization. They were in a place for hunters and prey, and still, they went up a mountain. Up, up, up. The air got thinner. Forks became a thing of memories.

She was a vampire and she was alone in it. Not even the distant blur of Alice or the insistent sound of Edward and Esme crashing through nature behind her felt like company. And maybe they weren't.

Maybe Alice felt alone in her mission, too.

The yell of her mate and then her brother reached her ears. Close.

In a few seconds, Rosalie had to resist coming to a complete stop at the glimpse of Alice literally tackling Emmett off his feet. She broke through the trees and halted in a clearing—a campsite—and didn't know where to look.

Jasper was a statue, dropped in a crouch ready to fight, with his head turned toward Alice. Her hand was out to him and Rosalie had to stare, but yes, it was shaking in the air in her silent plea for him not to act on whatever he was feeling. Emmett was at Alice's feet still since he'd never found the will or reason to jump back to his feet. A streak of dirt decorated his cheek as his face stretched into what would've been comical shock if it was any other situation.

A stranger stood at the edge of the campsite, weight on their back foot as red eyes moved between them all.

Rosalie was only just taking in the body and its lifeless eyes lying just outside a large, green tent when Esme and Edward stopped next to her. That is, Esme stopped.

Edward had only hesitated, and only for a second.

A snarl ripped out his throat at the injustice before him, at the unexpected murder on their doorstep, at the reminder he was a monster.

Only decades of familiarity made Rosalie move once Alice twitched. The back of Edward's jacket ripped apart in her attempt to grab him, then she swiped at empty air, and then her fingers clamped down on a stiff shoulder. She dug her heels into the ground and was just considering flipping him backwards when Esme caught his arm.

But he just waved his free one at Alice and venom shot out his mouth with a hiss. "How could you?"

"I don't care who gives it, but I'm getting a five second explanation. Now."

The stranger just looked between them. At Jasper, still and focused on her. At Edward and his clear desire to attack her as if that made up for something even though he stayed put. At Emmett leaning up on his elbows in the dirt. At Alice, the only one with her back turned to a possibly hostile vampire. After lingering on Rosalie, she settled on Esme. She cleared her throat, but didn't otherwise move.

"What is there to explain? This person's corpse speaks for itself! She must leave. Now."

She didn't even spare Edward a glance.

When Alice's lips parted, a choked noise came out, but nothing else. A hand fisted in her already wild hair and her eyes just bounced between Rosalie and Esme with need for understanding of...something. Of this anomaly in her behavior.

Edward's head jerked to the side to practically glare at Esme. "Are we really doing nothing? Nothing about a nomad endangering our lifestyle? We sit and ask for explanations when there are none to be had?"

A few blond curls fell out of place as Jasper shifted, just a little, the smallest tension leaving him. "Emmett and I came upon a hunt. She...incensed him and Alice stopped him from attacking her. Rather, trying to." He finally stood up straight, head cocked as he stared across the campsite. "You didn't move."

Red eyes drifted from him to Alice.

However, Alice never turned around and Esme made a noise somewhere between annoyed and tired. "Emmett, get up. Edward, stop embarrassing yourself."

It took the shuffling of Emmett for Alice to come back to herself and she offered him a hand while Edward was released.

And Edward took the opportunity to stomp half the way to Alice. His finger jabbed through the air. "Why are you protecting her? You know she's a shield and as dangerous as she is, double that with the fact she's killed on our land. The wolves are going to lose their minds—"

"No need to do that for them." Rosalie just shrugged when Edward whipped around to glare at her for a second.

"—and you're keeping your reasoning a secret from me. Me! For this random nomad?"

But Alice turned away from him and stared at the stranger just as she had been staring the whole time. Her hand twitched at her side. She swallowed, lips starting and stopping before they pursed. Then, quiet and defeated, she more so said than asked, "You won't stay."

The stranger took off.

Wood crumbled in her hand. Splintered and fragmented and rotten as it fell through her fingers.

It felt like a small stone was tossed into the lake of her being.

The ripples once meant something.

They still whispered it.

But she'd forgotten the language and just pushed open the rest of the door hanging on by a single hinge. Something made her eyes sweep across the ruins of the small house this time. A rug all but eaten away or worn through. The same chair she'd thrown against the wall years and years and lifetimes ago and the ripped painting it had caused. Glass crunched beneath her boots as the door swung shut, the hinge coming out of place just a little more. Whether it was memories or pure thought, she found herself stooping to pick up one of the fractured legs and dragged her thumb over what used to be the smooth and beautiful wood of a chair that could've paid for a month of food when she...when she was…

Before.

She settled it atop the lone table too gently, too slowly, and it occurred to her it was much darker inside than it had been when she first opened the door. She kept doing that lately. Losing time.

The fact she hadn't flung it out the window missing all but one pane of glass brought up the question of how tired her soul was.

It was a question she had been ignoring for a while.

For too long, perhaps.

Perhaps, as she knelt in the corner of the living room of the dead and curled her fingers around the edge of a dresser and pulled. She reached into the dark behind it, needing only a moment to find what she came here for. While it didn't need to be hidden, you didn't get to survive for as long as she had without at least a little paranoia.

The door finally gave up behind her and fell onto the porch and its missing boards.

She didn't look back, but as she took an abrupt left and walked so that the forest enveloped her, she did wonder how long it would take for people to stop whispering about the ghost haunting the abandoned cabin on the east side of the mountain and the forgotten souls who had ventured too close.

When she did come to a stop, the stars were bright in the sky and she contemplated them.

They were different.

Still, she dropped to her knees and flared out her coat and began to dig into the dirt. Time had buried her chest deeper than she had, and, somewhere along the way, she'd lost the key. Not that it mattered. The old metal of the lock broke apart with a pinch of her fingers.

The creak of it opening brought the beginning of silence as she dragged her palm across the old thing and memories threatened her. Questions threatened her.

She shook herself and retrieved some of the items to tuck them into her coat before burying the chest for perhaps the final time, unlocked.

Edward had only just started talking to her regularly again, and now all he did was shoot her sideways glares when he couldn't avoid being in the same room as her. He'd even had his classes switched around for the year so they didn't have to share one.

Knuckles rapped on the frame of her open door. "Would you like to go shopping?"

"No." Alice didn't move even though she looked very much unlike herself. She was at her desk, leaning on its surface with an arm folded around her head and fingers gripping her hair. Her free hand was splayed across a set of pens she rolled back and forth across the rich wood. "Thank you, Rosalie."

It was honest and a gift of permission to escape Alice and her mood. Instead, Rosalie came into the room and reached past her sister to pick up the sketchbook. She flipped through dozens upon dozens of pages. They were more or less the same, at first. Blurry shapes done in charcoal and nameless buildings. Someone as if they stood at the edge of your vision. But then different pens came into play and the charcoal began to subside and harsh lines replaced fog and uncertainty. Regret gave the erratic image of a destroyed home, the family inside pulled from life one at a time. Red eyes and a hunter's grin—closer and closer and closer. Filling the page. Blurs and charcoal and red eyes and a hunter's grin.

All black ink for the night, for the endless and ever-watching forest, for the moon, for the figure standing in a tree like a silent sentinel.

The hunter didn't appear again.

Rosalie reached the last page and she paused. It was the only one in full color and rich with clarity as if it had been torn straight from a memory. She set down the sketchbook, watching as not a second later Alice's fingers traced over the jawline of the stranger from the campsite last spring.

"I can't watch you pretend anymore and I don't think you're capable of it for one more day."

Alice didn't say anything.

A sigh left Rosalie as she reached into chaotic hair to ease her grip and rest her fingers over Alice's. At last, she asked what everyone in the house already had. "Who is she?"

"I don't know," she whispered. Her fingertips slid to the edge of the page. "But she saved my life. No, I don't know her from my human life. Her appearance didn't make me remember any of it. That vision I had that pissed you off over not telling you?"

"I was not pissed."

Alice continued like she had merely agreed. "I didn't know how to tell you about it. It was just," her fingers crumpled the edges of the page, "Just a blur. A blank. Nothing. Empty. It hit me that I'd experienced it before, back in the haze of my time as a newborn. I'd forgotten all about it after enough killing. Between the thirst and the visions, I was...God, Rose, I was something else."

"Rabid? Blinded?"

"Both. I still can't recall everything, but I remember him." She flipped back some pages and jammed her finger against red eyes. "I was a game to him and I was too young and too stupid to care beyond nothing getting in the way of my next meal. I think I got into half of a fight with him once and he kept farther back after that. But anyway, I remember feeding, and I remember my fight or flight instincts kicking up the worst they ever had because I kept having distorted visions or ones that just ended all of a sudden. I felt too vulnerable. I was ready to fight and I found him watching. Waiting."

A pen practically appeared in her hand and she started filling red irises with black.

"He wasn't alone. I remember that. I remember being angry. My visions were telling me I would die. Something happened. A flash of noise and then fighting. I ran. I moved on."

The pages turned.

"I'd just killed—a couple in their own home? A lonely old man? A single mother and her child? I don't know. I was leaving and I saw her watching me from a tree. I hissed, clumsily searching the future just to come up empty. She left."

Rosalie's head tilted, her hair falling over her shoulder. "And she just...wanders back into your path? After all this time?"

"I don't know."

"That can't be coincidence."

"I'm not sure anything has ever been coincidence with me."

"Are we sure she's just a shield? It's uncanny for her to find you twice."

Alice sat up to toss the sketchbook into a trashcan. "I appreciate your mind, Rose, but I just don't know."

"Do you want to?"

She looked up at gold eyes. "Ask what you want to ask."

Rosalie's fingers moved to tap the back of the chair. "Do you want her to come back?"

"Yes."

"Well, I guess we're just going to have to wait because she has to be the most solitary nomad to ever live to stay under the radar. If the Volturi even heard a rumor of a shield, they would snatch them up like a greedy toddler."

Alice frowned once her sister started walking away. "Where are you going?"

Pausing in the doorway, Rosalie had a hand on the frame and a certain smile on her face. "To harass Edward into getting over himself, of course. He's had plenty of time. Besides, I don't like how he's been toward you."

For some reason, Alice cupped a hand around her mouth as she called after Rosalie, "He's entitled to feel certain ways, Rose!"

"I'm entitled to not really caring."

Maybe Alice didn't remember her human life, but she didn't wonder anymore whether or not she had family or friends who had loved her because she currently had a sister who would challenge the sun to a fistfight in her name.