A/N: So I haven't written fan fiction for probably about seven years. This is the first idea I have had in years that I immediately knew the beginning, middle and end, so I'm actually pretty excited to work on this. I didn't think I could write anymore! First things first:
DISCLAIMER: Stephenie Meyer owns most of the characters along with most of the situations. The only things I own are a few of the newborns and two packs of cigarettes. That's all I've got.
WARNINGS: This isn't going to be an entirely easy ride. There's a good amount of violence, a healthy dose of rough sex and some (somewhat) non-con sex. It's not exactly non-con, as you'll see from this chapter, but it may be kind of iffy for some people so I thought I'd put a warning up.
My basic idea behind this story is an alternate universe that still leads to the same place. I plan on Alice and Jasper will be in Forks with the Cullens when Bella pops up, but their lives each take a different, darker turn before finding each other. Also, I always wanted to write a story about a femme fatale spy. C'mon, who doesn't?
THE SOLDIERING LIFE
Chapter 01: The Long Drink
Tell me, darlin, did I pass your test?
I lay, as still as death, until the dawn,
Whereupon I wrested from
That godawful lawlessness
-Joanna Newsom "Soft as Chalk"
June 5, 1944
Alice steeled herself as she slipped out of the Volturi's lair, into the silent streets of Volterra. She wound quietly through the cobbled alleys and up and over the walls of the Fascist controlled town. She could smell the change in the area, the growing desperation of the people after living with war for so long, as the Allies advanced closer yet. Rome had fallen the day before.
Still, she ignored all that. Human squabbles were nothing to her, and she had something important to do. She ran silently through the hills, heading straight to the shore. Ten miles from the shore, she stopped short, a vision overtaking her. A dark shape ran along behind her, tracking her with an almost lazy ease.
"Demetri," she said softly, almost bitterly. She knew he'd hear her, no matter how far back he'd hung. A minute passed, but he did appear, his sharp eyes calculating and not bothering to hide the hint of arousal rising up in him to find her so alone and exposed. "Why have you followed me?"
The tracker sniffed at that. "I don't receive thanks for watching out for you on your dangerous journey to the sea?"
Alice betrayed no emotion. "Thank you," she said simply.
"That wasn't the thank you I was looking for," Demetri grinned, his eyes blood-red, punch drunk on the gluttony and carnage of the evening. Volterra rejoiced in the chaos of war, using the disorder, confusion and desperation to feast. He reached for her then, a large graceful hand on top of her dainty fingers. Alice snatched her hand away in disgust.
"I am leaving on my mission. It would do you good to concentrate on yours. I don't want all my training and hard work to amount to nothing because you're feeling a little frisky after dinner," Alice snapped. "Contact me in two months. You'll be able to find me." She turned then abruptly and ran again toward the sea. She didn't turn to look back.
She reached the cliff and dove swanlike into the sparkling cobalt sea. Alice swam purposefully, all night until she had traversed the Mediterranean and only had the Strait of Gibraltar to pass through until she reached the open Atlantic. She came ashore a few miles from Tenerife to hide until nightfall. There were too many ships about for her to take any chances during the strong daylight of June. She lay in wait until the sky darkened and the ship traffic decreased and then set out again, concentrating on swimming as fast and as straight as she could.
For two days she swam, until she had come ashore twenty miles from Savannah, Georgia. She pulled herself out of the water and into the sand, disliking how the salt and sand stuck to her smooth skin and how all she could smell was salt and brine. She already missed the deep earth scent of Tuscany where she'd lived for the past fifteen years.
She left the dark beach and ran through the woods, finding an empty house and slipping inside to wash up and see if there were any suitable clothes she could "borrow". She felt refreshed after rinsing the salt and sand from her body, and was able to find a few simple cotton dresses, lightweight but sturdy. She left the house exactly as she'd found it, minus the dresses, and stole out into the night.
A week later she found herself in New Orleans. Marcus had instructed her to visit a bank in the Financial District to obtain the contents of a safe deposit box. Waiting until a cloudy day, she wore a stolen pair of sunglasses and never took them off as she charmed the bank manager into letting her have it without Marcus's key. She watched carefully in her visions to say exactly the right thing, and he left her alone with the box with a blush on his face and his hand in his pocket.
Alice opened up the box and emptied the contents. A stack of American bills, a fake passport bearing the name Alice Baker, and an envelope full of papers with a note to burn after reading. Alice stuffed it all in her purse and waved goodbye to the manager, disappearing into the crowd. Once back at her camp, she opened the envelope, her eyes scanning each page. Most of it was full of information she already knew, background on the major players in the coven, how Maria was rumored to run her army.
Still, it didn't hurt to be sure. The first page had a drawing of a lovely woman, petite and olive-skinned with curves ready to burst off the page. This was Maria. Alice had never seen a picture of her before, only heard descriptions. All the information she'd received before was nothing compared to her actually likeness: beautiful and delicate, calculating and cruel. Maria's background was sketchy at best. She had originated in Mexico a few hundred years before, not making much of a splash until after the Volturi had stepped in on the original Southern Vampire Wars. With Benito gone, she had stepped up in his place, carefully avoiding the chaos that brought Pueblo down. Alice scoffed, knowing her to be ignorant of the Volturi's interest in her coven. The Volturi always knew.
She flipped the page. A handsome, scarred, bitter face stared back at her. So this was Jasper Whitlock, known as Major to those who knew and respected him. He was Maria's right hand man, her army commander. The Volturi knew less about him than they did about Maria. He was younger, only changed about eighty years before. (Alice often had trouble fathoming just how old the Volturi were.) He was an empath, a powerful one, which is why Alice had been receiving lessons for ten years on how to shut down her emotions, betraying nothing with her body or her eyes. She had mastered it, but had never come up against a real empath before. That was the mission's weak spot. Still, the Volturi had full confidence in her, and Alice couldn't bear to waste all that she'd worked for.
She flipped the page again, reading about Maria's known battle strategies and estimates on her numbers. The Volturi had grown increasingly concerned as the War continued to rage. The cities in Texas had emptied of young, strong men, as they left to join their own human armies and fight their government's battles. That left the highly concentrated urban vampires in Texas to become desperate at the suddenly shrinking food pool. Fights for territory were fiercer than ever before, convincing the Volturi that the time to act would be soon.
Alice was dispatched to infiltrate and collect information on how to bring down the army. Demetri would be joining her in Texas in less than two months time for her first report. She had much work to do before then.
Having finished with the files, she lit them on fire and let the ashes scatter to the wind as she ran further west, past the wet Louisiana bayous into the Texas desert.
After two weeks of searching, she found them on an ramshackle antebellum plantation on the outskirts of Houston. They lived in filth, and decaying grandeur, everything that had once been beautiful about the grounds and building now left rotting in a sad abandon. In truth, it had not been hard to find them. The army was not hidden very well. For miles around, all she could smell was the sweet stench of hundreds of newborns cooped up in one space. They swarmed the grounds of the plantation through the night, constantly being drilled and punished, rewarded and cut down. A small bonfire burned permanently on the edge of what was once a grand lawn, a threatening brightness always in the corner of their eyes. It didn't feel like a happy place, but reeked of egos and violence and death.
Alice lay in wait. She watched her visions carefully, planning exactly so she'd find Major Jasper Whitlock alone.
By the end of June, she decided to act. She tailed him on his journey out into the city to hunt. The Mexican migrants were the easiest victims during this time of war, as always there was a much lesser chance that they'd be missed than an American wife waiting for her husband to return from abroad. That was just how war went. She followed him into a dark rundown neighborhood and waited for him to feed. He found someone nearly immediately, a middle-aged man who reeked of liquor and quickly snapped his neck before he had time to react, biting down greedily and sucking, draining the blood from the new corpse. After he satisfied his thirst, he stashed the body in a dark alley. Alice could see something new in his shoulders. Since she'd been watching him, she'd yet to see him show any sort of emotion, something quite odd for anyone, an empath especially. Yet she could see something now in the way he held his shoulders. There was a new defeat, a sadness to him that he didn't seem to quite recognize for what it was. He steeled himself quickly, and then looked up when he noticed an unfamiliar scent. Alice knew this was her chance.
She stepped out from the shadows, still keeping her distance. "You are Major Jasper Whitlock," she spoke quietly, her musical voice twinkling clearly through the distant city noises.
He said nothing, but he didn't move either, staring her down, obviously trying to get a read on her emotions.
Alice spoke again, "I believe I have something for you that would prove very valuable to your senorita's cause."
Jasper couldn't help but let out a low, cold chuckle. "Oh yeah? What would that be?"
Holding her head high, Alice said, "Me."
Jasper stepped closer now, still keeping a wide berth between them. He circled her, scrutinizing her. "What is so useful about you? You're pretty scrawny," he scoffed.
She puffed her chest up and stared him straight in the eye. "I have visions. I see the future. I can think of a few uses for that in war, can't you?"
He crossed his arms and stared down at her. Alice hadn't realized just how tall and well-built he was. "Why should I trust you?"
"Because you'll die without me," Alice said honestly. "I've seen it."
"How?" He stayed absolutely still, watching her every move, her every twitch. Alice, to her credit, stayed nearly completely immobile also, only breathing so she could speak.
"First I saw the newborns mutiny. They tore you and Maria apart and had a double burning party. Then I saw a rival army destroy yours. You and Maria chose to kill each other rather than be captured and killed by the enemy. Then I saw your army victorious, too victorious. The Volturi caught wind and left Italy to destroy you." Alice held her emotions in tightly, afraid of relaxing her control. "Once I decided to find you, I stopped having visions of your death and destruction, and I started seeing…" Here she trailed off. She hadn't quite known what to make of what she'd been seeing lately. It was less "seeing" really than feeling, her suffocated emotions running amok in her visions, leaving her with impressions of deep love and hate, of lazy summer afternoons spent lying in tall grass, of passion and arousal.
Jasper watched as a quick play of emotions ran across her face. Too quick for him to catch and identify, he warily eyed the tiny newcomer, perplexed as to why she felt so cold and empty to him. It was like she was less than alive without the constant flow and tumble of human and vampire emotions. She felt familiar, her lack of emotions matching the ache in his own chest. "What do you see now?" He finally asked.
Her head snapped up and her eyes met hers. "Power," she said quickly, thinking fast. "Power and success. The war is ending in Europe soon, and once the men return home, your army will grow stronger still."
He considered this stranger, with her wide dark eyes, her coldness barely betraying the thrum of excitement vibrating through her body. "And you wish to help us?" He asked.
"It is what I have seen myself doing," Alice said simply. "It looks to be best for all involved."
Jasper acquiesced and bade her follow him to the plantation. They ran silently together through the streets, to all others they just appeared an inky smudge in the dark of the night.
The plantation emerged from the mist well after all the other buildings around it, the ugly industry of the city having reached what had once been the countryside surrounding the urban machine. Alice followed Jasper from a safe distance, hearing the common banter of the newborns lazing in the yard. He opened the great oak door, pocked with bullet scars and dents roughly the size and shape of a human shoulder or knee. Inside, the house flickered by gaslight, having never been connected to the city's electricity. A thick layer of dust covered all surfaces, as though the hundreds of people that flowed in and out all day simply were never there. The curtains, thick velvet curtains at least fifty years old, were moth-eaten and torn, letting in a soft moonlight, though it was diffused through the gently drifting dust.
Alice took in all the details with great interest, committing a plan of the house to memory as she followed Jasper down a long corridor. A large oak door was cracked open at the very end of the hallways, letting a sliver of gaslight illuminate Jasper's face as he hesitated. He reached up and rapped his knuckles against the jamb, three sharp quick raps.
"Come in," A soft accented voice beckoned. Jasper pushed the door open and entered first, Alice following him a few steps behind.
Maria sat behind a cherry desk, studying battle plans in all her curvaceous flesh. Her old-fashioned dress dipped low in the front to show off her ample cleavage, and her feet were bare and dangled above the floor.
"Why Jasper," she cooed. "What have you brought me?" Her eyes narrowed when she saw Alice, saw how he instinctively put himself between the two women, how he protected the newcomer from her without even thinking of it. The small woman was quite pretty, but paled in comparison to Maria herself.
Jasper stepped aside slightly, letting Alice stand closer, so that she could face Maria herself. "A volunteer, ma'am," he said. Alice noticed a hulking newborn in the corner. His baby face combined with his bright red eyes made him look like a mischievous sprite rather than an impossibly strong and deadly creature of the night.
"My name is Alice, ma'am," Alice spoke very politely, keeping her face straight, her breathing even and her stance non-threatening. "I have a gift that I believe could be very useful to your army."
"What sort of gift?" Maria directed this question to Jasper.
"Psychic visions," he told her. "She found me while I hunted and offered her services."
"You'll have to be more careful while you hunt from now on, if any old riff raff can sneak up on you these days," Maria sniffed haughtily, looking Alice up and down. "Please explain your gift to me. I can see immediately that you could be useful, but I must understand how it works."
Alice nodded quickly. "Of course," she said coolly. "It's not a definite glimpse of the future. The future is always changing, never the same twice. There are too many variables involved to make a completely accurate prediction. It's decisions that make the future happen, and I am shown the outcome of a particular decision. I believe I could be very useful for strategizing battles both before and during a fight."
Maria still regarded her coldly. "Have you ever seen war?"
"I spent the last fifteen years in Europe. I have seen many things," Alice admitted quietly.
"Petty human skirmishes! That's nothing like real war, girl. Imagine limbs being torn apart, living creatures burned alive by their own brethren. That is real war."
"And I have seen it," Alice asserted quietly, looking Maria directly in the eyes. "Just because it's human and not vampire does not make it any less destructive. I don't like war, but I have realized over the years the benefit it can have to any individual, if not the masses."
"War profiteering?"
"In a way…" Alice hedged. "I'm more of a mercenary, however I allow my conscience to pick my own causes, not any monetary amount. Money is not an issue. I just need to be doing something with my time. And war happens to be the biggest rush, the biggest payoff. I am no stranger to it, I assure you."
The other woman cocked her head, regarding her intently. "So you have visions. Do they come to you, or must you call them?"
"I can do either. Sometimes they come but usually I search for them."
"May I ask you to look for me?" Alice nodded. Maria searched through her desk drawer and pulled out a paper marked with X's and arrows. "A possible plan of attack against dreadful Maximo's pathetic army. He's not very strong, but he handpicks his newborns so that while they always lose, they take out as much of the opponent's army as possible. I've been battling him for twenty years, and still he won't back down." She gestured for Alice to sit in the leather chair across from the desk. Alice sat stiffly, hearing the leather creak beneath her. Maria pushed the paper over to her and pointed at the different symbols as she explained. "Maximo always has the strongest newborns attack first, taking out as many of my foot soldiers as possible. I have to amass so much new cannon fodder after every battle so that those big oafs won't destroy my smart fighters off the bat. With the war going on, it's hard to keep up. I don't know how he does. After he sends his brawn, he sends his brains as backup, watching for weaknesses in my men as they fight the first wave. I just haven't figured out an easy way to take both waves out in one go. Splitting the army's attention seems to always end in a bloodbath."
Alice regarded the diagram intently, opening her mind and waiting for the familiar fogging that warned her a vision was near. Indeed, she saw her answer. She saw Maria's army, paired in twos, brawn and brain at once, slaughtering dreadful Maximo's army. She opened her eyes to see Maria's waiting face.
"Well?" She asked greedily. Alice explained what she'd seen and Maria grabbed the diagram back, scribbling a few messy notes. "Yes, that just might work…" She mused, impressed. She pushed her chair back and slowly got to her feet, Alice choosing to do the same. She could feel Jasper hovering slightly behind her. The tiny woman circled her a few times, watching both how Alice fidgeted and how Jasper responded to every slight twitch she made.
Maria regarded the other female carefully. In many ways, they were similar. Short of stature and very pale, they both had very dark hair, although Alice's hair was cut short spiky and was colored inky black, while Maria's was fell in smooth chocolaty brown curls down her back. Alice lacked Maria's curves, but her simple clothing couldn't hide her small but supple breasts or her tiny but plump rear. She looked at Jasper, feeling his hidden desire bubbling beneath his pallid skin. Maria knew then what she would do.
"Newcomer," she spoke sharply. Alice looked up at her with wide emotionless eyes. "I would like you to join us, but I confess I cannot be completely trusting of your allegiances. I will ask you to swear full loyalty to me and to my army. You will do everything we ask of you. If you are of no use to us, we will not hesitate to destroy you. With success comes great power, and if you prove yourself to be useful there will be great rewards for you indeed." Maria watched as Alice nodded solemnly. "Do you swear?" Maria asked her.
"I do," Alice replied softly, looking determined, but still quite cold.
Maria nodded then and beckoned Jasper forward. "Jasper, I am going to reward you too for bringing in this tasty find. I must admit that I've grown tired of your attentions in my quarters and that as I'm sure you know, I've found a new lover who is quite adequate." She glanced then at the handsome newborn who'd been snatched from a college football game and winked. Maria turned to Alice and looked her up and down. "She's your type, Major, you have to agree."
Alice's eyes widened almost imperceptibly and she glanced from Jasper to Maria and back all the while trying to suppress any emotion that might betray her.
Turning to Alice, Maria fixed her own cold red eyes on Alice's. "Consider this your test of loyalty, Newcomer. Major, she is yours to keep. I like to keep my soldiers happy and occupied," Maria laughed then, although it wasn't a pleasant laugh at all, but cold and calculating.
Alice looked then at Jasper and saw a flicker of disgust pass over his face, but he nodded and thanked Maria politely. He never even glanced in her direction, staring instead at Maria as they moved on and discussed a few plans for the next evening. When the sun's rays began to peep through the worn curtains, Jasper grasped her hand firmly, bid Maria farewell and pulled her up the grand staircase to his room.
Alice stood awkwardly in the corner, watching him carefully as his tall graceful figure swept through his quarters, picking up papers strewn about and placing them on an old antique desk underneath the window. There was a threadbare couch along one wall and a large dusty bed, obviously unused for decades, against the other wall. Jasper pulled the top blanket off the bed and beat the dust off of it, sending dust sparkling in the air in the weak morning sunshine, still trying to peak through more tattered curtains.
At last satisfied that his quarters were tidy, he looked up at Alice. Alice stood squarely, looking neither submissive nor threatening. She was carefully hiding a bubble of panic rising in her stomach, but her face betrayed nothing.
"Take off your clothes," Jasper ordered softly, firmly.
Alice looked into his dark red eyes, feeling the humming of his body even while she was halfway across the room. She smelled desire. Stepping forward tentatively, she pulled her simple cotton dress up and over her shoulders, revealing first creamy white thighs and then slowly her hips and a dark tuft of hair, then up and over her pale smooth stomach and over her small perky breasts. His eyes took her in greedily.
"Step closer," he beckoned, again his voice soft. Alice complied, stepping into a pool of light from the window. At once, her skin lit up, sending soft sparkles and prisms on the entire room, lighting up Jasper's face in a radiant warmth. Alice could see then just how handsome he could be. Any beauty he had when his face was wrapped in darkness and secrets was nothing compared to now, with her own light illuminating him. Alice took another step forward.
Jasper went to her then, his eyes sweeping her up and down as he lightly placed a hand on her shoulder and ran it down her arm, feeling her smooth skin and entangling his fingers with hers. He pulled her hand up to his mouth and kissed the top of it. Alice still felt wary, until his mouth opened and he swiftly sucked a finger inside, his tongue running along it, heating and wetting her skin with his desire. Alice felt a throb from deep within herself, a soft burning between her legs and above. Unfamiliar and so purely pleasurable, Alice shut it out of her mind swiftly, disconnecting her body from her mind, so that the empath could only feel her body reacting to his touches, rather than her brain's nerves and confusion.
For all her years of training, the Volturi had failed to teach her about mating. She couldn't remember if she'd ever been with anyone when she was human, and she certainly hadn't after her change. She didn't even know entirely what it entailed, only that it was supposed to be a pleasure beyond all other. Demetri hadn't been quiet in his desire to take her as a lover, but she'd always rebuffed him and eventually he had given up.
Jasper dropped her hand then and reached up to stroke her pale cheek, his thumb trailing down her jaw, and then up her chin and against her full lips, urging her to part them. She obliged and he pushed his thumb inside. "Suck," he whispered in her ear. She obliged, gently sucking on him as he teased her tongue. He began to kiss along her neck, his thumb leaving her mouth when she cried out and she felt it reappear on her breast, feeling the cool of her own saliva on his thumb as it danced across her nipple. She'd never felt such electricity.
In a daze, she felt his mouth trail all over her body, trailing down her neck to gently nip at her gaunt collarbone, then down again to her breasts, which fit perfectly in the palm of his hand as he taunted and teased her nipples with his tongue until she felt she was going to die from the pleasure. Down, further down he went until his tongue dipped beneath her soft tuft of hair between her legs and Alice jumped as a wave of something indescribable washed over her, causing every hair on her body to stand on end.
Jasper stood tall then, towering over her tiny form, and began to remove his shirt. "Bend over the bed," he ordered. Alice complied, forcing her legs to work when all they wanted to do was stay rooted to the floor and stare some more at the muscles in Jasper's chest as he removed his clothing. She leaned her elbows on the dusty comforter, the mattress stiff and hard beneath her. She felt an arm snake around her waist and lift her up so that her knees balanced on the edge of the bed. She felt Jasper's hands on her hips, running over her small, fleshy rear, squeezing and then bestowing a sharp smack to her cheek. Alice gasped and looked back at him then, her eyes meeting his. He looked away and down again at her body, as Alice took in his naked form in front of her. He was slim and so tall, but each muscle was defined sharply through his pale, glittering skin. A trail of soft blond hair ran down from his navel to… Alice's eyes opened wide. How was that supposed to fit inside her? Every second became agonizing as she forced herself to suppress her fear. She watched as Jasper touched himself, running his hand along his thick length, before aligning himself with her. Fingers poked and prodded and she could feel something wet dripping from her onto his hand. Then with one great thrust he was buried deeply inside her. Alice felt something give way within her and cried out from the sudden pain of her invasion.
Hearing her cry, Jasper froze. He could feel her hips shaking from the strain and felt a sharp flash of anger and frustration. "You've never done this before?" He asked, his voice stricken. Maria was again forcing him to destroy innocence, what else should he have expected? Alice cringed, her back arching up in the continued pain of being stretched within.
Alice breathed in and out, trying to accustom herself to feeling so full. "No," she gasped finally. His hips still frozen, he pushed her down so that her chest pressed against the comforter with her hips and rear still high in the air.
He waited another minute or so for her to adjust before he continued, somewhat roughly. Alice hid her face in the comforter, feeling his large length slide within her as his hips slapped against her rear. Short, sharp mechanical movements that felt like he was stabbing her, over and over. She closed her eyes, remembering from somewhere (from deep down in her shadowy and blank past?) a phrase, "Lie back and think of England." She exhaled sharply as Jasper rammed into her in one particularly hard jab. Burying her head in her arms, she thought desperately of her one winter spent in England before moving on to Italy in search of the Volturi, a winter spent on the windswept moors of Yorkshire.
As she felt Jasper picking up a steady driving pace, much faster and harder than before, she forced herself to imagine the smell of the peat, the biting cold of the wind, the acrid smell from the peat fires burning in the little cottages on the edge of the moor. She forced herself from the present so fully that she failed to notice the small fire burning in her belly that began to grow and grow until she could not ignore it anymore and she shuddered and cried out, her whole body tingling and thrumming with palpable desire. Jasper momentarily slowed to enable her to catch her breath and stop shaking, before he resumed his furious pace. Alice lay prostrate on the bed, the pain fading until it was just a dull throb overtaken by the errant crackling of pleasurable shivers down her nerves as Jasper drove into her faster and faster. She braced on the mattress as he cried out and collapsed over her, his smooth chest rippling against her back as his hips bucked and grinded into her. She felt herself filled with his warmth and release.
His breathing slowed and he pulled out of her gently, drawing her close to him with an arm wrapped around her heaving stomach. She lay in his arms, stunned and forcibly empty. How she wished he were not an empath so she could just lay in her afterglow and confusing tangle of emotions like any other girl, but the Volturi had taught her that emotions always get in the way of the mission, so perhaps it was really just a blessing in disguise.
She could feel him gently kissing her neck and shoulders, could feel his sharp teeth running along the nape of her neck under they settled where her shoulder started to gently curve into her nape. There, he bit her, not roughly or savagely, but cleanly. It still ached sharply and would certainly scar, but there were no brutality behind it. Jasper pulled back and admired his mark.
He traced it gently with his fingertip, sending a slow shiver down Alice's back. "There," he said. "I have marked you. You are mine." Alice whimpered and curled her knees up to her chest. "Who do you belong to, Newcomer?" He asked her, pulling her toward him, looking at her straight in the eye.
She shivered and met his gaze back. "I belong to you," she whispered, and as he smirked, she felt herself suddenly fall into a vision, cursing that she couldn't keep it out. Her control must be weakened so from the heavy workout that day. The vision curled around her like smoke and showed her on a farm, tilling dark loamy soil in the bright sunlight, not caring who saw her sparkle. A shape came running across the field and stopped short of her. She could feel herself smile as she gazed up at the kind face, marked by scars and held her hand out to him. He took it and then tugged her toward him, lifting her up so that her legs wrapped around his hips. "Mrs. Whitlock, I do believe I'd like to make love to you right here right now," he said, his normally quiet voice a little louder and less shadowed, less hoarse. The vision drifted away before she could see her reaction.
When she opened her eyes and found herself back in the same dusty room, Jasper was already half dressed, hurriedly buttoning his shirt and fastening his suspenders.
"Where are you going?" She asked him, ignoring her own nakedness as she sat up in the sunlight, her sparkling breasts sending prisms all over the room. He came and sat next to her on the bed, nestling his face in her between her soft mounds, placing one kiss directly on her breastbone.
"To plan more with Maria, and then to hunt," he said simply. He stood then and turned toward the door. "You may stay here in my quarters. I think Maria expects you to share the same rooms as all the newborns, but you have pleased me and I wish you to stay here instead."
Jasper took one last glance at Alice before he slipped through the door, leaving her alone and naked and sparkling upon the bed.
He stalked down the hall and collapsed against the wall, holding his head in his hands. Maria had taught him nothing of love and feeling, instead forcing him to hurt and destroy. He hadn't felt emotions of his own in so many years. He'd shared a bed with Maria for decades, with Maria throwing in a few of the most attractive newborns for him to discipline when they misbehaved. He'd felt her tire of him in the past ten years or so and she'd pout and tell him that he used to be great, but now he was a pitiful shell of what he used to be. But she needed him, so keeping him happy was her priority. She couldn't imagine running the army without him. It was possible, but greatly more difficult without the help of his gift.
Jasper thought it was funny that everything he was useful for revolved around emotions, and yet his had run dry. So had Alice's, he mused. He'd never felt another of his kind so empty, so devoid of feeling. He could feel bits and pieces sneaking through when they mated, but nothing discernible, nothing tangible. Not until he made her come. Then he'd felt something beautiful. He didn't know what had brought the tiny vampire to willingly involve herself in such ugliness, for he had never felt emotions so pure. He could feel her unbearable pleasure, her fear (of him, of sex, of her own pleasure), and also a swift flash of shame. It was the shame that crippled him.
He'd become such an old, despicable monster in the time since his change. There was little left of his humanity, but when he'd felt Alice's emotions, something broke within him and it frightened him. Desperate to suppress it, he ignored his meeting with Maria and left to sit in the cool, damp basement until the sun set and he could hunt.