A/N: This one's been banging around in my head (and Google Docs) for a long time. I thought I'd finally give in and break my posting cherry. I'd love to hear your thoughts.
September, 2006
Outside of Laredo, Texas
He watched as tiny vapors of morning dew spun off the thorny, foul-smelling plant he crouched beside, twisting in the breeze for a moment before becoming invisible. The sun was well into its slow creep up the eastern slope, turning the rough soil pink. Soon he would be hot to the touch. He wondered, idly, if he would ever catch up with the 110 billion people who had come before him, naming and classifying in their native tongues. There was a time when the challenge might have been compelling. He had been a godforsaken fool then, and for all he knew, he still was. He didn't trust himself to do sensible things anymore.
The adoration in her eyes as she'd looked at him, moments before her undoing, sprang unbidden into mind. For the briefest of intervals, he thought he had finally bested his grief. And then something in his gut twisted, and he pulled in on himself, cursing his body's daily betrayal.
It wasn't supposed to be like this.
Edward did not just pride reason; he lived by reason. How else to restrain the thing within him? He had constructed himself over the past eighty years; a cultured sophisticate with crisp words and practiced mannerisms, forcing strained grimaces onto a mouth that wanted nothing more than to bloody itself in soft, clean, sweet flesh. And now, the mind he had conquered betrayed him. God damn that girl. God damn himself for wanting to save her.
Bella.
Her name slipped through his careful mental defenses, and he was undone. At war with himself. She was no more a 'girl' than she was a collection of atoms and air. She was Bella.
How she would look in this light. Fair, rosy. He had watched her undress once, unseen in the recesses of the forest. A casual change of her shirt, and his granite hippocampus captured her for eternity. The soft irregular goosebumps scattered across her ivory flesh, the tiny mole hiding beneath her left breast, the delicate buds of her nipples.
He picked up a pebble and threw it. Vowed to spend the rest of the day mentally arranging Schoenberg. But which piece? Pelleas und Melisande, the first, miserable opus. Of course, it was the softer Pelleas Et Melisande that launched itself into his mind, meandering skillfully into the simple soundtrack of their love. His fingers twitched to play the opening chords. He wanted to howl, biting his lips to keep them quiet. Must everything come back to her?
He counted 6,044 pebbles. Spent two hours watching a snake digest a lizard. Counted back the days to her birth, and determined she was born on a Sunday. To save him. He was in Massachusetts at the time, reading that morning and in a gross anatomy lab in the afternoon. They'd located the inferior mesenteric artery.
The sun rose and the day dragged on. Over and over he left and returned to himself, losing sense of space and place, but always coming back to her. He knew from stories that immortality would eventually strip him of his sense of time until he did not know minutes from years, everything warping and shrinking until he was no more linear than a character in a Pynchon novel. But he thought she would always be his guide, leading him along the cracked and fading rubber band.
Eventually he felt the force of the midday sun bearing down on his hood-covered head. He imagined he felt photons zinging through his impermeable skin, chastising him for becoming complacent in hidden northern forests. This country was hardscrabble, rough even to him, and he knew nothing of it. Ah, the arrogance born of immortality; to think he'd once thought he'd had a measure of control in the spinning chaos that surrounded him. The soft ministrations of a girl - no, a woman, his mind corrected - sending him spinning, a wheel off its axle, and now he had wobbled to a stop in a desolate Texas valley.
A hard gust of wind came up over the long, sloping headplain before him and threatened to knock the brown hood back off his head. He shifted to catch it. It would not do to let the cloth fall; in this sun his skin would become a beacon. He tasted the air and smelled a human several miles off, mixed with the slightly stagnant smell of the river. Sour venom filled his mouth, but he did not flinch; he had smelled them off and on as he sat in the brush for a fortnight. They came slowly up from the river valley, hiding in hard clay gulches and thick stands of desert shrubbery. He could smell their fear when they came close, and he did not know if it was for the border agents or the thing they sensed somewhere beyond their sphere of vision, cloaked under cover of night. Their thoughts were quiet, instinctual utterances. Thirst. A rush of adrenalin at the stir of the bird in the brush. A strain to hear the sound of thorns scraping metal, tires grumbling over the desert soil. Occasionally, hope, and the thought of comforting meals, the smiles of welcoming relatives.
Mostly, he waited. Listening for the sound of her mind.
He had been tracking Victoria on foot for a year. She'd first headed north, making multiple attempts to double back to the western coast, but he thwarted each. Eventually she came down through the middle of the country, keeping to isolated stretches of the Dakotas and eastern Nebraska. He learned to keep his distance, noting that her ability to evade him seemed to increase with proximity. Like most vampires, she stuck to cash and tended to move at night. She also seemed to be avoiding towns and major roads, taking victims only sparingly.
He'd been close once, in southern Nebraska. Alice called during a howling windstorm and said she'd seen a sign - Victoria Springs State Recreation Area. He'd raced south and finally caught her mind, trailing her in the Volvo until the path went cold in the empty fields of the southwest corner of the state.
She was stronger than him now, having fed twice in the past month. A young oil worker outside of Midland, and a trucker west of San Angelo. All he'd had since leaving Washington were a couple of scrawny antelope he'd found along the Texas border.
Now they played a cat and mouse game between each other and the ever present border agents.
The sun began to set, and still he waited. She would come. He was sure of it. Alice had seen her just yesterday, somewhere near the ridge that jutted up to his north. He'd traversed back and forth for miles across the border, taking pictures with his phone and sending them to her for comparison. It was absurd, but he had no other leads and nothing better to do. Alice's vision hadn't changed for a fortnight. He'd been sitting by the bush for three days; he could wait another month if he needed to. Months, even.