Wow, that was some reaction to chapter one. *swallows nervously* I hope you continue to enjoy. We'll see if you're still with me after this.

arfalcon betas and seriously, she's amazing. I'd have flounced myself by now if not for her.

*0*0*

Jasper and Emmett finally stopped in the middle of a shadowy clearing littered with rotting trees. Neither of them tried to hold onto Edward when he yanked his arms free and charged away to the far side of the clearing. He gripped the wet, lichen-covered tree, his fingers digging so deeply into the bark that huge gouges would be left behind. He pressed his forehead to the trunk, eyes closed. His shoulders heaved as he sucked cold damp air into his empty lungs and forced it back out, trying to clear the burning scent from his head. He could still smell it. He could still taste it on the back of his tongue. It left a cramp of hunger in his stomach that was like nothing he'd ever experienced before. And the burn… God how his throat burned for it.

For a long time, Alice, Emmett and Jasper stood motionless on the far side of the clearing just watching him, tense, waiting for him to make a dash back down the mountain. But Edward didn't try. He didn't move at all.

With a whisper of shifting branches and not a single twig snapped underfoot, Rose arrived. She joined the silent vigil. She wasn't sure what had just happened, but she was astute enough to know it was major and that Edward was in real distress.

Alice was the one to break the silence.

"Edward, what was that? I could smell it through the vision…"

"Stop, Alice," Edward hissed through gritted teeth. Even talking about it would trigger the memory of it, and he was afraid he wouldn't be able to keep himself from going back down there to carry out the horrifying things he'd been imagining for the last hour.

"I think I know," Emmett said at length. Edward caught a flicker of Emmett's memories, ones he usually kept locked up tight. Emmett never felt particularly guilty about the slip, the human he'd killed decades ago. Unlike Edward, he wasn't one to torment himself over something. And to Emmett's thinking, what happened was unavoidable. Once he'd smelled that woman's blood, no part of his conscious mind had anything to do with the events that came next. He was amazed that Edward had the willpower to fight against it at all, never mind manage to resist it entirely. Amazed and impressed.

Nobody but you, brother. No one else could have resisted a singer.

"A what?" Edward asked.

"A singer. That's what that was. Carlisle told me about it. Some of them have blood that some of us just can't resist."

Edward shook his head. "That stuff is just old Romanian legend."

"Happened to me."

Emmett thought about the woman again, unremarkable in every way in her faded dress and sagging apron, her hair in an untidy bun, her face lined by years and hard work. The sheets she was hanging on the line to dry snapped in the wind like sails and they carried her luscious, intoxicating, unearthly scent, straight to Emmett where he stood. The rest was over in less than a minute.

Edward picked up his head and opened his eyes as Emmett's memories played out between them.

"If that's what happened to you back there, it's a miracle you got out at all."

Edward blinked, processing that. It wasn't just an aberration. It wasn't him reacting in an unheard of way to some random human. It was her—that girl and her unique smell, sent straight from hell to damn him further. Which meant that it wasn't a one-time thing. As long as she lived and pumped that blood through her veins, this could happen to him again. It would happen to him again, every time he came near her.

"I have to leave," Edward said, his voice low and ragged.

"What?" Alice startled.

"I need to get out of here. Away from her."

"Edward, come on—"

"I need to get out of here before something awful happens."

"You can handle this, Edward," Alice said as she moved across the clearing towards him. He turned sharply and the look on his face brought her up short.

"Alice, you saw!" he shouted. "You saw what I was about to do. I wasn't imagining it, or wondering about it. I was planning it. Over and over, in all kinds of ways."

"But you didn't do it," Alice pressed.

"Just barely. You have no idea how close it was. If she'd exhaled at the wrong moment, shifted half an inch closer, I would have snapped. And it would have ruined us all."

Emmett rolled his eyes. "C'mon, Edward, that's a little dramatic. It would have been an unfortunate situation, but we'd hardly be ruined." He stretched his arms out at his sides. "Look at us. We don't ruin easily."

Edward narrowed his eyes at him. "Do you have any idea who she is? She's Chief Swan's daughter. The Chief of Police. She's not just some girl."

Emmett threw a salacious smirk at Edward in spite of the gravity of the situation. "You seem to know an awful lot about the new human girl."

Edward looked incredulous. "You've got to be kidding me, Em."

"Emmett," Rosalie said quietly, a gentle reprimand. "Leave him alone. Edward knows best."

Alice rounded on her, eyes wide with disbelief. "Rose! You can't be serious."

"What? It's Edward's call. If he feels it's too dangerous while she's here then maybe he's right."

"But—"

"I'm going, Alice," Edward cut her off. "It's for the best."

"For how long?" Alice would be crying if she still had the ability. She loved all her family, and of course, Jasper was the center of her world, but there was no denying the special connection she had with Edward, the result of their unique and related abilities.

"I don't know," he said honestly. "I just… I need to clear my head first. Then I'll figure it out.

There was a long tense pause while they each thought through the situation and no one said anything. Rose, of course, was the one to break the silence with a practical consideration.

"I'll go get your car."

Edward nodded tightly.

"Should I bring it back to the house?"

"No, I'll meet you out on the 101."

"You're not even going home first, Edward?" Alice said. "You won't say goodbye to Carlisle and Esme?"

Edward flinched at her hurt tone. "It's not forever, Alice. I just need to go. I'll call them and explain. They'll understand."

Truthfully, Edward didn't want to see Carlisle. Carlisle would want to talk. And talk, and talk. He'd be reasoned, analytical, philosophical. And what Edward had just experienced defied reason and all philosophy. Edward had come face to face with his own utter lack of humanity and right now he had no patience for the illusion of it. All the words in all the books in Carlisle's vast library had nothing to say that could make sense of this.

Alice's face was a mask of misery, but she nodded. Edward tossed his car keys in a high arc across the clearing and Rose plucked them out of the air without looking at him or breaking her stride.

"Wait." Jasper's voice—the first word he'd spoken since they got to the clearing—stopped them all. "That was a pretty intense reaction you had, Edward. Are you sure she didn't… notice anything?"

Edward shook his head. "I have no idea. I wasn't exactly in my right mind, if you know what I mean."

Jasper scowled at him. "Well, what was she thinking?"

Edward blinked. "I'm…um…" Their kind were rarely speechless, but Edward suddenly had nothing he could say.

He shook his head, trying desperately to recall what was happening in the fog of his bloodlust. He remembered stray thoughts from the students around him, the usual morass of hormone -addled moping and low-grade academic stress. He fought to remember the girl next to him. Not her blood—her. He could see the swing of her long dark hair obscuring most of her face. He could see the pale curve of her cheek as she rested her chin on her fist. He could see the slope of her narrow shoulders as she leaned over her textbook. He could even remember the dark shadowy sweep of her lowered lashes. But he couldn't remember hearing a single thought in her head.

"I…I couldn't hear her," he muttered.

Jasper narrowed his eyes. "You mean she didn't say anything?"

"No, I mean I couldn't hear her thoughts. There was… nothing."

Jasper's eyebrows shot up in surprise as Emmett whistled through his teeth.

"Well, well, well," Emmett drawled. "This just got a whole lot more interesting."

Rose huffed. "So what? He was pretty distracted. We don't know if she saw anything or if she noticed Edward's freak-out."

Jasper turned to Alice. "Ally? Do you see anything?"

Alice looked away at a blank space between trees and tried to focus on the girl, on Bella Swan. But she didn't know her, and outside of this afternoon's close-call, she had no real connection to any of them. She could see hazy images of the students of Forks High milling around the parking lot at the end of the day, and of Bella leaving the building flanked by Jessica Stanley and Angela Webber. There was nothing more specific than that.

She shook her head. "I can't see much, but nothing big."

Jasper pursed his lips thoughtfully, staring at the ground.

"What are you thinking?" Rose pressed him impatiently.

"Maybe we should eliminate the threat, just to be on the safe side."

"What?" Edward snapped, taking half a dozen fast strides towards Jasper. "No way. I just practically tore myself to pieces to avoid killing the girl. There's no way you're going to go down there and do it anyway for no good reason."

"But if she talks—" Rose began.

"She won't," Alice interjected.

"You're sure?" Rose asked.

"I don't see her talking," Alice said, sounding far more confident than she was. She quickly muddled her mind to keep Edward from seeing exactly how little she really knew. But in this case, for reasons Alice couldn't quite understand, she had faith that she was right. Bella Swan wouldn't say anything to anyone. "Besides, what could she even say? 'Edward Cullen acted weird in class?' That's hardly going to blow our cover."

"Fine," Rose sighed, "I'm going for the car." With scarcely a rustle of leaves, she was gone.

Alice, having spent a lot of time waiting for disconnected puzzle pieces to connect themselves, had developed a fairly healthy respect for the concept of fate. Because in most instances, those puzzle pieces eventually found their place in her pictures of the future. It was just a matter of time until all the disjointed information finally made sense.

This human, Bella Swan, mattered to them in some way. Alice would have to wait to see how.

But for now, the most pressing issue was Edward. Edward leaving. Exactly the thing she'd so feared, in spite of his assurances that it was just temporary.

"Alice…" Edward said in warning, catching the drift of her thoughts.

"I can't help it, Edward. You're already so alone and now you're taking off on your own."

"I'm not alone. I have all of you."

"You know what I mean," Alice said softly, almost voicing what they all worried about. Edward and his utter lack of love. All of his family paired up and happy, content with their partners, and Edward, alone with his piano and his books and his music.

"I'm fine," he said through gritted teeth. He'd been through hell today—the last thing he needed was another family intervention about his lack of steady companionship.

She's just worried, Jasper mused.

You're always so tightly-wound. That was Emmett.

"That's enough!" he roared. The few birds that still lingered in the nearby trees took off with a flutter of wings at the disruption. "I'm going to meet Rose at the highway. I'll…" he trailed off, not at all sure how they were leaving things. "I'll call you soon and let you know where I am."

Alice finally closed the space to him, throwing her arms around his waist. Edward pulled her in close and pressed a kiss to the top of her head. In spite of all the misery of the day and the tension between them, he adored her and always would. She was his sister in every way that really mattered.

"I love you," she whispered into his shirt.

"Love you, too. It'll be okay, Alice. I'll come home soon. I promise."

"You'd better."

"Take care, Edward," Jasper said, coming closer to put his hands on Alice's shoulders, ready to comfort her when Edward left.

"I will."

Then he was gone, another quiet rush of air through the woods.

*0*0*

Edward retrieved his car from Rosalie and he kept driving in the direction it was already pointing—north up Highway 101. His only plan was to get away fast. So he floored the gas and pushed his Volvo to the limits of its mechanical abilities, trying to outrun the horrifying savagery that had momentarily taken him over.

Somewhere in the impenetrable wilderness of British Columbia, he realized he was choosing highways on instinct, heading like a homing pigeon back to the last place the Cullens had lived before Forks—the Denali Wilderness. It seemed as good a destination as any other, and there were friends there, so he pressed on.

Carlisle seemed relieved when Edward called and said he was going back to Denali. Edward could hear his worry through the phone, just like he'd seen Alice's concern. They were all so afraid they were going to lose him. He felt guilty for making them worry, but he was at a loss as to how to reassure them. He always told them he was fine, but was he? Edward was no longer sure.

Carlisle could sense Edward's mental fragility and didn't press for details about what had happened. No doubt Alice had filled him in anyway. He simply promised to clean up the details in Forks and cover Edward's tracks. They left off discussing when and if the family might join Edward. The call concluded with a promise to speak soon.

Edward drove on into the night, increasing his speed once he reached the vast, sparsely-populated expanse of the Yukon Territory. There was no moon and he drove with his unnecessary headlights off, the car windows down. He let the cold night air blow through the car and through his hair, clearing away the confusion.

What happened back in the classroom was a kind of bloodlust unlike anything Edward had ever encountered. It obliterated every other sensation and thought. Even his expansive vampire mind had been overcome. It was only now, hours later, when the last wisps of that scent were finally cleansed from his head, that he was finally able to remember everything that had gone on that afternoon. And his kind were generally incapable of forgetting anything.

Now that he was calmer, he focused on Carlisle's teachings over the years, all the techniques they used to emphasize their human instincts and suppress their animalistic ones. The girl wasn't prey; she was a person—someone with a family and a future. That's what he needed to remember, not the scent of her blood or his fantasies about its taste on his tongue.

To that end, he pushed back into his hazy memories of those moments next to her. He tried to remember everything about her, to make her real and living, a unique individual, and not a meal. He grasped at a memory of her as she first walked into the room, his last coherent thought before he hit the wall of her scent. He forced himself to revisit everything about Bella Swan, pressing it into his memory like a leaf in wet clay, where it would leave its mark and never fade, as if that would make him immune to her. As if anything could.

But nevertheless, he persisted, cataloguing her height and build and her skin, clear and remarkably fair for a human. He focused on her eyes, large and deep brown, and her hair, thick and dark. He thought about her face, the shape of it and the delicate slopes of her bone structure. With a start, he realized that he found her attractive for a human. She was pretty. He hadn't even noticed when he was fantasizing about ripping her throat out.

He felt sick with himself all over again. That pretty, fragile little human girl had almost met her end today, just because she had the bad luck to sit too close to him. Monster.

When he finished retroactively memorizing everything about Bella Swan's appearance, he moved on to the random facts about her he'd inadvertently culled from the thoughts of others all morning. She was the daughter of Charlie Swan, Chief of Police. She'd lived in Forks until she was two and her parents divorced. That had come from the thoughts of Angela Webber. She and her mother had lived in Arizona. He'd picked up that from Michael Newton, along with his commentary that she was awfully pale for an Arizona girl.

After that, he was out of information about her, because maddeningly, inexplicably, he couldn't hear her thoughts. He hadn't even let himself dwell too much on that alarming fact. In a hundred years on earth, he'd never encountered anyone, human or vampire, whose thoughts weren't open to him. Most of the time—nearly all the time— it was a curse and a burden. Then suddenly, this girl's mind was closed to him. This same girl whose scent drove him to the brink of homicide. He was half-convinced that it was all related somehow, or that he'd been driven so mad with bloodlust that he wasn't listening for her thoughts. That had to be it. Because if Bella Swan possessed the one silent mind on earth, in addition to possessing that singular blood…he had no idea what that could mean for either of them.

He wanted to ask Carlisle, but once again, he was reluctant to. Carlisle would deconstruct it and examine it like a thorny scientific experiment. He'd talk through it endlessly, forming hypotheses and looking for answers. And what Edward wanted to do most right now was to put it behind him.

Sometime in the very early morning, Edward finally neared the Denali compound. It was still pitch dark, but being January, it would stay that way for a while, no matter what the hour. They were into the months of endless night up here.

Snow lay heavily, swept up in huge drifts against the house and outbuildings, frosting the trees in thick swags of white. There must have been an epic snowfall to leave that much on the ground, Edward thought as he sunk up to his knees stepping out of the car.

But the bad weather had blown through and the night was now clear and dry. The air was almost brittle with cold, although Edward scarcely felt it. He stopped next to his car, listening to the engine tick as it cooled. It was the only sound he could hear for miles out here.

Well, that plus the thoughts.

They weren't loud—at least not yet. They were also studiously scrambled, so Tanya must have known it was him. Maybe Alice or Carlisle called ahead to warn her.

Katerina and Irina are out hunting with Carmen and Eleazar. Her thought floated to him through the night by way of greeting. So much the better, Edward thought. Fewer minds to listen to right now.

The front door of the Denali coven home opened and an elongated rectangle of gold light stretched across the snow towards him. Tanya waited in the doorway for him to acknowledge her. He smiled faintly in her direction and he could see the bright flash of her white teeth in the dark. Her thoughts, so calm and carefully controlled, flared up bright and ecstatic for just a second. He could feel a flicker of her thrill at seeing him for a moment before she shut it down and schooled herself back under control.

"Hi, Edward," she said out loud.

"Tanya." He took a few steps towards her through the snow. "I'm sorry to show up unannounced."

"You never need an invitation here, Edward. You know that," she chided gently. "And besides, Alice called and told us you were coming."

"Ah." He gave a rueful smile, imagining that conversation.

"She says there's trouble."

Edward cocked his head to the side, looking up absently at the sky, remembering his long, fraught afternoon and the girl he nearly killed. "Trouble?" Is that what this was? He shrugged. "Perhaps. I just needed a little space to think."

Tanya moved out of the doorway and towards him. She met him at the front of his car, stopping to smile up at him.

"You look out of sorts," she said, mildly accusing.

"I am out of sorts. The fact that I just drove twelve straight hours to get here says so."

She spent just one more moment examining his face, her eyes taking in every detail despite the blanketing dark. Then she slid a hand around his elbow.

"Come take a walk with me. It's a nice night."

Edward allowed her to tug him across the wide snowy expanse stretching away from the house and towards the woods.

Tanya was right—it was a nice night. Bitterly cold and cloudless. The air was sharp and startlingly clear. Small, intermittent fluttering breezes kicked up the frozen powdery snow on the surface of the pack, making little crystalline eddies of white. This far north, there was hardly a whiff of humanity to disturb them. No car exhaust or fast food or pulsing blood. Just the wind and the trees and the animals who were smart enough to keep their distance.

Tanya fell back abruptly into a snow bank, heedless of the cold and wet, which she didn't really feel anyway. Edward lowered himself to her side with a sigh.

"So tell me all about it," she said.

Edward leaned forward, resting his forearms on his knees, examining the snow between his feet, his flawless vision noting the tiny differences between every flake. Tanya looked at the elegant curve of his spine and the lovely broad expanse of his shoulders and sang old Russian lullabies to herself so he wouldn't hear her admiration and become uncomfortable.

"Just…" Edward began, "I almost slipped up today. I was seconds from doing it."

"That's it? We've all slipped up, Edward. Well, except for Carlisle and Rosalie. Some of us lived that way for centuries. You lived that way once. Why all this misery?"

"I don't know. It feels different now. We live alongside them, looking exactly like they do—"

Tanya gave a small huff of laughter. "Pardon me for saying so, but none of us look exactly like they do. We're lucky that humans choose not to ask questions they know they won't be able to satisfactorily answer."

"You know what I mean. They believe we're human because we want them to. They trust us."

"So?"

"So… should they? Is it fair of us to live so close to them when at any moment we could slip up and one of them dies? It feels dishonest of us."

"Any one of them could be hit by a bus, too. None of them is guaranteed safety in this world."

"They know about those risks, though. Bella Swan thought she was going to Biology class. Little did she know that her life almost ended because she had the bad luck to sit down next to me. She thought I was an ordinary high school boy, not an unstoppable killer."

Tanya felt an irrational flutter of jealousy when Edward said her name. There was no reason for it. She was only some human girl—a child, really—that Edward thought of as little more than food. Still, hearing him say any other woman's name, even in distress, reminded her of how infrequently he'd ever said hers. She feared this nearly-dead human girl had already held his attention longer than she ever had, never mind the reason for it.

"Well, you know how I feel about it," she said brusquely. "There's a reason we live up here. I like the cities well enough for a while, but it's uncomfortable to live so close to them for long periods. I don't like hiding what I am all the time."

Edward threw her a fond little half-smile over his shoulder that would have made her pulse race if she still had one. "No, you've never shied away from your true nature, have you?"

"Maybe that's the problem, Edward."

"What is?"

"All this repression. Maybe it's not for you."

"If you're suggesting that I go back to hunting humans—" Edward bristled.

"Of course not. None of us approves of that as a choice, you know that. I meant the rest. Living among them, pretending all the time… Maybe you'd be happier at a distance, like us. Besides," she continued with a shrug, "It can't be easy for you living around the other Cullens all the time."

"Why would you say that?"

Tanya met his eyes for a second. "They're all together. Happy. And you're—"

Edward closed his eyes and sighed. "Not," he finished for her.

Tanya felt truly sorry for him. She was keeping her full thoughts hazy and discreetly concealed from him, but he could pick up on enough to know that. It wasn't pity, either.

And then it was there, one thought sailing through clearly, like an arrow.

I wish I was an option for you. I wish I could make you happy.

His eyes flew open. Her bright eyes were locked on his face. Her face was placid, but open and artless. Not over-eager or pressuring, just wistful. As he stared back at her, the corner of her mouth lifted in a small, encouraging smile.

Just try, Edward.

He swallowed unnecessarily, but couldn't bring himself to look away.

You're unhappy. You've tried it their way, now try a new way. Stay here with us.

Tanya's eyes finally shifted, her lashes dipping slightly. Stay with me. Let me try.

There was no moon out, but the sky was illuminated by the aurora borealis, glowing and snaking silently over their heads. She had her head tilted back, the dark gold of her hair tumbling down her back, the Northern lights glinting off of her smooth, perfect pale skin.

She was so beautiful. All of their kind were, but Edward suspected that Tanya had been stunning even when she was human. She'd been his friend for decades, always there for him through the long, unchanging years. She wanted him. She always had and he knew it, but she'd never pushed him or made him feel uncomfortable about it. He'd simply heard her thoughts now and then. He'd never commented on it, knowing she'd probably prefer him not to know, since he didn't reciprocate her feelings.

But did he? Could he? There was nothing overtly stirring in his chest, at least nothing that made him think this would be anything like what his siblings had. But did it have to be? Was it always all or nothing? Was there sometimes just "enough"?

Could Tanya be "enough" for him? Could she fill the vast empty holes in his life and make his eternity worth enduring? Could she be a friend? A companion?

A lover?

There was nothing in his own head that would give him any answers. He was lost. All he could hear was Tanya's desire. She wanted him. Could he stay here with her and forge his own new happiness, away from his family of cozy pairs, away from the crush of human life he was eternally shut out of?

Suddenly he wanted it to be enough. He wanted this to be his answer: the cold and the night and the vast quiet wilderness and Tanya.

Edward still said nothing. He didn't know what to say. He was too uncertain to give it voice, to definitively say "yes." So he held his tongue. But he also held still—perfectly still—as Tanya leaned in close to him.

He focused on the soft curl of her hair against her cheek, and on the glow of the aurora borealis on her forehead and the tip of her nose. And then she kissed him and he focused on that, singularly. And he kissed her back.

Maybe this could be enough.

*0*0*

"Oh."

Alice had been standing at the glass wall in the living room of the house in Forks for hours. She'd watched the winter sun set between the trees and she continued to watch even when darkness obscured nearly everything outside.

She watched because she wasn't seeing glass and woods and sky. She was seeing puzzle pieces, flashing, focusing in sharp only to fade away, endlessly moving and re-orienting themselves.

The dark-haired girl, who'd turned out to be Bella Swan, had faded in Alice's visions all day until now her future was just as hazy as any other Forks High student. She couldn't help but feel slightly frustrated at that, although she couldn't say why.

The visions of Edward, though—in the dark and in the snow—grew clearer and clearer.

Then there was Tanya, and the aurora borealis and her beautiful hair and Edward so close to her and then…

"Oh."

"Alice?" Jasper was hovering just behind her, feeling the tremors in his wife's mood, her confusion, anxiety, and now her sadness.

"We've lost him," Alice said.

"Who? Edward?"

Alice nodded, still not seeing the dark forest in front of her. Instead she saw the cold, dark night and snow and Tanya curling around Edward, his fingers tangling in her hair.

"He's not coming home," she said, missing him already.

She felt worn out from watching her visions all day, but it didn't matter, because the frantic scrambling in her brain had finally stopped. For better or worse, the pieces finally fit.

*0*0*

A/N: I will try, when time permits, to reply to at least some reviews. I really do like to, but my real life is crazy-busy right now and will get MUCH busier over the next few months. It's a good thing I've almost finished writing this, because otherwise I'd be in trouble. Anyway, just know that I read and appreciate every single review I get, even if I don't have the time to say thank you to each and every one of you.