Hi Folks! I apologize for the wait. I had planned to update Friday/Saturday but my plans were thwarted but here's a long chapter to make up for it. :) Thanks to my new beta Aegis Trickster for looking at this for me. Any mistakes are mine. I changed a thing or two and I'm my own worse critic sometimes.
Dont own. Just playing in her sandbox.
Chapter 1
BPOV
Running was my favorite thing to do these days. It was the only thing that calmed me down enough to keep my focus, not that I had much to focus on anymore. The feel of the wind in my hair and caressing across my skin always relaxed me. Helped me think. The sky was a beautiful baby blue and every few minutes the sun would peek out from behind some clouds. I don't really remember what the warmth of it felt like and in some ways I missed it but in others I didn't.
I sighed.
More things I didn't want to think about, didn't want to dwell on. It was bad for me to do so. I'd lose my temper. And that wouldn't be good for anything within a five-mile radius. I learned that the hard way. My skin sparkled when the sun peeked out again. I looked at my hands as I ran, my vampire senses allowing me to concentrate on more than one thing at a time. They were the same as always, small and dainty. They sparkled like diamonds, light refracting off my skin into a plethora of rainbows.
I stopped running. The air settled around me. I took a deep breath and noticed the thirty different types of trees around me, the bugs under my feet, the family of bunnies just behind me and a million different other things. I could name them all but that'd take forever, something I had but could hardly see the pleasure in. Then, I smelled something else... something delicious.
I took off to the west, bursting through some foliage to see a few elk grazing by a small stream. They hadn't noticed me yet, which was good because I didn't feel like chasing after my food today. I took a few steps forward and pounced, wrapping my legs around the largest and clamping my teeth in its neck. The hot blood extinguished the fire in my throat only minimally. I took down three more and felt much better. Relieving the burn in my throat always served to make me feel better even when I didn't know I wasn't feeling good.
I brushed invisible dirt off my white dress and stood from where I was perched on a branch of a hundred-foot tall oak tree. I flipped and landed lightly on the balls of my feet on the ground. I grinned to myself. I was never a fan of heights before I was forced into this life and now I can't seem to keep myself on the ground.
"Bella."
His voice was soft, as if he was right in front of me even though we were two and half miles apart. I straightened up and ran back to our cottage. I was there in less than a minute. I opened the door and found Emmett shirtless, sprawled across the wooden floor looking at apartment magazines.
"Yes?" I answered him.
"Are we moving again?"
I sighed and shrugged my shoulders as I sat cross-legged next to him.
"I think we should. I mean we don't do much of anything here and it's getting close to the summer time. That means campers, hikers, hunters and the like. We don't want a repeat of five years ago."
Emmett nodded.
Five years ago, Em and I were out hunting and we happened across three hikers who thought they'd died and gone to heaven when they spotted me. I hadn't been paying attention to my surroundings, which was completely stupid on my part, and wasn't able to hide before they saw me. They had cameras, managed to snap a picture of me and said no one would believe what they saw if they didn't have proof. I ran before I could do any more damage and the men gave up and left when they couldn't find after an hour or two. We let it play out for a few days and laid low but unfortunately they came back with company, hunting for me. We devised a plan to scare them one evening at their campsite but problems arose when they got a little too drunk and one man tripped and fell into their fire. He died before the other men could get him out and they scattered, a few finding our house in the woods. Em followed them and knocked them out before they could discover anything and I rounded the others up, knocking them as well and left them close to a road where they'd been seen and picked up in less than and hour. Emmett did some digging a few days and found that the men tried to report what they saw but because they were so intoxicated no one believed them. Em had also destroyed the pictures. We even sent an anonymous donation the man's family who died. Needless to say, we left soon after, destroying any and all evidence of our presence.
"So where do we go this time?" he asked bringing me out of my past musings.
"Well, I visited the local library today and found a few places. Seattle, Washington came up as well as a few other places but not too far from Seattle was a little town called Forks. It's small and it rarely has sunny days so we could stay there longer."
He hummed. "But what about people and hunting?"
"It's a woodsy town with plenty of wildlife and space. We could hunt without fear of being discovered and since the population is so small we won't have to worry about being found. Well, as long as we stay off trials and such. We could probably even go as far as Canada."
He thought for a minute and then grinned.
"Sounds like a plan."
I laughed. "Yes, my dear brother, it does."
His joy and euphoria washed through me. I breathed deeply and smiled. He was always so happy and carefree. He was hardly ever worried about anything. Sometimes I was jealous and other times I was grateful. He's been my anchor for some, or most, of the extremely hard times.
I watched him as he grabbed another magazine, one full of jokes and start laughing when he thought some were funny and frowning when they weren't. I let my eyes lose focus and watched the air shimmer around him, watched the bright white color with a faint trace of red around the edges that always puzzled me pulsate from his head to his toes.
My power was quite unique and took me a long time to understand, figure out, and use. It was hard and taxing, which was saying something since vampires do not get tired.
Emmett punched me in the leg, snapping me out of my day dreaming once again.
"You okay, B?"
I nodded and challenged him to a wrestling match since a thunderstorm was coming on. He grinned and hopped up and raced me out to the woods.
Within the next week we would be in our new home and new things would await us there.
~EoU~
It took us longer than a week to find a place to live. I was getting frustrated and a little worried because people were getting closer to our cottage (it was supposed to be empty and abandoned but we sort of fixed it up) and soon we'd be found out.
Finally, we found something and just in the knick of time. A hunting party was closing in and that wouldn't bode well for anyone. The house was out of the way and quite hidden from prying eyes but you could still reach it if you knew where the turnoff was. After living in the forest for a few years we needed to clean up and join with society again. We washed up in the nearest stream along with our clothes, demolished our small cottage, packed what little we had and ran to the closest city, which was Denver. From there, we took a plane to Seattle. We visited a car dealership and bought a jeep because Emmett had always wanted one and we needed some way to get to Forks. We bought a couple laptops from an Apple store and went on our way. It took about two hours to get to the house.
"Wow," Em whistled.
The house was huge and white with a wrap around porch. It reminded me of the homes the 'royal', rich upperclassmen folk, had in the suburbs in old Paris when I was growing up. It didn't have a garage yet but I suspected Emmett would be adding that on in no time. He was bred to be a carpenter in his time. We parked the Jeep, grabbed our bags and headed in. We had the realtor deliver the keys to a P.O. box to prevent any more delays.
The first floor had the living room to the right and the dining room and kitchen to the left. In front of the front door were the stairs and behind those was the den. The second floor had four bedrooms and two bathrooms, evenly placed on either side of the stairs. The bedrooms were spacious and connected by a door like some hotel suites. Assorted closets and windows filled in some other areas. The third floor held a wide, open area of space, which I thought I'd turn into a library, get my books out of storage. There were two bedrooms on the opposite end of the stairs from the library and I had picked one of those.
Em had chosen the left side of the stairs on the second as his room. The right side we were going to leave empty for the time being. I'm not sure why we picked such a big house but something just felt right about it.
Prior to our arrival we had furniture bought, delivered and set up. In the dining room we had a table and four chairs mostly just for props and the kitchen was left alone. We furnished the living room with a couch and two love seats and a huge flat screen and a few gaming systems (because Emmett just had to have his toys). I rolled my eyes at him and just laughed when had that set up. Our bedrooms contained a king sized bed, two large dressers, and a modern desk and chair set in a corner near a window. We were having some other essentials like towels, shower curtain, window curtains and such delivered shortly.
After a few weeks and a few forged documents, I found a job at a bookstore in Port Angeles, a small town bigger than Forks but smaller than Seattle, only an hour away. We took a short trip to Seattle to get myself a car because I refused to drive Em's behemoth of a jeep to work everyday. I got a jeep as well, but a much more modest sized one.
Sue Clearwater was the owner of the bookstore and she was very nice. Her son, Seth, had to be one of the kindest people I had ever met in all my years. Sue told me that she thinks he has a crush on me after about a month of working there. I laughed and waved her off.
Her daughter, Leah, hated my guts for some reason. Whenever she was around, she tried her hardest to make my life miserable. I asked her, once, what her problem was and she responded with a 'Fuck off, Bitch!'. It made me angry and I laughed to myself when I realized she didn't know I could snap her neck with one finger.
One time, I let my eyes lose focus as I stared at her and Seth while they stocked the shelves with a few new releases. The air around them was in complete contrast to each other. The air around Seth was white and I could sense a kind of peacefulness and calm, almost like Emmett's and knew that when those two met they'd be friends for a while. The only difference between those two was the color around the edges; Emmett's was red while Seth's was light blue. This added to my confusion even more. I filed it away for more thought later. The air around Leah, however, was dark red, an angry red with black around the edges. It made me wonder what she went through to get that color and to have that much hatred and rage and sorrow around her for her to be so mean and nasty. What did I do to her?
I told Emmett about this and he said he wanted to meet Seth and that Leah was either heartbroken or someone died that was really close to her. I joked with him, asking him when he had become such a genius. He grinned and flipped me off, stating that he did have brain cells. I knew this, of course; it was just so easy to mess with him sometimes.
Turns out he was right, about both things.
Sue told me their father, her husband, had died of a heart attack just six month ago and her high school sweetheart left her…for her cousin.
Talk about pain.
I left her alone after that but she was still horrible. I vowed to figure out how to make her life better if I could.
Emmett, after much laziness, got a job at the docks in Port Angeles, loading and unloading cargo ships. He rather liked it because he could lift heavy things like it was a piece of paper and not many people would say anything because, well, he was huge.
The money we made went to savings or stocks. We didn't have much use for it, in fact, we didn't have much need to work, but we wanted to do something. Being civilized did require some sort of social interaction. We didn't mind so much either way. It gave us something to do other than sitting around and twiddling our thumbs. The money? Well, years and years of saving could come handy, I should know. I managed to take all the money I had out of the banks two years prior to the Great Depression (Emmett had a thing for numbers and I had gotten lucky because he had only been with me for about ten years otherwise I probably would've lost a good chunk of money) and since then, I earned to stockpile. I had money in places even Emmett didn't know about but that was just in case something happened to me. I wanted him to be okay without me.
Overall things had been going good for us in Forks. We kept ourselves busy, hunted every two weeks or so, and lived comfortably.
It wasn't long, though, before I started to get the feeling that something bad was about to happen…
For those of you reading Language of Love, it will be updated tonight. For those of you not reading it, read it. Please. It brings me happiness.
Next update: Sunday
R4L
