As they approach the area , Rosalie makes some simple calculations to narrow down the original trajectory of the helicopter. She is interrupted when Emmett stills her with a touch. She turns to him and sees his eyes are closed and his nostrils are flaring.
Then he takes off.
Rose follows him.
When he leads her towards the edge of town, she is able to see where they are headed. Slowly, as she filters out the many noises and smells that surround the area and focuses on the wearhouse, she can smell the blood.
People say that sharks can smell a single drop of blood when it falls in the ocean. That might be true if the shark is very close. But a larger amount of blood will certainly expand the area that the smell can travel through.
This is also true of vampires. A woman with a bandaid or tampon will catch the attention of the vampires within a few yards. But a woman who is bleeding out will catch the attention of any vampires within a half mile or so.
Rose could smell the blood in the air. Thick and metallic and sweet. And an undercurrent of a heavy earthy smell, like gravel and sand in the sun.
As close as they were now, with a bit of focus she could hear . . . begging.
"Please. Please. Please. Please, please, please. Please, Mary Mother of-" The woman must have been barely breathing, the sound was so soft.
"Oh Lord God," She whimpered. "Please- I'm trapped- don't deserve this. Please. Help."
Rosalie is old. But every time she hears a woman bleeding and begging she remembers her own last breath. She remembers the feeling of dying. Coldness creeping up her body as she bleed out. The sound of drunken laughter. She freezes. Emmett stomps forward, a little too fast for normal humans.
This isn't fair.
With this much blood in the air, there's nothing she can do. And if she goes in there, even to hold that woman's hand, she will always remember the face of that woman as she dies begging for help.
A vampire's curse, that perfect memory. Maybe worse than the bloodlust.
"Help," the woman's voice grows louder. She pants from the effort. Her last breaths. Slurred words that Rosalie is too good at deciphering. "Please! If not for me then for my son. This is my fault. Not his. He doesn't deserve to die. Please."
Then Rosalie is moving faster than a human could process those words. Emmett is at the side of the wearhouse before her and punching the wall. Three punches, fast enough that they sound like one punch with a weird echo. Head level, and then moving down. Rose moves into the falling wood and plaster as his arm moves aside.
She takes in the situation in a moment. There's the woman. There's the boy, a teenager and the source of the earthy scent that she smelled in the blood. She catches a glimpse of dark hair and tan skin. Both are hurt and bleeding. And there- that could only be a bomb. Well, Emmett had warned her. And then she has the boy in her arms and maneuvers them back through the wall hole.
"Emmett," She barks, to fast and soft to be heard by humans. "Shelter. Now."
She follows her husband, trying to keep the boy stable as she runs. The warehouse explodes. They dodge the flaming debris. She notes that explosives would be very effective way to kill a vampire- all that flame, all at once.
Emmett leads them to another warehouse. It's dark inside, windowless. She finds a spot in it that isn't immediately visible from the front and kneels down. She doesn't let go. Not yet.
There was a time, when Rosalie was young, when she had been Calisile's assistant. A vampire nurse to his vampire doctor. She'd had no passion for the work but she had picked up a great many life saving skills.
"Rose," Emmett said. "Can you save him? Do I need to leave?"
Emmett was hungry. And even well fed, he had difficulty in self control. If she was going to be able to keep this boy alive, she would need Emmett out of the room.
She took a single breath. She could taste the boy's blood in the air. She could smell the pain he was in, a cloying scent with undertones of fear, hidden under the smell of burnt flesh. (She hadn't dogged all of the flames, after all.) She could hear his heart stuttering and feel the blood it pushed out of his body with each beat.
She can't keep him alive.
She'd need blood transfusions immediately and a ready surgery with a doctor who could remove his appendix and fix his spleen, liver, and kidneys while navigating around several broken ribs, any one of which might be shattered. Those bone fragments could cause even more problems. She wasn't able to tell if the area around the heart was bleeding too, but she suspected from the sound of it's stuttering beats that it was. He didn't have enough blood to undergo the surgery. And there were too many open wounds to get blood into him fast enough to be able to perform the surgery. But none of that matters. The hospital is ten miles away and in the middle of a city. She couldn't get there in time. She has no supplies or equipment or even a clean area to perform a surgery here. It's impossible.
"I can't keep him alive," she says, dully.
He has dark hair.
It curls.
His eyes had been blue, when she caught a glimpse of them in the warehouse.
She didn't know his name and he was dying in her arms.
"But you can save him," Emmett says. He has such faith in her.
"I can't keep him alive," She insists.
"But you can save him," Emmett repeats, looking at her intently. His eyes are dark and hungry. Once, before Rose, they had been blue. "His mother asked you to save him."
Rosalie looks at him. She once carried Emmett in her arms, miles and miles with his blood dripping out behind her, just to get him to Carlisle and his vampire venom. She'd been afraid that she would kill him instead of transforming him.
She's still scared.
But she looks down at the small boy, with curls in his dark hair that look just like Emmett's (just like the baby she had dreamed of and never had) and a bloody, ruined face, just like her face was before she died. And she thinks, Maybe I can't save him. Maybe he'll be dead today no matter what.
But-
She leans down and bites.
Human blood is delicious.
