*strikes the band*
Here it is... the sequel...
I am not promising constant updates, as I am still knee deep in La Lune Bleu, my Bella/Alice fic. I should actually get to work on that update next...
The poll is now closed, and the winning poll will be announced at the end of this chapter. Thank you for voting, and thank you for your support of this fic.
Disclaimer: S. M. is the owner. I just twisted it a little.
AndiePOV:
I knew she had a vision as soon as she stiffened in my arms as we lie together in the mountainous woodlands in which she had chosen to hide, watching the star appear in the twilit sky together after hours of making love: on the forest floor, in the tree tops, against boulders, under the water in the basin lake... We had left our mark all over this place.
Her head was on my chest and I was running my fingertips up and down her exposed side, tracing the curve of her hip over and over while she purred contentedly in my embrace, until the purr cut off and she went rigid. I continued to hold her patiently, waiting for her to come back to me, nestling my face into her dark locks, inhaling her scent, and exhaling my own into her hair, staking a physical claim on her. Mine.
When her muscles loosened back into liquid finesse against me, she turned her ocher eyes to me and I saw fear in them, and I snarled in reflex. "What did you see?" I asked her, trying to keep my tone soft and even, though everything in me wanted to go into protective tracker mode to tear the offender to pieces. No one upsets my mate and gets away with it.
"You... giving Aro your hand," she said quietly, and my brow furrowed. Why would I do that? "You were saving us all," she answered my unspoken question. "He is not going to be happy to hear that Kalilah has chosen to stay here, regardless of whatever her reasoning."
"He's going to feel threatened?" I asked her, and she nodded, lying her head back down on my chest, lying her hand over the place where my heart once beat, but now lay dead and cold in its cavity; it remained her possession, regardless of its lifeless state.
"You'll prove to him that vampires have souls... I wonder of he and his ilk have them, too?" she pondered aloud, and I sighed, shifting so that we were both on our sides, facing each other.
"I imagine that they do," I said softly, uncertain, but basing my guess on the fact that every life form I had encountered possessed a soul, even the animals that sustained our appetites. True, the color conformed to a species, as the cougars and mountain lions I so favored shared a similar color of yellow, and deer were all a golden brown. I had a hunch that it was more their instinct, and their natures, rather than an actual soul, as a human or immortal housed. "Did you see how he reacted after he'd touched my hand?" I asked her, and she shook her head.
"No, it ended as soon as you held your hand out to him," she whispered, reaching up to touch my face, and I turned my lips to kiss her palm. "We should get back soon, so I can tell the others, and see how Carlisle wants to handle this... We need a family meeting and a conference call to England."
"Kiss me first? Before we get back and Emmett smells us all over each other?" I requested, and she smirked her sexy little smirk, giving me what I asked for and more as she invaded all my senses and ravaged me from the inside out with the intensity of her lips.
About four miles away from the house, I smelled the strong scent of a wet dog covered in urine, with feet caked in swamp slime, but mixed with a pleasant aroma of daisies in the summer time. In short, I smelled Leah and Kalilah close to the vicinity, and Alice locked eyes with me, both of us grinning. Payback was such a bitch, especially in times like now, when there were more pressing matters than the little ball of orgasm that I was positive was building in one or the other's stomach. I knew that they were having sex not far from where my mate and I stood. I closed my eyes and searched out the cornflower blue soul-line in my Sight that belonged to the ancient vampire, which was woven together with the burnt orange soul-line that told me Leah was ended physically connected to her right now. I did not run, I actually slunk down into a hunter's crouch, poised on my toes and the tips of my fingers as I followed the line, which thrummed in its completion not long after I'd began tracking them, though my ears had picked up the pants and moans several football fields back from where they were lodged in a shallow cave.
"So warm..." I heard Leah say, and Alice and I looked at each other, both of us surprised. A vampire? Warm, to Leah's fiery temperature that would fry a normal human's brain? A vampire was warm?
"Only for you," the words were whispered back. "My fire simmers only for you, my bold, brave wolf." A whimper followed Kalilah's declaration, and I shook myself into reality, because to be honest, the sounds of their mating was making thoughts about the beautiful girl next to me turn to the more dirty side of my imagination.
"AHEM!" I cleared my throat loudly, needlessly and obnoxiously. I heard two simultaneous gasps, before I heard Leah swear fluently, and then she came stomping from the cave, not bothering to cover her long, dark body reeking of arousal and sex.
"You ticks better have a good goddamn reason, that's all I am going to say," she snapped, glowering at me, then Alice.
We both gave her sweet smiles. "Was it a good goddamn reason that day you busted up my first time with my mate as equals? Hmm?" I said, sweet as human blood smells, and Leah growled.
"Okay, fine, ha fucking ha, you got me back. Now kick rocks!"
I rolled my eyes, and Alice snickered behind her hand. "As much as it pains me to say so, we actually have a reason for this interruption. Alice had a vision, and it concerns your mate. Do you care to join us at the main house shortly?" I asked her, watching her face turn red with conflicting emotions; Leah looked torn between the want for information, and going back in there to make her mate see stars.
"Let's go to the house, my wolf," Kalilah said as she came out of the cave, modestly pulling Leah's long shirt around her body. "I want to hear about this vision young Alice had."
"Fine," Leah sighed back to Kalilah, giving her a tiny wave as she turned and phased to wolf, taking off for the house without even waiting on Kalilah to join her.
"How inconsiderate," I murmured to Alice, who gave a little shrug as Kalilah spoke softly from our other side.
"She still struggles with... things being what they are. She is very young, very volatile, but there is a sweetness that underlies all the anger on the surface. I am tapping into her slowly, she is beginning to trust me with herself," she said quietly, reflectively, and in that softly blunt way she generally used to speak. Her black eyes told us she needed to feed, which I am sure was an after-effect of her love-making that we had interrupted, and now those eyes shifted from myself to my mate next to me.
"What is this that you saw?" she asked, and Alice brought her eyes to meet the ancient vampire's, regret evident in the golden hues.
"Aro is about to find out your whereabouts somehow, and he isn't going to like it. It looks like it is going to result in him seeing exactly what Andie's abilities are. This isn't good." Alice's mouth hung open for a second as if she wanted to say something else, but she closed it, and shook her head firmly. Looking back at me with a blazing look in shining ebony eyes, she gripped my wrist so hard it almost hurt though I was not yet out of my newborn year.
"Alice?" I said, giving her a look of concern, barely noticing as Kalilah left us be in the forest, following her mate to the house.
"He won't have you!" she snarled, and I pulled her into my body, holding her tight against me, trying to calm her down before rejoined the gathering of people waiting for us.
I held her as the growls ripped through her and her nose sniffed around my neck her lips pressing against the flesh in its wake, and I swallowed the purrs of consent that fought to rip free of my larynx. When I felt a light scraping of her teeth against my long-still pulse point, a ghost of that last human sensation floated over me, and I couldn't help but moan at the memory. Alice made a noise of satisfaction into the side of my neck, then where her lips rested she opened her mouth and let her tongue trace across the surface, sucking against it as her mouth closed the sensual kiss. But it was what happened next that caught me off guard.
As I began to reciprocate her actions, she opened her mouth against my neck again, only this time I felt the press of her teeth getting a grip, as if she were planning to tear into me enough to harm me. My instincts sharpened to a fine point, and I stiffened around her, making her pause in what I am sure was going to be her biting me... and I do not mean a nip, a teasing bite. Alice was setting up for a kill.
We remained motionless for a solid ten minutes, Alice in my arms with her teeth against my neck, while both of us fought with ourselves, just so we did not clash. When I had enough control to allow myself movement, I gently shifted away from her and took in her demeanor, which looked ashamed. "What was that?" I said to her in a whisper so low no human could have heard.
"I... I was going to mark you," she said, and the expression on her face told me that if she could have blushed, her face would be dark red. "I shouldn't have– I'm sorry."
"You were going to bite me," I stated flatly, and she nodded.
"It shouldn't be done on impulse, it should be a conscious effort between both immortals. I wanted to wait until our wedding night," she added shyly.
"I felt threatened," I admitted, stepping away from her, but she reached out and pulled me back to her.
"I know, I'm sorry," she implored, an earnest light shining behind her eyes, the lilac soul shimmering in the moonlight. She reached up and touched my face, and my eyes slid shut at the contact. "But the instinct nearly overtook me. I hate the thought of Aro trying to claim you as his own, and I know that is what will happen, unless we figure out some way to avoid it, find a way to dodge his reasoning..."
I kissed her to stop the rest of her worries from voicing themselves, holding her close to feel her completely flush with my body. There was no way this Aro would be able to pull me from my forever's side. Alice was a part of me, a vital part to my survival, one that I missed deeply when we were merely playing our Hide and Seek games, the very compulsion to find her as fast as possible. I loved everything about this astounding woman in my arms.
"The others are waiting on us, we should go," I whispered against her lips a minute later, and she nodded, stepping back, but not releasing my hand.
"AGAIN?"
I couldn't help but wince at Rosalie's snarl, and I saw Alice flinch in my peripheral. I swallowed the surge of anger that rose in me at the sight, and just stood silently beside Alice as we shared with our siblings what she had encountered in her last vision.
Emmett slid an arm around her waist, pulling her into himself, but she shoved away from him angrily, eyes still on Alice, then they flickered around to everyone that was gathered in the room. "No, this isn't right, it isn't fair! Why is that we only have a second's worth of peace before these son of a bitches are on the defensive against us again, even when we have done no offense to them?"
Bella glanced at Edward as he cleared his throat and stared at his blonde sister, his hands buried in the pockets of the khaki chinos he was wearing today. "You know perfectly well why, Rosalie," he stated calmly, giving a nod to Bella, Alice, Kalilah, and me. "We are a large collection of talented individuals, and he seems to think that because we choose to be together as a family, that we have a motive to attack against him... and you know that he wants us for himself."
"So, what if I have an idea?" Bella said quietly, and everyone looked at her, as this was the first time she had spoken up. She, Kalilah, and I had been the quietest of the bunch thus far; Emmett, Jacob, Leah, Embry, and Quil wanted to go to war, were ready for a fight, but Edward, Seth, and Alice argued diplomacy, and Rosalie just snarled and growled, muttering under her breath the entire time. When no one spoke, she sighed, running a hand wearily through her long mahogany hair. "What if... what if we broke up shop, what if we... seperated?"
"No! Absolutely not!" Jacob yelled, obviously thinking that if Bella and Edward were to leave, they would be taking his Nessie with them, and there was no way Jacob the Wolf could leave this land; his spirit was tied to it.
"Jacob... Bella may have a point," Alice said quietly from my right, and I looked over at my mate in surprise. How could she agree to this? We were a family... all of us.
"How can you say that, Flea? If we split up, we're weaker, we're more likely to be taken out one by one," the giant boy argued fiercely, his brown face deepening into a puce color, showing the heat of the rage building inside of him. It was a great testament to his control that he had not phased to wolf and attacked anyone as of yet.
"If we aren't living under one roof... there's no cause for their alarm, and they indeed care about their reputation," Edward said, reading Alice's mind, and she nodded stiffly, obviously not fond of the plan, but not seeing an alternative as of yet.
"Temporarily, of course," Bella said in barely more than a whisper; no human ears could have heard it. "Edward and I will actually move to Italy." Jacob growled, and she shut him up with a stern glare, before going on in a steely voice, "Renesmee will remain here with you, you ridiculous mutt, I trust you and the pack to see to her safety... I can't see the Volturi getting past both yours and Sam's packs."
I could hear the distress in her voice as she decided to leave her daughter with the boy that would someday become more than her best friend, but her son-in-law. Edward's jaw tensed and he looked at his shiny shoes, but he did not contradict his wife's words, obviously well-trained not to go against her wishes. I knew Edward trusted Jacob as much as Bella did, and that his discomfort lie solely in the fact that he himself would not be close enough to bodily protect his little girl.
Rosalie hissed at the information, however, her distrust of Jacob's temper bleeding through, and if I had learned one thing about Rosalie Cullen in the past eight months I've lived here, it's that Nessie is one niece you just don't fuck with. Emmett shook his head, wrapping an arm around his wife's shoulders to try and calm her instincts, which were making her quite volatile.
"Come on, Rosie... We've been wanting to do a honeymoon, anyway. We can travel, just like you want," Emmett said in a promising tone, and Rosalie gave a grudging look at him for a minute, before she nodded, slightly mollified for the moment.
"Fine," my favorite sister-in-law muttered, and she saw me give a tiny grin at her agreement, barely winking at me in return.
"But... I'll miss you guys," Jacob whispered, looking from Bella, to Edward, and the rest of us vampires, even Rosalie, who rolled her eyes at him. But her face held a hint of sadness.
"I will have to go, as well." The ancient's tone was sorrowful, and I saw her giving her mate a long look. "If my presence is putting you in danger..."
Leah's eyes flashed dangerously when Kalilah spoke those words, and her body began to tremble in the dim light of the living room. "You can't," Leah said a second later, something in her expression breaking.
I tore my eyes away from them as Kalilah pulled her upset wolf into her arms, and cooed to her softly, though I filled my mind with the things at hand so as to give them some sort of privacy as she tried to calm Leah.
"What about us?" I asked Alice, who hadn't said anything more, just watching as our family prepared to say goodbye.
"I have an apartment in Paris, but I want to remain close... I think some of us Cullens should stay in the States," she answered, and I thought hard about where we could go, that we would not stick out like a sore thumb.
It would have to be a place with pretty shitty weather, and small enough to maintain a certain reputation, but large enough to blend in. Our home would have to be placed far away from human contact, as I still could not control myself around them. I was getting better, but still could not stand more than a few hours with no more than three. We found that out when I had to meet Jacob's father and two other Elders of the Quileute tribe when I was six months old. Before that was the time I had come very close to attacking a lone hiker in the woods by accident.
"We have a little while, we'll figure it out," she said to me, turning her face into my chest, burying her nose into me.
I caught sight of the ring on her finger, and I bit my lip, thinking about the promise that ring held. "There's something I want done before we all part ways," I blurted out loudly, startling everyone, including myself.
"What's that?" Rosalie asked, her eyes narrowed in suspicion, as if she had a reason to be suspicious at all.
I looked down into the golden eyes of my mate, and they shined back up at me with the knowledge of what I was about to say. With that, I looked back up to my family and friends. "Alice and I are getting married... here, in Forks, as soon as you can throw together a ceremony."