We zipped down the hall as only vampires could. The guard made no attempt to follow us; it had probably looked like Emmett and I had simply disappeared. I could feel his surprise quickly change into confusion as he no doubt decided he had hallucinated. In fact, even as far away as we were by then , I could hear him muttering about taking the night shift and vowing to request a different shift.
Emmett chuckled heartily. We were both slightly giddy from the experience of nearly being caught.
We ran home quickly, excited to witness the results of our prank.
Our journey home started out fine, but quickly turned sour on my part. Emmett had somehow acquired a joke book, which he had read through in about 35.6 seconds flat. I didn't understand why he bought it at all; I would have just perused it at the book store.
So about five minutes after we had left Washington DC, the torture began.
"Hey Jasper."
"Hey, Emmett."
"How does a farmer fix a hole in his overalls?"
"What?" This made no sense.
"I saiiiiiiiid, how does a farmer fix a hole in his overalls?"
"I don't know, Emmett. Is there a point to this question?"
He sighed heavily like I was missing something. "Noooooo. Jasper. How does a farmer fix a hole in his overalls?"
Oh. Ok. A joke. "How?"
"With a cabbage patch!" And with that he howled with laughter. Birds exploded out of the treetops and howls could be heard from miles around. I frowned at my brother. "Come on. You've scared every animal within five hundred miles out of their wits. And it wasn't even a good joke!"
Emmett's previous humor abruptly switched to shock. "What?! How can you say that? It was the best joke ever!"
Yeah. Sure. Whatever you say, Emmett.
"Uh huh. If you say so, Emmett."
He pouted, still not satisfied with my response. I sighed and turned my gaze forward, watching my path.
We continued on in an amicable silence for a few minutes. The moon was still in the sky, a round, glowing orb full of pockmarks that could only be describes as resembling the scarred face of a teenager who had a bad bout of acne in his/her youth. I swept a peaceful calm over the two of us. After a half an hour or so of this, I relaxed my hold on the giant's emotions…which immediately snapped back to impatient and excited.
"Hey! Jasper!"
Ugh. I didn't feel like talking right now. Especially not to Emmett. I missed Alice, her sweet, playful nature. Emmett's gruff, coarse humor was beginning to drain me. "What?"
"What do you call a man with two left feet?"
Not another one! "Fiiiine. What?"
" Whatever the hell you want! If he tries to chase you, he'll just keep running in circles!" And with that he laughed so hard the earth began to quake beneath me. A tree in our path crashed in front of us with a monstrous 'boom'. The tree, being one of those ancient monsters that has probably been around since the dawn of time, made quite a mess as it fell. Dirt flew everywhere, and clumps of grass jumped into my hair. I looked down at my silk shirt and paled (well, I would have paled had I been human). My attempts to brush of the dirt only succeeded in ingraining it further into the weave of the soft gray silk.
No. This could not be happening. It was inconceivable. There was dirt on my shirt? Alice had given it to me! This was utterly and unmitigatedly unacceptable. My vision turned red, and I turned my gaze from the harrumphing vampire speeding beside me.
I stopped running suddenly, and Emmett whizzed past me a few thousand feet before he realized I wasn't with him. He loped lazily back to me, taking his time. His slowness only annoyed me further as I waited the long few seconds for him to cross the distance between us.
He jammed his hands in his pockets and whistled a snatch of tuneless song as he drew nearer. I quivered with rage at his insolent behavior. Did he not understand what would happen if someone happened to see us? How was anyone going to explain how that tree had fallen? Who the hell let him read a joke book? And why, oh WHY did he have to ruin my shirt?
He continued sauntering over to me as if he hadn't a care in the world. Almost a whole ten seconds had passed since the tree fell, but my rage was akin to a fiery pit of hell that had been flaming in existence for thousands of millennia.
I watched as his eyes flickered around my body, filing away my tension and facial expression. I'm sure he noticed my hands quivering. I honestly felt like I was about to burst. Somewhere in the back of my head a thought bubbled up: I wonder if this is what the werewolves feel like when they're about to shape shift…
When he was twenty feet away from me I sprang. Before any conscious thought my feet were off the ground and I was soaring through the air, a pale blur against the black night sky to any with vision weaker than that of a vampire's. I darted to the fallen ancient tree and before Emmett could react, seized him by the scruff of the neck, picked up the tree with the other hand, and proceeded to use it as a hammer for pounding Emmett into the ground. When I was done, the tree was standing back in it's original hole, only slightly crooked.
I heard Emmet's muffled cries from under the ground. The tree shook a little, once, twice, and then a third time before settling into place. I heard earth churning beneath me as my bear of a sibling supposedly attempted to burrow his way out. I dusted off my hands and ignored his pitiful escape attempts, proceeding down my path as if this whole little interlude hadn't just happened. I think I might have even skipped a little.
A small smile drifted across my face. I would be home in a matter of hours, if not less, and soon after Alice would arrive. I could wait till then, and once she got here everything would be fine. She was my angel, my everything, my wonderful, breathtaking, gorgeous, unmitigatedly awesome, preeminent Alice.
And best of all, she was mine.
