I am not a light sleeper. I mean seriously, I am not. I am one of those two-alarm-clocks, pour-a-bucket-of-water-over-his-head kind of sleepers, I am a log. I can fall asleep on a dime and then once I'm out, I am out. I am gone. This isn't something that I'm really proud of or anything—it's certainly caused its share of problems in my life, but hey. That's the way it is.

Alarms can't wake me up. Yelling can't wake me up. Kicking can't wake me up. Here's what can wake me up: vampires.

It's the smell, it's the instinct—you smell that hot sweet vampire scent, like burning sugar. Neurons fire, muscles tense, and you are up. Even if you're me.

I must have been tired, because it took me a lot longer to wake up than it should have. There are some days when the wind blows the wrong way from Forks and I sit bolt upright in my bed, smelling the Cullens. Every vein of me pulsing with the awareness of them, no matter how harmless my brain knew them to be. Not this morning. This morning, I opened my eyes and there were boots right in front of my face.

I don't know what I was expecting—there are vampires everywhere, vampires in Canada too, of course, but that hadn't occurred to me. I guess I'd been spoiled. I scrambled up at once, suddenly very much regretting having changed back to human last night.

Fortunately for me, they weren't serious boots. They weren't combat boots, they weren't even hiking boots. They were red suede calf-length stilettos, soaked darker red up the sides with melted snow. These weren't monster vampire boots. These were Rosalie boots.

Honestly, I would have rather had Leah.

"Morning, sunshine," she said, standing over me with her arms crossed, sending me down that famous glare. Could melt a hole in sheet metal from fifty feet, that's what they said. Could thaw the whole state of Alaska.

"Rosalie?" Quil said groggily, surging awake next to me. "What the—what are you doing here?"

"I'm your backup," she said, saying that word the way most people reserved for saying things like "cockroach" and "flesh-eating bacteria".

"You're our backup?" I repeated, in case it had been some sort of horrible mistake. I didn't hate the Cullens. I really didn't. It wasn't in me to hate people who were harmless, and it wasn't in me to hate people who were trying to be good. Now, that didn't mean we were going to be having any slumber parties anytime soon, braiding each other's hair or anything. But we could be civil. We could have a little mutual respect.

At least most of us could. Because the thing was, prejudice usually goes two ways. Historically, it had always been the Cullens reaching out the hand of friendship, always been them coming to us. But not all of them were reaching. Not all of them were willing to play ball.

Actually, basically it was just Rosalie. "Yes," she said crisply. "I'm your backup. I'm supposed to replace—what's the kid's name? Jason Black?"

"Jacob," Quil said automatically. "Are you telling me that Sam sent you to—"

"Oh, be serious," she said, with all her regal scorn and all her beauty.

Rosalie Hale. She made me want to cringe just looking at her, even knowing what she was, even knowing what she was capable of. She made me want to stammer and steal glances at her from the corners of my eyes. Heaven help any human boys who crossed her path. It would be carnage. Even knowing what she was, it was hard to keep my head straight. She was so beautiful she made my teeth hurt.

"What, you think Sam Uley told me to go help you two out, and I said yes sir and ran right up here?" she continued, striding away with her shoes punching heelprints in the show. "Please. I'd been wanting to go up and see my friend in Denali, and I heard you were headed that way."

"We are," I said warily, walking behind her, my arms crossed over my chest. I wasn't cold, not even now that we'd crossed over into Alaska, only wearing the shorts I carried with me and that was it. I was never cold. Now that Rosalie had shown up, though, I was suddenly thinking that I should have worn a little more clothes. "Are you, um—are you, um, are you sure you want to come with—us?"

"Um, yeah, um, I think I'm going to," she mocked, turning back around right in my face. She was almost as tall as me. There weren't many people I could look at straight on and not down to, but she had to be at least 5'11. She could look me in the eye. "Strength in numbers, you know? Emmett won't come with me, he doesn't like Tanya, and if I can't get anyone else I might as well go with you."

She was making my head hurt—I mean, I hadn't exactly been the Alpha of this little trip before, but I sure as hell wasn't now. She was so bossy and busy and mean, so full of casual menace, I couldn't keep up with her. "Rosalie—"

"What do you want now?" she said, exasperated. "What? Do you want me to chip in for gas money? Do you want to see some ID? What's the deal, sparky?"

"Nothing," I said hurriedly, taking a step back. Suddenly, this trip had gotten much more interesting. And by interesting, I mean really horrible. "Nothing, nothing. We're fine."

"Glad to hear it," she said, and somehow made it sound like a threat. This was a girl who woke up in a morning thinking about how she could make her life better, and maybe, if she was bored, about how she could make everyone else's life worse. I don't know. Maybe I was stereotyping her. Probably I was stereotyping her. Considering that I generally visualized her as a thirty-foot harpy with claws and flames coming out of her mouth—I'd say probably.

She was stalking away drifts up to her knees, knowing that we would follow her, because people always did. Ladies and gentlemen, Rosalie Hale.

I looked over at Quil, still standing back where he was, standing shirtless in the snow next to me, and I tell you, we looked crazy. Crazier still for this new addition to our lives.

I raised my eyebrows at him. We were human just now, we weren't reading each other's thoughts. But I'd known him since I was four. We knew what we were saying. I raised my eyebrows, and he gave me a half smile back. Shrugged his shoulders. And went after Rosalie.

---

I wasn't much for confrontation.

I guess I didn't really have anything to fight about, was all. I was really just more of the stand-on-the-sidelines type—wait for someone to yell for help, pull me into it. Newton's First Law: objects in motion tend to stay in motion. But what about the objects that were never in motion in the first place? What about us?

So if Rosalie wanted to be here and be bossy, if she wanted to drag us to the interstate and drive us to Alaska in her car because our wolf forms "creeped her out", well—okay. It was a nice car. Nothing to start a fight about.

Well, that was my opinion, anyway. Quil, on the other hand, seemed to think it was something to start a fight about after all. Quil liked to fight. Well, that wasn't exactly right—it wasn't like he was mean-spirited or naturally contentious, or anything. He just enjoyed a good healthy argument, the kind that was just for brain exercise.. He was hardly ever serious.

Of course, Rosalie didn't know that. So when Quil said things like "Your car smells terrible," she didn't know to avoid getting sucked in. And so she got sucked in.

"Listen, I hope you understand exactly how generous I'm being, letting you ride in it at all. I'm not ever going to get this dog-smell out of the upholstery."

"Well, it wasn't exactly my idea to take the Porsche," Quil retorted. "Believe me, I'd much rather be running on my own two feet."

"Don't you mean four?" she fired back. "This is faster. And it doesn't involve any pine sap."

"Faster?" Quil scoffed. "Have you seen me run?"

"Have you looked at the speedometer lately? I can't remember the last time I was under 100."

"Only 100 in a Porsche? You must be a woman."

"Excuse me?"

All right. That was it. Don't love Rosalie, do love Quil, but I was out. I needed a break. I turned to my door and flipped the unlock button, opening it carefully by inches.

"Hey!" Quil yelled, suddenly and effectively distracted. "Embry! What are you doing?"

"I am going to—" I said vaguely, concentrating on keeping the door open, "do some scouting. I think we're getting pretty close, I'm going to go check out the area." I'm going to get away from you two until you finally strangle each other and I have some peace.

"Are you crazy?" Rosalie wanted to know. "Did you hear me say how fast this car was moving? We need to stay together, we need to—"

"Bye," I said, watching the ground blur past, trying to convince myself to jump out now, right this instant. One, two, three, jump.

This was stupid. It was just a moving car. I'd broken bones, I'd punctured a lung, I'd fallen off a thirty-foot cliff and healed in minutes. There was nothing left in the world that I should be afraid of. But here I was staring at the fast-moving scenery, trying to convince myself I should join it, and failing. Couldn't take the plunge.

"Hey, Embry," Quil said uncertainly, reaching for me. And then the car hit a pothole and jolted suddenly sideways, and my decision was made for me.

I went tumbling out of the open door into the snow, but fortunately for me, I had gotten very good at pretending that I had done things on purpose, when in fact I had done them accidentally. By the time my feet hit the ground, they were paws, and I was running with the ready stride of someone who fell out of the car on purpose, thank you very much. It had been what I'd been intending to do anyway. So there.

We'd passed the "Welcome to Alaska" sign some time ago, so we were definitely, officially in Alaska. In a way, though, it was good that Rosalie had come along, because this was where my strategy had run out. There was no Denali Highway, after all. All I had really known was that it was somewhere in the middle, sort of, and that I would just maybe keep a lookout for Mount McKinley. I never had to share this fairly embarrassing plan with Rosalie, though, because she'd been here a thousand times and knew exactly where Denali was, thank you very much. In fact, she'd helpfully gotten me within sight of said Mount McKinley—tallest mountain in the US, 20,300 feet or something like that—so that when I got out of the car, I knew which direction to run.

Of course, I didn't really make it all that far. In fact, I had barely made it into the trees before it was in my nose and mouth again, sharp and sweet. Burning sugar. Fantastic. I turned just in time to catch of glimpse of the girl slamming into me from the side, tackling me over into the snow, leaving long furrows like screwed-up snow angels.

Blond hair and long fingernails, digging into my back as she swung me around into a tree.

Rosalie! I yelled in my head, even though I knew she couldn't hear me, almost better that way because I was pretty annoyed. What the hell?
I shoved myself out of her grip and scrambled to my feet, turning back to her to see that wait a second, something was definitely wrong. Strawberry-blonde hair not golden blonde, shorter sharper not the same. Vampire. But not Rosalie. Not Rosalie at all.