A/N: Another thank you to KBelle1 and TheEagerScribbler for beta reading this chapter.
April 4th, 2010
Lauren the teenaged vampire turned out to be nothing like what I expected.
For starters, I was shocked that she'd shown up in Forks. In the time since they had moved away, Rosalie and Emmett hadn't come back to visit. That was in spite of Nessie's continued sadness that they were gone. It had always appeared to me as if they either didn't know or didn't care.
Now that they had another family member (I couldn't bring myself to use the word 'daughter') to show off, they'd come back to visit within several weeks. I wasn't sure how Bella or Edward felt about that because they were doing an excellent job of not revealing anything. Even as I tried to analyze them from across the room, I couldn't read their expressions.
I wasn't sure how I'd gotten here, dragged along for a visit by Mom and Charlie. Charlie appeared nervous around the girl despite having grown used to the knowledge that the Cullens were vampires. I couldn't fault him when I felt the same uneasiness. It was strange to look at a girl so young and know that she was dead, unaging, immortal. It was a far cry from Nessie's existence. We'd watched her grow from the day she was born.
Not happy about this forced visit, I'd dragged Embry along with me. Although it wasn't dragging when he wanted to come and get a firsthand look at the vampire who had managed to rock Nessie's life. Jake hadn't left Nessie's side since her aunt and uncle arrived, and Seth had, of course, been dragged along as well.
Lauren wasn't too thrilled to be sitting in a room with four wolves. She had taken a seat as far away from us as she could be while still being in the room. Every few seconds, her eyes would flicker between the four of us as if she was ready to run at a moment's notice.
The girl's physical presence felt as unthreatening as a vampire's could, although I had a sneaking suspicion that this came from her aversion to us. It was clear that her own instinct was telling her to run away, and she was having to fight it. At the same time, I knew she had no desire to engage us in a fight. It wasn't only the Cullens' request that kept her from attacking, which made it easier to relax around her.
I could see her as little more than a thirteen-year-old girl who happened to be creepy on account of being a vampire, yet she was less of a threat to us than we were to her.
However, I didn't think we were the ones Lauren was most intimidated by. She watched Nessie with intensity. She inspected her as if she were sizing up every bit of information she could get. That in and of itself was creepy, but Nessie ignored it.
In fact, she ignored Lauren in every sense. I hadn't seen her so much as look at the older girl since we'd shown up. I couldn't know for sure what had happened between them since Lauren had arrived two days ago, but I had a feeling it had been this same stone cold silence since they had met.
Absurdly, Rosalie sat between the two of them and was doing a poor job of pretending like everything was fine and dandy. She attempted to carry on conversation with both girls and use that to get them to talk to each other, but they offered her short, dismissive answers at their most responsive. Mostly, Lauren watched Nessie, and Nessie watched everyone but Lauren.
I wanted to talk to Rosalie in private for the first time in my life. I knew it was a terrible idea, that I didn't know what it was I wanted to say. Still, as she sat there across from me, trying to make the two girls get along while acting like she didn't understand the problem, I felt a strong urge to say something.
An urge that I quelled, forcing myself to instead listen to the other conversations in the room.
There was nothing I could do or say that would hold any weight with Rosalie, and it wasn't my problem anyway. I kept repeating that over and over to myself, hoping it would stick.
April 26th, 2010
Emmett and Rosalie were gone after two weeks in Forks.
Afterward, Nessie started to look happier. I wasn't sure if that was because she'd managed to work things out with her aunt and uncle or if she'd realized that having them around wasn't all it was cracked up to be. I didn't ask, not wanting to bring up her feelings again, but I did notice that she never mentioned Lauren to me. Or Rosalie or Emmett, which wasn't new. It had more or less been the norm since the two of them had moved away.
She still didn't mention Alice's or Jasper's names that often either. A fact that I hadn't found strange enough for it to occur to me, and even now, I might have been making a big deal out of things that didn't mean anything.
Either way, the Cullens had managed to work their way to having a larger presence in my life yet again.
Funnily enough, it wasn't through Nessie, who rarely mentioned any of her family members to me. Instead, it was Jake who had taken to complaining about various small things here or there. All of it pertaining to the Cullens.
"I think they're hiding something."
I had been looking down at my plate, not caring enough about Jake's complaints to pay attention to them. It wasn't like the Cullens being annoying was anything new. Jake had known that once before he got stuck up their asses. Now he was beginning to see it again, and none of his complaints could be taken very seriously by the rest of us.
But at those words, my eyes shot up to look at him. I heard a few clatters of forks hitting plates as the other members of our pack did the same thing. We were gathered around, eating dinner together at Billy's house, just our pack and Billy. It was an occasion that wasn't rare but didn't exactly happen often either.
If the words had been spoken to me or a smaller group of us, I would have thought less of it. As it was, Jake had decided to say it to all of us, including Billy, who he knew had never come to trust the Cullens. That meant that he was dead serious.
"Like what exactly?" Embry asked, voicing the question that all of us were thinking. Already, I was formulating my own theories in my head, and I had a good hunch about where this was going.
Jake took a deep breath to steady himself before speaking. "I don't know. That's what's frustrating me. All I know for sure is that they've started acting strange since Rosalie and Emmett told everyone about Lauren. Bella, especially, has been weird and distant. Nessie's the only one acting normal. I know that, if anything is going on, they haven't told her either. Whether it's because they don't think she's prepared to know or because they're worried about her telling me."
He fell silent, but I could tell that he had something else to say. We sat there watching him until he continued. "I immediately started thinking it was about the Volturi." He looked around at us until his eyes landed on his father and stayed there. "You think that too, right?"
Billy nodded. He had a serious but unsurprised look on his face, almost as if he'd been waiting for a moment like this. "It wouldn't be surprising," he allowed. "We know the Volturi are bound to attack them, and at this point, I'm not sure what else they could be hiding. We're no longer in the days of suspecting them of biting humans."
There was another silence around the room. No one had anything to say, but I knew it was because everyone was lost in their own fears about the Volturi. We'd all, except Billy, seen them firsthand, and we'd been able to learn about what fighting them would be like.
We knew that a possible attack would mean that we had no chance, but none of us had been worried about that happening since they last left Forks. We'd basked in the relief of that day, and we'd been comfortable with the idea that they would wait centuries, maybe millennia, before coming after the Cullens again. It would never be a problem we had to deal with.
Even Jake, who theoretically would be dealing with the Volturi at that distant point in the future, hadn't worried over the past several years. Perhaps because that was too large of a timeframe for us to imagine after only living the short time we had in comparison to the Cullens.
Sam had shown worry, that much was true, but I had accepted that as him being cautious, not him believing that something would actually happen.
"What does this mean?" I asked, startling the others in the room.
Everyone turned to look at me, but I zeroed in on Jacob. He was our alpha. As much as I often hated there being someone who held complete authority over me if he wished to exercise it, it was true. As a wolf, it was my duty to carry out his orders, and if anything involving the Volturi was to happen, it was Jake who we would have to rely on to call the shots.
I needed to know what that meant. I needed to know what he expected of us.
"I don't know," Jake replied, sounding defeated. It wasn't what you wanted to hear from someone in his position. Ideally, an alpha would always portray a sense of confidence. Sam certainly tried to do just that even when the rest of us knew it was fake.
Jake had never been like Sam. Not at the beginning and not now. I knew that this was a large part of the reason he hadn't wanted to be alpha in the first place, a large part of why he'd thought he couldn't be an alpha. He didn't possess the same ability to pretend like he knew what to do no matter the situation. He was far more likely to admit to us that he had no idea what course of action to take than Sam was.
It was one of the reasons I was thankful to be in Jake's pack instead of Sam's. True, as Jake's beta, I also possessed authority that I wouldn't have had in Sam's pack. But that wasn't the only privilege I felt that I enjoyed. All of us seemed to be more equal in Jake's pack when it came down to it. Something evidenced by the fact that Jake had yet to issue any alpha orders to any of us.
We couldn't say the same of Sam, who had delivered alpha orders like it was a responsibility he had to perform despite not liking it.
"I've tried talking to Bella," Jake continued. "She still won't say anything. I wish I could ask Nessie to try to weasel something out of her or Edward, but I can't do that. I'd feel terrible if I forced her to be a spy between me and her parents. There's nothing else I can think of to try to figure it out."
"They promised that they would tell us if the Volturi changed their plans," Embry reminded Jake. He managed to sound optimistic, like he still held hope that they would keep that promise. "They've never gone against their word before. Not unless you count changing Bella, but even then, they had your permission, Jake."
"I know," Jake said with a sigh. "And I'd like to trust them. God knows that would make my life easier, but something is off. I'm positive of that, and after everything that happened with the Volturi, I don't know if I can afford trusting them when my senses are telling me that something is wrong."
"That's you being a good leader," Billy assured his son. "Your pack must always come first. I know that you know that. None of that is to say you should turn your back on the Cullens, but you have to think of your brothers and sister."
Jake nodded. It was the same thing he had been told a million times. It was also, I believed, a large reason why he hadn't wanted to be alpha Of course, there had been a million reasons that I had seen in Jacob's thoughts over the years, but much of it came back to his reluctance to take on responsibility for so many people. He didn't like it, and I thought that part of him still resented having to put the pack before everything but his imprint. Pack law expected her to come even before the pack, but I didn't think Jake was as bothered by that.
"I'm going to keep trying to talk to Bella," Jake told us. "I don't know what else to tell you except that. I don't think there's anything we can do, but I thought you should know. It's too difficult to try and keep blocking it out of my mind."
"And Sam's pack?" I asked. "Will you tell them?"
Jake looked torn.
"We can't keep it from them," Seth interjected.
Jake nodded, although he didn't look like he knew how to approach the situation.
"We'll play it by ear," he said slowly. "I don't know. Give me more time to try and get Bella to talk to me before any of you mention it." He directed a stern gaze at the youngest members of the pack, which they shrugged off. "I'll make the call about telling Sam."
"Remember the patrols we had to run the last time he got worried about the Volturi," Quil complained. He'd been a vocal complainer during those very patrols, and his face made it clear that he was turned off by the idea of doing it all over again. "That should be enough to keep us in line."
"Right," Jake said with a short nod. "Do that."
"I don't like it," Seth grumbled, but he didn't argue beyond that, possibly because Al reached out to take his hand under the table and got a smile out of him.
"I don't like it either," Jake said, which made me roll my eyes. I didn't get why keeping the secret would be that big of a deal. As far as I could tell, Sam and the other pack knowing wouldn't change anything, and it wasn't like we were drafting up an elaborate lie.
Then again, some of the other guys had always been far more into the idea of a pack mind—where we told each other everything and were one person—than I was. Frankly, I found it bizarre.
"I think it's for the best," Jake concluded. "For now."
Several of the other guys nodded. A few, particularly the youngest at the table, continued eating, not caring either way what was decided. Despite having seen the Volturi firsthand, the wolves who had phased after the battle with the newborns always acted more blasé about the possibility of fighting than us older wolves who'd experienced it did.
For the next several weeks, I tried my hardest to convince myself that I wasn't worried. There was, after all, not much evidence that we should be more worried about the Volturi than we were before, but I never quite convinced myself that I should believe that.
