Oooh, I'm so bad ... forgetting to upload this yesterday! Sorry, sorry! And then IE and Chrome were annoying me. But, here it is. Hope you like it!


Chapter Three

I Can't Help

It didn't make a bit of sense. I had no idea why a cloaked vampire would suddenly begin appearing in my visions. He was a complete stranger to me but, whenever I saw him, he was in places that Jasper and I had only just left. He was following us, that much was clear. But did Jasper know that we were being followed? Is that why he had snuck away four times since he killed the motel manager; always coming back with his eyes still black even though he said he was leaving to hunt?

I sighed and wrapped my arms more tightly around my knees; compacting myself into the smallest, safest space in the passenger seat of our quite agreeable Cadillac. Jasper hadn't really wanted to drive; he claimed that he was from the time before cars and wouldn't be any good at it. But vampires have perfect reflexes and I had convinced him to give it a try. He was quite good.

I watched him closely. We had found a black leather jacket lying on a park bench in Pittsburgh and he wore it now with the collar turned up to hide his skin from the sun and passing motorists. His hands fit snuggly into a pair of black leather driving gloves and a black felt fedora was angled rakishly on his golden curls. His eyes, as black as his clothes, and the line of his mouth were tight with tension and intensity.

"Jasper?" I said quietly, curiously. "Is something wrong? I can drive again, if you really don't like it."

His eyes flashed to me. "No, Alice, nothing's wrong," he replied with the ghost of a smile. "You were right, though. I do like driving."

I couldn't help but smile back. Maybe I was worrying for nothing. "Well, I like it too," I laughed happily. "So we'll just have to take turns."

"Fair enough, ma'am," he agreed easily. "After all, you did do all the work to get the car. You haven't seen any changes in our course, have you?"

"Nothing lately," I admitted with a guarded sigh. I wasn't at all sure that I wanted to risk scaring Jasper away if he found out about our shadow. "So I guess we just keep heading west."

"West it is, then," he said, deftly passing a sputtering truck laden with crops from the Iowa farmlands we were passing through. He glanced at me with worry in his eyes. "I have to ask, Alice, is something bothering you?"

"Why?" I blurted it out before I could stop myself. "Nothing's bothering me, either."

"You're scared," he said, looking at me out of the corner of his eye. "And nervous. I don't understand. Isn't this what you wanted? I'm sorry if you're upset about the motel manager. I promise to be better."

"Oh, Jasper, it is what I want," I promised him quickly, reaching out tentatively to touch his arm. "I think maybe I'm just nervous about the future because I remember so little of the past. And I'm not upset about the motel manager. I've seen parts of our journey, Jasper. It won't always be easy. For either of us. But I know, I just know, that we can get through it together."

"We can?" he asked, doubt radiating from his velvet voice.

"If you want to," I said quietly, allowing him a way out if he wanted to take it. "If you don't want to, that's okay, too."

"I want to, Alice, I do. I promise you that." He paused and focused again on the road. "I just don't know if I can do it. But I trust you. Completely."

Why did he keep disappearing if he trusted me so much? It was all so confusing. You just don't hide things from people you trust completely.

"Completely?" I asked, trying to hide the skepticism from my voice and my emotions.

He nodded as sunlight streamed through the windshield and I instinctively tucked my chin deep into the collar of my royal blue felt coat. "I don't know why," he admitted slowly, "but I do trust you completely. I shouldn't, but I do."

I had known this process would be slow and even painful at times, so I would just have to take what I could get. Jasper trusted me. I could deal with that. I hoped.

I was only vaguely aware of Jasper pulling into a full-service though abandoned looking gas station and parking the car near a rusty, antiquated gas pump. I knew that a wrinkled old man in dusty denim overalls and a filthy white t-shirt would approach the car and begin to pump the gas before cleaning the windshield. I knew that Jasper would pay him with money that we had found in the pocket of the leather coat. And I knew that Jasper would drive away; the old man standing in a cloud of dust with blood still pumping in his veins. I had seen all this in a vision I had while we hunted so I knew it was safe to concentrate on other visions.

The cloaked stranger would visit the gas station after dark; he seemed to only travel at night. The old man in the overalls would not see morning.

I blinked back tears that I would never be able to shed. The old man would die because of us; no other reason than that we had been there would bring the end of his life. It wasn't fair at all.

"Alice?" Jasper asked softly, the concern all too evident in his voice.

"It's nothing," I lied quickly, hoping that my laugh seemed honest and true. "Nothing at all. Just the Cullens and more pine trees."

"I see." I could tell that he didn't really believe me. The human teenager in me was fine with that. He was keeping things from me, why shouldn't I keep things from him? "That reminds me, Alice. If we keep driving straight west, we'll cross through the flat, open prairie states and it will be harder and harder to hunt and to travel by day. Not to mention find pine trees. So I was thinking that perhaps we should head north into Minnesota and then maybe follow the Canadian border for awhile. What do you think?"

"Perfect idea," I agreed happily as I forced myself to project happiness to him. I pulled out the map I had bought in Illinois and twirled my finger around. "If we start north at the next chance, the Yellow River State Park should be an excellent place to hunt and then we can move on to Minnesota."

"To Yellow River State Park then, ma'am," Jasper announced with an exaggerated accent.

It was twilight when we found the park. A small herd of deer wouldn't be passing through for a few more hours so we walked, hand-in-hand, to the banks of the river. I spread my felt coat over a fallen log; I didn't want to get my ivory cream and blue striped chambray cotton dress dirty or snagged, and folded my legs underneath me as I sat on the log. Jasper sat at the other end of the log, his posture military perfect and his hands folded in his lap.

"May I ask you something?" I asked as I folded my hands in my lap.

"You answered all of my questions in Philadelphia," he said with a smile that seemed sad, "the least I can do is answer as many of yours as I can. Why did you wait so long to ask, though?"

I shrugged my small shoulders and sighed. "I decided a few times to ask, but then I saw how much it upset you so I waited. There were a few times you even would have been so upset that you would have left. I didn't want that. Besides, I'm patient."

"That might just be the understatement of your existence, my darling," he said with a chuckle. "You did wait twenty-eight years for me, after all."

Every fiber of my frozen body tingled when he called me 'my darling'. I wondered if he even realized he said it; he seemed so lost in thought. "I'll always wait for us," I murmured shyly but honestly as I stared at my hands.

"I know that," he murmured just as quietly though he still seemed sad about something. He looked up quickly and his face transformed into a smile. "Now, about your questions, what is it you'd like to know?"

"I won't ask you about Maria," I promised him quietly. "I know you aren't ready to talk about that. I'll stick to asking about Jasper Whitlock before Maria and Jasper Whitlock after Maria. Is that okay?"

"Thank you for saying that. It's more than okay," he said, turning to look at me for the first time. "It is broad, though. What do you want to know?"

"What were your parents names? Did you have any siblings? Was your family mad when you joined the Confederate Army? Why did you join? What was your childhood like?" I cringed as the questions tumbled from my mouth. The last thing I wanted to do was overwhelm him. "Sorry."

"Don't be," he said with a low chuckle, nudging my head back up from its bowed position with his fingers. "No one has shown half the interest in me that you do in my entire existence, living or undead. It's kind of nice."

"I might just be living vicariously through you, you know," I cautioned him, slowly reaching up and catching his hand in mine. I couldn't help myself; I pressed his hand to my cheek. "Not remembering my human life makes me a little desperate to know about the human lives of others."

"That's okay, too," he said with a smile, only slightly tense as his hand rested against my cheek. "My parents were Thomas and Margaret Whitlock. I had one younger sister. Her name was Mariah. She died three years ago in Cincinnati; I found her obituary in a newspaper when I was in Kentucky. She was 100. Almost immortal, right?"

I watched as clouds of sadness danced across his dark eyes and wondered if he envied Mariah, her long, probably happy life and her release to something else, maybe better, in death.

He shook his head, bringing himself back to the moment. "As to my short, sweet military career, my sister cried for days. My mother was upset when I joined the army. After all, I was her only son and I lied about my age to get in. Plus, my father had left her with two young children when he went to war. He, on the other hand, couldn't have been more proud, especially when I reached the rank of major. He had fought in the Mexican-American War from 1846 to 1848. He was decorated for bravery and valor by General Taylor. I was his only son. It was pretty much a given that I would join.

As to my childhood," he continued wistfully, "I don't really remember that much. Human memories are very fuzzy in a vampire mind. If you don't think about them all the time, they will fade in time until you have to struggle very hard to remember them or you forget them completely. I must have had a good childhood, though. I remember trying to think about it when I was first changed. But it hurt too much to compare carefree summer days playing with my friends outside the schoolhouse to what I had to do in my new life. So I stopped. Maybe something will come back to me, now that I'm with you. If it does, I'll tell you then."

I hoped, for Jasper's sake and for my own, that something would come back to him. I hoped that I could make him happy enough to want to remember playing outside the schoolhouse and spending Christmas with his sister. I had found my purpose, then. I would make Jasper happy, no matter what it took.

"I'm going to hold you to that, Major Whitlock," I vowed, smiling just the same as I tucked my legs under me and scooted closer to him.

"I wish you would do just that, Miss Alice," he drawled back with a grin. "I really do."

I wrapped my small hands around his larger hand and squeezed tightly; I hoped he could feel how very, very happy I was just then.

"You are so easily pleased, ma'am. Isn't there anything that could make you unhappy?" His question told me that he had felt my happiness. I was ecstatic.

"You don't want to make me unhappy, do you?" I asked, teasing and worry combining quickly in my mind. "Because the only thing that could truly make me unhappy would be if I was alone again. Without you."

I felt Jasper tense but he didn't pull his hand away. "I'm going to do everything I possibly can to make sure that you, Alice, never have reason to be unhappy," he promised solemnly before he forced himself to laugh softly. "Do you have more questions? After Maria questions, I believe you called them."

I didn't like it one bit that he had so quickly and easily changed the subject. It worried me. But going with the flow of things seemed the best course of action at the moment. Nothing in my visions had told me otherwise.

"After you left Maria," I said, his hand still clutched in mine, "I saw you with two people. They seemed like friends. But I could never figure out who they were."

"Peter and Charlotte." He stared into the rapidly darkening forest as he said their names. "Peter was the second longest surviving member of Maria's army. I was first; seventy odd years. He was all of three years a vampire when he escaped."

"Why did he escape?" I asked eagerly. "How?"

"I wish you didn't have to ask that, but you deserve to know," Jasper sighed wearily; if a vampire could be weary. "Maria built armies. It's safe to say that the turnover rate was extremely high.

Peter and I were destroying the oldest of the army; the year olds. I called Charlotte's name as the next to be destroyed. He screamed at her to run. I reached out to stop her and he jumped between us, teeth barred, ready to die so that she could live." As he told the story, his voice went from a mechanical recitation to a quiet awe.

"He wasn't angry, though. He was desperate. And in love. I could feel those things from him. And from her. I looked him in the eyes and nodded. He motioned for Charlotte to go. She mouthed 'thank you.' He asked me to come with them. But I couldn't. Not because of loyalty to Maria. No. I couldn't go because I was too important to Maria. She would have hunted me. And maybe killed them. I couldn't have that. So I nodded again and turned my back on them.

Anyway," he sighed after a long pause, "Peter came back for me five years later. He told me about the quiet, peaceful life that he and Charlotte had found in the North. So I went with him. I was desperate. But it didn't work out very well. My depression after feeding was torture for them, not that they'd ever admit it. So I left them."

I blinked patiently at him, not moving or speaking, in case there was something else he wanted to say.

He smiled at me and lifted my hand to his lips. "And then I found you," he whispered softly.

I scooted even closer, my knees were touching his leg. He wasn't ready for what I really wanted to do, I had seen that. So I slowly pulled my hand away from him. I kissed the palm of my hand. And then I pressed the spot I had just kissed back against his lips.

My entire body tingled again when he wrapped his fingers around my hand, pressing it all the more firmly to his lips. I watched as he closed his eyes and took a deep, calming breath.

We stayed just like that, statues in the forest, for two hours.

I finished hunting before Jasper. He was enjoying having to work so hard to catch a meal and he needed more than I could ever dream of drinking. So I sat on a log and searched the future.

What I saw sent a stab of pain through me that was worse than I could have ever imagined. All of the hope and happiness of the afternoon was completely erased or, at least, it would be soon.

Jasper was going to leave me.