Perk #4: You Will Never Fall Asleep at the Wheel

After Jacob had gone to bed, I continued going through my list of black Mercedes owners in the United States. I had more candidates than I'd ever dreamed. Mercedes were a pretty popular item.

Jacob finally returned to the garage late in the morning. He went to business immediately.

"Perhaps we should pay a visit to the Cullens before we go gallivanting off after a hopefully immortal Edward Masen," Jacob suggested. He lifted the hood of the Rabbit, studying it. This is what he did when he was bored in the garage – played around with his car.

"The Cullens?" I blinked out of habit. Now that he said it, the name was familiar. "As in that family from Forks. The one with the doctor?"

Jacob nodded. "Yeah, the very same. They moved away to some place last year, if you didn't know."

This information still didn't clear anything up for me, so I prodded for more. "And why should we want to visit them?"

"They're a big bunch of bloodsuckers themselves, that's why." He grimaced at my offended expression. He attempted making amends with, "They stick to your kind of diet though. Where do you think I came up with that idea?"

I hadn't ever considered that before. I figured I was the only vampire who hunted cute, fuzzy, yet smelly, animals.

"Why haven't you told me about them before?" I wondered.

He shrugged his large shoulders. "They didn't come up."

"The Cullens." I mulled them over. I floated back to my distant human memories of the four students in the year ahead of me at Fork High School. They'd been unnaturally gorgeous, pale. I hadn't paid much attention to them those few months we were schoolmates. Why should I have? What were their names again? Alice, the tiny one. Emmett the huge one. Jasper the tall blonde one. Rosalie the most beautiful person in the world, though they all had been exceptionally good looking. That was as much as I knew about those four.

I'd never met their mother, but I dredged up my memory of Dr. Cullen. Without a doubt he was the hottest doctor I had ever seen during my many experiences as a patient.

Shortly after I had moved to Forks to live with Charlie, Tyler Crowley, the idiot, nearly hit me with his van on an icy day. I should have been killed, except I'd slipped on the ice myself and fallen just barely out of the way. I hit my head hard on the pavement, knocking myself completely unconscious.

To imagine that Dr. Cullen was a doctor and a vampire…

I gasped loudly.

My list!

I felt like an idiot, and then I corrected myself. I hadn't known Dr. Cullen was a vampire. Jacob had. He was the idiot.

"Jacob BLACK, why didn't you tell me this earlier?!" I demanded angrily. I stalked up to him from my lumpy mattress on the floor, my usual sitting place.

Jacob looked up at me from beneath the hood of the Rabbit. "I told you, it didn't come up."

"Do you know that I spent all of last night searching through this list unnecessarily? You were holding the answer from me all this time!" I accused him, pointing my finger. An angry purr rumbled from within my chest.

Stupid Jacob still appeared clueless. He seems dafter and dafter the more time I spend with him as a vampire. He can't keep up with my thought processes.

"The Cullens?" He asked uncertainly. Okay, maybe he's not so dumb.

"Yes! Last night I saw on the list that a Dr. C. Cullen was registered as owning a new black Mercedes! I crossed him off as a potential candidate, because I thought it impossible for a bloodsucker to be around so much blood as a doctor."

Jacob's eyes lit up with understanding. "That makes perfect sense. I don't really think all that well of him myself, but he is a doctor. He might've seen the crash and stopped to check it out - to see if he could help."

A hitch in the theory occurred to me. The theory suddenly began to fall apart. "Wait, Jake…The Cullens moved away, right? Why would Dr. Cullen have been back in Washington?"

The werewolf in front of me looked as discouraged as I did. "Good point…Still. It can't hurt to find the Cullens. They'll be easier to find than that huge list of Mercedes owners."

"True," I agreed. "They might even know who the leech that attacked Edward was."

"It's a start." He must have seen how disappointed I was, because he added, "Bella, it could still be him. How many leeches do you think own a black Mercedes?"

"You never know. Maybe that's the only car vampires like to drive," I moped.

"I can't believe I hadn't figured that out myself. I remember his Mercedes now…It was one of the nicest cars around here. The whole family keeps these expensive cars…"

My mind had already moved on to finding the Cullens. The Cullens who would hopefully help me on my quest to find Edward. "You think Google will work again?"

*

"Take this exit here," I instructed Jacob.

"You sure? I don't want to have to turn around…again."

"That was your own fault. You didn't listen to my flawless direction reading."

"You're a terrible directions reader. We've had to turn around five times because you told me to take the wrong exit," Jacob said, laughing at my innate inability to understand the United States highway system.

I felt myself losing my temper. "You're the one who printed off the directions from Yahoo! I told you to use MapQuest, but did you listen?!"

"Oh, now it's the directions themselves' fault? I thought it was my fault."

"It's both of you put together, now take this exit!" I yelled.

Jacob maneuvered the rental car into the exit lane. Rental, because his Rabbit was still a suspicious vehicle to the police. We'd required Billy for that part of the trip. Billy had been all too eager to help. He was hoping I'd never come back to La Push. A few more werewolves had spawned because of me and, well, let's just say a few more weeks at La Push and Frankenstein's monster would've been attacked by a large pack of werewolves.

Jacob still had a smirk on his face.

So, maybe I wasn't great at directions. He didn't even know how many times (eleven) I'd had to turn around last night while I drove the night shift as he slept. We made great time seeing as I was now a permanent member of the insomniac club.

"I can't believe this was my idea." Jacob sighed, clenching the steering wheel tightly.

"What do you mean, dog breath?" I'd been trying out nicknames for him. If he was calling vampires leeches and bloodsuckers, I was going to find one that suited the stinky werewolf.

"It goes completely against my instinct to ask a leech for help. I suppose saving you, I took a dive into leech-loving territory. Now I've driven all the way to Alaska to ask a leech for help. It's insane!"

I nodded like I understood. In reality, I couldn't relate to it at all. The only thing I saw as a barrier between werewolves and vampires being friends was the fact that we each smelled awful to the other. Even that problem Jacob and I have grown accustomed to with all the time we've spent together. You have to take into account that he and I spend most of our time confined to a garage with no ventilation whatsoever. It was desensitize our noses to each other's stenches or hold our breaths for hours, something I could do, but Jacob couldn't. I'd briefly debated wearing deodorant again – I doubted it would cover up my smell.

Wait a minute.

"Jake, are other vampires going to smell as bad to me as they do to you?"

Jacob shook his head. "I doubt it. I'm sure werewolves are the only ones who think leeches stink. Humans don't notice a bad stench, so why would you?"

I sighed in relief at this explanation. If Edward was alive out there somewhere, I didn't want him to think I smelled bad – or vice versa.

"When's my next turn?"

I glanced down at the directions. "Uh..." I looked up at the road. "You just passed it."

"Damn it, Bella!"

"Oops."

Despite my handicap at following and reading directions, Jacob and I finally made it to the town we were looking for. The heat in his car was on full blast, which made me suspect that it was colder than my corpse of a body thought it was. Jacob had stolen more of his sisters' clothes – baggy on me – as well as a worn coat, for our trip. I had never been one to care much about how I looked, yet even I was a little embarrassed at the outdated and raggedy clothes I had to wear. I wished for my clothes, wherever they had ended up as a result of my disappearance.

Time passed in the car, before I asked, "Should we try his house or the hospital first?" We had directions to both. For my part, I was leaning toward the hospital. Neutral ground and all. I wondered what a bunch of vampires would do if another vampire and a werewolf knocked on the door. Probably spray down Jacob with air freshener.

"I suppose…the hospital. He could be working." Maybe Jacob was on the same track of mind I was.

"Alright, you're going to take a left after a couple more streets. The hospital should be right there."

"Great." Jacob had grown less and less enthusiastic the closer we got. He was downright grumpy now. I bet the gas prices had something to do with it, too.

We parked the rental in the visitors' lot. Neither of us moved.

"Err…I guess I'll go in," I said after a minute. I was scared out of my holey pants as I put on my sunglasses (crimson eyes tend to freak people out) and started to get out when a warm hand stopped me.

Jacob's eyes were determined. "You're not going in there without me."

"I thought you didn't like us bloodsuckers."

His eyes softened. "You're the only one I like. That means I have to protect you from all the ones I don't like…which is all the rest." He grinned.

I found myself grinning back, "Alright, let's go, Rover." Our sappy best-friend moment was over.

"You're going to have to work on your derogatory nicknames."

"Shut up."

We got out of the rental car and approached the hospital's main doors. I pretended to look cold. Jacob had told me I was creepy when I didn't act human. I even pretended to chatter my teeth. Jacob chortled at my antics, the tension lifting for a few minutes before we went to talk to Dr. Cullen.

An idea popped into my head. "Jake, you're not just coming with me to protect the humans are you? From me, I mean."

"I trust you, Bells. There shouldn't be any blood where we're at, and if there is, I'll just wrestle you out of there. I can handle a little leech like you." He patted my head.

I wanted to believe him; a difficult task when I'd punched him lightly last week and cracked some of his ribs.

The doors glided open automatically and I started holding my breath.

We approached the receptionist, a large woman with dark hair and glasses. "May I help you?" Her name plate said Dina Jones.

Jacob spoke. "We were wondering if Dr. Carlisle Cullen was in today."

"Hmm…let me see." Dina began typing away into the computer in front of her. "It looks like today is his day off. Was it an emergency?" She said this while taking in my pale complexion and odd face I was making in my attempt to not breathe. My nose was scrunched up awkwardly as if I were constipated.

"No, not an emergency. I'll try his cell," Jacob lied. "Thanks for your help."

He walked several paces faster than usual, his hand behind my back.

We stepped into the cold air. I let myself breathe again.

"What a waste of time," I complained. "Now we have to go to his house. His house where there might be…more bloodsuckers than you and I can handle." It wasn't that I was worried about myself. I was worried about my wolf friend who still had a beating heart. He was still mortal, vulnerable.

"The Cullens should have no reason to be aggressive towards us," Jacob endeavored to assure me.

"I don't know, Jake, you do stink pretty awfully." I had an idea. "You should wear cologne. It might help with the smell."

Jacob glared at me as we each reached for our door handles. "I am wearing cologne."

My eyes widened. "Holy crow your wolf stench is all-powerful! I can't even tell! That's impressive."

"Get in the car, Bella," Jacob said tiredly.

"Maybe we should check into the hotel first. You need a good sleep and it's getting late for humans." It was pushing 6:00, hardly late, except this meeting another vampire thing was worrying me. The last time I'd met one, they'd wanted to kill me. My opinion of them was low, even if Dr. Cullen had treated my head injury in high school kindly and perfectly.

"Late?" Jacob looked at the clock in the car. "Hardly, but we probably should check in to the hotel now so we won't have to later."

"We might as well put off talking to Dr. Cullen until tomorrow," I wheedled. I was chickening out. What if they didn't know anything about Edward? What if we just looked ridiculous showing up to visit the family of vampires?

"He might be at work tomorrow. Then we'd only be talking to his…family," Jacob gritted out the last part. He was right about Dr. Cullen working, though. We'd have to visit them tonight.

I grumbled in irritation, "Alright, let's check into the hotel and get over to his house."

"You better stay in the car while I do it. You're still a dangerous bloodsucker."

"Why'd I get to go into the hospital, then?" I argued.

"That was because I thought we were going to talk to the leech. This is your project by the way, Miss I-Have-To-Find-This-Guy-I-Only-Knew-For-Three-Weeks."

Jacob was so much nicer when he had had a crush on me. This new Jacob didn't spoil me enough.

*

Author's Note: Our favorite person is finally going to appear in the next chapter!

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I tried changing the summary to entice people to read this…I guess the story just sucks? LOL.