A/N: Second verse, same as the first – The characters belong to SMeyer, what they do in this story is allll mine

A/N #2: A special thank you to anyone who's taken the time to review. I can't tell you how much it means to know that people are reading, and enjoying, your efforts, and that you're not just posting words into the ether.

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Chapter 4

My breath caught. Could she be back already? Maybe she just panicked? Needed a moment?

"See you soon, Alice," I said hastily and dropped the phone into my pocket before running back down the stairs to the front door. I pulled it open so hard I damaged two of the three hinges.

But my welcoming smile fell straight off my face when I saw who was waiting on the other side, and no amount of manners could keep the shock from showing.

"Jake?"

My jaw was in danger of coming unhinged. Not only was the Quileute alpha on my front doorstep, he was here alone…and he was here human.

"This is, ah, a surprise," I said, thinking I'd never uttered a bigger understatement in my long life. "What do I owe the...honor?"

Jake scowled. He took a deep breath, just managing to keep from showing his nausea over the act. Then his eyes met mine straight on and I gasped. The last time I'd seen that level of intensity on his face...no, I'd never seen anything like this.

"Where is she, bloodsucker?"

I gaped again, utterly lost. "She? What are you talking about? You're looking for...Alice? Esme?" I laughed. "I know you're not looking for Rosalie."

But Jake apparently wasn't in the mood for laughing. He was, as ever, all business.

"Where's Bella?"

Whatever controls he'd managed over his thoughts disappeared when he said her name. His mind became a whirlwind of memories. A little girl with long, brown pigtails maturing through the years in a blur of images, not slowing until her face matched the one I knew. Then they became more steady images of her: laughing on a front porch swing, walking on the beach, falling into a tidal pool…laying in the hospital, then finally the memories of his frantic search through the forest.

And what he found there.

The devastation in his thoughts was unlike anything I'd felt since Rosalie's awakening. I had to work to shed the lingering feel of his heartbreak. It wanted to cling to me like spider webs, pulling at me and dragging me down into his grief. I focused on the last thought – the reason behind the pain – to keep that from happening.

"You knew," I said, breaking the silence at last.

"Of course I knew," Jake snapped.

"But you never found her?" The doubt was, I'm sure, all over my face as well as in my tone.

"No, I didn't," he said, back straightening in defiance almost out of habit, "because I stopped looking."

I cocked my head to the side, hearing the thoughts almost shouted at me. Maybe it was easier for him to think them rather than give them voice. I didn't care; I was too eager for information to quibble about how I obtained it.

I'd only just phased for the first time; Billy and old Quil's words fresh in my mind, you know? But I knew what I knew, what I'd been told, and what my purpose was. Bella'd been taken and turned by the vampires we'd had crawling through the area. The same vampires that had triggered the gene and caused my transformation.

There was a pause, a blank spot in his thoughts. Then, after a shudering breath, he continued.

And I knew if I found her, I'd have no choice but to kill her.

I understood.

Like his great grandfather before him, Jake took his duty as Quileute protector very seriously. Maybe even more so. Carlisle thought, as I did, that if it hadn't been for the precedent set by Ephraim Black years before, Jake might well have slaughtered us where we stood rather than make any sort of peace treaty.

"Understandable," I said after a long pause.

"So where is she?"

I laughed. "Right. Because I'm going to tell you so you can rip her to pieces now?"

"Do you really think I'd do that?"

I didn't hesitate. "If you thought your people were in danger? Yes, I do. Just as you would have done then. Bella's a vampire, Jake, in the truest sense. Truer even than my family and myself. She has red eyes and exists via a steady diet of humans. You need to divorce yourself from the idea that this is your childhood friend. Completely. That Bella is gone. She was gone from the moment the venom entered her system."

Jake winced.

"Better accept that one straight away, before you take one step further down this path."

He stood before me, silent and stoic. I could almost watch the wheels turning in his head as he worked through the new information.

"One more thing you need to consider. She has, from what I can tell, no memories of her human life. As far as she knows, she woke up a vampire and that's where her life began."

"But surely she..." I could feel it practically radiating from him, the further devastation that nothing of their friendship remained within Bella. That he was the sole keeper of those memories.

"Don't feel too badly about it," I said, and would later wonder why I felt the need to comfort a shape-shifting wolf who would, under different circumstances rip my body to pieces, burn them, and then dance on the ashes.

"We all lose our human memories after awhile, it's just another part of the change."

"After a while," he repeated and I heard the hope in his tone.

"It's been, what, two years now?"

"About that," he agreed, grudgingly.

"I really doubt it. I'm sorry. I have a few memories of my mother, but only because Carlisle helped me remember. Jasper and Rosalie have a few as well, because they worked so hard to keep them in the first few days after their transformations were complete. Bella had no such help, no one to tell the stories to, and, I'm guessing, no one told her that she'd need to work to remember them."

"What d'you mean?"

"I mean if she woke up alone, and she says she did, then whomever made her abandoned her soon afterwards. Whatever Bella is now, she's become on instinct alone. The fact she's still alive is a near miracle."

Jake still looked confused. I explained newborn madness, the near-reckless behavior we all showed in the first year; all of our time spent consumed with thirst, our lives ruled by it and rarely stopping if anything got in our way, and the unprecedented strength at our disposal if anyone was stupid enough to try. And the role our fathers or mothers took, guiding us through that crazy time, seeing that we did nothing to betray our existence or leave evidence behind.

"Many of your unsolved homicides can be laid at the feet of newborn vampires run amok."

"That's bullshit," Jake scoffed. "If that were true, there'd be more of them, whole areas of unsolved murder, serial killings, that sort of thing. It would've made the news at least."

I smiled. "You're thinking of us in relation to yourself and your eating habits. We don't need to but once a week, give or take a few days, sometimes longer. Newborns perhaps every two days on rough average. There are some that gorge, yes, but they're the exception. Given our speed, a nomad could be in another state when the next bout of thirst hit."

"And the ones that gorge?"

Trust Jake to narrow in on that one little bit of information. "They're taken care of," I answered simply.

"How?"

I merely looked at Jake.

He scowled. "Right, I get it. Some big leech secret. Like I really care about any of this."

I watched the bravado slip back into place, hear him tell himself repeatedly he didn't care, that he'd already buried her in his mind. The Bella he knew was dead.

I winced away from the pain that lanced through every part of the man in front of me at that thought. He'd apparently been under the impression that he'd accepted her death long ago, but was only now finding how raw the wounds still were.

"Was there anything else?" I said, sensing his need to get away from here as soon as possible and giving him the out he needed.

"No, that's it. Just make sure sh- make sure it remembers to stay off our lands. Better yet, get it the hell away from here. Our treaty extends to the Cullen family only. Visiting leeches aren't mentioned. That makes them fair game."

Without another word, Jake turned and stalked down the porch steps. His body was already vibrating so hard, he didn't make it to the safety of the trees. Instead, he shook into wolf form right before my eyes, shredding the gym shorts he wore into tatters.

The second he was in wolf form his thoughts filled with the running forest and I realized I was right the last time we'd met. He wasn't just hiding things from my mind. Jake had come here in human form for one reason only…to keep these thoughts from the rest of his pack. However close they were, Jake hadn't told his packmates that his former best friend was a vampire.

Whether to protect her, or protect himself, I didn't know.

~*~*~*~*~

"Tell me again, why we're here? Didn't you do enough of this back when you first...when you first found out about her?"

I snorted a laugh, because we'd both known she'd changed her mind halfway through and not mentioned my former obsession with the human girl. Out of contrariness alone, I didn't answer that part. Besides, I didn't need to.

We both know I had.

"That was different. This time I'm looking for something specific."

"What?"

I paused, looked around. "I don't know." I finally admitted.

"Well, that clears that up, thanks," Alice said, dropping onto a chair. Her movement dislodged one of two braces set against the wall.

We both stopped, listened, then carried on our whispered conversation.

We were in Bella's room, the second of two bedrooms in Chief Swan's modest house. It had been two years at least since Bella's disappearance but this room, apart from the dust, looked just the same as it had that day. Her backpack was still hanging off the chair, math homework still on her desk.

She'd gotten the all the problems right, save the last one.

I'd spend entirely too much time wondering if the reason the eraser was left pointing towards the problem was because she was about to correct her mistake.

I really did need therapy.

I turned to look at Alice when she put the brace back up. She was staring at the device, a cane with an arm cuff and hand bar, curiously. Carlisle had told me it was used not to bear the weight of the person using them, like typical crutches, but used as support instead.

With what I knew of her injuries, that made sense.

"What happened to her?"

"Alice," I sighed, "I told you this, back when I first found it out." And find out I had, eavesdropping on the thoughts of those around me when I'd surreptitiously get the poster in front of them in an attempt to steer their thoughts towards Bella.

She smiled, unapologetic. "I didn't listen, though, did I? I mean, honestly, Edward, you went on and on about it some human girl who'd disappeared over a year beforehand. Much as I hate to say it, none of us were really enthralled by it. But we'd never seen you so excited about anything before, so we..." She stopped, shrugged.

"Pretended to be interested until I shut up about it?"

"Something like that," she said easily. "Oh don't get all offended. You know you did the same thing when that HBO special on the Civil War came out and Jasper went into spasms over it."

I had no defense; she was right. The two weeks that show aired were a small nightmare for all of us as Jasper ranted and raved about facts they got wrong. And, let's face it, if Carlisle ever got wind the BBC was doing another historical series on the Restoration, we would all develop urgent needs to be elsewhere until it was over.

"So," Alice prompted, "what happened to her?"

"She was hit by a car not a month after arriving here to live with her father."

"Really?"

I nodded. "A freak thing, by all accounts. Another student's car hit a patch of ice and spun out in the parking lot of the high school, pinned her between it and her own truck. She broke both of her legs, but she was lucky to not have suffer worse, luckier still to be alive after that. She spent a week in the hospital, then a month in a wheelchair. She'd only had the casts off and been back on her legs, using the braces, for a month when she disappeared."

Alice's eyes were as wide as dinner plates, her skepticism clear. "And people really believe she ran away from home? Without her braces?"

"Honestly? Most of them don't know what to think. There were some thought she'd run off and eloped because there was another disappearance around the same time," I said, then paused, because the very idea still left a bad taste in my mouth. "But that was debunked when Jake came home alone with no Bella and without a clue where she was."

Alice's nose wrinkled. "Bella and the puppy? No way."

I nodded my head hard enough to rattle my teeth in full agreement with that sentiment. No matter Jake's pain at losing Bella, I couldn't see them together.

But my conclusions might not have been altogether unbiased.

"Not arguing the point with you, but that was the initial assumption. Jake had helped Bella with her rehabilitation, they'd been close friends since she moved here and knew each other when they were kids, too. In a lot of minds around here, it made sense. But when Jake came back alone, everyone shifted gears and the search reintensified. By then, though, any possible trail was cold and eventually, even the Chief stopped looking."

"All right, so that's what the town thinks," Alice said, eyes travelling over the varied photos around the room, several showing a much smaller Jacob than the one we knew. "What do you think?"

I raised an eyebrow and snorted. "I think she became a vampire, Alice," I said, sarcasm dripping from my words.

"Ha, ha, ha," Alice said, rolling her eyes at me. "You know that's not what I meant. I meant how do you think the change happened? Who turned her?"

"Of that, I have no idea, unfortunately. All I have to go on is old newspapers, and all I got from those is that it was a bad spring for hikers on the Olympic Peninsula. Four of them disappeared over the two months leading up to Bella's disappearance. Spring was also bad on the people of Port Angeles and Bremerton as well, but nothing sensational enough to raise any media or law enforcement flags. No one ever connected the dots."

Alice nodded. "All right, so it was a nomad, but why so many around one area? They don't usually center around one place like this. Why stay so central? And for so long?"

I only had one answer to that. I picked Bella's pillow up off the unmade bed and handed it to Alice. "If this is the scent that remains after two years dormancy, can you imagine the potency when she was a living, breathing human?"

Skeptical, Alice pressed her nose to the pillow and inhaled, I could see the way her shoulders jolted, but I could also hear her thoughts and knew from them that venom was pooling in her mouth.

"I see it isn't just me," I said, rather grateful that my sister had a similar reaction to mine the first time I was here, surrounded by Bella's scent. But it had only been a few months since she'd disappeared then and the scent had been much stronger; it had brought me to my knees. My eyes automatically went to the spot just below her desk chair were a small drop of her blood had once rested.

A drop of blood that had caused an immediate and overpowering thirst so strong I'd had to leave the house for fear of attacking Chief Swan where he slept simply to slake my need. I was very thankful after that night that I had never come across Bella while she was human. No matter my commitment to Carlisle's lifestyle, I didn't think anyone was strong enough to withstand a scent that strong.

Alice tossed the pillow away from herself and I watched her swallow down the venom before putting the pillow in its proper place on Bella's bed.

"Adding it all up, that means there was a nomad vampire or vampires here two years ago that stayed long enough to thin the population a bit and then take off with Bella…why? I mean, if they'd killed all along, and all around the area, why not kill Bella too? With a blood scent that strong, I can't imagine whoever this was resisting for long."

"That's the part I haven't been able to figure out," I conceded. "It's why I stopped my search last year, because it was starting to consume me, searching for answers I had no way of recovering."

Alice was no fool. "So now we're back in her bedroom, because you're, what, trying to find something to trigger long-forgotten human memories that may or may not give you those answers?"

I winced. "It sounds almost Machiavellian when you put it that way."

"Right, because you've always been known for your altruism, haven't you?"

I laughed. "All right, it is Machiavellian, but I'm also doing it for Bella," I said and then reached over to touch the tip of Alice's nose. "I know what it's like to see someone struggle with trying to determine just who, or what, they are."

Alice's head shook. I could hear the determination in her voice as well as her thoughts. "I know who I am, Edward. Knowing if I wore pinafores with matching ribbons in my pigtails won't change a thing about that."

"I know, but if you'd had a chance, a known place to go for answers about who you'd been, can you honestly tell me you wouldn't have gone?"

The room fell silent and that was answer enough.

~*~*~*~*~*~

The next few days passed much the same as the past few years.

With one notable exception.

For the past years, even decades, my life had been an endless loop of home and school, broken only by the occasional move every few years to keep ahead of the suspicion. Nothing changed, really, even in a new town. It was more of the same everywhere.

But there was something new for me now. As the sun set each night, anticipation would fill me. I'd spend hours running through the forest near our house, hunting close to home rather than following my family off on a trip into Canada. With anticipation came letdown, however, when the sun would rise each morning on another night spent with no sign of Bella.

I refused to let that disappointment eat at me, though. She had come before, she would come back again. She just needed time. I needed to be patient.

I was starting to really hate that word.

"We're going to Rainer tonight," Emmet said on the ride back towards the house. "You're coming, right? Long weekend? Nothing more pressing than hunting up a mountain lion or two?"

I let my silence answer.

Emmet groaned. "You're not serious? You're going to stick to mule deer with the prospect of a meat-eater on the horizon? Just because some nomad might stop by?"

Again, I kept silent. After all, what could I say? He was right and it was stupid, but I—

"What the hell?" Jasper's exclamation stopped and I raised my eyes. I'd just opened my mind to his, probing his thoughts to see what had startled him, when I saw....

I was out of the car before either of my brothers could stop me.

"Subtle, kid. Real subtle."

I ignored him, and the laughter that followed. I was too busy keeping myself from running full speed the short distance from the car to the front steps.

Where Bella sat, still in the clothes Alice had given her when she was here before.

Alice. Now I knew why she had insisted we take separate cars today, as well as her "impulse" shopping trip to Portland with Rosalie.

I should have known better than to trust anything Alice did to not have a hidden agenda, but I'd concentrate on that later. Much later.

"Hello," I said when I came to a stop in front of her, thankful my brothers had foregone more teasing to head straight into the house.

"Hi," she said back, smiling shyly at me. A long, silent pause followed as my eyes travelled over her face like a man lost in the desert regards an oasis.

"Shouldn't. Have run," Bella said at last. "Sorry."

"No, it was my fault. You'd no sooner told me that you didn't like to be touched and I took hold of your arm. That one's totally on me."

"No," she said, starting to protest again.

"Oh for God's sake, you both were idiots about it. Move on or you'll be apologizing until next week."

I growled in the general direction of the second floor, but he was too busy being proud of his own wit to care. He'd had his say and was now intent on leaving me to my idiocy and whipping Jasper's behind at Call of Duty 3. Again.

"He. Charming," Bella said. I felt the oddest fluttering, not quite in my stomach, not quite in my chest, when she favored me with another shy smile. Like my long-dead heart was struggling itself back to life. It took me a minute to figure out why I couldn't speak before realizing that I needed to breathe first.

I took a deep breath, storing oxygen in case I forgot again.

"Isn't he, though? Charming and sensitive and…"

"Ha! See? That's how it's done, son. Knocked your ass straight to the fucking ground. Who's the ma—" The rest was drown out by the unmistakeable sound of a scuffle. Esme's voice followed, calling out dire consequences if they broke the furniture again. There was a silent pause, a few muffled laughs before the game resumed.

Bella laughed, a high, sweet sound that left my mind reeling. I tried to compare the sound to others I'd heard; a bell choir in perfect tune, a symphony of violins playing Vivaldi's Four Seasons, the arias of Mozart and Puccini. All close, but not quite. In fact, in my opinion, gifted musicians the world over could work their whole lives and never come close to the music of her simple laugh.

This time I knew I was biased. And I didn't give a damn.

I knew something else as well. I didn't want an audience, and a constant critique of every word I said from my brothers or the contented humming from my mother, interrupting us.

While I had no practical experience with courting, neither as a human or as a vampire, I'd seen my share of films and read thousands of books that had some form of courtship intertwined in the story. Enough to at least have a guidepost along the new road I was travelling now. It was almost childish, in a way, to be taking my cues from books and films, but the old adage about beggars and choosers had been around awhile for a reason.

I had to take what I had available.

"Would you like to take a walk with me?" I asked, a bit hesitant.

Bella stood and smiled again, laying her hand gently on my arm and raising her crimson eyes to mine. "Yes."

We both ignored the chorus of "awwww" from the upstairs game room as we headed out together into the forest.