Chapter Six (by LJ Summers)

"You are so dead," Emmett howled as Jasper pinned him on the grass of the meadow behind the Cullen mansion. "Get your teeth offa my neck, bro!"

"Uncle?" Jasper hissed triumphantly.

Refusing to give up, the bear-sized, curly-haired vampire growled deep in his chest and flung Jasper from his back. The tall blond vampire hit the exterior walls of the house with a thunderous crack.

"Boys! You'll be re-siding the house tomorrow!" Esme called from within, her voice edged with warning. Wrestling was fine, as long as they didn't damage property.

Rosalie laughed as her husband shoved a fist victoriously into the air. "Pay up, Alice."

"Jazz, I swear, I can't afford –" Alice's words were choked off in mid-sentence as a horrifying image forced itself upon her.

A square-jawed vampire with eyes the crimson of the freshly-fed was facing a woman with subtle blue stripes in her hair. Alice shook off the different-ness of that and focused on the scene – the woman was human and in her middle-years. Face stubborn, glasses slightly askew, she had her lips compressed in obvious defiance of the vampire. Alice didn't know who the vampire was, but it was obvious from his appearance that he was hard and forceful.

And then, he sliced the woman's arm with a thumbnail, drawing her blood.

Out of nowhere, another vampire – smaller, with wiry blond hair and a feral expression – lunged, his mouth affixing to the woman's bleeding arm as she gasped in fear in and pain.

"Come, now, Kathie," the square-jawed interrogator whispered, holding a book in his hand. "Who told you about us? We have laws and we will see them obeyed."

"No one!" the woman – Kathie – cried out.

"No!" Alice gasped, coming out of her vision and finding herself sprawled in her husband's arms, with the rest of her golden-eyed family about her.

"Ali, honey, what is it? What'd you see?" Jasper whispered urgently, cradling her against himself. He loved his wife but – even as much as they all relied on it – her gift privately terrified and irritated him by turns.

Alice put a hand on top of her head and endeavored to sit upright, with most of her weight resting on Jasper. "Kathie. A human. Her name's Kathie, but I don't remember seeing her before. And someone questioning her, telling her about our laws."

"The Volturi? Talking to a human woman?" Carlisle's voice was just on the agitated side of clinical. "Hm. They usually avoid humans, save when they need their services."

Or blood, Jasper thought but didn't say. He shook off the remembered – always remembered – taste and asked, "Who's Kathie?"

"I don't know..."

Rosalie and Emmett, their arms around one another, exchanged a quick glance. "How old was she in your vision, Alice?" Rose asked, a thin line of tension vibrating in her voice.

"Middle years, for a human. Some gray in her hair, some blue."

Emmett lifted a brow. "Blue?"

"Shut up," Alice snapped, "or I'll do the same to yours. Who is she?" the small woman wondered, half to herself. "Why am I having a vision about someone I don't even know?"

"What was happening in the vision, with the Volturi?" Carlisle inquired as they all moved slowly – for them – into their white-walled house in the woods outside of Forks, Washington. A light drizzle was moving in and the plan had been – before Alice's vision – to wait for the storm to hit later and go play baseball. The physician was relatively sure that these plans were now on hold. "Why would they be talking to a human woman?"

"Torturing her," Alice whispered. "He cut her arm."

"Hungry?" Carlisle wondered, still analyzing the situation with the scientific bent of his mind.

"No. Just for effect," Alice whispered again, horrified. "Someone told her about us, the Volturi guard said. Oh wait," she closed her eyes. "He's holding a book. She must have written a book about...about vampires?"

Emmett frowned and moved toward the cold fireplace in an entirely human manner. Some things were just habit. "Hell, Al. Everyone and their sister is writing books about vampires, lately. We'd know about it if the Volturi were killing all the authors."

"Emmett!" Rosalie fisted her hands on her hips. "Stop it. This is bothering Alice."

"Jasper," Carlisle suggested, "why don't you do a quick search online. Amazon, maybe. The name Kathie with vampires?"

"On it, Carlisle."

Jasper's laptop computer had been tweaked by Emmett – a computer hardware genius with advanced degrees in Engineering – and the former warrior had found great enjoyment in the digital world and being able to go all sorts of places without endangering anyone.

Back on the sofa, next to his wife, he tapped the keys with impossible speed. "Kathie K... Yeah, look, see? And she's got a website here – no blue streaks in her dust jacket photo, hon – and her book is called Guarding Robert. Ranked at number five hundred thirty-seven on Amazon right now..."

"That's pretty good," Rosalie said, leaning over Jasper's shoulder. "They've got millions of books."

Esme looked, too. "Where's her picture, Jasper? Maybe one of us knows her?"

"Did any of us tell her anything?" Rose wondered, a frown marring her alabaster brow.

Having seen the official dust jacket picture of the author, Esme flickered it through her mind, playing with the way time aged humans. Linking possible permutations to the name of the woman and seeing if it matched in any way to any possible human they had encountered in all their years. Well the last forty or so anyway.

"Does she have a biographical sketch anywhere, Jasper?" Carlisle sat in an armchair with one leg crossed over the other.

Jasper nodded, a lock of honey-hued hair flopping over his eye. He flicked it back absently. "Yeah, here. Hey, we were there..."

"Where!?" the entire family demanded with one voice.

"Mississippi in 1969," Jasper said, looking up to meet one pair of eyes at a time. "Camille."

"Oh, I know who she is!" Esme cried, her voice poised between delight at a memory and fear for the woman Kathie had grown into, who was now threatened by the Volturi. "She came down with a group to help, Carlisle, after the hurricane. Remember? Not a big group, but they were there from a church or something. Some girls were trying to help the animals who'd been stranded by the storm and one of them got bitten, remember?"

Carlisle did indeed remember. "A girl, yes. Kathie." He could see her face in his mind's eye and compared it to the picture Jasper had on the computer. "It could be her."

"Oh, Carlisle. Please don't tell us you let her see you? Like... Like we are?" Rosalie said, her voice pleading. "We worked so hard at staying inside during the daylight." She remembered vividly, as they all did, their quiet stint as volunteers after the storm blew through Mississippi and headed north and east. The sounds of the hurt who felt so awful after dark, when so many of the rescue workers had to stop because there just wasn't enough light left to work safely. But the family of Carlisle Cullen had, of course, been able to help. Quietly, without making a fuss, they had found several hurt and dying people and had brought them to where they would be seen by humans.

"Not intentionally, Rose," the patriarch answered in his calm way. "But a shaft of sunlight hit me when I was pulling her out from where she had a dog in an attic. The dog leapt out, but she was stuck and bleeding. I couldn't just leave here there."

"No, of course not," Alice and Esme said on a breath.

"Well." The psychic vampire cocked her head. "So she saw you. Saw the whole sparkle thing and repressed the memory, maybe? She was telling the man in my vision that no one told her about us."

"No one did," Carlisle insisted. "I just got her out and patched her up, making sure to get indoors as quickly as possible. There was a trailer used for the medics and we went there. Her family found her. I gave her medicine and –"

"And we left," Jasper said.

Emmett nodded. "We did." He leaned against the mantle. "But she didn't forget entirely, huh? Because now she's got this book out and we're all in trouble if she remembers what she forgot."

"We have to get to her," Esme insisted.

Jasper smiled thinly. "I'll find her. Alice, hon, keep me updated, all right? I guess we can handle a couple of guards from Volterra." He spoke lightly, but he knew that in a fight, he'd have to be on the top of his form. The Volturi were not amateurs.


The visions changed during the rest of that day and into the night. Jasper tracked Kathie down – "Oklahoma? Who the hell lives out there?" Emmett had joked as he loosened up with the Wii. "Rednecks."

Rosalie kicked his butt from her position on the sofa behind him. "Some good ol' boys from Tennessee should keep their big mouths shut."

Even Alice laughed at that, though her visions were troubling her. Jasper rubbed her shoulders as she told him what she saw.

Teenagers chasing chickens and falling over themselves. A man and a woman in warm kitchen, sharing a piece of apple pie. The woman had a grin on her face as she fed the man and Alice knew it was Kathie and her husband. A long, old-fashioned, two-man painted saw was laid out on a wooden table. There was a chicken painted on it. Then a flash of three girls giggling in a bathroom. One had pink streaks in her hair.

Alice liked this family already.

Then, suddenly, she bounded straight up, away from Jasper's soothing touch. "Newborns."

Gentleman though he was, Jasper could set air on fire with his volatile language. And he did. "Where?" he managed to grind out eventually. "Should we get reinforcements? Is one human woman worth fighting a newborn army, Alice?"

"No, not an army. Just two. Male and female. And they're not fighting...." She frowned and held up a hand to tell Jasper to be quiet for a minute. "No. They're with us, in the vision. They look like they're maybe late teens, early twenties. Not fighting, but they're with us."

"Huh. What else?"

"I can't see. It's all going fuzzy on me. Like something's keeping me from seeing any more."

Jasper swore a blue streak again. "Maybe we should sit this one out?"

"No! It's our fault she's in trouble, Jazz! We have to help her!"

"We will." Carlisle's voice interrupted them from the living room. A reminder of the lack of privacy in their lives that neither Alice nor Jasper needed. "Tomorrow's overcast and we'll leave at dawn."

Carlisle and his wife gazed into each other's eyes before Esme rose from the cream leather sofa. "I'm on it," she said, purposefully echoing Jasper's earlier words with a small smile. "Two guest rooms, coming up."