It was Edward who went to retrieve his daughter a little less than an hour later, when the corpse had been taken care of and Jasper and Jacob dispatched to verify the man's identity. He made his way through the darkness of the trees at human pace, letting the afternoon rainfall wet his hair and face. For the first time in years, he had more to think about than his mind could process at once.

She was hurt and angry, he knew. She had cherished a thought that they wouldn't be upset with her, but there was so much she didn't understand. He remembered with grisly clarity the visions that had surfaced in Bella's mind when they first saw their daughter with those startling purple eyes and blood on her blouse—nightmarish images, dim with her humanity, of a towering pile of ravaged bodies and a little boy with ruby eyes atop them, a little boy whose hair turned long and curly, whose eyes turned purple in a too familiar face... and then the vision had died like a snuffed candle. She closed her mind to him so rarely that it disturbed him almost as much as his daughter's appearance.

But he had only needed that short, unchecked moment to know exactly what Bella was beginning to fear. What did they really know, after all, about this strange new race they had created? Very little.

And then Renesmee's thoughts. Panicked, defensive, uncomprehending. The unfairness of her situation played like a loop in her frantic mind, her anger growing with every word they said.

This isn't fair... it was just an accident...it's no big deal...

The fact that she had managed to hide something like this from him so completely was the most disturbing element of all. She had been feeling the bloodlust...well, he didn't know how long. He was questioning everything, now. Possibly it began in those first days when her behavior began to change, when she started to lash out at all of them for something as simple as a hand on her head or a suggestion about her schoolwork. Months. Months of sinister thoughts and physiological reactions, and he'd had no idea.

How had she kept this from him? What else had she buried beneath so much falsely innocuous chatter? He had been so certain that there was nothing he didn't know about his child. Her mind had grown confusing, yes, but it had hummed along and opened to him whenever he delved into it, crystal clear always with love and fear and intelligence and frustration.

But she had been lying to him. He could almost have admired the mental agility required if he hadn't been rocked to his very foundations.

When she had slammed the door after their terrible interview and Edward had lifted his head from his hands, his eyes had turned immediately to Jasper.

"Tell me she felt it."

Oh yeah, said his brother to him alone, like you wouldn't believe. I know it didn't sound like it, and she probably wasn't thinking about it all coherently or anything, but... and he began to radiate a shocked remorse and self-hatred so crushing that some of them gasped, and Edward's dead heart broke open even as relief flooded him, and he and Bella looked at each other, her beautiful mind wide before him once again.

It's fine, they told each other. She's still our girl. It's fine.

And now he would go get her. They would fix this, somehow. He was her father; fathers fixed things.

But she wasn't there. The door was open, her bedroom drawers turned over, but she was gone. He sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose. She had done this before, and every incident frayed his parental nerves just a little bit more. One of these days, something was going to happen to her. Oftentimes they let her come back when she was ready, after her volatile temper had cooled and reason had a chance to prod her home a few hours or a few days later. This time, he decided, he would go after her. It was possible she was more out of control at this point than she had been before she killed that man. She would need him, so he breathed her in and sprinted east. There was no doubt he would catch up. He was easily five times faster than she was.

He followed her scent—that singular combination of flowers, blood and earth that was the union of her parents' bodies—through the trees for miles and came to the edge of the yawning gray water at the same moment he heard Alice call from somewhere behind him.

Edward!

He stared at a sailboat rocking gently in the Sound as he waited for his sister. Her mind was an overwhelming cascade of visions, hundreds appearing at once as though the dam through which her sight trickled had burst and flooded her. Rosalie taking down a buck, Carlisle in his study, Esme sanding a cabinet, Emmett and Jasper wrestling. They kept coming, rich in the certainty and detail so long denied by that thread of their family that hindered her gift.

Edward, I think...I think she's really gone.

oOo

The bell over the shop door tinkled quietly, but Renesmee didn't get up from the floor of the back room. It was Fatima, she knew, home eighty-five minutes after her Thursday class was over. Fatima's footsteps echoed with startling force across the shop and she threw open the storage door and dropped her bag with an angry flourish.

"What's wrong with you today?" Nessie asked, turning a page of her book.

Fatima sighed. "I ran into Oliver and his goons on my way home. He has a new song."

"How many pieces is his girlfriend in this time?"

Nessie raised her head when Fatima didn't immediately respond to see Fatima staring at her with her mouth open. Then she threw her head back and laughed so hard she started sliding down the wall.

"Was it that funny?"

Fatima just kept laughing, nodding her head and wiping tears from her eyes.

Nessie smiled. It felt unexpectedly fantastic to have someone appreciate the darkness of her humor. She'd had thoughts like that (in her own head) for years now, but for some reason none of her irreverent quips had seemed right to say out loud. She grinned a little wider, pleased with herself.

She probably should have been worried about Fatima, actually. Things in the neighborhood were getting worse—rock throwing and rioting and some fights with police. This new role Fatima had found for herself gave her fierce purpose, but Nessie was noticing lately that it also gave her a sizable burden of guilt when anything in the world continued to go wrong. She'd been too quiet for the past few weeks, almost sullen. Now, recovering her breath and clutching at her stomach, she looked like a young woman who didn't know if she should be laughing, crying, or screaming.

"When you've calmed down...is it time for dinner?

"Yes...yes it is...want to help me?" Fatima picked up her bag again and nudged open the door.

"Uh... I don't know how."

"Sure you do. I'll show you."

Nessie shrugged and put her book away. "Okay."

In the end she didn't have to cook anything; she just chopped the onions. Fatima handed her a board and knife and three huge spanish onions, and then lit a candle and set it down by Nessie's hand.

"For the tears," she said.

Nessie picked up the knife and cut one onion straight down the middle, letting the husk flake off in her fingers. She wondered, as she turned the onion over and peeled off every clinging bit of brown, if the closer layers—the moist, sharp, white ones—would turn dark and snake off if you exposed them long enough, if inner layers became outer layers when left in the sun.

They worked in silence, Fatima warming something in a pan while Nessie chopped slowly, unsure of proper technique. A pleasant sizzle began to rise in the little kitchen as Nessie finished the last onion. She blew out her candle and Fatima looked up at her.

"Done? You can just toss them straight in here," she said, pointing at her pan. Nessie lifted the unwieldy board piled high with onions and carried them over, dumping them in with one flick of her wrist.

"Thanks," said Fatima.

"It smells really good."

"Onions and garlic usually do."

"So," Nessie said in her best Causal Voice, "what's going on, you know, out there?" she waved her hand at the kitchen window.

Fatima sighed, eyes on her pan. "Nothing out of the ordinary, I guess. Just people being loud and violent to make a point and undermining all of us to do it. It never bothered me so much before, but I get so angry now that I can't even think about anything else."

"I'm sorry."

"So am I. I want to live to see this done for, Dori," she said, her eyes hard. "Every last stupid, cruel thing. But I won't."

Nessie didn't have the heart to tell her that even as an immortal, she didn't think she'd live to see it, either.

Fatima looked up and must have caught the despair in Nessie's expression, because she said, "Oh, listen to me, sounding like the voice of doom. I'm sorry. Have you heard about the angel?"

"The what?"

"I've overheard three different conversations about it this week," she said, turning down the heat on the stove. "People think there's this ange des ombres saving people from criminals. No one ever sees it, it just...saves them and disappears."

Nessie re-instituted the Casual Voice. "That's really strange."

"Yeah, I have no idea if it's true or not, but there's a girl who swears it saved her from getting dragged into somebody's car the other night. They're saying that before she even tried to scream, the guy's windshield was broken and his face was pressing down on the car horn. He was totally knocked out, but she hadn't seen a thing. She'd barely blinked."

Nessie tried not to smile. That one had been awesome.

"So she wrote violeur on the side of his face with her lipstick, and then she went home."

Nessie laughed. "That's perfect! Weird, though. There's no explanation?"

Fatima tilted her head. "No, not yet."

They looked at each other for a few seconds.

"Anything else I can do?" Nessie asked.

"No. No, I think we're almost ready."

"Great." Nessie smacked the counter with her palm and headed downstairs to close the store, telling herself that not even Fatima was that perceptive.

oOo

It didn't occur to Nessie until later that night, as she sat perched on the roof of the grocery store, that Fatima had said nothing about the carjacking or the murders. She had to have known about it, but she hadn't said a word. Maybe she figured Nessie already knew, and didn't want to bring it up. Or maybe in Fatima's mind such things were in a different category, the routine violence married to poverty. As far as Nessie was concerned, however, it was a lot more worrying than the riots.

It was worrying because Nessie had never seen it happen. By now she knew this district like the back of her hand, and she had thought nothing happened on the street in St Denis at night that she didn't know about. But a week ago someone had been killed and their car stolen, and then two mornings ago she had woken from her usual three hours of sleep to hear that two men had been shot at opposite ends of the neighborhood. After breakfast that morning, she went back upstairs and cried for half an hour until her shift started.

She did strange things like that a lot more often now that she was barely sleeping, and once again she found herself bitterly hating her body's limitations. No one else in her family would be unreasonably emotional, because none of them needed to sleep at all. Alice would have known exactly who would be killing who, and her father could have stopped every single one of them, across town or not, in about ten seconds. Nessie could stick her hand in somebody's face and show them something disturbing, but that was about it. And here she was, half-vampire and whole nothing, parading around like she had enough power to protect the innocent. Sorry, everyone, you'll have to take the pseudo-hero. The professionals are otherwise occupied. The people around here got the crap version of everything, apparently.

She could have stayed on top of the grocery store and indulged these self-pitying thoughts until sunrise, and she probably would have if she hadn't heard a car door slam and several pairs of feet head her way from down the block. She flattened and waited motionlessly for them to pass. They stopped a few yards away, in front of the hair salon next door.

"Where d'you think you're going?" said a voice. "This isn't over."

"I'm going home because it's bad information and you're wrong. I didn't say anything."

There were five of them, three on two. The two accused men were backed up against the wall of the building next to the grocery store, one defiant and the other clearly nervous. The other three stood shoulder to shoulder on the pavement, gold chains on their arms winking at her in the headlights of the car still running down the street.

"Oh, I think you did, though. We all do. We think both you scumbags decided you could get a better deal from the cops than you get from the boss."

"That's shit, asshole. How stupid would we have to be to cross the boss?"

The man on the far left laughed, his smile wide and frightening. "No worries, man. I know how stupid you are."

And then it all happened so fast she didn't even have time to jump to the ground. The one against the wall who had been arguing opened his mouth for another ill-considered retort, but he never made it. The rapid, echoing bursts of machine gun fire tore the night's silence and both men jerked horribly and fell to the pavement and Nessie still hadn't moved, and the three others ran for their car with weapons in hand and peeled away as the pools of blood below her fanned out into the street and trickled down the storm drain.

oOo

She walked home. There was nothing else she could do, but she felt terrible for whoever was going to have to see the bloody mess in the morning. Why hadn't she seen their guns? They were assault weapons. Where were these guys getting assault weapons in Paris? If this was how they were all going to kill each other, she couldn't stop them.

She was in her bed, she realized. She didn't remember getting there. Fatima was lying on her stomach with her arms splayed and dangling off the edge of her pallet, breathing softly. Nessie rolled over and tried to close her eyes, but she saw the whole thing over and over again...

Exhausted beyond reason, she eventually fell into a strange, nightmarish half-sleep where murders ran together between biting and shooting and her mother kept trying to touch her face, and then her mother was Fatima and she was waving an AK-47 at Oliver, and all his friends were dancing...

And when Fatima woke her thirty minutes later, Nessie had an idea.

oOo

"Abdul, would you mind closing up on your own if I left a bit early this evening?"

"Why? Have you joined up with Fatima?"

"No, no, I just have some things I need to buy, some personal items." She hated lying, but she had learned from the men in her family that no one asked any questions when they thought feminine products might be involved.

"I'll be fine, of course," he said hastily. "I only scheduled both of us for this afternoon because tourist season is coming up. Just want to be prepared. You go right ahead."

Nessie thought he was being a little optimistic, as it wasn't even April, but she just smiled her thanks and picked up her backpack. "I might be late coming back. Don't worry about me."

"I will in any case, my dear. Be careful."

She laughed awkwardly and pushed open the door.

Oliver was usually to be found within a few blocks of the bookstore, holding court in an empty park. She circled carefully around the neighborhood, determined to see them all before they saw her and started jeering. When she turned down the Rue de Falla she spotted them, grouped lazily at the other end of the street under the fledgling shade provided by a clump of trees in early spring bloom. She stepped into the bushes beside the pavement and searched all the faces turned in her direction. She was looking for a certain set of features she remembered from last night. She had seen them once before, that first day in St. Denis when she had attracted Oliver's unwanted attention with her staring. All his friends had turned to look her over, too, and one of them had a gold incisor and a disturbing smile, a disturbing smile she'd seen last night from a similar angle. She knew it had been him. But was he even here? Did murderers hang out a few blocks from their crime scene the day after they'd killed someone?

She inched forward a few feet to get a better look at the few men whose faces she couldn't see, and there he was. She felt a thrill of nervous electricity as she looked at him, leaning against the iron fence with his cap in his hand. He really was there, just standing there like a normal person after turning two people to swiss cheese the night before.

Did he have a gun now? She couldn't tell from here. She would just have to wait and follow him. After dark, he would either go home or he'd go wherever it was his "boss" worked and handed out assault rifles for his employees to tote around the suburbs.

As she watched the darkness grow around the knot of men she was amazed anew at their ability to do absolutely nothing for such a long period of time. It was like an art, almost, and the boys in this neighborhood did it better than anyone she'd ever seen. They finally dispersed a few minutes after midnight, and Gold Incisor went north with a couple of the others.

Nessie had never stalked anyone before, but she managed fairly well. She stayed a few hundred yards back in the shadows and followed the three men down streets and through parking lots, flattening against a car or building if any of them turned around. When they went inside a residential building and didn't come out again, she kicked the gate and went home.

The next day she worked until closing but left before Fatima could come home and make her stay for dinner. She found the boys in the same spot as the day before and she and hung back, once again, in the bushes until they went their separate ways.

This time he went alone, and he went the opposite direction. She tried not to hope for too much as she trailed him, but she was burning to do something about all this madness and if he led her into the middle of it himself, so much the better. He was walking more briskly than the night before, footsteps echoing in the darkness while her careful steps made no sound at all. Whether he was hurrying because he was alone or because he had somewhere urgent to be, she couldn't say. They hadn't gone more than a mile when he stopped in front of an old, empty warehouse, looked left, right, and behind him, and then jumped the gate and disappeared behind a side door.

Nessie was torn. She had landed atop this very building multiple times during her evenings out, and she'd never heard or seen anything suspicious. Following him inside might just be a disappointing waste of her time, and she risked being seen. She'd never know if she didn't check, though, and this was the reason she'd followed him in the first place.

She crept around the building, examining all four of its dilapidated faces, and found a broken window a few stories up on the east-facing side. She could probably jump most of the way there without making any noise, but if there were too many of them in there, and they didhear her...

At that moment a service truck came rumbling down the street and turned into the warehouse loading dock. That decided it for her. She had to see what was going on. She crouched and sprang, landing just left of her intended window. She shimmied sideways and peered in.

There were, well, a lot of them. Twenty, it looked like, and they were working on cars, feet sticking out from underneath engines or backs bent, rummaging in their open hoods. The smell of oil and gasoline wafted to her sensitive nostrils, mixed with overheated blood and perspiration. She felt a flash of disappointment; nothing even slightly illegal was going on. This was ridiculous, spying on a bunch of auto repairmen, even if one of them did happen to be a murderer. Where had he gone, anyway?

She spotted him at the corner of the warehouse, but not before noticing the teenage boy crouched in front of a windshield with a razor blade. He was removing the car's VIN.

There was no way that could be right. She decided she was still interested, leaned forward a little further.

The service truck had backed in from the loading dock and shut off its engine. Three men jumped out and slammed the doors, and all the heads in the warehouse swiveled in their direction. They shook hands with Gold Incisor and began a quiet conversation that the other men apparently couldn't hear, because they all bent right back to their work. Nessie strained to pull the soft voices out of the din below her and realized they were speaking a language she didn't know. It had a lilt that reminded her of her cousins in Alaska.

"They say that they are only leaving you with half."

"No. We have a deal. You pay up and you do it now."

More of the rapidly spoken foreign language... she wished someone had thought to teach something Slavic. It suddenly seemed incredibly useful.

"They say that it is you who breaks deal. They see these cars..." He waved his hand at the scene before him. Nessie noticed that he had sunglasses on. "These cars not even half what you say you give in one month. They leave half because they decide to be generous."

Gold Incisor looked like he wanted to pick up a rifle again, but he just gritted his teeth and said, "You tell them I can make bigger trouble than they want, if they pull this again. We'll fill our order, and you'll owe us with interest, got it?

The man in the sunglasses translated this last bit of bravado and the other two men nodded. One of them unlatched the back of the service truck and lifted the door with one great tug, and Nessie almost gasped out loud.

There were guns piled inside it from floor to ceiling. Everything suddenly made sense—the spoils of the Soviet Union arming every kid in the district, the stolen cars, the murders...

She'd seen everything she needed. She made sure she'd forced open the broken window all the way before she scaled the warehouse and leapt home in her usual fashion, a reckless but strangely alluring plan forming in her mind.

oOo

"Fatima, have you guys ever had a car?"

"Ah, no, I don't think so. Not since I was very little. Why?"

"Just wondering...all the people driving around here but no mechanic. Seems strange."

"Oh, there's one about ten minutes from here. That's where most people go."

"Huh... Well, I'm going out."

"Where? Do you want me to come with you?"

"Oh, no, just walking. I'll be fine, you stay here."

Fatima waved at her lazily from her pallet. "Enjoy."

oOo

"Abdul?"

"Yes, my dear?"

"What's the policy on days off?"

"I don't have one. You say you don't want to work, I don't make you. Very civilized."

"What if I didn't want to work on Tuesday?"

"Then I wouldn't make you."

"That's quite civilized."

Abdul inclined his head. "I told you so."

oOo

Sneaking into the warehouse in the middle of a sunshiny spring morning was going to be a lot more complicated than spying from a broken window in the middle of the night. It was her only chance to find the place unoccupied, though, and she had to take it. She tied her eye-catching hair back in a black scarf and put the bookstore's screwdriver in her backpack, next to the precious little bottles she'd managed to get her hands on. She acted as normal as possible walking down the street (which of course made her feel ten times more conspicuous, and probably look it, too), and took advantage of the thick bushes growing on the west side of the warehouse compound to pause before setting into a sprint she knew no one would be able to see. She ran full-speed up the side of the building and pushed through the open window without slowing down. She grabbed at a pipe that buckled with her weight but held her. She caught her breath, dangling over the empty warehouse floor, and listened for a heartbeat besides her own as she hung by one hand. Hearing nothing, she dropped to the ground.

Seven cars were sitting in a row, smelling of fresh oil. Their VINs had all been removed and they were clearly ready to be transported tonight. To her great relief, they all looked as old as she remembered them. If they'd been newer models, she might not have known what to do.

She punched in the driver-side window of a white Fiat and unlocked the door, brushing the glass off her arm. She unscrewed the well cover and set about stripping the wires, breathing a silent thanks to Jacob as she did so. Once she had it running she could...

Wait. She was going in the wrong order. She climbed back out of the car, fingers shaking slightly with adrenaline, and fished around in her backpack for one of her little bottles. They'd been hard enough to get—she'd had to count out all the money that was left after she helped the Debhis pay the rent, and then find the auto store and get hold of the substance without really knowing how one said "sodium silicate" in French. In the end she just told the clerk she needed something to seal caps and he'd brought it out from the back and taken her money. She'd only been able to buy four bottles of it with all the cash in her backpack, but she would get paid again next week and what she'd purchased should get her a long way.

She wrenched open the Fiat's hood and said another silent prayer of thanks, this time to her Aunt Rosalie, as the proper repository for her silicate presented itself immediately. She poured in what looked like a good amount (she had no idea how much she needed, really), and climbed back into the car to finish hot-wiring. This had to work. Please, please let it work.

The dashboard lit up and the engine revved to life a few seconds later, and Nessie scrambled into the seat and floored the gas pedal, watching the needle climb until some truly terrible noises began and the whole thing gave out for what was, unquestionably, the last time.

"Yes!" she yelled, laughing and bouncing in her seat. She'd done it. All the other cars should be just as easy, and when Gold Incisor and his murdering friends showed up tonight, they would find seven cars that would never be driven anywhere again, not even onto a loading truck for transport.

oOo

She was exhausted by the time she got home, and covered in engine grease. The other six cars had notbeen quite as easy as the first one, but she'd killed them all eventually. Her stomach was rumbling, too; she'd missed lunch. She crept back into the bookstore by the storage door and climbed the stairs to the attic to change before Abdul saw her.

"Dorianne?" he called from the front. "Is that you?"

"Yes, I'll be out in a minute," she yelled back, wincing. She closed her bedroom door and stripped out of her blouse and skirt, tripping over her shoelaces. She steadied, straightened, and caught a glimpse of herself in Fatima's closet mirror. There was a black smudge on her right cheek and some warehouse dust coating her calves and ankles. She stepped around her trundle bed and stood directly in front of the mirror in her underwear, fascinated. She hadn't looked at her body in a very, very long time.

As a child Nessie had spent a lot of her time without clothes on. Her poor mother had worked as hard as she could to instil the necessity of decency, but even at four years old Nessie sometimes changed clothes in her bedroom without thinking, doors and windows all wide open, or stripped outside to swim naked and then came home that way because she didn't want to get her clothes wet. She had just never really understood why it mattered, and figured no one would see her.

Since moving into the bookstore, however, she'd only had her clothes off for the briefest of moments in the morning and the evening, as she and Fatima both tried to change from clothes to pajamas and back again while spending the smallest possible amount of time undressed. She'd even learned to take off her bra without removing her shirt.

Now that she was alone and could actually look at herself her own body surprised her. She had noticed a bit of widening in her hips, how her hand had something to rest on now when she placed it there, but the curve of her body was much more dramatically different than she would have expected. She lifted one hand above her head and shifted her weight. If she pulled down her hair and fluffed it around her shoulders, she looked like a painting. Like a woman.

Unbidden, the thought of Jacob entered her head for the second time that day. She imagined him seeing her right now, like this, and flushed. In her mind his black eyes swept her whole body and the look in them made her lightheaded; her stomach squirmed as she trailed a hand from her shoulder across her breast. She felt powerful and weak at the same time, weak in a beautiful and delicious way that made her face heat up as in her imagination he was still so much older, knew so much more about these things she didn't understand...

Her hand trailed down her stomach and she snatched it back, almost frightened at herself. She found her other blouse on the floor of the closet and dressed hastily, back to the mirror. When she came downstairs a few minutes later, there was still a smudge of grease on the right side of her face.


Notes:

ange des ombres- angel of the shadows

violeur- well, that one should be fairly obvious.

I did not have to make up the weapons trade between eastern Europe and suburban France, unfortunately. Many thanks to my insightful readers- minor edits you will find in the last chapter can be credited to their wisdom.

Until next time!

Foi