Chapter 8: Race
Bella
We'd combed everywhere for Alice and Jasper, searched every nook and cranny, poked around each fern. Forks, La Push… they were nowhere to be seen.
"Alice went to get her sight back," Edward explained to the Cullens late that afternoon. The sun was just beginning to find its way out of the labyrinth of dark clouds, like a beam of hope in a sea of loss. The light that filtered through the large glass panels of the Cullens' living room made us twinkle like stars, and cast rainbows on the walls.
"We should call off the search, and wait for her to come back," Emmett suggested.
From the kitchen, I heard a crash, loud, like someone had just pushed everything onto the floor. Emmett sighed and scowled. "Rosalie, stop hurting the dishes!"
He laughed at my absurd frown. Rosalie, with her deep topaz eyes and shock of fair hair, appeared at the doorway - but she looked different. Her eyes seemed a different shade than usual - and not because of her hunger. It looked like she was wearing orange contact lenses over white irises, but I couldn't be sure. She also looked distraught and messier than usual.
Emmett didn't seem to notice this, or if he did, he didn't say anything. The heavily-built vampire just strolled casually across the room and patted Rosalie's head affectionately. She let out a low, guttural growl, from the back of her throat - a noise that I'd never heard before. Rosalie cut it off abruptly.
"Err… Rosalie?" warily, I took a step towards her.
She looked at me with those strange eyes of hers, and the expression seemed to say: I stuck up for you when you most needed me. Her angry expression turned begging. So please help me.
I took a deep breath, then tried to draw the attention off the blondie. After all, she was right, she'd protected me and Renesmee, so it was only fair to do the same for her.
"Come on, let's just… watch TV or something. Wait for her to come back." I suggested. Edward looked at me curiously, but Carlisle nodded. He reached for the remote and turned it on to the news.
"The mysterious killings have stopped, but nobody has managed to find the reason for all these deaths, or the murderer. We believe it was a large animal, as the mangled bodies-" Carlisle changed the channel.
I pressed myself closer to Edward's hard, cool body, tracing my fingers down the four new scars on his chest. He ran his fingers through my hair, purring gently. The wind made the lacy white curtains at the window flutter, since the window was open. They rippled in the breeze, like waves in the sea. I remembered the time I'd almost drowned… there in the icy water, with my hallucinated Edward at my side, not knowing which direction was up, or which way was down. Lost in a void of water and bubbles of oxygen that I couldn't inhale.
We lay in our room in the small cottage, and it was the middle of the night. I wasn't physically tired, but I was a little mentally worn out, what with the werewolf and Alice and Jasper's disappearance. It was nice that me and Edward could just have a night like this. I was afraid that it would take a while for us to continue doing this, after the attack and Nessie's nightmare, but I had worried for nothing. I could hear his gentle breathing and smell his sweet scent. It would be fine, I convinced myself.
"Bella, love?" Edward breathed.
"Yes?" I murmured.
He hesitated, then began. "Alice was having visions about this boy. He looked about 13 or 14, and every time she saw him, he was running. Her first vision of him showed the boy as a vampire, with red eyes, the second one showed him shoving something shiny into his pocket. The third vision, and whenever she looked at his future, he was running from something that Alice couldn't see. He was sprinting through a forest, as a human, running as fast as he could. He kept glancing behind him.
"When you found her in the woods with Jasper, having her last visions, she saw far too much to process. I didn't see all of it, but it really shook her. She was trying to avoid thinking about the last one, so I didn't see it, but I ended up catching a glimpse.
I'll tell you about some of her other visions first. She saw her sight going black, and the way she got it back was going to the mental asylumn from her past. She would get her sight back, return, and then we would save the boy that she kept seeing. He was being chased by the Volturi, as well as a werewolf. Another one." his topaz eyes, darker than yesterday, glinted as they focused on me. I nodded slowly.
Edward continued. "The boy is running to us, trying to get to us."
"But why? Who is he, and why is he running from the Volturi, to us?" I wondered.
"We don't know. But Alice also saw Emmett get attacked by something at the same time we save the boy. That bit was blurry. She's scared that the Volturi are going to catch up to the boy, and kill him. She decided that that couldn't happen, and her vision changed, and she saw me, finding the boy only minutes before the Volturi, and changing him." Edward finished.
"Why can't we just leave peacefully for a while?" I sighed, talking mostly to myself. Edward murmured an agreement, then we lapsed back into silence.
I allowed mind to wander. The boy, he sounded so young, just a teenager, barely 14. I hated that he would be turned before he became an adult. Stuck as a kid forever… some people wished for that, but how would he react? Would he prefer die as a human? Would he even get a choice?
And then, what about Edward and the Volturi? It was a race against time. The vampires were both twice as fast as humans, and we both had our advantages. Edward's speed, Alice's ability to foretell the future. Demetri, and his enhanced tracking skills. Their numbers.
The boy had nothing.
He would never win.
