A quick recap: Nessie has sent Fatima to the Cullens' house in Toulouse to keep her safe after the Remittance Riots, and she has convinced Abdul to stay and play the grieving father until things die down. Alice has appeared briefly, and given Nessie the family's address in Scotland.
Nessie didn't know how long she wandered after leaving the cafe, but she realized when she hit the edge of her own neighborhood that she had indeed walked all the way home from the 4th. It was getting dark, and she was no closer to knowing what to do with the slip of paper balled up in her right fist. Her hand itched to throw it in a gutter, but she couldn't quite bring herself to toss this overture from her family to the wind as though it meant nothing. She owed them more than that.
She thought about going home, about every face she would see and what they might say when they saw her again for the first time.
She thought of her mother's happiness, the warmth in her gold eyes.
She thought of tearing her way out of her mother's body.
She fingered the tiny locket she always wore beneath her shirt, sliding it open and closed again with one finger. Plus que ma propre vie. That was the problem, wasn't it?
She thought of Irina, smoking in bits on the ground, Tanya and Kate holding each other and sobbing a vampire's silent tears.
She thought of how every member of her family had narrowly escaped the same fate.
She thought of how they all still lived with that constant taste of tension, knowing who would come swooping in for vengeance if any of them put a foot wrong. All that was needed was a new excuse.
She thought of how she had put a foot wrong, almost given an excuse.
She thought of the man whose throat she had torn open.
She thought of Saint Denis, of Fatima and Abdul, of the people she'd saved and the people she hadn't, of the weapons that weren't coming in anymore.
She wanted to go home and they wanted her back, but she couldn't go to Scotland unless she could stand straight, look them in the eye, know beyond a doubt that she deserved a place there. She wouldn't be able to bear their forgiveness otherwise. She would just leave again, ashamed and unworthy as ever.
Her brow furrowed as she realized that she had no idea where she stood on the moral scale of the universe. She had to finish this work first, but she didn't know when it would be done, how many acts of justice it would take. She had never asked the question before, never needed to. She glanced up at the twilit skyline before her and saw the imposing, Gothic spires of Saint Denis Cathedral. They were a familiar sight, hovering over the entrance to the metro. She passed them almost every day, but she'd never gone inside. On impulse she crossed the street, climbed the steps, and pressed open the ancient doors.
The candlelit hush was immediate. Renesmee stared at the ceiling, stretching to vaulted points seeming miles above her. She remembered Carlisle explaining on a visit to Salisbury, when she was very little, what cathedrals were like before electricity—how easy it was to believe that they towered into eternity. Jacob had been standing beside her, and he picked her up, tossed her into the air, and said, "Go tell us what it's like!" He caught her when she came back down, of course, and she buried her face in his shoulder, giggling. "Well?" he asked.
"Very pretty," she'd said.
Cathedrals, yes. Eternity, no. At least, she didn't think so anymore.
There was no one in here. Nessie wandered to a flickering bank of candles, thinking about lighting one and kneeling down to ask for something. She moved to the font and stared down at her reflection, watching it waver and distort as replenishing water bubbled up from the pipe at the bottom of the basin. She moved on to a pew, sat down, looked around some more. There was a green light over the confessional booth, harsh and strange against the numinous backdrop of stained glass and stone. She stood again, hesitated, scooted out and opened the confessional door, sat down inside. The space was small, the screen to her right almost opaque. She leaned forward minutely, staring out of the corner of her eye through the hundreds of tiny crosses in the iron grill. She was unsure about the etiquette of these sorts of exchanges, but she knew that the point of the whole thing was to not look at each other. The silence expanded.
"I've, um, this is the first time...I've never...I'm not Catholic or anything."
"That's all right, my child." The voice from the other side was thin and reedy, trembling with age. She leaned forward a bit further.
"Do I just, um, start talking?" She could see his hands in his lap, tattooed with cross-shaped shadows. They were knobby, covered in blue veins and stiff with arthritis. This priest was ancient.
"Yes, my child."
"Okay, so... I committed a murder."
There was silence from the other side. She waited, saw him clench and extend his slightly shaking fingers. He was going to have a heart attack. Her confession was going to send this nonagenarian into cardiac arrest.
Wonderful.
She sighed, moved to leave.
"And was this occurrence...recent?"
"No, no! No," she said, sitting back down. "It was a good while ago. And really far away. There's nothing to tell the police about or anything..."
"What were the circumstances of your crime?"
Well, I'm half-vampire and I started really wanting blood, so I bit a guy's neck and drank away his life force over a span of thirty seconds. "Temporary insanity. I cut a stranger's throat." She winced. He wheezed.
"Has this ever happened again?"
Almost. "No."
"And have you repented of this terrible sin?" His voice wavered over the last words.
"Well, yeah, I think so. I mean, of course I have. I feel terrible about it."
"Have you received absolution?"
"Well, no. That's kind of why..." she sighed. "I've been making up for it, but I don't know how much I need to do. Like, how much does it take? I just want to know when I'm going to be finished, because I have some... plans to make. I mean, I know that sounds trivial, but I promise it isn't. I've been keeping people safe, while everything has been so bad around here. And that's good, right? I'll stay until I've done it all, but I need to leave sometime, and..." She trailed off, fearing she'd been talking too much.
She heard the priest shift in his chair. "The Lord...ah...tells us that grace is given freely..." He was stumbling over his words. Poor man. The people who came and sat in this box probably confessed lustful thoughts or envy of their friends' shoes. She was his first murderer, old as he was. He cleared his throat and continued. "It isn't something won by goodness, because you would never succeed..."
Never succeed? She realized when he said it that this was exactly what she had feared and suspected, that she would step forward and slide backward for the rest of her immortal existence, never gaining anything. The tiny box was suddenly making her feel claustrophobic. She wanted to cry. This had been a terrible idea.
"Even the gravest of sins, such as, ah, murder... are covered if one is truly...repentant of them. And, you repent most heartily?"
"Yes," she said, frustrated.
"I absolve you of your sins in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit," he mumbled rapidly, as if he wanted to get rid of her. "Give thanks to the Lord, for He is good."
That was it? She got up and left, more frustrated than ever. She left the heavy scent of incense and the unnatural hush behind her with the creaking of the door, gaining the street to see a few, weak stars gracing the cathedral's stone spires. She went home.
She didn't explain her nine hour absence to Abdul, who opened his mouth and raised a finger as she walked past the kitchen. She felt guilty for leaving the shop entirely unattended while he was at lunch, but for some reason her story-making skills weren't on call and she couldn't figure out what to tell him besides, "My aunt showed up and asked me to come home." So she didn't say anything. She'd apologize later.
In the attic, she paced from the wardrobe to the window and back again. The room had felt strange ever since Fatima left—her pallet was still on the floor, her clothes and photographs still scattered around the room. Her most essential clothes and books were now stuffed in a duffel bag by the door. Nessie had packed them that morning, so they'd be able to take them to her when they left.
Wardrobe, window. Wardrobe, window.
Plus que ma propre vie. So, so heavy.
Wardrobe, window.
I know what it's like to be the girl telling people things they don't want to hear.
You didn't do anything wrong.
Wardrobe, window.
She paused at the edge of the bed, fingering her locket again. For the first time since she'd run away she pulled it out of her shirt and opened it, needing suddenly to see their faces. They smiled up at her, bronze and brown, eyes matching and frozen.
Given freely...
She would take Abdul to Toulouse, and then she was going to Scotland. Finished or no.
oOo
She just wanted to do one more car. For fun. As a sendoff, or something. Her friends the mechanics deserved a parting gesture and she had half a bottle of silicate left, so that next evening after closing she went back to the warehouse. It was full dark, a few hours later than she usually showed up there, but she had been trying to make up for her failures as an employee yesterday and stayed late to pack up the whole back room into storage boxes. It had taken longer than she thought it would, because Abdul had wanted to help her. She'd been reduced to human speed.
There were no sentries out today, so she hopped onto the wall and crawled carefully up it to the broken window. She was only a few inches below the ledge when she heard voices coming from the ground floor inside. She froze, listening.
"We're trying to take care of it." Gold Incisor, if she wasn't mistaken. Damn it, how many of them were in there? She wasn't going to get a chance today; she'd come too late.
"I'm unconvinced."
A tingling chill ran to Nessie's fingers at the sound of the second voice. It was hauntingly, powerfully musical. Seductive, compared to the harsh words of the other speaker. It was the voice of a vampire.
"You've proved your incompetence repeatedly. I am displeased and I'm prepared to deal with this situation myself."
"If you suck me dry and leave me somewhere," said Gold Incisor, his voice rising to panic pitch, "you won't get anyone else to work for you. Everyone will know pulling cars for you means dying, man. They're freaked about you already."
Nessie peeked as boldly as she dared over the ledge of the window, trying to get a glimpse of the vampire on the warehouse floor. She had to know what was going on, who was involved in this. She craned her neck slightly as a night breeze ruffled her hair, and she saw him. He was huge, towering over the man she had until now thought tall. His hand was in the air, forestalling his companion's speech. His shoulders lifted as he inhaled deeply and she shoved away from the wall in terror. Her heart hammered as she dove into a free fall, landing painfully on her right shoulder and rolling onto her back. She was up again immediately, sprinting in no general direction with her pulse in her throat. She was done for. She'd know Felix anywhere.
There was no way he didn't hear her climbing the wall. No way he didn't smell her, know she was a vampire. No way he didn't hear her heart beating, her lungs expanding, know she was also not a vampire. No matter how fast she ran he could catch her in seconds.
She ran blindly, pushing her legs until they burned and her lungs caught fire. She never changed course, fearing it would slow her down. Every second she expected a giant, cold hand to slip around the back of her neck and slam her down. After about an hour of this her body refused to go any further, and she stumbled to a stop in the middle of an open field, falling to all fours and gasping for breath. Around her, all was silent. There was a small town winking in the distance, a road empty of traffic winding like a ribbon back the way she'd come. She looked frantically left, right, up, down for a pair of glinting ruby eyes in the trees, but there was nothing. Where was he? He had to have followed her. He was just playing with her now.
She stood in the knee-high grass in painful indecision, waiting for her life to end, but it never happened. He hadn't followed her. She collapsed on the ground and tried to calm her body and organize her thoughts. The stars above her dotted the purple sky in a riot of light, so different from the few meager ones she'd seen outside the cathedral. So beautiful, but she had never appreciated them less.
Felix was in Paris. The boss, the boss she'd never seen...it was him. Was this Volturi business? Was he doing it on his own? She thought of a whole legion of the gray-cloaked Guard chanting "Yes, Master," in an eerie monotone—no, he was not doing this by himself, which meant that she had spent the past month tangling with the Volturi. The Volturi. She couldn't even bring herself to think about what that meant.
It was getting late, and it would take her a long time to run all the way home. Abdul would be worried about her if she stayed out past midnight, and she hadn't told him where she was going. She stood, shook out her legs, and ran back at a slower pace, careful to make a wide circle around the neighborhood and stay well away from the warehouse. She dropped down from a roof a block south of the bookstore and walked the rest of the way, setting off the bell as she tried to think of a suitable excuse for her absence from dinner. She trudged slowly up the stairs, all her muscles protesting. She had never been so sore in her life.
Abdul was standing in the hallway with his hands on his hips. She drew breath to give him an explanation but no words ever came out.
"Where have you been? I didn't even know you were leaving, and I was afraid you weren't going to... Dorianne? Dorianne, are you all right? What's wrong?"
"He's been here," she muttered.
"What?"
She pushed past Abdul and stormed the house, throwing open every door. There was nothing out of place, but the scent was unmistakable. Panic bubbled up in her throat. She turned to look at Abdul, who was trailing her through the house with a puzzled expression on his face. She couldn't believe he'd been left alive.
"It's time to go," she said.
"Dorianne, we're not leaving until next week. There's too much to take care of if we're boarding up this whole place... you told me all of this yourself."
"Well, I was wrong. You're leaving now. You're leaving tonight. I'll stay. I'll finish packing everything and close the place up and follow you."
"It's 22:00, Dorianne. This is ridiculous."
"You don't understand!" she burst out, grabbing his arm. "You need to leave now! Take the money, take a change of clothes, and go. I'm not joking, Abdul. You need to leave right now."
His eyes narrowed as he searched her face, alarmed. "What happened?" he asked.
"Just trust me. Please. I'm keeping you both safe."
She watched from the kitchen window as he made his way down the street, burdened only by the duffel bag bouncing against his hip.
AN: If you're still with this story after that ridiculously long hiatus, well, you are a better reader than I deserve. I have returned from school (hooray!) and am now free to focus all of my creative energy on this story until it is finished.
Just one note on this chapter:
Plus que ma propre vie: More than my own life. The locket Nessie wears is the one Bella gave her for their first Christmas together in Breaking Dawn.