Northern Lights
Northern Lights
by kctjohnson
CHAPTER 9 – War Room
Dinner would have been a near-silent affair had it not been for the angry clattering of Bella's utensils as she sawed through her steak with a vengeance. I ignored it and tried to enjoy my medium-rare portion, but Charlie began bouncing his knee impatiently under the table. That was hard to ignore, especially since his knee was jerking against a table leg, causing my steak to vibrate.
"Okay, Bells," Charlie finally said after he placed his fork down and turned to her. "What is it?"
Bella continued to murder her steak without sparing her father a glance. "Nothing."
"Well it doesn't look like 'nothing'," Charlie countered. When it seemed as though Bella was not going to explain her sour mood, he turned to me. "Kayla, what's going on? You two haven't said a word to each other this evening."
I kept my head down but raised my gaze to Bella across the table. She shot me a warning glare and I looked down once again at my food, shrugging in response to Charlie's question. He sighed heavily and shook his head as he stood up from the table, apparently having lost his appetite from an overdose of our wordless conflict. Well, the negative vibes were mostly coming from Bella now, since I was feeling a little better about her not disowning me, being able to keep a closer eye on the Cullens and the Pack, and as an added bonus, maybe getting to see some Nayeh wolves for the first time.
"Whatever it is, girls, you'd better sort things out soon," warned Charlie. He didn't seem too concerned though – Bella and I have had our share of quarrels and friendship-breaks, but we always ended up apologizing to one another and picking up from wherever we left off. I was ready to talk any time, but Bella was still miffed, so I figured I'd give her time to work off the steam a bit.
Charlie headed into the living room, plopped himself on his usual seat right in front of the television, and began his routine flipping of channels. I twisted in my seat, rested my arm on the back of my chair, and studied him. He probably doesn't know a darn thing about Edward, but did he know about Jacob Black and his pack of friends? From what I gathered in Bella's letters, Jacob was Charlie's best friend's son. It only took a few seconds before I decided that Charlie was pretty much ignorant of the existence of supernatural beings in his town. Besides, even if he knew, what would he do? Arrest them? No, he'd probably take Bella far, far away from Forks – away from all the monsters. The Cullens and the Quileute boys might be safe enough, but it was the other kinds – the ones heading out this way – that concerned me.
I blinked and mulled over this thought. Bella would be far from danger.
I swiftly turned to face Bella once again, noting the fixed grimace on her face. I must've stared at her oddly because her expression softened a little, perplexed.
"What?"
"What?" I repeated.
"Why are you looking at me like that?"
"Like what?" I asked innocently before stuffing a healthy portion of steak into my mouth.
"I know that look," she accused, waving her fork at me. "It's that look you always have when you're about to do something I wouldn't approve of."
Darn. She knows me too well. If I said a word to Charlie, Bella would never forgive me, and then I would never forgive myself. I guess there goes that idea.
"M nuffinking mfung," I muttered with my mouth full.
Bella grimaced as I swallowed my food. "You mind?"
"I said – I'm not thinking anything," I lied. "I'm just looking forward to tomorrow, I guess." That part was actually true. I wanted to check out the werewolves that existed "only to protect humans" – I never knew such things existed.
The irate look returned on Bella's face, but I could tell she was more worried than angry.
"C'mon, Bells. I really would be helping your friends out by staying. I promise," I whispered, aware that Charlie could be listening.
Bella placed her fork on her plate and leaned closer, her chin nearly touching the food on her plate. "Could we not talk about this right now?"
"Fine," I agreed with a smile as I stood from the table to place my empty plate into the sink.
I made my way into the living room to join Charlie, but had second thoughts when I realized he had settled on ESPN. I was always the type who preferred playing sports over watching them; so instead, I sat on the floor by the television to peruse through their DVD collection on the shelves – except there were none. There maybe were a dozen or so VHS tapes with titles like "Rocky", "Miami Vice", and "Lethal Weapon 2". Judging from the titles, these definitely didn't belong to Bella. VHS…. What century was Charlie living in anyway? I pulled a few tapes out of the shelf to see if there were any films double-stacked in the back, preferably with less testosterone.
Aha! One DVD.
I extracted it from the back. It was still sealed and shrink-wrapped – probably because there wasn't a DVD player to play it in to begin with. Flipping the case to the front, I noted a familiar title – Crosshairs. I recalled it being in the theaters a few years ago.
"Hey, Charlie. I didn't know you were into horror flicks."
Charlie's attention was all on the football game so he was only half-listening, if that. "Into what?" he asked absently.
Before I could hand over the DVD to him, Bella came rushing out of the kitchen and snatched the case right out of my hand.
"Um… I bought that." There was a slight discomfort in her voice as she stuffed it back into the shelf. I arched my eyebrows in amusement.
"It's yours? Since when do you watch gory stuff?" I laughed. Maybe hanging out with monsters changed her taste in movies.
"What's that?" Charlie's ears seemed to have perked up after 'gory stuff'.
Bella grabbed my wrist and pulled me up to my feet. "It's nothing, dad. Kinda getting late so Kayla and I are gonna go to bed."
"Sure, honey. Good night, girls."
I had a feeling that we weren't going to sleep for another hour, at least. Bella's always been stubborn and I knew she was going to try to talk me into going back to Phoenix.
We barely got to the second floor landing when we heard a knock on the door. Bella started back down the stair and called out to Charlie. "I got it."
"No, no." Charlie appeared from the living room and waved her back upstairs, clearly miffed by the late visitor. "You girls go to bed."
He had barely turned the door knob when he began giving a sermon on visitation etiquette to whoever was outside. "It's ten o'clock! It's common courtesy to-"
Charlie stopped mid-sentence and his jaw dropping slightly. He'd opened the door only a foot so we couldn't see who it was. "May I help you, miss?" offered Charlie in a much friendlier voice.
"Chief Swan?" It was an all too familiar female voice and I felt knots in my stomach. If she was here, the situation was much worse than I had imagined.
"Yes," Charlie confirmed, and he sounded somewhat pleased.
"I'm so sorry to impose on you at this hour. My name is Jessie Blade. I'm a friend of Kayla Whitehorse and I was told that she was staying with you."
Charlie didn't see or hear me zoom down the stairs and I was at his side before he could respond. "I got this, Charlie," I said as I gently nudged him aside. "Sorry about this, Charlie. We'll just talk outside."
"Sure? I mean it's a bit chilly out there. You can talk in the kitchen if you like," he offered.
"No, we'll be fine," I assured him. I looked up the staircase and found Bella staring at me questioningly. I forced a smile then closed the door before turning to Jessie, who looked impeccable and sharp in her gray pant-suit. Her hair, which was usually tied back neatly, was wind-swept, but on her, it looked fashionable. I began walking down the path towards the curb and silently waved her to follow. "What's with the tousled hair? You didn't actually come running from Arizona, did you?"
"No," Jessie retorted. "Corky insisted on renting a convertible and drove it with the top down. In a 60-degree weather!"
"Corky's here too?"
"Nash and Linc as well," she said, pointing to a vehicle parked in the shadow of a large tree in front of a neighbor's house. As we approached the car, I was able to identify it as a black Volvo C70 Convertible. Maybe a 2004, but I couldn't be certain. "The kid doesn't even have a license and I would never have allowed him to drive if the other two didn't make some stupid bet with him. Oh, and Angie and Joseph are back at headquarters. They just finished off the last batch of Newborns over in Reno yesterday."
The four of them were here. This wasn't good – it was downright bad. Slayers worked on missions in pairs, or in groups of three, so if the four of them came to Forks – knowing that I was already here – it had to mean that we were facing an unusually large, or unusually powerful, group of creatures.
"Is it the Nayeh?" I queried, causing Jessie to momentarily halt before catching up to me.
"You know about them? Did Nash tell you?"
"No, he didn't," I assured her. Nash, Linc, and Corky were already out of the car and leaning against it when Jessie and I reached them. "Hi, guys," I greeted them uncomfortably.
"How did you know about the Nayeh heading out this way then?"
The other three exchanged confused glances before turning to me expectantly. Oh, boy. I wasn't sure if now would be the best time to tell them that Forks was infested with vampires and werewolves, but there was no other way to explain how I'd gained the information without divulging this 'little secret'. They all knew that my sensory abilities as a hunter were as dull as dishwater, so telling them that I sensed the presence of the Nayeh would have been too obvious a lie.
"Can we all get in the car to talk?" I looked at Corky and pointed at the non-existent roof of the car. "With the top up."
We settled into the car – our make-shift War Room – with Corky on the driver's side, Jessie next to him, and I sat at the back flanked by Nash and Linc. I began explaining to them about the meeting in the forest, about how Edward and his family were vegetarian vampires, the special abilities seen in some of them, the Quileute boys, and about the truce formed between the two groups of monsters to protect the people of Forks, La Push, and the surrounding communities.
The four managed to not interrupt me, but the whole time they were listening, all but Jessie wore bewildered expressions, as though I was giving a lecture on quantum mechanics. I imagine the bit about "vegetarian vampires", "werewolves protecting humans", and "truce" confused them the most. I couldn't blame them because even I was still somewhat skeptical. All of these concepts were foreign in our encounter with their kind.
However, I had to believe that they were true, for how else would I explain Bella surviving while living amongst them? At such close proximity?
When I was finally done, the silence continued to stretch on. Corky and Linc looked confounded. I couldn't tell what kind of expression Nash wore – it was uncharacteristically expressionless. Jessie, as usual, appeared thoughtful. She rarely showed discernible emotions and was always level-headed, so much so that sometimes I wondered if she was even human. Right now, all I could see was that she was already trying to form a plan in her head that probably involved eliminating the Nayehs and the unknown vampires, then dealing with the Cullens and Quileute werewolves later.
"So Alice is a vampire, no doubt?" Nash finally broke the thinly stretched silence. I had only mentioned Alice's name once before, but Nash's memory was impeccable.
"Who's Alice?" Linc turned to Nash, astonished that he knew a name.
"Edward's sister," Nash retorted, this time with much sarcasm in his voice.
"A vampire with human emotions and human relations…. There's no such thing," Jessie scoffed, still sporting a poker-face.
"I'd definitely never heard of such a thing," Linc added as he crossed his arms in the cramped space at the back. Corky said nothing but he nodded furiously in agreement.
I turned to my right to look at Nash. I wanted to get his opinion on all this but he'd turned away and was now staring out the window, his eyebrows pulling together pensively. I wished I had Edward's ability to read minds. Then again, Nash had the ability to block out intruders from invading his mind so it might have been useless to even try. According to Jessie, even she had a hard time controlling Nash's mind. Once, when they were experimenting with his ability, though her intention was to get him to raise his hand, in the end she was only able to get him to move his pinky finger.
"Well, the Nayeh wolves moved out of Arizona rather quickly when we found one of their lairs on the reservation, not far from Ganado," Jessie began to update me. "I don't think they ever intended to stay very long, regardless."
"Why's that?"
"Nash found out that they were already beginning to move northwest. We didn't pursue them at first since they had stopped hunting for a few days, but when Nash realized that they were moving out of State lines, we all became suspicious."
"Yeah, so Jessie got Linc and me to track the pack," Corky added excitedly. I recalled the two having left a few days before my departure. "They were moving real weird though! At first, they were easy to figure out because the entire pack moved in one direction. But then they'd stop like every few hundred miles, split the group, move on and then stop again all at the same time just to split up again!"
Linc began banging the back of his head lightly against the backseat in annoyance. "We were so distracted by trying to read their motions that it took a while before we realized that there were bloodsuckers on the trail too. How did I miss it?!"
"So anyway," continued Corky, who now had his body completely turned to face us at the back and leaning in with enthusiasm. "The bloodsuckers seemed to move randomly, but then we realized that whenever the Nayeh would stop, they stopped too! We couldn't be certain of their locations because they were just everywhere, just like the Nayeh. Is that totally weird or what?!"
"They knew we were tracking them." Nash suddenly spoke and it startled me.
"How would they know that?" I asked. The Nayeh were not exactly known for their intelligence. They were mostly instinctual and greedy for power, but the world had been fortunate enough that they weren't very intellectual creatures. Otherwise, the Slayers would have all been wiped out long ago, and the human race might have followed thereafter.
"I don't know," Nash hissed. "I almost had the answer when -" He gasped lightly and paused, looking as though he was about to say something he wasn't supposed to. "It seems the Nayeh have a built-in defense mechanism to block out others from their minds, too. I hadn't counted on that. All I could gather was that they were headed for Washington."
I was confused. I'd always known that Nash understood werewolf movements and tactics better than anyone else, but I never knew he could read their minds. Was that another special talent that he never bothered to mention?
"But oddly," Linc noted, interrupting my thought. "The pack we were following – the greatest in number – began slowing down around Ashland, just north of the state line between California and Oregon." Linc's voice was serious, something I was not entirely accustomed to. "I'm not certain if they were trying to regroup or what. I'd guess they should be near Olympia by now."
"Okay. Let's back up a bit here," I said as I squirmed in my seat. "If Linc and Corky were the ones tracking, why is it that you two-" I looked from Jessie to Nash. "- are here, too, at the same time?"
Corky beamed. "We told Jess and Nash that the pack was definitely too big to handle on our own, and with the bloodsuckers involved…. So Linc and I managed to sneak past the pack and took a flight out of Medford. They -" Corky jerked his head towards Jessie. "- flew in from Phoenix and we all met up in Seattle, then came straight over here to pick you up so -"
"Time out," I interrupted Corky as I formed a 'T' with my hands, shifting my gaze between Corky and Linc. "Why didn't you guys keep on the trail? The monsters slowed down, didn't they? What was the rush to get here?"
Corky and Linc both looked at Nash at the same time. He was still staring out the window and didn't look like he was concentrating on what Corky had been explaining all this time. Instead, Jessie answered for him.
"Nash and I actually booked a flight right after he got off the phone with you today. He said that he sensed the presence of a vampire when he spoke to you. It was very faint, since it was over phone lines, but he was certain. That was soon after I got word from Linc that the Nayeh and the vampires were already in Oregon. It all seemed too coincidental. We couldn't take any chances if they were going to meet up with more of their kind here in Washington for goodness knows what reason. We had to assume that something was brewing out here – that maybe they were organizing something that would be too big for all of us to handle.
"I just can't imagine the Nayeh and the vampires working together…." Jessie's voice trailed off as she considered this one more time. "But if what Kayla says is true – that the Forks vampires and the Quileute werewolves have a truce…."
"Yes, but only to fight the Nayeh and the normal vampires," I noted to emphasize that the Cullens and the Quileutes were not the enemies here. Oh, wow. Was I defending them now? I wasn't sure if Jessie took my comment in, but Linc and Corky did raise an eyebrow each at me.
"We're going to have to get in on this meeting," Jessie decided, her grey eyes piercing mine.
"I don't think that would be wise, Jess." Nash was paying attention now, and I agreed with his assessment. I wasn't even sure if Sam and his boys would consent to meet with just me – what more an entire team of Slayers. I was certain Edward would do anything to convince Sam to agree to the meeting.
"I'm leading this group," Jessie said forcefully. "We were after the Nayeh and the vampires first, so if they want to powwow and discuss going after them, they'll have to include us."
"Hang on!" I protested. "I'd have to at least let them know first!"
"Kayla, you can't warn them about us coming. Each of us are capable of taking down two monsters at a time – you can take out four or five. I don't think they'd agree to meeting with five Slayers even if you asked them politely, do you?"
"Yes, I do," I snapped, surprised at myself that I'd actually trusted the Cullens and the Quileutes on this one. My fellow Slayers all stared at me wide-eyed – even Jessie – and this time, Nash joined in. "I don't completely trust Edward… yet, but I think he's a sincere per… vampire. And if he thinks Carlisle and Sam -"
"Carlisle?" There was an undecipherable tone in Nash's voice.
"Yeah… didn't I mention him?"
"No, you haven't given us names, except for Edward, Alice, and Jasper," Nash reminded me. I realized that I'd only referred to the Cullens as 'Edward's family' and Sam's pack as 'the Quileute werewolves'.
"Oh…. Um, okay. Well, Carlisle is kinda like Edward's dad," I explained. "You know, the head of the coven, I suppose."
"Carlisle Cullen."
"Yeah…. Wait, did I mention 'Cullen'?"
I didn't recall mentioning the surname in my explanations either. Jessie remained silent while Corky shrugged his shoulder. Linc merely shook his head.
Nash's eyes bore into mine with an intensity that I hadn't seen in a while. "Kayla, where is this meeting going to take place?"
"Why?" I asked suspiciously.
"If Carlisle is involved, then we should definitely meet with them."
Jessie's cool exterior faltered a little. "You know this vampire?"
"Yes, but it's a long story," Nash responded before turning to face me. "Kayla, just give us the coordinates and we'll make sure to arrive right after you. That way you can tell Carlisle ahead of time that we're coming."
My eyes flickered towards Jessie and I half expected her to blow up at Nash for suddenly playing Alpha Slayer, but she didn't. She simply nodded slowly, prompting me to draw out a map for them. The meeting at twilight was turning out to be a lot more complicated than I wanted it to be.