Raum

Snare

[5-20-2013] Julius Caesar - that Julius Caesar - plays a role in this chapter.

Chapter 10

The Power of Answers

Charlie Swan parked his car in his driveway but didn't get out immediately; his thoughts wandered through the events of the long day, which was finally coming to an end.

He gazed up at the front of the house, noting that the light in Bella's room was still turned on. Is she working at her computer this late? His daughter had inherited from him the ability to focus on a project without the need for a break; when something fascinated her, she often skipped meals or cut back on her sleep, completely absorbed by the passion for what she was doing. Charlie hoped that what was keeping her wide awake wasn't worry, but something that could make her feel alive again, like her job with Rachel had done until a few months ago.

No light filtered out from the other windows of the house. He let out a sigh as his gaze rested on the corner where Renée's favorite armchair still sat. His memory drifted back more than twenty years, to when he and his wife used to cuddle their little Bella in that same room. Every evening, when he came home, the sight of them was his relief; in his line of work, he'd often been told how important it was not to succumb to the evil he witnessed on a daily basis. For him, his wife and daughter were a perpetual reminder of how much beauty there was in the world, and how precious and worthy of being protected it was. His family had given him the strength to keep doing his job, and to aim to do it to the best of his ability, with the hope that his efforts would grant to other people the safety he enjoyed in his home.

But over the last six years, the moment when he came home had become the mocking reminder that he'd lost his battle. The day Renée had been taken, he'd arrived in the late afternoon and had been put immediately on alert by the fact that her car wasn't in its usual place. Bella had been in Italy, enjoying a long holiday they'd given her as a gift, and Renée had told him she would prepare his favorite dinner; she'd hinted that they might spend the rest of the evening in the gazebo in the backyard, basking in the pleasant breeze of the warm season. That dinner had been the reason why she'd gone out to do some grocery shopping and had never returned.

The evil had entered his safe haven, bringing pain and destruction. And then, a few months ago...Charlie tried to push away the thought of the recent sorrow that had come crashing down on his daughter. Forgive me, he silently told Renée, as if his thoughts could reach her. If there's any way I could have helped her better, please forgive me.

He left the car and walked toward the door. On the porch steps, he recalled the moment when he'd been told that his wife had been found. He shuddered, realizing that, if things had gone worse a few hours before, he would have had the burden of notifying Lee's family that he'd...Charlie recoiled at the mere thought, and found himself mentally replaying the conversation he'd had with him on their way back from the hospital.

-x-x-x-x-x-x-

"I'm not coming back to the lodge."

Charlie, who was driving his assistant home, kept his eyes on the road. "Of course. Take all the time off you need."

Lee shook his head. "I'm not coming back...ever."

Charlie slowed the car and looked at him in disbelief. "Why? What would make you decide that, after all the time you've put into this project?"

Lee let out a slow breath, his eyes downcast. "I can't do it anymore, Charlie. I can't walk into that room and look at Edward trapped behind a sheet of glass–let alone interrogate him or run a test. He saved my life. I can't continue to be a party to his imprisonment."

"After what you went through today, you just need some time to recover. You'll put things in perspective in a few days."

"We've kept him in that cell for more than two months, and what do we have against him? It's a miracle he hasn't gone out of his mind."

"Have you forgotten how dangerous he can be?" The insane experiment Walsh had run on Edward was branded into Charlie's memory. He'd harshly reprimanded his assistant and had ended up accepting his apologies, though he'd been inclined to fire him for his recklessness. But Walsh hadn't been about to take that chance; he'd hinted that he could call the press and reveal what went on at the lodge. Charlie had been trapped between the proverbial rock and a hard place, and granting Walsh the promise that he wouldn't lose his job on account of the accident had been the reward for his silence.

"After what Robert did to him?" Lee countered. "If I were as strong as Edward, I would have done much more than that."

"See? Exactly my point. We can never let our guard down, and this is one of the reasons why I'm going to inform the Bureau about our research."

"I don't want to be there, then. I won't tell anyone what we've discovered – you can trust me on this – but I can't stand to see him imprisoned by the government or destroyed."

"So you'd rather take the side of a monster?" Charlie snapped. "The moment he's out, he would begin to kill, starting with us and the guards at the lodge."

"If he'd wanted to see any of us dead, he sure missed a great opportunity today. If he'd just kept his mouth shut, I wouldn't be here."

"What about Walsh, then? Don't you think the subject would hunt him down as soon as he was free?"

Lee groaned. "Do you think Robert has been pestering him with his questions since we left?"

"No way. I told Eric to not let anyone into the gallery as long as I wasn't there."

Lee pointed out his house as it came into view. "Some of his questions made sense, though. How could a vampire have such a broad knowledge of medicine?"

"I don't know, but I plan on finding out." Charlie stopped the car and let out an exhausted sigh. "I hope you'll reconsider your decision. I've shown you the evidence that other monsters like him have mingled with humans in the past. They disguised themselves as humans and earned people's trust before striking. Frankly, Lee, I wouldn't put it past Edward to do the same."

"But..."

"Please," he cut in. "I need the best researchers available to continue our studies." Charlie gripped the steering wheel with force. "One of those demons took my wife from me, and the thought that he could have made her trust him before..." The words died in his throat. He swallowed back a lump, unable to talk about the way Renée's body had been mutilated.

-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-

Bella squinted and rubbed at her eyes, which were sore after the hours she'd spent staring at the computer screen. She'd scanned the copy of Edward's drawing her father had given her. I hope you've appreciated the rain falling on Florence, Edward had said. She selected an area of rainy sky on the drawing and began to zoom in on it. I've always been fascinated by the rain, because every drop is unique. It didn't take her long to discover what he'd meant by those words. The raindrops were made up of strings of minuscule numbers. Following them as they fell from the Florentine sky on Giotto's Campanile, Bella saw that they were all "ones" and "threes."

What could these numbers mean for him?

She wrote down the combinations of the two numbers, but could make no sense of them. She turned back to the drawing, hoping to find more hints there. She scrolled down the image and focused on the same areas where she'd written her questions for Edward when she'd shown him her photograph. In those same lozenges on the bell tower, he'd written some letters in minute handwriting, hiding them among the bricks of the building. She copied them: Nafjref jvyy pbzr. She moved down to the following level of the tower and found another snippet. V pna'g gryy lbh rirelguvat, ohg V jba'g yvr gb lbh. V pner sbe lbh.

Bella stopped and blinked. The words made no sense at all. She put them into a search engine, trying to find out whether they belonged to some exotic language that Edward could speak, but to no avail. Then she recalled what they'd talked about before she showed him the picture. I told him about my job. She looked again at the mysterious words and suddenly the memory of one of her college classes resurfaced.

Mr. Molina, one of her teachers at the University, had led a seminar about cryptography, and had told them about rotation encryption and Caesar's cypher. In his private correspondence, Julius Caesar used to replace each letter with another that was some fixed number of positions down the alphabet. In order to decipher the message, the receiver had to know how many positions the letter had been shifted. Bella began to try different combinations: it didn't make sense with a shift of one, and she had no more luck with three. But when she tried it with thirteen letters, everything fell into place.

She could finally read the messages Edward had hidden in the drawing.

Where and when were you born? She'd asked.

Answers will come, was his reply.

But when she reached the second set of words, she doubted she'd deciphered the message correctly:

I can't tell you everything, but I won't lie to you. I care for you.

She'd asked Edward to trust her, and he was doing that. Could she reciprocate? He'd given her the drawing before they began to talk about her mother's assassin, but since then he'd assured her that he would tell her the truth. Could she believe his words?

She wondered why Edward had asked her to bring him works by Keats or Shelley or other Romantic poets. She intended to do just that, as soon as Charlie relaxed the restrictions on the observation gallery. She'd selected some poems and found a number of quotes about Italy and Florence in particular. One of them, by Percy Shelley, had caught her attention, and she read it again: Thou Paradise of Exiles, Italy!

Was that the way Edward had seen Italy? Or could he have wanted to tell her how he felt in the prison – exiled from his previous life, and not in Paradise, but buried in Hell?

I'm reading too much into it, she told herself. But new questions began to pile up in her mind: what could have brought Edward to Italy? Had he been there during his vampire existence, or when he was still human?

Succumbing to her tiredness, Bella switched off the light and fell asleep quickly. She dreamed of Italy and recalled an evocative riverbank in Rome, along the Tevere. It wasn't a part of the city she'd actually visited, but she'd seen the pictures in the tourist guide and had fantasized about finding that enchanting spot. It hadn't been possible back then, but in her dream she was walking along the river on that bank, basking in the sun of the late summer afternoon. A tall man sauntered up beside her and rested his elbows on the bridge railing, looking down at the quiet river below. He turned toward her, and his face brightened with an open smile. He had green eyes and his skin was slightly tanned, but Bella recognized him. It was Edward.

-x-x-x-x-x-x-

As the last act in what seemed to him a neverending day, Charlie returned to the lodge. Edward braced himself for the coming onslaught of questions that he could foresee in Charlie's mind well before he entered the observation gallery.

"You were right," Charlie began. "Lee had an anaphylactic reaction, and without your help the consequences could have been terrible. He's very grateful to you."

Edward eyed the bottle his captor held in his hands; it represented the proof of what had caused Lee's allergic reaction. "I take it you didn't come here tonight just to thank me on his behalf."

"Glyceryl Cocoate, Panthenol..." Charlie read aloud from the label of the bottle of soap he'd brought with him. "And here we go: iodine." He lifted the bottle, holding it close to the gallery's glass. "This antiseptic soap arrived a couple of days ago. It comes in bulk, and it was bought for the restrooms of the entire building," he went on. "Except for yours. That means there's no chance you could have known that it contained iodine. So, would you care to explain to me how you came up with the right diagnosis?"

"A lucky guess?"

"I don't believe in luck."

Edward scowled. Based on what he knew about Charlie's life, and having witnessed the sorrow that occupied his mind, he couldn't blame him. "He had the symptoms of anaphylactic shock."

"But why would you be so well-informed about them? You even knew about epinephrine and the EpiPen."

"Your man is okay, isn't he? Shouldn't that be enough?"

Charlie didn't relent. "Is your kind affected by the same allergic reactions?" he pressed.

"I don't think so." Edward gave him a mocking grin. "Maybe I should be checked for food allergies. Would you offer me a bite as a test?"

Charlie narrowed his eyes. "The cabin where I found you was destroyed by the fire, but I've examined what I could collect of your clothes. You wore expensive jeans and a tailored shirt. Now it turns out you have medical knowledge." He silently added how Edward's manners and use of formal language pointed to an upper-class upbringing, and resolved to get straight to the point. "What did you do before you were brought here?"

Edward closed his eyes and inhaled deeply. "You know what I am. That's already too much."

"How many people have you fooled, pretending to be human?" Charlie pressed. "Others of your breed have already done it, and their purpose was always the same." The inhuman creatures mentioned in the 98331 folder had been killers, and none of them had missed their targets.

The implicit accusation was not lost on Edward; his hands clenched into fists. "I've already told you that I've never killed one of your breed. And there's no evidence proving otherwise."

"What did you used to do, then?"

"Wouldn't you like to know? Knowledge is power, but what are you putting at stake in order to get it, Charlie?"

"Are you trying to blackmail me?" He raised his voice. "Should I search for doctors that match your description? Would I find out that you had a fake job, perhaps?"

Edward froze at the thought of what his exposure would mean for Bella, and for the other people who would be destroyed just because they knew about him. As if Carlisle hadn't been enough. Charlie would never know how fortunate he was to have escaped the Volturi's wrath for so long.

"What would you do, then? Would you tell all the world that you're the brave knight who locked away the evil vampire?" He laughed bitterly.

"If I can prevent even a single person from being attacked by one of your kind, everything would be worth it."

"Everything?" Edward growled. "Even the people you care for? Do you have any idea of the risks to which you expose both them and yourself with every detail you discover about me?"

"Still trying to scare me?"

"I'm not the one you should be afraid of. Believe it or not, I'm not the most dangerous thing out there. Let's leave it at that."

Thanks for reading!

In the next chapter we'll know more about Edward's passion for Romantic poets. Stay tuned!

Thank you! to Snare's great prereaders/betas: Camilla10, SatinCoveredSteel, and Marlena516.

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