The night was consumed in silence. Chloe twitched and whimpered in her sleep. Felix did not move at all.
Alec kept an expectant eye on his fellow guard. If he did not know better, he could have sworn that Felix had timed his illness on purpose, just to be irritating. Felix specialized in irritating; he would know when to stir his victims up and when to leave them begging . . .
He was going mad. He had to quit his paranoid delusions and accept the reality that while Felix was still minimally alive, he might not ever be the same again. The Felix that delighted in bad jokes, particularly bad jokes played on Alec, might be gone for good.
Once that thought latched on him, it refused to go away. The revelation made impossible other things that had to happen in the future. He was no longer sure that he would see Jane again, or that the virus would stop before it wiped out every human on the planet, or that he would ever leave this claustrophobic valley. He was foolish in pretending that everything would revert to normal once the virus passed. Without the Volturi, and without Felix, he had no future. He doubted anyone on Earth did.
He did not notice the pale light that announced the sunrise, not until Chloe awakened. She brushed her hair out of her face.
"Did Felix wake up at all?" she asked.
"No." Alec's voice was quiet, exhausted from the bombardment of ugly truths and doubts. "Is that bad?"
"I don't know," Chloe said honestly. She scooted her legs around from her makeshift bed of coats and stood. She strode over to the table to check on her patient. She parted open Felix's eye. "Still plenty of red," she noted with some satisfaction. So far, her theory proved right.
Hours later, Chloe asked Alec, "So how long have you been a vampire?"
The entire day, the two had not exchanged any words that were not related to their direct survival. Chloe tired of the ominous silence that had settled over the house. She had fed Felix again and Alec refuelled the stove, so there was nothing else that needed to be done. It suddenly occurred to her how long the day would stretch in this silence.
Alec moved his head to stare at her. Disapproving.
"Look," Chloe said, "I don't know about you, but I don't want to sit here staring at each other like in The Thing."
"I don't have a problem with it."
"You can even have the first question."
"There's nothing I need to know about you." You're Food, he silently added, though he was sure he got the idea across to her.
Chloe's face narrowed in exasperation. It reminded Alec of the look Jane got when she demanded he do something she wanted.
"What made you decide to become a doctor?" he asked.
A ridiculous grin spread over her face. "That is a very good question," she chirped. "I never knew anyone who was seriously sick and no one in my family was a doctor. Those are the usual reasons, but not for me. Actually, my role model in that regard was Dana Scully. Have you seen The X-Files?"
"Some." Jane was obsessed with that show for about a year.
"What about ER?"
That he had not seen. He shook his head.
"Well," Chloe conceded. Her grin melted to a saner level of contemplation. "I wanted to be a person who helped others if something bad happened. Becoming a doctor seemed like the surest way to do that."
As if aware of whom she was talking to, she grinned sheepishly. "I guess it sounds like a silly reason."
"Not really," Alec replied, ignoring the jab that a vampire could not be expected to know about helping others.
He offered nothing else representative of his opinion, so Chloe plied her question. "What was your life like before you became a vampire?"
"You changed your question," he stated.
"Well," Chloe faltered. "That's allowed, isn't it?" Of course it was. She started the game, so she decided the rules.
"Not good."
She did the narrow glare again. "You have to tell me more than that."
Alec cursed her intelligence. "My sister and I were not well liked. One year they found an excuse to get rid of us. They accused us of witchcraft and tried to burn us at the stake. Ar - a vampire found us and rescued us." All of this was common knowledge to the Volturi, so Alec had no difficulty sharing it with this human.
"Oh," was her gutteral reply. Chloe reacted like he had torn open her chest. Her white fingers clutched at the end of the table.
"I'm sorry," she finally said.
"It was done long ago," he said, in some manner of consolation.
Chloe's tone lightened. "So you're sister is a vampire?"
"Obviously."
"Where is she?" she asked, an irritating gentleness or caution absorbed in her voice.
"She and her boyfriend got stranded in Geneva," he explained. "They weren't in Volterra when the virus hit."
"That's good." The odd thing was, Chloe sounded genuinely glad that these two vampires she never met had survived.
It was Alec's turn for a question, and oddly enough, he did have one. "Do you think there is a cure?"
He could see her optimism dim. "The news had not said anything about a cure, but I would think it would be a top priority for everyone," she hedged. "Even so, I don't know if it would help Felix. The doctors would be concentrating on humans."
Alec's hands clenched together. Chloe read his real question too easily.
"There's a vampire who's a doctor. In the United States," he told her. "But I doubt he would want to cure Felix."
"Why not?" She sounded less eager to hear the answer. Like Felix, her curiosity waned when it lead to personal unpleasant knowledge.
"We . . . our coven tried to kill his too many times." Feeling the urge to correct Chloe's judgment, he added, "It wasn't personal. Our coven had to enforce the rules, and his coven broke them. One of the underlings fell in love with a human and told her all about vampires."
"What's wrong with that?" Chloe asked.
"We have to keep our identity hidden. If the wrong person found out, it would ultimately mean the extermination of our kind. Edward was lucky that this human cared about him enough to keep it a secret. She eventually became a vampire herself.
"Aro was lenient with them, but the fact was it wasn't this coven that was the problem. It was the less scrupulous vampires who would see this as preferential treatment and rebel against us, including some from within our ranks. The Cullens got into more trouble, and Aro kept excusing them, using their po- . . . their abilities as a pretext to keep them alive, but they were not grateful for their reprieves. Instead they believed we were persecuting them because they only drank animal blood.
"When word reached us that there was a child vampire with them, we had to act. Creating a child vampire was against the rules; they are too feral and uncontrollable. The one who brought us this news was lying, but we believed it. Why shouldn't we when the Cullens took all those other risks? So our coven gathered up an army and went over there. Had the rumor been true, we would have slaughtered them. But the child was not a full vampire, she was a half breed, created by the underling and his girl when she was still human. We punished the liar, and Aro had some difficulty quelling the fight that some so badly wanted. Of course, the Cullens blamed us. They did not give one thought to their carelessness and how we had to clean up their mess."
Chloe had ceased with the questions, though many parts of Alec's story must have gone over her head. She paused, absorbing this new information. Alec could not begin to guess what she would want to know.
Finally she spoke up. "If this vampire were a true doctor, he would help Felix, no matter what you did to him and his family. It's part of our training. The Hippocratic Oath."
Alec shook his head, unpersuaded. "Humans create these ideals all the time, then put them aside when it suits them. This coven is the same. They would gladly let Felix die."
Chloe tilted her head to the side, studying Alec. "You don't have a lot of trust in others, do you?"
"I trust those who earn my trust," he said shortly.
"Why did you tell me about vampires if it was against the rules?"
Surely she understood that the Volturi would no longer enforce these rules. It did not matter because Alec meant to keep to them. If the virus had demolished the human population as much as he suspected, then he and Felix would need every advantage.
For some odd reason, Alec realized he had stopped equating Chloe with the food supply out there. She had elevated slightly in status. Not as an equal: she would never be that. She had become more like a pet, a therapy animal for Felix. Because of Felix, she had value.
"You deserve to know what's going on," he said.
"Okay," Chloe accepted in hushed voice. "Thank you."
Alec's gaze drifted toward the ceiling. "The sun had set hours ago. You should get some sleep."
Catching herself just before she closed her eyes, Chloe instructed, "Wake me if anything happens with Felix."
Alec did not answer, but she was satisfied he would do as she advised.
