A/N: What can I say? I so enjoy sharing this with you and I love that I am now Governor of the State of Wow. Be afraid. :) THANK YOU. :)

Oh, if you asked for a teaser before and didn't get one, check to make sure your review was from a signed account. I don't always recognize first names!

Now, back to Bella's email account:

Chapter 14: Still I'm Searching

Bella,

We miss you and yes, we were upset, but we just hope we didn't upset you, you know? I was so happy to get your note. Jasper was relieved, too.

Look, we're here whenever you need to talk. Buy a throw-away phone if you want. We miss you. But mostly, be safe. And come back to us as soon as you can, okay?

Love you,

Alice

Running through the night, Bella scented some scattered deer in the midst of a mostly-denuded forest. Tempering her thirst, she still decided to feed from two, since their numbers were more plentiful here than they might be elsewhere. After her hunt, her first thought was to get home. She almost, for the briefest instant, called for Alice.

Which was really when it hit her, there by herself in the middle of the woods. She was alone. She was a nomad. She had no place to go that was home, save where there was love that hurt her heart and shattered her mind or where there were too many reminders of old joys that would taint everything.

She collapsed on the snowy ground, not even retrieving her pack from where she had hung it on a high branch of a tree.

Jasper,

I had a bad day. I missed you. My immaturity is apparently endless, but I wanted you to know. You said you felt, once, like maybe you were turning into a "coven leader." I think of you as ours. Be strong for Alice like you always are and give her a hug from me.

Do you remember those matching sneakers I promised you for Christmas? I bought them for you. They're in my closet in the box marked "That's What She Said."

I miss you.

Bella

Was she going to see the sights or wasn't she? Bella decided that wallowing in her confusion and hopeless feelings wasn't getting her anywhere, so she would need a project. She would visit national monuments. Her first destination, she decided, would be Washington D.C. Running at night, avoiding direct sunshine were adventures as she passed through New York and Pennsylvania into Maryland.

She dodged sunlight in the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, walked at a slow human pace to the Washington Monument, visited the Korean War Memorial — which was eerie, with the stone soldiers who sometimes looked like frozen vampires from another era.

The bright light grew persistent, so she eventually found a Wi-Fi hotspot indoors and away from a window. It was a coffee shop, and everyone was in there trying to get out of the wintry weather. It was in this hotbed of humanity that she smelled him.

A vampire for real.

He caught her eye across the crowded shop as if they were in some old movie on the Lifetime Channel. He was rangy, about as tall as Edward, she judged, and had long, sandy hair that he had tied back with a leather thong. He wore sunglasses, but a lightning-fast move in her direction showed her that his eyes were the dark, thirsty burgundy of the human-hunter. His clothes were young-adult casual for winter, and he mimed blowing on his hands.

Inside, no one noticed that his breath didn't steam.

He wouldn't hunt in someplace so crowded, and Bella didn't want to know whom he had chosen as a victim anyway. Would it be that dark-haired woman who was reading from a Hebrew website on her laptop? Or the girl with the huge mug of cappuccino and a long, gray scarf being knitted into being? Or perhaps the other vampire would want to drink from the man who hadn't stopped talking once on the ear-piece of a phone since he entered the shop?

She resolutely ignored the rest of the patrons as best she could to check her work email and send in the latest revised chapter of a high school AP Biology text.

A slew of people left while she was so occupied. Before a new batch came in, the distinctive scent of the vampire approached her and, nudging on the steel chair on the other side of the small table Bella had commandeered, he waited for her to acknowledge him.

She nodded so that he sat down, the slow speed of humanity ebbing and flowing around them while the marble immortals paid them no heed. "Hello?" she began. How did nomads greet one another?

He smiled a little and leaned back in the chair. "Golden eyes, eh? I know one of us with eyes like that. Are you acquainted with Carlisle Cullen?"

In spite of her discomfort, Bella had to laugh softly. "Out of all the others I could have met, I ran into someone that knows the family. It's like I can't get away."

"So you do know him? He and I are old friends, if that means anything," the stranger said, relaxed and easy. "I'm Garrett."

"Bella. And yes. I suppose you could say he was my father-in-law. He's a fine man."

"Father-in-law?" Garrett sat up and leaned forward. "I remember he had a growing coven."

"I was Edward's wife. Edward was his first-created." She got that out without wincing, internally or externally, and Bella found that to be a huge plus.

"Are you here with Carlisle and his coven? I haven't seen him in quite some time and would welcome the chance to meet with him."

She shook her head and closed her computer. "No. I've recently decided to try...to try things on my own. I've never done so, before."

His grin flashed a bit too white to blend in. "Well done. I like an independent woman. Come, let's get out of here and get better acquainted. Acting like one of them too long makes me twitch," he confided with a quick jerk of his thumbs toward the people that surrounded them.

Bella,

I'm so sorry, hon, that you had a hard day. I know how that can be, out there on your own. I wish you could have talked to me - to us - before you hied off like you did, but that's all right. We're here for you, always.

And if you think you need to stay out for a long time, let me know. If you say I'm the leader of the coven (that's still making me want to scratch my head) then I need to know to have a place for you when we have to move on. Because we will, soon enough.

Take care of yourself. We love you and miss you.

Jasper

"Since you're of Carlisle's persuasion, you might not want to join me on my hunt," Garrett said politely as his gaze swept the busy mass of people who were out and about in the nation's capital. "But hunt I must. Is there a place we can meet after dark?"

The memories of meeting up with Jasper and Alice made her sigh inside, but Bella thought that they could perhaps meet near a certain diner she had seen that was attached to a Spy Museum tourist attraction. She told him about it and added, "Since they have 'spy stuff' there, your wearing sunglasses won't stand out."

He laughed. "Excellent. Look for me after dark."

She continued to look around, and was gratified when, as she took the occasional picture to send to Carlisle and Esme, and Jasper and Alice, people offered to take pictures of her, too. It was an unusual thing, maybe, but she didn't have too many pictures of herself since she had been changed.

At length, Garrett returned, eyes in a pair of cheap black sunglasses in the darkness. "Bella," he called.

"Garrett. Well, where do we go?"

He was careful not to touch her, but she felt as if he were watching out for her nevertheless as they walked through the emptying streets. "Do you have a room in a hotel?"

"No," she said, feeling a little foolish. "I thought that, if I were going to experience life as a nomad, I should try to go as close to unencumbered as I could."

"With a computer," he teased.

She shrugged. "I have to work."

"Why?"

And so they began a conversation that lasted while he smoothly got them out of town and into a more lonesome area. Her wishes for security and freedom, her desire for purpose in her day to day life. His explanation of what "unencumbered" felt like to him.

They came to a rest in the dark shadow cast by a moon over a rock in rural Maryland. Garrett sat cross-legged in front of her while she leaned on the cold stone. The strong moonlight glinted off his features in a way that might have passed for a facial treatment by human eyes, but she could see the tiny refractions of moonlight on his intelligent forehead and strong cheekbones.

"You see, Bella, when you are without a coven, you are beholden to no one and nothing save your own free will. I don't take issue with those who align themselves with others, so long as they don't impose their will on me."

"And I bet no one tries to set you up with anyone, either," she muttered, knowing he'd hear but also thinking with annoyance on the extended Cullen family's social interferences.

He laughed and leaned back so that his legs stretched out long and lean before him. "No. Though some of our kind do find their mates while they're running alone." With a mischievous and experienced grin, he asked, "Is that what you're really doing, Bella? Looking for your mate?"

"Well, since we're being all candid," she said with a snort, "maybe I am. I don't know, to be honest."

"Honesty is good among immortals. Eternity is a long time to keep track of lies."

At that, Bella had to laugh thinking of the sheer volume of falsifications that most of the vampires she knew lived with on a daily basis. However, their circumstances and the present one in the conversation with Garrett were very different. "It is indeed."

"Well then. I don't think it's necessarily a bad idea," he remarked with half a smile.

"No... Mating is prevalent in many different species," she said, her thoughts angling on an obscure tangent to the topic of her formal education. "Mating for life, that is," she added, embarrassed as Garrett angled his brow with playful suggestion. "My husband, Edward, and I loved each other, but we... We were not mates."

"And he found his," Garrett guessed shrewdly, without a drop of sympathy or pity. Which was kind of refreshing.

"Yeah."

He held out his hand to her, a small smile tilting his lips. She took it. "You still haven't found yours," he said after a moment.

"No."

Still, he shifted himself to lean his back against the boulder beside her and held her hand. She wondered if even an immortal with as much self-confidence as he had just needed to hold hands, once in a while.

She didn't ask.

"You know, sex without a mate-bond is not a bad thing," Garrett opined while borrowing her laptop to send an email to someone. She did not pry. He had been her escort and her friend and she didn't spy on his correspondence.

"I didn't say it was," Bella retorted, taking her clothing — a couple of new tops and a newer pair of jeans as well as a change of footwear — out of her rather-larger knapsack. "I'm just not accustomed to just, well." — How had Kate put it? Bluntly, that was how! — "Relieving frustrations with someone."

He nodded, murmured that Carlisle's coven was a singular bunch of vampires, and continued typing on her keyboard. For a man she had learned had been changed around 1780, he did remarkably well with technology.

"You're getting ready to return to Carlisle, then?" he asked after they left the small internet café they had found in Pennsylvania. He wrapped his hand around hers and she walked with him. They had known one another for about three weeks and it was entirely comfortable for her.

"No. I'm going home, though. To Jasper and Alice."

"You told me they were in the coven before, but left for a time."

She nodded. "Yeah, and we have all been living together since, well, since Edward found his mate."

"And you're alone, living with the mated pair? That doesn't often last long among nomads. Usually, the single one gets too frustrated and leaves." Then, he threw back his head and laughed, causing not a few heads to turn in admiration at his attractive exuberance. "So that's what happened with you. And yet you'll return?"

He eyed her closely without missing a step as she bit her lip and looked away. "Yes. I miss them."

They walked together for the rest of the night, not needing sleep. As neither needed to hunt, they spoke lightly of his plans for the spring. At length, they came to the northern border of the Susquehannock State Forest. "Here's their Highway 49," Garrett told her without preamble. "If you run beside it and do not veer far away, you can be in Trumansburg before morning."

Amazed and humbled, Bella impulsively turned to embrace this man who had been her undemanding friend and companion for weeks. "I don't know what to say," she said against his chest.

He passed one hand lightly over her hair. "Say farewell. Say you'll send my regards to Carlisle and his mate. And say you will write to me with your computer."

"All of that and my thanks, Garrett. I don't know what I would have done without you."

He grinned, intuition flashing in his eyes. "You would have gone home much sooner."

She acknowledged that he was likely correct before turning resolutely from him and, marking the path of the highway, running into the night.

Alice,

Hi! So you'll see some pictures as attachments. They're legit, honest. I wanted to share where I've been, lately.

I met a nomad named Garrett who knows Carlisle. I just heard from Carlisle and he confirmed the acquaintance and that was all kinds of weird, let me tell you. Garrett's been great, very helpful, and has been willing to explain how nomadic life works. Also, he took several of the pics attached.

It's been a month that I've been gone. I think I'm ready to come home. I think maybe I can, now.

Just please don't move without me?

Love,

Bella

A/N: And…breathe! Again!

I have to say that I really enjoyed Sara Bareilles' music while I was writing these last several chapters. I encourage you to check out her Kaleidoscope Heart album. I know, I never say that stuff, but yeah.

Yes, there IS a chapter fifteen sneak-peek on offer for those willing to ask for it in writing AND whose PMs are enabled. :)

My thanks to Katmom, who is in FORKS with my EDGE GIRLS right now, for her PR mojo and for everyone who has sent me PMs and tweets and reviews. I think you're the best readers anywhere. :) See you Friday! ~LJ