"I can't believe I missed it," Kelly sulked, poking her fork in her pasta salad. Danica and Ryan filled her in on the chaos from Jim's latest prank.
"Don't worry," Ryan consoled her. "It's not like stuff like this doesn't happen all the time."
"I guess that's true." Kelly forced a smile. "Remember the fire, when Michael cut in front of us and ran out before anyone else?"
"He did?" Danica asked. "Was that a prank or a real fire?"
"A real fire. Ryan left the foil on his burrito and the microwave overheated -"
"I never tire of telling that story," Ryan sighed.
Kelly cut herself short. "Ohmigod, I'm sorry Danica. That was insensitive of me."
Danica squeezed her napkin. "It's okay."
"It's fine," Ryan said, trying to smooth things over. "I bet there was lots of stuff that happened before I came here too."
Kelly shook her head. "I mean because her parents died in a fire."
Ryan had just taken a bite from his granola bar. He coughed, rapping his knuckles against his chest, and swallowed heavily.
"It was a long time ago," Danica stated. "And I don't really remember it.
Kelly offered her personal brand of sympathy, including the statement that "if that happened to me, I would not be able to look at a microwave without freaking out."
"It had nothing to do with a microwave," Danica corrected.
"Well, I'm glad you weren't there during the fire here." Kelly glared at Ryan as if he were personally responsible for the fire that killed Danica's family.
Ryan leaned forward and patted her hand. "I'm sorry to hear about that," he said.
"Thank you," Danica said, forgetting to stress how long ago the tragedy was.
To the camera, Danica says, "No. There's no real story to it."
"So, was that your idea?" Alec asked as he and Danica roamed through the Upper Delaware Wilds, for hunting. "The alien invasion?"
"No. It was all Jim and Pam."
The evening was warm, ushering in an early spring. Icicles dripped off of tree branches, magnifying the scents of the small game. Danica found that she was enjoying the stroll. She hoped they didn't run into hikers.
"It was good," Alec commented. "It helped that it undermines Dwight."
If Danica did not know better, she would have thought he was watching the show. More likely he and Jane had merely been keeping up with their supervision.
"Dwight's undermined pretty well by himself." Danica stepped over a fallen log.
She caught a scent of a herd of elk. After picking out a clear path between her and the herd, she dashed in and snatched one of the elk. She dragged it out of screeching distance from the rest of the herd and drank up.
She buried the remains and returned to the fallen log where Alec waited. "Not bad," he said.
"Bite me."
His businesslike demeanor returned. "The camera crew hired a new video editor."
"Oh. I didn't realize they were hiring." Danica spoke before she realized what Alec meant; he had installed a Volturi agent in the camera crew. "Wait, so you put one of your lackeys in the production crew?"
"Yes. It's a natural solution," Alec reasoned. "The agent can remove any footage that exposes you as a vampire."
Should she be impressed by this idea? It did have a ring of ingenious compromise to it. The Volturi would no longer need to worry about her accidentally sparkling in front of millions of viewers.
Still, she needed to know Alec's motivation behind this idea.
"Why would you and this agent want to do this?" she asked.
"Isn't it apparent? You remain in the show without wrathful repercussions. No one gets endangered, which benefits all of us."
Danica crossed her arms. A protest rested on the tip of her tongue. "I'm sure some of your colleagues would disagree," she hedged.
"They might fantasize about massacre, but realistically any mysterious death of a public figure will call attention to us."
Odd, Danica thought to herself, that the TV show that serves as a threat to the Volturi is at the same time helping to ensure my survival. Because if she disappeared, people would notice. And that is exactly what the Volturi want to avoid.
They neared the end of the trail. "Are you going to get anything while we're here?" Danica asked.
Alec lowered his eyebrows as he shook his head. Though he did not say it out loud, he preferred to get human prey. "I'll get something later."
"Hmmm." Danica saw right through his polite evasion.
They did not speak the rest of the way to Scranton.
Jane met her brother at a low-income neighborhood.
"The younger ones never do learn gratitude," she said, sulking. She tossed Alec's meal, bound and gagged, on the ground.
Alec ate quickly. Though abstaining from human blood was beyond his means, the least he could do was not prolong the human's suffering.
"She'll never be one of us," Jane informed him. "She's weighed down by all those trite principles of the twentieth century."
Alec wiped a trickle of blood from his chin. "It doesn't matter. This plan will work."
"It must." Jane started to pace. "What a troublesome development."
"One we were bound to run into sooner or later," Alec reasoned. "With television and the Internet. Humans no longer exist in private groups. Such technology will affect our ability to hunt them."
"That's no reason that a vampire needs to make a spectacle of herself with the humans' idiotic inventions." She glanced at the sky. "Come. We must see to things in Seattle."