~Edward~

Gently, I stroked Bella's hair, not wanting to see, but unable to avoid noticing, how it appeared a bit longer and fuller than it did three days ago. The change would not be discernible to the human eye, but I could see it. That wasn't all. Her pores were minutely smaller, and had a tiny bit of extra sheen. The soft skin that covered her body wasn't quite as soft as it was before. Tonight, she hadn't fallen asleep until well after midnight, even though her broken body should have made her tired enough to slumber far earlier. All of this worried me.

While I watched her sleep and kept up the gentle slide of my hand through her hair, I listened as Carlisle and Jasper discussed all they'd found, and not found, about Bella's condition. Jasper was going above the call of duty, considering his mate had forsaken him for another. Beyond the conversation they were having, I also focused on the land outside our home, listening to every mind that came within my range, hoping to pick up whatever notice might be available that the authorities were on their way. Of course, no part of my attention left Alice's room, as I bided my time waiting for the vengeance that I would be taking. My appreciation for Jasper's help only went so far; I wasn't nearly the man he was.

Bella stirred under my hand, her eyes flashing open; she looked much too awake for having only gotten four hours of sleep.

"Hey, you haven't moved?" she asked.

I smiled down at her, trying to keep all the worry off of my face. "Move? Why on earth would I move? All I could need is right here, sleeping peacefully with her head in my lap." I continued running my fingers through her hair...hair that was now a sixteenth inch longer than when she fell asleep.

"You're worried."

I had to laugh; it was stupid of me to think I could hide my concern from Bella and wrong of me to even try. To actually say the words to her, though—how could I? She was going to want to die—and I was terrified she'd ask me to kill her.

"Go back to sleep, love. It's still early; you need rest. We can talk when it's daytime."

She scrunched her face up at me. "I can't; it hurts."

We both looked down at her wrist, at the patch of skin that was healing all wrong. If what I thought was correct, that patch would be gone soon.

"Is it the burn or the ice this time?"

"Both?" she answered, seeming a bit unsure how to describe what she was feeling.

"Do you burn anywhere else?"

She dropped her head, and I knew then she suspected what was going on. "All over, like a mild sunburn, but getting stronger, as if I went back out in the sun after being burned."

"Ah, Bella," I moaned, gathering her in my arms, wishing I could cry to relieve the pressure building inside me.

"I'm going to go back to sleep now. I don't want to be awake anymore," she mumbled.

Twisting, she moved herself out of my arms, off my lap, and onto the bed, only confirming she was going to hate me if we couldn't fix what was happening to her. While I still caressed her hair with one hand, the other dug finger tips deep into my thigh muscle as I tried to release my self hatred through pain. It didn't work.

Though she tossed and turned a bit, Bella finally went back to sleep, and I once again started to relive the moments of the past two days, wondering what I could have done differently.

My first mistake had been the damn, fucking door. Ripping it open as hard as I had, ripping it right off of the hinges and onto the floor, was a big give away to Bella's father that something wasn't right with me. Rapidly switching his gaze between the obviously heavy solid wood door and my slim seventeen year old looking body, his mouth opened and shut a few times as he tried to process what he'd seen and wanted to say. Since I had neither the patience nor the will power to keep up the human charade while my mate was missing, I'd done nothing to try to explain what he'd seen and instead only made it worse by flashing out the door faster than his eyes could track. While the incredulous thoughts in his head were duly noted, they were of no concern to me right then.

Of course Carlisle was far more mature than me and able to keep his head on straight even through all the fuckery around us. Faster than Charlie could see, Carlisle cold cocked him before gently laying him on the floor near the open door way. He then moved the fallen door next to Charlie's head. Quickly, he manipulated the hinges to appear as though they'd already been weak at the time I flung the door open. I watched all this as I raced from one end of our property to the other, trying to find Bella's scent. It was useless; there was nothing. The wolves were doing the same, though they'd ceased to be anything more than random dust bunnies flitting about on our land the moment Bella had been taken from under their noses. Any respect I'd had for them was gone, even knowing it wasn't their fault. Now, they were simply nothing to me—everything was nothing now—except her.

As I ran as fruitlessly as a hamster in a wheel, I wondered, was it the time Carlisle spent cleaning up after me that could have gotten us to Bella sooner?

After he'd messed with the hinges, he'd called out to Esme to make sure she was the first person Charlie saw once he woke. Quickly—but was it quickly enough?—he explained to her what he wanted her to say to Charlie when he came to.

"Explain the door had been broken just the other day by vandals and we hadn't yet gotten it properly fixed. It had clipped Charlie in the head and knocked him unconscious. He mentions anything about flying doors and super human strength, start talking concussion and hospital time and he should clam up."

Esme nodded and then went still as a statue as she waited for Charlie to waken, there being nothing else for her to do now as she waited for her newest daughter to be found.

That took, what, one minute? Less? I hadn't been paying attention. Was that the time that we'd needed to get to her before the first drop of venom hit her blood stream?

Free from his responsibilities in the house, Carlisle rushed outside and caught me on one of my high speed frantic circuits around the property. Grabbing my arm, he whipped my body to a stop, the momentum nearly hurtling me backward less one appendage. I deserved it, too; running around like a moron instead of focusing on my surroundings was my second mistake, as my father would show me.

"Edward, calm," he demanded, wanting me to be still and less of a distraction to whatever he might be able to detect from the air around us.

His mind was a blur to me as thoughts and ideas moved faster than I'd ever seen. The speed with which he considered and tossed one plan after another actually soothed me. My calm, mild mannered pseudo-father was showing his three century age, along with all the time he'd spent honing his vampire abilities during his existence.

I could hear high-speed typing in the house as my siblings took to the wires in an attempt to find where James may have gone. While most nomads stayed completely off the grid, there were still plenty that kept in electronic contact with others of our kind. If James had taken my Bella to a favorite hideout, then maybe someone knew where it was. We were also tracking any new missing persons reports as any killings may provide a trail. Later I'd deal with the guilt I felt hoping someone would die and become the breadcrumb I needed.

Carlisle was every bit as still as his wife in the house, except for one barked order of "Silence!" directed to those on the computers and the wolves loping around us.

Finally, when everything was as motionless as could possibly be, I began to hear it. What I heard wasn't in the land around me, but solely in my father's head. It was what only he could hear, he with his hearing that was three hundred years better than my own. The rushing sound of vampire feet racing at top speed, the impact to the ground exactly 109 pounds heavier than it should have been, if he hadn't had my Bella in his arms.

As much as I desired to take off then and there, I waited to see what Carlisle would recommend. He held up a fist signaling us all to keep still, and then spoke directly to me in his thoughts.

We're going to follow. Just us, not the wolves.

Within mere nanoseconds of the last thought coming from Carlisle, Alice was a streak of lightning dashing from the house into the woods towards the direction of the rushing foot steps. I tried reading her mind to see what she was doing, but all I heard was mine mine mine mine. Immediately, I tensed up: Bella was mine, Jasper was hers. Something was horribly wrong.

Alice's unexpected leap into action could ruin any chance we had of catching James unaware unless we overtook her—unless I overtook her—I was the only one fast enough to do so. I was gone.

They say bad things happen in threes; that was my third mistake, going after Alice.

Behind me, I could hear the rest of the coven following, and the wolves bringing up the rear since Carlisle hadn't gotten a chance to tell them to stay. Ahead I could hear Alice's footsteps and still catch the tail end of her thoughts as she drifted in and out of my mind reading range. Still, she only repeated the same word over and over in her head: mine.

Unexpectedly, after a few miles, she stopped running and waited for me to catch up. When I saw her, it was like she was a different person. Her face no longer held the sweet, friendly expression I was used to. She was now hostile and tense, her face pinched while her hands clenched and released at her sides.

You're not getting through me, Edward. Don't even try; I can see you won't make it no matter what you could possibly decide.

Shocked, I didn't bother trying to figure out what she was doing—I charged. As I hurtled towards her, I could see in her head her vision of what would happen depending on what she did. While I was fast, her mind was faster, and she successfully blocked me as she'd promised she would. Still, I was forewarned on what she would do and could, in turn, counter attack immediately. It was a fight with no physical contact, only attempts to feint and dodge around each other. Still, her mind did not show me why she was doing this. Behind her quickly moving strategies, I could hear over and over, like a hum, mine mine mine.

I was enraged now, and wanted to kill Alice for keeping me from my mate. Snarls ripped through my mouth as I tried to get around her.

Finally, Carlisle and the others showed up. We formed a circle around Alice, leaving her out of options. She stood in the middle, her arms crossed in front of her, seemingly fine with the situation as long as we weren't making progress in rescuing Bella.

"Alice, please tell us what's going on?" Carlisle spoke to her quietly and calmly, like my reason for existing wasn't being taken further and further away as we stood here.

Unfortunately, I couldn't leave yet. As soon as I decided to go, I could see in her mind that the circle would have enough of a gap for her to pounce on me once more. I may run faster than her, but her ability to hurtle through thin air more than made up for that when we were starting from the same point.

Jasper held out his hand to her, as if she was a small child. He was every bit as confused as we were but felt if he could get her in his arms, everything would be okay.

"Stay away from me, Jasper," she snarled. "You too, Carlisle. Stay away."

"Why, Alice? What's wrong?" Jasper entreated her to explain.

She growled at him, low in her throat, a sound vampires only make when they're on the edge of extreme violence. Her words were guttural and harsh, nothing like the cheery lilt we were used to hearing from her. "I'm not your mate anymore. You're nothing to me now; my maker has arrived, and he will be everything I need."

We all stared at her completely stunned. No mated pair I'd ever come across had seemed as complete as Jasper and Alice. Who was the maker she referred to? James? Or the other male?

Jasper had dropped to his knees as if stabbed, her words the only things sharp enough to pierce his strong vampire skin.

"Alice, no, I'm your mate. You saw us together before we even met. What are you saying?" He was begging her to take it back, to admit they were still Alice and Jasper.

Alice snorted, "The feelings I had for you are nothing compared to what I feel now for him. The future I see for us is everything I could ever want. Finally, I'll be able to drink from humans like a vampire should. Edward's little twat will be my first."

I couldn't take any more and lunged forward, grasping with my hands to reach her neck and rip her head off. Of course, she saw me coming, and it was all the break she needed. Fast as an arrow, she flew through the gap in the circle, landing a good five hundred feet away from where we stood before bounding off into the brush.

Leaving my family in tatters behind me, I streaked after her, hoping I could catch up again, knowing it would be a lot harder now. The damage was done, though; having to deal with her, Carlisle lost the sound of James. Even Alice's mind revealed she didn't know where he was, she only ran to keep me from finding him before she could. Once I realized chasing Alice was useless, I stopped and headed back to the rest of my family. If anyone was going to be able to find James again, it would be Carlisle—or Jasper, if he was even up to helping anymore after her betrayal. I needed to let go of my desire to destroy Alice and focus on rescuing Bella.

I reached my family to find Jasper prostrate with grief on the ground. He was on his knees, hunched over and keening in a horrendous wail. The desolation emanating out of him threatened to cripple us all as it hit us in wave after wave, pouring out from him in increasing amounts and burning into our brains thanks to his mental gift. His despondency, on top of my own depression at Bella's abduction, nearly made my knees buckle, but I held fast, knowing that anything else would mean the end of my love.

I hunched down in front of Jasper and spoke to him—begged him—to do all he could right now to get up. "Please, Jasper. Help me find her. We find Bella, we can destroy James, and you'll have you're Alice back. They must have somehow done something to her and the only way we'll be able to fix it is to find and kill him."

He looked up at me with eyes more dead than any I've ever seen in an undead body. "I can't kill anything my mate loves. And I won't let you do it, either."

He bowed his head again, dismissing me, as I sat there in stunned silence.

I turned to Carlisle, hoping for some guidance, but he look every bit as shocked as I did, and we all were still struggling with the emotional overload coming at us from Jasper.

A brief charge in the energy around us preceded the entire wolf pack shifting to human. It had been too much of a struggle for them to deal with Jasper's grief while in animal form. Their bodies weren't equipped for it. Surprisingly, Leah separated herself from the pack and approached Jasper. She did nothing except kneel beside him and rest her body against his, trying to bring some kind of comfort to him. In her mind, I could see memories of how she'd felt when Sam had left her for her cousin. It was those thoughts that brought her to Jasper's side now.

Once she was actually touching Jasper, Leah's dose of his melancholy increased exponentially, and her strong body started to shudder and twist. Jacob immediately tried to move her away from Jasper, but she held him off with a raised hand and stood her position. I didn't have the heart to tell her it was doing absolutely no good at all.

In the meantime, Sam had been consulting with Carlisle on what the next step would be. They decided we would follow the path Jake and Leah had been on when they'd been tracking Victoria and Laurent to the hideout they'd mentioned. It was our only lead at this point, even though it meant going in the opposite direction we'd been heading in.

We had one problem, though, that needed fixing first.

"Jasper." I knelt down in front of him again to get his attention. "Man, you've gotta rein it in. I know you're suffering horrors right now, but we're all getting it tenfold from you."

He raised his bleak eyes to mine. "I can't."

"We're going to need to take you back home then, before we head back out to find them."

That seemed to get his attention as his eyes focused a bit and he looked angry instead of lost. "You won't go anywhere without me. I need to make sure Alice and—well—whoever she wants stays safe. You'll kill anyone to save that human of yours."

He was right. Fuck, I'd even kill him if he got in the way of rescuing Bella. I wondered if he realized that. Going by the challenging way he glared at me, it seemed he had. He'd gotten up off of the ground and squared off in front of me. His thoughts showed his confidence in being able to defeat me if necessary. Now, in addition to the misery I'd felt from him before, there was anger and violence. A very dangerous combination.

Carlisle noticed the growing tension between us and came over to address Jasper. "We'll all work to keep Alice safe and protect her well being. Bella's, too. Please, Jasper, try to control what you're putting out. It's too much, especially for the pack."

As always, Carlisle knew exactly what to say to settle things down. Jasper closed his eyes and we could watch him working to relax every part of his body in order to gain control. Abruptly, it felt as if my emotions belonged to me again, and all I felt was the anxious urgency to get underway in rescuing my mate.

The pack all breathed a collective sigh of relief once they were no longer getting bombarded by Jasper's emotions. Like me, they were ready to get the show on the road and find Bella, and they quickly phased back to their wolf forms. Emmett and Rosalie, who'd been unusually quiet through everything, simply stood off to the side waiting for the rest of us to go. Both were carefully keeping their real thoughts hidden behind banal observations of the day's events. That was the strangest thing since they were notorious for using x-rated visions of themselves to keep me out of their heads when they wanted. Obviously the seriousness of the situation had gotten even to them, breaking through Emmett's normally perpetually good mood and Rosalie's constant self absorption.

With nothing else that needed to be done, we were finally able to get underway again.

"All right, everyone," Carlisle called out. "The pack is going to lead the way to where Jacob and Leah were when they turned around and came back to Forks. Let's go."

The wolves were a blur as they took off into the woods; we chased after them, staying no further than arm's length away from the rear tail. Leah was in the front, being the fastest of all the wolves; Sam took the rear spot as he'd never be comfortable with us following directly behind his pack and was using himself as a barrier, albeit if only in his own mind.

Moving at full speed, it still took us a good hour before we were approaching the spot where Leah and Jake had turned back earlier in the day. The sun had set during the run, and I had become morose at the thought of how much time had gone by since Bella had been taken. I was confident she was still alive, convinced I would have spontaneously expired into a pile of ash the moment her heart stopped beating. But that didn't mean I had any good feelings at all about the condition we'd find her in.

Leah's sense of smell was marginally better than even Carlisle's, so it was once again that my first clue we were on the trail came in another's thoughts instead of via my own senses. In her mind, I could see she'd picked up a fresh scent from the red headed female and the other male, not James. No Bella.

Miraculously, Leah was able to go even faster. We all found an extra reserve of strength and probably broke some kind of world record for vampire and werewolf speeds.

After another fifty miles or so, the scent was strong enough that we all had it real good. Vampires and wolves mingled together in one large group as we all ran at top speed to save the only human ever precious enough to unite us.

Finally, after another twenty-three miles of running, I picked up Bella's scent. I was the first one this time, as none of the others were anywhere near as attuned to her as I was. We were exactly 15.7 miles from where she was, and it took me less than a minute to make it there. The scent of her blood spurned me on to speeds I was sure had never been attained before.

When the ruined little cabin came into view, it took every ounce of control I had not to barge right in. Thankfully, I had enough sanity left to know that if I burst in there in a moment where he was already drinking from her, he'd be able to kill her before I could rip him away.

I stood there, still as stone, while waiting for the others to catch up and processed what I was hearing inside. There was one voice and one heart beat, but no thoughts. I was used to not hearing Bella's, but I'd been able to hear James before. Then, I figured it out. He must be able to shield himself at will, some sort of camouflage that could mask everything: sight, sound, scent, and mind. The perfect gift for a hunter. It would have been easy for him to figure out I was a mind reader back the first time I heard him if he'd been close enough to catch me interrogating Sam. He must have been keeping his mind blocked ever since. It was the only explanation for how he was able to get close enough to grab Bella when she went to her dad's car.

In that moment, now that I was near enough to my Bella to hear her heart beat, I was glad I couldn't hear James' mind. His words were awful enough. Thankfully, they were also all I needed to calculate his distance from her beating heart. He was at least three feet away from her.

Carlisle approached me and gave the go ahead. The cabin was surrounded. We both heard James' plans for Bella, and there wasn't anything that could have held me back in that moment.

Using a running leap, I soared into the cabin through a hole in the wall that used to contain a window. Amazingly, I'd caught James completely unaware of the hoard outside, his senses filled to the brim with Bella's blood, leaving nothing for his own defense.

Furious to hear he planned to administer some sort of sick medical care to my beloved, I made sure he knew who was going to truly suffer.

"It's nothing compared to the pleasure I'll have destroying you."

I snarled the words at him, ready to tear him apart, when Jasper burst in from the other side of the room and landed in front of me.

Quicker than lightning, the room filled with vampires and wolves. Barely able to see what was going on as I tried to get around Jasper to James, I at least managed to catch Carlisle and Emmett grabbing Bella's cage down from the ceiling and Rosalie taking her out. The wolves formed a barricade between Jasper, James and me, and Bella, not caring about us, only wanting Bella to be safe.

Jasper seemed to be almost splitting himself in two as he made sure to keep James inside the cabin instead of allowing him to go after Bella, while at the same time preventing me from attacking James.

I was almost through Jasper when Alice showed up, dropping part way through the ceiling right on top of James, grabbing him around the waist with her legs, and then hoisting him back up again and out onto the top of the cabin. Jasper and I stood opened mouthed looking up at what we could see of them through the hole she'd made. Deciding I no longer cared about the three of them until I'd checked on Bella, I ran outside to where Rosalie had her propped up against a tree, letting her sip some fresh water.

I collapsed to my knees in front of Bella, afraid to touch her after what she'd been through, but desperately wanting to take her in my arms and never let go.

She lifted her head to look at me, her eyes clouded with pain and her lips pursed tight as if she was trying to keep from screaming.

"You came," she whispered from what must have been a damaged throat. "You really came."

"Yes, Bella. I'm so sorry! I had no idea he was there; he camouflages himself. Tell me what hurts. What can I do for you?" My voice grew frantic as I begged her to give me something I could do to fix what had happened, to allow me to do penance for letting her be taken.

Rosalie broke in, "Edward, she has a broken arm and leg. And look." She pointed to a nasty looking rash on Bella's arm. "I don't know what this is."

"That's where he licked me."

We both stared at her, neither one of us able to say anything.

"What?" Bella asked, confused by our incredulous stares.

I slid one hand under her arm and placed one over the rash. I could feel the heat under the skin; it was much warmer than it should be.

"Mmm," Bella hummed. "That feels nice."

Her eyes closed, and she rested her head back against the tree.

"Bella, did he bite you?" I had to know what was going on. Licking her shouldn't have left a rash. We were able to heal wounds with our licks, not cause them.

She nodded her head a tiny bit and then winced as if the movement hurt.

"Where?"

"There, where your hand is. The teeth marks went away but the rash didn't."

Her eyes remained closed, and I got the sense that she'd retreated into her self, not wanting to deal with what she must be hearing in my voice.

I looked at Rosalie, and then we both looked down at her arm. The rash was healing, but very slowly. The skin there felt firmer than it should, a bit less pliant than the rest.

Quietly, too quiet for Bella to hear, I asked Rose if she'd ever seen anything like this. She only shook her head.

Carlisle was over by Alice, Jasper, and James. I had no room in my mind to even consider the fuckery of that conversation barging into my head. Over my burned ashes would Alice be bringing James back to our home.

I motioned to Carlisle to come check on Bella; if there was ever a time we needed a vampire doctor, it was now.

"Yes, Edward? I'm sorry, I thought Rose let you know the results of my examination. The breaks are bad, but they'll heal. I'm sure you can hear from her heartbeat she hasn't lost enough blood that we need to be concerned."

I broke in impatiently, still whispering to keep Bella from hearing, but doing nothing to mask my irritation at being given information I already had.

"Her wrist, Carlisle. What the fuck is up with her wrist?"

Rose answered me while Carlisle bent to look. "It didn't look like this when he first examined her. Then, it was more like a friction burn. We, uhm, we assumed she'd been bitten somewhere we can't see right now. She wasn't talking. At the time, she wasn't changing, so all he examined were the breaks."

At the time.

Carlisle finished and looked up at Rose while I covered the rash again with my hand, hoping I could cool it down and stop what was happening.

"I've never seen this before. It's—well—I don't know. I'll need to research when we get back home. Perhaps a call to the Volturi will yield answers, but I hope it won't come to that as their involvement should be avoided at this point."

He didn't speak the words out loud, but I could see them in his mind all the same. There may not have been any reason to keep Bella secret from the Volturi much longer.

Bella shifted on the bed, her body coming back to rest in my arms now that she was asleep and instinctively seeking the comfort of her mate. I took another look at the rash; it almost looked like it was sinking into her skin, and fresh skin was forming on top, but the new skin was translucent instead of opaque. In the time I'd been focused on the memories, the blood flow around her broken bones had improved—much faster than it should have.

Alice and James were arguing now. Alice wanted to leave immediately; she wanted to start her new life with her true mate. James was working to convince her to stay, ostensibly in order to give her time to make sure she wanted to be with him. His mind was still blank to me, but I knew the true reason was to remain near Bella. Alice knew it, too, but every time she considered confronting him, she got a vision of herself alone: no Jasper and no James. After what Jasper had pulled back at the cabin, I couldn't conceive of what had happened in her vision to eliminate both from her side.

Of course, while Jasper couldn't see the visions she was having, he could hear all of their arguing, and it was taking everything he had in him not to blast us all again with misery. Still, he held out hope that Alice would come to her senses and eventually be back in his arms. From what I saw in Alice's head, it wasn't likely.

The fact that James still lived was destroying me. I wanted nothing more than to slowly rip him to pieces, and then sit and watch as they tried to come together, occasionally kicking them apart again and again to prolong the agony he'd be feeling. I'd stick his head on a stake pointed in the direction of the rest of his body so he'd see it all. As long as I made sure his venom touched all the body parts, he'd feel a pain ten thousand times worse than when he'd been transformed—and I'd relish every moment.

But, before I could commence my torture, I had to convince Carlisle and Jasper. They were the ones that allowed him to come to our home, Jasper claiming we couldn't kill him without it destroying Alice, and Carlisle too concerned for the rest of the humans in our territory to let him go.

Yes, Jasper was a master strategist, and yes, Carlisle knew me well. Still, I bided my time, sitting on the bed, running my fingers through my beloved's hair. I bided my time; it would come.