Note: Short chapter, mostly just to fill in Edward's feelings about the Debussy/Wagner argument. Gave me the chance to expand on Alice a little more, too.

XXVI.

I rested my forehead on my drawn-up legs. Carlisle wasn't home yet, but his office smelled like him. It was...comforting.

"Edward…" Alice sighed from the door.

"What was I thinking?" I asked miserably. "I might have killed her." The entire scene in the parking lot kept replaying over and over again in my mind, with everything that might have gone wrong highlighted for me in vivid detail. I could still feel the heat from Isobel's body against the arm I had pressed to her back to hold her in place. I had been gentle, but had I forgotten myself - even for a moment - I might have snapped her spine. The tips of my fingers, which had caused her to squeal and writhe with laughter, might have broken her ribs. And then, worst of all, I had very nearly kissed her. I had very nearly placed my teeth in dangerous proximity to the so-delicate veil of her skin, beneath which beat the blood that I -

The blood that I still craved.

Why had I done it - any of it? I knew better. I knew. What was it that had made me forget?

I remembered Isobel, standing with her hands on her hips, trashing two brilliant composers. I had been thinking - that she liked to argue. That I would never convince her using words. I had been dazzled by her impudent playfulness. Fearless. Bold. Trusting implicitly that I would never hurt her.

How little I deserved that trust, especially after today. How easily I might have destroyed her forever.

"You wouldn't have," Alice replied to my lament, her tone emphatic.

I looked up in surprise, trying to see what she had seen. Was my control that much better than it had been? "You were watching?"

Her eyes shifted away from mine. "No," she admitted. "But - "

I didn't wait to hear it, lowering my head back to my knees. If she hadn't been watching, she didn't know anything.

"Edward!" she trilled, frustrated. Abruptly she was right before me, leaning on Carlisle's desk.

I refused to look up.

"You wouldn't hurt her, Edward," she insisted. "You won't. You love her."

A bitter laugh rose up in my throat, choking me. "If you believe that," I taunted her, "why are you avoiding my future?" She was - her mind was fully on me, entirely ignoring the kaleidoscope of possibilities she had access to.

"Because my visions are dependent on your choices," she responded. "I know you'll make the right ones with regard to Isobel. I don't need to see the future to know that."

She was so confident. I wished that I could be. Isobel was so breakable, and I - I was such a fool. "I have to tell her," I whispered. "Before this goes any further - she has to know." Alice was getting what she wanted: without any real intention of doing so, I had somehow engaged Isobel's affection - at least to some degree. But we couldn't go on like this without her knowing exactly what it was she was attaching herself to.

Not another person. A monster.

"Hm, well…" Alice said, flipping rapidly through possible futures - and pointedly ignoring those in which Isobel still ended up dead. "Telling her isn't such a bad idea," she admitted.

An understatement - according to what Alice saw, if I didn't tell Isobel about myself soon, she would not take it well when she found out.

"Give her one thing at a time slowly over the next week or week and a half," Alice advised as I tried out, in my mind, different ways I might tell her about us - about me - in order to see how it changed Alice's visions. "If she has time to process each piece of information separately, she'll be less overwhelmed."

I shouldn't manipulate her reactions like that - but I could see that even if I admitted exactly what I was doing to her, she wouldn't be upset over it. Her preference for not being emotionally overpowered was greater than any resentment she might feel over my conscious attempt to get the best reaction possible from her. I felt my lips turning upward as I caught one possible future in which she thanked me for being considerate. That was an interesting way to look at it. Was it manipulation or consideration? Since Isobel was the one I was either manipulating or being considerate toward, I supposed I might as well allow her to shape my perception of my actions.

I sighed and unbent myself, putting my feet down on the floor and rubbing my forehead with one hand. "This is so wrong," I groaned.

"Well," Alice piped, "you could always turn her and then none of this would be a problem."

I shot her a glare. "I'm not going to do that, Alice."

"Just saying," she replied with a roll of her eyes, taunting me.

Emmett's footsteps were briefly audible on the stairs, and then he appeared at the door to the office. "Is emo-Edward done crying over unspilled blood? Because we've got better shit to do tonight."

I shot him a glare. As though finding a road for a race held even a fraction of the importance that decisions regarding Isobel did.

"I could just tell you which road you'll pick," Alice offered.

"No!" Emmett snapped, shaking his finger at her. "You keep your mouth shut, pixie girl. We're going out and picking properly."

His mental image of how we would choose caused me to snort with laughter. Jasper had volunteered his Audi to test potential roads. He and Emmett wanted me along to help choose, and Rosalie and Esme had both voiced an interest, as well. We would be crammed in, but I could see why Emmett was excited.

Alice made a face. "Fiiiine, leave me home alone with Carlisle." That, I was certain, was meant for Jasper, who was downstairs but could undoubtedly hear us.

"You haven't given him a deep-sea fish anatomy lesson in a while," I told her. "And didn't they just find some new kinds of bacteria almost a mile into the oceanic crust?"

"Three-quarters of a mile," she corrected, being unnecessarily precise mostly to annoy me, "but yes - that's true. We could read up on that together." Carlisle, Rosalie and I all had more knowledge of human biology since we had all gone to medical school, but Alice's interest was far wider-ranging. She actually had a decent collection of deep-sea curiosities, some still unknown to human science, collected for her by myself and Carlisle a few years ago. Alice would have gone with us, but she had a touch of claustrophobia, apparently brought with her into undeath and never quite overcome. The darkness and press of water proved too much for her when she gave very deep sea diving a try.

Carlisle and I had made it down close to ten thousand feet below the surface during our own dives, and were able to stay put for long periods of time. Days, even. Vampires were, of course, much better suited to extremes of pressure than humans. Unfortunately, buoyancy was still a problem we had to contend with. Achieving neutral buoyancy was practically a necessity if we intended to do any thorough exploration of local wildlife. Our reflexes were good, but having to constantly fight against rising - or, less commonly, sinking - was still enough to throw things off a little, especially when we were trying to approach very wary fish and molluscs or hold still enough to convince them to approach us. The commercially available gear for adjusting buoyancy was meant for the shallower depths commonly achieved by scuba divers. Other, non-commercial gear was meant to be integrated into submarines. Rosalie had come up with a few solutions, but it wasn't as though we had a factory or clean room available to churn out anything really sophisticated

Maybe once 3D printing became more versatile.

In any case, Carlisle and I had managed to find and catch a few odd animals for Alice to dissect, diagram and then preserve. She had named them - not in the scientific sense, but rather in the "I call this cutie Spike because of her dagger-like teeth" sense - and attempted to keep them in her room where she could admire and coo at them on a daily basis. That had lasted until Jasper put his foot down. He couldn't, he had claimed, concentrate on anything - especially their love life - with more than a dozen pairs of cold, dead eyes set in a series of grotesque faces watching his every move.

Emmett had laughed at his cowardice for days - until Jasper had suggested that Alice might use his room to store her collection. That shut Emmett up. Fast. Now the collection resided on shelves in the little lab Esme had attached to our workshop.

Alice still didn't understand why anyone would find her "precious little fishies" "creepy" or "disgusting."

Carlisle wouldn't mind discussing her fish, though. His personal interests were wide-ranging and he had an exquisite understanding of how interrelated the world could be. He and Alice had set up a separate investment account that would hopefully, in another decade or so, offer up enough funds to buy or build a fully-outfitted lab somewhere remote. By that time 3D printing would probably be able to do much more varied work, and so a clean room attached to the lab would give Rosalie and Esme somewhere to design and manufacture better gear for buoyancy control. Alice - perhaps with the help of a few locals working as lab assistants - could start doing a real investigation of whatever we managed to find for her, including thorough chemical analyses. Carlisle hoped that the venture would lead to some pharmaceutical applications. If we - or a shell corporation we owned - held the patents, Carlisle could see them sold at-cost.

That was long-term, though. In the meantime, Alice kept up on the latest research and discoveries, and Carlisle wouldn't object to an evening spent getting updates from her.

Emmett cleared his throat, cutting off Alice before she could begin enthusing over the fact that the newly-discovered microbes were apparently unrelated to the bacteria that made their living in the basalt just a few hundred feet higher. "Anyone have eyes on Esme yet?" he asked at a just-slightly-louder-than-conversational volume.

The question was for Jasper and Rose, but I answered before either of them could: "I hear her thoughts returning. She'll be here in a moment." She had apparently just finished hunting. "Carlisle isn't far from home, either," I added as an aside to Alice.

"Come on," Emmett urged, his face breaking into a boyish grin. "This is going to be so awesome."