Chapter 35- Picking Up The Pieces.

"Jasper!" I throw myself at him, wrapping my arms around him and kissing him frantically as he automatically catches me. His eyes are glowing the ruby red of blood.

"Did anyone see you?" Edward demands.

Jasper looks up at him. His eyes look bleak, but his body is practically thrumming with satisfaction and well-being after his forbidden, delicious feeding. "No. I had a study period and I came outside to get away…he was down here smoking."

"Okay," Edward sounds resigned. "Alice, I'll go back to our class and tell the teacher that I'm taking you home. I'll see if I can get Rosalie out of class too, she's good in these situations."

He vanishes, and as soon as we're alone I curl into Jasper, breathing in his scent and stroking his hair. "I love you."

"I'm sorry I let you down, darlin'," he says in a low voice. "I didn't even think, just heard the heartbeat pounding and dove."

"I know," I breathe. "It's okay, I know you didn't mean it." I kiss him again, desperate to be close to him, to have him feel how very deeply and intensely I love him. His arms tighten around me and I know he understands what I'm trying to tell him without words. "It's okay."

There's a distant bell, and then footsteps and Rosalie, Edward and Emmett appear around the side of the gym, taking it in. Emmett grimaces, but Rosalie's eyes are cool as she assesses the situation.

"No one saw you come down here?" she says.

"No, I had a library period."

"Okay…and now you have gym with Emmett, right?"

Jasper and Emmett nod, and Rosalie glances at Edward. "They should go."

Jasper and Emmett both makes noises of protest, but Rosalie shakes her head. "You have to. We can't do anything that might draw attention to us. Five of us skipping out on the last period is too obvious." She looks at Edward, who nods at her.

"Yes, that might work." He looks at the rest of us. "We have to get rid of the body. We can't make this look like an accident, he can't be found with bite marks and we can't disguise them but Rosalie thinks she can take him down and hide him in the lake."

I have a sudden vision of Rosalie, a grotesquely beautiful mermaid swimming naked through dim green water with her golden hair streaming behind her and a limp body being towed along in her wake. It is all I can do not to cringe away from her.

"I'll take Alice with me," Rosalie says, flicking her eyes my way. "If you go to the office Edward, and tell them that you got me to take her home after she fainted, that covers an absence for the two of us this afternoon. The three of you boys need to stay at school. I'm sorry, but as I said, all of us disappearing will be too obvious." Her eyes meet mine, hard and challenging. "If you can help me with this, Alice?"

I straighten my shoulders and meet her eyes squarely. "I can do whatever you can."

A ghost of a smile crosses her face, and she turns back to the boys. "You think this will work? Edward?"

Jasper shakes his head. "I really think…"

"Shut up," Emmett says to him, not unkindly. "We've done this before- no one can stage a death scene or hide the evidence like my angel girl can. Just let her get on with it." He kisses Rosalie, hard and briefly. "Love you, baby."

Edward shrugs at Jasper. "Emmett's right. Rosalie is good at this, and I think what she's planning will work."

Jasper's lips tighten, and I know that he is deeply unhappy with himself. I also know that having the others leap in and sort out his mess is something he is both grateful for and resentful of, and for a moment I hug him hard.

"Go on," I say to him quietly. "Go with Emmett to gym, and then come home. I'll be waiting for you."

Emmett scruffs Jasper's hair so that it falls forward over his face, shading his crimson eyes. "Just don't look at anybody," he advises. "Come on buddy, let's get this over with."

Jasper and Emmett disappear around the corner, and Edward nods at Rosalie and speeds after them. Rosalie frowns for a minute and then says to me, "We need to get that in to the car I suppose. Can you get it over to the back fence?"

I wince a little, but nod determinedly. I have to do this for Jasper, I have to make this potential disaster for us disappear as soon as I can. I think about my squeamishness over the rat such a short time before and almost laugh at myself, as I now find myself stuffing a dead teenage boy into the trunk of a car and keeping an eye out for anyone who might see us.

There isn't anyone to see us though. It's a cool, grey day and all the other students are busy in school, this back road screened from the building by a stand of trees. Rosalie drives fast, taking the road that leads to our house and then accelerating past it as we head towards the lake.

"Have you done this before?" I ask hesitantly, desperate to break the silence.

Rosalie doesn't look at me. "Getting rid of bodies? Not in the lake, but yes. Emmett…he had trouble with temptation at the start. There have been several times when restraint was too difficult." She shrugs. "As I always said to him, it's inevitable really. We fight our own nature every single day, and sometimes we're going to lose. Sometimes we can make it look like an accident, particularly when it's somewhere Carlisle is established as a doctor and can rule on cause of death. We're too new here for that though, so it's just a matter of hiding the evidence and avoiding suspicion."

I close my eyes and let the visions come. "It will work," I say distantly. "We'll take him down to the lake and out to the centre in a rowboat. They'll find the body and think he skipped school to go fishing. They'll rule drowning…by the time the body floats any evidence of what Jasper did will be gone." I open my eyes and blink, coming back to reality.

"You're sure?" Rosalie's voice sounds faintly surprised. "I didn't know what you could see of the future." She turns the car off the main road on to a track that cuts towards the lake through the forest, swearing softly as we rattle through the ruts and potholes.

"I can't explain what I do and don't see," I say honestly. "Mostly I see the results of decisions…but not always."

Close to the lake, Rosalie pulls the car off the road, concealing it in the thick scrub. "We need to be careful that no one sees us," she says.

"No one will," I say confidently. "They'll be fishing over on the other side of the cove. If we take that boat, it will all work out as I said."

I take the body and flit lightly down to the water's edge where an old wooden dinghy is tied to a neglected looking jetty. I don't think anyone has used it for a long time and I step carefully into it, undoing the knots in the water swollen rope. Rosalie steps down beside me, her eyes scanning the water.

"I'll tow us out," she says quietly, rapidly removing her clothes and tossing them up onto the jetty. "I'm a better swimmer than I am rower." Naked, she drops over the side of the boat into the water with barely a splash and a moment later the rope pulls taut and the boat begins to move. Closer to the centre of the lake Rosalie stops swimming and rises back to the surface, her long hair slicked back from her face and swirling around her in the water.

"Toss him over," she says. "There are some branches down here, I can snag the clothes on them so he'll stay down long enough for the fish to get at him and take care of the bite marks." She pauses. "We need to leave the boat loose…you'll have to swim too. I'm sorry, I didn't think about it but your clothes…"

"That's okay." I follow the body over the side of the boat, keeping my hand on the boy's shirt as he starts to sink. Rosalie takes the body from me and duck dives under the water, and taking an unnecessary breath I follow her down into the dim, cool water, seeing ahead of me the Rosalie mermaid of my visions. Beautiful and terrible all in one as she takes care of her grisly task.

We swim slowly on the way back to the bank. I've never swum a distance like this before, but I copy Rosalie's movements and get along well enough, despite the dragging weight of my clothes. Rosalie reaches the jetty first and then holds out her hand to help me up.

"You did well," she says quietly, drying herself as best she can with her slip, and then pulling her skirt and sweater back on her still damp body. She wrings out her long tail of hair and looks at me. "I wasn't sure that you could handle it, back at school."

"I never had to hide a body before," I tell her, a little hesitantly. "When I was newborn I didn't know enough…I just killed and fed with abandon, leaving all the bodies as they fell." I squeeze water out of my clothes so I don't have to look at her, remembering that conscienceless slaughter of my early days. "Even when I was trying not to feed off humans anymore, if I slipped and killed one I just left them. I was never settled in one place, you see…if I left behind a gruesome scene it wasn't something that would ever come back to me. I had my home with the carnival of course, but we were always moving. And when I had to leave the carnival, well, after that it felt like I was little more than a ghost moving through space and time. It wasn't until I found Jasper that I existed for anyone at all."

Rosalie's eyes are dark. "The people I killed I didn't hide either. I wanted them to be found…I wanted the ones who would die later to know that their time was coming." She turns abruptly on her heels and heads towards the concealed car.

"Do you know about that?" she asks me as I catch up to her at the car. "About what happened to me, and what I did afterwards?" Her face is an expressionless mask and her voice is hard.

I hesitate, but I remember Rosalie herself telling me I am best served by honesty in this family and I nod. "My visions…I saw you. I knew your story before I met you."

Rosalie slides in behind the wheel, staring ahead of her as I scramble into the seat beside her. "I'm sorry," I say timidly. Whether I'm sorry for what happened to her, or sorry because I know, I'm not exactly clear on.

Rosalie sighs, and the tension in her shoulders eases as she looks over at me. "At least you knowing everything already means I don't have to talk about it." She carefully reverses the car and begins the jolting drive towards home. "Will Jasper be very upset about today?"

My heart twists. "He judges himself very harshly for what he sees as a lack of discipline," I whisper miserably. "He was also unhappy that you and I were going to take care of the matter; he would prefer to clean up his own messes."

Rosalie snorts. "Boys!"

I giggle a little unwillingly, and Rosalie gives me a sudden comradely smile. "Emmett's the same way," she says confidingly. "He gets very upset when he thinks I'm emasculating him!" She laughs and then sighs a little. "But I'll do whatever it takes to protect him, and unfortunately when it comes to human deaths he's given me more practice than I would perhaps like over the years."

"He doesn't dwell on it though?" I ask. "Emmett doesn't seem to…worry too much."

"No, he doesn't worry too much. It's not in his nature to fret about what can't be changed really. He's accepted that the two of us need to be equals and that he has to let me take care of him when I can, just as I let him take care of me. Even if that does involve rather more corpses than it would for normal couples." She laughs, low and wickedly gleeful. "And of course, there are some very simple things I can do that let Emmett feel like a man again!"

I clap my hands across my mouth against my burst of laughter. "Rosalie!" It may have only been a week that I've known them, but I'm all too well aware of just what Rosalie does to let Emmett reassert his manhood!

Rosalie laughs comfortably as the car hits the made road and we accelerate smoothly towards home. "Oh, don't play innocent Alice! You know how things are."

"Between you and Emmett, yes, I know how that is!" I look across at her and then say solemnly, "Thank you Rosalie, for what you did today."

Her smile fades and her face turns serious. "It's nothing more or less than I would do for anyone in the family Alice, and you and Jasper are my family now." She hesitates. "I don't find it easy to be open. Trust is hard for me, and I know I can be a complete bitch and I push people away…but I'm glad you're here Alice. You and Jasper. I'm glad you're my sister now."