Alice followed Emmett around for several hours after that. He talked to her a little bit about the battle up in Boston, but she could tell she was only getting the abridged version of everything. He only really told her the basics: about how they were currently doing a massive amount of resetting, and how a group would be sending up the first in a series of vital supplies to the city soon.
According to their estimates, that region would be out of blood by the end of the week, and would need new stock ASAP.
It was a scary thing, to think about what they would do if they ran out of blood.
Thankfully it was always kept stock piled in each center; standard protocol. But in Boston the radicals had destroyed most of it, so they'd be dipping into other reserves across the region for the time being, until things were sorted out.
Rosalie was busy delegating tasks and trying—but failing—to get one of the center's only lieutenants left (six others had died in the initial attacks and one had accompanied Emmett to Boston) to take up more responsibility.
She'd been seething while ranting about the man's incompetence. "If I have to explain to any more of his cadets how simple tasks are performed, I'm firing him the second this war is over and moving to Manhattan until this center gets its shit together."
Not one to want to stand in the way of Rosalie's wrath, Alice had been keeping away from her since Emmett returned.
He was going to be leaving in less than a day to head to Philadelphia. Every time he mentioned it or it was brought up, Alice wracked her brain trying to come up with a good enough thing to say to get him to take her along.
Right now her chances were all-but-existent. She would have to come up with something better to get Emmett to agree to take her along, and at this point, she was started to get nervous that it wouldn't even be a conversation worth having.
Following him without his knowledge wasn't an option, either. Each vision that came to her in those scenarios always left her feeling horribly guilty and highly uncomfortable. Emmett's temper wasn't something that most people ever came into contact with—his threat to Jasper back at the house on the day Maria made her declaration looked like a kitten's mew in comparison to the fury Alice could see he was capable of producing.
And potentially being on the receiving end of that was not something Alice wanted to do. Especially knowing how impossibly upset he would be with her, beneath all the justified fury.
Truthfully, she had no real desire to go to Philly, and even less of a desire to leave the city. Despite being quite literally confined to the walls of the Upper Manhattan Containment Center, Alice's visions hadn't shown her much in terms of progress toward finding Jasper, leaving her feeling as if she had nowhere to go anyways.
Where could she go if it weren't straight toward him? She didn't want to be anywhere except for at home, in Jasper's arms. An impossible thing currently, and a silly thing to want in the face of the war they were currently fighting. But it was that—the hope that one day, they'd be together again and able to do all the things they'd missed out on—that kept her going.
It was just getting increasingly difficult to shake the image of Jasper lifting his shaking arm toward his torturer as an offering in exchange for her safety.
The thought made her feel sick.
As she watched, only halfway paying attention to Emmett explaining the route they'd taken in order to take back Boston, she was only focused on the fact that she'd seen Emmett return home before travelling to Philly.
It wasn't on the way, which meant this was a decision he'd already made, and meaning they'd be taking a pretty stiff detour in order to see if the house in Ricketts was still standing. It meant that maybe she didn't have to ask to go to Philly. Maybe all she had to do was beg to go to Ricketts with him, and then return.
Even thinking it in her head made her feel like an idiot. There was no way anyone would agree to it.
"I want to go home," she muttered quietly, interrupting Emmett's explanation of Boston's tricky geography and having to navigate through the Bay.
He paused, offering her a sympathetic look. "I know what you mean. But," he shrugged, "it's a war. We've got things to do first. Then things can go back to normal."
"Can they though?" She folded her arms on the table and rested her chin on them.
Emmett's smile faltered. "Maybe not back to normal, but—"
"Please please please can I come with you?" The words fell out of her. She'd seen over and over again how he wasn't going to listen to reason, but maybe he'd listen to the emotion in her words. The two of them seemed to have much better luck communicating when feelings were involved. As if they operated on the same wavelength in some way. "I've already seen you go. I don't know what you're doing there exactly but I want to go back. Please? Even if only for a few minutes?"
The home was filled with all sorts of things. Countless priceless belongings and expensive art. Things from Carlisle and Esme's time as well as photos from only the past year. Alice hadn't been there long, but it truly had become her home.
She'd been worried while thinking about the house at first. It was one thing to know that a building full of personal belongings had gone up in flames, but their house wasn't simply a house. They worked out of it. Countless confidential documents and items and files were stored there.
Rosalie had assured her a couple days ago that everything was entirely safe. Files were encrypted, vital documents were sealed in a safe with material several times the strength of their gym floors, and the house had been built with security and sturdiness in mind.
"Nothing except a week straight of hard fucking work would knock that thing to the ground." The blonde had assured her, not even once looking up from that moment's paperwork.
Selfishly, Alice found herself wanting her bracelet, not caring how ridiculous of a want that was. It was an object of peace for her; of comfort. Even knowing it wouldn't have survived their initial attack at Toronto's center, she still found herself regretting leaving it behind.
"Of course you've seen it," Emmett muttered, running his hands over his face, "listen, Alice—"
"I swear I'll come right back here. You can even assign me my own team of containers; people who will make sure I come back. It's not like I have anywhere else to go right now. I just—" she paused, collecting her composure before burying her face in her arms and speaking directly down toward the table, "I just want to go home. Even for a minute."
Emmett sighed deeply. "I don't want to tell you no, because I don't want it to seem like we have you held hostage here—those princess in the tower jokes were just jokes, by the way. Sorry if they hurt your feelings. But even though the area is cleared, it still isn't entirely safe for you. And y'know, you're—"
"The key." She muttered grumpily, repeating Esme's old words. "The key to a lock we can't even find."
"Yet," he fixed her with a stern look. "I know patience isn't easy. Trust me. It's absolutely ridiculous, boring, frustrating; you name it. I get it. But it's necessary." He sighed again. "Or so Rose tells me."
"Please please please please?" She lifted her head and clasped her hands together, interlacing her fingers and shaking them toward him. "It will be so quick."
Emmett laughed kindly. "No way kid. I'm just grabbing some documents to hand off to the team. It's going to be a quick in-and-out, and yeah, yeah I know you say that's all you want, but Rose would have my head if I tried taking you on a field trip."
"Ugh," letting her head smack down onto the table, she groaned. "I hate this. I hate every part of this."
Ruffling her hair, Emmett stood. "I know, Alice." And now his voice was sad again. "I know."
Watching Emmett prepare to leave had been rough. Thankfully he didn't leave without giving her one last big squeeze. She wished him luck, begged for him to be careful, and Rosalie had given him a goodbye kiss that left Alice and everyone else in the room feeling borderline uncomfortable.
If she possessed the blood or ability to blush, she would have lit up bright red.
Thankfully, Rosalie immediately had put her to work, sitting her at a desk in sight of the blonde, and instructing her to try and focus on some more visions.
"This," she'd slammed a huge stack of books down, "is a directory of our employees. Almost everyone's name and face is in this. If you see anything vital or important or suspicious or whatever," she patted the stack firmly, "flicker through, try and find their center, and make some calls."
"And say what?" Alice's eyes were wide as she took in the size of the directories.
Rosalie quirked a perfect eyebrow. "I don't know. Improvise." She shrugged, giving her a pointed look before walking away. "You're a Protector too, you know."
It had been several hours since then, and despite Alice's initial skepticism at how such a strange plan would work, it was giving her much better results than anticipated.
It had only taken her several minutes to flip through each book, scanning names and pictures, in order to learn and recognize each face she'd been provided with. While it left out a few hundred employees—there was a portion of the midwest and a small part of the northern territories that they didn't have directories for—knowing these people's faces was so vitally important.
These were technically employees of hers. Well, employees of the government, but subordinates of hers. That was something she didn't think she'd ever get used to. It was incredibly nice to be able to finally put names to faces she already knew. She was embarrassed at how many containers she'd met this spring whose names she didn't know until now.
She would have to do better in the future.
With that thought, she paused, completely stopping what she was doing to shake her head and force herself back into her work.
It was hard to think too far into the future. A funny thought for the psychic to have, but it was painfully true. She still wasn't entirely sure she would survive to see the end of this war. She would be lucky to survive long enough to see Maria dead, and as the hours passed, she realized with shock that she was almost okay with her vision coming true now.
If it came true, that would mean that at least she'd get to see Jasper once more before she died.
She didn't need to think too hard about the likelihood that she could die immediately after, but the two thoughts were hard to divorce from one another. As long as she could tell Jasper one more time how much she loved him, and as long as he would be inevitably set free from Maria's grasp, she could die happy.
Well, maybe not happy. But content.
At the desk, Alice remained halfway in her head and halfway out. She kept her mind wide open, letting visions come and go, and every time she recognized a container she quickly made a call. Most of the time she was giving a heads up about radical movement in the area—after all, most of her visions were of said containers dying at the hands of the foreseen radicals—and thankfully only a couple of people questioned her intel.
She knew as well as anyone that "oh, I can see the future" wasn't a valid reason. Thankfully it was easy to skirt around the questions with a reminder that time was of the essence. Sadly, she still wasn't very good at deciphering the timing with her visions, and she wondered if she ever would be able to learn when a vision would happen, instead of just only knowing the scene.
Something told her that might be impossible, but still, if she had a future beyond this war, that would be something else she'd have to practice.
After nearly an entire day of this work, Rosalie interrupted her, tossing a folder down in front of her while she was finishing up a call with Wapusk's center—a small group would be attempting to attack from the Hudson Bay sometime during the day soon, and they would need to be ready. Alice stared blankly at the folder for a moment, but when a vision flickered through her, revealing the contents of it, she was eager for the phone call to end.
"When did you find this?" Alice asked, hardly a second after the phone was hung up and she was already flipping through the photos.
It was the scene from Maria's broadcast. The same mountains, the same field. It was as if someone had cleaned up a photo from the broadcast, removed Maria, and printed it.
"We zeroed in on the location a week ago, actually," Rosalie leaned against the desk, picking up a photo of the field from another angle to glance at it. "Our people were there hours after we figured out where it was. There's a couple of pretty desolate parts of Ashley National Forest over in Utah. It would have been fairly easy for her and her people to slip in and out to film this regardless of the time of year. Hunting is pretty dry there."
"Something isn't right though," Alice spoke as she stared at the photo. "In her video the grass was dead and the mountains had more snow on their caps."
Rosalie nodded. "We suspected as much once we started analyzing the footage, but it wasn't a live feed. According to records, their mountains haven't been that white in at least eight years." Rosalie plucked another photo from the pile and turned it toward Alice, "Global warming is a bitch, but she's helping up piece this specific puzzle together."
"Well, we already knew she'd been planning this for a while," Alice commented, sadly realizing that this meant that whatever team had been dispatched would have absolutely zero chance at tracking her. "So what does this mean for us?"
Rosalie shrugged, "Nothing so far. Figured you would want to know though. It doesn't look familiar, does it?"
Alice shook her head. "I've only seen it in the video. It mustn't be a vital location. I also can't imagine them going back there now that they know we've been there."
"Just a random stage for her sick games," Rosalie hummed, slowly collecting the photos back into a pile and closing the file up. "We still have people sweeping the park—you can never be too sure—but nothing more." She nodded at the girl before turning and walking away. "Let me know if you see anything else."
"Okay." She felt a pang of sadness as she watched Rosalie leave, but then quickly got back to work. Despite their conversation she'd gotten a couple more visions while the blonde had been there, and had a few centers off the coast of the Carolinas to call.
Dozens and dozens more phone calls were made over the next day. Most of the calls were quickly made and dealt with, but a few of them would last upwards of an hour sometimes, as Alice tried hard to give as many details as possible while knowing little to nothing about the timing of what she was seeing.
She'd nearly lost track of time when her surroundings began to fade and suddenly she was in another vision.
Another basement, not unlike the first few, was the scene that Alice found herself thrown into.
Jasper sat slumped against a wall, his eyes black and unseeing as he stared out ahead of him. He made no noise but occasionally he'd lift his head and shake it for a few seconds before letting it slump forward again.
"How much longer?" A vampire Alice didn't recognize asked from the opposite wall. The woman was of average height, her hair wild, the color of fire. Her eyes were an odd shade of amber; perhaps from a diet of both animals as well as humans. She looked irritated at the girl, hunched over in the corner of the room, curled in on herself.
"Fuck if I know." The vampire at her side shrugged, another unrecognizable face. His hair was a sandy brownish-blond color, a few shades darker than his skin. "The first guy we tried it on broke after his first twelve hour exposure. Maybe she's using it too long, or not as harshly. I don't know how it works."
"Not that," the red-haired woman snapped, eyes watching as Jasper's head shot up, his hands lifting to scratch desperately at the back of his neck for a few seconds, before his hands fell and he began shaking his head once more. "I mean, how much longer before they find her?"
"Oh," the man let out a dry, sarcastic noise, "they've narrowed it down to either the midwest or the northeast. Still a lot of space to cover but," he shrugged. Then, he shot the woman a look of contempt with his red, narrowed gaze. "If that mate of yours hadn't been so difficult we would know exactly where she is by now."
"How unfortunate," she spoke, her face expressionless as she turned her nose up. "You wouldn't have a girl to track if it weren't for us."
"Seriously, shut up," a third vampire chimed in from by the doorway. Her hair was dark, chin-length, her one eye glaring at the red-head through the darkness. "You gifted ones are so fucking annoying."
"Quiet," Skye eventually spoke up, her voice dark and commanding, and suddenly, the room was quiet.
Alice simply watched, her heart shattering, as Jasper sat and rocked, pausing to nod or scratch, before letting his head fall to the side as his eyes stared at what appeared to be nothing. Occasionally his eyes would lock on a dust mote, but then seconds would pass and he'd start shaking his head again.
This went on for several minutes before eventually he grabbed his hair in his hands and screamed, and eventually, he spoke. The words were loud, angry, and in Spanish. She could hear Maria's name thrown in occasionally, but other than that, it was all barely comprehensible to her.
He came back to himself at one point, his panicked eyes locating the three vampires in the room quickly, before flinching back at the sight of the girl in the corner, her knees still drawn to her chest and her head still down.
The moment he seemed to realize he wasn't being physically restrained, he tried hard to stand but only ended up stumbling backward into the wall, sliding down it before falling forward onto his hands. He screamed again and suddenly Alice was back in the office.
She stared for a few minutes, watching dust of her own collect on the fake potted plant on the corner of the office. Suddenly, the buzzing of the fluorescents was all she could focus on, trying hard to force Jasper's screams to stop replaying in her head.
It was just after she realized she'd been staring for nearly an hour when she attempted to stand. The second she lifted herself out of the chair, another vision hit.
She felt sick to her stomach as she watched Maria cradling his slumped form. The woman sat on the floor of the basement, cooing and shushing at him as she brushed his blonde hair back and away from his face.
In her lap, not even bothering to expel energy to lift his head, Jasper was making pitiful, heartbreaking noises. It took Alice a few seconds to realize that he was crying.
It was a sound that shattered her, never having heard it before.
Under his breath, he repeated the same word over and over again, muttering it every time Maria ran her fingers through his hair.
All throughout the basement, vampires were all stationed closely, most of them poised to act. There were at least fifteen that watched anxiously as Maria attempted to soothe the captured Protector. Kyle and a few of the other larger ones stood so closely to the pair that it was surprising that Jasper's eyes, still opened and staring, hadn't focused on a single one of them.
It made Alice worry that it was because he couldn't see them.
"I don't know," Maria's voice finally sounded sympathetic, and that's when Alice realized what Jasper was saying.
Dondé?" He mumbled, his lips hardly moving except to draw more breath in and let out a haggard, shaky breath. "Dondé? Por favor... dondé…"
"I don't know yet, Jasper. We can't find her, I'm so sorry." And something about the way she spoke sounded vaguely familiar to her. Maria didn't sound like Maria as she whispered to him—her words without their typical edge and accent—and as Alice watched the woman run her fingers through his hair, she realized what was familiar about the scene.
"Esme," Jasper's voice caught on a sob, "please," and he closed his eyes tightly again, choking back a sob. "Please… where?"
"The entry codes, Jasper," she cooed, and Alice watched with disgust as she continued tenderly brushing his hair out of his face, "we can't find her without them."
He started shaking his head again, staring blankly ahead of himself. And then, his voice more certain than she thought he was capable of, "You're not Esme."
"Fight it, Jasper," Maria continued to coo, never once pausing her hand in his hair, and when Jasper stopped shaking his head, letting it go limp in her lap, his face contorted into a heartbroken grimace.
"No," he groaned, closing his black eyes tightly, a whimper escaping. "Where is she? Where?"
"Safe, Jasper, but not for long." Alice hated the faux concern in the woman's voice. "Unless we get the codes we can't find her, and if we can't find her we can't protect her." Jasper's crying cut off her words and quickly she was shushing him again. Seconds later, she spoke again. "Don't you want to protect her?"
"I need… I need…" He struggled to complete the thought as he tried to speak through his tearless cries.
"You need Alice, I know sweetheart, I know. We'll try and find her for you."
"You'll take me to her?" His voice was so pitiful, so absolutely defeated, yet there was a desperate hope hidden in his words.
"We have to make you strong first, do you understand?" And then instead of shaking his head, Jasper began to nod, not stopping for several seconds before letting his head go limp again, his eyes still not quite seeing what was in front of him. "Wonderful." Then, Maria lifted her head, making eye contact with a blond man and nodding toward him. "Promise me you'll drink all of it?"
And Jasper simply continued to nod, even as vampires began to usher out of the room. And when the bodies, still living, still breathing, but unconscious, were ushered in by some of the older vampires and piled on the floor, Alice felt her stomach turn.
Suddenly the comforting mask fell from Maria's face and she roughly shoved against Jasper's shoulders, knocking him directly onto the concrete floor beneath them. Of course, he made no move to catch himself, instead rolling slightly before he began shaking his head once more.
"No," he sobbed, as if deep down he knew what was going on, despite all of his senses seemingly being suppressed or manipulated somehow. "Esme, Maria, no, por favor, no."
But as most of the vampires fled the basement, leaving behind seven unconscious humans, a pair of older vampires, Maria, and Skye, still in her corner, Alice felt sick. Maria walked over to the human closest to her, lifted her foot, and stepped through the girl's skull, pulling her foot back before it could sit in the gore for any longer than necessary.
Jasper's mouth was buried in the girl's neck, drinking deeply, his black eyes still staring as his body moved on auto-pilot, when Alice fell back into the present.
It wasn't until Rosalie rushed into the room, three vampires quick on her heels, when Alice realized she'd been sitting on the floor, sobbing.
Rosalie had barely wrapped her arms around the girl, pulling her up and off of the floor, when she was sucked into a third vision.
"He's not ready yet," the sandy haired man from her earlier vision spoke, his words calm as he stared at Maria across the room.
The floor was no longer riddled with bodies, but instead it was stained red, the blood having already dried where it fell upon on the cold, hard floor. As Maria took a few steps across the floor, the deep red didn't transfer against the bottom of her shoes but a sick, sticky sound could still be heard; this was a vision many hours ahead of the one she'd just witnessed, this one just as terrifyingly certain as the previous two.
Maria's red eyes flickered up to the man's and she cocked her head. "Do I look like a fool who doesn't already know that?"
If the man were human, he would likely have began to sweat. "Of course not—"
"Keep quiet before I have your tongue ripped out," she advised calmly, her eyes falling back onto Jasper's prone form. He was no longer shaking or scratching at himself, but still he stared blankly.
Bright red eyes focused on nothing.
"Skye," she snapped, head flying toward the girl still huddled in the corner, now noticeably shaking. "You need to increase it."
"I can't," the girl barked in reply, her voice shaking as much as her body was, "intensities don't change, just the visuals," it was very much the whine of a teenager. She sounded like a girl repeating something to her mother that she'd already said dozens of times already.
Something told Alice that the only reason Maria was enduring the attitude from the girl was due to her terrifying, mysterious gift.
"Control them then," Maria snapped right back, "and no excuses. You've been practicing all this time, it should be possible for you by now."
"Unless we find something else for him to fear there is no way. It's fucking impossible." Skye tightened her grip on her dark hair and Alice could hear the girl grinding her teeth together.
"What does he fear now?" The dark blond man spoke up, daring to walk a bit further into the room. "What's he seeing?"
"Hallucinations that clearly aren't vivid enough," Maria mumbled under her breath as she inspected the bottom of her shoes. "Dig deeper. Find something better. We don't have time to wait for you to crack him properly," she instructed Skye brusquely before walking toward the bottom of the staircase and toward the pair of older vampires. "We've already wasted enough time."
The one-eyed girl with dark, chin length hair spoke up again, "Now that we know they're in the Northeast the odds of them being in New York is almost certain."
"I don't want almost-certainties. That is not good enough."
"We can have confirmation by the end of the week."
Maria paused her movements and was silent for a few minutes. Alice hated how Jasper's eyes shined in the dark, staring straight ahead, his back pin straight. Not blinking, not breathing, not acknowledging anything around him.
He looked hollow.
"Fine," she spoke quietly but firmly. "We wait until the end of the week, we seek confirmation, and in the meantime we hope our little nightmare over there finds a better thing to haunt him with or she'll need to keep him under even after we start moving."
"He can't fight when he's under though," the blond man's annoyance was slight, but noticeable. "He's worse off under than he is out."
"Do not continue to remind me of things I am already aware of," Maria's voice was cool, but still threatening. "The girl is irreplaceable. You are not."
"I'm sorry," Skye began to mumble, almost to herself, as Maria continued to deliberate with the others. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry."
Maria shushed the girl before leaving, but even after Maria's departure, the apologies continued to fall out of her mouth.
It took a minute before Jasper reacted, but when he did, he simply turned his head and stared at her form.
"Please," he rasped, staring at her with his terrifying red gaze, looking and sounding so much like a stranger, "please."
"I'm sorry," she shouted, and Jasper simply resumed staring.
Then the scene morphed, and a new vision fell upon her.
It was a different setting. Not a basement, finally. Wherever they were was residential. It looked like a living room not too different from the ones Alice would see in Josie's Life Style magazines. Of course, the curtains were all pulled down tightly, but Alice could still see the sun shining through the cracks on the perimeter.
On a pristine, leather couch, surrounded by throw pillows, sat Jasper. Eyes still red and staring, hands resting in his lap, entirely unmoving. Across the room stood the red haired woman from an earlier vision, at her side the man with the sandy hair. They simply stared at Jasper with curious expressions.
Alice couldn't help but notice the absence of Skye from the room, and it left her wondering until someone spoke up.
"Why don't they just kill the others first?" The woman spoke, her eyes now looking more red than gold, making it more clear the direction in which her diet had shifted over the past several weeks.
"It's her strategy, I think. Have her old second-in-command witness the death of the girl he loves—the girl this entire stupid continent adores—and she's confident he'll finally lose it."
"Like he hasn't lost it already."
Skye shook her head, stumbling into the room on unsteady feet, her eyes a brighter red than Alice had seen her with since these visions had started coming to her. "I keep telling you morons that he's in there. You guys just aren't believing me."
The woman strode up to Jasper then, pulled her foot back, and kicked him in the side. Jasper simply flew a couple of feet and landed on the carpeted ground, shaking the entire room with the impact. In another room they could hear what sounded like glasses falling and breaking.
She started laughing. "Yeah, he's definitely present all right."
"Maria would kill you if she saw you do that," the blond spoke uneasily, hesitating before walking over and cautiously heaving Jasper back onto the couch. He still remained unmoving.
The woman scoffed. "I may not be as useful as the little monster, but I'm just as important."
"I was good at hide and seek as a kid, too," Skye mocked, walking around the room and gazing at the art and photos that adjourned the walls and tables.
"Just hiding," the woman corrected, as if unbothered with the taunt.
"When are we leaving?" Skye asked, directing her attention to the man.
"Two days, last I heard. Marek estimates it'll take us about a week to get there."
"I've never been to New York City," Skye mumbled, running her finger along a fragile-looking framed painting. When the canvas ripped under her finger, her frown deepened.
"You found it, right?" Blond man asked, narrowing his eyes at her turned back.
"It wasn't mine to find," she shrugged. "He had to find it. I just," she made a wiggling motion with one hand, "had to help show him where."
"Good," the man then turned to leave, "you better not be full of shit."
"I wish I were." Skye let her finger trace along the rest of the painting, ripping it easily with her fingertip. "This isn't easy to do." There was silence for several more minutes with the blond's absence, and eventually Skye spoke up again. "How much longer do you think we have until she kills us?"
"Once you crack him, you're probably gone."
"I doubt it. If she kills me there's a chance the effects could be permanent. Or reversed. It's hard to say." Skye turned, her eyes calm as she regarded the older woman, "And you?"
"I'm running the second we charge New York."
"A week, huh?" Skye let her eyes fall on Jasper's prone form, and she sighed. "I don't think I can crack him that soon."
"Can you crack him at all?"
"I thought I could, but he's still there."
"Where?" The woman gestured toward his empty stare. "If he's there, then he's buried too deep to be a threat."
"When he cracks," Skye spoke quietly, "he'll be a threat to absolutely everyone."
"What will crack him then?"
"When the fear finally becomes a reality."
There was a pause.
"And what is his?"
"That he'll be the one that kills her."
The redhead made a thoughtful noise at that. "Interesting. Makes sense, but still. I'll be interested to see how you and Maria manage that."
"Me too."
And when Alice fell back into the present, her first, original vision as bright and vivid in her memory as it ever was over the years, she inhaled deeply once before letting herself take note of her surroundings.
"They're coming," Alice gasped, lifting her arms to grip Rosalie back. The taller woman was clinging to her tightly, waiting for the psychic to come back to herself, and as Alice's words rang throughout the room, their embrace tightened. "They're coming here."
The next two days were nearly a blur as the center prepared for Maria's inevitable attack. Several hours were spent with Rosalie deliberating whether or not to have Alice leave.
"If she gets you, it's game over," she kept insisting as the clock continued to tick. The lockdown that had been lifted the previous week would be reinstated in another forty-eight hours time. Currently, a mandatory city-wide evacuation was underway, and it was using up nearly half of their resources. "If you leave, you're vulnerable. If you stay, you're a sitting duck."
They'd been in the process of calling back as many containers as possible from the surrounding areas. Thankfully it was possible since most of the region was virtually radical free. Sadly, Alice could see the opposite becoming true over the next week and a half as Maria and her cronies planned their attack.
Visions came to her, morphed, disappeared, and then came back with worse results every hour. Alice hated how they seemed to cycle in and out of existence, and when the visions began to include results that ended in the death of people she knew, she began to panic.
When Kate and Garrett returned the dawn of the third day since her series of visions, and when Emmett returned later that night, Alice's heart sank when different variations of visions of the three of them dying began to grow more and more certain in her mind with each passing hour.
It was hours before dawn broke on the fourth day since her visions had struck her, when she finally had a moment alone.
When Rosalie wasn't at her side, Emmett was, and when neither of them could be, either Garrett, Kate, or the both of them would stick close. They didn't know when Alice would have another vision of Jasper and subsequently, Maria, so they had to stay on alert. Their presence at her side didn't bother her, in fact she found herself subconsciously clinging to them when they were around, but the second she was alone she felt as if she were suddenly able to breathe again.
Maria was coming, and would soon be attacking a city with a population of eight million people. Ninety-nine percent of which were human. And Alice could already see that even if half the city evacuated, that still left millions in the crossfire.
The death that was going to take place within the next week or two—Alice hated how she still didn't know when they would arrive—was going to be devastating.
They would have to rewrite maps after this fight, no matter what happened.
As she walked through the halls, trying to avoid company for as long as she could now that she had the silence and relative privacy to think to herself, she found herself stopping abruptly as she rounded a corner.
A thought struck her then that she couldn't believe she hadn't thought of before, and as a vision came to her, morphing just about everything in their future, she knew she had to act, and now.
Thankfully no one looked at her too strangely as she quickly flitted around the sixth and seventh floors. It took her seconds to prepare what she needed to be found, and then after that, it was laughably easy to access the room where they'd been keeping most of their 'evidence'.
It was still strange to remind herself that of course she could access each room in this building. She was the boss, technically.
Alice only grabbed a few items before shoving them into a random backpack, and after leaving the room and standing in the stairwell for almost three entire minutes—she needed to wait for the entire stairway to clear—she inhaled deeply and bolted.
It took her less than ten minutes between the moment when the vision struck her to leave the Upper Manhattan Containment Center. The moment her feet hit the sidewalk outside she turned directly north and ran.
For the first twenty minutes she let her visions lead the way, making every single move and choice all depending on the results she saw in her mind. After fifty miles, and when the concrete jungle was nothing but a point in the far distance, she turned, crossed the Hudson, and continued moving north.
When Rosalie found the note, the vision Alice was left with brought along such heavy guilt.
I'm drawing her away. I'm so sorry. I can't let anyone else die for me. Please understand and please stay safe. Tell everyone I love them.
She tried hard to avoid letting her emotions overwhelm her, but as more visions came to her, since Rosalie would then turn around and have to pass the message along to all of their fellow Protectors, Alice only wanted to curl up in a ball and cry.
They were going to be absolutely devastated.
But it was an easy trade to make as the visions of Emmett dying faded from her mind entirely with her new series of decisions now made.
She was nearly a hundred miles away when the next vision struck her and she was forced to stop herself quickly, clinging to a tree as her world faded from view.
"It's a fortress," a bald man spoke, swiping his finger along a flat screen on a table. "Penetrating the city won't be hard, but getting control of either center in Manhattan will be where most of the work need to be put in."
"More newborns is our best bet but throwing them into a place so densely populated is going to get tricky very quickly," another man with long black hair spoke, arms crossed.
They were no longer in a basement but the room was still dark, and the only window in the corner was small, no light shining through it. The conversation she was witnessing would happen at night then, likely that following night. A cheap, foldable table was in the center of the room, and a dozen vampires stood in various places around the room.
In the corner sat Skye, with Jasper hardly a foot away, also sitting on the floor, his eyes still not quite in focus as the vampires talked while disregarding the pair.
"We'll start making them tonight then," Maria eventually spoke, as if unbothered by the degree of what they were planning. "If we must we can wait a couple of weeks. We don't need skill from them, just their strength. We make enough, we storm the city and let them lead the way, if they run off, they run off," she shrugged. "It will draw their containers out—they can't leave their city unprotected."
"Strength and numbers," the bald man nodded, "They have to act. They can't just let their humans die."
"Their broken moral compass gives us the upper hand," Maria was pleased that apparently they were following along with her idea. She let her eyes flicker over toward where Jasper sat, silent and staring, and sighed, her voice sounding a bit sad when she spoke. "A shame they broke his, too. He always was the better strategist."
It seemed the other vampires in the room felt uncomfortable at the reminder of Jasper's presence. Some even shifted further away from the incapacitated man, as if they were afraid he'd break free from his trance and attack.
"We'll get the girl, and maybe we'll be able to get him out of that funk and negotiate a bit," she purred on her way toward the door. "If we're going to win this we'll need at least one of them to cooperate."
Shaking the haze from her head she started running full speed once more. She wasn't far enough away from the city to feel entirely comfortable stopping yet. As long as Emmett continued to toy around with the idea of chasing after her there was still a chance that someone could be hot on her trail within the next hour. But she knew that if she kept running those chances would dwindle.
And hours later when she was nearly four hundred miles away, just south of the Canadian border, she stopped abruptly, digging her heels into the ground and swinging her backpack off of her back and into her hands immediately.
In it was a compromised cell phone that had been taken off the body of one of the moles they'd expunged upon the initial fighting. In her other hand was a satellite phone, this one was a center-issued one that would prevent Maria's forces from triangulating her location as easily.
It only took her a few seconds of shuffling through visions before she opened the first phone and began pressing buttons. In an instant the phone was ringing, and when a high-pitched female voice answered, Alice began speaking.
"Tell Maria if she wants me, she can come and get me herself." There was a pause and some slight commotion on the other end of the line, but Alice didn't wait for a response before speaking again. "Tell her Skye can't break Jasper the way she's hoping. Tell her taking New York City will be a complete waste of resources on both of our parts. Tell her that I've been watching her every move and that no amount of blood-stained basements will hide her from me." She paused for a moment, realizing that her emotions were starting to get the better of her.
"Tell her that if she wants Alice Brandon, she can come find me." And with that, she abruptly hung up.
She dropped the phone, turned and ran.
EDIT: oh my god. oh my GOD. I'm so sorry. I edited this late Tuesday night, had sworn I'd updated the chapter, but it turns out I'd just saved the document instead of posting, and then went straight to sleep. and here I was wondering why no one was reviewing this chapter. god, I'm such a tired mess LMAO. forgive me for posting on AO3 and not here: I didn't mean to neglect y'all, I'm just so exhausted all the time. IM SORRY!)
A/N: I know as we near the end I should be spending more time editing these chapters, but I simply don't have the energy (nor do I know when my next day off will be) so please just accept this for what it is. Hopefully chapter 39 will be posted by this time next week or sooner. I'd say 'have patience', but this story will be over by the end of the month, so just enjoy what you have left to consume, I guess.
Also! I was wrong in the last two author's notes! There are only THREE chapters left and the story will end with chapter 41! I had forgotten that a couple months ago I'd combined two chapters into one so it threw my chapter count off a teensy bit. So, the story will end one chapter sooner: forgive me.
I love you guys, thanks a million for the reviews and favorites and what-not. I'm excited to wrap this up.
~*~review replies~*~
guests: glad everyone is simultaneously enjoying and dreading all the crazy shit poor alice is going through—don't worry, she'll shine soon enough.
deltagirl74: I knoooow, and poor Alice is stuck seeing all this messed up shit. if I were the only one with a window into the horrors the love of my life was going through? oh I'd literally lose my mind. and hmmmmmm, I don't know! :~) we'll have to wait and see!
Meagan: yeah! optimism! that's something you definitely have to have when reading this fucking angst-fest haha! right on!
Julia: skye is an interesting character that you'll find more about. eventually. that's all I'll say about her! but we're nearing the end so you'll find out all the vital tea very very soon...
Reinbeau: HOLD ON COWBOY YOUR BABY IS COMING FOR YOU! WOO!