Chapter Fifty-One: Carlie

School had shut prematurely in the wake of Nahuel's death. Forks was still buzzing about the murder. Reports spattered the papers of tax evasion, and conspiracy theories about this strange man's untimely death.

"How are you feeling, honey?" Bella said, her arm linked with mine as we wandered through the terminal at Sea-Tac Airport.

I shrugged. I felt like I'd lost a limb.

"I just can't understand why Jacob went back for Nahuel. I just wouldn't have put him down as the jealous type and I thought I knew him."

She turned midway through the concourse, her wheely bag spinning round alongside her with a squeak. "Are you kidding? He is the epitome of 'the jealous type'. He doesn't just fall in love, he 'imprints'. Does that not tell you anything?"

She carried on walking towards check-in. A queue had already formed back to the doors, and attendants were advising passengers to have their passports ready.

"I'm worried about him," I said.

She slowed to rummage through the front pocket of the suitcase for her passport, and frowned. "Don't worry, he won't come near, Carlie, the others won't let him."

"What if I want him too?" I said quietly.

She turned to me, her eyebrows drawing together in confusion. "I thought that was—."

"I know, I know, I'm so angry and upset and confused, but right now I feel a bit... torn."

She zipped her bag back up and stared up at me, causing me to twist in embarrassment.

"I just thought things were finally starting to get better between the two of us, like we were finally going somewhere, you know. Then he did… what he did… and that changed everything." I swallowed. "Do you not think it's strange?"

"That's what I said," she replied. "But you know actions speak louder than words. If he can lash out and do something like this over a petty fight, then imagine what he's capable of when the going gets tough. You know what happened to poor Emily when Sam had a moment of weakness. She's scarred for life."

"So, was I wrong to think I was falling in love with him?"

Her face softened. "Oh Carlie."

"All set?" Alice chirped, from somewhere behind me. 'Looking for something Bella?" She giggled and handed over two passports. My father was someway behind, along with Jasper, a number of canvas bags heading for special cargo and a well-worded doctor's note.

Rosalie and I watched their departure from the airlounge before heading into Seattle for want of a distraction to end the day.

The next morning, I was up and out early, hunting around the highlands of the Issaquah Alps with Carlisle and Emmett. Unlike the women of our family, they wouldn't want to talk feelings, and unlike my father, they wouldn't be able to hear mine. It turned out to be the perfect start to the day. I barely thought of Jacob or my parents and the feed did much to clear my head.

It was sometime between catching the white-tailed deer and the mountain lion that I remembered something that I'd been meaning to ask Carlisle for quite some time.

I found Carlisle some distance away wrapped within a fold of dense bushes. He was flat on the ground with an elk in his hands, guzzling desperately at its hide. I waited while he finished the creature off, trying not to watch. He didn't appear to be surprised by my presence. Then he discarded the carcass beneath the prickly bedding.

"Carlie," he said, hiding his teeth behind his lips. It took a few moments for the warmth in his eyes to return. "Are you done?"

I nodded, waiting for some indication that he was too. He rose to meet me out on the steep hillside. As he approached I fell in line beside him, and allowed him to lead us both down the mountain.

"Carlisle, can I ask you something?"

"Sure." He panned around for sight of Emmett. I hadn't seen him for a while.

"Who's Sofia Alonzo?" I said.

This time, he didn't conceal his surprise.

"Well... that's not a name I've heard for a very long time." He took a handkerchief from his pocket and dabbed his impeccably clean mouth. "How on earth did you hear of her?"

"The treaty," I said, sheepishly.

His eyes narrowed slightly; not exactly anger, perhaps just mild concern.

"We've never mentioned her before," he said, "so seeing her signature at the bottom of the treaty must have come as quite a shock?"

I nodded, watching his expression contort.

"Who is she anyway? Is she a vampire?"

"Who was she more like... and yes, she was a vampire, a very old vampire." His eyes flashed with sadness.

"Was?"

He nodded, pursing his lips slightly. "I met her in the late nineteen hundreds, during my time with the Volturi. If you can consider Esme to be like the earth; grounded and nurturing, then Sofia was the fire. She was strong-willed, flamboyant and free-spirited."

"You were with this woman?"

He paused, for a millisecond. "Briefly."

We walked on quietly.

"Her unquenchable thirst and her stubbornness took her in unsavory directions," he continued, eventually. "It brought all those traits I hated most about myself to the surface. Maybe it was Sofia who helped me find who I really was by showing me that which I could never be."

We walked on. Underfoot the grassy plains thickened.

"So what happened?" I said.

"I outgrew the Volturi and that's when we went our separate ways. She wanted to stay in Italy. I came to America and in time I found your father, then Esme, then Rosalie. It was just the four of us back then, but I never forgot about Sofia. I can't describe what she was like, but I always felt like she needed my help. It's hard to explain."

"Try me," I said. It was no longer steep and our walk slowed to a meander.

"The way we split. I always felt at some level I'd let her down. It was not a personal thing so much. She cared little for others and enemies grew in her shadow before she'd even realized she'd overstepped the mark. I tried to protect her from her own bad habits. It is not always easy being a vampire; there are always greater powers in play."

"Like the Volturi?"

Carlisle sighed. "It was all my fault," he said. "I shouldn't have got her involved."

We hit a hikers trail and followed it along a wide open track.

"What happened?" I asked, looking up at him as we walked. A crease had formed across his brow.

"I had adapted to a completely vegetarian way of life with the others here in Forks, the first time we settled here. Everything was going well for us and I was proud of it, proud of the new life I led. It was the first time I'd established a completely integrated existence. I'd tried it before, but with the moderate successes came the unsubtle scrutiny. No vampire could respect my decision as none of them had the willpower nor the inclination to try it. Yet, with Esme, Edward and Rosalie, we made it work. We'd broken through that painful barrier that others could not and rather than mock each other, we congratulated ourselves on our overwhelming achievement.

"I wrote to Sofia to tell her. I don't know why I thought she'd care, but I was so proud and it reached her at a time when she needed out. She had stayed in Italy and generated too much noise for herself so I was only too happy to offer her a place to lay low for a while. It was never meant to be permanent.

"I thought in my naivety that I could convert her to our way of life and she'd release all the anger that she carried. I assumed that she would be able to adapt, that she would want to..." Like I had with Nahuel.

He sniffed at the air and twisted round in the direction of another rolling hill. "Emmett's travelled quite a distance today," he commented, taking us off on a tangent. "Anyway, Sofia did indeed accept my invitation, and came up to Forks, and she settled in fine.

"It had only been a couple of months, but that spring we were caught hunting in the forests near La Push by Ephraim Black and his companions. Sofia was with us when we drew a truce and promised to keep the lands sacred and she was with us when we signed the treaty."

"So she turned completely vegetarian?"

"Yes," he said.

We slowed at a cattle gate. We could have leapt over it without drawing breath, but with any pedestrian routes, we stopped and climbed the wooden steps just in case there were humans nearby. I took a deep breath; the taste of deer caught on the tip of my tongue with the faint fragrance of Emmett.

"So," Carlisle continued, walking on. "I didn't waste a second worrying whether Sofia would fit in or be able to stay away from humans. She was part of the family and I trusted her inexplicably as I do all my family. I should have remembered that she was wild like the lions; too strong, too long gone and too stubborn to ever change."

He thrust his hands into his pockets, eyes cast to the dirt track ahead.

"She was lying?" I said.

He rocked his head from side to side. "Not lying exactly, just not strong enough. She said she was in the wrong place at the wrong time. He was a barman up in Port Angeles who was taking a load of empty bottles out to the bins and it caught her off guard. That led her into a binge; four people in all, and in her volatile state she left a mess of their bodies in her wake."

His face looked strained.

I could only think of the treaty. By the very fact that Carlisle was still around to tell the tale must have meant that he'd negotiated with them and come to an understanding.

"So the wolves let you off?" I said. "They just sought revenge on Sofia?"

"Not exactly."

"I don't understand. Then what? The treaty clearly states only one punishment - annihilation. It doesn't differentiate between vampires. The threat was clearly for us all—."

"We kept it from them," Carlisle cut in.

"You didn't tell them?" I said, astonished. Carlisle was the fore-bearer of moral democracy; the godfather of all principles I had ever known.

"It's not something I'm proud of, Carlie, but I couldn't tell them. The ink was barely dry on the paperwork that I'd orchestrated. We'd come so close to a war with the wolves over our differences in the first place. It was not an easy decision for them to spare us like they did. It still isn't." His voice petered off. "Everything we'd sworn to the Quileutes went up like smoke in the instant she turned. How could I tell them the truth?"

He squinted up at the sun which for a moment threatened to rip through the clouds. "I've not thought of Sofia for many decades," he said. "But when I do, I comfort myself that she wouldn't have survived no matter where she was. There are rules to follow in this existence..."

"Then what actually happened to Sofia if the wolves never knew about her attacks?"

Carlisle paused.

"She turned on us, made it clear she had no intention of respecting this place." He watched my face register his words. "Carlie, we couldn't risk the wolves finding out, and she made it clear that she had no allegiance to us." He came to a stop and settled onto a large boulder that jutted out from a relatively flat plain. "Things came to a head."

"And what, you killed her?" I said, my voice loud. I stopped walking. Carlisle didn't immediately turn to face me, but when he did, I saw his eyes full of remorse.

"No, we didn't kill her, of course not… but when the Volturi came for her, we did not intervene."

I sucked in my breath, my eyes wide with shock. "You told them she was here?" I said.

"We didn't have to. They knew all along. It was just a matter of time. They had their own private vendetta to settle and we wanted no part of it. It doesn't make it any easier to come to terms with now after all these years Carlie, but I still believe it was the right decision not to tell the Quileutes. We ensured that no negative repercussions could come back to haunt us. It was that decision alone that enabled us to show our faces in Forks again. Otherwise, we would always have been running from them. It would have been a war with the wolves, and we weren't prepared to shed anymore blood."

We walked on, and the scent of Emmett thickened. All around us the air was laced with animal blood.

From what Alice and Jasper had told me, the leaders of the Volturi were lazy. They sent messengers to do their dirty work, while they enjoyed the home delicacies of Volterra. I couldn't imagine that Caius, Aro or Marcus would have left Italy to come for Sofia, but then they had left Volterra for me, back when I was a baby.

"Did they know about Sofia's binge?" I said.

Carlisle raised his eyebrows. "The Volturi? I'm not so sure they'd care. That of all things is permitted."

Four innocent people.

"Did Jacob's grandfather never asked after her? Did they never notice her disappearance?"

"Our relationship with the wolves was not like it is now," he said. "We never spoke nor crossed paths. They would never come near us and of course we were forbidden from their lands as we still are today."

We both walked on, consumed with remorse.

"There are many things I regret, Carlie, and one of them is bringing Sofia here... to her death."

"As I did to Nahuel." It was the first time I had said it aloud and the words stung.

"Carlie, I understand the emotions you must be feeling over him right now," he added, looking over at me. "The guilt twists within my gut like a jagged knife every time I think of Sofia. Could I have helped her more. But in this instance, you really didn't do anything wrong. Jacob did."

"But if I hadn't taken Nahuel to my stupid, irrelevant prom, he would never have met Jacob. I took him there to antagonize Jake, I wound the whole thing up. He didn't even have a chance to break the rules."

"There you guys are," Emmett said. "I've been looking all over for you." He ran towards us with a thick smile.

"You ready?" Carlisle said, jumping up.

"Yup," I replied, looking to Emmett who was still smiling and now nodding too.

We meandered back off-road and the conversation moved on to much lighter topics, like who had feasted on the best animal and how fresh the mountain blood was up here. It was neither warm nor sunny for a mid-summer day, so we didn't come across many hikers on our travels, which allowed us to run fast. We slowed when the foliage around us turned familiar.

We'd cut across the forests up by the school and found ourselves close to the high school gym. It was all locked up. Since Nahuel's body was found, it had turned into a crime scene. Now the police tape had been stripped back, the place was like a ghost town. We walked through, our heads hung slightly. If there had been any lingering scent of Jake or Nahuel, it had been washed away by the heavy rains. Now the air just felt close, with the occasional stiff breeze.

"Hey," Emmett said. "Check this out." He looked around before jumping up onto the lower branches of a nearby tree. I didn't need to climb it to see what it was he'd spotted. There on the trunk were three horizontal lines sliced into the bark.

"More?" Carlisle said. We both come forward for a closer look. They were exactly the same as the ones back home, around the cottage. Carlisle looked perplexed. "It's strange," he said. "Someone is definitely making these, but why?" He shook his head. "Edward said the ones in the Amazon were quite old and weathered, yet the ones in our forest are fairly recent, and these, well, they're brand new... could be a week old, max."

Emmett ran his left hand over them, then put one finger in his mouth. "Weird," he said, "doesn't taste of anything. Like Mississippi." He shrugged and jumped down from the branches.

"And there's more over there," I said, running over to the back of the science block. We took two minutes or so searching the trees that ran around the back of the school. In addition to the one he'd seen, I found another two behind the gym, and Carlisle found one out in the woods. He started pacing just like my father had the other day.

"Are they evenly spaced?" I said, although I already knew they would be. He nodded back at Emmett and I.

"Five in total," Carlisle said, his expression contorted. "What did you mean, Emmett, when you said it was like Mississippi? You saw these markings down there?"

"No," Emmett said, "but they just reminded me of this lady we saw down there, that's all. Forget I mentioned it."

Emmett looked ready to dismiss the whole conversation, but Carlisle drew closer to him. "Tell me about her?"

"Well." Emmett sucked in his breath. "This old woman... she was covered in jewelry, and I mean tons of the stuff; heavy earrings, necklaces that almost covered her turtleneck, rings on every finger, and each one bore markings on them."

"These markings?" I said, "she had lines on her jewelry?"

"No, not lines, but always in threes. Three skulls in a line, three spirals in a line, three dots in a line. They were always identical, and always one on top of the other, like these markings. Then, when this old lady saw me, she immediately started backing away, muttering some foreign language under her breath."

Carlisle was watching Emmett. "Latin?" He asked.

"I don't know," Emmett said, "I couldn't catch a single word, but I was sure she knew what I was."

Carlisle frowned. "Could she have been a vampire?"

"No, definitely not. Her scent was human, but thick and musty like incense. She seemed afraid of me, but then down there, the place is full of voodoo and stuff so I just put it down to that," Emmett said.

"Did you keep tabs on her?" Carlisle said. "We don't want her causing any trouble."

"It was twenty-five years ago, Carlisle. Although at the time I did try to keep an eye on her, but I'd already lost her in the crowd. I told Rosalie about her when we hooked back up, and I was quite surprised when not long after, Rose spotted this old lady in the crowd. I couldn't see her, so I told Rose to describe her... and sure enough, she described her exactly as I had seen her; black clothes, long earrings, tons of necklaces that went down to her waist with stuff on them. She even picked up on the musty scent."

I perched on a low tree stump and continued to gaze at Emmett as he spoke.

"But this is the weird thing," Emmett continued, "when I was asking Rosalie to keep on describing this old woman, she turned to me and said, 'why don't you just look yourself, she's only ten feet in front of you,' but when I looked up there was no one there."

"She'd run away?" Carlisle said.

"Nope, she was standing right there. Rose was watching her."

"A gift of invisibility?" I said. Already I could feel goose-bumps running up my arms.

"She made herself invisible just to you?" Carlisle said, his eyebrows raised. "What about her scent?"

"You got it," Emmett said. "From being all musty, the air became clean, just like these markings. It was like the scent had been removed."

Carlisle jumped up and smelt the markings from the nearest tree. "That is one very interesting trick," he mused. "Do you think the two are connected?" He said.

"Well... we have markings in sets of three, and no scent... I'd say the two are pretty similar. Maybe the markings are the root of the ability?"

"I've been around a long time," Carlisle said, "and I've never seen anything like this. Gifts are unique from within. They're not something that can be chanted and captured. You're talking about witchcraft."

Emmett shrugged. "Is that so inconceivable? Nahuel's been searching for a witch for years to fulfil his prophecy. How else would I have not been able to see this old lady, but Rose could? She wasn't a vampire, but a human could not possess a power so strong. She muttered words I couldn't understand, she had all these funny symbols all over her and kaboom, I never saw her again."

I started walking away from them, my mind puzzling. Ben was human and his gift was strong. Alice's too, back in that asylum. But failing that, was it possible that some kind of spell had masked Emmett's sight, and the old lady's scent?

Certainly it seemed coincidental, but the old lady saw Emmett twenty-five years ago and she knew what he was. If she was old back then, then she'd probably be dead by now. But what if she wasn't? What if she was coming back for him after all these years?

I spun around and started heading back towards Emmett and Carlisle. They hadn't moved an inch since I'd left their sides.

"So, that old lady is here in Forks?" I said.

"Do you think she's come to find you?" Carlisle added. "After all this time."

"Hell no," Emmett replied. "That old lady isn't here. She wanted to get as far away from me as possible." He nodded in the direction of the school parking lot and started walking. "I've not been here for ages," he commented, glancing to the empty spaces.

"So what do you think, Emmett?" I said, looking up at him. He jumped into the woodlands across the road from the school gates.

"I think someone is using these symbols like that old lady did to make themselves invisible and cover their tracks."