34 Flirting with Disaster

The chapter title belongs to Molly Hatchet

Sometime in the wee hours of the morning, Bella and I pried ourselves apart and took a shower together, having fun soaping each other up and staying long after the hot water had run out.

We pulled on pajamas and settled in the bed to watch a movie.I chose A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, and when we'd finished, after giggling like fools for the better part of two hours, the sun had come up. Bella wouldn't look out the window, purposely avoiding it, but the raven was there nonetheless.

As a newborn, she needed to hunt daily, so we dressed and headed out. The air was warmer, and the snow, so beautiful in its frozen state, had turned to mush. Summer reared its head to give a last, dying gasp before winter claimed it, giving the autumn no time to enrich us with turning leaves or cool, crisp days.

Together we sloshed through the slush, chatting about Emmett and his silly t-shirts. "Rose has apparently decided that Emmett's image needs some sprucing up." Bella laughed. "I saw some of the new t-shirts she got him. They are outrageous!"

I looked over to her.

"I was with her as she unpacked. She held up a bright pink one that said he's sure to enjoy. Bright pink! Says keep out of direct sunlight!"

"He showed me a new one this morning when you were in the bathroom," I told her. "His shirt today isn't something he could wear just anywhere."

She glanced over to me and raised her eyebrows questioningly. "It says, There is no 'I' in Teamwork, but there are three 'U's in Shut the Fuck Up."

"Where does she come up with those bizarre shirts?" Bella laughed.

I shook my head hopelessly.

Despite the random appearances of a singular raven, I was happy. Blissfully content. Life with Bella was more perfect and rewarding than I ever thought possible, and the way in which we merged, almost seamlessly, surprised even me.

The sun shone from an impossibly blue sky. We walked slowly, not wanting or needing to hurry. Bella was realizing that it was important to drag things out and let them take as long as they possibly could. The alternative was to rush and then be faced with continually trying to find something to do.

"I didn't know how much extra time there would be in a day if you didn't sleep," she confided, as we walked under the quaking aspens and out of the sun. "Humans don't think about the fact that they spend a third of their time in bed." I nodded, remembering that I had thought the same thing when I had woken to this life.

Humans run around constantly moaning about not having enough time. They'd have a different perspective if they were faced with eternal life in a town as bustling and full of life as Forks, Washington. God, how many nights had gone by that we just couldn't fit everything in that we had waiting for us! There was TV, movies at home, the computer, reading...did I mention the TV? You get the picture.

She looked at me tenderly. "How did you do it, Edward? How did you go on, year after year, all alone, with nothing but algebra to look forward to?"

I didn't have a good answer for that. The truth was, I didn't know how I had managed to survive and not go crazy. The nomads of our kind often travel alone, or with one other person. Oftentimes it's not a mated pair, just companions. They move from place to place, surviving on the periphery, not bothering to blend in, just staying out of the way of humans until they feed and move on. That lifestyle works for our kind. It's the staying put in one place and feeding on lousy herbivores that gets you down.

"It was difficult," I conceded. "The constant pretense is the worst. Pretending to be human is excruciating. You'll see how hard it is, even with me by your side, when we go through high school again."

She narrowed her eyes and shook her head. "I'm not going through high school again, Edward. I graduated. I'm done with that."

"Okay," I said lightly, wondering how long it would take her to enroll when she found out the alternative—The Price is Right, the wonderful world of soap operas, and re-runs of Gilligan's Island. Oh, in the beginning she'd fill her days and nights and days with all the things she ever wanted to do and watch everything she wanted to watch, but, sooner or later, even Keeping up with the Kardashians loses its appeal, and then all you've got is time. Lots and lots and lots of time.

Bella still walked with her head slightly inclined. She was amazed at what she could smell. After we'd walked for about thirty minutes, she picked up a scent she hadn't come across before. Glancing back, she gestured with her head for me to follow her, and really, I wasn't about to miss the look on her face when she found the majestic animal attached to that aroma.

We ran for a little over a minute. Bella stood, her mouth hanging wide open. A moose stood near a huge pine tree, pawing the ground and nibbling shoots he'd unearthed. He was huge, about six feet at the shoulder, roughly 1200 lbs. Bella swallowed uncomfortably and looked at me sideways.

"Um, that's like, the biggest animal I have ever seen in my life," she whispered.

"The largest member of the deer family," I volunteered. "Male. Called a 'bull.'

"I...don't want..."

"If he's too big, Bella, don't worry, I'll—"

"No!" She shook her head emphatically. "He's beautiful. And...you said deer weren't very tasty, and I had one already...so…."

She didn't want to harm it. "We'll leave him then, shall we?" She nodded gratefully and we both backed up the way we'd come. He went back to his meager meal, paying us no further attention.

We'd come far out into the wilderness to keep from affecting the local large animal population. As we trotted through the trees, she slapped me as she had done yesterday and sprinted off for our daily game of hide and seek. She ran quickly away, tearing into the trees but making too much noise to be stealthy. At one point she stopped and hid behind a tree, waiting to ambush me as I walked by.

Playing this game with Bella was like enjoying a simple game with a young child. As the adult, you don't want to let the child win too easily but you can't use your obvious superiority at the task to overpower the tot. I wanted Bella to learn but I also relished the opportunity to play.

I'd grown complacent about Bella's accomplishments and abilities, and didn't want to think of the fearsome and unpredictable nature that defines all who are born new to this life. I foolishly felt that because she had me with her that she could bypass the random impulses to feed, that the strangling desire to consume would somehow be mitigated by my presence.

That tepid, slushy morning was a first on Bella's calendar, the day marked as awakening plus two, but emblazoned on the little square there squatted a symbol—not that she, or I, would need a piece of paper to help us remember.

It was a V.

It was Black.

It was there to remind us that Bella was a vampire.

After we'd played for a bit, a chilly breeze hurried by us. It gave me a shiver, causing the hairs on the back of my neck to stand up. On the end, on the very tail end, of that unnatural draft was the promise of a meal so delectable, so alluring and so available, that when I smelled it, I was momentarily stunned. I stopped walking, and for a split second became lost in the memory of the taste and sensation of human blood.

A lone hiker walked near the tree line, probably taking advantage of the warmer climate before winter set in for good. His inner banter suggested late teens, early twenties. He was backpacking through the Alaskan Tundra, hoping for some great photo ops of wild animals in the wilderness that was untouched by humans.

Well, no problem there.

Bella's head snapped in the direction of the scent. I made an instantaneous grab for her, almost too late. As my hands found purchase, we both tumbled to the marshy ground.

The hiker was about a mile away, so thankfully, he couldn't hear the fight. It sounded like two jungle cats going at it. Bella acted like a rabid animal, falling face first onto the wet ground, clawing and growling, bucking like a roped steer.

I lay on her back, gripping her shoulders. She could overpower me if she thought about it but I'd still be attached to her as she ran. It was little comfort.

I talked to her calmly and in a soothing voice. I knew she could hear me through the spitting and writhing. "Bella, honey, he's a kid, just about your age. He's a musician, like me. Only, Bella, he plays the guitar. He's been playing the odd club, washing dishes, anything to earn a few bucks. His mom, a woman named Eileen, worries about him."

The narrative seemed to calm her a bit. At least she wasn't clawing the ground anymore.

"You've successfully defected from the human race, Bella," I murmured. "Before you jumped ship you let Renee and Charlie know you'd be going. If you show yourself, we'll have to kill him. He'll just be gone. And his family will never know what happened to him."

All the tension seemed to leave her body and she collapsed, crying, in the mud.

The wind had picked up, blowing his scent in the opposite direction. Only the smell of the tundra remained.

"Are you all right now?" I asked, as I brushed her hair back from the side of her mud-soaked face. She nodded, her chest heaving with her sobs.

Tentatively I scooted off of her, my hands still on her shoulders. She got up on her knees and I knelt beside her, rubbing her back with one hand. I couldn't see her face as she had hung her head, her hair forming an ebony curtain between us. I took the remaining hand off of her shoulder to pull it aside when fate dealt us, and the hiker on the tree line, a nasty smack.

It all happened almost simultaneously. As I reached to sweep her hair back, the wind changed, blowing the smell of him over us again. Bella immediately tensed; for a whole second the balance of right, wrong, good, evil and the needs and desires of a singular supernatural being hung, suspended, until they came crashing down.

Bella twisted, rolling over to lie on her back. I grabbed her but my hands slipped off the muddy shirt.

I could barely discern her movement, so quickly did she run.

I followed her scent into the trees, monitoring the hiker's thoughts as I tore through the woods, wishing I could warn him, knowing he was going to lose his life in a matter of seconds.

Random and incomplete thoughts, ideas and hopes bounced around in his head. The woman he'd met in the club...how her skin looked in the sun...the first morning he'd woken up with her...

He enjoyed his life and his freedom. With no regular job, he was free to roam, playing small clubs, staying as long as he liked, picking up and leaving when he had enough cash to last for awhile. He loved the wilderness of Alaska and took professional-grade photos of wildlife in its natural habitat. He chose his own schedule. He was his own boss.

Next to those images lay the woman he had fallen in love with, the woman who represented what so many young men fear—responsibility and more responsibility. He imagined getting stuck in the rut of a nine to five job, a couple of kids and a mortgage, struggling to make ends meet, where sex, romance and spontaneity were sarcastic reminders of the distant past, so long ago he couldn't even properly remember them.

Despite his trepidation, he'd decided to go back to the little town where they'd met, when Bella and the cruel wind nearly cut short his life, his plans and his tomorrow.

I tackled her hard right at the tree line. "No, Bella! He's an innocent! Think! You're not even thirsty! Look at me!"

I rolled over to sit on her stomach and when she saw my face, an expression of horrified awareness came over her, as she realized what she had been about to do. "Hold me tight, Edward!" she begged. "Ohhh, my throat!" she grabbed it, holding it with both hands.

"Look at me, Bella," I commanded. When she finally focused and her eye met mine, I began to speak to her very calmly. "Hold your breath. I know it's hard, there you go." I tried to take her mind off what was occurring, hoping the hiker would get the hell out of Dodge before she realized she could easily overpower me and have him for lunch.

"I've wanted to tell you how great you looked when you hunt," I said pleasantly, like we always carried on conversations with her lying in the mud with me sitting on her stomach, holding her wrists with an iron grip.

She stopped struggling for a moment and looked up at me, puzzled.

"You were beautiful. Graceful. I was in awe of your abilities." I nodded my head as spoke. It was the truth.

Bella shook her head slightly, frowning.

"No," I assured her, "it's true. You have great instincts. Now, everyone learns how to find the best way to take down prey, but that takes time. It's usually really messy and haphazard for weeks to months." Finally she managed a thankful smile of sorts.

The hiker walked on; we lay on the ground for a full ten minutes before I dared move and let up my grip on her. I was afraid to even reach for my phone to call Alice. Bella wept miserably, trying not to breathe but sucking in air involuntarily, trying to taste the human on her tongue.

Finally the air was clean-smelling again, the offending scent just a painful memory. It felt safe. "Are you in control?" I asked.

Bella POV

I nodded, rather quicker than was necessary to be totally believable. Edward trained a wary eye on me, considering my sincerity. Finally he fluidly hopped up, extending a hand to help me out of the muck I'd been lying in. He brushed the hair from my face tenderly, noticing the state of my clothing.

"You're soaked through," he murmured, as he picked me up and cuddled me. "We better head back so you can get in a shower." Neither his face nor his tone indicated he was unhappy about our close call, but I had to know how he really felt about it.

"Are you...angry with me?" I asked, my voice small.

He stopped trotting, slowing to a walk. "Bella, Bella," he sighed. "Did you think that because you consciously chose this life that you'd somehow be immune to the true nature of the beast that you now are?"

After a second I nodded.

He looked down at me. "I'm sure you're much better adjusted emotionally than most who are turned against their will, or, like my family, due to an accident or illness. And that's important, because it's really difficult to let your humanity go, when you had things you were looking forward to. So, you have half the equation solved."

His tone became very tender. "But love, the physical changes that have occurred in your body can't be mitigated. You'll just have to learn, through experience, through trial and error, and through failure, Bella, how to control yourself."

"So, you're not angry?"

"No," he chuckled. "You're doing great. The impulsive need to feed when you're presented with the scent of human blood is part of every vampire's early life and it can't be bypassed. By anyone."

"I knew I could overpower you and run flat out. If I had lost total control I would have had him before you arrived to stop me." Shit. Honesty, true and total honesty, was a bitch.

He nodded and then laughed softly. "You know, I was afraid you would do that. I couldn't have stopped you." He thought for a moment. "Why didn't you do that, if you thought about it? You certainly wanted to."

We were near the house, and I was itching to crawl into the warm, soft bed with Edward cuddling up next to me. "Well," I answered, "it seemed that the thought it took to plan out that scenario, how I would push you off of me and run away, even though you would call me and beg me to reconsider, made the act seem like the crime it was. To cold heartedly scheme a way around the one person who was desperately trying to prevent me from committing murder wasn't something I'd ever imagined I'd be capable of."

"This may sound like a platitude, but it gets easier. With every passing day it gets a little more tolerable."

I hoped so. At the moment I smelled the hiker, all human pretense vanished from my being and left me standing alone, straight and strong. A vampire. A monster. In less time than it takes to blink an eye I became capable of breaking that young man's neck and drinking every drop of precious blood from his body. Nothing else mattered at that moment. Not Edward, or our love for each other, or the code we'd all agreed to live by, or the man and his hope, wishes and desires. Only the blood mattered. Only the blood.

I remembered back to an early conversation with Edward. He'd taken me to the meadow but I hadn't told anyone where I was going or when I'd return. He'd been angry, telling me that nobody knew where I was and he needed a reason to bring me home.

How had he managed it? How had he held my hand, walked with me, snuggled me in my bed? How did his family function in school? Shame overtook me. I would have killed that hiker. Only Edward stood between me and death.

The house was in sight. I didn't look for the raven, keeping my eyes closed, hoping the rushing air could take some of the black stain of failure away but knowing, deep down, that it had to wear off by itself.

Edward and I quickly shed our clothing at the door. My clothes were a total loss. The boots, a gift from Edward before we left Forks, were muddy, but I wanted to clean them up, so they were saved from the growing pile of trash bags out the back door. Edward saved his shoes as well, but the rest was piled with mine. Emmett had said he'd carry the bags to the dump sometime tomorrow.

We dashed straight to the bathroom and stood in the small shower, shampooing each other's hair and rinsing all the mud and debris down the drain. The memory of the blood remained intact.

"I know you tried to tell me, but I never knew how strong the craving could be until today," I admitted, holding him close to me in the spray. We got out and Edward wrapped me in a big towel.

"I know," he said simply. "Words don't do the thing justice."

Edward's eyes were beginning to lose their burgundy glow, turning amber by degree. They gazed at me thoughtfully.

"This is only the first time you've be tempted by human blood," he said, as he toweled my hair dry, finally hanging it on the rack and grabbing the brush. He might have been telling me about a term paper, and not about how I would someday commit murder.

"There will come a time when you get away from me, or I won't be there to stop you, or circumstances will overcome your thought process, and you'll succumb. I don't think you can properly prepare for that eventuality, but just know, Bella, we've all been there."

I imagined drinking that man, feeling his blood run down my throat, then waking to discover what I'd done. In Tanya's backyard. I wouldn't be the reason her whole family had to leave the place they'd called home for many years.

My eyes met his in the mirror. "I just want to go to bed for awhile, listen to my iPod, maybe check my email."

He pulled a soft cotton gown over my head, tickling me as I put my arms in. He kissed me softly. "Take all the time you need, love. We have plenty of that."

After he set me up with all the stuff I wanted, he closed the door. I heard him building a fire in the little fireplace in the living room. Emmett's voice floated in, and after a few minutes Edward knocked and poked his head in.

"I'm going up to the main house for a bit, love. Emmett will stay with you."

I nodded solemnly, and he kissed me sweetly before he left. After a few minutes I got up and dressed in sweats and a long sleeved t-shirt, and sat with Emmett in front of the fire.

"Tough break, kid," he said, "but it gets easier."

"How long did it take until you calmed down?" I asked.

"What day is it?" he chuckled. I shot him a withering glance but he just laughed. "This is part of the deal, Bella. You've been around the family for months now. Surely you aren't surprised?"

We sat in silence as I pondered his words. I loved Emmett but it was hard to take him seriously when he sported a white t-shirt with the caption in black, block letters, You're my type of people. Type A and Type O.

The weather had already turned colder, freezing the melted snow into ice. Clouds had gathered, giving the sad day a more melancholy feel than it otherwise might have had.

I glanced out the window toward the main house, hoping to see Edward's lanky frame approach, but the lane was bare. Skeletal grasses blew forlornly in the rising wind, and it seemed the entire landscape was monochromatic, from the gray of the sky, the white on the ground and the gravel of the path leading away from the cabin.

A dark speck drew my eye, and in the second I saw it, my heart fell. He sat on the fencepost, the shrill wind ruffling his feathers. The raven with the white splotch on his back. The same raven that I'd seen, now, eleven times since I'd woken.

The strange dream bounced around in my head. All I can tell you is this: all is as the universe decrees. What did that mean?

Was this just an odd occurrence? Something that Edward and I would look back on as bizarre, with no discernable meaning? Or would this turn out to be, as I feared, something that would change our lives?

I'd looked up the mythology of ravens online. There was ample folklore surrounding them. They were considered tricksters by some Native American tribes, while others associated them with prophecy, intelligence, the ability to shapeshift, and longevity.

I felt as if we were flirting with the edge of something none of us understood, that our sightings and my dream of the raven weren't coincidence, but stood for a larger truth that we would learn of when the universe decided to tell us.

So, while we waited, it didn't help me any to recall that the Scottish legends pointed to the raven as a harbinger of death.