Chapter 58 Chapter Notes
Edward is on his way to Forks, following the ambulance taking Bella and Charlie to the hospital. Meanwhile, Lisle James, Dr. Pierce's grown daughter, arrives at her parents' house for dinner, but is greeted with carnage and death. Again, the title might be prophetic.
The chapter title belongs to The Beatles
Chapter 58 Misery Thursday November 2nd
Victoria. I start the Volvo and drive off the reservation, glad at least that she's no longer a threat that we have to worry about. I flip my phone open and call Carlisle. He answers on the first ring.
"Hello? This is Carlisle Cullen."
"Carlisle, it's me."
"Edward! Where are you, son? Emmett said you called. We've been worried, as Alice lost—"
First things first. Take care of the living. "Carlisle," I cut in, "listen. Bella and Charlie are on their way to Forks hospital. There was a confrontation with Victoria and—it's a long story. Bella was bitten by one of the Wolf-Protectors. Not too bad, I don't think, but Charlie looks to have significant damage to his shoulder from a Wolf bite. Do you think Forks Hospital can effect the kind of repair he'll need?" I'll tell him about the massacre later.
"First-class institution, Edward. They can take care of Charlie unless he needs a specialist in Seattle. I'll have a doctor on standby. If that happens, son, call me right away and I'll arrange a helicopter."
Before I'm out of range, I hear Billy and Jacob telling the Elders and the Pack about the scene in front of Jacob's house. Billy says, "I…was wrong. We should not have lied to Edward and his family."
After a few miles, I can no longer hear their conversation, but I wonder what he meant. They lied to us? About what? But all I think about as I speed toward the hospital is Bella, her injury, and my terrible lapse as I felt the fiend rise up inside me. Again.
And that I've got to change her before something happens that a doctor can't fix.
Lisle James has three nights off a week, and they are more precious than gold. She's the head librarian at the La Push branch, a job she loves. Her family sent her to school to get her Master's Degree in Library Science at the University of Washington at Seattle. It was hard to be away for so long, but she worked part-time and came home as often as she could manage it.
Her husband, Gordon, is taking online courses to be a teacher. Darla, their daughter, just turned six. Her favorite color is yellow, and she loves playing with Lego blocks. But only with the yellow ones. Darla takes turns staying with her mother, Maria, or with Gordon, depending on his class schedule and what his needs are. Her father, Julius, is the tribal doctor, and he's called on to do everything from stitching wounds to delivering babies to administering vaccines at the clinic.
He's gone a lot.
Tonight, though, the family should be home. Her mother is cooking pea soup, her father's favorite, and Lisle is bringing a new casserole that she's been dying to try out on somebody. As the family are all hearty eaters and not the least bit picky, she's certain it will be a success.
At 5 pm, Lisle bids adieu to her fellow employees and scurries through the rain to her car. After a quick stop at home, where she changes clothes and grabs the casserole out of the refrigerator, she's off to her parents' house, on the far end of town. When she pulls up, she sees lights on in the kitchen, smells wood smoke from the fireplace, and spies the electric candle in the upstairs bedroom that her mother keeps lit, day and night.
She says it leads lost souls home. Lisle stares at it for a moment. It is flickering.
Lisle's stomach growls as she fairly skips up the sidewalk. She hasn't seen her father for over a week, and a warm feeling grows inside of her as she imagines the evening: hearing the local gossip of the tribe from her mother, trying to cajole her father into finally giving up his cigarettes, holding Gordon's hand while they both adore their beautiful little daughter.
She's unnerved when she sees that the front door stands ajar a few inches. Her mother has been fierce lately about keeping Darla indoors. She won't let her play outside by herself, which is unusual. Tentatively, she pushes the door open and calls, "Mama? Papa?"
Lisle puts the casserole on a side table and looks around suspiciously, because she smells blood. Her heart quickens as she starts flipping on light switches. Nothing seems amiss in the living room, and it's only when she nears the kitchen that she sees the carnage.
And her world falls apart.
Lisle's mother lays on the tile floor, near the stove. Her dead eyes stare up at nothing, her lips parted as if she's preparing to speak. "Mama!" she screams, as she falls to the floor. Her mother's neck is bruised and swollen.
"Mama, no," she cries, as she pulls her mother's limp body into her lap. She brushes hair out of the woman's face and strokes her cheek as she sobs. Everyone was supposed to be here—her mother, father, Gordon and Darla. Where is everybody else?
What happened here?
In total shock, Lisle lowers the body to the floor and scoots away from it. She should call someone. Who should she call? 911? The Police? Her father should have been here. Is Darla with him? She gets shakily to her feet, and after clawing around in her pocket for a minute, she finally pulls out her phone. Before she can flip it open, though, she looks around for the source of the smell that's so strong in the kitchen.
Blood. And not just a little bit of blood.
The Pierces enjoy a big kitchen with an island in the back, near the sink. It's covered in something glutinous and green, and a sniff confirms that it is pea soup. As Lisle looks up and beyond it, she sees that there's soup dripping off of everything on that end of the kitchen.
Her eyes fall on a patch of something red on the floor, peeking out from the edge of the island, and she tentatively walks around it. Her eye follows it to her husband laying on the tile floor. She shrieks and falls back hard against the refrigerator, upsetting the copper bowl that sits on top. It clatters to the floor and rolls in the blood that is slowly seeping from her husband's cracked head.
"Gordon? Oh, Jesus, Gordon! What—" Lisle's husband, a small, soft spoken man with a rather more serious outlook on life than Lisle and her irreverent family, lays as twisted as a pretzel with a rictus grin across his tortured face. He looks as if he's taken a massive reaction to a potent allergen, as his body is swollen and lumpy, with great hives in irregular shapes covering his face and hands.
Lisle feels the vomit in the back of her throat and turns to puke. And then it's vomit and blood and the unmistakable smell of death, and it's all around her, it's in her nose and mouth and she'll never be rid of it.
"My god, oh my god, oh my GOD," she screams, over and over, as she wrenches her husband's dead body up into her arms. She wails as she clutches him, and with horror feels that his body is still warm.
This just happened. After a moment, she kisses his forehead and gently places him down, back in the sticky blood, while with a sinking, desperate feeling, decides to call her father, hoping and praying that Darla is with him.
She gets shakily to her feet and realizes that her phone is not in her pocket. After looking around, she sees it on the floor in a puddle of blood. As she turns to the phone on the kitchen wall, she slips in a wide smear of blood next to the table and lands hard on the tile floor. Black spots swim before her eyes and she has to stop and take a few deep breaths before she faints.
Whose blood is this? she wonders in alarm. With a sickening awareness, she finds that she can't escape this mire. She flounders around for a moment and finally gains enough purchase to crawl out of the kitchen.
At the doorway, she pulls herself up, desperate now to find her father and Darla. She turns and takes one last look at the ruined kitchen, at her dear mother, lying crumpled in a heap, and the ever-widening pool of blood that insistently creeps from behind the island.
As she stumbles away, she spies her father's cigarettes on the table.
Dr. Julius Pierce never goes anywhere without his cigarettes. Good god, he's here, somewhere! Where is my daughter?
"Darla! Papa!" Lisle screams, as she staggers through the house, leaving bloody footprints in her wake. She hears nothing but a faint moan from the back bedroom, her parents' room. She rushes in and finds her father lying on the floor, face down. His head is encircled by an arc of bright crimson, oozing from a rent in his skull, above and behind his ear.
"Papa!" she cries, as she falls to her knees and checks for a pulse. It beats erratically, and with a sigh of relief, she dashes into the kitchen and makes the 911 call. On her way back, she fetches a hand towel from the bathroom and holds it to the gash in her father's head.
With what seems like great effort, the doctor manages, "Darla…is she…okay…"
"I don't know!" Lisle cries as she dashes away her tears. "I don't know where she is!"
"Need an…Elder…Sam…" he gasps. "Right away…"
"Okay, Papa, okay," Lisle murmurs, her voice thick with emotion.
When she hears the ambulance a few minutes later, she hurries to open the front door. "My father is still alive in the back bedroom, but my daughter is missing!" she cries. Mike, who knows the family well, is already dashing down the hall to his patient, while the other, Baxter, makes a call on his radio.
"I've called this in, Lisle. Tribal police will be here in a few minutes." He squeezes her arm gently and rushes after his coworker.
As Lisle dithers at the door, frantically wondering where Darla could be, a battered Ford Tempo roars up and Jacob Black jumps out, trots to the passenger side and helps his father, Billy, into his chair. He runs Billy up the sidewalk and Lisle moves aside as he ducks to enter the house. Lisle stares at him in amazement. She hadn't realized he was so tall.
"What happened?" Jacob says.
With a bloody hand, Lisle points a shaky hand to the back bedroom. "My father is back…there," she says haltingly through her tears, just as the Chief and another Elder, Dave, charge into the house. "He said he needs Sam or an Elder." Jacob disappears into the hallway with Billy, as the Chief and Dave bring up the rear.
When Sam walks into the house, Lisle motions him to the back bedroom as well. A bunch of the boys that hang around with him mill about outside, looking like they've ingested enough steroids to fuel a major league sports team. Each of them has to be at least six and a half feet tall, an impressive stature, but together they look like a small army. She vaguely wonders if the rumors are true, if the boys are turning into Wolves.
It all seems too fantastical, but as she watches them, they give off an aura of capability. They swagger. These boys, well, they look like men, even though she knows some of them can't be sixteen years old, are taking matters in hand, speaking respectfully to onlookers, keeping everyone except emergency personnel and law enforcement out of the house, and generally keeping the area peaceful and calm.
An ambulance arrives from Forks and Lisle points them to the kitchen. She feels as though her world has come to an end when she watches the paramedics gently place her mother and husband each on stretcher. Clean white sheet are pulled over the bodies, causing her to utterly break down.
She falls to the bloody floor and screams as she rocks on her knees. The paramedics dither beside her, not sure what to do, until she grabs great handfuls of her hair. She's finally pulled to her feet and led into the living room, where she collapses onto the sofa, sobbing.
One of the medics, a guy named Roger, scans the room, and after locating the liquor cabinet, sloshes some whisky in a glass and thrusts it into her hand. She watches the men wheel out the stretchers with their white sheets. Her mother's form under its shroud looks smaller in death, but she can clearly see Gordon's shape. The blood that seeps up through his sheet is stark in its finality.
As soon as the stretchers have cleared the door, Nina, her parents' neighbor from down the street, walks in, holding a very upset little girl by the hand. When Lisle sees them, she breaks down all over again. She falls to her knees, sobbing, and holds the child in a tight embrace.
The house is in total chaos. Tribal police have arrived and are asking questions and taking pictures of the damage. Neighbors come asking questions. The minister from the church and a troop of parishioners show up with their shirtsleeves rolled up, ready to help.
Nina glances around at the noisy activity, then back to Darla's staring face as she clutches her mother. "I followed the ambulance here," Nina says, her face drawn in concern. "I was on my way over when I spotted Darla's yellow dress. She was huddled in the corner of my porch, by that big planter. Told me a bad woman had hurt her Papa, her Nana and her daddy. What happened?"
The smell of blood is pervasive, even with the door standing wide open and the constant rush of people, to and fro. When Lisle holds Darla away from her, Nina sees that her friend is covered in blood. It is smeared onto her pants and crusted on the knees, has crept up her shirt sleeve from the cuff. Lisle's hands are coated with dried blood, caked under her fingernails.
Lisle picks Darla up and carries her to the couch, where she holds the trembling child in her lap. In a quiet aside, she tells Nina what she found when she arrived. Nina takes a quick look in the kitchen and dashes her tears away, holding back her gasp of horror. The kitchen fairly reeks of blood.
She stands for a moment and takes a few deep breaths to calm herself. "Let me take Darla back to my house until this is all sorted out, Lisle." Darla clings to her mother but she loves Nina, whom she knows and trusts.
Their eyes meet, and Nina knows that Lisle will never be the same after this. She wonders who would attack the family in this way. She can't ask, not now, but she wonders what wounds Lisle's mother and Gordon received to cause the puddles of blood that adorn the once-beautiful kitchen.
"Yeah, okay," Lisle says through her tears. She kisses Darla and hugs her close, then turns her over to Nina. "I'll…I'll be over when this mess is sorted," She promises. Darla screams for her mother but Nina hugs her friends and rushes out with her, unable to keep her own grief in check.
Nina hurries to her house, sidestepping a knot of worried neighbors and townspeople, muttering and asking the Chief questions. When she gets home, she runs a bath for Darla. When the child is bathed and in some of Nina's pajamas, she rocks her until she falls asleep.
With shaking hands, Nina locks every door and window. She lives alone, so if the same maniacs come to her house, she has no way to fight them off. After checking on Darla, she stands at an upstairs window to smoke a cigarette.
It's going to be a long night.
In the Pierce's back bedroom, the paramedics bandage the doctor's head. Before they place him on the stretcher, he opens his eyes, and in a voice not much above a whisper, asks them to wait in the hall for a moment while he speaks with the Elders and Sam.
Baxter and Mike both frown at this direction, but Sam says, "Give us two minutes, guys, then you can come back in." As soon as they're out of the room, the doctor takes a deep, shaky breath. Everyone in the room gathers round to hear him.
"Vic…Victoria," he rasps. "Killed…fed on Henry…blood made her sick." He stops and takes a few shallow breaths and grimaces. "Blisters on her…skin. Told me Brady…attacked. Bit her leg."
The room is deathly quiet. Nobody questions him. Sam is desperately sad to see a single tear edge its way out of the doctor's eye and slip down the side of his face. He grabs Sam's hand and says, "Brady…ate the pieces from her leg. S-swallowed them."
The paramedics rush back into the bedroom and shoo everyone out, but the doctor gasps his last breath before they can wheel him into the hall. Sam sees their sense of urgency kick into high gear.
In that brightly lit hallway, the paramedics valiantly attempt to revive the doctor, but after twenty minutes, twenty long, excruciating minutes, where they take turns doing CPR and inject all kinds of substances into his IV, while the Elders murmur and pace, with Lisle screaming in the living room, he is finally pronounced dead.
Both Mike and Baxter have tears in their eyes as they pull the sheet up over the doctor's tortured face. Lisle continues to wail, having lost her mother, father and husband in a single vicious attack.
When Dr. Julius Pierce is wheeled out, every person stands still and respectful as they bid farewell to their beloved doctor, never seen without a cigarette, never turning a patient away, never judging anyone.
Sam crouches against the bedroom wall, seething in anger. He'd known the minute he'd pulled up that the same cold one that had attacked and killed Henry Upchurch had committed these atrocities. What a mess, he thinks. Jacob extends his hand and Sam takes it.
They file out of the pristine bedroom, which reeks of blood, to see Chief Littlefoot trying to calm Lisle. Sam thinks she needs more than a tumbler of whisky. The woman needs a massive dose of phenobarbital. Enough so she doesn't wake up until the fucking season changes.
She must hear the Elders speaking quietly, wondering if she needs to be hospitalized for a few days. Sam smiles sadly at her bravado. The glint in her eye is noteworthy. She throws off the blanket someone had placed on her as she lay on the red sofa and goes into the bathroom.
The shower runs briefly, and when Lisle emerges, she's dressed in clean clothes and her hair has been washed. She swallows thickly and says, "I'm going to Nina's to get Darla, then we're going home." After looking around at the blood and mess, she says, "I don't care what you do here. I'm never setting foot in this house again."
Jacob walks with her down to Nina's house to pick up her daughter. His offer to drive her home and stay with her is refused, and she leaves in her own car.
Out in the yard, the Pack and the Elders gather around to talk. Billy Black says, "I guess we now know that the tribal magic works. The Quileute are certainly toxic to the cold ones. And can we all agree that Brady has reverted to a wolf because he ingested toxic vampire flesh?"
There's a murmur of agreement and Billy cocks an eyebrow. "Then, we'd better put that tidbit of information in the handbook. No eating the vampire bits that you bite off."
"We don't have a handbook," Jacob says with a huff of laughter.
"Well, we need one," says Dave.
"Tell them what happened in front of the house, Billy says, and everyone gets quiet to hear the story first-hand.
Jacob sticks his huge paws in his pockets. "I pulled up behind Bella's truck, and I gotout of the car just in time to see Victoria launch herself over Edward Cullen and grab Bella, who had just gotten out of the Chevy."
"What was Edward Cullen doing on the reservation?" Dave asks.
"I asked him the same thing," Jacob says. "He told me he had caught Victoria's scent and it freaked him out."
Dave frowns. "The Cullens were banished. Why did he come back?"
Jacob shakes his head. "That you'll have to ask him yourself. But if he hadn't been here, Victoria might have killed Bella. She was…mad. Looked like she'd been living under a bridge. Filthy dirty, hair all over the place. When she pulled up her shirt to show Edward her skin—the blisters, I guess, but I was behind her and didn't see them—he grabbed Bella."
He fishes the tiny carved wolf out of his pocket and lays it on his outstretched palm. "I knew for certain she was the one that had killed Henry by the smell alone, but this clinched it. I ripped her to pieces and we tossed them into a fire. Before we could take a breath, we heard growling from Mollie's garage, and Brady walked out. He attacked Edward Cullen, and don't ask me why, but Bella jumped in between them. And then, of course, Charlie jumped in to save Bella."
"Good lord," Dave says.
"Oh, there's more," Jacob says. "For any of you that didn't know before, we can now add a female to our ranks. Charlie's girlfriend, the half Quileute woman named Maya? She's like, forty years old? Phased into the most beautiful black Wolf I'd ever seen. Jumped in between Brady and Charlie." He shakes his head. "I phased again and sorted it all out. Gave Brady a bite and he slunk off. But meanwhile, Charlie Swan was lying in a puddle of his own blood, Bella was unconscious, and Edward Cullen looked like he was about to lose it. I ran him down to the end of the block so he could get some fresh air."
Dave growls, "But he's a blood drinker. They all are. The whole family." He says this as though nothing could persuade any of the Cullens from feeding if human blood were available, as if the last two years they'd been hiding the bodies so no deaths could be reported.
"They've all taken a vow not to drink human blood," Sam says. "They're serious."
Jacob nudges the ground with the toe of his shoe and says, "Believe me, the tribe has more to worry about from alcoholism and petty theft than it does from the Cullens."
Billy looks up at his son and asks, "Do you think Charlie will be okay? How much blood did he lose?"
Jacob's expression darkens. "A lot. And his shoulder was just torn up. Not like a dog's bite, where you see a big print. More like a carnivore's bite that pulls flesh out. Like a chomp. I can't imagine how long it will take to heal."
"And then he gets to wake up and come to terms with the fact that Maya is a Shapeshifter," Chief Littlefoot says, as he joins the group. The full moon peeks out from behind a cloud, and bathes them all in its yellow light.
Sam looks around. "Where's old Quil?" he asks.
The Chief hangs his head. "I found out this morning that he's dying of liver cancer. He won't be attending any more Council meetings."
This sobers everyone up. Quil has been a fixture on the reservation for decades, had guided the tribe through disasters and downfalls with grace and determination. Sam says, "When was he diagnosed?"
Chief Littlefoot says, "Julius was his doctor, and had been treating him for a few months. Quil told me he had actually foreseen his own death in a vision, many years ago. The Seer shall perish after the snow of September, betrayed by his own flesh. That's what he wrote on the vision, which was of his coffin emblazoned with his name."
Someone lights a cigarette, and Sam automatically looks around for Doc Pierce. But he'll never light up again.
Chief Littlefoot says, "We'll need to meet in the morning. I've called Edward Cullen to join us, to explain his presence here. And I have some personal news to share." Sam looks up at the moon, as round and white as a pancake, and it's impossible not to think of Quil's last prophecy. Of the magic spell and the mischief it's caused, all centering around this full moon.
"So Alice Cullen was really telling the truth when she said she couldn't see Edward. He wasn't here," Dave clarifies.
Jacob nods. "I don't know where Edward was that his sister couldn't see him, but he's sure as hell back now."
Everyone mills about anxiously for a few more minutes, until Sam says, "The Pack will stay until the cleaners arrive. Why don't you all go on home. We'll lock up when we're done here."
The Chief doesn't want to leave, but Dave and Sam insist. He looks like he's on the edge of a nervous collapse. Dave drives Billy home; the police depart; neighbors escape; the remaining Elders mill about for a while, and then each finds his way home.
Sam and his Pack remain, and when everyone has gone, they take in the scene. Green soup has splattered every surface in the kitchen. A couple of big smears of blood stain the kitchen tiles, but behind the island, where Gordon wheezed his last, is a partially-congealed puddle of blood that fairly reeks of the stinking vampire essence.
They sit around and talk about different experiences they'd had with the doctor and his family. Dr. Pierce was a pillar on the reservation, an iconic figure whom everybody trusted and liked. He and Maria had been married for years. Lisle was their only child, and by all appearances, her marriage to Gordon was a union of love and understanding.
After about an hour, Sam directs the boys to go home as well. Some have jobs they need to get to; others have families and responsibilities. He falls onto the pretty red couch in the big living room, overcome with grief. That the day has ended in tragedy is a given. But why it wasn't worse is what Sam can't understand. Why had Darla been spared? At least the bloodsucker is destroyed. He's thankful to Jacob for that. And he's vindicated in his assertion that it wasn't a Cullen's scent in the alley. It had been Victoria, all along.
From the window, Sam watches the full moon arc across the sky as he waits for the cleaning crew, who arrive around midnight. He has the early shift at the market tomorrow, but he'll get through it.
They'll all get through it. But they've had a bunch of bad luck, and Sam is just about ready for things to go their way for a change.
At 3 am, the house is finally clean. The crew piles the garbage in their truck and drives away without a word. Sam opens several windows that are shielded if it rains and does a final walkthrough of the house. No blood remains on any surface, rugs have been shampooed, the soup has been scrubbed away, broken glass swept and discarded.
Sam locks up as he leaves and finds the yard illuminated by the moon, sinking in the western sky. He remembers how the full moon had always comforted him in the past, how it seemed to say, Life goes on.
Now he'll never look at it glowing in the sky again without thinking of this horrible day. How the reservation lost a treasured physician and friend, his wife, and Gordon. Poor, serious Gordon, who wouldn't even swat a fly if he could shoo it out the door instead.
Yeah, Sam thinks. Life goes on.
Big deal.