The Jaguar Versus the Wolf

Chapter 37 - What Texts?

Orbiting Satellites Book Two, Chapter 37 - Turmoil companion


I was out on the back porch, making a few belts. I found I really enjoyed it and it relaxed me. And right now I needed to relax. I was so upset. The last thing I expected had happened.

While I was not going back to farmers market, I was considering possibly… maybe taking Esme up on her previous offer to sell my stuff on that evil computer devise. I figured it couldn't be worse than getting my heart broken.

How could this have happened to me? How could I have fallen in love? And with a human? A weak pathetic little human? One that I had not even met? We'd only talked on the phone. Sure she appeared beautiful in the picture I saw but...

"NAHUEL!" Jennifer's voice screamed at me as she came running out of the forest. "Nahuel, thank goodness. When you didn't respond to my calls and texts I worried Joham had you too," she gasped. She was frantic, yet looked almost relieved as soon as she saw me. What was she doing here?

"Carlisle!" I yelled, knowing he would hear me even if I hadn't, but I was too emotional, too worked up, too overwhelmed. I couldn't think clearly. My sister needed help. Medical help. What had happened to her? She was a hybrid, almost as indestructible as a full Vampire, but was covered in bruises.

"Jennifer, come into the house, let me take a look at those injuries," he said, appearing with Esme, a second later. His voice was calm, but I could tell by his eyes that he was as concerned as me.

"There's no time! He's after her; you need to go, now. It may already be too late," she yelled back, pulling on my arm and refusing to go into the house. Looking down I saw that her injuries were even worse than I first thought.

"Who?" Carlisle and I asked in unison.

"Father, he's after Renesmee. Didn't you get any of my messages?" she asked me.

What was she talking about? I'd have to find out later. It didn't seem like there was time now.

"Where is he?" I asked Jennifer while Esme tried calling Renesmee.

My sister didn't know, but thought it must be somewhere around here. Joham had gone south with Serena to convince her and Maysun to come back with him. He wanted all three of his daughters to help capture Renesmee and the dog. For some reason it was essential to our fathers plan that they both be captured alive. Renesmee I could understand, Jennifer said he was planning to get around the Volturi's rule about not making any new hybrids by mating with Renesmee, but why not kill her guard dog?

As mad as I was about her choosing the dog over me, I did not want my father getting his hands on her.

Oh no! "Carlisle, Jennifer's right, we need to go," I said, halfway to the cars, but he stopped me.

Why? Didn't he want us to go save her?

"We will," he said, "but we need to wait for the others. We don't know where Joham is. Without knowing where to look, going now will be pointless. Hopefully Alice will be able to find him."

I didn't see how. She couldn't see him, when they thought he was after me. Why would she be able to see him now?

Esme called the rest of the family, while Carlisle convinced my sister to come in the house so he could treat her injuries. There were deep gashes in her wrists and hands that were still bleeding, and several of her fingers had been broken and were healing improperly. She was also dehydrated and thirsty, having not fed in some time.

Rosalie and Emmett joined us in a matter of seconds, but Edward, Bella, Alice and Jasper had gone to Canada to hunt.

Luckily when Esme got through to Alice we learned that she had seen them coming back, so while she didn't know what had happened, she had gathered the other three and they were already on the road. They'd be here in less than an hour.

"Neither Renesmee nor Jacob are answering their phones. They left the Amazons, three days ago." I heard Esme tell Carlisle.

"It could be nothing. Maybe they just haven't stopped anywhere where they could charge their phones," Emmett offered.

"They're not Immortal. They'd need to stop to sleep." Rosalie said. She was right. Any hotel they stopped at would have outlets.

Esme wasn't nearly as fast as Jasper, but managed to use the computer to find their recent credit card transactions. "They checked into a hotel in Ramapo, NY this afternoon."

She called the hotel but no one picked up in their room.

Carlisle phone started ringing a short while later, but he was busy re-breaking Jennifer's fingers so he could set them properly. I went to reach for it. I needed something to do even if it was just talk on the phone, but Esme got to it first.

I paced the room while she talked to Edward. I had to strain to hear over my sisters screams, but I managed to make out almost everything they were saying. It helped that Edward was practically screaming.

"What have you learned?" I'd never heard him speak that way to his mother before.

"Not much," Esme replied, before filling him in on the little we did know.

"There's a park near there," he replied when she got to the part about the credit card hotel room charge. "Nessie may have needed to hunt. We'll meet you there."

"But shouldn't…" Esme started to say, but he had already hung up.

"Where going to New York?" I asked.

"Alice must still not have been able to see anything. We need to start somewhere," Carlisle told me. "Rose, Emmett, pull out the cars, I'll join you momentarily," he then told them before turning back to me. "Someone is going to have to stay here with Jennifer. I've tended to her wounds as best as I can for now, but she needs blood and rest. And I don't think she should be left alone."

"No, I'm coming," Jennifer gasped. "This is my fault. If I had escaped sooner, or called instead of…"

"No, it's not. It's Joham's." There was no way she should blame herself for any of this. She didn't look convinced.

"Alright, but drink this on the way," Carlisle said after retrieving one of the many packs of donated blood, he kept in his office, for emergencies.

He'd also grabbed his medical bag; not one of those small black ones, I saw in older medical shows from the 1950's, but a large modern one. It was red and covered in writing and medical symbols. It didn't look like he was expecting to find Renesmee in good shape.

"How's the pain?" he asked my sister, once we got into the car. Esme was driving and Rosalie and Emmett were in the other.

"I'll be fine," she replied.

"I'm sure you will, but this should help," he said, taking out a needle and vial of something, I'm guessing some sort of pain medicine.

Instead of inserting the needle into her arm, he injected it into the blood bag. Once she finished drinking it Jennifer lost consciousness.

"Jennifer?" I shook her, but she didn't wake up. Was something else wrong?

"It's alright Nahuel," Carlisle assured me. "She's just sleeping. I had a feeling that after the trauma she had been through, combined with her lack of sleep as she raced here over the last few days, and the morphine I gave her for the pain, that this was likely to happen."

"When will she wake up?"

"I'm not sure. It partially depends on how fast her body burns the drugs off. Once we get to the State Park it might be best if you take one of the cars and drive her back to New Hampshire."

She's not going to like that.

And neither did Edward. "She could have answers. She may know something," he seethed.

"Jennifer would have told us if she did," I growled back at him.

We'd gotten to the park shortly before him, but had no idea where to start looking. The area was huge. Rosalie, Emmett, Carlisle, and Esme had done a preliminary search of the area while we'd waited for the others but came up with nothing.

"Wake her up," Edward ordered Carlisle. Another first I had never seen or heard from him.

It didn't look like he wanted to but followed his son's instructions.

"This isn't going to hurt her, is it?" I asked when I saw Alice slice a cut into my sister's arm with her nail so Carlisle could insert a needle.

"Its adrenaline," Carlisle informed me, as if that explained anything.

"Adrenaline is naturally occurring in the body. It's a stimulant; it won't harm her," Edward quickly explained. It seemed even though he was snapping at his family, he still hadn't lost all his manners.

But it was all for not. Once she woke, Jennifer didn't have any new information to tell us.

"Anything Alice?" Bella pleaded to her sister.

"It would be easier if they weren't here," she said looking at Jennifer and me, but it looked like after some effort, she was able to see something and we all took off running after her.

What we found wasn't good. The stench was unmistakable. The dog had been shot, his blood was splattered around the forest for hundreds of meters but had pooled in a couple spots, contaminating the ground. It had dried, indicating how late to the scene we were. By one former puddle we also found several darts and smashed bullets.

"Tranquilizers," Carlisle determined, after taking a whiff. "This kind is usually reserved for horses, but with enough, would probably bring down a wolf of Jacob's size as well."

"Oh no!" Bella started panicking and dry heaving, the vampire version of crying.

"Bella sweetheart, there's no body," Edward tried reassuring her. "He could still be alive."

Renesmee's scent was here too, but just that. No blood. She hadn't been injured… at least not here.

There were three other scents that I immediately recognized as belonging to Joham and my sisters, each leading off in a different direction. Following the trails we found numerous bullet casings.

"Found something else," Emmett called from a few hundred meters away. Gathering around, no one knew what the black metal box with lots of wires coming out of it was.

"Do you think it's a bomb?" Esme asked, but didn't look worried.

Bella however did and took a step back. "Could one kill us?"

"You'd probably be fine, but Jennifer and I might not be so lucky. Our father might have left it here if we…"

"Let's just find out," Jasper cut me off, taking out his phone. "Hmmm, I don't seem to be getting a signal."

The rest of the Cullens also took out theirs and none had a signal. "Nahuel, yours is a satellite phone, are you getting anything?" Edward asked me.

"I… um, I didn't bring it." I wasn't even sure where it was in my room.

"I don't think it'll matter," Rosalie told him, before Edward could start screaming at me. "I believe it's a jamming device. That's why we can't get a signal."

"On it," Emmett said as he smashed the device in his hands.

At the same time Edward, Jasper and Rosalie all shouted, "NOOOOO!"

"Emmett, we could have tried to use that to find Joham."

"We don't have time for this," Edward pinched the bridge of his nose and started pacing around in circles.

Bella who had froze, came out of it to speak briefly, "We need to do something. He could be… hurting her already," then returned to a statue. That seemed to do something to Edward and he did the last thing I expected. He calmed down.

"Nahuel, you told the Volturi that Joham seduced your mother. How do you know this?" he asked, but I had a feeling that wasn't really what he wanted to know.

"If you're worried about my father forcing himself onto Renesmee I don't believe he will, at least not right away. If he took the d... Jacob, it probably means he wants her to give herself to him," whether through his own charms or if he has to threaten the dogs life. "But..." I hesitantly added, "he knows of her reproductive timeline, so he won't wait forever."

"I don't think there's anything more to learn here," Jasper said after another search of the area turned up nothing.

We'd already determined which way the five of them had left so we started following the trail, but had to stop again at the edge of the forest when the trail ended. They must have gotten into a car or something.

We were at a dead end.

Now what?

Defeated and with no clues we reluctantly headed back to the house.

All but Edward and Bella. They refused to come saying they would continued to search the area.

No one thought there was anything else to find out here, but they refused to give up.

Not that we were, but like Jasper said, we needed to regroup. Running around in circles without knowing where to look was pointless.

Bella and Edward said they'd call us if they found anything, and we them.

Nobody spoke as we drove back to the house. Jennifer started to doze off to sleep again. The entire ride home was quiet until I heard a growl from Emmett's jeep and he crashed it into a tree. When he got out he grabbed the entire thing by the front grill and started slamming it up and down, into the ground over and over again.

"Feel better?" Rosalie asked him, when he was done.

"No, but there's nothing left to break." His Jeep was nothing more than a pile of rubble.

"Idiot," Jasper screamed. Why'd you do that? The sun's going to be up soon. How are we going to get home now? Can't you ever use your head?"

Tensions were running high and the two of them looked like they were about to attack each other. Alice looked worried for half a second then rolled her eyes; Rosalie on the other hand completely ignored them, instead picking up the crumpled jamming device and started picking through the pieces.

"Jasper, Emmett," Carlisle stepped in between them, "fighting amongst each other won't get Renesmee and Jacob back." It took a while but he eventually got them to calm down.

"I think I can put this back together," Rosalie spoke up. "We might be able to trace it back to Joham. It'll just be a lot harder and take more time, than if you hadn't smashed it," she said to her husband, in a less than loving way. I didn't think they were going to be behaving like a married couple anytime soon, judging by the look she was giving him.

Not wanting to waste any more time Emmett, Rosalie, and Jennifer piled into the front of Rosalie's convertible, Carlisle, Esme, and I, took the backseat and Jasper and Alice squished themselves into the trunk.

Everyone hoped Rosalie was right.


A.N. Thanks for reading. What do you think?

Just one chapter left till the end of The Jaguar Versus the Wolf then I'll start posting Orbiting Satellites - Book Three.