I'm alive! Sorry, writing's been hard recently. I feel like I'm going round and round in circles with the plot but this chapter should hopefully open it up again. Check out the outtakes if you want to know what led up to this chapter.
Chapter 16
DISCLAIMER: if you need to, please wait for the next chapter to be up before reading, or simply skip to the very end after the first line break. This is Carys' catalyst/breaking point.
Unusually for the time of year, the sun burned bright and hot, high in the sky above Seattle. Carys, dressed for the weather she had expected following that morning's forecast rather than the sun-drenched streets she was passing through that afternoon, adjusted the waist of her thick velvet dress.
Long-sleeved, deep red, and the most expensive garment she owned, it wrapped around her torso, accentuating her figure in a way that drew and deflected eyes in equal measure. Just as she needed it to. Much like her makeup, which save for a red lip to match her dress, was non-descript, the dress was a camouflage of sorts.
She had bought the dress in the summer sales the year before, anticipating it being worn sometime around Christmas; it was now the beginning of March.
The outfit rendered her both incredibly visible and all but invisible at the same time - a duality she had become used to when getting to know Rosalie better.
While each of the Cullens garnered similar admiration from the world, fewer people dared look Rose Hale in the eye, and, therefore, though she attracted their gazes like moths to a flame, specific details were overlooked unless she crossed someone's path more than once.
"Easily the most stunning woman I've ever met," they might say. But when asked what she looked like, they differed in the particulars, their minds filling in the blanks. "Brown eyes. No. Hazel. No, they must have been blue? Maybe darker. Or lighter. Gold perhaps? Incredibly pale. Her... Well, she was blonde."
They would then hide any embarrassment they might feel by reeling off a list of people they thought she looked like, but was more beautiful than.
Carys, having observed the reaction many times, had made use of what she had to achieve a poor man's version. It had paid off earlier, and she only needed it to do one more job that day.
She had discarded her coat over an hour before, hanging it over her bag as she stood in the lobby of Richard's building. The bag, which she had bought that morning to better complete her outfit, had since been left behind in her car, ready to be returned along with the ring which she still wore as proof at a glance that she was married.
Carys had wasted part of Saturday visiting the last place Riley Biers had been seen alive. Rather than a bustling bar, she had found a shell - boarded up and left to ruin, waiting on some developer to buy the land and no doubt finish what a fire three months before had started.
That had left Richard.
It hadn't taken much to begin a conversation with the concierge earlier that afternoon; he had shown himself more than willing to give up information about the building and its occupants.
She had been careful not to push too quickly, and had adopted the persona of a concerned (and rich) American woman whose step-daughter, not far from her own age and unhappy about the new family dynamic, was to attend the University of Washington that year and needed a place to live.
When lying, she had heard it was best to stick as closely to the truth as possible.
Just as she had expected him to, the concierge corrected her twice during their short conversation.
First, that the apartment for sale in the building was a three-bed rather than two, and second, that it had been a man who had disappeared leaving everyone in his life in a state of confusion, rather than a woman.
During the brief interlude from otherwise run of the mill questions, he had let slip just what she needed.
"I saw him at the Finnegan's pub down the road just before he left; heard him talking," he had told her. "Weird thing was, I could have sworn he said he was going on a business trip."
It was that apparently inconsequential piece of information, which the concierge had no doubt added to insinuate himself into the story again, that had now brought her to the pub.
Carys entered, eyes adjusting to the dim light within. After so long in a small town, it was like a shock to the system to walk into a real pub.
Despite being a Sunday, the taproom was all but deserted. It surprised her. A pub which sold food (as the sign outside promised) would have been bustling with trade back home. Even Forks' small bar attracted interest on a Sunday afternoon.
She found herself a seat at the bar, which lacked the dubious stickiness of hastily mopped spillages that would likely come by the end of most nights, and made quick work of ordering herself lunch.
By the time the bartender returned with her Coke, she was lost to thoughts of the call from Carlisle which had delayed her visit by almost an hour.
He had called just as she was wrapping things up with the concierge, and had immediately asked why she greeted him in an American accent.
"I'm investigating vampires in Seattle and thought it was better not to use real names or accents," she had told him when she had reached the freedom of fresh air and dropped the accent.
Carlisle had laughed.
Carys, after a beat, had chuckled nervously along.
"I've missed your jokes this week."
"Mhmm," Carys had replied, her voice a touch shrill when, after a moment's hesitation, she had added, "At least you can't say I didn't warn you."
From there, she had turned the conversation over to the subject of his prodigal son.
Towards the end of their call, which had lasted some forty-five minutes, Carys and Carlisle had finally admitted just how much they missed being together.
The momentary elation which gripped her each and every time she heard from him had been followed, as always, by intense longing.
Carys stared into the dark swirling abyss of her soft drink, which fizzed and leapt when she swirled the glass, and wished she could be cradling a tumbler of whiskey instead.
"Everything alright?"
"Hmm?"
Carys raised her head, dropping the hand that had been propping up her chin first to her collarbone, then to the crook of her elbow. She had attracted the attention of a woman two stools away.
Short, tired, in possession of a short mop of greying hair which lifted this way and that as if she were used to gripping and pulling at it, she had the slow blink of someone more than a few drinks deep.
"Work or boyfriend?" the woman asked, slurring her words a little. "Which one?" she prompted again when Carys stayed silent.
Carys shook her head. "None of the above," she whispered.
Already tense and morose, she was now embarrassed by the attention they were drawing from other patrons scattered around the large taproom.
"What was that? Speak up!" The woman punctuated her words by slapping the bar.
Carys tried to make herself as small as possible.
Glancing at the doorway, she began to plot the swiftest, most polite escape she could think of. She didn't want to be rude, but neither did she want to discuss her personal life with a complete stranger who was well on her way to being day drunk.
Had she been in England, or a drink or two in herself, she might have been more inclined to friendliness.
A wave of homesickness caught her unawares.
The woman leaned across the space between them, her stool tipping precariously, and tried again.
"Work or relationship?" she slurred, gripping the bar and raising a single finger in the air. "Theerress only one reason you come in here with a face like that on a Saturday-"
"Leave her alone, Madge!"
The bartender had come to Carys' rescue. He stood at the other end of the bar, well away from the pair, and continued sorting through receipts. Somewhere between Carys' age and that of Madge, his reddish stubble contrasted with the dark brown of his thick hair.
Carys wondered whether it would be strange for her tip him liberally for the effort to save her from embarrassment. She hoped not.
"Jusss being friendly," said Madge, righting herself and her chair. She held her hands up in supplication when the bartender, glancing up, raised a solitary eyebrow.
"Butting in where you're not welcome, more like. And it's a Sunday."
Madge harrumphed, returned to her drink for a moment, and then slowly began to lean across.
"Madge."
"Sorry, Anthony!"
When she swayed back, eyes flaring as if to say "okay then," Carys laughed. She couldn't help it. It was the kind of sudden laugh that cut through tension and surprised her as much as it delighted Madge and drew the gaze of the bartender.
She felt the attention of the pub as a whole return to her, but with warm curiosity this time. It wasn't quite so bad.
"Sorry," Carys echoed, biting her lips together as she turned back to her own drink.
Madge slapped the bar again; slowly but surely, the others returned to their drinks or murmured conversations.
"Husband," Carys said a few minutes later, before she could stop herself, meeting Madge's eye in the mirror behind the bar. "You?"
"Noooo," Madge declared, swiping a hand through the air like a sword. "If I had one, he'd likely send me to drink."
Carys pressed the back of her hand to her lips to hide her chuckle; Madge's eyes glittered with mirth in the low light; the bartender drifted closer and grabbed a glass, wiping at it with a cloth as if to suggest he wasn't listening intently.
"Lucky then," Carys offered, tipping her glass a little.
"You're British."
Carys studied Madge for a few moments in silence before responding.
"Um, well, I'm English, act-"
She broke off when the bartender sighed heavily, slammed the glass back in its place, and crossed over to lean against the bar directly opposite Madge.
"Now why'd y'ave to say that?" he asked.
Carys perked up at the sudden, unmistakable change in his accent.
"You're Irish? But-oh."
The bartender was already dangling Madge's winnings, a ten dollar bill, in front of her. She snatched it from the air and pocketed it, all the while grinning at Carys.
"Finnegan's," he said. "It's in the name."
Carys felt herself blush.
"Sorry."
"Fer what?" He teased. "Losing me the cash?"
Carys raised an eyebrow and gave in to the inclination to joke along.
"Well, I mean, I'm English so it kinda comes with the territory, you know."
The bartender, Anthony, stared at her for one drawn out moment before he grinned and dropped to lean his arms on the bar.
"D'yer hear this, Madge? The territory. Fecking hell."
"If it makes it any better, I'm a quarter Welsh?"
"Dunno if it does. Madge?"
"Nah."
"I'm just saying, my people've had their fair share of shit from the British," Carys told them, now struggling not to laugh. "We've got centuries on you."
"Pah!" Anthony watched her as he laughed, trying to suss her out. "Sure, I'll let that pass, I s'pose, but don't be makin' a habit of it. Youse rolled right over, so you did."
"You could've gone with the obvious," Madge said, interrupting Carys' response.
Wanting in on the joke but not quite getting their particular party line, she nodded her head in an exaggerated display, her gaze roaming over Carys' face and body.
Carys adopted a nonplussed expression and looked down at herself.
"What obvious?" she asked, twisting about.
"You know."
"No? What?"
Anthony, struggling to keep his amusement in check for long enough to let it land, managed to settle on a bemused expression, and turned back to Madge.
"Sure, Madge?" he asked. "What's obvious?"
"Well the-" Madge waved her hand in Carys' direction, increasingly frustrated. "You're black." she finally blurted out.
Carys considered getting into the semantics of denying one half of her parentage in favour of another and decided against it.
"Oh my god, would you look at that!?" she replied instead, as if mildly shocked to discover the news.
It took a second, but then Anthony burst out laughing again, just as she expected him to. Madge glared, muttered something about foreigners, and returned to her drink.
"Did she just...?" Carys whispered when Anthony sidled across from her.
He grinned and nodded, putting her a little at ease again.
"She's slow on the uptake, is all," he assured her. "She fergets how much we hate the Romans."
"Oh, I really hate the Romans," Carys assured him, as seriously as she could.
"How much?"
"A lot!"
"Right, yer in."
They chuckled, quietly so as not to draw attention again, and then he shrugged.
"You've got the Pythons going fer yous, I'll give you that."
Carys bit her lip against a grin. "How long've you been here?" she asked quietly.
"Here? Since about six t'get the kegs in."
Carys laughed. "You know what I meant."
"Five years. What about you?"
"Ten minutes."
"Catch yerself on, using my joke like that!"
"Going on three years. It's that accent...? Derry...?"
"Aye, sure, you picked that up quick."
"So's my grandmother," she told him, thinking of Findlay's mother. "Well. Not since she was two, but she says it counts."
When Carys left the pub two hours later, it was with a full belly and more information than she could have hoped for.
Richard had been a regular - so much so that his absence had been noted and catalogued, and Carys had been able to tease out information here and there.
Richard had apparently been surprised when a hippy, wearing what Madge judged to be a cheap black wig, had made a beeline for him the night he had left town. They thought that must have been the goth girlfriend she referred to; neither of them had seen her before or since. The pair had taken a photo together and then gone back to Richard's at the end of the night; he had been more than a little tipsy, boasting about it before they left.
The crucial parts she focused on: a woman had lured him away, and Madge had overheard them talk about how she lived with friends downtown.
The first cluster of disappearances had taken place downtown. It was a different part of the city to the alley where Carys had seen Richard and Riley.
If she were about to change someone into a vampire, Carys doubted she would tell them where she lived first, for anyone to hear. She might, however, tell them about an area she knew well enough to lie about easily. Somewhere away from her current residence. A former hunting ground, perhaps.
Carys ran through her mind, discarding the main downtown area as she had others for various reasons. When she got back to Forks she would take out the map she had locked in her car and cross the area out officially.
There were only three likely areas to search now. She would come back on Thursday and start to search as soon as she bought a new camera; she didn't want to get too close, so she would need the best zoom lense she could buy.
The hairs on the back of Carys' neck raised a few steps from her car, and she fought the urge to look round. She was being watched again, but she didn't want them to know she could feel it.
Her phone rang and she answered it without checking the caller ID, dropping into the front seat as she did so.
"Nice dress."
Carys jumped and emitted a shriek, slamming her car door shut.
"You're so creepy, Alice! Why? After months? Would that be the first thing you say to me? In your freaky high pitched whisper? Creepy!"
"You've been avoiding me," Alice responded, a triumphant note in her tinkling bell-like voice.
"I thought we agreed to disagree on the definitions of theft, abandonment," Carys reeled off, staring at the roof of her car as she kept count on the fingers of one hand, "shunning, and backing the wrong horse, so we should just stop talking before we get back into that?"
"Carlisle isn't a thing," Alice chastised gently, rubbing Carys up the wrong way. "He's a person, so he can't be stolen."
"You emptied the entire house and left him no choice but to follow."
"You could have come too..."
"You could have come back. Better yet, you could have never gone in the first place," Carys said, controlling her tone.
She closed her eyes and reminded herself she was a grown human arguing with a vampire who had different concepts of things like time. She had been in such a good mood before the phone call. She deserved a good mood. She just had to hold onto it.
After a stretch of silence, Alice asked, "Why are you in Seattle, dressed the way you are, drinking at a bar you don't know?"
"Cutting straight to the chase...," Carys sighed. "Well..., for one, I wasn't drinking, it was a Coke. And maybe that's who I am now...?"
"You're not going on dates or anything, are you?"
Carys couldn't quite believe her ears.
"What?"
"You only dress like that when you're going to dinner with Carlisle."
Carys tried to keep the worst of her rising annoyance out of her voice, and said, "No, I'm not cheating on my husband, Ali-"
"WHAT!?"
Realising her mistake, she sat bolt upright in her seat and cried, "Fiancé! I meant fiancé!"
"WHAT!?"
They hadn't planned on telling the family about their impromptu, highly dubious, wedding yet, but even Esme knew they were planning on getting married one day soon.
"Boyfriend...?" she offered, confused by the reaction.
"I've been so focused on Bella's ridiculous antics. I thought you would be sensible!" Alice growled. Whilst her voice did not deepen as such, it took on a threatening quality that Carys had never had directed at her.
"Which antics?"
"Hardly the time or place, Carys. Who did you marry!?" Alice demanded.
Carys made the mistake of emitting a bemused, snort, belying her amusement. "What?"
"You heard me!"
"Who do you think I married?" she forced out between breathless chuckles.
Alice, seemingly thrown by Carys' reaction, held on to a far less assured tone of indignation and answered:
"Well, it can't have been Carlisle because he's all the way in Brazil right now, looking for Edward!"
Carys left her hanging for a moment while she composed herself. Carlisle was going to be out of touch again for a while, and the thought of it made her heart sink anew.
"Calm down Alice," she finally told her. "It isn't official, we just made our vows when we saw each other before Christmas. I'm surprised you didn't see it."
"Well... I... Well...," Alice stuttered, not usually one to be left out of the loop of major life decisions. It was almost palpable through the phone, the way she reeled from the news she had missed it.
"Alice?"
Her voice thready, she replied, "I sort of... I stopped..., poking my nose in when the two of you see each other because it only ever goes one way..."
"Didn't want to see Carlisle having-" Carys cut off when Alice whined in horror, taking pity on her. "Sorry. I see why, is all, but don't worry. You, Esme, and Rosalie will all get to be bridesmaids when it happens."
"I-(No, mine! Esme, help! Jasper!)"
Carys listened to the sounds of Alice being wrestled from the phone and expected the call would cut off when yet another device was destroyed. Instead, a few moments later, a smooth voice said, clear as a bell:
"Carlisle wants us to be your bridesmaids?"
"No, I do."
"I expect you'll choose some hideous creation for us to try and make yourself look better, then?"
Carys grinned, then forced the expression away so that she could sound entirely serious.
"Pssh. No. Rose, I'm going to choose the perfect dresses to make each of you look incredible. Then," she added, "I'm going to upstage the lot of you."
"There's no way you could do that," Rosalie responded so quickly that Carys' last words hadn't quite left her mouth.
"Try me," Carys warned with a smile. "Any way it goes, you'll be swanning around my wedding looking fantastic."
"Why...?"
"Because... Well... Why wouldn't you? You're going to be the joint best looking person there anyway. I might as well have you look like it."
"The first being you?"
"Hahaha! Nope."
"Carlisle?"
"You're not gonna guess."
"Who?"
"Leah Clearwater," Carys said. "My other bridesmaid."
Carys had not actually asked Leah to be her bridesmaid yet, but she had spoken to a couple of friends from home in England, who had told her if she was going to go with a parade of stunningly beautiful teenagers, she was both mad, and not going to be asking them to join her.
They had been joking, of course, but the rare phone call had led to the realisation that most of Carys' friends and family back home would not be able to make the trip due to money and/or time constraints.
"A human?" Rosalie asked, her displeasure at the notion bordering on disgust. "Ugh."
"I'm a human!" argued Carys.
"I said what I said, and I stand by it."
Carys, once she had begun, found that she couldn't control her laughter; Rosalie joined in after a little while.
It was either kind or overly self-assured of Rosalie not to have immediately shut down the suggestion that a human could rival her. Kind, in that she had continued their banter, self-assured in that she assumed Carys must have been wrong.
"Alice wants her cell back," Rosalie told her a few minutes later. "Bye."
"I love you too."
"I did not say that," Rosalie complained, a touch too testily.
"But ya felt it?" Carys teased.
"Not even a little bit. Goodbye."
"She doesn't dislike you," Alice supplied a few moments later.
She must have been out of range of Rosalie to be speaking like that. Or, of course, she might have simply been content to ignore the hisses her sister would no doubt be sending her way.
"I know. To be honest, I think I prefer how she is with me sometimes."
"What do you mean?"
Hearing how confused Alice sounded, Carys hesitated and then whispered:
"I mean she's at least open about not wanting-" She stopped herself.
"Not wanting what?"
Me.
"Nothing. I just know she likes me even if she doesn't want to admit how much... Anyway. Were you just calling for the first time in months about my potential day drinking, or?"
"Well..."
"Yeah?"
"I haven't seen you and Bella together in a while. I'm not supposed to be looking, but-"
Carys sincerely hoped Alice wasn't about to say what she thought she was.
"-I told Edward it wouldn't be as simple as he thought it would. You do know what she's been doing, I assume-"
"No!" Carys yelled, teeth gritted against a scream of frustration as the banks finally blew, suddenly, and without reservation.
Voice lowered to a fierce growl, she continued, "You want to know about Bella, you ask her yourself. You do NOT get to do this to me again. None of you do! Not anymore. You-you-you abandoned me as well, or do you not remember that? You only ever want to know about her - you only ever seem to care about what might have happened, or might be happening with her.
"What about the fact you all left me, Carlisle included, the instant you could - the very fucking instant I could move enough without pain to drive to work? And then all you have to say for yourself, all Carlisle or Esme ever have to say about you, is that you think it's the right decision for Bella. To keep her safe. No. You had a fucking choice, Alice, and you chose to wash your hands of her so you do not get to call me up after months, just to ask me how she is.
"At least Rosalie's honest enough about me. At least she knows where she stands and doesn't need to lie about it. To my face, Alice. To my face, you told me you loved me, that I was part of your family. Well I'm not, am I? And I'm sure as hell not part of Bella's. I'm just here, swanning along, twiddling my thumbs, waiting like an idiot for some crumb of affection that could make me feel for two minutes like I'm not wasting my time."
"Carys-" Alice's weak interjection was as lost as her tone.
"I am dealing with far far more than whether Bella Swan gives a fuck about what she's doing. It is her life, not mine. Take it to her if you disagree with her actions - I'm pretty sure she won't cast you aside like she did me when I dared try and give her advice!
"Do you have any idea of how I feel right now?" Carys cried, tears flowing down her cheeks unchecked as she lost the momentum and rage of her tirade. "You call me up, you-you called me. And you accuse me. And then you don't bother to utter a word of "how are you?" or anything. Nothing. You just skip over anything you don't have to ask about me, straight to Bella.
"No. You don't get to do this to me. Not anymore."
Blind anger resurfacing, Carys wrenched the phone from her ear, checked the sidewalk, half kicked her car door open, and threw it in the gutter. The screen smashed, ending the call a moment before it bounced straight into the storm drain.
"No no no no no!" Carys whimpered, dropping from her seat to the ground, feeling about for the phone she knew was already lost despite the tears blurring her vision. "No no no, please, no. Fuck!"
Carys had never so completely and utterly regretted anything she had said or done as much as she did in that moment.
Carys, having cried all the way back to the hotel she had spent more time in than her own home for the past couple of weeks, was enough of a fright to look at that the receptionist simply took her card, reopened her reservation, and then, in continued silence, returned the room key Carys had given her hours before.
She sniffled her way to her room, dumped her bags in the corner, and spent an hour under a stream of hot water before calling the one number she knew off by heart: Forks Hospital.
It was a Sunday, and so at least Sandra wasn't there to receive the call when she told them she was sick, this time with a bad case of the flu.
Rather than abject misery, Carys felt as if a weight had been lifted from her when she ended the call; she felt calm. Deadened. Numb. Peaceful.
She woke up late the next morning and found nothing had changed overnight.
It wasn't an effort to drag herself from her hotel room so that she could allow herself to be directed by another receptionist to a camera shop within walking distance.
She half expected a painfully drawn-out process of selecting the right camera with the longest lens and clearest picture. In fact, without her second-guessing herself as she often did when making large purchases, and with the help of the owner of the shop, she was in and out within half an hour.
Instead of painful and near all-consuming, her compulsion to search for the vampires until she found them seemed to work in her favour. Something about her had changed, inside and out.
Carys didn't have to concentrate on where she was going because people seemed to ebb and shift out of her way unbidden; she spent much of the day wandering tirelessly around the first of the three parts of Seattle she had worked out might house vampires, and trusted her instincts when something told her to discount it, hours later.
Being almost completely cut off from her life, the stress and worry, uncontactable save for the number she left with Forks Hospital, she should have been scared, worried, anxious. But it was as if her depression and anxiety couldn't reach her there.
Finding the scrap of paper in her notepad from when Leah had scribbled her number down over Christmas gave her one number to add to the new phone she purchased that day.
Sporadically texting back and forth about pretending to have the flu because she literally couldn't come home or Leah's increasing foul mood, strangely enough, made her feel as if she had a home base.
The Leah/Monica/Sarah phone tree sorted out the rest.
She was officially out of contact because she was too ill, and no one saw anything strange about her choosing not to drive for three and a half hours to suffer alone at home, when she could simply call down for room service when she needed it.
For four days, she searched Seattle before something clicked.
The murders and disappearances had all happened at night.
Not a single one had been committed during the day.
(And she was probably in the middle of a mental breakdown, but that felt like a problem for another day.)
It was a nighttime coven...
She needed to think of a better name for it by the time she had proof enough to go to Carlisle or Esme.
If, of course, they were still speaking to her by the time she got home and dug out her address book.
A/N: WE OFFICIALLY HAVE ONE CHAPTER BETWEEN US AND THE PROLOGUE - WHICH MEANS WE ONLY HAVE (MAYBE) FOUR? BETWEEN US AND THE EMMETT SCENE. THIS WON'T BE ALL PAIN AND ANGST, I PROMISE. I know I promised that before, but I'm sure of it now. The angst stops here completely.
Thank you to: GuestMG, TheLadyO, Nana (neither did we, but in the war, the Confederates were created and rose up in defence of continuing to enslave people. And I hope you feel like this chapter kind of gives something of a catalyst for the Cullens (and Carlisle) to realise she's really not actually okay!), ALotofNerdyThings, Guest (not long to go now, and I hope you liked parts of this chapter, and the next two chapters, because they're fully detective novel), chellekathrynnn, Courtney-Tamara, Mason99, Ella (it's like you keep reading my mind... There's a little clue Alice leaves Carys near the start of their chat which I think might shed some light on her watching Carys! And you're right, it would give him a chance to have grown in a way the books didn't explore. As for Greys Anatomy, I kind of left it playing while working so I guess it was more like a radio show at times?), Lady Jensen, Riariabookworm, Kimkrys, Stephanie, jhaenox, SparkBomb'sFaith, souverian, QualityBean, and Love. Fiction. 2020 for your reviews.
Consensus is that Jasper stays the same and we see how he worked through his former ideas for the better!
