Before we begin, I have some fantastic news: Shades of Destiny is down to its very last chapter, which is already partially written and should be finished next month! Then I'll finally be able to rework my updating schedule; while I'm not totally sure yet what it'll look like, I'm pretty confident that I'll at least be able to update again this year, as opposed to the, ahem, one lonely chapter this story got in all of 2019. Seriously, I know I've fallen WAY down on the job here, and whoever's still reading, I really am grateful for all your patience and understanding.
Chapter 8: Found and Lost
Lights shone from every window as they approached the house, but the place was eerily silent; even when Edward opened the front door, not a sound could be heard from inside.
"Doesn't look like anyone's home," Peter commented as he surveyed the interior, which was decorated in the style of an upscale mountain lodge. "Are these lights on a timer?"
"No, they're all here," Edward assured him. He could tell from the concentration of their scents that they were congregated in the living room, though he wondered at the lack of telepathic chatter. After decades of living with him, his family had learned how to guard their thoughts, even make their minds completely blank in order to keep him out, but he couldn't imagine why they would do so now. What could they possibly want to hide from him? "Come on, they're waiting."
He led the way into the living room, where Carlisle, Esme, Alice, Jasper, Emmett, and Rosalie had arranged themselves on various sofas and armchairs in a perfect tableau of a relaxed family gathering - they even had a pile of logs blazing in the huge stone fireplace - except that none of them looked particularly relaxed. Carlisle's smile as he stepped forward and offered Peter his hand (which he had just warmed by the fire), however, was completely genuine.
"Welcome to our home, Peter; I can't tell you how pleased we are to have you here. Please allow me to introduce my family..."
He began listing their names, but Peter wasn't listening. As soon as he'd entered the room, his mind was swamped with a barrage of emotions that weren't his: nervousness, curiosity, relief and happiness at his arrival...and an increasing sense of perplexity as he stood frozen just inside the arched doorway, making no move to take Carlisle's hand.
"Are you all right?" The question came from the other blond guy, who unfolded his lean form from the ottoman he was sitting on and took a step closer. "You seem a little...overwhelmed."
"I imagine absorbing your ability would be overwhelming at first, Jasper," Edward said dryly. "That's why I advised you to keep your distance." To Peter he added, "My brother here is an empath, but of a different stripe than yourself; rather than mimicking the powers of those with whom he comes into contact, he can sense and influence emotions."
"Personally, I think what you can do is way cooler," the huge, dark-haired guy who took up half the couch by himself commented with a teasing smirk at his brother.
"Maybe, but I don't envy him," retorted a girl as tiny as he was large, who was perched on the sofa's armrest. "Dealing with one of these 'gifts' is enough, thank you very much. But don't worry, Peter; we've met before, so you've already copied everything from me you're ever going to."
"Good to know. I just wish I could remember meeting you...or anyone, really."
Sensing his frustration, Jasper was quick to offer what consolation he could. "Since Edward called to tell us you were alive, Carlisle has been working on a way to remedy your situation - he's a doctor, you know. Why don't you tell him your hypothesis, Carlisle?"
"Very well, but I don't want to get your hopes up; neurology isn't my specialty," the doctor cautioned as Peter turned an eager gaze on him. "Based on my observations of a prior case, I believe the process of memory removal must affect the brain in some physical way-"
"A prior case?" Peter interrupted, forgetting his own troubles for a moment in light of this startling - and rather troubling - revelation. "You know someone else this has happened to?"
"Yeah, me," Elle said coolly, with a withering look that suggested asking for more details would be extremely unwise. "I don't think you want to get your memories back the same way I did, though."
"It was a fairly radical treatment," Edward explained, "which resulted in some permanent changes to Elle's brain chemistry...among other things."
"Oh," Peter said softly, much more subdued now. He wanted very badly to get his life back, but if doing so meant becoming something other than what he was now...he wasn't sure how he would feel about that. "Exactly how extensive a change are we talking about?"
"Never mind that," Carlisle said quickly - perhaps a little too quickly. "Apart from your amnesia, you're perfectly healthy, and this, ah, 'treatment' should only be considered as a last resort - the very last resort, you understand? Besides, there may be another option for you. The...procedure which was performed on Elle was only intended to repair an injury that came very close to ending her life; the restoration of her memories was an unexpected side effect, which led me to conclude that there must have been damage to her brain that was inadvertently cured in the process. Unlike Elle, you already possess the ability to heal yourself..."
Peter nodded thoughtfully, recalling his speedy recovery from the beating Ricky, Will, and Tuko had given him. There was just one problem with Carlisle's theory: "It hasn't fixed my amnesia, though. If my healing could take care of that, wouldn't it have happened already?"
"Perhaps not, since the loss of your memory isn't life-threatening," Carlisle countered, refusing to be discouraged. "Our understanding of your power is far from perfect, but it seems as if it's easier for you to access certain abilities when you have urgent need of them, whereas you've had to make a conscious effort in less dire situations."
Instead of lifting Peter's spirits, this information only served to further dishearten him. "I've been making a conscious effort ever since I first realized I could do this stuff, trying to find something that could help me get away from that gang in Ireland, and so far, nothing."
"Bella mentioned that you had a hard time pulling from your bag of tricks at first," Elle mused, "but she said you eventually figured out how to do it by just thinking about the people you copied stuff from, even when they weren't around. So for healing, you need Claire."
"Great. Who's Claire?"
"Your niece. She's this perfect little princess with a pink room and a massive collection of teddy bears - oh, and of course she's also a freaking cheerleader-"
"That kind of description isn't exactly helpful," Edward interrupted with a slight roll of his eyes. "There are more effective ways of conveying information to a telepath." Reaching into his memory, he brought Claire's image to the forefront of his mind, focusing on every fine detail of her features, the cadence of her voice, every tiny nuance in her expressions...
Peter was instantly drawn into the remarkably vivid recollection, his telepathic senses almost making it feel as if he was really there in the sweeping foyer of his family's mansion, where he and Claire had once discussed whether she bore any resemblance to her biological father...his brother...Nathan!
With that one word, a dam seemed to open in his brain, and all his missing memories came flooding back as the neural pathways that had been severed by the Haitian's touch mended themselves, the names and faces of everyone closest to him cascading through his mind - Nathan, his parents, his nephews, his old friends from nursing school, Charles and Simone Deveaux...and at last, Bella Swan. He felt a moment's relief at finally being able to put a face to the name that had haunted him ever since his first conversation with Caitlin in the pub's back room; then he remembered the last time he saw her, barely clinging to life after sacrificing herself to save New York City from him, and his relief quickly gave way to desperation.
"Oh God, Bella! I need to find her-"
"It's all right, Peter, just calm down-"
"You don't understand! Linderman threatened to sabotage her life support if I didn't keep cooperating with his experiments, so when I escaped, I had planned to get her out of the hospital, take her somewhere he couldn't get to her, but she was already gone. If he's got her-"
"He doesn't," Alice cut in soothingly. "I promise you, Bella is in no danger whatsoever from Daniel Linderman."
"How do you know?" Peter demanded, refusing to be placated so easily.
"Because we're the ones who took her from the hospital," Jasper informed him.
"You did? But why would you-?" Then something Carlisle had said earlier came back to him. "You were going to try the same treatment you gave Elle on her, weren't you?" If ever there was a time to employ the very last resort, surely Bella's case was it.
"We were," Carlisle confirmed. "We did."
"And?" Though the doctor's grave expression wasn't exactly encouraging, Peter needed to hear him say out loud that the treatment had failed before he could accept the grim outcome Carlisle seemed to be hinting at.
"The results were...mixed, at best. I still wonder if I was right to allow it..." Esme gave his hand a supportive squeeze, which he gratefully returned before continuing. "Bella did regain consciousness-"
"Then it worked, didn't it? Where is she? I need to see her."
"Wait." Edward moved to block his path, though Peter wasn't actually going anywhere yet. "There are things you still don't know, things you need to understand. Bella isn't the same girl you last spoke with on Kirby Plaza anymore."
"Right, you mentioned some altered brain chemistry," Peter said impatiently, with a sidelong glance at Elle. Of course, he hadn't met her before she underwent this mysterious 'treatment', so he had no way of knowing if her personality was any different, but she had not, as far as he could tell, developed any neurological disorders or psychoses. Surely whatever side effects Carlisle and Edward were making such a fuss over couldn't be that big a deal. "She can probably work around it with the right therapy, can't she?"
Some of the Cullens seemed to find this question quite funny, while the rest appeared somber, almost regretful.
"Uh," said Elle, who belonged to the former group, "not really. I don't know if you've noticed, but we're a little different from most people - even you."
"Yeah, I did notice a few things about you and Edward back in New York. You seem to have extra abilities - you're stronger and faster than normal people, your senses are sharper, and when Alice gave me a ride to the airport after I woke up from that coma, I saw that she has better-than-average reflexes - which is probably the only reason we made it there in one piece," he added with a mildly reproving look in her direction. That ride was one memory he would've been happy not to recover.
Alice responded with a blatantly unrepentant shrug. "Well, I'm glad you were paying attention. What else have you figured out about us?"
"I haven't been able to copy any of your secondary abilities, which is weird since I didn't have any trouble picking up Edward's telepathy, or Elle's lightning. I'm not sure why, though."
"But I bet you have a theory," the big guy, Emmett, prodded. "Everyone always has a theory about us."
Something in his tone - something that sounded suspiciously like premature scoffing - made Peter hesitate, but he forged ahead anyway. "Well, I read a book by a geneticist from Madras who thought these powers were the next phase of human evolution, so maybe you guys are what comes after that? Maybe you're somehow evolving faster than the rest of us?"
That wiped the smirk off Emmett's face; in fact, all of them looked rather impressed by his reasoning. "Close - very close - but you're just a little off." Alice illustrated the point by holding up her thumb and forefinger a millimeter apart. "It's not that we've evolved faster, it's more like we're on a different evolutionary track. You might even say we're not really human anymore, strictly speaking," she finished with a nervous little laugh.
Peter watched her with a slight frown, wondering where she was going with this, but decided to play along for the moment. "So if you don't think of yourselves as human, what are you?"
"Well," she hedged, "it's more how others think of us. Our abilities come with...side effects...that resemble certain myths-"
"Just spit it out already," Elle said impatiently, "before we all petrify here."
Emmett guffawed loudly at her remark, and even Rosalie, who until now had observed the proceedings with a pronounced air of disinterest, let out a reluctant chuckle. "For once, I agree with the faulty wire. Peter - we're vampires."
For a few seconds, he could do nothing but stare at her; then he tugged at one ear as if to check for wax. "Sorry, I thought you just said-"
"Vampires," Jasper repeated. "And no, she wasn't joking."
Peter scanned the others' faces, hoping one of them would yell, "Fooled you!" and they would all have a good laugh before steering the conversation back in a direction that even remotely made sense, but they all appeared dead serious. "But- But that's impossible," he finally stammered out. "There's no such thing as vampires."
That statement produced the amusement he was looking for, but somehow, it wasn't very reassuring. "This, coming from the man who decided he could fly based on a dream?" Rosalie asked, one eyebrow arched in an expression of elegant derision.
"That's different - maybe I can do some things other people can't, but I'm still human. I can even accept that there might be a factual basis for some legends; when I stayed with Bella in Forks, she basically told me the local Quileutes were some kind of werewolves, and I believed her. I mean, I've met a shapeshifter who can completely change her appearance, even make herself look exactly like someone else, so why can't there be other shapeshifters who turn into wolves, right? But aren't vampires supposed to be, you know...undead, or something like that?"
"I suppose that's as good a term as any to describe our condition," Carlisle conceded, though the slight furrow in his brow seemed to indicate that he wasn't overly fond of it.
"But it's not possible," Peter insisted. "I can't discount people coming back from the dead since Claire and I both did it, but after we regenerated, we were alive again. Walking around after your heart and most of your other vital organs have stopped functioning - how is that supposed to work?"
"You're correct; according to all the laws of nature as most people understand them, we shouldn't exist," the doctor admitted. "Yet here we are."
"You can check my pulse if you don't believe us," Alice offered.
That gave him pause, because surely she wouldn't have suggested such a deceptively simple test unless she was confident it would back up her claim. He wasn't quite ready to give in, though. "There are still some things that don't add up. I've seen those two-" he nodded at Edward and Elle "-move around during the day-"
"Only when it was cloudy," the blonde pointed out.
"Maybe so," Peter allowed - admittedly, he hadn't paid very close attention to weather conditions at the time, "and the stories are more flexible on the whole 'sleeping in coffins' thing these days, but that still leaves the issue of your diet. If there's one thing all the books and movies about vampires have in common, it's what they eat. The whole time you guys were in New York, I never saw anything on the news about any bodies turning up drained of blood."
"Well, you don't think we would be careless enough to leave our prey lying around in plain sight, do you?" Edward demanded, sounding rather insulted. "Even if we had, the discovery of a few dead squirrels would hardly have merited blanket media coverage, especially during the election cycle."
"Wait... Squirrels?"
"I'm afraid so." Edward's mouth twisted in a slight grimace. "Central Park doesn't offer a very wide selection of wildlife."
"Plenty of people, though."
"We don't prey on humans," Esme stated decisively, her voice soft yet firm. "It's true that most of our species hold different views in that regard, but Carlisle's conscience would never allow it. He discovered that animals' blood sustains us just as well, and he has shown us all a better way of life, so that we can coexist peacefully with our human neighbors." She gave him an adoring smile, which he returned with such affection that Peter quickly looked away, feeling as if he was intruding on a private moment.
"Well, that's something," he muttered. "If I had to end up in the middle of nowhere with a bunch of vampires, at least I don't have to worry about you taking a snap at my neck."
"We wouldn't do that anyway," Emmett assured him once his laughter subsided, his golden eyes glistening with mirth. "Your kind smell too funny to eat."
"Carlisle thinks it's some sort of natural defense mechanism," Jasper explained, "though for whom is debatable. Most humans are no match for us, but some of your kind possess such formidable powers that hunting you might actually be hazardous to our health, or at least increase our risk of exposure if one of you survived to tell the tale."
"I think I could take 'em," Emmett remarked. "Not that I would, of course." Rosalie snorted, and he gave her a wounded look. "You don't think so? That hurts, babe."
"Normally I wouldn't dream of questioning your prowess in any area, but that one almost leveled an entire city." At Emmett's crestfallen look, she smirked and patted his knee. "Still, if you think you can take him on, you know I'd be rooting for you...from a safe distance."
"We'll see about that." He turned and jabbed a finger in Peter's direction. "You and me, arm wrestling - and no fair going nuclear when you lose."
Peter's attention, however, was on more pressing matters. "Look, this is all fascinating, but what does any of it have to do with Bella? Do you guys have some kind of healing powers?"
This question sent a ripple of tension through the room, as if they had finally reached the point everyone had been waiting for since the moment he walked into the room - waiting rather apprehensively, it seemed. "In a manner of speaking," was Alice's somewhat delicate reply.
"What does that mean?"
"Come on, Peter, you watch movies, don't you?" Elle asked, her voice unusually soft even as her eyes bored into him with an almost burning intensity. "How do vampires usually stop people from dying?"
This was precisely the answer Peter now realized he had been dreading ever since Rosalie first uttered the 'V-word', which was probably why he'd tried so hard not to believe it, but now there was no more room for denial. Every attempt to argue that their claims of vampirism couldn't possibly be true had been met with irrefutably logical rebuttals, and if this was all a big joke, they would have to be pretty sick to take it this far, which he didn't think they were; at least, he couldn't sense any deceit or malicious glee from any of them, only sympathy. Unfortunately, their compassion didn't make it any easier to hear that the girl he loved had become a bloodsucking creature of the night.
He staggered over to the nearest chair and collapsed into it, burying his face in his hands while he struggled to process this sudden, drastic shift in his reality. At last, he looked up into their kind, concerned faces and asked, "Why? Why do...any of this? Why go to all the trouble of taking Bella out of the hospital, away from her parents, and...turning her? Why'd you track me all the way to Ireland and help me get my memories back? What do you people want with us?!"
"Bella's my friend," Elle said with a shrug. "I never had one before, so I didn't want her to die on me. And Alice asked me and Edward to keep an eye on you and your brother-"
"What?" He turned sharply to stare at the diminutive girl, who suddenly seemed even smaller as she leaned against Jasper, shrinking away from his scrutiny. "Why did you do that? You hinted that you knew my family that night you took me to the airport, but I'm pretty sure none of my relatives ever had anything to do with any vampires!"
"I wasn't always a vampire, though," she said softly, "and the Cullens weren't always my family. When I was human, I had another family - my parents, and a sister, Angela...your mother."
"My mother? That's-" He barely stopped himself from saying 'impossible'; after tonight, he thought he might as well delete that word from his vocabulary. Instead he said, "Mom never said anything about having a younger sister."
"Of course she didn't; I'm actually older than her," Alice explained with a faint smile. "I just stopped aging at eighteen. Angie was sixteen then, and our abilities were just developing; we both saw things, but her visions were confined to dreams. Mine came while I was awake, and unlike her, I never learned to keep my mouth shut about them. Our parents were at their wits' end, so eventually they sent us both to a government-run camp in the desert that was set up to study 'special' children...but someone followed us. You know how we said our kind don't usually hunt yours? Well, there are exceptions to every rule; in fact, there was one particular vampire, James, who actually preferred hunting evolved humans - he thought they made for better sport."
Her lip curled in disgust for a moment before she continued her story. "One night, Angela and I sneaked out after curfew with some boys from the camp, and James seized the chance to make his move. He took me out into the desert, but there was a sandstorm... Somehow I must have managed to escape him, though obviously not before he bit me. I still don't know exactly what happened that night, but I imagine it was traumatic enough that I went to great lengths to block it out, because when I woke up, I couldn't remember anything. For decades, my past was a complete mystery, until Elle discovered my former identity in Primatech's old records; since then, bits and pieces have started coming back, and Angela's helped to fill in the remaining gaps."
"You've been in touch with her? So Nathan and I have a vampire aunt no one ever told us about, who looks about the same age as his daughter whose existence was also hidden from everyone all these years... Our next family reunion should be fun," Peter muttered while rubbing at his forehead. An uncomfortable pressure was building behind his eyes, as if his brain was straining under the weight of all the information that had been crammed into it in the last hour or so.
As if sensing his mental fatigue, Esme said, "Maybe you need some rest. I can show you to one of our guest rooms..."
"No, what I need is to see Bella," he retorted, a little more sharply than he had intended. Her calm rationality always kept him grounded amidst the chaos that frequently surrounded them, and he desperately needed that anchor right now. This also wasn't the first time he had inquired as to her whereabouts, and while he was grateful that the Cullens had informed him of the change in her condition before taking him to her, he was starting to suspect that they were putting him off for some reason. "Tell me where she is."
No one answered him for a long moment, during which the anxiety level in the room ratcheted up again, though this time it was accompanied by a strong sense of...guilt? At last, Carlisle spoke. "I'm afraid we can't do that."
Peter shot to his feet and took a step in the doctor's direction, noticing as he did so that the others seemed to be bracing themselves, except for Edward and Elle. Whatever was going on was evidently news to them too. "Why not?"
"Because we don't know where Bella is," Carlisle confessed, resolutely meeting Peter's gaze even as his feelings of remorse intensified. "She's gone."
"Gone?" Peter and Elle uttered the word in unison, but he let her take over after that; her shrill voice was more effective at conveying their mutual shock and dismay than his, and he doubted he could have made himself heard over her anyway.
"What do you mean, 'gone'?" She whirled to face Edward. "Did you know about this?"
"Of course not. I noticed that everyone was being exceptionally careful not to think of her, but I thought they were merely trying to prevent Peter from learning of her transformation before we had a chance to explain things properly."
That seemed to satisfy her, because she fixed her burning glare on Carlisle once more; Jasper readied himself to calm her down - this was why he had decided to attend the family meeting even though it meant Peter had to deal with absorbing a new ability on top of everything else, since he and Elle both possessed volatile powers that could be dangerous if their emotions got the better of them - but Edward warned him off with a subtle shake of his head. Elle hated being manipulated or controlled in any way, so forcing tranquility on her now would only make her angrier in the long run. Besides, there were no sparks dancing at her fingertips yet, and Peter, while definitely not happy about this latest revelation, appeared content to watch and listen for the moment.
Before she could start demanding answers, Esme stepped in to take the heat off her husband. "It happened shortly after you and Edward left," she explained quickly. "We all went out hunting, and when we returned, Bella was gone. We followed her scent as far as the river, which she used to keep us from tracking her beyond that point. There were no other scents nearby, nor any sign of an intruder in the house, so it appears that she left on her own."
"Excuse me? How does a girl who's been catatonic for a freaking month just get up and waltz right out the front door?!"
"Catatonic?" That was when Peter chose to jump back into the conversation. "Nobody said anything about her being catatonic!"
"She had a little trouble adjusting to her new life. Jasper actually thought maybe she was still brain-damaged, but I guess there was more going on up there than we thought," Emmett said wryly. "The question we've been scratching our heads over is, where did she go?"
"She hasn't shown up in any of my visions," Alice reported with a dispirited shrug, "so either she's become powerful enough to stop me from seeing her, or..."
"Or what?"
"Well, some of the things I see are pretty concrete, like the weather - it follows set patterns, so I could give you an accurate forecast six months in advance, but a person's course of action can change day to day, sometimes minute to minute, based on their decisions, and then what I see changes too. But if Bella hasn't actually made any decisions - if she's just wandering aimlessly somewhere, I probably wouldn't see anything."
"And if that's what she's doing," Peter began, forcing the words out with some difficulty as his throat tightened, "could she be in trouble? Hurt, or...?"
"Our kind are extremely durable," Edward said reassuringly. "She won't suffer any ill effects from exposure to the elements, and it's highly unlikely that she'll encounter anyone or anything capable of injuring her..." Then a troubled expression crept onto his face. "...Unless she runs afoul of the Volturi. They're a very powerful family," he continued in response to Peter's questioning look, "practically royalty in our world, who have taken it upon themselves to enforce our laws."
"Vampires have laws?"
"Just one, really: our existence is to be concealed from humans at all costs. If Bella exposes herself..."
"What will they do to her?"
No one answered, but they were all seized by a sudden reluctance to make eye contact with him, which was answer enough.
"I don't think we have to worry about it, though," Alice said with an air of determined optimism. "She had the presence of mind to wait until the house was empty before she left, and to use the river to hide her trail, so I doubt she'll do anything foolish."
If this statement was intended to be comforting, it failed to achieve the desired effect, mainly because the inclusion of words like 'think' and 'doubt' made it sound far too uncertain. "But you don't know for sure," Peter pointed out. "And even if she doesn't do anything to piss off these Volturi people, we can't just leave her out there alone. We have to find her!"
Regardless of what Edward said about vampires' durability, it was hard to believe Bella could be safe when she had looked so fragile and helpless the last time he saw her in the hospital, breathing through a tube - he shook his head to clear away the image, but he suspected it would continue haunting him until he found her, until he saw with his own eyes that she truly was okay.
"Agreed, but I'm afraid we simply have no way of locating her," Carlisle said with a heavy sigh. "If you have any ideas on that score, we'd love to hear them."
He looked expectantly at Peter, and the rest of the family, accustomed to taking their cues from him, followed suit, but Peter had no helpful suggestions to offer, could only meet their hopeful gazes for a second or two before turning away. The irony of the situation wasn't lost on him - a little over an hour ago, he had no idea who he was; now all his memories were restored and he was fully in command of his impressive array of superhuman abilities once more...yet somehow, he had never felt more powerless than he did at that moment.
Well, there's another chapter down. I hope the length made up somewhat for the absurdly long wait, and I hope all of you are staying safe and healthy in the midst of the pandemic we're currently facing. Good luck, everyone.