Author's Note:
*takes a deep breath* Okay. Here we go. This one is a bit of a thrill ride. Buckle up and mind all the content warnings from previous chapters. It's about to get intense in here…
Chapter 28 — Desperation
When Edward came crashing back out of the woods at top speed to retrieve Bella from the hospital, every one of his waking nightmares came true in quick succession as he frantically searched the grounds for Bella and Alice — who wasn't answering her phone.
His mate wasn't there.
She wasn't fucking there — and he didn't know where she was.
What he did know immediately was that his sister had never even reached the hospital to protect Bella. There was no fresh trace of Alice's scent anywhere near Carlisle's office or the entrance to the hospital, nor was Bella's scent in Carlisle's office, where he had told Edward she would be.
Bella's protection had never arrived — and neither had Bella. It was a chilling realization, causing the boulder of worry already permanently residing in the pit of his gut to grow exponentially.
Bella wasn't in the parking lot where he left her with Carlisle. She wasn't in Edward's car, or her truck she had driven to the hospital, or in Carlisle's office. She wasn't anywhere on the hospital property, a thing Edward knew with absolute certainty because he could pick his mate's heartbeat out of a crowd at 100 yards.
And still, the snow fell. Reaching blizzard proportions now, exactly as Edward had seen in Alice's more recent visions of Bella's terrifying future.
Time was running out. For him, and for Bella as well. And maybe for Alice too. Nothing less than catastrophe could deter his sister from Bella's side. Of that he had no doubt.
Though he wasn't yet actively tracking, he still caught the traces of his mate's intoxicating scent mingled with his own as he reemerged from the hospital and then made a straight line for the last place he had held her in his arms, the sidewalk near his car, where he had left her with Carlisle when Jacob forced his hand and gave him no choice other than to remove the dog from Bella's presence.
He began to branch out in a radius from there, cursing the fast-falling snow that obscured both scent and any recent footprints in the snow as he methodically but fearfully started to search for any clue to what may have happened to her.
Halfway across the parking lot, he first crossed the lingering traces of a scent with which he had carefully familiarized himself once before, the current presence of which struck terror through his heart — the same scent he had detected outside his and Bella's cottage after Albert and Victoria dumped Lacey Matthews' body there in an attempt to terrorize Bella.
It was the wild card in the entire equation: the shield. Thomas. He had been close by — and recently — just as Edward had feared.
But the bastard wasn't there anymore. And Bella wasn't there either.
There was only one possible conclusion he could reach from that information.
As Edward began desperately tracking Thomas's scent across the parking lot toward the hospital, it terrifyingly began to converge with the path of Bella's scent on the sidewalk, closer to the entrance of the hospital.
An interception course, coming in perpendicular to her line, cutting across the parking lot.
He located the exact spot that Thomas's and Bella's scents mingled and then changed course, turning to go back across the parking lot — the bastard had chased her down and grabbed her, he could ascertain easily enough — and Edward's fear started to take over.
But none of it made sense. Why had Carlisle told him Bella was in his office, with Alice?
Then he saw it. Nearly covered by the fresh falling snow, exactly where Thomas's scent combined with Bella's, something shiny caught his attention, glinting in the glow of the street lights. He hastily picked it up.
A key. One with Bella's scent and Carlisle's. The key to Carlisle's office.
Every other member of the family had one already. It wasn't Alice to whom Carlisle had given that key. It was Bella. And in her fear, she had dropped it when Thomas grabbed her.
Carlisle had left her outside alone, told her to run to his office himself to wait for Alice. Completely defenseless.
Ruthlessly suppressing his fierce anger, Edward tracked Thomas's and Bella's mingled scent back across the parking lot, on a slightly different trajectory than Thomas had taken to run her down.
And then both scents vanished.
The shield had put her in a car. There was nothing more for him to track.
And Edward was beside himself.
To top it all off, Alice still wasn't answering her phone, and he couldn't hear her either. She was out of his range.
The shield must have been out of his mental range by then too, because suddenly, he could hear everyone else again, every single mind within three miles of the hospital, all of which he scanned for any reference to Bella, Thomas, or Albert.
He had nothing. Not one single lead to go on.
And that scared the fuck out of him. He went into a state that was surely as close to shock as a vampire could get.
He would gladly tear the earth apart to find her, but he had nowhere to start. He didn't know what to do. Any direction he drove or ran looking for her….it could be the wrong one, taking him farther away from her while she screamed for him to help her. And that knowledge paralyzed him. Froze him. Rendered him useless.
If it weren't for Emmett and Rosalie, who arrived at the hospital expecting to rendezvous with Alice and Bella, he'd have been in danger of making a very, very public scene — either that or running right back into those woods and brutally ending Jacob Black's life that very moment, because the wretched dog had set this entire chain of events in motion when he put his hands on Edward's mate without her consent.
Despite his normally flawless memory, when he thought back on it all later, he would only be able to remember the time that followed in flashes, a chaotic flurry of activity:
Rosalie, a worried expression on her face, her phone pressed to her ear as she checked in with Esme and the Denalis, putting them on high alert to keep the areas all around the meadow covered.
Emmett, disappearing in a blur into the woods and then reappearing, solemnly informing them that Carlisle was nowhere to be found either: only his scent remained in the woods, barely detectable over the residual scents of many, many wolves, who had also vanished into thin air.
And Carlisle wasn't answering his phone either.
Edward would be able to remember the fresh wave of terror that news sent through him. His sister and his father — was he now responsible for both of their deaths too?
Worst, was he to be responsible for Bella's?
Another vague memory would be the fiercely determined look on Rosalie's face, just before she broke every single one of her own rules about risking exposure to the family by dashing into the hospital at vampire speed, knocking out a security guard and stealing the security footage for the sidewalk and front entryway.
There was a large gap in his memory at that point. He was still in shock. He had no memory of how he ended up in the backseat of his own car, with Emmett at the wheel, driving them home like a maniac. All he could think about was Bella. Gone. Lost. What might be happening to her at that very moment.
And it being his own fault.
The next thing he truly remembered — and would never forget — was sitting between Emmett and Rosalie on the couch at home, Emmett's hand heavy on his shoulder, as Rosalie scanned through the security footage she had quickly set up to run on the large TV in the living room, controlled through her laptop.
She soon found what they were looking for.
Bella. Running. Stumbling back up the sidewalk as she came into the camera's narrow view of the front entryway and first section of the sidewalk.
And then just after she came into view, she seemingly disappeared into thin air as she was grabbed too fast for the ancient camera to register.
Not so fast that Edward couldn't see the flash of sudden terror on her face, like rusty nails scraping across his heart.
And then nothing.
That was another low point in his awareness. He would remember vague flashes of staring motionlessly at the screen in abject terror and helplessness, his soul splintering and his teeth grinding together so hard they threatened to crack as Rosalie and Emmett paused, rewound, and fast-forwarded the footage several times, looking for clues. There was nothing visible on the narrow field of footage that helped them.
He picked up a few words his siblings were saying, but they had no meaning as his world seemed to segment and finally collapse in around him — weird settings…can you change it…wider…it's like it's zoomed…here, try this…
It seemed hopeless. Until….
"Edward! Look!"
The world snapped back into focus as Emmett appeared by the side of the television, his large finger pointed at something on the far left edge of the picture he and Rose had just expanded.
Motion on the opposite edge of the screen from Bella, across the parking lot, in the exact place hers and Thomas's scent had disappeared. A vehicle. A green Toyota Camry, an old beater of a car.
Less than half of the vehicle was visible in the picture. It had no front license plate, and they couldn't see the back. But it rapidly pulled up and came to a stop about a minute before Bella came into view, running toward the hospital — and then it tore away about seven seconds after she was snatched.
Rosalie's laptop clattered to the floor as all three vampires dashed out the door without a word.
And from that point on, Edward would forget nothing.
Death was certain.
If something didn't drastically change, if the odds didn't vastly improve in his favor, Jasper was only prolonging the inevitable.
Nonetheless, he refused to give in, as he once again snatched Bree from the grasp of certain doom, throwing her out of the way to take on three more newborns alone.
He had already taken out twelve of them, though not without difficulty — and not without his body bearing the evidence of it. He was missing two fingers. Fresh, new scars now crisscrossed the old ones that laced his arms, his face, and up and down his back like a roadmap of pain.
He couldn't hold out much longer. They were adapting. Getting smarter in their attacks — beginning to coordinate.
And he was running out of tricks.
It was curious. He had faced near-certain death in the past. But that had all been before Alice — and it had never scared him.
Now, despite the battle raging around him, Alice's face was all he could see. It propelled every swing of his arms, every lunge out of harm's way, every attack he launched.
And he was afraid.
The thought of Alice alone, without him to protect her and make her happy? That scared him in a way he had never felt.
It was her face that he saw when the odds finally overtook him, when he was too occupied with the three newborns in front of him and the two closing in on Bree to notice the one who had sneaked up behind him and got its arms around him.
He fought like a cornered tiger, but in his heart, he knew the truth.
It was over.
Time seemed to slow down as it happened. When an overwhelming wave of fear hit him abruptly, he at first believed it to be his own.
But then the crushing arms around him abruptly went slack. The newborns before him began to back away.
As he dropped his partially crushed body onto the ground and painfully rolled, trying to put some ground between himself and his nearest attackers, Jasper had just enough time to realize that that wave of fear was coming from the vampires all around him.
But the snarls weren't. No, they were different. They were….
Wolves!
Three of them crashed past him, ignoring him as their jaws locked down on the heads of the three newborns who had just attacked him.
Remaining on his stomach in painfully exhausted relief, Jasper's eyes scanned the scene around him — and perhaps the only sight more shocking than the dozen-plus werewolves making short work of Albert's army was the sight of Carlisle and Alice right in the middle of them, working with the wolves in concerted attack as they fought their way toward Jasper.
The wolves were on their side. He would never have believed it possible.
And then nothing else mattered. Because Alice ripped the head off the last newborn standing between the two of them, and then she was at his side, assuming a protective crouch over him, snarling at any newborns who dared to venture close to him as they fled, with a savagery he had never before seen from his tiny mate.
Tearing his eyes away from that welcome sight, he once again tried to get up to defend his mate, continuing to scan the scene around him. But the wolves were taking care of the last of the army. Carlisle was at Bree's side, and she was safe too.
It was over.
And then Jasper's eyes were closed, relaxing into the ground as Alice threw her arms around his already repairing body, tearless sobs racking her frame. Her emotion, too, was an overwhelming wave — but one he welcomed.
Her head hurt.
That was Bella's first coherent thought as she slowly swam into consciousness, whimpering softly — still too out of it to notice yet that that sound was heavily muffled.
Her second awareness was that her shoulders and wrists hurt, far worse than her head.
And then, even before she opened her eyes, it all started flooding back to her:
Edward dragging a phasing Jacob off into the woods…
Carlisle giving her a choice: protect her or stop Edward from killing Jacob...
Herself standing frozen on the sidewalk for long moments, paralyzed with fear, desperately trying to see or hear any of what was happening in the woods, until she finally remembered Carlisle's instructions and started running toward the hospital, feet slipping in the snow and ice, her heart beating out of her chest…
Hard, granite hands, grabbing her less than thirty feet from the safety of the hospital, nearly knocking the breath out of her...
And then darkness. The claustrophobically tiny interior of a car trunk. Trapped. Trapped.
Albert! It had to be.
She had never even seen her abductor's face. And would it really even have mattered if she had? She knew exactly whose face he would show her, and she certainly wasn't eager to go through that torture again.
Like it had happened in a dream, as consciousness slowly began to dawn, she relived the darkness closing in around her as the lid was slammed, being bumped around painfully in the back of the trunk as the car took turn after turn at high speeds, bouncing down a dirt road at some point as her imagination ran away with her.
Albert would never even have to touch her, she had realized. He could push the car off the side of a cliff with her in it if Edward got too close. He could drive it into the water and let her slowly drown as he kept Edward busy in a fight to the death. She would be just as dead either way.
What if she never even made it out of that trunk alive?
Panic had started to set in, as she kicked and beat her fists against the trunk lid, not even registering the pain in either injured hand. She had to get out of there.
Only one thought had kept her panic at bay: Edward. Edward would be looking for her. He would find her.
He had to.
Would she know the difference this time, she had wondered? When that trunk next opened and she looked into the face of her mate, would her only clue as to whether that face belonged to Albert or to Edward be how he treated her, whether he pulled her out of the trunk to hold her or to hurt her?
That facet of it…the terror of not knowing…was nearly as scary as the physical danger. Perhaps more so.
She couldn't let Albert destroy her mind again. If she made it through this, she never again wanted to associate Edward's face with Albert. She had to see the difference this time.
More memories flooded back in as she drew closer to full consciousness. When the car had finally come to a stop, that was even worse. She had heard her own heartbeat for long seconds, as loud as her terrified breaths, not knowing what was about to happen. She'd heard the footsteps approaching, and she'd hyperventilated, suppressing the urge to scream.
And then sudden light had flooded her eyes from inside the trunk when the trunk lid was wrenched open without warning, closely followed by a sharp and sudden pain in her head before she could get her eyes open again.
And that was the last thing she remembered. Everything had gone black. She must have been knocked out.
But where was she now?
The pain in her shoulders intensified, drew all of her attention. Her eyes finally forced themselves open, her vision swimming as she tried to focus in the snowy darkness.
The sight of the snowy, moonlit landscape several feet beneath her face, one that should have been beautiful, instead made her shiver.
Cold. She was so cold. She still wore the same clothes she had worn to the funeral — the warm gray sweater dress and thick tights Alice had brought her that morning — but she had no coat or shoes. As her eyes focused in on the ground below her, she saw both, discarded in the snow. Her coat was shredded into pieces. The warm boots Alice had given her lay uselessly in the snow.
In no way was she dressed to be out in such extreme temperatures, at least not for long.
And that wasn't all she noticed. Multiple other revelations barraged her awareness at the same time.
One, her arms were stretched uncomfortably high above her slumped head. But when she instinctively tried to pull them down, they didn't budge — sending a sharp stab of pain through her sore, stiff shoulders.
Full awareness of her situation burst horrifyingly onto the scene with a gasp, one that was, again, inexplicably muffled.
She was tied up, she realized. Her back was shoved hard up against a rough tree at the edge of a clearing that reminded her entirely too much of hers and Edward's meadow.
Rough rope was painfully cinched around her waist to hold her tight up against that tree. More rope wound tightly around her wrists and kept her arms wrenched high over her head, secured to a branch far above and behind her, arching her torso. As she had slumped there, unconscious, all of her weight had been hanging from her pulled-back arms and the rope around her waist.
Immediately, her loose-hanging feet scrambled to find purchase on the ground and push herself up.
As tightly stretched as she was, only the balls of her feet could just barely reach the ground, and the snow was so cold through the tights. But it gave her just enough leverage that the pain in her shoulders lessened somewhat, along with the feeling of having her air cut off by the too-tight rope around her waist.
But that rope wasn't the only reason she struggled to get enough air. When she instinctively sucked in a breath to scream Edward's name, to scream for help until he found her, she found that very little sound could escape from her mouth — nor could air get in.
She was gagged, she understood with horror. A thick wad of cloth had been shoved into her mouth, with another strip of some kind of cloth tied tightly around it. It was part of the coat that had been torn off of her, she realized. She could both taste and smell the leather.
She was completely helpless, a sitting duck for Albert, stretched out with no way to protect herself.
Her feet, at least, seemed unsecured. But there was still an uncomfortable tightness around her ankles.
Upon further examination, carefully lifting up one foot and then another until she could see them, she found something even more disturbing than if her feet had been bound together.
A single rope was tied individually to each separate ankle, with long ends left trailing on the ground — ready to be secured to anything Albert chose.
It didn't take too much imagination to understand the purpose of that. Albert intended to render her completely helpless, unable even to close her legs.
Panic set in again. She had to escape.
Her hands twisted desperately against the rope, abrading her skin. It was too tight even to turn her wrists in their bonds. There was absolutely no give in the rope around her waist either, no matter how hard she pulled. With her toes, she even tried pushing the ropes off of first one ankle and then the other.
But it was no use. Even if her toes hadn't been numb with cold, the knots were too tight. There was nothing she could do — not even scream out her frustration and terror, nearly choking on the thick cloth that hampered her short, panicked gasps.
All she could do was wait. Wait to die. Wait for Edward. Wait for Albert.
Just wait.
As Thomas drove away, trying to push down his guilt over the orders he'd just followed to leave an innocent human girl tied up in a snowy field behind him, like some kind of macabre offering for a truly sadistic monster, he pulled a little cell phone from his pocket and turned it over and over in his hands, debating what to do next.
When Albert had first pressed that phone into his hand a few hours before, as they swapped places behind a rock outside Seattle, it had been accompanied by a written note and a whispered instruction to keep it on his person.
That hadn't been part of the original plan, the one they'd discussed during his shielded briefing. Thomas's first thought was that the phone must be for communication purposes so they could better synchronize their timing.
But when he had a chance to read the note once he got far enough away from the army, there were other instructions. The phone's power was off. He was to power on that phone only after dropping off Bella Swan in Albert's meadow, and not until he was on his way back toward Forks afterward, where he was to abandon the abduction vehicle in a pre-designated location.
By that point, his part in the plan would be nearly complete. So the purpose of the phone clearly wasn't for communication with Albert.
He could smell the girl's scent on it, along with her vampire's. But most pungently, he could smell the foul odor of something akin to wet dog — an odor he'd caught a whiff of when Edward Cullen got into the confrontation outside the hospital that had drawn him away from Bella. He'd smelled it on the girl's clothes, too.
It was clearly Bella Swan's phone, which Albert must have stolen in Forks, just prior to his return to Seattle to change places.
Why did Albert want him to have that?
It gave Thomas an uneasy feeling. Like just maybe, he was being set up. Used as a diversion, a decoy...
Or just a loose end to be tied up, something to keep Edward Cullen busy while Albert carried out his vengeance.
Much like Bree would also be a loose end...
But following orders wasn't debatable. It was Bree's only chance. Albert had sworn she wouldn't be harmed if Thomas toed the line, so he had no choice in this matter — none at all. There was far too much riding on his obedience.
Everything, in fact.
So his thumb pressed the little button to power on Bella Swan's phone, fully aware it might be the equivalent of signing his own death warrant.
At least Bree would be safe. His own life was a small price to pay for her freedom.
And after what he had just done, he deserved it.
Even with the help of Esme, Carmen, and Eleazar — who Edward had immediately called in as reinforcements in the search, leaving the other three Denalis surrounding the meadow, with Kate in charge — tracking the green car that had abducted Bella was proving impossible.
The six of them split up into groups of two, each of them expanding out in a radius from the hospital, checking the major roads: Carmen and Eleazar, Rose and Emmett, and Esme with Edward.
But after a half hour, there was no trace of that green car anywhere. And with each successive check-in report that the others had been unable to find anything either, Edward spiraled a little further.
"We're going to find her, Edward," Esme assured him repeatedly. But even she seemed to know that the more time that passed, the less likely that seemed. The look on her face each time she made eye contact with him became progressively more worried. Her hand as she gripped his shoulder felt more and more desperate, as though she knew exactly what would happen to him if they didn't find his mate.
He didn't bother reading her thoughts to find out. She knew nothing more about where Bella was than he did.
They all converged outside the Cullen house to regroup — a suggestion that Edward didn't love, because it involved some backtracking. But they were accomplishing little by simply running roads at random, and by that time, he was near apoplexy.
The chatter of his family around him, even as they all expressed grave concern over why Jasper, Alice, and Carlisle were all still unreachable, was little more than background noise. With his eyes closed, he braced himself with his arm up against a tree, deceptively still, running over every single piece of information he knew, turning it over and over in his mind obsessively.
There was something. There had to be. Some tiny, insignificant-seeming thing he had missed that would blow the whole plot wide open.
He ran through the whole day in his mind. Every single event that had taken place since Bella left his side that morning, with Jacob. Every single word that had passed between them. Every single terrifying change of plans as the day went on. Every action he himself had taken. Every single phone call…every single thing Bella had told him at the hospital...
And then suddenly, he was no longer still.
"Bella's phone!" he called out, his eyes snapping open and his body going ramrod straight. His own phone was in his hand in the next instant, eyes intent on the screen as he pulled up the location. "She turned it off for the funeral. It came back on earlier, when I was looking for her, right before Carlisle called to tell me she was at the hospital. Carlisle told me where she was as soon as I answered, so I never checked her location. I just assumed she turned it back on. But Bella told me at the hospital that Jacob threw her phone into the woods when he attacked her. She didn't even have it by then. It wasn't Bella who turned it on."
He could feel the concerned looks of his family, sharing worried glances with each other, their gazes burning into him as he waited for what seemed an eternity for the location to come up. It was taking longer than usual. Like it might have been turned off again, which would undoubtedly be the end of his sanity.
"It could be anybody," Emmett was the first to try to bring him back down to earth, his voice surprisingly gentle. "Anyone could have found it."
Edward didn't even look up. He suppressed the urge to shake the device in his hands, willing it to locate her phone faster. "Out in the middle of the fucking woods, Emmett? Close to where Bella was? Come on."
Emmett clearly didn't want to get his hopes up. "Could be a wolf. They could have caught her scent on it, tracked it down that way."
Edward's heart seemed to jump into his throat as a little green dot came up on the screen, on a road that was closer to Seattle than it was to Forks — and nowhere near La Push.
He held it up triumphantly for his family to see. "So could Albert and the goddamn shield. It's one of them, Emmett. One of them was stalking Bella and Jacob from a distance, and they have her phone. It doesn't matter which one. If I find either one of them, I can make them talk."
Emmett stared at the screen for a second. Then his face grew hard as he made eye contact with his brother. "I'm coming with you. I'll drive."
Despite the souped-up engine in Emmett's Jeep and Emmett's lead foot, it still felt to Edward like they were moving at a snail's pace as they homed in on that little green dot on his screen, drawing closer to Bella's phone with every mile — and hopefully, to Bella and her abductor. He held onto the small device like a lifeline, eyes never leaving the display, grateful for Emmett behind the wheel so that he never had to take his focus away from the phone.
He soon realized that the phone was moving toward them, not away, headed back toward Forks from the general direction of Seattle. What that meant, he didn't know. And at that point, anything he didn't know only terrified him further.
"Come on. Come on," Edward muttered through gritted teeth, willing the Jeep to move faster.
"How far?" Emmett growled back.
"Two miles. We're close."
While the Denalis and Rose had gone back to keep the meadow covered, Esme had insisted on coming with her sons. She sat in the back seat behind Edward, trying to soothe him with a gentle hand on his shoulder. He barely knew she was there.
It was less than another minute before Edward's attention was finally jerked away from the phone by Emmett's somber announcement.
"Son of a bitch. It's him, all right."
When Edward's eyes shot up to see in front of them, his heart lurched. Coming straight at them, getting closer fast, was the very same green Camry that they had all seen on the hospital security footage.
He had found her.
God, he desperately hoped that he had found her.
Emmett's fingers tightened on the wheel. "I've got him, bro. Everybody hold on."
The Jeep took a lurch and spun around on the road, going broad-side and blocking off the road in front of them.
Brakes squealed, as the other car came to a stop within feet of Emmett's Jeep.
The driver threw it into reverse and slammed his foot down on the accelerator. Tires squealed, but the green Camry didn't move again — because by that time, Edward was already standing behind it, holding it in place with one hand.
Emmett dragged the driver out and threw him up against the side of the Jeep, teeth bared as he held their prey by the throat.
It was him. Thomas, the shield. He had Bella's phone, because they had just tracked him down using it, and he was driving the same car that had been at the hospital when she was abducted.
Edward processed all of that in a millisecond, already frantically searching the inside of the car for Bella, then ripping the trunk lid completely off, desperate to find his mate.
But the inside of the car was empty, and so was the trunk. Bella wasn't there.
But she had been. Her scent exploded in the back of his throat when he tore the trunk lid off.
He could still smell her fear. She must have been utterly terrified.
It only fueled his fury.
He spun around, eyes enraged as he started to move in the direction of Thomas.
But Esme beat him to it, hitting Thomas from the side and knocking him out of Emmett's grasp, onto the ground. She crouched over him, gripping him by the throat.
She had smelled Bella's fear too.
"Where is she?" Esme snarled, more out of control than her sons had ever seen her. "Where is my daughter?"
Edward's gaze was deadly as he and Emmett both rapidly moved to stand over them, Emmett assuming a bodyguard-like stance behind Esme, who had just tackled a newborn alone.
"Oh, don't worry," Edward said with quiet, deadly fury as he drew to a stop, looking down with cold, vengeful eyes at the shield. "He may not tell you, but he's going to tell me." His fingers flexed as he bent down, grabbing Thomas by the collar to jerk him to his feet. "I'll make sure of it."
She was getting colder.
Already, Bella could no longer feel her feet. It was getting harder to support her weight on her tiptoes. Several times already, she'd slipped, painfully taking her weight on her arms and waist again, until she could get her numb toes to once again make contact with the icy ground and hold her up.
In the cold air, breathing was becoming more challenging too. With her mouth packed full of the stifling gag, cloth tied tightly across her lips, she could only get air through her nose. The wind constantly whipped her hair into her face, hampering her breathing, and her nose kept clogging up with the tears she couldn't fight.
She didn't have much longer. She'd either freeze to death, or she'd suffocate.
Both might be preferable to surviving until Albert arrived.
Because she already knew Edward wouldn't be coming.
With nothing to do but hang there, tortured by her own thoughts, she'd long since figured out why the meadow in front of her looked so much like hers and Edward's. And now she knew why Edward had been so adamant about staying away from it since his return.
Alice hadn't just had a vision of her being raped and murdered. No. She'd seen it taking place in their meadow.
But it wasn't their meadow.
It was just another trick by Albert. Another illusion, another clever shapeshift.
But Edward and Alice wouldn't know that, especially with the snow. Edward would be looking for her in the wrong place. And he would be frantic. Beside himself. Agonized.
She was lost. And Edward... he would surely be lost too. For him to know she died the way Albert planned to kill her...it was too much.
She would be better off if she could find a way to end her own life before Albert got there. She could just stop fighting that cloth packing her mouth, allow it to make its way down into her throat...
That thought had barely crossed her mind when even that small measure of hope was taken from her.
An all too familiar, velvet voice suddenly hissed right into her ear from slightly behind her.
"Have you missed me, love?"
Her entire body jerked with terror, her head snapping sideways with a muffled yelp to see what she already knew she would find.
A perfect replica of Edward, a falsely gentle smile on the handsome face, his face so close to hers she could feel his ice-cold breath.
To be so close to finding Bella — only to be stymied by a newborn vampire who refused to tell them anything and wouldn't drop his mental shield, no matter how much Edward and Emmett pummeled him — was a new kind of frustration.
Edward had unleashed every cruelty on Thomas that his monster could devise. He'd threatened to remove body parts. Then he'd carried through. Slowly. Several of Thomas's fingers and toes lay on the ground at Edward's feet.
He hadn't burned them yet. He had certainly threatened. And those weren't idle threats.
Nor was the threat of what he intended to remove next.
But something was keeping Thomas from giving in — and it wasn't fear for his own life.
The newborn shield had yet to speak a single word.
With anyone else, with the notable exception of Bella, Edward could have just pulled answers straight from his thoughts. But Thomas kept his shield firmly in place, his mind silent to Edward, along with Esme's and Emmett's. Edward could hear nothing.
"I said tell me where she is," Edward screamed in frustration, driving the heel of his hand into Thomas's gut once again, as Emmett and Esme each held an arm, forcing Thomas to stand with his back to the Jeep.
"Edward! Stop!"
Aside from Bella's, he couldn't imagine a more welcome voice in that moment.
Alice.
But he didn't even turn around to face her. "He knows where Bella is," he growled, his hand squeezing the shield's throat, suppressing the urge to rip his head right off his shoulders. "He fucking knows."
"Yes, he does. But I know what he wants." Alice's voice was closer this time, right next to his ear. Her hand squeezed his shoulder. "Edward, stop. He's not going to tell you anything this way."
She turned her attention to the shield.
"Bree is safe," she assured him. "She's with my mate, Jasper, and our leader, Carlisle. They'll be here any moment."
For the first time, Thomas's steely disposition faltered. And for the first time, he spoke.
"It's a trick. You've killed her." His voice broke. "She's dead."
"No, she's not," Alice soothed. "I know why you did what you did. She does too, even though you never told her. And she feels the same way about you."
Edward's patience was running thin. Not being able to hear the minds near him was disorienting in the extreme — and being out of the loop was simply not a thing he had patience for at the moment, nor was listening to his sister inexplicably trying to play matchmaker when the life of Edward's mate was on the line.
"What the hell are you talking about, Alice?" Edward growled. "I'm out of time! I have to know what he knows!"
"Bree!" Thomas suddenly shouted, jerking his arms so hard that even Emmett nearly lost his grip on him. "No! Get out of here!"
Following the shield's gaze, Edward turned and looked over his shoulder to see his father and Jasper approaching, with a curly-haired newborn. The girl Carlisle had wanted to save when he first went to Seattle to observe the army, no doubt.
Edward's head snapped back around to look at Thomas with sudden clarity — and hope. "You did it for her," he breathed. "Albert threatened her."
The tiny female vampire pushed past Edward at a dead run, running up to Thomas, who tried desperately to free his arms and get to her. "They're all dead," she told him excitedly, laying a hand in the middle of his chest. "We're free! Thomas, you have to tell them what they need to know!"
But his teeth bared as he growled at Edward and Emmett, who were now entirely too close to his mate. "They're just going to kill us anyway. Damn it, don't you touch her! Bree, run!"
It was the first aggression he had shown since they found him.
Edward spoke up, edging Bree out of the way and grabbing hold of Thomas's shoulders, getting right in his face to regain his attention. His voice had gone from furious to soft, understanding, soothing.
"Listen to me. That feeling you feel, that anger and fear that's threatening to consume you right now? It's because Bree is your mate. You'd do anything to protect her. If you tell me what I need to know, you have my word we won't hurt you anymore. We won't hurt her. But Bella is my mate, just like Bree is yours. So if anything happens to her because of your silence, I'm coming for you both. Do you understand me? If you want to protect Bree, tell me where Bella is. Now."
Thomas's eyes flicked back to Bree, who nodded urgently. "Tell him. Thomas, please, before it's too late. Tell them."
Her word was his command. Without a word, Thomas dropped the shield. And Edward saw everything, all at once.
He went stiff, glassy-eyed, his breathing picking up as Thomas rapidly went through every horrifying thing he needed to know. Alice gasped softly as her visions of the future also returned, her body slumping into Jasper's side as he supported her.
And then Edward disappeared at a dead run.
"Jasper! Emmett! You have to go with him!" Alice yelled, her voice high-pitched with fear. And without question, the two of them tore off after Edward.
Esme gripped Alice by the shoulders desperately, taking Jasper's place to steady her. "Alice! What is it? Where's Bella?"
Alice's face was stricken when she snapped back to the present, eyes searching Esme's desperately. "He has her."
"Who? Edward?"
Alice shook her head. "No. Albert." Her pained eyes met Esme's. "It's a different meadow. I had it all wrong."
The scene he saw in Thomas's memory was not one Edward would soon forget.
Most importantly, he now knew exactly where Bella was and how to get there. The route he had taken in was the first thing Thomas showed him.
A meadow. One that looked exactly like his and Bella's meadow, the one uselessly guarded by the Denalis. Albert had used his army to landscape a similar clearing miles away to look exactly like Edward's and Bella's meadow. A clever ruse to keep Edward and Alice on the wrong track, to keep the Cullens guarding the wrong location.
That was why Alice's vision had changed after Albert's first attempt on Bella, he now understood. The original vision had been their meadow, but that attempt had been thwarted when Bella was rescued. Albert had surely known that was the first place Edward would look if Bella went missing for even a millisecond, even if Albert could get past Edward's defenses to take her away from him again.
When the visions persisted, Edward and Alice had believed only the timing had changed, with the addition of the snow. Neither of them had noticed the subtle differences in the landscape, especially under cover of snow.
But that wasn't all Thomas showed him.
He also swiftly showed Edward exactly what he had done:
The abduction. The instructions from Albert on exactly how to leave Bella bound and helpless until his arrival.
Those instructions — they flooded Edward with white-hot rage. Had Edward had the time, Thomas would have been in grave danger of becoming ashes.
But Thomas hadn't gone through with all of it, thank God.
To be clear, he unequivocally would have — in the name of protecting Bree. But he had been denying his thirst of late, loathe to kill humans. And the smell of Bella's delicious blood had nearly driven him to insanity.
He'd got as far as partially binding her and gagging her, tying her to the tree with her arms high above her head as she slumped over lifelessly — a mental image that would stick with Edward forever now, having seen the memory in Thomas's mind.
The bastard had been in the beginning stages of binding her legs, when in his dread of carrying out that task, he accidentally took a breath. The smell of her blood had simply become too much for a thirsty newborn, even one carrying out a mission to protect his own mate.
He had been forced to flee, leaving Bella's ankles unsecured and her body still fully clothed, aside from the coat and shoes he'd already removed — putting off the rest until the last possible moment because he vehemently didn't want to go through with any of it.
All the shield had been able to think about was Bree. What he would do if the same thing happened to her. And it had agonized him.
Even Edward could begrudgingly understand that Thomas had truly felt he had no choice.
Even so, despite those small mercies, Edward knew his very human mate was going to be frostbitten — or freeze to death — or suffocate, if he didn't find her soon.
Or something even worse, if Albert got there before he did.
Edward pushed his speed a little faster.
He had to get there.
"You and I are going to pick up right where we left off, love."
As Bella tried uselessly to shrink away from the icy fingers that traced her gagged face, forcing her to stare into amber eyes that were identical to her mate's as her captor leaned in far too close, with his other hand propped on the tree behind her head, only one thought was clear enough to cut through her absolute terror at what she knew was surely about to happen to her:
He wasn't Edward. And he couldn't make her believe he was. Not this time.
He didn't even look like Edward to her anymore, despite the identical features. She could tell the difference now, and it was glaringly obvious.
All she could see was Albert. His cruelty. His evil. Nothing even resembling her Edward.
Both body and mind knew her mate. And this wasn't him.
It was the one comfort she had, if she was about to die. And she wasn't going to let Albert get inside her head and change that, no matter what he said or did to try to make that happen. He wasn't going to destroy what she had worked so hard to regain.
He could kill her. He could hurt her terribly in the process, and likely would.
He could even force her to say Edward's name again when he did it. To look into "Edward's" eyes when he hurt her.
But he couldn't get inside her head. He couldn't make her believe the lie.
Her mind was made up. She wasn't going to see Edward in her murderer when she died. Albert didn't get to have that. He could take everything else from her, her life included. But he wasn't going to make her believe it was Edward when he did.
It wasn't much. But as Albert began circling around the tree, cruelly terrorizing her by circling in and out of her field of vision as he taunted her, building up her fear that was just a sick aphrodisiac to him, it was all she had.
The only way she could fight back.
Albert leaned in close again, pressing his body up against hers, his fingers tracing her jaw over the gag as she tried to flinch away in disgust.
"I'm going to make you say my name when I claim you," he whispered in her ear, in Edward's voice. His hand closed around her throat. "Just like last time. Edward. I'm going to make you say it until you believe it, love. My mate. Mine."
The worst part of Edward's desperate run toward Albert's meadow was the final four and a half miles, once he was close enough to begin picking up some of Albert's thoughts — from farther out than he could normally manage, given his urgent determination to break through.
His first fuzzy glimpse through Albert's eyes gutted him — Bella's terrified face being the first thing he saw through the monster's mind — devastating him with the certain knowledge that he was too late, that Albert was already there, alone with his Bella.
Equally horrifying were the occasional flashes Edward could just make out of Bella's tied body through the sadistic vampire's mind as Albert finished slowly stalking around the tree, just as Edward came into the outskirts of his range — the areas of her body Albert focused on; his lustfully twisted thoughts; his frustration that Thomas hadn't followed his instructions on stripping and binding her to the letter, something Albert intended to quickly remedy…
It was clear that he had been circling her, playing with the blind spots in her vision, drawing out the terror.
Bella's terror, and Edward's too, as Albert's thoughts began to come into clearer focus — the things he planned to do to her.
Edward recognized his own hand through Albert's eyes as the other vampire softly stroked her tear-streaked face with a single, deceptively gentle finger, making her flinch and whimper into her gag. Then that same hand closed around her throat.
"Edward," Albert was saying as his thoughts became clear enough to hear what he was saying, and Edward knew all too well his mate would hear those words in his voice. "I'm going to make you say it until you believe it, love. My mate. Mine."
Albert was disguised as him. Edward had known that, of course. But it was jarring to see it through Albert's eyes, to see his own hand being used to terrorize his mate.
It was Edward's voice that Bella would be hearing; his face she would be seeing.
Through Albert's disturbing, twisted thoughts, Edward watched Bella squeeze her eyes shut, trying to turn her face away.
Edward growled in fury when Albert roughly grabbed her hair and yanked it to pull her face back toward him, increasing the pressure on her already over-stretched arms. A muffled cry of pain ripped out of her throat.
"Oh, no, love," Albert sneered softly, right in her face. "No, no, no. You look at your mate when he speaks to you." Albert gave her hair a controlled but vicious, painful yank. "Do I make myself clear?"
Her eyes were open now, terrified and fixed on Albert's — Edward's — Albert's face. From up close. Her body tried to shrink away in terror, but she had nowhere to go.
Having Bella look at him like that, even through another mind, was among Edward's most awful fears. He wanted to shove the image away, close his eyes against it. But he couldn't.
He grit his teeth, trying to coax more speed from his legs.
His primary focus was watching Bella — getting to Bella — so his attention was now divided when it came to the rest of Albert's thoughts. But he picked up on the tail end of some fleeting dissatisfaction in Albert's mind, something that wasn't going his way.
Before Edward could focus on it further, Albert abruptly reached out and ripped the sleeve off of Bella's dress, startling Bella and Edward both with the suddenness of it.
And then he tied it tightly around her eyes, blindfolding her and increasing her visible panic threefold.
It was Edward's voice that Albert now planned to torture her with as he terrorized her, rather than his face.
He intended to remove the blindfold later, when he was done toying with her and took her down from the tree to finish his vile fantasy on the snowy ground. He wanted to remove it at the worst moment, forcing Bella to see Edward's face as he carried out the awful vision Edward had been tortured by for months, when Albert would lose control and tear her body to shreds, taking his pleasure and his revenge as Bella swiftly bled to death.
Through Albert's mind, Edward could see Bella begin to hyperventilate as Albert trailed his finger down her blindfolded face, to her neck, to the neckline of her dress, dipping a finger inside, once again cruelly grasping her hair to hold her still. Her panicked breaths were short and shallow as she fought to get enough air through the overstuffed gag in her mouth, the cloth so tight it cut into the sides of her cheeks.
And Edward ran faster yet, propelled by blinding fear as he saw in Albert's mind what was coming next.
He was done simply terrorizing. He was ready to truly hurt her.
"Let's make you a little more uncomfortable, love," Albert cruelly teased her from far too close to Bella's face. Without warning, he grasped her chin painfully tight and ran his tongue down the side of her face as Bella tried desperately to squirm away from him, gasping for air through her nose and still hyperventilating. She tried to scream when his vile hand trailed down her body, resting on the side of her butt. His voice went soft, gentle…Edward-like. "You don't know how long I've waited for you. How long I've thought about making you mine."
An enraged Edward knew Albert's intention a moment before it happened — he knew Bella's face was about to disappear from his sight, replaced by Albert's new focus as he stooped down to the ground in front of her: the loose ends of those ropes at Bella's feet.
Albert was ready to finish the binding job he'd assigned Thomas.
But Edward was getting close. Very close.
Edward watched a facsimile of his own hand reach toward one of the ropes. He saw Albert take hold of it, start slowly pulling it outward, as Bella desperately kicked her feet, trying to delay the inevitable. Edward was close enough now to hear Bella's muffled shrieks of terror with his own ears as her left leg was steadily pulled outward.
He was close enough, in fact, that suddenly, he was watching himself burst out of the woods and into the clearing, directly opposite the tree where Bella was bound, as Albert detected his unexpected presence and dropped Bella's leg, snarling.
For just the shortest moment, as he skidded to a stop and dropped into a crouch, Edward could see himself in duplicate: first, through Albert's mind, as Albert stared back at him; and secondly, through his own eyes, as he stared at his own face on the horrifying monster before him.
It was surreal.
Moreover, it was terrifying. Albert stood practically on top of Bella, too close. Time seemed to slow down. To stop completely.
Despite his formidable speed, Edward could never get there before Albert could end her life, if he chose. He could do it in one, swift motion. He could snap her neck, and she would be gone — Edward wouldn't even be able to change her.
But Albert knew all of that too. And Edward was listening when the bastard considered that at the moment, cutting his losses and leaving Bella Swan breathing was his one chance for escape.
And then, like the coward he was, Albert turned and fled into the woods, knowing Edward would go straight to his mate, rather than give chase.
Which, of course, was exactly what he did.
Bella, unable to see, had no idea the real Edward was there or what was happening — that she was finally safe. She pressed her legs together the moment Albert dropped her foot, desperately twisting against the ropes that held her to the tree as she reacted to his outraged snarl, rubbing her bloodied wrists all the more raw as she frantically tried to pull her arms free before he could try anything else.
Edward was in front of her in the next instant, immediately pulling the blindfold off of her eyes.
"Bella… Bella...God, baby, I'm here. It's me," he assured her, near pleading. He knew better than to call her love. He'd heard the sickening way Albert used it. "It's me."
He watched as her eyes adjusted and she focused in on him, with full and horrified realization that his face would do nothing to calm her.
His mate would only see the face of her tormentor.
When Albert abruptly released the rope around her leg, her ankles painfully banging together as she was unexpectedly able to close her legs, Bella didn't know why, and she didn't care. All she cared about, in her panic, was the fact that he had stopped. The fact that she was temporarily spared.
Desperately squeezing her legs together, she fought to free herself, knowing it was futile.
And then, all of a sudden, she could see. The blindfold disappeared so quickly she didn't even feel it being removed.
But when her eyes refocused on the face in front of her in the darkness, her heart jumped up into her throat.
Blindfolding her, talking in her ear, terrorizing her? It had worked.
She didn't see Albert anymore. She saw Edward.
He looked like her Edward now. He sounded like her Edward.
And that utterly broke her. Her panic absolutely exploded.
Edward couldn't really be there. He would be searching for her in the wrong meadow. He wouldn't know where to find her.
And if he was there, he would be tearing Albert to shreds. But there was still only one of him.
It was a trick. Albert had got inside her head again, used the blindfold and a change of clothes to mess with her mind, suddenly releasing her leg at the peak of her terror to convince her he was now Edward, there to rescue her — the cruelest trick imaginable.
Seeing Edward when this happened to her...it was the one thing she couldn't bear.
But she wasn't done yet. She was going to fight it.
Edward had expected Bella to react with fear when she saw his face. That much was to be expected, as desperately as he hated it.
But if anything, when she saw him, she looked even more horrified than she had through Albert's thoughts — a visible escalation of her terror. The blind fear on her face when she focused on him, while hardly a surprise, cut him to the core regardless. Her struggles were worse now than they had been with Albert. Any part of him that had desperately hoped she might immediately recognize him died a swift death.
She flinched away in utter terror when he reached for her face again, intent on removing the gag from between lips that rivaled his own for cold at the moment.
He hesitated. She didn't want him to touch her. But he couldn't just leave it there. She couldn't even breathe.
Gritting his teeth, he gently cupped the back of her head in one hand to hold her still and pulled the cloth free anyway, despite her struggles.
"No! NO!" Bella screamed hoarsely as soon as her mouth was free, kicking at him with her feet. "You're not him! EDWARD, HELP! HELP!"
"It is me! God, Bella...sweetheart…it's me," he frantically reassured her, holding his hands out to the side, palms facing her, his own desperation bleeding through into his voice. He didn't dare touch her again, but he had to get her down before she pulled her arms out of the sockets. "Bella, I need to untie you. I swear to God I'm not going to hurt you. It's me. Look at my clothes. It's only me."
Given her voice back, Bella only fought harder, twisting and turning her body until her shoulders nearly dislocated, kicking her feet in his direction. "Stop saying that!" she screamed, her voice broken and ravaged. "You're not him. I'm not letting you do this to me again! You're not Edward! Get away from me, you bastard!"
In one swift motion that her eyes wouldn't even see coming, so as not to frighten her, Edward reached up and snapped the ropes that held her arms above her, with the binding around her waist quickly meeting the same fate. He gently caught her as she fell forward into him, then backed off again when she pushed away from him in fright. She desperately tried to run, but her legs wouldn't hold her up, and she ended up on her side on the snowy ground, looking up at him in terror, defeated.
"Please," she whispered, shrinking away, visibly giving up on fighting back, at least physically, and his heart broke. "I'll never say it. You're not him."
"I won't hurt you," he promised gently, although he could see she didn't believe him — didn't believe he was even Edward. He slowly squatted down to her level, still showing her his hands, not making any sudden motions. "I won't. I won't even touch you. I promise you, Bella, it's only me."
He had to get through to her. He had to get her up off of the cold, snowy ground, get her to safety.
He inched the tiniest bit closer to her, keeping his hands where she could see them. She closed her eyes, turning her head away.
"You're not him," she whispered, and it was so quiet even he barely heard it.
"I'm Edward. I'm real, and you're safe. Please just let me get you somewhere warm, Bella. You're freezing, love."
The familiar endearment had slipped out without his realizing it, and he immediately froze, hating himself all the more for it.
Bu Bella actually looked at him then, for a few heartrending seconds. Then her face crumpled like she was about to burst into tears. "Edward?" she pled, studying him closely, and her voice broke. "It's...it's really you? You're real?"
Before he could even answer, Emmett and Jasper finally caught up with him, tearing into the clearing and quickly coming at the two of them from either side.
"It's me," Edward called out again, rising slowly to his feet and holding up his hands. He was quickly beginning to hate that phrase, but he repeated it again anyway, for the sake of his excitable but lethal 'big brother'. Emmett was wholly intent on taking his head off, right in front of Bella, and asking it questions later. "It's me, Emmett. Test me."
Edward quickly gave both Emmett and Jasper the answers to their questions they mentally asked.
Emmett only snarled in return, still in the grip of his own monster. "He's getting away!"
Edward's jaw clenched as his eyes flicked back toward Bella. "Like hell he is. Get Bella somewhere warm."
When Emmett made the mistake of reaching toward him, to offer going on his own while Jasper and Edward got Bella to safety, he nearly lost a hand. Edward snapped, cutting him off before he could even make that offer.
"He has too much of a head start. I'm the only one who can catch him, and she's terrified of me right now. Get her home, and get her warm. Stay together and don't let her out of your sight for any reason."
"Edward," Jasper tried next, but he got cut off too.
"No." Edward's voice was hard. "Albert is mine. I want both of you with Bella."
"Edward…" Bella called his name, reaching out for him.
But he was already gone.
TO BE CONTINUED...
Author's Note:
I want to thank everyone who's expressed concern for my situation. I also want to thank you all for coming back to this story! I had expected that I would have lost most if not all of my readers after such a long absence, but it was so wonderful to hear from you all again. Each and every review made my day, and I can't WAIT to hear what you all thought of this one.
Thank you especially to the reader(s) who posted the updates to social media! That was a HUGE help and greatly appreciated. Anyone can feel free to post about story updates to any fanfiction group, along with my FF author name, but it would be best not to post directly on my actual FB profile. That account is compromised. I hope to reestablish a social media presence soon, but it can't be with that account or name.
The next update may have to be pushed back by one week, to the following Tuesday. It's not what I want, but it's probably necessary, just because of how I have to do this now. Holiday weekends throw wrenches into my opportunities. If I can, I'll post any timeframe updates on my profile.