Harry and Merope and the Mystery of Forks
Disclaimer: I, sadly, do not own any of these characters, only the plots and situations that you do not recognize.
Chapter 17
The Denali Coven had chosen to stay for a few days, during which time they reluctantly agreed to taste the strange food that the Cullens were eating, instead of going hunting as they normally would. After that first taste, they were hooked and begged Harry and Merope to also make some for them to take back home to Alaska when they left, which Harry and Merope were more than happy to do for them.
During the time that the Denali Coven were visiting, there was no news from or about the spies from the Volturi. If they were in the area, they didn't bother to make contact with the Cullens, which would have been the normal protocol when coming into the known territory of a vampire coven.
They continued to maintain regular patrols around the area, while the Pack maintained vigilance at La Push. Harry and Merope even talked to the snakes around the area, who agreed to keep an eye out for unfamiliar vampires, which they were happy to do after they found out about the existence of Speakers.
A few days after the Denali Coven returned to Alaska, it was time for the students to return to school, much to the kids' displeasure.
The first thing Harry did when they arrived back at the school was place that babbling hex on Mike and all of his friends. He added a little something special for Mike whenever he attempted to flirt with Bella, which was to give him uncontrollable gas any time he attempted to approach her about anything that didn't involve school work.
The first time the babbling hex came into effect was entertaining, to say the least. Harry and Merope were sitting at their usual table with the Cullens and Bella when Mike and his friends decided to come over to start trouble.
Mike clapped Harry on the back and said, "Hey, sexy, I'd like to take you out." Causing Harry to choke on his food he had just swallowed and he started coughing. The vampires all started to chuckle. Edward was the most amused as he could hear Tyler's and Eric's thoughts of confusion, because that wasn't what Mike had told them he'd planned to say.
After Harry got over his coughing fit, he turned slightly so he was facing Mike and said, "Mike, I'm flattered you find me sexy, but I am very much in love with my girlfriend and won't be leaving her to go on a date with you." Seeing the look of confusion on Mike's face, he added, "Congratulations on coming out of the closet, though, it was very brave of you to put yourself out there, but you really should have known that I was straight, considering our past friendship, and that I'm happily with Merope."
Mike sputtered and exclaimed, "I'm not gay!" Noticing the open-mouthed expressions of the others in the cafeteria, he turned to Eric and Tyler for support and saw that they had taken a step or two away from him and were giving him worried looks. Mike said adamantly, "I'm not!"
Harry's lip twitched in amusement, but was mostly able to keep a look of confusion on his face. When Mike turned back towards him, Harry asked with a frown of confusion, "Then why did you call me sexy and ask me out on a date?"
Mike sputtered, "What? That's not what I said." He turned to Eric and Tyler in desperation. "You guys heard what I said, that's not what I said," Mike said earnestly.
Eric looked at Mike in confusion and said, "That's what you said, dude. You said, and I quote, 'Hey, sexy, I'd like to take you out.' I know that's not what you said you were going to say, but that's what you said." When Mike turned to look at Tyler for confirmation, Tyler nodded in agreement with Eric.
Mike turned back to Harry with what Harry thought was an attempt to look intimidating, which was sort of lost on his baby face, and said, "What I was trying to say was that your eyes look really nice with that sweater."
Harry looked down at his jumper and said cautiously, "Um, thanks, Mike."
Mike was confused by Harry's reaction and turned to Tyler, who was looking at him with equal confusion. Tyler asked, "Are you okay, dude? Maybe you should go see the nurse. You're not acting like yourself."
Eric's response was, "I'm not sure complimenting someone's eyes is a reason to send someone to the nurse, but what do I know?" Then he shrugged and walked over to their usual table, deciding that the whole confrontation was just too weird to think about anymore.
"I complimented his eyes?" Mike asked in confusion. "That's not what I was trying to say at all."
Merope smiled mischievously and said, "Well, I do find his eyes rather dreamy myself, so I can't really blame you for saying they look nice with his jumper, now can I?"
Mike mumbled to himself, "Jumper?"
"Oh, sorry. Sweater," Merope corrected. "It's called a jumper over in England, we've not acclimated ourselves to using the American versions of the words all the time, no matter how hard we try to remember what they are."
Mike decided not to press his luck anymore and realized that it was probably time to go back to his normal table, still sporting a confused expression on his face. He was too lost in his thoughts to notice that all his friends had added a little extra space between them and him as he sat down.
After Mike and Tyler were out of earshot, Harry quickly threw up the notice-me-not charm and modified muffliato before he and his friends laughed their heads off.
Only Edward and Alice weren't surprised by the strange confrontation, but that was because Alice had the vision and Edward saw it in her head, which was the reason that Harry hadn't placed their normal wards around the table when they first sat down.
After Emmett stopped laughing so much, he asked Harry, "Hey, did you have anything to do with that?"
Harry shook his head in amusement and said, "Beyond cursing him and his friends with a babbling hex that will kick in whenever they're acting like bullies, anything that comes out is generally pretty random, but my understanding of the hex is that it will sometimes go with the opposite of whatever the one under the cruse was trying to say. I suspect if he was really trying to compliment my eyes, he would have insulted them and so on." He gave a bit of a frown as he added, "I can't begin to imagine what he really intended to say when he called me sexy and asked for a date though."
The school days began to pass pretty normally after that, considering that Mike seemed to have spooked himself enough the first time the hex kicked in that he decided to leave Harry completely alone. And since Mike was no longer bothering Harry, his friends went on with their own lives as well, since they were basically just doing it in support of Mike.
By spring break, Mike and Jessica were dating, though it was not really because they truly liked each other, but because Jessica had finally given up on Harry and Mike was the next most attractive to her that wasn't a Cullen or a Hale. Mike on the other hand just wanted to prove to the student body that that little scene they witnessed after the Christmas break meant nothing. Though some folks thought he was denying it too much for it to not have some truth to it.
Jacob Black had been feeling a little strange for the past few weeks. The first sign was that he kept growing abnormally fast. At first, he just thought that he was just going through a growth spurt, but then he just kept outgrowing his clothes faster than his dad could afford to buy him more.
The next thing that happened was his temperature. He just kept feeling like he was burning up. What was even more odd was that the cold weather never bothered him anymore.
In addition to all the weirdness, he noticed that Sam and his gang seemed to have been paying him an abnormal amount of attention and it was making him feel very strange.
It was after Sam's cryptic remark that sounded too much like an order telling him to not leave the La Push boundaries that had him deciding that walking in the trails outside of La Push sounded like a good idea. He wasn't part of Sam's gang, and Sam had no authority to be telling him what to do, it wasn't like he was his dad or the chief.
A few miles outside of La Pash, Jacob started to get a weird feeling, like something wasn't quite right. And he kept smelling something that didn't belong in the woods, something that smelled so sweet that his nose burned.
He mumbled to himself, "Yeah, maybe I should go back home. This place doesn't feel right." As he turned to leave, suddenly there were two young men standing in front of him and the sickly sweet smell was even stronger. Both of the men were fairly large and could pass for brothers, with the pale skin and black hair, but what was really freaky was that they both had crimson-colored eyes.
The taller one spoke, "Look what we have here, Demetri. He must be one of them. Get a whiff of that, he doesn't smell like a regular human. He smells repugnant."
The one who was identified as Demetri responded with a wrinkle of his nose, as if that would make the smell better, "I do believe you're right, Felix. Caius will be most interested that the rumors surrounding the area are true."
The aforementioned Felix gave a feral grin.
While the two were talking back and forth with each other, Jacob started shaking uncontrollably, but he was surprised when he realized it wasn't in fear, but uncontrollable rage. One minute he was standing there as a man, and the next minute his clothes burst into shreds and he had become something rather large. He tried to stay focused on the threat in front of him, which he realized must be the Cold Ones from the tribal legends, which meant he must have turned into a wolf, but he was distracted by someone talking in his mind, which freaked him out a fair bit.
"Jacob! It's Sam. It's going to be okay. We're coming and we'll explain everything. Don't let one of them bite you!" Which was what caused him to turn his full attention back to the Cold Ones in front of him, though he continued to hear the chatter of Sam and others in his mind. So far the Cold Ones hadn't made a move, while he was focused on the chatter in his head.
"What the hell?" Felix exclaimed incredulously, as he looked up at the sky and noticed it was still daylight. "I thought werewolves only changed on the full moon, it's still daylight and nowhere near a full moon." He said in confusion.
Demetri shrugged and said, "I don't know, but we need to report back."
"What about him? Should we take him with us? You know Caius is going to want to be the one to kill him." Felix said.
Before Demetri could respond, they were suddenly aware of more wolves approaching. Realizing they were outnumbered, they took off running while the wolves took chase, though they were not close enough to catch any of what Demetri said to Felix, "I've got their mental essence now, so I'll have no trouble finding them again. There's too many of them for us to try to capture right now. We'll have to come back with Jane and Alec to capture them."
The Cullens and Potters were called to La Push after Sam was able to coach Jacob back into his human form and provided new clothes. They didn't have long to wait before their friends had arrived, though Jacob was wary about the Cullens, after having come to terms that the legend of the Cold Ones was real, but he was confused that he couldn't smell them.
Once everyone got settled and Edward had explained what he saw in Jacob's memory of the confrontation, much to Jacob's disgruntlement at having his mind invaded and he was able to do nothing about it. They sat talking about what they needed to do, while Harry quickly made Jacob something that would block his smell from the vampires, which the Cullens were grateful for. They had nearly forgotten about how unpleasant the smell of wolf was.
Since Jasper was the only one amongst them with any war experience, other than Harry, he was the one that was looked to for strategy when it came to how vampires fought. However, Carlisle's experience with the Voluri was also called on, so that they could make predictions about how the Voluri might respond to the threat of the wolves.
"So they discussed the idea of capturing Jacob and taking him to this Caius person, but ran away when they realized they would soon be out numbered?" Harry asked curiously, trying to think about it in terms of how Voldemort and the Death Eaters might have responded. "Do you think Caius would plan to come back with an army to take the wolves out, or do you think they plan to come back with more numbers and capture them to take them to Caius? Would they even have a way to do that?"
"They have a couple of twins who are very talented, Jane and Alec. Jane has a talent that allows her to make a person feel unimaginable pain, but it's limited to one individual at a time." Edward explained. "Their best weapon, so to speak, is going to be Alec. He can incapacitate many individuals at one. He takes all their senses away; sight, smell, touch, taste. It's as if one is stuck in absolute nothingness."
Jasper commented, "That's probably what they plan to do, bring back the twins and let Jane have a bit of fun with the psychological torture, then have Alec take away all senses so they can be captured without a fight."
Harry hummed in thought, while the others debated about how such powers could be fought.
Bella asked, "Are their powers mental or physical?"
Edward looked at Bella thoughtfully and said, "Mental."
"Well, as long as I'm here, I would be able to block their powers, so they would be ineffective." Bella said with a grin.
Everyone's eyes lit up at that, until Harry pointed out that Bella wouldn't be able to spend every waking moment with the Pack, not to mention it would be difficult to explain to Charlie why she needed to be excused from school so that she could stay on the Reservation. Additionally, they didn't know how long it would be before the Volturi made their move, which made them go back to the drawing board so to speak, to discuss strategy further.
When Merope noticed that Harry wasn't really contributing much to the discussion, she asked him, "What's got you thinking so hard?" Which caused everyone to quiet down and focus on Harry.
Harry shrugged and said, "I don't know, I was just thinking that, rather than go through all this suspense, I could just go straight to the Volturi and give them a piece of my mind."
"Look, Harry, I know you're pretty powerful and all, but I don't think you should take on the Volturi by yourself." Carlisle told his friend very seriously.
Harry looked at his friends fondly and said, "It's not as if they can kill me." Merope rolled her eyes. "Hear me out," Harry said. "I can go anywhere undetected. They won't know I'm there unless I want them to."
Seeing that he still had everyone's attention, Harry resumed, "Merope can stay here, in case some come while the rest remain over in Italy. You know we share the same powers, so she'll be able to help you all fight, should it come to it. If it comes to it and the twins do come, they can't incapacitate her because of her mental shields, so she would be able to take them out before they are able to do too much damage."
After much debate and being unable to change Harry's mind, Emmett said, "So, you're going to Italy."
Harry shrugged and said, "I've always been curious about what it's like, but never really felt the need to go there before. It should be fun."
Turning to Sam, Harry added, "Before I leave, you need to take Jacob to the RoR to get him trained, you and the Pack. Take all the time you need, as you know that no time will pass outside the room. I think I'll make plans to leave in about a week. After all, they will need at least that amount of time to get on a plane, talk to their leaders, make whatever plans they need, and then get back on a plane to come back here."
Merope shook her head and said, "I don't think you should wait that long. I get what you're saying, they'll have to take a bit of time, but if you're going to go, you should go ahead and go. You can be there before those two arrive back and you can observe them while they make their plans."
Harry shook his head. And looked at his friends, "See, this is why I married her. She's smart and beautiful." Causing everyone to chuckle, while Merope rolled her eyes fondly and gave him a kiss on the cheek in response.
