Six
The near-perpetual soft rain had faded to mist when Paul made it back to La Push. He phased at the edge of the woods and pulled on his shorts, walking at a brisk pace along the packed dirt road toward Sam and Emily's house.
He didn't even consider going to his own house. More and more, Paul was finding that he was only willing to be there if he needed to sleep. Plus, it would be empty and its cupboards barren, while at his Alpha's place Paul stood a decent chance of finding Jared and probably some food. Emily usually had something in her kitchen that she could transform into a delicious meal in mere minutes.
As Paul climbed the steps up to the front porch and let himself inside, he saw he was one for one: Jared was asleep on the couch, snoring, his feet fully touching the floor where his legs hung over the armrest. Across the room, the television blared a commercial for motorized wheelchairs.
Fucking daytime TV – it reminded Paul of watching The Price Is Right with his mom when he'd gotten strep throat and had to stay home from school in the first grade. She'd bought him three flavors of ice cream even though she didn't like him eating processed food and stroked his hair as they'd watched Bob Barker try to make two-door refrigerators sound like an exciting prize.
Paul shoved the unwelcome memory away and walked past Jared and into the kitchen. First, he hoped and prayed, food.
Thank the gods, Emily was standing at the counter, her back to him as she kneaded a pile of dough with the confident rhythm of a woman who had done this a thousand times before.
"Hey," Paul said when he was inches away from her.
Emily jumped, spinning around. "Paul Lahote, you did that on purpose." She hit him half-heartedly on the shoulder, dusting flour on his arm.
He grinned. One of the things he liked best about Emily was that she wasn't scared of him. Kim could barely look him in the eye, and even Billy and Old Quil watched him warily when he was around them, as if he might phase at any moment without provocation. Emily, though, had faced Sam's wolf, which was even bigger than Paul's, and she had come out the other side.
No, he didn't faze her in the slightest, and Paul found the feeling surprisingly welcome.
"'M hungry," he told her unabashedly.
She rolled her eyes but wiped her hands on her apron and turned to the fridge. "You always are. Here, I think I've got still got some of the stew I made last night. Will that work?"
"Edible's all I need, Em," he told her truthfully.
She nodded as if she'd expected something along those lines and ladled delicious-smelling spoonfuls into a bowl and turned on the microwave.
Paul heard footsteps crossing the living room, and Jared strolled into the kitchen a second later, looking wide awake. "Did you really think you could get away with cooking without me waking up, Emily?" he asked in a mock-hurt voice.
Emily tried to look annoyed. "How silly of me," she said dryly, but she was smiling as she reached for a second bowl.
Jared slid into the seat next to Paul. "Hey, man," he said. Then, as Emily turned to pull the first bowl out of the microwave, he raised his eyebrows expectantly and mouthed, "Talk?"
Paul shook his head. "Later," he said in a voice too quiet for Emily to hear.
He really didn't want her to know about all his imprint drama, especially considering she had the most picture-perfect imprinted lifestyle with Sam that Paul could imagine.
As he began gulping down the stew that Emily set in front of him, Paul frowned to himself. Apart from the part where she had accidentally stolen her cousin's and best friend's boyfriend, of course. And then gotten slashed in the face by a giant wolf, physically scarring her and emotionally scarring Sam forever.
Okay, so maybe the history of her imprinted life wasn't perfect, but Paul still didn't want her to see how horribly his fell short of the ideal.
"You're an angel, Em," Jared said fervently as he was presented with his very own bowl of stew.
She laughed. "We'll see how long you'd say that if I ever stopped feeding you all."
Jared clutched his chest in horror. "Don't even joke about that."
Emily's smile froze suddenly, and her eyes flicked toward the back end of the house, where Paul knew the bedroom that she shared with Sam was.
"I'll be right back," she said, slipping her apron off and hurrying out of the room. "For the love of god, don't touch my dough!"
Jared just snorted and went back to eating, but Paul frowned, his food forgotten. "What just happened?"
"Imprint thing, dude," Jared said between bites. Then he added, "Sorry, forgot you're in the club now. Sam probably had a bad dream or something."
That didn't help. "What, and Emily has dream radar?"
Jared shook his head. "Nah, but she could feel he needed her." He swallowed another spoonful. "I'm guessing that hasn't happened with Bella yet?"
Paul snorted. "Yeah, right." Like his imprint ever thought about anything but her own non-stop mental Whirl-o'-Pain. But she had, hadn't she? "She knew I needed to eat," he admitted.
"Yeah, that's probably pretty normal. As much as any of this shit is." Jared looked embarrassed, something Paul had never seen from before. "Don't laugh, but Kim knows when I need to sleep. Before I imprinted I would stay up all night – not on purpose, just lying in bed thinking about random shit nonstop, and then I'd be as jumpy as fuck the next day."
"So she puts you to bed," Paul said, unable to resist grinning at the thought of Kim, who was five-foot, tops, and baby-faced, tucking Jared into bed.
Jared shoved him off his barstool, laughing when Paul stumbled backwards. "And yours feeds you, dickhead."
Paul picked up his bowl and carried it in the dishwasher. "I'm just fucking with you," he said, and he was sincere. "I'm the last person who should make fun of anyone else for their imprints."
Jared shrugged, his annoyance already faded. "Hey, speaking of, do you want to hear about my totally not awkward in the slightest chat with my dear friend Sue Clearwater or not?"
Paul had almost forgotten about why he'd wanted to see Jared in the first place. "You'd never talked to her before, huh?"
"Nope – not outside tribal gatherings, at least. Thanks for making me come off looking like a bigger weirdo than normal, by the way."
"No problem."
Jared rolled his eyes. "Whatever. So I caught her walking in to open the clinic, told her I know someone who hallucinates that her ex-boyfriend is with her, talking to her. I asked her what could cause that besides, you know, schizophrenia." Paul nodded, impatient. "After she told me to take her to a doctor like, yesterday, she told me what else it could be. Look, I even wrote it down, since you were so damn intense about it." He pulled a crumbled sticky note out of his pocket and thrust it at Paul.
In Jared's messy handwriting, it read: "Epilepsy. Sleep disorder. Sleep deprivation. Extreme stress."
Paul drummed his fingers against the countertop, thinking. "Okay, she doesn't have fucking epilepsy, but she's got at least two of the others."
He knew about yoga, meditation, all the other hippie shit people did to help them relax. He'd always thought it sounded stupid, but he'd start taking tai chi classes himself if it helped Bella. And if not sleeping right was fucking her up, then he knew there were herbal supplements you could buy to sleep better. Even taking sleeping pills would be better than how she was living now.
A warm feeling settled in the pit of his belly, and he realized after a moment that it was hope. He could do this, he could help Bella.
Just as suddenly, the hope was replaced with the drowning feeling of the exhaustion he'd been trying to fight off for hours. It was as if he only allowed himself to feel it once he had his next plan for his imprint worked out, but he was going to start hallucinating things himself if he didn't crash soon. His wolf genes helped him get by on not much sleep, but he couldn't avoid it forever.
He started to head back out the front door but stopped. "Oh, and thanks a ton, Jared," he said over his shoulder.
"Welcome," Jared replied, sounding surprised.
Paul wondered if that was the first time he'd ever thanked him.
Shock of shocks, Paul's dad wasn't home when he opened the front door, so the whole place was dark and dank and smelled like cheap beer. Home sweet home.
Paul pushed open the door to his bedroom and was asleep within seconds of his head hitting the pillow.
He awoke to the noise of something clattering around in the kitchen, which didn't sound much different from a wild animal. Paul knew better, though. He was unfortunately way too used to his father's drunken fumblings, and he pulled himself out of bed, annoyed. It took his dad ten times as long to do anything when he was drunk, and it was easier for both of them if Paul just found whatever he was looking for.
As he walked into the kitchen, he caught sight of the time on the microwave. It was only a little past two. Getting this drunk so early in the day was a little excessive, even for Mark Lahote. He also reeked of Jack Daniel's instead of Rainier, which was another worrisome sign in broad daylight.
His dad turned with unsteady coordination to peer at him. "Oh. Paul…" he started, then trailed off, as if he had nothing to add.
"What are you looking for?" Paul didn't add that he had been sleeping, because what did it matter? Paul had never been much of a factor in his dad's life choices.
"I need…" Mark looked around in confusion and clutched his hand over his jeans pocket, where the metallic edge of his five-year old cell phone peeked out. "I need my phone."
Paul sighed. "You're touching it, Dad." He reached out to pluck it out of his dad's pocket and hand it to him, but his dad reacted more violently than he'd expected, lurching backwards and almost falling to the floor.
"No!" he said, and it was almost a shout. "I'm – I'm just going to – I'll look at it myself."
Paul didn't move, looking at him in bemusement. His dad, for all his flaws, had never been a violent drunk. "Okay," he said slowly. "So are you good now? Will you go sit down?"
His dad still looked flustered, and he tucked the phone down deeper into his pocket, as if he thought Paul was going to try to steal it from him. "I'm going to – I'll be in my room."
Paul gestured elaborately in front of him. "Fine. Be my guest," he said sardonically, and his dad edged past him as fast as a man with a blood alcohol content of roughly point-twenty could.
He shook his head in disgust as he heard the bedroom door shut. His dad was being even weirder than usual.
As long as he remained at least somewhat functional, though, Paul was just going to ignore the elephant in the room.
He felt a prick of guilt as he left the house and phased to wolf, but the truth was that with himself, his imprint, and the pack to worry about, Paul had no extra room in his life to deal with his dad's shit, too.
For the first time since Paul had imprinted, a police car was parked alongside his imprint's truck in the front drive. Still in wolf form, Paul backed up farther into the woods and tried to think.
He hadn't spared much thought for it before, but Charlie Swan being home was going to be a serious issue if Paul wanted to be closer to his imprint than the nearest cluster of trees.
Quil, who was patrolling La Push along with Embry, caught Paul's thought. He started singing, "I Shot the Sheriff," only instead of "sheriff", Quil substituted "werewolf," accompanied by a mental image of the Police Chief with a Glock in his hand, pointed at Paul.
Oh, fuck off, Paul told him. He was already well aware this wasn't going to be easy.
Quil sniggered but was abruptly distracted by two girls from the reservation high school walking out of a nearby house in tight shorts they had to be freezing in. He was as bad as a fucking cartoon wolf, but for once Paul was grateful for it, as his awareness of Quil mercifully faded out again.
Edging as close to his imprint's house as he could while still in wolf form, Paul concentrated on the sounds he could hear coming from inside. Someone was walking back and forth in the living room, while water flowed heavily down from the second floor through the plumbing, meaning someone else was taking a shower.
Then there were footsteps across the kitchen, and there she was, standing in the open back door, just like she had last night. "Paul?" she called softly.
He didn't remembering phasing back."Here," he said, walking toward her as soon as he'd pulled on his shorts.
She didn't look cheerful, exactly, but she also didn't look like she was teetering on the edge of a nervous breakdown at this exact moment, which was a nice change. "You didn't get enough sleep," she accused, frowning up at him.
"Yeah, my dad woke me up on accident." He didn't go into any further detail; he didn't need her feeling sorry for him. "But speaking of sleep, I figured out something we can do to help you feel better."
Her face went blank, and her voice, when it came, was carefully neutral. "And?" He thought he caught the faintest trace of fear in her eyes, and it reminded him of the wild, almost inhuman look she'd had in her eyes when he'd pulled her off the ledge this morning, when she'd tried to get that much closer to killing herself so that her hallucination would keep talking to her. He'd probably remember it until his dying day.
So he tried to choose his words carefully. She was whiny and mopey and she was so, so much more fragile than she looked.
"Well," he said, trying for tact. "You're stressed, and you're not getting enough sleep."
She paused, visibly changing what she had been going to say. "Okay?" It had the underlying, unimpressed ring of Tell me something I don't know.
That shouldn't have made him want to chuckle, but knowing that there was a spark of something still inside her wasencouraging."So we're gonna fix that," he said, undeterred. "Tell me something that calms you down."
She looked at him skeptically, as if he was making fun of her, but he held her gaze.
"I guess being in the desert," she said after a minute. "It's peaceful. Open." An expression of longing crossed her face before she wiped it away, looking embarrassed. "You know. Just… beautiful, I guess."
Paul was uncomfortably aware that he would have no problem driving her to Arizona at that moment. He resisted the pressing urge to offer to, knowing that would only freak her out. "How about around here?" he asked instead.
She paused for longer this time, biting her lip. "Maybe…the ocean? As long as I don't have to get in the water, at least."
That he could give her. "Okay, so we'll go to the rez. Go put on some comfortable clothes." She was still wearing the jeans he'd seen her in that morning, which had probably once fit but were now at least two sizes too big on her.
She shook her head frantically, taking a step back from him until her back was pressed against the door. "No, no – I can't."
He could tell, whether through the imprint bond or just plain common sense, that she needed this. She really was her own worst enemy.
"Why the hell not?"
She looked around, as if she'd see an excuse written on one of the trees. "I… I have to cook dinner for Charlie."
"Make pasta, then. It takes like fifteen minutes. You need to get out of this fucking house."
She actually wrung her hands in front of her. "I'm scared," she whispered finally to the ground.
He took a step forward and pulled her hands apart, careful not to scare her, pushing them back down to her sides. She let him, watching his hands on hers with wide eyes.
"Of what?" he asked as gently as he could.
"Where do I even start," she said, laughing without humor. Paul didn't say anything, and she added softly, "That I can't get better."
He knew there was more, and after a minute the words rushed out of her – the most he'd ever heard her say at once."I know I'm broken, but that's okay because I'm not trying not to be broken, not really. I thought maybe Jake would fix me eventually, at least a little, but then…he left me, too." She wiped her eyes on the sleeve of her hoodie. "And it hurt, and I think maybe it was better before, you know? At least it didn't hurt so much back then. I couldn't do anything… I couldn't feel anything."
She was talking about how she had been when Jake had seen her for the first time after the leech had left, back when she'd been 100% pure, unadulterated zombie.
"If I try again, and I can't fix myself, I'm not sure there's gonna be enough left of me to pick up the pieces," she finished in a miserable whisper, holding her arms tight around her sides again.
It felt like a physical kick in the balls to hear that she felt so abandoned now that she thought the zombie she'd been before might be better.
Was it that much of a surprise, though, really? She'd had no stability in her life since the day the leech had left her. He knew Jacob could barely bring himself to talk to her now, her father obviously didn't know how to deal with her, and the vague impressions he'd gotten of her mother through Jacob's mind had painted her as well-meaning but shallow and self-absorbed.
"Isabella," he said, waiting until she met his eyes. He held her shoulders, trying to make her understand. "I can't speak for anyone else, but whether you want me or not, I'm here. I will never leave you. Never. I can't."
He was surprised to find that he no longer resented that fact.
Her eyes filled up with tears again, and he took a few steps back, pretending to examine an old lawn chair that had probably been rusting away in her backyard through thousands of Forks' rainy days. He was absolute crap at dealing with feelings, especially those of girls, especially especially those of his imprint.
The sound of water stopped, and Paul abruptly wanted to be far away from his imprint's house. "Go tell your dad you're going to the beach," he told her. "I just heard the water turn off. He should be coming downstairs in a minute."
She looked nervous again. "By myself? He thinks that Jake and I had a fight."
Tell him you're coming to see me, he wanted to tell her, but that would top an already impressive list of idiotic things Paul had said in his life.
At Billy Black's request, Charlie Swan had come to talk to Paul a couple times right before he'd phased, when Paul's temper and fighting had been at their worst. The Chief of Police was not going to remember him fondly.
Really, Paul was lucky that the reservation wasn't under police jurisdiction, since he vaguely remembered telling Charlie to fuck off and die.
She was going to have to introduce him to her dad someday – as long as she didn't kick him out of her life entirely. Paul sucked in a breath and forced himself past that thought.
He was cowardly enough to hope that that day was far, far away, though.
"Tell him you made up," he said reluctantly. He didn't even like to imagine her and Jacob in the same room together. He'd seen the fantasies in that boy's mind for months. "I'll even take you by his house after the beach, so you don't have to lie about seeing him. His patrol should be over by now."
Her face lit up, and that was reward enough in itself. Then her shoulders slumped. "I don't think he likes me much anymore," she muttered. "He'll take my calls, but he won't ever come see me."
Good, Paul thought, but he couldn't lie to her, even by just letting her think something that wasn't true. "He's not mad at you," he told her.
Just then, the stairs creaked, and her dad was about to be in sight of the back door. "Come to the rez," he said, trying not to sound too pleading. "We'll talk there. I'll be waiting near the border."
She hesitated, and he experienced a sudden burst of fear that she was going to refuse. Then she nodded. "Okay."
He couldn't help grinning. "Great."
Paul didn't need his enhanced hearing to hear her clunky-ass truck coming from about a mile away. She pulled up beside him along the road, and he jumped up from where he'd been sitting and pointed her where to park it. "We can walk from here."
As she climbed out of her truck, he was surprised to see that she'd changed into jeans that she didn't have to tug back up her hips every other step, though her hoodie still swallowed her small frame. She'd also pulled her hair back into a loose bun that revealed the smooth, pretty lines of her face. She looked better than he'd ever seen her.
"So," he said, once he realized he was just standing there gaping at her and she was looking at him expectantly, "there's a ledge that overlooks the ocean that I used to hike up to. I've even seen whales from it a few times. The path up there is a little rocky, and it gets steep in places, but it's the best view of the bay in twenty miles."
"No, I can't," she said immediately.
He stared at her, surprised. "Why not?"
"I…" She flapped her hands helplessly. "I fall. I'm really clumsy."
He did remember a few times, both from his memories and Jacob's, that she'd proven to be on the less coordinated side, but that was a stupid reason not to do something.
"Guess what? You get better at everything by practicing." She still hesitated, and he sighed. "Look, I've got a hundred pounds of pure muscle on you. There's nowhere you can fall into that I can't bring you back out."
She looked uncertainly between the coastline and her truck, as if she was trying to decide if she should go back home.
"It's really pretty," he said. He tried to think of something else that might entice her. "I'll tell you anything you want to know about the tribe or the wolves."
She bit her lip. "You have to stop if I say so, okay?"
He snorted. "That's what she said."
Her nervousness turned to pure feminine indignation, and he chuckled as she reached out to hit him on the shoulder. He barely felt it. "Be a gentleman."
"That sounds boring."
She rolled her eyes, but she didn't look like she was really mad, and she followed him toward the barely visible trailhead without another word.
Paul maturely kept his fist pump inside his head.
She wasn't kidding about being clumsy.
"I bet you could do this three times as fast as me," she muttered as she slipped again on a loose pile of rocks, almost face-planting before she regained her balance.
Five times, Paul thought. For the umpteenth time, he had to physically clench his fists to stop himself from reaching out to break her fall. Something in him was sure she wouldn't like that.
Aloud, he said, "We aren't in a hurry. Why would it matter?" The sooner they got to the top, the sooner she would want to leave, and his time with her would be at an end, at least for the day. He'd have been happy if she'd wanted to crawl up the hill.
"I don't know," she said. "It just has to be frustrating for you. I'm so…weak."
"You're human," he told her. "You're exactly what you're supposed to be. It's not your fault I can turn into a wolf."
"I guess not." She didn't really sound like she believed him.
Paul moved in front of her to stare at her in disbelief. She couldn't really think that, could she? This martyr complex of hers was getting ridiculous. "Tell me, exactly, how it's your fault that a family of vampires moved to Forks two years before you did." This had to be good.
"Well, obviously not that part," she blustered, looking at the ground.
"Then what?" he persisted. He felt uncomfortable pushing her, but he could feel the knowledge of the imprint bond tingling under his skin – she needed to learn that she couldn't blame herself for everything bad that had ever happened in her life.
"I don't know," she snapped, and she glared directly at him with blazing eyes.
He thought for a sinking moment that he had fucked up everything, that she was going turn around and go back to her truck and leave him and maybe even refuse to ever see him again.
To his surprise, she pushed right past him and kept climbing the hill. She didn't trip half as much with anger fueling her.
"No part, Isabella," he told her back. "No part of this is your fault."
She didn't answer.
It took them a little over an hour to reach the top, and not a single rescue attempt was necessary on Paul's part. He'd actually been so distracted making sure she didn't need help that he'd almost run face-first into a tall beach scrub while his eyes had been on her.
She'd snorted, then looked innocent while he'd pretended to glare at her.
He let her make the final ascent first, and when he reached the top she was standing at the highest point of the cliff, looking over the water, a far-away expression on her face.
Paul came to a stop beside her. "Told ya," he said.
He didn't see any whales today, but dozens of seagulls were flying low over the water, diving in brilliant flashes of gray and white to scoop up the tiny fish that were stupid enough to swim too close to the surface. The clouds that made up Olympic Peninsula's perpetual gray haze were sparse today, leaving a ray of sharp sunlight to shine down upon their cliff.
Paul glanced at his imprint from the corner of his eye, just to make sure she wasn't about to try to jump off the cliff or anything stupid like that.
Then his eyes seemed to get caught on her, and he stared, shocked by how pretty she looked in the sunlight. The brightness lessened the gaunt shadows of her face and caught the lighter shades of brown in her eyes and hair, and the tightness that she wore perpetually in her expression and in the way she held herself was gone. He hadn't even realized it was there until he saw the absence of it.
She looked relaxed, free. Beautiful.
She cut her eyes over to him, obviously feeling the weight of his gaze, and he thought he'd been caught staring. Her words surprised him, though.
"You let me come up here first."
"Yeah," he agreed.
She turned to face him fully, and it was one of the first times since he'd imprinted that she'd made eye contact with him."You weren't worried I'd go crazy and try to jump off?"
"I was terrified," he admitted. His heartbeat was only now returning to normal. "But I could tell you needed to do it yourself."
After a moment, she nodded, seeming to accept that, and turned back to face the water. "You didn't have to worry, you know. And not just because I wouldn't do that again. I won't," she added sharply, as if he'd been arguing with her. "But…I don't see him when you're with me."
"Good," Paul said immediately, fierce pleasure filling him that his presence kept the hallucination of her vampire ex-boyfriend away.
Bella shrugged. More importantly, she didn't get up and leave, or jump off the cliff, so he figured that for his imprint's standards, that was something like success.
He didn't want her to have to talk about Edward anymore unless she wanted to, and he tried to think of something that might stand a chance of actually making her happy. "Tell me something you like to do," he said finally.
There was that pause again, that long wait as if her brain was out of practice at thinking about anything except the leeches. "I like to read," she said finally, looking back out over the water.
"Really?" he said doubtfully. "I've never seen you with a book."
"All the stories remind me of… of Edward." She sounded pained as she said his name, but she didn't clutch her chest this time.
He shook his head. "You can't let the leech ruin an entire hobby for you."
She paused, as if she was trying to organize her thoughts. "He was just so…old-fashioned, and those are the kind of books I like. The classics, like the Bronte sisters and Jane Austen."
"So try a different genre for a while," he said, determined. "Read a trashy romance with a dashing 'Indian' as the romantic lead." Her lips twisted into a reluctant smile. "Or read something completely different, like sci-fi or mysteries. We'll go to the bookstore at Port Angeles this weekend."
"We will?"
He fought down a surge of embarrassed for how easily he was sliding into her life. "Sure we will. We have to spend time together anyway, right? Might as well do something productive while we're at it."
"Okay," she said, and he caught a glimpse of an actual smile on her lips before it faded. "Charlie will be happy, at least. He doesn't like how much time I spend in my room."
"Okay, so we'll thrill him to pieces. We'll go to the bookstore, then we can get dinner at one of the restaurants–" Her face fell, and he quickly corrected course. "Or, actually, we'll bring sandwiches and have a picnic at the park there. Okay?"
She nodded, looking grateful that he hadn't commented on her dismay. The leech must have taken her out there at some point. "I can bake us some brownies."
"Excellent." She had never seemed uncomfortable with silence, so he didn't prod her to talk again. Together they watched a cruise ship, so far away it was hazy even to Paul's sharp eyes, meander slowly along the horizon.
"Can we stay up here for a little while?" Bella asked suddenly. "You were right - I like this."
Paul managed to say, "Sure," instead of, "Duh," but it was a close call.
She smiled then, a small but genuine smile, and sat down cross-legged on the ground without a fuss. Paul didn't know many girls who wouldn't have screeched about having to get dirty.
He knelt down beside her, close enough to grab her if a meteor hit the ledge, but not close enough to touch her. That was only if she wanted him to. Maybe, someday. If she could ever think about anyone beside the leech.
"Tell me about the pack," she said. It was one of the first times in Paul's memory that she had actually sought out information. "I know Jake, obviously. And Quil and Embry, a little. And you."
"That's almost all of us," Paul said. "There's Sam, our Alpha. And Jared's the last one."
She picked up a small rock and began drawing idle patterns in the dirt with it. "Sam's the one who found me when I got lost in the woods."
Paul had seen Sam's memory of that day. That had only been a week or so after Paul had phased for the first time. Sam had ordered him to stay where he was, so he'd had nothing to focus on but what he could see from Jared and Sam's eyes as they searched for the girl. She'd been so pale, he remembered, a ghostly white figure with dark hair, limp and cold like a corpse. He shuddered at the memory.
"Yeah," he said. "And Jared is the skinny one with the light brown hair."
"He has a girlfriend," she remembered. "He was telling me about her while I was freaking out after you turned into a wolf. I think he was trying to distract me."
"He has an imprint," Paul said. "Kim. That's probably why he was telling you about her, even though he couldn't explain the whole thing to you then."
"Oh," she said, and the stick in her hand stilled. "So Kim and Jared, and Emily and Sam, and-"
"You and me," he finished. "And that's it. For now."
"Why 'for now'?" He was pleased to hear the curiosity in her voice. Anything was better than the sadness she usually carried around with her.
"The elders think everyone in the pack will eventually imprint." He hoped she didn't ask why – the thought of having children with him would probably creep her out enough to never talk to him again. "And we're pretty sure more wolves will join the pack, too."
"Why do you think there'll be more?" she asked, frowning.
"Mostly because Seth Clearwater is getting too big too fast, and he would have the genes, too." Though now that Paul thought about it, that could just be a fluke. He'd seen Leah the other day as he'd walked home after patrol and she'd looked pretty ripped for a chick. Maybe she and her brother had just been working out together.
Her voice was troubled. "Will it ever stop?"
"It's triggered from being near vampires," he told her. "The more the vampires in the area, the more wolves that phase. When the Cullens left, we thought we were it." He ran a hand through his hair, frustrated at the memory of his own complete failure to stop the leech. "But then the redheaded leech came to town, and she fucked everything – Bella?"
His imprint had gone white.
"I'm sorry," she said calmly. "Could you say that again? There's a red-haired vampire, a woman? She's the one you've been chasing?"
"Yes," Paul said. His whole body went tense as he watched her carefully, instinctively looking around for what threatened his imprint. "Does that mean something to you?"
She laughed, but then her lips pressed together tightly, as if she was trying not to cry. "It means she's trying to kill me," she said.
Author's note: Until now, Bella had only heard Victoria described in passing as "the leech" by Jacob, who had mentioned neither what she looked like nor her gender, so Bella didn't make the connection before now.
Thanks for reading and, as always, your sweet reviews!