I'd gone with Jasper for a quick, precautionary hunt. Everyone was in a fairly gregarious mood when the two of us returned home; we gathered outside in the misty gloom, watching Rosalie work on her car, talking and engaging in some minor roughhousing. After watching the sunset, we went back inside, engaging in our usual pastimes. Catching a hint of wistfulness from Esme as she passed my piano, I went to the neglected instrument and played softly, allowing the music to provide quiet background to everyone's conversation. The mood often went from placid to boisterous as activities changed or topics of conversation switched, and I joined in. As the night wore on, however, the couples began to detach themselves from the group activity, at first in their thoughts, then in reality, and move to their private quarters for the minimal daily requirement of marital bliss. Emmett and Rose said a quick goodnight and ran upstairs, hand in hand.

Seeing the party start to break up and shift into night mode, I rose from the piano and walked over to the video corner. "Anyone mind if I start a movie?" I asked, taking out a French film I'd been meaning to watch, one I'd set aside for solitary viewing because it wasn't a favourite with many of the others.

"All yours, Edward," Alice assured me, giving me a smile as she led Jasper by the hand toward the stairs. I wished them both a good night, and turned to Carlisle, who was preparing to leave for his night shift at the hospital. "Best of luck at work."

"Thank you." He smiled and laid an affectionate hand on my shoulder, and we exchanged a few words about his current cases, the hospital staff, and one or two minor concerns about our cover story and our position in Forks. It pleased me that he still turned to me for counsel on anything of importance to our family. Esme may have been first in his mind and heart, Jasper the expert on security, and Alice the most talented source of information, but I was still Carlisle's right-hand man and implicit second in command, his first-created companion and his most trusted advisor. His son, in almost every way possible. After a brief consultation, he once more bid me goodbye, then turned to Esme. They embraced warmly, and I casually looked away, but their thoughts reached me: intense devotion, tinged with the never-lessening daily tragedy of separation and the joyful expectation of the anxiously awaited reunion in the morning. Their unflagging mutual adoration would look wildly extravagant from a human perspective, but it was the nature of most vampire couples. Given Carlisle's preference for the night shift, he and Esme did not enjoy private time along with the others; but, as Emmett had laughingly pointed out more than once, they had the entire house to themselves most days, when the rest of us were in school.

Having seen Carlisle off at the door, sighing deeply as she watched him drive away, Esme joined me in the media room. I gestured invitingly at the DVD player. "Which one is it, dear?" she asked.

"Une Amour de Jeunesse." She cocked an eye at the video case in mock apprehension, and I grinned. "Nothing violent, nothing cynical," I said, knowing her preferences. "A young woman recovering from the end of her first love affair."

"Very well; I'll watch with you, if I may." She perched gracefully on the off-white sofa as I started the film. Since Carlisle had requested steady nighttime hours at the hospital, Esme was often my sole companion, once my brothers and sisters had gone off by themselves. I wondered if it might, just possibly, have been planned that way. At our previous location, I had picked up the occasional hint of pity for my solitary nights, and given Carlisle's duty schedule, having Esme keep me company would, happily, not even interfere in her and Carlisle's love life. If that was the intention, I tried to be grateful for it without allowing my feelings to lapse into petulance over being the subject of emotional largesse. It wasn't their fault I was the only single family member, and it was thoughtful of..whoever might have come up with the idea. In any case, I enjoyed Esme's company, and genuinely appreciated the opportunity to have her to myself, taking pleasure in the unusual combination of a quasi-mother-son relationship, and a fond friendship between equals, driven by shared tastes and a similar sense of humour. I glanced briefly upward as the sound of Emmett's and Rose's bedroom furniture taking a fatal hit floated through the ceiling, and turned my full attention on the movie's opening credits.

In the morning, Carlisle arrived home in time to see us off to school, describing a frantically busy night at the hospital, the tail end of the new year's accidents and overdoses. It had kept him from hearing any news, either via the television in the doctors' lounge, or through hospital staff; and none of us had watched the television since Saturday. Alice might have seen something, but she had no particular reason to keep watch over strangers in the community. So it was that we arrived at school to find some twenty students milling uncomfortably near the front door, trying to avoid the cold January rain by huddling under the entranceway, talking nervously, and several of the teachers unaccountably lurking near the entrance and looking uneasily out the windows of the principal's office. "What's going on?" Jasper whispered tensely as we parked our car and stepped out into the parking lot, his mind automatically going into security overdrive.

"Their thoughts aren't specific enough just now," I said. There was a mental chorus of Wow, weird! and Right here in Forks!, and …two of them!, but no one offered immediate details.

We automatically turned to Alice for an update. "There's been another death." Jasper looked at her in surprise. "Like the last one, they assume mauled by a bear. There's an announcement, and the principal is thinking about providing counselling…no, he's decided it's not necessary."

"Who is it - a student, a teacher?" Emmett asked in surprise.

She shook her head. "A local man. I don't think we know him."

Before the first class of the day, following the usual list of school events and schedule changes via the PA system, there was an awkward announcement. "I'm sure you've all heard about the, uh, tragic event of last night…" The principal went on to explain that a local man had died, apparently of a bear attack, the second such death in a short time, and urged students to be especially cautious about going into wooded areas until the situation was "fully resolved." Emmett glanced at me from across the room, thinking Bears, huh? I'd be happy to deal with the problem for them! and I gave him a quick smile as class began.

By the end of the day, few of the students were still talking about the death of the unfortunate local. He was a man with no connection to them, and once the horror of the bear attack had been duly exclaimed over, they lost interest entirely. The police placed temporary warning signs at the entrance of area hiking trails, and the staff of nearby state parks scouted around for rogue bears who had become too bold about approaching humans. Two days later, however, we picked up a rather shocking bit of data.

We were in the cafeteria, and I was unobtrusively monitoring Jasper, who was trying for a full two weeks without hunting and now, on day twelve, was in considerable discomfort. Suddenly I took note of a conversation at a far table, where two boys and three girls were gathered, and one girl was whispering eagerly to the others. "My mom's a nurse, you know, and she was there when they brought him in. It was the weirdest thing, she said…I mean, she isn't really supposed to be talking about it, so don't repeat any of this, okay?" The others quickly assured her of their discretion. "She looked at the autopsy records, and she said he was almost completely empty! Of blood, you know? There was, like, none left in the body at all!"

I looked at the others, my expression clearly indicating something was up. "What?" Emmett asked. I nodded unobtrusively at the table in question, giving a quick, whispered summary of the conversation, and the others tuned in.

"Well…maybe he, you know, bled out on the ground," one of the boys suggested.

"Yeah, but his clothes had almost no blood on them."

This led to speculation about precisely what kind of injury would cause the draining of blood yet leave so little evidence on the victim's clothing, escalating into descriptions of spurting arteries from some forensic studies-based television show, causing squeals of dismay from one of the girls, and from there into a discussion of favourite horror movie moments, leaving morgue records safely behind. "What do you think?" I asked the table at large.

Emmett shrugged. "So, maybe not a bear. But wouldn't we have picked up on something?"

Once again, we looked at Alice. "It's in the past now," she said, "so out of my jurisdiction. But I don't see any of us in the area in the near future." 'Us' as in other vampires. "But we're in the clear; I definitely don't see this getting connected to us in any way."

Jasper still looked concerned. "We should talk to Carlisle."

"Absolutely," I agreed, sighing over the necessity of attending three more pointless classes before we were free to return home and consult Carlisle on the matter. Maintaining a cover story could be very tedious.

Carlisle took the matter seriously, and shared our concern that we may have somehow overlooked the presence of vampires. He suggested we visit the site where the poor man's body had been found, and check for any lingering scent that might provide more information. We accordingly ran, at dusk, to the isolated area of riverbank where the corpse had been discovered. Our suspicions were immediately confirmed. "Two of them!" Rosalie exclaimed. "No, three!" The scent trail was cold and faint, but we were still able to make out the distinctly vampire scent leading from the spot, and to discern the particular fragrances of three separate individuals. We followed the trail due north until it reached the water and disappeared.

"Maybe they've moved on, then?" Carlisle suggested. At Jasper's urging, we scanned the surrounding area, but found nothing further. It appeared the trio had simply paused at Forks to hunt before continuing on their way. Satisfied, we returned home, although we resolved to keep a closer watch for such arrivals in the future.

Another two weeks passed without incident. The Swan girl was due to arrive on the weekend, and start school in Forks on Tuesday, but when we pulled into the parking lot on Monday morning, we once more encountered the strange, subdued gathering of students by the front door, the teachers nervously hovering by the windows. We stood casually together in a circle beside Rose's car as I tried to pick up coherent thoughts. "Another one," Alice said. "The principal's planning an announcement. Again."

Rosalie looked at her in surprise. "What? Another so-called bear attack?"

Alice scanned ahead. "That will be the conclusion of the coroner. She left the house on Saturday and never returned."

Jasper shook his head. "This is getting to be too much. We have to get them out of the area."

"We'd have to find them first," Emmett remarked. "And they may not leave just because we ask them to." I could hear the hint of eagerness behind this reasonable comment. Emmett would have welcomed the chance to force the strangers out of town.

"Three of them, seven of us," Jasper said shortly.

"Carlisle won't like it." I could say this with some confidence.

"I can't say I much care for the idea myself," he replied, "but Carlisle might very easily convince them to go. Just seeing all of us together may be enough. What nomads want to encroach on the territory claimed by such a large coven?" Jasper sometimes fell back into the language, and the innate strategies, of his former life.

The expected announcement came over the PA soon after the bell for first period had rung. Following one or two incidentals, the principal cleared his throat nervously, and went on, "I regret to have to inform the students of the death of our own police chief's daughter, Isabelle Swan."

It's Isabella, I thought, not Isabelle. I heard the reactions of the class, some of them shocked by the news, others already aware of the death. The word bear could be heard among the whispers.

The announcement went on to say that any students who were acquainted with Isabelle could send cards or flowers to the Anderson Funeral Home, or to Chief Swan himself. "I'm sure we all, er, grieve along with our police chief at this, er, difficult time," it concluded.

"What a shame!" Angela Weber exclaimed. "Her poor parents!"

"Did she have any brothers or sisters?" asked a girl from the next desk.

"Not that I know of."

The teacher added a few words before starting the class. We hurried home at 3:00 to talk things over with Carlisle and Esme. We were of one mind on dealing with the situation. "We should approach them with caution," Carlisle said, "but I agree with Jasper: they will probably leave voluntarily once we confront them."

"Did you hear anything about the girl's death during the day?" I asked. "Is everyone accepting the findings of bear attack?"

"Yes, so far, although it remains inconclusive because no body was actually found."

I raised an eyebrow. "Why do they assume she's dead, then? Couldn't she have run away, or gotten lost in the woods? It's unfamiliar territory to her, I assume."

"Isabella had just arrived to stay with her father - without reluctance, it appears - so the police see no reason for her to run away. More to the point, they found fairly conclusive evidence. The coroner was at the hospital, and I could hear him from an adjoining room. They found a great deal of blood on the ground; some torn clothing identified as hers; one of her shoes, also bloodstained; and…body parts." I looked at him questioningly. "Two of her fingers, on the ground a short distance from the other items. Fingerprints were intact; it was easy to ascertain they belonged to the Swan girl."

"Found where?" Jasper asked.

Carlisle sighed. "La Push. Inside the boundary line."

"And…why do we assume it was vampires again?" I asked. "It could be a genuine animal attack this time, or an accident of some kind." A vampire attack, after all, was unlikely to spill much blood.

"True." Carlisle turned to Alice. "Do you see the girl's body being found? Anything further on the matter?"

Uncomfortably, Alice replied, "I don't see her at all."

Carlisle tilted his head inquisitively. "You mean, because she is no longer alive?"

"No, I mean I can't see her, period, alive or dead. Her future is a blank. So is Chief Swan's, at the moment." Her mind was full of disturbance over this failure.

"You mentioned blind spots once before. Is this something that's become worse?"

She nodded unhappily. "It seems completely random. Everything will be crystal clear, and then every so often, someone's future will just blank out!"

We pondered that a moment. "Could the nomads be blocking you?" Jasper suggested. "Possibly one of them is gifted."

"I hadn't thought of that! It might explain why I didn't see them earlier. And why I didn't see this girl, their victim - or possible victim."

"That does make sense," I agreed. "Although I wonder why you can't see Chief Swan. When was the last time you saw his future?"

"I was scanning everyone involved right after his daughter's death was announced. I saw him taking phone calls, answering questions. Terribly upset. Then some friends of his came to see him. One of them was that man Carlisle spoke to when we first arrived. They helped him make funeral arrangements and so forth. They invited him back to La Push, but a little while after they started driving there, they all disappeared."

Carlisle regarded her thoughtfully. "The nomads made their last attack inside the reservation boundary. Perhaps they were still nearby. If Jasper's theory is correct, they might be able to block your vision on a geographical basis."

Jasper nodded. "The theory being, Alice can't see anyone who approaches their current location?"

"Exactly."

After a little further discussion, we drove together to just outside the Quileute territory, parking our cars and scouting the perimeter on foot. To our disappointment, there was no fresh trace of the three strangers, either near the boundary, nor leading away from it. We gave up around 7:00, but as we were returning to our vehicles, Alice suddenly stopped short.

"Charlie Swan! He just came back!" At our puzzled looks, she explained, "I see his future again. He's on his way to the station. Hmm…I see another police officer bringing in evidence soon, something to do with his daughter."

"Is he alone?" Carlisle asked her.

"Yes, he's driving back alone. He'll enter Forks in twelve minutes."

Carlisle paused. "Would the rest of you mind going back in one car? I'd like to stop and see the Chief. Perhaps this new evidence will offer some enlightenment. Edward, come with me, please. You may be able to hear forensic information that's not discussed in our presence."

I was happy to help. Leaving the others to return home, Carlisle and I drove to the small police station in downtown Forks. "Why are we supposedly coming here?" I asked, wanting to back up his cover story as required.

"Just to offer our sympathy. I could also volunteer to help with any search and rescue efforts, if it seems appropriate."

I nodded. As we pulled into the station parking lot, I began to pick up thoughts from inside the building. Chief Swan's mind was odd, as I'd previously noticed. His thoughts seemed to waver in clarity, like a radio station intermittently picking up a distant signal, and sometimes seemed to become rather opaque. So it was now; but the overall nature of his thoughts were clear enough. He was mourning, cycling through moments of disbelief (…no way she's really gone…), self-recrimination (…shouldn't have let her go walking off!), images of his daughter tinged with tenderness and pain, and occasional flashes of wordless despair. Carlisle watched me listen. "His grief is severe," I explained. "I'm surprised he's even here."

"No doubt he finds it preferable to being alone at home. We won't stay long," Carlisle replied, opening the car door.

Chief Swan was as much of a mess as his mental state suggested: unkempt, red-eyed, and wearing a stunned expression. He was seated at his desk, but looked at us blankly when we entered. His deputy approached and greeted us. "Sorry to bother you at this time," Carlisle told him, "but I wanted to offer my condolences to the Chief, and see if there was anything I could do." He half turned toward me. "Edward expected to be in some of Isabella's classes. It was a shock to the students to hear of her accident, my own kids included."

Chief Swan nodded vaguely. "Um, thanks."

The deputy added, "I think everything's being done that can be done. There's no, uh…" He glanced uneasily at the pathetic figure at the desk behind him. "…no search party or anything. But thanks. Doctor Cullen, isn't it?"

The door opened and a uniformed officer entered, carrying a clear plastic evidence bag, improperly sealed so that it was partly open, either from carelessness, or because the case was considered solved and the police were just going through the motions. I could see it contained a sleeve from a woman's shirt, a simple cotton knit pullover such as teenaged girls often wore, torn off close to the shoulder. It was almost completely saturated with blood, now stiff and dry. I saw the officer hesitate, heard him, in his thoughts, wonder whether to present the evidence to the grieving Chief or to his more fully functional deputy. Then, thinking to check for any remaining trace of the three vampires that might be left on the evidence, I inhaled.

It was a mistake. Through the gap in the evidence bag, I picked up the aroma of the blood staining the torn sleeve. I had not expected the blood to be a concern; it was completely dry, and two days old. The scent should have been harmless; but it hit me with significant force. Venom pooled in my mouth, desire flooded my mind, and my muscles clenched in instinctive preparation to pounce on the source of that smell. The idea of that source, of the human who had had the original, still living elixir flowing in her veins, momentarily overwhelmed me. I could see Carlisle realize that something was amiss. As I forced my attention away, a sound came from my throat, and the deputy looked at me curiously. Seeing my eyes fixed intently on the bloody cloth, he came to the obvious conclusion. "Doc, your boy seems a little bothered by the, uh…" He nodded to the evidence bag, which he finally had the sense to take and stow away, out of Charlie Swan's sight.

Carlisle looked at me. "Are you all right, Edward?" he asked aloud, his mind echoing the question, but with more alarm.

I pulled myself together, quickly taking on the role of teenaged boy made queasy by the sight of blood. "Yeah, yeah. Think so." I added, quickly and inaudibly to humans, "It's fine." In fact, my mind had already cleared, and I was beginning to wonder at my reaction.

"Would you like to go and wait in the car?" he asked paternally, while thinking Are you sure?

I gave a barely perceptible nod, and rather sheepishly excused myself. As I walked slowly back to the Mercedes, I could hear Carlisle saying to Chief Swan, "Charlie, you shouldn't be trying to work at a time like this."

"It's okay," I heard the chief reply dully. "My buddy, Harry, is coming by in a bit. He's going to stay at my place for tonight."

"I'm glad to hear it. Again, let me know if I can be of any help. I'm so very sorry, Charlie."

Carlisle joined me a minute later, sitting in the driver's seat and turning toward me. "What happened, Edward?"

"It was the blood."

He frowned. "The blood on the evidence?" I nodded. "But it was days old, completely dry and mostly sealed in plastic!"

"I know, but even in that degraded state, the scent was so incredibly…" I shrugged, recognizing that it made no sense. "I've never had that kind of reaction before. I can't even imagine what it would be like to encounter the actual person…I mean, if even old traces on a piece of cloth had that effect…"

He understood what I meant. "Yes, indeed. I can only say, thank God you never actually encountered her!"