Chapter Thirteen
My dreams were oddly transient. More so than they'd ever been before. I saw Charlie holding my baby picture in his room. I saw Alice explaining our weekend to Jasper, shaking her head as she reached the end of it, the bit where I ran away. I saw my mother snoring on the recliner in my old house, with the television blaring and Phil nowhere in sight. I saw Mark ranting about me to his friend Stephen. The words coming out of his mouth, well... I just didn't recognize him anymore.
And then I was in the woods. It was night time, and hard to make out anything, but there was a small clearing and just enough moonlight filtering down through the clouds, through the trees. I saw a boy, a man, sitting on a rock. He wore a white shirt, so his movements were easy to mark as he ran his hands through his hair over and over again...
Suddenly, he stopped moving, cocking his head to the side... he seemed to sniff the air and then... a mountain lion ran from behind a tree, taking off towards a more densely wooded area. The man leapt off his perch and all but disappeared, his form a dim white blur as he tracked the big cat, chased it, leapt upon it, and...
A shaft of moonlight pushed through the trees above, better illuminated fragments of the man's form as he hunched over the animal and...
Flashes of tousled bronze hair over a porcelain white face with features too beautiful, too perfect to be real, and then red... blood red... covering the man's mouth, staining his lips...
He dropped the mountain lion's limp body to the ground, bringing his fingers to his face, wiping and licking the red away in a gesture that should not have been sensual but somehow was, in a gesture that should have been disturbing but somehow was not.
And he walked back to his rock, calm as could be, a patch of white in a sea of darkness, climbing gracefully back on top and assuming his original posture, head in hands, fingers in hair.
He spoke one word. Quietly, reverently.
Mournfully.
"Isabella."
I woke up.
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I wrote everything down... more out of habit than anything else. I was beginning to lose faith in the journalling, though perhaps it was the act itself that was important, and not the evidence.
I tried not to think too much about what I'd just seen. But I couldn't exactly go back to sleep, either. And it was only 2 a.m.
I turned on every light in my room and began hanging the clothes that had become such a point of contention over the weekend. I shook each piece out, smoothing it over the hanger and imagining Alice seeing the act in a vision and smiling. I even tried to arrange the closet in a manner that would meet with her approval, but gave up in the end... there was only so much a person could do to organize a rack full of clothes.
After the clothes came the shoes, of course. I stacked the emptied boxes in the corner, arranging them into a sort of fort. I wondered what Charlie would think if he came up here and saw the state of my closet. He hadn't seemed to notice the volume of what was being carried up the stairs. Perhaps he just didn't care. Perhaps I shouldn't care as well...
There were four bags left, white and minimalist and with a silver Apple logo in the center. I refused to go near them. At some point, I realized I would have to dig out the charger for my new phone, but... well, that wouldn't be today. Not now, at least.
I thought about Edward. I tried to reconcile the boy in the limo today with the... creature from my dream. But creature wasn't a fair term. He had still been beautiful. Not...
It was a big leap, of course, connecting Edward with... that... but they...
I mean, it had to be him, right?
I went to my desk, retrieving my journals from Phoenix, and flipped to the last page of the last book. Pale figures with dark eyes drinking from the necks of animals. I remembered now. I had seen it before, just not in such... vivid detail.
This had been different from the others. This had been like I was living it, not watching. The only other thing I could compare it to was the meadow. The first time I saw Edward. Sitting in a field of flowers. Telling me about his family.
And if only one dream, a dream about Edward, had ever been so vivid... well, wouldn't that mean that this dream had been about him as well?
Bronze hair and pale skin...
Red... so much red...
And then my name...
It was too much.
I looked at the clock on my nightstand. 4 a.m. Good enough for me.
I grabbed a pair of sweats from my dresser and the lone hoodie that Alice had allowed me to buy. For the first time since I had moved to Forks, really, for the first time since I had decided to move to Forks, I went for a run.
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I started out easy. I jogged up and down the street in front of the house, ignoring the chilly dampness of the still-night air. But it wasn't enough, so I made a right onto the town's main drag, moving at an even pace past the elementary school, the high school, the meager shopping district.
As I moved, I was plagued by images. Dreams and reality, past and present. So much had happened to me, around me, with me...
I saw amber eyes and a smiling mouth, only to watch them shift into my mother's scowling face. I saw Mark punching the wall in my old room, but replaced him with Alice smiling and laughing and hugging me on our shopping trip.
There was so much going on here... so much that I didn't understand. But in the end... did it matter? The Cullens were strange, yes, but so was I. So was everyone. And in the end, you either look past the strangeness, or you let it blind you.
I didn't understand what I had been shown tonight. And part of me was terrified... but not by what I had seen... more by my lack of reaction. I was thoughtful and puzzled... and I was relatively certain that the man had been Edward and, even if it hadn't happened tonight, it had been or would be... recent.
He'd seemed upset.
He'd said my name.
I didn't know what to think.
I ran faster.
Now I was on the outskirts of town. The buildings were spaced further apart, the trees lining the road spaced closer together. But there was still pavement under my feet, and so I kept moving. Running blindly.
I tried to make a list. Signs, symptoms, quirks... what did it all mean?
They were all beautiful. All of them. Every last one. But they weren't related. Not really. I understood that now... I think. And Alice had seen me first...
Pale skin. Across the board. And I was pretty sure they all had the same eyes. Amber. Honey. Gold. Whatever the descriptor, they were the same. Though Edward's were warmer to me than his sister's. Softer. I liked his eyes the best.
And they were cold. I couldn't leave that out. Every time one of them reached for me, it was as though they had been standing outside in the dead of winter without a jacket or gloves. But it wasn't unpleasant. And Edward's touch felt warmer than his sister's, for some reason... though it was definitely still chilled. His hands, though... when they touched me it was like electricity. My body generated enough warmth for both of us when he was around...
And Alice could see the future. Which wasn't so odd to me, because I could do it, too. The only difference was the method, really. I did it while I slept. She never slept. Another thing to consider.
And then, they never eat, either. I thought back to all those days we'd spent together. She'd order food when I did, but would only pick at it, really. She'd cut it up. Rearrange it on the plate. She said she'd explain later... that it was related to everything else.
And there was the dream. It kept coming back to the dream. Moving faster than I could comprehend, taking down a wild and dangerous animal, bringing its neck to his lips...
It was almost too much. Almost.
But not quite.
The sun was rising now, but it didn't matter. It was kind of pretty, actually. All the clouds were turning shades of pink. Grey pink, but pink all the same. I kept running.
There was a conclusion to be reached here. A period to put on the end of the sentence. And I reached for it, trying to grab hold, but it kept slipping through my fingers, dancing away at the last moment.
Pale and beautiful and strange and deadly.
My beautiful new friends. Who told me that we were family. Bonded. Mated.
Mate.
Where had I heard that word?
Someone had used it.
It was antiquated and primal, but then, I suppose, so were they.
A car sped past me, honking, bringing me back into the world.
I looked around. I had no idea where I was.
And my legs... were rubber. Useless.
I collapsed into the grass on the side of the road, sprawling out on my back and watching the sky continue to change colors as it filled with the rising sun.
I tried to catch my breath. I tried to will feeling back into my legs. I tried to care where I had ended up. But it didn't seem to matter. Not when there was so much more going on...
I listened as a car pulled onto the shoulder, slowing down and stopping not ten feet from me. A door slammed and feet crunched through gravel, growing closer every moment.
"That's a strange place to take a nap, Bella bear," a familiar voice said.
"I was tired," I explained, maintaining my spot on the ground.
"I guess it's a good thing I came and got you, then. Come on. Get in the car. This grass is ruining my heels."
I struggled to my feet and moved slowly towards the ridiculous vehicle, wobbling like a newborn foal on my overtaxed legs. When I stumbled, a hand was there, small and pale and cold, holding on to me, keeping me upright. And finally we'd covered the small distance and I dropped gratefully into a black, leather bucket seat.
"The diner's about to open," Alice said, settling herself behind the wheel. "How about you buy me a cup of coffee?"
A/N: As ever, big thanks to IssaBissa, beta extraordinaire, who continues to fight the good fight between me, my indecision, and my much beloved sentence fragments.
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