The sun was sliding further behind the tall buildings; it wouldn't set for another two hours, I guessed, but we were obscured in the deep shade created by the towering structures all around us. Not that it would have hidden us from the keen eyes of the wolves, or of Edward, for that matter, but it did give the young alpha a chance to show off her swiftly surfacing abilities. Even so, without Alice's directions, we never would have found the place.
"Here," she'd said, and handed me another envelope flat on her palm, just the way she'd handed me the first one. We'd crept away from the car, gently closing the single door and racing away down an alley. We kept moving quickly, quickly, quickly, away from the growing roar behind us, knowing that any of the pack could catch us in seconds because of our combined clumsy humanity. When we were far enough away, she turned to me with the new envelope.
I saw how Alice had tricked Edward. He wouldn't have been able to distinguish the memories from one another without knowing the contents of the letters. Alice, I thought. Alice, what have you done…But there was no answer. Just clipped sentences written in her whispery hand, ending with an unfamiliar address. There was no explanation of what we were to do once we entered the building, and I hoped that meant it would be obvious. We dashed off in to the dark, four white blonde heads bobbing like ghosts through the increasing dark around me.
"They're close," she growled, one white hand holding a small boy back, who crouched low. Her nose wrinkled the way Jacob's did, cutting and dividing the scents in the air into quantifiable categories, naming what I could not see or know. Her young pack fell in line behind the boy she held, descending in size. It hit me how predatory they looked, suddenly—these were not normal children. Their eyes glimmered unblinkingly in the waning light, all muscles tensed and at the ready. It wasn't that they were wolves, yet; they did not have the sleek, terrifying praxis of the grown La Push pack, for example. They looked like soldiers. Child soldiers.
"This is the address," I confirmed, nodding towards the wide building in front of us. One structure that took up the entire city block, as far as we could see, windowless and sleekly modern in spite of the ancient foundation. Black towers loomed above us, the jagged horizon continuing behind them out of sight, the hum from the electricity illuminating its broad face louder than even the wind. We held hands and moved forward, and I felt myself moving to the front protectively. As if I could save us.
The receptionist was stunning, but something desperate clung to her like a rank perfume—the fake beauty mark, the sweep of her eyeliner, her carefully understated outfit and garish shoe dangling from her swinging foot. She rudely reminded me of some kind of Barbie version of my old highschool friend Jessica. The young alpha stood behind me and growled, deep and low, and the woman looked up and smiled pleasantly. I wondered why I'd reacted to her so poorly, and pushed the thoughts from my mind.
"Hello." She spoke English with a delicate accent, almost unnoticeable. "Did you say something?" The children were silent, huddling behind me.
"No," I said, and faked a smile back at her. With my shabby clothing and unwashed body, I knew I resembled a vagrant, but I walked forward in what I hoped was a confident way. "I'm here to see Alice."
The woman's smile disappeared, and her hand quickly moved to a button on the top of the desk and hovered over it. A cloud briefly passed over her eyes. "Are you sure?" She spoke without moving her mouth; there must be cameras trained on us. Her eyes went back over the children behind me, and before I could answer, her mouth firmed and she pressed down. "You shouldn't have come here," she said, just as suddenly sounding like a chastising matron lecturing the young and uninitiated. "And you definitely shouldn't have brought them."
"She already stinks like them," said the young girl, and the woman laughed lightly just as the elevator door behind her opened. I hadn't previously noticed that for the size of the room, it was strange there was only one exit and one entrance. White marble. The woman's white throat as she laughed. The tinkling echo crashing back and forth from stone wall to stone wall as someone moved towards us. I still had that fake smile on my face when the vampire appeared behind the receptionist, who looked docilely back at her.
"Come with me," the woman said, and I found I wanted to follow her, though I didn't know why; her liquid violet eyes hypnotized me from her shining face. The receptionist turned herself towards the beautiful vampire as if she were basking in the light of the summer sun. The vampire never bothered to look at her, and turned her back on all of us, her pace becoming faster as she approached the elevator. I found I was frozen.
Fear. I was going to die.
The tiny white hand wrapped around mine and tugged. Gently. "It's time to go," she said again. I remembered watching Jacob in the crowd, his black hair like a furious halo. Edward and Leah's arms reaching towards one another, never quite touching, as the crowd enveloped them. My feet began to shuffle towards the elevator where the vampire waited, smirking; the sound of my worn shoes on the smooth floor was deafening to me.
I hadn't realized there were more of them waiting inside, but it made sense; the children formed a tight circle around me, and the three vampires in the elevator laughed uproariously, as if we'd told them a brilliant joke. One of them was almost as small as the young alpha, whose face was twisted in a ferocious scowl. The two blonde girls stared at each other eagerly. In real life—in the human world, where there were no vampires of werewolves or humans who loved them—they could have been sisters. None of us spoke. The elevator reached its floor and the vampires, smiling unctuously, moved past us at human speed until the young looking one had to leave her stance opposite the small wolf; she stood perfectly still, smiling sweetly, then snapped her jaws inches from the girl's neck before flying out the door at her natural speed. The tiny alpha exhaled furiously, then pulled us through the door after them.
"You're not even fully grown," cooed a strange voice. "Why ever would you think that you could fight us?" It was a vampire's voice, wooing us with its sinister music from the doorway at the end of the hall, where the white walls gave way to a dark and cavernous room. The vampires also had a militaristic form as they entered the dark room ahead of us, the shape of their group becoming more clear as they divided automatically before us and regrouped behind. The children once again stood in a close ring around me, all of us facing out in the dark.
The sun was almost down. This high up, we could just see it, a searing red ball of fire in the yellow tinted sky far away, across the turreted rooves and eaves between. The few shining steel structures winked blindingly white, but the city was mostly the black stone of the room we stood in now. It looked as though it had remained unchanged for centuries; the ceiling was high, the windows bare of glass, thin and long. It was also round, and full of stark white faces. Vampires drifted around the edge, peering down to our precarious position; one moved apart from the others. His voice was high, girlish, and still echoing around the chamber. Long nails like mother of pearl tipped his thin skinned hands, and his whole body looked as though it were covered in some kind of ancient dust, as if a film stood between him and my eyes. But he was real. He kept talking in his high voice, coming closer. I tried to listen.
"Bella, Bella, Bella…of course you know, in our little city here that word has quite the connotation." I realized he was beaming at me. "It suits you, my dear. You are lovely." He faltered as his gaze took in my small bodyguards. "It is unfortunate you chose your alliances so wantonly. We could have been such friends." He turned his back to me, and one of the others rushed forward—a big, oafish vampire, if there can be such a thing. The first one put his long fingered hand on his chest and clucked his tongue. "Caius, my darling brother, show some patience—"
"—The sun will set! The sun is almost down, Aro, and I can smell her—" The vampire spoke with a feverish intensity. His eyes were brilliantly red, swirling in their sockets over the children. This was the one that Jacob said he would kill, my Jake, beautiful strong Jacob—
The scalding terror locked my breath. All of these red eyes, red eyes on me—
She startled me back again. "Where is she?" The fierce tiny alpha's high clear voice was unaltered. It was as if she were telling Jacob she could fight for rank again, as if she were talking to Edward about how useless it was to learn to read, as if she were shrugging off her human name—she sounded firm and bright. "Alice? Is she here?"
"Everyone is impatient," clucked the lilting voice inside the vampire called Aro. His lips were still, his head cocked to the side, and a chiding sigh escaped him. He waved a white hand to his right without looking in that direction, and the vampires there parted immediately to reveal a shadowed pocket in the back. A woman knelt there in the dark.
I thought at first she was chained, but then I saw she was free, and actually a vampire; she was so filthy that the incandescence of her skin was dulled. And then she raised her face, her eyes so pitch and wide there was no pupil, only a divided void where eyes should be—and then I saw the face around the void, and screamed. Alice.