AN: I'm submitting chapters faster now, and one went up over the weekend, so if you missed it, read 11 first.
PART 2
The phone lay on the ground.
There was a sour, animal scent that made Bella ache to hiss at nothing, but sound would serve no purpose, so she held it in. Edward's scent was too weak to follow, and all signs of him and his attackers ended at the river.
Someone was going to be begging for mercy soon.
It had been a few hundred years since she'd faced a moment like this, but her tendons and her muscles remembered how to react, and her mind had never forgotten.
First, she had to recharge the phone. Since there was no trail left to follow, she ran her hand over the piano keys and then sat down on the bench and focused on breathing evenly while she waited. Anyone who saw her might have thought she cared nothing about the newborn being taken from her, but the concentration kept her mind sharp and ready. After an hour, when her phone was working again, the old blacksmith was her first call. Bat didn't even sound surprised when she told him. Like her, his personality had been forged by the frequent and violent loss of those around him, and he didn't waste her time.
"What do you need?" he asked.
"I need travelling papers, and I need you to stay at the cabin in case whoever took him tries to contact me."
"You'll need more than that. The world has changed. Do you even know what currency they're using now?"
"The world always changes. I'll manage."
"You'd be a – you'd be unwise to go it alone when you don't have to."
"I need you to wait at the cabin," she said, "and I won't ask Carlisle to come with me; he may have the best talent of all of us, but where I'm going, they don't respect compassion."
Bat sighed, long and impatient. "I can guess where the hell you're going. Take my granddaughter. She'll keep the tracker on the straight and narrow and let you know if he tries to pull one over on you."
"Ginnlaug won't want to come."
"She'll do it. If there's one thing Vikings understand, it's a life debt. She owes you just as much as I do."
"If she's willing, she'll have to come straight away. I won't wait."
Bella heard papers shuffling on the other end of the line. "You'll need to sit tight until I can get there anyway," Bat said, "and I'll be there tomorrow night if I can get in touch with the forger right away. Ginnie will be with me."
Tomorrow night. That left about thirty hours before she could make a move. If Edward wasn't already in pieces, it meant that someone wanted him alive. She tasted venom in her mouth and had to trust that the delay wouldn't make a difference.
Her next call was to Carlisle. He listed the times of flights out of Seattle. There was yet another newborn with him, a young woman named Rosalie, but the coven in Alaska would open their home to her and to Esme if need be. At any other time Bella might have teased him about his newfound drive to increase the world's population of vampires, but she had more important concerns. How could she tell the strongest man she knew that he would be a liability?
"Perhaps you should stay in Forks," she said, "in case Edward is making his way to you."
Silence from her phone.
"Carlisle?"
It was always strange talking to people at a distance. Beyond the reach of her unsettling influence, they behaved differently than they did in person, and she wasn't always sure how to read them. Carlisle was quick to understand nuance, and she wondered if his silence meant that he already suspected the real reason she wanted him to stay at home.
"Was there any sign that he left of his own free will?" he asked.
There wasn't. In fact, all signs indicated that there had been a fight, and she had yet to tell anyone about the sour animal smell or her fear that it was the scent of a werewolf. Having never encountered one before, she couldn't be sure, so she decided not to cause him extra stress.
After several moments of waiting for her to answer, Carlisle said, "You think you stand a better chance of getting Edward back if I stay behind."
He always saw to the heart of things.
"I may need to persuade the Volturi that it's in their best interest to help me. I don't know how far I'll have to take it. If you're there, I might hesitate. Bat's granddaughter can help with minor details like money and the airport. She can sense a lie, so she'll be useful in Volterra."
"You're going for Demetri?" he guessed.
She nodded, though of course he couldn't see. "Whether or not the Volturi are behind this, I need a tracker. If Demetri tries to lead me astray, Ginnlaug will know."
"I understand."
He really sounded as though he did, and she was grateful for that. Guilt would only slow her down.
"I'll fix this," she said. "I should never have let him out of my sight while he was my responsibility, but if he's alive, I will bring him back for you."
Her phone batteries were dying, and it wasn't long before she found herself alone in the silent cabin with another twenty-nine hours before Bat and Ginnlaug were supposed to arrive. She went upstairs and thumbed through a few of Edward's architecture books. He didn't spend that much time in here, but there was the scent of him – an unnamed, heady warmth like sandalwood. His duffle bag was saturated with it, and she pulled it onto her lap.
Edward, I'm going to fix this.
He was only supposed to be a favor, straight forward and uncomplicated. She understood favors. She'd bartered everything from blood and sex in Europe to goats and gold in the Middle East, and favors were just an affectionate sort of bartering between friends. They didn't require accounting. For friends – and there were precious few of those – she would help even if she received nothing in return. So when Carlisle had been forced to push Edward out of the nest, she'd agreed to look after him.
Like all newborns, he was edgy and defensive, and he stared a lot. It had taken her just two days, three chess moves and one brush against his knee to realize that he was a threat, a stone dropped into her still pond.
She'd survived by observing repetition and cycles, by knowing what to expect from cities, from the wilderness, from ruling covens and shifting alliances. She'd relied on the breath, the warmth of prey, the dirt under her nails when she turned the earth, the rush of water on the washboard. She had learned a long time ago to pay attention to sensation so that she could keep her brain from overloading. Then Edward tugged her out of complacency.
She shook her head to clear it and left his room for her own. As always, her eyes were drawn to the urn that had been buried with her mother. Though it was a symbol of violence and bloodshed, she set it aside with careful reverence. It was the only thing that remained, unless she counted the concoctions her mother had taught her: lavender, chervil, valerian, and yarrow, brewed in a tea, could combat fevered dreams, and foxglove, which her mother had only used once, made sleep last forever. One memory bled into another: the weight of an abandoned fledgling in the hand felt as heavy as a river stone one fourth its size. She knew how to set the leg of an injured lamb, though it had been thousands of years since she'd copied her mother by trying to work her healing on animals. She could barely get close to them now, and as prey, they were right to fear her.
She closed the lid on the window seat, but the memories kept coming. There were detailed recollections from after the change, like the fishermen who sieved the Nile using nets that wriggled fat and silver with fish whose scales smelled sharp like a tin can and soft like the body of a woman. Once dead, their stench was too disgusting to equate with anything other than decay. In the end, everything decayed except her own kind, who could only be destroyed by severing the head. Unless it was already charred in the fire, a vampire could still see even after the brain had been separated from the body. Enkidu had shown her that. His defeated foes' eyes would dart over to their headless bodies in alarm and disbelief. She tried to drive the image away, but other bitter lessons replaced it. She remembered that blood offered freely tasted the same as blood taken by force.
Enough.
It was better shut it out than to let the past make her feel things that would leave her weak. She'd gotten so good at it until Edward crashed into her life. Now there was memory and yearning and hopes that were best left unexamined.
There was still more than a day left to wait, but she stowed a few things in a backpack and then went for a hunt. She realized how unsettled she was when it took her three hours to get herself into a calm enough state to surprise a stag. Afterwards, she sat on the roof, the last place she'd been with Edward, and the point with the clearest lookout, until she heard the steady thrum of an engine in the distance. She set out towards the sound. Ginnlaug was leaning against a slim blue car and looking off into the trees, but Bat gave Bella a swift pat on the arm and handed her an envelope full of papers.
"Is there anything I need to know?" he asked.
"Nothing. I don't think Edward will be back here on his own, but keep an eye out. I assume Ginnlaug has a phone?" she asked.
"Ginnie. I haven't been Ginnlaug in about nine hundred years. And of course I have a phone."
Bella ignored her and turned back to Bat. "You know where to go to get reception. I'll check in with you when I can. Or you can call Ginnie."
He nodded. "Don't hesitate to put Caius in his place. You know he doesn't like anyone who remembers a time before Volturi rule."
"He hates werewolves even more than his elders. I can use that if I need to."
"Are we going or not?" Ginnie asked. "We have a flight out of Dulles that leaves in five hours."
"She's a pain in the ass sometimes, but it's just chatter. She will be of use to you," Bat said.
Bella opened the passenger door to throw her backpack onto the seat. "How far is this city?"
"Several hours. And Dulles is an airport, not a city. Do you even know what state we're in?" Ginnie asked.
"Does the land have border lines across it? What do I care what humans call the ground I walk on?"
That was enough to shut Ginnie up, and she went around to the driver's side and got in. After a minute she rolled the window down. "Morfar," she called, and Bat went over. Though she was still pouting, her face softened when he came up, and she leaned out to kiss him on the chin.
"Don't get yourself in trouble," Bat told her, "and don't forget what you owe Isabella."
She nodded and rolled up her window.
The air in the car was colder than the air outside. It smelled of tannin and cow hide and an unusual chemical stench that had her wrinkling her nose.
"New car smell." Ginnie tapped the dashboard. "Vinyl." She threw an arm over the back of Bella's seat and did a quick three point turn to head them in the opposite direction.
They didn't speak for a long while, but the car had a radio, and it pumped out a rhythmic beat. Bella watched the landscape shift quickly as it passed. Humans had found a way to move almost as fast as she did. Given time there seemed to be little they couldn't invent, which was strange given their short lives. They built upon the work of the ones who came before them, and she admired that, even if she didn't always like the results.
Ginnie was tapping her long fingernails against the wheel she used to steer the car. Every so often, her wispy white hair would tickle across her forehead, and she'd tug it back by running her fingers through it and then checking her reflection in the mirror that hung in front of the glass.
"What does Morfar mean?" Bell asked.
"Hmmm?"
"You called Bat Morfar."
"Grandfather," she said. "Specifically mother's father. Why?"
"I was just wondering. I've only ever heard him called Bat or Völundr."
"Well, it's not like you'd have a reason to call him grandfather," Ginnie said. She fiddled with a lever by the wheel and they pulled off the four lane road and onto a smaller street, where they rolled to a stop.
Bella looked over at her, and the blonde popped the cap back on a tube she'd used to repaint her lips a light pink.
"What?" Ginnie asked. "It's a red light. I'm stopping because we have to."
"I didn't say anything."
"Well don't. Trust me to know what I'm doing." She reached into the glove compartment and pulled out a band to hold her hair back.
"I've seen traffic lights. I visited a town about twenty years back."
"Well great, you're an expert then."
Bella found it easy to shut out Ginnie's unsettled irritation, but she let herself focus on it anyway. Something small like that could take her mind off larger issues until they arrived in Volterra.
The airport had high ceilings but was otherwise purely functional. The heated scent of human food poured out of shops along the way to where they would get on an airplane. Music or announcements came out of the walls. There were a lot of people moving quickly (for them) and with purpose. They gave her a wide berth whenever possible. They weren't as wary as other animals though; humans were easily distracted and seemed less inclined to act on instinct. She took a good look at them. They were plumper and wearing a lot less clothes than she remembered. Many of the women wore pants, and she was pleased to see that everyone appeared to be free. That had not been the case when she'd last spent any serious amount of time around people, and she'd never liked servitude.
She had to show her passport again and again. There was a time when nothing held people back from roaming except a lack of transport. She felt a tinge of resentment at their attempt to control her movements, but it wasn't a useful emotion, so she let it go and moved quietly through the lines.
Once on the plane, she closed her window shade, but a woman came by and asked her to open it again.
"Because of 9-11," Ginnie said, but then she shook her head. "Never mind. Just leave it up for now."
For the sake of getting Edward back, Bella was willing to put aside the fact that, as far as she understood, airplanes could break apart and catch fire in the air – an event that could accomplish both of the things it took to make a vampire cease to exist. She didn't actually know how they'd managed to make something this big lift off the ground. She could have asked Ginnie, but it didn't really matter. Apparently, like everything else they wanted, humans had found a way to make it happen. The only thing they didn't seem to be able to do was live long.
Bella smelled sweat and cologne and food more disgusting than anything that had assaulted her before now. Pictures flickered above her head and showed her the image of the belt Ginnie had made her tighten across her lap. Compartments opened and snapped shut, and the murmur of human voices blended together over the music that played even here. She let the sounds blend into a mass of undefined static, and beneath it she heard her own mantra. For once it wasn't saying calm.
Edward, it said. Edward, I'm coming. Don't let it be too late.
Edward didn't fear her unless she concentrated on it, and he didn't listen, but when he touched her, she didn't want him to listen. She'd had a perverse longing to lay under him and feel safe. Ridiculous to want that when he couldn't even take care of himself. She was supposed to be keeping him out of danger for Carlisle, and look what a great job she'd done of that. But I'm coming, Edward, and once I find you, there's nothing anyone can do to stop me from taking you back.
Ginnie had been looking at pictures of makeup in some reading material at her seat, but now she set it aside with a huff.
"You're driving me absolutely insane, and we haven't even taken off, you know that?"
"I'm making you afraid?" Bella asked.
"You know you are, Isabella. It was almost bearable in the car. Now it's off the charts. Are you upset or something?"
"I haven't been in the air before. I'm letting it bother me, that's all."
Ginnie turned sideways in her seat, and for a moment she sputtered. "You– You're lying to me? Seriously? I've left everything behind to go on this wild goose chase with you, and I accept that I'm supposed to owe you a life debt, but Jesus, we all know that you used the worst possible method to get me to leave Santa Fe, and even if you hadn't there's always the chance I would have made it out on my own, so I can't believe you're going to sit there and spout off shit you don't mean when we aren't even on our way yet, because how am I supposed to help you when I can't trust what you tell me, even though I'm probably putting my existence in your hands, which, by the way, I am only doing because my grandfather will never accept gifts, and this, this of all things, is what he actually wanted, so fine, here I am, but at least have the guts to be straight with me."
Bella wondered if it were really a good thing that vampires didn't need to breathe.
"I apologize," she said. "I didn't think you required a complete answer. I'm worried about the newborn as well."
Ginnie relaxed slightly at the sound of the truth. "I don't need to know every little thing. Just don't screw with me." She opened her magazine and started flicking pages back and forth, though she wasn't looking at them. "This kid we're after, he's only a couple of years old right?"
Bella let a long, stale breath move in and back out of her lungs. "If you want me to stop frightening you, I should probably not talk about this for a while. Don't take it personally."
"Do what you gotta do. I'm going to find somewhere else to sit. I don't mean to be a bitch, but you're making me want to wrench a door off and jump out of the plane."
Bella nodded and closed her eyes. She felt her elbows on the padded arm rest and her feet flat on the floor. Beneath them was carpet and metal and clouds. She let that image go, and refused to think of Edward, held captive, somewhere below.
She felt her breath moving in and out and prepared herself to bring the Volturi to heel.
All the usual characters, settings, etc. are the property of S. Meyer. Original characters and plot are mine. No copyright infringement is intended. May not be reprinted without express written permission.