In the year 2020, Vampires took control of society and ordered all humans placed in vampire custody. The people who were not captured formed a Resistance movement, headed by the Human Council, who began to plan the Insurgence.

I am, of course, indebted to Stephanie Meyer for this world we all play in, and these characters we all adore. Additionally, I am indebted to hitntr01, who has graciously allowed me to use certain concepts from her wonderful story "In Need of Rescue", which constitute much of the background of my own story. These include: the language Vampiri, the Rules, the machines used to draw blood from humans, Manners Training, and the plot theme of Edward working as a guard at a facility holding humans. Thank you, hitntr01.

Chapter 38 – Hearing about Jasper's new problem

(Bella's POV)

My cousins and I listened to Ardella make her deal with Jasper. We waited to hear his reaction to her response after we had translated Alice's whispered remarks to Jasper to Ardella.

When we first contacted Ardella, we had convinced her to leave her room just to go downstairs for a few minutes. It gave me a look at a house I had never been in. We first checked out the kitchen, and then she walked to the patio and looked out. There was a standard sliding glass door, with a lock I could show her how to open if necessary, and a standard fence. I could send someone in from the outside if I needed to. The Quileutes would be able to step in if things started to go wrong.

Since we had contacted her using a direct mind-to-mind connection, we had given her several days to get used to hearing our voices. One of our objectives had been to give her information about her owners. She had lived with them for years without knowing anything about them, as they had only communicated with her using simple Vampiri commands. So we started showing her pictures of Jasper and Alice's human lives, as wells as pictures of both of their immortal existences. We needed her to know what Jasper Whitlock had been through, and what he was capable of doing.

We had found her baby, now two years old, in the Seattle living death camp. Another woman was raising her child. We started talking to Ardella about her baby and told her we had a plan to get her baby back. She was going to have to ask Jasper and Alice for the baby, and we told her we would spend a few days coaching her. Negotiating with Jasper Whitlock, who had been a slave owner in both his human and vampire existences, was going to be a complex transaction. And this girl had not only been a slave all her life, raised to be terrified of vampires, she had also been depressed for two years.

But Ardella came through quite well. The mind reader said she was even beginning to earn Jasper's respect, while Alice was dropping in his estimation. Personally, I was glad to hear that Jasper was annoyed by Alice's suggestion to trick Ardella.

When the situation with Ardella's child had first come up, my cousins had gotten busy. As they first adjusted to their new homes three years ago, Papa and their mates had tried to find them something to occupy their time. They discovered they liked sewing. After a lifetime wearing drab, undyed clothing, in semi-dark rooms, they loved the feel and color of fabric.

And my cousins seemed to have a knack for sewing. Papa would buy them patterns and material from the Internet, having everything sent to a post office box in a small town near their property. The cousins first started making clothes and moved on to making coordinating outfits for one another. They would wear similar dresses each day, varying by color and accessories, but always the same basic pattern. After a while, they started making up their own clothing patterns and also started making curtains and linens for the kitchen and table to match the changing seasons.

And they loved dressing the three children Hope had brought with her.

So, when Ardella's situation came to light, the cousins immediately began making matching Mommy-daughter outfits for Ardella and Amy. They began to fill a trunk with clothes and shoes for the two of them, as well as bath toys and toiletry products. They did a marathon crochet session with the women from the human side of the Coven family as well, so there were blankets and little sweaters to go into the trunk.

They sent two of the boys to Forks in the Cessna with the trunk, timing their arrival for the day Jasper and Alice left to look for the baby at the Seattle HCF.

I told Ardella, using our mental connection, that a delivery was coming, and she would need to open the door. She went to the front door, and I gave her the universal combination override for the type of lock that had been installed on the inside of the door. Thankfully, Jasper had never got around to tinkering with the lock, so our first attempt at overriding the combination worked. She was able to open the door to the house for the first time since she had arrived.

The ally Sean had decided to deliver my cousins' trunk to her; he was a good choice as he had a way with humans. He saw Ardella opening the door carefully, and said, "I believe this package is for you, ma'am," in English to her. She was startled; she had never been addressed in English by a strange vampire before. She opened the door wider to let him bring it inside. We told her to ask him to take it upstairs, as she would never be able to carry that trunk upstairs on her own.

She shyly motioned for him to take it upstairs and then ran ahead to show him which room was hers. So he carried it up to her room and set it in the floor. He handed her his keypad to sign, and we told her to make an "x" on it. She did so carefully, and then Sean bowed and left the house.

We told Ardella how to undo the buckles on the trunk and then open it up. We went through each item of clothing with her as she took it out, and each toy. We told her to take the toiletries, including soap and baby shampoos, into the bathroom.

Once we knew Alice and Jasper had found and purchased Amy, we told her that they were on their way home. She started shaking with emotion, and we warned her that Amy was probably going to be crying, as she had been taken away from the only mother she had known. She should be prepared for the crying, but it would eventually stop as Amy got used to being with her.

Hope suggested she start drawing Amy a bath when Alice and Jasper were about twenty minutes from the house. Giving Amy a bath might help relax her, she told Ardella, and help Amy get to sleep in a strange house. So Ardella carefully laid out the bath items and the clothes that she would put on Amy when she was done, and she then went back downstairs to wait for Jasper and Alice to arrive with her daughter.

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