Four figures stood on the shore to meet us. One, obviously Siobhan, was taller than Rosalie and built like a brick shithouse, gorgeous and imposing with her proudly uplifted jaw and her flashing eyes. Her mate, Liam, was both shorter and slimmer, an impression enhanced by the fact that he held himself more tightly, with his hands in his pockets and his shoulders up around his ears. Maggie had to be the young girl, Southeast Asian to my eyes, with a curtain of blue-black hair falling around her young face and a sort of basic boniness that hinted at a life underfed.
Maggie's hand was tightly clutched around Bree's, who was regarding me with a look of tense apprehension. While Carlisle and the others walked down the beach a little ways with Siobhan and Liam, I approached the two youngest. Bree didn't look inclined to make eye contact, so I talked to Maggie instead.
"I'm Bella," I said, holding out my hand. Maggie ignored it; she was too busy bestowing on me a shockingly perceptive wide-eyed stare.
"So you're the one who got our Bree into this mess, eh?"
"Maggie," said Bree weakly. "It wasn't like that—" She looked unspeakably embarrassed.
Maggie smiled. "Kidding," she said. "I mean, I'm not kidding completely. I do think you should have warned her better. But I know you were caught between a rock and a redhead. We've all been there."
"You're right," I said, dipping my head an inch, trying to catch Bree's eyes. "I should have warned her better. Bree, I…I'm really sorry. I'm sorry you got dragged into all this."
Bree finally looked straight at me. "Me too," she said. "I shouldn't've...I shoulda seen it coming."
"Well, now that you're...um, you know, how are you doing?"
She shrugged. Her skin shone pale blue in the light from the moon. "This is a good day," she said. "Better than any so far. The first week was…" she trailed off and started clicking her teeth together compulsively, twisting her fingers around and around. Her shoulders drew in and up, and her breathing grew labored. Was this what newborns looked like from the outside? One minute she was fine, a little cagey perhaps, but holding it together. The next, she looked like someone had just informed her there was a bomb planted in her gut that might go off at any moment. Worse, watching the strain take over her face was making me flash back to an episode the day before, when we'd boarded the charter plane that would bring us to Belfast. The plane was full of the scent of human; I'd slumped and gibbered in the corner of the plane, drooling venom around the mouthful of kerosene-soaked cotton I was compulsively chewing on, until Laelia picked up on my panic and started crying. Comforting her for the whole plane ride was all that had kept me sane on that flight, the scent of human had been...
No. I couldn't go down that road. I stared down at my feet and counted every blade of grass that was touching my shoes. I loosened my jaw, which had clenched without my noticing.
"You two look like the arse-end of a bad time," Maggie said, not at all judgmentally. "Listen, I know Bree already ate a really big dinner but there's always room for dessert, and I'm getting peckish myself. Are you hungry, Bella?"
I stiffened and glanced at her . The Irish family didn't live like the Cullens, I remembered—but then something about Maggie's face caught my attention. I peered her Maggie's eyes more closely. They weren't dark red, as I'd first thought in the dim blue moonlight. They were more...tea-colored. Dark orange. But definitely not true red. What was the meaning of this?
"It depends," I said cautiously, "on what you have to eat."
Maggie smiled broadly. "We have sheep," she said. "All the sheep in the world."
"But I thought you…" I trailed off uncertainly.
"Oh, we do," Maggie assured me, no longer sounding very cheerful. "Every time a new sparkler goes off in town, we make a little investigation. We don't mess with kids or with people who don't have it coming. Dirtbags only. And when there are no dirtbags around to rid the world of, we eat sheep." She grinned suddenly, but it was a sharp, hard grin. "Someday," she said, "there will be no more dirtbags in the world, and we will eat nothing but sheep, and be happy to do it. My last one was a guy who caught his wife cheating and bashed her head in with a wrench. Didn't even get jail-time, 'cause they couldn't prove it was him. But he couldn't fool me. No one can. And now he's fish food. Tell me that was wrong."
If I'd been human, I would have shuddered. I didn't like this line of talk. But I'd expected them to be more like Victoria and James. This was...better?
"Anyway," said Maggie, tossing her silky hair over her shoulder, "Bree's decided to stick with sheep for now, and I don't mind keeping her company. You want some?"
"What the hell," I said. Edward was carrying Laelia further and further down the beach, her scent growing fainter in my nose. Might as well do something about the solar flare that would be appearing in my throat in T-minus ten seconds. "Lead the way."
This island caught some sweet breezes off the Gulf Stream; winter here felt like summer in Forks. Oileáin Aonair, the territory belonging to Siobhan, Liam and Maggie, actually consisted of a sizeable cluster of islands north of Aranmore. Bree and Maggie showed me around, leaping or swimming from island to island, or rowing in small wooden boats when the distances didn't lend themselves to other modes of transportation.
The largest island was the sheep farm. They kept over two hundred sheep here, all grazing and bleating and stinking up the air for miles around. The first thing Maggie did was show me how to use a needle and a length of tube to suck blood from a sheep's arteries without killing it. I might drink from twenty or more sheep in one meal; but none of them had to die to feed me.
The second-largest island held a good-sized manor house where Siobhan and Liam lived, and Maggie when she was feeling social. But Maggie was currently staying on a third island, where a pretty little stone cottage had been erected so she could get some privacy. This was where Bree spent most of her time, as well as on a fourth island that was close enough to leap to.
Several miles further out to sea from the main four islands were half a dozen more, too hilly and rocky for much serious building, although Esme had thrown up a simple cottage of wood and local stone when Siobhan cleared us to come stay with them.
Solar-powered generators on the main island provided whatever electricity we simply couldn't live without, so I was still able to charge my phone and call my dad regularly. But I found that I didn't want electricity for anything but phone calls to my parents and, occasionally, school friends. I liked the quiet here. I enjoyed being away from the whining hum of wall-to-wall gadgets.
We ran out of donor blood for Laelia shortly after arriving at Oileáin Aonair. Laelia was two weeks old now, and already she could sit up without assistance. Nahuel had made clear that she would thrive on animal blood and human food, and so we gradually began to introduce sheep milk and soft farmer's cheese into her diet, in addition to bottles of still-warm sheep blood that Edward pulled for her from the herds. Then, when Siobhan found it necessary to slaughter a few of the older sheep, Laelia had her first taste of meat. We gave her mutton steaming and fragrant in the early dawn air, shredded into chunks that she couldn't choke on, and she just about inhaled the stuff. Maybe because of this, she hit a serious growth spurt. Soon she was scooting all around the lawn in front of the main house—backwards, because she hadn't figured out how to scoot forwards yet. Alice lamented that she was ruining all of her clothes with full-frontal grass stains, but since she was growing out of everything so rapidly, it hardly mattered.
Our first month there, nothing catastrophic happened, which was practically a record for us. But this was no vacation for Esme.
"I would be surprised if Victoria weren't keeping an eye on us somehow," she said. "But we've found no trace of her on the mainland." By this she meant Ireland itself, where various members of the family ran regular patrol.
By the time Laelia was six weeks old, she was crawling around our island like the hounds of hell were behind her. She climbed, too, hand over hand, up onto the furniture, up the frighteningly steep and twisty and un-banistered stairs at the main house, never with less than one pair of hands waiting to catch her if she should fall. She could stand if someone got her feet under her, and toddle, holding onto our fingers. Alice had trouble keeping the little monkey decent from day to day. Like us she was less affected by cold than a human would be, and preferred not to wear any clothes at all when the sun was shining. If I so much as looked away from her for a moment, like as not she would be sitting in a bird's nest of shredded clothes when I looked back, a beatific smile on her face.
Soon, Laelia's incomprehensible baby talk morphed into real words, and then simple sentences. Then she was walking, and the minute she figured out how to do that, she never walked but ran everywhere. It seemed like we'd found a sort of pleasant stasis here. The Aonair family told us we could stay as long as we liked, which is what a good hostess always says, except that in their case it was the absolute truth; Maggie would sulk for hours if Siobhan dared to utter even a white lie in her presence. She said white lies made her teeth ache.
One night Alice decided it was imperative that we revive the "estrofests" that had so amused us when I was a living human and Jessica and Angela would park in the Cullen family room with mounds of junk food. Rosalie, Alice, Maggie, Bree and I retreated to Maggie's little island. I turned Laelia over to Edward for the evening (she was on a bedtime-strike these days and would resist sleep for hours, glaring at us stubbornly while her head drooped closer and closer to her chest). Then the girls and I sat around on the fresh-smelling green grass, all of us sloshing with sheep's blood, and talked.
"I think Liam would have been happy to go on, just the two of them, forever," Maggie explained when we begged her for her story. "But Siobhan grew up surrounded by people. She liked the honeymoon period, but I think she was ready for a family. Had a fire in her that nothing could drown. They'd been together already longer than any of you have been alive, but Siobhan couldn't settle. They came to Manila in '45. They'd heard there was good eats there; well, they weren't the only vampires to figure it out. The Japanese came and murdered my whole family, but I hid away under the foundations of my house. My own big brother's blood dripped down on my face between the floorboards, and I didn't move an inch. For three days my family rotted two feet over my head, and I lay there in the red mud and I thought, this is war. It means nothing. It will come to nothing. We fight and we die, and in the end we are nothing, fragments of earth, nothing more. We don't even deserve the dirt we're made of. I saw the truth of it. I saw the truth and I saw the lie, plain as day, and I knew that soon I would die and my enlightenment would die with me, but until that happened, I refused to live the lie for one more second.
"When everyone was gone, Siobhan and Liam showed up. They came to pick off stragglers, y'know, not the only vampires to do it. If Liam'd been the one to find me, I'd be nothing but bones now. But it was Siobhan. She found me under the floor and held me up to her face and I was ready to die, I didn't even care what happened to me. I looked in her eyes and I saw how it was with her, and I just said, 'You've seen death and it has only left you empty. What will you do now?' And instead of drinking me, she bit me, she changed me. Liam didn't like it, he didn't want anyone else, especially someone who feels a lie like a punch in the gut, but in the end he accepted me. We're friends now. And Siobhan is happy. They didn't like it when I made them eat sheep, but they are happier like this. I know it for sure. I would feel it if they weren't."
By the end of this retelling, Bree had entwined herself around Maggie like a security blanket. Now Maggie was playing with Bree's hair. She smiled suddenly at all of us.
"You don't have to feel sad for me," she said. "It won't change anything that happened. I stopped needing comfort for it a long time ago. I never look to the past. Only the future."
Not long after this, Alice had a call from Nahuel: he wanted to take us up on our offer of a visit. She gave him the location of Oileáin Aonair and he was here a few days later, carrying a paper shopping bag full of changes of clothes and a few personal effects.
"You're Bella," he announced when we met him on the shore. He held out his hand and I took it. His skin was warm, like Laelia's. He didn't smell like her, but his scent did have a soothing undertone to it just as hers did.
"Hi, Nahuel," I said. "It's cool to meet you."
"You too," he said. "I would have come sooner, you know, just to see you were alright, but I got word Joham was sniffing around a new girl and I had to look into it. It was a false alarm, I think. So I thought I'd come here instead."
"Well, you're most welcome, lad," said Siobhan pleasantly. "Mags, won't ye show the boy to dinner?"
Shortly after Nahuel joined us, Liam, Jasper and Carlisle caught Victoria's trail on the mainland just across from Oileáin Aonair. Everyone who wasn't specifically unsuited for the task went into action, trying to round her up. Alice scanned Victoria's futures constantly, but she didn't have any fixed plans. I didn't dare join the search, nor did Bree. Although we managed to get through our days on the island with very few psychotic bloodlust-fueled breakdowns, if Victoria's trail led near humans, neither of us would be strong enough to keep our marbles in the jar. Besides, Bree confided in me that she wasn't sure what she'd do even if she did catch up with Victoria. She still felt so conflicted about what Victoria had done for and to her.
I could see Esme's mounting frustration. Victoria wasn't giving us any new information to work with, which was smart on her part but a real drag for us. She didn't make any new demands, didn't try to communicate with us in any way; as far as we could tell, she didn't even kill anyone in the surrounding towns. I heard Esme, Carlisle and Siobhan talking about it late into the night. Victoria was playing it safe, and as long as she had that damn evasive power, there was nothing we could do.
"I've been talking with Eleazar Denali," Esme said to me one morning. I was performing my daily chore of shoveling sheep shit, a routine intended to help me learn focus and better motor control.
"What's he think?" I asked, flicking a two-foot-high mound of dung onto a pile ten yards away. Bullseye.
"Her gift is a sort of shield," said Esme. "That's what he thinks. It can sort of read people's level of threat, in a way; if she's in the presence of someone who wants to harm her and can, she feels a powerful instinct to flee. Her gift shows her which direction to run, to escape the danger. Eleazar has been in her presence only once, and it was only for a short time; but he is reasonably certain that this is how her gift works. That would certainly dovetail with what we know of her behavior."
"Okay," I said. "So what's this mean for us?"
"Not sure yet," said Esme. "But it may become necessary to involve you in the search after all. Provided we can do so safely, without putting you near any human populations. It's possible that her shield would be cancelled out by yours."
"How do you mean?" I said. "How can two shields cancel each other out? Shields are just...defensive."
"I could be wrong," said Esme, "but if Victoria's shield works the way we think it does, then your own shield might very well prevent her from perceiving that you represent a danger to her. If she met you, she might not take you seriously as a threat. It could be the last mistake she ever makes."
"And we're pretty sure it's me she wants, right?"
"Pretty sure, yes."
"Then I hope you're right."
Hardly any notes for this in-between-y chapter! I changed Maggie's ethnicity and background because so far I can count on one hand the number of important nonwhite characters and that's lame/boring. It may be only a drop in the bucket, but it's something; I feel that her core characteristics remain true to the Maggie in the book and it won't hurt the story to acknowledge that Earth has some nonwhite people living on it too.
Thanks to jansails for all the conversations on how to live off of herd blood without sacrificing the animals.
And if anyone wants to check out my tumblr (in which I critique the good and bad in Disney movies, and post art I've arted), the username is knackard. Maybe I'll see you there!