Happy Halloween! It's time, it's time! Time for some little Halloween truffles, a few two-fers.

All credit for characters and setting to the amazing Stephenie Meyer, of course. She creates, I play.

Thanks to GeezerWench for the prompts and my amazing beta, EdwardsMate4Ever.

Costume Issues – Chapter 2

"Hey, get away from her!" She heard Jake's voice from a distance.

"Jake, you're too young for me," she slurred out, pushing hard to focus on the tall Lone Ranger who had just reappeared. Why did her throat feel so thick?

Jake looked like he had been slapped. "I hope you know what you're getting into," he mumbled, turning away and leaving a Coke on the table.

"Where did you leave your drink?" Jasper whispered urgently in her ear. "Tell me."

He sounded so far away. It was all just too much trouble. "On the table under the mirror in the entryway," she said.

She felt a breeze. Someone passed someone something.

Then she felt a light slap on her face and someone forcing her eyes open. A bright light shone and burned her eyes. She shook her head, blinking, trying to pull away.

"Did you take something?" a man's voice asked. "I need you to tell me if you're on anything."

"Of course not," she declared, though her tongue felt thick.

"I think you've been drugged…" Whatever the speaker was saying, his voice was coming from too far away and she fell into darkness.

The next thing she knew she was in bed. Not her own, though. She was lying on something soft under scratchy sheets that smelled of astringent. Must be a hospital.

She thought she heard Charlie's voice saying, "Thank you, Dr. Cullen."

She tried to call out, "Dad," but she wasn't sure the words made it into the air. They seemed stuck on her thick tongue, behind too heavy lips.

xxx

Bella woke up for real the next day. As she sat up, Charlie put down the newspaper he was reading. He was sitting next to her bed, an all too familiar position with all her hospitalizations over the years. "You OK?" he asked.

"What happened?" she asked, patting herself to find her injury. "Did I trip?"

"No," Charlie replied. "One of the Cullen kids saw you stumbling around right after just you got to the party. They thought it seemed odd and called their Dad. He checked you and suspected you'd been given a roofie. They drove you to the hospital to run blood tests and called me. You slept through most everything."

"Did I throw up on anyone?" Bella asked.

"Well, yes, I believe you did," Charlie replied. "But I wouldn't worry about it. They brought you here because they thought you were drugged, after all."

"Which one?" She closed her eyes, her heart beating. Not Jasper, not Jasper. But she knew it probably was him.

"I don't remember his name, but when I saw him at the hospital, he was wearing regular shirt and not a costume. The blond one, James?"

"Jasper." She closed her eyes. Of course she got sick on the cute one.

Her eyes sprang open as she remembered being rude to Jake. "Where's my cell phone?" she asked. "I gotta call Jake."

Charlie opened the nightstand by the bed and pulled it out. "Is something wrong? Do I need to call Billy?"

Bella leaned forward to take the phone, shaking her head. "No, I said something stupid to him, and I feel bad," she replied, pulling up Jacob's number and pushing call.

Billy answered on the third ring. "He can't come to the phone right now, Bella."

"Oh c'mon, Billy," Bella replied. "I said something to him that wasn't nice, but, well, I'd had a few drinks. And been drugged, but it wasn't supposed to be me."

"What?" Billy said.

"The Cullens got me out OK," she said. "I'm not supposed to say anything, but we think Mike did it. Where's Jessica?"

"The Cullens?" Billy seemed focused on that name. "They helped you?"

"Yeah. They called their father, Dr. Cullen, and brought me to the hospital."

"Interesting," Billy said. "I'll give Jacob the message."

She was discharged at noon and Charlie drove her home. Her truck was already in the driveway. One of the Cullens had picked it up from where she had parked it at Jessica's, driven it to their house, and left the keys in their mailbox. As far as Charlie was concerned, the Cullen kids were saints. "A credit to their parents," he told Bella.

On Sunday, still no phone call from Jake. She drove out to the Rez in the afternoon, planning to apologize in person but was met at the door by his father, Billy Black.

"I'm sorry, Bella," Billy said when he came to the door, "but Jake has mono. He can't see anyone right now."

"Will you give him this?" Bella handed him a note she had written.

Billy nodded his head and took the note. "I'll make sure he gets it," he told her in his gravelly voice.

"Tell him to call me, okay?" she said as she turned to leave.

Billy nodded and closed the screen door.

Jake wasn't the only MIA after the party. As of Monday morning, no one had seen Mike since Saturday morning. Charlie had gone out to have an official chat with Mike the day after Bella went home from the hospital, but wasn't able to. His mother said he had left Saturday morning to go hiking at Goat Rocks. When he wasn't back by Sunday night, she filed a missing person report. Several search parties were looking for him.

Edward Cullen had found Bella's cup at the party and brought it to the hospital. Charlie sent it and its contents to a forensics lab for fingerprinting and tox screening. When the initial forensics came back, they showed that the only fingerprints on the cup were Bella's, Jessica's and Mike's. Jessica said she had a good time at the party but was a little foggy on the details, which she attributed to the punch. She didn't think she had been drugged.

Monday at school, Bella found Jasper waiting for her outside her classroom. She felt like the whole school was staring at them as they walked down the hall. The original odd couple.

"Thanks for rescuing me, but you don't have to stay with me, you know," she said to him as they walked to her math class.

"What if I told you that meeting you rescued me?" he teased.

She blushed, ducking away from him. He put one finger under her chin and turned her face up toward his. "I love your blush," he said. "It's so charming."

For her part, Bella loved studying his eyes. There were fascinating as they changed from ochre to black to ochre. That was weird, but she felt she could read his moods in them.

And his smell was intoxicating. She wondered what the aftershave was.

On Tuesday, she left her hoodie in her locker on purpose to see if he would put his jacket over her shoulders. Her ruse worked, and she slept with her prize that night, burying her face in its scent.

By Wednesday, Jasper was riding home with Bella after school, with his brother Emmett driving behind to take him home.

Everything was going so fast. She wasn't used to getting this kind of attention, but Jasper seemed so sincere. Charlie was home early Wednesday night and Bella saw him watching through the kitchen window as Jasper climbed out of her truck and into Emmett's.

"He seems interested," Charlie commented as she walked into the kitchen.

"Yeah, I kind of like him too."

"He's a good kid, but you need to be careful," Charlie said.

"We're taking it slow," Bella replied, though it wasn't true. She was head over heels in love.

Thursday, Halloween arrived. The excitement level in school was high. Most of the kids were wearing some kind of costume, and most of the teachers seemed to have given up on any kind of productive classroom sessions. They were loading on homework for Monday to make up for it.

To add to the general Halloween spirit, a pack of noisy wolves had moved into the area. There were eerie howls all night and even occasionally during the day. The deputies who were searching for Mike on Goat Rocks reported seeing unusually large tracks in the forest during their search and hearing wolves nearby.

She asked Jasper about the wolves, and he said he had heard them but hadn't seen them. He asked questions about Charlie's search for Mike, though. He told Bella that he and his brothers had hiked Goat Rocks often, and there were steep cliffs where a lone hiker could have fallen.

When she met Jasper after school on Halloween, she could feel a very different tension in the air.

He looked worried, though glad to see her, as he got into her truck for the drive home. After driving a few blocks with Emmett following, Jasper asked her to turn off and pull over.

Once she turned off the motor, he turned to her and said, "If I asked you to leave with me, would you?"

"Right now?" she said.

"Yes, right now." Taking her hand, he leaned across the cab. His eyes were so intense, and that scent...all rational thought left her mind. He reached up to stroke her hair, smiling.

"Um, OK," she said. How could she say no?

"Things are happening," he said, glancing around. "My family can't stay here any longer. But I can't leave without you."

"I need to talk to Charlie," Bella said.

"You can call him from the hotel later," Jasper replied.

They got out of her truck and into the Emmett's car. Once she was buckled in, Emmett leaned back and gave her a grin. "Take any drinks from anybody else lately, Bella?"

"Cut it out," Jasper snapped.

"Alice will drive your car. I just want you next to me." In a daze, she saw Alice appear at her window, so she handed Alice the keys to her Chevy.

Bella thought she heard Alice say, "Go on. I'll take care of it and catch up."

"Let me tell you a story," Jasper began, his arm around her. "Once upon a time, in Texas in 1860, there was a boy who fibbed about his age to go to war…"

She snuggled up against him, letting him pull her close. She listened as he recounted an amazingly detailed story about a boy growing up in Texas and joining the Confederate Army, while watching the trees outside the car window growing steeper and closer to the car.

They must be going up into the mountains. Where were they going? She couldn't remember any hotels up this road. As long as she was locked into his arms, she didn't really care.

She heard a wolf howl behind them, then another, but the sound died out as the car sped into the growing darkness.

She was almost asleep in his arms when she heard him whisper, "Sorry, but I need you with me, more than you can know," and felt a sharp bite on her neck.

The End

Xx

So, thank you for reading! I'll be posting the next story soon. Bella wanders into a maze…think of the possibilities!

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