eleven.

(Leah)

Jacob simply smirks in the long moment of silence which follows, evidently amused that he's managed to catch her so off-guard.

"What did you expect?" he asks after watching her blink stupidly.

"Well . . . a fight, honestly," Leah admits quietly. After having been building herself up for an argument she wasn't going to back down on, the last thing she expected was for him to so easily agree with her — let alone for him to announce that he plans to tag along, too. "What happened to it being a terrible idea?"

"It is a terrible idea," Jake says all-too-agreeably, that smirk still on his face which makes him look closer to his sixteen years than it does the rest of his body.

"So remind me again why you're not going to stop me?" she asks, frowning in her disbelief and confusion after he's so vehemently insisted that Quil is dangerous. Not forgetting that he has been given his orders from Sam (the bastard), who has essentially made Jacob her babysitter to stop her from doing exactly this.

(Because as much as she hates it, as much as she hates him, Sam knows her. He knows how she hates secrets and being kept in the dark, which makes it ridiculous to suggest that Quil is the one who he's really worried about. After years of living in one another's pockets, Sam would quickly have put two and two together and known exactly what it is she wants to do before she managed to figure it out for herself.)

Jacob shrugs. "There's really no point. As soon as you're out of my sight you'll just go and find Quil anyway."

(And apparently Jacob knows her too, which surprisingly — or rather unsurprisingly, given how the rest of this day is going — doesn't piss her off as much.)

"This way I can at least make sure you don't get torn to pieces while you do it," Jacob continues in the same light tone despite that he is talking about placing himself between her and certain death — or permanent disfigurement, Leah thinks as her cousin's face comes to mind once again.

"You don't need to say it quite like that," she mutters. She wants to tell Quil, she has to tell Quil, otherwise this secret is going to eat her up and swallow her whole . . . but now she can't help wonder if she's doing it for the right reasons. She might think it's the right thing to do, but will Quil see it that way?

Jacob's shit-eating smirk turns slightly grim. "Doubting yourself?"

She narrows her eyes accusingly. "Now I am."

"Don't. It's the right thing to do. I would have told him myself already if I could."

"What do you . . ." she starts, then she suddenly remembers their conversation yesterday morning — before she'd had something close to the meltdown she still won't (or can't) acknowledge. "Oh. Right. Alpha."

"Yep," he says, lips popping. "Can't breathe a word about it, so you're going to have to do most of the talking. The first part, at least. I'll be choking on thin air otherwise."

"That's if he doesn't explode first."

Jake shakes his head, eyes rolling. "It's called phasing, you know." He steps closer and holds his hand out, which she reaches out for almost instinctively, allowing him to hoist her up from where she sits on the stairs. "And even if he does, which I kind of think he will, then I'll have to tell him all about it anyway. So no big deal, right? Just . . . make sure you're not standing too close to him, okay?"

"Right. God forbid you have a coronary or something," she says without thinking. She freezes on the last word, her fingers slipping from Jake's and her eyes flickering over the banister towards the living room where Harry fell, and she swallows thickly.

"Hey," Jake breathes softly after what might be a minute. Two. Longer. The whole world is spinning. "Look at me."

Leah casts her eyes down towards where this annoying kid she's known forever (and who both confuses and frightens the living shit out of her) stands at the bottom of the stairs, waiting for her, and she gives a shaky smile that even she wouldn't believe if she saw herself in the mirror.

"That was a bad joke, huh?"

Jacob returns her smile. It's steadier than her own, yet sadder and softer. "I took out the rug, you know. It's outside."

"I didn't notice," she says quietly, oddly touched underneath how sick she feels with herself. She is no less off balance, but . . . sure, somehow, like there's something to hold on to and right herself with even as everything else goes to shit. She doesn't know what exactly, and yet she's certain of it all the same.

"I can put it back, if you want."

"No." Leah recalls how it'd looked: shredded, ugly, its patterns near unrecognisable as she'd picked up the scraps of Seth's clothes afterwards. "I mean, it's ruined anyway."

He nods. "That's what I thought."

"I . . ." Leah sucks in a quiet breath. "Thanks."

"Sure, sure," he says, as though it's nothing at all. He offers his warm hand out again, and she finds herself taking it not just because she wants to walk down the last few stairs feeling somewhat steadier. "You wanna leave a note or something?"

"No. They'll be fine." Her mom is staring at the ceiling again and Seth is doing his best to feign sleep. "Are we walking or driving over?"

Jacob considers her for a few seconds, his fingers still wrapped around hers. "Better drive. If shit hits the fan then I don't want you to have to walk back."

She blinks. "You'd let me drive your car?"

"Why not?"

"You love your car," she says. "You spent all of Christmas dinner trying to tell Bella how amazing it was. The Coolest Car in the World, remember?"

Jacob's eyebrows shoot up. "You were listening to that?"

"I think everyone except Bella listened to that," Leah says tartly, thinking back to three months ago when he'd sat across from the Swan girl at the makeshift dinner table they'd put together to accommodate their three families. Bella might have well as not been there at all with her dead eyes and broken heart.

The reminder of Charlie's daughter has Leah freeing her fingers from Jacob's, because she remembers more than last Christmas — she remembers the huge crush he has on the girl, too, and for some inexplicable reason there is a flare of anger in her chest at the thought.

Leah tries to reason with herself that it's because Jacob deserves more than a pale-faced girl who barely uttered a word to him at Christmas, who has spent months becoming his friend and has instead chosen the vampires and Italy and blood and death. Jacob is a good kid. Kind, even when nobody gives him good reason to be.

"Have you heard from her?" Leah asks then, unable to help herself. She reaches for her jacket hanging off the peg on the wall, plucks her house keys from the bowl on the side, and pretends she's asking for a reason other than morbid curiosity as she slips her arms into her jacket.

"No," Jacob answers, and when Leah snatches a glance at his face there is a scowl upon it which he's directed at the floor. "Why?"

Leah tips her head back, freeing her trapped hair from the collar of her jacket with a swipe of her fingers just so that she doesn't have to meet his eyes. And, hoping her tone is casual enough, she says, "No reason. Just wondering when I need to kidnap you and Seth before war breaks out."

"Me and Seth?"

"Why not? I'll take Quil, too."

Jacob snorts softly. "Okay, Little Engine That Could. Let's see if that works against Sam."

She tilts her chin in a show of bravery. "You just leave Sam to me."

"Happily," he says before gesturing to the door, a wide and sweeping motion. "Lead the way, Little Engine."

Leah skips past him with her head high, throwing a particularly rude gesture over her shoulder her mom would kill her for as she goes. Jacob only laughs.

In the car, Jacob's hulking frame seems to take up every inch of free space even with his seat pushed back as far as it can go and then some.

He grins when he catches her staring in bewilderment that he can fit, let alone drive the thing looking as comfortable as he is. His huge, solid arm keeps bumping into hers when he changes gear. "I had to kind of break the seat," he explains. "It was like sitting in one of those red and yellow toy cars."

"Kind of?"

"Ripped out the suspension assembly and made my own." He grins again with a small colour of self-consciousness tinting his cheeks. "And the seat pan," he adds. "I had to weld that."

"Too bad for anyone sitting in the back," she remarks, covering how slightly awed she is that he actually seems like he knows what he's doing around cars. Most boys pretended just to save face. "Seth and Quil will be really cramped. We'll have to get a new car. Bigger."

Jacob's eyes widen with mock horror. "That hurts my feelings."

"Feeling," she corrects.

"Rude. I was going to say that we should just tie Quil to the roof, but I think you can take that honour."

More than happy to take the distraction and play along, Leah simply laughs. "You can try." There's something easy in being able to joke with Jacob even if it's obvious their hearts are not quite in it. "Don't suppose there's anyone else we need to make room for, is there?"

"Embry," Jake answers automatically. "He can go in the trunk. The rest of them can stay behind and sort it out for themselves."

"Poor Sam," she says with as little sympathy as she can. It's not difficult.

"He'll be furious. But, hey, whatever. I'm already a dead man. What can he do?"

Leah can't think why he's in any kind of trouble, especially when it's not as if he's done anything wrong. Except for maybe sending Seth home before he was supposed to, but then Jacob has been saying a lot of things which don't make sense lately — almost like he can't stop himself from doing it.

"How dead?" she ventures with slight hesitancy. "What have you done?"

"Sam will probably say it's what I'm doing rather than what I've done," Jacob mutters, hands tight on the steering wheel and voice so low that Leah knows he's talking more to himself than he is her.

"You know, I think you forget that I don't have unbidden access to your mind," she reminds him lightly, "so I don't know what you mean."

"I know," he says with a slight sigh Leah has a feeling he wanted to hide. "I guess that's my problem, isn't it?"

"I guess so."

With a suspicion that they're talking about different things which aren't entirely related to Sam now, Leah brushes his words off along with everything else she doesn't want to question. Like how Jacob rests his arm against hers instead of the gearshift, how he leans a little closer over to her side rather than the window. Like how she doesn't really care.

Jacob clears his throat. "So," he says, loudly enough that she knows he's deliberately changing the conversation, "how did you think this thing was going to go down? You telling Quil?"

She accepts his evasiveness easily. "Well, I wasn't really banking on you being around, so . . . I don't know." There's a beat of silence as she imagines Quil rearing back as a gigantic wolf and howling. "Tell him and run?"

"Run," Jacob repeats slightly disbelievingly.

". . . I'm fast?" she offers, knowing that Jacob will laugh at her. He does, exactly as she expects, and she pulls a face at him. "I am!"

"I bet I'm faster," he says. "Gonna have to be, when—" Jacob stops abruptly, his amusement flying away with the sound of his breath and she thinks he might be imagining exactly what she was not one minute ago. "Well. You know."

She sighs. It's almost like he wants her to ask what is on his mind, and yet she knows that he likely won't give her a straight answer even if she does.

"No. I don't," she says. "Is this about how dead you are?"

"Yep."

"You wanna talk about it?" she asks in the same tone that suggests she wishes he doesn't. All the same, despite her reluctance, it feels like the least she can offer after the emotion he's had to endure from her.

"Nope," he says, and Leah hopes her relief isn't too palpable. Obviously Jacob needs to talk about it, but he doesn't want to. Perhaps it's just because she's not the person he wants to talk about it with, and that's fine by her. Besides, she's the last person in the world who could push someone else to talk when she refuses to share her own problems. She might have turned into a bit of a hypocrite as of late, but she's not usually one for such double-standards.

The drive doesn't take much longer after that. It seems like the car is quiet with thoughtful silence for only a heartbeat before Jacob is announcing that they've turned into Quil's street, and he points to the one-storey house where she knows Old Quil lives with his daughter-in-law and grandson.

Jacob pulls in at the bottom of the Ateara's drive, his movements methodical but relaxed as he parks and cuts the engine before ducking his head a little to look clearly through the window on her side. His breath blows over her cheek.

"Is he in?" she asks, following his gaze and refusing to shiver.

"Blasting that stupid band he loves from his bedroom. Jimmy Eat someone-or-something, I don't know, but he always brings their CD to the garage whenever we're working on something with Embry. He knows how much it annoys us."

"Not eighties hair metal?" she asks, meaning to be funny, however her voice sounds a little weaker than she expected. She can't hear anything coming from Quil's house, and she's still unused to everyone else around her who can apparently hear everything. It's a little disconcerting, knowing Jacob hears the nervous beat in her chest.

"Nah, that's all me." Jacob huffs and slaps his hand lightly against the steering wheel, his joke falling flat. "Whelp. Come on, then."

"We can't do it in there, Jake. What if Mrs. Ateara or Old Quil are in?"

"They're not," he says with certainty. Even still, he takes a few seconds to deliberate, his brow furrowing in thought. "But you're right. How about you get him out to the yard? I'll go round the back."

It's a better plan than tilting Quil's world on its axis out here on the street, so Leah says, "Okay," and takes the keys from Jacob, jumping out of the car before she has a chance to lose her nerve.