Vol de Nuit
I cannot leave school fast enough. Walking slowly enough not to startle the humans around me is excruciating. I finally reach the refuge of my Volvo, only to find Alice slipping into the passenger seat beside me, and Jasper in the back. His thoughts betray him. He is here as much to protect Alice as to help her influence me. I am that far gone, and he knows it. I can feel him grappling with my turmoil, trying to tame it. For his own sake, truth be told, as much as for mine.
"What is this?" I snap, as I turn the key in the ignition. He's not even trying to be subtle. As my anger rises, I feel him throw twelve layers of goose down around me, and bundle me tight. I hate it.
"We're going hunting," says Alice, "right?"
As if I hadn't already hunted this very morning. As if she hadn't seen exactly where my runaway thoughts were leading me at the sound of the last bell – even with my belly still brim-full of deer blood. Like Little Red Riding Hood's wolf, taking the short cut to her father's house. At the rate her truck travels, any road would be a short cut! Hiding my car, waiting for her … where else but in her own bed? In a horrid little flash of humor, I see myself with the covers drawn up to my nose, and an old-fashioned nightcap on my head.
Alice is gripping my arm tightly, digging in with her fingers to pull me back.
"Hurricane Ridge", she whispers.
Why not?
We leave the school parking lot at a highly illegal speed.
Route 101 skirts the northern border of the park, taking us all the way to Port Angeles before the right-hand turn that leads back into the reserve. Alice wants to get me as far away from Forks as she can while I'm still confined in an automobile with her and Jasper. She wants the familiar smell of kin to wash away my memory of Bella's scent. It can't.
As we approach the switchbacks, I can hear Rosalie and Emmett's thoughts ahead. I'd never even seen them leave the school.
"What is this, Alice," I growl, "an intervention?"
"Do you really want to kill her, Edward?"
"Of course not!"
Why else did I flee to Denali, and beyond, past the Arctic Circle, to where no light that ever touched her skin could reach me? For all the good that it did.
The distance closes as I negotiate the steep turns in the mountain road, my silent brother feeding me wave upon wave of calm from behind. As bad as a newborn, he thinks.
Soon, Rosalie and Emmett's voices begin to sound in my ears as well as in my head.
"C'mon Rosie", Emmett cajoles. "It'll be fun, might be we'll even meet us up with some b'ar."
"Bar?" My sister's voice drips with sarcasm, but my brother is unabashed.
"Yep! Baarrrrrrr!" And he purposely rolls the r's into a drawn out growl.
"Emmett McCarty, you are the most incorrigible man I have ever met, BAR none!"
Through his eyes, I see her slap his arm, and through her eyes I see him jump on her, face alight; sending them both to the ice-hard ground in a rolling, growling tussle. Alice cannot help but smirk, since the whole exchange was audible to all of us. Once again, Emmett has succeeded in distracting Rosalie from one of her piques. I do believe, if it were not that we strive so devotedly to leave no trace, Emmett would surely be the class clown wherever we go to school. Even the teachers would love him … and remember him, which is best not done. Perhaps that is what he once was when he was alive, I think; although it is hard to know how much formal schooling a boy might have gotten, growing up in the mountains of Tennessee when he did. My mind conjures a Norman Rockwell image of a little red schoolhouse … and I realize that Emmett has succeeded in distracting me, as well.
The service track below the visitor center comes up quickly, and I almost miss it.
Dammit, Emmett, did you ever stop to think that my Volvo can't clear snowmobile ruts the way your jeep can!
Most of the roads and campsites of Olympic National Park are closed at this time of year, and the rest are as close to deserted as they will ever be. Still, there is no point in taking any chances. We hide our vehicles, and step out into the waning afternoon. It is overcast, so we have barely an hour of daylight left. Not that it matters to us.
We line out across the frozen slope, crossing patches, and soon drifts, of snow, among the thinning trees. Barefoot, of course, to spare our shoes.
The air is very cold, and there is no smell of anything human. I let Alice take the lead. She obviously has something in mind, although she is hiding it from me by reciting the Ramayana to herself, in Sanskrit. Jasper shadows her, matching her stride for stride – no mean feat when his legs are so much longer than hers – yet he does so with the perfect grace of our kind, a tall, blond doppelganger at her side. He has picked up on the hypnotic effects of the rhythmic verses she is silently chanting, and, in perfect tandem, reflects that back against the perverse bloodlust I am feeling. I let them do this to me. Let Rosalie and Emmett herd me from behind. Let the pristine mountain air begin to cleanse my senses at last.
We jog at a pace that is downright leisurely, yet it carries us across the steep ground like wraiths of wind. In minutes we have cleared the last stands of stunted trees and emerged to the bare ridge-tops. Alice has ignored all the smells of game along the way. It hardly matters. None of us is actually thirsty – not even me. Perhaps all she wants is just to run the craving out of me. But why? Why is she trying so hard?
We course along in a frozen world between clouds: the shifting mists below us, the high overcast above, a treacherous, slanted terrain of rock and snow and wind-bared ice underfoot. Five unholy ghosts.
"Why, Alice?"
She looks at me over her shoulder, then runs on.
"She's just another human. She's no different from any of the others. Why do you care about this one so much?"
Alice refuses to answer. Behind me, Emmett and Rosalie are getting bored. They have begun wiggling their eyebrows at each other, and teasing each other in American Sign about what they will do together, and who will get the upper hand, once Alice lets them off of this wild goose chase.
My thoughts slip back to this morning, in the school parking lot.
She was going to like me. We were going to be friends.
Impossible. Their lives is short. And the time that we can allow acquaintance with any of them is shorter still. Never more than a handful of years at most. Lest anyone see how unchanging we are.
Alice shifts direction slightly, carrying us over the crest of the ridge and diagonally down the other side. She is reciting furiously – the abduction of Sita, Rama's grief – and still her vision slips through.
Herself and Bella, leaning against each other, their arms about each other's waists. The image flickers past in a flash, dim and uncertain, shaded in umbers, as if some old daguerreotype. It's impossible. A mistake. An illusion. There is no way that it can be true. And still I am jealous. Why does Alice get to see a vision of such sweet affection, when all that I can see – and feel and taste and smell – is my teeth making carnage of a tender throat, and Bella's lifeblood pulsing into my eager mouth? It's not fair.
"It's not fair," I say aloud.
"You can choose, Edward. You can choose." Suddenly she points with her chin. "There!" A mile away, on the next upward fold of mountain, a handful of grey dots against the white snow. A herd of bighorn sheep. Their eyesight is almost as keen as ours, when it comes to detecting movement, and they know us for what we are. Already they have begun to flee at a fast trot. We could burn a path to them in seconds, down our slope and up theirs, spreading like a net to encircle them, but Alice doesn't lead us that way. She angles at a tangent to the herd's course, matching their pace, but just a little faster. Rosalie and Emmett are too bored with it all to care. So long as they keep me in line, their duty to Alice and her schemes is done. They can devote the rest of their thoughts to each other.
The tenor of Jasper's emotion stream has changed subtly. I see that now his fingers and Alice's are entwined.
"You're meaning to walk them down, then," he murmurs to her. Images of old plains Indians flash through his mind. If a man didn't have a horse, he could get one this way.
Alice nods.
"What're you going to do with them when you get them?"
"I don't know."
No, Alice, you don't get to drag me out here like this and then not talk to me.
I interrupt as rudely as can be. "Maybe I don't have a choice in this, Alice."
I think of Emmett. He hadn't even thought of choosing. He had just acted. So had Esme, when she had met hers. Soft, gentle Esme, kindest of us all, even Carlisle.
"Maybe there's no escape for me."
The distance to the sheep herd has closed significantly. They are on a northeast-facing slope, now, and already shrouded in dusk. The whites of their rumps make ghostly twinned half-moons against the pale grey-tan of their haunches, as they continue away from us through deep snow.
"It won't go well with you if you hurt her Edward."
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"It will be bad for you."
She's not talking about moving, or Carlisle heartbroken, or even the Volturi. There's something else…
As if she had read my mind, Alice adds, "You'll wish you hadn't, and it will be too late."
"How do you know?"
"I've seen it."
"Show me."
Alice turns her head to look at me again, and I see my own face through her eyes: staring back at her, filled with conflict and doubt, and unspeakable craving to quit this whole expedition and race back to Bella's house. If I leave now, at dead run as the crow flies, I have just enough time to snatch her away before her father gets home.
"I only see her death, Alice."
"Look harder."
"No! Leave me alone!"
"Stay with him, Jasper!"
As if any of them could keep up with me if I really wanted to run! I let them bunch around me, let them herd me, just as we are herding the wild things ahead of us.
The forced trot continues, angling across spine after spine of the Olympic range, until darkness falls. We are far inland now, almost in the center of the entire peninsula, and the overcast has cleared, Stars glitter in a pitiless black sky, waiting for the moon to rise. We have walked the herd down. What aboriginal humans might have needed days to accomplish, we have done in the space of a few hours. The animals are overheated (even in this frigid night), because they can't sweat, and have had no respite even for a mouthful of snow. They lie about on the ground, or stand, panting blood and steam. Exhausted. Accepting the death that they know us to be.
Alice turns to me. "Well?"
I stare at the poor creatures. I have no quarrel with them. I'm not even thirsty. None of us are. Why should they die just because I am denying myself what I really want?
The night wind swirls, lifting the fine surface powder from the tops of the snowdrifts, coating us in diamond dust. It doesn't melt. We are as cold as the air.
I stare at the ground and shake my head. "Let's just go home."
Rosalie rolls her eyes and mutters, "Well that was an exercise in futility!"
But Bella Swan is safe for a night.