CHAPTER TWO.

ALASKA & COWARDICE

Alaska was a long way, but still, I fled into the night on foot. The thought of being confined in a car for any amount of time seemed detrimental to my deteriorating will. Besides, running was faster and it allowed me to work; to fill my lungs with fresh air. There was probably a direct parallel here about literally running away from one's problems, but at the time it didn't matter anymore. I just needed to feel free.

Somewhere in Canada, my thirst drove me to hunt. I tracked a herd of deer, hoping my desire for the girl's blood would be suppressed if I could slake my thirst. I drank savagely, trying to feed the monster inside me an alternative. I would have done almost anything to quell this beast, but nothing would satiate it. The doe was limp and flavorless. It enunciated how magical the girl's blood would feel sliding down my throat.

My desperation flared vibrantly, and I floundered. It would be too easy to let the animal inside me win. Why should I have to resist? Vampires were designed to drink from humans, it was the cycle of life! Only, Carlisle had taught me that it didn't have to be.

This internal argument was counter-productive. I howled out viciously, funneling my anger and frustration into it, and kept hunting. When a towering bull moose crossed my path I taunted it, made it angry enough to attack me. The fight was fierce and satisfying, but even he tasted poor while the fresh memory of something sweeter plagued my thoughts.

Even with my thirst well in hand, the memory of her haunted me over the next few days. I ran hard and reached Denali, but couldn't bring myself to call on my friends in their giant homestead. Instead, I cowered in a snowbank, holding my breath, and willing my mind to cease spinning in circles.

Snow piled around me as I lay back to stare at the stars. Little snowflakes danced across my flesh like miniature kisses. They didn't melt, as my flesh had cooled to the same temperature as the snow. Eventually, the breeze would blow them away.

The sky was brilliantly clear, the view astonishing, and yet the only thing I seemed to be able to see was confused, dark eyes surrounded by swirls of blue-black hair. I tried to see past her, to the awesomely swirling shapes in the cosmos. I tried to think about neutron stars, black holes, and the unfathomable size of the universe. My problems meant nothing by comparison. One little girl meant absolutely nothing.

So, then why couldn't I get her out of my head?

I flipped over, burying my face in the snow, and made a lopsided snow angel by swiping my right side arm and leg through the powder wider than the left. My limbs cut through the snow easily, creating perfectly shaped divots in the bank.

This wasn't getting any better. I'd been out here playing in the snow for five days and I was no closer to any answer than I had been when I first arrived.

The Denali coven had come out to check on me the first couple of days, but my consistent unresponsiveness had convinced them to leave me alone. I knew it was rude, and yet I couldn't bring myself to tell them how badly off I truly was. How weak I had been.

As if the mere thought had willed them into existence, soft footsteps crunched through the snow toward my hiding place. I groaned loudly enough for the visitor to hear. I did not want to talk to anyone. The footsteps were not deterred. As they approached, I accepted my fate, and even considered sitting up to face the intruder head-on, but couldn't be bothered.

"What are you doing?" The crunching footsteps came to a halt close by. When she received no answer, Tanya plopped down in the snow next to me. The sound of snow sifting around unyielding flesh could be heard from the place she disappeared. She was making her own snow angel.

Of all the members of the coven, it wasn't surprising that Tanya had been the most persistent about visiting me in the snowbank. The two of us had been close when our families had cohabitated. We hadn't been mates, precisely, but whatever it was had been fun while it lasted.

"This feels nice," she commented, voice muffled. I sat up to appraise her. She was face first in the snow as I had been, her angel lopsided on the opposite side, complementing mine. Her long blonde curls were tangled up in the drifts above her head. She turned to see I had gotten up and offered me a hand.

She didn't need the help, but I took it and pulled her up. We stepped out of the angels we'd created and admired our work quietly. The silence stretched for a long while. It was nice to not be alone, to be in the wilderness with another of my kind. No need to force shifting, or fidgeting, just to be still and quiet.

"Irina and Kate think I should leave you alone," Tanya ran a hand through her hair, brushing little bits of snow out of the strands. "They think I'm annoying you."

"Not at all." I grew disinterested in the angels and walked away, looking for something else to grab my attention. "I'm the one being rude, hiding out here, not talking to anyone."

"Well, you're talking now," she followed my steps and pulled me to a stop. "You're going home, aren't you?"

"I don't know." I shut my eyes and saw the girl's face.

"But you're not staying here?" She seemed a bit wistful.

I opened an eye to peer at her. "Do you want me to?"

She shrugged and took a few steps back, purposefully increasing the space between us. "I miss you." A pause, "…I miss us."

Wait, what? "I thought you didn't…"

"I'm starting to think that was stupid."

I opened my mouth to protest but didn't know what to say. Somehow, she got my meaning anyway.

"Fine, but it was definitely naïve." She blew an errant curl out of her face. "Just because we're surrounded by people that have found their mate doesn't mean it's common. It's not. And it was dumb of me to break off a good thing with you just because it wasn't what Carmen and Eleazar have. I may never find that."

Right before the Cullen family had moved away, Tanya had very clearly admitted she was no longer interested in romantic involvement with me. We weren't mates, and that's what she wanted to find. I didn't mind, though it was naïve of her to think she would eventually find her soul mate. Even if it was silly, the admission took me by surprise. I didn't know what to say, so I just stared at her.

Tanya looked at me seriously as I dithered. "At first I thought that's why you came back… When you never came in, never spoke to anyone… I didn't know what to think."

I probably owed the entire family an apology. Showing up on their doorstep and then ignoring them? That was an Edward move. "I'm sorry for confusing you. I should have been more open with you."

She took in my blank stare unhappily. "I am really not used to rejection," she stated, but I didn't get the impression she was actually upset.

Tanya and her sisters tended to prefer humans - it was how they eventually developed their consciences. At first, part of the conquest had been in the kill, but as hundreds of deaths mounted over the years, the luster of that type of conquest began to fade. In time what had once been a thrill became repulsive. As Tanya put it; it gets harder to look in the mirror with mountains of the dead behind you.

This was what had bonded us in the beginning. We both had histories we weren't proud of that drove us to be better than we were. The three sisters had stopped killing their lovers sometime in the last century. Now the people they loved lived.

"Of course not," I grinned at her. "Why should you be? You are the most beautiful woman in the known universe."

She swatted at me and returned the grin playfully. "But it's not enough," she said with the most appealing of pouts.

"No," I said.

"Then why did you come here?"

"I have some things going on at home. I needed a break."

"Hang on." She appraised me suspiciously through narrowed eyes. After a split second of consideration, she threw herself at me, hooking her feet on my calves to climb up and fling her arms around my neck. Her lips whispered against mine, in light seductive butterfly kisses, the type of which used to make me melt under her touch. I wrapped my arms around her waist out of reflex, but I wasn't in the mood for a make-out session. I pushed her away, gently.

She let go of her grip around my neck, fell to the ground, and landed on her feet light as a cat.

"You've met someone!" She declared.

"I… what?"

She stared at me, disbelieving. "Oh my god," she said with awe. "You've found your person."

"No," I shook my head and backed away from her slowly. She smacked away my raised hand and gripped my wrist to hold me in place.

"You have," she accused. "Is that why you're here?" She was starting to yell. "Did you run away from them rather than admit you found your partner?"

"No!" This was ridiculous. I'd nearly killed a room full of people to eat a person. How could she go from that to accusing me of being in love with someone? This wasn't just ridiculous, it was insane. The last thing I needed was to be yelled at about love by an ex-fuck buddy.

"Tell me," she said and plopped back down into the snow. She was still gripping my wrist tightly. The look on her face told me she wouldn't give this up, so I relented and plopped down next to her. I told her everything; every detail falling from my mouth in a rush. I admitted how weak I felt, how cowardly my actions had been. How scared I was of disappointing my family. She shifted in the snow and pulled me into a hug, resting my head on her chest as she squeezed me.

"I'm so sorry, Emmett," she whispered consolingly into my hair. "You're not a coward. Running away was the bravest thing you could have done. Most of us wouldn't have had the strength to do it."

I gave in to the hug and wrapped my arms back around her waist. My eyes tightened and burned. If I could, I would have wept.

"Here's the thing," she continued. "You have to go back. She's your mate. You need to find her."

"How can you possibly still believe that?"

"Because I've never seen her and I could pick her out of a crowd of a thousand. You remember her every detail from before you ever caught her scent. What does that say to you?"

"That I have vampiric memory?" I mumbled petulantly into her shoulder. She chuckled.

"It tells me she was the first woman you've actually seen since I've known you."

"I nearly murdered thirty innocent people to get to her a week ago. If I go back there is still a very good chance I will kill her." I shifted away from the hug to sit up and took a big breath. "I almost definitely will kill her if I ever smell her again."

"Or you won't," Tanya lifted her hands to demonstrate scales. "You could either stay here in this snowbank forever, making ugly snow angels, or you could go back to Forks, and figure out what to do about this with your family supporting you." She dropped her left hand to level with her bent knee. Her right hand was lifted level with her shoulder where she waggled the fingers practically.

It all seemed much more reasonable when put that way. We sat in comfortable silence for a while, feeling the velvety snowdrift across our skin, watching the stars make their trek across the night sky.

"It's possible," she added quietly.

"What's possible?"

"To love a human," she said simply. I thought about the thousands of humans she'd loved over the millennia. I'd even met one or two of them in our years together.

"None of those people smelled like she does," I corrected her.

"No," she agreed. "But you're strong enough to control yourself. I have faith in you."

"Thanks," I muttered and stood, pulling the lithe vampire with me.

"It's a shame, though," she said. "We made a cute couple."

"You're too good for me anyway," I winked at her. She laughed and gave my shoulder another smack.

"If I don't see you again before you leave," she dusted herself off. "Goodbye and good luck, my friend. Oh, and one last thing," she tossed a tiny object my way. I snatched it out of the air and peered down at a key to a motorcycle.

"Bye, Tanya," I said to empty air. She took off with a quiet even gait, unlike the loud crunching footsteps she'd used to warn me of her approach earlier. I listened to the sifting of snow once she'd vanished from sight, trying to pick out her steps. When I could no longer hear her I slumped back into the snow and resumed staring at the stars.

What she'd said had been ludicrous, of course. I couldn't be in love with someone I'd never met. Disregarding that, though, maybe she was right about running away. It had been the right decision at the time, but staying away for so long might be overkill.

The more I thought about it the more wretched I felt, and the clearer it became that the true cowardice was in continuing to hide out in Alaska. I was over a hundred years old, and here I was allowing some kid to scare me away, to push me from my home and family. I would go back and prove that I was stronger than my desire for her blood. I would win this fight - or I wouldn't. Either way, it wasn't the end of the world. If I gave in and killed her, moving would suck, but we would regroup and move on just like we always did.

I raced after Tanya, flying over the snowfield toward the Denali Clan household. When I arrived a motorcycle was parked out front, already facing the long drive away from the house. There was a note on it:

"You've got this."