Forks, Washington 2020
"Rock, paper, scissors."
"No! You'd just cheat with your gift!"
"It's not cheating. My gift is a part of who I am and you know I can't turn it off."
"Cheater, cheater, pumpkin eater!" Sydney paused. "Where did that phrase come from anyway?"
Edward rolled his eyes and fished a quarter out of his pocket. "Fine. Coin toss instead?"
Sydney considered the coin in Edward's hand. "Fine. I call heads."
"You always call heads," Edward complained.
"Because it's luckier."
"That's nonsense. It's a fifty-fifty chance either way."
"Then why are you complaining?"
Carlisle stuck his head in the doorway on his way to deposit boxes in his new office space. "Are you two going to sort out who gets this bedroom anytime soon?"
The Cullens were busy moving into their house outside Forks, Washington, and Edward and Sydney tried to stake a claim on the same bedroom. She wanted this room because it had its own bathroom and since she was the only one that used a bathroom in the normal human way, she thought it was fair that it should be hers. Edward could deal with using a hall bathroom.
"Yes, Dad!" Sydney rounded on Edward. "He said stop stalling and flip the coin already." In the room next door, Carlisle let out an indulgent laugh.
"That's a very liberal interpretation of what he said," Edward said dryly and tossed the coin. He sighed with an extremely martyred face when he caught it and it was heads.
"Ha," Sydney said smugly and lightly kicked a box containing Edward's CDs. It slid a few feet toward the door. "Told you heads was lucky. Now get your stuff out of my room."
"Best two out of three?" Edward asked without any hope as he gathered his boxes.
Alice smirked at him leaving the room in defeat. In her arms was a stack of boxes nearly as tall as she was. "I could have told you that you wouldn't win this."
"You can't even see her future, Alice," Edward retorted.
"No, but I saw you in the south facing room on the third floor," Alice replied cheerfully. She and Sydney shared smug looks as Edward darted upstairs, muttering something about annoying sisters.
Sydney gathered the rest of her boxes out of the moving truck and started working on getting her room set up to the background noise of her family doing the same. It was only the fifth move in her life, a drop in the ocean compared to how many times her family moved before she was born, but she already had a system for settling in. Her bed was always the first thing she got squared away. She was busy wrestling her fitted sheet onto her mattress when Esme appeared in her doorway with a plastic tote and a box marked "Syd's books" balanced on top. "I have another for you, Syd."
She went to take the box from Esme but got distracted by the tote. The name written on the lid stood out to her as if it was a neon sign – Sarah. "Where are you putting that?" she asked in what she hoped was an offhand voice.
"I was going to put it in our bedroom closet," Esme said carefully, almost coming out as a question.
"Can I have it?" Sydney asked in a rush, not meeting Esme's eyes.
A small frown appeared in between Esme's eyebrows but cleared just as quickly. "Of course. Where do you want it?"
"You can put it in my closet." After Esme navigated the maze of boxes that was her room and left the tote where she wanted, Sydney hugged her. "Thanks, Mom."
"Of course," Esme said with a kiss on Sydney's head. "Do you need help with your sheet?" It was grudgingly bunched up at the corners and stretched across the mattress awkwardly.
"Yeah, it's being a real pain in the ass."
Esme flipped up one of the corners. "It helps if you have it positioned correctly," she said dryly. "You're trying to put the top along the side."
Sydney made an annoyed sound in the back of her throat as she watched her mom reposition the sheet with ease. "It would also help if they'd label which side is which."
"Two of the sides are longer than the others."
"Ha ha, very funny, Mom."
"You're not finished yet?" Alice leaned against the doorjamb and eyed all the boxes Sydney had yet to unpack. "Jazz and I are done."
Sydney rolled her eyes. "That's only because the majority of your stuff is going to your Seattle house." While Edward and Sydney would be living in Forks full time with Carlisle and Esme and going to the local high school, Alice, Jasper, Emmett, and Rosalie would be living in Seattle while they attended University of Washington.
"Well, you should hurry up so we can go hunt," Alice said with a wink in Esme's direction.
"Is Emmett that eager to meet the local bears?" Esme joked.
Alice scoffed. "Always."
Sydney let out a half-hearted laugh of her own, furiously concentrating on making her bed and trying not to think about the real reason for the evening hunting trip planned with her siblings. Namely, to give Carlisle and Esme some alone time in the new house. Nobody liked to think about their parents having sex.
By evening, Sydney's room started to look more like it was fit for habitation. In her closet, she changed into her usual hunting outfit - a faded Queen t-shirt she stole from Edward a couple of years ago, a pair of ratty jeans and boots. She snorted softly to herself, thinking of the last hunt when Alice wore stilettos. She thought it was a weird choice. It's not as if the animals would be impressed by Alice's need to look like she stepped off a fashion runway.
As she grabbed a jacket from a hanger, the tote shoved in the corner caught her eye. She knelt and pulled it out. It was filled with all her birth mother's personal items left from when she had stayed with Cullens before she was born. The tote had come with them each move, waiting for the day Sydney was ready to learn more about Sarah. She pulled it out, fingers hooking under the latch and opening it slightly.
Sydney's birth mother had been a sore point for her growing up. She had the gift of psychometry – seeing memories attached to objects and people by touch – and when it first manifested for her as a toddler, she accidentally saw Carlisle's memory of her traumatic birth. The trauma of that memory had made her avoid anything related to Sarah.
But now she thought maybe she had grown up enough that she should stop being afraid. Underneath the fear, there was a growing curiosity she tried hard to ignore – not only curiosity about Sarah, but her mysterious vampire biological father as well.
"Sydney, let's go!" Emmett's voice boomed from downstairs.
Sydney jumped. "All right, all right!" She shoved the tote back in the corner.
She could start being brave another day. Besides, looking through it was something she wanted to do alone without a certain nosy mind reading brother in the house. With that, she shrugged on her jacket and met her siblings downstairs.
.
If she thought really hard, she could almost remember being held by Esme and Carlisle shortly after being born. Their faces were slightly unfocused as they looked down at her with happy-and-sad eyes. Esme kissed her forehead and whispered, "Hi, sweetheart." She gripped Carlisle's finger with her tiny hand and he kissed it, saying, "I'm glad to meet you properly, Sydney."
There was also another female voice that didn't belong to either of her sisters that said, "Oh, there you are, baby girl."
But Sydney didn't trust that those particular memories were actually hers. She held a lot of memories that weren't.
.
Sydney raced after her siblings as they raced through the twilit forest. The landscape was familiar from spending so much time looking it up on the internet before they moved, but being there in person was something else. Many of the trees were so overgrown with moss that it gave them otherworldly shapes. It almost felt like she strayed into a fantasy forest like Mirkwood and at any moment she'd a wood elf step out into her path. They wouldn't be out of place here. She could do without the giant spiders, though.
Edward huffed out a laugh.
Sydney rolled her eyes. Would you want to come face to face with a giant spider?
"Not particularly." The reply caught the others' attention, but they were all too used to Edward replying to someone's thoughts that they didn't comment on it.
Thought so.
She caught the scent of elk to the south and broke off to pursue. She felt Alice follow her while the others raced on, looking for more satisfying prey. They were down by a creek and she approached downwind, crouching behind a large lichen covered rock, Alice beside her. The elk were busy drinking and grazing, oblivious to the danger. Sydney could hear their hearts beat and her mouth watered as she decided which one to take. She wanted to avoid a bull. There were a couple in the herd with wicked looking antlers. They couldn't do severe, life-threatening damage to her, but that didn't meant it didn't hurt when they hit her. Last time she hunted a bull, she lost concentration for a moment and it rammed her with its antlers and she came home with bruises on her side. She settled on a cow at the edge of the group. The herd spooked as she caught the cow from behind and pinned it to the ground before snapping its neck.
Now for the part she hated.
Sydney fought back a gag as she bit through the jugular and fur and fat and muscle filled her mouth. She didn't know if she would ever get used to this aspect of hunting. Growing up, her parents or Emmett would catch deer and drain them for her so she could drink blood at home. Her parents worried about her getting hurt hunting when she was younger, especially by a predator, and it wasn't until she was twelve that they finally allowed her to hunt like everyone else. She was tired of feeling like she was being babied, but a part of her longed for the more sanitized option of drinking blood. She ripped the flesh away to expose the blood vessels and spat several times to get the fur off her tongue, fighting back yet another gag.
"I could have done that part for you," Alice offered from her perch on the rock.
"No, it's fine." It wasn't fine, but she didn't want to admit that. She bent down to guzzle the gushing blood and a shiver of satisfaction went down her spine at the warm, salty taste. It made up for the gross feeling of fur in her mouth. Emmett liked to joke about her "broken taste buds" since she didn't taste much of a difference between herbivores and carnivores. She remembered what human blood tasted like from when she was a baby and honestly, there wasn't a big difference between that and animal blood either. She drunk all she could before stepping back to let Alice finish. One elk was more than enough for her.
Once Alice finished and the carcass was taken care of, Sydney knelt by the creek to wash off her hands and mouth as best she could. "Shall we find the others?" she asked.
Alice nodded and her eyes got the faraway look that told Sydney she was checking where they would be. With Sydney separated, she would be able to see their futures. For whatever reason, Alice's gift didn't work on Sydney and it made what she could see of the whole family's future very spotty. "Emmett and Rosalie are closer to Mt. Olympus, while Edward and Jasper are up by the hot springs tracking a couple of mountain lions."
"Emmett and Rosalie aren't doing it, are they?"
Alice gave her a look. "What do you think?"
"I thought the whole point of this hunt was to get away from lovers," Sydney grumbled.
"Technically, we are away from them."
"You know what I mean."
Alice laughed. "Come on, let's catch up with Edward and Jasper."
With a sigh, Sydney followed Alice. She was trying to avoid thinking about sex, but it was harder now that it was brought up again. It made her wonder about her biological parents. Relationships between humans and vampires were supposed to be taboo because of the secrecy law. Not only that, but they were also supposed to be virtually impossible because the typical vampire thirst made it difficult to interact with humans, let alone have sex with them. The Denali sisters had human lovers but most of them died until they started the animal blood diet. Was her biological father an animal drinker too? Did he love Sarah or was it something darker? How did they even meet in the first place? She'd probably learn some of those answers if she ever worked up the courage to open that tote and use her gift. But how would she avoid seeing things she didn't want to see? What if she saw a memory of her biological parents having sex? Gross.
At least she didn't have Edward's gift. He got an unfortunate front row seat to everything. Good thing Emmett and Rosalie were currently outside his mental hearing range.
Edward and Jasper's scent trails got stronger and Sydney picked up their voices intermingled with the sound of a waterfall. A couple minutes later, she and Alice found them on a bridge overlooking the Sol Duc Falls.
"I hope you saved some for me!" Alice called.
"There's a bobcat trail to the west," Jasper said. Alice gave him a brief kiss before darting off again.
Sydney stopped on the bridge and leaned against the railing. She could feel her legs starting to get tired after all that running and she appreciated a chance to rest. "Have fun with the mountain lions?" she asked, gesturing to her brothers' clothing. There were claw marks down the back of Jasper's jacket, Edward had a torn sleeve, and both of them had mud smeared everywhere. At least it would give Alice the excuse to shop again.
"Have fun with your elk?" Edward asked.
"So much fun. You know how elks fight."
"Hopefully you avoided the antlers again. No need to give Carlisle a heart attack," Jasper teased.
Sydney rolled her eyes. "It was just a bruise!" Carlisle had insisted on a full examination, worried about internal bleeding.
"You're his kid. Don't expect him to be rational if you're hurt."
"He was just as concerned when Emmett took off my hand when he was newborn, so it's not just you," Edward added.
"Yeah, sure," Sydney sighed. "Speaking of giving Dad a heart attack, that tree down there would make an excellent extreme balance beam." Several feet away from the bridge, there was a thin fallen tree that reached across the chasm above the turbulent river.
"Don't even think about it," Edward warned.
"Too late." Sydney purposefully imagined herself doing an aerial on it and made like she was going to actually do it.
Edward grabbed the back of her jacket. "No."
"Now who's having the heart attack?" Jasper muttered.
"I'm kidding and you know it! Besides, what are we supposed to do while we're waiting for the others?"
Alice chose that moment to reappear. "Hey, I found something!"
Edward's face lit up. "Oh, brilliant!"
"Care to share with the class?" Sydney asked as they all followed Alice.
"You'll see."
"Is it a bigfoot trail?" Sydney guessed.
Jasper snorted. "The only bigfoot around here is Emmett."
"I'll tell him you said that."
"Somehow I don't think he'll be offended."
It wasn't a bigfoot trail that Alice found. She led them to a large clearing that seemed to have been carved out by an ancient glacier. "Our new baseball spot," Alice declared, spreading her arms out wide.
"Yay, more sportsball," Sydney said, climbing up on a rocky outcropping.
Edward rolled his eyes. "Don't pretend like you haven't missed it." They hadn't played baseball together in a few years since they didn't have a decent place to play away from humans at their last home in Halifax.
"It's still sportsball to me."
Eventually, Emmett and Rosalie caught up with them in the clearing. Emmett started up a series of wrestling matches with Edward, Jasper, and Alice. (Emmett always wanted to take advantage of the fact that Sydney blocked Alice's visions. In the past, it would have made Jasper more nervous, but even without her gift, Alice was a formidable opponent and nobody ever really hurt anyone.) Sydney watched with Rosalie, as she was getting quite tired. She was almost asleep against Rosalie's shoulder when she heard Emmett ask, "Think it's safe to go back yet? I mean, they don't want their kiddo to have to camp out, right?"
"Don't look at me," Alice said. "I've already checked in with you and Rosalie tonight. I'm not playing sex lookout again."
"Edward can check," Jasper said, a smirk in his voice.
"Why me?" Edward demanded.
"Because you have a gift that also allows you to check and you spoke last," Rosalie said.
Edward growled. "First I lose the room I wanted and now I have to be the sex lookout."
"Yeah, life is just so unfair to you, Eddie," Sydney mumbled sleepily.
Thankfully, Edward's phone chimed with a text from Esme that said they could come back. "Thank you, Esme," Edward whispered fervently.
"Come on, babe." Rosalie coaxed Sydney up and then on her back and all of them headed home.
.
In the dream, Sarah was prepped for a c-section. Sydney picked up a scalpel and dragged it along Sarah's stomach. But instead of a baby, there was only a fountain of blood. Sydney stood there watching the blood in sick fascination as alarms blared and Sarah bled out in front of her.
.
Sydney woke with a start, an uneasy feeling in the pit of her stomach. Her phone told her it was four thirty in the morning. She pressed her palms into her eyes until she saw stars.
That wasn't how it happened. Carlisle delivered Sydney and then did everything he could to save Sarah. He didn't just stand there and let her die.
But that didn't stop the voice that said she killed her mother.
