HORRIBLE RECESSESS

"You will get to know me better; there are still a number of horrible recesses in me that you don't know."

—Franz Kafka, Letters to Felice

—

DECEMBER 7TH 2039

7:40PM MST

NEDERLAND, COLORADO

Jasper stared at the arm as it skidded to a stop at his feet. He would've been more pleased at the fact that someone had finally gotten a good shot in if it weren't for the shock and guilt that swamped the man who had done the damage.

The other man currently on the floor was the largest of the group, with a physique that was comparable to Emmett's and a face that displayed a perpetual peppering of hair. He looked as if he'd been overdue for a trim when he was changed. His clothes looked too new to have been what he was changed in; he was a street grab of Maria's, for sure.

If Jasper cared enough to get the story of where and how she found each of these men, he would. He did not care and would not ask but he would give Maria credit where it was due: when she wanted a small, strong force, she knew exactly how to choose.

Maria possessed many fine-tuned skills—to say that she didn't was a lie and it wasn't worth lying about someone just because you didn't like them—but her uncanny ability to pick her armies and stock them with exactly what she needed was only a testament to something more there.

He'd been her first soldier back in the day for a reason.

The soldier on the ground gritted his teeth together as he staggered back onto his feet. His one remaining hand didn't seem to know where it wanted to land, and swatted desperately at a space on his body that shouldn't have been there.

He was in pain and he was shocked and angry and there, just beneath it all, was a simmering, unrelenting fear.

Jasper zeroed in on it like a predator.

Jasper kicked the unmoving arm up into his hand with one swift step and stalked forward with long, intimidating strides. The man who had done the tearing—a shorter, thinner man with pale, almost-white eyebrows framing a freckled face that used to be pink—staggered back at Jasper's approach. Even though Jasper's eyes were on the larger, scruffier man, his focus shifted to the redhead.

It didn't take a lot of effort to dial up the feeling of confidence and exhilaration in him. The shock fell away naturally (as it always did) but the guilt remained—it always remained with newer recruits—and it was Jasper's job to squash that useless emotion out of existence.

Doing it manually was a good place to start.

Jasper forced the man's guilt and worry to extinguish entirely and with just the slightest push Jasper could feel the excitement build inside of him. It was like cupping your palm around kindling to blow against a spark. The rest of the dry space in the man's chest caught flame and ignited with a delicious ferocity so bright and so strong that Jasper was able to divert his attention away from him after only a split second of his focus. Newborns always were easier to tune.

By the time Jasper finally reached the staggering, scruffy man, the redhead was filled with a burning sense of rightness. The scruffy man flinched back when Jasper reached out for him and for a moment Jasper forced the man's fear to flare stronger and more vivid than it had been.

There was a gasp and a flinch when Jasper's left arm reached out to grip the man's left shoulder firmly and painfully.

The fear and the pain and the misery were all part of it. They were a necessary piece of this puzzle that Jasper had arranged again and again and again. It had been a hundred years since he'd done this last, but thankfully vampires did not forget.

The ease with which he'd been able to perform his old duties again should have startled him. Muscle memory flooded through him as he resurrected an ancient, buried habit. This was what Jasper knew. His fluency in the language of violence was the crooked advantage that he was able to bestow upon his family now, for the first time since the turn of the century.

Unfortunately, too many factors were currently working against them. The main one being the problem of time.

Jasper did not have the time to do things the way he preferred. What he was doing was a cheap imitation of the tried and true methods he'd perfected around the turn of the 19th century. This was just a simple fix. A battlefield cauterizing of a wound they couldn't yet treat; a wound that would fester and rot and kill its host no matter what. He was patching holes in boats with cotton and sending them out to sea knowing there would be no return journey.

He could not train these men to be soldiers that would one day build themselves up into becoming true forces of nature, with potential to outlive their first year.

Thankfully, Jasper did not need to make carefully polished guns or delicately sharpened blades out of these soldiers. He needed bombs. Men to charge in and inflict the most damage without a second's hesitation. They needed not to exist without fear, but to thrive and charge forward despite it. Self-preservation instincts had to go and if they couldn't be replaced with the ruthlessness Jasper tried so hard to instill within them then they had to be adjusted.

Jasper was good at creating weapons out of people. He'd successfully made one out of himself, after all.

He dialed up the scruffy man's fear of him so that it was at its peak by the time Jasper had batted the tattered sleeve away and jammed the limb back in place. Most animals thrashed and kicked in the face of agony like this, but not these men. Not anymore at least.

Only the loudest newborn had tried to retaliate after Jasper had jammed a few of his fingers back on. The man's arm had barely gotten halfway to Jasper's head when he'd been yanked toward the ground and had the full limb wrenched back.

Jasper hadn't torn the arm off fully—just a simple dislocation was more effective. Minutes later when Peter had stepped in to reattach the fingers and pop the shoulder back into place, the loud man was notably silent throughout the treatment. The silence, along with the commingled fury and hate spewing out from him, had been very useful since.

A pained hiss escaped from between the man's teeth as Jasper pressed the limb firmly into place before releasing it; the noise momentarily drowned out every other sound in the room, like steam releasing from the nozzle of a hot pipe.

"Thanks," the scruffy man muttered in a voice that would have been gasping for air if it were necessary.

The strange emphasis on manners that a few of these men seemed to be clinging to was downright bizarre for a group of people that had spent any measure of time as part of Maria's company.

Of course Edward had confirmed with him that Maria had been attempting a different form of manipulation for this group. After all, land acquisition and fighting armies weren't what was important to her right now. No, she'd chosen these men as bodyguards and treated them with just the barest measure of kindness to ensure that they viewed her the way she wanted them to view her: as a poor misfortunate girl who needed help.

He was at least glad he hadn't been around to watch her play that role. (It would've reminded him too much of memories from nearly two centuries ago. Memories that wouldn't die with age no matter how badly Jasper wished they would.)

Jasper's only consolation was feeling Maria's irritability whenever she overheard one of them vocalizing any measure of kindness. It almost made him want to encourage the uselessly misplaced decency just to keep her annoyed but he didn't dare waste a second of his focus on something so trivial.

Peter cleared his throat and Jasper roughly released the man from his grip. When Jasper turned toward where Peter was leaning against one of Rosalie's cleared-off work tables, he had to school his expression very, very carefully as he walked across the garage.

The closer Jasper got to Peter, the stronger the grief felt. The pressure of the emotional agony that translated to physical pain in Jasper's head was like a punch to the gut and a kick in the teeth all at once. The worst part was thinking about the cause of all of that grief.

The urge to let his eyes flicker to Peter's side was so strong that for a second, that's exactly what he did. It was an old habit, and as Jasper's eyes found nothing (no one) beside Peter, and as Peter realized just what Jasper had done, the pain in the air thickened. Muscle memory was both a blessing and a curse to Jasper tonight, and now Peter's heartbreak was a tangible, painful sharpness in the air.

Jasper had known Peter without Charlotte the same way Peter had known Jasper without Alice. Jasper had once allied himself with a man who had nothing to fight for and Peter had once been familiar with a soldier without anything but a job to do and newborns to train. They'd known each other as militiamen and seen each other in the trenches of that wretched experience.

Jasper watched Peter. Peter watched Jasper. This was nothing like before.

Peter nodded his head back toward the house. Jasper focused for an instant before looking back at Peter, a question making him quirk his brow. "You aren't going to see them off?" Peter asked, his voice taking up a careful and strange tone.

Jasper knew Peter well enough to know what he was really saying.

You aren't going to say 'bye' to Alice?

You're just going to leave her life in Maria's hands?

You don't want to go with them?

Peter also knew Jasper well enough not to ask him stupid questions like that. They stared at one another for a long moment. Jasper was the first one to look away. He shook his head quickly, as if trying to shake something off; not unease, but a sense of something not being right. Peter knew it wasn't a reply and just waited patiently for Jasper's flinch to subside.

Jasper lifted a hand and ran it through his hair, trying not to let his temper take hold when his fingers couldn't move through the tangles. He needed a shower. He needed a break.

He needed to be away from Peter for long enough to clear his fucking head.

The reminder that the newborns were still stationed at the opposite end of the long garage, watching them curiously, made Jasper straighten up and square his shoulders, looking to Peter with what he hoped was a calm, measured expression. There was no use getting angry. That emotion was better left for training purposes; it would get him absolutely nowhere if he started letting himself become irritable now.

"I need five." Jasper finally muttered, low enough that only Peter would hear. To his credit Peter didn't react outside of a terse nod, his eyes flickering behind Jasper toward the newborns before locking back onto his gaze.

"Take twenty," he spoke just as low, pushing off from the edge of the table. Then, his voice took on a curious tone, and his voice was almost light when he spoke. "Cycle drills?"

Jasper, who was already unmoving where he stood, felt his limbs freeze further. Peter had already, barely thirty-eight hours prior, shaken his head toward the newborns as they'd been corralled inside of the emptied garage. He'd already looked at Jasper with those broken, furious red eyes and said a weak "I can't…" as he'd physically backed away from the training that he knew was about to begin.

This sudden willingness to participate stunned Jasper so acutely that there was a single moment of clarity for him. The adrenaline of the training faded away from his body as his focus stuttered and subsided, and suddenly the noises in the rest of the house were more vibrant in his ears.

The music playing in the loft with Esme's voice lightly humming along was the loudest, followed by what sounded like Emmett and Rosalie speaking lowly. That's right. They were about to leave for their hunt. Jasper focused for a split second to listen in on Carlisle's voice "… about an hour. If we're any longer than that I'll have Emmett or Alice call. If… if Tanya calls while…"

Jasper stopped listening to what he was saying to Edward. He was already trying to ignore one source of mind-numbing grief, and for all they knew, Tanya and Eleazar and everyone could still be alive. There was no use mourning them preemptively.

They'd done that with Charlotte and they'd paid the price.

Peter seemed to take Jasper's silence as consent. "I'll work them through the rounds. You go check in with," he lazily flung his hand toward the door that led into the mudroom without looking toward it. He didn't finish the sentence.

Jasper's mouth felt dry. He couldn't ask this of him. It was cruel to expect him to play along with the very game that almost killed himself and Charlotte all those years ago. All he could bring himself to say was a hoarse, "Pete…"

The smile Peter offered him did not reach his eyes. "If I don't start fighting now, I might not start at all."

Jasper walked away not long after that, trying to block out the sound of Peter's voice as he did what Jasper had done almost two days before and slipped back into his old role.

It was one thing for Jasper to be forced back into these sick, rotted habits he'd developed when he was more monster than man, but for Peter to do it felt like a failing on Jasper's part. He couldn't protect Charlotte from death and he couldn't prevent Peter from doing something that was going to hurt him more in the long run.

He was already so tired of this game.

Despite his exhaustion, Jasper found himself idling in the kitchen. Carlisle, Emmett, Alice, and Maria were leaving now; he could hear Edward and Rosalie saying goodbye, and Bella was upstairs telling Esme that if she looked out the window she could probably wave goodbye, too.

Esme just continued humming.

Jasper didn't know what kept his feet planted—whether it was Peter's grief weighing him down, Maria's suffocating presence preventing him from approaching, or Alice's guilt dangerously commingling with his own—but he continued to stand there as he heard them leave, lingering at the doorway that connected the mudroom and the kitchen.

After a few seconds the soft sounds of them running drifted away, and Jasper did not feel any better. The painfully hollow feeling in his chest morphed until there was a horrible pressure; it felt like someone had put a balloon in his ribcage and there wasn't any more room for it to expand.

He was resisting the urge to lift a hand and press hard against his chest when Edward walked back in through the back doors, Rosalie not far behind him.

The reproachful look Edward tried to conceal would've annoyed him on any other night, but tonight he couldn't bring himself to care. He had too much to think about. There were too many fucking emotions in this house and he hated every single one of them.

Edward never got time to say anything because Rosalie approached Jasper swiftly. It wasn't until she reached out to take hold of his arm that he stepped back.

"What?" She was offended at his reaction.

"Don't," he spoke quietly, knowing that if she grabbed him it would only shatter any shred of clarity that she had right now. "Trust me." Despite his single-minded focus with training the nine newborns, Jasper was well aware of the fact that he was nothing more than a wound up ball of nerves and fury.

Anyone who touched him would get smacked across the face with some less-than-tolerable emotions.

Rosalie narrowed her eyes and jerked her head back toward the library. "Come on," then, without waiting for a reply, she turned and started walking, expecting him to follow. When he didn't, she stopped and made a 'what are you waiting for' gesture. "Bella and I need to talk to you."

Whatever Edward saw in Rosalie's mind caused him to let out a low hiss. "Rose…"

"You weren't invited," Rosalie snipped without a glance in Edward's direction.

"It's not going to help."

Rosalie ignored him as the sound of Bella swiftly descending the stairs drew Jasper's attention away.

Edward spoke up again. "Emmett's going to be upset with you."

"Oh, like you're one to talk right now," Rosalie finally snapped at him, and when Bella entered the room Jasper suddenly remembered with abruptness that she and Edward were still not speaking. Edward's reaction to his wife was swift—a hurt combination of anger, sadness, and frustration—and caused Jasper to flinch.

Jasper shook his head out again. He lifted a hand and scratched at the back of his scalp, just to give him a sensation to focus on that wasn't the misery of his family. He rolled his neck slowly and then pressed his knuckles against his chin, turning his head until the sound of popping was loud in his ears.

Edward stared curiously at Jasper's fidgeting with a stony expression, and Jasper hated how good his poker face had gotten in recent years. Jasper could feel the curiosity and the concern flicker, and he hated that.

"Come on," Rosalie's voice had taken on an impatient whine and Jasper knew that was a precursor to her falling into a temper. Which was the last thing Jasper needed added onto everything else going on in this house. "Now, please."

It was the "please" that forced Jasper to indulge her and finally move his feet forward. Whatever she was about to talk to him about—whatever conversation Edward wasn't 'invited' to—didn't seem to be something that Jasper was going to enjoy.

Jasper followed after Rosalie with Bella trailing close behind him, bringing up the rear only to close the doors to the library with a firm and resolute pull, and he found himself desperately hoping that they weren't about to try and talk to him about Charlotte.

Or worse, about Alice.

What they wanted instead, shocked him into silence.

"What do we do if he gets a hold of us?"

He did not respond for a long, drawn out moment.

"Well?" Rosalie stared impatiently from where she sat on the edge of Carlisle's desk. It had been pushed up against one of the far walls to make room for all of the papers Alice had pinned up (with just a glance Jasper could tell that they hadn't been updated in well over a day) and the old wood creaked quietly beneath her weight. "We have less than an hour before everyone is back."

"Rosalie," Jasper spoke her name slowly, then turned to Bella, who was standing a few feet from Rosalie, her arms folded across her chest as she frowned. "Bella. You two don't know what you're asking."

"Cut the shit," Rosalie finally snapped, and Jasper knew this was the precursor to a bigger blow up, so if he wanted to avoid that he had two options: answer her questions or leave.

The door had never looked so tempting as it did in that moment.

Bella spoke up next. "Even if that were true, even if we didn't know what we were asking, it doesn't change the fact that we only barely know what we're up against. If the worst happens, there has to be something we can do."

Jasper tried to swallow a knot in his throat. "Everything you've heard Maria say about him is true."

"He's a fully-mad psycho priest who brainwashes his army and convinces them they're saint-like soldiers of God," Rosalie listed this all off like she was reading items off of a shopping list, her voice annoyed. "He looks like shit and he likes pulling people apart for fun and he gets off on killing because he thinks he's sending souls to hell."

Jasper felt his jaw twitch as he ground his teeth together. "That's a very basic understanding, yes."

"Then tell us more," Bella's voice was quiet and pleading. "Who really is he? What can you tell us that will help us against this army?" There was a pause, and he could tell the next question was one she did not truly want to know. "What happened that made him so easy for the Volturi to recruit?"

The true unspoken question was clear: "What did you do to this man?"

Jasper turned his head away from them and stared blankly toward some of Alice's lists with unfocused eyes, not registering a single word on the sheets. He did not look at either of his sisters for a long time. He felt their eyes boring into his head as sharply as he felt their emotions radiating off of them.

Bella was a maelstrom of guilt and worry, the edges of her aura vibrating with a type of anxiety he'd never before felt from her. They were on hour forty-one since Renesmee disappeared and with each minute that passed without news, the fog of grief and concern grew thicker in the house, heavier with every silent moment.

Jasper could feel Edward's emotional agony at that thought, and knew that he was listening into this conversation. Jasper wasn't surprised by this, but did somehow hope that Renesmee would call soon, and Edward and Bella would reconcile promptly. That alone would probably improve Jasper's struggling focus.

Rosalie on the other hand was radiating emotions that made Jasper not want to look at her. He could handle Rose when she was angry or annoyed or on the verge of a fit. Jasper could stomach her fury and her frustration.

What he could not handle was her fear.

She was holding it beneath the surface currently, well-controlled and impressively concealed—in his peripheral Jasper could see her glare—but the frequency of it was sharp; there was no smell to it, but fear sometimes left a metallic taste in the back of his throat. It was a sensation he had once been so accustomed to; now, he was struggling as he forced himself to become desensitized once more.

Jasper did not sense fear from Rosalie often. Tonight was the worst he'd ever felt it.

"We came to you because we wanted to see if you'd tell us," Rosalie eventually spoke, her voice quiet but scathing in the still, dark room. "We don't want to ask her, but we'll be damned if we end up going into this blind. If you aren't going to let us help out in there," she gestured vaguely to the garage at the opposite end of the house, "then at least help us out with this. Give us anything, Jasper."

For a moment Jasper really did almost turn back around and leave the room. He couldn't handle their eyes on him. He couldn't face their judgment. He couldn't stand their worry and fear. Even worse, he couldn't stomach the idea of the two of them ever standing on the same ground as fucking Father Esteban.

Despite Rosalie's hatred for Maria, Jasper knew that she meant it when she said she would corner Maria for information if Jasper didn't start speaking.

The feeling of Esme's panic beneath his fingertips was still bright in his mind. Jasper let his mind drift for just a moment—a quiet hunting trip several decades before, him and Rosalie sitting with their feet in a creek, Rosalie telling him, with a detached, analytical calmness in her tone, about the incident that was the catalyst for her immortal life—and the memories that followed left him uneasy.

Maria hadn't been exaggerating. Whenever they found victims of Esteban's men you could smell the musk of violation in the air.

Maria once made him follow a victim of one of Esteban's men—a girl barely older than fifteen who had managed to escape her attacker and survive the rest of the battle against all odds—back to the barn.

"I don't care how you do it," Maria's voice had taken on an amused tone as they watched the rest of the surviving newborns retreat across the plains, the sound of the girl's panicked cries clear in the night as she ran alongside them, "but if I can hear her meltdown from here then she's served her purpose."

It had taken Jasper both his full undivided focus, overwhelming the girl with more soothing emotions than he'd ever had to muster together in his life, and twenty minutes of talking to goad the girl into following him toward the hills that night.

He never could get rid of her fear—as if, at the end of her life, she'd misinterpreted Jasper's true intention. To this day, Jasper tried to tell himself what he did was kinder than what their enemy had done.

It was that thought that forced the first words from his mouth.

"We first met him on the battlefield in 1888. He was new to the game with an army of nine that didn't stand a chance when they breached our territory from the West."

There was palpable relief from the two women across the room. It appeared they'd both noticed the way he'd tensed and must have thought he was going to bolt from the room. If he was becoming that easy to read, that was dangerous.

"Where did he come from?"

The words did not fall out of him easily, the way he almost hoped they would. Jasper had to force out each and every sentence spoken. It didn't get easier with each subsequent word. If anything, the more he told them, the more dread he felt. "Spain, we assume. He was a missionary sent from the Catholic Church back in the eighteenth century. We don't know much more than that. We don't know how he was changed." He finally turned his head and fixed Bella and Rose with a blank look. "We don't exactly introduce ourselves to each other down south. Sometimes information finds its way to you, but unless it helps you kill the enemy it's useless."

"Did you ever figure out any of that information, then?" Rosalie's fingers were tapping idly against her bicep. Her glare was still just as sharp as the fear he could still sense in her. "For this Father Esteban guy."

"Maria is right"—and Jasper hated to admit it, but that sentence was becoming a bit of a mantra to him over the past several days—"his army is frustratingly hard to fight."

"Are all of his… soldiers," Bella settled on the word after thinking for a couple of seconds, "that willing to die to help take down your numbers?"

Jasper bit back the urge to say "Maria is right" again and instead just nodded. "You don't survive as a warlord for as long as he has without being smart. His system doesn't just work, it's flawless. It's not him they're loyal to, but 'God.' He's an expert at manipulating that loyalty."

"Why doesn't she implement it?" Rosalie's question was rhetorical but Jasper was suddenly very happy Maria was out of the house. For anyone to assume that Maria might have a gnostic bone in her body would have likely driven her to murder.

And there were nine almost-disposable bodies in the garage that they couldn't lose just yet.

"For his army to function the way it does there are more systems in motion than we ever implemented." He paused. That was true as far as he knew. He'd been with Maria for almost a century and she'd never changed strategy once they found out what worked. "He's on top and leading the charge, but there are layers to their army that we always found…" he paused, thinking of Esteban's disfigurement and the markings that he bestowed upon his wretched, willing 'congregation.' He did not settle on a word to finish his sentence. Instead, he moved on. "There are a few that operate directly beneath him that deal with almost everything as far as we know. Training, indoctrination, planning. Beneath them, more ranks; it mirrors a human army in ways." It also mirrored the way the Church's system worked, but he stuck to the allusion he knew best. "He keeps newborns far longer than we do. His strength doesn't just come in his army's willingness to throw themselves headlong into death, but even without their newborn year's strength they're useful because he makes a lot of them."

"How many constitutes 'a lot'?" Bella asked.

"We first saw him with nine, the second time, with twenty-nine." That had been the first time they'd underestimated him. That had been the time Esteban and his men had put Maria down on her knees.

Hearing Maria scream had been the first time in his second life that Jasper had ever felt bone-chilling, all-consuming terror.

"We don't keep more than twenty-five, and that was at our most. Even that number is unusual—it's like I said back in Washington: armies that big are rare. My ability was the only reason I could keep them in line. Once I figured out better ways we kept our numbers lower; between fourteen and eighteen usually."

"How did he manage twenty-nine then?" Bella shifted uncomfortably. She wasn't looking at him now, but instead at some spot on the ground, as if contemplating more than their enemy's numbers.

"Because of his church-like system. Esteban has those layers beneath him; he's never fully in the presence of his entire army unless there's a fight. In a way, it's almost as if he has multiple armies, but it's all him. We once received intel that Esteban's numbers were consistently split between three or four bases across Durango." It had been a stupid strategy, as far as keeping a hold of land was concerned. Often, Jasper and Maria would hear about one of Esteban's groups getting annihilated. Of course, Esteban always regrouped, but it had amused to Maria to hear about, every single time. "His higher-ranking soldiers report to him, and I suppose he just travels between their bases, but there are smaller groups of newborns that are beneath those soldiers' direct command."

"Cults within a cult," Rosalie observed. "If Esteban's system consists of smaller armies kept separated, then they probably don't fight well together, even as large as they are." It wasn't a question, but Rosalie's voice almost sounded hopeful as she waited for Jasper to confirm.

Jasper hated that he had no assurances for them.

"The most I saw Esteban with was over forty."

He could feel the dread chill the already depressing mood of the room down further. It felt as if someone had turned the thermostat down. As if someone had snapped their fingers and sank the temperature twenty degrees.

Bella's eyes widened at that, but when she looked toward Rosalie she was not rewarded with any acknowledgement.

He knew exactly what they were thinking. Back in Forks they'd had the benefit of fighting alongside the wolves on the battlefield. Victoria's army, despite being filled with almost twenty newborns, had been poorly organized and untrained. They'd been on more equal footing, since Jasper possessed the experience they all needed, and they'd established a solid strategy; they'd even set the scene for fuck's sake, and picked the battlefield.

Father Esteban charged forward with his entire congregation and had always been the instigator to their bouts along Maria's western borders. He'd had the benefit of both numbers and, within those numbers, followers ready to die. He turned twisted believers into crucifix-carved grenades who could take out one of his own highly trained newborns with just two or three of themselves.

A century ago Jasper would also have had disposable bodies ready to throw headfirst into battle. Finely tuned weapons and temperamental time bombs. Outside of the nine half-trained men in the garage, Jasper did not have enough vampires to keep them safe.

"Are they all men?" Rosalie's voice was even and calm which made the fear Jasper could still sense suddenly unbearable.

Although he wanted to, Jasper did not flee. He walked forward some more, his eyes easily finding the name 'Tanya' pinned to the wall. Snippets of a conversation she'd had with someone—Kate or Carmen, it seemed like—were scratched against the paper. If she were dead, Jasper wondered if this was a snippet of one of the last conversations she had ever had.

"Usually, but," he looked toward Kate's row and easily found the second half of the conversation that had begun on Tanya's last page. "I'm not sure now. He had women before. He likely still has them now."

The hot swell of hate and rage bloomed a bit brighter than her fear for several wonderful moments, and, since neither woman could see his face currently, Jasper allowed himself to close his eyes and cherish it. It was easier to stay angry and lean into the red heat of fury. He was glad to feel its usual fires burning within Rosalie, even if it didn't completely stamp out her terror.

"When we fight them," because he knew, even now, that they would need absolutely everyone for this—all hands on deck—or else they stood no chance, "it won't matter. They all kill and die the same way." He opened his eyes and turned back toward them, glancing over his shoulder. "They all burn the same."

"If he has forty people, what do we do?" Bella asked, and her voice took on another pleading tone. They all knew the general plan at this point. The formation they would take if they ended up cornered on their property before they could properly set a plan of attack into motion.

Jasper would do what he always did best and lead the charge, with four of the newborns at his sides, all of them spread out wide enough to fight out of each other's way. Behind him, another two newborns, Carlisle, Edward, Rosalie, and Peter would be the next line of defense and behind them, Maria, Alice, and Esme. In the back on the flanks the other three newborns would remain and between them, Emmett and Bella would take up the rear; Emmett to protect them from the back and Bella to keep her eye on everyone and shield them all.

Jasper hated imagining that any of Esteban's army might possess any sort of extra ability, but if he somehow had in his midst someone who could—intentionally or not—disrupt Alice's visions, then that meant sinister things.

Jasper's mind drifted toward the members of their family that were heading further and further away from the house, off for a quick hunt close to home. No one had said anything about him demanding that Maria go alongside them, nor did they say anything about Jasper placing her in charge of their center, where Esme and Alice were supposed to be shielded. But whether that was because of their trust in him or their unease at vocalizing any mistrust in Maria, he didn't know. It didn't matter much either way.

Maria would bring Alice back home within the hour or Jasper would kill her.

"I can't tell you anything that I didn't tell you all back in Washington." He hated how resigned he sounded as he continued to ignore his sisters' prying eyes. He pulled his gaze away from the papers but fixed it above their heads and on the crucifix pinned to the wall behind Carlisle's desk. He pointedly ignored Rosalie's tapping foot and spoke again. "You never stop moving, you never go for the easy shot, you either come at them from the side or not at all. Use your momentum to your advantage, keep your stance low and your feet on the ground, tear what you can, when you can. Do not let them get a hold of you, do not let anything or anyone distract you; you only pay attention to what is within your reach."

There was another moment of quiet before Bella spoke up again. "If he has forty, we're dead, aren't we?"

Edward's grief and hopelessness from the kitchen pulsed at that question, glowing wildly in the periphery of Jasper's awareness. Rosalie's fear brightened ever-so-slightly, but Bella's uncertainty was slowly extinguishing, a more hardened resolve beginning to take its place.

Bella had already done the hardest part and gotten Renesmee off to relative safety. Her beloved daughter was out of the firing range and the calm resignation Jasper now felt emanating from her was too much for him to handle.

In an instant, Jasper was furious again. He could not stand by while any member of his family resigned themselves to their own deaths. He would not let them go into this battle thinking they would not emerge victorious. His ability could only do so much, his training could only get them so far, his patience could only withstand so much.

But before he could snap at them, his temper rising inside of him, threatening to burst out of him like a cork from a bottle with words of anger already hot on the tip of his tongue—

"Why is he coming here?"

Rosalie's voice finally cracked, and suddenly Jasper's temper snapped itself out of existence. A puff of smoke expanding in his chest was the only sign that a fiery inferno had just been burning inside his ribcage. Now, the cold emptiness from before reared its ugly, but quieter, head.

Jasper pulled his gaze from the wall behind Rosalie and finally locked his eyes on hers.

The things that his family did not know about him had been kept under wraps for a multitude of reasons. The main reason being that a lifetime of pain, suffering, murder, and violence was not worth recalling when they existed peacefully in a coven driven by compassion and fueled by love. His crimes were not worth repeating and his sins were not worthy of any spiritual absolution a confession might bring. Nothing could undo the damage he'd caused in eighty years protecting Monterrey, Mexico.

"Because of me." It was the simple truth that they all knew, but Jasper thought it could stand to be repeated.

His family was in danger and it was all his fault.

It would be cruel to lie to them, to tell them that he didn't deserve it. It would be dishonest of him to look at Bella and Rosalie, or to face Edward when he left that room, or even Esme upstairs, after denying that Esteban's retaliation wasn't justified in every way.

Maria and Jasper had taken away his coven. Why wouldn't Esteban return the favor?

Jasper forced himself to hold Rosalie's gaze when he spoke his next words. "I was not a good man."

With Alice gone, Jasper could finally say that. Jasper focused on his sisters in that silent, tentative moment. He felt Bella's frustration and anger and resolve swirling around her, seemingly not accepting this as a proper response. But Jasper's main focus was on Rosalie.

She was searching his face for something, and Jasper knew exactly what it was she was looking for. She wanted to see a hint of innocence. A sign of some leftover humanity. Proof that he was exaggerating.

Rosalie was trying to see if Jasper was someone she really knew.

When her hesitance formed, and when her fear focused itself, unease finally pointing in a concrete direction, Jasper let out a low breath of air. At this point in his life it would only serve him right if his dearest sister started to think the worst of him.

Jasper should have seen something like this—a warlord with a vendetta, his peaceful disguise failing him, his loved ones fearing him—coming for him a long, long time ago. The consequences for his past actions felt long overdue.

Jasper finally pulled his focus off of Rosalie and looked toward Bella. His voice was very quiet when he spoke again. "I'm sorry I've sentenced you all to this."

"No," Bella shook her head at him before Jasper could finish talking. "You can't accept all the blame here." Rosalie was shocked when she looked toward Bella. "This isn't about southern vendettas; this is all about the Volturi. It's how they knew where to find Peter and Charlotte. How they're able to work around Alice's visions. I'm taking responsibility here, too." She steeled herself, her hands clenching into tight fists at her side as her lip trembled and her eyes fluttered between himself and Rose. "It's just as much mine and Edward's fault." Jasper could feel Edward bristle at that.

Jasper felt a rare pulse of pity building within him. Despite the Volturi's involvement, Jasper still had doubts about who was the real driving force here. It was hard to trust Alice's visions nowadays and she'd said so herself: she was being fooled by what she couldn't see, not by what she could.

As far as Alice had seen, Aro, his fellow kings, and his guard were all easily accounted for.

There had been a time when Jasper would have nodded his head along with this declaration; this mad attempt to redirect the blame elsewhere. In fact, a few decades ago Jasper would've been the first one to point the blame their way.

But time had passed, and Jasper had grown to care for his newest sister and love his dear niece, and while he had never forgiven Edward for his choices he'd managed to accept them and move on from them.

Even if what Bella was saying was true…

"Your mistakes pale in comparison to my crimes." With that final thought, Jasper turned and left the library, leaving them to sit with his words and their dark implications.

Rosalie's fear solidified itself, Bella's frustration did not diminish, and Edward's despair was still gnawing at the background of Jasper's awareness from where he lingered at the top of the stairs. If Jasper focused he could still hear Esme's soft hums from the top level while Peter's training of the newborns was currently the loudest noise in the house, echoing from end to end and likely even beyond the house.

Jasper did not spare a thought to his tangled hair or the absence of people from the house. He did not let his mind drift toward the misplaced trust he'd granted Maria or the pain he felt when he thought of Alice. All Jasper focused on, as he walked back across the den, through the kitchen, and toward the garage, was the rage that was simmering within him.

He inhaled deeply, absorbing everything he could feel in the house—Esme's sadness, Edward's worry, Bella's frustration, Rosalie's fear, Peter's misery, the newborns' anger and unease—and took it all into himself. He forced them all into the empty space in his chest where the past couple days had hollowed him out and left him feeling desolate and miserable.

He absolutely refused to let his family pay for his crimes. If Father Esteban wanted to dole out some sort of divine retribution to Jasper, then so fucking be it. But he would do absolutely everything in his power to try and prevent his family from suffering for his sins.

After Carlisle and everyone else got back from their hunt, Maria would be allowed to take her newborns and feed them. When that second hunting group left, Jasper was determined to be a part of it.

Thirty, forty, fifty newborns… the numbers didn't even matter anymore. Jasper would go down fighting, as strong as he could make himself, to keep everyone safe.

It was the least he could do, now.

A/N: This chapter is brought to you by flamingelmo . jpg and Lil Jon's first line of song "Let's Get Fucked Up."