A/N: I haven't edited this is as heavily as I usually do, so I apologize in advance for what will probably be numerous errors. Thanks for reading and reviewing, and for the follows and favorites:)
Entreaty
"A woman came through my territory last year," Maria started. "She was skittish and seemed on edge, and when I politely encouraged her to get the hell off my land, she apologized and said she was being hunted by the person who'd killed her mate."
Jasper scoffed and shook his head. "Edward didn't kill James. We did," he said, gesturing to Alice and himself. Emmett had helped with burning the tracker but Jasper didn't feel the need to offer that information.
Maria looked at him in surprise. "You know who I'm talking about?" she asked, but her face immediately twisted into a sneer and she continued before he could answer. "You killed him over a human?"
"She isn't just any human," Jasper answered calmly. "She's my brother's mate. James thought she'd be a fun toy to play with. We disagreed."
Maria was silent and looked at him a little suspiciously. That didn't line up with the story Victoria told her, but she knew Jasper as well as anyone and knew he was being honest. "Whatever, that's irrelevant," she said, waving a dismissive hand. "We got to talking and she explained that she'd decided to create a new coven for herself but she also wanted revenge for the death of her mate. I didn't know at the time that she was speaking about your coven. I won't bore you with all the details, but she asked about the southern armies and I gave her some information. Not much, and nothing detailed about myself or my army, but enough for her to put a plan together."
"How did you find out she was talking about us?" Alice asked.
Maria didn't answer right away. It went against everything inside her to give away even the smallest scraps of information, but she needed their help. "She mentioned there were multiple gifts in the coven that she needed to work around. One being an empath. I've never heard of the existence of another with that gift, so I questioned her. Imagine my surprise when I realized she was talking about you and that you had two other powerful gifts in your coven," she said, glaring at Jasper.
He gave her an incredulous look. "Do you honestly think I would have offered that information to you in 1950? The last time I'd seen you, you were plotting my death."
Maria again waved her hand dismissively. "I knew you no longer trusted me," she said, not seeing anything wrong with the fact that she had been considering killing someone who'd been with her, fighting by her side, for the better part of a century.
"And god forbid you just let me leave? I'd been nothing but loyal to you," he snapped, then cut her off when she got defensive and opened her mouth to contradict him. "I may have let Peter and Charlotte go but I stayed. Even through all those punishments for not killing the only two people I loved, I fucking stayed."
"You deserved those punishments," Maria growled, ignoring the brief flare of jealousy she felt at his words. She'd known Jasper had stopped loving her long before he left her. "I told you to kill them and you disobeyed a direct order."
"No, you ordered me to kill Charlotte," he growled right back. "Or are you finally admitting that your real goal was actually to get rid of Peter? You knew what he meant to me and you felt threatened by that. But I never walked away. I never stopped fighting. I never stopped training your newborns. I did every single fucking thing you asked of me, I took every single punishment you doled out without a single word of protest, and it still wasn't enough because I'd stopped worshipping the ground you walked on."
Maria's fist clenched in rage but before she could take a single step forward, Alice stepped in front of Jasper. "Do it and it'll be the last thing you ever do," she warned her, making Maria sneer at her. "It would be a mistake to underestimate me, Maria. Jasper taught me everything he knows, and with my gift, you stand no chance. I've seen you burned to nothing but ash, so unless you want that particular future to come to pass, I'd tread lightly and control yourself."
Maria swallowed back her rage. It wasn't easy, and it was made slightly harder by Jasper's impassive stare, but eventually she managed it. Alice nodded and stepped back to Jasper's side.
"Why don't you just tell us why we're really here?" Jasper said. "You didn't come to warn me out of the goodness of your heart, so let's just get to the real purpose of this meeting."
Maria felt an uncharacteristic flash of hurt at his words. "We were together a very long time, Major. Is it so unlikely that I would warn you that there was a threat out there against you?" she asked. When Jasper scoffed again and shook his head, she shrugged a little. "Fine. Maybe it is unlikely," she said with a light laugh. "I can't honestly say I forgive you for leaving without a word, but I don't hate you, nor do I want you dead."
"Great. That's lovely to hear," he answered with a sarcastic drawl. "But can you please just get on with it? Victoria has created an army to destroy my entire family and I'd really like to get back to them."
Maria sighed quietly. She knew Jasper's protective nature likely made him uncomfortable leaving his coven, even temporarily, when there was a threat against them. Even during the years after he allowed Peter and Charlotte to escape, even after they both stopped trusting each other, Jasper's protective instincts meant he continued watching over her in battle. It would have been so easy for him to turn a blind eye and pretend he was too caught up in the fight to see if she was in any danger, but he always came to her defense. Always.
Despite everything she did to forge him into her deadliest weapon, she never managed to completely stamp out the decency inside him. She had to admit - only a little grudgingly - that he was a good man. It's why she was never able to kill him, even after she knew he'd betrayed her by letting Peter and Charlotte escape. Back then, she was still so damaged from the death of her mate that she wasn't sure she was capable of feeling genuine love for another, but Jasper was the closest she'd come. Until recently.
She took a deep breath and kept her gaze steady as she looked at him. This would be the hardest part of why she'd been looking for him. She knew there was every likelihood that he would shoot her down without hearing her out.
"I've been looking for Peter and Charlotte," she told him, pushing forward even as his eyes hardened and he looked at her coldly. "I wanted to know if you knew where I could find them."
"No," was all the answer he gave her.
"I mean them no harm," she said, forcing herself to remain calm, unsurprised that he wouldn't immediately offer up the information she wanted. "You know I've seen them since they escaped and all three of us walked away from that encounter without any injuries."
"No," he repeated.
Maria growled in frustration. "We can do this the easy way or the hard way, Major. If you tell me what I want to know, I'll leave the rest of your 'family' in peace. If you refuse to help me, I'll track Victoria down and offer her my assistance to wipe out your entire coven."
Even though Jasper knew from her emotions that she was bluffing, he still opened his mouth to answer her threat with a threat of his own. He stopped and held his tongue when he felt Alice being pulled into the future at the same moment his phone quietly vibrated in his pocket.
Alice's vision was very brief. It was only the image of a text message Peter was sending Jasper. The first part was straightforward enough, but the second part only left her with more questions.
She's going to threaten to come to Washington to help Victoria. It's a bluff, so use the guards coming to Seattle to force her to back down. And she's not only looking for me and Char, she wants help from all four of us.
"Threats won't help you in this situation," she warned Maria once she'd blinked her way back to the present. "You're welcome to go find Victoria, and I'll even make it easier on you and tell you she's in Seattle, but you should know that one of the kings is sending guards to the city. I doubt you want to give them a chance to finally catch up to you. You're guilty of more than one Volturi law, and Caius isn't known for his leniency."
Maria's eyebrows shot up, unable to hide her shock. "Why are they sending guards all the way to North America? It's been decades since they've done that."
Jasper just looked at her for a moment in exasperation. "I don't know, Maria. Maybe because there are newborns running riot and the authorities are investigating it as the work of a serial killer?"
"And imagine what would happen if Caius or Aro were to find out that you were the one who gave Victoria the idea to create a newborn army," Alice added, knowing she didn't need to spell out the consequences of that. When Maria snapped her mouth shut and turned to stare off into the trees, she continued. "But that's not all, is it? It's not only Peter and Charlotte you're interested in?"
Jasper turned to Alice, unsure what she meant by that. He knew she'd been pulled into a vision, but he'd also felt her confusion at whatever it was she'd seen. She discreetly shook her head and used her emotions to ask him to be patient.
Maria shut her eyes for a moment before turning back Jasper, who was completely taken aback by her expression. Whatever she wanted from him, or from Peter and Charlotte, meant enough to her that she was willing to show him her vulnerability, regardless of how much she hated doing it.
Jasper honestly wasn't sure he'd ever seen Maria vulnerable before, not in all his time with her.
After delving into his sire's emotions to ensure he wasn't about to do something he'd regret, he briefly glanced at Alice. She tipped her head back and forth as she considered what he was silently asking, then shrugged and nodded. It was the closest Jasper was getting to an agreement, so he fought against his instincts and took a seat on the ground at the base of the tree so he was still in the shade. Alice sat beside him and they both ignored the shock on Maria's face and just motioned for her to come sit with them.
It took her a minute of looking at them suspiciously, but eventually Maria nodded and walked over to sit in front of them. She cocked her head to the side as she curiously studied the way they were sitting and saw they hadn't let go of each other's hands.
"No," Jasper answered her unasked question. "She's not my mate."
Maria just nodded. She didn't have very much experience with relationships. At least not proper ones that weren't based on power and manipulation. She hadn't had a single friend since her coven in Monterrey was killed. Jasper had been her lover, and yes, he'd worshipped the ground she walked on for a time, but they'd never been friends. He was the person she'd cared about the most in the world after losing her mate and the rest of her original coven, but she couldn't honestly say she'd loved him.
It took her a moment to decide on the best place to start, but she figured a little reassurance might be the best way.
"Before I tell you what I want, let me first tell you that I truly mean Peter and Charlotte no harm. There's no point in me attempting to lie to you, so yes, I am still angry that they escaped and that they returned to take you away," she admitted to Jasper, ignoring the way his jaw clenched at her words. "But I've known where they lived for years, Major. They're not so far from the camp that they went unnoticed, and when one of my scouts traveled further north into Texas than usual, he found the ranch," she explained, watching Jasper's expression carefully. He had a damn good poker face, but she saw the briefest flash of surprise. "That was in the late '90s, and I've made precisely one trip there, simply to confirm the information myself. Other than that, they've been left alone to live in peace. Every scout I've had for the last twenty years has been ordered to keep their distance."
Jasper couldn't deny being shocked by that news. He knew she was being honest, but he also knew what she wasn't saying. "You didn't do that out of the goodness of your heart either, you did it to keep yourself alive. You know I would have made it my life's mission to destroy you if you killed them. Regardless of how long it took or what I needed to do to accomplish that goal, I would never have given up. Even if it killed me in the end."
Maria just nodded. There was no point in denying it. "Yes. But why I did it is irrelevant. And if any harm were to befall either of them now because of myself or my actions, you'd still make it your mission to destroy me. So you see? I have every reason to ensure they stay alive and unharmed."
Alice eyed her for a moment, still trying to understand the second part of the vision she'd just had. "I hope you know Jasper would be equally focused if any harm were to come to me," she said sharply. "And it wouldn't be Jasper alone," she added. "There are five other members of our coven who would fight right alongside him."
Maria just nodded again, because she knew that also. "May I ask a question? It's largely irrelevant, but I can't deny being curious," she said to Jasper, who nodded. "What is like to live in a coven like yours?" she asked. Her coven in Monterrey had consisted of four members - Maria and her mate, along with another mated pair. They were the only people Maria had loved until recently, but they weren't a 'family' in the same way the Cullens seemed to be. The things Victoria had told her about Jasper's coven had piqued her curiosity.
Surprised by the question but feeling Maria's genuine curiosity, he took a moment to answer. "It was difficult in the beginning," he admitted. "My experience in this world up to that point meant trust didn't come easy for me, and trusting a coven leader was an even steeper uphill climb," he said, giving his sire a pointed look. "I did, however, trust Alice. So I did my best to push past my discomfort at being part of another large coven. It was actually you who inadvertently helped me see that the Cullens were nothing like you or Lucy and Nettie, and that they were people I could put my trust in," he told her. "Your visit to Calgary was the catalyst that allowed me to let my guard down with them. And once the trust was there, it wasn't that far of a leap for me to come to love them."
Alice ignored Maria and looked up at Jasper with a bright smile. She'd known he would find a true family with Carlisle and the rest of the Cullens, but it still filled her with happiness that he'd allowed himself to accept it.
Maria just nodded her understanding. She'd seen back in 1950 that his new coven was just as protective of him as he was of them. "What is the blond woman's name?" she asked, remembering that she'd looked particularly on edge and fully prepared to rip Maria's throat out if she made one wrong move towards Jasper.
"That's Rosalie," Alice laughed. "She may not have been a warrior like Jasper, but he absolutely found his female counterpart in her. They're eerily similar."
"Is she an equally gifted fighter?" Maria asked. When Jasper growled lowly, she waved him off. "That wasn't a challenge, Major. I'm simply curious."
"Jasper has taught all of us through the years," Alice answered calmly. "Why are you interested in what living in a peaceful coven is like?"
Jasper again saw that flicker of vulnerability in Maria's eyes, and his own eyes went wide with shock and disbelief. "No fucking way."
Maria glared at him. "No, I have no interest in living the way you do," she snapped, knowing what conclusion he'd jumped to. "Walking among the humans holds no appeal whatsoever for me."
"Does all of this have something to do with a man named Matthew?" Alice asked her after a moment.
Maria's eyes immediately shot to the tiny vampire. "You've seen him?"
"No," Alice shook her head. "I've seen very little about you, but I have seen you asking about him. If he's still alive and where he might be."
Maria took a deep breath, knowing it was time to lay all her cards on the table. Jasper might have more patience than she did, but he didn't have unlimited patience and she knew it was growing thin.
"I was worried when you disappeared," she started. "I know you didn't believe me in Calgary, but it's the truth. When you didn't return to camp, I waited a few days before jumping to conclusions. I thought maybe you just needed time away, but eventually I realized you weren't coming back. My first assumption was that someone from another army somehow managed to catch you off guard. When I went searching for where you might have been ambushed, I caught a lingering trace of Peter's scent mingled with yours and I knew you'd left of your own free will. I was furious. If I'd seen you in the first few years after you disappeared, I absolutely would have tried to kill you. After seventy-five years, you leaving without a word, without a backwards glance, felt like the ultimate betrayal."
"Maria," Jasper sighed. "I was miserable. You knew I was miserable. Losing Peter meant there wasn't a single good thing left in my life, and suffering through all of your punishments only reinforced that belief. Over the course of those five years, I was slowly losing the will to live. There was nothing to live for. I knew you'd stopped trusting me. I knew you were plotting ways to kill me. I had very few options left. I could try to kill you first or I could walk into a fire and put an end to the misery," he said, sounding nothing but exhausted. "Did you notice anything else when you found Peter's scent?"
Maria nodded slowly. "The remnants of a fire pit."
"Yes, because I couldn't bring myself to kill you. If Peter had found me five minutes later, he wouldn't have found a man, he would have found a pile of ash."
Alice's heart clenched and she held Jasper's hand a little tighter. She'd seen that moment. She'd seen Jasper choose to die, she'd seen him step into the flames, she'd seen him burn, and she'd seen the immense grief that brought Peter to his knees when he arrived too late. For a few minutes it felt like her entire world had ended. She'd been seeing Jasper for nearly twenty years and she'd seen the beautiful life they'd have with the Cullens. But for those few minutes, that future was snuffed out of existence. It disappeared entirely.
Maria was quiet for a full minute. She'd known how unhappy Jasper had been in his last five years with her, but she hadn't known he was unhappy enough to end his life. She'd been forced to do some heavy soul-searching in recent years, had done her fair share of uncharacteristic reflecting on the life she'd lived since her mate had been taken from her, yet the news that the only person she'd truly cared about in a century wanted to leave this world rather than continue to fight at her side… well, it left her a little breathless.
"It's in the past," Jasper said quietly. "I haven't felt that way in eighty years. Please, just continue with whatever we're here for."
Maria nodded. "Things admittedly worsened in the first few years after you left. You'd been the one to keep the newborns under control for such a long time that I'd gotten too accustomed to relying on you, and I lost a lot of territory in those years. I think maybe it was always in the back of my mind that perhaps you would come back eventually. When ten years passed without a word, without a single sighting of you, I decided to try and find you. That decision was partly because I wanted to convince you to return to Mexico with me, but I was also genuinely interested in finding out if you were okay," she admitted. "You'd spent seventy-five years in a war zone as an empath. I had no idea how you would react to the wider world."
Jasper just nodded. He'd known as much from her emotions in Calgary, and Edward had confirmed it with his gift as well. The dominant thoughts in her mind were about how to manipulate him into returning to the south with her, but she'd also been genuinely curious how he was doing. He personally believed that was simply so she had a greater chance of manipulating him - if he was even a little bit unhappy it would be easier to try and tempt him back to her side.
"When I returned to Mexico alone, I threw myself into rebuilding a strong army. I had no intention of making those temporary losses of land permanent," she continued. "It worked for a time. For decades, in fact. I changed a man who showed as much potential as you had, though without your gift obviously, and he eventually became my new second in command. The Volturi had begun cracking down on any armies that were drawing too much attention, so after the '70s, I intentionally kept my numbers down. I rarely had more than ten newborns at a time from that point on," she explained. "But even with a smaller force, I continued winning battles. I retook all of my lost territory and gained more along the way. But as time went on…" she trailed off for a moment and stared blankly into the trees before meeting Jasper's eye again. "As time went on, as the decades passed and the time since losing my mate fell further into the distant past, it slowly stopped mattering."
Alice shocked herself by feeling sympathy for Maria. "You knew nothing would bring him back," she said gently. She may hate the woman with every fiber of her being, but she wouldn't wish watching their mate being killed on anyone. Maria had been seeking revenge for nearly three hundred years, but she couldn't turn back time. She couldn't undo what had already been done.
Maria gritted her teeth to keep from snapping at the pixie-like vampire. She didn't need anyone's sympathy, nor did she want it. When she saw Jasper looking at her with a raised eyebrow, she growled at him. "Shut up," she hissed.
Jasper just shook his head. "Don't be so quick to disregard her. Sympathy might just be the only way to secure our help with whatever it is you want from us."
Maria briefly - very briefly - debated lunging for him and ripping his tongue out, but Alice pointedly clearing her throat with a raised eyebrow of her own made her sigh and work again to keep herself calm.
"How about I just tell you what I think you're here for," Jasper said, wanting to just move the whole thing along. Maria looked at him warily but nodded. "I think somewhere along the way you changed someone named Matthew. Whether he was the one with potential who became your new second in command or just a random newborn, you surprised yourself by coming to care about him. His life mattered to you. But he disappeared recently. Like a repeat of me eighty-two years ago, he left camp one day and never returned. You don't know where he is or if he's even still alive, so you want Alice and Charlotte to work together - Alice's gift with Charlotte's tracking - to try and find him. If he was ambushed somewhere and taken behind enemy lines, you want Peter and I along as your muscle to fight our way through. Is that about right? Did I miss anything?"
Maria probably shouldn't have been surprised. Jasper had always been smart, perhaps even smarter that she was, though she'd die before she admitted that out loud. And he knew her as well as anyone had since her mate had been killed. He had the benefit of his gift, but after his first couple decades with her, he'd often been able to read her without it. It was why he stopped coming to her bed and stopped trusting her. He knew she didn't love him, and because she continued to insist that she did in order to keep manipulating him, he eventually came to realize that he couldn't trust her words.
There was no use protesting, he'd see through her in an instant, so Maria took another deep breath, ignored the screaming in her head, and admitted the one thing she'd fought so hard to deny. "I didn't know it was possible to love someone who wasn't a mate. I didn't know it was possible to love after losing a mate."
Jasper shocked her by breaking into a smile. When all the suspicion left his eyes, when he lowered his guard and gave her the first true, genuine smile he had ever given her, Maria was reminded again how beautiful he was.
"See? That wasn't so hard, was it?" he laughed.
Maria rolled her eyes but couldn't entirely keep from laughing a little with him. "Actually, it was," she said, shrugging a shoulder.
Jasper took a minute to try and figure out how to proceed. He had a mate he didn't want Maria knowing about and he wasn't prepared to make a commitment to help Maria without discussing it with Leah first. Since he couldn't be honest about why his answer wasn't an immediate and definitive yes, he fell back on an excuse Maria wouldn't question.
"We believe Victoria will be making her move within the next two weeks. I can't offer to help you right now, not with the current threat against my coven and my brother's mate," he said eventually. "I'm also not particularly comfortable telling you where Peter and Charlotte are without speaking to them first. What I can promise you is that I'll talk to my coven leader when I get back home, and assuming he has no objections, I will do my very best to help you find this new love of yours once the threat to my family is eliminated," he told her. As a coven leader herself, Maria would accept that he needed to speak to Carlisle before coming to a decision.
Maria nodded but didn't otherwise answer. She wanted to demand he drop everything and help her now, but she knew he would never abandon his coven when they needed him. And while she was a little surprised that Jasper deferred to anyone, she still accepted that he needed to talk to his coven leader. If anyone in her coven made a decision to set off on a potentially risky mission without her permission, they would've been punished severely.
"I don't, however, speak for Alice, Peter, or Charlotte," Jasper continued. "Whether they help you is entirely up to them. If they refuse and you try and threaten them into agreeing, I walk away. If you attempt to threaten anyone I love, I walk away," he warned her. "I'm willing to help you but I won't tolerate you trying to use my family or friends as leverage."
Maria debated all the options in front of her, but she admittedly had very few left. She'd tried to find Matthew on her own, she'd had every member of her army scouring the countryside for him, but they'd had no luck. She'd found a faint trace of his scent about twenty miles from camp, but there was no trail to follow. It was as if he'd vanished into thin air. The only thing she had to hold onto was that there was no sign of a fire anywhere near where his scent disappeared. She'd run all through Mexico, all through Central America, and all through the southern states, carefully skirting the territory of her enemies, but no one she'd come across had seen him.
As much as she hated the idea of having to wait, she also knew Jasper would kill her before he let her anywhere near his family in an attempt to force his hand, so Maria nodded. "Alright. You have my word."
Alice had been busy scanning the future, but she snapped back to the present when she saw that Maria wouldn't argue with Jasper about waiting. "I'm willing to help you, but I have to be honest, it won't be easy. Finding someone I don't know is virtually impossible," she cautioned Maria. "For starters, I don't know what Matthew looks like, so if I did somehow catch a vision of him, I might not even know it's him."
Maria shifted a little so she could pull something from her pocket, and when Jasper saw it was a cell phone, he couldn't keep from laughing. "Holy shit, you're in love and you've embraced modern technology? Quick, Ali, say a couple prayers. I think the end of days is upon us."
Alice laughed and put her hand on the ground in front of her, then nodded. "Ground's cold. Hell has officially frozen over."
Maria didn't know if she should laugh or scowl, so she went with what she knew best and scowled at both of them. Teasing wasn't a thing she was all that familiar with and she wasn't sure she liked it that much. "Here," she snapped, shoving the phone in Alice's hand. "That's him."
Jasper leaned over to look at the picture of a tall vamp with jet black hair and deep red eyes that told Jasper he was no longer a newborn. "He's handsome. I can see how y'all would make a cute couple."
Maria sighed in exasperation, but had to admit to herself that seeing Jasper laughing settled something deep inside her that she'd never acknowledged aloud before. She had never stopped thinking about him through the decades that passed, and she'd often wondered if he was truly happy. He'd been so on edge when she'd seen him in Calgary and she didn't believe it was possible for him to ever lower his guard completely.
Alice quickly called her phone from Maria's so she had the woman's phone number, then immediately deleted the call history so Maria didn't have hers. She was willing to help, but she wasn't willing to give Maria a method to contact her. "Here," she said, handing Maria's phone back to her and standing up, then yanking on Jasper's hand until he huffed a laugh and got to his feet. "The best way I can think to start while we're still dealing with Victoria is for me to decide where to search and then see what my visions tell me. But keep in mind how big the world is and don't expect any immediate answers."
Maria nodded her understanding as she stood up, imagining the pixie-like vampire poring over a map and deciding to search city by city. "Perhaps start in Mexico and then south into Central America," she suggested. "It's where most of my enemies are."
"I'll call you after I speak to Carlisle. It may be a couple days, but I will call," Jasper told her as he prepared to leave. He hesitated a moment before continuing. "I'm happy for you, Maria. I'm sorry he's missing, but I'm glad you finally found someone you care about. Finding love in this life is a gift, and that's true whether that's the love of a mate, a coven member, or just a friend."
Maria just nodded, not at all sure she agreed with him. Changing Matthew had turned her whole damn world upside down and she hated it. But she hated even more that she didn't know where he was or if he was safe. She hated the thought of never seeing him again.
As she watched Jasper and Alice turn and run out of sight, she debated how to spend the next couple weeks while she waited for them to deal with that lying bitch Victoria and her army. Without making any conscious decisions Alice could see, Maria began running east before eventually making a wide arc to slowly head northwest. Straight for Seattle.