"But on the other hand," he countered, "you will soon be leaving time behind you altogether. So why should the transitory customs of one local culture affect the decision so much?"
I pursed my lips. "When in Rome?"
He laughed at me. "You don't have to say yes or no today, Bella. It's good to understand both sides, though, don't you think?"
"So your condition . . . ?"
"Is still in effect. I do see your point, Bella, but if you want me to change you myself. . . ."
"Dum, dum, dah-dum," I hummed under my breath. I was going for the wedding march, but it sort of sounded like a dirge.
Time continued to move too fast.
That night flew by dreamlessly, and then it was morning and graduation was staring me in the face. I had a pile of studying to do for my finals that I knew I wouldn't get halfway through in the few days I had left.
When I came down for breakfast, Charlie was already gone. He'd left the paper on the table, and that reminded me that I had some shopping to do. I hoped the ad for the concert was still running; I needed the phone number to get the stupid tickets. It didn't seem like much of a gift now that all the surprise was gone. Of course, trying to surprise Alice wasn't the brightest plan to begin with.
I meant to flip right back to the entertainment section, but the thick black headline caught my attention. I felt a thrill of fear as I leaned closer to read the front-page story.
SEATTLE TERRORIZED BY SLAYINGS
It's been less than a decade since the city of Seattle was the hunting ground for the most prolific serial killer in U.S. history. Gary Ridgway, the Green River Killer, was convicted of the murders of 48 women.
And now a beleaguered Seattle must face the possibility that it could be harboring an even more horrifying monster at this very moment.
The police are not calling the recent rash of homicides and disappearances the work of a serial killer. Not yet, at least. They are reluctant to believe so much carnage could be the work of one individual. This killer -- if, in fact, it is one person -- would then be responsible for 39 linked homicides and disappearances within the last three months alone. In comparison, Ridgway's 48-count murder spree was scattered over a 21-year period. If these deaths can be linked to one man, then this is the most violent rampage of serial murder in American history.
The police are leaning instead toward the theory that gang activity is involved. This theory is supported by the sheer number of victims, and by the fact that there seems to be no pattern in the choice of victims.
From Jack the Ripper to Ted Bundy, the targets of serial killings are usually connected by similarities in age, gender, race, or a combination of the three. The victims of this crime wave range in age from 15-year-old honor student Amanda Reed, to 67-year-old retired postman Omar Jenks. The linked deaths include a nearly even 18 women and 21 men. The victims are racially diverse: Caucasians, African Americans, Hispanics and Asians.
The selection appears random. The motive seems to be killing for no other reason than to kill.
So why even consider the idea of a serial killer?
There are enough similarities in the modus operandi to rule out unrelated crimes. Every victim discovered has been burned to the extent that dental records were necessary for identification. The use of some kind of accelerant, like gasoline or alcohol, seems to be indicated in the conflagrations; however, no traces of any accelerant have yet been found. All of the bodies have been carelessly dumped with no attempt at concealment.
More gruesome yet, most of the remains show evidence of brutal violence -- bones crushed and snapped by some kind of tremendous pressure -- which medical examiners believe occurred before the time of death, though these conclusions are difficult to be sure of, considering the state of the evidence.
Another similarity that points to the possibility of a serial: every crime is perfectly clean of evidence, aside from the remains themselves. Not a fingerprint, not a tire tread mark nor a foreign hair is left behind. There have been no sightings of any suspect in the disappearances.
Then there are the disappearances themselves -- hardly low profile by any means. None of the victims are what could be viewed as easy targets. None are runaways or the homeless, who vanish so easily and are seldom reported missing. Victims have vanished from their homes, from a fourth-story apartment, from a health club, from a wedding reception. Perhaps the most astounding: 30-year-old amateur boxer Robert Walsh entered a movie theater with a date; a few minutes into the movie, the woman realized that he was not in his seat. His body was found only three hours later when fire fighters were called to the scene of a burning trash Dumpster, twenty miles away.
Another pattern is present in the slayings: all of the victims disappeared at night.
And the most alarming pattern? Acceleration. Six of the homicides were committed in the first month, 11 in the second. Twenty-two have occurred in the last 10 days alone. And the police are no closer to finding the responsible party than they were after the first charred body was discovered.
The evidence is conflicting, the pieces horrifying. A vicious new gang or a wildly active serial killer? Or something else the police haven't yet conceived of?
Only one conclusion is indisputable: something hideous is stalking Seattle.
It took me three tries to read the last sentence, and I realized the problem was my shaking hands.
"Bella?"
Focused as I was, Edward's voice, though quiet and not totally unexpected, made me gasp and whirl.
He was leaning in the doorway, his eyebrows pulled together. Then he was suddenly at my side, taking my hand.
"Did I startle you? I'm sorry. I did knock. . . ."
"No, no," I said quickly. "Have you seen this?" I pointed to the paper.
A frown creased his forehead.
"I hadn't seen today's news yet. But I knew it was getting worse. We're going to have to do something . . . quickly."
I didn't like that. I hated any of them taking chances, and whatever or whoever was in Seattle was truly beginning to frighten me. But the idea of the Volturi coming was just as scary.
"What does Alice say?"
"That's the problem." His frown hardened. "She can't see anything . . . though we've made up our minds half a dozen times to check it out. She's starting to lose confidence. She feels like she's missing too much these days, that something's wrong. That maybe her vision is slipping away."
My eyes were wide. "Can that happen?"
"Who knows? No one's ever done a study . . . but I really doubt it. These things tend to intensify over time. Look at Aro and Jane."
"Then what's wrong?"
"Self-fulfilling prophecy, I think. We keep waiting for Alice to see something so we can go . . . and she doesn't see anything because we won't really go until she does. So she can't see us there. Maybe we'll have to do it blind."
I shuddered. "No."
"Did you have a strong desire to attend class today? We're only a couple of days from finals; they won't be giving us anything new."
"I think I can live without school for a day. What are we doing?"
"I want to talk to Jasper."
Jasper, again. It was strange. In the Cullen family, Jasper was always a little on the fringe, part of things but never the center of them. It was my unspoken assumption that he was only there for Alice. I had the sense that he would follow Alice anywhere, but that this lifestyle was not his first choice. The fact that he was less committed to it than the others was probably why he had more difficulty keeping it up.
At any rate, I'd never seen Edward feel dependent on Jasper. I wondered again what he'd meant about Jasper's expertise. I really didn't know much about Jasper's history, just that he had come from somewhere in the south before Alice found him. For some reason, Edward had always shied away from any questions about his newest brother. And I'd always been too intimidated by the tall, blond vampire who looked like a brooding movie star to ask him outright.
When we got t
o the house, we found Carlisle, Esme, and Jasper watching the news intently, though the sound was so low that it was unintelligible to me. Alice was perched on the bottom step of the grand staircase, her face in her hands and her expression discouraged. As we walked in, Emmett ambled through the kitchen door, seeming perfectly at ease. Nothing ever bothered Emmett.
"Hey, Edward. Ditching, Bella?" He grinned at me.
"We both are," Edward reminded him.
Emmett laughed. "Yes, but it's her first time through high school. She might miss something."
Edward rolled his eyes, but otherwise ignored his favorite brother. He tossed the paper to Carlisle.
"Did you see that they're considering a serial killer now?" he asked.
Carlisle sighed. "They've had two specialists debating that possibility on CNN all morning."
"We can't let this go on."
"Let's go now," Emmett said with sudden enthusiasm. "I'm dead bored."
A hiss echoed down the stairway from upstairs.
"She's such a pessimist," Emmett muttered to himself.
Edward agreed with Emmett. "We'll have to go sometime."
Rosalie appeared at the top of the stairs and descended slowly. Her face was smooth, expressionless.
Carlisle was shaking his head. "I'm concerned. We've never involved ourselves in this kind of thing before. It's not our business. We aren't the Volturi."
"I don't want the Volturi to have to come here," Edward said. "It gives us so much less reaction time."
"And all those innocent humans in Seattle," Esme murmured. "It's not right to let them die this way."
"I know," Carlisle sighed.
"Oh," Edward said sharply, turning his head slightly to look at Jasper. "I didn't think of that. I see. You're right, that has to be it. Well, that changes everything."
I wasn't the only one who stared at him in confusion, but I might have been the only one who didn't look slightly annoyed.
"I think you'd better explain to the others," Edward said to Jasper. "What could be the purpose of this?" Edward started to pace, staring at the floor, lost in thought.
I hadn't seen her get up, but Alice was there beside me. "What is he rambling about?" she asked Jasper. "What are you thinking?"
Jasper didn't seem to enjoy the spotlight. He hesitated, reading every face in the circle -- for everyone had moved in to hear what he would say -- and then his eyes paused on my face.
"You're confused," he said to me, his deep voice very quiet.
There was no question in his assumption. Jasper knew what I was feeling, what everyone was feeling.
"We're all confused," Emmett grumbled.
"You can afford the time to be patient," Jasper told him. "Bella should understand this, too. She's one of us now."
His words took me by surprise. As little as I'd had to do with Jasper, especially since my last birthday when he'd tried to kill me, I hadn't realize that he thought of me that way.
"How much do you know about me, Bella?" Jasper asked.
Emmett sighed theatrically, and plopped down on the couch to wait with exaggerated impatience.
"Not much," I admitted.
Jasper stared at Edward, who looked up to meet his gaze.
"No," Edward answered his thought. "I'm sure you can understand why I haven't told her that story. But I suppose she needs to hear it now."
Jasper nodded thoughtfully, and then started to roll up the arm of his ivory sweater.
I watched, curious and confused, trying to figure out what he was doing. He held his wrist under the edge of the lampshade beside him, close to the light of the naked bulb, and traced his finger across a raised crescent mark on the pale skin.
It took me a minute to understand why the shape looked strangely familiar.
"Oh," I breathed as realization hit. "Jasper, you have a scar exactly like mine."
I held out my hand, the silvery crescent more prominent against my cream skin than against his alabaster.
Jasper smiled faintly. "I have a lot of scars like yours, Bella."
Jasper's face was unreadable as he pushed the sleeve of his thin sweater higher up his arm. At first my eyes could not make sense of the texture that was layered thickly across the skin. Curved half-moons crisscrossed in a feathery pattern that was only visible, white on white as it was, because the bright glow of the lamp beside him threw the slightly raised design into relief, with shallow shadows outlining the shapes. And then I grasped that the pattern was made of individual crescents like the one on his wrist . . . the one on my hand.
I looked back at my own small, solitary scar -- and remembered how I'd received it. I stared at the shape of James's teeth, embossed forever on my skin.
And then I gasped, staring up at him. "Jasper, what happened to you?"
13. NEWBORN
"THE SAME THING THAT HAPPENED TO YOUR HAND," Jasper answered in a quiet voice. "Repeated a thousand times." He laughed a little ruefully and brushed at his arm. "Our venom is the only thing that leaves a scar."
"Why?" I breathed in horror, feeling rude but unable to stop staring at his subtly ravaged skin.
"I didn't have quite the same . . . upbringing as my adopted siblings here. My beginning was something else entirely." His voice turned hard as he finished.
I gaped at him, appalled.
"Before I tell you my story," Jasper said, "you must understand that there are places in our world, Bella, where the life span of the never-aging is measured in weeks, and not centuries."
The others had heard this before. Carlisle and Emmett turned their attention to the TV again. Alice moved silently to sit at Esme's feet. But Edward was just as absorbed as I was; I could feel his eyes on my face, reading every flicker of emotion.
"To really understand why, you have to look at the world from a different perspective. You have to imagine the way it looks to the powerful, the greedy . . . the perpetually thirsty.
"You see, there are places in this world that are more desirable to us than others. Places where we can be less restrained, and still avoid detection.
"Picture, for instance, a map of the western hemisphere. Picture on it every human life as a small red dot. The thicker the red, the more easily we -- well, those who exist this way -- can feed without attracting notice."
I shuddered at the image in my head, at the word feed. But Jasper wasn't worried about frightening me, not overprotective like Edward always was. He went on without a pause.
"Not that the covens in the South care much for what the humans notice or do not. It's the Volturi that keep them in check. They are the only ones the southern covens fear. If not for the Volturi, the rest of us would be quickly exposed."
I frowned at the way he pronounced the name -- with respect, almost gratitude. The idea of the Volturi as the good guys in any sense was hard to accept.
"The North is, by comparison, very civilized. Mostly we are nomads here who enjoy the day as well as the night, who allow humans to interact with us unsuspectingly -- anonymity is important to us all.
"It's a different world in the South. The immortals there come out only at night. They spend the day plotting their next move, or anticipating their enemy's. Because it has been war in the South, constant war for centuries, with never one moment of truce. The covens there barely note the existence of humans, except as soldiers notice a herd of cows by the wayside -- food for the taking. They only hide from the notice of the herd because of the Volturi."
"But what are they fighting for?" I asked.
Jasper smiled. "Remember the map with the red dots?"
He waited, so I nodded.
"They fight for control of the thickest red.
"You see, it occurred to someone once that, if he were the only vampire in, let's say Mexico City, well then, he could feed every night, twice, three times, and no one would ever notice. He plotted ways to get rid of the competition.
"Others had the same idea. Some came up with more effective tactics than others.
&nbs
p; "But the most effective tactic was invented by a fairly young vampire named Benito. The first anyone ever heard of him, he came down from somewhere north of Dallas and massacred the two small covens that shared the area near Houston. Two nights later, he took on the much stronger clan of allies that claimed Monterrey in northern Mexico. Again, he won."
"How did he win?" I asked with wary curiosity.
"Benito had created an army of newborn vampires. He was the first one to think of it, and, in the beginning, he was unstoppable. Very young vampires are volatile, wild, and almost impossible to control. One newborn can be reasoned with, taught to restrain himself, but ten, fifteen together are a nightmare. They'll turn on each other as easily as on the enemy you point them at. Benito had to keep making more as they fought amongst themselves, and as the covens he decimated took more than half his force down before they lost.
"You see, though newborns are dangerous, they are still possible to defeat if you know what you're doing. They're incredibly powerful physically, for the first year or so, and if they're allowed to bring strength to bear they can crush an older vampire with ease. But they are slaves to their instincts, and thus predictable. Usually, they have no skill in fighting, only muscle and ferocity. And in this case, overwhelming numbers."
"The vampires in southern Mexico realized what was coming for them, and they did the only thing they could think of to counteract Benito. They made armies of their own. . . .
"All hell broke loose -- and I mean that more literally than you can possibly imagine. We immortals have our histories, too, and this particular war will never be forgotten. Of course, it was not a good time to be human in Mexico, either."
I shuddered.
"When the body count reached epidemic proportions -- in fact, your histories blame a disease for the population slump -- the Volturi finally stepped in. The entire guard came together and sought out every newborn in the bottom half of North America. Benito was entrenched in Puebla, building his army as quickly as he could in order to take on the prize -- Mexico City. The Volturi started with him, and then moved on to the rest.
"Anyone who was found with the newborns was executed immediately, and, since everyone was trying to protect themselves from Benito, Mexico was emptied of vampires for a time.
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