Luminosity

by Alicorn

  On the thirteenth, a Sunday, I visited the vampires' baseball field again, this time to watch it used for its customary purpose. The Cullens all liked baseball, but because a vampire hitting a ball with all of his or her strength was very loud, they elected to play only when there was thunder nearby to cover their activity. Constraining game dates also by the desire not to be rained on where they played, this left them with precious few appropriate days, but Alice was well able to predict them in advance. Edward picked me up at my house to convey me there (by car most of the way, and carrying me himself from the house to the field).

  As the resident psychic had predicted, the field was completely dry while Forks proper was deluged in torrential rain and illuminated by lightning. I sat on the grass, beside Esme, who refereed while the others played, leaving even teams of three. Vampire baseball was about what I'd expected: too fast for my eyes to follow. I mostly enjoyed the expressions on the players' faces when they were still between moments of action - variations on frustration and triumph. Sometimes they heckled each other, coming up with reasonably creative insults (although I had no way of knowing if they were original to this occasion). Esme and I chatted idly when she didn't need to call out declarations of safety and outness.

  Fifteen minutes into the game, Alice froze in place between first base and second. Emmett tagged her out, actually knocking her over with his momentum. She hopped to her feet again, looking frustrated and shooing Emmett and his protests away. Edward, in the outfield, flashed in closer, to stand by his sister. "Alice," he murmured. I saw their lips moving, and I knew the other vampires could hear what passed between them, but I couldn't. She was seeing something and he was watching it and it alarmed them both...

  Edward appeared next to me. The others approached more slowly, forming a loose semicircle. "Bella," Edward said, "there are three other vampires, not our friends, in the area. Alice saw them before but they firmly intended to head north without getting very near, until they heard the game and could tell it wasn't thunder. They're curious. I can't travel as quickly carrying you as I can alone. Even if I could, your scent would still be on the field, obviously new, and the last thing we want is for them to start hunting you." He said all this barely slowly enough for me to keep up with the words, and as soon as he'd finished informing me he turned towards his family and they began talking very rapidly. I caught a handful of the words.

  "...thirsty?" said someone's voice, possibly Esme's. Edward shook his head - I thought at that question - and that seemed a small relief.

  "Only three..." scoffed Emmett.

  "How soon?" I thought this was Carlisle. The answer contained the number "five", but I didn't catch the unit - minutes were most likely, I judged...

  "Everyone," said Carlisle over the hum of agitated chatter, and the others quieted. "Let's just continue the game. Edward said they are simply curious."

  "Esme, you catch," Edward said in a hard voice. "I'll call." She didn't protest, and flitted over to her place. Edward positioned himself in front of me, looking furiously into the distance, at the direction I guessed the other vampires would approach from.

  "Is there anything I can do to smell less obvious?" I asked.

  "Take your hair down," Edward said, growling under his breath - clearly anticipating a fight. I pulled it out of my ponytail and shook it down over my face. I huddled as small as I could under my coat. Look undelicious, I told myself, but I didn't know how to do that. If it came to a fight, the Cullens would win, I thought - by the numbers - but there could be casualties. Someone could die. Edward could die. I looked up at him, peeping through the gaps in the curtain of my hair, and knew he'd do it without hesitating if it would save me.

  I clamped my lips down on the words I wanted to say, provoked by the danger - it was not a good time to have that conversation; it would be dramatic, but not clever, and I didn't want to be dramatic if it would put anyone in more danger...

  The game proceeded tensely. The batters all bunted, not wanting to send anyone running after a ball that careened out of the field as most of the solid hits did. The outfielders stalked the edges of the clearing, paying less attention to the game.

  And then the other vampires arrived. There were three: a nondescript male with sandy hair entered the clearing first, then fell back to let a darker-haired, more muscular man with an odd olive hue to his chalky skin take the lead. Last to arrive was a woman with brilliant orange hair, which was long, curly, and full of forest debris. All of them had feral, catlike gaits, obviously predatory, and wore backpacking outfits but no shoes.

  Their eyes were a dark wine red.

  Carlisle approached them with his arms spread non-threateningly; Emmett followed slightly to his left and Jasper on his right. It was a small comfort to notice that the leader of the unfamiliar coven was just Jasper's match in size, and dwarfed by Emmett's great bulk. I wasn't sure how much that mattered, but it looked like it did. The visitors (I kept forcing myself to choose alternatives to the word "enemies" in my mind - they hadn't yet proven themselves that, not so directly) dropped into more casual poses, and the olive-pallored leader smiled, showing off bright and even teeth. Between stabs of fear, I had a vague intellectual interest in watching the covens meet; it was the sort of thing about vampire behavior I'd need to know later - if I didn't die then and there.

  "We thought we heard something interesting," the dark-haired one said. "I'm Laurent; these are Victoria and James." He indicated the flame-haired woman and the ordinary-looking man beside her. Victoria and James exchanged a look; I had the sudden intuition that they were mates, with Laurent either without one of his own or separated therefrom.

  "I'm Carlisle. This is my family, Emmett and Jasper, Alice, Rosalie and Esme, Edward and Bella," Carlisle said. He waved towards us in vague groups, avoiding drawing attention to individuals. I was momentarily surprised that he included me in the family - but of course he didn't want to pick me out as a mere future in-law for Laurent's benefit.

  Laurent took in the baseball equipment. "Do you have room for a few more players?" he asked, sounding friendly and inquisitive. I wondered if I looked suspiciously unvampiric, crouched under my jacket when no vampire would have been bothered by the cold. None of them had yet tried to eat me. I tried to hold still the way I could if I were inedible.

  "Actually, we were just finishing up," Carlisle said, matching Laurent's tone, sounding vaguely regretful as though he'd have liked nothing more than to have a catch with the anthropophagic creatures standing before him. "But perhaps another time. Are you planning to stay in the area for long?"

  "We're headed north," said Laurent, "but were curious to see who was in the neighborhood. We haven't run into any company in a long time." Except for their dinner. Dinner probably made terrible company, though, gibbering and begging for its life, and that was if you paused to let it talk...

  "This region is usually empty except for us and the occasional visitor, like yourselves," said Carlisle. Laurent's coven looked relaxed and casual; I wondered if Jasper was leaning on them, and decided to thank him fervently if he were.

  "What's your hunting range?" Laurent inquired, tone casual. The question didn't assume outrightthat the Cullens hunted humans - they had to have seen the gold eyes, but did they know what that meant?

  Carlisle described the environs of Forks, covering the La Push area in his claim even though the Cullens didn't venture there, and then said, "We maintain a permanent residence nearby. There's another permanent settlement like ours near Denali."

  "Permanent?" asked Laurent, looking interested. "How do you manage that?" Had they still not noticed I was human? My scent was supposedly strong on the field - the wind had been wrong, but if they would supposedly have smelled me even if I were gone.

  "It's rather a long story," Carlisle said, and then he invited them to their home - I had no idea what he was thinking. There was no way for me to get out of that field without revealing human clumsiness or being implausibly carried. Was he plann
ing to take them there in a splintered group while Edward circled around via some other direction with me? Did he think he had Laurent intrigued enough to avoid hunting me as long as there was information to be had? Laurent didlook curious - James and Victoria less so.

  Laurent said the invitation was welcome. Carlisle then put in a request that they not hunt in the Cullens' range, on the grounds that they needed to stay inconspicuous. Laurent agreed readily; his coven had just eaten. (I restrained a shudder.) And then as Carlisle began to say something else, a breeze wafted by me in exactly the wrong direction...

  Edward went entirely stiff and James was suddenly, as though under a strobe light, posed facing me in a hungry crouch, teeth bared, nostrils flaring wide.

  Edward snarled like some sort of animal, not the harmless little grumbles I'd heard the vampires make - it was a threat, full of menace, a declaration that Edward was prepared to kill if James took one step too close. I had so many reasons to be afraid: My boyfriend can sound like that. Those vampires might kill me. They might kill Edward. He might kill them. If they have friends and he kills them, they might find us...

  "What's this?" asked Laurent, clearly astounded. He didn't seem to have caught my scent as strongly as James - and Victoria barely reacted at all except to fix her attention on her mate - but he clearly knew the situation now.

  "She's with us," Carlisle told them, aiming the statement more at James than Laurent.

  "You brought a snack?" Laurent asked incredulously. His foot moved forward. Edward's lips curled back, showing all his teeth, and he let out another, more ferocious snarl.

  "I said," corrected Carlisle sharply, "she's with us."

  Laurent was dumbfounded. "But she's human." He didn't sound hostile - but nor did he make a move to check James, who still looked ready to pounce. Emmett shifted position a little, and James slowly straightened up, but went on staring at me - Edward didn't budge.

  "It appears we have a lot to learn about each other," Laurent said, trying to defuse the hostility. If Jasper was using his talents, they were not as effective as I'd imagined.

  "Indeed," said Carlisle tightly.

  Laurent went on. "But we'd like to accept your invitation. And, of course, we will not harm the human girl. We won't hunt in your range, as we said."

  James looked at Laurent unbelievingly and then glanced to Victoria, whose eyes were flicking from face to face without settling in any one place for more than a moment. She looked edgy, but not very interested in eating me - if I was reading her right.

  Carlisle looked steadily at Laurent, and then said, "We'll show you the way." And then he called Jasper, Rosalie, and Esme to join him and the foreign coven. They formed a line that blocked me from view. Alice appeared at my side as soon as it was clear he didn't want her with the larger group; Emmett fell back more reluctantly and kept his eyes on James as he backed towards us.

  I was still sitting on the grass, rigid with fear. Edward picked me up without ceremony and clutched me so tightly that it was almost uncomfortable, but it was better than huddling in my coat. The four of us were off through the forest. Under the trees, it was pitch black; not even the tendrils of cloud-filtered sunset that had lit up the field were visible through the leaves. Edward normally seemed exhilarated when he ran, but not this time - he was running off pure rage. I wondered how difficult it had been for him to avoid attacking James the instant my species had been revealed.

  We reached Emmett's gigantic Jeep, and Edward tossed me into the backseat. Emmett slid in beside me, Alice took the passenger seat, and Edward was starting the engine.

  "Where are we going?" I asked in a low voice, when I'd found where my vocal cords had gotten to.

  "Away," said Edward tightly. He sounded like he didn't want to answer me, he was just mechanically answering me because I had to be answered. The spedometer was overtaxed by the crazy velocity he was undertaking. I couldn't tell where the car was hurtling in the dark. "We have to get you far away from here. Now."

  * * *

  "Why?" I asked. "That doesn't make sense; Laurent said they wouldn't hunt in your range, it's safer for me to stay here."

  "James won't abide by that agreement," said Edward tightly, forcing each word through his throat with immense effort. "He's a tracker."

  Emmett reacted to this word considerably more than I did, going stiff in his seat. Alice seemed to recognize it too. I said, "A what?"

  "He's got a power," Edward said. "Hunting is his passion, his obsession. And he wants you in particular. You're the most irresistible sort of prey - a single vulnerable element in a large coven of protectors. He's committed to the hunt now and he can't be stopped unless we kill him."

  "Then why run? If he'll follow me wherever I go until he's dead or I am," I said, "then it will come to a fight, won't it? There's got to be some advantage to having it out on your turf. Or do you mean he'll stop when I'm turned and you need to put me in a bunker in Alaska where I can be hidden for the three days it'll take me to vamp up ahead of schedule?"

  "He's no match for us, Edward," Emmett said. He sounded like he relished the possibility of a fight.

  "The female, she's with him," Edward said. "And if it turns into a fight, their leader will go with them, too."

  "There are enough of us," scoffed Emmett.

  "I'm sure you could beat them," I said, "but I'm not sure you could do it without casualties. Edward, will he lose interest if I'm turned? Is that the plan, or were you just thinking I could live the rest of my life on a series of airplanes until there's a chance to put me on a space colony or something?" Edward didn't answer. Perhaps he didn't know - his brand of mindreading picked up only surface thoughts, and could leave gaps like that.

  Alice said, "I don't see him attacking. He'll try to wait for us to leave her alone."

  Edward growled. "It won't take him long to realize that's not going to happen."

  "If he finds it interesting to hunt protected, vulnerable people, what would be the point of waiting until you left and then finding me at home or someth-" I choked on the rest of that word. "Charlie. If he crosses my scent anywhere in town he'll find Charlie."

  "She's right," said Alice.

  "And wouldn't it be interesting," I said, "wouldn't that make it so much more fun for James, if he had my father hostage and had me desperately working against you to get away from my protections in exchange for Charlie's life?"

  Edward snarled again; I started to fear for the structural integrity of the steering column.

  "So we'll pick him up," Emmett said. "If James is still waiting for us to leave her alone, that's safe, isn't it?"

  "Turning Charlie isn't part of the plan!" I cried. "If we grab him, even if you manage to fake being human perfectly, the choices are still run forever or eventually fight James. And you don't think he'll come quietly, do you?" Charlie was far more closely tied to Forks than I was. He had a job he loved, longstanding friendships he cared about, he was on the Quileute reservation all the time...

  Edward clenched his jaw. "The coven has visited the house. Laurent is still there, talking to Carlisle; James and Victoria looked around a little, and excused themselves," he reported. He was driving quickly but I supposed his family's minds might still be just in range. "They claimed to plan to continue their original route, and headed in the correct direction as far as Carlisle could see, but could easily have doubled back. Laurent is expressing an interest in visiting the Denalis."

  "Look," I said. "We're going about this in a completely confused way."

  "What's your idea?" asked Alice.

  "I don't have one yet. Hang on." I took a deep breath.

  What do I want?

  I wanted to live. I wanted Charlie and all of the Cullens to live. In - I had to admit to myself to have the best chance of getting what I wanted - roughly that order. It felt awful to realize that I wouldn't die for Charlie, and I hoped never to be in a position where that was actually the tradeoff, but I knew Charlie would insist that I be the one to
live if it did come to that, which was something of a salve for the guilt.

  I felt less terrible about preferring myself to the Cullens. Edward, probably even more so than Charlie, would fling himself into any danger if it would give me a better chance. I half-suspected that he was sufficiently emotionally vulnerable that he literally could not live without me - that if I turned up dead he'd calmly douse himself in napalm, hoping, in his confused theological muddle, to somehow join me. The others were friends - Alice in particular was a good friend - but I simply hadn't known them that long. Also, they would not want Edward to feel compelled to napalm himself either.

  If everyone's life were assured, I wanted everyone involved to have mutual knowledge of that survival. I wanted to stick to my original plan - finishing out the school year, dramatically eloping to Europe, and bringing my parents and friends into the fold one by one in any case where Alice said we could do it safely.

  What do I have? And the sub-question, What do I know?

  Edward's absolute top priority was my life - but he was susceptible to bad reasoning about what that meant and would not necessarily be easy to bring into an agreement about how best to secure it. Emmett was itching to fight. The other Cullens, as a group, were prepared to treat me as a member of the family and would probably defend me as well. There were seven of them; even split up in two groups, each half was at least an even match for Laurent's group.

  James was a tracker whose purpose in life was to pick interesting targets and commit himself absolutely to getting them. At least under the condition where I remained human, he'd follow me until at least one of us was dead. He probably didn't know about Edward's and Alice's powers, although he might have an inkling of Jasper's. He had seen Edward's display in the field, and could likely figure out that there was an eternal vampy soulmate thing going on there, and knew that Edward (and by extension the entire family) thought he was a threat to me. Victoria had his back, the typically devoted vampire mate. Although apparently hunting was not her own hobby, or Edward would probably have been able to pick up similar intentions from her. Laurent was not personally hostile, but would take his coven's side in a confrontation.