Luminosity

by Alicorn

  As far as the Cullens were concerned, money was no object. I did not think it was possible for me to come up with a plan that didn't involve the outright purchase of a small country, which could tax their finances irrecoverably. As long as I got a Cullen, at least one of them, on board with whatever plan I invented, I could freely call for financial expenditure.

  What is the best way to use what I have to get what I want?

  Wild plans spun to life in my mind and I tried to sort them, dividing plausible from untenable.

  At least one of two things had to happen in the reasonably short term, unless Edward was wrong about James's implacability: James had to die or I had to turn. Turning might not be a guarantee of deterring the hunter, but it would make me less vulnerable if he got through my protectors. (I did not expect to emerge into vampirehood equipped with expert fighting skills, but at least I wouldn't so closely resemble a melting marshmallow in texture and menace.) The process would take three days, but it might be possible for the vampires to move me while I was incapacitated.

  "James hunts alone?" I asked Edward.

  "Yes," he grunted. He was still driving absurdly fast. I had no idea where he was going.

  "Alice, can you see if Laurent and Victoria are really going to Denali?"

  Alice closed her eyes; I saw her in the rearview mirror, concentrating. "Laurent is," she said finally.

  "Laurent's really only with them for convenience," said Edward. "I said he'd stand with them in a fight, but that's if they were all attacked together..."

  "Someone should call the Denali group and ask them to keep Laurent occupied for a while if they can," I said. Emmett had a cellphone on him; he flipped it open and dialed a number, murmuring a summary of the situation and request to the friend on the other end once he was answered. "Where is Victoria going?" I asked Alice.

  "It looks like she's going to sort of... loiter, north of where Carlisle said our hunting range was," Alice reported. "And wait there for James to contact her or come back."

  "She'll wait alone?" I confirmed. Alice nodded. "How long will James wait for me to be left by myself before he'll change plans?"

  "Maybe... two days? Three? He hasn't decided yet," she said.

  "What would happen," I said, "if, in that time, youkidnapped Victoria?"

  * * *

  The car was filled with another hubbub of vampires talking too fast for me to follow, and I frowned, annoyed. Was it a good idea or not? If there was anything James cared about more than getting me dead, of course it would be Victoria - if we had a little leeway of time, five of the Cullens could go get her while two at home still left James outnumbered if he made an unexpected early move on me. And then there'd be leverage over James, or bait, depending - if I'd missed something important I wished they'd tell me. I listened harder. The words I did catch were names - Cullens and the other coven's members - and that told me almost nothing.

  "Hey," I said. "I don't really appreciate being left out of a conversation like this."

  "Sorry, Bella," said Alice. "We like your idea. We were discussing strategy - who should stay to watch you and who should go get her, and how to hold her once we have her, and then what happens next."

  "Is there a way to hold a vampire short of, you know, actually holding her?" I asked, miming grabbing a wrist and hanging on.

  "Not really - not without powers we don't have," said Emmett. "But two could do it, especially if Jasper's one."

  "With Laurent out of the way, that leaves five more of us to split up between making sure he doesn't free Victoria and making sure he doesn't get you," Edward muttered. "If Jasper and, let's say Esme, hold Victoria, and Alice and I watch you, and Emmett, Rosalie, and Carlisle confront James in a group... One of them would have to stay on the phone with Alice so she could direct them. Or maybe Alice should go and Rosalie or Carlisle should stay with you..." He fretted, but he wasn't as obviously full to bursting with terror on my behalf and fury at James as he had been before. This was planning, not despairing flight.

  "Where are we going?" I asked pointedly.

  "Oh." Edward frowned and started to slow down. "I was driving to the airport. I suppose we should take you home. You can tell Charlie you want Alice to sleep over; I'll go in through the window," he suggested. The Jeep slowed enough to allow him to execute a safe U-turn.

  "That works," I agreed. "How are we going to keep Charlie from getting taken hostage when I have to go to school? Should I fake sick?" Alice saw that as long as I got good long vampire hugs for a few minutes before telling Charlie I didn't feel well, I'd be easily cold and clammy enough to get him to let me stay in. She'd be able to stick by me openly by getting Carlisle's "permission" over the phone and protesting that I shouldn't be left home alone while Charlie was at work. Edward, of course, would be hiding.

  "Should we even keep Victoria alive?" Emmett asked. "That's two fighters she'll tie up just by being kidnapped. I think we should kill her. Grab some hair first to prove we got to her, and maybe hang on to her long enough to ask personal questions and have Ed pull the answers so we can "prove" to James that we've got her someplace. But then - I mean, we're going to have to kill James, you know. She's not gonna put up with that. Sooner's easier than later."

  Edward and Alice seemed to consider this a fair question. I felt a little queasy plotting Victoria's death. I knew she was a murderer, and probably had no realistic chance of ceasing to be one, and that she probably wouldn't nonviolently tolerate her mate's death, which was likely necessary for self-defense... but Victoria hadn'tpersonally done anything to me yet, or even formed the intention to do so, and that seemed to put it on different footing. I didn't bring it up. I want to live, I told myself. And it was true: my discomfort over orchestrating Victoria's execution didn't compare to the sick fear I'd felt when James had looked at me like a delicious beverage.

  Whoever she'd have eaten next probably wanted to live, too.

  * * *

  Edward drove less manically towards my house. Emmett called his wife while we were on the way, uttered some overdone mush to Rosalie so she'd have a good excuse to get out of Laurent's earshot, and then summarized the plan to her. We got to my place at about ten, and I bounced in, arm-in-arm with Alice, pleading with Charlie for a sleepover and leaning very hard on my limited acting skills. Alice was much better at it than me, and jabbered about painting our nails, and how she couldn't wait to braid my hair because hers wasn't long enough and Rosalie and Esme wouldn't let her do theirs, and she justhad to dish dirt on her boyfriend to someone who didn't live in their same house and - Charlie finally waved us upstairs, overwhelmed by girly excitement. Alice followed me up the stairs with a gleeful squeal that I thought was probably uncalled for.

  When we got to my room, Edward was waiting there - pacing. "Will you face one wall long enough for me to change, please?" I asked him pointedly. He sighed slightly and obediently looked at the door to my closet. I hopped into my pajamas gratefully - I kind of wanted a shower, too, but I wasn't sure Edward would tolerate me spending that long out of his line of sight until he'd calmed down a bit more. It could wait. If the vampires had a problem with how I smelled, it wasn't with the fact that I was gross. My outfit of the day had dirt on it from where I'd sat in the field, and it was covered with the sweat that apparently came with the immediate fear for one's life. I dumped it into the hamper.

  As soon as Alice saw that Laurent had left the Cullen home, she called Esme and asked for an overnight bag (which was to contain a number of non-overnight-bag-ish contingency items, like several thousand dollars cash, in case we had to bolt). Esme was obliged to make two minutes of small talk with Charlie about how her silly daughter had spontaneously organized the sleepover without thinking to pack anything, ha ha, and she'd just take this upstairs and be on her way. She dropped it off with us, gave Alice and Edward each a kiss on the forehead, patted my hair, and then went out again. To go help kill Victoria.

  I hoped Victoria wouldn't kill any of them.

&n
bsp; Five vampires, including Jasper, should be enough to take down one who had no power or one so inconspicuous that neither Alice nor Edward had caught it. Should. And if they didn't die, but were merely torn to parts, they could be put together again - she wouldn't have the chance to grind them up into powder or the materials to set them on fire -

  It hurt to think about it. I got into bed and buried my head in pillow. Alice stood by the window and Edward by the door, unsleeping, watchful, as I effortfully nodded off.

  * * *

  Edward and Alice were my near-constant companions for the next three days, which I spent entirely in my own room or five feet down the hall in the bathroom. (Edward glared at Alice when she suggested that perhaps I did not need to be accompanied to the bathroom when her sight was clear of James, and thereafter she went with me; I got accustomed to it after a while.) They hid when Charlie was nearby; luckily, he didn't go through my stuff.

  On Monday, very early in the morning, Edward briefly traded his guard duties with Carlisle in order to enact Emmett's idea of retrieving personal information from Victoria without her enthusiastic cooperation. He was back a couple of hours later, grim but looking marginally more comfortable with the state of the world and its population of hostile vampires. Victoria had had a phone, but not a number with which to call James: he was supposed to call her first. So there was no immediate use for her as bait to lure James into a trap. She'd only be useful as a way to throw him off balance when the time to fight came.

  Esme and Rosalie trailed my father as he went about his work, in case James tried for him. Carlisle went to work as usual and let out that all his children had some illness that he'd troubled to make medically plausible.

  James was indecisive. The tenth time Alice growled to herself about headaches, I started to suspect that he somehow knew about her power. If he were such a great hunter, why would he make such fragile plans, and discard them so readily? It was thwarting us, and rather neatly, but it could only slow him down with most targets. Maybe he didn't care about being leisurely as long as he got to destroy his prey in the most elegant way possible.

  But Alice did keep seeing fairly stable flashes of his immediate plans, too near at hand to conceal with indecision. And from these she was able to conclude, on Tuesday morning, that he was in Arizona.

  Extracting this information from Alice was like pulling teeth. I knew she'd seen something, because she and Edward made faces at each other the way they did when he was reading her mind and he was talking too softly for me to hearanything, even an excessively rapid babble.

  "Why," I asked, when I'd finally prodded her to give up this information, "didn't you want to tell me that James is in Arizona? It would be better if he were in Siberia, but relative to, say, Seattle, Arizona's pretty good."

  "Because your mother lives in Arizona," Edward said reluctantly.

  "Yes," I said, "but she isn't there now. She's in Florida, with Phil." One thing that was very easy to do without leaving my room (along with the homework that Angela brought me every day, forcing me to look convincingly sick) was keep in touch with Renée by e-mail, but the vampires didn't spy on my correspondence, apparently.

  "Oh," said Alice, and she looked like she felt very silly.

  "Then why would James be there?" asked Edward, flinging his hands up.

  "I don't know," I admitted, and I didn't. Of course it could have something to do with Renée, but he might have other tasks in his life that he wanted to accomplish. That involved going to Arizona, when he'd been headed north from Washington before... and which he wanted to do while his mate waited for him (so he thought)... and that didn't make sense after all. Maybe he thoughtRenée was there, and would leave when he found she wasn't. I tried to think whether there would be any way he'd be able trace her to Florida. Perhaps his tracking powers wouldn't be deterred by airplanes, but neither of my guardians knew. There was no one she'd leave a note for. Evidence of Phil's occupation was scattered around the house, though, and could let a clever person determine his whereabouts - and hers by extension. It was a lead. More of a lead than I wanted James to have.

  "Is he going to be in Florida?" I asked Alice, apology in my voice for the probable headache. "Or stay in Arizona for very long?"

  She scrunched up her face, looking unhappy. "I... I see him in Florida. Yes. I can't tell where exactly, but... there's a sign. He's going to be in Florida."

  I sucked in air through my teeth. "We need to get a detail on my mother."

  "We're already too split up," fretted Edward.

  "My mother, Edward," I snapped. "If someone might be trying to get Esme in order to hurt you, and she weren't a vampire herself, you'd want her protected."

  This was inarguable. Eventually it was decided that Alice belonged as close to James as possible, to give that group the best chance at killing him and rendering all the guarding unnecessary. The same argument applied to Edward, really, but he refused to leave my side, so instead Jasper went with her. Emmett went too, as the physically strongest fighter. They left on Wednesday morning, which Alice promised would still put them in Florida before James's arrival.

  When Carlisle wasn't at work, he hung around near my house. When Charlie wasn't at work, so did Esme and Rosalie. But during the day, it was me and Edward.

  I could not help but notice that, by the time Wednesday afternoon rolled around, Edward's eyes were awfully close to black.

  "You need to hunt, soon," I said. "Tonight, when the others show up."

  Edward gritted his teeth. He had never liked being away from me and the fact that James wanted me dead wasn't improving his ability to function without me right there, visibly intact. But I couldn't come hunting with him, and if he got hungrier, he'd be nearly as much of a danger. So Edward slipped away in the night, taking the time to tuck me in first.

  Besides, James was far away, in or on his way to Florida, being chased down by three vampires jointly four times his size.

  And so of course it came as a complete surprise when he captured me anyway.

  * * *

  I was asleep when he nabbed me. I assumed, when I awoke and noticed I was tied up in the backseat of a moving vehicle driven by James, that there had been chloroform or something of that nature involved - or I would have woken up in the process. What I couldn't figure out was how James had gotten past Carlisle, Esme, and Rosalie. I also wasn't at all sure why he'd taken me alive.

  As it happened, he hadn't gagged me, so I spent ten minutes forcing the mind-numbing terror into the background to let myself ask questions. If he wanted me dead I'd be dead, I told myself. I'm not dead. He's going somewhere. He won't kill me until he gets there. Dread is not useful in any way, shape, or form. I repeated the sentences to myself, letting them march across my mind in a loop, and tried to find a comfortable way to lie on the seat, which proved impossible. So did completely ridding myself of the fear. It was far too appropriate to the situation to be dismissed so easily. I could just barely shove it aside enough to let me think around it. And utter sentences, or parts of them, although they shook like gelatin.

  "How...?"

  James smiled. I was arranged at such an angle that I could see the rightmost corner of his mouth turn up. "Hi there, Bella," he said. "I betyou're curious. I'll tell you all kinds of interesting tidbits while I kill you. I'm planning to send your boyfriend the videotape, and it'll be more interesting that way. But I have no interest in repeating myself."

  My brain flew into action.

  I want to live. I have the power of speech. How can I get what I want?

  And then I spoke the words.

  * * *

  "You don't know?" I asked, feigning surprise. I didn't have to conceal the terror in my voice - the lies I'd spun in a panic to protect myself didn't call for me to pretend to be invulnerable or to have a deathwish, so I could still act as fearful as I was insofar as that didn't interfere with speech. But I did need to overlay other things on top of that. "About the reward? But there's no other reas
on to kidnap me," I prodded, when James didn't say anything.

  "What are you talking about?"

  "Wait a minute - why did you think they were keeping me around?" I asked. "Didn't that seem kind of weird?"

  "Not your boyfriend, then?"

  I made a little snorting noise. "You thought that because he snarled at you? No, that would have been much pleasanter all around, I'm sure," I said. The wobbling of my voice between real fear and fake contempt made for an interesting effect. "He just wanted to turn me in undamaged to the Volturi, to get the reward."

  "Mm-hm." James wasn't buying it - quite - but I wasn't done.

  "They didn't tell me much directly - no reason to," I said. "But they talk around me. Not much choice since they never let me alone - I don't know how you got past them. They said I'm awitch, that the Volturi like turning witches. They got on the phone with someone with a funny Latin name - Caius, I think - and made a deal that they'd hand me over to those Volturi people."

  "What were the Volturi offering?" James asked, starting to get curious.

  "Let me think if I can remember the exact words... It was something about immunity from the rule about keeping themselves secret," I mused. "I guess they really like having a permanent settlement and wish it were... more permanent? That it would be okay for people to notice they don't age? They were talking all the time about how they'd have to make sure the word didn't get out too far, that it could just be the one town. But they still really wanted it. Enough to give me to the Volturi people. They had to wait a few days before taking me to Italy because the other two they didn't talk to on the phone, Aro and another Latin name guy... Marcus or something?"