by Alicorn
Leah whined miserably at that, and Rachel shot her a look; the gray wolf hunkered even lower to the ground, ears flat against her head in submisison or guilt or both. Seth looked anxious.It's terrible, but when it's over, it's over - he'll be fine, I promised in writing. I need rope or something like it, and a path no one's looking at to my car so I can bring him to it. I spat a mouthful of venom into the emptied bottle and set it on the ground. I'll leave you this so you can activate Becky and the other out-of-towners without me here.
Rachel nodded. I didn't see anyone running to get me what I'd asked for, but she'd probably sent a mental order to another wolf or two. I wrote, It's up to you what you tell his wife, but he will probably want to contact her, which will be less of a shock to her if she knows. Text me, don't call, if you have to communicate something in the next three days. I won't want to breathe with him in the car. If your phone can't do it buy one that can; I'll send you more money as you need it. Rachel nodded again. Is there anything else I need to be here for before I get him out of here? She shook her head.
I carefully lifted Mr. Clearwater off the ground, clamping one hand over his mouth to stop his moans of pain from carrying to anyone not in the know, and ran for my car. I saw only werewolves on my way: Embry and Jacob on lookout and Marilyn waiting by the passenger door with a convenient hank of rope and a fleecy comforter. I took them from her without speaking, tied Mr. Clearwater's wrists and ankles together behind his back, rolled him up in the blanket, and put him in the backseat; he bled a little on the fleece, but I could already see his wounds getting shallower as the venom percolated through his system. I slammed the door and got into the driver's seat.
* * *
I had no idea where in Alaska one would find Denali, nor where in Denali the coven lived. I texted Edward for directions (telling him to direct me there from Seattle) as I hurtled southeast to route around Puget Sound. He replied in installments, and asked if I wanted him to warn the Denali family that I was en route; I said that I'd appreciate it and told him to also warn them that I was bringing another newborn.
Edward said he'd let the necessary border crossing agents know that I wasn't to be troubled, through suitably convincing channels. I hadn't even thought of the difficulty of getting a mid-turning Mr. Clearwater into Canada and then from Canada into Alaska and experienced a surge of gratitude for my husband's support.
He also asked if I wanted him to meet me there.Gianna can't go, I wrote back. David would try to eat her. You shouldn't leave her unattended.He replied with his acquiescence and asked if there was anything else I needed, which there was not. I love you, I concluded my last message. He wrote back in kind, and then my phone went into my pocket.
I had to stop for gas after only forty miles. Luckily, the gas station was under heavy clouds and almost deserted. I closed the door behind me as quickly as I could after getting out, and took a few breaths of fume-scented air. Only the barest whiff of blood, from dried drops clinging to my sleeves where I'd picked Mr. Clearwater up, heated the air: it was tolerable. I filled up the tank and hoped the other patron of the station thought I was splattered with paint. It was fortunate that my shirt was dark brown: it looked damp, but not necessarily bloodstained.
I got back in the car and used my lungful of air to talk to Mr. Clearwater. "I'm Bella, Charlie Swan's daughter," I told him. "I'm a vampire. You're turning into one. Your children are werewolves. Leah lost her temper and hurt you. This was the only way to save you. I can't talk much because if I smell your blood I may also hurt you." Mr. Clearwater made a confused wailing noise, but I had no more words.
A few hours later, I decided to try opening my window, sticking my head out, and getting a breath of bloodless air that way. It worked. With clean air in my lungs, I said, "Mr. Clearwater, I'm taking you to Alaska. Some vampires my family is friends with live there and they will take care of you. Being a new vampire is hard, especially if you aren't prepared for it, and you will need help." I stuck my head out the window again, and kept talking. I gave him the rundown of vampire ins and outs, and got him up to speed on the status of the werewolf pack.
My car was waved through the border when they read the license plate and I continued through British Columbia. I continued talking to Mr. Clearwater with outside air, trying to keep his mind off the pain as much as possible. "Please don't tell my friends that you are from a tribe of werewolves," I told him. "It's safest if they don't know." I explained Aro, then repeated myself in case he hadn't been able to follow the entire justification for secrecy through the burning. "Tell them that you're from Forks, that I know you through Charlie, that I ran into you in Seattle while you were there bringing your thirteen-year-old to the Space Needle - don't give them Seth's name unless you can't avoid it - and I tagged along, that you were hit by a car, and that I turned you to save you from your injuries."
It took only two days to get as far as Fairbanks, and Mr. Clearwater wasn't done turning. I didn't want David to kill him, so instead of continuing directly to the coven's home, I parked on the edge of the Denali National Park to wait.
Nobody was liable to interrupt us, so I unwrapped his blanket and untied his ropes. His eyes were scrunched shut. His clothes were still torn and covered in blood, but his wounds were all smoothed over, not even pinkish. The color was mostly drained from his skin - melanin dissolving, blood converting to vampire fuel. He was slightly ecru, that was all. I pulled up a misty memory of the olive-like hue to Laurent's skin, and wondered if the off-white tinge was because Mr. Clearwater was not finished turning or because he was Native American. I looked completely bleached, but I'd started out pale and Caucasian.
By my estimation, Mr. Clearwater was in his late forties or early fifties, but the transformation was rearranging his features and smoothing out his complexion: it took at least a decade off his apparent age, an effect that I hadn't noticed so much with vampires who'd been turned young or at unknown ages. I could actually see him becoming more symmetrical. A time-lapse movie of his face would have shown his nose tilting out of its crookedness, his left eye drifting south to match the right, puckers and lines in his skin fading into flush smoothness with the surrounding skin.
It occurred to me that I didn't remember his first name. He was one of Charlie's friends, and I had to have heard it before, but I'd always referred to him as "Mr. Clearwater" in writing and couldn't conjure up a human memory of learning his full name. Presumably that wouldn't be something he'd forget, though, and he could tell me when he finished turning.
He was surprisingly quiet. I'd screamed more than he had even with my abbreviated consciousness. He didn't talk, either. Just occasionally whimpered.
I could still hear his heart beating, so he wasn't dead and didn't have to die. I waited, not breathing.
* * *
As dawn broke on the last day of Mr. Clearwater's turning, I got a series of texts from Rachel: all of the far-flung werewolves except Marilyn's cousin had arrived, and droplets of venom on unbroken skin "hurt a little but didn't injure them and now they're all floofed". She reported that Becky was black, "like Sam - so far I'm the only white one, although Nina's kind of pale yellow".
The twins didn't seem to share the Alpha power. It remained with Rachel. They were considering trying to somehow deliberately split the pack in two so as to make it more manageable. Becky's husband Caleb had been brought into the loop with considerable astonishment, but since I was willing to cover lost wages, his main protests about staying at La Push for a time involved the inferior surfing opportunities, which no one, even Becky, took very seriously. (I did have to confirm that it was fine with me if I had to go on covering his surfing instruction money for a bit longer than expected in case he lost clients.)
Sue Clearwater, Leah and Seth's mother, had been told about her husband's situation and was reacting as though he'd died - that didn't bode well for a later happy reunion.
It occurred to me to wonder whether there was any reason that Mr. Clearwater would, as a vampire,
find that his wife was also his supernatural mate. There didn't seem to be any strong reason why he would. It was only charitable to assume that they loved each other, but it would be in an entirely human way - and I knew human things dissolved quickly when the mind was barraged by even a few seconds of ultra-clear vampire sensation. I knew human love could evaporate under lesser pressures than that, and could occur more than once in a lifetime.
Neither of the elder Clearwaters had, so far as I knew, the unusual beauty or witchcraft that seemed to correlate with being turned under the traditional way of things. That meant that if my hypothesis about what created vampire mating bonds was in the right ballpark, it would be extremely unlikely for Mr. Clearwater to be drawn to Mrs. Clearwater the way Edward had been drawn to me.
I was half tempted to say to myself, "But if Sue really loves him, she'll just be glad he's alive!" But according to Rachel, she was acting like hewasn't, as though a heartbeat or being above room temperature were somehow more important than the ability to move around and think and talk. And anyway, even if she'd been willing to consider her vampire husband a living creature, it was all too common that real love wasn't as selfless as the fictional kind.
Even Edward, the sincerity of whose affection I had no cause whatever to doubt, had been driven to what was, on reflection, fairly rash behavior in order to be around my human self. Had Alice simply saved me from Tyler's errant van and then evaporated from my life with her family, then I, untouched by magically enhanced emotion, could have finished high school, gone to college, married some arbitary human when I was at an age more pleasing to my parents - perhaps without even remembering that Edward existed. I might have been happy, in the way that humans could be happy. But Edward had wanted to be with me, could not but panic at the notion that I might do without him. And so he'd braved my singer's blood, swallowing flames with every breath for the privilege of talking to me.
I tried to think about the situation in reverse, and my imagination failed me. I couldn't imagine Edward as a human, wayward and fickle. Couldn't imagine him willing and able to forget about me. In the entire time I'd known him, it was so core to his personality that I was his top priority. I didn't know how to construct a mental image of him with some other motive driving him. He'd been human, once, had spent many years managing reasonably well without my having even been born. But I failed to picture it. And he framed it, when he spoke of those times, as if his life prior to meeting me had just been a drawn-out and unusually elaborate waiting period. Like I was his reason to exist in the first place, and I'd just taken my sweet time getting there.
Somewhere in the world, I expected with sadness, was Mr. Clearwater's reason to exist -
And she probably wasn't Sue.
I could only hope that he'd still love his children the way he should. I had better hopes for this - I hadn't stopped caring about my parents, after all. They weren't as strongly featured in my thoughts anymore, but I didn't think that their reduced centrality in my life needed further explanation beyond my international change of residence, assorted globetrotting, and new marriage.
But it would be clear soon enough what changes beyond the obvious I had wrought. The sun crept higher in the sky.
* * *
Mr. Clearwater's heart was beating faster.
I opened all of the windows in the car: his blood had long since dried, and wasn't even as interesting as a live unbleeding human, but it was still better to get fresh air into the enclosed space where he was about to wake up.
I reviewed what Jasper had said on the subject of handling newborns. Don't let them get their arms around you, don't go for the obvious strikes because that's all they expect, let their own momentum wrench off an arm and they'll be distracted enough by pain that you can pin them -
I was a newborn too, and would therefore have some advantage over most wranglers thereof, but having some strategy was rarely amiss.
Mr. Clearwater curled up in the fetal position, moving slowly to clutch at his heart, but only a quiet moan betrayed the enfolding pain in sound. Why wasn't he screaming? Was it because he was old, did he just have a stoic personality, was there some interaction with the werewolf gene -
His eyes flew open, blazing red, and his body unfolded and propelled itself through, not an open window, but through the door itself. He left a ragged hole. The door didn't cling to him, but it was pulled from its frame and clattered to the ground; Mr. Clearwater ran headlong into the woods.
He was, of course, vampire-fast, but he wasn't making good use of his strength to get the most distance out of each stride. I caught up to him and kept pace rather than trying to tackle him and risk provoking him into fighting me. "Mr. Clearwater!" I yelled. "Hey!"
He looked around, grimacing, and then faced forward again and kept running.
"Mr. Clearwater, please stop," I said. "I can help you." He didn't slow down. "There might be humans in the park, if you run into one you could hurt them," I pleaded.
He scrambled up a tree, and I followed. "You can't outrun me," I said. "If you don't hold still -" He flung himself thirty feet to the next branch and I kept chasing him. "Mr. Clearwater! Stop!" Was this normal newborn behavior? Had something gone wrong? A drop of lemonade in the venom, a reaction to the werewolf gene...?
When I heard non-animal-like rustling, I didn't have time to indulge his flight any further. That could be a hiker he might run across and kill. I propelled myself directly at him, knocking him out of the air between trees and to the ground. I used a branch to swing away immediately after impact, not wanting to trigger any instinct he might have to grab me and squeeze. I dropped to the ground beside him.
"Mr. Clearwater," I began one more time, and then he was off again. I had no patience left: I sprang at him, pushing off from the ground with all the power I had, and tackled him. I managed to get my arms around him, and although I had no intention of crushing him to powder, I could hold on more than tightly enough to hold him still. I managed to sort of fold him up, his knees to his chin, so I could prevent him from kicking me or trying to push me over. He wasn't going anywhere. "Mr. Clearwater," I repeated. "Please say something so I know I didn't find a way to turn you while somehow leaving your brain behind."
He stared up at me out of confused vermilion eyes. "...Bella?" he managed. His voice was a smoother, lower version of the one I'd heard chastising Leah.
"That's me. How do you feel? Are you okay?" I asked encouragingly, slightly relaxing my hold as he'd shown a sign of sanity - and then he twisted suddenly, springing his shoulders away from his legs like a backwards bear trap and catapulting himself away. He took off at a run again, in the direction of the rustling. I couldn't smell a human, but we were upwind of the area - I chased him, trying to circle around and drive him the opposite way. "HEY!" I yelled at the top of my lungs, hoping the hiker or whoever it was would hear me, "I saw a bear, if anybody can hear me run, I think it's mad!" Not that it'd help a human much to run from a vampire. I should have driven the rest of the way to the Denali's house as soon as I heard his heart speeding up! I chastised myself. I managed to circle to Mr. Clearwater's left and drive him away from where I'd heard the sound.
It wasn't until I knocked him down again and was struggling to get him into another bear hug without being deprived of a limb that I noticed the rustling was following us.
Very fast.
I felt a hand clap me on the back, not hard enough to hurt but enough to tell me that it was no human hand, and I saw bright sparks running over Mr. Clearwater's skin. He convulsed as if Tasered, breaking my grip but making no further attempt to run. He cringed on the ground and looked up. I risked taking my eyes off him to see who'd joined us.
* * *
Chapter 19: Denali
"How are you on your feet?" asked the vampire woman. She was gold-eyed - one of the Denalis, then, not some random nomad. Her platinum blond hair was pulled back into a long ponytail.
"It's nice to meet you too. I'm Bella." I hadn't received any detail
ed descriptions of the Denali coven - I remembered that there were three original sisters, and a mated couple who'd joined them together, and that Laurent had wound up mated to a sister called Irina and then there was David, but I couldn't determine who of four possible women I was speaking to. I didn't remember receiving a rundown of any witchcraft that the coven possessed.
She reached out and poked me in the shoulder, gently; nothing happened. "You're something, Bella," she told me. "I thought it was just your brain that was all locked up safe."
"And who might I have the honor of being poked by?" I inquired testily.
"Oh, sorry. I'm Katrina, you can call me Kate. Is this your newborn?" she asked, peering at Mr. Clearwater, still curled up on the ground and staring at her.
"Yes - what did you do to him?"
"Zapped him. I was trying to get you too, to be honest. Edward said you were a special one, but he's your mate, he'd say you were special if you'd tried to pulverize his head. Couldn't be sure that you hadn't just got into a normal newbie scuffle with this fellow. What's wrong with him, anyway? He should be up by now. I can only down people for a second."
"I don't know. I can't even tell if it's normal newborn behavior. I'm the only one I've ever met, and Edward wasn't just being a doting husband when he told you about me."
"I've had to knock David around some, but he gets right up," said Kate.