by Alicorn
"Since I already met the Denalis, yeah, that seems to be next," I said. And that reminded me of Laurent, and his eyes. "Hey, have you noticed anything different about me?" I asked, attempting to sound perky and proud of myself.
"Hmm," said Edward, placing his hands on my face to move it into a convenient location for inspection. I laughed while he made an exaggerated show of peering at my features, and then he said, "Of course I saw your eyes, Bella. You're right on schedule. They'll be completely gold in just a few months."
I grinned, kissed him, and said, "Is it the same schedule for vampires who ate humans first and then stopped?"
"Considerably faster, actually," said Edward, and my lips compressed. "I'm sure you've noticed that your eyes don't go black. Well, you haven't gone long enough without hunting to really see them go black - that takes a week or two and you've been very careful - but they don't darken, because you're a newborn and still using up the supply of your own human blood. A black-eyed vampire who eats an animal will immediately turn gold-eyed; a non-newborn who has eaten humans and has the burgundy colored eyes, who then switches to an animal diet, might take a few days."
Yep.
Laurent was killing people. The Denalis all knew it, with the possible exception of David and likely exception of Harry (however temporary these exceptions might be). They weren't doing anything about it. They might or might not be aware that I knew.
Now, what was I going to do about that?
* * *
Quickly rifling through my information, I decided that there was little or no risk associated with telling Edward about Laurent. The Denalis had made no attempt to swear me to secrecy. The Volturi would certainly not care if Laurent was eating people as long as he covered his tracks, which he likely was, so there was no special danger from them if his transgressions became known.
Finally, a problem I didn't have to attack without Edward.
"But I saw Laurent at Denali," I said. "His eyes were still red."
Edward stilled, then held me a little tighter. He didn't look shocked, just protective. The information was not alarming to him - but he realized it might be so to me.
Then again, Edward classed his meta-killing, the slaughter of murderers, on approximately the same moral level as picking an arbitrary person off the street for no special reason and eating them. I tilted my head back to look at his face - yes, there was that familiar guilty look, begging my forgiveness like I was a divine being of some kind. If I judged Laurent aloud now, without assuaging that, he'd think I was classing them together.
"I don't think he's just slipping up," I went on, and I described the indications that he was planning extended hunting trips. "And he doesn't have a convenient way to make sure he's only eating people who were about to hurt someone." I snuggled closer to Edward. "I suppose it'spossible that he's doing some kind of detective work and trying to find unsavory targets that way, but it doesn't seem likely..."
"You're right," said Edward heavily, "it doesn't."
"David might have no idea, and Harry almost certainly doesn't, yet," I said. "But the others have to know. They all still have gold eyes, so unless I came at a really odd time and they'reomnivorous or whatever the euphemism would be for a mixed diet, it's just him. Why are they putting up with it?"
Edward spoke slowly, measuring his reply. "There's a few possible reasons... First, there's essentially no way they can control Laurent. You can't put a vampire in prison. It wouldn't be any significant deterrent to try to fine him or anything. The only way to make a vampire act, or not act, against his will, is by violence or the threat of it."
"Kate could take him," I said.
"I'm sure Kate alone, or any two or three of the others, could take him in a fight," Edward agreed. "But it's not a live option even if we assume they have no qualms about harming Laurent himself. If they hurt Laurent, they hurt Irina - possibly literally; she might back him in a physical confrontation. You remember how I reacted when Jasper was trying to talk about manhandling you during your first exposure to a human? That was when you were demanding, in so many words, that Jasper be allowed to rip your arm off if it would save "your experimental subject" and I barely managed to tolerate it. And I'm not sure what I would have done if he'dactually had to injure you. Laurent wouldn't be likely to reason with Irina in that way, so to attack him they'd have to contend with their sister as well."
"Okay," I said, "so they won't fight her to defend humans they don't know, but why is Irinatolerating it? Why isn't she getting him to stop? He'd have to listen to her."
Edward chewed on this question for a couple of seconds. "Well," he said, "the second reason is that the Denalis don't see vegetarianism in quite the same way we do. It was Tanya's idea to call it that, actually, and I think she considers it analogous to the plant-eating version practiced among humans. That is, it's a personal lifestyle choice, perhaps with a moral dimension to it, but nothing worth introducing social strife about."
"David and Harry -" I began in horror. David's eyes had been pale orange, but...
"They'll raise their children, so to speak, as vegetarians," Edward assured me, squeezing my hand. "I don't think you need to worry about David or Harry being encouraged to drink human blood any more than Ilario is now. They won't be stopped if they decide, on their own, to leave and join the ranks of typical vampires - I wasn't stopped either, for that matter - but if they stay with the coven, they aren't likely to. And Irina's probably not going to return to the practice herself. But she doesn't have enough of a motivation to evangelize that she'll risk relationship strain to argue with Laurent about it. If she did, she probably ran out of impetus months ago and they've settled into an uneasy compromise at this point."
"He's killing people," I said. "Not pigs and chickens and cows, people. That's not a lifestyle choice, that's dead mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters and sons and daughters -"
Edward was not happy. I sighed. "Not that I'm saying that you should go back to the vigilante-justice-and-fast-food habit," I said, smoothing his eyebrow with my thumb, "but it's different. I really do think it's different. If I thought Laurent were capable of distinguishing good and evil people, and choosing to eat only the evil ones who were about to abduct children or set fire to orphanages or whatever, this wouldn't be the most thrilling information I could learn - but there are plenty of higher priorities in my life than stopping killers from being killed. If Laurent's eating bad humans, though, it's by coincidence."
Edward nodded mutely. "The third reason," he said softly, "is that there are a lot of vampires in the world, and just because Laurent lives in Denali now, it might not seem to the sisters and Eleazar that they have more of an obligation to control him than they have to control any vampire outside the family."
I realized that I probably sounded hypocritical to Edward, complaining about Laurent, because he didn't know that I was laying groundwork to overthrow the Volturi and thereby end a number of objectionable diets. I tried to think of a way to stop sounding like that without giving anything away. "Eleazar mentioned a friend of Carlisle's named Alistair," I said abruptly. "I assume he's not a vegetarian either and Carlisle calls him hisfriend."
He nodded, confirming this fact. "Well, insofar as Alistair has friends. He's the most misanthropic individual I've ever met, and he can stand to have a visit from Carlisle - his closest acquaintance, as far as I know - about once every hundred years. There are letters a little more frequently than that. I believe they last wrote in 1982."
"Are there any other friends of the family I should know about?"
Edward listed them: Jasper's old covenmates Peter and Charlotte. An Irish coven, an Egyptian one, one that lived in the Amazon Basin, solitaries Garrett and Mary and Randall in North America and the pair Charles and Makenna in Europe. "We've met others, of course," he said. "Chance meetings like our encounter with Laurent and his old coven. But those are the ones with whom we have some ongoing acquaintance. In fact, I think Rosalie and Emmett were think
ing of going to Ireland soon to visit Siobhan and her coven - it used to be just the mated pair, Siobhan and Liam, but they've added a member recently."
"And these are all... non-vegetarians."
Edward nodded solemnly. "Vegetarian vampires are very, very rare, Bella. Vampires in general are merely uncommon."
"Has any effort been made towards deliberately convincing anyone who eats people to stop eating people? Or is it all a matter of waiting for them to show up by themselves - your return, Carmen and Eleazar showing up on the Denali's doorstep, Alice seeing herself and Jasper join up with us and doing so?"
"There have been some gentle attempts," Edward said. "They haven't met with much success. You don't know what human blood tastes like, Bella - it's not a small thing to ask someone to give up, when they've already decided that they accept the cost in human life."
"You know what it tastes like," I said. "Esme knows what it tastes like. Alice knows what it tastes like. Emmett knows what it tastes like." Jasper was a bad example, so I did not bring him up. "Tanya and Kate and Irina and Carmen and Eleazar know what it tastes like."
"Yes," Edward said heavily, "we do. Why do you think it makes it so much harder to resist, when you have that knowledge? Gianna's downstairs right now. I know what she would taste like. It takes a toll, whenever I'm around a human, that I have to know, that I don't need to merelyimagine like you."
"How could it taste that good?" I asked, flopping dramatically backwards onto the floor. The house was irregularly furnished like other Cullen homes, and we were not in a room equipped with a bed - they had aesthetic purpose, which was why Esme's island had them, but were not necessary for comfort during sleep or at any other time. Gianna was lucky that there was, for some reason, one four-poster in Alice's room here.
"To give you an idea," said Edward, "before our wedding, I asked my brothers what to expect about the honeymoon, and Jasper's exact words were "second only to the taste of human blood". Emmett did not disagree with him."
I stared at him incredulously. "So you're saying that Jasper and Emmett think human blood is better than sex. Than vampire sex, not the human kind. And Jasper's never even run into a singer."
Edward nodded.
"What's your opinion on this issue?" I asked archly, striking a pose. "Don't feel like you have to lie to spare my feelings."
My husband's eyes raked appreciatively over me and he said, "I wouldn't have to lie to do that even if you were easily offended. I'm not sure what I would answer if I'd ever tasted yourblood, though."
"I wonder if Irina and Laurent would be inclined to cast votes," I said. "Or any of the other friends of the family who have the relevant information."
"Well, I suppose you could ask them," he said, but his attention was clearly no longer on topic, and I didn't feel like dragging him back towards it right then.
Chapter 20: Europe
A few hours later, Gianna announced loudly that she was running low on certain food items and needed either permission to take one of the cars or for Edward to bring her to the store. She didn't know I was in the building, apparently. Edward sighed, made himself presentable, and went down to give her a set of keys. While he supplied directions to the grocery store and counted out some Canadian dollars for her, I stared at the ceiling and thought.
Assuming I managed to get rid of the Volturi, the power vacuum would need to be filled or things would only get worse. Vampires were, as a group, violent creatures: force unto intolerable pain or death was the only viable threat and the only realistic means of resolving conflict, and this had to be delivered by more vampires. (Or, I supposed, werewolves.) There wasn't a vampire economy I could corner, influencing its participants to behave themselves thereby. There wasn't a significant vampire society in which reputation was reliably important - the only social connections that reliably mattered to arbitrary vampires were mate bonds, impermeable to the vicissitudes of crime and punishment and not possessed universally anyway.
If I had about half a dozen of Alec, and they worked for me, something could be set up to work like a prison, without the only options for keeping order involving actions that were themselves repulsive. But I didn't know where to find half a dozen of Alec, let alone how to get them on board with careers as prison guards for a vegetarian vampire regime.
At any rate, I wasn't sure if I could beat the Volturi in a stand-up fight even if my coven, the Denali coven, all the friends of the family, and the entire pack of Quileutes fought at my side. I was the only one immune to Jane and Alec, the weapons - well, technically, illusionists - of the guard, and I was not so personally puissant that I could expect to defeat them all by myself. I needed more allies, ready to call into place when they accumulated critical mass. In all probability, I wouldn't be able to move until Gianna had had my baby and said baby had gotten to be old enough to sanely turn - until then, the child would be a terrible vulnerability that my attempt at rebellion could ill afford. So I had a while to think about where to get six of the anesthetic witch twin, and other details of my intended administration.
It was a bitter leisure. Murders were going on every day, all over the world, at the hands and teeth of hidden but otherwise unchecked vampires. And, at an even more staggering scale, people were dying for more mundane reasons. People like Ilario, except without his convenient connections and massive stroke of luck, were falling prey to disease. Age and injury and human-originated violence claimed more. Perhaps not all of these dying humans would want the rescue of vampirism, but they could not even be offered that choice under Volturi law. I could only pluck a few from the maw of oblivion, here and there, based on excuses and chance.
It occurred to me that I hadn't checked my e-mail in far too long, and I found my computer. I was looking at my e-mail inbox when Edward had finished teaching Gianna the phrases of French she'd need to buy groceries and returned to the second floor. He didn't look over my shoulder, just peered into the room to see what I was doing and went elsewhere. I heard the piano's trilling notes as he played a sonata to occupy himself.
I had several e-mails from both of my parents, which I scanned first and then replied to together rather than individually addressing each of Renée's dozen three-sentence news updates or Charlie's four giant rants/expressions of affection. I gave them both good-sized replies, telling them what little I could about what I'd been up to and padding with nostalgia and inquiries about their lives. Since they had no reason to expect me to be all that interesting, they were unlikely to find the limited disclosure odd. In most people's lives, having "started to learn Norwegian" would be the most momentous event of an entire month, let alone week. (I didn't mention Italian, French, Portuguese, Ukrainian, or anything else on my list. Humans did not normally try to learn that many languages at once.)
Rachel had also sent me several e-mails, which I didn't think were urgent because she hadn't texted, but which I opened with some trepidation anyway.
One was an update on Sue Clearwater. After a lot of long, loud conversations with her daughter, Sue had apparently come to the conclusion that if Harry was dead, then Leah had killed him. This was not an acceptable thing to have happened. Sue didn't want to live in a world where her daughter had killed her husband. And so she'd decided that Harry was not dead - but progress beyond that was slow in coming, Rachel reported. Sue seemed agnostic as to the question of whether vampirism dissolved human marriage, had no clear opinion about whether she ever wanted to see Harry again, was adamant that Leah and Seth should not attempt to visit him (thankfully - I didn't want the other Denalis learning about werewolves yet), and was not one bit happy about the entire mess. Rachel added as a footnote here that Leah was grateful for my rescue of her father and that Seth still thought I was a "nice vampire".
The next e-mail was what Rachel saw fit to relay to me about Harry's electronic correspondence with his children. He did not like Denali very much, and had trouble getting along with everyone in the coven except Carmen and Eleazar (so it was lucky that he was
in their house). This was exacerbated by the fact that the sisters and Laurent interpreted any display of significant emotion from a newborn as reason to become wary and occasionally violent, trying to keep things from spiraling out of control. But Harry did not lack for a source of significant emotion: he missed his children. Also, he seemed more interested in soothing Sue's discomfort than I would have predicted. Maybe she was supposed to be his mate after all. I didn't know quite how that would manifest given that they'd never been in one another's physical presence since he'd started turning, let alone opened his eyes, but if it turned out to be the case, I supposed I'd find out.
There was then an e-mail stating that the pack had finally, as a group, gotten sufficiently controlled that Rachel had authorized breaking camp and going back to living full-time in the village. The entire tribe was cleared to know the secret, but under strict instructions from the tribe elders and Chief Rachel not to share it elsewhere. (The elders now included Sue Clearwater, who had taken her husband's place in his absence, and would likely retain it even if he moved back to the reservation due to his being a vampire.) Rachel had not run out of money, but anticipated doing so in relatively short order and wanted more; I called Gianna, asked her to pick up envelopes and stamps while she was out, and looked up the French words she would need to purchase those things. I replied to this e-mail saying I'd get a check in the mail.
And then, after that, I read her latest message. It was about Sam, Leah's fiancé - but no more. There was one tribe legend I had not happened to hear. Werewolves were supposedly prone to "imprinting" - which was something like a unidirectional and more psychologically unique version of vampire mating. And Sam had gone and imprinted on Leah's second cousin Emily, who had come for a surprise visit from the Makah reservation where she lived. This was apparently not infrequent; growing up, Leah and Emily had been close as sisters.