by Alicorn
Through their shared thoughts, everybody in the pack knew exactly what had happened to Sam. Rachel described it as being like the sudden extinction of the sun: "like there's no other light or warmth in the world except from her," she'd written. "Being in Sam's head is really weird because he has everybody in the pack half in love with Emily just because he's so anchored to her. It wasn't like that before when it was him and Leah, and that was already plenty."
However, a unique ability among the pack members - Leah included - to empathize intimately with his change of heart didn't prevent it from becoming major drama. Leah was inconsolable at the betrayal, especially on top of her father's sudden absence due to her having lost control, and was staying out of wolf form as much as she could manage to avoid having to run across Sam's thoughts.
Emily had been brought into the know: imprinting overrode even Rachel's echoey Alpha commands for secrecy, and Sam had told his imprintee everything the moment he laid eyes on her. This did not impress her. Emily's loyalty was to Leah, and she didn't show any inclination to accept Sam's mystically acquired devotion. She was crashing at the Clearwater's house to help comfort her cousin, since most of Leah's other friends were in the pack and had trace amounts of sympathy for Sam.
The other wolves were not thrilled about this development. Or at least, most of them weren't. A couple thought that imprinting would be romantic or something and looked forward to it eagerly, although legend had indicated that it was a rare phenomenon even among wolves. But Becky was terrified, as were the handful of other wolves who had significant others and hadn't imprinted on them. The only way to prevent imprinting, according to the corpus of stories available, was to not see the person on whom one would imprint. A few of the pack had accordingly moved out into the woods to camp out again, thereby avoiding most visual contact with humans.
Rachel speculated that with everything going on, I might want to "stay far, far away from Leah - she doesn't really hate you, and she's still grateful you saved her dad, but you're kind of turning into the herald of all things awful in her life the way she thinks of it". Since I had no immediate plans to go to La Push, this was fine.
I sent Rachel another reply, asking for more information on how imprinting worked as it became available, and then I went downstairs to listen more closely to Edward's music.
* * *
The following Monday, Alice's vision of Ilario's resistance to human scent shored up. She brought home a human to waft under his nose, and then escorted her out again unharmed, although Ilario had been considerably twitchier and more dependent on water during the exercise than I had with Nils. He didn't want to risk Gianna until he was surer of himself, so he started going on excursions with Alice and Jasper in (sparsely) populated areas of Norway. No one died. That Thursday, Edward, Gianna, and I flew back to Europe.
"I'm going to need to apologize to whoever that car belonged to," I remarked softly during the flight. Oddly, Edward hadn't asked at all about what had become of it.
"It was mine," he said. "It's all right; it was hardly a favorite. I thought you'd want something inconspicuous."
I told him the story of how the car had come to be wrecked, and he didn't bat an eye, just approved of my careful destruction of evidence. Sheepishly, I said, "I'd offer to replace the car, but it's not like any of the money I've been throwing around is mine in a meaningful sense; I didn't earn any of it." I had written Rachel a rather large check - just a low enough figure to fly under Alice's threshold of stockbroker terrorizing.
"It is yours," Edward said firmly. "You're a part of the family. You're my wife. Alice handles the investments because she's uniquely qualified and it amuses her. Carlisle holds down a paying job because he loves practicing medicine and it's hard to do it for free in most places with decent cloud cover. But it's shared out among all of us, and you mustn't feel awkward about using it."
"Well, I know you think I should throw it around, but I haven't really done anything to pitch in - I don't just mean that I didn't show up with a wad of cash in my pocket, I mean at all."
"Bella, when I turned you, we were prepared for the possibility that you'd be unable to do anything more sophisticated than growl and hunt for the subsequent decade," said Edward.
"A decade? Does it sometimes take that long?" I asked. "I thought it was a year."
"Usually it's a year, but it varies," said Edward. "It would have been surprising, but less surprising than the reality, if you'd still been acting like a newborn in 2015."
I thought of David, pacing and frightened, and was alarmed by this possibility, obviated for myself though it was. "Well, even so," I said. "I'm not going to be careful about money if it's as unnecessary as all that, fine, but I feel like I should make it known that I want to be useful if I can."
Edward kissed my forehead and murmured in my ear. "Bella, my love, you don't know how glad our family is to have you. Leaving aside my own supernaturally good luck for the moment - you are Alice's best friend. You are a hope for Rosalie, a role model for Jasper, Esme's pride and joy. Emmett loves your sense of humor and Carlisle admires you. Useful - you're priceless."
Of course Edward had to tell me I was marvelous, but he also had to tell me the truth. I basked in the compliments and snuggled up for the long flight.
* * *
Ilario did not eat Gianna when we got her home, although he didn't like to be in the same room as her for very long at a stretch. He developed a habit of zipping between rooms at high speed, so he could talk to her without breathing the air she occupied. She was so overjoyed that he was healthy and had what he wanted that she didn't seem to mind the part where he craved her blood so much that he couldn't comfortably breathe near her.
By the time we finished carrying luggage out of the car in which Esme had fetched us, Emmett and Rosalie were debating whether to visit the Irish coven by swimming or by catching a plane. (Emmett thought swimming would be more fun, whereas Rosalie cited time and the difficulty of packing for a sea journey.) I announced an interest in acquainting myself with the coven, which caught Edward by surprise, although he didn't protest. Edward was indifferent to modes of transportation, which left me to break Emmett and Rosalie's tie. I voted apologetically for swimming, which would be interesting, wouldn't have me choosing between muteness and a throat full of fire en route, and would mean that the trip wouldn't have to be postponed so I could hunt first. Rosalie rolled her eyes and asked us to wait for ten minutes so she could buy a swim cap and preserve her hair from the ravages of saltwater, and I used the time to find a more swimming-friendly outfit than what I had on somewhere in my giant closet. Eventually I located an actual bathing suit, but I didn't really want to go gallivanting around Ireland in one, so I just wore normal clothes in fabrics that probably wouldn't look terrible after a few days in the ocean.
We all put our handheld electronics in redundant plastic bags, dove off the nearest fjord, and started for Ireland. I was actually able to outpace the others: in water, strength was a significant enough factor in rapid movement that my newborn arms could pull through the water more efficiently than Edward's. I swam ahead, and when I happened upon a luckless orca, I ate it; they caught up to me during this process and thereafter I kept pace.
Edward decided to teach me sign language so we could talk while swimming underwater. It had the convenient feature that I didn't need to learn an accent, that being the factor of language learning least affected by vampire memory and cognitive speed (though those still helped). When I had the alphabet mastered, he could continue teaching me words and grammatical conventions without needing to fall back on English.
By way of vocabulary practice, he told me about the coven we were going to visit. Siobhan was the leader, and as far as she knew she was the oldest vampire who lived in Ireland full time. She was some eight and a half centuries old. Liam was newer, having turned in 1800. Siobhan had not turned him - he'd been created by a Scottish coven making an excursion to Ireland, and traveled with them until a later e
xcursion saw them run into his mate. She'd extracted him from the coven, and made her disinclination to otherwise share the space clear, by (with Liam's help) killing one of the Scottish vampires and chasing off the other.
Maggie was a little over 150, and had been turned after emigrating to escape the Great Famine by an English vampire. Her creator, who had been solitary until turning Maggie, had been motivated by a suspicion about Maggie's witchcraft potential. This had proven correct. Maggie could tell when people were lying. Homesickness had eventually led Maggie to amicably part from her covenmate and return to Ireland in 1982. She'd managed to completely miss the existence of Siobhan and Liam until ten years later. Then they'd run into each other while simultaneously trying to take advantage of the cover that an IRA attack could provide for feeding. This had nearly turned into a fight: Liam wanted himself and Siobhan to go on being the only vampires in Ireland. Maggie would likely have run to England, enlisted the help of her former covenmate, and fought for the territory, but Siobhan had wanted to add her to the group.
My first thought was that of course Liam would do what Siobhan wanted if she had the stronger preference, but Edward said that Siobhan was a witch, too. According to him, she could will plans to pan out. Siobhan herself did not consider this a talent for anything other than good strategy, and I thought the example of Maggie's inclusion in the coven was a weak one - Siobhan hadn't needed to sway anyone but her own mate to make it work, for crying out loud. Edward didn't have more examples ready to hand. While he'd met Siobhan before, she didn't tend to discuss or think about situations that could be cases of this power, and so he was taking Carlisle's word for it; Carlisle considered the instance of bringing Maggie into the coven the quintessential one, and hadn't thought of any others while in Edward's range. I was curious enough to ask Carlisle about it later, but for the time being I was skeptical.
While our route was only about eight hundred miles (plus course corrections as needed, vertical or lateral, to avoid boats), swimming was slower than running, and we spent almost half a day in the water. Rosalie had wanted to land near Edinburgh and run across the larger island, then swim the Irish Sea to get to our destination, but Edward thought it would be too hard to avoid notice by boats or onshore observers in Edinburgh given the time of day - we probably could have managed it at night.
Instead, we got out of the water near Ballycastle, and then, careful to avoid humans, followed Emmett, who'd received instructions on how to find the coven. They moved around, because non-vegetarian vampires staying in one place for too long eventually attracted notice. However well-hidden the bodies, missing persons were recorded; but two in greater Belfast followed by three near Cork and one in Limerick plus two in Galway and then a gaggle of tourists in Dublin didn't form a pattern in the minds of investigators who didn't suspect vampires.
I wondered how many missing persons worldwide were just missing, and how many were vampire food.
The Irish coven were outside a town called Maghera in Northern Ireland. I hypothesized that the top bit of the island was a better hunting ground than the rest of it because casualties were liable to be chalked up to sporadic religious violence, but I didn't speculate aloud. Emmett ranged ahead when we approached the designated area to find them and explain that there were four of us, not two, and to give them fair warning that I had newborn eyes but was not typical of newborns. He came back, gave us the go-ahead, and led us into the wooded area where the other three vampires waited.
* * *
Siobhan was a brunette, with a short and well-maintained haircut. She was very tall and broad, and she moved forward to greet us with an undulating smoothness that I considered trying to emulate before deciding that its impressiveness depended on her size. I wondered if she could beat Emmett in a fight and was unsure. She was barefoot, like the others, and they were all dressed in simple outdoor wear.
Her mate, Liam, followed close behind, a grimly noncommittal expression on his face. He didn't make any aggressive moves, but I was inclined to watch for them anyway - I had the impression that he wasn't happy about the visit. He was only a little shorter than his mate, which made him about Emmett's height. As vampires went, he wasn't particularly attractive; he was more like Harry and David, who'd been turned for reasons unrelating to appearance. Or, I supposed, James, who wouldn't have looked unusually lovely even in a crowd of humans (or so I'd written; vampire vision might have revealed something else). His hair was a shade lighter than Siobhan's, and cut similarly to hers.
Behind the pair followed the newest member, Maggie, who was about my size and had a smiling face wreathed in springy red curls. Except for the telltale wine-colored eyes, she seemed very likeable. She was also the first to speak, in a perky Irish accent. "Hello! It's good to finally meet you!" She was addressing everyone but Emmett, who she'd encountered moments before, but she seemed particularly interested in me - probably because of the Super Newborn thing. When my eyes were finally gold I could expect to get less (although not much less) attention among the general vampire population.
"Yes, it's been some time," acknowledged Siobhan, similarly accented. I wondered for half a second why vampires would speak any language with an accent, and then mentally kicked myself for assuming that sounding American meant lacking an accent.
"We're not usually in Europe long enough to make visits," apologized Rosalie.
"But aren't you all living in Norway now?" inquired Maggie. "Why is it just the four of you?"
"There's another newborn at home," explained Edward. "He's nearly as controlled as Bella, but not quite. It's better to leave him with supervision." He omitted mention of Gianna, without whose presence a smaller contingent of babysitters would have sufficed to soothe Ilario's worries about slipping and eating her. I supposed that our hosts would be no less likely than any other vampires to think it was strange and suspicious that we kept a human around, and I wasn't exactly motivated to disclose the details of why she was still human.
"That explains Jasper, and by extension, Alice," said Siobhan, "but what about Carlisle and Esme? The only reason I've met any of you at all is through Carlisle."
"Carlisle is still new to his job in Norway, and prefers not to ask for time off so soon," said Edward. This was true - I supposed it had to be, if Maggie was to be present - but not the whole story, of course.
"Well, perhaps they'll pay us a visit soon," said Siobhan.
Rosalie nodded, and there followed quite a bit of catch-up conversation: the latest developments in our coven and theirs. Rosalie and Emmett had taken Edward's hint about leaving Gianna unmentioned, and they didn't know that I'd left Québec during our trip at all. Edward had successfully kept that a secret. Bearing in mind the topics I should not mention, I chatted away with the others. It was much easier to conduct small talk with family present - or maybe it was just Edward.
It was interesting, the way we stood. There was, as ever, no reason to sit - and no chairs that might feel neglected if we didn't, since we were in the middle of the woods. So we were all on our feet. The Irish vampires were in a loose V with Siobhan at the hinge, standing closest to us. Our contingent stood in a line, but clearly divided in half; Emmett had his arm around Rosalie and I was holding hands with Edward, and there was about two feet between my left foot and Rosalie's right. I wondered why Siobhan and Liam weren't touching. They'd been mated longer than we had, which might explain it all by itself. I wondered how we'd have arranged ourselves if the entire family had been present.
The conversation split into numerous simultaneous threads, as statements prompted more than one possible response. We could all hear each other, easily filtering each voice from the others, and keep track of where everyone was looking by virtue of unblurry peripheral vision, so this wasn't as difficult as it would have been for humans.
Maggie was mildly curious about vegetarianism, and wanted to know if we'd tasted human blood. She seemed equally entranced by Rosalie and I, who had not, and our husbands, who had, and interspersed he
r incredulous questions with remarks to herself about how it was "all really true, huh!"
Meanwhile, Rosalie had convinced Liam to break his stony silence by talking about cars, which he liked, and Emmett was trying to persuade Siobhan that they should spar. (Apparently Edward and Alice "cheated", fighting Jasper got old after a while, and the others weren't usually in the mood.) I was rather interested in acquiring at least a cursory understanding of how to fight, but I could propose this to Emmett (or Edward or Jasper) any time; he probably didn't often have the opportunity to match up with Siobhan.
Eventually she relented, silencing Liam's protest with a look, and they got some distance and sprang at each other. I watched out of the corner of my eye, still keeping up with Maggie's questions about whether I wasn't just a little curious about how humans tasted, etcetera.
"Aren't you curious how animals taste?" I asked, finally, as Siobhan knocked Emmett to the ground and he leapt to his feet to attack again.
"Not really," said Maggie, wrinkling her nose. "They smell terrible."
"I can't say eating humans sounds like something I'd enjoy, either," I said.
"But they taste great!" Maggie enthused.
"So I'm told," I said. "But you can't be constantlyin the process of swallowing their blood. You've only got so much room. Inevitably, you spend more time not eating than you spend eating, and you would still have to do that even if they marched by you in a convenient line and you didn't have to hunt them or conceal evidence. According to the experts," I tilted my head towards Edward, "eating human blood makes it harder to not be eating at any given time between meals. So I'm making the non-eating parts of my life more comfortable by forgoing some extra yumminess when I eat."
Maggie blinked at me, and Liam actually let out one low ha of a laugh. "That's something," he put in. "Carlisle's all about compassion and respect for human life, and you have an actual reason."