Luminosity

by Alicorn

  "I'm a big fan of compassion and respect for human life too," I said, "but if those things mattered to you, you'd already be vegetarians. It's not like you've been living in ignorance of the fact that we can live off animals and were only waiting for this information before swearing off a human diet; you've known Carlisle for a while."

  "But how do you resist?" exclaimed Maggie. "Perhaps that's a reason to do it, but how?"

  "Don't you ever go someplace where you can't eat the nearest human right then? Walk into some town where there's 50 of them in one place, and you'd have to either kill them all, which would be conspicuous, or kill only some of them, which would also be conspicuous?" Of course they had; Maggie nodded. "So you can clearly refrain from eating humans," I said. "You don't need me to tell you how."

  Maggie looked vaguely puzzled, but then asked about how animals tasted, which was promising; Emmett even shouted a remark about the superior flavor of ursine creatures in between being used to knock a tree over and successfully depriving Siobhan of one of her feet. Liam clenched his teeth very tightly at that, but Siobhan (while evidently in considerable discomfort) just picked her foot up off the ground without even yelling and attached it to her ankle again. After about a second, during which Emmett graciously did not pounce, the injury knitted, and then she was in motion again.

  "I like killer whales best," I put in, when Liam had relaxed marginally. "Hunting in the water is fun - the whales are designed to move in the ocean, and while I can do it, it's not what I'm best at. So there's an element of challenge that there isn't to hunting land creatures. Of those, though, I liked the wild boar I ate once."

  "Coyotes," supplied Rosalie shortly, half-smirking.

  "There's all kinds of variety," said Edward dryly. "Mountain lions, here."

  "I'm really looking forward to being able to go about in public without contact lenses," I said.

  "I just tell everybody I have weak veins in my eyes and they keep bursting," said Maggie. "Or I say that the red is because of contacts anyway. Or I make up something in fake Latin like "iris crimsonus" and act like I'm really sensitive about it if anyone gets curious. I ask them if they know what it means, and if they know it's not real Latin then I kill them." She shrugged.

  "Sunglasses," said Liam shortly.

  "I've done sunglasses before," I acknowledged. "Useful things, but anytime we'd be outside so anyone would notice, sunglasses are a bit odd."

  "More fake Latin," advised Maggie. "You have a condition that makes your eyes really sensitive to light. I think that might actually be a real thing."

  I sort of liked her, in spite of the part where she killed people. I was beginning to see how my family could have acquired red-eyed friends. It didn't take the same personality, in a vampire, to kill people that it did in a human. A human who murdered was opposing culture and instinct, risking social censure and societal repercussions from every angle. A normal human had to be put in an unusual context like war, or subjected to enormous stress, before becoming willing to kill.

  A normal vampire, though, was fitted with a different set of natural impulses. Was normally lifted entirely out of their human context and could not safely continue human relationships (and would be most likely to form new relationships with vampires who already ate people). Did not face significant danger in the process of hunting, as long as they were careful. Had been put in the sort of context that might make a normal human turn dangerous, complete with a label that generally meant "killer" and the ability to live up to it with impunity.

  I was the luckiest vampire in the world. I'd walked in with my eyes open, kept hold of my original ties, and landed in the laps of a family that didn't eat people. Carlisle was the impressive one who'd managed it with no help, no precedent, no support, no ability to write home to his human relatives.

  But at any rate, the personality types of killer vampires weren't the same as killer humans. Maggie was a perfectly likable person. And when someone saw through her fake Latin, she killed them, that was all.

  I was very tempted to make the entire conversation about converting Maggie, to retrieve it from the tangent it began to drift off on about some real Latin that Edward helpfully produced from his medical school days. Maybe the next human Maggie met wouldn't die of excess education. I decided against it. It could just as easily make things worse, and she was already curious, which was something.

  * * *

  Eventually Emmett invited me to join the brawl without prompting, and I agreed. He knocked me around, but more gently than he had Siobhan. I tried not to rely too much on my excessive strength, which would be gone soon enough. Instead I learned which instincts were useful and which to suppress, a few things about distinguishing feints and genuine attacks and how to dodge, and fascinating tricks with leverage. Siobhan also took a turn, and her style was noticeably different from Emmett's - he was playing, and she was doing something more like parkour.

  It was fun, and although periodically it hurt rather a lot, I had the sensation that I was learning very efficiently. Learning to fight by sparring wasn't linear, like reading a book and (however quickly) absorbing each word in sequence. The rapid immersion in combat let me engage almost all of my mind on the same task. Every sense had something to tell me about my partner and my environment; all of my muscles could be doing something useful; I needed to model my opponent's strategy and think of a move that he or she hadn't thought I'd make, often stacking up levels of obviousness quite deep and still sometimes being found predictable. It was wholly engaging.

  All of this bothered Edward immensely, and after Siobhan clocked me across the ear hard enough that it stopped processing sound for a few seconds, he quietly asked me to stop. I went back to his side and he gathered me into a hug. Rosalie snorted.

  "Aw, but she's good at this," protested Emmett.

  "Later," said Edward tightly. "Not here."

  "Siobhan's got a different style..." I said.

  He gritted his teeth. "I know," he said. "So does Jasper. You can practice at home if you like." I wondered if Siobhan had thought something in particular, or if he just didn't trust her. Liam looked relieved that she appeared to be done, though, and she went back to stand by her coven with a shrug. Maggie looked briefly wistful.

  I tilted my head at her, inviting her to explain this. "Oh," she said. "Just, I wish my mate would hurry up and find me."

  "If you don't ever leave Ireland, are you very likely to run into him?" I inquired.

  Maggie considered this. "Her," she corrected absently. No one, even my husband from 1901 with oh-so-traditional values, reacted to this. I decided to inquire about that later. "Well, I traveled more before I joined this coven," she said at last. "And I didn't find her then either."

  I couldn't resist. "Maybe you ate her."

  Siobhan rolled her eyes, but Maggie looked genuinely horrified. "What? That couldn't happen."

  "Of course it could," I said. "I was human when I met Edward. Not only that," I added with relish, "I was his singer. It's lucky that he had so much practice not eating humans. Otherwise I would have been toast. Delicious, dead toast."

  Maggie looked scared. I wasn't sure if that was good or not, so I backed off a little. "You most likely haven't met her yet, though." I hesitated for a beat, letting the redheaded vampire calm down, and added, "But that doesn't mean she's a vampire."

  "Nnng," whined Maggie.

  Rosalie chuckled darkly and threw in a barb of her own: "Emmett was human when I found him, too." She paused. "And absolutely covered in fresh blood."

  "Esme was human when Carlisle met her," put in Edward; I wasn't facing him, instead studying Maggie's face, but I heard a smile in his voice.

  Eventually Maggie announced, "Well, maybe I'll just eat men," which was not really the solution I'd had in mind, but at least she'd found the possibility compelling. Siobhan sighed but didn't have an interest in encouraging Maggie to be an equal-opportunity predator, and Liam had lapsed into silence again.

  The con
versation turned to other things, and after about two days, we were done visiting. Siobhan graciously allowed that we might spend a while touring Ireland before going home. So we ran from place to place on the island for a bit, looking at the major attractions. "This part I can tell my parents," I remarked. "Ireland is totally a normal part of a tour of Europe."

  "If you want, we can look at more of Europe before we go to South America," offered Edward.

  "Let's go to Wales and England and Scotland on our way home," I decided, "and then I want to hang out there for a while, just like a week, we've spent so little time actually with our family. Then South America."

  Of course he had no problem with this, and so while Emmett and Rosalie swam directly back to Norway after they'd had their fill of Ireland, Edward and I swam east and he spent five days showing me around. He'd been there before, but most of his knowledge came from Carlisle, who'd been born in London. None of the specific locations that had been important to Carlisle's human life were still in their original form, but it was interesting to wander around the city with this information. I wondered if Chicago, Edward's birthplace, would feel similar if I went there.

  * * *

  We were wandering the streets of Glasgow (me in contact lenses) when I decided to ask Edward why Maggie's correction hadn't elicited a reaction. "Given that you're from 1901, and have used this as an excuse to have outdated values before," I said. I kept my voice high and fast; passing humans wouldn't notice anything but a couple looking into each other's eyes and walking together.

  "Well, first of all," laughed Edward, "my outdated values, as you call them, apply to me. It's not my business whether anyone else obeys them. You haven't heard me complaining about the conduct of the succubus triplets - I suppose it's down to Tanya and Kate, now - have you?"

  "That's true," I acknowledged. "And second of all?"

  "Second of all, vampires in general don't have much choice but to be relaxed about that in particular," he said. "There's simply nothing to argue about. Just like with Laurent's eating habits, the choices are permission or violence. There's no legal policy to argue. No social pressure or ethical argument that could ever practically compete with the mate bond. You might have noticed that vampires don't go in for organized religion or, even in opposite-sex couples, have children, so the traditional arguments are moot anyway. There's no reason for anyone to go to the trouble of trying to keep a vampire away from her mate, even if the mate's also a woman. It would be very troublesome and have no point."

  "Okay," I said. "But apart from the fact that you aren't going to fight Maggie to the death over it, do you have 1901-shaped feelings on the matter?"

  Edward shrugged. "Not really. It wasn't something I gave any thought to as a human. That was hardly the hot-button issue at the time. When I was turned, everyone was busy thinking about the Great War - World War I - and the flu pandemic. So I didn't enter the vampire world with preconceptions on the subject to set in stone. It's not my cup of tea, but then, you are the only cup of tea in the world for me." He picked me up by the waist and spun around, then set me back down on the sidewalk; some watching humans awwwed at the display of affection.

  I decided this was satisfactory. And then an unrelated question occurred to me: "Am I immune to Maggie's power?"

  That brought Edward up short. "I don't know. You didn't lie to her, as far as I know..."

  "I didn't," I confirmed. "Unless sarcasm or speculation or just being mistaken counts...? How sensitive is she?"

  "Not very," he said. "While it's possible for someone very good at controlling their thoughts or very immersed in their duplicity to lie to me, and she'd catch most such deception, I'm more effective overall than she is. She doesn't detect anything at all unless someone deliberately states something they want her to believe which they think is false. If they don't know she's listening, or they're confident they're right, or they think she'll notice that they're uncertain or making a joke instead of trying to share definite information, nothing happens."

  "So if I'm immune to her she wouldn't have noticed," I said, nodding to myself. "I wish I'd thought to test it there."

  "Do you expect to need to lie to Maggie?" Edward asked, and then he shook his head. "You don't have to answer that."

  "It's okay," I said. "I don't expect to need to lie to her, but it would be interesting if I found out that I could, or couldn't. I want to know more about how my power works, so I can make it get better. If I didn't start out immune to Maggie, learning how to develop that would be useful practice. I guess I'll just work on hedging out Jasper to start. Not because I expect to needto, just because I want to know how to improve." I tilted my head curiously. "Have you gotten any better at reading minds since you turned?"

  "Not in the way you probably have in mind," he said. "Since I can follow familiar voices at greater range, it did improve in the sense that I could hear Carlisle from one mile away to begin with and two later and almost five now, but I'm not any better at hearing new people I meet. And it's still just surface thoughts as it's always been."

  "Have you tried to work on that at all?"

  "Not really. I do have some qualms about invading people's privacy," he said, smiling faintly. "In cases where need overwhelms those concerns, the level of discernment that I started with has been serviceable. I did try a little to hear something from you, but failed utterly, and you've made it clear that you don't want me to succeed - so I stopped working on that."

  "Fair enough," I replied.

  * * *

  Chapter 21: Hybrid

  It was more than a week into the month of August when we swam back to Norway. When I checked my e-mail, there was a small heap of messages from my parents and Rachel - and, interestingly, one from Angela. I was so surprised to get an e-mail from her that I opened it first. It was sweet and postcard-like. She was still in Forks for the summer, and wanted to make known her hopes that I was having a nice time in Europe. I replied and told her what I could about Norway, Ireland, the U.K., and Italy, and mentioned - since unless Charlie had told everyone, she didn't know - that I had eloped and likely wouldn't be returning to school in the fall. I sent her three wedding photos that Alice had Photoshopped to make me look pinker, and asked her if she'd do me the favor of notifying Jessica and our other friends.

  Then I tackled the e-mails from my parents - more of the same, really, but I dutifully compiled the recent tourism data for their reading pleasure. Renée was mostly adjusted to life in Florida, where my stepfather had gotten signed earlier in the year. She missed Phoenix but liked Jacksonville pretty well, and was already cycling through the locally available diversions and hobbies. She and Phil were still getting along very well.

  Charlie, meanwhile, was starting to worry about Harry. Since he obviously could not be told what had really happened to his friend, and yet could also not be invited to the funeral that he'd expect to attend if Harry were dead, he was being fed a confused jumble of vague misinformation.

  I'd turned the Denalis' latest addition in mid-July; it was becoming awfully suspicious that in the weeks since, Harry had supposedly been visiting his aunt in Nashville, then become too sick to receive visitors but not sick enough to be in the hospital, then become well enough to go and see a cousin Charlie had never heard of who lived in Toronto. All of these plane tickets, of course, being paid for by the visited relatives; the Clearwaters were not especially wealthy, although Leah and Seth now had some access to pack money I'd supplied. Charlie didn't appear to suspect foul play - Billy and Sue both were making sure of that - but he was very confused.

  I assured Charlie, in my e-mail, that Harry was probably just fine and there was no reason to worry - but I didn't know what long-term solution would work. If Harry were reported as a missing person so he could be declared legally dead later, Charlie would certainly look for him, and could run into wolfy or vampiric things that he shouldn't see yet. Short of torching the Clearwater house while Sue and the kids were out of it and Harry was supposedly in
side (to eliminate the need for a body), there was no other obvious way to give Charlie a satisfactory story. I toyed with the arson idea, but it would be too obviously staged if the family rescued their belongings first, and not all of those objects were likely to be of the easily replaceable variety. They would be unlikely to go for the idea.

  Next I opened the e-mails from Rachel. Two more wolves had imprinted. One, a teenage boy named Jared, had fallen instantly for a classmate of his who'd turned out to have a longstanding crush on him, so that was all sweet and convenient. Less sweetly, Quil Ateara had imprinted on Emily's two-year-old niece Claire, another Makah. Emily was still staying at the Clearwater house to comfort Leah, and had agreed to babysit Claire from that location, which was how Quil had gotten a look at her.

  Rachel added, hastily, that Quil was absolutely not sexually interested in the toddler, which was the only reason he still had all of his face attached. Apparently imprinting wasn't necessarily sexual. The pack was assuming that when Claire grew up, she and Quil would be as happy together as Jared and his imprint, but for the time being he was absolutely content to serve as a older brother figure. Rachel confided to me that he let Claire boss him around very indulgently, never tiring of her.

  Leah had, at first, thought that this might mean that Sam could come to think of Emily as asister, so that Leah could have her fiancé back. Emily and Rachel had been all for this plan, and so Sam, supernaturally obedient to his imprint and his Alpha, had tried. Rachel didn't doubt the sincerity of his attempt. But he'd failed; he was still in love with Emily.

  In a brief message, Rachel informed me that everyone in the pack was growing like a weed. "Everybody fifteen and up looks 25 years old and on our way to the Olympics," she told me. "The younger ones look about five years older than they really are already, and they're catching up, and even the kids are completely built. Wolf form sizes still vary by age and size in human shape - I'm not the biggest, just the prettiest and the one who can boss everyone around."