by Alicorn
Rachel's next e-mail said only, "I think Emily is wavering."
The next message said nothing more of Emily, Sam, or Leah, just told the stories of more imprintings. One boy I hadn't met, who'd been flown in during my drive to Denali, had apparently picked up on the Makah pattern. His name was Victor, and he was really enthusiastic about imprinting. He and two like-minded friends had actually run north all the way to the Makah reservation, while Rachel was asleep and unable to order them to stop. There, they'd wandered around looking at girls until Victor had imprinted on one.
Thus freed from his obligation to keep the pack's information contained, he told her everything (complete with a phasing demonstration) and actually convinced her to visit La Push and live with him until school started, although she would be obliged to go back home and finish her last year of high school in September. The other two hadn't imprinted during the excursion, and Rachel had resorted to Alpha commands to prevent any more of that kind of foolishness. This hadn't prevented one other wolf from (accidentally) imprinting on a Forks girl, who I didn't recognize by name or description.
It did not escape Rachel's notice that all of the wolves who had imprinted were male. "The dominant hypothesis," she'd written in her latest missive, "is that we imprint on people who'll be able to pass on the werewolf gene."
And all the female wolves had stopped having periods.
Rachel passed this information to me clinically, but I could imagine that it wasn't being taken with such calm by all of the female half of the pack. With menstruation had gone the ability to have children - or so they strongly suspected. I could guess why, biologically, this would be the case. It would not do a fetus any good at all to be subjected to violent transformations between shapes. Small children with the gene couldn't activate; presumably they also lacked the ability in utero. Miscarriage would be inevitable. Male wolves, on the other hand, would be perfectly able to sire offspring. None of this was likely to ease the blow to the girls.
I promptly wrote back. While they couldn't safely carry children, that wasn't necessarily a reason to suspect that all of their eggs were non-viable. Secrecy, including from my own family, was still important, but in a few years I could be in and out of medical school and equipped to personally do for the pack what Rosalie had done for me. (If, in that time, discretion became unnecessary or impossible, then one of the existing Cullen doctors could handle the task.) Individual wolves who, for some reason, valued the ability to bear their own children more than the ability to never age could quit their wolves. At that point, they would probably pick right up where they'd left off, reproductive capacities and all.
While I wrote my reply to Rachel, another e-mail appeared. This one, surprisingly, was fromHarry.
He wanted to know how I'd become sure that I could handle being around humans. I sympathized with his impatience - not only had he been thrown into vampire-hood without warning, he wasn't getting along well with most of his coven. So I summarized all the tips I'd collected, my self-tests with my old human-smelling clothes, and the trial we'd devised with Nils. I gave him Alice's e-mail address and a summary of her power, and suggested that he ask her to see if he'd be safe to try. Given a green light from her, all that would be needed would be for one of the longstanding Denalis to take David safely away and another to bring in a Nils-equivalent.
I also recommended he get in touch with Ilario, whose contact information I realized I did not have. I poked my head out of the window, asked Esme - the first person I saw - for his e-mail address, and added it in an endnote to my reply to Harry. I reminded him not to tell Alice or Ilario that he was Quileute, and further advised that he not even use his last name with them lest Edward pick something up and recognize the family.
Before I hit "send", it occurred to me that everyone in my family but Edward thought that I'd spent my entire detour to North America simply hanging out in Québec, less the time it had taken me to encounter, turn, and transport Harry. They'd assume he was Canadian. The Denalis and Edward thought that I'd brought Harry up from Seattle, which was still off, but too close for comfort. The Denalis knew Harry's last name but not what it meant; everyone in my own coven would know who the Clearwaters were except Ilario and maybe Alice and Jasper.
If Harry started e-mailing people other than me and his fellow Quileutes, some informational cross-contamination would happen. It was already likely, if one of the Denalis called him "Harry Clearwater" in correspondence to my family or mentioned where he'd come from, but there was nothing I could do about that withouttelling them to keep it on first-name terms, which was a greater risk than just crossing my fingers about that leak.
I didn't have to make it worse, though. I deleted my last paragraphs. Instead, I wrote that Harry should look for solitary hikers with someone's supervision, and very firmly make up his mind that he would immediately tell me if he slipped up and ate someone, and that I would resolve that if he told me of this event, I would...
I tried to think of something flashy that Alice would definitely tell me about if she saw me doing it, which she'd definitely see if it was to happen. Eventually I decided that if Harry killed someone, I'd pick a fight with Ilario. I didn't think we were likely to squabble otherwise, so I would probably not get a false signal. But it was the sort of thing Alice would notice and try to head off if she saw it, while not being sufficiently bizarre behavior for a couple of newborns that I would be obviously faking. I explained to Harry that if Alice gave me this warning, I'd warn him in turn that his test wasn't going to go well and he should put it off. Then I hit "send".
My e-mail thus taken care of, I went to locate Emmett and get another fighting lesson.
* * *
Emmett started getting cocky after a couple of hours of flinging me into treetops and making Bella-shaped impressions in the ground, so I quit reining in my strength. I was trying not to depend on it, since it wouldn't stay with me, but it was available for the time being as a tool to wipe Emmett's smirk off his face. I grabbed him and, holding him too tightly for him to escape, stuck him into the dirt headfirst, all the way up to his knees. This made a spying Alice snicker.
Emmett lost no time in wriggling his way out of the ground, but he was absolutely covered in soil and looked perturbed. "I'm a newborn," I reminded him sweetly.
"Arm-wrestle him!" cried Alice. "I'll get you a rock to use as a table, hang on!" She zipped off into the woods and came back with a boulder four times her size. "Here!"
"What's the point? I'll win," I said.
"Will not," challenged Emmett.
"Emmett, that's ridiculous. I've been a vampire for less than two months. I'm sure you'll be able to beat me at any contest of strength you care to name this time next year, but now?"
"Come on," he goaded, getting into arm-wrestling position with his elbow on the rock. I rolled my eyes and clasped hands. Alice counted down, and Emmett started pushing.
I could definitely tell that he was pushing - he probably could have shoved his arm shoulder-deep through solid granite with the force he applied. But my arm didn't move. It wasn't hard to keep it still. Vampire muscles didn't react to physical challenges in the same way. While there were things too heavy for us to pick up, attempting to lift them, or slightly lighter objects, did not cause strain or any sort of fatigue. So I sat there, looking innocently at Emmett, as he gritted his teeth and pushed harder. My arm still didn't move.
We'd collected more spectators; an amused Edward had come to the yard, presumably following someone's thoughts, and Rosalie and Jasper were looking out two windows of the house. Ilario peered out a window and then left the house to watch from a better vantage point. "Let me know when you're ready for me to break this rock with your forearm," I told Emmett mildly.
He pushed even harder, but I compensated automatically. "Rrr," he said.
"This isn't nearly as fun as sparring," I complained. "Do you really want to sit here all day? Just tell me when you're done, and then I'll win. But since you wanted to do
this, I'd hate to deprive you of your fun before you say so... not that I can tell what you see in this activity..." I tilted my head, looking curiously at our joined hands as though trying to figure out what might be interesting about them.
Edward laughed, and Alice tittered. I was being a little mean, obliging Emmett to say he wanted to lose before allowing the contest to end, but the look on his face was so much fun. I blinked at him patiently.
Suddenly, Emmett grinned and let his arm go limp all at once. Unprepared, my arm slammed forward and drove his into the rock, but on his terms. I laughed with everyone else.
"Want to try me?" Ilario asked me.
I had not spoken to Ilario at all since he'd turned, and only a handful of sentences before that. I'd left right after he'd been injected, and stopped in Norway only briefly to drop off his sister - who monopolized his time - before jumping into the ocean and swimming to Ireland.
"Hm," I said. "You're newer than I am - how much does that matter?"
Jasper, resident newborn expert, opened his window and hopped out, falling twenty feet and landing neatly. "Very little," he said. "But it's not nothing. Either of you could win, but I'd bet on Ilario."
Ilario was a tall, skinny guy, not particularly burly, but I hadn't brought special physical prowess into my vampire life either. Unlike with Emmett, who I'd known I could beat, I was honestly curious about the outcome. "Sure," I said. "The rock is a little beat up on this side..." I turned it over, pressing it into the ground so it wouldn't wobble, and put my arm in place.
Ilario walked up, eyeing my arm appraisingly, and took hold of my hand. Alice counted again.
The difference was immediately obvious, and my arm twitched backwards half a centimeter before I brought more power to bear and held my own. Ilario looked very focused and calm as he pushed my hand.
I decided to just go all out, and forced my arm to push as hard as it physically could. Ilario matched me, and then some; my arm leaned, bit by bit, towards the rock. Clearly he was stronger than I was, but that didn't necessarily mean he'd win... I relaxed my arm for a fraction of a second, and it shot towards the rock, but Ilario reduced the strength of his attack in response, and just before my knuckles hit stone, I pushed back with maximum power and had our arms perpendicular to the rock before he reacted and stopped me cold. It was back to a near-stalemate in his favor.
"Not going to fall for that again," laughed Ilario, good-naturedly.
"No?" I didn't have any more tricks, and I sighed as he forced my arm down to the rock, millimeter by millimeter. I didn't let go like Emmett had, and so the back of my hand just brushed the boulder very lightly, and then he'd won.
"Congratulations," I said; he extracted his hand and I swept a little rock dust off of mine. Jasper nodded to himself and Emmett looked pleased.
* * *
Other than the arm-wrestling, my week of downtime in Norway was pleasantly uneventful. I got to know Ilario, who was a pleasant fellow, very careful and deliberate in his choices and protective of Gianna. I spent a lot of time with Edward in our cottage, dined exclusively on killer whale, and got to be conversationally fluent in Italian. I explored the countryside around our house, sometimes with Edward or other family, sometimes all by myself.
Harry e-mailed; I opened the message nervously, worried that Alice had missed the tussle I would have to provoke with Ilario in response to a tragic failure. But Harry had successfully gotten within ten feet of a hiker, with Carmen along to check his movements, and not done the man any harm. He thanked me for my help. In a P.S. at the end of the message, he apologized for having acted so afraid of me; via e-mail no one seemed like a person to him, and so I didn't stand out as scarily in the remote medium.
I kept abreast of the goings-on in La Push. Rachel was nervous about what would happen when school started up again for the Makah who Victor had found. She didn't think that the boy would hold up well without his imprint. Claire, too, would eventually have to return to the Makah reservation; her parents, while moderately neglectful, were not complete absentees. They'd expect Emily to return her charge eventually, and then Quil would be alone. For her own part, with no way to hand off Alpha responsibilities to someone else, Rachel was arranging with her school to do everything long-distance come autumn. She might need to go to Spokane to sit exams at the end of each semester, but could otherwise expect to keep up while based in La Push.
I found occasion to ask Carlisle what evidence beyond Maggie he had for Siobhan's witchcraft. It wasn't impressive at all. In fact, that was the strongest example he had. Every other case gave Siobhan lots of time to lay complex groundwork. I announced that I was in Siobhan's camp as far as the nature of her talent: she just planned well. Until she and Eleazar were in a room together and he said otherwise, or she pulled off something more impressive than getting Liam to put up with a new covenmate, there was no reason to consider her a witch. Carlisle smiled agreeably and said that this was fine, which frustrated me, but didn't seem worth having a long argument over; I went and watched Esme pour cement in the basement instead.
After a week at home, as specified, I was ready to go to South America and hunt for half-vampires. I informed Edward of this, and he happily booked us tickets. A few hours later, we were flying over the Atlantic again, hoping to find out if our potential child was mythical or possible.
* * *
"I confess I have no idea how to go about looking for half-vampires," I told Edward, in Portuguese, as we walked away from the airport. I'd spent the trip studying the language, since we had no textbooks handy on any other tongues that the obscure tribes we could wind up talking to might use. Using translators would be ill-advised, given the sensitive nature of our search, but we could hire one to teach us a few words without explaining what they were for and use them to elicit images in people's minds that Edward could examine.
"I don't have much experience with it either," he replied in the same language. "That's why we landed in Manaus instead of Rio. I thought we could start by finding the Amazon coven and asking them if they know anything. Humans who believe in vampires might not want to talk to you and me, although if we dead-end with the Amazons we could try coming back with Gianna and getting her to ask for us."
"Oh, that makes sense. Tell me about the coven?" I invited.
The Amazons were three women, all unmated, who formed an unusually close coven and were rarely seen apart. Zafrina, the leader, was an illusionist. Though limited to vision and unable to affect other senses, she was still very powerful, and could compose entire scenes to supplant whatever input one's eyes would normally supply. Edward expected me to be immune to this talent. The other two, Senna and Kachiri, were not witches. All three of them were on the order of five hundred years old, as they reckoned it. They'd been turned separately, departed from their creators separately after maturing, and then found each other a few years later.
While they were not the only vampires in South America by a long shot, or even in Brazil, they did have more or less undisputed run of the Amazon River and its environs. Edward assured me, though, that Zafrina was sufficiently confident in her ability to turn a fight to her advantage that they could afford not to attack intruders on sight, even unexpected ones. (They did not hold with modern technology, and could not have been called ahead of time.) They'd recognize him and be willing to be introduced to me, and if they couldn't or wouldn't help, they'd let us leave peacefully.
The rainforest was not a location notable for its transportational infrastructure, so we were on foot, with a modest amount of luggage carried in backpacks and wrapped in plastic to keep the rain off it. The constant rain had the effect of making it very difficult to track by scent. We could smell things that had been nearby recently, but figuring out where the coven had been and which direction they'd gone since was near-impossible.
* * *
It took us two very scenic and damp days before we finally found them, during which time I improved my Portuguese considerably and learned to ident
ify a wide variety of native wildlife. I also ate a jaguar, which was okay. When we located the three women, they were in the middle of eating. Edward caught the scent first, and warned me to hold my breath; I was still untested with regards to the smell of fresh human blood. He didn't look terribly comfortable himself, either, and quit breathing once he had the direction; he signed, to avoid using up air, that he was pretty sure that the blood was from the Amazons' prey.
The humans in question were all dead by the time we got there. Each of the three Amazons appeared to have bagged one of her own - by their outfits, I thought they might have been loggers or something like that. The coven, for their part, were all dressed entirely in hide and leather, just vests and pants. They had elongated limbs and features, like average people as seen in a funhouse mirror - elegant tall faces, willowy limbs and digits. All of them had braided black hair past their waists and a slightly beige hue to their pale skin.
One of the women lifted her head from the throat of her quarry to look at us, and I was surprised by the fact that I did not feel physically queasy. Apparently that was a sensation vampires did not experience, because the dead men were one of the most disturbing things I'd personally laid eyes on. Harry Clearwater's mangled body was in the same ballpark. Actually, he'd been torn up worse, whereas these men were missing most of their necks but otherwise intact. But Harry was walking around healthy as a horse, and the loggers never would again. I found it unhelpful to speculate that they had been killing endangered species. Endangered species, however photogenic, did not think. Their deaths did not warrant vengeance. Even if they did, that had not been the motive.