by Alicorn
"That's been my impression, but Gianna's entitled to her own."
Emmett and Rosalie were moving off now that Edward and I were there to chaperone. Maggie flopped onto her back, as though about to make an angel impression in the rock. (I decided to see later if that was something I could do practically or if it would be inefficient.) "I don't know what to do!" she wailed. "I can't just not have her, that's not okay at all."
"You might want to ask Alice for help," I suggested. "Edward needed instructions on how to approach me, and that worked out. But even if she gives you guidelines and you follow them all perfectly, I can't guarantee you that Gianna will be interested."
"Well, where's Alice, then?" asked Maggie gamely.
"Back at the house, now," said Edward. "She left Jasper and Ilario to talk by themselves."
Maggie ran towards the house, but Edward got in her way. "Gianna hasn't made up her mind yet," he said. "I wouldn't advise you to show up where she is until that's changed. Alice is on her way here."
Maggie pouted, but stomped her way back to the edge of the fjord to wait for Alice. The little spiky-haired vampire arrived a few seconds later, and said, "So, I don't believe we've been properly introduced! I'm Alice, and it's nice to meet you, Maggie."
"Nice to meet you too," said Maggie. "What do I have to do?"
"First of all," said Alice, "don't eat anybody. Gianna is quite forgiving, but that also means she'll forgive Bella if you eat someone and Bella kills you, and then where would you be?"
"...Dead, presumably," said Maggie, flicking her eyes in my direction. I actually doubted I could beat Maggie in a one-on-one fight to the death, since she was a lot older and more experienced than I was and that could overwhelm the advantage of newborn strength, but of course I wouldn't be alone if it came to that.
"Right, and then that wouldn't be at all conducive to you and Gianna living happily ever after," said Alice reasonably. "So don't eat anybody. And you really need to work on the thing where you talk about or to Gianna like she's not a person. You've got way more leeway than Edward had when he was trying to court Bella, but it's not infinite. Don't act or talk like Bella owns Gianna. Don't act like the only obstacles to you carrying Gianna over the horizon to have your way with her are Bella or Ilario or any of the rest of us - what Gianna wants has to matter to you too. Get on Ilario's good side if you can or at least make a sincere effort. Gianna cares what he thinks, and he's only going to stay unsettled by the revelation he got today for a few more hours, tops."
Maggie hadn't been present for Gianna's explanation of how her brother had reacted, so I had to explain that when the redheaded vampire protested confusion. Then Alice picked up again with more tips.
"You will have to be very careful with her upon being actually allowed to touch her," Alice said. "You haven't had to handle any creature with a heartbeat intending to let it live before, at least since you turned. But you know they're very easy to hurt. Problem is, it actually matters - to you, even - if you hurt Gianna. She's fragile. Don't break her."
"Of course I'd be careful!" cried Maggie.
"In more than half the futures where she decides to give you a chance, she winds up with a broken bone or worse inside a week," said Alice flatly. "In ninety percent of futures where you injure her enough that she bleeds, you kill her." Maggie's jaw dropped. "This isn't a simple matter, Maggie," Alice continued relentlessly. "You can never stop being careful. You have to always, always pay very close attention and exercise very careful control. One slip is enough to damage her. Two in close succession is enough to kill her at your own hands."
Maggie whined. "I don't want to hurt her," she whispered.
"Then you have to be careful, constantly, without exception," said Alice. "If you want to pet her hair, you have to make sure you don't crush her skull. If you want to hold her hand, you have to make sure you don't shatter her knuckles. Et cetera. Even if you don't get to the point of injury, you can cause her pain very easily, so it's not like handling a flower or a piece of paper or something that will be fine as long as you don't cause any visible damage. You cannot, in a burst of affection, hug her as tight as you possibly can."
Maggie hung her head. "I understand."
"Future's solidifying a bit in favor of her being okay," said Alice. "Not all the way, though. It should go without saying that if you seriously hurt Gianna, Ilario will do his best to kill you and he will have help."
"Well, and he should, if I hurt her!" exclaimed Maggie. "I won't I won't I won't I won't."
"That's better," said Alice, and Maggie brightened a little. "I think that's enough don'ts. She's going to like it when you sing," Alice supplied with a smug little grin.
Maggie beamed. "I can sing. I can sing all the time if she wants. I know enough songs to fill up a whole year without repeating myself."
"And I foresee cuteness if you let her teach you Italian," Alice said.
Maggie nodded eagerly, waiting for more, but that was apparently it for common threads among Alice's happy visions; the tiny psychic shrugged.
"You can't leave with her," I told Maggie. "If Gianna says she wants you around, Esme's the person to ask about rooming arrangements."
Maggie looked desperately at Alice. "What's she going to say?" she squeaked. "I didn't know any of this before, I just looked at her and - and my brain was full of exclamation points. I didn't even know what was going on, let alone what to do about it. I don't think I made a very good first impression. Is she going to want me to go away forever? I don't know if I can!" She wrung her hands. "What if she says I have to go away and I can't even do that and then Ilario kills me and then later she's a vampire and it turns out that she can't ever love anybody but me? Then she'd be alone forever and she'd be sad!"
"And you'd be dead," I added helpfully.
"That too!" said Maggie. "But I don't know how I could just go home to Ireland when she's - she'sright there."
"Edward, any tips?" I asked, glancing at my husband.
"Well, it took me longer to realize what I was dealing with than it's taken Maggie," he chuckled softly, "and I had a sister to send to intercede with you on my behalf."
"But if you know anything that could help," Maggie pleaded. "I can't think of anything more important than making this work."
He pursed his lips. "When I've had to be away from you," he said, addressing his statement to me but obviously intending that Maggie hear, "what helped me tolerate it was knowing that you were all right. I... didn't do well when I didn't know that." Alice nodded emphatically; I supposed he'd been dramatically out of sorts when I'd been kidnapped.
"I could occasionally call you and let you know Gianna's safe, even if she wants you gone," I told Maggie.
"That would be... better than not..." said Maggie unhappily, apparently reluctant to positively label any state of affairs where Gianna wanted her gone.
Alice and Edward both jerked their heads up simultaneously, and Maggie startled with a smalleep noise. "She's made up her mind," announced Alice.
* * *
Chapter 23: Sue
Gianna teaching Maggie Italian was very cute.
"How do I say, "I love you", in Italian?" Maggie asked Gianna, trying to sound innocent. Gianna was sitting on a sofa with her feet tucked under herself, using one of my textbooks to give structure to the lesson. Maggie was lounging on the floor in front of the couch, gazing up adoringly at an increasingly pink-cheeked Gianna.
Ilario, standing relatively unobtrusive guard in the corner of the room, furrowed his brow uncomfortably while Gianna stammered through the sentence. Maggie ignored him. She just grinned at Gianna and repeated the words.
Maggie was trying to get Gianna to say "you're beautiful" in Italian when I heard Carlisle's phone ringing in his office, and him answering it. Tanya's voice was on the other end. "Carlisle," she said, "Harry's gone."
I was up the stairs in a flash to listen to this conversation. "Gone?" asked Carlisle. "How did that happen?"
"We've been trusting hi
m to hunt on his own, ever since he ran into some human's trail while he was hunting with Eleazar and managed to hold his breath and run," she said. "He's been going on his own most of the time. But he's been gone for almost three days now and isn't answering his phone. We don't know what the matter is - if he's hurt someone and is ashamed to come home, or if he just decided to leave, or - what. Can Alice see?" Tanya asked.
"I'll ask her," Carlisle said, and he brushed past me in the hall to find Alice. She was located in short order, with me following, and he summarized the situation for her.
"I can see him... but not far," murmured Alice. "He's... I guess he hasn't decided something very significant about what he's going to do when he gets into Washington again. He's going south, though."
I went to the room with the computers and e-mailed Rachel.
* * *
Rachel took an hour to answer my e-mail. "If you're right about what blanks out your sister's vision, then we have to expect that he's coming here," she agreed in her reply. "I've warned Sue, and the pack. I'm not sure how well he'll do with not attacking us, even if he's been okay with humans, but we're sticking to groups of four and five for the time being and think we can probably pin him if he's hostile. Please come out here as soon as you can to help keep things under control, though. We have to sleep and if we wind up pinning him we run a risk every time we need to change guards."
I wrote back, asking if Sue had appeared to know anything about his approach; the answer was quick: "I couldn't tell, but it's possible. She refused to be accompanied by wolves as a precautionary measure and wants to go about her business normally."
I sent her another message: "I'm going to buy tickets and I'll get there by tomorrow, but Harry might arrive before me. However, he's been demonstrated safe around humans. I don't think you need to worry about Sue - it's wolves who might be a problem."
I bought tickets. During that process, there was no further substantive content from Rachel, just "see you soon". I logged off, found Edward, dragged him to our cottage, used up the hour and a half that I didn't need to make my flight on time, and then told him, "I need to leave again."
He sighed. "All right."
"Can I ask you to pretend we're going to explore Scandinavia together? I'll be the one to tell Maggie. I tested her earlier; unless she's got an amazing poker face and doesn't care as much about the truth as you say she does, I'm immune to her. I should be back in a few days, and then we can really explore Scandinavia for a little while and I'll have all the right stories to tell. And I'll be able to keep in touch by phone. So you know I'm all right."
Edward nodded. I packed, and he put some things in a suitcase too so he could go running around in parts nonlocal to give me cover. We went to the main house, and distributed the news, with all false statements that Maggie could hear carefully uttered by me and not Edward. I made it clear that I was trusting everyone to keep Maggie from taking Gianna away from the house, and no one contradicted me about the needfulness of this restriction. Then Edward and I went to the garage.
Rosalie had bought me a car, which I'd managed to have no occasion to look at since it had come to reside in our garage. It was dark green, streamlined, and sat low to the ground, but otherwise wasn't the sort of flashy vehicle screaming wealth that most of its neighbors were. However, Edward drove me to the airport in one of his cars instead, kissed me goodbye, and then drove away to explore Scandinavia - alone.
* * *
I did not enjoy my flight. Anticipating the loneliness of being without Edward made it kick in faster, apparently. I felt a moment's regret at having ever activated the wolves, or at least at having done it when I had - they'd been unharmed, in fact completely unnoticed, by the Volturi so far. If I hadn't started activating them until later, then my life would be a lot simpler at this time and nobody would have died. Of course, the nature of the threat the Volturi posed to the wolves was such that I couldn't have predicted the timing in advance, and earlier was safer for the tribe - just inconvenient for me.
I didn't bother with a car once I landed, I just ran. I'd looked at enough atlases to find a mostly unpopulated route from memory. I arrived at the reservation in the evening on Friday, where I discovered the tribe in chaos.
* * *
I could hear the barking and growling well before I saw anything, but to hear Rachel tell it, scuffles between wolves were not at all uncommon. A combination of emotions running high and reduced consequences due to fast healing meant that somebody got scratched up a bit nearly every day, and Alpha orders only did so much to counter wolf tempers. I could tell that there were more than a couple of wolves involved, but fights would vary in scope like everything else.
I was in no way prepared, when I arrived, for thewar that the wolves were waging amongst themselves.
No one seemed to be actually out to kill. There were drops of wolf blood (mercifully undesireable to me), splattered around on the dirt and vegetation and combatants, but no one had been injured badly enough to be out of commission. I did a quick count: all thirty-two of the giant pack were involved in the fracas. Before I could try to figure out who was on whose side, the wind wafted past me and carried my scent towards their battlefield.
The majority of the skirmish died down as nearly everyone stopped what they were doing to look at me. One nearby wolf lunged to snap at me but checked himself halfway through the attack - or possibly was stopped by Rachel commanding him to leave me be.
Rachel, the only entirely white wolf in a crowd of multicolored furs, shot a dark look at one of the black ones - that would be either Sam, Becky, or a wolf I couldn't recognize by coat - and walked towards me. A wolf with striking ochre fur trotted a few steps into the forest and came back with an outfit for her, from some stash of clothes they kept among the trees. Rachel stalked off behind cover with it, assumed human form, and came back into view a few moments later decently clad. She had grown a lot. I was pretty sure she cleared six feet in height, and as she'd said, she looked like she was on her way to the Olympics. And not for figure skating.
"So..." I said. "What's all this, then?"
"It's a very, very long story," Rachel said stiffly.
"I'm immortal," I said.
She laughed once, a bit sharply. "Of course. Okay, so, ballpark, how long would it take you to do some combination of running and swimming between here and Denali?"
I mentally stitched together the various maps I'd looked at and did some quick estimating. "Maybe twelve hours. It's not that densely populated a coast, and if I did it at night... cars are only faster over developed routes where there are highways."
"And you wrote me that this Tanya vamp only bothered to call your father-in-law when Mr. Clearwater had been gone for three days, right?" Rachel prodded.
"Right, that's what she said. Why?"
Rachel laughed hollowly. "Yeah, that's about what I thought. I don't think this is the first time Mr. Clearwater's been down this way."
"What?" I exclaimed. "Is somebody hurt? Did he -" Rachel shook her head, and I stopped, tilting my head.
"Don't think he ate anybody," she said. "Or if he did it wasn't anyone we know and nobody's made a fuss over the missing yet. But Mrs. Clearwater... is, uh..." Rachel gritted her teeth. "We think she's pregnant."
I was fairly dumbfounded by this. "Oh," I said.
"I mean... she looks pregnant, and she seems to think she's pregnant, and she's been eating really strangely and acting weird. But it's too fast," fretted Rachel. "Even if he'd visited back in July when you turned him it's too fast."
"It wouldn't have had to be July," I said. "A week or two ago would have done it, although you're right that his most recent departure can't be the first."
"Wait, you knew this could happen?" exclaimed Rachel.
"Half-vampires are possible, yes," I said. "Living mothers of half-vampires, as far as I know, arenot. Like you said - too fast. It doesn't slow down. The entire pregnancy lasts a month, start to finish, and if the mother lives that lo
ng she dies when it's birthing time. I have to get my father-in-law - or at least my husband - out here now, and save her while there's still a chance."
"You'll probably have to talk to Mrs. Clearwater about that," said Rachel ruefully. "She's not really cooperative."
"Explain?"
"Before we figured out she was pregnant, we all thought she was maybe sick, but she wouldn't go to a doctor - flat refused. Then we figured it out while you were still in transit and told her that you've got doctors in your family and a regular one wouldn't do because we have to be all secret-secret, but a vampire doctor would be fine - and she still flat refused. I knew she wasn't, like, a huge fan of abortion, but shereally does not want one, one bit. Maybe if you tell her it's going to kill her that'll be another story."
"I'll talk to her," I said. "What were you all fighting about?"
"Whether to force her," said Rachel quietly. "I mean, listen, we didn't know what the hell it was going to turn out to be, it could have been some unstoppable monster or even just like a newborn vampire is supposed to be when it doesn't know to expect turning, something we'd have had to kill anyway - right? And, uh, some of the others wanted to kill it whether Mrs. Clearwater liked it or not, to be safe."
She paused. "We... figured out how to split the pack. Becky seems to be Alpha of that half now. She balked when I Alpha-voiced everybody that Mrs. Clearwater's in charge of her own body, and everybody who agreed with Becky answers to her, now, not me. I can still hear Becky's thoughts and vice-versa, but the non-alphas can only hear within the... sub-pack, plus relays when me and Becky are both wolfed. Anyway, it's kind of a major issue, and we aren't very pacifistic critters at the best of times. So there's been a lot of fighting and you walked in at one of the worst times.
"I'm hoping you can get Mrs. Clearwater to see sense," she continued, "and then it'll just be like we split the pack on purpose, like we were trying to, but if you can't get her to see sense, I don't want to have to hold her down while you get your husband to do the doctoring."