by Alicorn
"...Hello," said Harry.
"Harry, is that you?" demanded Charlie. "What are you doing here? What's up with your face? Billy and your wife have been giving me the runaround - and who's this?" He gave me a closer look, and I held very still, trying to avoid projecting any mannerisms that would make me look familiar. "Are... you..."
"Charlie," said Harry, momentarily distracting my father from his attempt at figuring out what was going on with me. "Please trust me. It's not good for you to be here. Please go home, go to bed, and wake up and think of it like a dream."
"Hell no," said Charlie, and a little candle-flame of hope in the land of metaphors winked out. "I could have let it go if you disappeared for a week and wouldn't explain, but Harry, I haven't gotten a verifiable story about where you've gotten to since July! Billy and Sue contradict each other, they contradict themselves, you're always sick or visiting relatives or running some mighty long errands, and I just don't buy it for nearly two months straight, my friend. And Sue hasn't let me drop by and check in on her for the last couple of days either. Her kids chased me off when I tried last night - I swear Leah looked like she might bite my head off."
"Charlie, I'm fine," said Harry. "I'm completely fine. And that's all you need to know, and it is very important that that be all you know, and I think you should go home and go to bed now."
"Not that simple anymore," Charlie said. "I have co-workers. Sometimes I mention stuff to them. I told 'em I couldn't get ahold of you, end of July. Came up again in conversation last week. I was willing to trust Billy and Sue pretty far, but they're not the other cops' friends. And cops start wondering what's going on when somebody goes missing that long and his wife and a friend of the family are running interference. This is me wandering around every place you might be hiding at an ungodly hour of the morning so on Monday, Rick doesn't ask me "hey, did your friend Harry turn up yet" and I have to say "nope" and he has to launch an investigation."
I failed to restrain a curse word.
Charlie looked at me again.
"Young lady," he said, and my still heart sank, "I don't care what freaky stuff you've gotten into - keep a civil tongue in your head."
* * *
"And you got here how?" Charlie asked me, about an hour and a half later.
"I flew," I said.
"You can fly, too?!"
"On an airplane," I said. "Are you absolutelysure you aren't being followed or tracked at all? You haven't noticed any weird, pale people hanging around, there haven't been any unexplained disappearances in a radius of a hundred miles besides Harry...?"
"Not that I've noticed," muttered Charlie. I thought he might be disappointed that I couldn't fly. "But if it's a... you seriously call yourselves "vampires"?"
"That's the English term, yes, for immortal creatures that drink blood," I sighed. I'd been explaining Things You May Not Have Known About The World 101 to Charlie since it had become clear that his cooperation would be necessary to keep the secret from exploding any farther beyond its current straining boundaries. He was so uncomfortable with the concept that I thought if only he'd stumbled across something he shouldn't have seen five or six weeks ago, he'd have blocked it all out of his mind and done the cover-up on request without needing to know details. As it was, the runaround he'd gotten was not letting him feel satisfied with partial explanations.
"If a vampire's following me, I wouldn't necessarily have noticed," Charlie said.
"There's nobody else within a couple of miles, anyway," said Harry quietly. The edge of the inhabited part of the reservation was four miles away from the shack, and Harry's range seemed to be about three miles, irrespective of whether he knew the people he was sensing or not. The shack itself had unclear origins but had been a haunt of Harry's since he'd been a kid; Charlie had been there once before, when Harry had been trying to generate interest in repairing it for some purpose or other that neither of them recalled.
"So you weren't followed here," I said, "at least not closely. That's good. I might have been overcautious; goodness only knows how many people the Volturi would like to have an eye on, but they've only got so much staff to spread around. But Dad, that doesn't mean you can talk about this to anybody. Not anybody except Quileutes, they're okay, and certain individuals they've had no choice but to tell. If enough people find out, it will cause a big enough stir that the Volturi will definitely find out, and definitely intervene."
Charlie nodded slowly. "What about Sue?" he asked finally. "Is she all right?"
I bit my lip as Harry struggled through an explanation. Charlie's expression grew darker as he heard the story of her pregnancy, the wolves' split, and Sue's refusal to let me so much as ask Edward how to get human blood. "Would it help at all if I talked to her?" he asked quietly.
"I'm going to try, when she's woken up later this morning," Harry said. "I only got here a few hours ago. If I can't, you're welcome to give it a shot - but I don't think she's going to budge."
"Wouldn't surprise me," said Charlie, looking at the ceiling. It was hard for me to guess how much he could make out in the little moonlight filtering in through the windows. My night vision wasn't something I'd ever written about extensively before turning.
"You look tired," I said.
"A bit," he admitted. "I have tomorrow off, though, so it won't do me so much harm to pull an all-nighter."
"You have to sleep, Dad. You're not a vampire," I said. "Yet."
"Oh-ho-ho no, Bells," he said. "That's - not - no."
"It'd be safer," I said. "In a wide variety of ways."
Charlie shook his head. "Bells, I know you don't take after me this way, but I put down roots. I can't disappear from my life."
"Okay, well - think about it," I said. "Now that you know and you can't un-know... offer's on the table. Say the word and I'll do it."
"Not likely, Bells."
"I guess I can just send you the un-photoshopped versions of my wedding photos," I sighed.
"That," Charlie said, "will be good enough for me."
* * *
Harry, Charlie, another attempt by me, a plea from Rachel, Leah's badgering, and Seth's puppy eyes did nothing to persuade Sue on any count.
However, the fact that she could no longer threaten to tell Charlie on me meant that I didn't have to wait for her to agree to anything -
Which meant that I was pacing around in her backyard arguing with myself about whether to go against her wishes or not.
An important consideration that I was wrestling with was how much of my desire to call Edward and get him to come was just that. Honestly, Idid hate keeping secrets from him. It didn't feel right. The fact that Charlie didn't seem to be under surveillance wasn't making it feel any more urgent. I hated being away from Edward for more than a few hours at a time.
In an attempt to separate out what of my feelings was about Edward and what was aboutgetting Sue medical help, I contemplated calling Carlisle instead. Carlisle had more medical expertise. If I told him what was going on, he'd probably take the time off work and show up and help Sue. He couldn't read her mind and find an argument that would convince her to accept what she most needed, but he was a charismatic and pleasant enough person that he might have a shot at it anyway. I ignored for the purposes of the thought experiment the fact that Edward could read Carlisle's mind, and therefore bringing Carlisle into the picture would be two people learning about the wolves and the Clearwaters' predicament, not just one.
I found, predictably enough, that I was less enthusiastic about calling Carlisle. Or, when I tried another substitution, Rosalie. I just wasn't as keen on hauling them into the situation. Partly, I felt less entitled to their time - while they'd really be coming for Sue, not me, the entire issue was ultimately my own fault since I'd activated the wolf who'd mauled the man I'd had to turn who'd knocked up his wife with a dangerous baby.
I decided that was silly, disregarded it, and identified the other reason I didn't feel much like phoning them besides their m
ere non-Edwardness. If I had to bring in someone other than my very own Edward, then I wasn't personally handling the situation. It wasn't just that I wasn't entitled to ask them for help. If I told them I felt that way they - well, Carlisle at least, perhaps not Rosalie - would think I was being silly and that of course I could ask for whatever I needed.
Edward, on the other hand, felt and acted like almost an extension of myself. I didn't even think he'd dispute the description. If I got Edward to help me with something, it still felt like I had accomplished the something - I had this impression about my ability to keep my whereabouts secret even though he was covering my continent-hopping.
With all of this sifted out, I came to the conclusion that I didn't actually think it was important to force medical interventions on Sue that she wouldn't accept when offered. It was also beginning to look like she was not capable of being convinced. I'd known that earlier, really, or I would have sided with Becky and I would have found some way to physically prevent Sue from telling Charlie anything when threatened. (For instance, it would not have been at all difficult to take away her phone, and her kids had already started chasing him off from attempting to visit her in person.) So, no Edward. Or at least no physical presence of Edward.
I called him again.
* * *
Chapter 24: Delivery
Sue got worse.
Every day, she was visibly more pregnant, and not just to vampire eyes. I hung around in Harry's shack when she drank her human blood, as did Harry. As I'd suspected, werewolf blood was not palatable to her revised sense of taste; she was able to stand the blood of inactive carriers of the gene, like Billy, but preferred typical humans' offerings. Charlie was the first donor, stuck and inexpertly drained by a wolf in Rachel's pack who'd spent a few months in nursing school before droppping out. Someone in Rachel's pack would come let us know when it was all safely consumed and we could be in the room again, but there wasn't much to be done.
Sue didn't move around much. She was getting thinner and spindlier everywhere but her belly, which became huge - too huge. She was constantly hungry. Mostly she wanted eggs, but we made her eat anything that we thought might help - spinach, assorted meat, anything loaded up with starch and sugar for quick cheap energy. She was usually hungry, so it wasn't too hard to make her eat. Between meals, she drank a constant stream of juice, and occasionally puked.
The baby started breaking her ribs. It was hard to tell, without any fancy medical equipment or knowhow, whether any given snap was a new rib or an already broken rib fractured in a new place; we stopped counting, after a while.
She decided to name the baby "Cody".
Since she was quite confident that it was a boy, she let Harry unilaterally pick a backup girls' name, which he did with some obvious mixed feelings; he settled on "Maya". I commented that they sure liked names with four letters, and he nodded, but his mind was entirely somewhere else.
It should have been a cute and touching thing to learn that, yes, Harry really was supposed to be with his wife forever - but "forever" was looking to be cut short. Sue sometimes just outright lost consciousness. It was only for a few minutes at a time, but it never failed to send Harry into a panic. Even when she was awake or in a normal sleep, he wasn't in good shape. He paced the house. He gingerly held Sue's hand, terrified of injuring her and giving her overtaxed body more to keep up with. He made appeals to every non-wolf on the reservation who Rachel couldn't convince to donate blood, succeeding only once but redoubling his efforts every time she passed out again or made a face at a bowl of animal blood.
There wasn't really much for me to do to help her. I told Harry absolutely everything that Nahuel and Huilen had told me, and had no further expertise available. Sue was adamant that I not go home - if baby Cody-or-Maya was going to chew its way out of its shell, it might serve to have a vampire present to get that part over and done with faster so Sue could get started turning. Wolves' teeth and claws were sharp enough to cut vampire skin, and could probably break the shell, but they didn't have the necessary dexterity in that form to do it carefully.
I searched high and low in the family home in Forks, and eventually did find a kit with medical equipment. I didn't recognize most of it, but found a few syringes that looked like the ones Ilario had been turned with. I took them and then had nothing useful to do until the baby of doom decided to come along. Mostly I loitered, wished Edward were there, and let Seth distract himself from his mother's plight by telling me all the pack drama.
"Sam's in Becky's pack now, so I think Leah's feeling a little better about being a wolf," he said one afternoon. We were wandering along the beach. "He took longer to decide than most of us, but I think maybe he was just being nice to Leah, going with Becky." I hadn't spoken to Becky or anyone in her pack since arriving. They were sticking to the half of the reservation that didn't contain the Clearwater house, having come to a very uneasy agreement about letting Cody/Maya live given that he or she wasn't doomed to be hellspawn.
"Well, I wouldn't expect his imprinting on Emily to make him hate Leah," I said. "Heck, Becky split the entire pack by countering the Alpha voice over a disagreement with Rachel and I don't think they hate each other. Regular love isn't aspowerful as the magic kind, but it's something."
"I don't think Sam does hate her, but Leah feels like it," said Seth.
"Wouldn't all the mindreading you guys get up to simplify this question rather a lot?"
"There's a lot of us. It's a little easier now that there's only half as many, but there's a lot to keep track of, and lots of echoes. Leah didn't like to listen to Sam at all, so she didn't try to check whether he hated her, I guess."
"How do you feel about imprinting?" I asked him. "It's, what, five of the guys who have done it now?"
"Yeah," Seth said. "I don't think I want it. It seems to mess stuff up."
"Jared's didn't," I pointed out, naming the boy who'd fallen for a classmate with a preexisting crush on him.
"No, his didn't," acknowledged Seth. "But all the others did at least a little. Sam was just worst."
"What about the guy who fell for the girl from Forks?" I asked. "What'd that do? I didn't get a lot of details."
"Her dad is kind of racist," said Seth. "He doesn't like that she's dating him because he's not white, and she can't tell him why she's doing it, so he thinks it's to annoy him."
"Yikes. I hope her boyfriend can keep from ripping her dad's head off."
"It's been close, once," Seth said seriously. "It's really hard for some of us to keep our cool. We're supposed to protect human life, that's the point of us, but then we get all this temper."
"Is it getting easier over time?" I asked.
"Yeah," Seth said, "and we can all heal really well and Rachel's been smart about making sure that when we're having a hard day we're away from people who aren't in the pack. I'm handling it okay, better than some people."
I nodded. "You seem pretty mellow in general. You can even stand being around me and the scent of evil, minty flowers."
"It's good that I can, because now my dad's a vampire too and my mom's... going to be," said Seth, troubled again. The point of this walk had been to distract him...
"I'm hoping I can eventually convince my dad to turn," I said, instead of speculating as to how a half-vampire would smell to a werewolf.
"How come?" asked Seth.
"Well, he can't be one of you guys, and he can't be a half-vampire, and humans - regular ones - are -" Bringing up human mortality seemed like abad conversational topic to the kid with the dying mom, for all that she might have a better chance of escaping it than my less-dramatically withering parents. "Just not as awesome."
"I do like most things about being a wolf," said Seth philosophically, and then he added, "Want to race?"
He phased, and we raced up the deserted beach - I won by a hair. Rachel was faster than me, but also faster than most wolves.
When I next stopped by to check on Sue, she was worse.
* * *
"How about this idea," I said to Sue, after I'd been kicking about the reservation for a little over a week.
"If it involves calling your husband, the answer is no," Sue said sharply.
"It doesn't," I said. "Or doesn't have to, anyway. But Nahuel was born not just healthy, he wasambulatory - he lived for three whole days without any help or care at all in the middle of the jungle and was perfectly unharmed when Huilen was able to move around again. You're out of human blood donors who can safely give you more to drink, you're passing out all the time, you have goodness knows how many broken ribs - if it gets your spine or manages to detach the placenta, he could wind up killing himself."
"I'm listening," said Sue guardedly.
"C-section," I said. "One big cut, pull the baby out shell and all, and then start turning you because even if you magically stopped being pregnant right now I'm not sure how you'd hold up long term, as weak as you've gotten. I don't have the resources to put you in a coma, but that won't make turning ineffective, just more unpleasant. Me or Harry can break the shell - holding breaths as necessary with plenty of warning, instead of maybe being surprised by it chewing its way out and making the room smell like your blood while we're inhaling. The baby will be premature, but it should be okay."
"I've been pregnant for three weeks now," Sue said, "out of a pregnancy that's supposed to last a month. That's not just a little bit premature, that's like inducing labor in the second trimester."
"At the end of the second trimester, and - we don't know how these things decide that it's time to start gnawing on their moms," I said. "We doknow that Nahuel was not just a little more advanced than a human infant when he was born. We do know that your midsection is big enough to hold a pretty good-sized baby, or two - we aren't talking about extracting something two inches long without well-defined internal organs. Since there's plenty of care available for your baby, if it turns out to need it - it doesn't have to find its own food in the middle of nowhere or anything - I honestly think that it would be safer for both of you to operate now rather than deliver it in an emergency later."