by Alicorn
"Humans have twenty-three, right?" I asked, and he nodded. "Has Carlisle ever taken a vampire cell apart and looked at it?"
"We've got twenty-five pairs," Edward said. "So it makes a bizarre kind of sense. Anyway, Carlisle could guess what the other genes on the embryos' chromosomes might mean, but it would be just that - guesswork."
"I guess it's still more choice than most parents get," I sighed. Alice and Jasper left the room, the former rubbing her temple. Jasper threw a suspicious look at me over his shoulder. We'd avoided crossing paths very much since I'd added his witchcraft to those I blocked. There hadn't been another dramatic confrontation, but when we did pass each other in a hallway or have reason to exchange information, he was definitely less friendly and more willing to assume that I was acting in bad faith.
Edward frowned at his departing brother but didn't comment on that subject. "Indeed," he said instead, turning back to me and taking my hands in his. "So, my love - son or daughter?"
"Do you have a preference?" I asked, and he shook his head. "I suppose the evidence we have available suggests that a girl will probably not be venomous," I said. "That seems like a plus." I supposed I could have covered for my existing bite mark by having a son and plausibly being bitten once thereby, but I wasn't confident I could manage the concealment for that long anyway. Emmett would be suspicious if I suddenly lost interest in sparring, and that would inevitably push my sleeve up my arm unless I made obvious and equally peculiar efforts to prevent it. I really needed to figure out how to explain it. Ran into an immortal child in Sweden while not with Edward? But then what would I have done with it after receiving the bite? Found some baby brother of Nahuel's in Finland someplace, whose mother swore me to secrecy? That could work. Got into a fight with a vampire midget?
"True," he said, fortunately and maddeningly oblivious to my thought process as always. "So, a daughter, then?"
I nodded slowly. Everything was coming together very fast, and while it was still necessary and I still liked the idea, it was also intimidating. Picking a gender was much more emotionallyreal to me than being vaguely aware that strange pieces of medical equipment were being carried into the house. "I guess we should start thinking about names," I said, "since we won't have as long as human parents to think of them."
We left the room where the embryos that included our future daughter rested, walking together out of the house and into the yard. "I don't know anything about your opinions of baby names," Edward said.
"Likewise," I replied. "I feel like we should - one way or another - name her after somebody. I'm a little concerned that as the only half-vampire in a large coven of vampires she'll be... disconnected, somehow. A meaningful name might help her feel grounded. I'm making this up completely, of course; my parents picked my name out of a baby book because it sounded pretty and I haven't felt particularly un-grounded."
"It's still a place to start," Edward said. "I was named after my father. I don't remember a lot about him, but I have his name, which is something."
"I didn't know that," I said. "Okay, what was your mother's name?"
"Elizabeth," supplied Edward. "Actually, I think Isabella is a variant on the name Elizabeth, too, but the source I heard that from might not be reliable."
"So maybe another Elizabeth variation," I said. "Especially if that turns out to be right." I ran through the other names we might want to incorporate into our daughter's. "You know," I said, "it really seems like there should be a way to portmanteau "Renée" and "Esme". The vowels are so similar. But there's just no way to put them together in a way that sounds like a name and not a Pokémon."
Edward laughed. "I think it would mean a lot to Rosalie if her name were wedged in there somewhere. A middle name would do," he suggested.
"I think it'd also make sense to honor Gianna. She's helping us out in a really major way. "Annarose" for a middle name?"
"That's perfect."
We went to our cottage, and I pulled out my laptop and looked up names derived from "Elizabeth" on the Internet. There were a lot, including, as Edward had said, "Isabella". I pruned out those that were just different spellings of the base name or my own version, and the obvious nicknames like "Liz" that our daughter could plausibly choose to go by no matter what variant we landed on.
"Look," I said, smirking. "Buffy is a nickname for Elizabeth."
"I think we should rule that one out," Edward said seriously. "It could prompt the wrong sorts of guesses if people notice anything different about her."
I nodded, deleted it from the list of possibilities, and then started removing other names for increasingly minor reasons, mostly aesthetic. I removed "Libby" and its near cousins, which I sort of liked, at Edward's direction; he'd known someone who went by that name and had found her an unpleasant person. After a while, we had a short list: "Babette", "Bettina" and a few similar names, "Elspeth", "Ilsa", "Lisel" and other spellings thereof, and "Lilibeth".
"I'm tempted by Lisel," I said, "but I think I like Elspeth better. It's uncommon without being unpronounceable, nor so novel that it risks sounding much more out of place after a hundred years than it does now."
"Elspeth Annarose it is," said Edward.
* * *
Carlisle picked out a female embryo for us, and Rosalie did the honors of actually implanting it. The others were frozen. We were warned ahead of time that the rates of pregnancy for in vitro techniques were low, but the following day Gianna was absolutely certain that the first try had taken, and she made herself a large plate of eggs for breakfast. Puking began shortly afterwards.
Maggie insisted that Gianna shouldn't have to cook for herself in her condition, bought a large stack of cookbooks so she could make Gianna's food herself, and burned a few omelettes trying to get them right. At that point Ilario took over, rolling his eyes at Maggie as he expertly poached a new batch of eggs; he actually knew how to cook, having done some of it in his human days, and kept his sister supplied with whatever she wanted for her solid food while she ineffectively protested that she wasn't thatimpaired.
There was plenty of human blood in the fridge that Carlisle had purchased, too, which Gianna drank out of opaque cups with lids so she didn't have to think about it too hard. Carlisle, who was taking a lot of time off work and pretending that he was looking after a sick Esme to excuse it, fetched her these beverages and did the dishes. Maggie, Ilario, Jasper, and myself left the house for safety reasons while the scent of blood was in the air, and everyone else at least gave a wide berth.
I e-mailed Charlie and told him the whole story; Rachel got the truth too. I told Renée that I was pregnant (as of early July, moreover); I planned to take an inordinate number of baby pictures and dole them out to her at a rate that would make Elspeth appear to age normally.
After I'd reminded the wolves of my existence with this e-mail, Leah sent a conversational sort of note, sounding me out for ongoing correspondence. She was an irregular pen pal and had poor spelling, but I wrote her anyway, telling her what had my attention in a newsy sort of way and making polite inquiries about her. I was informed that Sue's turning, adjustment period, and assumption of her share of the duties of infant care had gone without significant hiccup. Cody was growing as fast as expected and was already talking in complete sentences (his first words had been "Seth, can I have a wolf ride?", which request Seth had obliged). Relations between halves of the pack were cordial, but sadly distant.
Gianna did not lack for attention during the ensuing weeks. Maggie fussed over her, obsessed; she rearranged her hair several times a day for lack of much else helpful to do, and sang constantly. Ilario mostly stood in the corner of Gianna's room, looking stoic, when he wasn't cooking something. Edward and I, plus Rosalie, were mostly interested for Elspeth's sake rather than in Gianna herself, who didn't lack for caretakers anyway. This still had us hovering around the bed where she spent most of her time resting, trying to make sure she had everything she needed.
The one problem it turned o
ut we were least prepared to handle was Gianna's fluctuating temperature. It had never occurred to me to read anything into it when Sue instructed her children to hug her; now I wondered if she'd been using them as sources of warmth. When Gianna felt too warm - which did happen, although less often - Maggie could snuggle up to her and that worked fine. When she was cold, though, turning up the heater or giving her blankets worked too slowly for comfort. Electric blankets were purchased, but Gianna seemed to find them vaguely unsatisfying. Eventually we settled for keeping the house warmer all the time, and Maggie's cuddling efforts were called on more frequently.
All told, Gianna held up better under Elspeth than Sue had under Cody. Probably, this was because twenty-three was a more convenient age at which to be violently pregnant than forty-two. In spite of that favorable comparison, and Gianna's better care, Elspeth started doing damage a couple of weeks in. Several ribs were casualties, and Gianna went on painkillers - taping them up, I learned, was not actually a treatment for them, which made me feel better about Sue's neglected fractures. Gianna did not lose consciousness except when properly sleeping.
Without giving this comparison away, though, I could only do so much to soothe Maggie and Ilario. Both were in states of constant worry by the end of the first week and wanted Elspeth's birthday to be as early as possible. They were agreed that far, but could not so readily come to an agreement on who was to turn her, each preferring to do that task themselves.
Gianna was prevailed upon to settle their argument - which consisted mostly of Maggie gesturing wildly and ranting (half in Gaelic) while Ilario regarded her impassively and occasionally uttered a monosyllabic denial. It was an odd role for Gianna to have fallen into, since she hated confrontation and would obviously have rathered it if Maggie and Ilario invariably agreed on everything. Still, she ultimately came up with a compromise they both accepted - Ilario would administer the venom, but it would be Maggie's.
We planned to deliver Elspeth on October twenty-first, if nothing required us to operate earlier. It was exactly three weeks after the implantation date, when I knew and everyone else suspected that this would be safe enough for Gianna and Elspeth both. I suggested the tooth-ripping-out plan so no one had to risk tasting Gianna's blood, and volunteered a canine of my own which Edward could use to open the shell. He was leery of trying to do delicate surgery while distracted by my discomfort, though, and Rosalie readily offered to loan a tooth in my place. My role would instead be to lift Elspeth out.
On October thirteenth, Edward remarked that my birthday had been a month prior, and I hadn't mentioned anything about it. He asked if I was just not counting birthdays anymore. I'd been in La Push on the thirteenth of September - but in all the excitement even Charlie had forgotten the significance of the day, and he (and my permanently scatterbrained mother) had both sent me belated e-mails of well wishes. I'd noted the date when it had passed, but not seen fit to announce it to anyone. "What's the point of counting them?" I said. "So I'm chronologically eighteen now - but I'm going to be physically seventeen for all time, and I'll use mostly forged documents to demonstrate my legal status anyway, and I no longer find birthday cake appetizing."
"That was my guess," he said. "No presents, either?"
"You can get me presents if you want, but there's no need to use my birthday as an excuse," I replied. I smiled. "Or as a restriction."
"So acknowledged," he laughed. "I've been thinking we'll need to celebrate birthdays and half-birthdays for Elspeth, while she's growing still - it still won't be as many as most people get, over the course of a childhood, but..."
I nodded. Elspeth had become the primary topic of conversation between Edward and me; soon we would be parents. If everything went according to plan.
In the next room over, Gianna failed to keep her juice down.
* * *
A little over a week before Elspeth's artificial due date, Tanya called Carlisle again.
I wasn't near enough to hear the call on this occasion - I was with Edward in our cottage - but the subsequent morning I heard the news. Laurent had been gone for seventeen days - more than double his previous record excursion length. He wasn't answering his phone, hadn't been for the past week, hadn't called to check in with Irina once in that time. While the very fact that he didn't bring Irina on his trips meant that he didn't want to be witnessed partaking of his unethical food, or doing whatever else it was that made him take so long, she was out of her mind with worry and wanted to prevail on Alice again.
When Carlisle had passed on the message, though, Alice had come up completely blank.
"No," she said when I asked her about it, "not like you - it's subtly different."
"What are the different kinds of blank you can get?" I asked.
"There's four," Alice said. "There's you, there's Elspeth, there's Gianna-while-pregnant-with-Elspeth, and there's Laurent - all different. Your future looks like Swiss cheese. Sometimes it veers off into patches I can see, sometimes when you're in the middle of a hole I can't see anything about you, but a lot of your futures are normally visible. Elspeth per se is just not there. I can't see her at all and that casts shadows on everything she affects, so I can only see the big obvious regularities that she can't change. Gianna's mostly in a shadow like that, but I can see around Elspeth in a limited way and get possible futures of Gianna's that don't directly involve Elspeth. But it gives me a killer headache to try, so I've been doing it only when Maggie or Ilario badgers me into checking that I can still see Gianna alive in some futures. And Laurent is..." Alice bit her lip. "He's not there to see. It's not like trying to look for someone invisible like Elspeth, because he doesn't cast any shadows. It's like trying to look for a person who doesn't exist in the first place. I think he's dead."
Irina had heard this suspicion before I had, of course - "How's Irina taken it?" I asked Alice quietly.
The little vampire shook her head. "I can't even imagine what she's going through. She's insane with grief, of course, but she's still got a sliver of hope that Laurent isn't really dead and something else is interfering with my vision. She does have a point that a lot of things seem to be foiling me lately."
"Have you tried looking for people who turned out to be dead before?" I asked.
"Several times," Alice replied. "They were all humans, though, so... But I still think that Laurent's somehow died."
"What exactly does it take to kill a vampire?" I asked, pacing. "Is it the sort of thing that could remotely happen by accident?"
"Not likely," said Alice. "Possible, but not at alllikely - he'd have to be caught in a very serious explosion, to be unable to escape or put himself back together."
"Has anything like that happened in a plausible radius of Denali?"
"He's been gone long enough that "plausible radius" means "anywhere on the globe"," Alice pointed out. "If he was in Gaza and got in the way of a missile, or near that volcano in El Salvador, for instance, and he wasn't paying enough attention to get to safety, he could have been killed that way. Or taken apart thoroughly enough that he's still incapacitated, but then I'd expect to see him put back together and going home."
"But you don't think that's what happened."
Alice shook her head. "It's way more likely that he got into a fight with another vampire, and lost. I've never heard of any vampire dying in a natural disaster, I just know it's theoretically possible."
"How densely populated by vampires is North America?" I asked. "I realize he could have gone anywhere, but at least we know he started in Alaska."
"Mmm... since the Volturi cleaned out the newborn armies in the South, not all that densely, but you can definitely find us in population centers and roaming around."
"Ballpark population on the continent?"
Alice thought. "More than a hundred, fewer than a thousand, if I had to narrow it down I'd say something like three or four hundred. Mostly in big population centers, because you need more territory to be inconspicuous if the area's rural."
>
"How territorial and inclined to fight are average vampires?" I asked. "I've only met the Volturi, friends of the family, and Huilen, who was alone when Edward and I showed up. Plus Laurent's old coven, but I was human then, and don't remember them too well."
"Laurent's old coven is the closest to normal you've met, considering that Huilen's in contact with her nephew..." Alice trailed off, closed her eyes, and then opened them with a small gasp. "Oh, how strange," she exclaimed. "Elspeth doesn't take after you - or perhaps she does, but that isn't why I can't see her. I can't see Nahuel either, any more than I can see Elspeth."
My eyes flew open very wide. "It's a species thing."
She nodded emphatically. "I can see Huilen... but only about as much as I can see you. It's Swiss cheese. Huh, I wonder why your immunity works that way."
Because I'm only invisible to you when I'm being acted on by another invisible species."Maybe only a bit of my brain has the hang of being invisible and you see me when other bits are in charge," I said, affecting uncuriosity with a shrug.
Alice frowned, her brow furrowed. But she didn't pursue that topic. "Anyway, your standard vampire wanders around - or lurks in a big city where a lot of people can go missing without it being big news. Eats every three, four days, one or two people at a time, or lies low for as long as a couple of weeks if one of their meals gets too much attention. They usually steal stuff; maintaining legitimate funds is too much of a hassle under those limitations. About a third of them travel alone, another third in mated pairs, last third in covens of two or three, rarely four or more, which may or may not include mates."
"Doesn't quite answer my question," I said.
"Lone vampires are more likely to avoid confrontations," Alice said. "But if we assume Laurent was alone too, he'd run some risk of provoking one if they just didn't like the look of him or felt like getting into a fight... some think of combat, even lethal combat, as recreational. Pairs and covens will stake out territories and are pretty likely to attack anyone who won't clear off when told to. Less likely to attack an individual for fun, though, because without the individual being a witch, the odds are in the group's favor to the point of being unsporting. And I don't understand why Laurent wouldn't just get out of other vampires' way if he ran afoul of one - but I'm not sure why he'd have to leave home for so long to begin with anyway."