Luminosity

by Alicorn

  And then the picture focused in on the blood from Gianna's cut.

  "Ummmmm," elaborated Elspeth, putting her hand down. That was the sound she made when she had tasted a food and it appealed to her. As much as food food ever did, anyway.

  "Elspeth," I said, "in our family, we do not drink human blood. The rest of us have to drink animal blood, but you don't have to do that. You can eat regular food." I didn't talk baby-talk to her; it wouldn't do any good to get used to that when we expected complete sentences back in just a few days.

  "What's going on?" asked Alice, sounding lost and holding a flowery hat.

  "We've got ourselves a little witch," I said, tickling my daughter and smiling. "A little witch who thirsts for human blood, but we will not be encouraging bad habits, no we will not." Elspeth giggled, apparently in spite of herself. Then she made a remarkably mature sort of face, one that would have looked like a disappointed authority figure on anyone but my two-day-old child.

  "What'd she do? Is she telepathic?" asked Alice. "You acted like she'd asked you for something."

  "Sort of. It was all visuals, no sound, no words - her own memory," I said. "But I definitely had the impression that when she remembered the bit about Gianna's blood, she wasn't asking after her auntie's welfare."

  Alice chuckled. "Can I see if she'll show me something?" she asked, holding her arms out.

  I gave her Elspeth, who didn't appear to know what she was meant to do. Eventually Alice took her hand and laid it against her cheek, the way Elspeth had done of her own accord when trying to communicate with me. "Ooh," said Elspeth, apparently comprehending, and Alice's eyelids fluttered while she processed the offered memory.

  "So now you have three sources of vision," I said. "How's that working out for you?"

  "Just a bit dizzying," murmured Alice. "She's very insistent on the blood thing. Maybe she thinks I'll give it to her if you won't."

  "Ah, no you don't, Elsie," I said, retrieving her - and the intended hat - from Alice. "There will be no begging favors from others if you get a no from me."

  "Pah," said Elspeth, disgruntled, and she tried to pull the hat away from me, but I got it onto her head and arranged her in a photogenic pose so Alice could snap the picture.

  * * *

  When Edward got home, not long after the photos for the day had all been taken, he noticed Elspeth's "voice" at once. He leapt into the cottage with a grin on his face that momentarily disrupted my ability to think, plucked Elspeth from her perch on the chair we'd last posed her in, and spun around once, holding her at arm's length. Alice slipped out to give us family time.

  "Ee!" was her pleased response to this treatment, and when he brought her in closer, she planted her hand on his cheek, too, so before I could explain what was happening he was also the recipient of a memory.

  He looked much less surprised than Alice had been, or me - either Alice had been thinking about it or Elspeth had, coherently enough that he'd expected it.

  "What's she showing you?" I asked.

  "The last time she saw me," he murmured. "She recognizes me."

  "Lucky you," I laughed. "She was begging me and Alice for blood, earlier."

  Edward's face changed, a moment after I said the word "blood". "Oh, that does seem... hm." He blinked. "If she dislikes human food thatmuch..."

  "She's two days old," I said. "This is, for her, old enough to express a preference. Doesn't mean she's also old enough to be given charge of her own diet. If she wants to hunt animals for herself when she's old enough to do that, I'm not going to stop her. That'd be kind of hypocritical. But let's not rule out the possibility that she's just being a baby and has yet to develop a taste for what she's offered."

  "I suppose," he said.

  "Ummmm," said Elspeth insistently, patting his cheek.

  "There's mashed potatoes," I said, gesturing at the fridge we'd moved into the house to store Elspeth's food. I had cooked for the day in the early morning, before she woke up, so during her active period I wouldn't be distracted by putting together the meals. "She hasn't tried those yet."

  Edward dutifully retrieved the tub of mashed potatoes, warmed them up in the microwave that had also been added to our dwelling, and offered Elspeth a forkful. She frowned at the starchy item, but disdainfully parted her lips and consented to taste it. Instead of making either of her typical noises, she placed her hand on Edward's cheek. He gave her another bite of the food.

  "She approves?" I inquired, going to stand near them.

  He nodded. "As much as she does of anything she's tried. I'm getting that as much from my talent as hers, though. It's a little tricky to decipher what she wants from the images alone."

  "She doesn't have a lot to work with, if all she's doing is transmitting her own memories. But maybe she'll grow into more versatility," I speculated. "Interesting that she should be sticking to visuals while you work with an auditory channel..."

  "I can see images from other peoples' minds," he said, "it just feels like I'm hearing them. Almost like synaesthesia."

  "But I didn't feel like I was hearing Elspeth's memory." She was wolfing down potatoes, barely chewing them - she'd seemed to have a preference for softer foods, despite her vampire-piercing set of chompers. Possibly because she could swallow it faster and get the chore of eating over with.

  "Maybe if you were aware of your shield, it would look visible to you," Edward said.

  "How heritable is witchcraft, anyway?"

  "Where there's data, it suggests that it does run in families... but it's skewed," Edward said. "For instance, Alec and Jane are biological twins and powerful witches, but if only one of them had had a talent, it's unlikely we'd ever have heard about the other."

  I nodded. "But you said Charlie's thoughts are indistinct to you. That's sort of related to what I do."

  "It is. And Aro's sister was a witch, after she turned - according to Marcus's memories, he turned her on the suspicion that Didyme's talent would be as useful as his own."

  Elspeth finished the potatoes, having swallowed them nearly as fast as Edward could bring the fork to her mouth. Her quick metabolism was already burning them for fuel; there was no visible protrusion in her belly. "What did Didyme do?" I asked Edward, plucking her from his arms selfishly to cradle her. He looked at the pair of us with a pleased gleam in his eye.

  "She had an aura of happiness," he said, plainly not thinking very hard about the topic of conversation as he reached out to stroke Elspeth's cheek. "Couldn't turn it off, couldn't direct it, couldn't do anything with it but project it everywhere she went. She had a lot of admirers, actually, but Marcus was the only one whose interest she returned."

  "That sounds pleasant, I suppose, but not that useful by Volturi standards," I mused. "How'd Aro react to that?"

  "I haven't heard Marcus dwelling on it, and as I said, I've never caught Aro thinking of her," said Edward, still distracted by our baby's smile. Elspeth blinked at him with her mesmerizingly brown eyes. "She's so beautiful," he murmured.

  I handed her back to him. "One of these days I'm going to stop thinking I'm the center of the universe," I teased.

  That broke his stare; his eyes flicked up to meet mine. "She's half you," he said. "With your eyes - your old eyes. Can you blame me?"

  "Not a bit. I'm awfully pleased with her too, you know. Just - you take very readily to fatherhood," I said. "I knew it appealed to you, but watching it happen is something new to integrate into how I think of you."

  He leaned over and kissed me, then returned to staring at Elspeth. She stared back, obligingly enough. I chuckled, then asked, "How did the errand go?"

  "Well enough," he said. "We found a fellow in Oslo, and got Norwegian papers claiming that Elspeth is a year old. There are more on order, which will be finished in a few weeks, claiming two, three, five, seven, ten, thirteen, and sixteen, on the theory that this will cover enough ages to get along with during the time we're likely to spend here. That being limited by Carlisle's ability to p
ass for his supposed age at work, of course. Jasper's competent to add home-taken photographs as she approaches those apparent ages. He was working on the one-year-old version when I left him."

  Elspeth could probably pass for a smallish one-year-old already. She was roughly baby-sized, but slimmer, more alert, and toothier than any brand-new human in the world. If I had to explain her tininess to someone confused about her claimed yearling status, I supposed it wouldn't even be a lie to claim that she was born prematurely.

  "I feel like she ought to be getting some social interaction with people outside the family, at least once she's talking," I said. "But it's not safe to give her any real continuity, is it? Someone would notice. She'd either like the people she met and miss them, or not like them and not get much out of having met them."

  "It's a big family, love," he pointed out. "Especially if Maggie and Gianna - and Ilario - stay. It might do for the time being." Ilario's original plan to go with his sister and live near Rome was not meshing well with Maggie's affection for Ireland. There had been other topics looming larger in their minds, of late, but there had still been occasional spats about it. I expected Gianna to be made tiebreaker or the engineer of compromise once she woke up, and it might be that she'd split the difference by announcing that she wanted to remain in Norway. They weren't at all unwelcome, although it would make our group kind of unwieldy.

  I kind of wanted to invite Charlie over, but even Edward didn't know that he was in on the masquerade. Charlie had been sort of passive-aggressive about this in his various e-mails, lamenting that he didn't get to hold his new granddaughter. I might need to find an excuse to bring her there, in spite of my prior resolution not to run to La Push at the drop of a hat anymore. Maybe she could make friends with Cody, too, and have a peer of her own species. I didn't really want to take her to Chile to meet Nahuel. He was nice enough, but as far as I knew he had no plans to permanently abandon his preferred diet, and that wasn't the sort of influence I hoped to bring into her life. I didn't want anyone in Elspeth's life to normalize murder in her hearing until she had something resembling critical thinking faculties.

  Elspeth put her hand on Edward's cheek again. "She wants you to read to her," he announced. "Interesting... it was an image of when you read to her last night before she went to sleep, but there was a feeling attached to it, not just the picture."

  "That's a request I'm perfectly happy to oblige," I said, and I plucked the top book off the stack of reading material I'd raided from Carlisle's library, accepted Elspeth from Edward's arms, and began to read.

  * * *

  The subsequent morning, in the wee hours when Elspeth was still asleep, I went up to the main house to whip up a few more batches of miscellaneous food. I could hear Gianna from a mile away. I could hear Maggie too, singing brokenly, trying to soothe the unsoothable, but Gianna was far louder.

  I tried to ignore it, just focused on the oats I was boiling and the chicken I was trying to overcook until it would be soft enough to suit Elspeth, but Gianna was hard to hedge out.

  I was halfway through stirring syrup into the oatmeal when she abandoned wordless screaming for some very underhanded wordyscreaming.

  "If you love me," I heard Gianna cry, her voice already taking on the glassy quality of a vampire's. "Please, please, if you ever loved me."

  "Baby," whispered Maggie, breaking off the song.

  "It hurts, it hurts," sobbed Gianna. Her spine - which Carlisle had broken as soon as she came out of the coma - had healed hours ago. "If you love me you'll make it stop."

  That was low, really. I'd begged to die too, but I hadn't impugned the quality of Edward's love when he'd refused. Maggie whined, deep in her throat. "It's mostly over," she said, frantic. I could hear Gianna thrashing around, Maggie trying to find purchase and hold her. Was Ilario even in the room, or had he left, unable to tolerate the spectacle? "Baby, you're almost done, I promise, I promise -"

  "Make it stop," Gianna begged. "I never asked you for anything - anything - this is the one thing I want - if you love me -"

  Maggie sounded like she was trying to cry, but she couldn't, of course. "I love you. I love you so much, my Gianna, and I can't kill you, I could never, I wish I could make the hurting stop right now any other way but I can't, baby, but I love you, please, you have to know that. It's almost over." Then, a quaver in her voice that I barely detected, she sang again, and Gianna gave up on arguing and just howled.

  I gritted my teeth a little. The screaming was bad enough, but I also knew what it signified, and that was worse. It was all well and good to know that Gianna would wake up a glorious immortal and return in joy every moment of misery she was causing Maggie now, and get back every one she was enduring by fire herself. She was still suffering.

  I packed up the sweetened oatmeal. Gianna was hyperventilating. I pulled the chicken out of the oven, and replaced it with a pan of assorted vegetables to roast. Gianna started repeating Maggie's name, over and over and over, too fast and desperate and strung together to sound like she even intented to start a complete sentence. Maggie was too distraught by this to go on with her song, and she interrupted it again, repeating Gianna's name in turn.

  I couldn't turn off my ears; if I was going to be in the house, there were no earmuffs in the world fluffy enough to prevent me from hearing everything they said. I busied myself with the transfer of the chicken from its roasting pan to a more portable container, trying to ignore the strangely intimate exchange of pain upstairs.

  "Bella," said Gianna's voice, suddenly, interrupting the litany of "Maggie, Maggie, Maggie".

  "Huh?" murmured Maggie.

  "What?" I said. They'd hear me as well as I'd hear them, at this point - the remaining enhancements Gianna would get to her hearing weren't so great that she couldn't already hear me from a flight of stairs away.

  "No, no," Maggie pleaded. "Baby, don't do this to me, please -"

  "Bella," choked Gianna. "I helped you. Help me."

  "I won't kill you," I said.

  "Baby, please stop," Maggie begged. "Ilario said no and I said no and Bella said no and everyone's going to say no, please don't ask, baby, I know you want to live, it's just the -"

  "I want to die," Gianna screamed.

  There was a silence, a pause, and it occurred to me to wonder how that statement, so bald and certain, would affect Maggie. Not a request or an implication, just a fact.

  Spoken to Maggie, who knew lies when she heard them...

  Gianna wasn't lying -

  There was a sound like fingernails on a chalkboard and Gianna's breath caught and I was up the stairs and through the door without bothering to open it. I pried Maggie off of Gianna, breaking the redhead's wrist in my haste with an unrestrained application of newborn strength.

  I seemed to have been just barely in time. There were cracks running along the surface of Gianna's skin, where Maggie had squeezed her, but she was basically intact, still breathing, her heart still forcing envenomed blood through her veins. Maggie let out an incoherent sob but didn't try to fight me; it had been a moment of weakness against her mate's demands, then, not a concerted change of opinion.

  The cracks knitted; Maggie's wrist healed. "Should've let her," gasped Gianna. "Please. Please."

  "Maggie, do you need to be somewhere else?" I asked. Gianna didn't have the power to hurt herself; she'd be fine left alone, physically, and the emotional succor Maggie had to provide was clearly not going to do her any good.

  "I can't, I can't, I can't, I hurt her, oh God, I didn't want to hurt her, I can't," Maggie wailed.

  "Maggie," whispered Gianna, but the named vampire shut her eyes tightly.

  "Yes," Maggie told me. I picked her up and carried her out of the house, away from the screaming.

  * * *

  I didn't worry about the vegetables in the oven. If they were going to catch the house on fire, Alice would see in plenty of time. Maggie didn't try to get me to set her down, she just curled up inwards on herself and
made keening noises.

  I put her on the edge of a fjord, and she sat, mostly upright, hugging her knees and burying her face. "Thank you," she murmured.

  "You're welcome," I said, although the stock response seemed inadequate to the situation. "Are... you... okay?"

  "Ilario is better than me," Maggie said in a monotone, unlike her usual lively voice. "He wasn't sure of himself, so he left, that was better for her, not so risky, I wasn't sure and I stayed because I wanted her to need me but she doesn't, she needs anybody but me, I was weak, I hurt her, I knew it could happen, it happened before..."

  "Before, it was a series of accidents," I said. "After, a response to a sincere request - albeit a request you should have seen coming. It's not like your ultimate plan was ever to cause her harm."

  "I didn't ask to die, when I was turning," Maggie murmured. "I asked if it would be over and she said yes and I believed her because it was true."

  "It's not just a matter of believing it," I said.

  Maggie clenched her hands in the fabric of her pants. The denim strained, but she didn't tear it. "If I leave now," she said, "if she never sees me once after she's done, do you think she has a chance to find somebody better than me one day? Who wouldn't have t-t-tried to -" I'd never heard a vampire stutter before.

  "I have no idea," I said. "And even if she could, it might take long enough that Alice couldn't see it. You couldn't be sure." I didn't have the details of how Sue had felt about Harry between his turning and hers except the obvious behavioral evidence. Let alone how she'd have fared if he'd died while she was mid-change, and that was the nearest template I could have extrapolated from.

  "What if I died? Would that do it?"

  "I don't know," I said. "Besides, how would you manage it?"

  "Ilario," she said. "I could find him and tell him what happened and I could just not fight back..."