by Alicorn
"Where are you?"
"We're making a run for it, eastward - we've got Cody too. Harry and Sue were going to try to save their other kids last I saw. We couldn't stop to get your dad, he's still in Forks - mine's still in La Push. Everybody just grabbed their imprints and we're on the run. Lucky they were all around and nobody tried to go for the Makah rez because that would've been suicide. We need backup right the hell now. The leeches were talking about doing experiments on the pack so they're not killing them right away but I don't want to count on that for long."
"A young-looking boy, dark blond hair...?" I asked.
"He's one of 'em, yeah, and a girl who could be his twin sister and a couple of big skeeters, seem to take orders from the girl," Jacob said. I could hear wind rushing past; he was probably riding one of the escaped wolves, only in his own human form so as to be able to talk to me.
"You got away when you split off your own pack?" I said, uncomfortably aware of the fact that everybody in the room was staring at me. "When the boy - he's Alec - when he knocked out one from a pack did it carry over to everybody?"
"I think so - it looked like Nina went first, only she was screaming, not just collapsing, I think that might have been the girl and not the boy because she had this sadistic grin on her face. And then Becky's whole pack was down howling bloody murder, and then Rachel got too close to "Alec" and we were out too, but I broke off. Raych gave me an excuse, she Alpha-voiced me so I'd have something to disobey. And it was like all the guys with imprints had enough motivation or something to get gone with me and nobody else did. I guess once we were up, we were out of there too fast for the leeches to catch us."
I ground my teeth. It sounded like both Jane and Alec could echo their powers through an entire pack via telepathic relay, and only Jacob's split had let anyone get away at all. "I'll do what I can. Will you be able to answer this phone if I call you later?"
"I'll give it to Kim to hold," he said, naming one of the imprints. "You'll get her if you call again."
"Anything else I've got to know?"
"Last I saw everybody was in that big field a ways up from the ravine," he said. "One of the big bloodsuckers was baiting us, weaving in and out of the rez, trying to get us all in one place to attack him as a group, and damned if it didn't work. I don't know if they'd be able to move all those wolves or not, but that'd be the first place I'd check. Also don't know if we're being chased now, but have to guess so. Handing the phone to Kim now. I'm slowing down Jared too much." Jared was the wolf who'd imprinted on Kim. I heard the sound of Jacob giving away the phone and leaping off Jared's back, phasing midair.
"Bella?" said a girl, presumably Kim. She was quavery. "Are you going to be able to help us?"
"I'll do what I can," I promised. "I'm in trouble too, though, if they've got captives - even if they don't say anything in spite of Jane, Aro could show up at any time and he'll get any information he wants. Probably I could not be more on their hit list than I already am now, even if I'd killed Aro's wife. But I'll do what I can."
"Okay," said Kim in a small voice. I snapped the phone shut.
Everybody was still staring at me.
I had missed a gaping, obvious security flaw. Ofcourse Irina wouldn't try to personally destroy thirty-one wolves even if she found out that they were responsible for Laurent's death. Of courseshe was not that stupid. Even if she weresuicidal, revenge would take priority over getting herself dead in a hurry, and the way you kill someone more powerful than you is to get someone more powerful than them aboard. I'd done it myself - I'd brought James straight into the Volturi's lair when I'd needed him dead and didn't have the power to kill him - why hadn't I expected the same of Irina?
And now all hell had broken loose, and several of my most necessary allies were looking like they'd never forgive me for unleashing it.
* * *
I was expecting an infuriated accusation from Jasper, but it was actually Carlisle who recovered the ability to speak first.
"Bella," he said, every inch the gravely disappointed father figure, "what have you done?"
That broke the silence; suddenly everyone was yammering to everyone else. Esme, still holding Elspeth, brought Ilario, Gianna, and Maggie up to speed on the werewolf matter. Edward's rapidity of speech was overtaxed as he defended me from simultaneous accusations from Jasper, Rosalie, and Emmett. Alice tried to see something and then clutched her head and squeaked, which distracted Jasper, but only made him angrier at me when she whispered that everything was in shadow.
I wanted to hide. I wanted to run to my fairytale cottage and be with the smaller, less difficult part of my family. Edward was busy. I thought of asking Esme for Elspeth, but in the current climate of the house, there was no safer place for a baby than Esme's arms - no one would attack Esme, Esme would not attack anyone. Me, on the other hand - I might be less safe.
"You woke up the dogs?" Rosalie was shrieking.
"You knew who had killed Laurent, and you said nothing?" Carlisle asked. He wasn't shouting, just exuding dismay. How had he made the connection between what Jacob had said and Laurent's death? Some contact I wasn't aware of between him and Irina or other Denalis? Didn't matter. I wasn't getting out of this room without telling them all everything anyway. This was not the time to figure out what secrets I could and couldn't salvage.
"When did you even find the time to -" Emmett began, and then he looked at Edward, who stared him down. "Ed, did you know -"
Jasper wasn't talking. He was hissing, curled protectively around Alice as though he thought I'd attack her. She'd quit yelping, having stopped trying to use her vision, but she wasn't making any move to calm down her husband - she was just staring at me, uncomprehending.
Esme, to her eternal credit, was trying to soothe Elspeth in between catching up the three who were not aware of the full Cullen family history. Elspeth wasn't crying, but she was clearly bewildered and displeased by the shouting that was going on around her.
"I -" I began, trying to answer any of the many questions aimed at me, but words beyond that wouldn't come. "I..."
"We need to get out of here," Maggie said fiercely, turning to Gianna and Ilario. "We had no part in anything Bella did; we're safe from the Volturi if we cut and run now. Siobhan and Liam will have us - especially since we're not competing for their prey. I asked earlier. Let's go, now, before we're complicit in anything."
The siblings nodded, and Ilario shot me a dark look and Gianna an apologetic one as they left the room after Maggie.
Esme turned to face the middle of the room, where I stood. She didn't look angry - but she did look afraid. I'd endangered her family. The guilt was crushing: how could I hurt Esme, of all people? As if I hadn't done enough to the Quileutes? If I hadn't activated them, Laurent might have killed three or four people in the area, gotten in and out in a few days, gone home to Irina, the Volturi wouldn't have found them or at least not so soon. And now Esme's loved ones - including me, including Edward - were all in likely danger.
The questions died down. I located my voice - it had sunk to somewhere near the pit of my stomach - and tried to answer them, one at a time, over the tingle of fear from Jasper's hisses.
"I - I - I -" So this was how Maggie had stuttered: lots of room in the vampire brain, lots of room for huge and crippling emotions, enough to let them displace peripheral functions like language. "I activated Rachel in July. And most of the others. Harry's a Quileute too. His daughter hurt him and I had to turn him to save him -" I stammered, ineloquently, through the Cliff's notes of the secrets I'd been keeping. I had to double back several times to explain my motivations, about Aro's witchcraft and Sue's pregnancy and the like, and even when I offered these feeble justifications it sounded almost as though I'd been acting randomly. Jasper growled at me (to an answering snarl from Edward) when I mentioned that I wasn't immune to Alice, never had been, I just fell into werewolf-derived shadows on a regular basis. Alice looked hurt, still made no move to restrain Jasper, b
ut she wasn't snarling herself.
When I'd run out of things to say, events and explanations both, silence settled over the room. Edward didn't relax at all.
"Maggie was right," said Rosalie, breaking the quiet. "The smart thing to do, the safe thing, is to cut and run. Bella's painted a great, big target on herself but we can prove to Aro that we weren't involved."
This wasn't how I'd wanted it to go, I didn't want to be like the Denalis' mother, sacrificed as an example to my family so they would develop ahealthy respect for the law -
"Rose," said Edward. "Rose, you're not like this -" I could tell as he said it that he didn't believe it. She was like that, exactly like that, and she had every right to be, she didn't need to let her second life be broken to smithereens the way her first one had because I was playing Secret Agent Vampire behind everyone's backs.
"Edward, you weren't like this," she snapped. "Go get yourself executed with Bella while she tries to save the mutts she made, fine, your prerogative, but don't expect us to live with the mess she's created." She paused. "Don't drag Elspeth into it either."
"No," I said, suddenly. "No, of course not. I can't bring Elspeth there."
"I'll take her," said Rosalie readily.
I nodded, rapidly. "I got the wolves into this, I'll have to do what I can to get them out, I'm the only prayer against Alec and Jane - but I should go alone. The rest of you should stay out - Rose, if I can ask you to look after Elsie even now..." Rosalie was nodding impatiently. "Here would do, I suppose, or you could go to ground in one of the other houses or Denali..."
"Bella," said Edward. "Bella, I can't leave you."
"I can't bring Elspeth there," I repeated. "Can you leave her? Our daughter?"
"Don't go, Bella," Edward pleaded, recoiling from the choice presented. "You don't have to go."
"I've gone and painted a target on myself, like Rosalie said," I murmured. "The Volturi are going to come after me at this point whether I go to them first or not. But if I go and I take out Jane and Alec somehow - and realistically I'm the only person who can do that - and the wolves are there and they get up and fight, then there might be a chance."
"Go with them," I said to Edward, gesturing at the rest of the family. "Wherever. Look after Elspeth."
"Bella, do you seriously think they'll leave Edward alone?" asked Rosalie scathingly. "They know perfectly well he's your mate. If you survive the head-on fight the very next thing they'll do is grab Edward and use him as bait."
I looked up. My brain was kicking into overdrive. I could not screw this up. I had to be right, I had to be careful, if Rosalie was willing to tell me when and how I was being a moron then I had touse that resource in order to be less of a moron. "Would they do that with Elspeth, too?"
Rosalie didn't seem to have thought of that. "...Maybe." Esme tightened her hold on my daughter.
I thought. I was still thinking when Alice spoke.
"Jasper," she murmured, "we need to go. Not with everyone else. The bits I can see, the bits that aren't shadowed - they're going to use this as an excuse to try to collect me. Aro's never wanted anything else as much as he's wanted a precog. A criminal in my coven is just the pretense he needs. We have to run and keep running until it's obvious we've cut contact and there's no excuse to try us with the others."
Jasper nodded once, jaw clenched tightly, eyes narrow. They got up and left; I heard Alice's car starting up. They didn't discuss where they were going - of course; they probably weren't even thinking about it while Edward could hear. If we could find them, then that wouldn't be a plausible severing of contact. Alice had said enough that no one who loved her would try to find her, and that was all she could safely say.
The room was beginning to look rather empty.
* * *
How could I keep my husband and daughter safe?
I didn't even need to ask myself what do I want?- it was too obvious, the sole consuming thought in my head. Edward needed to be safe. Elspeth needed to be safe. Both of those things had to happen before anything else could attain a shred of importance.
What do I have?
I had Edward - and that was half the problem. His very attachment to me was making him vulnerable. If it weren't assumed by everyone who knew word one about vampires that we would be together, then he could go somewhere with the others, hole up and wait for the Volturi to clean up my undesireable self.
Rosalie, and Esme and Carlisle and Emmett, might abhor what I'd done, might be forced to write Edward off as a lost cause they'd have to pinch off the family in order to salvage anything. But they did want to protect Elspeth, and that was more plausibly doable. The Volturi didn't have the same ironclad expectations about my relationship with her. There wasn't the same kind of precedent for half-vampire children.
Could I hide her? I couldn't think of anyone to hide her with, and while she might survive if I just dropped her off in the middle of nowhere, she wouldn't understand the need for concealment and would eventually give herself away - not to mention that it was hardly what I had in mind when I thought of the word "safe". The Volturi had the resources to track down anyone I could trust her with, from Renée to Gianna. That held if I flung the definition of "trust" as far as it could go and considered leaving her with distant acquaintances like the Chilean coven. I couldn't leave her anonymously at an adoption agency or on someone's doorstep. She grew too fast, she'd be too obviously nonhuman to anyone taking a close look. Exactly the kind of oddity that the Volturi liked to stamp out with lots of death.
So: if the Volturi wanted her, they could find her. Whoever had her needed to either run from them forever or be armed with a way to make them uninterested in kidnapping or hurting her.
Or she needed to spend so little time there that they never got around to looking.
"Bella," said Edward.
"I'm thinking. It takes long enough to get to America from here that the best way to hurryisn't to rush the thinking part," I said, but anxiety betrayed the fact that I didn't feel so confident.
What else did I have? I was still a newborn, still a shield, might be able to kill or at least interrupt Jane and Alec long enough to get wolves up and fighting, before the other handful of Volturi on their team tore me to bits, if I got there before reinforcements from Volterra arrived. Rachel's pack and Becky's, minus Jacob and the five imprinted wolves he'd peeled off, maybe plus Harry and Sue if they weren't already dead, could probably kill off the handful of vampires that Jacob had described. After that we could regroup; without their favorite illusionists the Volturi would be at much more of a disadvantage against the wolves.
So I might live long enough to be able to retrieve Elspeth from a temporary hiding place without heavy duty defenses, if there were one that wouldn't delay me too much to leave her at.
I couldn't count on being able to go back for her. But I'd already established that she could be found wherever I put her. So that meant I had to leave her with someone who could hang onto her if necessary, and that someone had to have a way to convince an angry Volturi guard to leave her alone if one came knocking.
The Volturi's top priority was containing information. They were probably limiting their sphere of destruction to La Push, not extending to Forks. Charlie might be ignored for the time being, while the Volturi contemplated the wolves. If he turned his siren on he could be streaking away from Forks like a bat out of hell, difficult for even a vampire to keep up with, and he could bring Elspeth along. If I died...
Charlie couldn't fight off a vampire. His limited version of my shield might offer some sort of defense against the same things I was immune to, but ultimately he was human, helpless unless the Volturi had another reason to leave Elspeth - and Charlie - alone. He wouldn't be able to drive the getaway car if he was in the middle of turning, and I couldn't wait around three days for him to finish. She - and possibly also he - would be bait if (when) caught. He had to sleep, he couldn't run forever.
So Charlie was out.
Maybe
I was dwelling too much on how I'd get her back, and not enough on how I'd make hersafe.
"If you go to Denali," I said softly, indicating Carlisle and Esme, Rosalie and Emmett, "and you take Elspeth, and I make it impossible for you to contact me... and I swear never to come for her... then they can't use her as bait."
Edward swallowed. "But..."
"Edward has to come with me, because they will never, ever believe that we'd cut ourselves off like that... they'd know that if they got him, they'd get me too, and they'd be right," I whispered. "But Elspeth's another story. I can leave her if... if that's the only way she can be kept safe, is to be away from me. Between you four and the Denalis you can make the Volturi at least ask a few questions, before they try to attack. They need excuses to wipe out covens or they lose their aura of legitimacy, and they don't have one for any of you. The only weak point is making sure Elspeth can't be used to find me. So I have to be unable to receive threats. No contact. Like Alice and Jasper. Even if I live through this in the short term. Until and unless the Volturi are allgone or so scattered as to be no threat, I can't see her."
"Bella," whispered Edward.
"Please have a better idea," I said. "That's the best I can do."
"We could just run. The three of us. You'll never be in time to save the wolves anyway."
"I might be there in time," I said. "But you're right. We could run. Until they caught us. And they would. You aren't immune to Demetri - hell, we don't even know for sure if I am - and he's met you, he can track you down anywhere on Earth. But it might take him long enough that Elspeth wouldn't be a baby anymore, and then she'd be obviously in cahoots with us, and they'd just kill us all three. You and I might be done for unless we manage to singlehandedly wipe out the Volturi, but Elspeth has a chance if we leave her - and it means she won't be caught in the fight at La Push itself."