Life and Death

by Stephenie Meyer

  But then she looked at me calmly and said, “Just one exception. Hypothetically.”

  Well, damn.

  It took me a minute to recover. She waited patiently.

  “Okay.” I worked to sound casual. “Just one exception, then. How would something like that work? What are the limitations? How would … that someone … find someone else at exactly the right time? How would she even know I was in trouble?” My convoluted questions weren’t making any sense by the end.

  “Hypothetically?” she asked.

  “Right.”

  “Well, if … that someone—”

  “Call her Jane,” I suggested.

  She smiled wryly. “If your Hypothetical Jane had been paying better attention, the timing wouldn’t have needed to be quite so exact.” She rolled her eyes. “I’m still not over how this could happen at all. How does anyone get into so much trouble, so consistently, and in such unlikely places? You would have devastated Port Angeles’s crime rate statistics for a decade, you know.”

  “I don’t see how this is my fault.”

  She stared at me, that familiar frustration in her eyes. “I don’t, either. But I don’t know who to blame.”

  “How did you know?”

  She locked eyes with me, torn, and I guessed she was wrestling against the desire to just tell me the truth.

  “You can trust me, you know,” I whispered. I reached forward slowly, to put my hand on top of hers, but she slid them back an inch, so I let my hand fall empty to the table.

  “It’s what I want to do,” she admitted, her voice even quieter than mine. “But that doesn’t mean it’s right.”

  “Please?” I asked.

  She hesitated one more second, and then it came out in a rush.

  “I followed you to Port Angeles. I’ve never tried to keep a specific person alive before, and it’s much more troublesome than I would have believed. But that’s probably just because it’s you. Ordinary people seem to make it through the day without so many catastrophes. I was wrong before, when I said you were a magnet for accidents. That’s not a broad enough classification. You are a magnet for trouble. If there is anything dangerous within a ten-mile radius, it will invariably find you.”

  It didn’t bother me at all that she was following me; instead I felt a strange surge of pleasure. She was here for me. She stared, waiting for me to react.

  I thought about what she’d said—tonight, and before… . Do you think I could be scary?

  “You put yourself into that category, don’t you?” I guessed.

  Her face turned hard, expressionless. “Unequivocally.”

  I stretched across the table again, ignoring her when she pulled back slightly once more, and laid my hand on top of hers. She kept them very still. It made them feel like stone—cold, hard, and now motionless. I thought of the statue again.

  “That’s twice now,” I said. “Thank you.”

  She just stared at me, her mouth twitching into a frown.

  I tried to ease the tension, make a joke. “I mean, did you ever think that maybe my number was up the first time, with the van, and you’re messing with fate? Like those Final Destination movies?”

  My joke fell flat. Her frown deepened.

  “Edythe?”

  She angled her face down again, her hair falling across her cheeks, and I could barely hear her answer.

  “That wasn’t the first time,” she said. “Your number was up the first day I met you. It’s not twice you’ve almost died, it’s three times. The first time I saved you … it was from myself.”

  As clearly as if I were back in my first Biology class, I could see Edythe’s murderous black glare. I heard again the phrase that had run through my head in that moment: If looks could kill …

  “You remember?” she asked. She stared at me now, her perfect face very serious. “You understand?”

  “Yes.”

  She waited for more, for another reaction. When I didn’t say anything, her eyebrows pulled together.

  “You can leave, you know,” she told me. “Your friends are still at the movie.”

  “I don’t want to leave.”

  She was suddenly irritated. “How can you say that?”

  I patted her hands, totally calm. This was something I had already decided. It didn’t matter to me if she was … something dangerous. But she mattered. Where she was, was where I wanted to be.

  “You didn’t finish answering my question,” I reminded her, ignoring the anger. “How did you find me?”

  She glared at me for a moment, like she was willing me to be angry, too. When that didn’t work, she shook her head and huffed a sigh.

  “I was keeping tabs on Jeremy’s thoughts,” she said, like it was the most normal thing. “Not carefully—like I said, it’s not just anybody who could get themselves murdered in Port Angeles. At first I didn’t notice when you set off on your own. Then, when I realized that you weren’t with him anymore, I drove around looking for someone who had seen you. I found the bookstore you walked to, but I could tell that you hadn’t gone inside. You’d gone south, and I knew you’d have to turn around soon. So I was just waiting for you, randomly searching through the thoughts of everyone I could hear—to see if anyone had noticed you so I would know where you were. I had no reason to be worried … but I started to feel anxious… .” She was lost in thought now, staring past me. “I started to drive in circles, still … listening. The sun was finally setting, and I was about to get out and follow you on foot. And then—” She stopped suddenly, her teeth clenching together with an audible snap.

  “Then what?”

  She refocused on my face. “I heard what she was thinking. I saw your face in her head, and I knew what she was planning to do.”

  “But you got there in time.”

  She inclined her head slightly. “It was harder than you know for me to drive away, to just let them get away with that. It was the right thing, I know it was, but still … very difficult.”

  I tried not to picture what she would have done if I hadn’t made her drive away. I didn’t want to let my imagination run wild down that particular path.

  “That’s one reason I made you go to dinner with me,” she admitted. “I could have let you go to the movie with Jeremy and Allen, but I was afraid that if I wasn’t with you, I would go looking for those people.”

  My hand still rested on top of hers. My fingers were starting to feel numb, but I didn’t care. If she didn’t object, I’d never move again. She kept watching me, waiting for a reaction that wasn’t going to come.

  I knew she was trying to warn me off with all this honesty, but she was wasting the effort.

  She took a deep breath. “Are you going to eat anything else?” she asked.

  I blinked at my food. “No, I’m good.”

  “Do you want to go home now?”

  I paused. “I’m not in any hurry.”

  She frowned like my answer bothered her.

  “Can I have my hands back now?” she asked.

  I snatched my hand away. “Sure. Sorry.”

  She shot me a glance while she pulled something from her pocket. “Is it possible to go fifteen minutes without an unnecessary apology?”

  If it was unnecessary for me to apologize for touching her, did that mean she liked it? Or just wasn’t actually offended by it?

  “Um, probably not,” I admitted.

  She laughed once, and then the waiter showed up.

  “How are you do—” he started to ask.

  She cut him off. “We’re finished, thank you very much, that ought to cover it, no change, thanks.”

  She was already out of her seat.

  I fumbled for my wallet. “Um, let me—you didn’t even get anything—”

  “My treat, Beau.”

  “But—”

  “Try not to get caught up in antiquated gender roles.”

  She walked away, and I rushed to follow, leaving the stunned waiter behind me with what looked l
ike a hundred-dollar bill on the table in front of him.

  I passed her, hurrying again to get the door, ignoring what she’d said about antiquated roles. I knew she was faster than I could probably imagine, but the half-filled room of watching people forced her to act like she was one of them. She gave me a strange look when I held the door open—like she was kind of touched by the gesture, but also annoyed by it at the same time. I decided to overlook the annoyed part, and I scrambled past her to hold the car door, too. It opened easily—she’d never locked it. Her expression was more amused than anything at this point, so I took that as a good sign.

  I almost ran to the passenger side of the car, trailing my hand across the hood as I moved. I had the nerve-wracking feeling that she was regretting telling me so much, and she might just drive off without me and disappear into the night. Once I was inside, she looked pointedly at my seat belt until I put it on again. I wondered for a second if she was some kind of safety-first absolutist—until I noticed that she hadn’t bothered with hers, and we were racing off into the light traffic without a hint of caution on her part.

  “Now,” she said with a grim smile, “it’s your turn.”

  9. THEORY

  “CAN—CAN I ASK JUST ONE MORE?” I STUTTERED QUICKLY AS SHE ACCELerated much too fast down the quiet street.

  I was in no hurry to answer her question.

  She shook her head. “We had a deal.”

  “It’s not really a question,” I argued. “Just a clarification of something you said before.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Make it quick.”

  “Well … you said you knew I hadn’t gone into the bookstore, and that I had gone south. I was just wondering how you knew that.”

  She thought about it for a moment, deliberating again.

  “I thought we were past all these evasions,” I said.

  She gave me a kind of you asked for it look. “Fine, then. I followed your scent.”

  I didn’t have a response to that. I stared out the window, trying to process it.

  “Your turn, Beau.”

  “But you didn’t answer my other question.”

  “Oh, come on.”

  “I’m serious. You didn’t tell me how it works—the mind-reading thing. Can you read anybody’s mind, anywhere? How do you do it? Can the rest of your family do the same thing?”

  It was easier to talk about this in the dark car. The streetlights were behind us already, and in the low gleam from the dashboard, all the crazy stuff seemed just a little more possible.

  It seemed like she felt the same sense of non-reality, like normality was on hold for as long as we were in this space together. Her voice was casual as she answered.

  “No, it’s just me. And I can’t hear anyone, anywhere. I have to be fairly close. The more familiar someone’s … ‘voice’ is, the farther away I can hear him. But still, no more than a few miles.” She paused thoughtfully. “It’s a little like being in a huge hall filled with people, everyone talking at once. It’s just a hum—a buzzing of voices in the background. Until I focus on one voice, and then what he’s thinking is clear.

  “Most of the time I tune it all out—it can be very distracting. And then it’s easier to seem normal”—she frowned as she said the word—“when I’m not accidentally answering someone’s thoughts rather than their words.”

  “Why do you think you can’t hear me?” I asked curiously.

  She stared at me, eyes seeming to bore right through mine, with that frustrated look I knew well. I realized now that each time she’d looked at me this way, she must have been trying to hear my thoughts, and failing. Her expression relaxed as she gave up.

  “I don’t know,” she murmured. “Maybe your mind doesn’t work the same way the rest of theirs do. Like your thoughts are on the AM frequency and I’m only getting FM.” She grinned at me, suddenly amused.

  “My mind doesn’t work right? I’m a freak?” Her speculation hit home. I’d always suspected as much, and it embarrassed me to have it confirmed.

  “I hear voices in my mind and you’re worried that you’re the freak.” She laughed. “Don’t worry, it’s just a theory… .” Her face tightened. “Which brings us back to you.”

  I frowned. How was I going to say this out loud?

  “I thought we were past all these evasions,” she reminded me softly.

  I looked away from her face, trying to gather my thoughts into words, and my eyes wandered across the dashboard … stopped at the speedometer.

  “Holy crow!” I shouted.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked, looking right and left, rather than straight ahead where she should be looking. The car didn’t decelerate.

  “You’re doing one-ten!” I was still shouting.

  I shot a panicked glance out the window, but it was too dark to see much. The road was only visible in the long patch of bluish brightness from the headlights. The forest along both sides of the road was like a black wall—as hard as a wall of steel if we veered off the road at this speed.

  “Relax, Beau.” She rolled her eyes, still not slowing.

  “Are you trying to kill us?” I demanded.

  “We’re not going to crash.”

  I carefully modulated my voice. “Why are we in such a hurry, Edythe?”

  “I always drive like this.” She turned to flash a smile at me.

  “Keep your eyes on the road!”

  “I’ve never been in an accident, Beau—I’ve never even gotten a ticket.” She grinned and tapped her forehead. “Built-in radar detector.”

  “Hands on the wheel, Edythe!”

  She sighed, and I watched with relief as the needle gradually drifted toward eighty. “Happy?”

  “Almost.”

  “I hate driving slow,” she muttered.

  “This is slow?”

  “Enough commentary on my driving,” she snapped. “I’m still waiting for you to answer my question.”

  I forced my eyes away from the road in front of us, but I didn’t know where to look. It was hard to look at her face, knowing the word I was going to have to say now. My anxiety must have been pretty obvious.

  “I promise I won’t laugh this time,” she said gently.

  “I’m not worried about that.”

  “Then what?”

  “That you’ll be … upset. Unhappy.”

  She lifted her hand off the gearshift and held it out toward me—just a few centimeters. An offer. I glanced up quickly, to make sure I understood, and her eyes were soft.

  “Don’t worry about me,” she said. “I can handle it.”

  I took her hand, and she curled her fingers very lightly around mine for one short second, then dropped her hand back to the gearshift. Carefully, I placed my hand over the top of hers again. I ran my thumb along the outside of her hand, tracing from her wrist to the tip of her pinkie finger. Her skin was so soft—not that it had any give at all, no, but soft like satin. Smoother, even.

  “The suspense is killing me, Beau,” she whispered.

  “I’m sorry. I don’t know how to start.”

  Another long moment of silence, just the purr of the engine and the sound of my hitching breath. I couldn’t hear hers at all. I traced back down the side of her perfect hand.

  “Why don’t you start at the beginning,” she suggested, her voice more normal now. Practical. “Is this something you thought up on your own, or did something make you think of it—a comic book, maybe, or a movie?”

  “Nothing like that,” I said. “But I didn’t think of it on my own.”

  She waited.

  “It was Saturday—down at the beach.”

  I risked a glance up at her face. She looked confused.

  “I ran into an old family friend—Jules, Julie Black. Her mom, Bonnie, and Charlie have been close since before I was born.”

  She still looked confused.

  “Bonnie’s one of the Quileute leaders… .”

  Her confused expression froze in place. It was
like all the planes of her face had suddenly hardened into ice. Oddly, she was even more beautiful like that, a goddess again in the light of the dashboard dials. She didn’t look very human, though.

  She stayed frozen, so I felt compelled to explain the rest.

  “There was this Quileute woman on the beach—Sam something. Logan made a comment about you—trying to make fun of me. And this Sam said your family didn’t come to the reservation, only it sounded like she meant something more than that. Jules seemed like she knew what the woman was talking about, so I got her alone and kept bugging her until she told me … told me the old Quileute legends.”

  I was surprised when she spoke—her face was so still, and her lips barely moved.

  “And what were those legends? What did Jules Black tell you I was?”

  I half-opened my mouth, then closed it again.

  “What?”

  “I don’t want to say it,” I admitted.

  “It’s not my favorite word, either.” Her face had warmed up a little; she looked human again. “Not saying it doesn’t make it go away, though. Sometimes … I think not saying it makes it more powerful.”

  I wondered if she was right.

  “Vampire?” I whispered.

  She flinched.

  Nope. Saying it out loud didn’t make it any less powerful.

  Funny how it didn’t sound stupid anymore, like it had in my room. It didn’t feel like we were talking about impossible things, about old legends or silly horror movies or paperback books. It felt real.

  And very powerful.

  We drove in silence for another minute, and the word vampire seemed to get bigger and bigger inside the car. It didn’t feel like it belonged to her, really, but more like it had the power to hurt her. I tried to think of something, anything to say to erase the sound of it.

  Before I could come up with anything, she spoke.

  “What did you do then?”

  “Oh—um, I did some research on the Internet.”

  “And that convinced you?” She was very matter-of-fact now.

  “No. Nothing fit. Lots of it was really stupid. But I just—”