Luminosity (Book One)

Chapter 22: Maggie

When we arrived back in Norway, Gianna's egg-harvesting surgery had been and gone; hers were in the freezer next to mine. I went up to one of the computers in the bank of shared ones, rather than running to my cottage to boot up my laptop. I had another heap of e-mails from my parents and Rachel, and one reply from Angela saying she'd relayed my news to everyone and they all wished me well.

Rachel had sent an e-mail that was very depressing. Emily and Leah had gotten into a fight. This was all it had taken to push Emily teetering over the edge of the fence she'd been sitting regarding Sam. She ran straight to his arms, leaving Claire in an eager Quil's care for a couple of days. (Claire had spent one week home with her parents before being farmed out to her Aunt Emily again; this hiatus had made Quil very miserable but didn't appear to do him physical harm, and he perked up again when she returned.)

Leah was enraged. She picked fights with anyone and everyone - her brother, often, but everyone in the pack had gotten into at least one tussle with her except Rachel (who could order her to stand down) and Sam. Fast healing prevented this from being too much of a danger, but didn't make the doubly betrayed Leah more pleasant to be around. When Sam went wolf, she de-wolfed. At all costs she avoided sharing his thoughts. She stayed otherwise isolated from everyone except her mother, who was undergoing a loosely comparable distress.

Rachel had nominated Leah to test the pack's range, and Leah had run all the way to Canada (but not near Denali, thankfully). There was no noticeable delay, static, or loss of fidelity to the telepathy. Moving away wouldn't free her from the torment. Even if she scrupulously avoided direct mental contact with Sam, she couldn't help but get it secondhand from the others in the pack.

I thanked Rachel, asked her to keep me posted, and reminded her to let me know if she or the pack needed anything. I couldn't think of anything helpful to do about the Leah/Sam/Emily mess except to feel vaguely guilty. At least with the evidence stacking up that only male wolves could imprint, Becky's marriage was safe - unless the other accumulated stresses of activation and the move and her husband's departure from his career fractured it themselves.

I wrote my obligatory replies to my parents, but had no new European countries to tell them about; I told them we were in Norway and in the process of deciding where to go next. I confirmed for Charlie that I didn't plan to go back to Forks - or for that matter the United States - and attend high school in the new school year.

Inbox unburied, I scanned my mental list of projects. I figured it was a fine time to start building an immunity to Jasper, to see if I could expand my power that way. I closed my eyes and tried to shift my thinking.

I'd been told that he operated on a physical level. Breathing, pulse rate, maybe hormones. But he could work equally well on vampires and humans. (He tended to get better resultsfrom humans, but that was because their emotions were weaker and more malleable, not because he worked extra-forcefully on them.) Vampires had no pulses. Vampires could quit breathing at any time. I hadn't found either of these things to be major components in my experience of emotions. If we had hormones at all, it wasn't clear how they'd work - with no bloodstream to carry them, what would make them work?

From what I'd been told, Jasper didn't work overtly on any of these physical signals, either - he didn't say to himself "now I will calm this target's heart rate" or "more dopamine is called for here". He sensed and manipulated emotions directly. While he thought of it as functioning on a physical level, that wasn't how he interacted with his own power.

So it was rather strange that I wouldn't be immune to him to start with. It was probably a very borderline thing, and the very unconsciousness of what I did was likely working against me. Perhaps if I just concentrated...