Luminosity (Book One)

Chapter 27: Scatter

The phone call came the next morning. I was with the whole family, posing Elspeth for more pictures against the backdrops available in the main house. While Esme took her turn I picked up the phone unthinkingly, and froze when I saw the identity of my caller. Before I could invent an excuse to take the call privately, Jasper had seen the name.

"Jacob Black," snarled Jasper. Would he know the name? The surname certainly, but - I remembered a snippet of a paragraph from my notes, read and attached to memories early in my second life. Jasper had answered the phone first when I'd called Edward to tell him that Jacob was at Charlie's house on Valentine's Day. He'd have been near enough to hear the entire conversation. He would know who Jacob was - Billy's son. A Quileute. He'd know enough to be furious that I was in secret contact with him.

Edward's head snapped up and he was across the room in a moment to interpose himself between me and Jasper. The phone rang again, and everyone else was holding still, waiting to see what was going on.

If Jacob was calling me - not texting, not relaying a message through Rachel, not sending an e-mail - then it was urgent. He would know as well as Rachel or Leah the protocols for getting ahold of me. Or at least it had better be urgent, because if it wasn't, I was going to kill him. I flipped the phone open, trusting Edward and Alice to keep Jasper under control while I dealt with the emergency. "What?" I snapped.

"Bella," said Jacob, "you know that bloodsucker Becky's gang killed a while back? His mate was here sniffing around, and we couldn't catch her when we found her - she went into the water and we lost the trail. And she snitched on us to the Volturi and now there are some scary damn leeches who've got near everybody lying on the ground blind and deaf and sorta paralyzed. I peeled off my own pack, same way Becky did, and was able to get everybody with an imprint to follow me and they didn't knock me out, somehow. Nobody else managed to get away and we had to leave them."

"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?"