Blood Moon [a Twilight Saga FanFiction]

First Meeting

BACK AT WORK, I went straight back to my office and dialled Igor's mobile. He had to know, he had to be told!
     The sister that my nieces and nephews were worried about dying to Argah was his Mary Alice Brandon!
    His phone went straight to the message bank.
     "Igor, it's me. Please, call me back when you get this, it is important. Please, call me back. It's about Mary Brandon."
     I hung up and forced myself to get back to work. Though the thought of Argah, leaning over little Mary Alice Brandon's fragile body... of course she wouldn't be the same fragile girl I knew, she'd be powerful. An immortal. Yet when I pictured her remembering with Argah, she wasn't Alice Cullen, she was Mary Brandon. Afraid. Unsure. Sick.
     And in danger.
     While I worked, the foremost part of my brain wasn't focusing on my work, it was picturing how Argah would kill her. Which out of his five locations would he take her, too? What sort of scenery, would be her last?
     Would he laugh while he killed her? Would he relish in drinking her dead blood?
     The worry for her almost made me feel faint. Although, apparently I had not done a good job covering up my worries. After an hour and a half, Hannah Collin was approaching me.
     "Fuller! My office," she snapped and walked off.
     "What did you do?" Toes whispered as we watched her walk away.
     I simply shrugged and followed Collin back to her big, head of hospital staffing, office. Her red carpet looked plush, and idly I wondered why red in between mental images of Mary's slaughter. She had a rather lush looking, and suede smelling, cream couch in one corner by my left when I walked in, to my right, a plastic fern... and a rather unusual plastic statue with a plaque reading, "made with recycled plastics"... which was both terrifying and beautiful.
     I tried to use the plastic statue to distract myself from my mental images of despair. Tried to be grateful that there were at least some of humankind in the 21st century trying to save the planet they lived on...
     It didn't work. Argah lowering his neck to an already char-skinned Mary knocked me back.
     "You look like you need a seat," Collin said from behind her mahogany desk. She waved to the chairs on the opposite side of the desk than her. "Sit. Relax for a little."
     "Collin, I can't, I've got so much going on right now," I sighed. "So, if I'm not in any trouble, I'd like to get back to work. Please?"
     "Are you feeling okay? You look pale."
     ... What? "I'm always pale," I pointed out.
     "No, I mean, really. Paler than usual. Are you sick?"
     "Nothing ondansetron won't take care of. I'll be fine."
     Collins' old brows pulled together as she looked over her half-circle spectacles at me.
     "Go home. Make a list of everything you need to get done and I'll give it to Toes."
     "Toes has his own load to handle."
     "And he handles that as well as yours before you got here. Write down everything you need down and I'll give it to Toes," she handed me a pen and paper. "You don't have a choice in this, Fuller. We can't risk spreading some contagious disease to the patients of this Hospital. Nanaimo does not need an outbreak of whatever stomach bug you have."
    "It's overwork, maybe?" I joked but wrote down what I needed anyway. "I have been working double shifts every day for the last month. Give them to someone else for a change."
     "But you pick them up," Collin grinned.
     I handed her my list and she read over them over her spectacles. I never understood really why she needed them if she was just going to read and look at everything over them all the time.
     "So, Jimmy Barrens needs an MRI. Casey Harolds needs a cranial X-Ray... haven't you already done one?"
     "That last three had some sort of blurriness obscuring the image, I was going to look over this next scan myself to ensure it's done properly," I explained.
     "Lucy Arnold needs a medication check and Emily Hargreaves needs a blood transfusion in half n hour. Got it, now go home."
     "Collin seriously I'm okay-"
     "Go, or I'll cut your pay."
     I chuckled, knowing she didn't have the guts, or balls, to do that, but I didn't argue anymore. The thoughts and images of Mary and Argah were burning my eyes. Stinging my throat. I couldn't let that happen to her.
     I wouldn't let it happen to her.
     So before telling Igor, before going home, before going to make sure that Igor knew what was going on and that my brothers family had moved into our town. I went to his house.
     It didn't really click in my head, where I was going until I quickly forced my car to a stop in front of a beautiful white, bright house.
     They weren't due to start at work for a few days so Carlisle would be in there. My brother, my long lost brother would be in there. I was finally going to meet him... finally going to see him face to face and not through a church window... a house window... a memory.
     I was finally going to meet my twin brother.
     Bella and Edward came outside to greet me, I was out of my car before they reached the bottom of their porch stairs.
     "Your sister?" I said and forced myself to not think about just how nervous I suddenly felt. Meeting my brother.
     Bella and Edward escorted me inside... and I was right, everyone was there.
     "Hello, Esme," I said to my sister-in-law as they approached me.
     Then I looked at him and I felt such a huge, sudden wave of hatred for this man I had never met. What made him so special so that he got chosen to live and not me? What did our father see in him, to let him live and kill me? Why did he get to live in a home, with a warm bed and a fire and food and water and I didn't? Why was he so special? Why was it not me?
     And then the feeling disappeared as quickly as it had arrived. I had more important things to think about than petty hatred for something he had no control over.
     "Edward tells us that your gift tells you pasts?" Carlisle asked me.
     "Yes," I answered him. I was surprised that my voice sounded so even. Trying to not focus on my brother, I turned to my eldest nephew. "Your sister, Edward?"
     "I'm here," a little woman said, coming around Edward.
     I saw it immediately. The short, spiked hair. The sunken cheekbones, the thinness, the petite figure... girlish features...
     And yet, still beautiful.
     Immortality had healed Mary Brandon in ways I never could.
     "You know her!" Edward accused.
     "A little," I retaliated.
     "Really?" Mary gasped. "How?"
     "Alice," as her adoptive siblings called her... in the home. "I don't need your scent to know why you can't remember your past. You were in an asylum, your real name is Mary Alice Brandon. Your family put you in the asylum because they thought you a monster, your father and your step-mother were afraid of you so they put you in the asylum two states over from your hometown." No need to mention her father's guilt. "I know you because, at the time, I was close friends with the vampire who owned the asylum."
     "Was?" Mary echoed. "What happened to them?"
     "Oh, he's perfectly fine." Currently working to help with troubled teens.
     "Okay. Um... thanks for telling me that you know me and all, but if it's okay with you, I'd still like to know everything," Mary said softly.
     "You already know my answer, Mary. But very well, open a window. Just remember, some pasts are best kept forgotten, Miss Brandon. I hope you are aware of that."
     "I'm aware," Mary nodded before she took her blond mates hand. Jasper.
     Jasper reached behind them and opened the window there, knocking both of their scents into me.
    Hmm... interesting how similar Jasper's past was to Igor's. Both changed to build an army to take the land the leader thought was rightfully theirs. Escaped with and for friends that had found love in the army.
     Both loved Mary Alice Brandon.
     There was one thing in his past that bothered me, however. His maker. Jasper believed Maria long dead by this point... but I had seen pasts, I knew otherwise.
    "Jasper," I began and looked at him. "Fair warning. Maria's not dead, and she's not in Texas anymore, not even in the southern region of the country."
     "Where is she?" Jasper asked.
     "I'll see if she comes here, it'll be okay," Mary assured her mate, softly, calmly. Her smile was just as radiant now as I remembered it being when we talked about the annoying aspects of our gifts, while she was human.
     "Seven years ago, more than a few covens and nomads ran through our borders, and a few of them had Maria in their pasts. She's travelling north, but I don't think she's trying to track you so you should be okay."
     "I'll keep an eye out," Mary said again. "I'll see if she comes."
     "Thank you, Alice," Edward said softly.
     "Mary Alice? Did you still want to know your past?" She only nodded once, stiffly.
     "Very well. You may want to sit down."