Six days after Ben's showdown with the Goddess Artemis, Edythe gazed pointedly out at the waning afternoon sun and for the second time reminded irrepressible Jacob Black that the medflight from Phoenix had taken a lot out of Ben. He'd been lost in the peaceful oblivion of coma for only three days and change; he had a big day tomorrow with the commencement of physical therapy, and he had more than three dozen bone fractures that would never heal without rest.
Luckily, in the past half hour Charlie had dropped by from work to make sure that Ben was comfortable and settled in, else Jacob might never have left on his own, despite all the hints.
The great thing about Charlie was that the past truly was in the past. He made no mention of Ben's cruel and unfair parting words last Sunday. "Hah," he boomed, "great to have you back, kid! I can hardly believe it. And don't you worry. Carlisle's found you the best P.T. doc in the northwest. Gonna be back on your feet and home where you belong in no time."
Then he looked up at Edythe, and he said, with authentic emotion, "And thanks for being there for him. Made all the difference to Ben, and it meant a lot to Renée and me, too."
"Say nothing of it," Edythe whispered, meek and nonplussed, as though she'd had a choice in the matter.
Ben said, "Say Dad, listen, I'm not going anywhere, anytime soon, and right now I can't keep my eyes open."
"Right, got it. Jake and I'll say goodnight, then," he resolved, with a warm hammy palm on Ben's shoulder.
Jacob through this exchange had been transfixed by Edythe. He glanced up, blinked distractedly, and muttered, "Yeah, right."
His russet complexion took on the hue of a bruise, and he put up his hands. "You're right, you're right, sorry. We should get going."
Charlie had said his goodbyes and was already at the door, waiting for Jacob.
Ben watched Jacob's ill-considered attempt to backpedal toward the door without taking his eyes off Edythe, and he nearly toppled the heart monitor. Jacob laughed at his own clumsiness with abashed self-deprecation.
"Thanks for visiting, Jake," said Edythe. "And also for catching me up on local events."
"No worries," Jacob replied, several inches south of her eyes. "Say, you guys don't mind if I drop by again, right? To deliver the news of the day?"
Ben generously replied, "Yes, that would be great. During visitor hours."
He could not see Jacob's departure, but he listened to the receding footsteps and the closing of the door. His eyes never left Edythe. For the past hour, ever since the nurses had completed their ministrations and opened the curtains, Ben had been watching her bemused silence as Jacob had droned on and on, recounting every intrigue, from the perspective of Forks and La Push, since Ben's near-death encounter at the ballet studio. Now in the blessed silence he took his first proper stock of Edythe, herself.
This room's exterior had a deep overhang which blocked direct sunlight throughout the day. The glass walls were equipped with powered window shades, which Edythe at some point had activated, to drop them from the twelve foot ceiling to the floor. She had also dimmed the interior lights, one of the many hints to oblivious Jacob that his esteemed visit had run long. At no time of day, in this room, did she have to concern herself with the effect of natural sunlight or hot halogen lamps on her skin. Down in Phoenix, in the St. Joseph's recovery ward, she had been on constant high alert due to the incessant visitors and foot traffic. Here, she knew the nurses and interns, and she had understandings with all of them. Visitors' hours had no relevance here, not for Edythe, and she had Ben all to herself, the occasional pesky nag like Jacob notwithstanding.
Consequently, she had dressed comfortably, for Benjamin alone. She wore a white satin headband, with her hair down. A faded red short-sleeved cotton shirt extended to her thighs and almost entirely covered a tight lemon skirt. She'd been wearing yellow canvas flat-soled shoes early on, but at some point she had lost them.
Ben looked at her and recalled the fateful embrace that they had begun on the vale's cliffside, in the grotto behind the waterfall, almost a week ago. A seeming eternity. He needed her more intensely than ever, and he struggled to control his respiration, heedless of the lancing fire through his ribs. He stared up resentfully at his marginalized and immobilized arms. Even as he forced a humored laugh through his lips to mask his embittered resentment, he harbored doubt that she fell for it.
She sought to steer him from his fixation on Jacob, Zoey, and their dubious prospects for intimacy. "So," she said.
"Indeed," said he.
Edythe drifted forward, astride his bed, and gently kissed his forehead, as she idly ran a finger along the raised bedrail. "Back in Forks," she said, in a tone weighty with implications, "and finally alone in this pretty, spacious room with panoramic views of the night forest."
He nodded and looked out at the trees beyond the windows, at night revealed to be not an untamed forest at all, but rather a forested garden, the trunks and boughs backlit by lamps set in cultivated moss along paved walking paths. His room had an exterior door that opened to those same gardens. He couldn't imagine ever being in a condition to avail himself of that door, so he labored to repress his knowledge of its existence.
She reached for a steel table and picked up a remote control. "Do you mind if I dim the lights a bit more? It truly has been a long arduous day, for you." The recessed ceiling lights diminished to distant, feeble stars before he could answer. She set the remote down and smiled timidly.
He bit his lip and closed his eyes. Unbearable. Simply unbearable, his attraction, despite his debilitation. He inquired of the darkness, "How late do visiting hours run, precisely?"
She whispered, "I don't honestly know. I didn't think to inquire. Ben, do you mind if I lower this bedrail? It's kind of in the way." The bedrail silently disappeared, before he could reply.
He frantically stammered, "I– I can't move at all– I can't hold you– I can't even breathe"–
"Shhhh." She slipped under his sheet and blanket. The stainless steel gurney easily took her weight. The fiberglass encasement of his torso extended from his collarbones all the way to his pelvis, so she confined her warm, feathered caresses to his neck and face. "No need to move, no need to hold me. Sleep and heal, my beloved. That is all I require of you."
His chocolate eyes searched for her. In the dimmed room he could not see that her eyes were progressively fading to black, but he knew it. He wished she would feed. He understood on some level why at this time she deemed it impossible, and he told himself that there would be time for that. She had told him that while their tolerance of thirst varied by the individual, she could go more than two weeks without feeling dangerous compulsions, given sufficient distraction. And now Ben supposed that she had distraction aplenty. "Thank you, honey, for taking me home– I know you wished I would stay in Phoenix."
She testily chided him, between a flurry of insistent kisses to his cheeks and lips, "I did not want you to be away from me. I was resigned to your making that choice. But I am relieved that you are here. With me."
Ben tried to say something insipid, about there being no real choice and no real decision. She didn't want to hear it. She had gotten him out of Phoenix in the nick of time, much as she could admit on a rational level that she had been resigned to a different outcome.
She silenced him with lips to his mouth, fingers in his hair, her warm breasts pressed ever so gently against his upper chest and neck. The kiss inevitably broke, and she whispered, "I am going to cradle you, my beloved, and sing you to sleep, and guard you as you dream, until you are well. I am patient. In the meantime, don't worry about anything."
He could hardly relax, burdened as he was by his intense physical ardor for her, that very moment, which he couldn't possibly act upon.
She curled around his head and shoulders, cradled him, and softly hummed a minimalist classical melody from Satie's Gymnopiedes. He recalled the tune from early childhood and sang along silently, in his head.
He reflected on Jacob's biased account of the venison roast, from back on Tuesday night. Ben had heard the Quileute legends, in broad strokes, from none other than the Tribe's heir apparent, back in the winter, on First Beach. Jacob treated his heritage with contempt, but Ben from his privileged perspective had no trouble with any of it.
Jacob's vampire stories were unequivocally true, though he didn't believe a word of them. Therefore it stood to reason that the rest of their campfire stories carried grains of truth, as well. Jacob had intimated that big Sam Uley and his pals had betrayed paranormal faculties that night, with his alleged accounts of impossible speed, strength and perception. Jacob hadn't known what to make of the evidence imparted by his own senses, but Ben wondered: were the older Quileute boys part-wolf? If so, how much? How did it work? Jacob hadn't seen them change into dogs. So, what? An excess of imagination? Or had there been something to it? They were fast, like vampires. What else? Did their hearts beat? Did they bleed? Did they turn into wolves literally, if sufficiently provoked? Did they age? Could they die?
He resolved to ask Edythe. He had no choice. But first, he asked a more urgent question, given her present posture and attitude, curled right around his pillow like an amorous kitten. "Do the nurses make evening rounds?"
She chuckled and promised that she was listening for them. "Worry not, precious one. I will blend right into the woodwork. Which does remind me. In their estimation the intravenous suffices for nourishment, but I can go out and forage something more substantial for you."
He meekly demurred, "Maybe tomorrow morning." He didn't want to belabor his sense of insufficiency, being unable to reach the bathroom on his own, or the humiliating necessity of sponge baths by male nurses. He changed the subject by asking his less urgent question. "Sam Uley and his posse. Do you know if they literally turn into wolves?"
She shook her head. "I don't. I suppose it's possible. Genetic cross-contamination of the kind that Jacob described to you appears to manifest itself in a broad spectrum."
"So you've never seen one of these... mixes? crossbreeds? hybrids?"
"I have not. None of us have. Not even here, where the aborigines claim to be shapeshifters. If there's truth to the claim, it skipped several generations. I met Ephraim Black, a long time ago, and even he had no idea what he was carrying in his cell nuclei. He had nothing but campfire stories, himself."
"I suppose if this Ephraim could have turned into a wolf at the sight of you guys, he would have," Ben surmised.
"Oh, yes. He was deeply embittered that he had to negotiate with us at all, with the forging of the non-aggression treaty. He would rather have chased us into the ocean. But now we know that he had to have been carrying the trait, albeit recessively, and it somehow skipped a bunch of generations."
"How do we know, for sure?"
She tapped her head with a wan smile. "Jacob doesn't believe a word of it, but his memories can't lie. I saw everything that he witnessed, through his eyes. I don't know what Sam Uley and his boys have become, and they certainly don't know, either. But they're definitely something."
This last needed a response, but he repeatedly forgot the thread of the conversation. This had been a long, long day. At some point Edythe made the observation that her body warmed for him more efficiently with direct contact. She removed the faded t-shirt to curl her bare chest around his head and shoulders. More than ever, he wanted the use of his hands and resented their suspension on the traction cables. The tiny skirt bunched up around her waist. She removed that, too. They kissed in the darkness. Both were wistful.
Off and on she had to retreat from the bed and hide in a far corner, behind the burgundy Chesterfield sofa, while nurses came in to adjust the traction. His arms and chest would require suspension for several more days, at the discretion of the physical therapist, whom Ben would meet tomorrow. The first time the attendants came to the room, he fretted with Edythe's departure. She returned an instant after they withdrew. On subsequent episodes, throughout the night, he never properly awoke.
_________
Ben opened his eyes to an overcast sky filtered through the cultivated trees, and the musical chimes of Alice, who'd been bustling in and out of the suite with armloads of garment bags.
This improvised boardroom had a spacious walk-in coat closet, complete with a coat-check desk, adjacent to men's and women's restrooms with black granite counters and stalls. Yet she derided the pitiful accommodations.
"You'll be here for the duration, Edythe Cullen," she petulantly asserted on her third trip to the overflowing closet. "You'll have to change out of those rags inevitably. You could have thought ahead and arranged a room with decent amenities."
Edythe glanced down at her red t-shirt, which she'd put back on inside-out and backwards, tag out. She wrinkled her nose and angrily snapped, "Benjamin is not going to be in this room any longer than necessary."
"Whatever. I suppose I can recover some space if I take everything out of the garment bags."
Edythe shook her head and left her to it.
She raced to the bed and enthused, "You're awake." She punctuated the observation with a kiss.
"Your shirt's inside-out."
"You can help me fix it later," she promised. "How about breakfast?"
"Can I get something besides pureed applesauce?"
She considered and said, "I could pilfer whatever you want. But I think I'd better go ask what is officially allowed." Edythe flitted out of the room, disheveled t-shirt and all.
Alice popped into view, peeking over an immense two-armed stack of empty garment bags.
"Are any of those clothes for me?"
"God, no. These clothes are all Edy's. There's not a vacant cubic inch in there for your stuff. You'll just have to go buff. You look lots better since Friday. Wow."
"I had a great night," he said wryly.
She laughed and said, "I can only imagine how pent-up you must be. Believe me, Edythe's aware, too, but she's super-paranoid about killing you with kindness. That'll pass. She's pent-up, too. The nights will improve."
He knew that Edythe would be back in seconds, and he had to get something out. He hastily whispered, "She's gone to fetch breakfast. For me. But Alice, her eyes are so black. She must have to eat. Feed. Whatever. But she won't even think about leaving my sight for two minutes."
"No worries," she said dismissively. "I'm sure to your perception a year has transpired, but she and I hunted together just ten days ago. For Edythe, that's not a long time, at all. I've seen her go two weeks. She forgets to eat when she's preoccupied with nonsense, and you, my friend, are not nonsense."
"Okay... I suppose that makes me feel a little bit better...."
Alice hastily whispered, "She's well aware that her fasting bothers you, and she's anxious about it. She insists that she's managing it. Hush. She's coming back."
_________
Ben reclined with head and spine elevated to a diagonal. He worked happily on a bowl of jellied cranberry sauce.
"I know you would have preferred a bacon cheeseburger, but at least you get to chew."
"This is perfect," he gratefully assured her.
"The nurses also showed me where I can get ice-cream for you. Chocolate and vanilla. As much as you want." She laughed at his yearning expression and flitted out of the room again.
Later, between spoonsful of chocolate ice-cream, he asked her if they were ever going to talk about what had become of the redheaded accomplice named Victor after the three amped friends of big Sam Uley had chased him away from Charlie's back yard venison roast.
Edythe decided that nothing could be gained from withholding the whole truth. She speculated that the truth, if skillfully framed, might even give him some peace of mind, since he clearly worried about it.
"First off, yeah, Victor was ghosting your house. But Charlie had two protectors, all day, Esme and Rex. He was never in danger. In fact we don't think Victor cared about Charlie at all. We think he was really watching Charlie's protectors, waiting for their reactions to any news out of Phoenix. Remember, Victor was sidelined up here. The action was down south, and he wasn't getting any calls from Artemis.
"In fact we think that was how he found out about the ballet studio and Jillian's inglorious end. Carlisle called Charlie a couple times, and no doubt Victor heard at least one side of those calls. So he knew early on that you were alive, in a hospital. Victor must have hovered over the party to hear the rest. And when Emmie called Rex to tell him she'd be up to get the Chevy, she gave a rundown on events in Scottsdale. We suspect that was when Victor learned that Jillian was dead, and that's probably also when he learned that you were the first to cripple her with fire."
Ben's appalled expression made her chuckle.
"Emelia was very proud of you. She thoroughly enjoyed telling Rex that story."
Ben scowled and blurted through a mouthful of ice-cream, "Great. Just great. So now Victor's after me?"
"Oh, no. Definitely not. Impossible."
"Why?" he demanded, incredulously.
"Because he's afraid of you."
Ben choked with huge eyes. She snatched up a cloth and fussed over him. Her hair spilled over his forehead, and her whispered apologies tickled his inner ear.
She explained, "You have to understand, dearest one, what you did to Artemis... well, as far as we know, it's never been done. Victor is a skittish, haunted soul to start with. I have never felt the mind of one so fractured. And for Victor to have heard from a witness that you alone, a human pet, crippled a fighter that he idolized and had believed practically invincible, well, it's incomprehensible to us, and we know how uniquely delicious you are."
"Honestly," he insisted, quite abashed, "it was pure dumb luck. She offered one free shot and reneged, and then"–
–"No, my love." Edythe shook her head emphatically. "I'm sure she must have erred. As I said, this just doesn't happen. But err she did. She presented an opportunity, and you capitalized. It wasn't luck. Opportunity and resourcefulness, amplified by courage and your determination to live. Oh, believe me sweet one, Victor is very afraid."
She knew that she wasn't convincing him. They would have to disagree. She moved on. "As to what's become of him, Esme chased after Victor's three pursuers that night, to learn the outcome. She witnessed the first few seconds of the chase. We don't know exactly what these amped Quileute boys have become, but she says their power and dexterity were utterly remarkable. They chased Victor all the way to the Pacific Ocean and most likely tried to chase him into the depths. From there, we lost him for a time. For all we knew, they could have caught up with him.
"We know now that he's alive, because he turned up a couple days ago in Phoenix, when he stole the jet from under the noses of the federal marshals. Chances are that he crossed the length of California in the deeps of the Pacific. Esme says that whatever else the Quileutes have become, they still have hearts and blood."
"They're aerobic," Ben provided.
"Exactly. Which means they're susceptible to high pressure. The bends. It's possible that the ocean depth is the only thing that saved Victor. According to Esme, neither the trees nor the ocean in and of itself slowed them down at all. She lost them and had to trail after them by smell alone. Which I suppose is a blessing. For all we know, they could have turned on her."
"And she knows for a fact that they never turned into dogs?"
"She never got close enough to see them, but she doesn't think so. They left human footprints. Impossibly long strides, but definitely bipedal."
"You're the smallest and fastest. Could you have kept up with them?"
"I don't know," she admitted darkly, unhappy to admit it and displeased by his tone of admiration. She put that out of her mind and ploughed forward.
"Now, the upshot is, you expressed skepticism that Victor fears you. Consider this, dearest. We don't know what the Quileutes are. Well, Victor doesn't know what you are. He only knows that you somehow killed Jillian or at least crippled her and left her for dead. For all he knows, you're one of them, yourself. Just imagine what you must look like to him. How to describe... okay. Try to imagine Micaela Newton killing Jasper."
Ben laughed nervously at the sheer absurdity of the notion.
She went on to relate that when Victor had been down in Phoenix, he had not once strayed within ten miles of St. Joseph's Hospital. After the barbecue and being routed all the way to the Pacific, he would not have dared.
"Alice and Jazzy left for home on Friday night, after Homeland Security seized Jillian's jet. Stealing it to keep it out of Victor's hands had been the last item on their cleanup punchlist, so when it got impounded, they had nothing else to do. After that, I ran patrols."
Ben raised a skeptical eyebrow.
She giggled and nuzzled his nose with hers. "You seem to have convinced yourself that I'm literally tied to your hip and hopelessly in thrall, but this weekend you did sleep most of the time, and I did manage to drag myself away from you long enough to check in on your neighborhood and your closest friends. I do know when Victor showed up. He went to Scottsdale and lingered for at time at the ashes of the ballet studio, to ascertain that Jillian is dead. Then he went straight for the jet and discovered the seizure. We thought it was safely out of his hands, but a few hours later, he stole it from the guarded airport hangar."
Media and federal investigators were calling it the heist of the century. He had somehow slipped the jet out from under heavy guard with no casualties. No one had noticed the jet missing until it had appeared on logs with an approved flight plan and clearance for takeoff. In the air, its call sign had changed three times before it had disappeared entirely.
Ben summed up, "So now this dude Victor has a private jet."
Edythe nodded glumly and concurred, "Jazz and Emmie did try to meet him at the Montana airfield that Artemis had used last week, but Victor never showed. They destroyed the airfield out of principle, but Jazz doesn't think it matters. He thinks Victor has jets stashed all over the place, and who knows what else. If he were human, he'd be a consummate survivalist."
"And now he's after me."
Edythe emphatically shook her head. "No. No, Benjamin. Don't you see? His obsession with technology is a crutch. He's a feckless coward. I'm not saying he doesn't have a beef. But at this point the only thing he fears more than his own shadow is you. Jazz thinks he might attempt to enlist allies to help with his little crusade, but it's hard to imagine any of us indulging him. There would be no reason. He has nothing to offer in return."
Ben considered all of that quietly and felt dissatisfied with her certitude. Cowards made the worst bullies, in his experience. Scared cowards lashed out. He couldn't imagine that this Victor wouldn't try. He also didn't buy her assertion that he had nothing to offer. Jillian had found a use for him. Now Jillian was sweet ash in the wind. Victor still lurked, stalked, plotted, hunted.
He said, "Edythe honey, this Victor has to die."
She nodded. "Agreed, my Benjamin. Absolutely. He's a menace, and he has to go."
He wanted very much to urge her to go after the loser. It was what he would have done, in her shoes. But he feared hurting her feelings by seeming to send her off on an errand, when she felt so strongly that her place was with him, while he healed and whatnot. Instead he quietly ventured, "So what now?"
She bent over him and hugged him. "Victor has gone to ground. Wherever he is now, he's lost. So now we just wait for him to surface, and then we'll deal with him." She brightly added, "In the meantime, we have more important concerns. This morning, we have school."
"Ugh!"
She laughed and assured him that remote attendance would be fun. They had optional Internet access to all of his classes, in case he had questions for his teachers, but every one of them had assigned independent study. She would be taking dictation and providing general technical assistance, since the school had been apprised of his physical limitations, particularly his present inability to use his hands.
"You'll be getting full gym credit for physical therapy. You're meeting Dr. Niland for your first session this afternoon. After school."
He frowned at that. He'd forgotten all about the torture session to come. Then he brightened and urged, "What about Choir? I want to attend Choir."
She smiled and promised him that he would.
"And we have to attend Bio Lab. Do you think we can get test tubes and Bunsen burners and stuff? We're in a hospital. I bet this place has every chemical."
She giggled and assured him that she would talk to Mr. Banner about the practicalities of getting him set up for remote participation.
He only had one objection to the plan for his return to school. "What about your courses, honey?"
Edythe scoffed, "Please."
_________
On Monday morning, Colleen leapt into Edythe's room, through her open window wall, and landed so deftly that no one but Alice knew by inference that she had arrived.
Colleen felt Alice as well, sympathetic shared reverberation, a shiver of energy out on the river, where she worked on a clever little house made of tiny stones. Alice intentionally made herself scarce, to grant Colleen space.
Colleen sensed everyone else, too. Carlisle and Esme were nearby, out in the village, practicing their narrow repertoire in service of their human charade.
Jasper ranged along a timeline that threaded from northwest Oregon through Washington and deep into the Canadian Rockies, chasing game trails. The surviving adversary, the feckless redhead, ghosted himself at every turn, yet he always managed to evade his pursuers, ever in retreat.
Rex and Emilia were back as well, downstairs, industriously poring over a vast cartography collection. Colleen would assuredly have to peek into that door and intrude on their little love nest. She adored maps, particularly the old illuminated variety, the more replete with griffons, serpents, and demons lurking within narrow crags, the better. She watched them with intrigue and amusement. Emilia's anthropological theories, like her maps, were wrong on nearly all accounts. Colleen made this idle observation with neither derision nor reproach. She could assuredly sympathize. She could barely recall the time that she had first consigned herself to ignorance, and as a practical matter, this little fieldtrip notwithstanding, she despaired of ever understanding anything of consequence.
Not for the first time, she pondered the possibility that her particular definition of consequence presented the essential difficulty.
She had left Phoenix on Wednesday afternoon, moments after her meeting with Edythe Cullen and her pretty silk parasol. She had taken her own sweet time getting here: innumerable distractions of no consequence, on the way. The sojourn had provided felicitous diversions. She seldom fed on this benighted side of the world. The bronzed, languid males of California tasted no different than men anywhere, but the settings conferred novelty.
She wondered, should the San Andreas Fault be rent asunder by a scream, and should that vast dry purgatory obligingly entomb itself in the chambers of the sea, by sea girls red and brown, would Atlantis arise again in compensatory restoration of balance, astride this continent's opposing shore? She lamented the plausibility of that outcome: yet another realm for the living to besmirch and efface, the latest in an unremitting litany.
'Regolith rises and falls,' she told herself, 'and everywhere that it rears itself into the sun, life poisons beautiful oblivion with its cancer.'
Curiosity took her out of Edythe's window and down the back lawn, to the river. She took a leisurely stroll on the way there, to practice at being human. The absurd pretense mattered to Carlisle, for some inscrutable reason. For the duration of her stay, she would endeavor to humor him.
Alice watched Colleen's approach. Somewhere in her travels she had picked up skin tight Capris jeans and an oversized oxblood and yellow rugby shirt with a smart white collar. Her long titanium white hair, fine as an infant's wispy locks, draped straight down her back to her thighs. In the warm spring air, humidity condensed and crystallized in her wake, a train of microscopic ice shards.
Colleen folded her legs, set herself cross-legged at the shore, and imagined herself walking through the rooms of Alice's clever palm-sized stone cottage.
Alice despondently said, "Edythe's back in town with Ben. I suppose you know that. She won't need a thing from her room, so it's all yours. I've cleaned out her closet. That's yours, too."
Colleen idly skipped stones on the river, and she occasionally tossed particularly pretty ones to Alice. She said, "Thanks, but I didn't bring luggage."
Alice nodded at her outfit and remarked, "That's cute on you."
"I borrowed it from some profligate's wife."
Alice pondered this, with a tongue in her cheek, and admitted, "I'm not much for roughing it. I acquire my wardrobe in boutiques. I'm pampered and spoiled."
Colleen grinned. She really liked Alice.
The Cullens' resident clairvoyant continued, "Edythe's stuff wouldn't have fit you. You're taller than she. Some of my stuff might fit. I've got lots of ensembles I haven't opened, yet. You're welcome to pick through it and see if there's anything you like." She placed a pretty purple stone at the corner of her little house.
Yes, indeed, Colleen liked Alice. She decided to go for broke. "Do you mind if I ask a question?"
Alice's eyes went wide. "You need my help with a question? I thought you knew everything."
Colleen smiled and shook her head with a bemused sigh. "If that were true," she averred, "I wouldn't be here. May I? I'll advise you, it's personal."
Alice shrewdly guessed, "Why do I humor Carlisle and his unseemly philosophy by sucking on the necks of mule deer? Believe me, I often wonder myself. Your eyes are so gorgeous. Just looking at you makes me thirsty."
Colleen fell backward with her laughter and had to pick herself back up. She blinked with her fine white eyelashes, and the freckles across her cheeks shimmered like constellations. "I've wondered about that one, too, but that's not my question."
Alice shrugged and offered, "Shoot," truly curious.
Colleen poured tiny smooth stones through her fingers and confided, "All the way here, I've been concerned about the spillage of secrets that could pose inadvertent implications on events. I endeavor not to meddle. I try to let time unfold and reveal itself to the world naturally, come what may. The other day, in Phoenix, I suppose I goaded Edythe a little bit, by addressing her by her born name."
Alice interrupted, "That's what I mean, about how you seem to know everything. Even Edythe doesn't really know that. Her birth name is acquired knowledge that she keeps on a yellowed slip of paper."
"That's not the only place it's written. It's etched. On the part of Edythe that I see."
"What does that mean?"
Colleen shrugged. "I don't know. I hope to one day find out. As I was saying, I suppose I instigated what came next. She returned the sentiment by plucking my born name out of my head."
"No, she didn't," Alice asserted.
Colleen tilted her head, perplexed.
Alice explained, "On the phone call last week, you mentioned Aro, the leader of the Italian Guard."
"He's not Italian."
Alice patiently insisted, "Whatever he is, Carlisle has warned us about him, many times. Edythe and I, particularly: that we are vulnerable to him, and should avoid him, because he is decadent, and irreverent, and unscrupulous, and most of all because he would covet our gifts. You said it yourself on the night that Carlisle called you, that he craves omniscience and would see in our gifts a means to achieve it: Edythe's knowledge of the present, and my knowledge of the future. But he would not achieve the total knowledge that he seeks, even if he had us. He covets us, because he does not understand us. He perceives and judges the value of our gifts from his perspective, and he is making the same error that you're making, now.
"Carlisle told us about Aro's frightful, terrible gift. His ability to sift the thoughts of every memory one has ever had. Carlisle explained how it is invasive, aggressive. How one feels violated. How it feels like rape. Carlisle said that humans cannot withstand it, that their malleable gray matter is assaulted by it, that to humans it feels as though he has entered their brains through their temples by a drill. Carlisle says that we can withstand it, though we feel dirty forever after, but mortals are driven insane by it and sometimes even killed.
"Edythe is nothing like Aro. Edythe's gift is not invasive in that way. She did not access your thoughts. Edythe's gift is passive, utterly painless and surreptitious. Those around her do not even know they are being read. Edythe didn't pluck your name from your memories. She knows your name only because your own thoughts revealed and projected it. The same way my eyes see you now, only because you are reflecting and projecting light."
Colleen pondered this new clarity and murmured, "So, Edythe didn't read my name? She heard it, because on some level I wanted my true born name to be known?"
Alice shrugged and said, "Or her reaction to your use of her name shook your name loose of its protections. Who's to say? The point is, you allowed it."
"Hmm. So I meddled, after all. Subliminally. Thank you, Alice. No matter how long I persist, I never despair of being regaled by insights altogether fresh and new. And what of yourself? For you it is the same? You can see the future. And with it, one would reasonably presume, all the thoughts that one shall ever think, in the future. Edythe knows my name, yet you do not. I am wondering how that can be the case."
Alice wrinkled her nose and shook her head. "I don't see the future."
Colleen cracked up with mirth, certain that Alice was putting her on.
"No, really, I don't. I mean, I do. But I don't. It's more like seeing every plausible outcome at once. And from that I don't predict. I infer. Extrapolate. Sheesh. That makes it sound like math. I don't really have to think about it. I just do it. Like seeing or smelling or hearing. Anyway, I can see the physical conditions that undergird peoples' decisions. Their thoughts, yes, but not like mindreading, more like seeing what their neural activity will look like, thinking particular thoughts, if those thoughts should ever come to pass. And that's the crux. Their thoughts only arise in the first place if they have some relevance to future decisions."
Colleen considered that, flummoxed, and guessed, "So... you're saying, you don't know my name, because Edythe won't be thinking about it anytime soon, because my name isn't relevant to Edythe's immediate future?"
Alice clapped with delight. "See? You do know everything!"
Colleen rejected the notion with a sniff and said that she knew everything except how to run Edythe's hi-fi sound system. "All the tubes and dials are a bit daunting."
Alice agreed, while adjusting a stone on her little house, "Edythe's all about analog. An old soul. You two have that in common. Let's go back. Her stereo's easier than it looks. I'll show you." She abruptly and forcefully swept her house into the river, sending some of the stones fifty feet.
Shocked Colleen exclaimed, "It was so pretty! Why would you do that?"
Alice dismissively replied, "I'll just rebuild it again, tomorrow. Gets old fast. It comes out exactly the same, every time."
They walked back to the house together and up to Edythe's room. Colleen practiced human speed, human gestures, human mannerisms. She had assured them that she would blend in. They entered through a side door on the first level. They took the stairs. Colleen tested Edythe's long butterscotch couch, while Alice demonstrated that only two buttons on the daunting hi-fi system really mattered: the power toggle, and the square LED button that set the turntable spinning. All the rest pretty much took care of itself, as it should.
Colleen arose and selected a particular album that had caught her eye on her first perusal of the meticulously ordered shelves. Alice watched as she deftly slipped the fragile vinyl platter onto the turntable's spindle. Here was a woman who had lived in ancient palace chambers sculpted by trial and error for their acoustics and filled with minstrels. The diamond stylus settled into the meticulously etched spiral, and Edythe's room filled with the Go-Gos.
Alice ventured, "May I ask"–
"Anything, sure, whatever," Colleen absently said, humming to herself as she danced to the beat.
"Edythe and Ben have returned to Forks. They're just a few miles away, at the hospital, as I'm sure you're aware. And yet here you are. Dancing to poptarts. You raced across the world on this errand, but now that you're here, it doesn't seem to be particularly urgent. I'm just wondering how and when you intend to tell them what's happening to them."
Colleen didn't open her eyes, didn't stop dancing. She said, "Benjamin Swan's in no fit condition for my tripe. He has to rest and recover. And you're right that there's no urgency. None whatsoever. I'll just hang with you guys, until he's ready to listen."
"You could always talk to Edythe"–
"But I mustn't. Edythe's mind isn't safe. She knows my name. Even that's too much. Only Ben's mind is safe."
Alice thought she understood that. Colleen referred to Ben's natural and effortless ability to block Edythe's telepathy. But she had to ask, "Why does your born name matter so much?"
"Who knows?" Colleen rhetorically countered, with a shudder. "It won't matter at all, until it suddenly does." A single snowflake could trigger an avalanche.
Alice advised, "If you intend on telling Ben alone, that's easier said than done. They have no secrets. They tell each other everything. No filters. Zip."
Colleen laughed warmly at that. "I can only imagine. I bet that's annoying for you guys."
"Just a little," Alice concurred grumpily. "They're in their own little world, and to hell with all the rest."
"Yes," Colleen agreed, softly laughing again. She settled herself, eyes closed, swaying to the pop quintet that filled the room, and gently explained, "Benjamin can share my story with Edythe if he wishes, and yes, he all too likely will. I expect it. Want it. No matter. From her perspective it will all be hearsay, when that inevitably occurs. Not the same as knowing. Not the same as hearing it directly from me."
Alice silently wondered why the distinction would matter, and who would be listening.
"But that's all beside the point," Colleen went on. "Your premise is faulty."
"Pardon?"
"I didn't come all this way to educate them. I don't know what's happening to them. I have my guesses, sure, but I've been wrong throughout my ten thousand years. Or is it twelve thousand? It might even be twenty. I no longer recall when I stopped counting. When did the Last Recession empty Eden? I sculpted it once. The memory was long lost to me by then, and remembered indirectly through artifacts. It had to have occurred at least ten thousand years before Sekhmet subjugated the known world. I was a young child there, with my mother and father, indentured by need, at the outermost Ring Wall, when we joined the last westward caravan. As a girl I helped my father by hammering the scene into the copper face of his shield, or else the memory would have been lost forever. This would have been years before I was enslaved on the island of the bestiary. It has all reduced to shadows. How old would that make me? Inevitably one stops caring. Maybe twenty thousand. Countless years. Too many millenia. Benjamin and Edythe, and how they relate to your premise: I'm not here to teach. I'm here to learn."
Alice stared.
Colleen's eyes opened, and she gazed wistfully at the open closet. "Say, you guys have fast cars, don't you?"
"We do."
"I've got like nothing for clothes, except these rags I stole. Is there any chance I could persuade you to take me shopping?"
Alice smiled.
_________
Victor had considered flying the jet all the way up to Juneau. That had been his intention, when he had disabled the chain motors of the airport hangar's posterior doors to lift the Cessna from under the oblivious human guards. But on the low altitude northward flight, he had thought better of taking the jet all the way up to Lauren. He maintained the machines for escape, not for travel. They were a liability at far-flung locales, difficult to conceal, to refuel, to flight-prep.
Instead, he had returned to the northwestern continental region. Merely landing and stashing the jet had been work. The Cullens were aware of the Montana airstrip, and it could not be trusted, so he had rerouted himself to an improvised landing on an isolated stretch of interstate in Wyoming. From there he had taxied off the road into an abandoned, fallow field concealed by wild, overgrown hedges. He maintained eight other cold sites like the lost Montana airfield, hidden along the same latitude, distributed across every northern continent. This jet would have to be transferred to a new, secured storage location. Another puzzle for another day.
He castigated himself for purloining the plane without first attempting to kill the boy in his hospital bed. A lost opportunity, yes, but it would have been unthinkable. The boy had been thoroughly guarded, for one thing, and Victor was still shaking from the pursuit of the three monsters, which he had barely evaded with a deep dive into the Pacific. He still did not know what had chased him from that modest little domicile of the boy's father, but he surmised that the boy himself had to be the same abomination. The boy had somehow crippled Jillian at the ballet studio, which implied that he had to be talented in some way, more than human, just like those things that had chased him from Forks all the way to the ocean.
He had failed to kill the boy on his gurney, but he had acquired the needed proof of Jillian's demise. He had gone to the Scottsdale ballet studio, the site of the fire. He had ghosted into the ruins, among piles of ash and scorched masonry, wherein he had smelled her cloying sweetness, which to human sensibilities would have resembled aromatic oil or petroleum. Jillian's sweet blood-tinged scent lay like an invisible film upon every surface, dispersed and obliterated, all that was left of her, and he had fallen to his knees in the ashes and groaned with the realization that Jillian was dead.
Killed, by the thing that looked like a human boy.
Only one friend remained on earth, one last potential ally: Lauren, the traitor who had abandoned the hunt and left their strength diminished. Victor did not think he could persuade her to reunite, not even for an expedient campaign of self-preservation, but he had to try. Last Sunday, he and Jillian had watched and listened from the woods surrounding the Cullens' compound, and they had heard Lauren's last words, before she had leapt from the house to commence a sprint northward. She had speculated that she might run to Denali and appeal to the Cullens' golden-eyed friend, Terrence, for sanctuary.
Surely Lauren and her new friends would see that it served their own best interests to join forces in a campaign for survival, by cleansing this region of its unnatural abominations and their vampiric abettors, the evil Cullens.
First he had to reach them, to make his appeal.
Now he ran alone, pitted against an enclave of unified fighters, with formidable talents among them. And they had legions of monstrous hybrids for allies. He couldn't risk an encounter with them, anywhere between Forks and the abandoned Montana airfield. He ran a broad track, along an arc east and north of the entire region, and he crossed to the northwest, toward Alaska, deep in the Canadian Rockies, terrified that their clairvoyant would foresee the evasion and preempt it.
He reached Juneau, miraculously unaccosted. He stopped on the northern outskirts of the city. He stood under a busy freeway overpass, amid the roar of the traffic, and dared for the first time to attempt a satellite call.
Lauren recognized the number and picked up the call on the sixth ring.
Before she could get a word out, Victor exercised the utmost limits of his tact and discretion. "You have to help me."
Lauren shook her head with a sigh. "So good to hear from you, Victor. How's work? How are the wife and kids?"
"We have to meet," Victor insisted.
Lauren treated him coolly. She slowly enunciated, "Do you know where I am?"
This question gave him pause. He realized that he didn't know; he had only assumed. This being a satellite call, she could be almost anywhere on earth. Suddenly less sure of himself, he said, "I know where you were headed."
"And I have arrived. Terrence and his family have granted me sanctuary," she informed him. "The Denali coven. I like them. They are friends. I won't jeopardize my status or my hosts."
Victor seethed silently, and Lauren patiently awaited his rejoinder. Even now, six decades since having been hauled from near-dormancy, he seldom spoke and had neither negotiation skills nor poise. When he spoke, his awkward attempt at reassurance backfired. "I know that you and Jillian had disagreements."
She laughed at him, and he heard the laughter of others in the background. She was not alone. He had an audience who found humor in his crisis.
Lauren icily said, "I have been following the news. I know that Jillian is dead."
He tried again. "Jillian can no longer harm you, it's true, but you are still in danger. That's why I'm calling."
Lauren laughed and winked mischievously at others in the room, two Germanic high school boys, named Geoff and Karl. "I have no doubt whatsoever," she said, "that your reappearance bodes ill."
"Not from me," he muttered irritably, "not me. You don't know the circumstances"–
"And I don't have to. Artemis can no longer hunt me and add me to that grisly necklace of hers. This is a good day, Victor."
"I'm telling you, the circumstances of her end do matter. We're all in peril. All of us. Even your hosts. Lauren, we have to meet. I need to speak to your hosts, as well."
Lauren raised an eyebrow at Geoff.
He sneered and mouthed, "Stall him. I'll ask Terrence." He slipped out of the room.
Geoff shuffle-stepped silently down the polished granite floor of a long hallway with rough-hewn walls, and with the distance acquired a more assured cadence. Lauren had shown up at their doorstep unannounced, a week ago. Terrence had wanted to turn her away, but Geoff had persuaded him to allow her to stay on as a guest. They hunted together, explored Eleazar's library together, ranged through Denali together. He felt something for her, an unfamiliar and atavistic attraction, a strange sense of kinship that dredged up the gray vestiges of instincts long-forgotten.
He entered a white ovoid room, with the shape of an upended egg, thirty feet high, with an exterior facing wall composed of semi-opaque ice.
Terrence sat in the room's exact center, legs crossed and eyes closed, facing the ice window.
Geoff informed him, with a mirthful sneer, "Lauren's last travel companion, the coward Victor, insists that we face grave danger."
Terrence calmly said, "The one thing I ask of existence is occasional novelty."
Geoff chuckled and guessed, "Then we should let him come?"
Terrence suggested, "Would you mind informing Eleazar? Wouldn't hurt to have his opinion of this... individual. And do ask him to inform the Cullens."
Geoff exclaimed, "Oh?" His tone implied, What the hell for?
Terrence gently laughed and said, "Carlisle told me they'd lost track of Victor. They'll be relieved to know he's been found."
_________
Edythe sensed the approach of Carlisle, with Ben's physical therapist, and she whispered in Ben's ear. He groaned and glared with trepidation at the weight racks, parallel bars and treadmill that occupied half the room. They sat together at the elevated head of his bed and faced the flatpanel monitor suspended by a telescoping arm.
Despite Ben's upright posture, his pelvis and spine took almost no weight. An orderly had adjusted the traction system to put him at attention for school. He detested the cables and travois. Dr. Niland today would begin the process of removing them, hopefully by twos and threes.
The flatpanel projected a wide angle view of the Band Practice room. Dr. Ustinov accompanied from the piano. Their fellow students stood on the risers and rehearsed the Introit movement of Requiem. All but Alice and Jasper. Edythe knew that Jasper had been out ranging all morning with Emilia, both to destroy the Montana airfield and to attempt to track the movements of Victor. He had to have landed the jet somewhere, and a fresh track would lead them to it.
As for Alice, even Jasper had no idea where she had gone.
The choral members continuously mugged for the camera and waved. Ben and Edythe had also attended Bio Lab virtually, on a Zoom feed into the classroom, and it had been much the same. Ben's secret was out: Forks High School knew about his return to town. He could expect another rush of visitors.
Ben hummed along to the Introit, which was about all he could manage. Dr. Ustinov had him down with an A-plus for participation.
Edythe for the most part curled beside him and cuddled. The classroom also had a monitor. The choir were getting quite a show. Whether or not Ben and Edythe were a couple was no longer an open question at Forks Public High School.
Ben heard the door open and close, and he stage-whispered, "Should we...."
She wrapped herself around him more tightly with a devious shake of her head.
They finished out the last ten minutes of the class. Ben knew that he had an audience, his physical therapist, no less, so he worked it and made an effort to project his voice. At the end of the piece, their fellow choral members applauded the effort on-screen, and Dr. Ustinov asked if they could expect him back two days hence.
"Absolutely," Ben promised.
Edythe tapped an icon on her phone and cut the connection just as Dr. Niland came around the bed to greet them.
"Solid workout," he enthused in a sharp, clear contralto. "You don't need me." He grinned widely with bright white teeth and deep laugh lines . He had his long gray hair tied into a knot with rawhide. He stood five-six at most, all legs with a voluminous upper chest, lean wiry limbs, the body of an ultra-marathoner. Ben appraised his bronzed complexion and wondered about his heritage, because he plainly hadn't acquired his uniform earthtone color from sun exposure. Too short to be Quileute, Ben surmised. Macah? Possible.
Dr. Niland's deep umber eyes flashed shrewdly at Edythe, who curled up beside Ben and betrayed no inclination to move.
"So, Ben. Pleased to meet you. I'm told by my good friend Carlisle that you've defenestrated yourself."
Ben grinned and admitted, "I'm afraid I have, Dr. Niland."
"Just Fred. If you call me Frederic, I'll call you Benjamin."
Ben laughed. They were going to get along, he decided, despite his trepidation.
Dr. Niland returned to Ben's companion and greeted, "Edy. A pleasure as always. I'm going to need this guy for a couple hours, if you don't mind."
Only at that moment did the pair become aware of how they must have looked, and they carefully disentwined. She smirked at Ben with a scrunched nose and said, "I really ought to get home and check in."
Ben sniffed knowingly. She hadn't been home in a week, but he knew that she and Carlisle had just conducted a swift mental exchange. He would have to ask about it later.
He murmured, "You'll be back, right?"
She winked and inhaled deeply, as though girding herself for a trial. He wistfully watched her disappear from view, escorted by Carlisle. She'd been with him every waking moment since he'd emerged from coma. Now they faced two hours apart. He wondered if they would be able to endure them.
Dr. Niland abruptly clapped and broke him from his reverie. His voice boomed and echoed in the large room. "I'll bet you want to be off those cables, am I right?"
"Uh, yeah," Ben stammered, "it would be great to get to the bathroom and wash myself on my own. But I don't think I'm ready for that... umm, what exactly are we gonna do?"
The exuberant therapist chided, "Whoa, now. Hold your horses. This is going to take time. I see you eyeing the treadmill as though it's a medieval rack. For today, you're staying on that bed. From the waist down, all we're going to do is assess your range, to shake the cobwebs out. We're also going to assess your shoulders. I've had a look at your scans, and the fall seems to have spared your rotator cuffs. You've got a cracked collarbone, but that's wrapped up tight, and it's had a week to set, so we'll take a look and see."
"Umm, Doctor– I mean, Fred– what are you saying? See what?"
"See if you can have your arms back."
Ben gasped, "Is that even possible?"
"The casts aren't going anywhere, anytime soon. Your elbows are going to need weeks, so it's going to be a while before you'll be feeding yourself. But as for the traction? No promises at this point. Won't know until we see what your shoulders can handle. Maybe."
Ben grumbled, "Thanks for getting my hopes up."
"We're gonna work it every afternoon, Mr. Swan. I'm all about motivational incentive. Every day, I'm going to dangle some bait, no more than I think you can achieve. The rest is up to you. Do you want your arms back? Yes or no?"
"Yes."
"Are you ready to work?"
"Yes!"
Despite Dr. Niland's constant peptalks and incentivization, he remained skeptical that the cables on the arm casts would come off, anytime soon. He refused to believe Edythe's reassurances that she could see his improvements from hour to hour, and he felt like he would be suspended from the traction cables to the end of his days.
Ben made anxiety-induced smalltalk as Dr. Niland worked his way around the bed, adjusting the traction on each limb to extend the range of each joint not enclosed in a cast. He especially focused on Ben's shoulders and wrists.
Ben whispered, with pronounced strain, "My doctors tell me I am going to fully recover. But I'm not improving at all."
Dr. Niland spotted him on exercises for his right shoulder and shook his head reprovingly. "Tsk, tsk. You're not authorized to say that. You're not qualified to rate your improvement."
"So I'm going to get out of this bed someday?"
Dr. Niland shrugged and said, "Ben, I can well imagine that now it doesn't feel that way. You went down for surgery just yesterday, didn't you?"
"The g-tube removal. My stomach actually feels better than before."
"It would. So, that's improvement, right there, isn't it? I don't know if you realize, Ben, but the fall you took last week was roughly equivalent to being struck and thrown by a car at twenty-five miles per hour. I'll say again, that was just one week ago. Now, whether you do fully recover, to some extent that will be up to you. But people in the know have told me that you're a fighter. That usually helps."
Ben said, "Can you believe that just ten days ago I did three hundred ninety-seven pushups in a single set?"
"Yes, I can. Do you know how much these arm casts weigh? Keep working these shoulders as you are, and you'll be back to full strength before you can say feel the burn. I know it won't feel that way for awhile. Trauma recovery is a lot like trying to watch water boil."
Dr. Niland worked his way down to Ben's legs and then circled around to his left side.
"You're anxious that you'll never recover. A reasonable and natural source of anxiety. Not at all surprising. Helplessness is the greatest motivator of fear. We're animals, you know. Under the skin. Animals don't want to be helpless. In the wild, helpless animals are food. You'll give yourself a big, big attitude lift when you can take a wheelchair to the toilet. That's the first goal. Small incentives, Ben."
Later, Dr. Niland detensioned the cable attached to Ben's left arm and spotted him through rotator cuff exercises, tentative movement in five degree steps. His left side had taken the fall especially hard. He had a hand under Ben's upper arm, just above the elbow, and a hand on Ben's palm.
He frowned with puzzlement, fingers on Ben's hand, and mused aloud, "What a strange scar." He scrutinized the bone white crescent on the back of the palm. "Where did you get this?"
Ben froze and knew exactly what had the physical therapist intrigued. He said, with forced disinterest, "Oh, that? Just an old injury."
Caleb fingered the scallop shaped scar on Ben's hand. It felt colder than the surrounding skin and hard as bone. Never had he seen anything like it. The white scar perhaps could have been explained in terms of receiving no circulation, if it were recently inflicted, but this being an old injury, it should have gone necrotic long ago. Perhaps this was a new treatment for deep abscesses, some kind of hypoimmunoreactive composite. The graft felt smooth as ceramic, perfectly embedded, flush with his living skin. Some state of the art procedure? Dr. Niland made a point to read up on the latest research on reconstructive methods and materials. He well knew that Ben's young attending physician, Carlisle Cullen, was recognized as an enigmatic wünderkind.
He returned to the task at hand and informed Ben that if he had to have fallen twenty-two feet through a glass window, he could not have done it better.
Shattered Benjamin Swan easily concurred, as he rotated his shoulder in five degree steps, "Mom tells me that I've always been incredibly lucky."
_________
The race home took a toll on Edythe. She had just left him awake, bound and helpless, with a stranger. Ever since the attack by Jillian, Edythe had never left him awake, and even in the depths of his coma, she had never been parted from him for longer than fifteen minutes. Her accumulating thirst, the searing burn in her throat, was amplified by the intolerable state of fracture, being parted from him as debilitating as the night a week ago, when she had left him for mere minutes to seek the counsel of her family. Now this return to her house felt like a reprise.
She could have left the suite and stayed with him, nearby, close enough to protect him. She was only making this trip because Carlisle had informed her that Colleen had arrived and had taken up residence in her room. Edythe had to find out how long Colleen would be staying, what would happen next, and when.
Last week she had sought Colleen's advice for insights into the nature of her acquired talent for warming to Benjamin's temperature and to find out whether their lovemaking could be harmful to him. Those questions had diminished in urgency as of late, given Ben's crippling injuries, but now with daily coaching and motivational peptalks from Frederic Niland, Edythe's questions for Colleen would matter again, soon enough.
She had lingered beyond the doorway and listened to their session long enough to know that Ben just might have his arms and hands back, tonight. As she had listened, she had felt herself warming, and the kickstart to her heart had shaken her intensely, there in the corridor.
On the approach toward the house, she confirmed that Esme was still out monitoring Charlie and that Jasper had yet to return from his distant ranging in search of Victor's track and the returned jet.
Carlisle had informed her of Colleen's return, yet both Colleen and Alice were out. This intensely aroused Edythe's suspicions, but only Rex presently occupied the house. He was in his room, at the enormous custom-built, one hundred seven key Falcone. with an eleven and a half foot soundboard. Loathe to disturb him, she merely listened instead, with sincere admiration, to his use of the entire oversized keyboard, the extended lower octave especially, notes that to human ears sounded like atonal bass drums, in a piece that evoked the violent birth and death of the planet earth.
"Is Emmie out with the girls?"
He replied, without a pause, "She's in Tacoma, at the warehouse. The other two took your car."
He didn't tell her where, and she didn't ask. Instead she praised, "Gorgeous, Rex."
He made a gruff sound and played on without comment.
She leapt into her room, snatched up a little hand broom, and swept out a few pine needles while effortlessly observing Colleen's recent presence. She noticed the Go-Gos on the turntable and blinked at the platter, nonplussed by the notion that a being older than Aphrodite appeared to favor bubblegum pop over everything else in her vinyl collection.
She stopped at her open, bare closet, and her eyes shrewdly narrowed as she focused on a note, jotted by Alice and stabbed through by a coat hanger:
There is nothing more tragic on this
tragic earth than an empty closet.
She stared at the note and ground her teeth with murderous annoyance. Colleen had promised to tell her "everything." So where was she? On the way to Los Angeles, to give yeoman service as Alice's pack mule. Beyond irritating.
Buzzing in her pocket shook her back to the present. She snatched up her phone, panicked that Dr. Niland might have somehow killed Ben with a fateful overreach, but she frowned at the number, perplexed, and granted the call.
Eleazar spoke from Denali with his smooth, stentorian tone, "Good afternoon, my dear. I thought you and yours might like to know who's popped in for dinner."
______________
Next: Chapter 6: APPEAL.