As the days wore on, Ben gave up on diversions and distractions, and he regressed to waiting by his wide open window, night and day. He peered out into the night in the hope of seeing her looking back, and predictably enough, he saw her everywhere. She watched him from the boughs of the maple tree, from the hemlocks beyond the yard, from the rooftop of the neighboring house, from tall treetops deep in the woods, from hammocks suspended on silver string under the mauve shadows beneath the clouds. Edythe was more guardian angel than vampire, and she watched over him all night, or so he believed.
Ben knew they'd had a rocky parting, but he had been stressed and anxious at the time, and he no longer recalled the specifics. Something about the fact that she had been literally falling apart from malnourishment, and how for her own good he had compelled her to feed. A reasonable response, in his opinion, to the cracks that he'd seen slashed across her knuckles and running down her neck like minor chasms. Surely she would agree, in hindsight, that his fears had been entirely justified.
Truly, he said to himself, she would take a long run, clear the air, breathe, and understand that he'd been terrified on her behalf, when he had 'sent her away,' if a reasonable person could even have called it that. She had been crumbling to pieces. She would see things clearly, and she would remember.
He had sent her away for her own good.
She had been dying.
Well, vampires could not die, not on their own, not that way. But they weren't immortal either, not by a longshot, and he couldn't help that perception and couldn't help feeling that way.
He sat at the open window every night, with the screen ajar to ward off the mosquitoes, and fell asleep there. He imagined that she had fed early on. Perhaps she had murdered humans, having gone to extremes to revitalize herself, and if so, he forgave it without a thought, sight unseen. She'd been falling apart. Whatever she had done, it had been necessary. He had to presume that she had reconstituted herself, back to her strong and glorious self, yet night after night, she stayed away. Maybe now, with the crisis having passed, she was easing back into her vegetarian lifestyle, so that when she did come back, she would be back to gold eyes, so as not to shock him.
What had become of her? Why had she not returned?
Don't follow me, he had said, but surely she had understood the context. He had meant, don't follow me, so as to attend to feeding, and mending, and revitalizing herself.
So, she had mended. By now, she must have mended.
Victor still menaced them, along the dark rough edges of their lives, a splinter that pried and rooted in fingernails and callous in a bid for the soft tissue beneath them, and surely Edythe had joined Alice and Jasper in a bid to finish him off, for good, so that they could be safe and secure. He dimly recalled having exhorted her to do just that.
So, she had gone after Victor. Surely, she must have.
He gazed out into the yard and woods, past the maple tree, and imagined that she had made the defeat and death of Victor her primary mission. He had exhorted her to be the vampire that he loved. That vampire would have gone forth to vanquish their red eyed foe. Ben imagined that she would return in triumph with Victor's head.
He sat at the window every night, fell asleep in his chair, and awoke deep into the early morning with pulled muscles in his neck, but she never came.
All week, on his circuits through the village, he shunned the Newtons' place– not to avoid Zoey, but because he didn't strictly know whether or not she had arrived– the rumor mill notwithstanding– and didn't want to know.
It wasn't so much that he didn't want to talk to Zoey, and given that she would be here all summer, he knew that encounters were inevitable. But he couldn't see her, not now, not when things were so unsettled with Edythe. Life was complicated enough.
Besides, he thought to himself, Edythe might be watching. Sure, he hoped that she was nowhere in the vicinity; he hoped that she had followed Jasper and Alice on the hunt for Victor, wherever that might have taken her. But he also waited at his open window every night and wanted nothing more than her return. And in the worst patch of their recent falling-out, she had been murderously jealous of Zoey. She had been blindly furious, upon learning that Zoey would be coming to Forks for the summer. She had even accused him of pushing her aside, to make way for Zoey this summer. She had not come out and said it explicitly, but the accusation had been implicit. He had tried to tell Edythe that Zoey had come up to give Jacob a try, but she hadn't believed it for a second, and if Ben was honest with himself, he didn't believe it, either.
He wouldn't put it past her if she was waiting in the woods, watching, wary and expectant of his betrayal. He told himself that he wouldn't give her the satisfaction. As the week wore on, he refused to inquire after Zoey, to learn where she might be, and each night he opened the window wide, in welcome, and he silently begged into the night for Edythe's return.
He stayed off social media, kept to himself to the degree possible, and managed to avoid knowledge of Zoey's whereabouts all the way to the weekend, when none other than Charlie gave the game away.
He came in Saturday afternoon from fishing, with two armsful of gear and a string of gutted trout over his shoulder. "Hey kid, you been down to Newtons' lately? Seen that giant rock wall ol' Archie Newton built in back? That friend of yours from Phoenix drew a crowd this afternoon, up on the wall with a screw gun, mounting them plastic handholds and footholds. Half the time she was upside-down. Crazy stuff. That girl belongs in the circus, that's what."
Ben icily said, "Thanks, Dad. Thanks for the update."
"Hey, kid! What do you say to fish tonight? Give that girlfriend of yours a call. Tell Edythe I miss her. She hasn't even seen the new kitchenette."
So. Zoey had arrived.
She'd been in town for two or three days, as it happened, and he had expected as much, but now he knew.
Back in the winter, when they had been fifteen hundred miles apart, they had called each other every other night, it seemed, to agonize over their homework assignment and to trade all kinds of inane pledges about not waiting for each other or saving themselves for each other. How ridiculous that whole phase had been, as formative phases tended to be, in hindsight. Now she was here, just a few miles away, living on top of the Newtons' outfitting shop. Two or three days, she had been here– he wasn't entirely sure of the chronology– and she hadn't called. Why not? To give him space with Edythe? Or maybe things were going so well with her own homework project, Jacob Black, that she needed space, herself?
Ben knew that those weren't the reasons. Jacob Black was the flavor of the week, to her, and he knew her well enough to realize that she owed Jacob nothing and would drop him flat on the slightest pretense. And as for Edythe... well, Zoey had just hung three thousand feet off the ceiling of the world by her bare fingers. Ben knew that nothing and no one, not even Edythe Cullen, would stand in the way of whatever Zoey wanted.
Oh, no. Ben knew why Zoey had arrived two or three days ago and hadn't yet called him.
She had chased him fifteen hundred miles, and she was camped down the road, with a single apartment.
Ben sighed and said to himself, "Your move, idiot."
_________
At nine o'clock on Sunday morning, Zoey dangled by a finger from her hangboard, which she had mounted in the bathroom doorway, when she heard footsteps on the exterior stairs, followed by a tentative knock.
She held her breath and peered around the corner, but all she could see through the tasseled coral drapes was a silhouette. She groaned with irritation.
He wouldn't have the gall to come calling on her one day to sleep in, would he?
This was only her third day in Forks, and Chief Jacob was already driving her nuts. That boy was constant, never-ending work. She'd been awake for three and a half hours, but it was the principle. He had no right to come barging in and lifting his leg to mark his territory on a Sunday. Especially unannounced.
A second knock on the door, somewhat more emphatic, broke her deliberations.
She dropped off the hangboard for the first time in a half hour to give him a piece of her mind. She threw the door open with a lungful of air, to let him have it.
"Oh," she said. "It's you."
"And a fine how-dee-doo to you, too," said Micaela Newton. She didn't seem at all put out by the cold greeting. She peeked around Zoey to take in the room. It was all tassels and screens and candles, with Japanese fans and dried flower arrangements on the walls. This, the front sitting room and kitchen, had white wicker furniture with flowered fabric upholstery. The smallish bedroom was dominated by a queen sized canopy bed.
"Mind if I come in?" Micaela asked, worming into the room.
"No, not at all– I'm just relieved that you're not Jacob Black, ruining my day first thing."
"That boy's kind of clingy," Micaela agreed.
Great, Zoey thought. Even the idle observers noticed. Not good.
"Actually I can't stay. I'm only popping in to see if you want to go to church. Archie and Sara are downstairs waiting."
Zoey blinked and freshly observed that Micaela's sun dress matched the decor of the room. She looked down at herself in dismay– she'd been working out on the floor and hangboard all morning and had nothing on but panties and a nightshirt.
Micaela hastily assured her that they were in no hurry, the service didn't start for an hour, and the parents would wait for her to shower and change, if she wanted to come along.
"It's just that... well, I'm not very religious. I mean, Faith, yes. But religion, blech. In fact I've never been to church in my life."
Micaela chuckled and said, "Full disclosure: we're not all that religious, either. Dad says Sunday Service is good for business."
"So, you go to church on Sunday for marketing and public relations?"
"It's more than that, but not by much. Yeah, it's the best way to connect with the community and fit in. Anyway, it's totally optional. Even for me, technically. I take lots of Sundays off. Mom won't look down her nose at you if you pass."
"Tell them I'll be down in a half hour."
On the short drive into the village, Zoey asked if the entire town turned up for church service every Sunday. Not by half, Sara Newton informed her with a laugh. A sizable contingent communed with nature on Sunday mornings.
"Fishing?" Zoey guessed.
"Mostly," said Sara, "but more than half do nothing at all."
Zoey had no trouble believing that, not that she understood it. She couldn't imagine being awake, without an occupation. She tried to imagine herself awake, sitting still in a corner for hours, effectively on pause. Most people, she surmised, would consider it a form of torture, yet that same majority, in her experience, accomplished just about as much with their waking hours.
Micaela nodded at a leather bound book on Zoey's lap. "What's that?"
"A journal."
"Good move," Micaela praised. "Aaron's mom puts me to sleep every Sunday."
"Sorry?"
"Aaron Weber's mother. She's the minister."
Zoey enjoyed the service. The homily was about miracles, and the lesson was about the power of the Lord God, through his corporeal instrument on earth, his Son. Reverend Weber gave as example the parable of the Raising of Lazarus from the dead. Zoey listened and went off a bit onto her own little tangent, to dwell on the perils of miracles, their intrinsically imprecise nature, and their tendency to go awry. She recalled a poem on the topic by Rilke, about the terror that had gone through the mind of Jesus as he had commanded Lazarus to rise, for the trivial purpose of regaling the hoi polloi. Rilke had imagined Jesus casting his eyes in fright across the vast burial ground and thinking to himself, what if every corpse rises from the grave?
She especially enjoyed the music. The congregation broke into song every other minute, on ineffable cues, and Zoey scrambled to follow along in a missal until Micaela pointed out the numbered song chart that hung on one of the columns. A competent choir led the celebrants. Reverend Weber's husband played the electronic organ. Micaela pointed out Aaron Weber and his girlfriend, Erica Yorkie, in the choir, as well as some other friends from school, including a handsome African American boy named Lionel Mallory and another super-athlete, apparently the top amateur singles tennis player in the state, named Taylor Crowley.
Ben and Charlie Swan were conspicuous absences, but this did not surprise her. She knew that Charlie was big into fishing, solidly in the communing with nature contingent.
After the service, Micaela formally introduced Zoey to most of the kids on what would now be their senior lunch table. Zoey begged Aaron's dad for a spot on the choir for the summer.
"Well I don't know," he said, in deliberation. "The spots are coveted, and there would have to be tryouts."
This raised a storm of protest from the members of the choir, who couldn't believe they'd have the conqueror of El Capitan in their ranks.
Aaron's mother, Reverend Weber, overheard and shouted across an aisle, "Don't listen to him; he's putting you on. There's never been a tryout. Of course you're in the choir."
From there, Archie drove them to the village diner, where at a square table with a red checker tablecloth he ordered the "special" for everyone, all around, with whole milk and orange juice in pitchers.
Zoey looked around herself and expressed surprise that the Newtons had time for an afternoon brunch on Sunday, given that it must be a big retail day.
"The store's open," said Archie without a care. "Leah Clearwater's at the register this morning. Gave Ol' Crawford a break."
"She's already started?"
Archie grunted, "Showed up to start a day early, so I put her to work. Already like her attitude."
"Bright girl, Leah," Sara expounded. "Had a rough patch. As so many do. Terrible, what that big Sam Uley did to her. Just terrible."
Zoey asked, with perhaps too much interest, exactly what big Sam Uley had done to Leah Clearwater.
Sara Newton ignored the question and said, "And plus there's the box on the front porch."
"The box?"
"On Sundays we put outdoor essentials out on the front porch, and we just leave a cash box out there. Honor system, you know."
"Does the box ever come up short?"
"Not as much as you'd think," Sara Newton provided. "The stuff we put out is mostly off-season remainders, so we don't keep a proper account. Let me put it this way: the cash box pays for church tithes and brunch."
Zoey mused, "So I suppose this could be called a box brunch."
Micaela coughed orange juice all over table setting, and Sara chortled, "Oh, aren't you just a clever little thing."
A few minutes later, the waitress presented Zoey with a plate bearing the most enormous muffin she had ever seen, sliced in half and stuffed with a mound of pulled pork, a thick reddish sauce, eight strips of bacon, and two sunnyside-up eggs arranged like a happy face. Greasy potatoes, onions and sliced sausages clogged every other centimeter of real estate on the platter.
Zoey blanched, nudged Sara Newton, and worriedly said, "Ma'am, this is more than I typically eat in a week."
"I'm Sara, for Godsakes. And no worries. You can take it home."
They dropped her off behind the store at around one thirty, with a big gray pie box under her arm. She thanked them for everything, promised to be ready for church on time next Sunday, and trudged up the back stairs. She got about halfway, looked up, and sighed.
"Where've you been all day?" Jacob demanded.
Zoey put her chin right up with a deep scowl. "You back off, Jacob Black! I'm warning you. Back off, here and now, or this is so done."
He ignored that and arose off the landing to his full height. "And who are you all dolled up for?"
"The village minister, that's who! I've been to church. Not that it's any of your business." Though she did a double-take and had to look down at herself, because he made a good point. She had dressed in a hurry that morning, with Archie and Sara waiting downstairs. She had crammed herself into the only decent outfit she owned: the same canary yellow cocktail dress that she'd worn to Ben's going away party, down in Phoenix, complete with the matching headband, pearl necklace, and earrings.
"Oh. It looks good," he blurted.
"Thanks so much. Put your eyes back in your head, creep."
"So, like, what? This church business is going to be a thing?"
"Ugh!" She shoved past him, saying, "It's Sunday every seven days, jerk." She slammed the door on him, put the leftovers in the refrigerator, and changed into her typical attire: sweatpants and a t-shirt. She tried to ignore the knocking at the door and idly considered bringing him up on charges for stalking. Even Micaela had noted that the "Quileute boy" was kind of clingy.
She emerged, pushed past him again before he could get started, and said, "Let's go for a walk, Jake."
Zoey ambled down the stairs and across the parking lot, to her enormous outdoor classroom. Archie and Sara had speculated, on the inception of the enterprise, that if they were to put some fliers on telephone poles around town, Zoey might have "one or two" students come Monday. The class was already booked to capacity: Ten rope teams of five members each, one session in the morning, another in the afternoon, each class to run for three weeks. Booking had already begun for the August term, and at the rate of registrations would be filled by Monday. Zoey hadn't taught a single minute yet, and Archie had already paid for both Zoey's payroll and the gaudy El Cap replica that she would be teaching on.
"That girl is a goldmine," Archie had said to Sara.
To which Sara had sternly said, "She's a sweet thing, and she's terribly sensitive. She misses her kitty, Princess Cleopatra. You're not to exploit her, do you hear? Four hours per day, maximum. She must have a quality of life. I'll insist on it, you insensitive scalawag. And she has weekends off, or you'll have words with me."
Sara had even offered Zoey a comfort animal.
"We can arrange a puppy. For your apartment. Or a kitty, if you'd prefer. Though I'm thinking a kitty would hit too close to home, as it were. Given your poor Egyptian pussycat."
"Truly," Zoey had said, "Cleo isn't actually Egyptian– her breeders are in Des Moines– and what I really need is to be busy. A summer pet would be too strange. I mean, what would happen to the poor beast in September, when I go away?"
Sara had gaped at her as though stricken. "Why, what do you think? We'd put her to sleep? God, no! We'd hold onto him or her for the year, of course. For when you return next summer."
Zoey had nearly keeled, but she had regrouped and insisted, "Truly, once I'm busy with the rock climbing classes, the homesickness will pass. Thank you, though. So thoughtful."
Jacob didn't care all that much about Zoey's exploitation, and he certainly cared even less about comfort animals.
He followed across the lot to the kitsch El Cap replica. All the way, he strutted ahead, glared malevolently, and cracked his knuckles, ready for a fight.
Zoey came to a stop at the MDF-composite contraption that she would be using to teach ground-dwellers how to belay each other. Not because she wanted to climb the foolish thing, but because her recommended ceiling-overhang had been constructed, and it shielded her from the drizzle.
She collapsed to the ground, cross-legged, and impulsively commenced with stretching.
She dug out her journal and jotted an essential note: she would need real stone to climb, on her days off, or she would truly go insane.
She looked up at Chief Jacob, who persisted in his inveterate alpha-dog pacing and practiced his glower. She asked him, "Are there scorpions in Forks?"
His glower turned into a picture of befuddlement. "No. I mean, what? Scorpions? Why?"
Because she intensely missed the Stone Table, she thought to herself. And Maxwell's Crux. And Midnight Lightning. And Heaven. And Atomic. And she decided then and there not to ask if Forks had rattlers.
All the while, he had been strutting circles around her, and now that she planted herself in a fixed attitude, he endeavored to air his grievances.
"So what is this? You're dumping me?"
She looked up at him, squinting with perplexity. "That's impossible," she started to explain.
"Well, good"–
And she finished, effectively ripping his poor little heart out, "because we're not actually together. You're not even a candidate for dumping."
He stopped dead and scowled at her. She ignored him, unperturbed, and stretched on the ground, with her legs in a straddle.
He stood over her, legs apart, fists up, combative. He reminded her, dripping with all kinds of slightly turned sauce, "We made out. Every night. From Yosemite to Forks."
"That's true," she agreed, "we did," as though reliving it was a source of pain.
"So," he railed, "what exactly are you implying? Our kissing was no good?"
Zoey shrugged. "It was okay."
"Just okay?" he challenged, as though she hadn't been clear.
"Yeah."
He went berserk. "Well, who's better?"
"How would I know? I'm not all that experienced. I've kissed a few boys, and you think I'm a slut."
"I didn't say that."
"But you think it. I hear it crystal clear, in your tone. I'm not a slut. I'm just a girl who's kissed a few boys. It's not a crime."
"I didn't say it was. I only asked who's a better kisser than I am."
"And I said I haven't kissed him, yet."
Jacob nearly blew a blood vessel. "Then how do you know there's better?"
"Oh, there is," she declared. 'And I'll know it, when I kiss him,' she said to herself, with absolute certitude.
If Jacob were trying, at this point he might have asked her what he could do to improve his technique, not that she would have had a clue as to how to reply, apart from a vague and persistent sense that he couldn't hope to give her true satisfaction, but as to specifics she really did have no idea, but he didn't ask, which spared her a lot of unnecessary complication. Plus, she didn't want to quibble. His kissing was just okay. There. Done.
He chose her moment of introspective vacillation to turn the tables and come back to her point for their little turn about the parking lot. "Why did we walk out here? You're gearing up for something. What is it?"
She absently said, as she leaned flat against the ground and wrapped her hands around her straddled feet, "I've already said it. Which you would have known, if you were really listening."
He growled, "Remind me."
Zoey frowned acerbically and snipped, "Fine. You can't be lurking. The way you were this morning. Hovering over my door, watching the second hand turn. It was noticed. Though that's secondary. It's offensive to me. This sense of entitlement and possessiveness that you have, it's an insult. To me. I resent it. The way you're constantly hovering and marking your territory like some kind of autonomically driven dog. It's demeaning to me, and just so you know? In case this is in any way unclear? It's not winning my heart."
He gaped at her for three beats, while she waited, and then he boomed, "The weekends are all I've got with you, and you're accusing me of creeping around as though there's no good reason for it."
"I don't doubt you have your reasons," she said, "but I don't care about them."
"You and my old man have me roped into summer school. Five days a week."
"I said I don't care," Zoey maintained.
"And now you've roped off Sundays for church, of all things."
Zoey got her back up. "Sunday is the traditional day for it, loser."
"So that leaves just one day a week for us. Saturday."
"Not even that. I've been asked to join the choir, and I've accepted. Saturday is for choir practice." This wasn't precisely true. But she said it anyway, to twist the knife. It worked.
Jacob lost it. "Your moving up here had nothing to do with me."
Zoey unfolded herself from the ground and walked away. "Stay here and stew. Don't follow me."
"Where the hell are you going?"
"To talk to Leah."
She crossed the parking lot, whilst checking occasionally to verify that the goofus wasn't following, and she passed into the store through the back. She slipped past a couple people who were comparing various field stoves, and another guy avariciously studying the guns with anything but venison on his mind, and she found Leah Clearwater at the cash register.
Leah occupied two high stools, one for her feet and the other for the rest. Between them, she propped a book on her knees. She didn't look up. She surmised, "Jake's being a butt again, isn't he."
"Yeah," Zoey admitted glumly.
Leah didn't comment. The confirmation didn't surprise her. She went on reading her book.
Zoey frowned at the comely Quileute girl at the cash register and asked, "What do I have to do, to get Chief Jacob to relax and chill? Besides the obvious?"
"You mean, besides go down on him?"
"Yeah, that."
"There's nothing else."
"Great."
"Don't try going down on him, either. That boy is such a virgin. You'd probably kill him."
_________
It took Charlie three or four days since Ben's return from his Yosemite excursion to consciously acknowledge that Edythe wasn't coming around, but he had probably noticed it a lot sooner, in the back of his mind, as it were. Ever since Phoenix, she'd been at the house so much tending to Ben and nursing him and mothering him that it almost seemed as though she was somehow sneaking into the house through the locked doors after lights out. Luckily he had an infallible ingrained nose for that sort of thing and could smell the shenanigans of amorous teenagers from a mile away.
If he'd harbored misgivings about her constant presence, he had kept them to himself. Sure it seemed intense, and yes he thought they were going too fast, but after the Phoenix debacle and how Ben had fled the whole state that night in early May just to get out from under this girl, now Charlie was just relieved to have him back. Now with that trauma behind them, if they seemed to be over-compensating a bit, he took it silently and made the best of it. At least the kid was back where he belonged. All the rest, he could put up with, and putting up with it was just an aspect of good parenting, was it not?
So now, a week had transpired, by his reckoning, since she'd last come to the door, and the contrast of her sustained absence was hard to miss.
Charlie found Ben in the cellar when he came off his shift. Ben sat at the universal leg station. He was pushing a hundred pounds on his broken leg, continuous repetitions. That the kid was doing it without supervision was troubling enough. He'd taken a glance or two at the workout sheets that Ben maintained religiously on the bulletin board behind the universal gym system. His standard workout consisted mostly of stretching and resistance drills with minimal weight and high repetitions. That was the part that troubled Charlie. He could only guess how long Ben had been at it. His body looked ripped from head to toe.
Prior to Yosemite, when Charlie had come home from work, he would have typically found Ben with the Cullen girl, the two of them sitting innocently on opposite ends of the couch or on opposing kitchen chairs, innocent as babes to outward appearances, but Charlie would see right through it, and he had known damn well that they had heard the car coming and had broken to their corners for appearance-sake. That Cullen girl with her freakishly angelic face had to be the most talented poker player on earth, and in retrospect he had never once gotten a clear read on her. But Charlie only had to glance at Ben to see he was guilty as sin. And that was how the two had always looked on his arrival, no matter how much distance they would put between each other.
He had figured, there wasn't much he could do about it, given Ben would be turning eighteen in just a couple months, and she'd just had a birthday– he wasn't entirely clear which one– but their ages at this point were irrelevant: even Charlie, chief of police, would be the last to start pontificating about age of consent with those two. Ben sure knew what he wanted, and only an idiot would argue Edythe wasn't an adult woman in her own right, and besides, she had the consent of her mom and dad, official consent crystal-clear as you please, so who was Charlie to say? It's not like he could keep them apart, even if he'd wanted to, not even if he took a summer-long leave of absence from the police work and hovered over them, no, not even then, because separating them was about as impossible as keeping rainwater out of a leaky roof.
For the month-or-so leading up to Yosemite, that was how he had left it, for better or worse. But now, the easy hands-off policy was upended by the girl's apparent absence.
Edythe Cullen had been gone entirely for three days, by his reckoning. He'd wanted to say something to Ben about it, but he didn't know how to broach it. Last time he'd gotten into the middle of one of their spats, Ben had fled south across the continent and thrown himself through a window. Maybe this time the girl had run off. Well if that's how it went down, all the better and far be it from him. They'd been too cozy in this house for his liking, and he'd been at a loss as to how to broach that, too. So maybe he could chalk this up to a problem solved, clean and spiffy as you please.
_________
Sergei stood on the roof of the mobile home that he used as a field office, high atop the north end of the continuously growing hill of waste fill that accumulated faster than the unending convoy of dump trucks could cart it away. Every time the hill spoiled his view, graders flattened the top, steamrollers tamped it down, and crane riggers hoisted his mobile home up into the sky and deposited it on the new summit of this vast earthworks.
He managed the expedition with determined disinterest. He didn't know the point of it and didn't care. Crane operators and arc welders below him labored at the erection of steel framing for a new outer ring of dormitories and warehouses. Buses were arriving daily with fresh workers, who were given meals, clothes and cots as they were processed. A busy, busy hive, twenty-four-seven activity, and the question, why, never entered his mind.
Below him, he watched the paving crews. He had paid a king's ransom in bribes to apparatchiks from this province all the way to the Capital, in order to get them here.
For a brief time the paving had been jeopardized by suppliers upstream who had claimed that they didn't trust the currency. Sergei had taken the matter to Mr. Rex and Dr. Emelia, much as he'd hated to do it. The less he spoke to the expedition leader, Dr. Emelia, and her brooding captain, Mr. Rex, the better. On the rare occasions that they called meetings, he had to struggle not to soil his pants. But they'd converted their U.S. currency to rubles at the local provincial exchange rate, and no one who mattered would accept it.
The next day, Mr. Rex had called him to a face-to-face conference. Mr. Rex had slammed an impossibly heavy trunk on the floor and had opened it to reveal the hardest currency in existence, stacked ingots of pure platinum. Mr. Rex didn't volunteer where the bullion came from. Sergei didn't ask. He didn't care. He commissioned an armored truck and a convoy of halftracks outfitted with fifty millimeter machine guns. He drove the convoy to the Capital unopposed and made his payments. The paving crews arrived on the following day.
The entire city was waiting for asphalt, and where were the paving companies? On Emelia's Hill. All in the service of Dig Two. Which no human would ever see. Sergei didn't know that, either. The point of the paving? A mystery. He didn't care.
Below him, he heard strident, booming voices coming from within his mobile home. One tiny corner of the box served as a bedroom and kitchen. The rest served as his conference room. The crew chiefs had convened below on his call. They were threatening to mutiny, over the latest and greatest project ordered by his mysterious taskmasters: the construction of a watertight coffer dam and collar, to be framed and poured down through the water table's aquifer, deep into the earth.
Deep down to nowhere.
Their loudest spokesmen were down in the makeshift conference room, rehearsing the ultimatum that they planned to deliver. In short, the coffer dam was impossible; thousands would die in the attempt, and therefore they wouldn't do it.
He brooded on the roof of the mobile home and eavesdropped on the plotters below him until his blood came to a boil. Then he descended and entered his conference room.
Eight men stood in a semicircle, grim and determined. They chose as their spokesman an enormous bull named Vasilly, the foreman of forward excavation in Dig One, the vast and rapidly expanding tunnel system three hundred sixty feet below them, at the water table.
Sergei faced off and said, "You are all being paid to go along and lead without the asking of questions."
Vasilly spoke softly and dangerously. He said, "This Dig Two is impossible. If it is possible, yes. I send my men down. If they are afraid, they draw straws, a bonus goes to their families, and they go. But this is impossible. They are not to be drawing the straws. Not for Dig Two."
"They're not going down."
"Good. Very good. Then we have nothing to argue about and all is good."
"Your men are to be supplying the concrete and the angled steel to the forward team. You are for the support only. Not for the digging and the welding and the pouring."
This offended Vasilly and the foremen deeply and affected them more acutely than their previous fear. There were angry mutterings behind Vasilly. He scowled and put up his hand for silence.
"What is this forward team?"
"That is for Mr. Rex's business, not for yours. Mr. Rex is in charge of the forward team."
How Sergei held his stolid poker face through this lie, even he didn't know. Sergei knew that Mr. Rex was the forward team. Mr. Rex would be constructing the coffer dam and watertight collar singlehandedly, using the materials supplied from above. Sergei didn't know how that was possible. He didn't ask. He didn't care.
Vasilly snarled, "You pay us well, Sergei. You pay us too well. This thing you claim, it is impossible."
Sergei said, "Yes, I am paying you too well, Vasilly. This is true. No more talk. You are to set up a cable winch over Dig Two. You are to drop steel and concrete buckets to the forward team as ordered on the shortwave. Crews night and day."
Vasilly insisted, "The collar won't hold through the aquifer. I will not send men down through it for any price. Each thing you demand is more impossible than the last. These people, this Mr. Rex and this Dr. Emelia... and the other one... the one with the eyes of the devil... you must talk to these people, Sergei."
Sergei advanced on Vasilly, grabbed his neck with both fists, and hissed in his face, so that only Vasilly could hear, "They are not people."
Vasilly stood so shocked that he didn't resist when Sergei shoved him backward into the line of supervisors. They were shocked as well, too astonished to catch him. Vasilly staggered backward and fell over a table with a crash.
Sergei stood over him and spat. He said, "You want to be in charge, Vasilly? You think you can do my job better, do you? You want to talk to Mr. Rex so badly? Go ahead. Get out of my sight. Knock on his door and reason with him."
Sergei slammed the door and gazed up at the dreary sky. He drove his pickup truck down the shoulder of the new paving project, past the mile-long convoys of trucks, and maneuvered down the narrow, serpentine road past pedestrians, bicyclists, and rickshaw drivers, toward the center of the ancient city and its tall steeple, which by odd coincidence stood at the exact center of the elusive innermost Ring Wall, which Emelia sought on that very moment, a mile below him.
A half hour later, he knelt in a confessional and divulged to the shadowy patriarch behind the rosewood screen that he labored in the employ of blood-drinking demons.
His somber father confessor, a specter himself, behind the panel, inquired, "What task have these demons set for you, my son?"
Sergei replied, "To kill us all."
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Jasper picked up Victor's trail deep in the badlands of Baja California, southwest of San Ignacio, in a region inhospitable to humans and largely picked clean of prey, owing to centuries of contention between perpetually warring immortals. People were so sparse in this region of brackish puddles, toxic salt flats, and venomous teeth under every stone that even the vampires shunned the place. Jasper warned Alice that the only immortals they would likely find in these badlands would be stray survivors of recently decimated covens who had crawled here on shattered limbs to reassemble, such as they were able, and plot their next acts of retribution.
Victor fled several small covens that he encountered, when instinct warned him not to attempt contact, by pivoting either west to the Pacific Ocean or east to the Gulf of California. Jasper and Alice followed his scent on a serpentine track, resembling the turbulence of water running weakly from a tap, and they didn't understand it at first, not until they factored in his sophisticated gift for conflict avoidance. Then, freshly informed and empowered, they cut a track down the center of his feints and gained time on him.
Victor had come to the southwest in search of allies, but that desire contended so anemically against his self-preservation instinct that he might never have encountered anyone at all, had he not caught himself afoul of an ingenuous snare that had been set for humans.
On a flatland deep in the peninsula, near Cabo de Pacifica, Victor followed several converging radial scents toward a low sandstone cliffside, carved primordially by a long since beached shore. The cliffside over the centuries had been carved out into ascending cells of open-air hovels, most of them above the surface level, for protection, and at times entire human villages had thrived here, in communal fashion, with the members sharing cookfires and daily fishing hauls, retiring to the sandstone cells to sleep.
The lowest cellular hovels, one could enter easily, with a hop or by lifting a leg. The upper ones were reached not by ladders, for wood was dear, but by single thin tree trunks, stripped of branches and set like diagonal ramps from the ground up to the entries.
Elsewhere in the desert, humans scampered up and down the improvised foot-width ramps with nimble ease, but not here. Victor's nose brought him not to a cliffside domicile, but to a ramp that lured passing vagabonds, tourists, and over-inquisitive armchair anthropologists in search of shelter from the desert sun. That sorry ilk clung to the poles and shimmied up to the tunnel entrance with relief, only to edge into shadow and promptly fall ten feet to a grisly floor set with spikes, where they lay maimed and helpless, yet all too often alive, to be chosen for their final purpose.
Despite the isolation of this landborne wall, the cunning little trap attracted the curious and caught at least three juicy flies per week.
Victor didn't fall for the trap itself, but the stench of its captives did lure him, and he was confronted at the ramp by three baldpated vampires who swept in to guard their catch.
His first instinct, to flee, nagged insistently at him, yet he had come this way in search of allies, and he had fled every other encounter. These three guarded their little trap and its captives. All three twitched nervously and ducked their heads as though ashamed or humiliated. They cowered and hunched themselves over their stomachs as though they had just been struck. Their shorn heads revolted Victor, because they had not been reborn that way. They had suffered the hair removal recently. The intentionally inflicted maiming debilitated and subjugated them.
Victor did not fear these three, any more than a human would have feared a chained and collared dog.
For the first time since having strayed onto this accursed peninsula, he ventured to speak. He felt his voice emerging rough, too high, too strained. "I'm not a thief," he said, with a nod to the fly trap that they guarded.
"Then go," one said.
Victor insisted, "I've come in search of friends." He used the word friends, rather than allies, with the desire of keeping the encounter peaceable.
The three conferred silently. An exchange passed between their eyes, only gradually, because they seemed reluctant to look at each other. Victor watched them and surmised that they silently debated whether or not to take him before their master, the one who had cut them.
Now his head raced with fear, that he might be crippled and enslaved in turn. But he didn't think so. This method of subjugation was crude, and these three, crippled and barely functional, would be useless in a fight against vampires. They maintained the trap, nothing more.
Victor decided he need not fear whoever had done this to them.
The three emerged from their silent deliberations, and without a word, they leapt up the sandstone cliff, over several hops, and Victor followed them. They led him to an open-air amphitheater cut into the top ridge of the sandstone hill, to bring him before the vampire who had crippled them.
_________
Now, judging by the age of Victor's scent, Jasper estimated that he had come to the sandstone hill and its grisly trap less then fourteen hours ago. Maybe he had never left, but Jasper and Alice knew that this might have been too much to hope for.
They followed Victor's wake, to discover what had become of him, and walked right into the same hilltop amphitheater.
The three servants shadowed them warily, from a hundred yards away.– no distance at all, really, apart from the symbolism of the gesture, a cautious respect. Both Alice and Jasper had bright red eyes. By mutual agreement they had been gorging on human blood, all the way down the peninsula. Jasper cheated at every opportunity in his travels, most especially in the south where factions were constantly at war, but for Alice the human blood that coursed through her system was revelatory and laid bare the falsity of Carlisle's humane piety.
Alice reveled in the raw power that coursed through her limbs and knew that she could hold her own easily against these three maimed ones with their shorn pates, not that it would come to a fight. They dared not approach Jasper, the warrior scarred from head to foot with bites from past battles. The three followed warily and maintained their distance, all the way to the central stage of the amphitheater.
They stopped before the most enormous vampire they had ever seen or could ever have imagined, a veritable giant, a troll with a head the size of a basketball and jaws that could have engulfed a black bear. He had a vast gut, with the breadth of a kitchen table, and arms bigger around than Jasper's chest.
He reclined on the stone seat of a circular dais, head back and scowl planted, as bald on the crown as his shorn acolytes.
One of the three acolytes, in a timid hollow voice informed by rote memorization, recited, "Bow before the uncontested Lord of Baja de Sur, His Highness Moctezuma the Eternal and All-Powerful."
Jasper and Alice did not bow.
The massive warlord glanced at Jasper and absently asked, with a tone of disinterest, "You once ran with Maria. Has she sent you to kill me?"
Jasper did not answer. He kept every option open. "We're pursuing another. A redhead. He's come this way seeking allies."
The All Powerful Moctezuma shrewdly assayed Jasper's thousand scars and wondered if he would survive this encounter. He acknowledged, "He called himself Victor. He mentioned a conflict to the north and claimed it will affect everyone."
Alice said, "There is no conflict. Victor is nursing a vendetta."
Their host shrugged without comment. In his experience every encounter was a conflict of one sort or another.
Jasper said, "We want him."
"Then find him," Moctezuma bade with a shrug. "I sent him away."
"Where?"
"Anywhere. Nowhere. I don't care about his conflict, or yours. You see how I've lived these past two hundred years, since the loss of San Diego."
Alice nodded at the three shorn acolytes and asked, "Why didn't you shave and keep him?"
Moctezuma wondered about that himself. To escape this place and return to the world, he knew that he had to grow in numbers, but he stood trapped, relegated to a state of bare subsistence.
He said, "That one was no fighter. I could imagine no use for him. He contains no blood."
Jasper asked, "Do you know, or can you guess, if he could be headed on a course toward Maria?"
Moctezuma absently said, "Maria will nail that wretch to a wall."
Jasper and Alice headed east and crossed the Gulf of California to enter central Mexico. They would cross the domains of no less than six petty warlords on the way toward Maria in Texas, any one of whom might attempt to take Victor captive, either through crude subjugation as Moctezuma had done with his thralls, or by plying him with promises of assistance in his vendetta against Edythe, promises that would never be honored.
Alice expressed dismay and disgust at the way Moctezuma had subjugated his three acolytes, and presumably also the far greater number of servants that he must have lost centuries ago in his ill-advised attempt to claim and hold San Diego as territory.
Jasper said, "His method of crippling newborns and transforming them into dependent thralls has been tried, as you've seen, and it does not work. They're too weak. They're useless in a fight. Those three can barely subdue the human prey that they catch in their little fly trap. The only reason the All-Powerful Moctezuma has survived this long is that Cabo de Pacifica is worthless territory, with no conceivable value as a feeding ground."
Alice asked, "What method does your old friend Maria use, to subdue her thralls?"
He admitted, "Back when we were old friends, she used devotion. Now I'm not so sure. Moctezuma's comment that Maria will nail Victor to a wall is troubling. He must have meant it figuratively. Alice, please reassure me that there is a point to all of this. What's happening with Edythe and Ben?"
"Crisis averted. Things were tense for a time, with Zoey Martine moving up to Forks for the summer, but Edythe and Ben have reconciled. Zoey Martine is a friend to them both, and nothing more."
Jasper wanted to believe that the hunt for Victor served a purpose larger than retribution. He had gone north with Alice to escape the South's unremitting cycle of vendetta, and there they stood, in a tar and creosote marl pit, deep in the blasted wasteland of Baja California's Cabo de Pacifica, any reasonable mortal's foretaste of hell. He crossly said, "I'm encouraged to hear that they're no longer at each other's throats. But I have to admit, I need more, here. Are they together, Alice? And not like, a month from now, with good odds. I'm asking, are they together, now?"
Alice confirmed, "Now, three days from now, thirty years from now. I don't think anything but Ben's death will ever separate them. And maybe not even death. That's not for me to say."
Jasper's red eyes gleamed as brightly as Colleen's. "I want to see that."
"Then let's catch this dirtbag, finish him, and then we can go home."
_________
Benjamin and Edythe had all the time in eternity for pillow talk.
She cradled his perspiring head against her chest, combed her thin fingers through his wet hair, caressed his muscles, soothed their spasms, softly hummed in his ear. His hot, rapid exhalations felt like wind in her cleavage, as his arms gripped desperately behind her neck and shoulders with his insistent effort to anchor himself forever to her body, yet all the while his hips repeatedly withdrew and then drove forward, pressing lubricious oil up through her viscera, a driving pressure which emerged up through her lungs and emitted from her mouth as fevered gasps.
He panted, in tempo with his loving, "Soon I'll need to have you, again."
Edythe curled her knees up over his flexing buttocks, rubbed her thighs against his flanks, locked her ankles around the base of his spine. She whispered, with a sweet and smug possessiveness, "You're having me now."
"I can't stop," he admitted.
She felt him up inside her tummy, pressing against kidneys, vestigial yet alive and aware of this insistent pressure of her lover. "Mmm," she replied.
"I think I can withdraw," he mused, with a tone of doubt, "and sleep. If you're sore. You must be sore."
Edythe wrapped her limbs more tightly round him, entwined herself around him , gripped him and held him. "You're right where you belong."
"Yes," he breathed into her cleavage.
"Sleep, though, if you like, my dearest one."
"I can't."
She giggled, hummed softly in his ear, looked up through his pretty brown locks at a cobalt sky backlit by a horizon spanning arc of ten thousand suns. They held each other weightlessly in the air, suspended aloft by a nest of gossamer webs. A warm, humid wind accreted moisture on their bodies which accumulated into water droplets, countless reflective domes that converged into rivulets and dripped off them, into the sky, as rain. Her wordless song, her warm breath, the clench of her abdomen on her lover's invading body, the enervation that coursed through her muscles, all danced in syncopation to his fevered, staccato heart. She clung desperately to this glorious being, this amalgam of two natures, both archon and anthropocene; with yearning and hunger she felt him swelling and lengthening again within her body, felt him engorging himself on a need that matched her own hunger and desire. With a groan he took his head out from between her breasts, reared up over her chest, and trembled above her, and she looked up at him, thin forearms wrapped around his shoulders, and studied the straining cords in his neck, his skin flushed to a plum bruise, the striation of every sinew beneath his skin, in unison with the fevered throbbing of his sex deep within her tummy, behind her bellybutton.
The sky and its thousand suns faded to indigo as they drifted over the cloudbanks illuminated from above by sprawling platforms constructed of filigree and light, populated by travelers who propelled themselves through the furious glare of fusion fire, under the wheeling arms of a galaxy that spanned the horizon, close enough to touch, and banished the darkness.
Benjamin clenched her body with his entire strength, shuddered above her, drove into her body to the roots, groaned with abandon as every worry and care dissipated to nothing, and Edythe felt a deep, welcome gratitude within herself, as her body became saturated again with hot, dulcet oil. She curled her pelvis up around him, elevated herself, let her head fall back, and they received each other upside-down, the better to keep and cherish everything that they gave to each other.
The nighttime sky, the empty void above, filled with ineffable spectra, superluminary messages between worlds, stars, galaxies, realms. Angels and archons regarded them speculatively, and Edythe looked right back at them, inquisitive and unafraid, a child's curiosity, an infant unabashed before the ageless and timeless. In the silence, the syncopated interstices between Benjamin's breaths, she sent a hypervelocital message of her own, to worlds, stars, galaxies, realms, and her triumphant hail said, this love is for all of us.
Benjamin gasped and trembled, his nose to hers, his gaze lost in her blue-gray eyes, the amber tendrils on her pale alabaster forehead. He had been laboring to say something for an eternity.
"Tell me, my beloved," she gently urged.
"I'm sorry. So sorry."
Edythe raised an eyebrow with bemused skepticism. She found his mouth with her own. He struggled to speak through their sweet kiss.
"I was so hard on you," he insisted, "and so foolish. It was so unnecessary. I was afraid. There is that, but it is no excuse. It is not enough."
She found his mouth again, welcomed his tongue, reveled in his desperate possession. He entered her body from everywhere at once as they merged into one heart, one soul, one spirit. All too soon he shuddered and gasped again, driven, desperate, and she clung to his sweaty muscle and sinew, trembled with perfect contentment in his arms, whispered, "You need never be afraid, my Benjamin. Whatever you want, whatever you need, anything you want, anything you need. I am yours. I will always be yours. Please tell me, dearest one, if I am hurting you. I can't tell. To me this is heaven. So you need to tell me. If I am clenching you too tightly. With my tummy. In our loving."
He dismissed her worries and fretting without a word, and he whispered through gusts with his effort, "Edythe, honey, we fit. We fit perfectly. Heaven."
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Next: Chapter 29, SUMMER SCHOOL.