Jacob had abandoned First Beach an hour ago and retreated to his house and bedroom, to suffer alone, and cram, for his two exams tomorrow. Emily had been useless as a tutor, more a distraction than a help. With that woman in a room, a guy couldn't concentrate on anything. No wonder Sam Uley had regressed to the maturity of a thirteen year old boy in the past six months. No wonder his mind had turned to mush. Jacob honestly didn't envy the guy, even though his college-dropout-girlfriend had the body of an idealized pin-up girl. He'd been out on that beach gawping at flash cards for nearly an hour, and he couldn't remember a single one.
He had barricaded every crack of his bedroom door with damp towels. It did nothing to filter out the revelry going on outside. These walls had the porosity of a cheese grater. Some Council meeting. Who were they kidding? What a shallow pretext for this community-wide effort to haze him into flunking out of sophomore year and being forced to repeat it. He could hear, through the door, a horseshoe championship, a ghost pepper eating contest, and robust debate over how to dress and spit a boar.
Everyone seemed to be out there. Not only Pop's Council of Elders, and not only Sam Uley's cult, but also Leah's crew as well. And to top it off, it sounded to him as though she had conscripted his own former best friends, Embry and Quil, as wingmen. Those three were louder than all the rest. What did they have to cheer about? Nothing. They were raising the roof just to haze him, nothing more.
But the thing that finally set him off was the rock band, warming up in the side yard. Four middle school aged kids who couldn't even tune their guitars, with a pimple-faced greasy fourteen year old frontman who thought he was the hottest thing since Pearl Jam. It wasn't even the noise that set Jacob off. He managed to keep his cool, with his nose firmly jammed in his Natural World textbook, until the idiots crossed some wires, shorted the circuit breakers, and knocked out every light in the house.
Twenty pairs of boots stomped into the house, in search of the electrical panel.
Jacob boomed, "It's in the hall closet! Damn it! I have finals tomorrow!"
They wanted him to fail. It was a plot, a vast conspiracy, and the whole damned Reservation was in on it.
He heard a timid, mousey knock on his door, and he couldn't help but think that maybe Ben and Zoey had finally given up on their futile quest to find the vale and high falls, on the foothills of Skyline Ridge. He'd told them they'd never find it in less than two days, but had they listened? No.
But yeah, maybe they'd finally given up. Maybe that was Zoey at the door, coming to tell him that he'd been right all along.
The knock repeated.
"Come on in." He yelled the words, no doubt too loudly, but he couldn't hear himself think.
The door shimmied back and forth against thirty pounds of wet towels.
"Give it a shove," he called out.
It had to be Zoey. Strong for her size, he'd grant her that much, but objectively a lightweight. He'd let her struggle for a few seconds. Then he'd go to the rescue, and things would be cool with them, again.
Then again, Ben Swan might also be with her, he realized. That would suck. Those two were like peas in a pod, or peas and carrots, or maybe peashooters and air darts. Whatever they were, he didn't like it. Ben was supposed to have a girl of his own. They'd had a deal, and Ben Swan had reneged. He was so done with that kid, and he didn't care how close Billy was to the filthy traitor's old man.
"I should take the Chevy back," he said to himself.
The door absorbed a hard shove and burst inward. A chestnut maned bombshell in a flesh colored bikini and sarong nearly sprawled on the floor, and then recovered.
"Jese, Jakey, what is all this?"
Jacob wanted to scream so badly that he did just that, while she fumbled around with the towels in a lame attempt to rearrange them around the doorframe. She jammed sopped terrycloth into finger-width cracks, struggled, fretted, and ultimately gave up. She turned to face him, and with a jazzed, toothy smile, she held up the flash cards.
"This isn't happening," he said to himself and anyone else who'd listen.
"You've got a really small room. Don't you have a chair? Mind if I join you?"
Jacob glared at her as she hopped up onto his bed, cross-legged, and he blushed a little bit when, in a flurry of rare modesty, she pulled a sheet over her lap.
"What. Are. You. Doing. Here."
Emily brightly said, "I'm here to help you study. I know you despise me. You know, the whole carpetbagger, interloper thing. But you really do need to pass sophomore year, and I might be the most qualified tutor in this party, so suck it up, kiddo."
Jacob icily asked, "Does Sam even know you're here?"
"Huh? Sure. He sent me here."
Jacob gasped and caught flies with his mouth for a bit before he managed his next question. "Are you telling me that Sam Uley sent you? To my bedroom? To play hot-for-teacher?"
"He thought it would be best. Because you do need to pass. And you're totally unhinged. To be honest, I'm better off in here, myself. Leah Clearwater tried to set my hair on fire, again."
Jacob couldn't help but laugh at that. She didn't laugh along. Whoa. It must have really happened.
"And also," she said, "I'm not just here to help you with your schoolwork. Jake, I know you think that I don't have a clue about what's happening here, but it's more that I've been engaging you at your level. The thing is, wheels are in motion, and things are going to get bad for you, for awhile. Until you learn to get your head on straight. Jake, it's time for you to grow up. Whether you're ready for it, or not. And I'm here to help you with that."
Jacob frantically backpedaled and cowered against the headboard. "Oh, no you don't. I don't need any help with that. I've got a girl."
Emily scowled and crossly said, "Oh, pull your head away from the porn track, Jake. Look at me. I'm up here."
He reluctantly dragged his eyes out of her cleavage.
"Listen to me, Jacob Black. Pay attention. This is important. Sam Uley is not the Chief of this Tribe. You are."
_________
Ben and Zoey had fled the Delta monoliths. They had not lingered to learn the outcome of the Quileute boys' cocky, foolhardy chase. They had left everything behind: the backpacks, the tents, the prayer flags, all of it, and they had raced back to Forks with the poor old Chevy redlined all the way. Now Ben pulled to a stop at the stairway to her apartment and cut the engine.
They stared out into the night, through the thin, insignificant windshield, and the entire landscape moved in the shapes of black cloaked wraiths and shirtless men with slavering mouths and bone white nails.
Zoey did not have to ask Ben for confirmation. She knew what she had seen and did not need it corroborated. Nor did she need the names of the things that she had seen. Leah Clearwater had told her what the Cullens were, and what the Quileutes were, as well.
She glanced up at the exterior stairs that led to her apartment and couldn't help but imagine the raven haired chimaera with red eyes, waiting within her sanctuary.
Zoey whispered, "This is the part where, if we were lovers, I would invite you up for the night."
Ben murmured into the night, "A friend might invite me up, too."
She smirked bitterly at the stairway and asked, "Is that what I am?"
He looked at her sharply and shook his head. "What you are to me defies definition."
She nodded desolately. Not a lover, then. Neither a lover, nor a friend. Something ineffable, something in-between. Half of one thing, half of another.
Yet another chimaera.
"I asked you... before all of that... if you'd told your dad that I was with you. And you couldn't answer."
Ben emptily admitted, "I was ashamed."
Zoey struggled to hold it together, as vulnerable as she'd ever felt in her life, to get through her next question. "Because you told him you'd be out camping with Edythe?"
"What? No. No! Of course not."
His vociferous denial startled her so completely that she now felt more intrigued than vulnerable.
He went on, "I told Charlie that I'd be out camping alone. I told myself, as I was saying it, that it wasn't technically a lie. We had two tents. But I still felt awful. It felt like a betrayal."
Zoey wrung her hands in her lap, nodding, and she agreed, "Yes, but not as bad as... well, the other thing. I'm not angry about it, Ben. I mean, it's understandable, right? You gave him the alibi he expected and let yourself off the hook, spared yourself a lot of tedious third degree. We left our tents and stuff there, though. So now, what?"
Ben ground his teeth, muttered, and took out his phone.
"What are you doing?"
"Calling Charlie."
"Ben, you don't have to"–
"Shh."
Zoey sat there and incredulously listened.
"Dad. The camping plans kind of fell through. But I won't be coming home, tonight, so don't wait up for me. I'm going to sleep over at Zoey's tonight. What? No, Dad. Not a date. She's going back to Phoenix soon, and we have a lot of things to talk through."
After another pause, Ben became irate. "What? Ugh. Good night, Dad."
Ben hung up, muttering again.
A small, satisfied smile cracked on Zoey's lips, and she asked, "What was the last thing he told you?"
"To be safe."
"I thought so."
"Hey, Miss Martine, no pressure. If this is too presumptuous, I'll drop you here and go back to Charlie's."
She smiled and timidly asked, "Ben, would you please come up and keep me company tonight?"
_________
At close to midnight, Jacob staggered from his bedroom, with his skull ripped in two by feedback that screeched through guitar amps and a crappy public address system, and he had to shove past arm wrestling between Quil and Embry to get to the front door. He clomped out into the muddy front yard, and no one stopped him. Behind the house, the middle school rock band was breaking every noise ordinance in a forty mile radius, but the revelers spilled all the way out into the street. What on God's earth were they celebrating? Emily had tried to explain it to him, but he had kicked her out of his room, to fend for herself against Leah Clearwater.
The Volkswagen Rabbit was blocked in as usual, but this time the obstructions didn't stop him. He leaned on the horn and drove right through the party.
On the main road out of La Push, he opened all the windows and breathed. As he drove by the scenic overlook and roadside parking lot for the Delta Monoliths, he cursed bitterly. That had been a sound recommendation, a good plan, but Zoey had rejected it purely out of spite, just to be combative. More likely, she'd given him the brush-off just to ingratiate herself to Ben Swan.
The notion made him spit, but once he allowed himself to get a grip and breathe, he speculated that they had probably lost themselves in the woods, in their stubborn insistence to find the vale and high falls. He could just imagine the two knuckleheads stumbling around in the dark, being eaten alive by mosquitoes, and he really had to laugh.
Then he took it into his head to find them and rescue them. He knew it wouldn't earn him any points with either of them, but pity demanded it.
He took a few dirt switchbacks northeast and made his way to the steep rockbed of the fire road. This path wasn't intended for cars and was death to anything less than a halftrack, but Jacob figured he could get just about as far in the Rabbit as Ben had gone in that old battleax Chevy, before ripping the undercarriage to pieces.
He drove up the road as far as he dared. He left the car running, and the headlights on, and he got out and ran ahead, in search of the old faded pickup truck.
Nothing.
He jogged back down the fire road, a steep descent from the half mile or so that he'd covered on foot, in search of them.
Well, he told himself as he executed a three-pointer, it didn't mean anything. Maybe the two goofballs had been inflicted by common sense, had given up their search, and had called a retreat. Between the two of them, they had one full brain, didn't they?
When he emerged onto the main road, halfway between Forks and La Push, he decided to drive into town and check Charlie's house, just to make sure Ben had gotten home okay.
He feathered the gas and idled into Charlie's neighborhood, mindful of the hour, topped the gentle rise at the head of their road, and coasted down to Charlie's place. In the darkness, he saw the glint of moonlight reflected off the police cruiser and the rusty Ford that Charlie used for fishing. He looked twice for Ben's red Chevy.
Nothing.
His first impulse was to return to the fire road and check the steep embankments on the path's shoulders, absent of guard rails, where they might have somehow rolled down into the woods. Then he was struck by another notion entirely.
"No," he told himself, "they wouldn't," as he gunned the accelerator.
A couple minutes later he pulled into the Newtons' place, rounded the building to the back parking lot, and found the old red Chevy, parked in front of Zoey's apartment, its big old iron engine block still lukewarm, ticking into the night.
Jacob parked on a far corner of the lot, shut off the Rabbit, and began to curse through an all night vigil.
_________
Jasper called Alice from Kennedy International and lamented, "Victor just landed in Rome, and I'm still on the wrong side of the Atlantic."
"I know. I was afraid of this. I somehow knew, back in Oklahoma City, that we waited too long in that alley. Please relax, Jazz. That's not an accusation."
"It should be. This is my fault. Our window collapsed. You said we had to move, and we didn't."
"It could have gone either way. If we had moved and rousted him, we could have found ourselves chasing him to Australia. I'm wrong, more than I'm right."
He said nothing to that. No one gave credence to her modest self-deprecation, least of all himself. He bitterly said, "There is no way to stop him from entering Volterra."
"Agreed. And once he's there, it's hopeless. Jasper, it would be suicide to go there and try to prevent him from attending an audience with Aro. We have no choice but to let it happen. You have to come back. First go to Hanover and Dartmouth College. Round up Carlisle and Esme. They'll be needed here."
Jasper started to move, but he sought to reassure her. "I still don't see how the situation is dire. You say Victor knows Colleen's name. I don't see how that's important."
"Neither do I."
"A rose by any other name, Alice."
She forced herself to chuckle, but the effort fell flat.
He insisted, "I still say Caius is going to take one look at Victor and set him on fire."
"I hope you're right."
_________
The softly luminous night filtered through a wall of tasseled cotton drapes and French paned glass. This front room, a combined kitchenette and sitting area, had a deep plush rug and a small television that Zoey had never turned on.
They sat on wicker chairs, at a small table, with cold tea and an untouched bundt cake between them. Between the table and the porch stood a wicker chaise with plump, comfortable pillows, where Zoey often curled up for the night, without ever making it to the bedroom. She explained that the sun arose in the east-facing windows and awoke her reliably. All summer, she had never once needed an alarm clock.
They discussed the four Quileute boys, and what Leah Clearwater had claimed that they were, and how she had used the word, werewolf, with literal intent.
"They looked like real people," Zoey said with a shudder, in reference to big Sam Uley and his three companions.
Ben nodded in agreement. Yes, Sam Uley and his boys had looked human, moments before they had transformed themselves into missiles and chased the sound barrier.
"Did you know they can do that?"
"No. Jake didn't tell me much. He dismissed it as nothing more than old campfire stories dating back to the Bering Land Bridge. He doesn't believe them, himself."
"And he's really not one of them?"
"I don't know," Ben admitted.
"Ben, how could they run so fast, like they just blurred?"
"I don't know."
"But you did know that the chimaera– the thing named Lauren"–
"The vampire," he provided.
She shook and nodded in the darkness. "You knew that she could run that fast. Because you've seen something like that before. From things like her."
He stared at nothing and saw Edythe leaping up and down trees in the circular flowered meadow, their garden, the pretty sanctuary that she had cleared from the forest just for him, when she had first met him.
"Yes," he whispered. "Things like her."
"Ben, do you think those boys caught up to her?"
"I don't know."
"Are they still alive, do you think?"
"I don't know."
They lapsed into silence. They didn't want to talk about the possibility that the boys could have caught up to that thing and died, so they didn't. Zoey took their tea cups, refreshed them, popped them back into the microwave. She returned the cups to the table, and the tea went cold, once more. Ben dreamt that his neck was breaking and startled himself awake. Zoey awoke, too, roused by the creaking of the wicker chair.
Zoey yawned and stretched. Ben watched her arms span the little room.
She looked at him and said, "This is the part where, if we were lovers, I would ask you to undress me and take me to bed."
He breathed hard and shuddered as he whispered, "You can't imagine how much I've wanted that. My entire lifetime."
"Yes, I can."
He abruptly stood, crossed to the fluffy chaise lounge, sat and wrapped himself in a crochet blanket, stared out through the French panes and trembled.
Zoey, still at the table with the untouched bundt cake and cold tea, tonelessly said, "She is gone, Ben."
"I know."
"But you love her. You love her, still."
"Yes."
She stood and came around to the window. She faced him, blinked in the darkness. "I don't want you to go. I need you to hold me tonight. Even if this is a trial for you. Even if you don't want to be here."
He whispered, "Zoey, she is gone. And there is nowhere else I want to be."
He extended his arms and raised the crochet blanket. She joined him, curled up at his side, tucked her head under his shoulder, and he wrapped the blanket around them.
Together they trembled, and they looked out through semi-opaque tasseled drapes at the night sky. To angels that peeked from behind stars, they looked for all the world like the boy and girl on the school bus who held each other in their slumber, to ward off nightmares and share the same dream. Not once, for the rest of the night, did either he or she close their eyes.
_______________________
Next: Chapter 42, AUDIENCE.