Everything was silent again as the others caught up to where I was already.
“An immortal child,” Carlisle whispered.
I felt Edward kneel beside me, wrap his arms over us both.
“But she’s wrong,” I went on. “Renesmee isn’t like those other children. They were frozen, but she grows so much every day. They were out of control, but she never hurts Charlie or Sue or even shows them things that would upset them. She
can
control herself. She’s already smarter than most adults. There would be no reason. . . .”
I babbled on, waiting for someone to exhale with relief, waiting for the icy tension in the room to relax as they realized I was right. The room just seemed to get colder. Eventually my small voice trailed off into silence.
No one spoke for a long time. Then Edward whispered into my hair. “It’s not the kind of crime they hold a trial for, love,” he said quietly. “Aro’s seen Irina’s
proof
in her thoughts. They come to destroy, not to be reasoned with.”
“But they’re wrong,” I said stubbornly.
“They won’t wait for us to show them that.”
His voice was still quiet, gentle, velvet… and yet the pain and desolation in the sound was unavoidable. His voice was like Alice’s eyes before—like the inside of a tomb.
“What can we do?” I demanded.
Renesmee was so warm and perfect in my arms, dreaming peacefully. I’d worried so much about Renesmee’s speeding age—worried that she would only have little over a decade of life.… That terror seemed ironic now.
Little over a month…
Was this the limit, then? I’d had more happiness than most people ever experienced. Was there some natural law that demanded equal shares of happiness and misery in the world? Was my joy overthrowing the balance? Was four months all I could have?
It was Emmett who answered my rhetorical question.
“We fight,” he said calmly.
“We can’t win,” Jasper growled. I could imagine how his face would look, how his body would curve protectively over Alice’s.
“Well, we can’t run. Not with Demetri around.” Emmett made a disgusted noise, and I knew instinctively that he was not upset by the idea of the Volturi’s tracker but by the idea of running away. “And I don’t know that we
can’t
win,” he said. “There are a few options to consider. We don’t have to fight alone.”
My head snapped up at that. “We don’t have to sentence the Quileutes to death, either, Emmett!”
“Chill, Bella.” His expression was no different from when he was contemplating fighting anacondas. Even the threat of annihilation couldn’t change Emmett’s perspective, his ability to thrill to a challenge. “I didn’t mean the pack. Be realistic, though—do you think Jacob or Sam is going to ignore an invasion? Even if it wasn’t about Nessie? Not to mention that, thanks to Irina, Aro knows about our alliance with the pack now, too. But I was thinking of our other friends.”
Carlisle echoed me in a whisper. “Other friends we don’t have to sentence to death.”
“Hey, we’ll let them decide,” Emmett said in a placating tone. “I’m not saying they have to fight with us.” I could see the plan refining itself in his head as he spoke. “If they’d just stand beside us, just long enough to make the Volturi hesitate. Bella’s right, after all. If we could force them to stop and listen. Though that might take away any reason for a fight. . . .”
There was a hint of a smile on Emmett’s face now. I was surprised no one had hit him yet. I wanted to.
“Yes,” Esme said eagerly. “That makes sense, Emmett. All we need is for the Volturi to pause for one moment. Just long enough to
listen
.”
“We’d need quite a show of witnesses,” Rosalie said harshly, her voice brittle as glass.
Esme nodded in agreement, as if she hadn’t heard the sarcasm in Rosalie’s tone. “We can ask that much of our friends. Just to witness.”
“We’d do it for them,” Emmett said.
“We’ll have to ask them just right,” Alice murmured. I looked to see her eyes were a dark void again. “They’ll have to be shown very carefully.”
“Shown?” Jasper asked.
Alice and Edward both looked down at Renesmee. Then Alice’s eyes glazed over.
“Tanya’s family,” she said. “Siobhan’s coven. Amun’s. Some of the nomads—Garrett and Mary for certain. Maybe Alistair.”
“What about Peter and Charlotte?” Jasper asked half fearfully, as if he hoped the answer was no, and his old brother could be spared from the coming carnage.
“Maybe.”
“The Amazons?” Carlisle asked. “Kachiri, Zafrina, and Senna?”
Alice seemed too deep into her vision to answer at first; finally she shuddered, and her eyes flickered back to the present. She met Carlisle’s gaze for the tiniest part of a second, and then looked down.
“I can’t see.”
“What was that?” Edward asked, his whisper a demand. “That part in the jungle. Are we going to look for them?”
“I can’t see,” Alice repeated, not meeting his eyes. A flash of confusion crossed Edward’s face. “We’ll have to split up and hurry—before the snow sticks to the ground. We have to round up whomever we can and get them here to show them.” She zoned again. “Ask Eleazar. There is more to this than just an immortal child.”
The silence was ominous for another long moment while Alice was in her trance. She blinked slowly when it was over, her eyes peculiarly opaque despite the fact that she was clearly in the present.
“There is so much. We have to hurry,” she whispered.
“Alice?” Edward asked. “That was too fast—I didn’t understand. What was—?”
“I can’t see!” she exploded back at him. “Jacob’s almost here!”
Rosalie took a step toward the front door. “I’ll deal with—”
“No, let him come,” Alice said quickly, her voice straining higher with each word. She grabbed Jasper’s hand and began pulling him toward the back door. “I’ll see better away from Nessie, too. I need to go. I need to really concentrate. I need to see everything I can. I have to go. Come on, Jasper, there’s no time to waste!”
We all could hear Jacob on the stairs. Alice yanked, impatient, on Jasper’s hand. He followed quickly, confusion in his eyes just like Edward’s. They darted out the door into the silver night.
“Hurry!” she called back to us. “You have to find them all!”
“Find what?” Jacob asked, shutting the front door behind himself. “Where’d Alice go?”
No one answered; we all just stared.
Jacob shook the wet from his hair and pulled his arms through the sleeves of his t-shirt, his eyes on Renesmee. “Hey, Bells! I thought you guys would’ve gone home by now. . . .”
He looked up to me finally, blinked, and then stared. I watched his expression as the room’s atmosphere finally touched him. He glanced down, eyes wide, at the wet spot on the floor, the scattered roses, the fragments of crystal. His fingers quivered.
“What?” he asked flatly. “What happened?”
I couldn’t think where to begin. No one else found the words, either.
Jacob crossed the room in three long strides and dropped to his knees beside Renesmee and me. I could feel the heat shaking off his body as tremors rolled down his arms to his shaking hands.
“Is she okay?” he demanded, touching her forehead, tilting his head as he listened to her heart. “Don’t mess with me, Bella, please!”
“Nothing’s wrong with Renesmee,” I choked out, the words breaking in strange places.
“Then who?”
“All of us, Jacob,” I whispered. And it was there in my voice, too—the sound of the inside of a grave. “It’s over. We’ve all been sentenced to die.”
29. DEFECTION
We sat there all night long, statues of horror and grief, and Alice never came back.
We were all at our limits—frenzied into absolute stillness. Carlisle had barely been able to move his lips to explain it all to Jacob. The retelling seemed to make it worse; even Emmett stood silent and still from then on.
It wasn’t until the sun rose and I knew that Renesmee would soon be stirring under my hands that I wondered for the first time what could possibly be taking Alice so long. I’d hoped to know more before I was faced with my daughter’s curiosity. To have some answers. Some tiny, tiny portion of hope so that I could smile and keep the truth from terrifying her, too.
My face felt permanently set into the fixed mask it had worn all night. I wasn’t sure I had the ability to smile anymore.
Jacob was snoring in the corner, a mountain of fur on the floor, twitching anxiously in his sleep. Sam knew everything—the wolves were readying themselves for what was coming. Not that this preparation would do anything but get them killed with the rest of my family.
The sunlight broke through the back windows, sparkling on Edward’s skin. My eyes had not moved from his since Alice’s departure. We’d stared at each other all night, staring at what neither of us could live through losing: the other. I saw my reflection glimmer in his agonized eyes as the sun touched my own skin.
His eyebrows moved an infinitesimal bit, then his lips.
“Alice,” he said.
The sound of his voice was like ice cracking as it melted. All of us fractured a little, softened a little. Moved again.
“She’s been gone a long time,” Rosalie murmured, surprised.
“Where could she be?” Emmett wondered, taking a step toward the door.
Esme put a hand on her arm. “We don’t want to disturb . . .”
“She’s never taken so long before,” Edward said. New worry splintered the mask his face had become. His features were alive again, his eyes suddenly wide with fresh fear, extra panic. “Carlisle, you don’t think—something preemptive? Would Alice have had time to see if they sent someone for her?”
Aro’s translucent-skinned face filled my head. Aro, who had seen into all the corners of Alice’s mind, who knew everything she was capable of—
Emmett cussed loud enough that Jacob lurched to his feet with a growl. In the yard, his growl was echoed by his pack. My family was already a blur of action. “Stay with Renesmee!” I all but shrieked at Jacob as I sprinted through the door.
I was still stronger than the rest of them, and I used that strength to push myself forward. I overtook Esme in a few bounds, and Rosalie in just a few strides more. I raced through the thick forest until I was right behind Edward and Carlisle.
“Would they have been able to surprise her?” Carlisle asked, his voice as even as if he were standing motionless rather than running at full speed.
“I don’t see how,” Edward answered. “But Aro knows her better than anyone else. Better than I do.”
“Is this a trap?” Emmett called from behind us.
“Maybe,” Edward said. “There’s no scent but Alice and Jasper. Where were they going?”
Alice and Jasper’s trail was curling into a wide arc; it stretched first east of the house, but headed north on the other side of the river, and then back west again after a few miles. We recrossed the river, all six jumping within a second of each other. Edward ran in the lead, his concentration total.
“Did you catch that scent?” Esme called ahead a few moments after we’d leaped the river for the second time. She was the farthest back, on the far left edge of our hunting party. She gestured to the southeast.
“Keep to the main trail—we’re almost to the Quileute border,” Edward ordered tersely. “Stay together. See if they turned north or south.”
I was not as familiar with the treaty line as the rest of them, but I could smell the hint of wolf in the breeze blowing from the east. Edward and Carlisle slowed a little out of habit, and I could see their heads sweep from side to side, waiting for the trail to turn.
Then the wolf smell was suddenly stronger, and Edward’s head snapped up. He came to a sudden stop. The rest of us froze, too.
“Sam?” Edward asked in a flat voice. “What is this?”
Sam came through the trees a few hundred yards away, walking quickly toward us in his human form, flanked by two big wolves—Paul and Jared. It took Sam a while to reach us; his human pace made me impatient. I didn’t want time to think about what was happening. I wanted to be in motion, to be doing something. I wanted to have my arms around Alice, to know beyond a doubt that she was safe.
I watched Edward’s face go absolutely white as he read what Sam was thinking. Sam ignored him, looking straight at Carlisle as he stopped walking and began to speak.
“Right after midnight, Alice and Jasper came to this place and asked permission to cross our land to the ocean. I granted them that and escorted them to the coast myself. They went immediately into the water and did not return. As we journeyed, Alice told me it was of the utmost importance that I say nothing to Jacob about seeing her until I spoke to you. I was to wait here for you to come looking for her and then give you this note. She told me to obey her as if all our lives depended on it.”
Sam’s face was grim as he held out a folded sheet of paper, printed all over with small black text. It was a page out of a book; my sharp eyes read the printed words as Carlisle unfolded it to see the other side. The side facing me was the copyright page from
The Merchant of Venice
. A hint of my own scent blew off of it as Carlisle shook the paper flat. I realized it was a page torn from one of my books. I’d brought a few things from Charlie’s house to the cottage; a few sets of normal clothes, all the letters from my mother, and my favorite books. My tattered collection of Shakespeare paperbacks had been on the bookshelf in the cottage’s little living room yesterday morning.…
“Alice has decided to leave us,” Carlisle whispered.
“What?” Rosalie cried.
Carlisle turned the page around so that we all could read.
Don’t look for us. There isn’t time to waste. Remember: Tanya, Siobhan, Amun, Alistair, all the nomads you can find. We’ll seek out Peter and Charlotte on our way. We’re so sorry that we have to leave you this way, with no goodbyes or explanations. It’s the only way for us. We love you.
We stood frozen again, the silence total but for the sound of the wolves’ heartbeats, their breathing. Their thoughts must have been loud, too. Edward was first to move again, speaking in response to what he heard in Sam’s head.
“Yes, things are that dangerous.”
“Enough that you would abandon your family?” Sam asked out loud, censure in his tone. It was clear that he had not read the note before giving it to Carlisle. He was upset now, looking as if he regretted listening to Alice.