Twilight Fan Fiction / Twilight Fan Fiction ❯ I Know My Duty ❯ Foundations ( Chapter 23 )

Twilight and its three and two half sequels are the creation of Stephenie Meyer. This story is a fanfiction based on characters, settings and concepts from Twilight, its three sequels and the first half of Midnight Sun, all of which are the creation of Stephenie Meyer. No party other than the submitting author may alter this work in any way other than font size and other reasonable accommodations to formatting.

*ahem* I had planned a long author's note to explain the delay in this chapter but I found that my feelings on this matter could only be properly expressed through dance. Bear with me...

(The music starts and a Russian-style ballet chorale steps apace to Tchaikovsky's "Everyday Indecision" and then an elegant modern version of Copeland's "NaNoWriMo November.")

(The chorale shifts to interpretive as the music changes abruptly to "Computer Crash" by minimalist composer Philip Glass with a segue into his celebrated "And the Geek Squad Erased the 18,000 NaNo Words on Your Hard Drive.")

(The music changes again to Andrew Lloyd Webber's over-the-top "Finally, a Job! ...It Needs a Month of Preparation" complete with original ribbon-dancing.)

(The chorale then dons forties professional wear and does an interpretation of "Gainful Employment Is More Tiring Than I Remember," from Sweet Charity.)

(Scenery takes on Manhattan 1989 as the orchestra hammers out "Fever, Chills, the Flu!" from Rent.)

(The finale is an acrobatic rendition of "Adventures in Competitive Puking" from recent cult classic Repo: A Genetic Opera.)

(The company comes back for an encore with "Wait, NOW FFnet Has an Error?")

So that's 68,000 words of NaNo, over 74,000 words of job prep in December, three weeks of job itself (which is now continuing part-time) in January, finally two different stages/cases of the flu and finally a glitch in FFnet that prevented me from uploading this chapter when it was first ready on March 23. Special thanks for Acier Glace for telling me how to sidestep the problem. It's a shame. November to January is peak sparklepire season. All the cold weather makes the little dudes rev up like firecrackers and the all hop right into the vampire nets like bunnies on acid. (And YES, I made up the song titles. The composers and long-form works are all real, though.)

I'd had a few different drafts of a twenty-third chapter set up even in November, but I didn't figure out what arc I wanted to cover with part two until the middle of February 2011. I hope you'll find it worth the wait, and if I may be so bold, MWWAAA HA HAA HAA HA!

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"I began to plot." -Edward , Midnight Sun

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This was officially the creepiest room I'd ever been in.

It wasn't the feeling that we were too high up, or the way the windows seemed filmed like mirror glass or the sense that those cracks in the walls hadn't been there before World War Two. This whole place could have looked exactly like my Grandma Swan's kitchen and it still would have been the creepiest room I'd ever been in.

But maybe not if it had smelled like Gran's kitchen. The air in here was cloying, like that perfume that dentists added to the knockout gas right before they put their patients under, but there was also an underlying feeling of honey left out too long. The overconcentrated scent of vampire.

"Can they ...talk?" I asked.

One of them turned its neck. I expected it to make a sound, grating like rock or creaking like old hinges, but nothing reached my ears. She said something in Italian to the other one. Or was it Latin? It didn't sound like anything Edward had been teaching me, but she didn't seem happy.

"Treat the wives with respect," Renata hissed quietly.

I nodded, more to myself than to anyone else. After all, I had a job to do.

"We have a role to play here, Bella,", he'd said to me. "We do not want the Volturi for enemies. If we become too troublesome, Aro will get rid of us, and not by letting us go."

And it wasn't their fault that they were all cragged and weird-looking …unless it was. Edward hadn't said why they or Aro or Caius were like that. No one had. I hadn't figured out how to ask yet.

I tried to ignore how my marble skin felt like it was going to crawl right off my body and watched the first one turn back to me. I twitched, just a fraction of a hair, but I was sure at least Renata noticed. That was the other side of having a vampire's senses: all the other vampires did too.

The tower room was large and almost perfectly round. What little furniture there was sported fine, recent finishing or upholstery. Two well-appointed canopy beds dominated the far side, and I could see the back of what looked like a painter's easel set up near one window. On the floor nearby was an old-fashioned chest that looked like it should have been holding pirate treasure. The whole place was conspicuously free of dust. Air hissed in and out through vents in the ceiling and near the floor.

It was more like an old lady's attic than a chamber for a pair of queens, but then the wives didn't look very queenly. Their hair was thick but brittle, standing out from their skulls in wisps. I couldn't tell if it was faded from blond or just yellowed white like old newspaper.

The one who'd spoken seemed to be in charge, so I focused on her. The other one was half a head taller, but the first one seemed less out of it. I still wasn't sure the tall one really knew I was here.

The first wife's cheeks were high and round. Going by the shape of her face alone, I wouldn't have put her past twenty-five, but instead of smooth marble, her skin was rough like a layered rock that had been out in the weather, soft spots eaten away to show the crags hiding underneath. Her eyes seemed to move back and forth from behind a gray, scummy soap bubble, turning them a sort of dusky pink. It should have made them seem gentle but it didn't. Blood in the bathwater.

So this is what vampires look like when they get old, I thought. And to think I'd been worried about crow's feet and varicose veins. It made me think about Alice and Jasper, growing rocky together holding hands, but that made my heart ache. There were too many pains there.

She spoke again, not seeming to address anyone in particular this time. The tone of her voice was flat, full of boredom, disapproval or a mix. Renata answered, gesturing to me with one hand. I looked back and forth, feeling like a tourist watching her cabbie try to talk his way out of a traffic ticket.

The tall one moved, twisting her head toward her companion as she spoke again. Two scummed red irises pointed toward me through their spun-gray shell.

The first one shook her head and answered in sudden and almost accentless English. "They all dress this way now, Athenodora. It means nothing."

I half-expected Renata to roll her eyes or give an offended sniff. She'd been the one to pick out my clothes, after all. It was what Alice would have done. But she didn't twitch an eyelash.

The woman's voice had been nice enough, almost chillingly normal, but with a strange hollowness to it, like she were a flute. Smooth and pretty, but empty inside. All her reediness had been worn away. I guessed it was rude to stare. I guessed she was used to it.

"If he wants her, let him have her," the woman said again, though I wasn't sure to whom. I didn't like it. It was like Marcus in the audience chamber again. Like I were something to be handed out by other people to other people.

I blinked and found that she was already across the room, looking out the window by the easel. I found that I'd moved as well—away. I hadn't expected her to get up so quickly. Somehow, I'd thought she wouldn't be able to move properly. I wondered if she could even see all the way to the ground. She moved again, and the cloth was in her hands, probably the exact same one that Renata had fussily ironed and brought up here this morning. You'd think they'd just let Renata give it to me herself, but they liked their rituals, their little shows of power here in Volterra.

The wife held out her arm, ripples of strange, light-sucking fabric falling like water toward the floor.

Novices in convents wore white habits. Mine was cloud-gray.

Renata's fingers twitched. I imagined she wanted to mime her original set of instructions back in the reading room. "Take the cloak with both hands, then back away. Don't take your eyes off her." Much as it annoyed me, I did exactly as I was told.

Just as instructed, I let the wife look away first. She settled down again, next to the easel. Her movements were as graceful as Esme's, almost as graceful as Alice's, but when she was still, she looked like she couldn't move at all.

Renata's pinched fingers gave a microscopic tug on the edge of my bodice. I quietly turned and followed her out of the room.

"Thank God that's over," I said after the door had closed behind us and we were starting down the spiral stairs.

"You're going back," Renata said with a hint of an edge to her voice. I was beginning to think that she wasn't as afraid of me now. Oh well. "We all go back. Some of the girls come in here every day to clean and take care of the wives. We take turns, and you're going to have a share of this now that you've got your cloak."

"Just girls?" I asked, Renee's voice in my head telling me that boys weren't too good to load the dishwasher.

Renata nodded. "They don't like males coming up here. Old-fashioned," she said, smiling.

"Of course," I said, smiling back. "Old-fashioned."

That was her go-to excuse, I'd learned, the clothes, the paternalistic talk, the creepy fighting in the hallways. The Volturi weren't chauvanistic, medival, barbaric or evil; they were old-fashioned.

"Wait," I said, frowning. "The wives don't like men coming to the tower or the masters don't?"

Renata paused, eyes blank, mouth a little open. I watched her face closely. Was this a woman wondering how to answer because she'd never thought of it before or because she had to come up with a lie?

"Do they sleep?" I asked, putting this line of conversation out of its misery. "The wives, I mean."

"No," said Renata, her smooth eyebrows cinching together in a seamless vampire frown. "Why would they?"

"Why else would there be two beds in their room?" I asked. No one else in the compound made any pretense of sleeping or eating the way the Cullens had. Except for just now, I hadn't seen a bed since I'd arrived here.

"Well, because—" Renata's smile broke off. Her head tilted to the side, as if she'd just realized that I'd said something terribly odd. "You really don't know?"

I shook my head. "What would I know?" I asked.

Renata turned her head forward and pressed her lips shut.

"Renata," I said in as mildly scolding a tone as I could manage. I hated it when she got like this. This wasn't a real Volturi secret; she could tell me if she'd just open her mouth, and I'd learned how to press her for information.

She looked at me and then away. "They're for, ah…" she made a funny gesture with her hand, as if trying to wave this whole conversation along. "They're for when one of the masters comes to visit."

Well that made no sense and I opened my mouth to say so. Aro, Caius and Marcus didn't sleep either, so what would they need with—

Oh.

I found myself suddenly much less annoyed with avoiding eye contact. No wonder Renata hadn't wanted to talk about it. It was goddamned disgusting.

"The masters are great men," she recited, "and the wives are great women. And we try to give them their privacy."

I nodded mechanically. Privacy, yup. Couldn't give them enough of that.

And around here it was damned hard to come by.

Once they'd decided that I no longer needed to be locked up, I'd half-expected to be assigned quarters or a room somewhere. This place had certainly seemed big enough to me at the time, before I'd had a real mental map of all the counterintuitive twists of the hallways and basement levels, but aside from the wives and masters, no one here had a whole room to themselves.

There were a few amenities. Movies and television were popular but usually shared activities. Back in the sixties and again in the nineties, the masters had insisted that everyone learn enough about new popular culture—movies, the Internet, cell phones—to be able to blend in with the humans. This, though, was an area in which nomads didn't usually need the same level of precision as vampires who lived in the human world, and, from what I'd picked up, most of these vampires had been nomads before joining the Volturi rather than coming straight from human life like I had. Most of the Volturi had already been used to not having a home with four walls or more possessions than could fit in a pocket.

Sure, I didn't need to sleep any more, but I missed not having a place to put things down or to think of as my own space. I thought back to my tiny closet of a bedroom back at Charlie's with the purple bedspread and the geriatric computer. I wondered how long he'd leave everything as it was before giving my things to Goodwill. Never, I figured. The man who still had a picture on the wall of his ex-wife of seventeen years would never touch his missing daughter's bedroom, not except to go through it for clues. The closet, the bedspread, the stacks of schoolbooks. They'd stay there as a monument to me ...a monument that would never get dusted.

Of all things, I wondered if Charlie was eating right. I'd cleaned the unidentifiable muck out of his fridge when I'd moved in. I knew he didn't know how to cook... He would probably go back to his diet of takeout and fried river fish and die of a heart attack or mercury poisoning.

God, what was the use? It wasn't as if I could go back to Forks and start doing the grocery shopping again. Even if I didn't lose control and kill him, one of Jake's friends would get me before I could explain who I was.

I closed my eyes against the memory of Quil and Embry mock-wrestling against the rusted backdrop of my truck, and I tried to picture them as they must have looked to Laurant, massive and terrible. As a human, I'd had to worry about Jasper and even Edward. Now... Maybe it was my fate to always be at risk of dying at the hands of someone I loved.

I shook my head as we rounded the stairs down toward the rest of the compound. I'd save the memories for when I needed them. There was no sense torturing myself in the meantime.

"So," I started in my best change-the-subject voice, "anything go on downstairs today?"

"Oh don't get me started," Renata said, shaking her head. She'd picked up the expression from me, a bit of Renee and her teacher friends brought to Volterra by way of Forks. "Adrienne has been here for over fifty years and she still doesn't know to never touch Heidi's disguises. What was the word again?"

"Bogarting," I told her.

"'Bogarting...'" she trailed off. "From the actor, right?"

I nodded. I wasn't even sure if I was using the word correctly. It was a little bit before my time, but Renata didn't know that. She lapped up all this what-the-cool-kids-are-doing-now stuff.

The poor thing didn't stand a chance, even without the new-toy mojo I'd "enjoyed" back in Forks. If I'd ever paid Lauren Mallory this kind of attention, that backstabbing bitch would have been my friend for life. Or maybe not. I was new to this whole manipulating people bit. Pretty much the only time I'd tried it was getting Jacob to tell me those werewolf stories that day on the beach. My memories of that attempt were so full of blushing awkwardness that I tended to forget that it had worked and Jacob had told me everything he knew.

It wasn't as hard this time. It had taken me a full week after Edward's collapse in the feasting hall to figure out that Renata was starved for girl talk. She didn't seem to get along with any of the other female vampires here, and I didn't think she understood why not. It was actually kind of sad.

Even as Renata rattled out the latest secondhand details of a catfight in the supply room, I had to wonder if she was playing me. Even though I couldn't think of any reason why she might want to—or might be ordered to—sabotage me, I didn't know anyone here well enough to be sure.

Well that was going to change. I didn't know if Renata was afraid of the other girl vampires or if they just thought she was annoying, but I was going to find out sooner or later. I was going to find everything out.

"So does Adrienne have a habit of taking Heidi's things?"

Renata shrugged. "We all do now and again. Adrienne's just the worst. But there was that time just after you got here when she accused Heidi of stealing her comb right out of her pocket. Rolfe tried to butt in and say that maybe Adrienne had just lost it, but even I could have told him that that would only make things worse... Eventually he and Afton had to run and find Chelsea before they ripped each other's eyes out."

"Now which one is Chelsea again?" I asked. This did not come naturally to me, and the sound of my voice, just like all the gossipmongering froths that I'd avoided my freshman and sophomore years of high school, made me feel like my throat was lined with cough medicine gone gummy.

"Brown hair, bit of a square jaw, mated to Afton," she recited.

It couldn't hurt, I reminded myself. It could not hurt to have Volturi gossip taking up its tiny specks of space in my enormous mind.

"And how did she break up the fight?" I asked, remembering the joke about the zombie and the farmer's daughter that Mike Newton had told right when Jessica had been about to rearrange Lauren's front teeth with a pair of cafeteria tongs. The two of them had just stared at him for a full minute, enough for Ben and Angela to drag them apart. Mike was a better person than I'd given him credit for. It was amazing what a few thousand miles could do for my opinion of a guy.

"Oh she just did it," said Renata. "That's what she does."

"Her presence calms people down?" I asked, thinking of Jasper. If I ever felt someone rev me up or calm me down, I'd know to look around for a square-jawed, brown-haired, Afton-nagging vampire named Chelsea.

"Something like that," said Renata. "I never asked the details but I've been out with her when we go after renegade covens. She makes it harder for them to work together against us. It's hard to explain, but I'm sure you'll see it yourself one day."

I smiled, but couldn't quite manage it. Edward had said that Caius would want to know how I would do in the field, and that it would probably be before my first year was up. The more stable I acted, the more freedom they gave me within the compound, but the more likely it was that they'd give me non-freedom outside of it. I didn't like to think about it, but there it was.

...fortunately, I thought with a smile as I tasted honey and sun in the stale air, fortunately, I didn't have to think about it.

He'd said he'd be waiting for me on the landing. I stopped but Renata didn't, my marble smile going motionless on my face as her shoes clicked past me on the stair. I recovered and caught up, but I was sure she noticed.

He had been here, and not long ago... I stopped breathing, on purpose this time. Without the smooth rushing sound of air in my deadened lungs, I listened.

Oh not again, I thought.

Renata looked at me, shaking her head, but at least she looked like she thought the situation was serious. God damn her if she smiled and said "old fashioned" again.

I flexed my fingers around the bundle in my hands. I hadn't planned to wear it right away, though I'd known Edward would disapprove of waiting, but under the circumstances...

I hurried down the steps, taking them three at a time, all the while throwing the cloak over my shoulders and fumbling for the ties. Even now, my knee-jerk reaction was to hold onto the handrail or else break my neck, but my feet didn't miss a step and neither did my fingers. I reached the second floor and the cloak settled down around my legs as perfectly as if I were a model turning at the end of some runway in Milan and then I was off again toward the sound.

"Outside the library," Renata muttered in my ear. She hadn't been far behind, then. I just nodded. She knew the compound better than I did.

Felix. It had to be Felix. If it had been anyone else, it would have been over by now. Except for that one night when Byron and two of his friends had cornered Edward outside the lobby, Felix was the only one who took his time.

I skidded to a stop at the edge of the gray-cloaked crowd clogging the hallway ...if I could call it skidding. I didn't need to wheel my arms or even bend my knees to keep my balance.

"What's going on?" Renata asked a dark-haired vampire whose name I didn't know.

"The new boy," was all she said back. Then she shook her head and murmured something else in what was probably French. I could pick out the words for "human" and "fool." I scanned the crowd, looking for jaws, noses, any pieces of face visible outside the cloaks and hoods. I saw Heidi on the far side, Randall and another vampire whom I'd seen in the library but whose name I didn't know.

I held in a growl as I realized what must have happened. Edward would have been waiting for Renata and me on the landing, alone. It didn't usually start when there were witnesses. They showed up after.

Over the past few weeks, Edward would come to see me with a shoulder held too stiffly or a limb that wouldn't bend and a pigheaded refusal to tell me what was going on. Once I began to get more freedom to walk around the compound, I figured it out. He was a moving target.

It hadn't been like the fight with Byron the day he'd gotten back from Budapest. It hadn't been a fight at all. Renata and I had been walking down the hall toward the library and Edward had come out of the stairwell. I hadn't expected to see him. I also hadn't expected Afton and Rolfe to grab him by the arms while Randall landed a series of punches to his face and midsection.

He hadn't even tried to stop them.

It had been over after less than a minute, and they'd walked away. I'd been too surprised to move, to do anything. Renata had given her same smile and said, "They always do that with the new ones." I'd recovered myself just in time to shape the words "old-fashioned" as they came out of her mouth.

Edward had picked himself up from where he'd slid to the floor and started brushing off his clothes. I was sure he'd known I was there, and I was sure he'd wished I hadn't been.

Edward had finally admitted that it was some kind of Volturi hazing and that he was swallowing double rations of it because he was a pig-eating outsider and because he hadn't joined up willingly. It made sense from a sickly objective standpoint. The psychology books I'd been reading quoted studies that theorized that hazing brought on a kind of low-level Stockholm syndrome, that it was a way of bringing new members into the group on an instinctive level. That had helped me understand. What it hadn't done was make any of it a single bit less disturbing.

But as the weeks went past, it let up. As far as I knew, Rolfe had only been involved in that one attack, and Demetri hadn't done any. Byron kept it up longer than most, but recently even he seemed to have lost interest or gotten it out of his system. Maybe they'd learned that Edward wouldn't break. Maybe they figured he was already broken.

Felix was the main holdout. I didn't know what Edward had done to piss him off, but I could see that something was seriously wrong with that son of a bitch.

What I couldn't do was see what was happening. I gave the woman in front of me a shove and she elbowed me back hard without even turning around. I could hear the swish of Renata's hood as she shook her head. I felt a low growl in my throat. I didn't need her disapproval right now.

I heard a heavy grunt that was probably Edward and an appreciative murmur from at least five male voices. Felix was getting his digs in. I all but snapped my fingers in agitation, swaying left and right like a cobra with no luck. What was happening?

This wasn't the first time, but they were never exactly the same. Felix always chose tight corners, and Edward said he was getting better at fighting on impulse. Edward's speed couldn't help him and his gift gave him less of an advantage each time.

"What did he do this time?" Renata asked the dark-haired vampire.

"Bumped into him," I heard her respond.

A small hiss escaped between my teeth. Edward didn't bump into people. Come to think of it, I'd never known any vampire to bump into anyone, not by accident, and Edward knew better than to provoke Felix deliberately. If anyone did the bumping, it was Felix, for an excuse.

Not that he needed one, I noticed as I took in the crowd. They were hanging back. It was some informal Volterra-code that you didn't jump into a fight between two males. Three-man fights and women were different, but one-on-one guy-on-guy meant jumping in just wasn't done. There were a fair amount of teeth being gnashed and hands opening and closing, reflexes from a group of vampires trained as fighters. I listened carefully. Edward had said that the hazing would change things, that the other vampires here would feel less hostile toward him once it was over, but all the half-growled snarls and hisses sounded the same. If any of these people favored Edward over Felix, I couldn't tell. Apparently, being glued to Aro's right hand didn't come with any special privileges, such as exemption from daily rounds as Felix's punching bag.

But that was how things worked here. That was what I was picking up from the other vampires here ...and discreetly prying out of Renata. Fights—at least this kind of fight—happened all the time.

There was a heavy sound of marble-metal on stone and the wall on my right vibrated like a tuning fork.

"That thing is load-bearing, you idiots!" I heard a strong, silken female voice shout. Heidi.

Please, you evil bitch, just tell them to stop it, I wished silently. If Heidi could use her voice to lure humans in to the buffet, then couldn't she use it to keep Felix from bashing Edward's face in and bringing the roof down on our heads for good measure?

"All the soundproofing in the world won't keep the public from noticing if the east wall collapses, Felix!" she called out again.

There was that growl again, that thick, impossible growl that still made me shiver, but Heidi was more used to it than I was. I heard another thud and a muffled curse, and then the sound of palms on shoulders and thick feet stomping as that mountain of a vampire moved away. I saw the side of his face as he pushed past me. I'd expected him to look sullen, like a child told not to play rough in the house, but there was a dark calmness to him that made me very, very worried.

I ducked to the side of the hallway as the crowd broke up, noticing that Renata was still at my elbow.

"I think he's starting to like you," I overheard from somewhere near the far wall.

"Don't joke with me Rolfe," Edward answered, his slowly uncrumpling form becoming visible through the dispersing sea of gray bodies.

"No no no, he went for the elbow this time. He's been going knee for the past week. I've been making this chart..."

Edward sat up slowly, giving Rolfe an annoyed look. There was dust on his head and his hair had gone flat, probably where Felix had ground his skull into the floor. I could see just enough of Rolfe's face to tell that he was almost laughing. "At least someone's amused by all this," said Edward.

"Well it was rather balletic when he pitched you down the stairwell. You two didn't practice that or anything, did you?"

"Sure," Edward answered. "I go through this twice each time, just for your amusement."

"Well it shows. I appreciate it."

"Edward," I said, interrupting.

He looked up at me. He'd already known I was there; he had to have known, but sometimes he liked to pretend he didn't. He looked away, closed his eyes and I could see him pulling each muscle into place until he gave me his new smile, his Volterra smile, small and subdued. "I see your interview with the wives went well," he said as he got to his feet and nodded toward the cloak around my shoulders.

"Edward, your arm." I didn't want chitchat about those gravelly old hags now, not when there was something that actually mattered going on.

"Here," said Rolfe, "I'm pretty good at this."

"Ah, thank you," Edward said tightly as Rolfe picked up the one white, perfect chunk just the size of Felix's jaws and carefully lined it up with the wound, like he was completing some jigsaw pizzle made of nitroglycerin.

I hated to watch this. I hated the sound these fights made. I hated the excitement that rose in my guts every time I saw one. I even hated seeing Edward put himself back together like he was some earthworm or starfish that could grow new limbs. I tried not to picture him after a year of this, all patchwork down his arms and legs.

Edward had spent months telling me how very far from human he was, but I still hated to see it.

"How's that?"

"It feels all right," Edward answered.

I opened my eyes in time to watch Rolfe nod, "Renata," he said, still sounding nothing worse than amused, "what do you think of our friend here's performance today?"

She mumbled something about not having seen much. Renata reminded me of an eleven-year-old girl asked to talk by her grandfather, chin tucked tight against her chest. What reason did she have to be frightened?

"She never does," Rolfe said to Edward. "Hey, have you thought about what I said?"

"I have," Edward answered, one hand still rubbing against his newly reattached chunk of tricep. "I still think you should ask her yourself."

"Of course I am. But what's she going to say?"

"Rolfe," Edward said with gentle warning.

"Not even a hint?" he asked. Rolfe shook his head, making a sound of disapproval. "You're hogging all the fun, you know."

Edward turned his eyes meaningfully toward the dent he'd left in the wall. "I think I have a realistic concept of that, yes," he answered.

Rolfe laughed loudly and gave Edward a slap on the back. "I've got to get back to work," he said. "We'll talk again later." Edward nodded as Rolfe walked away.

"What did he want?" I asked, honestly curious.

Edward rolled his eyes, but I could hear the old Victorian form coming through in his voice. "He wants to know how Adrienne would respond if he began to court her attention."

Behind me, I heard Renata giggle and cover her mouth with her hands.

Edward met Renata's eyes, "I know," he said. "I don't have the heart to tell him."

"Tell him what?" I asked.

"That she'd sooner kiss a pig," Renata answered from behind me. "Her words," she added.

"You see?" said Edward. "He should have asked you instead of me." He shook his head. "Honestly, it's like being back in high school. At least the football players know how to write 'Do you like me?' on a note and stick it in someone's locker."

"Well if the halfback knew that the head of the foreign language club could read the cheerleaders' minds, he might just change his tactics," I said. The image in my head was funny, though. I pictured the mildly creepy, joking Rolfe sitting across a candlelit café table from the significantly more creepy, sneering Adrienne. I supposed Rolfe wasn't looking for anything but good looks. Adrienne certainly didn't have anything else going for her.

"I'd been going to come and wait for you," Edward said.

"I know," I answered, tapping my nose with my finger. He nodded. We'd been working on that, filtering out all the overload so that I could make use of my new senses. Too bad the bad guys all had superpowers too.

"I've got some things to take care of," Renata said simply. "How about I meet you at the reading room later?" she asked. God bless her annoying ass, but she could figure out when she wasn't wanted. I'd figured out that Renata could take being blown off if it was Edward. Maybe he'd dazzled her too, or maybe she just liked to think she was being useful, giving the young lovers time alone together. As bloodsucking monsters went, Renata wasn't so bad. I muttered a thank-you and she finally left.

"So you're not going to tell me how it went?" he asked.

"You already know," I reminded him. Renata probably hadn't been thinking of much else, even during the fight.

"Yes, but I like to hear you say it," he told me.

I licked my lips, trying to find a way from having to answer.

Edward smiled, tilting his head back. "If you pin me six times in one hour, I'll stop asking," he told me, "but if we get through combat practice without you beating me once, you must tell me everything I wish to know."

I smiled, more surprised at the playfulness in his voice than anything else. "You haven't had enough fighting for one day?" I asked.

He shrugged. "You need to practice and I want you to tell me what happened at your meeting. Are we agreed?"

I nodded, too glad to see Edward acting normal to do anything else.

Edward held out his arm and I took it. It had taken me a while to understand what that gesture had meant. I'd read about it in Jane Austen novels, men and women walking with the woman seemingly literally leaning on the man's arm. The first time, Edward had stood there for a full thirty seconds before closing his eyes and explaining what he wanted. I'd reached out and he'd tucked my hand into the crook of his arm. "Shall we go?" he'd asked me then. Since then, that had been our modus operandi A slow pace, close enough for our bodies to touch but not actually doing so, separated by a simple wall of formality. I didn't know why he liked to do it. My new mind had cooked up a million guesses and no ways of telling which one was right.

I hadn't asked him about it. It was number eighty-nine on my list of weird things about Volterra, and I was still working on six.

Speaking of which... "You could have done that yourself," I said, touching his arm.

Edward looked down at my hands then sidelong back at my face. "What do you mean?" he asked. I looked for the tugging at the corners of his mouth. Nothing, none of the sly sass that I'd hoped to see. But his lower lip had tensed up again.

"I think you know what I mean," I told him.

"How can you always tell?" He did smile this time, something almost like his real one. I felt my insides perk up. There was my Edward.

I shrugged, knowing he would never press a lady for her small secrets so long as she did him the courtesy of pretending to be a lady. From time to time, I wondered if I should tip him off about his little tell, but for now I needed my BS detector too much. Maybe once I learned some other tricks. "Well are you going to tell me what you were doing or not?" I asked.

"Fair enough," he said, turning his head to look down the hall where Rolfe had gone. His eyes went out of focus the tiniest bit. He was listening, I'd figured out, checking people's thoughts to see if anyone could overhear us. "If you want to make friends, Bella—" his smile dropped and he followed up with "—and don't look at me like that. You know we have to make friends, at least after a fashion."

I nodded. It was easier that way.

"If you want to make the kind of friends we're going to need, don't start by doing them favors," he said. "I've been watching people a long time, Bella. There wasn't much else to do after my fifth time through high school. If you're at a disadvantage in a new place, you should never start by trying to help other people. If they don't really need what you have to offer, they'll see it as weakness. If they do need you, they'll just resent it. Start by letting them help you."

I stared at him blankly, trying to process this. I'd been invisible in middle school, neither popular nor an outcast, and my strange notoriety in Forks had come to me without my doing anything to get it.

"People don't want to think that they owe you something, Bella," he explained. "If I want Rolfe to feel comfortable around me, I have to let him think that I owe him but not so much that he'd call it in for more than I'd be willing to pay. Small favors, just enough to make me seem like less of a threat."

I found my gaze drifting to the floor. Small favors... I remembered the pretty girls braiding each other's hair in the cafeteria back at my old school in Phoenix. I remembered watching the football team practice... Well, I hadn't been able to tell much of what had been going on, not for all Charlie's attempts to explain it, but sure, why not? They'd probably been doing it too.

"Small favors," I repeated, licking my lips and wondering if Edward was right. How could I use this? Never mind, I would find a way. Perhaps... Wait, I'd assumed that I was doing Renata a favor by giving her someone to talk to. Did she think she was helping me by giving me the compound gossip? I ran through the past few days of conversations with her in my head. Yes... yes she just might. So far so good, then.

I blinked, suddenly remembering Jessica Stanley my first day at Forks High. She'd told me everything she knew about other students, the Cullens... Then she'd steered me toward the spot next to her on the cafeteria table bench and I'd followed her lead without even thinking about it. I'd been the shiny new girl, and Jessica had found a way to be only two feet from the center of all that attention. And it hadn't been mean of her; even at the time I'd been able to see that she was trying to be nice.

And Jacob! I'd done the same thing then, gotten him to trust me by asking for his help—and we'd become friends, real friends, whatever mistakes I'd made later. Was that how all of this worked?

"We're going to be in Volterra for a long time, Bella," he said, misinterpreting my silence.

"I know," I recited.

"I'm laying the foundation. Eventually, all this will pay off."

"I know."

He pulled a breath in and pushed it out again. He still sounded a little shaky. The fight had unsettled him more than he wanted me to notice. But I did. I always would.

"So why Rolfe?" I asked.

Edward shrugged. "He took an interest, I suppose. He watched a little too much Star Trek back in the nineties and thinks being able to read minds looks like fun."

I smiled. "Well it does sometimes."

Edward shot me an exasperated look. "Can I help it if you make it look easy?" I asked. "So doesn't Rolfe have a gift of his own or does he just think yours is better?" I said, changing the subject.

Edward shook his head. "I don't think so. He's a good fighter and finds it a little easier to live with other vampires than the rest of them do, but I wouldn't say that's a gift."

"Any news today?" I asked.

"Nothing good," Edward told me. "China has sent its navy into the Gulf of Aiden to fight pirates."

"Well …that's good, isn't it?"

Edward gave a sideways shrug. "Aro thinks the pirates might be an excuse. They're also expanding into the Indian Ocean in general, moving in to control lines of communication there. It's not overtly threatening, but other countries in the area are starting to choose sides—India is the other rallying point. There's also talk of reunification with Taiwan."

I nodded. We'd talked about Taiwan.

"Aro had seen things like this happen before," Edward explained. "They don't always come to anything, but it's worth keeping an eye on."

And now he had Edward's eyes. He still wanted Alice's. I noticed that Edward never talked about Alice. I guessed that he tried not to think about her, but I did, all the time.

"What else happened?" I asked.

He opened his mouth but didn't say anything. Damn him. I could see it behind the tension in his neck, feel it in the incomplete stillness of his fingers on my arm.

"We agreed," I insisted, "no secrets." If he couldn't keep secrets from Aro, then he would not keep them from me. "How can I be ready for things if you don't tell me when you see them coming?"

He closed his eyes. He knew I was right. It had been his idea, after all. My mind flipped through the possibilities. Was Caius going to send me out to shred other vampires with Jane and Alec? My insides went cold. Was it something to do with Carlisle, Alice and Esme? Edward had said that Carlisle had been here, and that it hadn't gone well.

"Aro's picked out a new ...candidate," he said. "Someone from legal." Edward's breath started to come faster, and he said, "Bella, I don't know if I can—"

I put my hands on his shoulders, looking him in the eye. "We'll think of something," I told him. I could see doubts swimming around in his eyes, along with what was left of Gianna. "You have to let me help you, Edward," I told him. He forgot it too often. Of course, that was probably because I hadn't been much help up until now.

He couldn't kill this person. That was what he needed. He needed to get through what Aro wanted from him without killing the human. If he could do that, he could make it into the next day and the day after that until the next time Aro asked him to cut out another sliver of who he was.

"When?" I asked. How much time did we have to find a way?

"He hasn't decided," said Edward. "Days?"

"What's her name?" I asked.

"His name is Marcell. He studied in the U.S., then went to a law school in Rome." His lip twisted and I felt his fingers clench on my arm. "When he came to Volterra, he—"

"No," I said, stopping him. "Don't tell me. Whatever's wrong with this guy, don't talk about it. Don't think about it if you can help it." Edward had said that he'd killed Gianna because he'd hated her. Gianna was one of the closest things to a regular person that I'd seen in Volterra. Whoever this Marcell was, he was probably worse.

Edward looked at me for a moment, then nodded, but I could tell he didn't think it would be enough. Neither did I, not really.

"Would it help if I were there with you?"

"Yes," he answered without hesitation, "but—"

"Then I will be," I said.

"—I don't know if the Masters will allow it."

"I will be there this time," I repeated.

He looked from my eyes to the rest of my face and back. I could see him deciding not to argue.

We hadn't talked about what he'd said to me in the feasting hall. I hadn't had the guts. But what little I did know was like a warm ember in my stomach, filling me up. He had loved me. I hadn't imagined it.

If something like time could be relative, changing with space and speed, then maybe love was too. Was it that Edward could only love me in Forks when things were going well? He'd said that vampires couldn't change.

Back in Forks, I'd been Edward's match—or at least I'd thought so at the time. What he'd needed had been to forgive himself and allow himself to be happy, and I'd helped with those things just by being who I was. Here in Volterra, we had other responsibilities, and they weren't coming naturally to me. Vampire politics? Military tactics? I didn't know the first thing about any of them. Edward would have been a million times better off stuck in Volterra with Jasper than with me. Alice might have been even better. Even Rosalie, with her fearless determination, would have done as well. She, at least, could have intimidated some of the cattiness out of these Volterran vampire girls.

I held my breath, closing out the scents of the hallway. Maybe Jasper or Emmett or Rosalie would have made a better companion, but he didn't have them; he had me. Whatever it was that had to be done, I was going to have to do it.

"Do you still want to go practice?" I asked.

He nodded. "You know," he said, "I think I might be learning a few things from Felix." The strain behind the attempted humor made my throat hurt, but I was glad he was trying.

"Well when Big-Stupid-Ogre-Fu comes into style, you'll be ready for your black belt," I answered.

His half-smile dropped away. "Be careful no one hears you, Bella."

"It's only a joke, Edward," I snapped.

He pursed his lips and I felt bad for being short with him. He was trying his best, too, after all. And for all that his nagging grated on me, he was right: The stakes here were high, higher than I was able to fully comprehend. I knew that there were things I didn't understand about turning a new vampire, about Renata and Heidi, about hazing and Rolfe and Felix and Aro, and I knew that I was making mistakes and doing things that I would regret once I finally got a clue, but there was nothing for me to do about it except keep my eyes open.

And watch. And remember. And keep my little lists of which vampire was which, who had which powers, who had which weaknesses, and how to make them work for me. I'd figured it out that day in the tunnel, right before my disastrous run-in with that poor lady who worked here. Edward had said something about Aro knowing everything we did, and I'd figured it out.

It wasn't that we couldn't keep an escape plan secret from Aro, it was that he couldn't do it.

I wanted two things out of life—well, two things that were possible—I wanted Edward and I wanted my freedom. The first one... Well, I already had a pretty good game plan about that, but it was a bit ...fluid. It depended on someone else's wishes. If I did everything I could and Edward still didn't want me, then I was going to have to accept it.

The second one was a lot simpler. I was getting the hell out of Volterra no matter what anyone else wanted, and I was taking Edward with me.

I wasn't my mother. As much as I wanted to see Charlie and Jacob and Alice right now, I could focus, take it slow, play the long con. I would wear a gray cloak and smile at Edward and do what Renata told me and act like I was slowly adjusting to life here.

It could take a long time. It could take a hundred years, but I had time now, thanks to Edward. I was laying my foundations too.

.

.

.

One of my favorite moments in Twilight is when Bella does her Snow White bit, coming to the house, cleaning up, making dinner and putting things to rights. It showed that she wasn't a useless, whining froth (and considering how much whining she did later on, it was kind of necessary for balance).

drf24 (at) columbia (dot) edu