“NOW, ALICE,” I BEGAN AS I SHUT MY DOOR.
She sighed. I’m sorry. I wish I didn’t have to—
“It’s not real,” I interrupted, accelerating away from the parking lot. I didn’t have to think about the road. I knew it too well. “It’s just an old vision. Before everything. Before I knew I loved her.”
In her head, it was there again, that worst of all visions—the agonizing potential that had tortured me for so many weeks, the future Alice had seen the day I’d pushed Bella out of the way of the van.
Bella’s body in my arms, twisted and white and lifeless… a ragged, blue-edged gash across her broken neck… her blood red on my lips and blazing crimson in my eyes.
The vision in Alice’s memory brought a furious snarl ripping up my throat—an involuntary response to the pain that lashed through me.
Alice froze, her eyes anxious.
It’s the same place, Alice had realized today in the cafeteria, her thoughts tinged with a horror I hadn’t understood at first.
I’d never looked beyond the ghastly central image—I could barely stand to see that much. But Alice had been examining her visions for decades longer than I. She knew how to remove her feelings from the equation, how to be impartial, how to look at the picture without flinching away from it.
Alice had been able to absorb details… like the scenery.
The gruesome tableau was set in the same meadow where I planned to take Bella tomorrow.
“It can’t still be valid. You didn’t see it again, you just remembered it.”
Alice shook her head slowly.
It’s not just a memory, Edward. I see it now.
“We’ll go somewhere else.”
In her head, backgrounds to her vision spun like whirling kaleidoscopes, changing from bright to dark and back. The foreground remained the same. I cringed away from the pictures, trying to push them from my mental eye, wishing I could blind it.
“I’ll cancel,” I said through my teeth. “She’s forgiven my broken promises before.”
The vision shimmered, wavered, and then returned to solidity, with sharp, clear edges.
Her blood is so strong to you, Edward. As you get closer to her…
“I’ll go back to keeping my distance.”
“I don’t think that will work. It didn’t before.”
“I’ll leave.”
She flinched at the agony in my voice, and the picture in her head shivered again. The seasons changed, but the central figures remained.
“It’s still there, Edward.”
“How can that be?” I snarled.
“Because if you leave, you will come back,” she said, her voice implacable.
“No,” I said. “I can stay away. I know I can.”
“You can’t,” she said calmly. “Maybe… if it was just your own pain…”
Her mind raced through a flipbook of futures. Bella’s face from a thousand different angles, always tinted gray, sunless. She was thinner, unfamiliar hollows beneath her cheekbones, deep circles under her eyes, her expression empty. One could call it lifeless—but it would only be a metaphor. Not like the other visions.
“What’s wrong? Why is she like that?”
“Because you’ve left. She’s not… doing well.”
I hated it when Alice spoke like that, in her strange present-future tense, which made it sound like the tragedy was happening right now.
“Better than other options,” I said.
“Do you really think you could leave her like that? Do you think you wouldn’t come back to check? Do you think when you saw her that way, you would be able to keep from speaking?”
As she asked her questions, I saw the answers in her head. Myself in the shadows, watching. Creeping back to Bella’s room. Seeing her suffer through a nightmare, curled into a ball, her arms tight around her chest, gasping for air even in her sleep. Alice curled in on herself, too, wrapping her arms tensely around her knees in sympathy.
Of course Alice was right. I felt an echo of the emotions that I would feel then, in this version of the future, and I knew I would come back—just to check. And then, when I saw this… I would wake her. I would not be able to watch her suffer.
The futures realigned into the same inevitable vision, only delayed a bit.
“I should never have come back,” I whispered.
What if I’d never learned to love her? What if I hadn’t known what I was missing?
Alice was shaking her head.
There were things I saw, while you were away.…
I waited for her to show me, but she was focusing very hard on just looking at my face now. Trying not to show me.
“What things? What did you see?”
Her eyes were pained. They weren’t pleasant things. At some point—if you hadn’t come back when you did, if you’d never loved her—you would have come back for her anyway. To… hunt her.
Still no pictures, but I didn’t need them to understand. I reeled away from her, nearly losing control of the car. I stomped on the brake, and pulled off the road. The tires tore into the ferns and threw patches of moss onto the pavement.
The thought had been there, in the very beginning, when the monster was nearly unbridled. That there was no guarantee that I wouldn’t eventually follow her, wherever she might go.
“Give me something that will work!” I exploded. Alice cringed away from the volume. “Tell me another path! Show me how to stay away—where to go!”
In her thoughts, suddenly another vision replaced the first. A gasp of relief choked through my lips when the horror was removed. But this vision was not much better.
Alice and Bella, arms around each other, both marble white and diamond hard.
One too many pomegranate seeds, and she was bound to the underworld with me. No way back. Springtime, sunlight, family, future, soul, all stolen from her.
It’s sixty-forty… ish. Maybe even sixty-five-thirty-five. There’s still a good chance you won’t kill her. Her tone was one of encouragement.
“She’s dead, either way,” I whispered. “I’ll stop her heart.”
“That’s not exactly what I meant. I’m telling you that she has futures beyond the meadow… but first she has to go through the meadow—the metaphorical meadow—if you catch my meaning.”
Her thoughts… it was difficult to describe… widened out as if she was thinking everything at the same time—and I could see a tangle of threads, each thread a long line of frozen images, each thread a future told in snapshots, all of them snared together in a messy knot.
“I don’t understand.”
All her paths are leading to one point—all her paths are knotted together. Whether that point is in the meadow, or somewhere else, she’s tied to that moment of decision. Your decision, her decision.… Some of the threads continue on the other side. Some…
“Do not.” My voice faltered through my tight throat.
You can’t avoid it, Edward. You’re going to have to face it. Knowing it could easily go either way, you still have to face it.
“How do I save her? Tell me!”
“I don’t know. You’ll have to find the answer yourself, in the knot. I can’t see exactly what form it will take, but there will be a moment, I think—a test, a trial. I can see that, but I can’t help you with it. Only the two of you can choose in that moment.”
My teeth ground together.
You know that I love you, so listen to me now. Putting this off won’t change anything. Take her to your meadow, Edward, and—for me, and especially for you—bring her back again.
I let my head fall into my hands. I felt sick—like a damaged human, a victim of disease.
“How about some good news?” Alice asked gently.
I glared up at her. She smiled a small smile.
“Tell me, then.”
“I’ve seen a third way, Edward,” she said. “If you can get through the crisis, there’s a new path out there.”
“A new path?” I echoed blankly.
“It’s sketchy. But look.”
Another picture in her head. Not as sharp as the others. A trio in the cramped front room of Bella’s house. I was on the aged sofa, Bella beside me, my arm casually slung around her shoulders. Alice sat on the floor beside Bella, leaning against her leg in a familiar fashion. Alice and I were exactly the same as we always were, but this was a version of Bella I’d never seen before. Her skin was still soft and translucent, pink across the cheeks, healthy. Her eyes were still warm and brown and human. But she was different. I analyzed the changes, and realized what I was seeing.
Bella was not a girl, but a woman. Her legs looked a little longer, as if she’d grown an inch or two, and her body had rounded subtly, giving a new curvature to her slender frame. Her hair was sable-dark, as if she’d spent little time in the sun during the intervening years. Not many years, maybe three or four. But she was still human.
Joy and pain washed through me. She was still human; she was aging. This was the desperate, unlikely future that was the only one I could live with. The future that did not cheat her of either life or afterlife. The future that would take her away from me someday, as inevitably as day turned to night.
“It’s still not very probable, but I thought you’d like to know it was there. If you two get through the crisis, this is out there.”
“Thank you, Alice,” I whispered.
I put the car into drive, and pulled onto the road again, cutting off a minivan chugging along under the limit. I accelerated automatically, barely registering the process.
Of course, this is all you, she thought. She was still picturing the unlikely trio on the sofa. This doesn’t take her wishes into account.
“What do you mean? Her wishes?”
“Did it never occur to you that Bella might not be willing to lose you? That one short mortal life might not be long enough for her?”
“That’s insanity. No one would choose—”
“No need to argue about it now. Crisis first.”
“Thanks, Alice,” I said again, caustically this time.
She trilled a laugh. It was a nervous sound, birdlike. She was every bit as on edge as I was, almost as horrified by the tragic possibilities.
“I know you love her, too,” I muttered.
It’s not the same.
“No, it isn’t.”
After all, Alice had Jasper. She had the center of her universe safely at her side—even more indestructible than most. And his soul was not on her conscience. She had brought Jasper nothing but happiness and peace.
I love you. You can do this.
I wanted to believe her, but I knew when her words were built on sure foundations, and when they were no more than ordinary hope.
I drove in silence to the edge of the national park and found an inconspicuous place to leave the car. Alice didn’t move when the car stopped. She could see that I would need a moment.
I closed my eyes and tried not to hear her, not to hear anything, to really focus my thoughts toward a decision. A resolution. I pressed my fingertips hard against my temples.
Alice said I would have to make a choice. I wanted to scream out loud that I’d already decided, that there was no decision, but even though it felt as though my whole being yearned for nothing but Bella’s safety, I knew the monster was still alive.
How did I kill it? Silence it forever?
Oh, he was quiet now. Hiding. Saving his strength for the fight that was coming.
For a few moments, I thought seriously about killing myself. It was the only way I knew to be sure that the monster didn’t survive.
But how? Carlisle had exhausted most of the possibilities in the beginning of his new life, and had never come close to ending his own story, despite his very real determination to do so. I would have no success acting alone.
Any of my family would be capable of doing it for me, but I knew that none of them would, no matter how I begged. Even Rosalie, who I’m sure would claim to be angry enough to do it, who might bluster and threaten the next time I saw her, would not. Because even though she sometimes hated me, she always loved me. And I knew if I could trade places with any of them, I would feel and act exactly the same way. I would not be able to harm any of my family, no matter how much pain they were in, no matter how much they wanted out.
There were others.… But Carlisle’s friends wouldn’t help me. They would never betray him so. I could think of one place I might go with the power to end the monster very quickly… but doing that would put Bella in danger. Though I’d not been the one to tell her the truth about myself, she knew things she was forbidden to know. It was nothing that would ever bring her the wrong kind of attention, unless I did something stupid, like go to Italy.
It was too bad the Quileute treaty was toothless these days. Three generations ago, all I would have had to do was walk to La Push. A useless idea now.
So those ways of killing the monster weren’t possible.
Alice seemed so sure that I had to go forward, to meet this head-on. But how could that be the right thing to do, when the possibility that I would kill Bella existed?
I flinched. The idea was so painful, I couldn’t imagine how the monster could get past my aversion to overcome me. He didn’t give anything away, just silently bided his time.
I sighed. Was there any choice but to face this head-on? Did it count as courage if one was compelled? I was sure it did not.
All I could do, it seemed, was cling to my decision with both hands, with all my strength. I would be stronger than my monster. I would not hurt Bella. I would do the most right thing that was left to me. I would be who she needed me to be.
And then suddenly, as I thought those words, it didn’t feel so impossible. Of course I could do that. I could be the Edward that Bella wanted, that she needed. I could grasp hold of that one sketchy future I could live with, and then will it into being. For Bella. Of course I could do that, if it was for her.
It felt stronger, this decision. Clearer. I opened my eyes and looked at Alice.
“Ah. That looks better,” she said. In her head, the tangle of threads was still a hopelessly confusing maze to me, but she saw more in it than I did. “Seventy-thirty. Whatever you’re thinking, keep thinking it.”
Perhaps just accepting the immediate future was the key. Facing it. Not underestimating my own evil. Bracing for it. Preparing.
I could do the most basic preparation now. This was why we were here.
Alice saw my action before I took it, and she was out her door and running before I had opened my own. I felt a shallow sensation of humor and almost smiled. She could never outrun me; she always tried to cheat.
And then I was running, too.
This way, Alice thought when I’d nearly caught up. Her mind was ranging ahead, looking for quarry. But while I caught the scent of several nearby options, clearly they weren’t what she wanted. She disregarded everything she saw.