Something caught his attention—Alice, uncloaked as Jasper moved away from her. There was a flicker of surprise as he took in her face for the first time, perhaps wondering why he hadn’t thought to appraise her before, but that surprise did not resolve into words before he turned and dashed after the others. Carlisle and Jasper ran close on his heels, Rose and Esme following.I had to work to keep my voice from coming out as a snarl or a shriek. “Let’s go, Bella.”She seemed paralyzed. Her wide eyes were so blank that I wondered whether she even understood what I was saying. But I didn’t have time to soothe her, or treat her if she were in shock. Right now the only priority was escape.I took her elbow and pulled her in the opposite direction from where the others had just disappeared. After one staggering step, she found her footing and half ran to keep up with me. Emmett and Alice moved behind us, hiding her, just in case.I was positive James would not follow Laurent back to our house. When he found an opportunity, he would break off and circle back to catch Bella’s trail. I couldn’t know how long it would take him to find that opportunity, but I had to act as if he were already watching. If he were, it would be better to let him think that we would move at Bella’s speed. I doubted he would be surprised for long when her scent became suddenly tenuous in the trees, but if we could obscure how we were traveling, he would have to pause to reassess.His thoughts were too far away for me to pinpoint him now, though I had a sense of where the larger group was. I couldn’t be positive he was still with them. If he ran up the side of one of these peaks, he’d have a good view of our movements. Still, I chafed at our velocity—or lack thereof.Emmett and Alice didn’t comment on our pace. They were both aware that we might have an audience, though Alice couldn’t see clearly what James was doing. His path wasn’t going to cross ours here, nor in the near future. She’d only seen the strangers in the clearing in the first place because they had decided to interact with us. It wasn’t easy for her to see outsiders unless they were with a member of her family. James would be mostly invisible until he decided to accost one of us.It seemed hours till we reached the edge of the clearing, but I knew it was really just minutes. As soon as we were deep enough into the trees to be invisible to any watcher, I lifted Bella and settled her against my back. She understood, not too far gone into shock, then. She wrapped her legs tightly around my waist and locked her arms around my neck. Her face was tucked down against my shoulder blade again.I thought it would feel better, safer, when I was running, when we were racing away from the danger at an acceptable speed, but the momentum did nothing to dissolve the solid block of panic that seemed to weigh me down. I knew this was an illusion—I was flying through the trees as fast as I could go without hurting her—but I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was making no progress at all.Even when the Jeep appeared, and in less than a second I had Bella in the backseat, it felt like I was lagging behind.“Strap her in,” I hissed to Emmett. He’d chosen the back with Bella, recognizing that he would be her bodyguard as long as I needed to drive. He was willing, even eager.For once, Emmett’s disposition toward humor was quelled—a mercy, as I would not have been able to bear it now. His temper was roused, and his thoughts were all directed toward violence.Alice sat by me, and without my asking, she was sprinting through all the futures we could face now. Mostly there was a dark road ahead of us, flying away under the tires, with no clear destination in mind. But there were other futures going in the wrong direction, back in Forks, inside Bella’s home and our own, though I couldn’t imagine what would turn me around.We lurched and careened across the rough road as fast as I dared go without chancing flipping the Jeep, but it continued to feel like I was losing a race.While Alice kept searching—there was the blistering sunlight again, why would we choose that kind of location when it would trap us indoors?—I focused on the road. Finally we were back to the highway, and I wished fervently we were in another car, any other—mine, Rose’s, Carlisle’s. The Jeep wasn’t modified for racing. But there was nothing for it.I was vaguely aware of the sound of my own voice, snarling out half-articulated obscenities, but it felt distant from me, as though not under my control.That was the only sound besides the roar of the engine, the tires moving against the wet road, Bella’s uneven breathing in the back, and her thudding heart.Alice was seeing a hotel room now, but it could be anywhere. The curtains were closed.“Where are we going?”Bella’s question sounded like it was coming from a distance, too. My thoughts were too wound up inside Alice’s visions or frozen with dread for me to compose an answer. It was almost as if the question didn’t apply to me.Her voice had quavered, little more than a whisper. But now it turned hard.“Dammit, Edward! Where are you taking me?”I pulled away from the confusing swirl of Alice’s futures so that I could be present. Bella must be terrified.“We have to get you away from here—far away—now,” I explained.I would have thought the idea of being far away would be a welcome one, but she was suddenly shouting, her hands fighting with the harness as she tried to loose herself.“Turn around! You have to take me home!”How did I explain to her that she’d lost her home for now, that the loathsome hunter had stolen more than that from her tonight?The priority for the moment, though, was keeping her from throwing herself out of the Jeep.Emmett was already wondering if he should restrain her. I spoke his name, low and hard, so he would know that I wanted him to do this. He caught her wrists carefully in his huge hands and immobilized them.“No! Edward! No,” she howled at me. “You can’t do this!”I didn’t know what she thought I was doing. Did she think I had a choice? The sound of her anger, her desperation, made it hard to concentrate. It felt like I was the one hurting her, rather than the danger of the tracker.“I have to, Bella,” I hissed. “Now please be quiet.” I needed to see what Alice was seeing.“I won’t!” she shouted at me. “You have to take me back—Charlie will call the FBI! They’ll be all over your family—Carlisle and Esme! They’ll have to leave, to hide forever!”This was what she was worried about? I supposed it shouldn’t surprise me that she was going to pieces over the wrong menace.“Calm down, Bella. We’ve been there before.” So we had to start over. It seemed a meaningless thing at the moment.“Not over me, you don’t!” she shrieked. “You’re not ruining everything over me!”She thrashed against Emmett’s hold. The only part of her that was still was her trapped hands. Emmett stared at her, confused.What am I supposed to do?Before I could tell Bella why she had it wrong or tell Emmett that he was doing fine, Alice decided to join me in the present.“Edward, pull over.”The calmness in her voice irritated me. She was thinking about what Bella was saying, though—clearly—none of those concerns meant anything. Alice should have known better. Bella didn’t grasp what had happened. How could she? She had no context for any of this.I gunned the engine automatically, suddenly realizing that Alice didn’t have all the context, either. For all her prescience, there were things she couldn’t see.“Edward.” Alice was still calm, her tone so reasonable. “Let’s just talk this through.”“You don’t understand,” I exploded. “He’s a tracker, Alice, did you see that? He’s a tracker!”Emmett reacted more powerfully to the word than Alice did. Because of course she had seen that—the moment I’d decided to shout it at her.We’d not had a great deal of exposure to trackers, aside from stories. The most powerful of them were far away, serving in Italy. Carlisle knew one, but as he was the furthest thing from sociable, none of us had ever met Alistair. Emmett and Alice only knew trackers as those with a talent for finding things, finding people. They didn’t understand the concept in the more dynamic sense. James didn’t just have a talent for finding people. Tracking was everything to him.“Pull over, Edward,” Alice said, as if I hadn’t spoken.I glowered at her while urging the engine faster.That’s not how tonight goes, she thought with perfect assurance. “Do it, Edward.”“Listen to me, Alice,” I seethed, wishing I could put everything I knew directly into her head for once instead of the other way around. She didn’t get it. “I saw his mind. Tracking is his passion, his obsession—and he wants her, Alice—her, specifically. He begins the hunt tonight.”She was unmoved by my outburst. “He doesn’t know where—”I cut her off, impatient with her refusal to see. “How long do you think it will take him to cross her scent in town? His plan was already set before the words were out of Laurent’s mouth.”Bella gasped, and then she was shrieking again. “Charlie! You can’t leave him there! You can’t leave him!”“She’s right,” Alice said. Still too calm.My foot eased off the accelerator without my giving it that order. Obviously, I couldn’t have Charlie in danger, either. But how could I be in two places at once?“Let’s just look at our options for a minute,” Alice coaxed.I was shocked by the image suddenly in her head. I’d not seen her tracing this future—I would have interrupted, and violently, if I had—but she somehow had it all laid out. Complete.Alice saw one version of the future in which the tracker lost interest and abandoned the chase.It’s meaningless to him without the prize, she explained.It looked just like the old vision, but I could tell it was new. Freshly generated. Bella, her eyes blazing a red so bright it nearly glowed, her features as sharp as though they had been chiseled from diamond, her skin whiter than ice.Sure enough, the tracker disappeared from this version of destiny.And Bella’s brilliant eyes stared at me coldly… accusingly.I wrenched the Jeep onto the shoulder and braked hard. We jerked to a stop.“There are no options,” I snarled at Alice.“I’m not leaving Charlie!” Bella yelled at me.“We have to take her back,” Emmett interjected.“No.”Emmett looked at me in the rearview mirror. “He’s no match for us, Edward. He won’t be able to touch her.”“He’ll wait.” He enjoyed the waiting.Emmett smiled without amusement. “I can wait, too.”I wanted to rip my hair out in frustration. “You didn’t see—you don’t understand! Once he commits to a hunt, he’s unshakable. We’d have to kill him.”Emmett looked at me like I was being slow.Of course we have to kill him, he thought, but his spoken words were milder. He was being uncharacteristically sensitive, aware of the fragile human he was confining. “That’s an option.”“And the female,” I reminded him. “She’s with him.” This didn’t affect Emmett at all, so I added, “If it turns into a fight, the leader will go with them, too,” though I doubted that.“There are enough of us.”Did he count Rose and Esme in his tally? Of course not. He thought he could do it alone, as if they would stand and face him directly, without subterfuge.“There’s another option,” Alice repeated.It’s coming anyway. Why not embrace it and make her safe now?The fury that gripped me felt dangerous, as though I might actually hurt Alice now, despite loving her. I tried to contain it, letting it vent only in words.“There is no other option!” I roared, inches from her face.Alice didn’t flinch.Don’t be stupid about this. There are too many futures, too many twists and turns that I can’t unravel. It’s too far-reaching. You’re right that he won’t give up.… Unless he has no motivation to continue.In Alice’s head, I could see decades of James hunting Bella while I tried to hide her. A thousand different traps and ruses. Clearly, he’d be harder to kill than Emmett imagined.Well, I had no problem being vigilant for decades. I wouldn’t trade her life for an easier future.A small, shaky voice interrupted us.“Does anyone want to hear my plan?”“No,” I snapped, still glaring at Alice. She scowled back.“Listen,” Bella continued. “You take me back—”“No.”“You take me back,” she insisted, her voice stronger and angrier now. “I tell my dad I want to go home to Phoenix. I pack my bags. We wait till this tracker is watching, and then we run. He’ll follow us and leave Charlie alone. Charlie won’t call the FBI on your family. Then you can take me any damned place you want.”So she wasn’t thinking entirely irrationally, offering herself as a sacrifice in exchange for Charlie’s life or our protection. She had a plan.“It’s not a bad idea, really,” Emmett mused. He had little faith in the tracker’s abilities; he’d rather leave a trail to follow than have no idea from what direction the enemy would appear. He also thought it would be quicker this way, and despite his words before, Emmett really wasn’t much for patience.Alice considered, watching how Bella’s resolve shifted her futures. She could see that, if nothing else, the tracker would be there for the performance.“It might work,” she allowed. New visions were crowding fast upon the old. We’d split up, three different directions, leaving only the trail we wanted to leave. She saw Emmett and Carlisle hunting in the forest. Sometimes Rosalie was there, too, sometimes it was Emmett and Jasper, but no grouping held stable.“And we simply can’t leave her father unprotected. You know that,” Alice added, still watching the play of the images. This part she was sure of. We would go back and give the tracker something to focus on besides Charlie.But in these very clear visions, the tracker was too close to Bella. The thought strained my already raw nerves.“It’s too dangerous,”