Spitefic: Thomas Raith Explains It All
Jan. 25th, 2011 11:55 pm![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
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twispiteficTitle: Thomas Raith Explains it All
Author:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
gehayi
Fandom(s): New Moon/The Dresden Files
Rating: PG
Word Count: 2,726
Summary: Alice's comments on the history of Volterra draw the attention of another passenger—one who knows a great deal about Volterra, vampires and true love.
Chapter Inspiration: Chapter 19 – Race
Author’s Note: I started this because Meyer's erroneous history of Volterra--all of which could have been fixed with a two-minute Google search--annoyed me. The rest of the story just snowballed from there.
***
She chuckled darkly. “The city holds a celebration every year. As the legend goes, a Christian missionary, a Father Marcus — Marcus of the Volturi, in fact — drove all the vampires from Volterra fifteen hundred years ago. The story claims he was martyred in Romania, still trying to drive away the vampire scourge. Of course that’s nonsense — he’s never left the city. But that’s where some of the superstitions about things like crosses and garlic come from. Father Marcus used them so successfully. And vampires don’t trouble Volterra, so they must work.”
Her smile was sardonic. “It’s become more of a celebration of the city, and recognition for the police force — after all, Volterra is an amazingly safe city. The police get the credit.”
“That,” said the pale, dark-haired young man sitting across the aisle from Alice and me, “is the most anti-historical, anti-Catholic, anti-Christian nonsense I’ve ever heard.”
Alice sneered at her. “I suppose you know better.”
“More than you. Not that that would be hard.” With that, the young man turned toward me. He was still watching Alice the way that a person would watch a mutt that had been known to bite, all wariness and contempt. I realized, as he glanced in my direction that “pale and dark-haired” was a weak description. He looked as if he should be battling pirates and ninjas while composing sonnets in ancient Greek. During an orgy. Seriously, that’s what he looked like--an action hero/porn star who had somehow blundered into our world.
“Now,” he said grimly, and I drooled at the sound of his voice, “let’s go over the lies your friend” --and he made the word “friend” sound like “mortal enemy”-- “just told. First, there was no 'Christian missionary to Volterra' in the fifth century A.D. There was no need for one. Catholicism--it hadn’t split into Roman Catholicism and the Eastern Orthodox Church yet--was legalized by the Emperor Constantine in 313 A.D. And it became the state religion of the Roman Empire in 382 A.D. As a matter of fact, during the fifth century, Volterra was the residence of a bishop, and the bishops kept that power in Volterra until the twelfth century.”
I glanced at Alice, who was glaring at the man as if he was an offense unto the Cullens. No help there.
“All right,” I said. “So she got one thing wrong. So what?”
“Second,” the man continued, as if I hadn’t spoken, “Volterra does have a celebration every year in honor of their patron saint—”
Alice grinned.
“San Giusto. Saint Justus, it would be in English.”
The smile vanished.
“And the celebration isn’t centered on the cathedral, anyway,” he added casually. “There’s a parade, a tug-of-war, and a city-wide foot race where participants hold lit candles while they run. And it doesn’t happen on March 19th, either--which is Saint Joseph’s Day, by the way. It takes place on June 5th, probably because the weather is nicer on that day than on Saint Justus’s real feast day--November 2nd.”
I gulped. Not that I doubted Alice was right, of course. But he seemed so sure…and Alice wasn’t saying a thing to contradict any of it.
“Also,” he added, “Saint Justus didn't and doesn’t have a thing to do with vampires--not in his lifetime, and not as a patron saint invoked against them. Some saints are enemies of vampires. St. Roch is prayed to in Poland to keep vampires at bay. And of course St. Sisinnius, the Virgin Mary and the Archangel Michael are invoked against the gello. It’s a very special kind of vampire-demon. It steals and eats children.” He glowered at this, as if he found it beneath contempt, and I couldn’t understand why. Vampires could do whatever they wanted--as long as they didn’t get caught by those pesky Volturi.
“So what did Justus do to become a saint?” I demanded. I’d never heard of Saint Justus before, and I was sure that the guy across the aisle, drool-worthy though he might be, would have a hard time coming up with anything on the spur of the moment.
The action hero didn’t even hesitate. “He was a kind and charitable man who was martyred. The Emperor Diocletian didn’t like Christians, so he ordered Justus tossed into the sea to drown. There was nothing mysterious about his death, either. Some fishermen found his body a few weeks later.”
“But...garlic,” I said, staring at him. “And crosses.”
He sighed impatiently. “Crosses have been used to ward off evil things since a certain carpenter-rabbi from Nazareth died on the cross. No vampire had to tell humans to use sacred objects to ward off evil--every religion does that. Of course, it only works on one kind of vampire, but—”
“Shut up,” Alice hissed at him. The man continued to ignore her.
“One kind of vampire?” I said weakly. “There’s more than one kind?”
“There are four kinds.”
I gaped at him. Four?
“The first type is the Black Court,” he said, holding up one hand and folding down his thumb. “They’re the type of vampire that most people picture when you say ‘vampire’--undead corpses, vulnerable to garlic, crosses, roses, sunlight--the whole thing. They’re almost extinct now.” He smiled mirthlessly. “Not too surprising, since after Stoker was commissioned to write his how-to manual, everyone knew how to kill them.”
Alice was snarling now. I couldn’t figure out why it wasn’t making the man nervous.
“Then there’s the Red Court,” he said, folding down his index finger. “Basically, they’re human-sized slime-covered bats that can produce what a certain wizard of my acquaintance calls ‘fleshmasks.’ The fleshmask lets a Red vampire look like the human they once were. Oh, and their saliva has something in that makes human prey want to stand there and get eaten. Sunlight can kill them, though it takes a while. They may get third-degree burns from casual exposure, but they won’t die.” He looked thoughtful. “Beheading works pretty well, though. As does fire.”
“Shut. UP!”
“Third, the Jade Court. The Jiang-Shi. Hopping vampires, they’re called. There are a lot of ways to stop them, though some aren’t too easy. Like writing a spell in chicken blood on thin yellow paper while a hopping vampire is attacking you. And then pinning the spell to its forehead. Or attacking them with a sword made of lucky Chinese coins. Probably the easiest thing to do is just to throw sticky rice at them; that draws the evil out of their bodies. No more evil, no more vampire.”
I was just about to ask what the last kind of vampire was when Alice ripped off her seat belt, stood up, and tip-toed over to the man in about three steps.
“I told you to stop,” she said. “Now you’re going to stop.” And with that, she lunged for the man’s neck.
I was indignant. Who was this guy? Why did he get the chance to be a vampire when I didn’t? It wasn’t fair!
But a second later, Alice had pulled away from Action Hero Guy, her mouth swollen and covered in blisters and blackened burns. And when the man looked at her--his grey eyes cold and angry--Alice cringed and crept back to her seat.
“The fourth Court,”--and the man sounded more than a little depressed now--“is the White Court. They look human--like incredibly gorgeous humans, in fact. They can even breed with humans. And, unlike the other three, they don’t drink blood.”
This part was sounding oddly familiar. “What do they eat?”
“Souls. They focus on certain emotions. The Raiths live off of lust. The Malvora devour fear. And the Skavis eat suicidal despair.”
I blinked.
I had been thinking a lot more about death and killing myself since I met the Cullens. Even when I was around Edward, I seemed to alternate between bliss and hopelessness. And Alice…Alice kept telling me things that crushed my will to live and then tried to convince me once more that I had a reason for going on.
Over and over again.
Oh, no. No. It wasn’t possible.
And yet...I kept coming back to something Alice had said. She had been furious about my jumping off a cliff. Not because I could have died.
Because she hadn’t been there.
Alice had wanted to be there when I died--not to stop me, but to feast. To binge on despair.
“But...but the Cullens have been gone for months.”
“Skavis have one talent that the rest of us don’t share,” he said quietly. “They can become invisible. It helps them feed.” He glanced at me, and then sighed. “Don’t you get it? We’re pretty Dementors.”
I didn’t know what that meant, because at the time I hadn’t read the Harry Potter series. But I had to know. “Are White Court vampires usually...sparkly?”
He threw back his perfect head and laughed. “Good God, no! Neither are we hard and cold as stone. Except in bed, of course. That Skavis sitting next to you”--he nodded toward Alice--“is using a glamour to make herself more…Raith-like to draw in the prey. I suppose she needs it; not many humans want to hang out with a being who makes them sick with despair. Of course glamours are never perfect; there’s always something to tell you that the glamour is fake. Like making a living person--and White Court vamps are alive--feel like living stone. And magic can be visible to certain people--even to ordinary humans, if you use a lot of it. Any sparkles you’ve seen are basically the magic sitting up and waving at everyone, yelling, ‘Hey, here I am!’”
He explained a few other things, too--like the Volturi being a splinter group that had broken with the White Court, and that everyone who followed them was effectively a renegade. And that the Volturi had to have rules about vampires not killing everyone, because if they didn’t police themselves, wizards, who didn’t take kindly to humans being massacred by anything supernatural, would take out the renegades AND the Volturi.
Wizards didn’t like vampires.
I wondered how Action Hero Guy--whose name was Thomas Raith--had managed to befriend a wizard.
“Are you through exposing us to the kine, witchspawn?” Alice snarled, not sounding like her spacey and perky self at all. She sounded...
...like a predator. A predator who’d had her meal stolen by a stronger one.
“If you’re going to play with her, she should know what she’s in for.” He raised one perfect eyebrow. “There’s a difference between hunting a sitting duck and hunting one that insists on sitting in front of the gun.”
“I should kill you right now,” Alice whispered, casting aside the glamour that she’d always used. She was still beautiful...but older. Much, much older. And her eyes were no longer gold, but so pale a gray as to be almost white.
He laughed. “Because driving me to suicide on a plane wouldn’t attract attention at all. You really have been out of touch with the Court for too long if you lack subtlety to this degree.” He gave her a vicious grin. “Go away, cousin. Find a seat in coach. I’m getting bored.”
And Alice--still not looking her normal self--gave him a death glare of doom and then trudged off into coach. Before I could move, Action Hero Guy was sitting in her seat, blocking me in.
“Sit,” he said. “You need to think, and I can help with that. I might inspire pornographic thoughts--Raiths do that--but I won’t drive you to suicidal despair.”
Only one question mattered, and I asked it. “C-can a human become White Court?”
“No. White Court vampires are born, not made."
As simply as that, the door was slammed in my face.
“You wouldn’t want to be like us, anyway,” he said, gazing at me with something like pity in his gray eyes. “True love is poison. It burns us.”
“But—but I’ve touched the Cullens!” I shouted, making other passengers take the earbuds out of their ears, turn around and glare at me reprovingly before shoving the earbuds back in twice as hard. “And they haven’t been burned! My boyfriend is a Cullen and he hasn’t been burned.”
A devastating reply. Thrown off so casually. “Then you’re not in love.”
I thought of Edward’s reluctance to touch anything about mine other than the clothes I was wearing. Of his unwillingness to have sex with me. Of his saying again and again, with a sad certainty, that I didn’t love him. Suddenly, it made sense.
But...
“Jasper went after my blood, though.” And I explained what had happened at my birthday party, and how the smell of my blood had driven Jasper out of his mind.
“Provided a great excuse for Edward to dump you, didn’t it?” he said once I was done. “A nice, rich opportunity for despair. And how convenient that Carlisle had his instruments and some morphine at home. Just when you needed them—during a party that you didn’t want and that Jasper’s wife knew would be a stressor.”
“You’re saying it was a set-up?” I whispered.
“Empty night, Bella”--by this time I had told him my name--“you don’t have to feed on blood to bite someone!”
By the time we landed in Rome, I was starting to build up new fantasies. All right, Edward and Alice had all been using me to feed from my despair, but Thomas was different. He was a sex vampire. I wouldn’t mind him feeding from my lust. And all right, maybe he couldn’t turn me, but he had said that he knew a wizard. Maybe the wizard could make me immortal. Then Thomas and I could be together forever and ever.
Then we got through Customs.
A woman in a tailored pantsuit was waiting for him. Her hair was completely covered by a shawl; her hands and arms were shrouded in long leather gloves; her legs and feet were encased in leather boots. Her mouth was covered by a dental guard.
Thomas walked toward her very slowly, his eyes fixed on her as if she were the only woman in the world. “Justine,” he whispered as he reached her side, took her hand, and pressed a passionate kiss into her gloved palm.
“Thomas…” And, without removing her dental guard, she kissed him.
A line from an old Star Trek episode drifted through my mind: Always and never touching and touched.
I knew without being told that Edward and I had never looked at each other that way, that Edward had never been eager to be burned by my touch and that I’d never been willing to do anything to protect him from it. We’d had...something. But it was mostly a lie.
I turned around and walked toward the phones. I needed to call Charlie right now.
Once he picked up the phone, the words just came out in a gush. “Dad?” I started to cry. “Dad, I’ve been really stupid…”
“I’m not your father,” said the voice of a man I didn’t know. “I’m Morgan. Your father called us; we’re rather good at finding lost people in...improbable...circumstances. My colleague and I tracked you as far as the airport, but--”
“I’m in Italy. Alice said that Edward was going to make the Volturi kill him, probably by massacring a lot of humans, only she turned out to be a Skavis so she might have been lying to make me despair and I thought I loved Edward but it turns out I don’t and the White Court can tell I don’t…” And then I realized that this must sound idiotic, and I shut up.
Morgan wasn’t fazed at all, though. “Sit tight and find something to distract yourself,” he said. “Captain Luccio will be in the airport in about a half hour. Don’t despair, whatever you do. That would be like a beacon to Alice Skavis and her kin.” And he hung up.
I distracted myself by watching Italian-language TV, noshing on aracini di riso and wondering how I would recognize Captain Luccio.
As it turned out, it wasn’t hard to spot the woman who ripped a hole in reality and walked through a wall.
But that’s another story.
Author:
gehayiFandom(s): New Moon/The Dresden Files
Rating: PG
Word Count: 2,726
Summary: Alice's comments on the history of Volterra draw the attention of another passenger—one who knows a great deal about Volterra, vampires and true love.
Chapter Inspiration: Chapter 19 – Race
Author’s Note: I started this because Meyer's erroneous history of Volterra--all of which could have been fixed with a two-minute Google search--annoyed me. The rest of the story just snowballed from there.
***
She chuckled darkly. “The city holds a celebration every year. As the legend goes, a Christian missionary, a Father Marcus — Marcus of the Volturi, in fact — drove all the vampires from Volterra fifteen hundred years ago. The story claims he was martyred in Romania, still trying to drive away the vampire scourge. Of course that’s nonsense — he’s never left the city. But that’s where some of the superstitions about things like crosses and garlic come from. Father Marcus used them so successfully. And vampires don’t trouble Volterra, so they must work.”
Her smile was sardonic. “It’s become more of a celebration of the city, and recognition for the police force — after all, Volterra is an amazingly safe city. The police get the credit.”
“That,” said the pale, dark-haired young man sitting across the aisle from Alice and me, “is the most anti-historical, anti-Catholic, anti-Christian nonsense I’ve ever heard.”
Alice sneered at her. “I suppose you know better.”
“More than you. Not that that would be hard.” With that, the young man turned toward me. He was still watching Alice the way that a person would watch a mutt that had been known to bite, all wariness and contempt. I realized, as he glanced in my direction that “pale and dark-haired” was a weak description. He looked as if he should be battling pirates and ninjas while composing sonnets in ancient Greek. During an orgy. Seriously, that’s what he looked like--an action hero/porn star who had somehow blundered into our world.
“Now,” he said grimly, and I drooled at the sound of his voice, “let’s go over the lies your friend” --and he made the word “friend” sound like “mortal enemy”-- “just told. First, there was no 'Christian missionary to Volterra' in the fifth century A.D. There was no need for one. Catholicism--it hadn’t split into Roman Catholicism and the Eastern Orthodox Church yet--was legalized by the Emperor Constantine in 313 A.D. And it became the state religion of the Roman Empire in 382 A.D. As a matter of fact, during the fifth century, Volterra was the residence of a bishop, and the bishops kept that power in Volterra until the twelfth century.”
I glanced at Alice, who was glaring at the man as if he was an offense unto the Cullens. No help there.
“All right,” I said. “So she got one thing wrong. So what?”
“Second,” the man continued, as if I hadn’t spoken, “Volterra does have a celebration every year in honor of their patron saint—”
Alice grinned.
“San Giusto. Saint Justus, it would be in English.”
The smile vanished.
“And the celebration isn’t centered on the cathedral, anyway,” he added casually. “There’s a parade, a tug-of-war, and a city-wide foot race where participants hold lit candles while they run. And it doesn’t happen on March 19th, either--which is Saint Joseph’s Day, by the way. It takes place on June 5th, probably because the weather is nicer on that day than on Saint Justus’s real feast day--November 2nd.”
I gulped. Not that I doubted Alice was right, of course. But he seemed so sure…and Alice wasn’t saying a thing to contradict any of it.
“Also,” he added, “Saint Justus didn't and doesn’t have a thing to do with vampires--not in his lifetime, and not as a patron saint invoked against them. Some saints are enemies of vampires. St. Roch is prayed to in Poland to keep vampires at bay. And of course St. Sisinnius, the Virgin Mary and the Archangel Michael are invoked against the gello. It’s a very special kind of vampire-demon. It steals and eats children.” He glowered at this, as if he found it beneath contempt, and I couldn’t understand why. Vampires could do whatever they wanted--as long as they didn’t get caught by those pesky Volturi.
“So what did Justus do to become a saint?” I demanded. I’d never heard of Saint Justus before, and I was sure that the guy across the aisle, drool-worthy though he might be, would have a hard time coming up with anything on the spur of the moment.
The action hero didn’t even hesitate. “He was a kind and charitable man who was martyred. The Emperor Diocletian didn’t like Christians, so he ordered Justus tossed into the sea to drown. There was nothing mysterious about his death, either. Some fishermen found his body a few weeks later.”
“But...garlic,” I said, staring at him. “And crosses.”
He sighed impatiently. “Crosses have been used to ward off evil things since a certain carpenter-rabbi from Nazareth died on the cross. No vampire had to tell humans to use sacred objects to ward off evil--every religion does that. Of course, it only works on one kind of vampire, but—”
“Shut up,” Alice hissed at him. The man continued to ignore her.
“One kind of vampire?” I said weakly. “There’s more than one kind?”
“There are four kinds.”
I gaped at him. Four?
“The first type is the Black Court,” he said, holding up one hand and folding down his thumb. “They’re the type of vampire that most people picture when you say ‘vampire’--undead corpses, vulnerable to garlic, crosses, roses, sunlight--the whole thing. They’re almost extinct now.” He smiled mirthlessly. “Not too surprising, since after Stoker was commissioned to write his how-to manual, everyone knew how to kill them.”
Alice was snarling now. I couldn’t figure out why it wasn’t making the man nervous.
“Then there’s the Red Court,” he said, folding down his index finger. “Basically, they’re human-sized slime-covered bats that can produce what a certain wizard of my acquaintance calls ‘fleshmasks.’ The fleshmask lets a Red vampire look like the human they once were. Oh, and their saliva has something in that makes human prey want to stand there and get eaten. Sunlight can kill them, though it takes a while. They may get third-degree burns from casual exposure, but they won’t die.” He looked thoughtful. “Beheading works pretty well, though. As does fire.”
“Shut. UP!”
“Third, the Jade Court. The Jiang-Shi. Hopping vampires, they’re called. There are a lot of ways to stop them, though some aren’t too easy. Like writing a spell in chicken blood on thin yellow paper while a hopping vampire is attacking you. And then pinning the spell to its forehead. Or attacking them with a sword made of lucky Chinese coins. Probably the easiest thing to do is just to throw sticky rice at them; that draws the evil out of their bodies. No more evil, no more vampire.”
I was just about to ask what the last kind of vampire was when Alice ripped off her seat belt, stood up, and tip-toed over to the man in about three steps.
“I told you to stop,” she said. “Now you’re going to stop.” And with that, she lunged for the man’s neck.
I was indignant. Who was this guy? Why did he get the chance to be a vampire when I didn’t? It wasn’t fair!
But a second later, Alice had pulled away from Action Hero Guy, her mouth swollen and covered in blisters and blackened burns. And when the man looked at her--his grey eyes cold and angry--Alice cringed and crept back to her seat.
“The fourth Court,”--and the man sounded more than a little depressed now--“is the White Court. They look human--like incredibly gorgeous humans, in fact. They can even breed with humans. And, unlike the other three, they don’t drink blood.”
This part was sounding oddly familiar. “What do they eat?”
“Souls. They focus on certain emotions. The Raiths live off of lust. The Malvora devour fear. And the Skavis eat suicidal despair.”
I blinked.
I had been thinking a lot more about death and killing myself since I met the Cullens. Even when I was around Edward, I seemed to alternate between bliss and hopelessness. And Alice…Alice kept telling me things that crushed my will to live and then tried to convince me once more that I had a reason for going on.
Over and over again.
Oh, no. No. It wasn’t possible.
And yet...I kept coming back to something Alice had said. She had been furious about my jumping off a cliff. Not because I could have died.
Because she hadn’t been there.
Alice had wanted to be there when I died--not to stop me, but to feast. To binge on despair.
“But...but the Cullens have been gone for months.”
“Skavis have one talent that the rest of us don’t share,” he said quietly. “They can become invisible. It helps them feed.” He glanced at me, and then sighed. “Don’t you get it? We’re pretty Dementors.”
I didn’t know what that meant, because at the time I hadn’t read the Harry Potter series. But I had to know. “Are White Court vampires usually...sparkly?”
He threw back his perfect head and laughed. “Good God, no! Neither are we hard and cold as stone. Except in bed, of course. That Skavis sitting next to you”--he nodded toward Alice--“is using a glamour to make herself more…Raith-like to draw in the prey. I suppose she needs it; not many humans want to hang out with a being who makes them sick with despair. Of course glamours are never perfect; there’s always something to tell you that the glamour is fake. Like making a living person--and White Court vamps are alive--feel like living stone. And magic can be visible to certain people--even to ordinary humans, if you use a lot of it. Any sparkles you’ve seen are basically the magic sitting up and waving at everyone, yelling, ‘Hey, here I am!’”
He explained a few other things, too--like the Volturi being a splinter group that had broken with the White Court, and that everyone who followed them was effectively a renegade. And that the Volturi had to have rules about vampires not killing everyone, because if they didn’t police themselves, wizards, who didn’t take kindly to humans being massacred by anything supernatural, would take out the renegades AND the Volturi.
Wizards didn’t like vampires.
I wondered how Action Hero Guy--whose name was Thomas Raith--had managed to befriend a wizard.
“Are you through exposing us to the kine, witchspawn?” Alice snarled, not sounding like her spacey and perky self at all. She sounded...
...like a predator. A predator who’d had her meal stolen by a stronger one.
“If you’re going to play with her, she should know what she’s in for.” He raised one perfect eyebrow. “There’s a difference between hunting a sitting duck and hunting one that insists on sitting in front of the gun.”
“I should kill you right now,” Alice whispered, casting aside the glamour that she’d always used. She was still beautiful...but older. Much, much older. And her eyes were no longer gold, but so pale a gray as to be almost white.
He laughed. “Because driving me to suicide on a plane wouldn’t attract attention at all. You really have been out of touch with the Court for too long if you lack subtlety to this degree.” He gave her a vicious grin. “Go away, cousin. Find a seat in coach. I’m getting bored.”
And Alice--still not looking her normal self--gave him a death glare of doom and then trudged off into coach. Before I could move, Action Hero Guy was sitting in her seat, blocking me in.
“Sit,” he said. “You need to think, and I can help with that. I might inspire pornographic thoughts--Raiths do that--but I won’t drive you to suicidal despair.”
Only one question mattered, and I asked it. “C-can a human become White Court?”
“No. White Court vampires are born, not made."
As simply as that, the door was slammed in my face.
“You wouldn’t want to be like us, anyway,” he said, gazing at me with something like pity in his gray eyes. “True love is poison. It burns us.”
“But—but I’ve touched the Cullens!” I shouted, making other passengers take the earbuds out of their ears, turn around and glare at me reprovingly before shoving the earbuds back in twice as hard. “And they haven’t been burned! My boyfriend is a Cullen and he hasn’t been burned.”
A devastating reply. Thrown off so casually. “Then you’re not in love.”
I thought of Edward’s reluctance to touch anything about mine other than the clothes I was wearing. Of his unwillingness to have sex with me. Of his saying again and again, with a sad certainty, that I didn’t love him. Suddenly, it made sense.
But...
“Jasper went after my blood, though.” And I explained what had happened at my birthday party, and how the smell of my blood had driven Jasper out of his mind.
“Provided a great excuse for Edward to dump you, didn’t it?” he said once I was done. “A nice, rich opportunity for despair. And how convenient that Carlisle had his instruments and some morphine at home. Just when you needed them—during a party that you didn’t want and that Jasper’s wife knew would be a stressor.”
“You’re saying it was a set-up?” I whispered.
“Empty night, Bella”--by this time I had told him my name--“you don’t have to feed on blood to bite someone!”
By the time we landed in Rome, I was starting to build up new fantasies. All right, Edward and Alice had all been using me to feed from my despair, but Thomas was different. He was a sex vampire. I wouldn’t mind him feeding from my lust. And all right, maybe he couldn’t turn me, but he had said that he knew a wizard. Maybe the wizard could make me immortal. Then Thomas and I could be together forever and ever.
Then we got through Customs.
A woman in a tailored pantsuit was waiting for him. Her hair was completely covered by a shawl; her hands and arms were shrouded in long leather gloves; her legs and feet were encased in leather boots. Her mouth was covered by a dental guard.
Thomas walked toward her very slowly, his eyes fixed on her as if she were the only woman in the world. “Justine,” he whispered as he reached her side, took her hand, and pressed a passionate kiss into her gloved palm.
“Thomas…” And, without removing her dental guard, she kissed him.
A line from an old Star Trek episode drifted through my mind: Always and never touching and touched.
I knew without being told that Edward and I had never looked at each other that way, that Edward had never been eager to be burned by my touch and that I’d never been willing to do anything to protect him from it. We’d had...something. But it was mostly a lie.
I turned around and walked toward the phones. I needed to call Charlie right now.
Once he picked up the phone, the words just came out in a gush. “Dad?” I started to cry. “Dad, I’ve been really stupid…”
“I’m not your father,” said the voice of a man I didn’t know. “I’m Morgan. Your father called us; we’re rather good at finding lost people in...improbable...circumstances. My colleague and I tracked you as far as the airport, but--”
“I’m in Italy. Alice said that Edward was going to make the Volturi kill him, probably by massacring a lot of humans, only she turned out to be a Skavis so she might have been lying to make me despair and I thought I loved Edward but it turns out I don’t and the White Court can tell I don’t…” And then I realized that this must sound idiotic, and I shut up.
Morgan wasn’t fazed at all, though. “Sit tight and find something to distract yourself,” he said. “Captain Luccio will be in the airport in about a half hour. Don’t despair, whatever you do. That would be like a beacon to Alice Skavis and her kin.” And he hung up.
I distracted myself by watching Italian-language TV, noshing on aracini di riso and wondering how I would recognize Captain Luccio.
As it turned out, it wasn’t hard to spot the woman who ripped a hole in reality and walked through a wall.
But that’s another story.
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Date: 2013-08-05 03:13 am (UTC)Knowing Harry, he'd probably drive Bella to the Carpenters and beg Michael and Charity to look after this stray while he tried to prevent the end of the world. Again.
Just imagine Bella in the grasp of Charity. I love Charity Carpenter, but she would horrify Bella, because she does not put up with bullshit. And I don't think the Carpenter kids would, either. Molly would be doing her neuromancy by Harry's side; Daniel, according to Ghost Story, is brave and responsible; Matthew has a serious work ethic; Alicia is a deadpan snarker; Amanda is logical; and Hope appears to be the family eccentric at the age of--what, nine? No word on what little Harry is like, but...well, none of these kids sound like they'd like or be easily persuaded by Bella. (These are kids who have ACTUAL ANGELS as babysitters, after all.)
Also, I seem to recall that as of Ghost Story, Ivy's started hanging around with the Carpenters. Good luck impressing the embodiment of all recorded knowledge with your intellectual achievements, Bella!
And if all else failed, Bella could go spend some time on Ebenezar's farm in the Ozarks. I'm sure she'd have loads of fun living with a wizard who's more than two hundred, lives a virtually technology-free life...and, if necessary, can pull a satellite out of orbit and drop it on her head. (He IS the Blackstaff, after all.)
Now, if Harry and his allies can just keep Bella away from the Denarians...
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Date: 2013-08-05 04:35 am (UTC)For once, I pity Bella. Does this make me a horrible person?
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Date: 2013-08-05 05:28 am (UTC)