“Do we have time to—” Alice began.
“No,” Carlisle interrupted. “Bella needs blood immediately.”
Alice sighed. If we went to the hospital first, things got more complicated.
Carlisle sat beside me in the backseat of the Cayenne, fingers pressed lightly against Bella’s carotid artery, one hand supporting her head. Her splinted leg stretched out across Emmett’s thighs on the other side of me. He wasn’t breathing. He stared out the window, trying not to think about the blood drying all over Bella, Carlisle, and me. Trying not to think about what I had just done. The impossibility of it. The strength he knew he didn’t have.
Instead he mulled over his dissatisfaction with the fight. Because, honestly. He’d had the tracker. Totally contained, though the tracker fought and squirmed and thrashed to avoid Emmett’s crushing arms. There was no chance any of this struggle could have helped him, and Emmett was already breaking him when Jasper lunged into the blood-drenched room.
Jasper, mangled and ferocious, eyes sharp and empty at the same time, looking like some forgotten god or incarnation of war, projecting an aura of pure violence. And the tracker had stopped trying. In that fraction of a second when he saw Jasper (for the first time, but Emmett didn’t know that), he’d surrendered to his fate. No matter that his fate was sealed once Emmett had gotten his hands on him, this was what demoralized him.
It was driving Emmett crazy.
Someday soon I would have to describe to Emmett what he’d looked like in the clearing and why. I doubted anything else would soothe the sting. Jasper was in the driver’s seat, his window cracked to the hot, dry outside air, though like Emmett, he wasn’t breathing. Alice sat beside him, directing everything—the turns, the lanes to travel in, the highest speed he
could go without attracting unwanted attention. She had him at sixty-seven miles per hour now. I would have pushed that, but Alice was confident that she would get us to the hospital faster than I could. Dodging patrol cars would only slow us down and complicate everything.
Although Alice was monitoring every facet of this drive, her mind was in a dozen different places, finding ways through the necessary errands in front of her, working through the consequences of every choice available.
A few things she was sure of.
Now she pulled out her phone and called the airline—one she already knew would have the right flight—and booked one ticket for the two-forty to Seattle. It would be tight, but she could see Emmett on the plane.
She saw the day ahead as clearly as if it were happening, and I saw it all, too.
First, Jasper would drop Carlisle, Bella, and me at St. Joseph’s. There were closer hospitals, but Carlisle insisted. He knew a surgeon there who would vouch for him, and it was a nationally recognized level-one trauma center. His urgency, and Bella’s ashen complexion—though her heart continued steady and strong—made it difficult for me to do much besides silently panic and curse our circumspect speed.
“She’ll be fine,” Alice growled quietly at me when she saw I was about to complain again. She shoved a picture into my head of Bella sitting up in a hospital bed, smiling, though she was all over bruises.
I caught her slight deception, though. “And when exactly is this?”
A day or two, okay? Three tops. It’s fine. Relax.
My panic skyrocketed as I processed that. Three days?
Carlisle didn’t have to read thoughts to understand my expression.
“She just needs time, Edward,” Carlisle assured me. “Her body needs rest to recover, and so does her mind. She’s going to be okay.”
I tried to accept that, but felt myself spiraling again. I focused on Alice.
Her methodical planning was better than my useless agitation.
The hospital, she saw, would be tricky. We were in a stolen car that was linked to another stolen car and a twenty-seven-car pileup on the 101. There were multiple cameras around the emergency entrance. If we could just stop to switch to a better vehicle, something close enough to the rental Alice would acquire later… It was only a matter of fifteen minutes or so, just a short detour and she knew exactly where to look—
I growled, and she sniffed once without looking at me.
It never gets less annoying, Emmett grumbled internally.
So no car exchange. Alice accepted this and moved on. We’d have to park out of range of the cameras, which would make us more conspicuous. Why not pull right under the metal overhang with our unconscious patient? Why carry her farther than necessary? At least there would be shade for Carlisle and me to run in, otherwise we would have to brave the cameras and Alice would have to find her way into whatever security stronghold was used to store the recordings. And she simply didn’t have time for that. She had to check into a hotel and create a scene of violent injury stat. Because it was supposed to have happened before we arrived at the hospital.
So that was obviously urgent. But first she needed blood.
The blood should be quick. When I burst through the emergency room doors looking like someone had thrown a bucket of crimson paint at me, and with a motionless body in my arms, it was going to cause something of a stir. Every able-bodied staff member within a hundred yards of the emergency entrance would be running to meet us within seconds. It would be simple enough for Alice to slide in behind Carlisle and walk purposefully past the front desk. No one would question her, she could see that. A pair of blue booties available in a box attached to the wall would cover the stains on her shoes, and then it was simply a matter of darting into the emergency wing’s blood storage room through a closing door.
“Em, give me your hoodie.”
Careful not to jostle Bella’s leg, Emmett yanked the sweatshirt over his head and tossed it to Alice. It was remarkably clean, especially compared to Carlisle’s and my clothes.
Emmett wanted to ask what she needed it for, but he didn’t dare to open his mouth and possibly taste or smell his surroundings.
Alice shrugged into the enormous sweatshirt. It pooled around her tiny body, and yet, somehow, there was an air of the avant-garde about it. Alice could pull off anything.
Alice saw herself in the blood bank again, filling the sweatshirt’s ample pockets.
“What’s Bella’s blood type?” she asked Carlisle. “O positive,” Carlisle responded.
So some good had come from Bella’s accident with Tyler’s van. At least we knew this.
Alice was probably being overthorough. Would anyone bother to type the blood she would leave at the scene of the “accident”? Perhaps, if it looked too much like a crime scene.… No harm in her being meticulous, I supposed.
“Leave enough for Bella,” I cautioned.
She twisted in her seat so that I could see her roll her eyes, then turned back and kept planning.
Jasper and Emmett would be in the stolen car, engine running. It would only take her two and a half minutes to get in and out.
She would choose a hotel near the hospital to make the timing less conspicuous. As she decided this, she saw the hotel she wanted just a few blocks south. It wasn’t someplace she would ever actually stay, of course, but it would do for a grisly tableau.
It felt like watching in real time as she ran through the check-in.
Alice strides into the modest lobby of the hotel. On her, the maroon- dyed shoes and the long hoodie tied around her waist look like a fashion statement. The woman at the desk is alone. She looks up, not very interested at first, but then she processes Alice’s stunning face. She stares with awe, barely noticing that Alice’s hands are free.
But Alice is dissatisfied.
The vision rewinds. Alice is back in the hospital, exiting the blood bank with her pockets full of four cold, quietly sloshing bags. She makes the shortest detour, ducking into a curtained-off treatment area. A woman sleeps, her vitals beeping on the monitors behind her. There is a sack with the women’s belongings, and beside it a blue duffel bag. Alice takes the bag and returns to the hallway. The detour adds only two seconds to her trip.
Alice is back in the hotel lobby. She wears no sweatshirt, and the duffel bag is slung over her shoulder. The woman behind the counter does her double take. There is nothing wrong with the picture now. Alice asks for two rooms, double occupancy for one, single for the other. She puts her driver’s license—not a fake—on the counter with a credit card in her own name. She chatters about her companions, her father and her brother, who have gone to find covered parking for the car. The woman starts typing on her computer. Alice glances at her wrist; it’s bare.
The vision pauses.
“Jasper, I need your watch.”
He held out his arm, and she took the bespoke Breguet—a gift from her
—off his wrist. He didn’t bother to wonder why; he was too used to this. The watch hung loose against her hand. She wore it like a bangle bracelet, and it looked perfect. She could start a trend.
The vision resumes.
Alice looks at the watch dangling in such a chic way from her wrist. “It’s only ten-fifty,” she says to the woman. “Your clock there is fast.”
The woman nods absently, typing the time Alice has just fed her into the reservation.
Alice grows a little too still, waiting for the woman to finish. It takes much longer than it should, but there’s nothing to do but wait.
Finally the woman hands her two sets of key cards, and writes down the numbers. They both start with a one: 106 and 108.
The vision rewinds.
Alice walks into the lobby. The woman behind the counter does her double take. Alice asks for two rooms, double occupancy for one, single for the other. Second floor, please, if that’s not too much trouble. She puts her cards on the counter. She chatters about her companions. The woman starts typing in her computer. Alice corrects the time. Alice waits.
The woman hands her two sets of key cards. She writes down the numbers 209 and 211. Alice smiles at her and takes the keys. Alice moves at human speed until she is in the stairwell.
Alice ducks into both rooms, dropping the duffel bag in the first, and turns lights on, closes curtains, puts out the “do not disturb” signs. Blood bags in hand, she flits down the empty hallway to another stairwell. No one sees her. She pauses at the landing in the middle of the flight. At the base of the stairs is an exit to the outside. The door is flanked by a floor-to-ceiling pane of glass. There is no one near the exit on the outside.
Alice dials her phone.
“Sound the horn for three seconds.”
An obnoxiously loud klaxon rises from the parking lot, covering the sound of the heavy traffic on the freeway (a different freeway, one we did not all but shut down).
Alice hurls herself down the stairs, curling like a bowling ball. She
smashes through the dead center of the tall window. The glass lands on the sidewalk and gravel, some of it flying all the way to the pavement of the parking lot. It creates a pattern like a sunburst, glittering in the white shine from above. Alice retreats to the shadow of the door, and—one by one— rips the blood bags open using the broken glass fragments in the window frame, leaving blood on the edges. She flings the contents of one bag so it sprays out in a fan like the glass. The next two she pours onto the edge of the sidewalk, letting it pool up and soak into the concrete and run onto the pavement.
The horn goes silent.
Alice dials again. “Pick me up.”
The Cayenne appears almost immediately. Alice dashes through the sunlight to duck into the back, the last bag of blood clutched in her hand.
And then I was back in the present with her. Alice was satisfied with how that section would play out. She turned her attention to the next parts. None of it as much fun, but all still vital.
“Fun,” I scoffed. She ignored me.
Back to the airport. She chooses a white Suburban from the rental counter. It doesn’t look that much like the Cayenne, but it’s large and white and any witness with a story that doesn’t match will be written off. She doesn’t see any such witness, but she’s being meticulous.
Alice drives the Cayenne. She’s having an easier time with the scent than Jasper and Emmett; even though Bella is no longer in danger from them, the smell burns them when they breathe. They follow at a distance in the Suburban. She finds a car wash called Deluxe Detail. She pays with cash, and warns the boy at the counter—who is staring, mesmerized, at her face—that her niece threw up a bunch of tomato juice in the backseat. She points to her shoes. The besotted boy promises that the car will be spotless when they’re finished. (No one will question this story. The technician, fearing the scent of vomit will make him ill, will breathe only through his mouth.) She gives the name Mary. She thinks about washing her shoes off in the bathroom but sees that it won’t help very much.
She will wait an hour for the car to be finished. She calls the hotel after the first fifteen minutes have passed, ducking out the back door and standing in the shade where the sounds of vacuums and sprayers keep anyone from overhearing her words.
She apologizes to the same woman at the front desk, her voice frantic. A visiting friend, a horrible accident in the back stairwell. The window… the blood… (Alice is barely coherent). Yes, she’s at the hospital with the friend now. But the window! The glass! Someone else could get hurt. Please, it should be cordoned off until maintenance can clean it up. She has to go— they’re going to let her in to see her friend. Thank you. So sorry.
Alice sees that the woman at the desk will not call the police. She will call management. They will direct the woman to get everything cleaned up before someone else is hurt. That will be the story when the legal papers are served: They cleaned up the evidence for safety’s sake. They will wait in miserable suspense for the lawsuit that never comes. It will be more than a year before they start to believe their amazing luck.
The detailing done, Alice examines the backseat. There’s no visible evidence. She tips the technician. Alice gets into the Cayenne and takes a deep breath in through her nose. Well, the car won’t pass a luminol test, but she sees that it won’t get one.
Jasper and Emmett follow her to a mall in downtown Scottsdale. She parks the Cayenne on the third floor of a huge parking garage. It will be four days before the security guard reports the abandoned vehicle.
Alice and Jasper go shopping while Emmett waits in the rental car. She buys a pair of tennis shoes in a busy Gap. No one looks down at her feet. She pays cash.
She buys Emmett a T-shirt-thin hoodie that actually fits him. She buys six large bags of clothes in her size, Carlisle’s size, Emmett’s size, and my own. She uses a different ID and credit card than she used at the hotel. Jasper acts as a Sherpa for her.
Finally, she buys four suitcases that don’t match. She and Jasper wheel them to the rental car, where she pulls tags and fills them all with brand- new clothes.
She throws her bloody shoes in a dumpster on their way out.
There are no rewinds or replays. Everything goes perfectly smoothly.
Jasper and Alice drop Emmett off at the airport. He takes one of the carry-on suitcases; he looks less conspicuous than he did for the morning flight.
They find Carlisle’s Mercedes where they left it in the parking garage.
Jasper kisses Alice and starts the long drive home.
Once the boys are gone, Alice empties the last unit of blood onto the backseat and floor of the rental car. She takes it to a do-it-yourself car wash outside a gas station. She doesn’t do nearly as good a job cleaning up as the detailers. She’ll get fined when she returns the car.
It will be raining when Emmett lands in Seattle, only a half hour till sunset. A taxi will take him to the ferry. It will be easy for him to slip into the Puget Sound, ditching the suitcase in the water, and then—swimming and running—it will be just thirty minutes until he gets to the house. He’ll take Bella’s truck and immediately head back to Phoenix.
Alice frowned in the present and shook her head. This plan would take too long. The truck was incredibly slow.
We were just four minutes from the hospital now. Bella was still breathing slowly and evenly in my arms, and we were all still covered in blood. Emmett and Jasper were both still holding their breath. I blinked and tried to reorient myself. When Alice’s visions were detailed like this, it was easy to lose track of what was happening in the moment. She was better at acclimatizing back and forth than I was.
Alice opened her phone again and dialed a number. She was swimming in Emmett’s sweatshirt, Jasper’s watch dangling from her wrist.
“Rose?”
In the tight, quiet space, we could all hear Rosalie’s panicked voice. “What’s happening? Emmett—”
“Emmett’s fine. I need—” “Where’s the tracker?”
“The tracker is out of the picture.” Rosalie gasped audibly.
“I need you to rent a flatbed tow truck,” Alice instructed. “Or buy one, whatever’s faster—something with some kick. Load Bella’s truck and meet Emmett in Seattle. His flight lands at five-thirty.”
“Emmett’s coming home? What happened? Why am I towing that ridiculous truck?”
For a brief moment, I wondered why Alice was sending Emmett home at all. Why not let Rosalie just bring the truck here? It was the obvious solution. And then I realized that Alice couldn’t see Rosalie helping us in that way, and I felt an ice-cold wave of bitterness at the reminder. Rosalie had made her choice.
Emmett wanted to reach for the phone, to calm Rose, but he was still unable to open his mouth.
It was amazing how well both he and Jasper were doing. I thought the extra stimulation of the fight was probably still affecting them, helping them ignore the blood.
“Don’t worry about it,” Alice said curtly. “I’m just cleaning up the loose ends. Emmett will give you all the details. Let Esme know it’s over, but we’ll be detained for a bit. She should stay near Bella’s father in case the redhead—”
Rosalie’s voice went flat. “She’s coming for Charlie?”
“No, I don’t see that,” Alice assured her. “But better safe, right? Carlisle will call her as soon as he can. Hurry up, Rose, you’ve got a deadline.”
“You’re such a brat.”
Alice disconnected the phone.
Well, Emmett will get to keep the clothes, at least. I’m glad. They’re going to look amazing on him.
Emmett was pleased with the call. Happy to know he would be with Rose in just hours, and she would get his side of the story. No reason at all to mention the ridiculous thing with Jasper. If Alice didn’t see any problems with the redhead, then Rose could make the ride back to Phoenix with him. Or maybe she wouldn’t want to.… He looked down at Bella’s wan face, her fractured leg. A deep swell of fraternal affection and concern washed over him.
She’s such a good kid. Rose is going to have to get over this, he thought to himself. Pronto.
Alice’s brow was furrowed. She thought through her chores and looked at the consequences of all the hundreds of choices she had made. She saw herself at the hospital, bringing us clothes from our suitcases so we could get out of our bloody things. Had she caught everything? Had any details slipped her mind?
Everything was fine. Or it would be.
“Well done, Alice,” I whispered approvingly. She smiled.
Jasper pulled up to the emergency room, keeping his distance from the camera on this side of the entrance, looking for our shade.
I adjusted my grip on Bella and prepared to go through it all again for
the first time.
